Israel is making some big claims about the Rafah crossing opening for Gazans to leave. It seems they forgot to tell Egypt though... Right, so Israel has announced it’s about to open Rafah “in the coming days,” and Egypt has apparently replied with the diplomatic equivalent of “don’t even start,” and the fact both sides can say completely opposite things with a straight face tells you more about this situation than the announcement itself ever will. Israel says the gate will open exclusively for exit, which is convenient when you’re the one controlling the gate, and Egypt says it hasn’t agreed to a thing, which is also convenient when you’ve spent the past year digging trenches and parking tanks along that same frontier. So you can already see the game. Israel gets the headline, Egypt gets the panic, Gaza gets the uncertainty, and none of it requires a single door hinge at Rafah to actually move. Right, so what Israel has done here is announce that the Rafah crossing will open “in the coming days” to let Gazans exit into Egypt, and they’ve done it with the kind of confidence that usually means the groundwork is already laid, except the one government they claim to be coordinating with has immediately said the opposite, and that contradiction is the whole point of the story. Israel says there will be an exit, Egypt says there will not, and you can already see how easily a border can become a political weapon long before a single person ever walks through it. Israel has said this crossing will open exclusively for people to leave Gaza. Egypt has said it has agreed to nothing, and Egypt has said it because of the fear that sits under every one of its statements on Gaza: the fear of being forced to absorb a displaced population. This is the red line Egypt has repeated for two years, and when you look at how they’ve acted, not just what they’ve said, you see that isn’t rhetorical posturing at all because Egypt has reinforced its side of Rafah with berms, trenches, concrete, and tanks, and you don’t build that unless you believe someone might try to move people across that frontier without your consent.

The Green Party co-Deputy Mothin Ali has visited Bronzefield prison to meet with FIlton 24 hunger strikers, held without charge - political prisoners. Right, so you look at the state of Britain in 2025 and you realise we’ve reached the point where people are starving themselves in prison just to be heard now, and the government still acts like they’re a filing error, actually acting with casual indifference in my view, since they’ve done nothing about it. Six hunger strikers on remand, at least one hospitalised, trials drifting into next year, and the political class can’t even pretend to care. We are of course talking about six members of the Filton 24, this is how the government treats protesters taking their action to the doorstep of an Israeli arms firm after it dresses them up in the language of terror. They treat them like an administrative inconvenience, which tells you everything about who this system is built to serve. And then along comes Mothin Ali, the deputy leader of the Greens, walking into Bronzefield prison to visit these political prisoners as he has called them and I don’t disagree, because nobody else in Westminster dares open the door, and suddenly the whole thing looks as political as it always was. If you want to understand how power works here, you start with the people the state hopes you never notice. Right, so this is what’s happening, and I’ll say it plainly because the state won’t: a group of people are in prison on remand, some for more than a year, not because the courts have found them guilty of anything, not because a jury weighed evidence and reached a verdict, not because the law demanded it, but because in my view the government finds their politics inconvenient and the justice system has quietly allowed the line between protest and extremism to blur until that distinction barely exists. They are the Filton 24, although not all are held in the same place and not all are on hunger strike, and their story tells you more about the real state of civil liberties in Britain than any speech, manifesto or ministerial press conference. And if that sounds like a heavy opening, good, because this is a heavy story and it should feel heavy. It should sit in your chest like a stone because this is one of those moments where you can see the machinery of power working in the open, not hiding, not apologising, just g*inding on as if this is all normal. You have people charged with criminal offences linked to direct action at a weapons factory, a place tied into a wider international supply chain feeding wars many of us have watched in horror.

The BBC has been caught out pushing neutrality over Venezuela - until their chosen guests funding sources came out... Right, so the BBC has done it again it seems. You can always tell when Washington is gearing up for something ugly, because the BBC suddenly discovers a new “expert” who — surprise, surprise — sounds like they’re telling you exactly what the US State Department wants you to hear. And this time of course it’s Venezuela in the crosshairs, with the BBC quietly wheeling out an analyst whose organisation literally takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from the same US government now escalating military operations in the Caribbean. No disclosure, no context, just the usual polite fiction that this is impartial journalism instead of what seems like the warm-up act for whatever the White House decides to do next. And while American officials are out there reportedly ordering troops to “kill everybody” on a fishing boat, the BBC is busy smoothing the narrative so Britain won’t ask too many questions when the next phase arrives. Right, so you can tell when the British state is getting ready to look the other way for whatever Washington does next, because the BBC suddenly discovers a new “expert” who speaks with the full confidence of impartial analysis while carrying the assumptions of US foreign policy like it’s part of their bloodstream. And that’s exactly what’s happened with Venezuela, because this whole story didn’t begin with a government statement, or a debate in Parliament, or even an announcement from the White House. It began with a tweet. Not from an official, but from an investigative journalist who knows how media power works: Matt Kennard of Declassified UK. He was watching BBC World News when it interviewed Jeremy McDermott, co-director of InSight Crime, about the situation in the Caribbean. InSight Crime themselves had posted the clip proudly, showing McDermott explaining how US anti-drug operations have disrupted c*caine routes and how, in his framing, the Maduro government is sustained by state-embedded criminal structures.

The funniest kind of political self own are the self-inflicted kind and no fewer than 20 Labour MPs fell for this one - the greedy gets! Right, so here’s the thing: when a fake Hong Kong investment firm that doesn’t exist can stroll into Westminster and get meetings with Labour MPs who think they’re about to land a tidy little advisory gig, you stop pretending the problem is subtle. Led By Donkeys and Democracy for Sale didn’t run some clever espionage caper here; they slapped a logo on a made-up company, got the Chamber Group to make the introductions, and watched around twenty MPs treat it like a normal day at the office. And because the sting is this crude, the punchline is obvious: the door wasn’t forced open, it was already ajar, which tells you more about the culture of Parliament than any committee report ever will. So yes, it’s funny, but the joke isn’t on the activists, it’s on the people who treated a company that didn’t even exist as if it were a legitimate route to yet another outside role. Right, so it’s always remarkable how quickly the mask slips in Westminster when you drop the pretence of formality and simply look at what people do when they think nobody is watching, and that’s exactly what has happened here because Led By Donkeys and Democracy for Sale have just run a sting operation so simple, so bare-bones, and so blatant that the only reasonable conclusion you can draw is that Labour MPs — not one or two outliers but a whole cluster of them — are perfectly willing to open the door to a foreign investor they’ve never heard of, with no due diligence, no security questions, and no hesitation about whether any of it looks remotely appropriate. The fake company didn’t need depth, it didn’t need a reputation, it didn’t need a paper trail, it just needed a name, a location, and the right middleman to make the introduction, and once that happened you could see the machinery of Westminster kick in exactly as it always does when the prospect of another paid advisory role is put on the table in front of people who claim to be there for public service. And the thing is, if you strip out the noise and stick to the facts as they stand, the scandal isn’t that the company was fake, it’s that the behaviour would have been exactly the same if the company had been real. So let’s start where the facts sit. A Hong Kong-based investment firm called EC Strategies was invented by Led By Donkeys and Democracy for Sale as part of an undercover test, and the Chamber Group arranged meetings between that fictitious firm and Labour MPs who believed they were meeting a legitimate foreign investor looking for political guidance and possibly paid advisory roles. These MPs sat down — some online, some in follow-ups — and engaged with a representative they assumed was the London face of a powerful international investor, when in reality he was an undercover reporter recording the entire thing.

Venezuela might have just broken Trump before he's put a single boot on the ground by hitting the orange one right where it hurts most... Right, so Donald Trump has spent the last few weeks insisting he’s cracking down on Venezuelan drug trafficking, despite offering no evidence for any of it, and now he’s moved from sea to land as if scaling up a military campaign is just another line in a speech. He’s declared Venezuelan airspace “completely closed” as if the United States suddenly owns South America, and he’s doing it after more than twenty strikes that have k*lled around eighty people with nothing publicly tying those d*aths to the story he’s selling. And you can get away with that sort of thing when nobody pushes back, but Nicolás Maduro has pushed back, and he’s pushed back in the one place Trump can’t afford it: the global oil system. Because if this really is about control of the world’s largest reserves, then Trump’s problem isn’t Venezuela. It’s everyone else who needs that oil stable, not seized. The thing about this confrontation between the United States and Venezuela is that once you strip away the slogans about drug trafficking and the big declarations about “closing” Venezuelan airspace, what you are left with is a pattern people in Latin America have been living with for decades, and a president in Washington who is running the same script again but without the evidence, without the legitimacy, and now without the geopolitical freedom of action the US used to take for granted. So when Donald Trump goes onto his platform and tells airlines that Venezuelan airspace is “completely closed,” and when he tells US forces they will soon start operating “by land” after weeks of maritime strikes that have already k*lled dozens, he is doing something that relies on everyone else pretending they cannot see the machinery underneath. And what has changed in the last few days is that Nicolás Maduro has stopped pretending. He has called it out as oil politics. He has called it out as an attempted seizure of the world’s largest reserves. And he has not just complained — he has taken it to OPEC. And that changes the shape of the entire thing. The sequence matters because the escalation is not theoretical. Trump has already pushed this further than rhetoric. The United States has hit more than twenty vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific since September, k*lling somewhere around eighty people, and none of those d*aths have been substantiated with evidence linking the targets to drug trafficking.

In seeking to clamp down on its own armed forces, Israel have accidentally exposed far more to the world than they ever intended! Right, so Israel keeps telling us it has the most moral army on Earth, and yet here we are: the government has had to build an AI censor just to stop that same army posting what it actually does. If your troops are as saintly as you claim, you don’t need a machine scanning their TikToks in real time. But soldiers have been filming everything — raids, smashed homes, detainees, the lot — and instead of asking why the footage looks like this, Israel’s answer has been to deploy Morpheus, an algorithm already watching more than forty thousand soldiers, with plans to cover the entire force. You don’t gag your own troops because they’re too moral. You gag them because the record they’ve created is a threat — and the state knows it. Right, so after months of soldiers filming themselves in Gaza, filming detainees, filming destruction, filming taunts, filming things no state comfortable in its own narrative would ever want surfaced if we’re honest, we’ve all seen the footage I’m sure, Israel has decided the only way to survive the truth is to erase the evidence record it’s own forces keep adding to. It has built an AI machine called Morpheus, very much blue pill or red pill territory and the purpose of that system is not to fight an enemy or defend a population. It is to track what Israeli soldiers say and show online and stop the world from seeing what they have already lived. If the state believed its own rhetoric about discipline, morality and restraint, it would not need Morpheus. It would welcome the footage. It would point to it as proof of everything it claims. The fact that Israel has built a tool to monitor tens of thousands of soldiers in real time tells you immediately that the government knows exactly what those cameras have captured, and it knows those images cannot be reconciled with the message it is selling abroad. You do not create a machine to erase the record unless the record is dangerous. And Israel has decided the most dangerous thing in this entire war is not Hamas, not Hezbollah, not Iran, but its own army and what they are sharing via their own smartphones. The sequence that brought Israel to this point makes the pattern unavoidable. The government thought it could manage the war’s image the old way: keep journalists out, impose tight military censorship, refuse foreign media access to Gaza, and rely on controlled briefings. But the state misread the era it is operating in.

The Jersey based Palestine activist Natalie Strecker has been acquitted over terror support and it's exposed Starmer's lawfare like never before! Right, so you can tell when a government has run out of arguments to defend Israel, because that’s when it starts inventing terror threats out of thin air, and the Starmer crew just tried exactly that with Jersey based activist Natalie Strecker. They scraped four social media posts out of tens of thousands, mangled the digital evidence with a software bug, shipped in outside “help” to steer a prosecution Jersey didn’t need steering, and still couldn’t convince a court that a pacifist was secretly running a pro-Hamas fan club. It’s pathetic, but it’s also the clearest look yet at how desperate this government has become to make pro-Palestine voices disappear. They wanted a scalp. They got an acquittal. And in the process they’ve shown everyone that their big law-and-order posture, their lawfare against protesters and activists and pro Palestine voices is just political cowardice dressed up as national security. Right, so it is hardly news to many of you I’m sure that something has gone very wrong inside a political system when a government tries to turn a human-rights activist into a t*rrorism suspect and ends up being exposed for how flimsy the whole operation is, and that’s the thing about this case that has just ended in acquittal in Jersey, the Natalie Strecker case, because once you strip out the courtroom formality, the titles, the press releases and the drama that comes of state authority, what you’re left with is a prosecution that never had the weight to carry the political purpose built into it, and that’s why it fell apart, because it wasn’t designed for scrutiny, it was designed for fear, and fear only works when nobody looks at it too closely. This is what lawfare looks like when the government overreaches, when the evidence isn’t strong enough to survive daylight, and when a court decides it isn’t going to sign off on a political message disguised as a security concern. And if you want to understand why this matters, you start with the basic truth that this case should never have existed in the first place. Because the charge was t*rrorism, the label was t*rrorism, the framework was t*rrorism, and the punishment would have carried all the weight of that word even though the prosecution knew she hadn’t committed, planned or facilitated anything remotely connected to t*rrorism.

So Benjamin Netanyahu has decided he wants a pardon, but still won't admit guilt and as a result is turning into his biggest self own to date. Right, so you always know a government has gone past the point of embarrassment and into full-blown panic when the man running it tries to escape his own trial while still standing in the dock, and that’s exactly what Benjamin Netanyahu has just done. A sitting prime minister, still facing three corruption cases, still denying every charge, still telling the country the courts will vindicate him, suddenly decides the safest place to be is nowhere near a verdict and asks the president to make the whole thing disappear. And you don’t get clearer than that do you? People confident in acquittal don’t beg for pardons. People who trust the process don’t try to dodge it and protests outside the president’s house before breakfast tell you everything you need to know. If Netanyahu thought this was the way out at this point, he’s got it catastrophically wrong. Right, so you always know a political era is creaking when the people running it start trying to escape the very systems they’ve spent years insisting still work, and that’s exactly what has happened with Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to request a presidential pardon while still on trial, because this isn’t a routine legal step or some procedural tidying-up, it’s a sitting prime minister trying to end his own corruption trial before the court has finished hearing it, still without admitting guilt, without accepting responsibility, and without even pretending the process has reached a point where clemency would normally be considered. It lands as a moment where the system feels it twitch, because a move like this tells you he no longer trusts the process to deliver the outcome he has spent five years telling his supporters is inevitable, and that’s the point where you can see the politics through the legal paperwork, because nobody confident of acquittal asks for the trial to suddenly disappear.

An independent media outlet just sent an Israeli arms firm fleeing from Britain, because that's the power of real journalism. Right, so you can always tell when a political access operation has gone wrong, because everyone involved suddenly pretends it was never happening, and that’s exactly what we’ve just seen with Rafael’s little UK adventure. A state-owned Israeli weapons manufacturer turns up calling itself a British company, slides £1,499 into a parliamentary group that’s not allowed to take foreign-government money, gets cosy access to MPs under the banner of “defence technology”, and nobody inside Westminster notices a thing until an independent newsroom actually checks the filings. And the moment the disguise drops, the whole thing folds in on itself. The APPG dissolves. The Standards Commissioner steps in. Rafael files to shut down its UK arm without so much as a protest, which is what it looks like when a company operating in the political space becomes unviable under scrutiny. And Independent media very much scrutinised it – into running away. Right, so it’s so often in the smallest stories that you see how power really works, because power rarely announces itself, and it rarely leaves fingerprints where people are actually looking, and that’s why this Rafael saga tells you far more about Britain’s political system than most scandals ten times the size. Because on paper this is minor — a company most people have never heard of, a payment so small it could barely cover a London dinner bill, an APPG nobody outside Westminster cares about — but the scale of the incident isn’t the number on the cheque, it’s the structure that cheque unlocked, the access it bought, the loophole it exposed, and the retreat it triggered, because you don’t get a state-owned weapons manufacturer dissolving its entire UK operation unless something has gone very wrong in the place they were trying to operate. And when you trace the sequence cleanly, without Westminster’s instinct to minimise everything that isn’t convenient, you can see what really happened here: an Israeli arms firm tried to position itself inside Parliament, Declassified UK exposed the method, and the whole operation collapsed before MPs had even finished pretending they were surprised. The remarkable thing isn’t that Rafael tried to do this. The defence industry has been treating APPGs, conferences, trade delegations, committee events, sponsored trips and “policy roundtables” as an extension of their sales funnel for years, because that’s how lobbying works in a system where ministers tell you the country is broke while handing out defence contracts like they’re raffle prizes. What’s remarkable is that someone saw it happening in real time. Because when you go through Rafael’s UK footprint, the absurdity becomes obvious straight away.

Donald Trump's Gaza takeover plan has fallen at the first hurdle, but then it was always going to when peace meant jumping to Israel's tune. Right, so here’s the thing about Trump’s grand Gaza plan: it’s only “historic” if you judge history by how fast a policy collapses under the weight of its own nonsense. The United States marched into the UN Security Council with a straight face and sold a blueprint that puts Trump in charge of Gaza’s transition, hands sweeping authority to a Board of Peace that still hasn’t been staffed, and demands an International Stabilisation Force that nobody is actually willing to send. And of course they told the world this was the path to order, because Washington always does, even when the plan depends on foreign soldiers enforcing a demilitarisation mandate that no Palestinian faction has agreed to and no contributing country is prepared to take on. So you look at the resolution, you look at the silence that followed, and you realise the truth: the takeover isn’t stuck, it never changed. Right, so Trump’s Gaza plan has already hit the point where the only way you can describe it honestly is to say that the packaging looked impressive, the machinery looked complicated, the Council vote looked decisive, and none of it has changed the basic fact that you cannot impose a new order on Gaza if the countries you need to carry it don’t believe the mandate is workable, legitimate, or safe. The United States pushed through a resolution that creates a governing body chaired by Trump, installs a transitional administration with sweeping authority, and orders the formation of a multinational force to stabilise Gaza and begin demilitarising the territory. On paper this is a takeover. In the real world it is a blueprint that has been collapsing the moment anyone outside Washington tries to translate it into actual troop numbers, legal responsibilities or political realities. The core of the plan is simple enough when you strip away the choreography. The Board of Peace is written in as the transitional authority over Gaza. It has the power to oversee reconstruction, manage borders in cooperation with neighbours, supervise the training of a new Palestinian police force and certify when Israel’s security thresholds are met.