Donald Trump faces renewed Epstein scrutiny as Iran rhetoric resurfaces, raising fears of escalation used to drown out domestic fallout Right, so Donald Trump has been named again in Epstein-related material, and the important part isn’t shock, outrage, or whether anyone thinks this finally changes anything because it doesn’t. What’s changed is procedural. The material has come out through a formal process, his name is back on the live record, and he’s been forced to respond in public again just when he thought he’d buried it after the last lot of revelations. Well sorry not sorry Donnie, this is never going to go away and nor should it. And Trump’s response tells you everything you really need to know. He hasn’t denied the documents exist. He hasn’t challenged their release. He’s simply insisted that whenever his name appears, that part is distorted or malicious, while the rest of the record apparently stands. That kind of denial doesn’t close anything. It’s childish, arrogant and take the global public for fools, but above all else, it doesn’t make it go away either. It keeps the issue alive. But Trump has a disturbing track record whenever these kids of revelations come out for looking for a distraction to bury it in the news cycle and with his ships all lined up in a row right now, and all despite reports of ongoing talks, Iran must be looking awfully tempting right now. Right, so Donald Trump has been named again in newly released Epstein-related material, because of course he has, he’s been named more times than Epstein himself has and the important thing about that is not novelty, not shock, and not whether anyone thinks it changes the legal picture, because it doesn’t. The papers are out. Not leaked, not teased, not backgrounded. Out through a process that puts them on the record. Trump’s name is back in them, formally, and that matters because it raises the cost of the noise he has to generate in response. He was always going to speak out against it. The difference is that now, whatever cheap talk he chooses to chunter doesn’t work.

Labour faces growing scrutiny as their by-election candidate’s professional record sparks questions over privatisation. Right, so Labour has picked its candidate for Gorton and Denton and then acted surprised when people started looking at the record that came with her, as if candidate selection is meant to be beyond question rather than a concrete political choice with consequences attached. Especially when, as a Manchester City Councillor, she very much has a track record. Because this isn’t about rumours or smears or who somebody’s married to or isn’t, that’s the cheap stuff, that’s what gets thrown around when there’s nothing real to hit. This is about what Labour chose to stand behind in a seat it clearly thinks it’s entitled to. A candidate whose professional life sits inside private infrastructure delivery, stakeholder management, rail projects, consultancy culture, the exact machinery Labour keeps insisting it’s going to dismantle one day, just not today, and apparently not here either. Nothing illegal. Nothing hidden. Nothing you can wave away as fake news either though. Just a very clear signal about what Labour now considers normal, acceptable, and safe. And once you see that, the by-election stops being about stopping Reform or mocking the Greens and starts being about something much more uncomfortable: whether Labour still even recognises the problem it claims to exist to solve. Right, so Keir Starmer’s Labour has selected Angeliki Stogia as its candidate for the Gorton and Denton by-election, and that choice has already narrowed what Labour can plausibly posture as, because a candidate isn’t a press release, a candidate is a bundle of lived decisions, affiliations, votes, jobs, roles, networks, and instincts, we will look for them and pick through them and based on who you’ve chosen to impose – because that is the Starmer way – we’ll hold that to scrutiny.

Israel turns Rafah into a pressure valve as Gaza concentration camp plans and aid cuts expose a dangerous new phase Right, so Israel has begun clearing ground in Rafah for what Israeli military figures themselves describe as a tightly controlled camp, with monitored entry and exit, biometric surveillance, and direct linkage to the only crossing Israel intends to open, but which they will never relinquish control of, no matter how many laws and accords that breaches. The moment you start preparing land for a concentration camp, which is what this is, you are no longer improvising under fire, you are committing to a governing structure and owning every single historical precedent it lays out. This single act collapses a whole set of claims people have been relying on. The claim that Gaza is not being administered. The claim that displacement is voluntary. The claim that Phase Two of the Trump peace plan is about recovery rather than containment. Because concentration camps do not function alongside reconstruction, free movement, or adequate aid flows. They function alongside scarcity, filtering, and coercion. It’s the next layer of apartheid being implemented by a rogue apartheid state and this is happening at the same time Israel is pushing to cap aid entry at questionable survival levels and redesign Rafah as an exit route without goods, where people can leave but not return. Those pieces only make sense together. Once they’re built into the ground, the argument isn’t about intent anymore. It’s about what the system now requires to keep it operating.Right, so Israel has started clearing ground in Rafah for a tightly controlled holding area, and the most important part of that sentence is not the outrage language people are fighting over, it’s the practical one. Clearing ground is not a tweet, it’s not a minister floating a trial balloon, it’s not a “sources say” line that can be walked back after a bad news cycle. It’s bulldozers and rubble and the beginnings of an infrastructure choice, which means a set of downstream choices now comes attached to it whether anyone likes it or not, including the people building it.

Apple’s billion-dollar purchase of an Israeli AI firm has sparked controversy over privacy and growing BDS pressure seems certain to follow. Right, so Apple has just bought an Israeli company whose technology reads facial micromovements to infer speech, and that decision immediately pulls Apple into a political space it has spent years trying to pretend it can sidestep. Until now, Apple could sell itself as a neutral platform company, focused on privacy, above the fray of boycotts, sanctions, and ethical supply-chain fights. That insulation is gone. When Apple chooses to integrate Israeli surveillance-adjacent AI at the core of its ecosystem, it doesn’t matter how carefully the feature is deployed or how many privacy slogans follow - the relationship itself becomes the issue. For BDS supporters, this isn’t about settings or safeguards, it’s about institutional choice, and Apple has now made one. And for everyone else, the timing matters, because this lands just as Apple is asking users to trust its AI ambitions without explaining their limits. That combination removes deniability, narrows Apple’s room to manoeuvre, and turns what used to be a background political argument into a live liability sitting inside Apple’s privacy story. Right, so Apple has now confirmed it has acquired the Israeli start-up Q.ai, and what matters here isn’t the gawping at the price tag like it’s a football transfer fee, it’s the nature of the technology Apple has chosen to pull inside its walls at the exact moment it is trying to sell “AI” as something you can trust. Q.ai is not a weather app. It is not a cute little machine-learning widget that recommends you a playlist. It is a company whose work has been described, in plain technical terms, as analysing facial micromovements to interpret “silent speech”, with patents pointing at deployment in headphones or glasses for non-verbal interaction. Apple is a company that has already built an entire brand identity around controlling the sensor stack, controlling the silicon, controlling the operating system, and then telling you the whole point of that vertical integration is privacy.

Green Party shakes up the Gorton by-election as a local plumber takes on Labour’s machine politics and Reform’s media grift in ManchesterRight, so the Greens have just selected a local plumber, Hannah Spencer as their candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Labour has of course blocked Andy Burnham from standing, and a privately commissioned by-election poll by one of their donors managed to circulate allegedly without ever being properly published, the sample size being so small as it was, yet is now growing to be a bigger and bigger scandal for Labour in a seat they already had only a slim chance of defending. What we have now is a locally chosen tradesperson, someone who literally fixes stuff for a living, standing to fix the constituency, up against Reform UK’s TV pundit from Hertfordshire and a leadership-managed nominee from Labour, by the name of Angeliki Stogia. The assumption that politics is just brand versus brand simply doesn’t fly here now when an ordinary working class person is on the ballot and ticks all the boxes to push back against that. And once polling becomes something that appears when it’s useful and disappears when it isn’t on top of that, well we have a contest on our hands. It’s very much grafter vs grifter.Right, so Keir Starmer doesn’t get to pretend this by-election is a local issue anymore, because the moment Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing, they turned Gorton and Denton into a test of who actually controls the Labour Party, and whether the party is still capable of reading a working-class seat without treating it like a spreadsheet. It’s already become the sort of contest where you can feel the machine panicking, because the machine has realised something basic: it can’t rely on habit and it can’t rely on deference, so it’s trying to rely on procedure, and the procedure is starting to look like the problem.The Green Party selecting Hannah Spencer has poured petrol on that, not because it’s some grand strategic masterstroke in Westminster terms, but because the optics are brutally simple and they don’t need explaining.

Trump escalates confrontation with Iran as US carrier deployment wipes out any remaining diplomatic exit routes Right, so Donald Trump has put a carrier strike group back into the Arabian Sea, moved long-range strike aircraft forward, reinforced missile defences across the region, and done it all while threatening “far worse” action unless Iran submits to a deal. I thought making deals was an art form to Trump – not very good at it is he! But that combination has already taken away the only thing that ever made this feel controllable, which is deniability. Once the threat is shouted and the hardware is parked in public view, everyone plans for the consequences, not reassurance, and the fantasy of a tidy, limited episode stops working because it relies on a sense of restraint that’s already gone. You can hear the strain in the language now, the insistence that this is still “pressure for diplomacy,” still calibrated, still reversible, even as the preparations quietly assume retaliation and the region adjusts to that reality. A prop people were leaning on has been kicked out from under them, and anyone still trusting the old script is already late. Right, so Donald Trump is threatening Iran out loud while the US military is visibly moving the kit needed to carry it out, and that combination is already doing the damage that usually only becomes obvious once bombs start falling. The line being sold is that this is pressure for diplomacy, something that can be turned up or down to force a deal. In reality, once you make the threat public and you move the hardware where everyone can see it, you remove the option for everyone else to pretend this is just noise. Other states, militaries, and armed groups stop listening to reassurances and start planning for impact. From that point on, this stops being something Washington can finely control, because every other actor is now locked into worst-case planning. The space to step back doesn’t grow, it shrinks, and it stays shrunk because you can’t un-show a threat once you’ve put it on display.

Houthis among other groups issue warning as US carrier nears Iran, raising Red Sea risks and regional escalation stakes. Right, so the United States has moved an aircraft carrier group into the Middle East, flown extra jets into neighbouring countries, and senior figures are openly talking about striking Iran. In response though, it’s not just Iran talking up a response, but armed groups aligned with it across the region - the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon – have all publicly said they will get involved if that happens. Groups in Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon are openly telling the US that if Iran is hit, they’re in. Once that’s on the table, a strike on Iran isn’t just a strike on Iran anymore. The talk coming out of Washington still assumes this can be managed as a clean operation, quick and simple, but the people who would blow that assumption up have already said they won’t play along, so the stakes just got raised again should Trump be so stupid as to strike. Right, so the United States has as I’m sure most of us know by now, moved the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group into West Asia, but has also flown additional fighter jets into Jordan, and has deployed more of their advanced missile defence systems across the region, all while the Cheeto dusted maniac passing for a US president keeps talking about armadas and threats and unfinished business with Iran. Well its not just Iran that are having none of it. Yemen’s Ansarallah movement has responded to that carrier movement by issuing a public warning aimed at US naval assets, accompanied by video mock-ups of flaming warships captioned with a single word: soon. It’s hardly a statement to be buried in a briefing or a slogan aimed at a domestic crowd is it? It is a deterrent signal directed at the US, but also at commercial ships, those Red Sea shipping lanes, all the infrastructure that keeps them moving, issued at the moment US naval power turns up again.

EU blacklists Iran’s IRGC as a terrorist organisation, breaking its own legal precedent and exposing a double standard the bloc will never fix. Right, so the European Union has put the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC on its terrorist list. And by doing that, the EU has changed what it can say without being challenged, has changed the definition of terrorism itself. It has said that a state military body, and all states have them in the name of defence, can meet the terrorism threshold. That removes a defence the EU has relied on for years, which is that terrorism only applies to non-state actors. Dissidents. Armed militias. Extremists. They just tossed that in the bin. From this point on, when the EU uses the word “terrorism”, it has to explain why that label applies in one case and not in others given equal weight. That explanation is no longer optional and they’re going to have a tough job doing so given what they cast a blind eye to. Yet it has to be given every time the standard is invoked. And explaining selective application is harder than issuing the label in the first place. It forces officials to justify exclusions rather than assert principles. That is the situation the EU has created for itself, and they deserve every bit of the fallout for their blatant hypocrisy. Right, so the European Union hasn’t just sanctioned the IRGC, it has used its terrorism designation framework against it, and that matters because this is the first time the EU has used its terrorism designation framework against an official arm of a sovereign state’s armed forces. Until now, that list has been reserved for non-state actors, insurgent groups, armed movements, and individuals operating outside recognised state command structures. The EU has never before put a state military institution into that category. By doing it here, the EU has collapsed a distinction it previously relied on in such designations whether it cares to admit it or not. From this point on, terrorism is no longer a label that stops at the edge of state power. It has now been formally extended into it.

Greens surge in Gorton and Denton by-election as Labour pushes a decidedly dodgy poll to try and shut them down. Right, so the polling company Find Out Now has published a by-election poll for Gorton and Denton based on just 143 people, commissioned by a private company, with Reform ahead, Labour close behind, and the Greens written off. That poll is already being used as proof that voters only have two real options, despite the pollster itself warning it’s small, unstable, and early. At the same time, Reform has parachuted in a candidate with a long record of anti-Muslim rhetoric, while campaigning in the wrong place, the Greens have made pushing back on such narratives a central plank of their campaign, the Muslim Vote advocacy group has endorsed the Greens as well so momentum is with them. Yet a really poor quality poll, conducted seemingly in Labour’s interests, is being pushed hard on social media, and is getting rightly torn to shreds, because when a tiny poll is passed off as reflective of 78,000 people, when endorsements are breaking old loyalties, and when Labour is attacking the Greens harder than Reform, what’s failing isn’t so much an election campaign, it’s Labour’s credibility – whatever is left of it these days anyway. Right, so Find Out Now has put out a voting-intention poll for the Gorton and Denton by-election with a sample size of just 143 people, run between 25 and 27 January on behalf of Betterworld Ltd, weighted by age, gender and 2024 General Election vote, and the headline figures excluding don’t knows are Reform UK on 36 per cent, Labour on 33 per cent, the Green Party on 21 per cent, the Conservatives on 8 per cent and the Liberal Democrats on 3 per cent, with the pollster explicitly warning that the sample is very small and the margin of error is larger than a regular voting intention poll, and also warning that the by-election is about a month away and not all candidates have been selected. That is the hard procedural core of it, the bit that’s meant to feel neutral and managerial, the bit people get waved at as if it’s a weather report, but the sort of weather report where you’d be better off looking out of the window and checking if its raining for yourself.

The Green Party has tabled a motion at Spring Conference seeking to make the party anti-Zionist, triggering a major political debate in UK politics. Right, so the Green Party has accepted a motion for its Spring Conference saying that Zionism is racism. It’s in the system. It’s got a number. It’s on the agenda. And that’s the bit people weren’t expecting, because this is the argument that’s supposed to stay outside. You can shout about it, march about it, argue about it online - just not put it through the rules. That’s how this has worked for years. And now it hasn’t. Because the moment it goes through procedure, the safety net goes. You can’t say it’s settled anymore. You can’t say it’s unsayable. All you can say is it shouldn’t be there. And that’s not an argument. That’s panic. Because once it’s inside the rules, you either deal with it - or you admit you never had an answer in the first place. Right, so the Green Party of England and Wales has tabled Motion A105 for its Spring Conference. It has been accepted into conference procedure and so is now set for debate. It states plainly that Zionism is racism and commits the party to an explicitly anti-Zionist position. That sentence alone would have been treated as unutterable inside British party politics for more than three decades, not because it was disproven, not because it was illegal, but because it was kept out by design. The fact it now exists as a procedural object means that design has failed, in no small part due to more than 2 years of Israeli genocide in Gaza and the old excuses, because that is what they were, no longer wash.