There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Etiquette lessons offered to Israel
From smaller bombs to more targeted murders, Britain and the US are offering what amounts to advice on the ‘correct manners to massacre’ for their Middle East ally, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
NOWHERE TO GO: Palestinians flee to northern Gaza as Israeli tanks block the Salah al-Din road in the central Gaza Strip last Friday
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
ISRAELI Defence Minister Yoav Gallant is threatening the Israeli Defence Forces will “continue operating with full military power” in Gaza after the “short pause” of the ceasefire.
Let’s hope Gallant is wrong, and the current ceasefire holds long enough to break the momentum of war.
But if Gallant’s soldiers do go back into battle, we can be sure they will be getting lots of advice. The Western powers want to tell the IDF how to do war, but nicer. Are their top military tips really any good?
British newspapers claim the SAS are on hand to offer counter-insurgency advice. But given that British forces essentially lost to the Taliban, and the SAS are currently subject to an independent inquiry into whether their “night raids” during the Afghan conflict descended into murders which built Taliban support, this advice might not be useful.
More seriously, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke to Netanyahu about “concrete steps that can and should be taken” to minimise civilian deaths. US officials would not reveal these secret methods, but officials briefed the New York Post on two techniques.
The first: keep on bombing — but use smaller bombs. The US sent Israel more, but smaller, bombs in an attempt to persuade the IDF to reduce their use of 2,000-pound devices.
But there is less enthusiasm in Israel than in the US for sizing down, and if you send a nation munitions, it is hard to specify how they use them. If you don’t want a country to drop bombs, don’t give them bombs.
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Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
US General Stanley McChrystal has been invited to advise on creating a ‘team of teams’ for healthcare transformation. His credentials? He previously ran interrogation bases where Iraqis were stripped naked and beaten, reports SOLOMON HUGHES
