Mubeen Blogs

What about these missing WhatsApp messages? Who better to decide what is relevant than the former first minister herself? Sometimes you have to wonder whether politicians live in the same world as us. Breathe the same air, talk the same language. Almost as if election is immediately followed by a spell at idiot school. To implant that sense of effortless superiority that places their own experience on a higher plane to the rest of us. Their punishment is to be perpetually misunderstood. Take George Freeman . A former Tory minister unable to get by on £120,000 a year. It’s only the Just Giving fundraiser I started this week that’s keeping him off the streets. Pray for George. But Freeman is far from the only one. On Wednesday, it was hard to find any minister or former minister not hellbent on taking the public for mugs. Maybe they just had spare capacity in their condescension quota for the month. Start again afresh on the first day of February. Or could it be almost everyone has giv

Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/ZSPU3V8

The Trump-Smiths feud is the latest episode in a story that re-emerges every four years: the war between musicians and politicians over campaign songs Somewhere in Donald Trump’s orbit, embedded among the wild conspiracy theorists, worshipful toadies and dead-eyed schemers, there’s a Smiths fan. This fact came to the nation’s attention last week after a video showed a Trump rally blasting the 1984 B-side Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want over the PA. And Johnny Marr, the onetime Smiths guitarist, wasn’t happy – in a tweet, the songwriter told fans to “consider this shit shut right down”. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/6dgIHJc

Residents of tiny coastal community of Cape Ray excited by discovery of what appears to be 19th-century vessel A coastal community in Newfoundland has been left baffled and excited by the sudden and unexplained appearance of a centuries-old shipwreck on the sands of a nearby shore. Gordon Blackmore, a local resident, was hunting seabirds on the sandy shores of Cape Ray when he spotted a dark shadow under the turbid waters. It had not been there when he visited the spot just a few days earlier. He rushed back into the family home, shouting about about the discovery, his mother told the Canadian Press. She grabbed her jacket and hurried to the beach to see it for herself. “It’s amazing, there is no other word for it.” Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/q4OHZ79

Teams meet with place in Super Bowl LVIII on the line Championship Game predictions: who will win out? The other football: sign up for Jonathan Wilson’s soccer newsletter Email David with your thoughts or tweet @LengelDavid Crab cakes vs ribs I’ve often thought to myself, what do I prefer, crab cakes or ribs? You know, I was driving home from Washington DC a few weeks back, and I stopped at this back road seafood hole in the wall joint in Maryland and had a crab cake. And it was pretty good. Simple, but good. But I feel like there’s a ceiling on crab cakes, like there’s a ceiling on hamburgers. How good can a burger really get? How good can a crab cake really be? You can only be blown away so much. But when I was in KC, the ribs. Oh the ribs. I was there for under 24 hours, on a trip that also included a trip to the ER – I was ok, thank you for your concern. But I got KC ribs in, and man, there’s no ceiling on anything with a thick sticky sweet sauce. So BBQ ribs v Baltimore/Ma

Henderson’s chaser makes serious mistake four from home Elixir De Nutz provides emotional success at Cheltenham Irish stables have a 64% strike rate at the Cheltenham Festival over the past five years, outscoring the home team by 89 wins to 51, and there were ominous hints of another drubbing in six weeks’ time at the track’s trials meeting. Willie Mullins, Ireland’s perennial champion, had a double on the card and his nephew, Emmet, took the Cleeve Hurdle with Noble Yeats, while even the heartwarming success of Elixir De Nutz in the Clarence House Chase was the result of a worryingly slipshod performance by Jonbon, the second-favourite for the Champion Chase on 13 March. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/dV58i3A

The Nottingham killer has been detained under a hospital order with restrictions – how does this work? On Thursday, Valdo Calocane, an engineering graduate diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, was sentenced to a hospital order with restrictions for killing three people and attempting to kill three others in a violent spree across Nottingham. The decision enraged the families of his victims, who believe he should have been prosecuted for murder, with one saying they were “railroaded” into accepting Calocane’s plea to the lesser charge of manslaughter. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/ZRsTIUh

Coroner concluded 14-year-old girl took her life after prolonged and sustained bullying in person and online The father of a 14-year-old girl who killed herself after being bullied has said his family are victims of a “failing system” after an inquest into her death. Mia Janin, a year 10 pupil at the Jewish free school in Kenton, north-west London, was found dead at her family home in Harrow on 12 March 2021. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/pEn8RsN

Sundance film festival: Netflix forked out $17m for the low-budget, high-concept mystery but while there’s some fun to be had, there’s something missing With this year’s festival entering its dying days, market news remains unusually slight, a surprise given how strike-impacted buyers were reportedly foaming for schedule-fillers. Big sales so far haven’t been all that big – Jesse Eisenberg comedy A Real Pain at Searchlight, Steven Soderbergh ghost story Presence at Neon – and so there are questions that still need answering going into the last weekend. But earlier this week, as others umm-ed and ahh-ed, Netflix made a bullish statement with a $17m purchase of low-budget mind-bender It’s What’s Inside, an unusually high number for a genre film without any stars attached. While it may well be trumped over the next week or so given how other, more commercial titles remain unsold, it’s currently stamped with this year’s biggest-of-fest tag. That comes with a mostly terrible, tortured

A teenager in 70s New Zealand dreams of starting a band in Jonathan Ogilvie’s nostalgic comedy, which opens Rotterdam’s international film festival Jonathan Ogilvie is the New Zealand film-maker who made the gangster drama The Tender Hook (2008) and also Lone Wolf (2021), a postmodern spin on Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Now he hits a lighter, gentler and much more personal note in this coming-of-age comedy, which opens the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) – a nostalgiafest romance from the 70s post-punk era about a kid in New Zealand mooching around in his uncool school uniform, hanging out in the local record shop (which still has its prog-era name of Middle Earth Records) and dreaming of starting a punk band called the Daleks – though wondering if just Daleks sounds cooler — and obsessing about an unattainably sexy girl who sneers at him. It will have all of us of a certain age smiling along to its madeleines: the musical cues, stereo music centres and album covers. Th

South Africa’s foreign minister will fly to The Hague for the ruling in a possible sign of Pretoria’s confidence in its case South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, is flying to The Hague to be present on Friday when the international court of justice (ICJ) delivers its highly anticipated verdict on South Africa’s request for an interim ruling in its genocide case against Israel . The ruling, if granted, would probably take the form of an order to Israel to announce a ceasefire in Gaza and allow more UN humanitarian aid into the country. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/Cc5A7nK

The price of the Tories’ new border regime beggars belief. In a cost of living crisis, it’s a bill we can’t afford The government is planning to increase the cost of doing business in Britain by a total of £330m a year. From the end of this month and again in April, it will start imposing a battery of border controls on agricultural trade with the EU. Fierce protests from farming and fishing interests have delayed these controls five times. But Rishi Sunak is frantic to show himself to be macho on Brexit. It is vital that Labour’s Keir Starmer steps forward and promises to rescind the controls immediately on taking office. The question is: does he have the guts? Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3oKxrEc

Growing private wealth, combined with public austerity, is undermining the health of western democracies In an intriguing study about to be published , the Dutch political philosopher Ingrid Robeyns poses a question that very rarely gets asked in mainstream politics. When it comes to the personal income and assets of the super-rich, how much is too much? The answer, she suggests in Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, should be anything above €10m. At that point, taxation should intervene, redeploying the surplus for the common good. Ms Robeyns is not naive. She thinks of her €10m figure as a guiding ideal to be striven for, but one that is unlikely ever to become a reality given the current way of the world. Quite. Nevertheless, her provocative intervention is valuable, because it draws attention to a curious disjunction: as the wealthy have got steadily richer in recent times, soaking up the benefits of free capital movement , share price surges and rising asset values,

The inauguration of the temple erased divisions between politics and religion in a theoretically secular state Monday’s inauguration of the new Ram Mandir in Ayodhya by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, was a moment decades in the making. Yet it also came too early. Despite the grand spectacle of the ceremony, with celebrities, tycoons and politicians in attendance, the temple is still incomplete. There is an obvious explanation for this rushed endeavour, and it is not religious. India will go to the polls in late spring and while Mr Modi is all but guaranteed to win a third term , he wants a large majority for his Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). Mr Modi rode to power, and has entrenched it, on the back of rightwing Hindu nationalism. On Monday he went beyond the exploitation of ethno-religious sentiment. He did not merely attend the ceremony; he carried out rituals. Religion and authoritarianism have proceeded hand-in-hand in recent years. But few strongmen have melded the polit

Brentford striker moved ball to right before scoring free kick ‘Clubs writing to PGMOL is embarrassing’ says Gary Neville Nottingham Forest have asked for an explanation from the Premier League and the referees’ body PGMOL over Ivan Toney’s controversial free kick that helped Brentford to a 3-2 win on Saturday. In his first game since completing an eight-month ban for betting breaches, Toney moved the referee’s vanishing foam and then shifted the ball to a more advantageous position before scoring. His goal brought Brentford level after Danilo had put the visitors in front, and the hosts went on to win through further goals from Ben Mee and Neal Maupay. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/yE9X4zj

The past 10 months have been an exciting yet excruciating battle of self-control before her Australia tour begins in February With only 33 sleeps until the biggest pop star on the planet arrives, already I can hear the groans from some readers, exhausted over the amount of space one singer and her tour can take up. How can the Eras Tour still be going? It’s surely been years, a colleague might complain. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/gwxQikr

Journalist who started out on the Nottingham Evening Post and went on to become the sports editor of the Observer Ronald Atkin, a former sports editor of the Observer, was a journalist of impeccably high standards, whether looking after other writers’ copy or fashioning his own, usually on top-level tennis or football matches. But as a representative of an old Fleet Street newspaper community that did not take itself too seriously, he also had an ability to laugh at the foibles of his profession. In an amusing piece written in 2012 for the website of the Sports Journalists’ Association, which had voted him their journalist of the year almost 30 years earlier, he listed some of the many ways in which his byline had been mangled over the years. Among the variations, he had been Atkins, Aitken, Atkinson and Hatchkin, and sometimes Rod or Tim rather than Ronald. In the citation for their supreme award in 1984, even the SJA had managed to get it wrong. Continue reading... from The Guar

Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/v2sm7XC

Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/bSEdsTP

Analysis shows Trump’s best gains in evangelical areas may be less predictive of success around the country than results in Iowa’s bigger metropolitan areas Iowa caucus takeaways: Trump’s hold on Republicans is clear Iowa caucuses 2024: Republican results in full US elections 2024: a calendar of the key events Nikki Haley has said in a new campaign advert attacking Donald Trump and Joe Biden that she is the “better choice” for America, as the former South Carolina governor tries to regain momentum after narrowly losing to Ron DeSantis in the Iowa caucuses. Haley puts herself forward as the better choice than Biden and Trump, whom the narrator in the ad suggests “are the two most-disliked politicians in America”. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/gC7r8WO

Industrial action over pay starting on Wednesday could affect processing of self-assessment tax returns and is unrelated to Post Office scandal Staff at Fujitsu, the technology firm at the centre of the Post Office Horizon scandal, are due to go on strike tomorrow, which their trade union said could disrupt HM Revenue and Customs at the busiest time of year for tax collection. About 300 staff, most of whom work in IT support for HMRC at sites in Telford and Stratford, east London, will go on strike in protest at a pay offer that the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS) said was 10 times less than what Fujitsu is offering staff in Japan. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/16/fujitsu-it-workers-hmrc-systems-to-go-on-strike

From Mark Ruffalo to Robert Downey Jr, men are expressing platonic affection in ways their forebears wouldn’t have dreamed of And the winner is … platonic male intimacy! Maybe everyone is just a bit overexcited this early in the awards season, or maybe we’re witnessing a seismic shift in male social intimacy, but there has been an outbreak of men kissing each other this year. Enjoy it before the inevitable backlash kicks in. Where did it start? Perhaps at the Golden Globes ceremony last week, where co-stars Ramy Youssef and Mark Ruffalo were seemingly so thrilled that Poor Things won best film for musical or comedy, they forcefully kissed on the lips. “Well, my mouth was going towards his mouth …” said Youssef afterwards . “And then the next thing, mine went to his,” added Ruffalo – which goes to show how novel the concept of just kissing another dude is to some men. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/jan/16/the-moustache-ceiling-wh

Continue reading... from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2024/jan/16/ella-baron-tory-rebellion-against-rwanda-bill-cartoon

Poll suggests almost everyone has had enough of the Tories, as party prepares to tear itself in two over Rwanda bill The marketing apparatchiks have taken to calling it Blue Monday. That day in January when you are generally feeling about as bad as you are ever going to feel all year. Anxious, depressed and broke. A time to go heavy on the Valium and Prozac. Just try to get through to better days relatively unscathed. Rishi Sunak doesn’t have to worry about being short of cash. He’s got more than he can reasonably spend in any number of lifetimes. But he’s sure as hell buying whatever else is on offer. Because days don’t come much bluer than this Blue Monday. He’d always imagined he’d be a brilliant prime minister. Not because he had the necessary qualities but because everyone has always said he’s brilliant whatever he’s done. He’s Mr Brilliant. The Entitled One. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/CbVoNh1

American artist known for his epic street ‘crawls’ through 70s New York, who also showed at the Museum of Modern Art One morning in 1978, passersby along the less salubrious end of West 42nd Street in New York were met with a curious sight. A young man dressed smartly in a pinstripe suit fell to his hands and knees and began to crawl along the dirty pavement, not letting up until he reached Times Square. It was the first of more than 30 “crawls” by the artist Pope.L, who has died unexpectedly aged 68. In a city beset with homelessness, it was an act of solidarity to lose his “verticality”, the artist said, the suit a symbol of power. “We’d gotten used to people begging, and I was wondering, how can I renew this conflict? I don’t want to get used to seeing this. I wanted people to have this reminder.” Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/Sl071zf

Croatian teenager takes set off Djokovic on grand slam debut ‘This is his moment. It could have easily been his match as well’ Novak Djokovic hailed Dino Prizmic as a future star after his narrow 6-2, 6-7 (5), 6-3, 6-4 win against the 18-year-old Croatian to reach the second round of the Australian Open. The world No 1 also admitted he has been under the weather for the past “four, five days” as he tries to win his 11th title here. “He deserved every applause, every credit that he got tonight,” Djokovic said. “He’s an amazing player, I must say, so mature for his age. This is his moment, honestly. It could have easily been his match as well. He was a break up in the third. He fought, even though he was 4-0 down. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/J80yPKb

Reforms should be made to guard against an inevitable conflict of interest, the Bar Council chair argues Before the latest Post Office headlines swept across the country, I expect very few people were aware that the law allows any adult, or organisation, to bring a private prosecution. In light of the Horizon scandal, the next question must surely be: how do we guard against abuse? The Bar Council, representing almost 18,000 barristers in England and Wales, last week called for parliament to review the safeguards associated with private prosecutions. The Post Office Horizon scandal is one of the worst miscarriages of justice our country has seen and focus rightly turns to the circumstances in which the private prosecutions were brought. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/KEXDIR4

By their military intervention, Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden have started something they may not be able to finish There are, broadly, three ways of looking at last week’s US and British military strikes on Houthi bases in Yemen : necessary, futile, dangerous. Yet, however the world views this action, taken in response to repeated, unprovoked attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea, the possible consequences are all the more alarming because they are unknowable and unpredictable. Joe Biden, the US president, and Rishi Sunak have started something they may find difficult to finish. The US-British bombardment of dozens of targets, Succeeded by a limited “follow-on” attack a day later, was necessary in the sense that the Houthi leaders had rejected numerous pleas, public and private, to end their Red Sea mayhem. Ships and crews were at risk. There was real fear that anti-ship missiles could hit an oil tanker, causing an environmental disaster. The global economy faced supply disru

Foreign policy displays in Yemen and Ukraine may win PM reflected glory – but capping inflationary pressures will be his foremost wish Returning from an overseas trip last year that had been broadly seen as a success, Rishi Sunak was heard privately observing that a truism of foreign policy is that even when you get things right, voters tend to not especially notice or care. Time will tell whether Sunak’s decision to throw in the UK’s lot with US-led attacks on Houthi forces will stem a spate of attacks on international shipping. But for now, the strike has won support from the bulk of British MPs, despite a few qualms about a lack of prior parliamentary consultation . Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/kbtRd70

The actor stays in the same lane to play a trained killer taking down the bad guys in David Ayer’s enjoyably silly time-waster If you’re not in the market for what David Ayer is forcefully selling in batty January thriller The Beekeeper at the point when someone says to the titular character, “To bee or not to bee, that is the bloody question,” then you might as well just give up and walk out. By this stage, late in the film, Ayer and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer have given us just about enough bee puns, bone cracks and bizarre cameos from British actors to give those in the right headspace (read: drunk) a solid, low-stakes, medium-reward new year’s effort. I can’t imagine a devoted Beekeeper hive emerging any time soon (it’s far too derivative and far too rough around the edges), but there’s enough energy and well-pitched silliness to have audiences, ahem, swarming to cinemas this weekend. It’s primed as Jason Statham’s John Wick (not that the actor needs another franchise since out of

Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/tAwiQvy

I want people to be excited about the animals I find and get them involved in conservation I am a British tourist, and I spend my holidays searching for species that are believed to be extinct. On my last trip to Papua New Guinea in 2022, I found a Louisiade pitta bird, which had been the focus of failed professional expeditions for years. It hadn’t been seen alive since 1898. We went around playing recordings of a related pitta, which sounds a bit like a chicken being strangled , until we received a reply. Imagine if you went around a haunted house rattling chains and then you heard a ghost rattling them back – that is what it was like. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/Pg7f9ke

Our countdown of the best players on earth continues and Tabitha Chawinga, Caroline Weir and Trinity Rodman featuring in places 70-41 Putellas tops 2022 list | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | Meet the judges Subscribe to our free women’s football newsletter Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/uMYsJwV

Gabriel Attal, the youngest-ever occupant of the Matignon, has his work cut out to turn around the government’s fortunes ahead of June elections Emmanuel Macron’s decision to appoint the youthful Gabriel Attal as France’s new prime minister represents a double first in the country’s history. At 34, Mr Attal will be the youngest politician ever to hold the office. Upliftingly, he will also be the first openly gay occupant of the Matignon. In his book, Revolution , written prior to his first presidential campaign, Mr Macron wrote: “What keeps France united is the acceptance of the diversity of origins and destinies and the refusal of fatalism.” As the final phase of the two‑term Macron presidency begins, Mr Attal is a choice designed to re-evoke the optimism and hopes for democratic renewal present at its outset. More narrowly, Mr Macron’s move to replace Élisabeth Borne after only 20 months in office constitutes a political throw of the dice, ahead of European elections in June. Thes

The cruel treatment of thousands of subpostmasters is a cautionary tale about technology as well as access to justice Between 1999 and 2015 at least 3,500 sub-postmasters across the UK were wrongly blamed for discrepancies in the accounts of the post offices they ran – when the real cause was faulty software. This is the crux of a scandal that involves Fujitsu, Japan’s biggest technology company, as well as the Post Office and the UK government that owned it. At the time the Horizon system, which cost £1bn, was the largest non-military IT system in Europe. An ITV drama screened last week, Mr Bates vs the Post Office , has pushed this disgraceful saga back into the news. But in many cases justice, if it comes at all, will be too late. At least four sub-postmasters have taken their own lives in the intervening years, while others died of natural causes before receiving compensation. Two decades after victims first identified IT problems as the probable cause of the discrepancies, it i

All you need to know about one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in UK history Sunak mulls plan to exonerate Horizon scandal victims ‘I got tarred overnight’: how scandal turned lives upside down Between 1999 and 2015 the Post Office relentlessly pursued operators of sub-post offices across the UK for alleged theft, fraud and false accounting based on information from its Horizon IT system installed in the late 1990s. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/vtwXGCT

It was one of those days when Arsenal might have played for another 90 minutes and failed to score. It was so deeply frustrating for Mikel Arteta and the home support. The sting in the tail, however, would devastate them, sparking boos at full-time and the sense that the club have stumbled into a mini-crisis. Liverpool’s joy knew no bounds. There had been the sense that this FA Cup tie was more important for Arsenal, given the form that they had taken into it – three Premier League defeats in five. The need for them to recover momentum was greater. Liverpool, sitting pretty at the top of the table, had the security of their shot at Carabao Cup glory; they face Fulham in their semi-final first leg at Anfield on Wednesday. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3ZhqGt1

Although Olivia Carr had been engaged and was married, she had never been in love. By healing her relationship with herself, she learned to open her heart I’d been engaged four times and was married, but I’d never been in love. As Covid hit and I turned 40, I decided I could no longer live that way. I left my husband the day after my birthday. I learned at a young age how to protect my heart by building walls around me. When it came to romance I just went through the motions. I was basically numb; the strongest emotion I felt when it came to intimacy was fear. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3uBndqM

‘We need to move so much faster’ to battle climate crisis, warns the Rev Canon Nick Davies, as locals assess damage Standing at the top of Tewkesbury Abbey tower, the Rev Canon Nick Davies is talking about the flood. But this is no sermon; the vicar is not reading from the Book of Genesis. He is discussing the flood waters before his very eyes, stretching far into the distance and besieging the medieval market town once again. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/n6PQKLI

Actor who played Roy Tucker in the in the long-running BBC Radio 4 drama serial The Archers Ian Pepperell, who has died aged 53 from complications of oesophageal cancer, acted in the world’s longest-running radio serial, The Archers, for 28 years. As the genial hotelier Roy Tucker, he played his part in taking the storylines of the Radio 4 soap from rural to raunchy. The actor said that fans of the programme, which began in 1951 billed as “an everyday story of country folk” in the fictional village of Ambridge, often failed to conceal their surprise on meeting him, having expected to find a tall, dark, strapping lad. “The reality is, I’m 5ft nothing with blond hair,” he said a few years after joining the cast in 1995. “Even other actors are surprised when I tell them what character I play.” (He was, in fact, 5ft 6in.) Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/hME9YyL

Children’s campaigner lived an extraordinary life encompassing social entrepreneurship, fame, politics, a fall from grace and a dramatic courtroom exoneration Family and friends are squashed into the late Camila Batmanghelidjh’s neat, tiny, kaleidoscopically colourful flat in north-west London. There are tears and hugs. Dates are passed round and cups of tea. “One thing is for sure,” said Lindita Berila, who has dropped in to pay her respects, “everyone knew Camila was special.” A few days previously, Batmanghelidjh had been here with colleagues helping to wrap thousands of Christmas presents to be delivered the next day to disadvantaged children. “She looked fabulous,” said her brother Bobby. “There was no indication she was going to leave us.” Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/wf350Xr

The assassination of a Hamas leader in Beirut and Houthi attacks on ships in the Red Sea increase the risks From the moment that the full extent of the 7 October atrocities by Hamas in southern Israel became evident, the spectre of an ensuing regional conflict loomed in the background. Since then, attention has been fixed on Israel’s pummelling of Gaza, where the death toll passed 22,000 this week , according to Palestinian health authorities. Yet in recent weeks the risk of a greater conflagration has grown . The assassination of the senior Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut marks a new and dangerous moment, as Israel (which did not publicly claim responsibility) will have known. Arouri was the group’s key conduit to Lebanon-based Hezbollah and to Iran. His death is a blow not only to Hamas but the broader network. It follows last week’s killing – which Tehran blames on Israel – of an Iranian military official who oversaw the shipping of arms to Hezbollah. Continue reading

Flawed elections confirm Europe is being strung along by a government intent on an authoritarian, ethno-nationalist agenda According to Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, the country’s recent parliamentary elections were the “cleanest and most honest” in its history. They were also a triumph for his misnamed Serbian Progressive party (SNS), which won by a landslide. But the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe had a different take. The 17 December poll, said a statement by its international observer team, took place in “unjust conditions”, marred by “bias in the media, pressure on public sector employees and misuse of public resources”. Instances of intimidation and “serious irregularities” including vote-buying and ballot-stuffing were noted. Other allegations have been made that Bosnian Serbs were bussed-in en masse to fraudulently vote in Belgrade. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/atlXEOT

English player, 16, was born into an era of Nintendo Wiis, Amy Winehouse, and the all-new iPhone The 16-year-old darts protege Luke Littler is just two wins away from becoming world champion after storming through to the PDC World Darts Championship semi-finals with a 5-1 victory over Northern Ireland’s Brendan Dolan . Here we take a look at how the world has changed since Littler was born on 21 January 2007. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/mUHIlZy