News Round-Up

• “Iran-Israel latest: Netanyahu calls on Iranians to ‘rise up’” – Netanyahu is trying to foment an uprising in Iran, calling on Iranians to “rise up” against the regime, reports the Telegraph.
• “Iran launches missile strike on Tel Aviv” – A barrage of missiles has been fired at Israel in retaliation for attacks that killed Tehran’s top military commanders and took out Iran’s nuclear programme, says the Telegraph.
• “The next attacks will be even MORE brutal Trump warns Iran” – President Trump says Iran muyst agree to a nuclear deal or face further attacks that will be “even more brutal” following Israel’s shock attack on its nuclear and military facilities, according to the Mail.
• “Mossad agents in secret mission to blow up Iranian missiles” – The Telegraph reports on Mossad’s activity inside Iran in the run-up to operation Rising Lion.
• “Israel’s war against Hamas is succeeding. No wonder the West wants it to end” – The discourse around the delivery of aid into Gaza is woefully uninformed, writes Jake Wallis Simpson in the Telegraph.
• “Why the Iranian regime must fall” – Tehran is the source code of terror, says Ayaan Hirsi Ali on her Restoration Substack.
• “Watch civil servant discuss ‘vile’ ministers and ‘insidious’ Israel influence” – Hundreds of staff saw webinars by the Civil Service Muslim Network containing antisemitic tropes. The Times has the video evidence.
• “‘Unreliable’ UK not told in advance about Israel’s attack on Iran” – A senior government source has told the Times that Israel failed to give Britain any advance warning about its latest military operation because Britain is not regarded as a reliable ally. Shock!
• “Mosque praised by Lord Hermer warned over anti-Israel sermon” – The Charity Commission has ticked off the Abdullah Quilliam Society, a mosque praised by Lord Hermer as “inspiring”, over an “inflammatory” talk urging Muslims to “wage war for Allah”, says the Telegraph.
• “How to game the social housing system” – Labour-controlled Westminster council has announced that every single social housing tenant in the borough will receive lifetime tenancies, according to the Spectator.
• “Man, 49, charged with threats to kill Koran burner” – Muhammad Naasir Attaari has been accused of telling an Asda employee he wanted to behead Hamit Coskun and when the police arrested him at his home they found a terrifying collection of weapons, reports the Telegraph.
• “Watch: Minister jeered for claiming most Channel migrants are children and women” – Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was jeered on Question Time when he claimed the majority of illegal immigrants arriving in small boats were “children, babies and women”. In fact, Home Office data show that 83.6% of arrivals over the year to this March were men. The Telegraph has the footage.
• “Labour MP U-turns on migrant age numbers after Question Time boos” – Darren Jones has now sort-of corrected himself for his patently false claim, asserting he was just referring to the occupants of one dinghy, says the Times.
• “The Welfare Bill is too little, too late” – How much of the Government’s Welfare Reform Bill will survive the mauling of backbench Labour MPs? Ross Clark in the Spectator thinks not much.
• “Migrants are draining our welfare system. Here’s how we fix that” – Only those who pay their way should be allowed to stay, argues Douglas Carswell in the Telegraph.
• “Rochdale grooming gang are convicted of sex offences against two teens” – A rape gang in Rochdale preyed on the vulnerabilities of young teenage girls to groom them as ‘sex slaves’ between 2001 and 2006, reports the Mail.
• “On being ‘America brained’” – On her Maiden Mother Matriarch Substack, Louise Perry reproduces a brilliant speech given in Budapest last week by former Acting US Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf.
• “The first official DOGE report – into Kent County Council” – Watch Reform UK’s DOGE report into Kent County Council.
• “‘Magic circle’ ditches Pride logos as Trump attacks DEI” – Slaughter & May is the only leading law firm to celebrate Pride Month after Trump’s crackdown on EDI, according to the Telegraph.
• “Pride continues to crumble” – In my latest Spectator column, I report on a small victory won by Conservative peers this week, getting the House of Lords canteen to remove the ‘Progress Pride’ flag.
• “Trans model named in list of ‘women defining Britain’” – Munroe Bergdorf, a biological male, has been chosen by Vogue as one of Britain’s 25 most influential ‘women’, says the Telegraph.
• “The Equality Act is a gift to grifters, and Labour wants to make it worse” – As an undergraduate student, Rakib Ehsan welcomed the passage of the 2010 Equality Act. Now he thinks it’s a menace, he says in the Telegraph.
• “The football club who went woke are going broke” – Lewes FC were the first side to announce equal pay for their men’s and women’s teams and, not surprisingly, has now run out of money, according to the Telegraph.
• “Life is too precious for assisted dying” – Assisted dying has attracted for me, and no doubt many other MPs, far more mail than any other issue, writes the Lib Dem MP Brian Mathew in the Spectator. He’s planning to vote against.
• “An Australasian sceptical note on the effectiveness of Covid vaccines” – In the Australian Spectator, Ramesh Thakur digs down into the data to show the Covid vaccines weren’t nearly as effective as their proselytisers claim
• “Spain’s Socialist PM begs for forgiveness over corruption” – A close ally of Pedro Sanchez, Spain’s Socialist PM, has been implicated in a bribery scandal but he refuses to resign or call a snap election, says the Telegraph.
• “The ‘experts’ you’ve never heard of inspiring Rachel Reeves’s disastrous economic policy” – If you want to know who the Chancellor will clobber next, try looking at the radical tax ideas pushed by CenTax, writes Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.
• “‘It’s absolutely f—ed’: Why Google’s new £1 billion London office is in crisis” – Thomas Heatherwick’s utopian Google building in King’s Cross is plagued by a fox infestation and water damage, according to the Telegraph. But it’s not the first setback he’s experienced.
• “Badenoch: I’m glad Tory defectors are going to Reform” – The Conservative Party leader says good riddance to those former Tory MPs and councillors defecting to Reform UK, reports the Telegraph.
• “Delegation and destruction” – AI’s existential threat to humanity is real, says Francis Fukuyama in Persuasion. Can we resist the temptation?
• “From dancing robots to DeepSeek, the university helping China to win tech race” – Hangzhou University has produced some of the world’s most impressive entrepreneurs, enabling China to compete with the US in a global technological revolution, according to the Times.
• “The iron law of energy” – The ‘Clean Transition’ is a step toward collapse, writes Richard Lyon on his Substack.
• “Britain’s wind farms paid to switch off at a record rate” – Britain’s wind farms are now costing the taxpayer a fortune to switch off, says the FT.
• “Private school families lose legal challenge against Labour VAT raid” – High Court judges decided the Government’s decision to charge VAT on independent school fees was “proportionate” in its aim to raise extra revenue for state schools, even though Sir Keir Starmer has now said it will be spent on house building. Disappointing news from the Telegraph.
• “Falling fertility: a crisis we refuse to face” – Fertility decline is not merely a demographic curiosity – it is a structural challenge with civilisational implications, says Andrew Glover in Quillette.
• “NYT ‘disinformation’ expert blames conservatives for riots” – The New York Times’s ‘disinformation’ correspondent has blamed conservative commentators on social media for whipping up the LA riots. Nothing to do with the deportation of illegal aliens, apparently.
• “TfL sacks Tube driver for knitting and watching videos at the wheel” – A driver on the Northern Line driver has been fired by TfL after being caught knitting and watching videos while operating a train, reports the Telegraph.
• “Museums put trigger warning on manual about trigger warnings” – From the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ department comes a story of a heritage organisation that has attached a trigger warning to a book about trigger warnings, says the Telegraph.
• “IQ isn’t everything but it’s a lot” – In Aporia, Noah Carl reviews the latest research on IQ and other factors that influence life outcomes and concludes IQ is still the big one.
• “Who did this?” – On X, il Donaldo Trumpo has posted a very funny fake video of the leader of Iran having a meltdown over Israel’s attack.

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