News Round-Up

• “France sends warships to defend British base from Iran” – Keir Starmer has ordered a Royal Navy warship to set sail for Cyprus to defend a UK airbase from Iranian air attacks, after being humiliated into acting by the French, reports the Mail.
• “Is this the Royal Navy’s biggest humiliation?” – With the fleet stuck at home and unable to defend a vital base in Cyprus from Iranian drones, is this one of the Royal Navy’s most embarrassing moments in decades? asks Tom Cotterill in the Telegraph.
• “Iran has shown how naive Keir Starmer truly is” – Tehran’s latest moves have brutally exposed just how naive Sir Keir Starmer has been about Iran and the wider Middle East, says Eliot Wilson in the Spectator.
• “Trump renews his attack on Keir Starmer and says he has ‘not been helpful’ amid fury at Prime Minister’s ‘pearl clutching’ response to Iran” – Donald Trump has taken another swing at Keir Starmer, accusing him of pandering to Muslim voters and failing to back the fight against Iran, according to the Mail.
• “No PM since Suez has bungled the special relationship worse than Starmer” – Behaving like an Attorney General in a time of international crisis is not working for Britain’s third-rate leader, argues Philip Johnston in the Telegraph.
• “Vigils at British mosques for ‘martyr’ Ayatollah Khamenei” – Iran’s supreme leader has been mourned at student organisations across the country, reports Fiona Hamilton in the Times.
• “How Khamenei’s martyrdom could fuel a UK migration and security crisis” – The dramatic fall of the Ayatollah could trigger a fresh wave of migration and serious security headaches for Britain, warns the Rationals on Substack.
• “Tax burden to reach record high” – Labour’s stealth raid on workers will drive Britain’s tax burden up to a new record high, rising further and faster than previously forecast, reports the Mail.
• “Now the luvvies flock to the Greens!” – Singer and lifelong Labour supporter Paloma Faith has declared Green leader Zack Polanski “exactly what we need” right now, according to the Mail.
• “Labour’s migration bind” – After coming third in the Gorton & Denton by-election, Labour now faces an awkward choice between chasing Green voters with softer migration policies or trying to outflank Reform on deportations, writes David Shipley in the Spectator.
• “Kemi Badenoch has said the unsayable on multiculturalism” – Kemi Badenoch has broken the political omertà by delivering a refreshingly candid speech on the failures of multiculturalism, says Stephen Daisley in the Spectator.
• “Counter-terror police at stabbing near primary school” – Police have launched a murder investigation after a man in his 20s died following a stabbing in Birmingham, reports Sky News.
• “Ed Davey could well be the crassest man in British politics” – Lib Dem leader Ed Davey has stunned many by launching a surprisingly harsh attack on Brits living in Dubai, writes Robert Taylor in the Telegraph.
• “How a regime claim became a viral headline” – Several major outlets have uncritically repeated Tehran’s claim of an Israeli strike on a school – conveniently omitting that the building sat inside an IRGC military complex, writes Sharon Levy for HonestReporting.
• “Israel hacks prayer app to push propaganda to Iran” – Israeli operatives reportedly hijacked a popular Iranian prayer app to blast messages straight to worshippers’ phones, according to the Register.
• “Mossad hacked every traffic camera in Tehran for years… how Israel and America sealed the fate of the Ayatollah” – Mossad has spent years secretly tapping into almost every traffic camera in Tehran to track regime insiders – surveillance that helped seal the Ayatollah’s fate, reveals the Mail.
• “In 48 hours, Trump sent Iran’s navy to the bottom of the sea” – The US has basically wiped out Iran’s entire navy in under two days, reports James Rothwell in the Telegraph.
• “Is it a crime to mock politicians in Germany?” – A government that sets the police on pensioners over fairytale nicknames is not “protecting” democracy – it’s terrified of it, says Stephen Sidney in Spiked.
• “When the curve turned – and the silence began” – Covid death rates had already started falling sharply before lockdowns kicked in — yet almost nobody wants to talk about what that timing really means, say Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Tom Jefferson on the Trust the Evidence Substack.
• “Zuckerberg’s AI glasses ‘spy on people on the toilet’” – Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are a privacy nightmare, with footage of naked people, sensitive information and violent acts captured and seen by Meta’s AI and an army of employees, reports A.J. Dellinger on Gizmodo.
• “Crypto billionaire pardoned by Trump gives £20 million to science” – Crypto mogul Ben Delo has donated £20 million to the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences – one of the biggest gifts ever to a non-Oxbridge uni outfit ever, according to TradingView.
• “Army spends taxpayer cash on ‘bat disco’” – British defence chiefs were forced to install a “bat disco” lighting system at the country’s biggest military training ground to comply with strict nature laws, reports the Telegraph.
• “The US is officially pulling out of the UN climate cabal” – The United States has officially notified the United Nations that it is withdrawing from the Framework Convention on Climate Change, writes Anthony Watts in Watts Up With That?
• “Media say ‘climate change’ caused the deadly Lake Tahoe avalanche. They’re wrong” – Several news outlets have blamed “climate change” for a tragic February 17th avalanche that killed nine people near Lake Tahoe, yet heavy winter snow and avalanches have long been normal in the Sierra Nevada, says Anthony Watts in Climate Realism.
• “New study: ‘Internal noise’ and volcanic forcing can trigger 10–15°C warming within decades” – A recent study has demonstrated that internal climate variability combined with strong volcanic activity can produce rapid regional temperature increases of 10–15 °C over just a few decades, reports Kenneth Richard on No Tricks Zone.
• “Stefani on the Sun vs CO₂ as climate drivers” – New analysis shows solar activity plus CO₂ explain sea surface temps better than high-end IPCC claims, says Andy May in Watts Up With That?
• “Swiss television tries to refute climate sceptics and fails” – Swiss public broadcaster SRF Meteo has published what it calls a ‘fact-check’ debunking climate sceptics, but there are multiple errors and misleading claims in its arguments, writes Dr Peter Panther in Clintel.
• “BAFTAs host Alan Cumming brands ceremony a ‘trauma triggering s**tshow’” – Alan Cumming has called last weekend’s BAFTAs a “trauma-triggering s**tshow” and apologised to black attendees and Tourette’s sufferers after the N-word was aired live, reports the Mail.
• “These Hollywood crybullies have accidentally exposed the truth about the ‘compassionate’ Left” – The furious reaction from parts of Hollywood to a Tourette’s sufferer’s involuntary outburst at the BAFTAs has inadvertently shone a light on some uncomfortable truths, says Michael Deacon in theTelegraph.
• “Keir Starmer has finally taken drastic action on Iran, by unleashing Britain’s most deranged Net Zero zealotry on the regime” – Sir Keir Starmer has personally dispatched Ed Miliband to Tehran to carpet the place in hundreds of wind turbines and lecture the ayatollahs into submission.

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