President Trump has signed his ‘treaty’ with Iran in, of all places, Versailles. Which is fitting since Versailles 2.0 likely to be as disastrous as Versailles 1.0.
The deal allows for an immediate resumption of Iranian oil exports, worth $60 billion a year to the tyrants of Tehran. That’ll buy a lot of new missiles, arms for terrorist proxies and equipment to enrich uranium, as Trump’s attention wanders far from the Gulf.
Already this week, several oil-laden Iranian tankers have steamed out of port and across the U.S. naval blockade line, an early indication of the rush of anticipated exports.
Fascinating that Starmer is widely regarded as doomed when so many key metrics are going his way: channel crossings, migration more generally, NHS waiting lists, and today’s inflation numbers
Carlo Ginzberg is dead. The giant of microhistory. If you don't know The Cheese and the Worms, seek it out. When I read it as a student it changed my sense of what history-writing could do. Had the pleasure of hearing him speak in Stockholm via zoom last year. A brilliant mind.
Very sad to learn that Radio 4's The World Tonight is to be killed off in the latest round of BBC cuts. It has a long and honourable history as one of the more thoughtful BBC news programmes and I am proud to have been associated with it for more than twenty years.
Trump: "Qatar is the closest to Iran, physically. With other countries, I noticed they had to travel about 45 minutes to get there. With you, you could walk right across the border."
There's no land border between Iran and Qatar. They're separated by the Persian Gulf.
Syria cannot afford to intervene in foreign wars. It is dealing with violent mobs across the country trying to lynch people suspected of being Assad-era criminals, an ISIS insurgency, an Alawite insurgency, Druze separatist militia, drug-trafficking gangs, an Israeli occupation, and Iranian-backed terror cells.
He sent 13 service members to their deaths over “not very valuable stuff”?
168 Iranian school girls.
Thousands of civilians killed.
Our bases badly damaged.
Stockpiles depleted.
$80 billion price tag.
$6 gas.
For “not very valuable stuff”?
The draft US-Iran framework would see Tehran maintain the "status quo" on its nuclear program, allow Iran to sell oil and potentially trigger a full US troop withdrawal and sanctions removal if a final deal is reached, Israel's Channel 12 reports.
The @BBCNews has now confirmed what some of us warned for years.
A Russian diplomat ran a sabotage campaign on British soil: arson against the Prime Minister’s own home, and fake far-right and Islamist groups built to turn us against each other. This is not crime. It is how war is fought by powers who don’t want to expose their hand. https://t.co/G7cp3xaZQK
Hard hitting resignation speech by John Healey in the Commons, with a parting shot at the Chancellor
‘Our adversaries don’t follow timetables set by the Treasury,’ he told MPs
‘This is the age of hard power and rising threat, this is not the moment for calibration or incremental change. That means bigger politics, bolder priorities, harder choices,’ he said
He repeated his call for Britain to commit to spending 3% of GDP on defence by 2030
Head of the armed forces Sir Richard Knighton today: "We will have to dial back our activities and our exercise and operational activity if the level of resource funding that is available to us does not increase."
Speaking at the G7 today, Keir Starmer made clear there will be no more money forthcoming.
John Healey's resignation speech in the Commons later should be box office.
Rarely has a geopolitical roll of the dice gone so rapidly wrong. Netanyahu played on Trump’s vanity to help convince him to start this war. That same vanity will now be deaf to any future bridges Netanyahu might try to sell.” My column https://t.co/nCEDvdTm1J
After reading the details released on the deal with Iran, let's get give them a battleship so we can sign our unconditional surrender.
What a colossal foreign policy disaster.
Let's just reflect on this for a moment. For the past few months a group of people who style themselves "patriots" have been peddling propaganda on behalf of a foreign state after it sponsored a firebomb attack on our Prime Minister.
Same administration that called on the Iranian people to rise up and rid themselves of their oppressors now offering prospect of $300bn to said oppressors to presumably oppress more lavishly.
Wait, is this for real? Trump spent $60 million of our taxpayer funds to host a UFC fight and then is selling UFC coin to line his family’s pockets. The Trump corruption swamp is a mile deep. https://t.co/jUtLu4cTaz