Global Pulse

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  • UK: Backlash as Lloyds ‘debanks’ independent media outlet The Canary ‘with no explanation’

    UK: Backlash as Lloyds ‘debanks’ independent media outlet The Canary ‘with no explanation’

    A major crisis has erupted over press freedom in the United Kingdom after prominent independent left-wing news outlet The Canary announced this Tuesday that it has been abruptly de-banked by Lloyds Bank, one of the nation’s largest and most influential banking institutions.

    In an official statement published across its website and social media channels, The Canary confirmed that Lloyds has frozen a significant sum of the outlet’s operating funds, and has failed to provide any formal justification for the decision even after repeated outreach and communications from the outlet’s leadership. The sudden action has left The Canary in an extremely precarious financial position, according to the statement.

    In an interview with Middle East Eye (MEE), The Canary’s chief executive officer Steve Topple explained that the outlet is currently unable to issue pay to its full team of in-house journalists and contracted contributors. “We have a large team, and all of them are now extremely distressed and in limbo. Many of them are marginalised people, and it has hit them very hard,” Topple said.

    Founded in 2015 as an alternative to mainstream corporate-owned UK media, the small left-wing outlet made headlines earlier this May when it announced plans to launch a print edition to expand its reach. The publication operates without a paywall, relying almost entirely on direct reader donations to fund its daily operations. That model leaves it extremely vulnerable to sudden disruptions to its banking services, Topple noted.

    Topple called the unannounced debanking an outrageous attack on independent media. “It is an outrage that the Canary has been unceremoniously dropped into financial instability with no notice or explanation from Lloyds. Our situation is a damning indictment of the treatment of independent media in this country – whereby you can be potentially ruined without recourse by banking giants like Lloyds,” he said.

    News of the debanking quickly sparked widespread backlash across major social media platforms, with users, journalists and activists across the political spectrum condemning the action and calling on Lloyds to immediately release a public explanation for its decision. Critics have raised growing alarm over the incident as evidence of expanding restrictions on independent journalistic freedom across the UK.

    MEE attempted to contact Lloyds Bank directly to request comment on the incident, but had not received a response by the time of this report’s publication.

    Ahmed Alnaouq, a Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the advocacy group We Are Not Numbers, warned that the debanking sets a deeply dangerous precedent for independent outlets across the UK. “[This] sets a very dangerous precedent,” Alnaouq said, adding that The Canary’s work must be “protected and supported at any cost.”

    Ash Sarkar, author and contributing editor at UK independent outlet Novara Media, framed the action as a worrying development that fits into a broader pattern of politically motivated debanking targeting figures and outlets across both the left and right of the political spectrum. Sarkar pointed to the high-profile 2023 closure of former UK politician Nigel Farage’s accounts with Coutts, a prestigious private bank tied to Lloyds, as evidence of this growing trend.

    Award-winning journalist and author Jonathan Cook also highlighted that The Canary has already faced years of financial pressure following a targeted campaign against the outlet by the pro-Labour group Labour Together in the aftermath of the 2017 UK general election. That campaign cost the outlet a large share of its existing advertising revenue, leaving it even more exposed to the current banking disruption.

    Social media users have launched a coordinated campaign to pressure Lloyds to reverse the decision and explain its actions. Hundreds of users have filed direct complaints with the bank on platforms including X (formerly Twitter), TikTok and Instagram, while many have shared official customer contact information to help other critics escalate their concerns. Some users have called for widespread boycotts of Lloyds, and dozens of TikTok users have announced they are closing their own personal accounts with the bank in protest. Other users have launched fundraising drives to encourage direct donations to The Canary to help the outlet meet payroll and stay operational.

    On Instagram, comments from angry and concerned users have flooded Lloyds’ most recent public post, with nearly all comments demanding the bank issue a full explanation for its treatment of The Canary. Maddison Wheeldon, a reporter on staff at The Canary, echoed the outlet’s call for public support in a post on X, writing: “Please share and support us, we need independent media now more than ever before.”

    The incident is not an isolated case: recent reporting has revealed that debanking has become increasingly common across the UK in recent years. An investigation published by The Telegraph in January found that UK banks closed nearly half a million customer and organization accounts in 2023 alone, representing a more than tenfold increase compared to the number of account closures recorded between 2016 and 2017.

    Earlier this year, The Guardian published an investigation that found Muslim individuals and community organizations in the UK are disproportionately targeted by debanking practices. The report noted that UK banks face intense regulatory pressure to monitor accounts for potential terrorist financing, a pressure that has pushed many institutions to hastily close accounts and block transactions of innocent people and registered charities, in most cases without offering any opportunity for appeal or review.

    Successive UK governments from both major political parties have faced widespread cross-spectrum criticism for failing to address unaccountable debanking, and have recently introduced legislative reforms aimed at curbing the practice. New regulations set to take effect in late April will require banks to provide customers with a minimum of 90 days advance notice before closing an account, as well as a written explanation for the decision. The regulations do, however, include a broad exception for cases where banks suspect an account is being used for criminal activity, leaving a major loophole that critics say will allow politically motivated debanking to continue.

  • Starmer’s legacy: Labour has a mountain to climb to recover its Muslim voters

    Starmer’s legacy: Labour has a mountain to climb to recover its Muslim voters

    In October 2023, as Israel launched its military campaign in Gaza, Keir Starmer — then leader of the UK opposition — faced a pivotal question during a live interview with LBC’s Nick Ferrari. When asked about Israel’s deliberate use of starvation as a tool of conflict against Palestinian civilians in Gaza, Starmer’s response would reshape the future of the Labour Party: he stated he believed Israel held a legitimate “right” to cut off electricity and water supplies to Gaza’s civilian population, a move widely classified as a war crime under international humanitarian law. What Starmer did not anticipate in that moment was the lasting damage his words would inflict on Labour’s standing with its core supporters, particularly the UK’s Muslim community.

    Historically, Labour has positioned itself as more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and more open to Palestinian advocacy than the ruling Conservative Party. So Starmer’s remarks triggered an immediate wave of backlash from voices both inside and outside the party. Within just a few weeks, more than 150 Muslim Labour councillors penned an open letter to party leadership, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The plea was brushed aside, and the first cracks in the long-standing alliance between the Muslim community and Labour quickly grew into a major political rupture.

    Though Labour had held a consistent lead in national opinion polls since December 2021, translating to a landslide victory in the 2024 general election that delivered a majority government, the election exposed deep, costly rifts within the party. Starmer’s government took power with the lowest popular vote share for any UK ruling party in modern history, and the party lost multiple parliamentary constituencies with large Muslim populations. One of the most high-profile losses was the newly created Dewsbury and Batley constituency in West Yorkshire, a seat where 43% of the population identifies as Muslim.

    Warning signs of this backlash had already emerged in the May 2024 local elections, when thousands of disaffected Labour voters threw their support behind independent candidates across the country. This trend held strong in the most recent round of 2026 local elections, particularly in the Kirklees metropolitan borough that covers Dewsbury and Batley. Yusra Hussain, a local councillor who defected from Labour to run as an independent, and who won a full term in Batley West alongside two other independent candidates, summed up the sentiment of many defectors: “I did not leave because my values changed. I left because I believe the party’s direction has changed.”

    To understand Labour’s current unrest, observers say it is impossible to separate the Gaza backlash from the broader ideological shift the party has undergone over the past decade. Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour advanced a clear platform of radical left-wing policies centered on renationalization of key industries, massive public investment, and expanded social rights. It was on this platform of Corbyn’s “10 pledges” that Starmer won the 2020 Labour leadership contest — but within months of taking power, Starmer abandoned each pledge one by one, steering the party sharply to the right, further even than the centrist New Labour government of Tony Blair.

    This ideological shift left Labour vulnerable in marginal seats with large Muslim populations. In the 2021 Batley and Spen by-election, for example, then-incumbent Labour candidate Tracy Brabin — now Mayor of West Yorkshire — saw her majority whittled down to just 323 votes, after prominent Palestine advocate George Galloway ran as a spoiler candidate and drew thousands of left-leaning pro-Palestine voters away from Labour. That same lack of a coherent, progressive appeal, paired with the party’s hard turn toward pro-Israel policy, cost Starmer the newly created Dewsbury and Batley seat in 2024.

    Iqbal Mohamed, the independent MP who now holds the Dewsbury and Batley seat, explained the coalition that brought him to power: “What united so many voters was a firm belief that this country is — in a myriad of ways — failing the vast majority of people, their basic needs and their human rights, be that at home or abroad. Along with the abandonment of traditional centre-left viewpoints, moving the party towards a pro-Israel ideology was a devastating shift in this constituency.”

    This electoral backlash is not limited to West Yorkshire. Independents also claimed key seats from Labour in Blackburn and Birmingham Perry Barr, both constituencies with even larger British Asian populations than Dewsbury and Batley. Political analysts note that Starmer’s abandonment of the party’s longstanding pro-Palestine position has proven even more disruptive to Labour’s voter base than his broader shift to the right. For decades, successive Labour leaders had backed Palestinian statehood: Ed Miliband oversaw a parliamentary vote in 2014 where the party voted in favor of recognizing Palestinian statehood, and Corbyn remained a consistent advocate for Palestinian rights throughout his leadership. Though Starmer eventually relented and recognized Palestinian statehood late last year alongside Canada and France, political analysts say the damage to Labour’s reputation among core supporters was already irreversible.

    Post-election polling from 2026 confirms that the backlash extends far beyond the Muslim community. More than half of Labour’s former voters — across demographic groups — now cite the party’s inaction on the Gaza conflict as a key reason they switched their support to the Greens, Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, Liberal Democrats, or independent candidates. Beyond the Gaza issue, Labour has also lost much of its historic left-wing base after the ousting of Jeremy Corbyn, who has since reemerged as a prominent independent left voice. Many political analysts compare this sustained net loss of support to the collapse of other traditional center-left parties across Western Europe in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

    The Green Party has emerged as the primary beneficiary of this exodus, with a 2026 YouGov poll finding that more than one in five former Labour voters have now switched their allegiance to the Greens. The party’s new viability was on full display in the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election in Manchester, where the Greens came within a hair’s breadth of taking the seat from Labour.

    In Dewsbury and Batley, the impact of this political realignment is impossible to miss. The most recent Kirklees Council elections returned a minority administration led by the right-wing Reform UK party, whose incoming leader drew widespread public mockery for demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of basic parliamentary procedure. The council remains deadlocked without a permanent leader, with a new vote scheduled for later this month to break the impasse. Across the 16 wards covering Batley and Dewsbury, voters elected 11 pro-Palestine independent councillors and five Reform candidates — and not a single Labour candidate won a seat.

    Mohamed, the independent MP for the area, argues that the result makes clear voters have rejected the UK’s longstanding two-party system entirely. “They deserted en masse a Labour Party that has for too long treated residents with contempt, taken their vote for granted, and aided and abetted the Israeli apartheid, occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people,” he said.

    The original analysis, published by Middle East Eye editor and journalist Joe Gill in a 2026 opinion video, challenges Starmer’s core narrative that he rescued a party left morally, financially, and politically bankrupt by Corbyn. For analysts, the path to repairing Labour’s broken trust with voters will require decisive action to shift the party’s direction on both domestic and foreign policy — a change that has not yet materialized under Starmer’s leadership.

  • Greek politician’s mother dies of wounds after arson attack

    Greek politician’s mother dies of wounds after arson attack

    In a shocking series of coordinated attacks targeting senior members of Greece’s ruling New Democracy party in the northern city of Thessaloniki, a 72-year-old woman has become the first fatality after succumbing to severe burn injuries sustained in an early Wednesday incendiary assault.

    Vagia Nestora, mother of New Democracy parliamentary candidate Afroditi Nestora, was caught in the blast and fire that tore through the apartment building where her daughter resides. Hospital officials confirmed that Nestora arrived at the medical facility in critical condition with burns covering nearly 80% of her total body surface. Despite aggressive, round-the-clock intensive care intervention, she developed multiple organ failure and passed away shortly after admission.

    Her daughter Afroditi, who is running as a party candidate in upcoming elections, also suffered second-degree burns and severe smoke inhalation, and remains hospitalized in stable condition as of the latest updates. Afroditi’s father, who lives with the family and has pre-existing chronic health conditions, alongside two other residents of the multi-story building, were also admitted for observation after experiencing respiratory distress from smoke exposure.

    Authorities confirm the attack on the Nestora family’s building was one of three synchronized improvised incendiary attacks that unfolded within 17 minutes across Thessaloniki. The first explosion was recorded at 4:18 a.m. local time, followed by two more blasts at 4:23 a.m. and 4:35 a.m. respectively. The two additional attacks targeted the private residences of Zisis Ioakeimovits, chair of New Democracy’s Thessaloniki regional administrative committee, and Savvas Anastasiadis, a former New Democracy member of parliament. No injuries were reported in these two incidents, though minor property damage was recorded at both locations.

    Investigators say the attackers placed homemade petrol-based incendiary devices outside the targeted apartment buildings. At the Nestora residence, the blast completely destroyed two parked passenger cars, damaged multiple nearby motorcycles, and caused significant structural damage to the building’s ground floor and entryway.

    Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis traveled directly to Thessaloniki’s main hospital immediately after the attacks to meet with victims’ families and oversee the initial law enforcement response. Speaking to reporters shortly before Vagia Nestora’s death was announced, Mitsotakis condemned the attackers in strong terms, rejecting any attempt to frame the violence as a legitimate form of political or social protest. “Those who carry out these attacks under the guise of social struggle are nothing more than criminals, and they will be treated as such,” the prime minister said. He added that violence has no place in a functioning democratic society, and vowed that all those responsible would be apprehended and held fully accountable under Greek law.

    The Greek Counter-Terrorism Service has taken over lead investigative responsibility for the case, and is currently working to confirm whether the three attacks were fully coordinated by a single group or network. Investigators are reviewing hundreds of hours of closed-circuit television footage from nearby businesses and public spaces to identify suspects, and have not yet announced any arrests in connection with the assaults. As of Thursday morning, no domestic or extremist group has issued a claim of responsibility for the attacks.

  • How Israeli president’s advisor worked to set up Reform Friends of Israel group

    How Israeli president’s advisor worked to set up Reform Friends of Israel group

    Calls for greater transparency over foreign lobbying in British politics have reignited after a heated parliamentary debate last week, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK facing fresh scrutiny over its undisclosed links to Israeli lobbying networks. The Westminster Hall debate was convened to discuss a public petition calling for a formal public inquiry into pro-Israel influence over UK politics and democratic institutions. During the debate, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice delivered a fierce rejection of the petition, labeling its core motivation fundamentally antisemitic and calling for it to be thrown out entirely.

    What has thrown Tice’s comments into question, however, is the record of official trips that senior Reform figures have taken to Israel, all funded by pro-Israel groups tied to the Israeli government. Just six months before the debate, in September 2024, Tice himself traveled to Israel for meetings with senior Israeli ministers, with the trip fully financed by Reform Friends of Israel (RFI), a little-known pro-Israel lobby group founded to coordinate ties between the party and the Israeli government. A separate trip by a delegation of senior Reform party figures in November 2024, which included a stop in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, was funded directly by the Israeli foreign ministry, investigative journalism outlet Declassified UK revealed this week.

    Against this backdrop, questions are mounting over the leadership, funding and objectives of RFI, a group that has never publicly disclosed its donor list. The founding driving force behind RFI is British-born political strategist Jason Pearlman, a figure with deep decades-long ties to both British politics and Israeli official circles. Until December 2024, Pearlman served as international media advisor to Israeli President Isaac Herzog, and he continued to work to secure funding for RFI while holding that official Israeli government role. When Pearlman departed his post with Herzog, the Israeli president praised him for guiding the presidency through some of Israel’s most challenging periods with the global press.

    Pearlman has since confirmed he has stepped back from his role leading RFI, telling Middle East Eye in a recent interview that he left the group after relocating to Israel for personal reasons, and that he was honored to have helped launch the organization. He has repeatedly refused to name the group’s financial backers, though he denied claims that RFI has ever received funding from the Israeli government or any other foreign state, and claimed there was never any overlap between his work for the Israeli presidency and his work setting up RFI.

    Pearlman’s long career in pro-Israel advocacy stretches back decades. Raised in Sunderland, northeast England, Pearlman has deep family roots in the global Zionist movement, with a great-grandmother who famously sat alongside Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, at the 1903 Sixth Zionist Congress. After working as media director for the Board of Deputies of British Jews and later in the public affairs department of the Israeli embassy in London, he relocated to Israel in 2006, taking up a role as foreign press liaison for the Israeli government press office a year later. He returned to the UK in 2010 to serve as deputy director of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), a Westminster-based neoconservative think tank with a long record of strongly pro-Israel advocacy.

    HJS’s current director, Alan Mendoza, is another key figure connected to both Reform UK and pro-Israel lobbying circles in the UK. Mendoza serves as a senior foreign affairs advisor to Reform leader Nigel Farage, and also holds the role of president of the UK branch of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), an organization that has faced widespread international criticism for its role in facilitating the displacement of Palestinian people. JNF UK has donated £1 million ($1.36 million) to what has been described as “Israel’s largest militia”, and counts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who faces an arrest warrant for alleged war crimes from the International Criminal Court—as an honorary patron. A former Westminster Conservative councillor, Mendoza defected to Reform UK last year and lost his council seat in the May 2025 UK local elections.

    Under Mendoza’s leadership, HJS has exerted significant influence over counter-terrorism policy during successive Conservative UK governments, while maintaining an unapologetically pro-Israel stance. The think tank has faced harsh criticism even from former insiders: co-founder Matthew Jamison later denounced it as a “monstrous animal” and a “deeply anti-Muslim racist organisation”, while former member Marko Atilla Hoare described it as an “abrasively right-wing forum with an anti-Muslim tinge” that publishes superficial, polemical content from aspiring commentators. Last year, Mendoza publicly opposed the UK government’s plan to allow family dependants of Palestinian students from Gaza to enter the UK, telling TalkTV that “we don’t know what they believe. We don’t know what their tendencies are. We don’t know whether they mean us well or ill.”

    Efforts by Israeli lobbying groups to court Reform UK have ramped up significantly since the second half of 2024. Pearlman previously told Declassified UK that he attended a dinner with Farage and key potential donors while still working for President Herzog, to discuss seed funding for RFI. While he would not name RFI’s current backers, he acknowledged that he expects many donors are overlapping with the groups that fund the long-established pro-Israel lobby groups Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI). Pearlman is an open, vocal defender of Israeli military actions in Gaza, having written a op-ed for UK outlet LBC earlier this year supporting the US-Israeli attack on Iran and criticizing the current Labour government for failing to offer stronger backing for the strike. He has also repeatedly denied that Israeli forces have committed war crimes in Gaza.

    During his September 2024 funded trip to Israel, Tice met with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar, and later wrote that with the current Labour government openly declaring pro-Palestinian positions from the prime minister down, it falls to other parties in UK parliament to stand with Israel as an ally. He added that during the trip he visited an Israeli border crossing into Gaza, and claimed that widespread reports of famine in Gaza pushed by the United Nations were false, saying his own observations and conversations with what he called “credible top people” convinced him the famine claims were untrue.

    Tice’s labeling of the transparency petition as antisemitic during last week’s debate has drawn sharp pushback from the petition’s creator, Andy Kalil. The debate saw most participating MPs who are affiliated with pro-Israel groups echo Tice’s claim that the petition was antisemitic, while a small number of MPs who supported the call for an inquiry raised detailed questions about lobbying and transparency that went unanswered. Kalil has since submitted a formal complaint to Deputy Speaker Nusrat Ghani, obtained by Middle East Eye, arguing that the repeated labeling of the petition, its 118,000 public signatories, and supporting MPs as antisemitic amounts to an sustained attack on a legitimate call for greater transparency and accountability, rather than a serious engagement with the substantive issues raised. Kalil added that the debate failed to address core questions about foreign lobbying, political donations, publicly funded parliamentary trips, and foreign influence, and has called for the debate to be rerun.

    Newly unearthed Israeli government data obtained by Berlin-based journalist Yossi Bartel confirms that the Israeli foreign ministry paid more than £50,000 to a Jerusalem-based events firm called Conexión Israel to organize the November 2024 trip for the Reform UK delegation. The delegation included then-Reform chairman David Bull, Lancashire County Council leader Stephen Atkinson, London Assembly member Alex Wilson, and party board member Gawain Towler. During the trip, the group visited sites of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks, including the site of the Nova music festival massacre. After the trip, Bull called it “life changing”, and said the group had discussed issues including visa overstayers and asylum seekers with the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. Towler said in a statement after the trip that Israel’s fight is “in many ways, our fight” as a shared struggle for “enlightenment ideals, international norms, democracy and the rest.”

    In addition to its deepening ties with pro-Israel lobbying networks, Reform UK has also built formal connections with the United Arab Emirates, with Farage meeting senior Emirati ministers earlier this year. Abu Dhabi has reportedly found common ground with Reform over their shared opposition to political Islam, and last September Farage pledged that a Reform government would ban the Muslim Brotherhood, following the lead of multiple Gulf states.

    Middle East Eye, which first reported on many of these connections, provides independent, in-depth coverage of the Middle East, North Africa and surrounding regions. Requests for comment from Reform UK have not yet received a response.

  • Bibles, Home Alone and perfume: Six surprising ways Trump made money in 2025

    Bibles, Home Alone and perfume: Six surprising ways Trump made money in 2025

    In a recent release from the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, a sprawling 927-page financial disclosure document detailing President Donald Trump’s personal and business finances during his first year of his second term in the White House has been made public. The massive filing, which dwarfs the disclosures of other top U.S. officials, offers an unprecedented look into the income streams, investments and business dealings of the sitting president. For context, Vice President JD Vance’s 2025 disclosure clocks in at just 17 pages, while former President Joe Biden’s final 2024 disclosure was only 11 pages long. After combing through the thousands of lines of financial data, six of the most noteworthy findings have emerged.

    First, Trump’s famous personal brand remains a powerful moneymaker. The president pulled in millions of dollars in 2025 from licensing his name to a wide range of branded products. His coffee-table book *Save America* generated $1.8 million (£1.38 million) in revenue alone. A Trump-branded Bible added $208,000 to his total income, while a line of signature footwear and fragrances – including the women’s Victory 47 perfume, which retails for $249 per bottle – brought in an additional $67,000. Even limited-edition MAGA-themed merchandise turned a profit: sales of the “American Eagle” collector’s guitar netted roughly $36,000.

    Second, First Lady Melania Trump recorded substantial personal income in 2025, led by her eponymous documentary produced by Amazon. The streaming giant invested $40 million into the film, which followed the First Lady in the months leading up to her husband’s second inauguration. The documentary pulled in $7 million at the box office last year, and Melania, credited as both producer and the documentary’s subject, earned $10.7 million from the project. Beyond the film, she added $6 million in income from non-fungible token (NFT) sales and another $520,000 from her memoir, also titled *Melania*.

    Third, the disclosure reveals a staggering volume of investment activity from Trump: more than 21,285 separate share trades across hundreds of public companies in 2025. Among the most high-profile holdings was stock in AI chip giant Nvidia, a company that made major headlines last year for its $5 trillion market valuation and its central role in U.S.-China trade tensions over advanced semiconductor technology. Last summer, Nvidia struck an agreement with the Trump White House to invest billions of dollars in domestic U.S. chip manufacturing, a move that sent the company’s share price climbing rapidly. In August, the administration announced a deal requiring Nvidia to pay the U.S. government 15% of all revenue generated from sales of one of its key AI chip models to China. Later that same month, investment managers acting on Trump’s behalf acquired between $5 million and $25 million worth of Nvidia stock. When asked about the potential conflict of interest this week, Trump maintained that all of his personal investments are managed on a strict arms-length basis. “I don’t get involved in my personal [finances], we have funds that run my money,” he said. “I’ve made a lot of money before I became president, and they invest my money, and I don’t talk to them.”

    Fourth, the sitting president collects a six-figure annual pension from the U.S. entertainment industry’s leading labor union. Trump holds two separate pension plans with SAG-AFTRA, the union representing film and television performers, stemming from his decades of on-screen cameos and hosting work. The pensions paid out a combined $86,532 in 2025. Trump’s entertainment credits include a cameo in *Home Alone 2: Lost in New York*, a multi-season run as host of *The Apprentice*, and a guest appearance on *The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air*. The two separate plans date back to before the 2012 merger of the original film actors’ union SAG and the television performers’ union AFTRA. Though Trump resigned from the union in 2021, shortly before the union was set to vote on expelling him over his role in the January 6 Capitol riot, his pension benefits remained fully intact.

    Finally, a series of legal settlements against major media and technology companies netted Trump $86.5 million in 2025. The largest single payout came from Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which paid $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Trump over the suspension of his social media accounts in the wake of the 2021 Capitol riot. Lawsuits against Paramount (owner of CBS News) and ABC News each resulted in $16 million settlements. Per the disclosure, net proceeds from these three settlements will be donated to the Trump presidential library. YouTube paid $22 million to settle a similar account suspension lawsuit, with that sum earmarked for the trust that manages Washington D.C.’s National Mall. Former Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey also paid $8 million to settle a related claim against Trump after his 2021 ban from the platform (now known as X); the disclosure does not specify how these funds will be used.

    Beyond these highlights, the filing also confirms that Trump earned more than $1 billion in total from cryptocurrency-related business dealings in 2025, underscoring the breadth of his ongoing business interests while serving as U.S. president.

  • Israeli settler group calls for seizing crops in occupied Syrian land

    Israeli settler group calls for seizing crops in occupied Syrian land

    Tensions along the Israeli-Syrian frontier have spiked in recent weeks following the collapse of the former Assad government, as a newly formed Israeli settler advocacy group has publicly called for the systematic cultivation and commercial sale of agricultural produce grown on seized Syrian land in the southern regions of the country.

    Pioneers of Bashan, the organization pushing for permanent Israeli settlement expansion into newly occupied Syrian territories, launched its call to action targeting the fertile lands held by Israel in Daraa and Quneitra governorates. In a public post shared on the social platform X, the group highlighted that roughly 2,000 tons of wheat had already been harvested this year from lands within the small Quneitra District alone. The statement went on to make a controversial, inflammatory claim that the fertile region would produce far higher yields when worked by what the group called “pioneering Jews” rather than the Sunni communities that currently inhabit the area, falsely alleging those communities support Hamas.

    Founded only in April 2025, Pioneers of Bashan emerged just four months after armed opposition groups overthrew the government of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in December 2024. That collapse of central state authority, which brought Ahmed al-Sharaa’s transitional government to power, created a power vacuum that Israel exploited to expand its long-standing occupation of Syrian territory beyond the Golan Heights — a region Israel has held illegally since the 1967 Six-Day War. The group has repeatedly framed its settlement advocacy through religious framing, citing ancient Biblical texts as flawed justification for seizing additional Syrian land for Jewish settlement.

    Escalating Israeli ground incursions have already uprooted local communities in the region. Just this past Sunday, Israeli military convoys advanced into the village of Abidin in Daraa governorate, where local residents gathered to block the entry route by stacking stones across the road. According to official Syrian state media, Israeli forces responded to the nonviolent protest with heavy artillery fire, forcing the entire village population to flee to safer neighboring settlements overnight.

    Syria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued an official formal statement condemning the violation of its sovereignty. “We condemn in the strongest terms the ongoing Israeli attacks, represented by repeated incursions into Syrian territory in Quneitra and Daraa provinces and the deliberate targeting of civilian populated areas with artillery shelling. This is a blatant violation of Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity that violates all international law and UN resolutions,” the statement read.

    Israeli government officials, particularly far-right members of the current governing coalition, have ramped up warmongering rhetoric in recent weeks, openly framing the new Syrian leadership as an imminent threat to justify further military escalation. Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli, a prominent far-right figure in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, laid out his aggressive stance in a series of recent radio interviews, labeling al-Sharaa’s transitional government as part of what he inaccurately called a “radical Sunni axis of evil” across the Middle East.

    Chikli argued that what he described as a jihadist regime rooted in the ideologies of the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, which he claimed holds aspirations to claim Jerusalem, could never coexist peacefully alongside the state of Israel. In an additional interview with Israel’s Army Radio last Thursday, Chikli claimed a new anti-Israel alliance has formed between Pakistan, Turkey and Qatar — a bloc he claimed poses a far greater threat to Israeli security than Iran, even amid Tehran’s recent ceasefire agreement with the United States.

  • Musk remaking the world like Ford – but far more dangerously

    Musk remaking the world like Ford – but far more dangerously

    Elon Musk, a figure who briefly claimed the title of the world’s first trillionaire before returning to mere billionaire status, has built a career defined by exceptionality. Unlike most industry leaders, he has not one but two globally transformative pioneering technology companies — Tesla and SpaceX — and has openly discussed plans to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars since two decades ago. He also upends standard CEO communication norms, posting multiple times daily to his own social platform X. In 2025, he drew widespread controversy for a public gesture widely interpreted as a Nazi salute in Washington D.C., and that same year, he took a high-level role in the U.S. federal government with no prior formal political experience, all while continuing to expand his sprawling business empire.

    During his short, turbulent tenure leading the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk framed governance as a technical problem of data aggregation and pattern recognition, focused on generating algorithmically optimized policy outcomes. Critics argue this approach overlooked a fundamental reality: millions of real people, entitled to equal treatment and due process, were profoundly impacted by his top-down, desk-bound decisions.

    Musk’s outsize influence has made him a global household name and one of the most powerful individuals on Earth, leading many observers — including journalist Cory Doctorow — to question whether he has become uniquely dangerous, and where he fits alongside other widely criticized West Coast tech billionaires, often labeled “broligarchs,” such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Palantir’s Alexander Karp, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. A new carefully researched, thought-provoking book from Canadian political economist Quinn Slobodian and technology journalist Ben Tarnoff, titled *Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed*, sets out to answer these questions by dissecting both Musk’s personal background and the vast systemic power he has accumulated.

    The term “Muskism” draws a deliberate parallel to “Fordism,” the socioeconomic model named for early 20th century industrialist Henry Ford, whose mass production system reshaped American government and society for 40 years starting in the 1930s. Slobodian and Tarnoff argue that Musk, alongside other leading tech titans, is constructing a sweeping new industrial framework that is reshaping modern society in a fundamentally different direction than Fordism. While Ford’s industrial model formed the foundation for mass employment, living wages, robust social safety nets, and widespread consumer prosperity in post-World War II America, Musk’s corporate empire aims to build an entirely new socioeconomic order: one that is hyper-connected, pervasively surveilled, anti-liberal, and insular.

    Under Muskism, the authors contend, unelected tech oligarchs collaborate with national governments to deploy advanced technology to erode democratic institutions, deepen social divisions, entrench rigid hierarchical power structures, and insulate elite actors from accountability. To understand the ideological roots of this system, they trace it back to Musk’s formative upbringing.

    “To understand the world that Musk aims to build, we have to understand the worlds that built Musk,” the authors write. The first and most formative of these worlds was 1970s South Africa, where Musk was born and raised in a wealthy white family during the final years of the apartheid regime. The authors argue that “South Africa was the cradle of Muskism,” teaching Musk the core ideology of “fortress futurism”: the belief that technology can be used to entrench individual and elite self-reliance in an inherently hostile world. The systemic racism that structured every layer of apartheid society, where state and private business colluded to entrench white privilege through complex bureaucratic rules and discriminatory legislation despite international condemnation, shaped Musk’s worldview long before he left the country.

    A bookish early adopter of video games, science fiction, and emerging technology, Musk emigrated to Canada in 1989 at age 17 to avoid mandatory military service in the apartheid military. Contrary to popular narratives that he left his apartheid-era beliefs behind, the authors argue he carried those ideological core assumptions with him. By 1992, Musk had moved to the United States to study physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and by 1995 he had settled in Palo Alto to launch his first tech startup, Zip2. He went on to found X.com, which later merged with Peter Thiel’s PayPal to form the digital payment giant. By 2002, he had amassed his first fortune and founded SpaceX; he joined Tesla as an early investor and lead figure in 2004, helped found OpenAI in 2015, co-founded brain-computer interface firm Neuralink in 2016, launched tunneling venture the Boring Company in 2017, acquired Twitter and rebranded it as X in 2022, launched AI firm xAI with its Grok chatbot in 2023, and took the helm of DOGE in 2025 before splitting with then-President Donald Trump. All of these achievements came before Musk turned 55, marking an extraordinary pace of expansion that has left a white South African immigrant at the pinnacle of American political and economic power, with influence spanning the globe.

    Unlike existing biographies of Musk — ranging from the celebratory authorized accounts to Walter Isaacson’s widely cited 2023 definitive biography and Jacob Silverman’s 2025 critical work *Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley* — Slobodian and Tarnoff frame Musk as a distinct figure among big tech leaders, shaped by his unique apartheid-era South African upbringing that allowed him to accumulate social power in ways unmatched by his peers. “He sells the fantasy that, in an increasingly unstable world, both states and individuals can fortify their self-reliance by plugging into his infrastructures,” the authors write. “The paradox is that, in doing so, you become reliant on him.”

    They define Muskism as a cohesive system that blends proven commercial technologies, aspirational technological prophecies, cozy public-private partnerships, and viral online messaging designed to market and legitimize Musk’s sprawling empire. Together, these elements advance a project the authors call “tech-sovereignty”: a framework where cutting-edge technology developed by private corporations allows national governments and their favored demographic groups to project power globally while reducing vulnerability to external shocks or perceived rivals. This system secures American economic dominance in a post-free-trade era where China, Russia, and Iran are framed as systemic threats, and it operates largely out of public view even as it reshapes the lives of people around the world.

    At the core of Musk’s empire are three interconnected assets: SpaceX, Tesla, and X. SpaceX and Tesla pioneered new commercial technologies in the U.S. private sector — reusable rockets, low-orbit satellite networks, and mass-market electric vehicles — with Musk driving relentless innovation while raising massive capital through skillful hype and what the authors call “future fabulation.” He built vertically integrated conglomerates to reduce dependence on external suppliers; for example, Tesla now manufactures not just vehicles but also large-scale batteries and renewable energy storage systems, resembling the large Fordist conglomerates of the mid-20th century, but without the presence of large unionized workforces that defined the earlier era.

    Musk’s willingness to partner closely with the U.S. national government is most visible in SpaceX, which has become a preferred federal supplier, contractor, and partner with almost no competitors. Most notably, the U.S. military now relies on SpaceX’s Starlink low-orbit satellite internet system for frontline operations, pointing to a far more intimate integration of government and big tech than existed during Ford’s era. “State symbiosis,” rather than open market competition, is Musk’s preferred operating model when he can secure it. For Tesla, the Obama administration’s concerns about Chinese economic competition and climate change allowed Musk to secure massive federal subsidies after the 2008 financial crisis, giving him a decisive advantage over legacy American automakers that had barely entered the electric vehicle market at the time.

    From 2017 onward, Musk became increasingly active on what was then Twitter, using the platform first to promote his companies and later to broadcast his increasingly right-wing political views, which have aligned closely with the resurgence of global right-wing populism. After acquiring Twitter and rebranding it as X in 2022, he began spreading rhetoric about a so-called “woke mind virus” and has since posted repeated incendiary comments targeting immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, and promoting false claims about declining white birth rates and the supposed collapse of Western civilization.

    The book devotes specific analysis to Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface venture, and xAI, his artificial intelligence firm, framing these projects as core to Musk’s long-term vision. In a 2016 conversation with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Musk argued that merging humans and AI into a single symbiotic system would eliminate the risk of rogue AI, because “we are the AI collectively.” Musk envisions a future where digital and biological systems merge, raising critical unanswered questions about who will control the resulting cognitive and informational ecosystem. While this vision can sound like a fanciful, villainous plot straight out of a spy film, Slobodian and Tarnoff emphasize that Musk’s proven business acumen and access to state support have allowed him to turn this specific ideological vision into a concrete, functioning system that already shapes global society.

    In computer science terms, Musk is building an all-encompassing “superset” of interlocking infrastructure, spanning energy, transportation, space, communication, and artificial intelligence. Unlike other tech leaders such as Bill Gates, Alexander Karp, and Peter Thiel, Musk has never published a formal manifesto laying out his ideological vision, but his consistent pattern of expansion makes clear he is driven by a clear mission. It remains unclear how much more power Musk will accumulate, or what new technologies he will bring to market with continued state backing, but critic Nick Srnicek argues that the apparatus of Muskism is already a formidable, influential force.

    This new book offers critical insight into how one individual is working to reshape the world in his own image, without any input or consent from the vast majority of people affected by his decisions. It makes a clear case that no democratic society should allow a small handful of unelected individuals to accumulate the level of power that Musk currently holds. Just as the global community rejects the idea that millions should be left to die of deprivation, the authors argue, we must oppose the idea that unelected oligarchs get unilaterally to determine the future of global society. This commentary is adapted from an article by Noel Castree, Adjunct Professor of Society & Environment at the University of Technology Sydney, republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

  • ‘Time for him to pay’ – Carroll calls on Trump to pay $5m after president’s appeal fails

    ‘Time for him to pay’ – Carroll calls on Trump to pay $5m after president’s appeal fails

    A years-long legal battle between former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and former U.S. President Donald Trump has reached a new turning point, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump’s bid to overturn a civil jury verdict that found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation, prompting Carroll’s legal team to demand immediate payment of the nearly $5.8 million in awarded damages.

    The core of the dispute stretches back to the mid-1990s, when Carroll, now 80, accused Trump of sexually assaulting her inside a fitting room at the luxury Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan. The case moved forward decades later, culminating in a 2023 civil trial in New York, where a jury reached a verdict that Trump was responsible for the abuse, and additionally found him liable for defamation after he publicly labeled Carroll’s accusations a fabricated hoax on his social platform Truth Social. The jury initially awarded Carroll $5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

    Trump immediately launched a series of appeals to challenge the verdict, arguing that the trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, had incorrectly permitted damaging evidence to be presented to the jury that unfairly skewed the panel’s perception of him. His appeal was rejected by a federal appeals court last year, which ruled that Kaplan had not committed any legal errors that would justify overturning the jury’s decision or ordering a new trial. On Monday this week, the nation’s highest court declined to take up Trump’s appeal for review, closing off this final avenue of appeal for the former president in this specific case.

    Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Carroll’s legal team filed a new court motion on Tuesday asking a judge to compel Trump to release the full damages payment. With accumulated interest added to the original award, the total sum owed now stands at roughly $5.8 million. In the motion, Carroll’s attorneys noted that they had granted all of Trump’s prior requests to delay payment throughout the appeals process, but that cooperation would end now that all legal challenges had been exhausted. “Given the extraordinary lengths he has taken to avoid such payments and that each of those efforts has been denied in full, that cooperation ends today,” the filing read. “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”

    Carroll’s legal team also added a new piece of evidence to their filing: a Truth Social post Trump published on Monday immediately after the Supreme Court’s decision, in which he repeated his claim that the entire case was a “fake” brought against him through partisan “lawfare.” “Surprisingly, the Supreme Court declined to ‘review’ a fake case brought against me,” Trump wrote, adding that he would continue to fight the “weaponization and lawfare case” including “the ridiculous claim of defamation, with all of my power and strength.”

    This is not the only defamation case Trump has lost to Carroll. In a separate 2024 civil trial, another jury found Trump liable for a second instance of defamation related to additional comments he made about Carroll, awarding her nearly $84 million in damages. Trump also appealed that ruling, but a panel of federal judges rejected his appeal last year.

    The BBC has reached out to Trump’s legal team for a response to Carroll’s latest motion, and has not yet received a comment.

    This legal confrontation comes as Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, faces a string of ongoing criminal and civil legal challenges across the country, many of which he has repeatedly labeled as politically motivated witch hunts.

  • Zelensky in Dublin as Ireland begins EU presidency term

    Zelensky in Dublin as Ireland begins EU presidency term

    DUBLIN — A landmark ceremonial event kicking off Ireland’s six-month term holding the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union launched in the Irish capital on July 1, 2026, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gracing the guest list alongside top EU and Irish leaders. The gathering, which opened with a formal flag-raising ceremony featuring performances of both the Irish national anthem and the European Union’s official anthem, marks the eighth time Ireland has held the rotating presidential role since it joined the European Economic Community, the EU’s precursor, in 1973. The last time Dublin assumed the responsibility was 2013, and this current term will run through the end of December 2026. As the presiding country, Ireland will be tasked with steering legislative negotiations across EU policy areas and mediating consensus between the bloc’s 27 member states.

    Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin opened the ceremony by extending official welcomes to European Council President António Costa and visiting Ukrainian President Zelensky. In his opening address, Martin emphasized that Ireland’s decades-long evolution into a modern, outward-facing economy and inclusive society cannot be separated from its decades of European Union membership. “Ireland has always been a deeply European country,” Martin told attendees, framing the nation as “a beacon of hope for the transformative potential of the European appeal.” He went on to reaffirm Ireland’s longstanding commitment to Ukraine amid Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion, stating: “We will stand unswervingly by the people of Ukraine. We are determined to ensure Ukraine get the peace and justice they deserve.” The presidency role passed to Ireland from Cyprus, which completed its own six-month term in June 2026.

    In his address at the ceremony, Zelensky offered his warm congratulations to Ireland on assuming the presidency, noting that the role carries an outsized “great responsibility” for the bloc. He thanked Ireland for its consistent “attention to Ukraine” and recalled that the country has stood with Kyiv from the “very beginning” of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. “We must protect lives and our values from Russia’s anti-European aggression, and when we face many other challenges, both in international affairs and at the national level,” Zelensky said. He added that the European Union currently holds a unique “opportunity and responsibility to be a force that brings more stability” to the European continent and the broader global order.

    Costa echoed this sentiment in his own remarks, praising Ireland for its consistent leadership in upholding the core tenets of the international rules-based system. “Ireland has consistently been at the forefront” of efforts to defend these foundational principles, Costa noted, highlighting the country’s longstanding commitment to multilateral cooperation and European integration.

  • Trump’s $1.4bn crypto earnings revealed

    Trump’s $1.4bn crypto earnings revealed

    A bombshell new disclosure from U.S. President Donald Trump’s mandatory 2025 financial filing has uncovered that the sitting president pulled in over $1.4 billion in earnings last year from cryptocurrency-related business activities. The figure, which translates to roughly £750 million, marks one of the most unusual and high-profile personal financial windfalls for a sitting U.S. president in modern history, reigniting debates over conflict of interest and transparency in executive branch financial holdings.

    Mandatory financial disclosures are a core legal requirement for senior U.S. government officials, including the president, designed to give the public visibility into potential conflicts between personal business interests and official policymaking. Prior to this filing, Trump had already drawn widespread attention for his unusual engagement with the volatile crypto sector, breaking with longstanding norms around sitting presidents maintaining distance from speculative private assets during their time in office.

    The size of the disclosed earnings has already prompted questions from government ethics watchdogs, who argue that the massive crypto profit creates an obvious conflict of interest as the president oversees federal policy related to digital asset regulation, taxation, and market oversight. As details of the filing continue to circulate, public and congressional scrutiny of the transaction origins and regulatory compliance of Trump’s crypto dealings is expected to intensify in the coming weeks.