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Instead of going to jail, Mike Amesbury will be expected to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work, undertake both a 12-month alcohol monitoring programme and an anger management course and do 20 days of rehabilitation work. ✍️ Steerpike

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That this Russification of German politics coincides with the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine feels less like coincidence and more like strategic triumph for the Kremlin and its numerous attempts to undermine Western elections. ✍️ Henry Donovan

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At Gemelli hospital, where Francis is being treated, a gaggle of young Italian hospital workers say they don’t believe the official bulletins and think he is already dead. ✍️ Paul Wood

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However you phrase it, the idea that the AfD might be good in parts remains too subtle a point for much of the media in Germany and beyond.

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The handsomely paid presenter is one of 500 media figures to have signed a letter urging the BBC to reinstate the documentary, describing it as ‘an essential piece of journalism, offering an all-too-rare perspective on the lived experiences of Palestinians.’ ✍️ Steerpike

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I celebrated with a walk along the River Dwyfor to Lloyd George's grave, surrounded by daffodils about to bloom, while I contemplated the big questions: Does it matter if I'm now 40 and not married? ✍️ Sophia Money-Coutts

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Last week my husband shouted from the next room while I was peeling potatoes that he had ‘discovered’ an article on Wikipedia called ‘Wikipedia: Unusual articles’. ✍️ Dot Wordsworth

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Waiters speak with the gentleness of consultants addressing burns victims. ✍️ Tanya Gold

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How can I say something without undermining his new confidence? ✍️ B.B., London W11

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Daylight robbery seems to be the most apt description of England’s showing, assuming members of the daylight robbing community don’t mind being associated with events at Twickenham. ✍️ Roger Alton

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That’s why the woke mind virus is so good at replicating itself: each person exposed to it is unaware they’ve become infected. ✍️ Toby Young

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Special Forces are now being hounded and punished for simply following orders and conducting operations. And what will we soft sofa-sitters do when no one wants to be a soldier any more? ✍️ Mary Wakefield

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If one trainer sees a load of hay en route to the races she’s so sure of bad luck that she’s inclined to turn back. ✍️ Robin Oakley

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We await the full details of Donald Trump’s ‘take it or leave it’ solution to the Ukraine war, but at least Romans liked that sort of clarity. ✍️ Peter Jones

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Many of the Zoomer Doomers would like to see either the destruction of the Conservatives or a total takeover of the party, akin to the MAGA Republicans. ✍️ Gus Carter

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Artillery has been reduced by 96 per cent compared to Cold War levels

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Britain’s Trident nuclear missile force is a last-stand deterrent against a massive nuclear attack, but what can the country do to defend against an assault on infrastructure that falls short of Armageddon? ✍️ Clifford Beal

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Have you ever noticed that there is no pressure group for people who want the government to leave them alone? ✍️ Christopher Snowdon

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President Zelensky has floated the idea of Ukraine having nuclear weapons again several times, and while it would violate Kyiv’s signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, few could argue that Ukraine wasn’t justified in wanting them. ✍️ Colin Freeman

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The attention of millions of people worldwide has been engaged by this strange, rather mad computer-generated fantasy vision of a future Gaza. It’s got everyone thinking about the issue afresh. That can’t be all bad. ✍️ Jawad Iqbal

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What precisely is the ‘compromise’ women are demanded to make when they need single-sex spaces, services, and opportunities, but a minority of men insist said spaces should include them? ✍️ Jenny Lindsay

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There are two fundamental issues that will need to be addressed by those charged with bringing the government’s Grenfell commitment to fruition. ✍️ Graham Watts

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Kemi rebuked Keir Starmer calmly. ‘Someone needs to tell the Prime Minister that being patronising is not a substitute for answering questions.’ ✍️ Lloyd Evans

submitted 21 hours ago • 3 comments

Euthanasia in the Netherlands is now available to children, and indeed infants, of all ages, and there are continuing attempts to extend it to anyone over 74 who considers their life ‘complete’. ✍️ Theo Boer

submitted 22 hours ago • 0 comments

Turning invective about ‘the Jews’ into criticism of ‘Israeli forces’ isn’t journalism, it’s propaganda. The job of the journalist is to reflect back to us the world as it really is, not to feed us half-baked morality tales. ✍️ Brendan O’Neill

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The idea that Ukraine’s minerals are some kind of get-rich-quick bonanza for rapacious American capitalists is simply untrue. ✍️ Owen Matthews

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While the Foreign Office has rejected the suggestion that the Chagos deal could end up costing £18 billion, Starmer still hasn’t managed to clear up questions concerning its funding. ✍️ Steerpike

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Kemi Badenoch was right about the need for more detail on defence: it’s just that she failed to ask the right questions to expose that. ✍️ Isabel Hardman

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These countries do suffer from poverty, but that should be a problem for their governments to address. ✍️ Patrick West

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There is now a hot war in Europe, during which Russia has made clear that it could use tactical nukes on the battlefield.

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Patrick Robinson is a Jamaican judge who has previously served on the International Court of Justice – and was one of the judges who, in 2019, agreed the UK should hands over the archipelago ‘as rapidly as possible’. ✍️ Steerpike

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Ukrainians are hoping that by giving the Americans a vested economic interest, it will incentivise Trump, who continues to think more in terms of balance sheets than geopolitics, to think of their security. ✍️ Mark Galeotti

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The Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Left keep insisting that the ‘rich’ should pay even more. But President Trump has just effectively put a cap on that, by offering them the US as a refuge. ✍️ Matthew Lynn

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‘I think the Americans should be more worried,’ Oleksandr says. ‘It’s their country (Trump’s) going to destroy. We’re just going to carry on fighting.’ ✍️ Justin Marozzi

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From a ‘Trump Gaza’ tower to a huge statue of the US leader, no expense appears to have been spared in the rather bizarre video. ✍️ Steerpike

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North Korea’s cyberwarfare campaign looks set to continue. It is a highly lucrative means of funding its nuclear and missile capabilities. ✍️ Edward Howell

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What these two moves – cutting aid and upping tough-talk on defending the borders – point to is the extraordinary ruthlessness of the Prime Minister, even by the standards of those who reach the very top of the greasy pole of politics. ✍️ Patrick O’Flynn

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The golden low-carbon economic future portrayed by the Climate Change Committee is simply not credible – though sadly it will fool many MPs just like its previous reports. ✍️ Ross Clark

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The ordinary people, the ‘Somewheres’, are of no importance. But the Somewheres are on the march, in Germany, in France and all across Europe, and the firewall won’t hold for ever. ✍️ Gavin Mortimer

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They look like social studies professors at failing universities, or bad ceramicists. They initially smile, because they cannot grasp the idea of opposition, or even disagreement. ✍️ Tanya Gold

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There is a peculiarly British pride in successful improvisation to overcome challenges without sufficient resources, part of our national genius for ‘muddling through’. ✍️ Eliot Wilson

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I fume as I watch drug dealers arrive on my road and pass over the goods in what’s known locally as the ‘stoner handshake’. ✍️ G.V. Chappell

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Of all these jobs, the only one I truly loved was working at the NME. I was basically being paid for doing what I loved – listening to music, going to gigs, and going to film previews and drinking wine. ✍️ Leyla Sanai

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Dr Ursula Muntean-Rock put my low mood, lethargy and inability to deal with life’s challenges down to the amount of gunk I’d been carting around in my gut – the rotting residue of a thousand ready meals. ✍️ James Innes-Smith

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Today’s education attainment figures won’t help the nationalists’ argument that they deserve another chance in power – as the stats show the attainment gap between Scotland’s most and least deprived students has widened once again. ✍️ Lucy Dunn

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The speed with which Labour intends to move on defence will take both critics and supporters of the government by surprise. It means Starmer can hope to arrive in America with a credible offer to the Donald. ✍️ James Heale

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Macron’s eclipsing of Starmer at the court of King Donald is a taste of the true ‘reset’ Labour should be attending to. ✍️ John Keiger

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What more will the armed forces be able to do with this increased funding? What extra capabilities and missions will be enabled? How will this affect the UK’s contribution to ‘burden sharing’ with its allies? ✍️ Eliot Wilson

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Trump has a point. The Online Safety Act is a terrible piece of legislation that restricts freedom of speech online, whilst at the same time making it much harder for new companies to get into the market. ✍️ Matthew Lynn

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Slamming the party of government for first redacting parts of the text, the Speaker attacked Labour over reports that ‘some of the redacted information was provided to the media’ and called for a probe into the matter. ✍️ Steerpike

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