As Israeli jets bomb a Syrian air base over alleged Turkish deployment plans, Ankara, Washington and Damascus are scrambling to prevent a direct Israel-NATO confrontation. But critics across the region say the strike was never just about security; it was about maps, sovereignty and an expansionist project Israel refuses to name.

QUSRA, OCCUPIED WEST BANK – In the rugged hills south of Nablus, a slow-motion displacement is unfolding. For nearly two weeks, a cluster of Palestinian families in the Ras al-Ain area of Qusra have been trapped inside their homes, not by a military curfew alone, but by a coordinated siege involving extremist Israeli settlers and the very army units ostensibly deployed to disperse them.

Beneath the wreath-laying and “plunder” rhetoric lies a contest for Iraq’s logistical arteries and post-war allegiance, where Tehran declares victory, Washington weighs withdrawal, and Baghdad speaks the language of resistance while quietly hedging between two unravelling regional orders.

As mediators push for ceasefire extensions, airstrikes on police infrastructure reveal a strategic campaign to dismantle the last remnants of public order in the besieged enclave.

As the federal government petitions the Supreme Court to recall its order shifting Imran Khan to Shifa International Hospital, a volatile legal and political struggle over prisoners’ rights, judicial authority and the boundaries of executive power unfolds, leaving the PTI founder’s health and the credibility of the state’s commitment to equal treatment hanging in the balance.

Our Guardian Taskforce have had a busy weekend making multiple arrests and have recovered multiple knives and weapons.

As Prime Minister Andy Burnham tours Britain promising “everyday fixes”, from banning phoney bargains to make subscriptions easier to cancel, families like Donna O’Hara’s are still choosing between food, rent and heating. Behind the consumer-protection rhetoric lies a deeper emergency: Universal Credit that no longer covers the basics, private rents that outpace housing benefit, and more than a decade of austerity that has left 7.4 million low-income households unable to afford at least one essential. With the October Budget looming, campaigners and analysts warn that without structural reform to welfare, housing and local economies, Burnham’s plan risks being remembered as tinkering around the edges of a crisis that is breaking Britain’s social contract.

As Israeli warplanes, artillery, and white phosphorus shells pound the Ali al-Taher heights and civilians are killed in Ansar and Deir ez-Zahrani, the June truce is revealed as a thin cover for creeping occupation. Netanyahu’s unilateral “Yellow Line” is quietly redrawing Lebanon’s southern border, Hezbollah’s drones are testing Israel’s deterrent, and a Lebanese government caught between disarmament demands and Israeli violations faces a US-brokered framework already hollowed out by its own contradictions.

Plan No. 1284223 would extend Jerusalem’s southern settlement belt toward Bethlehem. In Qusra, three Palestinian families remain trapped without water, electricity, food or medicine.

As the Reform UK leader celebrates a theatrical win over Count Binface, the resumption of a parliamentary inquiry into undeclared financial gifts threatens to transform his political triumph into a reckoning.

The United Kingdom is not merely experiencing a spell of hot weather; it is undergoing a systemic stress test. As a rare amber warning for “extreme heat” came into force across vast swathes of England on Thursday, the country found itself simultaneously bracing for thunderstorms in Northern Ireland, battling wildfires in Scotland and Greater Manchester, and counting the economic cost of a climate that is changing faster than its infrastructure.

As Iran locks down the Strait of Hormuz and its Houthi allies turn the Bab el‑Mandeb into a no‑go zone, an audacious three-party blueprint is taking shape: a $5 billion Omani refinery and export hub beyond Tehran’s reach, a revived India–Middle East–Europe rail corridor, and a clandestine Saudi‑to‑Israel pipeline built on the buried secrets of a Cold War deal with the Shah. But there is a fourth prong, less discussed yet no less transformational: a planned Leviathan gas pipeline that would funnel Israeli hydrocarbons directly to Europe via Turkey, starving Egypt of transit revenues and cementing Israel’s role as the region’s indispensable energy hub. This investigation reveals the U.S.‑ led gamble to weaponise infrastructure, redraw the energy map, and force a reckoning, while risking a wider war that could consume the very chokepoints it hopes to bypass.