UK - More than half of local authorities are still failing to comply with the 'crystal clear' Supreme Court ruling on biological sex almost a year after the landmark judgment. Some 159 of the 317 councils in England are still 'waiting for guidance', despite the Equalities Minister saying that the ruling was 'crystal, crystal clear'. Just 19 local authorities are confident their policies are legally compliant and at least 17 councils have policies which are 'likely to be unlawful', according to a new report.

VATICAN - Most of us are ignorant of the true evil that may lurk in the shadows. It is why the Catholic Church, the Church of England and other faiths have exorcists or deliverance ministers on their teams. And it is why the Vatican holds its course on the Ministry of Exorcisms and Prayer of Deliverance in Rome each year, open not only to Catholic priests but rabbis, imams and evangelical preachers. I’ve been told that exorcists are a bit like plumbers. They deal with what have been described as ‘leaks’ in the liminal void – the space of transition between life and death – which can present as ghosts, apparitions, poltergeists and even demonic possession, of buildings and of individuals. Exorcists are reportedly busier than they have ever been. In Italy, a country which monitors these things seriously, the need for exorcisms has reportedly risen in the past year by more than 500,000. Other countries around the world, including the UK and Ireland, report similarly.

MIDDLE EAST - As the war in the Middle East enters its second week, energy-rich Gulf countries being bombarded by Iran have been nervously anticipating attacks on their most precious resource: water. The mostly arid region depends in large part on desalination plants, which convert seawater into drinking water and have turned into one of the region’s main pressure points. The region has more than 400 plants, which produce about 40 per cent of the world’s desalinated water supply. The war on water may have already begun. A plant in Bahrain came under attack by Iran over the weekend, after Tehran accused the US of an airstrike that destroyed one of its own desalination plants. Two plants, one in Kuwait and one in the UAE, have sustained minor damage from the debris of intercepted missiles.

QATAR - There are many important places in the world, many crucial pieces of infrastructure and, as we have learnt this past week, many critical chokepoints, but few are quite as important as the Ras Laffan complex, at the very nape of Qatar. No other single gas field, or for that matter oilfield or coalmine or uranium mine, accounts for quite so much of the world’s useful energy. The North Field is in a league of its own, as is Ras Laffan, which processes most of the gas coming out of it.

MIDDLE EAST - The USS George H W Bush (CVN 77) is expected to deploy to the eastern Mediterranean, Fox News reported on Saturday, joining the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Gerald R Ford as the third US Navy aircraft carrier active in the region. The Bush recently completed the Composite Training Unit Exercise (COMPTUEX), which “brings together all elements of a carrier strike group to operate as a cohesive, multi-domain fighting force,” according to the US Navy. Like the Lincoln, the Bush is a Nimitz-class supercarrier. The Ford carrier strike group crossed the Suez Canal on Thursday, while the USS Abraham Lincoln is stationed in the Gulf.

MIDDLE EAST - As long as the present regime remains in power in Iran, there will be no genuine revival of Gulf-Iran relations. Only a new regime could mend the rifts. The Arab world, broadly speaking, is in crisis. Apart from summits and empty declarations, it has played little meaningful role in the Israel-Hamas War that began after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023. The Arab world appears fragmented. However, an attack by a non-Arab state on six Arab ones generates solidarity rooted in shared Arab identity. Saudi Arabia is still waiting; though an Aramco refinery has been hit, the kingdom has not yet responded militarily. It can be estimated, however, that if Iranian attacks intensify, the crown prince will be compelled to respond since his leadership is being tested.

USA - Trump is right. It is crucial, now perhaps more than ever, to acknowledge the cogency of his diagnosis of what has gone wrong over the past quarter-century. The West has been taken for a fool, played by enemies within and regimes abroad, such as that in Tehran. He was right, too, that there needed to be a dramatic, muscular corrective.

USA - Donald Trump is of a generation still scarred by the embassy hostage crisis in 1979 that defined US-Iranian enmity. It was a humiliation he has never forgotten. At the height of the Iranian hostage crisis, with dozens of American citizens held captive inside the US embassy in Tehran, Donald Trump advocated a full-scale invasion of Iran and the seizure of its oil fields. Diplomacy had failed; President Jimmy Carter was floundering, unable to secure the release of the hostages and unwilling to resort to force; oil prices had more than doubled with the collapse of Iranian oil production.

MIDDLE EAST - No one can afford a conflict like the 1940s but if America depletes its military in Iran then China and Russia may gleefully take advantage. In just over one week we have seen the new Gulf War spread across the region, sending global energy prices soaring and drawing in different world powers. And as if that wasn’t enough, the idea that the chaos might swiftly be stilled has been scotched by President Trump talking again about regime change and the Iranians rebuffing attempts at mediation.

SUDAN - Experts are warning of a new risk emerging from Sudan’s civil war: that violence may spread in the region amid foreign influence that links countries from central Africa to the Arabian Gulf. Fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), the government army, and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has torn the country apart since April 2023 and displaced 13 million people, according to the United Nations. Both sides have been accused of war crimes and a UN group found “hallmarks of genocide” in the RSF’s takeover of El Fasher in North Darfur in October. “The war is getting worse, and way more complex because of regional dynamics,” Sarra Majdoub, a former UN security council expert on Sudan, said. “I don’t think it’s a civil war any more.”

UK - Sir Keir Starmer could pay for 15 new warships or quadruple the size of the British Army by halting this year’s £18 billion rise in welfare spending, analysis has shown. A study found that a single year’s increase in benefits and pensions spending could have bought 15 advanced Royal Navy frigates or 220 fighter jets. Alternatively, it could have paid 250,000 soldiers’ salaries.

UK - There was a time when Britain stood alone as the defender of the free world. It came, of course, in 1940, when after the fall of France, our country was the only one to defy the rise of Nazi Germany in Europe. Today, we find ourselves alone once more, but for entirely different reasons. Typically, Donald Trump saw our bruise and punched it: under Keir Starmer, he said, this was “not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with”. Not so in Britain. Ever since Franklin D Roosevelt brought the United States into the war after his “day of infamy” speech to Congress, both our national security and national psyche have been wedded to our transatlantic cousins. We have stuck with the Americans through thick and thin, epitomised at its height by those immortal pictures of Margaret Thatcher dancing with Ronald Reagan in 1988.

MIDDLE EAST - The US has lost nearly $2 billion worth of military equipment amid its military operations against Iran since Saturday, according to estimates and data compiled by Anadolu. The chief driver of the cost is a US AN/FPS-132 early warning radar system at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, valued at $1.1 billion, which was hit with a missile strike by Iran on Saturday. Qatar confirmed that the radar was hit and damaged. On Sunday, 3 F-15E Strike Eagles were lost in a friendly fire incident by Kuwaiti air defenses. While all six aircrew survived, the planes did not; the cost of replacing them is estimated at $282 million. Iran also claimed to have destroyed the AN/TPY-2 radar component of the THAAD Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) System deployed at Al-Ruwais Industrial City in the United Arab Emirates. Satellite imagery through open-source intelligence reports suggests that there has been a hit. The destroyed radar component is estimated to be worth $500 million. Combining these costs, Iran has damaged $1.902 billion worth of US military assets in the region.

IRAN - The war between the United States, Israel, and the Iranian regime dramatically escalated Saturday night after Israeli forces, coordinating with US military assets, launched massive strikes targeting Iranian oil infrastructure in and around Tehran. Israel’s public broadcaster KAN reported that the Israeli Air Force struck oil storage depots and refinery facilities in Tehran. Israeli officials confirmed that the operation focused on fuel depots and energy infrastructure believed to support Iran’s military operations. Massive fires were reported at storage facilities as explosions rocked parts of Tehran late Saturday.

USA - Breaking: BlackRock just froze $1.2 billion in withdrawal requests at its private credit fund.

Here's what happened:

• Investors in BlackRock's $26 billion fund asked to pull out 9.3% of their money
• BlackRock said no — capped withdrawals at 5%
• Blackstone's $82 billion fund saw record withdrawal requests the same week
• Blackstone had to put in $400 million of its own cash to cover the exits

Two of the biggest funds on the planet are limiting how much you can take out. This is a major red flag. Something big is coming.