A diver who helped recover bodies from a deadly collision between a boat carrying migrants and a Greek coast guard vessel says most of the 15 people who died had suffered severe head injuries, as questions mounted over the circumstances of the incident
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The large number of casualties has led to questions over how the collision occurred. Judicial authorities have launched an official inquiry.

Evaggelos Kirithras, a diver who participated in the recovery of the bodies that night, told The Associated Press that when he arrived on the scene, he saw 12 bodies lying inside a semisubmerged inflatable speedboat. The vessel had not capsized, he said.

“Most of them had head injuries. I can’t describe how bad the head injuries were,” Kirithras said, comparing the injuries to the impact of hitting a wall. The diver said he has participated in other rescue and recovery operations with the coast guard in the past, “but this was the first time I’ve seen such force.”

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Greek and French authorities arrested suspected spies in separate operations this week, with both cases involving alleged transmission of classified military data to China.

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At the European level, Fratelli d’Italia is part of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) parliamentary group but maintains strong links with both the European People’s Party (through Forza Italia) and the Patriots group (through Lega and close-ally Vox). This positioning places Giorgia Meloni in a uniquely advantageous role, allowing her to bridge the centre-right and far-right blocs in the EU parliament.

Overall, Meloni has capitalised on the legitimacy that figures like Fini and Berlusconi once secured for the Italian right, using it to normalise increasingly hard-line positions. While many EU observers were initially reassured by her moderate foreign policy stance and pro-Atlantic alignment, these gestures concealed a consistent ideological continuity. Her rhetoric, alliances, and domestic agenda have all revealed the true contours of her politics. Her strategy differs from that of her ally, Orban. Instead of open confrontation with Brussels, she has pursued a quieter consolidation of power, seeking to rally the three right-wing groups within the European Parliament to marginalise the left and shift the EU’s ideological centre of gravity further right.15

By quietly rallying Europe’s right-wing groups and isolating the left, Meloni is reshaping both Italian and European conservatism from within. Beneath the language of tradition, identity, and sovereignty runs an unbroken current of authoritarian thought, as shown from FdI’s domestic network. Its forms have changed; its roots have not. As the old MSI nostalgics and neo-fascists often recall, quoting J. R. R. Tolkien: “Deep roots are not reached by the frost.” The endurance of this political culture shows how Italy’s fascist legacy continues to nourish the politics of the present, making it a relevant contribution to the reactionary international.

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Political hypocrisy is usually treated as a moral failure—a sign that rulers invoke law and principle only when convenient. Yet this familiar condemnation misses a more unsettling possibility: that hypocrisy has also played a constitutive role in modern political life. By forcing power to justify itself, even dishonestly, it compelled rulers to speak a language they did not fully control. This insistence on explanation was never merely decorative. Power was expected to render itself intelligible, to offer reasons that could be contested or rejected. Hypocrisy preserved this expectation even as it betrayed it. By invoking principles it did not honor, power acknowledged their authority, keeping open the space for judgment, critique, and resistance.

As Hannah Arendt observed in On Violence, power and violence are not interchangeable. Power depends on recognition and collective judgment; violence appears where power can no longer command assent. What distinguishes political authority from domination is not the capacity to coerce but the ability to secure obedience without resorting to force.

What has emerged in the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency suggests a departure from this long, uneasy arrangement. The danger is not simply that rules are being broken more brazenly or that norms are eroding more quickly. It is that power increasingly refuses the obligation to explain itself at all.
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What makes the present moment dangerous is not that hypocrisy has been exposed, but that it may no longer be needed. The abandonment of justification is defended as honest realism—rules dismissed as naïve, law as theater, explanation as weakness. But this is not realism; it is political exhaustion. Authority has always depended on a shared expectation that power will explain itself. Fragile and often abused, that expectation nonetheless distinguishes politics from domination.

What emerges instead resembles what the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt described in Political Theology: sovereignty revealed in the power to decide, even when justification is reduced to the bare assertion of necessity. In such a world, authority no longer argues; it declares. The exception becomes permanent, and explanation gives way to command.

Trump did not invent this erosion, but his presidency, particularly in his second term, has made it explicit. Authority is increasingly announced rather than argued—through fiat, spectacle, and appeals to strength. The message is not that rules permit such actions, but that rules no longer matter. When power stops explaining itself, critique loses its footing: there is no claim to interrogate, no contradiction to expose.

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Riyadh has unleashed a fierce media campaign targeting the Emirati leadership and its wider political project. Notably, the media offensive has framed the UAE as seeking to fragment Arab states for its own – and Israel’s – political gain.

This week, Saudi state channel Al-Ekhbariya alleged that the UAE has been “investing in chaos and supporting secessionists” across North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Prominent Saudi writer Salman al-Ansari went further, calling UAE economic support for Egypt “one of the largest political deception operations” in modern history.

Last week, Saudi academic and columnist Ahmed bin Othman al-Tuwaijri accused the UAE of deliberately undermining Saudi Arabia by throwing itself “into the arms of Zionism” and serving as “Israel’s Trojan horse” in the region.

Notably, the UAE has responded less through its own media than through its closest strategic ally, Israel. In recent days, attacks on Saudi Arabia have come from pro-Israel lobbying networks, American media figures and pro-Israel US politicians.

On 23 January, the Anti-Defamation League posted on X in support of the UAE, warning of the “increasing frequency and volume of prominent Saudi voices … using openly antisemitic dog whistles and aggressively pushing anti-Abraham Accords rhetoric”.

Last week, pro-Israel American broadcaster Mark Levin posted a series of anti-Saudi remarks to his five million X followers. On 26 January, for example, he wrote that he would “never forgive” Saudi Arabia for the 11 September attacks and accused bin Salman of “trying to destroy the UAE… our closest Arab ally”.

Pro-Israel US Senator Lindsey Graham also rebuked the kingdom for its “attack on the United Arab Emirates”. Jewish Insider, the Jerusalem Post, Axios, the American Enterprise Institute and other outlets have also come to the UAE’s defence.

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U.S. Agency for International Development staffers in early 2024 drafted a warning to senior officials in Joe Biden’s administration: Northern Gaza had turned into an “Apocalyptic Wasteland” with dire shortages of food and medical aid.

Three months after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, the internal message laid out in gruesome detail scenes observed by United Nations staff who visited the area on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission in January and February.

The staff reported seeing a human femur and other bones on the roads, dead bodies abandoned in cars and “catastrophic human needs, particularly for food and safe drinking water.”

But the U.S. ambassador to Jerusalem, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked the cable from wider distribution within the United States government because they believed it lacked balance, according to interviews with four former officials and documents seen by Reuters.
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Reuters saw one of those cables. The other four, also blocked by Lew and Hallett because of their concerns about balance, were described by four former officials.

Three former U.S. officials said that the descriptions were unusually graphic and would have commanded the attention of senior U.S. officials had the message been widely circulated within Joe Biden’s administration.

It would have also deepened scrutiny of a National Security Memorandum, issued by Biden that month, which conditioned the supply of U.S. intelligence and weapons on Israel’s compliance with international law, they said.

“While cables weren’t the only means of providing humanitarian information … they would have represented an acknowledgement by the ambassador of the reality of the situation in Gaza,” said Andrew Hall, then a crisis operations specialist for USAID.

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Two Human Rights Watch (HRW) employees who make up the organization’s entire Israel and Palestine team are stepping down from their positions after leadership blocked a report that deems Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees the right of return a “crime against humanity”.

In separate resignation letters obtained by Jewish Currents and the Guardian, Omar Shakir, who has headed the team for nearly the last decade, and Milena Ansari, the team’s assistant researcher, said leadership’s decision to pull the report broke from HRW’s customary approval processes and was evidence that the organization was putting fear of political backlash over a commitment to international law.

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According to DW Turkish, the Ankara Public Prosecutor’s Office launched the investigation in December after an opposition Iyi Party MP highlighted a reference in Epstein’s 2008 civil case. The case alleged that he had “transported minor girls from Turkey, the Czech Republic, Asia, and numerous other countries, many of whom spoke no English”.

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