A seminar to train British police officers about Islam used Brexit pioneer Nigel Farage and other Reform UK party figures in lessons on “prejudice” and racially aggravated crimes.
British police officers who attended the York and North Yorkshire Hate Crime Conference in 2025 were treated to a heavy-handed seminar in which delegates were taught that Islam is compatible with British values, that women are not oppressed by Islam, and that views expressed by mainstream British politicians should be legally actionable, according to footage leaked to a British newspaper.
The Daily Telegraphstated the presentation to officers was given by former cop, Abbas Najib, who now runs the Better Communities Bradford activism group, and that it was intended to bust “myths and misconceptions about Islam”. The session told the audience that “Muslims, the immigrant, the brown person” are scapegoated by society, while the problems are actually down to “the rich”, the report states.
Several prominent British politicians were used to illustrate hate crime, with top politicians now involved with Reform UK featuring heavily, among them Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Michael Gove, and Matt Goodwin. Najib is reported to have said that if Islamosceptic remarks by such politicians had been said about Jewish communities instead, the politicians would have been arrested, and that the same approach should apply to scepticism of Islam.
Attendees were challenged to consider whether Nigel Farage speaking causes physical hate crimes to happen in real life, and to “draw your own conclusions”.
Further, it is stated that typed materials handed out to attendees stated that Islam is compatible with the recently coined modern British values, and that it doesn’t oppress women.
The revelations about the form of training given to some police officers on Islam and what is called Islamophobia may go some way to explain why it is that some British police forces appear to have become so proactive in pursuing not just criminal speech, but non-criminal “hate incidents” as well. A report from the Free Speech Union earlier this month revealed an enormous disparity in arrest rates between British police forces, with some arresting ten times as many people as others.
The footage published by The Telegraph also recalls a report published last week by Policy Exchange, blowing the whistle on what they said was an erosion of police impartiality by the spread of special interest staff networks, and particularly the association of Muslim police officers. This organisation is among those that have politicised policing, they claimed, stating it was pushing for terms like “Islamist” to be phased out by police because it drives “Islamophobia”.
David Sanchez, brother of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, and Miguel Angel Gallardo, former leader of the Extremadura branch of the ruling party PSOE, attend the start of their trial at the provincial court of Badajoz, Spain, 28 May 2026. Screengrab youtube
The leader of a drug-trafficking clan in southwest Spain has told Guardia Civil investigators that a member of the network around Leire Díez, the former Socialist official known in Spain as the party’s plumber, asked her to have the judge who investigated Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s brother removed from the case.
Officers of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) travelled to Badajoz on September 24 and questioned Cintia Rocho, head of the Los Rochos clan, for four hours at the local barracks, which reported the interviews on September 30. She said a member of the network had supplied her with detailed personal information about the private life of magistrate Beatriz Biedma.
Rocho named Luis José Sáenz de Tejada, a former judge struck off in December 2022 after convictions for domestic violence offences. He has since run a YouTube channel from which he attacks judges, prosecutors and journalists.
Investigators questioned a second man the same day as a witness. He is said to have acted as intermediary with a trafficker known as El Gitano, meeting Sáenz de Tejada in a café in Badajoz in late 2024 and taking delivery of photographs documenting the surveillance of Biedma and her two young daughters.
The trafficker was questioned in prison at 7.30am on September 25. He confirmed that his intermediary had told him the network’s interest extended to other female judges as well as to Biedma.
Biedma led the investigation that ended in the conviction of David Sánchez in July, when the Badajoz provincial court found the Prime Minister’s brother guilty of administrative malfeasance over a post created for him at the provincial council.
Spain’s National Court has admitted the magistrate as a private prosecutor in the case against the Díez network. Investigating judge Santiago Pedraz restricted that to a possible offence of slander and declined, for the moment, to open a specific line of inquiry into a note found in Díez’s diary referring to a judge in Badajoz, heroin and a clan name.
Pedraz said the UCO could not establish the significance of the note without further material. He is separately examining whether the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) can be charged as a legal person in the wider case.
Biedma is due to give evidence on October 8. Díez has consistently denied running any smear campaign against officials investigating the party.
The PSOE has said that neither Díez, a former member, nor Santos Cerdán, its former organisation secretary, holds any post in the party, and that it is not itself a party to the proceedings. The Guardia Civil and the interior ministry have made no public statement on the Badajoz questioning, which was first reported by El País.
A 22-year-old Syrian man is accused of seriously assaulting several rail passengers in Cologne in June during a rampage attack. However, details have now emerged of just how serious this man’s criminal history is after a parliamentary request from politician Markus Wagner of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Currently, the Syrian remains in a psychiatric hospital while prosecutors investigate, but the man’s long history of criminal offenses is truly remarkable.
Federal police said the attacks began about 3:10 p.m. on June 21 at the Cologne-Trimbornstrasse stop. A police spokeswoman said a 22-year-old man “grabbed a traveler and tried to pull him toward the tracks.” Both fell to the ground. Bystanders pulled them apart, but the victim suffered bruises and abrasions.
Police told Westdeutscher Rundfunk that the witnesses “behaved correctly” by acting together and separating the attacker from the victim.
The suspect then boarded an S19 train toward Cologne Central Station, police said. Near the Cologne Messe/Deutz stop he suddenly punched two passengers in the face, according to witnesses and video.
At the main station, in a fast-food restaurant, he punched and kicked a 47-year-old man and continued striking him on the ground after federal officers arrived.
Officers managed to detain the man and later said he was under the influence of narcotics.
He was taken to a psychiatric facility. The Justice Ministry said he “is currently provisionally accommodated in a psychiatric hospital” under Section 126a of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a measure used when investigators believe a suspect may have acted without full criminal responsibility.
Cologne prosecutors are investigating, among other counts, intentional bodily harm, attempted dangerous bodily harm and attempted dangerous interference with rail traffic, the ministry said.
Asked what police already knew about the suspect, the government listed suspected prior offenses that had led to complaints or investigations: five thefts, one case of receiving stolen goods, one robbery, one insult, three threats, 11 assaults, 13 dangerous assaults, 11 narcotics violations, one rape allegation, one count of resisting officers, two property-damage cases and two fraud cases.
However, none of these arrests have resulted in convictions. The ministry stressed that police records “rest on suspicion” and “do not allow a conclusion on the correctness of the allegation.”
Regarding formal prior sentences, the government said the man’s Federal Central Register extract “shows solely sanctions under youth criminal law that are not entered in the certificate of good conduct.”
In other words, most of these offenses were either handled in juvenile court or were never formally tried in court due to the man’s psychological state. German youth-court measures often do not appear on the clearance certificate employers and agencies commonly request, meaning these criminal entries would not be available to potential employers.
Asked about citizenship, the ministry wrote that, “as far as known,” the suspect has Syrian nationality.
Notably, he has never been deported despite the trail of mayhem he has left behind him.
Commie Canada and the dis-United Kingdom should be renamed the “Dumb and Dumber” of the British Commonwealth.
King Charles III’s North American prime minister, Mark Carney, ran to The New York Times last week to talk about his military combat preparations against the United States in the event that President Trump crosses Lake America and liberates Canada from its delusional leaders. What a showboating dunce. The U.S. singlehandedly sustains Canada’s economy and national security, yet the tiny central banker huffed and puffed in a hilariously Napoleonic display of fake strength.
In the same interview with the failing Times, Con-man Carney outlined his intent to integrate Canada’s economy with that of China and the European Union and to replace the U.S. Dollar with a China-linked global reserve currency. Rhetorically defending Canada’s sovereignty while insulting his U.S. benefactor, Little Mark Carney explained how he would subjugate his socialist nanny-state to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Mark is the global mascot for “educated” idiots everywhere.
Not to be outdone by not-so-Great Britain’s Canadian cousin, U.K. Prime Minister Poindexter (er, I mean Andy Burnham) informed the United Nations General Assembly last week that his government was constructing yet another speech-police organization (this one given the august name, “National Centre for Information Defence,” which should not be confused with the “Research, Information, and Communications Unit,” the “Government Communication Service,” the “Counter Disinformation Unit,” the “Defending Democracy Taskforce,” the “Information Threats and Influence Directorate,” the “Rapid Response Unit,” the “National Cyber Force and Social Cohesion Taskforce,” the “Media Monitoring Unit,” or any of the other information-control agencies already mobilized across totalitarian Britain) to protect the British people from scary thoughts and words. Burnham blamed the Russians for spreading “a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair” in the U.K. (and definitely not Westminster’s promotion of decline, division, and despair!) and promised to counteract this “information warfare” by censoring Britons’ public speech and feeding his collapsing country a steady diet of State-sanctioned propaganda. In order to beat back the Russians, Dilapidated Britain must have its very own digital Iron Curtain! Two cheers for democracy! Hip hip…who cares.
The British people are screwed. On average, their government grants settlement or citizenship to an illegal alien every single minute. These foreign nationals receive more welfare from British taxpayers than ever before. The third-world invaders (I mean, “newcomers”) use Britain’s streets as public toilets. Rather than securing the kingdom’s borders, the Home Office hands out a nine-page booklet informing mostly-Muslim men of military age that it is illegal to rape women and children while they conquer the islands. In the last two years alone, the number of illegal immigrants (and future citizens!) arriving by boat has exceeded the size of the entire British Army! But if these outrageous facts disturb you enough to publicly express your feelings on social media, you will most likely join the roughly 65,000 Brits who have been arrested for “speech-related offenses” over the last five years. Foreign invasion? Good! Free speech? Very bad!
Apparently, the British police state also plans to imprison anyone who would rather not fight WWIII against the Russian Federation. During a recent episode of former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “State of the Nation” on GB News, one leftist-globalist commentator in favor of mass conscription argued, “We would have to lock a few people up…some of the pro-Russian voices, people saying there isn’t a threat, don’t fight for your country, don’t go to war for Burnham, we’ll have to lock ‘em up.” Rather than responding with horror at the suggestion that his fellow Britons should be imprisoned for opposing a catastrophic war, Rees-Mogg pedantically replied, “Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars…indeed, yes.” In another interview, Rees-Mogg nonchalantly remarked that British citizens have a “duty” to “die” for Britain in a war against Russia.
In Burnham and Rees-Mogg’s Britain, the only way to “defend democracy” is to imprison anyone who disagrees with the British Establishment and to sacrifice everyone else to the killing fields! The British Isles might as well be renamed the “Gulag Archipelago.”
Interestingly, GB News — which leans conservative — discovered last week that Britain’s media regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), had covered up data showing that viewers trust GB News more than the BBC. GB News, in fact, is ranked above all other networks with regard to viewpoint diversity and impartiality. British authorities apparently did not want the public to know these inconvenient truths because the BBC is treated as an objective, trustworthy, and premier source of news (fact check: false!). In an effort to control the public’s perception of the BBC, Ofcom restricted what information the public was permitted to know. P.M. Burnham takes the “defense of information” very seriously!
How seriously? Burnham and the British government force citizens to pay for the BBC’s awful dreck whether they watch it or not! Every household in the U.K. must fork over a £180 license fee to the BBC each year. Because more households are refusing to pay the license, the government is considering the imposition of a mandatory £11-a-month Internet tax in order to keep the BBC’s fake news funded. The BBC says that the “fee is essential for maintaining the quality and diversity of public broadcasting in the UK.”
What does “quality and diversity” look like at the BBC? Two “reporters” just did a major exposé describing how women who don’t polish their nails perpetuate “white supremacy.” No joke! “Nail art’s historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures,” the BBC “reports.” “They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty.” Yes, Burnham, force Britain’s working-class to pay for this race-baiting propaganda posing as hard news!
Earlier this year, British authorities announced that YouTube and other social media platforms would be forced to manipulate their algorithms and push BBC “news” to the top of feeds in order to counter “disinformation.” In other words, Whitehall steals money from British citizens to pay for State-run TV and then forces them to watch it. During the Cold War, we called that Soviet-style propaganda. Yet if you ask the fake “reporters” at the BBC, Canada’s publicly-funded CBC, or America’s NPR or PBS, all these propagandists would insist that they have nothing in common with the Soviet Union’s Pravda or the Russian Federation’s RT (Russia Today) News. In the West, State-funded media are somehow not State media. Does that sound more like propaganda or breaking news?
Britain’s State-imposed “narrative control” is utterly totalitarian. Dismissing the “narrative of decline” and “despair” in Britain as a “corrosive narrative…which bears no resemblance to reality” and a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain,” P.M. Burnham casts all public dissent as “far-right narratives.” As military historian Professor Michael Rainsborough mocks, “The problem isn’t the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem.” Rainsborough points out that right after Burnham rebranded “decline” as “disinformation,” the prime minister laid out a “10-year plan” to fight inflation, housing costs, hopelessness, inequality, and division. “The narrative of decline,” in other words, “bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan.”
Both Canada and Britain are failing. The public has noticed. Carney and Burnham wish to whitewash reality with fake “narratives.” The worse things become, the more difficult it will be for their ministries of truth to succeed. Expect the BBC to blame Trump, Putin, and “white supremacy.”
The killing of a 1-year-old Dutch child through euthanasia is a “fundamental violation” of the toddler’s dignity, Cardinal William Eijk of the Netherlands said recently.
Controversy has grown in the past several weeks after further details emerged on the murder of an almost two-year-old boy in the Netherlands. Though the killing occurred last year, Dutch authorities only recently released their review of the matter, sparking renewed interest. The euthanasia occurred just one year after the Netherlands expanded its assisted suicide regime.
The child, nearly 2 years old, had been born at 26 weeks’ gestation. He had severe brain damage, cerebral palsy, seizures, and a developmental age of about six weeks. Although the child was not dying, doctors and parents chose to sedate and kill him, as LifeSiteNews first covered in June.
The report argues that the child “had multiple, very severe disabilities, both mental and physical, and the prognosis was that the child would be dependent on support with all activities of daily living for the rest of their life,” with a “very high probability of the child dying at a very young age due to complications.”
“In the course of the child’s short life, there was a complete lack of development or improvement,” the report claims, with parents and physicians “convinced that the child was suffering unbearably and without prospect of improvement.”
Some doctors objected to the killing, so the child’s parents simply found other doctors who supported euthanasia and endorsed their plan.
But killing disabled children is not compassionate, Cardinal Eijk toldCrux during a recent interview.
“The word ‘merciful’ is often used nowadays to justify ethically questionable actions. However, is it merciful to violate the fundamental dignity of the human person by ending their life,” he asked.
Euthanasia violates the dignity of the human body, Eijk said.
“Objectively speaking, however, a human being is not merely his body, nor is he merely his soul, but both soul and body,” he said. “The body is an essential part of the human person. The termination of his body is therefore a fundamental violation of his inherent dignity.”
A selfish culture, beginning in the 1960s, that places the wants and desires of individuals first leads to not only euthanasia, but the mutilation of the bodies of gender-confused individuals, the Catholic cardinal said.
The prelate said:
Initially, this autonomy meant that an individual should not be prevented from doing as they pleased, unless it caused harm to others. Gradually, the ideal shifted to the extent that autonomy also came to mean being whatever one wished to be – man, woman, binary, or, through gender reassignment procedures, belonging as closely as possible to the opposite sex.
This autonomy also came to mean that the individual had the right, under certain conditions, to have their life ended through euthanasia.
He suggested palliative care as the better, moral option.
The Catholic Church has always condemned the practices of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
“Intentional euthanasia, whatever its forms or motives, is murder,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2324) states. “It is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator.”
LifeSiteNews writer Jonathon Van Maren previously warned that this toddler would not be the last.
“In 2024, the law changed,” he wrote. “Now, a child has been killed. More will certainly follow.”
Eva Vlaardingerbroek is a Dutch right-wing political commentator and activist. Photo credit: Instagram
A study by sociologist Ulrich Rosar of the University of Düsseldorf, evaluated by the German mainstream weekly newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS), concludes that conservative and liberal politicians are more frequently perceived as more attractive than their left-wing counterparts.
For the study, people in several countries were shown thousands of photos of politicians they didn’t know. Researchers then compared these ratings with election results and party convention data. According to the findings, more attractive candidates received more votes, had fewer opponents, required fewer rounds of voting, and were more frequently nominated in promising constituencies. An Ifo study from 2023 also concluded that good-looking politicians earn higher additional income. In parliament, they are more likely to attain prestigious leadership positions and are more likely to be perceived as courageous when they deviate from the party line.
Voters also more frequently associate physical attractiveness with intelligence, creativity, honesty, authenticity, trustworthiness, and competence. Attractive politicians are more likely to be forgiven for their mistakes and receive more support and attention during crises. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) writes: “Disadvantages based on skin color, gender, or sexual orientation are often discussed. But ugliness remains taboo.”
The fast track for the attractive starts early: pretty children more often have friends and better grades, and as adults earn more and are promoted more frequently. And there’s another important correlation: those who see themselves as winners are more likely to perceive society as fair and are more inclined to support conservative or liberal parties.
Differences also exist between the parties. In the European Parliament, conservatives were rated as 25 percent more attractive than social democrats, in Australia the gap was 32 percent, in Finland 41 percent and in the USA 14 percent.
Panu Poutvaara of the Ifo Center for Migration and Development Economics even considers it possible that conservative voters infer political convictions from appearance. More attractive, unknown candidates were more frequently categorized as right-wing in tests. Even left-wing voters preferred attractive candidates: “In our study, we found that left-wing voters also preferred better-looking candidates, even though they had a greater ideological distance from them.”
A Scandinavian analysis of the American National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health reached a similar conclusion. People who rated themselves as attractive were more likely to identify as conservative.
Illustration. FlyDubai Boeing.Wikimedia Commons, Konstantin von Wedelstaedt, GFDL-1.2
A flydubai flight was diverted Wednesday morning to Saudi Arabia after the pilots clashed in the cockpit, the airline confirmed.
During the fight, the pilot activated a distress code used to signal unlawful interference with a flight, which may be used in cases of a suspected aircraft hijacking.
Aftermath of incident. צילום: לפי סעיף 27/א
Flight FZ1073, which had been en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 180 Israelis on board, turned around while flying over Jordan and changed course. A few minutes after the distress code was activated, the pilot signaled that it was on its way to Israel, and once again changed direction.
Data from the Flightradar24 flight-tracking app shows that during the incident, the aircraft made an unusually rapid descent from an altitude of approximately 34,000 feet to around 14,000 feet.
According to the data, at one point the aircraft registered an instantaneous descent rate of approximately 30,976 feet per minute. Sharp changes were also recorded in the aircraft’s ground speed.
Israeli Air Force fighter jets were scrambled toward the aircraft, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz held an urgent meeting to discuss the situation.
The IDF said: “Following reports, the IDF Chief of the General Staff conducted a situational assessment in recent minutes with the Commander of the Israeli Air Force, the Head of the Operations Directorate, the Head of Military Intelligence, and additional commanders.”
However, the plane’s pilots did not contact control towers, and the flight disappeared from Flightradar24 and other flight-tracking apps.
Soon afterwards, the plane contacted Saudi authorities and safely landed in Saudi Arabia.
Later, flydubai confirmed that the distress signal had been entered due to the violent flight between the pilots. Channel 12 News reported that the pilot is Russian, and the copilot is Ukrainian.
A passenger who was aboard the flight told i24NEWS that during the unusual incident, an attempt was made to stab the pilot.
“The entire cockpit was covered in blood. The Israeli guys took control of the situation and caught the attacker,” the passenger said, adding, “We were either going to crash or be murdered. It was like a terrorist attack in mid-air.”
Passengers aboard the flight said that one of the pilots was stabbed with a penknife and that they noticed a large amount of blood. According to them, the pilot lost control of the flight for several minutes, and the Israeli passengers helped regain control of the situation.
According to a passenger, “There were moments when we were sure this was the end. We heard screaming and yelling and then we saw them open the cockpit and that there was blood there.”
Another passenger commented: “As soon as the cockpit opened, numerous Israeli passengers rushed forward. We heard shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar.'”
Authorities are investigating suspicions that one of the pilots attempted to take his own life and crash the plane, which later made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. The second pilot, together with Israeli passengers on board, reportedly prevented the suspected attempt.
Following the incident, flydubai’s CEO informed Israeli transportation authorities that a plane will soon be sent from Dubai to Saudi Arabia and will continue from there to Israel.
The Prime Minister’s Office stated: “Following concerns of an aviation incident, Prime Minister Netanyahu held discussions on the matter and followed the developments.”
“The incident is under control, and we are now using all means available to bring the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”
“Following situation assessments and passenger testimony, Israeli authorities are treating the incident as a terror attack in every respect,” a statement read. “It appears that the copilot repeatedly stabbed the captain.”
“Once the incident began, crew members and numerous passengers managed to breach the cockpit door and overpower the terrorist.”
A senior Israeli official said that a much greater disaster was prevented. The copilot is now being questioned, and indications are mounting that he intended to take control of the aircraft and crash it with the passengers on board.
Another senior Israeli official stated that there was an additional crew of pilots on the plane as part of a routine procedure, and they took over. “The flight was lucky they were there – otherwise we would have had another 9/11.”
A senior military official said it appears that the pilot involved in the incident is Omani, and that authorities are investigating the possibility that he attempted to take his own life using the aircraft.
At this stage, it remains unclear whether the motive, if such an attempt did in fact take place, was psychological or nationalistic. The official described the incident as “a great miracle” and attributed the outcome to the resourcefulness of the crew members and the assistance of Israeli passengers.
The IDF Chief of Staff is currently holding a situation assessment and considering whether to dispatch Israeli Air Force Hercules aircraft to Saudi Arabia, alongside Flydubai’s decision to send an aircraft to the country to return the passengers to Israel. The Air Force has raised its readiness level in preparation for the possibility of carrying out the mission.
Buckingham Palace brought in experts from the charity Alcohol Change UK to deliver an alcohol-awareness course for royal household staff.
The educational session, organised as part of the Palace’s broader wellbeing programme, aimed to equip staff with the knowledge to manage situations involving colleagues who may be under the influence of alcohol at work.
Richard Piper, chief executive of Alcohol Change UK, confirmed that the royal household had approached the charity to deliver its workplace seminars.
Topics covered during the presentation included mindful drinking and so-called “grey area drinking”, a term describing patterns where individuals consume excessive amounts of alcohol without necessarily being dependent on it. The course also addressed the wider risks associated with alcohol in professional environments.
Buckingham Palace brought in experts from the charity Alcohol Change UK to deliver an alcohol-awareness course for royal household staff.
The educational session, organised as part of the Palace’s broader wellbeing programme, aimed to equip staff with the knowledge to manage situations involving colleagues who may be under the influence of alcohol at work.
Richard Piper, chief executive of Alcohol Change UK, confirmed that the royal household had approached the charity to deliver its workplace seminars.
Topics covered during the presentation included mindful drinking and so-called “grey area drinking”, a term describing patterns where individuals consume excessive amounts of alcohol without necessarily being dependent on it. The course also addressed the wider risks associated with alcohol in professional environments.
“You’ve also got safeguarding issues. So, this isn’t just about the stigma around whether drinking is a good or bad thing. We try and get away from that and focus on health and individuals and making everyone feel included,” he added.
GB News understands the Alcohol Change UK session took place several years ago and formed part of a wider series of wellbeing initiatives coordinated by the royal household’s human resources department.
The course sits within a broader drive to modernise the working culture at the Palace. Over the past year, 17 new mental health first aiders have been trained across the royal household to provide support to colleagues.
In November, the Palace conducted an “employee pulse” survey designed to gauge staff satisfaction in their roles. The findings have not been published, though a report stated that the exercise “provided valuable insight into the lived experience of employees, helping to inform future priorities and targeted actions”.
GB News has contacted Buckingham Palace for comment.
In December 2024, a member of the Palace workforce was arrested following a Christmas gathering at a bar in central London, which had been preceded by an evening reception at Buckingham Palace.
Police were called to All Bar One in Victoria after reports of glasses being smashed and an alleged attempt to assault a staff member. Around 50 household employees had attended the event.
A 24-year-old woman was detained on suspicion of common assault, criminal damage and being drunk and disorderly. She was subsequently released with a penalty order.
A Palace spokesman said at the time: “We are aware of an incident outside the workplace involving a number of household staff who had previously attended an early evening reception at the palace.
“While this was an informal social gathering, not an official palace Christmas party, the facts will be fully investigated, with a robust disciplinary process followed in relation to individual staff and appropriate action taken.”
Călin Georgescu, winner of the first round of Romania’s 2024 presidential election, in handcuffs. Image via X.
Romania’s Bucharest Court of Appeal has ordered Călin Georgescu into preventive detention for 30 days, overturning a lower court ruling that allowed the former presidential frontrunner to remain free under judicial supervision.
Călin Georgescu is the first political prisoner since the 1989 Revolution.
Let this be clear to everyone: today, the system is PSD–PNL–USR. All appointments to leadership positions within the prosecutors’ offices and the police are politically driven.
The decision sends the figure at the center of Romania’s conservative, anti-globalist camp—and the most trusted politician in the country, according to some polls—back behind bars.
The move has further intensified accusations from his conservative Romanians that the country’s post-2024 establishment is using prosecutors and courts to contain a movement it has struggled, and even failed, to contain at the ballot box.
DIICOT prosecutors secured the reversal after challenging the Bucharest Tribunal’s refusal to imprison Georgescu while the €1.1 million fraud investigation proceeds. Businessman Ionel Rusen was also ordered into preventive detention, with the Court of Appeal’s ruling final.
Even the appellate panel was reportedly divided over whether detention was justified. Two judges disagreed, requiring a third to resolve the split in favor of incarceration—a detail Georgescu’s defenders have seized upon as evidence that the prosecution’s demand was hardly self-evident.
Georgescu’s lawyer, Mircea Sinescu, reacted with fury. “It is a hallucinatory solution!” he said, adding that “paper supports anything,” according to the Romanian account of the ruling. Pasted markdown The contrast with last week could scarcely be sharper. Bucharest Tribunal Judge Vlad Andriescu had rejected preventive detention and instead placed Georgescu and Rusen under judicial control for 60 days while prosecutors continued their investigation.
More damaging politically for DIICOT, the lower-court reasoning reportedly questioned whether prosecutors had concretely established the precise role each defendant allegedly played in the supposed fraud. The judge called for investigators to clarify how the alleged deception was actually carried out rather than relying on a broadly asserted criminal association.
That earlier ruling did not amount to exoneration. The judge restricted Georgescu and Rusen from leaving Romania after considering intercepted conversations concerning a possible move to Tuscany, but concluded that imprisonment was not then necessary.
When Georgescu emerged from court after that decision, supporters greeted him with chants of “Freedom!”, “Călin, we love you!” and demands for the cancelled presidential runoff to be restored. Georgescu told the crowd that he was innocent and described the cases against him as “politically motivated.”
He also attacked what he called Romania’s “neo-Marxist and neo-Phanariot system,” casting his confrontation with prosecutors as something larger than one criminal file. That language reflects a conservative, sovereigntist movement that increasingly views Romania’s political, judicial and security establishment as a single entrenched structure defending the country’s existing order, which is said to take its orders from Brussels and Paris.
DIICOT, an institution that has a storied history of deep corruption, rejects that political interpretation and says it is pursuing an ordinary organized-crime and fraud case. Prosecutors allege Georgescu and two other men deceived businessman Răzvan Leu into providing roughly €1.1 million after promising access to a €15 million foreign credit facility that allegedly never materialized.
Those allegations remain unproven, and preventive detention is not a criminal conviction. Georgescu denies wrongdoing, meaning prosecutors will ultimately have to demonstrate both that the alleged scheme existed as described and that he knowingly played the role attributed to him.
The age of the underlying allegations has nevertheless become another rallying point for his supporters. The purported financial activity dates back to 2021, while the complaint moved into the DIICOT investigation in 2024, prompting Georgescu’s camp to ask why an old financial dispute has produced such an aggressive response only after he became Romania’s most prominent anti-establishment figure.
That perception hardened after the September 21 operation at his home. Georgescu was stopped in traffic, taken to his Mogoșoaia residence during searches lasting nearly nine hours, brought to DIICOT headquarters and later led outside in handcuffs before assembled cameras and supporters.
According to the reporting supplied, one of Georgescu’s sons was with him when officers stopped him, while his wife and younger child were at home when masked units arrived.
Five addresses were searched across Bucharest and nearby localities, turning the investigation into the kind of heavily visual police operation that was always likely to acquire political meaning.
For AUR and Georgescu’s supporters, however, the image that endured was simpler: the winner of the first round of Romania’s 2024 presidential election being paraded in handcuffs less than two years after the state cancelled the election he had unexpectedly led. That sequence has become the emotional center of a much broader revolt against what conservatives routinely describe as Romania’s globalist regime.
The Constitutional Court annulled that election after intelligence services alleged, without providing any evidence, Russian-linked online interference, campaign irregularities and manipulation favoring Georgescu. To this day they have failed to provide evidence supporting their extraordinary claim, which effectively ended Romanian democracy. US Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and US State Department have all slammed the decision to annul the presidential election and effectively suspend democracy.
Following Georgescu’s earlier detention, the AUR leader George Simion warned, “Any of us could be next. Stop the abuses! Romania is a dictatorship!” — a political accusation that captures AUR’s interpretation of the crackdown, rather than an independent legal description of the Romanian state.
The scale of AUR’s support gives that rhetoric considerably more weight than it would have carried several years ago. INSCOP’s September survey placed AUR at 39.7% among respondents expressing a party preference and 40.2% among those expressing a preference who also said they were certain to vote.
PSD stood at 18.7%, PNL at 16.3% and USR at 9% among respondents expressing a party choice, leaving AUR with roughly twice the support of its nearest rival in that survey. The poll interviewed 1,100 adults between September 1 and 7 and reported a maximum sampling error of ±3 percentage points.
Those figures do not prove AUR’s allegations about the courts or prosecutors, but they expose the danger for Romania’s establishment of treating the sovereigntist challenge as a marginal phenomenon. When a movement polling around 40% watches one of its defining political figures repeatedly investigated, searched, handcuffed and detained, every prosecutorial decision inevitably becomes part of the country’s larger struggle over state legitimacy.
The Romanian state now faces a credibility test considerably larger than Georgescu’s next 30 days in detention. Prosecutors must show that the fraud case rests on evidence strong enough to withstand scrutiny, while institutions already damaged by the extraordinary 2024 annulment must convince millions of distrustful voters that the state is enforcing law rather than protecting an embattled political order from the sovereigntist movement now dominating the polls.
Centre-right candidate and post Berlusconi Forza Italia (FI) treasurer Fabio Roscioli won a by-election in Calabria Monday. Roscioli, who is close to the Berlusconi family, won with around 60% of the vote. The Reggio Calabria-Locri seat was vacant after the FI’s Francesco Cannizzaro was elected mayor of Reggio.
