USA - ‘You don’t move that much junk into theatre unless you’re going to play’. You can always get an insight into the thinking in the White House and the Pentagon by looking at where the US aircraft carriers are: and today the USS Abraham Lincoln and her strike group have just arrived in the vicinity of Iran. Quite apart from the Lincoln’s air wing, US warships in the area count 500 vertical launch cells among them, many of which will contain Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) capable of striking targets ashore over a thousand miles from the launching ship.

IRAN - It appears that an apocalyptic war is about to begin in the Middle East, and yet most people living in the western world don’t seem alarmed by this at all. But they should be, because once the missiles start flying, the death and destruction that we will witness will deeply shock the entire globe. The nuts that are running Iran fully understand that the goal this time around will be to bring their regime to an end, and they will throw everything that they have got at us in a desperate attempt to survive. Anyone that believes that there is any limit to what they might do is not being rational. They figure that if they are going to go down, they might as well go down swinging.

USA - The price of gold plunged by more than 5 percent on Thursday, erasing almost all its gains from earlier in the day. The bullion fell to $5,184 in the late afternoon in London, having previously risen above $5,500 for the first time. Gold still remains 3 percent higher than yesterday’s closing price, although the sudden drop highlights the volatility across the commodity market. Silver also fell to $110 an ounce on Thursday afternoon, having risen to a high of $121 previously in the session. Gold has soared by almost 100 percent in the past year, while silver has rocketed by 285 percent over the same period.

USA - The Facebook owner reported that revenue rose 22 per cent to $201 billion this year while profit dipped 3 per cent to $60.5 billion. Meta Platforms forecast on Wednesday that its annual capital expenditure will rise sharply as the world’s largest social media group builds artificial intelligence infrastructure in the pursuit of superintelligence, a theoretical milestone where machines could surpass human performance.

GERMANY - Germany has been urged to withdraw gold worth more than £100 billion from American vaults because Donald Trump’s unpredictability has made keeping it there too “risky”. The country currently stores 1,236 tons of gold, roughly the same weight as three Air Force One jets, at the US Federal Reserve in New York, worth around €164 billion (£122 billion). Economists and politicians warned that this vast wealth was exposed to the whim of an increasingly erratic US president, who this month alone threatened Europe with crippling sanctions over Greenland, captured the president of Venezuela and was poised to launch air strikes on Iran.

IRAN - "The next attack will be far worse! Don’t make that happen again," Trump wrote. He also said another "armada" is floating toward Iran. Iran's mission to the United Nations responded in kind. "Last time the US blundered into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it squandered over $7 trillion and lost more than 7,000 American lives," it said in an X post quoting Trump's statement. "Iran stands ready for dialog based on mutual respect and interests — BUT IF PUSHED, IT WILL DEFEND ITSELF AND RESPOND LIKE NEVER BEFORE!" On Monday, a US source confirmed to The Jerusalem Post that the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier strike group had arrived in CENTCOM waters in the Indian Ocean. According to a Reuters report on Thursday, the USS Abraham Lincoln group included other US warships, destroyers, and fighter aircraft.

UK - The Bank of England has warned of the “urgent need” to make the shadow banking industry safer amid mounting concerns it could be the cause of the next financial crisis. Andrew Bailey, the Bank governor, said regulators should not “rest on our laurels” because they had strengthened the resilience of traditional lenders following the 2008 banking crash. “The challenge now lies in managing risks that sit beyond the banking perimeter as well as identifying and understanding new interconnections between banks and non-banks,” he wrote in an article for The Banker magazine. “There remains a particular and urgent need to increase resilience in market‑based finance globally.” The comments are the latest in a series of warnings sounded by the Bank about the possible threat to financial stability lurking in what is a largely unregulated corner of the system.

UK - Claims that there is a Christian resurgence in Britain have been shot down by global analysts, who have poured cold water on surveys that feed a “misleading” narrative. Church leaders around the UK have hailed the prospect of a “quiet revival” in Christian faith, particularly among young people. They have been buoyed by surveys suggesting that Gen Z are more open to spirituality and more likely to be churchgoers than older generations.There is scepticism around the claims, however, from experts who point to the fact that church attendances across the major denominations have failed to recover fully from their pandemic slump. The Pew Research Centre, an American think tank and analyst of global trends in religious faith, has now published an analysis showing there is “no clear evidence” of a revival in Christianity in the UK.

SICILY - Entire neighbourhoods in a hilltop town in Sicily have crumbled in a landslide caused by a freak storm, forcing the evacuation of 1,500 residents. Buildings and streets along a 2.5-mile ridge-top stretch in Niscemi collapsed after Cyclone Harry’s heavy rains saturated the sandy soil, which gave way and slid into the fields below. No casualties were reported but officials warned of further landslides and began evacuating homes within 150m of the collapse.

USA - I was shocked at dinner on Monday with a visiting English friend who lives and works in Minneapolis. When Greek-Cypriot terrorists were agitating against British rule, our family’s life in Nicosia was serene; but our Telegraph-reading relatives in Britain pictured a virtual war zone and begged us to come home. I learnt that local troubles are rarely as all-consuming as they appear in other countries’ media. So I’d been supposing this month that life in Minneapolis was probably fairly normal for most people, despite some horrid incidents with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Oh boy, was I mistaken!