UK - Dozens of household names have taken out privacy injunctions to prevent the media from publishing details of their affairs and sex scandals, figures show. Revelations of the extent of their use came after a judge rejected David Walliams’ attempts to prevent the reporting of allegations about his predatory behaviour. But scores of celebrities, athletes and public figures have successfully turned to the courts to keep allegations of infidelity and sexual misconduct out of the spotlight. A total of 111 applications for new privacy injunctions have been made over the past decade, according to official figures. But as the data only covers this period, the true number granted will be far higher. Giving evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee yesterday, media minister Ian Murray said he was ‘deeply saddened and also angry’ to see the prevalence of abuse by men in the media industry. NDAs, he added, are ‘a major part of the problem'.

EGYPT - Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said on Tuesday that Egyptian forces have been deployed to Saudi Arabia for “defensive objectives to defend sensitive sites, including holy sites and others.” “We already have a military presence there at the request of our brothers and sisters in Saudi Arabia to help; and we are strengthening that,” Abdelatty told France24 television in an interview on Tuesday night. Abdelatty said Egyptian troops first arrived “a few months ago after the attacks and aggressions on Saudi Arabia during the escalation with Iran.” The foreign minister’s remarks were the first public confirmation from an Egyptian official that troops have been dispatched to Saudi Arabia. The Egyptian parliament voted to give President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the authority to order such a deployment in late October, a week after the president requested a vote. The Houthis angrily denounced the vote as a “declaration of war.”

UK - If Britain reaches its Net Zero target, the world will be 0.00376c less warm by 2100. Is that REALLY worth £695 billion? Andy Burnham went to the Turkish seaside resort of Antalya for a global climate summit. But if he’d hoped to fix up meetings with Donald Trump, Mark Carney, Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni or even Japan’s Sanae Takaichi, he would have been disappointed. Burnham is the only G7 leader who thought it necessary to attend. There was no sign, either, of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or Narendra Modi. As he twiddled his thumbs in Turkey, sipping sustainable soy lattes with his Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh and the 255 British officials who have made the trip with them, Mr Burnham might have noticed something else. COP31, the annual jamboree of the climatocracy officially known as ‘the 31st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change’, has finally managed to unite both sides of the climate debate. Yes, the sceptics and the alarmists are in agreement at last: COP meetings are a waste of time.

USA - The president claimed that the US controls the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, and that the blockade it imposed on Iran is severely damaging its economy. US President Donald Trump threatened Thursday to renew military strikes against Iran in an interview with the Salem News Channel. When asked whether he would hesitate to use military force to prevent Iran from threatening US allies and American vessels, he replied, "No, without hesitation." Trump added that the Iranian regime is on the brink of collapse, and claimed that inflation in the country has reached 301%, its economy has been destroyed, and its military forces have been wiped out. In a separate interview with TV personality Stephen A Smith, Trump said that several Gulf states, led by Saudi Arabia, had asked him to refrain from escalating military operations against Iran, even though he claimed the United States could destroy the country's critical infrastructure in just three days.

MIDDLE EAST - Last week’s midterms were a damning indictment of the war in Iran. Republicans lost both houses of Congress by margins neither party has suffered in a midterm for 50 years. J D Vance put it in seven words on Wednesday: “The reason we lost is the war.” He has his own reasons for being this blunt, 2028 among them, but Trump himself called the verdict “largely true” before adding that he would do it all again. A third of voters told exit pollsters the war was crucial to their choice. “Gas” (petrol) prices did the rest.

IRAN - Major General Mohsen Rezaei, the secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council, said on Wednesday that Iran would strike American bases, including those located in areas thought to be out of Tehran’s reach. He also said that Iran’s response to renewed US attacks would “target America’s more distant military installations – including the ones we have not yet attacked”, without specifying which bases. Speaking to a Lebanese-based media outlet, he said: “If American aircraft take off from an American military base, even one located in a European country or some other distant region, to bomb Iran, we will strike those bases as well.” “We may even strike certain islands that they assume are beyond the reach of our missiles,” he added.

UK - Cash withdrawals rose for the first time this year after the Government advised the public to stockpile for emergencies. Britain’s biggest cash machine provider, Link, said the total value of withdrawals climbed last week amid a surge in crisis preparations. The average amount withdrawn last Friday was just under £105, which the organisation said was a high for a day that was not the last working day of the month. It comes after Wes Streeting, the Defence Secretary, launched a “national resilience conversation”, urging Britons to prepare for emergencies by stockpiling food and water.

UK - What’s wrong with us? Why do we treat luvvies as oracles, celebrities as messiahs, actors as scholars, court-jesters as philosopher-kings? Why have we empowered such a vacuous, hypocritical and unprincipled class to be our moral arbiters, to shame us, to dispense wisdom, to tell us what to think and who to vote for? Why do we pretend that fame, however fleeting or random, somehow imbues its beneficiaries with moral authority, with knowledge, with judgment, experience, insight or extra compassion?

TURKEY - This year’s El Niño will cause “pandemic-scale mortality” worldwide, epidemiologists have claimed. Scientists on Tuesday said that El Niño – predicted to be the most intense on record – should be classified as a global health emergency which could kill hundreds of thousands. “The 2026-27 El Niño is going to cause pandemic-scale mortality,” said Dr Colin Carlson, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Yale University, warning it would be deadlier than the 2009 swine flu pandemic, which killed roughly 284,000 people. Concerns about the fallout from El Niño rose as world leaders, climate scientists and policymakers met at the COP31 climate conference in Turkey this week, where the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) unveiled its latest State of the Climate update. It found the past four years had been the warmest on record, and warned El Niño would unleash “even more heat and extreme weather well into 2027”. In a speech on Monday, Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate chief, warned that the climate crisis, turbocharged by a super El Niño, was “a global health crisis of pandemic proportions”.

UK - Andy Burnham has promised a “new era of British leadership” on net zero as every other G7 leader shunned the Cop31 climate summit. The Prime Minister used his speech at the annual conference in Turkey to suggest his counterparts on the world stage were not taking climate change seriously enough. World leaders including Donald Trump, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron have all been absent from the two-week climate meeting in Antalya. For a second year in a row, the US has not sent any official delegation after Mr Trump withdrew his country from the Paris climate agreement. Germany and France have sent their climate ministers. Mr Burnham said: “This crisis can only be solved in partnership. I have pledged a new era of British leadership over the next decade.” The Prime Minister insisted that the wildfires in Britain over the summer, which were among the worst in decades, had convinced him it was important to attend. Mr Burnham said: “I decided then it was important for me to be here, to show British leadership in a world where climate issues have taken too much of a backseat.