FRANCE - Emmanuel Macron has ordered an “unprecedented” naval deployment in the Middle East to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. France will deploy eight frigates – more than the entire British fleet – along with two amphibious helicopter carriers and the country’s flagship Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier. Britain is still struggling to send a single warship to Cyprus, where RAF Akrotiri, a UK military base, was struck by an Iranian-made drone earlier this month. “We aim to guarantee freedom of navigation and maritime security,” Mr Macron said during a visit to a military air base in Cyprus. The French vessels are expected to join US forces aiming to reopen the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is carried, following a series of Iranian attacks.

USA - Massive airstrikes hit Tehran with explosions last night as Donald Trump promised the world the war would end 'very soon' and claimed the US has 'already won'. The American President even described the massive US and Israeli onslaught as a 'short-term excursion' which will be 'finished pretty quickly'. But further remarks betrayed Mr Trump's willingness to keep the war with Iran going, as he added: 'We've already won in many ways but we haven't won enough... we're going to go further.' The sky above the Iranian capital glowed amid the latest wave of US-Israeli attacks proving the US President's vow to 'go further' in the conflict was serious.

IRAN - Iran has warned Donald Trump to 'be careful not to be eliminated' after the US President said he did not believe the regime's new Supreme Leader can 'live in peace'. Mr Trump told Iran to brace for 'death, fire and fury' for keeping the Strait of Hormuz shut before threatening its new leader Mojtaba Khamenei. He told Fox the new Supreme Leader will be unable to ‘live in peace’ and he was ‘not happy with the appointment’, having warned Iran he would have the final say over their leader. But the regime's security chief Ali Larijani dismissed Mr Trump's comments, claiming Iran 'is not afraid of your empty threats'. He added: 'Even those greater than you could not eliminate the Iranian nation. Take care of yourself not to be eliminated!'

USA - Before the outbreak of war, a US official warned that analysts were tracking increased activity among Iran’s spy networks. Iran has proven capable of operating proxies on European soil, including a plot targeting the Israeli embassy in London. Ken McCallum, the head of MI5, warned in October: “MI5 has tracked more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in just the one year since I last stood at this podium. The UK was among the first to call out this wave of Iranian transnational aggression.” A day after the war began, a gunman opened fire on a Texas bar while wearing a “property of Allah” T-shirt, killing two people and wounding 14. Chris Swecker, a former assistant FBI director, recently told Fox News: “If ever there’s going to be a Hezbollah cell or a Hamas cell act in the United States in a violent way, it’s now.”

GERMANY - The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has scored a record result in Baden‑Wurttemberg’s regional elections, doubling its vote share from the previous election and achieving its highest result outside its traditional heartland. The right-wing party finished third in the election held over the weekend, behind the Greens and Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU). It secured nearly 19% of the vote, up from just under 10% in 2021. The result also marks AfD’s highest score outside the former East German states, which are its traditional stronghold. AfD’s previous best result in former West Germany was in the 2023 regional election in Hessen, where it won 18.4% of the vote.

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.

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 - 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.