News Desk

A New York City man is facing charges after allegedly pulling out a knife near the set of the latest “Miami Vice” reboot.

On Friday around 11 p.m., the New York Police Department received a call about a man brandishing a knife near the intersection of Avenue N and McDonald Avenue in the borough of Brooklyn.

The caller, identified only as a 42-year-old man, told police that he had been in a verbal dispute with an “unidentified individual” when the man took out a knife, according to a police spokesperson.

The suspect was identified as Brooklyn resident Alex Perez, 23. The police spokesperson said Perez was taken into custody without incident and charged with menacing and criminal possession of a weapon. There were no reported injuries, she said.

In a video obtained by TMZ, a man the outlet identified as Perez is shown taking out a large butcher’s knife from his black sweatshirt pocket.

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday night. It was not immediately clear whether Perez has a lawyer.

NBC New York reported that “Miami Vice ‘85” had been filming nearby along Bay Parkway and McDonald Avenue, near Washington Cemetery.

Universal, the studio behind the film, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Joseph Kosinski, the director behind “F1” and “Top Gun: Maverick,” is directing “Miami Vice ’85.” The movie, which according to Universal was in production as of Oct. 12, features Michael B. Jordan as Tubbs and Austin Butler as Crockett, according to the company’s social media posts.

The movie is based on Anthony Yerkovich’s iconic 1980s TV cop show. A movie adaptation directed by Michael Mann, also called “Miami Vice,” came out in 2006 but was a box-office flop, The Times reported at the time.

The localised ceasefire, secured by US First Lady Melania Trump, will allow evacuations and aid deliveries to Oleshky.

Russia has suspended strikes on the Ukrainian province of Kherson as a localised ceasefire takes effect ahead of a humanitarian mission led by the United States’ First Lady Melania Trump.

The pause in fighting started at 01:00 GMT on Tuesday, according to the Russian Defence Ministry, to allow for an aid mission into the Russian-occupied town of Oleshky in southern Kherson later this week.

The mission will enable aid deliveries and allow evacuations from the front-line town, which is suffering acute shortages of food, medicine and other basic supplies.

The agreement was announced on October ‌23 and brokered by US First Lady Melania Trump, with the additional involvement of Pope Leo, as Washington seeks to revive peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv after more than four and a half years of fighting.

Up to 2,000 people remain in Oleshky. They have been unable to leave because of explosive mines and drone attacks in the area, according to the United Nations.

The town, which had a pre-war population of 24,000 people, lies on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River in the partially occupied Kherson region, opposite Kherson city, which is held by Ukrainian forces. Russian troops seized Oleshky during the first ⁠days of their February 2022 invasion and have controlled it ever since.

Oleshky has suffered extensive war damage and was hit hard by flooding after the destruction of the nearby Kakhovka Dam in 2023.

The localised ceasefire is due to last through Saturday, or longer, amid deep mistrust between Russia and Ukraine that has thwarted previous attempts at ceasefires.

Negotiators involved in the aid mission said doctors, medicines, food supplies and water would be taken to Oleshky before evacuation corridors are opened.

LOUIS Walsh claims former pop protege Ronan Keating’s music career is over and believes the Irish singer will never have another hit.

The former X Factor judge was instrumental in launching Ronan‘s career through his management of Boyzone – to date, the second most commercially successful boyband in the United Kingdom behind Take That.

He would continue managing the singer, now 49, through the successful early years of his solo career, during which hit singles Life Is A Rollercoaster and When You Say Nothing At All rocketed up the charts.

But a sharp decline in popularity and ongoing disputes over Ronan’s musical direction led to a bitter parting of the ways – and persistent claims by Walsh, 74, that the singer had ‘started believing his own publicity.’

Appearing on the latest instalment of The Big Interview, Walsh reignited his feud with Ronan by claiming he will never have another hit single.

“I did all the work on Boyzone, everybody knows that,” he told host Collette Fitzpatrick on Sunday evening. “They were the puppets for Westlife, and I picked all the songs.”

READ MORE ABOUT LOUIS HERE

CELEB BIG BOTHER

Louis Walsh reveals he suffered HEART ATTACK while on Big Brother

LOU-SE LIPPED

Louis Walsh accuses Simon Cowell of ‘fixing’ votes on The X Factor

Ronan became a household name with Boyzone – earning three number one albums and a string of hit singles alongside bandmates Stephen Gately, Mikey Graham, Keith Duffy and Shane Lynch.

But he would leave the band at the height of their success in 1999, with Louis staying on as his manager during the hugely successful first decade of his solo career – before creative differences led to his sacking.

“Ronan started believing his own publicity then,” Louis recalled. “He said to me one day in the Four Seasons, ‘I don’t want to be a karaoke artist anymore.’ But that’s what he is!

“I was picking all the songs – he hasn’t had a hit since. He hasn’t! He’s singing all the old songs now, he doesn’t have a record deal. He was great to work with at the start, but then he believed it.”

He added: “He wanted to be George Michael… he was chasing around George Michael in London.

“What he didn’t know is that George Michael fancied Stephen [Gately], and George Michael was only being friendly with him to get to know Stephen. That’s the real story.”

Ronan has since returned to Boyzone, now a four-piece following the death of Stephen to an undiagnosed heart defect in 2009.

But Louis remains adamant that the singer’s music career is finished.

“It’s over – he’s never going to be a pop star now,” he said. “He’s never going to have another hit. I’m happy.

“We had great times together, we had great fun, but it was a bad divorce, and it’s fine – I’m over it. I’d say he’s happy enough in his life, because he’s always gonna be working.

“He’ll either be a DJ, or he’ll act, or he’ll dance. He can do anything.”

The political party of Senator Flavio Bolsonaro has acknowledged the result of Brazil’s presidential run-off, despite the right-wing candidate pledging to annul the outcome.

On Monday, Valdemar Costa Neto, the leader of the right-wing Liberal Party, issued a statement saying his political group had accepted the outcome of the vote.

Still, he echoed Bolsonaro’s concerns about the circumstances surrounding the election.

“We recognise the presidential election results,” Costa Neto said. “But we believe the issues raised need to be properly clarified.”

On Sunday, Bolsonaro was defeated by left-wing incumbent President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva by a margin of more than 4.4 million votes.

Bolsonaro has yet to formally concede. In a post-election speech, he called the election results “unacceptable”, citing a last-minute extension to voting hours.

“We will take legal action,” he told supporters. “I will request that these elections be annulled.”

An extension to Sunday’s vote had been sought by the campaigns of both candidates — but for different reasons.

Bolsonaro’s camp had pointed to inclement weather that impeded some voters from reaching polling stations. Parts of southern Brazil, considered a right-wing stronghold, had experienced heavy rains on Sunday.

Lula’s campaign, meanwhile, pushed for longer voting hours after it accused some cities of limiting public transportation on election day.

The left-wing leader’s allies framed those reductions in service as an attempt at election interference, aimed at preventing Lula’s working-class base from voting.

Media reports indicated that Pablo Souza, a transportation official in the city of Salvador, was arrested on Sunday over the matter.

In response to the petitions, Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin agreed to extend voting by two hours.

Whereas polls across the country had been slated to close at 5pm Brasilia time (20:00 GMT), Zanin’s order allowed those that had not already closed to remain open until 7pm (22:00 GMT).

Following his loss, Bolsonaro cried foul, saying that the justice’s decision had disadvantaged his voters.

He pointed to Zanin’s relationship with Lula as support: Lula had appointed Zanin to the high court in 2023, and Zanin had formerly served as the left-wing politician’s personal lawyer.

“With a simple stroke of a pen, at the request of a former partner, [Zanin] changed the rules of the game mid-match,” Bolsonaro said in his address on Sunday night.

But experts signalled they were sceptical of Bolsonaro’s claims of malfeasance.

An analysis by Pedro Burgos, a professor at the Brazilian educational institute Insper, found that the extension resulted in 35,000 additional votes across the country, less than 0.03 percent of the total.

That amount was far short of Lula’s 4.4 million vote advantage. The incumbent won more than 64.25 million votes, compared with Bolsonaro’s 59.83 million.

Still, some right-wing allies rallied to Bolsonaro’s support. US President Donald Trump, who has clashed with Lula in the past, told reporters that the vote seemed “rigged”.

“Elections have to be indisputable and it looked very bad to me,” Trump said on Monday. “It looked like another rigged election, frankly.”

Still, Trump stopped short of suggesting that he would get involved on behalf of Bolsonaro, saying instead he “did not take sides” in the election.

Bolsonaro’s refusal to accept his loss has raised concerns about whether he will abide by the democratic process or follow in the footsteps of his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who served as Brazil’s president from 2019 to 2023.

After his defeat to Lula in the 2022 election, the ex-president refused to acknowledge the outcome.

Instead, he and his allies sought to overturn the results, including through a legal challenge, and prosecutors accused him of plotting a coup to prevent the legal transfer of power.

Jair Bolsonaro is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence on coup-related charges.

Separately, he was also barred from serving in public office for eight years, after a court found he had misused his public office to spread misinformation about the election.

Flavio Bolsonaro, along with his siblings, has sought to have his father released. The family has denounced the elder Bolsonaro’s trial as a case of political persecution.

Still, it is unclear whether Flavio Bolsonaro will continue with his legal challenge over Sunday’s election.

The Brazilian news outlet Folha de S Paulo reported on Monday that legal advisers and political allies have convinced Bolsonaro to abandon his quest to have his loss annulled, citing the large margin of Lula’s victory and its validation by the Supreme Court and election authorities.

Bolsonaro also announced on Monday that federal police asked him to hand over his passports amid speculation that he could leave the country following his loss.

He said that he would comply with the order and had no plans to leave.

“To withstand the chaos, I’m going to organise the opposition,” the right-wing politician said.

The One About Matthew Perry is a new documentary exploring the life of the late Friends star, who played Chandler Bing on the beloved sitcom, three years on from his tragic death

Famously the Friends theme tune features the lyric “I’ll be there for you”.

And in real life actor Matthew Perry had both family and friends looking out for him along the way for most of his 54 years. Best known as Chandler Bing, he was regularly the stand out comic actor in the sitcom, both with physical gags and his comic timing of lines.

But often away from the cameras and the fame, there were problems in his life and we see and hear about those in abundance in the new Netflix series. I didn’t expect to react strongly to The One About Matthew Perry, but his sister Mia Perry Bowick is a captivating and unflinching interviewee.

Ahead of watching the documentary, I couldn’t really understand why she had agreed to take part and what good could come from it. But she does an incredible job by balancing her words to pay tribute to a brother she loved dearly, at the same time as also explaining the difficulties and pain of him struggling and battling with addiction.

I felt I understood the issues around addiction and Matthew Perry much more after watching and had huge sympathy for him and Mia. Here was an incredibly intelligent and talented man trying to manage a career as an A-list star as he fights desperately to not drink or turn to drugs when he feels depressed.

Those that worked with him point to his comic timing, his willingness to help with script tweaks or tiny scene changes to make projects even better. But for all his successes he never seemed to be able to be completely happy.

Despite having lots of friends and women falling at his feet, he would sometimes feel alone, perhaps thinking back to a time he would be put on planes on his own as a child flying between him mum in Canada and his dad in Los Angeles after they had separated

In one archive interview he says: “The beliefs that I had were I was too needy, I wasn’t enough, and I didn’t matter. And my whole life was about trying to have those three things not be true.”

Mia elaborates and says: “He would talk about that feeling of kind of a sense of emptiness or loneliness that he couldn’t quite fill.”

His closest friends and girlfriends discuss a recurring theme of poor Matthew losing the battle over and over again with relapses, and then his death. At one stage Mia says tearfully: “I know that a lot of parts of him did not think it was possible for him to live a sober life.” Going back further Mia recalls the good times, when Matthew first landed the Friends job, and when she was being cuddled on set by his cast mates like Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox as a young girl.

Her brother could be ridiculously generous and bought her a Corvette car when she was 15 and regularly treated friends and girlfriends to expensive gifts too. He also wasn’t against putting his hand in his pocket to try to help solve his own problems as Mia highlights he spent $7million on rehab to try to get clean and stay sober.

But another scene that lives long in the memory is when Mia describes visiting him in rehab in 2001 and being unable to control her despair at the situation, running and hiding in a cupboard in tears until her brother came to get her.

“This was my big brother, my idolised big brother. He was the most special person on the planet. Just seeing him suffering, I was really scared for him.”

As she grew older she matured and found she was having to help him even more, rushing to hospital to his aid in 2018 just six weeks after she had given birth. He came out of a coma that time and was released from hospital against the odds after three months, but the hopes that this would be rock bottom only lasted a few years.

At times this series if a tough watch because it does not sugarcoat what happened and the issues around addiction. But this decision should be applauded. It is a million miles away from so many of the other “celebrity documentaries” released these days which gloss over the difficult moments over simplify what really happened.

Explaining her reasoning for taking part, Mia said: As his sister, he shaped who I am today, the person I strive to be, and the work to which I’ve devoted my life. Matthew had a beautiful heart and a generous spirit, and even in his darkest moments, he could still make you laugh and feel loved. I hope this series gives everyone who loved him, whether personally or from afar, a deeper appreciation for who he truly was, and the legacy he leaves behind.”

Mia, you were there for him, and along with director Mary Robertson you have done Matthew proud with this documentary.

VERDICT: A challenging and heartbreaking series *****

* The One About Matthew Perry premieres globally on Netflix on October 27.

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok , Snapchat ,

Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .

Authorities say the fire in Brasov in September is part of a broader Russian campaign against European countries that support Ukraine.

Romanian authorities say they have uncovered a network “coordinated” by Russia that they believe was responsible for a fire at an industrial site near a state-owned weapons factory in September.

Romania’s Intelligence Service said on Monday that the blaze in the central city of Brasov on September 14 was “part of a wider campaign of sabotage operations coordinated” by Russia amid its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The agency said the operations were aimed at arms manufacturers and “other targets of military and industrial interest”.

“These actions are intended to intimidate, undermine defence capabilities and weaken the contribution of the targeted states to European and regional security,” it said in a statement.

There was no immediate comment from Russia on Romania’s claim. Moscow has previously repeatedly denied such accusations.

Romania’s Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism, known as DIICOT, said three people had been involved in the Brasov fire – two Belarusians and a Ukrainian, all living in European Union countries.

Two were “tracked down and remanded in custody in Germany while they were preparing to commit similar offenses”, the directorate said.

The third remains at large in Poland.

According to Romania’s Intelligence Service, recruits for such networks are often found on social media and are first offered money “for a seemingly harmless task”, such as “observing or photographing certain targets”.

Over time, “the tasks become increasingly serious, potentially involving acts of vandalism, arson or even murder”, it said.

‘Hybrid’ war

Romania, a member of the EU and NATO, shares a border of more than 600km with Ukraine.

Its centrist president, Nicusor Dan, has said the country is a target of a hybrid war that Russia is waging to destabilise nations backing Kyiv, citing drone incursions into Romanian airspace, cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns and sabotage.

Foreign Minister Dan Neculaescu said the fire in Brasov was “part of a broader campaign of sabotage across Europe” targeting military production.

“Hybrid attacks will not hold us back from strengthening our resilience and defense,” he wrote on X.

The accusation follows a string of incidents at defence sites across Europe in recent weeks.

In September, explosions and a fire erupted at an ammunition storage site in Bulgaria, weeks after a blaze at another munitions facility in the country. Both sites are operated by the Bulgarian arms maker EMCO, whose munitions are used in Ukraine.

That same month, firebombs were thrown near the offices of a defence company in Munich, and Romanian authorities said they had detained a Russian citizen accused of filming and photographing military sites in preparation for sabotage.

In August, a blast struck an ammunition factory near Rome in Italy operated by the arms maker KNDS.

At sea, at least eight cargo ships have been hit off the coasts of Romania and Bulgaria over the past three weeks, and about 34 sailors have been reported dead or missing.

Dan, the Romanian president, has called the attacks on ships in Romanian waters “a new example of the tragic consequences of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine”.

A year ago, Poland and Romania also detained eight people suspected of taking part in a Russian plot to send exploding parcels to Ukraine.

KIDS TV legend Johnny Ball has today hit out at the BBC and accused them of ageism.

The national treasure, 88, claims his broadcaster daughter Zoe Ball, now 55, was suddenly “gone” from Radio 2 when she reached the age of 54.

Zoe announced she was leaving her coveted Breakfast Show slot in 2024, after six years at the helm.

The radio star then briefly returned last year for a Saturday slot on Radio 2, but left again in December.

Johnny, who himself had a long career at the Beeb, having fronted kids shows like Play School, has now given his opinion on her departure from the Beeb – after she had worked for them since the 90s.

Speaking at The Dorchester Literary Festival, the TV star said: “I did Play School for 17 years, I wrote nearly all of Play Away then I did Think Of A Number and Think Again.

JO’S PAIN

Jo Whiley breaks down in tears as she opens up on dad’s death with pal Zoe Ball

SHADY POST

Scott Mills’ hubby takes swipe at BBC as pal Zoe Ball starts new gig after axe

‘I loved every minute of it. But what happens when you are 50 at the BBC? Gone! Zoe was 54. Gone! You cannot believe it because we gave so much to the BBC.’

Johnny also gave his verdict on Strictly Come Dancing’s new hosts, Emma Willis, 50, Johannes Radebe, 39, and Josh Widdicombe, 43, after his daughter Zoe missed out on the job.

“Josh is not a Bruce Forsyth. He is a lovely bloke and I have met him a couple of times but he is not a domineering comedian as some comedians like Bruce Forsyth were,” he said.

“When I did Strictly, and I only did three shows, but on each show I gave Brucie a joke and he used them and he said to me ”I have got a writer here and he does b****r all so thanks very much’.

“And he said to me ‘You should never have gone out’ but that’s another story.”

Before quitting Radio 2, Zoe was one of the Beeb’s highest-paid female stars, taking home just under £1M a year.

The U.S. Air Force has handed Lockheed Martin a $694 million contract for the production of AGM-183A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) hypersonic missiles. In 2023, the service had moved to cancel ARRW, which had been in line to be the U.S. military’s first operational hypersonic weapon. At the time, we had reservations about the service’s intent and speculated the missile could make a major comeback or continue development in a classified setting. The program has since made an incredible turnaround, and there are already plans for another variant that will be able to use an all-new seeker to hit moving targets, including enemy warships.

The ARRW contract was awarded on September 29, but only announced today. It is not immediately clear how many missiles are to be built under this deal or when the Air Force expects to start taking delivery of them. The Air Force has previously disclosed plans to integrate the missiles onto its B-52 and B-1 bombers. Other aircraft with sufficiently large payload capacities and physical space to carry outsized stores could potentially carry AGM-183As, or variants thereof, in the future.

“The contract was executed under the Department of War’s Enterprise-Wide Agile Acquisition Contract to modernize America’s Arsenal of Freedom,” according to an Air Force press release. “This milestone marks the formal transition of the boost-glide hypersonic missile program from prototyping and flight testing into production, solidifying the Air Force’s commitment to fielding standoff, high-speed strike options.”

As noted here, the AGM-183A is a so-called boost-glide vehicle-type hypersonic weapon, which uses a rocket booster to bring it first to an optimal speed and altitude. The nose cone on ARRW then breaks away, and a wedge-shaped unpowered boost-glide vehicle concealed within is released.

The vehicle then glides to its target along a relatively shallow flight path within the Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic speed, defined as anything above Mach 5. It is capable of maneuvering along the way, sometimes erratically. The mix of speed, flight trajectory, and maneuverability creates significant challenges for opponents in terms of spotting and tracking the glide vehicle, let alone attempting to intercept it. As a result, hypersonic weapons of this type offer particular benefits for piercing enemy air defenses to very rapidly strike time-sensitive and otherwise high-value targets.

The ARRW production contract “is a turning point in our advanced weapons roadmap,” Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said in a statement accompanying today’s release. “By moving ARRW from test to production, we’re providing our combatant commanders with a credible, high-speed strike weapon capable of penetrating the most advanced anti-access and area-denial systems.”

“Fielding ARRW enhances our ability to hold targets at risk anywhere around the world,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach said in his own statement. “This hypersonic weapon provides the Joint Force a flexible and rapid response option for highly contested environments.”

As mentioned, the Air Force had moved to cancel ARRW in 2023, following a number of failed flight tests. The explicit intent at the time was to shift resources to the Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) effort. HACM is an air-breathing hypersonic cruise missile that functions in a completely different way from ARRW. HACM is still in development, and the program has now moved into flight testing, as TWZ was first to report earlier this month.

There had already been steady signs in recent years that ARRW’s fortunes were changing and that it had not actually been axed, despite the Air Force’s stated plans to do so. The Air Force’s 2026 Fiscal Year budget request last year confirmed that the service had fully rebooted the program and was seeking new funding to procure actual missiles.

The service’s 2027 Fiscal Year budget request, released earlier this year, revealed further plans “to begin [ARRW] INC 2 [Increment 2] technology efforts such as but not limited to integrating pre-planned product improvements, design, trade studies, hardware upgrades, facilitization, affordability initiatives, and testing.”

A request for $296 million would support “the design, test, and evaluation of Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) Increment 2 with terminal seeker and data link capability and other cost reduction production initiatives into ARRW,” those same documents added.

In general, the U.S. Air Force has historically framed hypersonic weapons, including ARRW and HACM, as being especially critical for success in future conflicts, especially high-end fights, such as one in the Pacific against China. This was underscored by the launch of an AGM-183A with a live warhead from a B-52 flying from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam in 2024. The future anti-ship variant could be even more relevant in a Pacific context.

As TWZ has written previously:

“…the Guam test sent clear signals to China. The Air Force has made no secret of how important it views the development and fielding of hypersonic weapons as part of larger preparations for a potential future high-end fight against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the Pacific. This is further underscored by the fact that the mention of the ‘terminal seeker and data link capability’ for Increment 2 of ARRW is actually contained in the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) section of the Pentagon’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request.”

“In the context of a major conflict in the Pacific, there would also be a very high demand for prompt, long-range anti-ship capability. The ability to conduct those strikes even in the face of dense anti-air defenses would be even more attractive for engaging very high-value vessels, such as China’s growing fleets of aircraft carriers or big deck amphibious assault ships. The PLA Navy’s (PLAN) combat fleets, overall, continue to grow in scale and scope at a prodigious rate, as well. This, in turn, has put additional emphasis on the development and fielding of new and improved anti-ship capabilities that can be air-launched, as well as employed from the maritime and ground domains, across the U.S. military in recent years. Increment 2 ARRWs could also offer another means to strike mobile, high-value targets on land, such as ballistic missile transporter-erector-launchers.”

“For its part, the PLA has been actively developing and fielding various types of hypersonic weapons, including boost-glide vehicle designs. Its ever-growing arsenal of traditional ballistic missiles now includes several air-launched types, including ones with nuclear and conventional warheads. The latter are widely believed to be capable of being employed against enemy ships, as well as targets on land.”

If nothing else, after moving to cancel the ARRW three years ago, the Air Force has now fully reversed course and has placed its first order for production examples of this hypersonic missile.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

RUSSELL Brand had an “insane sexual appetite” and treated women poorly, his former PA told his rape trial yesterday.

Helen Berger described him as a “peacock” who would allegedly find random women online to satisfy his lust.

Ms Berger, who worked with the comedian from June 2006 to February 2007, said: “Though I’ve worked with a lot of celebrities before and seen a lot of people normalising bad behaviour, this was on another level.”

In a statement read to Southwark crown court, she said Brand, now 51, was having sex day and night and described him getting “antsy” on deadlines.

She said he would joke: “May I go and have sex now?”

But she said sexual activity would also make him depressed.

Read more on Russell Brand

BRAND TRIAL

Russell Brand in ‘f*****g sheets’ rant after alleged rape, court hears

‘RAPE’ TRIAL

Brand jury shown pics of home where he ‘raped woman & told her clean up mess’

Ms Berger, who worked for Brand through his agent John Noel, told the court she would often be called to go to the comedian’s flat in Camden, North London, where she found he was always in his underwear.

She described seeing him use MySpace to find women and invite them over for sex.

She also recalled being instructed to get phone numbers for Brand from female fans when she first started working for him but said she felt uncomfortable and told him she would not do it anymore.

Ms Berger said she quit working for Brand within months because she became sick of him.

She wrote: “I worked a lot and was exhausted, emotional, and it was a lot to deal with.

“I always had to manage my emotions around him. He had an insane sexual appetite and was sleeping with people day and night.

“He was very open about what his needs were. We didn’t have a specific conversation about it.”

Brand, supported in court by wife Laura Gallacher, denies three rapes, three sexual assaults and indecent assault on six women between 1999 and 2009.

Mr Justice Bennathan told jurors the defence case would begin today.

Doha, Qatar – African countries are feeling the economic fallout from the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, with rising fuel and fertiliser prices threatening to drive up food costs, according to trade ministers from the region and the United Nations’ top trade official.

The crisis around the Strait of Hormuz due to the United States and Israel’s war on Iran needs to be resolved “sooner rather than later”, Luz Maria de la Mora, director of the Division on International Trade and Commodities at UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD), told Al Jazeera at the World Investment Forum on Monday. She warned that soaring fertiliser prices could affect harvests next year.

“Prices of fertilisers have risen dramatically … so many countries have decided to reduce the use of fertilisers, which will have an effect next year in terms of crops,” she said.

“It may have an effect on availability of food and prices of food.”

The US-Israel war on Iran has highlighted the world’s heavy reliance on the strategic waterway, through which one-fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas trade previously passed.

Against this backdrop, Doha hosted UNCTAD’s World Investment Forum on October 25 and 26, bringing together heads of state, policymakers, CEOs and investors to discuss global investment and sustainable development.

The Strait of Hormuz’s disruption has rippled through African economies. In Zimbabwe, rising fuel and fertiliser prices are a critical concern in a country where more than 70 percent of the population depends on agriculture, Monica Mutsvangwa, the country’s minister of women affairs, community, small and medium enterprise development, told Al Jazeera.

Uganda, another heavily agrarian economy, has also been hit, with fuel prices more than doubling, Sanjay Tanna, the country’s minister of trade, industry and cooperatives, told Al Jazeera.

The impact extends beyond the immediate cost of energy. Rising oil prices have disrupted supply chains, with effects lasting longer than anticipated, according to de la Mora.

“The effects are lasting longer than we would have expected or would have wanted,” she said.

‘Friend to all, enemy to none’

The shock has also exposed differences in how African economies weather global disruption.

Uganda’s reliance on subsistence farming has helped cushion the impact, with domestic food production offering some protection from international market volatility, said Tanna.

But the country has not been insulated from financial pressures: its currency has lost 10 percent of its value against the US dollar, the minister said. The Ugandan shilling has steadily declined since mid-2026.

For Zimbabwe, the crisis has reinforced the importance of attracting investment while maintaining economic ties across geopolitical divides.

Amid the simmering trade war between the US and China, Harare considers itself a potential partner to investors from either side, Mutsvangwa said.

“We are a friend to all and an enemy to none,” she said.

“Money has no color … If we get an investor who comes into our country, follows the rules and regulations of the country, makes his money, and Zimbabwe develops, that’s what we want.”

The official pointed to Zimbabwe’s deposits of more than 60 critical minerals, including lithium and graphite, as well as its tourism potential.

Trade in an unequal system

But attracting foreign capital remains a challenge for developing economies, with investment concentrated in a relatively small number of countries.

That concentration is “very understandable”, de la Mora said, arguing that investors need confidence that their money will generate returns.

“Capital is risk averse. Capital needs to have certainty that its investment is going to yield returns and it’s going to come to fruition,” she said.

Governments can help build that confidence through transparent institutions, the rule of law and investment in infrastructure, including reliable electricity, energy supplies and digital connectivity, she added.

The question of whether the international trading system treats all countries equally prompted a more blunt assessment from Uganda’s trade minister.

“Of course not,” said Tanna. “The world cannot be equal … It’s unfair, but we believe that, within the space that we are in, we are in a good space.”

Uganda was well placed for the future, he argued, because it produces its own food – an advantage at a time when international supply chains are under pressure.

For both Uganda and the Republic of Congo, building resilient economies also means investing in younger generations.

The Republic of Congo’s Deputy Prime Minister for Coordination, Development Infrastructure and Land Planning, Jean-Jacques Bouya, said the country had aligned its national development plan, Vision 2063, with the African Union’s broader development ambitions.

Connectivity – through electricity, digital infrastructure and physical links – is central to that strategy, he told Al Jazeera.

The Republic of Congo also wants to expand local processing so that more value from its natural resources remains within the country.

“Africa can no longer be a reservoir of raw materials, and neither can Congo – a place where raw materials are extracted, taken elsewhere, processed and then sold back to us at a much higher price. We cannot go on like this,” Bouya said.

The Pentagon is reportedly aiming for U.S. military installations to be able to continue essential operations for at least 90 days, or roughly three months, without any external support. The installation of new small nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is key to this part of a larger plan called Fortress America. The main intent is to ensure America’s armed forces can remain functional and ready to protect the homeland in the face of any massive disruptions to power grids and other supply chains due to major conflicts or other crises. For years, TWZ has been sounding the alarm about the glaring vulnerabilities of America’s critical civilian energy infrastructure, including to drone swarms and cyberattacks, which could cripple key military capabilities right where they live.

Fox News was first to report on the 90-day base resiliency goal yesterday, citing documents it said it reviewed. This is part of the extremely wide-reaching Fortress America initiative the Pentagon announced last month, which covers everything from improved physical and cyber defenses at facilities to securing reliable access to critical defense industrial resources. The “Fortress” in Fortress America is technically an acronym that stands for Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy Supply, and Survivability.

“Under FORTRESS [sic], every major military installation in the continental United States would be expected to sustain essential operations independently for at least 90 days, including access to electricity, water, fuel and communications,” according to Fox.

Fox News’ story also includes comments about Fortress America from Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell, but it is unclear if he explicitly confirmed the 90-day target. TWZ has reached out for more information.

Parnell did put particular emphasis on the importance of reducing reliance on civilian power generation as part of the larger Fortress America plan. Previous reports have said that Parnell was key to formulating this initiative. He has also been discussed as a potential frontrunner to become the next Secretary of the Army.

“Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures,” Parnell told Fox. “We don’t want to rely on standard civilian municipal infrastructure to run our national defense. We just simply can’t. It’s an intolerable risk.”

It should be pointed out here that some U.S. military bases do have their own power plants now, but this is not something that is far from universal across the board.

Secretary Pete Hegseth made similar comments when he first unveiled the Fortress America initiative during a speech to service members at the U.S. Marine Corps’ base in Quantico, Virginia, in September.

“We are launching Fortress America, a national insurance policy for the American homeland,” Hegseth said at that time. “Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power, independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid by cyber attack, by sabotage, or by any means, our bases stay lit, our aircraft keep flying, our command centers never go dark.”

Fox News’ report says that “portable nuclear reactors,” as well as “large-scale battery storage and microgrids capable of disconnecting military installations from the civilian electrical grid,” are key elements of the plan to achieve this independence when it comes to generating electricity.

The U.S. military, in cooperation with the Department of Energy, has already been heavily investing in the development and installation of so-called microreactors at bases across the country. In August, the U.S. Army, in partnership with the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), notably cut new deals with five companies as part of a plan to install more than 20 microreactors at bases, starting in 2028. This effort, called the Janus program, is not limited to Army installations.

The video below offers an overview of one of several microreactor designs the U.S. military is currently pursuing.

Introducing Kaleidos, a Portable Microreactor from Radiant

Establishing new microgrids and other supporting energy infrastructure has also been an important focus for the U.S. military in recent years.

Details about how bases are expecting to maintain supplies of water and fuel, as well as communications connectivity, for 90 days or more are, as yet, still not entirely clear. All branches of the U.S. military have already been exploring new and novel options for ensuring the availability of water and fuel in future contingencies, though generally with more of an eye toward tactical operations. Relevant developments, including the possibility of using a process called carbon transformation to turn ambient air into fuel, could easily be applicable in a homeland defense scenario.

Fox News’ story also makes no mention of how sufficient food for personnel at these facilities would be sustained, but that would have to be part of the equation. In his remarks in September, Secretary Hegseth also made clear that making sure supply chains delivering munitions, medicine, and even blood would be unbroken in any future crisis was part of the Fortress America vision. As already mentioned, the initiative also extends much more broadly into matters of physical force protection, cyber defense, and the resilience of America’s defense industrial base.

“For decades, we built the most powerful military in the world,” Hegseth said at Quantico. Then we “regrettably made it dependent on foreign mines for rare earths, on overseas factories for microchips, on foreign supply chains for weapons, and on a civilian power grid to keep the lights on at our bases.”

“We’re bringing our critical supply chains home: the rare earths, the specialty metals, the semiconductors, the propellants, mined in America, refined in America, built in America by American workers,” he added at the time. “We are building long-overdue strategic reserves, deep enough to fight through disruption.”

More specific details about how the Pentagon now intends to pursue these aims have yet to be more fully defined.

“The Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment is directed to stand up the FORTRESS America Program Office within thirty (30) days,” according to a memo dated September 30, which was released after Hegseth’s September speech. “The Program Office shall report directly to the Under Secretary of War for Acquisition and Sustainment who will appoint a member of the Senior Executive Service to lead the day-to-day operations, assisted by a two-star Military Advisor, and shall begin as a lean core cell that scales to full operating capability within months – delivering results in weeks, not years”

There is also a question of how much of the Fortress America initiative will actually be new. As mentioned, just when it comes to increased energy resiliency, including through the installation of new microreactors, this is something that has already been top of mind for the U.S. military for years now. In 2022, the U.S. Army had a publicly stated goal for every one of its bases to have its own microgrid by 2035 as part of a larger plan to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. In 2024, the Department of the Air Force rolled out its own Installation Infrastructure Action Plan (I2AP) that included a target to have new microgrids in place at 16 bases by Fiscal Year 2030. In May, the U.S. Navy announced plans to demonstrate the ability of the supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford to act as a floating nuclear power plant as part of broader “energy resilience and mission assurance” plans.

The U.S. military has also already been heavily engaged in efforts to secure access to critical resources, especially rare Earth elements in light of China’s continued dominance in that market globally, and otherwise expand America’s domestic defense industrial base. Physical hardening of bases, especially against emerging drone threats, has been more of a heated debate, as TWZ has been following closely for some time now. However, even before Fortress America was unveiled last month, there had been signs that institutional attitudes were shifting.

“The [Fortress America] program aligns basing and infrastructure projects to ensure they are collectively advancing toward greater independence,” the aforementioned September 30 memo itself notes.

There are additional questions to be answered as to how the U.S. military expects to fund its expansive Fortress America ambitions and the schedules for implementing them. This will all be heavily influenced by how much the initiative leverages efforts that were already ongoing. At the same time, concerns about underinvestment in infrastructure modernization, in general, across America’s armed forces, and the worrisome cascading impacts thereof, are hardly new.

There are still key elements of the Fortress America initiative that have yet to be fully proven out. This is particularly visible when it comes to microreactors, which hold the promise of being simpler and safer to build and operate compared to traditional nuclear power plants. Despite significant progress with this technology just in recent years, environmental, proliferation, and other concerns continue to be raised. You can read more about all of this can read more about here.

On top of all this, it should be noted here that the U.S. military and the rest of the U.S. government already have mechanisms in place to ensure the key functions can continue, even in the midst of the gravest of crises, such as a limited nuclear attack. This is known as continuity of government planning, and includes a network of hardened and otherwise resilient facilities designed to support continued military operations and other activities in those ‘doomsday’ scenarios. But these facilities are few in number and are focus on strategic capabilities compared to what the Fortress America plan envisions.

At the same time, the dangers posed to civilian power grids in the United States, in particular, are only growing in scale and scope, both in the physical and cyber domains. Existing domestic U.S. energy infrastructure is aging and has been increasingly strained to meet routine day-to-day demands for decades now.

The potential for uncrewed aerial attacks on power plants and power lines has been real for years. The basic barrier to entry when it comes to weaponized drones, including converted commercial types, is also already low. Drone threats, broadly speaking, are only set to expand as swarming technology and artificial intelligence-driven capabilities continue to proliferate, as you can read more about this in this past TWZ feature. A well-informed enemy could concentrate a small number of resources on highly critical points in the grid to have vastly outsized effects, using drones or any other kinetic means.

The threat of various types of cyberattacks is also no longer limited to blockbuster movies and other popular media. This was made clear all the way back in 2021 with the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline, a key American oil pipeline system, and has only become more evident since then, including in the course of the war in Ukraine. U.S. authorities have run major exercises to help prepare for exactly these kinds of threats in the past. These are also capabilities where the barrier to entry has been steadily lowering over the years. Increasingly open access to powerful artificial intelligence agents with the ability to overwhelm networks and software to find critical vulnerabilities faster than humans can react is perhaps the most concerning layer of risk.

If a major conflict with a global competitor like China were to break out, physical and cyberattacks on energy infrastructure would be an extremely attractive avenue to hobble U.S. military forces, including airpower, before they can even leave their bases. The capacity to threaten grids in the United States, at least to certain degrees, has become worryingly within reach of smaller nation-states, as well as non-state actors and even lone wolf attackers, too. Firmly attributing cyberattacks to a nation-state, at all, can be challenging.

There is also a secondary component to all of this for responding to major natural disasters, which are another way U.S. grids can end up being knocked out for extended periods of time. These same circumstances could easily leave military bases, as well as their surrounding communities, without access to fresh water and other supplies. The U.S. military routinely plays a key role in responding to such crises.

“This is not a wait-and-see kind of a thing. We want to move out pretty quickly to get to that energy [resilience]. Those solutions can include investments in microgrids, battery backup storage,” a senior U.S. defense official said last week at a Defense Writers Group roundtable, according to a separate report from Air & Space Forces Magazine. “First and foremost, it’s doing the assessments of the installations to make sure we understand power generation and where we’re going to go with that, and then getting those deployed.”

The Pentagon is certainly making a new push now to make sure that, as Secretary Hegseth put it last month, “America cannot be starved out, shut down, or cut off.” However, there is clearly still work to be done to meet a goal of bases being able to go three months without outside help and the many other aims of the Fortress America plan.

Contact the author: joe@twz.com

The parent company of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders has filed a petition aimed at preventing emo-rock band My Chemical Romance from continuing to use dancers wearing outfits nearly identical to those worn by the iconic cheering squad since the 1970s.

Pro Silver Star filed a document Monday in the District Court of Collin County, Texas, asking for a temporary restraining order and injunction against the band and event promoter Live Nation “to stop them from infringing DCC’s signature cheerleading uniform in a manner that causes confusion, trades off of Silver Star’s decades of goodwill, and degrades the DCC brand.”

A temporary restraining order hearing is scheduled for Tuesday morning.

On Wednesday, My Chemical Romance played the first of five Hollywood Bowl shows scheduled through the end of the month. During the song “Teenagers,” background dancers performed in costumes that the filing states “copied the DCC Uniform’s signature elements: white boots, white shorts, a blue blouse tied above the midriff, and a white vest adorned with blue stars.”

“Defendants left no doubt about who the performers were meant to be,” the filing states. “As the costumed performers cheered across the stage, MCR frontman Gerard Way told the crowd, ‘Thank you, Dallas.’

“Then Defendants handed the performers rifles. The costumed performers armed themselves with semi-automatic rifles and joined a staged firefight, and were then depicted being shot and crawling off the stage.”

Attorneys for Pro Silver Star sent the band a cease-and-desist letter on Thursday, the filing states, and a copy of the petition for the restraining order and injunction on Friday. The causes of action listed in the petition include false designation, false association, false endorsement, trade dress infringement and federal trademark dilution by tarnishment.

“MCR’s performers nevertheless again wore the DCC Uniform” on Friday night during the band’s second Hollywood Bowl performance, the filing states. “Audience members at both shows and online commentators understandably believed that the performers were the real Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and said so in social media posts that continue to circulate.”

Online photos appear to show that the costumes were used again during Saturday night’s show. A representative for My Chemical Romance, which finishes it run at Hollywood Bowl this Friday and Saturday, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Silver Star is not litigious, and it takes no issue with MCR’s music, its artistic ambitions, or any message Defendants seek to convey,” the filing states. “Silver Star does not ask Defendants to change their setlist, narrative, politics, choreography, or even their decision to put gun-toting performers on stage. Silver Star asks only that those performers not wear the DCC Uniform while doing it. The universe of alternative costume designs is effectively unlimited.”

One of the most recognizable cheer squads in sports, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have appeared on countless calendars and posters and starred in their own movies and TV series, including Netflix’s “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” which is currently in its third season.

Last week, after years of fighting for pay increases, the cheerleaders announced that they have unionized, with the Cowboys recognizing the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleading Assn. as the collective bargaining representative for the cheer squad.

BREAKINGBREAKING,

Comey, who was fired during Trump’s first term, has been accused of unlawfully divulging national security information

James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), is facing a third set of criminal charges under the administration of United States President Donald Trump.

On Monday, sealed documents came to light showing that the Trump administration accused Comey of two counts related to the unlawful dissemination of “information related to national defence”.

Comey, a high-profile Trump critic, has not been indicted in the case. He has denied any wrongdoing.

But it is the third time the Trump administration has sought to level a criminal case against the former FBI director since the president returned to office in January 2025.

In a video on the online platform Substack, Comey once again denounced the Trump administration’s attempts to prosecute him as a campaign of political retribution.

“Well, now they’re back again. it would almost be funny if it weren’t such an appalling abuse of the Department of Justice, one that we cannot become numb to,” Comey said.

“Nothing’s changed with me. I’m still innocent, and I’m still not afraid of these people, and I still believe in the independent federal judiciary.”

He also noted that Trump is only midway through his second term, and he hinted that he expects more criminal charges to come.

“The next couple years are going to be hard for all of us,” Comey added. “It’s really important that we stand straight and keep the faith in America.”

More details to come.

No single Argentine capability shaped British planning during the 1982 South Atlantic conflict more than the pairing of the Dassault Super Étendard strike fighter and its deadly AM39 Exocet anti-ship missile. Against that threat, the British launched a series of special forces operations, all with the same objective: kill the Argentine pilots and destroy their aircraft and missiles before they could be used again. Together, the strike fighter and missile pairing had proven to be the biggest threat to the Royal Navy task force that had been sent to recapture the islands.

Five Super Étendard aircraft and five AM39 Exocet missiles had been delivered to Argentina before a French embargo took hold. The jets were flown by the Argentine Navy’s 2nd Naval Fighter and Attack Squadron out of Río Grande, on Tierra del Fuego, a region at South America’s southernmost tip, shared by Chile and Argentina. The Super Étendard/Exocet combination had already cost the British the destroyer HMS Sheffield on May 4 and the container ship Atlantic Conveyor on May 25.

The special forces operations were broken down into four phases — named PLUM DUFF, MIKADO, KETTLEDRUM, and IMPI — the last of which is the least well-documented, and the focus of this article.

PLUM DUFF was the insertion phase and was a reconnaissance mission. On May 16, an RAF Hercules airdropped eight special forces troops onto RFA Fort Austin to form a recce party. On the night of May 17/18, a Sea King HC4, ZA290, lifted off from the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible for a one-way flight to Tierra del Fuego, where the men were to observe Río Grande and report back. The patrol was set down far from the objective and never completed the reconnaissance; the helicopter crew flew on into Chile, where the aircraft was deliberately burnt to try and hide the evidence, while they tried to evade capture.

MIKADO was the planned attack phase, and it depended on that missing intelligence. Two Hercules were to air-land up to 70 men of B Squadron, 22 Special Air Service (SAS), directly on Río Grande — the air operation order of May 19 also named Río Gallegos, further up the Argentine coast, as an alternative. The men would destroy the Super Étendards and their Exocets on the ground, kill the pilots, and then withdraw overland into Chile. Commander Task Force 317, at Northwood, accepted from the outset that the mission could well cost both Hercules.

The aircrew did not refuse the task, but they were blunt about what it demanded: formation landing by two heavy transports on a possibly heavily defended, icy military runway, with a probable 20-knot tailwind, at night and on passive night-vision goggles in minimum light levels, with intelligence that was inadequate to support any air-land option at all. The RAF planning team recommended an airdrop as the better way to maintain a covert posture, and the Senior Air Staff Officer at Headquarters 38 Group warned the Air Commander to watch for overambitious schemes coming out of the SAS.

The U.K. Ministry of Defense formally cancelled MIKADO on June 4.

KETTLEDRUM was planned as the third of the set. It was aimed at Puerto Deseado, Santa Cruz Province of Argentina, and would have inserted a Special Boat Service party (SBS, the Royal Marines’ special forces unit) from the submarine HMS Onyx — a boat that will reappear before the end of this story.

None of the three was executed as planned.

Less well-known is that the cancellation of MIKADO produced a fourth project: Operation IMPI, named after a Zulu fighting force.

Cancelling MIKADO did not mean the wider operation was over. Also on June 4, the U.K. Ministry of Defense tasked CTF 317 to produce a new plan for special forces to destroy the combat effectiveness of the Super Étendards.

CTF 317’s staff went to work on what became IMPI. The planning document, Ops 1/3, is dated June 14 — the day of the Argentine surrender in the islands. In broad terms, the objective was to be attacked by special forces arriving both by air and by sea.

That much has been known, in fragments.

What has not been published until now is the fact that the operation had already been resourced.

At 2240Z on June 12, Maj. Gen. Jeremy Moore, commanding the land forces as CTG 317.1, signalled Rear Admiral Sandy Woodward’s battle group (CTG 317.8), with Admiral Sir John Fieldhouse at Northwood (CTF 317) and Commodore Michael Clapp’s amphibious group (CTG 317.0) as information addressees. The message called for B Squadron, 22 SAS, to be made available for operations as soon as possible: cover was needed against rapid developments of an unfavorable nature in West Falkland (Gran Malvina), and the theatre’s existing special forces assets were fully absorbed supporting the battle for Stanley — and IMPI. Operation IMPI, Moore noted in passing, was by then self-sufficient.

Examining two lines of routine signal traffic settles several things at once. Forty-eight hours before the surrender, IMPI was not a staff study but an operation that had been resourced, and that was enough to consume the theatre’s special forces and justify calling a fresh SAS squadron forward. It is also the only contemporary, operational-level reference to IMPI released so far: everything else comes from a narrative written years afterwards.

As that later narrative describes it, the concept behind IMPI was much leaner than MIKADO. Against two Hercules and 70 men, the air element of IMPI rested on a single RAF Hercules.

The aircraft was to fly from Ascension Island, refuel in flight, and then track east of the Falkland Islands and south of Cape Horn before making a low-level approach below Argentine radar cover for a night landing of special forces at the airfields codenamed San Jose and Arco Iris. Other special forces would have been inserted by sea. That air element, as will be seen, is the most questionable part of the entire file.

The routing is worth attention, because it rules out the intuitive picture of a direct run south from Ascension. Instead, the aircraft would have entered from the least-covered and least-expected direction, coming around the bottom of the continent rather than from the northeast.

The precise identities of San Jose and Arco Iris are not established in the declassified record.

The most likely reading is that they stand for Río Grande and Río Gallegos — the airfields at which the planned navigation ended, and the two named in MIKADO’s air operation order a month earlier. For a document circulating through restricted channels, encrypting the names of the two targets was an elementary precaution, although it should be noted that an operational order would more commonly have designated them simply as Target One and Target Two.

None of this rules out Chilean participation in other phases of the operation; if anything, it suggests it’s more likely. The narrative survives inside a folder classified Top Secret and restricted to the Chief of the Air Staff, whose declared subject is cooperation with Chile. That setting contrasts with the earlier stage of the planning, when mounting and recovering a special forces insertion from a Chilean airfield was considered and expressly discounted on political grounds — much as the use of an Antarctic strip was discounted after the New Zealand High Commission advised that the Antarctic winter precluded safe trans-polar flight.

The maritime half of IMPI can be traced in the records of those who were there.

Navigational support for the final phase was to come from the nuclear attack submarine HMS Conqueror. On June 9, 1982, Conqueror was off Bahía Camarones, working as an advanced picket and hunting targets of opportunity that ventured outside the 12-nautical-mile limit of Argentine territorial waters, with authority to sink any civilian vessel judged to be running to the Falklands/Malvinas; that same morning the sub had in fact entered Argentine territorial waters trying to locate the Argentine Navy’s Task Group 79.2.

That day, Conqueror received preparatory information on IMPI. The sub’s task was to come to periscope depth and act as a radio beacon, giving the Hercules a radio reference against which to refine a navigation that, low and at night, allowed no error. The resulting picture is an odd one: a nuclear submarine deployed on interdiction off the Patagonian coast, turned into a navigation aid for a transport aircraft.

The insertion itself fell to HMS Onyx, the Oberon class diesel-electric boat that had already taken part in Operation KETTLEDRUM and the only conventional submarine Britain deployed to the South Atlantic. On June 14, at 0815Z, lying in San Carlos Water, Onyx embarked a party of 10 men from B Squadron, 22 SAS and the SBS for the mission. The timing matches Moore’s signal of two days earlier almost exactly.

The plan called for the submarine to surface some two nautical miles offshore at night. The troops would close the beach in Gemini inflatables and destroy the objective — aircraft and missiles, if any were there — using anti-tank weapons and demolition charges.

What happened next illustrates the inertia of military machinery. The Argentine surrender in the islands came on that same June 14, hours after the party had gone aboard Onyx. Even so, preparations did not stop at once: on June 15 the embarked troops carried out practice landings from a Gemini. That does not mean IMPI was ever executed — it was not — but it does show that with the strategic outcome already settled, the machine was still rehearsing.

The British record closes the matter with administrative dryness: the surrender of the Argentine forces in the Falkland Islands and the cessation of hostile activity by Argentine aircraft resulted in the operation being cancelled.

The air part of the mission is another matter entirely and is where IMPI becomes more uncertain.

The only link between IMPI and an aircraft is a single paragraph in an RAF historical narrative. The folder that holds it was opened on April 18, 1986 — four years after the war — as an eyes-only briefing file for the Chief of the Air Staff, and the pages appear to be a working draft rather than a finished submission, carrying pencil amendments throughout.

Had a Hercules been earmarked, there is no doubt which unit would have provided it. The Special Forces Flight that runs through the whole chapter — five crews, commanded by a squadron leader, exercising regularly with SAS and SBS Sections — appears with its squadron number blanked out, yet the number surfaces a few paragraphs later, where two of its crews are described training on the probe-fitted Hercules C1P. The unit was No. 47 Squadron, RAF, home-based at Lyneham, and it would keep the special forces air support role for decades afterward.

The men who were at Ascension with that detachment, however, say they had nothing to do with it. Reliable sources with direct knowledge of the flight’s activity state that they never saw the codeword at the time, had never heard of the operation until this file surfaced, and consider it inconceivable that a special forces Hercules and crew could have been earmarked for a mission of this kind without the flight — a community of five crews that has stayed in touch ever since — learning of it at some point in the intervening four decades. By June 14, at most one aerial-refueling-qualified special forces crew was at Wideawake.

That skepticism is reinforced by the way the same narrative handles events those crews lived through. Its account of their own work-up does not survive contact with their logbooks.

For example, a practice infiltration into RAF Laarbruch in Germany that the narrative describes as successful had in fact been detected; the Hercules was notionally shot down about two miles out on the approach. The ramp toes (attachable extension plates located at the very end of the rear cargo ramp) it describes as droppable at 20 to 30 knots were never meant to be lowered with the aircraft moving, which would have been unsafe and risked the airframe. There are other anomalies, too.

A document that misstates the squadron’s own exercises is thin evidence on which to place that squadron over Tierra del Fuego.

What is not in question is what the Special Forces Flight could have done, had it been asked.

By mid-May the flight had two crews qualified in air-to-air refueling — one deployed to Ascension, the other held in the United Kingdom to train the others — flying Hercules C1s fitted with probes and, where the task required it, additional fuel tanks in the fuselage. It had rehearsed stream landings and rapid offloads, parachute insertion below radar cover to a pinpoint coastal feature, as well as flying on ANVIS goggles at 250 feet over sea and land. The goggles themselves were fitted to the crews’ helmets by RAE Farnborough specialists in a single day in mid-April. The reach was demonstrated on May 16, when the sortie that dropped the PLUM DUFF party stayed airborne for 24 hours and five minutes, with Victor tankers refueling some 1,800 miles from Ascension. Almost none of it was routine: nearly everything the force did during the conflict was improvised, at speed, in a matter of weeks.

What never had an answer — not for MIKADO, and not for whatever IMPI intended — was the other end of the problem. Putting men ashore deep inside Argentine territory was the solvable half. Getting an aircraft and its passengers out again after a direct action, from a strip in range of the Argentine Air Force, was not.

All of the above is reconstructed from lateral references: the RAF’s narrative in file AIR 20/13036 at the National Archives, unit records, submarine logs, operational signal traffic, and the accounts of participants.

The specific file — the one holding the complete plan with its annexes, the identification of the airfields and the execution sequence — remains closed. It is DEFE 71/980, titled Operation Corporate (Falklands Conflict): Operation IMPI, retained at the National Archives at Kew with no announced opening date. Until it is released, the air element of IMPI cannot be settled either way.

Forty-four years after the conflict, the last British special operation of the war is still, in essence, a document the British state is not prepared to show. That is not a trivial detail: the files touching on cooperation with Chile have consistently been the most reluctantly opened of all.

What remains is an operation of two halves. One of them is solid: a resourced plan, declared self-sufficient on June 12, with a nuclear submarine briefed to act as a beacon, 10 men of the SAS and the SBS embarked in a conventional submarine in San Carlos on the morning of the surrender, and rehearsals continuing the following day. The other half — a lone Hercules coming round Cape Horn to land on a codenamed strip — rests on one paragraph of a flawed staff narrative and is rejected by the only men who could have flown it.

Either way, the obsession is the same.

Between June 4 and June 14, 1982, while the final battle for Port Stanley/Puerto Argentino was being fought and the Argentine land campaign was collapsing, part of the British planning effort was still revolving around five French-built aircraft, their 10 aircrew, and their missiles. That the plan carries the date of the surrender itself, that it was still being rehearsed the following day, and that it remains classified today says a good deal about how far the British were prepared to go to destroy the Super Étendards and their Exocets.

Contact the editor: thomas@thewarzone.com

Mariano Sciaroni holds a master’s degree in Strategy and Geopolitics as well as a postgraduate diploma in Contemporary Military History, both earned at the Argentine Army’s Military Academy. Sciaroni has published five books and numerous articles on military and naval history. He is also an active member of the Argentine Institute of Military History and serves as a sub-lieutenant in the Argentine Army Reserve (Army Aviation Reserve Squadron). You can find out more about his books here.

Coronation Street fans are concerned that little Dorin, the son of Tyrone Dobbs, may have been hurt by someone else after he claimed he was punched by his friend Aled

Fans of Coronation Street fear Dorin is covering for whoever really hurt him.

The little boy had a bruise on his arm, leaving his dad Tyrone Dobbs and stepmother Fiz Dobbs concerned. Dorin claimed that fellow youngster Aled, the young nephew of Fiz, had punched him.

He claimed that Aled hurt him and that was what caused the bruise. Dorin’s grandfather Ross Wilkes was furious, and told his son Tyrone he needed to go round to Aled’s parents house and confront them.

Amid the drama between the family and Ross’ keenness for violence, one theory suggested Dorin might be covering for someone. Some fans questioned if Aled really hurt Dorin, or if someone else did in a sickening twist.

Given Ross’ misogynistic beliefs and comments, and him telling son Tyrone to “man up”, he’s been pushing for Tyrone and Dorin to take up boxing. Ross clearly believes his son is weak, so some fans wondered if Ross may have hurt Dorin to set up Aled, in order to get Tyrone to take action.

A fan said: “Did Ross hurt Dorin and tell him to say Aled done it? I wouldn’t put it past him, that man is a piece of work.” Another fan agreed: “If anyone’s gonna get Dorin harmed it’s Rancid Ross.”

A third fan said: “Not going to end well here with Ross and Tyrone in Corrie storyline come up.” A fourth added: “Ross is a conniving and nasty bully, wake up snd smell the coffee Tyrone.”

Another fan posted: “Tyrone is slowly becoming Ross, because of his manipulation.” A final commented read: “Ross is a nasty piece of work and isn’t a good influence for Tyrone.”

It comes as fans feared that Ross could turn violent against Tyrone. A fan posted: “He hates Tyrone’s son so trying to hurt him,” so could a random revenge plot be at play? The other theory read: “Ross going to beat up Tyrone?”

Fans also think a character, not currently on the show, will return to take Ross down, either Tyrone’s missing mother, Ross’ ex, Cassie Plummer [Claire Sweeney], or Cassie’s mother Evelyn [Dame Maureen Lipman ]. A fan posted: “Cassie will come back and save the day.”

Another fan posted: “Bring Evelyn back to get rid of him!!” as a third agreed: “I agree, Evelyn won’t stand for his nonsense.” So will someone see through Ross’ behaviour, and could it lead to him finally being put in his place?

Coronation Street airs weeknights at 8:30pm on ITV1 and ITV X. * Follow Mirror Celebs and TV on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .

Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva delivered a defiant message after being declared the winner of a run-off vote on Sunday.

He lost round one to his right-wing rival. But he made history by coming out on top in the second poll.

Opponent Flavio Bolsonaro has disputed the result and says he wants it annulled.

This will be Lula’s fourth nonconsecutive term in office. He’s promised a new approach to governing. But many challenges lie ahead. So, how will his government handle them?

Presenter: James Bays

Guests:

Thiago Vidal – Political risk specialist and the director of Political Analysis at Prospectiva Public Affairs

Robert Valencia – Latin American affairs analyst and a former journalist

Graziella Testa – Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Parana