News Desk

IN the last six months of her short life, there was one person Amy Jade Winehouse could turn to unreservedly.

Dale Davis, her band leader and confidante, provided her with a shoulder to cry on and a reason for her to break into the infectious laughter that came with her wicked sense of humour.

He was there to give Amy “a cuddle” during her final public outing, and three days later — on the night before she died aged 27 in 2011 — he spent 15 minutes on the phone to her, telling her she was “the best”.

“We were always chatting in those final months,” he says today to mark the 20th anniversary of Amy’s stellar Back To Black album.

“I remember her saying to me, ‘Dale, I’ve just realised that I’ve spent my whole adult life with you’.

“I was with her from when she was 19 to 27. The things I miss about her most are her big grin and that glint in her eyes.”

Dale joined Amy’s band in 2003 as bassist because the original choice was “too expensive” and, as he self-deprecatingly admits, he was “the uglier, cheaper” alternative.

A year later, he became her musical director and remains the keeper of her flame by leading The Amy Winehouse Band on its regular tours of the UK and abroad.

Though he was 17 years her senior, they bonded over a shared love of “hip-hop, soul and Nineties R&B”.

He adds: “We were also the only members of the band who drank Jack Daniel’s — so there was a lot of affinity there. If Amy loved you, no matter who it was, she loved you hard. She always had my back and I always had hers.”

Reaching the 20th anniversary of Back To Black, released on October 27, 2006, is a milestone Dale finds “surreal”.

Amy’s second album, the follow-up to her debut Frank, catapulted the vivacious, naturally talented singer on to the world stage and has sold more than 20million copies (and counting).

It contained raw, personal songs loaded with pathos and humour, such as Rehab, Me & Mr Jones, Tears Dry On Their Own and Love Is A Losing Game, all delivered in deliciously smoky, jazzy tones.

It charted in graphic detail Amy’s turbulent relationship with the love of her life, Blake Fielder-Civil, as well as her battles with drug and alcohol addiction.

“I believe she was the first star of this millennium, of the broadband generation,” maintains Dale.

“She was a most courageous performer and human being. Amy had a massive heart, but it left her open to the highs and the lows.”

To give an example of her inner conflict, Dale vividly recalls being with her on February 10, 2008, when she scooped five Grammy awards in the wake of Back To Black.

“Life was never dull and that night I saw an indication of what she was going through,” he says.

Amy could not attend the ceremony in Los Angeles because she’d been denied a visa amid drug and legal issues, but she was hooked up remotely to perform from London’s Riverside Studios.

“When she won her third Grammy, it was just me and her on stage,” continues Dale.

“Everyone else had walked off. I said, ‘Well done, Amy’. And she just said, ‘No, this is s*** because Blake’s not here’.

“While she was winning all those awards, her heart was going through the extreme pain of not being with him. There was no middle ground with Amy, and things like that are so destabilising to your mental health.”

When he considers the Back To Black songs, he says Wake Up Alone was Amy’s favourite, but he singles out a sad track, Love Is A Losing Game, and a funny one, Me & Mr Jones.

There’s an exquisite demo rendition of Love Is A Losing Game on the new, expanded anniversary editions, just Amy’s sublime, soulful voice and the strums of an acoustic guitar.

Dale says: “She was equally comfortable with an orchestra or on her own.

“The great thing about that version is that she delivers the most beautiful performance and then, at the end, she goes, ‘Is that all right?’. That really sums her up.

“Amy was so bright and so intelligent, but because she spoke so normally, it fooled people.”

Of Me & Mr Jones, with its old-school jazz vibe and jaw-dropping line, ‘What kind of f***ery is this?’, Dale says: “That’s my favourite song on the album. It’s right up my street. It’s got doo-wop. It’s got swing.

“I can imagine the mischievous grin as she’s thinking, ‘Right, I’m going to turn this into a funny old song’.

Also, you can’t play it on the radio. That’s the great thing about Amy — she knew no boundaries.”

Yet Dale senses that the star who burned bright for a fleeting moment “sold herself short in the end”.

“Amy was the most rebellious person I’ve ever come across,” he decides.

In 2004, the year Frank came out, Dale remembers “having breakfast with Nick (Shymansky, her first manager), who said, ‘We’ve got some issues with Amy’. I said, ‘Just leave her be, she’s a punk’.

“She had that spirit which could be destructive. However, the only harm she ever did was to herself.

“At the same time, she was so funny — her observational humour was ridiculous.

“I could always tell something funny was coming when I saw that glint in her eyes.

“Had she lived, Amy would have been like Barbra Streisand or Bette Midler — an all-round entertainer.

“I can imagine her having her own TV programme or being a great actress. She even talked about wanting to do some acting.”

When I caught up with Dale this week, he was preparing for last night’s Back To Black 20 show, directed by the album’s producers, Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, at The Roundhouse in Amy’s London stomping ground of Camden.

Among the singers due to step into her ballet flats at the gig were Baby Rose, Corinne Bailey Rae, FLO, Jessie Reyez, Jorja Smith and Lianne La Havas.

Mention of the venue prompts Dale to cast his mind back to Amy’s final public outing, which took place there on July 20, 2011 — three days before she left us too soon.

Dale was by her side for a showcase by her goddaughter, the singer Dionne Bromfield.

Amy bravely appeared on stage — “dancing and being a good sport” — to support Dionne, but declined to take the mic.

“She was wearing a vest and jacket and looking as well as when I first met her,” says Dale.

“After the show, Amy said, ‘Let’s hang out’. So I spent two hours with her and we chatted so much. Before we left, we went outside and she said, ‘Cuddle me because I’m cold’.

“I spent the last ten minutes holding her. When I look back on that moment, I’m thinking it wasn’t like her because she was never cold.”

Dale believes Amy’s “eating disorder got her in the end”, a subject of great sadness to him.

He says: “She was never ever big — curvy at most. But I know a comment was made one year and then suddenly all the weight came off. I felt sorry for her.

“It has taken me a long time to realise what eating disorders are.

“I wish I’d had more knowledge so I could have helped.

“Towards the end, her nervous system was getting more and more shocked with the lack of eating.

“And when Blake went to prison, she also stopped sleeping. That had a massive impact on her physical state.”

This brings us to Dale’s phone call with Amy, which started at 11.15pm on July 22, 2011, hours before she died.

He says: “Purely by chance, I had the longest conversation with her that night.

“Even at her funeral service, I ended up right next to the coffin because there was no room for me elsewhere. All those weird things draw me in to make sure that I protect her legacy.”

Dale describes their final conversation: “Amy said, ‘Dale, I’ve had a little bit to drink’. And I said, ‘Well, you don’t sound at all drunk’.

“Then she said, ‘I’ve been watching some old clips of me on YouTube. I CAN sing, can’t I?’. And I just said, ‘Of course you can. You’re the best’.

“I’m so glad that, on her last evening, she could turn round and say that because she was the least arrogant person about her abilities.”

In the wake of Amy’s tragic death, there have been blame games involving various parties — Blake, management, the music industry, the media, her parents.

Mention of this prompts Dale to launch a staunch defence of Amy’s divorced mum and dad, Janis and Mitch.

He says: “I feel so sorry for Janis because when Amy started to get famous, Janis had her own health problems.

“Amy always said her mother was so serene — and then she had to go through her struggles and watch the demise of her daughter.”

Turning to her London cabbie dad, who left the family home when Amy was about ten but became more involved in her life as her career took off, Dale says: “People point the finger at Mitch.

“Me and my dad don’t really get on, but we love each other and are there for each other.

“It was very difficult for someone like Mitch coming back into Amy’s life when she’d become a self-made multimillionaire. It must have been quite hard to try to direct someone when they’ve made it themselves.”

On a more general note, Dale adds: “The industry and everyone else can take steps to do everything they can — but there’s always going to be someone who slips through the net.”

Next up for him is a UK tour with his Amy Winehouse Band, a chance to hear some of that beautiful, rebellious spirit.

“They tried to make me go to rehab but I said no, no, no.”

• UK tour details at theamywinehouseband.com. The Back To Black 20 ­Concert is on BBC Two on Saturday, 9.35pm, and Radio 2, Monday, 7pm. Expanded editions of Back To Black, with unheard demos and a 2007 live show, are out on Friday.

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has been hit with the largest ever fine against it for its business practices.

A judge in New Mexico on Wednesday ordered the company to pay $25bn (£18.6bn) following a two week trial earlier this year that found it had spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data.

“The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well,” the judge said, adding they went to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”

The fine is the largest to date against Meta, which has either been fined or agreed to settle several other lawsuits this year, including an $18bn deal with California over child safety.

The lawsuit stemmed from the role of Meta, then known as Facebook, in what became known as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

That firm utilized data and information from millions of Facebook users as part of its work in political consulting, including on work related to the 2016 US Presidential election, which saw Donald Trump elected for the first time.

The US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 levied a $5bn fine against the company over its data privacy practices.

Lawyers for New Mexico sued the company over many statements Meta executives had made over the years that user data was never shared with or accessed by third parties without a user’s permission, when in reality it had been.

They claimed that the entire population of the state, roughly 2 million people, was impacted by Meta’s dishonesty regarding the way it controlled user data. A jury found that Meta had violated state laws more than 40 million times.

“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said Wednesday.

“Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”

The state lawyers sought up to $40bn in fines against Meta. Meta had argued anything beyond $3.4bn would be unconstitutional.

Judge Francis Mathew on Wednesday was direct in his decision to fine Meta an amount roughly equal to its profits each quarter.

He said Meta’s violations of law and misrepresentations to the public about how their Facebook data was used and shared were “willful” and spanned “more than 11 years,” stretching from 2010 to 2021.

Communications between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public,” Judge Mathew wrote in his order.

While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.

A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New Mexico has been one of Meta’s most notable adversaries in court. The state this year also fined Meta almost $1bn for misleading the public about the safety of its social media platforms for children.

The judge overseeing that lawsuit ultimately compared Meta to an industrial polluter of the air, with its form of pollution being “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children.”

California and several other states had collectively sued Meta over similar issues related to a lack of child safety features on Meta’s platforms and resulting harms to children.

Meta and the states reached a mutual settlement deal, which did not include a fine or any admission of wrongdoing, to end that case only a few days into what was expected to be a multi-week trial.

Los Angeles is still struggling to bring filming back to the region, though projects that receive a state tax credit are making up a growing share of local shoot days, according to a new report.

For the three-month period that ended Sept. 30, there were 4,171 shoot days in the greater L.A. area, down 4.8% compared with the same period last year, according to FilmLA Research, a program of FilmLA which tracks on-location production. That’s also down about 11.5% from the second quarter, and nearly 29% below the five-year average.

“Where the tax credit applies, it’s working to bring productions back to Los Angeles and put local crews to work,” FilmLA Chief Executive Denise Gutches said in a statement. “Still, overall production remains far below where Los Angeles needs it to be, and crews and businesses across the region are feeling it.”

The report counts only on-location filming. Productions shot on certified soundstages aren’t included.

Television shoot days totaled 1,400, a 2.8% slide from the third quarter of 2025 and a drop of nearly 53% compared with the five-year average. About 23% of the TV shoot days were for incentivized projects, up from about 9% a year earlier. Among them was the CBS drama “Tracker,” which relocated to L.A. from Vancouver for the show’s fourth season after receiving a state tax credit.

“California’s incentive is what made it possible to bring ‘Tracker’ here,” Elwood Reid, showrunner and executive producer of “Tracker,” said in a statement. “Los Angeles is the big leagues, and after more than a decade away, I’d forgotten what I was missing.”

Within television, comedy made the biggest gains, with 192 days of filming, up 143% from the 79 days in the third quarter of 2025. More than 60% of the comedy shoot days were for projects that received a production incentive, FilmLA said. The organization said this figure could be even higher, as many comedies shoot on soundstages, which are not included in this report. Promisingly, the third-quarter comedy numbers were a 16% improvement on the five-year average.

Other TV genres lost ground, including drama (494 days, down 9.4%), reality programming (630 days, down 2.9%) and pilots (9 days, down 52.6%).

Feature film production was a bright spot, with 533 shoot days, up 2.1% from a year earlier and about 20% from the second quarter. About 24% of that filming came from incentivized projects, up from about 22% a year earlier, including Netflix’s “13 Going on 30” reboot and Jonah Hill’s comedy “Cut Off” from Warner Bros., according to FilmLA. However, the third-quarter numbers are still a 19.3% decline when compared to the five-year average.

Production for commercials, which are not eligible for a state tax credit, continued to struggle, with 562 shoot days, down nearly 16% from the same time period in 2025, though it improved 3.5% from the second quarter.

FilmLA’s “other” category, which includes student productions, still photo shoots, documentaries and online content, totaled 1,676 shoot days, a 4.2% drop from the same period in 2025. Within that category, however, online content accounted for 556 days of filming, up 16.3% from last year.

Public sector workers and teachers joined student protesters, amid growing youth-led demonstrations across Europe.

Thousands of students and teachers ‌have rallied across cities in Greece, demanding more funding for ⁠education, including better facilities and smaller ⁠class sizes.

The demonstrations echo a wave of youth-led protests across Europe this month, including in France and Albania, where anger over rising costs and alleged corruption has led to clashes with police and major property damage.

Greek police said about 10,000 demonstrators, including school and university students, rallied peacefully in central Athens and the capital’s suburbs on Wednesday.

“From Greece to France, we want public, free education,” protesters chanted as they gathered outside Parliament, where students staged an overnight sit-in nearby before the rally.

Others joined the protests in Thessaloniki, Patras, Larissa and other cities ⁠across Greece in solidarity with growing demonstrations in France and elsewhere in Europe, where rallies demanding educational resources have morphed into angry demonstrations over soaring living costs.

Cost-of-living crisis

In Greece, the protests add pressure to ⁠Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his centre-right government as the country prepares to hold elections in mid-2027 amid a weakening economy.

Greece struggled with a serious debt crisis from 2009 to 2018, during which the government agreed to spending cuts in exchange for three European Union and International Monetary Fund bailouts worth about 290 billion euros ($326bn).

But the measures have impacted Greek workers, who are among the poorest in Europe and struggle with stagnant wages, high rents and rising energy costs.

The average monthly salary of 1,500 euros ($1,685) sits at 2009 levels, with many young Greeks having been priced out of housing in ⁠cities by skyrocketing rents.

“Surviving here is very difficult; the ⁠rent is really high, the houses are really small. Our parents can’t make ends meet to pay for our rent, the electricity, for our life here,” university student Georgia Foukidou, 21, who joined the protest in Athens, told the Reuters news agency.

The protests on Wednesday included strikes by primary and secondary school teachers protesting low pay and staff shortages, while substitute teachers demanded permanent positions and reduced class sizes. Public sector workers and other unions also joined the demonstrations.

Education Minister Sofia Zacharaki said prior to the protests that she was listening to student demands, noting that the government was spending more than 733 million euros ($823m) on new student residences and facilities upgrades.

Mitsotakis’ government has also pledged about one billion euros ($1.12bn) in state subsidies and other benefits to offset increased energy costs for households and businesses due to the Iran war and inflation.

Omar’s actions towards Rhianna in the Big Brother house drew over 7,000 Ofcom complaints, with Refuge joining Women’s Aid in releasing a statement.

The fallout from Monday evening’s Big Brother continues after fans were left disgusted with Omar’s behaviour towards Rhianna.

The pair, who have became an item in the famous ITV house, had an altercation and viewers were fuming with the way he spoke to her. He was filmed sternly telling her not to talk about him and saying: “Your feelings aren’t fact unfortunately.”

They appeared to have made up on Tuesday. Nonetheless, more than 7,000 people sent in their complaints to Ofcom and now the charity Refuge has also shared concerns about the show.

A statement for the charity, which supports sufferers of domestic abuse, said: “Refuge is deeply concerned by the behaviours witnessed during the current series of Big Brother. Media outlets have a responsibility to prioritise participant welfare and to ensure that harmful behaviour is identified and addressed appropriately.

To see more of the stories you love from The Mirror and to find them easily in Google then make us your preferred source. Free and easy-to-do, just click on the link here to find more from The Mirror at the top of your feed.

“Broadcasters must also actively choose not to amplify individuals displaying abusive behaviour. At a time when one in four women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime, it is vital that public platforms do not contribute to the normalisation of abusive attitudes or behaviours.

“Every survivor deserves to be heard, believed, and protected – both on television and in their everyday lives. Refuge stands in solidarity with all survivors of domestic abuse and calls for media companies to be held accountable for the safety and wellbeing of contestants.”

The charity concluded: “We call on all broadcasters, producers and media organisations to use their platforms responsibly, placing safety, dignity and accountability at the heart of their decision-making.”

ITV issued a statement of their own following the uneasy scenes. They said: “All Housemates receive Respect and Inclusion training and an extensive briefing from the Big Brother Senior team to prepare them for living in the House and to set out Big Brother’s expectations for appropriate behaviour and language.

“Housemates are monitored 24 hours a day and any instances of inappropriate behaviour are responded to appropriately. Welfare and safeguarding are prioritised throughout the production, with a dedicated welfare team available to support Housemates before, during and after their time in the House.”

Women’s Aid also said on Instagram: “We’re seeing coercive and controlling behaviours being given a platform in popular media like Big Brother. We’ve been contacted by many viewers who have expressed concern. Not only does Big Brother risk minimising survivors’ experiences, it also risks presenting abuse as a form of entertainment.

“Producers should understand their responsibility to keep contestants emotionally and physically safe. The women in these programmes are real people and need real support. We continue to urge television companies such as ITV to engage with experts like Women’s Aid to understand the nature of abuse and how they can do better to protect contestants.”

The issue arose as viewers watched on as an upset Rhianna looked to end the duo’s relationship. She questioned his maturity in conversation and was later called to the Diary Room.

She was asked by Big Brother if she was okay and she told them: “I’m not that good but I’ll be fine. Obviously me and Omar have not been good over the last few days and sometimes I don’t like the way he speaks to me.”

She added: “I wouldn’t let a boy speak to me like that outside of here so why am I letting him speak to me like that… If it keeps going in circles, we can just be friends.”

I’m A Celeb star Dean McCulloch, a regular guest on Big Brother companion shows, said: “Omar needs to be removed from the house with immediate effect.”

For confidential support, call the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Freephone Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or visit womensaid.co.uk

Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Threads.

French president meets Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh to discuss energy, security, and infrastructure as cost-of-living protests rage at home.

French President Emmanuel Macron visited Riyadh on a surprise “solidarity” visit, making him the first Western leader to touch down in Saudi Arabia since the Houthis intensified their attacks this month.

The unannounced trip comes as Saudi Arabia agreed to supply extra diesel to France “for as many months as necessary”, the Elysee Palace told the AFP news agency on Wednesday.

The visit aims to “demonstrate France’s solidarity with the kingdom in the face of the attacks carried out by the Houthis against its territory, and to continue efforts undertaken on securing and diversifying hydrocarbon supplies”, the French presidency said earlier.

The diplomatic push follows days of rioting in France, fuelled by the cost of living, especially as the US-Iran war and Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz have kept energy prices high.

Faced with criticism of his Gulf tour at home, Macron told reporters he was just “doing his job” in a bid to “ease tensions” over petrol prices, one of the causes of social unrest in France.

“There must be no sign of febrility,” he said. “I am fulfilling my role. I am at my post.”

Macron met Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Saudi capital, and the two agreed to consult on expanding security cooperation and on infrastructure projects to bypass the blockaded strait, the palace said.

It did not say how much extra diesel Saudi Arabia would supply.

Macron’s Gulf tour

The deal follows pledges secured earlier in Macron’s Gulf tour. The presidency said on Tuesday that the United Arab Emirates had committed to about 100,000 tonnes a month, with a further 100,000 tonnes monthly to be secured in Bahrain.

Together with Saudi deliveries, France now has commitments for 295,000 tonnes a month, just more than 10 percent of its consumption, it said.

Meanwhile, France is also sending military assets to Saudi Arabia, under an earlier agreement, to help protect the Red Sea port of Yanbu, which has come under attack from the Iran-backed Houthis, an armed group also known as Ansar Allah (Arabic for Supporters of God).

The United Kingdom also announced on Tuesday that it would deploy fighter jets to help shield the kingdom. Both countries say their support is purely defensive.

Analysts say the moves protect Saudi oil exports that matter to Europe’s energy markets and bolster the Gulf alliance as the US shows reluctance to offer direct military help. They also carry risks, analysts say, potentially drawing the two European states into the protracted Saudi-Houthi conflict.

SYDNEY Sweeney has stunned in a sexy ad for her Syrn holiday line, wearing sultry lingerie and wrapping her boobs in a bow.

The actress is gearing up for the holiday season with several fresh pieces from her lingerie brand, and she modeled them all in her new campaign.

Sydney, 29, shared the video ad on Wednesday via Instagram, which captured the Euphoria star curled up on a cozy chair, dressed in a loose-fitting white sweater, no pants, and matching knee-high socks.

She wore her blonde hair in loose waves as she tucked a bright red napkin into her sweater neckline while digging into a giant bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup.

The model then pointed a remote at a retro TV box screen as she settled into the chair – a recreation of an iconic scene from the Christmas classic, Home Alone – to watch footage of herself dressed in various holiday-themed outfits inspired by other holiday films.

It started with a clip of Sydney seemingly playing Cindy Lou Who from Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, as she mimicked the character’s wild, sky-high, braided hairstyle.

Sydney struggled to carry a stack of wrapped presents in front of a brightly decorated Christmas tree, donning a plunging ensemble and a furry pink coverup draped over her shoulders.

She also sported a red-and-white-checkered pajama set while screwing in light bulbs for her outside decorations.

The clip then transitions to Sydney rocking a darker look: sultry black lingerie, leather gloves, pin-straight hair, and heavy makeup, resembling Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

The footage continued with Sydney in other provocative attire, including a tight red lingerie set that looked like she’d wrapped herself in a bow, paired with a white veil.

Sydney also modeled a baby blue lace lingerie set while waving a massive white feathered fan, and another all-white set while lounging on a bed.

“Welcome to the @syrn holiday shop officially open on october 27th,” The Housemaid star wrote in her caption.

This is the first holiday line for Syrn, which Sydney launched in January.

Sydney regularly models in the brand’s ad campaigns, showcasing her curvy figure in the revealing pieces.

The Handmaid’s Tale star sparked controversy last month when she posed completely naked in an ad for the sports betting app, Novig.

Photos showed Sydney wearing no clothes and concealing her breasts and private parts with various sports equipment.

The pics ignited massive discourse online, especially from female athletes, who accused Sydney of sexualizing women’s sports.

However, Sydney was unbothered by the backlash and is focused on leveling up in her career, a source told The U.S. Sun exclusively.

“Sydney’s goal is to become a billionaire mogul and ‘boss lady’ as soon as possible.

“She wants to do things entirely on her own terms, confident that her unique talent and beauty give her an edge, and she doesn’t care if people dislike her,” the insider said.

“Sydney is on the fast track to becoming an icon and an elite businesswoman, like Madonna, who she sees as the benchmark for combining sex appeal with massive entrepreneurial success.”

Israeli far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir boasted Tuesday of the destruction of the Gaza Strip and mocked Palestinian residents in a campaign video released ahead of parliamentary elections, Anadolu reports.

Ben-Gvir, leader of the far-right Jewish Power party, posted the AI-generated clip on US social media platform X, presenting a vision of Gaza in 2030 based on the widespread destruction inflicted by his government.

The video shows the enclave as a ghost town, with its schools, infrastructure and port destroyed.

A scene showing a donkey is followed by the party’s message: “You’d have to be a donkey to stay in Gaza,” mocking Palestinians who remain.

Ben-Gvir has repeatedly demanded occupying Gaza, displacing its Palestinian population and establishing Israeli settlements on the territory.

READ: Israel’s Ben-Gvir uses fines against mosques in election campaigning

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, launched with US support in October 2023, has killed more than 74,000 victims and injured over 175,000, while destroying 90% of civilian infrastructure.

Despite a ceasefire that has been in effect since Oct. 10, 2025, Israel has continued shelling, shooting and demolishing Palestinian structures, further expanding the destruction.

The campaign video comes after Arab parties accused Ben-Gvir on Sunday of exploiting his measures and violations against Palestinians to rally support and intimidate Arab voters.

Israel is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections on Oct. 27, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc competing against opposition parties.

A Channel 12 poll published Monday projected 55 seats for opposition parties and 51 for Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, leaving both blocs short of the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset.

READ: Netanyahu says Ben-Gvir will hold prominent ministerial position in next government

Big Brother fans have been unimpressed with one star who just days ago was favourite to win

The Big Brother star was in the running to win the show.

ITV Big Brother fans have admitted that one star has “fumbled” their potential win in a matter of minutes. Tensions continue to run high in the iconic house as the housemates live in this week’s House of Time.

Just last night (October 20), a game changing nominations twist saw four housemates up for eviction. This week will see Catrin, Twinks, Harry and Sam facing the public vote as viewers are being asked to choose who they wish to evict.

It comes after the housemates each took a turn in the Time Zone where they nominated as usual. But with four names in the zone, each housemate afterwards had the opportunity to swap two of those names – with the last person ultimately having the final say.

But amongst the drama, it was Yasmin who came under fire with fans after her nomination choices. As a result, she is now no longer favourite to win, according to latest betting odds.

According to Coral’s John Hill, despite being up for eviction, Twinks is actually the new favourite to win, with odds sitting at 5/4. Yasmin has drifted from 4/5 odds to now 7/4.

John Hill said: “Twinks is the safest of the four housemates, according to our odds. She is also the new favourite to win the show, with Yasmin’s odds drifting over the last couple of days.”

Ensure our latest TV stories always appear at the top of your Google Search by making us a Preferred Source. Click here to activate or add us as Preferred Source in your Google search settings.

Viewers have shared their disappointment with the star as one person wrote on X: “Yasmin is fumbling this win those cheers got to her head.” Another said: “Yasmin literally took away the win in one episode last night”, as a third fumed that the star had gone “from the people’s princess”, adding: “That is crazy.”

A fourth added: “Even since Yasmin heard the cheers on Friday night she now thinks she is untouchable. Get rid of her.” A fifth raged: “Yasmin really plummeted her own stock, how embarrassing.”

However, one person defended: “Yasmin has one bad episode and people are acting like she murdered someone oh ok.”

Another said: “Yasmin does one thing you deem as wrong and you all turn on her and insult everything about her.”

Of course, betting odds are not guaranteed to happen, the power is still in the public’s hand as they have the power of the vote. But with hours to go until the next live eviction on Friday, one star has been dealt a brutal blow.

Currently, Sam is favourite to go with odds sitting at 4/5 compared to Frankie’s odds at 3/1. Twinks’ odds sit at 8/1. Coral’s John Hill added: “This is the toughest eviction to call so far in the series. Sam is the favourite to go, but Frankie and Catrin are both in danger, especially if Big Brother decides to throw in a double eviction.”

Big Brother continues tonight at 9pm on ITV2 and ITVX

US president has continued to support data centres in advance of midterms, despite growing opposition from Republicans.

United States President Donald Trump has said AI data centres should pay “dividends” to communities, in a shift before the midterm elections.

“If companies want to make their Data Centers popular, pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend’” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday.

The president’s comments come after he doubled down on his support for data centres, a stance seen as one of several political liabilities for Republicans in the run-up to the midterm election, as Trump’s approval rating has hit record lows.

Polls show dismal support for such centres amid concerns about the sprawling complexes’ water and energy use.

In the post, Trump advised companies that they could make the centres popular if they “pay the community, and/or individuals within the community, a ‘dividend’.”

“I have watched the process closely, and Data Centers that were highly unpopular in a certain area, have become extremely popular when a financial deal is struck,” he said. “MAKE DEALS, and get them built!!!”

Several top Republican candidates have opposed data centres before the midterm polls, with the issue emerging as an area of rare bipartisan consensus in advance of the November 3 vote.

Republican Senate candidates, including Ken Paxton in Texas, Mike Rogers in Michigan and John Husted in Ohio, have all called for more restrictions and oversight on the centres, in a reversal of earlier positions.

The issue featured prominently in a recent debate in Iowa, where Republican Senate Candidate Ashley Hinson said the local level should decide whether to build AI data centres.

Despite the shifting sentiment, Trump in late August issued an impassioned defence of data centres, decrying what he called “the anti-Data Center movement” as a gift to China.

“The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote at the time.

“If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”

Trump has taken several measures to accelerate data centre development, including issuing an executive order last year that called for measures to fast-track permitting and environmental review. The order promised to use federal land for the “expeditious and orderly development of data centers”.

Trump has also backed a voluntary pledge by AI companies to cover the full cost of the electricity data centres use, but has avoided supporting legally binding federal restrictions.

A Gallup poll conducted in March suggested that 71 percent of Americans opposed establishing AI data centres in their areas.

An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday identified a similar rate of disapproval, with 72 percent of respondents saying that they opposed building new data centres in their communities.

A plan for a new military weapons “super range” test center in Montana announced by President Donald Trump Wednesday night seeks to address a growing concern about the need for more such facilities. As the U.S. races to develop autonomous capabilities, hypersonic munitions, laser and directed energy weapons and improved electronic warfare systems, a limiting factor has been the lack of suitable locations for testing.

While the U.S. military has a wide array of installations where it can test these systems, it’s still not enough. In addition to the massive increase in weapons development and the need for more realistic training, the changing nature of war is outstripping the capacity of existing facilities as future kill webs will extend thousands of miles, not hundreds. There are only so many places with enough space to try out these systems even to a limited degree without butting up against statutes and regulations while also avoiding interference with civilian air traffic and communications, all in an environment remote enough to avoid prying eyes. The need for more and bigger testing grounds is an issue TWZ has long raised.

In addition to the backdrop of the increase in a wide range of weapons testing, much of it aimed at China, Trump’s super range announcement was delivered as the Pentagon and services are specifically creating commands dedicated to autonomous weapons. On Tuesday, during the annual Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, D.C., attended by TWZ, the acting Army Secretary unveiled one such new command, which we will discuss in greater detail later in this story.

“I’m pleased to inform ​you and announce that right here in Montana, the Department of War is ⁠going ⁠to establish a new ⁠”super range” ​for testing advanced weapons and technologies, technologies including potential autonomous weapons, space, and electronic ​warfare technology, supersonics and ⁠hypersonics,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Kalispell. “Montana will help ensure the American military always reigns supreme.”

Trump provided no additional details about where this new “super range” will be located, when it will come online, exactly which systems will be tested or how much it will cost.

Thursday morning, the office of U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy noted that he has been “a strong advocate for building an advanced training range in Montana, securing $10 million for a feasibility study in the FY27 National Defense Authorization Act that passed the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this year.”

“The 21st-century battlefield is being redefined by new weapons and evolving technical frontiers that require a novel approach to how America will resource its warfighting capabilities,” the senator said in a statement. “Contested spectrum, electronic warfare, hypersonics, space capabilities and enhanced targeting require a new class of testing and evaluation facilities for our military. The U.S. faces a clear choice: adapt and expand our development infrastructure to the realities of modern warfare, or risk falling behind adversaries who iterate faster.”

The Montana Republican highlighted the value of his state’s huge swaths of undeveloped land for this effort.

“By combining our state’s vast landscapes, innovative spirit, and proud tradition of military service, we are the Last Best Place to ensure America’s fighting men and women have the technological edge they need to dominate the battlefield and win the wars of tomorrow,” he explained.

Like Trump, Sheehy offered no specifics about exactly where in Montana the “super range” will be located, when it will come online or how much it will cost. We have reached out to the White House, Sheehy and the Pentagon for more details. The Pentagon deferred us to the White House, which referred us back to the Pentagon. We also contacted the office of U.S. Sen. Steve Daines and Gov. Greg Gianforte.

There are already a number of facilities in Montana conducting the kind of military weapons testing described by Trump. One that closely matches what would be needed from such a location is the Montana Spaceport & Test Range and the affiliated Limestone Hills Innovation & Test Campus. A public-private aerospace and defense initiative, it already conducts testing for next-generation space vehicles, hypersonic, supersonic and ballistic weapons, drones and counter-drone systems and electronic warfare equipment.

Another potential site could be an expansion of the Big Sky Autonomous Systems Range (BSASR). Located near Bozeman, it is “the Lobo Institute’s primary training and testing facility for U.S. and allied military, federal, and partner organizations.” Operated under the Lobo Tactical division, BSASR is “a 6,000-acre, fully fenced complex purpose-built for advanced unmanned aerial systems operations, full-spectrum live fire, mounted and dismounted mobility, and full mission profile exercises grounded in the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures from active conflict zones,” according to the Lobo Institute. “The range pairs realistic terrain with the regulatory, infrastructure, and instructor depth required to train against the operational realities of today’s and tomorrow’s battlefields — and it does so in a remote, controlled environment where units can push hard while keeping risk to acceptable levels.”

We have reached out to both facilities for more details.

The new super range could also leverage existing range space on the ground and in the air. There is also the large Hays Military Operations Area (MOA) which could be expanded for this new test range effort. MOAs are blocks of airspace designated for military training. Malmstrom Air Force Base and its ICBM fields could also potentially be utilized. Overall, it’s possible a number of existing range areas could be interconnected, both digitally and via airspace corridors, to create a larger complex, as well.

The Pentagon has long realized the need to increase the areas where it can test out these systems, especially to evaluate them under combat-like conditions.

“The current open-air range space should be increased and better integrated to support system-of-systems assessments of air, land, and sea combat systems with capability for emerging long-range fires, hypersonic missiles, EMS warfare, unmanned systems, nuclear effects, and directed energy (DE) weapons,” the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) stated in a report last year. “The DoW needs to invest in and coordinate expanding and connecting the airspace available to the open-air ranges enabling testing and training of advanced capabilities.”

The current facilities are inadequate, DOT&E further explained.

“Threat systems and our own capabilities far exceed the current available air space on the open-air ranges,” according to the report. “The ranges need support and assistance to coordinate additional airspace and corridors with the FAA and industry. Expanding and connecting range air space is necessary to facilitate testing and training critical long-range capabilities that our warfighters need and to replicate the threats they will face.”

In addition, the report states that “to test missiles with longer ranges and gather data to support simulation validation, including for hypersonic missiles, the DoW should invest in long-range, overland missile flight test corridors with land-based impact areas and mobile hypersonic-specific range instrumentation to produce the required lethality data against threat-representative targets for terminal area assessments.”

The Defense Department had largely been conducting the testing of hypersonic weapons — those that can reach speeds of Mach 5 and above — at sea given the need for the long ranges for evaluation. Still, even that was limited. The Pentagon restricted the number and location of hypersonic tests it carried out each year because of the aging fleet of ships it used as its primary data collection assets to track the capabilities while in flight.

Retired Block 20 and Block 30 RQ-4 Global Hawks belonging to the U.S. Air Force, reconfigured as RangeHawks under the SkyRange hypersonic weapon testing infrastructure program, would help address some of those restrictions. You can read more about that in our story here.

However, if testing moves to an overland phase, the need for expanded air corridors could grow increasingly critical. Last year, the Pentagon’s Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) identified three candidate locations to perform those tests, one over Alaska, another at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and a third in Australia, Defense News reported at the time.

Hypersonic testing in Australia is already underway. Earlier this month, we broke the news that the U.S. Air Force’s scramjet-powered Hypersonic Attack Cruise Missile (HACM) had finally reached the flight test phase, with at least one “release” having been carried out so far over a range in Australia.

The military is also looking to expand where it can test electronic warfare systems to help ease the bottleneck at White Sands and a few other locations. Such testing is limited due to U.S. restrictions on jamming, which can interfere with civilian systems.

Before he resigned after tensions with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, former Army Secretary Dan Driscoll in June said the service had plans to set up at least two domestic ranges that mimic realistic conditions on Ukraine’s battlefields, where the electromagnetic spectrum is a highly contested domain. This spectrum would be even more heavily disputed in a fight with China.

“You can have a kind of electronic warfare and all of the contested environment created, and you can have drone manufacturers and counter-drone tool-builders engaging together,” Driscoll told reporters. “Then, we also want soldiers to be able to go there, so that they can strengthen their skills and work hand-in-hand with developers.”

Driscoll said there are already places in the U.S. where the Army can test safely, and separately, the service is looking at a global range outside the U.S. to do “much more aggressive testing,” including with hypersonics. When asked, Driscoll declined to say where these ranges would be until planning is farther along. 

“At least some of the current counter-drone training for soldiers, like one CBS News saw in April, does not include electronic jamming — in part because the U.S. restricts jamming domestically,” CBS reported.

In August, the Army opened premier test ranges for the use of private industry to conduct internal research and development. Additionally, the service co-hosted a Denied, Disrupted, Intermittent and Limited testing environment, at Camp Grayling in September, and there are three more scheduled for Fiscal Year 2027, an Army spokesperson told us.

Trump’s news about the “super range” was delivered as the Pentagon and the services are working to ramp up the development and production of a range of autonomous systems.

Last month, as we noted earlier in this story, the Pentagon announced plans for a new functional combatant command, very broadly akin to U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) or U.S. Space Command (SPACECOM), but for operational activities involving autonomous and robotic capabilities. In addition, Hegseth also announced new initiatives to help further accelerate the fielding of uncrewed systems in the air, at sea, and on land, as well as to explore future warfighting challenges. All of this builds on previous and long-overdue efforts to prioritize the fielding of various tiers of drones, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, across domains, but there are questions about how these new efforts will translate into tangible developments.

On Tuesday, acting Army Secretary Adam Telle announced the creation of the service’s Futures and Autonomous Systems Command (FASCOM).

“This is our way to make sure that we take all of the great work that’s been happening with the resources that we have today, and we centralize it,” Telle said. “We’re pushing autonomy down into our units, but when it comes to having and making sure that the left hand in the Army knows what the right hand of the Army is doing, this happens at FASCOM; then FASCOM feeds up into AutoWarCom.”

Telle added that FASCOM “will work with the other services to create scale for purchasing power and share best practices on autonomy.”

“It is too soon to speculate about anything related to FASCOM,” the Army told us. “Specifics on structure, command, mission, etc. will be announced at a future dates [and] will require the kind of additional testing facilities that a new Montana super range could provide.”

The use of highly cooperative autonomous weapons platforms that can swarm and operate collectively over large areas will also tax existing ranges beyond their capacity.

Details about the new range proposed by Trump are scant, and it remains to be seen whether it will live up to the hype or even be built. As we noted earlier in this piece, a feasibility study, which hasn’t even been funded yet, is still needed before major work can begin. However, if and when it does come online, a new Montana test range will be welcomed by a military in need of additional places to test out its latest capabilities.

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

Eric Dangerfield is surrounded by senior citizens.

After a packed set at Riot Fest the previous weekend, the 25-year-old lead singer and rhythm guitarist of the Paradox welcomed the quiet of his boomer-dominated neighborhood.

“I’m a suburban dude,” he said, smiling from his home in metro Atlanta, his cropped two-toned dreads bobbing as he spoke.

The Paradox spent much of the summer on the festival circuit, powering through a growing discography of pop-punk gems, so Dangerfield and the three other band members are taking a brief breather before their Proceed With Caution Tour starts this month — their first as headliners.

It’s peaceful. That is, “Except when the boys come over,” he adds.

On a late morning in September, the boys are here and accounted for: patching in to a video call, minutes apart, from their homes, also in suburban ATL. Dangerfield, born with the perfect stage name, has ideas that flow faster than he can seem to get them out. Then there’s Donald Bryant on bass. Yin to Dangerfield’s yang, with a quiet, commanding presence.

Percy “PC3” Crews has been playing drums since he was 3, and his vicious skills on the drum kit contrast with a cheery, relaxed demeanor. Finally, there’s Christopher Bernard, a.k.a. Xelan — the lead guitarist and Dangerfield’s vocal complement.

Dangerfield likens the four to musical superheroes from a Marvel series. But not so much the “Earth’s mightiest heroes” variety.

On their first headlining tour, the band brings its new EP, “Proceed With Caution,” to Los Angeles while claiming space in a historically white genre and weaving social commentary into its pop-punk sound.

(Shorefire Media)

“I’m like Mister Fantastic and Donald’s my Invisible Woman. Xelan’s the Thing, and Percy is John Storm,” he says of his partners in musical mischief. “If I’m ugly, just say that,” quips Xelan, the band’s oldest member at 30. “Yeah. Because you’re strong, bro,” reassures Eric.

By this time, the interview has devolved into fun-loving chaos.

They finish each other’s sentences and switch up their Google Meet backgrounds, cracking up as an awkward graduation portrait pops up. At some point, Bernard decides to give a bedroom tour, showing off his collection of Blink-182 and Fall Out Boy posters.

A photo of him with Travis Barker hangs next to a framed Billboard plaque on a nightstand. Barker was featured on the Paradox’s 2025 single “Bender” and performed with the group at Vans Warped Tour the same year.

The Billboard plaque commemorates the band’s song “Get the Message” from its debut EP, “NSFW,” reaching No. 1 on the Alternative Airplay chart in January — a great achievement for any rock artist — but the Paradox also happens to be the first all-Black band to do so.

The success, although rapid, didn’t come from nowhere. All of the members have been working toward music in some form for years.

Dangerfield had a deal with a small label where he was originally making a go of it as a pop and R&B soloist. He also put out his music online. Looking for something different, he remembered his passing interest in pop-punk from his days growing up in Palm Coast, Fla. It was the “Fat Lip” video by Sum 41 that sealed the deal.

Yearning to be in a band, he started working with Bernard, whom he met online and shared his passion for the genre. Bryant was Dangerfield’s childhood friend from Palm Coast who had also moved to Atlanta, while Crews had been a fixture on the local music scene. And the name? It came from Dangerfield’s love of quantum physics.

Shortly after the group officially formed in June 2024, Dangerfield’s then-girlfriend — now wife and band “momager” Lexi Dangerfield — opened Instagram and TikTok accounts filming and posting their homey videos. The band’s song “Kaitlyn” and some covers blew up. The artists’ perspective, filtered through a Gen Z lens, struck a multigenerational nerve.

Attention came so quickly that Dangerfield felt the need to defend against online detractors who were convinced the group was an industry plant.

From there, the fairy-tale plot thickened. Billie Joe Armstrong followed Dangerfield on Instagram, and the two struck up a friendship that led to the Paradox opening for Green Day on the Atlanta stop of its Saviors Tour. But this was, of course, after Jack White’s people called — who the group ended up opening for at Basement East in Nashville.

Things haven’t slowed down in the two years since, with opportunities coming fast and furious. In the spring of last year, the band signed a deal with Hundred Days Records, a subsidiary of Virgin Music Group, and teamed up with producers Mike Pepe and Robopop to work on “NSFW.”

“Bender,” the group’s collaboration with Barker, and “Do Me Like That” are featured on Madden NFL 27 and NBA 2K26 video game soundtracks. Last month, the musicians streamed a concert from Twitch superstar Kai Cenat’s house. And now, instead of opening for their idols, they are inviting them up on stage as guests. For their second Warped Tour in Long Beach, that meant Deryck Whibley of Sum 41 and Logan Henderson from Big Time Rush.

The embrace from established musicians has definitely helped the band navigate its rise. In a moment of doubt, Crews said Good Charlotte’s Joel Madden, in particular, came through with sage advice.

“He asked me a question: ‘How does it feel being where we were?’ And I was like, ‘It feels like a dream.’ It felt like I was gonna wake up on my desk sophomore year with drool on my f— table. And I was telling him that, and he was like, ‘You know, it may feel that way, but it is real … It’s real, and it’s you … you belong in these rooms.’”

The irony of being embraced in a mostly white subgenre of punk rock while Black American culture formed its foundation is not lost on the group. Had the band come about during one of Dangerfield’s favorite eras of music, the ’50s and ’60s — there would likely have been rooms in which they weren’t welcomed.

While the band members understand the impact their visibility has — especially for non-white kids who grew up in the suburbs as they did: skating, riding BMX, building Legos, watching anime, dreaming of a life onstage — it does require some balance. “They’re not asking Taking Back Sunday this stuff,” Dangerfield acknowledged when asked if they might tire of the representation mantle. “Or Blink, but … We are a minority in this space and in this country, and I think that you know the stuff that comes with being Black should definitely be talked about. I think those conversations are important.”

He said as much in August, when the group made its Tiny Desk debut in celebration of NPR’s Black Music Month. “Now, like they said, we made history,” he said, leaning into the mic after the first song. “And the Paradox is in the business of bringing rock ’n’ roll back to the originators.”

A glance at the comment section under the video makes clear the group’s authenticity resonates with those who haven’t felt seen or heard in certain spaces.

“I’m a black girl from the suburbs of Metro ATL,” wrote @rainjojo. “And I’m glad to see representation of people who are like me indulging in punk rock. I got into this genre from childhood shows like “16,” “Stoked”, and other early 2000 to 2010 shows, and I remember being bullied for being whitewashed. Please keep making more music like this.”

The tour is named after “Proceed With Caution,” the band’s sophomore EP released on Oct. 2. Across six tracks, it continues in the same vein as “NSFW,” with sharp melodies and a dash of humor thrown in. But on “That’s Not Fair,” the group wades deeper into social commentary. It was also the most difficult to record, cut raw with no click track.

“We were just trying to think of things that were not fair, [from] small and trivial like losing your keys to, I don’t know, using it as a bridge to talk about larger issues and things like that,” Dangerfield says of the song. “I think a big thing for me personally, it’s not political … is kind of the fact that everything is getting so expensive. The price of everything is rising so rapidly, and the salaries that people are being paid are not really growing to match that.”

The Paradox perform at The Moroccan Lounge on Thursday, Oct. 22.

(Hunter Lyon)

“And it’s like, we got very lucky, but the thing is, most people don’t,” he continued. “If you’re gonna sacrifice all your time, slaving away working for big corporations and stuff like that, you should at least be able to, you know, buy a candy bar or something.”

So far, the musicians aren’t taking anything for granted and are trying to enjoy the in-between moments.

Dangerfield and his wife took their daughter on a Disney cruise for her second birthday — she’s spent much of her young life traveling with the band.

With some of his publishing money, Bernard indulged his love of vintage Japanese fashion and has a 2000s-era Tuscan house on his vision board. Crews stays healthy, listens to lots of Snarky Puppy, and looks forward to the relaxed cannabis laws of L.A. when the tour stops at the Moroccan Lounge on Oct. 22 and 23. If time allows, he might even have time to surf in Malibu.

Bryant, who counts Mike Dirnt, Mark Hoppus and James Jamerson among his biggest influences, balances a dream of seeing his band play for thousands with looking forward to a life lived like his older brother: a chiropractor with a nice family.

But some dreams will have to wait as the band goes back to making music, hopefully with lasting impact. The members want to become household names, “like Nirvana,” with music people will play for hundreds of years. Why not?

Anything is possible when you are a fantastic foursome.

Qatar, Turkiye, Pakistan and Indonesia signed a deal on Wednesday to deepen their defence industry cooperation, reflecting a broader effort by countries in the region to widen their network of security partners amid the prolonged US-Israel war with Iran.

The four countries signed the memorandum of understanding in Doha, building on existing military projects through joint production, technology transfers and more closely integrated supply chains.

The initiative comes as the failure of the United States and Iran to reach a concrete peace agreement pushes countries in the region to diversify their defence partnerships and look beyond what experts described as an overreliance on Washington for their security. But they stress that closer cooperation does not mean abandoning long-standing alliances. Instead, the ambition is to gain greater control over their own security while strengthening pre-existing partnerships.

Arda Mevlutoglu, a defence industry analyst and managing director of Mergen Analytical Strategies, told Al Jazeera that the implications could extend well beyond the four participants.

“We may be witnessing the emergence of an interconnected network of defence and security arrangements extending from the Gulf to South and Southeast Asia, rather than a single formal alliance,” he said.

What would the agreement do?

In a statement, the Qatari Defence Ministry said the “Badr” Memorandum of Understanding “aims to foster cooperation in the field of defence manufacturing, enhance defence capabilities among the four countries, and promote collaboration in technical defence training, as well as in research and development areas, thereby contributing to the creation of solutions and industries worthy of the evolution of modern defences”.

Experts say that under the agreement, each country will bring its own resources or set of skills to the table. “Turkiye contributes technological expertise, systems integration and a mature defence industry; Pakistan and Indonesia offer manufacturing capacity, skilled workforces and sizeable domestic markets; and Qatar provides investment potential and demand,” said Mevlutoglu.

Together, the four nations could “establish integrated supply chains, allowing these countries to jointly develop, manufacture and sustain defence systems”, he told Al Jazeera.

Such arrangements could give buyers a larger role in producing and supporting their own equipment, while providing manufacturers with longer-term orders and investment. Albert Vidal, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told Al Jazeera that Pakistan and Indonesia were both willing to purchase Turkish weapons and locate part of their production at home.

This could bring down costs for Turkish companies and bring jobs to Pakistan and Indonesia, while Qatar brings “financial depth”, he said.

Building on existing partnerships

Turkiye, home to one of the world’s most advanced defence sectors, already has military manufacturing ties with Qatar, Pakistan and Indonesia separately. Qatar and Turkiye, for instance, signed a bilateral defence industry memorandum in October 2025.

But Vidal says that the new agreement, bringing together all four nations, points to a strategic calculation alongside an industrial one. Closer relationships could give more countries a stake in each other’s security. He pointed to Qatar’s investment in the Turkish defence industry over more than a decade and Ankara’s deployment of forces to Doha during the 2017 diplomatic crisis.

Pakistan’s existing naval manufacturing project with Turkiye, meanwhile, shows how weapons purchases can support domestic manufacturing. Of the four ships announced under the project, two are to be built in Istanbul and two at Karachi Shipyard.

Indonesia and Turkiye, meanwhile, are jointly building a tank.

“The rationale is to streamline these distinct defence export and joint production agreements under a more structured and resilient networked hub, rather than reinvent the wheel with each new defence agreement,” Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, told Al Jazeera.

Less dependence on Washington?

The US-Israeli war with Iran and recent Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia have heightened regional security concerns, analysts say, while reported US weapons shortages may be adding urgency to efforts to strengthen pre-existing partners and bolster domestic arms-building capacity.

“Diversification is a major driver, particularly as recent conflicts have exposed vulnerabilities associated with dependence on foreign suppliers, technology restrictions and supply chain disruptions,” Mevlutoglu said.

But he cautioned against interpreting the memorandum as a break with Washington. “Qatar is unlikely to abandon its strategic relationship with Washington, while Turkiye seeks greater technological independence within NATO, not autonomy from it,” he said.

According to Bader Mousa Al-Saif, an associate fellow with Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme and an assistant professor at Kuwait University, the initiative reflects Gulf countries increasingly looking towards the Global South and fellow Muslim countries.

It also complements a separate effort to formalise military cooperation across the region, analysts say. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement in August, establishing a mutual defence commitment. Ankara submitted the agreement to parliament for ratification on Wednesday, although deploying Turkish troops abroad would require separate parliamentary approval.

The Doha memorandum concerns industrial cooperation rather than a mutual defence pledge, but Mevlutoglu sees a connection between the two initiatives. “While Mecca focuses on collective deterrence and military cooperation, Doha could provide the industrial and technological foundations for such partnerships,” he said.

Lander says dozens remain in Israeli custody after being detained while helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives.

United States Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander says he has been released from Israeli military custody with a warning after being detained alongside dozens of volunteers helping Palestinian farmers harvest olives in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday.

But several dozen others, including rabbis and international volunteers, remain in detention, according to Lander, who called them to be released immediately.

“I’ve been released from IDF custody with a ‘warning,’ apparently because of my public profile,” Lander wrote on X. “I told them I wasn’t even a congressmember yet, just a nominee.”

Lander, a former New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, was among approximately 80 volunteers detained by Israeli soldiers and police near the village of Nahalin, outside Bethlehem, according to the Israeli organisation Rabbis for Human Rights.

The group, which included American, Israeli, Palestinian, British and Canadian volunteers, had been accompanying Palestinian farmers for about two hours when Israeli forces arrived and informed them that they were in a closed military zone.

The volunteers were then taken to a police station, according to Rabbis for Human Rights.

The Israeli government has not responded to a request for comment.

It’s the third afternoon in another string of sweltering days in Los Angeles. A recent Friday offers no salvation for the weekend ahead besides sitting in front of a fan or turning up the air conditioning.

Thankfully, standing inside the climate-controlled walls of the Line hotel’s lobby and behind a cup of joe from its Alfred Coffee, there’s a smidgen of comfort.

The bell to the ground floor elevator rings and out steps a tall figure, wearing an all-black ensemble. His shorts hang just below his knees, his hair is a bit messy and his boots climb up his calf.

Grian Chatten looks remarkably cool for someone who’s just rolled out of bed, even more so for someone who has a performance at Hollywood Forever Cemetery later that night. He’s the leading man behind Fontaines D.C., a Dublin-born rock quintet that’s become one of the most exciting acts to grace a stage today.

And how couldn’t they be?

Their 2019 debut, “Dogrel,” was met with critical acclaim, a masterful album with references to James Joyce and a teeming garage-style production. Fast-forward five years later and their fourth effort, “Romance,” became their first to chart in the United States, reaching No. 97 on the Billboard 200.

Nowadays, they’re kicking up dust again with the release of “Dopamine Chamber,” which came out last Friday via XL Recordings. Its a continuation of the precedent they’ve set in terms of lyrical and sonic quality, but simultaneously is far more melancholic and synthesized than their previous work.

“Dopamine Chamber” is the band’s fifth release, following the success of “Romance” back in 2024.

(Ewen Spencer)

However, its rollout was rocky as the debut music video “Marianne” was criticized for its use of artificial intelligence. When the psychedelic, entrancing recording first hit YouTube, it listed a credit for AI “artists” in its description, sounding alarms among the band’s loyal fan base.

After all, it was widely viewed as contradictory of the group, which has been vehemently outspoken on various contemporary issues, including what the U.N. Human Rights Council has officially concluded to be genocide in Gaza.

We sat down with Chatten to discuss the new album, as well as some of the backlash the band has recently faced.

Tell me about this album title. Is it a literal happiness chamber?

It was me [who came up with it] because it originated as a line in a song, and the song never made it onto the album. We kept the pairing of words “dopamine chamber.”

I wanted to make it a bit more literary. Turns out that the dopamine chamber … it’s where they put rats to test different chemicals or in order to check their dopamine levels. We found that out after.

So it’s fake happiness.

It’s almost like nonconsensual happiness. I mean, if that exists.

Do you ever feel like that in life? Like you’re like forced to be happy with everything bleak that’s going on?

I think we force ourselves to feel a certain happiness every now and then, just so we can compartmentalize things and go about our day. I think that’s a survival mechanism, anyway. But to lose that is dangerous.

This album is a lot more synthesized than your previous work. “Six Short Morning” and “Mimesis” definitely stand out there.

It made sense, thematically. I felt that those textures signaled … I hate using the word “dystopian,” but the dystopian future. I wanted the album to feel more like an advanced version of “Romance,” where the body of the record had become more bionic. There’s a reason that there are so many strings and cinematic stuff, that’s the organic world that I wanted to draw on — people like Mina, the ‘60s singer from Italy.

The acoustic sounds are, of course, still present.

They’re supposed to be kind of like fighting for space, a little bit.

One track that stuck out to me was “Happy for You,” because of it’s insincere flattery. Who or what do you have in mind when you write songs like that?

It’s a bit like [R.E.M.’s] “Shiny Happy People,” it’s a similar function. That song is a jealousy of other people’s happiness or well-adjustedness.

I noticed those internal struggles show up a lot on this album. On “One Man,” are you singing about feeling the weight of many?

I think that’s more about the general existential feeling of helplessness in the face of things that are happening in the world. I’ve got a really good friend called Nikolaj Schultz, do you know him?

No idea.

He’s a sociologist and philosopher, and he writes mostly about the environment, the Anthropocene, and he’s written a couple of books with the French philosopher Bruno Latour, who passed away [in 2022]. He’s someone who’s strapped to their bed and feels away the world from morning to night.

That was a profound influence on “Romance” and on this album. So I think “One Man” pertains to that, maybe even to him.

It seems like you are heavily inspired by literature, more so than other artists would be by just general music and listening.

I think in literature, I can understand sometimes what the point is in what they’re writing. For example, this Schultz book “Land Sickness,” the style of it is to render the audience sensitive to this issue just by the osmosis of showing how much it affects you. Like, my mom got me into music by showing me how much it affected her.

How did the feature with Rosalía come about for “Where Is Gone?”

Well, this is our first feature. Carlos [O’Connell], our guitarist, grew up in Spain and had been listening to her first couple of records. Then we got into “Motomami” together and it became a fixture to listen to it backstage before our shows. When “Lux” came out, we were all quite obsessed with it.

We were four days out from mixing or from mastering the album, and Carlos rang me. He was like, “I think we’d be mistaken to not just send Rosalía something and see if she’d be interested.”

We sent her four tracks. We sent her “Where Is Gone?,” “One Man,” “Tongue,” and I can’t remember what the other one was. She got back within 48 hours with a full vocal of “Where Is Gone?”

You weren’t in the studio together?

She was on tour. She was in Miami at the time.

What happened with “Marianne?” There was a moment where it was credited to AI “artists.” Then it was corrected to be effects artists.

I woke up at like 5:30 a.m. the day after the video came out, and I saw an article that said there was AI used in the video, and I called our management, and I was like, “What the f—, is this true?” and it turned out that there was some AI used in like the workflow or the postproduction.

So all those main scenes and main effects and stuff were VFX and prosthetics, like the cheeks and everything. Over 110 people worked on the thing. It was a real huge human effort. But then somewhere in the process, someone from the VFX team I guess used some kind of AI in the workflow. And none of us were told about it. Apparently, not even our label or our management were told about it and it was a real shock.

Yeah, it seemed like you guys didn’t know.

Of course. I mean, we’re gonna have it written into our contracts going forward that like it can’t be in our music videos. You know what I mean? I don’t condone it.

I think a lot of people were shocked just because you guys are so active in contemporary issues, which AI certainly is.

It’s so f— ironic. No, very contradictory. The themes of the f— album as well. I was hoping to talk about how I felt about AI in interviews at some point anyway, and then this kind of pulled the rug from under that conversation a little bit.

It just f— sucked.

Well, how do you feel about AI?

I think it’s f— terrifying. I was watching a Robin Williams scene from “Dead Poets Society” when he talks about poetry, literature. These are the things that we stay alive for, and well, that’s exactly what AI threatens to rob from the human race.

I’ve seen those articles about those guys who are leaving AI companies because they said that the human race is going to be dead within 10 years. AI is literally rendering our souls obsolete and I think that is true death.

A lot of people say, “It’s here, we have to deal with it.”

We should just shut it off.

It always ends here. Every conversation [about AI] just ends grim. This is like every conversation with my dad over the last three years about it. It makes it tough to be alive, doesn’t it?

France and the United Kingdom have both moved to deploy military assets to Saudi Arabia, deepening their defence ties with the kingdom as its conflict with the Houthis, an armed group also known as Ansar Allah (Arabic for Supporters of God), in Yemen escalates.

Paris last week said it had begun sending assets to Saudi Arabia as part of a previously announced agreement, after President Emmanuel Macron committed to deploying troops and air defence systems to help protect the Red Sea port city of Yanbu, which has come under attack from the Iran-backed Houthis.

The UK, for its part, on Tuesday announced plans to deploy fighter jets to help shield Saudi Arabia from Houthi attacks.

Both countries stressed that their support would be defensive.

Analysts say the European moves serve several geopolitical purposes: protecting Saudi oil exports that are important to European energy markets, shoring up their strategic alliance in the Gulf amid US reluctance to offer direct military assistance to Saudi Arabia, and strengthening deterrence against future Houthi attacks.

But the deployments also carry significant risks, many analysts say, potentially drawing the two European states more directly into the protracted Saudi-Houthi conflict.

“If insufficiently deterred, the Houthis may decide that the moment is ripe to test the resolve and resilience of Saudi Arabia’s defensive posture, and attempt to draw Saudi Arabia’s allies even further into the Yemen-Saudi confrontation,” Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow for Middle East Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told Al Jazeera.

‘Support during crisis’

The British and French military support measures come as Saudi Arabia faces a sustained Houthi missile and drone campaign against it, including targeting energy and transport infrastructure.

Houthi attacks targeting Saudi airports in Riyadh and Abha this month have killed 19 people and injured more than 300 others, according to the Saudi-led coalition spokesman Turki al-Maliki.

Addressing the UK’s stepped-up military support for Saudi Arabia, UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting called recent Houthi attacks in Saudi Arabia “absolutely despicable”, specifically condemning the group’s targeting of Riyadh airport.

The UK Ministry of Defence said it would deploy Typhoon fighter jets to fly “defensive counter air missions” in Saudi Arabia, send UK military advisers to work with Saudi staff officers and provide an A400M transport aircraft to help move defence material within the kingdom.

French support for Saudi Arabia would include soldiers, radars and defence systems, Macron has said, without detailing the scale of the support.

Urban Coningham, a research fellow at RUSI, noted differences in the British and French roles, with the French mainly limited to protecting Saudi export infrastructure. The British, by contrast, will conduct “defensive patrols where they would shoot down incoming missiles or drones” in Saudi Arabia, as well as provide air-to-air refuelling support for Saudi bombers and jets heading into Yemeni airspace, he said.

Camille Lons, policy fellow and deputy head of the Paris office at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said France is limited in what it can provide to Saudi Arabia, particularly given the demands on European defences amid the war in Ukraine. Still, Paris sees its assistance as a way to “show support [for Saudi Arabia] in times of crisis, and a way to deepen the defence partnership”, Lons told Al Jazeera.

‘Freeing up’ Saudi aircraft

Saudi Arabia will welcome the European deployments, as it has struggled to translate some of its security partnerships into high-level military support.

In September, US President Donald Trump rejected multiple Saudi requests to participate in strikes on the Houthis, agreeing only to provide intelligence and targeting support, the news agency Reuters cited informed sources saying.

Turkiye and Pakistan have committed to “collective deterrence measures”, including potential troop deployments, under the newly signed Mecca defence pact with Saudi Arabia, but the agreement has yet to be ratified in Turkiye.

Egypt’s parliament has also postponed a vote that would authorise its armed forces to support Saudi Arabia.

Nawaf Obaid, a senior fellow at King’s College War Studies Department, called the UK and French deployments “militarily valuable and politically significant”, saying they could help shield the kingdom’s sprawling territory from persistent Houthi air attacks while giving Riyadh more room to focus its own assets on offensive operations.

“The British Typhoons can reinforce Saudi air defences and, crucially, free up Saudi Eurofighters for offensive operations,” Obaid told Al Jazeera. “France’s contribution is particularly important for protecting Yanbu.”

Saudi Arabia “does not need foreign assistance to conduct air strikes”, Obaid added, noting that the kingdom has its own powerful combat aircraft fleet. “What it needs is additional defensive coverage across its enormous territory, particularly for critical energy infrastructure.”

Ozcelik said the recent British move was “not insignificant”, but its deterrent impact was not immediately clear.

“The question remains whether the UK air missions will move the dial in deterring sustained Houthi attacks while Saudi air defences and interceptor stockpiles are stretched,” said Ozcelik. “The difference between deterrence and interdiction is an important one.”

‘Dragged into protracted conflict’

What also remains to be seen is whether the UK and France will maintain a purely defensive posture – and whether the Houthis will recognise that distinction at all.

Coningham said the Houthis could interpret European military involvement, especially the UK’s air-to-air support for Saudi bombers and jets, as “offensive” rather than defensive, leading the group to view those countries as belligerents and their forces as targets.

As a result, Coningham said, the Houthis could strike at British forces stationed in the region – whether in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere, such as Cyprus – or reverse their position on allowing free transit to non-Saudi vessels, including European ships, in the Bab al-Mandeb strait – a key maritime route in the world.

Another potential flashpoint would be a Houthi attack in Saudi Arabia that kills British or French personnel, analysts noted.

“Whether it’s a direct attack planned by the Houthis or collateral damage, if the British or French have any casualties … then there becomes a pointed debate in those countries as to whether they should then retaliate,” said Coningham.

Ozcelik said the UK could face pressure to play a more offensive role in the event of a “mass civilian casualty event” caused by the Houthis or “debilitating attacks on Saudi’s energy infrastructure”, although London would likely view such a scenario as a “last resort”.

“Neither the Mecca signatories nor the UK are inclined to get dragged into deeper and likely protracted conflict inside Yemen,” said Ozcelik.