The Prince of Wales accepted a suitcase containing €1 million in cash from a controversial Qatari politician, The Sunday Times can reveal.
It was one of three lots of cash, totalling €3 million, which Prince Charles personally received from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar who is nicknamed “HBJ”, between 2011 and 2015.
On one occasion, Sheikh Hamad, 62, presented the prince with €1 million, which was reportedly stuffed into carrier bags from Fortnum & Mason, the luxury department store that has a royal charter to provide the prince’s groceries and tea.
On another, Charles, 73, accepted a holdall containing €1 million during a private one-on-one meeting at Clarence House in 2015. On Saturday night Clarence House said the money was “passed immediately to one of the prince’s charities who carried out the appropriate covenants and assured us that all the correct processes were followed”.
After the heir to the throne accepted the small suitcase, it was given to two advisers in the royal household who hand-counted the money. It was said to be in the form of €500 notes — a denomination dubbed the “bin Laden” because of its link to terrorist financing, and which has since been discontinued.
Palace aides then asked Coutts to collect the cash. The private bank, which is headquartered in the Strand in central London, and has served the royal family for centuries, is understood to have retrieved the suitcase from Charles’s London residence.
Each payment was deposited into the accounts of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF), a low-profile grant-making entity which bankrolls the prince’s pet projects and his country estate in Scotland. There is no suggestion the payments were illegal.
The prince’s meetings with Sheikh Hamad do not appear in the Court Circular, the list of official engagements undertaken by working royals.
The royal gift policy states that members of the royal family are allowed to accept a “cheque” as a patron of, or on behalf of, a charity. It is silent on cash.
There are questions over a “cash-for-access” culture at Clarence House, with the Metropolitan Police and Charity Commission investigating fundraising practices, including the sale of honours. Last year The Sunday Times reported that Michael Fawcett, Charles’s closest confidant, fixed an honour for a Saudi billionaire. There is no evidence the sheikh did not intend the monies to go to the charity and Sheikh Hamad did not comment on Saturday.
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Editor: Tina is having too much fun with Trump as Comic Interest, in her collection of comments about Trump’s dull-wittedness: Brown places Trump in evocatine historical positions, to comic effect for the NYT reader. Who recalls her time at ‘The Dailey Beast’ as editor from October 2008 September 2013?
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The Daily Beast Tries to Claw Its Way Back to Relevance
Can Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood revive the once-buzzy news site and reclaim their perches atop the New York media world? Their own staff isn’t sure.
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The Daily Beast, launched in 2008 by the longtime magazine editor Tina Brown and backed by Barry Diller’s IAC, became known over the years as a cheeky and aggressive tabloid with reporting on politics and national security that often had an impact belying the relatively small size of its newsroom.
There can be no doubt that The Economist, under the direction of toxic Zanny Minton Beddoes, former partner in crime with Jeffrey Sachs, during the Post-Soviet period. See Stephen F. Cohen & Katrina Vanden Heuvel ‘Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers’, the details of what ‘Glasnost’ was about, in fact!
Editor: A selection of The Economist propaganda about various aspects of the political present, and its toxic actors, that constitutes the Economist Cadre of ‘experts’ : who are in fact about the evolution of the Neo-Liberal Toxin, in its many and various iterations: Name it Oxbridger Political Embroidery!
How Israel is losing America:
ON SEPTEMBER 14TH, after showing Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, the massive, 2,000-year-old blocks of the Western Wall at Jerusalem’s holiest site, Binyamin Netanyahu declared the alliance between their countries to be “as strong and as durable as the stones…we just touched”. Unfortunately, he is wrong.
As Israel becomes isolated over its war in Gaza, it depends increasingly on America. During the current UN General Assembly old friends, including Australia, Britain, Canada and France, will recognise a Palestinian state, even as Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank makes real statehood less likely. America is all that stands between Israel and a pariah status that would have dire implications for its diplomatic, legal and military security.
ON SEPTEMBER 14TH, after showing Marco Rubio, America’s secretary of state, the massive, 2,000-year-old blocks of the Western Wall at Jerusalem’s holiest site, Binyamin Netanyahu declared the alliance between their countries to be “as strong and as durable as the stones…we just touched”. Unfortunately, he is wrong.
As Israel becomes isolated over its war in Gaza, it depends increasingly on America. During the current UN General Assembly old friends, including Australia, Britain, Canada and France, will recognise a Palestinian state, even as Israel’s expansion of settlements in the West Bank makes real statehood less likely. America is all that stands between Israel and a pariah status that would have dire implications for its diplomatic, legal and military security.
For all Mr Netanyahu’s blithe assurances that relations with America are perfectly solid, they are not. The prime minister has riled the Trump administration and is ignoring cracks deep within the foundations of the alliance. Democratic voters have long been drifting away from America’s most indulged ally. Republican voters are increasingly losing faith, too. A sudden loss of popular American support would be a catastrophe for Israel—a small country of 10m people in a dangerous and hostile neighbourhood.
The polling in America is startling. The share of Americans who back Israel over the Palestinians is at a 25-year low. In 2022, 42% of American adults held an unfavourable view of Israel; now 53% do. A recent YouGov/Economist poll finds that 43% of Americans believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. In the past three years unfavourable views of Israel among Democrats over 50 rose by 23 percentage points. Among Republicans under 50, support is evenly divided, compared with 63% for Israel in 2022. Between 2018 and 2021 the share of evangelicals under the age of 30 who backed Israelis over Palestinians plunged from 69% to 34%. Pollsters think that shift has endured.
To understand why this matters, go back to the years when America’s bond with Israel was a powerful amalgam of values and interests. Both are democracies founded by pioneers seeking refuge from persecution. Both believed that their country was exceptional: one a shining city on a hill, the other a light unto the nations. At the same time, their interests overlapped. During the cold war, Israel was a bulwark against Soviet expansion in the Arab world. After the Soviet collapse, they were still allied against Iran. After the attacks of September 11th 2001, they were united by a loathing of Islamist terrorism.
What Elon Musk gets wrong about Europe’s hard right
He imagines a continental revolt against Islam and elites
“You either fight back or you die,” Elon Musk told a big crowd in London on September 13th at a rally organised by Tommy Robinson, a convicted criminal who preaches anti-Muslim bigotry. Mr Musk has cultivated ties with insurgent hard-right parties across Europe. The continent is being overrun by Muslims, he claims, and faces demographic disaster and oppression by corrupt elites. It can be saved only by disruptive, MAGA-like parties that represent the true voice of citizens (take it as read: white, Christian ones).
In fact, to lump together Europe’s hard-right forces is a mistake. They all dislike immigration and wokery, and are fond of conspiracy theories and social-media pugnacity. But their paths are different. In France the hard right appears to be moderating as it gets closer to power. In Germany the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is radicalising further, but remains distant from power. Britain is in flux: as the rally showed, extreme views are becoming normalised, and the electoral system could yet propel the hard right into office.
Giorgia Meloni in Italy is actually in power. When she first soared in the polls, liberals panicked. Here, they feared, was a future prime minister rooted in post-fascist politics, who might unleash culture wars at home and an economic crisis in the European Union. Yet since winning office in 2022 Ms Meloni has proved pragmatic. She has been firm but not xenophobic on illegal migration. She has not waged a culture war, beyond trying to restrict surrogacy. She has cleaved to fiscal discipline, backed Ukraine against Russia and avoided open conflict with the EU. Her calculation is clear: Italy’s economy depends on European largesse, its companies on the single market, its bonds on the European Central Bank’s support.
In France Jordan Bardella shows early signs of following a similar script, positioning himself as the moderate face of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally ahead of a probable tilt at the presidency in 2027. (Ms Le Pen is currently barred from standing.) Mr Bardella is trying to reassure French business that a hard-right president need not mean fiscal ruin or a euro crisis. Whether he can honour that promise is doubtful. But even the act of wooing the establishment marks a shift.
Contrast those two cases with the AfD. It thrives in Germany’s east, where disaffection with the state runs deep. Its rhetoric is xenophobic and pro-Russian. Nonetheless a “firewall” put up by mainstream parties which refuse to work with it has so far blocked it from national or state-level office. It did well last year in state elections in the east, but without coalition partners failed to turn protest into power. And local elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, outside its eastern base, on September 14th showed its limited appeal west of the Elbe: it increased its share but failed to break out of the poorer areas.
America’s monetary policy risks getting too loose.
N THE NIGHT of September 15th the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) launched its long-expected attack on Gaza city. “Israel is at a decisive moment,” said Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, the next day. Under the cover of air strikes and artillery fire, two divisions moved towards the city’s central neighbourhoods. Two more are being held in reserve. For now, most of the IDF’s troops remain on the city’s outskirts. They have surrounded it on three sides, leaving open only the western exits, to the Mediterranean coastal road, for civilians fleeing south.
Most of the city’s residents are not leaving, though, risking yet another brutal chapter in a war that has dragged on for nearly two years. Israel has ordered them to move to “humanitarian zones” further south. Between 200,000 and 350,000 have done so; around 600,000 remain. Most have already seen their homes bombed and been displaced multiple times. Few can afford the cost of hiring a minivan to carry them and their belongings to Deir al-Balah, 15km away and still somewhat safer than Gaza city. Tents worth 150 shekels ($45) are going for 20 times that. “After all that, you don’t know if it will be declared a hostile environment and you’ll have to move again,” says Hisham over the sound of explosions. The former civil servant is staying in Gaza city.
In many ways this looks like a re-run of the first big offensive of the war. Then, as now, Israeli armoured columns wreaked havoc on Gaza city, while Israel’s leaders promised to wipe out Hamas. But since then at least 64,000 Gazans, most of them civilians, have been killed. So have nearly all of Hamas’s chiefs. Most of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. International aid organisations say people in much of the territory are starving.
The mood in Israel has changed, too. When the IDF attacked Gaza city 22 months ago, Israelis were nearly unanimous in their support. Hamas had burst out of Gaza, massacring hundreds and taking 250 hostages. (In all, nearly 1,200 people died.) The public agreed that Hamas needed to be destroyed.
Jobs growth is probably weak because of low migration, not a cold economy
THE FEDERAL RESERVE is usually run by technocratic consensus. Today it has become a battleground. On September 17th the Fed cut interest rates for the first time since December, by a quarter of a percentage point, to 4-4.25%. One of its governors, Lisa Cook, could attend only because a court blocked President Donald Trump from sacking her. Another, Stephen Miran, was confirmed just before the meeting for a short stint, after which he says he will return to his job at the White House. It is an unseemly arrangement for a central bank that should be independent of politics. Mr Miran dissented in favour of a half-point rate cut. And he appears to have called for three such moves by the end of the year, twice what the next-most-doveish committee members suggested in their anonymous projections.
The Fed finds itself at a dangerous moment, and not just because of Mr Trump’s quest for lower rates. The economic argument for looser money is finely balanced. Mr Miran’s submission, though an outlier, was pivotal: by 10-9, the committee expects at least three rate cuts this year. That is what markets have been betting on, too. But following through on those expectations would be a mistake.
The case for easier money depends almost entirely on the labour market. Recent data and revisions show firms have created only 27,000 jobs per month on average since May, down from 123,000 in the first four months of the year. The hiring swoon has vindicated predictions made by Chris Waller, another Fed governor and the betting market’s favourite to replace Jerome Powell as chairman next year.
The trouble is judging how much poor jobs numbers—and an accompanying slowdown in economic growth—reflect softer demand for workers rather than their shrinking supply. Immigration has collapsed under Mr Trump. Agents reported just 8,000 “encounters” with illegal migrants on the southern border in July, compared with 100,000 in the same month last year. Some researchers think that net migration this year will be negative. The unemployment rate, which should reflect the balance between supply and demand, is only 4.3%—hardly evidence of a glut of workers.
Weiss opines on the death of Charlie Kirk a semimal moment in American History, forgetting the Murders of Malcom X, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, MLK, John & Bobby Kennedy…… !
Hi folks. This was a hard week. As we wrote in our editorial in the wake of the worst political assassination our country has witnessed in decades: “Charlie Kirk’s assassination has hit the staff of The Free Press hard. . . . We’re journalists, which means we are used to reporting on horrible events, including gun violence, assaults, and murders. So why does this one feel different? Why is there sure to be a prolonged impact from this tragedy?”
It’s because Kirk was assassinated for his views. It’s because he was murdered while practicing the virtues we aim to stand for here at TheFree Press: speaking freely, and inviting good-faith debate from all corners.
I am proud of our reporters and writers always, but especially over these past days.
They’ve helped me make sense of this precarious moment, helped separate the signal from the noise, and kept cool heads in a moment where so many others are raising the temperature.
Let’s get to it.
Editor. Bari Weiss lets others do the Heavy Lifting :
We offered a 10-step guide to fixing our broken country.
Editor: This reeks of a tired old collection political hacks, warmed over for the occasion. Reminding the reader of Bari Weiss’s complete lack talent, as a scribbler devoid of talent, and bereft of literary skill!
Editor: My patience with Mr. Brooks ‘morlizing chatter’ is exhausted by his self-congratulation: Even his unremarcable ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ of 2003 which brought him to The New York Times, was a shopworn amagamation of War Mongering, via its feckless protaganist ‘Joey Tabla Rasa’! I will limit my commentary some select portions of his essay! Mr. Brooks re-writes his Own History in the first three paragraphs of his essay!
Sometimes when I have nothing better to do, I think back on the elections we had in the before times — when, say, Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama or John Kerry ran against George W. Bush. I try to figure out why politics and society in general felt so different then.
It’s not because we didn’t have big disagreements back then. The Iraq war kicked up some pretty vehement arguments. It’s not because we weren’t polarized. Pundits have been writing about political polarization since at least 2000 and maybe well before.
Politics is different now because something awful has been unleashed. William A. Galston defines this awful thing in his fantastic new book, “Anger, Fear, Domination: Dark Passions and the Power of Political Speech.” Even before the Charlie Kirk assassination it was obvious that the dark passions now pervade the American psyche, and thus American politics.
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Editor : What Reader of Mr. Brooks present essay will recall his War Mongering chatter via ‘‘Joey Tabla Rasa” ?
I will post this as of 9:02 AM Pacific Time 9/19/2025 and will add to its later in the day. ?
The very notion that Jimmy Kimmell represent A Clear and Present Danger to what remaines of the American Republic, is on its face BULLSHIT! Look to The New Democrats i.e. The utterly Corrupt Clinton’s Bill & Hillary, Pelosi and Old Money Pretty Boy Newsom. With political hysteric and Zionist Stooge Adam Schiff bringing up the ass end ! Not to forget ‘Lets put this all behind’ and Simpson/Boles of Obama, and the millions who lost Homes to the reinvigerated Neo-Liberal toxic Fiction.
The Tea Party was about ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ that Obama embodied.
In France look to the gilets jaunes as the expression of that ‘Rebellion’ that still animates French Politics.
Political Cynic on Zionist Shill Schiff & Patel as FBI Stooge: The exchange of insults is revelatory and entertaining: The Gentlemans Club of the Senate is now dead?
On behalf of the undersigned organizations representing millions of Americans, we strongly urge you to oppose Kash Patel’s confirmation to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the nation’s principal criminal investigation agency.
Mr. Patel lacks both the professional experience and temperament to lead a federal agency charged with investigating a range of civil and human rights violations, including hate crimes, voter intimidation and election-related crimes, human trafficking, and police misconduct. Unlike previous FBI directors, Mr. Patel has no senior-level law enforcement experience, nor has he ever held a Senate-confirmed position.[1] His incendiary comments, including those directed at perceived political rivals and civil servants, could endanger American lives if acted upon.
The threat posed by Mr. Patel is not merely hypothetical — it is grounded in historical reality. The FBI possesses tremendous law enforcement authority, and as the nation’s primary criminal investigative agency, the FBI is deeply consequential to civil rights, public safety, and the integrity of our democracy. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI conducted a covert and illegal operation known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program)[2] targeting civil rights groups and leaders, including the anti-Vietnam War movement and the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.[3] This program, intended to surveil, infiltrate, and sabotage civil rights movements, is now widely regarded as one of the agency’s most significant overreaches. It led to widespread abuse of power and prompted a series of reforms, including the creation of permanent U.S. House and Senate Intelligence Committees[4] and the establishment of term limits for FBI directors.[5] Despite these changes, the FBI continues to monitor religious communities and civil rights movements. The FBI developed a system of “ethnic mapping,”[6] infiltrated mosques following the 9/11 attacks,[7] and surveilled Black Lives Matter protesters and tracked protest activity after the murder of George Floyd.[8]
In the federal government’s law enforcement structure, the FBI is the chief investigatory agency with the broadest authority. This tremendous authority has, at times, led to serious abuses of civil rights and civil liberties. For example, in 1975, the Senate formed the Church Committee in part to investigate wide-ranging FBI abuses, including planting informants in civil rights organizations, surveilling and threatening Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and keeping files on 1 million Americans.
The Church Committee’s shocking findings led to reforms at the FBI, but today it now wields significant investigative and surveillance powers, including under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law allows the FBI and other agencies to engage in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications. Although Section 702 requires the government to direct this surveillance at people outside the U.S., in practice, it ensnares Americans who are communicating with those targets. Notably, targets need not have any connection to criminal activity or terrorism; they can be journalists, human-rights workers, or businesspeople discussing U.S. foreign affairs. After acquiring these communications, FBI agents across the country routinely search for Americans’ communications in their Section 702 databases — again, without a warrant.
Our democracy hangs in the balance because of initiatives like Project 2025. Read our memos outlining what each presidential candidate means for…
Over time, Section 702 has morphed into a domestic surveillance tool. FBI agents use Section 702 databases to conduct millions of invasive searches for Americans’ communications, including those of protesters, racial justice activists, 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign, journalists, and even members of Congress. While the number of these warrantless queries has declined in recent years, they’re still happening far too frequently and without the judicial approval the Constitution requires.
Powers like this are even more concerning given President-elect Trump’s expressed desire to investigate and prosecute his perceived “enemies” — journalists, civil servants, and government officials — based on their political views or activities. For example, President-elect Trump has vowed, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.” He expanded this sentiment to include “all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders, & [sic] country itself!”
What William Buckley and Charlie Kirk had in common
As George Will noted, both made ‘politics fun’ (to be sure, even while disparaging equal rights).
William Buckley, we were told in a Washington Post column last week by the venerable George Will, “would have recognized the 31-year-old [Charlie] Kirk as a kindred spirit.” Writing in the wake of Kirk’s horrific assassination, Will noted that Buckley, “like Kirk, had a talent for making politics fun.”
Working within the iron cage of the 750-word Post opinion column, however, Will lacked the space to document many of the myriad similarities between Buckley (particularly the young Buckley, to whom Will devoted most of his consideration) and Kirk. Allow me, then, to add some specifics to Will’s glowing generalities.
Among the deeply held beliefs that Kirk and the young Buckley shared was a staunch opposition to the federal government’s striking down the Southern laws that mandated race-based segregation. In 1957, when Buckley was the same age as Kirk was when he was cruelly struck down, he authored an editorial in his magazine, National Review, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” In the wake of the 1956 Montgomery bus boycott, in which Blacks won the right to sit where they wished on public buses rather than in the last few rows, and at a time when the leader of that boycott, Martin Luther King Jr., had called for legislation enabling Blacks to win the right to vote in Southern states, Buckley wrote:
The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race … The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.
As Buckley saw it, “the claims of civilization,” collectively personified by the white South, did indeed trump those of universal access to the ballot. For which reasons, Buckley would oppose both the 1964 Civil Rights Act, mandating an end to racial discrimination in public institutions and employment, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, mandating an end to the Southern states’ effectively prohibiting Black voting.
Buckley doubled down on these views many times in the years following. In 1961, for instance, he answered a question posed in a 1961 Saturday Review symposium—“Desegregation: Will It Work?”—with an all-caps “NO,” going on to disparage King’s call for an end to Jim Crow by terming King “more sensitive, and so more bitter, than the average Southern Negro, and hence unqualified as a litmus of the Southern Negro’s discontent.” With the passage of time, however, Buckley eventually reconciled himself to desegregation.
During the past couple of years, Kirk began sounding remarkably like the Buckley of the 1950s and ’60s. In a December 2023 speech to the annual conference of Turning Point, the organization that Kirk founded and led, he said, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” according to a story published in Wired (whose particulars, when Wired ran the text by him, Kirk confirmed). Kirk went on to term Martin Luther King “awful. He’s not a good person.”
The 1964 Civil Rights Act, of course, banned racial discrimination in public facilities and hiring; it did not institute affirmative action policies. King himself, as he made clear many times, particularly by his support for the 1966 “Freedom Budget,” called for the extension of universal, as explicitly counterposed to race-specific, social and economic rights. Given those well-documented historical facts, it’s clear that Kirk’s sweeping condemnation of King specifically and equal rights generally really does extend to the law banning racial discrimination in facilities like restaurants.
In that better world where we can still imagine Kirk dining with his good friend JD Vance on a cold winter’s evening, then, we can call up the happy image of their supping, free from the dictates of an intrusive federal government and its bureaucratic mandates, in a congenially whites-only restaurant, and their graciously braving the snow to venture out of doors to bring food to Vance’s shivering wife and children—all warmed, despite the weather, by the glow of good fellowship and civil discourse.
Critics on the left might quibble with the actual doctrines that Buckley and Kirk so articulately advanced, and their real-world consequences. But that would require ignoring the palpable joie de vivre they brought to their bold endeavors, to their capacity, as Will put it, for “making politics fun.”
Editor: the opening paragraph of Mr. Turleys rant is well past its sale date!
Below is my column in the Hill on murder of Charlie Kirk, the latest victim of our age of rage. The evidence of Antifa scribblings and indoctrination of the shooter came as no surprise. For months, some of us have been warning Democratic leaders about their dangerous rhetoric and how it would be received by the most radical elements in the Antifa movement.
Editor: Mr. Turley in his political despraraion to diagnose the toxic American Political Moment, reminds this reader of Arlen Spector , Edward Jay Epstein, The Warren Report, and Walter Cronkite and CBS News constrution of tower in Dealey Plaza, that failed to reach Texas School Book Depository window, from which Oswald fired the shots that killed Kennedy! That trusty World War II Mannlicher-Carcano was Oswald’s weapon.
The Respectable Bourgeois Lawyering Trade follows the lead of an utterly corrupt and mendacious cadre, that is the American National Security State! In its many iterations, and its confererates and partners with a global reach! Jonathan Turley is just one of the cogs in this toxic machinery, who warn of impending political/moral collapse from secure Academic Positions. Reader think of Norman Finkelstein, as one of the most egrious examples of the fate of the Academic Dissenter!
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