The freeing of the hostages is not because of a change of heart by Hamas, but part of a deal involving the temporary cessation of hostilities, the admittance of humanitarian aid to Gaza and the release of Palestinian prisoners.

So far, Israel’s operation against Hamas in Gaza has been a success. Much of the terrorists’ extensive network of tunnels has been destroyed, and their northern Gaza headquarters has been captured.

While Western governments have rightly been broadly supportive of Israel – albeit this backing coming with perhaps excessive hand-wringing and soul searching – the same cannot be said for large sections of the Left in the UK, continental Europe, and indeed the United States.

Too many have been all too ready to excuse Hamas’s attacks in the name of sympathy for the Palestinian people.

Regardless of rights and wrongs of past actions in the region, nothing could ever justify the brutal murder of civilians or the kidnapping of children and the elderly. The youngest hostage is 10 months old, the oldest 85.

Politicians from the Labour Left, the SNP and the Green Party demanded Israel cease fire even before the IDF had crossed into Gaza.

Would any country other than Israel be urged to show magnanimity under similar circumstances?

The fact that children are being released by Hamas will remind the world who instigated the current conflict and who has perpetrated war crimes.

The kidnapping of non-combatants, and especially children, is an unambiguous war crime.

Yet London’s “pro-Palestinian” marchers have only shown opprobrium against Israel.

While humanitarian aid making its way into Gaza is welcome, there is growing concern that it is Hamas which stands to benefit the most from the pause in hostilities.

As John Bolton, the former US national security adviser, writes in these pages, Hamas has been offered a lifeline enabling it to buy time.

After the agreed release of the first 50 hostages, the “pause” will be extended by 24 hours for every further 10 hostages released – time that may allow Hamas terrorists the chance to regroup and plan future attacks.

This risks prolonging the conflict and Western nations must be unequivocal in stating that Israel remains justified in defending itself so long as the Hamas threat remains.

This Sunday there will be a rather different march in London than those witnessed on recent Saturdays.

The main innovation of the missile is its ability to evade anti-aircraft fire.

It can do so, Tehran claims, because it is fitted with a hypersonic glide vehicle which detaches from the missile itself, and can make sharp manoeuvres to dodge conventional missile defences and travels at hypersonic speed to its target.

There has been no official response from the US or Israel to the development. The Pentagon has previously expressed scepticism at Iran’s hypersonic claims.

But Bradley Bowman, senior director at the Foundation for Dence of Democracies (FDD), said its missile programmes “are not simply for show” and should not be dismissed out of hand.

“Tehran’s claims about new capabilities should be taken with a heavy grain of salt, but it would be a mistake to shrug at Iran’s growing missile capabilities,” he said.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran uses ballistic missiles to attack its neighbours and US troops while proliferating some missiles or related technologies to Tehran’s terror proxies.”

Iran has been a major supplier of rockets and other arms to the Hamas and Hezbollah terror groups, both of which have unleashed them on Israel since the Oct 7 attacks.

Tehran is also the main backer of Yemen’s Houthi rebels and various militia groups in Iraq whose attacks on American soldiers have increased since the war in Gaza began.

Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has previously said it intends to increase the range of its hypersonics from their current maximum of 869miles to 1,242miles (1,400km to 2,000km).

“Iran has proven it has the capability and intent to develop a more lethal ballistic missile arsenal, one with projectiles it hopes will cause more headaches for American and allied missile defenses.”

United Nations restrictions limiting Iran’s development of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles expired in October, although it is believed Tehran had been ignoring them for some time.

Iran first claimed to have developed a hypersonic missile in November 2022.

– Once again, the question to be asked is why Iran isn’t taken out as a threat to the Middle East, Ukraine via Russia and sponsoring terrorism in general.

Once the Mullahs have nuclear capability, we will all be at their mercy.

They used compasses and 50-foot chains to measure distances. Demand only grew for military mapping as the English looked nervously across the Channel at the French Revolution. Roy’s ongoing surveying work for the Board of Ordnance, later the Ministry of Defence, led, in 1791, to the birth of Ordnance Survey, which remains Britain’s mapping agency.

War maps destined for public eyes have been vulnerable to both censorship and the often-limited access granted to observers on the ground, including journalists. The big wars of today have coincided with enormous technological advances in mapping software and open-source investigative techniques.

ISW sits within this wider open-source intelligence, or OSINT, revolution that is bringing a new transparency to war, taking conflict cartography out of the hands of generals thanks to a team of super-smart – and often very young – analysts. All over the world, journalists, academics, activists and hobbyists are exploiting unprecedented access to information as they scour – and share – sources in the hunt for clues.

Youth and digital nativism are also an advantage, because the modern field of GIS – or geographic information system – mapping, is pretty new.

Human fallibility is often the modern war mapper’s most potent tool; social media has become a goldmine. In Russia, where a fear of insurance fraud has resulted in the widespread use of dashcams, patriotic or simply curious drivers posting clips online unwittingly helped flag up the movements of military convoys before the Ukraine invasion.

Often it’s fighters themselves, including units of volunteers, who reveal more about their locations and movements than the generals might like. Combat footage, including valuable aerial scenes captured by drone, is increasingly used to raise funds. ‘These units will say, “We really need tourniquets or body armour… Check out the great work we’re doing and donate here,”’ Barros says.

New renewable energy investment has all but ground to a halt, the Snowy pumped hydro project is billions over budget, transmission line construction is years behind schedule, and community resistance to new wind, solar and transmission lines is growing.

Two days after his flight of fancy address to the Lowy Institute, Bowen signalled that the government would substantially increase subsidies to attract renewable investment.

The government will write a blank cheque to subsidise investment in 32 GW of renewable energy capacity by guaranteeing a long-term fixed return.

This radical intervention, born from desperation, imposes an uncapped levy on taxpayers that could continue for decades.

Rather than pass the rising cost of renewable energy to customers, the government will pick up the tab at our expense.

Labor’s energy policy is grounded in wishful thinking.

There was no cost-benefit analysis, no technical feasibility study or any sign that an engineer or economist had scrutinised it.

How sure was the Opposition leader that the projected $275 saving was robust when he would only have three years to deliver it?

“Well, I don’t think I know,” Albanese replied.

“I know because we have done the modelling. The modelling is available. We are releasing it here today.”

The fatal flaw in Labor’s modelling was the assumption that wind, solar and hydropower are abundant and cheap.

Renewable energy was considered immune from the constrain of scarcity that applies to other forms of energy

“We receive 58 million petajoules of solar radiation per year,” Blackout Bowen told the Lowy Centre, “ten thousand times larger than our total energy consumption.”

As so often, Blackout Bowen brushed over the problematic part, the challenge of harvesting diluted solar power and getting it to market in sufficient strength to turn on the kettle when the customer demands it.

One obvious challenge is the preposterous amount of land required to meet Bowen’s ambitious emissions reduction targets solely with renewable energy.

The organisation Net Zero Australia, headed by former Commonwealth chief scientist Robin Batterham, calculates that we’ll have to sacrifice 120,179 sq km of land to construct enough renewable plants and associated transmission lines to meet Bowen’s target.

That is roughly 15 times more land than we use for mining or almost half the size of the state of Victoria.

No less confronting is the demand for capital.

Labor’s policy assumes that $76 billion of private capital would be readily available.

Yet even that relatively modest sum has not been forthcoming, and achieving Labor’s targets will require considerably more capital than that.

The installation cost of wind generation, in particular, has been soaring.

The cost of offshore wind is proving prohibitive in the United States.

The Danish company Ørsted has abandoned a half-begun project to build two offshore wind farms off the coast of New Jersey.

The Labor Minister for Energy and Climate Change Blackout Chris Bowen’s press release says this “expansion will take the CIS [Capacity Investment Scheme] from the current pilot stage to 9 GW of dispatchable capacity and 23 GW of variable capacity nationally – for a total of 32 GW nationally”.

What all taxpayers should be asking is exactly how much will this cost us, how many foreign owned companies will benefit, how much farming land, bush land and ocean beds will be destroyed, and how will the solar panels, wind turbines and batteries be decommissioned and disposed of at end of life?

Leaving aside the cost of this plan, which is difficult to precisely calculate given Labor’s intended market intervention and complicated mess of funding already announced (for example the Department of Climate Change ‘Powering Australia’ website alone lists approximately $42.2 billion worth of projects, and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has estimated Labor’s total renewable plan will cost $1.2-$1.5 trillion), Australians should be examining the practical reality of how much land is needed to install solar panels, wind farms and transmission lines necessary to transport renewable energy.

Using the 23 GW of “variable capacity” figure, how much land would hypothetically need to be covered in solar panels to reach this figure on paper and how much will it cost Australians?

The same estimates could be made for on-shore and off-shore wind turbines.

Austrade lists five foreign companies from Denmark, Italy, France, Japan and the UK who have renewable projects in Australia and links them with $25 billion of federal government spending.

Taxpayers deserve to know whether state and federal government’s are subsiding these projects, and if so, by exactly how much.

For example, Japanese company Sojitz is building the Edenvale Solar Park project near Chinchilla, Queensland, with a finance agreement with Naxitis (based in France), and an engineering, procurement and construction contract with Gransolar (the Australian subsidiary of Spanish company Grupo Gransolar).

This solar farm will cover 428 hectares (4.3 km2 or 1,058 acres) and have an installed capacity of 204 megawatts (MW).

There are 1,000 MW in a gigawatt (GW) so in this instance five of these solar farms would hypothetically generate around one GW of power and cover 2,140 hectares (21.5 km2 or 5,288 acres).

Again, hypothetically, to produce 23 GW you would need 49,220 hectares of solar panels (492.2 km2 or 121,625 acres).

An estimated 75-80 per cent of all solar panel components are made in China.

The controversial Pacific Solar Hydrogen Project in Queensland being built to underpin the production of green hydrogen will cover 6,000 hectares near Callide and produce up to 3,600 MW of power.

One 2,700 hectare site in this project is estimated to cover the equivalent of 4,000 football fields.

The federal Labor government needs to explain exactly how much productive farming land and how much bushland will be affected by solar panels?

They also need to explain why this will be allowed when farmers, for example, are bound by strict native vegetation laws in every state and territory, and when banks like Westpac are now setting targets for farmers such as “no deforestation from 2026, in line with existing law in most states” when the installation of solar panels will inevitably require the destruction of vegetation?

And how will all of these panels be decommissioned and disposed of at the end of their life?

At the same time Victorian farmers are protesting the installation of 400 kilometres of power lines to support renewables at a cost of $11 billion, which will come at a physical, economic and productivity cost of 1,000 hectares of prime farming land at significant personal cost to farmers and the federal budget bottom line, and Labor need to outline exactly how much more land will be needed around the nation.

Collectively, Labor’s renewables experiment delivers a double blow – economic and environmental.

Economically, during the worst cost-of-living crisis in decades, Labor are spending untold amounts of taxpayers’ money to encourage foreign-owned companies to come here, purchase productive farming land to put farmers out of business, and China are benefitting from the supply of panels and components.

Environmentally, solar panels will decimate the on-shore and off-shore environment and will eventually need to be decommissioned and disposed of at end of life.

Australians need to be able to quantify this cost.

The unprecedented riots come after years of growing community protests against the migration that is impoverishing Irish people with rising rents and flatlining wages.

So far, none of the established Irish political parties have sought to curb or reduce the impact of migration on Ireland’s people.

“At the risk of sounding like a bleeding-heart lefty, that [riot] an expression of the disconnect that has been festering amongst disadvantaged young men for a long time,” reported an anti-establishment Irish news outlet, Gript.ie, which added:

But the media, like the government and the Oppositon, were eager to change the conversation, and Dublin city centre being set on fire gave them perfect cover to do so. So the usual nonsense about the ‘far-right’ started immediately, and the front pages are full of those photographs this morning.

The government offered a very different view.

“This is not about immigration,” Justice Minister Helen McEntee declared Thursday night. “These are criminals and thugs who have come into our city center and have used a horrific attack on innocent children for their own gain.”

The media can’t tell you that the stabber was allegedly an Algerian Muslim and so it also can’t explain why people might be rioting. The result is a ‘Pravda’ like story in which you can only understand things by reading between the lines and inverting the official denial.

Irish police said they weren’t treating the case as terror-related, adding that a man in his 50s, who was also hospitalized with serious injuries, is a “person of interest.” No further details about the man’s identity were released by authorities.

If you’re an average person, this whole story makes no sense. Someone stabs some kids and people riot. But if you’re versed in reading Pravda journalism, you understand that the man’s identity is very important… because the media and the authorities aren’t telling you who he is.

And the one thing the media is telling you, that the case is not terror-related, should be viewed with suspicion.

The level of media censorship is so extreme as to make it impossible to understand what’s going on.

Ireland’s non-nationals comprise a whopping 20% of the population.

The tinder box of immigration blew open Thursday with a mass riot in Dublin following the stabbing of a number of young children outside a school near the main street.

The alleged perpetrator is foreign-born but still a citizen.

The riots have, so far, led to more than 30 arrests and a number of stores destroyed.

Once a source of massive emigration to the United States, the Emerald Isle is now the destination of choice for Ukrainian refugees and other nationalities seeking a better life — and better welfare entitlements.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ireland had a surge of 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.

Ukrainian refugees receive more than $200 a week from the Irish state — the most generous supplement provided by any European country.

Last year, more than 13,000 people from non-Ukrainian origin entered Ireland, a 400% spike over 2021.

A large portion of new applicants hail from Georgia, a country deemed “safe” by Georgia’s ambassador in Dublin.

This has turned an already explosive housing shortage into a catastrophe.

All these factors culminated in the horrific riots this week as hundreds of inner-city residents torched the streets in what the Prime Minister Leo Varadkar described as “huge destruction by a riotous mob.”

Buses, rail carriages and police cars were burned alongside an orgy of destruction and looting.

Dublin’s “fair city where the girls are so pretty” (as the famous Irish band the Dubliners proclaimed) was turned on its head as a Foot Locker and several other stores were burned and raided.

Rioters even hijacked a bus for reckless joyriding.

Police chiefs have been quick to blame “far right” anti-immigrant elements.

Yet public frustration with homelessness, joblessness, immigration, lack of law and order and anti-social behavior have been breeding a revolt by the urban underclass.

Ireland has seen a surge in anti-immigration protests in recent years as the large influx of migrants has sparked clashes with already deprived communities and rural enclaves.

That includes incidents of arson, such as the deliberate torching of centers used to house migrants.

Ireland’s authorities are now in panic about immigration, issuing last-minute promises about revoking generous welfare handouts for Ukrainians.

Their bigger problem: An election looms next year amid a dire shortage of houses for the young.

Irish youths are swinging to the Sinn Fein opposition political party, which was at one point the political wing of the terrorist Irish Republican Army.

Mainstream or center-led parties are in a panic about a Sinn Fein voting surge, as in 2020.

Commentary with vague but menacing tones about the “far right” masks the fact there is no political representation of serious conservative opinion in the Irish Parliament.

The speed with which the rioters took control of the main thoroughfare is bound to raise questions.

Irish police are afraid to use water cannons and tear gas, unlike other European countries and the United States; it took them more than four hours to subdue the rioters.

Plus, police morale is very low due to pointless virtue-signaling such as “hate speech” initiatives.

More than 90% of ordinary police officers recently voted “no confidence” in the country’s top law-enforcement officer.