They have not yet provided us with a date for these further works.

There was no claim of responsibility for the deadliest bombing in the country since the foundation of the Islamic Republic in 1979.

The attack, which wounded more than 200 people, came less than 24 hours after the assassination of Hamas’s deputy political leader in a Beirut drone strike.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, vowed a “harsh response” against the “evil and criminal enemies of the Iranian nation”, but stopped short of blaming Israel.

The commander of the external wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps said it was carried out by “the Zionist regime and the United States”.

On Wednesday night, Scotland Yard confirmed that its war crimes team had received more than 40 referrals “in recent weeks”, including from individuals returning from the region.

It is thought the vast majority are allegations of war crimes against Israel. Any relevant information is then passed to the ICC.

In October, two officers were pictured removing posters calling for the release of Israeli hostages. Scotland Yard said they had been acting to defuse local tensions.

Mr Johnson added: “When I was mayor of London I made it clear that we would not import foreign wars or disputes onto the streets of London.

The Met would be better off fighting knife crime in the capital.”

One former senior Cabinet minister said: “This begs the question of why the Met Police have got involved. They have a lot of work to do domestically, while what’s happening in Israel and Gaza is a grey area right now.

“Counter-terrorism reports directly to the Home Secretary, and he would have been briefed on this.

The Home Secretary should have offered guidance on whether this is an appropriate use of resources.”

Gideon Falter, the chief executive of the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism, said: “This poster campaign is utterly surreal.

“At a time when protesters are marching in London every week wearing Hamas-style headbands, shouting genocidal chants, calling for jihad against the Jewish state and inciting violent intifada with apparent impunity, the Met is concerned with acts of terrorism and allegations of war crimes halfway around the world, potentially even in contravention of the stated position of the British Government.

“The first duty and priority of Britain’s police must surely be the safety and well-being of British people in Britain.

Israeli retaliatory strikes on Gaza have claimed the lives of at least 20,000 Palestinians, many of them women and children, and razed vast swathes of the territory.

A spokesman for the Met Police said the force had a duty to assist the ICC. It also said officers were also gathering evidence relating to the Oct 7 attacks, given that British nationals had been victims of them.

In a statement, the force said: “As the UK’s investigative authority for war crimes, counter-terrorism policing – through the Met’s war crimes team – has a responsibility to support ICC investigations. The ICC opened an investigation in 2019 into alleged war crimes in Israel and Palestine.”

The spokesman added that “under the terms of the 1998 Rome Statute, our war crimes team is obliged to support any investigations opened by the ICC that could involve British subjects” and said the posters were put up to meet that obligation.

“With higher volumes of British nationals and UK-based individuals currently returning from Israel, Gaza and nearby countries, we anticipate there may be people who have evidence or relevant information to the ICC investigation,” said the spokesman. “We are therefore signposting people to reporting routes where appropriate.

“The Met’s Counter-Terrorism Command also continues to gather direct information and evidence relating to the terrorist attack in Israel on Oct 7 in support of the UK coronial investigations into British nationals who were killed during those attacks.

“At this time, there is no UK-based investigation by the war crimes team linked to the current events in the Middle East.”

The Met said it was “working round the clock” to identify suspected “terrorism offending” after setting up a task force to investigate potential crimes committed online and during protests.

Back in 2008-09, a sharp rise in the working-age population through migration kept Australia out of recession even as the rest of the world collapsed into a post-global financial crisis torpor.

It ensured that Australia’s record run of economic expansion from 1991 kept going until 2020, when the pandemic changed everything.

In the short term, the extra demand from more people has been buoying up price inflation while the Reserve Bank has been pushing it down.

But over time, migration eases labour and skills shortages that would prolong inflation.

Jobs beget more jobs, and it is shortages of labour, skills and talent that will stifle our prospects in the long term.

That helps ensure that a bigger economy is also a better economy for most Australians.

Joblessness is set to inevitably rise from its record post-lockdown lows, but the reason why Australian CEOs are generally optimistic about businesses is the resilience of job numbers.

For most mainstream Australians, the most tangible aspect of a decent economy is having a job.

Yet even if Australia gets away with at worst only a technical recession of two negative quarters, as most economists suggest it will, the economy at the kitchen-table level will still feel tighter.

Labor’s migration review did something to take the steam out of the issue, but the review also caved in to union demands to control the arrival of tradespeople.

And the Coalition has tried to use last year’s catch-up to demonstrate that Labor has lost control of the borders.

It is in housing where the angst over migration appears to be highest, and where rising rents are also behind stubbornly persistent services inflation.

But this is not new.

In successive resources booms from 2003, capital flowed into new mining development, drying up the investment needed in the cities to house the new population drawn in by the growth.

The result was continuous political panics over housing affordability and traffic congestion, with state governments all too willing to scapegoat migration.

That history is being repeated, with home builders competing for materials and labour with the huge state government infrastructure investment programs, which are essential if cities are to work – but which in Queensland, for example, have pushed up construction costs by 40 per cent.

It’s really a problem of success – but it is happening again because we have not learned the lessons of earlier migration and job booms.

Even if construction costs were still normal, Australia remains a land-rich but housing-poor country because it has made building land some of the most expensive in the world through taxes, regulation and slow approvals.

Up to 40 per cent of the cost of a new home is tax, on which state governments depend excessively.

And approvals often rest with local councils that worry more about NIMBY-ish local voters than accommodating the national population.

Crazed ideas like the Greens’ proposals for investment-killing rent controls have at least stung the Albanese government into more action.

But too much of its effort involves throwing money directly at new housing investment.

Some funding, however, is being used to persuade local councils to fast-track lower-risk housing development.

And once mortgage rates start coming down, there will be no shortage of buyers.

However, without more deregulation of a constipated land and housing supply system, house building will still struggle to keep up.

But it must.

Official rates rose, to about 200 basis points above the long-run neutral rate, and inflation started coming down.

At the end of 2023, it looked like inflation was headed back to target in the first half of 2024, and that rate cuts could then begin.

Unemployment remained low, productivity increased, and wages rose.

Happy New Year! If you happen to live in the United States.

In Australia, things look rather different.

Consider the contrasts.

In the US, inflation is 3.1 per cent; in Australia, it’s 5.4 per cent.

Over the past six months, core inflation (the “core personal consumption expenditure deflator”, which strips out the most volatile items) has been 1.9 per cent in the US.

The analogous measure in Australia (monthly CPI excluding volatile items) stands at 5.1 per cent.

Official interest rates in the US are 5.5 per cent, while in Australia they are 4.35 per cent. And that’s relative to a history where Australian rates are typically a percentage point or more higher than they are in the US.

The long-run neutral rate of interest in the US is probably 2.75 per cent. In Australia, it’s more like 3.5 per cent.

It has been pushed by a range of commentators, and by Treasurer Jim Chalmers, and it’s also true that bond markets are tipping at least one rate cut in Australia in 2024. Perhaps all those folks are right, but there are good reasons to be sceptical.

Start with the raw facts. Australia has done less to get inflation under control, and made much less progress than the US (and other countries) in so doing.

Then there’s wages growth in Australia.

We’ve seen a 5.75 per cent increase in the minimum wage, a 15 per cent one-off increase for a quarter of a million aged-care workers.

Private sector wage growth was 4.2 per cent in the third quarter of 2023, putting overall wage growth at 4 per cent.

But let’s be clear about a couple of things.

These increases are not being driven by productivity improvements, and wage rises in Australia tend to be very sticky because of our bargaining system.

So 4.2 per cent today is a good indication of above 4 per cent increases tomorrow.

And this risks baking in above-target inflation increases.

Indeed, elevated inflation in the services sector arguably already reflects this.

Taking all this together, a more plausible scenario for Australia in 2024 is that interest rates do not fall – and if anything may rise a little more to get inflation under control.

Reserve Bank of Australia governor Michele Bullock certainly seems to have a laser focus on getting inflation back inside the target band.

This is a good thing.

We may achieve a “soft landing” in the technical sense of not having an official recession in 2024, but per capita economic growth is already going backwards.

And if inflation does get back to 2.5 per cent sometime in 2025, then it’s worth remembering that prices will be about 20 per cent higher than they were before inflation took off.

And that also means that for every $100 you had in savings in 2021, you’ll effectively have $80 in 2025.

Is it any wonder, then, that people are not very happy about the state of the economy?

Inflation getting back to 2.5 per cent doesn’t undo the damage that’s been done to households.

It just means it’s not getting worse.

And in this is a critical lesson for Labor’s next election campaign.

It’s a really, really bad idea to tell people how awesome the economy is doing when the voters don’t feel that way.

It’s an even worse idea when the voters have a good reason to feel that way.

Even if the inflation rate has come down by the next election, prices won’t have.

They will just have stopped going up so fast.

The hard truth is that prices will be a lot higher than when Labor took office, and savings will implicitly be worth a lot less.

That may not be Labor’s fault. But nobody in the history of democracy won an election by telling the voters that it’s their fault.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers must be careful not to overpromise about 2024. And if rates fall elsewhere, but not here, he needs to be prepared to explain why Australia’s experience is different from other countries’.

There is nothing more meaningless and hopeless than this.

A year ago I wrote this: I want to contribute to the most absurd and ridiculous predictions for the future.

No, they still write with indignation, but why isn’t anything being done? For mercy, how can it not be fulfilled?

Everything stipulated by signed contracts and time schedules was delivered in time, even in advance for certain plants,” he stated, adding that “concerning new airplanes, the order for the Su-57 aircraft has increased almost twofold.” “The order is even greater and even more work will have to be done in 2024,” he concluded. UAC delivered 12 Su-57s in 2023 up from just six in 2022, with Slyusar’s statement confirming reports that deliveries for 2024 are scheduled to exceed 20 aircraft.

This increase would make the Su-57 by far the most produced fighter class in Russia, effectively doubling the fleet size over the next 12 months, with second place for manufacturing scale held by the Su-34M which has also seen production expand.

Su-34 annual delivery rates are expected to reach a little under 20 airframes despite no expectation of exports, although the class is estimated to cost well under half as much as the Su-57 to produce.

76 Su-57 fighters are currently on order and expected to be delivered before 2028.

The expansion of production will allow Russia not only to meet this goal, but also to potentially begin exports, with Algeria is widely reported by multiple sources to have already placed orders for an estimated 12-14 aircraft.

A key facilitator of large scale acquisitions is that the Su-57’s lifetime costs are comparable to those of the Su-27, Su-30 and Su-35 it was designed to replace, allowing it to be deployed in place of these fourth generation fighters one-for-one.

This contrasts sharply to the American F-35 and F-22 fifth generation fighters which, due to major overruns in their operational costs and very high maintenance needs, are unaffordable for acquisitions to similarly replace their predecessors.

A key means by which the Su-57 achieved this has been through the use of innovative solutions such as radar absorbent fibreglass to avoid the need for special radar absorbent coatings to be applied as is done on American fighters – which are particularly difficult to apply and maintain.

The president of the University of Pennsylvania – Liz Magill – managed to ride out the backlash for a few days.

Harvard’s president held on rather longer. But this week she, too, finally resigned.

Claudine Gay might have weathered the storm because she had the protective cover of being Harvard’s first black female president, and in an age of identity politics that puts her very close to the top of the oppression Olympics that now dominate everything in American public life.

You can be rich, privileged and the president of Harvard.

But it transpires that you can still claim to be a victim if you are Claudine Gay.

That is what she tried to claim in her resignation statement on Tuesday.

She said that there had been “racial animus” in the attacks on her.

In fact, the attacks started because of her glaring inability to stand up to racism, followed by allegations that Gay’s distinctly meagre academic work, included a significant amount of plagiarism.

The plagiarism story had been around for a while, but after her Congressional embarrassment, a larger number of people – including Leftist media – started to look into these serious allegations.

At first, Harvard tried to ignore them.

Its board embarrassed itself by repeatedly expressing its full support for her.

Ordinarily, basic academic failings like seeming to lift whole chunks of work – including acknowledgements – from the works of others would have seen a student censured.

But not the Harvard president, apparently.

Finally it became too much.

Gay’s resignation letter on Tuesday could have confessed to her failings and apologised.

Nikole Hannah-Jones (who initiated the New York Times’s lamentably ahistorical “1619 Project”) claimed something similar.

She said in the wake of Gay’s resignation that “Academic freedom is under attack.

Racial justice programs are under attack. Black women will be made to pay.”

In its coverage of Gay’s resignation, even the BBC claimed that the embattled former president had been a victim of America’s “campus culture wars”.

And that the idea that identity politics trumps academic rigour is some kind of phantasm from the fevered imagination of the Right.

The trouble is that identity politics does trump academic rigour in the modern American academy.

Gay’s own appointment last year was testimony to this.

Nearly all of these are about the usual modern American sociology obsessions about race and status.

It is an embarrassingly thin output for anyone expecting any academic preferment.

The idea that someone with such paltry achievements could ever have risen to be president of Harvard would until recently have been preposterous.

The very idea is ridiculous.

But it doesn’t mean that the Left in America and further afield will not continue to excuse Gay.

The truth is that as well as being a moral catastrophe, she was a walking disaster for Harvard.

It was high time she went.

But nobody should feel sorry for her.

The crash was the first loss of an Airbus A350, a model that entered service in 2015, and first complete destruction by fire of an airliner made largely from carbon fibre, a material increasingly used in aerospace.

“The JAL A350 is the first hull loss of a composite airliner and the first by fire,” noted Scott Hamilton, head of consultancy and news site Leeham News. “Investigators will learn all kinds of lessons from the A350 accident.”

Five of the six people onboard a smaller De Havilland Dash-8 Japan Coast Guard aircraft that collided with the JAL plane died.

While the cause of the accident and the exact sequence of events remains under investigation by the Japan Transport Safety Board, police and other official agencies, experts said the evacuation of the 367 passengers and 12 crew from the JAL plane was remarkable.

Early indications suggest the intercom system between the flight deck and the cabin had broken down following the collision while only three of the eight exit doors were available for evacuation given the fire on the outside of the aircraft.

“It was a good outcome but the evacuation scenario was high risk,” said Ed Galea, a professor at the University of Greenwich in London, who specialises in fire safety. He noted that the nose was also angled downwards, making it harder to use the inflatable slides.

“In these circumstances, every second counts.”

Modern aircraft are required to prove to regulators that they can evacuate all passengers and crew within 90 seconds using half the number of the available exits. Aircraft cabins are designed to prevent flames from spreading for as long as possible.

“The most important part, whether the plane is aluminium or carbon fibre, is that you have protection for many, many minutes from external heat,” said Bjorn Fehrm, an aeronautical engineer and an analyst at Leeham News. “In this case, the carbon fibre is giving that heat-shield protection.”

Airbus said that composite materials made up 53 per cent of the model in question, the A350-900.

The plane maker said tests had shown that composite structures offered a similar level of fire resistance as aluminium, typically used in older aircraft.

While composite materials are not new to the aerospace industry, their use has increased significantly in recent years as both Airbus and Boeing have focused on reducing weight and increasing fuel efficiency.

Leeham’s Hamilton pointed out that fires have previously occurred on two Boeing 787s with similar amounts of composite materials.

In January 2013, a battery overheated and started a fire in a JAL aircraft parked at Boston airport after a flight from Tokyo. In July of the same year, an Ethiopian 787 parked in London suffered fire damage caused by a short circuit at the emergency locator transmitter. Both planes were heavily damaged but repaired.

Aviation experts said the images of the burning JAL A350 showed that the composite structure appeared to withstand the heat for a long time.

Aluminium melts at about 600 degrees Celsius and, although composites would burn at a lower temperature, they reacted differently to fire, said Emile Greenhalgh, professor of composite materials at Imperial College in London.

“As the material burns, all the flammable material forms a char layer?.?.?.[so] you end up with a barrier against the progression of fire.”

The accounts from both crew and passengers on how they pulled off the evacuation in such demanding circumstances should also provide lessons on best practice and safety at airports, experts said.

Although everyone on the JAL plane survived, Galea at the University of Greenwich questioned the efficacy of the 90-second evacuation tests because they often bore little resemblance to real-life accidents.

In a deposition, Maxwell appears to say that Andrew visited Epstein’s Island in the US Virgin Islands. Epstein has been accused of abusing numerous girls on this island.

“Were you present on the island when Prince Andrew visited?” Maxwell was asked.

She responded in the affirmative and, when asked how many times, she said: “I can only remember once.” When asked if there were any girls on the island at that time, Maxwell insisted: “There were no girls on the island at all. No girls, no women, other than the staff who work at the house.”

One document included a deposition given by Johanna Sjoberg, whom Maxwell allegedly procured for the purpose of performing sex acts on Epstein.

Sjoberg said in her deposition that Epstein “said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls”.

In 2019, Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña denied claims made about Clinton’s involvement with Epstein and wrote in a statement on Twitter that “President Clinton knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.”

Clinton notably had an 18-month long affair with Monica Lewinsky, his then 22-year-old intern, during his first term as president. He was 49 years old.

Sjoberg also said that the late musician Michael Jackson was at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion, and that she met the famed magician David Copperfield.

“Did you ever meet anybody famous when you were with Jeffrey? she was asked. “I met Michael Jackson … at [Epstein’s] house in Palm Beach.”

Asked whether she massaged Jackson, Sjoberg said: “I did not.”

As for Copperfield, Sjoberg said that he attended dinner at one of Epstein’s homes and “he did some magic tricks”.

“Did you observe David Copperfield to be a friend of Jeffrey Epstein’s?” she was asked. Sjoberg replied in the affirmative.

“Did Copperfield ever discuss Jeffrey’s involvement with young girls with you?” she was also asked. “He questioned me if I was aware that girls were getting paid to find other girls.”

Copperfield, she said in the deposition, didn’t tell her any specifics of that question. “Did he say whether they were teenagers or anything along those lines?” she was also asked. “He did not.”

Donald Trump, whose association with Epstein has been widely reported, was also mentioned in the documents; the former US president is not accused of wrongdoing. In Sjoberg’s deposition, she said that they went to one of Trump’s casinos in Atlantic City when a storm prevented Epstein’s plane from landing in New York City.

“Jeffrey said, Great, we’ll call up Trump and we’ll go to – I don’t recall the name of the casino, but – we’ll go to the casino.” Asked at one point whether she ever gave Trump a massage, Sjoberg said “no”.

The deposition also includes Sjoberg’s account of allegedly meeting Prince Andrew at Epstein’s New York home. “Ghislaine asked me to come to a closet. She just said, Come with me. We went to a closet and grabbed the puppet, the puppet of Prince Andrew,” she said in the deposition.
“And I knew it was Prince Andrew because I had recognized him as a person. I didn’t know who he was. And so when I saw the tag that said Prince Andrew, then it clicked. I’m like, that’s who it is.”

Sjoberg and Maxwell then returned to the living room with the puppet. “I just remember someone suggesting a photo, and they told us to go get on the couch. And so Andrew and Virginia sat on the couch, and they put the puppet, the puppet on her lap,” Sjoberg recalled. “And so then I sat on Andrew’s lap, and I believe on my own volition, and they took the puppet’s hands and put it on Virginia’s breast, and so Andrew put his on mine.”

Sjoberg said she went to bed shortly thereafter. “Did you hear Ghislaine Maxwell tell Virginia to do anything while you were in that room?” she was asked. Sjoberg replied: “No.”

Giuffre, who claimed that Epstein and Maxwell forced her into a sexual encounter with Britain’s Prince Andrew at age 17, had sued the publishing heiress for defamation after claiming the accuser lied. Giuffre settled her lawsuit against Maxwell in 2017.

In 2021, Giuffre sued Prince Andrew over the alleged sexual abuse. The suit settled in early 2022. Andrew has always strenuously denied any wrongdoing. As part of the settlement, he agreed to donate to Giuffre’s victims’ rights charity.

The documents’ release is among several tranches of filings in Giuffre’s civil case that were unsealed following the Miami Herald’s years-long effort to make them public. Giuffre did not make allegations of wrongdoing against Clinton.

In one set of documents released in July 2020, Giuffre claimed that Maxwell participated in Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls. These documents were released several weeks after Maxwell’s arrest for her involvement in Epstein’s sex trafficking.

Giuffre claimed that Maxwell lured her into Epstein’s perverse orbit under the false pretense of work as a professional masseuse. Instead, Giuffre said, Maxwell “trained me as a sex slave”, according to a filing in that set of unsealed court papers.

The documents released in July 2020 also provided insight into Maxwell and Epstein’s relationship.

In a January 2015 email exchange, Epstein told Maxwell: “You have done nothing wrong and i woudl [sic] urge you to start acting like it … go outside, head high, not as an esacping [sic] convict. go to parties. deal with it.”

A large collection of documents in Giuffre’s civil case were also unsealed in August 2019. Those papers included accusations, since denied, that global leaders were participants in Epstein’s trafficking ring.

Epstein was arrested on 6 July 2019 for sex trafficking. He was found dead in his jail cell on 10 August of that year; authorities determined that he hanged himself.

Maxwell was sentenced in June 2022 to 20 years imprisonment. She has maintained her innocence and is appealing her conviction.

Asked for comment on the documents’ unsealing, Maxwell’s attorneys, Arthur L Aidala and Diana Fabi Samson, said: “Ghislaine Maxwell took no position on the court’s recent decision to unseal documents in Giuffre v Maxwell as these disclosures have no bearing on her or her pending appeal.”

Bubble curtains are being “widely” used in Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

The BBC is happy to report it now there are good results from a study, but apparently they weren’t too enthused in 2013 about telling us how pile -driving during construction can permanently destroy hearing in marine mammals.

Indeed, ocean noise is such a problem the pile-driving teams use acoustic deterrents — loud noises designed to scare marine life away before they get started on the industrial noise.

How bubble curtains protect porpoises from wind farm noise

As huge offshore wind farms spread across Europe’s North and Baltic seas, efforts grow to buffer the impact on wildlife.

Over the past decade, a curious invention has spread across Europe’s northern seas. It’s called a big bubble curtain, it works a bit like a giant jacuzzi, and it helps protect porpoises from the massive underwater noise caused by wind farm construction.

The original pile-driving in that study was actually done around 2009. If intrepid investigators from the BBC cared about marine life for real and investigated, they could possibly have reported it 14 years ago and before another 4,000 wind turbines were hammered in to the sea floor.

Do dolphins matter or don’t they?