The far right is gaining power in Europe, fuelled by conspiracies about migrant invasions and a shrinking white population.
But someone else is funding it: powerful tech billionaires in the US, who have their own agenda at play.
Harry Potter star Jessie Cave has bared her soul over an ‘awful’ two years with boyfriend Alfie Brown after their secret split. The actress-turned-author’s candid confession comes after she launched a brand new podcast which sees her dig deep into their personal life – as she revealed her fears that they could end up breaking up again.
The 38-year-old, who shares four children with Alfie, said the ‘terrible’ time also ‘massively affected her career and self confidence’, in a lengthy and emotional Instagram message.
Jessie, who played Lavender Brown in the Harry Potter films, launched the podcast with her other half Alfie, also 38, who is a stand-up comedian known for his Next Up Comedy series.
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Alfie, son of composer Steve Brown and impressionist Jan Ravens, was “cancelled” in 2023 after old footage which showed him using a racist slur in 2015 came to light, something the performer later apologised for.
He and Jessie – who has her own OnlyFans account, secretly split earlier this year, and Jessie has now opened up on the details of that rocky time. Posting a snap of their son watching Alfie’s stage show on TV followed by other pictures of life at work, she began her caption: “My boyfriend was what is/was called ‘cancelled’ in 2023 on the day our youngest son Becker turned one.”
She went on to reveal, “It was the beginning of a terrible year, two years, actually longer…. I won’t make this about me and tell you how AWFUL it has been to watch the person you love most in the world go through so much pain, public shaming and humiliation…
“Or even how it has massively affected my career and self-confidence too – because he has just put his comedy special about it the whole thing out on YouTube, and it’s getting a brilliant and entirely well deserved response… though it’s not been easy at all to get it out there.”
She added: “I’ve watched him hide away and overthink, lose himself. I watched him do Edinburgh shows in tears at midnight, as he first worked the show out, a few months after everything disintegrated.
“I’ve watched his whole life change in the last three years, losing not only his career but with the shocking deaths of his great friend and director Adam Brace and his wonderful dad Steve Brown… two of the most vital and supportive people to him.“
Her emotional post continued: “I’ve watched as people we thought we could trust betray him. I’ve watched as the theatre we used to love and who we both worked with for over a decade cover up posters of him and act like cowards. I’ve stood by him for it all as I will stand by him forever. But I think the saddest thing of all is that I’ve watched him shy away from gigs when it used to be that being onstage was the most natural thing in the world to him.
“I tried to pick photos from during that time for this post but they were all too bleak. But I like the ones I’ve chosen as he looks so uncertain and scared, yet determined to find a way forwards onstage, telling jokes.” But Jessie, who is also a comedian, then revealed that life is a lot better now, with her other half’s show The Last Cancelled Comedian show now available for free on YouTube.
She explained, “Everything is much better now. He’s back onstage again, we are close to happy (if you listen to our podcast you might know what I mean). I find the show very hard to watch, though I’ve seen it over 10 times. I think it’s incredible and I would love people to watch it. Thank you if you already have. I love you Alfie.”
The pair first met in 2012, when they were both doing stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and two years later went on a date after a mutual friend set them up.
After going home together, they didn’t see each other again until four months later, when Jessie realised she was expecting Alfie’s child – Donnie, who arrived in October 2014, followed by their daughter two years later. But in 2018 the couple went through a brutal break-up, which they revealed on their new podcast, Before We Break Up Again (BWBUA)
Speaking with The Sunday Times, Jessie revealed that she’s not sure if the pair “will remain a couple for ever”. In October 2020, they had a second son, and in December 2021 announced they were expecting baby number four.
The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) on Wednesday staged a protest over the spate of insecurity in different parts of the country.
READ ALSO: UPDATED: NLC Protests Over Rising Insecurity In Nigeria
The NLC was joined by different civil society organisations, who carried placards calling for urgent actions to address the security problems.
Demonstrations were recorded in Abuja, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Niger, Taraba and Lagos states, under the watchful eyes of security agents.
But the Edo State council of the NLC withdrew from the nationwide protest against insecurity, saying that the timing of the protest was not appropriate.
It explained that the state serves as a major transit route to several parts of the country, especially during this period of increased travel.
It also noted that the Oba of Benin, Oba Ewuare II, was currently marking the annual Igue festival, which had attracted a large influx of visitors to Benin City.
See more photos from the protest below:
In early November, United States President Donald Trump declared that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria”. In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform, he accused “radical Islamists” of “mass slaughter” and warned that the US “may very well go into that now disgraced country, guns-a-blazing“.
The claim rested on a familiar assumption: that violence in Nigeria is driven by religious ideology, with Christians targeted by Islamist militants.
In mid-November, a new wave of school abductions revealed how perilous parts of northern Nigeria have become for children of all faiths. On November 17, armed men raided Government Girls Comprehensive Secondary School in Maga, Kebbi State, killing a vice principal and abducting 25 students. The school was state-run, and the victims were Muslim girls. One escaped, and the remaining 24 were later rescued.
Days later, in the early hours of November 21, gunmen stormed St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary School in Papiri, Niger State, abducting pupils and teachers. While some captives later escaped or were released, many remained missing into mid-December, leaving families in agonising uncertainty. Parents continue to wait without answers, their desperation and anguish hardening into anger as official assurances fade.
Taken together, these attacks do not reflect a campaign of religious persecution. They follow a pattern that has become increasingly familiar across northern Nigeria: mass kidnapping for ransom, striking opportunistically rather than along religious lines.
Trump’s remarks do more than misdiagnose this violence. They reimagine it. With a few lines of incendiary rhetoric, a country grappling with criminal insecurity and institutional collapse is recast as a front line in a civilisational struggle — a place where force, not reform, becomes the implied solution.
Once framed that way, Nigeria is no longer a society in need of protection and repair, but a battlefield-in-waiting.
That shift matters. When violence is described as religious war rather than organised crime, responsibility moves outwards, solutions become militarised, and foreign intervention begins to sound not reckless but righteous.
This pattern is hardly surprising.
American power has a habit of transforming complex foreign crises into apocalyptic moral dramas, and then acting on the story it has told itself.
Nonetheless, Nigerian church leaders, who know the terrain and the people intimately, reject Washington’s narrative. The Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, Matthew Kukah, a leading figure in Nigeria’s peacebuilding efforts, for example, cautioned against interpreting the violence as religious warfare, pointing instead to criminal motives and state failure.
Analysts concurred, emphasising that attacks fall on Christians and Muslims alike and often follow patterns of banditry and ransom rather than theology.
In Kebbi State, the victims were Muslim schoolgirls taken from a state-run boarding school. In Niger State, the targets were pupils and teachers at a Catholic mission school. Across Zamfara, Katsina, Sokoto, Kaduna, Niger and Plateau states, villages have been raided, farms abandoned and populations displaced.
This violence is driven primarily by profit-driven criminal violence rather than religious belief.
Chronic poverty, rural neglect and youth unemployment — with about 72 percent of rural Nigerians living in multidimensional poverty — fuel recruitment into criminal and armed networks.
True to Bishop Kukah’s analysis, ideology accounts for far less of this violence than predatory criminal behaviour and opportunism. What flourishes instead is organised crime in areas where the state barely functions. The principal threat now stems from armed “bandit” networks rather than a single ideologically driven insurgent movement.
These criminal militias kidnap schoolchildren and commuters for ransom, rustle cattle, extort villages, attack highways and, according to multiple reports, increasingly tap into illegal mining economies, often operating from forest bases across the northwest.
At the same time, Nigeria is not confronting one armed threat but several. Across the northeast, Boko Haram and the ISIL (ISIS) affiliate in West Africa Province (ISWAP) remain active. In the northwest and north-central regions, armed bandit networks dominate. Further south, in the middle belt, militia violence feeds on land disputes and communal tensions.
The outcome has been mass displacement and civilian death on a devastating scale.
Amnesty International estimates that more than 10,000 civilians were killed in armed attacks in the two years after May 29, 2023, when President Bola Tinubu took office. Hundreds of villages have been destroyed or emptied. Thousands of children have abandoned school. In parts of the northwest, attacks are reported to occur weekly and, at times, even daily. More disturbingly, kidnapping now reaches highways and commuter routes in and around the capital, Abuja.
To treat this catastrophe as religious persecution is not just inaccurate but profoundly dangerous. This false framing transforms organised crime and state collapse into a myth of religious war, one that obscures causes and invites disastrous cures.
That is why language matters: it shapes intent and consequences.
When Washington defines domestic collapse as moral failure, Nigeria ceases to be seen as a country in need of reconstruction and starts to look like an international threat to be managed from outside.
Global attention shifts from strengthening local institutions towards employing financial leverage, coercive tools and military force.
Communities become talking points in US politics.
In the process, Nigerian citizens are reduced to abstractions rather than treated as living human beings with rights, and localities like Kebbi and Niger are recast as conflict zones instead of places in need of urgent repair.
When powerful states define a crisis, they begin shaping the outcome.
History offers no reassurance.
From Iraq to Libya, US-led interventions have ushered in untold devastation, leaving in their wake public institutions in ruins and wars without end.
Crucially, every military campaign promised peace and stability. Over time, every mission has killed thousands of civilians and left entire countries in ruins.
If US forces entered Nigeria, even in small numbers, foreign troops would quickly become magnets for attack and targets for retaliation, turning villages and forest communities into potential battlefields.
Communities would be squeezed between bandits and foreign firepower, as criminal networks splinter, rebrand and adapt to the new battlefield.
This is the architecture of the US’s war cycle: an excuse first, force second, and civilian lives last.
Nigeria should not assume immunity from this great power logic, as countries do not become warzones overnight. They are first described as failures, then reframed as threats, before being treated as acceptable targets.
Nigeria’s institutional weakness is no accident. It is rooted in years of protecting assets instead of people, while neglecting policing, justice and basic services.
Colonial and post-colonial rule built systems for natural resource extraction rather than citizen protection. For many decades, often under military rule, securing oil revenue and political control mattered more than effective governance, public welfare or human security.
In the Niger Delta, this approach has meant environmental ruin, loss of livelihoods and institutional neglect — the true cost of protecting wealth before people.
Today, that systemic design persists: the state still defends assets more effectively than lives, while inequality and neglect have deepened civilian exposure.
Even so, Nigeria still has options.
In late November, Tinubu declared a nationwide security emergency, ordered the recruitment of 20,000 additional police officers as part of a broader expansion plan, redeployed VIP escorts to front-line duties, and authorised the deployment and expansion of DSS forest guards to hunt bandits and rebels.
Whether these moves produce results depends not on announcements but on enforcement and extensive reform.
Police and intelligence services must be strengthened and reoriented towards community protection, with proper oversight and resourcing, not merely expanded on paper.
Only about 15 percent of Nigerians say they trust the police, while many view officers as corrupt or violent, leaving communities fearful of both criminals and law enforcement.
Courts and financial regulators need the capacity to dismantle ransom and extortion networks as business systems, not only to chase their gunmen.
Regionally, Nigeria must push for serious cooperation on intelligence sharing, border control and joint operations, or armed groups will continue to move freely across borders with near-total impunity.
From Washington, Nigeria does not need troops or threats.
It requires support to rebuild the institutions that keep citizens safe: forensic capacity, actionable intelligence, training and diplomatic backing that strengthens Nigerian sovereignty instead of overriding it.
With about 61 percent of Nigerians reporting that they have felt unsafe in their communities in recent years, this must be a national wake-up call for Nigeria’s political class.
Only a comprehensive solution can deliver peace and protect besieged communities in northern Nigeria.
Trump must de-escalate. Tinubu must act decisively.
What will determine Nigeria’s future is not foreign firepower, but whether its institutions are rebuilt to protect citizens rather than assets.
Saturday Night Live star, Bill Hader, looked stressed as he was seen for the first time since his ‘tense chat’ with Nick Reiner just hours before Rob Reiner and his wife were found stabbed to death.
In news which has left the whole of Hollywood reeling, Nick Reiner, 32, has been charged with the murder of his dad, 78, and mum, Michelle, 68, who were found stabbed to death by their daughter, Romy, 28, at their home in Los Angeles on Sunday. Before the tragedy, the Reiner family had been at a party at Conan O’Brien’s house, where comedian Bill, 47, is said to have been seen having a ‘disagreement’ with filmmaker, Nick.
READ MORE: Shocking photos released of Rob Reiner’s son being arrested after leaving ‘trail of blood’READ MORE: Rob Reiner took son Nick to party to ‘keep an eye on him’ before creepy behaviour
In photos obtained by the Daily Mail, Bill is seen wearing a black tracksuit and striped sliders. He looked strained while pacing back and forth during a phone call in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
A source told the publication that the SNL star ‘is horrified’ and ‘extremely sad’ over the heartbreaking murders of Rob and his wife Michele and ‘doesn’t want to be connected to this story’. They said: “Bill doesn’t want this tragedy to be made about him, and any disagreement he may have had with Nick, Bill is refusing to talk about it.”
Hours before the tragedy, Nick allegedly ‘stormed off’ from TV host Conan’s Christmas party on Saturday after getting into a tense chat with Bill. “Bill, like everyone who saw Rob and Michele at the party, is horrified over what happened and is extremely sad that what went down, actually went down,” the source said.
They added: “With total respect for Rob and Michele and their family, Bill is not going to talk about his interaction with Nick publicly.”
The insider concluded that Bill “doesn’t want to be connected to this story over a few minute interaction at a party that was meant to be fun and festive”.
Before the gruesome murders, the Reiner family had been at a party at Conan’s house, with Rob reportedly asking the TV host if Nick could come so he could ‘keep an eye on him’. At the party, sources said, the director’s youngest son “exhibited antisocial behaviour,” such as staring at people.
When Harry Met Sally star, Rob, reportedly had a ‘very loud argument’ with Nick at the party – with witnesses claiming Nick, who has a history of substance abuse, was acting erratically at the festive bash, according to TMZ.
A source then claimed to NBC News that Nick ‘interrupted Hader’ at the party and was allegedly left annoyed when the comic told him he was ‘in the middle of a private conversation’. The source claimed after Hader’s alleged comment: “Nick just stood there and stared before storming off.”
Tragically, just hours later, Rob and Michele were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home on Sunday, Dec. 14, their bodies allegedly found by their daughter, Romy – with the LA Fire Department called to the gruesome scene at around 3.30pm local time, to provide medical aid.
Shortly after the tragic news broke, son Nick was arrested 15 miles away from the family home and was pictured, surrounded by police.
He was later charged with the murder of his parents and could face the death penalty if found guilty.
Roman Kemp has candidly discussed a significant change in his family dynamics, revealing that his parents Martin and Shirlie were “scared” by one of his recent endeavours. The 32-year-old TV host recently clinched victory on BBC One’s Celebrity Race Across the World alongside his sister Harleymoon Kemp.
The popular programme saw the siblings embark on a 33-day, 5,900km (3,600 mile) journey across Central America, armed with a budget of just £950 per person and without mobile phones. They managed to cross the finish line a mere two minutes before Strictly Come Dancing’s Molly Rainford and her fiancé Tyler West.
Six hours later, Ani Rani and her father, Bal, secured third place. Derry Girls star Dylan Llewellyn and his mum Jackie came in fourth, having to bow out of the competition due to dwindling funds.
The final episode, which aired last week, featured the contestants navigating a 1,000km route from Medellín to the Guajira Peninsula in Colombia.
Prior to participating in the show, Roman, known for his appearances on The One Show, and Harleymoon confessed they weren’t as close as they’d like, with their hectic careers limiting their time together. However, he disclosed that his sister “saved” him with a phone call during a mental health crisis, reports the Manchester Evening News.
Roman, who has been transparent about his struggles with depression and PTSD, shared: “I don’t know if I ever have actually spoken to Harley about that call. What I do know is that the conversation between my mum and Harley might have saved my life on that day.”
In a chat with the BBC prior to the show, 36 year old Harleymoon shared: “One of the main things for me, was just being able to spend that time with Roman, we haven’t lived together since we were 15 years old. So, we obviously love each other, brother and sister, but we don’t hang out just us. We don’t get time, Roman’s got a busy schedule, I’ve got a busy schedule.
“I think sometimes when you are in that family dynamic, you meet up to drop the dogs off or pick up my house keys and that becomes your dynamic. So being able to have a month that is going to be just me and him… I feel like I’m about to meet Roman again as a person, and I look forward to that so much.”
The siblings now hope their worldwide journey will inspire them to spend more quality time together in the future. During an episode of the You About?
podcast, Harleymoon expressed: “I hope we continue to see each other more. I don’t think we saw each other much at all, other than at mum and dad’s house really, it’s such a different thing. That’s why I was really looking forward to doing the race.”
Roman chimed in: “Now I feel it easier to hang out with you because I know you. I can piece together the bits that I never understood, where I just thought, ‘Is she just being a d**k or is she being extraverted beyond? Why?’ Now I know why, and you’re not, it’s just part of you.”
Before setting off on their adventure, Roman confessed that their parents were “scared” about potential sibling squabbles. In a chat with singer Tom Grennan, he shared: “Harley is like wild, party, fun, like the complete opposite of me. Boring is what I am. It was really interesting, and that’s why I was quite worried about it in that sense, and my mum and dad were so scared about us arguing, but you’ll have to see.”
Born into a family of celebrities, Roman and Harleymoon were exposed to fame from a young age. Their father Martin, 64, travelled the globe as the bassist for Spandau Ballet before transitioning into a successful soap career, notably playing Steve Owen in EastEnders. Their mother Shirlie lent her voice as a backing singer for WHAM!
Despite their famous lineage, both siblings have forged their own paths. Roman made his mark on Capital Radio before transitioning to television.