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Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features SUBSCRIBE TODAY The same digital infrastructure used by Israel's military in Gaza has been quietly coded into the design of Gaza's proposed post-war administration, Byline Times can reveal. Poised to profit are the very American tech giants backing President Donald Trump, who plans to send US troops to Israel to monitor the new Gaza ceasefire. A Byline Times review of the leaked Gaza International Transitional Authority (GITA) framework, procurement guidance documents, and FEC filings shows that its digital-governance backbone - covering identity, border control, aid logistics and donor coordination - matches the Oracle-Palantir technology 'stack' of digital technologies currently used in Israel's defence network. They further suggest that the GITA board structure is planned to allow this stack an easy entry-point into reconstruction contracts. The plan was drafted by the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), whose biggest financial backer is Larry Ellison, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of tech giant Oracle Corporation. Since 2021, the institute received donations or pledges of at least £257 million from the Larry Ellison Foundation, an amount that dwarfs all other donors combined. The funding has enabled TBI to expand across Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, embedding consultants in government ministries. TBI insists that Ellison's money is "ring-fenced" for social and climate programmes. Yet Ellison's dominance in TBI's revenue stream makes such separation largely theoretical. Ellison himself is a Trump supporter and Republican Party megadonor, who has given tens of millions of dollars to the party and embedded Oracle across the American federal government following extensive lobbying. Oracle is also poised to oversee TikTok's US algorithm after the completion of its US sale, under Trump's deal with China. Ellison has close ties to fellow pro-Trump billionaire Peter Thiel, through a little-known partnership between Oracle and Palantir, the surveillance and defence-analytics firm co-founded by Thiel. Both companies have directly supported Israel's military operations in the Gaza Strip. But the same companies are also in prime position to profit from the technocratic management of Gaza after the war. The leaked draft first obtained by Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz outlines a sweeping post-war system: a unified civil registry and digital identity platform; centralised border and customs management; data-driven humanitarian logistics for aid and reconstruction; and an interoperable digital-governance backbone connecting donor agencies and local authorities. These mirror the operational domains of the Palantir-Oracle technology stack. The Ellison-Thiel Technological Axis In April 2024 Oracle and Palantir announced a deep "strategic partnership" to deliver "mission-critical AI solutions to governments and businesses." It was a relationship nearly a decade in the making - back in 2017 Ellison had held exploratory talks with Peter Thiel about acquiring Palantir outright. By July, Palantir and Oracle jointly unveiled deployment guides showing its Foundry and AI platforms running on Oracle's sovereign, government and "air-gapped" clouds, tailored for national security clients. In June 2025 Oracle launched its Defence Ecosystem including "Palantir for Builders." Palantir has long become a cornerstone of Western military data infrastructure, and in January 2024 the company had announced its own "strategic partnership with Israel's Ministry of Defense" to supply operational software for the Gaza campaign. Palantir technology has also been instrumental in Israel Defence Force (IDF) AI targeting in Gaza. Ellison's Oracle had made parallel moves. Through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's (OCI) Jerusalem Region launched in 2021 - a sovereign data centre built "to ser...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features SUBSCRIBE TODAY It's taken a long time but Keir Starmer's Government has finally admitted that Brexit has been a disaster for the UK. "There is no doubt that the impact of Brexit has been severe and long-lasting", Rachel Reeves told Sky News, in her first big admission that leaving the EU has badly hit the UK economy. This admission has been a long time coming. For years Labour's strategy has been to suggest that they could seize the "opportunities" of leaving the EU in order to "Make Brexit Work". Yet with polls showing support for Brexit at all time lows, and support for "Mr Brexit" Nigel Farage at all time highs, Downing Street have decided to start linking the two. The strategy has a double purpose. Not only do they hope that it will put the blame for the UK's faltering economy onto Farage, but they also hope that it will help pave the way for the tax rises that Reeves today explicitly stated will have to be introduced at her upcoming budget. There are two big problems with this strategy. The first is that it is unclear how effective trying to blame a man for the UK's current economic stagnation, who has never been in Government before, rather than the two parties who were in charge of the country both before leaving the EU and since, will be. If Brexit is to blame for the economy then so are the two parties who voted it through and keep it in place. UPDATE 'Stunned?' Farage's Admission He Knew Nathan Gill but Not His Kremlin Associates Does Not Stand Up to Scrutiny Insiders have told Byline Times it is 'inconceivable' the Reform Leader did not know about his close aide's pro Russian statements Peter Jukes The second and bigger problem is that if Brexit has been such a disaster, which it has, then why is Keir Starmer's Government still so intent on continuing with it? Since entering government the Prime Minister has repeatedly insisted that the UK will never rejoin the EU in his lifetime, while also ruling out any return to the European Customs Union or Single Market either. There have been some slight but welcome tweaks to the UK's trading and regulatory relationship with the EU, with the overall trend under Starmer being a gradual shift towards a more pro-European and internationalist position. Reeves' comments today are undoubtedly a part of that shift. Yet when it comes to making the sort of significant move back towards the EU that would actually make a meaningful difference to Britain's stagnant economy, Starmer remains firmly stuck in the Brexit mud. Making Brexit Worse This is particularly the case when you look at why Brexit has been such a disaster for the UK economy. On this the evidence is clear. By shutting off the UK from its main economic partners in Europe, Brexit put the breaks on British trade, while shifting the costs for this additional friction onto UK consumers. Most experts agree that one of the main reasons inflation remains so stubbornly high in the UK compared to most other European nations is because of the additional trade and Labour costs associated with being outside the EU. The fall in the pound that followed Brexit, combined with the impact of depriving British companies of a skilled and relatively cheap European workforce, means that inflation in the UK is now significantly higher than it otherwise would have been. The result is that even now when forecasts suggest stronger economic growth in the UK in the years to come, most voters will continue to feel worse off because of ever-spiralling prices. The political beneficiary of this will inevitably be the same Reform UK leader the Government is now belatedly trying to shoulder with the blame for it. Of course the obvious solution to this problem would be to remove those inflationary barriers, either through reversing Brexit altogether, or through negotiating re-entry into the Single Market and Cus...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features SUBSCRIBE TODAY The recent investigations into Syria's "stolen children" have uncovered a bleak truth. Documents and testimonies indicate that children "disappeared" under Bashar al-Assad were hidden in so-called orphanages, including facilities run by the global charity SOS Children's Villages. Many were not orphans, but the sons and daughters of detainees and regime opponents. The centres were used to extort and punish their families. Reporting by Lighthouse Reports, the Observer and the BBC details mothers denied answers, records altered, and children's identities changed. The Syria scandal demands answers, but what SOS truly needs is a reckoning with the very foundations of its model of care. SOS is not a small organisation. It is a federation operating in more than 130 countries which presents itself as the world's largest provider of care for children without parental care. With revenues of €1.64 billion in 2023, the organisation operates with a level of power and influence comparable to some governments. That same year it claims to have provided "a range of care options" to about 69,000 children, while supporting 103,500 families to prevent separation, according to its own impact data. At the heart of its system are the "villages", clusters of houses where one SOS "mother" cares for up to ten children. Marketed as "family-like care", these villages are essentially residential institutions. The idea is not new. A century ago, Barnardo's in the UK built "cottage homes" on the same model, later abandoned because children were stigmatised and segregated from community life. SOS has repeated this model for many decades on a global scale. With tens of thousands of children in its care, it holds enormous influence yet operates without democratic oversight. The Syria scandal is not the first time SOS has faced serious questions. In 2021 SOS commissioned independent reviews of historical abuse after allegations surfaced across the federation. The organisation issued apologies and pointed to stronger safeguarding, but survivors and whistleblowers continue to ask who has been held accountable and how decisions were made. The federation highlights reforms including a revised child safeguarding policy, a strengthened code of conduct and the creation of a global ombuds system. Yet these measures raise questions about whether they represent genuine cultural change or reactive crisis management. How Trump's Gaza Peace Plan Could Quickly Crumble The President's America-first, Palestine-last plan for Gaza risks collapsing under its own contradictions, argues Rana Sabbagh Rana Sabbagh The notion of the villages "family-like" care also falls apart under scrutiny. SOS villages are often built on the outskirts of towns, hidden behind walls and fences that cut children off from everyday community life. However well-intentioned, this segregation reinforces stigma and marks children and young people out as different. Inside the houses, a single adult is usually responsible for eight to ten children, and when one caregiver is stretched so thin, older children frequently take on the parenting of younger peers. Evidence shows it piles stress on children and harms their long-term outcomes. A recent review of studies comparing foster and residential care underline what practitioners already know: children thrive best in families rooted in their communities rather than in institutions by another name. In my own research in Thailand, we interviewed children living in children's village settings, some run by SOS and some by the Government. Children described both the strengths and the strains of this model. They appreciated the stability of house mothers, but also spoke about the stigma of village life, feeling marked out at school as being different from their peers. Boys were separated at the age of 14 int...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features SUBSCRIBE TODAY Having heard about my dear old party losing yet another set of marbles, this time deciding to ban journalists (including Byline Times) from its party conference this year, I felt it was my duty to provide some 'insider' coverage of what actually happened there. So, what was the party trying to hide? For a start, the conference centre was very sparsely filled. At times you could literally hear wind wailing through it. The Manchester venue offers two conference halls next to each other, seating 2,000 people each, which can be, as in the past years, be put together around one stage. This year they were unused. A small auditorium with just 700 seats was prepared for the biggest event of the conference on Wednesday morning - the Leader's Speech. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher faced conference halls seating 3,000-4,000 at least, in Brighton, Blackpool and Bournemouth. In 1983, some 5,000 Conservative representatives descended on Blackpool. The scale has shrunk and so has the confidence. Policy Vacuum If the conference centre felt empty of people, so too did it of ideas. This is hardly surprising given there has not been any serious work done on policy for years. Under Johnson, policy became fungible and vague. His slogan "Get Brexit Done" boxed the party into populist single issue politics with simple solutions, in contrast to the complex and hard policy work required for parties to win elections in true liberal democracies. There has already been academic work that explored this astonishing phenomenon. For example, in his essay "Conservative Party Statecraft and the Johnson Government," Hayton argued that Brexit was repurposed as the organising narrative at the expense of substantive governance and so it has proved. Meanwhile, successive party leaders have seemed too scared to ditch immigration as our main obsession, despite its total irrelevance to the electorate's central concern: the state of the economy. If you ask leading economists to come up with the top ten reasons for Britain's economic problems, immigration will not feature in any of them. Some of the long-term weaknesses originate as far back as the global financial crisis of 2008. Some, like Brexit, are more recent. On that basis, the Conservatives could have used their superior economic experience to destroy Reform UK's platform completely. But they do not: the pull of far-right populism and the illusions of easy election gains are still far too powerful. Past Glories In the exhibitors' space at the Manchester conference, three of Margaret Thatcher's three outfits hang behind the glass like old skins, reminding the Party of its metamorphosis into something quite unrecognisable. Her success was built on hard-won policy victories, the result of long days (and nights) spent testing her ideas in argument with other politicians, economists, and experts. Before launching her famous Monetarist Medium-Term Financial Strategy (MTFS) in 1980, Thatcher personally worked with the legendary economist Milton Friedman and her chief economic adviser Sir Alan Walters. She then forced it through against "wet" Conservatives such as Jim Prior and Ian Gilmour, who attacked the money-supply fixation in early-1981 debates. The Right-to-Buy was designed in Keith Joseph's Centre for Policy Studies with Thatcher and her ministers seeing off Conservative rebel attempts to water it down The "Big Bang", the deregulation of the financial services industry and opening the City of London to international banks in 1986 was driven by Nigel Lawson and Cecil Parkinson. Despite the City's protectionist resistance, who wanted to keep fixed commissions and single-capacity dealing, the Government backed the Bank of England's liberalisation timetable and abolished the cartelised rules in one stroke. All that attracted the heavy-weight intellectual ...

Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features SUBSCRIBE TODAY It took Nigel Farage over two weeks to finally respond to Nathan Gill's conviction for eight counts of bribery for taking payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian MP and close associate of one of Putin's closest allies, Viktor Medvedchuk. Speaking on the campaign trail in Caerphilly for a forthcoming Senedd byelection, Farage said he was "stunned" that his close associate had taken bribes: "I'm the only one [in Reform] that really knew him, going back a long way." Despite Farage's concession, after multiple denials from Reform UK, that he was close to Gill, the admission only raises more questions. Farage's claim that he was the "only one" in Reform UK who knew Gill contradicts the information Byline Times has received from former MEPs that Gill and Tice worked closely together during the Brexit Party era. EXCLUSIVE 'Thick as Thieves': Nathan Gill and Nigel Farage's Putin Problem Far from being distant from the Reform UK Leader, insiders told Byline Times that the former MEP convicted of bribery was one of Farage's closest aides, while we reveal how Gill worked on the Kremlin's strategic plan to crush Ukrainian independence with 'Moscow's Man in Ukraine' Peter Jukes Meanwhile, the Reform UK leader's denial that he knew anything about Gill's pro-Russian activities in Ukraine is even more problematic. "I didn't know anything about it, all I knew was that he'd been to Ukraine," he told BBC Wales. "I told him not to go; he defied me and went. I was completely unaware of any statements that he made." Byline Times has been told by various sources over the years that Farage has maintained a close interest in Ukraine's conflict with Russia, as the public record of his comments about it can attest. At a plenary session of the EU Parliament on 16 September 2014, after the invasion of East Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, both Gill and Farage made nearly identical statements claiming an 'uprising' had overthrown the "democratically elected Pro-Russian President", Viktor Yanukovych, and criticising the EU for supporting the Maidan Revolution. But Farage's ignorance of this particular set of pro-Russian influencers around Nathan Gill is even more specific and questionable. Oleh Voloshyn, indicted as Gill's paymaster and loyal servant to Putin's close ally, Viktor Medvedchuk, was married to another employee of the pro-Russian media mogul's TV channels, Nadia Borodi. Also known as Nadia Sass, Borodi worked as a presenter on Medvedchuk's Channel 112 and has been described as a "Russian propagandist" by the French investigative news site Desk Russie On 12 December 2018, within six days of receiving his first bribe to spread pro-Kremlin messages, Nathan Gill addressed a plenary session of the EU Parliament about an EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. He specifically spoke up to criticise the Ukrainian government for threatening to ban Medvedchuk's TV stations Channel 112 and NewsOne for pro-Russian propaganda. "The Ukrainian Government is in the process of banning the two biggest TV channels in the country, Channel 112 and NewsOne, and proper democratic procedures are being ignored four months before an election," he told the Parliament: "How can this be: that the President of Ukraine can potentially close down independent media just before an election?" However, Gill did not declare that he was in the pay of Medvedchuk's associates, who filmed him on Medvedchuk's live station NewsOne. As if that wasn't enough, Gill followed up his major parliamentary intervention with an interview with Channel 112 correspondent Nadia Borodi outside the media wall of the EU Parliament. Wearing the same outfit, but without the microphone, Borodi snapped herself with Farage outside the European Parliament on what appears to be the same day. She retweeted this image on X last year with the message: "I will s...