BERLIN — An extreme left-wing group has claimed responsibility for an arson attack that caused a blackout affecting about 45,000 households and more than 2,000 businesses in Berlin over the weekend. “This isn’t just arson or sabotage. It’s terrorism,” Berlin’s Mayor Kai Wegner said Sunday of the attack, which burned through a cable connected to one of the city’s largest gas-fired power plants. Members of the so-called Vulkan Group, known for similar attacks on critical infrastructure in the past, claimed responsibility for the sabotage in a letter titled: “Cutting off power to those in power,” which was published online. “In the greed for energy, the earth is being depleted, sucked dry, burned, ravaged, burned down, raped, destroyed,” the group, which is listed by Berlin’s intelligence services as a left-wing extremist organization, said in the letter. “The aim of the action is to cause significant damage to the gas industry and the greed for energy,” its authors wrote. The group has used similar means to communicate in the past, and Berlin police believed the letter to be genuine. With temperatures below freezing in the German capital, schools and kindergartens in the southern districts affected by the power outage remained closed on Monday morning. Around 30,000 households and approximately 1,700 businesses were still without power on the third day of the power outage. Full restoration of supply is expected to take until Thursday. The city’s energy senator, Franziska Giffey told POLITICO’s Berlin Playbook Podcast on Monday that Berlin’s critical infrastructure needed better protection. “There is a great deal of public information about our critical infrastructure that we need to publish and make transparent. In the future, we will have to consider how we can handle this differently and how we can protect ourselves even better against these issues,” she said. In a separate interview with Berlin’s public broadcaster rbb, Giffey said prosecutors at the national level would need to assist with the investigation. “The question is, are these just left-wing activist groups acting on behalf of ideology, or is there more to it than that? That absolutely must be investigated,” said the politician from the center-left Social Democratic Party that governs Berlin in a coalition with Wegner’s conservatives. “This is not just an attack on our infrastructure, but also an attack on our free society.” Josh Groeneveld and Rixa Fürsen contributed to this report.

At least 12 people are dead after two gunmen opened fire at Sydney’s famed Bondi Beach in an attack authorities said targeted the Jewish community during a major holiday celebration. One of the shooters is among the dead while the second is in a critical condition, local police said in a statement. More people have been injured, among them two police officers, authorities said. Police are investigating whether any other assailants were involved. “This attack was designed to target Sydney’s Jewish community, on the first day of Hanukkah,” said Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales. “What should have been a night of peace and joy celebrated in that community with families and supporters, has been shattered by this horrifying evil attack.” The attack occurred as hundreds of members of Sydney’s Jewish community gathered in Bondi Beach for the annual Hanukkah celebration, among the biggest events of the local Jewish calendar. The event, attended by many families, features the lighting of the menorah, a petting zoo, a children’s climbing wall and other activities. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said his “thoughts are with every person affected.” Israel’s President Isaac Herzog called the attack terrorism: “Our hearts go out to our Jewish sisters and brothers in Sydney who have been attacked by vile terrorists as they went to light the first candle of Chanukah.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen sent “heartfelt condolences” and said “Europe stands with Australia and Jewish communities everywhere,” in a statement. “This appalling act of violence against the Jewish community must be unequivocally condemned,” said Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat. The incident is Australia’s worst mass shooting in decades, after the nation’s gun laws were tightened in response to a 1996 massacre in the state of Tasmania.

President Donald Trump intends for the U.S. to keep a bigger military presence in the Western Hemisphere going forward to battle migration, drugs and the rise of adversarial powers in the region, according to his new National Security Strategy. The 33-page document is a rare formal explanation of Trump’s foreign policy worldview by his administration. Such strategies, which presidents typically release once each term, can help shape how parts of the U.S. government allocate budgets and set policy priorities. The Trump National Security Strategy, which the White House quietly released Thursday, has some brutal words for Europe, suggesting it is in civilizational decline, and pays relatively little attention to the Middle East and Africa. It has an unusually heavy focus on the Western Hemisphere that it casts as largely about protecting the U.S. homeland. It says “border security is the primary element of national security” and makes veiled references to China’s efforts to gain footholds in America’s backyard. “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity — a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region,” the document states. “The terms of our alliances, and the terms upon which we provide any kind of aid, must be contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence — from control of military installations, ports, and key infrastructure to the purchase of strategic assets broadly defined.” The document describes such plans as part of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. The latter is the notion set forth by President James Monroe in 1823 that the U.S. will not tolerate malign foreign interference in its own hemisphere. Trump’s paper, as well as a partner document known as the National Defense Strategy, have faced delays in part because of debates in the administration over elements related to China. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed for some softening of the language about Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations. Bessent is currently involved in sensitive U.S. trade talks with China, and Trump himself is wary of the delicate relations with Beijing. The new National Security Strategy says the U.S. has to make challenging choices in the global realm. “After the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy elites convinced themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country. Yet the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests,” the document states. In an introductory note to the strategy, Trump called it a “roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history, and the home of freedom on earth.” But Trump is mercurial by nature, so it’s hard to predict how closely or how long he will stick to the ideas laid out in the new strategy. A surprising global event could redirect his thinking as well, as it has done for recent presidents from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. Still, the document appears in line with many of the moves he’s taken in his second term, as well as the priorities of some of his aides. That includes deploying significantly more U.S. military prowess to the Western Hemisphere, taking numerous steps to reduce migration to America, pushing for a stronger industrial base in the U.S. and promoting “Western identity,” including in Europe. The strategy even nods to so-called traditional values at times linked to the Christian right, saying the administration wants “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” and “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes.” It mentions the need to have “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.” As POLITICO has reported before, the strategy spends an unusual amount of space on Latin America, the Caribbean and other U.S. neighbors. That’s a break with past administrations, who tended to prioritize other regions and other topics, such as taking on major powers like Russia and China or fighting terrorism. The Trump strategy suggests the president’s military buildup in the Western Hemisphere is not a temporary phenomenon. (That buildup, which has included controversial military strikes against boats allegedly carrying drugs, has been cast by the administration as a way to fight cartels. But the administration also hopes the buildup could help pressure Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to step down.) The strategy also specifically calls for “a more suitable Coast Guard and Navy presence to control sea lanes, to thwart illegal and other unwanted migration, to reduce human and drug trafficking, and to control key transit routes in a crisis.” The strategy says the U.S. should enhance its relationships with governments in Latin America, including working with them to identify strategic resources — an apparent reference to materials such as rare earth minerals. It also declares that the U.S. will partner more with the private sector to promote “strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region.” Such business-related pledges, at least on a generic level, could please many Latin American governments who have long been frustrated by the lack of U.S. attention to the region. It’s unclear how such promises square with Trump’s insistence on imposing tariffs on America’s trade partners, however. The National Security Strategy spends a fair amount of time on China, though it often doesn’t mention Beijing directly. Many U.S. lawmakers — on a bipartisan basis — consider an increasingly assertive China the gravest long-term threat to America’s global power. But while the language the Trump strategy uses is tough, it is careful and far from inflammatory. The administration promises to “rebalance America’s economic relationship with China, prioritizing reciprocity and fairness to restore American economic independence.” But it also says “trade with China should be balanced and focused on non-sensitive factors” and even calls for “maintaining a genuinely mutually advantageous economic relationship with Beijing.” The strategy says the U.S. wants to prevent war in the Indo-Pacific — a nod to growing tensions in the region, including between China and U.S. allies such as Japan and the Philippines. “We will also maintain our longstanding declaratory policy on Taiwan, meaning that the United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait,” it states. That may come as a relief to Asia watchers who worry Trump will back away from U.S. support for Taiwan as it faces ongoing threats from China. The document states that “it is a core interest of the United States to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine,” and to mitigate the risk of Russian confrontation with other countries in Europe. But overall it pulls punches when it comes to Russia — there’s very little criticism of Moscow. Instead, it reserves some of its harshest remarks for U.S.-allied nations in Europe. In particular, the administration, in somewhat veiled terms, knocks European efforts to rein in far-right parties, calling such moves political censorship. “The Trump administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the [Ukraine] war perched in unstable minority governments, many of which trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition,” the strategy states. The strategy also appears to suggest that migration will fundamentally change European identity to a degree that could hurt U.S. alliances. “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European,” it states. “As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” Still, the document acknowledges Europe’s economic and other strengths, as well as how America’s partnership with much of the continent has helped the U.S. “Not only can we not afford to write Europe off — doing so would be self-defeating for what this strategy aims to achieve,” it says. “Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” it says. Trump’s first-term National Security Strategy focused significantly on the U.S. competition with Russia and China, but the president frequently undercut it by trying to gain favor with the leaders of those nuclear powers. If this new strategy proves a better reflection of what Trump himself actually believes, it could help other parts of the U.S. government adjust, not to mention foreign governments. As Trump administration documents often do, the strategy devotes significant space to praising the commander-in-chief. It describes him as the “President of Peace” while favorably stating that he “uses unconventional diplomacy.” The strategy struggles at times to tamp down what seem like inconsistencies. It says the U.S. should have a high bar for foreign intervention, but it also says it wants to “prevent the emergence of dominant adversaries.” It also essentially dismisses the ambitions of many smaller countries. “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations,” the strategy states. The National Security Strategy is the first of several important defense and foreign policy papers the Trump administration is due to release. They include the National Defense Strategy, whose basic thrust is expected to be similar. Presidents’ early visions for what the National Security Strategy should mention have at times had to be discarded due to events. After the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush’s first-term strategy ended up focusing heavily on battling Islamist terrorism. Biden’s team spent much of its first year working on a strategy that had to be rewritten after Russia moved toward a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The EU is adding Russia to its blacklist of countries at high risk of money laundering and financing terrorism, according to two EU officials and a document seen by POLITICO. The global watchdog Financial Action Task Force (FATF) suspended Russia as a member after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, but failed to blacklist it, despite evidence presented by the Ukrainian government, because of opposition from countries in the BRICS group of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. EU lawmakers called on the Commission many times to do what FATF was not able to. The Commission committed to complete a review by the end of 2025 to get their support to remove the United Arab Emirates and Gibraltar from the list earlier this year. POLITICO saw a draft of the Russia decision, which will be an annex to the list. In other internal documents, the Commission had said that the assessment was complicated by the lack of information-sharing with Moscow. The EU already has a wide range of sanctions heavily limiting access to EU financial services for Russian firms. The blacklisting is landing as the EU executive is trying to end Belgium’s resistance to using the revenues from Moscow’s frozen assets to fund Ukraine. The move will oblige financial institutions to strengthen due diligence on all transactions and force banks that have not already acted to further de-risk. The EU has usually aligned itself with FATF decisions, but from this year, it has its own Anti-Money Laundering Authority. AMLA will contribute to drafting the blacklist from July 2027. Dutch top official Hennie Verbeek-Kusters, a former chair of the financial intelligence cooperation body Egmont Group, is set to join the AMLA authority executive board after a positive hearing with lawmakers held behind closed doors, one of the EU officials said. A vote on the appointment is due on Dec. 15, said a third official.

LONDON — Three men were arrested Thursday on suspicion of assisting Russia’s foreign intelligence service. The Metropolitan Police arrested the men — aged 48, 45 and 44 — at addresses in west and central London. Searches are ongoing at those addresses as well as another west London address. The capital’s police force said the alleged offenses related to Russia. Counter Terrorism Policing London Commander Dominic Murphy said: “We’re seeing an increasing number of who we would describe as ‘proxies’ being recruited by foreign intelligence services and these arrests are directly related to our ongoing to efforts to disrupt this type of activity. “Anyone who might be contacted by and tempted into carrying out criminal activity on behalf of a foreign state here in the U.K. should think again.”  Murphy added: “This kind of activity will be investigated and anyone found to be involved can expect to be prosecuted and there are potentially very serious consequences for those who are convicted.”  Moscow was put on the enhanced tier of the U.K.’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme in July, meaning anyone working for the Russian state needs to declare their activity or risk jail. Three men were convicted earlier this year after an arson attack at a warehouse containing aid for Ukraine.

The State Department rebuffed a recent ruling from the International Court of Justice on Wednesday, defending Israel on a court opinion that found the Israeli government is obligated to facilitate a stream of aid to Gaza. The ICJ ruling — issued earlier Wednesday — asserted Israel has an obligation under human rights law to allow essential aid to reach Gaza in collaboration with United Nations agencies. In a post on X shortly after, the State Department slammed the decision as “corrupt,” defending both Israel’s and the Trump administration’s actions in the region while also reiterating long-held allegations tying the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees to Hamas. “As President Trump and Secretary Rubio work tirelessly to bring peace to the region, this so-called ‘court’ issues a nakedly politicized non-binding ‘advisory opinion’ unfairly bashes Israel and gives UNRWA a free pass for its deep entanglement with and material support for Hamas terrorism,” the State Department wrote in a statement. “This ICJ’s ongoing abuse of its advisory opinion discretion suggests that it is nothing more than a partisan political tool, which can be weaponized against Americans,” the agency continued. The Trump administration has looked to sever ties with UNRWA due to claims that some of its members were involved in the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks against Israel. The ICJ found Wednesday that Israel “has not substantiated its allegations that a significant part of UNRWA employees ‘are members of Hamas … or other terrorist factions.’” In Wednesday’s ruling, the court said the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services had investigated 18 UNRWA staff members, with the cooperation of Israel, and dismissed nine members who “might have been involved” in the attack. The court said investigators “found either no or insufficient evidence to support the involvement of the other ten investigated persons.” The court also demanded Israel “co-operate in good faith” with the United Nations by providing assistance to the region. “The State of Israel has an obligation under international human rights law to respect, protect and fulfill the human rights of the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including through the presence and activities of the United Nations, other international organizations and third States, in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the court wrote. The court’s advisory opinion outlines other obligations Israel must adhere to as the country continues to take steps toward ending the war, like protecting access to medical services, prohibiting forcible deportations from the region and prohibiting the use of starvation of civilians as “a method of warfare.”

A shooting Wednesday outside the Serbian parliament in Belgrade that left one person injured was a “terrorist attack,” President Aleksandar Vučić said. “He carried out — this is my political assessment, and as a lawyer — an awful terrorist attack on other people and on others’ property; he caused general danger. The final legal qualification of the act will be given by the competent prosecutor’s office,” Vučić said at a press conference shortly after the shooting. In a video shared on social platform X, gunfire is heard and black smoke rises from a fire at a tent camp outside the parliament. The man who was injured is in serious condition and will undergo surgery, according to local media. The tent settlement was erected by supporters of Vučić in front of the parliament during the anti-government, student-led protests that have turned into the largest demonstrations across the country since Slobodan Milošević’s ouster in 2000. “It was a question of time before this would happen … There were countless calls for this,” said Vučić, who has repeatedly accused the protesters of violence. Vučić said that the suspected perpetrator, a pensioner from Belgrade, was arrested. The students, who plan another big protest on Oct. 31, said in a post on X that their strategy “has never been a path of violence.” The protests began last November after a railway station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad, killing 16 people, including two young children, and leaving several others gravely injured. The government denies any blame despite accusations linking the tragedy to a state-run renovation project plagued by shoddy construction and oversight failures.

LONDON — The threat from states such as China is as bad or worse as the threat of terrorism, the head of one of Britain’s top intelligence agencies warned Thursday. Giving his annual threat update speech from MI5 headquarters at Thames House in London, MI5 director general Ken McCallum called for the most profound change in the way British intelligence operates “since 9/11.” His comments come as Westminster continues to be engulfed by questions over the high-profile collapse of a case against two alleged Chinese spies. Both the British government and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have faced scrutiny over the case after the CPS unexpectedly dropped the charges against the two men in question last month. Speaking Thursday, McCallum said his teams are running a “near-record” volume of investigations into terrorism, and have foiled 19 late-stage terrorism attacks since 2020. But he said that threats from states — including China — are now a “second menace of equal or even greater scale,” forcing “the biggest shifts in MI5’s mission since 9/11.” McCallum said that since his update last year state-based threats to the U.K. are “escalating,” with an increase in the number of people being investigated for state threat activity — such as espionage “against our Parliament.” FRUSTRATED THE CASE COLLAPSED Christopher Cash, 30, a former researcher for a Conservative MP, and Christopher Berry, a 33-year-old teacher, both denied allegations that they passed sensitive information to an alleged Chinese intelligence agent between 2021 and 2023. On Wednesday evening the British government published key witness statements from Matthew Collins, the deputy national security advisor, whose evidence was blamed by CPS for not providing enough grounds to prosecute the two men accused of spying for Beijing. Asked how he felt about the collapse of the China prosecution against the two men, McCallum said: “Of course I am frustrated when opportunities to prosecute national security-threatening activity are not followed through.” He added that in this specific event “the activity was disrupted” by MI5 and that his teams have “every right to feel proud” of the work they have done in the case. However he said that it is “far from unprecedented” for his officers to disrupt a threat to national security and for it not to result in a criminal conviction. Asked about Collins, the deputy national security advisor who submitted the witness statements to the CPS, McCallum said he would make a “rare exception” to speak about Collins’ integrity, having worked with him. “I do consider him to be a man of high integrity and a professional of considerable quality,” he said. McCallum was also careful not to criticize the work of the CPS, telling journalists: “Not only am I not a criminal prosecutor, I’m not a lawyer. And so for the same reason that the DPP (Director of Public Prosecutions) presumably wouldn’t stand up and comment on how to run covert intelligence operations, I’m not going to presume to appoint myself a temporary expert in the running of prosecutions.” The decision to replace Britain’s Official Secrets Act with a new National Security Act — pointed to by the current Labour government as a key reason the case collapsed — was praised by McCallum, who said it has “definitely has closed serious weaknesses that we have previously suffered from.” CHINA A WIDER THREAT The MI5 head said the relationship between Britain and China is “complex,” but his agency’s role “is not,” adding that the U.K, needs to become a “hard target” to “all the threats, including China, but not limited to China.” McCallum revealed that in the last week MI5 had “intervened operationally” against China, though this is not believed to be related to alleged spying on Parliament by Beijing. “Do Chinese state actors present a U.K. national security threat? And the answer is, of course, yes they do, every day,” he said. However, the MI5 chief would not “comment on the overall balance of U.K. bilateral foreign policy relationships with China.” “When it comes to China the U.K. needs to defend itself resolutely against security threats and seize the opportunities that demonstrably serve our nation,” he added, pointing that the U.K. and its Five Eyes allies including the U.S. share a “pragmatic approach” and that having a “substantive relationship with China” means Britain is in a “stronger position from which to push back.”

President Donald Trump on Thursday told reporters that “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics,” following the killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. The president, speaking on the South Lawn of the White House as he was heading to New York City, was responding to a reporter who asked what the president’s message was to conservatives who feel targeted by “radical groups.” Trump, who also had some more measured comments about Kirk’s killing during the roughly 10-minute exchange with reporters, said: “We have to be brave in life, in all fairness, we have a life. I probably shouldn’t be out here talking to you in all fairness but we will be brave. And we have a great country. We have radical left lunatics out there and we just have to beat the hell out of them.” The president added in a separate answer that he would urge his supporters to follow a nonviolent path in response to the shooting. “He [Kirk] was an advocate of nonviolence,” Trump said. “That’s the way I’d like to see people respond.” Kirk in the past argued that his message was one of nonviolence and that “Antifa and far-left activists” have forced him to cancel speaking events at college campuses. Trump’s comments come one day after the 31-year-old Kirk was killed in an attack at a college campus event in Orem, Utah, that stunned the nation. Authorities haven’t captured the shooter and a motive for Kirk’s slaying remains unknown. In the wake of the shooting, Trump recorded an address from the Oval Office and distributed on social media, where he praised Kirk and also blamed the “radical left” for his death. He said that the “radical left” compared Kirk to “Nazi’s” and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals and blamed vitriolic rhetoric for the killing of the conservative activist. “This type of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” the president said in the three-minute video. He also said Wednesday night that his administration will find the “organizations that funded and supported” political violence, though he didn’t go into specifics on which groups he was talking about. Trump listed off the assassination attempt on himself last year in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left one audience-member dead, attacks on ICE agents, the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in broad daylight in midtown Manhattan and the 2017 shooting of House GOP leader Steve Scalise at a congressional baseball game. “We have a radical left group of lunatics out there. Just absolute lunatics,” the president said Thursday. “And we’re going to get that problem solved.” During the remarks to reporters Thursday evening, Trump added that authorities have made “big progress” in the investigation into Wednesday’s killing of Kirk. On Thursday morning, Trump announced that he would posthumously award Kirk the medal of freedom.

LONDON — “At what point did we become North Korea?” Nigel Farage asked of the U.K. Wednesday as he took to the grand surrounds of Washington’s House Judiciary Committee chamber — more than 3,500 miles from Westminster. “I come from the land of Magna Carta, I come from a land that gave us the mother of parliaments so it doesn’t give me any great joy to be sitting in America and describing the really awful authoritarian situation that we have now sunk into,” the Reform UK leader lamented to the committee of U.S. lawmakers probing “European threats to American free speech and innovation.” Farage — who is surging ahead in opinion polls in the U.K., and making great domestic play of being a champion of free speech — landed in Washington for his big committee moment with apparently perfect timing. Back home, a furore over the arrest of Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan, detained by police at Heathrow Airport on suspicion of inciting violence with a series of social media posts about transgender people, is brewing. What happened to Linehan could “happen to any American,” Farage told the U.S. lawmakers. The Reform UK leader also raised the case of Lucy Connolly, a mother jailed after pleading guilty to stirring up racial hatred with a social media post in the wake of a deadly knife attack on young girls in Southport, England last year. The case has similarly animated the right in the U.K. Farage’s appearance will do little to calm a narrative — already being pushed by key allies of U.S. President Donald Trump — that free speech is under threat in Europe, and particularly in the U.K. U.S. Vice President JD Vance stunned European leaders in February when he accused the continent’s governments, and what he called EU “commissars,” of being more interested in stifling free speech than in providing security for their citizens. Vance beefed with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the issue in the Oval Office, earning a rebuke from Starmer in full view of President Trump. Just last month, the U.S. State Department issued an unflattering assessment of the U.K.’s free speech record. But some domestic opponents believe Farage is overplaying his hand — and amping up a complex issue in a bid to earn political capital. Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday, Starmer accused the Reform UK leader of lobbying Americans to “impose sanctions on this country to harm working people,” adding that it “cannot get more unpatriotic than that.” Ahead of the hearing The Sun newspaper reported Farage would call for the U.S. to punish countries that restrict free speech with diplomatic and trade penalties, though Farage denied suggesting sanctions “at all, in any way.” Conservative Shadow Housing Secretary James Cleverly also refused to row in behind the Reform leader ahead of his evidence session. “I’ve been to parts of the world where freedom of speech really is curtailed,” Cleverly told GB News, the right-wing network whose pin Farage wore in his evidence session, and which is expanding into the United States. “We’ve got to be careful that we don’t add to what I think is fundamentally a political attack from Nigel Farage toward his own country.” Farage also draw criticism from committee member Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, who argued there was “no free speech crisis in Britain,” highlighting Farage’s own show on GB News. Raskin described the Reform UK leader as a “far-right, pro-Putin politician who leads the U.K. Reform party — a party that has four members out of 650 members in the parliament.” But Claire Fox, a libertarian author and member of Britain’s House of Lords, thinks there is a case for British authorities to answer, after a series of high-profile incidents that have blurred the lines between offense and actual risk of harm. There has, she argued, been a “huge shift” in recent years as the definition of harm has become “a very elastic concept.” “People will say that they’re harmed by speech that’s effectively offensive, but which you wouldn’t ever have seen as being on a par with somebody coming up and biffing your head in,” Fox said. Public order legislation — under which Linehan was arrested — is being used “promiscuously in relation to speech,” she argued.  Ken Macdonald, a former director of public prosecutions, is skeptical. “I don’t think we face a crisis of free speech,” the former top prosecutor for England and Wales argued. “The Court of Appeal has been absolutely clear that people must be allowed to express themselves offensively. They must be allowed to ridicule, they must be allowed to say things which are upsetting to other people. All of this is protected. What you can’t do is incite violence. That’s illegal.”  “I think it’s an issue that’s been weaponized by Farage, and it’s been weaponized by American tech titans like [Elon] Musk and [Mark] Zuckerberg, and the rest of them. Farage is doing it for political reasons, and they’re doing it for commercial reasons,” he added.  Indeed, Farage argued that Britain’s new Online Safety Act — a controversial and long-in-the works law that imposes a duty of care on platforms to protect users from harmful content — would “damage trade between our countries.” MARTYRING CONNOLLY Senior lawyers have little time for Farage making Connolly, the jailed mother, a cause célèbre over her 31-month prison sentence for posts on social media platform X, which she admitted had incited racial hate. Farage told the U.S. committee Connolly was “living proof of what can go wrong.” The post was “intemperate” and “wrong,” he said, but it was removed three-and-a-half hours later, he added. Connolly’s sentence was too high, Macdonald acknowledged. But he pointed out: “She pleaded guilty to a very serious offense. The Court of Appeal found that she had admitted inciting racial hatred with the intention that serious violence should result from her tweet. The idea that prosecuting a person in this situation is a curtailment on free speech is just completely ludicrous.” Brits’ views are decidedly mixed on these hot-button issues. Polling from the think tank More in Common last month found a third of those asked thought Connolly’s sentence was too harsh, although that leapt to 70 percent of Reform UK supporters. Yet just one in five of the group polled thought politicians should associate themselves with Connolly. Support for doing so was strongest among supporters of Farage’s Reform UK. There is also strong public support for the Online Safety Act, despite skepticism about how effective age verification measures meant to keep eyes off content deemed harmful will be. A majority of Reform UK voters also support online age verification, according to separate polling from Ipsos, although they are the least likely voting group to say they would comply with age checks. ON HIS LEFT FLANK While the right-leaning Farage is leading the charge on the Connolly case, the left in Britain is waging its own battle over free speech, and the right to protest. Earlier this year, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper moved to proscribe Palestine Action, a pro-Gaza campaign group involved in direct action at a U.K. military site in July, as a terrorist group. That makes membership of, or support, for the group a criminal offense, and it’s a restriction being challenged by high-profile figures on the left, including former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn. Civil liberties groups have also leapt on the protest curbs. In August, more than 500 people were arrested at a demonstration in London in support of the banned group, many for displaying placards in support. Akiko Hart, director of the campaign group Liberty, said the proscription of Palestine Action is a “disproportionate application of counter-terror laws, and is a worrying escalation of how the government treats protest groups and uses terrorism powers.” She said it was creating “a chilling effect in which many people are now also unable to express their opinions on the proscription of a direct action group because of the risk of arrest.” The Home Office has long insisted the proscription does not affect the freedom to protest on Palestinian rights, and only applies to the “specific and narrow organization.” The decision to proscribe had been based on “strong security advice” following serious attacks, the Home Office said. For the police — tasked with enforcing the controversial law — the proscription of Palestine Action had “clearly been a pressure” over the summer, Gavin Stephens, a senior chief constable who chairs the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said. But they had the “capability to deal with the law where it needs to be enforced.” Stephens is also forthright on the pressures of policing the online world. “If people are committing crimes online and are stirring up hatred, and inciting others to commit crimes, we have to deal with it,” he argued at a briefing with journalists on Tuesday. Police unease about potentially ill-defined laws is, however, apparent. In the wake of the Linehan arrest, Met Police Commissioner Mark Rowley said Wednesday that officers had been left “between a rock and a hard place” in cases where intent and harm of a post is ambiguous — because successive governments had made confusing hate crime laws. “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position,” he said. On Wednesday, one of Starmer’s most senior allies, Wes Streeting hinted the government could be open to clarifying the law. Cops, the health secretary said, should be “policing streets, not just policing tweets,” he said. For Farage — who thrives on setting the political agenda even without the parliamentary heft he craves — that will feel like a win. Tom Bristow contributed to this report.