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The Far-Right Influencer from Renfrew Who Fanned Flames After Southport Killings  (Dominic Hauschild, The Times)
The rundown pebbledash block of flats is typical of deprived parts of towns throughout Scotland. Only here in Renfrew, six miles west of Glasgow, one of its occupants is highly unusual.
According to the electoral register, it is home to David Clews, a former Renfrewshire councilor turned far-right conspiracy theorist with hundreds of thousands of online followers. The average property here costs £70,000.
With concern about unverified and offensive online content rising, Clews was among those who contributed to the anti-immigrant scaremongering that helped to trigger widespread rioting following the murder of three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport in July.
Clews, 41, is the co-founder and “lead correspondent” of Unity News Network (UNN), a self-proclaimed media source that has promoted vaccine denialism, accused Buckingham Palace of using artificial intelligence to “fake” videos of the Princess of Wales and given extensive air time to the neo-Nazi group Patriotic Alternative.
In the hours following the Southport stabbings on July 29 Clews, broadcasting from an unknown location in Costa Rica, spoke to several thousand listeners on a live stream hosted by X, owned by American billionaire Elon Musk, and the video sharing site Rumble.
Styling himself as “the Emperor” alongside clips of Joaquin Phoenix’s twisted Roman character Commodus in the 2000 film Gladiator, he used the stream to promote conspiracy theories that included the false allegation that the Southport attacker was a Muslim immigrant.

Terrorism Warning Lights Are ‘Blinking Red Again.’ This Group Is a Big Reason.  (Max Boot, Washington Post)
Remember the Islamic State? The vicious terrorist group took advantage of the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 to stage a major offensive across both countries. By the end of 2014, it controlled roughly 30 percent of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq and was carrying out horrifying massacres and atrocities. The Obama administration committed U.S. air power and advisers to help the Iraqi military and Syrian Democratic Forces (mainly Kurds) battle back. By 2019, ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been killed in a U.S. raid, its last redoubts had fallen and then-President Donald Trump claimed “100 percent” success in the anti-ISIS campaign. (Cont.)