Latest news with #JohnSimpson
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
'Downhill From Here For Trump': Senior BBC Reporter's Bleak Prediction After Iran Strikes
It is all 'downhill' for Donald Trump from now onwards after his strikes on Iran, according to the BBC's world affairs editor. The US president announced overnight that America has 'obliterated' three nuclear facilities in Iran, and urged Tehran to come to the negotiating table or face further attacks. The move comes after Israel began a week of exchanging fire with Iran. 'I feel last night was a big change, a major turn of the page,' John Simpson said on BBC News. 'In one major respect, I think it's downhill for President Trump from now on.' The broadcaster continued: 'He's losing the support of the isolationists among the MAGA-supporters, of whom there are a large if not dominant amount. 'He's done something he promised he wouldn't do and he's moving against that, and I think we'll find that his power will start to diminish after this.' In his election campaign, Trump promised to be a peaceful president, and put 'America First' by pulling the States out of other countries' wars. But many of his supporters now question if that is still his thinking, considering he has just pulled the US into a raging war in conflict. Simpson also discussed the likelihood of an Iranian response. He said: 'We shouldn't overestimate Iran's strengths or its abilities.' 'Yes of course it can do asymmetrical attacks,' he noted, but added that these were 'limited small-time' moves which are not 'population-threatening'. 'We shouldn't be too scared about Iran's likely retaliation,' he said. Simpson sent a similar message on X, saying: 'As a result of his bombing of Iran, Trump's presidency has entered new and much more conflicted territory. 'The US isolationist right are already criticising him. Trump could now be involved in precisely the kind of war he blamed his predecessors for.' As a result of his bombing of Iran, Trump's presidency has entered new and much more conflicted territory. The US isolationist right are already criticising him. Trump could now be involved in precisely the kind of war he blamed his predecessors for. — John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) June 22, 2025 Trump Brags Of 'Obliterating' Iran's Nuclear Program, But Top Adviser Is More Cautious Nations React To US Strikes On Iran With Many Calling For Diplomacy Minister Refuses To Say If Britain Believes Trump's Attack On Iran Was Legal
Telegraph
11-06-2025
- General
- Telegraph
John Simpson: I got Frederick Forsyth sacked from the BBC
John Simpson has claimed that he engineered Frederick Forsyth's sacking from the BBC for spreading 'propaganda' about the Biafran War. Forsyth, who died earlier this week, maintained that he quit his job as a BBC foreign correspondent because he was fed up with his bosses, who thought he was biased in favour of the Biafran fight for independence. But Simpson, the BBC's world affairs editor, says he was instrumental in Forsyth's exit, and suggested that Forsyth might never have written The Day of the Jackal were it not for his intervention. He wrote on X, formerly Twitter: 'The Times obit on Freddie Forsyth says he left the BBC in 1967 because he displeased powerful people by his reporting from Biafra. Not quite. 'As a very junior BBC subeditor, I spotted how he was introducing Biafran propaganda into his reports and told my boss. Forsyth was sacked – and went on to write one of the best thrillers ever.' The Times obit on Freddie Forsyth says he left the BBC in 1967 because he displeased powerful people by his reporting from Biafra. Not quite. As a very junior BBC subeditor I spotted how he was introducing Biafran propaganda into his reports and told my boss. Forsyth was… — John Simpson (@JohnSimpsonNews) June 11, 2025 Writing for The Telegraph more than 20 years ago, Simpson said: 'As an extremely lowly subeditor in the BBC radio newsroom, I had to put Mr Forsyth's Biafran dispatches on the air. 'Even at the age of 23, I could see that he had accepted the Biafran line entirely. He was reporting propaganda as fact. 'Eventually he announced, without any qualification, that Biafra had shot down (as far as I remember) 16 federal Nigerian aircraft. 'The newsroom copy of Jane's All The World's Aircraft said that the federal air force possessed only 12.' Forsyth joined the BBC in 1965, first as a radio reporter then as the assistant diplomatic correspondent for BBC Television. When war broke out between Nigeria and the secessionist Republic of Biafra, he was dispatched there for three months. Writing in 2020 to mark the 50th anniversary of the war's end, Forsyth said he realised within days of arriving in Biafra that the BBC had swallowed British government propaganda. Harold Wilson's government supported Nigeria in its fight against the Biafran forces. Forsyth said: 'My brief was to report the all-conquering march of the Nigerian army. It did not happen. 'Naively, I filed this. When my report was broadcast our high commission complained to the CRO [Commonwealth Relations Office], who passed it on to the BBC – which accused me of pro-rebel bias and recalled me to London. 'Six months later, in February 1968, fed up with the slavishness of the BBC to Whitehall, I walked out and flew back to West Africa.' He said that 'every reporter, peer or parliamentarian who had visited Biafra and reported on what he had seen was smeared as a stooge'. Forsyth later wrote a non-fiction book, The Biafra Story (1969), and used some of his experiences there to inform his third novel, The Dogs of War. The conflict officially ended in 1970. It caused an estimated one million civilian deaths from starvation after the Nigerian federal government cut off food supplies to Biafra. Forsyth remained 'haunted' by what he had seen there, saying: 'Sometimes in the wee small hours I see the stick-like children with the dull eyes and lolling heads, and hear their wails of hunger and the low moans as they died. 'What is truly shameful is that this was not done by savages but aided and assisted at every stage by Oxbridge-educated British mandarins… with neutrality and diplomacy from London it could all have been avoided.'
ABC News
11-06-2025
- ABC News
Prosecution failed to prove Joshua Wright was armed before murder of John Simpson, court finds
A New South Wales Supreme Court justice has found prosecutors failed to prove a man who has admitted to murder confronted his victim armed with a gun. Joshua Wright, 36, has pleaded guilty to murdering his housemate John Simpson, 42, at a property on Great North Road, Laguna in April 2023. Mr Simpson's body was found several months later in a shallow grave on a neighbouring property. Ahead of Wright's sentencing a disputed facts hearing was held before Justice Richard Cavanagh, SC, regarding who had the gun before Mr Simpson was shot. The Crown argued Wright took a rifle from a cupboard inside the Laguna home before going out to the shed and shooting Mr Simpson. This version of events has been disputed by the defence. Wright told police he went to the shed to confront Mr Simpson after coming home from work to find his two dogs had been seized by the RSPCA. He claimed the gun was already in the shed and that Mr Simpson swung at him, which led to a scuffle during which the firearm discharged. The defence does not dispute that Wright then deliberately shot Mr Simpson. The court was played an excerpt from his police interview in which Wright said the first shot that hit Mr Simpson was unintentional. When asked about the second shot Mr Wright said, "I don't know why I did it". "I think he was already dead … there was so much blood," he said. "I didn't mean for it to happen … I didn't go up there to shoot him … I just wanted to hit him." The court heard the second shot struck Mr Simpson in the neck/upper back area. Wright was asked during his police interview if he remembers taking aim at Mr Simpson. "Not full aim," Wright said. Another housemate of the pair, Jeremy McLaughlin, told the court that on the afternoon of the shooting he went to his room to avoid any confrontation. He said he knew the cupboard where the rifle was kept was being opened because it had "a unique sound". Mr McLaughlin told the court he saw Wright in the hallway but did not see him open the cupboard. Another witness told the court that Wright said to him, "I picked up my gun, walked outside, then boom boom, it was over". The defence has argued both witnesses are unreliable as they lied to police on several occasions. Justice Cavanagh has found the Crown did not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Wright took the gun from cupboard before Mr Simpson was shot. Wright is expected to be sentenced later this week and the disputed facts will be considered during the process.
Irish Times
08-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
John Simpson: ‘It's been great to watch how Ireland went from a pretty backward country to a real powerhouse in Europe'
With a grandmother from Co Tipperary , the veteran journalist and broadcaster John Simpson holds dual British-Irish citizenship. Speaking from his home in Oxford, he says the idea of moving back to Ireland is a topic of quite regular discussion with his wife. He has lived in Rathgar in Dublin 'but even more gorgeous was moving to Dalkey , to Bullock Harbour in Dalkey'. 'My life has been bound up with Ireland for a very long time. I got married very early [to his first wife], too early, at the age of 21, and we had our honeymoon in Ireland, in Co Cork , which was just delightful. From that age, through to today, Ireland has been part of my life.' He accepts that television 'is a medium which does of course bulk up your ego', but he says having a Doppelgänger helps keep him humble. 'Everybody thinks I'm David Attenborough . They think I'm doing two jobs or something. For years now any self-image has been modified by the knowledge that people can't even recognise who you are.' A number of paths led Simpson to a career in journalism. 'I found when I was at university in particular, that I was good at writing and love the sound of my own voice,' he says. The other was reading George Orwell's 1984 when he was 15. 'I was so horrified by the thought that you could scrub out the past and rewrite it according to the interest of the government of the day, that I remember thinking very, very clearly then ... I want to do something to make sure that doesn't happen. READ MORE 'The desire to see things as they are, and present them to people as they are, and to make sure that people don't forget what they were like – that was something that mattered to me when I was 15 and it still matters to me now that I'm 80.' He continues to present Unspun World with John Simpson, which is broadcast on BBC2 . 'That's a high even in [the sense] of, with one foot in the grave and the other one on a banana skin, I can still have a real enjoyment of journalism.' For a low point in his storied career, he points to his time in Beirut in the 1980s reporting on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon for the BBC . 'I was captured, and accused of being a spy, and tortured and subjected to mock execution. I've talked about some of those things in the past, but I've never talked about the torture, never to anybody, not even to my wife ... I realise, while I was being messed about with by these torturers, that I would tell them anything. 'I was so humiliated ... I like to have a good opinion of myself and I realised I wasn't strong enough to resist it, that I kind of kept silent about it, kept it a secret, and it's only in the last five years that I felt free to talk about it ... It doesn't come much lower than that, sort of gibbering with fear and pain and praying to be free of it. And then having a mock execution at the end of it. I really do know what a near-death experience is because I was about half a second away from it. It's just that there wasn't a bullet in the gun.' He has had other near-death experiences. 'Getting bombed in Iraq, by the Americans. A 1,000lb bomb landed 15 paces from where I was standing, killed my translator who was standing beside me. God knows why I wasn't killed. Being nearly ripped apart in Iran, that was a pretty fierce experience.' John Simpson: 'Everybody thinks I'm David Attenborough. They think I'm doing two jobs or something' But his first such experience was a little closer to home, he explains, during The Troubles. 'I was BBC correspondent in Ireland. On the very first day I covered an IRA funeral in Belfast. The key thing was to get a sound recording – I was working for radio – of the moment when the guys pulled out their guns and fired over the grave. And I had a tiny little tape recorder which was new on the market – this was 1972, I think. Every time I thought someone was going to pull out a gun I sneaked out my little tape recorder and thought nobody could possibly notice what I was doing, and of course they did and they said I was a British spy. And the man in charge clearly of Provo security for the funeral said to the other guys who were around us, 'Give him one up the nostril.'' A colleague of Simpson's had noticed what was going on. 'All the other journalists had left by this stage, because the end of these things is always the most dangerous. I was too new to the game to realise that. This man from the London Sunday Times spotted what was happening and came back, and said in a very Brit way, 'Oh hello, John. Is there any problem?'' [ John Simpson: My torture was 'deeply humiliating, wounding to the spirit' Opens in new window ] Although his colleague vouching for him was enough to get Simpson out of the situation in that case, the experience was sufficiently frightening to make him question if journalism was really for him. 'I sat down on the bed and I thought, 'this stuff isn't for me. This is too dangerous. It's too nasty. You can get seriously hurt and I want to go home.'' He paused and considered before making a decision. 'I mean, whoever said journalism should be a safe profession? And as I worked my way through to that thought, I just thought, 'Well, you should just be really grateful you got out of that. Make sure you don't get into similar situations through your own stupidity again, and give it a bit of a try.'' Simpson's family lived in Dublin then and he commuted to Belfast. 'There were great stories in the Republic too, at that stage,' he says. 'It was a textbook perfect start to a career ... I've loved Belfast and I've loved Ireland, as a whole, ever since. I'm very much afraid that the future for Palestinians is to be driven out of their own country — John Simpson 'I made a huge number of friends, particularly in Dublin.' he continues. 'In the South I was much, much freer.' Simpson doesn't have any big concerns about the Irish and UK relationship post-Brexit, even with the growth of Reform UK , the party led by Nigel Farage . 'I don't know how strong Reform is going to be. I certainly don't think it or anything else will really get in the way of a good relationship with Ireland,' he says. 'As we're seeing with Donald Trump, there are these big waves and troughs. But we mustn't ever think these things are permanent. Donald Trump will be gone in just over three years' time and the world will carry on without him. And it will carry on without individual politicians in Britain. 'One of the great things in my life has been to watch how Ireland went from being a frankly pretty backward country, through to being a real powerhouse in Europe ... And that has been such a joy to me to see. Ireland needed to get out of Britain's shadow and it's done that and the Brits have been obliged to regard Ireland as a serious entity which they've got to treat with as much care and thought as they treat France or Germany or the US.' Just as in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, he's aware of some of the unrest and discontent around issues such as immigration in Ireland. 'I think it's just a matter of governments learning how to balance themselves with these difficult circumstances ... I don't think any recent government in Britain has been terribly good at it. And I don't think any government in Ireland has been terribly good at it,' he adds. As much of the world looks on in despair at what is happening in Gaza , Simpson doesn't see any solution in the short term. 'I'm now running out of hope for the longer term,' he says. 'I've always assumed that at some stage a form of a two-state solution would be established and, well, I think Binyamin Netanyahu has made it impossible for that to happen. 'I'm very much afraid that the future for Palestinians is to be driven out of their own country. It's a terrible thought to me, but I think that is where Israel is going ... and I think that at the moment, at any rate, the US is allowing that to happen.' Influencing public opinion in Israel is the only potential solution he sees at the moment. 'Not by being angry and dissociative, but by supporting the quite large number, the proportion must be about 40-45 per cent of Israelis, who don't want to go down that route. But isolating Israel and condemning it – it may be morally the right thing to do, many countries might feel it's the right thing to do, but it wouldn't have the effect of helping the future of the Palestinian people,' he says. John Simpson and his son, Rafa, in Brighton As Simpson reflects on his extensive past and continuing career, it's hard to imagine how he managed to combine it with being a father. 'Badly for the first two,' he admits. 'My two daughters are absolutely lovely girls and they've been so nice to me. I was an absentee father. I was never really around properly. Then I married again in 1996 and we had a son who spent part of his life in Ireland, went to Castle Park School in Dalkey and loved it. I was [at] a kind of level then where I was able to say, look, I'm not going to catch a plane because somebody's shot themselves in the toe in Vladivostok. I'm going to stay in London, and if you, the BBC, don't like it, well, I'm sorry, I've got other commitments.' 'I've been around much, much more for my son, and if he's as nice to me as my daughters have been I'm a lucky man.' Simpson's son is 19 and he's finding the experience of fatherhood quite different from when his daughters were born in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For one thing, his son has introduced him to the world of football. 'I'm now as fanatical a supporter of Chelsea as he is,' he says. 'Fatherhood has been, I think, the most exciting and profitable thing that I've done. To have children and to [see] the world through their eyes. It's just we've got this slight desert at the moment because he's at university ... and I haven't got anybody to talk to about Chelsea'. John Simpson's The Leaders and Lunatics Tour comes to the National Concert Hall on Thursday, November 6th, 2025
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Carson spins Sussex to win over Hampshire
Rothesay County Championship Division One, Utilita Bowl (day three) Hampshire 154 & 165: Dawson 48, Middleton 32; Carson 5-26 Sussex 297: Simpson 106*, Hudson-Prentice 74; Turner 3-54 & 23-1 Sussex (20 pts) beat Hampshire (3 pts) by nine wickets Match scorecard Jack Carson's five-wicket haul wrapped up a simple three-day victory for Sussex as they won on the road for the first time in the County Championship this season. Off spinner Carson found turn, bounce and a bagful of Hampshire wickets as he ripped through three of the four remaining batters to pick up 5-26 – his best of the campaign. Hampshire were bowled out for 165, and despite Oli Carter falling, Tom Haines and Tom Alsop easily knocked off the 23 runs needed to take them past the winning line before lunch. Sussex's third win of their return to Division One came with 20 points, to keep tabs on the leading title contenders. Hampshire began the day trailing by 29 runs, they had only whittled that down to 15 before Brad Wheal turned Carson around the corner to leg slip. There was a mini-flash point when James Fuller and bowler Nathan McAndrew collided during a single. Liam Dawson was not impressed, although the umpires calmed things quickly. Dawson took the hosts into a slender lead, his two accompanied by a huge cheer, but just 10 runs later he tried to ride Carson's turn, but tickled behind to John Simpson. Dawson had been the main hope for Hampshire to test Sussex, but his exit for 48 saw Kyle Abbott edge to slip three balls later. Henry Crocombe put Hampshire out of their misery when John Turner prodded a short ball to short leg. Dawson managed to get Carter's edge but it was a rare moment of joy as Sussex ticked off the runs in under 15 minutes. It was a particularly revered victory for the visitors, with strike bowler Ollie Robinson rested with an ankle injury and overseas opener Daniel Hughes absent awaiting the birth of his first child. Captain John Simpson had noted his side had "punched above expectation" so far this season. They leapfrogged Hampshire with the win, and also kept in touching distance of the title pacesetters. Simpson's third century of the season, in a 173-run stand with Fynn Hudson-Prentice, was the difference in the match, while Crocombe's first appearance of the season was a huge success – four explosive wickets in the first innings were followed by a tidy 2-44 in the second. For Hampshire, it was their first home defeat in the Championship since July 2023, with this only their fourth loss at Utilita Bowl since April 2019. Although this fixture was the first between the two south coast counties in a decade, Sussex have still only lost once on this ground in 10 red ball outings – 20 years ago. Hampshire have endured a rollercoaster trio of matches heading into the T20 Blast portion of the season. A dismal performance against Nottinghamshire was followed by a sensational victory at Edgbaston, which reignited excitement of a potential title charge, only for a seven session mauling. Their six batting bonus points in the first block is only better than bottom-side Worcestershire, with only Ben Brown of the regulars to average over 40. Only he and Nick Gubbins have recorded centuries. They did not get a batting point in this match, and only took three points from a dire week. ECB Reporters' Network supported by Rothesay Notifications, social media and more with BBC Sport
