Giles Whittell

London

Sensemaker Editor at Tortoise

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Articles

IDF changes its story to fit new evidence

2 weeks ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

Germany has called for an urgent investigation into the killings of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers by Israeli soldiers in southern Gaza last month. The Israeli military claimed at first the Palestinians were travelling in “suspicious vehicles” with their lights off at night, but verified video footage recovered from a phone found on one of the dead showed the vehicles had been travelling with lights flashing.
Eleven things to note about the Signalgate fightback

3 weeks ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

From the moment the Signalgate story broke – in which the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg was invited into a group chat that kept top Trump administration officials intimately briefed on impending attacks on Houthi rebels – the White House has been wishing it would go away. So what? It hasn’t. The story is too wild, too telling, too confounding to die, so the administration has had to close ranks and try to neutralise it with a familiar mix of lies, dissembling, distortion, defamation – and truth.
White House accidentally texts top secret war plans to journalist

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

Four days before the US launched lethal airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen this month, a prominent journalist got a heads-up on a public messaging platform. This wasn’t a hint or a nudge from a covert source.
How Wiz went from zero to $32 billion in five years

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

Google’s $32 billion acquisition of the Wiz cyber security firm last week was its biggest ever. Other than that it’s worth noting, first, that Wiz’s four founders all served together in Israel’s Unit 8200, which trains IDF soldiers in what used to be called signals intelligence. Second, these founders had already made $320 million between them selling an earlier cyber-security firm to Microsoft.
Why America may have passed peak Musk

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

When the two astronauts who’ve been stranded in orbit for the past nine months splashed down on Tuesday, a voice from mission control said: “On behalf of SpaceX, welcome home.”So what? Say what you like (or don’t like) about Elon Musk, he has an almost intravenous connection to the American psyche as the man who picked up where Nasa left off and dared to dream again of new frontiers in space.
Markets give Merz the benefit of the doubt

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

Germany under Friedrich Merz is not Britain under Liz Truss. This is obvious, but still instructive. In the 48 hours since Merz persuaded the Bundestag to lift Germany’s debt brake and allow hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of extra public borrowing for defence and infrastructure, the bond markets have barely flinched.
Carney rides anti-Trump wave

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

Mark Carney is not a member of the Canadian parliament, but as of Friday he’s prime minister and much more likely to win the next election for his Liberal Party than if Trump had left Canada alone. Before Trump started trolling Canada as America’s 51st state, Canada’s Conservatives held a 25-point lead in polls. They now have a one point lead and Carney – ex-governor of both the British and Canadian central banks – is expected to call an election any time before October.
The search for alien life is picking up speed

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

In 2019 two French physicists won the Nobel prize for physics for their discovery of an Earth-like planet orbiting around a Sun-like star. So what? They made their discovery in 1995. It was a big deal then. It isn’t now. Thirty years on there are more than 6,000 known earth-sun systems in the Milky Way alone. Do any of them support life? Professor Dava Newman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes humans will find proof of life beyond Earth by the end of this decade.
North Korean crypto hackers cash out with $300 million

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell

A group of North Korean hackers has turned at least $300 million worth of stolen cryptocurrency into unrecoverable funds – meaning they can spend it, and the crypto exchange from which they took it can’t get it back.
UK leads European rearmament drive

1 month ago | tortoisemedia.com | Giles Whittell |Nina Kuryata

The government hopes that will lead to closer economic ties as well Ursula von der Leyen has proposed an €800 billion increase in European defence spending over the next four years. That is more than twice what Europe and the US have delivered to Ukraine in military and non-military aid since February 2022. It’s equivalent to nearly a full year’s defence spending by the US and it signals a tectonic shift in Europe’s approach to its security in the long term. So what?