Isis

She took the call herself the night the Islamic State came into Mosul. ‘Convert or leave or you’ll be killed,’ she was told. The callers, identifying themselves as Isis members, knew the household was Christian because her husband worked as a priest in the city. They fled that night. Like many of their Christian neighbours they sought refuge in the monastery of St Matthew. But Isis took that over, tore down the Cross, smashed all Cross-decorated windows, used it for their own prayers and flew their black flag on top of the church. Across what was Nineveh, Iraq’s Christians spent this year fleeing from village to village, hoping to find

Watching the recent footage of Islamic State gang members haggling over the price of captured Christian women in a makeshift slave market — one of them wants a 15-year-old with green eyes, another wants to exchange a girl for a gun — I was reminded that Islamists are at least consistent in their hateful worldview and in a way uniquely honest. Even a terror gang as vile as the IRA tried to keep a lid on the rapes and paedophilia going on within its rancid ranks. But when Amnesty International first claimed in September that Isis were enslaving and abusing ‘hundreds, if not thousands’ of Yazidi women and children, it

Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote in the Commons, which enraged backbenchers all the more. Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, tabled a procedural motion, forcing David Cameron, the Prime Minister, to hurry from the Lord Mayor’s banquet in white tie to vote amid angry scenes. George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, came back from Brussels claiming that Britain would now only have to pay half of a £1.7 billion bill that the European Union had presented; but critics said that he was merely counting a future rebate that Britain was owed in any case. A

Over the past year or so, a determined and fanatical Islamist has been waging a deadly and bloody war against the western world. This enemy is capable of moving unnoticed across continents and inflicting savage violence in each of them; inspires young Muslim men to become suicide bombers and die in their thousands. The enemy is particularly horrifying for being a traitor, born in Britain and a woman to boot. The ‘White Widow’, remember her? Samantha Lewthwaite from Aylesbury, usually described by our tabloid press as one of the most evil and powerful women alive. But is she really evil? Is she really even much of a threat? My contention

Home A hundred firemen could not prevent wooden cooling towers at Didcot B gas-fuelled power station in Oxfordshire from burning down. A consortium said it could power 2.5 million houses in Britain by 2018 with solar energy generated in southern Tunisia. The Bank of England indicated that interest rates would stay low for longer because of a poor outlook for the global economy. Government borrowing rose to £11.8 billion in September: £1.6 billion more than a year earlier. HSBC offered a mortgage at 0.99 per cent interest. The government is to pay a bounty of £55 to GPs for every patient they diagnose with dementia. English hospitals near the Welsh border

This is a sneak preview from tomorrow’s magazine: Home A hundred firemen could not prevent wooden cooling towers at Didcot B gas-fuelled power station in Oxfordshire from burning down. A consortium said it could power 2.5 million houses in Britain by 2018 with solar energy generated in southern Tunisia. The Bank of England indicated that interest rates would stay low for longer because of a poor outlook for the global economy. Government borrowing rose to £11.8 billion in September: £1.6 billion more than a year earlier. HSBC offered a mortgage at 0.99 per cent interest. The government is to pay a bounty of £55 to GPs for every patient they diagnose