What are your thoughts on this, Steve? Because I think you wanted to tell us the story about AI causing or being behind a near miss.

Yes.

So that I'm so sorry.

That was interesting story.

Exactly.

Is certainly not the not the only example of that that we're going to see.

But where you almost had an armed conflict where AI told the Americans they thought something was on the Chinese boat.

Indeed, and the way that this narrative is borne out, you've seen this happen in Russia in the past, haven't you? So you're drawing direct comparisons with what's happened in Russia, even going back as far back as the Soviet Union, to what is happening in Israel today.

Mm.

But your question already hints at that fact, like we've underestimated him before, as you say, and say like, can he pull some awful rabbit out of a hat? Because usually it is something truly terrible which somehow brings people over to his side.

I hope that's not the case.

At the moment, we seem to see a flailing and going downwards.

And the piece I was interested in here is obviously lots of commentary, including his latest mad idea that, that, um, as, as punishment Lake Ontario should no longer be Lake Ontario but Lake America.

This kind of derangedness which we almost protect ourselves from because there's so much derangedness day after day.

But there's an interesting piece in The New York Times, um, it's part of a series called The Conversation, which was between one of their columnists, Frank Bruni, and Bret Stephens, traditionally very much a conservative, um, writer himself.

Mm.

And yet the way that time sanitizes, uh, an unacceptable regime on an international stage, it, it, it's, it, things, things get cleaned, don't they?

It, they, it, they do get cleaned.

Um, and to be honest, I was worried seeing some of this stuff that, that Anthony Loyd was somehow going to be normalizing stuff.

I always find really interesting the, the kind of distinction between, on the one hand, the abuses of the regime and the things that the regime wants to do, and, and you, your introduction, or the introduction to the piece that you, that you mentioned kind of goes to some of that, and then the list of things, of the bans taking in adultery, lesbianism, music, organ implants, gambling, dog fighting, beard shaving, sodomy, and befriending non-Muslims.

So that list is so long.

But the fact of other things happening at the same time, I feel often actually that's the s- that's the story that we don't hear about.

So working at a human rights organization, quite rightly, that's gonna be focusing on, here's the list of things that have gone wrong.

He wanted to sell it to a Trump.

I mean, of course, there's, there's problems within the court itself because, um, of, of these, uh, sexual misconduct allegations against the head.

So this has come, this is really now coming to a head.

So as you say, this has been bubbling, I can't say gently, but a little bit behind the scenes sometimes, or at least without the, the Seeing the, the person most directly involved.

So there've been very serious, um, allegations against the chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, um, um, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

Those who hate the court, of course, have suggested that somehow this m-makes the court's work itself invalid, which it does not.

This is a completely different issue.

So Khan, um, has denied the allegations, but the, um, person, the, the main complainant, um, has now more or less gone public, not with her second name, but with her first name, Sarah.

A great piece in, uh, the new issue of Prospect about, uh, the Israeli e-election.

He says there are sh-fuel shortages, and they have been caused by Ukrainian strikes.

Yes.

Um, uh, duh.

Yes, this is not, you know, anybody who's been reading a newspaper anywhere in the world is aware of these things, let alone Russian social media, which is absolutely full of people, uh, standing in vast long petrol queues.

Um, but as you say, this is a BBC story.

Putin makes a rare admission of fuel shortages caused by Ukrainian strikes.

And so this-- it's interesting that he felt he was forced to do so.

There's been an increase in child-free spaces in France, uh, and there's a very, very interesting piece, um, I love this woman, um, [chuckles] uh, called, uh, uh, headlined, Did American-Style Gentle Parenting Spoil French Children? Uh, and there's a psychologist who's written all about this.

Mm-hmm

...but also of the possibilities of justice, which is the theme of the book.

So to take your question directly, yes, Nuremberg, as we all know, is a foundation stone of pretty much everything.

There were things that happened before that, but what happened in nineteen forty-five and a couple of years after was so important.

And many of your listeners may be familiar with Philip Sands' great book, East West Street, where those two characters, Raphael Lemkin on the one hand and Hersch Lauterpacht on the other, played such a key role.

And as you say, both of them came from Lviv, at that time Lvov in Poland, but now western Ukraine.

So it's tied in with Ukraine in so many ways.

But what you're saying is actually there is growing confidence in the institutions from inside in what they can do.

Will they ever face justice, do you think?

This is, as you say, it's kind of the question at the heart of everything, really.

And so I guess the short answer to that is none of us can know for certain.

I mean, there are no immediate ways of getting our hands on any of those three.

But I think it's worth dipping back into history briefly of like so many of the big conflicts that we've seen.

It seemed nothing would ever happen.

And for me, a kind of central moment in my own biography, my own life, but also in a sense for the storytelling of the book, was when I was a journalist, as you mentioned, at The Independent.

Who actually worked to make it happen?