The BBC has verified footage of several damaged hospitals, including the 17-story private Gandhi hospital in Tehran, close to the headquarters of the state broadcaster which was the target, a Red Crescent hospital in the town of Mahabad in western Iran, and a hospital in the southern port of Bushehr, from which babies in incubators were seen being evacuated on 3 March.

Run by volunteers, it has served the north London community of Golders Green, which has a large Jewish population, since 1979. There are dozens of synagogues throughout the area and according to the London Data Store, 49% of residents in the Golders Green ward identify as Jewish.

Paul Fish, 47, from Cardiff, kicked his £3k-a-month cocaine habit and lost 6.5 stone by walking 12,000 steps daily and fasting

A man who battled a £3,000-a-month cocaine addiction and would binge eat up to 10 times a day has conquered his drug dependency and lost 6.5 stone through fasting and walking 12,000 steps each day. Paul Fish, 47, struggled with binge eating and substance abuse after accumulating £100,000 in debt during the financial crash.

At his lowest, the sports massage therapist, from Cardiff weighed 22.5 stone and wore size XXXL clothing, binging 10 times a day while spending £700 on cocaine per week. Never miss a Cardiff story by signing up to our daily newsletter here

After he was rejected from a wisdom tooth procedure due to his high BMI, Paul started walking for fitness, but whilst still eating poorly and using drugs, he managed to lose just three stone over four years.

He then discovered fasting on YouTube. Paul now waits until 2pm to eat, trains six days a week, and has swapped crisps and chocolate for salmon and avocados, resulting in him slimming down to 15.8 stone.

After experiencing a “spiritual awakening” on October 31, 2025, Paul finally ended his 25-year drug habit, and has started a walking group in Cardiff to help motivate others.

Paul, who initially shared his story with Talk To The Press, said: “There was a point where a dealer would throw two grams of cocaine in a fag packet over the fence at 9am every day, and I’d just be in the house sniffing all day.

“I’d go out to the pub getting pissed every night as well, and I’d get my partner at the time to go to the Co-op to buy me flakes, and salt and vinegar Squares and full fat coke.

“In 2021, I was denied wisdom tooth surgery because I was 22.5 stone, and doctors said my BMI was too high.

“I put on my trainers the next day and started walking. I did a 150km charity walk for Great Ormond Street, but I was still sniffing cocaine and eating crap, so I wasn’t getting anywhere.

“I started fasting and now I don’t eat until 2pm, sometimes 4pm. I eat things like avocado, salmon, chicken, it’s changed my life.

“Then on October 31st 2025, I had a spiritual awakening, and I haven’t touched cocaine since.

“Fixing my food was the final piece of the jigsaw, my mental health has improved so much, because I’m giving my body what it wants.

“I feel like I’ve been released from prison, I’ve got so much more energy. I’m now on a mission to help other people.”

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Paul initially began battling addiction during the 2007 financial crisis, when he found himself drowning in debt which he couldn’t manage on his modest salary as a car salesman.

“I was struggling with drink due to the pressure of the payments,” he said.

As his financial troubles continued to grow, Paul separated from his partner, which resulted in him comfort eating whilst also drinking excessively and using cocaine.

He moved to South Africa with a new partner, but when that relationship ended in 2016, he found himself back at his mum’s small bungalow.

“I felt like a spare part. I would just end up going to the pub and sniffing coke.”

At his lowest point, Paul would arrange for a dealer to throw two grams of cocaine over his garden fence each morning, setting him back approximately £100 a day.

He would then spend the entire day indoors “sniffing”, and binge eating on crisps and chocolate.

He eventually lost his job in car sales due to his drug habit, prompting him to retrain as a sports massage therapist.

When he was refused wisdom tooth surgery, Paul was launched into action, and the next day he put his trainers on and began walking 12,000 steps a day.

He set up an Instagram account for fellow male walkers in his area, and walked 150km in 14 days to raise funds for Great Ormond Street Hospital.

However, despite his new passion for exercise, Paul was still using cocaine and eating poorly, meaning he was “getting nowhere”.

Between 2021 and 2025, Paul lost just over three stone, bringing him from 22.5 stone down to 18 stone 10. He then started watching videos on nutrition on YouTube, and decided to experiment with fasting.

Having previously indulged in Gregg’s chicken and mayo sandwiches and crisps for lunch, eating up to 10 times a day, he now eats less than 40g of carbohydrates from Monday to Saturday, and does a “carb refeed” on Sunday, where he eats 450g.

Paul eats nothing until 2pm or sometimes as late as 4pm each day, and maintains an exceptionally healthy diet of salmon, avocado, Greek yoghurt, chicken and steak. He also lifts weights six times a week, and takes a range of supplements, including collagen, magnesium and ashwagandha.

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He explained: “I’d been to Cocaine Anonymous for years, I’d been through counselling, and lost relationships and nothing worked, but after my spiritual awakening, I haven’t thought about using cocaine once.”

Since Paul’s “spiritual awakening”, he has lost a further three stone, bringing him down to 15 stone eight.

Eager to help others, Paul has now set up a walking group in Cardiff called the Monday Reset Project, as well as sharing his journey on his TikTok channel @paulfish.ckd.

Welsh boxer Joe Cordina attended his first walking event earlier in March and he is now expecting over 100 attendees at his next event, on March 29.

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The conflict between the US – and its partner Israel – and Iran was nearly half a century in the making. Many explanations have been offered: strategic miscalculation, nuclear brinkmanship, regional rivalry and the failure of deterrence of Iran’s nuclear programme. But there is also the nature of the language through which each side has come to perceive the other.

Over 47 years, the language on each side has progressively hardened from assessments of behaviour into verdicts about the moral nature of each side’s adversary. It not only describes the enemy, but actively participates in creating it.

The language of American enmity towards Iran did not begin as a full moral verdict. In the 1980s and 1990s, Iran’s clerical leadership appeared in western media and policy discourse as the “mad mullahs”. It was a label that personalised the conflict and cast Iranian leaders as irrational rather than simply hostile. By the 1990s, the “rogue state” frame took hold, still defining Iran by its behaviour rather than its nature: a rogue, in principle, could change course.

A significant shift occurred in January 2002 when George W. Bush designated Iran as part of the “axis of evil”. His speechwriter David Frum later recalled drafting “axis of hatred”, but Bush insisted on using “evil” instead. This choice was unsurprising, as Bush’s was widely seen a “faith-based” presidency, influenced by deeply internalised evangelical Christianity.

By February 2026, the vocabulary had reached its most extreme register. Donald Trump described Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as “one of the most evil people in history”, killed along with “his gang of bloodthirsty THUGS”. In a video posted on his Truth Social, Trump explained the collapse of negotiations by stating that Iran’s leaders “just wanted to practise evil”. The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, invoked the Book of Esther, equating the Iranian leadership with Haman — the inherently evil villain of Jewish scripture. He framed the operation as the fulfilment of a 2,500-year moral obligation.

Iran had its own vocabulary, with roots that were theological before becoming political. The designation of America by the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the “Great Satan” drew on the Quranic figure of shaitan ar-rajim (accursed one/outcast devil). It eventually became a category through which American actions – the 1953 coup and decades of support for the deposed shah — were interpreted. The term also served a domestic purpose: the Great Satan depicted any Iranian advocate of rapprochement as a collaborator with Satan. This made moderation seem less like a policy dispute and more like a form of moral treason.

When Bush named Iran in his axis of evil, a parallel mechanism emerged on the other side. Political analysts found Iranian elites overwhelmingly viewed the designation as a boon for conservative factions in Iran – the metaphor appearing to reinforce the intransigence it claimed to criticise. Over the following two decades, Tehran increasingly framed its regional alignment as an axis of resistance: a loosely connected network of allied movements presented not as acts of aggression but as heroic solidarity against a cosmic aggressor.

What stands out across this arc is a pattern of accumulation. Each new label — Great Satan, mad mullahs, rogue state, axis of evil, axis of resistance — added another layer to the adversary’s story, making it progressively more resistant to revision. Both sides converged on the same device, each attributing a corrupted moral nature to the other, an entity whose soul was the central issue.

A soul to condemn

National anthropomorphism — the metaphorical attribution of human traits to a nation-state — is a common feature of political language. “Mother Russia”, “Uncle Sam”, and “Homeland-Mother China” each give the country a face, a will and a singular identity that can be addressed, celebrated or defended. Such figures allow citizens to experience attachment, obligation and hurt as if directed toward a single person.

However, labels such as “Great Satan”, “the Global Arrogance”, “mad mullahs”, and “gang of bloodthirsty thugs” serve a fundamentally different purpose. They moralise and condemn a nation’s soul itself. The moment a nation is characterised as evil rather than as an adversary, it drifts out of the realm of diplomacy altogether.

The framings were not just hostile but asymmetrical, with clear geopolitical implications. Iran’s language depicted the US as untrustworthy yet highly capable – powerful, calculating, world‑devouring. This portrays an adversary whose strengths you resent and feel compelled to match. It carries an emotional logic of envy in the technical sense – a rivalrous resentment towards an opponent you tacitly admit is formidable. Seen through such a lens, Iran’s nuclear ambitions appear less as pure aggression and more as an effort to close a capability gap with an opponent whose strength its own rhetoric acknowledges.

The US framing attributes untrustworthiness and malevolent incompetence to Iran. They are a country of mad mullahs, a rogue state, a gang of bloodthirsty thugs whose leaders “just wanted to practise evil”. This does not sketch a formidable rival – it conjures something menacing in intent yet incapable of reason, operating below the threshold of rational calculation. Groups framed in this manner tend to elicit contempt. An enemy framed as contemptuous is less likely to register as an adversary that can be deterred and more likely to appear as a problem to be removed.

Its members cease to exist as reasoning agents. Their stated aims are no longer believed, their experiences no longer imagined and their inner life no longer granted as grounds for negotiation.

When that perception becomes embedded within political leadership, the arguments for engagement with the adversary start to disintegrate.

What the words have led to

The US-Israeli strikes happened in the middle of active diplomacy, not after its failure. Iran had proposed a pause on enrichment and zero stockpiling. But within a framework that had spent 47 years defining Iran’s nature rather than its behaviour as the key issue, no such proposal could be seen as genuine by Washington. When a nation’s nature is repeatedly portrayed as irredeemably evil, what it does at the negotiating table becomes insignificant. The nature precedes the behaviour, and no behaviour can change it.

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Iran has been attacked by US and Israel when peace was within reach

To each side, the identity judgements of nearly half a century have become almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. Each side will interpret what follows as confirmation of what it has always believed. That is what 47 years of presupposed moral condemnation can become: a frame so absolute and impenetrable that the violence it accompanies becomes a vindication.