Getting into the parked car.

#OTD #RedDevils #Belgium🇧🇪

Nina Litvinova, granddaughter of Stalin's foreign affairs commissar, spent more than half a century helping political prisoners — carrying samizdat to those in Soviet internal exile, then writing to the inmates of Putin's prisons. In May, at 80, she took her own life. meduza.io/en/feature/2...

Your regular reminder that cryptocurrency does in fact have a use case and that use case is crime

Sunder is a public service.

Interesting to see a reference in this article to Daniel Foliard 'Dislocations: The Photography of War in the Middle East' (London: Verso, 2023) - a book that sounds incredible but which doesn't actually exist. Wonder what else has been hallucinated...?

About the worst possible basis for suspending that player is that the referee was wrong.

Ukraine are kindly destroying the Russian army for European allies. The least we can do is give them these missiles to defend themselves with.

It's worth stressing that the *magnitude* by which some of these records are being broken is nothing short of astonishing

I am enjoying my ABCNews feed….

I’m going to sleep now, but I hope you all enjoy your football match.

It looks like there was a trial, that is, a trial of whether he did act charged under the Criminal Procedure (Insanity and Unfitness to Plead) Act 1991, before a jury. And, just looking at this report, one can’t tell, but it seems the group he was in sought to extort money from victim companies.

They’ve just called last orders in this Dartmoor pub. I guess there won’t be drunken revels leading up to the football match.

The latest on my very boring local WhatsApp group is that Jess has offered everyone purple flowering periwinkle, and Carolina has asked for some.

“Reading the Riot Act” used to be a legitimate way to get crowds to disperse. Once it was read, the crowd had one hour to go home ON PAIN OF DEATH You might notice “death recorded” sentencing in the 1830s and 1840s following riot convictions

Meanwhile, universities are closing humanities programs

Yes, like he says.

Just a quick reminder that it was 491 days ago that strategic genius Donald Trump lectured Zelensky about Ukraine having "no cards".

Also, only once every seven years.

Even their “intellectuals“ are fucking stupid.

I’ve cut off the chaps name, because it’s just an example. People keep saying this sort of thing, and it’s annoyingly silly. I mean, I’m not a member of the wee frees, and don’t agree with them, but I’m not one of them because I don’t “speak up against them”.

I dont know. I'm not so keen on all these videos of patient dogs appeasing cats.

Intrigued to hear Danny Kruger, of Reform UK, tell Any Questions that universities need to "change their business model". What would he suggest? Selling crypto? Acting as "brand ambassadors" for Direct Bullion? Recording videos saying "Up the Ra"? Or getting a billionaire to chuck us £5 million?

The ABC Bluesky feed informs me that the proper term is Socceroos. I expect that, unlike me, you all knew that.

On my timeline, Mamdani followed by Dolly Parton. So, hope yet for America.

That 25.5, for everyone else. Seems reasonable.

What’s the biggest place in the UK you haven’t been to? I think mine is probably Hull.

Why don’t any of the papers allow you to buy a single edition online, when you arrive there from a link? I’d happily buy that day’s paper to read a single article that looked interesting, but my only option is to subscribe.

This is Porter. He's had a long day. Needs a pup cup on the rocks. And make it a double. 13/10 (TT: drunkengolden)

Jesus, hasn’t he heard of “paid demonstrators”?

X owner Elon Musk indicates he would prioritise political violence (assassination of pro-migration politicians is the common sense meaning) over violence against "invaders" (refugees, asylum seekers, maybe ethnic minorities generally) while endorsing call for violence (killing) against both groups

Hotel is in conference centre in a university campus, and I’m pleasantly surprised to hear the drunken shrieks of - I assume, anyway - now drunk examined students in the middle distance.

“Just give me a bar of soap” cries man in hotel who’s just dropped stupid fucking bottle of shower gel and broken little squirt top thing …

I started following ABC Australia because they were being criticised for leaving twitter for over here, but there’s rarely a day goes by without a gem.

Too many abbreviations. I’m reading a Court of Appeal decision in which the judge insists on abbreviating things, to the extent of square bracketing his abbreviation for a statute in quotations. It’s pretty pointless and irritating for the reader to over-abbreviate like this.

Seeing how the US Supreme Court nearly made millions of people stateless and how there is an active effort by MAGA to make people stateless, I think it is necessary for the world to seriously consider the problems of statelessness.

The only thing I’d add on the Midlands thing is that I don’t think there’s a cross-Midlands chauvinism. You are either West or East, and neither prefer the other to Northerners or southerners.

As a displacement activity a little earlier, I undertook an analysis of my suits. I find that 48.3% I bought at charity shops, 41.4% from vintage sources, that is, for profit vintage shops or on line; and 10.3% I bought new. I have rounded the decimals.

I just want to say that I did have a little to do with David Hencke many years ago, and thought he was great.

How do you pronounce the author of consolation of philosophy? I always assumed bow-ee-thee-us, but I just heard it on an old In Our Time as a breathy single syllable?

I like the woman in the third row looking at her phone, deadpan, then breaking off to go “whooo!”, at the end.

Christ, this is pathetic in the extreme. She acknowledges that the attacks do not target civilians, obviously misreads what “closer to Russians” means (it’s petrol shortages, not killing them, FFS) AND hasn’t noticed that Russia IS targeting civilians night after night!

This is the best advice.

Should we vote; AI or not AI?

But the out-going PM, had he remained in post, would also have been unaccountable to Parliament during that period. What this really means is that Parliament is having to wait a bit before it gets its first go at the new PM, which doesn’t seem to me to have any constitutional significance.

An under-remarked but disconcerting effect of the heatwave is very runny marmite.

It’s increasingly obvious that Polanski looked at the 2010s and went “what if Corbyn but with someone who wasn’t shit at comms”

What’s just as astonishing to lawyers here, I’d have thought, is that avowed partisan advantage can be a lawful reason to make an administrative decision, like drawing a districting map. Or am I misunderstanding?

v.int.

The Godfather usage of the term “respect”, here.