Coming up later: A special Easter Sunday edition of Captain Dan’s laundry, part of the St Martin in the Fields effort to help homeless and/or destitute asylum seekers, refugees, and other migrants without recourse to public assistance

Absolutely horrific that the mayor of London needs this level of protection in the first place. How many other mayors need it? But how many others are Muslim and subject to so much bad faith and outright dishonest reporting and commentary? That's the real story here.

This isnt' a "masculinity crisis". Let's call it what it is: a deliberate campaign by the right to brainwash boys with misogynistic propaganda. Calling a woman teacher "a fucking slag" isn't masculine behaviour. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

French President Macron: “Europe is an extremely attractive continent. For months I’ve been saying this. And thanks to our American friends, I now have an unprecedented selling point: We are predictable.”

It’s that time of year again.

King David, the guy who arranged the murder of a lowly soldier purely and simply because he wanted to bang the guy's wife. Yeah, he's the one we should be guided by.

I'm sorry but I don't buy the excuse "I was in a rush and too busy to check" (paraphrased). To be lucky enough to be commissioned by NYT Books and then devalue everything writers work and sweat for by cheating, is lowdown. AI is only there because it fed on writers' stolen work in the first place.

Very traditional part of the British constitutional settlement on display here: a scaffolder finding something mislaid by someone in authority and carrying out his solemn duty of calling both the police and the Sun newsdesk.

The obvious jokes aside, supermarkets aren't doing much to help themselves (arf) when they're relentlessly decreasing staffed tills in favour of automated ones. The random checks that are undertaken do very little other than annoy legitimate customers and I get the sense staff detest them as well.

No word from Starmer, of course, who's funding it, and nothing from him about new law for executing Palestinians.

Terrifying reality check on Al Jazeera. Israel is systematically detonating and completely destroying entire civilian towns and homes across Southern Lebanon. This is not a war, it is a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing and total erasure of Lebanese communities. Where’s the outrage 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

🚨REALITY BITES! Voters Back Starmer Over Farage! When offered a binary choice the public prefer a Starmer led Labour government to Farage led Reform one by 40-32. Source: Ipsos in the UK

Also Macron, speaking for many, has this explanation: "When you want to be serious, you don’t go around saying the opposite every day of what you just said the day before. And perhaps you shouldn’t talk every day.”

Make some noise. Share this post. 🚨 The Israeli government has granted itself another means to dehumanise, suppress, and kill Palestinians. Israel is violating international law.

What Yitzhak Yifat (centre) told me before he died. "I didn’t know then what the result of the war would be. I can say that the results of the war were bad. We realised that we had conquered another people. A whole people. And now it seems we cannot now get to a true peace, a real peace."

Via James Montgomery: St James’s Park #London this #spring morning. As you can see, London is an absolute hellhole.

Holiday advice: It's pleasant to get a train to Europe. You just have to turn travelling into a core part of the holiday - lunch in Paris, dinner in Bordeaux, trip to Spain, week on beach etc. It's limiting, but very enjoyable & decent alternative to a flight you won't be able to afford by summer.

And PLEASE can we get it right this time and use “staycation” to mean “holidaying at home”, not “holidaying in Britain”. We have a term for the latter, which is “holidaying in Britain”. “Holibobs”, wherever they are taken, remains a capital offence.

"Even if Trump declares unilateral victory in the Gulf, Iran would still have more influence than him over US inflation. Iran's regime has stumbled on a weapon that can induce Taco." Me on Trump's declining fortunes at home & abroad. as.ft.com/r/c336f5ca-a...

this is the chaplain btw. wonder why he was fired.

CNN: Sources are telling us that recent U.S. Intelligence assessments found roughly half of Iran's missile launchers are still intact and that thousands of one way attack drones are still in Iran's arsenal tonight. That's despite daily U.S. And Israeli airstrikes.

BBC News seems to have moved on from Iran - the story being below one about marmalade.

important note. This “freelance journalist” is a wealthy investment banker. His wife did Kate Middleton’s make up. Aside from AI this is also about careless mediocrity being accepted if you move in the right circles. He was reviewing books for fun & even then couldn’t be bothered to do it properly

Deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure without apparent military value is a war crime. Shouldn't be surprising since America elected a war crimes advocate, who in his first term pardoned convicted war criminals, and in his second made the public champion of those war criminals SecDef.

not sure this is a mid-terms winning slogan

Following from @sarahowen.org.uk earlier this week another MP having to abandon their public presence due to threats and attacks. Its not a coincidence, I suspect, that its another woman. Something is badly broken

Huge respect for Ed Miliband's refusal to back down to pressure over North Sea oil. The fact is drilling for oil in the North Sea will do NOTHING to fix the Iran crisis. The only long term solution to this crisis, and others that will follow, is renewables. Anyone who says otherwise has an agenda

Man I really hope they don't have to reformat a Word document or their mission is in real trouble.

Trump mocks Starmer and Macron. With reference to the UK’s “old, broken down aircraft carriers”, they are both newer than the US ones. news.sky.com/video/share-...

When i was a kid in Switzerland, there was a family circus that used to come to town regularly, and my dad became friends with some of the people running it. We used to go down and see the show and I remember there was a guy who span plates as an act and one night he just kept smashing plates…

‘Right now we surrender vast swathes of land for crops that we simply burn in our cars’, said one expert.

Speaking for many (if not all) of us, I suspect.

it's ridiculous that this "London has fallen" bullshit has been allowed to fester for so long. The best time to deal with this was a few years ago, and the second best time is now

Hear me out. Keep the State Visit, but send Princess Anne instead.

Think about this: A retired game show host may end the world as we know it. Only a master satirist could write this scenario, but Mark Twain is dead.

finally

Listening to Matt Vickers blaming the government for the state of the roads and, engaging in an extended sales pitch for a product produced by a major Tory donor (albeit without naming him) says everything about where Badenoch is taking the party.

This is an extraordinary front page for a British newspaper to run. Donald Trump’s delinquency, derangement & imperilling of international security is somehow a stick with which to beat our own Prime Minister, who has negotiated the current horror show rather well. It is actually sickening.

Folklore geek here: if the Home Secretary thinks fairy tales were comforting, she has not read many fairy tales. Pre-Disneyification, they were usually *not* comforting. And as for law, rather than lore: this is the Home Secretary's usual hogwash.

Maybe she will be the one who finally tears up the Refugee Convention. So far it has outlasted many insignificant political careers.

Here we go. With new polls showing a Doomsday Scenario for Republicans in the midterms, Trump escalates efforts to try and steal the midterms with an unconstitutional and illegal order.

Thornberry is a good egg.

I'm not into gesture politics but I think this visit should be cancelled, actually because it would be a gesture that it doesn't matter that in recent months Trump has repeatedy insulted Britain. But it does. The counter-argument is that it'd keep him sweet: it won't. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It says a lot about how hostile to those seeking safety Labour has become that Mahmood's defence for implementing some of the most inhumane and draconian anti-asylum policies in the world is "well Reform would be worse". It's a fairytale to think that by being xenophobic they will counter Reform.

Trump is mad online about the ballroom

These guys are obsessed. They spend more time slagging off Britain than they do Iran

Many congratulations to Doug Wilson, the new Treasury Solicitor and head of the Government Legal Department. (One of the best jobs) www.gov.uk/government/n...

having a normal one

Not sure I’d read a book on Catholicism by a guy who keeps getting personally called out by the Vatican for not understanding Catholicism.

Increasingly common of the AI slop on social media. Great that we're burning the planet for crap like this. And, yes. I'm more grumpy than usual this morning.