France’s PM lasted almost exactly half of one Liz Truss - is this a new record for political failure? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/06/france-pm-sebastien-lecornu-resigns

But she has read a LOT of tweets about how the ECHR is bad.

Bonta: Just minutes before the hearing, we got word that the Texas National Guard has been federalized. We asked the judge to issue a broad order — one that applies to every National Guard unit in every state — stating that none of them can be deployed to Oregon. She issued that order

What an absolute crayon muncher. "Masculine Christianity"

I understand a court of appeal ruling is due this month on the question of whether a judicial review of the ban can go ahead in November. The government is opposing it, but I think they might be wiser to get this cleared up as soon as possible. The current situation looks awful & is not sustainable.

*gasp*

If any Government can just snatch basic human rights away from any section of society when it pleases then none of us has rights – just privileges that can be taken away by people in power whenever they want

This week’s Big Issue is out today! ✊ Cillian Murphy fights the system ⚕️ Can Marmot Principles fix Britain? 🏠 Our hidden homelessness special Pick up a copy today, and read a sneak peek here. 👀 www.bigissue.com/behind-the...

Water lilies - 1907 https://botfrens.com/collections/41/contents/3110461

If Michelle Mone has "no wish" to return to the Lords as a Tory peer, as reported this weekend, she should probably stop boasting about being a baroness

It's funny, when you have a cognitively challenged Dem president, his advisors manipulate him into forgiving student loans & expanding domestic cleantech manufacturing. When you have a cognitively challenged GOP president, his advisors manipulate him into fascism. Kinda revealing.

'Protected' by Yorkshire born printmaker Hester Cox. #ReframingWomenPrintmakers

I’ve got two articles in this week’s Observer. One is a big piece of reporting on lone asylum seeking kids arriving in Britain - a group is often missed out of the conversation observer.co.uk/news/columni...

I was told not to teach a class on the intellectual histories of Zionism and Anti-Zionism next year - not because they doubted I could teach it fairly, but because it would attract too many politicians scrutinizing the syllabus. A society where that is a valid fear is no longer fully democratic.

This is the logical endpoint of the far-right media echo chamber / isolation booth: a confused, elderly man has become president and, with Fox et al as the only source of information he believes, he thinks archival footage of things that happened over years is all stuff that’s happening now.

Governor Gavin Newsom said the White House, thwarted in its effort to deploy the Oregon National Guard to Portland, is calling up California's Guard troops instead. Newsom said he was suing over the order.

A great many delusions here, but also: Noah Smith is in his early 40s. Even without googling, he was alive for all of this. So was I. Has he scrambled his brain so badly he has fake memories of the 90s in which the American left cheered Communism and then, after 9/11, allied with Al Qaeda?

This reads far better in the original German, where of course the discussion would have been about Jews, Poles, gypsies, gays, Communists and Social Democrats. Still, Miller's model for all his rhetoric and action plans is unambiguous.

Do we really have such abysmal collective memory that we need to be *told* that the right has a history of censoring free speech? Have we really swallowed so much reactionary-centrist bullshit about "cancel culture" that we've forgotten that primal political truth?

An acrostic that doesn’t actually work as an acrostic because of the line spacing is a neat summary of the Conservative Party in 2025, I guess.

Great thread. Badenoch’s complete lack of interest in Ukraine in particular is just utterly bizarre to me. She talks as if she is engaged in a battle for our values. What does she think Ukrainians are fighting and dying for? Why does she think Boris and Ben Wallace helped to arm them?

ICE in the US have been driving around beating up and abducting random nonwhite people. The fact the tories thought ‘this is what we need in the uk’ makes me glad they’re a completely irrelevant nonentity of a party.

So this is really it. We’re very close to a line being crossed that is going to be clarifying for a lot of people who have either not been paying attention or who have been in denial.

This just a few weeks after many of Robinson’s supporters were doing Nazi salutes and shouting Nazi slogans at his march in London. Absolutely insane stuff.

Just heard Chris Philp on BBC’s Today programme explaining why the Tories want to leave the ECHR. He claimed ECHR isn’t mentioned in Belfast Agreement - which is simply untrue. The UK govt agreed to incorporate it into NI law & give direct access to the courts (Strand 3). Why no BBC fact-check?

I travel a lot on the WCML to see family and when I’m budgeting I generally assume prices are about 40% lower as that’s what I’m going I get back on delay repay. Ironically the delay repay is the best-run bit of the entire service. Maybe they could hive off the rest and just be a refund company.

Over 400 arrests of protesters in London thanks to the government’s refusal to admit that their decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist group has been a disaster The Labour gov has so far arrested well over 1,000 people for holding up signs www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

I wonder if it has ever occurred to Tommy Robinson that if he doesn't like prison, he could try not breaking the law.

Oh look, another White House Signal scandal. This time it was an aide to Stephen Miller who was using Signal so openly in a public space that a bystander captured images of the chat. Oh and the messages were about sending the *82nd Airborne* into Portland. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

We fought a revolution so that we would not be subject to the rule of a king who could make law by decree. An executive order does not overturn the Constitution.

Had the government said "as a mark of respect, we'd like you to cancel football matches, concerts etc AND protests today", then fair enough. But to single out the protest they've long wanted to stop anyway as the one thing we should not do looks like disgraceful exploitation of a horrific attack.

A recent photo of a starling murmuration as if smoke from a chimney has been called a "fluke" by its Yorkshire based, UK photographer, Anna Tosney #WomensArt

Turns out Batman’s been around at least since Roman times

“So I leant over, tapped her on the cleavage with a pastry fork, I said my mother gave birth to twins in an unheated wash house and then got straight back up and finished the mangling, so think on.” RIP, Patricia Routledge.

I don't know where this revisionism has come from about the suffragettes - people saying "if the suffragettes were around today, they'd be considered terrorists." The suffragettes were arrested and tortured, sexually assaulted and beaten by the state. They *were* considered terrorists!

Just by way of an aside - and with no obvious connection - Farage took up his line that the West "provoked" Putin's full invasion of Ukraine a few weeks after this tweet in June 2024, and for the first time since the 2022 Russian Military's 'special operation'

ok yes i acknowledge that if i go to the gym today i will feel better after, but what -- I ask you WHAT -- about during?

Johnson’s cull of MPs prepared to tell the truth about Brexit consigned the Tories to the absurdity & irrelevance they currently enjoy. The media’s pitiful complicity in & failure to explain this lets Farage move in to the vacated space despite embodying the stupidity & bigotry that did for them.

Notable how far France is ahead of the UK on this stuff

Jenrick allies are collecting no confidence letters from Conservative MPs calling for party leader Kemi Badenoch to quit, Hard to work out the strategy of these people. If it’s to copy Reform policies to lure back voters, it won’t work - they’ll go for the real deal.

🔴NEW🔴 Thread 🧵 @bylinetimes.bsky.social can now reveal that, during the crucial period when convicted Reform leader Nathan Gill was most active, working directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most senior ally in Ukraine, he was also one of Nigel Farage’s closest confidantes 1/12

"Milei is amazing. It's Thatcherism on steroids. Cutting and slashing. That's leadership" - Nigel Farage Milei would be the "template" for my government - Kemi Badenoch

also, in keeping with Vance’s view of american identity, only white people are fully American with the right to critique or dissent. nonwhites must show proper gratitude (supporting Trump or marrying JD Vance) before they can speak critically of the country (in approved ways, of course)

Tommy Robinson posted a neo-Nazi blog that accused me and my fellow Jews Jack Straw and Barbara Roche of conspiring to flood the UK with immigrants.

Palantir has pulled out of involvement with the UK Digital ID card, according to an interview with their UK CEO on Times Radio. They’re concerned about the reputational damage of being involved with an unpopular Starmer policy.

The messages show high-level officials in the Trump administration discussing the possible deployment of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, an infantry force that has dropped into combat zones in both World Wars, Vietnam and Afghanistan.

“Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth considered sending an elite U.S. Army strike force to Portland, Ore., to quell protests that President Donald Trump has characterized as ‘lawless mayhem,’ according to images of messages provided to the Minnesota Star Tribune.”

Autumn painting by US modern impressionist Erin Hanson #WomensArt

Via @annabjournalist.bsky.social: Alabama continues to lead the nation in prosecutions of women in relation to pregnancy, pregnancy loss and birth, according to a report released Tuesday.

Presidents? SCOTUS gives them immunity. Corporations? SCOTUS makes it easier for them to pollute. Billionaires? SCOTUS says they can buy elections. But if you look Latino, speak Spanish, or work at a low wage job, SCOTUS says you can be abducted by masked agents. The legacy of the Roberts court.