CI🇪🇺🔻🏳️‍🌈👍♥️🇺🇦🇵🇸

“We think the case for it is overwhelming...The Liberal Democrats are very progressive politicians. That’s who we always have been." I'm not laughing, I'm really not! 🤦‍♂️🤣🤣🤣 @cllrmikeross @libdemsinhull @LibDems @Hull_Labour @Hullccnews @bphillipsonMP theguardian.com/politics/artic…

@DefendOurJuries You have to pity @metpoliceuk when the proscription case finally concludes in the protestors favour and they sue in a mass claim for wrongful arrest! 👍😜

BREAKING: Mass arrests under the Terrorism Act in Trafalgar Square, as hundreds defy the ban on Palestine Action. The police are knowingly unlawfully arresting peaceful protestors for holding placards which say: "I oppose genocide - I support Palestine Action"

@DalrympleWill I seriously think its got to the point where only crazy 'Murikans waiting eagerly for "Rapture" believe anything that comes out of @Israel Even many of the MAGAts like @mtgreenee @TuckerCarlson seem to have travelled the road to Damascus & seen the light regarding Zionism! 🤷

How Israel's supporters weaponise racism, bigotry and a particularly ignorant Islamophobia to dehumanise their enemies and justify their egregious war crimes

@Microinteracti1 Other triumphal arches have rather sad endings, as minor traffic roundabouts: in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Ar… Or Louis XIV's grubby arch in @Paris! 👇

The Arc de Trump: A Monument to the One Thing America Doesn’t Need More Of There is a very short list of leaders who built triumphal arches in their own honor while still alive and in power. Napoleon is on it. Various Roman emperors are on it. A handful of men whose names now appear primarily in history books under the heading “cautionary tales.” Donald Trump would like to join them. The plans filed Friday with Washington’s Commission of Fine Arts call for a 250-foot gilded structure planted between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, crowned with a winged Lady Liberty, four golden lions, and enough gold leaf to make a Vegas casino blush. It will be taller than the Arc de Triomphe. It will be taller than the Lincoln Memorial. It will, according to the man commissioning it, be “the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World.” He also said it was for him. His word, not mine. Triumphal arches have a specific historical function. They commemorate military victories. Rome built them after conquering Gaul, after crushing Jerusalem, after decades of actual battlefield triumph. Napoleon built his after Austerlitz. The question nobody in the White House appears to have asked is: what exactly are we celebrating here? The trade war with Canada? The tariffs on Danish cheese? Vietnam veterans have filed a lawsuit to stop it. Their argument is straightforward: the sightline between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington was deliberately designed to symbolize national reconciliation after the Civil War. Trump’s arch would sit directly in it. His response was that veterans should like it because it honors them. This is roughly the same logic as buying your wife a lawnmower for her birthday and explaining that the garden is technically hers. The structure will cost American taxpayers a sum not yet fully disclosed, and it will sit in some of the most congested airspace in the country, a few hundred feet from a Reagan National Airport approach path. Which brings us to the actual point. Modern democracies stopped building triumphal arches because history kept demonstrating, with considerable consistency, that leaders who erect monuments to themselves while still in office tend not to end particularly well. Washington already has the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the FDR Memorial, the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. Every single one of them honors a man who was dead before the stone was laid. That was not an accident. It was a principle. Trump looked at that tradition and decided it was inefficient. The Arc de Triomphe took thirty years to build. It was completed in 1836, fifteen years after Napoleon died in exile on a remote Atlantic island, never having seen it finished. There is probably a lesson in there somewhere. Stay connected, Follow Gandalv @Microinteracti1

@IraninJapan Except customary international law gives right of free passage to commercial shipping possibly since the Øresund 🇩🇰 tolls ended. Even the Bosphorus is toll-free. Only man-made canals are tolled. UNCLOS formalises this & most countries are party to it. 🤷

Having already responded to the second part of the post, here is a quick legal reminder for the author: The Strait of Hormuz does not constitute 'international waters.' Rather, it is composed of the territorial seas of Iran and Oman. There is even no 'corridor' of high seas or an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) running through its center, hence, every ship passes through the terrotirial waters of Iran or Oman. Consequently, under customary international law, the two coastal states have rights over these waters that must be respected. Having a legal advisor around is not a bad idea!

@Aelthemplaer Derivative nonsense! Sort of thing Saddam Hussein might have built or Kim Jong Un will build! That Napoleon did build. Dictator chic! 🤷 Napoleon at least won a few battles & had a lasting impact across Europe. @WhiteHouse @USCongress_

Note the lack of victorious battles engraved on it.

@JChimirie66677 @Elsiebubbles Ironic @mauritius claim is built entirely on former 🇬🇧 colonial administrative convenience. Chagos are geographically closer & more similar to @maldives or even @SeychellesFAD I met Navinchandra Rangoolam once, wily 2/3rd gen Indian migrant. Their claim is speculative & spurious!

Elsie, Mauritius will demand whatever the situation allows them to demand. That is how negotiations work. The real question is why Britain has put itself in a position where that demand carries any weight at all. There is no ratified treaty. No transfer of sovereignty has taken place. No binding obligation to pay has crystallised. Until those things happen, this is still a political negotiation, not a settled legal liability. But here's the problem. The government has spent months arguing that Britain is under a duty to hand the islands over. It has framed the deal as compliance, not choice. That weakens its hand. If you tell the world you are obliged to act, you invite the other side to behave as if the outcome is already theirs. So yes, Mauritius will push. Of course they will. But any demand for payment only has force if the British government chooses to give it force. And that choice flows directly from the position ministers have taken from the start. Strip it back and the position is simple. No deal, no payment. If the government ends up arguing otherwise, it will not be because it has to. It will be because it has convinced itself that it does.

Hermer's Law: How a Non-Binding Opinion Became a £30 Billion Surrender The Chagos bill is dead. Not delayed, not paused, not pending resolution of a diplomatic disagreement with Washington. Dead. The government has run out of parliamentary time, lost American support, lost a domestic court ruling, and is now appealing against a judgment that grants the very people it claimed to be helping the right to return to their homeland. The deal Keir Starmer signed, the bill his ministers championed, and the legal reasoning Lord Hermer placed at the heart of Labour's foreign policy have together produced a comprehensive and entirely avoidable disaster. Begin with the legal foundation, because that is where the rot starts. The government's case for surrendering Chagos rested on a 2019 advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice. Not a binding ruling. An opinion. One that carries, in the Spectator's precise formulation, roughly the legal force of a politely worded email. Any government confident in its own sovereignty would have noted the opinion, acknowledged its non-binding status, and proceeded as before. Instead, Lord Hermer, as Attorney General, treated it as an obligation Britain had no realistic choice but to honour. International law was placed at the heart of Labour's foreign policy, and a non-binding advisory opinion became the justification for surrendering a strategic asset Britain has held for two centuries. The consequences were predictable and have duly arrived. The legal framework constructed to make surrender seem inevitable has since been turned against the deal itself. A domestic court ruled earlier this year that Chagossians expelled from their homeland have a right of abode. The government is now appealing against that judgment, deploying British courts to resist the rights of the people whose welfare the deal was ostensibly designed to protect. The legal reasoning that was supposed to close the argument has reopened every argument simultaneously. Then there is Trump. His final withdrawal of support came after Starmer refused to allow American aircraft to use British bases to strike Iran. The refusal was consistent with this government's broader posture: cautious, legally constrained, reluctant to act without multilateral cover. But the consequence was the loss of American backing for a deal that required American cooperation to implement. Britain had already committed £30 billion of public money. It had signed. It had staked its diplomatic credibility. And then, when the alliance was tested at the precise moment it mattered, the terms of British foreign policy prevented Britain from meeting the condition on which everything else depended. The geometry of this failure is worth stating plainly. Starmer signed a deal he could not implement without US consent. He then adopted a foreign policy posture that made US consent impossible to retain. He built his legal case on a non-binding opinion that has since generated binding domestic consequences he is now fighting in court. And he committed billions of public money to an agreement that cannot be ratified, to lease back a base Britain already owned, from a government it was paying to take it. Lord Hermer bears particular responsibility. The decision to treat the ICJ opinion as effectively binding, to frame sovereignty as a liability and legal compliance as a virtue, set the terms for everything that followed. A government that begins by conceding the argument rarely wins the negotiation. Britain conceded Chagos in principle before a single formal demand had been made, and has spent the years since discovering the price of that concession while failing to collect any of its promised benefits. The bill is dead. The deal is stranded. The base remains, for now, in British hands. That is not a vindication of the strategy. It is a verdict on it.

@grantshapps Idea of you ever resigning on a point of principle is really rather hilarious. However @mauritius claim is spurious based on 🇬🇧 colonial convenience not geography. The base though is far more impt to 🇺🇲 than 🇬🇧 given you decimated @DefenceHQ & we have no force to project there

The Chagos deal is dead. Good. I would have resigned as Defence Secretary rather than hand over a critical British asset – and pay another country for the privilege for 100 years. It was always madness.

@John4bricknell @Ameer_Kotecha @Conservatives @CIJ_ICJ @JamesCleverly @FCDOGovUK They opposed what they had negotiated, you are being disingenuous! I think the deal is bad btw & unnecessary. @mauritius claim is spurious & @CIJ_ICJ were in error in making their advisory opinion @FCDOGovUK weak in its response. But Diego Garcia matters much more to 🇺🇲 than 🇬🇧🤷

@ceeing42 @Ameer_Kotecha @Conservatives @CIJ_ICJ @JamesCleverly @FCDOGovUK Accounts vary what is clear, and only this, is talks were started. What the direction would be and the end goal intended is conjecture -and irrelevant. Living today and with what we know : the Labour administration proposed a deal and the conservatives opposed straight away

Starmer and his government never gave a good rationale for the Chagos giveaway. They hardly even bothered to provide a justification for it to the public - it was as if they didn’t feel they had to, because the ‘adults’ were in the room and the adults knew best. For me that condescension just rubbed salt in the wound when it came to this egregious deal. If it is truly dead - if - then let that be a lesson to this government about treating the public like fools

@John4bricknell @RubinReport @JDVance @magyarpeterMP I only recall @BarackObama commenting on the incredibly stupid Brexit referendum, saying it was dumb to leave, in which he was, of course, totally correct! It didn't help, merely reinforced the latent racism & anti-🇺🇲ism of many hard core Beleavers! 🤷

@ceeing42 @RubinReport @JDVance @magyarpeterMP Obama perhaps?

Don’t make a terrible mistake, Hungary…

@coachbrucepearl They won't miss you. Barcelona is overwhelmed with tourists & Catalans being firmly against racist genocide, I doubt many would want you there! 🤷 @sanchezcastejon is a moral giant amongst European leaders! A true Socialist, scary huh for crazy fascistic Floridians? 🤣

Looks like I'm gonna call off my summer trip to Barcelona. Think I will spend my hard earned money someplace else on vacation. Anybody with me on this?

@anishmoonka The average longevity of a mammalian species is reported as ~1,000,000 years. Will Homo sapiens break that average rule?

We live on a planet with 1.3 billion habitable years left. We've had rockets for 69 of those years. In that time, the cost of reaching orbit dropped from $54,500 per kilogram to $2,720, and SpaceX is targeting under $100 with Starship. If they hit that number, getting to space becomes 545 times cheaper in a single lifetime. 329 orbital launches happened in 2025. Almost one a day. The space economy crossed $626 billion last year and should hit a trillion by 2034. SpaceX just filed for an IPO targeting a $2 trillion valuation, worth more than every airline on Earth combined. Starship, their fully reusable rocket (both stages fly back and land), can lift 150 tons to orbit. The entire International Space Station weighs 420 tons. Three flights could put the whole thing up there. The engineering side of this is solved. What remains is a survival problem. Researchers published a paper in Scientific Reports calculating the natural extinction rate for humans, how often we'd get wiped out by asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes, the stuff we can't control. Less than a 1-in-14,000 chance in any given year. At that rate, we'd survive millions of years, more than enough to spread across the solar system. Toby Ord, a philosopher at Oxford who spent a decade studying how civilizations end, puts the odds of a civilization-ending catastrophe before 2100 at 1-in-6. The threats aren't from space. Nuclear war. Viruses engineered in labs that could spread before anyone understands what hit them. AI systems are smart enough to act on goals we never gave them. All things we built ourselves. A 2017 NASA paper made this case: we have a roughly 50-year window to lock in spacefaring infrastructure before resources run thin and energy costs make a restart nearly impossible. We're 9 years into that window. Given enough time, the math takes this to 100%. The only question that matters is whether we make it through the next few decades without blowing our shot.

@Ameer_Kotecha Be honest, it was Brexit, the foundation of all our other problems. Lost us the automatic support of 27 advanced influential countries and the other European @UN SC member! 🤷‍♂️🤢

The origins of the Chagos debacle were long in the making. I was in New York in 2017, serving at the UK Mission to the UN, when we lost our seat on the ICJ. That was arguably the first Chagos domino to fall. But throughout, the problem was a deeper one: a Foreign Office establishment - who found their guardian angel in this lawyerly PM - who were obsessed with following the strictures of international law first, and paying heed to British interests second. Let this be the final death knell for the idea that we should put the demands of international lawyers over our own national interest

@NavyLookout @COM_SNMG1 @PortsmouthProud Why are they not playing the Imperial March from "Star Wars"? Its a tradition!! @deutschemarine youtube.com/watch?v=E1q6qN…

🇩🇪FGS Sachsen, assigned as @COM_SNMG1 flagship (in place of HMS Dragon) arrived in Portsmouth yesterday. Via @PortsmouthProud

@John4bricknell @Mambo_85 @ClarionHousing SAD has not had a Cllr that actually lives in the Ward since its creation. I always lived in the Ward I represented, its obviously not essential but it is preferable. One living 300km+ away is clearly ridiculous! 🤷‍♂️

@ceeing42 @Mambo_85 @ClarionHousing Well yes but I was making the point I was not “one of my own” but still served. I think Salman has much to offer but the impediments are huge also

If I, an ethnically white man of British heritage, was born in India (for example), there would be no way I would ever convince the average Indian I only cared about their best interest. This would be an acceptable opinion on their part But I'm supposed to pretend otherwise.

@John4bricknell @Mambo_85 He hasn't "served" it for 37 years though, in fact cleared off to London, so really not sure what this grift is all about? If he wins is he planning to give up @ClarionHousing job & London flat? A Cllr based 300km away is not my personal preference & yes I have a SAD vote.😉👍

@Mambo_85 I’m not sure your point. There are perhaps some serious question marks over this candidacy but I have no doubts his belief in the City. A city in the other hand I arrived in by accident, somehow forgot to leave, and yet served for 37 years. Are either of us unworthy in your eyes.

@hel1958 @John4bricknell Ah indeed, a whole new dimension to "upskirting". I'm sure the Firefighters were just mesmerised by your gold chain! 😉

!!

@adamjohnsonCHI Not hard is it? 🤣 🇺🇲 hardly ever signs up to anything like this & what has been signed @realDonaldTrump wants to leave! All that Manifest Destiny crap befuddles 'Murikan brains! 🤷

Hey man without looking, tell us what other country never ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

@John4bricknell @GuildhallHull Late Dave Gemmell once got me onto concrete cross-bar of @humberbridge North Tower! Terrifying!🤦‍♂️ Think all goes back to being stuck at top of Big Wheel at Hull Fair with sister who thought it a hoot!! 😱 @hel1958 may recall @HumbersideFire sending us up in their lift thing!😭

@ceeing42 @GuildhallHull I did that Guildhall clock tower too and am equally uncertain how I made it. Probably because it was all mainly inside. Way lower but standing on top of the Pearson Arch was terrifying having to duck under a scaffold pole to climb a ladder. Son of a pilot and I’m scared of height