Sean Robertson

Anyone who watched Channel 4’s Dirty Business about Water Companies & the Environment Agency’s failure to regulate them properly will be shocked to read the Sec of State’s response to my PQ “The EA already operates a robust, risk-based system to respond to pollution incidents.”

It’s only right we bring back this classic on the day Roy Hodgson comes out of retirement and into the Bristol City job… A classic! 🤣👏

Sheringham is doing what all of the other supposed legends of the club should be doing and using his voice. Would be good if the others followed suit and called the club out for the shambles it is #thfc

Swedish Gen. Claesson: I drove 3,000 km across Ukraine and met many military leaders. Main conclusion: Ukraine is tired, but it is not a broken country. Don’t let one-crisis-at-a-time blind us. Ukraine and the Middle East are happening together — and the constraints are shared.

In 2019, MIT professor Patrick Winston gave a legendary 1-hour lecture called “How to Speak.” It has 18M+ views for a reason. His frameworks: • Your ideas are like your children • The 5-minute rule for job talks • Why jokes fail at the start 15 lessons on communication:

BREAKING: French Senator Claude Malhuret TORCHES Trump and his alcoholic, drug-addicted administration on the floor of the Luxembourg Palace: "Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction!" This might be the greatest MAGA takedown of all time. Nobody was spared... "A year ago, here in France, I compared Trump's presidency to Nero's Court. I was wrong. It's the miracle court. An anti-vaxxer, former heroin addict as Minister of Health," he said, referring to RFK Jr. Malhuret's comparison to the mad Emperor Nero is fitting. It's said that he fiddled while Rome burned. In Trump's case, he's building a ballroom while the entire world goes up in flames. "A climate-skeptic Minister of Economy. An alcoholic TV host, Minister of the Armed Forces," Malhuret continued, referring to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. "An old Qatar agent, Minister of Justice. A groupie of Putin, Minister of National Security," Malhuret went on, referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Bondi previously worked for the Ballard Partners firm which raked in $115,000 a month by lobbying on behalf of Qatar. "A Turkish proverb says 'When a clown settles in a palace, he does not become king, it is the palace that becomes a circus," said Malhuret. "His fine team has decided to create a competitor to the UN. Since the creation of the Board of Peace, Trump has triggered more military strikes than Biden during his entire term." "Every time the Epstein affair resurfaces, bombs explode somewhere in the world and cause a distraction," he continued. "Bomb more to win more." This is how the world now sees the American president: as a pedophile desperately exploiting his role as commander-in-chief to obscure the fact that he preyed on children with his long-time pal Jeffrey Epstein. "There isn't a single country where Trump did not take advantage of the situation to enrich himself without ever forgetting his family. A Boeing plane offered by Qatar," he said, referring to the $400 million jet that Qatar "gifted" to Trump. "Investment in all Gulf projects or elsewhere. Stock market manipulation that only a few insiders benefit from." "Any one of these conflicts of interest would have caused here an immediate procedure of impeachment here," Malhuret. "But we are not here. We are in MAGA's America where public business is conducted in favor of private interests." Rarely have we heard such an exhaustive yet succinct distillation of the Trump administration's rampant criminality and incompetence. By focusing on individual Cabinet members and what makes them uniquely unfit for office and then expanding the aperture to the broader patterns of corruption and malignancy, Malhuret delivered a master class in political messaging. Every mainstream outlet in the U.S. should be running this speech to show Americans what the world thinks of our leaders. Since they won't, make sure to like and share to spread this far and wide!

I asked @richardquest if he sees a pattern in Trump’s seemingly market-timed statements on the Iran war: “Jim, from where I come from, in northern England, we have a saying, let's call a spade a bloody shovel. And and you just got to call it as it as it appears. And here there is no doubt that when the heat gets really hard in the market, something happens. The president says something, he acts. There is a movement that takes the heat out and the market rallies back up again, but nothing fundamentally alters underneath it. And that's the important thing to bear in mind. And in fact, arguably the underlying movement is deteriorating and worsening. All that's happening is the market is being is being teased, if you will. It's being sugarcoated, manipulated with a small M it's being told things it wants to hear. And as a result, it goes back up again. You can't necessarily say that. And I wouldn't say that's the president's motive because I don't know. But I can say that the relationship, as you say, between these statements, market movements, reality of what's happening, true change in the economic circumstances, which as the oecd points out, is deteriorating, that there is a connection.”

A young girl practicing martial arts while waiting for the bus. Sometimes, you need less than you think to stay active.

🚨BREAKING: In a bombshell revelation, Rep. Tim Burchett drops a nuke on insider trading by stating, "Washington isn't just a 'swamp' — it's a 'sewer' of corruption enriching from taxpayers' money and it needs to STOP.. Everybody wants to knock Pelosi; she's not even in the TOP 10." What's your response to this...??👀 Do you firmly support Rep. Tim Burchett on this? A. Huge Yes B. No IF Yes, Give me a THUMBS-UP👍!! MAKE THIS GO VIRAL ON 𝕏. LET’S GO 👏

JUST IN: Chinese satellites guided an Iranian missile onto a residential street in Kfar Qasim in Israel this morning. Five Israeli civilians are in hospital. China has not fired a single shot in this war. China does not need to. The missile was Iranian. The BeiDou-3 military navigation system that guided it to its dispersal coordinates was Chinese. The sodium perchlorate fuel that propelled it was shipped from Gaolan Port in southern China. The interceptor that destroyed the parent warhead was American. The bomblets that survived the interception and flipped a white SUV on a residential street were designed to overwhelm defences built by Rafael, whose IPO valuation just doubled to $23 billion during the war. Four nations in one detonation. One street. One flipped car. Five people bleeding from blast waves produced by a weapon that was simultaneously destroyed and delivered. And the country that provided the fuel and the coordinates is not in the headlines. Iran completed its full military transition from American GPS to Chinese BeiDou-3 in June 2025 after GPS jamming during the 12-day war rendered its missiles inaccurate. The B3A encrypted signal provides sub-5-metre precision, frequency hopping against jamming, and mid-course corrections to 2,000 kilometres. Seventy percent of Iranian ballistic missiles now carry cluster warheads. Each disperses 20 to 24 submunitions at 7 to 10 kilometres altitude, above Iron Dome’s engagement ceiling. The parent missile is destroyed. The children scatter. The six-second gap between interception and ground impact is the window the bomblets exploit. Iron Dome was not designed to track 24 falling objects across an 8-kilometre radius. The cluster warhead does not need to penetrate the shield. It needs to outlive it by six seconds. China supplies the navigation. China supplies the fuel. Approximately 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate from Gaolan Port in early 2025, enough for 260 to 500 missiles. And the bombs that America drops on Iran to destroy these launchers contain Chinese rare earth magnets. The interceptors that engage these missiles cannot be manufactured without Chinese minerals. The $200 billion supplemental that Congress is funding cannot replenish the munitions without Chinese supply chains. And the $650 billion that Big Tech is spending on AI infrastructure depends on semiconductors fabricated with helium from a Qatari facility that this same war shut down for three to five years. Every node in this conflict routes through Beijing. Every side depends on Beijing. Beijing profits from every side. The bomblets create de facto minefields in residential areas. EOD teams in Kfar Qasim clear them one by one. The next wave arrives before clearance is complete. Petah Tikva reported impacts in the same salvo. The satellites guiding the next missile to its dispersal coordinates are the same satellites guiding Pakistani cruise missiles and Belt and Road freight across Central Asia. The SUV on the street was flipped by a 3-kilogram bomblet that separated at 7 kilometres, fell for 40 seconds, and detonated on asphalt navigated to within 5 metres of its target by 40 satellites owned by a country that sells fuel to the nation that launched it, minerals to the nation that intercepted it, and helium infrastructure to the nation that fabricates the chips both sides need to fight. That is not a war. That is a supply chain with a body count. And the supply chain has one backbone. It is not in Tehran. It is not in Washington. It is not in Jerusalem. It is in Beijing. And Beijing has not fired a single shot. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Stubb: We are in a situation where the Ukrainians are killing over 30,000 Russians per month. Russians are not able to recruit back. We're getting closer to the moment when there might have to be a general call from the Russian part. 1/

If there is precisely one thing you watch today, make it this. French Senator Claude Malhuret. A microphone. And the most magnificently savage dismantling of the Trump administration ever delivered in a language they almost certainly don’t speak. He covers Iran. He covers corruption. He covers the kind of staggering, industrial-scale incompetence that would get you fired from managing a car park. And he does it with the calm, unhurried certainty of a man who has read every page of the indictment and found it, if anything, worse than expected. France has never pretended to like these people. But this is contempt elevated to an art form. The kind of refined, aristocratic disdain that takes centuries of civilization to produce and approximately ninety seconds to deploy. Malhuret sounds like he is four seconds from the button. Not out of panic. Out of sheer, exhausted disgust. Honestly? Understandable. Watch it. Share it. The adults are speaking. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

In historical terms, the Russians are losing, one hundred percent. Right now, they are suffering a terrifying number of casualties – 30,000 to 35,000 people a month. Russia cannot keep up with mobilization, contract recruitment, and certainly cannot keep up with training its troops. Will they decide to launch a full-scale mobilization? That I cannot tell. So far, they have been afraid to take such steps and have relied only on offering large sums of money to recruits. Why do we react so sensitively to sanctions being lifted? Because it’s about money. And money isn’t just tanks. Nobody fights with tanks anymore. Money means drones. Money means people. People mean contracts. And if they don’t have the money for contracts, their strength is declining. From an interview with Le Monde (4/5).

BLINKEN: The idea that Finland and Sweden are members of NATO is extraordinary. It was never in anyone's imagination for decades. What Putin has done in Ukraine is to precipitate the very things he claimed he was trying to prevent, including a stronger NATO closer to Russia.

British government diplomacy in the Middle East. As satirised by Yes, Prime Minister. Same as it ever was…

This cracked me up!! 😹😹😹

Zelensky isn’t angry. He is patient in a way that makes it worse. He is saying that Ukraine is now turning to the Middle East and the Gulf for what Europe has failed to deliver. Ballistic defense. Financing. The things Europe has had four years to coordinate and still cannot because Hungary sits in the room and nobody has figured out how to remove a hostile state from an alliance it is actively sabotaging. Four years. That is how long the EU has been pissed on by Orban and responded by scheduling another meeting. And now Zelensky is cutting deals with Gulf states based on shared drone warfare expertise. Ukraine teaches them how to survive modern aerial attack. They help fund Ukraine’s defense. A clean bilateral arrangement that bypasses the entire European bureaucratic apparatus completely. If that deal gets done, it is the single most embarrassing indictment of EU foreign policy in the institution’s history. Not because Ukraine found partners elsewhere. Because it had to. Europe built a system so paralyzed by its own consensus rules that a single pro-Kremlin government in Budapest can hold 400 million people hostage for four years while a democracy bleeds out on the continent’s eastern border. The question is whether Europe is even embarrassed enough to notice. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

U.S. General Christopher Cavoli on Patriot systems in the Ukrainian army: “Frankly, I was just a little bit dubious in the beginning. It’s a complicated system. We trained guys for a long, long time to be able to operate it. The Ukrainians put their best people on it and took to it like a fish to water. In fact, we’re now learning from some of their employment techniques.” 🇺🇸🇺🇦

PM Starmer showing what happens when the UK works in a close union with other European nations Worth thinking about.

Naturally followed by a polite chorus of “Ding Dong Merrily On High.” #MontyPython