mike fenster

@DanStylus @laurensam Don’t know if anyone’s told you but Palestinians massacred and kidnapped over 1000 innocent people on Oct 7th… That’s a problem for a lot of people But it’s of no relevance to an Airbnb letting.

@laurensam Don't know if anyone's told you, but Israel just killed 100k innocent people.. That's obviously a problem for a lot of people...

Just booked an Airbnb in the lake district for my family holiday. After reading my reviews and seeing one from Israel I get a reply from the owner saying "I'm pro-palestine, don't want things to be awkward for you" - well they would have been less awkward without that reply...

@nsandihelp I have been unable to log in to my NSAI account for 36 hours, either using my iPhone App or via the website. Is there a problem now?

@realDonaldTrump I believe it is very important that Donald Trump passed a test on truth recognition. His actions have led many to believe that he has no comprehension of the difference between a lie and the truth.

I believe it is very important that Kamala Harris pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility. Her actions have led many to believe that there could be something very wrong with her. Even 60 Minutes and CBS, in order to protect Lyin’ Kamala, illegally and unscrupulously replaced an answer she had given, which was totally “bonkers,” with another answer that had nothing to do with the question asked. Also, she is slow and lethargic in answering even the easiest of questions. We just went through almost four years of that, we shouldn’t have to do it again!

@Hells4Heroes @afneil Or she is nudging pensioners to apply for the benefit they are entitled to. 2 ways to interpret this.

@afneil So she knows they need the help, but she's relying on pensioners still not claiming, or being daunted by a complicated form..... what a heartless cow she is.

Rachel Reeves urges the 800,000 poorer pensioners who do not claim pension credit to do so, thereby restoring their right to the winter fuel payment too. Of course if they all did so it would wipe most of her savings from curtailing the winter payment. But then she probably knows the pension credit application is 24 pages, 15 sections and 243 questions. So there’s no chance of all 800,000 getting what is rightly theirs. Job done.

@Jessrocks71 @afneil @Iromg Not true. The government doesn’t know what savings and private pensions people have , so they don’t know who is entitled to pension credit until people apply. The 800,000 figure for those might be entitled to PC are a guess.

@johnredwood And you know very well @Johnredwood that thatcher prevented councils from doing that. So that the policy did lead to a shortage of council/ affordable homes.

Selling a Council home to the people who live in it does not add to the shortage of homes. If the Council uses the money from the sale to build another it adds to the supply of homes.

@elonmusk And you Elon are on the wrong side of that line.

I have never been materially active in politics before, but this time I think civilization as we know it is on the line. If we want to preserve freedom and a meritocracy in America, then Trump must win.

@DPJHodges He has done what Heath and Cameron did before him in similar circumstances. That didn’t stop the community supporting the tories.

The jury is still out on Prime Minister Starmer. But one thing we now know for certain. No-one can trust a word he says > Mail Plus > dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…

@cleeve_matt @afneil Consumer protection legislation has been passed by governments from the left and the right. There is nothing wrong (and a lot right) to extending it to tickets for gigs.

Communists and socialists both share a belief that government intervention is the only way things ever improve Both ignore obvious economic concepts like supply and demand The best you can hope for is that they don’t ruin things too much, so I don’t mind them being distracted by small things because you can bet your bottom dollar that they’d make a monumental pigs ear of anything complex and important

We’re out of our depth on so many fronts, in places we have no idea what we’re doing, especially me, there are serious economic and geopolitical issues to be tackled, we’re cur spending and raising your taxes but we think it’s our job to determine the ticket prices for the concerts of a couple of wrinkly rock stars. Government in action.

@RobNoLastName Economically literate. The state took stamp duty (maybe) on the sale, and the new owner carried on paying 4%. So how does the state lose?

I've sold a property that made a 10% return. I pay 40% tax, so the state made a 4% return on an asset it paid nothing to purchase. Then they told me they wanted yet more. So I sold the asset. Now it gets nothing. Labour aren't economically literate. [Before the twitterarti pile in: yes. I make money from rent. Sometimes renting is the best option. Imagine you want to open a sandwich shop. There are two identical premises available. One for sale for £3million. One for rent for £2000 a month. Which one do you choose? You'd rent, obviouisly.

@Kahlissee I suppose it depends what you call modern? The ISIS Caliphate, Germany, The Lords army in Uganda all did worse.

@TuhinRI1 @metoffice Meteorology and climate are sort of linked.

@metoffice Why can’t the Met Office just tell us about the weather. Leave the climate change stuff to other people and then you’ll have done your job

It's been the hottest day of 2024 so far with 34.8°C recorded in Cambridge today 🌡️ Provisionally this is only the 11th year since 1961 temperatures as high as this have been recorded 8 of those years have been since 2000 and 6 of them have been in the last decade 📈

If Biden had had to face PMQs on a weekly basis (PotusQs?) when would the penny have dropped that a new candidate was needed? #PMQs

@AmeliaRocket1 It’s a lot of things, all of them horrible, but it isn’t fascism. Not everything bad is fascist.

@PaulBrandITV It’s up to the media to call this what it is. Fascism.

@antisemitism How many 18-24 year olds were polled out of the 2000 respondents?

We have commissioned King’s College London to survey British adults’ attitudes towards Jews, using YouGov. The polling has revealed worrying levels of anti-Jewish prejudice among the British public, with particularly frightening rates among young people aged between 18 and 24. Coming on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, the polling raises serious questions about whether lessons about the antisemitism that motivated the Nazis have really been learned by British young adults. For example, more than one in ten 18-24 year olds believe that Jewish people talk about the Holocaust just to further their political agenda.

@antisemitism @SadiqKhan Why not Sunak’s Great Britain? It’s clear where CAA’s politics are

Thinking of visiting @SadiqKhan’s London? This is what you can expect to see.

@orenbarsky Nablus has been an Arab town for centuries. You can argue over the name but Israel either allows the Nablus Arabs to be part of an Arab state, or annexes the West Bank and lets the Nablus Arabs vote for the knesset. It can’t deprive them of belonging to any state for 56 years.

One of the Arabs' best-kept secrets, skillfully obscured over the years, is the true reason behind their refusal of the 1947 UN partition plan: For those less familiar, here's a quick summary: After WWII, the British, looking to exit the complicated situation they found themselves in in the Middle East, planned to hand back the mandate they had received from the UN. The UN dispatched the UNSCOP committee to determine the region's future. The committee proposed several plans, with the well-known Partition Plan eventually being accepted by the majority of its members. The Jewish community accepted this plan, and a majority of UN members voted in favor of it. However, the Arabs rejected it, similarly to their earlier refusal of the Peel Commission's recommendations (a topic for another post). So, why then did the Arabs reject the partition proposal? Primarily, they were confident in their ability to swiftly defeat the Jews, eliminate them, and seize the entire territory. This conviction also had a significant contribution to the Nakba as it led them to advise many Arabs to temporarily vacate their homes during the conflicts, expecting to return post-victory - a victory that, of course, never materialized. Yet, this is not the core reason. Pay close attention now: The primary reason Arab leaders rejected the UN's partition proposal was their own disbelief in the Palestinian people's right to self-determination. In fact, they were opposed to it! Indeed, that's exactly as it sounds. Arab leaders never recognized Palestinians as an ethnic group with self-determination rights, but rather as a part of the larger Arab nation. As those knowledgeable in history (and not propaganda) understand, there were originally no 'Palestinians', only Arabs. The Arabs' national goal was to create Greater Syria, covering today's Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Israel, a vision outlined in the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915-1916. Therefore, they rejected any proposal that independently defined the Palestinians, as such a distinction simply did not exist. (Interestingly, this truth is widely recognized in the Arab world. While not often acknowledged publicly, it occasionally surfaces, as seen in a video I'll share in the comments) So next time Palestinian history, culture, or their right to self-determination is discussed, remember that while the world, Jews included, were willing to acknowledge this, the refusal came from the Arabs themselves, who recognized the idea of a Palestinian nation as a UN fabrication.

@PaddyBriggs @paulmasonnews Sponsors will pressure the reporters even more than BBC management.

@paulmasonnews I have suggested that BBC TV should hive off News and Current Affairs into a totally separate and independent entity, funded by sponsorship, aimed at both a domestic and an international audience. A sort of CNN , but bigger and better. Disconnected from political pressure.

When I started at Newsnight, the interview was like a PhD viva, if your PhD was about every random aspect of business and economics. They asked me to bring 10x original story ideas and ruthlessly ripped every one of them to shreds - and then said: give us another one. I had a permanent job as an editorial manager at Reed Elsevier and they offered me a 3 month contract on less money. I took it because I knew I was joining the most accomplished team of broadcast journalists in Britain, and possibly the world. I am talking levels of excellence associated with the Berlin Phil in music, or certain Oxbridge/Imperial teams in science. But the war on Newsnight's kind of journalism was already under way. And so was the technological change that ultimately allowed the disaggregation of what we were geared up to do. The big divide at the BBC was between "programmes" tailored to a specific audience, making their own editorial calls and competing on stories, versus "newsgathering", which had been designed as a sausage machine of information into the programmes. Once they decided to empower Newsgathering and disempower Programmes, which was logical in a resource strained environment, the happy upside for the top management was that they could control the news agenda, and there were fewer alternative power centres to push back. This was never a left/right split: it was a "rocking the boat versus not rocking it" split. It wasn't just NN that suffered - so did Today, so did the Ten. But NN survived because we had strong editors - and then came the Savile fiasco... there was a time, after the subsequent McAlpine disaster, when the bosses wanted to get rid of Newsnight - it survived, but only at the cost of further erosion of its autonomy and money. I left because I could feel the management tentacles gripping tighter, whatever the team did to go on knocking it out of the park. Only when I joined C4 did I finally get to see what an adequately resourced news operation should look like, and what happens when there is no invisible presence above the editor trying to shape the output, and where they don't complain about having too many reporters. But NN's demise is partly also to do with audience and technology. Once you don't have an appointment to view, there's no call for the 10-15minute reportage film; and as the rest of broadcasting has become a screaming match between extreme views, actual reason- and fact-based discussions look tame, and it suits politicians to avoid them - see their effective boycott of C4N. Also, people in the AB social bracket kept telling us: it's on too late. Professionals go to bed earlier, and the news cycle wraps earlier, so the value of a 22:30 programme diminished. Ditto because Gen Z are simply not interested in TV News. Apart from the demise of a single still excellent but struggling programme, the BBC is basically getting out of long form daily current affairs. There will be no market equivalent of NN because the market won't produce a programme like this - which was copied and emulated by every other major broadcaster. I suppose the challenge now for BBC/ITN/Sky is to resist the final erosion of OFCOM standards to the point where broadcast news becomes a far right dominated blood sport. I cannot see how moving to a late night discussion programme is going to help, especially as the open secret about far right TV is that they are paying people to turn up and be performatively outraged. At the very least they should institute a "no grifters" rule.

@HussainShafiei @paulmasonnews Did any of these 8 movements emerge in opposition from another terrorist movement that was making exactly the type of transition to mainstream? And were any of them inspired by the same religious fundamentalism that makes Hamas so implacable. I don’t think the comparison works.

Why is Hamas different to this list? There have been several groups throughout history that were originally labeled as terrorist organizations but later evolved or contributed to movements that achieved political legitimacy or played a significant role in the freedom struggles of their countries. 1. **African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa:** Initially, the ANC's military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, was classified as a terrorist organization by the South African apartheid regime and some other nations. The ANC, led by Nelson Mandela among others, was a key player in the struggle against apartheid and later transitioned into a major political party in post-apartheid South Africa. 2. **Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland:** Sinn Féin, considered the political wing of the IRA, was once labeled as a terrorist organization. The IRA conducted a campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin is now a legitimate political party in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. 3. **Irgun in Mandatory Palestine:** Irgun was a Zionist paramilitary group that operated in Mandatory Palestine, and it was labeled as a terrorist organization by the British authorities. Many of its members later integrated into the Israeli Defense Forces and played roles in the foundation of the state of Israel. 4. **FRELIMO in Mozambique:** The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) fought a guerrilla war against Portuguese colonial rule. Initially branded as a terrorist organization by the Portuguese government, FRELIMO later became the ruling political party in independent Mozambique. 5. **Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF):** The EPLF fought for Eritrea's independence from Ethiopia. Initially labeled as insurgents or terrorists, they eventually led Eritrea to independence and formed the core of its government. 6. **Mau Mau in Kenya:** The Mau Mau was an armed movement against British colonial rule in Kenya during the 1950s, considered terrorists by the British. The struggle played a significant role in Kenya achieving independence. 7. **Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA):** The KLA fought for Kosovo's independence from Serbia in the late 1990s. Initially labeled as a terrorist group by some governments, it gained political legitimacy after the conflict, and its leaders became part of Kosovo's political landscape. These examples illustrate the complex nature of liberation movements and the evolving perceptions of such groups over time. The transition from being labeled as "terrorists" to being recognized as legitimate political players often occurs in the context of significant political and social changes. So why is Hamas to not be perceived as a future one of these?

Why Corbyn's refusal to ID Hamas as terrorists sucks. It's not just one increasingly cranky politician. There are people on the demos - not a majority but a significant # - who simply do not believe Hamas committed atrocities on 7/10, and think they are a legitimate resistance movement. I hope every other MP supporting StW will come out and acknowledge Hamas as a proscribed terror organisation and repudiate JC's comments.