Try to take this in. In England, in 2025, police are pandering to the religious whims of an aspiring Islamic State soldier. Like a sad tribute act to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, they replaced a ‘sinful’ image of a female terrorist with a halal one in which her features were hidden beneath black cloth in the fashion of hardcore Islam. We all know Britain’s cops have lost the plot, but doing the pious bidding of an extremist who dreamed of joining the mass murderers of ISIS? That’s a new low.
They charge by the half hour for small jobs, so it shouldn’t be too much
Oh, I do like making stew! Another pie and four helping of venison and mushroom stew in the freezer.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14399423/Miliband-tree-massacre-drax-energy-pellets.html
Since it started importing huge quantities of pellets in 2012, Drax has relied on America's South for most of them, not only because it has vast tracts of forest close to coastal ports for easy export but also because these conservative states impose few of the regulations that protect woodland in the UK and the rest of Europe.
Logging companies traditionally cut down only the biggest trees as they are most suitable for the building and furniture industries, leaving the smaller ones to keep growing. They also left the ecologically-precious 'wetland hardwood' varieties such as cypress because they were too gnarled to become planks or tables.
Now, there's so much demand for wood that will simply be pulped for pellets, everything is worth cutting down. Environmentalists acknowledge that any really high-quality hardwood may still be sent to a sawmill but the rest becomes biomass. Sometimes, they say, an entire clearcut is turned into pellets. […]
Everyone I spoke to in North Carolina admitted they were slightly shocked that 'tree-loving' and climate change-aware Britain, of all countries, had facilitated the biomass industry –adopting renewable energy accounting rules that didn't account either for the forests being lost in the US or the carbon emissions from burning the wood.
Derb Carter, a senior lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Centre, told me he had repeatedly visited the UK to explain the situation to government officials.
‘There was this assumption that surely the US regulates how forests are managed to protect the public interest,' he said. The Brits were 'surprised', he said, when he explained that in southern states like North Carolina, there was nothing of the sort.
Pizza!
Is he english? Wondering if it’s some sort of “see, I’m a student!” visa thing.
It’s not the Guardian, it’s the Observer (which has always been more GC).
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpquxmmyz2nw8ys8npflt93m9yu5c8ewckp00xsu5g3aykvn836jt7qc8d30v He should get a more extensive set of colours and paint fake potholes 😂
Isn’t there somewhere where they tried that as a traffic calming measure? Canada, maybe?
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/02/11/court-gives-gazans-right-settle-uk-palestine-ukraine/
A family of six seeking to flee Gaza have been allowed to join their brother in Britain after an immigration judge ruled that the Home Office’s rejection of their application breached their human rights.
The family had made their application through the Ukraine Family Scheme and the decision to accept their case came despite warnings by lawyers for the Home Office that it could open the floodgates to “the admission of all those in conflict zones with family in the UK”.
Possibly so. The was no paint on the worst bit, naturally.
The man with the can of spray paint has been to visit. Looks like he got bored after a couple of miles.
Bored of this, now.
Is there a word for “drizzle, but it’s frozen”?
My ducks would love that!
Given that these animals have been mutilated and the money has been spent, I would like to know the results of the trials (despite thinking that they should never have taken place).
For example, the Biden-Harris Administration spent $2.5 million taxpayer dollars to study the fertility of transgender mice.
$1.1 million dollars were spent to find out if female rats receiving testosterone therapies to mimic transgender men were more likely to overdose on a party drug commonly used in the LGBTQ community to induce drug-fueled “chemsex.”
Federal funds were also used to forcibly transition male monkeys to see if hormone therapy made them more susceptible to HIV.
https://freespeechunion.org/universities-failing-to-promote-diversity-will-face-funding-cuts/
This means that a quarter of all research funding assessments will now be dictated by institutional culture, rather than academic output and impact. In other words, academics may find themselves under heightened pressure to conform to specific ideological frameworks, potentially at the expense of scholarly independence and the open exchange of ideas. […]
Notably absent from the new REF criteria is any reference to academic freedom – despite mounting evidence that UK universities are restricting scholars’ ability to research and discuss topics such as the clash between trans rights and women’s sex-based rights.
It’s an astronomically unusual month: all the naked-eye planets are visible at one time of night or another, and there are quite a few conjunctions.
Not as good as this from a couple of years ago, Venus and Jupiter:
Driving over the tops just now, I came over the brow of a hill and got an almighty shock at the sight of the huge red moon hanging on the horizon. It’s not up yet here, so have some stars instead, but if you look out in an hour or a bit less you might see Regulus hanging next to it.
