It's heartening to read of the appointment of an Urban Beaver Officer tasked with fostering "human-beaver coexistence" - even as efforts for human-human coexistence fall short. uniofbrighton-newsroom.prgloo.com/news/rewildi...
At the weekend I was cutting my garden hedge with a huge electric saw and so the chat with passing neighbors turned naturally to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and what it said about carnage and corruption in 1970s America. Fifty-two years later, the movie's tagline has a chilling resonance.
Russia unleashed its deadliest attack so far this year on the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other cities overnight, killing at least 17 people and wounding scores in drone and missile strikes reut.rs/4mEL61g 📷 Valentyn Ogirenko & Alina Smutko
Hard to overstate what a disaster this would be for public interest journalism
"they have no cards, other than a short term extortion of the World by using International Waterways"
Those feel like... pretty solid cards?
Vance visits Hungary. The Guardian's irony meter is almost at breaking point. www.theguardian.com/world/live/2...
‘Russian satellites, the undated assessment said, made at least 24 surveys of areas in 11 Middle Eastern countries from March 21 to 31, covering 46 "objects", including U.S. and other military bases and sites including airports and oil fields.’
“Reject premise of safe return.” Fantastic.
I was in Vietnam last summer. People there still talk in horrified astonishment about General Curtis LeMay saying North Vietnam should be bombed "back to the Stone Age" in 1965, even though it's disputed whether he ever actually did. Whereas, in today's Washington...
Leo Radvinsky, the billionaire owner of OnlyFans, has died of cancer at the age of 43. Here's our Dec. 2024 profile of the porn mogul and his road to riches. www.reuters.com/investigates...
The $1.3-Million-a-Minute War www.nytimes.com/2026/03/21/o...
Revealing who owns England just became Government policy.
Here's my blog post analysing this historic moment, as well as assessing some of the other ambitious policies unveiled in the Government's new Land Use Framework:
whoownsengland.org/2026/03/19/r...
Remarkable story from Denmark's nat'l broadcaster. "When Danish soldiers were flown to Greenland in January...they brought explosives so they could destroy, among other things, the runways in Nuuk & Kangerlussuaq [to] prevent US mil aircraft from landing" www.dr.dk/nyheder/indl...
Edward Luce in the FT.
RED ALERT Physical crude markets are flashing stress signals that paper markets have so far largely ignored. Omani crude - exported from a terminal outside the Strait of Hormuz - is trading at a record premium of $51 a barrel to Brent, compared with an average of just 75 cents in February, pushing the outright price to around $150 a barrel for May loading. A similar pattern is playing out elsewhere. Cash premiums for Dubai crude jumped to $56 a barrel on Monday from an average of 90 cents in February, according to data from S&P Global Platts and Reuters.
Striking datapoint from @ronbou.bsky.social: while oil futures are still relatively calm about the Strait of Hormuz, physical markets for the black stuff are showing much, much higher prices.
www.reuters.com/markets/comm...
Today one Russian newspaper writes of a world leader who has “made a mistake as old as the world. It’s a feature of personalistic regimes. He comes to believe in his own genius & takes a decision in a narrow circle of trusted persons...the blitzkrieg didn’t work.” #ReadingRussia
The Society of Authors has launched a 'Human Authored' scheme to 'help identify works written by humans in a market increasingly flooded by AI-generated books' 👇#BookSky
"People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed," said the 53-year-old, who moved to California in 2003. "I don't want to live in a place like this."
www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...
“Nor can Trump handpick a new Iranian leadership. Others have observed it took America two decades to replace the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan. It took Trump just over a week to replace one Khamenei with another.”
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...
Recently stranded American: “The woman I spoke to [at the US embassy], she asked me where we were. I said ‘Oman’ and she asked me to spell it for her. I never thought I’d have to spell ‘Oman’ to a member of our State Department.”
www.nytimes.com/video/world/...
“Deliberately attacking a school or hospital or other civilian structure would likely be a war crime under international humanitarian law.
“If a U.S. role were to be confirmed, the strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East.”
“Deliberately attacking a school or hospital or other civilian structure would likely be a war crime under international humanitarian law.
“If a U.S. role were to be confirmed, the strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East.”
Home page of the U.S. Embassy in Egypt. Missiles, drones, security alerts . . . and "the Trump Declaration for Enduring Peace."
After many years of court reporting, I've just had a completely new (to me) reason for a hearing delay: “The lights have gone off downstairs”
The courtroom is fine but the cells appear to be in darkness 😬
