Reminded me that I want to do this, so may try running some up this weekend.

Would be a cool project for a beginner too, once they’ve cracked rectangles of basic fabric. Very little of the crochet I did at the start was stuff I or those around me would have use for, so I’d unravel to avoid wasting yarn. Everybody finds learning easier if they quickly arrive at items they want to keep or gift.

AWS can fuck right off.

If the UK decides to put any funding toward AI, it must be publicly owned & run, with Amazon’s grubby, grasping paws barred from any access to it or to any part of our grid.

How is it “lecturing” to decide that a publicly-funded state company will not use products built by enslaved people?

It is straight bizarre to suggest the current Labour government (who’d like to abolish the monarchy fwiw) should embrace the evils of slavery because British capitalists often embrace the evils of slavery.

Not wild at all - who better to help with intelligence than defectors?

Founder of the school I went to maybe somewhat similar to your idol, having had to flee himself once he spoke out against the regime he’d previously advised on education, then persuaded parents to send their teenagers to him after. It is said the war memorial is one of the few which has British and German in equal measure, so he wasn’t successful beyond keeping his own pupils safe whilst they were still his pupils.

Wake every day overwhelmed with dread, and the clinging stench of death and misery coating my everything.

Yup, there’s plenty of scope for closer ties between Mexico (along with other Central America countries) & the EU.

Just as Nazi Germany caused millions to flee Europe for the US, Fascist US is causing the first of millions to flee to Europe.

Here’s hoping all who make it will be safe for at least several generations.

Concentration camps conveniently situated near farms & factories & burgeoning with detained “undesirables”.

“Neither” implies they have an opinion on the relative prioritisation of the US and Ukraine by the UK, and believe that both should be prioritised to a similar degree:

“Don’t know” implies they do not feel they know enough about the relationships the UK has with either country to form an opinion.

But yes, there is some fuzziness, as anyone who does not care is more likely to choose “neither” as there is no “either” option, yet many of this type of respondent will have picked “don’t know”.

Possibly emerged from a triskelion, which exists as a motif across Europe and beyond, but especially in regions associated with Celts, morphing into legs for reasons unknown and a few meanings attributed long after the fact.

Here, we’ve yet to get around to abolishing hereditary peerages in the House of Lords.

Current government intends to get that done.

Until then, though there have been lifetime appointees to the HoL for a while, and the hereditary system somewhat eased in other respects, it means if the right seeds are believed to have got into your mother’s womb prior to your conception, you don’t merely inherit whatever land and titles your ancestors arrayed about themselves, you bag a seat in the upper house of a bicameral legislature until you pop your clogs, whereupon your heir slides in.

Unlikely to be similar for the hereditary Monarch as Head of State, nor as Head of the Established Church, though there may be some movement on the Spiritual Lords (about 2/3rds of the Anglican bishops & archbishops also get a seat in the House of Lords).

To the UK they are emigrants.

Expat is a casual term referring to someone whose employer sent them overseas on a posting. Diplomats are the most obvious example, but companies will use the same employment structure.

Different jurisdictions have different official terminology for this type of migrant worker, but their legal status in the host country is typically different to that of other categories of migrant worker in the same country, they are usually paid & taxed in their home country, and employed under the regulations of their home country (though in some instances, a host country may extend protections or impose obligations over them).

The confusion arises because when the UK had an Empire, huge numbers were sent abroad to run it, whether for companies like the East India Company, or as civil servants or on military postings, and so the British now think of “people who live abroad” as “expats” because that’s the word the older generations always heard, and then continued to use long after this ceased to be the predominant vehicle for of British to be living outside the UK.

The word is absolutely couched in a colonial past, but those using the term to describe other types of British people overseas are not generally doing so out of some sense of white supremacy or British exceptionalism, but plain old lack of awareness.

Yeah, the way people who’ve been on it describe how it changes they way it shifts their mental relationship with food reminds me a lot of the way those with ADHD describe the effects of their meds.

Getting fees out of clients is like getting blood out of a stone.

Those barristers may not get paid by Tesco for years & not without a fight - they’re prohibited from taking retainers and from turning down cases, and though they can refer cases on to other barristers, the circumstances in which they can do this are very limited.

Have you considered putting letters written on paper in the post?

Seems unwise to give your child’s early life story to any of these companies, especially when mapped to a network of her relatives and likely including photographs which people may not be as diligent to keep private as you.

Your daughter cannot consent to this, and it is your duty as parents to protect her privacy until she is old enough to decide for herself what to share and where.

Correct.

You qualify through low income, and as the list to get council housing is long, need is taken into account also.

Right to Buy allows council tenants to buy their homes at a substantial discount on market value. This is alright, as it promotes stability and gives tenants equity, but at the same time, council tenants don’t get evicted anyhow, even if their income has become very high, and you can pass on a tenancy when you die if a relative was living in the council house with you.

But the money from the sale of council houses to tenants does not get ploughed back into buying or building more council housing, and the people who bought them can in turn sell them on the open market rather than back to the council.

This has made it near impossible for councils to maintain levels of housing stock, let alone increase it to reflect population growth. In central London, many types of essential worker are hard to obtain as too few can afford to live within commuting distance - large & high quality housing estates in the centre and all through the Boroughs having been sold off under the scheme long ago & snaffled up by developers.

Thatcher brought it in as a populist policy, and to weaken state services, but every other PM after permitted the policy to carry on unaltered.

Most of them seem closer to being wrong’uns than weird.

It is only working in the US context as it isn’t an insult per se, yet really gets under the skin of their conservatives due to their obsession with conformity, and enables everyone to mock their ludicrous ideas without expending energy explaining why each of them are so awful.

Entirely different groups of people, and they’re profoundly opposed to each other.

At the core of this massive protest/strike are groups which have been against the bombardment of Gaza from the outset, and protesting Israel’s war against Palestinians for years.

Yer a pterodactyl, Mox. A pterodactyl.

Tell people you vaguely know, too.

Right now, they can’t.

Money has gone, opportunity for very cheap borrowing (which is what a sane government would have grasped enthusiastically grasped in the wake of the last crash instead of breaking out to exploit everyone harder) is gone.

Maybe, if Reeves is given scope to do her shit, this country can not merely stall the accelerating decline, but turn stuff around.

Nothing is more vital right now & for some time than keeping faith against the odds that that can happen.

There is nothing to lose by trying to hold our nerve.