Edit: it is not that bad, it’s an open judgement, it can be appealed but if the appeal fails, relief will be granted to the claimant (proscription will be canceled)
Sadly yes, journalistic standards are not high up today. Check everything, because people don’t bother checking and want to publish first. :o
There is reason to expect that the proscription will be canceled.
They have skipped reading the ruling or the press summary and misunderstood the ruling. This is a preliminary ruling (clarification: an open judgement). Quoting from the press summary:
The Divisional Court has today handed down its judgment, and allowed the claim on two of the four grounds of challenge.
It indicates that the claimant had grounds to dispute the Home Secretary’s measure (proscription), but the court has not yet issued relief (has not yet canceled the proscription).
Valid grounds for challenge, one example of many:
- The court instead measured the interference with the Convention rights by reference to the restrictions imposed by criminal offences consequent on proscription, and also by the extent to which people would exercise self-restraint in conducting lawful activities. The court’s overall conclusion was that, even discounting Palestine Action’s non-peaceful activities, proscription did result in a very significant interference with the right to freedom of speech and the right to freedom of assembly. [116] to [124]
- Since the Home Secretary’s policy had not been properly applied, it follows that the interference with the right of freedom of speech and freedom of association did not meet the requirement under section 6 of the HRA that any interference with Convention rights must be prescribed by law. [125]
Current status:
The proscription Order remains in force until further order of the court. It therefore remains an offence: /…/
A “hothouse Earth” scenario can be prevented in two ways:
Choice 1 is obviously a dozen times more preferable. Choice 2 will be almost inevitable if making choice 1 fails, and could bring about unforeseen risks.
They slowed it. Blocking Telegram would start an instant s**t volcano in Russia, perhaps a bigger one than officials currently expect to contain.
I doubt it. Much of the same would happen with sane people in power.
The demographic transition:
means longer life spans (which means that older people use resources which would be used by new generations in a pre-transition society)
means lower infant mortality (which means that people don’t need to reproduce a lot, as their children have good chances of surviving childhood)
Whatever additional processes are in play, likely aren’t amenable to change either.
Result: some never achieve it, some achieve it when less fertile or infertile, some when their own parents already need care.
Result: people live separately from their parents more often, and expect it as a criterion of normal life, as a result of which grandparents are less available to help with child care.
Result: children aren’t had accidentally.
Changing some politicians seems unlikely to change that, unless a new social agreement forms. What that agreement might be, I don’t know. I speculate it could be “consider having children before building a career, to enable this, very strong welfare guarantees are offered to parents raising kids”.
My viewpoint: turning it into a carbon sink is likely true. A desert is near carbon neutral in its natural state anyway. Not much grows and not much decomposes. Adding even a bit of vegetation turns it into a carbon sink, but the number next to the minus sign will be very small, considering the total area.
Takla Makan is big (for those acquainted with Europe, about the size of Germany). Planting great numbers of bushes, shrubs and trees along the edges and the river beds will contain its shifting and spare settlements on the edges from the nuisance, but the desert remains a desert.
There is no need to confirm, they’ve published more than a bit about it. China has been working on containing the desert since 1978. A road was built across the desert more recently, in 1995, and a railway around it. They intend to drill a 11 km research hole to study the local region of the Earth’s crust. They intend to produce solar power.
Locals… well, this is Xinjiang. Locals mostly aren’t Han (ethnically Chinese) but various Turkic peoples, including the seriously repressed Uyghurs. They would probably fear a mass of Han Chinese moving in more than a mass of sand, but they are most likely OK with the trees, because sand pesters them just as badly. So far, it looks like not much is happening in that part of Xinjiang, because there is not much to build an economy on. Solar power is nice, but if sand buries it, it’s not so great. Currently, if you build a solar power plant to a random place in Takla Makan, there is a considerably above-zero chance of the desert burying it. Fencing it with lots of trees (irrigation needed) will allow a project to perhaps operate long enough.
Regarding “statutory instruments” - the UK might benefit from a constitution. Or some other document that says “only the parliament passes laws”.
There is a trend however, in several sectors: the financial volume of Chinese exports to Russia grows, but the unit volume does not.
That’s not called bankrolling, it’s called price gouging, and if someone price gouges an agressor, that’s actually pretty tolerable.
(I do not exclude that in other sectors, actual bankrolling may be occurring.)
Sources and background:
China Hikes Prices on Dual-Use Goods Exports to Russia – Study
China’s 2025 trade with Russia posts first decline in 5 years
This seems very likely to be true.
He’s the second in command of the GRU - he would be a priority target for the GUR and would not go anywhere without a bodyguard somewhere near.
Assassins of any origin have life plans too, they don’t want to be pinned down into a firefight with people who have lots of backup coming fast. The assassin did his job, which may yet prove successful, and did his best to get out fast.
Realistically speaking:
If the buyer is Canada and their threat model involves Trump wanting to attack them, it’s a foregone conclusion. Get Gripen, equip with Meteor, get ready to kill some tasty AWACS.
It is my impression that deep strike drones previously flew pre-programmed (attempting to locate the target using satnav, with some fancy versions using ground scanning lidar or machine vision).
The problem of deep strike drones becoming remote-controlled seems recent, and Ukraine has been experiencing an increasing frequency of those since autumn. They’ve been attacking moving targets. One recently hit a locomotive moving on a railway, the other hit a bus full of miners.
I don’t know the background - was Starlink responsive or unresponsive, or did Ukrainians wait for a statistical curve of adoption to present itself and become certain, before asking Starlink to pull the rug.
What is clear that Ukraine has worked out a way of registering and whitelisting their own Starlink terminals, and hasn’t yet fully completed the process. Some Ukrainian units relying on small donors’ Starlink dishes are still working to get theirs whitelisted. However, this likely can’t be used to determine if Starlink was responsive to requests, as Ukraine would likely not start implementing a whitelist before getting a positive reply from Starlink - so the process becomes rushed for natural reasons.
Russians have been observed cursing Musk in colorful ways. In several places, offensive operations have temporarily stopped because units had become over-reliant on Starlink, and considered Musk “their own guy”.
Next step: war of the mesh networks.
Serhii Beskrestnov (radio amateur and now adviser to the Ukrainian defense ministry) has already pointed out that Russian drones are increasingly often providing connectivity to those that fly before them (expensive Chinese frequency hopping mesh radios have been recovered). While this dulls the edge of the swarm (the swarm has to be gradual, air defense will get time to reload) it requires Ukrainians to rework their jamming efforts and try to shoot down the relay nodes (which may be identifiable using signals intelligence). And of course, ideally, someone should talk to the Chinese companies, maybe offering to buy all the fancy mesh radios they make.
Besides the speculations about Israel and Russia having some relation to Epstein’s “work” (which sure looks like a honeypot, even if typically the operator of a honeypot doesn’t dive into honey) there is another avenue of extortion open currently.
It is imaginable that US special services could offer people “deals” worded like:
…and it’s foreseeable that some people would do a lot to have their name redacted. I hope that in the DoJ, it’s a large crew of many people doing the redactions, since that would reduce risk of someone trading favours.
Residents told Reuters the gunmen were jihadists who often preached in the village and that they demanded that locals ditch their allegiance to the Nigerian state and switch to sharia law. When the villagers pushed back, the militants opened fire during Tuesday’s sermon, they said.
The motive almost certainly is power - gaining and maintaining it.
Heyva Sor is real and if you can, I am sure they welcome any help. :)
Jammers, jammers and ever more jammers.
If Starlink cooperates, that’s good because Ukrainian units use it for their stationary communications.
But one also has to jam GPS, Galileo, Glonass and Beidou - and these systems cannot cooperate, they just have to be jammed.
Drones can navigate using mobile networks: mobile operators have to prevent data traffic to a SIM card which roams too fast between base stations. Drones may read mobile network cell IDs, this has to be prevented.
…and finally, drones can communicate directly with ground stations far away. This too must be jammed.
…and then, drones can navigate using machine vision, radio direction finding or ground-sensing radar / lidar. These methods are really hard to counter, if they start using that, then it’s kinetic defense only. :o
Sadly, the “student” (Russia) has by far exceeded the teacher (Iran) by now, and only depends on China to supply components.
To prevent damage, one has to either:
Of these avenues, I think Ukraine has been most successful at preventing navigation and reducing Russia’s revenue stream by just droning them back.
Inara has a very good point.
You already have other skills. You likely have other resources. What is your job in all of this? What are you capable of doing? /…/ You know what is needed in crisis? Lots of people doing the work that they’re able to do.
It is very likely that most people can accomplish a lot more peacefully. :)
However, I would like to offer opposition on another point:
Could it potentially become more dangerous to have it than to not have it?
In the time of remote operated weapons stations, not really if used with caution.
What has never been there, can’t be switched.
This is a valid counterpoint, but one should be aware that the Afghan government was extremely corrupt and inept, quite ready to be bribed and pushed over.