FOARP

In what way would blindly following the US into what shows every sign of being a massive blunder be “leading”

Parris is reasonably OK most of the time.

If, in the year of our lord 2026, you are still banging on about the 1953 Iranian coup - something that happened 73 years ago - as if that explained everything since as Monbiot was the other night on Question Time, then you have no right to accuse your opponents of ignorance.

Sunak sinks new royal yacht plan in favour of ocean surveillance ship Defence capabilities prioritised over Johnson’s £250m ‘vanity project’ for successor to HMY Britannia

And the £2.5m spent just on planning for it, when it was never going to get built in the first place…. still, how much could a few tins of paint cost, £1m?

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022...

Yeah, definitely going to be able to afford another Type-26 if we… cut local council spending on colourful paint?

I recall the cost of the royal yacht was basically that of a Type-26.

It'll happen.

It's Bucks (~900k population), Kent (~1.6m) and Lincolnshire (~1.1m) where they kept the 11-plus AFAIK? That's ~3.6m people or ~5% of the UK population.

That plus a scattering of schools nationally I guess could get to that figure?

Doesn't Bucks have them?

More generally, the pandemic remains the hardest thing we've had to deal with nationally since WW2, and it happened during my adulthood when people my age +/-15 years or so were the ones who dealt with it, so all of those "Folk used to be tough" posts can just do one.

I remember seeing some idiot coming out of my local Co-Op with their arms full of bog-roll.

Obviously this is me putting my own thoughts on to them, but they were of exactly the correct age and appearance to be one of those "Folk used to be tough, not like young folk nowadays" Facebook-posters.

British production capacity has turned out to be Pretty Relevant Actually(TM) when it comes to artillery shells, so land-mines could see the same issue.

I realise this is the kind of thing Clare Short was saying in 1991. She was wrong, because the 1991 Gulf War had a clear objective (liberate Kuwait), and she didn't accept that doing this meant destroying Iraqi forces and bombing Iraq.

In this case, though, there is no actual objective.

So, it's now a matter of personal importance that Labour doesn't hold the election until 2029 so that my daughter never has to sit the 11-plus.

The whole thing is based completely on vibes.

I can't think of a single example where a war has been fought not with the goal of conquest, or eliminating a threat, or changing a government, but simply to smash a country up like this. It's the kind of thing some mad Mongol despot might have done.

I know the history behind why we're in this agreement. I know there's good intentions behind it. But there's a strong possibility that it's going to look very silly in a few years.

You mean, our guys in WW3: Baltic Breakdown/'Peacekeeping' In Ukraine Turns Out To Be Fighting A War, Actually, will be dug in behind minefields laid by our allies, or possibly even mines they laid but which came from allied stocks?

David Squires on … Gianni Infantino’s accomplishments in 10 years as Fifa supremo Our cartoonist on a decade of magic moments in the big job for world football’s leading ‘man of the people’

Here’s this week’s cartoon for @sport.theguardian.com

www.theguardian.com/football/pic...

(Libya being ruled by Gaddafi for decades, and then wracked by civil war, also didn’t help)

During WW2 extensive minefields were sown all over Europe and North Africa. After the war they were cleared and practically none now remain (the biggest exception is Egypt near Alamein and Libya, where the minefields were poorly recorded and shifting-sands/floods moved and hid them).

This is well-intended, but ill-thought-out.

The reason why the Finns and Balts have withdrawn from this treaty is because they are facing potential war with Russia, a country that tries to overwhelm its adversaries with numbers. AP mines help even the score.

Not every use of AP mines is Cambodia.

This is incredible. UK emissions fell 2.4% in 2025 as coal fell to a 400-year low. Incredibly, we used less coal last year than than in 1600, when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and Shakespeare was writing Hamlet
www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-...

Got the day of the week wrong guys…

The waiter following up at the rear with a Swastika badge is Konrad Adenauer BTW, one of modern, democratic Germany's greatest leaders, who was jailed under the Nazis and was a noted anti-fascist, so that's who you're slagging off by sharing this.

Just to say this again, as this cartoon goes around pretty regularly:

This is a Stalin-era Soviet propaganda cartoon, with English translations added, and is not true even from the most warlike of Western nations, where healthcare is always the biggest recipient of spending.

I mean it's a large country, but people shouldn't genuinely hate their countrymen like they do in the US.

Pretty amazing to see countries that I am familiar with and are typically thought to be fairly distrusting (Poland, Italy) still poll much more positive than the US does.

Question: is someone with poor anger management “neurodiverse”?

And how Ukraine isn't their war, so we in Europe have to pay almost the entire cost of supporting the Ukrainians.

But Israel's wars are their wars, apparently, and we should join them too.

Since the armed forces intake of ethnic minority and female recruits still drags behind national proportions, there's still a bit of play to get more recruits that way too.

Pay more, better family accommodation, try to get back people who've left. Ultimately just drop standards if necessary.

And how we don't respect freedom of speech, unlike them.