Best Of

Talking of ICE, masked up agents pulling a legally-in-USA PhD student off the streets. She wrote a piece in the student newspaper criticising Israel. It's getting nastier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGDVKBdq3Gw&t=179s

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, was arrested outside her off-campus apartment. Then renditioned in violation of a Court Order.
...
Khanbabai said Ozturk had valid F-1 visa status as a PhD student. She has filed a habeas petition in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts for Ozturk’s release from detention.
...
“Unless otherwise ordered by the Court, petitioner shall not be moved outside the District of Massachusetts without first providing advance notice of the intended move,” wrote federal judge Indira Talwani in a three-page order to ICE on Tuesday night.
...
But shortly after the judge made that order, federal authorities transferred Ozturk to Louisiana, according to her attorney.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local/2025-03-26/tufts-international-graduate-student-taken-into-ice-custody

The op ed she wrote:
https://www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024/03/4ftk27sm6jkj

Land of free speech my arse.

It couldn't happen here, Oh wait:

https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3llit6dd7es2u

You think the arbitrary arrest of political dissenters cannot happen in the UK? It already does. www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-eve...

Is there any more reporting on that ?
Your link provides very little detail.

https://www.quaker.org.uk/news-and-events/news/quakers-condemn-police-raid-on-westminster-meeting-house

It was a meeting of the group "Youth Demand" who rented a room at the Meeting House. They are protesting for a boycott of Israel and for climate action.

https://youthdemand.org/

And this as well

https://x.com/c_kletzer/status/1905888893737590924?
t=0ax4E2LsJ9FxEAZG7gXwuA&s=19

According to radio 4 they sent 80 emails in a 6 month period (basically one every 2 working days) having been banned from the school premises after challenging the appointment process for the head teacher and “casting aspersions” on the chair of the governors.

While the police may have been heavy handed it does seem like there could potentially be a case to answer on harassment

From reporting, it seems that most of the emails were about managing their disabled daughter - they were not allowed into the school to show the teachers how to give medication, for example.

The mum locked up is a producer for Times Radio.

The Times article is quite good and detailed (I commend the journo):
https://archive.is/20250328191932/https://www.thetimes.com/article/d8c8566b-99b1-45c6-814b-008042d74a3a

Interview with the dad:
https://x.com/timesradio/status/1905693691416883419

It is a far more credible complaint imo that Allison Pearson's. I'd call it afaics that it was an acting head who they had been slightly rude about ("control freak" - imo accurate from the accounts) in a parents' group on Whatapp, who put in an over-juicy complaint and so the police went in feet first and mob handed.

The one negative point I can see for the parents is that the Whatsapp group was a little large with 1.2 million members. And perhaps initially emailing all the Governors when he did not get a reply was a bit OTT.

I think the arrest may have been unnecessary - chap said he would quite happily have toddled along to the station for an interview.

The authorities are trying to let it lie. I don't think it will.

A school whatsapp group has... 1.2 million members? This is a part of social media I am completely unfamiliar with. The biggest one I'm in is about 200 hundred, and that's for organising climbing trips.

Class sizes have really ballooned of late.

EU plans concessions to the Trumpdozer after tariffs - Bloomberg

https://x.com/wallstengine/status/1905609090606456980?s=61

People looking for a western counterweight to Trump will need to look to Canada rather than Europe.

What do you think about this one from your team? Critic of Putin arrested and due to be sent back to Russia.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/harvard-scientist-russia-deportation-antiwar-b2723063.html

It sounds like she screwed up by trying to bring something into the country that she shouldn't have and is just using the war critic angle in a bid for sympathy.

So she gets sent back to the tenth floor french windows.

I don’t think she’s likely to be on anyone’s radar as a dissident.

Having been poisoned in front of the world that's possibly what Navalny thought when he boarded the plane from Berlin.

He wasn’t an obscure scientist but a high-profile thorn in Putin’s side.

There are plenty of obscure Russians in Siberian jails for far less high profile expressions of opposition to the war.
You’re either being naive or obtuse.

The BBC has commissioned a legal drama set in the "glossy, high-octane world of Glasgow lawyers".

Counsels will follow "five young lawyers who once trained together at one of Scotland’s elite law schools, but are now scattered across the profession and find themselves facing each other in the courts of Glasgow".

"Some will rise to the top, while others risk losing everything as their careers teeter on the edge when they lock horns in their biggest cases yet," the Beeb said in a press release.

Counsels' "ambitious lawyers must navigate a legal battlefield where their friendships begin to fracture, love affairs crumble, and the fight for justice threatens to tear them all apart."

Sadly, it means the vital work of transactional lawyers in non-contentious roles, poring over documents for hours on end, will continue to go ignored by the telly people.

https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/bbc-capture-glossy-high-octane-world-glasgow-lawyers

This whole tv legal drama thing is getting stale. What I'd like to see for a change (and I think I speak for many) is something focused on an Accountancy practice. There's plenty of thrills and spills there, I can assure you. So let's get a top writing team on that. It can still be set in Glasgow if that's deemed important.

No, no no.

What you need is a drama set up in an investigative team in the City with a feisty, charismatic female lawyer in charge of a team of brilliant oddballs, police-style work, some of it involving the actual police, lots of thrilling romans-a-clef plot lines involving, ooh, I dunno, a Scottish bank, some politicians and a takeover going disastrously wrong, crooked traders, US and Swiss banks involved in Italian corruption cases with Sicilian cement manufacturers, whistleblowings about the Vatican bank, the discovery that a bank has hired the son of a Ukrainian mafioso with close links to the Kremlin, the salesman doing some insider dealing through a Franco-Lebanese bank with close links to some very disreputable Middle Eastern politicians and so on.

It will shed a new perspective on lawyers, investigators, finance and politics and all through some interesting characters. Not yer usual City blokes snorting coke - such a cliche. I have the plot lines, character names and quickie portraits of their foibles.

What we need is a thriller writer. One who can also add some exotic sex for some of the characters. Now where might we find such a person?

EU plans concessions to the Trumpdozer after tariffs - Bloomberg

https://x.com/wallstengine/status/1905609090606456980?s=61

People looking for a western counterweight to Trump will need to look to Canada rather than Europe.

What do you think about this one from your team? Critic of Putin arrested and due to be sent back to Russia.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/harvard-scientist-russia-deportation-antiwar-b2723063.html

It sounds like she screwed up by trying to bring something into the country that she shouldn't have and is just using the war critic angle in a bid for sympathy.

When you wrote that, I thought "bringing drugs into the US, well, more fool her".

Then I read:



And I thought, were you deliberately trying to mislead? Because failure to declare something legal (but declarable) is not something that would normally result in a visa being pulled.

Biosecurity is taken seriously by serious countries:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/02/australia-biosecurity-act-change-visa-cancellation-meat-plant-declaration

Visitors to Australia will soon be warned that concealing plant and animal products at the bottom of their suitcase is now grounds for visa cancellation, under new powers for the immigration minister.

New regulations add concealing goods that require a permit to import because they pose a biosecurity risk to existing grounds to cancel visas. The rules apply to visitors including international students, working holidaymakers, maritime crew and temporary workers.

You're right - when I flew to New Zealand, they were quite clear that if I brought any fruit with me from Australia I would be sent to a hostile country where I would be tortured and killed.