Best Of

Interesting details from Ten Terms Tommy:

He described seeing a silver Bentley with a lone driver that he said was "an unusual car to come through". The driver was Mr Lennon.
...
"He refused to provide the Pin number, saying there was journalist material in his phone," PC Thorogood said.

Jo Morris, for the prosecution, said that Mr Lennon had used an expletive at officers, who also found a small bag in the Bentley containing £13,370 and €1,910 (£1,660).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2lp1k7pnpno

So if he was Fred Smith of 123 Fake St, would plod have arrested him? And is the journalism thing a real defence? What are they looking for on his phone?

There's a more interesting case that may come up soon.

Someone travelling through the UK border was asked to provide the pin to his phone. Which unlocked the phone.

The officers then charged him with the offence of not providing access - because they believed that the account on the phone was a "burner" account.

For the non-technical - you can, for an iPhone (say) setup multiple Apple Accounts. All the data is stored online by Apple. Only one account at a time can be loaded on the phone - changing Apple ID will wipe out

So you can create a second account, load that on your phone, go through customs etc, then load your "real" account the other side. Many journalists and activists do this when they suspect opening their phone may be demanded. Such as at US customs, these days.

There is nothing in the law, that I am aware of, that says you have to do other than provide access to the *device* (the phone).

This will be an interesting test of the law, if it comes to trial.

Travelling with ‘clean’ laptops and mobiles has been a thing for many years now, and made much easier now we have cloud storage for everything.

Will be interesting to see the law as it relates specifically to a border search, rather than a police stop. IIRC the regular police need a warrant to force you to unlock your phone.

The US are famous for saying that the Consitution doesn’t apply at the border, and used that to justify all sorts of bad behaviour starting after the 9/11 terror attacks. The usual suspects of China, Russia, Iran, Saudi etc are all interested in who you’re meeting and why, and if there’s any nice company documents on your laptop that might be worth stealing. .

That was the case 15 years ago - I once travelled into the US sans laptop and phone, picking up fresh ones when I arrived in the US.

got to love BAe

The new Chinese export controls include advanced battery tech, along with rare earths, of course.
BAE is one of the UK companies on the restricted list.

Gotion announces it has made breakthrough in full solid state battery & it is in the midst of building a 2 GWh production line.

Currently, this 350Wh/kg 金石 battery is under testing.
All the major battery makers are making great breakthrough here. Why China started export control on 300 Wh/kg batteries. It wants to keep its edge here.
https://x.com/tphuang/status/1977693738492170653

After three decades of slowly boiling the frog, the World is finally waking up to the fact that the frog is dead.

China doesn’t care about anyone else, only China, and they think decades ahead. The World is now dependent on China, so they’re imposing their own terms on trade.

Developing the Greenland rare earths just got more urgent.

Yep, we all need to be doing deals with friendly nations.

China is not a friendly nation, anything but. The West needs to come up with a response the Chinese will understand, whether it be high tariffs or even banning Chinese cars and other key exports, especially anything with their new battery tech.

The UK might be better off encouraging them to build battery manufacturing here.

One of the most laughable things the Reform clowns do is cite China as the reason to ditch "Net Stupid Zero" - because they have a lot of coal power. Making out China is backwards and using fossil fuels so lets ditch renewables.

Meanwhile, China continues to grow its dominant leadership position in solar and battery...

Its not quite that simple. China is also using vast amount of coal power. We should be developing our own independent renewables plus batteries and all that is needed, but we don't also have to tie our hands behind our backs with net zero.

They're vast - of course they are using a lot of the thing they already had. But coal will ramp down and solar will ramp up. When people use Chinese coal as the excuse to tie our hands behind our backs with LNG imports, it makes no sense.

China is all about producing as much power as possible, it doesn't particularly care whether or not it's green or coal or whatever.
It's entirely non ideological, unlike BOTH Miliband & Farage when it comes to power.

They do care. They have a plan to reduce fossil fuel use. They know their agriculture is vulnerable to global warming, in a way that the US and Russia, for example, are not.

In Britain we've been distracted by arguing over whether to do it, rather than working out how best to do it. And we're still having that false argument while China is simply doing it.

The new Chinese export controls include advanced battery tech, along with rare earths, of course.
BAE is one of the UK companies on the restricted list.

Gotion announces it has made breakthrough in full solid state battery & it is in the midst of building a 2 GWh production line.

Currently, this 350Wh/kg 金石 battery is under testing.
All the major battery makers are making great breakthrough here. Why China started export control on 300 Wh/kg batteries. It wants to keep its edge here.
https://x.com/tphuang/status/1977693738492170653

After three decades of slowly boiling the frog, the World is finally waking up to the fact that the frog is dead.

China doesn’t care about anyone else, only China, and they think decades ahead. The World is now dependent on China, so they’re imposing their own terms on trade.

Developing the Greenland rare earths just got more urgent.

Yep, we all need to be doing deals with friendly nations.

China is not a friendly nation, anything but. The West needs to come up with a response the Chinese will understand, whether it be high tariffs or even banning Chinese cars and other key exports, especially anything with their new battery tech.

The UK might be better off encouraging them to build battery manufacturing here.

One of the most laughable things the Reform clowns do is cite China as the reason to ditch "Net Stupid Zero" - because they have a lot of coal power. Making out China is backwards and using fossil fuels so lets ditch renewables.

Meanwhile, China continues to grow its dominant leadership position in solar and battery...

Its not quite that simple. China is also using vast amount of coal power. We should be developing our own independent renewables plus batteries and all that is needed, but we don't also have to tie our hands behind our backs with net zero.

They're vast - of course they are using a lot of the thing they already had. But coal will ramp down and solar will ramp up. When people use Chinese coal as the excuse to tie our hands behind our backs with LNG imports, it makes no sense.

China is all about producing as much power as possible, it doesn't particularly care whether or not it's green or coal or whatever.
It's entirely non ideological, unlike BOTH Miliband & Farage when it comes to power.

Interesting details from Ten Terms Tommy:

He described seeing a silver Bentley with a lone driver that he said was "an unusual car to come through". The driver was Mr Lennon.
...
"He refused to provide the Pin number, saying there was journalist material in his phone," PC Thorogood said.

Jo Morris, for the prosecution, said that Mr Lennon had used an expletive at officers, who also found a small bag in the Bentley containing £13,370 and €1,910 (£1,660).
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2lp1k7pnpno

So if he was Fred Smith of 123 Fake St, would plod have arrested him? And is the journalism thing a real defence? What are they looking for on his phone?

There's a more interesting case that may come up soon.

Someone travelling through the UK border was asked to provide the pin to his phone. Which unlocked the phone.

The officers then charged him with the offence of not providing access - because they believed that the account on the phone was a "burner" account.

For the non-technical - you can, for an iPhone (say) setup multiple Apple Accounts. All the data is stored online by Apple. Only one account at a time can be loaded on the phone - changing Apple ID will wipe out

So you can create a second account, load that on your phone, go through customs etc, then load your "real" account the other side. Many journalists and activists do this when they suspect opening their phone may be demanded. Such as at US customs, these days.

There is nothing in the law, that I am aware of, that says you have to do other than provide access to the *device* (the phone).

This will be an interesting test of the law, if it comes to trial.

The new Chinese export controls include advanced battery tech, along with rare earths, of course.
BAE is one of the UK companies on the restricted list.

Gotion announces it has made breakthrough in full solid state battery & it is in the midst of building a 2 GWh production line.

Currently, this 350Wh/kg 金石 battery is under testing.
All the major battery makers are making great breakthrough here. Why China started export control on 300 Wh/kg batteries. It wants to keep its edge here.
https://x.com/tphuang/status/1977693738492170653

After three decades of slowly boiling the frog, the World is finally waking up to the fact that the frog is dead.

China doesn’t care about anyone else, only China, and they think decades ahead. The World is now dependent on China, so they’re imposing their own terms on trade.

Developing the Greenland rare earths just got more urgent.

Yep, we all need to be doing deals with friendly nations.

China is not a friendly nation, anything but. The West needs to come up with a response the Chinese will understand, whether it be high tariffs or even banning Chinese cars and other key exports, especially anything with their new battery tech.

The UK might be better off encouraging them to build battery manufacturing here.

One of the most laughable things the Reform clowns do is cite China as the reason to ditch "Net Stupid Zero" - because they have a lot of coal power. Making out China is backwards and using fossil fuels so lets ditch renewables.

Meanwhile, China continues to grow its dominant leadership position in solar and battery...

Yes, by fuelling their cheap manufacturing of those things and therefore their market leadership in them with dirty energy!

We on the other hand, who used to make solar panels in the 1990s, have priced our manufacturing out of business, and now we import them and marvel at China's 'dominant leadership'.

I refuse to believe that you're not sensible enough to understand all this.

When China is producing solar panels using solar energy (which is not that far off), they will be even cheaper.

The UK never had a real panel manufacturing industry. China became dominant because its government backed the industry through sectoral recessions; they allowed/encouraged cutthroat competition between competitors, but made sure the fittest survived. The US just allowed its industry to go bust (and not infrequently for the assets to be acquired by the Chinese.

"Clean versus dirty energy" has very little to do with it. It's not as though the US was any kind of paragon in that respect bad when it was developing its own panel manufacturing.

We used to have a significant manufacturing industry, and then we broke chunks of it and sold the rest.

We also had stupid people running unions in a way that destroyed our competitiveness. See British Leyland for examples.

Trump beaming as the Knesset stand and applause and cheer him

He deserves credit but it will grate with many

I never thought I would say this, but thank you Donald Trump. Ungrits teeth.

Can't help thinking this is all very over the top considering how many more v hard steps to a lasting peace there are.

Hope I'm wrong.

Agree. R4 Today this morning was totally OTT, as are lots of others.

It was quite bizarre for a radio news programme to be ditching all other news/any discussions to be waiting to report on a man getting out of a plane. I could understand them live covering Putin and Zelensky meeting live at the Vatican for example but the coverage was OTT.

Part of the price of Trump's involvement in anything like this is that he gets to strut.

As an alternative to a potential genocide, a day of the BBC's cooperation in that is a very small price.
As long as they regain their critical faculties, I'm not going to complain.