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Wow, Lib Dem Chief Whip takes action to stop a defection to Lab in The Commons –politicalbetting.com
Wow, Lib Dem Chief Whip takes action to stop a defection to Lab in The Commons – politicalbetting.com
Last night Lib Dem MP Steve Darling’s guide dog @rthonjennie momentarily crossed the floor and fraternised with Labour MPs during a division.Today she gets a doggy dressing down from Lib Dem Chief Whip Wendy Chamberlain. https://t.co/Zt1XbpozmJ pic.twitter.com/xNbFB98acD
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Lib Dems and a dog for scale.
Trump: An exportable F-47 variant will be made available to select US allies.
https://x.com/ColbyBadhwar/status/1903109505203736754
With that though, heaven knows. Might be us; might be the Saudis.
Incidentally, I do wonder if spreading expertise is one reason the US government have gone for Boeing. They have form for this: the B2 stealth bomber was awarded to Northrop despite Lockheed having loads of stealth experience with the F-117. In part, according to Ben Rich, because the government did not want only Lockheed having the knowledge on how to build stealth aircraft.
It now means NG have the contract to build the B-21 Raider bomber; LM the contract to build the F-35, and Boeing the F-47. The three main contractors all have future work.
Or, knowing Trump, there were bungs. And it's not as though either Boeing or Lockheed are innocent of that in the past...
Tom Watters, who has worked on critical infrastructure around the world, told MailOnline the crucial substation powering Heathrow and west London contains 'very old' equipment and blamed a 'lack of investment' for the crisis.
The substation fire in Hayes involved 25,000 litres of cooling oil igniting, the London Fire Brigade (LFB) has said."
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14523119/firefighters-major-update-heathrow-airport-met-police-cause.html
If you think of all the various things that can take an airport's front end service out partly or in full, security evacuations, a broken plane stuck on a runway, an ash cloud, an ATC strike, that this particular bit of resilience to the specific scenario was not high enough to materially affect the 3.x 9s that the airport itself expects to be able to process planes at, and that a lot of the back end operations sat there just fine.
They will review, but they may well just conclude it is just a part of their acceptable risk.
"Nearly 250 years after America declared independence from Great Britain, President Donald Trump suggested he was open to taking a small step back towards the warm embrace of the British monarchy after a media outlet reported that King Charles III intends to extend an offer for the United States to join the Commonwealth of Nations.
The King is reportedly preparing to extend the offer of “associate membership” in the voluntary association of 56 nations, most of which have history as former British colonies. Trump, it seems, is open to the idea.
Writing on his Truth Social platform while sharing an article referencing the unprecedented offer, Trump said: “I Love King Charles. Sounds good to me!”"
If coming to Uruguay bring at least two bottles of Tabasco. The smoky habanero and the green jalapeño. Maybe the third trad original if you’re daring
They are tiny and sneaky enough to be weilded in cafes and restaurants and they can turn - as they just did for me - a desperately mediocre dish of frozen fish and meh tabbouleh into something… tolerable
In Uruguay, “tolerable” food is ambrosia. People travel thousands of miles for a tolerable meal. They have entire guides full of the five or six restaurants which serve food which is regarded as “just about edible” or the full on top notch “some lf it was actually nice”
Vegans are advised to apply for asylum: elsewhere
And if we don't develop the next generation of air combat platforms with European partners, we'll quite probably lose the capability.
But it's a key inflection point in the transatlantic relationship.
(Note, Italy and the UK are wooing the Saudis to join our Global Combat Air Programme - though Japan isn't very happy about that.)
"An exportable variant" means downgraded versus the US version. Which proved impractical with the F22 which was why it was never exported.
Then there's the navy version of NGAD (which hasn't yet had a contact awarded). It's specced to operate off US carriers, so might not fly off ours. In that respect, a Euro/Japanese option is also less risky.
"Nice little substation you've got there. Shame if anything should go KER-BOOOOM...."
President Trump appears to agree to the US joining the British Commonwealth, saying it "sounds good to me"
Democratic voters are even angrier than you think.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/03/21/polling-data-democrats-primaries-grassroots-tea-party-00241769
And if it was a "one off", where we then found ourselves in the US's "good books", with all the benefits that accrue from that, then great.
The problem is that once you have established a reputation for completely shafting your allies (see Canada), then why should Britain join the US? It'd only be a matter of time before we too were shafted because we'd upset King Donald.
But they aren't about to make a
pussypower grab...By the way, is the Commonwealth Games dead or was it saved? The US can pony up for that...
Is that a new term for superinjunctions?
Huddleston was a Mirfield (Anglo-Catholic social action tradition, so schools, nurseries, education, community facilities etc. ) missionary who went to work in South Africa in the 1930s, and ended up in the middle of a township called Sophiatown as Apartheid came in in the 1940s. He had a platform and buildings, and a community round him, and used them to fight the system. The Govt demolished Sophiatown, and rebuilt it as a white area.
He wrote a book called "Naught for your Comfort" in 1956, which title was drawn from Chesterton's poem The Ballad of the White Horse. where the Virgin Mary advises King Alfred, facing invading Danes:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
He was in all sorts of places later, including as Bishop of Stepney.
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Huddleston
I find it troubling that such matters nearly all seem to end without any elected official being charged
Whether the Donald would be safe if he then tried to visit, say Chicago, of course would be a question.
But more seriously: it's one thing to ask nicely if someone wants to join you; it's something entirely different when it's combined with threats, tariffs, etc.
Huddleston had nursed him in the infirmary when he was summoned back to Mirfield on furlough to recover, and Raynes more or less identified him as his replacement.
It's all less eye catching than keeping a stiff upper lip whilst being eaten by lions, but it's more useful in the long term.
https://www.londoncityairport.com/media-centre/press-releases/london-city-airport-submits-application-to-accommodate-the-a320neo
(Largest aircraft so far is the Embraer E2 at 146 passengers.)
/s
1. The habanero and jalapeño varieties are seriously superior to the classic vinegar-and-heat trad Tabasco. It is that of which you speak
2. Only Tabasco does the bottles tiny enough you can sneak them out in restaurants with UTTERLY DREADFUL FOOD* and not cause a stir
*approximately 94% of eateries in Latin America
What is it with their pathetic fear of seasoning?
Today I ordered “grilled fish”. I knew it would be quite bad but eeesh. It was just about saved by salt, lemon, olive oil and HABANERO Tabasco
I still got the sense they offered the salt reluctantly.
Like the waiter was saying “surely our slab of frozen fish listlessly grilled should provide enough flavour?!”
I’ve just come from Myanmar - GDP per capita $1800, enduring a civil war, power cuts every day - magnificent varied cuisine. Now I’m in Uruguay - GDP per capita $18,000 - ten times richer - stable and prosperous by local standards - dreary ugly nasty food. Badly cooked and zero sense of spicing and flavouring
My piece should be out soon
As for the Caribbean it is fairly bad and the more Spanish it is the worse it gets. Cuba OMFG
@IAStartingLine
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3h
At Sen. Chuck Grassley’s raucous town hall in Hampton, Iowans’ anger with Trump and Musk boils over.
“Why do you believe President Trump is above the law … Why have you not spoken out?” one man asked the longtime senator
A video thread:
https://x.com/IAStartingLine/status/1903107013929849013
https://news.sky.com/story/incoming-ioc-president-to-open-talks-on-russias-potential-return-to-olympics-13333288
Am I correct that it has either to be packed in checked-in luggage, or be very small indeed?
A lot of pressure on Rashford and Foden to deliver tonight.
It's not ASML - DUV, not EUV - but it gets their industry well beyond legacy chip production.
Compact narrow-linewidth solid-state 193-nm pulsed laser source utilizing an optical parametric amplifier and its vortex beam generation
https://www.opticsjournal.net/Articles/OJfa68cb6b8be8034d/FullText
Deep ultraviolet coherent light, particularly at the wavelength of 193 nm, has become indispensable for semiconductor lithography. We present a compact solid-state nanosecond pulsed laser system capable of generating 193-nm coherent light at the repetition rate of 6 kHz. One part of the 1030-nm laser from the home-made Yb:YAG crystal amplifier is divided to generate 258 nm laser (1.2 W) by fourth-harmonic generation, and the rest is used to pump an optical parametric amplifier producing 1553 nm laser (700 mW). Frequency mixing of these beams in cascaded LiB3O5 crystals yields a 193-nm laser with 70-mW average power and a linewidth of less than 880 MHz. By introducing a spiral phase plate to the 1553-nm beam before frequency mixing, we generate a vortex beam carrying orbital angular momentum. This is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of a 193-nm vortex beam generated from a solid-state laser. Such a beam could be valuable for seeding hybrid ArF excimer lasers and has potential applications in wafer processing and defect inspection..
Ceviche, for an example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_cuisine
Always interesting to hear the counterpoint though.