Someome ought to ask Councillor Hadwen if he still believes what he said in 2018, shortly after the assassination of Sergei Skripal on British soil: “Russia is not my enemy. We should be working with them, and not throwing around threats like a spoilt child.”

Are you thinking of the ECHR? The EHRC is a different thing, it’s run under the British government

This honestly should not be an issue. While Birmingham council is currently supposed to have a leader, there is provision within the law for a local authority to operate without one (as in, permanently and intentionally, not just as a falback measure). A minority leadership can be a thing too. There are plenty of those about already, and there’s even a minority coalition in Rutland county council

I searched “reform councillor suspended” yesterday and filtered for articles in the last 24 hours. The top four results were all about different people

The last thing any of us need is another Liz Truss

We’re actually just octopodes in skin suits, each of my legs is just a leather bag controlled by a couple of tentacles

I volunteered at a greyhound rescue for a while. They’re lovely sweet animals. It was quite clear from how a lot of them acted, especially new arrivals, that they weren’t used to being well-cared-for. Not all of them, but far too many. Part of that will certainly have been due to being thrust into a strange new environment, but that shouldn’t make them visibly anxious around humans. I am glad to say that almost all of them seemed to chill out once they got accustomed to their new lives and the ones that I saw post-adoption seemed like they were doing great

Because I’m quite tall and reasonably fit while most of the other volunteers were little old ladies enjoying their retirements, the more unruly ones were generally my job. I remember one in particular who was too outwardly aggressive, and he was big too. I took a while to get to know him, just being in his kennel at first until he tolerated me being there. Eventually he let me take him out for a walk and it was like a new dog, he was just lovely. I mean, he was still definitely badly behaved, but it was now playful zipping about and not realising how strong he was instead of growling. He got adopted and I hope he’s doing well

The more we depend on the AI for these things, the worse that our reasoning gets. It’s like a muscle, it withers without use

For what it’s worth, the act only authorises the president to command that to happen rather than requiring them to do so. It has a bunch of prohibitions on doing anything to facilitate the ICC, including on extraditing American citizens to get them on trial, but if he somehow does end up in the Hague then the then-president is 100% within their rights to just abandon him there

Of course I don’t expect him to ever come close to winding up in the Hague in the first place. What a beautiful sight it would be if it did happen

I can believe that he wrote this more than I can believe that some MAGA-loyal handler wrote praise be to Allah

The only rule is “don’t be the one to lose”. As long as the theocracy does not surrender, they are winning.

It’s entirely reasonable to believe that it is more likely that a new administration would take the chance to end the war than the current one is to make America incapable of bombing Iran on a reasonable timeline

Of course, that assumes that Iran thinks that this would work at all. They might make the full release of the files a condition to open the strait, but America would then just say “well we already released them so that won’t work as a deal” and rely on the current administrations cultish supporters to believe that

Well to not get bombed, naturally. The uselessness of said idiots does not have an impact on the fact that the bombs are actively landing on Iran

You probably know this stuff better than me since you’re coeliac, but just in case you don’t: try the Loopy Whisk’s bread recipes. I have a couple of coeliac family members and these are by far the best results I’ve gotten for making gluten free bread for them

I can’t see that being likely. The current Labour admin seems cautiously pro-rejoin but just recognises that the public is too divided for rejoin to be actual policy (for them, I’m not meaning to say that that’s an objectively correct viewpoint)

Soup and bread is genuinely great if you have them available and don’t want to put effort into cooking. It’s the right kind of simple and hearty thing that helps when you feel run down

Even if we include death, you can absolutely check the numbers and see that life peers are not replaced upon either retirement or death in any kind of timely manner. To use the years 2000 - 2006 as an example because that doesn’t require me to combine more tables than necessary from wikipedia, the stretch from the summer appointments in 2001 through to the summer of 2004 saw very few new appointments, and then throughout the second half of 2005 there was a substantial batch of appointments after the main summer one that was bigger than the retirements/deaths that had happened since the summer batch

I’m quite happy to be proven wrong here but it’d be nice if you can point to a source, because I can’t find one and everything I can find doesn’t support it

That surely can’t be right, there was no way for a life peer to retire until quite recently (and after Blair’s tenure)

Ahh, there’s the danger of working off of memory without checking. That said, upon checking, it must be more than annually? If we take Blair as an example since he had a long tenure, it seems like he did a big chunk in June most (but not all) years but there are almost always at least a couple of other batches or individual appointments

Edit: I remembered the appointment process a bit wrong, see ohulancutash’s reply

For the most part it is appointed. Each prime minister traditionally gives some people peerages at the end of their term, which entitles but does not require those people to sit in the House of Lords. On paper it’s the king that does it, but in practice it’s the PM. There are a few others like the last hereditary lords that this is about (they used to make up most of the House) and the lords spiritual (a couple dozen bishops from the church of England, who I would rather like to see get the same treatment as the hereditary peers)