I assume that’s the reaction they were going for by expressing the stat in that way, but aside from shock value it isn’t that informative.

Child mortality is usually expressed as ‘X per 1,000 live births’ so you have some sense of scale. We’ll never live in a world where zero children die before their 5th birthday (simply because of illnesses and accidents) but expressing the number of deaths per 1,000 gives you a sense of whether the number of deaths is a lot or not.

Here’s a UNICEF article that provides some more context on the 4.9 million global figure for under-5 deaths: ‘The global under-five mortality rate declined by 60 per cent, from 93 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37 in 2022.’ To add more context on 37 per 1,000: in San Marino that figure is about 1.5, in the United Kingdom it’s about 4.1, whereas in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa it remains above 100 deaths per 1,000 live births - which I find to be a frankly much more informative and terrifying way of understanding the number.

In general I get that and my instinct was similarly that it was strange not to use the word. I’d use Taoiseach for Varadkar in a way I wouldn’t use the native language word for other world leaders, because I think of Ireland as a primarily English-speaking country and that’s the word they still use whilst otherwise speaking in English.

But then again, I can also see that British readers like you and I who follow current affairs are going to be a lot more familiar with the term Taoiseach (or, in Calamity Truss’s case, the ‘Tea Sock’) given it’s the country next door and so hugely intertwined with British politics. I could name every Taoiseach in the last quarter century just by virtue of how much those individuals have featured in UK news - through the peace process, the financial crisis and then Brexit. I couldn’t do that for the leaders of any other foreign country of Ireland’s size. So I think it’s not unreasonable to assume the average US or other reader might not not know what a Taoiseach is.

I mean I suppose there are a few ways you could read this.

One is that the NYT article was inaccurate - it wouldn’t be the first time that fake news around this conflict has travelled halfway around the world before the truth has had its breakfast.

But another interpretation is that tight-knit communities don’t want the full horror of the final moments of these girls and women to be so publicly exposed to the world. The article points out that the NYT article effectively identified the individuals and that can’t have been a helpful experience for their surviving families and friends.

There is very little to read into this. Rochdale is an unusual constituency, Galloway is an unusually high profile candidate, there was no official Labour or Green candidate. Still, he failed to even win 40% of the vote yesterday.

This sort of thing is his speciality. He’s personally won three seats from Labour over the last few decades but never in circumstances that can be repeated by other candidates in other seats. This will be no different.

Also he’s a deeply unpleasant individual. It’s frustrating that the false charge of antisemitism gets thrown round like confetti by supporters of the Netanyahu regime, because when an actual bonafide antisemite like Galloway comes along people don’t realise that this time the shoe does fit. His previous support for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party is total horseshoe theory stuff.

Totally. In my alternative scenario where she was a blonde-haired blue-eyed white girl called Shania, the Daily Express would have turned her into a Madeleine McCann-like figure and campaigned every day on their front pages to ‘bring our girl home’.

A child who was groomed and sex trafficked by terrorists is now being punished for it. Also this is a punishment that is only being applied to her because she has Bangladeshi ancestors so the government argues she is hypothetically eligible for a Bangladeshi passport (which the government of Bangladesh has no intention of giving her), and so the Tories can pretend they’re not illegally rendering her stateless.

This is literally a punishment that, by the Tories’ own formulation of their rule, would not be applied if the sex trafficking victim was a white girl called Shania with English parents instead of a brown girl called Shamima.

We’re supposed to be a country where people are treated equally before the law. But the Tories are now claiming that they and any future government has the right to render any Briton with some hypothetical right to a foreign passport (for example, most second generation immigrants and every single Jewish Briton) stateless at the whim of the home secretary.

It’s more than just a product of it - it’s the main factor.

Over the last half century or so, the UK has experienced around 200 civilian deaths from Islamic terrorism and around 2,000 civilian deaths from Irish terrorism. Which community do you think the far-right in the UK tend to target?

Muslim immigrants will have de facto faced as much (if not far more) hostility and prejudice before any of those events.

What changed is that by the late 20th century, it had become politically unacceptable for right-wing parties to be perceived to be preying on overt racism towards their countries’ brown-skinned citizens. But the War on Terror at the start of the 21st century created a new organising framework for nativists, whereby they could incite hatred against exactly the same brown-skinned people as before, but claim they were targeting them for their religion and not their skin colour. At the heart of it is still the same prejudice towards those who are different, it’s just that the aspect of difference they choose to focus on today is more politically acceptable than the one they used to focus on.

From the perspective of a brown-skinned Muslim immigrant, the ideological hoops the far-right jump through are likely irrelevant. These people were targeted by nativists before, and they get targeted by nativists now.

I mean, bigotry and unenforceability aside, it’s also pretty unambiguously illegal.

Italy is a signatory to the ECHR which creates an explicit right to privacy (Article 8) and freedom of religion (Article 9).

The Italian constitution itself also specifies a right to religious equality before the law (Article 8).

I was similarly pretty confused here that it was referring to the little seaside town in Yorkshire, which I assume all these other Scarboroughs (that I too had never heard of) are named after.

Humza Yousaf became the first Muslim head of state in western Europe in 2023 when he was appointed First Minister of Scotland.

This is a really specific point, but the sub-heading irks me in several ways.

First, how do so many people not know the difference between a head of state and a head of government? Scotland’s head of state is Charles III.

Second, by what definition is Yousaf the first Muslim head of government in western Europe? I assume they must at least mean ‘in western Europe in the modern era’, since various parts of Iberia obviously had Muslim rulers for over seven centuries in the Middle Ages.

Third, Scotland isn’t an independent state, and the head of government of the United Kingdom is Rishi Sunak. So if they’re counting Humza Yousaf, that means they’re counting leaders at sub-national levels of government (such as devolved government in the UK, Länder in Germany, etc). But if they’re counting devolved government, why does Humza Yousaf (first minister of Scotland, population 5.4 million, since 2023) count but Sadiq Khan (mayor of London, population 8.8 million, since 2016) apparently doesn’t?

Anyway it was two right-wingers in the second round so

A centrist, europhile, pro-immigration, pro-multiculturalism, former patron of Helsinki’s Pride event, vs the literal Green League candidate.

Bed bugs eunt domus!

For most things, the European Council already decides things by qualified majority voting (typically requiring the support of 55% of member states representing 65% of the EU’s population). This was enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. But extending QMV to matters that currently need unanimity would require treaty changes, which by definition would need every EU member to sign up. There are limited incentives for smaller members (let alone problematic members like Hungary) to agree to more QMV since unanimity gives them disproportionate influence.

It is really inspiring that so many Germans are coming out to make their voices heard like this. It’s easy to tell a pollster you don’t like Nazis; but coming out on the streets week-after-week in the middle of winter like they’ve been doing recently shows commitment.

Reminder also that whilst it’s a very fun story, this claim was:

a. written as part of a hit job by two right-wing Brexiter journalists in the run-up to the referendum as part of a wider effort by the right to discredit the centrist establishment in the months before the vote (see also: Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith resigning from Cameron’s cabinet in protest at the work and pensions policies he had conceived and implemented over the previous six years…); and

b. never substantiated by any evidence that those two Brexiter journalists were willing or able to provide, despite them claiming in the book there was a photo.

The 2016 Brexit referendum was the dirtiest election in living memory in the UK. It was plagued by fake news and Russian interference. Isabella Oakshott herself is known to have covered up evidence of Putin’s links to the Brexit campaign and her domestic partner is literally the current leader of Reform UK (the party formerly known as Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party). She is not a credible or impartial figure.

There are totally things Cameron should be criticised for over his time in government, but that is no excuse to parrot Brexiter (and possibly Russian) fake news that was designed to discredit moderates and favour the far-right.

Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world, richer than France or Germany.

And much of that wealth was built on exports of beef, especially to Britain. But that was well over 100 years ago.

Now, thanks to a profound economic crisis, it languishes in around 70th place, according to the latest figures from the World Bank.

It wasn’t ‘an’ economic crisis that caused that change. It was a long-term political crisis. The fundamental cause of Argentina’s economic decline was political misrule - the combination of decades of political instability, military juntas, protectionist trade policies and hyperinflationary monetary policies, all of which discouraged long-term investment and left Argentine businesses and industries inefficient and uncompetitive.

Argentina dropped out of the developed world because the Argentine political class chose to drop out of the developed world.

Argentina is what those Americans flirting with the idea of re-electing Trump should be thinking about. Right now, MAGA, protectionism and political chaos are a one-term aberration in American politics. If they bring him back, if they make Trump’s form of politics a regularised part of the American political culture, Argentina is their future.

No, they can do more. The nuclear option is to use Article 7 to suspend Hungary’s voting rights at the European Council if they deem that Hungary is acting against the EU’s values.

Stopping the flow of EU funds is part of the escalation route towards that but they won’t do it unless they’ve exhausted other options - it’s a tricky balancing act to cajole Orban into behaving like a European, and once they use Article 7 there will be no more escalation threats available.

A better analogy would be that if you had thrust your head so far up Putin’s arse that you could taste the pirozhki, then you too would probably find your mouth constantly full of his shit.

Orban is scum.

Businesses buy out other businesses across borders all the time. This is normal behaviour.

As for whether it’s a good idea: in short, competitive markets tend to be a lot more efficient than protected markets - which ultimately leads to lower prices for consumers. Nippon Steel thinks it can operate US Steel more efficiently than the current owners and managers of US Steel, hence Nippon Steel thinking it is profitable for them to buy it at a price that is higher than what the current owners value it at (as reflected in US Steel’s share price).

The fact that more efficient companies can buy out less efficient companies is an important part of what keeps market-based economies successful and dynamic. If you want to know what it looks like when economies don’t allow this, take a look at the economic malaise in somewhere like Britain in the 1970s after several decades of protectionism and state support for failing industries (or if you take protectionism to a logical extreme, North Korea…)

There’s potentially a line of argument about monopoly risk (monopolies are economically inefficient) but that seems limited here - US Steel is only the 24th largest steel producer and the combination of Nippon and US Steel will still be smaller than the biggest players in the steel market like Baowu and ArcelorMittal.