Paul C(innamon) Kirby

What comes next is unknown, but it is hard to believe there will be no negative repercussions for WPS work from aid cuts in the billions, and any new plan will suffer from doubts raised by the narrow rhetoric of the defence and security strategies.

To be fair to PSVI, the issue was never that funding was going to dry up today. The team secured £4 million in continuity funding for 2025-26 and Lord Collins seems committed.

…and then with unprecedented aid cuts, from which there will be no relief this parliament. Reducing protections for people around the world in the name of homeland defence is a false economy and a waste of progress made in the last decade.”

But!

Starmer cuts threaten Angelina Jolie and William Hague’s anti-sexual violence scheme Sir Keir Starmer’s foreign aid cuts have left the future of a scheme tackling sexual violence in warzones in doubt

Quoted in the Independent today: “The global coalition against sexual violence in conflict is already reeling from the destruction of USAID. The UK government has compounded the crisis by neglecting PSVI during its first year in power…

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Time Has Run Out: Mass Starvation in Gaza and the Global Imperative It is time for comprehensive, full-spectrum, sustainable, and coordinated humanitarian action. States globally must act without delay on that imperative.

The very least we can do is to see clearly what is happening. To grasp the grotesque irrelevance of diplomatic gambits and alibis. What counts is not symbolic votes in September but red lines enforced today.

www.justsecurity.org/117962/mass-...

Time Has Run Out: Mass Starvation in Gaza and the Global Imperative It is time for comprehensive, full-spectrum, sustainable, and coordinated humanitarian action. States globally must act without delay on that imperative.

Devastating account of
-the irredeemability of Western govs' responses to 🇮🇱's starvation of #Gaza
-our collective moral failure
-applicable legal obligations right NOW

by the foremost experts on starvation Alex deWaal &
@tomdannenbaum.bsky.social

justsecurity.org/117962/mass-...

Someone on here compared AI produced material as "digital asbestos " which in a few decades' time we will have to work out how to eradicate from the fabric of research.

BBC news summary reports that Starmer has been accused of “appeasement”. Feels like relevant information that the accusation comes from an indicted war criminal credibly responsible for genocide and currently directing a famine.

a lot of politics right now is about whether you hate your dad or your mom

Moments like Iraq 2003, the 2008 financial crash, and now Gaza are when democracy loses moral legitimacy, when the response itself reveals the system’s hollowness, and evidence leads to no justice, no accountability, no change.

In a similar way, you sometimes see—even amongst professionals—a way of thinking that goes “This thing you just decisively identified or demonstrated via a clear method and careful use of evidence reminds me of a thought I had a while ago, but did not write down; I should get credit for this tbh”.

Marvellous. Where did he write that?

That’s the national interest folks.

…without indeed any deep complicity on our part, just a parochial UK which could do more, perhaps by recognising the statehood of a mass grave.

This is a world without a UN Security Council, without an International Criminal Court or Court of Justice that have issued warrants and provisional measures, without the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, without sanctions instruments, without military transfers or diplomatic cover…

The Guardian view on starvation in Gaza: it will take more than words to halt Israel’s genocide | Editorial Editorial: Condemnation is rightly growing. But until concrete action is taken, western allies will remain complicit with these horrifying crimes

Insofar as The Guardian represents a bloc of elite opinion, this editorial is very, very late but welcome. And yet it is written as if stuck in the long nineteenth century, a plea to “do something” with no awareness of all the mechanisms that exist to do things.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Being in tech and having a single modicum of critical thinking is just screaming "this isn't what LLMs are designed for" over and over as people shove a bunch of word predictors into critical decision making processes because some glorified used car salesmen told them it would fix all their problems

ALEX DE WAAL: So, let me say that I've been working on this field of famine, food crisis and humanitarian action for more than 40 years, and there is no case, over those four decades, of such minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed mass starvation of a population as is happening in Gaza today.

Few if any experts know more about the deliberate use of starvation as a war crime than Alex de Waal. If he says it's happening, it's so.

If Bret Stephens wishes to consult excess mortality predictions by the likes of Johns Hopkins and LSHTM from over a year ago, before the worst developments in Israel’s conduct, he would realise there have indeed plausibly been hundreds of thousands of deaths.

There’s a whole class of arguments like this. See also “Opposition to LLMs is just a way to discriminate against non-native English speakers”. In this style, reasons are in fact bad-faith efforts to defend privilege. The case is made largely rhetorically, eg by characterizing it as “shaming” etc.

Not at all clear that Republicans are wrong on either count.

The only plausible explanation is that the hostile environment is more important than minimal protections for women who are not UK citizens. A very ugly position for any 'progressive' to find themselves in.

So far there is no successor justification to that which held for Priti Patel, Grant Schapps, or Suella Braverman, who could at least plead that matters were 'under review'.

It *did* report - almost two years ago in August 2023 - and yet the Labour government has still not addressed the protection gap. A Home Office official told me recently that there are no plans to change policy.

For a decade Conservative governments put off ratifying the treaty, and then maintained the Article 59 reservation on the highly questionable grounds that a pilot migrant support scheme had to report first.

That would mean that no woman has to stay in an abusive relationship for visa reasons, and also undermine the differential access to refuges and other services enforced by the no recourse to public funds rule.

Influential women urge Labour to include asylum seekers in plan to tackle violence Exclusive: Letter warns of ‘two-tier’ system if asylum seekers are excluded from promise to halve violence against women and girls

Great to see high-profile advocacy on the denial of freedom, protection and services to asylum-seeking women. An easy fix for the government, and of benefit to all migrant women, would be revocation of the UK reservation to Article 59 of the Istanbul Convention.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

It’s hard to take seriously arguments that claim damage to military kit is an ‘ordinary’ definition of terrorism or which ignore all the other powers available to governments and prosecutors.

The quasi-market is destroying everything it touches, esp in England. All the incentives are to game the rankings and take every student you can, without regard to who they are or damage to the whole educational ecosystem. Too late tho: huge damage already done, much more already locked in. (2/2)

not far off from this, is it