🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: Trump releases statement that extends national emergency due to human rights abuses and violations for 1 year until 12/20/21. This extends the national emergency declared on 12/20/17.

1/9 My response to the announcement today that @10DowningStreet has appointed 16 new peers to the @UKHouseofLords:

My fundamental concern is about the number of new peers that have been appointed by the Prime Minister in his first 12 months in Office.

2/9 Mr Johnson has added 16 to his list of appointments bringing the total for the year up to 52 new peers over two lists. This list will bring the total in the House of Lords to over 830 - almost 200 more than the House of Commons.

3/9 I will not comment on the personalities involved, although perhaps I could personally welcome @JohnSentamu. But my concern remains that the central defect is the present system of appointments.

4/9 Unlike other senates in democratic countries, there is no limit on the number of members there can be. Any Prime Minister can appoint as many as he or she likes. To her great credit the previous Prime Minister, @theresa_may , committed her govt to a policy of ‘moderation.'

5/9 In a massive U-turn, those words seem to have been forgotten. It may also now be the time to review the role and the powers of the House of Lords Appointments Commission (HOLAC.)

Dear @nsitharaman and @narendramodi, with having full faith in you & your government, I wish to draw your attention to certain facts. A thread

We haven’t come across or heard incident of corruption against your government which should be a normal practice but yet when compared with the previous UPA government, it is a commendable achievement

However the situation is not as good at the ground level. There has been lesser corruption because of use of systems driven techniques and lesser human intervention. But still there is rampant corruption in many departments & ministries, by bureaucrats & officers

Officers including IRS officers at Income Tax office both at investigation & assessments level, Enfircement Directorate dealing in FEMA, PMLA, IT. Customs offices, GST department again at all levels to name a few are highly corrupt

I and my office have been dealing with many of them on behalf of our clients and regularly come across several incidents of revenue officers asking for huge money and threatening to open old cases and harass clients on various counts

China and the EU: 2020

The media and the US think tank complex have persistently touted the narrative that Europe is "turning against China" and presumed instantly that a Biden victory would create a "transatlantic alliance" against it. It's time to look at the details:

2020 has been a bad year for China's relations with the west at large. It would be naïve to assume that this has had no impact on the EU. However, it would be a simplification to assume that such spells an appetite for Pompeo's cold war fanaticism and evidence of this is scant

Firstly, European Union foreign policy is a collective endeavor, than a monolithic one. We should not talk about the EU as "one" thing when it is a bloc of 27 countries who forge common positions through pragmatism and compromise, and is subsequently less dogmatic than the US.

The diversity of Europe means that priorities and perspectives amongst the states subsequently differ, therefore its views on China constitute an aggregation, than a single binary position which the U.S advocates. Some countries in the EU dislike China more than others.

The European Union subsequently operates on an agreement of its collective interest towards a "greater good". Whilst this means it will have some disagreements with China in the process, it also means it has a pragmatic understanding of why Beijing is important too.

Papers reporting that Neil Ferguson only resigned from Sage after it was revealed he broke lockdown rules to meet his married lover - as minutes now show he stayed on NERVTAG

At the time, the government was clear he had quit *all* government advisory roles, including NERVTAG

In my front ups to Ferguson and the government on May 5, I asked whether he will be resigning from Sage and NERVTAG

Ferguson's apology, received hours later, said Sage. But the government said NERVTAG too

The delay in publishing minutes raise serious gvt transparency questions

Here is the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman in the lobby call on May 6:

Asked if Ferguson will remain on NERVTAG he said:

'NERVTAG is part of Sage, so the answer is no, Professor Ferguson will no longer attend, participate or contribute to SAGE meetings'

PM spokesman 6 May contd:

Q: So that includes all sub-committees? He’s not advising the government in any way?

'Not that I’m aware of, no'

The spokesman went on to say there are other scientists at Imperial, on Ferguson's team, who could contribute to the government so it did not lose access to its research

Now minutes published 7 months later show Ferguson personally has continued to attend NERVTAG

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Can I just point out that it has been admitted that the British & US government told us masks made no difference because they didn’t have enough even though they knew this wasn’t true

Like this is fact not even speculation. Healthcare workers didn’t have PPE there wasn’t enough to go to them and the public so they told the public masks had no scientific evidence behind them so people would stop buying them

The conspiracy theories wind me up so much because of this exact point. The truth is equally scandalous we don’t need some 5G theory

The arrogance of the west has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, desecrated the economy & caused a mental health crisis. There’s no conspiracy theory you can create that is worse than the actual truth of what’s happened this year.

America and the UK was warned about an impending pandemic at the beginning of January - they both chose to ignore it, they had time to start buying PPE in January, they didn’t. When they started making PPE instead of giving it to their citizens they sold it to China.

Yesterday saw the Government reach a compromise with Peers over the devolution aspects of the UK Internal Market Bill. The Lords were standing strong over an amendment on Common Frameworks - so what has been agreed & where do we go now? 🧵

First a quick recap: the bill enshrines 2 Market Access Principles in law 1) Mutual recognition, anything acceptable for sale in one part of the UK is acceptable in another 2) Non-discrimination, no discrimination against goods from another part of the

The purpose of these is to prevent trade barriers, caused by divergence, between parts of the UK. But the 4 governments were already working on 'common frameworks' to manage divergence *by agreement*. The Scottish & Welsh govs argued these were sufficient

Lord Hope's amendment aimed to exclude areas were divergence has been deemed acceptable through common frameworks from the Market Access Principles. The gov amendment makes it clear existing powers for UK ministers in the bill can be used to do that.

So this is good news on the devolution front. But it doesn't solve everything - common frameworks only cover policy areas returned from the EU & the devolved governments also have concerns about other parts of the bill. So what are the key questions now?

MAJOR FAILURE OF COVID RELATED SERVICES AT UK BORDERS

Nearly 2 million passengers entered UK June to September 2020.

Launched by the Home Secretary, run by 2 private firms, the Isolation Assurance Service only made contact with 3.5% (66,800) to ensure they were isolating🤦‍♀️

2/ The Government’s half-hearted, privatised approach to critical COVID-related services also extending to virus control at Britain’s borders by the IAS appears to have failed to ensure self-isolation by international travellers.
Source: Private 👁 4-17 Dec 2020

3/ When launching the IAS in June, Home Secretary Priti Patel said Public Health England (PHE) would “undertake checks and ensure that people understand and are following the rules”....

4/ .... Later announcements revealed that the IAS would “attempt to contact randomly sampled arriving passengers to ensure that they are self-isolating”.

5/Sitel, the US call centre firm that shares the poorly performing contact tracing contract with Serco 🤦‍♀️, makes these calls

PHE wouldn’t say how much Sitel’s work is worth, & Govt hasn’t published details of the contract

Sitel already gets £310m for its contact tracing work😱

Ok. Its sinking in.... The Storm is UPON US!
OUR military is in position!!! 😱😱😱

I'm excited & nervous all at the same time!

Please read this thread!

🚨EVERYONE needs to read this.
Stay informed. Scary times we're in.

Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky,

🧵 So today we’ve got the Government’s vision for online harms legislation. It’s a landmark day for all of us who’ve worked for this for years. Some quick early (personal!) thoughts:

This is a systemic Duty of Care, with a requirement to risk assess - regularly - for reasonable foreseeable harms and to act on them. Supported by Codes but that serve as guardrails, not a prescriptive checklist

There’s a broad requirement on all services to tackle illegal content and to take measures to protect children. Worried that age assurance may be expected to do a lot of heavy lifting instead of proper moderation for legal but harmful, but we’ll see

The biggest weakness: enforcement measures. Criminal sanctions & named persons have deference value - that’s why industry pushed back strongly. But not for at least 2 years and even then only covering failure to comply with the regulator. If Govt thinks this is really enough...

Investigatory powers are OK (particularly pleased to see the inclusion of skilled persons reviews 😉). But the balance between investigatory powers and duties isn’t where it needs to be to drive culture change

Yesterday, @MassAGO Maura Healey and her team issued a groundbreaking report finding that the Bristol County Sheriff's Office violated the civil rights of immigration detainees.

Let's take look at some key findings (thread

First, some background.

The BCSO is administered by Sheriff Thomas Hodgson. @GlobeAbraham has reported on his close relationship with Trump's White House. He corresponds with Stephen Miller, the notorious architect of Trump's anti-immigrant

Although the BCSO is a state facility, it has also contracted with ICE to hold people detained for federal civil immigration proceedings.

ICE essentially pays a per diem rate for each detainee.

In 2019, the Mass. State Auditor found that BCSO improperly failed to remit more than $300,000 in ICE payments to the

BCSO also has a 287(g) agreement with ICE. It allows BCSO personnel to be deputized to do some of ICE's work. ICE does not pay for their hours. It is essentially a donation of state employee time to federal immigration

There's a R1000 maintenance tweet doing the rounds. It's not it per se I want to talk about but the conversation on it does trigger a lot of things in me& life in SA generally. The issue of low or nonexistent incomes in many households tends to escape us.

We tend to view life only with our lenses of privilege or bias depending on our station in life. The reality for many rural &township households is extremely brutal in this country. There are still people who earn R1000 or less as a month's wage. They often do heavy manual labour

It took time for my grandparents to be convinced to go over R1000 in paying their live-in helper. That was some years ago. My grandfather had pension from eThekwini municipality &my grandmother is on SASSA.They were lucky to accumulate some savings, they run their household fully

But we are a very lucky few to have grandparents in their late 80s who are still this financially independent. Sure we do things at home but not the basics, including not having to build a house for them etc. This is almost out of the norm experience.

A lot of people in our country have salaries below R10 000 pm. They have to divide this between their needs (food&transport), some dependents and sending remittances back home so that their parents and other loved ones can put some bread on the table &complement some grants.

Read slowly and carefully.
Knowledge is power.
https://t.co/sb5HWwD8HQ📁
>Irregular warfare is far more varied than conventional conflict: hence the importance of an intellectual framework that is coherent enough to provide guidance, and flexible enough to adapt to circumstances.