MalaProper

also at @malaproper.bsky.social

[Gyll King Post Skip Diplomacy @GyllKing]

@implausibleblog @Michell41027038 Mick Lynch is right. Under the new ownership The Telegraph is making space for racism and shifting their editorial stance to back Nigel Farage's party.

[Sam @SamCKx]

Rob, earlier you put out a video claiming you would save the Ashton library. Why as a councillor did you fail to attend every single meeting held in relation to saving that library? Are you even aware that due to many hours of work from your fellow councillors who did actually attend, the library is already being repaired and kept open? You truly are a chip off the Nigel block in terms of being great at PR but utterly dishonest and useless when it comes to public service.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

Jill Biden just exposed the most painfully awkward limo ride of Melania Trump’s life.
In her new memoir “A View from the East Wing,” Jill writes about Inauguration Day 2025, when tradition required her to ride from the White House to the Capitol with Melania after the pre‑inauguration tea. It should have been a symbolic handoff between first ladies. Instead, she says, Melania sat “stone‑faced,” barely speaking, clearly furious over the FBI search of Mar‑a‑Lago for Trump’s hoard of classified documents.
Jill actually tries to show empathy: she notes that as first lady she had her own home searched by agents as part of the investigation, and that she knows “how distressing it was to have agents rummage through your underwear drawer.”
Melania, Jill writes, wasn’t having it. She blamed Joe personally, acting as if the normal chain of law‑enforcement and courts didn’t exist and the president himself had ordered a raid on her bedroom.
The tension was so thick that the inaugural committee didn’t dare put the two women alone together. Jill says they recruited Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s husband, John Bessler, as a human buffer and plopped him in the middle seat.
Bessler did what Midwestern dads do in impossible situations: he tried small talk. He asked about Barron’s studies at NYU. Melania, staring out the window, gave him a single word: “NYU.” Every attempt to shift the conversation back to something neutral — the weather, the ceremony — died in the air. In Jill’s telling, the presidents’ limo up ahead was probably tense too, but at least Joe and Trump were talking. In the first ladies’ car, it was just cold silence and one‑word answers all the way up Pennsylvania Avenue.
Jill uses the story to make a broader point: this wasn’t a one‑off. She writes that Melania declined her invitation to the traditional 2021 inauguration tea when Joe first took office, breaking a norm that has survived even the ugliest transitions.
Four years later, when the roles reversed and the Trumps came back to the White House, Melania still didn’t extend the same courtesy back. In every interaction Jill describes, Melania shows zero grace — even compared to other first ladies who have quietly swallowed humiliations and still showed up for the sake of the country.
And here’s the part that matters beyond the gossip. Trump has spent years telling his followers that the Mar‑a‑Lago search was a personal vendetta by “the Bidens,” not the result of him hiding boxes of classified nuclear and military documents in a ballroom, a bathroom, and a basement.
Melania apparently believes that narrative so deeply that she can’t even make small talk in a limo without seething. Jill, who knows firsthand what it’s like to have agents go through your things, points out the obvious subtext: it’s not the invasion of privacy Melania is truly angry about. It’s that her husband was finally treated like any other citizen who hoards national‑defense secrets and refuses to give them back.
We don’t often get honest, human‑level snapshots of what power feels like up close. This one matters because it captures the collision between entitlement and accountability.
Jill Biden is sitting there thinking about how to show a little solidarity over something painful that neither woman directly controlled. Melania Trump is sitting there convinced that nothing in her orbit — not an FBI warrant, not a criminal investigation, not even the peaceful transfer of power — should happen without her family’s permission, and furious at anyone who suggests otherwise. VIA~~~Josh Helfgott
In a few years, historians will write whole chapters about classified documents, indictments, and constitutional crises.
For now, it’s worth remembering this image: two first ladies in the back of a limousine, one trying to keep a fragile tradition alive, the other staring out the window, still unable to see that the law applies to her husband, too.

[Alex Cosh @AlexCosh_]

A Canadian Sumud Flotilla participant explains that on April 29-30, Israeli forces fired a shot between 2 crew members, held and searched them at gunpoint, and then destroyed the boat's engine and communication systems before setting them on course towards a storm.

"Please let me be clear. The intentions of the Israeli military was to kill us and the crews of two other boats."

[Irish Communist Party @IrishCommunists]

IRA members were regularly excommunicated during the tan war and then again republicans were excommunicated for being anti-treaty IRA.

[MalaProper @ProperMala]

@MrChristopher79 @our_jesse Wouldn't you?

[MalaProper @ProperMala]

@our_jesse Not even a big, hearty soup.

Consommé should do the job.

[Middle East Monitor @MiddleEastMnt]

A campaign calling on the UK government to investigate and monitor British nationals who served in the Israeli army during the Gaza genocide has gained public support, with Green Party leader Zack Polanski among more than 60 signatories to an open letter published by Declassified UK and the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP).

Read: https://t.co/KVsZkZmbLY

[Parody Jeff @Parodyjeffx]

Albania just froze Kushner’s $4 billion coastal mega-project.

I think Albania is weeks away from building a nuclear weapon.

[Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan]

I swear to God we are living in Idiocracy. Everyday I think 'This can't be real.' But it is.
You couldn't write a satirical movie like the insane shitshow we are being forced to live through in real life.

[Thanos Angelopoulos @Th_Angelopoulos]

10 years ago those who are now rioting in the name of Henry Nowak, a young Polish British man who was killed by a lying piece of shit, are those who targeted people like Henry.

They think we have a short memory. We don't.

[John Cusack @johncusack]

I know the feeling ;)

[Ciaran Tierney @ciarantierney]

"An insult to the soccer kids of Gaza"

A blog about Robbie Keane, from July 2023.

At least eight children from the Al-Hillal academy have been murdered by #Israel since then.

#GazaGenocide‌

https://t.co/QdwdtG4l9e

Photo: John Kelly, Co. Clare.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

Wow! @SenatorLujan just completely torched Scott Bessent and Donald Trump for their corruption.

"President Trump's sons signed a deal, as you know, with World Liberty Financial with a bunch of folks you sanctioned. And now, as part of this, there's an addendum that says President Trump and his kids and anyone affiliated with him, I don't know if it's current wives, former wives, people that just did transactions with him, they're off scot-free... You're telling me as the Secretary of U.S. Treasury, you don't know that the President of the United States, who I think you work for, got a sweetheart deal from the Department of Justice, who's your lawyer. You're in line for the Presidents, Scott.

"Here's a list of all the insider trading right here... You should apologize to the American people for fleecing them and giving this a way to Donald Trump, man. That's what you should do."

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

BBC PAID A WOMAN HALF A MAN SALARY FOR THE SAME JOB AND THOUGHT NO ONE WOULD NOTICE

Carrie Gracie spoke fluent Mandarin. Ran the @BBC Beijing bureau. Thirty years of service. One of four international editors at Britain's most prestigious broadcaster.

Then the BBC was legally forced to publish salary data in 2017. Gracie looked at the list. Her male counterpart covering North America was on up to £249,000. She was below £150,000. Not even on the published list. Neither was Europe editor Katya Adler. The two women. Funny that.

She had explicitly made equal pay a condition of taking the China role. The BBC said yes. Then paid her nearly half anyway and apparently hoped she'd never check.

She checked.

She asked for equal pay. The BBC, with the confidence of an institution that had been getting away with this for decades, offered her a raise that still left her short.

She turned it down. Resigned from the post. Published an open letter to the licence fee payers explaining exactly what their public broadcaster was doing with their money.

The BBC's response was to put her through nearly a year of their own internal grievance process. Run by the same institution she was complaining about. Investigating itself. Shockingly, it went nowhere.

It took three separate meetings with the Director-General and the concrete threat of an employment tribunal before the BBC caved, issued a public apology, and paid her £361,000 in backdated wages.

She gave every single penny to the Fawcett Society (@fawcettsociety).

A publicly funded broadcaster. Breaking equality law. Caught red-handed. Dragging a 30-year employee through a year of institutional theatre. Paying up only when a judge became a realistic possibility.

[Elon Mack @ElonMackk]

This video was deleted from Facebook and Instagram yesterday.

You know what to do ‼️

[dave lawrence 🐟🐟🐠 @dave43law]

You want to know how desperately performative Reform are, as well as being extremely ill informed - look no further

'What is Wrong With You?': Zia Yusuf Monstered Over Prostate Cancer Screening Complaint https://t.co/nsxydWGKE3 via @HuffPostUKPol

[Liz Webster @LizWebsterSBF]

Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger on Brexit: “Putin would have been absolutely delighted by our decision.”

“So would Xi. France has effectively eclipsed us. Brexit has marginalised us.” Most striking of all: “Just nobody mentions the UK.”

Very sad that Sir Alex Younger, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, born on July 4, 1963, died of pancreatic cancer on June 2, 2026, aged 62

[MalaProper @ProperMala]

@DaAngryOstrich Life in z closet will do that to you

[MalaProper @ProperMala]

@MittensOff @stuzi_pants What's a fellow to do?

He's made an entire career from promoting hate & taking dodgy money.

But now both seem to be going out of fashion in the UK.