Mark Almond

[Alan D Miller @alanvibe]

Hampshire Poloce were working on putting out a statement that put the blame on Henry Nowak -

This is so utterly shocking, ghastly & irredemanly wrong. Insulting and denigrating Henry to family & nation. Gaslighting. Lying

The brave Nowak family said no way. Huge respect to them as well as continued deep condolences and love

Alexis Boon must go

This is outrageous

Time for real change now no more excuses

The rot that runs from Civil Service & senior command is endangering Britain with this @ukhomeoffice

No more @PatrickChristys

[Jack Prandelli @jackprandelli]

BP is out.

SOCAR now operates both of Azerbaijan's westbound oil pipelines.

Kazakhstan just got a non-Russian route to Europe.

2 moves in the same window:

→ June 2026: SOCAR takes over Baku–Supsa and the Supsa Black Sea terminal

→ July 2026: SOCAR takes over BTC (Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan)

BP stays as commercial participant.

But the operator of every westbound Caspian barrel is now SOCAR.

Baku–Supsa is the bigger story.

830 km to Georgia's Black Sea coast.
5-7 mtpa capacity. Idle since 2022.
Heads of Terms signed May 19.
It's back and not just for Azeri crude.

Kazakhstan needs this.

Kashagan and Tengiz oil flows almost entirely through Russia's CPC route.

That route has been disrupted, weaponised, and sanctioned repeatedly.

Azerbaijan is offering up to 5 mtpa of Kazakh transit via Baku–Supsa segregated, grade preserved, Russia free.

With SOCAR running both pipelines, the commercial logic is clean: one operator, unified tariffs, direct slot allocation for Kazakh volumes across the Middle Corridor.

Azerbaijan just made itself the indispensable transit node between Caspian producers and European buyers.

[Alexander Stahel 🌻 @BurggrabenH]

I doubt the barefoot hike. I'm no fan of the Christopher Columbus complex, and I happen to admire elites who develop a country rather than exploit one. So let me explain what is actually going on here.

I did, among others, property across Eastern Europe during my years at Babcock & Brown, and I spent the better part of a decade fighting a court case in Romania against people who tried to defraud my land title. I won. And here is the lesson I paid for: the one thing that separates an investable Eastern Europe from an uninvestable one is European Union membership. It is the guardian of the rule of law in an otherwise wild East, the easiest place in the world to lose your money.

That is the lens through which I read what is happening on Sazan Island.

You see, there was a time when Western elites saw themselves as custodians of institutions, rules and the places they touched. That instinct is fading. What remains too often is the Columbus reflex: arrive by yacht, "discover" land that people already know perfectly well, and treat the rules as obstacles reserved for everyone else. And then have the wisdom to go on camera and brag about it. Jesus. No wonder Albanians are now on the streets in their thousands.

"We were on a friend's boat and stopped for a swim. That's how we found it. We swam to the island. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way up to the top, and we were just captivated."

What she "found" has been there for millions of years, in the Adriatic, not "the Mediterranean." It has a name. Sazan Island sits where the Adriatic meets the Ionian: a former military base, Italian and then Cold War, including a Soviet submarine base, inside a protected national marine park that has been open to the public since 2017 via boat tour from Vlorë. An island crawling with snakes, including the nose-horned viper, Europe's most venomous. So much for the barefoot hike.

Nothing was discovered, and nothing justifies any entitlement. Quite the contrary.

What actually happened is that Jared Kushner set out to cash in on his father-in-law's temporary power as President of the United States. That status means precisely nothing in Switzerland, with its seven centuries of direct democracy and institutions no outsider can buy. But it means everything to a weak man like Albania's prime minister, Edi Rama, cornered at home, courting Washington, and now under criminal investigation for how his government handed this deal away. Kushner understands that asymmetry perfectly. And he wants to exploit it. Period.

In Albania, he can. Albania is chronically bureaucratic, the long tail of its communist heritage, a home-grown Stalinism so absolute it broke even with Moscow and sealed the country off from the world. That legacy is the same one that ran, and still runs at times, from Sarajevo to Tirana, from Bucharest to Belgrade: decades of one-party rule that hollowed out the courts, the press and property itself, and left a vacuum filled by the personalised, strongman power of a connected few. It is the soil in which corruption flourishes, and Albania's greatest vulnerability.

And on that soil, in one of Europe's poorest countries, the island's protected status was suddenly changed in December 2024, in the weeks between Trump's election victory and his inauguration. Just like that. The public-tender rule was bypassed. "Strategic Investor" status went to a Kushner-linked SPV before the inauguration: no business plan, no feasibility study. Wonderful. Because Ivanka "discovered it". Right? Wrong.

A country vulnerability like that can be met in two ways. A responsible investor sticks to the rules and ties his fortunes to the country's long-term development, because that is what makes returns durable in the first place. And that will take a lot of time and upfront investment, with a highly uncertain reward. That's called risk-taking.

A powerful one, on the other hand, willing to bend the rules, as this deal suggests the Trump family is content to do, sees only something to exploit.

The subsequent damage runs far deeper and longer than a few harmless bungalows built without a proper concession. What is happening here is that Kushner is becoming part of the problem that corrodes Albania's path into the European Union. That is the real issue here. Just like the issue when JD Vance travelled to Europe and openly campaigned for illiberal politicians while lecturing Europeans about democracy. Who do these people think they are? Guardians of democracy?

Consider what the Albanian path actually looks like right now. The Balkans, like much of post-communist Europe, are chronically corrupt. But they are also full of people fighting to turn their countries toward something better, and EU accession is the single most powerful tool they have. It forces the one thing that actually develops a country: predictable rules, secure property, contracts that hold, and the credible belief that the same rules apply to everyone.

That belief is what brought the great wave of investment into Poland. Its absence is why Romania and Bulgaria remained under special monitoring for years after accession. The rule of law that eventually held in that Bucharest courtroom, and saved me, exists because membership forced it into being. Brussels learned the lesson. Today enlargement runs on a "fundamentals first" basis.

Which is exactly where Albania stands.

Last month it became only the second candidate after Montenegro to clear those rule-of-law benchmarks, with the EU's own enlargement commissioner describing SPAK, the very prosecutor now investigating this deal, as the country's "most trusted institution." The concession lands squarely on the chapters that decide membership: the judiciary, justice and public procurement. So this is not a side issue to Albania's European future. It is a direct test of it.

And that is why this does not help. It does the opposite. A single family connected to the presidency of the United States showing that the rules bend on demand corrodes the one asset a poor country cannot afford to lose: the belief, hard-won and easily lost, that the rules are real.

Then those same people have the chutzpah to complain about corruption in Eastern Europe and lecture the world about American exceptionalism. It is all so deeply wrong. And make no mistake, it erodes our democracies too, ever so slightly.

The thousands in the streets of Tirana understand all of this instinctively. They are not protesting a resort. They are defending the only thing that gives their country a future and hope: the rule of law applied equally to all.

And make no mistake about who the brave ones are. They are not on a yacht. They are on the street of Tirana and inside SPAK, because in Albania, stepping on the toes of the powerful is done in the knowledge that the danger is real. Confronting entrenched corruption in the Balkans has cost prosecutors, judges and journalists their their lives. That is the issue here, ladies and gentlemen!

I doubt Ivanka loses any sleep over any of this. Her concern is closing the deal while her father remains in office. And on a timeline that tight, a public tender, one they may well have won fairly, becomes an inconvenience rather than a safeguard.

That is the difference between a custodian of capitalism and democracy like Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger and a primitive land-grabber without any moral compass and integrity.

[Anna @AnnaDeMilanese]

Das ist kein Luxusresort. Sazan – die albanische Insel an der Straße von Otranto – ist das maritime Tor zwischen Adria und Mittelmeer.
3.600 atomsichere Bunker. 15 Kilometer Tunnel. Ehemalige sowjetische U-Boot-Anlegestellen.
Die Insel kontrolliert wer die Adria kontrolliert. Und wer kauft sie?
Kushners Affinity Partners – finanziert zu 99 Prozent von Saudi-Arabien, UAE und Katar.
157 Millionen Dollar Gebühren von ausländischen Staatsfonds.
Das bestätigt der US-Finanzausschuss unter Senator Wyden.

Und wer leitet das Team? Kein einziger Hotelmanager. Ausschließlich Ex-Geheimdienstler und Ex-Regierungsbeamte der Trump-Administration. General Miguel Correa – ehemaliger Direktor für Golfangelegenheiten im Nationalen Sicherheitsrat. Mitarchitekt der Abraham-Accords.
Kevin Hassett – ehemaliger Vorsitzender des Wirtschaftsberaterstabs im Weißen Haus.
Chad Mizelle – ehemaliger amtierender Chefsyndikus des Heimatschutzministeriums. John Rader – ehemaliger Nationaler Sicherheitsrat. Nick Butterfield – ehemaliger stellvertretender Koordinator für Politik im Weißen Haus.
Senator Wyden: Die Anwesenheit von General Correa „wirft Bedenken hinsichtlich der Emoluments-Klausel der Verfassung auf."
Das ist kein Resort. Das ist eine geopolitische Operation – finanziert von Golfstaaten – auf einer ehemaligen sowjetischen Militärbasis – im Herzen Europas. 🇦🇱🇸🇦🇦🇪🇶🇦🇺🇸🇪🇺

[Pete North @FUDdaily]

Yes, we need to rip up DEI across the public sector but we need to tackle the problem at source. We need an urgent focus on the state of British higher education. You will, by now, understand the concept of "elite overproduction". DEI is is the embodiment of the devil making work for idle hands. We have more academics than society can sustain - most of them studying niche areas to the extent that the majority of their work is valueless and if all of them vanished overnight, nary a ripple would be felt off university campuses.

We all know that modern universities are diploma mills and that the degree is increasingly worthless. It is no longer the ticket to social mobility it once was. It's been completely debased. Similarly, the PhD is no longer a credible research qualification. You'd be shocked at how low the bar is these days. Universities offer them just as a revenue stream. You have to be spectacularly bad to fail in a non-STEM subject.

Meanwhile, universities are compelled to implement DEI practices because it's a prerequisite for some research funders. If you want to apply for an EU grant, institutional eligibility requires that public bodies, research organisations, and higher education establishments hold a valid intersectional Gender Equality Plan. even if we strip DEI out of British law, we're still going to be dealing with the residual effects of the EU racial equality directive.

Many of the philanthropic foundations have the same stipulations. The Athena Swan Charter is a globally recognised equality accreditation framework administered by Advance HE (a British charity and professional membership scheme), which "encourages and celebrates commitment to advancing gender equity in higher education and research".

You then have things like International Science Partnerships Fund Institutional Support Grant. Funding is strictly regulated to align with international aid targets - and in that there's national equality law as well as international frameworks (UNSDG). As such, there is a equality industrial complex, as much made up of self-imposed frameworks and voluntary standards as law.

Very often the British right talks about QUANGOs in terms of their running costs, largely ignoring their cultural significance. We're going to have to either scrap or purge the Office for Students and Research England and defund the flanking charity organisation. The whole model of research funding needs a close look.

This is where Danny Kruger's work for Reform is unimpressive. Reform is dead set on deleting dozens of public bodies, but the problem is, they do actually serve a function and if you delete them, you still need a government department to do the job. What's needed is a deeper analysis of what they actually do, their institutional impact, and how we can reconstitute them to perform their functions without the subversive political agendas. We still need a research funding apparatus.

There's a lot of work to be done in this area. Obviously we need to scrap the post 97 universities and reconstitute polytechnics, remove the cap on tuition fees and reform the student loans system, A lot of the problems can be sorted just by letting market forces do their thing, but the modern British university is a woke madrassa, and making higher education fit for purpose is no small undertaking.

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

Nobody who had their time again would stay in academia.

[NPRG @CptHastings1916]

I loved my Late Antiquity papers as an undergrad; if I had my time again, I'd seriously consider staying on in academia.

[Umbricius 🇫🇷🇮🇹 @UmbriciusR]

Les Italiens n'en ont jamais rien eu à foutre de l'antifascisme. Ils reprochent à Mussolini l'alliance allemande et 1940 c'est tout.
Les funérailles du Général Graziani de 1955 ! Torneremo !

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

Just wait. Like the Easter Islanders, the Yookay university sector will raise its biggest votary statues just before the last academics starve to death in their shadows.

[Martin Dominik @EverFurther]

@Future_Cities @LRB I am surprised that so little money has been spent on statues of Vice-Chancellors

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

Odd that Queens University Belfast @QUBelfast celebrates Ulster Scots aka Scots-Irish language and culture but you need to "know f*ck all" to know that. https://t.co/KvHgdIxvdR

[Alys Denby @alysdenby]

No quicker way to reveal you know f*ck all about Britain than calling yourself ‘Scots-Irish’ - not a thing any Brit would say - and not understanding why we have a population of Sikhs

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

Wouldn't anyone prioritising forestalling harm to this country? Another counter-factual suggests that a Beeching controlling the Reichsbahn or Soviet railways would have moved Hell-and-earth to keep the trains rolling to Auschwitz or the Gulag. He was that kind of guy.

[Dr Paul Stott @MrPaulStott]

This is great.

Although I sometimes wonder if Peter Hitchens could go back in time and assassinate any historical figure, he wouldn't pick Stalin or Hitler, but Dr Beeching....

[Channel 4 News @Channel4News]

Speaking in Iran, academic and regime critic Sadegh Zibakalam tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy that democracy cannot be imposed overnight, and that lasting reform must come gradually.

Despite being banned from teaching and facing pressure from hardliners, he says he remains hopeful about Iran’s future and can still see “light at the end of the dark tunnel.”

[Sana Ebrahimi Ledene @__Injaneb96]

Let me introduce you to Sadegh Zibakalam, the Islamic revolutionary man who, back in a 1979 interview, straight-up admitted how Islamist and leftist groups in Iran were getting training, support, and connections from Palestinian terrorists and other Arab extremists.

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

And then Mr Justice Bright passed a sentence in effect shorter than that imposed on a man unjustly imprisoned for 17 years for the crime Quinn had committed and covered up keeping the innocent man in jail and charging him for his food and keep. British justice at its best. Not two-tiered, two-faced. Nice words masking penalising the innocent.

[Sam Corbishley @corbishleys]

After weeks' spent focusing on judges getting it wrong in their sentencing remarks, here is Mr Justice Bright with a moving tribute to a victim.

In fact, he refuses to use that word, or complainant or survivor, saying they're 'demeaning'.

He instead refers to her as the 'hero'.

[Catherine Blaiklock @blaiklockBP]

Summary - the police pulling Henry’s arms back, massively increased the blood flow and opened the wounds - so he went from consciousness and survival to dead in 3 minutes.

[Henry von Blumenthal @PaulinusOfTrier]

Ever since graduate entry was introduced into the Police force, it has gone downhill.

[Adam Gwiazda @delestoile]

🟥 Czy Henry Nowak mógł przeżyć?
Dr Krzysztof Magier @DrMagier , lekarz pediatra i były konsul honorowy RP w Cowes, przeanalizował nagrania z policyjnej kamery nasobnej pokazujące śmierć Henry'ego Nowaka.
Dr Magier jest lekarzem prowadzącym oddział intensywnej terapii dziecięcej, z doświadczeniem w szkoleniach z medycyny pola walki oraz po specjalistycznym kursie leczenia ciężkich urazów (w tym ran postrzałowych i kłutych).
Nie zgadza się z opinią patologa i sędziego, że Henry Nowak nie miał żadnych szans na przeżycie i ze skucie go w kajdanki nic w zasadzie nie zmieniło. Wręcz przeciwnie – istnieje duże prawdopodobieństwo, że to interwencja policji przyczyniła się do jego śmierci.
Przeanalizował on raport z sekcji, który wskazuje na uszkodzenie żyły podobojczykowej jako główne źródło krwawienia i tłumaczy, gdzie leży problem.
U zdrowej osoby krwawienie żylne odbywa się pod niskim ciśnieniem i często samoogranicza się dzięki powstającemu naturalnie skrzepowi, a samo zbliżenie krawędzi rany i ucisk otaczających tkanek domyka żyłę na tyle, że spowalnia albo nawet zatrzymuje krwawienie.
Z nagrania z policyjnej kamery nasobnej wynika, że gdy policja przybyła na miejsce (prawdopodobnie 5-10 minut po zranieniu), Henry był na tyle przytomny, że mówił dość głośno. Nie był zatem jeszcze w stanie terminalnym. Po wykręceniu rąk do tyłu i skuciu za plecami najprawdopodobniej doszło do rozciągnięcia żyły, rozerwania skrzepu i gwałtownego nasilenia krwawienia. W ciągu zaledwie ok. trzech minut stracił przytomność i zmarł.
Osoby z podejrzeniem urazów wewnętrznych nigdy nie powinny być gwałtownie przemieszczane ani szarpane – takie działanie może zniszczyć naturalny skrzep i doprowadzić do masywnego krwotoku wewnętrznego.
Zamiast natychmiastowego wezwania zespołu ratownictwa medycznego i przekazania pacjenta w ręce ratowników, policja go skuła. Gdyby na miejscu jako pierwsi pojawili się paramedycy, szanse Henry’ego na przeżycie byłyby znacznie większe. "50%" - pisze dr Magier.
Ratownicy mogliby szybko założyć kroplówkę, podać płyny zwiększające objętość krwi krążącej oraz kwas traneksamowy stabilizujący skrzep, a w razie potrzeby wykonać dekompresję igłową (wkłucie grubej i długiej igły w płuco), bo problemem nie był tyle brak funkcji płuca, ale ucisk zalanego krwią płuca na serce i śródpiersie, który blokuje krążenie.
Co gorsza, incydent miał miejsce zaledwie kilka minut jazdy samochodem (2–3 minuty karetką na sygnale) od Southampton University Hospital – regionalnego Major Trauma Centre dysponującego pełnym zapleczem specjalistów, procedur i sprzętu. "Jestem przekonany, że gdyby Henry dotarł tam żywy, lekarze nie pozwoliliby mu umrzeć" - pisze dr Magier.
Podsumowując: agresywna interwencja policji, zamiast ratować życie, doprowadziła do śmierci przez nieodpowiednie postępowanie z ciężko ranionym człowiekiem, mimo że najwyższej klasy opieka była w zasięgu kilku minut. "Obawiam się, że Sędzia i patolog byli zbyt łaskawi dla policji" - pisze dr Magier.

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

Transcripts are not available even for members of the jury. I was once on one when a very poor quality recording of a police interview was introduced in evidence but a key word was so indistinct as to be ambivalent since two radically different but very similar sounding words were possible. There was no transcript. Nor, by the way, was there a court reporter. Local news media can no longer afford them or exist at all.
Most trials are effectively in camera.

[marydejevsky @marydejevsky]

'transcripts are probably available' - alas, unlikely. It's impossible for almost anyone, incl media, interested parties, etc, to obtain a court transcript except by paying ££££. No recordings either. So much for open justice

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

People don't grasp the sheer speed and scale of Europe's decline.

This 👇 is an extraordinary number shared by Luis Vassy, director of Sciences Po (one of France's most famous schools) in this article: https://t.co/BQbkXb2kPl

He calculated that the EU is declining 3 times faster than the Qing dynasty at the height of China's century of humiliation.

Back then, it took China 50 years to drop from 30% of world GDP to 17%, whereas it took the EU just 17 years (from 2008 to 2025).

Insane 😢 And, sadly, given the current direction and the EU's systematically suicidal policy choices (latest example: https://t.co/6EYJgdXVVo), it's just the beginning...

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

Sadly, this is true. Tamerlane should rise from his tomb and wreak havoc on its "restorers".

[ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 @kunley_drukpa]

FAKE HALF-ARSED DISNEY CITIES ALONG THE SILK ROAD 🇺🇿

Samarkand, Uzbekistan is a great city, very historically important in the context of Central Asian ‘Silk Road’ history city and so with a well-earned reputation as ‘impossibly exotic and far off’ in the same way as all the other great ‘impossibly exotic and far off’ cities; Timbuktu, Lhasa etc. Worth visiting BUT with big qualification - the Uzbek government completely botched the restoration work on Samarkand’s major historical buildings

It’s just a total slap-dash mess in places. Looks like a cheap replica reconstruction city you would find at Disney Epcot or, worse, in a Chinese theme park just outside Shanghai. Go to Tamerlane’s tomb for example and you will see a lot of uneven exposed dried cement protruding from the edges of tiles. Rough, irregular, grayish-white (or sometimes even coloured) blobs, ridges or smears of hardened mortar that have oozed lout from between or beyond the tile edges and hardened, rather than being neatly recessed or concealed. Also (not just in Tamerlane’s tomb but elsewhere in restored buildings across the city) the tiles are apparently often incorrect tiles - either they’re excessively garish or they have patterns or calligraphy that make no sense if the intent was to restore the buildings in a period accurate way

Actually part of the restoration for the city was done by the Soviets, so not *all* the Uzbek government’s fault. When the walls and domes of the various mosques and madrasas were reconstructed apparently the Soviets were far too happy with cement - with the effect that the buildings still look tacky and cheap, like they’ve been built from the most inexpensive material possible. Uzbek government’s culpability here is that it unfortunately ran with this mess when it decided to restore the buildings even further and open Uzbekistan up to tourists. While the famous Registan square looks okayish try the Shah-i-Zinda Necropolis (restored during the 00’s) and the tiling does not look any better than the tiling in your grandmother’s bathroom. Photographs well but is not as impressive in person as it looks in the photographs. Many many buildings like this, won’t go through them all but all the major attractions have at least one appreciable flaw in their restoration work

You get the sense that the medieval city has been restored just to be instagrammable (if you crop the picture properly). What was the Uzbek government thinking? Did they really just rush to get it done as soon as possible so they could get the tourist money? It’s not impossible. Another questionable design decision too - they created cemented, roped little pathlight-lit pathways between the various buildings, with the effect that, once again, it feels like you’re ambling around Disney World. Sometimes they even had golf buggies whizzing up and down carrying tourists around. The ‘Disneyfication’ of Samarkand is an accurate description of what has happened, with the extra qualification that the ‘Disneyfication’ is at a level that seems designed to appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of provincial Chinese tourists

Samarkand is a city you have to do your own reading about before you get there to rally make the most of what you’re seeing. About the Timurid Empire and Ulugh Beg and Shah Rukh and the Silk Road and so on. Modern city is mostly a boring Soviet cut and paste city you’ll see anywhere in the former USSR with the disneyfied medieval Samarkand forming a sort of half-assed showpiece in the city centre. Samarkand is Samarkand so was still good to visit but it was a bit disappointing insofar as you felt like you didn’t really get the ‘real thing’. Best part of the stay was meeting an Uzbek woman who spent a long time offloading on me how she hated how conservative Uzbek culture was and wanted to move to Canada. Had a lot to say about modern Uzbekistan and agreed the restoration work was half-arsed for probably financial reasons too. She did later move to Canada

[Mark Almond @mpalmond]

Has @HantsPolice gone from adopting the knee for @GeorgeFlloyd to adopting the Derek Chauvin approach to suspect control?

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

British police officers kicks a Henry Nowak protester as he’s pinned down on the ground by several other officers