Phil Thomas

Deputy news editor @independent. Previously @thetimes @SkyNews @PortsmthNewsHub

[Fraser Nelson @FraserNelson]

Farage wanted to take on the establishment. It looks like he'll end up with Count Binface.

My thoughts on his by-election gamble:-

https://t.co/pLBeCuPNiX

[The Kyiv Independent @KyivIndependent]

“The CEO of Mondelez has acknowledged that the taxes the company pays in Russia help Russia’s war against Ukraine. Just three days after, Russian drones struck a Mondelez factory in Ukraine,” writes Bennett Freeman, Co-founder and Steering Committee member of B4Ukraine, in his op-ed.

https://t.co/BwZ09JURkn

[Quinten | 048.eth @QuintenFrancois]

US against Belgium tonight

[Phil Thomas @philipthomaspt]

As a proud son of Bury St Edmunds I welcome this opportunity for revenge. A dish best served cold indeed … #ENGvNOR #saintedmund #869AD

[Yop @AFCYop_]

The star of the parade 🤣❤️

[Waqas🔶️ @m0w4q45]

I Accidentally Joined Tommy 10 Names’ Rally
Full disclosure: I’m not from London, and I genuinely just wanted to get to Green Park station. Instead, between 2 and 3:30pm, with the chaos peaking around 2:30, I got an unscheduled walking tour of Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally. Here is the geographically accurate, crowd-counting field report nobody asked for.

I began my afternoon at Dave’s Hot Chicken near Piccadilly Circus, where I made the executive decision to order the extra hot tenders. This was, frankly, a worse decision than anything in Tommy 10 Names’ back catalogue, and that’s saying something. I staggered out a changed man and drifted into Leicester Square, which was absolutely heaving but unless Tommy has quietly launched a European chapter for grown adults queuing at M&M’s World, those were tourists.
Diagnosing myself with acute spicy-tender-mouth, I ducked into Cold Stone Creamery for emergency dairy intervention. Verdict: a confident 5/10. Fine ice cream, fine experience, staff declined to sing. Pure mid.

From there I wandered past the National Portrait Gallery towards Trafalgar Square. The Met had closed the road to traffic but you could still use the pavement, which was generous of them. Trafalgar Square itself had been caged off like a zoo enclosure fitting, I thought with a crowd inside. I tried to cut through to Charing Cross station. Plenty of foot traffic, but honestly nothing more impressive than an average Bolton v Wigan fixture, and that’s a League One game that struggles to fill a midweek stadium.

Notable amenity gap: the organisers appear not to have commissioned enough Portaloos, so the side streets near Charing Cross were being repurposed as open-air urinals by several patriotic gentlemen taking back control of their bladders. Reclaiming the streets, literally.
I dove into Charing Cross tube, popped one stop east to Embankment, and crossed the Golden Jubilee Bridges (the two footbridges flanking Hungerford rail bridge — pedantry matters) over to the South Bank where the London Eye lives.

From there I walked along the river and climbed the steps up onto Westminster Bridge, then crossed it towards the Palace of Westminster. Parliament Square that bit of grass opposite the Houses of Parliament was rammed, but let’s be honest: a few thousand people will fill a small green square. Not a great metric.

Then came the proper crowd audit. Walking up Whitehall, the first stretch was decently full. By Horse Guards Parade it was thinning. By Trafalgar Square it was downright patchy a few thousand, at best. Organisers will doubtless claim a million; the Met said 110–150k last September; my honest eyeball is more like 30–40k.

The give-away was the side streets. Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall Place the two roads running east off Whitehall down to the Embankment were ghost towns. Coming off the Golden Jubilee Bridge, you could clearly see Union Jacks flying along Whitehall, but Whitehall Place itself? Bare.

A genuinely enormous rally spills into every side road like a burst pipe. This one did not.
Also, as my reward for navigating all of that without becoming part of the demographic, I had to endure Glenn Beck’s voice booming across central London. There is no statute of limitations on that crime against tourism.

0/10, would not stumble into again. The tenders, though those I’d consider.

[Whit Stillman @WhitStillman]

A personal announcement.
"Adam Brody and Laura Carmichael to Star in ‘A Night at Claridge’s’ as Whit Stillman Sets Big Screen Return" (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/ARPzPMVilt via @variety

[OSINTtechnical @Osinttechnical]

Trump, just hours after talking to Putin, says the US is considering the withdrawal of some troops from Germany.

[Dylan Byers @DylanByers]

One small state-of-the-culture observation on last night….

Shortly after leaving the Hilton, where a gunman attempted to enter the room in which the President, Vice President, several cabinet members, congressmen, dignitaries, business executives, and hundreds of America’s leading journalists were gathered, I went to a bar with a small group of colleagues to touch base, get our bearings, and, ideally, watch the news coverage.

When I lived in Washington a decade ago, bars like this one usually had at least one TV tuned to CNN or Fox News. These TVs were on a hockey game, and no one in the bar seemed aware of what had just taken place mere blocks away. We asked a bartender to change the channel to CNN so we could watch the president’s briefing with captions, which they did. But then, a few minutes later, the bartender said he’d been informed by the manager that the bar had a policy against showing political content, and he’d have to go back to sports.

I tried to imagine what this bar might have looked like on March 30, 1981, an hour or so after Hinckley fired shots at Reagan at the very same hotel. I imagine every television would have been on CNN or the wall-to-wall special coverage on the broadcast networks, and that passers by would have come in to watch, as well.

The media is giving this the ample coverage it deserves. But it’s unnerving how desensitized so many people have become—to shootings, obviously, but also to political violence and the abnormality of the moment.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we just picked the wrong bar. But I doubt it. Pew Research recently reported that attention to news in the U.S. has declined across all age groups since 2016, and that young adults (ages 18 to 29) have consistently had the lowest levels. Even as the news itself intensifies—in politics, geopolitics, technology, etc—more and more people seem to be tuning it out.

And I suppose this is how you find yourself in a bar in the nation’s capital, an hour after crouching behind a chair as secret service members evacuate the President of the United States from the room, being told that you’ll have to watch Penguins vs. Flyers.

[Joe Scarborough @ScarboroughNow]

Drawing on the lessons of Vietnam and the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon, SecDef Weinberger listed requirements for US military engagements. Later expanded by Vietnam vet Colin Powell, the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine explains later failures in Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

[Middle Temple @middletemple]

Being Called to the Bar is a moving experience for many newly launched barristers. Leonie Hughes describes what it feels like to achieve her goal.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Johnny FD @JohnnyFDK]

What Trump promised: "I'll end Russia's war in Ukraine in 24 hours if you elect me."

What Trump did: "I tried to force Ukraine to capitulate and give Russia everything they want.

When that didn't work I ended all financial support to Ukraine, lifted sanctions of Russia, rolled out the red carpet for Putin, and doubled oil prices so Russia can have more money to continue the war."

[manny @mannyfidel]

oh my god. was trump told to tell the press that the image was "doctored," but misunderstood and told everyone that he was depicted as a "doctor"?

[Richard Stengel @stengel]

An American president threatening the death of an ancient civilization is in some ways the end of the 250-year moral experiment of a constitutional republic that the framers saw as a model for all mankind.

[Karim Sadjadpour @ksadjadpour]

1 The defining deliberations of this war aren't between the US and Iran, but Trump and himself. He’s vacillated between walking away and promising to bomb Iran to the Stone Age. Iran has been consistent: Its ideology is resistance, its strategy is chaos, its endgame is survival.

[Tymofiy Mylovanov @Mylovanov]

Fukuyama: The U.S. does not now have a Trump doctrine.

Its behavior can best be explained not by a set of principles, but by the personal interests and preoccupations of the president.

Trump's head is full of resentments, anger, anecdotes, and made-up facts. 1/

[Phil Thomas @philipthomaspt]

@GasBuddyGuy Trump blithely saying the Strait will just “open up naturally” is reminiscent of his repeated line for the first few months of the Covid crisis in 2020, that “when the warm weather comes it just goes away” — complacent, unthinking happy talk. No real plan beyond blind optimism.

[The Sting @TheStingisBack]

Rita Moreno is one of just three people to win an Emmy for The Muppets, the other two: Bernadette Peters and Peter Sellers. The comedy timing during her performance of "Fever" while Animal attempts to railroad her is incredible. It was also done in one take
"Dat my kinda woman!"

[. @GregTSargent]

Trump just raged at our NATO allies for refusing to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz and bail him out of the fiasco he created. He threatened to withdraw from NATO with childish insults.

This is really an admission of serious political weakness. 1/

(new)
https://t.co/orv37e4mxH