Surprise, surprise, there is no "waste" in English local government

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Some nice touches here:

- Julius Caesar had coins minted with his face on them "weeks before his death"
- The lifespan of the American republic looks about right: 1776-2026
- Also, given that Trump is going to be on both sides of the coin: heads he wins, tails you lose

Listening to Lisa Nandy on Radio 4 trying to defend the 'digital ID' scheme.

It all sounds a bit half-baked. Strong suspicion that this, along with local govt reorganisation, risks being a distraction that takes up loads of political capital for little benefit, and may not even end up happening

🚨📢 I am hiring a PhD candidate /research assistant in Swiss Politics and/or Comparative Politics (100%)!

🚨📢 Je recrute un·e assistant·e diplômé·e en science politique en politique suisse et comparée!

Please join me @unil.bsky.social, Switzerland!

Thanks for sharing! polisky @sspunil.bsky.social

This is terrific on Charlie Kirk. Maybe I live in a bubble, but I had never heard of him before Wednesday.

After having read up about him since, I'd agree that "I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either"
www.thenation.com/article/poli...

I bought a special issue of the original on DVD last year, which includes loads of outtakes that are equally as funny as the actual film and almost as long. The process of making it must have been hilarious

Do you mean a formal, post-election, coalition, based on Germany's "firewall" against the AfD principle?

It may be that a wave of "anyone but Farage" tactical voting on polling day ends up with an even more unpredictable outcome, but makes a post-election coalition unnecessary

Witnesses Assumed Charlie Kirk Shooter Was Just Ordinary Gunman On School Campus

Oops

BBC News - Great North Run medals show Sunderland instead of Newcastle - BBC News
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is absolutely magnificent

www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

The normalization and rationalization of the often authoritarian, erratic and nonsensical behavior and policies of the Trump administration by most of the business, media, and political elites shows how shallow the support for democracy, let alone liberal democracy, always was in this country.

"Last night I dreamt of some bagels"

Not really a surprise: whilst analyses of this nature inevitably involve a lot of guesstimates, countless studies of local govt reorganisation show that it rarely saves any money and instead leads to citizens feeling less affinity with their local council

www.bbc.com/news/article...

I'm in a German supermarket for the first time in a while, but will always struggle to get my head around the juxtaposition of overt tobacco advertising on the one hand, and cigarettes openly on sale with vivid health warnings on the other

What an incredible series #ENGvsIND. Right up there with the Ashes in 2005, but with an even more unforgettable finale. 3-1 would have been unfair on India, who probably should have won in Leeds and it feels about right that the teams are still even after 25 days

Sad to hear about Ozzy. I was pretty into metal as a teenager, but for some reason only began to appreciate Sabbath's role in defining the genre later. Clearly he had been ill for some time, but it's still a bit of a shock after the farewell gig the other week. RIP

Many thanks to Jonas Schoenefeld and Ulrike Zeigermann for overseeing a special collection of the journal, and organising the preparatory workshop in Würzburg last November. Also grateful to Jale Tosun for arranging a waiver on the author processing charge, which means the paper is *open access* :)

Also, given that many studies of local climate policy are based on desk-based analyses of mitigation and/or adaptation plans (rather than their implementation), it suggests that our knowledge of what is actually happening 'on the ground' may be distorted.

Smaller cities are also more likely to rely on external experts to draft mitigation and adaptation strategies. These issues raise concerns about the ownership of local climate policies, the extent to which they are realistic, and whether municipalities will (be able to) implement them.

The smaller municipalities have begun to catch up with bigger cities in terms of climate planning and carbon neutrality targets. However, smaller cities in particular are incentivised to produce highly ambitious and (potentially) unrealistic plans in order to access funding for climate initiatives.

We compared the high-level climate plans and activities of Germany's 80 largest cities (those with 100,000+ inhabitants) with 114 smaller municipalities (populations of 50,000-100,000). We then carried out interviews with climate managers and local activist groups in ten of these smaller cities.

My latest paper with Antje Otto, Wolfgang Haupt and the late Kristine Kern (RIP) is now out.

"Climate capacity in medium-sized German cities: (how) do smaller municipalities implement mitigation and adaptation policies?" features in npj Climate Action.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Fascinating charts depicting how the growth of clean tech in China may well herald a massive geopolitical shift in power away from the US over the coming decades 👇

www.bbc.com/news/article...

This is good news in principle, though I await the details with some trepidation