Law

Members of the House of Lords have proposed “totally unnecessary” and “very cruel” amendments to the assisted dying bill in an attempt to scupper it, the MP leading the campaign has said.

Kim Leadbeater said on Friday she believed that peers opposed to the bill were trying to block it by proposing hundreds of changes, including one that would require terminally ill people to be filmed as they undergo an assisted death.

That “wrecking amendment” is even a phrase tells us this.

This even before we get to the nonsense over this particular bill – pass it in the Commons and we’ll sort it out in the Lords etc. Then complain about it being sorted out in the Lords etc.

Three days earlier, on 2 September, he was reported to have given a verbal order for a drone strike against two unidentified men desperately hanging on to the smoking pieces of their shattered boat in the Caribbean after nine members of their crew had already been blasted. “Kill everybody,” was the order, according to the Washington Post on 28 November. It was the first of 21 strikes that the Pentagon states have so far killed 82 people who are said to have been “narco-terrorists”, though their identities are unknown. Hegseth denied knowledge of the second strike.

Can’t say I’m in favour of either the first or the second strike myself. But that’s not the point here.

The question of whether Hegseth had committed a criminal act was immediately raised in response to the Post report in a statement issued on 29 November by the Former Jags Working Group, which “unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both. Our group was established in February 2025 in response to SECDEF’s firing of the army and air force judge advocates general and his systematic dismantling of the military’s legal guardrails. Had those guardrails been in place, we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.”

This international war crimes law is really very clear. If you’re not at war – meaning declared war against a sovereign state – then you cannot commit war crimes.

Murder is obviously possible, piracy is not – piracy is by definition something done by a non-state actor. Genocidal crimes are obviously possible and so on. But war crimes require there to be a war.

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton,

Unbiased source there, right?

Any attempt by the Lords to block a bill backed by the Commons would breach long-established constitutional conventions because it would subvert the authority of the elected chamber.

Nonsense.

The Lords can’t refuse a finance bill nor, in the end, a manifesto committment. A private members bill? Have at it, maties.

Peers’ delay of assisted dying bill ‘could lead to constitutional crisis’
Opponents are playing with fire with 1,100 amendments, critics say, as filibuster tactics to defeat Kim Leadbeater’s law ‘threaten the upper chamber’s future’

They’re lying.

The US supreme court agreed on Friday to decide the legality of Donald Trump’s order to heavily restrict the right to birthright citizenship, the long-held constitutional principle that individuals born on US soil are automatically United States citizens.

The justices will hear the president’s request to uphold his executive order on birthright citizenship, issued just hours after Trump took office for his second term and immediately blocked from taking effect.

The order was a contentious part of the administration’s far-reaching immigration crackdown – and a step that would transform the interpretation of a 19th-century constitutional provision.

There’s an argument over what the constitution actually means. The people who sort out what the constitution means atr the Supreme Court. So, the issue then goes to…..shrug.

“Of course it’s right that I reflect on whether someone who has stolen two iPhones from Currys should be heard by a jury or should be heard by a magistrate or in some other way,” he said. “Because if they’re heard by a jury, that can take two or three days, and that enters the system and will hold up the rape case or the murder case. There are a group of defendants in ‘either-way’ cases who are playing the system, who effectively leave pleading guilty as late as possible.”

The trial is about whether someone has stolen two iPhones…..

Juries are an archaic and inefficient feature of Britain’s collapsing justice system. They survive only in some English-speaking countries as quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence. They deserve dispatch to the world of ducking, flogging, drawing and quartering.

That’s Sir Simon Jenkins. So, now we know what te wrong answer is we can proceed, right?

Nope, really, fuck off:

Jury trials for all except the most serious crimes such as rape, murder and manslaughter are set to be scrapped under radical proposals drawn up by David Lammy.

Do one.

As it happens, from yesterday:

And so it is with many another crime. It’s the jury that protects us from the insanity of our rulers. Because it’s the jury that subjects everything our rulers want to do to us to the “No, we’ll not be having with that” test of a grouping of average and normal people.

Which is why our rulers hate juries because they hate the idea that their impositions can be rejected by the mere people themselves. Thus my headline.

Juries are our ability to tell the politicians to Fuck Off, Twatface. Which is why they’re both so valuable and also so hated. After all, if we weren’t allowed to tell the Twatfaces to Fuck Off we’d have to hang them instead, right?

Unelected Lords are blocking assisted dying – this is a democratic outrage
Simon Jenkins

In the Commons they said don;t worry too much about the details, they’ll be sorted out in the Lords. Now the Lords are sorting out the details and this is an outrage?

Fuck off.

In July 2025, the international court of justice delivered a landmark decision that clarified that all states were bound under international law to tackle the human-made climate crisis, which the judges unanimously concluded posed an “urgent and existential threat” to the planet’s life-sustaining systems and therefore humanity itself.

The ICJ advisory opinion built on rulings from hundreds of climate lawsuits across the world over the past decade or more, and added further legal weight to strong decisions from the inter-American court of human rights in July 2025 and the international tribunal on the law of the sea in May 2024.

They do seem to take them all over, don’t they? At which point we should probably start leaving them….

Turkey issues genocide arrest warrant against Benjamin Netanyahu

Now that the siege is over and people can get in and have a look around those cries of genocide are rather receding. Because it’s blindingly obvious that there isn’t mass starvation nor famine. Which is what the important part about the claims of genocide was.

So, indictement after it’s obvious that the crime claimed was not committed? Amusing, no? Politics hasn’t got the moemo that we’re all now onto new and different claims?

Sex offenders will no longer be entitled to parental responsibility for children conceived through rape, under new measures proposed in parliament.

In a government-backed amendment to the Victims and Courts Bill, due to come before parliament on Monday 27 October, parental responsibility will automatically be restricted where a child is born of rape.

New reforms will also see parental responsibility restricted when a parent is convicted of serious sex offences against any child, not just their own.

“Yeah, but wot if some bird decides to fit up a bloke for a sex offence so’s to stop ‘im seeing ‘is kids?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, no one would do that!”

“Met many ‘umans, ‘ave yer?”

The other thing would be absence of parental responsibility so, well, they don’t have to pay child support either?

He said: “Some of this was just translations and some of it was cut-and-paste. A lot of things were from the British media. It was more like a copyright infringement than an espionage issue.”

Brown said he considered that “stronger evidence” might have been presented during the trial that he might not have seen. The Observer understands the prosecution did disclose all the available material to the defence team, which considered none of it could be reasonably described as prejudicial to the safety or interests of the UK.

Well, yes, I imagine the defence would put it that way. They are, after all, the defence.

A judge has branded a judicial review application into the use of SAS force in an IRA ambush more than three decades ago as “ludicrous” and “utterly divorced from reality”, The Times can reveal.

Rilly?

However, Roisin Nugent, the daughter of one of the IRA men, Tony Doris, challenged that decision, arguing that Soldier B should have paused after every shot to consider whether it was absolutely necessary to fire another one.

Ah, yes, ludicrous.

Majority of family court cases in England and Wales feature domestic abuse, watchdog says

Erm, what else are family courts going to be dealing with ither than dysfunctional families?

Nearly 90% of cases before the family courts in England and Wales show evidence of domestic abuse, a watchdog has disclosed.

Physical, psychological or sexual abuse of a member of the family or household was uncovered in 87% of cases, according to a review ordered by the domestic abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs.

The abuse was frequently not recognised as an “active issue” or taken seriously with regard to the type of contact children would go on to have with the abusive parent, she said. In more than half of the cases reviewed, unsupervised overnight contact was ordered.

‘Mazin’ how the idiots can be even worse than your ingoing prejudices, eh? This is the social workers (or that type) discovering abuse that no one else has noted.

A federal grand jury has indicted Letitia James, the New York attorney general, for bank fraud, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Lindsey Halligan, the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, personally presented the case to the grand jury on Thursday, the person said. US attorneys do not typically present to a grand jury.

“This is nothing more than a continuation of the president’s desperate weaponization of our justice system. He is forcing federal law enforcement agencies to do his bidding, all because I did my job as the New York state attorney general,” James said in a recorded video statement on Thursday.

“These charges are baseless, and the president’s own public statements make clear that his only goal is political retribution at any cost. The president’s actions are a grave violation of our constitutional order and have drawn sharp criticism from members of both parties.”

Her charges against him were clearly politically motivated. But, as sometimes happens, they enraged the bear not killed it. So there’s that.

There’s also the interesting question of whether Ms. James actually is guilty of bank fraud of course.

The justice secretary, David Lammy, has ruled out reintroducing charges for employment tribunals after a backlash from unions over the proposals.

The Guardian revealed last week that ministers were considering a plan to charge workers a fee to take their bosses to court as part of negotiations in this year’s spending review. Trade unions responded with fury, labelling the idea a “disaster”.

The employer has to bear all the costs of every attempt. Employees none of any. There are going to be more claims than might really be justified, aren’t there?

Donald Trump has not had the opportunity to pack the US supreme court to nearly the same degree. Nor has he, despite his brash, bullying ways, done much to pressure or browbeat the court’s nine justices. Nevertheless, the court’s conservative supermajority has ruled time after time in favor of Trump since he returned to office. The six conservative justices have fallen into line much like Hungary’s and Turkey’s judges, even though the supreme court’s justices have life tenure to insulate them from political pressures.

Possibly because what Trump’s doing – or at least those issues whoch have reached the SC – is constitutional and legal?

I blame Tony Blair:

Labour sabotaged the trial of two alleged Chinese spies by refusing to describe the country as the “enemy”, it has been claimed.

Chris Cash, 30, and Christopher Berry, 33, had been accused of handing foreign policy reports to the Chinese government when charges against them were dropped last month in what the prime minister’s spokesman described as an “extremely disappointing” turn of events.

Prosecutors said that the “evidential standard” for the offence — namely the collecting and passing of information that would be “directly or indirectly useful to an enemy” — was “no longer met”.

It has now emerged, however, that ministers withdrew a key witness who had been tasked with testifying that China was an “enemy” of the UK, according to The Telegraph.

For it was ‘ee that downgraded the punishment for Hig Treason from the hempen dance.

Not that that’s wholly relevant given that the trouble here is withholding evidence, not the punishment, but fun just to mention it again.

Before sentencing Combs on Friday, Subramanian also delivered remarks in court and said that Combs “abused the power and control with women you professed to love”.

“You abused them physically, emotionally and psychologically,” he said.

Subramanian said that “a substantial sentence must be given” to “send a message to abusers and victims alike that abuse against women is met with real accountability”.

But of course Combs was found not guilty of everything except Mann Act violations – transporting someone interstate for the purposes of paid sex or whatever it is. The judge is then sentencing him for all the stuff he was found not guilty of. Or even hadn’t been charged with and possibly weren’t even illegal.

That seems, umm, odd shall we say?

Nope, never:

A friend of a British couple who died at a Swiss clinic for assisted dying has raised concerns that the wife was coerced by her husband into ending her life.

Ruth Posner, 96, and her husband, Michael, 97, sent an email to friends on Tuesday announcing that by the time the message was read they would both be dead.

Julia Pascal, 75, a close friend of the couple, said that although they both openly discussed planning to take their own lives for two years, she felt that Mrs Posner, an actress, was emotionally controlled by her husband.

How could anyone even dream there could be any coercion?