Working Together For A Safer London?

That's the motto of the Metropolitan Police. How exactly do they go about it? Well...

A Sudanese lorry migrant who stabbed a stranger to death while on police bail over a rampage just 48 hours earlier was jailed for 27 years. Rasheed Rahman, 21, murdered grandfather Mark Carroll, 55, on April 10, 2024 in a park in Camden, north London. Just two days earlier Rahman went berserk on a canal tow-path, punching and kicking members of the public but was bailed by the police.

 🤦‍♀️

In February two months before those two attacks, he broke Iulian Cavaliuc's arm with a wooden club and knifed him in the back on a double decker bus in east London. Mr Cavaliuc reported the attack to police later that day but Rahman remained at large while police officers tried to obtain CCTV footage and find him.

Did they try very hard? 

Despite Rahman's violence, staff at the supported accommodation unit where he lived in Chadwell Heath, east London, handed him a blade a day before the murder. It was this 5in knife he plunged into Mr Carroll in a frenzied outburst.

Not quite as bad as it sounds, he told them he wanted it to cook with. 

Judge John Dodd, KC, at Wood Green Crown Court jailed Rahman for life with a minimum of 27 years, and told him he would be deported.

Why not deport him now, to serve his sentence in Sudan? 

Rahman made a successful asylum application in March 2023 and was granted temporary leave to remain in the UK.

And of course, he was supplied with a lawyer free of charge to plead for clemency. 

John Femi-Ola KC, defending, said Rahman was born in Sudan and saw his sister murdered when the Islamic militant group Boko Haram invaded his village.

Shame. That they didn’t get him as well. 

Mr Femi-Ola said he fled to Chad and then Libya and then came to the UK in the back of a lorry. He was found to be living undocumented in Essex in 2021 and was granted temporary leave to remain.

Of course he was… 

There's Too Many Of Them Here, And They Don't Belong!

But does that mean we should allow members of the public to take the law into their own hands. No, of course not, but it will happen anyway, if the government fails to act. 

I am of course not talking about illegal immigrants - they are well protected - but about invasive parakeets. Apparently, the London catapult yobs find them an easy target, and at least this spares our native wildlife.

A wildlife charity said 43 ring-necked parakeets were found in Priory Gardens in Orpington, south-east London, in just three weeks.

Dead, from likely catapult wielding youths. Well, saves them using native species for targets, I guess...  

The charity is now calling for tighter controls on the sale of catapults to under-18s and for wildlife crime to be given greater priority by police.

Of course they are. 

Gareth Bacon, the Conservative MP for Orpington, has previously called for catapult sales to be licensed.

Od course he has. 

In One Bold Stroke, Two-Tier Policing And The Labour Government's Ineptitude...

This guy at today’s Portsmouth anti migrant demo followed advice on here and dressed up in a Burqa🤣
He was then let off by the police!
Hilarious, if blatant 2 Tier policing though.🤨 pic.twitter.com/BxWBP4h2lU

— Dave (@DaveKent101) September 12, 2026

H/T: Dave at Twitter

Update: 

Shortly after cuing this post up, someone with two brain cells to run together realised how it would look and he was arrested. It'll be interesting to see if he's charged, I can't see the nototiously work-shy CPS wanting to take a punt at it.

Oh, Can You Imagine The Tantrum...

...if #Charles were to take Matt's advice? 

Sunday Funnies...

 Of course, we haven't had the real ending to No 11, and I don't think we'll ever get it at this rate....

Hysterics And Technophobes!

There is now a growing realisation that Britain's second-hand bookshops are being pillaged - not by voracious collectors of prized first editions but by Silicon Valley tech firms for a far more insidious purpose.

What are they doing? Buying things. And treating those things as if they owned them, the bastards! 

Today, the Daily Mail explains how millions of second-hand books are being bought in bulk and sent to warehouses across America, where the pages are sliced from the spine before being fed into industrial scanners, harvested for their text, and later destroyed. This process, known as 'destructive scanning', is the latest method of gathering the vast reams of data being used by Big Tech to train its AI chatbots.

I wonder what Longrider's take on this is... 

'It's a moral dilemma,' says Lucy. 'They're my books, my babies. I feel like we've been eaten by the AI monster. It's difficult. 

Then why are you offering them for sale? 

'I want the sale, but not to somebody who will b****r up everybody's books.'

Well, you gave up the right to demand what should happen to them when you sold them! 

Aside from the obvious concerns over copyright - of which more later - there are fears tech firms could be destroying rare books - even the last remaining editions of some historical tomes. As Lucy herself admitted, some of the books purchased from her store are 'collectable and valuable'. 

It would be perfectly ok if a person bought them, read them once (or not at all) and then put them on a shelf never to be taken down again, I suppose? 

'Bulk-buying books just to rip them apart to scan is shocking, but it's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the brazen theft of copyright materials by the tech giants,' says Dan Conway, CEO of the Publishers Association.

The books are paid for - thrice, once by the original purchaser, and a second time as second-hand books, so it’s hard to see how authors are being hard done by here. 

Most book-lovers would find the practice of destroying huge numbers of physical volumes stomach-churning. Scenes of grinning young Nazis burning towering pyres of 'un-German' books in university cities across the Third Reich in 1933 are seared in the public memory: a 'cultural genocide' that continues to horrify us.

The books aren’t being destroyed entirely, though! Their content still exists, just in digital format. 

Of course, the AI companies would argue they are doing something different: rather than destroying books to censor the material they contain, as the Nazis did, they are destroying them in order to disseminate their contents more widely.

They would be right to argue that, because they demonstrably are. 

Let's Check In On How David Paulden's Green Party Is Doing...

A Birmingham Green Party city councillor has been charged with attacking a member of the public, three police officers and a member of police staff.

Oh. Oh dear. 

Siobhan Harper-Nunes, 66, was arrested on suspicion of assault after police were called to the junction of Monument Road and Hagley Road in the city, at about 17:00 BST on 6 August. Harper-Nunes, of Monument Road, was charged the following day. West Midlands Police said that she was arrested again at Monument Road on Wednesday morning on suspicion of harassment. She remained in custody while inquiries continued, police said. Harper-Nunes will appear at Birmingham Magistrates' Court on 10 September on the assault charges, the force said.

Sounds like a domestic, where she redirected on the cops who turned up.

The Birmingham Green Party has been approached for comment.

What can they really say? 

25 Years Ago...

 ....yes, I checked, it really is.

The US faces growing challenges in countering international terrorism as resources are diverted to other threats, experienced security officials leave and “complacency” spreads, experts have warned. 

It is 25 years this week since the 9/11 attacks launched by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida on New York and Washington, which killed about 3,000 people and led to decades of conflict, radicalisation and instability across the Middle East and beyond. 

Though there have been no successful attacks on anything like a similar scale in the US since, and only a small number inspired by extremist Islamist ideologies, many are warning of growing risks.

As they were in the years and months before 9/11, as it turned out but learning lessons isn’t humanity’s strong point, it seems.

I, Too, Think We Should Ban Nuts On Planes...

...but not peanuts, people like you:

What are you most scared of? Perhaps snakes send a chill down your spine. Or heights leave your knees weak.

Heights, yes, I don't like them. But I don't let that fear rule my life. 

Peanuts may sound like an odd source of phobia, but they have taken on an absurd bogeyman quality for me since my daughter was taken to hospital by ambulance after eating peanut butter when she was six months old. Just the sight of a bowl on a pub bar, or their shells discarded on the pavement, can raise my heart rate – even when I’m not with her.

Nowhere is the sight of peanuts more confronting than at 30,000ft, especially now when millions are jetting back from their holidays. Travelling with a severely allergic child can be a nightmare for all sorts of reasons, but the idea you could be sat next to a passenger consuming the very thing that has hospitalised them is its own kind of hell.

As Tim pointed out, this is a you problem. Not an us problem. 

Most airlines will make an announcement asking passengers to avoid consuming nuts if you let them know that somebody in your party has a severe nut allergy. But I brace for impact when these announcements are piped out. On almost every flight there is at least one passenger who sighs or makes some inane comment, loud enough for everyone to hear, about how annoying it is.

When confronted with someone else's neurosis and entitlement, I'd be surprised if no one did that. 

I didn’t realise the right to eat nuts was a civil liberties issue. How utterly absurd.

Then you're as dumb as a brick. 

I am mystified by this mean-spiritedness. Allergies are not a lifestyle choice but a medical condition.

 It's a very good question, isn't it? 

Take a look at some of the comments under Chloë’s post and you’ll see what I mean. They are staggering in their stupidity. “Fly private or DON’T FLY AT ALL. Don’t make other people’s lives miserable just to please yours!” one reads.

Allergic people can’t be wrapped in cotton wool.

Good, we agree on that!  

Banning nuts on planes seems like a no-brainer.

To a person with no brain, yes. What are airline supposed to do, frisk people for them? 

Banning nuts on planes could send an important message to the broader public. That people with allergies should be able to travel without fear. That compassionate societies make accommodations.

We've made far to many accommodations to modern life and the inability of people to realise it doesn't revolve around them or raather, we've been made to!

.Another Day, Another Senseless Death...

Star Lane in Canning Town was shut in both directions between Manor Road and Durham Road at around 5am on Wednesday, September 9, with forensic teams seen working at the scene. A shopkeeper claimed the incident involved an elderly man who died after being bitten on the hand by a dog.

And yet, unlike the incident in Yorkshire, which quickly generated police appeals to the public and has resulted in a man being charges in short order, there's been little in the news - the 'Mail' has found a juicier story to worry like a bone from across the pond. 

He said: "A customer had a large dog which went for the man’s small dog.

It will be interesting to find out the breed, when - or if - he's evetually caught. 

Another shopkeeper said the man had been walking his small dog home from the park when the incident occurred.

A lot of shopkeepers in this area - did no-one have a suggrstion as to who the mystery man might bre, perhaps a regular customer?  Even Facebook has no commentd on th teo stories they have up. 

Hsve we become so used to the threat it's no longer newsworthy?