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Thanks, Lisa and bunny Maisie! Lisa writes, “Maisie was having a really funny ‘hare’ day! Her bangs and floof never stop entertaining. Mochi seems a little less amused.”
britcountryside_feedstaubyns posted a photo:
The Anglican parish church is dedicated to Saint Mary and was built in the 12th century. Older records give the church as dedicated to Saint Michael, but this is clearly incorrect. The church was restored in 1667. The church was re-roofed, re-pewed and thoroughly repaired but poorly restored in 1831.
Castle Hill is possibly a mid 12th century earthwork motte and bailey fortress, founded by Thomas de Cuckney. It is thought that the castle was never completed or slighted after the Anarchy, in the reign of King Stephen. The low motte, is partly enclosed by a wide ditch and the bailey now supports St Mary's church, which has destroyed any internal features. 5 miles south-east at Clipstone is King John's Palace and 6 miles west is Bolsover Castle.
free_beacon_feedA Minneapolis Marxist looking to become the Zohran Mamdani of the North Star State is offering an even more extreme program of woke goodies on a platform that would enact race-based housing policy, prevent evictions from rental properties, and codify public financing for the state’s annual "Trans Equity Summit."
Omar Fateh, born in Washington, D.C., to Somali immigrant parents, grew up in Falls Church, Virginia. He ran an unsuccessful 2015 campaign for school board in Fairfax County, moving to Minneapolis shortly after his electoral loss. He then worked in a variety of municipal government jobs and has served in the Minnesota state senate since 2021.
Fateh announced his candidacy for mayor in November 2024 and stunned the state’s political class last week by winning the endorsement of the Minneapolis Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL) over incumbent mayor Jacob Frey.
Frey—an avowed progressive with maximalist stances on Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 restrictions enforcement—nonetheless took heat from the far left of his party for a number of moderate stances, including coming out against rent control, vetoing a bill that would have set minimum wage standards for Uber and Lyft drivers, and dismantling a homeless encampment that spent almost a year erected in Minneapolis's Phillips neighborhood.
Fateh is broadly supportive of a slew of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, many of which he proudly touts on his campaign website. He's vowed to "ensure that events like the Trans Equity Summit are fully funded and prioritized" and attacked Frey for underfunding and mismanaging the event, "resulting in the cancellation of the 2024 summit."
"Space will be protected for community care and collective witnessing for trans and gender non-conforming neighbors," read a promotional email for the Aug. 11 event from Augsburg University, which also promised participants "a job and resource fair and healing justice offerings."
The state allocated at least $15,000 for the event in 2023, records show.
Fateh’s record on trans issues as a state senator includes having sponsored a bill that would prevent Minnesota from cooperating with out-of-state judgments surrounding "gender-affirming care."
Like Mamdani, Fateh has committed himself to building more public housing and frustrating efforts for more market-based approaches. On his website, he promised to implement the sunny-sounding "Minneapolis 2040 Plan."
The plan includes enshrining explicitly race-based housing considerations in an effort to steer more minority groups into full-time housing by, among other tactics, "prioritiz[ing] outreach to local developers and businesses owned by people of color, indigenous people, and women, in the administration and development of City-funded housing projects."
"The funding of street reconstruction and maintenance prioritizes equity considerations in transportation," the plan adds.
Fateh has vowed to fix homelessness by "prevent[ing] rental evictions" and proposed on his campaign website to ship Minneapolis’s homeless to "other jurisdictions" to find housing elsewhere.
Fateh has a long history of opposing law enforcement, and has vowed to reduce the footprint of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), replacing "armed officers" with members of a "Behavioral Crisis Response program."
On a since-deleted website, Fateh celebrated the Minneapolis City Council’s decision to defund the police and praised an amendment to the city charter that would have replaced the MPD with a "Department of Public Safety." As a state senator, he has sponsored bills that would end qualified immunity for cops and repeal a law making it a crime to falsely report police misconduct.
Minneapolis did ultimately end up steering millions of dollars away from their police department after the death of George Floyd, leading law enforcement officers to leave the force in droves, ushering in a surge of crime.
Other policies in Fateh’s platform include moratoriums on new charter schools, fresh new taxes on "the rich," and carbon taxes. He has also vowed to institute a $20 an hour minimum wage and make public transportation free.
Fateh’s track record as a state legislator shows a lawmaker preoccupied with race. He sponsored a bill in February 2022 to create a commission studying reparations for black Minnesotans and apologize for slavery—even though Minnesota was never a slave state. The bill would also have steered $2 million in public funds to "study the effects of systemic racism on Black Minnesotans who are descendants of persons who were treated as chattel slaves in this state."
He backed legislation in January 2021 to mandate that high school students in Minnesota be subjected to an "ethnic studies" requirement.
"Every public school in Minnesota must offer as part of the social studies curriculum one or more ethnic studies courses that include the following topics: (1) Latinx Studies; (2) African American Studies; (3) Asian American Studies; (4) Indigenous/First Nations Studies; or (5) Ethnic Studies 101," the bill read. It is now state law.
Like Mamdani and democratic socialists more broadly, Fateh has staked out sharply critical positions on Israel. Just 10 days after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks against Israel, Fateh called for a ceasefire, blasted the Jewish state for defending itself, and parroted the lie that Israel struck al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City—an explosion actually caused by a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket.
"Since the Hamas attacks, Israel has cut off water, power, fuel, food, and medicine to over two million people," he wrote. "And today, we heard the shocking and horrifying news that hundreds of Palestinians seeking medical treatment were killed in a single air strike on the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza. Both of these actions constitute collective punishment and are flagrant violations of international law."
Fateh, a Muslim, also claimed that "we have seen a mass mobilization of efforts to demonize and defame anyone who dares speak out against the atrocities we see committed on a daily basis by our ally, Israel," and warned that outrage over Hamas’s massacres was similar to rhetoric "that has been a precursor to every documented act of genocide in modern history."
He later falsely accused Israel of committing a genocide and signed a letter accusing a state senator who noted that children in Gaza are taught to martyr themselves of Islamophobia.
Fateh’s other pieces of legislation include bills to ban bottled water, prohibit pet stores from selling dogs and cats, end standardized testing requirements for admission to public universities in Minnesota, and normalize relations with Cuba.
The socialist’s DFL endorsement did not come without controversy. Frey campaign officials alleged that the online voting system broke down, and many supporters of the incumbent mayor left the convention. The remaining delegates endorsed Fateh by a show of hands at around 9:30 p.m., and the campaigns of both Frey and challenger Jazz Hampton indicated they do not believe all votes were counted.
While Fateh has the DFL’s official endorsement, Minneapolis uses a ranked-choice voting system in its municipal elections. Fateh, Frey, and three other candidates will appear on the ballot in November as DFL members, with an independent, a Republican, and a member of the Socialist Workers Party running in the election as well.
The post Mamdani of Minneapolis: DFL-Backed Omar Fateh, a Northern Virginia Native, Seeks Left-Wing Takedown of City’s Already Progressive Mayor appeared first on .
free_beacon_feedHomicides and other types of violent crime are dropping precipitously in the crime-ridden city of Baltimore. It started shortly after voters fired their progressive Soros-backed prosecutor in 2022—and experts say that's no coincidence.
Baltimore's homicide rate soared after state's attorney Marilyn Mosby took office in 2015 on a progressive platform of refusing to prosecute low-level crimes while aggressively charging police officers including those involved in the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who died from injuries sustained while in custody. Those officers were ultimately acquitted, but Mosby's policies still had a chilling effect on the Baltimore Police Department. Arrests plummeted under Mosby's watch as homicides jumped from an average of 229 per year before she took office to 333 per year during her eight years as state's attorney, according to figures compiled by the Heritage Foundation.
By July 2022, Baltimore voters had enough. Mosby lost her primary election to her Democratic challenger, Ivan Bates, who pledged to reverse her progressive non-prosecution policies and put in place harsher penalties for repeat violent offenses and illegal gun possession.
By all appearances, it worked.
In 2022, Mosby's last year in office, Baltimore saw 334 homicides across the city. The next year, under Bates's watch, that number dropped to 262. In 2024, it dropped further to 202 homicides. And during the first half of 2025, Baltimore saw just 68 homicides, a 62 percent drop from the same timeframe in 2022. Auto thefts are also down 34 percent, robberies are down 22 percent, and arson is down 10 percent in Baltimore so far in 2025 compared to the same timeframe last year.
"The numbers don't lie," Maryland Public Policy Institute fellow Sean Kennedy told the Washington Free Beacon. "Ivan Bates's model of targeting the most violent or violence-prone offenders (gun carrying criminals) is the primary driver of Baltimore's miraculous success."
"Homicides only started dropping when Bates came in and signaled that carrying guns meant prison," Kennedy said.
Mosby was often missing in action as violent crime ran rampant in Baltimore on her watch from 2015 through early 2023. She lounged at five-star hotels in Germany and Portugal as part of the 23 out-of-town trips she took in 2018 and 2019, several of which were sponsored by nonprofit organizations including Fair and Just Prosecution, a dark money group funded by billionaire financier George Soros's Open Society Foundations that trains and supports progressive prosecutors. And in January 2022, a federal grand jury indicted Mosby on charges of mortgage fraud and perjury related to her two vacation homes in Florida. She was convicted on those charges in 2024 but an appeals court overturned her mortgage fraud conviction earlier this month.
To Rafael Mangual, the head of the Manhattan Institute's Policing and Public Safety Initiative, Baltimore's turnaround under Bates's watch epitomizes a simple truth in law enforcement that Mosby and her fellow Soros-backed liberal prosecutors elected during the late 2010s and early 2020s lost sight of.
"There really isn't any place that’s ever been able to gain control over a crime problem without the police, the prosecutors, and the jails and prisons playing a role," Mangual told the Free Beacon. "That's it."
Nearly two dozen Soros-backed prosecutors across the country have been voted out of office since 2022 alongside Mosby, including Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón and Chicago district attorney Kimberly Fox. Major cities across the country have instituted re-policing policies since 2022, which has contributed to a "statistically significant correlation" with reduced violent crime, according to a May 2025 study by the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund.
But some liberal Maryland officials have attributed Baltimore's turnaround to other factors. That includes Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott (D.) who said his Group Violence Reduction Strategy (GVRS) initiative and other investments in non-police community organizations have been a primary driver in the reduction in violent crime.
Both Kennedy and Mangual said those sorts of progressive non-police interventions have, at best, a marginal impact on reducing crime.
"The mayor can bang on a drum all day about GVRS but the only thing that made his strategy a success was clanging jail house doors—prosecutors matter," Kennedy said. "GVRS is sprinkles on a cake—pretty but empty calories."
Mangual concurred. "People like Brandon Scott have trouble with getting around the reality that significantly reducing crime is always, has always, and will always require good policing and the ability to incapacitate offenders by putting them behind bars," he said.
The post Violent Crime Began Plummeting in Baltimore Just After Voters Fired Their Soros-Backed Prosecutor. Experts Say That's No Coincidence. appeared first on .
free_beacon_feedA freelance reporter who plays a leading role in the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Hezbollah has repeatedly praised the terrorist group while condemning "the Israeli enemy," a Washington Free Beacon analysis has found.
Adam Chamseddine, a Beirut-based reporter, has written or contributed to more than three dozen reports as a freelance contributor for the Journal since last year, including providing coverage of the funeral of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Chamseddine was also the lead reporter for a story on Israel’s use of pagers to assassinate Hezbollah commanders. And he was one of the reporters for a Journal story last week that Iran is rearming its "militia allies," like Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthis.
While writing for the Journal, Chamseddine, a former reporter for the pro-Hezbollah newspaper As-Safir, has expressed stark anti-Israel views while hailing groups like Hezbollah and Hamas.
He has referred to "the Israeli enemy" in multiple social media posts, according to English translations of his missives, written in Arabic. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Chamseddine asserted that "female journalists are dismembered by direct Israeli targeting" and criticized what he said was "Israeli criminality" in response to the Hamas attack, while making no similar condemnation of the terrorist group. He touted an interview "for those who want to understand the Hamas movement" with Tarek Hamoud, the head of the Palestinian Return Centre, which has reportedly been linked to Hamas.
Chamseddine’s anti-Israel views could raise questions about his work for the Journal. The paper, owned by conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has faced scrutiny over the anti-Israel sympathies of other reporters covering the region.
Abeer Ayyoub, a Gaza-based freelancer for the Journal, lamented the "Jewish mafia" on social media and posted Hamas propaganda videos after Oct. 7, the Free Beacon reported. The watchdog group HonestReporting, which uncovered Ayyoub’s posts, has criticized the Journal’s coverage of Israel and noted that the paper uses the term "militant group" to refer to Hezbollah, downplaying its terrorist activities.
Chamseddine, whose reports refer to Hezbollah as a "Lebanese militant group," has offered sympathies to the terrorist group’s leaders. In July 2019, he commemorated the anniversary of the death of Hezbollah commander Khaled Bazzi, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike after he orchestrated the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers on Israeli soil. Chamseddine expressed "greetings" to Bazzi on the "anniversary of his martyrdom," adding: "May God be pleased with you as much as your eyes blink."
After Nasrallah’s funeral, which Chamseddine covered for the Journal in a story entitled "Hezbollah Uses Nasrallah Funeral to Show It Is Still Alive," Chamseddine wrote on social media that the turnout at Nasrallah’s funeral "terrifies Israel" and that Nasrallah had "proved that the impossible has become possible."
Sentiments like Chamseddine’s have increasingly infiltrated American mainstream media outlets post-Oct.7. CBS News producer Marwan al-Ghoul spoke at an event for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group. And CNN freelancer Abdel Qader Sabbah once served in a Hamas-affiliated group and took photos with one of the group’s leaders.
Chamseddine has used his several other media gigs to promote anti-Israel and pro-Hezbollah views. He hosts a news talk show on Al-Jadeed, an independent Lebanese television network, and is senior policy adviser at Badil: The Alternative Policy Institute, a Lebanese think tank that often demonizes Israel and defends Hezbollah.
Chamseddine interviewed his Badil colleague Giselle Jetti last year about a report she produced at the think tank entitled "Lebanon’s War Crimes Case Against Israel."
Jetti’s report cited Chamseddine’s Journal article that asserted Israeli strikes killed 44 civilians in addition to a Hezbollah fighter. In the interview, Chamseddine asked Jaffi to describe how Lebanon "can take legal action against the Israeli enemy," according to a translation of his remarks.
Jetti published a report for Badil in May that called to "safeguard the essential services Hezbollah currently provides" in Lebanon. She wrote that American lawmakers’ critiques of Hezbollah "implicitly dehumanize millions of Lebanese citizens who continue to support, or at least sympathize with, the party and its armed resistance."
Chamseddine has interviewed numerous other Hezbollah apologists at Al Jadeed, including Mikhael Awad, a Lebanese analyst who has called for Lebanon to declare war on Israel, which he called a "cancerous growth."
The Journal did not respond to a request for comment about its relationship with Chamseddine. Chamseddine did not respond to a comment request.
The post WSJ’s Hezbollah Coverage Led by Reporter Who Praises Terrorist Group’s Leaders and Fumes Against ‘The Israeli Enemy’ appeared first on .
britcountryside_feedBen Revell posted a photo:
Order: Boraginales
Family: Boraginaceae
Genus: Echium
Species: E. vulgare
Common Name: Vipers Bugloss
britcountryside_feedBen Revell posted a photo:
Order: Asterales
Family: Asteraceae
Genus: Arctium
Species: A. lappa
Common Name: Burdock
britcountryside_feedBen Revell posted a photo:
Before the introduction of hops in the beer-making process, Mugwort was commonly used in England as the flavouring agent. Dried mugwort flowers were added to malt liquor, and this was added to the beer.
Order: Asterales
Family: Asteraceae
Genus: Artemisia
Species: A. vulgaris
Common Name: Mugwort
dailybunny_feed - Bunny's Entered Her Emo Phasebritcountryside_feed - Cuckney Villagefree_beacon_feed - Mamdani of Minneapolis: DFL-Backed Omar Fateh, a Northern Virginia Native, Seeks Left-Wing Takedownfree_beacon_feed - Violent Crime Began Plummeting in Baltimore Just After Voters Fired Their Soros-Backed Prosecutor. Efree_beacon_feed - WSJ’s Hezbollah Coverage Led by Reporter Who Praises Terrorist Group’s Leaders and Fumes Against ‘Thbritcountryside_feed - Stone Circlebritcountryside_feed - Small Copper Butterflybritcountryside_feed - Echium vulgare - Vipers Bugloss #008britcountryside_feed - Arctium lappa - Burdock #002britcountryside_feed - Artemisia vulgaris - Mugwort #004
