A toddler, in the sort of pink for girls very popular with Eastern european families, is being pushed along past the park in her heavy duty pushchair. Her arms are determinedly folded, a fierce frown and pouted lips, like a minature Mussolini en route to his balcony.

A red faced little boy wearing spiderman pyjama’s and crying forcefully is walked back to the bus stop by his Mum, where his half a dozen siblings are standing about – all about the same size with the same bullet headed haircuts – where he promptly belts his brother in the face. The brother starts crying, as well he might. “Spiderman” looks satisfied for a moment, then cries even more fiercely, to maintain a parity of percieved pain.

On the Thameslink train heading for Farringdon a Scottish family with two small children gamefully keep them entertained. The Dad holds the toddler up by the doors and shows him sights out of the window, adverts, anything to keep him interested. The Mum reads a story to the litttle girl, who sometimes looks at the book, sometimes out of the window, following it intermittently. One of the main characters in the book is a dog called “tramp” and, at one point, she pronounces it as “Trump” and laughs.

Since December last year, more than 15,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza; more than half of that since Israel collapsed the ceasefire in March.

About half as many have been killed in Syria since the HTS came to power on December 8th last year. At least 7,670, mainly civilians, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). This includes more than 2,130 “extrajudicial executions” and “identity-based killings.”

Given the sheer continuous ferocity of the IDF assualt on Gaza, the total for Syria is alarming.

SOHR – which relies on a network of sources across Syria – documented “the killing of 7,670 people across Syria from December 8, 2024, to June 6, 2025,” adding that this number comprises “5,784 civilians, including 306 children and 422 women.”

The UK-based war monitor warned that “this grim toll is a result of ongoing violence and violations by local and external parties, alongside widespread security chaos,” and reflects “the fragility of the security situation and the increasing danger to the most vulnerable constituents of society.”

SOHR further pointed to what it said was an “escalation of extrajudicial executions and identity-based killings,” noting that it had documented 2,133 of such killings that were “committed in brutal ways.”

According to SOHR documentation, civilians constituted 75.4 percent of the total fatalities during these six months, while non-civilians accounted for 24.6 percent.

Sections of the Left in the UK welcomed the overthrow of the Assad government in December as a “liberation”. The reports above, and the HTS regime’s current discussions with Israel on possible partition of Lebanon, which appear to be animated by the United States, with with the prospect of Syria occupying the North of the country as far as the Med at Tripoli and occupying the Bekaa valley to act as pressure from the North to help secure Israel’s Northern border; should put that sharply into question in their own minds.

Israel is now indicating, with bombs, that it is far from reliant on such a deal and may simply want to hold hard to the Syrian territory it has occupied since the fall of Assad.

Or perhaps not. Today’s busker in the High Street is a woman playing an accordion. Slightly jazzy, fragments of a recognisable tune, skidded away from and improvised around, so the echoes are hard to identify. I’m half way down George Street before I realise its Zippety Doo Dah.

On the way back I give her a coin and said that her music makes you want to get out some spoons, clack along and dance; and asked if the buskers who are now pretty regular on that spot have to book it. It turns out that, apart from Central London pitches and a few suburbs, busking is unregulated. People just turn up. She said it can be a bit awkward if several come at once. She covers a lot of local centres, likes doing Corringham.

I ask, rather shyly, if she could play Captain Pugwash, which might spread a little happiness, but she says something at the same time and plays something else as I walk off. I’m halfway to the War Memorial before I realised its Thoroughly Modern Milly.

The latest opinion poll by Janus Institute for Strategic Studies and Forecasts and the SOCIS Center for Social and Marketing Research, both Kyiv-based pollsters shows that

• 56 percent of Ukrainians would agree to a compromise peace involving giving up land in exchange for the end of the conflict.
• 16.6 percent would agree to a freeze along the current front lines.
• Only 12.8 percent want Kyiv to fight until it wins back the 1991 borders.

This continues the shift in opinion shown in Gallup polls between 2022 and 2024, which showed that

• the number of people agreeing that Ukraine should seek a negotiated end to the war as soon as possible rose from 22% in 2022 to 27% in 2023 and almost doubled to 52% in 2024.
• the number agreeing that Ukraine should continue fighting until it wins the war fell from 73% in 2022 to 63% in 2023 and sharply down to 38% in 2024.

The attempt by the Ukrainian oligarchy and NATO to keep fighting now only has minority support in the Ukrainian population.

Those who claim to be in solidarity with “Ukraine” should ask themselves, in this context, who they are in soldarity with – the majority of the Ukrianian people, who want a negoitiated peace as soon as possible, or the oligarchy, and NATO, who, in the absence of any serious prospect of winning, want to drag the war on as long as possible for fear of the consequences of accepting defeat?

In 2023 – 24 the UK spent £53.9 billion on “defence”. That was 2.3% of GDP.

Keir Starmer today bent the knee even further to the United States by pledging to more than double that to 5% by 2035. An additional 2.7% of GDP.

That amounts to an additonal £63.3 billion, to make a grand total of £117.2 billion.

Assuming some GDP growth that will be even more in 2035 money.

The obvious question here is, who, and what, is going to pay for this morbid exchange of tissue in our economy if it is not resisted? £63.4 billion every year.

The word “defence” is in inverted commas throughout this blog because, as the “Defence Review” points out “you can’t do defence on the goal line”. In other words, “defence” for the Uk means fighting wars in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya or, with a certain amount of plausible deniability, Ukraine and Gaza.

Trigger warning. This post contains cold beans.

Kapow! Yes we can!

This is a tin of beans that slipped through quality control somehow. Aiming to make some beans on toast, as you do, J noticed that the lid on this can seemed a bit swollen, checked the sell by date to find that it was ok until 2027, and pulled on the ring, much as you would a hand grenade.

The resulting eruption splatted all over her glasses, clothes and across the room. The kitchen units, ceiling, floor and windows had an orange explosion pattern reminiscent of the Chemistry Lab ceiling at Grays Tech- a montage of multicoloured stains accumulated over many years of over enthusiastic experiments – with one particularly far flung splat making it as far as the washing machine four yards away.

And that, as you can see form the picture, was just from the top half a centimetre of beany effervescence; a different kind of bang from the one you normally get from Heinz.

Beans, beans, the musical fruit

The more you eat, the more you toot!

Trad. US version.

There was an item on the World at One on 5th June that talked about the two Israeli hostages whose dead bodies were recovered by an IDF operation in Gaza the previous night.

They were named and some of their story, and that of another hostage from the same Kibbutz were told.

This introduced and framed a following item on the chaotic and lethal Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution sites, in the same way that Israel’s attack on Gaza is invariably framed with October 7th, as an innoculation against the full horror of it; in an illustration of the way that Stalin’s remark that ” a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” is routinely applied by the news media.

Altogether, the item lasted about 3 minutes.

So, one minute for each hostage.

Were the World at One to give the same respect and time to each of the 62, 614 Palestinian dead in Gaza – name them, tell a little of their story, round them out as human beings in the way they do for the Israelis – that would be 62,614 minutes.

Thats 1,043 hours.

Or 43 and a half days.

If they were to clear the airwaves of Radio 4 to run this continuously, 24 hours a day, starting with their broadcast at lunchtime in June 5th, it would take them until July 18th to get to the end of it.