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You need to listen to it all to get it.

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I'm not ready.

"you have no idea how crazy you make me"

I've never felt so empty.

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The Spectator:

The Supreme Court has today rejected the Government’s appeal from the High Court judgment by a majority of eight justices to three.  The decision means that a new Act of Parliament will now be required before the Government may lawfully trigger Article 50.  However, the Court has also unanimously dismissed the devolution challenges, which argued that the consent of the devolved legislatures in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland was a constitutional precondition to Brexit.

The judgment is obviously important, but perhaps less important than once assumed.  The litigation was launched immediately after the referendum.  While it was framed as an attempt to vindicate parliamentary sovereignty, the point of the litigation has always seemed to be to frustrate implementation of the referendum result, by delaying the process and giving MPs and Lords a chance to obstruct it.

The political subtext of the litigation was not a reason for the courts to turn the claim away.  The litigation raised an arguable point of law, but a point of law that most constitutional lawyers initially thought was ambitious at best or hopeless at worst.  It was a surprise when the claim succeeded in the High Court.  That judgment has since been subjected to robust legal and scholarly criticism, as well as giving rise to unwarranted personal attacks on the judges.

The Supreme Court should have allowed the Government’s appeal.  The High Court mishandled the relevant law, partly because the Government did not argue its case as well as it could have.  But the Supreme Court has much less excuse for going wrong.  It had the time and opportunity to consider the flaws in the High Court’s reasoning and the advantage of much better legal argument from the Government. 

The central question in the appeal was how to understand the European Communities Act 1972.  Like the High Court, the majority in the Supreme Court misinterpreted the 1972 Act, concluding that Parliament in 1972 did not envisage UK membership of the EU (then the EEC) being set aside by the executive alone, without specific parliamentary authorisation.

An important premise for this reading of the Act was the majority’s view that the Act made European law in some way a direct source of law in the UK, the bringing to an end of which would be a major constitutional change requiring express legislative authorisation.

Here the dissent is more persuasive.  Lord Reed, with whom Lord Carnwath and Lord Hughes agreed (although each wrote a short judgement of their own), pointed out that EU law has effect only on the terms provided for in the 1972 Act, as the Supreme Court has made clear several times before and as the European Union Act 2011 also reiterates.

The majority conceded that the content of EU law in force in the UK changes from time to time, without any need for a new Act of Parliament.  That is, the prerogative is often lawfully used, in engaging with the EU institutions, to vary the content of resulting legal rights in the UK.  Variation in this way was in accord with the terms of the 1972 Act, which refer to obligations under the Treaties as they stand “from time to time”.  However, the majority insisted that withdrawal from the Treaties was different in kind and that the Act impliedly forbade this further step.

Lord Reed again shows how unreal this is.  In a painstaking analysis of the context of the 1972 Act and the way in which the UK came to be a member of the EEC – by way of the exercise of the prerogative to enter into the Treaties – he makes clear that Parliament did not at all intend to limit the Crown’s continuing powers in relation to foreign affairs.  Rather, it took them for granted.  The majority draws an implication from the Act, Lord Reed concludes, without foundation.

No one in the litigation questions parliamentary sovereignty and indeed one silver lining of the majority’s decision is its clear affirmation of this fundamental principle.  The dissenting judges, agreeing with the Government and with many eminent constitutional lawyers, conclude that the use of the prerogative in no way contradicts or displaces any statute.  But there are real constitutional disagreements in play between majority and minority.

The majority judgment makes a nod towards the importance of the prerogative in general but is dismissive of the significance of parliamentary accountability in particular.  It is true that the Government’s accountability to Parliament is never a reason to expand prerogative power.  But it may be highly relevant to understanding the propriety of a long-standing power, and hence a reason to be slow to conclude, in reading the 1972 legislation, that it has been set aside.

Lord Reed strongly implies, near the end of his judgment, that the majority has overlooked the constitutional importance of ministerial accountability to Parliament, that it has legalised a political issue, which is neither constitutionally appropriate nor wise.  Likewise, Lord Carnwath notes that affirming parliamentary sovereignty is not a reason to overlook parliamentary accountability. 

This legal claim should never have succeeded.  The majority judgment makes some important mistakes in its handling of the relevant constitutional principles and the legal materials.  It is unlikely to delay or obstruct Brexit if, as seems likely, the Commons and Lords support new legislation. The wider significance of the judgment – its potential to encourage other legal challenges to the use of the prerogative – remains to be seen.

But it is the Court’s unanimous dismissal of the devolution challenges that is more immediately significant for it avoids giving legal blessing to the arguments of the devolved administrations.  Those arguments can still be made in the political arena but, as the majority rightly says, judges are neither the parents nor the guardians of constitutional convention.

Richard Ekins is Head of Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, and Tutorial Fellow in Law at St John’s College, University of Oxford.

Reuters:

British finance minister Philip Hammond warned the European Union on Thursday that Britain would find other ways to remain competitive after Brexit if it did not strike a comprehensive trading deal with the bloc.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he stuck closely to the government's message that it wants to explore ways with the EU to ensure that decades of close ties are not broken - saying with goodwill, anything was possible.

But Hammond, who is keen to show Davos that Britain is "open for business", said while the government did not want to leave the economic mainstream and trigger a race to the bottom on tax, the decision was "not entirely in our gift".

"We have to remain competitive. The best way to do that is to have a comprehensive trading relationship with the European Union, our closest neighbours," the finance minister, known as the Chancellor, told Reuters.

"But if we can't achieve that then we will have to find other ways to maintain our competitiveness, because our first obligation of government is to make sure that our people are able to maintain their standard of living."

Hammond later said that this was not a threat, but German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Britain should not try to gain competitive advantage by cutting corporate tax rates after the G20 leading economies agreed not to do so in 2015.

Recalling a pledge by Prime Minister Theresa May to make Britain a global player post-Brexit, Schaeuble said: "A truly global economy has to stick to what's been agreed globally."

FAR APART

Britain and the EU have stuck fast to their opening gambits as May prepares to trigger some of the most complicated talks since World War Two by the end of March.

The prime minister said in a speech this week that Britain would quit the EU single market when it leaves the European Union.

She threatened to withdraw the bloc without any agreement with Brussels in place, unless she failed to win a good deal, in what aides say was a speech aimed at a domestic audience.

British officials however now hope to reassure businesses in Davos that there will be prospect of falling off a "cliff edge" into uncertain trading conditions.

On Wednesday, two of the world's biggest banks, UBS and HSBC, said they could each move about 1,000 jobs out of London to prepare for Brexit disruption.

In her speech on Tuesday, May did offer some comfort to those who want to see Britain retain close ties with the EU, saying that she is aiming to secure an agreement that "may take in elements of current single market arrangements in certain areas" and to have a customs agreement with the EU.

'WELCOMING SOCIETY'

Asked how such an arrangement could work, Hammond said Britain wanted to explore options to find ways in which businesses - including the financial industry, which fears losing the right to sell their services in the bloc - could trade freely.

"Obviously we can't be in the full customs union because the restrictions that implies goes beyond the political imperatives from a UK point of view," said Hammond, who had campaigned to stay in the EU ahead of the Brexit referendum in June last year.

"But we have a lot of reasons on both sides of this discussion to want to try and maintain the most frictionless border system possible," he said, pointing to fresh produce imports every day, which neither side would want to disrupt.

And he said Britain would always be an attractive investment destination because of "the high level of confidence in our institutions".

British economic growth would slow this year, but the government did not expect to have to borrow more to keep the economy afloat, said Hammond, adding that Britain was still a haven for foreign talent and entrepreneurs.

"We want to go on being that kind of open, welcoming society which people choose as a venue to do their business," he said.

http://www.npr.org/2017/01/12/509545778/in-surprise-send-off-president-obama-awards-biden-presidential-medal-of-freedom

that day is not today

Independent

The European Union is at greater risk than the UK if the two parties are unable to agree a financial transition phase for the City of London after Brexit in 2019, the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has warned.

Giving evidence to the Treasury Select Committee, Mr Carney stressed again that it would be "welcome" and "highly advisable" for UK-based financial firms that do business with Continental Europe to receive transition arrangements so they do not lose access abruptly in two years' time.

But he stressed that if this did not happen the greater financial stability risk lay with European states, rather than the UK.

“I'm not saying there are not financial stability risks to the UK - and there are economic risks to the UK - but there are greater financial stability risks on the continent in the short term for the transition than there are for the UK,” he said.

The Governor stressed the reliance of European households, governments, corporations and banks on the City.

“If you rely on a jurisdiction for half of your lending [and] half of your securities transactions you should think very carefully about transition from where you are today to where you will be tomorrow,” he said.

The fear in the City is that the UK will leave the single market, meaning UK-based financial firms will no longer be able to sell services to Continental customers.

The UK-based derivative clearing operations are also thought likely to be required to move to mainland Europe after Brexit.

The chief executive of the London Stock Exchange warned yesterday that the UK's vote to leave the EU poses a risk to the global financial system and could cost the City of London up to 230,000 jobs if the Government fails to provide a clear plan for post-Brexit operations.

Asked about the possibility of a regulatory "equivalence" regime for the City of London in the wake of Brexit, which could allow financial business to continue uninterrupted, Mr Carney stressed that "we don't want to be a rule taker as an authority" and for the Bank of England to be required to merely "cut and paste" financial rules made in Brussels and Frankfurt.

”If the EU and the UK starting from the position we are in today when we have the same rules, the regulators are known to each other, it's a tightly wound ecosystem, we're talking about wholesale finance - if we can come to some arrangement roughly along the lines for this - that is an arrangement that can be replicated by both sides for other major financial centres around the world to the betterment of the global financial system," he said.

Related BBC article.

CNN:

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The allegations were presented in a two-page synopsis that was appended to a report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The allegations came, in part, from memos compiled by a former British intelligence operative, whose past work US intelligence officials consider credible. The FBI is investigating the credibility and accuracy of these allegations, which are based primarily on information from Russian sources, but has not confirmed many essential details in the memos about Mr. Trump.

The classified briefings last week were presented by four of the senior-most US intelligence chiefs -- Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, and NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers.

One reason the nation's intelligence chiefs took the extraordinary step of including the synopsis in the briefing documents was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him are circulating among intelligence agencies, senior members of Congress and other government officials in Washington, multiple sources tell CNN.

These senior intelligence officials also included the synopsis to demonstrate that Russia had compiled information potentially harmful to both political parties, but only released information damaging to Hillary Clinton and Democrats. This synopsis was not an official part of the report from the intelligence community case about Russian hacks, but some officials said it augmented the evidence that Moscow intended to harm Clinton's candidacy and help Trump's, several officials with knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

The two-page synopsis also included allegations that there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government, according to two national security officials.

Sources tell CNN that these same allegations about communications between the Trump campaign and the Russians, mentioned in classified briefings for congressional leaders last year, prompted then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to send a letter to FBI Director Comey in October, in which he wrote, "It has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government -- a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States."

CNN has confirmed that the synopsis was included in the documents that were presented to Mr. Trump but cannot confirm if it was discussed in his meeting with the intelligence chiefs.

The Trump transition team declined repeated requests for comment.

CNN has reviewed a 35-page compilation of the memos, from which the two-page synopsis was drawn. The memos originated as opposition research, first commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans, and later by Democrats. At this point, CNN is not reporting on details of the memos, as it has not independently corroborated the specific allegations. But, in preparing this story, CNN has spoken to multiple high ranking intelligence, administration, congressional and law enforcement officials, as well as foreign officials and others in the private sector with direct knowledge of the memos.

Some of the memos were circulating as far back as last summer. What has changed since then is that US intelligence agencies have now checked out the former British intelligence operative and his vast network throughout Europe and find him and his sources to be credible enough to include some of the information in the presentations to the President and President-elect a few days ago.

On the same day that the President-elect was briefed by the intelligence community, the top four Congressional leaders, and chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees -- the so-called "Gang of Eight" -- were also provided a summary of the memos regarding Mr. Trump, according to law enforcement, intelligence and administration sources.

The two-page summary was written without the detailed specifics and information about sources and methods included in the memos by the former British intelligence official. That said, the synopsis was considered so sensitive it was not included in the classified report about Russian hacking that was more widely distributed, but rather in an annex only shared at the most senior levels of the government: President Obama, the President-elect, and the eight Congressional leaders.

CNN has also learned that on December 9, Senator John McCain gave a full copy of the memos -- dated from June through December, 2016 -- to FBI Director James Comey. McCain became aware of the memos from a former British diplomat who had been posted in Moscow. But the FBI had already been given a set of the memos compiled up to August 2016, when the former MI6 agent presented them to an FBI official in Rome, according to national security officials.

The raw memos on which the synopsis is based were prepared by the former MI6 agent, who was posted in Russia in the 1990s and now runs a private intelligence gathering firm. His investigations related to Mr. Trump were initially funded by groups and donors supporting Republican opponents of Mr. Trump during the GOP primaries, multiple sources confirmed to CNN. Those sources also said that once Mr. Trump became the nominee, further investigation was funded by groups and donors supporting Hillary Clinton.

Spokespeople for the FBI and the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment. Officials who spoke to CNN declined to do so on the record given the classified nature of the material.

Some of the allegations were first reported publicly in Mother Jones one week before the election.

One high level administration official told CNN, "I have a sense the outgoing administration and intelligence community is setting down the pieces so this must be investigated seriously and run down. I think [the] concern was to be sure that whatever information was out there is put into the system so it is evaluated as it should be and acted upon as necessary."

This could be big.

So Buzzfeed leaked the allegations.

so i turned vsync off to imrpve my computational performance but now i keep getting killed all the time in bf1 they should really put a thingymebob in the dooberyferkin next to the vsync option which CLEARLY STATES that turning off vsync gives a buff to enemy weapons but the thing is i turned it back on and i keep getting killed so it looks like the effect is permanent and now im really pissed off at dice because i payed good money for this game but i keep dying because they failed to fully inform me of the consequences of altering certain options and whats up with that windowless boarder stuff am i rite xDDDDDDDDD