Here's the current status with the Extinction Rebellion protest on Long Acre & St Martin's Lane.
A handful of protesters stood on a giant pink table in the middle of the road.
Oddly, it was just the police, the protesters, and me. Everyone else has been kicked out of the area.
There are tons of police in the area. I'd guess a few hundred. And it's all fenced off with temporary barriers.
The area is only a couple of hundred yards from one of the largest police stations in Central London, so fairly easy for police to come & go.
The police aren't letting anyone in, but oddly they have closed it using a 'Section 14'. They have cleared the whole area using that, and are telling everyone they cannot go in, but legally that is not true: They should let you in if you are not part of it.
Aside from the large pink table, most of the area has been cleared.
There're a few people in a couple of the roads like this - locked onto whatever is in the rolling luggage.
The junction Extinction Rebellion have picked is not actually a particularly busy traffic junction, and is easy to cordon off
The main effect tonight is several restaurants have closed. Monday is a quiet night, and the only theatre within the cordon is closed on a Monday anyway.
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I went to take a look at the 'Palestine' protest in London today.
I guess I've seen more than 100 demos of one sort or another in London.
Most banners at this one were from either Socialist Worker, or 'Friends of Al Aqsa', which was formed by the optician @Ismailadampatel.
I asked various people what the Socialist Worker/Palestine connection was and even some people carrying 'Socialist Worker' branded signs did not to know. The Socialist Party had various recruitment gazebos at the start of the route too, so I asked there.
It felt slightly odd that they were using a demonstration against military action in Palestine so explicitly to try and recruit new members.
The man on the stand said the link was 'anti imperialism', and they recruit there as people are open to anti-capitalist movements.
We decided to walk 'The Queue' today, but the wrong way: from the finish to the start.
Here is a short thread of photos, from the gates in front of Parliament Square back to the park in Bermondsey where people collect their wristbands to join the queue...
The exit is actually an odd spot - people leave, get asked if they're ok by Samaritans (a nice idea), and have to either force through the crowds of Whitehall, or wait to cross to the relative quiet of the square.
Here's the final outdoor bit of the queue - where people go through security, under the windows of Parliament, after they've looped through Victoria Towers Garden.
On the value of proof reading, and unintended consequences:
There is an NFT project called Azuki. A month ago it would cost you around 34eth to buy one, which at the time was about $100k. Even at the current lows of the crypto market, they were selling at 25eth a few days ago...
As the crypto market has hit a rough patch, one of the team decided to write an article to talk about ups and downs, and that the way out of a crisis is to keep building.
Obviously, they didn't get it proof read too widely.
The blog post revealed - which the writer seemed to think fine - that the team had been involved in several 'rugs' (projects where other people had invested cash, and the team had just abandoned the project, pulling the rug on it).
The BBC has now run a day-long anti vaccination campaign. Possibly the most-viewed coordinated anti vaccination campaign in the world so far.
It centred around Novak Djokovic.
Here is a short thread on how it worked.
They got an 'exclusive interview' with Novak Djokovic, the #1 ranked men's tennis player, and the only man in the top 100 who has not taken a covid vaccine.
Everyone who pays attention to tennis knows his stance, but he quickly falls out of the news outside of major tournaments.
Then they filled their flagship morning news program - which they believe sets the news agenda for the day - with ads for their interview, running snippets from it continuously.
Other outlets copied the story, and it has trended all day on Twitter as a result.