NEW: The first images of the Trump presidential library have been published - a 47 storey tower on Miami's waterfront, complete with giant golden statues of Donald Trump www.ft.com/content/610e...

Very excited to have won a @sabew.bsky.social award for my piece on the Line and how MBS's dream city fell apart.

This is an astonishing read. The US-Israel coalition is burning through munitions at a financially and industrially unsustainable rate. The real danger is not just how much has been spent, but how hard it will be to replace. $26B spent, $50B to replenish.

This is the best thing I've read on what it really means to introduce AI to kill chains - that speeding up decision making and calling it efficiency is in fact just removing the safeguards that allow systems to work in the first place. substack.com/home/post/p-...

NEW: The net seemed to be tightening around the shadow fleet, but now these ships are ready to capitalise on the chaos of the Iran war and restricted supplies of oil. ig.ft.com/shadow-fleet/

Using interviews, satellite imagery and atmospheric modelling, we reconstructed how smoke from strikes on oil infrastructure spread across Tehran. The plume extended across much of the city. Investigation by @baydoun.nl, @ntabrizy.bsky.social, @wammezz.bsky.social, and myself.

chinese propaganda trolling continues to be unmatched (first 3 minutes here, complete 5+ minute video in twitter link below)

"Faced with viral footage of an attack on an Iranian school, xAI’s chatbot Grok didn't just fail to identify the location—it hallucinated three different and conflicting 'facts' for the same video." Now imagine this same technology networked into Pentagon command-and-control infrastructure.

A great opportunity here to work with the Amnesty International Evidence Lab to do geospatial analysis to investigate human rights abuses. Deadline 22 March careers.amnesty.org/jobs/vacancy...

a year is a long time in politics

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland. And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

This sort of framing of stories about 'left behind' places is getting very tired. How have they been 'failed' by politics? They are the product of political choices - which organisations like the BBC have often failed to explain to people.

I had to check the date on this three times ‘At home with Peter Mandelson’ in Times magazine *today* This is how we cover corruption in Britain? Seriously??

Some good news! Guan Heng has just been granted asylum in the US, although DHS reserve the right to appeal the decision in the next 30 days.

Next Thursday in Cambridge I'll be talking with @foxcahn.bsky.social about his new book on how we can build the technology that meets our actual needs. More below

I spoke to the BBC about Neom - the latest Saudi announcement that they won't be hosting the Asian Winter Games in 2029 after all, as well as what's happening with all the ambitious sci-fi projects that were planned for the region: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/n...

New on FT: as.ft.com/r/169805cf-5... Nigel Farage attended Davos as adviser to Iranian billionaire

So excited that the UK launch of my first book with the amazing Evan Selinger is just a few days away! If you’re in the UK, please join me and @alisonkilling.bsky.social for this great launch party! And please show publishers to invest in the anti-tech bro narrative by pre-ordering today!

When do we get one of these "nothing happens" decades I keep hearing about? Or even a month. I need some sleep.

Kazakh activists face 10 year sentence, prosecuted in Kazakhstan, at Chinese government’s request, for their peaceful protest against crimes against humanity in Xinjiang. Kazakh government should drop charges. Beijing should halt targeting critics abroad. www.hrw.org/news/2026/01...

Let's fight the spread of misinfo + disinfo by creating a Bluesky Culture of Context for imagery. Please make a good faith effort to name the SOURCE, even if you don't link to an evil media empire. For video and photos, CREDIT the creator. No exceptions! BONUS points: give Date | Time | Location

Good time to repost this www.bellingcat.com/resources/20...

Residents of a white working-class neighborhood in Amsterdam North attack police with fireworks on NY’s Eve. The city had barred them from lighting a public bonfire because of the danger to neighboring houses.

What the war against London really is about. V good by @robertshrimsley.bsky.social #Giftlink And on a different note: A v Happy New Year to everyone!

Woohoo! Best Christmas present ever:

Thank you to everyone who has shared this. The hearing is over for today. DHS has filed a motion to pretermit (end Guan's asylum application in the US) and have him sent to Uganda - where he'd be at risk of being sent to China. The hearing to decide that will be held 12 January.

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

The whitewashing of JA21 continues - now talked of as a member of a new coalition. Make no mistake: this is a far right party, with an immigration policy indistinguishable from Wilders; a history of dabbling in conspiracies; a co-leader who’s blatantly antisemitic www.volkskrant.nl/politiek/cda...

In late 2020 a Chinese man called Guan Heng travelled to Xinjiang with our BuzzFeed map of detention facilities to provide ground truth for our work - he provided the first corroborating evidence for many sites. He escaped to the US - then ICE detained him. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

I don't really post anymore, but I would like to carry on writing books at some point in the future. Hate to be annoying, but any chance you could retweet so old twitter followers can find me if they want to? Going to delete my twitter, or at least abandon it on lock and let it die a slow death.

One thing that rankles with me - slightly - about nepo baby discourse, is that seemingly 90% of successful actors in the UK have a massive structural advantage simply from being born rich. To obsess over the 1% who also have famous parents as if THAT'S the problem, misses the forest for the trees.

Of course, abandoning international human rights norms is as Far Right as it gets. What this is really about is dressing up Blue Labour's political strategy of appealing to Reform voters in clothing less likely to alienate everyone else.

Labour’s shift away from “immigration is good but it needs to be managed” to “it is bad” is a gift to essentially everyone they compete with, because it means that they don’t have the right position to be able to attack *anyone*.

X rolled out a new feature overnight showing where accounts are based. This network of “Trump-supporting independent women” that claimed to be “real Americans” are based in Thailand. The photos were stolen from European models & posts pushed pro-Trump lines while targeting Islam and LGBTQ people.

This contribution to the volume of human misery is yet another policy from Labour based on a false premise, in this case that refugees are overly attracted to Britain. It will increase bureaucratic limbo, thus making worse the problem of "cohesion" it purports to solve. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Some good news this morning - exports of Xinjiang tomatoes have collapsed. Last year I worked with the BBC to expose how XJ tomatoes produced with forced labour were making their way to UK supermarkets via Italy. 🧵

If you think that “the slow vanishing of employee benefits” is a better trade politically than “the other lot saying you broke your promise on income tax”, you are out of your tree: www.ft.com/content/1160...

Looking for a long read to go with your coffee this morning? The Line is a project of incredible hubris - we got the story of how it unravelled.

NEW: The End of the Line: the centrepiece of Saudi Arabia’s Neom gigaproject - a 500m tall, 170km long wall-like building intended ultimately to house 9 million people - can’t get out of the ground, say more than 20 former Neom architects, engineers and senior executives. ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a fantastical vision for a new way of living. But The Line, his plan for a vertical city in a vast mirrored wall, is rapidly being undone by the laws of physics and finance. Here is an #FTEdit 🧵 of eight mind-bending facts about this moonshot in the sand 👇

The part of Mamdani's speech that I found most exciting was "you dismantle the conditions that allowed him to gain power. That's how we stop Trump — and the next one." We need popular political figures to point out that Trump is not an anomaly and there are plenty more to take his place.

Great working on this with @alisonkilling.bsky.social, Chris Campbell, @peter.andringa.me, @ian-bott.bsky.social, @sdbernard.bsky.social and @raydouglas.bsky.social. Come for the reporting, stay for the largest map we‘ve ever built...

NEW: The End of the Line: the centrepiece of Saudi Arabia’s Neom gigaproject - a 500m tall, 170km long wall-like building intended ultimately to house 9 million people - can’t get out of the ground, say more than 20 former Neom architects, engineers and senior executives. ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Absolutely shocking that the Chinese govt pressured a UK university to shut down research about forced labour in Xinjiang and the links to global supply chains. The work of Laura Murphy and her team had been instrumental in getting Chinese companies sanctioned. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Great to see the PVV vote fall back, but it still looks like there's a similar number of votes for the far right, just spread across several parties rather than concentrated in one. #verkiezingen

Great to see the PVV vote fall back, but it still looks like there's a similar number of votes for the far right, just spread across several parties rather than concentrated in one. #verkiezingen

On a day of nationwide — even global — No Kings protests, sharing this panel from our graphic novel YOU MUST TAKE PART IN REVOLUTION. CC: @badiucao.bsky.social

Some changes to immigration rules today, not just increasing English language requirements, mean migrants looking to live and work in UK will have to meet far far higher standards than British nationals, while paying vast sums to be allowed to do so. That isn't a system based on "fairness". 1/

Talk of Badenoch's incompetence is entirely superfluous at this stage. In fact, foregrounding her incompetence and lack of future prospects only detracts from how dangerous she is, right now, as leader of the opposition. That is the real issue. That the leader of the opposition is far right.