That these racist thugs have morphed into "far right influencers" is central. Being a bigot used to be a hobby. It is now a profession. We don't have to treat the monetisation of hate as an inevitable phenomenon. We can regulate platforms - not to supress speech, but to remove financial incentives.

Thread on Farage/Reform antisemitism (actually this is just SOME of the counts against them — it would break Bluesky to actually list it all) bsky.app/profile/sund...

Important to note that the rally organisers didn’t invite the one Jewish leader of a political party that has been growing in support, but did invite Farage because Reform “is a serious party”

The Newcastle Results!!! Absolute madness, a three way split between Lib Dems, Green and Reform. Labour have utterly cratered, they've lost 32 seats. new.newcastle.gov.uk/election/new...

French police are forcibly separating asylum seeking families as they try to board small boats. On Saturday, this resulted in a 3-year-old crossing the Channel alone, his mother left behind. Full thread and story below: www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Forgot to post this on Fri, in case anyone wants some Sunday reading as.ft.com/r/9d1a0148-f...

‘I’m fighting two wars. One against the Russians. And one inside myself.’ Ukraine is reshaping warfare through its use of drones. Yet human operators remain at the controls. For @ftweekend.com, I profiled one Ukrainian FPV drone pilot to examine the personal costs. www.ft.com/content/95f5...

Great profile of Chinese dissident Teacher Li @whyyoutouzhele who chronicles the hidden parts of daily life in China, having Lunch with the FT at McDonalds in Tokyo www.ft.com/content/2574...

Access Now, the group that organizes RightsCon, says Zambian officials asked it to exclude Taiwanese participants if it wanted the event to proceed as planned. www.wired.com/story/the-ch...

I had assumed that RightsCon had been cancelled because of critiques of *Zambia* but it looks like Chinese interference was key? www.rightscon.org/rc26-stateme...

May post a little more about this later today, but this is the FT source article, and an animation of the March 13 overhead pass of KSA that probably did the imaging for Iran's March 14 strike on the base www.ft.com/content/1fdd...

Don't like folks importing the culture of not posting source links from X. You're not the original source, make it easy for people to find to verify your claims!

SCOOP: Iran is using a Chinese satellite to obtain high resolution imagery of targets in the Middle East, from US bases, to civilian infrastructure such as power plants and desalination facilities www.ft.com/content/1fdd...

Breaking news: Another very rich and once powerful man discovered that he can't bully the FT

👀 The US used MQ-9 Reaper drones to protect the missing F-15E crew member by "striking Iranian military-aged males believed to be a threat who got within three kilometres of the Airman."

Particularly alarming that this includes Lebanon & Gaza. I had just shared imagery from March 18 showing the demolition of villages along the southern border of Lebanon by the IDF and now not even that imagery is available: bsky.app/profile/godi... Mass demolitions haven't stopped in Gaza, either.

Just had this from Planet Labs, the US government have asked satellite imagery providers for "voluntarily" restrictions on access to satellite imagery. Given a lot of them provide satellite imagery to the USG we can probably guess the outcome of not acquiescing to that request.

The FT is hiring an investigations correspondent! Apply by April 12: job-boards.eu.greenhouse.io/financialtim...

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.