I mean... everyone who works in a school or hospital has a lanyard. Even as someone whose job involves *visiting* schools I usually have to wear a lanyard. It's a safeguarding/security thing. I don't know why there's an obsession with this.

This is not only a response to circumstances but a major bid by Qatar to pressure the USA to end hostilities ( 🎁) giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... Qatar warns war will force Gulf to stop energy exports within weeks

Very chuffed about this. Been trying to get Gill to run for ages. She’s absolutely excellent and a total asset to our union.

I have known a number of really intelligent people who are about my age who have no GCSEs and it has basically always been because when they were 15/16 a lot of horribly difficult things were going on in their lives and not enough people were looking out for them. And it fucks things up later.

And this too. An absurd waste of potential.

"Not capable of graduating?" A ton of students here and across the post-92 sector come to university through access courses, take foundation years, etc. They graduate just fine, thanks. Tickell should confine himself to plans for a rowing lake on campus or something, if the edge needs taking off.

Imo it's a mistake to blame the AI. Gives up all the key ground for nothing. The people are culpable, and they cannot be allowed to shed responsibility to the AI. AI got it wrong? Of course it did, and the people who let the AI decide are 100% culpable

today’s guy was a 32 year old DACA kid. they scooped him up for possession last August and sent him to ICE detention in Arizona where he contracted COVID. like probably 3/4ths of these people, it says ICE never officially reported a cause of death and it’s still under investigation. Jesus Christ

Covid deaths by poverty of postcode from ONS, with dark blue bars the most deprived Poverty was itself, in the parlance of that time, an “underlying condition” www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...

Look again at the recent decline & how concentrated it was in poorer postcodes — where people already died much earlier Yes Covid was part of the picture, but official stats show that its toll was also far heavier among men in poorer postcodes

A sickening society is clear in these statistics So why is it not in the news? Powerful wake-up call from @chakrabortty.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I will miss Kristi Noem's inimitable constitutional insights, as when, asked by Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H. at a Senate hearing to define "habeas corpus," she replied, "Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country."

More excellent news for #UCU members! I know Suzi from the Women Members' Standing Committee, which she chairs. She will be an amazing VP!

Excited and honoured to have been elected to the #UCU NEC. Many thanks to everyone who voted for me (and indeed, everyone who voted at all). I'm looking forward to representing our members to the best of my ability.

Maybe. I’m not saying it’s not a problem but if we look at Shabana Mahmood it doesn’t seem like Labour wants her out of the way but rather like her shouting at things. There are different modes of misogyny and racism etc. We can see fairly pure modes of anti black racism in Trump.

They keep wagging their fingers and telling (cis) women of working age that what we actually want is transphobia & lots of it, and then getting cross at us when we tell them no we don't.

Good analysis by Ben, my only addition is that I think psychologically Labour cannot accept that their median voter is closer to Hannah Spencer: still young, well off but still renting, female, and socially liberal than it is their desired median voter: Lee Anderson, and that is because of misogyny.

Honoured to be elected to #UCU NEC. Thanks for all your votes! Disappointing turnout of 8.5%. I was elected by around 1% of total members. I won in the first round (of STV system), which is a pretty emphatic endorsement of my ‘manifesto’, but sorry to report that our Union is in a parlous state.

Mark being elected VP is a huge win for UCU and for members nationally. Huge.

UCU’s elections concluded this week and I am honoured to have been elected as the next Vice-President for Higher Education, to become President in 2029-30. Thank you for all the support. A short statement about the election and what’s to come after I take up the role in May.

The #UCU election results are quite good overall. We could use more good people running. The turnout, unsurprisingly was worse than the baseline though I’m gonna have to dig out all the numbers again. However having @markpe as chair of HEC is a relief for me.

Delighted to announce I have been elected UCU Vice President from the FE sector. I am honoured by all those who voted for me and endlessly thankful to everyone who supported my campaign. I pledge to listen to members and fight for our sector with fierce energy and integrity. Let's do this 💪

Beyond delighted by these election results. Huge congratulations to @markpendleton.bsky.social and @suzitoole.bsky.social : I cannot imagine a better VP duo. And some incredible UCU members will be joining the NEC in June! #ucu

Many congratulations to all those standing in the #UCU elections this year, and to the successful VP candidates @markpendleton.bsky.social and @suzitoole.bsky.social

Absolutely BEAMING at this. So proud of all our candidates and those we supported #UCU

Congratulations @markpendleton.bsky.social & @suzitoole.bsky.social for smashing the UCU Vice-President (HE & FE) election! Overall results are great. EVERY single @ucucommons.org candidate was elected, as were the vast majority of candidates we endorsed! Forward! 💪 www.ucu.org.uk/article/1419...

The full results are available here: www.ucu.org.uk/article/1419...

Congratulations to all of our members who got elected, as well as those endorsed by us. More from us in the coming days. #ucu

Thanks so much to everyone who voted for our candidates! #ucu

NEW: A judge ordered the US government to refund Trump's illegally collected tariffs. It was theft in broad daylight. I'm pushing Donald Trump to give the American people their money back.

I don’t have the data access to check this but I thought the strategy of the last campaign was to focus on vote efficiency rather than vote share thus maximizing the majority in Parliament. This isn’t necessarily galaxy brained. Obama focused on delegate share rather than “primaries won” in 2008.

The post mortem of 2024 is a classic in only acknowledging the top line result, rather than thinking what par would have been for the starting position. Hemorrhaging votes in solid Labour areas should have been a massive warning light.

Just WTF man.

You will definitely want to hire one of these tough-as-nails, $1500-an-hour attorneys who caved to Trump, only to find that they didn’t need to after all. Gift link www.wsj.com/us-news/law/...

How does Benjamin Ryan think therapy works? Here he’s challenging @michaelhobbes.bsky.social claim that therapists know the difference between gay kids and kids who are trans. How do therapists know a kid is depressed other than “trusting the kid?”

The Gaslighting continues... Trump Spox Leavitt blamed the 500,000+ Americans still present in the 14 countries for which the White House issued "DEPART NOW" orders for not leaving sooner. She said that they should have known to leave when the State Department raised the risk level to 4. (1/2)

what's insane is that this is basically the same way they made the iran bombing lists

I did not share the original story because my gut was that the sourcing was dubious. Someone who knows more about the sole source confirms that skepticism. Don't fall for clickbait, read the piece linked below. (If the story is confirmed by other outlets, that's another thing. But ... it's not)

The downside of being a bad faith actor

"Unlike hallucinations, which introduce falsehoods, sycophancy is a bias in the selection of the data people see. When AI systems are trained to be helpful, they may inadvertently prioritize data that validates the user’s narrative over data that gets them closer to the truth."

Anna Slatz started off her career in journalism writing puff pieces about Nazis she was good friends with before rebranding as a feminist for the sake of "you can call anything feminism these days if you kick trans people". Her username is Slatzism on account of the thing it rhymes with.

"The dry and the wet burn together. One hundred and sixty-five graves have been dug in Minab ... for those killed when US or Israeli missiles struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh school on Saturday morning as classes began. Most of the dead were girls aged between seven and twelve."

Did you see this headline? Did you feel the requisite anger and rage at asylum seekers that The Sun was asking of you? Did you maybe blame Starmer because.... um... it was probably his fault🤷‍♀️ Would you like to know the reality behind the headline? Course you would!😜 Let's take a look 🧵 1/25

Jesse singal literally wrote a whole article about an imaginary me and then asked people to be furious at his fantasy version of me.

A place where it's a real problem is Iran, where homosexuality carries the death penalty & all sorts of "treatments" up through sex reassignment surgery abound. Not limited to effeminate boys—e.g.,trans people who don't necessarily want surgery can be pressured into i. www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazin...

In the age of Trump, we sometimes forget that a good message like this is the right thing to do.

"Parents deprived their children of vaccines and those kids got measles as a result."

People explain the real impact of politically-motivated changes to the settlement rules on their lives, the Home Office responds with "We make no apology ..." IME people in power who use the "no apology" formula know full well that they are doing something very wrong