My favourite of John Hinde's postcards of Ireland: the Montague Motel, located on the old N7 between Ballybrittas and Portlaoise. Every other wedding or debs in and around Laois took place in it. Love all the vintage detail but the Martini-branded parasol is 😗👌🏻 📷 P. O'Toole, John Hinde Studios

"Excuse me, I didn't see any puff pastry sheets in the frozen food aisle ..." Huge sigh: "Well they wouldn't be in the frozen food cabinets, obviously!" and tramped off with me following in tow like a schoolboy fallen foul of a vice-principal schoolteacher.

The Pahlavi's were parvenus whose claim to royality was purely because Reza Shah said so (and the 1920s were the last possible period anyone would have tried that act). No, if the Monarchy of Iran is really going to be restored (it won't) it's going to have to be the Qajars.

Excellent Gist. I had forgotten about the Garda visit to Today FM about the Brian Cowen painting. #IrishPol

In Dublin, on Fenian Street, there's a factory that makes child sex abuse material. You can pay it money, as a subscription, and that's one of the services it offers. This doesn't happen by mistake or because you've tricked or hacked the system. It’s a feature. www.thegist.ie/the-gist-the...

Unless I’m missing it, the December order barring ICE from illegally denying Members of Congress access at any time to their facilities has not been stayed. ICE was violating the text of the law, now defying a court order. ICE is incompatible w democratic governance. (CBP too.)

Can’t help thinking they’re teeing themselves up for the mother of all all Find Outs

Oil barons demur, seeking investment protections. “We’ve had our assets seized there twice, and so you can imagine to re-enter a third time would require some pretty significant changes. Today it’s uninvestable," said Darren Woods of Exxon Mobil.

President Trump met with oil and gas executives on Friday in an effort to push them to invest money in Venezuela, a plan many of them are reluctant to embrace.

Mad King George

It’s gonna be hard to top this one folks

For context, this is a west of Ireland man who has just moved to Northampton for work in the early 1950s. The porter comment is interesting, as is the blend of stout and mild ...

Imagine coming back from the dead only to be shot...

“Venezuela needs a civilian government constrained by law, respectful of individual freedoms, accountable to voters and capable of rebuilding institutions,” Ricardo Hausmann writes in a guest essay. “Donald Trump appears not to understand this”

I want to see Lowe on TV explaining why banning the monetisation of paedophilia and sexual assault is an attack on free speech.

A woman recording an ICE agent tells him "Shame on you." The agent responds, "Have you all not learned from the past couple of days?" "Learned what?" she asks Then he knocks her phone out of her hand

I don’t think we should have ceded control quite so quickly and without so much as a fight.

This one isn't as sharp as I would like but I still love this shot I got two years ago today! The vibrant reflection on the Puyallup River in Tacoma was caused by different colored shipping containers and I watched as this Common Merganser paddled right into the shot. #Birds #Nature #Photography

We thought we were made when the 'Four Horsemen' wielded so much influence in Washington, USA in the interests of nationalist Ireland. But our leprechauning seemed to go out of fashion.

"We have to post on X" say the people with thousands of followers and tens of views. #Speirgorm

Now obviously there is no 'iron math law of goon quantity' or anything. We're ballparking. But that's useful to get a sense of the broad order of magnitude of violence necessary to hold a population by force of arms. Charitably, these guys need at least a million goons.

Go Indonesia! No messing. www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/...

Red light cameras left idle for a decade, draft plan left unfinished for 8 months but Govt says reducing road deaths “absolute priority” -- Law for enforceable variable-speed limits for the M50 and other major roads enacted in 2023.-- Much-ignored advisory square speed sign cannot be enforced.--…

Free speech is not undressing someone, woman and children, putting on a bikini and then posting it online all against the will of the victims

If Pahlavi comes back to Tehran I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of IRGC leaders and units suddenly rebrand comfortably in a new regime as part of an Iranian Royal Guard Corps

The absurdity that is Google policies at the minute. They will let Grok and X be on their Play Store knowing they are generating CSAM violating their own rules Google will also lock your entire Google Account forever if its bot deems pictures you have taken of your children as CSAM.

On this day in 1920, Canada officially joined the League of Nations as a founding member. Participation in the League brought Canada its first official contact with many foreign governments and helped Canada establish itself as sovereign from the UK. 📸 LAC C-9055

Well they did tell us all after they won Brexit that if we didn't like it we should leave..

Entirely predictable/predicted: I wrote this almost two years ago "If this government – or the next – does indeed succeed in reducing migration very substantially below projected levels, it will have a large fiscal cost, with consequent impacts for tax and spending." ukandeu.ac.uk/has-higher-i...

Trump's crazy week raises questions for Britain and Europe: how can we credibly distance ourselves from the country that still underpins our national security at a time the world is becoming more dangerous and our adversaries more of a threat? My latest @theipaper.com inews.co.uk/news/world/t...

Yes, it's become completely normal for this terrible man to say and do terrible things, and the governments of the world just ignore it.

That will piss the orange despot off. 'Selfies and smiles: South Korea seeks 'new phase' in ties with China' www.bbc.com/news/article...

saw the guy who’s always pissing me off on the internet irl today

It would be like saying that in order to increase the number of applications from people from disadvantaged backgrounds, they are going to encourage applications from the most illiterate member of every youth offender institiution.

It’s a great site. And especially fun to watch during surges.

Stop the boats latest

Graham Linehan made a willing place in his heart for evil, and once you open that door wide all the horrors come in.

Deserves a wider audience, Passenger train runs into the hunt in Lincolnshire with tragic results (for the hounds) and police are absolutely baffled as to who the culprits might be

The Norwegian Nobel Prize committee has been forced to make a statement, declaring that the prize cannot be transferred. It's hard even to comprehend how stupid this has become

Much that is astonishing about this story, buti look, if I had the money, I'd send my hypothetical kids to an elite private school. The schools listed are great. The pupils there who need *further* encouragement from a Cambridge college apply...that's who you want to target to *increase* quality?

Yeah it’s a flurry of people posting that we’re having new users, rather than an actual influx. But since people are posting starter packs, people’s counts will be going up, so it’ll *feel* like an influx. Still, mostly harmless so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The end of the line for me as a news reporter was my pieces or my posts being used as launchpads in comments or Quote Tweets for misinformation. If you're a conspiracy theorist or racist - jump straight in to the top comment spot or use the reporting to gather new followers, spread your message

The idea that journalists, politicians, groups or - you know, women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people - should "stay on the pitch" doesn't really hold up. Foreign Minister's account has 60k followers - 40 likes, 13k views? Blue ticks straight to the top of the queue with misogyny, bile.

Not a spoof

A comment on the snow in Scotland..... in Doric.

In case you've seen the story about “grok now only generates images for paid users”, it's untrue. Apparently everyone just reported it because… it was what grok told them 🤦🏼 www.theverge.com/news/859309/...

Niamh Smyth also says Apple and Google should remove Grok and X from their stores while it is generating CSAM and nonconsensual intimate images of women. A much tougher government stance than we've heard from some colleagues in recent days.

If it's your first day on Bluesky then you need to go up to the biggest, baddest poster you can find and scold them for not including alt text in an image.

It seems to me here using a dummy account that the long-press “Edit Image with Grok” is still available to non-paying users on Twitter. Is it just the “@grok” tweet based prompting that has been set to subscriber only perk?