* Face Palm Sunday

This is utterly jaw-dropping. A school that bans Atwood, Zadie Smith, Terry effing Pratchett and *literal George Orwell* is actively harming its pupils. www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/scho...

The UK Could Be Quietly Heading for a Solar Power Revolution – Byline Times bylinetimes.com/2026/03/19/t...

When I became Education Secretary, I said we'd drive a sea change in the way we approached the early years. These stats show our progress: Childcare costs halved Working parents now saving £8,000 a year Cost of a childcare place dropped back to same level as 2005 www.lbc.co.uk/article/chil...

2/ Releasing free data & maps of who owns the vast majority of land will enable greater public scrutiny of what goes on behind the barbed-wire fences that crisscross the countryside. The new Land Use Framework is an ambitious step towards making England a greener, fairer and more pleasant land.

Netanyahu and his US-based acolytes really have scorched the earth for short-term benefit. Support for maintaining US-Israel relationship in its current form is fracturing across range of political audiences, even if it still has enough heft that changing course will take meaningful time and effort.

New: Salary of top-paid person, at academy chain poised to be taken over by England’s largest, soared by £60,000 last year, to £250,000-plus educationuncovered.co.uk/news/salary-...

"Never underestimate the capacity of Keir Starmer to stay calm." Finnish President Alexander Stubb on his admiration for the Prime Minister, and how many international leaders have "good days [and] bad days" with President Trump #Newsnight

Currently the Israelis are systematically killing off anyone the Trump administration could reach out to for a deal that ends this quickly

Pretty staggering that the FT Trump interview opens with ‘if NATO doesn’t help us sort this mess, there’ll be problems’ and ends with ‘Russia might be helping target American soldiers, but really that’s sort of fair enough - we started it’. www.ft.com/content/1ca6...

Make Jack Aubrey a commodore with that mission and give him almost no material support

The move to create “AI-free” certification systems.

UPDATE ON THE HORMUZ COALITION (Mon, March 16): 🇫🇷 France: REJECTED 🇬🇧 UK: REJECTED 🇮🇹 Italy: REJECTED 🇪🇸 Spain: REJECTED 🇯🇵 Japan: REJECTED 🇳🇴 Norway: REJECTED 🇨🇦 Canada: REJECTED 🇦🇺 Australia: REJECTED 🇩🇪 Germany: REJECTED 🇨🇳 China: NO RESPONSE 🇳🇱 Netherlands: NO RESPONSE 🇰🇷 South Korea: NO CONFIRMATION

'Those who 'circle back' and 'synergize' also tend to be crap at their jobs' www.theregister.com/2026/03/15/c... Who would have guessed that! #anxiety #stress #depression #deepermindfulness #vedana #feelingtone #headspace #ArtOfBreathing #opiods #PTSD #pain #chronicpain

Tories refused to act on energy prices when UK public were crippled by them, as energy companies made record profits year on year.. which lead to people in energy poverty Labour aren’t perfect but they are very different👇🏼 We will intervene on energy bills if necessary, says Miliband

Easy to miss the good news amongst all the chaos. “Despite the record winter, the waiting list has continued to fall and decreased to 7.25 million in January 2026, dropping by 43,666 compared to the previous month.”

Petrol retailers deny ‘price gouging’ as even the Chancellor tells them not to use the war to ‘rip-off’ their customers bit.ly/4rCCokX never fill up on a motorway and use a site with the govt’s own fuel finder data to fill up cheaply wherever you are.

CCTV shows the moment a car hits a Muslim woman in broad daylight in southeast London before the driver speeds away. The woman survived, and an investigation is ongoing, but no suspects have been arrested yet.

I signed this letter. A lot of harm has been caused by ideological approaches to birth. “We are a democratic party and our policies are determined by our members.” is a pretty terrible way to approach health policies.

BREAKING: BOOTS ON THE GROUND. The pentagon is sending a Marine Expeditionary Unit of up to 2,500 to Iran. 1/ www.wsj.com/livecoverage...

ICE detained a 9-year-old with severe autism and his mom for more than 80 days. The boy depends on daily therapy, but at Dilley, those supports vanished. Unable to understand why they couldn’t go home, he would cry through the night and hit himself, his mother told me. My latest for @nbcnews.com

Okay, okay, going to keep adding these as I see them. This one made me snort.

Though slightly annoying, also really quite funny that I'm reading about the efficiency of global supply chains and all was fine until the driver of the last leg delivered the package to the wrong address. Never believe the national self-sufficiency myths.

On the academy pay front, it is interesting that the Aspirations trust is £500k in the red, when the husband and wife at its head between them in recent years have been paid approaching £500k, with that barrier now broken. schoolsweek.co.uk/academy-trus...

Russia rakes in $150mn a day in extra revenue from surging oil prices ft.trib.al/LcDFmtH

Fully *one year later*, the Telegraph has been forced (by @ipso.co.uk) to admit that it was lying about foreign nationals claiming benefits.

A fellow poster just responded to a plea from James O'Brien with this little gem, the media's faux outrage, pearl clutching in all its glory.

They estimate Boris Johnson’s decisions throughout Covid resulted in 22,000+ unnecessary deaths. Throughout his time the media had a love in with him. Starmer appointed Mandleson. For right reasons. But it was wrong. He’s apologised. Media hysterically demand he resign

We have a real problem in this country with how the press portrays and writes about Muslims. This story is just another example of that. It will be no surprise if you follow my work that the Telegraph and Daily Mail are two of the worst offenders🙄 cfmm.org.uk/resource/th...

Back in 2014-2015 we did a national crowd sourced project where people who experience mental ill-health, distress and trauma submitted a blog about their day and wellbeinv on four named days across the year. Sleep was far and away the thing people mentioned most positively and negatively

Dear everyone, As per the post from the Bodleian librarian below, AI bots and scrapers are putting just about every website under great pressure, British History Online included. A lot of excellent tech staff are working hard to keep everything working, but outages and siruptions are inevitable.

And it is done. Who your dad is no longer gives you a guaranteed say on the law of the land. We have tonight done what so many Labour people have sought to do throughout our history: no more hereditary peers

The President of the USA is now openly threatening Iran with being the target of one of the greatest crimes in world history. Trump is saying he will destroy the basis of life for more than 90 million people. He should be removed from office for this.

Human Rights Watch says that Israel has been illegally using white phosphorus in Lebanon reut.rs/4dbIDsa

Trump Went to War With Iran to ‘Seize Oil’ as US Shale Enters Terminal Decline open.substack.com/pub/bylineti...

A savage, magnificent, virtuosic and unlikely to be surpassed evisceration of "Mummy's Favourite". www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

The guy who voices Master Chief from the video game "Halo," who was featured in a White House meme video showing missiles blowing people up in Iran, calls it "disgusting and juvenile war porn" wapo.st/3NhffGm

A thing that’s shocking me about the lack of coverage is air safety info. Hi, Glasgow folk, from a Southern Californian transplant: ash from old buildings is super gnarly. Please wear a respirator if you need to be near the scene. Queen Street is still available, but it goes different places!

War crime upon war crime upon war crime

I think about this a lot

New post, on whether I could get Claude Code to complete a data task that had taken me AGES a decade ago… kucharski.substack.com/p/how-much-t...

The far right are working themselves up into a jihadist frenzy because our elected representatives have decided that it would be unwise to join an illegal imperialist war prompted by a demented president with serious cognitive impairment. Thank goodness for Sir Keir.

Trevor Phillips after his interview with Yvette Cooper seems to have been forced to correct his comment about Blair criticising Keir Starmer. He said that Blair had made the comments in private and not for publication and that they have been taken out of context. Interesting

Going to be on BBC South radio at 13:10 discussing why time seems to go by more quickly as we age. Here's an article I wrote on the subject in case you're interested.

This isn’t a hallucination, Michael Gove. You’ve never explained the millions you disbursed to buddies with your crony Covid Contracts. Cashing in on the worst public health crisis in a century should disbar people from public life permanently. www.bylinesupplement.com/p/we-need-to...

Love this.

Well. This is an interesting thing from a council that gave control to Reform UK just under a year ago.

Blowtorching diplomatic and humanitarian capacity while burning through military capabilities and alienating allies is malpractice of the highest order by the Secretary of State, the nation's top DIPLOMAT, and by the National Security Advisor. It does not help the military to kill US diplomacy. 14/

Not quite sure what it will take for MAGA to see Putin as an enemy.

I dropped out of high school, gained a huge amount of often difficult life experience, then went to community college, and now I'm a professor in a prestigious university. There HAS TO BE A PLACE for non-traditional students. www.theguardian.com/education/20...