Even his enemies are likely to admit Ed Miliband is Labour’s best cabinet minister, writes Michael Jacobs. Not even Morgan McSweeney could stare him down...

It was unwise to seek mental health advice from a platform that isn’t regulated to provide it—and is incentivised to keep users online, writes @sarahelizacollins.bsky.social.

“I carried him on my back. It took seven days.” A camp in eastern Chad is now home to more than 100,000 refugees of Sudan’s civil war, and is a key destination for those fleeing El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State. Resources are strained as the number of newly displaced people increases.

The actor Michael Sheen used all his money to start a fake debt collecting business, buy 900 people in Wales's debt, and excused it. If Musk bought ALL $194 billion in medical debt in the U.S. and excused it in the same way, he'd still be the world's riches man by hundreds of billions of dollars.

The CBS reporter who led the story calls pulling it a "political" decision. "The decision was made after Bari Weiss, the new editor in chief of CBS News, requested numerous changes to the segment." www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

boy, a grim echo of Budapest's memorial to pogrom victims here.

The victims at Brown University? Ella, a white Christian student, and Mukhammad, a Muslim student who originally came from Uzbekistan. We're all in this together. Be wary of the hatemongers who are demonizing an entire faith for the sins of the few and love guns more than our kids.

Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who tackled one of the Bondi killers, became an Australian citizen 3 years ago. His deed was "his way of conveying his gratitude for staying in Australia, for being granted citizenship." He took 5 bullets, and fears he'll lose his left arm. www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...

apart from the sheer inconceivable horror of the El Fasher massacre and its attendant horrors itself, the thing I'm feeling depressed about is that it probably won't matter. these were people already on the utmost margins of the global system, who the world has already decided it doesn't care about

I fear for people relying on AI for mental health advice, writes @sarahelizacollins.bsky.social.

Meanwhile. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/c...

Here is Congressman Randy Fine explicitly calling for the genocide of Muslims. This is abhorrent. We are disgusted by Congressman Fine's persistent and rampant anti-Muslim racism and call on all American Jewish leaders to speak out.

How ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ inspired Victorian Hedonists

With or without 'Big Short' predictions, the concern that AI hardware might soon become obsolete has been growing for a while

After Martin Luther King’s family protested, OpenAI now restricts users’ ability to make fake videos of MLK. It’s just one way AI must be prevented from warping our sense of reality, writes @ethanz.bsky.social.

A recent M.I.T. study found that 95% of companies that had invested in A.I. tools were seeing zero return.

St. Augustine (yes, that one), the African. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

“Tigray is broken. Its leaders divided, some aligning with Addis Ababa, others with Eritrea. Another war looms, one that could pit Tigrayans against each other. I fought once to defend my people; I will not fight again in a war that will destroy what remains.” continent.substack.com/p/the-exodus...

‘Writers, for better or worse, need publishers (and vice versa), and their relationships, involving taste, friendship and money, can be as long-lasting, as complicated and as asymmetrical as any marriage.’ Online early: Julian Barnes on Flaubert and his publisher. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

While the war has been raging in Gaza, the right-wing Netanyahu government has been doing everything short of formal annexation to extend Israeli control over the West Bank—and it might well have done the formal annexation if Trump had not blocked it. wapo.st/3W5yhAx

‘Like James Baldwin, she thought social revolution required a reckoning of all relationships, including the individual’s relationship to herself.’ Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (@keeanga.bsky.social) on Audre Lorde: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

"Asked what freedom felt like, [Alaa] said: “It is overwhelming. It is also comfortable and natural, and I am immediately fitting in with them, including witnessing three family fights in two days. The usual stuff." Don't miss this Guardian interview: www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

John Milton's Areopagitica, one of the most important and influential tracts on free speech ever written, is basically 100 pages of "belittling conservative ideas." Glad Milton got that one published before Marc Rowan came along.

A labour government wants to make amendments to our laws to bring in conditions, and possible outright ban on protests in the UK because the Palestine movement got too big for them to continue to ignore. A Labour government. Not Tory, not reform, but Labour.

‘Chinese Gen Z-ers don’t want their parents or colleagues to know what they say, watch or read in the virtual world. Plus, cyber violence is rife: who wants to be doxxed over a silly comment?’ Yun Sheng: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Foreign staff have ‘changed our lives’: Scottish farmers fear for future after changes to skilled workers visas

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Since 2021, an estimated 18 per cent of Cubans—as many as two million residents—have left. Many of these migrants once regarded the U.S. as a haven. Not anymore.

Canada recognizes Palestine www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Once again tapping the sign of Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Spoke to @nbcnews.com about why travel influencers visiting Afghanistan do so from a place of privilege. Their experiences do not reflect reality for most Afghans, especially women & girls facing harsh restrictions on daily life & bearing the brunt of Taliban rule. www.nbcnews.com/now/video/tr...

“Palestinians are being intentionally starved to death. Although signs of the coming horrors were clear within months of the war’s onset, many governments averted their eyes. Now, they are failing in their duty to prevent and stop a genocide.”

A reminder that #SouthAsia is at the frontline of #ClimateChange thoughts and prayers www.theguardian.com/world/video/...

USAID funded roughly half the world’s supply of ready-to-use therapeutic food. The dismantling of the agency has disrupted the global supply chain that provides the packets, leaving thousands of malnourished children at risk of dying.

In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “Gaza represents not some distant and inevitable tragedy, but our own moral and practical failing,” our columnist Nicholas Kristof writes. “We have blood on our hands.”

At a time when many funders are retreating from Africa, we are reaffirming our commitment. As I write in an essay for The Mail & Guardian, this work is African-led and born of African realities: mg.co.za/article/2025...

Investigators say the former president and first lady exerted undue influence on the conservative People Power Party to nominate a specific candidate during a 2022 election.

The defense of “we could have killed more people more quickly” is not particularly compelling. www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-if...

“I was skeptical about a Stewart candidacy, but maybe ‘The Daily Show’ host is the right person to shake up the Democratic presidential primaries.” Me for Zeteo on the debate over ⁦‪Jon Stewart‬⁩ and 2028:

Forum Romanum. 1890.

Also, a crime against humanity.

Last week, OpenAI finally released GPT-5, which many had hoped would usher in the next significant leap in A.I. capabilities. But it is just the latest product to suggest that A.I. might not get much better.

A bigger problem than just Starmer with UK politics is that the country now has about five viable contending parties, a situation that FPTP is wildly unsuited for.

Myanmar security forces involved in systematic torture, UN report says reut.rs/3HaQBo6

Southern Europe is sweltering under life-threatening heat that could last through Monday, fueling wildfires that have left at least two people dead. In Spain, soldiers have been deployed to battle the fires and hundreds of people have evacuated. nyti.ms/46STog7

It’s been more than a quarter of a century since the bursting of the great dot-com bubble. Is the current surge in tech following a similar trajectory?

This weekend, Neo-Nazis in Berlin attacked attendees of a queer pride festival at Ostkreuz, one of the city’s main terminals (for Londoners, the equivalent is Liverpool Street).

Breaking News: The Colombian presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe has died at 39, two months after he was shot in the head at a campaign rally. The authorities have arrested four people in connection with the shooting, including a 14-year-old boy identified as the gunman.

Israel's massacre of Palestinian journalists has been unconscionable. And the silence of western journalists has been an utter abomination to our profession. And to humanity. www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/...