India has now electrified almost 100% of their tracks, a poorer country with vastly more track. Over half of that has happened in just the last decade. The UK's poverty of ambition by comparison is truly staggering (and sad...) earthbound.report/2025/02/03/i...

Govt scraps all electrification investment. Midland Main Line to stay forever diesel Leicester Nottingham Derby Sheffield. Hugely embarrassing and inexplicable www.ft.com/content/5ecd...

We can’t afford to do what every other country did years ago for our railways, but people need to drive their kids to school in a tank

The Washington Post’s new editorial stance: trillion dollar executive compensation packages while tripling the price of tens of millions of Americans’ health insurance premiums is A-Ok, but proposing free childcare and public transit is class warfare. Dropping the mask, indeed.

I’ve been feeling quite doom & gloom about #COP given no USA, China, india, but christiana figueres (how to tag?) @edmilibandmp.bsky.social & TheClimatePodcast @outrageoptimism.bsky.social pointed out that at Copenhagen we 🌎 were headed for 4-5 🔥 and now it’s 2.5-3 degrees So… progress … ?..?

Today I learned Kavanaugh was 1 of the investigators on Ken Starr’s team. That team: *Threatened Lewinsky w/27 yrs in jail if she didn’t cooperate. *Threatened to prosecute Lewinsky’s mom unless she wore a wire. *Interrogated her for 12 hrs. *Denied her attempts to speak to her lawyer. She was 24.

Obviously it's never an unpopular move to take money away from lawyers. I get that. But if you make it uneconomical to work as a solicitor or barrister suing the Government, then that same Government can essentially do whatever it wants without fear of being stopped in the courts.

My daughter Alma is very sick. She has blisters all over her body due to infection and a severe ear infection. She needs treatment. Please help us. The crossings are still closed and the situation is bad.😣😣 Please share and help us💔🙏🏻 chuffed.org/project/1566...

This has brought back my faith in humanity. Lots of people saying they’d rather sell clothing on Vinted for only £1 then see it go to waste when charity shops can’t sell or take them. We might solve the #fashion waste crisis after all. @samanthataylor.bsky.social www.reddit.com/r/vinted/s/J...

3/ One of the two panels described how a million African-Americans volunteered for service during World War II, but had to fight against both the enemy and racism on their own side, including segregation within the army itself that confined many to supporting roles.

2/ The Dutch newspaper reports that two memorial panels installed at the NAC were removed some time earlier this year. They commemorated African-American soldiers who helped liberate Europe from German occupation during World War II.

Well this is disgusting. This should be a huge political scandal in the USA, but it's not. Because they've effectively switched sides and nobody in any position of authority the USA disagrees enough to condemn it.

Climate crisis doesn’t differentiate between the wealthy and the poor. It also doesn’t care if you believe in it or not. It is dangerous for everyone.

In 1989 England and Wales became the only countries *IN THE WORLD* to have a fully privatised water and sewage disposal system. The companies profits have doubled in the last 6 years alone. Shareholders interests > investment in infrastructure and environmental impact. Free money basically...

Judging from the mass media there's nothing to see here. The money, jobs, and benefits to be gained from investing heavily in renewable energy are rarely even mentioned. Instead, it's wall to wall immigrant bashing, if not out and out racism.

All those people who think they can dodge the effects of the climate crisis because they live in a nice developed country are about to get punched in the face. It’s coming in hard everywhere.

Bill Clinton raised income tax on the rich in 1993 and there followed a long economic boom plus re-election

Horrific. Astounding that some of the children of the survivors (Netanyahu etc) now do similar to others

How about bringing Corporation Tax, Capital Gains Tax and the tax on dividends in line with income tax? Why do the people who actually work pay the highest tax of all and significantly more than those who don't work?

"with 1 trillion dollars, Elon Musk could-" He doesn't have one trillion dollars. He's not going to have one trillion dollars. The company promising to give him one trillion dollars isn't worth one trillion dollars. It's not going to be worth one trillion dollars.

Drax still doing what Drax does: burning old-growth forests in order to be Britain's no. 1 producer of CO2.

Governments and transport secretaries come and go. But Treasury Brain is timeless and eternal

Two years ago, the world made a bold commitment. To triple renewable energy capacity and double energy efficiency by 2030. We have good news. 95% of new energy capacity worldwide comes from renewables. We are moving ever faster towards these goals ↓ link.europa.eu/h4RVrW

Meanwhile, if anyone thinks there are are many Reform voters who think "I have zero trust in Labour on immigration, the small boats are still arriving, but *this* latest gesture at hardline policy is the one that will make me look again" I have a bridge to sell you. So who is this policy for?

Anyone else find no coffee means totally sleepy and useless but a coffee means heart racing? The old happy medium of a nice wake-up seems gone; yet naturally wake by 7am each day no matter 8 or 5 hours sleep. #peri #menop

They expect their privileged access to political leadership to continue unabated. Mamdani’s alleigance is to regular NYC residents and not the monied elites.

Israel’s underground jail, where Palestinians are held without charge and never see daylight - The Guardian

Miraculously, he didn’t hit a single CDC employee! But he did kill David Rose, the police officer who responded, who leaves behind two children and a pregnant wife. I can't help but imagine the vast attention this case would have received if the race of the shooter and the victim were reversed.

It’s hard to overstate the scale of death in Darfur. “These are people being shot in the back and shot while they’re trying to escape. It’s as bad as it could possibly get,” a former Africa analyst for the C.I.A. said. https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/qVoDbI

Important thread here on the possibility of scrapping ECO. I would add that when ECO was cut in 2013, 10,000 people lost their jobs. That's more than 3 times as many than Scunthorpe steel works and a whopping 20 times more than Grangemouth oil refinery

Jailed UK climate protesters facing conditions reserved for extremists on release

This study by my colleagues at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa shows that deep sea mining waste to be released near the ocean surface would disrupt marine food webs. The same would be true of grinding and spreading rocks in the ocean for CO₂ removal. 🌊

Not enough attention is being paid to the effective closure of the bulk of one of the 2 or 3 most important public archives for modern British history. A terrible own goal for the BBC as a public-service agency.

Someone at a Russell Group university was moved to almost-poetry by their Faculty Meeting… Can anyone do better?

This is the man who Tesla's board and shareholders, even having witnessed his unhinged performance over the last year, think is worth one trillion dollars. One thousand billion. One million million. They've completely taken leave of reality. No one, least of all Musk, can possibly be worth this.

Maths... If you make $100,000 a year (not bad), it will take you 10 MILLION years to earn a trillion dollars. If you make a million dollars a year (wow!), it'll still take you a million years to earn a trillion dollars. Tax the rich.

In 2008, a blogger named Curtis Yarvin called for a future president to kill foreign aid programs as part of a plan to replace democracy with dictatorship. Now 600,000 people are dead—and 14 million will die by 2030, according to the Lancet. This is the running death toll of tech fascism.

Countries around the world have agreed to phase out the use of mercury-based dental amalgams in tooth fillings by 2034, a move that will change the practice of dentistry. The World Health Organization considers mercury one of the top 10 chemicals of major public health concern u.afp.com/Sn4Z

I’m not sure which is the worst part of ADHD, this or time blindness, but oof, yeah:

#Firstview: Lucy Right, Jeremy Springman & Erik Wibbels on what happens when foreign governments restrict NGO activity. www.cambridge.org/core/journal... They find that donors most committed to democracy promotion back down in the face of restrictive NGO laws.

SV40 used in the manufacture of the vaccine pre 1963 appears to be his reasoning. Like most conspiracy theorists they often take negative out of date information and dont bother to update. The potential issue of SV40 he refers to in interviews was dealt with in the early 60's.

So really do need a new phone now after about 5 years. Choices are refurbished iphone £200, @Fairphone £400 (minimum). I can't see any refurbished/2nd hand fairphones for sale. But paying DOUBLE...?

A 🇨🇦 connection: Stephen Harper was in the Fraser Institute, part of the Atlas Network, prior to becoming PM. While PM he chose Carney as our central banker. Carney is now our Liberal PM. Yesterday Carney brought forward a very fossil fuel friendly budget and previously passed C5. Coincidence?

🚭 As a pharmacist I know smoking isn’t just a health crisis — it’s an economic one too. 📊 Nearly 1 million smokers in England are now too unwell to work — an 80% rise in a decade. 💸 Smoking costs our economy £27.6 billion a year. ⚠️ Smokers are 3x more likely to be out of work due to poor health.

honestly i find the logic in gates' memo and this subsequent op-ed so muddy and confused that it seems almost futile to try to untangle it...instead i recommend reading @michaelemann.bsky.social in @thebulletin.org thebulletin.org/2025/10/you-...

This? Arrested for these totally peaceful Candlelight vigils? I took this sat amongst about 100,000 people, singing. The world barely gets more special, than when we can come together, freely give those one doesn't know a candle & leaflet, sit, sing, listen, share, pray, peacefully leave #HongKong

All in favour of shared spaces that get people out and about and it you’re going to burn money on gambling then yeah, better to do so with a friendly person on hand. But still some incredible “men’s mental health” lobbying against a gambling tax in the Sunday Times. www.thetimes.com/article/f115...

Important reporting from Louise Callaghan Men think they’re watching sex-cam models. In fact they’re slaves www.thetimes.com/article/23c8...

And to stuff the for profit prison industry that donated heavily to Trump. Stocks in Core Civic and the GEO Group skyrocketed when Trump became “president”.

You haven’t heard as much about Sudan because people in Sudan aren’t able to broadcast their suffering on social media the way many others are but it is really bleak there. This is just the tip of the iceberg. 🎁🔗