"In one chapter [of Cottrell's book] entitled 'The Art of the Bribe', [he] sets out how politicians can be bought....'Long-term relationships keep the bought person in hand while you're making money'". Subtle. www.ft.com/content/7a0f...

Latest Reform star is this councillor who thought, “forget data protection I’ll use private information held by the council to promote my mates business” www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home...

Good to see pushback on this www.theguardian.com/education/20...

UEFA: “.. Football, like any other sports, relies on rules .. We express our disbelief at such an unprecedented, incomprehensible and unjustifiable decision.” www.uefa.com/news-media/n...

Nearly 400 local newspapers sue OpenAI, Microsoft over alleged copyright theft newjerseyglobe.com/media/nearly...

'What is perhaps remarkable about the Exeter cuts is that they are targeted at some of the university’s most successful departments, many of which turn over a profit even after they have made enormous and increasing contributions to the central university budget.' Read, rage and weep.

The sums involved in the MPs expenses scandal were chicken feed compared to the Farage £5m. HIs reaction - mind your own business - suggests he may not be cut out for this democracy thing app.prospectmagazine.co.uk/story/73952/...

Sat here wondering if Peter Murrell ever bought an air conditioner that's still in its box somewhere not being used.

“We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” - ChatGPT

The divisions within the Irish Freedom Party, split between the Kelly and Leahy factions, appears to have cost it (for now, at least) its status a registered political party in Ireland. www.independent.ie/irish-news/p...

Notable that there was no attempt to collectively blame a community of people for the crimes of Jeffrey Donaldson last night, and portray them as an existential threat requiring surveillance. Can’t possibly think why.

Lewis Hawkes, 36, charged with “terrorism-linked” attempted murders in Edinburgh

Children are being used as “dispensable” weapons by organised criminals and hostile states paying for crimes including murder and arson, international law enforcement leaders have warned The NCA says “younger and younger” childre are being investigated as perpetrators inews.co.uk/news/how-bri...

End of an Keir-a.

David Prior John Black George Parnell All on the BNP list, all Reform UK candidates.

Government report warns of growing concern over far-right extremism in #Ireland www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41...

Five men have been injured in a series of suspected anti-Muslim attacks as a bare-chested man was seen roaming the streets of Edinburgh with a large weapon.

When Al Cairns is given a platform to decry ongoing Troubles-era investigations he avoids any focus on the repeated settlements and formal apologies which continue to be made in collusion cases. These inconvenient cases are written out of all "lawfare" complaints: www.irishnews.com/news/norther...

Never fails to miss.

EXCLUSIVE A former ice cream salesman, whose only medical training is watching videos online, treats stage 4 cancer patients in his central London clinic by sealing them naked in a plastic bag and gassing them with toxic bleach www.wired.com/story/pseudo...

Thirty-five killed as gunmen attack Niger's biggest airport www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

This is just the end stages of the ERG22+ as was (and the ERG-R isn’t far behind it, despite a nod to protective factors etc.) When *everyone* is allegedly “vulnerable” to radicalisation, then policy has to follow the logic. And here it is.

Ulster Workers’ Council strike 2.0. #NorthernIreland #Belfast www.thejournal.ie/psni-looking...

🔴 SCOOP: Farage doesn't seem to want to answer questions about his money. So I went looking - and found that the Reform leader's personal company is in breach of UK company law democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-n...

More trouble for Tommy Robinson. He’s been working with Russia propagandists to incite violence in the UK well before fuelling pogroms in Belfast last week, from his well heeled perched in Moscow with agents like Malofeev BBC report t.co/xTQuLCVNDa

“Legitimate concerns” are never expressed through burning people out of their homes. If homes are being burned out, then it is something more than “legitimate concerns“. It is extremism. www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/violenc...

If the government was concerned with safety - of all kinds - it would ban AI, not social media as such.

The question isn’t really about whether it was lawful to proscribe. It is whether the proscription makes the UK safer, and is a good use of counter-terrorism resources. Or if those resources might be better focused elsewhere. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

If you have been using X over the last year, you are likely to have seen claims that rent boys were behind the arson attacks on Keir Starmer's former homes and car We charted how the *completely false* conspiracy theory spread from far right 'patriots' and conspiracists inews.co.uk/news/starmer...

Tommy Robinson detained at Heathrow under counter-terrorism laws

Some thoughts on the week's events in Belfast and racist attacks in general. open.substack.com/pub/saturday...

Some of the media struggling with the Belfast events. If a group is burning migrants out of their homes it isn’t whether they’ve been “influenced” by the far-right. It’s that they are the far-right.

One thing that no help is required with in Belfast is orchestrating a riot. www.wired.com/story/a-whit...

Swedish man killed in Limerick crash was on his way to carry out contract killing

Migration has become fully “PREVENT-ified“. The logic of all vulnerable to radicalisation has reached final boss level with framing all vulnerability and vulnerabilities as inherently risky from a national security perspective. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Agree with this. Let’s revisit this and see where the few outliers are in mid-July. Nor, I suspect, will any alliance between Dublin and Belfast be enduring for all sorts of reasons.

Immigrants were being attacked, threatened, and intimidated out of their homes in Northern Ireland long before algorithms and influencers were in the vernacular.

Also, there were posters being put up in some areas focused on landlords/HMOs and targeted graffitI on properties for quite some time. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

If you think that the folks who were burning houses out in Belfast needed any encouragement from outside actors, then you probably haven’t been paying attention for the last century or so.

"Remigration" is a clean word for an ugly idea: ethnic cleansing. Last month several hundred of Europe's far right gathered in a hotel near Porto, Portugal, to turn it into policy. We went inside. hopenothate.org.uk/2026/06/11/r...

Academic writing should be addressed neither to the public nor to other academics. It should be addressed to a single interlocutor with whom you have a petty rivalry and whose work you are trying to discredit

Odd how those who claim asylum decisions should be traceable to the individuals who make them never seem to make a similar case about those security force and intelligence service operatives whose decisions got people killed in Northern Ireland.

Of all the comments after the horrendous attack in Belfast, the notion that those who make asylum decisions should somehow be “traceable” is one of the worst.

In Mississippi, lawyers on both sides of a court case were caught using AI, essentially two LLMs arguing against each other. The judge dismissed all lawyers from the case and canceled the trial: www.404media.co/judge-learns...