Vor genau 100 Jahren, am 22. Dezember 1925, wurde Berlins erste Rolltreppe heutiger Bauart im Warenhaus Tietz in der Leipziger Straße in Betrieb genommen. Am Fuß der Treppe gab ein umgeschulter Liftboy Anweisungen und Hilfestellung.

Happy winter solstice, to all who celebrate!

Shoppers pack Market Street, Manchester, on the last Saturday before Christmas, 19 December 1987.

"Bradage de la traduction, plan social invisible : Harlequin passe à l’IA" Faites tourner, parce qu'il va falloir se battre encore plus. :/ #traduction #IA #Harlequin #ATLF

Hard no to this: French publisher Harlequin has told translators that their work will now be done by AI. They can ‘revise’ AI translations at much lower rate. It’s a subsidiary of Harper Collins so treat this as a test for rollout elsewhere

French publisher Harlequin stops using professional translators to translate books, and intends to use AI instead. I wonder what the impact will be on the readability and quality of the books? #xl8 #translation oecd.ai/en/incidents...

French publishing house Harlequin decided to use AI translation instead of human translations. All their freelance translators (some of whom had been working with Harlequin for +30y!!!) were told they would no longer receive work from Harlequin

Translation / book publishing news: Harlequin, a publisher owned by Harper Collins, has informed their French translators that they will in future be using AI to translate novels. #xl8

Remember how I said I have it written into my foreign-language contracts that my work has to be translated by an actual human? This shit is why. Those book translations are gonna suck. They'll save money putting out books that are going to be painful to read. That's not a great long-term strategy.

Delighted to see that Britain is rejoining the Erasmus scheme. Encouraging our young people to experience other cultures, to meet people from other cultures. www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c4...

This sounds like a wonderful first step!

Your regular reminder 👇 🏥 81% want publicly owned NHS 🏫 78% want publicly owned schools 💧 73% want publicly owned water 🚂 70% want publicly owned rail ✉️ 70% want publicly owned mail 🚍 67% want publicly owned buses 💡 65% want publicly owned energy

Remember how biased and leading the questions were in favour of the AI companies? And this was still the response.

Close one for one of my club mates today…having a deer skim his face after it landed in the road in front of him, then launched itself over the hedge on the other side🦌🫣

Campaign to tackle drop in A-level language studies in south west buff.ly/6eIbUWu #langsky #xl8

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Our Manchester RoSPA Advanced Drivers group has had a busy 2025. We've given advanced driving training to 30 people this year, and rounded off the year with news that an associate from our latest 8-week course has passed their advanced test at Silver standard. www.safedriversandriders.org.uk

I'm reading a novel, translated from another language. And feeling a tad disappointed that I can see the syntax and structure of the source language shining through far too clearly in this translation. #xl8

Thatchersim — still the basis of so much of our economy — worked by making us buy things we already owned, using money we borrowed from our grandkids, and then cancelling the maintenance and calling it "savings". And now everything is broken.

🚨New research published today🚨 Reforms to Scottish disability payments suggest that the system can be kinder without being costlier. Full story 👉 buff.ly/OAMzq06

What does passing a RoSPA Advanced Driving (or riding) test at Gold standard mean? Take a look below. "Gold is only awarded to a driver who shows a consistently high standard of driving throughout the test." Keeping our roads safe. #rospa #advanceddriving #greatermanchester #roadsafety

The Nobel Prize committee should announce the World Cup winner tomorrow

It’s a quirk of history that Berlin’s former U Bahn stock were sold off North Korea, where they’re used on the Pyongyang metro. The former Berlin trainsets were given a new red and cream livery, and all advertising was replaced by portraits of leaders. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyongya...

Gotta love it when you stay home so you can receive an Amazon delivery due "13:15 - 16:15" Then it gets to 15:30, and suddenly Amazon have changed it to "3:45 to 7:45 pm". Gee, thanks for nothing Amazon! Sigh ...

Rétro Station Service ⛽️ ESSO ⛽️ Avec pompes & VW Cox sur l'Alpenstra ße à la limite sud de Salzbourg 1967

I'm "your listener", Chris Mason. I want to know why Boris Johnson isn't in jail, not whether Rachel Reeves left some details out of a few interviews. #r4today

Indeed. This is not the BBC's job and to make it worse, in the same piece, Chris Mason again lurches into opinion and gives government carte blanche when he absolutely should not have!

Eine Berliner Erfindung, ohne die kaum eine deutsche Stadt auskommt: Das S-Bahn-Logo. Weißes S auf grünem Hintergrund. Anfang Dezember 1930 wurde es eingeführt, um ein starkes Markenzeichen in Abgrenzung zur U-Bahn zu schaffen.

I am glad common sense has prevailed. BUT The UK’s fastest-growing city-region should not be in the position of having to beg and plead for basic rail connectivity. A plan to improve Manchester-London services in the short, medium and long terms is now well overdue.

A Decade-Long Study Shows Cycling Helps Older Adults Live Longer, Healthier Lives. momentummag.com/a-decade-lon...

#Kunde* kauft ein Fieberthermometer. #DerApotheker: Wichtig: Die rektale Messung ist die genaueste! #Kunde: Ah, OK! Vielen Dank! Zu seiner Frau: Kannst du es mir hinten reinstecken? #DerApotheker: Oh, bitte erst zuhause messen! 😜 #Kunde: In meinen Rucksack, meinte ich! 😂😂😂

Even Brexiters are beginning to acknowledge the damage Brexit has done to the economy, and Westminster needs to catch up. Facing reality is the first step towards repairing the harm and rebuilding a serious relationship with Europe.

So we are already back to the levels of migration of the early 2010s and declining faster... let's hope all those new restrictions, based on previous higher numbers, don't make Britain massively unattractive to those migrants the government DOES wish to attract.

The OBR says the rise in claims was linked to the cost of living crisis The way disabled people have been vilified over PIP, as if they were trying to play the system, was disgusting & shameful Hacks & commentators that engaged in the grotesque demonisation of disabled people should be ashamed.

“The Motability scheme was set up to protect the most vulnerable. Not to subsidise the lease on a Mercedes Benz,” Reeves says. Misleading and nasty in equal measure.

I am not sure that "encouraging" people to invest in stock markets if they wish to have tax-free savings is wise. Most people in the UK do not have the skills to invest successfully in the stock markets. It sounds like a good way to lose money for a lot of people!

Off out into town this evening for a Chinese meal with "the lad". Bit of quality father and son time!

Rachel Reeves has removed Audi, BMW, Mercedes from the motability scheme because disabled people aren’t allowed nice things ignoring the better resale values and the fact cars like the Audi A1 and BMW 1-series are hardly limos www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/con...

Did you know that government levies have driven more than half of the rise in electricity bills in recent years? Read 'Splitting the bill' to find out how to cut energy bills 👉 buff.ly/sHhw6L1

I was helping out a friend who's looking for publishers to submit her translation (into French) and it was really eye opening how all the French indie presses I looked at had detailed transparent and open submissions guidelines compared to their anglophone equivalents

🚨 ♾ Our report out yesterday calls on HM Government to deliver an effective new autism strategy. Open this link committees.parliament.uk/committee/77... to view the following: - Full report - Easy Read report - Report summary with conclusions and recommendations - Shorthand

REMINDER: Our report shall be published on Sunday 23 November. From this date, open this link committees.parliament.uk/committee/77... to access the following: - Full report - Report summary with the list of conclusions and recommendations - Shorthand (shorter summary of our report's key points)

A failure by successive UK governments to create a public awareness campaign on autism during “misinformed public discourse” about the condition is “both striking and unacceptable”, a report by a House of Lords Select Committee reviewing the 2009 Autism Act has said.

Today, @hlautismactcom.parliament.uk published their report, 'Time to deliver: The Autism Act 2009 and the new autism strategy'. Access the full report and recommendations (including easy read report, video from the Chair, and shorthand story) here: committees.parliament.uk/committee/77... [1/4]

Gmail users!! They've turned on AI scraping by default now...Here's how to turn it off. Pass it on!! www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...

Whiteside above Lorton #landscape #photography #shotoniphone 📷

So, if you're organising a conference, we all recognise that having an all-male discussion panel would be wrong. Not reflecting gender mix properly. And how about the voices quoted in promotional materials? Should there be diversity of gender there, too?

"Quand il fera froid il n'y aura plus aucun cycliste sur les pistes cyclables" bah non ! À Paris, peu importe la météo, le vélo reste une partie inéluctable de la mobilité... tant qu'on a des infrastructures sécurisées 🧐

Compare and contrast the Government language. £3,750 EV grant on a £35k car: ‘helping families’. Cycle to Work: ‘subsidising leisure’. And yet cycling delivers TEN TIMES the impact of electric cars for reaching net zero. It’s almost like narrative, not data, is driving policy.