They've lost the 9yos

Thinking about several hundred thousand Gazans ...

The Hot Fuzz Swan, (Stage name Gregory Peck), papped leaving his agent's office earlier today. They both had a good laugh about Farage as Greg once nearly got eaten by an overacting Mark Rylance filming a Wolf Hall banquet scene in the Bishops Palace in Wells. @edgarwright.bsky.social

BREAKING: Stunning new documents lay bare Carter-Ruck’s attempts to silence whistleblowers and cast doubt on police probe www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025...

Think the Tony Blair Institute looks sinister? You've not seen anything yet. Crucial investigation by @petergeoghegan.bsky.social and Democracy for Sale: democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-the...

Hermes bag: 20k Documented donations to the Iona Institute from far-right groups like the Novae Terrae Foundation: at least 25k? The grassroots desire for an alternative voice: priceless

How many times does this shite have to get debunked?

This post contains possibly the most evil invention I have ever come up with

Thread The Times #Journalism

Anyone who writes the sentence "Average IQ, having risen for the entire 20th century, now appears to be falling" (sans citation, I might add) does not merit attention, time or energy. For an article that sneers at academia, it is curiously ill-read, under-cited and makes fantastical stretches/claims

However, he acquired effective editorial control before that with the appointment of John Witherow against the wishes of the supposedly independent editorial board.

Hello Jonathan. Former Times night editor here. Yes, there appears to be no interest or effort made anymore to fact-check columnists or for that matter news and features. It's not the subs, it's political. The Times has not been a newspaper for some time. Murdoch gained editorial control in 2022.

(I've noticed that the Times has entirely given up on fact-checking its columnists -fairly sure this didn't use to be the case?)

I have to acknowledge that this by @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social does an excellent job of proving its own point, by being appallingly badly researched (mostly random and inaccurate/misleading snippets from X, I think). I blame the Times more than Oxford, though. archive.ph/kYfps

A 7% decline in English birds in just 5 years is astonishing The web of life is unravelling fast

Following his appearance on a panel with Alastair Campbell, Curtis Yarvin: How the Alt-Right Gets In Byline Times examines the writings of the thinker who is apparently… https://bylinetimes.com/2025/09/24/curtis-yarvin-how-the-alt-right-gets-in/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=jetpack_social

I'm talking about my experience of listening to and watching the BBC bulletins since Trump delivered his unhinged one hour rant at the UN. James Landale covered some of the content here but the BBC neutralised its repugnance and mendacity of with a “tame” headline.

If the BBC was your only source of news you’d have no idea Trump told world leaders -UK & Europe are “going to hell” -climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” -“immigration and suicidal energy ideas will be the death of western Europe” -London has adopted Sharia law

Auto lender’s bust raises alarms over financial health of US households on.ft.com/46CGMYG

Where the separate divisions of ANTIFA landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944:

If anything good came out of WW2, surely I was the defeat of fascism and a warning about not to go down that route again.

The forest was shrinking but the trees kept voting for the axe, for the axe was clever and convinced the trees that because his handle was made of wood he was one of them.

Chris Mason’s defence of the BBC over Farage coverage goes badly wrong Soon after its political editor denied giving Reform an easy ride, the Beeb broadcast 56 minutes of the populist’s press conference, live www.thenewworld.co.uk/rats-in-a-sa...

Today the BBC reported on asylum seekers relying on home office-funded taxis to get around. But as I heard when I visited Bristol City of Sanctuary, this isn't the reality for many - it's being forced to walk for hours to get to appointments, sometimes with kids, or miss out on essentials.

Aussie Dr Nada Abu Alrub, who is working at Al Shifa hospital, says the IDF are now just 400m away We know that when Israeli forces storm hospitals in Gaza they murder Palestinian healthcare workers & abduct others, disappearing them into prisons where they are tortured & killed

Introducing a protected minimum floor together with ending the two-child limit would lift 500,000 children out of poverty by the end of the parliament and reduce the depth of poverty for a further 1 million. 6/6 Read more here: www.jrf.org.uk/child-povert...

At @jrf-uk.bsky.social we are calling for the Government to complete a protected minimum floor 15% below Universal Credit's standard allowance. This would limit all reductions, including from the benefit cap, to this level and would be a low-cost step towards an Essentials Guarantee. 5/6

The benefit cap also interacts with the two-child limit. Scrapping the two-child limit without addressing this will see more families impacted by the benefit cap. The Government must tackle these policies in its upcoming child poverty strategy. 4/6

The benefit cap disproportionately hits families already at high risk of poverty. Of families with children affected: - around 5 in 6 are single-parent families - over half have 3 or more children - over half have a youngest child under 5 years old 3/6

New DWP data today shows 123,000 families – including 103,000 (over 4 in 5) with children – had their Universal Credit reduced by the benefit cap in May 2025. This eats into UC’s already inadequate basic rate, pulling it further below what’s needed to afford life's essentials. 1/6

DAILY MAIL: DAN HODGES: This is damning proof Starmer's most senior adviser tried to pull the wool over the eyes of electoral officials. The net is closing Archive: archive.today/hUBmz

Crypto hoarders turn to share buybacks in push to boost falling stock prices - on.ft.com/4mtEYXS

Just found out that George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, written around 1948, describes a "versificator" that composes the words for songs "entirely by mechanicsl means" simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/6/n...

Settlers just attacked the village of Al-Mughayir, in the northern West Bank. In the attack, one of the settlers shot and killed a 20-year-old Palestinian man, Saeed Murad Al-Nassan. All the settlers were wearing white, in honor of the Jewish holiday.

Q: Do you support defund the police A: No Q: Do you support defunding the police A: Yes

A friend working in—and enthusiastic about—AI asked me how kids were using it in K–12 schools now, so I asked my kids. Kids: "Cheating." Me: "Yeah, I figured, but have you ever had a teacher try to use it for something el—" Kids: "No, it's for cheating. For writing papers for you."

Don't think I've ever felt this embarrassed to be an American. There's shame and anger too. But mostly embarrassment. We're the laughingstock of the developed world. And we should be.

...apparently he tweeted about it several days ago. it seems weird that The Economist purposely hid his name from readers. unless of course they knew that readers might already be aware of Jəsse's long history of bias on this issue...

so the Economist article isn't attributed an author. but someone in the replies of this 🧵 tipped me off that it was Jəsse Singal. & it turns out that it was, which in retrospect isn't surprising (as he's one of the ppl who would never answer this question):

many ppl highlighting flaws in this article. but having fought in the "80% desistance" wars of the mid-2010s, I remember asking anti-trans activists if they'd be ok if 80% of youth were helped by gender-affirming care (flipping their argument). & they *never* answered. b/c they want *zero* trans ppl

Perhaps Chris Mason can offer an explanation to this.

What on Earth is this? An "in depth" BBC article about free speech in the UK that only cites examples of right-wing/ 'anti-woke' speech being suppressed. How can you mention Lucy Connolly but completely ignore Palestine Action / Just Stop Oil? Gob-smacking. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Watch the rich scramble to grasp their hoards even more tightly.

I was pretty late to covering AI but seemed to get it right in February 2023 www.wheresyoured.at/degenerative...

Benedict Cumberbatch recites Mahmoud Darwish’s poem: “On this land, there are reasons to live. This land, the lady of lands, the motherland of beginnings, the motherland of all ends. She was known as Palestine; she, forevermore, will be known as Palestine. My land, my lady, you’re a reason to live.”

A boy carried his little sister for miles while fleeing the war zone. Gaza, September, 2025. 📸 PHOT unk.

More music for the Rapture! youtu.be/l482T0yNkeo?...

It slowly dawns on the FT that Milei is a fucking lunatic, his top economy team are ex-trader wideboys and that he and the sister deliberately spat in the face of every party and politician outside his inner circle that might help him.

On the one hand, it is *incredibly* aggravating that this is being Noticed now, and Noticed via being passed to a Tory MP to make it look like a new story in particular. On the other, this letter is a Who’s Who of people who spent early 2024 bragging to journos about how smart they’d been.