Goes back to the golden rule that if you want some kind of fudge with the EU you need to make the effort to look as unthreatening as possible bsky.app/profile/dune...

Jeffrey Epstein claims he gave Russians insight into Trump

NEW: Jeffrey Epstein said in emails that he had been advising the Russian government on how to deal with Donald Trump, one of several cases in which he wielded his connections to try to influence the course of foreign affairs. w @nahaltoosi www.politico.com/news/2025/11...

Professors at the Collège de France say that the systematic cancelation of colloquia and seminars dealing with questions relating to Palestine demanded by groups like Jonathan Greenblatt's ADL presents a grave threat to academic freedom www.lemonde.fr/idees/articl...

It is crazy that there is no testing or licensing regime for these things, dozens of deaths later. A drug which had such serious mental side effects would have been withdrawn instantly

Underscoring how exceptionally lawless the maritime strikes are.

every company in 2025

Your regular reminder that “postliberalism” is just Catholic integralism — the revival of which started in 2018 with a debate over whether it was ok for a 19th century pope to kidnap a Jewish child (recall firstthings.com/non-possumus/).

What resonates so grimly with the Epstein crimes is the way rape renders women and girls invisible. Even when the focus is on legal accountability for the men who rape, it’s *their* states of mind, their conspiracies, their infighting that takes up all the oxygen.

These men are nothing. Just howling vacancies. Many of them—the complicit ones, those who looked the other way—are not even monsters, just opportunistic mediocrities. But we spin endless breathless narratives about them and let the people whose lives they wrecked slip into abstraction.

If I allow myself to really stop and think about the disregard for the humanity of girls that these people had, and what it says about society's disregard for the humanity of girls and women that they are STILL in positions of power and prestige, existing in this society may become untenable

I’m glad that some of these emails are coming out and I hope people keep asking the White House about them. At the same time, I just finished @manongarcia.bsky.social’s excellent Living With Men, about the Pelicot trial, and I have never had less hope that anyone will care 😔

One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/777485...

Wow and I always thought the most damning citation of Larry Summers was the epigraph from *Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor* (2011)

The Epstein Files have caused the United States to initiate DEFCON 2.

Why hello there former US Treasury Secretary, president of Harvard, and director of the National Economic Council Larry Summers. Sharing with alt so we can all bask in his hidden insights that we are NOT allowed to share. And here's the source link: oversightdemocrats.house.gov/sites/evo-su...

There is absolutely clear and compelling evidence that X is in breach of its legal obligations in the UK, under both the Online Safety Act and the Equality Act, because This point landed well with the Women & Equalities Select Committee today

Ireland's media regulator has launched an investigation into X It has good reasons to suspect X is not meeting its legal obligations to run a legally compliant complaints system in Ireland. It is not giving users who report unlawful content the chance to appeal www.cnam.ie/coimisiun-na...

Today the British union IWGB said it has filed formal legal claims against Rockstar Games for firing 30+ employees two weeks ago, as Bloomberg first reported. Rockstar said the employees were leaking information. The IWGB calls it union-busting. More to come as the legal process plays out...

This sounds reasonable but is 100% wrong. Whether you or agree or disagree with a study is completely immaterial. What matters is whether the study was conducted properly and generates valid results. And it's impolitic to say but it's true: you have to have some level of expertise to judge that.

Supermarkets should put all their price data on line to enable real time price comparisons.

Goldsmith had a decent piece a couple weeks back that pointed out all the systemic/institutional challenges towards any prosecution that would result from an OLC memo saying this I'm cooking up a framework for overcoming that, because sorry, OLC can't just legalize murder

Too bad I've just finished my statutory interpretation classes!

generally definition of terms in legislation only arises when you are departing from ordinary meaning in some way (either through narrowing it down or expansion). I am not quite sure what the motivation is here - particularly as the definition is an exhaustive ("means") one.

Scientists and academics, well known for agreeing with each other all the time

@adamserwer.bsky.social la tocca pianissimo...

The longevity of the Mafia in Italy serves as a warning that, once this style of rule embeds itself in the state, it is “very difficult to extract,” Adam Serwer argues. https://theatln.tc/cmuUQ5Rh

Musk is very confused - the EU Commission president is nominated by leaders of (elected) govts and approved by the (elected) European Parliament, not 'appointed by a committee'.

“In an email from January 2019, Mr. Epstein wrote to Mr. Wolff of Mr. Trump: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”” Starting to see why Mike Johnson kept the House shut down for weeks rather than allow the 218th signature to release the Epstein docs…

'Ofcom has not responded to our follow-up request for additional information. That means there's no way for the public to know whether the data provider is a company with a track record of protecting people’s privacy, or one known to use invasive surveillance techniques.'

The British government admits it is now monitoring VPNs use by UK residents. Regulator Ofcom has contracted with an AI-powered surveillance service to detect the number of citizens using VPNs to evade the Online Safety Act. The UK tech minister has said a VPN ban is on the table.

Breaking News: House Democrats released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein alleged that Donald Trump knew of the convicted sex offender's conduct and “spent hours at my house” with a victim.

The only thing that can actually make this regime fall at the moment… www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/u...

Spectator running a piece by Daniel Hannan which leans heavily into the inferred idea that you're not necessarily British if you come from a migrant background, even if you were born and brought up here.

The Economic and Social Research Council core budget for 24/25 was £134m, not £8 billion.

We covered plenty of ground here. (I also enjoyed venting a little about some of the more bad faith/badly reasoned criticisms of the Strasbourg case-law.)

Yesterday, House of Lords in the sunshine (and over 2 hours giving evidence to committee!). Today? A rainy picket line because my employer is closing vital depts and cutting staff from our university.

I also think that this was very nearly a miscarriage of justice and in these cases it would be helpful to have a harm-prevention investigation. Why did thinks go so badly wrong before the Circuit Judge? Why was the mistake spotted so late?

This case really reinforces my concern about the British state and its attitude towards data. Orders being treated as mere requests to be actioned at will. Junior staff members making blanket assertions about IT systems. It is all rather Horizon-like.

This is an appalling judgment to read. Two Chief Constables found in contempt of court for misleading the court about the existence of video footage. But this was only discovered when the matter made it to the Court of Appeal. Incredible perseverance. www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWC...

Christianity Today is an influential magazine in Evangelical circles, and it's a noteworthy signpost that they're doing stories like this because it's the kind of story that pops bubbles.

Medieval Peasant Brain USA

For someone who made decisions as if he were trying to get fired, this took surprisingly long www.dallasnews.com/sports/maver...

Unless it's Manchester

I asked about this, and one of our excellent librarians discovered that in fact AI summaries/"Research Assistant" can be switched off at the level of the library. Something to request. support.proquest.com/s/article/Eb...

One of the best Italian comedians ever (Corrado Guzzanti) had kind of foreseen what we are witnessing now ten years ago youtu.be/ELgzMk-3BZQ?...

I look forward to the instant movie about Nico Harrison

famous rule of war: never march on Chicago in the winter

Russian state media are today alleging that a Bellingcat reporter was involved in an attempt to hijack a Russian fighter plane. We would like to make clear that Bellingcat had absolutely no involvement in the alleged activities and the accusations towards us are entirely false.