1. As Jared Kushner heads to Pakistan to represent the United States in critical talks with Iran, the media is ignoring a historic corruption scandal. Kushner is serving in this role while on the payroll of the Saudi government. Let's look at the data. 🧵

Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.

Surprise, surprise. www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/...

Of course it won't protect unpopular views based in concern for fundamental human rights. Speakers voicing concern for Palestinians won't be allowed to speak in the first place. And I'm sure pro trans speakers will have to be "balanced" with gender critical speakers.

This is a policy to crack down on dissent and ensure that bigots can come onto campus and if any student disagrees with them, they can be suspended under the banner of protecting "free speech." It's absurd.

Once again. These people do not want freedom of speech, they want the freedom to monolog without criticism. They're going to end the freedom of speech of students to protest bigoted speakers they disagree with.

A new scoop from @writesbright.bsky.social for @desmog.com with The Mirror 👇 The £675K pocketed by Farage from foreign governments, companies & donors dwarfs his public salary. For me, this begs the question, Farage is Minister of Parliament for... who exactly? www.desmog.com/2026/04/18/n...

Again, a chance to remind everyone of this batshit episode - where Karp recited British fascist Oswald Mosley’s speeches for several minutes verbatim to Mosley’s stunned grandson whom Karp was interviewing for a job at Palantir. Karp then did some tai chi moves, left wordlessly - Mosley got the job.

Starmer will stand in Parliament today &, like Johnson before him, lie to try & save his job. Before this gets lost in the depths of procedure & fingerpointing, the bottom line is this: from watching the news as a child, I, a mere bum, knew Mandeslon was a corrupt individual, how did the PM not?

"'Lots of people think Keir Starmer is a good man who is out of his depth,' said one Labour insider. 'Wrong. He’s an asshole who’s out of his depth.'"

In my own personal opinion the crisis in universities is: the student loan scandal, fees, debt, high rents, poor quality housing, high transport costs, lack of flexible work, low wages, long waiting lists for counselling, lack of specialist support equipment for students, mass staffing cuts.

wish to exercise their own freedoms. Government should not be interfering with higher education. Doing so is a very, very authoritarian move.

Universities (and Student Unions) are private entities. They have a legal right as I understand it to allow or disallow whoever they wish from speaking on their premises. This law would end that and force them to platform any bigots/cranks who wish it, and leave them open to being fined if they /1

Starmer did this to the party, stopped members from debating and closed down protest. It was inevitable that in government they would go down the same route.

PS Gotta love how The Times' so-called Education Editor Nicola Woolcock has just invented a new Freedom of Speech Act. (HT @embergreen.bsky.social).

Bridget Phillipson will introduce new laws to make it possible for Universities to be fined millions of pounds if they don't silence students who protest bigots invited onto their campuses. It's like the Tories never left office.

In an image driven age and living lives surrounded by an abundance of horrific video, it is symbols and the unsaid and unseen that has the most power. One reason why zionists still continue to use October 7th as this great unique horror to justify bombing refugee camps

there’s a video of them blowing up an entire village in Lebanon, and it’s not the first one either.

(I do understand why the symbolism is especially bad for a government that is reliant on the total support of very racist Christian right wingers. I’m just saying it is bleak as hell).

I mean, all those videos and photos of soldiers riding around on children’s bikes taken from houses they were going to destroy, or parading about wearing women’s underwear they had taken from the houses of people they had evicted. But no, it’s the insult to Jesus that is so bad 🤷🏼‍♂️

This one seems to have caused panic, and it’s pretty bleak that a picture of a guy smashing a statue of a dude who died two thousand years ago is more internationally disastrous than hundreds of hours of video of civilians being bombed, burned, machine gunned, sniped, evicted and starved.

This sort of thing is very irritating. The Home Office are telling people that they WILL be able to apply for settlement after 10 years (this is from a grant under the current 10 year route). Totally irresponsible given the Earned Settlement proposal is a near certainty.

URGENT| Bientôt 1 mois sans aucun don pour la famille de Hani! Voici Younes, l'un des frères de Rowan. Il cherche du travail, en vain. Et ils n'ont pas de quoi subvenir à leurs besoins. La santé de leur tante Faten se dégrade également. Partagez SVP ! Donnez, même un peu 🔗✅ tinyurl.com/7kv295bc

The company run by the guy who literally said “I talk to nazis all the time online” while on camera? futurism.com/future-socie...

Very insensitive of those in Asian countries to be complaining about fuel rationing and long queues at petrol stations; have some respect for the happiness being felt around Norwegian oil company share prices please e24.no/boers-og-fin...

the most perfect summation of a mind completely stewed in the liberal worldview that power is exercised by tone, communicating by brooches and vibes generated by (completely unacknowledged) class positioning

Israel is "PROHIBITED" by the US from bombing Lebanon, says Donald Trump. It underlines a basic fact: Israel's genocide and war crimes could be stopped at any moment by any US president.

Naming my security company after the giant evil eye that, crucially, was too distracted to see the actual threat sneaking in

This is how, responsible statesmen are supposed to be. Brazilian president Lula, using simple common sense, putting the majority of western leaders to shame. (Dubbed) More here: youtu.be/vP5ISjVQxJk?...

Here comes another counter demo. It never stops.

'My name is Ahmed 🙏, I'm injured and my health is rapidly deteriorating 💔. I need treatment that costs $260💊 and I can't afford it on my own. Any small donation 🤲 could save my life and give me hope ✨. Thank you from the bottom of my heart ❤️ to everyone who helps or shares my story 🙏'

To surmise: there is A LOT OF EVIDENCE of insider trading. Some analysts say it's insider trading. Some analysts say it's not. Who's right? No one knows! what kind of fuckery is this? What does the evidence available to us say?? What is the point of the news if its going to be like this?

Timid and toothless. This has been going on, quiet blatantly, the whole damn time www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Turns out I was wrong here: it wasn’t so much the Tories we needed to worry about.

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

Given the fascistic attacks on trans people, migrants, women, disabled folks etc, talking about “free speech” in abstract terms without confronting our political reality just enables bigotry to thrive. Bad faith actors use “free speech” to bully marginalised people. We must refuse this intimidation.

Public toilets are vital for human dignity. And clean streets.

Celebrities are also paid for the event and even get their Mars bars, for free!

I wish we could skip to the bit where Starmer's gone and centrists have stopped writing desperate thinkpieces about how Wes Streeting is strong and stable leadership that will save Labour.

Imagine having a 400 year Head-start, and every trick you have tried has still seen black America succeed the way that they have. It pisses you off that much you try to move the goalposts, once again by recruiting brown people like Ramaswamy, Patel, etc to help you do it.

🤯🤯🤯 "Matthew Swindells, the trust’s chair from April 2022 to March 2026, not only previously worked with Palantir through the advisory firm Global Counsel but also chaired the company’s health advisory committee. "Swindells returned to advising Palantir after the FDP was procured."

the core belief in our (fairly venerable, self-selecting) audience afterwards was that we just need to convince other more stupid, ignorant, evil or selfish people to change their minds and lobby our MPs and eat less meat and teach young people about climate change I left feeling frustrated

at screening of this yesterday, and I think it's factual, urgent, well put together, compelling I recommend seeing it I'm also aware of similar energy around Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' — but the resulting lack of real impact afterwards, twenty years ago and I see a similar flawed analysis…

This is incredible if true. I thought the barrister, whose whole career was based on preparation, gaming scenarios, anticipating replies, having plans B, C, and D for cases, would have a plan for government. It seems not.

Actually kind of incredible how far Starmer tries to stretch “i wasnt told“ as an excuse for all his failings. Why u governing like shit? I wasnt told how. Is America committing war crimes? Ive not been told. Are we at war with Iran? Ive not been told

“Starmer assumed Gray had a super-secret plan for governing but she didn’t so they did nothing” is such a wild line, and the hacks seem so uninterested in learning more about this astonishing, farcical setup

I'm thinking of Butler's essay on Mandelson and lobbying for the LRB (www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...), & how he was framed as trustworthy. & even w/ attempts to memory-hole Mandelson, we still have more in the pipeline, eg Streeting and Palantir (the latter of whom unnerved the Swiss armed forces).

I know good people who are still in the Labour Party & deserve better than. I know people who joined Your Party who deserve better. We're in a really sick place politically in the UK. I see an Italian future for us. Corrupted, oligarchic, decayed and slowly losing ground, always at 60%

Speaking as someone who's basically given up on politics, I don't know, but maybe the horrified reaction of centrists to the rise of the Greens, maybe isn't actually sincere? Maybe it's the Labour Party hierarchy that is a danger to national security?

It's incredible Starmer has the balls to smear Polanski as someone who can't be trusted, a threat to national security, when it's the Prime Minister's own inner circle who were the real security risk, the ones most likely to sell out this country to the billionaires and the Chinese communist party.