After a video seemed to show Israeli soldiers abusing a Palestinian prisoner, Israel has... arrested the lawyer who authorised the release of the video www.ft.com/content/0456...

This weeks post: How the reaction to a football ban showed how our politicians and media have become trapped in right wing Islamophobic narratives and detached from the majority of voters mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/10/how-... Within 5 hours leaders of the 4 main parties had condemned the ban.

Exclusive: In an open letter, Israeli ex-officials, Jewish artists and intellectuals say ‘unconscionable’ actions in Gaza amount to genocide and call on UN and world leaders to sanction Israel via @jgedeon.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/world/2025/o...

"That’s the quiet corruption corroding modern philanthropy: the ability to give as a license to impose one’s will. It’s a kind of moral laundering." -- Laurene Powell Jobs www.wsj.com/us-news/laur...

Reject the ongoing censorship of student media on our campuses! “Administrative efforts to subordinate campus journalism to public relations are inconsistent with the mission of higher education to provide a space of intellectual exploration and debate” —Hank Reichman, in a new Academe Blog post

Another way of looking at this same picture: The euro zone is a system that use the leverage of a central bank outside the control of national governments to force deep austerity on countries like Spain, which sent them into deep depressions that created fiscal deficits that didn't previously exist.

UK privatises water, lets financiers turn it into an asset class, extract billions, pollute our rivers and now Labour government may let them pollute for another 15 (!!!) years instead of nationalising Thames Water? incredible.

Surreal moment for America. Needless to say, if the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run warrant checks — they would be sued into oblivion. Yet ICE is going to get away with it entirely.

For anyone who's published a book. (Source: www.alcs.co.uk/news/the-lat...)

New argument against AI regulation just dropped. Checkmate, atheists. www.wsj.com/tech/peter-t...

📕My new book 'Debt and the Future of Workers' (@brisunipress.bsky.social) is now up for pre-order! If you are interested to learn why organizing around #debt is as crucial as organizing at #work, see more details below: 📰 25% off via BUP newsletter #Debt #Work #Financialization #Booksky

“It also warns all other countries have an immediate obligation under the Genocide Convention to "prevent and punish the crime of genocide", employing all measures at their disposal. If they do not, it says, they could be complicit” UK govt should wake up& take action. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The chief judge of the Rwandan genocide tribunal has concluded, after studying the evidence exhaustively, that the Israeli government and military are committing genocide in Gaza: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/o...

"Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds" The UN joins other experts including the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Holocaust historians, and multitudes of lawyers in concluding this is genocide. www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

“Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. This finding is based on investigations and extensive evidence,” writes Navi Pillay, the head of a U.N. commission. “It has been corroborated by multiple sources.”

“These are not the accidents of war. They are acts calculated to bring about the destruction of a people.” www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/o...

My opinion about the historic verdict coming out of Brazil, with @stevelevitsky.bsky.social, is in the @nytimes.com today. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/o...

Only 25% of Gaza detainees are identified as fighters by Israeli military intelligence. Civilian detainees have included an 82-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s who was jailed for six weeks and a single mother who found her children begging on the streets upon her release following 53 days in prison.

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

My Trade Secrets today. Govts often do an immigration sleight-of-hand, demonising a tiny minority esp asylum-seekers as cover to admit workers. Giorgia Meloni can still pull this trick off and is issuing 500k non-EU work permits. Keir Starmer is so scared & UK public trust so damaged he can't. 1/2

The Voice of Hind Rajab gets 23-minute ovation at Venice film festival

Four journalists were killed by an Israeli strike on a Gaza hospital today, including Mariam Dagga, a freelancer with the @apnews.com. She has a 12-year-old son, who was evacuated from Gaza earlier in the war. She was a true hero, like all of our Palestinian colleagues in Gaza. tinyurl.com/3cn5c9vb

More and more people in Gaza are dying from a man-made famine caused by Israel’s blockade on essential food supplies.

Children in #Gaza are starving to death. Across the Gaza Strip, most children examined by UNRWA health teams are emaciated, weak, and at risk of dying, if they do not get the treatment they urgently need. It’s time to stop this war on children. #CeasefireNow

Again: shock.

It's a tax "raid". When you or I pay our income tax it's just a tax. But when a fabulously wealthy millionaire who refuses to contribute to the country whose public services they use (and yes, they use roads, defence, police etc) it's a "raid". www.ft.com/content/8882...

also a good one to read (which circulated for a while but just came out formally) as part of the catch-up, by @arindube.bsky.social and coauthors onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

I have studied the targeting of journalists for many years, but the scale and public display of these killings is truly shocking: “Israel admits deliberate attack on the journalist, known for frontline coverage, in a strike on a tent outside al-Shifa hospital“ www.theguardian.com/world/2025/a...

How BBC presents the anti-migrant hotel protests vs how we do at @bylinesnetwork.co.uk BBC lead with a Reform UK voter saying "We are not happy with these men in this hotel because we fear for our children” We tell of the refugee children inside the hotel terrified by chants of “send them out!”

🤷🏻‍♂️

In case you missed what happened at Journal of Economic Surveys, this is a good summary on Retraction Watch. retractionwatch.com/2024/02/12/e... The good news: Reviews of Economic Literature - the new journal created by the former JES editors- is up & running! rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/re...

Israel is using Microsoft Azure to store recordings of every phone call made by Palestinians in the occupied territories, then using AI to analyze the contents and select targets. Microsoft is (dubiously) claiming ignorance.

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

More coverage of the Gaza students waiting to be evacuated to the UK, this time from the BBC. Most positive statement from a government spokesperson yet, but when will they make a decision? www.bbc.com/news/article...

Yesterday's bomb threat against the hotel where Texas Democratic quorum breakers were staying - some with children, and surrounded by innocent bystanders - has thus far not been condemned by any Republican in elected office. Pod: bit.ly/3Z0lr7x ⁠Story: tinyurl.com/2zp37est

In case you missed what happened at Journal of Economic Surveys, this is a good summary on Retraction Watch. retractionwatch.com/2024/02/12/e... The good news: Reviews of Economic Literature - the new journal created by the former JES editors- is up & running! rel.journals.sup.org/index.php/re...

For months, the UN has warned of the consequences unfolding in #Gaza. Now, people are starving and being shot at while trying to find food for their families. This cannot continue. A political decision must be made to unconditionally open the crossings. Let the UN and our partners do our job.

The US is complicit in genocide. Let’s stop pretending otherwise @mehdirhasan.bsky.social www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This is as close as you get to an open announcement of genocidal intention, from a member of Netanyahu's cabinet.

This framing is absurd. The moral crisis here is *caused* by US policy. And in which universe is Trump “wringing his hands” rather than continuing to supply weapons and diplomatic cover to a government engaged in a campaign of deliberate, mass starvation? www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/u...

Y'days post: Delusions on the Left and Labour Right mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/delu... In which I will upset nearly everyone by arguing that the Labour Party only works if it is a broad church that spans left to right, but only if the left does not have control.

Brown is acceding to government oversight of course evaluations, where they can investigate anyone they want for "antisemitism" based on student complaints.

The “deal” that Brown made with the Trump admin is much more extreme than is being reported. It includes government oversight of course evaluations and no barrier to government interference in faculty hiring. Read it for yourself here: www.brown.edu/sites/defaul...

Why was the correct answer (George Osborne's austerity) not provided as an option?

Tony Aguilar—combat veteran of Iraq, Afg, and Syria who retired as a lieutenant colonel—describing what he calls the “barbaric use of force against an unarmed population,” including (starting at 21min) an IDF lieutenant colonel ordering IDF snipers to fire at children for crowd-control purposes.

UK academics - please sign this open letter to the UK government: Request for biometric deferral and safe evacuation of incoming Palestinian students and scholars from Gaza to UK Universities docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

As starvation worsens by the day in Gaza, the Netanyahu government has been using food as a weapon of war — with complicity from Trump and U.S. taxpayer dollars. This is painful to listen to but here’s what a U.S. Army veteran and Green Beret who witnessed it first-hand recounted to me:

‘Worst-case scenario’ of famine unfolding in Gaza, says global hunger monitor https://on.ft.com/3Hbi09b

The world has stood by for 21 months while Israel has bombed, shot, starved, and tortured 2m civilians trapped in a fully blockaded ghetto. Now that we are seeing what happens when you starve children for months and their bodies begin to consume themselves, dropping in a little food is a sick joke.

The same NGOs that warned (accurately) that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would be a disaster that lead to famine and violent deaths are now warning that food air drops are a cynical measure that will not help and likely hurt so of course European countries are now racing to do them