Solving mysteries with SQL · Luma This month we'll be learning how to solve mysteries with SQL. SQL is a special language for communicating with databases using clear, readable commands. Well,…

Registrations are now open for April! Come along and learn how to solve mysteries with SQL 🕵 luma.com/h3cjxr87

Four court hearings, probably £1m+ of fees, all to work out if large marshmallows are a "sweetened prepared food which is normally eaten with the fingers", and therefore subject to VAT.

Spoiler: they are not. Because "A > B and C > D, (A + C) > (B + D)"

Our look into collapsed UK lender MFS found much of their lending went to companies controlled by five people, allowing them to build up a £530m property portfolio. Many shared a registered address with MFS, and hundreds of the properties have multiple mortgages www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Tangled Web of Loans Brought Down a British Property Empire The collapse of Paresh Raja's property empire has left lenders facing up to $1.7 billion of losses and questions about their due diligence.

60 Ennismore Gardens, a Knightsbridge townhouse that once counted Ava Gardner as a neighbor, is at the heart of the meltdown at UK lender MFS. Owned on paper by individual with close ties to MFS owner, it secured 2 Wall St-backed mortgages on the same day.

shorturl.at/hvadP

OK this is nuts.

A vulnerability in the Companies House website that let *anyone* with an account view ***ANY COMPANY'S DASHBOARD***, see all personal info and - I think - modify company records.

Couple things here:

1. What the fuck
2. I am allllllmost more offended by the suggestion that I would give this shitbox edit than having my identity stolen
3. The CEO is scheduled to be on Decoder soon and we will see if they back out!

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

MFS CEO Spent on Artwork, Parties, Indian Rapper Before Collapse The walls of Market Financial Solutions Ltd.’s London offices were a shrine to the passions of founder Paresh Raja.

Indian rapper Badshah. Dancers performing inside a glass dome. A vast collection of sporting and music memorabilia that has since disappeared. Behind the scenes at MFS, the UK lender backed by £2b+ of Wall Street loans that collapsed last week. Story via @bloomberg.com

shorturl.at/VKdK6

Journocoders: Exploratory data graphics with Altair · Luma This month we'll be learning how to explore data with charts and graphics using Altair. Altair is a Python library for building a wide range of graphics and…

Registrations are now open for March! Come along and learn how to produce exploratory data graphics with Altair 🧭 luma.com/2ibfrwr9

Simon Goldberg denied to me he’s running a huge tax fraud. He says he's an expert. Says he “studied under Winston Shrout”

Shrout was convicted of tax fraud, got 10 years, fled, & was captured by US marshals

Is this what they call soft power?

I just did the dumbest thing of my entire career to prove a much more serious point.

I tricked ChatGPT and Google, and made them tell other users I’m a competitive hot-dog-eating world champion

People are using this trick on a massive scale to make AI tell you lies. I’ll explain how I did it

Journocoders: Making maps and analysing geographical data with Python · Luma This month we'll be learning how to make maps and analyse geographic data using the Python programming language. In this session we'll be following a tutorial…

Registrations are now open for Feburary! Come along and learn how to make maps and analyse geographical data with Python 🗺️ luma.com/kospxtu7

Journocoders: Scraping the web with Beautiful Soup and Playwright · Luma This month we'll be learning how to scrape the web using the Python programming language and two libraries, Beautiful Soup and Playwright. Beautiful Soup is a…

Registrations are now open for January! Come along and learn how to scrape the web with Beautiful Soup and Playwright! 🥣 luma.com/50ge2x1e

Registrations are now open for December! Come along and learn how to automatically categorise things with AI 🎁

don't really think drugs, as a concept, will ever be able to recover from the reputational hit they're about to take

Beth Rigby spotted that the OBR accidentally published their Budget papers too soon. It's down now, but I've archived a copy: buff.ly/SfFAiCu

Amazing. Bypass model safeguards and get helpful responses about nukes, bioweapons, cyberattacks, etc., simply by putting the adversarial prompt in a poem.

Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2511.153...

Wtf: in the 18th and 19th centuries, green park and st James’ park were covered with cows and milkmaids, and you could buy milk fresh from the cow

memoirsofametrogirl.com/2020/05/02/s...

End of The Line: how Saudi Arabia’s Neom dream unravelled Mohammed bin Salman’s utopian city was undone by the laws of physics and finance

NEW: The End of the Line: the centrepiece of Saudi Arabia’s Neom gigaproject - a 500m tall, 170km long wall-like building intended ultimately to house 9 million people - can’t get out of the ground, say more than 20 former Neom architects, engineers and senior executives.
ig.ft.com/saudi-neom-l...

Journocoders: Computer vision for AI image and video analysis with Roboflow · Luma This month we'll be learning how to use computer vision for AI-powered image and video analysis with Roboflow. Computer vision is a field of AI that enables…

Registrations are now open for November! Come along and learn how to use computer vision for AI image and video analysis with @roboflow.com 👀 luma.com/3928sgrf

How HS2 built a bridge to nowhere A state-of-the-art road bridge has been built deep in the heart of rural Buckinghamshire. Designed to carry traffic over the HS2 railway, there's just one tiny problem - there's no actual road.

My latest: Move over bat tunnel, here’s the wild story of how HS2 were forced to build a multi-million pound bridge for a road that… doesn’t actually exist.

Not-Ship A newsletter charting the age of uncertainty

I'm launching something for us. Not-Ship: a newsletter using data and visuals to navigate our turbulent world.

Everything feels like A LOT lately. It's all so uncertain. And the way I try to make sense of things is with data. So, that's what Not-Ship is all about. Come chart the chaos with me.

The snail farmer of London, his mafia friends, and a £20m vendetta against the taxman Terry Ball runs elaborate mollusc-based tax avoidance schemes that are costing London councils millions of pounds. Yet when London Centric tracks him down, an even stranger story emerges.

I think this is the weirdest story I've ever reported. www.londoncentric.media/p/terry-ball...

Registrations are now open for October! Come along and learn how to track boats and see the seas with @globalfishingwatch.org 🌊

Congrats!

July September

More than a year's worth of investigation into the very Russian life of ex-Wirecard COO, and wannabe Russian super-spy Jan Marsalek: in English: theins.ru/en/inv/284980

Babe, new candidate for "most unfathomable spatial comparison" just dropped.

Journocoders: Telling stories with maps using Mapbox · Luma This month we'll be learning how to tell stories with maps using Mapbox. Maps are a great way to tell a story which has a geographical element at its heart.…

Registrations are now open for September. Come along and learn how to tell stories with maps using @mapbox.com! 🗺️ luma.com/blz20uhu