This is great. OTOH WTAF have Democrats been doing all this time to make this feel refreshing and new?

Ossoff: I don’t know if you saw, but JD Vance was in Georgia this week. Don’t worry—no one showed up. The stadium was empty.

It’s true, we usually call them bodegas.

Ironically the BBC stumbled on a really important story: Desperate asylum seekers being forced to turn to fraudulent fee-charging “advisors” to navigate a system that is intentionally impossibly baroque and from which all sources of free advice have been removed.

But no: they chose Fake Gay Panic.

Thanks @jonfrewin.bsky.social, and yes — you too!

We need to talk about Donald The increasingly incoherent and volatile president is much easier to understand if we come to terms with one thing

There are those who feel obliged to make excuses for Donald Trump. But for the rest of us, writes Alan Rusbridger , it is time to speak bluntly about what we see: the guy is nuts

EN DIRECT, guerre en Ukraine : la centrale nucléaire de Zaporijia privée de son alimentation électrique externe ; des coupures de courant dans six régions ukrainiennes En raison des combats et des bombardements visant les infrastructures énergétiques en Ukraine, certains consommateurs des régions de Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporijia, Kharkiv, d’Odessa, de Mykolaïv et Kherso...

Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Ukraine, disconnected from external power, running on emergency generators for 13th time since start of war.

"loss of external power is yet another reminder of the risks to nuclear safety during the conflict" ~ Rafael Grossi, IAEA

www.lemonde.fr/internationa...

Got a printer that's no longer supported by your computer? (Claude and) I made this for you! printervention.app/details

The UKVI rejected the application, explaining that they were not satisfied the applicant was genuine given they had quoted the wrong founding year. The university subsequently confirmed that the applicant had provided the correct year and the UKVI caseworker was incorrect, but the decision could not be reconsidered. In another case a foreign student was rejected from obtaining a visa to study at the University of East Anglia due to a dispute over whether the university was in Norfolk. The applicant asserted correctly that it was, but the UKVI caseworker appeared to confuse Norfolk with Norwich, which is the capital of the county, and rejected the application - believing the applicant was wrong.

I hope the new Permanent Secretary at the Home Office is going to be able to look at the UK Visas and Immigration’s practices
www.thetimes.com/article/1644...

What if AI just makes us work harder? In a column in January about the paradox of work, I recalled the immortal Douglas Adams joke about working conditions: the hours are good, but “most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy”. The jok…

What if AI just makes us work harder?
timharford.com/2026/04/what...

Violence in the vicinity: the mental health impacts of nearby crime Crime leads to a range of adverse outcomes for those who live nearby, and a common hypothesis is that this relationship is mediated by mental health. However, little is known about how the mental hea...

Just published in Economica: using Mappiness plus granular crime data, @pankabencsik.bsky.social, @richarddickens.bsky.social and I show that violent crime causes increased stress to people living in the immediate vicinity over the following week. Open access. doi.org/10.1111/ecca...

"The oil crisis is exactly what the net zero brigade wants"

These people have a funny way of saying "Environmentalists have been proved right yet again."

"“The current campaign in Lebanon must end with a fundamental change,” Bezalel Smotrich, the hard-line Israeli finance minister behind much of his country’s recent expansions in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, said this week. “The Litani must become our new border with the state of Lebanon.”"

I fail to see how this is different from Putin saying the Donbas must become part of Russia.

Screenshot from a report of Nigel Farage being chased out of Felixstowe. Reads: "2:57pm Nigel Farage has left the scene. Our reporter saw him leave in a black car. Protestors were laughing as the political leader fled. It is unknown where he has gone."

Poem of the day from the East Anglian Daily Times.

US and TotalEnergies reach 'nearly $1 billion' deal to end offshore wind projects The US and the French company signed an agreement to end TotalEnergies' offshore US wind farm projects and redirect those funds towards fossil fuel production.

Proper actual insanity. www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...

Where were the school governors in all this? It was their job to stop it, but they’re not mentioned once.

The coming of crypto: how Nigel Farage plans to reshape politics — The Times and The Sunday Times The general election may be years away but Nigel Farage is already acting like a winner — and one flush with cash. His political campaigns are starting to look like gameshow giveaways, with huge cash ...

Labour needs to legislate fast to keep this kind of money out of UK politics.

If not, Farage will buy himself a fascist state.

Ctrl-C in psql gives me the heebie-jeebies - Neon There are a few different reasons to hit the brakes on a Postgres query. Maybe it’s taking too long to finish. Maybe you realised you forgot to create an index that will make it orders of magnitude qu...

WARNING: Reading this post may cause a little jolt of anxiety every time you cancel a query with CTRL+C in psql.

George MacKerron is back with another deep dive into one of Postgres’s strangest corners. neon.com/blog/ctrl-c-...

This Illegal US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is Also an Assault on the United Nations | Common Dreams Let us be clear about what the United States and Israel are pursuing. The US objective is not the security of the American people. The objective is global hegemony. The attempt is to destroy the UN an...

www.commondreams.org/opinion/unit...

If Trump likes to see people cheering in the street when the rule of their brutal authoritarian leader comes to an end then he knows what to do.

The US is not a 'partner'. It's in their National Security Strategy to support far right parties that oppose multicultural liberal democracy here. They are behaving lawlessly at home and abroad, summarily executing their own citizens, and now bombing Iran with no coherent rationale or plan.

Kind of incredible. I was just sitting down to write about how Starmer should be given credit for keeping us out of this mess when he does this. Unutterably foolish and obsequious. Why in God's name should we have anything to do with this shortsighted madness.

Netanyahu Calls Iran Strikes Necessary To Prevent War He Just Started

Netanyahu Calls Iran Strikes Necessary To Prevent War He Just Started

This is terrible from Starmer. Just absolute trash. And any normal voter looking at the new MP and then reading this description will think him mad.

lan Byrne MP Liverpool West Derby 27.02.2026 Statement re: Gorton and Denton By-election It takes some doing to turn a 13,000+ majority in 2024 into a catastrophic loss today. This is not an isolated trend - Labour MPs across the country are told every week by lifelong Labour voters that they won't be voting for the party again under the current leadership & direction. I have been urging the leadership to change direction since the General Election as a series of dreadful political choices & a monumental effort to chase the Reform vote has led to this. The leadership has taken its base for granted, despite constant warnings from backbenchers & unions not to. The lines from PM and Cabinet today essentially labelling the Green Party as extremist is appalling, desperate and frankly embarrassing. It also makes very clear that the leadership has zero understanding of where it has been going wrong. The party is being destroyed & an urgent change of direction is needed.

When your own MPs are openly calling your response to the Green win an embarrassment then you've got problems

Not only a business thing. So many dept meetings on ‘how to move this metric in the right direction’ where it’s felt necessary to try to bring discussion back to: how about we not focus mainly on gaming the metric but rather on fixing whatever the metric is meant to measure by doing our jobs better?

Costco is a really popular subject for business-success case studies but I feel like business guys kinda lose interest when the upshot of the study is like "just operate with scrupulous integrity in all facets and levels of your business for four decades" and not some easy-to-fix gimmick

Salma Yaqoob @SalmaYaqoob Almost feel sorry for the haters who are trying to spin Muslims voting for a woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man is evidence of Islamist sectarianism In fact it's evidence of genuine tolerance, rejection of superficial identity politics and ability to prioritise tackling common concerns of cost of living, protecting public services and rejecting war mongering. And the promotion of mutual respect and individual freedoms. The coming together of people is terrifying for the ruling elites.

Totally this.

The rightwing hate “journalists” are spinning Muslims voting for a woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man as Islamist sectarianism.

A critique of the polarisation narrative: expanding the limits of democracy, parties and political participation - Contemporary Political Theory Contemporary Political Theory - Public discourse about polarisation has become one of the latest hypes in politics, whether it is in the political sphere proper, the media, or academia. Much like...

This is something @juanroch.bsky.social, @daniel-balinhas.bsky.social and I discuss at length in this article

As fascism resurges, what we need is more polarisation, as anything less is complicity

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Remember when parties who lost elections used to be like "This is a strong message from the electorate and we will listen and learn and change" rather than "Fuck everyone who didn't vote for us, you're all extremists trying to destroy Britain"