@lb-southwark.bsky.social put up a fancy new sign in my building with social handles and everything, but they spelled the name wrong 🫠 It’s *Leysdown Hose*

Unparalleled parker ticks off each bay in his second Sainsbury’s Alexander the Great is said to have cried salt tears when there were no worlds left to conquer. Luckily for Gareth Wild, there’s a Morrisons and Lidl in Devizes

Brilliant, happy read by @annadowell.bsky.social. I feel inspired to start collecting more data on myself.

Unparalleled parker ticks off each bay in his second Sainsbury’s

www.thetimes.com/article/e7d2...

Trump’s reasons for bombing Iran have all either been unproven or disproven, according to government officials, international weapons monitoring groups, and American intelligence reports. This NYT story is a day old but still newsworthy and worth a read:

Great thread by Jade explaining what a data centre is and dispelling a few myths

Hot take: Don’t use what an AI chatbot says as your hook for an article.

For example: “ChatGPT says X, but actually it’s Y” or “I asked some AI chatbot to tell me such and such thing and here’s what it said.”

I read this type of lede about once a week now. I find it both uninteresting and lazy.

My LinkedIn is full of people who were laid off. It’s shocking.

Ouais. 😔💛

Minnesota Star Tribune.

And a rundown of their latest on the crackdown: bit.ly/4pXDlDC

Trump’s second term: a visual guide to a year like no other From signing 228 executive orders to imposing widespread trade tariffs, the US president has reshaped America’s economy, borders and global standing

Trump has signed more executive orders in the last year than during his entire first term. The result? An increase in government revenue, thanks partly to tariffs. But also stubborn inflation, growing unrest, and a record number of people in ICE detention.
www.thetimes.com/article/98d9...

Robert Jenrick quit Tories for sake of his own career, voters say Reform is a ‘party of traitors’, says Kemi Badenoch as 57 per cent tell a Times-YouGov poll the former shadow justice secretary defected for his own ambitions

I went up to Newark, Nottinghamshire yesterday to speak to Robert Jenrick’s constituents. Here’s what they had to say about their MP’s defection and his work in Newark more generally. www.thetimes.com/article/b713...

Such an interesting analysis of the UK’s top 40 songs. I’ve definitely sensed pop music getting more gloomy and physical, but the extent of the change and other insights were more surprising

A good explainer / overview of the missed deadline and what has or hasn’t been released

FDA Commissioner: HIV “May Very Well Have Come From a Lab” During a recent podcast appearance, Dr. Marty Makary promoted lab origin conspiracy theories involving HIV, Lyme disease, and one dead raccoon.

NEW: On a podcast last month, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary:

- said HIV “very likely came from a lab.”

- said Lyme disease came from a lab—“a high degree of probability.”

- said the so-called “Montauk
Monster”—a bloated, dead raccoon carcass—was proof “mad scientists” were doing experiments.

Labour ministers ditch stately prints for modern art Classical landscapes have vanished from the walls of Whitehall in favour of Turner prize nominees. ‘The aristos are out,’ says our critic

I loved helping out with @geraldinescott.co.uk‘s piece on the art Labour has hung up in government buildings.

Art is “a very useful and cheap way of doing politics,” Dr. Buckley at Goldsmiths Uni told me. Recently, there’s been renewed interest in art as gov’t PR.
www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/...

Unbelievable. Since when is the law and justice dependent on expediency?

Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era | The Local A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.

This is a must-read for anyone in the news industry, and especially people hiring freelancers.

We need a more efficient way to catch AI scammers. This problem undermines trust in journalism when it is already critically low, and it threatens genuine freelancers.

thelocal.to/investigatin...

Last night, my friends threw a pasta and PowerPoint party. So naturally I did my presentation on freedom of information and subject access requests. What could be more fun and exciting than that???

Anyway, it was actually a hit. I’m helping someone submit a SAR today 💁🏻‍♀️ #foi #freedomofinformation

At the very bottom of the US Army’s “Shutdown Guidance” for troops in Bavaria, there was a “Running list of German support organizations for your kit bags” including various local food banks. @evystadium.bsky.social has more.

Full story by @mjgault.bsky.social here:
www.404media.co/army-tells-s...

7 am today oops

This election has me absolutely WIRED. It’s 1:15 am in London, and I have work at 7 am tomorrow 🫠

🔔 First, listen to this PSA from @johncusack.bsky.social on the need to unpaywall public records reporting.

Then, RSVP to our webinar and hear @josephcox.bsky.social and @katie-drummond.bsky.social discuss why this is so essential.

🗓️ Oct. 29, 2 p.m. EDT

freedom.press/unpaywalled

Big news for Wales and the whole UK

AI-generated news sites spout viral slop from forgotten URLs A new generation of content farms are harnessing AI to spin out clickbait — and they’re getting help from Google.

There is so much in this. Well worth reading.

And it makes me wonder what happens when the AI news sites start generating content off of other AI fake news content 🫣

www.niemanlab.org/2025/10/ai-g...

It was a sea of colors and American flags, and the speeches were almost drowned out by cars and trucks honking in support as they drove by.

There were no counter protestors. As the event came to a close and people cleared out, one passerby could be heard booing.

Anne Paluck, 74, said “we’re upset about just about everything that’s been happening.”

“My father fought in WWII, and I’m so glad he’s not here to see this because he would be devastated. Those people risked everything for democracy and now these people are trying to take it away from our country.”

Placards displayed a mix of anti-Trump and pro-democracy messages.

5,000 people gathered in front of Princeton’s revolutionary war monument yesterday for the town’s No Kings protest, more than the estimated 3,000+ that attended the last.

#nokings #protest #america #princeton #newjersey

More Than 170 U.S. Citizens Have Been Held by Immigration Agents. They’ve Been Kicked, Dragged and Detained for Days. The government does not track how often immigration agents grab citizens. So ProPublica did. Our tally — almost certainly incomplete — includes people who were held for days without a lawyer. And near...

Quality reporting, and an excellent example of collecting data when the government fails to do so itself. @propublica.org “compiled cases by sifting through both English- and Spanish-language social media, lawsuits, court records and local media reports.”

www.propublica.org/article/immi...

Are UK library books at risk of being banned? - Words + Numbers How many complaints have UK libraries had about books and are they responding by removing titles from their shelves?

This week has been #BannedBooksWeekUK but going through #FOI data on complaints and removal requests, UK library books mostly stay on the shelves.

clairemiller.net/2025/10/are-...