Should potholing be banned?

You'll only drive it underground.

Mad fact... 42% of Labour Prime Ministers have had to fire Peter Mandelson.

Why did BBC Breakfast give Reform UK a special graphic? A small detail in a brief report sparks some big questions about what the national broadcaster is doing during the run up to local and national elections.

NEW | On an odd choice…

WHY DID BBC BREAKFAST GIVE REFORM UK A SPECIAL GRAPHIC?

A small detail in a brief report sparks some big questions about what the national broadcaster is doing during the run up to local and national elections.

brokenbottleboy.substack.com/p/why-did-bb...

'Terrified of rent increase': How housing benefit cuts hit renters The government froze local housing allowance, which effectively meant a real-terms cut to housing benefit. This is what it means for renters

NEW: More than 160,000 private renters on low incomes face rent shortfalls worth up to hundreds or even thousands of pounds a year due to Labour’s housing benefit cuts

Greater Manchester and the West Midlands are particularly badly hit

By me, for the Big Issue: www.bigissue.com/news/housing...

OMFG I had to go and check that this ACTUALLY happened.

Since when does the BBC ever do chyrons with a political party's branding, rather than their own? Not to mention this is during a pre-election campaign purdah.

(h/t @iainsol.bsky.social)

Just watched higher ed in the US turn into a sad farce, as the right destroys academic freedom for all save bigotry, moving to bankrupt any uni that still allows their staff and students to demand racial justice, protest war crimes or defend the trans community. Now Labour is on the same ugly track.

Her office said the Office for Students (OfS), which regulates universities, had received reports of speakers and lecturers being harassed and blocked for holding gender-critical or religious views, of foreign interference suppressing academic freedoms, and of ideological belief requirements featuring in job advertisements.

The OfS will be able to use the new complaints scheme from September. From April, it will be able to fine universities the greater of £500,000 or 2 per cent of their income, which would amount to millions of pounds for large institutions, for breaches under the Freedom of Speech Act. Ultimately, universities could be deregistered for egregious cases.

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.

Alright Lisa. Go to any British high street. Stop the first person you meet and ask them if you think it needs more betting shops. Let me know how you get on.

Migrants are making false domestic abuse allegations to stay in the UK, BBC investigation finds In the third part of an undercover investigation, the BBC reveals how rules aimed at protecting abuse victims are being exploited.

It’s genuinely staggering how little substance there is to today’s instalment of the BBC’s attempt to create a national crisis out of a few unproven allegations of immigration fraud 1/

The right to protest isn’t a gift from government. It’s a democratic principle, hard-won and easily lost. Last night the government tried to smuggle through a “cumulative disruption” power that would let police ban protests simply because other people had protested in the same area before. (1/5)

A belted galloway cow walking into the mist, towards a bold, unpredictable future.

“So it was, on that misty morning, that Brenda set off for the capital. She knew not what she would find there, only that the time had come to move on - away from small-minded rural attitudes and people who called her ‘Oreo’ and ‘the wide panda’ - to seek a more fulfilling life.”

BBC News leading all its bulletins on demands by former Government advisor Lord Robertson for more defence spending, without at any point mentioning his current paid senior role for US defence lobbyists

I've been on a NJ Transit train. The thought of paying $100 for the privilege is mind-blowing.

(Thinks fondly of the stack of free all-zones One Day Travelcards I got with 2012 Olympic/Paralympic tickets and the nice walk I did from Chesham before going to Greco-Roman wrestling in the evening).

Sam Altman isn't another bullshit artist He's so much worse than that

This week, I argue that it's natural to ask whether a serial liar like Sam Altman can be trusted to wield the most world-changing tool on Earth.

I simply suggest we stop trusting him, again and again, when he tells us how world-changing that tool actually is.

www.newstatesman.com/science-tech...

A doctor costume, honestly, not Jesus…

So sad that this is an AI fake.

Fucking AI, what a waste of everyone's time. Evolution is a goddamn marvel on its own, and octopuses incredible without this bullshit.

Told my wife to have dinner ready at 6 or I'll obliterate her entire civilization. So anyway, she now charges me a fee to use the bathroom that used to be free, and I didn't get any dinner, but I'm pretty sure I won that exchange.

I lol'd at this.😆

AI footage in the quote post. However it's a real fact, with real footage available (See my link below). Now people who believed it have a false image of how octopus act, and people who recognise it as AI question a real observed scientific fact. Utter bullshit.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN9B...

Abolish the Home Office

(I find it useful to repeat this)

It's going to catch out people who have pre-settled status, eligible for settled status, but because they weren't informed properly, didn't apply again

Another Windrush scandal in the bag, good job

What is happening to our planet? And why don't people care more? We just had a hideous amount of military emissions and all anyone on mainstream media cares about is the price of fuel and the stock market, even the leftists are too busy to bring up the human-made catastrophe...

Fuel duty is *already* 34p per litre lower, in real terms, than in 2010

Its been frozen or cut for 15 years

Its cost the Treasury over £200bn in tax - and hugely incentivised people to keep using ICE cars and driving. It's favoured the richest

If anything we should be restoring it to 2010 levels

I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence -but we are as valuable as ever| Stephen Marche The Guardian The, GuardianOpinions

You wrote a novel using AI? Cool. It's like that time I ran a marathon using a Ford Focus.

The first photo of the Sun was taken 181 years ago today ☀️

Credit: Hippolyte Fizeau & Léon Foucault

This is one of the reasons the government needs to start warning people about what an energy crisis could mean.

The average member of the public will have no idea this is a possibility. It might not happen, but if it does happen and it’s a surprise… ouch

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

A tweet from UK home secretary Shabana Mahmood: "if we retreat to the comfort of fairytale, a nightmare will follow, as those who follow us will have none of our restraint"

This post would make more sense – by which I mean any sense – only if Labour wasn't hurtling towards electoral oblivion. But since it is, it doesn't remotely stand up even under its own 'logic'.

It's my own fault for using ChatGPT as a search tool, but this really made me laugh. "...with an important nuance..." is sublime 🤌

It's tight but he is just on

Impossible to bury the lede here. It’s all lede. All the way down. To the centre of the earth.