Dr Viviane Gravey

Judge finalises US$575 million judgement against Greenpeace in pipeline case Greenpeace in a statement said it would seek a new trial in a lawsuit pursued by pipeline company Energy Transfer.

BREAKING:
A US court has just sided with fossil fuel pipeline giant Energy Transfer and ordered Greenpeace International and Greenpeace entities in the US to pay them US$345 million.

This is a billionaire-backed attack on the right to protest.

Greenpeace stands for all of us.

Mercedes Sanchez Varela is appointed new chair of IEEP Supervisory Board  - IEEP AISBL As we enter the sixth decade of IEEP leadership, we are pleased to announce the appointment of Mercedes Sanchez Varela as its new Chairperson, effective January 2026. Mercedes will be supported by Marianne Kettunen and Thomas Nowak as Deputy Chairs.

🎉 As we enter the sixth decade of IEEP leadership, we are pleased to announce the appointment of Mercedes Sanchez Varela as IEEP's new Chairperson, supported by Marianne Kettunen and Thomas Nowak as Deputy Chairs.

Read more about Mercedes, Marianne, Thomas and their appointment 👇

Without family voting, British Asians would have instead voted for…the guy who thinks that they are not British? Or the woman who both reputable polls showed in third place? Seems legit!

This is a massive shift which would upend the lives of millions - not just the nearly half million directly threatened but their families. It would abandon a basic principle of law that changes are not retrospectively applied.

When you consider the fuss that UK officialdom made for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (a fuss that could and should have been much louder), yes absolutely the FCO has to answer for its abject failure here in what is actually a very similar case.

This is an excellent analysis by Sophie of a great European conundrum. French leaders, from De Gaulle, through Chirac to Macron, have been prescient about the need for greater European independence from the US. They are getting grudging, belated credit from other Europeans. BUT…1/

“Deregulation” = code language for “fast-tracking legislation to dismantle EU standards while sidestepping the democratic process”. Now whom does that remind us of? 🤔🤦‍♀️

[Event] Air Quality: Can the UK feasibly reach WHO targets? A devolved perspective - IEEP UK On 26 February 2026, from 15:00-16:30 UK time, IEEP UK will be hosting a webinar on UK air quality standards and the potential for alignment with WHO guidelines. 

🍃 𝐀𝐢𝐫 𝐐𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲: 𝐂𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐊 𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐲 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐖𝐇𝐎 𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐬?

Find out more next week in this webinar organised by our colleagues at @ieep-uk.bsky.social with the participation of our @canto-nelli.bsky.social bringing a European perspective 👇

❓ @adrianabuneauib.bsky.social and @sergiulipcean.bsky.social ask: If the European Commission consults more stakeholders, are its proposals less likely to be changed by legislators?

✅ Bottom line: Yes, but it depends

🔗 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

It's Meloni's Europe, and we're just living in it The Italian PM has pressured the EU into participating in Trump's "Board of Peace" as an observer. Amid a leadership vacuum at the top, Meloni is dictating Europe's Atlanticist right-wing direction.

WTF happened here? As of last week, only 2 EU countries were going to Board of Peace inaugeration - Hungary & Bulgaria, who joined

Then, after Meloni announced this weekend Italy would go as an observer, suddenly the Commission & 14 🇪🇺countries each sent someone last minute.

We need a post-mortem.

Are policies terminated because of capacity loss or policy subsystem support loss ❓

Erik Baekkeskov & Olivier Rubin use the case of #AMR #NAPs & argue that #PolicyTermination can be relatively pervasive when policy lacks #roots in domestic politics 👇

doi.org/10.1093/pols...

NEW PUBLICATION
“How the Media Cordon Sanitaire Crumbles: Lessons from Germany” now out in @prxjournal.bsky.social
🔓 doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2026.2621808
I’m very happy that this paper is out – this project is particularly important to me.

I've written for The Social Change Blog on 'Developing higher education for driving social change'.

It's a short piece inspired by finding a small newspaper cutting at my grandmother's house a few years ago - a front page story about my mum graduating university.

blogs.york.ac.uk/social-chang...

The reason these people have been attacking scholars and universities is that they stand in the way of the ahistorical bullshit they need to spew in order to construct white Christian nationalism

Can we fix the worst student loan system in the world? As graduates from England struggle under crippling levels of debt, Mary Downer looks at how other nations do it better

"We’re charging graduates a higher marginal tax rate than somebody earning £150,000" www.thetimes.com/money/family...

Starmer's reported condition - incredibly unpopular, shorn of authority, probably un-reelectable and yet will stagger on for want of an alternative - is just the new normal of how Britain is governed. It was also true for two-thirds of May's premiership, half of Johnson's and all of Sunak's.

The way Chris pincher has been basically been erased from boris downfall is really instructive in Westminster culture and how these people get away with it

What does authentic assessment mean in the context of AI? To weather the AI storm, Charlotte von Essen argues that assessment needs to be both authentic and accountable.

'Where authenticity shapes the nature of the task...accountability addresses the nature of the evidence. An accountable assessment focuses on the extent to which students can substantiate, explain, and take responsibility for what they produce, regardless of whether AI tools were involved.'

I cannot sufficiently underline how despicable it is that the IOC has required Haitian Olympic athletes to remove an image representing the leader of the Haitian Revolution (against SLAVERY) from their uniforms.

The moral panic about young men is the new version of “UKIP is winning over former Labour voters” (also a Goodwin argument). Both rely on anecdote more than data, and do significant damage to public understanding of the radical right. Young men are the second *least* pro-Reform group in the UK.

The Board of Governors decided, unilaterally, that no published textbook in the field of sociology could be used in compliance with the law for an Intro to Sociology class. None. Victor: There's not a single existing textbook on the market that could be used that would qualify under state law? Zachary: Correct. Victor: I'm sorry, that's kind of funny. Like, the absurdity of not a single sociology textbook getting past the censors. I mean, it makes me kind of proud of our colleagues, but...

I do want to shout-out my fellow sociologists, who have collectively created a discipline so woke that not a single one of our introductory textbooks can make it past Florida's censors.

Great work everyone.

Free Images and Open Access | National Gallery of Art Free open access image downloads are now available directly from the object pages located on this website. Close to 60,000 images are available for download, and we will continue to add more images fo...

Regarding the Discourse, lemme just say that if you can't draw, yes you can.

Everyone can draw, and folks will almost certainly respond more positively to your stick figures than some generic "A.i." slop.

Also, there are LOADS of resources for free images. Like this! 🧵

www.nga.gov/artworks/fre...

L’extrême droite en Belgique — Un Jour dans l'Histoire En Belgique, comme ailleurs, l’extrême droite connaît un nouvel essor dans ce premier quart du 21e siècle, particulièrement en Flandre où le Vlaams Belang s’est imposé comme un acteur incontournable c...

Interesting podcast on the far right in Belgium, why it barely exists in Wallonie and why it nearly fell apart in Flanders - I learned a lot. overcast.fm/+AABkOEQEgxo

This works pretty well in academia too:

"I had a hungry ghost in a jar write this code" > sure, as long as u checked it works 🤷‍♀️

"I don't remember that paper, I fed it to a hungry ghost in a jar" > why?

"a hungry ghost in a jar did that calculus course for me" > you're paying to educate a ghost?

We're pushing hundreds of thousands of kids back into poverty so a bloke drinking 20 pints a week can save a quid

Space-based data centres are the CCS of big tech. They'll just be perpetually around the corner, there will be a handful of flimsy demonstration projects, and the concept will just suck up gov't subsidies for decades while serving as a rhetorical tool to fend off real regulation of industry

Congratulations 🎉!

An important study on an underappreciated diversity concern in academia: by class background.

Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.

Are you an academic already alarmed and upset by the prospect of Matt Goodwin MP?

Just think! If Reform wins the next general election, they'll probably make him higher education minister.