Robin Wilson

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

#AI suffers from the 'garbage in, garbage out' flaw, as poorly trained workers rate material under time pressure from profit-seeking corporations which ignore copyright constraints while having huge ecological footprints: www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Sinn Féin’s merchandising arm donates €205,000 to party in Belfast Sale of flags, T-shirts, books, and an IRA fridge magnet, gave boost to party coffers

The banality of evil, no 567: Sinn Fein, understood by police north and south in Ireland still to be ultimately controlled by the IRA, merchandises an IRA fridge magnet--with no sense of the irony, given the cold graves its many victims were consigned to: www.irishtimes.com/politics/202...

Lord Rothermere’s Telegraph takeover strengthens UK media’s rightwing tilt Many fear competition and diversity will be diminished as Daily Mail owner wins race to buy newspaper

With advertising poached by online platforms, and 'social media' drawing younger users away, corporate media are consolidating everywhere--creating an unhealthy polarisation between ideological, oligarchic outlets and state brodcasters committed to impartiality: www.theguardian.com/media/2025/n...

Boris Johnson took four days off as NHS warned Covid could ‘overwhelm’ system Files show then PM was walking dog, riding motorbike and hosting guests as pandemic planning stalled in ‘lost month’

Going to Cambridge University (from a provincial state school) in the 1970s exposed me to Britain's ruling class of patrician, home-counties, private-school and Oxbridge-educated 'gentleman amateurs', clueless about the real world but with overweening entitlement: www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

The ‘Danish model’ is the darling of centre-left parties like Labour. The problem is, it doesn’t even work in Denmark | Cas Mudde This week’s local elections are the latest reminder that when social democrats move rightwards, they’re making a mistake, says academic and author Cas Mudde

Brilliant piece by @casmudde.bsky.social on the amorality and myopia of Labour and other social-democratic parties copying the xenophobia of their Danish partner--ousted this week from decades of power in Copenhagen by angry progressive voters: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Record Numbers of Younger Women Want to Leave the U.S. The percentage of younger women in the U.S. who express a desire to migrate permanently has surged in the past decade.

When #misogyny becomes official: fully two fifths of women in the US under 44 would prefer to be living elsewhere--and political attitudes are a major factor. news.gallup.com/poll/697382/...

How the UK and Denmark are pushing Europe to reinterpret the ECHR Over the past decade, Copenhagen has pioneered a conditional model of asylum that blends temporary protection, strict family reunification rules, and incentives for return. What began as a national ex...

The xenophobic campaign to deter asylum-seekers--now finding adherents on the supposed centre-left, following Denmark--ignores entirely the volume of evidence showing #refugees offered integration are not a 'burden' but a boon to hospitable societies over time: euobserver.com/Migration/ar...

Bosnian Serb Minister Taunts International Peace Overseer by Sending Nazi Helmet Trade Minister Stasa Kosarac sent High Representative Christian Schmidt an SS helmet along with a letter calling him the 'embodiment of evil', escalating the Serb entity’s confrontation with Bosnia's ...

It was always evident to the NGOs in former Yugoslavia that the cynical carve-up of #Bosnia and Herzegovina into ethnic power blocs by the US at #Dayton was never going to bring reconciliation. Three decades on, the Serb-nationalist bloc has effectively seceded: balkaninsight.com/2025/11/20/b...

Covid decision-making in NI was 'chaotic', says inquiry The criticisms were contained in the UK Covid-19 Inquiry's second report, which examined government decision-making at the time.

The independent inquiry into the UK's Covid-19 response casts a forensic light on the 'chaotic' governance of Northern Ireland under the dysfunctional structures bequeathed by the Belfast agreement and the populist, sectarian parties favoured by the 'peace process': www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Trump’s anti-climate agenda could result in 1.3m more deaths globally, analysis finds Fallout from increased emissions linked to president’s ‘America First’ policies expected to most affect those in poor, hot countries

To add to the vast loss of American lives due to Trump's first-term Covid-19 ignorance, now comes the vast loss of lives around the world due to his climate idiocy (plus gutting of US Aid). And he doesn't have a clue: www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Una cuarta parte de los jóvenes ve preferible en determinadas circunstancias un régimen autoritario Casi la mitad desconocen cómo murió Lorca. En el electorado de Vox hay más simpatizantes que detractores del franquismo

As in other studies, an opinion survey on Francoism 50 years after its demise shows a resurgence of #authoritarianism among young men, with one in five having a benign view of the dictatorship as against just one in ten young women: elpais.com/espana/2025-...

The EU's so-called Civil Society Strategy: a band-aid on a gaping wound The EU Commission’s new Civil Society Strategy, promised by Ursula von der Leyen in 2024, aims to protect civic space, strengthen participation, and secure funding for NGOs. On paper, it sounds promis...

Civil society is marginalised in the EU while capital has won its evidence-free campaign for deregulation ('simplification') and the real reasons for economic flatlining (constraining fiscal rules, failure to tap the 'diversity advantage'--contrast Spain) are missed: euobserver.com/EU%20Politic...

‘Deeply shocking’: Nigel Farage faces fresh claims of racism and antisemitism at school Bafta-winning director among contemporaries urging contrition and apology from Reform UK leader, who denies the allegations

Tolerance, according to Michael Ignatieff, is a modesty of self-regard. That's why xenophobic populists, from Hitler to Trump and Farage, are actually narcissists--who are, after wreaking great damage through their egomania, eventually found out: www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...

Ultra-processed food linked to harm in every major human organ, study finds World’s largest scientific review warns consumption of UPFs poses seismic threat to global health and wellbeing

After Big Tobacco and Big Oil, now Big Food tries the tested tactic of obfuscation of the disastrous 'externalities' of ultra-processed foods, in terms of morbidity and mortality: www.theguardian.com/society/2025... #UPF

I grew up in Spain amid a collective amnesia about Franco. It is time we faced up to our dark past | María Ramírez This week marks 50 years of Spanish democracy, but the failure to talk more about the crimes of the dictatorship leaves us vulnerable, says the journalist María Ramírez

Spain's democratic transition half a century ago was marked by a 'pact of forgetting'. Not only was victims' trauma left unexpurgated but many Franco sympathisers segued into what is now the PP, increasingly allied to the fascist redux Vox: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Religious education in NI schools breaches human rights, Supreme Court rules The legal action was taken by a girl who attended a Belfast primary school and her father

A UK Supreme Court ruling means Northern Ireland will finally have to come to terms with the fact that its religiously-controlled education system, unique in Europe, does not comply with article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights on freedom of conscience: www.irishnews.com/news/norther...

Neuropsychologist Ian Robertson: Troy Parrott’s words give a clue to those key five minutes Parrott’s lack of ego, his grit and the way he says ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ were forged in adversity and disappointment

There's no 'I' in team: brilliant account by a neuropsychologist of how resilience-driven confidence, not ego, works for success in high-stakes football moments: www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2025...

Starmer facing fresh challenge as Labour MPs condemn asylum plans Significant divisions exposed within party as angry backbenchers vow to force changes to hardline proposals

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the UK Refugee Council, said: “What’s being forgotten here is that behind these proposals are men, women and children who have survived war, persecution and unimaginable loss, and who arrive in the UK with almost nothing." www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

‘No safe place to go’: people sent back to France under ‘one in, one out’ deal tell of desperation In Paris, a group of those returned from UK as part of the immigration scheme say they feel frightened and hopeless

The brutal policies on #asylum being pursued across many European states, including the UK, stem from a simple device: dehumanisation. Once #refugees fleeing trauma, deserving of hospitality, become 'illegal migrants', anything is possible, however inhuman: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ng-i...

‘They have total impunity’: West Bank settler violence surges after Gaza ceasefire UN logs 260 attacks in October alone, its highest monthly tally, as settlers attack farmers and burn olive trees

It's clear that the Israeli far right's goal is a '1-state solution' in whicn Gaza is rendered uninhabitable and the west bank uninhabited (except by settlers): www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n... That Trump backs this is no surprise; that the EU has not ended the association agreement is appalling.

Trump Bows to Reality in Epstein Reversal, Beating a Rare Retreat

With Trump's approval ratings below even his 1st-term slide, the economy flatlining amid his political volatility and recent Democrat election wins, he is now a 2nd-term lame duck whom Republicans must increasingly distance themselves from as the mid-terms approach: www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/u...

Sign the petition: save our BBC: don't let the likes of Trump and his UK cronies meddle with our public broadcaster 🚨Our BBC is under attack 🚨 We can't let those that want to see it torn up & replaced by the likes of GBNews or Fox win. Sign the open letter now to demand the new BBC boss is someone that will protect...

🚨Our BBC is under attack 🚨 We can't let those that want to see it torn up & replaced by the likes of GBNews or Fox win. Sign the open letter now to demand the new BBC boss is someone that will protect the BBC, not let its enemies tear it down: 38d.gs/2sa8

Drugs, violence and profit: Inside Britain’s Brook House detention centre At the UK's Brook House, migrants describe being trapped in a system driven by profit rather than policy — a place where private companies earn more the longer people are kept in limbo, a new investig...

The UK government should spend on reception, support and integration of asylum-seekers the billions it wastes (including in vast bills to generic contractors) on securitisation of people movement. But, obsessed with 'pull' factors', it can't see the value of doing so: euobserver.com/Migration/ar...

Illegal migration tearing UK apart, Mahmood says The home secretary is set to announce major policy reforms, including a 20-year wait before people granted asylum can apply to settle permanently.

The UK home secretary says she's engaged in a 'moral mission'--but really it's a moral panic about those who fetch up on Britain's shores in the absence of safe, legal routes to seek asylum and, meanwhile, of permission to contribute to society through work: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

How Britain replaced the US as Russia’s villain of choice London and Moscow’s rivalry stretches back to the imperial era, but the Ukraine war has brought relations to a new low

'Brexit' campaign funder Aaron Banks never explained his numerous secret meetings at the Russian embassy in London before and after the referendum but Putin's English 'useful idiots' certainly succeeded in isolating Britain from the wider Europe: www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int...

UK government set to make support for asylum seekers ‘discretionary’ Home secretary expected to change system to deny help to those who can work or who have assets

Labour's complete absence of vision means its single goal of 'growth' will be denied: economic prosperity and social comfort are features of open, innovative, societies with high social investment and strong public institutions--not a cramped, austere xenophobia: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

NUJ backs BBC journalists and calls for governance reform The NUJ has called for worker representation and independent appointments to the BBC board ahead of culture secretary Lisa Nandy's urgent statement to parliament today.

These few paragraphs from my union cut through the BBC furore. To sustain professional, public-interest journalism, its board should be independently appointed (ie no government-placed gentlemen amateurs or ideologues) and its workers should have >25% representation: www.nuj.org.uk/resource/nuj...

Huge support revealed for 'Zucman tax' on wealth in high-income countries

Analysing Hitler's DNA for a TV gimmick tells us nothing useful To understand Adolf Hitler, we need to look at his personal life and the wider societal and historical context - analysing his DNA for a TV gimmick tells us nothing, says Michael Le Page

Genetic determinism provides the same cognitive shortcut as market fundamentalism--a fallacy of composition reduces a complex unity, a social formation, to a simple component (DNA, market exchange): www.newscientist.com/article/2504... Of course, the Nazis believed in their own genetic determinism.

EU conservatives join far-right to gut green rules The European Parliament’s biggest political group, the centre-right European People’s Party, has teamed up with the far right to roll back major parts of the EU’s green corporate rulebook.

@eppgroup.bsky.social caves in to far right's climate idiocy and corporate worship. Like (Groucho) Marx, Manfred Weber has his principles, but if you don't like those he can show you some others: euobserver.com/Green%20Econ... Whatever happened to Christian democracy and the social-market economy?