Anne Murphy

Yeah, British politics is simple. You just need to improve public services without any meaningful tax increases, reduce immigration without any labour market impacts, and deliver growth and you'll be hugely successful.

Autistic people seem to feel joy differently – here’s what it can tell us about neurodivergence It’s a common misperception that autistic people are always unemotional.

Autistic people seem to feel joy differently – here’s what it can tell us about neurodivergence

theconversation.com/autistic-peo...

Nearly 1,000 feared missing in latest migrant tragedy - Vatican News An Italian aid group says that scores of people are unaccounted for after many boats left during a fierce storm.

www.vaticannews.va/en/world/new...

Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist, was the only woman Pope Francis mentioned in his address to Congress. Photo credit: Getty Images.

#ResistanceRoots

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. ... No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.”
— Dorothy Day

Major news on SEND funding this evening…

All the details here ⬇️⬇️

🚨
Are people sicker now than in 2019?

Civil servants in England are.
Sickness absence rates have *risen by between 12% to 23% across the age groups*.

Are things getting worse?
It certainly looks like it.

This is exactly what we predicted repeat covid infection would do.

2 posts in my team

Public Health Practitioner (Behavioural science, poverty, and inclusion health) G9. Closes 27th Feb

ce0369li.webitrent.com/ce0369li_web...

Health Improvement Officer (Health Protection, poverty, and health inclusion) G7. Closes 22nd Feb.

ce0369li.webitrent.com/ce0369li_web...

Labour complaining about the right wing press is like penguins saying how shocked they are by how cold Antarctica is. You'd have thought we'd have figured this out by now - it's been over 100 years since the Zinoviev letter.

Rather than bringing Starmer down with the Mandelson/Epstein stuff, perhaps we should accentuate the Bannon/Epstein (and more) stuff which talks about supporting the European far right and breaking the world system.

Via Brexit, Reform UK and the new model Badenoch party tagging along.

#R4Today

Please read this and then watch the video. It is just too good. I scrolled back through 10 hours of my time line to find it again to show Mark.

Exactly. The children are invisible.

This works only if we think of children as parental property to the age of 18, rather than as small citizens with their own needs.

Denmark’s generous child care and parental leave policies erase 80% of the ‘motherhood penalty’ for working moms Two researchers found that Danish government benefits do not fully offset moms’ lost earnings. But they do help offset lost income for working women with kids.

"We estimated that motherhood cost the average Danish woman a total of about $120,000 in earnings over the first 20 years after they first had children – about 12% of the money they would have earned over those two decades had they remained childless."
theconversation.com/denmarks-gen...

People often jump to saying online propaganda is either the work of radicalised actors, or else Russia.

In practice, it’s amazing how often the answer is much simpler – someone is chasing either (a) clout, (b) money, or (c) both.

We’re treating social media like a moral failing rather than an infrastructure substitute.

When young people have no safe, low-cost third spaces, the phone becomes the youth club, the park and the bus pass.

If we restrict that, we need to replace it with real-world belonging, not just rules.

Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal Newly unsealed documents suggest that Anthropic was well aware that destroying books to train its AI would look bad.

Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal futurism.com/future-socie...

Kids can't hang out in parks. They can't hang out at the mall. They don't have 3rd spaces because no one wants kids around and then we are surprised when they rely on SM for connection.
If you take that away, what do they have left?

Closing Central Madrid To Cars Resulted In 9.5% Boost To Retail Spending, Finds Bank Analysis City of Madrid significantly boosted the takings of its shops and restaurants last Christmas by banning cars from the CBD, finds an analysis by Spain's second largest bank.

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY.

There was also a 71% drop in air pollution.

Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

"The risk is not making AI conscious, but making humans zombies, parasitized by fake realities with real consequences" 🔥

Bekker & Ciaunica popping the hype bubble and reasserting the value of care for living beings

Go read any set of ICB Board papers and you’ll find the whole system has made 9-figures worth of “efficiencies” in the year, yet the ICB providers are often still nowhere near break-even budget.

It is frankly impossible to cut that much without cutting patient care.

The dude whose company, thanks to Labour, will run our military analytics and to whom Wes Streeting is giving our personal healthcare data.

ICE protester says her Global Entry was revoked after agent scanned her face Global Entry and Precheck revoked three days after incident, court filing says.

Protest ICE and they scan your face.
Three days later, your Global Entry and TSA PreCheck are gone.

No charges. No explanation.
Just surveillance → retaliation.
Facial recognition. Watchlists. Revoked privileges.
This isn't security It's Big Brother policing dissent in real time.

Nothing quite like rushing through legislation allowing the state to kill people (soon to be a Reform state if polls are to be believed).

Zero unintended consequences (but just for the proles, the rich will still be able to get palliative care)

Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.

The question nobody seems to be asking. If nature abhors a vacuum, who has filled the Epstein void? Because these scum lords won’t stop their activities just because someone is dead. Look at the mafia, cut off a head and two more grow to replace it.

Well, given that latest plans for immigration is that ‘people who use benefits’ will have their settlement period extended, while ‘high earners’ have theirs reduced…

…given that care/nursing is so badly paid, it seems like our government has made a value choice.

Mesothelial cells promote peritoneal invasion and metastasis of ascites-derived ovarian cancer cells through spheroid formation Ovarian cancer cells form spheroids with surrounding mesothelial cells in the ascites, altering them to facilitate metastasis.

And the open access in Science Advances
#Ovary #Cancer 🧪 #OvarianCancer #MedSky
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Scientists now know why ovarian cancer spreads so rapidly in the abdomen Ovarian cancer kills more women than any other gynecological cancer. Most patients receive their diagnosis only after the disease spreads throughout the abdomen. Until now, scientists have never fully...

“the study shows that cancer cells recruit help from protective mesothelial cells that normally line the abdominal cavity. Mesothelial cells lead the invasion and cancer cells follow the pathways they create. These hybrid cell clusters resist chemotherapy”
🧪 #Ovary
medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02...

Comparing school term and holiday seasonal respiratory virus detection rates in hospitalised children, 2019–2024 We analysed laboratory-confirmed seasonal respiratory virus infections among hospitalised children in Leicester, UK (2019–2024), comparing nucleic aci…

'Across multiple viruses, hospital-based detection & test positivity were generally lower during school holidays, indicating that the school calendar is associated with hospital-based paediatric respiratory virus detection patterns.'
@elsevierconnect.bsky.social
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...