Lex Schlup

Completely agree this is great news - but we need a lot more.

Conflating this with abolishing juries (there is no question of that) diminishes your message. Finding a way to stop minor criminals intentionally clogging courts to avoid facing justice may be a good thing for justice overall.

Melania does billionaires?

Zack Polanski to hand in NHS contract termination notice to Palantir Zack Polanski is telling defence surveillance corporation Palantir to 'pack its bags and get the hell out of the NHS'.

Zack Polanski to hand in NHS contract termination notice to Palantir www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2026...

@gurdeep.ca ... what would we do without him. He is magic.

This will be seen by most as a rare but incredibly welcome bit of news about the UK's marine environment. A few will immediately spy and start to (over)exploit a commercial opportunity. Thanks to @oceanauk.bsky.social and others for all the work they do to try and prevent that.

I was taught about the carbon cycle and greenhouse effect in A Level biology in 1986, which is a neat transposition of the digits of the year Arrhenius did his calculations, and which also feels like a very long time ago.

This year I’m doing something different - I’m only going to talk about this one appeal.

Please donate at the link here if you possibly can, or share this to beat the far right vigilante groups 👉 www.justgiving.com/campaign/tog...

"there's a new serif in town"

Totally agree with the urgent need to stop fossil fuel, but linking one fairly typical UK winter storm to global warming undermines the argument. It's about averages, not single events.

Dog rescuing cat in floods is AI fake

BBC Verify has 62 staff and a payroll of £3.3 million, and this is what we get for it. Scrap the department and send the money to proper open source investigators like @bellingcat.com

I don't think Elon meant human rights relative to each other. He meant rights relative to other species and the ecosphere itself. There is an irrational belief that we have the right to exploit anything and everything on the planet at will and without limit. Where is the consent for that?

Welcome! You are invited to join the global launch of the Earth Rover Program and the release of our inaugural report, which explores how a new scientific concept, ‘soilsmology’, is shaking up our und... We are delighted to invite you to the global launch of the Earth Rover Program and the release of our inaugural report, ‘Soilsmology: Transforming our Understanding of Soil’, which explores how an eme...

Do please join me on World Soil Day, 5 December, 2pm GMT, for the global launch of the most exciting thing I’ve ever been involved with:
The Earth Rover Program, developing a new scientific approach which will massively enhance our understanding of #soil.
Register: us02web.zoom.us/webinar/regi...

Cold, windless, long winter nights. Covering those is a choice between gas and nuclear. Nuclear is by far the lesser of two evils.

States

Reminder:

Taking this a step further, why does a bed need to be heated?

A picture of a foggy street

Edinburgh castle failing to render, likely thanks to the AWS outage

The internet makes it possible to design in redundancy, but it's not baked in. You have to engineer your app properly. Most apps are locked in to a single supplier like AWS, Google or MS. That saves on development costs, but is bad software engineering - plain and simple.

Good history of Twitter. Trouble is, X is the crack cocaine of social media. You know it's bad for you but it's incredibly hard to give it up. All those followers, all those likes. Well done for kicking the habit.

MPs suggest National Commission on Electoral Reform In our increasingly fragmented and volatile political environment, the case for electoral reform becomes clearer every day. And as the political landscape changes, so too will the route

How should the government address the distortions of our political system? MPs in the All Party Parliamentary Group on Fair Elections have set out one approach, a National Commission on Electoral Reform

📣 Scottish Govt has announced new rules for protecting its offshore marine protected areas. They are a big step forward, but don't go far enough. Our campaigns director Alyx Elliott has the story 👇

Stay with us in this fight. We will keep pushing until ALL MPAs are truly protected 🌊

Only electoral reform will save us from the devil. Never got the thing about chlorinated chicken though. Factory farmed chicken is terrible, but chlorination is no worse than antibiotics for dealing with bad bacteria in intensive farms. We drink chlorinated water every day.

Good work, but by now, everyone is well aware of the scale of the problem. The question now is who will stop the water companies breaking the law. There is no meaningful enforcement. The replacement of OFWAT with an as yet undefined new regulator is unlikely to change things.

Watch as an activist is arrested in Glasgow for displaying a sign reading 'genocide in Palestine, time to take action'

'We're not terrorists', he said as he was taken away by police

Wow! 😳
A first-past-the-post (#FPTP) moment.

🪑 21.7% wins the seat!

😅Just 0.6% of votes between 1st & 2nd place

5️⃣ 5 parties in double figures

🗳 Only 12.7% points between the 1st & the 6th placed party.

⏳Time to
GET PR DONE!
#getPRdone
#ProportionalRepresentation

The government says it wants to "rebuild trust in our democracy".

This needs to start with giving everyone an equal vote.

Thank you to @tomgordonld.bsky.social, Sarah Olney, Chris Law, @alexsobel.co.uk @drscottarthurmp.bsky.social and @shockatadam.bsky.social for raising this in Parliament.

Round-headed Rampion and the wonderfully named Bastard Toadflax, growing on Offham Down near Lewes, Sussex.

This SSSI was partially ploughed up by a farmer in the 1990s, only to be ‘unploughed’ by local activists, leading to a strengthening of SSSI protections.

But if we had PR, and the percentages were the same* this is how many MPs each party would win:

REF 26% 169 MPs
LAB 23% 149.5 MPs
CON 18% 117 MPs
LD 15% 97.5 MPs
GRN 11% 71.5 MPs
SNP 3% 19.5 MPs
PC 1% 6.5 MPs
OTHER 2% 13 MPs

*if we had PR, people would likely vote for policies, and less tactically

Brownshirt ICE rolled up to my local Home Depot today and got the F-off treatment.

Shoutout to this woman because this is exactly how it’s done. No badge, face covered = F*ck all the way off.

📌 It’s on us citizens to stand up for our vulnerable brothers and sisters.

c) Pray that the inevitable trough of disillusionment (which will be a Mariana Trench of a trough) about AI will massively reduce its power requirements as servers go idle.

Reeves using the spending review to reannounce exactly what the government had already promised on migration:

- Stop using hotels: Good.
- Spend more on enforcement: Bad, useless, performative, Trumpian, stupid, harmful, a money pit that will never be filled or satisfied, dumb.