Dan McCrum

Getting really tired of "this is all a media concoction"...

Starmer has the lowest approval rating of any PM in history bar Truss. Senior ministers are openly and unsubtly positioning. His Chief of Staff, Director of Comms and Cab Sec have all resigned on the same day.

I mean come on...

A few charts on these benchmark revisions. Starting with the big picture: These revisions dramatically lower the rate of job growth over the past two years. In total, payroll employment is more than 1 million jobs lower than previously reported. #NumbersDay

Early indications are incompetence

This is a pretty brutal Whiskey Friday with Tony Dokoupil

Benevolent corporations: FT Alphaville needs YOU Well, your chief marketing officer’s money anyway

Keep Alphaville free by giving us money: tin rattling edition.

www.ft.com/content/07c0...

Here at Death and Deportation Corp, we recognise that some employees may have concerns about the death and deportation work we are currently involved in.

We are committed to an open and honest dialogue, subject to NDA, and would also encourage you to visit the welfare section of the staff portal.

The deadline for responding to this consultation (about whether we should shovel even greater heaps of bureaucratic misery onto immigrants in the hope of pacifying racists) is midnight on Thursday 12th:

It is mad, but maybe breeze past it and start calling it Oat-mlk and Soy-mlk.

Before you know it we'll have cow-mlk as well.

Solar and Batteries can Meet Malaysia’s Growing Electricity Demand Without Compromising Energy Security and Affordability | BloombergNEF ● BloombergNEF’s Malaysia: A Techno-Economic Analysis of Power Generation finds that solar power is the cheapest source of electricity generation for Malaysia ● Solar paired with batteries could becom...

"BloombergNEF’s Malaysia: A Techno-Economic Analysis of Power Generation finds that solar power is the cheapest source of electricity generation for Malaysia"

Rikers Island being, until now, America's most notorious jail.

That’s Life is how I discovered when I was about 12 that women and men had been paid different wages for the same job until the law just changed. Esther Rantzen held up an advertisement from a local authority advertising for an equal pay officer showing different rates for men and women.

FAA closes airspace around El Paso, Texas, for 10 days, grounding all flights The Federal Aviation Administration is closing the airspace around El Paso International Airport in Texas for 10 days, grounding all flights to and from the airport.

What's the range of reasons for abruptly closing the airspace at a busy airport next to the Mexican border for 10 days?

El Paso is a city of 700,000 people, btw.

The best response to tear gas or pepper spray on eyes or skin is water, lots of it.

Two metres of rain so far this year in parts of Spain!

Or to put it another way. A year and a half of rain in three weeks.

This is the 38th time that the U.S. military has unlawfully killed civilians on the orders of Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump. At least 130 people — never charged with crimes, their identities unknown to their executioners — are now dead.

BONUS RULING: Judge Thomas Johnston, a George W. Bush appoiintee in West Virginia, used a recent ruling to warn of the dangers of defying due process for immigrants because of what it could also mean for Americans. It's worth a read.

storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A strong recommendation from my sister led me to Proto Bakery in St. Albans, and I'm glad it did. A lovely bready cardamom and orange bun, an impressively layered pain au chocolat, and an almost comically tall slab of olive-studded focaccia, as soft as anything

The largest investor in the Trump's BribeCoin was also pardoned by Trump. What are the odds?

Chart only goes back to 1997 but the full dataset goes back to 1979

We've always been unpopular! Its us, politicians, and estate agents down at the bottom, although I imagine the 9th circle of hell is reserved for landlords these days.

Records only began in 1997, but still...

maybe the most upsetting and nefarious thing that the NYT does here, backed by predictable quasi-prohibitionist healthcare sources and reporting, is insist on equating cannabis addiction to alcohol addiction, in terms of severity or damages. It’s frankly offensive to anyone who grew up with drunks.

Citing "exaggeration and polarisation", its report started with a question: "why has the use of marihuana reached problem status in the public mind?"

One reason: "the topic of marihuana usage by the young received considerable attention from newspapermen and television reporters".

Fun fact: Before Nixon launched the War On Drugs in the 1970s, the Shafer Commission led by a Republican governor took a deep look at marijuana in the US and recommended decriminalisation.

Earned settlement The government is consulting on how the current settlement system should be reformed and how those reforms should be implemented.

If you want to give feedback to the government on their proposed changes to the immigration system - like a decade wait for settled status - do it here.

If some random MP's can meme Al Carns to leader on the basis, essentially, he was in the military we can meme Yuan Yang leadership from Bluesky on the basis of her dog.

Re-upping this for the Monday crowd... I think my favourite, most revealing detail is that the guy seems to not realise he's in trouble because London Centric's reporting didn't hit anything like his view counts, so therefore it can't really matter.

"Although the judge noted numerous irregularities on Ice’s court documents, she ultimately sided with the agency."

Irish man has a work permit, US business, American wife, almost finished Green card application, and has paid a bond to be released. ICE, implausibly, claims he agreed to be deported.