I propose a minutes silence for the journalists and broadcasters who are now in mourning because Rachel Reeves did nothing wrong, what are they going to do now. Think there might be a story about a house in Clacton worth investigating, just a suggestion.

Dominic Cummings Lobbied Officials to Hand 'Test and Trace' Contracts to Palantir After Secret Meeting With Peter Thiel Exclusive: Boris Johnson's senior advisor pushed for Covid contracts to be handed to companies run by Trump-supporting tech billionaires Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison

🚨 Dominic Cummings Lobbied Officials to Hand ‘Test and Trace’ Contracts to Palantir After Secret Meeting With Peter Thiel

+ New emails released to Byline reveal Cummings involvement in VIP Lane deals.

Read my latest @bylinetimes.bsky.social report here: bylinetimes.com/2025/10/31/d...

AXA and Ipsos have published the 12th edition of the Future Risks Report, a report based on a global survey of 23,000 citizens and 3,595 risk experts.
What do both experts and citizens rank as greates risk?
*** Climate change ***
So do I, after over 35 years experience in climate science.

In a way I would not call those risks "emerging" but in case of climate change "still unresolved", not least thanks to the power of the fossil fuel lobby. Climate change has been ranked as the top risk since 2018, except for 2020 during the pandemic.

The largest war ship in the world has been moved to the Caribbean, along with other ships, bombers, amphibious vehicles and more.

That’s a lot of firepower to stop small vessels carrying drugs.

It looks a lot more like preparation for war.

Congress needs to get involved before it’s too late.

“.. Staying on X when it has become so toxic and ungovernable suggests either weakness or complete naivety. We are living in a world of many malevolent geopolitical actors. Musk’s X is one such actor.”

@drjennings.bsky.social
@lorak.bsky.social
observer.co.uk/news/opinion...

Senate Republicans Vote to Gut Arctic Protections This comes after Trump’s Interior Department wrenched open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas leasing.

The Republican-controlled US Senate voted to scrap a Biden-era policy that protected millions of acres in the Alaskan Arctic from fossil fuel drilling. The final vote on the resolution was 52-45, almost entirely along party lines. Sen. Fetterman was the only Democrat to join Republicans.

"Having grossly mislead the British public over the supposed benefits of Brexit which have turned out to be entirely false, Mr Farage…”

Billie Eilish Calls on Billionaires to Support People in Need: 'No Hate, But Give Your Money Away' Billie Eilish donates $11.5 million from 'Hit Me Hard and Soft' tour to charity and calls on billionaires to support people in need during hard times.

I don't see a lot of people talking about this, so I want to highlight something GOOD

Billie Eilish stood in a room full of billionaires and said "you're billionaires... Why?"

She donated 11.5 MILLION DOLLARS to food equity and climate orgs, which Stephen Colbert announced to said billionaires.

Lubov Chernukhin, wife of the Russian president’s one-time finance minister Vladimir, certainly takes an interest in her adoptive British homeland. In a decade up to the last election she gave more than £2m to the Tory party.

🧵1/2

Her commitment does not, alas, extend to paying what she owes to the country’s business people and taxpayers.

Full story by the Eye’s new business columnist ‘Gold Digger’ in the latest issue.

🧵2/2

Migrant workers on legal visas trapped in modern slavery Revealed: UK’s employment visas are causing thousands of legal migrant workers to end up in modern slavery

New - how people arriving into the UK on visas become trapped in modern slavery

www.opendemocracy.net/en/migrants-...

Kavin came here to work. He did everything “right”. But the way we design visas contributed to his exploitation @opendemocracy.net

Ofcom slams O2 over unexpected mobile phone contract price rise The media regulator said it was disappointed O2 raised prices more than was advertised when customers took out contracts.

Corporate Rip-off.

Ofcom rules brought in to stop phone/broadband companies from hiking prices mid-contract.

O2 to ignore the rules.

15.6m O2 customer bills to rise 40% more than expected.

Other companies bound to follow. They raise capital from customers.

Customers need enforceable rights

On October 30, 2025, in Chicago, Illinois, ICE GOONS Backs into a U.S. citizen’s car and subsequently arrests her for documenting their actions.

A thug singles out the vulnerable to make him feel better about himself. He punches down because that makes him feel like he’s a success. Reform is a club for the socially inadequate. Always accusing and whining. Never helping.

But Gove said all contracts were handled by civil servants. Surely you're not telling us he lied?

Immigration, indecency, and incompetence. New post on my Brexit & Brexitism Blog. The ever-more indecent terms of the immigration 'debate' are another failure of Brexit, which links to the ever-more obvious incompetence of Reform in local government: chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2025/10/immi...

We live on a planet on the brink of disaster This year’s State of the Climate Report warns of imminent climate chaos

✍️ We live on a planet on the brink of disaster

This year’s State of the Climate Report warns of imminent climate chaos

By Brian McHugh

@brianmchugh.bsky.social

JD Vance’s Road to Rome — and to MAGA He once likened Trump to Hitler. Now Vance is Trump’s vice president. The Ohio conservative’s journey from “Never Trump” skeptic to MAGA firebrand coincided with his 2019 conversion to Catholicism.

JD Vance has only been Catholic for six years. During that time, he’s desecrated the faith in service of Donald Trump and his own political ambition.

And many over 50 😁
#GoGreen

Photo of construction site with cranes. Article header: STRIPPED TEES How Britain's flagship 'levelling up' project turned into a scandalous giveaway by Richard Brooks

IT WAS to be the UK's largest regeneration scheme in decades, a model for regional devolution and the flagship post-Brexit freeport. But the redevelopment of the former steelworks on the south bank of the River Tees became little more than an unlawful, taxpayer-funded scheme to promote the political career of a Tory golden boy and vastly enrich a couple of local businessmen and their families, all hidden in a web of deception. In the process, it is financially imperilling a major regional development body and squandering the chance to revive one of the country's most deprived but industrially promising areas. This is how it happened...

As some of you will know, Private Eye has a very good track record of persisting with long-term investigations into scandals such as Post Office Horizon. It's often hard to tell when the reporting will break into the mainstream. On Teesworks I'm still waiting.

(8 page report in edition 1660)

In the past year we've had a series of papers with results that've shocked #climate scientists - the globe is heating #FasterThanExpected & we don't fully know why

The public discourse is not keeping up.

Here's a series of 5 new studies that climate hawks & journos need to have on their radar 🧵

Earth's Energy Imbalance More Than Doubled in Recent Decades Earth's energy imbalance more than doubled in recent decades The large trend has taken us by surprise, and as a community we should strive to understand the underlying causes Our capability to o...

2/ The Earth is absorbing energy faster than climate models had predicted...

"Observations from space of the energy imbalance shows that it is rising much faster than expected, and in 2023 it reached values two times higher than the best estimate from IPCC"

Observed trend in Earth energy imbalance may provide a constraint for low climate sensitivity models Climate forcings by greenhouse gases and aerosols cause an imbalance at the top of the atmosphere between the net incoming solar radiation and outgoing longwave radiation from Earth. This Earth energy...

3/ Scientists now believe this rules out lower #climate sensitivity estimates

Which "means that increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases likely will cause even more warming than most current models predict."

Our carbon budgets are smaller. Meeting the Paris goals is harder.

Accelerated Ocean thermal expansion and its contribution to Global Sea-level rise Global ocean heat content (GOHC) changes are crucial to understanding climate change, as oceans store about 91 % of the excess heat in the climate sys…

4/ We're seeing this manifest in an acceleration in global warming.

"Ocean heat content rose 1.7× faster in the past decade than in previous decades"

& impacts like sea level rise are also accelerating...

"Global mean sea level rose 1.8× faster in the past decade than in previous decades"

5/ This pre-print by Foster an @rahmstorf.bsky.social shows that this acceleration in global warming means we will breach the 1.5C goal in 2026!

www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6...

Contraction of the World's Storm‐Cloud Zones the Primary Contributor to the 21st Century Increase in the Earth's Sunlight Absorption Satellite observations show that in the past 24 years the worlds storm cloud zones have been contracting at a rate of 1.5%–3% per decade This contraction allows more solar radiation to reach the ...

6/ Scientists aren't entirely sure whats causing the acceleration. But it's related to a decline in the planets reflectivity.

A leading explanation is that clouds are shifting pole-wards. This "constitutes the largest contribution to the observed 21st century trend of increased solar absorption"

Derailment risk: A systems analysis that identifies risks which could derail the sustainability transition Abstract. The consequences of climate change, nature loss, and other changes to the Earth system will impact societies' ability to tackle the causes of these problems. There are extensive agendas of s...

7/ The take away is that that we'll see climate impacts sooner than previously predicted.

We therefore need to redouble efforts to phaseout fossil fuels, whilst at the same time investing in adaptation

We must avoid a doom-loop where the impacts of climate chaos derail our ability to cut emissions

Why You Should Talk About Climate Change Right Now In an excerpt from Saving Us , The Nature Conservancy chief scientist Katharine Hayhoe explains how the simple act of talking can be a big climate benefit.

I’ve been doing it for so long, tho, that I’m finally starting to hear consistent stories that add up to a compelling set of data points that the above really works.

Every few weeks now I hear a story that makes me think: that one impact totally made that trip/talk/book/convo worthwhile. Like this:

Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo In 2023, the global mean temperature soared to almost 1.5 kelvin above the preindustrial level, surpassing the previous record by about 0.17 kelvin. Previous best-guess estimates of known drivers, inc...

Terrifying thread!

It's not just that clouds are shifting polewards, but also that low-elevation cloud isn't being formed

That might be because warming itself is hindering cloud formation, because of reductions in aerosols
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...