I am Spartacus

Dance, grow things, try not to be a dick!

[Donna-Louise @NoLongerTheFuzz]

Public service 📣
With so much to be depressed about in the UK, I’ve found an app called Merlin, it’s completely free and identifies birds from their songs. I’m sat in the garden and here’s what it’s heard in the last 30 seconds. A bit of nature and respite from the misery inflicted on us ❤️

[Katie Lam @Katie_Lam_MP]

The Environment Agency can't find the time to deal with criminals who dump waste into our rivers - but they're perfectly happy to investigate volunteers who clean those rivers.

It's the same story, over and over.

Rule-breakers go free. People who do the right thing get crushed.

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

Six of these ten Highland Councillors voted to allow a taxi driver who raped a passenger to keep his operator’s license — even though senior police officers urged them not to.

Please note that although we’re constantly told it’s women who grease the wheels for rapists, every single councillor who voted in rapist David Brown’s favor is a man. Take a good look at them, Scottish women: these 6 men would put you, alone and unwarned, in a taxi with a man who has already raped at least one passenger.

Brown has been put on the register for life; he raped an 18 year old girl and dumped her outdoors on a sub-zero January night in the Scottish Highlands; but these 6 men - Chris Birt, John Grafton, Ruraidh Stewart, Sean Kennedy, Willy MacKay, and Duncan MacPherson - are more concerned about his finances than they are about the safety of local women.

https://t.co/Rq2jzLJ9P3

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

In Uganda, an organisation called The Big Fix Uganda is teaching children that Dogs are friends, not animals to fear or mistreat.

For many of the kids, it’s the first time they have seen Dogs calmly respond to commands.

A small lesson, but it can change how a child looks at Dogs for life

[🎈🎈🎈 @Irmenberga]

Best day EVER at @N_T_S property Newhailes, just outside Edinburgh. They restored the 18th century doocot, & three of the ladies who work there knitted pigeons for it, & it's snowballed & people are sending in hand made pigeons from all over the world 😁 I'm dying to make one 😁

[Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives @dom_lucre]

🔥🚨BREAKING: mysterious vigilante has been hunting down suspected motorcycle thieves, duct taping them to street poles, and leaving signs accusing them of theft. The unknown figure, nicknamed "Mexican Batman" by social media, has reportedly been linked to at least five incidents in the city of Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco.

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Above all nations is humanity: 104 skydivers from 20 nations and a world record

[I am Spartacus @Ask_ThOracle]

@Beno_ldn Accurate 😄

[VisionaryVoid @VisionaryVoid]

The Fake Cities Britain Built to Be Bombed Instead

After the Luftwaffe obliterated Coventry on the night of November 14, 1940, killing 568 people and flattening the city center, British engineer Colonel John Turner had one mandate: make sure it never happened again.

His answer was to build fake Coventrys. Starting in 1940, Turner's team constructed "Starfish" sites across Britain's countryside, elaborate decoy installations positioned four miles outside real cities. Creosote-and-water fires simulated incendiary bombs. Diesel tanks atop 20-foot towers reproduced burning factories. Strings of dim bulbs, powered by underground generators, mimicked the blacked-out streets of a British city. The hardware was designed by film technicians borrowed from Shepperton Studios.

The mechanics: German pathfinder planes marked a real city with flares, then the main bomber wave followed minutes behind. The moment those flares dropped, the Starfish crew lit their fires, so that the second wave would see what looked like a city already burning and drop their loads on the field instead.

The people running these systems sat in brick-and-concrete bunkers in the middle of empty farmland, watching German planes overhead, deliberately trying to attract bombs onto themselves.
At Uphill in Somerset, the electrics failed mid-raid. One operator crawled out of his bunker on his hands and knees and lit the fires manually, in the open, under an active raid, until the bombers redirected. He was awarded a gallantry medal. By 1945, there were 237 Starfish sites protecting 81 cities, towns, and factories. Official records counted 730 bombing raids diverted. An estimated 968 tons of German ordnance fell on empty English fields.

Their job was to sit in the dark and hope the bombs found them. Success felt exactly like failure.

[Sarah Bee🐝 @BirrelleBee]

I swear on everything Holy, I would not leave that window for a month. 😭❤️

[Claire Adams @claire_adams694]

Good morning.

We need your help. Following the recent announcement on early prisoner releases, we’re supporting around 50 survivors of child sexual exploitation who no longer feel safe where they live and urgently need to relocate before any potential releases. We’re looking for landlords or landladies across Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, the Midlands, London and surrounding areas who may be willing to accept tenants through housing support. Everything will be handled in the strictest confidence to protect the women involved. If you own property, or know someone who does and may be able to help, please send me a DM.

A safe home could make all the difference

@adamreeds

[Andrew Rosindell MP 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 @AndrewRosindell]

Today in Parliament, I called for greater transparency around the euthanasia of healthy animals in shelters.

Rescue centres are overwhelmed, and the true scale of the problem remains unknown.

In the memory of my late friend and colleague Sir David Amess, and following in the footsteps of the wonderful work done by his daughter @KatieAmess, we must ensure euthanasia is always a last resort and stand up for animals that cannot speak for themselves.

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

NHS KILLED A BABY THEN EDITED HER MEDICAL FILE AFTER SHE DIED

Kate Stanton-Davies lived for six hours. She was born in 2009 at a midwife led unit in Ludlow, run by Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust @sathNHS. Her mother Rhiannon Davies had already raised concerns about reduced movement in the weeks before birth. Nobody acted on it. Nobody classed her as high risk. She gave birth in the wrong place with the wrong support and her daughter died.

Then it got worse. An NHS England investigation into Kate's death was later found not fit for purpose. A second investigation in 2016 found something uglier still.

Someone had gone back and changed Kate's clinical observation notes after she had already died ...

... Not an update. A correction made to a dead baby's file to make the story look cleaner.

Rhiannon and her husband Richard Stanton @hergehound5 were refused an inquest at first. They had to threaten a judicial review just to get one. When it finally happened in 2012, the jury unanimously found that delivering Kate in a midwife led unit contributed to her avoidable death.

The Health Service Ombudsman agreed, ruling the death avoidable and the trust guilty of maladministration in how it handled the complaint.

Two parents who were told to grieve quietly instead built one of the biggest scandals in NHS history. Their campaign led to the Ockenden Review, chaired by Donna Ockenden @DOckendenLtd, which has since examined 1,862 cases of baby and mother deaths and injuries at the same trust. It is the largest maternity review the NHS has ever run. Kate was case one. Pippa Griffiths, who died at the same trust in 2016, was case two. There are 1,860 more behind them.

West Mercia Police @WMerciaPolice later opened Operation Lincoln, investigating individual and corporate gross negligence manslaughter at the trust. It is still running.

In 2023 Rhiannon and Richard were awarded MBEs for services to maternity healthcare, alongside fellow campaigners Colin and Kayleigh Griffiths. A medal is a nice gesture. It does not bring back a six hour old life that a trust decided was worth editing out of the record rather than learning from.

The pattern is the one this series keeps finding. A family raises a concern. The institution ignores it. A child dies. The institution edits the paperwork instead of fixing the system. Then it takes a decade of two grieving parents doing the NHS's job for free before anyone admits what happened.

Sources: @BBCNews @Channel4News @guardian @HSJnews

[KumoriRaver @kumoriRaver]

Even the grandparents in Norway 🇳🇴 weren’t left out of the party!
These legends are straight-up vibing in the hallway Rowing and holding the Norway Flag This is what it’s all about, generations celebrating together ❤️

[I am Spartacus @Ask_ThOracle]

@KittyLovaMass @juliet_turner6 Have a day off will you 🙄

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

This is Judge Eilidh MacDonald. She’s the judge who sentenced Joseph Wood, of Milton Drive in Buckie, to 3 years’ probation after Wood spent five years sexually abusing a little girl, starting when she was seven. He was found guilty of multiple sexual assaults at Inverness Sheriff’s Court, but MacDonald allowed him to walk away free, with just 200 hours of community service, three years’ supervised probation, and 3 years on the sex offender registry — two years less than Wood spent abusing his victim.

Eilidh MacDonald obviously cannot be trusted to mete out appropriate punishment for crimes committed against children, or to take appropriate measures to protect the public from predators. She should be removed from the bench, and held accountable in some way when Joseph Wood molests another child.

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

While nobody was looking, an octopus escaped its enclosure for the first time in three years and crawled all the way back to the ocean.

On June 2, 2025, an aquarium known for its fish, seahorses, and colorful tanks had one main attraction people always came to see. The octopus.

Visitors loved him because he would reach out, grab onto people, and sometimes refuse to let go until a worker offered him a snack to return to the tank.
For years, everyone thought it was amazing.

But after CCTV footage showed the same octopus slipping out of his enclosure and crawling across the floor toward the dock, people started looking at those old moments differently.

Maybe he wasn’t being playful. Maybe every time he held onto someone, he was trying to leave.

Staff used to lure him back with food, and people online began saying the snacks may have been the only thing keeping him from chasing the one thing he really wanted.

Freedom.

One day, while the aquarium was quiet, the octopus found a way out, slipped past the tanks, and made it all the way back toward the water.

The clip went viral because it didn’t look like a random escape. It looked like something he had been waiting three years to do.

Months later, the aquarium faced heavy backlash after visitors started raising concerns about the way the animals were being kept.

But by then, the octopus was already gone.

For three years, people thought he was reaching for attention, but maybe he was reaching for the ocean.

[Trivela 🇵🇹🇮🇹🇩🇿ファンタジスタ愛好家🇯🇵 @Trivela_Futebol]

こんなW杯のド真ん中の日程で
🇸🇪スウェーデンの伝統「ミッドサマー」がアメリカのド真ん中で行われた。

くそぅ。こんな素敵な空気の文化で殴ってくるなんて
敵と思えないじゃないか！
アメリカで世界各国の文化が見せ合い、異国の人も一緒に楽しむ。W杯って素敵！