Sally Oldfield

free woman

[Martin Francis @WembleyMatters]

WEMBLEY MATTERS:Zadie Smith: South Kilburn residents face an unfair choice between housing and grass in contrast to their Queens Park neighbours @GranComKitchen https://t.co/y2R47yPktB

[Gordon Fielden @GordonFielden]

I completely reject the way the BBC has framed this argument, and particularly the suggestion that the triple lock is somehow becoming unsustainable because pensioners’ living standards have improved more quickly than those of working people. That is an extraordinarily narrow way of looking at what has actually happened.

There is a rather important part of this story that is being conveniently overlooked. Successive Conservative governments froze the personal tax allowance, and the present Labour Government has continued that policy. The consequence for pensioners is particularly stark. Their State Pension rises, as it should, yet the amount they are permitted to receive before paying income tax remains frozen. They are therefore being steadily dragged into the tax system through fiscal drag, with an increasing proportion of their pension becoming taxable.

Indeed, we are now reaching the absurd position where the full new State Pension itself is likely to exceed the personal tax allowance. The Government will increase the pension under the triple lock and then, because it refuses to raise the tax threshold, begin taking part of that increase back in taxation. If we are going to talk about a “ratchet effect”, perhaps that is the ratchet effect we ought to be discussing.

Nor are these payments some unexpected act of generosity bestowed upon pensioners by the state. These are people who have worked and paid National Insurance contributions throughout their lives on the understanding that, when they reached retirement, the State Pension would form part of their income. For millions of people, that was part of the social contract between the individual and the state.

We should also remember how that contract has already changed. When many of today’s pensioners began their working lives, the State Pension age was 65 for men and 60 for women. Those ages have since been increased. People have already been required to work longer and wait longer before receiving the pension towards which they spent decades contributing.

Against that background, to portray a State Pension of around £250 a week as evidence that pensioners are somehow becoming too prosperous is frankly absurd. Nobody could seriously describe that sum, from which people must meet the ordinary costs of living, as an extravagant retirement income.

The triple lock was introduced for a reason. The value of the British State Pension had been allowed to fall behind earnings over many years, while pensioner poverty became a serious national problem. It was designed to prevent that happening again and to ensure that pensioners shared, at least to some reasonable extent, in the rising prosperity of the country rather than being progressively left behind.

So the question should not be whether Britain can afford to honour the triple lock. The more pertinent question is why governments believe it acceptable to increase the State Pension while deliberately freezing the tax threshold until that pension itself becomes taxable.

After a lifetime of work and contributions, pensioners are not asking for charity. They are asking for the settlement they spent their working lives paying towards to be honoured. That distinction matters.

[RNLI @RNLI]

We're proud of the lifesaving work our volunteers do in the Channel – we make no apology for it. Those we rescue are vulnerable people in danger & distress. Each of them is someone’s father, mother, son or daughter - every life is precious. This is why we launch:

[Poetic Outlaws @OutlawsPoetic]

The great Wendell Berry died yesterday. This one stings. He’s always been one of my favorite writers.

“Though the body grows old and bears
the ache and weight of many days,
the life by which it lives is young,
for life is young or it does not
exist, is not even dead. And so
as I walk in the land’s holy Sabbath
Under the tall trees, I come
at once into the old young joy
that has moved me all my life to be
here in the early morning light.”

—Wendell Berry

[The New Yorker @NewYorker]

A poem by Wendell Berry, who died yesterday at age 92. https://t.co/cAjR4iTs7u

[Daniela Gabor @DanielaGabor]

I invite @andyburnham to read this shocking piece and tell us, the British public, why we are not instantly nationalizing water and prosecuting the barbarians that have pillaged it.

Bonus points for Martin Baggs, that's the most shameless career move Ive ever seen.

[Clive Lewis MP @labourlewis]

Half of England is in drought. 40% of us are under a hosepipe ban. Here’s what the water companies did with the 35 years they were given:

💧 2.87 billion litres leaked every single day. Nearly one in five litres put into supply, lost.

💧 A national hosepipe ban saves about 577 million litres a day. Five times less than they leak. They ration us to cover their own failure.

💧 25 reservoirs sold off. Not one major new reservoir built since 1992.

💧 England faces a 5 billion litre a day shortfall in public water supply by 2055.

💧 £85 billion paid out in dividends since privatisation.

💧 £0 of debt in 1989. Over £70 billion now. Borrowed against your bills, to pay their shareholders.

💧 Almost a third of your bill goes on servicing that debt and paying dividends. Not on pipes.

💧 Thames Water took a £3 billion rescue loan at 9.75% interest. You pay for that too.

💧 £25.3 million in pay for chief executives and finance directors last year, up on the year before, despite a bonus ban. Thames handed £4.1 million to senior staff the ban didn’t cover.

They didn’t fail to fix the pipes because it was hard. They didn’t fix them because leaking is cheaper than investing, and the money got pissed away to the assorted circus of vulture capital.

We don’t need better regulation of them. We don’t need tighter control of them. We need to own it.

Public ownership. Nothing less.

[Richard Corbett @RichardGCorbett]

Since water services were sold off by Thatcher to be run for private profit, the water companies have:
- amassed debts of over £50bn
- paid £78bn to shareholders
- raised CEO pay to £1-3 million a year
- lose 2.87bn litres of water a day through leaky pipes
- polluted EVERY river

[Tamer Nahed @Tamer_Alnoaizy]

One of the most terrifying realities we live with in Gaza one that almost no one in the world talks about is the presence of more than 100 military towers, each standing over 30 meters tall, surrounding the Gaza Strip from every direction.

Each tower is equipped with an automated machine gun that fires remotely without a soldier standing behind it. It makes no distinction between a child, a woman, or an elderly person, nor between civilians and anyone else. It can open fire at any moment, turning the simple act of moving into a potential death sentence.

These machine guns are capable of firing more than 6,000 rounds per minute, with a range of nearly 3,000 meters enough to cover most of the small area of Gaza where the population has been confined.

We are not only living under bombardment; we are living under constant surveillance by machines that know neither mercy nor hesitation. Gaza has become completely exposed to these weapons, and fear follows us with every step. Even leaving to search for food or water can become your last journey.

This is not science fiction. It is not a scene from a movie. This is the reality we live every single day in Gaza.

We are literally living inside Squid Game.

[Ahmed Nashwan @ahmed_nashwan1]

This is Gaza before the genocide. Looking at it brings back a flood of painful memories. I swear my tears fall beyond my control. I miss this Gaza, the one where I grew up. I miss every moment I spent walking its streets and passing between its buildings. I miss my friends, who were an inseparable part of my memories there.

I feel lost now. I live as a stranger in my own homeland. I no longer recognize the city, and I no longer see my friends. Everything here has become completely destroyed, and the people who were once around me are no longer the same. Displacement has scattered us until each one’s tent has become their homeland.

I long for the Gaza that was, and I weep for the Gaza that has become. Every night I ask myself: Will what we lost ever return one day, or will memories alone remain the homeland we seek refuge in when the tents grow too small for us?

[💧Mary Kostakidis @MaryKostakidis]

'“This is not a ceasefire,” said the medical charity, also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), in a statement. “It is a continuation of the genocide, calibrated to be violent enough to keep Palestinians suffering every day, yet silent enough to avoid stirring international outrage.”'

'Since October, when the Israel Defense Forces controlled about half of Gaza, the “yellow line” indicating IDF occupation has kept shifting, to push Palestinians into “an ever-shrinking area,” MSF explained. “Today, almost 2 million Palestinians are confined to approximately 30% of the strip.”'

https://t.co/9zXSpeGTAA

[The Elders @TheElders]

“It’s no longer a matter of individual settlers. It’s now a policy. It’s a policy of getting rid of Palestinians from villages and literally obliterating the West Bank.”

Mary Robinson spoke to @IsaCNN on @CNN about her recent visit to the Middle East, alongside fellow Elders @HelenClarkNZ, Graça Machel and Hina Jilani, and their conclusion that the Israeli government aims to make Palestine disappear.

Watch a clip below ⬇️

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Night Sky Today @NightSkyToday]

JUST IN🚨: In a historic environmental turnaround, Costa Rica has doubled its rainforest canopy over the last few decades, making it the very first tropical nation to fully reverse deforestation.

[Rémi Kasprzyk @KasprzykRemi]

Cette photo mérite absolument tous les prix. Elle a même sa place au Louvre.

Elle relate précisément l’inertie de l’individu face à l’effondrement.

Regardez la composition. Un chef-d’œuvre involontaire.

Au premier plan, le sable doré, les tongs abandonnées, la glacière. Le décor ordinaire du bonheur estival. Deux personnages assis, de dos, comme dans un tableau de Caspar David Friedrich. Sauf que Friedrich peignait des hommes contemplant le sublime. Ici, ils contemplent la catastrophe. Et ils ne bougent pas.

Au centre, le parasol. Publicitaire, criard, dérisoire. Un pastis face à l’apocalypse. C’est presque trop parfait : la France qui prend l’apéro pendant que le monde brûle. Aucun scénariste n’aurait osé.

Et puis le ciel. Les deux tiers de l’image. Cette muraille de fumée qui avale la lumière, ce dégradé d’ocre et de noir digne d’un Turner. La nature qui reprend la palette des maîtres pour peindre notre propre fin.

La femme photographie l’incendie avec son téléphone. Mise en abyme totale : nous documentons notre disparition au lieu de l’empêcher.

Cette image dit tout. Le déni, le confort, l’habitude. Nous sommes tous sur cette plage. Nous voyons tous le nuage. Et nous restons assis, parce que l’eau est bonne et qu’on a posé nos congés.

Les historiens de l’art parleront un jour de cette photo comme on parle du Radeau de la Méduse.

Sauf que cette fois, le naufrage, c’est nous qui le regardons depuis la plage.
💔🌍

[Martin Francis @WembleyMatters]

WEMBLEY MATTERS: Proposed Frogmore Data Centre represents all that is wrong with the priorities of Brent and Ealing Labour controlled Councils @BrentGreens @EalingGreens @Brent_Council @EalingCouncil @EalingNews @bktimes https://t.co/3sEj3Fu8sL

[Martin Francis @WembleyMatters]

WEMBLEY MATTERS: Key questions remain unanswered about the Health & Wellbeing Hub in Gladstone Park @Brent_Council https://t.co/D95zTx3HzI

[RoslynByfield @RoslynByfield]

Sinister stuff. We mustn't sleep walk into it. #r4today #c4news #Newsnight
'These financiers want to remodel the UK into a form that suits them – one that could threaten to erode the barriers between crime and business'.
https://t.co/ozuQJmPr5z

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

The Trump administration has found a new target in its long war on Cuba: the island’s doctors. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Washington is now moving to destroy Cuba’s overseas medical missions – one of its last remaining sources of dollar income – having already blocked its fuel, sanctioned its officials and choked off remittances. Marco Rubio has toured the Caribbean threatening visa bans against any official who keeps employing Cuban medics, denouncing the programme – bizarrely – as “forced labour” and “state-sponsored human-trafficking brigades”.

Since 1963 – the first mission went to newly independent Algeria – Cuba has sent what Fidel called an “army of white coats” to heal the poor of the world. Some 24,000 Cuban health workers currently serve across more than 50 countries, from tiny Caribbean islands to the rural villages of southern Italy. They staff the clinics no one else will.

In Honduras, residents gave the departing Cuban medics a tearful ovation. Jamaica’s prime minister, standing beside Rubio, pushed back to his face: the Cuban doctors “have been incredibly helpful to us”. St Lucia’s leader said plainly that “our medical system would basically collapse without them”. And when the US leaned on St Vincent and the Grenadines, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves responded firmly: “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die.”

That is the choice the United States is forcing on the region: get rid of the Cuban doctors, or be punished. The world’s richest country would rather the poor of the Global South go blind and die than tolerate Cuban solidarity.

Why? Because those missions are not only Cuba’s largest export – some $5.3 billion in 2024, half of all its foreign earnings – but the clearest proof of what a small socialist country can offer humanity. That is the real target. Not “trafficking”, but the threat of a good example: a blockaded island of 11 million that sends doctors where empires send gunboats.

To wage war on Cuba’s doctors is to admit you have nothing to offer the world. Solidarity with Cuba has never been more urgent. ¡Venceremos!

[Quds News Network @QudsNen]

“The Moment Ahmad Raised His Hands in Surrender, an Israeli Soldier Shot Him Directly in the Head”

The Guardian reports that Palestinian aid truck driver Ahmad Esleem was shot dead by an Israeli soldier while transporting humanitarian aid into Gaza, in what eyewitnesses and Gaza’s Transport Companies’ Association describe as a field execution.

Esleem, who was delivering food for World Central Kitchen (WCK) through a fully coordinated humanitarian convoy, was ordered out of his truck after one vehicle broke down near the Philadelphi Corridor.

Witnesses say Israeli soldiers forced the drivers to strip, assaulted them, and made them stand under the sun. As Ahmad Esleem raised his hands in surrender, an Israeli soldier shot him directly in the head.

The 30-year-old, a father of two children, including a one-month-old baby, was killed despite wearing official identification, carrying all required permits, and operating under coordination approved by the Israeli military, according to his employer and Gaza’s truckers association.

Witnesses also said Israeli soldiers threatened the surviving drivers, warning they would meet the same fate as Esleem.