As a lifelong sufferer from asthma and other allergic conditions, I just wrote a brief media article on a subject close to my heart (and lungs!): the links between air pollution and mental health.
https://t.co/Nq4WkZ4pKG
Over 20,000 people were gathered at Belfast City Hall for the rally against racism today.
That’s over 1% of the entire population of NI.
I was one of them.
Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley very strong on scenes in Belfast:
"I was watching a bit of the news last night, and I can't remember what channel it was, but a journalist was talking about 'these protesters.'
"I thought, that isn't a protest. People are setting fire to cars. That's not a protest. That's violent disorder, that's criminality. I really feel for Northern Ireland colleagues who are wrestling with that. It's really, really difficult.
"We live in these volatile times and, some of what goes on online whips up, sentiment on the street.
"We know that Russian state actors, Iranian state actors, they want to sow discord on the streets of the UK. So this is a really complex issue we're wrestling with. So you've got very polarised debates in the UK, and you've got other people overseas who want to drive wedge issues to create disorder, and you've got the great men and women of Police Service Northern Ireland on the streets in the middle of that, trying to sort of protect people and stop people burning down houses and things. It's awful."
@ArthurCDent I have a similar one here in Vietnam where my wife is not allowed to work on her marital visa ... But I don't get any tax break for her being my dependent, because she's of working age and not disabled!
My dad just told me that a bunch of his co-workers rang in sick because they're terrified of leaving their houses, but tell me again how you're keeping the streets safe.
I see an international cabal of grifters & racists are suddenly concerned about a crime in Belfast.
15 murders in Northern Ireland last year, including Adam Krzan (71) a polish man stabbed to death by Ryan Kerr… why no performative outrage? Why do Elon & Nigel not care? 🤔
This morning everyone is reacting to the horrific attempted beheading in Belfast.
But last week in Galway a young Iranian mother of two, Masuma Sohrabi, was murdered and almost beheaded.
There is no viral video of this brutal attack.
She was living in State care.
Her body was thrown over a bridge.
Murdered by her ex-partner.
The had been living in an IPAS centre together.
She had previously secured a court protection order against him. He was moved only a few miles away.
Only a week later, her story is all but forgotten.
In 2012, Savita Halappanavar, died in State care while giving birth in Galway.
Her death lead to the one of the biggest political movements in Irish history, after an enormous campaign of outcry from, media & NGOs.
My question is:
Where is the national outcry for Masuma Sohrabi??
Where are the NGO's demanding an overhaul of IPAS?
Where is the media demanding answers?
The sad truth is her death doesn’t fit any convenient political narrative for the NGO/media complex.
As some journalist in the Irish Times might say,
her murder "isn't being helpful".
Trump is exactly what we knew he was. The harshest questions and criticisms of journalism today and history tomorrow are about how a generation of Republican politicians, partisan media, and US voters willingly chose to ignore it for power.
Spare us the civilisational lectures, you charlatan.
Atatiana Jefferson, 2019. Shot dead through her bedroom window during a welfare check. Playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew. The officer never identified himself.
Botham Jean, 2018. Shot dead eating ice cream in his own apartment by an off-duty officer who "thought it was her apartment".
John Albers, 2018. Seventeen years old. His friends called police because he was suicidal. Officers killed him during the welfare check.
Parkland, 2018. Seventeen children and staff massacred in their school. The armed officer paid to protect them? Hid outside.
Shajarah Tayyebeh Elementary School, Minab, February 2026. At least 175 dead, most of them girls aged 7 to 12. NYT analysis and US military investigators believe American forces struck the school. Trump blamed Iran without evidence. US Senators are still waiting for answers.
In 2025, American police killed 1,201 people. 98 unarmed. 233 school shootings at K-12 schools. American children do active shooter drills in primary school. American families are afraid to call for welfare checks because officers shoot the people they're sent to help.
Henry Nowak's father said: "We do not want Henry's murder to be used to create further hatred, division or tension". You used it anyway, to lecture a country 3,000 miles away while your administration bombs schoolgirls and your officers shoot people through bedroom windows.
The UK's government has plenty to answer for. But we don't take civilisational lectures from those who run a country that can't keep its children alive in their own classrooms and in their own homes and bomb children in far away lands, you pathetic charlatan.
Compelling essay by sci-fi writer Ted Chiang on why LLMs are nowhere near consciousness, but why it serves the interests of LLM companies to constantly suggest that they might be.
I've pulled one quote below, but the whole article is worth reading.
Colleges can only have some hope of staying relevant by embracing AI. Students will not accept being forced to write essays, do art, or code without AI when they know they could do the same work faster and better with AI, and that employers will expect it.
Suno - a company that trained on "essentially all music files of reasonable quality that are accessible on the open Internet", and argues it does not need to pay to do so - is now valued at $5.4 billion.
They will pay for GPUs, and for engineers, but not, apparently, for the music they use - other people's music - without which their models would not work.
I know lots of musicians who will be upset. I am with them.
Imagine if a woman president crashed the economy and started a war with no end in sight, and her biggest, seemingly ONLY concern was building a ballroom and redecorating the White House.
The Pope is making exactly our point. LLMs “may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand.”
This is the core epistemic fault line.
Most AI evaluation is still based on one assumption: if a system statistically approximates human behaviour, then it is close to human intelligence.
But approximation is not intelligence.
Simulation is not understanding.
LLMs can produce the right answer without knowing why it is right. They can simulate empathy without feeling. They can imitate judgment without responsibility. They can generate coherent explanations without having a world to which those explanations are accountable.
Stop confusing behavioural similarity with cognitive equivalence.
Human understanding is embodied, affective, relational, motivational, and normative. It is not just the production of plausible text.
*
Full paper in the first reply
Pope Leo XIV: "Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them." #MagnificaHumanitas
Since Pope Leo XIV mentioned this in encyclical, this means if your employer is pushing you to use AI, you can cite religious conserns as a reason to not use it at work
Too on point not to share. This is great, but too bad the Orange Felon’s enablers won’t let him see it.
This Australian's reply to #Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."
- Tony Locke