Charlie Pillock 🇵🇸

Still alive, still underachieving and still in Ilford.
#GTTO
Blocked by my ex-MP Iron @MikeGapes.
Still not Dead!

[Charlie Pillock 🇵🇸 @jrat0606]

@MikeGapes email sent to your @parliament.uk account.
Subject: As requested on Twitter

[Charlie Pillock 🇵🇸 @jrat0606]

Stop a 32% rent hike for Newham Bookshop - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/t7pTw01cpo

[RMT @RMTunion]

RMT East Midlands Railway picket line at Kettering.
The dispute centres around the roll out of the 810 fleet which has been operating with a significant number of dangerous faults.

[RMT @RMTunion]

RMT picket line at St. Pancras grows over East Midlands Railways refusal to withdraw its faulty 810 fleet from service.

[RMT @RMTunion]

Outsourced Merseyrail cleaners to take strike action

Cleaners on Merseyrail employed by outsourcing firm Churchill Services will take 24-hour strike action against low pay next week on Friday August 7 to Saturday August 8.

Despite repeated attempts to negotiate, Churchill has refused to put forward an acceptable offer, leaving workers no other option but to take strike action.

The union believes that Churchill can improve the current pay offer as the company reported a post-tax profit of £15.3 million for the 2025 financial year, and distributed dividends of approximately £13.5 million. Moreover, the company’s highest paid director, who is also a significant shareholder, received remuneration of £603,000.

RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey said that the company clearly had the capacity to fund the relatively small additional cost required to maintain the current pay differential sought by members.

“Churchill must recognise that our members are some of the poorest paid in our industry and need a pay offer that lifts them out of poverty.

“The current offer falls well short of that modest demand and now we must make the employer understand that our members are serious about securing a fair pay deal.

“It also remains our view that these workers should be insourced immediately so they can receive the same terms and conditions as directly employed Merseyrail staff,” he said.

RMT remains open to talks, but if Churchill refuses to engage, the union will escalate its industrial campaign.

[RMT @RMTunion]

RMT Rail Gourmet Picket Line outside Carlisle Citadel Station …
End the curse of outsourcing! End Low Pay!

[RMT @RMTunion]

End Low Pay - Pay Justice for Outsourced Workers.
RMT Rail Gourmet picket line at Glasgow Central

[Andy Walker @Andywalker1945]

1- https://t.co/uNVjaXqy7H I am not agreeing to the @RedbridgeLive gagging instruction threatening legal action. Instead of spending taxpayers money to defend @Jas_Athwal they should be investigating him. There is a reasonable suspicion of misconduct in public office by Ms...

[Emma 💛💙🇩🇰🇬🇧🇪🇺 @MonkEmma]

2 hours ago Tory MP Richard Holden posted this tweet👇🏼

I was the first person to reply to correct him - this was a Thatcher introduced law!

So he blocked me, hid all replies calling him out AND retweeted it himself🙄🙄🙄

[Charlie Pillock 🇵🇸 @jrat0606]

Save Redbridge Music School - Sign the Petition! https://t.co/i0YFU1bexF via @Change

Redbridge council are attempting to rush through a motion to “relocate” it from its home of 40 years without providing alternative like-for-like accommodation.

[Count Binface @CountBinface]

I enjoyed every second of this interview. Which makes one of us…

[Roger Gall @Shambles151]

On 12th June -10am–5pm.

After never having been charged with - & never having been found guilty of terrorism - Pro-Palestine activists will be sentenced for terrorism.

A first in UK history.

Please RT this until this travesty of justice is ended.
Thank you.

[Occupy Democrats @OccupyDemocrats]

BREAKING: THE WORLD TURNS ON THE TRUMPS! Over 100,000 Albanians flood the streets to STOP crooked @jaredkushner from turning their protected wetlands into a luxury resort for billionaires.

While Trump dismantles America's ocean monitoring systems and guts environmental protections at home, his son-in-law Jared Kushner is bulldozing protected wetlands in Albania to build a $4 billion luxury resort — and thousands of Albanians are in the streets trying to stop him.

The project, linked to Kushner's firm Affinity Partners, would cover 2.5 square kilometers of the protected Vjosa-Narta coastal landscape — home to flamingos, Mediterranean monk seals, and sea turtle nesting sites. The planned development includes roughly 10,000 hotel rooms and villas on protected Adriatic coastland that Albanian law was specifically designed to preserve.

In early May, excavators began clearing pine forests and dunes. Barbed-wire fences went up, cutting off locals and tourists from beaches they've used for generations. Then a video went viral showing private security guards dragging a peaceful protester along a cliff by force.

That was the spark. Thousands flooded the streets of Tirana for two consecutive days, chanting "Albania belongs to Albanians" and demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama, who has been facilitating the project through legislative changes to protected area laws passed in 2024 — changes that Albania's own anti-corruption prosecutors are now investigating.

SPAK, Albania's special anti-corruption prosecution office, has opened a formal probe into how Vjosa-Narta's protected status was quietly altered to make Kushner's resort possible. Two private security companies had their licenses revoked after the assault on protesters. Fifteen demonstrators have been charged. The local police chief was stripped of his duties.

This is the same Jared Kushner who received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund shortly after leaving the White House following Trump's first term. The same Kushner who has been leveraging Trump family connections into overseas deals across the Middle East and Europe,while his father-in-law runs American foreign policy.

Flamingos and monk seals don't have lobbyists. Protected coastlines don't make campaign contributions. But Kushner has a very famous father-in-law — and Albania's government apparently made the calculation that that was enough incentive to destroy their own country’s environment.

Now, Albanian citizens are saying otherwise. Loudly.
Please like and share this post everywhere if you support the Albanian citizens’ protests against Jared Kushner’s greedy desecration of their land and coastline.

[audrey White @RedRosa91940184]

The 4 women sacked from The Writing on the Wall festival would like to thank all the union branches who have made substantial donations to their fighting fund and to the president of the Bakers union for standing in solidarity on their picket line. Never cross a picket line….

[Roger Gall @Shambles151]

Anti-Semitism is unacceptable racism.

Zionism is an evil racist ideology - like Nazism.

Is anti-Zionism now everyone's duty as a human being?

Please RT after voting - thank you.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

A 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan got so angry at journal paywalls in 2011 that she built a pirate website holding 88 million scientific papers, and last month she turned the whole thing into an AI that lets you ask one question and get the actual research as the answer.

Her name is Alexandra Elbakyan, and the website is called Sci-Hub.

The AI she just launched is called Sci-Bot. It lives at https://t.co/6w0IBtOEYB and almost nobody outside academia knows it exists yet.

Here is the story, because it is one of the strangest things to happen in science publishing in the last 50 years.

Elbakyan was born in Almaty in 1988, the year the Soviet Union started to collapse. She taught herself programming at 12. She read Soviet science books that explained things her family used to call miracles. She got into computer security at university and graduated in 2009 with a degree she barely needed because by then she was already a serious hacker.

Alexandra moved to Moscow that fall. Then Germany. Then a research internship in the United States. She was working on brain-computer interfaces, the kind of research that requires you to read hundreds of papers a year just to keep up with the field.

And every single one of those papers was locked behind a journal paywall that cost between 30 and 50 dollars to read once.

She did the math. A graduate student in Kazakhstan could not afford to read science.

The first thing she did was learn how to get around the paywalls one paper at a time. She passed the trick around to other students. They asked her for papers constantly. She got tired of doing it manually.

So in September 2011, in three days, she wrote a script that automated the whole thing. A user pastes a DOI. The script logs in through a donated institutional credential. The paper comes back free. The website caches it.

The next person who asks for that paper gets it instantly because the previous request already saved a copy.

That was Sci-Hub. Three days of code. One graduate student. Done.

15 years later, the cache holds 88 million scientific papers. Almost every piece of scholarly literature published before 2020 is sitting on her servers. Researchers in 190 countries use it. Studies in Nature have shown that roughly half of all academic paper downloads worldwide now go through Sci-Hub, not the publishers who actually own the copyrights.

Elsevier sued her in 2015 and won a 15 million dollar judgment. She did not pay. The American Chemical Society sued her and won an injunction. She did not comply. Courts in India, France, Russia, and the UK have tried to block the domain. She just moves it. https://t.co/3sAWJzNe8I. https://t.co/tGIETesZ8i. https://t.co/H5WQ1f9lqR. The site has had over 20 domains and is still up.

Nature put her on its list of the 10 people who mattered most to science in 2016. The New York Times compared her to Edward Snowden. The Verge called her the pirate queen of science.

She has not been to the United States in over a decade because she would be arrested at the airport.

The Sci-Bot launch in April 2026 is the part that nobody is talking about.

She took the 88 million paper database and put a small language model on top of it. You ask a question in plain English. The model searches the entire shadow library, pulls the relevant papers, synthesizes an answer grounded in real citations, and links you to the full text of every source. Free. No login. No institutional credential. No paywall.

Three real scientists tested it for a Chemical and Engineering News article last month. They asked it medical and chemistry questions. The radiologist said the answer he got was usable. The chemist said the gaps in recent literature were obvious but the older science was solid. The publisher community is furious.

What she built is what the paid academic AI tools are trying to build. Except the paid ones are limited to what their parent publisher legally owns. Hers is limited to almost nothing.

Alexandra still lives somewhere in Russia. She does not give her address. She does not do video interviews. She gives talks over Skype with the camera off. She runs the largest illegal library in human history from a laptop and a donation page.

A graduate student who could not afford to read science built the system the entire scientific community now quietly depends on.

The publishers have spent a decade trying to shut her down.

She just shipped an AI that makes their entire business model outdated.

[Ian Ballantine-Gray, Dad, Signpost & Wonderer? @GrayWolfBG1]

As are so many of us Pete!

I see the odd post of folk who used to form the 'core' of My Twitter Family....but I'm not giving up....even if posts get sat on they still end up posted &, who knows, might have someone look at my T/L & discover them?....

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

The word ‘plan’ tortured and distorted. Planning - one of the great achievements of the human race - reduced to cruelty and dispossession.

[EuropeanPowell @EuropeanPowell]

The dismantling of social welfare systems throughout the 20th and 21st centuries clearly shows we are going backwards.
Capitalism has been corrupted to the point where citizens are seeing their civic spaces attacked by autocrats, and oligarchs and even more disturbingly by our elected representatives in our so-called democracies.
Complacency is dangerous, we must challenge those who seek to hoard their wealth and concentrate power to elites.
Blind trust in the strongman only ever leads to corporate fascism.

https://t.co/NwwsQLNKs8

[Dave @GamewithDave]

They removed CD/DVD drives from devices.
They made physical media harder to buy and use.
They removed expandable storage from phones.
They pushed us into streaming subscriptions.
They made always-online normal.
They made unlimited internet necessary.
Then slowly raised the price of everything.

Ownership quietly became renting.

[Alex Cinephile @DanladiYusty]

So the officers will get blame for his death he did it to himself??

The Rookie