Iain Macleod

[Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK @CovidJusticeUK]

. @michaelgove A mistake is forgetting to put the bins out.

Referring your 'great personal friend' and donor to a 'VIP lane' so that he is awarded £164 million in public funds, as you did, is not a mistake.

We know exactly what that is evidence of.

[Kyle @roboky303]

How have the commentators just glossed over this stonewall pen that should’ve been given???

[Damian Low @DamianLow3]

Seeing some of the embarrassingly hateful reactions to Starmer's resignation today, I thought it was worth resharing this.

The level of personal hostility directed at Keir Starmer deserves scrutiny in its own right. Not because he should be immune from criticism, but because the tone and intensity of the attacks tell us something unhealthy about the state of democratic politics.

Starmer is a conventional political figure. Cautious, legalistic, incremental. He frustrates people precisely because he is managerial rather than messianic. Yet the reaction to him often goes far beyond disagreement, tipping into visceral hatred more commonly reserved for authoritarians or demagogues.

Much of this hostility is disconnected from concrete policy. It is not about specific votes, proposals or outcomes, but about projection. A belief that Starmer embodies betrayal, bad faith or hidden malice. That kind of politics runs on suspicion rather than evidence.

This matters because democracy depends on the assumption of good faith among opponents. You can think a leader is wrong, timid, or misguided without believing they are fundamentally illegitimate. Once politics becomes moralised to the point of demonisation, compromise is reframed as treachery and pluralism as weakness.

The pattern is familiar. In fragmented, polarised systems, anger concentrates not on extremists, whose intentions are clear, but on moderates, who disappoint maximalists on all sides. The centre becomes the lightning rod precisely because it resists totalising narratives.

There is also a media and online dynamic at work. Incentives reward outrage, not proportionality. Algorithms favour contempt over analysis. Over time, this creates a political culture in which relentless personal attack feels normal, even virtuous, rather than disgusting.

None of this is a defence of Starmer’s decisions, instincts or record. Those should be argued over robustly as you do in a democracy. The problem is the substitution of critique with hostility and the quiet erosion of democratic norms that follows when political opponents are treated as enemies rather than rivals.

A democracy cannot function if every election is framed as an existential struggle against internal evil. At some point, the target may change, but the damage to trust, restraint and culture remains.

[Mike Levin @MikeLevin]

This is really stupid, and it’s not getting enough attention.

The Trump administration is pulling a working $368 million ocean monitoring system out of the water, equipment taxpayers already bought, built, and sank into the deep ocean.

And they are doing it right when the oceans are behaving in ways that alarm the scientists who study them.

Record-breaking temperatures.

A system of Atlantic currents that may be lurching toward collapse.

The response?

Yank out the instruments and walk away.

That is not budgeting. That is smashing the gauges while the engine is on fire and calling it efficiency.

For what? The Trump administration dressed it up as a “nimbler approach” and “smart lifecycle management,” which is fancy nonsense for “we shut it off and hoped nobody would ask why.” There is no return-on-investment analysis. They cannot show taxpayers save a dime, because the gear is already paid for and the science it produces protects real money and real lives.

The kicker: the same people killing the monitors want to mine the deep sea for minerals. So they are destroying the only tools that could measure what that mining does. That is not an accident.

That is the point. You cannot see the damage if you break the instruments first.
https://t.co/MzE4AW1QBv

[Bill Cruickshank @BjCruickshank]

@KarlTurnerMP @AnasSarwar How would someone who is MP for Hull know that? People in Scotland know the lies he tells on our NHS, Grangemouth & the WASPI Women, to name but three.

[Voice of Rabbis @voiceofrabbis]

Tonight in Upstate New York.
A powerful turnout, still growing.

[Republicans murdered the CONSTITUTION! @UpNorthOpinions]

@OrevaZSN Because it saves THEM money. NO other reason. There are alternatives. BUT it would eat into their precious profit and we just can't be having that.
LOTS of people won't have water to drink, cook or bathe with - but the only thing that really matters is a few guys get richer. 😑

[𝐌𝐚𝐥𝐜𝐨𝐥𝐦 @Malcolm_Pal9]

But everyone is still silent about it.

[Farrukh @implausibleblog]

I'm still in shock

Essa Suleiman stabbed three men, two Jewish and one Muslim

If the police caught him when called at 9am, he wouldn't have gone on to attack the two Jewish men

Keir Starmer then spent two days non stop talking about the two Jewish victims but didn't even mention the Muslim victim

And Labour voters are coming up with all sorts of excuses for Suleiman attacking the Muslim man, dismissing the attack as if stabbing someone, anyone, is a 'normal' thing to do

I don't know who I'm more disappointed in. The Prime Minister who has actively ignored a British Muslim victim, or supporters of the Prime Minister making excuses for why he ignored the British Muslim victim

Starmer promised change, he's just as disgraceful as Johnson

Don't vote Labour in the May elections, because this level of bias from the leader of Labour is really quite disgusting

[D.Radka, #NAFO 🇨🇿🤝🇺🇦 @DakdaR22]

- Kaja Kallas:

"Washington is not trying to manage Europe. It is trying to dissolve it.
They do not like the European Union,...
The tactics, resemble those used by the EU's adversaries..

The answer is not bilateral deals with Trump. It is unity. Because when Europe stands together, it is an equal power. And that is exactly what Washington cannot stand."

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Respected Jewish Rabbi Herschel Gluck drops a massive truth bomb on UK politicians. He completely exposes how they are weaponizing Jewish suffering to ban pro-Palestine protests. He declares that denying people the right to protest strips them of their basic humanity.

[Popular Sovereignty @Douglas_Haribo]

Why the so-called Union of 1707 did not happen.

[Robin Monotti @robinmonotti]

UK Jewish MP: "Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza"

"Israel was born out of Jewish Terrorism - Tzipi Livni's Father was a Terrorist"
Astonishing claims in the House of Parliament. SIR Gerald Kaufman, the veteran Labour MP, compared the actions of Israeli troops in Gaza to the Nazis who forced his family to flee Poland.

During a Commons debate on the fighting in Gaza, he urged the government to impose an arms embargo on Israel.

Sir Gerald, who was brought up as an orthodox Jew and Zionist, said: "My grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town a German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

"My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The present Israeli government ruthlessly and cynically exploits the continuing guilt from gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust as justification for their murder of Palestinians."

He said the claim that many of the Palestinian victims were militants "was the reply of the Nazi" and added: "I suppose the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as militants."

He accused the Israeli government of seeking "conquest" and added: "They are not simply war criminals, they are fools."

This was in 2009 when the truth could still be spoken in the UK Parliament

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Israel’s murder of journalists continues. The details of what happened to Amal Khalil are horrific. The Red Cross tried to rescue her but were themselves fired on.

How is Israel allowed such total impunity? Why is the international press not in uproar?

[Iain Macleod @macadedoodah]

@SeannachaidhS @SSalyers2 @liam9904 @AScot94175440 But surely that is important: to fail to vote for an independence-supporting party is to give an easy out for the unionists

[Iain Macleod @macadedoodah]

@SaraReyi .

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

Ethnic cleansing used to be Israel's surreptitious policy. Today, it is Israel's in-our-face pride and joy. Time to ban Israel from every international organisation, like we banned Apartheid South Africa. Enough is enough! https://t.co/vJrwgx3XPU

[Ryan Rozbiani @RyanRozbiani]

🇱🇧 An Israeli Soldier Just Cooked a Meal in Someone Else's Home in Lebanon

An Israeli soldier posted photos of herself picking vegetables from a Lebanese family's garden and cooking in their kitchen, while the family is BANNED from returning.

The house still had food in the kitchen. The garden was still alive. Everything was exactly as the family left it, except the family.

Fifty-five villages in southern Lebanon remain closed to their residents. The people who planted those gardens and built those kitchens are not allowed back.

Someone else is eating their food.