upekha bandaranayake 🌈 🇱🇰

i make blu-rays (and dvds too, sometimes)

[Hanan Ashrawi @DrHananAshrawi]

Israel has robbed Palestinian children of everything meaningful & that sustains life; it deprives them of their childhood & hope for the future.

[Alireza Salimi @AR_Salimii]

Yasmine Pahlavi, the wife of Reza Pahlavi, son of the former Shah of Iran, published the following post on her Instagram account, effectively attempting to normalize the use of weapons of mass destruction against the innocent people of Iran.

This woman and her husband have become puppets of Netanyahu and Trump, essentially broadcasting their agendas across social media platforms.

This serves as a serious wake-up call, as these two sellouts are normalizing pure evil and pushing 90 million innocent Iranians to the brink of destruction.

This exact post, which implicitly normalizes the use of weapons of mass destruction, could arguably be subject to legal prosecution.

@PahlaviReza
@PahlaviComms

[Paula Peters @paulapeters2]

Sainsbury’s won’t be the only ones “benefitting” from free labour. So will Boots, B&M, Toby Carvery and many more.
Exploiting younger people while the CEOs get bonuses & pay increases. @unitetheunion @UsdawUnion time for you to step up and fight this #WorkPlacements

[upekha bandaranayake 🌈 🇱🇰 @pekha]

@fuzzyyarns Koreeda

[upekha bandaranayake 🌈 🇱🇰 @pekha]

The timeline cleanse I needed. 😍

[Mike Bones @mrmikebones]

Dolly Parton & Kermit The Frog “Everyday People”

[Michael Chessum @michael_chessum]

Nothing says "we're the party of the workers" more than doing a free publicity stunt for a £33.6bn-a-year company that doesn't pay living wage.

[Joe Louis Monte ⭐⭐ @Jolomoco]

Whilst I see it as part of our job as fans to try to uplift Kyra at this time (as ever with all, really), just seeing her back with the team, looking strong, playing well and scoring an absolute Worldy has just been such an uplifting thing to see, probably for all of us

💫🇦🇺❤️⚪

[Tory Fibs @ToryFibs]

The passing of Ratko Mladić today is a reminder that they used to prosecute people for genocide and war crimes.

[The Voice Newspaper @TheVoiceNews]

Children's Black Book fair becomes the largest event ever held in Hackney library

A record 2,500 people attended the celebration of Black children’s literature, highlighting its rapid growth and the appetite for greater representation in books 👇🏾

➡️https://t.co/aK0icPpNkB

[Evolve Politics @evolvepolitics]

I’m absolutely certain it’s just a massive coincidence that Andy Burnham will be providing £millions in free labour specifically to Labour donor Lord Sainsbury - who also donated £164,000 directly to Burnham’s leadership campaign,

[Wellesnet.com @Wellesnetcom]

R.I.P. Dolly Parton.
In 1980, Dolly, Lilly Tomlin and Jane Fonda unsuccessfully lobbied Orson Welles to play their boss in the movie NINE TO FIVE. #dollyparton

[Ambereen Dadabhoy 🪬 @DrDadabhoy]

Why is this man allowed to do brown face and cultural appropriation in 2026?

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

🚨 What has gone largely unremarked in relation to the suspension of Nathan Cofnas from Ghent University last week, following the death of Jason Arday, is that Cofnas's own department at Ghent was at the centre of an almost identical row nine months earlier.

Both cases sit inside a network with a documented history stretching back well over a decade, one that involves Lord Toby Young.

In December 2025, the Flemish investigative outlet Apache published a piece on Bouke de Vries, a Gent University (UGent) associate professor of philosophy whom Apache had already shown, back in March 2025, to be citing "race realist" researchers approvingly in his published work.

The December article covered how right-wing outlets and think tanks (Doorbraak, the libertarian network Libera!) reframed the fallout from that reporting as a "cancel culture" attack on De Vries, despite Apache having sought comment from him before publishing, and despite Doorbraak never once contacting Apache before publicly accusing it of getting the story wrong.

Buried in that piece (posted by Steve Hall, below) is a detail that deserves far more attention: Apache's original reporting found that De Vries had accepted a personal invitation to speak at a conference in Budapest organised by a network with well-documented links to eugenics and scientific racism.

Every academic who had previously served alongside De Vries in his research group, GRELP (Ghent Research in Ethics, Law and Politics), quietly removed their name from its membership list rather than stay associated with him.

This shows that a UGent philosophy professor's willingness to engage with this network is not a new problem invented by the Cofnas affair. It surfaced, and was quietly disowned by his own colleagues, nine months before Cofnas's name meant anything to anyone.

The Budapest event Apache is almost certainly describing is the 'London Conference on Intelligence', or LCI: an invitation-only conference for research on human intelligence, including race and intelligence, and eugenics, founded in 2014 by James Thompson, an honorary UCL lecturer. In 2018, Times Higher Education called it "an annual conference on eugenics and intelligence", and several news outlets have described the conference as having ties to white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and scientific racism.

It ran secretly on UCL's campus for four years before student journalists at London Student exposed it in January 2018. The fallout was significant. UCL launched an inquiry, stripped Thompson of his honorary position, and banned the conference from campus. Records suggest that the conference was subsequently moved to Skanderborg in Denmark that same year.

What is less widely known, and largely absent from UK press coverage since 2018, is that the conference did not stop there. Edward Dutton, a British "race realist" broadcaster who runs the YouTube channel "The Jolly Heretic," wrote on his own Substack in June 2023 that "due to security threats, we were forced to hold the London Conference on Intelligence in Budapest this year."

That is a named LCI speaker, in his own words, confirming the conference retained its original name and was operating in Hungary, at least by 2023.

Dutton's platform is itself published by the Human Diversity Foundation (renamed Polygenic Scores LLC in 2025), an organisation whose key people include the Danish researcher Emil Kirkegaard, a figure named by UCL's own investigators and by British press coverage as a core organiser of the LCI since its earliest days.

This matters for the current story because it means the network that De Vries engaged with in Budapest is not some unconnected fringe group. It is the direct institutional descendant of the same conference exposed at UCL in 2018, run substantially by the same people, under the same name.

The person who connects the 2018 exposure to the present moment most clearly is Toby Young.

Young attended the LCI at UCL in 2018, a fact confirmed at the time by London Student, the Guardian and Times Higher Education. He later claimed he had gone purely to gather material for a speech about controversialism in academia.

That defence looks considerably weaker once the fuller record is examined: as Byline Times's Nafeez Ahmed reported in 2020, Young had already met Kirkegaard the previous year, in 2017, at a conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research, where Young himself delivered a paper defending the Pioneer Fund, a Nazi-era eugenics endowment, and the work of Charles Murray and Linda Gottfredson.

It seems that Lord Young was not merely an observer taking notes on a phenomenon, but was a participant, articulating some of the same positions the LCI network exists to promote, a full year before he turned up at UCL.

Young's involvement did not end there. He went on to found the Free Speech Union in 2020, an organisation whose advisory board reads, in Ahmed's phrase, like "a Who's Who of white identity politics," and several of whose members have their own documented ties to Pioneer Fund-adjacent research and rhetoric. Young remains a prominent commentator today, and has written extensively on the Arday affair.

Young has been one of the more vocal critics of Jason Arday, both before and after his death. He wrote at least two Spectator pieces on Arday, both mocking rather than substantive.

On 31 July 2026, he opened by asking "are congratulations in order for Sacha Baron Cohen?" and speculating Arday might be one of the comedian's creations. An 8 August cover piece was titled "Professor Arday is the gift that keeps on giving," continuing the same mocking tone. He also defended the piece afterwards in The Spectator, refusing to apologise despite being singled out by name by Alan Rusbridger and facing an IPSO complaint campaign.

Young has since returned to the subject a third time, in a piece titled "The horror of when your own side turns on you." There, he argues that Arday would have been hurt more by former allies distancing themselves than by right-wing coverage, drawing a direct parallel to his own 2018 resignation from the Office for Students after old tweets resurfaced.

None of this means the underlying plagiarism allegations against Arday were totally invented, or that Cofnas's claims were completely without foundation; but the framing of the story as a spontaneous, disinterested academic dispute ignores a decade-long pattern: a highly controversial network exposed once at UCL, driven underground rather than dissolved, resurfacing in Budapest under its original name, with a UGent philosophy professor already shown to have engaged with it nine months before a colleague in the same department made headlines for reasons that trace back to the identical milieu.

Toby Young's presence across nearly the entire timeline, from a 2017 ISIR paper defending eugenics funding, to a 2018 LCI attendance he later minimised, to his current commentary on Arday, is, imho, not incidental. It is one of the clearest through-lines connecting a scandal most of the British press is treating as new to a network that has been operating, largely unexamined, for well over a decade.

[Chris Doyle @Doylech]

Though far too many people think these are not alarming but justified. It is a form of racism and the authorities need to do far more

[Barry Malone @malonebarry]

So many journalists in the UK who ignored the actual slaughter of their colleagues in Gaza now loudly proclaiming that the pressure they're under after hounding a man to death is a disgraceful attack on the profession.

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

In the past year alone, the US empire:
- stole the elections in Colombia (with help from Israel), putting a far-right US citizen in power;
- meddled in the elections in Honduras, after releasing narco-dictator Juan Orlando Hernández from prison, to put in power another right-wing US puppet from the same political party of that drug trafficker;
- meddled in the elections in Peru to put in power the daughter of fascist US-backed dictator Alberto Fujimori, who committed genocide against Indigenous peoples;
- supported the right-wing narco-dictator in Ecuador (another US citizen), from the Noboa oligarch dynasty, as he banned the main left-wing Correísta opposition party from participating in elections;
- meddled in Argentina's elections by offering tens of billions of dollars to fund the right-wing party of US puppet Javier Milei;
- and is now meddling in Brazil's upcoming elections to put the son of far-right coup-plotter Bolsonaro in power.

Nicaragua's constitutional reform is aimed at preventing the US empire from repeating this in its country. Nicaragua is defending its sovereignty. Imperialism is the real threat to democracy.

[Mountain @sharpeleven]

@andyburnham acccepted large donations from prominent Labour Right/Labour Together, pro Israel donors. The same people that bankrolled the Starmer/Mandelson coup and sabotage of Corbyn Labour and the 2017/19 General Elections.

“Doing Politics Differently…”?

[Byline Times @BylineTimes]

🔴 NEW

The Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network that Penetrated Cambridge University and Targeted Jason Arday

By @NafeezAhmed

The media's coverage of the academic's life was fuelled by the campaign of an established far-right network

Subscribe to support fearless independent journalism.

https://t.co/XqrA9cRolw

[Dr Nafeez Ahmed @NafeezAhmed]

I watched the Jason Arday lecture Aaron Bastani repeatedly circulated to 1.4 million people as supposed proof that Arday was a “conman” – someone who, he said, could speak for more than 40 minutes while saying “nothing”.

That is an extraordinary characterisation of what is actually in the video, playing well to the racist gallery.

Arday’s delivery is undeniably repetitive. It is discursive, jargon-heavy and often far less concise than it could be. Some empirical claims are asserted rather than demonstrated.

One would be free to take issue with that.

But Bastani did not merely say: “I think this is a weak lecture.”

He said Arday was a “conman” and “literally a con artist”. And the lecture simply does not substantiate that allegation.

Arday quite obviously does say things.

His central argument is that racial inequalities in universities are reproduced not only through overt discrimination, but through what gets taught, who determines what counts as legitimate knowledge, who teaches it, and whether students from different backgrounds can meaningfully participate in academic life.

He argues that an “inclusive curriculum” cannot merely mean letting everyone through the door while leaving the substance and culture of the institution untouched.

He argues that overwhelmingly Eurocentric academic canons marginalise histories and intellectual traditions outside Europe.

He links curriculum, belonging and participation to racial awarding gaps.

He calls for students to participate in constructing curricula rather than simply completing module feedback forms.

He argues that unconscious-bias training is inadequate without deeper discussion about racism.

He criticises academic hierarchies which make it difficult for students to challenge lecturers.

And one of his strongest themes is that responsibility for combating institutional racism has disproportionately fallen on women of colour – including while men of colour have sometimes benefited from that labour – when it should instead be a collective responsibility.

You can reject every one of those arguments.

You can say the language is fashionable, the theoretical framework is wrong, the evidence is insufficient, the presentation is meandering, or the whole thing could have been said in a quarter of the time.

But you cannot seriously say he “says nothing”, unless you are deliberately attempting to perpetrator your own con - or are literally, yourself, utterly ignorant of the concepts he is discussing.

More importantly, the actual lecture is considerably more nuanced than the caricature subsequently constructed around Arday.

He explicitly distinguishes “whiteness” as a structure of power and privilege from white people themselves.

He acknowledges his own privilege “as a male or as a black male”.

He says everybody carries biases, including himself, and uses his own possible prejudice towards middle-class people – rooted in his working-class upbringing – as an example.

He argues for putting yourself in uncomfortable intellectual spaces.

He advocates difficult conversations rather than censorship.

He says students should be able to challenge academics.

This, of course, doesn't prove every argument Arday made was correct, or that he was a brilliant lecturer.

But where, precisely, is the "con"?

Calling someone a con artist is not an academic judgement. It is an allegation about their honesty.

A rambling keynote making arguments you disagree with is not evidence of a con, and never was. There is a vast evidential gulf between:

“I think this lecture is bad.”

and

“This man is literally a con artist.”

Repeatedly telling hundreds of thousands of people to “Watch it!” does not bridge that gulf.

Bastani did not make this accusation once in passing. He repeatedly jumped onto the Arday story and returned to the “conman” allegation, helping turn a contested argument about one academic’s work and career into an attack on his basic honesty and legitimacy.

Only after Arday’s death has Bastani now acknowledged that he should not have called him a conman – while accompanying that concession with a lengthy boring self-assuaging justification of why he regarded the wider story as newsworthy.

But saying afterwards that the word should not have been used does not erase what happened .

Bastani had no evidence in this lecture that Arday was a con artist. What he had was his own racist contempt for Arday’s performance. He transformed that subjective judgement into a sweeping allegation of personal fraud, repeatedly broadcast it to a huge audience, and encouraged others to treat watching the video as though it somehow proved the charge.

This was an evidential sleight of hand which helped egg on a much wider public pile-on against a man already being witch-hunted across the media as a fraud.

Who was the "con man", really?

[Lance Cooper @lmauricecpr]

The thought of becoming a racial minority triggers many white people because they fear being treated the same way they’ve treated others throughout history.