Stunning and devastating opening from Newsnight tonight.
Harsh, yes. Media students (and current broadcast journalists!) take note: your edit is nothing without the right choice of music. And oh boy this is quite the choice.
To George and Laura, Bill and Hillary — we're grateful for your friendship, counsel, and devotion to this country. And to Joe and Jill, thank you for being on this journey with us.
If a days’ old baby arrives in our care, chances are they might be assigned Joseph as their carer. He’s helped raise Toto, Korbessa and Lemeki to name a few, and each one requires a completely different approach.
As he says “We have to learn their favourite things, what they like and what they don't like. I remember when Toto was a tiny boy and he started to scream in his room in the night. In the wild, elephants sleep outside with their babies. I realised that to be inside was new for him. I started to bring him out in the night, while people were sleeping. Sometimes I brought his mattress out, so we could sleep under the stars.”
Before & After…
If anyone doubts the power of community action over the @EnvAgency’s spineless inertia, you can walk to the outskirts of Ilford & walk along an ancient lost river to see for yourself.
With 10 days of intense effort by dedicated volunteers, the river River Roding Trust managed to clean up & restore 250 metres of the Aldersbrook (about 1/3 of the brook). This allows a direct comparison between the parts of the brook we restored & those we haven’t got round to yet.
These photos & videos are all from May 2026. The first is on a part of the Aldersbrook still to be restored & shows the old flood defences which are no longer needed & are killing the river but which the EA won’t remove unless we volunteers pay them £50,000 just for surveys. These defences have caused 2-3ft of stinking sludge & silt to build up over 70 years, such that the water in the brook is just a few centimetres deep. Combine with huge amounts of rubbish & and out of control knotweed infestation & the river ecosystem is essentially dead. A river that is older than England destroyed by official indifference.
A hundred metres away, and it’s a different story. The rubbish & the invasive species (I sprayed the knotweed myself last autumn) are gone. The silt that used to clog the river is now spread on the banks & rapidly providing fertile ground for native plants. Instead of sludge, there’s 2-3ft of water, so fish have returned to the brook for the first time in decades, along with dragon flies, herons & a nesting moorhen. We river guardians knew our intervention would make a difference, but have been shocked at quite how quickly nature has come back. The restored Aldersbrook is now a rare jewel: pretty much the last fully natural tidal brook in London.
The EA now has a choice. It can salvage some good from this situation & work with us to restore the remaining sections of the brook, or it can continue to do nothing. If the latter, river guardians *will* be back this winter to finish the job & the EA can see how well prosecuting volunteers for restoring a river without permission goes for them.
"EXCLUSIVE: Feargal Sharkey urges ministers to 'seize' Thames Water as nationalisation looms."
It's time to end it and that time is now.
https://t.co/SeAK3ZgN7O
If you think the actions of the EA are outrageous, please email the chief exec Philip Duffy at [email protected] to express your dissatisfaction with the EA’s actions in strong (but always polite & never abusive!) terms. In particular, the River Roding Trust is calling for:
- All threats of prosecution against the River Roding Trust & its volunteers to be publicly withdrawn & stopping all threats to destroy the pond & river channel we have created.
- The EA to instead use its prosecutorial powers against Thames Water to demand that within six months they produce a plan to fix all illegal sewage spills on the Roding by 2030, failing which the EA will prosecute every single illegal sewage spill to the full force of the law.
- The EA to work with the River Roding Trust & guardians of the River Roding to actively protect & restore the River Roding.
Link to the full article by @sandralaville is here:
https://t.co/jomBnXKXOW
Good news! After decades of ignoring rampant environmental crime on the Roding, @EnvAgency has finally decided to act.
Bad news! It’s not against Thames Water for illegally dumping billions of litres of sewage in the Roding, or the waste criminals who have dumped thousands of tonnes of rubbish on its banks, but against myself & a small volunteer charity for… restoring a river without a permit!
Within a week of the magnificent work of River Roding Trust volunteers completing the arduous work of restoring 250 metres of the Aldersbrook this winter, EA investigators had been down to the site and rattled off a letter threatening us with prosecution for doing the work without a permit. This is despite the fact that the Trust have repeatedly asked the EA to do this vital work on the Aldersbrook themselves & they have refused. It is also despite the fact that they have not investigated the huge illegal sewage outlet on the Cranbrook a few hundred metres away, which illegally discharges 750,000,000 litres of raw sewage straight into the River Roding every year.
Kyle Kulinski: “Elon Musk is a parasite, he’s a welfare queen, he’s stolen $38B from US taxpayers to do fraud and make a bunch of dumbass rockets explode instantly. This guy’s a ketamine addict, he’s a fucking Nazi, he’s a genuine low IQ dipshit and total con man. And now he’s worth $1T”
Elon Musk can say what he likes about me but I won't stay silent whilst foreign tech billionaires, money earned off the backs of real workers, try to interfere in our democracy, incite violence in our communities and tear apart our country.
Time for him to pipe down.
Musk as a trillionaire- anyone as a trillionaire- is a grotesque economic, moral and political problem. We cannot have individuals with that level of power, whatever they might have achieved.
History will remember the millions of people who died around the world from preventable deaths because of Musk's DOGE cuts.
History will remember Musk's enabling, amplifying, and funding of 21st-century fascism across the West.
@Ed_Miliband when are you going to break the link between elec/green energy with gas price?!? What’s it not been done already! Get on with the difficult stuff! Nothing ever gets done!!!
This is becoming normalised - the misrepresentation of Britain’s green energy progress, the exaggeration of our grid issues.
This guy needs to do his homework, the cost of turning windmills off for a tiny percentage of the time is overwhelmed by the economic benefit - the rest of the time. It’s vital to see the whole picture not just the selected snapshot - lies, damn lies and statistics…..
And if there’s one thing that can bring bills down which remains in-explicably not done by government, despite Ed Miliband pretending that he has - it’s ‘breaking the link’ - so that we no longer pay gas prices for our own green energy. This will knock billions off our bills every year.
How about getting behind that @hodsonwill ?
https://t.co/Z6v3AZeGyW
The liars of Brexit are suddenly being exposed
They have got away with it for so long - sooner or later it was going to catch up with them.
Is this yet another reason Farage is in hiding
“Dear Diary
Had to let that slimy turd Jenrick to the presser today as I’m still in hiding from journalists. We launched out brilliant two-tier tax idea, which will hopefully convince Restore Britain supporters that we are every bit as racist and deranged as they are...”
Elon Musk is being given 715 acres of land in the Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. A lawsuit has been filed by numerous Conservation groups. They say it violates laws that are protecting refuges and harms endangered species. It’s on a National Historic Landmark.