Keep the faith.

You know Gustav Klimt for the gold, but this is what he painted when no one was paying him... It's Birch Forest from 1903: slender white trunks rise like columns out of a forest floor burning with autumn color, rust and orange and brown, with little flecks of blue scattered through it, maybe sky caught in puddles after the rain. Get close and the whole thing breaks apart into tens of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, laid side by side like the tiles of a mosaic. Klimt painted it during his summers at the Attersee, a lake in the Austrian countryside, where he went every year with Emilie Flöge and her family to escape Vienna and the endless portrait commissions that had made him famous. He would hold a square of cardboard with a hole cut in the middle up to the landscape, like a camera, until he found the view he wanted, which is why so many of his landscapes are perfectly square. Those summers were so productive that landscapes ended up making up a quarter of all the paintings he ever finished. And this one has its own story: it belonged to the family of Adele Bloch-Bauer, and hung in the same Vienna home as her golden portrait, the Woman in Gold which I wrote about in one of my recent articles. In 2006, it was one of five Klimt paintings restituted to Adele’s niece after a long legal battle over works that had been seized by the Nazis in 1938. The gold is what made Klimt a legend, but the forests are where you get to meet the man...

An utterly brilliant article about the work of EOD teams in the UK - It is absolutely fascinating and a great read. theguardian.com/news/ng-inte…

The number of ships taking the long and expensive way round between the Atlantic and Pacific, through the stormy Magellan Strait, has gone up 70% in the last months, mainly thanks to the increasing drying up of the Panama Canal through drought. briefs.co/news/strait-of-mag…

Really bad in England if hospital cases are this high - so many more people really ill at home. Mask up 😷

The most shocking thing about the 3 years long and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people is that Israel has faced no consequences for it from the international “community” of nations, not even sanctions. Much of the world has been complicit in this monstrosity.

Rowan Atkinson to bring Mr Bean, Blackadder and more to West End in new show share.google/0ZXZCZuMapgzLoI…

California's COVlD outbreak now surpasses 3 months. PMC estimates 1 in 29 residents are actively infectious statewide. Mask up and get boosted.💉💪😷 On a computer, go to pmc19.com/map and click on individual counties for more info, including a graph of recent levels. Here's a summary by county of the level and PMC estimate of the proportion of the population actively infectious: Alameda | Very High | 1 in 26 Alpine | High | 1 in 34 Amador | High | 1 in 36 Butte | Very High | 1 in 22 Calaveras | High | 1 in 30 Colusa | Very High | 1 in 25 Contra Costa | High | 1 in 36 Del Norte | Very High | 1 in 23 El Dorado | High | 1 in 40 Fresno | Very High | 1 in 23 Glenn | Very High | 1 in 23 Humboldt | High | 1 in 32 Imperial | High | 1 in 31 Inyo | Very High | 1 in 20 Kern | Very High | At least 1 in 20 Kings | Very High | At least 1 in 20 Lake | Very High | 1 in 23 Lassen | Very High | At least 1 in 20 Los Angeles | High | 1 in 34 Madera | Very High | 1 in 24 Marin | Very High | At least 1 in 20 Mariposa | High | 1 in 29 Mendocino | Very High | 1 in 24 Merced | Moderate | 1 in 43 Modoc | Very High | 1 in 21 Mono | Very High | 1 in 25 Monterey | Very High | 1 in 28 Napa | High | 1 in 33 Nevada | Very High | 1 in 28 Orange | High | 1 in 38 Placer | High | 1 in 29 Plumas | Very High | At least 1 in 20 Riverside | Very High | 1 in 26 Sacramento | High | 1 in 29 San Benito | High | 1 in 30 San Bernardino | Very High | At least 1 in 20 San Diego | Moderate | 1 in 48 San Francisco | High | 1 in 34 San Joaquin | Very High | 1 in 22 San Luis Obispo | High | 1 in 29 San Mateo | High | 1 in 37 Santa Barbara | Very High | At least 1 in 20 Santa Clara | High | 1 in 40 Santa Cruz | Very High | 1 in 26 Shasta | Very High | 1 in 26 Sierra | Very High | 1 in 23 Siskiyou | High | 1 in 31 Solano | High | 1 in 34 Sonoma | Very High | 1 in 25 Stanislaus | Very High | At least 1 in 20 Sutter | High | 1 in 31 Tehama | Very High | 1 in 23 Trinity | High | 1 in 30 Tulare | Very High | 1 in 20 Tuolumne | High | 1 in 29 Ventura | High | 1 in 34 Yolo | Very High | 1 in 24 Yuba | Very High | 1 in 28

Define ceasefire #c4news

Cases are rising briskly. It is Covid. As usual, the government are vaccinating almost nobody, antivirals are essentially unavailable, no-one is being asked to mask up. A&Es will overflow again. Everyone will express puzzlement. Government blames managers, doctors.....

Covid wave well in progress, despite NHS Public Health claims of everyone being immune (used to justify UK wide NHS restricting vaccines, antivirals, testing & staff testing). Clearly they’ve got it badly wrong & everyone will be worse off for their incompetence.

Given there is no community testing, nursing home testing, or universal hospital admission testing, & only a select few of those who are in hospital who might get treated who are ever tested, these official numbers are undoubtedly an underestimate of reality & are a sad reminder

Not only did we outsource an actual combat function of the Air Force to a PFI contractor, we now have to pay lawyers to ask that PFI contractor if it would kindly agree to do more for the defence of the state it inhabits… Honestly, what was everyone on in the 2000s?

So sick of this nonsense… 🤦🏽‍♂️ -why would any pt knowingly consent to seeing a PA? -“heavy supervision”?! why not facilitate the pt being seen a by a fully qualified GP in the first place! -why are Govt continuing to push Dr replacement when we have so many unemployed GPs?!

My wife works in a pharmacy. She's also reporting an uptick in covid test sales. She made the point to me that it's bizarre to have the most vulnerable members of society going to a pharmacy & mixing with customers buying tests, & staff who are mostly unmasked.

The Covid wave in England is growing very fast, & the overall Covid risk level has been raised to High. As of 4 October, 1 in every 175 people were infected, up 34% on the previous week. We recommend that Covid-Cautious people take full precautions anywhere indoors. A thread 🧵

This is, by far, the most accurate account and reflection on events since October 7, 2023. Worth following this group for their excellent work exposing Israel's atrocities across the occupied territories.

NEW: Estonia has readied measures to close its border with Russia to prevent a plague outbreak from spreading into Europe, the country's foreign minister said. Margus Tsahkna claimed Estonian authorities would be able to shut all its crossing points with Russia "within hours" should the health crisis deepen. “As a bordering country, we can close the border within hours if there is need for that," he told journalists during a meeting at Estonia's embassy in London on Wednesday. “We have two border points. We control every asset, every person, every car, everything which is crossing the border. We can close it very quickly. “The readiness is always there. As a bordering country we have a responsibility for Europe as well. Of course we are looking very carefully at this." The comments follow the death of a 28-year-old woman working at a Siberian plague research centre. Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s national public health agency, is investigating the death of the woman, who was a lab technician at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East and died on Oct 2 from “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” Pressure is increasing on Moscow to reveal the scale of the outbreak, with the World Health Organization demanding answers amid reports of a second plague case. Mr Tsahkna believed Russia was taking the health crisis "pretty seriously" but claimed Moscow still needed to share more information about the scale of the outbreak. “It will be the best thing if Russia really takes responsibility and shares information [about] how serious this is, what the indicators are for the spreading of this and what the control measures can be," he added. The Estonian diplomat was speaking out ahead of a meeting with Ed Miliband, the UK's Foreign Secretary, in which the pair were expected to discuss some international security concerns, including the ongoing threat posed by Russia, as well as the war in Ukraine.

“You’re tearing down your house before you have a new house.” Maddening to hear a Norwegian calmly explore how our energy policies - “we learned a lot from the UK” - have diverged. He can’t explain why we won’t use our own resources while becoming dependent on his. @BBCr4today

If the Covid pandemic is over, why is the 13th wave of Covid infections spreading in an uncontrolled fashion, impacting healthcare services globally now, you know, the very definition of a pandemic?

😬🙄😅