Israeli forces shot dead a 70-year old teacher in the southern Lebanese town of Baraachit on Monday.

👀 MUST WATCH: This video is so well done — and absolutely hilarious! 🤣🤣

I, Kevin Rowland (the son of Irish immigrants) and the main songwriter of ‘Come On Eileen,’ am disgusted to learn that Nigel Farage has used our song to make his entrance for his party conference. Myself, and all of Dexys are passionately against Farage’s politics. @ByDonkeys .

Today in The Times I’ve spoken about something deeply personal. In 2018 my brother Tariq took his own life. He never told anyone, not his closest family and friends, what he was going through. Looking back, we believe stigma was a large part of it. He isn’t alone. More than 7,000 people die by suicide every year in the UK, and over 70% were not in contact with the mental health services that might have saved them. It remains one of the biggest killers of young people. I’m supporting this campaign because of Philip Pirie, who lost his son Tom in 2020 and has since rallied experts and politicians around the country to push for change. When he approached me, I was very happy to join forces with him. Together we’re calling – alongside psychiatrists, charities and MPs from across the political spectrum – for a national public health campaign to reduce the stigma around suicidal thoughts and encourage more people to reach out for help. Public health campaigns work: we’ve seen it with drink-driving and HIV/AIDS. And the evidence suggests this one would more than pay for itself. Every life saved spares a family unimaginable grief and the country real cost. Giving people permission to speak saves lives. If you’re struggling, or worried about someone who is, the Samaritans are there free, day or night, on 116 123. thetimes.com/article/11bef78…

Excellent piece by Dr. Lisa Mckenzie defending sociology. I particularly appreciated her call to action for her fellow academic sociologists: “I also make a plea to my fellow academics: stop allowing this to happen. Stop allowing academic institutions to make appointments and pursue policies that denigrate everything we do. We need to go back to first principles. We need to forget the identity politics, the DEI quotas and the tick-boxes, and support and fund what we do best – deepening knowledge of what is really happening in society and arguing why that matters.” In my view, anthropologists need to do the same. If we don’t, we’ll find our departments and our discipline even worse off with respect to faculty positions, student enrollments, grant funding, and public support. The situation is already bad. If we’re not careful, instead of there being just a few jobs for our PhD students and postdocs to apply for each year, there’ll be virtually none. My sense is that sociologists and anthropologists need something akin to the discipline-wide reform process that medical researchers initiated in the early 1990s and which has become known as the evidence-based medicine movement. We need to begin pushing for an ‘evidence-based sociology’ and an ‘evidence-based anthropology’. We could do this together as closely related disciplines, perhaps with colleagues elsewhere in the social sciences, thereby creating the evidence-based social sciences movement. The lowest hanging fruit in such a reform process would be for us, when we’re acting as reviewers, to agree not to approve any paper or book for publication that makes claims based solely on autoethnography. Autoethnography should be regarded as a means of generating hypotheses and research questions, not as a research method. Reconceptualising autoethnography this way would immediately improve the rigour and reliability of sociological and anthropological research. Multiple reforms are needed but this is the most obvious and easiest place to start, I reckon. @drianpace, @redrumlisa, @HamesRaymond

People of Clacton, @ByDonkeys have absolutely lifted the lid here. You pay Farage £94k to be your MP. He’s hardly ever there. Meanwhile his 12 other jobs have paid him £1,182,498 since the election, Mayfair gold dealers, tax-avoidance passport hustlers, US anti-abortion outfits, thousands of Cameo videos, the lot. He who pays the piper dictates the tone. When the bigger cheques come from multimillionaires and foreign interests, what makes you think he’s representing you?

Watch & Learn from The Queen, my incredible mother, Lynn Nesbit, as she is interviewed by one of the best editors in all of publishing, Bob Weil, at the Columbia Publishing Course this June! c-span.org/program/book-tv/l…

When the Bin is sharper and smarter than the grifter he is about to replace. Clacton could not go wrong voting for @CountBinface he is a vast improvement in terms of credibility and honesty than Farage.

Excellent, moving, brilliantly argued speech from the Tory MP Edward Leigh. I find it profoundly disturbing when even papers like the Guardian attempt to frame disgust about what Israel is doing in Gaza as ‘left wing.’ It is as coldly cynical as calling it ‘anti-Semitic.’

Studies now present a striking picture of what happens when private equity firms acquire hospitals and nursing homes: predictable increases in harm and deaths. One landmark study shows: patient deaths up about 11% after such acquisitions.

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.

Hezbollah and Israel agreed to a 5th ceasefire at 4pm local time. At 4:12 local time, Israel bombed Nabatieh. 12 minutes was all it took.

There is a claim that keeps circulating, presented as sophisticated analysis: antisemitic violence is caused by Israel’s actions. If Israel behaved differently, Jewish communities around the world would somehow be safer. This argument is not analysis. It is a moral inversion. And it collapses the moment you apply it consistently. When China imprisons Uyghurs, does anyone warn Muslim communities in Paris to expect attacks? When Russia invaded Ukraine, did anyone tell Russian restaurants to brace for violence? No. Never. The causal chain between a government’s actions and violence against a diaspora is only ever constructed for Jews. Every other minority is extended the basic moral courtesy of being treated as individuals rather than proxies. Now look at what the data actually shows. The SPCJ, which tracks antisemitic incidents in France in coordination with the Interior Ministry, has documented a consistent and damning pattern: it is antisemitic violence that inspires more antisemitic violence, not Israeli policy. After Mohamed Merah murdered Jewish children at point-blank range at the Ozar Hatorah school in Toulouse in 2012, antisemitic acts surged by 200%. There was no Gaza operation. No Israeli military action. The massacre of Jews in France produced more attacks on Jews in France. The same logic held after the Hypercacher attack in January 2015: antisemitic acts increased by nearly 300%. Massacres of Jews do not shock antisemites into restraint. They embolden them. They signal impunity. They normalize hatred. And everyone in a position of responsibility knows it. Which brings us to October 7. From the day of the Hamas attack, antisemitic acts in France increased by over 1,000%. A daily average of approximately 25 antisemitic acts was recorded in the 30 days that followed, reaching nearly 40 on some days. In the three months after the attack, the number of antisemitic acts equaled those recorded over the previous three years combined. And here is another detail that makes the “Israel causes antisemitism” argument impossible to sustain: the spike began on October 7 itself, the very day of the attack. Israel had not yet responded. Not a single soldier had entered Gaza. Interior Minister Darmanin sent an urgent message to prefects that same day asking them to immediately reinforce protection of Jewish community sites. Synagogues. Schools. Community centers. By October 10, 10,000 police officers had been deployed to protect 500 Jewish sites across the country. Before any Israeli response existed, the French government already knew that Jewish communities needed protecting. Not because of what Israel was about to do. Because of what had just been done to Jews. Antisemitic violence has one cause. Antisemitism.

I haven't been this depressed about British politics since the post-Brexit period, when it was similiarly clear that every potential course of action involved huge, painful trade-offs, and so all the parties just spent years on displacement activities instead.

Lock him up

Moment of Truth newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…

Israel ARRESTED this 13 year old Palestinian girl. According to the law just passed, she could now be executed “legally” in the prison. Please don’t let them kill her. Repost this.

#The heroic doctor Hossam Abu Safiya is among the prisoners scheduled for execution 💔

From reading Paul Holden's statement, the BBC does seem to be guilty of very shoddy journalism here. Whoever the most senior person is in the BBC right now, they need to get a grip on this story at once - today, Monday - no faffing around.