#MutualAid #Solidarity #Anarchism

Mahmood accused of hardening rules for 200,000 successful asylum applicants

Cruel and heartless. The fact Mahmood is still in post tells you all you need to know about Burnham's Labour.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/nov/05/shabana-mahmood-accused-hardening-immigration-plans-200000-successful-asylum-applicants

The Francis Crick Institute are advertising a 4-year fellowship programme where you can either propose your own project or use one of the PI proposals as a starting point. Vikram Chandra, Marcus Ghosh and I have a suggested project on studying brain robustness in small networks:

https://www.crick.ac.uk/careers-study/vacancies/2026-09-29-mechanisms-of-extreme-robustness-in-small-biological-neural-networks

But we're also open to other suggestions / variations! Here's the general page for info on the scheme:

https://www.crick.ac.uk/careers-and-study/postdocs/postdoc-recruitment/pace-postdoctoral-fellowships

TIL that DuckDuckGo will allow you to block particular sites from search results — select the three dots to the right of a given result.

Goodbye from my search results to Etsy, Pinterest, and Amazon!

Edit:

1. there’s a limit of five permanent blocks.
2. I’m told other search engines have this feature, so check your favorites.
3. I’m muting notifications for this post. (I’m not surprised that people want to know this!)

Finished my first module of the year. 6 weeks block intensive teaching. It was hard work but the students were lovely and I even got a spontaneous round of applause at the end of the last class. Students came up to me and thanked me for being a great teacher. It almost made me cry. 🤩🤩

"The enemies of ordinary people in Scotland don’t wear niqabs or burqas. They wear smartly ironed, shiny new suits, and sit right over there"

Women who wear the niqab or burqa deserve to live their lives free from discrimination, intimidation and hatred.

Reform’s attempt to ban their clothing has nothing to do with public safety. It is about singling out Muslim women and telling them they don’t belong.

Scotland must reject this far-right politics of hate.

@ScottishGreens

Trans-Rights Supporters Protest J.K. Rowling at London Harry Potter Shop Opening

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/harry-potter-store-trans-rights-protest-1235652483/

#transgender #trans #LGBTQ #LGBTQIA

Sorry for the substack link, but this is unique information. The author is a library, particularly ebook/audiobook advocate, and got to interview the CEO of OverDrive, the company that runs Libby the library app and serves as a middleman between libraries and big publishers. If you want to be more informed about why your library pays 3 - 4 times as much as you do for an ebook or audiobook, it's essential reading. Several states are passing laws trying to improve the situation, but more concerted, widespread action is needed.

#Libraries #LibbyTheLibraryApp #audiobooks #ebooks #books @bookstodon

https://reciprocard.substack.com/p/fractured-access-how-state-lines?r=8ms1e3

For every innocent protestor that can afford good legal advice, how many are silently being criminalised in the UK?

#Palestine
#PeacefulProtest

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/nov/05/met-settles-claim-brought-by-palestine-activist-treated-like-a-criminal-during-arrest

Important reporting on the working conditions of the people building all those data centers. Sure, capitalism, it's exploitative, but the degree of neglect of safety standards and human rights is staggering.

https://www.investigate-europe.eu/posts/electrocutions-mental-terror-and-withheld-wages-the-exploited-workers-building-europes-data-centres

Survey on the use of AI in the publishing industry. Tell them how we feel.
https://s.surveyplanet.com/b5o4yctg

🔥 Very proud to say we’ve just won TWO govt grants for Bylines Network!

That puts twin booster rockets on our plans to push citizen journalism and hyperlocal newspapers into the spaces where the legacy media are failing.

Read all about it, as they say… 👇👇

https://yorkshirebylines.co.uk/society/bylines-network-has-big-plans-to-transform-local-journalism-and-now-the-backing-to-make-them-happen/

Nicotine is bad for you. It’s addictive, raises heart rate and blood pressure, and can disrupt sleep.

Don’t buy the claims by wellness influencers that it can boost your focus and brain health.
https://theconversation.com/how-the-pro-nicotine-wellness-movement-rebranded-an-addictive-drug-290129

An excellent interview. Greta Thunberg and Zack Polanski talking about how zionism is racism, smears, autism and living with the knowledge that people who say they love you are willing to sacrifice your future for their comfort.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxWUMbnk6kE
#GretaThunberg #ZackPolanski #zionismisracism #climatechange #climatejustice #autism

Manufactured consent: Paid social media posters are being recruited to promote Wisconsin data center
https://wisconsinwatch.org/2026/11/wisconsin-data-center-paid-social-media-posters-recruited-to-promote-port-washington/

There are studies that show increased productivity with multiple screens or larger screens, increased productivity with work from home, increased productivity with offices vs open plan, increased productivity with noise reduction.

They never have money for that tho.

It's trifle Thursday! Today we are launching Vivaldi 8.3 on Desktop, iOS and Android, which brings:

🛡️ Rebuilt ad and tracker blocker, with a new UI, new blocking levels and extensive backend refactoring
🔗 Copy sanitized links to remove tracking parameters

Desktop also gets two highly requested updates to vertical tabs:

📊 Expand tab bar on hover
📌 Pinned tabs in grid

...and there's much more in store, including a massive performance boost for our iOS version!

Get it from http://vivaldi.com or you preferred store and let us know what you think!

All the details:
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-on-desktop-8-3
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-on-mobile-8-3

Terrifying but stirring - health and wellbeing can improve hand in hand with reducing emissions, if we'd just get serious about a #plantrichfood policy, and facilitating active & public transport #UKPolitics #climateandnatureEmergency
"Approximately 10.7% of children in reception year at primary school are obese, along with 22.8% of those in Year 6, according to the statistics published by the National Childhood Measurement programme"
https://news.sky.com/share/13607989

In the run up to the US midterms, 70% of AI assistants tested sent users to Kremlin-backed propaganda sites

Perplexity, Claude, DeepSeek, Grok, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI and Google AI Overviews all cited Russian state media, Russia Today, Sputnik or the Pravda network

https://dosimeteraudit.org/research/ai-chatbots-us-midterms-2026

#misinformation

OpenAI launched a policy push to rebrand its data centers as AI compute campuses amid growing public backlash over energy grid strain, prompting criticism from environmental groups who view the name change as an empty public relations stunt.

https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/11/openai-rebrands-data-centers-ai-compute-campuses.html