Three Labour peers have been criticised by one of their party colleagues after speaking at the ‘Battle of Ideas’ festival, which is sponsored by a Reform mega-donor and which partnered with a far-right bookshop, which sells books by Joseph Goebbels and Oswald Mosley.

Labour MP Phil Brickell accused his colleagues of “legitimising” Reform’s crypto billionaire Ben Delo by participating in last weekend’s event, which was partnered with the far-right Oldspeak bookshop.

The festival, run by Baroness Claire Fox’s Academy of Ideas, partnered with the bookshop, as an official partner last weekend. Its guide pointed attendees their way, to source “works that challenge contemporary narratives and reinforce foundational beliefs”. Several speakers also conducted book signings at the stall.

As Byline Times recently reported, just days before, Oldspeak’s owner received a visit from police over an allegedly racist post on X. Oldspeak’s account frequently posts calls for “remigration” – the mass expulsion of people deemed not to be ‘British’ – but the visit focused on a photo the account posted of two Muslim men in the Suffolk village where it was previously based, captioned: “It’s started.” Responses included racist abuse.

The organisers had been asked about the bookshop’s more extreme content. This has included claiming that the black England footballer Marcus Rashford’s parents’ nationalities mean “he cannot be English”, and approvingly sharing a video arguing that entire communities four generations deep should be stripped of citizenship, detained and deported. Another post included the hashtag “#millionsmustgo”.

A man who was caught in a car with £14,000 of drugs, while a lamb ate from a bag of chips in the back seat, has avoided jail.

John McNeil, 56, was a passenger in Lindsey Sangster's vehicle which was stopped by police on the M74 in Glasgow on 22 April 2023.

Bags of heroin and cocaine were later recovered by a police dog underneath the front passenger seat of the Volkswagen Golf.

When quizzed about the animal - called Pablo - a sergeant claimed Sangster's partner McNeil told him she was a "trainee shepherdess." The duo were found guilty in September of possession of heroin and diamorphine with intent to supply.

https://sk.girlthi.ng/notes/ameop6rl2fh6001u

New Humble Bundle featuring a bunch of games from Flat2VR, a studio that ports flatscreen games to VR), though not all of these games are ports.

£20 gets you:

• Roboquest VR
• I AM YOUR BEAST VR
• VRacer Hoverbike
• WRATH
• Surviving Mars: Pioneer
• Genotype
• Out of Sight VR
• RAGER
• Audio Trip

If you go into the advanced options in the controller settings, there's an option that let's you configure the desktop controller mappings. This only affects the actual desktop though, not desktop apps you launch from the plus menu.

Also, the 'Enter Gamepad Mode' thing doesn't seem to do anything? I installed Super Tux Kart from Flathub, but entering gamepad mode just made the controllers not do anything.

Mark Broadhurst, 28, was arrested at Catterick Garrison, North Yorkshire, in September 2024, before police later found weapons and explosive substances at his home in Chesterfield, Derbyshire.

Officers found a "crude" homemade cannon, gunpowder, crossbows, bolts, six large knives and a baseball bat when they searched his home and barracks quarters.

Broadhurst, of Scott Close, Grassmoor, was sentenced to 46 months in prison at Sheffield Crown Court on Wednesday after pleading guilty to possessing explosives and a firearms offence.

He admitted the offences at a hearing in June but denied they were terror-related.

However, the judge found he was trying to impress other members of extreme right-wing groups and encourage them in their violent, racist and anti-authority ideology.

When I stood for leader of the Greens in 2025, our party was at a crossroads. The transformative leadership of Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay had taken us to an electoral success we’d never seen before. I knew we had even greater potential – and that the country was crying out for the bold politics we could offer.

We have seen unprecedented wins this year – from our first ever parliamentary byelection win to our landslide council and mayoral victories in former Labour strongholds.

Those victories have moved Labour. Our electoral successes helped topple Keir Starmer, seeing him replaced by a prime minister unarguably to his left. They forced a change in tone in the government’s relations with Israel. The government has even rowed back on some of its cruel anti-migrant policies.

Our work isn’t done. But the next phase for our party takes place in a landscape that is clearly more challenging for us. Andy Burnham is enjoying a honeymoon phase, and hasn’t yet had to make the “difficult decisions” that will reveal exactly who will lose out under his government – unpopular choices he will probably start making at his fast-approaching first budget.
[…]
The result also came at a difficult moment for our party. A motion voted through at our conference, “Zionism is racism”, has stirred up strong feelings among many members and the wider public too. And I know there have been questions about my approach to the motion.

I’m a Jewish man who grew up in a Zionist household. The story I was told about Israel was one of destiny and safety: a land without a people for a people without a land. But since then I have learned about the people who did live on that land – and what has happened to them. The Palestinians driven from their homes; slaughtered en masse; and those who remain, living under an apartheid system that denies them fundamental rights, including that of self-determination.

It has been difficult knowing how to approach this imperfect motion, because its substance chimes with my understanding of Zionism as the ideology that underpins the displacement and genocide of Palestinians. This is something I share with many other Jewish people, including Stephen Kapos, the holocaust survivor who was one of those supporting the motion.

At the same time, Zionism is not easily defined, and I know for many Jewish people it is bound up with identity, safety and belonging. In my view it’s not the job of a political party to tell people what to believe – and a narrow focus on definitions is neither desirable nor strategic.

There are also elements of the motion that I don’t agree with – such as dictating the future shape of a state in Israel and Palestine. While many people understandably see the idea of a two-state solution as standing in the way of concrete action to end the unbearable status quo, I believe it is not up to the British government – let alone the Green party – to decide the future for Israelis and Palestinians.

Before the vote, I made it clear that there were amendments I would like to see made, and I am disappointed that those did not pass.

One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like “torture” and “pain” experiments on a series of locally hosted large language models, causing a series of effective altruists and people who believe LLMs are sentient to beg GitHub to delete the project on the grounds that the AI is suffering and that this glorified text adventure game is somehow cruel. The saga is an outgrowth of several recent viral papers and blog posts that have sparked a wildly tiresome conversation about AI consciousness and the idea of “model welfare,” which is essentially worrying about the “mental health” of AI bots and agents.

https://beep.acab.taxi/

Context: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750

Bluesky

Nighthawks, the long-in-development vampire RPG due to be released later this month, is the latest game to run afoul of Steam's increasingly stringent rules regarding adult content. According to publisher Wadjet Eye Games, the game has been labelled 'Adults Only'—causing it to be removed from Steam search and outright delisted in certain countries like Germany—despite claims from both developer and publisher that the RPG's depictions of sex and nudity are very mild.

"We are aware that Steam has classified Nighthawks as an adult game and has excluded it from searches," Wadjet Eye boss Dave Gilbert wrote on Bluesky. "We are working on it. Valve is under the impression that this game is way sexier than it actually is." Gilbert further commented that "Valve is basically treating Nighthawks like a porn game!" in responding to a reply to his initial post.

A game being labelled Adults Only can affect its visibility in several ways. Adults Only games will not appear in Steam searches by default, requiring users to log in, verify their age (which requires the use of a credit card in some countries) and adjust their preferred content settings before they become visible. In addition, the label can cause games to be delisted outright in certain countries.

ZACK Polanski, the leader of the Green Party [of England and Wales], has announced his intention to stand as a candidate in Holborn and St Pancras – following Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation.

He had pledged to stand in a by-election if one came up in London and exclusively told the New Journal he was ready to fight this one.

“I have lived and worked in this community over many years, I know it well and I love it,” he said.

“It represents so many of the things that make London so special. I am so excited by the prospect of representing this place in Parliament.”

“Holborn and St Pancras has everything that’s the best of our country and so much potential,” said Mr Polanski.

“But for too long now it’s been held back by governments who have failed to make the changes to improve people’s lives.

“We know that the Greens can win here, and by electing me, voters will have someone who will always fight their corner – never scared of big donors or the party whip. Too often Labour has stood up for corporations and big money. I will stand up for people struggling to pay their bills.”

As he struggles with questions about the millions he has received from the billionaire Christopher Harborne, Nigel Farage has made no secret of his enthusiastic support for the industry that made part of his benefactor’s fortune – cryptocurrency. The Reform UK leader even urged the governor of the Bank of England to drop a crypto policy that may be costly for Harborne.

But another element of Harborne’s business interests could prove still more consequential if it shapes Farage’s positions. There appears to be no precedent for a major UK donor who is so entwined with the military.

The Guardian’s ongoing investigation into the origins of Harborne’s riches and whether his donations inform Farage’s agenda has established the Thailand-based tycoon’s global web of commercial interests in the arms industry and military contracts. Among Harborne’s business collaborators are a striking number of former army officers, air force pilots, military officials and even, it seems, a former MI6 officer.

Reform and its predecessor party spent over £645,000 on polling and canvassing work from an anonymous sole trader going by the name ‘COR Research’.

COR Research, which worked for the Brexit Party in 2019 and for Reform UK in 2024, has no Companies House entry, no social media presence, and ten key invoices are missing on the Electoral Commission website – something Reform UK has been criticised for by the elections watchdog.

The Commission’s own spending database records the supplier as an individual. The sole trader’s only public presence is a single-page website carrying a logo, the line “The best vision is insight”, and a contact form.

It gives no address, no named individual, and no description of what the business does. The domain was registered on 28 January 2019, three months before the first invoice. The payments were between May 2019 and July 2024.

Most of the spending – £529,160 of the £645,560 – was paid by the Brexit Party across the 2019 European and general elections, while £116,400 was paid in 2024, after the same party was renamed Reform UK.

Jewish Greens are deeply disappointed and angry about The Canary’s decision to publish an attack on our group, written by the Iranian state television co-host David Miller.

He states that Jewish Green Officers coordinated a campaign to filibuster the Zionism is Racism motion. This is simply not true and he provides no evidence for it.

He follows this unfounded allegation with a series of insinuations about our families, our communities and our synagogues. We need to be very clear. Attending a synagogue, or engaging in community activities such as youth work does not mean you hold any particular views on Israel and Palestine or the genocide in Gaza. Implying this is the case is antisemitic.

Many of our group identify as anti-Zionists, and there is no consensus on the motion, as indicated by our updated interim statement, which Miller has ignored. Miller appears to regard it as impossible for someone Jewish to not be a Zionist, regardless of what they say themselves. This is also antisemitic.

He has identified our families, potentially leading to them being targets of abuse or harassment for political stances they have no part in. He has identified the synagogue some of us are members of, also potentially opening it up to the risk of violence, in a year where we have seen several attacks on Jewish institutions and individuals. This is an intolerable invasion of privacy, dangerous, and cannot be justified as being in the public interest.

We remain committed to the values of the Green Party, an end to antisemitism and all forms of racism, and freedom for Palestine and Palestinians.