barrbloom.bsky.social

Trump asks Musk to lift Ukraine Starlink restrictions, WSJ reports reut.rs/4yxCLkh

OK, there is something very, very weird going on in the press right now. It certainly appears, from the outside, as if certain people are being very much protected in a way that was not afforded to certain other people! Let's start with the facts around Lola Salem... 🧵1/

Hormone-disrupting herbicide contaminating 25% of continental US rivers, report finds

Russian losses per 28/09/26 reported by the Ukrainian General Staff +2090 men (!) +1 tank +8 ACVs +49 artillery +2 MLRS +2 AD systems +1382 UAVs +12 GRCs

Incredible: another Ukrainian famine is unfolding, this time in Russian-occupied Oleshky. The remaining inhabitants of what used to be a thriving small city, now down to about 6000 people, are blockaded by Russian forces and cut off from food and water. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Revolving doors and political auctions. Labour peer and former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson joins Palantir. Palantir is trying to save its £330m NHS contract, wants more public contracts. Nick Clegg, Rishi Sunak, George Osborne and others have taken similar jobs.

A reminder that Delo previously pled guilty in the US to violating money laundering protections and agreed to pay a $10 million fine for "willfully” breaking the law with his BitMex platform, which was described as "in effect a money laundering platform.” This is who owns Farage now

90 years ago, Parliament responded to the rise of Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts by passing the Public Order Act, which banned political uniforms, private militias and the threat of force for political objects. The debates make very resonant reading today. Here's the Liberal Robert Bernays. (Short 🧵)

Undercover footage verified by Channel 4 News reveals a secret plot by senior Reform UK figures to break the law on party donations. A leading legal expert is now calling for a criminal investigation. 🔗 Read the exclusive story on Substack:

🔥 The EU 🇪🇺 is banning Brazilian 🇧🇷 beef and chicken after Brazil failed to prove compliance with antibiotic rules. Britain 🇬🇧 has not. NI must follow the EU ban, widening UK divide. Accepting meat rejected by Europe also threatens Burnham’s SPS reset. Shared food safety 👉 or Brexit divergence?

BREAKING: The Supreme Court has PAUSED a lower court ruling that had blocked Trump from using the Postal Service to restrict mail voting, saying the lower court lacked jurisdiction. Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissent 1/ www.npr.org/2026/08/24/n...

it’s happening in broad daylight www.ft.com/content/32db...

Unsurprisingly, a number of people asked me to look at this story doing the rounds on all the right-wing media 🧐 So let's take a look at who is exempt from the ban and why, and when this "two-tier" situation came about (spoiler - it's nothing new!) 1/20

Ben Cullen, a leading figure of the "Raise the Colours" campaign, will stand trial for three separate charges regarding a total of 78 indecent images of children. I have only seen this covered in local newspapers, so far. Grim as it is, it needs wider coverage www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2624087...

The treatment of this woman is absolutely outrageous and one of the most egregious corporate violations of free speech I've seen. I have just bought the book as a fuck you to Facebook. It's available here uk.bookshop.org/p/books/care...

Everyone should be extremely concerned that birthright citizenship was 5-4 and not unanimous.

It was inevitable, wasn't it🙄 Of course the Telegraph would run with something like this👇 So let's remove some of the rose-tinted spectacles and also look at some of that data comparing 1976 with modern heat waves Because the 1976 nostalgia porn is wearing a bit thin at this stage 🧵1/23

It is extremely annoying the way that Hunt, like Osborne before him, personally undermined the foundations of the British state and now gets to opine as if this mess was absolutely nothing to do with him.

Please take 15 seconds to respond to the Govt consultation today! Link below.

This morning scrolling Bluesky, there is nothing at all in my feed about Putin’s barbaric attack on the Ukraine’s holiest site, the UNESCO protected Lavra so I’m posting this here.

Condemning riots isn't enough. We need policy action, including an immediate appraisal of X as a vehicle for coordinating far-right disorder. And we need political leadership, to challenge white nationalism as an idea, not to validate it daily and then complain when it turns violent.

If the media actually explained Reform’s policies, would anyone support them? thedailybritain.co.uk/peter-stefan...

What Reform did today was an incitement to rioting and an insult to a grieving family. This bloke should have hung his goddamn head in shame.

Rep. Madeleine Dean: "What is true is that the president has lied about being on Epstein's plane, and the unredacted files prove that. There's a lot in here. It's all covered up."

When the father of a murdered son makes a public statement saying "we do not want his death to be used to create further division, hatred or tension", then I believe it's incumbent on any news outlet reporting on Farage's comments to ensure people know he has chosen to disregard the family's wishes.

"The fact that the party which is leading in all of the national opinion polls is now using the sort of rhetoric previously reserved for the very fringes of the far-right is deeply alarming – as is the fact that this rhetoric is being publicised and normalised by Reform’s media supporters."

Why $1bn in Balkans energy contracts are going to an obscure company connected to Donald Trump

As misleading headlines go, that has to be up there with some of the worst! As is the claim that "Immigration is fuelling mass unemployment among under-25s." The "shocking new study" does NOT show that at all 🙄 🧵 1/21

Lol. Lmao.

Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’ | Margaret Sullivan

Friends, I’ve been around politics for over 50 years. I’ve never seen anything as brazenly crooked and corrupt as what Trump and his cronies did today.

I hope this isn’t true. There are times when it’s more important to put country before party. This is one of them. Burnham’s longstanding commitment to a fairer voting system could transform our democracy & counter the dire threat of a Reform UK government elected on a minority of the vote

Don't forget what Reform promised the crypto industry after Farage took the cash: Farage....took an undisclosed £5mn personal gift from a crypto billionaire in 2024, months before pledging to slash tax and regulation on the digital assets industry if he becomes PM www.ft.com/content/6a56...

I wish someone would corner these chuds on "only when the sun shines or the wind blows." It's spectacularly embarrassing that the ENERGY secretary doesn't know how storage batteries work.

Not an Evangelical but pretty sure you burn in Hell for being an infamous draft-dodger and notorious coward who posts AI images of yourself on the front lines of a war you started to enrich yourself and your friends without any interest in how many kids or American soldiers it kills

Nigel Farage’s income since being elected MP has hit £2m, analysis shows

The mob reaction in Epsom to something that - it turned out - never happened is a depressing tale of populism and misinformation, often by people who should know better. That’s the pattern. app.prospectmagazine.co.uk/story/73184/...

As a Ukrainian journalist, I’ve covered the US for 20 years. I find it increasingly shocking

Back in September, I wrote about Ukraine's long-range drones. Now that they are regularly and accurately striking Russian refineries and oil infrastructure, I think it's worth reading again, for those who missed it. Gift link: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Desmond Morris obituary – zoologist, author and broadcaster who found fame with his groundbreaking 1967 book The Naked Ape

It’s as if the Iran war was fought to sustain the Russian economy. Lifting sanctions for Russians does nothing for Americans. It just makes it easier for Russia to continue its war in Ukraine.

We should be learning from other countries...

These people call themselves patriots. Almost invariably, they turn out to be stooges of foreign powers. goodlawproject.org/orbans-pay-c...

“Bucha survived 33 days of russian occupation, terror, torture — 33 days of total evil. 600 murdered Ukrainian men and women. Russia called it staged. Russia always does this. Actually, all evil acts this way.” President Zelenskyy addressed the European leaders at the Bucha Summit.

Badenoch criticised for ‘peddling dangerous fantasy’ about North Sea oil drilling

Farage really is utterly repulsive. A racist, misogynistic, Nazi-sympathising, hate-filled grifting arsehole. And v much not a school boy any more, so god knows what his excuse will be this time. Totally unfit for office. This should be career-ending. The fact that it won’t be is deeply depressing.

If it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between fossil-fuel lobbyists and the billionaire press, that's because there isn’t one. My column on the politicians, journalists and junktanks using the Iran crisis as an excuse to extract our remaining gas and oil. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...