Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 4h

I refer to the new metaphor to parse politics, @benansell.bsky.social 'the Andy Capp in their heads' who could easily be redrawn in a strip scoffing at 'the arts' over a pint.

Craig Grannell @craiggrannell.bsky.social · 4h

Also, I find it incredible that successive governments keep trying to knacker industries where the UK punches above its weight, such as an awful lot of the arts.

Tim Worthington @outonbluesix.bsky.social · 5h

How is this repeatedly made into a policy issue - by *all* parties - when the blunt fact of the matter is that grown adults who are obliged to pay for their own education, and relentlessly pursued to repay their loans, should be able to study whatever the fuck they want.

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 4h

"Should I whistle blow that my company bosses are being very naughty?"

Cynthia Brumfield @metacurity.com · 4h

Employees regularly paste company secrets into ChatGPT
www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/g...

Employees regularly paste company secrets into ChatGPT

: Microsoft Copilot, not so much

www.theregister.com

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 4h

Just ridiculous to send people off Googling some obscure law

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 4h

Also ‘that stuff you want to study is rubbish’ is a hard sell.

Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · 4h

If you want to win over younger voters, telling them they can't go to university is probably not going to help.

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 4h

I checked the school website and some of the wall bars seem to be still there.

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 4h

Going back in time a bit... ours were wooden wall bars that folded out, and thick ropes that pulled out along something a bit like a curtain rail. They got used every week for PE though. Climbing up the ropes was terrifying.

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JamesSmithRF @jamessmithrf.bsky.social · 5h

This is the quintessential read on household wealth inequality Britain - is well worth your time.

Resolution Foundation @resfoundation.bsky.social · 5h

🚨 New research published today

'Before the fall' looks at what has happened to the distribution of household wealth in Britain and the impact on families.

Read it here 👉 buff.ly/Ya8kInK

Senior Economist Molly Broome:
"Wealth gaps in Britain are now so large that a typical full-time employee saving all their earnings across their entire working life would still not be able to reach the top of the wealth ladder. These gaps are doubly concerning as wealth mobility in Britain is low – people that start life wealthy tend to stay wealthy, and vice versa.
Rising house prices and changes in the value of pension promises account for most of the growth in wealth gaps since the early 2010s, rather than any active behaviour on the part of individuals, such as buying homes or acquiring new assets.
Soaring wealth and an acute need for more revenue has prompted fresh talk of wealth taxes ahead of the Budget next month. But with property and pensions now representing 80 per cent of the growing bulk of household wealth, we need to be honest that higher wealth taxes are likely to fall on pensioners, Southern homeowners or their families, rather than just being paid by the super-rich."

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Greg Britton @gmbritton.bsky.social · 9h

Seriously, this is amazing.

Prof Sam Illingworth @samillingworth.com · 9h

🧠 Alzheimer’s reversed in mice

A new study found that injecting nanoparticles can 'remind' the blood–brain barrier to function properly again, restoring normal brain activity in mice. Human trials could follow within years.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#SciComm #Alzheimers 🧪

Rapid amyloid-β clearance and cognitive recovery through multivalent modulation of blood–brain barrier transport - Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy

Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy - Rapid amyloid-β clearance and cognitive recovery through multivalent modulation of blood–brain barrier transport

www.nature.com

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Josiah Mortimer @josiah.writes.news · 6h

"The very people who pledged that Brexit would result in surging levels of non-white immigration, now froth with rage that their promise came true." open.substack.com/pub/writesbr...

Has Farage forgotten his own immigration promises?

We have the receipts, Nigel...

open.substack.com

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Lewis Baston @lewisbaston.bsky.social · 19h

You can get my book Borderlines in electronic form for an amazing 99p at the moment; at a time when politicians are fetishising borders, why not look at them in a bit more detail, and get the view from Europe’s borders? www.amazon.co.uk/Borderlines-...

Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders

Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders eBook : Baston, Lewis: Amazon.co.uk: Books

www.amazon.co.uk

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Simon Wren-Lewis @sjwrenlewis.bsky.social · 5h

Y'days post: The uphill struggle to stop Reform mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...
Only two political parties are likely to stop a Reform government: Labour and Reform themselves. While Starmer at their conference showed Labour can fight Reform, they also fight against their core vote.

The uphill struggle to stop Reform

Making political predictions is foolish, but I can only see two political parties that can stop a Reform government in the UK: Labour and ...

mainlymacro.blogspot.com

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Toby Nangle @tobyn.bsky.social · 5h

After 80yrs of declining wealth inequality, top 1% and top 10% wealth share in the UK has flatlined for the past 40yrs.

via @resfoundation.bsky.social www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications...

Blue line shows share of household wealth held by top 1%; red by top 10%.

The chart shows declining wealth inequality from 1900-1980 and a flatlining since then.

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 5h

Every Labour intervention on migration has 'trade - good, brown people coming here - bad' lurking in the background.

Jonathan Portes @jdportes.bsky.social · 7h

Wilful ignorance of how trade and migration actually work in a globalised economy.

The idea that the (short and long-term) movement of people -especially between India and the UK - has nothing to do with trade and investment is (obviously) wrong.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

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Zach Dorfman @zachsdorfman.bsky.social · 9h

Hoffman wrote one of the best books on CIA in recent decades. A stupid and short-sighted decision.

Oliver Darcy @oliverdarcy.bsky.social · 11h

Last week, new WaPo opinion editor Adam O'Neal quietly carried out another purge of staffers, cutting editors and major names like Marc Fisher and David Hoffman, among others.

Meanwhile, he welcomed three conservatives to the section.

Details in @status.news: www.status.news/p/washington...

Post Traumatic Disorder

Adam O’Neal says he’s bringing “intellectual diversity” to The Washington Post’s opinion pages—but the moves he’s making behind the scenes tell a different story.

www.status.news

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Stephen C. Rea @stevierea.bsky.social · 10h

Local news is *crucial*

Daniel Knowles @dlknowles.bsky.social · 13h

Good reporting on the South Shore raid from South Side weekly here.

Confirms one thing I was told but didn't put in my own piece because I didn't have a second source and it seemed too insane: border agents segregated arrested residents by race

southsideweekly.com/federal-agen...

Federal Agents Storm South Shore Building, Detaining Families and Children

Families were woken by flashbangs and helicopters as hundreds of federal agents raided their homes. Days later, neighbors are still searching for the missing.

southsideweekly.com

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Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 14h

There’s probably also the view that university education manufactures left wing voters; and that being anti uni appeals to working class populist voters.

Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 14h

The Tories view many degrees as not worthwhile/woke/visa farming + consider lowering student numbers a way to lower the number of foreign students needed to cross subsidize domestic degrees.

Tony Yates @t0nyyates.bsky.social · 15h

Should go down great with parents of school kids who want to go to university 😂

Alistair Barrie @alistairbarrie.com · 15h

Kemi Badenocjh’s ability to channel Margaret Thatcher is quite astonishing. It’s just Maggie didn’t announce the Poll Tax until she had been Prime Minister for over a decade and still didn’t do it every day. She was, in fairness, also completely barking.

Times Higher Education (THE) @timeshighered.bsky.social · 16h

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is expected to announce plans to cut the number of UK university places by about 100,000 annually by reintroducing student number controls, reports Patrick Jack #edusky
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/badenochs-number-caps-plan-would-cut-100000-university-places

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Social Media Lab @socialmedialab.ca · 6d

According to our ongoing analysis of 1.6M+ X Community Notes, only 11% are ever made visible and displayed in the X app. That means ~89% of Community Notes never see daylight. See the data here: notetracker.socialmediadata.org

NoteTracker Dashboard

App for Discovering and Analyzing X Posts with Community Notes

notetracker.socialmediadata.org

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NBER @nber.org · 18h

Deviations from moderate temperatures kill hundreds of thousands each year in the US and EU, with limited evidence on which interventions work to reduce these burdens, from Burke, Wilson, Avirmed, Wallstein, Martins, Behrer, Callahan, Childs, Choi, French, Gould... https://www.nber.org/papers/w34313

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Bluesky @bsky.app · 1d

we hit 2 billion posts today! 🥳

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Sunder Katwala (sundersays) @sundersays.bsky.social · 19h

Party donor Nick Candy says "I cherish the values we grew up with here in the West. But today you are more likely to find the values we grew up with in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.’

Via Sam Leith in the Spectator
www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-...

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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 22h

more and more I am convinced a good share of why Trump 2 is so much worse than before is because of what Elon did to Twitter. it's like those group chats where people gassed themselves up to join ISIS, scaled up a millionfold

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Alex von Tunzelmann @alexvont.bsky.social · 1d

I agree with every word Zelda Williams says. And this at the end from OpenAI makes me want to go full Ned Ludd. Creators can’t have a blanket opt-out on copyright infringement of their work and have to fill out a form appealing to OpenAI’s mercy every time? Fuck off into the sun

OpenAI told the Guardian that content owners can flag copyright infringement using a “copyright disputes form” but that individual artists or studios cannot have a blanket opt-out. Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, said: “We’ll work with rights holders to block characters from Sora at their request and respond to takedown requests.”

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