Now, let's try that with a human body part

Tom's Hardware: In a blind test, audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between audio signals sent through copper wire, a banana, or wet mud — 'The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't,' notes the experiment creator.

Free-living amoebas are a little known group of single-celled organisms that don't need a host to live. They are found in soil and water, from puddles to lakes. What makes them remarkable is their ability to change shape and move using temporary arm-like extensions called pseudopodia - literally "false feet". This allows them to thrive in an astonishing range of environments. And they pose a growing health threat.

The most notorious free-living amoeba is Naegleria fowleri, commonly known as the "brain-eating amoeba". It lives naturally in warm freshwater, typically between 30°C and 40°C - lakes, rivers and hot springs. But it is rarely found in temperate countries such as the UK, due to the cold weather.

The infection happens when contaminated water enters through the nose, usually while swimming. From there, the amoeba travels along the nasal passages to the brain, where it destroys brain tissue. The outcome is usually devastating, with a mortality rate of 95%-99%.

Occasionally, Naegleria fowleri has been found in tap water, particularly when it's warm and hasn't been properly chlorinated. Some people have become infected while using contaminated tap water to rinse their sinuses for religious or health reasons. Fortunately, you cannot get infected by drinking contaminated water, and the infection doesn't spread from person to person.

Brain-eating amoebas can be killed by proper water treatment and chlorination. But eliminating them from water systems isn't always straightforward. When they attach to biofilms - communities of microorganisms that form inside pipes - disinfectants like chlorine struggle to reach them, and organic matter can reduce the disinfectants' effectiveness.

The amoeba can also survive warm temperatures by forming "cysts" - hard protective shells - making it harder to control in water networks, especially during summer or in poorly maintained systems.

Free-living amoebas aren't just dangerous on their own. They can also act as living shields for other harmful microbes, protecting them from environmental stress and disinfection.

While amoebas normally feed on bacteria, fungi and viruses, some bacteria - like Mycobacterium tuberculosis (which causes TB) and Legionella pneumophila (which causes legionnaires' disease) - have evolved to survive and multiply inside them. This helps these pathogens survive longer and potentially become more dangerous.

Amoebas also shelter fungi such as Cryptococcus neoformans, which can cause fungal meningitis. It can also shelter viruses, such as human norovirus and adenovirus, which cause respiratory, eye and gastrointestinal infections. By protecting these pathogens, amoebas help them survive longer in water and soil, and may even help spread antibiotic resistance.

Climate change is probably making the threat from free-living amoebas worse by creating more favourable conditions for their growth. Naegleria fowleri thrives in warm freshwater. As global temperatures rise, the habitable zone for these heat-loving amoebas has expanded into regions that were previously too cool. This potentially exposes more people to them through recreational water use.

Several recent outbreaks linked to recreational water exposure have already raised public concern in multiple countries. These climate-driven changes - warmer waters, longer warm seasons, and increased human contact with water - make controlling the risks more difficult than ever before.

Most water systems are not routinely checked for free-living amoebas. The organisms are rare, can hide in biofilms or sediments, and require specialised tests to detect, making routine monitoring expensive and technically challenging.

Instead, water safety relies on proper chlorination, maintaining disinfectant levels, and flushing systems regularly, rather than testing directly for the amoeba. While some guidance exists for high-risk areas, widespread monitoring is not standard practice.

Free-living amoebas aren't just a threat to the brain. They can cause painful eye infections, particularly in contact lens users, skin lesions in people with weakened immune systems, and rare but serious systemic infections affecting organs such as the lungs, liver and kidneys.

Free-living amoebas such as Naegleria fowleri are rare but can be deadly, so prevention is crucial. These organisms don't fit neatly into either medical or environmental categories - they span both, requiring a holistic approach that links environmental surveillance, water management, and clinical awareness to reduce risk.

Environmental change, gaps in water treatment and expanding habitats make monitoring - and clear communication of risk - more important than ever. Keeping water systems properly chlorinated, flushing hot water systems, and following safe recreational water and contact lens hygiene guidelines all help reduce the chance of infection. Meanwhile, researchers continue to improve detection methods and doctors work to recognise cases early.

People cannot get infected with free-living amoebas like Naegleria fowleri by drinking water, even if it contains the organism. Infection occurs only when contaminated water enters the nose, allowing the amoeba to reach the brain. Swallowing the water poses no risk because the amoeba cannot survive or invade through the digestive tract.

The risk from swimming in well-maintained pools or treated water is extremely low. The danger comes from warm, untreated freshwater, particularly during hot weather.

People can protect themselves from free-living amoebas by reducing exposure to warm, stagnant water. Simple steps include avoiding putting your head underwater in lakes or rivers during hot weather, using nose clips when swimming, choosing well-maintained pools, and keeping home water systems properly flushed and heated.

Contact lens users should follow strict hygiene and never rinse lenses with tap water. For nasal rinsing, only use sterile, distilled, or previously boiled water.

Awareness is key. If you develop a severe headache, fever, nausea, or stiff neck after freshwater exposure, seek medical attention immediately - early treatment is critical.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

With a thematic issue on a vital topic - the rise child poverty, ending on a hopeful note. You will find sharp analyses on the effect of poverty on children's lives, with a spotlight on the communities that are on the front line of deprivation, with personal stories and shared solutions. Click on the image to gain access to it, or find us on Substack.

Journalism by the people, for the people.

The post Why are scientists calling for urgent action on amoebas? first appeared on East Anglia Bylines.

The big scoop on Sunday 15 February has been that Labour Together paid investigators to spy on journalists. The problem is that this 'scoop' actually came out months ago:

If you've seen the Sunday Times today you'll know Labour Together were secretly hiring people to investigate journalists. Sadly you won't know that The National exclusively broke this story six months ago, since our work is not credited at all. https://t.co/cbvK1Di18Z

— Laura Webster (@LauraEWebsterr) February 15, 2026

In the National article highlighted above, Peter Oborne and Richard Sanders wrote:

Labour Together, the Labour Party grouping that helped propel Starmer to power, hired the individuals to find information on Paul Holden, the journalist whose book The Fraud was the source for revelations that resulted in the downfall of Paul Ovenden earlier this month.

It also explored Holden's personal life, sought points of "leverage" that could be used against him and tried to place stories in the media that would damage his reputation.

Reporting on the Times' story for the Canary, Skwawkbox reported:

'Labour Together' — the sabotage outfit that brought down Jeremy Corbyn and conned Labour members into choosing Keir Starmer — paid investigators to spy on, and smear two Times journalists. Unsurprisingly, the pair — Harry Yorke and Gabriel Pogrund — have publicised their experience as unique.

@Gabriel_Pogrund and I were the subject of a disgraceful smear campaign — just for doing our jobs

I'm proud that The Sunday Times is calling it out on the front page tomorrow

Labour activists paid for smear campaign against journalistshttps://t.co/Uw9UjNJtzm

— Harry Yorke (@HarryYorke1) February 14, 2026

Labour Together is a pressure group within the broader Labour Party. Morgan McSweeney is the man who used to run this operation; he's also the guy who recently resigned in disgrace as Starmer's chief-of-staff.

It's been known for years that Labour Together target journalists. McSweeney actually went after the Canary, and the mainstream media cheered him on, because these people are scum:

The man pulling Starmer's strings has resigned in disgrace

McSweeney said the Labour right needed to "Kill the Canary - before the Canary kills us".

Guess we're the last bird standing.https://t.co/G3YuBIYAnM

— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) February 8, 2026

This is how we reported McSweeney's downfall:

As journalist Paul Holden covered in The Fraud, the Labour Together schemer Morgan McSweeney was the man who spent the last decade manoeuvring to:

• Bring down Jeremy Corbyn.
• Position the Labour right as the leaders of the Labour Party.
• Return to government.

To 'bring down Corbyn', McSweeney worked to ensure that Labour lost the 2017 and 2019 elections. Because we have more than two brain cells, we understood that a group which will work against their own party will work against anyone.

For whatever reason, proper journalists like Yorke and Pogrund didn't think the vicious Labour Together would target them. What a shock it must have been to find out they're not special:

Let me be more explicit about this: Gabriel Pogrund is scum who should be hounded and pelted with rotting fruit through the streets like Cersei Lannister for reading out the shite he was sent by Morgan McSweeney as a national emergency. He knew exactly what he was doing then. https://t.co/qBhdlsyYLb

— Flying_Rodent (@flying_rodent) February 15, 2026

Yorke literally engaged in the same sort of smears as Labour Together:

Journalist Harry Yorke was "smeared" by the Labour Right as "part of a Russian conspiracy".

Now, where have I seen such "disgraceful" tactics before?

Outside the City of Hebron is the largest Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. It is called Kiryat Arba, and is thought to house more than 10,000 illegal settlers, although exact numbers are unknown. These large settlements have everything that settlers might need, including schools, health centres and shops. They also have their own roads and buses, which Palestinians are obviously not permitted to use.

But Hebron is unique in Palestine, as it is also the only occupied West Bank city with settlements inside its centre - within Palestinian neighbourhoods. Five settlements, which are all illegal under international law, are within the Old City. Known as H2, this area makes up around 20 per cent of the Hebron centre. It is under full 'Israeli' military control, as opposed to H1, which is under Palestinian Authority administration:

A total of about 500 settlers live in the Old City settlements and are protected by around 1500 Israeli occupation soldiers. Both settlers and the military have made life extremely difficult and dangerous for the 33,000 Palestinians living in H2.

The Old City of Hebron used to be the commercial centre for the Southern West Bank, but the economy has now collapsed in the area. While the occupation is attempting to drive Palestinians away and erase the Islamic identity of Hebron, it aims to increase Jewish presence in the city. And while Palestinians endure severe military restrictions and daily violence, settlers travel to Hebron every Saturday for a tour of the Old City. They are, of course, protected by large numbers of Israeli occupation soldiers.

The tours, which are surveilled using US-made MQ-9 Reaper drones, start at the al-Ibrahimi Mosque, and allow these settlers to walk around the city and maintain their presence in the area:

The aim is to intimidate Palestinians and show them these Zionist colonisers are in control. It also sends a message to these settlers that Palestinian land and property are there to be taken. Young settlers are encouraged to take back their homes and land that was supposedly promised to them by God thousands of years ago.

In these photos, the settlers can be seen concluding their tour by passing through the gate onto Shuhada Street. This street, once the main commercial centre in the whole of Hebron, is now closed to Palestinians. The building these settlers enter used to be a Palestinian school, until the occupation turned it into a Jewish one.

Hebron is a significant religious place for both Muslims and Jews. It is one of the four holy cities in Judaism, and Jews consider the city the birthplace of the Jewish people.

In Arabic, Hebron is known as Al Khalil, meaning 'the friend,' referring to Abraham, who is considered a prophet in Islam and whose remains are believed to be buried in the Ibrahimi Mosque. Muslims also believe Hebron was a stopping point during the Prophet Muhammad's night journey to Jerusalem.

Settlers have a five-star lifestyle for free. They are paid a salary, do not need to work and have everything provided to them by the Israeli occupation government, including weapons. They work with the Israeli occupation's government, military and police, making life as difficult as possible for Palestinians.

The aim of the Zionist project is displacement and ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine, and Jewish supremacy in occupied Palestine. These ambitions are enabled by the unconditional support governments around the world give to the criminal state of 'Israel'.

Featured image via the Canary

By Charlie Jaay

Umm al Kheir is in the South Hebron Hills. It is one of 12 communities that make up Masafer Yatta, in the Israeli-controlled area of the West Bank known as Area C. The village is home to 37 Bedouin families, approximately 300 people. These Palestinians were originally herders in the Negev, but were forcibly displaced from their land by the Israeli occupation during the Nakba of 1948. The community then settled in Masafer Yatta, and has written documents proving ownership of their land.

But since 1981, with the arrival of the first illegal Jewish settlers to the area, the community has suffered immense hardship, which has intensified today. The settlers stole a large area of village land to build the illegal Carmel settlement, where they live today. They regularly terrorise the community and have blocked all entrances to the village for Palestinians, except for one.

Last year, seven settler families stole yet more land, close to the community centre in Umm al Kheir. They are currently living in mobile homes on this land, have fenced off any available grazing, and have recently erected Israeli flags along the whole of its perimeter.

Khalil Hathaleen is Head of the village Council in Umm al Kheir. He tells the Canary about some of the problems the village has been facing.

Last year, Khalil's much-loved brother, Awdah, was fatally shot by an illegal settler, Yinon Levi.

Levi had driven through Umm al Kheir in a bulldozer to carry out infrastructure work at what is now the illegal outpost, next to the community. The killing, which happened in broad daylight, resulted in the occupation arresting Palestinians from Umm al Kheir on stone-throwing charges, while Levi walked free.

Levi, who is sanctioned by the UK, owns a company called Eyal Hari Yehuda Company Ltd, or Eyal Judaean Mountains Company Ltd, which is known for its work demolishing Palestinian homes in both the West Bank and Gaza.

Awdah was father to three young children, one of whom is still severely traumatised by the killing of his father and is unable to sleep at night.  His wife, Hanady, tells us that Awdah is irreplaceable.

She says:

It's really hard to see the settlers getting on with their daily lives, while here they have destroyed a whole community. They destroyed a family; they destroyed my sons. I don't see any life for me now that they have killed my husband. All the happiness and goodness have gone with him. Awdah was loved by everyone, and he made everything easy when he was here.

You thought there were no problems when he was with us. He would solve all the problems and show the world what life was like in Masafer Yatta. They killed him on purpose.

More than 100 structures have been demolished in the village over the years. In October 2025, more homes, the community centre, and the children's playground were all issued final demolition orders. The Israeli occupation is expected to come at any time, to flatten these structures, make families homeless and further destroy the fabric of this community.

Khalil says:

Before 7 October, our community had around 5000 goats and sheep. Now there are around 800, and they are kept inside all the time. The animals are now in jail, and this has destroyed the families here. Now there is no source of income for them.

The Israelis have made them very poor. Some cannot afford basic food, let alone milk, for their kids. Any money from the goats and sheep is now used to cover the food, as they cannot go out to graze at all. This is all happening because of the occupation and the violence from the settlers. The settlers killed my brother. Where is the justice in the world?

Recently, a settler went into Umm al Kheir with his sheep. This action was obviously an attempt to intimidate residents of the village and show them that settlers are in control. When activists- who were from the Centre of Jewish Non-Violence, objected to his presence, the police were called out and arrested them, instead of the settler.

There has also been nighttime activity on the stolen land of the outpost, with armed Jewish settlers and their children digging along to music. The occupation's military and police see these actions but do nothing to stop these Zionist colonisers. Instead, they attempt to stop and arrest those who witness and document the occupation's many crimes.

Bedouins are herders and traditionally moved with the seasons to the best grazing areas. Due to the Israeli occupation, this is no longer possible, but their livestock are still an extremely important part of their life and an essential source of income.

But in Umm al Kheir, as in other communities in Masafer Yatta and elsewhere in the West Bank, they have been unable to graze their sheep and goats because of the presence of settlers and the theft of their land.

There are now only 800 animals in Umm al Kheir, down from 4000 several years ago, and they are costing money to keep because they can no longer graze outside. As a result, the community has lost their only source of income and has been left with nothing.

Mahmoud Hathaleen, a resident of Umm al Kheir, and a cousin of Awdah, tells the Canary:

Settlers claim that we exist illegally here, and have asked the Israeli government to make more pressure on us, so we leave. They are confiscating our land, demolishing our homes and attacking us in the night, to make pressure on us to leave this land. The outpost built last year has a new road across our land, to connect it to all the settlements.

They made this road in the night, and was supported by the IDF ( Israeli occupying forces), the civil administration and the police. Sometimes these settlers also work in the IDF.There is no light at the end of the tunnel for us. All Palestinian people have lost hope, We all feel there is no solution, no future.

Nobody cares for Palestinian life - not the Arab league, not Europe or the US. What's happening in the West Bank is a slow genocide, killing Palestinians slowly.

The international presence is welcome in Umm al Kheir. This not only plays an essential role in non-violent resistance against the Israeli occupation but is urgently needed. Do not be put off from visiting the West Bank. Palestinians in communities across the territory are extremely welcoming and need our help, right now.

The occupation has only one aim - to colonise and drive Palestinians from their land. This forcible displacement is implemented through violence and land theft by illegal settlers and is happening throughout Area C of the West Bank. These settlers have the full support and backing of the 'Israeli' government, work together with the occupation's military and police, and are protected by them.

They receive a salary, have no living expenses, and pay no tax. They are all armed by the occupation and given vehicles. In the case of Umm al Kheir, the settlers have also been given sheep and goats. Pylons have also been erected on the village land to provide the settlements with electricity. Whilst Umm al Kheir are not permitted to be connected to the grid, the settlers' chicken factory has electricity 24 hours a day.

Settlers all over the West Bank use "security" issues as an excuse to push the government and the army to expel Palestinians and declare their land a closed military zone. Palestinians are unable to access this land, but settlers are still allowed to move freely in these areas. Several years later, it becomes their own property.

After the signing of the Oslo Accords, in the 1990s, the West Bank was divided into Area A, B and C. Area C makes up more than 60 per cent of the entire West Bank, and is the most fertile, resource-rich land in the occupied territory. But 'Israel' controls everything in area C, including 'security' and planning.

On 8 February 2026, the "Security Cabinet" also approved measures pushed by Ministers Katz and Smotrich, to deepen the de facto annexation of the West Bank. The 'Israeli" government has described these as steps towards the "normalisation " of Jewish life in the West Bank.

These approved decisions will bring far-reaching changes to land registration and will make it much easier for settlers to acquire Palestinian land and build settlements.

According to the Jerusalem Post, a Jordanian-era law has also been repealed, which barred the sale of land to Jews. The approved decisions also allow the Israeli occupation to demolish buildings owned by Palestinian families in Area A.

Despite constant fear and uncertainty, the people of Umm al Kheir remain steadfast. Every demolished home is rebuilt; every fenced-off patch of land becomes a reminder of what they refuse to relinquish — their right to exist on their own ancestral soil. Each act of resistance is a refusal to disappear.  Despite everything, the community of Umm al Kheir still believes in freedom.

Featured image and additional images via the Canary

By Charlie Jaay

Keir Starmer's government is a gutless, corporate-kowtowing betrayal of everything the Labour Party was supposed to stand for under Jeremy Corbyn. A Corbyn premiership would have been a revolutionary upgrade, not this tepid, right-leaning bullshit we're stuck with.

I guess it's easy to think about what could've been.

Corbyn's Labour would have built solidarity with global struggles rather than bowed to NATO warmongers and US hegemony. Starmer's Labour is a whitewashed, Zionist-appeasing machine that silences dissent and props up imperialism.

Corbyn's Labour would have prioritised aid over arms and cooperation over conquest, turning the UK into a force for global equity, not another lapdog for empire. Starmer's Labour has escalated tensions with Russia and China to please the Atlanticist overlords and ramped up military spending to 2.5% of GDP while nurses line up at food banks.

Corbyn's Labour would have ended the failed neoliberal austerity policies that have hollowed out Britain for decades. Rail, mail, water, and energy would've been back in public hands where they belong, rather than lining the pockets of fat cat shareholders. Starmer's Labour ruthlessly ditched those Corbyn-lite pledges faster than a rat fleeing a sinking ship. His "fiscal responsibility" rhetoric is simply code for continuing Tory-lite cuts, cosying up to big business with tax breaks for the filthy rich while public services crumble to the fucking ground.

Starmer's Britain is still a playground for billionaires, while Corbyn would have taxed them into oblivion to fund the NHS properly, not this half-arsed patching-up.

Starmer's "growth" is a euphemism for gangrenous decay. NHS waiting lists are stagnating, schools are falling apart and councils are on the brink of bankruptcy, all while he funnels your billions into private health vultures and arms dealers.

Keir Starmer isn't building Britain, he's burying it alive, six-feet-deep in austerity's grave, like a gravedigger with a knighthood.

You see, Jeremy Corbyn wasn't just a better option, he was the perfect antidote to the poisonous, soul-sucking capitalist rot that Keir Starmer is peddling as "change".

So next time you hear or see the oligarchs plaything taking a swipe at his predecessor, just remember the Labour Party didn't have a place for an honourable, decent man like Jeremy Corbyn, but it has plenty of room for paedo-enablers, Tel Aviv bootlickers, corporate shills and Blairite zombies.

And that's just Peter Mandelson.

To be honest, I am absolutely sick of hearing the liberal media tell us that Keir Starmer is a beacon of decency, a steady hand rescuing Britain from Tory chaos. In reality, the BBC and Guardian's insistence on Starmer's decency is just cover for their own complicity in propping up a system that chews up poor and working class people.

Starmer is anything but decent. If you have read the last five hundred words you might even agree with me, wherever you place yourself on the Overton Window.

Starmer's entire rise reeks of deceit and opportunism.

Starmer won the Labour leadership in 2020 by pledging a raft of left-wing Corbyn-lite policies such as scrapping tuition fees, nationalising utilities, and defending migrants rights. But once in power, they were abandoned faster than a bad date.

That isn't decent, it's calculated betrayal.

What about the freebies? I haven't forgotten about that, and I doubt you have either. More than £100,000 of freebies from the elite — more than every other Labour leader combined — while pensioners freeze and children go hungry under Labour's austerity-lite regime.

If that's decent, I'm a devoted Faragist.

Then there's Starmer's vicious purge of the Labour left, which the liberal media whitewashes as "professionalising" the party. Starmer and his former enforcer, Morgan McSweeney, have systematically expelled or marginalised anyone with a whiff of socialism under the guise of rooting out antisemitism, but really to crush dissent and drag the party to the right to the delight of their elitist paymasters.

Decency? No. Authoritarian thuggery? Yes.

On Gaza, his slow-footed, mealy-mouthed response to Israel's actions has been a national embarrassment and a fucking disgrace and has truly exposed his lack of moral spine.

Complicit Keir Starmer is a jellyfish, drifting with the tides of power rather than boldly standing against injustice.

Even the ultra-Blairite, Wes Streeting privately thinks Israel is a "rogue state" committing "war crimes" and "calculated brutality", yet publicly it's business as usual for this dreadful, callous government.

Remember, "decent" Starmer rolled out the red carpet for Israel's war criminals, licensed the tools of their barbaric, criminal slaughter, and suppressed the movement demanding accountability, only to be told it was unlawful.

Maybe someone in the liberal media can explain to me how supplying military equipment to a baby-killing regime is in any way, "decent"?

Haven't the actions of this vile, discredited Prime Minister caused enough harm to children already? Their blood is on your grubby hands, Keir Starmer.

Less than two years into the age of beige, Starmer is the most unpopular PM on record, with polls tanking and chants calling him a "wanker" echoing from football grounds to darts halls across the country.

We are not fooled. Keir Starmer isn't a fighter for the people, he is a doormat for the establishment.

Keir Starmer isn't decent, he is a man without conviction and the embodiment of everything that is so very wrong with centrist politics — hollow, elitist, and utterly treacherous.

Starmer's diabolical legacy was secured some time before the latest Peter Mandelson scandal.

History will not remember Keir Starmer as a decent Prime Minister, it will remember him for the gutless fraud that he is.

Featured image via the Canary

By Rachael Swindon

Project in Ceredigion aims to help country catch up with large-scale nature recovery projects elsewhere in UK

A Welsh charity has bought more than 405 hectares (1,000 acres) in Ceredigion to establish Cymru's "flagship" rewilding project, helping the country catch up with large-scale nature recovery projects under way elsewhere in the UK.

Tir Natur (Nature's Land), founded in 2022, announced it had acquired the site at Cwm Doethie in Elenydd, or the Cambrian mountains, after a fundraising drive launched last year raised 50% of the £2.2m purchase price. A philanthropic bridging loan enabled the sale.

New York City's public hospital system is paying millions to Palantir, the controversial ICE and military contractor, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.

Since 2023, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation has paid Palantir nearly $4 million to improve its ability to track down payment for the services provided at its hospitals and medical clinics. Palantir, a data analysis firm that's now a Wall Street giant thanks to its lucrative work with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, deploys its software to make more efficient the billing of Medicaid and other public benefits. That includes automated scanning of patient health notes to "Increase charges captured from missed opportunities," contract materials reviewed by The Intercept show.

Palantir's administrative involvement in the business of healing people stands in contrast to its longtime role helping facilitate warfare, mass deportations, and dragnet surveillance.

In 2016, The Intercept revealed Palantir's role behind XKEYSCORE, a secret NSA bulk surveillance program revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden that allowed the U.S. and its allies to search the unfathomably large volumes of data they collect. The company has also attracted global scrutiny and criticism for its "strategic partnership" with the Israeli military while it was leveling Gaza.

But it's Palantir's work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that is drawing the most protest today. The company provides a variety of services to help the federal government find and deport immigrants. ICE's Palantir-furnished case management software, for example, "plays a critical role in supporting the daily operations of ICE, ensuring critical mission success," according to federal contracting documents.

"It's unacceptable that the same company that is targeting our neighbors for deportation and providing tools to the Israeli military is also providing software for our hospitals," said Kenny Morris, an organizer with the American Friend Service Committee, which shared the contract documents with The Intercept.

Established by the state legislature, New York City Health and Hospitals is the nation's biggest municipal healthcare system, administering over 70 facilities throughout New York City, including Bellevue Hospital, and providing care for over a million New Yorkers annually.

New York City Health and Hospitals spokesperson Adam Shrier did not respond to multiple requests to discuss the contract's details. Palantir spokesperson Drew Messing said the company does not use or share hospital data outside the bounds of its contract.

Palantir's contract with New York's public healthcare system allows the company to work with patients' protected health information, or PHI. With permission from New York City Health and Hospitals, Palantir can "de-identify PHI and utilize de-identified PHI for purposes other than research," the contract states. De-identification generally involves the stripping of certain revealing information, such as names, Social Security numbers, and birthday. Such provisions are common in contracts involving health data.

Activists who oppose Palantir's involvement in New York point to a large body of research that indicates re-identifying personal data, including in medial contexts, is often trivial.

"Palantir is targeting the exact patients that NYCHH is looking to serve."

"Any contract that shares any of New Yorkers' highly personal data from NYC Health & Hospital's with Palantir, a key player in the Trump administration's mass deportation effort, is reckless and puts countless lives at risk," said Beth Haroules of the New York Civil Liberties Union."Every New Yorker, without exception, has a right to quality healthcare and city services. New Yorkers must be able to seek healthcare without fear that their intimate medical information, or immigration status, will be delivered to the federal government on a silver platter."

Palantir has long provided similar services to the UK's National Health Service, a business relationship that today has an increasing number of detractors. Palantir "has absolutely no place in the NHS, looking after patients' personal data," Green Party politician Zack Polanski recently stated in a letter to the UK's health secretary.

Some New York-based groups feel similarly out of distrust for what the firm could do with troves of sensitive personal data.

"Palantir is targeting the exact patients that NYCHH is looking to serve," said Jonathan Westin of the Brooklyn-based organization Climate Organizing Hub. "They should immediately sever their contract with Palantir and stand with the millions of immigrant New Yorkers that are being targeted by ICE in this moment."

"The chaos Palantir is inflicting through its technology is not just limited to the kidnapping of our immigrant neighbors and the murder of heroes like our fellow nurse, Alex Pretti," said Hannah Drummond, an Asheville, North Carolina-based nurse and organizer with National Nurses United, a nursing union. "As a nurse and patient advocate, I don't want anything having to do with Palantir in my hospital—and neither should any elected leader who claims to represent nurses."

Palantir's vocally right-wing CEO Alex Karp has been a frequent critic of New York City's newly inaugurated democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Health and Hospitals operates as a public benefit corporation, but the mayor can exert considerable influence over the network, for instance through the appointment of its board of directors. Its president Dr. Mitchell Katz was renominated by Mamdani, then the Mayor-elect, late last year.

The mayor's office did not respond in time for publication when asked about its stance on the contract.

The post Palantir Gets Millions of Dollars From New York City's Public Hospitals appeared first on The Intercept.

*Their beloved chatbot got shot in the head

I recently looked into Tesla's January sales in 12 European markets, and the results were not pretty. Overall, across those 12 markets, Tesla's sales were down 23%. However, one reader pointed out that it could be much more interesting going back two, three, or even four years. So, that's what ... [continued]

The post Tesla Sales Down Tremendously in UK, Norway, Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Switzerland appeared first on CleanTechnica.

While Tesla EV sales flounder, CEO Elon Musk engages in epic online poop-flinging against a leading Democratic donor.

The post Tesla CEO Elon Musk Should Stop Flinging Poop And Start Selling More Tesla EVs, STAT appeared first on CleanTechnica.

ai-pocalypse Legal scholars have found that OpenAI's GPT-5 follows the law better than human judges, but they leave open the question of whether AI is right for the job.…

At the recent "Protocols for Publishers" event, a group of us were talking about news paywalls, social media promotion, and the embarrassment of having to ask for money.

What if, we said, you could tip a journalist directly on social media? Or reward your favourite creator without leaving the platform? Or just say thanks by buying someone a pint?

Here's a trivial mock-up:

Of course, this hides a ton of complexity. Does it show your local currency symbol? Does the platform take a cut or does it just pass you to the poster's preferred platform? Do users want to be able to tip as well as / instead of reposting and favouriting?

But I think the real problem is the perverse incentives it creates. We already know that relentless A|B testing of monetisation strategies leads to homogeneity and outrage farming. Every YouTuber has the same style of promotional thumbnail. Rage-baiters on Twitter know what drives the algorithm and pump out unending slurry.

Even if we ignore those who want to burn the world, content stealers like @CUTE_PUPP1E5 grab all the content they can and rip-off original creators. At the moment that's merely annoying, but monetisation means a strong incentive to steal content.

When people inevitably get scammed, would that damage the social media platform? Would promoting a payment link lead to liability? Now that money is involved, does that make hacking more attractive?

And yet… Accounts add payment links to their profiles all the time. Lots of accounts regularly ask for donor and sponsors. GitHub sponsors exist and I don't see evidence of people impersonating big projects and snaffling funds.

It is somewhat common for platforms to pay for publishers to be on their site. If you're starting up a new service then you need to give people an incentive to be there. That might be as a payer or receiver.

Personally, I'd love a frictionless way to throw a quid to a helpful blog post, or effortlessly donate to a poster who has made me laugh. Selfishly, I'd like it if people paid me for my Open Source or (micro)blogging.

I don't know whether Mastodon or BlueSky will ever have a payments button - and I have no influence on their decision-making process - but I'd sure like to see them experiement.

You can read more discussion on Mastodon.

Or, feel free to send me a tip!

• Buy me a gift from my Amazon wishlist
• Sponsor me on GitHub
• Send me money via PayPal
• Support me on Ko-Fi
• Become a Patreon
• Join my Open Collective
• Donate using LiberaPay
• Pay with Wise

Wetter winters are set to become the norm, so unless we're farmers or flood victims, we need some coping strategies to keep our spirits up

There's a lot of complaining about the weather currently and I get it, it's wet. Here in York the river is getting above itself yet again and the council has fenced off large puddles in the park for health and safety reasons, to widespread mockery. Things currently taking in water include the letterbox (yesterday the postman told me with a manic laugh that he was leaving for the Philippines), the hens, my shoes and our car, which is growing moss around the windows. On the inside.

But does it merit all the moaning? I don't mean farmers, for whom it's a catastrophe, flood victims or the poor folk of Cardinham, North Wyke and Astwood Bank, who endured a biblical 40 days straight of rain. They're entitled to rend their garments and corral their pets into boats, two by two. But maybe the rest of us, just dealing with it being "quite wet", could get a grip. When life gives you rain, make rain-ade (do not drink rain; it's full of forever chemicals)! After all - OK, not the cheeriest thought - this could be as good as it gets in future, given accelerating climate breakdown. At the very least, these wet patches will probably happen more often, so we need coping strategies. Here are mine.

If you're wondering how Reform plan to tackle poverty, we now have an answer to that. The plan is to deny it even exists

Zia Yusuf claims that "real poverty does exist in this country."
@TrevorPTweets challenges Reform UK's head of policy on his comments #TrevorPhillipshttps://t.co/LFPXoeri6h pic.twitter.com/lqN76RkQ1q

— Sky News (@SkyNews) February 15, 2026

In the clip above, Zia Yusuf says:

So firstly, it's really important people understand when the term poverty is used primarily by left-wing politicians, let's define that term. It is… a relative term, which means that you could literally - this is a mathematical fact - you could increase everybody's incomes tenfold and that statistic would stay the same.

Oh my god, shut the fuck up, you oily, little nerd.

'I can tell you mathematically what poverty is'.

You sound like a Star Trek android, and not the good one.

We can tell you what poverty is, Zia, because most of us here at the Canary have experienced it.

Poverty is not having enough to get by.

Poverty is watching your outgoings outpace your incomings.

Poverty is spending hours a week figuring out how to make the money go around.

Poverty is constantly worrying about bills and life choices.

Poverty is fear and anxiety.

Poverty is the feeling that things will only get worse.

Yusuf thinks it's a mathematical equation, because he has no idea what the fuck he's talking about; he's just another ex-Tory, ex-Goldman Sachs rich boy who wants to gut the welfare state to give his billionaire mates handouts.

Too much will never be enough for these people.

They will take more than they can ever spend, and they will shit, and piss, and moan as they bite the hand that feeds them.

Yusuf continued:

But the most important thing is that Reform, we are fiscally prudent, and we wanted to make sure anything we announced was going to be fiscally neutral.

"Fiscally prudent", is it?

If you're familiar with Curb Your Enthusiasm, start imagining the end credits now as you read the following headlines:

• Reform grifters charging candidates £250 to stand as MP.
• 'Simply making it up' — Reform-led council invented supposed £40m saving.
• Reform called out for spaffing £600k on eight parking spots for councillors.

Reform have totally let the cat out of the bag about who they are.

Zia Yusuf lecturing that poverty and peoples everyday struggles with rising bills and rent is exaggerated.

A party of the failed status quo, funded and representing big corporate interests. https://t.co/G000aCvbLl

— Zack Polanski (@ZackPolanski) February 15, 2026

Phillips asked Yusuf if poverty measures are all made up, to which Yusuf responded:

No, it's worse than that, because real poverty does exist in this country, Trevor. And absolute poverty does exist in very, very small pockets. If you actually want to do the right thing for as many people as possible in this country, then you need to create social mobility. That has been crushed by the Tory government and now this Labour government.

To be clear, 'social mobility' is not the phenomenon in which everyone becomes more affluent. It's the phenomenon in which some working class people land middle class jobs. This is great for sly politicians like Yusuf, because it allows them to point at the fortunate few and say:

See - it is possible for you layabouts to earn more — anyone on poverty wages is just lazy.

If you're old enough, you will remember the UK's middle class did indeed expand in the 90s. Social mobility was happening on a larger scale, and we got the 'lower middle class' — i.e. working class families who could afford to alternate between taking their kids on holiday to Menorca and Butlin's Pwllheli (if that seems oddly specific, I'm talking from experience).

This phenomenon happened because we took advantage of the cheap labour of countries like China, allowing us to live beyond our previous means. We could have locked in that progress, and ensured the country's wealth was evenly distributed. We didn't do that; instead we got runaway capitalism, with the rich claiming more wealth and authority, and the rest of us losing our rights and purchasing power.

Now, we're at a point where social mobility can't happen because even the middle class are fucking struggling. Tinkering around the edges or making savings here or there won't cut it; we need to hobble the billionaire class, and we need to rob them of their power and influence.

Only then can we have a society in which people can live day to day without dreading tomorrow.

You've probably heard the phrase 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps', but did you know where it comes from? As Useless Etymology report:

The phrase "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" originated shortly before the turn of the 20th century. It's attributed to a late-1800s physics schoolbook that contained the example question "Why can not a man lift himself by pulling up on his bootstraps?"

So when it became a colloquial phrase referring to socioeconomic advancement shortly thereafter, it was meant to be sarcastic, or to suggest that it was an impossible accomplishment.

It's literally impossible for everyone in a capitalist system to be well off and content, because it's a tornado designed to pull everything up to the top.

In other words, beware of geeks bearing false grifts.

Featured image via the Canary

By Willem Moore

Zack Polanski has appeared on the 15 February edition of Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips. If you're unfamiliar with Phillips, he has a decades' long history in Labour Party politics. As such, it wasn't surprising to see him denying the creeping authoritarianism which is happening under Keir Starmer's government:

Phillips "This is not a country where people get thrown in jail for things they say"@ZackPolanski: 2,700 people have been arrested for holding up signs

And well done to Zack for challenging Phillips smear that 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' is antisemitic pic.twitter.com/fuEDYQJa9K

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 15, 2026

In the clip above, Phillips says:

In the press release today, you talk about a 'Big Brother Britain'. I'm assuming that you're talking about George Orwell's oppressive state rather than the telly programme. Isn't this going over the top a bit? I mean, this is not a country where people get thrown in jail for things… they say, at least not very often.

If you're a regular reader of the Canary, you'll know this is complete horseshit from Phillips. Thankfully, Polanski explained why for us:

Well, I think we're spiralling down that road. First of all, we saw 2,700 people potentially imprisoned, some of them waiting trials, a lot of them for holding up signs saying, I oppose a genocide. We have seen a genocide happen in Israel now for the last couple of years.

To add some specificity, the signs in question said this:

I oppose #GenocideInGaza I support #PalestineAction https://t.co/6j08nAMQNS

— Steve Mackie (@1SteveMackie) February 14, 2026

The government proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, which allowed them to arrest those who support the group. The people who held these signs got arrested for speech, albeit in written form.

As we reported on 13 February, a court has now overturned the proscription. Polanski also touched on this:

"The govt have been completely shamed in court & I'm proud the entire Green MP group all voted against proscription of Palestine Action"@ZackPolanski on the high court declaring the proscription unlawful pic.twitter.com/XUqaelUN8o

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 15, 2026

Back to the interview, Phillips responded:

No, that's not the signs that they're being arrested for. It is signs which say things like, from the river to the sea, a sign which imply elimination of the State of Israel, which are at some sense antisemitic and intimidating.

This simply isn't true; Trevor Phillips is a fucking liar.

He's not just any liar, either; he's a liar who picked Peter Mandelson of all people to be the best man at his wedding.

The 2,700 in question relates to those arrested for supporting Palestine Action. Additionally, the 'River to the Sea' chant is a call for the Palestinians to no longer be contained in an open air prison — not anything else.

Polanski responded:

Well, as a Jewish person, I don't find that antisemitic. And in fact, Benjamin Netanyahu himself has used that phrase.

I'm one of only five people in British history who have been Jewish and lead a political party. So antisemitism needs to be taken really seriously in the same way that Islamophobia or any form of racism or hate crime needs to be taken seriously.

But criticism of the Israeli government, I would say, is a moral responsibility when we're seeing what they are doing to innocent people day in, day out. And our government is not just complicit in that. They are actively enabling it.

So for people who are protesting against the genocide, I would say those people are actual patriots of this country who are saying, let's have a world where we make sure we're standing for human rights.

It's not just Palestine action, though, by the way. We've seen authoritarianism over the prime minister wanting mandatory ID cards. We've seen the authoritarianism of scrapping jury trials. Pattern over pattern shows that Keir Starmer is a deeply desperate caretaker prime minister who is clinging on to power by trying to crush dissent.

Things took a turn for the ridiculous later on, by the way:

So Phillips moved from talking about thousands of people arrested under terrorism legislation for holding up signs to criticising the idea that the UK is becoming an oppressive police state & then declaring the solution to fly tipping is more surveillance. He really is woeful.

— Saul Staniforth (@SaulStaniforth) February 15, 2026

As Novara's Aaron Bastani highlighted, the New Labour types have a lot of support in broadcast media:

The press broadly backs the Tories. But why does the Labour right get such easy treatment from broadcast media?

The answer is political sympathies. Just look at who is married to who. TV news, and New Labour, until recently, went together like sun and shadow. pic.twitter.com/zwPZJOkUNl

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) February 5, 2026

Haven't seen many/any videos of the broadcast media harassing Mandelson outside his house. Was constant during Corbyn leadership - and indeed for some time after.

I'd say 'curious', but it's because basically the whole of broadcast media (except GB News) swings New Labour.

— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) February 10, 2026

Phillips perverting reality as he did above is a clear example of this.

Featured image via the Canary

By Willem Moore

As we reported on 14 February, Reform-reject Rupert Lowe has formed his own party called 'Revive'.

Or was it 'Repeat'?

Hang on a minute…

…oh, it's actually 'Restore'.

We're sure it won't cause a problem that the 'Reform' and 'Restore' are basically the same word.

And sarcasm aside, it does look like the Lowe vehicle has legs:

This the first opinion poll, hypothetical or otherwise, to show the Green Party polling at 20%

Time-honored romance genre showing a lot of mutational vitality lately

Some districts are adding programs in clean energy and sustainability, while one state is infusing environmental lessons into culinary education and construction

On one end of the classroom, high school juniors examined little green sprouts - future baby carrots, sprigs of romaine lettuce - poking out of the soil of a drip irrigation system they built a few weeks prior.

On the opposite end of the room, a model of a hydropower plant showed students how the movement of water can stimulate electrical currents. In this class in South Carolina's Greenville county school district, students primarily learn about one topic: renewable energy.

'Labour Together' — the sabotage outfit that brought down Jeremy Corbyn and conned Labour members into choosing Keir Starmer — paid investigators to spy on, and smear two Times journalists. Unsurprisingly, the pair — Harry Yorke and Gabriel Pogrund — have publicised their experience as unique.

@Gabriel_Pogrund and I were the subject of a disgraceful smear campaign — just for doing our jobs

I'm proud that The Sunday Times is calling it out on the front page tomorrow

Labour activists paid for smear campaign against journalists https://t.co/Uw9UjNJtzm

— Harry Yorke (@HarryYorke1) February 14, 2026

The Sunday Times, which covered the story, reported that:

The group that helped to get Sir Keir Starmer elected as Labour leader hired lobbyists to investigate the personal, political and religious background of a Sunday Times journalist behind an article about secret donations that funded its work.

Labour Together paid £36,000 to Apco, a US public affairs firm, to examine the "backgrounds and motivations" of reporters behind a story before the general election.

The aim was to discredit The Sunday Times's reporting by falsely suggesting its journalists might be part of a Russian conspiracy or had relied on emails hacked by the Kremlin.

Apco produced a 58-page report including almost ten pages of deeply personal and false claims about Gabriel Pogrund, the Sunday Times Whitehall editor. He and Harry Yorke, the newspaper's deputy political editor, were named as "persons of significant interest".

But Pogrund and Yorke only stand out for being the only 'mainstream' hacks known to have been targeted by Labour Together. The pressure group was formerly run by disgraced Starmer adviser Morgan McSweeney and other 'red Tories' in Starmer's faction. But these latest revelations and labour Together'S spying activities is not new — not in any real sense. Their not-so-covert operations have been in the public domain for months.

In fact, news of the spying broke on the Canary in September 2025. McSweeney's outfit set investigators on Paul Holden, the author of The Fraud. This exposes Labour Together's dark tactics and Starmer's dishonesty. Furthermore, the book has been serialised by the Canary.

Labour Together did the same to Andrew Feinstein, the author and former Mandela government minister. He stood against Starmer in the 2024 general election and decimated his majority. Moreover, it did the same to journalists John McEvoy, Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan.

Labour Together's spies targeted Pogrund for being Jewish — ironic given their weaponisation of supposed 'Labour antisemitism' against Corbyn and the left. But they did the same to the Jewish Feinstein. They smeared Pogrund and Yorke as being linked to Russia — they'd done the same to Feinstein and Holden.

In fact, not even the 'news' about Yorke and Pogrund is new. The Canary reported it last week. No wonder McSweeney and his cadre are scared of the Canary. They have tried and failed to destroy it while Corbyn was still leading Labour.

Featured image via the Canary

By Skwawkbox

The by-election in Gorton & Denton is looking like a two-way race between the Green Party and Reform UK, but Labour are still fighting to win.

According to a new report in the Telegraph, Labour are throwing the kitchen sink at the race. Or, to be more specific, they're using the sink — and everything else in the kitchen — to prepare delectably illegal meals for potential voters (allegedly):

Labour referred to police over freebie gala dinner for 600 Gorton & Denton voters - attended by senior Labour figures including deputy leader Lucy Powell
Electoral law bans using food and drink to corruptly influence voters
Paywall-free link in replies

Independent progressives have launched their local election campaign to defeat what they call the "Labour-Tory coalition council" in the West Yorkshire borough of Kirklees. They say the "corrupt" council has "bowed the knee" to London's austerity agenda. And they're fighting back with a promise to stop destructive cuts and closures once and for all.

The Canary went along to the campaign launch to find out more.

Campaigners, trade unionists, and politicians across Kirklees have been working together for months now to oppose cuts, racism, and war. They form the People's Alliance for Change and Equality (PACE), and have received the support of Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn of Your Party.

PACE has consistently highlighted the serious issues facing local communities, supporting community campaigns against controversial council decisions. And in October, it showed the power of grassroots organisation with an impressive march through the town of Huddersfield.

On 7 February, PACE held its election campaign launch in Huddersfield. And at the end of the event, the Canary spoke to:

• • Mohammed Abubakar
  • Mike Forster
  • Alison Gaughan
  • Waseem Naeem

Abubakar will be standing as an independent candidate in the Crosland Moor ward, where he grew up. And he's making it very clear to voters that he's "not in it for a career or for money", because he has promised to donate:

at least £200 every month from my personal allowance to local projects.

He stressed that:

Poverty has been on the increase, whereas we're one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

And in particular, he said:

Young people have been neglected so much in our area.

The underfunding of schools and closure of youth centres has coincided with problems with crime. And as Abubakar asserted:

When you have kids picking up knives or guns and we have teenagers going into this gang culture, they're not to blame. We are.

He wants to act as "a servant" to local people, listening to them and voicing their concerns. And apart from issues like fly-tipping, potholes, and restoring parks, people have told him about a family becoming homeless following a parent's death or an employee needing food-bank support despite being in work.

Abubakar's values have driven him to take action. As he told us:

The best of mankind are those who benefit mankind the most. And so, if I'm not benefiting people, then I've just wasted my life.

He already participates in the running of a "young leaders programme" and a food bank — supporting the distribution of hot meals to the community since 2021. Speaking to the Canary, a longstanding member of the community emphasised how:

things have just got worse and worse and worse.

He added:

I think a lot of people have lost hope in politics, and rightly so. But I think the solution, the answer to that isn't to step away… we still need to carry on fighting and supporting candidates that are there for the community.

Forster will be standing as a PACE candidate in the Ashbrow ward. And he insisted:

Our priority is twofold in this area. One, we have to stop Reform. That has to be our number one priority. And the second will be that we've got to kick out this corrupt Labour council. And for that to happen, there will need to be cooperation between the independents, PACE and any other candidates who we would see as being progressive left, and they hopefully will have the power. We, by our arithmetic, then we think that we will have the majority of the councillors who will be able to form a group within the council who can hopefully run affairs.

On the council, Forster would prioritise opposing attempts to privatise dementia homes, stopping a local property development causing a public health crisis due to the presence of asbestos and other toxic substances, reversing the closure of leisure centres, and preventing ongoing rises to council taxes.

He also clarified what PACE will be pushing for, saying:

We're advocating what we call the needs budget. That is that the budget should be led by the needs of the people of Kirklees and not by the budget that's imposed by a centralised government. And that will mean having to stand up to the government and demanding more resources for Kirklees. I'm not afraid to do that.

This Labour council has bowed the knee because it is a Labour government and they're too afraid to speak out for themselves and for the people of Kirklees, and that's why they've got to go.

A "clique" of around four people run the council today, he said, and "yes people" in the cabinet just "go along with everything that they say":

And when Labour needs the votes, they reach out to the Tories, who are only too happy to go into coalition with Labour in order to force through cuts.

This is why they "need to go", he insisted:

They need to fight for the local communities and not for their own party labels or their own careers.

Many candidates, Forster asserted:

would have stood under the Your Party banner if we'd got our act together.

And it's "very disappointing" that this didn't happen on time, he lamented. But PACE isn't about sitting around and waiting. It's about getting on with organising on the ground, as:

we've demonstrated through PACE over the last year with our demonstration, our founding conference, and all the campaigns that we have supported.

Addressing the topic of unity on the left, he said there have been conversations with the Green Party and, hopefully, "an electoral agreement" will eventually come. He added that current Green councillors have locally "been supportive of what we've been doing" and asserted:

we will continue to work with them in whatever way we can.

Regarding progressive independent candidates Abubakar and Naeem, meanwhile, he stressed that they're:

founding members of PACE and have supported everything that we've done, and they will be standing on the programme that PACE stands for as well.

He also asserted:

We've already started work in the areas where we're standing… and the response we've already been getting on the doorsteps is encouraging.

Gaughan is a trade unionist and disability rights campaigner, and she has also been active in PACE. She will be supporting the local election campaign in Kirklees against what is:

effectively a Labour-Tory coalition council that is failing the people of Kirklees

The council, she said:

is pushing through cuts, blaming them on the government. But really, they just don't care about the effect it has on working-class people. There's a lack of democracy in the council — all the decisions are made in backrooms by a small group of councillors.

She added:

I teach young people from some of the most deprived wards in Kirklees, and really there's just been let down after let down for these communities.

A key slogan for PACE, she asserted, is:

we're against cuts and closures

And while collaboration and unity on the left is essential, she said cuts and closures are absolutely "our red line". So in terms of working with Greens or other progressives:

if they stay the right side of [that line], yeah, we'll work with them.

Naeem will be standing as an independent in the Greenhead ward. He emphasised his desire for:

Love and peace to everyone

But he also told us:

I'm not afraid of saying what needs to be said… Change is not going to happen by being as nice as pie.

Having grown up on a council estate at a time when it "was a bit of a taboo for Pakistani Asians", it wasn't always easy. As he said:

I remember coming home, saying to my mum, why am I this colour? Why am I being called this?

But he added:

I'm very, very thankful that my mum got me the right ethics and values into my mind where she always said 'we've got it bad now, but there are far more good people than bad people'. So my whole life has revolved around knowing that there are far more good people who are quiet than bad people who are loud.

And remembering the nice people around him growing up, he insisted:

We need that community cohesion back. It doesn't matter where you're from, what you've done, but we need to listen to one another so we can eradicate the fears that people have got and put hope into one another that 'you know what? That person walking down the street, my next door neighbour, we're all here to live peacefully at the end of the day and work for one another and we all want everyone to be happy.

For young people in particular, he stressed, many just want hope:

Recently it's kind of nosedived because they're thinking 'well, there's nothing for us to do'…

Following a "spate of knife crime", he said:

I helped to set up the Safe Zone Project… [which] has all been about community spirit.

And as he asserted:

If we have somewhere that the youth know they can go to, as a youth club primarily… it will open a floodgate and it will deal with a lot of stuff. Knife crime will go down itself, gang culture will go down itself, and there will be that community cohesion.

If he gets into the council, he insisted, the local people will be the boss.

Featured image via the Canary

By Ed Sykes

In a message posted to his Truth Social account, president Donald Trump has announced a plan which will surely repress the vote in the Midterm Elections:

"there will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not!"

Trump's authoritarian takeover and interference in the midterm elections under the guise of "election integrity" has begun. pic.twitter.com/FHYYKQ3u3h

— Melanie D'Arrigo (@DarrigoMelanie) February 13, 2026

Given Trump's dire polling, however, simply repressing the vote may not be enough.

The president's post reads in full:

The Democrats refuse to vote for Voter I.D., or Citizenship. The reason is very simple — They want to continue to cheat in Elections. This was not what our Founders desired.

I have searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future. There will be Voter I.D. for the Midterm Elections, whether approved by Congress or not! Also, the People of our Country are insisting on Citizenship, and No Mail-In Ballots, with exceptions for Military, Disability, Illness, or Travel.

Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

He has, in his own words:

searched the depths of Legal Arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject.

We'll be honest…we're not sure what this means. At the same time, we're confident he hasn't done it.

Can you really imagine the tycoon-turned-politician searching the depths of anything? The man has all the depth of a contact lens.

Recently, Trump claimed the US is the only country which allows mail in ballots. This may shock you, but the truth is actually somewhat different to what president Trump suggests:

"We're the only country with Mail In Ballots"

- Donald Trump

Fact Check: 70-80 countries worldwide
Roughly one-third of the world's countries allow some form of postal voting. pic.twitter.com/f69uDu5BlJ

— Bricktop_NAFO (@Bricktop_NAFO) February 13, 2026

He has also threatened to deploy his masked ICE goons to disrupt voting:

There are 39 other countries with mail-in voting.
Trump's plan is simple. If you block mail-in ballots, all ICE has to do is disrupt, intimidate and assault at polling places in blue areas to insure Trump remains King forever.
It's really that simple pic.twitter.com/3DdF782K8T

— BigBlueWaveUSA2026®

Devastating environmental warnings portend hothouse earth, species depletion, coral bleaching, future wildfires, and the dramatic reduction of grazing land. Is anyone listening?

Last Week in Collapse: February 8-14, 2026

This is Last Week in Collapse, a weekly newsletter compiling some of the most important, timely, soul-crushing, ironic, amazing, or otherwise must-see/can't-look-away moments in Collapse.

This is the 216th weekly newsletter. The February 1-7, 2026 edition is available here if you missed it last week. These newsletters are also available (with images) every Sunday in your email inbox by signing up to the Substack version.

——————————

Our "economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists warned, discussing the possibility of crossing devastarting tipping points that could doom earth into 3 or 4 °C temperature rise before the year 2100. A study in One Earth warns of a not-too-distant "hothouse earth" scenario, and that "We are leaving the stable conditions of the Holocene, and entering a period of unprecedented climate change beyond the natural interglacial envelope, with outcomes that are difficult to predict." There'll be no coming back from this.

The U.S. government reversed the so-called "endangerment finding" from 2009, which conceded that greenhouse gases present dangers to human and planetary health. This removes incentives and regulations on auto producers to produce more fuel-efficient vehicles, and also loosens pollution standards for power plants. President Trump also opened up for fishing the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, a couple tracts of the Atlantic Ocean far off the coast of Rhode Island (equivalent roughly to the size of the island Palawan in the Philippines).

Researchers say in a Nature study that "species turnover over short time intervals (1-5 years) has decelerated in significantly more communities during the last 100 years than it has accelerated, typically by one third." In other words, many species are not hitting their replacement rate as global warming & climate change intensify. Scientists say that "the internal engines of biodiversity are losing momentum due to the depletion of regional life," and it's because of human impacts.

Sustainable biodiversity of economic growth? A 37-page report from the UN was released last Sunday on this question, and 150+ countries more-or-less agreed that the two cannot both be achieved at the same time. The incentives between business (growth) minded people and those who prioritize the ability of our planet to sustain life are simply incompatible, and the values of the many stakeholders are much in conflict with each other. The UN Secretary-General has said as much many times over—but the people seem to have chosen death by economy.

"The growing economy continues to contribute to the direct drivers of biodiversity loss (land and sea use, unsustainable direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution, and invasion of alien species, among others), placing increasing pressure on biodiversity and nature's contributions to people….while biodiversity and nature's contributions to people are providing more food, energy and materials than at any other point in human history, this often comes at the expense of rapid biodiversity decline, diminished ecosystem function, and reductions in many of nature's contributions to the people….the resulting degradation of ecosystems generates physical risks for the very businesses and economic systems that depend on them….Risks associated with biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, along with extreme weather events, critical changes to earth system, and natural resource shortages and pollution, are among the highest-ranked global risks over the next 10 years….Climate- and biodiversity-related risks may interact to amplify social and economic impacts….businesses bear little or no financial cost for negative impacts and may not generate revenue from positive impacts on biodiversity. As a result, there are insufficient incentives for businesses to act to conserve, restore or sustainably use biodiversity….In addition to shifting financial flows away from negative activities, financial institutions can deploy instruments and strategies, such as blended finance, impact investing and green or sustainability-linked bonds to provide capital to businesses engaged in conserving, restoring or sustainably using biodiversity…" -selections

A study examined hundreds of Japanese folks' attitudes towards nature to determine what root values contributed to their mindsets. They sorted the base attitudes into three groups: instrumental, intrinsic, and relational. Relational is the one to which most attention is given here; it represents "the perceived appropriateness of the relationship individuals maintain with nature….relational value is not held in isolation; it is deeply embedded in traditional worldviews shaped by cultural and spiritual contexts." They concluded that "(i) relational value is linked to traditional religious-oriented worldviews; (ii) relational value shows a strong association with scales measuring human-nature relationships; and (iii) the distinctions among instrumental, intrinsic, and relational values extend beyond Western contexts."

A study from the European Geosciences Union found that boreal forest has expanded 12% from 1985-2020, a result of the warming earth making far-north habitats more viable for such forests. So the Arctic forests may provide a source of stronger-than-expected carbon sequestration, although "It remains uncertain whether boreal soils-especially under changing permafrost regimes-can structurally sustain expanded forest cover."

A third storm, Marta, struck Spain & Portugal within a two-week period, killing at least four people, displacing 11,000+, and bringing floods as far as Morocco as well. Flooding in Colombia killed 14 people and forced the president to declare a state of emergency.

A 51-page study on Patagonia's wildfires concluded that the devastating wildfires, which have left at least 23 people dead, had "conditions that drove the wildfires in the Chilean and Patagonia regions are characterised as a 1 in 5-year event in today's climate in both regions." Some of the trees affected by the wildfires were over 3,000 years old, and among the planet's oldest living trees. The full study contains lots of number tables if you're into that.

"...fire-season rainfall intensity has decreased by about 25% in the Chilean region and by about 20% in the Patagonia region….all climate models project a continued shift toward more severe fire weather conditions alongside declining seasonal rainfall. This strong agreement among models gives us high confidence that the changes already observed are driven by climate change….fire-adapted pine has replaced native vegetation, as climate continues to increase wildfire risk - the likelihood of succession by fire adapted species and even high wildfire risk increases…" -selections from the study's main findings

As the ancient ice sheets melt, some travelers are mounting so-called "last chance" tourism to see glaciers before they are gone forever. The irony is that this tourism increases the damage to the warming ecosystems in which glaciers spend their final years.

A marine darkwave is a sudden reduction in underwater light. Experts say darkwaves are increasing in the oceans around California and New Zealand, due mostly to storms that kick up sediment; though algal blooms can also cause the same phenomenon. Other scientists meanwhile say El Nino beginning in the second half of this year will probably cause record temperatures in 2027. The last El Nino (2023-24) "produced the largest detrended sea level anomaly on record," according to a Nature study.

A Nature Communications study concluded that the 2014-2017 "Global Coral Bleaching Event" affected "51% and 15% of the world's coral reefs {which} suffered moderate or greater bleaching and mortality, respectively, during one or multiple years, surpassing damage from any prior global coral bleaching event….the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems."

A recent study in PNAS estimates that there will be "a 36 to 50% contraction in suitable grazing areas by 2100 due to future climate change….this could displace the livelihoods of over 100 million pastoralist and 1.4 billion livestock….51 to 81% of these impacted populations reside in countries with low income, serious hunger, severe gender inequality, and high political fragility." So we might see a decline of total grazing land by half before the 21st century is done.

——————————

While much of the world becomes increasingly dependent on AI, some researchers determined that AI actually gives workers much more to do, not resulting in a decrease of time & effort spent. This is due to three primary factors: "Task expansion. Because AI can fill in gaps in knowledge, workers increasingly stepped into responsibilities that previously belonged to others….Blurred boundaries between work and non-work. Because AI made beginning a task so easy—it reduced the friction of facing a blank page or unknown starting point—workers slipped small amounts of work into moments that had previously been breaks….More multitasking. AI introduced a new rhythm in which workers managed several active threads at once…this rhythm raised expectations for speed—not necessarily through explicit demands, but through what became visible and normalized in everyday work." The upper limit on AI efficiency has also imposed new expectations for workers (those who haven't been totally replaced by AI yet) to do more in less time, resulting in more stress—and usually not more pay.

Some observers fear that AI may engineer a new pandemic. AI has been increasingly used in disease & threat monitoring, but it might also be "misused for harmful applications - such as designing a new biological agent with pandemic potential, or modifying an existing virus or bacterium to be more harmful or transmissible." Experts claim that it is unlikely that AI could, at present, design a completely new & effective virus, but within a couple years this may become much more realistic.

Recent flooding in Zambia resulted in an ongoing cholera outbreak that killed seven people this year. In Mozambique, deaths from diseases following flooding claimed 146 lives, alongside widespread residential flooding. In four states in the U.S., $600M in funding for STD prevention is being cut.

How many people can your country sustainably support? Switzerland (2026 pop: 9.1M) is planning a referendum on capping the population due for a vote in June. The proposal, if successful, will limit immigration to the landlocked Alpine country once the population in Switzerland hits 9.5M before 2050, with the aim of preventing the total population from reaching 10,000,000.

Estimates on the burden of Long COVID to the economy say that the disease may cost the U.S. economy $6.6B per year. They found that "certain people are genetically predisposed to develop Long COVID," namely those with the gene FOXP4, which is expressed primarily in lungs. Scientists may have also determined a blood-based protein that could more accurately identify Long COVID. Some researchers think that metformin, a type 2 diabetes drug, also greatly reduces the chance of developing Long COVID, when it's taken while you have COVID or recently recovered from it.

Bird flu has already been confirmed in 26 U.S. states since the start of 2026, and observers say it's coming back—and bringing higher egg prices along, too. H5N1 was responsible for the first dieoff of wildlife in Antarctica, after 50+ dead skuas (a kind of sea bird) were recently confirmed killed by bird flu during the 2023-2024 summer. Bird flu was also confirmed in South Korea at a duck farm.

U.S. household debt rose 1% in Q4 2025, to a new all-time high: $18.8 trillion. About two thirds of that new debt was in the shape of mortgages, followed distantly by auto loans, student loans, and credit card debt. U.S. government spending is projected to increase the deficit by another $1.4T over the next 10 years.

A revisionist piece on the Collapse of the Mayan Civilization posits that many more people may have lived in the jungles of Guatemala & Mexico than earlier believed, making their Collapse even more devastating. Some say it was due to climate change (megadrought), others say overpopulation, others claim soil depletion, others argue it was a result of a rejiggering of trade routes—and some scholars say all these and more, simultaneously.

——————————

An investigative report on Ethiopia's role in the ongoing Sudan War found evidence that the UAE likely funded a training camp for rebel fighters on Ethiopian land, not far from the border with Sudan. Some 4,300 people are said to have been trained at the site, mostly Ethiopians, although a number of Sudanese and South Sudanese were also trained. Recent tensions between Ethiopia and its Tigray region in the north are also heating up, and could drag the country back into Civil War. A brutal, 29-page UN report details a wide range of war crimes committed by the rebel RSF fighters in Sudan, including but not limited to summary executions of civilians, recruitment of child soldiers, ransom kidnappings, and torture. Read at your own peril. A couple children were slain in a drone strike on a mosque in North Kordofan; the assailants are unknown at this time.

A number of far-right European parties are reportedly planning their own versions of ICE-like police deportations if they gain power in their countries. ICE is meanwhile planning on greatly expanding its physical presence at 150+ new office & storage sites across the U.S. A migrant boat overturned in the Mediterranean, drowning 53 of its 55 passengers. Italy is committing to a stronger naval network to intercept and send back migrant ships coming from North Africa.

Train workers in Spain mounted a 3-day strike to protest safety failures following several recent train crashes. Unknown saboteurs meddled with Italy's train system as the Winter Olympics began in Milan. Algeria accused the UAE of election interference. North korea warned the South against drones trespassing over their airspace. An official in Niger's ruling junta claimed that "we are going to enter into war with France" days before hundreds of local bandits stormed through a village and killed 30+ residents. South Africa is planning military deployments to back up police forces in their struggle against gang violence.

Indonesia is planning to send a large brigade of peacekeepers (5,000-8,000) to monitor the ceasefire in Gaza. Last Sunday, Israel's government finalized a draft to change the status of the West Bank, which would allow Israel to impose its laws on much of the territory—and pave the way to greater Israel-directed building projects. Israelis would also be allowed to directly purchase land in 40% of the West Bank, and therefore establish new settler outposts more easily. Reports of strikes in Gaza on Wednesday claim 24 were slain.

Ukraine's retaliatory strikes on Russian oil refineries are estimated to have cost Russia's economy almost $13B USD in 2025 alone. Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure have meanwhile been reported to result in at least ten deaths by hypothermia. Thursday night strikes from Russia took out the electricity for 100,000+ people, injured a few, but did not result in any deaths across the four cities targeted.

The U.S. apprehended a shadow oil tanker in the Indian Ocean that had departed from Venezuela last month. Turkish military officials confirmed that they will not exit Syrian land they are occupying, despite agreements to do so. A Chinese fighter jet shot flares at a Taiwanese aircraft during an exercise near their air border. Japanese fishing officials seized a Chinese vessel illegally fishing in its waters—the first Japanese capture of a Chinese fishing ship since 2022.

The 2025 Corruption Perception Index report was released on Tuesday, and the full 28-page document and the U.S. and UK hit all-time lows. The report rates 182 countries on a 1-100 scale (with 1 being the most corrupt) for perceived corruption. Denmark ranked first, followed by Finland, Singapore, and New Zealand & Norway. Tied for last were Somalia and South Sudan, slightly behind Venezuela. The global average was 42/100. Researchers are particularly concerned because democracies are experiencing corruption increases—or at least the perception of corruption.

"Two patterns stand out among countries whose CPI scores have fallen. The first is a set of sustained declines since 2012, where deterioration has been substantial and prolonged….{some} countries show long-term, structural erosion of integrity systems driven by democratic backsliding, institutional weakening and/ or entrenched patronage networks. This has been accelerated by conflict in some cases. Their declines are steep, persistent and hard to reverse because corruption becomes systemic and deeply ingrained in both political and administrative systems….Several have also experienced strains to their democracies, including political polarisation and the growing influence of private money on decision making….The United States political climate has been deteriorating for more than a decade, and this year the country dropped to its lowest-ever CPI score. While the data has yet to fully reflect developments in 2025, the use of public office to target and restrict independent voices such as NGOs and journalists, the normalisation of conflicted and transactional politics, the politicisation of prosecutorial decision making, and actions that undermine judicial independence, among many others, all send a dangerous signal that corrupt practices are acceptable….the UAE's role as a weakly regulated financial hub facilitates abuse of power abroad - grand corruption perpetrators and their accomplices use it to invest their stolen wealth overseas and flee from justice…" -excerpts

At the Munich Security Conference, Germany's PM announced in a speech that "the international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed. I fear we must put it even more bluntly: it no longer exists. Together, we have entered an era once again openly defined by power and great power politics." A graphical article indicates how much of the world is being pulled into China's orbit (or, rather, pushed away from the U.S.) due to President Trump's economic & diplomatic policies. A growing number of leaders, and citizens, think WWIII is coming. Some observers argue that, like Collapse, it's already here, just not evenly distributed.

The United States is allegedly preparing to send a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf in preparation for operations against Iran—or as leverage in increasingly aggressive negotiations. Sources claim a weeks-long operation is being gamed out—but the rules are constantly in flux.

——————————

Select comments/threads from the subreddit last week suggest:

-Collapse is becoming, or has become, a dominant theme across a variety of other subreddits. This weekly observation cites a few climate & teaching related subreddits on which you can find alarming tales about brainrot, AI, crazy weather, flooding, and feedback loops.

-There are some black swan disasters you aren't preparing for—and some very common & realistic scenarios, too. This popular thread from r/preppers brainstorms some dangerous scenarios that you might want to put on your radar.

-You might want to start prepping for worldwide water shortages, according to this thread from r/TwoXPreppers , a women-oriented subreddit dedicated to prepping.

Got any feedback, questions, comments, upvotes, Iran predictions, ship-trackers, Candida auris poems, singularity rants, etc.? Last Week in Collapse is also posted on Substack; if you don't want to check r/collapse every Sunday, you can receive this newsletter sent to an email inbox every weekend. As always, thank you for your support. What did I miss this week?

Bork!Bork!Bork! Just picture it. You're at a Swiss train station, looking for information on your connecting line. You peer up at the platform sign hoping to find out how long you'll be waiting and whether you're standing in the right place. But instead of helpful info, you see "* Installation log files are stored in /tmp." Gee, thanks a lot!…

As a yet-to-be-built bungalow beckons, Sean Prentice concludes his relationship with a mysterious field.

Dog-Walking On Faerie Soil

The man that ploughed the ley would never cut the crop.

 — T. D. Davidson, The Untilled Field, Agricultural History Review. 1955.

There are in or near Worcestershire a great many fields and other places of the names "Hoberdy", "Hob", "Puck", "Jack" and "Will" … 

— Jabez Allies, On the Ignis Fatuus: Or Will 'O' the Wisp, and the Fairies, 1846.

In the last twelve months, as I enter my sixtieth year, as my disability progresses, as my mobility fails more certainly, a yet-to-be-built new build bungalow beckons, more insistently, and I begin the process of uncoupling from the slightly damp mudstone cottage, built in 1873, where I have lived for a decade longer than I have lived anywhere else ever. As part of this stilted farewell, which like all life changes is a variety of mourning, I have decided once and for all that I have to ignore a field — or rather to ignore The Field, to finally say, after all these years of unpredictable and confusing behaviour on its part and frustrating attempts at communication on mine — "this is the end for us". The field in question isn't much to look at — a standard issue agricultural space fringed by hawthorn and blackthorn, boggy at the farthest corner, and bounded at one edge by the Worcester-Hereford line, yet it seeps a rare order of liminality. The location itself, on the edge of the village bounds, beyond the remaining boundary oaks, lends itself to be another order of periphery, as a space between the everyday and down-to-earth and uncertain supernatural worlds. During the fourteen years of being its neighbour the field has oozed enough unplaceable strangeness to make me wary and suspicious of its true identity and possible intentions. The familiar becomes unfamiliar just beyond our back hedge. Walking the bounds of its almost-square I have on occasion become temporarily unstuck in time, I have heard discorporate voices at my shoulder and strange, unplaceable music. I have questioned both where and who I am.

The field is named as Jack Field on the 1841 tithe map of the village. I already knew enough to wonder about that name. There is of course Every Man Jack, Jack Tar, Jack the Lad indeed Jacks of all Trades and although once upon a time every John was also nicknamed Jack I had an inkling that the Jack of Jack Field wasn't a person at all, at least not a person in the strictest sense. Jack Field always puzzled me. In the adjacent Broadley Ground, where the shorn wheat stumps crunched underfoot, each harvest brought to the surface fresh shards of long broken crockery. I have two pickling jars full of this field-edge flotsam — blue and white, the odd piece honey-coloured slipware — evidence of harvest repasts gone by —  but I seldom find ceramic or anything much at all to indicate human agency and industry in Jack Field and surmise that it had rarely been cultivated or laboured-upon before living memory.  Thumbing through a copy of George Ewart Evans' The Pattern Under the Plough I find a reference to survivals of the belief that certain uncanny fields within the parish should be left untilled, and that these fields 'sometimes called Jack's Land' carried a taboo. I think of Jack in the Green, close kin to the Green Man, and his association with fertility rites, a bringer in of plenty — and that givers in folklore are often takers also. Jack, within this context, I learn, was the generic name afforded to many of the sprites, imps, and other members of the Secret Commonwealth that might slip into human form bestowing good fortune or alternatively cause all manner of mischief.  So it was understood that not to exploit the "fairy soil" of such land was a due, a deal made on behalf of the whole community to appease capricious supernatural forces and in so doing safeguard against havoc and mayhem, mischief and misfortune. I research further and find that the practice of sacrificially offering up land in this manner — in many instances on a farm by farm basis — was, in other parts of the British Isles, also referred to as the Goodman's Croft, Gudemen's Fauld, and Goodman's Fauld. Clooties Craft, Jack Craft were other variations. Here the word croft for enclosed farmland is as much Middle-English as Scots and the old time Gudeman doesn't contain the adjective good with an anachronistic spelling but the Anglo-Saxon noun god — the Germanic Guda. Meaning I think that the Gudemen's Fauld was once really the god-man's field, a field belonging to a supernatural being. The church and parliament preferring a different god-man crusaded hard to stamp out these practices throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly through the use of hefty fines but also by the threat of invoking laws pertaining to witchcraft. Ultimately it was economic pressures and which forced farmers to risk paranormal calamity and cultivate all available land and the practice dwindled and then died a death during the course of the nineteenth-century, with any remaining unworked field falling foul of the Cultivation of Lands Orders enforced for the duration of the First World War. It is possible to see the Enclosure Acts of the early nineteenth-century as an action which extended to the eradication and enclosure of folk beliefs along with the commons and earlier field systems. Now Jack Field, perhaps like the whole of the countryside, might be described as a "post-supernatural landscape" although only in that the supernatural has been pushed aside, trampled, and forgotten, in favour of secular common sense and measurable financial concerns. 

Earlier today I attempted to walk our dog in Jack Field. A good portion of it is presently out-of-bounds, divided by an ever-shifting latticework of temporary electric fencing, and the right-of-way down along the stream to the railway line has been churned up by so many sheep. The cold clay is waterlogged and slippy and half-rotted beets from the year before stick out of the soil like tiny bleached skulls. It is unsafe underfoot and I am already irked when I meet another dog-walking villager coming the other way, his own dog one of those overly enthusiastic breeds, and he and I fall into discussing the weather (which until the day before yesterday had been "mild for the time of year") and also the sudden absence of access through the neighbouring fields, and he concludes "O' well never mind…I'll circle 'round…join the footpath over there…" gesturing a semicircle "makes no odds…" and yet it makes significant odds to me. More than I can say as I hobble on. More than I have vocabulary for. The landowner believes, perhaps understandably, that Jack Field is his, but it isn't. The farmer believes equally that the soil he leases from the landowner is his to cultivate or graze as he pleases, but he's also mistaken. If land can be owned at all then that ownership resides elsewhere and beyond our ken.

Now, as I write on this cold and wet afternoon, with an early fire in the hearth, I am already partially elsewhere, partially ensconced in that soon-to-be-bungalow-land, and with this shift comes an acknowledgement that my relationship with Jack Field is coming to some kind of natural — or extra-natural conclusion. I have perhaps, like I accept the inevitability of my physical decline and a future wheelchair usage, accepted when it comes to Jack Field I am left with far more questions than answers — an ending without closure. And in the same manner I have inadequate language to describe the nature and nuance of my disability as I experience it over time — so will not even attempt to, I will also not attempt to describe who or what I once met crossing the field in the first light of morning in the that first year here. Suffice to say that the fellow I encountered on that occasion was more foliage than flesh and blood, and he wasn't walking a dog.