Francesca #RejoinEU#backto60 @Frasmi

Former CEO of Pennon, owner of South West Water, got £270,000 bonus after parasite outbreak that contaminated drinking water. SWW dumps sewage in rivers, fleeces customers, neglects investment. OFWAT didn't stop the bonus. Let customers vote on exec pay lbc.co.uk/article/water-…

10 years ago your children could just go and live and work anywhere in Europe. And you could retire there. Now they can’t and neither can you. That’s freedom is it? Well done Brexit voters.

Across Britain right now, farmers are shearing their sheep, bagging up the wool, and burning it. Some bury it. Some leave it to rot in a corner of the field. The wool-burning has made the odd headline as a protest, but the truth is duller and sadder. The fleece is worth less than the diesel it would take to haul it to the depot. The numbers are grim. In recent years a kilo of British wool has fetched somewhere between twenty and sixty pence, and hill breeds like Swaledale and Welsh Mountain sank as low as ten. A whole fleece off a mountain ewe might bring thirty pence. Shearing that same ewe costs the farmer around two pounds. One Lincolnshire farmer added it up out loud: over three pounds to shear and cart a single fleece to the depot, and twenty-six pence back. So she burns them. A great many do. Here is the part that stings. The shearing still has to happen, every year, whatever the wool will fetch. A sheep left in full fleece overheats, struggles to move, and gets eaten alive by maggots. So the job carries on purely as welfare, a cost the farmer simply eats to spare the animal, with the wool itself going on the fire straight after. And think about what this fibre once was. For centuries wool was the engine of the English economy, the country's greatest export and the crown's main source of tax. It raised the soaring wool churches of the Cotswolds. It turned merchants into princes. To this day, whoever presides over the House of Lords sits on the Woolsack, a literal cushion of wool, put there in the fourteenth century so nobody would forget where the nation's wealth began. Prices have lifted off the floor this past year, the first real relief in a long while. It still does not cover the shears for a hill farmer. The fibre that built England now smoulders in a heap behind the barn, and almost nobody notices the smoke.

The UK is increasing the Pension age to 68. Poland has lowered theirs to 60. Their pension is higher as well.

No , Natural England aren't looking to kill all the Dartmoor ponies , as disingenuous politicians across the political divide would have you believe . A lot of hysteria about this news story over the past few days – well and truly debunked here . . . dartmoornature.org.uk/post/ponies-da…

Nightmare for a friend of mine. Please share.

Brexit isn't a settled question. A decade on, more and more people are asking what Britain's relationship with Europe should look like in the future. On 20 June, thousands will gather in London to add their voice to that conversation. Read: northeastbylines.co.uk/news/europe-ne… #RejoinEU #RejoinMarch

Nobody wants a city on Mars. Nobody wants AI in every app. Nobody wants a robot butler. Nobody wants data centers everywhere. Nobody wants flying cars or humanoid robots. We want clean water, we want bees to survive, and we want a habitable planet.

Elon Musk: Trillionaire Jeff Bezos: Billionaire Public School Teachers: Can anyone help me get some pencils for my students?

A major new report warns that global wildlife populations have been cut in half in just four decades due to unsustainable human consumption and widespread habitat destruction. According to the Living Planet Report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), average monitored wildlife populations declined by 50% between 1970 and 2010. The Living Planet Index, which tracked more than 10,000 populations across roughly 3,000 vertebrate species, paints a sobering picture of humanity’s impact on biodiversity. Freshwater ecosystems were hit hardest, suffering a 75% decline due to pollution, water extraction, and dam construction. Terrestrial and marine populations both fell by around 40%, driven by habitat loss and overexploitation. The underlying driver is humanity’s expanding ecological footprint. Global consumption already requires the resources of 1.5 Earths to sustain. This burden is highly unequal: the average U.S. resident would need nearly four Earths, while the average UK resident would require 2.5 Earths. Wealthier nations often export their environmental impact through imported goods linked to deforestation and habitat destruction in developing countries. The report calls for urgent global action, including a shift to sustainable food systems, greater resource equity, and stronger habitat protection to reverse these trends. [WWF. (2014). Living Planet Report 2014: Species and spaces, people and places. World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, Switzerland]

Feargal Sharkey brands '£100billion' cost of nationalising water 'nonsense'. Spot on. They inflate investment by capitalising part of interest, repair/maintenance cost. Govt says Thames Water is worth £21bn. KKR wouldn't pay £4bn. Nationalise water. mirror.co.uk/news/feargal-s…

All of us at Battersea are deeply saddened by the loss of our beloved Ambassador Anthony Head. For over 20 years, Anthony was a passionate supporter of our work and a true advocate for rescue. Thank you, Anthony, for everything you gave to Battersea and the animals in our care.

I'll tell you what's 'unsustainable', and it's not state pensions, NHS funding or disability benefits. It's a society in which the majority works longer hours for lower wages so the 1% becomes richer still.

South West Water fined £1.853m for supplying contaminated drinking water. SWW is a serial offender, loses 107m litres of water daily to leaky pipes, dumped sewage in rivers for 407,006 hours. Still trades. No exec fined, charged. People fleeced. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

When people say "I'd do anything for my child," everyone praises them, but when a parent risks crossing a border to save their child from war, poverty, or danger, suddenly they're treated like criminals.

The UK should join the EU and the Euro! Let's take back our seat at the decision making table! Let's get back on the global stage! 🇬🇧 Follow me if you agree

134 years ago this cartoon was drawn, and in 134 years the problem has only gotten worse.

“AND YOU STILL DARE TO OPEN YOUR MOUTH…” Sasha Legerman: This is too accurate not to share. This Australian’s response to Trump’s rant that “NATO does nothing for America” is absolutely devastating: “Mate. You run a country where 600,000 homeless people will sleep on the streets tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment, and people ration it just to stay alive. A country where medical debt is the number one cause of bankruptcy. A country where women die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid of abortion laws to treat miscarriages. You imprison more of your own citizens than any country on Earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. In the land of the free, 2 million people sit in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re simply too poor to afford bail. Your life expectancy is declining. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your children practice active shooter drills between math and English classes while you sell defense stocks to your friends. Your minimum wage hasn’t changed in 15 years. Your teachers work two jobs, your veterans sleep under bridges, and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that never attacked you. And now a convicted criminal — found liable for sexual abuse, defending a pedophile, sleeping with a porn star, and running the biggest dumpster-fire campaign since the Taliban — is thanking you for yet another disaster. And you call Greenland badly governed? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody there goes bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because insurance refused treatment. ‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.’ When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn’t even in NATO, and we still showed up. For twenty years. And then you left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone and left everybody else to clean up the mess. You don’t care that a great nation is being terrorized by your friend, and you haven’t shown it a single ounce of sympathy. So maybe before calling other countries badly governed, take a look at your own backyard, you aluminum siding salesman with a spray tan. The only thing badly managed in this picture is your damn mouth. And you still dare to lecture the rest of the world?”

A 3-day weekend really makes you rally behind the 4-day work week. How is this not the standard?