The new prime minister has declared he wants to end 40 years of neoliberalism. But is he really prepared to be that radical?

In May 2025, when Keir Starmer was still prime minister, Labour politicians, campaigners and journalists gathered at the Ministry of Sound in London to watch a series of panel talks and presentations illuminated by the lucid glow of club lights. The day-long event was organised by a campaign group called Compass, and the subjects included child poverty, the Murdoch-owned media and the rise of the radical right.

“We felt as though the Labour government was failing, and needed to be pulled into the 21st century,” Neal Lawson, the founder of Compass, told me. The Starmer government’s support for the Conservatives’ two-child benefit cap, its equivocating stance on Gaza and its emulation of far-right rhetoric – crystallised in a speech on immigration, during which the prime minister suggested Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” – were causing Labour supporters to rapidly desert their party. “The Starmer project was so obviously intellectually bankrupt. He was personally so disinterested in ideas and big thinking that I thought, this is never going to fly,” Lawson said.

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A conflict that began with tanks and then artillery is now pivoting around a new generation of drones focused on military, industrial, economic and civilian targets

Finally, in the dead of night, the threat above has passed. The rain has eased and the Ukrainian drones are ready, prepared by a ground crew shrouded in hard-to-detect green and red lights. A small succession of Ukrainian Fire Point FP-2 craft, miniature monoplanes with a 6-metre wingspan and more than 100kg of explosive, line up for an attack mission into occupied Luhansk, over 200 miles away.

The drone’s main piston engine is a familiar scooter’s buzz, but its launch booster is something else. The jet sound reverberates, almost painfully. A burst of fire lurches into the distance, the last of which signifies it is time for Ukraine’s 413 Raid drone regiment to pack and go.

The launch of an FP-2 drone during the mission into occupied Luhansk

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In the last 15 years, she has gone from respected actor to stratospheric, garlanded star. Now she is back on TV as a chic sleuth in a racy car – despite being terrible at guessing whodunnit

It is high summer and, while Lesley Manville may be suffering a bit with hay fever and the heat (“I’m so white, all I do is burn”), she doesn’t do wilting. Soon to head outside to tend to the ailing garden of her London home, she is enjoying a rare period of rest after six almost unbroken months of Oedipus on Broadway and then Les Liaisons Dangereuses at the National. She keeps, incidentally, the Tony she won for playing Jocasta in Oedipus on a shelf by the computer, “next to its friend, Larry Olivier” – an Olivier awarded for the same role.

“You don’t go into a job thinking about awards,” she says, before grinning conspiratorially. “Listen, you don’t say to an Olympian, ‘Oh, is it OK that you didn’t win?’ Yes, you like to win!”

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This trip into the celeb couple’s Cheshire mansion is nowhere as real as they’d like you to believe. But their self-deprecation is hard not to enjoy

‘There are two obvious problems here, the first being that the Rooneys’ lives feel like fiction: he was a generational sporting talent, a one-in-a-million player whose success has bought him and Coleen a ridiculous Cheshire mansion with a cinema, indoor pool and adjacent football pitch. To get back to the road you have to drive over a bridge across a lake. As we join them, Coleen is working out how to capitalise on a recent appearance on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, while Wayne is plotting an uptick in his media appearances that he hopes will make him a regular on Match of the Day. Technically, the Rooneys exist on our Earth, but – as they both admit, recalling their working-class childhoods in Croxteth, Liverpool – they have left ordinary life behind.

Even if we accept that they are to some extent real people, the further problem is that if you want to get to know someone, watching a behind-the-scenes “at home with” reality show is not the way to do it. This is an established format that was initially shaped by the Kardashians and has now evolved to fit the specific needs of retired British sportsmen looking to relaunch themselves as media personalities. By design, the shows are anything but realistic, instead offering a carefully calibrated blend of fantastic luxury that viewers can escape into, and domestic rituals – breakfast, the school run – offered up in a half-hearted attempt to show that really, these famous folk are just like us.

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Hoogleraar plantenecologie Hans de Kroon heeft altijd met een bredere blik naar de natuur gekeken. Tijdens een wandeling bij Nijmegen toont hij zijn „liefde voor het landschap”.

Wereldwijd gaan landen steeds meer schulden aan. Maar sinds deze zomer stijgen ook de rentes op die schulden.

Wereldwijd gaan landen steeds meer schulden aan. Maar sinds deze zomer stijgen ook de rentes op die schulden.

Mijn relatie veranderde langzaam van liefde, wederkerigheid en instemming naar dwang, intimidatie en angst. Steeds was daar weer die ene vraag: ‘Waarom ga je niet weg?’ Dwingende controle maakt van je leven een gevangenis zonder muren.

Vandaag is een vriendelijke najaarsdag met flink wat zon en blijft het droog. De temperatuur stijgt naar ongeveer 19 graden en ligt daarmee iets lager dan gistermiddag. De wind is daarbij matig en komt uit het noordwesten.

Indian IT services companies increased their sales by 8.2 percent in FY 25/26, but less of that money went towards development of software products. Those numbers come from the annual Survey on Computer Software and Information Technology Enabled Services published [PDF] by the Reserve Bank of India. The Bank asked over 7,500 tech services firms for data and received replies from 2,363. It then extrapolated the results to suggest that Indian companies billed for $221 billion worth of services last financial year. $147 billion of those billings were for what the bank describes as “IT services” and another $56 billion went towards business process outsourcing (BPO). Software product development earned India $56.5 billion, making it the only category to go backwards – albeit by just over $1 billion. India’s BPO sector eked out just $200 million annual growth, and saw revenue reductions for accounting, auditing, bookkeeping and tax consulting services, and for HR admin. Demand for offshored medical transcription and document management nearly doubled. The US remained India’s top market, accounting for $119.7 billion of sales, up from $108.3 billion in the prior year. UK-based buyers sent $34 billion worth of business to India, up from $31.8 billion. The overwhelming majority of services the bank measured – 91.7 percent or $203 billion – were not performed on clients’ premises. The Bank also found another $26.4 billion of services revenue earned by foreign affiliates of Indian companies, taking the total earnings of Indian software services companies to $239.3 billion. That sum is 9.5 percent higher than for the 24/25 financial year. $17.9 billion of revenue from those foreign affiliates was earned outside India, a $4 billion jump in a year. India’s tech services giants have warned of possible “AI deflation” that means their revenue falls as AI takes over some work performed by humans. The numbers in this survey suggest that’s yet to happen. The World Bank ranks India as the world’s second-biggest exporter of IT services, behind the Republic of Ireland. The Register fancies that result reflects Ireland’s role as the legal and financial home for many giant tech companies, rather than its possession of an offshoring/outsourcing industry to rival India’s. The USA ($102 billion), China ($73 billion) and the UK ($65 billion) round out the top five tech services exporters. ®

Ars Technica reports:


Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks... The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deployments infeasible." The FCC plan is supported by broadband providers, but local governments told the FCC that it would override rules that protect public safety.

Local governments say the plan is illegal and that the FCC should instead focus on how Internet providers thwart competition with permit-hoarding and other tactics that prevent competitors from deploying networks... They object to FCC plans to impose a 120-day deadline for processing permits and to proposed limits on fees and compensation that local governments can require from providers... Another filing submitted by the League of California Cities said the FCC has no authority to adopt the proposal. "Federal preemption of traditional state and local authority over public property, construction, public safety, permitting, and rights-of-way management should rest on clear congressional authorization," the filing said. "The commission should not infer broad preemptive authority where Congress did not expressly provide it...."

A filing by Minnesota cities said the current FCC is making the same mistake it made during the first Trump administration, when its attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws was blocked in court... If the FCC finalizes its new preemption plan, city and state governments could sue and ask a court to rule that the agency exceeded its authority...

Democratic Commissioner Anna Gomez approved the step of asking the public for input but signaled she would vote against the final proposal. "I am dubious about the commission's authority under Section 253 to use rulemaking to preempt states and localities when it comes to their management of rights of way and fees charged to providers," she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

billy.reeder has added a photo to the pool:

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

Seal Island at sunset.

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

The old Australind rolling stock at Pinjarra depot.