The then cabinet secretary, Simon Case, appeared to advise Keir Starmer to complete security vetting for Peter Mandelson before announcing an appointment, documents reveal.

The documents released last month by the Cabinet Office as part of the disclosures over the US ambassadorial appointment also show Mandelson was offered a “higher tiers” briefing before his vetting was finalised.

In a letter written by Case to the prime minister, he is advised that in order to give the Washington role to a political appointee, the Foreign Office would “develop a plan for them to acquire the necessary security clearances and do due diligence on any potential conflicts of interest or other issues of which you should be aware before confirming your choice”.

The letter, sent on 11 November 2024, said the decision would then be formalised by the foreign secretary in a letter to the Foreign Office. Mandelson’s appointment was announced by No 10 just over a month later, on 20 December.

The documents also show Mandelson was offered a “higher tiers” briefing on 6 January, before his developed vetting was confirmed on 29 January. This means he was offered highly classified briefing from the Foreign Office as US ambassador before he finished the formal vetting process, one he is now known to have failed before that outcome was overruled by the Foreign Office.

Push it to the limit.

Countries are navigating between the desire to speed up the green transition and worries over Beijing’s clean-tech dominance.

China’s new device could reach vital undersea fiber optic cables deeper than its competitors’ known remote submersibles.

Among 18 rich countries, satisfaction with healthcare quality fell sharply after Covid hit and remains well below pre-pandemic levels. It is typically thought that domestic policy determines the challenges of healthcare but the article points out that, despite healthcare funding being the highest it has ever been, outside Covid productivity has stalled.

The Australian workforce has grown by 20% since 2019 but elective surgeries have flatlined and people are waiting longer to be seen. France, Canada, Germany, the US and the UK are similarly ailing.

But the bit of the report that caught my attention was something that has been right under my nose.

We know that Covid caused a mass exodus of nurses and doctors who resigned or retired early.

But the ones who stayed often reduced (note: not stopped) their “discretionary effort” such as staying back, teaching, mentoring or doing the myriad things that help the profession thrive. Medicine has become more transactional for everyone, not just patients.

...

The problem is that administrators still think that stress, burnout and “quiet quitting” are individual issues to be expunged even when the evidence shows that they are systemic and affect patient care.

Ministers must get to grips with the “national scandal” of England’s shadow child social care system, the children’s commissioner has warned, as a report reveals the number of children in unregulated settings has increased by more than 370% in five years.

Some of the most vulnerable children in England are being temporarily placed in unregulated caravans, Airbnbs and holiday camps, which risk the “accumulation of increasing levels of harm for children who have already faced enough distress for several lifetimes”, according to the report.

I keep seeing 444 everywhere or 4444.

My bank transactions are mostly 4s and my bank balance equated to 444.

What is the universe telling me?

plz. i saw the tbred about how mahe podts bad amd i wan f pist a fly bad post but suemthig.is hplding me bacj. stinky owls stink

https://hexbear.net/post/8295750

@deforestgump@hexbear.net Thanks for the new emoji, putting it to good use right away!

Source

Bonus panel

Source

Bonus panel

Fig. 1: Land subsidence in global deltas.

Each circle represents the location of the 40 deltas evaluated in this study, colour-coded by the average land subsidence rate. The size of the circle represents the percentage of the delta area subsiding faster than geocentric SLR. For visualization purposes, the geocentric SLR rate is shown as a colour gradient over entire watersheds or basins, although this does not represent the actual extent of exposure. Global coastlines are based on public-domain data from the CIA World DataBank II (using GSHHG (Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database)), distributed with MATLAB. The delta basin polygons were obtained along with the sediment flux dataset from ref. 29.

Link to open access article..

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09928-6

I am interested what do you use for tracking your expenses and other things like income, lending, investing, ...

All apps i tried don't have a lot of features or those features are buggy (or they at least seem so).

Have you found some app that does all that you want or do you use spreadsheets or some other solution?

(edit: typo and formatting)

United States President Donald Trump has denied being dragged into war with Iran by Israel as he faces increasing criticism over the conflict, including from segments of his own base.

From a lonely childhood to literary fame, her life was shaped by devotion to nature, paying attention, and the long journey toward learning to love and to be loved. If poetry had a pop icon, Mary Oliver would be it.

https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/1631822-mary-oliver-saved-by-the-beauty-of-the-world