Dan McCrum

@mccrum.bsky.social

Do investigations for the FT, into dubious accounting and dodgy characters mainly. Wrote a book called Money Men about a spectacular fraud

A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space and have we really thought this through?

In its defence, the FT had pleaded the accounts of 15 women willing to come to testify in court on its behalf. That included three women whose allegations had not previously been reported.

One of those said that in 2018, when she was aged 20, she had been invited to a shooting party at Odey’s home in Gloucestershire. She said she and her boyfriend became aware that Odey had entered their bedroom in the guesthouse uninvited and was watching them while they were having sex.

frame from a comic. Asked what's their favourite strip in The Phoenix, one of the Dunnos says "Dunno. I only read the Financial Times"

Still from Equilibrium: Christian Bale surrounded by gun-kata'd corpses

And finally, last week lawyers Carter-Ruck claimed Asif Aziz had reported London Centric editor Jim Waterson to the police for unspecified offences. This was after Waterson visited the billionaire’s office and home to ask if he was pushing ahead with the evictions. The Met police press office said they have no record of such incidents being reported to the authorities.

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Allister Heath
The sinister, anti-democratic forces behind focaccia must be exposed at all costs

Bar Chart: budget items % of GDP
Budget deficit 5.8%
Increased military spending 1.5%
Tax cuts in OBBBA 1.4%
tariff revenue 1%

Source:CBO, committee for a responsible federal budget

London is different from US cities. Much of its road layout predates the arrival of the car. Our roads are more chaotic, with the balance of power tipped a little less towards vehicles. Jaywalking is permitted in London. In 1966, the police tried to crack down on it, but gave up after three months. Our zebra crossings are far from machine-readable; they are designed for micro-conversations between drivers and pedestrians. In some parts of London, such as Exhibition Road in South Kensington, there are experiments in “shared space”, tearing up the old infrastructures that used to force buses, bikes and cars to stay in their lanes. This introduces uncertainty that slows down drivers but makes navigation harder for artificial intelligence.

Sunday March 6, 2011 mail exchange between Peter Mandelson and Epstein

Can we get shilling lawyers number asap, writes the pedophile.

Let me know when Schillings contacted, replies Mandelson

Print an email
1. Go to the mail app on your iPad
2. In the message tap [a fucking curved backward pointing email symbol designed by morons] in the bottom right corner, then tap print.

George Houraney, a businessman whose American Dream Calendar Girls beauty contest had been running in Las Vegas casinos since 1978, recalls encountering Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in January 1993. Houraney says that Trump asked him to organise a party that month with some of his pageant’s finalists, promising to invite heads of modelling agencies and prospective sponsors for his competition. “He had me fly in all these girls, and gave me a $30,000 budget for airfares and limos to pick them up at the airport,” he says. “The girls were all decked out, expecting to meet all these VIPs.” But after an hour at the party, Houraney says, there seemed to be only one other guest: Epstein. “I was like, ‘Donald, where are the guys? What’s going on here?’ And he said, ‘Well, this is it.’” Houraney says he realised “this is a Jeff Epstein party, basically”.

Presentation slide: in 2023 London had almost 3.8mn homes
Private sector 3mn
Social housing 426k
Local Authority 390k

In the US the middle class has a blue-collar connotation, whereas in the UK it seems to refer to the rich but not quite richest section of society.

For instance, while both might be seen as middle class signifiers, the BBC’s Radio 4 claims a weekly audience of just under 11m, or about a fifth of the UK population, while a smaller segment of the latter (about 7 or 8 per cent) were educated at fee paying schools.

Taking the official ONS data, we might say that a broad middle section of the UK is the 4th through 7th deciles of households, so excluding the bottom and top 30 per cent. To be in that range is to have a gross household income somewhere between £20,000 and £40,000 – the average of the 4th decile was £21,676 in 2011/12, and for the 7th decile it was £38,763.

Overall, 27 of the 41 intervals were less than 300 years in length. So when we tell ourselves the story of how often these earthquakes occur in the Pacific Northwest, it may be more accurate to say: *picture of time frequencies with us on the wrong side of the distribution.

Picture of the Hook Knife Film/Tape/Strapping Cutter with keyring JF07631 available for 83 pence from euroffice

Joel Pashcow, a real-estate executive and Mar-a-Lago Club member, offered a drawing of Epstein giving a lollipop to a group of young girls in 1983, juxtaposed with another drawing of Epstein in 2003 being fellated and massaged by another gaggle of women. The implication is that Epstein has groomed them from an early age. Paschow did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But his most startling contribution is a photo of him holding a novelty check bearing what appears to be a doctored or rendered version of Trump’s signature. The photo appears alongside a handwritten note suggesting Epstein sold him a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500. The New York Times reports that the check was a stunt meant as a joke about a woman in her 20s who dated both Trump and Epstein. But this is remarkable enough that it bears repeating: Inside the 50th-birthday book for Jeffrey Epstein—a man charged with sex trafficking—is a photo of a massive, novelty size check, seeming to reference the sale of a human being from one powerful man to another. The man whose supposed signature is on the check is the current president of the United States.

Regardless of who the dead were in this specific case, he added, history shows that a policy of using force against drug smugglers risks disasters based on faulty intelligence. For example, in a 2001 incident, the C.I.A. told the Peruvian government that a plane was smuggling drugs, and its air force shot it down, only to find out that it had instead killed American missionaries.

There's also a phenomenon called "overfitting" in AI models where information (in this case, text found in audio transcriptions) encountered more frequently in the training data is more likely to be reproduced in an output. In cases where Whisper encounters poor-quality audio in medical notes, the AI model will produce what its neural network predicts is the most likely output, even if it is incorrect. And the most likely output for any given YouTube video, since so many people say it, is "Thanks for watching."

The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models.

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.

Athletic chart of transfer fees spent and received. Man United's fees received is £0.0, versus £188.5mn at liverpool, £7,m at Arsenal, £227mn Chelsea...

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