… that Brexit “may be more brutal than anyone expected“. Sir John Major said the government’s “negotiating failure” will cost the public dearly, as he blamed the UK’s “blustering”, “threats” and “inflexibility” that he said will make future trading “less profitable”. The pre-recorded speech at Middle Temple also included Sir John’s stark claim that Britain […]
From the Irish Times: Veteran foreign correspondent and author Robert Fisk has died after becoming unwell at his Dublin home on Friday. It is understood the journalist was admitted to St Vincent’s hospital where he died a short time later. He was 74. Fisk was one of the most highly regarded and controversial British foreign correspondents of […]
Alas, the greatest Bond actor has died. It was hard not to like Connery on screen, besides being the best Bond, I really enjoyed his performance in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He had great screen presence, even in smaller roles like King Agamemnon in Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, he’s very memorable. He’ll be […]
Wow: Astronomers think that 16 Psyche is the exposed core of a full planet that didn’t make it all the way, and we’re itching to know more about it. NASA will be sending a probe to check it out in the next few years, and in the meantime, scientists are working to glean what they […]
Sebastien Cuvelier, a Belgian photographer, has a book out from a trip he took to Iran, ‘Paradise City’. That’s a country I would love to see: Paradise City is a personal search through both the contemporary and ancient landscapes of Iran to locate an elusive, dreamlike version of paradise. My journeys to Iran were inspired […]
Zynep Tufecki has an excellent analysis in the Atlantic of why Covid has been such a shock to every health system in the world. In short, we humans tend to be poor at systemic analysis, especially of complex systems with non-linear outcomes. This leads us to tend to under-estimate the impact of certain events – […]
Amazing detail in this tour of asteroid Bennu courtesy of NASA and the OSIRIX-REX probe:
Sad news: José Padilla, the Spanish DJ who helped define chillout music in the 1990s, has died aged 64 from colon cancer. An update on his Facebook page reads: “It is with great sadness that we bring you the news that José passed away peacefully in his sleep on Sunday night here on his beloved […]
The IT has a list of Irish online shops to help you shop local during lockdown. Might also be interesting to see something different to the all consuming Amazon, there’s plenty other retailers out there trying to survive: “Two hundred Irish retailers for all your online Christmas shopping“