Wow…immediately makes me think of the damage to and physical isolation of the Baxter IV fluids factory in North Cove, NC…60% national production of IV fluid supplies in US disrupted by Hurricane Helene bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz04… #HurricaneHelene #JustInTime #SinglePointOfFailure

Thanks to @Selyst for spotting this one Good case overview from @TonySeruga There will be a slew of root cause & compounding failures leading to such a catastrophic fire loss even Recently banged my head with a clients team & fire engineer over legacy & emerging issues.

This year the Home Office moved to stop expert sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand coming to shear British sheep. The people who keep the animals comfortable were declared surplus to requirements. For over a decade, around 75 of the best shearers on earth have flown in each spring on a simple visa concession. In a few brutal weeks they take the wool off up to two million sheep. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes. Hundreds a day. Calm hands, no panic in the animal. It is a global trade and a young body's game, and Britain has never grown enough of its own. The official line? Fourteen years to train Britons, so the door is closing. Here is what that tidy sentence ignores. A sheep must be shorn every year or she overheats, cannot move properly, and gets eaten alive by flies and maggots. Shearing on time is welfare, plain and simple, written into law and into the animal's own skin. So a government that lectures farmers without pause about welfare has quietly made the most basic welfare task harder to carry out. After the outcry they allowed one "final" year. Then the experts are gone for good. A sector already losing money on every fleece, already burning wool it cannot sell, now told it cannot even get the people in to take the wool off. You could be forgiven for thinking somebody wants the British sheep gone.

A JUDGE HAD NO WORKERS RIGHTS Claire Gilham was a district judge in Warrington. She spent her days dealing with some of the most difficult civil and family cases in the North West. People going through divorce, debt, custody battles. The kind of work that matters. The courts she worked in were a mess. Unsafe buildings. Overworked staff. Budget cuts so deep that basic safety was gone. Violent people in courtrooms with no security. She even received death threats. She reported it. Formally. In writing. To the people above her. Their response was remarkable. They told her the problems she was describing were not really problems. They were just her personal working style. She was then bullied and loaded with extra work for daring to speak up. So she did what any reasonable person would do. She took the Ministry of Justice @MoJGovUK to an employment tribunal. Here is where it gets truly absurd. A judge in England has no whistleblower protection. None. The law that protects workers who speak out about wrongdoing did not cover judges because judges are classified as office-holders, not workers. The person sitting in court enforcing the law for everyone else had fewer legal rights than almost anyone sitting in front of her. She lost at tribunal. She lost at the Court of Appeal. She started a crowdfunding campaign just to keep the case alive. Most people would have stopped. She did not stop. In October 2019, after seven years, @UKSupremeCourt ruled in her favour. Unanimously. Five judges, zero dissent. The law was rewritten to protect judges who blow the whistle. And the ruling went further, helping workers across the public and private sectors who had been denied the same protection. One judge. No institutional backing. Fighting the entire Ministry of Justice with a crowdfunding page. She changed the law for everyone. @guardian @BBCNews @lawgazette @thetimes @UKSupremeCourt - Gilham v Ministry of Justice [2019] UKSC 44

November 1971. Chiswick, West London. Erin Pizzey is 32 years old. She is not a lawyer. Not a politician. Not a doctor. She is a woman who talked Hounslow Council into lending her a cold, rundown building on Belmont Road — a former community hall — for almost nothing. Her original plan was modest. A warm room. A cup of tea. Somewhere for mothers with young children to simply get out of the house. Then the door opened. A woman stood in the entrance. She was covered, head to foot, in bruises. She was holding two small children. She was shaking. She didn't want tea. She needed somewhere to hide. Erin let her in. She didn't turn her away. She didn't tell her to call the police. Because Erin had already called the police. They told her the same thing they told every woman in Britain at the time: they could not enter a private home over a "domestic dispute." That was the law. The home was private. What happened inside it was a family matter. When Erin contacted a female civil servant to report what she was seeing, the response was astonishing. The woman told her flatly: "There wasn't a problem of battered wives until you made one." Erin put down the phone. Then she went back to her residents and made sure they were fed. Within weeks, 40 mothers and children were sleeping in four tiny rooms. No funding. No staff. No legal authority. She didn't stop. By 1973, word had spread through quiet whisper networks — one woman telling another, "There is a place. Go to Chiswick. She won't turn you away." That same year, Erin hosted the first National Women's Aid Conference in the UK. Women from across Britain arrived, and they all recognized the same thing at once: what she had built needed to exist everywhere. In 1974, the council set a maximum of 36 residents. At peak times, 150 women and children were living inside those walls — sleeping on floors, on chairs, in hallways. The building smelled of cooking, fear, and something else entirely: relief. Erin was taken to court for overcrowding. She appealed all the way to the House of Lords. She kept the doors open the entire time. That same year, she wrote a book. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear. It was the first published account of domestic violence in British history. It used real stories from real women inside the shelter. Overnight, a problem that had no official name was on front pages from London to New York. The movement spread. Refuges opened across the UK. Then Australia. Then Canada. Then the United States. The pattern she created in four small rooms in West London — no blueprint, no permission, no funding — had been replicated in hundreds of shelters across the Western world. MP Jack Ashley stood up in Parliament and said: "It was she who first identified the problem, who first recognised the seriousness of the situation and who first did something practical." She was ranked 14th in a poll of the 100 women who shook the world. She was awarded the Italian Peace Prize. She received a CBE. The charity she founded — Chiswick Women's Aid, which became Refuge — grew into the largest domestic violence charity in the United Kingdom, with over 460 employees and an annual income of more than £33 million. Erin Pizzey passed away on October 4, 2025, aged 86. She never stopped. It all began with one woman, one borrowed building, and an absolute refusal to say no. Forty women and children showed up with nowhere to go. She made room. Share this if you believe one ordinary person, refusing to look away, can build a shelter that holds the whole world. Follow us Lost in Yesterday

A beautiful detail from the FT’s obit of Sir Alex Younger

I dreaded this news. So sad to get off a long flight and learn that my dear friend Alex Younger had died. Alex was the best of #MI6 - high intelligence, low ego, driven - beneath the affable exterior, deeply moral, kind, fun and irreverent. And an ace spy. RIP.

In these globally turbulent times one man has regularly acted as a wise, thoughtful and witty guide for listeners of @BBCr4today. The former Head of MI6 Sir Alex Younger has analysed, explained and contextualised the actions of Trump, Putin, Xi and the Ayatollahs. After he first appeared in the programme I was lucky enough to get to know Alex and call him my friend. I’m desperately sad to hear the news I’ve long feared was coming. Alex has died after months trying to cheat the prognosis he was given whe. They discovered the tumour he nicknamed “Putin”. We’re always told not to speak of a fight with cancer because it risks implying that only those strong enough survive. I understand that. I really do but sod it. Alex fought so hard to find a treatment to give him a little longer to be with Sarah and their lovely children. And he used every last minute of the short time he did have to be with family and friends and to do what he spent a lifetime in the shadows doing - using his intelligence to understand the world, to explain it but, above all, to keep us all safe.

Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger on Brexit: “Putin would have been absolutely delighted by our decision.” “So would Xi. France has effectively eclipsed us. Brexit has marginalised us.” Most striking of all: “Just nobody mentions the UK.” Very sad that Sir Alex Younger, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, born on July 4, 1963, died of pancreatic cancer on June 2, 2026, aged 62

Your Password is Your Power 🔐 💬 Caption: Weak passwords = strong problems. 🚫 💡 Protect your digital identity: ✅ Use letters, numbers & symbols ✅ Avoid birthdays & names ✅ Change passwords regularly 👉 Stay cyber smart, stay cyber safe! #CyberSecurity #PasswordSafety

So very sad to have learnt of the untimely death of a great friend and colleague, Sir Alex Younger. We were at St Andrews University together, had parallel careers and retired together in autumn 2020. He was an outstanding national security leader. I will miss him terribly. Love and condolences to Sarah and the family.

Former MI6 chief Sir Alex Younger dies aged 62 bbc.in/4vrvpgL

"He will be remembered by the many Ministers, colleagues, friends, and family for his utmost dedication to British public life and protecting our nation". gov.uk/government/news/pm-tr…

NHS WHISTLEBLOWER SAYS PATIENTS MAY BE DYING. THE HEALTH SECRETARY DECLINED TO COMMENT. A senior clinician at Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (@BHRUT_NHS) went to LBC with a very simple message: the Trust's new electronic patient record system is broken, nobody in management wants to hear about it, and people may already be dead because of it. One patient with cancer and Covid died after a haematology referral simply never reached the right department. The system swallowed it. The clinician said they knew of incidents where patients came to harm. They said it is keeping them up at night. Staff are in tears. Appointments are wasted. Results go missing. The trust told LBC it has "no evidence" the IT system contributed to any deaths. Which is a great thing to say when your IT system is apparently very good at losing evidence. A patient at King George Hospital waited nearly two months for biopsy results on a breast change. When they finally got through, they were told delays were because of a new IT system "no one knew how to use." Nobody called them. Nobody reassured them. Two months of silence while they sat at home wondering. Clinical negligence solicitor Sanja Strkljevic from Leigh Day said the claims were "really quite shocking" and suggested the scale of the situation could justify a full inquiry. The Trust's constituency MP was Wes Streeting (@wesstreeting), the former Health Secretary, the man who said NHS reform was his personal mission and that his head would be on the chopping block if things didn't improve. He declined to comment. He has since resigned from the cabinet entirely. Whistleblowers do not speak to the press for fun. They do it because they have run out of other options. Source: @LBC lbc.co.uk/article/nhs-east-l…

Every day, ships leave this russian owned factory in Ireland straight for St Petersburg carrying thousands of tonnes of raw alumina for the war machine. There’s corruption everywhere. Locals tell me politicians are bought by oligarchs. Ireland is no longer militarily neutral.

Liking the depth of this analysis by @aviatrixtrc of the Iranian attack of @StrykerEC back in March. Have not seen anything to suggest p/t facing devices were directly vulnerable.

Are you still there @ausdronelawyer ?