Alexia Smith 💙

@Aquabeadsuk My geography-mad 8-year old made this with his aquabeads. He really took care with the details of each continent, including Antarctica.

@Freakonomics I just listened to this in the UK. Here the estate agents work for the seller, usually for commission of about 1-3%. What does a buyer's agent do? That's not a thing here. The buyer just goes to the estate agent to view and negotiate on the property.

Are realtors having an existential crisis? Their trade organization just lost a huge lawsuit. Their infamous commission model is under attack. And there are way too many of them. If they go the way of travel agents, will we miss them when they’re gone? freak.ws/40z47Zs

Look into her eyes. The eyes of an Iranian woman – strong, courageous, defying tyranny where the world has looked away. A gaze that the Tehran regime has decided to extinguish, one morning, at the hour of their prayers. They are going to execute her. Her name is Varishe Moradi. Wake up, world. Don’t let bravery die in silence. #VarisheMoradi

The Times splashes on the views of James Dyson who thinks the Budget is really unfair to people like him. That’s a billionaire who backed Brexit then moved his firm to Singapore - and owns more than 30k acres of UK farmland. But you wouldn’t know any of that from this article.

Our silliest millionaires have forgotten how they got their wealth in the first place: investment. Countries, like businesses, grow when you put money in. Everyone benefits. Choke off spending and the rich get richer, but the country gets in a mess. mirror.co.uk/news/politics/…

'Boomers find it very hard to believe that they've won.' The older generation have been handed 'the best end of the stick in British history,' according to @mrjamesob. So why are they so sceptical of the upcoming Budget?

I have some real concerns about what another Trump presidency means for women in this country — and I wanted to share some of my thoughts. If this resonates with you, send this video to every single person you know and remind them what’s at stake in this election.

It's kind of incredible that Barack Obama can be one of the best political speakers we've seen this century and still not be the best speaker in his own family.

Our GP committee has passed a motion stating the role of Physician Associates in general practice is fundamentally unsafe. They are calling for an immediate stop to PAs managing undifferentiated patients with a longer term phasing out of the role entirely. bma.org.uk/bma-media-cent…

This is an issue of enormous public concern @gmcuk. If your public consultation on your intended regulation of physician associates closed on 9 May why haven’t results been shared with the public? How long are you going to keep @doctor_oxford & the public waiting for a response?

On Saturday, I received a letter from the DWP telling my partner about changes to Winter Fuel Payment. My partner died on Thursday 19th September. I informed the DWP of his death on Friday 27th September using the online "Tell Us Once" service. 1/

TV Police underfunding is a major issue. Sherwood on BBC and The Tower on ITV have been forced to share a police station.

“So basically, they’ll either be able to go back 10 seconds by tapping this one, or about an hour and a half by pressing this one and leaving it for over 0.3 of a second” “Anything in between?” “Nope” [Standing ovation] “Rewind” department meeting at streaming service HQ.

🚨The @BMA_GP has just announced its GP committee has passed a motion stating the role of Physician Associates in general practice is fundamentally unsafe. They are calling for an immediate stop to PAs managing undifferentiated patients with a longer term phasing out of the role entirely If you are not yet familiar with this shocking scandal watch this latest update bma.org.uk/bma-media-cent…

This Daily Mail back page is an absolute disgrace. I know people will say to ignore it and not afford it oxygen but it’s simply embarrassing. Putting the word “GERMAN” in capital letters; it’s 2024, this sort of utterly backwards bollocks should be well behind us.

I'll never tire of saying this, but in the wake of Liam Payne's tragic death it seems important to say it: things can always get better, there is always help, tomorrow can be better than today, people care. The @samaritans are amazing, as are other charities. You're not alone.

Thomas Tuchel is a brilliant coach but England shouldn’t need to appoint a foreign manager. Doesn’t say much for coaching pathways or development that the FA is going in this direction again. And International football surely supposed to be our best v your best.

Reading a couple of @theguardian articles in a last few days, I feel we may be seeing its final departure from the pluralistic liberal tradition that made it a great newspaper, thanks to its capture by – or its morally fuddled editorial cadre - surrender to, an activist, ideological, anti-Western and more than that, anti-factual front. Our liberal democracy needs institutions of pluralistic discourse like this once-hallowed paper but it also requires a respect for facts and some sense of morals. Facts were once the essential ingredients of the coverage of a paper like the Guardian. However at least there are comedic sides to this. Two recent articles exemplify the Guardian’s embrace of illiberal anti democratic, anti fact forces and at the same time represent “a bonfire of the vanities” (an appropriate quotation from Savonarola who used the phrase to launch a bloodspattered but absurdly self-righteous purge of Florence that ended with his own execution.) Today’s was a truly creepy review of the One Day in October documentary, by a comedy-writer Stuart Jeffries, on the October 7 Hamas massacres who seemed irritated and uneasy that the real record of the atrocities by Hamas and some Gazan civilians, gleefully documented by the killers themselves on GoPros and smart-phones, did not accord with his and the Guardian’s political prejudices. How could these impertinent film-makers present these killers, decapitators, rapists, body-mutilators, corpse-abusers, kidnappers and looters as baddies? That is against the simplistic, rigid, flimsy framework of the ideology of anti-Israeli decolonization and must be wrong! This uncomfortable fact must be corrected! The result: a piece of unintentional, amoral gallows comedy at the Guardian's expense. The other was equally embarrassing and morally tone-deaf: a comically self-important and self-reverential but ugly and historically ignorant essay claiming the Israelis were guilty of memoralizing their October 7 fallen (so unlike every society, ever, in history from the 300 of the Spartans to the West with WW1 Armistice Day, the West and Russia with WW2, The Holodomor by Ukrainians, the Holocaust by the Jews, the Nakba by Palestinians, 9/11 by Americans and so on) by the clumsy Canadian provocateur Naomi Klein, all but indistinguishable from her alter-ego and fellow solipsist the other Naomi. As I posted this amidst general contempt for these pieces across the X platform, the paper may have taken one of them down 'pending review.' The fact is the paper has lost its heart and soul and sense of moral judgement but these preposterous pieces at least provide a sort of bleak, EndDays comedy amidst the heartbreaking civilian losses of Middle Eastern conflicts... @theguardian @KathViner 📷

Two years ago I swore I would never write about Boris Johnson again. This piece was my goodbye to all that and I think it stands the test of time. bylinetimes.com/2022/04/22/hat…