Liz Kelly

A trainee gynaecologist in Belgium who was found guilty of rape will face no punishment and receive no criminal record because, the judge decided, he is "a talented and (socially) engaged young man". Unsurprisingly, the student he raped is devastated by the ruling. It also means that he will be able to practise gynecology, potentially putting other women at risk of sexual assault.

This is MMA fighter Sean McInnes. When Anne Marie Boyle asked him to leave her alone, he punched her in the face so hard that he broke her cheekbone and her eye socket, knocked her unconscious, and left her with a life-altering brain injury. He was given less than two years behind bars. It would be a real shame if this post was widely circulated and impacted his career in a negative way.

This week on #bbcqt, arguably the most dangerous man in Britain that few voters have even heard of: Reform UK's anti-abortion #NatCon Head of Policy and Peter Thiel associate, James Orr, who is facilitating the transfer of control of Britain to #MAGA extremists. FFS WAKE UP!

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends. A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets. Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses. The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits. A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days. Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive. The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away. The investing angle nobody talks about. Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in. Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies. The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates. Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try. (a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

NEW: Two senior MOD whistleblowers with inside knowledge of Palantir's systems have come forward to @thenerve_news to say government ministers are ignorant of the grave national security risks the technology poses. Hugely important by @CharlieNotOld

This is the right thing to do.

NHS hospital: I noticed the clock on the wall showed the wrong time. A nurse told me they knew, but they wouldn’t report it because replacing the battery through the NHS would cost £70. A £2 battery... £70. How? Why? That's when I began to dig further. 🧵

This is simply inexcusable. Police Scotland hand over ALL data downloaded from a rape survivors phone to her alleged rapist (who happens to be a police officer). They then LIE to her and say the data breach had been reported when it hadn’t been. As the fine isn’t awarded to her, I really hope she takes a civil case out against them. ▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️▪️ Police Scotland has been fined £66,000 by the UK data watchdog after sharing the entire contents of a rape survivor’s phone with her alleged attacker. On July 5, 2022, detective constable Lianne Gilbert received a letter from a police data protection officer confirming that personal data and images had been shared incorrectly with third parties. Her phone had been submitted voluntarily as part of an investigation into criminal allegations against a serving police officer. The data was passed to Police Scotland’s Professional Standards Department (PSD). As part of the procedure, the officer subject to investigation is provided with the investigator’s report and relevant documents prior to a hearing. On June 14, 2022, all of DC Gilbert’s mobile data was provided to the accused officer, his police federation representative and his solicitor. In a letter seen by STV News, Police Scotland said this was “human error”. Three days later, the discs were retrieved from the officer. On June 22, 2022, the information was retrieved from the SPF and the solicitor. One disc contained 39,233 pages of information following the initial download of the phone. One included 697 image files, 17 uncategorised files and 13 video files, the majority of which were not relevant to the investigation. Only one disc contained messages between the victim and the accused officer. A review carried out by officers identified 15 images described as intimate which had been incorrectly shared along with DC Gilbert’s medical records. Almost two months following the breach, an email from a Police Scotland data protection officer stated that the PSD National Complaint Assessment and Resolution Unit determined the matter “could be considered under criminal legislation”. DC Gilbert told STV News: “This has left me with significant psychological issues. “At the time this happened, I had a five-month-old child. I don’t remember a lot about their early years because of the toll this had on me. It has been traumatic.” In the initial letter sent to DC Gilbert, Police Scotland determined that the breach “did not meet the statutory notifiable requirements” for the force to report itself to the data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). But, Police Scotland claimed in the letter that it reported the breach to “demonstrate accountability and transparency”. However, in an email seen by STV News, an ICO lead investigator stated they were not made aware until DC Gilbert lodged a complaint on September 2, 2022 – three months after the incident. The ICO confirmed it would investigate the “unlawful disclosure” of data and Police Scotland’s “mobile phone extraction process”. On Wednesday, March 11, 2026 – three and a half years after it being reported – the ICO said it had issued a £66,000 fine and a reprimand to Police Scotland for serious failures in the handling of sensitive personal information. “The ICO’s investigation found that Police Scotland extracted the entire contents of a person’s mobile phone after they reported an alleged crime, without ensuring there were sufficient safeguards to prevent access to irrelevant personal information,” the watchdog said. “As a result, officers collected a substantial volume of highly sensitive information, much of which had no bearing on the investigation.” *ARTICLE CONTINUED IN COMMENTS*

Me, a medical student on my surgery rotation Another student: You better stay away from Dr. Z, he’s handsy. Me: Ewwwwww, why hasn’t that been reported?? Her: He WAS. And the student who reported him got written up, not him. Me: SHE was disciplined? For what? Her: They just made something up. Just make sure you stay out of arms reach at all times. This was when I was a student but is still true today: Women who report abusive men face more consequences than the men do. If you want to support women in male occupied fields who still face this kind of behavior, write a Google review. No, it doesn’t make up for sexual harassment, but it does remind us that our patients value and appreciate us even when gross men treat us this way.

It wasn’t until 1998 that the American Academy of Pediatrics began instructing doctors to assume that a child who was infected with an STD had been sexually assaulted. This came after more than half a century of lies about infectious toilet seats, lies told to cover up both the reason why a post-war study of STD infection rates found that 10% of infections were seen in girls below the age of 13 — that is, that girls were getting raped — and the fact that rates of infection were highest in upper middle class white families. Once that data came in, researchers claimed — with absolutely zero evidence, and not a single case — that girls were catching STDs from toilet seats, even though this method of transmission had already been ruled out for women and boys. Girls, researchers decided (again with zero evidence) were especially vulnerable to infection from toilet seats because the walls of their vaginas were so thin that it made infection more likely. Just like that, the next fifty years’ worth of infected victims could be waved away as having caught an STD in prepubescence due to an infectious toilet seat. 1998. Sometimes this world just makes me sick.

A small but fearless group of women from Afghanistan is protesting in the streets of Kabul on International Women’s Day, demanding their basic rights and calling for an end to a gender apartheid regime.

Just a reminder, should it be needed, that the man slagging off the United Kingdom is a former reality TV host, who boasted about grabbing women by their genitals, has changed his mind no fewer than three times on the Chagos deal, blamed Ukraine for being invaded, refused to accept the result of a democratic election that he lost, uses social media LIKE A SULKING TEENAGER, taunts his allies with tariffs, and only weeks ago threatened to take over Greenland. If anyone’s damaging the special relationship between Britain and America, it’s Trump - a raging, narcissistic, unpredictable, vicious, vindictive man-child, who holds domestic and international law in contempt, and whose own White House pumps out content that celebrates him as the gangster-in-chief.

About 29% of college men in the US and Canada – close to one in three – report having perpetrated sexual coercion. 6.5% - about 1 in 15 – have perpetrated rape. Findings from a systematic review of 78 samples of 25,524 college men. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15…

This is going to piss off a lot of people, but I’m going to say it anyway. I’ve spent years wondering whether my being gay is connected to the sexual abuse I experienced as a child. Before any of that happened, I had “girlfriends” in the way little boys do. I remember being attracted to girls—chasing them on the playground, getting scolded by teachers for being a little weirdo. Then the abuse started. After that, everything shifted. I got hooked on gay porn. I even printed out pictures of Frankie Muniz (the Malcolm in the Middle kid back then) and hid them under my mattress because I was fantasizing about him. Between ages 7 and 13, I was molested nine times and raped twice. I’m not saying this is true for every gay man—far from it. Most gay guys don’t have this kind of history, and these experiences don’t define or explain the entire community. But these kinds of stories and questions do exist. They come up in private conversations, in therapy, in quiet moments of doubt. I wish we could openly acknowledge that some of us wrestle with this without it being used as a weapon against us or dismissed entirely. It’s part of some people’s truth, even if it’s not the whole picture.

🚨 Researchers just dropped a study that should make every AI user stop and think. 1,322 AI privacy papers reviewed. One conclusion: we've been worried about the wrong thing. Everyone talks about AI memorizing your data. That's not the threat. Here's the actual threat: → Inference. AI deducing what you never said. → A throwaway sentence reveals your income bracket → A health question maps your medical history → Certain word choices expose your ethnicity → A random photo pinpoints your exact location You typed ordinary sentences. The AI built a profile. Here's what nobody wants to admit: Memorization is easy to regulate. Inference is invisible. There's no log. No alert. No moment where the AI "takes" your data. It just... reads you. Your writing style is a fingerprint. Your questions are a map. Your curiosity is a profile. Current privacy laws don't cover this. Current frameworks don't address it. We spent 30 years protecting our data from being seen. We forgot to ask who was reading us.

Respect to @Lowkey0nline for being 100% right. No one called the Catholic priests systematically abusing boys a 'grooming gang'. It is a racist media panic meant to scare you into fearing the 'darkies'. Same as 'mugging' (also not a specific crime) and even the term 'gang' itself

We have a real problem brewing with the “Board of Peace” and it needs much more attention. 1) There is no legal entity for “Board of Peace” organized under the laws of any country, meaning it is subject to NO country’s laws. 2) Trump is acting like the US is party to it as a treaty organization, but only Congress has the power to do approve that. 3) BoP is collecting and distributing funds (JP Morgan playing as banker) but this must be in violation of Know-Your-Customer laws since BoP *doesn’t exist*. It is a transnational mafia backed only by the executive power of its members. 4) Since BoP doesn’t exist, USPTO is illegally holding its trademarks on its behalf, violating the Lanham Act, which requires that holders intend to use marks in commerce. 5) Trump signed Executive Order 14375 protecting BoP under the International Organizations Immunity Act, but this merely protects from interference, it does not legitimize or establish the organization. 6) Trump is saying he intends to use it to “oversee” the United Nations. There is no provision in the UN charter for any such oversight organization; what he means is that he is going to extort the UN by withholding US dues. This thing needs to be challenged legally and practically. If it is not stopped it will quickly evolve into a world takeover mechanism, and indeed it is already usurping US sovereignty as well as sovereignty in Gaza and of participant countries. Seriously, this is no joke and intervention is necessary NOW. The illegal trademarks are one pathway in. There are others. But whatever you do don’t brush this off as one of Trump’s follies. It’s anything but.

In 1970, if a woman arrived at an emergency room after being raped, the staff moved fast. They cut away her clothing. They washed blood from her skin. They cleaned her wounds, combed debris from her hair, sutured, swabbed, stabilized. They saved her life. And in the same efficient hour, they destroyed the case. The clothing that held fibers and semen was bagged with hospital trash. The fingernails that might have carried skin cells were scrubbed clean. The bruises were documented only as injuries, not as patterns of violence. By the time police arrived, there was often nothing left but a shaken woman and a report that would quietly die in a file. No one intended harm. Nurses were trained to heal, not to think like investigators. Emergency medicine focused on stopping bleeding and preventing infection. Justice was considered someone else’s department. Except it wasn’t. It was the survivor’s. Virginia Lynch was a nurse who noticed what others had normalized. Born in 1941, she grew up in a culture that treated sexual violence as something shameful, private, better left unexamined. In the ER, she saw the same pattern repeat. A woman would arrive assaulted. Staff would do what they were taught. Hours later, police would ask for evidence that no longer existed. Prosecutors declined cases. Defense attorneys dismantled what little documentation there was. Survivors were left with a quiet, corrosive message: if it can’t be proven, maybe it didn’t really happen. Lynch understood something radical for her time — hospitals were not neutral spaces. They were the first crossroads between trauma and accountability. If evidence vanished there, justice rarely followed. When she began asking why nurses weren’t trained to preserve forensic evidence, the resistance was immediate. Doctors said nursing was about care, not crime. Law enforcement questioned whether nurses could handle chain of custody. Administrators worried about lawsuits and reputation. Beneath all of it was a deeper discomfort: taking sexual assault seriously would require admitting how common it was. But Lynch kept pushing. She began designing protocols that did not force a false choice between healing and documentation. Clothing could be preserved without delaying treatment. Injuries could be photographed respectfully. Swabs could be taken with consent. Detailed notes could be written in language that held up in court. Evidence could be secured without turning a survivor into an object. She saw nurses differently than others did. They were already there first. They saw injuries before they faded. They heard the story before it hardened into a deposition. They had the trust of patients in moments when uniformed officers might not. If nurses were trained properly, they could protect both the body and the truth of what happened to it. Out of that insistence came a new field: forensic nursing. Eventually, the role of the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner — SANE — was formalized. These nurses learned evidence collection, trauma-informed interviewing, courtroom testimony, and meticulous documentation. They became the bridge between medicine and the legal system. Hospitals that adopted these programs saw measurable change. Evidence was preserved correctly. Cases were stronger. Convictions increased. Survivors reported feeling believed instead of processed. The difference was not dramatic technology. It was intention, structure, and training. By the 1990s, forensic nursing was recognized as a legitimate specialty. Courts accepted forensic nurses as expert witnesses. Nursing schools began offering training programs. What had once been dismissed as unnecessary interference became the standard of care. © Women In World History #archaeohistories

NEW: Read this terrific piece by @page88 for @thenerve_news in which she unpicks Edge.org, the hugely influential 'salon' funded by Epstein & threaded through with race science & eugenics. 1/

Ireland's basic income pilot for artists worked so well they made it permanent. The economic growth it generated paid back more than its net cost, study shows. How many people are being held back from their potential because they're living bill-to-bill? UBI is true freedom.