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jt's avatar

Good morning Northumberland!

Another great roundup of articles, Michelle. I'll be brief again and just say that the antisemitism is disheartening. We have the same problems over here.

And I'm glad to see that Paddy is so busy helping You write. When is Your deadline? Do You and the publishers know what the book is gonna be about, by the time You sign the contract?

TY, as always, Michelle.

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Michelle Styles's avatar

The antisemitism is depressing as I thought the education system was supposed to solve it, instead they appear to have made it worse.

My ultimate deadline is the end of May. My editor and I agree a broad framework and then I get to fill in the detail. Sometimes, I will write a synopsis as a roadmap and then as I write, I discover that the synopsis was for an entirely different journey if you will!

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jt's avatar

True that, about the education system.

That's fascinating. But, my! That's a fast deadline. And I can only imagine how the roadmap varies from the journey. Best o' luck to You, Michelle, and TY for writing.

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LudicrousLife's avatar

Good morning! So please forgive but every time I read about these post masters I do not have a clear view of who benefitted from this scheme that charged these postmasters . I think I must have missed the original posts.

In other news it is fantastic to see that people standing up for biology and their beliefs that there are 2 sexes are finding the slow wheels of justice moving in the right direction. It’s about time.

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Michelle Styles's avatar

One of the big questions is where did all the money go?

The best guess is that the PO pocketed it as profit which the higher ups were then paid bonuses on. Fujitsu of course continues to get contracts based on its 'gold standard' Horizon computer system.

And it is about time with the slow wheels of justice. Eventually the penny will drop and they will alter their training/complaints system etc. I noticed that some of this is happening in the US. The charity OneTen which is way behind its target of helping a 1 million black Americans move into management has had to pivot to a skills based rather than a race based system as a result of the Affirmative Action decision (basically what they were doing was illegal). The article was in the NYT this week.

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Sharon F.'s avatar

The coverage of the FOI case was interesting.. how the folks interested in Covid origins are Republicans using it for political fodder. No, many of us are not Republicans and think it’s pretty important to understand if something the US funded killed millions of people around the world. Also we are fully capable of reading and understanding this side of the emails. I didn’t know there was an FOI exemption in Scotland for “if a person has been threatened.” If so, it seems like that might be used pretty broadly to cover up malfeasance.

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Michelle Styles's avatar

Yes I thought it was interesting as well. It is important to try and understand the origins of COVID -- partly to see what (if anything) can be done to prevent this from happening again.

I thought the excuse was intriguing.

There are several ongoing inquiries on the subject in the UK. Sturgeon deleted all her Wats App messages for example.

This also was interesting about how the BBC misrepresented various news stories surrounding COVID including reporting rare deaths as if they were the norm . https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/25/covid-inquiry-bbc-misrepresented-risk-pandemic/ or https://archive.is/ombM3

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