Friday 7th June 2024
  • Shocking news: Daily Mail says public opposes Labour's votes-at-16 policy - here's why Starmer won't flinch

    Blow for Starmer as poll finds majority of public oppose lowering the voting age to 16 – in damning verdict on Labour’s flagship policy.

    That at least was the headline in the Daily Mail, reporting a new Lord Ashcroft poll which found that 52% of the public were opposed, compared to 38% who supported the policy.

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  • The growing wealth divide: Should average Canadians follow Warren Buffett's investment strategy?

    Whether you blame it on high inflation, declining real estate values or myriad factors coming out of a global pandemic that created the perfect economic storm, there’s no denying the harsh reality that Canada’s wealth gap is widening at a rapid rate.

    According to Statistics Canada, the wealth gap in Canada increased at an unprecedented rate in the first quarter of 2023, the largest on record since 2015.

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  • Sick of reboots? How 'nostalgia bait' profits off Millennial and Gen Z's childhood memories

    If you’re a Millennial or a member of Gen Z and immersed in our cultures’ current obsession with reboots, re-enactments, sequels and prequels, then you may be feeling a bit of nostalgia fatigue and asking yourself: “Haven’t we been here before?”

    From the recent Mean Girls reboot to upcoming sequels for films like Megamind and Moana, contemporary popular entertainment seems to be rooted in the continuous (re)manufacture of memory. Indeed, the practice of leveraging our fond memories of the past for profit has a name: nostalgia-baiting.

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  • How Sunak came up with disputed Labour tax figures - and what's wrong with them

    The first televised debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was dominated by the prime minister’s claim that every working family in the country would be paying £2,000 more in tax if Labour win the general election.

    It was a bold claim, which Sunak said was backed up by “official calculations” from the Treasury. Those calculations appeared in a document put out by the Conservatives which accused Labour of making billions of pounds worth of unfunded spending commitments.

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  • How studying (robot) pigeon navigation changed my mind about their intellect

    The cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands is fantastic, and cyclists in my hometown of Utrecht would have been the happiest in the world if it wasn’t for one thing: pigeons.

    One moment you’re pedalling in the sun with a cool breeze in your face, and the next you’re breaking and swerving. A pigeon casually strolled onto your path, seemingly oblivious to the danger it put itself in. Growing up, I often wondered just how stupid they must be to blindly walk into traffic. Many years later, I found myself once again puzzling over pigeon intellect, but this time in a new paper in the journal PLOS Biology on collective intelligence and flight paths.

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  • Save our grassroots music spaces: cross-party report calls for levy to help venues in crisis

    With politics now moving into the gladiatorial phase for the general election, it’s easy to forget the huge amount of parliamentary work taken up by cross-party efforts in select committees responsible for overseeing the work of government departments.

    The culture, media and sport committee recently produced a report on grassroots music venues – smaller, often independently run spaces – in the last parliament that is likely to be highly relevant to the next government whatever the electoral outcome.

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  • How giant earthworms have transformed the Isle of Rum's landscape

    My investigations over 30 years have uncovered how people have influenced the current fragmented and uneven distribution, diversity and abundance of earthworms on this national nature reserve.

    Rum’s human history goes back 9,000 years. Early humans came here to collect bloodstone, a flint-like mineral used to make arrowheads and other hunting or cutting tools. The island was deforested by early humans and the wet climate (with more than 2m of rain per year) led to the leaching of soil nutrients. The resulting poor-quality acidic soil supported moorland plants and low numbers of just three earthworm species.

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  • Keir Starmer's Trident triple lock: how Britain's obsession with nuclear weapons has become part of election campaigns

    With a campaign slogan of “change”, Keir Starmer is on a mission to persuade the electorate that the Labour party of 2024 is different to the one of 2019. Part of this is his unequivocal “triple lock” commitment to Trident, the UK’s nuclear weapon system.

    At a time when the risk of a major European war is higher than it has been for decades, Starmer has reiterated his support for a massive programme to replace the Trident system (submarines, warhead, missiles and infrastructure), initiated by former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, in 2006. The triple lock is a commitment to the current programme to build four new ballistic missile submarines, keep one of the four always at sea on operational patrol and keep the system up to date.

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  • Only 1.8% of US doctors were Black in 1906 - and the legacy of inequality in medical education has not yet been erased

    Fueled by the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling that bans affirmative action in higher education, conservative lawmakers across the country have advanced their own state bans on diversity initiatives, especially those that might make students feel shame or guilt for past harms against people of color.

    Despite clear and persistent gaps between white and Black doctors – and recent efforts to reckon with racial disparities within the medical profession – lawmakers have tried to advance policies to prohibit diversity initiatives in medicine.

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  • COVID vaccines saved millions of lives - linking them to excess deaths is a mistake

    A recent study has sparked another round of headlines claiming that COVID vaccines caused excess deaths. This was accompanied by a predictable outpouring of I-told-you-sos on social media.

    Excess deaths are a measure of how many more deaths are being recorded in a country over what would have been expected based on historical trends. In the UK, and in many other countries, death rates have been higher during the years 2020 to 2023 than would have been expected based on historic trends from before the pandemic. But that has been known for some time. A couple of years ago I wrote an article for The Conversation pointing this out and suggesting some reasons. But has anything changed?

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