WUFOOB … (Oct – Dec 2016)

Stations abandoned as RMT strike gets underway

The Guardian, 14th December 2016
Union leaders have said there is no prospect of industrial action on Southern ending soon, as passengers on Britain’s worst-performing rail network suffered fresh disruption on the first day of a series of three-day strikes.

Southern Rail advises passengers not to travel

Independent, 12th December 2016
Southern Rail advises passengers not to travel on Tuesday even if strike appeal is successful. The company said commuters were “strongly advised to consider alternatives methods of transport wherever possible”. The strikes will halt all Southern Rail’s services, disrupting the 500,000 passengers who use the service every day.

Usage of term ‘post-truth’ attributed to Trump’s presidential nomination

The Guardian, 17th November 2016
In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year. Defined by the dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”.

Met Police believed false claims by fantasist known as ‘Nick’

The Guardian, 8th November 2016
Operation Midland police fell for ‘false claims’ of VIP abuse, according to a report by retired judge Sir Richard Henriques, prompting calls for the policy of automatically believing alleged victims to be scrapped. The inquiry finds 43 failings in child sexual abuse investigation.

Mars probe lost on its descent

Sky News, 20th October 2016
A space probe that was supposed to look for signs of life on Mars has been lost, the European Space Agency has confirmed. Mission controllers said they were in the dark about the fate of the Schiaparelli probe, which is believed to have touched down on Wednesday after a seven-year journey. It was unclear what happened in the final seconds before the probe landed on the Red Planet, and no data had yet been received from the surface, they said.

Sky News, 4th October 2016
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three British-born scientists for revealing the secrets of unusual states of matter, leading to advances in electronics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz have “opened the door” to an unknown world where matter takes unusual states or phases. All three now live and work in the US.

CNN, June 2016
More than 150 leading scientists, including Stephen Hawking, signed an open letter saying a vote to leave the EU would be a “disaster for UK science and universities.”