Marcus Leroux

can I be the first to congratulation Mary Lou on her promotion to UK regional leader.

Mike Huckabee, Trump’s representative in Israel, was on Today pushing against sanctions on West Bank settlements. He just asked rhetorically where the sanctions are against North Korea and Russia. You can’t get out of Tesco nowadays without tripping over kimchi from Pyongyang.

Andy Burnham said, perhaps a wee bit clumsily, that a border poll was "off the table". Harold Wilson, by contrast, had a plan to deliver a United Ireland by some time around 1986. What changed? marcusleroux.substack.com/p/how-nation...

we're now at the "youth hosteling with Chris Eubank" and "arm-wrestling with Chas and Dave" stage of brainstorming justifications for drilling in the North Sea.

The latest Mandelson disclosures reminded me of this www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO2k...

www.economist.com/britain/2026... Wrote about how the 1990s has a chokehold on Britain, whether it is a luvvies reminiscing at the Groucho or a Jim Davidson gig in Purfleet

Thameslink Southern Great Northern... a name that screams "clear sense of direction".

At the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Essar owed $3.1 billion to VTB, the Kremlin-controlled Russian bank. Our latest story, with the Guardian, reveals that its response to sanctions on VTB was to shift the loans out of the EU from Cyprus to Mauritius. www.source-material.org/essar-stanlo...

INVESTIGATION: Indonesian firms targeted in a palm oil fraud probe supplied European firms, an investigation by AFP and SourceMaterial (@Source_Mat) has found. The European firms include Italian energy giant Eni and Finnish sustainable aviation fuel leader Neste u.afp.com/SLMh

New: Last month, Indonesian authorities arrested 11 people on suspicion of bribery and disguising palm oil as a less strictly regulated byproduct. SourceMaterial can reveal that exporters targeted in this probe supplied major international companies. www.source-material.org/indonesian-e...

The year before the EU referendum, the UK car industry was predicting record production of 2 million units a year by 2020. It's kind of mad how little political weather this makes. www.thetimes.com/business/com...

Rosa is ridiculously talented and lovely to work with. Sign her up before it's too late.

A major Tory donor has been sanctioned in the UK and EU for his alleged role in the Russian oil trade. The oil magnate Murtaza Lakhani was hit with a UK asset freeze and travel ban on the grounds that his activities were assisting Russia. www.thetimes.com/uk/law/artic...

🔴 BREAKING: Our fake Chinese AI investor bought access to 10+ Labour MPs and minister Brand new investigation by Democracy for Sale and Led By Donkeys. democracyforsale.substack.com/p/breaking-o...

Amazon, the biggest data centre provider in the world, is actually *even bigger* than we thought. New investigation based on leaked documents by my colleague @lukewbarratt.bsky.social. www.source-material.org/amazon-data-...

Coal-fired data centres at least sound a bit steampunk. Wood-fired data centres just sound deranged. finance.yahoo.com/news/drax-sh...

Can't recommend today's SourceMaterial offering enough, by @marcusleroux.bsky.social. It's the story of the son of a lorry driver from Calabria who has often struggled to distance himself from the Italian mafia and is now poised to buy 11 North Sea gasfields www.source-material.org/mazzagatti-v...

Francesco Mazzagatti is awaiting approval to buy a terminal that provides a fifth of Britain's gas. We took a close look at episodes in his career that experts say ought to be of interest to the regulator in charge of stewarding the UK's oil and gas. www.source-material.org/mazzagatti-v...

"Transparency is a one-way door". A leaked Amazon document reveals its anxiety over disclosing how much water their data centres use.

this is a dizzying yarn with a drunk Australian getting hit by a car in Paris at its centre and threads leading to the dictator of Congo-Brazzaville and a prominent Irish family via Monaco and Dubai. villagemagazine.ie/dubai-heir-c...

I'd love to have attended the meeting where this came up.

At dawn in Accra, Ghana, Lydia Bamfo (51) sets out to collect plastic waste. For 25 years she’s battled the tide of rubbish overwhelming her city. Now she says the World Bank’s “solution” has done nothing to help workers like her. 🧵

William of Ockham: we're gonna need a bigger blade.

On the Kneecap website you can buy a £25 “RUC not welcome tee”, in reference to a police force that was reformed and renamed before Mo Chara was in primary school. marcusleroux.substack.com/p/the-real-t...

A lie can be half way around the world before a preliminary crisis analysis has its trousers on.

I wonder if this cross-examination is building up to the 1976 Republican News column where Adams wrote, cryptically: "I'm an IRA volunteer". www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/courts/...

Isobel Oakeshott is a Reform cheerleader - but in 2018 she said the Kremlin “struck gold” with Arron Banks, who Reform’s West of England mayoral candidate. The article is still online. New from @marcusleroux.bsky.social on Democracy for Sale democracyforsale.substack.com/p/does-isabe...