With Bio-Waste Spreader: “So far this year, wildfires have burnt up around 60,000 acres of rural land in the UK. Several of these fires, mostly in the uplands, have forced evacuations and damaged protected natural habitats and property. As the incidence of wildfires in the UK increases due to global warming, it has sparked a debate about whether traditional sheep grazing of the uplands raises or reduces their likelihood and intensity…”
With MD: “Why did the University Hospitals of Liverpool Group delay telling victims’ families that staff at UHLG had inappropriately accessed the medical records of victims of the 2024 mass stabbing at a dance class in Southport? The Health Service Journal discovered that a ‘standard’ information access audit carried out by the trust in the days after the incident revealed that 48 staff had accessed the records without good reason. However, this information was not given to the survivors or victims’ relatives until May 2026…”
With Dr B Ching: “Derailments such as those in East Sussex and Essex last week and other signs of the rail system coming apart at the seams shouldn’t be a surprise, even during heatwaves that Network Rail says present ‘exceptional challenges’. The government ordained them by underfunding Network Rail’s operations, maintenance and asset renewal for the five years from April 2024…”
With Remote Controller: “As American streamers are a major cause of the crisis of funding and viewing numbers at the BBC (Eyes passim), let’s take a look at the state of the new TV. Disney+ has 126m global subscribers, who have just got The Shards, a nine-part drama based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel that started as a podcast audiobook during lockdown. Once a shocking prodigy of American fiction, with Less Than Zero and American Psycho, BEE is now an ancien terrible, revisiting the period of his druggy, humpy early fiction…”
With Old Sparky: “How much confidence are we to place in our electricity system? It’s two decades into being reconfigured and upgraded, at a cost of hundreds of billions of pounds, to wean us off fossil fuels, meet the needs of a nation hit by the long-predicted effects of climate change, and – presumably – deliver a service as good and reliable as a modern society demands. On the day before last week’s solar eclipse, National Grid emailed 8m customers in central England with advice…”
With Lunchtime O’Boulez: “Yet more aggro for visitors to this summer’s Edinburgh Festival (see last Eye) as staff at the city’s main museums, including the National Gallery of Scotland and Royal Scottish Academy, take strike action on selected days through the festival period, claiming they’re overburdened with responsibility. Meanwhile small but disruptive street protests have resumed against the festival’s sponsorship deal with Baillie Gifford…”
Letter from Baghdad
From Our Own Correspondent: “Ali al-Zaidi, our youthful new prime minister, has wasted no time pushing through multi-billion-dollar deals with American oil companies to develop some of Iraq’s biggest oilfields – and with good reason. A businessman with no political past who is unknown in the west, al-Zaidi figures his best chance of survival is to cosy up to Donald Trump, and he struck all the right chords on his visit to Washington last month…”
With Gold Digger: “A new prime minister resolved to crack some of the country’s more entrenched problems might want to look at the continuing failings in Britain’s response to the global scourge of illicit finance. Since the Eye exposed and mapped the extent of the ownership of British property via tax haven companies 11 years ago (see www.private-eye.co.uk/tax-havens), three governments and six prime ministers have been and gone…”