Linguabrand

Cyberattack on France’s national blood service (EFS) via its refrigeration contractor Coolworld. Hackers reset freezers keeping blood donor samples at -30°C to a target of 110°C. The thing that stopped it from destructive impact was an on-call technician who noticed the temperatures going up. Frozen plasma intended for transfusion was stored there too. Fortunately nothing was destroyed. This was a cyberattack on a sensitive layer of healthcare. From frozen peas to boiling plasma in three weeks...?

With Italy reportedly considering introducing an 'exit tax' for rich people who move their tax residence abroad, our poll last year found 60% of Britons would likewise support an exit tax

Six months in and the tribunal system is already gumming up. There’s basically zero reason not to challenge any rent increase (apart from a lingering reluctance to take the piss), and as more tenants cotton on, practically the entire rental market in England will grind to a halt.

UK Treasury confirms extra £20bn over five years for the so-called National Wealth Fund (£15bn) and the state-owned British Business Bank (£5bn), which lends to business. Treasury claims this will support around 100,000 jobs by 2035 in AI, defence and green energy — a figure it has pretty much plucked out of thin air and will never really be tested because by 2035 everyone will have forgotten such a modest announcement. Two takeaways: Yet more government borrowing. It’s an addiction. Illustrates government philosophy: growth will come from a bigger, more activist state. Ho hum.

🚨Hilary Cass has called for an independent inquiry into how Brighton GPs were allowed to prescribe cross-sex hormones to children as young as 12.“There urgently needs to be an investigation of why every system that should have protected children, young people, and indeed young adults has failed,” she told me. The employment tribunal between Dr Sarah Redvers and NHS Sussex has highlighted how regulators and the NHS collectively failed to stop prescribing of puberty blockers and hormones against national guidelines - for years - and how instead the person raising concerns was accused of transphobia and herself investigated. Dr Redvers sat down with me for her only newspaper interview about her treatment in a scandal which, Cass now says, “dwarfs” that of the Tavistock’s GIDS. Me for the Sunday Times… thetimes.com/article/cfde7b4…

83 years ago today, German soldiers landed in North America. Almost nobody found out for nearly 40 years. On October 22, 1943, the U-boat U-537 slipped into a remote bay near the northern tip of Labrador. Its mission wasn't to fight. It was to steal the weather. Weather in the North Atlantic moves west to east. Whoever knew what was forming over Canada and Greenland could predict conditions over Europe and the convoy routes days in advance. The Allies had stations all over that region. Germany had almost nothing. So Siemens built Germany a robot. An automatic weather station that could measure temperature, pressure, wind, and humidity, then radio coded reports back on its own every few hours. U-537 carried one across the Atlantic, along with a meteorologist named Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer. The crossing was brutal. A storm battered the boat and tore away part of its anti-aircraft armament. But they made it. A landing party rowed ashore with about ten canisters, each weighing over 200 pounds, and hauled them up the rocky ground while armed lookouts watched the horizon. In about a day, they had the station assembled. A tall antenna mast. Battery canisters. Instruments. They named it "Kurt," after the meteorologist. Then they disguised it. They painted the canisters with the words "Canadian Meteor Service." There was no such agency. They were betting that anyone who stumbled across it in that wilderness would assume it belonged to the Canadian government and walk away. They even left empty American cigarette packs lying around. Then U-537 disappeared back into the Atlantic. The station only worked for a short time, likely just a couple of weeks, before its transmissions stopped. U-537 never made it home. A year later, it was sunk with all hands by the American submarine USS Flounder in the Java Sea. And here's the wild part. Labrador wasn't even part of Canada in 1943. It belonged to Newfoundland, a separate British dominion that didn't join Canada until 1949. For decades, no one knew Kurt existed. Then in the late 1970s, a retired Siemens engineer researching Germany's wartime weather stations found records of the mission. He contacted a Canadian military historian. In 1981, they reached the site. Kurt was still there. Canisters scattered across the rocks. The fake "Canadian Meteor Service" markings still on them. The only armed German landing in North America during WW2, hidden in plain sight for almost 40 years. Today you can see it at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

When Holly Passmore heard a knock at her front door at about 11am on July 4 last year, she assumed it was an Amazon delivery. Instead, the 44-year-old mother-of-two from County Durham found two plain-clothes police officers on her doorstep wanting to know why she had recently visited Israel ⤵️ telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…

The NHS policy of including males in female spaces has had devastating results for women's safety, as our ground-breaking NHS Reports revealed. 🚩 Over a four year period more than 6,500 rapes and sexual assaults - some against children under 13 - were committed in hospitals in England and Wales. 🚩 In Scotland 276 sexual assaults and 12 rapes were committed between 2019 and 2024 in just 57 of Scotland’s 198 hospitals. The NHS put women and children in harm’s way with its relentless drive for ‘inclusion’ of males in the female estate. The news that the NHS in England will finally comply with the law is good news and long overdue. Link to WRN's Hospital Safety Reports in the next posts.