Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store have spoken by phone with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the Finnish presidential office said.
Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed the report to TASS.
The states of Scandinavia and the Baltic region must row back on their recent extreme hostility to Russia.
The Houthi have launched missile attacks on oil facilities in the city of Najran, in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia offered the Houthi movement (Ansar Allah) one billion dollars through Iranian mediation to halt attacks on the Kingdom, according to diplomatic sources in the Gulf, as… pic.twitter.com/20tEl73Hvy
At first, the Yemeni Houthis were regarded by many in the West as a bit of a joke, unlikely to be militarily effective, and reminiscent of the adoo of the 1960s and early 1970s in Dhofar, but they are now a very significant force in the region, and their actions are having effects globally.
More photos showing the aftermath of the attack by Russian armed forces on the Southern Bridge in Kyiv.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has confirmed the destruction of the Southern Bridge over the Dnieper River in Kyiv. pic.twitter.com/xKjKK0dWs9
Meanwhile, the government of little twerp Burnham is cutting the cost of gherkins by a few pence. It’s almost (?) insulting.
As I said on the blog recently, Burnham majors in minor things.
Most people forsee a collapse, they are waiting for an apocalyptic explosion. In reality you are living through the collapse. Everything just gets worse and worse until you accept any offer of assistance the system offers you.
— BBC World Service (@bbcworldservice) May 16, 2026
Our animal friends.
Given the ridiculous volume of Prime Ministers that Britain’s endured in recent years, I think it should now be law that if a PM quits or is forced out during his/her term, it automatically triggers a new general election. That might concentrate their minds to do a better job.
Who on Earth would vote “Conservative” now? I presume only people aged 70+ and who take little interest in what is actually happening in the UK, or in what has happened over the past 16+ years.
"Tell us one specific thing [Burnham] will do"
Simons: ".. one of the things he's really committed to.. energy, water, social housing.. have gotten so expensive.. & one of the reasons why.. is that we've privatised a lot of them"
I am presuming that that half-Jew has been promised a peerage in return for facilitating Burnham’s return to Parliament. If it happens.
Pundits seem to be operating in the mindset that opposing Brexit is still a mortal sin to Leave voters, where the real sin was refusing to implement Brexit in 2017-19 after they'd voted for it. Since Brexit has happened, it's just a policy, not an identity-level insult to oppose
Now it’s filled with annoying Polish people, Muslim ran corner shops, wogs, Indians, litter everywhere, junkies and violent teens. Still a beautiful city aesthetically.
Mark Collett on the ground in London alongside @RealSamMelia@Steve_Laws_@RemigrationNow_ & others facilitating a very successful leafletting campaign on the message of White Britons becoming a minority in their home countries
The truth, demonstrated so clearly by El Salvador and Bukele, is that a cold-blooded, dispassionate savagery is necessary to restore order to cities that have allowed tbemselves to decay this far. For centuries, something like 1% of the male population was executed, in order to… https://t.co/fo9SLOPt1v
Britain must become, or revert to being, an ethnostate, before anything else. That will not solve all of our problems, or solve any of them 100%, but it will solve most of them 95%. Start from there.
The US Congress is unlikely to approve another major supplemental spending package for Ukraine, Brian Mast, Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said:https://t.co/pgGztGAvgIpic.twitter.com/8OIkFXzcr2
Total daily losses of the Ukrainian armed forces in the special operation zone amounted to approximately 1,115 troops, according to data from the Russian Defense Ministry:https://t.co/fd4XsSvprLpic.twitter.com/KtATl0nSuL
A kindergarten in the city of Eenergodar in the Zaporozhye Region, came under a Ukrainian drone attack, no one was hurt, the city’s mayor, Maxim Pukhov, said:https://t.co/FJbpxlVacrpic.twitter.com/wrRZMsxExv
True. The betting market is a poor guide to the likely result of a by-election in particular.
I respect Maggie Oliver a great deal. Her words should be taken very seriously indeed. This is not about party politics. It is about getting those girls and their families the truth & justice they deserve ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/DPpqymwet9
To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years.
[“To get a license to drive a black cab in London, you have to memorize 25,000 streets, 20,000 landmarks, and the fastest route between any two points in a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. It takes most people three to four years.
A British neuroscientist asked the obvious question nobody had thought to ask. What does that actually do to a human brain?
Her name was Eleanor Maguire. The study changed neuroscience forever.
The exam is called The Knowledge. It was introduced in 1865, and the format has barely changed since.
Applicants ride a moped around London for years with a clipboard strapped to the handlebars, tracing every possible route between every possible pair of points in the city.
They get tested in person by an examiner who can ask them, on the spot, for the shortest legal route between any two addresses in a database of tens of thousands. Half the people who attempt it fail.
The ones who pass have spent an average of four years studying full time and have taken the test 12 times before getting through.
Maguire was watching a TV movie about it in 1995 when she had the idea. These were not ordinary people. They were people running one of the most extreme spatial memory training programs that exists anywhere on Earth.
If the human brain could be reshaped by experience, this was the cleanest natural experiment anyone was ever going to find.
She put 16 of them in an MRI machine.
Their posterior hippocampi were significantly larger than the brains of matched controls. The longer a driver had been working, the bigger the difference got.
A 40-year veteran had a measurably more developed hippocampus than a 5-year veteran, and both had more than someone who had never driven a cab.
Here is why that finding broke a century of consensus.
Until 2000, every neuroscience textbook in the world taught a version of the same idea. The adult brain is essentially fixed. You are born with a set number of neurons. Childhood is the window where the wiring gets laid down. After puberty, the structure freezes, and the rest of your life is just slow decline.
Maguire’s study was one of the first pieces of human evidence that this was simply wrong. Adult brains physically remodel themselves in response to what you ask them to do. Not metaphorically. Structurally. With grey matter you can measure on a scan.
The skeptics had an obvious objection. Maybe people with bigger hippocampi were just more likely to become taxi drivers in the first place. The brains were not changing. The job was selecting for brains that already looked that way.
So Maguire ran the experiment again. Properly this time.
She recruited 79 trainees who were just starting to study for The Knowledge and 31 controls who were not. She scanned all of them at the start. Then she waited four years. Of the 79 trainees, 39 eventually passed the exam and 20 failed. She scanned them again.
The trainees who passed had grown larger posterior hippocampi over those four years. The trainees who failed had not. The controls who never studied had not. The brain change was not selection. It was construction.
The act of memorizing the city had physically rebuilt the part of the brain responsible for spatial memory, and the rebuild only happened in the people who actually did the work.
There is a quieter finding from this research that almost nobody quotes, and it is the one I cannot stop thinking about.
The drivers had a bigger posterior hippocampus, but they had a smaller anterior hippocampus. The brain had not magically expanded. It had reallocated. Tissue that was being used for one type of memory had been compressed to make room for another.
When Maguire ran follow-up cognitive tests, the cabbies were measurably worse than controls at certain visual memory tasks unrelated to navigation. They had paid for The Knowledge with something else. The trade was real.
She also ran a second control experiment that is the part of the story most people never hear. She scanned London bus drivers. Same hours behind the wheel. Same city. Same traffic. Same stress. The only difference was that bus drivers follow fixed routes. They do not have to navigate. Their hippocampi looked completely normal.
The cab drivers had not grown bigger hippocampi from driving. They had grown them from the constant, active, effortful retrieval of spatial information from memory.
That distinction is the entire study.
Then in 2020, McGill researchers ran the inverse experiment. They tracked 50 regular drivers and measured how often they used GPS. The participants who relied most heavily on turn-by-turn navigation had measurably weaker spatial memory. When the researchers retested a subset of them three years later, the heavier GPS users had declined fastest.
The hippocampus, the same region the cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts, was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them.
The mechanism Maguire spent 25 years documenting works in both directions. Brains grow what you make them grow. They lose what you stop asking them to do.
The taxi drivers were running the most intense spatial memory training program on Earth. Most of the rest of us are running the opposite program without realizing it.
Maguire died in early 2025. UCL’s tribute described the cabbie study as a stroke of creative genius. She had spent her entire career on a single question. What does it physically take to remember something, and what changes inside a person who remembers a lot of it.
The answer is the part that should change how you live.“]
