@EstherMaile
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“The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children”. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer-
United Kingdom
Joined June 2012
- Tweets58.9K
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Esther retweeted
Beef production has been the largest driver of deforestation this century.
Over the last two decades, around 128 million hectares of forest have been cleared to make way for agriculture and forest plantations. That’s an area five times the size of the United Kingdom.
What has driven this deforestation?
A recent paper estimated the contribution of different agricultural products over the last few decades. In the chart, you can see the breakdown.
Beef production has been the largest driver by far, contributing over 40% of the total. This has mostly been the clearing of forest for grazing pasture, especially across Brazil and other countries in Latin America.
Oilseeds — mostly soy and oil palm — were the second-largest driver, again concentrated in Latin America for soy and in Indonesia and Malaysia for palm oil. While deforestation for palm oil was high in the early 2000s and 2010s, it has fallen a lot in recent years.
Forest plantations have been a large driver of deforestation in North America and East Asia. Deforestation for most other products — including cereals, roots and tubers, and cash crops like cocoa and coffee — has been concentrated in Africa, where yields have not grown quickly enough to offset rising demand.
(written by @_HannahRitchie)
Esther retweeted
Rome, Italy.
People are in denial about climate change. There’s loads of comments online about drains and maintenance when in fact rainfall intensity is increasing across the planet as the atmosphere heats, exactly as scientists told us it would.
It’s going to get much worse.
Esther retweeted
🚨 Hillsborough Law should cover Fujitsu & Capita bosses, say campaigners
The Public Office (Accountability) Bill will make lack of candour by public officials a criminal offence.
But campaigners want it expanded to private sector suppliers too. computerweekly.com/news/3666…
Esther retweeted
I have serious concerns about crowdfunding jurors, but I am especially opposed to crowdfunding a juror based on the position he took in deliberations.
Turning jury service, and specifically a particular vote, into something financially rewarding is abhorrent to me and frankly goes against everything the judiciary is supposed to stand for. I know public confidence in that ideal is already badly strained, but this makes it worse.
The largest of these fundraisers is framed around his role as the holdout, and the total climbed substantially after he went public with his defense of his vote. The moment that money becomes a reward for a particular vote, you create an incentive that has no place in a jury room, and every juror in the next high-profile trial will know it.
Counsel's handling has not helped. In roughly a day he went from calling the existing fundraisers "100% FAKE," to clarifying that unauthorized "does not in any way mean unappreciated," to announcing that he will establish an "authorized, consolidated, and official fundraiser for our Heroic Holdout moving forward."
This is less than two weeks out from a status hearing on whether the Commonwealth retries this case.
As it stands, we essentially have no framework for what happens when strangers send a discharged juror six figures immediately after trial because of the position he is publicly credited with taking. This has never been addressed previously by our laws, because it never had to be. I would argue that this seems like a great time to do so.
Esther retweeted
Can you help?
Police have issued an appeal for information after a teenage girl went missing from her home in Bolton on Friday 11 September.
CCTV footage shows 13-year-old Lillia in Manchester city centre two days later.
Read more: trib.al/G0CnUuf
Esther retweeted
He’s not a hero. He’s not an American patriot. He went in determined to NOT follow the law and that’s exactly what he did.
Those celebrating this, ONLY because you personally agree with his reasons, are supreme hypocrites.
Esther retweeted
Baroness Casey has done some incredible work to expose serious failings in many public services
The Met Police, Grooming Gangs, and now SEND
It's a shame that her recommendations following her dive into group Child Sexual Abuse wasn't taken forward - the need to address systemic multi agency failures
Every time it's the same story
Every time it's swept back under the carpet
She's a powerful voice, if only people listened
Baroness Casey explicitly identified the critical need to address systemic multi-agency failures in her initial rapid review, formally known as the National Audit on Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.
The audit uncovered a "collective failure" and "institutional paralysis" stretching back decades. Rather than treating the issue as a series of isolated criminal incidents, she highlighted deep-rooted systemic neglect across the entire multi-agency network responsible for child safeguarding.
Key Multi-Agency and Systemic Failures Identified:
Fragmentation and Data Silos: She found massive fragmentation in how different authorities responded. Agencies—including the police, local authorities, and national systems—failed to coordinate, share intelligence, or act on repeated warnings.
Widespread "Blindness" and Denial: The report cited a pervasive culture of "blindness, ignorance, prejudice, defensiveness" and denial, particularly regarding the ethnicity of perpetrators, which hampered cross-agency investigations.
Victim-Blaming Culture: Instead of receiving multi-agency support, vulnerable children were frequently failed by the system—either being criminalized themselves or having their abuse downgraded by authorities who wrongly assumed they had "consented".
Local Resistance to Accountability: During her review, Baroness Casey noted a distinct reluctance from local councils and statutory services to face up to their shortcomings, refuse to share data, or cooperate with assurance reviews.
Because these institutional failures were so widespread and deeply embedded, Baroness Casey changed her mind during the audit process regarding the need for a national approach. She concluded that a patchwork of localized reviews would be insufficient, and formally recommended the establishment of a comprehensive national inquiry to hold these failing institutions to account.
And yet neither Rupert Lowe or the National Inquiry included this within their remit!
Esther retweeted
The expert witness scandal the Family Court still has not fixed familyinjustice.substack.com…
“Until they do, the committee should be judged not by meetings held or guidance written, but by the dangers it knew about and still cannot show it controlled.” 👇
familyinjustice.substack.com…
Esther retweeted
Sometimes the woman with the biggest heart becomes the easiest person to take for granted.
She forgives more than she should. She gives second chances, third chances, and sometimes even tenth chances. She stays through difficult seasons, carries burdens that were never hers to carry, and keeps believing that things will eventually get better.
But kindness is not weakness.
A loving woman will fight for a relationship, communicate through problems, and give her all to the people she cares about. Yet even the strongest heart has limits. Every disappointment leaves a mark. Every broken promise chips away at trust. Every act of neglect slowly teaches her what she means to you.
Too many people mistake loyalty for permanence.
They assume she will always be there because she always has been. They get comfortable receiving her love without putting in the effort to protect it. They take her patience as permission to keep making the same mistakes.
What they fail to understand is that a woman can love you with all her heart and still decide she's had enough.
The day she chooses herself isn't usually the day she stops loving you. It's the day she realizes that loving you has been costing her peace, her happiness, and her self-respect.
Love should never be one person endlessly giving while the other endlessly takes.
If you're fortunate enough to have a woman who loves you genuinely, appreciates you, supports you, and stands beside you when life gets hard, don't wait until she's exhausted to show her value.
Because one day the woman who kept choosing you may finally choose herself.
And by then, it may be too late.
Esther retweeted
Unfortunately, the way patriarchy has worked out in the era of women's rights was to only allow women who are traitors to their own kind, and who are willing to do the dirty work for the patriarchy, to advance in the system, so that men can gaslight women that it's women hurting women more than men. It's psy-op, like "happy hooker" gaslighting orchestrated by pimps and johns, but fronted by women who they control entirely. This is the worst kind of DARVO and gaslighting, which has been especially soul-destroying for women and girls, and it has brought women's rights to its knees. We need to tough this out and keep going, though, even if it seems hopeless right now. Because somewhere down the line, there will come a time when women who are genuinely concerned with protecting safety of women and children, and brave enough to do it, will get to positions of power and the balance will start to genuinely shift from the porn-soaked, narcissistic and predatory male supremacy toward something far more benevolent and balanced. But we are not there yet, not by a long shot.
Esther retweeted
The mental load, the invisible work of remembering, planning, and tracking everything that keeps a household running, falls disproportionately on women, and a 2019 study confirmed it is cognitive labour that takes a measurable toll.
The concept was described by sociologist Allison Daminger at Harvard in a study that broke household management into four cognitive stages: anticipating needs, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring the results. She found that women performed the majority of the anticipating and monitoring, the two stages that are hardest to see and hardest to share, while decision-making was more evenly split.
Anticipating means noticing that the milk is almost gone before anyone asks for it. Monitoring means checking that the dentist appointment was actually made, the permission slip was signed, the prescription was picked up. These tasks run in the background of a woman's day like software she cannot close, and they consume cognitive resources that are then unavailable for other things.
The toll is not abstract. Studies on working mothers show higher cortisol levels on workdays and, in some cases, on weekends, compared to working fathers in the same household. The stress does not come from any single task. It comes from the fact that the list never empties, and the person holding it cannot put it down because nobody else knows it exists.
The phrase "just tell me what to do" is itself part of the problem. It puts the work of identifying, assigning, and monitoring the task back on the person who is already carrying the list. The study says the load is real, it is unequal, and it is invisible by design. doi.org/10.1177/000312241985…
“Children deserve safety.
Protective parents deserve to be heard.
And the truth must come before profit and power.”
m.facebook.com/story.php?sto…
Esther retweeted
People don't understand why our world is the way it is.
So let me explain.
In the 1960's and 1970's Rupert Murdoch and his group of Far Right billionaires wanted to own the whole world.
But countries still owned many things and they weren't for sale.
So Rupert Murdoch got Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and a whole other bunch of Right Wing Privatisation ghouls elected to sell everything to them.
You are now living in the result of a world owned by these evil billionaires, and the only solution is take back all the things they should never have been allowed to steal.
Same ‘snakes in suits’ who vilify and persecute protective/abused mothers in the Family Courts and make children available to perpetrators….☹️👇
WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE - POST OFFICE ROBBER
Let me tell you about Vipin Patel. He ran the post office in Horspath, a small village in Oxfordshire. In 2010 the @PostOffice) accused him of stealing money from his own branch. He hadn't. A Post Office's computer said he had, and that was apparently enough to prosecute a man.
This is one of those cases where every moral boundary got crossed. Post Office executives and the lawyers who ran these prosecutions acted like gangsters in suits, and the only fitting consequence is long prison sentences for the people who signed off on it.
The computer was Horizon, built by Fujitsu (@fujitsu_uk). It kept inventing shortfalls that were never actually missing. The Post Office knew the system was unreliable and prosecuted people, because admitting that would have cost more than ruining a few hundred lives.
Vipin sold his wife's jewellery and cashed in his Royal Mail pension trying to cover shortfalls that eventually topped £75,000. In 2011 he was convicted of fraud and given an 18 week suspended prison sentence. His business ended there and then.
Then his own village turned on him.
Someone put a sign on his shop door.
It read Wanted Dead or Alive, Post Office Robber, £10,000 reward.
In December 2020, Vipin was one of the first postmasters in the country to have his conviction quashed, at Southwark Crown Court.
10 years of his life gone, for a crime the Post Office itself invented by relying on a system it knew was broken.
That was almost 6 years ago. He is still waiting for the money that is supposed to put any of this right.
Vipin now walks with crutches. Doctors say he is likely to be paralysed. His son Varchas Patel (@VarchasPatel) has spent the past year writing to MPs Gareth Thomas (@gareththomasMP) and Blair McDougall (@blairmcdougall), asking for one simple thing.
Pay the £600K full and final settlement as an interim payment first, so his father is not forced to choose between help now and the amount he is actually owed. The family says the real figure is closer to £1M.
Even Parliament's own Business and Trade Committee, chaired by Liam Byrne (@liambyrnemp), said in June 2026 that £600K should be that interim payment. The government is still ignoring the advice of its own MPs.
This month the Public Accounts Committee (@CommonsPAC) published a report on the compensation schemes:
- 76% of victims said the claims process was distressing or retraumatising.
- 63% called it extremely difficult.
- 23% called it somewhat difficult.
- Add that up and you get almost everybody who has ever tried to claim a penny.
The Department for Business and Trade (@biztradegovuk) admitted it completely misjudged the scale of its own scandal.
It expected a few hundred claims. It got 2,417 by the first deadline, then over 10,000 more once the scheme reopened. For a government department, that counts as a rounding error.
Some claims took more than 1,395 working days to settle. The Committee says anything over 1,000 working days is unacceptable. More than half of claimants say nobody bothered to keep them updated while they waited.
Fellow victim Seema Misra OBE (@SeemaMisra_OBE), jailed while 8 weeks pregnant in 2010 and cleared in 2021, says the government found £250M for lawyers and acted like the rules did not apply to it the entire time.
Vipin Patel did not steal a single penny from anyone. The Post Office and the government that owns it have had 6 years to put this right. They have chosen delay instead.
Sources: @nickwallis @Karlfl @LBC @Guardian and many others.