According to infrastructure guy Simon Ludlam on a recent podcast, the U.K.’s Greenlink Interconnector was rerouted after “hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls” from Harry Potter Adults who were angry that the power cable would allegedly disturb the fictional location of the fictional grave of Dobby, the fictional formerly enslaved elf who was offhandedly freed by the fantasy series’ dimwitted but wealthy protagonist as a sort of prank on his private school enemy’s family, and who subsequently suffered both the social rejection of his still-enslaved fellow elves and the continued indifference bordering on contempt of his human idol, Harry Potter, before ultimately being killed while heroically rescuing Potter and several of his fellow human slave owners. […]

It took a random Reddit poster in this week’s r/ukpolitics “weekly Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction megathread” to fact check a story that the British and American press and me and you and everyone we know deeply wanted to believe was true:

First of all, this happened years ago. The consultation was in 2018, the cable was laid starting in 2022, it was tested at the end of 2024, and it's been in use since the start of 2025.

The cable wasn't dug into the top of the beach, it was drilled horizontally underground (point 7 here). This has evidently been the case since at least October 2018, and from what I can tell the route under the beach did not change between then and October 2021 when it was finalised.

Andy Burnham has said he will consider imposing a ban on disposable barbecues amid the risk of further wildfires as extreme heat continues to grip parts of the UK.

The prime minister will chair an emergency Cobra committee later on Wednesday in response to a prolonged spell of exceptionally hot and dry weather.

On a visit to Stevenage earlier, he said single-use grills could be banned to help prevent fires.

”There is obviously a significant problem of wildfires in the south. The New Forest fire is a great concern; we have seen them in northern areas as well as Suffolk recently.”

He added: “This is a message for the public as well, because the wildfires I mentioned, many of them have been created by disposable barbecues.”

It comes as temperatures are forecast to reach 33C today and up to 38C tomorrow.

An investigation by The Telegraph has found a potential link between Bankman-Fried’s money and Mr Streeting’s office.

The American gave a 610,000 dollar (almost £500,000) gift to David Lawrence on June 30 2022, who had founded a group called Labour for the Long Term, according to the newspaper.

On August 22 2022, Labour for the Long Term began funding a policy adviser role for Mr Streeting’s office “at a cost of £2,500 a month, total value £30,000”.

Asked about the money on Friday, Mr Streeting said: “I’m confident that I’ve received no money from Sam Bankman-Fried.

“I’ve never met the guy. I’ve never spoken to him.

“When Labour for the Long Term, which is a Labour supporting group, were willing to donate to support staffing in my office when I was a shadow minister, we did due diligence, not just on the organisation but asked the organisation to provide us a list of the donors who were donating to support that work.

“Those donors did not include Sam Bankman-Fried and, in fact, the only donor that did have a connection to Sam Bankman-Fried has since confirmed that the money he donated was his own money, not Sam Bankman-Fried.

“So, I’m absolutely confident that I’ve received no money from Sam Bankman-Fried.”

The New Statesman can reveal that Banks directed investigators from Precision Risk and Intelligence (a private investigation firm he previously owned, which is now dissolved), to look into Pogrund after the Insight story. Banks did not deny he had launched the probe. “We believe the Sunday Times used hacked information and that was an area of interest. We do have an investigative arm that’s got advanced capabilities,” he told the New Statesman.

VIZ Media, a leading global producer of anime, manga and original graphic novels, has teamed with The Gotham Group to develop film and television adaptations based on titles from its original intellectual property. The deal includes the company’s acclaimed VIZ Originals graphic novel line and its landmark animated RWBY franchise.

Sorry about the long downtime everyone. What happened is sometime around 20:00 yesterday the instance went down. I wouldn't be able to ssh into the server until the morning, so I tried restarting the server through our hosting's web interface, but this didn't work.

When I got home I found the reason Lemmy wasn't working was because the database had suffered some corruption. Thankfully, the only lost data was 3 posts, but some data got duplicated in random tables that shouldn't be and this wasn't the easiest thing to track down.

Why did the server go down in the first place?

I don't actually know the real reason, what I suspect happened is that the frontend got taken down by the rampant scraping we've been subject to. To put it into prospective, just look at the jump in the size of our web logs:

These are compressed plain text, like it's unreal.

But back to the server, I think when I restarted the server to get everything back up, docker killed the database before it had shutdown properly hence the corruption.

Anyway, it's sorted now. It's going to be a bit quiet until we've caught up with the activities we've missed, so enjoy the quiet while you can.

Going to bring the server down for a bit to update some system software, particularly the kernel.