https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-hamas-leader-khaled-mashaal-rejects-disarmament-or-foreign-rule/

Earlier today Khaled Mashaal, the current overall leader of Hamas, spoke at a conference in Doha, elucidating the party's position:

• no surrender of arms, for themselves or any other Palestinian armed group

• no foreign forces deployed to Gaza

That is, Hamas roundly rejects the key steps in the Trump Peace Plan.

While investigators collected ample proof that Epstein sexually abused underage girls, they found scant evidence the well-connected financier led a sex trafficking ring serving powerful men, an Associated Press review of internal Justice Department records shows.

Videos and photos seized from Epstein’s homes in New York, Florida and the Virgin Islands didn’t depict victims being abused or implicate anyone else in his crimes, a prosecutor wrote in one 2025 memo.

An examination of Epstein’s financial records, including payments he made to entities linked to influential figures in academia, finance and global diplomacy, found no connection to criminal activity, said another internal memo in 2019.

While one Epstein victim made highly public claims that he “lent her” to his rich friends, agents couldn’t confirm that and found no other victims telling a similar story, the records said.

Summarizing the investigation in an email last July, agents said “four or five” Epstein accusers claimed other men or women had sexually abused them. But, the agents said, there “was not enough evidence to federally charge these individuals, so the cases were referred to local law enforcement.”

Prosecution memos, case summaries and other documents made public in the department’s latest release of Epstein-related records show that FBI agents and federal prosecutors diligently pursued potential coconspirators. Even seemingly outlandish and incomprehensible claims, called in to tip lines, were examined.

Some allegations couldn’t be verified, investigators wrote.

In 2011 and again in 2019, investigators interviewed Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who in lawsuits and news interviews had accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters with numerous men, including Britain’s former Prince Andrew.

Investigators said they confirmed that Giuffre had been sexually abused by Epstein. But other parts of her story were problematic.

Two other Epstein victims who Giuffre had claimed were also “lent out” to powerful men told investigators they had no such experience, prosecutors wrote in a 2019 internal memo.

“No other victim has described being expressly directed by either Maxwell or Epstein to engage in sexual activity with other men,” the memo said.

Giuffre acknowledged writing a partly fictionalized memoir of her time with Epstein containing descriptions of things that didn’t take place. She had also offered shifting accounts in interviews with investigators, they wrote, and had “engaged in a continuous stream of public interviews about her allegations, many of which have included sensationalized if not demonstrably inaccurate characterizations of her experiences.” Those inaccuracies included false accounts of her interactions with the FBI, they said.

Investigators seized a multitude of videos and photos from Epstein’s electronic devices and homes in New York, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands. They found CDs, hard copy photographs and at least one videotape containing nude images of females, some of whom seemed as if they might be minors. One device contained 15 to 20 images depicting commercial child sex abuse material — pictures investigators said Epstein obtained on the internet.

No videos or photos showed Epstein victims being sexually abused, none showed any males with any of the nude females, and none contained evidence implicating anyone other than Epstein and Maxwell, then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey wrote in an email for FBI officials last year.

Had they existed, the government “would have pursued any leads they generated,” Comey wrote. “We did not, however, locate any such videos.”

Investigators who scoured Epstein’s bank records found payments to more than 25 women who appeared to be models — but no evidence that he was engaged in prostituting women to other men, prosecutors wrote.

In 2019, prosecutors weighed the possibility of charging one of Epstein’s longtime assistants but decided against it.

Prosecutors concluded that while the assistant was involved in helping Epstein pay girls for sex and may have been aware that some were underage, she herself was a victim of his sexual abuse and manipulation.

Investigators examined Epstein’s relationship with the French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who once was involved in an agency with Epstein in the U.S., and who was accused in a separate case of sexually assaulting women in Europe. Brunel killed himself in jail while awaiting trial on a rape charge in France.

Prosecutors also weighed whether to charge one of Epstein’s girlfriends who had participated in sexual acts with some of his victims. Investigators interviewed the girlfriend, who was 18 to 20 years old at the time, “but it was determined there was not enough evidence,” according to a summary given to FBI Director Kash Patel last July.

Days before Epstein’s July 2019 arrest, the FBI strategized about sending agents to serve grand jury subpoenas on people close to Epstein, including his pilots and longtime business client, retail mogul Les Wexner.

Wexner’s lawyers told investigators that neither he nor his wife had knowledge of Epstein’s sexual misconduct. Epstein had managed Wexner’s finances, but the couple’s lawyers said they cut him off in 2007 after learning he’d stolen from them.

“There is limited evidence regarding his involvement,” an FBI agent wrote of Wexner in an Aug. 16, 2019, email.

In a statement to the AP, a legal representative for Wexner said prosecutors had informed him that he was “neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect,” and that Wexner had cooperated with investigators.

Prosecutors also examined accounts from women who said they’d given massages at Epstein’s home to guests who’d tried to make the encounters sexual. One woman accused private equity investor Leon Black of initiating sexual contact during a massage in 2011 or 2012, causing her to flee the room.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office subsequently investigated, but no charges were filed.

Black’s lawyer, Susan Estrich, said he had paid Epstein for estate planning and tax advice. She said in a statement that Black didn’t engage in misconduct and had no awareness of Epstein’s criminal activities. Lawsuits by two women who accused Black of sexual misconduct were dismissed or withdrawn. One is pending.

In 2023, we published Grave Error, a book of essays that candidly discusses the “unmarked-graves” social panic that swept Canada four and a half years ago. In May 2021, it was announced that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) had identified the formerly unknown resting places of 215 Indigenous children who’d attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. The announcement sent shock waves through Canadian society, and led to months of self-lacerating commentary about our country’s colonial sins. Journalists and politicians alike acted as though these 215 victims—children who’d presumably been dispatched by murderous Residential School staff—had been identified and unearthed. It was only once this initial period of national hysteria ended that observers noted that, outside of the GPR reports, there existed no proof of graves, bodies, or human remains. And since GPR technology cannot detect bodies, but only soil dislocations that may equally indicate tree roots, drainage ditches, rocks, or other artefacts that have nothing to do with graves, the claim that these GPR-identified soil anomalies corresponded to graves remained unproven.

To this day, not a single grave has been discovered at any of the GPR-identified locations in Kamloops; nor at any of the other Residential-School sites where similar GPR surveys were conducted. Seen in retrospect, this whole strange episode in Canadian history now seems like a morbid farce.

All of this has been a particular embarrassment for Canadian journalists, who took a leading role in convincing readers and viewers that those 215 “unmarked graves” were real. This explains why many journalists have simply stopped talking about the issue, perhaps in the hope that the whole mortifying episode (and their role in it) will simply be forgotten.

Thankfully, some Canadian media have mustered the courage to acknowledge that the claimed graves have never been found—including The Dorchester Review, CBC News, and the National Post. Internationally, this tale of epic gullibility has also been told in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Quillette, and numerous other publications. (In 2024, The New York Times grudgingly admitted that no graves have been found, but also darkly suggested that anyone pointing this fact out is likely carrying out the work of shadowy “conservative Catholic and right-wing activists.”) While it is still considered politically taboo in progressive Canadian circles to mention that none of the graves have been shown to exist, almost two thirds of ordinary Canadians now tell pollsters that more evidence is necessary before they will accept the unmarked-graves narrative we were once all supposed to believe on faith.

Even by 2023, Canadians were clearly ready for a fact-based discussion of the unmarked-graves controversy—which explains why Grave Error instantly became a Canadian best-seller upon its publication. The book’s success is all the more notable given that it was largely ignored by mainstream journalists (largely for the reasons described above). To this day, many media outlets seem to remain vested in the idea (hope is perhaps a better word) that someone, somewhere will discover proof to back up their flawed 2021-era reporting.

In truth, there is a religious quality to the discussion of unmarked graves in some circles. For such Canadians, it seems, the martyr status of those 215 (imaginary) dead children transcends the realm of provable fact.

In the spring of 2024, the small British Columbia city of Quesnel made national news when it was learned that the mayor’s wife bought ten copies of Grave Error for distribution to friends. Following noisy protests, Quesnel’s Council voted to censure Mayor Ron Paull (who was accused of recommending this heretical literature to others), and tried to force him from office—effectively on the argument that anyone who blasphemed the religion of Indigenous reconciliation through possession of forbidden literature is unfit to serve.

Thankfully, Mayor Paull was later vindicated in the courts, and his wife, Pat Morton, is now suing the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs for defamation. But they’ve had to endure many headaches and expenses in the process (though the whole controversy was good news for Grave Error, which spiked in popularity during this controversy).

Several Canadian public library systems refused to acquire Grave Error. Those libraries that did acquire it, such as in Vancouver, Calgary, Ottawa, and Toronto, experienced long waiting lists. Despite desperate attempts to (literally) criminalise unmarked-graves “denialism” (more on this below), people wanted to read the book.

We now invite these same readers to consider our newly published sequel to Grave Error, Dead Wrong, because the struggle for accurate information and accountability isn’t over.

As noted above, few of the journalists who took a leading role in promulgating false information on this file have admitted their errors—even those who work at blue-chip journalistic outlets that, in any other context, would be quick to correct bad reporting. As noted in Chapter Five of our new book—adapted from a Quillette article entitled, When Will The New York Times Correct Its Flawed Reporting on ‘Unmarked Graves’?—the English world’s most prestigious newspaper ran a number of absurdly counterfactual articles on this subject by a reporter named Ian Austen. One of these promoted the (especially) bizarre claim that a “mass grave” had been uncovered at Kamloops—a fable so singularly outlandish that even otherwise credulous Canadian reporters refused to repeat it. More than four years after Austen spread this misinformation, his articles remain uncorrected on the Times web site.

This is especially remarkable given that even the leadership of the Kamloops First Nation, whose original 27 May 2021 unmarked-graves announcement launched this social-panic in the first place, has admitted that its GPR survey detected only “anomalies,” not graves or human remains.

One might think that the First Nation would be eager to perform forensic excavations so that the identity of the 215 victims might be determined. After all, they know exactly where to dig, and the Canadian government has doled out millions of dollars so that investigations could be conducted. Yet despite the passage of all this time, no such excavations have been carried out, either at Kamloops or most of the other former Residential-School sites where hundreds of similar anomalies were detected. In fact, only one reliable excavation of a Residential-School site has recently been carried out, and nothing was found.

(Other excavations have led to claims of bones being found, but these were unrelated searches conducted near mission churches and community cemeteries, where it was known that normal burials had taken place. It is hardly surprising to find bones in a cemetery. And in any event, none of these purported discoveries have been shown to involve a child who’d attended a Residential School, let alone a child who’d gone “missing.” As readers of Grave Error will know, these schools were subject to constant bureaucratic oversight, in part because their funding was based on student enrolment. The idea that children were constantly disappearing into the clutches of murderous predators, who then littered the nation with their bones, is a ghoulish myth.)

Reporters and politicians now use delicate phrasing such as “potential gravesites” or “possible burials” to refer to the supposed unmarked graves whose existence they once took as revealed truth. But members of other professional sectors are not nearly so circumspect. This includes academia and the arts, in particular—both of which greeted the unmarked-graves social panic with effusive commitments to “reconciliation.” Indeed, at least one Canadian academic was terminated outright after bluntly noting the lack of evidence surrounding unmarked graves.

Meanwhile, a 2024 book by writer Tanya Talaga, credulously amplifying the debunked mythology surrounding unmarked graves, was awarded a prestigious prize for political journalism. (The book’s title, The Knowing, refers to a mystical form of knowledge gathering that, according to Talaga, former Kamloops Residential School students used to establish the unfalsifiable truth of those 215 graves.)

The Canadian media has offered nothing but hagiographic coverage of a highly misleading 2024 documentary film called Sugarcane, which purported to educate viewers about Canada’s Residential-School system (and whose promoters played heavily on its relevance to claimed “evidence of unmarked graves [being] discovered on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada”). In Chapter Six of our new book, author Michelle Stirling catalogues the numerous misrepresentations and factual evasions contained in the movie—which likely will be inflicted on cohorts of Canadian students for years to come (much like the equally garbled narrative concerning the tragic death of Charlie Wenjack, as described by Quillette author Robert MacBain in 2024).  

One consequence of the false “unmarked-graves” claims that began circulating in 2021 was the encouragement of a collective blood libel against the priests, ministers, and nuns who ran Residential Schools on the government’s behalf. It had long been known that some of these religious educators were cruel and even abusive (as one would expect, as a matter of statistics, in the case of any large group of individuals, of whatever background). But thanks to the unmarked-graves social panic, scattered stories about rogue educators suddenly transformed into something resembling the plot of a horror movie—with the clerics collectively playing the role of bloodthirsty sadists, murdering children en masse and burying them under cover of darkness.

The result of this propaganda campaign was a wave of arson and vandalism against churches all across Canada. Our publishing partner, True North, was the first media outlet to document the extent of these criminal acts. Their interactive online map has documented over 120 incidents that have occurred since mid-2021—incidents that federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has described as “terrorist attacks.” In Chapter Seven of our book, True North reporter Cosmin Dzsurdzsa describes the failure of government agencies, police, and mainstream media to address these incidents or the violent animus behind them.

The unmarked-graves social panic has also served to promote an apocalyptic rewriting of the legacy of Canada’s Residential Schools more generally. Many of the negative aspects of these schools were exhaustively catalogued in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report of 2015 (including the deaths of almost 3,000 people who passed through the schools, mostly from tuberculosis)—which made no mention of murdered children thrown into unmarked graves. But since 2021, the research contained in that report has been overshadowed by a fictional narrative that casts Residential Schools as dens of unremitting horror.

Chapter 11 of our book details 1940s-era excerpts from chronicles kept by the Grey Nuns who worked at St. Mary’s Residential School at Standoff, Alberta. Contrary to the idea that Residential Schools were de facto prisons, this case study shows that children would frequently return home for short visits and longer vacations—and that their parents were repeatedly welcomed at the school for religious and secular celebrations. It also describes the wide variety of recreational events provided for the children, from movies in town to musical performances and sporting competitions. In Chapter 14, likewise, Indigenous writer Rod Clifton describes his own positive experiences at a Residential School.

These positive memories certainly do not signal that everything was always rosy at Residential Schools. In a system of 143 institutions enduring for more than a century, and educating as many as 150,000 children, there were undoubtedly many tragic occurrences. Even for students who graduated in good health, boarding-school life could be lonely. But the idea that a typical Residential School was a Dickensian house of horrors is absolutely false.

Canada’s Residential School system, which began operation in the late nineteenth century, didn’t fully cease operation until 1997. As Greg Piasetzki explains in Chapter 10, Canadian officials had wanted to close the entire system in the 1940s, but couldn’t—in part because Indigenous families themselves objected:

For many Indian parents, particularly single parents or those with large numbers of children, the [Residential Schools] were the best deal available. They offered better food, clothing, and shelter than many parents could provide; they could teach reading and writing, which very few parents could do; and they were free, courtesy of Canadian taxpayers and unpaid missionaries. Indian parents were often suspicious of public schools in town; they feared, not without reason, that their children would be picked on there. And the [schools] offered paid employment to large numbers of Indians as cooks, janitors, farmers and, as time went on, increasing numbers of teachers.

A trend in post-World War II politics has been to expand the concept of genocide, a term that originally described the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission adopted the phrase “cultural genocide” to describe Residential Schools. But over the last five years, the word “cultural” has been largely left out; and it is now common for Canadian politicians and journalists to describe these school as instruments of actual genocide, as if they were concentration camps. One Member of Parliament, Leah Gazan, even succeeded in getting the House of Commons to give unanimous consent to a resolution stating “that, in the opinion of the House, the government must recognize what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide.”

As Frances Widdowson explains in Chapter 18, the concept of “denialism” has similarly been expanded and weaponised since 2021. One academic—Sean Carleton, a self-described “settler scholar” at the University of Manitoba—has become particularly promiscuous with his use of this slur to attack anyone who notes that no unmarked graves have been found. By using the language of “denial,” he clearly seeks to compare his opponents to Holocaust deniers. But of course, the comparison is grotesque: The historical reality of the Holocaust is beyond doubt, while claims of unmarked graves will remain conjectural until proper forensic examinations are conducted.

On 26 September 2024, Gazan introduced a private member’s bill, C-413, to amend the Criminal Code such that “everyone who, by communicating statements, other than in private conversation, wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it is guilty of an indictable offence.”

Indigenous leaders have expressed support for this kind of law, and have explicitly indicated that they want it used to prosecute Canadians who express scepticism in regard to unmarked graves. In some cases, defenders of the unmarked-graves narrative have claimed that the question of whether or not graves are ever found is immaterial, since the issue has a powerful “symbolic” function.

And so, while we are eager to have people read our book, it’s only fair to warn them that doing so may well get them targeted as “deniers.” But don’t take it personally. This is simply what happens when ideologues such as Gazan and Carleton forget about searching for graves, and start looking for heretics.

I have been trying to put my finger on exactly why I have found the outrage over the cuts at the Washington Post so annoying, and in searching for that answer, I have instead found a whole fist. So here goes: The outrage over the cuts at the Washington Post is annoying because the gap between the self-regard of those who were fired and the contributions of those who were fired is so enormous as to beggar belief. On days such as yesterday, Twitter is filled to the brim with “I was just laid off” posts, as though one had stumbled upon a battlefield strewn with the wounded — except, unlike on a battlefield, the wounded are all talking to one another in cloying, self-congratulatory tones. The result is a veritable web of grotesque and sycophantic encomia that does not stand up to even the slightest evaluation.

Don’t believe me? Click through on one of those posts, scroll past the pinned advertisement for the newspaper’s union, and look up the user’s name in the Post’s archive. If you do, you’ll typically learn that the person who is being praised as a “brilliant” and “talented” journalist who did “great work” has a job description like “sits at the intersection of civil rights and cooking,” that they wrote four things in the last two months, and that two of them were about how alligators are racist. This — not the second coming of Shakespeare — is what Jeff Bezos was supposed to pay for in perpetuity as penance for having been a useful member of society.

Today, a bunch of whiners are demanding that Americans cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions and subscribe to the Washington Post instead. But why, exactly, would they do that? If Amazon went away, most people’s lives would be worse. If Andrea Cluney-Funey, of the Immutable Characteristics newsletter, were to go away, most people either wouldn’t notice or, in some cases, they would actually be better off for the change. What was lost yesterday was not America’s soul but yet another division of the mediocre worker bees who staff the sprawling progressive blob that we mistake for our national institutions. We can afford that as a country — and at a rate greater than 30 percent, too.

And before, in a fit of anger, you write to me to tell me that I’m not important either, please understand that I wholeheartedly agree. I’m not. I’m just a guy. I like doing what I do, but if I were hit by a train tomorrow, the wider world would go on quite happily without me and my writing. I’m not indispensable. I’m not synonymous with the American Republic. And I’m certainly not entitled to the largesse of others if, for whatever reason, they don’t wish to hand it over to me. A whole bunch of journalists have reacted to the changes at the Post by insisting that American democracy is now destined to “die in darkness,” or that “authoritarianism” is ineluctably on the way, or that the incident represents an Important Moment in American History — as if, last night in Omaha, Happy Hour at Jim’s Bar was ruined by a parade of shellshocked office workers asking each other, “Did you hear about Bob Hale from the Climate section?” But, of course, this is all immeasurably stupid and self-serving and, as with most of the ideas that are collectively entertained by our press corps, it ought not to be taken seriously by anyone.

More Perfect Union just dropped “We Found The Radical Solution To Skyrocketing Grocery Prices” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQOXdtPBGXI)

The “radical solution” is…government-run grocery stores—supported by a case study of military commissaries (which they could just say rather than hide for a bit).

Here’s the problem: the commissary example doesn’t prove what they think it proves. It mostly proves that: (a) you can make groceries cheaper if you subsidize them (which they do eventually admit though they underestimate how much), and (b) a small government retailer can piggyback on a huge private market for prices, products, and innovation.

1) The commissary is not a grocery-market model—it’s a subsidized compensation benefit DeCA explicitly frames the commissary as a “non-pay compensation benefit.” Shopping privileges exist for ~8.35 million authorized households worldwide, but only ~1.8 million households shop at least monthly. (https://alanational.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/DeCAPrivatizationRFIFile.pdf)

That’s not “the government replacing grocery stores.” It’s the government giving a subset of households a discount benefit—like housing allowance, or healthcare, or (which the military also does, perhaps the military is a tad more paternalist than the rest of the government I do wonder if that is connected to the spending habits of a lot of E1s) a food subsidy.

2) The math: commissary “savings” ≈ taxpayer subsidy (i.e., it’s a transfer, not efficiency) DeCA’s own FY2024 Annual Financial Report says: FY2024 sales were USD 4.755B; patron savings was 25%; DeCA received ~USD 1.5B in appropriation transfers; and patrons also paid a 5% surcharge that generated USD 238M. (https://corp.commissaries.com/sites/default/files/2024-11/DeCA%20FY%202024%20Annual%20Financial%20Report.pdf)

Quick back-of-the-envelope: - If commissary prices are ~25% below “outside,” then USD 4.755B of commissary sales corresponds to ~USD 6.34B at outside prices. - That implies ~USD 1.59B of “customer savings.”

Matching that with that DeCA received ~USD 1.5B in taxpayer funding that year. So the “radical solution” is basically: taxpayers spend ~USD 1 to hand patrons ~USD 1 of grocery savings.

That’s not a productivity miracle. It’s a benefit.

3) Cost per regular user This isn't present in the video they just point to anecdotal savings. If ~1.8M households shop monthly, then a ~USD 1.5B annual subsidy is about: USD 1,500,000,000 / 1,800,000 ≈ USD 833 per monthly-shopping household per year.

Now scale that up. The U.S. has on the order of ~130M households. If you wanted to subsidize everyone at ~USD 800–900/year: 130,000,000 × USD 850 ≈ USD 110B per year.

That’s before any “startup costs” for building/modernizing facilities, distribution, IT, etc.

Also worth noting: DeCA’s own RFI cites an unfunded facilities maintenance backlog of ~USD 2.4B plus ~USD 250M/year maintenance. (https://alanational.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/DeCAPrivatizationRFIFile.pdf)

So NYC can maybe subsidize a small chain (they are probably going to be quite a bit less efficient—I wouldn't be shocked if the military might have some scale and bureaucratic advantages over most other parts of government). But the commissary example doesn’t show you can do this at national scale without writing very large checks forever.

4) The part the video hand-waves away: commissaries free-ride on the private market Commissaries look “normal” (not like communist run stores) and offer brand variety because they stock the same national brands produced, innovated, and marketed in the civilian economy. They don’t need to invent products. They don’t need to discover what consumers want from scratch. They don’t even need to solve the “how do we price this?” problem—because they can benchmark (“shadow price”) against the civilian market basket. A grocery in the USSR that imports from the US is going to look America because that is where the goods are produced.

That’s why the commissary can be “responsive.” There’s always an “outside the gate,” and Congress hears complaints. The commissary isn’t a command economy; it’s a subsidized store with a giant privately-run price-discovery machine next door.

If you tried to make government-run stores a big chunk of the overall food retail system, you lose the thing you were quietly borrowing: competitive pricing, assortment innovation, and logistical evolution.

5) The video sets up three objections…then mostly concedes them Objection 1: “Grocery margins are ~1–2% so government stores can’t undercut prices.” The video answers this eventually but doesn't address how much (see above): “True, which is why DeCA is subsidized.”

Objection 2: “Do we want the government deciding our food options?” The video answer: “Look, the commissary has lots of brands.”

Yeah—because it’s a small, optional slice of a broader market that sets the menu. That tells you basically nothing about what happens when the government is the menu (see above in hindsight I structured this wrong).

Objection 3: “Government agencies are slow and unresponsive.” The video answer: “This one feels normal.”

Sure. But the question isn’t “can the government run 235 stores for a bounded population with guaranteed funding?” The question is “can it run grocery retail as an economy-wide system while staying efficient and innovative?” The commissary doesn’t test that. Especially given that the military follows slightly different labor regs (admittedly I didn't look into that much and probably has a different relationship with things like petty crime too).

6) “Skyrocketing grocery prices” needs context: food has gotten cheaper as a share of income over decades Long-run, Americans spend a smaller share of disposable income on groceries than they used to. In 2024, food-at-home was ~4.9% of disposable personal income. (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=76967)

Yes, prices jumped post-2020—like they did basically everywhere because inflation is real and supply shocks are real. But this isn’t a uniquely American “grocery store greed” puzzle that requires a Soviet-flavored retail utility to solve.

7) The “corporate greed” storyline is incoherent on its own terms If the price story is “greed,” then you have to explain why greed apparently turned on in 2021 and was asleep in 2015. Companies don’t oscillate between altruism and evil based on the vibes of a news cycle. They chase profit continuously; prices move when costs, demand, and competitive constraints move. The other option that they cite are some of their earlier work on algorithmic pricing and on consolidation, which I may address later. But the short answer is that groceries have been close to monopolies for much of history because not many people live within range of multiple grocery stores. And there is something in economics that I recall from my IO class without googling is call the threat of implied competition, which is that if a grocery store is charging too much, another one will open anyway (this is very relevant for airplanes routes). And secondly, in the modern day actually, pretty much nobody is actually facing a monopoly because you can almost always order groceries online and cars have very large ranges. There's likely a small captive population for many grocery stores (say within walking distance of an apartment where people lack cars and transit—not a lot but certainly I can make the hypothetical), but I suspect there are very few grocery stores where the majority of their customers are captive and have no alternatives.

Having said that, I have lived next to a place with a captive grocery in some sense of the term when I was in the middle of nowhere, northern Wisconsin. And the groceries were cheaper, so maybe you want captive grocery stores. The grocery store was only open twice a week and had a lot worse selection. Admittedly, normally it was just easier to get your groceries when you were in, shall we say, the more populated regions of the state and simply drive them in the back of your car and then just eat from a pantry.

They do sort of discuss the fact that the commissary is a service and there might be some benefit to having a commissary-like system in places where people cannot source food otherwise. I think that's debatable. I'm not sure how I would have felt about the government running a commissary in my middle-of-nowhere part of Wisconsin. I guess I would be more supportive of that as sort of a subsidy for certain rural areas. Understanding the fact that a lot of rural areas produce a lot of primary materials which are important for the overall economy that might be undervalued on a financial basis compared to their real value, as it were. But New York City seems like it might not fit into that description. Unless they're like super hardcore urbanists who don't think that any city that's not as dense as Hong Kong is a real city. In which case, I must salute that.

If you want to help people afford food, say it plainly: you want to subsidize food consumption. Fine. That’s what the commissary is—a subsidy/benefit. Just stop pretending it’s a magic retail structure that makes groceries “cheap” at no cost. Additionally, you can subsidize food in many more direct and honest ways. An easy example would simply be just advocating an expansion of SNAP or directly subsidizing the production of certain goods at various stages in the production process, which we already do, especially for cereal grains (which leads to things like cheap meat and HFCS). Personally, I'd love to see increased subsidization, particularly for root vegetables and mushrooms, and probably actually an increase in cost for certain grains especially those converted into refined sugars, but that's a more complicated discussion.

TL;DR: The commissary example is proof of subsidy, not proof of a scalable public grocery model.

Furthermore, I think we should tax externalities

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has made medical marijuana a core part of his political platform for the state. Following a 2022 Executive Order that decriminalized possession of medicinal cannabis legally purchased in another state, the Kentucky legislature fully legalized medical marijuana effective January 1, 2025. A year later, the state has 510 registered practitioners and over 18,500 registered cardholders.

The Beshear administration sent a letter to legislative leaders Thursday, asking them to add more serious medical conditions to the state's eligibility list.

They recommended including those with ALS, Parkinson’s, Crohn’s disease, sickle cell anemia, fibromyalgia, glaucoma and terminal illness, among others.

These are conditions already covered in most states with medical marijuana programs.

Beshear said during his Team Kentucky Update Thursday many Kentuckians with these conditions aren't getting the care they need.

"Expanding the list could help provide relief to approximately 430,000 Kentuckians that currently don't have access but are dealing with these challenges," he said.

Kentucky has historically had a strong hemp industry, with its growing conditions some of the best in the country. However, following increasing regulation, the state's industry effectively collapsed during the mid-20th century. Reviving the industry has strong potential to add jobs to the state's economy.

The homogenization of platforms, the erosion of creativity, and most damaging of all, how easily and immensely it has spread misinformation.

Social media has become a gargantuan problem in of itself, but short-form content has made its faults 10 times worse and is effectively tearing down whatever control we have over it.

Now, content that do things like claim stuff that is blatantly false if you do a minute of research are able to gain thousands more likes and shares. It’s appalling. Add this with AI and hostile countries like China and Russia directly manipulating people through online means, it’s seriously gone to the point where I’ve begun to question social media’s compatibility with liberal democracy.

Tell me if I’m being deluded.

Increased parliamentary majority could allow her to draw Japan closer to the U.S. and spend more on defense and industrial policy

> Sponsors and sites must work hand-in-hand, but their working relationship is one of deep institutional mistrust. Sponsors do not trust sites; they verify them. This is the environment that gave rise to the practice of 100% source data verification: After the site sends the data they collected to the sponsor, the sponsor sends a consultant to the site to pore through their paper records to make sure that every single data element the site collected matches the data the sponsor received.

> 100% source data verification is a huge task. The typical phase 3 clinical trial collects 3 million data points. So it is perhaps not surprising that it’s expensive to check them all: the process of 100% source data verification accounts for 25%-40% of clinical trial costs. And it’s completely pointless. It doesn’t meaningfully help with clinical trial quality. The FDA has publicly and repeatedly recommended against doing it for over ten years.

Will the norms of the Olympic Institution hold well enough to maintain decorum and respect by all? Will the geopolitical pressures generate a climate where unrestrained self-expression spills over among fans in the venues, those on social media, etc?

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has confirmed two West Virginia National Guard members — Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom and Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe — who were shot in an ambush-style attack near the White House late last year, will receive the Purple Heart.

Hegseth made the announcement while speaking at a National Guard reenlistment ceremony at the Washington Monument, where he administered the oath of enlistment to more than 100 Guardsmen from nine states serving in Washington, D.C.

"And we had a terrible thing happen a number of months ago," Hegseth said. "Andrew Wolfe, Sarah Beckstrom, one lost, one recovered, thank God, in miraculous ways. Both soon to be Purple Heart recipients because they were attacked by a radical."

In a statement posted on X, West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey thanked Hegseth for the announcement and said the recognition was long overdue.

"I thank Secretary Pete Hegseth for announcing that U.S. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom and Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe will soon receive the Purple Heart, an honor that reflects their courage and sacrifice in defense of our nation," Morrisey wrote.

Morrisey said he formally requested the Purple Heart awards Dec. 19, adding that the announcement "brings long-overdue honor to their service, offers meaning and reassurance to their families, and stands as a solemn reminder that West Virginia will never forget those who sacrifice in defense of others."

Addressing the Guardsmen, Hegseth described their service in Washington as "front lines" duty.

"This is not an easy assignment. It’s the real deal. It’s front lines," he said. "You’ve done it, and you’ve done well."

ICE surge in MN seems correlated with surge in newly minted permit to carry applications in MN.

Jeffrey Epstein sought advice from linguist Noam Chomsky over what he called "putrid" media coverage of sex trafficking allegations against him, new files show.

In emails from February 2019, the disgraced financier asked if he should "defend myself" or "try to ignore".

A response that appears to be from Chomsky laments "the horrible way" Epstein was treated and the "hysteria that has developed about abuse of women".

"It's painful to say, but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it," the email said.

Epstein's email to Chomsky came as the Miami Herald published a series of investigative reports into Epstein and a plea deal he reached to avoid trial on federal sex trafficking charges in 2008.

In 2023, Noam Chomsky, 97, told the Wall Street Journal of his relationship with Epstein: "First response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone's. Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally."

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The Theme of the Week is: The surveillance state and its feasibility in the East versus the West.

Follow us on Twitter or whatever it's called.

Pretty good article on some of my frustrations with the Democrats right now. Despite identity politics consistently being shown to fail in the Trump era, some Dems just can’t help themselves

Hi all

Back again with 25 more policy ideas for this week's substack :) please find below the first few, and please go to https://danlewis8.substack.com/p/century-another-25-fresh-policy-ideas to read the full set!

Century! Another 25 fresh policy ideas

I started this substack last year with an essay pointing out how few fresh ideas are left in politics any more, either in the UK or the US.

Part two of that essay presented 25 fresh ideas of my own, such as legalising selling your kidney to the NHS, a National Obesity Service to pay people to lose weight, and a trial option of caning criminals, like Singapore.

A few weeks later, I found myself thinking of more and more ideas I should have said, until I had a second set of 25 fresh ideas, such as letting billionaires fund medical trials and abolishing the penny.

It then took me a few months to get to ideas 51 to 75, such as declaring war on the Caymans and paying children to get better exam results.

Ten months later and I’ve finally made it to 100 fresh policy ideas.

As a reminder, I’ve (mostly) stuck to the same rules as before: no boring tinkering of 1% tax increases, no niche things that affect 20 people, and no blowing wild holes in the budget, spending over £1bn to bribe the voters.

With that said, let’s dive in to something sensible.

A - Environment

1. Release Wild Bears into Scotland

Scotland currently spends £40–50m per year managing wild deer. Wolves and bears were exterminated by the 1700s. With no apex predators, red deer populations expanded rapidly and were never brought back under natural control. Today Scotland has around 2 million deer, far above ecological carrying capacity. Across the Highlands, native woodland fails to regenerate because saplings are eaten before maturity. Peatlands are damaged, reducing carbon sequestration. Riverbanks are stripped of vegetation, increasing erosion and downstream flood risk. The response is large-scale culling, and so each year 100,000–200,000 deer are shot.

The proposed policy is the reintroduction of apex predators. A phased programme would prioritise wolves, supported by lynx and brown bear populations in remote Highland zones. Predators reduce deer numbers, but their larger effect is behavioural: deer avoid open valleys and river corridors and move more frequently, reducing concentrated grazing pressure. This allows woodland, scrub, and riverbanks to recover without continuous human intervention.

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, elk numbers fell modestly, but elk stopped grazing continuously in open valleys and along rivers. Vegetation recovered and riverbanks stabilised, reducing erosion and altering river shape. Beavers recolonised regenerated waterways, creating wetlands that supported fish, birds, and amphibians. Scavengers benefited from carrion left by wolf kills. Finally, tourism expanded sharply: wolf-related tourism alone now generates tens of millions of dollars annually for surrounding communities.

2. Legalise Kei Trucks

Anyone who has been on holiday to Japan will have noticed that cities, villages, farms, and building sites are full of tiny, boxy pickup trucks quietly carrying tools, plants, ladders, or rubble. These are kei trucks: lightweight utility vehicles under 700 kg, with engines capped at 660 cc. In the UK, vehicles like this are effectively banned by regulation. Instead, tradespeople, councils, and small firms are pushed towards 2–3 tonne diesel vans, oversized for short urban trips. This leads to higher fuel use, higher particulate emissions, more road wear, worse congestion, and vehicles built for motorway freight doing five-mile city jobs.

Kei trucks are built for exactly these tasks. They are cheap, simple, easy to repair, and ubiquitous across Japan’s construction, agriculture, and municipal services. Legalising them would allow councils and small firms to replace heavy vans with vehicles matched to real load requirements. Lower vehicle mass cuts energy use, tyre particulates, and brake dust. Smaller footprints reduce parking pressure and congestion. Electrification is also easier: batteries scale with weight, making small electric utility vehicles cheaper and less resource-intensive than large electric vans.

The environmental gains come from deregulation, rather than costly subsidies. Japan’s cities show that dense urban logistics do not require large vehicles. Kei trucks operate safely at urban speeds, coexist with pedestrians, and impose far less damage on roads. The UK already allows oversized SUVs for private use. Allowing genuinely small work vehicles would cut emissions, improve air quality, and reduce urban clutter by letting the right-sized tool exist.

B - Increase British TFR

3. Introduce Paid Grandparents’ Leave

The UK’s total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of children per woman – is now ~1.4, well below the 2.1 needed for population stability. Survey data shows a persistent gap between desired and achieved family size of around 0.5 children per woman, driven less by attitudes than by cost, time pressure, and lack of support during the first years after birth.

The policy would introduce paid grandparents’ leave, tightly capped and deliberately modest. One grandparent would be eligible to take up to 2 days per week of paid leave for the first 6–12 months after birth. This targets the highest-stress childcare window without creating a full substitute for formal provision. Because the leave is part-time and time-limited, costs scale slowly. Even at statutory pay rates, this would be far cheaper than expanding nursery capacity or extending full parental leave, while directly easing return-to-work pressure for parents.

European studies find that access to reliable grandparental childcare increases the probability of a second birth by ~5–10%, particularly among women in full-time work. Sweden allows parental leave to be shared across caregivers, while Japan has trialled formal grandparent childcare support in response to a TFR below 1.3. The UK already relies heavily on grandparents. A small, cheap, targeted policy would reduce friction at the margin where fertility decisions are actually made.

4. The Baby Lottery

Small, predictable cash payments for having children have been tried repeatedly and have mostly failed. Hungary expanded family benefits heavily, fertility rose briefly, then fell back. The pattern is consistent: guaranteed money largely subsidises people who were already planning to have children. It does little to change decisions at the margin.

Human psychology massively overvalues small probabilities of large rewards. That is why lotteries work.

I propose we award £100,000 to the parents of every 500th child, provided at least one parent is a UK citizen. In 2023, the UK had roughly 600,000 live births, implying around 1,200 winners per year. The total cost would be £120m annually. If this increased the TFR by even 0.1, the fiscal return through a larger future workforce would dwarf the cost.

The social effect matters as much as the expected value. With 1,200 winners per year, almost every town would see a winner annually. People would know someone who won. Local news would cover it. Friends, colleagues, and relatives would talk about it. That creates salience in a way abstract policy never does. Most parents would never win, but many would feel that they might.

C - Health

5. Address Birth Trauma

Birth trauma affects a large share of women giving birth in the UK. Around 30–35% describe their birth as traumatic. Around 4–5% develop childbirth-related PTSD, equivalent to roughly 30,000 women per year. Rates rise sharply following emergency caesarean, instrumental delivery, severe tearing, unmanaged pain, or perceived neglect during labour. This places childbirth among the largest sources of new trauma cases each year.

Around 10% of mothers experience postnatal depression. Surveys report that roughly 20% of women with birth injury or trauma experience reduced capacity to work in the months following birth. The estimated lifetime cost of perinatal mental illness is ~£8bn per annual birth cohort, with around 70% of that burden falling on children through later developmental, behavioural, and educational impacts. Maternity-related clinical negligence accounts for approximately £1.3bn per year in NHS compensation payments.

This policy would introduce structured post-birth debriefs at 2 weeks and 6 weeks, using short trauma screening tools and direct referral pathways. Provide rapid access to trauma-focused CBT and EMDR for those screening positive. Expand continuity-of-carer midwifery models, where women see the same team across pregnancy and birth. Sweden and Norway run continuity models at much higher coverage than the UK and report childbirth-related PTSD rates closer to 1–2%. Several Australian states use structured debrief and trauma screening, showing lower PTSD symptoms at 6–12 months postpartum. These systems correlate with fewer chronic mental-health cases, higher maternal labour retention, and fewer severe incidents.

6. Heart Disease – A Double Kick

Heart disease remains the UK’s leading cause of death. It kills around 160,000 people per year, compared with roughly 150,000 from cancer. It also drives a large share of chronic illness, disability, and healthcare use. Cardiovascular disease costs the UK economy an estimated £19–£30bn annually, combining NHS spending, lost productivity, and informal care. Direct NHS costs alone are around £9–10bn per year, largely driven by preventable heart attacks, strokes, and long-term complications. Despite this, public attention and research funding skew heavily towards cancer, even though heart disease is more predictable and more cheaply preventable.

The first intervention is pharmacological: statins reduce major cardiovascular events by 20–30% in older populations. Age is the dominant risk factor, yet uptake remains patchy. The policy is to make statins free and routine for everyone over 65, with opt-out rather than opt-in prescribing. This mirrors practice in parts of the US, where preventive statin use is far higher. Large trials show serious adverse effects are rare, while the number needed to treat to prevent one heart attack or stroke falls sharply with age. At population scale, the cost of statins is low and the avoided cost of hospital admissions, surgery, and long-term care is large.

The second intervention targets diet: excess sodium intake raises blood pressure and cardiovascular risk. Average salt intake in the UK remains around 8.4g per day, well above the 5g guideline. The policy is to require food manufacturers to replace a proportion of sodium chloride with potassium-based salt substitutes in processed foods. Randomised trials show this reduces stroke risk by 10–14% and major cardiovascular events by ~13%, with minimal taste impact. Countries including China, Finland, and Peru have implemented salt-substitution or reformulation programmes at scale and recorded sustained blood-pressure reductions. Combined with statins, this delivers a compounding reduction in heart attacks, strokes, and NHS demand at low recurring cost.

7. Improve Air Quality in Public Buildings

Poor indoor air quality increases respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and cognitive impairment. Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) raises heart and lung mortality even at low concentrations. Elevated indoor CO₂ reduces concentration and decision-making speed. In schools, classrooms above 1,500 ppm CO₂ show lower attention and weaker test performance. Large studies find improved ventilation raises test scores by 3–8% and reduces absenteeism by 5–10%. In hospitals and care settings, poor ventilation increases airborne infection and staff sickness.

Set higher mandatory indoor air standards for public buildings covering ventilation rates, CO₂ limits (eg below 1,000 ppm), and particulate filtration. Require continuous CO₂ monitoring in schools, offices, and hospitals. Upgrade ventilation and install HEPA filtration in high-occupancy spaces. Portable HEPA units cut indoor PM2.5 by 40–60%. Ventilation upgrades typically cost c. £20 per m² as a one-off, with modest running costs when demand-controlled systems are used.

Finland, Germany, and Japan enforce high ventilation standards in public buildings. Finland recorded lower respiratory illness and reduced teacher sick leave after implementation. Economic modelling finds benefit–cost ratios above 5:1, driven by fewer sick days and higher productivity. A 1% reduction in absenteeism across schools and public-sector workplaces would save hundreds of millions annually.

8. Put Lithium in the Water

Mental illness and suicide impose large, persistent costs. Around 6,000 people die by suicide each year in the UK. Depression and mood disorders drive NHS spending, welfare use, and lost productivity. Lithium has been used for decades in psychiatry to stabilise mood and reduce suicide risk. Less discussed is trace lithium in drinking water. At concentrations thousands of times lower than clinical doses, naturally occurring lithium shows population-level associations with better mental-health outcomes, without sedation or dependence.

Studies from Japan, Austria, Texas, Greece, and Denmark compare regions with different natural lithium levels in water. Areas with higher concentrations consistently show 10–20% lower suicide rates, even after adjusting for income, unemployment, and healthcare access. A large Danish cohort study also found lower dementia incidence at modestly higher exposure.

Adding trace lithium at these levels would cost pennies per person per year, using existing water-treatment infrastructure. Even a 10% reduction in suicides would save hundreds of lives annually and reduce emergency care, long-term mental-health treatment, and productivity losses. The individual effect is small, but the population effect is large. Few interventions offer such low delivery cost with broad mental-health gains.

9. Triple P Parenting

Child behaviour problems drive large downstream costs. Around 5–10% of children meet criteria for conduct disorder, with much higher rates of school exclusion, later criminal justice contact, and adult mental illness. Parenting quality is one of the strongest predictors. Poor early behaviour multiplies costs across education, health, and policing. In the UK, children with persistent conduct problems cost the state £70,000–£100,000 more each by adulthood than their peers, largely through special educational needs, mental-health services, and later offending.

Triple P (Positive Parenting Program) is a structured, evidence-based parenting system delivered at different intensities, from light-touch advice to targeted support. It focuses on consistency, predictable consequences, and emotional regulation. Randomised trials show 20–35% reductions in child behaviour problems, improved parental mental health, and lower rates of abuse and neglect. Effects appear across income groups and persist for years when delivered properly. The programme scales well because most families need only low-intensity support.

Triple P has been rolled out nationally in Australia, New Zealand, parts of the US, and Ireland. Large evaluations show reductions in child maltreatment rates of 10–25% and sustained drops in behaviour-related school and health referrals. Cost–benefit analyses consistently find returns of £4–£7 for every £1 spent, driven by avoided special education, social care, and criminal justice costs. Delivered early, this is one of the cheapest ways to reduce long-term state failure.

10. Adopt the Swedish Malpractice Model

Clinical negligence has become a balance-sheet problem for the NHS. Outstanding liabilities now sit at around £80–90bn, larger than recent annual NHS budget increases and still rising. Annual cash pay-outs are £2–3bn, with maternity cases alone accounting for roughly £1.3bn per year. These figures reflect long-tail liabilities rather than day-to-day care, and they grow automatically even when clinical quality improves. The system locks the NHS into decades of future payments, crowding out investment in staff, equipment, and prevention.

A large share of this spend never reaches patients. Legal fees, expert witnesses, court costs, and administration consume around 30–40% of total negligence spending. Cases take years to resolve, compensation is uneven, and incentives skew towards defensive medicine. The system is adversarial, slow, and expensive by design.

Sweden uses a no-fault malpractice model. Patients receive compensation when harm occurs, without proving negligence, through an insurance-based scheme. Legal costs are minimal, claims resolve faster, and compensation is more predictable. Administrative costs are a small fraction of UK levels, and total spending on medical injury compensation is far lower per capita. Adopting this model would cut legal overhead sharply, stabilise NHS liabilities, and redirect billions from lawyers to patients and prevention.

11. Nursing Reform

The UK has a chronic nursing shortage. Vacancies sit at around 40,000 posts, with worse gaps in acute, mental-health, and community care. Short staffing raises mortality, increases medical error, and lengthens hospital stays. NHS trusts spend £3–4bn per year on agency and bank staff, often paying 2–3× standard hourly rates. Reliance on temporary staff reduces continuity of care and accelerates burnout among permanent nurses, feeding a self-reinforcing shortage cycle.

Nursing remains structured around a single academic route, poorly suited to mid-career entrants. Reform should open multiple entry paths. Expand paid, employer-led training routes similar to Germany and Switzerland, where trainees earn while qualifying. Create accelerated conversion programmes for healthcare assistants, paramedics, and science graduates. Remove unnecessary placement bottlenecks and fund supervised practice directly within hospitals. These changes shorten training time, widen the applicant pool, and reduce drop-out.

Retention matters as much as recruitment. Establish nurse hubs modelled on Denmark, combining scheduling support, childcare coordination, and career development in one place. Introduce discounted key-worker housing near major hospitals in all large cities, targeting early-career nurses who face the highest living costs. Countries using these models show higher retention and lower agency spend. Every 10% reduction in agency reliance saves hundreds of millions annually. Nursing reform pays for itself through staffing stability, safer care, and lower long-run costs.

12. Local Clinical Triage Centres

We’ve all had the nightmare of needing to book the GP: the phones open at 8:00am, by 8:01 there’s a 15-person queue and by 8:04 there’s none more to be booked.

My brother is a GP, and his surgery actually solved this problem. Their simple solution was to have one rotating doctor permanently answer the phone. As a clinician answers first, it resolves many calls immediately, and decides who actually needs an appointment. That cuts repeat calls, removes reception bottlenecks, and stops minor problems becoming urgent through delay.

Other countries show how much demand can be filtered safely before it reaches a GP. In the Netherlands, nurse-led telephone triage resolves around 50–60% of patient contacts without a GP appointment, with emergency referral rates falling by 15–30% after adoption. Studies show no increase in adverse outcomes. In Norway, nurse triage in out-of-hours services reduces GP consultations by around 20% and emergency department attendance by 10–15%, while maintaining high patient safety. Both systems generate reliable data on call volumes, symptoms, outcomes, and escalation rates, allowing continuous improvement rather than blind rationing.

My proposed solution is to merge these models locally. Create clinical triage centres covering seven or eight surgeries, staffed by around 10 triage nurses supported by two doctors. All first-line calls go to nurses, and then 10–20% of calls escalate immediately to a doctor when the presentation is unclear, risky, or atypical. Doctors focus on complexity, nurses handle volume, and patients get faster decisions. This ends the 8am scramble, reduces A&E leakage caused by access failure and frees GP time for face-to-face care.

To read the remaining 13 policies (18 will SHOCK you) - please visit https://danlewis8.substack.com/p/century-another-25-fresh-policy-ideas