"Remember, when you leave this Earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received—only what you have given: a full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice, and courage."

~ St. Francis of Assisi

William Shatner, 95, performing at Riot Fest with his heavy metal band Star Trek actor's rider for Chicago music festival includes many outlandish demands

How data brokers get your information, even if you’re careful

• PCWorld explains how data brokers legally collect personal informationfrom public records, retailers, apps, and social media to create detailed consumer profiles for sale.
• Even careful internet users cannot avoid data collection since brokers gather information from everyday activities like store loyalty programs and voter registration.
• Automated data-removal services like Incogni can significantly reduce your digital footprint by sending opt-out requests to hundreds of brokers simultaneously.

G & S: Complete Works of Jane Austen

Step into the world of wit, romance and regency-era charm with The Complete Works of Jane Austen.

This fast-paced and delightfully inventive production brings all of Austen's beloved novels to life in one unforgettable performance. Six novels, countless romances, scandles and witticisms –  all in under 90 minutes…and afterward enjoy vino changed from water with G and A 

The complete works of Jane Austen include her six major novels:

 Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park.Major NovelsSense and Sensibility (1811):

 Two sisters navigate contrasting views on love and reason after financial changes force a move.Pride and Prejudice (1813): 

Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy overcome class snobbery and personal misjudgments.Mansfield Park (1814): 

Quiet Fanny Price stands firm against moral corruption while living with wealthy relatives.Emma (1815): 

Well-meaning, rich Emma Woodhouse mismanages the romantic affairs of her neighbors.Northanger Abbey (1817): Naive Catherine Morland learns to separate Gothic fiction fantasies from real-life society.Persuasion (1817): 

Anne Elliot gets a second chance at true love years after turning down a proposal.Minor and Unfinished WorksLady Susan:

 Short epistolary novel about a manipulative widow.

The Watsons & Sanditon:

 Unfinished narrative fragments.

Juvenilia:

 Early comedic stories written during her youth.

 

The Complete Works of Jane Austen (Abridged)

Written By:

Jessica Bedford, Kathryn MacMillan, Charlotte Northeast & Megan Winch

Directed By:

Ali Bendall

Playing From:

17 July – 22 August 2026 AD

Synopsis

Three actors. Six novels. Countless romances, scandals, and witticisms — all in under 90 minutes! When a cast member drops out, two Janeites must train up an unsuspecting understudy, plunging audiences into a whirlwind of Austen’s greatest hits. Fast-paced, big-hearted, and endlessly funny, this irreverent love-letter will delight die-hard Austen fans and newcomers alike.

Tickets on sale Early 2026!

Dates and Times

Preview: Friday, 17 July 2026
Opening Night: Saturday, 18 July 2026
Closing Night: Saturday, 22 August 2026

Fridays and Saturdays at 7.30 pm
Sundays at 4.30 pm

Running Time

TBA

Production Credits

Director	Ali Bendall
Production Manager	Roger Gimblett
Stage Manager	Natalie Hughes
Costume Designer	Susan Carveth with Ali Bendall
Set Design	Ali Bendall
Sound Designer	Ali Bendall
Lighting Designer	Cian Byrne
Set Build	Tom Fahy
Set Fixtures	Peter Curtis
Props Coordinator	Natalie Hughes
Dialect Coach	Benjamin Purser

Cast

Team Pride (The Actors)

Peter Hoekstra-Bass

Heidi Jilwan

Georgia Britt

 

Team Prejudice (Understudies/Stage Managers)

Harry Charlesworth

Isla Harris

Ali Bendall

 

The Complete Works of Jane Austen (Abridged)

20/07/2026  CAW

The Complete Works of Jane Austen (Abridged) Rating

★★★★★

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It was a fast forward and rewind enacted synopsis of Jane Austen’s plays from go to woe on the opening night. The audience was in for a charming, funny and rapid view of Austen’s women and men outlining the stupidity of Regency society through to pointing out that for most women of that era, it was ‘marriage or poverty’. Definitely read at least a couple of her novels for her ironic view and wonderful language on family and economic values. Best of all, the play is about real sisterhood and friendship through trials, tribulations and at times love and hope.

The set was a cartoon version of a Regency living room with the obligatory chaise lounge. Heidi Jilwan and Georgia Britt set the scene, breaking the ‘fourth wall’ and addressing the audience. Wearing Empire style dresses, bonnets and hairstyles they set to debating which was the best novel. As the audience settled, the immediate problem of a missing leading man was solved by a willing replacement actor ‘from the audience’.

Enter the actor, Peter Hoekstra-Bass, who quickly highlighted that he didn’t have a clue about Austen’s work but ‘needed the gig’. This was wonderful for any audience members who equally hadn’t had any information or who had only watched the television series, Bridgeton.

 

 

The ensemble had a great natural chemistry as if they were all best friends. Each actor portrayed different characters in the book with asides to what their modern personality really thought.

Bonnets and top hats were used to depict new characters and each actor changed style and attitude depending on the book. Peter was at times, convincingly dashing as Darcy or painful as a parson clumsily professing love. Both Heidi and Georgia were witty, ditzy and lovestruck as each female character came alive with explanations to Peter why women reacted to the wrong man at the wrong time and how long self-reflection takes before they realise with whom they should be in love. Peter was both wonderfully bewildered and superb when putting on a hat altered his persona and posture.

Heidi and Georgia were convincing as best friends who were trying to understand Austen’s view of women, marriage and what choices they could or couldn’t make.

Through Ali Bendall’s tight direction, the messages and wit of Austen came out quickly as each farce, family and affair were rapidly thrown out to the audience to make of it what they would and adding modernisms and comparisons to modern love and female issues. This could be frustrating at times with clunky text and perhaps breaking the fourth wall too often. The audience laughed and clapped as the cast pushed us along to make sense of it all and it really didn’t matter anyway as Austen herself, through the character of Charlotte Lucas in Pride and Prejudice, said, “We are all fools in love”

Trump Is Insider Trading – Made 2.4 Billion Doing It This Year Alone

Trump’s Super Pardon

Bloomberg – no paywall – Trump Extends Pardons to Companies, Echoing a 17th Century King “…Unlike in previous administrations, commutations as well as pardons have cleared unpaid penalties tied to the convictions…Since taking office for the second time, Trump has become the first modern US president to issue pardons for companies, from a Middle America auto supplier to a crypto platform and a media startup. 

The clemency grants have wiped out almost $200 million in financial penalties, some of which were destined for victims of wrongdoing. The pardons underscore Trump’s broader willingness to blow past the boundaries of executive authority in a second term that has been far less constrained by political and legal norms. He has granted clemency to almost 1,700 people in the past 18 months, far outpacing his predecessors, often benefiting political supporters or people who claim to be victims of legal weaponization…”

Defiance.org: In Donald Trump’s second term, something extraordinary is happening. Without an amendment to the Constitution, he has invented something new. I call it the “super pardon.” A Bloomberg report out this week dives into Trump’s latest corrupt feat, revealing how he’s become the first president in modern times to issue pardons for companies. If you’re baffled, you should be, but it’s even more alarming than you think because Trump’s not simply forgiving corporate crimes. 

He’s giving companies what amounts to a hall-pass to carry out misconduct in the future…It’s important to take a beat to understand how radical this is. For the 239 years since the Constitution was ratified, the pardon has typically been understood as an act of mercy for individuals. Presidents grant clemency to people who committed crimes but are seen as deserving a reprieve, whether because their sentences were unusually harsh or their convictions were unjust. The founders saw the power as a safety valve to temper the severity of the law and, on occasion, restore domestic tranquility. They didn’t envision it as a magic wand to be waved over entire corporations, i.e. legal fictions that cannot sit in a jail cell, cannot be executed, and cannot, in any meaningful sense, be shown “mercy.”…

                Plain haircut 

Trump Is Insider Trading – Made 2.4 Billion Doing It This Year Alone

Via DeanBlundell – “CNN published an investigation Thursday showing Donald Trump promoted more than 20 companies on Truth Social days after buying stock in those same companies — sometimes while announcing government actions that would directly benefit them. Not vibes. Not a hot take. Dates, dollar ranges, disclosure filings.

• Nvidia. April 2025: Trump posts “very big and exciting news” to his nine million followers about Nvidia building AI supercomputers in America and vows that all federal permits will be fast-tracked. What he doesn’t mention: days earlier, his accounts bought between $200,000 and $500,000 of Nvidia. The man expediting the permits owns the stock the permits pump. Then in January 2026, his managers buy up to $1 million more of Nvidia — and the very next week his administration relaxes export controls so Nvidia can sell its prized AI chips to China. Buy first. Deregulate second. Repeat.
• Tesla. More than 50 purchases last year, at least $4 million, including buys made days before he turned the White House South Lawn into a Tesla showroom with Elon. Then came the divorce — Trump threatening Tesla’s subsidies, musing about deporting Musk — while still buying Tesla stock the entire time, including a $500K–$1M buy in July. Publicly torching the company, privately long the company. That’s not politics. That’s a position.
• Palantir. Hundreds of thousands in purchases through March, then a Truth Social post in April praising Palantir’s “war-fighting” chops — with the stock ticker included. A sitting President posting a ticker symbol like a Discord pump group admin. Palantir’s federal contracts, meanwhile, nearly doubled to $970 million.
• American Eagle. Buys $15K–$50K of the stock on July 31. Four days later, posts about the Sydney Sweeney jeans ad tell the world the jeans are selling out. The President of the United States. Shilling mall denim. Because he owns it.
• Eli Lilly, Oracle, Amazon, Dell.Purchases that coincided with favourable GLP-1 decisions, the TikTok deal Oracle needed, and — I swear — an Amazon buy the same day a federal trial against Amazon began. The referee is betting on the game. Both teams. Every quarter.

And the volume is deranged: 3,642 trades in Q1 2026 alone — roughly 58 trades per market day — worth between $220 million and $750 million.

 Eric Trump says it’s all “broad market indexes.” The disclosure his dad signed lists thousands of individual stock picks. Someone’s lying, and it’s the one whose last name is on the filing.” It’s a huge conflict of interest,” Ethics attorney Virginia Canter said, arguing that Trump is funneling official information through “a private channel in which he has a private interest.”

Anti-Forbes list ranks wealthy by the wealth their companies generated for others

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, July 11, 2026 – Privacy and cybersecurity issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, finance, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and online security, often without our situational awareness.

Six highlights from this week: Every Way Meta Tracks You, and How to Fight Back; AI Agents Can Be Tricked Into Stealing Your Files, Researchers; All Cars Sold in the EU Now Require a Camera Aimed at Your Face. It’s Still Not Clear Where That Data Goes; Unpatched Flaws Disclosed in Filesystem Bundled Into Millions of Embedded Devices; and Wikipedia Is Battling for the Soul of the Internet.

Predicting the Court: Evaluating Large Language Models as Forecasters of Supreme Court Decisions

Stillwell, Hayley and Harrington, Sean, Predicting the Court: Evaluating Large Language Models as Forecasters of Supreme Court Decisions (July 10, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7096518

Large language models are increasingly used by lawyers to analyze legal materials and forecast litigation outcomes. 

This Article evaluates four leading large language models-GPT-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Grok 4-as predictors of Supreme Court decisions using every argued merits case from October Term 2025. Although the models predicted some aspects of the Court’s decisions with surprising accuracy, conventional performance metrics overstated their predictive ability. Much of the models’ justice-level accuracy reflected the Court’s ordinary ideological alignment rather than case-specific legal analysis. 

The models also systematically overpredicted ideologically divided decisions, particularly in politically salient cases that the Court ultimately resolved on narrow and often technical legal grounds. Rather than treating prediction as a simple accuracy problem, this Article uses the models’ recurring successes and failures to illuminate the current strengths and limitations of AI-assisted legal prediction and the continuing role of human judgment in forecasting judicial behavior.

The Types of People to Keep Around

“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” – Michael Altshuler

Gary Lineker leads 120 millionaires demanding to be taxed more in open letter to PM

Gary Lineker’s battle with HMRC to avoid £4.9m bill as he urges tax on wealthy 

Uncovered, a site for judging books by their first pages. “No cover. No bestseller sticker, no celebrity book club, no BookTok trend. You read the opening of a real book, blind, and answer the only question that matters: would you keep reading?”

The Types of People to Keep Around

Molly Burford, author of Moments to Hold Close, writes list poetry (is that a thing?) about the kinds of people that you want in your life. From Types Of People You Need To Hang On To:

The friend who helps you clean your room. Those who are kind to those who can do nothing for them. Messy folks who repeatedly get it wrong but never stop trying to get it right anyway. Kindred spirits. Loud laughers. Pals who make the grocery store fun. Loved ones who get as excited about your success as you do. The person you feel comfortable crying in front of. Sing-in-the-car friends. People who text you to look at the moon.

I am 100% the friend who will text you to look at the moon or the meteor shower or the aurora.

From Types Of People I Admire The Most:

Someone who isn’t afraid to just be human. The friend who commits to the bit, even if it is well past its expiration date. People who accept that their ducks will always be in a bit of a zig-zag formation. Relentlessly creative folks. Daydreamers. Awkward silence embracers.

From Types Of People Who Will Change Your Life:

Teachers who believed there was potential within you, even when you were convinced you would always be a lost cause. The internet friend who showed you that your art does matter, and it’s needed. The mentor who became the older sister you never had. The ex-partner who showed you there are some types of people you’re only meant to love from afar. The neighbors who became family. The family members who became friends.

More, more, more, more.