Well over 2 million Epstein files remain hidden (Jan 2026)

The news today, 31 January 2006, is that all the Epstein files have been released (31st Jan 2026). The Times tells me that 3 million files have been released which Todd Blanche, the US Deputy Attorney General, said complies with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Congress passed in November mandating the release of all the files.

But The Times newspaper goes on to say that in all there are 6 million files. To quote, "At a press conference yesterday, Todd Blanche, the US Deputy Attorney General, said that more than 500 lawyers had worked to review more than 6 million pages before deciding what to release."

In other words they looked at 6 million files or sheets of paper containing data and decided according to this report to release half of them namely 3 million subject to earlier releases (see below). Either I'm missing something or the news media have got this wrong. It appears that the authorities are still withholding a vast number of Epstein files.

If the universe of material is roughly 6 million files or pages, and the latest tranche is about 3 million, then even after adding the earlier December releases which were only hundreds of thousands at most, you are still left with well over 2 million items not yet disclosed.

In addition, many of or most if not all of the files released have been redacted in some way sometimes totally so that all one sees as a sheet of paper which is entirely black.

To redact the entire page is a complete waste of time and also confuses me because it is the opposite to being transparent. If the entire page is redacted it is not information that's being released to the public is it?

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins. Also, sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified. And, I rely on scientific studies but they are not 100% reliable. Finally, (!) I often express an OPINION on the news. Please share yours in a comment.

Why Claims That ChatGPT “Relies on One News Source” Miss the Point

A recent headline in The Times warns of “fears of bias” on the grounds that ChatGPT supposedly relies on a single news outlet, often cited as The Guardian. While eye-catching, this claim misunderstands both how large language models work and what the underlying research actually shows.

ChatGPT does not “rely” on any one newspaper in the way a human reader might rely on a favourite daily. It does not read the news each morning, subscribe to particular outlets, or assign internal weightings such as “58 per cent Guardian, 12 per cent BBC”. There is no editorial desk inside the model. Instead, ChatGPT is trained on a vast mixture of licensed data, data created by human trainers, and publicly available text from many thousands of sources, including books, academic writing, news articles, and general reference material. The model does not have access to a list of its training sources, nor can it identify or favour specific publishers by design.

So where does the “Guardian dominance” claim come from? It originates from studies that analyse citations appearing in generated answers to a limited set of prompts. In other words, researchers ask the model questions, observe which publications are named in responses, and then infer bias from the frequency of those mentions. That is a very different thing from uncovering a built-in dependency.

Several factors explain why certain outlets appear more often in such studies. First, some publishers make their content more accessible for indexing and quotation, while others sit behind hard paywalls or restrict automated access. If a newspaper tightly limits how its material can be referenced or surfaced, it will naturally appear less often in AI outputs, regardless of its journalistic quality. This is an access issue, not an ideological one.

Second, when ChatGPT is asked to cite examples, it tends to reference outlets that are widely syndicated, heavily quoted elsewhere, and commonly used as secondary references across the web. The Guardian, like the BBC or Reuters, is frequently cited by other publications, blogs, and academic commentary. That secondary visibility increases the likelihood of it being named, even when the underlying information is widely shared.

Third, these studies typically involve small samples of questions. Changing the phrasing, topic, or timeframe can produce very different citation patterns. Extrapolating sweeping claims about “bias” from such narrow slices risks overstating the evidence.

Crucially, ChatGPT does not browse the news unless explicitly instructed to do so using live tools, and even then it does not default to a single outlet. When summarising current events, it aims to synthesise information from multiple reputable sources to provide balance and context.

The real conversation worth having is not about imagined loyalty to one newspaper, but about transparency, access, and how news organisations choose to engage with AI systems. Framing this as ideological bias oversimplifies a technical and structural issue.

In short, the claim that ChatGPT “relies on one news source” mistakes surface-level citation patterns for underlying dependence. It makes for a provocative headline, but it does not accurately describe how the system works, nor does it demonstrate the bias it implies.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins. Also, sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified. And, I rely on scientific studies but they are not 100% reliable. Finally, (!) I often express an OPINION on the news. Please share yours in a comment.

POINTLESS UK EV grant of £3,750

This UK Labour government is as pointless and as misguided as the EV grant that they've introduced of £3,750 for brand-new electric vehicles.

It has to be a new vehicle. I'll tell you why it's a pointless grant and quite hopelessly misconceived. Take a EV that apparently holds value quite well: the Ford Puma GEN-E. Brand-new it costs £29,995 (as at today).

After the first year it'll be worth about £7000 less than that at about £23,000. So the purchaser loses about £7000 after 12 months, a point in the car's life at which the car is almost new. It's as good as new.

So if the buyer buys a nearly new i.e. one year old Ford Puma GEN-E car they will pay £23,000 for it and thereby save themselves £7000. But if they buy new one they will save themselves £3750 under the UK government grant.

It's pretty obvious that the wise choice is to buy a one year old version of this car because you save about twice as much money then you would if you bought a new one.

Other cars will depreciate faster. Many electric vehicles depreciate very rapidly actually, more so than the car mentioned in this article. And therefore the losses will be greater. As soon as the car is driven out of the showroom the buyer loses around £10,000 on many high-end EVs. They're paying £10,000 for the pleasure of smelling a new car!

This government's EV grant scheme is hopeless. It is hopelessly misconceived and is just a PR exercise. Anybody with a bit of common sense will not go down the route of seeking that grant.

In practice, the smart money is almost always a nearly new cars. You might like the dealer perks and the brand-new experience and you might like the maximum warranty but nowadays many cars have very long warranties up to 7 years and therefore taking one year off is neither here nor there.

To be fair, the grant is not absolutely useless. It does reduce the entry price for new buyers and some people really like to be new-car buyers. But in real cash terms, it's benefit is offset by the rapid drop in value of all new cars.

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins. Also, sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified. And, I rely on scientific studies but they are not 100% reliable. Finally, (!) I often express an OPINION on the news. Please share yours in a comment.

When Biological Clocks Collide: Humans, Cats, and the Quiet Strain of Shared Time

Humans and domestic cats live together in extraordinary intimacy, yet their relationship contains an often-overlooked structural tension. It is not about affection, training, or personality. It is about time itself.

Humans are a strongly diurnal species. Our biology expects daylight activity and consolidated sleep at night. Hormones, body temperature, alertness, and mood all follow this pattern. While modern life can bend these rhythms, it rarely does so without cost. Sleep fragmentation, in particular, erodes patience, emotional regulation, and cognitive resilience.

Cats operate on a different clock. Domestic cats are not truly nocturnal, nor are they continuously active. They are best described as crepuscular, with instinctive peaks of alertness and activity at dawn and dusk. These hours coincide with the natural activity patterns of their ancestral prey. Between these bursts, cats sleep lightly and frequently, often in short cycles that allow rapid reactivation.

This mismatch matters. Dawn and dusk are precisely the times when humans are biologically least inclined toward activity. Early morning is a low point for alertness and reaction time. Evening brings declining vision and physiological preparation for rest. What a cat experiences as opportunity, a human experiences as intrusion.

In a caregiving relationship, this divergence is magnified. The human controls food, warmth, safety, and stimulation. The cat therefore directs its biologically urgent behaviours toward the human, often at times when the human is least responsive. Vocalisation, pacing, scratching, and attention-seeking behaviours are not acts of defiance but attempts to close a feedback loop that evolution expects to function.

Over time, this can subtly undermine the relationship. Chronic sleep disturbance is not trivial. When irritation must be continually suppressed because the source is a loved animal, it often turns inward. The cat may be labelled “demanding” or “needy,” while the human frames themselves as a light sleeper or poor sleeper. What goes unnamed is the deeper issue: a chronic circadian misalignment embedded within an attachment bond.

This tension can be more pronounced in cats that experienced a feral or semi-feral early life. For these cats, dawn and dusk were not preferences but survival windows. Their nervous systems were shaped in environments where those hours carried heightened significance. When such cats later become socialised and domestic, the environment changes faster than the internal clock. Human routines, regular feeding, and artificial lighting can soften behaviour, but the crepuscular bias often remains sharper.

By contrast, cats raised entirely indoors from kittenhood tend to show more blurred rhythms. Their activity peaks are flatter, spread across the day by predictability and boredom rather than etched sharply into twilight.

None of this implies incompatibility or failure. Most human-cat relationships find workable compromises through routine, enrichment, feeding schedules, and acceptance. But recognising the biological roots of the tension matters. It reframes the problem not as stubbornness, bad behaviour, or personal inadequacy, but as two evolved chronologies sharing a living space.

The affection remains real. So does the friction. Understanding both allows the relationship to be managed with greater patience, realism, and compassion, for human and cat alike.

Skirts are a barrier to a student's movement and learning

It sounds very provocative but skirts worn by school girls can be a barrier to academic excellence. I might have said that the wrong way but the fact is that skirts are impractical and it has been found that freedom to engage in physical activities enhances the learning process. Clearly the classic schoolgirl uniform is a barrier to physical activities without wishing to put too fine a point on it.

And I'm told in The Times that primary schools that have ditched traditional uniforms both in respect of boys and girls but mainly girls as mentioned above, are reporting improvements in academic attainment, well-being and attendance.

This has prompted calls for a rethink about school uniforms. It is stated that a much better uniform would be one which is entirely practical and is in effect a sports uniform designed for activity; in short 'activewear'.

This is been found by Dame Dorothy primary school in Sunderland where the children wear an "always active" uniform. It was introduced two years ago with support from the Youth Sport Trust.

The uniform consists of practical weather-appropriate sportswear which is worn throughout the day.

The changing uniform reflected the school's long-standing commitment of physical activity and pupil health.

The head teacher, Iain Williamson said: "We have the children running outside every day during curriculum time, we have lots of activities on offer in the yard. So the question was, are they dressed and equipped to run safely and to be comfortable outside in the colder weather, and to take part and make use of all the apparatus? We encourage pupils to be active throughout the day, and the uniform was the final piece of the jigsaw."

Evidence demonstrates that traditional uniforms can restrict children's movement particular for girls.

A Cambridge University study published in 2025 analysed data from more than 1 million pupils across 135 countries. It found that in places where formal school uniforms are widely required fewer children met the World Health Organisation's recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity.

Traditional uniforms curb activity levels. It said that the female students feel less confident doing things such as riding a bike or doing cartwheels when wearing a skirt or dress.

When girls join activities at playtime attendance levels improve. It is said that prioritising well-being through movement could improve behaviour attendance and academic achievement.

Personally, I have always thought that schoolgirls should not be wearing short skirts. It is basically sexualising them. And they do this willingly. It seems that they want to be sexualised which must detract from academic excellence. It must detract from studying and focusing on studying. Uniforms must be entirely practical so that the student's minds can be entirely focused on the work at hand.

There has been some discussion on the Internet as to whether banning school skirts are a matter of human rights! Although I have not read the article by Dr. Helen Wright because I don't want to waste my time, she is questioning whether this is a breach of human rights. I find that absolutely ridiculous.

This is a question of practicalities, pragmatism and ensuring that students work at an optimal level, achieve what they can achieve and not be distracted by self-imposed sexualisation.

When I go and buy the paper in the morning at my local garage, I noticed a lot of girl students wear incredibly short skirts, barely covering their bottom; and even during the coldest winter day! It seems as though these girls are so addicted to the sexual turn on of wearing short skirts that they can't stop it.

That means that their focus is not on academic work. It is not truly on improving their chances of getting good grades in exams and thereafter progressing successfully throughout their life if they have aspirations of a career.

I am all for a complete ban on skirts. That's not because I am some archaic asexual nutcase. I want what's best these females. It could be argued that short skirts are as bad for academic excellence as an addiction to social media on smart phones!

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P.S. please forgive the occasional typo. These articles are written at breakneck speed using Dragon Dictate. I have to prepare them in around 20 mins. Also, sources for news articles are carefully selected but the news is often not independently verified. And, I rely on scientific studies but they are not 100% reliable. Finally, (!) I often express an OPINION on the news. Please share yours in a comment.