Academic and researcher, Co-editor Journal of Adult Protection (Emerald publication), elder abuse and adult safeguarding specialist. Tweets are my own views.
Norwich
Joined November 2010
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Bridget Penhale retweeted
📲 Alexis Sánchez Sends Heartfelt Message to Arsenal After UCL Final Defeat
🗣️: "To everyone connected with Arsenal, I just want to say one thing: be proud.
I know tonight is painful. Losing a Champions League final always hurts, and right now the disappointment will feel overwhelming. But when the emotions settle, I hope the players, the staff, and especially the supporters remember what this team has achieved.
You won the Premier League. You fought your way to the biggest match in club football. You represented Arsenal on the grandest stage. One difficult night does not erase an incredible season.
To the fans, I know how much this club means to you because I felt that love every time I wore the shirt. You have supported this team through good moments and bad moments, and once again you showed the world why Arsenal supporters are among the most passionate in football.
To the players, keep your heads high. Finals can be won and finals can be lost, but reaching them requires quality, sacrifice, and belief. You have given your supporters memories they will never forget.
Football can be cruel. Sometimes the result does not reflect the journey. But the journey matters. The fight matters. The badge matters.
Arsenal will be back. Arsenal always comes back.
And to every Arsenal fan around the world: never stop believing, never stop supporting, and never stop loving this club.
Today may be a day of sadness, but the future remains bright.
For me, Arsenal will always be special. For me, Arsenal will always be family.
And for me, Arsenal is the best team in the world. ❤️"
Bridget Penhale retweeted
North London has never looked this red. ❤️🏆
Millions of Gooners, one city, one dream fulfilled. From every street to every corner around the Emirates, Arsenal fans turned London into a sea of red.
This is more than a parade. This is the biggest parade in football history. This is history.
Bridget Penhale retweeted
In 2015 I ran against Peter Mandelson for Chancellorship of The University of Manchester. The votes came from three areas: The Board, The Alumni and The lecturers. I am not afraid to say that when the registrar read out the voting numbers on the phone I shed a tear. Lord Peter Mandelson: 5,269 votes Lemn Sissay: 7,131 votes. I served my full tenure as Chancellor from 2015 to 2022.
Peter Mandelson pivoted and almost immediately aligned himself as chancellor at Manchester Metropolitan University which had no such system of voting.
One of the greatest honours of my life is to give service. I loved being chancellor. I haven't commented on this particular matter up until now. I just want to say thank you to the people who voted for me. You made the right decision.
@RussellGroup @alumniUoM @uomhums @ManchesterSU @ManMetUni
Bridget Penhale retweeted
I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
Bridget Penhale retweeted
NHS FIRED A NURSE FOR TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT DYING PATIENTS
Graham Pink was a 57-year-old night charge nurse at Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport. He looked after 23 severely ill elderly patients at a time. On his ward, there was one qualified nurse and two healthcare assistants. That was it.
He said the patients he cared for had survived the Second World War. They deserved better than this.
So he did what you're supposed to do. He wrote letters. To his managers. To the hospital. To his MP. He asked for three more nurses per night. Three. The request was refused because, and this is real, it would set a precedent for other hospitals.
God forbid.
When his letters ended up on the front page of The Guardian in 1990, Stockport Health Authority (@StockportNHS) sacked him for breaching patient confidentiality. The patients whose neglect he was exposing, apparently, had their confidentiality to think about.
The Health Minister at the time was asked in Parliament whether he'd congratulate Pink for his courage. He said no. He said Pink's allegations weren't supported by colleagues or clinicians. Classic.
Pink fought a five-year tribunal battle. He won in 1993. The Health Authority pulled out before it could get worse for them, claiming the legal costs were too high. They awarded him £11,188. The maximum allowed. Then didn't reinstate him. His nursing career was finished.
His lawyer called it a triumph for those whose priority is care for patients over those whose first care is for balance sheets.
Pink went on to campaign for proper whistleblower protection. His case was cited in Parliament when the Public Interest Disclosure Act 1998 was being drafted. The law that was supposed to stop this happening again. The law that still gets ignored on a regular basis.
He wrote a book about it in 2013. He died in 2021, aged 91, cared for by nurses who told his family it was an honour to look after him.
The system that punished him is still running.
Source: The Guardian, Wikipedia, Nursing Standard,
Bridget Penhale retweeted
In January 1998, for approximately one week, the British public stopped whatever it was doing and gave its full attention to the fate of two pigs.
This actually happened. Newspapers cleared their front pages. Television news led with daily updates. Office workers asked colleagues whether there'd been any sightings. Pubs debated strategy. Children wrote letters. And somewhere in a damp thicket in Wiltshire, two young Tamworth pigs, blissfully unaware that they had just become the most followed fugitives in the English-speaking world, were curled up in a mud wallow they had built to their own specifications, having the time of their lives.
They stole the nation's heart in a week.
This is how it happened.
On the morning of 8 January 1998, a man named Arnoldo Dijulio loaded two five-month-old Tamworth pigs into a lorry bound for V & G Newman's abattoir in Malmesbury, Wiltshire.
They were a sister and a brother. Ginger-coloured, leggy, bright-eyed, of the oldest native pig breed in Britain. Worth approximately £40 each. Nobody had told them any of this.
The lorry arrived. The ramp went down. The pigs came out. And then, in a moment that would shortly consume the attention of three continents, the pair of them took one look at where they were, assessed the fence, and left.
They squeezed under it. They crossed a field. They came to the River Avon, a river most pigs, if asked, would probably decline on principle.
They swam it.
On the far bank they shook themselves off, had a brief consultation, and disappeared into a dense thicket near Tetbury Hill, where they proceeded to do what every Tamworth has done since the Domesday Book. Root. Forage. Sleep under brambles. Ignore humans entirely.
Within 48 hours, the story had escaped the thicket more comprehensively than the pigs had. ITN sent a crew. NBC sent a crew. Japanese television dispatched a helicopter. The Daily Mail installed a reporter in Malmesbury essentially full-time. Every national paper carried daily updates on the Tamworth Two, named after Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which is what happens when a nation is trying to work out how to describe two pigs who had outwitted an entire abattoir staff.
A woman thought she saw them in her rhubarb. A man was certain they'd crossed his lawn at dawn. A postman swore he'd made eye contact with one of them near a bus stop. In the thicket, Butch and Sundance were doing none of these things. They were asleep in the mud wallow, occasionally emerging to eat something, before returning to the wallow.
On day four, the owner was interviewed on national television and stated, somewhat tactlessly, that if recaptured the pigs would still be going to slaughter.
The nation, briefly, lost its composure.
The Daily Mail, sensing a story of the sort that does not come around twice in a career, stepped in and bought both pigs from their owner in exchange for exclusive rights. The bidding, it was reported, had reached £15,000 by the time he cracked. The pigs were now, legally and commercially, Daily Mail property.
This was probably the only time in recorded history that being purchased by the Daily Mail constituted a happy ending.
Butch was captured on 15 January, foraging in the garden of a local couple who had popped out to the shed and found a pig in their flowerbed. Sundance, sister now gone, made a break for the thicket again. He held out one more day.
He was flushed from cover by two springer spaniels and darted by the RSPCA. The first dart bounced off. This was worth remarking on at the time. Veterinary examination later revealed that Sundance was in fact half wild boar, which explained both the thick skin and the week-long refusal to co-operate with any human institution.
He was eventually subdued. He was not pleased about it.
The pair were transferred to the Rare Breeds Centre near Ashford in Kent, with the Daily Mail covering their upkeep. A generous enclosure. A large wallow. A woodland run that Sundance, in particular, approved of.
And there they lived.
Butch was the boss. Her keeper described her as a grump who could move fast when she felt like it and had strong opinions about who was allowed near her breakfast. Sundance, free at last of any agenda, became extraordinarily mellow. He spent his days wallowing. He lay in the sun. He greeted visitors with a sort of detached amiability that suggested he had thought about life and found it, on balance, acceptable.
They lived together for twelve more years.
Butch died in October 2010, aged 13. Sundance was quieter after she went. He had been in her company since the day he was born. He carried on for seven more months, pottering along, and was put down in May 2011 after his arthritis worsened beyond comfort.
They were buried in a quiet corner of the Rare Breeds Centre.
Two young pigs, on a cold January morning in Wiltshire, decided they were not going to do the thing everybody had planned for them to do. They squeezed under a fence. They swam a river. They held out long enough that the entire country stopped what it was doing and paid attention. And when it was all over, they went on to live twelve more years in a Kentish paddock, visited by the occasional tourist, neither of them with any idea that they had briefly been the most famous fugitives on the planet.
They would not have cared if you'd told them.
They cared about the wallow.
They cared about each other.
That was enough.
Bridget Penhale retweeted
NEW PROFESSORSHIP in Climate and the Environment 🌎
Lead world-class research on climate and the environment, enhancing our understanding of global change and associated hazards to inform or promote societal responses ⬇️ tyndall.ac.uk/news/sir-antho…
Bridget Penhale retweeted
🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks.
The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people.
ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher.
My Take
The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing.
I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all.
Hedgie🤗
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Bridget Penhale retweeted
Data drives change. 📊 ILC-Canada utilizes the who Ageism Scale to measure and combat discrimination with global precision.
#WHO #EndAgeism #AWorld4AllAges
CanAgeSeniors ILCGlobal
Bridget Penhale retweeted
Afternoon everyone. Some delightful individual hacked my account and X have permanently suspended it, thanks a lot. I’ve made some good friends on here and want to catch up, so if this could be retweeted loads, I’d really appreciate it, thanks a lot 😊😊
Bridget Penhale retweeted
This woman said: Ladies, it finally happened. I just had a mansplaining so epic it will never be topped. I just had a man ask me why I chose to be a widow. I said "I'm sorry, but that's not something you choose." He said "You just need to open your heart and let someone love you instead of choosing to stay a widow". I said "What do you think widow means exactly?" This man said "A widow is when a woman gives up on dating and stays alone for the rest of her life." I said "That is not what that means". HE SAID...
Bridget Penhale retweeted
📊 Norwich City have had the best defensive record in the Championship in 2026.
#NCFC
Bridget Penhale retweeted
I would remind Tory female Politicians (and voters) who are DEMANDING #Churchill remain on the UK bank notes that the man himself DEMANDED that they never got the vote, as it would lead to 'the loss of social structure'.
Perhaps he's not the 'British Hero' you think he is, hmm?
Bridget Penhale retweeted
Do you want to know more about social services in Wales?
Our resource page ‘A Guide to Social Services in Wales’, outlines how to get the help you need from social services, and how to ensure that your voice is heard when your needs are assessed.
olderpeople.wales/resource/s…
ALT Image of a young male care worker kneeling down, with his hand on the shoulder of an older man who is sat down. In the top left corner is the following text: ‘Our Guide to Social Services in Wales Covers: Understanding the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014; how to navigate the different services, and use them to meet your needs; how your needs are assessed’.
Bridget Penhale retweeted
The Office for Product Safety and Standards have put together some guidelines which outlines simple steps you can take when shopping online, to make sure that you are not buying an unsafe product.
Visit their website to learn more about how to shop safely.
gov.uk/guidance/consumer-pro…
ALT UK Government logo.
Bridget Penhale retweeted
Happy International Women’s Day!
We’re celebrating women who have changed the world. Here are all of the amazing women who have received the #NobelPrize and their remarkable achievements at the time of the award.
Tell us about the women who inspire you the most – and why.
#InternationalWomensDay
Bridget Penhale retweeted
@Keir_Starmer Your management of this crisis has been faultless. The majority of this nation respects you for your sane and common sense approach. British politicians should have learned lessons about going to war from Iraq. Political point scoring from war is unforgivable
