“It absolutely stinks rotten.”
Jen McAdam

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This morning I’m kicking off this bumper edition with a breaking TBIJ story, which BBC News has also published.

Peter Mandelson emailed Jeffrey Epstein after his release from house arrest to recommend a holiday home where the financier could host his “guests”.

Mandelson said he had found a villa in Italy that Epstein could use, offering “privacy with accompanying rooms for your ‘guests’” – with quote marks around the word guests. It is not clear who this was in reference to. Epstein’s connections among the global elite included bankers, royals and Middle Eastern sheikhs.

The email was published this week by the US government as part of the Epstein Files cache. Its sender has been redacted but we were able to identify it as coming from Mandelson.

A spokesperson for Mandelson said: “Lord Mandelson regrets, and will regret until to his dying day, that he believed Epstein's lies about his criminality. Lord Mandelson did not discover the truth about Epstein until after his death in 2019. He is profoundly sorry that powerless and vulnerable women and girls were not given the protection they deserved.”

The email chain is from August 2010, a month after Epstein had been released from house arrest following his conviction for child sex offences.

In the message in question, Mandelson tells Epstein that he is due to arrive back in London from “Myk”, shorthand for the Greek island of Mykonos, at the end of August. He goes on to say: “Found you a great place to stay on the Amalfi coast near to Positano. Zeferelli home converted into beautiful suites and privacy with accompanying rooms for your ‘guests’.”

While the identity of the sender is blacked out in the published file, other emails from the same period confirm that Mandelson travelled at that time to Mykonos, which he also referred to as “Myk” in separate emails. The email in question was sent from a Blackberry, Mandelson’s favoured method of communication at the time.

The redaction in the files leaves some parts of the email address visible, and we were able to match it with an address used by Mandelson. [You can watch our reporter Simon do it here.]

The conversation with Epstein took place during a period of frequent contact between the pair following Mandelson’s exit from frontline politics after Labour’s election defeat. The men discussed job opportunities for Mandelson, including with mining giant Glencore, investment banks Lazard and Deutsche Bank, and his own advisory firm, Global Counsel.

The house Mandelson refers to in the email appears to be Villa Treville, an exclusive 16-suite luxury hotel located on a clifftop overlooking the Gulf of Salerno.

There is no evidence that Epstein ever visited the villa.

In December, Jen McAdam was let down by the system once again. She had already been scammed out of her inheritance; now a court had killed off the case against the lawyer who’d silenced her when she tried to warn others about the $4bn OneCoin fraud.

The trial died before it could even begin to tackle how easily lawyers for rich criminals could brandish the law to silence free speech. The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal (SDT) said the evidence in the case against Claire Gill, a partner at the London law firm Carter-Ruck, was “plainly insufficient”.

Gill’s lawyers said she had acted “impeccably” and that her threat warning McAdam to pipe down about OneCoin was nothing less than professional conduct.

McAdam has lived with the consequences of her lost inheritance and Gill’s threat for nearly a decade. She thought this time would be different. After we exposed her case in an in-depth investigation, the charge against Gill brought McAdam some hope. Then it was dashed.

“This required a full hearing and the SDT has thrown it out before it reached this stage,” McAdam told TBIJ’s Lucy Nash after the decision. “It absolutely stinks rotten. I should have expected this given what I’ve experienced over the years [when] it comes to the very rich, powerful and criminal.”

McAdam was reminded of Martin Luther King Jr’s words: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The court’s decision – which is being appealed – is one of three that together form a dramatic setback for transparency and accountability. Gill’s threat to McAdam was widely considered a SLAPP, a legal threat designed to silence legitimate public questions.

In another SLAPP case, the SDT not only cleared a different lawyer of wrongdoing but also kept the public out of the hearings – so much for open justice. And in the third case, a lawyer acting for former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi managed to overturn a decision that found him guilty of professional misconduct.

We’ve been at the forefront of efforts to end SLAPPs, which have a ruinous effect on the free press and democracy. We’re a key player in the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition and we’ve called attention to the issue in our journalism and beyond. Things may be getting worse before they get better, but we’ll keep doing the work to make our society freer and fairer.

Last year we broke the story of a Sri Lankan influencer who claimed to make $300,000 on Facebook and taught others to do the same – including by posting racist AI-generated content. We found a whopping 128 Facebook pages linked to Geeth Sooriyapura and his students. When we interviewed him, he said he targets “old people… because they are the ones who don’t like immigrants”. It was our most widely shared story of 2025.

Misinformation online is rife and new generative AI tools are making it easier to create and spread falsehoods, doing more harm than ever before. We’ve also reported on Character.AI, a platform where young users can form intense emotional attachments to AI chatbots in spaces that sit largely outside existing online safety rules.

Join us on Wednesday 25 February at 6pm on Zoom to hear from TBIJ’s Big Tech editor James Clayton and our reporters Niamh McIntyre and Effie Webb about the risks posed by AI.

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Communities living around Banten Suralaya coal-fired power station in the west of Java, Indonesia’s most populous island, said the existing power station is so polluting that rainwater runs black with coal dust, and their banana and peanut crops can no longer thrive. 

According to a complaint filed on behalf of local residents in 2023, the impact of an ongoing plan to increase the power station’s capacity is “almost unimaginable”. Despite Indonesia’s 2022 commitment to phase out coal, the government has continued to build coal-fired power stations.

Read more here. 

For years, mega-dairies and vast cattle farms have been popping up across the UK. Forget picturesque cows in rolling green fields – these are US-style operations, and in some cases the cattle are kept inside all year round.

As far back as 2018, we exposed how slurry, a mixture of water and cow excrement that’s often used as fertiliser, is spread on the land around these farms and leeches into local rivers. This pollution can damage the environment, and the effect of a mega-ranch is often worse than pig and chicken farms.

But bizarrely these cattle megafarms haven’t needed an environmental permit, where poultry and pig farms do.

Now the government is drawing up plans to clean up the UK’s rivers and it’s asking whether that should change.

Industrial farming is a key threat to our health in the UK, whether that’s because of toxic waste in our waterways or dangerous gases choking our air. But any change is likely to meet resistance from farmers lamenting the cost implications.

One beef farmer in Somerset told Farmers Weekly: “This is yet another blow for farmers who are already in the doldrums … we try our best to keep slurry and manure out of rivers, not just pouring it in like water companies still do.”

But as James Wallace, CEO of the charity River Action, said: “[Extending permits to] dairy and beef units would give regulators the hard data they need to understand where cattle numbers in a [river] catchment have become unsustainable, and to target action where pollution is being driven.”

There’s a way to go on this, but at least seven years after we first started asking questions, the government is finally taking heed.

Thurrock council has finally admitted it: the scandal we exposed there six years ago is going to cost residents £200m.

Back then, we revealed that the council had poured £1bn – yep, billion with a B – into investments, including a series of secretive and ultimately disastrous business ventures. It’s recovered £661m so far, and reckons it’ll end up clawing back about £800m in the end. But that shortfall has already hit the people of Thurrock hard.

The beneficiary of the worst deals was a shady businessman called Liam Kavanagh, who spent tens of millions of the council’s money on personal luxuries. While he darted around on a private jet, the council had to cut public services and raise council taxes.

The Serious Fraud Office started investigating the case last year. The council is also taking legal action, and its finance lead has warned that “Liam Kavanagh is far from being off the hook”. The money is lost – but we don’t have to give up on justice, eventually, being done.

As Lynn Worrall, leader of the now Labour-run council, said: “There’s nothing that makes people [more] angry in Thurrock than hearing how much money is still outstanding and how much we’ve actually lost.”