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A new white paper emphasises innovation over regulation. Unlike ChatGPT, we have learned nothing from our mistakes
It’s almost 20 years now since a socially awkward young computer science student set up a website for rating “hot” women.
Facemash, as Mark Zuckerberg called his creation, was shut down within days. But this crass teenage experiment was still, in retrospect, the first faltering step down a road to something even he couldn’t possibly have foreseen at the time: a social media phenomenon now accused of unwittingly helping to polarise society, destabilise the democratic process, fuel hate speech and disseminate dangerous conspiracy theories around the globe, despite what providers insist have been their best attempts to stamp out the fire.
Continue reading...The former Labour leader’s appeal was his personality, but with the country on the rocks voters may overlook Starmer’s lack of charisma
Tony Blair’s triumphant time as opposition leader was more than 25 years and several political eras ago. But it still casts a huge shadow over our politics. Tories fear a repeat of the 1997 election. Pollsters try to work out whether such a rare and pivotal event could soon happen again. Centre-left voters of a certain age remember the mid-90s as a time of steadily growing hope and then pure elation, before Labour politics gradually went back to its usual divisions and disappointments.
But perhaps the people most fixated by Blair are Keir Starmer and his inner circle. In his use of former Blair speechwriters such as Philip Collins and Peter Hyman; of old Blair lines such as “Labour is on your side”; former New Labour ministers as advisers, including Blair himself; New Labour-style focus groups and charm offensives towards business; revived Blairite policies such as the asbo; and former New Labour strategists, spin doctors, party bureaucrats, fundraisers and donors. In all these ways, Starmer’s leadership often feels like a tribute to a form of politics many voters under 40 won’t even remember.
Continue reading...UK-German relations are long and complicated, and not all symbolism is empty
King Charles III will not only travel to Berlin during his state visit to Germany this week, but also Hamburg, the country’s second largest city and home to its biggest port. Hamburg is a trading hub known for its Anglophilia, with close connections to Great Britain that go back centuries that were revived during the British occupation of the city after the second world war, when the former enemy quickly turned into a close partner.
When you take the long view at UK-German relations, this part of the king’s trip is at least as important and meaningful as his appointments in the German capital. Those who criticise royal visits as constituting little more than expensive photo-ops fail to understand that not all symbolism is empty.
Continue reading...Kampala’s wildly innovative underground music scene has become a home for queer east Africans. A proposed law change not only endangers them, but an entire cultural movement
Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, in his 38th year of increasingly authoritarian rule, has declared that his people will never embrace homosexuality and that the west’s “deviations” are not to be normalised. Instead, Ugandan MPs have approved an anti-LGBTQ+ bill which recommends heavy sentences – including the death penalty – for acts of homosexuality in a country where it is already illegal. It awaits the president’s signature to become law.
The 2023 anti-homosexuality bill criminalises those touching another person “with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality” and any person who identifies as “a lesbian, gay, transgender, a queer” with up to 10 years in prison. Up to five years in prison is deemed adequate for the vague act of “promotion of homosexuality”. Only two out of 389 MPs voted against the bill, which has been broadly welcomed across Ugandan society.
Continue reading...A pilot scheme is inviting journalists into England and Wales’s most private courtrooms. This can expose those who use litigation as a weapon
What happens in the family courts stays in the family courts. That has been my experience over more than 10 years as a barrister specialising in family law. Every single day, family judges hear cases of domestic abuse that are damaging the lives of women and children. Yet these stories are hidden from public scrutiny, shrouded in mystery and secrecy.
Now, a long-awaited pilot scheme that aims to improve transparency in the justice system will open up family courts to journalists in three locations in England and Wales. And it’s about time. For too long, shadowy reporting restrictions have been masking a widespread problem that pervades the family courts: coercive and controlling behaviour.
Charlotte Proudman is an award-winning barrister specialising in violence against women and girls, and a fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge
Continue reading...The working-class son of Guyanese immigrants could soon be the foreign secretary. He discusses antisemitism, Suella Braverman – and his experience of being stopped and searched at 12
Last September, the son of a single mother raised in the shadow of the Broadwater Farm estate in north London attended the official proclamation of the king. It was only as David Lammy was dressing for the privy council ceremony at St James’s Palace that the experience started to feel faintly surreal.
“I got the bus back home just to feel normal,” the shadow foreign secretary says. “I get a bit emotional about this, but I can’t tell you – I’ve travelled a long, long way from where my parents started, and my upbringing, a long, long way. And that’s, in a way, the miracle of this country.” His Guyana-born parents, ardent monarchists, would doubtless have been proud, but didn’t live to see the day; as he notes, his parents, and those of his childhood friends, led hard lives and mostly died relatively young, while his posher university mates’ parents are still busy “running the world”.
Continue reading...Democracies should be maturely debating online safety and data, not making kneejerk responses that risk an idea we all cherish
TikTok’s chief executive, Shou Zi Chew, discovered during his five-hour grilling by US Congress what Huawei could have told him all along: being owned by a Chinese company is bad for business.
In fact, the panic over TikTok is a lot like like Huawei and 5G all over again. The security and privacy risks are plausible, but largely without evidence. What this is really about is trust, trade and geopolitics.
Emily Taylor is an associate fellow in the International Security Programme, Chatham House, CEO of Oxford Information Labs and editor of the Journal of Cyber Policy
Continue reading...Record breaker Marieke Vervoort, who had an agonising, degenerative illness, used Belgium’s assisted dying laws to give herself ‘a soft, beautiful death’
Marieke Vervoort died aged 40 on Tuesday 22 October 2019 about 8.15pm. She was at her home in Diest in north-eastern Belgium, her parents and loved ones at her bedside, following a small party with friends. It all was exactly as she had planned.
Vervoort, a world-record breaking Paralympian with an incurable, degenerative condition that caused her agonising pain, chose to die under Belgium’s euthanasia law. Now a documentary film on release in her native Flanders recounts the story of her final years and how she chose the moment of her death.
Continue reading...Is chirruping dangerous? How many legs can you tap-dance with? And what have they all been smoking? As the SpongeBob SquarePants musical hits Britain, we dive down to Bikini Bottom
“Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
Absorbent and yellow and porous is he!”
If these words don’t set your foot tapping, or prompt famished thoughts of Krabby Patties, then you may not be the target audience for a musical that brings to the stage the psychedelic deep-sea inhabitants of Bikini Bottom: namely, the irrepressibly chirpy SpongeBob SquarePants, his dopey best friend Patrick Star and the squirrel Sandy Cheeks, an inventor with martial arts moves.
Continue reading...The illegal migration bill would change the status of children and family groups in the UK asylum system. Surely we’re better than this
Earlier this month, a four-hour parliamentary debate on the illegal migration bill produced the expected majority (63) to secure a second reading. But during that debate there was a potentially misleading clarification from the home secretary. Claiming that the opposition had mischaracterised the bill’s proposals, Suella Braverman carefully noted that the government would not be detaining children. Or rather, for those who listened carefully, it would not be detaining unaccompanied children.
Good. But although unaccompanied children may not be detained, other children will be. The government is proposing to change the status of children and family groups in the UK asylum system. And in doing so it will overturn 12 years of established cross-party consensus in the UK that we are not a country that detains children and families for solely administrative immigration purposes. This policy was agreed by senior Conservatives still sitting in parliament. To overturn it would be a deeply, deeply regressive act.
Continue reading...Mia Brookes ripped up the rulebook to win the slopestyle world championship. Now her sights are set on the world stage
‘When I stood at the top of the run, I felt something in the air,” says 16-year-old Mia Brookes, her face etched with joy and awe as she relieves the dizzying trick that made her the youngest world champion in snowboarding history this year. “I knew it was going to happen. It was really weird.”
Until last month no female snowboarder had ever attempted a Cab 1440 double grab in competition. Little wonder. The trick is so risky it should carry an X-certificate. But on a witchy day in Bakuriani, Georgia, something magical was brewing. On her second run, with the slopestyle world championship on the line, the schoolgirl from Sandbach in Cheshire flew backwards off a ramp, twisted her body through four rotations while also grabbing her board twice, and landed smoothly and serenely.
Continue reading...Up early? My wife [comedian Rachel Parris] and I had a baby just over a year ago. The baby wakes before 7am, so we’re early risers.
Sunday brekkie? I’m doing the 16-hour fast thing. You eat for eight hours – as far as I can tell, nonstop – then you don’t for 16. I’m skipping one of my three favourite meals.
Continue reading...Japanese challenger ready to give Oisin Murphy a first big-race success since returning from his long ban
The second significant stopping-off point on Frankie Dettori’s global farewell tour is the Dubai World Cup card at Meydan on Saturday evening, when he will attempt to follow up last year’s success in the feature event aboard Bob Baffert’s Country Grammer.
Dettori and Country Grammer finished second behind Panthalassa in the $20m (£16.4m) Saudi Cup last month and he has already landed £8.25m in just three rides aboard the six-year-old, which means Country Grammer will overtake Enable as the highest earner of Dettori’s career if he lands the spoils on Saturday.
Continue reading...While the ex-president left the White House over two years ago, the Trump addiction is hard to beat as his legal perils dominate headlines
When Donald Trump took his final walk from the White House, boarded a helicopter and vanished into a cold sky, millions of Americans breathed a sigh of relief. With the former US president retired to his Mar-a-Lago estate, they reasoned, they would no longer live in constant dread of new scandals or impulsive tweets.
Two years and two months later, it turns out that Trump addiction is hard to beat. His legal perils have dominated headlines all week. Republicans continue to define themselves in relation to him. He remains the favourite for the party nomination in next year’s presidential election. Trump is still living rent-free in the nation’s head.
Continue reading...The war is a test of China’s ability to manage its interests. Putin, Zelenskiy, the EU, the global south: it’s trying to keep them all on side
The Moscow summit between the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, was described as a visit that may change the world order by many international media. Xi’s visit came at a time of great need for isolated Putin, but the rest of the world remains puzzled about precisely how far China will go in supporting Russia in its horrific war in Ukraine.
While China demonstrates a willingness to maintain the status quo in its relationship with its biggest nuclear neighbour, Xi has still not provided a straightforward answer on exactly what kind of support is on offer, beyond deepening bilateral trade ties and elusively worded further coordination in international affairs. Nor is there a clear next step for Beijing’s “peace plan” until a call between Xi and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, takes place.
Dr Yu Jie is a senior research fellow on China in the Asia-Pacific Programme, Chatham House
Continue reading...Unfortunately, actual justice may prove to be far more elusive
You have to hand it to Stormy Daniels.
After all of Donald Trump’s well-documented malfeasance over the decades – his fake university and failed casino, his Covid denialism, his consorting with dictators, his blatant lies about election fraud, his incitement of a deadly riot – it has taken a hush money payment to a porn actress to create the most imminent threat that he’ll face criminal charges
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
Continue reading...Only a small proportion of rape, burglary and violent crimes are actually solved by the police
The Metropolitan police cannot be reformed: it must be given its final rites and buried for good. I made this argument in the first column I ever wrote for this newspaper, nearly a decade ago: the case is surely even more compelling now.
By finding “institutional racism, sexism and homophobia” within the force, Louise Casey and her review have underlined a basic fact: most of the capital’s population cannot trust the Met with their safety. It is, as Doreen Lawrence puts it, “rotten to the core”. It took the murder of her son for London’s police force to be first damned for “institutional racism” by the Macpherson report nearly quarter of a century ago. And yet nothing changed, aided by a culture of denial among politicians, such as the then-Labour justice secretary, Jack Straw, who said, a decade later, the judgment no longer applied.
Continue reading...Last year Chris O’Shea spurned his annual bonus, this year he’s taking the full whack. What’s changed?
A year ago, Chris O’Shea was in solidarity mode. The chief executive of Centrica, owner of British Gas, didn’t take an annual bonus because it would be “wrong” to do so when so many customers were on the wrong end of soaring energy bills.
The financial hardships haven’t obviously become any less hard over the past 12 months (especially for those unfortunate enough to be visited by a British Gas-appointed prepayment meter fitter) but O’Shea will take his full whack this time, including an annual bonus of £1.4m within an overall tally of £4.5m.
Continue reading...Despite billions spent on the humanitarian response, Somalia faces another year of drought and hunger. We desperately need money, but it needs to be better spent
In Somalia, we are climate-vulnerable, yet we barely contribute to climate emissions. If we are to cope, we need justice in the form of financing.
We’ve seen droughts, but never six consecutive failed rainy seasons. We’ve known displacement, but never 3 million internally displaced people. We were at the brink of famine in October last year, we narrowly averted it, and we’re facing similar conditions today, with 8.3 million people needing urgent assistance.
Continue reading...Sweating profusely has improved my life, with the heat wringing all the worry out of me. But an unexpected conversation sent me spiralling
Don’t ask me why, but I keep a list in my head of inane and avoidable ways I might meet an untimely end. When I lived in New York and used a bike-share to get everywhere, crashing into a halal food truck while swerving to avoid a low-flying pigeon was at the top of that list. Either that or tripping over my small and erratic dog.
When I moved to a house in Philadelphia, falling down the stairs while carrying my laptop in one hand and half-drunk coffee cups in the other usurped those scenarios to take the top spot. As of a few weeks ago, however, a new No 1 has emerged: passing out in the sauna or getting infected with a brain-eating amoeba after spending time in a steam room.
Continue reading...Those at the top need to have skin in the game – and know that risky decisions they make will affect them too
Executives at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Credit Suisse took substantial risks. SVB proactively expanded the bank’s deposits, some might say excessively. These depositors were uninsured and undiversified. And back when interest rates were low, the bank invested significantly in US government bonds, which was fine at the time. But when there were signs that interest rates were rising and creating substantial interest rate risk, managers left this portfolio unhedged and unchanged. How come SVB managers took those risks? It seemed that they lacked “skin in the game”.
The risks taken by executives at Credit Suisse were of a different nature, but still substantial. By becoming involved in such companies as the now defunct Greensill and Archegos, the bank’s capital took a hit. The fines it has accrued after facing scandal after scandal have also bitten into its capital. It can be said that those involved also lacked skin in the game.
Natacha Postel-Vinay is assistant professor of economic history at the London School of Economics
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