Patch Thompson

UN human rights chief criticises 'disturbing' Palestine Action ban Volker Turk urges the UK government to lift the

Popping back here to say, this seems bad, doesn't it?

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Okay, so this is s fun new (genuine) risk with AI:

Companies feeling the need to jump on the AI bandwagon trying to impress their investors/LinkedIn followers etc end up freaking out their customer base instead and lose a big chunk of income.

Guys, you actually need to think about data security!

'Financial deregulation will boost growth'

Labour now has nothing to lose by going on the front foot on this (and other) issues. Starmer has shown how the govt only harms itself by trying to appease the unappeasable and ignoring what an actual majority wants.

in this week's newsletter! one of my hideously personal essays, on my long journey towards loving people and why I'll never take human connection for granted, and I don't think you should either: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/a-pro-huma... [free to read! and I'm running a subscription sale!]

Reform has, for various reasons, a core base of cranks. So far, they have managed to keep them and more ordinary voters within the tent. Breaking them requires forcing a split between these groups.

Thomas Tuchel absolutely *has* to win the next World Cup, btw. I want to see what it would do to Lowe's brain.

Rupert Lowe really did drop 'one World Cup and two World Wars' like this. What a time to be alive.

Mao ZeBen Thought

Whomst?

Poland presses EU to open probe into Grok’s ‘erratic’ behavior Deputy prime minister says ‘negative effects’ of Elon Musk’s AI chatbot may have been ‘by design.’

The Polish government is urging the EU to immediately open an investigation into Elon Musk’s Grok, according to a letter dated July 9 and seen by us.

AFAIK, you legally cannot penalise someone claiming asylum for the manner of their arrival. So, anyone who was 'sent back' to France as part of this deal would a) have a right to legally challenge the UK government and b) still be eligible to be one of the French contingent of asylum seekers!

Or you could just have a properly funded, legally compliant asylum system? Just a thought.

History repeated itself more brutally in 1962: his son, Brian, was attacked in his room at Cambridge and hospitalised. He was running for the presidency of the Cambridge Union - which he went on to win - and had to be bandaged up to sit his final exams. The attackers were never brought to justice.

Positive development, especially if smartly led.

'Tonight, a new group of Labour MPs launches, calling on the PM to radically refocus on actually acting like a Labour Prime Minister for a bit'

“.. traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter ..”

@niemanreports.org #Hellsite
niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-...

South Belfast: Council votes to remove contentious bonfire There had been concerns that the power supply has been put at risk at two major hospitals because it lies near a major electricity substation.

The chain of not-so-subtle passing of the buck from various bodies and agencies here is magnificent. Just letting the bonfire get bigger and bigger all the while.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

George Osborne

Moth Win? Seems more like he's on course to LOSE right now tbh!

A BBC news headline which says “Penguin says it did “all necessary due diligence” with The Salt Path

I’m no expert but I would’ve got a person to do it.

Tbf to me, I did say in the follow-up that I hoped there was a different/simpler explanation than deliberate censorship

Often the precise details of who is heckling who etc., won't be, true. Also, the issue of how things are recorded if they're said at the same time.

Not an exact science, which is why IMO it's still possible that this is an error. I think it's unusual to have it included then removed, though.

Yeah, it's obviously not fully verbatim in a lot of instances. But having included it then removed is, like you say, intriguing.

It's generally used as a break, yes. But afaik there are plenty of times where MPs being ruled out of order are recorded in more detail than simply stopping when the Speaker calls order.

Parliamentary transcripts are democratic documents. They can be an official record of what was supposed to have been said rather than what was - they’re a constructed version of Parliament that is close to, but not exactly, reality. This can be very important when democratic needs are not for verbatim transcripts. They sometimes add useful shorthand - referring to standing orders, or additional information that was not said orally. For parliaments with multiple official languages (in the UK’s case the Senedd/Welsh Parliament), transcripts make parliamentary activity accessible in all official languages. But the difference can also be political in the “first draft of history” sense. The transcript can retrospectively apply rule-following in a way that can remove political speech on the edge of those rules. We’ve noted before there are times where the transcript does not reflect reality in procedurally significant ways. Historically famous events can be at the edge of the transcript, rather than visible in it.

Just because I was writing this today anyway - on when Hansard doesn't match what happened.

Probably. But given Hansard's reputation and how seriously the staff who run it take their job, I'd rather no assign instant malice to something that could be a mistake.

Obviously, I have a professional interest in Hansard being the most accurate source possible. But ultimately, Parliamentary privilege and the ability of MPs to speak without censorship is one of the fundamentals of British democracy.

I *hope* that this has been caused by some overzealous editing from someone who has misunderstood the legal impact of the organisation's prescription last week, rather than a deliberate editorial decision.

Might not seem like much on the face of it, but Hansard is the gold standard historical source for Parliamentary proceedings and that even one instance of censorship like this is deeply concerning.