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> Sir Keir Starmer will be invited to meet EU leaders to discuss European security as Brussels seeks closer ties with the UK, in a significant post-Brexit move. > >The British prime minister will be asked to dine with the leaders of the 27 member states at an informal retreat in Belgium on February 3 by António Costa, incoming president of the European Council, two EU officials said. > >Nick Thomas-Symonds, the UK minister in charge of negotiations for a post-Brexit “reset” of relations with the EU, met Costa this week in Brussels. > >No British premier has attended such a gathering since the country left the bloc in 2020. The invite is a milestone as Starmer attempts to “reset” Britain’s relations with the EU after years of strained ties. > >Starmer wants a security pact with Brussels, covering defence, energy and irregular migration, as a key element of his attempt to improve on the post-Brexit framework agreed by former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson. > > […] Starmer’s invitation to discuss defence with the EU27 is a reflection of the fact that the UK has one of the most advanced military and intelligence capabilities in Europe. > >The February meeting also comes as European capitals come to terms with a potential change to the continent’s security framework, with the return of Donald Trump to the White House in January.

Upgrading to 0.19.7, should be a couple hours at most.

Context

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Joint opinion piece by British and French Foreign Secretaries David Lammy and Jean-Noël Barrot:

> By launching his illegal and unprovoked full-scale war of aggression in Ukraine 1,000 days ago this week, not only did Vladimir Putin accelerate the largest war on the European continent since the Second World War, he also sought to rewrite the international order. > >The annihilation of the global architecture that has been the cornerstone of international peace and security for generations. All to justify his illegal and intolerable aggression against a sovereign European country. > > The UK and France will not let him do so. Together with our allies, we will do everything that is necessary to put Ukraine in the best position to achieve a just and lasting peace. > > Indeed, what has happened in Ukraine is nothing short of the largest violation of territorial integrity of our time. From the bombing of civilians to the abduction and deportation of children, Vladimir Putin’s Russia has violated international law in countless ways. > > The risks are not only to European security, but the world at large. Putin’s aim is to set a new precedent that upends the rules-based international system, whereby countries feel they can invade their neighbours with total impunity. > > That brutality risks becoming the new norm and threatening peace everywhere. And as the war in Ukraine is spreading beyond Europe, we see the consequences of this attempted “Putinisation” for the world. > > North Korea is leveraging its relationship with Russia to flex its muscles on the battlefield in an attempt to strengthen its hand and further destabilise Asia, starting with its immediate neighbour. > >Iran is also toughening its stance by providing Russia with drones and missiles, while refraining from rolling back its nuclear programme and destabilising the entire Middle East via its proxies. > > As two founding nations of the UN and permanent members of the Security Council, the UK and France will relentlessly fight this campaign of “Putinisation”. > > Learning from history, we believe that international relations should be grounded in justice. Any just and durable peace cannot be achieved through violence nor maintained by force. > > This is why we have condemned the barbaric terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas and other terrorist groups on 7 October, 2023, and why we have sanctioned the perpetrators. > > This is also why we continue to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, the release of all hostages, the massive scale-up of humanitarian assistance, and the cessation of violent settlers’ activities in the West Bank in the interests of both Israelis and Palestinians. > > We know the Palestinian issue will not go away until a two-state solution is implemented, with mutual recognition and security guarantees. > > Similarly, we are no doubt that diplomacy, not violence, is the only way to achieve peace and security for Israel and Lebanon. We need an immediate ceasefire and a political solution consistent with the principles of UN Security Council resolution 1701. > > We reiterate our full support to UNIFIL and the important work it does every day. Further violence leading to civil casualties and population displacements risks forcing the country into chaos, fuelling even greater instability in the region. > > In all crises around the world, the UK and France stand united on the side of humanitarian law. We’ve demonstrated it once again this week by championing a UN Security Council resolution for the protection of civilians in Sudan where the worst crisis in the world is unravelling – an effort shamelessly opposed by Putin’s Russia, who stood alone in casting a veto. > […] > In the face of major crises and huge challenges, more than a century after the signing of the “Entente Cordiale”, the UK and France stand united in the same spirit. > > We are strengthening our bilateral relationship, and working toward enhanced relations between the UK and the European Union. We are offering a credible alternative to the world’s “Putinisation” and fragmentation. > > An alternative grounded in technological progress, international law and multilateral action. The world can count on the UK and France to advocate these principles in the years ahead.

> According to the estimates provided by the government, in the years ending March 2025, March 2026 and March 2028 there will be an additional 50,000 pensioners in relative poverty after housing costs. > > In the years ending March 2027, March 2029 and March 2030 an additional 100,000 pensioners would be in relative poverty after housing costs. > > The annual figures are rounded to the nearest 50,000. [Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall] said this meant "small variations in the underlying numbers impacted can lead to much larger changes in the rounded headline numbers". > > The cumulative total over the years does not necessarily refer to individual pensioners, who could move in and out of relative poverty over time depending on their personal circumstances. > > Currently the government estimates 1.9 million pensioners - around 15% - are in relative poverty. > > The new estimates, published on Tuesday, suggest the cuts to the winter fuel payment would increase pensioner poverty by 0.5 percentage points. > > A person is considered to be living in relative poverty if they have less than 60% of the median income. > > In her letter, Kendall said the work and pensions department had written to 120,000 pensioners to encourage them to claim the pension credit to which they may be entitled.

> MPs are to summon Elon Musk to testify about [Twitter's] role in spreading disinformation, in a parliamentary inquiry into the UK riots and the rise of false and harmful AI content, the Guardian has learned. > > Senior executives from Meta, which runs Facebook and Instagram, and TikTok are also expected to be called for questioning as part of a Commons science and technology select committee social media inquiry. > > The first hearings will take place in the new year, amid rising concern that UK online safety laws risk being outpaced by rapidly advancing technology and the politicisation of platforms such as [Twitter]. > > The MPs will investigate the consequences of generative AI, which was used in widely shared images posted on Facebook and [Twitter] inciting people to join Islamophobic protests after the killing of three schoolgirls in Southport in August. They will also investigate Silicon Valley business models that “encourage the spread of content that can mislead and harm”. > […] > [Twitter] did not respond when asked if Musk would testify in the UK, although it appears unlikely. The world’s richest man is preparing to take on a senior role in the Trump White House and has been highly critical of the Labour government, including weighing in on changes to inheritance tax on farms by saying on Monday that “Britain is going full Stalin”. During the riots that followed the Southport killings he said: “Civil war is inevitable.” > […] > [Chi Onwurah, Labour chair of the Commons science and technology select committee social media inquiry,] said the inquiry would attempt to “get to the bottom of the links between social media algorithms, generative AI, and the spread of harmful or false content”. > > It will also look at the use of AI to supplement search engines such as Google, which was found recently to be regurgitating false and racist claims about people in African countries having low average IQs. Google said the AI overviews containing the claims had violated its policies and had been removed.

Source

> A former director at the tobacco giant Philip Morris International (PMI) was handed a role on an influential expert committee advising the UK government on cancer risks, the Observer can reveal. > > Ruth Dempsey, the ex-director of scientific and regulatory affairs, spent 28 years at PMI before being appointed to the UK Committee on Carcinogenicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoC). > > The committee’s role is to provide ministers with independent advice. Yet since taking up the position in February 2020, Dempsey has continued to be paid by PMI for work including authoring a sponsored paper about regulatory strategies for heated tobacco products. > > She also owns shares in the tobacco giant – whose products include Marlboro cigarettes and IQOS heated tobacco sticks – and receives a PMI pension. On social media she continues to engage with senior staff at the company, including liking LinkedIn posts for the chief communications officer and the vice-president of public affairs. > > There is no suggestion that Dempsey has acted improperly or failed to declare her interests, which are listed in committee documents. She said she had always complied with the rules and that her contributions to the CoC were based on her scientific training and “decades of experience in the field”. She also said she was “no longer a representative of the tobacco industry” given she had retired and had disclosed details of her career and financial interests during the application process. > […] > Prior to Dempsey’s appointment, the CoC was involved in reviews of both e-cigarettes and heated tobacco products, two of PMI’s product lines. > > Dempsey is believed to have been appointed to the committee following an evaluation and interview conducted by a three-person panel, including a Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) official, after stepping down from her full-time role with PMI to establish her own toxicology consultancy in the summer of 2019. > […] > Dempsey said she was “very sorry if anyone feels that my presence on the committee is inappropriate”. > > When she joined she did not have any active consultancy agreements with PMI but said the two she has had since had been properly declared. She also declared potential conflicts of interest when topics arose “that could be related to work I was doing as a consultant to any company”. > > “In the five years that I have been a member there has been no topic related to tobacco products. If there had been, I certainly would declare my conflict of interest and would always follow the guidance of the committee chair regarding participation,” she said. She added that she had “never passed confidential or privileged information to PMI, and would certainly never do so”.

>The government could offer its own low-cost baby formula under a brand such as the NHS to combat the high prices and lack of choice in the market, the UK competition watchdog has suggested. > >The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said another “backstop” measure could be for the government to regulate and set a price or profit-margin cap on retailers as a way to bring prices down for parents more quickly. > > The potential measures formed part of the CMA’s interim report on the infant formula market after the watchdog identified that a lack of competition in the market had led to soaring prices, taking advantage of an ingrained belief among parents that higher cost equates to better quality for their children. > > The CMA report set out a number of potential recommendations including extending the ban on the advertising of infant formula to follow-on formula, or going as far as “prohibiting all brand-related advertising”. > […] > The provisional findings, which will feed into a final report to be published early next year, include some backstop measures that the CMA said were not actively recommended but that the government could make “with the aim of bringing prices down directly”. > > One option was for the government to procure its own infant formula from a third-party manufacturer at a competitive price and sell it under an established name, such as the NHS, or invest in creating a new brand for the market. > […] > Another option is to introduce regulations to place a maximum price cap on baby and infant formula, or establish a profit-margin cap, which the Greek government did earlier this year with the aim of making products more affordable.

> When he was a backbench MP in 2018, David Lammy described Trump as a "tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath". > > But in his first interview since Trump's victory, he told the BBC's Newscast podcast the president-elect was "someone that we can build a relationship with in our national interest". > > Lammy praised his election campaign as "very well run", adding that: "I felt in my bones that there could be a Trump presidency." > […] > Pressed over whether he had changed his mind, Lammy said the remarks were "old news" and you would "struggle to find any politician" who had not said some "pretty ripe things" about Trump in the past. > > "In that period, particularly with people on Twitter, lots of things were said about Donald Trump," he said. > > "I think that what you say as a backbencher and what you do wearing the real duty of public office are two different things. > > "And I am foreign secretary. There are things I know now that I didn't know back then." > > Asked in if Trump brought up his previous comments when the pair met for dinner in New York in September, Lammy said: "Not even vaguely." > > "I know this is a talking point today, but in a world where there's war in Europe, where there's a tremendous loss of life in the Middle East, where the US and the UK genuinely have a special relationship, where we got someone who's about to become again, the US president, who has experience of doing the job last time round, we will forge common interests," he said. > > "We will agree and align on much and where we disagree, we'll have those conversations as well, most often in private." > […] > But during the election campaign, [Trump] vowed to dramatically increase taxes, or tariffs, on foreign goods imported into the US. > > Such a move could hit billions of pounds' worth of British exports, including Scotch whisky, pharmaceutical products, and airplane parts. > > Asked if the UK would seek a special trade arrangement so there were no extra tariffs on British exports to the US, Lammy said: "We will seek to ensure and to get across to the United States, and I believe that they would understand this, that hurting your closest allies cannot be in your medium or long-term interests." > > Lammy also said Trump was "correct" in his argument that Europe had fallen short on defence spending. > > He called for a “clear” pledge from European governments to boosting military spending but could not say when the government would reach its target of spending 2.5% GDP on defence.

Real, btw

> I would like to use Bluesky. They've done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I've got lots of friends there who really enjoy it. > > But I'm not on Bluesky and I don't have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this in 2023: I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will. > […] > Enshittification can be thought of as the result of a lack of consequences. Whether you are tempted by greed or pressured by people who have lower ethics than you, the more it costs to compromise, the fewer compromises you'll make. > > In other words, to resist enshittification, you have to impose switching costs on yourself. > > That's where federation comes in. On Mastodon (and other services based on Activitypub), you can easily leave one server and go to another, and everyone you follow and everyone who follows you will move over to the new server. If the person who runs your server turns out to be imperfect in a way that you can't endure, you can find another server, spend five minutes moving your account over, and you're back up and running on the new server. > > Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in swift and devastating pain upon you. > […] > Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I've entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky's roadmap for as long as I've been following it, but they haven't (yet) delivered it. > > That was worrying when Bluesky was a scrappy, bootstrapped startup with a few million users. Now it has grown to over 13 million users, and it has taken on a large tranche of outside capital. > > Plenty of people have commented that now that a VC is holding Bluesky's purse-strings, enshittification will surely follow (doubly so because the VC is called "Blockchain Capital," which, at this point, might as well be "Grifty Scam Caveat Emptor Capital"). But I don't agree with this at all. It's not outside capital that leads to enshittification, it's leverage that enshittifies a service. > > A VC that understands that they can force you to wreck your users' lives is always in danger of doing so. A VC who understands that doing this will make your service into an empty – and thus worthless – server is far less likely to do so (and if they do, at least your users can escape).

Joint Statement from left leaning politicians criticising the new Budget.

> Labour’s first budget punishes the “working people” they claim to support. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves promised to deliver real change to the electorate, after 14 years of Tory rule. This week, they have broken that promise. This budget is austerity by another name. > > While we welcome the government’s decision to invest in school and hospital buildings, it is extremely disappointing that these investments have been undermined by a swathe of public sector cuts, cruel attacks on the worst off, and a dogmatic refusal to redistribute wealth and power. These are not “tough choices” for government ministers, but for ordinary people who are forced to choose between heating their home and putting food on the table. > > Labour is raising defence expenditure to 2.5% of GDP while telling us there is no money to lift 250,000 children out of poverty. This is a lie. There is plenty of money – it’s just in the wrong hands. The richest 1% in the UK hold more wealth than 70% of Britons. By refusing to impose a wealth tax, this government has chosen to force vulnerable communities to pay the price for years of economic failure, instead of making the richest pay their fair share. Labour’s first budget shows us whose side they’re on. > > Years of austerity and privatisation have decimated our public services and pushed millions into poverty, disproportionately impacting women, people of colour and disabled people. Making millions of children, working, retired and disabled people poorer damages our entire economy and stretches our public services. An austerity economy is a false economy. > > We, along with nearly 100 progressive Independent and Green politicians across the country, are calling on the Labour government to: 1) introduce wealth taxes; 2) abolish the two-child benefit cap and stop attacking welfare recipients; 3) reverse cuts to winter fuel; 4) restore the £2 bus cap; and 5) invest in a Green New Deal. > > We refuse to believe that child poverty, mass hunger and homelessness are inevitable in the sixth largest economy in the world. A progressive movement is growing up and down the country, demanding a real alternative to this race to the bottom between Labour and the Tories, which has seen the new government perpetuate decades of austerity and rampant corporate greed. > > The Tories’ collapse allowed Labour to come to power with the lowest vote share ever won by any single-party majority government. Labour haemorrhaging votes to progressive independents and Greens in their heartlands should be a lesson to this government: you are wrong to believe that progressive voters have nowhere else to go. Our movement is growing every day – and you ignore the demand for a real alternative at your peril. > > -- Jeremy Corbyn MP Independent, Carla Denyer MP Green party co-leader, Adrian Ramsay MP Green party co-leader, Sian Berry MP Green party, Ben Lake MP Plaid Cymru, Ann Davies MP Plaid Cymru, Liz Saville Roberts MP Plaid Cymru, Llinos Medi MP Plaid Cymru, Zack Polanski Green party deputy leader and London assembly member, Leanne Mohamad Independent candidate for Ilford North, Jamie Driscoll Former North of Tyne mayor, Andrew Feinstein Former ANC MP and Independent candidate for Holborn and St Pancras, Leanne Wood Former leader, Plaid Cymru, Beth Winter Former Labour MP for Cynon Valley, Hilary Schan Chair, We Deserve Better and Independent councillor in Worthing, Anthony Slaughter Wales Green party leader