Left Of London

Everyone else's mobile phone charges are going down. In the UK they are going through the roof. Zero regulation like Energy, Food, Water, Insurance, Rent... They just rip you off as much as they like and the Government does nothing.

Including, but maybe especially this: it’s a pattern. Harborne’s donations to Boris Johnson. And Boris Johnson’s pro-crypto statements prefigure those to Farage. 3/

When the BBC won’t engage with the story of a major politician’s phone allegedly having been hacked by Russia, and that politician declining to allow the authorities to investigate, it’s enough to make you suspicious that our national broadcaster has been infiltrated & corrupted.

@KanishkaNarayan Your party tried to hand the work of the country’s creatives to AI companies for free. This is the opposite of giving people agency. It is directly taking it away. If you want to support the agency of British workers and families, stop cosying up to big tech.

Email leaks revealed that Johnson lobbied for Harborne. Both Farage and Johnson started lauding crypto around the time they received millions from him. Harborne is suing Ben Habib for suggesting Johnson and Farage colluded in the 2019 election. But they were both in his pocket

Britain has the dirtiest rivers, the most expensive energy, the least reliable trains, the most overcrowded prisons, the worst access to healthcare and the widest gap between rich and poor in all of Europe. If you want a verdict on 40 years of neoliberalism, there it is.

We have failed young people more than words can express. #heatwave

The BBC’s desperation for balance once saw then-Tory MP Andrea Leadsom invited on #Newsnight to argue about post-Brexit trade with the actual head of the World Trade Organisation Now they’ll host a #BBCQT special about AI containing not a single critic of AI

Generative AI doesn’t run on magic. It runs on massive data pipelines built on privacy violations by design. Our new @Amnesty report exposes how big tech’s AI systems are powered by surveillance, data extraction, and abuse of people’s rights, at scale. We researched the models powering some of the most popular publicly available standalone generative AI tools, including GPT 3 by Open AI, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, DeepSeek and tools by Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. This is not innovation at any cost. It comes at a high price: our human rights. Read the report: amnesty.org/en/latest/news…

The UK has “turned into an offshore financial economy”. Speaking to Telegraph journalist Camilla Tominey, former RMT general secretary Mick Lynch argued that the country needs an “industrial plan” for people who “work with their hands”. He added that Margaret Thatcher's sell-off of council homes still plays a major role in today’s housing crisis, helping to ensure the economy only works for the wealthy.

@bbcquestiontime @BBCiPlayer @BBCSounds @BBCNews @BBCOne No one from creative industries on mass copyright infringement? No one on capture of revenue streams by prioritising AI summaries of scraped sites rather than sites themselves? There's zero balance in this panel.

Tomorrow, Question Time is in Dulwich for an AI special Joining Fiona on the panel are Darren Jones, Julia Lopez, Mo Gawdat, Laura Gilbert, and Victor Riparbelli Join #bbcqt, 9pm on @BBCiPlayer, @BBCSounds, and @BBCNews, 10:40pm on @BBCOne Apply to be in the audience here: eu.castitreach.com/ag/mentorn/que…

The latest Israeli military evacuation order is even more extensive, ordering all those living south of Zahrani river to move north. That’s about 14% of Lebanon ordered to leave their homes after the Israeli military declared it a ‘combat zone’. That’s roughly 300 towns and villages, tens of 1000’s of people.

Britain now languishes near Russia - and below Turkey and Serbia - on trans rights. But the anti-trans movement has decided their crusade will never ever ever ever ever be complete. Their all-consuming obsession dictates everything, no matter how many more lives are ruined.

@Prosperity_Inst @jackmrankin Jack Rankin thought Brexit would be a great idea. He was also Tory councillor during RBWM's period of epic financial mismanagement. Not someone you should pay any heed to on economics.

✒️ Our latest Substack is now LIVE. @jackmrankin MP on why the Right must pay attention to language. “The greatest modelling, policy papers, and statistical analysis in the world will mean nothing if we don’t win the argument.” Read here 👇 open.substack.com/pub/prosperity…

Former BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Llewellyn writes of the BBC being a "prime mover" in the "tidal wave of lies and misreporting" about alleged anti-semitism in Corbyn's Labour, and of Israel's financing "a political, racist libel that made impossible proper debate about foreign affairs running up to two general elections". electronicintifada.net/content/how-is…

I'm Jewish, British & 64 All my life, I wondered how the Holocaust could have happened. I understood that Hitler & other leaders were EVIL, but how did millions of ordinary people go along with it? NOW, seeing how so many in the West rationalise & defend the Gaza Genocide, I feel I have an answer and it is profoundly disturbing

Political corruption. @Jacob_Rees_Mogg party - the Conservatives @michaelgove and the unlawful VIP PPE lane. The long-awaited independent report concluded that almost 90% of the staggering £10.8bn lost to Covid fraud, error, and botched contracts cannot be recovered.

@SunilSharmaUK Happy to help explain the science in simple terms, if that helps.

So wait the weather was the exact same temperature as 82 years ago ?! But I thought every summer was “the hottest ever” because of climate change …

BREAKING: Israel just dropped bombs on the Qaraoun Dam in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley — a key water reservoir serving civilian populations across surrounding villages. This is not a battlefield target. It is a critical water infrastructure. This is an act of genocide.

In November 2022, Guillaume Lample was using pirated books to train LLMs at Meta. He told a colleague “Everyone is using lib-gen” (a massive pirate library). 5 months later, he co-founded Mistral, which started training LLMs. They have not disclosed what they trained on. It seems natural to ask - did Mistral also train on pirated books? Surprised they haven’t faced questions on this, given Lample’s known, almost contemporaneous use of pirated books at Meta, and his view that “everyone” was doing so.