Now, however, 11,279 coordinates obtained by WIRED show not only a flood of traffic to Epstein’s island property—nearly a decade after his conviction as a sex offender—but also point to as many as 166 locations throughout the US where Near Intelligence infers that visitors to Little St. James likely lived and worked. The cache also points to cities in Ukraine, the Cayman Islands, and Australia, among others.

Near Intelligence, for example, tracked devices visiting Little St. James from locations in 80 cities crisscrossing 26 US states and territories, with Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, Michigan, and New York topping the list. The coordinates point to mansions in gated communities in Michigan and Florida; homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket in Massachusetts; a nightclub in Miami; and the sidewalk across the street from Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

If I have the right zoom level to make the text in the feed a sensible size, the font size in the threads is too small to read easily. Correct the zoom level in the thread and the font size in the feed becomes way too large.

This has long been a problem and I'm not sure why this is suddenly irritating me more than usual. Is it just me? Is there a setting I'm missing?

E2A: It's likely a browser issue. I've found a workaround, thanks all.

Archive link

Summary linked, long version here: https://www.jfsa.org.uk/uploads/5/4/3/1/54312921/origins_of_a_disaster_-_summary_-_eleanor_shaikh.pdf

Both hosted by jfsa.org.uk, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance website.

Driven by wider political agendas which included the protection of Japanese inward investment in UK plc, Blair ruled that the Post Office must purchase a salvaged version of Horizon. Insufficient work had been done to determine the viability of this option and the Post Office itself was adamantly opposed to the idea. Right up until the day before the Prime Minister’s decision, the Post Office were vociferous; they wished to terminate Horizon and start afresh with a new supplier. In any event, they argued they would need months to assess his chosen solution:

‘POCL believe that the hardware and software is probably sub-optimal as the platform for providing network banking and Modern Government services, but would need several months' work to have a clear view.'

And all the others, thanks.

"Vennells’s incentive payments add up to £2.2m over the course of her time in charge. She may note that when James Crosby, former boss of HBOS, gave up his knighthood in 2013 after a parliamentary committee found he “sowed the seeds” of destruction at the bank, he volunteered to surrender 30% of his pension entitlement. Those were the days before clawback clauses but Crosby was nodding to the principle that giving up a gong is not enough. In a post-clawback world, matters should be simpler: the rules are meant to insist on repayment of bonuses. If the relevant clauses aren’t triggered in Vennells’s case, when would they be?

"None of which is to deny that the rotten saga goes further than her. The politicians with oversight roles of the state-owned Post Office clearly have questions to answer, as do the relevant executives at Fujitsu, supplier of the dodgy IT software. But, among the business crew at the top of the Post Office over the years, the two chairs during Vennells’s time must explain why they backed the executives to the hilt."

As the Post Office (Horizon/Fujitsu) scandal is getting more coverage this week, I thought this accountancy blog (which talks about an accompanying video, for those who like video) might be of interest. I've been following this story for years but this is the first thing I've read that gets into the detail of what went wrong with the software.

The Post Office trial is one of the few cases where an in-depth examination of system failures is made public and so it’s a valuable lesson to learn from. Even simple problems like maintaining a stock balance become complex when part of a distributed system. Techniques like ACID transactions can reduce the likelihood of errors but real implementations will sometimes fail. When a system processes a large number of transactions, this small probability of failure can add up to frequent errors. I hope that the presumption that computers operate correctly is revisited, and the factors revealed by the Post Office trial are taken into account when doing so.

The Conservative peer Michelle Mone has acknowledged for the first time that she was involved with a company that was awarded government PPE contracts worth £200m during the Covid pandemic.

Lady Mone’s husband, Douglas Barrowman, has also acknowledged for the first time that he was involved in the company, PPE Medpro.

A representative of Barrowman told the Guardian that the Isle of Man-based businessman was an investor in PPE Medpro, and chaired and led the operation to supply personal protective equipment.

The admissions raise questions about years of denials from the couple. Until now, Mone and Barrowman have consistently and emphatically denied to the Guardian, via lawyers, that they were involved in the company.

The investigation is ongoing. I very much hope this admission is a sign that it is getting somewhere.

In the August 6, 1945 edition, under the blaring headline: FIRST ATOMIC BOMB DROPPED ON JAPAN; TRUMAN WARNS FOE OF A ‘RAIN OF RUIN,’” the New York Times traced the simultaneously terrifying and wondrous development of the atomic bomb, its scientific history, and the race between the Allies and the Germans to build it and use it first.

Somewhere below the fold, buried in a long paragraph, this sentence appeared, as if highlighted in neon: “The key component that allowed the Allies to develop the bomb was brought to the Allies by a female, ‘non-Aryan’ physicist.”

I scanned the next paragraph looking for the name of this “non-Aryan” woman. No name. No photo. Nothing.

These periodic episodes of killing and destruction, which Israeli commentators and politicians cynically call “mowing the lawn,” have been a price Israel was willing to pay to avoid being pushed toward a two-state solution. We chose to “manage” the conflict through a combination of brute force and economic incentives, instead of working to solve it by ending our perpetual occupation of Palestinian territory.

Many of my Palestinian human rights partners who organize nonviolent protests are targeted and harassed by the Israeli military. I believe these policies have the goal of preventing pressure for a Palestinian state and permitting Israeli settlement development and creeping annexation in the West Bank.

For years, many of us on the left in Israel have been warning that we will never have peace and security until we find a political agreement in which Palestinians achieve freedom and independence. It isn’t just human rights activists taking this position: Even Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Israeli security service Shin Bet, has argued for years that Palestinian terror can be defeated only by creating Palestinian hope.