Skeet

Unite has announced it has suspended Angela Rayner from her membership of the union, in an escalating row over the long-running bin strikes in Birmingham.

The deputy prime minister has been urging striking bin workers to accept a deal to end the dispute tabled by the Labour-run city council.

In an emergency motion at its conference in Brighton, the union said it would also re-examine its relationship with Labour if the council makes any of its members redundant.
[…]
A spokesperson for Rayner said she is no longer a member of the union - although Unite is insisting that she is on its membership system.

Unite is affiliated to Labour, and is the party's biggest union funder.

It did not donate to the party's election campaign last year, but made donations worth £10,000 towards Rayner's campaign, according to her register of interests.

Members of the union walked out in January over plans to downgrade some roles as part of the city council's attempts to sort out its equal pay liabilities.

An all-out indefinite strike was announced in March, and a deal to end industrial action has not yet been reached.

They also suspended Birmingham Council leader John Cotton.

We conducted an extensive financial analysis of 32 of these anti-rights organisations. Here's what we uncovered:

• Anti-rights groups have dramatically increased their spending by over 33% between 2019 and 2023, reaching £106 million
• The largest spenders are UK branches of US organisations (£34 million), ultra-conservative Christian policy/advocacy groups (£31.5 million), and anti-abortion organisations (£28.5 million)
• Groups promoting so-called "conversion therapy" have increased their spending by an alarming 165%
• The growth in expenditure of ‘crisis pregnancy centres’ – which work to dissuade pregnant people from seeking an abortion – has risen 46% between 2019 and 2023

Big spenders from the US

The Alliance for Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian group that was instrumental in decimating abortion rights in the USA through the reversal of Roe v Wade, set up a UK branch in 2015. The ADF works to advance laws and policies that oppose access to abortion and LGBTI rights. In the UK they have been defending individuals charged for breaching Safe Access Zones around abortion clinics.

The ADF is spending more and more in the UK and its expenditure increased by 187% between 2019 and 2023, for a total of 3.9 million.

Anti-abortion groups and crisis pregnancy centres

We identified 25 anti-abortion organisations, including 13 so-called "crisis pregnancy centres". These unregulated centres pretend to offer impartial advice, but actually actively discourage abortion by spreading misinformation and stigma. For 9 of these 13 centres their spending rose by 46% from £4.4 million to £6.4million between 2019 and 2023.

Alarmingly, some of these centres receive funding from the National Lottery and government grants.

So-called ‘Conversion Therapy’ – a violation of human rights

We mapped 12 groups promoting the harmful and abusive practice of so-called "conversion therapy," aiming to ‘change’ or suppress people’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The spending of 4 of these surged by nearly 165%, marking the fastest growth of all categories tracked.

Despite the UK government announcing plans ban on conversion therapy in July 2024, no legislation has yet materialised.

Archive

I am talking to Amina, an AI avatar that plays the role of a woman living in a refugee camp in Chad after she escaped violence in Sudan. “I’m hanging in there, yeah,” Amina tells me. “ It’s tough here in the camp, but we’re staying strong.” I ask her how she came to be in a refugee camp. “I fled my hometown of Al Junaynah in Sudan back in June 2023, due to the violence, yeah?” It says. “It was a terrifying journey to escape the conflict. Now I’m trying to keep my kids safe and find some stability here in the camp. It’s not easy but we have to keep going, right?”

Amina is an experiment, part of a pair of AI avatars created by the United Nations University Center for Policy Research (UNU-CPR), a research institution connected to the United Nations. It’s one that is sure to be controversial, considering that the UN itself says a major problem facing refugees is their dehumanization for political gain or convenience. The UNU-CPR project is using an inhuman technology in an attempt to help people learn more about what they are facing. The group also tested a soldier persona called “Abdalla,” which “simulates the behavior and decision-making patterns of an actual combatant, offering negotiators and mediators a possible tool to train for future high-stakes negotiations.”
[…]
Right now, anyone can test Amina or Abdalla and talk with them for three minutes at a time. “The first is designed to create an accurate digital representation of a refugee living in a camp in Chad. The second creates a digital replica of a combatant leader in the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a group active in the southeastern part of Sudan from which many refugees are fleeing,” a write up of the project says.

The RSF began as groups of loose-knit militias in the early 2000s before becoming a more formal military group. It’s been conducting ethnic cleansing in Darfur for years now. I asked Abadalla if the RSF is committing genocide, and it gave a generally correct, though vague answer, and not one that you would expect from the group doing the killing.

“The RSF has faced serious allegations of committing atrocities and acts of genocide, particularly in Darfur, including systematic killings, mass rapes, and forced displacement of specific ethnic groups,” Abdalla tells me about the group it’s meant to represent. “These acts reflect a pattern of violence aimed at terrorizing civilians, contributing to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the region.”

On Monday, I gave what might have been my first ever fist pump for a House of Lords debate. Lord Watson of Invergowrie asked a question in the chamber about an investigation I published with Index on Censorship, where 53% of the school librarians I surveyed said they had been asked to remove books from their shelves. Even more worryingly, 56% of those librarians then felt forced to actually remove the books in question.

An overwhelming number of the books ripped off school library shelves had LGBTQ+ themes or authors, and the bans were usually in reaction to a single parent complaint – or even school leaders acting in anticipation of causing offence among particular communities. I spoke to librarians who feared for their jobs, and others have been in touch since, telling me about the pressure they are under.

The debate in the House of Lords showed overwhelming support for the freedom to read, and it was heartening to see the Lords sit up and listen.

Fast-forward to Wednesday evening. Just as I was thinking about which picture book to read to my son (which may or may not have had LGBTQ+ themes), a Reform councillor was making plans to raid library collections across Kent.
[…]
Whether books have indeed been banned, or a councillor is simply claiming that books have been banned, this is a dark moment for the freedom to read in the UK. Libraries in Kent have this week been a battleground for culture wars, and I fear they won’t be the last to become so.

There have been rumours of book ban demands happening in other Reform-led councils, but when I’ve asked the library services in question, they’ve denied having received such instructions. This is the first time it’s happened out in the open.

This is the kind of move we’ve already seen in the USA. Book censorship there has spiralled, with right-wing groups like Moms for Liberty and Republican politicians often leading the charge and calling for bans. Librarians have even received death threats and been investigated for holding LGBTQ+ content, as is very well-evidenced in a new film, The Librarians.

Up until this week, I could confidently say that library censorship in the UK was happening behind closed doors (not that that’s any better), and that incidents, whilst concerning, were not necessarily widespread. I can no longer say that. When a councillor publicly seeks to ban children’s books from a children’s section, something has shifted, there is a certain audacity to it. And now, I worry that the UK floodgates have opened. Others will feel emboldened to take similar actions.

Inspired by the lemmy.ca post, I want to discuss if we should follow and defed lemmit ourselves.

For those who don't know, or forgot because they blocked the bot, it's a Reddit reposter instance. It has very low engagement, but posts a lot. About 30% of all posts on feddit.uk are from this bot (838192/2806651 when I did the SQL). It is also by far the most blocked user on the instance, 151 blocks with second being a mere 40.

It also only synchronises with Reddit one way, so if you reply to a post, the person on Reddit won't see it.

If no one has any objections, I'm going to go ahead and defed as I don't think it's worth having around. Especially the way it makes the 'New All' feed useless if you don't have it blocked.

Volume 10 confirmed in early production! We are so fucking back baby!!!

Official art.

YouTube | Tumblr | Twitter

Archive

Some video games have been trying to use generative AI for years now, and for the most part people simply have not been having it. Why would we? It's lazy, it's ugly, it's an ethical black hole and it's being driven by an executive class desperate to lay off even more workers. While earlier and more brazen attempts at employing the tech were obvious, lately it's becoming more common for studios to slide a little AI-generated content in without drawing attention to it.

Jurassic World Evolution 3 launched with some AI-generated character portraits, then got bullied into removing them. Clair Obscur, which will be a lot of people's game of the year, appeared to quietly launch with some AI-generated art then just as quietly patch it out. I was going to review the city-building grand strategy game Kaiserpunk until I saw they were using AI-generated images for their dialogue sections, after which I promptly uninstalled it.

The latest culprit is The Alters, which has found to have shipped not only with AI-generated placeholder text in-game, but also employed AI-generated translations in some of its side content as well. None of this was disclosed prior to the game's release; it was all discovered later, by players, and has prompted an explanation of sorts from the developers which tries to calm everyone down, but which has just made things worse, because if it took people discovering these specific instances to find that 11 Bit had used AI-generated content in the game's development, how do we know there's not more of it?

Live reporting of the second reading of the infamous welfare bill.

The Work and Pensions Minister Sir Stephen Timms is expected to tell MPs that the timing of the eligibility changes to the personal independence payment (Pip) will now take account of the findings of the review that Timms is to lead.

MPs have expressed concerns over the last 24 hours that the planned scheduling of the Timms review was too close to the planned changes to Pip eligibility, that are due to come into affect in November of next year - and so its conclusions wouldn’t be able to be acted upon.

The government will seek to reassure MPs that this issue will now be resolved.