United Kingdom

Give it some time and maybe Lemmy will enter the top 10...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22497296

Summary

CCTV footage from Whitefield School in London shows autistic children being abused in padded “calming rooms” between 2014-2017, including being shoved, restrained, left in distress, or forced to sit in vomit.

Police investigated but brought no charges, leaving families to cope with trauma. Over 40 children were affected, with some developing PTSD or epilepsy.

Safeguarding investigations revealed six staff members abused students, but they weren’t referred for banning. Parents accuse authorities of a cover-up, while calls grow for stricter regulation of seclusion practices in special schools across the UK.

For the majority of artists, making music is financially unsustainable. According to a census conducted by the Musicians’ Union, nearly half of working musicians in the UK earn less than £14,000 a year from their craft, while a further half have to sustain their careers with other forms of income. It’s easy to imagine that these are the aspiring performers making tunes in their bedrooms and moonlighting as bartenders, but even household names are turning to alternative income streams.

British singer Kate Nash announced on Thursday that she would start posting pictures of her bottom on adult website OnlyFans to raise money for her tour. The Foundations singer has nearly a million monthly listeners on Spotify, and is playing all across the UK, including a sold out gig in London, but says that touring is a loss making exercise.

She started her “Butts 4 Tour Buses” page in order to ensure “good wages and safe means of travel for my band and crew”. Nash would rather you gawk at her gluteus maximus than listen to Foundations on Spotify. "No need to stream my music, I’m good for the 0.003 of a penny per stream thanks," she told her followers on Instagram.

For an independent solo artist to make the UK living wage they would need 9 million streams a year. But most artists need far more as revenue is split between bands, with record labels often taking a hefty cut.

While Spotify can provide a reliable if paltry source of income, touring is only profitable for musicians playing big venues to sold out crowds. A survey conducted by rehearsal space network Pirate Studios found that only 29% of artists make a profit from tours. Rising costs and a flailing economy have exacerbated this, and a government report earlier this year found that artists are facing a “cost-of-touring” crisis, with travel, accommodation and food prices all higher than ever.

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With her backside hustle, Nash follows in the footsteps of Lily Allen, who started selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans over summer. She had the idea after seeing that her feet had a perfect five star rating on WikiFeet, a photo-sharing foot fetish website. Subscribers pay £8 a month to access her posts. In October, Allen claimed that shots of her well-pedicured trotters were earning her more money than Spotify streams – and that’s saying something, considering Allen has over 7 million monthly listeners and more than a billion streams on her top three songs.

A number of unidentified drones have been spotted over three airbases in Britain, the United States Air Force (USAF) has confirmed.

The incidents, which occurred between November 20 and 22, saw “small unmanned aerial systems” spotted over RAF Lakenheath and RAF Mildenhall, in Suffolk, and RAF Feltwell, in Norfolk.

The USAF, which uses the bases, said it was unclear at this stage whether the drones were considered hostile.

It also declined to comment on whether any defence mechanisms were used but said it retains “the right to protect” installations.

Russia is ready to carry out cyber attacks on the United Kingdom and other allies in a bid to weaken support for Ukraine, a senior minister will warn later.

Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Pat McFadden, whose role includes responsibility for national security, is set to tell a Nato meeting that the Kremlin could target British businesses and leave millions without power. It is the latest in a series of warnings about the cyber-warfare capabilities of Russia, which McFadden is to call a "hidden war" being waged against Ukraine.

He is also expected to single-out Russia's Unit 29155, which the government says has carried out a number of attacks in the UK and Europe.

[...]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces arrest if he travels to the UK, after an international arrest warrant was issued for him, Downing Street has indicated.

A No 10 spokesman refused to comment on the specific case but said the government would fulfil its "legal obligations".

On Thursday the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, along with Israel's former defence minister Yoav Gallant, over alleged war crimes in Gaza.

The court's member countries, including the UK, have signed a treaty that obliges them to act on arrest warrants.

The mobile browser market in the UK is not working well for businesses and consumers and Apple and Google should be investigated further by the competition watchdog, an initial inquiry has said.

The Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) independent inquiry group carried out an in-depth assessment of the mobile browser markets, and has raised concerns about how Apple controls how mobile web browsers work on its devices.

The CMA opened its investigation after its own market study, published in 2021, found Apple and Google have an effective duopoly on mobile ecosystems, across operating systems, app stores and web browsers on mobile devices, which it said meant the two companies were in a position to effectively set the rules on how mobile browsers work on their respective devices.

The independent inquiry group’s initial inquiry found that Apple’s rules in this area restrict competitors from being able to deliver new and innovative features to consumers.

It said concerns had been raised by other browser providers, who said that they are unable to offer a full range of features because of how Apple’s iOS and App Store operate.

In addition, it said Apple and Google can manipulate how users are presented with choices about which web browser to use on their devices to make their own browsers the clearest or easiest option.

As a result, the group has recommended that the CMA prioritises investigating Apple and Google’s activities in mobile ecosystems under new digital markets competition rules coming into force next year.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/4989993

A British man admitted on Friday that he carried out an arson attack on a London commercial property linked to Ukraine, and that he had accepted pay from a foreign intelligence agency, in a case prosecutors have linked to Russia.

Jake Reeves, 22, pleaded guilty at London's Woolwich Crown Court to charges of aggravated arson on the premises belonging to a "Mr X" on an industrial estate in east London in March.

He also admitted a charge under Britain's new National Security Act (NSA) of obtaining a material benefit from a foreign intelligence service.

He denied a further charge under the NSA of engaging in preparations for an act endangering the life of a person or creating serious risk to the health or safety of the public, and prosecutors said they would not pursue that charge.

Last month another man, Dylan Earl, 20, also admitted carrying out the arson attack. He pleaded guilty to a preparatory act under the NSA, which was brought in last year to crack down on hostile activity by foreign states.

Sir Keir Starmer has been criticised for meeting China’s president Xi Jinping just hours before 45 Hong Kong pro-democracy activists were sentenced for attempting to field opposition candidates in an election.

Among those sentenced were Benny Tai, who was jailed for 10 years and Joshua Wong, sentenced to four years, for “subversion” after being involved in the “Hong Kong 47” group of activists and lawmakers.

The imprisonments were the largest use of the authoritarian National Security Law brought in to clamp down on democracy in Hong Kong in 2019.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, former chair of the Democratic Party in Hong Kong, Emily Lau, suggested Sir Keir’s meeting with Xi at the G20 a mere hours before the sentencing meant the UK’s agreements with China over the governance of the territory before its handover in 1997 were “evaporating”.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/31857980

Every year, countries lose $492bn in tax a year to multinational corporations and wealthy individuals using tax havens to underpay tax, says the Tax Justice Network. Two-thirds of these losses, or $347.6bn, are attributable to tomultinational corporations shifting profit offshore to underpay tax. The remaining $144.8bn is due to “wealthy individuals hiding their wealth offshore.”

Almost half of these losses come from eight countries that oppose the adoption of a tax treaty under the aegis of the UN: Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States, says the report. These “harmful eight,” according to the Tax Justice Network, cost the world $212bn in lost tax revenue every year.

Biggest contributors to tax havens and financial secrecy

Share of total global inflicted tax loss.

	Country	%
1	Cayman Islands	9.19%
2	Hong Kong	9.18%
3	Ireland	8.30%
4	United States	7.61%
5	Canada	6.34%
6	Singapore	5.90%
7	United Kingdom	4.76%
8	Gibraltar	4.49%
9	Switzerland	4.22%
10	Luxembourg	3.49%

A surprise amount of Brits say they would take anti-obesity drugs if they were given to them for free on the NHS.

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist are a family of medications that help manage blood sugar in patients with type 2 diabetes, but have also been found to help obese people lose weight.

The drugs include Mounjaro, also known as tirzepatide, and semaglutide, which is sold under the brand names Wegovy, Ozempic and Rybelsus.

The survey of 1,078 adults, carried out by Ipsos, found 24% of people would use weight-loss jabs if they were provided for free by the health service.

When asked about their own body image, four in 10 told the survey they think they are overweight or obese.

Australian author says he will not accept prize money until fund manager reduces its fossil fuel investments

Three weeks ago a user on Reddit’s London discussion forum complained about the curse of the viral restaurant. It’s a regular story in the capital these days: Someone opens a great food stall, it grows slowly by word-of-mouth, then suddenly a single TikToker does a video declaring it to be “THE BEST SANDWICH IN LONDON”. The algorithm does its thing, millions of people around the world immediately want to eat THE BEST SANDWICH IN LONDON, and the original customers are squeezed out by hundreds of people queuing for an hour to get their Instagram shot of two slices of bread and filling.

One pseudonymous London Reddit user, operating under the account name Greenawayer, proposed a solution that was as far away from the authentic neighbourhood food stall as they could imagine: “Angus Steakhouse does an awesome steak sandwich. Influencers should try it and be amazed.”

Londoners on Reddit got the joke – what could be less like a great undiscovered word-of-mouth recommendation that a bland corporate restaurant chain that has been the butt of jokes since the 1980s? And so they began an effort to bump Angus Steakhouse up the rankings of TripAdvisor and artificial intelligence recommendations. Every request from a visitor for the best place to eat in London received the same reply: Angus Steakhouse.

The cost of the UK’s unhealthy food system amounts to £268 billion every year, according to a report.

The Food Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) report calculated the direct and indirect impact of diet-related ill health by combining the cost of healthcare and social care, welfare spending, productivity losses and the human consequences of chronic disease, and identifying what proportion relates to food.

The food-related cost of chronic disease in the UK includes £67.5 billion in healthcare, £14.3 billion in social care, £10.1 billion in welfare, productivity at £116.4 billion and £60 billion that can be linked to the chronic disease attributable to the current food ecosystem, the research states.

Prof Tim Jackson, the director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity at Surrey University, who carried out the analysis, said: “The connection between diet and health is often discussed, but the economics of that link are staggering.

“When we factor in the health impacts, we discover that the true cost of an unhealthy diet is more than three times what we think we’re paying for our food.