| A cabinet minister has admitted to betting on the date of the general election, deepening the Westminster gambling scandal. Scottish Secretary Alister Jack says he placed three wagers, one of which was successful, but that none was made in the immediate run-up to the announcement. He trousered about £100. At least 13 protesters have been killed in Kenya during riots against new tax proposals. President William Ruto has deployed the military to quell the unrest, which saw demonstrators storm parliament buildings and set parts of the complex on fire. A new portrait of David Attenborough has been unveiled to celebrate 40 years of the TV naturalist's fellowship to the Royal Society. The artist Jonathan Yeo, who also painted King Charles's official portrait, portrayed the veteran broadcaster against a green background, "as if he might be emerging from one of [his] many habitats". |  | The Royal Society |
| | |  | Julian Assange leaving court on the Northern Mariana Islands as a free man. Chung Sung-Jun/Getty |
| Assange was let down by our spineless politicians | The plea deal that saw Julian Assange walk free is clearly good for Assange himself, says Trevor Timm in The Guardian. But is it good for press freedom? "Not so much." Under the agreement, the WikiLeaks founder pled guilty to one charge of violating the US Espionage Act. This amounts to "receiving and obtaining" secret documents, and "wilfully communicating" them "to persons not entitled to receive them" (ie the public) – a "crime" that reporters commit pretty much every day. Now, it's good news that this was settled before it came to court – had Assange been convicted, it would have created a legal precedent that could have bound other courts to rule against journalists in other cases. But the deal will still "embolden future federal prosecutors with an axe to grind against the press". | My question, says Duncan Campbell, also in The Guardian, is "why – why, for heaven's sake – has it taken so long"? When the US tried to extradite British hacker Gary McKinnon in 2012, the then home secretary Theresa May rightly refused. With Assange, May's "feeble" successors have "bowed the knee" at every stage. Neither Labour nor the Conservatives have fought for his right to expose the crimes carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay. Nor have they challenged the fundamental imbalance between the US and the UK over extradition: when they ask us to hand someone over, we usually oblige; when we ask, they don't. Andrew Neil, "no fan of Assange and certainly no lefty", wrote two years ago that Britain's refusal to extradite Assange would "send a clear message – a clarion call – to the free world and beyond: we do not jail our dissidents". If only our politicians agreed. | 🛫⚖️ According to Assange's former legal adviser, one of the main reasons the Biden administration cut a deal is because they didn't think a Labour government would extradite the WikiLeaks founder. Geoffrey Robertson KC, who mentored Keir Starmer when he was a young barrister, told The Daily Telegraph that American prosecutors knew they "couldn't rely on" a Starmer administration agreeing to extradition. | | | | The overall winner of this year's Audubon Photography Awards – celebrating the birds of North America – was a portrait of two blackburnian warblers locked in a skirmish in Pennsylvania. Other top images include a wild turkey prancing across train tracks in Minnesota; a flock of snow-white willow ptarmigans against a snowy backdrop in rural Canada; a Forster's tern emerging theatrically from a lake in California; and a barred owl about to tuck into a decapitated squirrel in Connecticut. See the rest here. |
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| | | 🗳️ 8 days to go...
For moderate centrists like me, says David Gauke in The New Statesman, the big fear is that whoever wins the next Conservative leadership contest will allow Nigel Farage to join the party, and that he'll then inevitably become leader himself. But I'm feeling increasingly optimistic. Several likely Tory leadership candidates – Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Priti Patel – have now said they won't let Farage in. And the Reform leader's refusal to disavow a large number of candidates holding "deeply unpleasant views" has made it clear to all that he isn't fit to lead a "broader party of the right". Perhaps this is wishful thinking, but this may have been the week "when Farage's attempt to become the undisputed leader of the right in the UK faltered". | | | |  | Ankle socks (left) and Zoomer socks. Getty |
| If you're trying to guess what generation someone is from, says The Guardian, just look at their socks. When actress Jennifer Lawrence was recently spotted wearing ankle socks, which sit so low that they are mostly invisible when worn with shoes, it sparked an online debate: apparently this style is a sure-fire signifier that the wearer is a millennial. Younger Gen Zs tend to go for longer numbers, dubbed "Zoomer socks", yanked up well over their ankles. | | | | | | Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share | | |
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| | |  | A robot parent, made using Microsoft Copilot Designer AI |
| Is ChatGPT a better mum than me? | The other day, says Clara Georges in Le Monde, a colleague set his six-year-old daughter up for a conversation with ChatGPT, which now has a freely available "voice" function. Their chat lasted 10 or 15 minutes, he told me, and he didn't have to intervene once. They just chit-chatted about this and that, the way little girls do. "ChatGPT understood everything she was saying, started its replies with a little word of appreciation, and concluded with a question for her to reply to." In the end my colleague, though quite the technophile, "put an end to this girl-machine infatuation". It was being "too nice", he said: polite, even-tempered, attentive, kind. "Your best friend couldn't talk to you like that for more than five minutes." | At first, my "technophobic boomer instincts", drawn from a childhood of Frankenstein and The Matrix, got the better of me. "The machines are winning," I told myself. "Our children are their prey." But after I calmed down, I had a more concerning thought: "What if ChatGPT is a better parent than we are?" I shout at my children when they bicker, issue about 850 strongly worded orders a day and chase them out of the house in the morning "as if to escape a nuclear attack". When I get home after a long day, I'm peppered with questions: "Which is stronger, a brick or a crocodile?" "Do you believe in God?" "Why do cats' eyes look like marbles?" It's hard to see how I'm better equipped to handle this barrage than a limitlessly patient chatbot. But then my son asked it: "What's stronger, my head or a lightsabre?" It gave a simple factual answer (lightsabre, obviously) followed by a pontificating remark about avoiding conflict. "What a rubbish conclusion!" We parents might make stupid jokes and shout too much, "but at least we're endowed with a sense of humour". | | | | These zany Japanese illustrations from the mid-20th century imagine an exciting future of flying cars and space travel, says Dark Roasted Blend. The futuristic fantasies include a "moving platform" that envelops a train mid-journey, allowing passengers to disembark without the train stopping; an elevated bus with room for other vehicles to drive under it; a pedal-powered plane; a propeller-powered locomotive; and flying saucers used (for some reason) to explore the Arctic. See more here. |
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| | | After 47 years, Radio 4's Today programme is scrapping its daily horse racing tips. The service, read out at the end of each sports bulletin, was never a serious enterprise, says The Daily Telegraph. It just gave the show's main presenters a bit of a breather and lightened proceedings with a few "silly horse names". The final two predictions on Saturday were presumably chosen with the decision in mind: Missed the Cut, in the 3.05 at Ascot, and, in the 2.55 at Redcar, End Zone. Neither won. | | | | | | It's a piece of space junk that fell through a family's roof in Florida, says Ars Technica. The celestial rubbish crashed into a property in Naples, Florida, in March, narrowly missing a 19-year-old who was home at the time. Nasa has confirmed that the 1.6-pound debris is part of a battery pack jettisoned from the International Space Station in 2021, prompting the family to file a claim for $80,000 in damages – the first case of its kind to be brought against the space agency. | | | | | "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default."
JK Rowling |
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