Keir Starmer to make Iceland boss Richard Walker a Labour peer
The formerly Conservative-supporting boss of the supermarket Iceland is to be made a Labour peer when the party appoints another 25 representatives to parliament’s upper house later this month.Keir Starmer will appoint Richard Walker to the House of Lords, the Guardian understands, the culmination of an unusual and rapid political transformation for someone named as a prospective Tory MP candidate a little over three years ago.It was only February this year when Iceland’s executive chair was rating Starmer’s government six out of 10, saying that Labour needed to focus on “inclusive growth and everyday growth” that could “trickle down in everyday people’s lives”.As a Labour peer, Walker will get the chance to push for policies close to his heart including closer relations with the EU and also for a more positive message on the economy.He took over the leadership of Iceland in 2023 after his father, Malcolm Walker, stepped down from the frozen foods chain he had founded in 1973.
Both men have previously expressed support for the Conservative party and have donated money to it,Richard Walker donated nearly £10,000 in July 2020, when Boris Johnson was prime minister during the Covid pandemic,He was then added to a list of approved parliamentary candidates for the party in 2022, only to perform an abrupt about-turn the following year,Writing in the Guardian in 2023, Walker said the Conservatives had “drifted badly out of touch with business and the economy, and with the everyday needs of the British people”,He then backed Keir Starmer in early 2024, saying that “after a lot of soul-searching” he had decided he had “exactly what it takes to be a great leader”.
Walker’s comments did not, however, suggest a would-be Labour politician.He said the Tories’ abandonment of “basic Conservative principles” had added to his disenchantment.Nevertheless, his appointment as a Labour peer, first reported by the Sun, would add a rare business voice in support of Starmer’s government, which has irked several sectors by raising national insurance.The Conservative party counts another retail boss, Simon Wolfson of Next, among its peers.Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionSome bosses have also complained about increases to business rates paid on commercial properties introduced at last month’s budget.
Some large retail businesses, however, expressed relief at the fact the changes were less onerous than expected.The Labour party declined to comment.Walker was approached for comment.
Artificial intelligence research has a slop problem, academics say: ‘It’s a mess’
A single person claims to have authored 113 academic papers on artificial intelligence this year, 89 of which will be presented this week at one of the world’s leading conference on AI and machine learning, which has raised questions among computer scientists about the state of AI research.The author, Kevin Zhu, recently finished a bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and now runs Algoverse, an AI research and mentoring company for high schoolers – many of whom are his co-authors on the papers. Zhu himself graduated from high school in 2018.Papers he has put out in the past two years cover subjects like using AI to locate nomadic pastoralists in sub-Saharan Africa, to evaluate skin lesions, and to translate Indonesian dialects. On his LinkedIn, he touts publishing “100+ top conference papers in the past year”, which have been “cited by OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Stanford, MIT, Oxford and more”
Cloudflare apologises after latest outage takes down LinkedIn and Zoom
Cloudflare has apologised after an outage on Friday morning hit websites including LinkedIn, Zoom and Downdetector, the company’s second outage in less than a month.“Any outage of our systems is unacceptable, and we know we have let the internet down again,” it said in a blogpost, adding that it would release more information next week on how it aims to prevent these failures.The outage on Friday came after Cloudflare adjusted its firewall to protect customers from a widespread software vulnerability revealed earlier this week, and was not an attack, it said. Earlier, it said a separate issue had been reported with its application programming interfaces.The issue, which affected 28% of its traffic, lasted for half an hour and was resolved shortly after 9am GMT, it said
‘Urgent clarity’ sought over racial bias in UK police facial recognition technology
The UK’s data protection watchdog has asked the Home Office for “urgent clarity” over racial bias in police facial recognition technology before considering its next steps.The Home Office has admitted that the technology was “more likely to incorrectly include some demographic groups in its search results”, after testing by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of its application within the police national database.The report revealed that the technology, which is intended to be used to catch serious offenders, is more likely to incorrectly match black and Asian people than their white counterparts.In a statement responding to the report, Emily Keaney, the deputy commissioner for the Information Commissioner’s Office, said the ICO had asked the Home Office “for urgent clarity on this matter” in order for the watchdog to “assess the situation and consider our next steps”.The next steps could include enforcement action, including issuing a legally binding order to stop using the technology or fines, as well as working with the Home Office and police to make improvements
New York Times sues AI startup for ‘illegal’ copying of millions of articles
The New York Times sued an embattled artificial intelligence startup on Friday, accusing the firm of illegally copying millions of articles. The newspaper alleged Perplexity AI had distributed and displayed journalists’ work without permission en masse.The Times said that Perplexity AI was also violating its trademarks under the Lanham Act, claiming the startup’s generative AI products create fabricated content, or “hallucinations”, and falsely attribute them to the newspaper by displaying them alongside its registered trademarks.The newspaper said that Perplexity’s business model relies on scraping and copying content, including paywalled material, to power its generative AI products. Other publishers have made similar allegations
I spent hours listening to Sabrina Carpenter this year. So why do I have a Spotify ‘listening age’ of 86?
Many users of the app were shocked, this week, by this addition to the Spotify Wrapped roundup – especially twentysomethings who were judged to be 100“Age is just a number. So don’t take this personally.” Those words were the first inkling I had that I was about to receive some very bad news.I woke up on Wednesday with a mild hangover after celebrating my 44th birthday. Unfortunately for me, this was the day Spotify released “Spotify Wrapped”, its analysis of (in my case) the 4,863 minutes I had spent listening to music on its platform over the past year
Elon Musk’s X fined €120m by EU in first clash under new digital laws
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, has been fined €120m (£105m) after it was found in breach of new EU digital laws, in a ruling likely to put the European Commission on a collision course with the US billionaire and potentially Donald Trump.The breaches, under consideration for two years, included what the EU said was a “deceptive” blue tick verification badge given to users and the lack of transparency of the platform’s advertising.The commission rules require tech companies to provide a public list of advertisers to ensure the company’s structures guard against illegal scams, fake advertisements and coordinated campaigns in the context of political elections.In a third breach, the EU also concluded that X had failed to provide the required access to public data available to researchers, who typically keep tabs on contentious issues such as political content.The ruling by the European Commission brings to a close part of an investigation that started two years ago
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Keir Starmer to make Iceland boss Richard Walker a Labour peer
Bill Kingdom obituary