Reform council leader says she has launched hunt for ‘cowards’ behind leaked video
The leader of Reform UK’s flagship local authority has told her fellow councillors that she launched a hunt for the “cowards” who leaked a recorded meeting in which she said those who disagreed with decisions would have to “fucking suck it up”.Bitter divisions among Reform members of Kent county council, one of 10 controlled outright by Nigel Farage’s party, were laid bare at the weekend by the Guardian in a leaked video of a chaotic internal meeting.Councillors can be seen complaining about “backbiting” and being ignored by their leader, Linden Kemkaran, who tells them they will be “screwed” and that Reform can forget about winning the general election if they don’t balance Kent’s budget.In an extraordinary recording, which shows the inner workings of Reform’s Kent operation, she shouts down fellow members before telling them they will be “muted” in scenes reminiscent of the viral “Jackie Weaver” video from a parish council Zoom meeting in 2021.In a message sent after the Guardian published the video, Kemkaran told her fellow Reform councillors that a “thorough investigation” was being launched as she said she had passed on her suspicions about who was responsible for “this treachery” to Reform UK’s head office.
“To have people on the inside, who smile to our faces, sit next to us at meetings, share jokes, anecdotes, before stabbing us in the back is very sad indeed,” she said in the message.“The people who did this are cowards.They are weak.They are foolish.They are incapable of displaying true courage themselves, so they look to harm those who are.
They are obsessed with personal gain at the expense of group success.They cannot cope with disappointment and personal inadequacies so they seek to bring down others to their level.”She added: “I want you to know … I passed my suspicions of who is responsible for this treachery to head office and a thorough investigation is already under way.The guilty parties will be expelled from the Reform party without delay.They will have no political future.
”It came as James Orr, an academic who is influential within Donald Trump’s administration, was appointed a senior adviser to Nigel Farage.Reform UK welcomed Orr, an anti-abortion theologian at Cambridge whom JD Vance once described as his “British sherpa”, to his role on Sunday night.Zia Yusuf, the party’s head of policy, described him as “a brilliant academic, theologian, thinker” who had been “a bastion of common sense and patriotism at Cambridge University”.Kemkaran was facing pressure on Sunday over her comments in the footage, which was of a meeting which took place in late August.The leader of Medway council issued a statement saying he would be writing to her to seek clarification after she told Reform councillors at the leaked meeting that other leaders of Kent councils who she had met did not like her because she was a woman.
“To suggest I don’t like her because she is a woman is utterly ludicrous,” said Vince Maple, the Labour Medway council leader,He said her comments flew in the face of the “collaborative approach” Kent councils had to date when it came to working together over local government reform (LGR) plans,Sign up to First EditionOur morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what’s happening and why it mattersafter newsletter promotionIn the video, Kemkaran complained about other council leaders in Kent who she had been meeting recent weeks, accusing them of a “shocking” level of ignorance about the LGR plans and suggesting that they did not like her because she was a woman,Kent county council, which has a £2,5bn annual budget, is considered to be a make-or-break showcase for whether Reform can be trusted to competently govern before a general election.
It faces two major challenges: the need to meet a legal duty to balance its budget, with resulting questions over whether Reform will have to hike council tax; the other centres on its response to national plans for LGR that would result in Kent’s councils in effect abolishing themselves,Kemkaran was seen telling fellow Reform councillors at the meeting: “We are going to live or die on that budget,If we don’t balance the books you can forget Reform winning the next election,It’s that crucial,“If we can avoid putting up council tax by the full 5%, that is going to be the best thing that we can do to show that Reform can actually run something as big as Kent council, because let’s not forget we are the shop window in KCC.
People are looking at us, they are judging us every single day, every single minute of every single day.Nigel knows that.He is super-aware that we are the flagship council.”The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know.If you have something to share on this subject, you can contact us confidentially using the following methods.
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Inside San Francisco’s new AI school: is this the future of US education?
In the world’s tech innovation epicenter, an “AI-powered” private school has made headlines for unabashedly embracing the technology.Alpha School San Francisco, which opened its doors to K-8 students this fall, is the newest outpost of a network of 14 nationwide private schools. Its learning model entails just two hours of focused academic work per day, during which the school says students can learn twice as fast as their counterparts in traditional schools – with the help of artificial intelligence.AI, Alpha says, is central to the school’s learning philosophy, brand and impact on students.Alpha is not alone in its efforts to incorporate AI into the classroom
The platform exposing exactly how much copyrighted art is used by AI tools
Ask Google’s AI video tool to create a film of a time-travelling doctor who flies around in a blue British phone booth and the result, unsurprisingly, resembles Doctor Who.And if you ask OpenAI’s technology to do the same, a similar thing happens. What’s wrong with that, you may think?The answer could be one of the biggest issues AI chiefs face as their era-defining technology becomes ever more ubiquitous in our lives.Google and OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence is supposed to be just that – generative, meaning it develops novel answers to our questions. Ask it for a time-travelling doctor, you get one that their systems have created
Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states
Parents will be able to block Meta bots from talking to their children under new safeguards
Parents will be able to block their children’s interactions with Meta’s AI character chatbots, as the tech company addresses concerns over inappropriate conversations.The social media company is adding new safeguards to its “teen accounts”, which are a default setting for under-18 users, by letting parents turn off their children’s chats with AI characters. These chatbots, which are created by users, are available on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta AI app.Parents will also be able to block specific AI characters if they don’t want to stop their children from interacting with chatbots altogether. They will also get “insights” into the topics their children are chatting about with AI characters, which Meta said would allow them to have “thoughtful” conversations with their children about AI interactions
AI chatbots are hurting children, Australian education minister warns as anti-bullying plan announced
A disturbing new trend of AI chatbots bullying children and even encouraging them to take their own lives has the Australian government very concerned.Speaking to media on Saturday, the federal education minister, Jason Clare, said artificial intelligence was “supercharging” bullying.“AI chatbots are now bullying kids. It’s not kids bullying kids, it’s AI bullying kids, humiliating them, hurting them, telling them they’re losers … telling them to kill themselves. I can’t think of anything more terrifying than that,” Clare said
UK MPs warn of repeat of 2024 riots unless online misinformation is tackled
Failures to properly tackle online misinformation mean it is “only a matter of time” before viral content triggers a repeat of the 2024 summer riots, MPs have warned.Chi Onwurah, the chair of the Commons science and technology select committee, said ministers seemed complacent about the threat and this was putting the public at risk.The committee said it was disappointed in the government’s response to its recent report warning social media companies’ business models contributed to disturbances after the Southport murders.Replying to the committee’s findings, the government rejected a call for legislation tackling generative artificial intelligence platforms and said it would not intervene directly in the online advertising market, which MPs claimed helped incentivise the creation of harmful material after the attack.Onwurah said the government agreed with most of its conclusions but had stopped short of backing its recommendations for action
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