Burnham allies warn against quick ‘coronation’ of Streeting if Starmer quits
Allies of Andy Burnham have warned against a “coronation” for Wes Streeting as the next prime minister and called on Labour’s ruling body to allow the mayor to stand for the leadership.As Keir Starmer attempted to face down mounting calls for his resignation on Tuesday, sources close to Burnham demanded immediate assurances from Labour’s national executive committee (NEC) that he would not be blocked from contesting a parliamentary byelection.However, the Greater Manchester mayor’s hopes of returning to Westminster were dealt a blow as the Merseyside MP whose seat had been named by key allies for a potential byelection said she would not stand down, and backed Starmer to stay in office.Marie Rimmer, the MP for St Helens South and Whiston, said the mayor of Greater Manchester had not spoken to her “in years”, and that her priority was to avoid the chaos of a leadership contest.Allies of Burnham, 56, who hopes to seek to replace Starmer as prime minister, had said Rimmer’s seat was one possibly in contention for him to fight a byelection.
But Rimmer, who has been an MP since 2015, said: “I’m not planning to stand down for anybody.I was selected by my constituency party and it’s my constituency party who decides who stands.I’ve not spoken to Andy Burnham in years and neither has he spoken to me.”Allies of Burnham said the two had in fact spoken recently.Rimmer, 78, said she had experienced ill health but had not stopped working and had not held any conversations with the Labour party about her future.
She said she did not believe Starmer should stand down as prime minister.“I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.It’s chaos.We will end up looking like the Tories.There’s far too much going on in the world today.
It’s just a nonsense to me, panic stations like this,”She said the speculation she could give up her seat for Burnham had been “annoying because there’s a lot going on”,The last time she spoke to Burnham was in the last general election campaign, she said, adding that they “get on well”,One local MP said: “St Helen’s would be tough, but it’s right next door to Andy’s old seat of Leigh, and he thinks people know him there,”More than 80 MPs have called on Starmer to quit as prime minister after dire local and devolved election results in England, Scotland and Wales, many of them supporters of Burnham who have published letters calling for Starmer to set out a timetable for an “orderly transition” that would let the mayor seek a seat.
Writing in the Guardian on Tuesday, one of Burnham’s closest allies, Neal Lawson, said only 10 people stood in the former Labour MP’s way: the officers’ group of the NEC, which blocked Burnham from standing in the Gorton and Denton byelection.He wrote: “The Labour party must now do what it takes to ensure that Burnham is available to be the next leader of the party and the country.“This must start with an urgent statement from the party’s ruling national executive committee saying that if Burnham wanted to fight any direct vacancy then he would be allowed through for local members to decide whether they wanted him as their candidate, alongside a timetable that allows him to enter the contest.”Separately, another close ally of Burnham expressed frustration at what they saw as Streeting’s attempts to engineer a rapid succession which would in effect keep the mayor out of the leadership race.“We can’t afford a coronation from Keir to Wes or whatever – that’s not going to cut it with the country,” they said.
Asked whether an MP could stand aside for Burnham in the next 48 hours, they said: “Honestly, nobody knows because each of the [potential candidates] have their own complexities.There’s a lot of work going on from colleagues who are desperate for Andy to get back to Westminster.”Sources on Labour’s ruling NEC suggested they could take a different course next time.“The officers’ group could move if there was clearly a question mark over political authority.But there would have to be a byelection called first before we know whether that is the case,” one said.
Another said “things could move” should Starmer clearly not have support to continue as PM.Supporters of Streeting have also begun calling for the prime minister to go and to oversee a “swift” transition that would favour the health secretary if Burnham could not find a seat where he could stand in a byelection.
What I saw at the Musk-OpenAI trial: petty billionaires, protests and a stern judge
For the past couple of weeks, on the fourth floor of a courthouse on a quiet street in downtown Oakland, the world’s richest man and one of the world’s most valuable startups have been at war over the future of artificial intelligence.Being one of the reporters in the room has felt like watching an updated, opposite-coast version of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – ambition, ego, greed and the spectrum of social class on full display. The supporting cast has included Elon Musk fanboys, a stern judge and a who’s who of Silicon Valley’s most influential people.All courtroom battles are theatre, but this one has proved to be a unique spectacle, with the judge chastising the lawyers for leading the witness, raising meritless objections and even too much coughing. With Musk on the stand, he griped that an opposing attorney had asked a leading question, to which the judge told him to “tell the jury you’re not a lawyer”
Who is Louis Mosley, the man tasked with defending Palantir against its critics?
The hall was packed with rightwing radicals when Louis Mosley heralded a coming revolution. Just as Oliver Cromwell – that “crusader for Christ and liberty” – routed King Charles I’s royalists, “a similar revolution is brewing today”, said the UK and Europe boss of Palantir. Globalism’s “twilight” was upon us, he said in a speech dotted with admiring mentions of the podcaster Joe Rogan and “Elon’s Doge”.It was not a typical peroration for a big UK government contractor with more than £600m in deals with the NHS, the Ministry of Defence and police. But Palantir, the world’s most controversial tech company, is no typical contractor
AI-powered surveillance company Palantir created a chore coat. Great, now I have no choice but to burn mine | Van Badham
It’s taken me years to find a chore coat with a cut that flatters my big tits but, now that I finally own one, I want to incinerate it.Such is the power of brand contamination; infamous data surveillance megacorp Palantir has decided to bang a logo on a chore coat to sell as corporate merch.Chore coats are the traditional short denim or twill jacket of the 19th-century French working class. Palantir, however, is a company whose public words and commercial-in-confidence activities are inspiring local calls to have its contracts cancelled and its business banned.The gentle French garment is now as cursed as whatever “Marie Amazonette” will ever wear to the Met Gala
‘Being human helps’: despite rise of AI is there still hope for Europe’s translators?
In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.The proposed translation was reassuring, with his job security in mind: L’air de la nuit, vif et vif, était vivifiant (The night air, lively and lively, was enlivening
UK schools should remove pupils’ online photos as AI blackmail threat grows, say experts
UK schools should remove pictures of pupils’ faces from their websites and social media accounts because blackmailers are using them to create sexually explicit images, experts have said.Child safety experts and the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) warn that criminals are using AI to manipulate photos of children and then demand cash not to publish them.They are recommending educational institutions remove identifiable pictures of children from their websites and social media accounts – or consider not using them at all.The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said an unnamed UK secondary school had recently been subjected to a blackmail attempt after criminals used the institution’s website or social media accounts to take photos of schoolchildren and then, using AI tools, turned them into child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The blackmailers sent the images to the school and threatened to publish them online if they did not receive money
Europe’s AI translation industry told it risks reputation by partnering with US firms
AI companies in Europe risk losing their world-leading status in the field of machine translation, industry figures have said, after the decision by one of the continent’s leading startups to partner with Amazon’s cloud computing division provoked alarm.While businesses in the EU have generally lagged behind the US and China in AI adoption, a small group of European companies have cornered the global market for high-quality machine translations for professional use.The biggest success story is Cologne-headquartered DeepL, an online translator that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments. Used by governments, courts and half of the Fortune 500 list of highest-earning US companies, last year it was reported to have recorded revenues of $185.2m
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