United Kingdom

What can a German do but a Briton cannot? What can a New Yorker, a Chicagoan and a San Franciscan do, but a Londoner cannot? What can Canadians, Dutch, Portuguese, Chileans, Uruguayans, Maltese all do? The answer is they can legally smoke cannabis. In California there are now courses for cannabis sommeliers. In Britain they would be thrown in jail.

Half a century ago, Britons prided themselves on being in the vanguard of social progress. In such matters as health care, sexuality, abortion, crime and punishment, they considered their country ahead of the times. Now it limps nervously in the rear.

I don’t use illegal drugs, neither am I addicted to nicotine or alcohol or fatty foods. Having sat on two drugs-related committees, I accept that narcotic substances can, in varying degrees, cause harm to their users and, through them, to others. If after half a century of a “war” on drugs, banning had solved or even reduced this harm, I could see the argument for banning. It has not.

Roughly a third of adults in England and Wales aged under 60 have tried cannabis. Almost 8% use it occasionally and 2% regularly. Far fewer use hard drugs. But nearly one in five residents of English and Welsh prisons are estimated to have been jailed for a drug-related offence. Half of all homicides are drugs-related. In many prisons, more than half the inmates use drugs regularly. The authorities turn a blind eye for the sake of peace and quiet.

Successive home secretaries have a terror of even discussing the issue. Tony Blair delegated drugs – as so much of his policy – to the Daily Mail and the Sun. While other countries researched, experimented and piloted innovation, Britain simply shut down debate. When, in 2009, the government’s chief drugs adviser, Prof David Nutt, evaluated the relative harm of different narcotics, he was sacked.

>The climate is changing British gardens everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The Royal Horticultural Society has modelled how global heating will affect its property until 2075 and discovered that summers will be hotter and drier in all its gardens – except in Manchester.

>Greater Manchester’s renown as a rain trap – there is even a website tracking rainfall, called Rainchester – means that the RHS Bridgewater garden in Salford is being earmarked for species that thrive in a cooler, wetter climate.

>Trees including oaks, birches and beeches that have been part of the British landscape for centuries are starting to suffer in southern England, so are being considered for RHS Bridgewater’s new arboretum, a botanical garden aiming to preserve a wide range of species...

> Elon Musk has managed to decimate Twitter’s UK users since taking over the platform and rebranding it as X, Financial Times analysis shows. > >Millions of users have abandoned the platform after the Tesla man appeared at the social media platform’s HQ carrying a kitchen sink in 2022. > > Once a thriving space for political discourse, news updates, and cultural engagement, Twitter’s UK usage has dropped by a significant margin, as users seek alternative platforms. > > ... > > In the UK, where Twitter had been a crucial forum for political debates, this shift has led to a considerable drop in engagement. > >Graphical data shared online clearly illustrates the stark drop in UK user numbers, confirming that Musk’s promises to revive Twitter have instead accelerated its decline. > >With no signs of reversing the trend, the platform’s future in the UK looks increasingly uncertain.

RIP professor McGonagall

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20203174

> A man with a facial disfigurement says he was asked to leave a restaurant in south London because staff said he was "scaring the customers".  > > Oliver Bromley has Neurofibromatosis Type 1, a genetic condition that causes non-cancerous tumours to grow on his nerves. > > Speaking to the BBC, he said when he had gone to place an order at a restaurant in Camberwell, staff told him there had been complaints about him. > > "It's a horrible thing to happen. I took it very personally on the day," he said.

> Adverts for Nike and Sky have been banned by the regulator for using “dark pattern” tactics designed to lead consumers to unintentionally spend money. > >Nike had advertised a shoe at a low price, causing consumers to click through only to find that it was for a children’s size, while Sky did not make it clear that a free trial for Now TV would automatically renew with a charge unless cancelled. > >The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said both rulings were part of its wider work investigating “online choice architecture” (OCA). > >Concerns around OCA include price transparency, hidden fees and “drip pricing”, as well as fake and misleading reviews.

>... Big Brother Watch slammed the new powers. Director Silkie Carlo said: "Starmer's benefits bank spying proposals sound alarmingly similar to the powers Labour fought just a few months ago in opposition. Everyone wants fraud to be dealt with, and the government already has strong powers to investigate the bank statements of suspects.

>"But to force banks to constantly spy on benefits recipients without suspicion means that not only millions of disabled people, pensioners, and carers will be actively spied on but the whole population's bank accounts are likely to be monitored for no good reason."

>Carlo said a "financial snoopers' charter" designed to automate suspicion of the UK's poorest people was intrusive, unjustified, and risks the kind of injustice seen during the Post Office Horizon scandal.

>"This is yet another insult to pensioners, an attack on Britain's poorest people, and an assault on the presumption of innocence," she said.

> Dozens of Tesco products price-matched to Aldi - such as chicken nuggets, cottage pie and blackcurrant squash - are not like-for-like, BBC Panorama has found. > >In the case of chicken nuggets, the Tesco product contained 39% chicken compared with 60% in the Aldi one. > >Of 122 Tesco products, 38 - nearly a third - had at least five percentage points less of the main ingredient than the Aldi products they had been matched to. > >Twelve Tesco products were found to have more of the main ingredient. > > ... > > Consumer expert Kate Hardcastle says Panorama's findings are an example of “value engineering” which involves changing quantities of ingredients to reduce the price. > > ... > > Tesco is not the only supermarket to offer products priced to match Aldi. > >Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and ASDA offer similar ranges, but Panorama found no clear evidence of a pattern of consistent differences in the proportions of main ingredients in their goods compared with the Aldi versions. > > ... > > Reducing quantities of the most expensive element in a product - such as meat in a ready-meal lasagne - can make a significant difference to prices, says consumer expert Kate Hardcastle. > >“It's only when you [customers] flip it over and look at that tiny, tiny, font size to see you're not getting the same deal,” she explains.

> The former cabinet minister Michael Gove has been named as the new editor of the Spectator magazine, weeks after the GB News backer Paul Marshall completed a £100m takeover of the rightwing magazine. > >Gove, who will take over from Fraser Nelson on 4 October, will be joined by the former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor Charles Moore, who has been named as chair. > >Nelson, who joined the Spectator in 2006 and became editor in 2009, said in a blogpost that Gove was his “clear successor”, having been tipped as a future editor during his time as a journalist on titles including the Times and as a contributor to the Spectator.

"The wi-fi has been hacked at 19 UK railway stations to display a message about terror attacks.

Network Rail confirmed that the wi-fi systems at stations including London Euston, Manchester Piccadilly, Liverpool Lime Street, Birmingham New Street, Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Central were affected.

People reported logging on to the wi-fi at the stations on Wednesday and being met with a screen about terror attacks in Europe.

A Network Rail spokesperson confirmed the wi-fi was still down and said: "We are currently dealing with a cyber-security incident affecting the public wi-fi at Network Rail’s managed stations."

The affected stations include:

In London, London Cannon Street, London Bridge, Charing Cross, Clapham Junction, Euston, King’s Cross, Liverpool Street, Paddington, Victoria and Waterloo

In the South East, Reading and Guildford

In the North West, Manchester Piccadilly and Liverpool Lime Street

In the West Midlands, Birmingham New Street

In West Yorkshire, Leeds

In the West and South West, Bristol Temple Meads

In Scotland, Edinburgh Waverley and Glasgow Central

British Transport Police was investigating, Network Rail said.

The rail provider said it believed other organisations, not just railway stations, had also been affected..."

Mortgage lenders' attempts to lure in first-time buyers have stepped up with the UK's biggest building society allowing some to borrow more.

Archive link here: https://archive.ph/mwFp9

Is the Royal Statistical Society debasing itself by pouring doubt on our judicial system, or is there something to it?

> Five women say they were raped by former Harrods boss Mohamed Al Fayed when they worked at the luxury London department store. > >The BBC has heard testimony from more than 20 female ex-employees who say the billionaire, who died last year aged 94, sexually assaulted them - including rape. > >The documentary and podcast - Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods - gathered evidence that, during Fayed’s ownership, Harrods not only failed to intervene, but helped cover up abuse allegations. > > ... > > “The spider’s web of corruption and abuse in this company was unbelievable and very dark,” says barrister Bruce Drummond, from a legal team representing a number of the women. > > Warning: this story contains details some may find distressing.

> The NHS is going to use drones to fly blood samples across London to avoid the traffic. > >Drone flights will mean the samples can be transported in a fraction of the time it currently takes couriers via road, officials said. > >Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust has launched a pilot scheme that intends to drastically speed up the time taken to move blood from major hospitals in the capital to labs for analysis. > >Usually, moving samples between Guy's Hospital and the lab at St Thomas' Hospital takes more than half an hour on the road. > >However, the same journey can be done in less than two minutes by drone, officials said. > >The research team also said there were environmental benefits to the switch in transport methods.

> The owner of the Guardian has confirmed it is in talks to sell the Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, to Tortoise Media. > >Tortoise has approached Guardian Media Group (GMG) with an offer to invest around £25m over the next five years on the "editorial and commercial renewal" of the Observer. > >Tortoise was launched five years ago by James Harding, a former BBC News chief and a former editor of the Times newspaper. > >The Guardian reported that the title will remain a seven-day-a-week digital operation regardless of the outcome of negotiations with Tortoise about the Observer. > >Observer staff were told that the investment would "help to safeguard its future" as a standalone product. > >GMG is not actively trying to sell the Observer, but it is examining the Tortoise proposal to see if it is viable. > >Founded in 1791, the Observer is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, with a staff of around 70.

> Social disadvantage is now so entrenched in “left behind” areas that a young person growing up poor in parts of London has a significantly better chance of going to university and getting a good job than a child of a similar background from the north-east of England, the UK’s social mobility commissioner has said. > >Alun Francis, whose remit is to assess progress in improving social mobility in the UK and to promote social mobility in England, said the “geography of disadvantage” had become increasingly marked in recent years, with deprived northern post-industrial and rural areas and seaside towns falling further behind England’s thriving south-east in terms of economic and social opportunity. > > Francis called for “decisive and bold” government action to drive economic growth in left-behind areas and narrow a widening north-south divide, arguing that past attempts to drive social mobility by focusing mainly on educational achievement to drive life chances had failed to shift the dial for many young people. > >The report found that working-class teenagers in areas of London with high levels of poverty such as Islington, Hackney and Newham were 19 percentage points more likely to experience upward mobility than contemporaries in similarly deprived places in the north of England such as Sunderland, Hull, Gateshead and Barnsley. > > The capital’s superior economic and job opportunities were likely to partly explain these differences, the commission suggested. Ethnicity could also be a factor, with London’s larger immigrant population more likely to see educational attainment as a tool to improve their children’s life chances. > > ... > > In an interview with the Guardian before the Social Mobility Commission’s 2024 State of the Nation report, Francis called for an “honest” assessment of why white British youngsters from the poorest backgrounds consistently under-attained educationally and were less socially mobile compared with their peers. > >He said white British people were “at the top of the social mobility tree and the bottom, like bookends”, adding: “We need to ask harder questions about why, and not be constrained by being anxious about what we might find, because if we want to bridge people’s outcomes of life we need to be really honest, to find a better answer.” > >Francis, who is principal of Blackpool and the Fylde further education college, said while white British children on free school meals persistently underperformed at school, children with a Chinese background on free school meals outperformed the national average for non-free school meal children at ages 11 and 16. > > It was important to avoid “simplistic and misleading” accounts that assumed social mobility was getting worse on all counts, he said. Poverty was not the only determinant of life chances, he added: “What are the things that enable some people to do well despite their circumstances, where others really do not?” > >Asked whether there was a link between the August riots and deprivation in many of the communities where disorder took place, Francis acknowledged many of those towns had been ignored in terms of economic opportunity, saying: “In those areas we certainly created a climate where people do feel left behind.” > >He added: “I would say in those areas the vast majority of people in straitened circumstances feel frustrated, a bit defeated, sometimes a bit sad, but I don’t think they always go on to the streets and become violent about it.”