You think you are in the 21st century think about the 16th century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sword_hunt

Quakers in Britain strongly condemned the violation of their place of worship which they say is a direct result of stricter protest laws removing virtually all routes to challenge the status quo.

Just before 7.15pm more than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with tasers, forced their way into Westminster Meeting House. They broke open the front door without warning or ringing the bell first, searching the whole building and arresting six women attending the meeting in a hired room.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023 have criminalised many forms of protest and allow police to halt actions deemed too disruptive.

Meanwhile, changes in judicial procedures limit protesters' ability to defend their actions in court. All this means that there are fewer and fewer ways to speak truth to power.

Quakers support the right to nonviolent public protest, acting themselves from a deep moral imperative to stand up against injustice and for our planet.

Many have taken nonviolent direct action over the centuries from the abolition of slavery to women's suffrage and prison reform.

Paul Parker, recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said: “No-one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory.

“This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.

“Freedom of speech, assembly, and fair trials are an essential part of free public debate which underpins democracy."

the current leader of the Fantasy Premier League... is not a data analyst, a football insider or a computer scientist, but a 67-year-old woman who uses a pen and paper to choose her team each week

Original link: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/a-quarter-of-britons-now-disabled-jhjzwcvbs

The new owner will rebrand the High Street chain as TGJones, but said it would keep the Post Office outlets that operate in many branches.

I think they've missed a trick here. My uncle used to call it Smudgers. Much better name!

The body of a disabled man was found in his flat in distressing, squalid conditions, just weeks after the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) wrongly removed his disability benefits because he had failed to return a claim form.

His sister, his only surviving close relative, believes he may have been left without enough credit on his phone to call for help, while he had not had enough money to fix his broken mobility scooter.

Susan believes the wrongful removal of his personal independence payment (PIP) played a significant part in his death.

She told Disability News Service (DNS): “He was already on the breadline, so I think it would have been devastating for him.”

She also believes DWP failed to make the necessary safeguarding checks before removing his PIP.

She has now warned that the death of her much-loved brother must act as a warning of the horrors to come if the government goes ahead with its planned £4.5 billion cuts to PIP.

The number of children living in poverty across the UK has reached a new record high, according to figures from the Department for Work and Pensions.

Some 4.45 million children were estimated to be in households in relative low income, after housing costs, in the year to March 2024.

This is up from the previous record of 4.33 million in the 12 months to March 2023. It is the highest figure since comparable records for the UK began in 2002-2003.

A household is considered to be in relative poverty if it is below 60 per cent of the median income after housing costs.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/31629438

Archived

Finn Lau [...] fled [Hong Kong] after local officials arrested him at a pro-democracy demonstration in 2020. Months later, while he was walking down a quiet street in London, three masked men jumped him and beat him unconscious. Now 31, Lau still has a faint scar on his boyish face.

British authorities called the incident a hate crime, but Lau was convinced that Beijing had sent the men to silence him. He wasn’t being paranoid: Last year, Chinese authorities declared that Lau would be “pursued for life.” They froze his remaining assets in Hong Kong and offered a bounty for information leading to his arrest. Since then, fake journalists have approached Lau seeking interviews, dozens of social-media accounts have impersonated him, and he’s received death threats. A group on Telegram posted his address in London, forcing him to move multiple times. The intimidation extended to his family members in Hong Kong. Eventually they had to flee too.

[...]

Lau is one of thousands who fled Hong Kong to Britain once the protests started—and particularly since June 2020, when China passed a national-security law that led to often-violent suppression. [...] Assailants have stalked them in public and smeared them online. Letters have shown up at their neighbors’ doors promising a reward for turning over dissidents to the Chinese embassy. Back home, government authorities have suspended their retirement savings and interrogated their families. Some have been attacked.

[...]

Even though China’s responsibility [for assaults of Chinese exiled dissidents] is an open secret, Western governments have struggled to deter the country from interfering on their soil. Xi’s crusade appears so brazen and far-reaching that it suggests he has little fear of provoking the West. By the same measure, it seems to reveal that something else really does scare him: China’s exiles.

[...]

Accounts of intimidation and harassment have emerged from virtually every corner of Britain where Hong Kongers have gathered. In 2019, a group of men dragged a refugee through the gates of the Chinese consulate in Manchester and assaulted him. Similar incidents have occurred in London’s Chinatown and on college campuses, including in Southampton, where Chinese students attacked Hong Kongers during a demonstration in 2023. Videos of the incident circulated on Weibo, China’s version of X, and prompted death threats against the victims.

[...]

In 2023, the Hong Kong government offered rewards for information leading to the arrests of [exiled dissident Simon] Cheng and 12 other overseas dissidents, six of whom lived in Britain. Officials in Hong Kong interrogated Cheng’s family, who became a focus of attention in Chinese media. “Watching my father dodge the news cameras on television sent me into a deep depression,” Cheng said. In an effort to protect his parents, Cheng encouraged them to sever ties with him. “If needed, criticize me and cut me off,” he wrote on X. “My hope is that my parents can enjoy a dignified, peaceful, and serene old age—until our next life.”

[...]

On Christmas Eve, Hong Kong issued bounties on six more exiles, including Chloe Cheung, who was 19 at the time. “I came here to protect my future,” Cheung told me. She had moved to the city of Leeds with her family in 2020. “I had dreams of pursuing a career in business or finance,” she said. “The bounty has changed all of that.”

She showed [...] a video on her phone of a Chinese man shouting death threats at her during a protest she helped organize in November. After another demonstration, two Asian men followed her into a restaurant; she alerted the police, who opened an investigation. On Instagram and X, strangers send her sexually explicit messages written in Mandarin. Friends have asked her to stop contacting them, worried that ties to her could create problems for their relatives in Hong Kong. “It feels impossible, suddenly, to meet new people or apply for jobs,” she said. “I have no idea who I can trust.”

[...]

Alberto Fittarelli, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group, who [said] China has two main goals when it targets activists online: to encourage self-censorship and to “discredit the targets in the eyes of the audience hosting them.”

That strategy nearly ruined the livelihoods of two exiled painters, who go by Lumli and Lumlong. When I visited their London apartment, which doubles as their studio, it was filled with oversize canvases depicting baroque scenes from the protests in Hong Kong. For years, mysterious accounts had posted hateful comments on the Facebook page they used to sell their artwork, which Lumli and Lumlong took with them when they fled Hong Kong in 2021. (A standard post: “You dogs and rioters will all die with your family.”) Many of the profiles showed signs of fakery; they were created recently, had few followers, rarely posted, and used simplified Chinese characters typical of mainland China. Experts at Citizen Lab told me the accounts’ features are “consistent with what has been observed over the years for pro-China networks.”

[...]

Laurence Fox has been charged with a sexual offence after allegedly tweeting a compromising image of broadcaster Narinder Kaur.

The 46-year-old is accused of sharing the photo of Ms Kaur – who appears regularly on Good Morning Britain and GB News – in April 2024.

Posting on X at the time, Ms Kaur, 52, said the image was “unimaginably mortifying”.

Police have charged the former GB News presenter after a one-month investigation.

He is due to appear in court in April.

Meta is considering a subscription option for UK Facebook users after it agreed to stop targeting a campaigner with adverts based on her personal data.

The technology company said the social network it owns and Instagram were “free for British consumers because of personalised advertising”.

It comes after Meta agreed to stop targeting adverts at human rights campaigner Tanya O’Carroll after she filed a lawsuit against Facebook’s collection of personal details.

...

Meta said it was “pleased to draw a line under this long-running case”.

A spokesperson said: “We fundamentally disagree with the claims made by Ms O’Carroll, no business can be mandated to give away its services for free.

“We take our UK GDPR obligations seriously and provide robust settings and tools for users to control their data and advertising preferences.

“Facebook and Instagram cost a significant amount of money to build and maintain, and these services are free for British consumers because of personalised advertising.

“Like many internet services, we are exploring the option of offering people based in the UK a subscription and will share further information in due course.”

Meta already offers an advert-free subscription option to users in the EU.

Previously:

• Facebook to stop targeting ads at UK woman after legal fight

Facebook has agreed to stop targeting adverts at an individual user using personal data after she filed a lawsuit against its parent company, tech giant Meta.

Tanya O'Carroll, 37, who lives in London and works in the tech policy and human rights sector, said it would open a "gateway" for other people wanting to stop the social media company from serving them adverts based on their demographics and interests.

The Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's data watchdog, said online targeted advertising should be considered direct marketing.

In a statement, Meta said it provided "robust settings and tools for users to control their data and advertising preferences".

Ms O'Carroll, who created her Facebook account about 20 years ago, filed a lawsuit against Meta in 2022, asking it to stop using her personal data to fill her social media feeds with targeted adverts based on topics it thought she was interested in.

"I knew that this kind of predatory, invasive advertising is actually something that we all have a legal right to object to," Ms O'Carroll told Radio 4's Today Programme.

"I don't think we should have to accept these unfair terms where we consent to all that invasive data tracking and surveillance."

It was when she found out she was pregnant in 2017 that she realised the extent to which Facebook was targeting adverts at her.

She said the adverts she got "suddenly started changing within weeks to lots of baby photos and other things - ads about babies and pregnancy and motherhood".

"I just found it unnerving - this was before I'd even told people in my private life, and yet Facebook had already determined that I was pregnant," she continued.

Behavioural metadata extraction underpins the 'surveillance business model', which we think has been shown to undermine democracy. We think it may too enable: manipulation of individual voting at scale via social media microtargeting, spreading fake news, increasing big tech power, mistrust of govs, opinion polarisation, victimisation. RTB [Real Time Bidding] system data can be accessed by anyone, not just advertisers.

Data is sold through Real Time Bidding (RTB) system which is easily accessible and data may be de-anonymised.