UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer defended his handling of gifts from a key Labour donor as he sought to take the edge off a controversy that has cast a shadow over his early weeks in office.

Starmer faces a potential parliamentary investigation after the Sunday Times reported

he initially failed to declare that Waheed Alli, a member of the House of Lords, paid for a personal shopper, designer garments and alterations for his wife, Victoria. But the premier told reporters traveling with him to Italy on Monday that he was “very consistent with following the rules.”

“My team, soon after the election, sought advice on what to do from the relevant authorities, and then had to seek further advice, which is what led to the declaration,” Starmer told reporters in Rome after meeting Italian premier, Giorgia Meloni, on Monday. “Wherever there are gifts from anyone, I’m going to comply with rules.”

Starmer is trying to draw a line under negative press surrounding Alli’s role in Labour’s early days in government. The premier has already come under pressure to explain why the TV mogul, who was named Labour’s chair of general election fund-raising in 2022, was given a 10 Downing St. security pass and also advised on public appointments, as reported by Bloomberg.

Moreover, the prime minister’s failure on Monday to rule out accepting further gifts from Alli opens him up to fresh accusations of hypocrisy from opposition politicians and the British media, given the Labour leader spent much of his time in opposition criticizing the former Conservative administration over its record on ethics and propriety.

Conservative MPs have petitioned the parliamentary commissioner for standards to investigate Starmer’s handling of the donations from Alli. The Survivor television franchise co-creator was appointed to the Lords by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998 — and has both helped Labour raise a record amount of funds and supported its politicians with his own money.

He has provided tens of thousands of pounds to subsidize the offices of Labour officials while they were in opposition, including giving Starmer £16,200 ($21,400) for “work clothing” in April and allowing Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner to use a New York apartment for a “personal holiday” around New Year’s Eve.

Starmer said the current framework regulating how MPs receive and declare gifts was “good.”

“I asked my team to make sure we’re complying with the framework, which is why they reached out for advice on what to do in this situation,” he said. “When they got further advice they made the declaration. And I think it’s really important everybody else follows the rules.”

The controversy over the Alli donations has coincided with a decline in Starmer’s approval ratings since winning the election, as he’s also faced blow-back over removing winter fuel payments from some pensioners and been accused of painting an overly pessimistic picture of Britain’s economic outlook and prospects.

The prime minister’s declarations while in opposition also show him receiving gifts from other donors of tickets to watch Arsenal play at clubs including Manchester United, Manchester City, Tottenham, West Ham and Wolverhampton Wanderers. The prime minister on Monday sought to justify such gifts on security grounds, alluding to his “massive” support for the North London club.

“I can’t go into the stands because of security reasons. Therefore if I don’t accept a gift of hospitality I can’t go to a game,” Starmer said. “Never going to an Arsenal game again because I can’t accept hospitality is pushing it a bit far,” he said, without explaining why he couldn’t pay for a hospitality ticket himself.

(An earlier version corrected the spelling of Waheed Alli’s name in second paragraph.)

The revolution in artificial intelligence that promised us breakthroughs in medical research and corporate productivity seems to be running a little behind. But already A.I. has become something of a nightmare for the Americans who happen to live near one of the more than 5,000 data centers that power it and keep the cloud above our digital world running.

Across the country, from Indiana to Oregon, companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are building data centers on sites that can stretch over 1,000 acres, ringed with guard towers and razor wire fences.

People who live near one Northern Virginia center have complained that the mechanical whir of the fleet of industrial fans needed to cool the sensitive computer equipment inside can sound like a leaf blower that never turns off. Cooling the heavy equipment also diverts great volumes of water even in places where it’s scarce. And some of the costs of powering the centers are shouldered by utility customers, in the form of hundreds of dollars a year added to household energy bills.

Residents rarely learn how data centers may affect their lives until it’s too late. Big tech operators are aggressively deploying nondisclosure agreements to force local officials, construction workers and others to keep these projects under wraps.

For tech firms, the incentives to build more of these centers are immense: A McKinsey analysis projected the generative A.I. business could eventually be worth nearly $8 trillion worldwide. Tech companies don’t want to tip off rivals who might try to swoop in and steal a viable site for development. That’s part of the reason they so zealously enforce nondisclosure agreements. But it’s more than that — they also seem to want to avoid angering locals who might learn of the coming disruptions and protest zoning changes.

The tactics companies have deployed in recent years to build their massive data center networks are downright mercenary, and regulators now need to step in to make sure the communities most affected by these industrial projects can learn about and evaluate them for themselves.

At the moment, without those measures in place, residents and environmental groups have to go up against the tech firms largely on their own just to obtain basic details about the water, energy and noise impacts.

In bucolic Frederick County, Md., county officials signed a nondisclosure agreement with Amazon in 2019 around a possible data center project that fell through in 2021. Sugarloaf Alliance, a local land conservation group with concerns about the project, wasn’t able to get details on the company’s plans to rezone parcels of land and the potential environmental impacts until it sued the county in 2022.

“Prying the details out of county government was a giant wake- up call,” Steve Black, Sugarloaf Alliance’s president, told me.

In Orange County, Va., residents learned Amazon was holding secret discussions with a group of nearly a dozen local officials who’d signed nondisclosure agreements. The agreements meant officials couldn’t disclose negotiations over energy needs and water usage for a data center project that is part of a 2,600- acre mixed-use development. A historical preservation group has continued to fight the project, arguing that it would undermine the character of a Civil War battlefield nearby. But they may not succeed in stopping the project from breaking ground.

Even when local leaders don’t sign nondisclosure agreements, it can be difficult for community members to assess the impact of a proposed center. In Cass County, Mo., local officials held private meetings with representatives of a company interested in building a facility in their small farming community, but few details emerged from those conversations, and residents eventually formed a group to host citizen town halls to crowdsource information on tax increases, noise issues and the potential strain on the electric grid.

Google and its big tech rivals are trying to get out in front of blowback from local constituents, and are investing in community engagement or tapping public relations spin shops. They argue that disclosing how much water and electricity their data centers require will put them at a competitive disadvantage. And they promise their data centers will eventually be “water positive” and use only renewable energy. It will be years until the cooling technology and green-energy infrastructure is in place to make those promises a reality.

Local leaders who run interference on behalf of tech giants often play up the benefits, particularly the jobs and advanced technical training opportunities they tout. Recently, a small but growing number of officials have begun to question these deals. In Georgia, where electricity demand and energy grid strain from more than 50 data centers pushed residential utility bills up almost $200 a year on average per household, state senators passed a bill earlier this year that would pause tax incentives for data center development for the next two years.

Yielding to intense lobbying from big tech, Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed the legislation in May, but the bipartisan support behind the new tax rules pointed to the emergence of a new sentiment summed up by State Senator John Albers, a sponsor of the bill, who said simply that the return on the tax incentives “is not there.”

A similar resistance from residents critical of the impact a 10-acre data center campus would have on electricity demand in Cascade Locks, Ore., led to the recall of two officials who’d supported the project. In Chesterton, Ind., concerns about energy use and noise from a proposed data center’s 75,000-square-foot yard of backup diesel generators were glossed over by the developer. In the end, the $1.3-billion project was nixed.

Those local victories will remain the exception to the rule unless regulators, Congress or both intervene to prohibit the use of nondisclosure agreements and require independent audits of how data center development could raise energy bills, drain water resources and increase noise pollution.

Protecting communities and the environment from the malignant impact of data center projects won’t spell the end of the A.I. industry. Though new rules could take a bite out of potential profits for big tech companies, ensuring the transparency of data center development as it proliferates is all but essential for the A.I. revolution to become a reality.

From Adam Johnson's tweet

JERUSALEM—Describing the terrifying yet valiant experience to his fellow battalion members, Israel Defense Forces soldier Yossi Saadon recounted Tuesday his harrowing, heroic war story of killing an 8-month-old Palestinian child during a violent attack against protesters. “It was a heart-pounding experience—there was smoke and gunfire all around me, and I made a split-second decision to hurl that canister of tear gas at the encroaching infant cradled in her father’s arms,” said Saadon to the group of awed soldiers, describing the chills that went up and down his spine as he realized that all he had was his M16 assault rifle and some tear gas to defend himself against the unarmed Palestinian family standing only dozens of yards away. “I could see the whites of the baby’s eyes and hear her terrifying cries, and I knew it was either her or me. And this wasn’t some newborn infant, you know? This was a baby who could probably sit up independently. I was scared, but I acted quickly to throw that tear gas at her and her older sister. And who knows how many lives I saved when I shot the women trying to help her?” At press time, Saadon’s battalion commander informed him that he was submitting his name for the Medal of Valor, the IDF’s highest honor.

Please disregard my mod status for this post. This isn't a comm wide opinion and fellow vegans are welcome to disagree.

Every time a obviously decent PETA post is shared on social media, maybe about fur or pet breeding, people come out of the woodwork to comment "wow one good opinion of PETA" or "broken clock is right twice a day". A very easy way for content creators to get views is to make yet another anti-PETA video. I needed to unfollow one YouTuber I liked, Call Me Kevin, because he played all the PETA video games, did the snarky thing, and had nothing to say about animals consumed for food.

Sure PETA isn't perfect. They're an NGO and have most of the problems of the NGO-industrial-complex. They don't have anything to say about non animal issues. Arguably they're not intersectional. Their campaigns can be a be weird or cringe by Hexbear standards. The objectifying people's bodies thing is very debatable, although in PETA's defense, all the naked people in their campaigns are volunteers. It's questionable if someone who's eagerly signing up for a cause is being "objectified". I've had mates, better looking than me, passionately strip to their underwear for the cause of hurting less animals. But I'm not a woman nor an expert, and there may be some real space for critique, if you're a vegan.

The number of times I've had to hear non-vegans, even left wing non-vegans, repeat corporate talking points is embarrassing af for non vegans. On multiple occasions I've been banned from non-vegan pages for pushing back against this, politely and without insults. The amount of times I've been treated worse than racists get treated on social media and banned for gently pointing out animal abuse is at least a dozen. So some PETA Twitter post made some carnist sad/angry for ten seconds. Non-vegans feel stress from getting called out on their contribution to animals abuse. To this I say: good, I hope you feel stressed about what you do.

I can't stress enough. PETA isn't perfect. But I have worked with them for animal-rights campaigns, and they're very helpful with resources and funding. In regards to the animal euthanasia thing, they could easily be liberals and give it up for marketing purposes. But their attitude is basically "we don't give a damn about what non-vegans think on the issue", which is kinda based. And I hope carnists continue to get cry about what PETA and other vegans are saying.

I went to Vietnam a couple times. If you hang out downtown in the city, you might get a random Jehovah's Witness or Seventh Day Adventist* try to chat you up. "Oh, we can't do missionary work out in the open, so we just do one-on-one conversations like this". Despite the lack of "Jesus saves, die sinner" signs in Hanoi, you can definitely find Catholic and Protestant churches in Vietnam.

The Western press likes to piss and moan about settler nation missionaries that go, without proper visas mind you, to spread their Western versions of Christianity to the DPRK, only to get deported. So am I allowed to enter a white people country without a visa to stir up trouble and expect no consequences???

I'm the furthest thing from an expert on Myanmar. I get everything I know from Burmese friends. But if you look into the minority people situation, many of them are being heavily proselytised by the worst of the Amerikan type. I don't want the Pat Robertson's the world anywhere near struggling people.

*I'm definitely not saying that JWs and SDAs are anywhere near the worst as Christian sects go.

Hi all, it's whitepwrfan69, your lovely admin here at lemmy.balls. The mod team and I have been hard at work making sure that this place is fun and pleasant experience for all the users here. After days of discussion, looking through literal petabytes of data, we've decided the best course of action is to defederate from Hexbear. Although we very much believe in free speech, there are some pretty obvious dangers coming from federation with them. Let me list the top examples that me and the mod team fleshed out.

• Regularly advocate for violence

• They have no respect for private property

• Completely filled with hopeless trolls

• They have bots that spam users with aggressive links

• And lastly, why the fuck is everyone named Owl?!?!?!

Even Amerika sounds better

I can't say this shit in work, so I'm gonna say it here.

linky

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26218550

View the original post to see the images

(posting to both communities)

A carnist lemmy world instance admin has stepped in and meatsplained to the mods while restoring comments that violated the community's rules. They deleted comments that they did not agree with, citing 'misinformation', and threatened to demod the mods if those comments were removed again. The comments were deleted and the admin was banned from the community as per violating the rules of the community, that was until they unbanned themselves (admin abuse) and unmodded two of the moderators because of "promoting harmfull actions against pets".

As far as it stands, if the lemmy world community wasn't already not a safe vegan place for you (it really wasn't) it most certainly isn't now as carnists (lemmy world instance admin) currently mod it.

I suggest any vegan who wants a safe and welcoming space to come and interact with vegantheoryclub.org. Sorry for any inconvienance that this may have caused. I am deeply upset at the admins actions today and don't condone them whatsoever.

All environmental indicators showed a positive association with amounts of animal-based food consumed. Dietary impacts of vegans were 25.1% (95% uncertainty interval, 15.1–37.0%) of high meat-eaters (≥100 g total meat consumed per day) for greenhouse gas emissions, 25.1% (7.1–44.5%) for land use, 46.4% (21.0–81.0%) for water use, 27.0% (19.4–40.4%) for eutrophication and 34.3% (12.0–65.3%) for biodiversity. At least 30% differences were found between low and high meat-eaters for most indicators. Despite substantial variation due to where and how food is produced, the relationship between environmental impact and animal-based food consumption is clear and should prompt the reduction of the latter.