United Kingdom

The £5m gift to Nigel Farage by a cryptocurrency billionaire was reported to the National Crime Agency by bankers who were concerned it may have been laundered money, the Guardian can reveal.

The disclosure will put further pressure on the Reform UK leader, who is awaiting a decision by the standards commissioner over whether his failure to declare the money breached parliamentary rules.

Farage was given a deadline of 1pm on Tuesday to respond to the Guardian about this article. He gave a video address at 2pm announcing he would force a byelection in his seat of Clacton-on-Sea.

That attempt to shake off the deepening scandal over his finances appeared to have backfired on Tuesday night as the Conservatives, Labour, Restore Britain and the Lib Dems all announced that they would not stand candidates in a contest described as a “media circus” and “vanity project”.

Five-million Farage has flounced out of parliament in order to pause the investigations into his alleged corruption, but other major parties are refusing to contest the resulting by-election, potentially leaving him facing Count Binface as his biggest rival. With the British public's love of the underdog and refusing to do what's expected - remember Boaty McBoatface? - I wouldn't bet against it being Count Binface MP soon.

This is what you get when you cater to the far right. Meaningless cruelty.

Trying to boast big numbers and seem tough on crime without looking at things on a case-by-case basis. Echoes of US fascism.

Ankara and Downing Street are not expected to release the text of the document, underscoring the sensitivity of its provisions, the sources said.

Turkey and the UK signed a Strategic Partnership Framework in April aimed at “strengthening dialogue and cooperation between the two countries as NATO allies and strategic partners”.

Relations between Turkey and the UK have strengthened following Ankara’s decision last July to purchase Eurofighter Typhoon jets in a multibillion-dollar deal.

A year and a day ago, octogenarian priest Sue Parfitt told Novara Media, “we cannot be bystanders”. Moments later, she became one of the first people in the country to be arrested under a draconian new law that many didn’t believe could be enforced.

Parfitt had, of course, defied the proscription of direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation, after a ban came into effect at 00.01 the night before.

Onlookers, who surrounded the group and chanted “free, free Palestine”, said they were shocked to see her and 28 other mostly elderly protesters bundled into police vans simply for holding up paper signs. Parfitt said she hoped “common sense would prevail” and that the new law would be immediately overturned.

[A new law in China] may become a tool of genocide and a weapon of transnational repression. The Orwellian-sounding “Ethnic Unity and Progress Law” will achieve the very antithesis of its name. It amounts to one of the most dangerous and draconian in a long line of repressive laws imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

For a start, it is an explicit mandate for Beijing to pursue critics of Chinese policy wherever they live. Article 10 states that “matters of ethnic unity and progress are not to be interfered with by foreign forces. All acts using excuses such as ethnicity, religion, or human rights to insult or disparage, contain and suppress, or infiltrate and undermine the PRC are to be resolutely opposed”.

More ominously, according to Article 63: “organizations and individuals outside the [mainland] territory of the PRC that commit acts aimed at the PRC that undermine ethnic unity and progress or create ethnic division are to be pursued for legal responsibility in accordance with the law”.

In other words, the reach of China’s criminal justice system will extend around the globe. Tibetan, Uyghur, Hong Kong and Chinese dissident diaspora communities abroad will likely be first to be targeted.

[...]

The new law will turbo-charge the repression which Xi Jinping has unleashed throughout China over the past decade, and spread it well beyond China’s borders.

This week we had news that China’s controversial new London embassy – in the historic old Royal Mint, opposite the Tower of London – may have cells in its basement to imprison dissidents. If the new embassy plans – currently under judicial review – proceed, Beijing could well point to the new law as justification for holding critics in its dungeons.

[...]

Sir Tony Blair’s policy institute has delivered an unusually direct intervention in the debate over Britain’s tax strategy, warning Andy Burnham that raising Capital Gains Tax (CGT) could undermine investment at precisely the moment the UK economy needs it most.

The warning comes as Burnham, widely expected to become Prime Minister in the coming weeks following Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation, is reportedly considering aligning CGT with income tax rates as part of a broader effort to strengthen the public finances.

Such a move would represent one of the most significant changes to the taxation of investment income in decades and could raise an estimated £12 billion annually, according to the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation.

But the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change argues the economic consequences could outweigh the fiscal gains.

Former British Home Secretary Suella Braverman has called for Britain’s former colonies to pay reparations to London for the "investment, effort and contribution" she claims the empire made in building them.

In a post on X, Braverman, a right-wing politician who defected from the Conservative Party to Reform UK earlier this year, entered the reparations debate by declaring: “The British Empire did so much good for the world.”

“Of course slavery was abhorrent but to expect the British people of the 21st century to pay for actions that took place in the 18th century has no basis in law," Braverman said. That claim is false. According to the British government, UK taxpayers were still paying off a £20m loan taken out in 1835 to compensate slave owners after abolition. The sum amounted to about 5 percent of the UK’s GDP at the time. In today’s money, that would be worth more than $3bn.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1242237/nhs-to-use-ai-on-its-app-to-tell-patients-in-the-uk-whether-they-should-see-a-gp-visit-a