United Kingdom

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.

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.

... 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.

"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..."

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.

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.

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.

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?