In latest Opinium poll, only 16% say accepting rightwing Tory MP’s defection was the right move – against 33% who see it as a mistake

More voters believe Keir Starmer was wrong to allow a rightwing Tory MP into Labour than think it was the right move, after anger from within the party’s ranks over the defection.

Natalie Elphicke, the Dover MP, said the Tories had become “a byword for incompetence and division” when she made her shock departure to Labour earlier in May. The party leadership regarded it as a major coup to win the support of the MP on the frontline of the Channel crossings issue that Rishi Sunak has attempted to prioritise. The move came despite concerns among MPs that her views conflict with Labour in a variety of areas.

As the inquiry publishes it final report, the chancellor is under pressure to find £10bn to put right a longstanding injustice

The chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will come under pressure to stay true to his word and sign off on immediate compensation payments totalling up to £10bn to victims of the contaminated blood scandal when the long-awaited final report on the affair is published on Monday.

The scandal is described as the worst treatment disaster in NHS history, with more than 3,000 people having died as a result of receiving contaminated blood products in the 1970s and 1980s. It is estimated that, even today, a person infected during the scandal dies every four days.

Head of Church of England Justin Welby tells Observer that ending policy would lift thousands of UK children out of poverty

• The Observer view: Labour must tackle this scourge
• Gordon Brown: People haven’t woken up to this
• Torsten Bell: We can easily end child poverty

Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, has issued an impassioned plea to the government and Keir Starmer’s Labour party to scrap the two-child limit on benefit payments to families, branding it as a cruel and immoral policy that plunges hundreds of thousands of children into poverty.

The intervention by the head of the Church of England will place particular pressure on Starmer to make a firm commitment to end the policy, which he has so far refused to do, as he tries to position Labour as being responsible with the public finances.

A quarter of Britain’s children live below the poverty line. Near his Fife home, the former PM shows how charities help families and says this issue must be a priority for any government

• The Observer view: Labour must tackle this scourge
• Torsten Bell: We can end child poverty
• Archbishop urges Starmer to ditch ‘cruel’ benefit cap

Outside a warehouse squeezed between a waste recycling plant, an auto parts outlet and a scaffolding company in Lochgelly, Fife, a blur of figures in hi-vis jackets are busily ­packing boxes into headteacher Ailsa Swankie’s car. Not for the first time, she is taking delivery of household essentials, hygiene products and food from the area’s heaving “multibank” – an institution she describes as an “absolute lifeline”.

The specific items differ with each pick-up – sometimes ­toilet rolls, other times washing ­powder or hot water bottles, donated by local businesses or sourced cheaply. But the need for each trip is always the same: an increasing number of families at her school who have found themselves struggling to afford what should be basic products. “We do have a lot of working families who work very, very hard, but they’re still really struggling,” Swankie says. “If I took nappies back to school, they’d all be gone by 3pm.”

Ending this shortsighted and unfair policy would lift half a million children out of poverty immediately, says Martyn Snow

In Leicester, where I live and work as bishop, two in five children now live in poverty. That’s 12 pupils in every classroom struggling to focus. Some haven’t eaten breakfast. Others are no doubt worried about arguments they have overheard at home about money, and how to afford next year’s school uniform. When I visit our local schools, I hear of teachers bringing in food for pupils who would otherwise go hungry and schools covering the costs of trips to protect children from the shame of being left out. I’m hugely proud of all that our churches do to support those in need, whether it’s with holiday clubs or food hubs. But we cannot by ourselves reverse the trend of growing child poverty seen across the country. One policy change, however, could: ending the two-child benefit cap.

The limit restricts the child element of universal credit to two children per household, so that families lose about £3,200 a year for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017. This is a huge amount for any family trying to make ends meet: of the 1.5 million children affected in 2023, 1.1 million were living in poverty.

Proponents of the Greater Idaho movement have argued Democrats in Portland don’t understand their way of life

Under a large tent at the Crook county fairgrounds in Prineville, Oregon, six people stand in a neat line, each clutching the gun in their holster. “Shooters, set,” a man to the side yells. They wait. A light turns on in the centre of the target. They fire. A clock above records how long it took them to draw, shoot and, if they managed to, hit the target. They’re playing in pairs. Best two out of three wins.

Welcome to Oregon’s Cowboy Fast Draw State Championship, a sport organisers say is “dedicated to the romance and legend of the Old West”.

Ex-president’s legal team sure to make hay out of Juan Merchan’s $35 gift to Biden for President and anti-Republican groups

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money campaign finance trial in New York has been cautioned by a state ethics panel over two small donations made to Democrat-aligned groups in 2020.

The caution is likely to be seized on by Trump and his lawyers as evidence of his claims that the New York trial, now entering its fourth week, has been unfairly adjudicated by Judge Juan Merchan along partisan political lines.

The dog-killing South Dakota governor’s VP hopes are in tatters. But she’s not the first politician to flame out with an own goal

She could have been a contender. But then she wrote a book. And suddenly Kristi Noem was caught like a rabbit – or a rambunctious puppy – in the headlights.

The governor of South Dakota found herself insisting that a false claim she met the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had been put in her book by accident. Wait, said Elizabeth Vargas of NewsNation, you recorded the whole audiobook version and read this passage out loud. Why didn’t you take it out then?

The court will play a crucial role in November’s election. Alito’s pro-Trump flag adds fuel to an already raging ethics debate

With less than six months to go before America chooses its next president, the US supreme court finds itself in a profoundly unenviable position: not only has it been drawn into the thick of a volatile election, but swirling ethical scandals have cast doubt on its impartiality.

The US supreme court’s discomfort worsened dramatically on Thursday night when the New York Times published a photograph of an upside-down American flag being flown outside the Alexandria, Virginia, home of the hard-right justice Samuel Alito. The photo was taken on 17 January 2021, days after the insurrection at the US Capitol and days before Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Campaigners say move to electronic permits by end of the year is a ‘recipe for disaster’ that could leave immigrants without proof of status

Lawyers and migrant rights campaigners have warned that the government is heading for a repeat of the Windrush scandal after imposing a “cliff edge” deadline for immigrants to switch to new digital visas.

By the end of this year an estimated 500,000 or more non-EU immigrants with leave to remain in the UK will need to replace their physical biometric residence permits (BRPs) – which demonstrate proof of their right to reside, rent, work and claim benefits – with digital e-visas.

In thrall to a character who may not truly exist any more, the Labour leader kicked off his election campaign in Purfleet

• Tim Burrows is the author of The Invention of Essex

Call him Southend Keir. The kind of geezer who when in search of a new job – in this case the next prime minister of the UK – rolls up his sleeves and takes himself to dockside Essex. That’s where the Labour leader launched his six pledges for the next election on Thursday, in an aircraft hangar-sized rehearsal space in Purfleet, a town in Thurrock known for its 18th-century gunpowder battery. But there were no explosive pledges. Instead, there were anaesthetised assurances that if elected, Labour will, tentatively, try to make people’s lives a little bit better. Just not straight away.

The significance of Essex was not lost on the Times, which pointed out the party’s attempts “to win over the modern equivalent of Blair’s ‘Essex man’”. Simon Heffer, the Telegraph columnist, came up with the term Essex man in 1990 to describe a new kind of voter who materialised during the Thatcher era. He had sharp elbows and worked as a trader in the City of London, near to where his unionised father had worked on the docks. He may have grown up in a socially rented east London flat, but he now lived in leafier environs on the other side of the newly built M25, where he was likely to have bought a council house.

Chancellor seems to cherrypick data as he tries to outline how the Tories have got the country back on its feet

Jeremy Hunt called a press conference on Friday to outline why the electorate should trust the Conservatives with the economy, but some of his claims appear to have used cherrypicked facts and figures. He gave his speech just over a week after the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, accused the Conservatives of “gaslighting” the UK over the state of the economy by presenting too rosy a picture of what is actually going on.

Here are some of Hunt’s statements on the economy, and some context for his claims.

‘Strikingly large’ sum being recouped from people who fell foul of system that did not flag overpayments

Ministers are clawing back more than £250m from unpaid carers over benefit infringements that occurred largely as a result of government failures, it can be revealed.

More than 134,000 people who care for loved ones are being forced to repay often huge carer’s allowance overpayments. The debts are incurred in many cases through no fault of their own, and leave carers saddled with enormous debts, and some with criminal convictions.

Exclusive: Experts call for higher taxes and tougher regulation as research shows cost to NHS, other public services and economy

The cost of alcohol abuse is laid bare in a new study that shows £27bn a year being spent in England on the health and social harms of drinking.

The research that found the extra burden on the NHS, social services, the criminal justice system and the labour market cost at least 37% more than in 2003, when comparable research by the Cabinet Office estimated the costs at between £18.5bn and £20bn.

Chancellor also criticised for ‘dodgy dossier’ on Labour plans as he aims to make low tax a key election issue

Jeremy Hunt has been accused of exaggerating the Conservatives’ economic record and presenting a “dodgy dossier” on Labour’s spending plans, as he moved to put low tax at the heart of his party’s offering at the next election.

The chancellor gave a speech in central London on Friday, pitching the Conservatives as having helped the UK recover from economic troubles more quickly than expected. He also signalled a further cut to national insurance in the autumn, having already reduced the tax from 12p in the pound to 8p.

Politics is about achieving things and telling a compelling story. But neither the president – nor Starmer – can match Trump’s gift for narrative

The smile was the giveaway. Asked whether he was “just a copycat” of Tony Blair at the launch of his Blair-style pledge card on Thursday, Keir Starmer positively glowed. He was delighted with the comparison, which the entire exercise was surely designed to encourage. Blair “won three elections in a row”, Starmer said, beaming. Of course, he’s thrilled to be likened to a serial winner. And yet the more apt parallel is also a cautionary one. It’s not with Starmer’s long-ago predecessor, but with his would-be counterpart across the Atlantic: Joe Biden.

It’s natural that the sight of a Labour leader, a lawyer from north London, on course for Downing Street after a long era of Tory rule, would have people digging out the Oasis CDs and turning back the clock to 1997: Labour election victories are a rare enough commodity to prompt strong memories. But, as many veterans of that period are quick to point out, the circumstances of 2024 are very different. The UK economy was humming then and it’s parlous now. Optimism filled the air then, while too few believe genuine change is even possible now. And politics tended to be about material matters then, tax and public services, rather than dominated by polarising cultural wars as it is now.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Kulveer Ranger resigns Tory whip after committee also recommends suspension from House of Lords for three weeks

• UK politics live – latest updates

A peer is set to be suspended from House of Lords bars for 12 months after he was found to have bullied and harassed two people while drunk.

Kulveer Ranger has resigned the government whip after the House of Lords conduct committee also recommended that he be suspended from the house for three weeks.

Trump will look to again cast Biden as greatly diminished while Biden will aim to remind voters why they rejected Trump in 2020

• US politics live – latest updates
• Sign up for The Stakes, our US elections newsletter

It’s game on for a pair of presidential debates between two unpopular candidates most Americans wish weren’t running for the nation’s highest office.

In a ratatat social media exchange on Wednesday, Joe Biden and Donald Trump agreed to participate in two debates on 27 June, hosted by CNN, and on 10 September, hosted by ABC.

As the United States approaches the 2024 presidential election, the integrity of our electoral process remains a critical issue. Despite persistent claims and efforts to undermine public confidence, there is no credible evidence of widespread election fraud in the 2020 […]

The post Ensuring Election Security and Integrity appeared first on TechSpective.

The post Ensuring Election Security and Integrity appeared first on Security Boulevard.

This week, it was Donald Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen’s turn to take the stand in the hush-money trial in New York. Cohen walked the jury through the steps he says he took to make any potential story that would damage Trump’s image go away, in advance of the 2016 election.

The defence is trying to chip away at Cohen’s credibility, to sow seeds of doubt among the jury listening to his testimony. So how did he do? Jonathan Freedland asks former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori what he makes of the prosecution’s star witness so far

Archive: Fox News 5, CBS News, CNN, Sky Australia

Bad actors are always ready to exploit political strife to their own ends. Right now, they’re doing so with the conflict in the Middle East. A holistic defense against influence networks requires collaboration between government, technology companies and security research organizations.

The post Emerald Divide Uses GenAI to Exploit Social, Political Divisions in Israel Using Disinformation appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Keir Starmer appeared in Dover and Deal alongside the Labour party’s newest MP, the former Tory Natalie Elphicke, to announce the scrapping of the Rwanda deportation scheme if Labour is elected. The Guardian spoke to people in Dover to get their reaction

Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. [...] If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. [...] Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement's leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda.

Enlarge / Mayans built impressive structures and occasionally put interesting items in the construction fill. (credit: Dr. Jürgen Tenckhoff)

As civilizations evolve, so do the political regimes that govern them. But the transition from one era to another is not always quiet. Some ancient Mayan rulers made a very fiery public statement about who was in charge.

When archaeologists dug up the burned fragments of royal bodies and artifacts at the Mayan archaeological site of Ucanal in Guatemala, they realized they were looking at the last remnants of a fallen regime. There was no scorching on the walls of the structure they were found beneath. This could have only meant that the remains (which had already been in their tombs a hundred years) were consumed by flames in one place and buried in another. But why?

The team of archaeologists, led by Christina T. Halperin of the University of Montreal, think this was the doing of a new leader who wanted to annihilate all traces of the old regime. He couldn’t just burn them. He also had to bury them where they would be forgotten.

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