United Kingdom

The recent stopkillinggames campaign has been my first exposure to UK petitions.

Link to petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/659071
Link to campaign: stopkillinggames.com
Link to the campaigner’s video

The timing of the announcement on the Rwanda scheme, which is estimated to cost more than £500m over five years, has prompted scorn Labour.

A party source said: “Is there any more blatant sign that [former immigration minister Robert] Jenrick was right about this all being symbolic before an election than this mad flurry of stories?

“The core substance though hasn’t changed. This is a tiny scheme at an extortionate cost and the criminal gangs will see through this con.”

Downing Street categorically denied this. The prime minister’s press secretary said: “From our part there isn’t really a day to lose when people are dying in the Channel having been induced into boats by gangs.

Cross posted from: https://feddit.de/post/11646748

Belgium reportedly denied Ahmed Alhashimi asylum by arguing that Basra, his hometown in Iraq, was classified as a safe area. He said his children spent the last seven years staying with a relative in Sweden, but that he was recently informed that they would be deported, with him, to Iraq.

"If I knew there was a 1% chance that I could keep the kids in Belgium or France or Sweden or Finland I would keep them there. All I wanted was for my kids to go to school. I didn't want any assistance. My wife and I can work. I just wanted to protect them and their childhoods and their dignity," he continued.

Eva Jonsson, Sara's teacher in Uddevalla, Sweden, described the seven-year-old as "kind and nice".

"She had a lot of friends in the school. They played together all the time… In February we heard she would be deported and that it would happen quickly. We had two days' notice," she said.

After learning of her death, the class gathered in a circle and held a minute's silence.

"It's very unfortunate that it happens to such a nice family. I have taught [other] children in that family, and I was really shocked about the deportation," said the teacher.

"We have Sara's picture in front of us still, and we will keep it there as long as the children want."

(They were on bail, but have now been charged)

Tech that comes with weak passwords such as “admin” or “12345” will be banned in the UK under new laws dictating that all smart devices must meet minimum security standards.

Measures to protect consumers from hacking and cyber-attacks come into effect on Monday, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said.

It means manufacturers of phones, TVs and smart doorbells, among others, are now legally required to protect internet-connected devices against access by cybercriminals, with users prompted to change any common passwords.

Brands have to publish contact details so that bugs and issues can be reported, and must be transparent about timings of security updates.

It is hoped the new measures will help give customers confidence in buying and using products at a time when consumers and businesses have come under attack from hackers at a soaring rate.

At least 18 public-sector websites in the UK and US send visitor data in some form to various web advertising brokers – including an ad-tech biz in China involved in past privacy controversies, a security firm claims.

[…]

In the US, .gov websites are not supposed to run ads. In the UK, ads are allowed on .gov.uk websites, subject to some limitations. The .gov and .gov.uk sites flagged by Silent Push each publish an ads.txt file that spells out the businesses allowed to automatically sell that site's ad space to advertisers as a visitor arrives.

[…] Silent Push found a bunch of UK and US government websites with [the ads.txt] file listing various advertising exchanges and resellers ranging from Google (like what El Reg uses) to one in China.

[…]

One of the ad-tech vendors used by the .gov.uk sites, and highlighted by Silent Push, is Yeahmobi. This Chinese entity reportedly had its mobile ad SDK removed from the Google Play Store in 2018 for alleged ad fraud. Yeahmobi did not respond to requests for comment.

[…]

Silent Push's report identifies four .gov sites that, in our experience, do not display adverts though do ping web ad platforms, do list various exchanges in their ads.txt files, and may break US government CISA rules. In the UK, it's a different story, as 18 sites identified by Silent Push use Yeahmobi among others to display ads somewhere on pages.

Inese Briede says her sister, Inga Rublite, 39, might not have died ‘if someone was just checking up on her’'

In a recent study in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, the authors looked at records of deaths for which pathologists were unable to determine a cause during an autopsy (coded as “unascertained”). In the vast majority of cases, including Giddings’s, this is usually because a body is too decomposed to examine properly. Their research suggests that the number of unascertained deaths in England and Wales increased five-fold between 1992 and 2022, even as overall mortality rates were falling.

Yet these figures only account for the most extreme cases of decomposition, notes Theodore Estrin-Serlui, a pathologist in London and one of the paper’s authors. He estimates that 8,000-9,000 people were found in an advanced state of decomposition in 2022.

Several factors influence how rapidly a body decomposes. Corpses rot faster in hot and steamy conditions; those of obese people tend to waste away more quickly. Yet warmer weather and wider waistlines cannot explain why decomposition has become much more frequent among certain groups, especially older men. “We’re talking about people who die alone and aren’t found for a good period of time,” notes Dr Estrin-Serlui. Frequency of decomposition, he suggests, can be used as a proxy for social isolation.

The theory seems plausible. In 2021 30% of all households contained only one person, compared with 17% in 1971. Rates of unascertained deaths tripled among British males over 60 between 1990 and 2010, the largest increase, at a time when the fastest-growing group of people living alone were middle-aged men. Family breakdowns, rising separation rates and changing social norms have pushed more people to live alone. People may not know who their neighbours are. In central London residents often live stacked in flats, in close physical proximity to one another but with little social contact. There, rates of decomposition at home are twice as high as in suburban Hertfordshire

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