Calculation includes policy U-turns, reshuffles, wasted time and expenses such as scrapped HS2 leg and ‘VIP’ helicopter rides

Conservative turmoil under Rishi Sunak has cost the taxpayer £8.2bn and nearly a year in lost time, according to calculations by Labour’s political attack team.

On Tuesday the Labour party unveiled a website and a bill totting up the cost of ministerial reshuffles , policy U-turns, byelections and unnecessary ministerial expenses incurred under Sunak’s premiership.

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More than 1 in 5 Wisconsin Democrats said that Israel’s war in Gaza is impacting their vote in the state’s primary on Tuesday, while 71 percent said they strongly support an immediate and permanent ceasefire, according to a new poll released on Monday.

Eleven percent of respondents said President Joe Biden’s handling of the war will impact their vote in November if he does not change course and another nearly 14 percent said it could. Nearly 5 percent, meanwhile, said their vote has been impacted regardless of a change in policy.

The poll was commissioned by Listen to Wisconsin , a campaign to mobilize protest votes during the battleground state’s primary in order to push the White House to change course on its support for the war on Gaza. According to the survey, which was conducted by Poll Progressive Strategies, nearly 26 percent of Wisconsin Democrats support that campaign, which would have voters cast a ballot for “Uninstructed delegation” rather than a candidate.

Reema Ahmad, a Palestinian and Muslim American organizer with Listen to Wisconsin, said that the poll results reflect that a significant proportion of Wisconsin Democrats’ primary votes “are determined by deep opposition to the White House policy in Gaza.”

“This is a serious threat to Biden’s chances in Wisconsin if he does not meet voter’s demands and impose a permanent, immediate, and unconditional ceasefire,” Ahmad told The Intercept. “Less than 1% of the vote determines an election in Wisconsin. Uninstructed Wisconsin voters in the Democratic Primary are sending a message that we demand serious steps towards peace.”

In 2020, Biden won Wisconsin by some 20,000 votes — an even thinner percentage margin than Donald Trump won the state in 2016. Campaign organizers hope that the Tuesday primary will yield at least as many “uninstructed” votes.

The “Uncommitted” campaign launched in Michigan , another electorally crucial state for Biden, where more than 100,000 voters cast an “uncommitted” ballot in the state’s February primary. Similar campaigns have been run in multiple other states. In Minnesota, 18.8 percent of voters cast their ballots for “uncommitted,” while roughly 10 percent did so in each of Washington, Missouri, and Colorado.

The Wisconsin poll also found that just under half of Democrats in the state strongly or even somewhat approve of Biden’s handling of the war. 65 percent of respondents under the age of 29 said they strongly disapprove of it; only 16 percent somewhat approved, while 0 percent strongly approved. 100 percent of voters below the age of 29 said they strongly or somewhat approve an immediate and permanent ceasefire (93.5 percent saying they strongly do).

While political pundits have repeatedly dismissed the Uncommitted campaign as representing only voters who would not vote for Biden anyhow, or ones who don’t represent a meaningful current in the party apparatus, 69 percent of survey respondents voted for the incumbent in the 2020 primaries. Just 13 percent had voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Waleed Shahid, a Democratic political strategist who has advised Uncommitted campaigns in numerous states, said that the poll signals a fracture within Biden’s party. “With margins likely mirroring 2016 rather than 2020, Biden cannot risk alienating tens of thousands of his own voters over Gaza as November approaches.”

The post 1 in 5 Wisconsin Democrats Said Gaza War Will Impact Their Primary Vote appeared first on The Intercept .

Fox News, one of the most relentless critics of the war on disinformation, now has a new challenge: Its parent company is looking to build up its own internal capability to combat disinformation.

Last week, Fox Corporation issued a job posting looking for a corporate “trust and safety behavioral analyst” whose responsibilities would include identifying “misinformation/disinformation.” The job aims to establish a content moderation system across Fox’s businesses, which includes Fox News, to fight disinformation. The corporation will work in close coordination with unnamed partners both inside and outside of the company, the posting says. To this end, Fox intends to use pattern recognition, a key component of artificial intelligence, to “identify hostile users,” the job description says.

The analyst, Fox says, would tend to the “ongoing community health and brand safety of Fox sites and apps that interact directly with users” in order to “safeguard … user communities.” A background in “psychology, criminal justice, social media, gaming, news or media” is a plus, the job announcement says.

Asked about the job posting, Fox did not respond to a request for comment.

The corporate concern with disinformation contrasts rather sharply with Fox News’s overwhelmingly critical coverage of anti-disinformation efforts that police what is posted in social media, which Fox News consistently equates with censorship.

When the Department of Homeland Security created a now-defunct Disinformation Governance Board in 2022, prominent Fox News hosts condemned the move in sensational terms. Fox News host Sean Hannity and then-host Tucker Carlson both called the Disinformation Governance Board a “Ministry of Truth,” a reference to the propaganda ministry of a totalitarian state from George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.” Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade echoed their remarks, saying that “it looks like the Biden administration is taking Orwell’s work not as a warning but as their own manual.”

Since the board story, the network has been obsessed with the disinformation battle. In the week following the revelation of the Disinformation Governance Board, 70 percent of Fox’s one-hour segments referenced disinformation and the DHS official in charge of the board, according to a defamation lawsuit Nina Jankowicz has filed against Fox News. During 2022, Fox News mentioned Jankowicz over 300 times, the lawsuit states. (Asked about the lawsuit, Irena Briganti, a spokesperson for Fox News, said that the company has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.)

Fox’s corporate interest in disinformation differs from the federal government’s. Fox is interested in audience “engagement” — a term that appears almost half a dozen times in the job posting.

“Helping deliver innovative technology solutions to support user safety and increase engagement,” Fox’s posting lists among the responsibilities of the job.

Much of the debate about content moderation focuses on heady subjects like freedom of speech and the threat of state-sponsored foreign influence campaigns. But largely absent from the discussion is the simple fact that it’s profitable for companies to remove content that might offend advertisers or audiences. And with advancements in AI technology, it is increasingly possible to do so at scale.

In addition to machine learning, Fox’s job posting references two other terms common to AI: large language models and natural language processing. This technology makes it possible to autonomously sift through vast amounts of data, which previously would have required expensive human teams. As a result, content moderation is going to be cheaper to conduct than ever before.

Fox is far from the only company taking advantage of the breakthroughs in AI to respond to disinformation.

“More than 95 percent of the hate speech that we take down is done by an AI and not by a person,” Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook (now Meta) told Congress in 2021. “And I think it’s 98 or 99 percent of the terrorist content that we take down is identified by an AI and not a person.”

The federal government is increasingly turning to AI to identify foreign influence operations, according to the Biden administration’s new budget request delivered to the Congress last month.

For the most part, the rapid changes brought about by the explosion of AI technology have yet to enter into the disinformation debate.

“I am pro-disinformation because one man’s disinformation is another person’s fact,” Fox News host Greg Gutfeld said in 2022.

Gutfeld may want to take that up with his employer.

The post Fox Used to Hate Disinformation Experts. Now It’s Hiring One. appeared first on The Intercept .

Rishi Sunak promised speedier care, but specialists believe long waits for hospital beds are costing thousands of lives

On one half of Rishi Sunak’s NHS pledge to voters, there has been some modest progress in recent months. Waiting lists for pre-planned hospital treatment and outpatient appointments in England fell from 7.8m to 7.6m between September and December last year. Given the intense pressures on the health system from multiple directions, this improvement is a remarkable achievement by the trusts that brought it about – even while the overall situation remains dire, with waiting lists predicted to remain longer than before the pandemic until 2030 at the earliest.

But the prime minister’s commitment was not limited to waiting lists. The pledge he made in January last year, as one of five priorities on which he said voters should judge him, was that “NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly”. New calculations by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) show that, with regard to the broader aim of delivering speedier treatment, his government is falling shockingly short .

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Labour leader’s ejection of far-left members has boosted his popularity in the party, as has belief he will deliver election victory

Four in five Labour members back Keir Starmer and believe he will win a majority at the next election, according to private polling that shows the transformation of the party’s grassroots.

Two polls shared with the Guardian demonstrate how the composition of Labour’s membership has changed since Starmer was elected leader in April 2020.

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Readers respond to an article by Owen Jones supporting plans by the Conservatives and Labour to maintain the triple lock on the state pension

The triple lock needs reform, but the wealth tax suggested by Owen Jones as a way of recouping revenue from wealthy pensioners will create other problems ( The poor need the money, the rich may not – but I say hands off the state pension triple lock, 27 March ).

One of the flaws in the existing triple lock is that the annual increase is determined as the greater of the yearly inflation rate and average wage increases in the year, with an underpin of 2.5%. But a one-off jump in inflation one year can easily be followed by a greater wage increase the next as salaries catch up, so the state pension benefits from two larger-than-usual increases rather than one. This can easily be mitigated by basing the state pension on the greater of cumulative inflation and wage increases rather than just using the yearly figures.

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Group working with Labour and Lib Dem MPs oppose government’s move to introduce harsher measures

Rough sleeping could be fully decriminalised after 200 years under proposals from rebel Conservative MPs to repeal legislation dating from the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.

A group of Tories working with Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs want to strip out proposed and existing legislation that criminalises homelessness.

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Five years after the Tories won over the ‘red wall’ with a pledge to restore deprived areas, voters in the north-east say they’ve given up waiting for change

• No progress made on half of levelling-up targets
• Report card: how the Tories’ pledges stack up today
• Britain’s levelling up agenda stymied from the start

Two days after his landslide election victory in 2019, Boris Johnson practically crowdsurfed into Sedgefield cricket club. Jubilant fans at the venue in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, craned for a photo, one thrust upon him their family pet, and another begged him to sign a copy of the Northern Echo, headlined: “Tory tsunami from the Wear to the Tees”.

“There was an absolutely huge buzz in the place,” said Jean Gillespie, 69, in the same function room this week, whipping out her phone to show a picture with the former prime minister: “I got a snog and a selfie.”

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Guardian analysis shows situation has deteriorated in three areas that Michael Gove promised to improve

• Report card: how the Tories’ pledges stack up today
• Britain’s levelling up agenda stymied from the start
• ‘We’re forgotten about here’: the broken promises

The Conservatives have been accused of failing to live up to their ambitious agenda for Britain’s regions, as Guardian analysis shows no progress has been made on half of their levelling up targets.

The analysis of the 12 targets set by Michael Gove in his 2022 levelling up white paper shows there has been no progress in six of them, including three where evidence suggests things have got worse. These include education, skills and wellbeing, which have stagnated, and local pride, housing and health, which have deteriorated in the last two years.

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