What happened
Two men have been convicted over a series of firebomb attacks on homes connected to Keir Starmer after a court heard that they were recruited online by a Russian-speaking figure known only as “El Money”.

At the Old Bailey, jurors found Roman Lavrynovych, 22, and Stanislav Carpiuc, 27, guilty of conspiracy to damage property. A third defendant, Petro Pochynok, 35, was acquitted.

Who said what
Commander Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, said investigators believed that the unidentified organiser had sought to generate “fear” and “uncertainty” in Britain. She said there was no evidence that the convicted men were politically motivated or knew they were targeting properties associated with the prime minister.

The attack was “just one part of an extensive campaign of sabotage, provocation and lies leading all the way to the Russian state”, said Daniel De Simone on the BBC. Russian operatives “ran their sabotage and provocation campaign remotely” through social media to organise “acts of vandalism in the UK and stir up division and fear”.

What next?
Lavrynovych and Carpiuc are due to be sentenced on Friday.

What happened
The UK’s oldest Indian restaurant is embarking on a court battle against the Crown Estate to remain at its Regent St premises.

Michelin-starred Veeraswamy has been operating at Victory House since 1926, but the Crown Estate has declined to extend its lease in order to carry out renovation works on the office space that occupies the rest of the building.

Who said what
Veeraswamy has long been a London institution, said The Times. “Princess Anne, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton and King Abdullah of Jordan have all dined there.” In 2016 it was awarded a Michelin star.

Ranjit Mathrani, the co-owner of Veerswamy’s parent company, said the renovations could be carried out “in a manner which could accommodate the restaurant business”. A spokesperson for the Crown Estate claimed that it had tried to help secure the restaurant “new premises on our portfolio” and had also offered “financial compensation”.

What next?
A five-day hearing that will decide Veeraswarmy’s future will begin on 29 June at the Central London County Court.

Artificial intelligence systems can now convince you that they are human. Two large language models (LLMs) have passed the Turing test, which determines if a machine can “show the same intelligence as a human being”, said The Independent.

In the test, a person “engages in text-based conversations with both a human and a machine without knowing which is which”, said Stanford University. If the individual cannot tell them apart, the machine is considered to have passed the test. Researchers tested four AI systems and found that newer LLMs can “effectively imitate people in short interactions”, according to a study published in the journal PNAS.

“Given the right prompts, advanced LLMs can exhibit the same tone, directness, humour and fallibility as humans,” said study author Cameron Jones. “While we know LLMs can easily produce knowledge on nearly every topic, this test showed that they can also convincingly display social behavioural traits, which has major implications for how we think of AI.”

AI models passing for humans is a concerning development. The Turing test is a “game about lying for the models”, added Jones, and “one of the implications is that models seem to be really good at that”. A big risk of the existence of AI models with this ability is the rise of “counterfeit people”. Thanks to the ease of deception, we “need to be more alert” and “people should be much less confident that they know they’re talking to a human rather than an LLM.” Still, AI is not yet at a level where it can be deceptive on its own.