Ten Things You Need to Know Today: 6 July 2023

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1. Pincher by-election potential
2. Police seize cannabis plants
3. Sunak told to ink science deal
4. Austerity linked to NHS decline
5. BBC apologises over Israel comment
6. Warning on women’s lung cancer
7. Starmer prioritises speaking classes
8. Windsor intruder ‘influenced by AI’
9. Ratcliffe criticises Foreign Office
10. ‘Twitter killer’ launches

published 6 July 2023

1. Pincher by-election potential

A regulator is due to publish the findings of an inquiry into assault allegations against former government whip Chris Pincher today. The report, by Parliament’s standards watchdog, could lead to a by-election in his constituency, if a suspension of more than 10 days is agreed. On a recent podcast, Boris Johnson “scoffed” at a question about his handling of the groping allegations by pretending to fall asleep, reported The Independent.

Police have seized up to £130m worth of cannabis plants and arrested almost 1,000 people in the UK’s “largest ever crackdown on organised crime”, said the BBC. More than 180,000 plants were discovered in raids across England and Wales last month, and officers also seized 20 firearms, £636,000 in cash and 20kg of cocaine, with a potential street value of £1m. The operation was described as the “most significant” of its kind in UK law enforcement history, noted Sky News.

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Rishi Sunak must stop “fiddling while UK science burns” as he is offered a draft deal to rejoin the EU’s £81 billion research programme, said a leading scientist. BBC News said that a deal has been negotiated and is awaiting approval from the prime minister. If Sunak agrees, an announcement is expected next week. Writing to The Times, Paul Nurse, director of the Francis Crick Institute in London and Nobel laureate, said “UK science has been burning like Rome as Nero fiddles”.

Austerity cuts led to the quality of NHS care declining in key areas, a study has found. The Nuffield Trust and Health Foundation said that the coalition government’s austerity programme in the early 2010s led to the heath service no longer being able to meet key waiting time targets. The dramatic fall in the government’s funding of the NHS produced “a turning point” that meant its quality of care began to decline in 2013 and ushered in “really concerning deterioration across the board”, it found.

The BBC has apologised after a news anchor said that “Israeli forces are happy to kill children”. Speaking to former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett about the country’s military action in Jenin, Anjana Gadgil said that “young people are being killed”. Bennett replied that: “All the Palestinians that were killed were terrorists, in this case.” Gadgil then added: “Terrorists, but children. The Israeli forces are happy to kill children.” The BBC said: “We apologise that the language used in this line of questioning was not phrased well and was inappropriate.”

The number of women diagnosed with lung cancer in the UK is expected to overtake men for the first time, reported The Guardian. Analysis by Cancer Research UK suggested that this year, female cases will eclipse male cases for the first time, with 27,332 and 27,172 cases respectively. Cancer experts said that women should now be as alert to potential lung cancer signs as they were about checking for lumps in their breasts. Lung cancer is the most common cause of cancer death in the UK, accounting for one in five of the total.

Speaking fluently and coherently will be given the same status as literacy and numeracy under a Labour government, said Keir Starmer. Writing for The Times, the Labour leader argued that the “almost exclusive” focus on reading and writing is “short-sighted” as the ability to articulate ideas is key to “getting on and thriving in life”. He added that “speaking and listening opens up a lifetime of empowerment — a chance for those who too often feel invisible in their own country to be heard”.

A man who broke into the grounds of Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow intending to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II was encouraged by an artificial intelligence chatbot, with which he believed he was in a “sexual relationship”, a court has heard. Jaswant Singh Chail, from Hampshire, was arrested on Christmas Day 2021 while the late monarch was living at Windsor. He has admitted a charge under the Treason Act and to making threats to kill and possessing an offensive weapon.

The Foreign Office is complacent over Britons held overseas, said the husband of the British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. Richard Ratcliffe spoke out after the Foreign Office rejected a call by MPs to reform the way it seeks to secure the release of British nationals. A report by the foreign affairs select committee had condemned the Foreign Office’s attitude as “secretive, inconsistent and built on the false assumption that quiet diplomacy works”, said The Guardian.

Meta has launched an app to rival Twitter. Experts believe that the Threads app could attract Twitter users unhappy with recent changes to the platform. The app allows users to post up to 500 characters, and has many features in common with Twitter. It passed five million sign-ups in its first four hours, said Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg. It is a “shockingly viable Twitter killer”, said Slate, while Mac Rumours said it is “unmistakable as a Twitter clone”.

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