LONDON: From the Westminster and London Bridge terror attacks to acid-wielding gangs, the city’s usual summer cheer is tinged with fear. Londoners are under siege.
On a balmy Sunday morning in July, Hyde Park in the center of the UK capital is in bloom and bustling with tourists enjoying the sunshine.
But in the boroughs beyond is a city deeply divided — by money, politics and religion.
The diversity, tolerance and good humor that once defined the UK capital are being shouted down.
At Speakers’ Corner, where public speakers have gathered since 1872, the shouting is being done by rival preachers of Christian and Muslim faiths.
They trade insults for the entertainment of the crowd — like boxers trash-talking before a bout.
Among the audience is Londoner Mercyn Botayi, who sees fear and inequality in many aspects of his home city — from the social deprivation revealed by the Grenfell Tower fire to the backlash against Muslims in the wake of a string of terror attacks in the capital.
“Islamophobia has become really real,” said the 18-year-old student, who is not himself a Muslim. “There is a typification of Muslims and I don’t understand where it comes from. People see Muslims and they think terrorists.”
Police figures point to a rise in hate crimes as well as those specifically targeting Muslims this summer.
The Metropolitan Police has increased its number of specialist investigators dealing with hate crimes by 30 percent over the last two years, with 900 members of staff now dedicated to this type of offense.
The Mayor of London’s office last month released figures that showed a sharp increase in hate crimes and Islamaphobic incidents in the aftermath of the London Bridge terror attack on June 3. Racist incidents leapt by as much as 40 percent.
Some have contrasted how the media covered the London Bridge attack to coverage of other incidents, such as the van attack on Muslims near Finsbury Park Mosque in June.
“The Finsbury Park attack was (allegedly) done by a white guy but they didn’t call him a terrorist. Had he been an Asian he would have been called a terrorist,” said Botayi.
His friend Simeon Mitchell, an 18-year-old student, agrees that the media has played a part in stoking such divisions and helping to tribalize a city world-famous for its tolerance.
Some commentators trace London’s changing temperament to last summer when Britain voted narrowly to leave the EU.
The vitriolic political language unleashed by Brexit is not just finding its voice in the city’s underclass estates or atop the angry soap boxes of Speakers’ Corner, but also among the highest rungs of society — as the jailing of aristocrat Rhodri Philipps this month highlighted.
The polo-playing viscount received a 12-week sentence for a string of menacing social media posts. One of them offered £5,000 for someone to “accidentally” run over anti-Brexit campaigner Gina Miller.
“If this is what we should expect from immigrants send them back to their stinking jungles,” he wrote in a post that he later claimed was “just satire.”
Mike Ainsworth, a director at Stop Hate UK, sees a clear link between the rise of hate crimes and the EU membership referendum.
He said that while there was nothing intrinsic in Brexit that should have encouraged more hate crimes, the rhetoric used by politicians and reported by a media that deliberately sought comment from individuals known for their extreme views, produced the same practical result.
“The relationship between hate speech and hate crime is absolute,” he said.The efficiency of social media in framing the narrative after a terror incident means that political leaders need to be equally swift in delivering messages that do not stoke up the potential for further hate crimes.
“We also tend to interact with people on social media who agree with us,” said Ainsworth. “The perpetrators of hate crime often say they never heard of the counter narrative until they were arrested.”
Rising wealth disparity in the capital could also be fueling tension.
The gulf between the city’s rich and poor — so vividly revealed by the Grenfell Tower fire in June, in which at least 80 people perished — is getting wider.
Grenfell Tower, which was home to many immigrants working on or below the poverty line, is located in a borough where the average terraced house sells for almost £4.3 million ($5.6 million), according to the Rightmove property listings website.”If you look at Grenfell, you can see the division in society,” says Botayi. “In a middle-class area there would never be a tower block with that cladding.”
Squalor and splendor have long lived cheek by jowl in London, back to the best and worst of Dickensian times.
But a rampant housing boom that is only now cooling has extended and distended that inequality by sucking a disproportionately large proportion of many people’s wages into paying rent — while many others fortunate enough to own their homes have become paper millionaires.
In a city where the average price of a home is now more than £630,000, some 27 percent of Londoners live in poverty after housing costs are taken into account, according to the New Policy Institute.
Almost 700,000 jobs in London (18 percent) pay below the London living wage. This number has increased for five consecutive years, particularly among men working full-time.
And there are more people in poverty in private rented housing than there are in social rented or owner-occupied homes. A decade ago it was the least common tenure among those in poverty.
A report released by the Resolution Foundation think tank this month reveals sharply rising inequality in the capital, driven by housing costs.
It estimates that the number of children living in poverty has more than doubled in a decade.
The number of eviction notices in London is currently almost double the rest of the country.
Stop Hate UK’s Ainsworth sees a clear link between poverty and hate crimes — such as when unemployment is blamed on immigration.
“Making that link has had an impact on hate crime,” he said.
Violence, whether motivated by hate, crime or a combination of both, has dominated the media.
Some 27 young people have been stabbed to death in London since the start of the year with police registering more than 12,000 knife attacks between April last year and March 2017, the highest figure in five years.
Acid attacks have also surged with 454 incidents recorded in London last year, compared to 261 in 2015. That number rose again earlier this month when five acid attacks took place within 90 minutes by young assailants on mopeds.
Such moped gang attacks were part of the biggest increase in police-recorded crimes across England and Wales in 10 years in the year to March 2017, according to official statistics.
At Speakers’ Corner the preachers are still shouting. There are no counter narratives here — or at least none that can be easily heard.
But as if to show that London’s spirit of tolerance has not been fully browbeaten into submission by fear and loathing, a lady emerges from the crowd dressed in a little mermaid outfit to tell everyone they need to start listening more.
“Every day go on to social media and find one thing you really disagree with,” she said. “Instead of trolling the person with whose opinion you so vehemently disagree, try to understand them.”
For a moment at least, the applause drowns out the shouting.
London’s long summer of hate: UK capital becoming divided along fault lines of religion, race, money and politics
London’s long summer of hate: UK capital becoming divided along fault lines of religion, race, money and politics
10 escape from New Orleans jail through hole in cell wall while lone guard left to get food
NEW ORLEANS: Ten men broke out of a New Orleans jail Friday in an audacious overnight escape by fleeing through a hole behind a toilet and scaling a wall while the lone guard assigned to their cell pod was away getting food, authorities said.
Nine of the escapees, which include suspects charged with murder, remain on the lam following the breakout that the local sheriff says may have been aided by members within the department.
Surveillance footage, shared with media during a press conference, showed the escapees sprinting out of the facility — some wearing orange clothing and others in white. They proceeded to scale a fence, using blankets to avoid being cut by barbed wire. Some could be seen sprinting across the nearby interstate.
A photograph obtained by The Associated Press from law enforcement shows the opening behind a toilet in a cell that the men escaped through. Above the hole are scrawled messages that include “To Easy LoL” with an arrow pointing at the gap.
The absence of the 10 men, who also utilized facility deficiencies that officials have long complained about in their escape, went unnoticed for hours. It was not until a routine morning headcount, more than seven hours after the men fled the facility, that law enforcement learned of the escape.
Officials from the sheriff’s office say there was no deputy physically at the pod, where the fugitives had been held. They said there was a technician, a civilian who was there to observe the pod, but she had “stepped away to grab food.”
Soon after the escape, one of the men, Kendall Myles, 20, was apprehended after a brief foot chase through the French Quarter. He had previously escaped twice from juvenile detention centers.
Sheriff blames ‘defective locks’ and possibly inside help
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said the men were able to get out of the Orleans Justice Center because of “defective locks.” Hutson said she has continuously raised concerns about the locks to officials and, as recently as this week, advocated for money to fix the ailing infrastructure.
Hutson said there are indications that people inside her department helped the fugitives escape.
“We do acknowledge there is no way people can get out of this facility without there being some type of lapse in security,” Hutson said of the jail, where she says 1,400 people are being held. “It’s almost impossible, not completely, but almost impossible for anybody to get out of this facility without help.”
The escapees yanked open a door to enter the cell with the hole in it around 1 a.m.
They shed their jail uniforms once out of the facility, and it is still unclear how some of them obtained regular clothing so quickly, officials said.
Authorities did not notice the men were missing until 8:30 a.m. Authorities initially said 11 had escaped, but at a Friday afternoon news conference said one man thought to have escaped was in a different cell.
Three employees have been placed on suspension pending the outcome of the investigation. It was not immediately clear whether any of the employees were suspected of helping with the escape.
Who are the fugitives?
The escapees range from 19 years old to 42. Most of the men are in their 20s.
One of the fugitives, Derrick Groves, was convicted on two charges of second-degree murder and two charges of attempted second-degree murder last year for his role in the 2018 Mardi Gras Day shootings of two men. He also faces a charge of battery against a correctional facility employee, court records show. Law enforcement warned that he may attempt to locate witnesses in the murder trial.
Another escapee, Corey Boyd, had pled not guilty to a pending second-degree murder charge.
Hutson said the police department is actively working with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to search for the fugitives.
Officials use facial recognition to find one fugitive
Police relied on facial recognition technology to identify and capture one fugitive, said Bryan LaGarde, executive director of Project NOLA, a nonprofit operating more than 5,000 cameras around New Orleans. His organization, which partners with Louisiana authorities, received the list of escapees and entered their images into the system — finding two within the French Quarter in minutes.
“When we saw them, they were wearing street clothes. They were walking openly in the street. They were keeping their heads down and checking over their shoulder.” LaGarde said, adding that the other fugitive walked out of sight of the cameras.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called the escape “beyond unacceptable” and said local authorities had waited too long to inform the public.
She said she has reached out to surrounding states to alert them about the escape. Murrill said the fugitives have had “ample” time to escape to “frankly anywhere across the country.”
New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said her agency has put “a full court effort” to respond to the escape and are working with the FBI and US marshals.
Officers were focused on identifying and providing protection for people who may have testified in their cases or may be in danger. One family has been “removed” from their home, Kirkpatrick said.
“If there is anyone helping or harboring these escapees, you will be charged,” Kirkpatrick added.
Turmoil at New Orleans’ jail
New Orleans’ jail has for more than a decade been subject to federal monitoring and a consent decree intended to improve conditions.
Security problems and violence persisted even after the city opened the Orleans Justice Center in 2015, replacing the decaying Orleans Parish Prison, which had seen its own string of escapes and dozens of in-custody deaths.
A federal judge declared in 2013 that the lockup had festered into an unconstitutional setting for people incarcerated there.
Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said staff is “stretched thin” at the facility, which is around 60 percent staffed.
The jail contained numerous “high security” people convicted of violent offenses who required a “restrictive housing environment that did not exist,” said Jay Mallett, Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office chief of Corrections. The sheriff’s office was in the process of transferring dozens to more secure locations.
Two dead and others injured in Las Vegas gym shooting, police say
LAS VEGAS: There was a shooting inside a gym, killing two people, with multiple other people injured, Las Vegas police said.
One person died as gunfire erupted at the Las Vegas Athletic Club on the city’s west side, Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Undersheriff Andrew Walsh said Friday.
“The suspect in this incident has been shot and there is no longer a threat to the public,” he said.
In a social media post, police said the suspect in the shooting was confirmed dead at a local hospital.
Trump calls ex-FBI chief Comey a ‘dirty cop’ after alleged threat
- Comey made a post on Instagram showingan image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells
- Trump's aides and allies charged that it was a veiled call to assassinate the president
WASHINGTON: Donald Trump labeled former FBI director James Comey a “dirty cop” Friday over a social media post that the US president deemed a veiled call for assassination and which prompted a Secret Service probe.
Comey made a now-deleted post on Instagram the previous day that showed an image of “86 47” spelled out in sea shells, with “86” being slang for kill and Trump the 47th president.
“He knew exactly what that meant,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News broadcast on Friday. “That meant assassination, and it says it loud and clear. Now, he wasn’t very competent, but he was competent enough to know what that meant.”
“He’s calling for the assassination of the president,” Trump said, branding Comey “a dirty cop.”
Trump was wounded in the ear during an assassination attempt at a campaign rally last July in Butler, Pennsylvania, and has faced other threats.
Comey said Thursday on Instagram that he posted “a picture of some shells I saw today on a beach walk, which I assumed were a political message.”
“I didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me but I oppose violence of any kind so I took the post down,” he said.
The “8647” and “8646” themes have been used as political slogans and on T-shirts during the administrations of both Trump and his predecessor, Democratic President Joe Biden, the 46th US president.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary says on its website that one recent meaning of the term 86 was “to kill” but that it had not adopted it “due to its relative recency and sparseness of use.”
Trump administration officials were unconvinced, with Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem saying DHS and the US Secret Service -- which is charged with protecting the president -- were investigating and "will respond appropriately."
FBI Director Kash Patel meanwhile said the law enforcement agency was "in communication with the Secret Service" and that it would "provide all necessary support."
And Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Comey had "issued a call to action to murder the president of the United States," adding: "We fully support the Secret Service investigation into Comey's threat on President Trump's life."
On Friday, US media reported Comey was questioned by the Secret Service over his post.
The meeting began around 6 p.m. EDT (2200 GMT) and lasted about an hour, the official said. Comey appeared voluntarily after being asked to come in, according to a law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Gabbard dismissed Comey’s explanation as absurd, and said the “8647” slogan has been used by anti-Trump protesters and was a veiled call to action against the sitting president.
Early in his first term, Trump fired Comey, who as FBI director had been leading an investigation into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign’s possible collusion with Russia.
Comey has been a sharp critic of his former boss, calling him “morally unfit” to lead in a 2018 interview.
Trump himself was accused of using Twitter posts to incite rioters, who attacked the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to prevent the certification of Biden’s election victory.
Trump last year also posted on social media a video that featured an image of Biden, who was then president, with his hands and feet tied together in the back of a pickup truck.
Elon Musk’s AI company says Grok chatbot focus on South Africa’s racial politics was ‘unauthorized’
- xAI blames employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic”
- Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said an “unauthorized modification” to its chatbot Grok was the reason why it kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” on social media this week.
An employee at xAI made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said in an explanation posted late Thursday that promised reforms.
A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in South Africa in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.
One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. It was echoing views shared by Musk, who was born in South Africa and frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.
Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself before the fixes were made Wednesday, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”
“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”
The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.
“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”
Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.
Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.
Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.
“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.
Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”
Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group that came after Trump suspended refugee programs and halted arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.
In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression by the Afrikaner-led apartheid government that ruled South Africa until 1994. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.
Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.
“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”
Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on the software development site GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”
Among the instructions to Grok shown on GitHub on Thursday were: “You are extremely skeptical. You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media.”
Noting that some had “circumvented” its existing code review process, xAI also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.
Moody’s strips US government of top credit rating, citing failure to rein in debt
- Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit
- White House dismisses downgrade as the work of a political opponent of Trump
WASHINGTON: Moody’s Ratings stripped the US government of its top credit rating Friday, citing successive governments’ failure to stop a rising tide of debt.
Moody’s lowered the rating from a gold-standard Aaa to Aa1 but said the United States “retains exceptional credit strengths such as the size, resilience and dynamism of its economy and the role of the US dollar as global reserve currency.”
Moody’s is the last of the three major rating agencies to lower the federal government’s credit. Standard & Poor’s downgraded federal debt in 2011 and Fitch Ratings followed in 2023.
In a statement, Moody’s said: “We expect federal deficits to widen, reaching nearly 9 percent of (the US economy) by 2035, up from 6.4 percent in 2024, driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation.”
Extending President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, a priority of the Republican-controlled Congress, Moody’s said, would add $4 trillion over the next decade to the federal primary deficit (which does not include interest payments).
White House communications director Steven Cheung reacted to the downgrade via a social media post, singling out Moody’s economist, Mark Zandi, for criticism. He called Zandi a political opponent of US President Donald Trump.
“Nobody takes his ‘analysis’ seriously. He has been proven wrong time and time again,” said Cheung.
A gridlocked political system has been unable to tackle America’s huge deficits. Republicans reject tax increases, and Democrats are reluctant to cut spending.
On Friday, House Republicans failed to push a big package of tax breaks and spending cuts through the Budget Committee. A small group of hard-right Republican lawmakers, insisting on steeper cuts to Medicaid and President Joe Biden’s green energy tax breaks, joined all Democrats in opposing it.
