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BBC election debate live: Sunak and Starmer clash over tax, borders and Brexit deal in final head-to-head before polling day

✇The Guardian
Andrew Sparrow

The Conservative and Labour leaders faced each other in the final major TV debate of the 2024 general election campaign

YouGov will have a snap poll on who won the debate, with the results available minutes after it finishes.

This is what Labour is putting out ahead of the debate, in a stateement from Pat McFadden, the national campaign coordinator.

Tonight, the British people will witness the choice at this election: five more years of chaos with Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives or change with Keir Starmer and Labour.

On 4 July, the British people will have the chance to vote for change. To stop the chaos, turn the page and start to rebuild our country with Keir Starmer and a changed Labour party.

Tonight, Keir Starmer has the opportunity to announce loud and clear to the British public what his intentions are.

Throughout this campaign we have challenged the Labour party, time and time again, to come clean on their plans for taxes. Time and time again they have declined to do so.

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© Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

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© Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA

LGBTQ elders struggle with health care, housing and isolation

✇NBC News Top Stories
Andrés González
LGBTQ older adults are twice as likely as their heterosexual counterparts to grow old single and living alone, according to SAGE, an advocacy organization for LGBTQ elders.

© Courtesy Gene Dinah

Gene Dinah, left, and his husband, Robert Malsberry.

© Courtesy Gene Dinah

Robert Malsberry with Cleo, the cat he shared with Gene Dinah.

© Courtesy Gene Dinah

Robert Malsberry when he was an Air Force lieutenant.

© Courtesy Gene Dinah

Photographs of Gene Dinah and his husband, Robert Malsberry, throughout the years.

© Courtesy Andrea Montanez

Andrea Montanez said it's "scary to be an elder as a transgender person."

© Courtesy Gene Dinah

Last Christmas, a SAGE volunteer helped Gene Dinah put up his Christmas tree.

Lake District sewage campaigners launch nuisance complaint in legal first

✇The Guardian
Sandra Laville

Statutory nuisance complaint lodged by Save Windermere against United Utilities is a first over sewage pollution

Campaigners fighting to stop sewage discharges into Windermere, the Lake District’s largest lake, have made a statutory nuisance complaint against a water company in the first legal action of its kind.

The civil complaints are normally used in noise disputes, or over noxious smells. But the environmental barrister Nicholas Ostrowski has for the first time lodged a complaint on behalf of campaign group Save Windermere against United Utilities over raw sewage discharges into the lake.

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© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

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© Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Closed-door trial of US journalist Evan Gershkovich begins in Russia

✇The Guardian
Andrew Roth

WSJ reporter faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted of spying charges US says are politically motivated

A Russian court has begun a closed-door trial of the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich on spying charges that he, his employer and the US government have all described as politically motivated.

Gershkovich appeared in a courtroom in Ekaterinburg on Wednesday, his head shaven by prison authorities, after being transferred from the Moscow jail where has been held since March 2023.

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© Photograph: Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters

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© Photograph: Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters

Price well and check fees: 10 expert tips on selling clothes online

✇The Guardian
Sandra Haurant

Insiders from sites such as eBay, Depop and Vinted give advice on how to get the best cash for preloved items

The competition is stiff, so finding the right place to sell your clothes will give you the best chance of getting them in front of people who might want to buy them.

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© Illustration: Jamie Wignall/The Guardian

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© Illustration: Jamie Wignall/The Guardian

David Tennant should have been more respectful when criticising Badenoch over LGBT views, says Starmer – UK election live

✇The Guardian
Andrew Sparrow (now)， Amy Sedghi， Martin Belam and Helen Sullivan (earlier)

‘I think it’s right that we have these robust discussions, but we must do it respectfully,’ Starmer said

When the Conservatives launched their election campaign five weeks ago, 20 points behind in the polls and on their fourth prime minister in five years, it was unclear how things could get any worse.

The gambling scandal that has engulfed the party has answered that question. The extraordinary row began when the Guardian revealed on 12 June that Craig Williams, Rishi Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, was under investigation by the Gambling Commission for betting on a July election three days before one was called.

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© Composite: Getty Images

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© Composite: Getty Images

From the archive: Brazilian butt lift: behind the world’s most dangerous cosmetic surgery – podcast

✇The Guardian
Written by Sophie Elmhirst and read by Lucy Scott. Originally produced by Esther Opoku-Gyeni with additions and scoring by Nicola Alexandrou. The executive producer was Ellie Bury

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors.

This week, from 2021: The BBL is the fastest growing cosmetic surgery in the world, despite the mounting number of deaths resulting from the procedure. What is driving its astonishing rise? By Sophie Elmhirst

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© Illustration: Guardian Design/ Getty Images

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© Illustration: Guardian Design/ Getty Images

Almost half of long-term antidepressant users ‘could quit with GP support’

✇The Guardian
Andrew Gregory Health editor

UK researchers say study shows stopping use of the drugs is possible at scale without costly therapy

Almost half of long-term antidepressant users could stop taking the medication with GP support and access to internet or telephone helplines, a study suggests.

Scientists said more than 40% of people involved in the research who were well and not at risk of relapse managed to come off the drugs with advice from their doctors.

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© Photograph: Liudmila Dutko/Alamy

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© Photograph: Liudmila Dutko/Alamy

NHS having to ‘pick up pieces’ of medical tourism ‘boom’, say doctors

✇The Guardian
Andrew Gregory Health editor

Britons increasingly seeking cheap weight loss surgery and hair transplants abroad

The NHS is having to provide emergency care to rising numbers of patients suffering serious complications following weight loss surgery and hair transplants abroad amid a “boom” in medical tourism, doctors have warned.

Medics said they were being left to “pick up the pieces” as more Britons seeking cheap operations overseas return with infections and other issues. In some cases, patients are dying as a result of botched surgeries performed in other countries.

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© Photograph: Caiaimage/Robert Daly/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Caiaimage/Robert Daly/Getty Images

ICC issues arrest warrants for Russian officials over alleged Ukraine war crimes

✇The Guardian
Andrew Rothin London and Pjotr Sauer in Kyiv

Army chief and ex-minister of defence accused over missile attacks on civilian targets including power plants

The international criminal court (ICC) at The Hague has issued arrest warrants for Russia’s ex-minister of defence and current army chief of staff for alleged war crimes in Ukraine after a missile campaign targeting Ukrainian power plants and other civilian infrastructure during the full-scale invasion.

Ex-minister of defence Sergei Shoigu and the chief of the general staff of the Russian armed forces, Valery Gerasimov, are accused of the war crimes of directing attacks at civilian objects and of causing excessive incidental harm to civilians or damage to civilian objects. They are also accused of crimes against humanity.

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© Photograph: AP

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© Photograph: AP

Sean Penn says ‘timid and artless policy toward the human imagination’ means he can no longer play gay roles

✇The Guardian
Andrew Pulver

In an interview the actor blamed cultural climate on casting issues as well as reflecting on his relationship with Madonna

Sean Penn says it would be currently impossible for him to play the part of a gay man, as he did in the 2008 film Milk, blaming a “timid and artless” current creative climate.

Penn was speaking to the New York Times about his earlier career, and responded to a question asking him if he would now be able to play Harvey Milk, the role for which Penn won a best actor Oscar. Saying that Milk “was the last time I had a good time [on a film set]”, Penn added: “It could not happen in a time like this. It’s a time of tremendous overreach. It’s a timid and artless policy toward the human imagination.”

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© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

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© Photograph: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images

How Tory neglect flooded Britain’s rivers with sewage

✇The Guardian
Sandra Laville Graphics by Ana Lucía González Paz， Lucy Swan and Pete Guest

On a journey along the Thames – where fury at pollution has spawned a wave of local activism – it is clear that the decline of rivers is among this government’s worst legacies

Red kites swoop above Fawley Meadows as Dave Wallace dips a sampling beaker into the deep green water of the River Thames on a late spring day. A sharp wind blows droplets upstream towards the arches of Henley Bridge, while the might of the river, its path here straight and wide, pulls downstream towards Windsor, on its 215-mile odyssey to the North Sea.

Today, the water meadows along its banks host blue and white striped marquees, lined up in uniform rows for the Henley regatta. After the rowers depart, the river bears the swimmers who follow. They dip, jump and dive its depths at an annual festival of open water races, echoing the galas that took place in Victorian days.

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© Composite: Guardian Design Team/Getty

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© Composite: Guardian Design Team/Getty

Microsoft removes documentation for switching to a local account in Windows 11

✇Ars Technica
Andrew Cunningham
A laptop PC running Windows 11 sitting next to a coffee mug.

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

One of Windows 11's more contentious changes is that, by default, both the Home and Pro editions of the operating system require users to sign in with a Microsoft account during setup. Signing in with an account does get you some benefits, at least if you're a regular user of other Microsoft products like OneDrive, GamePass, or Microsoft 365 (aka Office). But if you don't use those services, a lot of what a Microsoft account gets you in Windows 11 is repeated ads and reminders about signing up for those services. Using Windows with a traditional local account is still extremely possible, but it does require a small amount of know-how beyond just clicking the right buttons.

On the know-how front, Microsoft has taken one more minor, but nevertheless irritating, step away from allowing users to sign in with local accounts. This official Microsoft support page walks users with local accounts through the process of signing in to a Microsoft account. As recently as June 12, that page also included instructions for converting a Microsoft account into a local account. But according to Tom's Hardware and the Internet Wayback Machine, those instructions disappeared on or around June 17 and haven't been seen since.

Despite the documentation change, most of the workarounds for creating a local account still work in both Windows 11 23H2 (the publicly available version of Windows 11 for most PCs) and 24H2 (available now on Copilot+ PCs, later this fall for everyone else). The easiest way to do it on a PC you just took out of the box is to press Shift+F10 during the setup process to bring up a command prompt window, typing OOBE\BYPASSNRO, rebooting, and then clicking the "I don't have Internet" button when asked to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

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iFixit says new Arm Surface hardware “puts repair front and center”

✇Ars Technica
Andrew Cunningham
Microsoft's 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it's still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets.

Enlarge / Microsoft's 11th-edition Surface Pro, as exploded by iFixit. Despite adhesive holding in the screen and the fact that you need to remove the heatsink to get at the battery, it's still much more repairable than past Surfaces or competing tablets. (credit: iFixit)

For a long time, Microsoft's Surface hardware was difficult-to-impossible to open and repair, and devices as recent as 2019's Surface Pro 7 still managed a repairability score of just 1 out of 10 on iFixit's scale. 2017's original Surface Laptop needed to be physically sliced apart to access its internals, making it essentially impossible to try to fix the machine without destroying it.

But in recent years, partly due to pressure from shareholders and others, Microsoft has made an earnest effort to improve the repairability of its devices. The company has published detailed repair manuals and videos and has made changes to its hardware designs over the years to make it easier to open them without breaking them and easier to replace parts once you’re inside. Microsoft also sells some first-party parts for repairs, though not every part from every Surface is available, and Microsoft and iFixit have partnered to offer other parts as well.

Now, iFixit has torn apart the most recent Snapdragon X-powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop devices and has mostly high praise for both devices in its preliminary teardown video. Both devices earn an 8 out of 10 on iFixit's repairability scale, thanks to Microsoft's first-party service manuals, the relative ease with which both devices can be opened, and clearly labeled internal components.

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Moral Progress is Annoying

✇MetaFilter
airing nerdy laundry
Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying, argues a recent piece in Aeon magazine.

Two philosophers from Purdue University paint a psychological picture of "affective friction" resulting from moral change: Even when the difference between an old norm and a new one replacing it seems trivial, the disruptions caused by the shift can create feelings of anxiety, awkwardness – and anger. The article puts its readers on notice that, going forward, many of us should expect to feel annoyed: Changing the social world for the better will very often mean changing some old, harmful norms and replacing them with better ones. And very often, that's not going to feel good. Much of the time, it's going to feel preachy. It's going to grate on your nerves. It's going to make you roll your eyes. A lot of moral progress is going to be annoying. Ugh.

Two poems, four years in detention: the Chinese dissident who smuggled his writing out of prison – podcast

✇The Guardian
Written by Liao Yiwu and read by Daniel York Loh. Produced by Nicola Alexandrou. The executive producer was Ellie Bury

My poems were written in anger after Tiananmen Square. But what motivates most prison writing is a fear of forgetting. Today I am free, but the regime has never stopped its war on words. By Liao Yiwu

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© Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA-EFE

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© Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA-EFE

Palestinians reel from repeated strikes on 'humanitarian zones'

✇NBC News Technology
Aurora Almendral
The cuts on her feet from a strike she survived two weeks earlier had yet to heal, Asma Al-Sarafendi said, before more shrapnel embedded itself into the flesh of her leg during a strike this week on a designated humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.

© NBC News

A charred bicycle frame sits on the ground after an Israeli strike on Al-Mawasi early Wednesday.

© NBC News

Asma Al-Sarafendi speaks to an NBC News crew after an Israeli strike in Al-Mawasi early Wednesday.

© NBC News

Amu Amara mourns the death of her pregnant niece following airstrikes in Al-Mawasi.

Palestinians reel from repeated strikes on 'humanitarian zones'

✇NBC News Top Stories
Aurora Almendral
The cuts on her feet from a strike she survived two weeks earlier had yet to heal, Asma Al-Sarafendi said, before more shrapnel embedded itself into the flesh of her leg during a strike this week on a designated humanitarian zone in southern Gaza.

© NBC News

A charred bicycle frame sits on the ground after an Israeli strike on Al-Mawasi early Wednesday.

© NBC News

Asma Al-Sarafendi speaks to an NBC News crew after an Israeli strike in Al-Mawasi early Wednesday.

© NBC News

Amu Amara mourns the death of her pregnant niece following airstrikes in Al-Mawasi.

There are no pro-abortion rights OBGYNs in Congress. These candidates are hoping to change that.

✇NBC News Top Stories
Alexandra Marquez
As Congress grapples over abortion rights two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, two physicians specializing in obstetrics and gynecology are hoping to bring their expertise and exam room experiences to Capitol Hill.

© Tork Mason

Dr. Kristin Lyerly acknowledges her supporters as she is introduced during her campaign announcement on April 4, 2024, at Hinterland Brewery in Green Bay, Wis.

© Sam Woodward

Minnesota State Sen. Kelly Morrison, center, attends a "Women for Biden" event in Bloomington on April 19.

© J. Scott Applewhite

Rep. Michael Burgess, R-Texas, at the Capitol on Tuesday.

© Kevin Dietsch

Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan.

© Susan Walsh

Dr. Kristin Lyerly, right, speaks during a meeting of the reproductive rights task force at the White House in 2022.

$200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on the Windows 3.1 era

✇Ars Technica
Andrew Cunningham

 

  • The Pocket 386, a new-old laptop that can run MS-DOS, Windows 3.x, and (technically) Windows 95. [credit: DZT's Store ]

Of the many oddities you can buy from Aliexpress, some of the weirdest are the recreations of retro computer systems in semi-modern designs. We're most intimately familiar with the Book 8088, a recreation of the original 1981 IBM PC inside a chunky clamshell laptop. The people behind the Book 8088 are also responsible for the Hand386, which is a bit like a late-80s PC stuck inside an old Palm Pilot or Blackberry, and a second revision of the Book 8088 with more built-in ports and a VGA-capable graphics adapter installed instead of a basic CGA adapter.

Whoever is selling these systems is now back with the Pocket 386, which combines Hand386-style internals with a clamshell design similar to the Book 8088. The result is the kind of IBM-compatible system that would have been common during the Windows 3.1 era, when MS-DOS still dominated (especially for games) but Windows was on the upswing.

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Win+C, Windows’ most cursed keyboard shortcut, is getting retired again

✇Ars Technica
Andrew Cunningham
A rendering of the Copilot button.

Enlarge / A rendering of the Copilot button. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is all-in on its Copilot+ PC push right now, but the fact is that they'll be an extremely small minority among the PC install base for the foreseeable future. The program's stringent hardware requirements—16GB of RAM, at least 256GB of storage, and a fast neural processing unit (NPU)—disqualify all but new PCs, keeping features like Recall from running on all current Windows 11 PCs.

But the Copilot chatbot remains supported on all Windows 11 PCs (and most Windows 10 PCs), and a change Microsoft has made to recent Windows 11 Insider Preview builds is actually making the feature less useful and accessible than it is in the current publicly available versions of Windows. Copilot is being changed from a persistent sidebar into an app window that can be resized, minimized, and pinned and unpinned from the taskbar, just like any other app. But at least as of this writing, this version of Copilot can no longer adjust Windows' settings, and it's no longer possible to call it up with the Windows+C keyboard shortcut. Only newer keyboards with the dedicated Copilot key will have an easy built-in keyboard shortcut for summoning Copilot.

If Microsoft keeps these changes intact, they'll hit Windows 11 PCs when the 24H2 update is released to the general public later this year; the changes are already present on Copilot+ PCs, which are running a version of Window 11 24H2 out of the box.

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Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July

✇Ars Technica
Andrew Cunningham
Citing national security, US will ban Kaspersky anti-virus software in July

Enlarge (credit: Kaspersky Lab)

The Biden administration will ban all sales of Kaspersky antivirus software in the US starting in July, according to reporting from Reuters and a filing from the US Department of Commerce (PDF).

The US believes that security software made by Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab represents a national security risk and that the Russian government could use Kaspersky's software to install malware, block other security updates, and "collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans," said US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo.

“When you think about national security, you may think about guns and tanks and missiles,” said Raimondo during a press briefing, as reported by Wired. “But the truth is, increasingly, it's about technology, and it's about dual-use technology, and it's about data.”

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Denied the 'right to hug': In many U.S. jails, video calls are the only way detainees can see loved ones

✇NBC News Top Stories
Bella Ramirez and Dan Slepian and Kenzi Abou-Sabe and Alexandra Chaidez
In recent years, hundreds of jurisdictions around the U.S. have eliminated in-person visits, making a video screen the only way detainees can see loved ones.

© NBC News

Reekila Harris-Dudley speaks to her family members during a video call from Genesee County Jail on June 10.

© NBC News

The video visitation scheduling kiosk at Genesee County Jail in Flint, Mich., on June 10.

© NBC News

The Genesee County Sheriff's Office in Flint, Mich., on June 14.

© Kenzi Abou-Sabe

Reekila Harris-Dudley stands for a portrait with her parents, Brenda and Phillip Dudley, and her children in Flint, Mich., on June 13. Harris-Dudley was released on bond June 11.

Why the West is so alarmed by North Korea and Russia taking their relationship to the next level

✇NBC News Technology
Stella Kim and Mithil Aggarwal and Monica Alba and Andrew Gee
A pact between Russia and North Korea could scramble the balance of power in East Asia and make it even more difficult to halt North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

© KCNA

The two leaders delivered toasts at a state reception after signing the agreement.

© VLADIMIR SMIRNOV

Putin’s visit to North Korea is likely to strengthen defense ties between the two nuclear-armed countries as Russia pursues its war in Ukraine.

© KCNA

Kim driving Putin in the garden of the Kumsusan State Guesthouse in Pyongyang on Wednesday.

Why the West is so alarmed by North Korea and Russia taking their relationship to the next level

✇NBC News Top Stories
Stella Kim and Mithil Aggarwal and Monica Alba and Andrew Gee
A pact between Russia and North Korea could scramble the balance of power in East Asia and make it even more difficult to halt North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

© KCNA

The two leaders delivered toasts at a state reception after signing the agreement.

© VLADIMIR SMIRNOV

Putin’s visit to North Korea is likely to strengthen defense ties between the two nuclear-armed countries as Russia pursues its war in Ukraine.

© KCNA

Kim driving Putin in the garden of the Kumsusan State Guesthouse in Pyongyang on Wednesday.
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