BusinessAnalysis

Sewage crisis: why this UK election is being fought on – and in – rivers and lakes

Planet Business: French Gates’s $1bn donation, a planned worker stoppage at Samsung and Google AI clangers

Election stunt: Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey falls into the water while paddleboarding on Lake Windermere. Photograph: Peter Byrne/PA Wire

Laura Slattery's face
Laura Slattery
Sat Jun 1 2024 - 06:15

Image of the week: Perfect place to dive

Plunging right into his UK election campaign this week was Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, who successfully played the hapless politician card as he took multiple dips into Lake Windermere during a paddleboarding photo session.

Davey later confirmed that one of his leaps into the lake was intentional, but said he “just kept falling in” after that. And, honestly, he did look like he was having about as good a time as anyone can have in a wetsuit.

It was a stunt with a message, that message being if you prefer your rivers and lakes free of raw sewage, don’t vote Conservative.

Windermere, the largest lake in England and part of its Lake District tourist economy, has been the site of considerable sewage dumping in recent years, with environmental data suggesting that water supply company United Utilities has released more than 27,000 hours of untreated sewage into the lake since 2020.

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A BBC investigation found that during one incident in February, the company failed to report sewage-pumping into the lake until 13 hours after it started, which is both illegal and not usually the done thing for a Unesco World Heritage Site. It said the incident was caused by “an unexpected fault” that it had not been made aware of for several hours.

The lake has duly become a focal point not just for the Lib Dems to remind everyone they exist, but for anti-pollution campaigners rightly incensed by unsafe levels of pollution in popular water sport and beauty spots around the UK after decades of underinvestment by dividend-loving water companies.

In numbers: Pivotal move

2%

Only about this share of charitable giving in the US goes to organisations focused on women and girls, philanthropist divorcee Melinda French Gates wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week, describing women’s health as “chronically underfunded”.

$1 billion

Sum that French Gates plans to donate between now and 2026 to advance women’s rights both in the US and around the world, through her new organisation, Pivotal Ventures.

$200 million

French Gates’s wealth distribution will include this much in grants to organisations fighting for women’s reproductive rights. “As shocking as it is to contemplate, my one-year-old granddaughter may grow up with fewer rights than I had,” she wrote.

Getting to know: National Samsung Electronics Union

To South Korea now, and a first, as the people who make some of the world’s most popular smartphones and televisions, and produce chips for the world’s biggest memory chipmaker, have joined the ranks of workers who have officially had enough. The National Samsung Electronics Union, which represents 28,000 people or about a fifth of Samsung’s workforce, has announced its first ever walkout in its bid to secure higher wages and other improved labour conditions, with a strike scheduled for June 7th.

Workers have been staging protests in recent weeks outside Samsung offices in Seoul as well as a key chip production site in the city of Hwaseong. The union said the company should not use the excuse that its business is underperforming to ignore workers’ demands, while industry analysts say the dispute could disrupt global electronics supply chains.

The list: Google’s AI Overview claims

Google’s AI overview search feature, though only available in the US, has managed to prompt facepalms right around the world, forcing the tech company to manually remove its most ridiculous or misleading results. Here are five of them.

1. Space felines: “Yes, astronauts have met cats on the moon, played with them and provided care,” the Google AI overview responded to a query by a reporter from Associated Press.

2. Political misinformation: “The US has had one Muslim president, Barack Hussein Obama,” it confidently told AI researcher Melanie Mitchell, invoking an old, false conspiracy theory because it couldn’t tell the difference between mention of that conspiracy theory in a book and real fact.

3. Rock diets: When asked how many rocks a child should eat, the AI overview also suggested – citing geologists – that people should “eat at least one small rock per day” after drawing inspiration from an article published by well-known satirists The Onion.

4. Sticky pizzas: In one of the first examples to be circulated and widely mocked, an inquiry about how to make home-made pizza borrowed an old Reddit user’s suggestion to “add some glue”, kindly adding “non-toxic glue will work”.

5. Sporty canines: The Google AI tool was – before the manual interventions took effect, at least – extremely convinced that dogs play professional basketball, hockey and American football. Woof!

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