There have been penalties for those who looked the other way when Epstein was convicted of child sex offences and decided to maintain relationships with the financier — but not for the British ambassador to Washington, reveals SOLOMON HUGHES
Covert surveillance, blatant coercion
ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM HELLEWELL and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT take a look at what it means to live in an algorithmic society
[Alexandre Debiève / Creative Commons] 
Labour’s new Treasury unit will ‘challenge unnecessary regulation’ by forcing nominally independent bodies like Ofwat to bend to business demands — exactly what Iain Anderson’s corporate clients wanted, writes SOLOMON HUGHES
DR DYLAN MURPHY looks at a Big Brother Watch report which exposes the government as an enabler of DWP secret spying on benefit claimants
The EU faces a critical choice: will it remain in the shadow of an increasingly unreliable US ally, or will it forge its own path in a multilateral world where co-operation with China is essential, asks MARC VANDEPITTE as leaders meet for the EU-China Summit
A lot of discussion about how the left should currently organise – including debate on whether the Green Party is a useful vehicle for advance – runs the risk of refusing to engage with or learn from the reasons the left was defeated previously, argues KEVIN OVENDEN
For Egypt trade trumps the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, but how long can the country’s ‘misleaders’ – and others in the region – continue their indifference against the popular will of their own people, asks ROGER McKENZIE
TEN months ago, in April 2023, Google discontinued a device that it had worked on and publicised for 10 years. Google Glass looked like a pair of clear wrap-around glasses with a chunky bit at the top of the frame. The “chunky bit” was a tiny projector which projected onto part of the glasses themselves so that the user could see a screen in their field of vision. In September Google stopped updating or maintaining the Google Glass products that it had already sold.
What happened? Although the product had been through significant development since the original headset design, it was clearly not a moneymaker. The project started off at “X Development” (not associated with Elon Musk, but at the Alphabet subsidiary that Google uses for development projects).
The company trialled the product on a range of test users in an attempt to make the Google Glass technology seem useful and not creepy; for example, publicising its use by doctors to get a “surgeon’s eye view,” and also by a group of breastfeeding mothers who could apparently use the device to talk to experts and read advice while breastfeeding their babies.
More from this author
What’s behind the stubborn gender gap in Stem disciplines ask ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT in their column Science and Society
While politicians condemned fascist bombing of Spanish civilians in 1937, they ignored identical RAF tactics across the colonies. Today’s aerial warfare continues this pattern of applying different moral standards based on geography and race, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
The distinction between domestic and military drones is more theoretical than practical, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
Nature's self-reconstruction is both intriguing and beneficial and as such merits human protection, write ROX MIDDLETON, LIAM SHAW and MIRIAM GAUNTLETT
