
Your inside scoop on the week’s biggest stories
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Frankie Goodway,
Saturday Editor
"Hi there. Hot, isn’t it? (My personal favourite: the London Climate Action Week event on extreme heat, cancelled due to extreme heat.)
Naturally, that meant it was a busy week for the Bureau, with our reporters out and about at panel events, awards dos and even a pop-up cinema screening of our latest project. But hey, it’s our job to be out there when things are uncomfortable. The amazing thing is how many of you were there too, showing up to see journalism in action.”
How we mapped the UK’s ‘battery-style’ dairy farms
Andrew Wasley, our environment correspondent, has been investigating the rise of larger factory-style farms across the UK for more than a decade. In fact, his first investigation into intensive dairy units was in 2015, when he scoured records and visited dozens of farms to get a sense of how many kept cows indoors all year round. Now, he’s done it again – and this time, the response from farmers was remarkably different.
⚡ Immediate impact
The folks at 38Degrees have launched a petition calling for the environment secretary, Emma Reynolds, to introduce new labelling rules for dairy products like the “free range” egg mark. That way, consumers would be able to choose whether they want milk from cows that never get to graze on grass. The petition is up to 80,000 signatures already!
Braving the heat at London Climate Action Week
Our environment team were criss-crossing the capital this week for events at London Climate Action Week – or at least the ones that weren’t cancelled due to the heat. Just yesterday, as we hit the hottest June day on record, Grace Murray moderated a panel of women on the front lines of the climate crisis.
One of the panellists, Watatakalu Yawalapiti, made the point that for this week, Londoners have been experiencing a little of what Indigenous people in rapidly changing environments have endured. But for them, extreme weather has become the every day.
Blackmail and body bags – the costs of unregulated AI
On Wednesday, we screened the first two episodes of our upcoming video series on the dark underbelly of the AI industry at the Frontline Club in London. Blackmail, the first episode, covers what an AI chatbot was prepared to do in a simulated environment to preserve its own existence – including threatening to reveal an affair.
The second covered companion and romance chatbots – and what happens when falling in love with AI goes wrong. The episode featured cases where chances for AI to de-escalate suicidal encounters were missed and what can be done to make these models safer, especially for young people. Afterwards, James Clayton and Effie Webb from our tech team, alongside Adele Zeynep Walton and Aengus Lynch, took questions from the audience on the risks of unregulated AI expansion and what our investigations have already uncovered.

⚡ Immediate impact
At least one Parliamentary aide was in the room on Wednesday, listening when Effie explained the loophole the recently announced romantic chatbot ban has left for the bigger, “platonic” bots that still get kids addicted. After the screening, she said she’d take the issue to her boss at once. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – Effie’s in and out of Parliament so much she should practically have an office there – but expect to see this loophole raised by MPs soon.
Inside the story
The first episode of the series will be released on our YouTube channel next week, with new releases every two weeks. Subscribe now to be the first to know when each episode goes live – and tell us what you think of them when they do!
⚡ Impact this week
Fantastic news from Peru this week, where earlier this year we found dodgy chemo drugs were being purchased and then destroyed after failing quality tests. We identified five companies supplying the country, none of which held a certificate meant to prove their labs were up to scratch. But a loophole let them keep shipping drugs to the country while they were on the waiting list for inspections. Now, all five of them have either dropped or failed their applications for the certificate – meaning their products won’t end up being pumped into cancer patients, or destroyed by hospital pharmacists desperate for drugs that work.
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What we’ve been reading
🔴 Why was a US fighter pilot avoid a trial – and instead get a court martial from his fellow airmen – after strangling a woman on English soil? theguardian.com
🔴 Avon and Somerset Police built sprawling predictive analytics with the records of 300,000 people – but at least two of its models couldn’t be trusted wired.com
🔴 This visual investigation on how increasing car sizes – from higher bonnets to wider A-pillars – has made accidents more likely to kill pedestrians nytimes.com
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