Our appeal has raised £1.5m for those affected by war. You can still donate
A few weeks ago we launched our appeal in aid of victims of war and conflict in a mood of both gloom and optimism: despair at the terrible scale of human suffering in the world this year, but hope generated by the inspiring work of our partner charities.As we enter the last weekend of the appeal, it is clear that while there is little relief from the violence and misery, whether in Gaza, Ukraine or Sudan or beyond, the appeal has offered extremely positive glimmers of hope.We have raised the enormous sum of £1.5m.Our three 2024 appeal partner charities will share in the money raised.
They are Médecins Sans Frontières UK (MSF), War Child and Parallel Histories.This is the 10th year in a row that the appeal has taken more than £1m, and more than 13,000 readers have so far donated.These are tough times for many, but our readers’ response – as our journalists who took your calls at the appeal telethon in December will testify – has, as always, been one of incredible generosity.Thank you.MSF and War Child provide frontline medical and psychosocial care, working in stressful conditions and often risking their lives to offer a lifeline to thousands caught in conflicts across the globe.
Your donations will fund operations and therapeutic interventions, as well as provide supplies of surgical equipment, food and shelter.Parallel Histories has a longer-term aim: to help young people better understand the causes of conflict by giving schools the confidence and materials to teach contested histories, from Northern Ireland to Israel/Palestine.Its goal is to bridge community divides and provide an antidote to populism and extremism.Hundreds of you have written to us via our online donation page to tell us why you gave money.There was anger, and a dispiriting feeling of powerlessness, over the terrible events taking place in Gaza and elsewhere.
Supporting our three charities was often a way to reaffirm your commitment to peace and a better world, and show solidarity with those whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed,This year’s appeal is also a personal landmark,A decade ago, in my first year as editor-in-chief, we decided to raise the profile of the Guardian and Observer charity appeal, seeing it as a way not only to raise money for good causes, but to share a seasonal message of solidarity and hope with our audience, and raise a flag for social justice and progressive values,I’m delighted to report that over the 10 annual appeals since 2015, you, our readers, have raised nearly £15m for scores of charities doing vital work in areas as varied as refugee support, the climate crisis, child poverty, homelessness and victims of war,There is still time to give to this year’s appeal, which closes at midnight on Sunday.
I’d like to thank everyone who has so generously donated so far, and in advance to those whom we hope we can still persuade to contribute.
British politics are not Elon Musk’s to toy with | Letters
Your article (Elon Musk turns on Nigel Farage and calls for new leader of Reform, 5 January) raises fascinating insights as to how international interests play an ever more direct role in the British political system. Discretion is not assured. What is becoming clear is that the likes of Nigel Farage seem to have dispensed with the illusion that Brexit was about political independence. Instead, the need to comply with far-right US agendas, the infantile inconsistencies of rogue James-Bond-type billionaires, and to accept millions of pounds in overseas income are openly accepted.The positioning of Reform UK’s development in relation to overseas interests is at odds with the earlier rhetoric of national sovereignty
Collaborative research on AI safety is vital | Letters
Re Geoffrey Hinton’s concerns about the perils of artificial intelligence (‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December), I believe these concerns can best be mitigated through collaborative research on AI safety, with a role for regulators at the table.Currently, frontier AI is tested post-development using “red teams” who try their best to elicit a negative outcome. This approach will never be enough; AI needs to be designed for safety and evaluation – something that can be done by drawing on expertise and experience in well-established safety-related industries.Hinton does not seem to think that the existential threat from AI is one which is deliberately being encoded – so why not enforce the deliberate avoidance of this scenario? While I don’t subscribe to his perspective about the level of risk facing humanity, the precautionary principle suggests that we must act now.In traditional safety-critical domains, the need to build physical systems, eg aircraft, limits the rate at which safety can be impacted
Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’
Artificial intelligence companies have run out of data for training their models and have “exhausted” the sum of human knowledge, Elon Musk has said.The world’s richest person suggested technology firms would have to turn to “synthetic” data – or material created by AI models – to build and fine-tune new systems, a process already taking place with the fast-developing technology.“The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training. That happened basically last year,” said Musk, who launched his own AI business, xAI, in 2023.AI models such as the GPT-4o model powering the ChatGPT chatbot are “trained” on a vast array of data taken from the internet, where they in effect learn to spot patterns in that information – allowing them to predict, for instance, the next word in a sentence
Judge halts attempt to retrieve £600m bitcoin wallet from Welsh dump
A computer expert’s decade-long battle to recover a £600m bitcoin fortune he says has been lost in a council dump has been halted by a judge.James Howells, 39, launched a legal case to force Newport city council to allow him to search the site to retrieve a lost hard drive containing the bitcoins.The council sought to strike out the claim, and a judge has ruled in its favour. Sitting as a high court judge, Judge Keyser KC said on Thursday that Howells’s claim had “no realistic prospect of succeeding” if he allowed the case to continue to trial.He said: “I consider that the particulars of the claim do not show any reasonable grounds for bringing this case
Musk ‘lying like hell’ over AfD interview, says ex-EU tech leader
A former EU leader on tech has accused Elon Musk of “lying like hell” by claiming the bloc was trying to stop an interview the owner of X had set up with the co-leader of the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland.Thierry Breton, who quit as a European commissioner in September, having overseen the passage of ambitious legislation designed to regulate big tech, said Musk had been disingenuous in claiming the EU was trying to censor his discussion with Alice Weidel, which took place on Thursday evening.The US billionaire claimed on Wednesday on his social media platform: “First, the EU tried to stop me from having an online conversation with president @realDonaldTrump. Now they want to prevent people from hearing a conversation with Alice Weidel, who might be the next chancellor of Germany. These guys really hate democracy
Meta has ‘heard the message’ from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen
Mark Zuckerberg has “heard the message” from Donald Trump on restricting online content and his Meta platforms will intervene “less and less” on users during the president-elect’s administration, according to the whistleblower Frances Haugen.Haugen, who revealed the Facebook and Instagram owner’s struggles with user safety in 2021, said the US president-elect thought “the right way to run social media is with no restrictions”.Zuckerberg’s announcement on Tuesday that Meta was dropping third-party factcheckers in the US and making other moderation changes reflected this view, she added.“The announcement from Mark is him basically saying: ‘Hey I heard the message, we will not intervene in the United States,’” Haugen told the Guardian.Announcing the changes on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said he would “work with President Trump” on pushing back against governments seeking to “censor more”, pointing to Latin America, China and Europe, where the UK and EU have introduced online safety legislation
‘I’m bursting with ideas’: Michael Sheen launches new national theatre for Wales
Stephen Colbert on Angelenos: ‘Doing everything they can to help one another’
‘It’s our Olympic opening ceremony’: Dynamo, David Hockney and more unite for Bradford city of culture
Wicked, A Complete Unknown and Shôgun lead Screen Actors Guild nominations
Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Trump is already reminding us of what a terrible mistake we made’
Jon Stewart on Harris presiding over election certification: ‘Like attending your own funeral’