Live and let fly: James Bond helicopter firm awaits UK decision on £1bn deal

The Merlin helicopter sitting on a factory floor in Yeovil is a familiar sight to James Bond aficionados: it featured in the climactic shootout of the 2012 film, Skyfall.Workers at the Somerset factory are upgrading the aircraft for the Canadian air force, a lucrative source of income for its owner, Italian state-backed weapons maker Leonardo.But Leonardo has its eyes on a bigger prize for Yeovil: after a drawn-out process, it has emerged as the single bidder for a £1bn contract to build new medium-sized helicopters to replace the Pumas used for decades by the Royal Air Force in conflicts around the world.Yet with Labour in the UK carrying out a strategic defence review, some in the industry believe the helicopter purchase could be scrapped altogether by a government that has stressed the gloomy state of the public finances.What happens next matters hugely for Britain’s last remaining helicopter factory, the Somerset market town of Yeovil, and Britain’s wider defence industry

More than 2,000 jobs axed as UK prison builder ISG collapses

More than 2,000 jobs have been axed and dozens of government construction projects could be paused as ISG, one of the UK’s largest contractors, fell into administration.In the biggest collapse of a UK construction company since Carillion, administrators EY confirmed on Friday that ISG had ceased trading with immediate effect, with the closure of all of its sites.It confirmed that most of the 2,400 people it employed in the UK would be made redundant with immediate effect, with only 200 staff retained to assist administrators.ISG is involved in 69 live central government schemes, including several projects as part of the Ministry of Justice’s plan to increase the capacity in Britain’s prisons by an extra 20,000 spaces. It is also working on schemes for the Department for Work and Pensions and several school building projects

Labelling Trump’s lies as ‘disputed’ on X makes supporters believe them more, study finds

Labelling tweets featuring false claims about election fraud as “disputed” does little to nothing to change Trump voters’ pre-existing beliefs, and it may make them more likely to believe the lies, according to a new study.The study, authored by John Blanchard, an assistant professor from the University of Minnesota, Duluth, and Catherine Norris, an associate professor from Swarthmore College, looked at data from a sampling of 1,072 Americans surveyed in December of 2020. The researchers published a peer-reviewed paper on their findings this month in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review.“These ‘disputed’ tags are meant to alert a reader to false/misinformation, so it’s shocking to find that they may have the opposite effect,” Norris said.Participants were shown four tweets from Donald Trump that made false claims about election fraud and told to rank them from one to seven based on their truthfulness

Social media and online video firms are conducting ‘vast surveillance’ on users, FTC finds

Social media and online video companies are collecting huge troves of your personal information on and off their websites or apps and sharing it with a wide range of third-party entities, a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff report on nine tech companies confirms.The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states.The FTC’s findings validate years of reporting on the depth and breadth of these companies’ tracking practices and call out the tech firms for “vast surveillance of users”. The agency is recommending Congress pass federal privacy regulations based on what it has documented

City Of Troy wows crowds gathered for key Breeders’ Cup test at Southwell

When Southwell racecourse staged a seven-race card with 71 runners on a Friday afternoon three weeks ago, a grand total of 560 spectators turned up to watch. But there were nearly 1,000 here on Friday to watch just five runners, and there was something else too: the buzz that heralds the arrival of a special horse on a racecourse, as City Of Troy, the Derby winner, paid probably his final visit to a British track.The instant that City Of Troy set foot on the Tapeta, he went straight into the top 1-2-3 of horses to appear at Southwell. The exact point where he fits in remains open for argument, as the other contenders for the No.1 spot are Galileo, the 2001 Derby winner and later a legendary stallion, and Giant’s Causeway, who went down only narrowly in the 2000 Breeders’ Cup Classic

Max Verstappen punished for swearing in FIA Singapore GP press conference

Max Verstappen has been punished by Formula One’s governing body for swearing in the immediate aftermath of a backlash by the world champion and other drivers against the FIA president, Mohammed Ben Sulayem, and his demand that drivers cease to use bad language. It is a dispute Verstappen is expected to vigorously return to as this weekend’s meeting in Singapore progresses.Early this week Ben Sulayem had said: “We have to differentiate between our sport – motorsport – and rap music. We’re not rappers, you know. They say the f-word how many times per minute? We are not on that