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Removing CO2 could spark big rise in food prices

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Wheat prices could be affected by the rise in technologies to remove CO2

Technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the air could have huge implications for future food prices, according to new research.

Scientists say that machines that remove CO2 from the air will be needed to keep the rise in global temperatures in check.

But these devices will have major impacts on energy, water and land use.

By 2050, according to this new report, food crop prices could rise more than five-fold in some parts of the world.

In the wake of the Paris climate agreement signed in 2015, researchers have tried to understand what keeping the world under a 1.5C temperature threshold would mean in practice.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported on this question in 2018, and found that keeping below this temperature rise would require the world to reach net zero emissions by 2050 but would also need the removal and storage of large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

One of the ideas on how to achieve this is called BECCS – bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. It means growing crops that soak up CO2, then burning them for electricity while capturing and burying the carbon that’s produced.

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A Direct Air Capture (DAC) machine installed in Iceland

Critics say this idea would need the deployment of huge amounts of land which would reduce the amount of land for agriculture at a time of increasing global population.

Another technology that has raised much interest is called Direct Air Capture (DAC), where machines pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere.

A number of experimental installations of this idea have been successfully implemented, notably in Switzerland and Canada.

But there has been little research to date on how the deployment of DAC would impact crop and food prices.

This new study looks at the large-scale deployment of a range of negative emissions technologies including DAC.

The report says that the energy and water resources needed to drive these machines will be on a very large scale.

DAC will need large amounts of heat to make the process work, say the authors. This would require energy equal to 115% of current global natural gas consumption.

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Poorer countries will see the worst impacts on food prices

Water for DAC is also a significant cost by 2050, with the machines using 35% of the water currently used in global electricity production.

And while DAC reduces the amount of land required, there will still be a need for significant amounts of energy crops and new forests.

“I want to make clear that we’re not in any way trying to throw cold water on efforts to try and develop DAC,” says Dr Andres Clarens from the University of Virginia, who led the study.

“I think DAC is really very important technology that needs to be developed.”

“But in our simulations, what we find is that the world doesn’t just go 100% all in on DAC, right?

“Even under optimistic pricing scenarios for the technology, the world is still deploying a decent amount of BECCs, if you want to get to 1.5C.

“DAC is not going to be the only thing.”

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Rapeseed is an important energy crop and could be used for BECCS

According to the report, with widespread use of DAC, many parts of the world will see substantial price increases in maize, wheat and rice.

The worst affected areas would be in sub-Saharan Africa which could see prices rise by 5-600% by 2050.

India, Pakistan and many other countries in Asia could see three to five-fold increases, while Europe and South America could see prices double or treble.

But some people involved in DAC reject the report’s findings, saying that the authors wrongly assumed that all air capture systems are the same.

“We would like to point out that the paper only analysed liquid sorbent direct air capture technology whilst Climeworks has developed a solid sorbent technology that does not rely on the burning of natural gas or has a need for fresh water to deliver carbon dioxide removal from the air,” said Christoph Beuttler from Climeworks.

“We are confident that if the paper would have made that distinction the reported direct air capture potentials could be significantly higher and the risks lower.”

Despite the questions over methods, all involved in negative emissions agree that the longer it takes to implement these technologies, the bigger the impact on food, energy and water.

Short-term efforts to decarbonise, particularly in transport and energy production will alleviate some of the difficulties with negative emissions.

“I think that negative emissions are going to be important. I think that DAC in particular is going to be important. But I think that it can’t be our first order of business. We have to get off fossil fuels as soon as possible,” said Andres Clarens.

“Anybody that thinks we can continue to burn fossil fuels for another decade, because we’ll just do DAC, you know, down the road. That’s not a viable approach.”

The study has been published in Nature Climate Change.

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Microsoft backs Epic in Apple row

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Microsoft has thrown its weight behind Epic Games in a continuing legal battle with Apple.

Apple pulled hugely popular game Fortnite from its App Store after Epic deliberately broke its rules in protest at Apple’s policies.

In an escalation, Apple then said it would pull Epic’s access to developer tools on iOS and Mac.

But Microsoft said this would damage a “critical technology” for many third-party game creators.

That is because Epic also owns the Unreal Engine – a tool widely used by developers from other studios to build games, virtual-reality VR experiences and special effects in major television shows and films.

Microsoft uses the technology itself.

Marketing push

Xbox head Phil Spencer tweeted: “Ensuring that Epic has access to the latest Apple technology is the right thing for game developers and gamers.”

Epic has objected to what it calls a “monopoly” in the App Store – specifically the 30% cut Apple demands from in-game purchases.

It had legal documentation and a huge marketing push prepared after it decided to circumvent the rule by signposting players to a discount available away from the app.

Microsoft said denying Epic access to Apple’s developer tools would “prevent Epic from supporting Unreal Engine on iOS and macOS, and will place Unreal Engine and those game creators that have built, are building, and may build games on it at a substantial disadvantage”.

“Apple’s discontinuation of Epic’s ability to develop and support Unreal Engine for iOS or macOS will harm game creators and gamers,” it added.

Apple, however, says it applies the rules equally and “won’t make an exception for Epic because we don’t think it’s right to put their business interests ahead of the guidelines that protect our customers”.

‘Focused conversation’

Microsoft has also previously criticised Apple’s App Store terms.

When it became clear Apple would not allow Xbox game streaming on iPhones, Microsoft said Apple was the only major platform to “deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services”.

Earlier this year, when Apple was engaged in another high-profile stand-off with an app developer over its policies, Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, hinted at the company’s disapproval.

He said regulators should have a “focused conversation” about app stores and the rules they enforced.

However, Microsoft also runs the Windows and Xbox stores, where it takes a 15-30% cut of software sales, depending on the platform, according to its developer agreement.



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Record payouts for poor broadband service

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Most people said they were happy with their broadband, despite big compensation payouts

A record £20.7m in compensation was paid to broadband customers who used a new scheme to complain about their service in the last six months of 2019.

The scheme, which does not necessitate formal claims, paid out for delays in repairs and setting up new connections and missed appointments.

Ofcom said just £8m was paid to customers in the first six months of 2019, before the scheme was introduced.

Yet 85% of customers were reportedly satisfied with their broadband service.

The watchdog’s annual report showed Plusnet customers to be the most satisfied with their broadband – and TalkTalk users the least.

Nine in 10 mobile mobile customers said they were happy with their phone service.

Tesco Mobile users reported higher-than-average satisfaction levels, while Three customers were the most dissatisfied, reporting the longest call waiting times and worst reception.

Ofcom’s consumer group director, Lindsey Fussell, said: “Checking the quality of a phone or broadband provider’s service can be the difference between you signing up to a company that keeps you connected or one that falls short.”

The data looks at how providers performed up to January 2020, so does not cover the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ofcom is hailing the new compensation scheme, which it introduced in April 2019, as a success.

The payouts include:

  • £9.7m for delayed repairs following loss of service,
  • £1.6m for missed appointments
  • £9.5m for the delayed provision of new services.

Under the voluntary scheme, customers receive compensation from their provider without having to ask for it.

BT, Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin Media are among those who have signed up, and Ofcom is urging other providers to join to ensure “customers get fair compensation when things go wrong”.

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Lyft suspends California rides over employment row

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Ride-hailing firm Lyft says it is suspending operations in California after a judge ordered it to treat drivers as employees.

Both Lyft and Uber were told they must classify their drivers as employees and not contractors by Friday.

Lyft has now said its services in California will stop at 23:59 local time on Thursday (06:59 GMT on Friday).

Uber has warned it will have to do the same if a stay is not granted by an appeals court before the deadline.

But Uber has yet to make any formal announcement.

“This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips,” Lyft said in a statement posted online.

What happened?

Both firms have always argued their drivers are self-employed contractors.

But a California law that came into effect earlier this year, known as AB5, extended classification as an employee to workers in the “gig economy”.

The judge’s ruling that the law applied to both Uber and Lyft means the firms need to provide drivers with extra benefits, such as unemployment protection.

Both companies filed an appeal to the judgement – and asked for a stay on its enforcement while the courts dealt with the appeal.

Unless the stay was granted, both companies had 10 days to undertake what they saw as a significant overhaul of their business in California.

They both warned that they could be forced to pull services from the state after 23:59 local time Thursday.

What did the firms say?

Lyft claims that four out of five of its drivers do not want to be classified as employees. Both argue that flexibility is valued by those who choose to work for them.

The two firms had been emailing customers and sending app push notifications to try to drum up support for their side of the argument.

Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi, meanwhile, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times, arguing that his firm was not truly against paying the costs of things like health insurance.

Instead, he argued that the choice between being a full-time employee and a “gig” worker was a problem itself, and laws needed to be changed. He argued for a system where companies pay benefits based on a rate per hour worked.

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Media captionTwo Uber drivers take opposing views on how the company should treat them

But he has also said that the company can only offer full jobs to a tiny fraction of its workforce. In a podcast interview with Vox Media, he summed up the problem as: “We can’t go out and hire 50,000 people overnight.”

Lyft echoed that sentiment, telling the court that it “cannot make the changes the injunction requires at the flip of a switch”.

The companies do have some outside support.

Some drivers do not want to be classed as employees, and the mayors of San Diego and San Jose – one Democrat and one Republican – joined forces to warn that shutting down the services “virtually overnight” would hurt one million residents in the state.

What happens next?

There is a potential way out for the ride-sharing firms in the coming months.

A ballot that will be put to vote in November, at the same time as the US presidential election, would grant Uber and Lyft an exemption from the law. It is known as proposition 22.

“Your voice can help,” Lyft wrote in its blog post about suspending services.

“Prop 22, proposes the necessary changes to give drivers benefits and flexibility, while maintaining the rideshare model that helps you get where you need to go,” it said.

Both companies, along with other supporters such as food delivery app DoorDash, are reported to have spent millions of dollars in lobbying and campaigning for the law.

Labour groups, meanwhile, are set firmly against it, arguing it will save the companies vast sums of money at the expense of drivers.

It is possible that a shutdown of services could last until at least November, when the issue may be decided by the outcome of proposition 22.



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Some TV bulletins may disappear, BBC boss says

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Huw Edwards presenting BBC News

The BBC’s head of news has said the number of traditional TV bulletins may be cut over the next decade as more people watch news online.

Fran Unsworth told The Daily Telegraph she thought there might only be one bulletin a day.

Asked whether the News at Ten might survive but not the News at Six, Ms Unsworth replied: “Possibly, or maybe the other way round.”

The News at One is the corporation’s other major daily national bulletin.

Asked by the newspaper to predict how TV news would change over the next five or 10 years, she replied: “I think TV journalism will still be around because of the power of pictures to tell a story, but it won’t necessarily be received in quite the forms it currently is.

“So I still think, ultimately in 10 years’ time, we probably won’t be consuming linear bulletins exactly. I mean, I might be wrong about that. I doubt it.

“There might be one [bulletin] a day, or something. I think there’ll be fewer of them. But I think that the power of how you tell stories through television, pictures, video will just be in a different space.

“It’ll be in the digital space, it’ll be on, you know, iPlayer. It’ll be on your tablet, your iPhone.

“We have to think creatively about what the product is, but that’s the direction of travel and I don’t think that’s changed.”

News bulletins are regularly among the most-watched programmes on British TV, with the News at Six and News at Ten usually behind only the regional 18:30 news as the BBC’s highest-rated broadcasts.

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Fran Unsworth was appointed the director of BBC News in 2017

The audience for news has risen during the coronavirus pandemic, with more young viewers tuning in. But Ms Unsworth said she did not expect that to last.

“They’re sitting down and watching a television bulletin in a way that I thought they weren’t ever really going to again,” she said. “So that has been what’s been really interesting about this.

“I’m not under any illusions, to be quite honest with you, because I’ve seen it in the past. You get these big peaks, the big stories like the Bataclan [attack in Paris in 2015] and London Bridge attacks [in 2017 and 19], then the audience falls off again quite rapidly.

“What I would hope is that we’ve changed our image in the mind of the younger viewer, which is that we are there to be relied on, and if they really do want to know what’s happening they will come to us to find out. We’re not just any other news source.”

‘The direction of travel is clear’

Analysis by David Sillito, media correspondent

When ITN created the UK’s first half hour news bulletin in 1967, it was only commissioned for 13 weeks, because the bosses feared that viewers would find it too boring. The BBC’s Six O’Clock News was, at the time, under 10 minutes long, while the Nine O’Clock News was 15.

Fifty-three years on, the four main daily BBC news bulletins are at the moment more often than not the most watched programmes on BBC One. The audience for the BBC’s regional news programmes topped five million on Wednesday night – more than a million ahead of the most popular non-news programme of the evening, The Repair Shop.

The audience for traditional news bulletins has also been boosted by the impact of coronavirus. Not only is there a fast-moving story that affects everyone, more people are at home and able to turn the TV on. And what’s more, the basic shape and style of those bulletins has barely altered.

But things can change fast.

The amount of time we spend watching live TV schedules has been dropping for many years. There is, however, still a large and loyal (and largely elderly) audience who turn the TV on as a daily habit. The prime time TV audience even on a sunny August evening is usually around 16 million. However, Reuters’ Digital News Report noted that the number of people tuning in to TV news has begun to drop. For many years, 75-80% of people regularly watched a TV bulletin, but in January 2020 it said that had dropped to 55%.

Of course, predictions are always a fool’s game. The demise of print newspapers has long been predicted but so far the Independent is the only major paper to go digital only. News is a habit and habits change slowly. However, the direction of travel is clear. There will probably always be an audience for a daily digest of TV news reports but the online world offers so many new options for presenting news in greater depth and clarity.

Visual storytelling is not disappearing, it is going through an extraordinary moment of innovation and transformation. The traditional TV bulletin with its rigid storytelling formulas, desks and serious presenters will for a dwindling number of people be their preferred way of tuning in to global events, but the question is whether those in their 20s and 30s today will develop that habit in years to come. I suspect not.

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Tim Kaine predicts Senate breakthrough in Covid relief after RNC

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Democrats and White House negotiators have been unable to reach an agreement on a coronavirus relief package for weeks as the economy continues to struggle amid the pandemic. As the talks appeared to break down, President Donald Trump revealed a number of executive actions earlier this month, including moves on evictions, extending the deferment on student loans, providing boosted unemployment benefits at a lower rate and deferring payroll taxes.

Senate Republicans floated a smaller coronavirus relief bill this week, which would include extra federal unemployment benefits until the end of the year and an additional $10 billion in funding for the U.S. Postal Service. Democrats, who will vote this Saturday to provide $25 billion to the Postal Service, have maintained that they don’t want a “skinny” or piecemeal package. When asked where he stood on the proposal, Kaine said he expected to settle on compromises with Republicans but that some protections were non-negotiable for the next stimulus package.

“The top line number will end up in my view being some somewhere in the middle,” Kaine said. “But we have to make sure unemployed workers are taken care of, people don’t get kicked out of their houses during global pandemic, or apartments, and people have food aid. And these are kind of basics before Democrats can agree to have a package.”

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Phones could detect if drivers are over the limit

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Smartphones can detect when you’ve had too much to drink by monitoring your walk, a study has found.

American researchers used sensors in smartphones to detect when somebody was over the legal drink-drive limit.

Phones were able to do this with about 90% accuracy when users walked just 10 steps in the study by the University of Pittsburgh.

Scientists hope the discovery can be used to develop device alerts, such as asking people not to drive while drunk.

“We have powerful sensors we carry around with us wherever we go,” lead researcher Brian Suffoletto said. “We need to learn how to use them to best serve public health.”

The study had 22 participants aged 21 to 43, who were given a vodka and lime juice drink every hour until they reached the UK and US drink-drive limit of 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood.

With a smartphone strapped to their back, the participants performed a walking task every two hours – walking a straight line for 10 steps, turning around, and walking back.

About 90% of the time, the researchers were able to identify those over the limit through changes in gait highlighted by the phones.

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It’s hoped alerts could be developed on phones to stop people from driving while over the limit

One application could be to notify users who may not think they are impaired that they should not drive.

“I lost a close friend to a drinking and driving crash in college,” Dr Suffoletto said. “And as an emergency physician, I have taken care of scores of adults with injuries related to acute alcohol intoxication.

“Because of this, I have dedicated the past 10 years to testing digital interventions to prevent deaths and injury related to excessive alcohol consumption.”

Although this is a small preliminary study, the scientists hope it lays a foundation for further research. They want to carry out additional experiments which better mimic how people carry their phones, like in their hands or pockets.

Last year, almost 360,000 admissions to English hospitals were primarily due to drinking alcohol, with about 6,000 alcohol-specific deaths.

“In five years, I would like to imagine a world in which if people go out with friends and drink at risky levels, they get an alert at the first sign of impairment and are sent strategies to help them stop drinking and protect them from high-risk events like driving, interpersonal violence and unprotected sexual encounters,” Dr Suffoletto said.

The findings were published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

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‘Lottery Lawyer’ Is Accused of Fleecing Winners in $107 Million Fraud

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Lottery Lawyer Is Accused of Fleecing Winners in 107 Million
Lottery Lawyer Is Accused of Fleecing Winners in 107 Million

He called himself the “Lottery Lawyer,” developing a national reputation for helping high-profile lottery winners with their investments.

He promised to secure their wealth for generations and to protect them from scam artists.

But on Tuesday, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn accused the lawyer, Jason M. Kurland, of working with a mob associate to steal millions of dollars from his clients.

Mr. Kurland, 46, was arrested on Tuesday morning at his home on Long Island alongside three other men — including Christopher Chierchio, 52, who prosecutors said was a reputed soldier for the Genovese crime family.

As part of the scheme, Mr. Kurland tricked three lottery winners who had hired him into putting $107 million into various investments, prosecutors said. The lottery winners lost a total of more than $80 million.

One of them was the winner of last year’s $1.5 billion Mega Millions jackpot in South Carolina.

After persuading the lottery winners to invest, the four men then spent some of the funds on golf club memberships, yachts, private jets, a Porsche and other luxury cars and shopping sprees at stores like Fendi, prosecutors said.

“Lottery winners can’t believe their luck when they win millions of dollars, and the men we arrested this morning allegedly used that euphoric feeling to their advantage,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., head of the F.BI.’s New York office.

Mr. Kurland and his alleged co-conspirators face several counts of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. They each pleaded not guilty at their arraignments on Tuesday.

A lawyer for Mr. Kurland declined to comment. A lawyer for Mr. Chierchio said his client was not affiliated with the mafia and expected to be cleared of the charges.

Law enforcement officials had been wiretapping the men’s phone calls for months, including conversations in which they discussed whether they might go to jail.

The lottery winners paid between $75,000 and $200,000 in upfront payments to hire Mr. Kurland and his law firm, according to court papers. Mr. Kurland then charged monthly fees of between $15,000 and $50,000.

A spokeswoman for Rivkin Radler, the law firm where Mr. Kurland has worked since 2018, said the firm was cooperating with the authorities and planned to remove him as a partner.

In a 2016 interview with Vice, Mr. Kurland discussed the prevalence of scams targeting lottery winners. “A lot of these winners are not sophisticated enough to see it,” he said, “so you really have to rely on the professionals.”

On Mr. Kurland’s Twitter account, he often urged lottery winners around the country to hire him, using hashtags like #callme. In previous interviews, he said he has represented lottery winners since 2011, specializing in navigating the laws around real estate and trusts.

Behind the scenes, prosecutors said, Mr. Kurland was getting kickbacks for steering lottery winners to invest in business deals controlled by Mr. Chierchio and the two other defendants, Frangesco Russo, 38, and Francis Smookler, 45.

Some of the deals involved companies that sold personal protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic to the state of California and to the New York Police Department, court papers showed.

During a phone call last month that was intercepted by law enforcement, Mr. Kurland told an associate that the growing coronavirus outbreak in Florida would bode well for business. “The worse it is the better,” he said, according to prosecutors.

The men directed some of the lottery winners’ money to a jeweler named Gregory Altieri, who had promised sky-high returns to his investors. Last month, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn accused him of defrauding his investors in a $200 million Ponzi scheme.

Earlier this year, when Mr. Altieri failed to repay a loan, Mr. Russo and Mr. Smookler threatened to torture him and shoot his family, prosecutors said.

Mr. Russo’s father was a Colombo crime family captain who died while serving a life sentence in prison for murder, and he mentioned his father while threatening Mr. Altieri, prosecutors said.

A lawyer for Mr. Russo did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Smookler’s lawyer had no immediate comment.

Law enforcement officials are seeking to recover any stolen funds by seizing 13 bank accounts associated with the scheme, which had been going on since at least 2018.

In one instance, Mr. Kurland transferred $19.5 million out of a client’s account without the client’s permission and funneled much of it to Mr. Chierchio, prosecutors said.

In 2004, Mr. Chierchio pleaded guilty in a state case in Brooklyn to falsifying business records. Last year, he was acquitted at trial on bid-rigging charges.

Prosecutors said Mr. Chierchio lived in a $11,000-a-month luxury building in Manhattan and purports to run a plumbing business.

In a call last month that was intercepted by law enforcement, Mr. Chierchio brushed off an associate’s concerns about a federal investigation into the lottery scheme, saying he had been pursued by the authorities his entire life.

“So bring the F.B.I. Who cares?” Mr. Chierchio said, according to prosecutors. “It doesn’t matter. I laugh at them. OK? I laugh at them.”

In phone calls, Mr. Kurland discussed with his associates how to cover up the scheme, worried they were “playing with fire,” according to court papers. The men wondered if giving the money back to the lottery winners would thwart the investigation or if they could make the theft look like legitimate business transactions, prosecutors said.

At one point, according to court papers, Mr. Smookler and Mr. Russo predicted that they might face fraud charges; Mr. Smookler said on a phone call that he hoped to merely face a fine and not go to jail.

“We are in a little bit of a pickle,” he said.



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Romance scams, the Yahoo boys and my friend Beth

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Scammers often pretend to be military men

You may well think you’d never fall for a romance scam, that they’re cheesy, inauthentic and very obviously after your cash. But security experts have warned that there’s been an increase in all sorts of online fraud during the coronavirus pandemic.

It happened to my friend Beth.

One day she mentioned that she had met a man online who was in the military. She thought it was a neat coincidence, because my partner is also in the armed forces. But the more she told me, the louder the alarm bells rang.

Despite being deployed on a “top secret mission” in a highly dangerous part of the world, “Alexander” managed to message Beth all the time. He was handsome, charming and affectionate.

When she showed me a photo, my heart sank. Alexander’s uniform and rank didn’t match the role he said he had or the unit he said he was in. There was no reason for him to be in the place where he claimed to be.

He was almost certainly not the man in the photo.

‘He could be anyone, anywhere’

Telling Beth was hard. “It made me shake,” she said.

“You start thinking this could be someone that you could have the chance to meet and see if there’s any potential to see how it goes… then straight after that is the shock that you’ve been talking to someone who is not the person he said he was, and who could be anyone, anywhere in the world.”

If it hadn’t been for the coincidence of our joint military connection, Beth probably wouldn’t have mentioned him to me or anyone else – he had already spun a web of secrecy around his job.

In fact, telling someone else is probably your best chance of not getting sucked in.

Alexander contacted Beth on a dating platform, but he very quickly asked her to switch to a messaging app.

Cyber-security expert Prof Alan Woodward says scammers much prefer to operate within a private environment, away from the chance of being seen by others – whether that’s a direct messaging platform or a locked social media account.

“Effectively you’re giving them a bit of camouflage,” he says. “There isn’t going to be somebody who can see publicly that the same person who might have been trying to scam them is now trying to scam you.”

I noticed myself that, after making my own Instagram account private, I was deluged with follow requests and private messages, all apparently from men, many of them claiming to have military positions.

The military represents “authority, trust, romance” for many people, says New York Times reporter Jack Nicas, who made a documentary about romance scammers and their victims.

“For many, particularly women in middle America, the military guy is the ‘ideal man’,” he says.

Faking it

I wondered how the real people in the photos the scammers were using would feel if they knew, and I then got a small taste of it myself when someone set up a fake Instagram account using my pictures, and started messaging people – mainly men I believe – saying it was my “secret” space.

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The fake Zoe

I only found out when people started messaging me to ask what was going on. It was sickening, alarming and infuriating.

I’ll probably never know exactly what the “fake me” said and to whom. It was all in the form of private messages from an account bearing my name and my face.

Instagram deleted it when I complained, but declined to tell me whereabouts in the world it had been registered. Perhaps it was even Alexander, finding me via Beth’s followers.

The platform said impersonating a person or organisation is against its guidelines, and that such accounts are deleted once it is made aware of them. A quick search reveals that there are plenty out there though.

For scammers it’s worth the risk, as the pay-out can be huge.

Horror stories

There are people who work to try to help romance scam victims, and they hear plenty of horror stories.

One is Lisa Forte, from Red Goat Cyber-Security, who was contacted by a British lawyer in her 40s who had given $350,000 to a scammer in South America – which she got by re-mortgaging her house.

Wayne May, who runs the group Scam Survivors, told us of a man in Russia who gave $250,000 to a man he believed he was having a secret relationship with.

And Jack Nicas interviewed Renee Holland from Florida, who transferred her life savings to a man pretending to be in the US military. She was later killed by her husband.

The money, particularly if sent by wire transfer, is generally gone forever.

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Akinola Bolaji agreed to be interviewed by the New York Times and said he was a former romance scammer

Mr Nicas tracked Ms Holland’s scammer down to Nigeria – where romance scammers are rife. There young men work sometimes in groups, sometimes individually, and pretend to be both men and women online.

He interviewed a man called Akinola Bolaji, a 35-year-old Nigerian who said he had once been a “Yahoo Boy”, as romance scammers are colloquially known.

Mr Bolaji said finding victims was a numbers game.

“You may message thousands [of women],” he told the New York Times. “Only a few will respond. Five will comply. Out of the five, three may not have money. Two will have. Out of two, one may not be able to spend money. But one will surely send.”

He confessed to feeling guilty about the practice. “But poverty will not make you feel the pain because you need the money,” he said.

Mr Bolaji claims to have stopped romance scamming because he is now in a genuine relationship with a lady in the US state of Georgia. We only have his word for it.

The long game

In the few weeks that Alexander was messaging my friend Beth, he did not ask for any cash. That is not surprising, says Mr Nicas.

“You don’t even start asking for money until maybe a few weeks or a few months in,” he said. “You have to earn their trust first, because if you on the first day say, ‘I need money’, they’re going to know that you’re a scammer.”

Beth is adamant that she would not have sent any – but scammers are super-persuasive, says Ms Forte.

“They build a rapport and they slowly take you on this journey from being cautious all the way to re-mortgaging your house. I think we’re all vulnerable to it in the right situation.”

Where to go for help

  • Victim Support offers free, confidential advice via Supportline on 08 08 16 89 111 and/or live chat
  • My Support Space is designed to help manage the impact that crime has had on individuals
  • Scams can be reported to Action Fraud

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The algorithms that make decisions about your life

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Thousands of students in England are angry about the controversial use of an algorithm to determine this year’s GCSE and A-level results.

They were unable to sit exams because of lockdown, so the algorithm used data about schools’ results in previous years to determine grades.

It meant about 40% of this year’s A-level results came out lower than predicted, which has a huge impact on what students are able to do next. GCSE results are due out on Thursday.

There are many examples of algorithms making big decisions about our lives, without us necessarily knowing how or when they do it.

Here’s a look at some of them.

Social media

In many ways, social-media platforms are simply giant algorithms.

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At their heart, they work out what you’re interested in and then give you more of it – using as many data points as they can get their hands on.

Every “like”, watch, click is stored. Most apps also glean more data from your web-browsing habits or geographical data. The idea is to predict the content you want and keep you scrolling – and it works.

And those same algorithms that know you enjoy a cute-cat video are also deployed to sell you stuff.

All the data social-media companies collect about you can also tailor ads to you in an incredibly accurate way.

But these algorithms can go seriously wrong. They have been proved to push people towards hateful and extremist content. Extreme content simply does better than nuance on social media. And algorithms know that.

Facebook’s own civil-rights audit called for the company to do everything in its power to prevent its algorithm from “driving people toward self-reinforcing echo chambers of extremism”.

And last month we reported on how algorithms on online retail sites – designed to work out what you want to buy – were pushing racist and hateful products.

Insurance

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Whether it’s house, car, health or any other form of insurance, your insurer has to somehow assess the chances of something actually going wrong.

In many ways, the insurance industry pioneered using data about the past to determine future outcomes – that’s the basis of the whole sector, according to Timandra Harkness, author of Big Data: Does Size Matter.

Getting a computer to do it was always going to be the logical next step.

“Algorithms can affect your life very much and yet you as an individual don’t necessarily get a lot of input,” she says.

“We all know if you move to a different postcode, your insurance goes up or down.

“That’s not because of you, it’s because other people have been more or less likely to have been victims of crime, or had accidents or whatever.”

Innovations such as the “black box” that can be installed in a car to monitor how an individual drives have helped to lower the cost of car insurance for careful drivers who find themselves in a high-risk group.

Might we see more personally tailored insurance quotes as algorithms learn more about our own circumstances?

“Ultimately the point of insurance is to share the risk – so everybody puts [money] in and the people who need it take it out,” Timandra says.

“We live in an unfair world, so any model you make is going to be unfair in one way or another.”

Healthcare

Artificial Intelligence is making great leaps in being able to diagnose various conditions and even suggest treatment paths.

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A study published in January 2020 suggested an algorithm performed better than human doctors when it came to identifying breast cancer from mammograms.

And other successes include:

  • a tool that can predict ovarian-cancer survival rates and help determine treatment choices
  • artificial intelligence from University College, London, that identified patients most likely to miss appointments and therefore need reminders

However, all this requires a vast amount of patient data to train the programmes – and that is, frankly, a rather large can of worms.

In 2017, the UK Information Commission ruled the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust had not done enough to safeguard patient data when it had shared 1.6 million patient records with Google’s AI division, DeepMind.

“There’s a fine line between finding exciting new ways to improve care and moving ahead of patients’ expectations,” said DeepMind’s co-founder Mustafa Suleyman at the time.

Policing

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Big data and machine learning have the potential to revolutionise policing.

In theory, algorithms have the power to deliver on the sci-fi promise of “predictive policing” – using data, such as where crime has happened in the past, when and by whom, to predict where to allocate police resources.

But that method can create algorithmic bias – and even algorithmic racism.

“It’s the same situation as you have with the exam grades,” says Areeq Chowdhury, from technology think tank WebRoots Democracy.

“Why are you judging one individual based on what other people have historically done? The same communities are always over-represented”.

Earlier this year, the defence and security think tank RUSI published a report into algorithmic policing.

It raised concerns about the lack of national guidelines or impact assessments. It also called for more research into how these algorithms might exacerbate racism.

Facial recognition too – used by police forces in the UK including the Met – has also been criticised.

For example, there have been concerns about whether the data going into facial-recognition technology can make the algorithm racist.

The charge is facial-recognition cameras are more accurate at identifying white faces – because they have more data on white faces.

“The question is, are you testing it on a diverse enough demographic of people?” Areeq says.

“What you don’t want is a situation where some groups are being misidentified as a criminal because of the algorithm.”

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