William Wragg, the Tory MP caught up in the “honeytrap” sexting scam, has reportedly quit two committees in parliament following the revelations.
The MP last week said he gave the phone numbers of other MPs to a person he met on the dating app Grindr.
Wragg said he had been “weak” after becoming concerned that the man had “compromising” material on him.
Now, reports suggest the 36-year-old has resigned as vice-chairman of the 1922 Committee of Tory backbench MPs, and also stepped down from his role heading the public administration and constitutional affairs committee.
NEW: Understand that William Wragg has stepped down as chair of @CommonsPACAC and as vice chairman of the Tory backbench 1922 committee
Pressure has mounted in recent days amid concerns over parliamentary security.
Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, praised Wragg for making a “courageous and fulsome apology”
Bur Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns branded Wragg an “idiot” for “compromising security” as she revealed she had also been targeted with a spear-phishing text.
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It is understood that the Hazel Grove MP, who is standing down at the general election, will not lose the Conservative whip over the affair, which has rocked Westminster.
Nicholas Watt, “It looks like William Wragg is standing back as vice chair of the 1922 Committee of Conservative MPs. And stepping back as Chair of the cross party administration and constitutional affairs select committee”
Wragg told The Times last week: “I got chatting to a guy on an app and we exchanged pictures. We were meant to meet up for drinks, but then didn’t. Then he started asking for numbers of people. I was worried because he had stuff on me. He gave me a WhatsApp number, which doesn’t work now.
“I’ve hurt people by being weak. I was scared. I’m mortified. I’m so sorry that my weakness has caused other people hurt.”
Those targeted by the phishing attack were reportedly sent unsolicited messages on WhatsApp from senders identifying themselves as “Charlie” or “Abi”.
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Police and parliamentary authorities are investigating.
The move meant Labour had to either ditch its commitments, oppose the tax cuts or find the £2bn elsewhere.
In the aftermath of the Budget, Labour said it was still working out where to find the money.
Speaking on Tuesday, Reeves will pledge to “take on the tax dodgers” and raise £5bn a year by the end of the next parliament.
Reeves will point to comments by Gareth Davies, the chief executive of the National Audit Office, who said in January that £6bn could be raised by cracking down on tax evasion and avoidance.
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She will confirm £2bn of the funding raised each year from these plans will go towards the spending commitments.
“I have been clear that everything in our manifesto will be fully costed and fully funded. There will be no exceptions,” Reeves will say.
“That is why last month I promised to go through all the government documents in an orderly way to identify the funding streams to honour our commitments to the NHS and schools.
“That process is now complete and the funding a future Labour government will raise from taking on the tax dodgers will fund more appointments in NHS hospitals, new scanners, extra dentist appointments and free breakfast clubs for all primary school pupils.”
“Our schools and our hospitals are the British people’s priorities – and they are Labour’s priorities too.”
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Labour will outline a plan to give HMRC up to an extra £555 million each year to allow it to help it collect more tax.
Under the proposal, the number of HRMC staff by up to 5,000 to ensure tax owed is collected.
There will be investment in the digitisation of the tax office and a greater use of AI.
Researchers at the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy have developed a new method to predict the financial impacts climate change will have on agriculture, which can help support food security and financial stability for countries increasingly prone to climate catastrophes.
The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses climate and agricultural data from Brazil. It finds that climate change has a cascading effect on farming, leading to increased loan defaults for one of the nation’s largest public sector banks. Over the next three decades, climate-driven loan defaults could increase by up to 7%, according to the study.
The projections in the paper revealed that although temperatures are rising everywhere, there is substantial variation in what that looks like from region to region, which underscores the need to build distinct types of physical and financial resilience.
For example, parts of northern Brazil are predicted to have more dramatic seasonal swings around 2050, with heavier rainfall in winter and drier summers, so policymakers should be thinking about the need for water storage by building dams and reservoirs as well as increasing groundwater storage capacity. Conversely, central Brazil may have fairly steady weather, but will have higher overall temperatures, pointing to a need for heat-resistant crops.
The authors of the paper used a statistical approach pairing past climate data in Brazil with information on crop productivity, farm revenue and agricultural loan performance. They combined this data with climate simulations to predict future weather conditions and their impacts on farming and how those changes will affect financial institutions.
“A difficulty in studying climate impacts on agriculture is that there are all sorts of adaptations happening all the time that aren’t easily observed, but are really important for understanding vulnerability and how risk is changing,” said coauthor Jennifer Burney, professor of environmental science at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “We were able to distinguish signals from different types of climate impacts and which ones led to this larger financial risk.”
Systematic thinking about building resilience against climate change around the globe
A key objective of the research is to support resilient food security under a changing climate, which requires understanding of when small climate shifts might have outsized impacts, spilling across regions or into other sectors through institutions like trade and banking.
Understanding the systemic risk posed by climate change is especially helpful for policymakers and disaster relief agencies, as climate change has increasingly become a national security threat. To that end, the statistical approach developed in the study could be applied around the globe.
“The technique we developed will help populations identify where they are most vulnerable, how climate change will hurt them the most economically and what institutions they should focus on to build resilience,” said study coauthor Craig McIntosh, professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy.
For example, some governments in the Western Pacific region buy extra food on the global market in emerging El Niño years, when their own crop productivity suffers. The statistical approach used in the study could help governments around the world understand their own climate conditions and whether local, regional or international institutions will be best placed to address them.
The research could be especially helpful with the development of the loss and damage fund established by the United Nations in 2022. The fund is designed to help compensate developing nations that have contributed the least to the climate crisis but have been facing the brunt of its devastating floods, drought and sea-level rise.
“Our technique could help countries think about where the resilience returns would be highest for the money spent,” said Krislert Samphantharak, professor of economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy. “This technique also helps to identify where international reinsurance might be needed.”
The “Empirical Modeling of Agricultural Climate Risk” study was also coauthored by Bruno Lopez-Videla, who earned a Ph.D. in economics from UC San Diego in 2021 and Alexandre Gori Maia of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil.
For heart attack patients, treating only the coronary artery that caused the infarction works just as well as preventive balloon dilation of the other coronary arteries, according to a new large study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and others. The results are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Heart attack is a common disease with risks of serious complications. It has long been unclear what the best strategy is for treating narrowings in coronary arteries separate from the specific vessel that caused the infarction.
A new large Swedish study has investigated whether it is sufficient to treat only the coronary artery that caused the infarction, or whether long-term results are better if other narrowed vessels are also treated with balloon dilation as a preventive measure.
The clinical randomized study included 1542 patients from 32 hospitals in 7 countries. In the Swedish part, the SWEDEHEART registry was used to conduct the randomization and collect data. Patients were followed up for five years after the procedure.
The results show no difference between the groups in terms of new heart attacks, new unplanned balloon dilations or the total number of all-cause deaths.
“This is somewhat surprising. Our hypothesis was that it would be beneficial to do preventive angioplasty,” says Felix Böhm, a senior physician at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital at Karolinska Institutet, who led the study.
However, when it comes to problems with angina, the study shows that it is possible to avoid patients coming back for new balloon dilations through preventive treatment. According to Felix Böhm, this suggests that we should still aim for complete treatment of all vessels.
“But for those patients where there is some circumstance that makes a complete revascularization complicated, one might choose to wait, since there was no difference in the most serious complications — new heart attack and death,” says Felix Böhm.
If problems with angina occur, these patients can then come back later for a new treatment, according to Felix Böhm.
“A positive finding of the study was that most patients do not come back with new problems, regardless of the treatment strategy chosen. “Nowadays, heart attack patients are so well treated with drugs that it is difficult to find other interventions that provide further significant risk reduction,” says Felix Böhm.
The researchers will now go on to investigate how angina and other quality of life parameters in the patients were affected by the different treatment strategies, as well as health economic aspects of the chosen strategy.
The research was conducted by Uppsala Clinical Research Center (UCR) at Uppala University. The legal sponsor was Karolinska University Hospital. The study was funded by the Swedish Research Council, Hjärt-Lungfonden, Region Stockholm, Abbott and Boston Scientific. The companies had no influence on study design, results analysis or article writing.
Understanding heart function and disease, as well as testing new drugs for heart conditions, has long been a complex and time-consuming task. A promising way to study disease and test new drugs is to use cellular and engineered tissue models in a dish, but existing methods to study heart cell contraction and calcium handling require a good deal of manual work, are prone to errors, and need expensive specialized equipment. There clearly is a critical medical need for a more efficient, accurate, and accessible way to study heart function, using a methodology based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
BeatProfiler, new tool to rapidly analyze heart cell function
Researchers at Columbia Engineering unveiled a groundbreaking new tool today that addresses these challenges head-on. BeatProfiler is a comprehensive software that automates the analysis of heart cell function from video data and is the first system to integrate the analysis of different heart function indicators, such as contractility, calcium handling, and force output into one tool, speeding up the process significantly and reducing the chance for errors. BeatProfiler enabled the researchers to not only distinguish between different diseases and levels of their severity but also to rapidly and objectively test drugs that affect heart function. The study was published on April 8 in IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology.
“This is truly a transformative tool,” said project leader Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, University Professor and the Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Sciences, and Dental Medicine at Columbia. “It’s fast, comprehensive, automated, and compatible with a broad range of computer platforms so it is easily accessible to investigators and clinicians.”
Software is open-source
The team, which included Barry Fine, assistant professor of medicine (in Cardiology) at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, elected not to file a patent application, and instead are offering the AI software as open source, so it can be directly used — for free — by any lab. They believe that this is important for disseminating the results of their research, as well as for getting feedback from users in academic, clinical, and commercial labs that can help the team to further refine the software.
The need to diagnose heart disease quickly and accurately
This project was driven, like much of Vunjak-Novakovic’s research, by a clinical need to diagnose heart diseases more quickly and accurately. This was a project that was several years in the making in which the team added different features piece by piece. While the overarching need was to develop a tool that could better capture the function of the cardiac models that the team was building to study cardiac diseases and assess the efficacy of potential therapeutics, the researchers had an urgent need to quickly and accurately assess the function of their cardiac models in real-time.
As the lab was making more and more cardiac tissues through innovations such as milliPillar and multiorgan tissue models, the increased capabilities of the tissues required the researchers to develop a method to more rapidly quantify the function of cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) and tissues to enable studies exploring genetic cardiomyopathies, cosmic radiation, immune-mediated inflammation, and drug discovery.
Collaborators in software development, machine learning, and more
In the last year and a half, lead author Youngbin Kim and his coauthors developed a graphical user interface (GUI) on top of the code so that biomedical researchers with no coding expertise could easily analyze the data with just a few clicks. This brought together experts in software development (for the GUI development), machine learning (for developing computer vision technology and disease/drug classifiers), signal processing (for processing contractile and calcium signals), engineering (translating pillar deflection on the cardiac platform to mechanical force), and user experience by lab members (to give feedback for improvements in the interface).
The results
The study showed that BeatProfiler could accurately analyze cardiomyocyte function, outperforming existing tools by being faster — up to 50 times in some cases — and more reliable. It detected subtle changes in engineered heat tissue force response that other tools might miss.
“This level of analysis speed and versatility is unprecedented in cardiac research,” said Kim, a PhD candidate in Vunjak-Novakovic’s lab at Columbia Engineering. “Using machine learning, the functional measurements analyzed by BeatProfiler helped us to distinguish between diseased and healthy heart cells with high accuracy and even to classify different cardiac drugs based on how they affect the heart.”
What’s next
The team is working to expand BeatProfiler’s capabilities for new applications in heart research, including a full spectrum of diseases that affect the pumping of the heart, and drug development. To ensure that BeatProfiler can be applied to a wide variety of research questions, they are testing and validating its performance across additional in vitro cardiac models, including different engineered heart tissue models. They are also refining their machine-learning algorithm to extend and generalize its use to a variety of heart diseases and drug effect classification. The long-term goal is to adapt BeatProfiler to pharmaceutical settings to speed up the testing of hundreds of thousands of candidate drugs at once.
We have all lied and been convinced that somebody is lying. Whether it’s your partner keeping a secret from you or even somebody close struggling to keep a surprise secret.
However, research has revealed that some of the things that we believed to be indicative of lying are, well, lies.
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Associate Prof Timothy Luke and colleagues at the University of Gothenburg looked at the past five years of research by 50 international experts on lie detection to truly define how to tell when somebody is lying.
To clarify, when speaking to BBC Science Focus, Prof Luke explained that when they discuss ‘lies’ they don’t mean the white lies that we all tell. Instead, they mean intentional deception.
He said: “The construct of deception is more complicated than a lot of people think,
“There are many kinds of psychological processes that can underlie it. We’re not talking about the same thing. Even superficial things, such as the length and type of communication, matter.”
He said that the core of deception is the intention to mislead another person.
The common misconceptions about lying
While one of the most common beliefs is that avoiding eye contact is a sure sign of a liar, 82% of experts agreed that liars are no more likely to avoid contact than people telling the truth.
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This is worth remembering when you consider that according to the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community, some people who have autism actively avoid eye contact and appear confused and anxious when it occurs.
Pär-Anders Granhag, a professor of psychology at the University of Gothenburg and one of the study’s co-authors said: “the only single issue that a large majority of the experts agree upon is that gaze aversion is not a diagnostic cue for deception.”
Additionally, liars don’t tend to be more nervous than those telling the truth.
Another common belief is that people shifting and constantly touching themselves are likely lying.
This is something experts are still in debate over. While some believe that liars do these things more often, others say that liars actually do them less and others believe that fidgeting doesn’t indicate anything specific, either way.
Prof Aldert Vrij, an expert in the psychology of deception at the University of Portsmouth, spoke to BBC Science Focus about this study and he believes that people thinking that non-verbal lie detection works is the most prevalent misconception about lying and deception.
He added that people trying to use non-verbal lie detection should proceed with caution. This includes famous technology like lie detectors, video analysis, or even looking for changes in vocal pitch.
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So, what is the biggest sign that somebody is lying?
72% of experts believe that a very effective method of identifying a liar is actually in their words.
That is to say, if there is a surprising lack of detail in what you’re being told, the person could be lying.
Prof Vrij agrees with this and added that if the number of details in a story, or complications that occur in the story seem concerning, this is something you should examine more than, say, body language.
He added: “Statement-evidence inconsistency is another cue. A liar’s statements are less consistent with the available evidence than statements from truth tellers.”
It seems that thinking critically about what we’re being told is far more important than the behaviour of the person telling it.
Four years since the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to shut down office spaces around the world, remote and hybrid work seems here to stay.
About a third of US workers who can work from home now do so all the time, according to a Pew Research Center survey from March 2023. (The majority of U.S. workers – 61% – do not have jobs that can be done from home, Pew notes.)
Companies that insist on mandatory full-time attendance at the office do so at their own peril; today’s employees value the autonomy that comes with remote or hybrid work and are increasingly leaving workplaces that forget they have lives outside their 9-to-5.
In March 2022, Microsoft’s second annual Worker Trend Index found that 53% of respondents prioritise their health and well-being over work, “and if unhappy, more than half of Gen Z and millennial respondents said [they’d] seriously consider switching employers over the next year.”
Of course, working from home is not without its drawbacks. Many working women say they feel greater conflicts between their job and family roles while teleworking, and studies have shown increased rates of depression and anxiety during remote work. (Though it’s worth noting, most of the research was conducted while respondents were living through an active pandemic ― stressful in its own right.)
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Still, with increased social support and systems put in place by managers and organisations trained in managing hybrid teams, research also suggests there’s plenty of benefits to working from home. Below, 10 studies and surveys that quantify just how game-changing remote work can be for employees and companies.
Remote workers experience a better work-life balance
Prior to the remote work era, a healthy work-life balance often felt like a pie-in-the-sky goal for workers: nice to idly dream about but never quite attainable. Now, it’s more in reach: Among hybrid workers who are not self-employed, 71% say working for home at least partially helps them balance their work and personal lives, according to the Pew Research survey.
They don’t feel micromanaged, either, despite being out of the office and outside the eyeline of their bosses. The same Pew survey found that employees who work from home at least some of the time (71%) say their manager or supervisor trusts them a “great deal” to get their work done when they’re out of the office.
Working remotely can halve an office worker’s carbon footprint
Hybrid work arrangements help some, too. Working remotely two or four days a week reduced an individual’s emissions by up to 29% compared with office workers.
Working remotely two or four days a week reduced an individual’s emissions by up to 29% compared with office workers.
Remote workers tend to eat more healthy ― up to a point
Research on remote work can be a little contradictory – is it good for your mental health or does it lead to depression? – so in December 2023, British researchers set out to interpret over 1,930 academic papers on teleworking and hybrid work arrangements.
The study, funded in part by the British National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, pointed out some negatives, too. One of the studies reviewed found that 46.9% of employees working from home had put on weight. Another study put that number around 41%. Remote workers also tended to drink and smoke more.
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A downside for workers: Remote employees work longer hours
Though working from home is often equated with laziness and low productivity, the aforementioned British study found that remote workers tend to work longer hours and that their work is more likely to bleed into evenings and weekends. Regrettably, they’re also less likely to take sick time.
Another study – this one tracking more than 60,000 Microsoft employees over the first half of 2020 – found that remote work led to a 10% boost in weekly hours.
One drawback was less collaboration. The Microsoft study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, found that cross-group collaboration dropped by about 25% of the pre-pandemic level.
Less commuting time means more time for work
Remote employees are working more because they’re spending less time stuck in traffic. One 2023 University of Chicago study looked at data from 27 countries and found that remote workers saved 72 minutes in daily commuting time. On average, employees spent about half an hour of that extra time engaged in daily work, which comes out to more than two hours a week.
Since the pandemic, some social scientists have highlighted the downside to eliminating the daily commute: In one 2022 study published in the Organisational Psychology Review, researchers argued that commutes are a source of healthy “liminal space” – a time free of constraints from work and home that gives people a chance to recover from the workday and mentally prepare for reentering the home.
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“Without the ability to mentally shift gears, people experience role blurring, which can lead to stress,” the study’s co-authors wrote in The Conversation. “Without mentally disengaging from work, people can experience burnout.”
Remote or hybrid work options may help with employee retention.
Worried about losing your employees to more enticing offers? Give them the chance to work from home. In 2019, video conferencing company Owl Labs surveyed 1,200 U.S. workers between the ages of 22 and 65 and found that remote workers were 13% more likely to stay in their current job for the next five years than on-site workers.
When asked if the opportunity to work remotely would make them happier, 83% of the survey respondents agreed, while 80% agreed that working remotely would make them feel like their employer cares.
People of colour say they’re able to manage stress better working from home
More Black professionals want flexible work policies than their white, Asian and Latino colleagues, according to a 2021 study conducted by The Future Forum, a research consortium organised by Slack.
Black workers reported a 50% increase in their sense of workplace belonging and a 64% increase in their ability to manage stress when they began working from home.
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In the wake of the pandemic and office closures, many Black Americans spoke of how draining microaggressions in their office environments can be.
“Most of my interactions with my co-workers are very focused on the work that we’re doing, and for me, I appreciate that,” Christina, a Black software engineer, told HuffPost in 2021 after switching to remote work. “Sometimes hearing your co-worker’s opinions on current events are not really the most inclusive opinion. It’s nice that I don’t have to delve into that with them.“
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Black workers reported a 50% increase in their sense of workplace belonging and a 64% increase in their ability to manage stress when they began working from home.
Mothers and caregivers report higher rates of well-being with hybrid work
A March 2023 study out of the University of Melbourne found that women – especially mothers and caregivers – reported improved well-being when they’re given the option to work from home. The researchers posited that such flexibility helps women balance paid employment with unpaid caregiving and household duties, which women disproportionately bear the brunt of.
Remote work has been a benefit for people with disabilities, too
Workers with disabilities appreciate the option to work from home because it reduces transportation and accessibility challenges they face going into the office every day. It also allows them to better manage chronic health conditions.
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“Before COVID-19, work from home was generally not popular, and disabled people had to try hard to get these accommodations,” Meenakshi Das, a software engineer focused on accessibility, told HuffPost in 2021. “It took a pandemic for people to realise how accommodations are low-cost and totally doable, and I hope it stays that way.”
There’s benefits for employers, too. Almost two-thirds of disabled employees believe they were more productive when working from home than at an office or external workplace, according to a 2023 study out of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
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Workers with disabilities appreciate working from home options because it reduces transportation and accessibility challenges they face going into the office.
Employees with flexible schedules tend to have better mental health
Employees at workplaces that prioritize flexibility and higher job security are less likely to experience serious psychological distress or anxiety,according to a March 2024 study published in JAMA Network Open. The study, which polled more than 18,000 U.S. workers, defined “job flexibility” as the ability to adjust their own work schedule to meet personal demands.
Workers with flexible schedules were 13% less likely to experience daily anxiety, 11% less likely to experience weekly anxiety and 9% less likely to experience anxiety several times a year. The researchers also found that increased flexibility and job security led to reduced absenteeism ― a win for everyone involved.
