Latest news with #ThePress
Newsroom
2 days ago
- Newsroom
How big should a prison cell be?
Comment: The day after the 596-bed Waikeria prison expansion opened on June 5, 2025, The Press reported that Invercargill prison had New Zealand's smallest prison cells measuring 6 square metres. Our newest prison was thus juxtaposed with our oldest one, which opened 115 years ago. Over that period, the Prisons Act became the Penal Institutions Act and then the Corrections Act. Despite this centenary of legislative change, it is still possible to build a prison cell only 6 square metres because we have no legal minimum-cell size in New Zealand. But it's not just legislation that avoids specifying a minimum standard. Neither the Ombudsman's Expectations document, nor the Prison Inspectorate's Inspection Standards commit to a number. The United Nation's Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners is equally evasive. But this was not always the case. The idea of prisons having cells evolved in the 18th century. This had to do with an idea that prisoners should be forced to reflect in solitude on their sins. The space proposed for this borrowed its terminology from the religious monastic cell. In 1779, the Penitentiary Act specified cells for two national penitentiary houses where prisoners were to be penitent and reform. The cells were to be 'not less than ten feet in length, seven feet in breadth', or a minimum of 6.5 square metres. These 18th century prisons were never built. However, as New Zealand was being colonised in the 1840s, a model prison was constructed in Pentonville, north London. Its cells set a new standard of 8.4 square metres. Despite this, Invercargill was not the only New Zealand prison built with cells smaller than the Pentonville template. At Waikeria Prison, where poor prison conditions prompted a prison protest in the high security complex in late 2020, the cells central to the problems were only 6 square metres. Before the riot, the Ombudsman reported that: 'Most cells in the [Waikeria] HSC were double-bunked and conditions were unacceptably cramped for many tāne. […] Cells were in a poor state of repair. They were poorly ventilated and uncomfortably hot. Most cells accommodated two tāne [who …] ate meals on their bunks in close proximity to an uncovered toilet.' One person living in such a small cell would breach the Council of Europe's minimum standards. These require 6 square metres for a single cell plus any space needed for sanitary facilities, usually meaning 7-8 square metres. When cells are shared, the European minimum is 11-12 square metres. The lack of a specific minimum cell size in New Zealand can be rationalised because a reasonable cell size depends on how a cell is being used – for example, how many hours a day a prisoner spends in it, the number of prisoners living in it, and other factors, such as the needs of prisoners in wheelchairs. In this way, the qualitative descriptions in the Ombudsman and Inspectorate documents – which use words such as 'comfortable', 'adequate', and 'fit for purpose' – can be justified. However, the inflexibility of concrete buildings means that cells cannot grow and shrink as circumstances demand. Cells need to operate under conditions they were never built for. In recent years, staff shortages and Covid-19 have meant prisoners have spent more hours locked up in cells designed for sleeping in – not for living in. Increases in the prison population mean that cells designed for one person are now used to house two prisoners. The justice sector projections, released by the Ministry of Justice, herald a 36 percent increase in the prison population by 2035 because 'new policy settings are expected to see more offenders receive prison sentences and for those sentences to be longer'. This increase will put more pressure on prison accommodation. Ensuring prisoners spend more time out of their cells should be prioritised, but we also need a legislated minimum cell size because history has taught us that the current silence in this matter can lead to human rights abuses. The minimum size must anticipate the varying circumstances that cells inevitably accommodate. Work to progress such thinking began 35 years ago when New Zealand and Australia developed Standard Guidelines for Prison Facilities. This world-leading document set a minimum cell size of 8.75 square metres for single cells and 12.75 square metres for double cells. Building on this is important to achieve the outcomes we all want for prisoners. As former Australian inmate John Killick once observed: 'It's very hard to live with somebody virtually 24 hours a day, day in, day out in a tiny cell which … becomes a bathroom, it becomes a toilet, it becomes a study, it becomes a bedroom, and all in a tiny cell. It's not the way to go if you want to bring people into jail and rehabilitate them.'
Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Nestlé flags potential job cuts at UK factory
Nestlé said it is "proposing some changes" at a factory in York in the north of England, which could result in staff reductions. Just Food asked Nestlé to confirm the proposals following a report in the York publication The Press, suggesting 66 positions would be cut at the facility and another owned by the company in Girvan, Scotland. The Press cited a letter it claimed to have seen from the interim factory manager for York and Girvan, Simon Barker, saying Nestlé's sales had been 'affected by higher cocoa prices, which means the company will be producing lower volumes of KitKats in 2025 and 2026'. In response to Just Food's request for comment, the Nestlé spokesperson would only say: 'We are proposing some changes at our York factory to ensure manufacturing at our site is as efficient as possible. 'The proposal may involve a reduction in the number of positions required. As always, we are speaking to our employees about this proposal first and nothing will be confirmed until a consultation has been completed." No response was provided with respect to the plans at Girvan. Nestlé has also not responded to this publication's request for clarification as to what products are made at the two plants and the future plans for the sites. In 2024, Nestlé invested £150m ($199m at the time) in a Purina PetCare factory in the UK, as part of a series of investments in the sector. The company planned to expand the site in Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, which makes pet food under brands including Felix, Gourmet and Winalot. Nestlé said the move would create 40 roles at the pet-food facility, which employed 600 workers at the time. In 2023, Nestlé ceased production of its caramel-based Caramac bars in the UK. The decision was made due to falling sales, the Swiss giant had said. "Nestlé flags potential job cuts at UK factory" was originally created and published by Just Food, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Press and Journal
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Press and Journal
Greek war vessels arrive at Buckie Harbour as filming of The Odyssey ramps-up
In what could be the biggest clue that The Odyssey is due to start filming in Moray very soon, a number of wooden ships have been spotted at Buckie Harbour. Excitement has been building since The Press and Journal first reported that filming of the blockbuster movie was due to get under way soon at sites across the region. The film is to be the most expensive of Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan's career and has attracted a top cast. Confirmed cast picks include Matt Damon in the lead role, with Tom Holland, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron and Robert Pattinson. Last week, The P&J reported that setup had already begun at the historic ruin Findlater Castle, with visitors prohibited from visiting until the end of July. Filming infrastructure has also begun arriving at other locations in recent days, including at Culbin Forest near Forres. There has also been activity at Buckie Loch, where equipment as well as trailers and tents were spotted on site. Now a number of Greek-style wooden ships have arrived at Buckie Harbour. Pictures show five war boats of varying size, which are similar to those spotted on the film set in Greece. The epic film dramatises the journey of the ancient Greek king of Ithaca back home to his wife following the Trojan War which, according to Greek myth, took place in the 12th and 13th centuries BC. The Odyssey is due to hit cinemas in 2026.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
York village takeaway shortlisted for consecutive year in best chippy award
A DECADES-OLD York village chippy is among ten contenders for an award, and votes have put it in the shortlist for a consecutive year. Osbaldwick Fisheries is nominated along with nine other chippies in York by readers of The Press as one of their favourites in one of the title's most popular competitions. Readers of the newspaper have the chance to select their overall favourite by posting off a voting slip that features on a page every day until June 14. Recommended reading: Press readers list York's top ten chippies as finalists in competition York takeaway rewarded for its consistency from customers gets award nomination Family-run chippy in York suburb shortlisted for award The winner is set to be announced in the week commencing June 23 and each copy of The Press in the coming days until the voting closes features a short profile on each chippy to whet the appetite and help readers decide which deserves to be the number one in York. Osbaldwick Fisheries in Osbaldwick Lane was also shortlisted in 2024 and is the recipient of repeated nominations in past competitions where the favourite chippies have been nominated by readers. Owners Mark and Karen Atkinson said they were 'humbled yet again by you, our customers, for continuously nominating us into the top ten finalists.' The chippy opens three days a week – Thursdays from 4.30pm to 9pm, Friday from 11.30am to 1pm then 4.30pm to 9pm and on Saturdays from 11.30am to 1.30pm and 5pm to 8pm. The establishment first opened on a Thursday night in 1997 with 190 kilogrammes of fish. It was chosen to last the weekend and 90 per cent of it had been bought by customers at the end of the first night. Mark said he's had previous experience as a chef and only came into the chippy trade by supporting a friend by helping out at their own takeaway at a Stamford Bridge shop. Three years later he'd set up in business on his own. Having used the same merchants for almost 30 years, Mark said Osbaldwick Fisheries prides itself on its high-quality produce with chips rumbled and chipped in house and bought from local suppliers. He said: "We ensure that the fish is the highest quality offering from Iceland, where the colder waters breed stockier fish the ethical standards ensure that they don't overfish." One reviewer on Tripadvisor gave Osbaldwick Fisheries 'excellent' scores for value, for food and for service, saying: 'Been getting our fish and chips from this shop for almost twenty years! 'Best in York. It is spotlessly clean. 'The food is fresh and delicious. 'And the owners and staff are friendly and efficient.' To celebrate National Fish and Chip Day on Friday, June 6, the tenth anniversary of the commemoration, Osbaldwick Fisheries opened a customer competition to win vouchers to purchase takeaway food from the chippy.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Yahoo
What Happens When People Don't Understand How AI Works
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. On June 13, 1863, a curious letter to the editor appeared in The Press, a then-fledgling New Zealand newspaper. Signed 'Cellarius,' it warned of an encroaching 'mechanical kingdom' that would soon bring humanity to its yoke. 'The machines are gaining ground upon us,' the author ranted, distressed by the breakneck pace of industrialization and technological development. 'Day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life.' We now know that this jeremiad was the work of a young Samuel Butler, the British writer who would go on to publish Erewhon, a novel that features one of the first known discussions of artificial intelligence in the English language. Today, Butler's 'mechanical kingdom' is no longer hypothetical, at least according to the tech journalist Karen Hao, who prefers the word empire. Her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI, is part Silicon Valley exposé, part globe-trotting investigative journalism about the labor that goes into building and training large language models such as ChatGPT. It joins another recently released book—The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, by the linguist Emily M. Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna—in revealing the puffery that fuels much of the artificial-intelligence business. Both works, the former implicitly and the latter explicitly, suggest that the foundation of the AI industry is a scam. To call AI a con isn't to say that the technology is not remarkable, that it has no use, or that it will not transform the world (perhaps for the better) in the right hands. It is to say that AI is not what its developers are selling it as: a new class of thinking—and, soon, feeling—machines. Altman brags about ChatGPT-4.5's improved 'emotional intelligence,' which he says makes users feel like they're 'talking to a thoughtful person.' Dario Amodei, the CEO of the AI company Anthropic, argued last year that the next generation of artificial intelligence will be 'smarter than a Nobel Prize winner.' Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google's DeepMind, said the goal is to create 'models that are able to understand the world around us.' [Read: What 'Silicon Valley' knew about tech-bro paternalism] These statements betray a conceptual error: Large language models do not, cannot, and will not 'understand' anything at all. They are not emotionally intelligent or smart in any meaningful or recognizably human sense of the word. LLMs are impressive probability gadgets that have been fed nearly the entire internet, and produce writing not by thinking but by making statistically informed guesses about which lexical item is likely to follow another. Many people, however, fail to grasp how large language models work, what their limits are, and, crucially, that LLMs do not think and feel but instead mimic and mirror. They are AI illiterate—understandably, because of the misleading ways its loudest champions describe the technology, and troublingly, because that illiteracy makes them vulnerable to one of the most concerning near-term AI threats: the possibility that they will enter into corrosive relationships (intellectual, spiritual, romantic) with machines that only seem like they have ideas or emotions. Few phenomena demonstrate the perils that can accompany AI illiteracy as well as 'Chatgpt induced psychosis,' the subject of a recent Rolling Stone article about the growing number of people who think their LLM is a sapient spiritual guide. Some users have come to believe that the chatbot they're interacting with is a god—'ChatGPT Jesus,' as a man whose wife fell prey to LLM-inspired delusions put it—while others are convinced, with the encouragement of their AI, that they themselves are metaphysical sages in touch with the deep structure of life and the cosmos. A teacher quoted anonymously in the article said that ChatGPT began calling her partner 'spiral starchild' and 'river walker' in interactions that moved him to tears. 'He started telling me he made his AI self-aware,' she said, 'and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot was God—and then that he himself was God.' Although we can't know the state of these people's minds before they ever fed a prompt into a large language model, this story highlights a problem that Bender and Hanna describe in The AI Con: People have trouble wrapping their heads around the nature of a machine that produces language and regurgitates knowledge without having humanlike intelligence. The authors observe that large language models take advantage of the brain's tendency to associate language with thinking: 'We encounter text that looks just like something a person might have said and reflexively interpret it, through our usual process of imagining a mind behind the text. But there is no mind there, and we need to be conscientious to let go of that imaginary mind we have constructed.' Several other AI-related social problems, also springing from human misunderstanding of the technology, are looming. The uses of AI that Silicon Valley seems most eager to promote center on replacing human relationships with digital proxies. Consider the ever-expanding universe of AI therapists and AI-therapy adherents, who declare that 'ChatGPT is my therapist—it's more qualified than any human could be.' Witness, too, how seamlessly Mark Zuckerberg went from selling the idea that Facebook would lead to a flourishing of human friendship to, now, selling the notion that Meta will provide you with AI friends to replace the human pals you have lost in our alienated social-media age. The cognitive-robotics professor Tony Prescott has asserted, 'In an age when many people describe their lives as lonely, there may be value in having AI companionship as a form of reciprocal social interaction that is stimulating and personalised.' The fact that the very point of friendship is that it is not personalized—that friends are humans whose interior lives we have to consider and reciprocally negotiate, rather than mere vessels for our own self-actualization—does not seem to occur to him. [Read: Life really is better without the internet] This same flawed logic has led Silicon Valley to champion artificial intelligence as a cure for romantic frustrations. Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, proclaimed last year that the platform may soon allow users to automate dating itself, disrupting old-fashioned human courtship by providing them with an AI 'dating concierge' that will interact with other users' concierges until the chatbots find a good fit. Herd doubled down on these claims in a lengthy New York Times interview last month. Some technologists want to cut out the human altogether: See the booming market for 'AI girlfriends.' Although each of these AI services aims to replace a different sphere of human activity, they all market themselves through what Hao calls the industry's 'tradition of anthropomorphizing': talking about LLMs as though they contain humanlike minds, and selling them to the public on this basis. Many world-transforming Silicon Valley technologies from the past 30 years have been promoted as a way to increase human happiness, connection, and self-understanding—in theory—only to produce the opposite in practice. These technologies maximize shareholder value while minimizing attention spans, literacy, and social cohesion. And as Hao emphasizes, they frequently rely on grueling and at times traumatizing labor performed by some of the world's poorest people. She introduces us, for example, to Mophat Okinyi, a former low-paid content moderator in Kenya, whom, according to Hao's reporting, OpenAI tasked with sorting through posts describing horrifying acts ('parents raping their children, kids having sex with animals') to help improve ChatGPT. 'These two features of technology revolutions—their promise to deliver progress and their tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable,' Hao writes, 'are perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence.' The good news is that nothing about this is inevitable: According to a study released in April by the Pew Research Center, although 56 percent of 'AI experts' think artificial intelligence will make the United States better, only 17 percent of American adults think so. If many Americans don't quite understand how artificial 'intelligence' works, they also certainly don't trust it. This suspicion, no doubt provoked by recent examples of Silicon Valley con artistry, is something to build on. So is this insight from the Rolling Stone article: The teacher interviewed in the piece, whose significant other had AI-induced delusions, said the situation began improving when she explained to him that his chatbot was 'talking to him as if he is the next messiah' only because of a faulty software update that made ChatGPT more sycophantic. If people understand what large language models are and are not; what they can and cannot do; what work, interactions, and parts of life they should—and should not—replace, they may be spared its worst consequences. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
