James Ball is the Global Editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which last month launched a two-year project looking into Russian infiltration of the UK elite and in London’s role in enabling overseas corruption
In October, a panel of 21 experts from across the world gathered for the first of what promised to be a series of reports assessing readiness for pandemics. ‘Infectious diseases know no borders,’ warned the Global Health Security Index. ‘So all countries must prioritise and exercise the capabilities required to prevent, detect and rapidly respond
Experts have a get-out clause of which politicians can only dream when they are speaking from the podium at press briefings. While ministers are expected to be able to answer questions on any matter, there and then, and have details at their fingertips, advisors can escape most tricky questions with a simple few words: that’s outside
If there is hope, it lies in contact tracing. The countries that have successfully managed Covid-19 outbreaks and reopened without second peaks (at least so far) have done so through extensive track and trace infrastructure to prevent recurring outbreaks, sometimes after instituting general lockdown. The UK plan is no different: for weeks, ministers have been
Not much about Boris Johnson’s Sunday night television address was clear. The one definite new measure – one which will shape coverage for weeks to come – is the UK’s new ‘COVID Alert Level’, a five-stage measure that the prime minister said would be determined primarily by ‘the R’ – the rate at which the
Newspapers aren’t the place to debate expert advice on a crisis. Advisors advise, ministers decide. We should keep politics out of science. These three cries – and numerous variations upon them – have become common refrains as the UK’s increasingly fractious debate on the lockdown, the science behind it, and the best way to lift
Usually, if a government is reported to be working on a new policy reliant on sweeping new – largely untested – surveillance technology, we’re in the world of sci-fi or dystopias. At a minimum, we would expect the rollout of state surveillance to be the central issue at play, the focus of debate and objections,
If you’ve ever wanted to own a barrel of oil, today might be your lucky day – for the first time in modern history, there are traders across the world who’ll let you have it for free. On Monday evening the price of oil futures plummeted, with one key oil price in the USA hitting
We don’t know if our model for estimating immigration into the United Kingdom works. It’s a long-standing dataset, produced by the Office for National Statistics – one of the best at what it does in the world. The model measures people entering and leaving the UK, something tracked at ports and airports. It’s a model
There is a concept at least as old as computing itself — Charles Babbage, the father of the field, expressed the sentiment, if not the words themselves — ‘garbage in, garbage out’. The idea is not a complicated one: no matter how advanced the calculation machine, no matter how good the statistical model, no matter
Anyone looking at the Independent’s front page the other day – or at least its electronic mock-up, made primarily for social media and TV paper reviews – will have seen a bombshell of a headline: ‘Illegal Facebook spending “won 2016 vote for Leave”’. That’s a seismic claim if it can be confirmed: the once-in-a-generation vote
On 25 April 2005, Jawed Karim sent an email to his friends announcing the launch of a new video site — intended for dating — called youtube.com. Within 18 months, the site was being used to view 100 million videos a day. Last year it had more than a billion users, watching five billion videos
