UK probes 34 porn sites under new age-check rules
Ofcom said it was formally probing whether the companies - 8579 LLC, AVS Group Ltd, Kick Online Entertainment S.A. and Trendio Ltd - had "highly effective" age verification checks in place to protect children from encountering pornography across the websites.
These companies have been prioritised based on the risk of harm posed by the services they operate and their user numbers, the watchdog added.
Britain's Online Safety Act, passed in 2023 by the previous Conservative government, sets tougher standards for platforms to tackle criminal activity, with an emphasis on child protection and illegal content.
The legislation requires pornography sites and other platforms hosting harmful content to implement robust age verification systems to prevent children from accessing them.
Ofcom has the power to fine a firm up to 18 million pounds ($23.84 million) or 10% of its qualifying worldwide revenue, or block non-compliant sites.
The Labour government has said the law is a vital tool to protect children online, saying it strikes the right balance between safety and freedom of expression.
Populist Reform UK party, led by Nigel Farage, has vowed to repeal the act, calling it a "massive overreach" that threatens free speech.
In response, technology secretary Peter Kyle accused Farage of siding with "people like Jimmy Savile" - one of the UK's most prolific sexual predators - by opposing measures designed to protect children.
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The Independent
22 minutes ago
- The Independent
Dubbing tame pensioners ‘terrorists' makes a farce out of the Terrorism Act and freedom of speech
How upsetting for JD Vance to find himself holidaying in a country where terrorism rages out of control and where an autocratic leader orders people to be grabbed off the streets for voicing even the mildest of dissent. We know the US vice president cares about these things. Only last week, he warned that the UK must not go down a 'very dark path' of losing free speech. And a few months ago, he spoke of his concern at the 'backslide from conscience rights' in Britain. So we can only imagine his dismay over breakfast in the Cotswolds to read of the rounding up of hundreds of mainly older people for daring to scrawl a few words on a piece of cardboard. And how to calibrate his alarm after learning that they were all suspected terrorists? That's right – literally hundreds of terrorists roaming the streets barely 90 minutes up the M40 from the agreeable country house in the village of Dean where he has come with his family for a bit of R&R. His officials will doubtless brief him as to what on earth is going on. They will tell him that there is a group called Palestine Action, which has been going around mounting vigorous protests at what they view as the Starmer government's support for the situation in Gaza. The protests have included spray-painting military planes on an RAF base. Vance will not like the sound of these people. But even he might concede that they may be acting out of conscience, and that, as he argued only in February, conscience rights should be protected. How would he react to being told that these elderly protestors had also been labelled terrorists in a piece of rushed legislation last month? And that the effect of the new law meant that it was now a terror offence to even voice support for the banned group? Surely he's with George Orwell: 'If liberty means anything, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear?' The background to this outbreak of terror on the streets of London? More than 500 well-meaning protesters were arrested under section three of the Terrorism Act 2000 for holding a placard indicating support for Palestine Action. Around half of them were aged 60 and above, including almost 100 people who are in their seventies – and 15 of whom are in their eighties. Never mind free speech, it is difficult to imagine a bigger waste of stretched police time than deploying thousands of officers to haul harmless old people off the streets. And it is straightforwardly bonkers to order such draconian action where the entire prison system is close to collapse. And yet prison governors were ordered to trigger 'capacity gold command' at the prospect of an influx of demonstrators swamping available cells. And may god help the court system as it struggles to process these pesky protesting pensioners. Only recently, Ministry of Justice figures show that there is currently a backlog of more than 76,000 cases in the Crown Court and 310,304 outstanding cases in the magistrates' court. Now, it is perfectly reasonable to deplore the behaviour of Palestine Action – especially when they inflict costly damage. But there are already numerous laws in place to deal with such criminal behaviour – and the protestors well understand they could well spend a lengthy stretch inside for acting on their conscience. That doesn't deter them. You may similarly deprecate the group's beliefs. But it is perfectly reasonable to believe that Israel is, in fact, committing genocide in Gaza and vehemently to object to the UK assisting in that mission in any way at all. It is worth reading a lengthy and densely argued recent op-ed column in The New York Times by Omer Bartov, professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University. 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The Independent
22 minutes ago
- The Independent
Met volunteer officer had 12-year-old perform sex act in public, court told
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Scotsman
23 minutes ago
- Scotsman
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Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... A BOOK Festival isn't always about the people who attend, sometimes it's about the people who are absent. The absence of Ukrainian writer, poet and activist Victoria Amelina, who died in July 2023 in a Russian missile strike, was keenly felt on Monday at Remembering Victoria Amelina when Scottish journalist and writer Jen Stout and UK-based Ukrainian historian Olesya Khromeychuk joined forces to talk about Amelina's final book. Olesya Khromeychuk and Jen Stout joined forcels to pay tribute to Ukrainian activist Victoria Amelina | Contributed Looking at Women, Looking at War was about 60% finished when she was killed and her editors, who included her partner, decided to publish it in its incomplete state, a collection of fragments of diary, memoir and testimony, because, as Khromeychuk says: 'That's what war does to life.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Amelina had been a novelist but retrained to become a war crimes investigator, committed to hearing the stories of ordinary people and gathering them as material for future war crimes litigation. Khromeychuk described the book, which won the prestigious Orwell Prize in June, as 'the sort of book that turns a reader into a witness'. Stout read a particularly poignant paragraph in which Amelina describes visiting Nuremberg with her son and hearing him say to his cousin: 'This room is important, we'll try Russians here one day'. Amelina mentions the word 'impunity' in the context of Russia's conduct both post-second world war and in contemporary Ukraine. That chimes with a comment made on Sunday evening by barrister and specialist in international law Philippe Sands, who described impunity as 'the word of our times'. His latest book, 38 Londres Street, documents the extraordinary events around the arrest and attempted extradition of Chile's former dictator Augusto Pinochet from the UK in 1998, the first time that a former political leader was arrested in another country for crimes committed in his own country while he was president. He said there are 'parallels of impunity between Pinochet and [some] current presidents around the world who are very careful where they travel to… This is a moment which is very alive right now.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad At the time, Sands acted on behalf of Human Rights Watch in the battle to extradite Pinochet, but said that 10 years of dogged research for the book revealed far more about the situation than he had guessed at. By tracking down and interviewing figures like Pinochet's chief negotiator, and the woman who was his interpreter while he was in the UK, he was able to confirm that a deal was struck between Chile and Tony Blair's government whereby Pinochet – after some schooling on how to mimic the symptoms of dementia – was returned to Chile on medical grounds in 2000. Make sure you keep up to date with Arts and Culture news from across Scotland by signing up to our free newsletter here. The book also reveals Pinochet's friendship with former Nazi SS Officer Walter Rauff, the man responsible for the invention of the mobile gas chamber which claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Not only was he granted political asylum in Chile, where he lived from 1958 until his death in 1984, he is also now understood to have played a role in the 'disappearance' of many hundreds of political opponents of the Pinochet regime. Just when one was starting to feel that a little bit of light relief might be welcome, David Baddiel arrived at the Book Festival to talk about his memoir, My Family. At the heart of the book is the extraordinary story of his mother Sarah's long-running and not-very-secret affair with a golf memorabilia salesman, which his father resolutely refused to acknowledge. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad David Baddiel | Contributed At his mother's funeral, Baddiel explained, many people told him she was wonderful, but for him delving into the complexities of her life was an act of 'reclaiming' the real person.
