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Wales Online
a day ago
- Politics
- Wales Online
Reform UK gets first Carmarthenshire councillor after huge by-election win
Reform UK gets first Carmarthenshire councillor after huge by-election win 'All I kept hearing was that people felt they weren't being listened to', said Michelle Beer, Carmarthenshire Council's newest councillor Michelle Beer (centre), who is Reform UK's first county councillor in Carmarthenshire (Image: courtesy of Michelle Beer ) Reform UK has planted a flag in south west Wales after candidate Michelle Beer comfortably won a council by-election in Carmarthenshire. She will represent Llanelli's Lliedi ward after comfortably securing first place out of eight candidates. She polled 568 votes, while Labour's Andrew Bragoli came second with 312 votes. Councillor Beer will be the first Reform UK county councillor in Carmarthenshire and neighbouring Swansea, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion. The by-election was held following the death of the unaffiliated Independent Lliedi councillor Anthony Leyshon. Councillor Beer said the result hadn't been too much of a surprise although she stressed she hadn't been complacent. "I knew the support for Reform in that area had been very strong," she said. "We did face a lot of opposition, and we took nothing for granted." Stay informed on Carms news by signing up to our newsletter here The 47-year-old said she hadn't stood for public office before but had supported her husband, Gareth, also of Reform UK, who came second in the Llanelli seat in last year's general election. She said: "The opportunity came up and members said to me, 'Michelle, you would be the ideal candidate.' I love working with people and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to people. "We started door-knocking quite early. All I kept hearing was that people felt they weren't being listened to, and not enough was being done. They felt they had seen a deterioration. We formed our messages from there." She said this feeling of not being listened was directed at national and local politicians. Asked what she knew about how county councils were run, she said she had an idea and expected to get up to speed quickly. She added that she'd had a stint working for a district council in New Zealand when she and her husband lived there. Asked if she felt council tax was too high in Carmarthenshire, she said: "It can't keep going up. I feel there is a lot of wastage. You can look for better value in procurement for example, just like in business." She added that she did not advocate services being cut. Llanelli town centre (Image: WalesOnline/Rob Browne ) Reform UK had a lot of success in English council elections at the beginning of May, and leader Nigel Farage suggested that council diversity, equity and inclusion officers in any Reform UK-run authorities should look for another job. Was this a message that councillor Beer sought to bring to Carmarthenshire? "Not as a lone (Reform) councillor," she said. "But maybe something looking ahead to 2027 (the next council elections)." She said her priority was to respond to the needs of Lliedi residents, whether that concerns fixing potholes or ensuring bins were collected. Councillor Beer grew up in Llanelli where her parents, who had moved to the area from Hong Kong, ran a takeaway restaurant. After college she had different jobs, including running a marketing business. Later she attended and graduated from a Bible school, and then worked supporting her husband's business. The couple have four children - two boys and two girls. Councillor Beer lives in Kidwelly, around eight miles west of Llanelli. Asked if that had given her cause for any concern, given that she had been aiming to win a Llanelli seat, she said: "I travel to Llanelli almost every day, I know it very well. I would class it as my home town. I consider myself a Llanelli lass." Second-placed Mr Bragoli, a Llanelli town councillor, said he wished councillor Beer good luck. "She won, and I hope she sticks to her promises," said the Labour candidate. "I wasn't even a close second. If it wasn't for my local popularity and my experience being a union rep at Trostre (steelworks) I think it could have been worse." Asked for his opinion on why he thought that was the case, Mr Bragoli said the UK Labour Government's decision last year to means-test the winter fuel allowance for pensioners was, in his view, a "killer", politically-speaking. Last week, following mounting political pressure, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer signalled a change in the threshold to allow more pensioners to qualify for the payment of up to £300. Mr Bragoli credited Sir Keir for being "a bigger man" in changing direction but said the damage had been done. He said if the Lliedi by-election had happened 12 months ago he reckoned he would have been "a shoo-in". Carmarthenshire Council is run by a Plaid Cymru-Independent coalition. Lliedi is represented by two councillors, unaffiliated Independent Cllr Rob James and now Cllr Beer. The result of the May 29 by-election was: Article continues below Michelle May Beer - Reform UK - 568 Andrew Bargoli - Welsh Labour - 312 Sharon Burdess - Independent - 116 Jonathan Edward Burree - Welsh Liberal Democrats - 41 Wayne Erasmus - Gwlad, Wales Can Be Better – 9 Alison Leyshon - Independent - 86 Taylor Reynolds - Plaid Cymru, The Party of Wales - 107 Richard Williams - Welsh Conservative Party Candidate – 93 The turnout was 33.36%.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Profits recover at Magners maker C&C Group
Beer and cider maker C&C Group has seen profits rebound after progressing with turnaround plans. The company, which makes Magners and Tennent's, saw shares lift higher on Wednesday as a result. C&C reported a group operating profit of 45.8 million euro (£38.5 million) for the year to February 28, recovering from a 84.4 million euro (£70.9 million) loss a year earlier. The group said this was driven by its renewed growth strategy, after criticism from some investors over its performance in recent years. Bosses said the company are 'focusing on the basics' as part of this, with plans for further investment in its core brands and by simplifying processes and making operations more efficient. C&C said its efficiency drive has seen it close, or start the process to close, five depots in order to streamline its distribution network. The group said it is also looking to simplify its corporate structure by heavily reducing the group's roughly 30 separate legal entities. It came as the company reported net revenues of 1.66 billion euro (£1.4 billion) for the past year. This represented a marginal improvement on the previous year, despite poor weather last summer weighing down on demand for cider. Roger White, who took over as boss of the firm earlier this year, was optimistic for the rest of the year amid increased investment. He said: 'Looking ahead, year to date trading is encouraging. 'With the key summer trading period ahead, we are executing our plans for the year, supporting our customers, investing in innovation and brand-building, people, and systems, whilst continuing to simplify the business and control costs. 'We remain focused on building a solid platform from which we can maximise the potential of the group. 'We are developing plans to grow sustainably whilst delivering on our financial targets, creating increased long-term shareholder value.'
The Herald Scotland
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Ministers urged to 'come clean' over Sheku Bayoh inquiry
His appointment will see costs spiral further, with taxpayers already facing a bill of more than £23million for the long-running inquiry. Scottish Conservative shadow justice secretary Liam Kerr MSP said: 'Huge amounts of taxpayers' money have already been spent on this inquiry and this latest appointment will clearly add further expense. 'Given the extreme pressures on public finances the SNP need to come clean about what is truly happening with the Sheku Bayoh inquiry and guarantee answers will be delivered for all involved.' READ MORE: Former justice secretary urges MSPs to back Regan's prostitution crackdown bill Scotland 'can lead the way' with new specialist court to prosecute sex crimes MSPs to examine organised crime and overcrowding in drugs in prisons investigation Mr Beer's fee has not been disclosed. The inquiry is examining the circumstances surrounding Mr Bayoh's death in Fife in 2015 - and whether race was a factor. The 31-year-old died after being restrained by police officers in Kirkcaldy. The inquiry was plunged into turmoil last month after the Scottish Police Federation questioned the chairman's impartiality. Lord Bracadale is now considering his role after it emerged he had five meetings with Mr Bayoh's grieving family. Jason Beer KC has been hired by the Sheku Bayoh inquiry (Image: Jordan Pettitt) Mr Beer has worked on the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, the inquiry into Lucy Letby, the nurse convicted of murdering seven babies and the attempted murder of seven other infants, as well as those into the Grenfell disaster in London and the death of Dawn Sturgess in Salisbury. He is to lead the work on the procedural hearing on June 12 and 13 which will examine whether Lord Bracadale's conduct during the inquiry has been fair. Mr Beer joins Angela Grahame KC and Laura Thomson KC as senior counsel. The Scottish Police Federation (SPF) last month intimated a petition for a judicial review of the inquiry after announcing it had "lost confidence" in the proceedings. It is understood that Lord Bracadale, who has helmed the inquiry since 2020, will consider whether he should step down from the role in the aftermath of the hearing. Should he do so, it would result in significant delays to the inquiry's work. Since the statutory inquiry began in November 2020, it has cost more than £23.7 million. The inquiry has completed the process of gathering evidence and was due to hear closing submissions. After the concerns surrounding Lord Bracadale were first raised, Sadif Ashraf, the solicitor to the inquiry, wrote to all parties in March, pointing out the engagement of families was "crucial to the effectiveness" of the inquiry. He stressed that if the inquiry failed to obtain and retain the confidence of the families, its effectiveness would be prejudiced. Mr Ashraf said since the start of the inquiry's work, Lord Bracadale had publicly expressed his intention to keep the families "at the heart" of the inquiry, and considered it "reasonable and appropriate" to meet members of the Bayoh families "from time to time" to reassure them, maintain their confidence in its work, and encourage them to participate fully. The first meeting took place in November 2021, followed by further meetings in April and November 2022, and January and December last year. Mr Ashraf's letter noted the purpose of the meetings was "to address issues relating to the welfare of family members as the inquiry progressed", and its impact on them. "The chair made it clear that anything of an evidential nature would require to be examined in evidence in the inquiry," Mr Ashraf said. Chairs of other public inquiries have previously met bereaved families including those affected by the Covid pandemic in Scotland and the Grenfell fire. But David Kennedy, general secretary of the SPF, said last month: "These unusual developments have left many core participants feeling that the process no longer appears transparent and open, with all core participants having been treated equally." Earlier this week it was revealed that the cost of public inquiries in Scotland since 2007 had risen to £230m. The figures, collated by the Scottish Parliament Information Centre, found the costs of the Eljamel Inquiry had already grown to £1m, despite not having taken evidence yet. Some £666,949 of this was spent on staff, while £316,035 was spent on external legal costs. The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, which was announced in 2014 to investigate the abuse of children in care, remains the most expensive in the country, with a current cost of £95.3m. The Scottish Covid-19 Inquiry, which is examining the Government's response to the pandemic, was announced in 202l and has already cost £34m. The costs of the ongoing Scottish Hospitals Inquiry, which is examining issues with the construction of the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow and the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People in Edinburgh, announced in 2019, have risen to £23.6m. The completed Edinburgh Trams Inquiry cost £13.1m. The figures were published as Holyrood's finance committee investigates the cost-effectiveness of public inquiries. MSPs will probe the role of legal firms and whether they have a vested interest in inquiries running on for years past their original finish date. A spokeswoman for the Sheku Bayoh Inquiry said: 'The Scottish Police Federation has raised concerns about Lord Bracadale meeting with the families of Mr Bayoh. Loss of confidence by a core participant in the fairness of the conduct and procedure of the Inquiry by Lord Bracadale is a matter of concern. 'The Inquiry will hold a public hearing in June on the fairness of the conduct and procedure adopted by Lord Bracadale in meeting with the families. Submissions are invited from all core participants.' 'The Inquiry is delighted to welcome Jason Beer KC to the team. Mr Beer has a wealth of valuable experience across public inquiries and we look forward to working with him in the weeks to come.' The Scottish Government was approached for comment.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Yahoo
Terrifying Survey Claims ChatGPT Has Overtaken Wikipedia
A striking graph, which went viral on Reddit last week, shows the purported percentage of internet users visiting OpenAI's blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT overtaking Wikipedia over the past two years. The data, compiled by UK-based market research company GWI, shows a steady decline in the proportion of users visiting Wikipedia worldwide, excluding China. In less than a year following its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT appears to have surpassed the online encyclopedia, in a striking reversal of fortunes. If the data — which is based on survey responses and not site visits — is to be believed, it's a good reason to be concerned about the reliability of information people are seeking out online. While Wikipedia has never been known to be an infallible source free of bias or inaccuracies, generative AI has proven to be far more unreliable, thanks to widespread hallucinations and biases present in its training data. And while Wikipedia is built on prominently displayed citations, AI systems like ChatGPT often struggle to explain where their info is coming from, even cooking up fake references wholesale. There are also serious questions of ethics and fair use. Wikipedia has an army of over 49 million human editors who ensure accuracy across 64 million articles worldwide. In contrast, it remains infamously unknown what exactly the large language models supporting ChatGPT were trained on — but it more than likely contains data pulled straight from Wikipedia, which OpenAI is now profiting off. ChatGPT has seen a "36 percent rise in users from Q4 2023 to Q4 2024, as other online platforms remain the same or see a slight percentage increase or decrease," GWI senior data journalist Chris Beer told Futurism in an email. "It's reaching more of the internet, more quickly, than almost any other platform in history." Beer also pointed out the "massive adoption among university students," with 49 percent using ChatGPT, "compared to 53 percent who use Amazon!" ChatGPT, which has been named as the fastest-growing app in the history of computing, has quickly burgeoned into a global phenomenon. "I will say that based on our research, ChatGPT is actually most popular in the Global South," Beer said. "The markets where we see the highest adoption of it include Kenya, India, the UAE, and Brazil." China was excluded since "Chinese authorities ban" many online platforms, making the data "unrepresentative," Beer said. However, in the absence of a more detailed breakdown of actual usage numbers, it's hard to draw any definitive conclusions. In a statement to Futurism, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, said the organization hadn't noticed any "significant drops in traffic on Wikimedia websites since early 2021" in terms of "pageviews and readership traffic." "Our analytics show that Wikipedia's pageviews are approximately 15 billion (B) per month (these have consistently been in the 15B to 18B range since Oct 2020 including occasional rises and declines in traffic)," the spokesperson said. In other words, Wikipedia's traffic is holding steady, the organization says — but data from GWI and others suggests that ChatGPT usage has rapidly outpaced it. Web traffic estimator Similarweb appears to corroborate GWI's data. Wikipedia is currently ranked number ten globally in terms of traffic compared to all other sites, while ChatGPT is currently ranked number six with just over 4.5 billion monthly visits. And if Wikipedia's traffic is experiencing any type of decline, that could also have to do with the rise of AI. "I think the long-term downward trend for Wikipedia has largely come from search engines adding more 'zero-click' answers," Beer told Futurism. "Whereas before they might return a Wikipedia page as the top result, now you're more likely to see a weather forecast, or a famous person's height, or whatever it may be, within Google itself." "Google's AI features, along with ChatGPT, are likely compounding that pre-existing trend," he added. The discussion highlights just how ubiquitous ChatGPT and related tech have become in just a few years. It's helping students write essays, teachers grade papers, summarize data for office workers, and sending clueless hikers astray. But at what cost are we ditching carefully reviewed Wikipedia articles in favor of often misleading or sycophantic chatbots? Considering the latest data, the problem of hallucinations is only getting worse as AI chatbots become more advanced. Companies' efforts to nudge their chatbots' outputs in the right direction have also resulted in mayhem and confusion. The subject of carefully reviewed information and its reliability is more pertinent than ever in a world filled with disinformation and AI slop. Just last month, the Trump administration threatened Wikipedia's tax-exempt status, accusing the Foundation of violating the law via baseless allegations about the encyclopedia spreading "propaganda." To critics, it was pure grandstanding and an assault on the freedom of expression. "Wikipedia is one of the last places online that shows the promise of the internet, housing more than 65 million articles written to inform, not persuade," the Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement at the time. "Our vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." More on ChatGPT: Readers Annoyed When Fantasy Novel Accidentally Leaves AI Prompt in Published Version, Showing Request to Copy Another Writer's Style
Otago Daily Times
23-05-2025
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
More space for oyster fans at this year's festival
Lindsay Beer. PHOTO: NINA TAPU It will be a full floor when the Bluff Oyster & Food Festival takes place today. The festival returned last year — the first time since 2021 — after a break of a few years because of Covid and health and safety issues. But today's festival will be bigger and better, as the entire space originally planned for the festival will be available for the first time. The trust bought the rundown Club Hotel, a Category 2 heritage building, and the land in 2014. However, there were health and safety concerns associated with the hotel on the festival site. The trust then attempted to sell it but failed to attract a buyer, so it applied to the Invercargill City Council in 2019 for resource consent to demolish the building. The festival organisers finally gained consent to demolish the old hotel building in January last year after a previous attempt. A year on from the demolition, there is another 800sq m of floor being used and it will give the sold-out crowd plenty of room to roam. Bluff promotions officer Lindsay Beer said more space would be great for those attending. Tickets for the event had sold out weeks ago and 4000 punters would be rolling up to enjoy the food and refreshments on offer. About 60% of the people who attend come from outside Southland. A plane of 180 grab-a-seat passengers is flying into Invercargill from Auckland this morning and they are set to head back to Auckland later today. Mr Beer said people from all round the world turned up for the day. The weather in Bluff had been a bit rough earlier this week but a decent day was forecast for today. Mr Beer confirmed the oysters arrived yesterday and were all set to be eaten by the masses today. One of the highlights of the day are the races, which involve professional oyster openers racing each other with events for men, women, novices, factory relay teams and a blindfold race. Xavier Fife, of Calders Oysters, won the Men's Open last year, opening 50 oysters in a time of 3min 9sec. Mr Fife is back to defend the title this year while a two-time champion, Ricci Grant, is confirmed to be in the field as well. Vic Pearsey had won 10 titles in a row in the Women's Open before standing aside last year when Peg Bishop took over the mantle getting through 50 oysters in 3min 34sec. Ms Bishop is not competing this year, so the title race is wide open. Team Barnes won the Factory Relay race in 2024 but face tough competition this year from a Calders Oysters team of previous men's champions. After the openers have demonstrated their skills, volunteers from the crowd are invited on stage to find the fastest competitor to down a dozen of Bluff's finest.
