Fujitsu is not a parasite for continuing to profit from government contracts in the wake of the Post Office Horizon scandal, its boss told MPs. European chief executive Paul Patterson said Fujitsu had been given £500m of contract extensions despite its faulty software being at the centre of the huge miscarriage of justice. We are not a parasite, the government has got an option as to whether they wish to extend those contracts or not, he said, adding it would not bid for new business. Patterson also repeatedly refused to say how much Fujitsu would contribute to the £1.8bn redress scheme for victims of the scandal, currently funded by taxpayers. More than 900 sub-postmasters were prosecuted after the faulty Horizon computer system made it look like money was missing from their branch accounts.

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Mail handlers use long tools to drag packages out of a bin onto a conveyer belt for sorting at the Los Angeles Processing & Distribution Center. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . There is still time to get your packages and gifts shipped to friends and loved ones for the holiday season, but you need to hurry.

Victims of the Horizon Post Office scandal could meet face-to-face with Fujitsu and Post Office representatives as part of a restorative justice effort. The charity overseeing a new scheme said the first five months were an initial pilot phase, but it hoped the scheme would last five years and include extra initiatives such as a special commemorative postage stamp. It comes on top of the various financial compensation schemes in place for sub-postmasters. The Horizon IT scandal saw hundreds of sub-postmasters falsely accused of embezzling Post Office funds after faulty software suggested money was missing from their branch accounts. Children affected by Post Office scandal'should get grants' More than 900 sub-postmasters were wrongly prosecuted because of incorrect information from the Horizon computer system.

In many organisations, accurate forecasts are essential for making informed decisions for a variety of applications from inventory management to staffing optimization. Whatever forecasting model is used, changes in the underlying process can lead to inaccurate forecasts, which will be damaging to decision-making. At the same time, models are becoming increasingly complex and identifying change through direct modelling is problematic. We present a novel framework for online monitoring of forecasts to ensure they remain accurate. By utilizing sequential changepoint techniques on the forecast errors, our framework allows for the real-time identification of potential changes in the process caused by various external factors. We show theoretically that some common changes in the underlying process will manifest in the forecast errors and can be identified faster by identifying shifts in the forecast errors than within the original modelling framework. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework on numerous forecasting approaches through simulations and show its effectiveness over alternative approaches. Finally, we present two concrete examples, one from Royal Mail parcel delivery volumes and one from NHS A\&E admissions relating to gallstones.

AI systems often exhibit political bias, influencing users' opinions and decision-making. While political neutrality-defined as the absence of bias-is often seen as an ideal solution for fairness and safety, this position paper argues that true political neutrality is neither feasible nor universally desirable due to its subjective nature and the biases inherent in AI training data, algorithms, and user interactions. However, inspired by Joseph Raz's philosophical insight that "neutrality [...] can be a matter of degree" (Raz, 1986), we argue that striving for some neutrality remains essential for promoting balanced AI interactions and mitigating user manipulation. Therefore, we use the term "approximation" of political neutrality to shift the focus from unattainable absolutes to achievable, practical proxies. We propose eight techniques for approximating neutrality across three levels of conceptualizing AI, examining their trade-offs and implementation strategies. In addition, we explore two concrete applications of these approximations to illustrate their practicality. Finally, we assess our framework on current large language models (LLMs) at the output level, providing a demonstration of how it can be evaluated. This work seeks to advance nuanced discussions of political neutrality in AI and promote the development of responsible, aligned language models.

Actor Toby Jones, who played the lead role in the TV series about the Post Office scandal, has said he "played a hero" in the drama. He starred as Alan Bates in the ITV show Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which tells the story of hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting. Many of the reported losses in branch accounts which led to prosecutions were actually caused by faults in Horizon - the Post Office's computer system. Jones, speaking at the Hay Festival, said Bates - a former sub-postmaster himself, who led the victims' campaign to get justice - "doesn't want any honours until he's finished the job". "I get to play a hero. Really, someone who I think of as a hero. Someone in the culture who just doesn't seem to be subject to the same forces that we all are," the 57-year-old said.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. The former head of Britain's state-owned Post Office said Tuesday she will hand back a royal honor in response to mounting fury over a miscarriage of justice that saw hundreds of postmasters wrongfully accused of theft because of a faulty computer system. The British government is considering whether to offer a mass amnesty to more than 700 branch managers convicted of theft or fraud between 1999 and 2015, because Post Office computers wrongly showed that money was missing from their shops. The real culprit was a defective accounting system called Horizon, supplied by the Japanese technology firm Fujitsu.

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks can greatly improve model quality, however serving many different fine-tuned LLMs concurrently for users in multi-tenant environments is challenging. Dedicating GPU memory for each model is prohibitively expensive and naively swapping large model weights in and out of GPU memory is slow. Our key insight is that fine-tuned models can be quickly swapped in and out of GPU memory by extracting and compressing the delta between each model and its pre-trained base model. We propose DeltaZip, an LLM serving system that efficiently serves multiple full-parameter fine-tuned models concurrently by aggressively compressing model deltas by a factor of $6\times$ to $8\times$ while maintaining high model quality. DeltaZip increases serving throughput by $1.5\times$ to $3\times$ and improves SLO attainment compared to a vanilla HuggingFace serving system.

For many islanders, delays to the postal service are an inescapable part of life. But that should no longer be the case for those living in Orkney, after it became the first place in Britain to have mail delivered by a drone. The new Royal Mail service will see post transported from the Kirkwall delivery office to the village of Stromness, where drones will then transfer items to posties on the islands of Hoy and Graemsay for their regular routes. Currently, mail arrives at Kirkwall Airport before being sent by plane or ferry to Orkney's 19 inhabited islands. But the challenging geography and weather conditions often result in delivery disruptions.

Royal Mail has begun using drones to deliver post in the Orkney islands, helping pave the way for drone deliveries to islands around the UK and on the mainland during emergencies. The service between the village of Stromness on Orkney's main island to the nearby islands of Hoy and Graemsay, using aircraft able to carry up to 6kg, is Royal Mail's first permanent drone delivery service. Using drones allows Royal Mail to provide a faster and more secure delivery service to islands such as the Orkneys, avoiding ferries or scheduled air services subject to weather cancellations, tides and timetables that do not suit the postal service. Royal Mail has been testing and evaluating drone services on Scottish islands for some time, as has the NHS, which has trialled their use for flying urgent medical samples from the small Hebridean islands of Coll and Tiree. Chris Paxton, the head of drone trials at Royal Mail, said these flights were far faster and more efficient, and helped cut carbon emissions.