Goto

Collaborating Authors

 parliament


Chris Mason: Why a quick meeting is overshadowing the King's Speech

BBC News

Chris Mason: Why a coffee is overshadowing the King's Speech It is quite something when two blokes having a cup of coffee can generate more headlines and conversation than the King coming to parliament for the main ceremonial event of the parliamentary calendar. Both these things are happening this morning. The prime minister has met the Health Secretary Wes Streeting in private - a meeting offered by Sir Keir Starmer to cabinet ministers after Tuesday's cabinet meeting and an offer Streeting took up. It was a very short meeting - under 20 minutes - and we may not know what happened in Number 10 immediately. And then, not long afterwards, the King will arrive in Westminster for the State Opening of Parliament, in which the sovereign reads out the government's planned new laws for the year and a bit ahead. This ceremonial occasion was scheduled for this week precisely because government figures anticipated a rough set of election results and a splash of political tumult afterwards.


Japan to revise economic security law to support projects abroad

The Japan Times

The government plans to submit a bill to revise the economic security promotion law during the current session of parliament that began on Wednesday. The Japanese government plans to revise the economic security promotion law to support companies with economic security-linked projects overseas. This will be the first revision of the law, established in 2022. The move comes amid a rapidly changing international environment, as the Ukraine-Russia war drags on and China continues to flex its economic muscle. Competition is also intensifying in the development of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,449

Al Jazeera

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Ukraine's capital Kyiv came under Russian missile attack early on Thursday morning, the country's military administration said, with witnesses reporting the sound of explosions. There were no initial reports of casualties and the extent of damage from the attack was not known.


SupplementaryMaterial

Neural Information Processing Systems

A sitting is a meeting of parliament members. While in the virtual environment, you will need to install the specific Gensim1 version needed for theCompassapproach. Inotherinstances,thebeginning of the line that specifies the speaker consists of the role of the parliament member, for example "SPEAKEROFTHEPARLIAMENT" (meaning the member of parliament presiding), followed, but not always, by the actual full name of the person in parenthesis. Theidisa unique number we assigned to each file. Themainchallenge of translating the files from Greek to English was the conversion of the Greek alphabetic numeralstoindo-arabicnumerals.


Age Verification Is Reaching a Global Tipping Point. Is TikTok's Strategy a Good Compromise?

WIRED

Age Verification Is Reaching a Global Tipping Point. Is TikTok's Strategy a Good Compromise? TikTok's new age-detection tech seems like a better solution than automatically banning youth accounts. But experts say it still requires social platforms to surveil users more closely. Governments worldwide are moving to limit children's access to social media as lawmakers question whether platforms are capable of enforcing their own minimum age requirements.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,421

Al Jazeera

Could Ukraine hold a presidential election right now? Will Europe use frozen Russian assets to fund war? How can Ukraine rebuild China ties? 'Ukraine is running out of men, money and time' Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that a state of emergency was being declared for Ukraine's energy sector, after repeated Russian attacks destroyed electricity and heat infrastructure. Zelenskyy said he asked the government to review curfew restrictions during "this extremely cold weather".


OBR head's resignation leaves potential landmines for Reeves

BBC News

The shock resignation came for a very specific reason, but the OBR saga will continue with a series of decisions the chancellor will have to make over Richard Hughes' replacement. Firstly the Chancellor will have to find a respected and credible economist to run the OBR. There are several candidates, who might fit the mould of fiercely independent bean counters. The list will be carefully watched by the markets for any departure from the normal model. The problem is that there is some political pressure to do just that.


Russia-Ukraine war: List of key events, day 1,364

Al Jazeera

Is the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable? Is Trump losing patience with Putin? Russian drones struck two central districts - Slobidskyi and Osnovyansk - in Ukraine's second largest city Kharkiv, injuring five people in an apartment building and triggering a fire, authorities said. Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov said 22 residents had been evacuated from one section of the damaged apartment building while another drone struck an area outside a medical facility, injuring a doctor and damaging the building and nearby cars. The Kharkiv region's governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said 11 drones were deployed in the attack and seven people were injured in total.


Nature is not a blocker to housing growth, MPs find

BBC News

Nature is not a blocker to housing growth and the government risks missing both its housing and nature targets if it views it as one, a cross-party group of MPs has warned in a new report. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill overrides existing habitat protections, which the government has suggested is a barrier to its target to build 1.5 million houses by the end of this parliament. But in a report published on Sunday, the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) found the measures outlined in the bill are not enough to allow the government to meet its goals. Using nature as a scapegoat means that the government will be less effective at tackling some of the genuine challenges facing the planning system, the report said. A Ministry of Housing spokesperson said it was fixing a failing system with landmark reforms, which would deliver a win-win for the economy and the environment.


ParlaSpeech 3.0: Richly Annotated Spoken Parliamentary Corpora of Croatian, Czech, Polish, and Serbian

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

ParlaSpeech is a collection of spoken parliamentary corpora currently spanning four Slavic languages - Croatian, Czech, Polish and Serbian - all together 6 thousand hours in size. The corpora were built in an automatic fashion from the ParlaMint transcripts and their corresponding metadata, which were aligned to the speech recordings of each corresponding parliament. In this release of the dataset, each of the corpora is significantly enriched with various automatic annotation layers. The textual modality of all four corpora has been enriched with linguistic annotations and sentiment predictions. Similar to that, their spoken modality has been automatically enriched with occurrences of filled pauses, the most frequent disfluency in typical speech. Two out of the four languages have been additionally enriched with detailed word- and grapheme-level alignments, and the automatic annotation of the position of primary stress in multisyllabic words. With these enrichments, the usefulness of the underlying corpora has been drastically increased for downstream research across multiple disciplines, which we showcase through an analysis of acoustic correlates of sentiment. All the corpora are made available for download in JSONL and TextGrid formats, as well as for search through a concordancer.