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Jamie Driscoll, the former Labour metro mayor for North of Tyne who later played a role setting up Your Party, has joined the Greens, the party has announced.

It comes two days after five Labour councillors in the north London borough of Brent defected to the Greens, saying they were disillusioned about the party’s direction under Keir Starmer.

Driscoll, a former Newcastle councillor who served as mayor from 2019 to 2024, left Labour in 2023 after the party blocked him from running again. He stood as an independent, coming second to Labour’s Kim McGuinness.

Driscoll was later involved in efforts to set up a new leftwing party in association with the former Labour MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, which eventually became Your Party. He ended his involvement in the project after it became mired in disputes and infighting.

In a statement, Driscoll said he had joined the Greens “because I see an organisation that’s serious about running our country in the long-term interests of all our people”.

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Earlier today Bloomberg's Jason Schreier published an interview with Swen Vincke, the CEO of Larian, the company behind the internet's favourite video game and demonic relationship simulator Baldur's Gate 3. It could not have gone worse for the guy.

Among all the expected pre-release interview talk about how their next game, Divinity, will be making all kinds of improvements over their last game […]

Saying you only use AI for "reference" is wild. Artists use image searches and books as inspiration because they are drawing on art (but also everything else from colour palettes to photos to the weather). There's experience there, things they can relate to, be inspired by. There is no inspiration in slop! Everything AI is presenting to you is simply stolen and amalgamated. It's like asking your phone's autocorrect for relationship advice.

There's an unsurprising tendency across leaders in the tech world (games included) to see art as merely part of something's production line, a box that needs to be ticked before copies can be sold. It's why AI is often justified as something that saves time, or saves money. But with art, that process is the point. The themes and ideas artists draw on, the way they iterate through those ideas with sketches, the work itself is what creates art. There are no shortcuts.

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Glory to Tetoslavia!

Stolen from https://wetdry.world/@fish/115696056626379861

When Keir Starmer and Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, argue that asylum protections must be rewritten for a new “era”, they are not simply adjusting policy. They are reshaping the moral ground our societies stand on.

Their message is clear: hardening rules so that fewer people receive protection is the way to restore confidence in their leadership. They present this as measured and responsible, even progressive. But what they propose is not a new centre ground; it is a retreat into a politics that regards some lives as less worthy than others.

And there is a dreadful irony in seeing such a message conveyed just as the UK justice secretary, David Lammy, and Richard Hermer, the attorney general, travel to Strasbourg on International Human Rights Day – an occasion created to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the recognition, set down by the postwar generation, that dignity must not depend on borders, status or political fashion.

Human rights were never designed only for safe, comfortable times. They were written precisely for moments like this: when pressure mounts, when scapegoating becomes tempting, when compassion is portrayed as weakness. These protections exist to prevent us from repeating history’s worst mistakes. The whole point of human rights is that they are neither negotiable nor temporary.