Author: BBC

Johnny Ryan, a former advertising executive who now challenges the industry as a senior fellow at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, says that in some ways advertisers are easier pay lords to please than subscribers.”The advertiser in general doesn’t give a damn about what the content is,” he says. “Every now and then there’s a scandal, but in general they’re not that political.” There is an old adage “if you’re not paying for the product, you ARE the product” – meaning, if you are using something for free, then the company which owns it is taking the data you…

Read More

Billionaire philanthropist Melinda French Gates has said she will resign as a co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”This is not a decision I came to lightly,” Ms Gates wrote in a statement posted to X on Monday. Her last day of work will be 7 June. Ms Gates started the foundation – the largest private body of its kind – in 2000 with her then-husband Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder.In 2021, after 27 years of marriage, the pair announced their separation, but pledged to carry on with their joint philanthropic work. At the time of their split, the…

Read More

In the early 1980s, the UK could not keep up with demand for Factor VIII, which was made by pooling – or mixing – the blood plasma of thousands of individual donors.Instead the treatment was shipped from the US.In the UK, blood donations have always been voluntary, but in the US, drug companies were allowed to pay cash for plasma.High risk groups, from prisoners to drug users, had a clear financial incentive to give blood and potentially lie about their medical history.Evidence uncovered by campaigners and seen by the ongoing public inquiry into the wider contaminated blood scandal shows that,…

Read More

Award-winning Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof says he has fled the country after receiving a jail sentence for making his latest film in secret.In an Instagram post, he said he was in a “safe place” after people “risked their lives” to help him cross borders.His film The Seed of the Sacred Fig is to be premiered at the Cannes festival, which opens on Tuesday.Rasoulof won the top prize at the 2020 Berlin Festival with There Is No Evil, a film about the death penalty in Iran.”I am grateful to my friends, acquaintances, and people who kindly, selflessly, and sometimes by risking…

Read More