TODAY’S WEATHER

☀️ In Glasgow an overcast start will get brighter and warmer later. Edinburgh and Aberdeen start bright, and stay so, making for a pleasantly warm summer’s day in both cities. London tops out at 27 degrees today, the last reasonable day before it gets very warm again for the rest of the week. (Here’s the UK forecast).

THE BIG STORIES
The “appalling” impact of the Post Office Scandal | Calls for emergency action on A9 | Heatwave deaths

📣 The Post Office Horizon scandal may have led to 13 suicides, and drove 59 to contemplate taking their own lives, according to the first report from a public inquiry chaired by Sir Wyn Williams, a retired judge. (Guardian)

The scandal had a "disastrous" impact on those wrongly accused and prosecuted for criminal offences, with hundreds of sub-postmasters wrongly taken to court over shortfalls in their branch accounts, he found. The cases also had huge impact on their families. (BBC)

Scottish sub postmasters caught up in what is regarded as the worst miscarriage of justice in British legal history have called for immediate redress. (Scotsman)

• Read the full report

• Also in today’s briefing: what have we learned - and why AI could create similar scandals in the future - below ⬇️

📣 More than 300 people have been injured in car crashes on the notorious A9 road in northern Scotland, new figures show. They’ve led to fresh calls from the Scottish Conservatives for emergency action to make the road more safe. Little more than 11 miles of road have been converted to dual carriageway in more than 12 years. (Herald)

📣 The recent heatwave likely caused the deaths of 263 Londoners, according to new research into the effects of high temperatures on cities across Europe. The study found human-driven global warming was responsible for around 65 per cent of the deaths that occurred across 12 cities, including London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona and Rome. Another heatwave begins in the south of England today. (Sky News) (Independent)

IDEAS
The unspeakable cruelty of the Horizon scandal - and how we could easily sleepwalk into more of the same

🗣️ Reading Sir Wyn Williams’ first report into the Post Office scandal, what strikes you hardest is the sheer, brutal unfairness of it all.

It’s there in the opacity of the Horizon computer system, ridden with its “bugs, errors and defects”.

It’s there in the human cruelty those bugs then empowered.

It’s there in the “helpdesk” that desperate subpostmasters, noticing discrepancies in their accounts, called for support - only to be told, entirely wrongly, that the problems they were seeing were unique to them, and that nothing was to be done.

It was there in the process of investigation and prosecution, in effect run by the Post Office itself, through which thousands of people were chased.

It was there in the advice to accused subpostmasters from their own lawyers - not incorrect, in the face of seemingly irrefutable evidence from the computer system - to plead guilty to some offences to avoid or reduce jail terms (many, of course, were locked up).

It was there in the subsequent ruin: the money that was never owed but was “paid back” anyway, the businesses lost, the reputations shredded, the marriages ended, the bullied children.

It was there in the lives that were ended prematurely: the 13 suicides that may have been caused by the false charges and cruelty layered upon cruelty of the subsequent criminal process.

And, unbelievably, it is still there, in a compensation system that is - once again, just like the computer system that caused it - administered by the Post Office, complex, opaque and slow. Sir Wyn calls, in very specific ways, for that to hurry up.

But what of justice? The judge will apportion blame in the next phase of his inquiry, and police investigations continue. But there needs to be some. The Guardian’s Marina Hyde captures the sense of outrage well in her column today. She highlights the case of Harjinder Butoy, who went to prison for longer than anyone else, facing a downfall “like something straight out of a Thomas Hardy novel”.

“Harjinder broke a long silence on the eve of this report’s publication, she reports. “I just want everyone to know the impact, what’s happened to us all,” he said. “But I also need someone to be punished and let them go to prison and feel like what we’ve been through.”

That must be the expectation of thousands touched by this horrific affair. But we should also be looking ahead, and wondering if it could ever happen again. The answer to that may be “yes”.

Over on Computer Weekly, the trade publication that did so much to keep the subpostmasters’ fight in the public eye, they’re fretting about other matters now: about how the rise of artificial intelligence in organisations can create enormous risks. CW calls it “a new front line” for organisational security and governance.

The biggest risk must surely be one of explainability, or “interpretability”: that computer systems, even wildly sophisticated ones, and their output must be explainable in a way that makes sense to a human being.

The Horizon system, and the people and systems around it, failed to clear that hurdle. And it is now a problem with AI systems now being used worldwide, infinitely more complex than Horizon.

Indeed, one of AI’s high priests, Open AI’s Sam Altman, gained some notoriety when he admitted last year: “We certainly have not solved interpretability.” Pressed by an interviewer, who suggested “If you don’t understand what’s happening, isn’t that an argument to not keep releasing new, more powerful models?”, Altman “danced around the question, ultimately responding that, even without that full cognition, ‘these systems [are] generally considered safe and robust.’”

That, of course, is the sort of thing the Post Office bosses said.

As the government presses ahead to hand itself and AI companies more power, “further toward automated, opaque systems that make decisions with little transparency” (Computer Weekly again), perhaps all of us should be wary of the latent cruelty of these opaque systems, and the people they enable.

AROUND SCOTLAND

📣 Police are searching an area in Oban for a gun that may be connected to the gangland murder of a man in Glasgow almost nine years ago. (Record)

📣 Amazon has removed fake biographies of SNP leaders that appear to have been generated by AI, and gave wildly false information about the lives of John Swinney, Nicola Sturgeon and Humza Yousaf. (Holyrood)

📣 Food Standards Scotland has released research showing the calorific contents of the nation’s favourite takeaways: if you’re a fan of the (fried) pizza crunch, it’s bad news: it contains 1,327 calories, or 60% of your daily intake. And one doner kebab has more salt than you should eat in a day. (STV)

AROUND THE UK

📣 French President Emmanuel Macron said the UK and France have a "shared responsibility" to tackle illegal migration, his comments ahead of a summit between the countries later this week. (Sky News)

📣 Masterchef host Gregg Wallace has been sacked by the BBC, it was revealed yesterday, after a nine-month misconduct investigation and 50 new allegations, although he was exonerated of the most serious allegations being investigated. But he has denied the claims, and vowed not to “go quietly”. (Guardian) (Sun)

📣 Thousands of court cases that would normally be heard in front of a jury should be decided by judges alone, a former senior judge has recommended, in an attempt to clear the backlog of cases in English and Welsh courts. (BBC)

AROUND THE WORLD

🌎 Aid workers working in Gaza say they’re being overwhelmed by near daily “mass casualty incidents” as Israeli forces shoot at people attempting to get to aid distribution sites. (Guardian)

• Israel has outlined plans to pack hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into a closed zone of the Gaza Strip along the border with Egypt. (AP)

🌎 Officials signed off on emergency plans put together by Camp Mystic, the children’s summer camp swept away in catastrophic floods in Texas last week, only two days before the disaster. More than 160 people are still missing. (AP)

🌎 More than 100 people have been hurt as wildfires rage near Marseilles. (BBC) (Mail)

SPORT

🎾 Cameron Norrie’s meek Centre Court capitulation to Carlos Alcaraz left fans pining for the days of Andy Murray, writes Paul MacInnes. (Guardian)

⚽️ New Chelsea signing João Pedro stepped off a Brazilian beach and popped two stunning goals past his boyhood club to secure his new side a place in the World Club Cup final. (Guardian)

⚽️ Celtic won the inaugural Cork Super Cup, but had to flee the pitch to raise the cup after young fans invaded the pitch. (Record)

⚽️ Rangers are getting close to a deal to land young French winger Djeidi Gassama from Sheffield Wednesday. (Sun) (Record)