Latest / Pollar Sounds / A snap election, a school revolt and an AI apology

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A snap election, a school revolt and an AI apology · Pollar Sounds

• 0:02
  Hi there, this is Pollar, and welcome to 3x3.
• 0:06
  Three stories, three angles: what happened.
• 0:10
  How it's being told.
• 0:12
  And what we don't know yet.
• 0:14
  And after each story, we want to hear what you think.
• 0:23
  First up, Spain. What happened?
• 0:25
  On Friday the 2nd of October, Spain's Congress voted down two emergency housing decrees.
• 0:31
  The Popular Party, Vox, and the Catalan party, Junts,
• 0:35
  were among those who voted against both.
• 0:37
  The first fell by 178 votes to 172.
• 0:42
  The second, by 184 to 166.
• 0:45
  Francina Armengol: One hundred and seventy-two.
• 0:47
  Francina Armengol: Votes against: one hundred and seventy-eight.
• 0:49
  The decrees would have suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants with nowhere else to go
• 0:54
  until the end of 2030 and made leases on people's homes renew automatically.
• 0:59
  Three days later, on Monday, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez,
• 1:04
  announced he was dissolving Parliament
• 1:06
  and called a snap general election for the 29th of November.
• 1:09
  Pedro Sánchez: We must mobilise, and we must make sure
• 1:11
  Pedro Sánchez: that Parliament gives us a much broader progressive majority,
• 1:16
  Pedro Sánchez: with which to bring the elites to heel.
• 1:17
  He told voters he needs, in his words, "a much broader progressive majority,"
• 1:23
  one with which to bring the elites to heel,
• 1:26
  win new social advances, and keep transforming Spain.
• 1:29
  But the decrees aren't dead.
• 1:32
  On Tuesday, the government approved them again, with some changes,
• 1:36
  for a vote in the committee that stands in for Parliament while it's dissolved.
• 1:40
  And the Minister for Culture, Ernest Urtasun,
• 1:43
  says none of the protections will be weakened.
• 1:49
  How it's being told.
• 1:51
  On Saturday, tenants marched in Madrid and dozens of other cities.
• 1:56
  The Tenants' Union put the Madrid march at more than 500,000 people.
• 2:01
  The government's delegation in Madrid counted 70,000.
• 2:05
  Junts, whose votes sank the first decree, says the law itself was bad.
• 2:10
  Its spokesperson said it would still let vulture funds keep buying.
• 2:14
  Now it's a campaign.
• 2:16
  The Popular Party's leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo,
• 2:19
  says the vote is about Spain beating Sánchez.
• 2:22
  Sánchez told his party, "We are going to win and govern."
• 2:30
  What we don't know yet.
• 2:32
  Spain's two biggest trade unions say they'll hold
• 2:35
  a 24-hour general strike over housing this autumn.
• 2:39
  No date has been set.
• 2:40
  And it's not clear the second decree will survive.
• 2:43
  The Basque Nationalists of the PNV, who hold the deciding vote,
• 2:47
  say they'll back the first decree and vote against the second,
• 2:50
  the one that lets rental contracts roll on.
• 2:52
  So over to you.
• 2:54
  Is this the end for Pedro Sánchez after more than eight years in power,
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  or has he chosen the fight he wants?
• 3:00
  Are the parties that voted the decrees down protecting tenants from a bad law
• 3:05
  or using the housing crisis to force him out?
• 3:08
  And the bigger question,
• 3:09
  if neither the decrees nor the market have fixed Spain's housing, what would?
• 3:16
  Second, France.
• 3:19
  On the 17th of September, students at one high school in Créteil,
• 3:23
  south-east of Paris, protested about staff shortages.
• 3:26
  Within two weeks, the protests had spread across the country.
• 3:30
  On Tuesday, the government counted 891 schools disrupted out of about 3,700.
• 3:37
  The students want more substitute teachers, smaller classes, better buildings,
• 3:41
  lighter timetables, and changes to Parcoursup, the university admissions system.
• 3:46
  The Interior Ministry says 6,547 people have been arrested since the 28th of September,
• 3:53
  most of them minors.
• 3:54
  The education minister says at least 24 schools have been burned or ransacked.
• 3:59
  And the injuries are climbing.
• 4:01
  The government's figures from Monday count 715 police and gendarmes hurt,
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  215 students, and 85 school staff.
• 4:08
  On Monday in Lens,
• 4:10
  a 15-year-old lost a hand when a police grenade went off.
• 4:14
  The prosecutor says it's not yet clear whether he picked it up.
• 4:17
  The police watchdog has now opened 10 investigations,
• 4:20
  including one into a 16-year-old in Tours who lost the use of an eye.
• 4:25
  And on Tuesday, a police officer was charged over a grenade launcher shot
• 4:29
  that badly injured a 14-year-old's face.
• 4:31
  The Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu,
• 4:34
  told schools to treat long absences and vacant teaching posts as a priority.
• 4:38
  On Tuesday, students marched again, backed by the teaching unions.
• 4:42
  The Interior Ministry counted 256,000 marchers, 56,000 of them in Paris.
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  Organisers said 450,000.
• 4:52
  488 people were arrested and 43 police and gendarmes were hurt.
• 4:59
  How it's being told.
• 5:02
  The government tells it as a security problem.
• 5:04
  The education minister says far-left activists have hijacked the movement.
• 5:09
  The government blames France Unbowed, the radical left party,
• 5:13
  whose MPs have been out with the protesters.
• 5:16
  The government's spokeswoman, Maud Bregeon, says the priority is to restore order.
• 5:22
  France Unbowed's leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, says the government ordered the repression.
• 5:28
  He has called for non-violence.
• 5:30
  On Tuesday, the prime minister answered him in Parliament.
• 5:33
  "Talk of political orders to repress the students," he said, "is a lie."
• 5:42
  What we don't know yet.
• 5:44
  How many of those arrested will be charged has not been published.
• 5:48
  And it's not yet clear whether
• 5:50
  the prime minister's plan is enough to get the students back in class.
• 5:55
  Over to you. Are the students right about their schools,
• 5:58
  or is this about something bigger than staffing?
• 6:00
  How much of the violence comes from students
• 6:03
  and how much from people using their movement?
• 6:06
  Is the government restoring order or using the violence to avoid the demands?
• 6:10
  And with President Macron unable to stand again in two thousand and twenty-seven,
• 6:15
  who stands to gain?
• 6:18
  Third, Australia.
• 6:21
  OpenAI says that in June, during internal training,
• 6:24
  its experimental models accessed four government websites in ways they weren't authorised to.
• 6:29
  The most serious was at the statistics service of Medicare,
• 6:32
  the public health insurance scheme.
• 6:34
  That model was researching government spending on medicines for skin conditions in Victoria.
• 6:39
  OpenAI says it had trouble getting the figures
• 6:42
  and found a way to get non-public access.
• 6:44
  OpenAI says that model ran commands, retrieved credentials and internal files, and wrote files.
• 6:51
  It says no individual patient records were accessed.
• 6:54
  It told the agencies by email between the tenth
• 6:57
  and the twenty-fourth of September and apologised publicly on the twenty-ninth.
• 7:01
  And on Tuesday, OpenAI's chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon,
• 7:06
  apologised again to a parliamentary committee in Sydney.
• 7:09
  Jason Kwon: I want to begin with an apology.
• 7:12
  Jason Kwon: During internal training and evaluation,
• 7:15
  Jason Kwon: our models accessed Australian government websites in ways they were not directed to.
• 7:20
  He agreed OpenAI should have contacted ministers directly,
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  and he pointed to another intrusion disclosed by OpenAI last week
• 7:27
  into the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service.
• 7:35
  How it's being told.
• 7:38
  Here, it comes down to one word.
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  In writing, OpenAI said its models accessed the sites
• 7:44
  in ways they were not authorised to.
• 7:47
  In Sydney, Kwon said, "Not directed to."
• 7:50
  Almost everyone else calls it a hack.
• 7:52
  Reuters called it the first known instance
• 7:55
  of an AI agent hacking a government website.
• 7:57
  And The Independent and Der Spiegel called it a hack, too.
• 8:01
  Anthropic was questioned, too.
• 8:03
  Its head of safeguards, Dave Orr, said an internal review found no unauthorised contact
• 8:09
  between its agents and government websites,
• 8:11
  though he said it can't see everything its customers do.
• 8:16
  What we don't know yet.
• 8:19
  The Australian government is considering making AI incidents mandatory to report.
• 8:24
  It hasn't said what the rules would be.
• 8:26
  And separately, a Senate inquiry has called Sam Altman
• 8:29
  and Anthropic's Dario Amodei to appear.
• 8:32
  Neither has said whether they will.
• 8:34
  Over to you. Was this an accident in training or a sign
• 8:38
  that even the companies can't fully control their own models?
• 8:41
  When an AI does something nobody asked it to, who is to blame?
• 8:45
  The company, its engineers, or the agencies whose systems let it in?
• 8:53
  Those were three stories in three angles.
• 8:57
  The sources for each are at pollar.news.
• 9:01
  Tell us what you think in the comments or on Pollar's socials.
• 9:05
  In the next episode, we'll read out the best answers.
• 9:16
  A quick word about Pollar.
• 9:17
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• 9:20
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• 9:23
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• 9:25
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• 9:28
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