Slipping it in

All is relatively quite, given other things to worry about, like Trump sabre-rattling at North Korea (having missiled Assad bases in Syria), and whether or not Ted Hughes abused Sylvia Plath 50 years ago when they were both alive.

There is still stuff like the Guardian suggesting, in a link characteristic of 'news values' that foreign governments might have hacked a voter registration site in advance of the EU Referendum. Foreign hacking is very fashionable and it was blamed for the US Presidential election too (another terrible shock to Guardianistas, of course).

Foreign governments such as Russia and China may have been involved in the collapse of a voter registration website in the run-up to the EU referendum, a committee of MPs has claimed

At the time, that collapse in registration facilities was widely seen as disenfranchising the young (for some reason) who might have voted to remain, based on hints already that the young were disproportionately unregistered. Why they would have been particularly shy about using websites is unclear.  The site does seem to have collapsed after a surge in demand right at the last minute, which coud have been a denial of service attack: was the surge really massive?

The Government extended the deadline for registration anyway, and overall:

While the incident had no material effect on the outcome of the referendum, the committee said it was crucial that lessons were learned for future votes that must extend beyond purely technical issues.

But you can't keep a good Remoaner down.The Guardian today has an editorial about changes in Government statistics which mean we have only inadequare data about inflation (so seasoned Guardian readers are already smelling rat since inflation rates are an issue in whether or not Brexit has been catastrophic already), and sure enough, as a parting shot:

The ONS boasts that confidence in its statistics remains high: four out of five people trust them. It’s politicians whose use of the information is questioned. The Department for Education has just had to acknowledge that the student satisfaction survey was not nearly robust enough to be used to assess university teachers’ excellence. The £350m NHS Brexit bonus was officially discredited. Politicians must behave better. Treating data with the proper respect is an important part of persuading people to adjust their prejudices to accommodate the facts.

The same issue has a letter with the same technique:  

For three years in the late 90s, Sergey Lavrov was my Russian counterpart when we represented our countries on the UN security council in New York. Despite some obvious policy differences, Lavrov never played the UK false; he was a serious and creative negotiator, with a good sense of humour and a passion for the English language and its literature. To decline Lavrov’s invitation for our new foreign secretary to visit Moscow (Report, 10 April), just when new tensions show such contacts are most needed, seems ill-advised. Hard too to square with the windy rhetoric, since the Brexit referendum, that Britain will re-emerge as a world power rejuvenated.

(my emphases)