Day: November 30, 2017

    Rogue states and terrorists will get their hands on lethal artificial intelligence in the very near future, a House of Lords committee has been told. Alvin Wilby, vice-president of research at French defence giant Thales, which supplies reconnaissance drones to the British Army, said the genie is out of the bottle with smart technology. And he raised the prospect of attacks by swarms of small drones that move around and select targets with only limited input from humans. The technological challenge of scaling it up to swarms and things like that doesn't need any inventive step, he told the Lords Artificial Intelligence committee. It's just a question of time and scale and I think that's an absolute certainty that we should worry about. The US and Chinese military are testi...

    Net migration is estimated to have fallen by nearly a third to 230,000 in the year to June, new figures show. It is the first time that a full year of data has been available since the UK voted to leave the EU last June. The figure is still short of the Conservatives' target to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. Net migration is the difference between people coming to the UK for more than a year, and the number of people leaving the UK for a year or more. In this 12-month period, 572,000 people arrived in the UK, and 342,000 emigrated, the Office for National Statistics report showed. Immigration specifically fell by 80,000 people over the year and three-quarters of that drop was down to fewer EU citizens coming to live in the UK, figures showed. Nicola White, ...

    Donald Trump's re-tweets of far-right group Britain First are a betrayal of the special relationship, Sadiq Khan has said. The Mayor of London launched a blistering response to the US President's promotion of three anti-Muslim videos on Wednesday. Many Brits who love America and Americans will see this as a betrayal of the special relationship between our two countries, Mr Khan said on Thursday. It beggars belief that the President of our closest ally doesn't see that his support of this extremist group actively undermines the values of tolerance and diversity that makes Britain so great. Theresa May Mr Khan, who was targetted directly by the US President for his response to the London Bridge terror attack, added his most recent intervention should see a planned state visi...

    US President Donald Trump, in an unprecedented public attack on America’s closest security ally, sharply rebuked British Prime Theresa May on Twitter after Britain criticised him for retweeting British far-right anti-Islam videos. Theresa don’t focus on me, focus on the destructive Radical Islamic Terrorism that is taking place within the United Kingdom. We are doing just fine,’ Trump tweeted, sparking further outrage in Britain that has seen several major Islamist militant attacks on its streets. Trump’s unrepentant response was a reaction to May’s spokesman who on Wednesday criticised his retweets of anti-Islam videos originally posted by a leader of a British far-right fringe group. It is wrong for the president to have done this,’ the spokesman said. Trump sparked crit...