Watch: MoD ‘error' put thousands of Afghans at risk, admits defence secretary
A spreadsheet containing details of 25,000 Afghan asylum applicants, MPs, and senior military officers was mistakenly sent out in February 2022.
The incident put hundreds of thousands of Afghans at risk and was a 'clear breach of strict data protocols', Mr Healey said.
Following the breach, a relocation scheme for over 16,000 Afghans was implemented at a cost of £6 billion, with details released only after a superinjunction was lifted.
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Daily Mail
29 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
New map shows how immigration is reshaping your town
Up to one in 20 residents in parts of England and Wales are immigrants who moved here last year, new analysis suggests. It comes after Government statistics last week revealed that the total population of the two nations shot up by 700,000 in 2023/24. Immigration fuelled the surge – the second largest since WW2. The Daily Mail can reveal that net international migration – defined as the difference between the number of people entering the country and leaving – was positive in all but one of 318 councils. Newham, home to roughly 374,000 people, saw an influx of 17,200 immigrants in the year to mid-2024. That suggests new migrants arriving from abroad in the last year now account for 4.6 per cent of the London borough's total population – roughly one in 20 people. Luton (4.3 per cent) and Coventry (4.2 per cent) had similarly high figures, according to estimates published by the Office for National Statistics ( ONS ). Experts say current immigration levels, which have hit all-time highs, are piling even greater pressure upon on housing, schools and the NHS. Our postcode search tool - available to use below - shows how the situation in your area has changed over the last 12 months, tracking births and deaths as well as net international migration. Robert Bates, research director at the Centre for Migration Control, said mass migration is 'changing the very fabric of Britain'. He said: 'Assimilation has been made impossible by the sheer scale of mass migration and our national culture is damaged as a result. Stretched public services - from the NHS and GP surgeries to public transport and schools - are being further eroded by a low wage, low-skill immigration system. Politicians have ignored the concerns of voters due to a misguided belief that open borders benefit the economy. We fast need a government which rejects this dogma and starts work to scrap a whole raft of failed visa routes, end foreign nationals' access to the welfare system, and invests in skills for the British workforce.' There were an estimated 61.8m people in England and Wales in mid-2024, up from 61.1m in mid-2023, according to the ONS' estimates. That increase, of 706,881 people, was eclipsed only by the 821,210 population rise in the 12 months to mid-2023, with growth in both years driven almost wholly by record rises in the number of migrants. Some 1.1m people are thought to have immigrated in the last 12 months, countered by the 450,000 believed to have emigrated. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage yesterday claimed the figures were' disastrous for the quality of life for everyone in the country'. There were slightly more births (596,012) than deaths (566,030) in the year to mid-2024, which added just 29,982 to the population. In terms of raw numbers, the biggest local authorities, such as Birmingham (38,700) had the most international migrants arriving. Given the West Midlands city has a population of 1.2million, however, the effects of international migration aren't as stark as they are in Newham. The City of London technically had the highest share of its current population down to international migration in 2024 (10.8 per cent) – although it is home to only 15,000 people. Only one local authority, South Holland in Lincolnshire, experienced a negative sum, due to more international migrants leaving than arriving. The ONS said it had 557 arrivals from abroad last year, but 695 people emigrated. Movement around the UK – known as internal migration – is recorded separately. Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, said: 'The latest ONS figures are another eye-opener. 'While there is no breakdown of migration into nationality, gender, age or immigration status - as the ONS should do in the future - overall, the population of England and Wales increased by over 700,000 (the equivalent of Newcastle.) Just 30,000 of this was from births exceeding deaths.' Mr Mehmet also branded the government's response to the rising rates as 'complacent'. He said: 'Most worrying, these latest figures show that the speed with which the nature of our society is changing has not let up, and that the ethnic minority proportion of our population will become the majority in 30-35 years. The government must take decisive action to stem the immigration tsunami if we are not to become the island of strangers the Prime Minister referred to a few months ago.' The ONS cautions there might be some overlap in the data, although it is unclear by how much because of the difficulties in examining population flow. For example, the same person could be classed as both an international immigrant and internal emigrant. They could also die, further confusing the picture. Tory shadow Home Office minister Katie Lam said the data showed the population is rising at 'an unsustainable pace'. She said: 'This isn't about numbers on a spreadsheet, it's about pressure on housing, NHS waiting lists, school places, wages and it's about community and our culture. Britain simply cannot plan or build fast enough to keep up. We must secure our borders and deliver a fair and sustainable immigration system that works for the British people.' However Home Secretary Yvette Cooper (pictured) said yesterday the figures 'confirm the truth of the Tory legacy on immigration'. She added: 'Their failed open borders experiment resulted in net migration quadrupling to a peak of almost a million per year in 2023 even as they promised it would fall. Since the election, net migration has come steeply down, and as part of the Government's Plan for Change we have set out new measures in the Immigration White Paper and have already changed immigration rules to bring net migration down further. To be successful, effective and fair, our immigration system must be properly controlled and managed. Out of the chaos and failure of the Tory past, that is what this Government will deliver.' Keir Starmer unveiled a crackdown on immigration in May, warning that failure to control the system risked turning Britain into an 'island of strangers'. Downing Street was forced to deny angry comparisons from MPs that it was an echo of Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' speech. Scrambling to blunt the threat of Reform, Sir Keir has vowed to give voters what they had 'asked for time and time again' as he announced a package to 'take back control of our borders'. However, the month after the speech Sir Keir went on to say he 'deeply regretted' it, despite polling showing most Brits had no problem with the language used. His package of long-awaited policies to curb immigration involved a hiking of the skills threshold for immigrants and a toughening of the rules on fluency in English. Migrants will also be required to wait 10 years for citizenship rather than the current five and face deportation for even lower-level crimes. Policymakers estimate the Government's package will bring down annual inflows by around 100,000.
The Independent
30 minutes ago
- The Independent
South Korea makes major move aimed at reducing tensions with North
South Korea 's military has commenced the removal of loudspeakers, which were previously used for anti-North Korean propaganda, from its border with North Korea. This action is described as a "practical measure" by South Korea's new liberal government, aimed at easing tensions and rebuilding trust with Pyongyang. The broadcasts, which included propaganda messages and K-pop songs, were initially halted in June as a conciliatory gesture. The previous conservative government had resumed the broadcasts in retaliation for North Korea sending trash-laden balloons over the border. Despite South Korea's efforts to improve relations, North Korea, through leader Kim Jong Un 's sister Kim Yo Jong, recently rebuffed diplomatic overtures, indicating no immediate urgency for dialogue.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘He has trouble completing a thought': bizarre public appearances again cast doubt on Trump's mental acuity
Donald Trump's frequently bizarre public appearances, which this month have seen the president claim, wrongly, that his uncle knew the Unabomber and rant unprompted about windmills on his recent trip to the UK, have once again raised questions about his mental acuity, experts say. For more than a year Trump, 79, has exhibited odd behavior at campaign events, in interviews, in his spontaneous remarks and at press conferences. The president repeatedly drifts off topic, including during a cabinet meeting this month when he spent 15 minutes talking about decorating, and appears to misremember simple facts about his government and his life. During his presidency, Joe Biden was subjected to intense speculation over his mental acuity – including from Trump. After Biden's disastrous debate performance in June 2024, when he repeatedly struggled to maintain his train of thought, scrutiny over Biden's fitness eventually led to him not running for re-election. Trump, however, has largely been saved the same examination, despite examples of confusion and unusual behavior that have continued throughout his second term and were on full display on his recent trip to the UK. Over the weekend Trump, during a meeting with the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, abruptly switched from discussing immigration to saying this: 'The other thing I say to Europe: we've – we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They're killing us. They're killing the beauty of our scenery.' Trump proceeded to speak, non-stop and unprompted, for two minutes about windmills, claiming without evidence that they drive whales 'loco' and that wind energy 'kills the birds' (the proportion of birds killed by turbines is tiny compared with the amount killed by domestic cats and from flying into power lines). The abrupt changes in conversation are an example of Trump 'digressing without thinking – he'll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative', said Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in the psychology department at Cornell University and in the psychiatry department at Weill Cornell Medicine. For years, Trump has batted away questions about his mental acuity, describing himself as a 'stable genius' and bragging about 'acing' exams – later revealed to be very simple tests – which check for early signs of dementia. But Democrats have begun to more aggressively question the president's fitness, including Jasmine Crockett, the representative from Texas, and California's governor, Gavin Newsom, and this week alone offered multiple examples of Trump exhibiting odd conduct. Asked about the famine in Gaza on Sunday, Trump seemed unable to remember the aid the US has given to Gaza, and forget that others had also contributed. Trump claimed the US gave $60m 'two weeks ago'. He added: 'You really at least want to have somebody say thank you. No other country gave anything. 'Nobody acknowledged it, nobody talks about it and it makes you feel a little bad when you do that and you know you have other countries not giving anything, none of the European countries by the way gave – I mean nobody gave but us.' Trump seemed to not realize or remember that other countries have given money to Gaza – the UK announced a £60m ($80m) package in July, and the European Union has allocated €170m ($195m) in aid. And the Guardian could not find any record of the US giving $60m to Gaza two weeks ago. In June, the US state department approved a $30m grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as 'connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza'. The White House did not respond to questions about Trump's claimed $60m donation. Segal said another characteristic of Trump's questionable mental acuity is confabulation. 'It's where he takes an idea or something that's happened and he adds to it things that have not happened.' A high-profile example came in mid-July, when Trump claimed his uncle, the late professor John Trump, had taught Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, at MIT. Trump recalled: 'I said: 'What kind of a student was he, Uncle John? Dr John Trump.' I said: 'What kind of a student?' And then he said: 'Seriously, good.' He said: 'He'd correct – he'd go around correcting everybody.' But it didn't work out too well for him.' The problem is: that cannot possibly be true. First, Trump's uncle died in 1985, and Kaczynski was only publicly identified as the Unabomber in 1996. Second, Kaczynski did not study at MIT. 'The story makes no sense whatsoever, but it's told in a very warm, reflective way, as if he's remembering it,' Segal said. 'This level of thinking really has been deteriorating.' Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus. During the 2024 campaign there was the bizarre sight of Trump spending 40 minutes swaying to music onstage after a medical emergency at one of his campaign rallies. Trump's rambling speeches during his campaign – he would frequently drift between topics in a technique he described as 'the weave' – also drew scrutiny. The White House removed official transcripts of Trump's remarks from its website in May, claiming it was part of an effort to 'maintain consistency'. It is worth reading Trump's remarks in full, however, to get a sense of how the president speaks on a day-to-day basis. At the beginning of July, Trump was asked, 'What is the next campaign promise that you plan to fulfill to the American people?' He then rambled about meeting foreign leaders and removing regulations, adding: Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn't come out. They have a restrictor. You can't – in areas where you have so much water they don't know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn't uh, the shower doesn't, you think it's not working. It is working. The water's dripping out and that's no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it's really not. It's horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You're washing whole – water barely comes out it's ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can't just change it.' 'Any fair-minded mental-health expert would be very worried about Donald Trump's performance,' Richard A Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote in the Atlantic, after a stumbling performance from Trump in his debate against Kamala Harris last September. He added: 'If a patient presented to me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump now regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.' At a recent cabinet meeting called to discuss the flooding tragedy in Texas, the war in Ukraine and Gaza, the bombing of Iran, and global tariffs, Trump went on a 13-minute monologue about how he had decorated the cabinet meeting room. After talking about paintings which he said he had personally selected from 'the vaults', Trump said. 'Look at those frames, you know, I'm a frame person, sometimes I like frames more than I like the pictures,' and added he had overseen the cleaning of some china. As department heads, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, waited to be dismissed so they could go and do their jobs, Trump continued: Here we put out – you know these, these lamps have been very important actually, whether people love them or not but they're if you see pictures like Pearl Harbor or Tora! Tora! Tora!, you see movies about the White House where wars are being discussed, oftentimes they'll show those lamps or something like those lamps, something that looks like them. Probably not the reals, because I don't think they're allowed to – this is a very important room, this is a sacred room, and I don't think they made movies from here. You never know what they do. But they were missing, er, medallions. See the medallions on top? They had a chain going into the ceiling. And I said: 'You can't do that. You have to have a medallion.' They said, 'What's a medallion?' I said: 'I'll show you.' And then we got some beautiful medallions, and you see them, they were put up there, makes the lamps look [inaudible] so we did these changes. And when you think of it, the cost was almost nothing. We also painted the room a nice color, beige color, and it's been really something. The only question is, will I gold-leaf the corners? You could maybe tell me. My cabinet could take a vote. You see the top-line moldings, and the only question is do you go and leaf it? Because you can't paint it, if you paint it it won't look good because they've never found a paint that looks like gold. You see that in the Oval Office. Er, they've tried for years and years. Somebody could become very wealthy, but they've never found a paint that looks like gold. So painting is easy but it won't look right.' The White House pushes back aggressively on the issue of Trump's mental fitness. 'The Guardian is a left-wing mouthpiece that should be embarrassed to pass off deranged resistance leftists as 'experts'. Anyone pathetic enough to defend Biden's mental state – while being labeled as unethical by their peers – has zero credibility. President Trump's mental sharpness is second to none and he is working around the clock to secure amazing deals for the American people,' said White House spokesperson Liz Huston. So do his political allies. 'As President Trump's former personal physician, former physician to the president, and White House physician for 14 years across three administrations, I can tell you unequivocally: President Donald J Trump is the healthiest president this nation has ever seen. I continue to consult with his current physician and medical team at the White House and still spend significant time with the president. He is mentally and physically sharper than ever before,' said congressman Ronny Jackson. In April, Trump's White House physician, Dr Sean Barbabella, wrote that the president 'exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander-in-chief and head of state'. He said Trump was assessed for cognitive function, which was normal. That report hasn't stopped people from questioning Trump's mental acuity. 'What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone's baseline and function,' John Gartner, a psychologist and author who spent 28 years as an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, said in June. 'If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, [Trump] actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration.' Gartner, who during Trump's first term co-founded Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals who believed Trump had the personality disorder malignant narcissism, warned: 'I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know … we'll see. 'But the point is that it's going to get worse. That's my prediction.' The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know. If you have something to share on this subject you can contact us confidentially using the following methods. Secure Messaging in the Guardian app The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said. If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select 'Secure Messaging'. SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post See our guide at for alternative methods and the pros and cons of each.
