One of two men arrested today accused of spying for China is the public school-educated son of a GP who co-founded an influential policy group with security minister Tom Tugendhat. Christopher Cash, 29 – a Tory parliamentary researcher and China specialist – has been charged for an offence under the Official Secrets Act alongside Christopher Berry, 32. Cash, who insists he is ‘completely innocent’, grew up in a wealthy suburb of Edinburgh and attended £5,000-a-term George Watson’s College – where he was head of house – before studying History at the University of St Andrews. A ‘skilled networ ..read more

The technology behind England’s smart motorways network stopped working on a regular basis leaving drivers ‘at risk’, it has emerged. There were 397 incidents when the motorway network lost power, which makes it difficult to detect when a car breaks down and can trap drivers in a live lane, from June 2022 to February 2024. In some of the incidents, crucial safety equipment including CCTV, signals and signs were out out of action for days at a time. A traffic officer who works on the network told the BBC that they no longer consider the network safe. However, National Highways – which operates ..read more

Apple has reportedly suspended production of vegan phone cases it started selling less than a year ago. The tech giant is said to have stopped making its FineWoven cases and watch straps following complaints that the £59 cases would become easily scratched and worn out. Apple introduced the material, a “microtwill” made up of recycled textiles and other fibres, last September when it announced that it would no longer produce leather accessories as part of an environmental push. The business has committed to its supply chain being completely carbon neutral by 2030. When it introduced the FineW ..read more

Football is a game played by humans and it should be subject to the decision-making of humans, not AI. Will mistakes be made? Of course. There is no such thing as certainty despite the obsession with it. AI makes mistakes and humans make mistakes interpreting AI. There is no certain certainty, but the game is being ruined as a spectacle by chasing the impossible dream. For the Coventry player to be deemed offside by a fraction of a toe when no advantage was gleaned is a statement about the madness of seeking certainty – and the same is played out across human society by trying to take uncerta ..read more

The World Health Organization’s Dr. Hanna Nohynek testified in court that she advised her government that vaccine passports were not needed but was ignored, despite explaining that the Covid vaccines did not stop virus transmission and the passports gave a false sense of security. The stunning revelations came to light in a Helsinki courtroom where Finnish citizen Mika Vauhkala is suing after he was denied entry to a café for not having a vaccine passport. Dr. Nohynek is chief physician at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and serves as the WHO’s chair of Strategic Group of Experts ..read more

Every morning, men and women serving on the front line of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service pull on a cheap uniform and go to work in what’s been called the most hostile work environment in Europe. The endemic violence in our jails means many of them are ending their shifts in hospital rather than home with their families. A month ago, an officer went on duty on B wing in HMP Whitemoor, one of our maximum security prisons. He left in an ambulance and was put on a ventilator, unconscious, after a vicious assault. He’s now thankfully recovering. Rates of assault against prison staff ru ..read more

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he would fight planned US sanctions on an IDF unit accused of grave human rights violations in the West Bank with ‘all [his] strength.’ Reports on Saturday claimed that the Biden administration was planning on imposing sanctions on Israel’s Netzah Yehuda battalion, which has largely operated in the occupied West Bank and was accused in 2022 of allowing an elderly Palestinian-American man to die after he suffered ‘extreme violence’ at the soldiers’ hands. The reports came a day after the US announced a series of sanctions linked to Israeli settler ..read more

While we may allow ourselves a moment’s pause to mark the end of the trans scandal, we cannot celebrate. Another monstrous social contagion will soon engulf us. And if the progression of previous social contagions is anything to go by, the next iteration will be the stuff of even bleaker nightmares. More dreadful than the puberty blocking and sterilisation of children? Oh yes indeed. What made the trans movement so ice-cold-horrifying is that it was adults causing the harm to the children. From the teachers who accepted the child’s chosen pronouns, to the parents who took their children to th ..read more

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“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room.” So says Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus in sci-fi classic ‘The Matrix’ as he offers Keanu Reeves’s Neo the choice to find out just how “deep the rabbit hole goes”. Now, just as Neo discovered that the “life” he’d been living was little more than an algorithmic construct, scientists and philosophers are arguing that we could be stuck inside a simulation ourselves. In a paper published earlier this month, physicist Melvin Vopson, of the University of Portsmouth, offered scientific evidence for a philosophical theory know ..read more