Security guards tackled Leicester Square stabbing suspect to ground before arrest
Private security guards tackled the man suspected of attacking an 11-year-old girl with a knife before police arrived…
LIVE Ukraine has ‘no interest’ in holding on to Russian territory
Ukraine has said it is not interested in permanently seizing parts of Russia’s Kursk region, insisting it had launched the cross-border assault to “protect the lives of our people”.
Kyiv currently claims to hold 1,000 square kilometres of Russian territory after its forces smashed across the border a week ago in the largest attack of the war so far.
Heorhii Tykhyi, the Ukrainian foreign ministry’s spokesman, said: “Ukraine is not interested in taking the territory of the Kursk region, but we want to protect the lives of our people.”
Instead, he argued Kyiv, which had revealed little of its operational objectives until now, was working to rid Russia’s borderlands of military assets used to strike Ukraine and draw enemy troops away from eastern Ukraine.
Mr Tykhyi earlier declared that Kyiv would stop its ongoing offensive, which has forced 200,000 Russians to evacuate, once Moscow agrees to “just peace”.
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Musk’s interview with Trump marred by tech issues after ‘massive cyber attack’
Donald Trump rehashed familiar talking points and called Joe Biden’s decision to quit the presidential race a “coup” in a rambling two-hour conversation with Elon Musk that was marred by a “massive” cyber attack.
The talk between Trump and Mr Musk had been due to start at 1am BST (8pm ET) on X, formerly Twitter, but began 45 minutes later because of what the tech billionaire claimed was a cyber attack.
“There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X,” Mr Musk said, referring to a tactic used by computer hackers to overwhelm a server with internet traffic.
It recalled Ron DeSantis’ glitch-plagued campaign launch last year, which the Florida Governor’s team attributed to the sheer number of people tuning in. At the time, Trump gleefully accused his Republican rival of a “catastrophic failure to launch”.
Once the conversation got under way, Trump vented about a “zombie apocalypse” of immigration, repeatedly blasted Mr Biden as “stupid” and mused on developing a new missile defence system, based on the one that defends Israel.
Here are the main takeaways.
Biden quitting presidential race a ‘coup’
Trump claimed Mr Biden had been pushed out by his own party and attacked his replacement, vice president Kamala Harris, as a “San Francisco radical” who had opened the country’s borders to illegal immigrants.
“This was a coup of a president of the United States,” he said on X, Mr Musk’s social media platform.
“He didn’t want to leave and they said, ‘We can do it, the nice way or we can do it the hard way.’”
Mr Biden has previously said he ended his campaign because of pressure from Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress.
Disquiet from his own party had become a “distraction”, he said.
Border ‘apocalypse’
During his meandering conversation with Mr Musk, Trump steered clear of his controversial claim that Ms Harris had decided to “turn” black – an attack which had prompted accusations of race-baiting.
Instead, he hammered her on her handling of the border crisis, claiming she had overseen millions of crossings by illegal immigrants during her time in office.
“She was totally in charge. She could have shut the border down without [Mr Biden]. He didn’t know what he was doing anyways. He wouldn’t have even known what happened,” Trump claimed.
“Where’s she been for three and a half years? For three and a half years, we’ve had 20 million people pouring in,” he added.
Pointing to Ms Harris’ recent claim that she had not been responsible for the border and would tighten security, Trump accused Democrats of waging a “disinformation campaign”.
Mr Musk, who voted for Mr Biden in the 2020 election but has since broken with the Democrats, accused the party of “rewriting history” with a “propaganda attempt” to distance Ms Harris from the border issue.
Trump repeatedly hit out at the vice president for dodging media interviews since Mr Biden endorsed her as his successor last month.
Ms Harris, who has surged in the polls since entering the race and now leads Trump in several battleground states, has steered clear of sit-down interviews but has indicated she will agree to one before the end of the month.
“It’s pretty sad when you think that somebody that does this for a living can’t answer a question or is afraid to do an interview,” Trump said.
“And, in her case, with a very friendly interviewer. She’s got friendly interviewers.”
Trump is widely acknowledged to have struggled to find his footing in the presidential campaign since Mr Biden, 81, was replaced by the 59-year-old vice president.
He has run through a number of nicknames for Ms Harris, including “Crazy Kamala” and “Laughin’ Kamala, which have failed to catch on. He did not mention any of them during his talk with Mr Musk.
Assassination attempt
The conversation between the pair began with Trump speaking about the attempt on his life last month.
Trump told Mr Musk he would return to Butler, Pennsylvania, in October, where a bullet struck his ear at a rally.
“We’re going back to Butler, and we’re gonna go back in October,” Trump said. “The people are fantastic in Butler.”
He rehashed how if he had “not turned” his head at the last moment, he would not have survived the shooting.
“I would not be talking to you right now – as much as I like you.”
Foreign relationships
Trump often returned to boasting about his relationship with autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and China’s Xi Jinping during the chat and insisted America would be safer under his stewardship.
“One of the things we’re going to do is we’re going to build an Iron Dome,” he said, referring to Israel’s missile defence system.
“We’re going to have the best Iron Dome in the world… because it just takes one maniac to, you know, start something.”
Trump also suggested Ms Harris would struggle on the world stage when dealing with Xi, Putin or Kim.
“They’re at the top of their game. They’re tough, they’re smart, they’re vicious, and they’re going to protect their country,” he said.
Addressing the war in Ukraine, Trump said of Putin: “Ukraine was the apple of his eye”. But he claimed he told Putin “don’t ever do it”, in relation to commencing an invasion.
Musk fails to steer conversation
Mr Musk attempted to engage Trump in ideas for his second term, but had little success in steering the conversation with the 78-year-old former president.
Trump pushed back when the billionaire said he had made “some progress” with deregulation during his first term in office, but could be “radical” if he returned to the White House.
“We set a record,” he insisted. “We said we did more deregulation and more restrictions on all of the different businesses than any other president.”
When Mr Musk, chief executive of the electric vehicle company Tesla, talked about the need to tackle global warming, Trump launched into a tangent about the need for solar panels on cars.
“It just seems like something that at some point you will come up with. I’m sure you’ll be the first,” he said, admitting that the issue was “not my world”.
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Labour MPs may leave ‘hateful’ X amid Musk spat with Starmer
Labour MPs are considering whether to leave X, formerly Twitter, branding the site “hateful” amid a public spat between Elon Musk, its owner, and Sir Keir Starmer…
Badenoch distances herself from 2018 video encouraging migration
Kemi Badenoch has distanced herself from comments she made in 2018 in which she welcomed relaxed immigration rules.
The Conservative leadership front-runner had praised reforms by Sajid Javid, then the home secretary, which included lifting a cap on highly skilled migrants.
Ms Badenoch also praised Mr Javid’s decision to allow students from the European Union to stay in Britain for six months after graduating.
But after the 2018 remarks resurfaced in The Sun newspaper, the shadow communities secretary said she had changed her mind and called for a “truthful” debate on migration policy.
Speaking in the Commons on Dec 19 2018, Mrs Badenoch, a backbench MP at the time, said she had lobbied for a number of the decisions made by Theresa May’s government.
“As a first-generation immigrant, can I welcome the home secretary’s statement?” she said. “I feel this immigration white paper is a move from the 20th century to a much better future immigration system.
“In particular I’d like to thank the home secretary for removing annual limits on work visas and also on international students, both of which I lobbied for on behalf of the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Anglia Ruskin University, which serve my constituency.”
Responding to The Sun’s article on Monday, Mrs Badenoch claimed it was clear from her previous Tory leadership run in 2022 that she no longer stood by her comments.
Writing on X, formerly Twitter, she said: “Pretending that public statements (on party policy from three elections ago!) are new ‘bombshell’ revelations is clutching at straws. In 2018, we still had unlimited EU migration. Our party policy was to bring in highly skilled people but limit low-skilled ones.
“By 2022, I could see it wasn’t working. It’s why I was so vocal about it in the last leadership contest.”
Mrs Badenoch came fourth in the race to succeed Boris Johnson and was described during the contest as “the only candidate” to address taboos around the impact of immigration levels.
In a statement to The Sun, Rachel Maclean, a former Tory MP and supporter of Mrs Badenoch who lost her seat at the last election said it was “shameful that [the] 2018 clip is being used to attack Kemi”.
Ms Maclean noted that unlike three of her rivals – Dame Priti Patel, James Cleverly and Robert Jenrick – Ms Badenoch was never in a Home Office role responsible for migration.
A ConservativeHome survey last week showed Ms Badenoch was the grassroots choice to become the next Tory leader ahead of Mr Jenrick, a former immigration minister.
On Monday, separate rankings by the same website had her at the top of the monthly shadow cabinet approval rankings with a net satisfaction score of 45 percentage points.
Ms Badenoch joined the race to replace Rishi Sunak at the end of last month, saying: “We can’t control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation state and the sovereign duty it has, above all else, to serve its own citizens.
“Our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly.”
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More killers like Valdo Calocane out there, warns Nottingham victim’s mother
The mother of one of the Nottingham knife attack victims has warned there are more dangerous men like Valdo Calocane going unchecked.
Emma Webber, whose son Barnaby Webber was killed by Calocane in Nottingham last year, said similar killings would happen because of failings in the care system.
She told ITV’s Good Morning Britain: “It’s not a one-off tragedy. There are more Valdo Calocanes out in our community.
“It’s a case of when it happens again, and not if, and it’s going to continue unless things drastically change.”
Calocane killed Mr Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19-year-old students, as they returned from a night out in June last year, before also killing 65-year-old school caretaker Ian Coates.
He then stole a van and crashed into three other people, who were seriously injured.
A new report by the health watchdog has revealed that Calocane was sectioned under the Mental Health Act four times before NHS services lost track of him and then discharged him.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) identified five missed opportunities to deal with Calocane’s violent psychosis in the three years before the killings.
The families of the victims said that NHS doctors had “blood on their hands” after the report was published.
Speaking on Tuesday morning, Mrs Webber said: “It’s really hard to actually pinpoint one particular point, because the failings are so systemic and they’re so gross – it’s a catalogue of continual failures for years.”
She said “so much” had been spoken about Calocane’s mental health but that support for the mental wellness of the victims’ families was “appalling”.
Mrs Webber said: “If you’re a victim thrown into this horror, there has to be much better support… It’s so skewed the wrong way. There’s been so much about the perpetrator, the murderer.”
She added: “I question how someone who is so unwell, as that programme allegedly portrayed last night, [could complete a] 2:1 in mechanical engineering at Nottingham University – that’s not an easy degree.”
Mrs Webber said the victim’s families had met Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, and Richard Hermer, the Attorney General, whom she claimed had promised her a public inquiry.
She said: “The first thing that Richard Hermer said was ‘spoken to the boss, the boss has confirmed there will be a public inquiry’, which is great.
“We just now need to make sure it’s the right public inquiry, that it is a statutory public inquiry.”
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Youngest female rioter, 13, at court with mother and stepfather
A 13-year-old girl, who is thought to be Britain’s youngest female rioter, arrived at court with her mother and stepfather.
The girl, who cannot be named for legal reasons, admitted violent disorder in Aldershot outside a hotel two days after the attack in Southport.
Accompanied by her mother and stepfather, the court was told she could be facing two years in prison had she been an adult.
On Tuesday, in the youth court at Basingstoke magistrates’ court, Hampshire, the girl fidgeted in her chair as she was spoken to.
Dressed in a cream-striped jumper, shorts and trainers she spoke quietly and only did so to confirm her name and address and plead guilty to violent disorder.
The court heard the offence took place during a protest at Potters International Hotel, in Aldershot, on July 31.
‘Using or threatening unlawful violence’
The teenager admitted “using or threatening unlawful violence” when present together with others which “would cause a person of reasonable firmness present at the scene to fear for his or her personal safety”.
Kerry Richardson, the prosecutor, told the court that if the girl had been an adult, she would be looking at two years in custody due to the “serious nature” of events.
District Judge Tim Pattinson warned her she would be committing an offence if she did not attend the next court hearing and ordered her to “co-operate” with probation.
She will be sentenced on Sept 30.
It comes as a 26-year-old man pleaded guilty on Monday to kicking at riot police and smashing shopping trollies into officers who were protecting a mosque in Sunderland on Aug 2.
John Kirtley, from Sunderland, was caught on camera throwing bricks and a beer keg towards police officers while draped in a St George’s flag, South Tyneside magistrates’ court heard.
Footage of the violent clash showed Kirtley shouting “England till I die” while waving a flare.
He admitted violent disorder and has been remanded in custody and will be sentenced at Newcastle Crown Court on Thursday Aug 22.
While the majority of those charged with offences relating to the riots have been male, several women, including 34-year-old Stacey Vint, who pushed a burning bin into a line of officers during a riot in Middlesbrough, have received substantial sentences.
The 13-year-old is understood to be the youngest known female rioter to be convicted for their participation in the riots which broke out following the fatal stabbing of three girls in Southport.
The girl is not the only child to appear in court charged with offences relating to the anti-immigration protests.
On Monday two 12-year-old boys were convicted over violent protests in Southport and Manchester.
At South Tyneside magistrates’ court on Monday, Kirtley was among three men to be convicted over their roles in the disorder in Sunderland.
He was identified when images and videos of the disorder were shared with police, which included footage of Kirtley kicking out at front-line officers. After police issued a public appeal, Kirtley handed himself in at Southwick Police Station on Sunday Aug 10, the court heard.
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