US general warns British Army no longer top-level fighting force, defence sources reveal
A senior US general has privately told Defence Secretary Ben Wallace the British Army is no longer regarded as a top-level fighting force, defence sources have revealed.
They said this decline in war-fighting capability – following decades of cuts to save money – needed to be reversed faster than planned in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Classmates of triple killer who lied he was 14 to get into UK say the Afghan asylum seeker ‘terrorised classmates and frightened girls into sending him indecent photos’
The asylum seeker triple murderer, 21, who fooled authorities he was 14 terrified young girls into sending him indecent pictures when he was placed in a UK school.
Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai was yesterday convicted of murdering aspiring marine Thomas Roberts in Bournemouth town centre in March last year.
It then emerged he had murdered two other people in Serbia before he claimed asylum in the UK by pretending to be a 14-year-old orphan when he was actually 18.
The Beatles first visited the United States in 1964. They were the tip of the spear of the so-called British Invasion, the first of several pop groups to take America by storm. Fifty years later, Britain would export another boy band also named the Beatles. However, instead of touring the United States, they travelled to Syria, where they beheaded journalists and aid workers in cold blood. You could not invent a better signifier of British decline.
This cultural transformation does not reflect British hearts and minds. As a nation, we weren’t persuaded by fist-banging muftis or gun-toting clerics. On the contrary, the shift in our society has been imposed from the outside. A cocktail of involuntary impositions, mass legal and illegal migration, a Pravda programme of censorship, and the cowardice of our leaders have rendered swathes of British society unrecognisable. In this regard we stand apart from our European neighbours for our exceptional naïveté. We all know of Jihadi John, but as the Italian comic Nicholas De Santo remarked “nobody has ever heard of jihadi Pavarotti.”
A counter terrorism investigation has been launched after a man carrying a gun and a suspect package was arrested inside the grounds of St James hospital in Leeds.
The 27-year-old man was arrested at around 5am on suspicion of firearms and explosives offences. It is understood the suspect was arrested close to the hospital’s maternity unit.
Part of the hospital had to be evacuated and bomb disposal teams from the British Army were drafted in.
Shamima Begum, who left Britain to join Islamic State as a schoolgirl in 2015, has said she understands public anger towards her but insists she is “not this person that they think I am”.
Begum, who was 15 when she left her east London home to join IS with her school friends Kadiza Sultana, 15, and Amira Abase, 16, has told the story of how she joined the terror group and life in a refugee camp in a 10-part BBC podcast, The Shamima Begum Story.
Begum was found in a refugee camp in 2019, stripped of British citizenship and banned from entering Britain. She said she knew the public saw her “as a danger, as a risk, as a potential risk to them, to their safety, to their way of living”, but added: “I’m not this person that they think I am.”
She knew exactly what she was doing.
Lately I have felt a strange pain in my gut. A tight, sick feeling that is nothing to do with my physical health.
It is the feeling that my home is lost forever.
h/t SDMatt
The Home Office shouldn’t shy away from exposing Islamist extremism
Like many with an interest in national security, I’ve spent this week closely following the news that there has been yet another delay to the release of the long-anticipated review into the government’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent. But unlike many of my colleagues, these issues feel more intimate and closer to home for me, given my personal experience. In March 2017 I sustained serious injuries in the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack when an Islamist extremist targeted pedestrians, including me and my friends, with an SUV before stabbing a police officer outside Parliament.
Taxpayers’ money has been handed to groups promoting Islamist extremism, a landmark review of the Government’s flagship Prevent programme has found.
Key figures in organisations funded by Prevent are alleged to have supported the Taliban, defended militant Islamist groups banned in the UK and hosted hate preachers, according to a leaked draft of the report seen by The Telegraph.
The review by William Shawcross, a former head of the Charity Commission, is expected to say that the “unacceptable” cases undermined Prevent’s ability to “effectively undertake counter-radicalisation” work.
The bombing of the Pan Am flight 103 killed 270 people in Britain’s largest terrorist attack
The man accused of being the bombmaker in the Lockerbie terrorist attack that killed 270 people is now in US custody, Scottish authorities have said.
The bombing of Pan Am flight 103, travelling from London to New York on December 21 1988, killed all 259 passengers and crew on board. A further 11 people died in Lockerbie when the wreckage destroyed their homes.
Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi was said to be the “third conspirator” behind the downing of the flight in 1988.
Concerns are mounting in the U.K. about the number of Ukrainian refugees ending up homeless as their initial sponsorships come to an end.
“Hello, I need a help,” one Ukrainian refugee posted in the Facebook group Homes for Ukraine.
My sponsor won’t let me and my mom live with him anymore. It happened abruptly, and I don’t know what to do. I’m looking for renting room for not big money, as soon as possible
One more thing, we have a cat. I would be thankful for any information. Thank you.
According to recent government data, 2,985 Ukrainians are already homeless.
Two people have been arrested after protesters smashed into a weapons plant in Wales and destroyed the building using sledgehammers.
The activists from Palestine Action targeted Teledyne Technologies’ weapons plant in Presteigne, Powys, climbing in through smashed windows.
They then claimed to start “thoroughly dismantle the factory of the American-owned firm, forcing closure of a site used to supply military hardware to Israel”.
… Campaigning to bring jihadis back to Britain is a really bad, terrible idea. The situation is dour enough as it is, with the risk that refugees from the war-torn Middle East — they and their terrorist cohorts displaced — may one day “revert” to the fundamentalist Islam in which many of them were raised, as was demonstrated by 22-year-old Libyan, Salman Abedi, a who massacred scores of pop fans at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester in 2017.
For the first time fewer than half of people in England and Wales describe themselves as Christian, the Census 2021 has revealed.
The proportion of people who said they were Christian was 46.2%, down from 59.3% in the last census in 2011.
In contrast the number who said they had no religion increased to 37.2% of the population, up from a quarter.
Those identifying as Muslim rose from 4.9% in 2011 to 6.5% last year.
The U.K. is restricting Chinese-made surveillance equipment from sensitive sites including government buildings, based on a government review of security risks.
“The review has concluded that, in light of the threat to the U.K. and the increasing capability and connectivity of these systems, additional controls are required,” said Cabinet office minister Oliver Dowden in a statement to Parliament.
The cameras are “produced by companies subject to the National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China,” Dowden added.
