Futurology Today

London (AFP) – Thousands of Afghans who worked with the UK government and their families were brought to Britain in a secret programme after a 2022 data breach put their lives at risk, a minister revealed Tuesday.

Defence Minister John Healey unveiled the scheme to parliament after the UK High Court on Tuesday lifted a super-gag order banning reports of the events.

In February 2022 a spreadsheet containing the names and details of almost 19,000 Afghans who had asked to be relocated to Britain was accidentally leaked by a UK official just six months after the Taliban seized Kabul, Healey said.

"This was a serious departmental error," Healey said, adding "lives may have been at stake".

The previous Conservative government put in place a secret programme to help those "judged to be at the highest risk of reprisals by the Taliban", he said.

Some 900 Afghans and 3,600 family members have now been brought to Britain or are in transit under the programme known as the Afghan Response Route at a cost of around £400 million, Healey said.

They are among some 36,000 Afghans who have been accepted by Britain under different schemes since the August 2021 fall of Kabul.

As Labour's opposition defence spokesman Healey was briefed on the scheme in December 2023, but the Conservative government asked a court to impose a "super-injunction" banning any mention of it in parliament or by the press.

When Labour came to power in July 2024, the scheme was in full swing, but Healey said he had been "deeply uncomfortable to be constrained from reporting to this House".

"Ministers decided not to tell parliamentarians at an earlier stage about the data incident, as the widespread publicity would increase the risk of the Taliban obtaining the dataset," he added.

Healey set up a review of the scheme on becoming defence minister in the new Labour government. This concluded there was "very little intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution".

The Afghan Response Route has now been closed, the minister said, apologising for the data breach which "should never have happened."

Lufthansa CEO's wife is under investigation after running over an Italian woman with her SUV

Mar Menor, a 135-square-kilometer (52-square-mile) lagoon in southern Spain, is the only ecosystem in Europe that can be named a victim in a legal case. In September 2022, the Spanish Senate granted the largest saltwater lagoon in the Mediterranean legal personhood. From then on, any human who wanted to help Mar Menor could represent it in court.

For those in the budding Rights of Nature movement, who recognize the planet and all its ecosystems as living beings with inalienable rights, the Mar Menor victory was a breakthrough. The first body of water in Europe granted legal personhood, the move caught the region up to similar legal successes elsewhere, such as with Colombia’s Atrato River in 2016 and New Zealand’s Whanganui River in 2017.

Protection for Mar Menor came after a series of mass die-offs ravaged the ecosystem. In 2016, excessive nutrient runoff triggered a massive algal bloom that turned parts of the lagoon a misty green and killed 85 percent of its marine vegetation. Then in 2019, and again in 2021, nutrient runoff stripped the lagoon of oxygen, suffocating thousands of fish and crustaceans, and littering its shores with creatures gasping for air.

Spurred by the crises, environmental activists, lawmakers, and local residents banded together. They collected around 640,000 signatures and, in 2022, successfully pushed a citizen initiative through the Spanish parliament’s upper chamber. Their efforts resulted in a new law granting Mar Menor and its surrounding basin rights in every sense of the word: the right to live and flourish; the right to be protected; and the right to recover. The law’s Article 6 was particularly groundbreaking. It stated that any person or relevant legal entity “is entitled to defend the ecosystem of the Mar Menor.”

“The right to recovery is no longer something that depends on a ministry wanting to do it, but it is a right of the Mar Menor,” says Teresa Vicente. A law professor at the nearby University of Murcia, Vicente earned the Goldman Environmental Award, often called the Green Nobel, for the key role she played in driving the initiative and writing the law that gives personhood to Mar Menor.

But three years on, Mar Menor is still waiting for humans to act on their promises. So I visited this famous coastal lagoon—the name of which translates to Minor Sea—and chatted with some of its protectors to find out what was happening on the ground.

I tend to use DuckDuckGo most of the time, but its quality has collapsed considerably. Google is terrible now and only worth it for reverse image search. I haven't tried Brave much and SearX-NG was a pain to set up for being a de-facto Google and Bing wrapper. There's Kagi but I don't really have $120/yr for a search engine, nor do I want to deal with how they handle logins and session management.

Pelicot's landmark case led to reforms in France's rape laws after she bravely testified about enduring a decade of sexual abuse.

Gisele Pelicot, the French woman whose courage in publicly testifying about the decade-long sexual abuse she endured made her a symbol of women's rights in France, has received the country's highest civilian honor.

Pelicot was named a knight of the Legion of Honor in a list published Sunday, ahead of France's Bastille Day celebrations.

She joins 588 others on this year's list.

By Zeynep Tufekci - Opinion Columnist
July 11, 2025

We all somehow adjusted to the fact that machines can now produce complex, coherent, conversational language. But that ability makes it extremely hard not to think about L.L.M.s as possessing a form of humanlike intelligence.

They are not, however, a version of human intelligence. Nor are they truth seekers or reasoning machines. What they are is plausibility engines. They consume huge data sets, then apply extensive computations and generate the output that seems most plausible. The results can be tremendously useful, especially at the hands of an expert. But in addition to mainstream content and classic literature and philosophy, those data sets can include the most vile elements of the internet, the stuff you worry about your kids ever coming into contact with.

https://archive.ph/qZjnK

While we are all holding our breath for the possible initiatives against Israel that Kaja Kallas, the European High Representative for Foreign Affairs, could present on Tuesday (15 July) to the foreign affairs council, the lawyers of the JURDI Association (lawyers for the respect of international law), are taking action.

On Thursday, they will file an “action for failure to act” with the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg against the EU Commission and Council for their failure to act on the crimes committed by the Netanyahu government in Gaza.

A prominent Georgia Republican was running a Ponzi scheme that defrauded 300 investors of at least $140 million, federal officials alleged in a complaint filed Thursday.

The civil lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said First Liberty Building and Loan, controlled by Brant Frost IV, lied to investors about its business of making high-interest loans to companies. Instead, investigators said, it raised more money to repay earlier investors.

Frost is alleged to have taken more than $19 million of investor funds for himself, his family and affiliated companies even as the business was going broke, spending $160,000 on jewelry and $335,000 with a rare coin dealer. Frost is also said to have spent $320,000 to rent a vacation home over multiple years in Kennebunkport, Maine, the town where the family of late president George H. W. Bush famously spent summers.

https://xcancel.com/hasanthehun/status/1943174672981364937#m

Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 ‘appeared visually merged in optical sensor data’, space tracking firm says, a feat US seeks to match by 2026.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20250713141105/https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3318050/chinas-shijian-satellite-pair-appears-dock-orbit-historic-refuelling-mission

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.