Tag: united kingdom

Bungling police raid ‘terrified’ elderly couple’s home in search for cannabis farm after thermal camera mistook the heating in terraced home for drugs den

An elderly couple who like to keep the heating on at home were left ‘shaking in fear’ when police burst into their home searching for a cannabis farm – after a thermal camera on a helicopter wrongly identified it as a drugs den.

Pensioners Barry and Mavis Lovelock were finishing their breakfast when the ‘terrifying’ raid took place.

Nine officers stormed in because a helicopter camera had mistakenly identified their toasty terrace home as a potential cannabis grow.

But after charging upstairs looking for cannabis plants and the strong lamps used to grow them, the sheepish officers came back down empty-handed after quickly concluding their tip-off had been ‘not fully accurate’. 

The heat signature on the couple’s roof had instead been caused by their two gas fires, which they keep on around-the-clock in the colder months.

Leicestershire Police has now apologised. They said another raid on a separate property in the street in Newfoundpool, Leicester, had found a large cannabis farm, with 79 plants being seized.

Mrs Lovelock said the ‘awful’ incident, which took place on March 15 at the property the couple had lived in since 1978, had left her in tears.

She said: ‘They told us the camera on the helicopter had noticed our roof glowing white but that was just because we have the heating on all of the time.

‘People of our age feel the cold so we need the heating on. 

‘We have two new gas fires downstairs and the gas engineer told us they will warm the whole house and they do. We keep the doors open and the heat circulates. We have electric wall heaters too, but we only need to put the electric heater on in the back bedroom.’

She said the couple had just finished their breakfast when she noticed a group of police officers outside as her husband, a retired water board worker, went to make another cup of tea.

Mrs Lovelock said that police then ‘hit the door’, prompting Mr Lovelock to shout: ‘Hang on mate’, before somebody shouted ‘Stand clear’ from the street outside.

She added: ‘They just rammed the door in. It was awful. They knocked the gate at the back in as well.

‘It was terrifying and I said to them, ‘What the devil do you think you’re doing? There’s two pensioners here.’

The couple, who celebrated their Golden Wedding anniversary last year, were shown a warrant with their house number on it.

Mrs Lovelock, a former hospital worker, added: ‘They got in and two of them ran upstairs, but they only went to the top of the stairs and ran back down.

‘I think there were about nine of them altogether, maybe more.

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Rolls-Royce Planning to Shift Production to United States to Avoid Trump Tariffs: Report

British engineering giant Rolls-Royce is reportedly preparing to increase manufacturing production in the United States to avoid tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.

London’s Daily Telegraph reported that Rolls-Royce is currently drafting contingency plans to avoid the impact of trade restrictions imposed by the Trump administration. The plans are said to include ramping up production in America and hiring more workers in the United States.

According to the report, the aerospace and defence company is considering shifting production from countries impacted by the trade war, such as China, Canada, and Mexico, where it currently has around 6,000 workers.

A source told the British broadsheet, “If you are making something in countries like China, then you’ll be looking at whether you can do it in the US instead.”

Additionally, Rolls is also considering potentially shifting production from the UK and Europe should tariffs threaten its manufacturing sites in the regions.

In a message to shareholders, the firm said that trade restrictions “could lead to increased costs and consequently realign the global supply chain”.

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Peter Mandelson appears to have met Jeffrey Epstein at New York mansion on a taxpayer-funded trip – while billionaire paedophile was under house arrest, new documents show

Peter Mandelson appears to have met Jeffrey Epstein on a taxpayer-funded trip to America when the disgraced financier was under house arrest for sex offences, newly-uncovered documents indicate.

Epstein’s private schedule, unearthed by The Mail on Sunday, reveals Lord Mandelson was due to have two meetings with the convicted paedophile at his £60 million New York mansion on consecutive days in March, 2010, while on a trip that cost taxpayers more than £8,000.

At the time Lord Mandelson was Business Secretary and First Secretary of State – effectively the second most powerful politician in Gordon Brown’s government as de facto deputy prime minister.

Epstein, meanwhile, was under house arrest after being sentenced in 2008 to 18 months in jail by a Florida court for procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. 

Last night the Foreign Office refused to answer questions, including whether the Labour grandee’s two meetings with Epstein took place. 

Lord Mandelson, 71, now the UK’s ambassador to the US, has said he ‘deeply regrets’ both ever meeting Epstein and the hurt caused to his victims. 

He also claimed he never had any kind of professional or business relationship with him. But quizzed recently about his relationship with Epstein, who died in 2019, he told a senior Financial Times journalist to ‘f*** off’.

Lord Mandelson and the financier are believed to have been first introduced by Ghislaine Maxwell, who was jailed in 2022 for 20 years for helping Epstein traffic under-age girls. 

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UK Judges Rule That Docs Revealing Close Ties Between Disgraced Prince Andrew and Alleged Chinese Spy Yang Tengbo Must Be Released in Two Weeks

Another week, another damaging report brought Prince Andrew’s alleged corruption to the forefront of British public opinion.

A London tribunal has ruled that private documents of the correspondence between Andrew’s top adviser and an alleged Chinese spy must be made public in a fortnight.

Dominic Hampshire, an aide and close friend of the Duke, had to submit a witness statement after Chinese businessman Yang Tengbo was expelled and banned from the UK.

The Telegraph reported:

“Mr. Yang was forced to leave the country on national security grounds in March 2023 and unsuccessfully challenged the decision at the Special Immigration Appeals Commission last year. UK authorities have alleged that he formed an ‘unusual degree of trust’ with the Duke and developed relationships with politicians to be ‘leveraged’ by China.”

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USAID Censorship Scheme Exposed; Global Engagement Center Worked With UK Government And Media Firms To Deploy AI Tools

On Thursday, America First Legal (AFL) released explosive new documents obtained through ongoing litigation against the U.S. Department of State’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), exposing a vast, government-backed censorship operation to silence Americans under the guise of “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “malinformation.” The documents reveal a disturbing alliance between the GEC, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the British Foreign, Commonwealth, Development Office (FCDO), and media censorship organizations, all working in lock-step to manipulate public discourse, control media narratives, and suppress free speech.

The GEC, which was forced to shut down in December 2024, was designed to “combat foreign disinformation abroad.” However, through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, AFL uncovered that the GEC engaged in state-sponsored propaganda, repeatedly using willing participants from private media organizations. Further, AFL’s lawsuit against the GEC revealed that USAID had created an internal “Disinformation Primer” that explicitly praised private sector censorship strategies and recommended further censorship tactics.

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UK MP Questions Whether Elon Musk and JD Vance’s Criticism of Censorship Laws May Constitute “Foreign Interference”

At first glance, you might think Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, had simply woken up on the wrong side of a particularly Orwellian bed. During a recent parliamentary inquisition — sorry, hearing — on social media, misinformation, and algorithms, Darlington floated an idea so alarmingly daft that even the Ministry of Truth would have blushed.

Her proposal? That public criticism of the UK’s speech laws by Elon Musk and US Vice President JD Vance might amount to “foreign interference.” That’s right. According to Darlington’s logic, if an American so much as questions the Online Safety Act, they might as well be stuffing ballot boxes or hacking government servers.

“Should we consider the current JD Vance, Elon Musk campaign against the UK — particularly against the government and the Prime Minister — and this push about free speech and the misrepresentation of our free speech laws as foreign interference?” she asked, in a sentence so brazenly bonkers it should come with its own government warning label.

This wasn’t a discussion about cyberattacks or deepfake election manipulation. No, Darlington was talking about speech. Dissent. Opinions. The sort of thing democracies used to be quite fond of.

Now, under the UK’s freshly unwrapped National Security Act 2023, “foreign interference” can land you 14 years in prison and an unlimited fine. It used to be that such punishments were reserved for actual enemies of the state — spies, saboteurs. Now, apparently, tweeting that Britain’s Online Safety Act is a bad idea could get you tossed into the Tower.

One would expect a room full of educated adults to respond to this with a firm, resounding no. Instead, we got caution, hedging, and a heavy whiff of complicity.

Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman, a Senior Fellow at Georgetown and one-time Twitter Trust and Safety Council member, refused to outright dismiss the idea that Musk or Vance might be causing harm.

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“Beyond Reasonable Doubt”: Former MI6 Head Told Boris Johnson COVID-19 “Was Engineered In The WIV”

Last week we noted reporting by journalist Alex Berensen, who cited two large German newspapers in revealing that Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) has long had evidence that the Covid-19 virus originally came from a US-funded lab in Wuhan, China.

According to these reports, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe in 2020, the German government commissioned a secret intelligence operation under the codename of Saaremaa to investigate the origins of the Covid-19 virus, also known as SARS-CoV-2. When they concluded that a lab leak was most likely, the German Chancellery ordered that the results were to be kept hidden from the public.

The UK Knew Too…

Now, the Daily Mail reports that “a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.” 

Except that Patrick Vallance, the UK’s equivalent of Anthony Fauci, quashed it.

A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: ‘It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology’.

The file, marked ‘Secret – Recipient’s Eyes Only’ argued that Beijing was pushing a fake narrative that the virus had originated in an animal market. The dossier, compiled by a group of eminent academics and intelligence experts and seen by The Mail on Sunday, said China even retrospectively manipulated viral samples to give credence to the deception.

But the argument is said to have been dismissed by Patrick Vallance, who was a familiar face during the pandemic as he flanked Mr Johnson at No 10 news conferences.

In a new statement from Dearlove, he writes that “Boris himself was persuaded by its argument. But the weight of the Government’s scientific establishment, already signed up to the Chinese narrative, prevailed.”

Last night, a source close to Mr Johnson pointed the finger at Lord Vallance for rubbishing the lab-leak theory in order to appease the Chinese government. The source said: ‘Boris repeatedly asked the [intelligence] agencies to do more work on the origins of Covid. It struck him as simply too much of a coincidence that a mutant Covid virus appeared in a city that just happened to possess one of the only labs in the world that engineered mutant Covid viruses.

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The most outrageous benefits scandal of all: How taxpayer-funded firm set up to help the disabled is now handing its £4 BILLION stockpile of cars to people who are obese or ‘depressed’ – and even letting friends and relatives use them

The way Aaron Hooper told it, he was so disabled he didn’t have the strength to grip a knife and fork or move more than a few metres without a wheelchair.

The 31-year-old was sufficiently convincing for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to put him on disability benefit and he was awarded a brand-new car under the Motability scheme, which offers anyone in receipt of a ‘qualifying mobility allowance’ a free car, scooter or powered wheelchair in exchange for a portion of their disability benefits.

It was only when his mother came under investigation for suspected benefit fraud that a different picture of his physical abilities emerged.

DWP staff not only observed him walking a mile unaided through the Devon town of Axminster with a guitar slung across his back but also lifting heavy weights at a local gym.

It was his exploits in the fitness centre’s car park that were most telling, however. In a video the gym uploaded to Instagram, Hooper can be seen demonstrating his strength by pulling his car several metres across the tarmac using a rope attached to the tow hitch of the vehicle.

Hooper’s case is not just a salutary tale about the gullibility of the civil servants who police our bloated benefits system, but a reminder of the perks available to some of the 2.8 million people currently economically inactive due to ill health.

Last year, a record 815,000 claimants made use of the Motability scheme. This represents an astonishing increase of more than 170,000 customers in just 12 months thanks to a surge in people claiming disability benefits, which boosted Motability’s turnover to a whopping £7 billion.

This boom has proved extremely lucrative for the scheme, which enjoys a uniquely privileged position. Not only is it a private company, jointly owned by Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and NatWest, but enjoys a guaranteed revenue stream in the form of state-funded benefits and has a de facto monopoly.

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Spies, Secrets, and iCloud: Apple’s Legal Showdown in London

The Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) in London is the one that will consider Apple’s appeal against the UK’s Home Office secret order to include an encryption backdoor in the giant’s iCloud service.

As things stand now, pending the outcome of the legal – and political – wrangling, iCloud users no longer enjoy the security and privacy benefits of the Advanced Data Protection (ADP).

This affects iCloud Backup in the following categories: iCloud Drive, Photos, Notes, Reminders, Safari Bookmarks, Siri Shortcuts, Voice Memos, Wallet Passes, and Freeform.

Meanwhile, the tribunal itself is “secret,” and the date it will consider Apple’s attempt to avoid the permanent breaking of encryption, and of the trust of its users worldwide, has been set for Friday, March 14.

But privacy activists like Privacy International (PI) want these hearings to be public, since the outcome of the UK’s anti-encryption push potentially affects millions, possibly billions of people around the world.

Secret as it may be, the IPT – which is believed to normally deal with national security issues – announced Friday’s closed-door meeting, a move that is described as “unusual.”

Unusual perhaps, but not illogical – Apple’s appeal against the original secret order was also apparently meant to be secret but has in the meantime been “leaked” to the public.

The original order came from Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who targeted the US company with a “technical compatibility notice.” The end result of compliance was giving UK’s spies and law enforcement access to data, by compromising iCloud encryption.

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United Nations judge convicted of forcing young woman to work as slave

A Ugandan judge who sits on a UN court has been convicted of enslaving a young woman while she was living in Oxford.

Lydia Mugambe, 49, took “advantage of her status” over her victim in the “most egregious way” by preventing her from holding down steady employment and forcing her to work as her maid, while providing childcare for free, prosecutors said.

She was found guilty on Thursday at Oxford crown court of conspiring to breach UK immigration law, people trafficking, modern slavery and conspiracy to intimidate a witness.

Mugambe collapsed in the dock as the guilty verdicts were read out and the judge ordered that the court be cleared after there were audible gasps in the public gallery. The Ugandan judge was escorted from the court by two dock officers.

Mugambe was appointed two years ago to the UN court that deals with residual matters from the criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

She is understood to be a PhD research student at Oxford’s law faculty while on sabbatical from her main role as a high court judge in Uganda.

At the trial, Caroline Haughey KC, for the prosecution, said that Mugambe had “exploited and abused” the victim by “taking advantage of her lack of understanding of her rights to properly paid employment and deceiving her as to the purpose of her coming to the UK”.

The jury accepted the prosecution’s case that Mugambe had engaged in “illegal folly” with John Leonard Mugerwa, who was Uganda’s deputy high commissioner in London.

The pair were found to have conspired to arrange for the young woman to come to the UK. Prosecutors said that Mugambe and Mugerwa had participated in a “very dishonest” trade-off.

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