Britain hosts key nations to coordinate fight against people smugglers
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain will on Monday host a meeting of more than 40 countries and organisations, including the United States, France and Vietnam, to try to coordinate internationally its fight against illegal migration and those who profit from it.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, like all his predecessors for more than a decade, is seeking new ways to stop migrants coming illegally to Britain, where immigration remains a key issue for voters who worry about the pressure it puts on scarce resources like healthcare and housing.
Monday's Organised Immigration Crime (OIC) Summit looks to address every stage of the global industry in people smuggling, including the supply chains for the small boats used to travel from France to Britain, and the tech firms whose social media platforms are used to advertise such illicit crossings.
"This vile trade exploits the cracks between our institutions, pits nations against one another and profits from our inability at the political level to come together," Starmer will tell the summit, according to advance extracts of his speech.
Representatives from Meta, X and TikTok will participate.
Migrants from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere pay thousands of pounds to traffickers for places in small inflatable boats that then try to cross one of the world's busiest shipping channels to reach the English coast.
Starmer was elected last year, promising to "smash the gangs" behind the crossings. He immediately ditched the previous Conservative government's policy to deter migrants by setting up a scheme to deport them to Rwanda.
More than 36,800 people made the crossing in 2024, 25% more than the previous year, according to British government data. More than 6,600 people have crossed successfully so far in 2025.
"I simply do not believe Organised Immigration Crime cannot be tackled. We've got to combine our resources, share intelligence and tactics, and tackle the problem upstream at every step of the people smuggling routes," Starmer will say.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Justice Department accuses two Chinese researchers of smuggling 'potential agroterrorism weapon' into US
By Jasper Ward WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. federal prosecutors have accused two Chinese nationals of smuggling a dangerous biological pathogen that had the potential to be used as an agricultural terrorism weapon into the United States for research. The U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday identified the pathogen as Fusarium graminearum, a fungus it said was classified in scientific literature as a potential agroterrorism weapon. In a statement it said that the fungus causes "head blight" in some crops and is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses globally each year. According to an FBI criminal complaint, Zunyong Liu, 34, a researcher currently in China, brought the fungus into the United States while visiting his girlfriend, Yunqing Jian, 33, in July 2024. He admitted to smuggling in the fungus so he could conduct research on it at a University of Michigan laboratory where his girlfriend worked, according to the complaint. The university did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to the complaint, an examination of electronic communications between the two indicated that they discussed shipping biological materials and research being done in the laboratory prior to Liu's arrival. Jian and Liu were accused in the complaint of conspiracy, smuggling goods into the United States, false statements and visa fraud. Cheyvoryea Gibson, special agent in charge of the FBI Detroit Field Office, said the pair's actions "posed an imminent threat to public safety." Jian was expected to appear in court in Detroit, Michigan, on Tuesday. A judge appointed a public defender, who could not be immediately reached for comment, to represent Jian.
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Wind opponents sue Trump administration to block New York wind project
By Nate Raymond (Reuters) -Fishing companies and offshore wind opponents filed a lawsuit on Tuesday challenging the Trump administration's decision to reverse course and allow construction to resume on Empire Wind, a $5 billion wind farm project off New York's coast. Protect Our Coast New Jersey, Clean Ocean Action, ACK for Whales and 12 fishing industry participants in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, sought to reinstate a stop work order Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued in April halting construction of Equinor's wind project. Burgum issued that order after Republican President Donald Trump on his first day back in office on January 20 directed his administration to halt offshore wind lease sales and stop the issuance of permits, leases and loans for both onshore and offshore wind projects. He did so while also moving to ramp up the federal government's support for the fossil fuel industry and maximize output in the United States. Trump as a candidate last year promised to end the offshore wind industry. But weeks after Burgum signed the stop-work order, the administration in a turnabout on May 19 allowed work to resume on Empire Wind, which is being developed by Norway's Equinor and is expected to provide power for half a million homes from 2027 onward. The administration did so in a compromise with New York that could also see canceled plans for a gas pipeline revived. Burgum said he was encouraged that New York Governor Kathy Hochul will now allow new gas pipeline capacity to move forward. Tuesday's lawsuit argued that the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management did not adhere to the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to provide a basis for restoring the work permits. Bruce Afran, the plaintiffs' lawyer, said the administration had properly recognized the lack of investigation about serious environmental harm from Equinor's project. "The administration correctly pulled the Empire Wind work permit because of these concerns and had no basis to reinstate the work orders a month later," he said in a statement. "This lawsuit seeks to restore the stop work order." Equinor declined to comment on the lawsuit itself but in a statement said the project "has undergone years of rigorous permitting and studies, and secured all necessary federal, state and local approvals to begin construction in 2024." The agency did not respond to a request for comment.
Yahoo
24 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Big Tech's AI Endgame Is Coming Into Focus
If Google has its way, there will be no search bars, no search terms, no searching (at least not by humans). The very tool that has defined the company—and perhaps the entire internet—for nearly three decades could soon be overtaken by a chatbot. Last month, at its annual software conference, Google launched 'AI Mode,' the most drastic overhaul to its search engine in the company's history. The feature is different from the AI summaries that already show up in Google's search results, which appear above the usual list of links to outside websites. Instead, AI Mode functionally replaces Google Search with something akin to ChatGPT. You ask a question and the AI spits out an answer. Instead of sifting through a list of blue links, you can just ask a follow-up. Google has begun rolling out AI Mode to users in the United States as a tab below the search bar (before 'Images,' 'Shopping,' and the like). The company said it will soon introduce a number of more advanced, experimental capabilities to AI Mode, at which point the feature could be able to write a research report in minutes, 'see' through your smartphone's camera to assist with physical tasks such as a DIY crafts project, help book restaurant reservations, make payments. Whether AI Mode can become as advanced and as seamless as Google promises remains far from certain, but the firm appears to be aiming for something like an everything app: a single tool that will be able to do just about everything a person could possibly want to do online. Seemingly every major tech company is after the same goal. OpenAI markets ChatGPT, for instance, as able to write code and summarize documents, help shop, produce graphics, and naturally, search the web. Elon Musk is notoriously obsessed with the idea of turning X into an everything app. Meta says you can use its AI 'for everything you need'; Amazon calls its new, generative AI–powered Alexa+ 'an assistant available to help any time you want'; Microsoft bills its AI Copilot as a companion 'for all you do'; and Apple has marketed Apple Intelligence and a revamped Siri as tools that will revolutionize how people use their iPhones (which encompass, for many users, everything). Even Airbnb, once focused simply on vacation rentals, is redesigning itself as a place where 'you can sell and do almost anything,' as its CEO, Brian Chesky, recently said. In a sense, everything apps are the logical conclusion of Silicon Valley's race to build artificial 'general' intelligence, or AGI. A bot smart enough to do anything obviously would be used to power a product that can, in effect, do anything. But such apps would also represent the culmination of the tech industry's aim to entrench its products in people's daily lives. Already, Google has features for shopping, navigation, data storage, work software, payment, travel—plus an array of smartphones, tablets, smart-home gadgets, and more. Apple has a similarly all-encompassing suite of offerings, and Meta's three major apps (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) each have billions of users. Perhaps the only thing more powerful than these sprawling tech ecosystems is boiling them all down to a single product. That these tech companies can even realistically have such colossal ambitions to build everything apps is a result of their existing dominance. The industry has spent years collecting information about our relationships, work, hobbies, and interests—all of which is becoming grist for powerful AI tools. A key feature of these everything apps is that they promise to be individually tailored, drawing on extensive personal data to provide, in theory, a more seamless experience. Your past search history, and eventually your emails, can inform AI Mode's responses: When I typed line up into AI Mode, I got the 'line up' for the day's New York Mets game (the Mets are my favorite baseball team). When I typed the same phrase into traditional Google Search, I got a definition. In other words, the rise of AI-powered everything apps is a version of the bargain that tech companies have proposed in the past with social media and other tools: our services for your data. Meta's AI assistant can draw on information from users' Facebook and Instagram accounts. Apple describes its AI as a 'personal intelligence' able to glean from texts, emails, and notes on your device. And ChatGPT has a new 'memory' feature that allows the chatbot to reference all previous conversations. If the technology goes as planned, it leads to a future in which Google, or any other Big Tech company, knows you are moving from Texas to Chicago and, of its own accord, offers to order the winter jacket you don't own to be delivered to your new apartment, already selected from your favorite brand, in your favorite color. Or it could, after reading emails musing about an Italian vacation, suggest an in-budget itinerary for Venice that best fits your preferences. There are, of course, plenty of reasons to think that AI models will not be capable and reliable enough to power a true everything app. The Mets lineup that Google automatically generated for me wasn't entirely accurate. Chatbots still invent information and mess up basic math; concerns over AI's environmental harms and alleged infringement of intellectual-property rights could substantially slow the technology's development. Only a year ago, Google released AI Overviews, a search feature that told users to eat rocks and use glue to stick cheese to pizza. On the same day that Google released AI Mode, it also introduced an experimental AI shopping tool that can be easily used to make erotic images of teenagers, as I reported with my colleague Lila Shroff. (When we shared our reporting with the company, Google emphasized the protections it has in place and told us it would 'continue to improve the experience.') Maybe AI Mode will order something two sizes too large and ship to the wrong address, or maybe it'll serve you recommendations for Venice Beach. [Read: Google's new AI puts breasts on minors—and J.D. Vance] Despite these embarrassments, Google and its major AI competitors show no signs of slowing down. The promised convenience of everything apps is, after all, alluring: The more products of any one company you use, and the better integrated those products are, the more personalized and universal its everything app can be. Google even has a second contender in the race—its Gemini model, which, at the same conference, the company said will become a 'universal AI assistant.' Whether through Search or Gemini the company seems eager to integrate as many of its products and as much of its user data as possible. On the surface, AI and the everything app seem set to dramatically change how people interact with technology—consolidating and streamlining search, social media, officeware, and more into a chatbot. But a bunch of everything apps vying for customers feels less like a race for innovation and more like empires warring over territory. Tech companies are running the same data-hungry playbook with their everything apps as they did in the markets that made them so dominant in the first place. Even OpenAI, which has evolved from a little-known nonprofit to a Silicon Valley behemoth, appears so eager to accumulate user data that it reportedly plans to launch a social-media network. The technology of the future looks awfully reliant on that of the past. Article originally published at The Atlantic
