Donald Trump's Secret Service probes major security breach on Scotland visit after attempt to smuggle person onto plane
An investigation has been launched after an agent attempted to smuggle his wife onto a support plane accompanying the US President.
3
3
3
The agent, based in Dallas, flew his wife to Maryland, and she received the official Secret Service briefing at the hotel.
She then got on the bus to the visitor lounge at US military base Joint Base Andrews.
The woman was later discovered and told to leave, The Herald reports.
Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said: "The U.S. Secret Service is conducting a personnel investigation after an employee attempted to invite his spouse – a member of the United States Air Force – aboard a mission support flight.
"The aircraft, operated by the U.S. Air Force, was being used by the Secret Service to transport personnel and equipment.
"Prior to the overseas departure, the employee was advised by supervisors that such action was prohibited, and the spouse was subsequently prevented from taking the flight.
"No Secret Service protectees were aboard and there was no impact to our overseas protective operation."
Meanwhile, visitors were told to vacate Balmedie Beach in Aberdeenshire ahead of the President's trip to his neighbouring Menie Estate.
Police warned roads and the park would be shut in advance as a massive security operation got underway ahead of Mr Trump's arrival.
We told how a protester was arrested and given a recorded police warning on Friday for "abusive behaviour and refusing to stop" at Prestwick Airport in Ayrshire where the American leader's Air Force One jet landed.
Trump's security entourage deployed a highly modified golf buggy to protect the prez from fairway assassins while he played his favourite sport.
The vehicle, which can sit six people, is believed to have state-of-the-art security protection - including smoke screens, electrified door handles and armoured plates.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Record
5 minutes ago
- Daily Record
Scots schools must continue to invest in libraries to protect children's futures
Glasgow City Council is considering removing librarians from 30 schools, but Record View demands that they think again. School libraries play a crucial role in expanding the minds of pupils. Not every child grows up in a house with books. For some youngsters, a school library is where they discover a lifelong appreciation of books. So it's deeply concerning that Glasgow City Council is considering removing the position of librarian from its 30 secondary schools. While there are no plans to close the libraries, the loss of such experienced professionals would be devastating. In these financially straitened times, all local authorities must make difficult decisions to balance their books. But it seems perverse that cutting cash from the school libraries budget would even be considered in the first place. Councils are being forced into these choices by a council tax freeze that has devastated local services. The freeze was brought in by the SNP to try to tackle soaring household bills. This was considered a vote winner by successive first ministers and enjoyed widespread support. Now the freeze has been lifted and bills have gone up again but the damage done to local services is still being felt. But before councils resort to measures like removing librarians from our high schools, they must think of the impact on young people. This generation of high school pupils has already lost years of schooling through the Covid lockdowns. They deserve to have their services protected – especially those which help them expand their horizons. Libraries can play as crucial a role for kids as classrooms. They deserve investment – not cutbacks. The city council must think again and keep its librarians. He's Don a U-turn Stock markets around the world slumped again as US President Donald Trump announced new tariffs on more than 90 countries. Trump is touting tariffs as the answer to trade deficits with other nations – but clearly the move will slow the global economy and devastate jobs. During his visit to Scotland last weekend, it appeared that Trump was on a more reasonable course. It may have been the sea air at Turnberry and Aberdeenshire that made him mellow, as he appeared to open a window of opportunity to get a deal done on whisky tariffs. But now he's back on the warpath and using the threat of tariffs to get his own way with countries that should be allies. It's typical of this erratic, unpredictable figure that he would say one thing one week, and something different the next. The world will be much safer and more prosperous place when his time in office finally ends.
Sky News
5 minutes ago
- Sky News
Inside Jeremy Corbyn's new party and the battle for leadership
Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn may be the figureheads of a new left-wing party, but already there is a battle over leadership. The confusion behind the initial launch speaks to a wider debate happening behind closed doors as to who should steer the party - now and in the future. Already, in the true spirit of Mr Corbyn's politics, there is talk of an open leadership contest and grassroots participation. Some supporters of the new party - which is being temporarily called "Your Party" while a formal name is decided by members - believe that allowing a leadership contest to take place honours Mr Corbyn's commitment to open democracy. 5:51 They point out that under Mr Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party, members famously backed plans to make it easier for local constituency parties to deselect sitting MPs - a concept he strongly believed in. His allies now say the former Labour leader, who is 76, is open to there being a leadership contest for the new party, possibly at its inaugural conference in the autumn, where names lesser known than himself can throw their hat into the ring. "Jeremy would rather die than not have an open leadership contest," one source familiar with the internal politics told Sky News. However, there have been suggestions that Ms Sultana appears to be less keen on the idea of a leadership contest, and that she is more committed to the co-leadership model than her political partner. Those who have been opposed to the co-leadership model believe it could give Ms Sultana an unfair advantage and exclude other potential candidates from standing in the future. 2:18 One source told Sky News they believed Mr Corbyn should lead the party for two years, to get it established, before others are allowed to stand as leader. They said Ms Sultana, who became an independent MP after she was suspended from Labour for opposing the two-child benefit cap, was "highly ambitious but completely untested as leader" and "had a lot of growing into the role to do". "It's not about her - it's about taking a democratic approach, which is what we're supposed to be doing," they said. "There are so many people who have done amazing things locally and they need to have a chance to emerge as leaders. "We are not only fishing from a pool of two people. "It needs to be an open contest. Nobody needs to be crowned." 1:22 While Mr Corbyn and Ms Sultana undoubtedly have the biggest profiles out of would-be leaders, advocates for a grassroots approach to the leadership point to the success some independent candidates have enjoyed at a local level - for example, 24-year-old British Palestinian Leah Mohammed, who came within 528 votes of unseating Health Secretary Wes Streeting in Ilford North. Fiona Lali of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who stood in last year's general election for the Stratford and Bow constituency, has also been mentioned in some circles as someone with potential leadership credentials. However, sources close to Mr Corbyn and Ms Sultana downplayed suggestions of any divide over the leadership model, pointing out that their joint statement acknowledged that members would "decide the party's direction" at the inaugural conference in the autumn, including the model of leadership and the policies that are needed to transform society. A spokesperson for Mr Corbyn told Sky News: "Jeremy will be working with Zarah, his independent colleagues, and people from trade unions and social movements up and down the country to make an autumn conference a reality. "This will be the moment where people come together to launch a new democratic party that belongs to the members."
Times
43 minutes ago
- Times
Precrime profiling is no longer a fantasy
This week the UK government introduced an 'artificial intelligence violence predictor' into the prison system, a tool to analyse factors such as criminal record, age and behaviour, to calculate which inmates are most likely to resort to violence so officers can intervene before they do. With attacks on prison officers increasing, AI profiling of inmates is the latest example of so-called precrime technology, based on the dubious theory that science can foresee individual criminal behaviour and prevent it by disrupting, punishing or restricting potential law-breakers. The idea was popularised in the 1956 Philip K Dick novel The Minority Report, adapted by Steven Spielberg into a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise, in which teams of psychic 'precogs' exercise foreknowledge of criminal activity, including premeditated murder, to identify and eliminate persons who will commit crimes in the future. • Prisons get 'Minority Report' AI profiling to avert violence In the film, set in 2054, the chief of the Precrime agency explains the advantages of pre-emptive justice: 'In our society we have no major crimes … but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.' Thirty years ahead of schedule, instead of clairvoyance as a crime prevention tool, we have AI. The theory of precrime dates to the early 19th century and the Italian eugenicist Cesare Lombroso, who is purported to have invented the term 'criminology'. Lombroso believed that criminals were born lawless, inheriting atavistically villainous characteristics and physiognomies. Criminal anthropometry, the precise measurement of faces and bodies, he argued, could be used to identify crooks and stop them from committing crimes. This 'positivist' school of criminology claimed to recognise criminals not only by biological characteristics but also through psychological and sociological forms of behaviour. 'Born criminals', nature's psychopaths and dangerous habitual offenders, could thus be eliminated using capital punishment, indefinite confinement or castration. The sinister notion that a system might detect the mere intention to offend is echoed in the 'thought crime' of George Orwell's 1984. Richard Nixon's psychiatrist, Arnold Hutschnecker, advised the president to run mass tests for 'pre-delinquency' and confine those juveniles to 'camps'. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hutschnecker insisted these would not be concentration camps but holiday camps in a 'pastoral setting'. In the 1970s, the University of California, Los Angeles attempted to set up a Centre for the Long-Term Study of Life-Threatening Behaviour, using scientific data to predict 'dangerousness'. It planned to 'compile stocks of behavioural data to understand crimes that had not yet occurred but were 'in formation'.' The project foundered when it was suggested the centre intended to use 'psychosurgery' to modify behaviour. • Conned by the Tinder Swindler: how his victims took revenge But precrime is not some sci-fi fantasy or a wacko theory from the fringes of eugenics; it is already here. 'Predictive policing' — using data to forecast future criminal activity — is expanding rapidly. The UK Ministry of Justice is said to be developing a 'homicide prediction project' using police and government data to profile individuals with the aim of forecasting who is more likely to commit a murder. The project, revealed in April by the investigative group Statewatch, will 'review offender characteristics that increase the risk' and 'explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide'. In the US, the software system Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is used by police and judges to forecast the risk of recidivism among more than one million offenders. The software predicts the likelihood that a convicted criminal will reoffend within two years based on data that include 137 of each individual's distinguishing features as well as criminal or court records. This is where actuarial science (mathematical and statistical methods used to assess risk in insurance, pensions and medicine) meets crimefighting and sentencing guidelines: a technological tool to predict the risk of reoffending by rating factors such as type of crime, age, educational background and ethnicity of the offender. In Chicago, an algorithm has been created to predict potential involvement with violent crime to draw up a strategic subject list — or 'heat list' — of those the algorithm calculates to be the city's most dangerous inhabitants. Precrime is most obvious and advanced in the context of counterterrorism to identify threatening individuals, groups or areas, but inevitably invites conflict between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the needs of national security. In the traditional justice and criminal system, the law attempts to capture and punish those responsible after crimes have been committed. AI could invert that equation by meting out punishment or imposing surveillance where no crime has been committed — yet. As the chief of the Precrime agency in Minority Report observes: 'We're taking in individuals who have broken no law.' Critics fear that precrime techniques could remove the presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of the justice system, and increase guilt by association since an individual's known contacts would influence any risk assessment. It also threatens to dehumanise individuals by reducing people to the sum of their accumulated data. Latter-day predictive policing already deploys data analysis and algorithms to identify higher risks of criminality, triggering increased police presence in certain areas and communities. Critics argue that this leads to increased racial profiling, with certain populations disproportionately flagged as high risk. If the data pool being 'learnt' by AI is already racially biased, then its predictions will be similarly skewed. Until the digital age, crimefighting was based on solving crimes or catching criminals in the act. In the age of AI, the sleuth will rely on machine learning to uncover clues to crimes that have yet to be perpetrated. 'It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data,' said Sherlock Holmes. In the brave new world of precrime, the data will take over from the detectives.
