logo
UK turns to AI in bid to tackle Putin's threat in Arctic

UK turns to AI in bid to tackle Putin's threat in Arctic

Independent27-05-2025

The UK Navy will utilise AI to monitor Russian activity in the Arctic, a region increasingly crucial for European and British security.
Russia's operations in the Arctic, including the use of nuclear-powered icebreakers to facilitate transport of oil and gas, are seen as aiding the war in Ukraine and threatening undersea cables.
A joint UK- Iceland project, backed by £554,000 in UK funding, will explore how AI can enhance monitoring of state actors in the region.
The UK claims to have thwarted Russia's plans for a floating repair dock in the Arctic intended to service its icebreakers.
This announcement coincides with Donald Trump criticising Putin for missile and drone attacks on Ukraine, prompting calls for further sanctions.
Navy to use AI to detect 'hostile' Russian activity in the Arctic

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

US tells embassy staff to evacuate in Iraq over fears Israel is ready to attack Iran, as trump warns 'it could be dangerous'
US tells embassy staff to evacuate in Iraq over fears Israel is ready to attack Iran, as trump warns 'it could be dangerous'

Daily Mail​

time11 minutes ago

  • Daily Mail​

US tells embassy staff to evacuate in Iraq over fears Israel is ready to attack Iran, as trump warns 'it could be dangerous'

The United States has told embassy staff in Iraq to evacuate amid fears Israel could be poised to strike Iran within days, regardless of American support. Non-essential US embassy staff in Baghdad are set to leave due to heightened security risks, US government sources have warned without elaborating. President Donald Trump told media on Wednesday that 'they are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place and we'll see what happens'. Asked why family members of military personnel were allowed to voluntarily leave the region, he ominously replied: 'You'll have to see.' White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said that the decision was taken 'as a result of a recent review' by the State Department, without mentioning a possible attack. But fears of an Israeli attack on Iran have escalated dramatically in recent days, with delicate nuclear talks between Iran and the United States appearing to stall. Multiple sources told CBS that US officials have been warned that Israel is fully ready to launch an operation into Iran, having long opposed any deal. Trump acknowledged the perceived threat in comments on Wednesday, saying 'we are not going to allow' Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Iranian defence minister Aziz Nasirzadeh warned, meanwhile, that if talks do fail and 'a conflict is imposed on us', Iran 'will target all US bases in the host countries'. An Israeli fighter jet flies over southern Israel, Monday, May 5, 2025 Donald Trump spoke about the Iranian nuclear talks at the Kennedy Center yesterday A strike on Iran would disrupt the ongoing talks with the United States, now approaching their sixth round. Oman confirmed this morning that it would host the expected US-Iran talks in Muscat on Sunday. Israel is said to have become more serious about a strike on Iran as the talks approach a preliminary or framework agreement that includes provisions about uranium enrichment that Israel views as unacceptable, NBC reports, citing five people with knowledge of the situation. A lingering concern is that Iran could retaliate against US personnel or assets in the region for any action by Israel, the report notes. Sources told the outlet that they were not aware of any planned US involvement in the possible action. The US could - in theory - support Israel with aerial refuelling or intelligence sharing, rather than direct action against Iran, but the sources were not aware of plans for that, either. Israel has long been wary of any nuclear deal with Iran, and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office says that Israel has conducted multiple operations to restrain Iran's nuclear programme. Israel is believed to have nuclear weapons already. Trump, who has already told Israel it would be 'inappropriate' to strike Iran as 'we're very close to a solution', is now waiting on Iran's response to its latest proposals. Tehran said on Monday it would present a counter-proposal on a nuclear deal, suggesting Washington's offer still contained 'ambiguities'. It is also seeking relief from sanctions. Iran and the US have been locked in a diplomatic standoff over Iran's uranium enrichment, with Tehran defending it as a 'non-negotiable' right and Washington describing it as a 'red line'. Iran assures that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful. But the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has not been able to verify this and in May published a damning report that claimed Iran had carried out secret nuclear activities with undeclared material. U.S defence secretary Pete Hegseth said on Wednesday that there were 'plenty of indications' that Iran is moving towards developing a nuclear weapon, and political opponents of the regime claimed this week to have uncovered evidence that Tehran was intensifying efforts to acquire long-distance nuclear weapons. 'There are plenty of indications that they have been moving their way towards something that would look a lot like a nuclear weapon,' Hegseth said at a hearing on Wednesday. A US defence official said Hegseth authorised the voluntary departure of military dependants from locations across the Middle East. Non-essential personnel and their family members have been allowed to leave in Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait - all sitting between Israel and Iran. The NCRI claimed to have identified a number of military sites in Semnan Province. Number 3 on the map is allegedly 'used for the development of nuclear warheads intended for installation on the liquid-fuel Simorgh missile'. Number 4 is said to show the Imam Reza Training Centre, 'where the development of nuclear warheads for the Ghaem-100 missile is being pursued'. In Israel, Netanyahu's hard-right government survived an opposition bid to dissolve parliament on Thursday, as lawmakers rejected a bill that could have paved the way for snap elections. Out of the Knesset's 120 members, 61 voted against the proposal, with 53 in favour. The opposition had introduced the bill hoping to force elections with the help of ultra-Orthodox parties in the governing coalition angry at Netanyahu over the contentious issue of exemptions from military service for their community. While the opposition is composed mainly of centrist and leftist groups, ultra-Orthodox parties that are propping up Netanyahu's government had earlier threatened to back the motion. The results of the vote Thursday morning, however, showed that most ultra-Orthodox lawmakers ultimately did not back the opposition bill, with just a small number voting in favour. The opposition will now have to wait six months before it can try again. Netanyahu faces criticism at home over Israel's conduct in the war in Gaza, conscription fears and the failure to return hostages taken into Gaza by Hamas after 21 months of war.

Yes, protesting can help tyrants like Trump, with its scenes of disorder. But that's no reason to stay at home
Yes, protesting can help tyrants like Trump, with its scenes of disorder. But that's no reason to stay at home

The Guardian

time29 minutes ago

  • The Guardian

Yes, protesting can help tyrants like Trump, with its scenes of disorder. But that's no reason to stay at home

When Donald Trump was elected the first time round, the works of the German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt flew off the shelves in the US. It wasn't all good news – JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy was also enjoying a surge in popularity and Trump was, of course, still about to be president. But Arendt's famous 1951 work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was selling at 16 times its usual rate, which meant that by the time of the protests centred on the inauguration in January 2017, at least some of those people had read it. Arendt's view of popular demonstrations was complicated. She wasn't blind to the way authoritarian rulers use public protest as an excuse for a display of physical power, embodied in the police, which turns the state into an army against its people, altering that relationship. If it's no longer government by consent, it's rule by force, and they have the equipment. Yet 'how many people here still believe', she wrote of Germany in the 1930s, quoting the French activist David Rousset, 'that a protest has even historic importance? This scepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future.' It's an elegantly drawn lose-lose situation: if you lose the will to protest, you have been 'morally murdered', but if you don't, you play into the tyrant's hands. But the Women's Marches of January 2017 didn't spark police violence. Not a single arrest was made across the 2 million protesters gathered in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle. Commentators wondered whether this was due to the essentially peaceable nature of women and their allies, while academics drew comparisons with the hundreds of arrests made during the Ferguson uprising of 2014 (which, of course, happened under President Obama). 'Tanks and rubber bullets versus pussy-hats and high-fives' was how one scholar, Abby Harrington, described the contrast, making the case convincingly that protesters were treated differently on essentially racist grounds. It would be wrong, and actually quite sexist, to say that the women weren't considered worthy of violent suppression because they didn't seem serious enough. It would be wrong, too, to say that they made no impact – they were enormous, dispersed across 408 places in the US, rallying by some estimates more than 4 million Americans, and spawning protests in solidarity across seven continents, including one in Antarctica. The demand was very broad and consequently pretty loose, however: protesters wanted 'vibrant and diverse communities' recognised as 'the strength of our country'. They wanted reproductive rights and tolerance and protection from violence; mutual respect; racial equality; gender equality; workers' rights – it was a call for decency, to which the leader felt no need to respond, almost by definition, since he is not decent. The recent US protests were sparked last Friday at about 9am, as border patrol agents massed outside a Home Depot in Paramount, a predominantly Latino area in Los Angeles. An assembly member, José Luis Solache Jr, happened to be driving past, so stopped and posted the scenes, which looked chillingly militaristic even days before the arrival of the national guard. Protesters started to arrive, not in huge numbers but with a vast purpose – to prevent what looked like an immigration raid of people trying to do their jobs. It came on the back of the arrest of a senior union official in the Fashion District, and one father arrested in front of his eight-year-old son. The message, when border guards sweep a workplace or a courtroom where people are doing regular immigration check-ins, is quite plain: this isn't about deporting hardened criminals. The protestrs' demand was correlatively plain: don't arrest our friends, neighbours or colleagues, when they pose no danger to anyone. Since then, 700 marines have been deployed to the city, and the number of national guards doubled to 4,000. The situation recalls Arendt's later work, On Violence, in which she argues that power and violence are actually opposites – the state creates tinderbox situations when it has lost the expectation of public compliance. So if the protests were symbolic, they would be playing into the government's hands: an abstract resistance creating justification for concrete suppression. But the protests are not symbolic – the alternative to protesting against a raid by border guards is to let the raid go ahead and lose those neighbours. The Russian-American columnist and author M Gessen cites a distinction made in political science between faith, where you believe that justice will simply prevail, and hope, where you observe and participate. Gessen wrote in the New York Times: 'You can't take action without hope, but you also can't have hope without taking action.' Everyone has a line over which they'd be spurred to action – there's no one who wouldn't lie down in front of the government van if their child were kidnapped and put inside it by masked men. So the real art of the autocratic state is not just to weaken protective institutions, but also to foster the conditions of fear and hopelessness ahead of a critical mass finding its hard limit. It's not clear, yet, whether the repression is a deliberate spectacle in order to create that fear, or whether, conversely, it's the accidental creation of conditions that demand action. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

Trump pulling US personnel from Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran
Trump pulling US personnel from Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran

The Independent

time36 minutes ago

  • The Independent

Trump pulling US personnel from Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran

Donald Trump said he was withdrawing some of the American personnel deployed in the Middle East because it could be a 'dangerous place' amid rising tensions. The State Department said it had ordered the departure of all non-essential personnel and their dependents from its embassy in Baghdad. Simultaneously, a US official said, defence secretary Pete Hegseth had authorised the voluntary departure of military dependents from countries across the region, including Bahrain and Kuwait. American soldiers in the region were not affected by this order, however. The decision comes amid heightened tensions as Mr Trump's push to reach a deal with Iran to halt its nuclear programme is deadlocked and intelligence suggests Israel is making preparations for a strike against Tehran's nuclear facilities. 'They are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place, and we'll see what happens,' Mr Trump told reporters on Wednesday. 'We've given notice to move out.' Asked if anything could be done to de-escalate tensions in the region, particularly with Iran, the president said: 'They can't have a nuclear weapon. Very simple – they can't have a nuclear weapon.' News of the Baghdad evacuation drove oil prices up by more than 4 per cent. Oil futures climbed $3, with Brent crude futures at $69.18 a barrel. The US maintains a military presence across the oil-rich region, with bases in Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE. A US official told Reuters that the State Department was 'set to have an ordered departure for the embassy in Baghdad'. 'The intent is to do it through commercial means, but the US military is standing by if help is requested,' the officials said. Iraq 's state news agency reported, citing a government official, that Baghdad hadn't recorded any security indication warranting an evacuation. Sources in Iraqi and US governments did not explain what security risks had prompted the decision, although heightened tensions with Iran were widely speculated to be a reason. The sixth round of nuclear talks between Iran and the US is scheduled to happen over the weekend in Oman, with Tehran expected to hand over a counterproposal after rejecting an offer by Washington. Iran says it does not plan to build a nuclear weapon and is only interested in peaceful use of its nuclear programme. The US, though, wants Tehran to stop uranium enrichment entirely. Speaking on the Pod Force One podcast on Monday, Mr Trump said he was growing 'less confident' about getting a deal with Iran. It wasn't clear, he said, that Tehran would accept the key US demand to stop enriching uranium. 'I don't know. I did think so, and I'm getting more and more – less confident about it,' the president said. Iranian defence minister Amir Aziz Nasirzadeh warned that 'the situation may escalate into conflict' if negotiations with the US failed. 'If a conflict is imposed on us,' he warned on Wednesday, 'all US bases are within our reach, and we will boldly target them in host countries'. Tensions in the Middle East are also rising due to Israel 's war on Gaza. Israel and Iran exchanged fire twice last year – the first direct attacks between the region's most entrenched enemies – with missiles and war drones hurtling across Iraqi airspace. Strategic experts and former officials said Israel could consider taking matters into its own hands if nuclear talks with the US didn't yield a favourable outcome. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly warned that a flawed agreement would be more dangerous than no deal at all. Mr Trump recently revealed he had cautioned Mr Netanyahu against taking unilateral action, such as a military strike, which could jeopardise the ongoing negotiations with Tehran.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store