Asylum seekers housed 'unlawfully' at air base
The High Court judge has found the home secretary acted unlawfully in accommodating three asylum seekers at a former RAF base.
The men - who were at MDP Wethersfield in Essex between July 2023 and February 2024 - argued they were living in "prison-like" conditions.
Mr Justice Mould was told the asylum centre was "seriously inadequate", with residents queuing for food and experiencing outbreaks of scabies.
Lawyers for the individuals said they were vulnerable due to their background and had suffered a serious decline in their mental health while at Wethersfield.
Migrants began to be housed at Wethersfield near Braintree in July 2023.
There were initial plans to accommodate 1,700 people, but capacity was later capped at 580.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly. Please refresh the page for the fullest version.
You can receive Breaking News on a smartphone or tablet via the BBC News App. You can also follow @BBCBreaking on X to get the latest alerts.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
The British military base preparing for war in space
In a fake village in Buckinghamshire, several members of Space Command are huddled around a computer screen watching a foreign missile approach a Ministry of Defence communications satellite. It is just an exercise, but it is a scenario that is increasingly worrying military chiefs, who fear space is now the most important theatre of war. With satellites controlling everything from EasyJet flight plans, to Amazon deliveries, to army advances, targeting them would cripple society. Russia took down Ukraine's satellite communications hours before it began its full-scale land invasion in 2022. China and Russia have both tested anti-satellite missiles, while Moscow is allegedly developing a programme to arm some of its satellites with nuclear warheads, meaning it could destroy enemy networks while in orbit. In recognition of this new orbital battlefield, Space Command was established at RAF High Wycombe in 2021, to 'protect and defend' UK interests in space. It is now home to the UK Space Operations Centre, opened officially by government ministers this week. The RAF base is the former headquarters of Bomber Command, a military unit responsible for strategic bombing during the Second World War. With its winding streets, faux church towers and manor house office blocks, it was designed to look like a quintessential Home Counties village, should the Luftwaffe be passing over. The Bomber Command motto 'Strike Hard, Strike Sure' has been replaced with Space Command's 'Ad Stellas Usque' – Latin for 'up to the stars'. While Bomber Harris's team had its eyes fixed firmly on the ground, Space Command's are turned skywards. Maria Eagle, minister for defence procurement, who helped open the operations centre this week, said: 'From a national security point of view, space is a contested and congested and competitive domain, and we need to make sure, as our adversaries advance their capabilities, that we're able to deal with what that throws up.' She added: 'It's an extension of the more earthbound worries that we've got. The usual kind of things that you worry about on Earth, it's just extended upwards, because that's now a domain that is as important as land, sea or air to the potential of war-fighting or defending national security. 'The National Space Operations Centre does vital work in monitoring and protecting our interests. It's a recognition of the fact that our adversaries are active there, and we need to know what's going on.' Although the United States performed the first anti-satellite tests in 1959, space warfare has largely been consigned to Hollywood and science fiction until recently. Fears began to ramp up in January 2007, when China shot down one of its own ageing weather satellites with a ballistic missile creating a cloud of space junk, which is still causing problems. In November 2021, Russia conducted its own direct-ascent anti-satellite test, destroying the Soviet intelligence satellite Kosmos-1408, and generating a debris field that forced astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter. However it is not just anti-satellite missiles that are causing concern. According to the latest Space Threat Assessment, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, nations are developing evermore elaborate space weapons. These weapons include electro-magnetic pulses, microwaves and lasers to fry electronics, dazzlers to blind optical sensors, and grapplers to latch on to satellites and pull them out of orbit. China, Russia, Iran and North Korea all have the capability of jamming and hijacking satellite signals and launching cyber attacks. A 10-second delay in Google Chrome loading may seem like a domestic internet glitch, but bad actors could also be behind it, Space Command has warned. Space Command is particularly worried about China, which in the past year has launched increasingly advanced and highly-manoeuvrable satellites for purposes that remain unclear. CSIS believes Beijing may be creating a 'formidable on-orbit counter-space arsenal' and that manoeuvrability testing is allowing Chinese operators to develop 'tactics and procedures that can be used for space war-fighting'. US Space force commanders have also warned that Chinese satellites have been spotted 'dogfighting' in space, moving within less than a mile of each other. 'China continues to develop and field a broad set of counter-space capabilities,' a member of Space Command told The Telegraph. 'It's certainly one of the more capable adversaries. Space is no longer a sanctuary, it's a space of contest. It's the modern battlefield.' Russia's Luch satellites have also been spotted stalking European communications and broadcast satellites, moving close to their orbits for reasons not fully understood. Space Command fears they are probing the systems to find out how best to disrupt signals. Although Russia continues to deny it is developing an orbital nuclear anti-satellite weapon – which would breach the 1967 Outer Space Treaty – US intelligence suggests otherwise. Chris Bryant, minister of state for data protection and telecoms, said: 'There's a lot of stuff up there now … and the risks from deliberate bad actors, in particular from Russia and China, and the havoc that could be created either deliberately or accidentally, is quite significant. 'So we need to monitor as closely as we possibly can, 24/7, everything that is going on up there so that we can avert accidental damage, and we can also potentially deter other more deliberate, harmful activity.' Space Command currently employs more than 600 staff, roughly 70 per cent of whom are from the Royal Air Force with the remaining 30 per cent from the Army and Navy, plus a handful of civilians. Not only is it monitoring the sky for threats from foreign powers but it is also keeping an eye out for falling space debris, asteroids, and coronal mass ejections from the Sun which could wipe out power grids and satellites. When a threat is spotted, the team can contact satellite providers to warn them to reposition their spacecraft, or advise them to power down until a powerful jet of plasma has passed through. It also informs the government and the security services on the orbital movements of foreign powers. Space Command also launched its first military satellite last year, named Tyche, which can capture daytime images and videos of the Earth's surface for surveillance, intelligence gathering and military operations. It is part of the Government's £968 million Istari programme which will see more satellites launched by 2031 to create a surveillance constellation. Mr Bryant added: 'Lots of people think 'space' and joke about Star Trek and the final frontier, but actually the truth is you couldn't spend a single day of your life these days in the UK without some kind of engagement with space. 'The havoc that could be created, which might be military havoc, or it might be entirely civil havoc, could be very significant.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Yahoo
David Mamet's Complicated Brain
DAVID MAMET, THE PULITZER PRIZE–WINNING, Trump-and-Israel-supporting writer and filmmaker, is having something of a banner year. After the premiere of the much-ballyhooed Broadway revival of Mamet's essential play Glengarry Glen Ross (this time, boasting a headline-making cast that includes Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr, and Kieran Culkin), Mamet premiered Henry Johnson, his first film as a director since Phil Spector in 2013. And now, this month, we have the publication, for the first time ever, of Russian Poland, an unproduced screenplay written by Mamet in 1993, when his then-burgeoning career as a movie director was really beginning to ramp up. In 1991, Mamet released Homicide, his divisive but impactful third film as writer/director, and in 1992, the late James Foley's electric film of Glengarry Glen Ross, featuring a stacked ensemble cast led by Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino, became something of a cultural event—not a box office hit, but critically acclaimed, nominated for a slew of awards, and considered a bit of a comeback for Lemmon, while its (movie-original) scene featuring Alec Baldwin as an abusive sales executive became instantly iconic. The stage should, by all rights, have been set for Mamet to get a new project, something really ambitious, off the ground. Mamet's Jewish faith had been strengthening in those years, and had manifested itself in his writing most forcefully in Homicide, the victim at that film's core murder investigation being an old woman whose corner shop was a front for an operation running guns into Israel. The opportunity to pursue these themes further seemed to have presented itself. Mamet attaches a very brief introduction to the published screenplay of Russian Poland; in it, he lays out the historical, as well as the political, but more so the personal, inspiration for the script. For instance, he writes that his grandmother grew up near the Polish city of Chelm, and that she told him stories of the pogroms she'd survived in the Pale of Settlement—the area permitted to the Russian Jews. The Pale was geographically known as Volhynia, known to her, and, then, to me, as Russian Poland. The tales-within-the-tale, here, are fables of Isaac Luria, the Ari (lion) of Sfat, in the late 16th century… I set his mystical tales in my grandmother's Volhynia, and framed them in another fable. And that is, ultimately and unexpectedly, what Russian Poland is: a collection of Jewish fables, almost an anthology, with an illegal shipment of supplies by air to Israel functioning as a kind of framing device. This setting for this framing device is the late 1940s, shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel. The military men carrying out the mission are British RAF officers, and throughout the script, they are referred to only as Sergeant and Officer. Also on board is an elderly Holocaust survivor called Old Man. (Almost none of the characters are given names, except for one or two that appear in the fables.) Neither the Officer nor the Sergeant seem to know who the Old Man is, and they even ask him what he's doing there. Not very talkative, the Old Man does indicate he's on the plane because he's going to Palestine. The RAF men object that none of the planes at the airfield have the fuel capacity to reach that destination (and the Officer also asks why the Old Man wants to go to Palestine, because, he says 'The Arabs say they're going to drive you people into the sea'), to which the Old Man offers only a shrug. Something mysterious has now been established. Explore the deep mysteries while supporting our growing coverage of books, culture, and the arts: Sign up for a free or paid Bulwark subscription today. The Old Man begins to drift into his past, and into Mamet's fables, as the flight becomes more dangerous. In the first, set in a village in the 1890s, the Beggar roams the village, seeking charity, first from a pair of housewives, then from the local Rabbi, and then from the Rich Man (or, Reb Siegel, one of the few proper names in the script). As these short tales begin to take over the narrative of Russian Poland, the dialogue becomes less casual and more formal, but what's most interesting about this aspect of Mamet's script—Mamet being justly famous for his gift for stylish, stylized dialogue—is how it reflects his attitudes as a director more than as a writer. In his book On Directing Film, and more recently when promoting Henry Johnson, Mamet has said that ideally, when directing a film, it should be possible to remove all the dialogue and, as in silent films, let the images and the editing tell the story. This is, of course, the central idea behind all motion pictures, but I can't imagine following the narrative of a film as word-drunk as Henry Johnson with all the language removed. Henry Johnson is a very skillful and artful piece of film direction, but the words, and the performances of those words, are the whole show. This is not the case with Russian Poland, or it wouldn't have been, had a film ever been made from it. In the story about the Beggar, the Rabbi, and the Rich Man, Mamet lays out his scenes and his shots in strict visual terms, as directing choices he made at the screenplay stage. It begins with this image: A longshot. A road on a hill. A Beggar comes into the shot, moving across the frame from left to right. A mullioned window bangs into the shot. Camera pulls back slightly to reveal we have been looking at the scene through a window. The window frame bangs in the window. Then a cut to the Rabbi, outside the building, commenting on the deteriorated state of the window, and the Shul to which it is connected. We have also been introduced to the Beggar, and his journey. There is now a connection (ideally, anyway) in the viewer's mind between the state of the shtetl, where this is all taking place, and the Beggar. There is conflict in this connection, one that will play out as both Rabbi and Rich Man are shown to be somewhat callous towards the Beggar—though the Rabbi is perhaps more officious than callous—but the story is one of redemption. More importantly, that window, through which we were introduced to a setting and a key character, returns as an image, and through it we are shown actions the meanings of which the audience understands better than the characters do. We see, more than hear, both the Beggar and the Rich Man, independent of each other, find evidence for the existence of God, through each man's misunderstanding of events. To Mamet, these misunderstandings, and the revelations they inspire, are as true and as spiritual as would be those brought about by a literal angel appearing on the scene. Join now It's difficult, in this venue, to get across how much of Russian Poland's story is communicated visually rather than through dialogue. But this is very much a script written by a man who intended to direct: visuals, shot descriptions, and even camera edits are described at length, broken up by streams of conversation that is sometimes of a spiritual nature, sometimes just pure gossip. This is done in the same way that a film heavy with talk might find relief, or a heightening of emotion, through bursts of silence. I can imagine one fable, late in the script, being told entirely through images, with no dialogue whatsoever (not that there's so very much of it to begin with). This fable is much darker than the life-affirming tale of the Beggar (Russian Poland can get pretty bleak at times), and it ends with a punchline—I think a certain gallows humor is at play here, but as far as gallows humor goes, it's pretty heavy on gallows—that is entirely visual. (Words are spoken, but don't need to be.) Granted, these visuals include words written on a piece of paper—words that reveal the aforementioned punchline—but this is all part of the silent film grammar Mamet aspires to. Because of his outspoken conservative politics over the last several years, even well before Trump, Mamet long ago fell out of favor as an artist. Some artists, when confronting such a fate, will withdraw; others will lean into it, inflating the political rhetoric that had been subliminal or even non-existent in their work before. And while Mamet's responses in interviews and his nonfiction writing have gotten nakedly reactionary, it has not gotten in the way of his fiction. As implied earlier, this unproduced screenplay is particularly compelling when looked at Mamet's career as a film director as a whole, and especially in the context of his work during the 1990s. Once again, Homicide, his best film, can't help but spring to mind. Mamet's current politics (many say his politics have always leaned right, if not far-right, but I don't), and what I'd call the spiritual politics of Russian Poland, often seem to be at odds with each other. In Homicide, for example, the murder of the Zionist shopkeeper is not, as homicide detective Bobby Gold (Joe Mantegna) believes, an antisemitic act. In a final twist (a swing so wild I almost can't believe Mamet brings it off), it's shown to be a random act, an apolitical crime of greed, and evidence for the anti-Zionist motive is revealed as a blind alley. Though Gold has faced antisemitism in his past, and experiences it over the course of the film, his political righteousness becomes a mental trap, and his inability to view the situation from any other angle ultimately destroys him. Not the same kind of thing you'd expect from the author of Russian Poland, which radiates a kind of arcane energy. If Russian Poland can seem esoteric, especially to a gentile like myself, it is nevertheless clearly the work of an artist who sees in it a grand truth, whereas Homicide is awash with uncertainty. Yet both works are about, essentially, the same thing. And if Henry Johnson, the story of an unprincipled idiot who believes everything people tell him, doesn't seem like it could possibly have been made by someone who supports Donald Trump, well, the human brain is a complicated organ. Share this article with someone who appreciates the complicated nature of the human brain. Share
Forbes
5 days ago
- Forbes
45 Years Ago, CNN Changed The World. Then The World Changed CNN.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - MAY 15: Mark Thompson Chairman and CEO of CNN Worldwide speaks onstage during ... More Warner Bros. Discovery Upfront 2024 on May 15, 2024 in New York City. (Photo byfor Warner Bros. Discovery) Here's a thought experiment for you: The U.S. has suddenly found itself at war, and the first shots of the conflict are being fired at this exact moment. What TV news channel would you turn on to learn more: CNN? Perhaps Fox, or your local news? Would you even turn on a TV at all? And if I'd asked you this question, say, five years ago — would you have a different answer? For decades, the answer to that first question — for millions of Americans, and much of the world — was CNN. It was the network people reached for in such moments of uncertainty, crisis, and global significance as the Challenger explosion, the Gulf War, 9/11, election nights, and presidential debates. CNN made its name by being on when no one else was, delivering live news around the clock and across the globe. It wasn't just the first 24-hour news network; it was a public utility during moments of chaos. Forty-five years ago this week, at 5 pm Eastern Time on June 1, 1980, CNN went live for the very first time. For its viewing audience, tuning in would eventually become a kind of Pavlovian response to breaking news — and to anything major unfolding anywhere in the world. The network's promise was the world's headlines, at all hours of the day, right from your TV set. On that score, CNN founder Ted Turner fundamentally 'changed the way people get their news,' network anchor Wolf Blitzer tweeted on Sunday. To mark the anniversary, some CNN employees across the organization this week have shared photos of red cupcakes, the tops of which were decorated with the words 'CNN: Celebrating 45 Years.' Many of the network's anchors and journalists, like Blitzer, opened the X app and dashed off their respective ruminations — journalists like international correspondent Larry Madowo ('When CNN says 'go there,' I'm always like: say less. And I've gone all around the world representing, bearing witness.') and anchor/correspondent Kristie Lu Stout ('...with technology and audiences ever on the move, you can find our reporting on linear, digital, social, streaming and audio. The revolution is not over yet.). That's the tendency, when arriving at such milestones — to celebrate the past, and the distance traveled. Alongside all the nostalgia, however, it's also worth noting an important truth that points toward the CNN of the next 45 years: The cable news network that changed the world, the one that acclimated everyone to the idea of always-on TV news and broadcasts filled with talking heads, has itself been changed by the world it helped to usher in. Consider: The traditional TV sector in the US lost $12 billion in subscription and advertising revenue in 2024, according to one report. Cable TV subscriptions are also projected to decline from 34.7 million in 2023 to 27.1 million by 2028, continuing a shift away from traditional cable services. CNN, like its rival networks, has dealt with declining viewership in cable news by cutting production costs where possible and laying off employees (several hundred over the past three years), but none of that can alter the trajectory that the cable news business is on. Pricey cable news subscriptions have all but gone the way of the printed newspaper, as mobile screens and personalized social feeds command an ever-growing share of their users' time — which is to say, news is now something most people scroll past as opposed to sitting down for. And as consumers get accustomed to getting headlines in 15-second bursts, often algorithmically tailored to their worldview, the idea of TV news feels increasingly out of sync with how people engage with the world today. Cable news is besieged on one side by changing user behavior and on the other by unforgiving economics — one eroding attention, the other bleeding resources. To put it bluntly, this is an alternately weird and unsettling time to be in the news business — especially so for the cable news business. Those of us who cover it are having to expand our vocabulary to include the emergence of new companies with strange names like Noosphere and Versant. Veteran cable news broadcast personalities like CNN's own Jim Acosta have decamped to new media platforms like Substack. The economics are such that CNN back in the fall even felt compelled to launch a paywall for by far the largest digital news in the US. The talk-heavy nighttime lineup of Fox News, meanwhile, consistently trounces CNN in the ratings, a trend that shows no sign of abating. I say all that not to bash CNN, but to reiterate that the network today is far different from the one that emerged 45 years ago. If anything, it's a more cost-conscious business these days, and its influence is no longer a product of simply platforming the loudest voices on cable. If covering the network's important journalism and interviewing its talent over the years has taught me anything, however, it's that no one will be writing its obituary anytime soon — never mind the daunting challenges ahead. By the end of the year, for example, CNN will have launched a standalone weather app, CNN Weather, as well as a new subscription product that the network says 'will provide a simple and centralized way for audiences to experience CNN's journalism and original programming. Subscribers will be able to choose from a selection of live channels, catch-up features and video-on-demand programming, across all platforms.' Both moves are part of CEO Mark Thompson's ongoing digital transformation effort that's still underway. CNN also in recent weeks announced major new hires including Choire Sicha, who joined CNN Worldwide as Senior Vice President of Features Editorial (Sicha came from Vox Media, where he served as Editor at Large for New York magazine). These aren't just survival tactics; they're signs of a network still evolving, still experimenting. Forty-five years in, the network that once defined what breaking news looked like is no longer the only voice in the room. But for its workforce of journalists, of course, the instinct to bear witness is one thing that hasn't changed. And that instinct will keep the network moving forward. Happy birthday, CNN.
