Boris Johnson today defended keeping powers to overrule his new sleaze adviser Lord Geidt despite complaints the PM being in control is comparable to a thief investigating a burglary .
The PM insisted the newly-appointed ministerial standards adviser will do an outstanding job after he was tasked with reviewing the murky funding of the No11 flat refurbishment.
Mr Johnson also stopped short of committing to publish the peer s findings, despite Labour and the chair of the independent Committee on Standards in Public Life warning that the premier should not be the ultimate arbiter of whether there has been wrongoing.
Asked if he would release the report and follow any recommendations, Mr Johnson said: Well, I m sure he ll do an outstanding job. I think what people are focused on overwhelmingly is not that kind of issue, but on what we re doing to take this country through the pandemic.
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Afghan security forces broke up an alleged Chinese espionage ring in December that was operating in Kabul and trying to infiltrate terrorist networks in the country.
The Afghan government said little about the issue besides acknowledging the arrests. Beijing publicly denied knowledge of the group’s activities.
But Afghan officials later told journalists the spy cell had been operating for up to seven years in the country and had been seeking the help of the Haqqani network a Pakistan-backed Islamist group linked to the Taliban to hunt down Uyghur groups operating in Afghanistan.
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By Dr. Peter Layton
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology is suddenly important to military forces. Not yet an arms race, today’s competition is more in terms of an experimentation race with many AI systems being tested and new research centers established. There may be a considerable first-mover advantage to the country that first understands AI adequately enough to change its existing human-centered force structures and embrace AI warfighting.
In a new Joint Studies Paper, I explore sea, land and air operational concepts appropriate to fighting near-to-medium term future AI-enabled wars. With much of the underlying narrow AI technology already developed in the commercial sector, this is less of a speculative exercise than might be assumed. Moreover, the contemporary AI’s general-purpose nature means its initial employment will be within existing operational level constructs, not wholly new ones.