Police forces in England and Wales to get units that tackle violence against women
All police forces in England and Wales will have dedicated rape and sexual offences teams by 2029, the government has said,The plans are being unveiled as the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, prepares to outline a delayed strategy on violence against women and girls (VAWG) next week,Mahmood is also expected to announce the introduction of domestic abuse protection orders in England and Wales after a regional pilot scheme,The orders will be granted by judges in both civil and criminal proceedings, enabling them to impose sanctions on offenders, such as electronic tagging and exclusion zones,Those who breach the orders could be jailed for up to five years, the government said.
It also announced it would invest almost £2m in “crack police squads” made up of “covert online investigators” to target internet abusers.“This government has declared violence against women and girls a national emergency,” Mahmood said.“For too long, these crimes have been considered a fact of life.That’s not good enough.We will halve it in a decade.
“Today we announce a range of measures to bear down on abusers, stopping them in their tracks.Rapists, sex offenders and abusers will have nowhere to hide.”The government said that the plans for the new rape and sexual offences teams would be headed by “specialist investigators” trained to understand offender behaviour.The plans are in part a response to Operation Soteria, a Home Office project commissioned under the Conservatives in 2021 in response to concerns about how reports of sexual violence were investigated and low charge rates.Early data from the project suggested half the rape investigation teams were not fully qualified.
Sources have indicated training will have a particular focus on “rape mythology” and “problematic cultural issues”, which lead to some victims being dismissed or blamed.They added that some officers would be trained as sexual violence “first responders” in an attempt to ensure initial contact with victims is handled appropriately.The Guardian understands there will be no additional funding for these units, so forces will have to absorb the costs from existing budgets.The speed at which they are set up is also expected to vary between forces and will depend on the existing level of expertise in each area.However, the teams are expected to be supported by the National Centre for VAWG and Public Protection, a £13m project unveiled this year to improve the response to this type of offending.
Domestic abuse protection orders were introduced under a pilot scheme in November last year, operating initially in Greater Manchester and parts of London before being extended to north Wales and Cleveland,The orders are expected to target those who perpetrate all types of domestic abuse,The government said this would include “economic abuse, coercive and controlling behaviour, stalking and ‘honour’-based abuse”,It added there would be no maximum time limits placed on the orders,Halving gender-based violence in a decade was one of Labour’s key manifesto pledges but ministers have faced criticism for delays and an apparent lack of engagement with experts in the sector.
Karen Bradley, chair of the home affairs select committee, wrote to ministers this week to express concerns about how long it has taken to publish the strategy, originally expected in spring this year.She said: “The delay is creating significant uncertainty across the VAWG sector, leaving stakeholders unclear about the guiding principles that should shape their work.Repeated delays in publication sends the message that tackling VAWG is not a government priority, despite the ambition to halve VAWG within the next decade.”In her letter, Bradley added the committee understood there had been “poor engagement and transparency with VAWG stakeholders” throughout the development of the strategy.Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations.
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland.In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673.In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732).Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.
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Disney wants you to AI-generate yourself into your favorite Marvel movie
Users of OpenAI’s video generation app will soon be able to see their own faces alongside characters from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and Disney’s animated films, according to a joint announcement from the startup and Disney on Thursday. Perhaps you, Lightning McQueen and Iron Man are all dancing together in the Mos Eisley Cantina.Sora is an app made by OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, which allows users to generate videos of up to 20 seconds through short text prompts. The startup previously attempted to steer Sora’s output away from unlicensed copyrighted material, though with little success, which prompted threats of lawsuits by rights holders.Disney announced that it would invest $1bn in OpenAI and, under a three-year deal perhaps worth even more than that large sum, that it would license about 200 of its iconic characters – from R2-D2 to Stitch – for users to play with in OpenAI’s video generation app
Musk calls Doge only ‘somewhat successful’ and says he would not do it again
Elon Musk has said the aggressive federal job-cutting program he headed early in Donald Trump’s second term, known as the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), was only “a little bit successful” and he would not lead the project again.Musk said he wouldn’t want to repeat the exercise, talking on the podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a rightwing personality with a rising profile who was a Doge adviser and who is married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration deputy chief of staff.Asked whether Doge had achieved what he’d hoped, Musk said: “We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful.”Doge created chaos and distress in the government machine in Washington DC, and by May more than 200,000 federal workers had been laid off and roughly 75,000 had accepted buyouts as a result of purges by Musk’s external team of often-young zealots
ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor: ‘She was so afraid they would take her baby’
Pregnant immigrants in ICE monitoring programs are avoiding care, fearing detention during labor and deliveryIn early September, a woman, nine months pregnant, walked into the emergency obstetrics unit of a Colorado hospital. Though the labor and delivery staff caring for her expected her to have a smooth delivery, her case presented complications almost immediately.The woman, who was born in central Asia, checked into the hospital with a smartwatch on her wrist, said two hospital workers who cared for her during her labor, and whom the Guardian is not identifying to avoid exposing their hospital or patients to retaliation.The device was not an ordinary smartwatch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled
From ‘glacier aesthetic’ to ‘poetcore’: Pinterest predicts the visual trends of 2026 based on its search data
Next year, we’ll mostly be indulging in maximalist circus decor, working on our poetcore, hunting for the ethereal or eating cabbage in a bid for “individuality and self-preservation”, according to Pinterest.The organisation’s predictions for Australian trends in 2026 have landed, which – according to the platform used by interior decorators, fashion lovers and creatives of all stripes – includes 1980s, aliens, vampires and “forest magic”.Among the Pinterest 2026 trends report’s top 21 themes are “Afrohemian” decor (searches for the term are on the rise by baby boomers and Gen X); “glitchy glam” (asymmetric haircuts and mismatching nails); and “cool blue” (drinks, wedding dresses and makeup with a “glacier aesthetic”).Pinterest compared English-language search data from September 2024 to August 2025 with those of the year before and claims it has an 88% accuracy rate. More than 9 million Australians use Pinterest each month
UK police forces lobbied to use biased facial recognition technology
Police forces successfully lobbied to use a facial recognition system known to be biased against women, young people, and members of ethnic minority groups, after complaining that another version produced fewer potential suspects.UK forces use the police national database (PND) to conduct retrospective facial recognition searches, whereby a “probe image” of a suspect is compared to a database of more than 19 million custody photos for potential matches.The Home Office admitted last week that the technology was biased, after a review by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men, and said it “had acted on the findings”.Documents seen by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates reveal that the bias has been known about for more than a year – and that police forces argued to overturn an initial decision designed to address it.Police bosses were told the system was biased in September 2024, after a Home Office-commissioned review by the NPL found the system was more likely to suggest incorrect matches for probe images depicting women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under
Trump clears way for Nvidia to sell powerful AI chips to China
Donald Trump has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, marking a win for the chip maker and its CEO, Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country.Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns.Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday: “I have informed President Xi, of China, that the United States will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China, and other Countries, under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security. President Xi responded positively!”Trump said the Department of Commerce was finalising the details and that he was planning to make the same offer to other chip companies, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel. Nvidia’s H200 chips are the company’s second most powerful, and far more advanced than the H20, which was originally designed as a lower-powered model for the Chinese market that would not breach restrictions, but which the US banned anyway in April
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