In today’s newsletter: As thousands of scouts are evacuated from their quadrennial global get-together, the host nation’s handling of the event is in the spotlight
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Good morning. Imagine you are going on a school trip, but it’s with thousands of other schools, and the trip is to Fyre festival, and the guys from Trainspotting are taking care of the sanitation. Oh, and there’s an enormous hurricane on its way.
That may sum up what 4,500 British scouts have felt this week, after their trip of a lifetime to the World Scout Jamboree in South Korea turned into a bad comedy marked by successive calamities, natural and human-made, that yesterday culminated in the mass evacuation of all 43,000 young people.
Northern Ireland | A “monumental” data breach has exposed the names and rank of every serving Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officer. A spreadsheet was mistakenly published online for up to three hours in response to a freedom of information request. The Police Federation for Northern Ireland said it was a “breach of monumental proportions”.
Security | The data of millions of voters was accessible to hackers in a cyber-attack by “hostile actors” discovered almost a year ago, the Electoral Commission has admitted. The watchdog apologised for the security breach in which the names and addresses of millions of voters were accessible to hackers as far back as 2021.
Health | Millions of people under the age of 65 in England will be denied flu and Covid jabs this winter despite one of the government’s top public health officials warning that coronavirus has not “gone away”.
Conservatives | The Home Office spent more than £1,500 of public money painting over cartoon murals that were meant to welcome children to a controversial asylum reception centre, it can be revealed.
France | Five Marseille police officers have been detained for questioning over the death of a 27-year-old man during rioting in the French city on 1 July. The public prosecutor suggested it was “probable” Mohamed Bendriss died after “a violent shock to the thorax caused by a ‘flash-ball’ type projectile”, a controversial police weapon, that caused him to go into cardiac arrest.
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