MSPs asked to pause Scotland's AI data centre boom Scotland has a new boom industry, at least if planning applications are taken at face value. The term "hyperscale data centre", rarely heard a few years ago, is now dividing opinion across the country as a rush of applications are made to build them. A debate at Holyrood later, led by the Scottish Greens, will call for planning applications to be put on hold until promised new national guidelines are in force, with an emphasis on energy demand and the environment. Ahead of the debate, ministers announced that all new applications for AI data centres will have to undergo an environmental impact assessment. The growth of AI is happening at lightning pace, so what are the advantages and disadvantages of Scotland being at the forefront?

A man who drugged and raped his wife for more than 20 years without her knowledge will no longer be involved in a trial involving other defendants, a jury has heard. The husband, aged in his 60s and from the Stockport area of Greater Manchester, has admitted a total of 60 offences against the woman including rape, assault by penetration, administering a substance with intent and sharing indecent images without her consent. Twelve other men are still due to go on trial at Manchester Minshull Street Crown Court accused of serious sexual offences - including rape - against the same woman. The nine women and three men of the jury, plus two female reserve jurors, have been asked to return to court on 5 October. The court has heard the husband, who cannot be named to protect his wife's legal right to anonymity, has admitted abusing his wife since 2004.

The parents of a child injured in the Southport attack have said they are devastated after court files were accessed without authorisation. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said an urgent investigation had been launched after court files detailing victims, their families and survivors of the attack on the dance class in July 2024 were accessed without authorisation. It comes after it emerged earlier this year that the North West Ambulance Service (NWAS) was looking into whether staff inappropriately accessed the records of victims. The parents of one of the injured children said: Our family has once again been devastated by two data breaches that involve our daughter, NWAS and now the MoJ. The parents, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, continued: This culture of snooping across agencies and services must end and that will only happen if those individuals are held to account and not protected by the very confidentiality laws they flouted to access our daughter's information.

Image caption, Juan López was one of the environmentalists killed in Latin America recent years. The anti-mining activist was shot in Honduras in 2024. Colombia has again topped the list of countries with the highest number of killings of land and environmental activists, according to an annual report by campaign group Global Witness, external . Out of at least 124 activists killed globally in 2025, 39 were murdered in Colombia, followed by Brazil with 26. Global Witness says that 85% of the documented killings took place in Latin America, making it the deadliest region for every year since the group started publishing its reports in 2012.

Allowing AI firms to collude to'pace the frontier' is a dangerous proposition Anthropic's Dario Amodei is not the first corporate CEO to suggest that excessive competition is driving the world to some socially undesirable outcome. The safety breach disclosed by OpenAI after a swarm of its agents coordinated to breach their supposedly secure sandbox, get on the Internet and hack AI platform Hugging Face, warrants urgent action. It demonstrated the ease with which the technology can evade human control and gave concrete form to the existential fears about what it could do to humanity if not securely leashed. The end of the world may well be nigh, as some in the AI industry have warned. These are truly scary times.

JD Vance advised frontier AI companies to'look inward' when it came to safety risks. JD Vance advised frontier AI companies to'look inward' when it came to safety risks. 'If you're building Frankenstein, stop': JD Vance dismisses calls for AI regulation US vice-president's comments come as former Anthropic researcher revisits recent claim AI could destroy humanity The US vice-president has dismissed calls for global regulation of AI safety risks, telling companies creating the most advanced models: "If you're building Frankenstein, stop." In remarks addressed towards Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic who has called on Washington DC to coordinate control of AI systems, including with China, JD Vance said: "If you're gonna create Frankenstein, don't come to the government and say we need regulation." He said tech bosses should instead: "Look inward and accept that if you're building Frankenstein, No 1, you should stop and No 2, when companies come to you and say: 'We need the tools to fight back against Frankenstein,' give them those tools."

When asked why Jean-Olivier Irisson, a scientist at Sorbonne Université in Paris, decided to dedicate his life to studying microscopic creatures in the sea, his answer was simple: "They are beautiful." Beauty may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of plankton - organisms that drift in water and come in an extraordinary variety of shapes and sizes. But images by Irisson's team tell a different story. Shown in striking blues and oranges, as well as black and white, they reveal an unfamiliar and strangely beautiful world. "This one served as the model for the head of the creature in the Alien movie franchise," Irisson said, pointing to one particularly unusual specimen.

A hacker collective pulled down a Flock camera and dumped its data. The files included thousands of videos and logs showing that the device captured 1.6 million images of 50,000 vehicles in 21 days. Hackers ripped down a Flock camera above a roadway, made a near-complete copy of the data stored inside it, and shared the files with 404 Media and WIRED, revealing in new detail how exactly Flock Safety's cameras track the movements of both vehicles and people . The hackers say they are also publishing details on how they managed to obtain the software, in the hopes that other people may copy them. The breach provides an unprecedented look inside a system that Flock has described as protected by on-device encryption .

Trump and Republicans want companies to regulate themselves. It's a dereliction of duty that will make AI less safe I t is hard to get Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei to agree on much. But over the weekend, all three AI company CEOs called for AI development to slow down in the face of growing, alarming risks. Their employees are sounding the siren too, with one researcher publicly quitting and accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of "gambling with our lives". The combination of dire warnings from insiders and growing real-world evidence of rogue AIs should, in a sane world, lead to government action. Instead, Donald Trump and the Republican leadership have their heads in the sand.

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