The home secretary has announced a blueprint for reforming what she called the broken policing model in England and Wales. Shabana Mahmood confirmed the shake-up will create a new National Police Service (NPS) to fight the most complex cross-border crime and could also see the number of local forces in England and Wales cut by around two-thirds. She told the House of Commons she also intends to make better use of technology - including the largest-ever rollout of facial recognition. This government's reforms will ensure we have the right policing in the right place, Mahmood said. I set out reforms that are long overdue and define a new model for policing in this country, with local policing that protects our communities and national policing that protects us all.

Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood says she has lost confidence in West Midlands Police's chief constable after Israeli football fans were banned from a match against Aston Villa. Mahmood told MPs a damning review from the policing watchdog over the intelligence that led to Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being banned showed a failure of leadership. The force has apologised saying it did not deliberately distort evidence that was used by Birmingham's Safety Advisory Group for the 6 November game . Chief Constable Craig Guildford remains in post, but faces a meeting on 27 January to be questioned by Police and Crime Commissioner Simon Foster who has the authority to sack him. Mahmood told the Commons on Wednesday she intended to restore the power for home secretaries to dismiss chief constables who fail their communities.

Criminals and "malign actors" working on behalf of malicious states could use AI-generated "deepfakes" to hijack the general election, the home secretary has said. James Cleverly was speaking before meetings with social media bosses and said the rapid advancement of technology could pose a serious threat to elections across the globe. He warned that people working on behalf of states such as Russia and Iran could generate thousands of deepfakes – highly realistic hoax images and videos – to manipulate the democratic process in countries such as the UK. He told the Times that "increasingly today the battle of ideas and policies takes place in the ever-changing and expanding digital sphere", adding: "The era of deepfake and AI-generated content to mislead and disrupt is already in play. "The landscape it is inserted into needs its rules, transparency and safeguards for its users.

The story of the computer hacker Gary McKinnon and his long battle against extradition to the US is to be turned into a feature film. It will tell the story of how a young man hunting for evidence of UFOs found his way into the Pentagon's system and carried out what US authorities described as "the biggest military computer hack of all time" and then faced the possibility of a long sentence in a US high-security prison. The film, The People v Gary McKinnon, will be directed by Paul McGuigan, who made Gangster Number 1 and Lucky Number Slevin. The screenplay is by Peter Harness, who has written scripts for Wallander, Doctor Who, McMafia and Sherlock as well as the film Is Anybody There? It will be produced by Wall to Wall Media and Warner Brothers.

The UK government has unveiled a tool it says can accurately detect jihadist content and block it from being viewed. Home Secretary Amber Rudd told the BBC she would not rule out forcing technology companies to use it by law. Ms Rudd is visiting the US to meet tech companies to discuss the idea, as well as other efforts to tackle extremism. Thousands of hours of content posted by the Islamic State group was run past the tool, in order to "train" it to automatically spot extremist material. The government provided £600,000 of public funds towards the creation of the tool by an artificial intelligence company based in London.