A mild and partly cloudy afternoon is forecast for Saturday’s AFL grand final, with the match expected to stay dry from the first bounce.
Almost 100,000 fans are expected at Melbourne’s MCG when Geelong and Brisbane meet on Saturday afternoon.
Jonathan How, a forecaster at the Bureau of Meteorology, said the forecast was for a top of 19C.
“It will be a sunny morning and then a partly cloudy afternoon,” he said.
“It should remain mostly dry for the entire match, from the first bounce to the half-time show and then to full-time. We will have fresh westerly winds through the day, so we’ll be quite breezy out there.”
There was a chance of an evening shower, How said. But this would be unlikely to exceed 1mm.
Cats fans watching in Geelong can expect a top of 17C, with cloud increasing from the morning. Some showers from the late morning into the early afternoon are also forecast.
“It will be quite a windy day as well, but those winds will ease later on in Geelong,” How said.
In Brisbane, Lions fans will enjoy a mostly sunny day, expected to reach a top of 28C.
“We will see an afternoon sea breeze that will cool things off a little bit, and we are expecting a dry evening to follow there,” How said.
Fans flocking to Melbourne’s AFL parade on Friday morning could expect a top of 22C with a slight chance of a shower.
Showers and a thunderstorm would become more likely on Friday afternoon, according to How.
“It’ll be fairly windy, though, but those winds will ease later tonight,” he said.
Thousands of Lions and Cats fans are expected to watch the parade.
Saturday’s grand final is the first time in the league’s 138-year history that Geelong and Brisbane have crossed paths in the final game of the season.
Donald Trump on Thursday announced a new round of punishing tariffs, saying the United States will impose a 100% tariffs on imported branded drugs, 25% tariff on imports of all heavy-duty trucks and 50% tariffs on kitchen cabinets.
The US president also said he would start charging a 50% tariff on bathroom vanities and a 30% tariff on upholstered furniture next week, with all the new duties to take effect from 1 October.
Drug companies warned earlier this year that Americans would suffer the most if Trump decided to impose tariffs on pharmaceuticals.
In 2024, the US imported nearly $233bn in pharmaceutical and medicinal products, according to the Census Bureau. The prospect of prices doubling for some medicines could send shock waves to voters as healthcare expenses, as well as the costs of Medicare and Medicaid, potentially increase.
Pascal Chan, vice-president for strategic policy and supply chains at the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, warned that the tariffs could harm Americans’ health with “immediate price hikes, strained insurance systems, hospital shortages, and the real risk of patients rationing or foregoing essential medicines”.
“We are already being crushed by the highest prescription drug costs in the world and this will cause them to skyrocket further,” 314 Action, a US advocacy group that tries to elect scientists to office, said in a statement. “If [Trump] goes through with these tariffs, people across the country will die.”
Trump had previously suggested that pharmaceutical tariffs would be phased in over time so that companies had time to build factories and relocate production, making the sudden announcement of a 100% tariff more of a shock. On CNBC in August, Trump said he would start by charging a “small tariff” on pharmaceuticals and raise the rate over a year or more to 150% and even 250%.
Trump said on Truth Social that the pharmaceutical tariffs would not apply to companies that are building manufacturing plants in the United States, which he defined as either “breaking ground” or being “under construction”. It was unclear how the tariffs would apply to companies that already have factories in the US.
Several major pharmaceutical companies, including AstraZeneca, Roche, Novartis, Eli Lilly, and Johnson & Johnson, had already announced plans to invest in or increase manufacturing of their drugs in the US in an attempt to prepare for potential tariffs. Trump’s White House has touted these changes as a win.
While Trump did not provide a legal justification for the tariffs, he appeared to stretch the bounds of his role as commander-in-chief by stating on Truth Social that the taxes on imported kitchen cabinets and sofas were needed “for National Security and other reasons”.
He said the new heavy-duty truck tariffs were to protect manufacturers from “unfair outside competition” and said the move would benefit companies such as Paccar-owned Peterbilt and Kenworth and Daimler Truck-owned Freightliner.
“We need our Truckers to be financially healthy and strong, for many reasons, but above all else, for National Security purposes!” Trump added.
The new tariffs are another dose of uncertainty for the US economy with a solid stock market but a weakening outlook for jobs and elevated inflation. These new taxes on imports could pass through to consumers in the form of higher prices and dampen hiring, a process that economic data suggests is already underway.
“We have begun to see goods prices showing through into higher inflation,” Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, warned in a recent news conference, adding that higher costs for goods account for “most” or potentially “all” of the increase in inflation levels this year.
Trump has pressured Powell to resign, arguing that the Fed should cut its benchmark interest rates more aggressively because inflation is no longer a concern.
The US Chamber of Commerce urged the department not to impose new tariffs, noting the top five import sources are Mexico, Canada, Japan, Germany, and Finland “all of which are allies or close partners of the United States posing no threat to U.S. national security”.
Trump has launched numerous national security inquiries into potential new tariffs on a wide variety of products. He said the new tariffs on kitchen, bathroom and some furniture were because of huge levels of imports which were hurting local manufacturers.
“The reason for this is the large scale ‘FLOODING’ of these products into the United States by other outside Countries,” Trump said.
Mexico is the largest exporter of medium- and heavy-duty trucks to the United States. A study released in January said imports of those larger vehicles from Mexico have tripled since 2019.
Higher tariffs on commercial vehicles could put pressure on transportation costs just as Trump has vowed to reduce inflation, especially on consumer goods such as groceries.
Tariffs could also affect Chrysler-parent Stellantis which produces heavy-duty Ram trucks and commercial vans in Mexico. Sweden’s Volvo Group is building a $700m heavy-truck factory in Monterrey, Mexico, due to start operations in 2026.
Mexico is home to 14 manufacturers and assemblers of buses, trucks, and tractor trucks, and two manufacturers of engines, according to the US International Trade Administration.
The country is also the leading global exporter of tractor trucks, 95% of which are destined for the United States.
Mexico opposed new tariffs, telling the commerce department in May that all Mexican trucks exported to the United States have on average 50% US content, including diesel engines.
Last year, the United States imported almost $128bn in heavy vehicle parts from Mexico, accounting for approximately 28% of total US imports, Mexico said.
The Japanese Automobile Manufacturers Association also opposed new tariffs, saying Japanese companies have cut exports to the United States as they have boosted US production of medium- and heavy-duty trucks.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
Donald Trump issued a presidential memorandum on Thursday aimed at reining in what he has called a radical leftwing domestic “terror network” but which seemed likely to meet fierce legal pushback from critics depicting it as a licence for a broad crackdown on his political opponents.
Prompted by journalists, Trump suggested that George Soros, the billionaire Hungarian-born philanthropist who funds the Open Society Foundations, could be in his sights. He also identified Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist, adding: “I hear about him. Maybe it could be him. It could be a lot of people.”
Earlier, the Open Society Foundations had hit back at reports that the justice department was planning to target the group and criticized the Trump administration for “politically motivated attacks on civil society”.
Hina Shamsi of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in a statement: “After one of the most harrowing weeks for our first amendment rights, the president is invoking political violence, which we all condemn, as an excuse to target non-profits and activists with the false and stigmatizing label of ‘domestic terrorism’. This is a shameful and dangerous move.”
At a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, the memorandum was presented as aimed at “establishing a comprehensive strategy to investigate, disrupt and dismantle all stages of organized political violence and domestic terrorism”.
It was said to be part of an administration-wide response that would include the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforces, the Department of Justice and the Department of Treasury.
The ACLU said in a statement that joint terrorism task forces “already have a long history of investigations that wrongly target protestors, communities of color, and those engaged in dissent”.
Surrounded by members of his cabinet, Trump said the goal was to target “the funders of a lot of these groups”, some of whom he claimed to know. But he was vague when asked which groups he meant or who the funders were.
“These are anarchists and agitators, professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired by wealthy people, some of whom I know, I guess, probably know,” he said. “You wouldn’t know at dinner with them. Everything’s nice, and then you find out that they funded millions of dollars to these lunatics.”
Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School and former federal prosecutor, said the memorandum itself probably doesn’t carry much legal weight. “You can’t by executive order create new crimes. This does not create new crimes. This says you will use the Terrorism Task Force to go after things they would usually go after,” Richman said.
But, he added: “The concern is that this administration has made clear it is only interested in pursuing politically oriented terrorism that disagrees with its political agenda.”
The Trump administration does not need to create new crimes in order to do this, he said. Laws already on the books “have and continue to provide the ability to go after ideological opponents”.
Though the memorandum may not hold up in court, “I fear how far they are going to take this,” said Jason Charter, a former activist who faced charges during Trump’s first term in connection with efforts to tear down the Andrew Jackson statue in front of the White House. “Antifa is antifascism, and antifascism is a very widely shared thing, and being against fascism should not be illegal.”
“It’s trying to slap terrorism charges on people doing protected activities under the Bill of Rights,” Charter said.
The memorandum comes amid a rightwing clamor for retribution in the wake of the 10 September murder of the far-right pundit Charlie Kirk, which Trump and his supporters have blamed on an organized leftwing network, despite early indications that the suspect acted alone.
It also followed Wednesday’s deadly attack on a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Dallas that killed one detainee and injured two others. One of the bullets used in the attack was inscribed with the message “anti-Ice”.
The memorandum lumps together a series of apparently unrelated episodes, including a foiled 2022 assassination attempt on the supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh, the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare in Manhattan last December, last year’s two failed attempts on Trump’s life, and unrest on the streets of Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.
Stephen Miller, the influential White House deputy chief of staff – who has been vocal in the administration’s previous calls for a crackdown – called the initiative “historical and significant”.
“This is the first time in American history that there is an all-of-government effort to dismantle leftwing terrorism, to dismantle antifa, to dismantle the organizations that have been carrying out these acts of political violence and terrorism,” Miller said. The joint terrorism taskforce, a unit inside the FBI, would be “the hub” of the effort, he added.
He said “an entire system of feeder organisations” were funding “harassment, doxing, intimidation and, ultimately, attempted assassinations” of public officials.
“It is all carefully planned, executed and thought through,” said Miller. “It is terrorism on our soil. We are going to use the entire force of the federal government to uproot these organizations, root and branch.”
Trump and his allies have portrayed political violence as a phenomenon primarily associated with the left, overlooking recent incidents in which Democrats have been targeted by people who are believed to be rightwing extremists or incidents in which the perpetrator’s motives are unclear.
Posting on his Truth Social network on Wednesday, Trump clearly tied the Ice facility attack to the Democrats and their criticism of his immigration crackdown in a manner resembling his response to Kirk’s killing.
“This violence is the result of the radical left Democrats constantly demonizing law enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis,” he wrote. “The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped. ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat.”
But authorities on Thursday said that they did not find evidence that the suspect was a member of “any specific group or entity, nor did he mention any specific government agency other than Ice”.
In the wake of Kirk’s killing, Trump issued an executive order designating antifa, a loose network of groups that has been involved in confrontations with the far right, as a “domestic terrorist organization”.
The new memorandum states: “This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.
“A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies – including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them – is required.”
“Intimidation tactics against those standing up for human rights and civil liberties are sadly not new in the history of this country,” Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s national security project, said. “In an earlier era, civil rights movement leaders were also labeled security threats and investigated, monitored, threatened, and even arrested.”
James Comey, the former FBI director and one of Donald Trump’s most frequent targets, was indicted on Thursday on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of justice, in the latest move in the president’s expansive retribution campaign against his political adversaries.
“No one is above the law. Today’s indictment reflects this Department of Justice’s commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people,” Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, said in a statement on Thursday.
Trump celebrated the charges in a post on Truth Social.
“JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI,” he wrote in a post. “Today he was indicted by a Grand Jury on two felony counts for various illegal and unlawful acts. He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
The indictment came shortly after Trump instructed Bondi to “move now” to prosecute Comey and other officials he considers political foes, in an extraordinarily direct social media post trampling on the justice department’s tradition of independence.
The charges came less than a week after Lindsey Halligan was installed as the top federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia, after Trump fired her predecessor, Erik Siebert, after he declined to bring charges against Comey over concerns there was insufficient evidence.
Halligan, most recently a White House aide and former Trump lawyer who has no prosecutorial experience, was also presented with a memo earlier this week laying out why charges should not be brought. But the justice department still pushed it through, people familiar with the matter said.
The indictment, filed in federal court in the eastern district of Virginia, shows grand jurors charged Comey was charged with obstructing “a congressional investigation into the disclosure of sensitive information” and making a false statement to the FBI when he said he did not authorize someone at the agency to be an anonymous source. Prosecutors sought a third charge against Comey, but grand jurors rejected the request, court documents show.
“Today, your FBI took another step in its promise of full accountability,” Kash Patel, the FBI director, said in a statement.
Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, condemned the charges.
“Donald Trump has made clear that he intends to turn our justice system into a weapon for punishing and silencing his critics,” he said in a statement. “This kind of interference is a dangerous abuse of power. Our system depends on prosecutors making decisions based on evidence and the law, not on the personal grudges of a politician determined to settle scores.”
Days before submitting his resignation under pressure, Siebert reportedly conveyed to his superiors at the justice department that the cases against Comey and James were unlikely to result in charges.
In social media posts on Saturday, Trump claimed that Comey, James and a third political opponent, Democratic senator Adam Schiff of California, were “guilty as hell” and that his supporters were upset that “nothing has been done”.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” Trump posted. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Trump’s contempt for Comey stretches back to the early days of his first term, when according to Comey, Trump sought to secure a pledge of loyalty from the then FBI director, who refused. At the time, Comey was leading the criminal investigation into Russian meddling in the US election. Trump dismissed Comey in May 2017.
Earlier this year, Comey was investigated by the Secret Service after he shared and then deleted a cryptic social media post of seashells in the formation of “8647” that Trump’s allies alleged was an incitement of violence against the president.
Comey said he opposed violence of any kind and said he was unaware that “86” had a violent connotation. Comey voluntarily sat for an interview with the agency.
White pupils from low-income families in England start secondary school with far lower levels of enthusiasm or effort than other ethnic groups, according to new research that may partly explain differences in academic results and behaviour.
Both girls and boys from lower-income white families reported weak levels of engagement from year 7 onwards. Girls were less likely to enjoy being at school while the boys made less effort with their school work.
Only half of low-income white children said they worked hard at school, compared with about 70% of disadvantaged pupils of south Asian ethnicity.
The study measured pupils’ levels of engagement in questionnaires taken by children at more than 120 schools, which tested response to statements such as “I don’t feel bored at school” and “What I learn at school will help me in the future”.
Prof John Jerrim of University College London’s social research institute, who conducted the study, said the results revealed a difficult problem for policymakers at a time when improving education for white working class children was high on the political agenda.
“What you do see is that even on entry to secondary school, white working-class pupils tend to have lower levels of various measures of school engagement than other groups, both more advantaged groups and pupils of different ethnicity,” Jerrim said.
“It’s different across boys and girls. Girls struggle more with certain aspects such as peer relationships and enjoyment of school, whereas among white working-class boys, it’s more around valuing school and effort.
“One of the questions we asked is about self-reported effort and that’s probably the most interesting part where white working-class pupils stick out. If you ask them ‘how much effort are you putting into school?’, they really stand out from other groups in a bad way, and it’s because they are not properly engaged.”
Last month Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said that “the lack of progress for children from white working-class backgrounds is particularly concerning”, and promised to tackle it in the forthcoming white paper.
But Jerrim said that changing the group’s attitudes would be a “long-term slog”, and added: “This is a hard nut to crack. It’s likely to involve a lot of investment from an early age, following through these young people’s lives. A big message we all need to take away is that this isn’t going to change quickly.”
The study also found that pupil engagement with school declined over time across most groups, and Jerrim noted that black pupils had particularly poor relationships with their teachers compared with other groups.
Civilians in Gaza have sustained injuries of a type and on a scale more usually seen among professional soldiers involved in intense combat operations, research has found.
A study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that some types of wounds – such as burns or injuries to legs – were more common among civilians in Gaza than among US soldiers fighting in recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Injured civilians in Gaza are experiencing a pattern of wounds that you would expect in intense combat with military professionals. The distribution and nature [of injuries] is almost the same or worse,” said Dr Bilal Irfan, a bioethicist who conducts research at the University of Michigan and is one of the study’s authors.
The peer-reviewed research, the first of its kind, drew on data provided between August 2024 and February 2025 by dozens of international medical professionals who have worked in Gaza during the nearly two-year-old conflict.
Irfan said the data did not include most fatal injuries. “This is data for the patients who made it to hospital and so survived. We don’t even have a full profile of the serious injuries of those who died without any medical attention,” he said.
A Palestinian man rushes a wounded girl to al-Awda hospital in the central Gaza Strip on 24 September. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty
The war was triggered by Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel in which militants killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 hostage, of whom about 50 remain in Gaza, about 20 of them thought to be alive.
The ensuing Israeli military campaign has killed more than 65,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, and injured more than 160,000, and has reduced swathes of the territory to ruins and displaced most of the population, in many cases multiple times.
The new study will increase the pressure on Israel, which is facing deepening isolation over its conduct of the war in Gaza. Overall, almost 24,000 trauma-related injuries were reported in the study, of which 18% were burns. About two-thirds of injuries were from explosions.
Burns were particularly common and severe, in particular among children, the authors found. More than one-tenth of burn injuries were fourth-degree, meaning they penetrated all tissue layers down to the bone.
The extent of traumatic injury victims reflects “the impact of indiscriminate aerial and heavy explosive bombardment in civilian areas”, the study said.
Firearm injuries made up about 30% of war-related trauma, similar to reports from Syria’s civil war where civilians were frequently victims during a decade of violence. Just under 10% of gunshot patients were shot in the head.
The 78 experts who provided data came from 22 NGOs from Britain, the US, Canada and the EU, and included specialists in several disciplines. They were interviewed or provided data within three months of deployment in Gaza, Irfan said. The injury patterns in Gaza were then compared with studies of US combat veterans who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Dr Victoria Rose, a consultant plastic surgeon working at St Thomas’ hospital and King’s College hospital in London and another of the journal article’s authors, said the findings “should ring alarm bells through the halls of government worldwide and the humanitarian community”.
Nada Abu al-Rub, volunteering at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, treats a wounded man on 22 September. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty
Israeli military officials insist they act within international law but admit there is “a tension” between protecting civilians and the “demands of fast-moving military operations”.
They said: “We are fighting a very different war from any previous conflict anyone has fought anywhere in the world … There are strict rules of engagement but what has changed is the policy that was designed for small wars where we wanted to deter [enemies] … We are now fighting in Gaza to ensure that Hamas is not ruling Gaza.”
Data collected by the independent violence-tracking organisation Acled suggests that as many as 15 of every 16 Palestinians the Israeli military has killed since its renewed offensive in Gaza began in March may have been civilians. Last month the Guardian revealed that internal data from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) indicated a civilian death toll of 83% between the outbreak of war in October 2023 and May of this year.
Israel has imposed tight restrictions on supplies entering Gaza throughout the war. Last month, UN-backed food security experts confirmed famine in Gaza City and surrounding areas.
The medics who contributed to the new study found that malnutrition had worsened patient outcomes, “delayed wound healing and preventable deaths from otherwise treatable conditions”.
The few remaining hospitals and clinics in central and southern Gaza are now being overwhelmed by a “tsunami” of injured and sick patients fleeing a new Israeli offensive in the north of the devastated territory, medics say.
Donald Trump said on Thursday he thought a deal to end the war in Gaza was close. “I have to meet with Israel,” he said at the White House. “I think we can get that one done. I hope we can get it done. A lot of people are dying, but we want the hostages back.”
All working adults will need digital ID cards under plans to be announced by Keir Starmer in a move that will spark a battle with civil liberties campaigners.
The prime minister will set out the plans on Friday at a conference on how progressive politicians can tackle the problems facing the UK, including addressing voter concerns around immigration.
The proposals for a “Brit card” would require legislation and are already facing opposition from privacy campaigners.
However, No 10 is understood to believe that it is necessary to make sure people have the right to work in the UK to tackle illegal migration, and that the national mood has moved on since Tony Blair’s plans for ID cards were abandoned in the 2000s.
Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary, is a backer of the plans, having said her “long-term personal political view has always been in favour of ID cards”.
Starmer said this month that digital IDs could “play an important part” in making Britain less attractive to illegal migrants and France has repeatedly claimed that the lack of official cards acts as a “pull factor”.
Ahead of his speech on Friday, Starmer spoke about the government’s goal of “patriotic renewal”, comparing it to “the politics of grievance, of toxic divide, which is what Reform are all about”. He dismissed the Conservative party as “basically dead”.
He will set out on Friday his view that the far right is injecting a “poisonous” discourse into national life, saying: “At its heart – its most poisonous belief – on full display at the protests here in London, just a week or two ago, that there is a coming struggle, a defining struggle, a violent struggle for the nation. For all our nations.
“Now – you don’t need to be a historian to know where that kind of poison can lead. You can just feel it. A language that is naked in its attempt to intimidate.”
But he will also explain his belief that immigration and borders need to be controlled, saying: “For too many years it’s been too easy for people to come here, slip into the shadow economy and remain here illegally.”
Starmer will add: “It is not compassionate left-wing politics to rely on labour that exploits foreign workers and undercuts fair wages. But the simple fact that every nation needs to have control over its borders.”
The Guardian revealed in June that Downing Street was exploring proposals for a digital ID card to crack down on illegal migration, rogue landlords and exploitative work.
The idea came from a Labour Together paper given to the No 10 policy unit proposing a Brit Card, which it claimed could help avoid another Windrush scandal.
The thinktank paper also said it would help reduce vast numbers of visa overstayers, saying half of those whose asylum claims were turned down over the past 14 years were probably still in the UK. It proposed a free, secure digital ID, stored on a person’s smartphone using ministers’ planned gov.uk Wallet app, rebranded as the Brit Card app. That could then be verified by employers, immigration, banks and landlords using a free verifier app.
Under the likely plans, the technology is expected to be built on the government’s existing “One Login” infrastructure, which already allows citizens to access about 50 government services, from applying for a job as a teacher to using a lasting power of attorney.
The report’s author and the thinktank’s director of technology, Kirsty Innes, is now a special adviser to Liz Kendall, the technology secretary. When the paper was published, she said: “A progressive society can only work if we have meaningful borders. BritCard would make it far harder to flout the illegal work and illegal rent rules, and far easier to identify and punish exploitative illegal employers and landlords.”
The plans were welcomed by the Tony Blair Institute, with its director of government innovation, Alexander Iosad, saying: “Make no mistake, if the government announces a universal digital ID to help improve our public services, it would be one of the most important steps taken by this or any government to make British citizens’ everyday lives easier and build trust.”
However, they were opposed by David Davis, the Conservative MP and former cabinet minister, who led the charge against Blair’s ID cards decades ago.
Davis said: “No system is immune to failure, and we have seen time and again governments and tech giants fail to protect people’s personal data. If world-leading companies cannot protect our data, I have little faith that Whitehall would be able to do better.”
The Liberal Democrats said they could not support “a mandatory digital ID where people are forced to turn over their private data just to go about their daily lives”.
The Conservatives did not give a position, but its leader, Kemi Badenoch, said: “There are arguments for and against digital ID, but mandating its use would be a very serious step that requires a proper national debate.
“Instead, this is a throwaway conference announcement designed to distract attention from Andy Burnham’s leadership manoeuverings and the crisis in Downing Street over the prime minister’s chief of staff.”
Jim Killock, the executive director of Open Rights Group, highlighted that the digital ID card scheme was not in Labour’s manifesto, arguing that it was “the last thing this government should be embarking on during a cost of living crisis”.
“The digital visa schemes that are already in place for migrants are a stark warning of the harms aused by data errors, systems failures and an indifferent, hostile Home Office. People have been unable to travel, lost job offers and even been made homeless because of existing digital ID schemes,” he said.
“Labour are at risk of creating a digital surveillance infrastructure that will change everyone’s daily lives and establish a pre-crime state where we constantly have to prove who we are as we go about our daily lives.”
David Rennie, a former official at the Home Office’s identity cards programme and now chief trust officer at the startup Orchestrating Identity, said it was “absurd” to suggest a digital identity would stop illegal migration.
“Proposing a headline-grabbing ‘government digital identity for all’ as a way of combating illegal migration shows a lack of understanding or learning from the last 20 years,” he said. “Employers already have to prove a prospective employee’s right-to-work in the UK or receive a £45k fine.”
AFL grand final could spread Queensland measles outbreak
A leading doctor has warned that a measles outbreak in Queensland could spread nationally after this weekend’s AFL grand final because of potential transmission by Brisbane Lions fans travelling to Melbourne, Australian Associated Press reports.
There are currently around 20 active cases of measles in Queensland, with the largest cluster in the Cairns area of the state’s far north.
There are also smaller clusters in central Queensland and the Gold Coast, with a single case confirmed in Brisbane yesterday.
With up to 30,000 Brisbane Lions fans predicted to travel from Queensland to Melbourne for the match against Geelong on Saturday, epidemiologists warn of the highly contagious virus spreading.
The director of infectious diseases at Brisbane’s Mater hospital, Paul Griffin, was once the No 1 Lions ticketholder and will be at the MCG among 100,000 others for the big match on Saturday.
“Fleeting contact, or even being in the same room as someone two hours after they were there infectious with measles is enough to get infected,” Griffin said.
While he admits it unlikely a person with measles will attend, he said that for every known case of the disease there are likely to be 16 to 20 unknown cases.
Measles was eradicated from Australia in 2014, but has made a comeback as vaccination rates declined.
More than 120 cases have been logged so far in 2025.
Griffin described the return of the virus as a “terrible tragedy”.
“This is our biggest [outbreak] since 2019, and with our current trajectory we could continue to break other records,” he said.
Vaccination rates against measles in Queensland have slid to 90.35%, well below the target of 95%.
Griffin put the decline down to misinformation about vaccines in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and complacency about the severity of the illness.
Welcome
Good morning and welcome to our live news blog. I’m Martin Farrer with the top overnight stories and then my colleague Caitlin Cassidy will pick up the strain.
A leading doctor has warned that a measles outbreak in Queensland could spread nationally after this weekend’s AFL grand final because of potential transmission by Brisbane Lions fans travelling to Melbourne. More coming up.
The FBI said on Thursday that the suspect in the shooting at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention facility in Texas the day before had engaged in a “high degree of planning” before the attack.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, said in a statement on Thursday morning thatthe alleged perpetrator downloaded a document titled “Dallas County Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Management” containing a list of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) facilities.
The shooting occurred early on Wednesday at a facility in Dallas, with a spray of bullets fired from a rooftop hitting a building and an Ice transportation van, killing one Ice detainee who was inside the vehicle and badly injuring two others.
No Ice staff were hit in the attack, which the Trump administration condemned as being an action aimed at law enforcement and is urgently investigating, amid a surge in political violence in the US.
The suspect was identified as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, who took his own life at the scene.
On Thursday,Patel said that the suspect hadconducted multiple searches of ballistics and had searched the “Charlie Kirk Shot Video” in recent days, referring back to the murder of the rightwing activist and youth politics leader who was shot dead at an event in Utah earlier this month.
Patel also said that between 18 August and 24 August, the suspectsearched apps that tracked the presence of Ice agents. The FBI director added that authorities also recovered a handwritten note whichread, ‘Hopefully this will give Ice agents real terror, to think, “is there a sniper”? about to fire from a roof.”
Pateladded: “Further accumulated evidence to this point indicates a high degree of pre-attack planning.”
Authorities provided more details at a news conference on Thursday afternoon and said that at around 3am on Wednesday the suspect was seen driving, on footage, with a large ladder on his car, that they believe he used to position himself on top of the building.
The shooting, authorities said, started at about 6.30am on Wednesday, and officials said on Thursday that they believe that the suspect acted alone.
Nancy Larson, acting US Attorney for the northern district of Texas, said that authorities found a collection of notes at the suspect’s residence, with one of the note notes allegedly stating: “Yes, it was just me.”
“Notably, these loose notes included a game plan of the attack and target areas at the facility,” Larson said. “He called the Ice employees: people showing up to collect a dirty paycheck.”
Larson said that the suspect “wrote that he intended to maximize lethality against Ice personnel and to maximize property damage at the facility” and said that it “seems that he did not intend to kill the detainees or harm them. It’s clear from these notes that he was targeting Ice agents and Ice personnel.
“He also hoped his actions would give Ice agents real terror of being gunned down, and he did this to induce constant stress in their lives,” Larson said.
Among his papers, Larson said that they also found a handwritten note in which the suspect “expressed his hatred for the federal government”.
The suspect who shot Kirk earlier this monthalso fired from a rooftop at a relatively long distance, using a high-powered rifle with a precision scope in a sniper-style attack. He fired just one bullet in an assassination-style discharge that hit Kirk in the neck. The shooter at the Ice facility fired many bullets in a much more scattered fashion that did not appear to include aiming at a specific individual.
The identities of the victims in the Dallas attack have not yet been named , although the two men wounded were said to remain in the hospital in critical condition.
The mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson, a Democrat turned Republican, described the shooting on on CNN in a live interview on Thursday morning as “really, really sad.
“I want to stay out of the way of the FBI investigation … but I will tell you that it’s very troubling,” he said “I think the trend that we’re seeing of increasing political violence in this country, and yesterday’s … hit close to home and we’re concerned.”
Johnson added: “The division that seems to be leading to some folks taking these very, very unfortunate and violent steps to try to bring about policy changes [is] just wrong and it’s scary.”
Johnson condemned “the vilification of Ice”, the federal agency that has been stirring up protests amid the Trump administration’s anti-immigration, mass deportation agenda, with raids on immigrants across the country and a surge of detentions.
The motive of the suspect in Wednesday’s incident is still being investigated. A relative of the man said Jahn was not particularly political, NBC reported, but one unspent bullet casing was marked “Anti-Ice”.
Patel shared the developments as Donald Trump blamed the shooting on “Radical Left Terrorists” and the Democratic party, without citing official evidence of any specific affiliations, party politics or motives of the suspect.
The US president wrote on social media the day of the Dallas attack: “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis.”
JD Vance made a political comment before a suspect had even been named or many details of the victims released, saying that the attack was carried out by “a violent leftwing extremist” who was “politically motivated to go after law enforcement”.
It is 21 years since Tony Blair’s government made proposals for an ID card system to tackle illegal working and immigration, and to make it more convenient for the public to access services.
The same issues are on the agenda again as Keir Starmer revives what became one of New Labour’s most controversial policies. He is about to find out if he can defeat the argument that David Cameron’s Conservatives made before scrapping it. They said the ID card approach to personal privacy was “the worst of all worlds – intrusive, ineffective and enormously expensive”.
Blair is an important figure in the latest push, through lobbying carried out by his Tony Blair Institute (TBI).
The idea re-emerges in a different technological world in which smartphones are ubiquitous and much, but far from all, of the population is familiar with negotiating digital credentials.
Starmer appears ready to try again, and ministers believe there will be less public opposition, although digital ID cards could worsen the effect of digital exclusion.
Age UK has estimated that about 1.7 million people over the age of 74 do not use the internet. TBI’s arguments in favour are that far from reflecting the “papers, please” caricature, digital ID “brings fairness, control and convenience to people’s everyday interactions with each other and with the state”.
It can close loopholes exploited by trafficking gangs, reduce pull factors driving illegal migration to Britain, speed up citizens’ interactions with government, reduce errors and identity fraud and boost trust as a tangible symbol of a more responsive and flexible state.
The arguments against often centre on privacy. Civil liberties campaigners fear any mandatory ID card system, even one intended to tackle illegal migration, would require the population to surrender vast amounts of personal data to be amassed in national databases.
They worry that the information could be amalgamated, searched and analysed to monitor, track and profile people. This would shift the balance of power towards the state “with dangerous implications for our security, rights and freedoms”, campaigners such as Liberty and Big Brother Watch say.
Computer security experts also say centralised data could create a juicy target for hackers who, as the cyber-attacks on Jaguar Land Rover, the Co-op, the British Library and others have shown, pose a growing threat to the UK’s ability to function. It should be possible to decentralise the data to reduce that risk, but the detail is yet to be spelt out.
Huge government and public digital projects also have a history of going awry in the UK. Blair’s institute reckons it will cost £1bn to set up and £100m a year to run. It does not take a cynic to fear those costs could spiral.
The Association of Digital Verification Providers has estimated that a full mandatory national ID system would cost more than £2bn.
Another version of a national ID card proposed by the Labour Together thinktank and referred to as the BritCard has been costed at between £140m and £400m with running costs of up to £10m a year. The government appears keen to try to keep the spending low.
“This is not going to be a case of a gigantic, hundreds of millions of pounds contract issued to the likes of IBM or Fujitsu,” said a source involved in the government’s thinking. They said it could be built by the government’s own digital services department using smaller contracts with UK firms.