Ten Things You Need to Know Today: Friday 15 Feb 2019

1. Trump to declare national emergency

US President Donald Trump is to declare a national emergency in an attempt to get the funding for a border wall between the US and Mexico denied to him by Congress. Opinion is divided on whether the tactic will work and some see it as an unacceptable power grab. National emergencies have been declared 58 times since the law since Congress passed the National Emergencies Act in 1976.

2. May defeated as hard Brexit Tories rebel

Theresa May suffered another Brexit defeat in the Commons last night, when her latest plans for leaving the EU were voted down by 303 to 258. MPs from the pro-Brexit Tory European Research Group (ERG) abstained from the vote amid fears that the motion might lead to an extension of the deadline for the UK to quit the bloc. Meanwhile, The Times says May will no longer ask the EU to give legal guarantees on the Irish backstop.

3. New AI project ‘too dangerous to release’

A new piece of artificial intelligence (AI) software that can generate plausible-sounding text is too dangerous for public consumption, the Elon Musk-backed non-profit research firm OpenAI has ruled. GPT2 was trained using ten million sample articles, and given a sentence or two as a starting point can continue the texts in the same styles.

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4. Cheryl Grimmer: 1970 murder charge dropped

Prosecutors in Australia have dropped their case against a man accused of killing a three-year-old girl in one of the country’s most notorious unsolved murders. Cheryl Grimmer disappeared from a New South Wales beach in 1970, shortly after her family emigrated from the UK. A man was charged in 2017 but the case has collapsed as a result of a bungled police interview with him in 1971, when the suspect was 17.

5. RBS annual profits double

Royal Bank of Scotland has reported that its annual profits have doubled to £1.62m, up from £752m in 2017. The bank is still majority-owned by the tax payer following a bailout in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis. RBS chief executive Ross McEwan said the uptick in profits was a “good performance in the face of economic and political uncertainty”.

6. Trump obese but in ‘very good health’

US President Donald Trump has put on weight since his last annual medical check-up but remains in “very good health”, his official doctor Sean Conley has announced. However, other doctors in the US have noted that at 243lb (17st 5lb), Trump has a body mass in excess of 30, within the range of clinical obesity.

7. Australian floods dirty Great Barrier Reef

A flooding crisis in northern Australia has flushed dirty water across the Great Barrier Reef, putting sections of the natural wonder at risk, scientists say. The floods follow weeks of heavy rain in Queensland. Experts fear the sediment-laden waters may be blocking out light and effectively “smothering” coral.

8. ‘Witches’ marks’ found in caves

An unprecedented collection of “apotropaic marks” - symbols made between the 16th and 19th centuries to ward off witches or other evil spirits – has been found hiding in plain sight in a cave network on the border between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. The hundreds of scratched marks on the walls of the caves at Creswell Crags had been dismissed as Victorian graffiti.

9. Briefing: was Churchill a hero or villain?

Labour’s shadow chancellor John McDonnell is in the firing line after calling wartime PM Winston Churchill a “villain”.

Responding to quick-fire questions at the end of a live video interview with Politico, McDonnell was asked if Churchill was a hero or a villain, to which he replied: “Tonypandy - villain.”

Winston Churchill: antifascist hero or racist warmonger – or both?