What happened
Police arrested two more men in Thetford last night as anti-migrant demonstrators surrounded properties in the Norfolk town where they believed asylum seekers were being kept. Officers have been deployed in large numbers, with reports of damage and attempts to enter the homes. Two members of the police were injured during Wednesday’s disturbances, including a female officer who was “seriously bitten”.

Who said what
Assistant Chief Constable Julie Dean said police would take “robust action”, while insisting that peaceful demonstrations would be allowed. “We will not stand by and allow violence to take place, whether that is directed towards members of the public, local residents or police officers.”

Pictures appeared to show a “heavy police presence” in the area last night, said Neve Gordon-Farleigh and Orla Moore on the BBC.

What next?
Special police powers introduced yesterday evening will remain in force until this morning. Officers can order people to uncover their faces and leave areas if they are involved in, or suspected of preparing for, anti-social behaviour. One man has been charged with possessing a wooden bat.

What happened
The sister of murdered student Meredith Kercher has backed a push to remove a comedy show by Amanda Knox – who was convicted then acquitted of her murder – from the Edinburgh Fringe.

More than 2,400 people have now signed the petition to cancel “Cartwheel”, which Knox (pictured above) calls a show about motherhood, wrongful imprisonment and how she will explain her past life to her daughter.

Who said what
“I cannot fathom how rape and murder can be laughed about,” said Stephanie Kercher. This show “goes against everything that inspirational women are still fighting for today”.

Sally Alington, who created the petition, said this “isn’t just wholly inappropriate and hurtful to family and friends of Meredith”, it “normalises and trivialises violence against women”.

Knox claimed on social media that the petition made “false assumptions and mischaracterises the show”, and that it “honours Meredith Kercher’s memory”. She also said in a separate interview that Kercher would have found the performance “funny”.

What next?
“Cartwheel” debuts today at the Fringe and will run for 11 days.

An AI company has “destroyed” millions of books as part of a “controversial project” to train its models, according to City A.M.

Tech giants want to “feed an insatiable demand for training data”, but their methods could have serious ramifications for the publishing industry and the quality of future books.

The alarm was first raised when antiquarian booksellers in the UK and across Europe started to receive curious requests for thousands of obscure titles from anonymous buyers.

According to recent court documents, Anthropic, the developer behind Claude, launched an internal programme known as “Project Panama”, which concluded that books were “essential” for training advanced AI models.

One senior executive at the AI giant said books taught systems “how to write well”, as opposed to using “low-quality internet speak”. The company has bought millions of second-hand books, “sliced off their spines” using “industrial cutting machines”, scanned every page and recycled the rest.

This trend has “raised fresh concerns about copyright and the future of physical books”, said the Turkish news outlet Anadolu Agency. But dealing with the issue could be quite another matter; copyright violations are “difficult to prove in court” because of “legal loopholes”.

Thomas Koch, of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association, said it “appears to be yet another example of AI companies using vast quantities of copyright-protected works to train their language models, without consent and without payment”.