What happened
Police say they were compelled to use batons and Pava spray during clashes with masked demonstrators in Portsmouth on Sunday evening after about 120 asylum seekers arrived by boat. Officers reported being attacked during a stand-off after roughly 200 anti-migrant protesters gathered near the landing site. Hampshire Police Federation reported that two officers were pushed off motorbikes while others had bricks thrown at them.

Who said what
Home Office Minister Sarah Jones (pictured above) said officers had been “forced to use batons and Pava spray to maintain order in the face of some aggression”. Andy Burnham urged Labour MPs to confront political extremism with “positivity and hope”.

Why were anti-illegal migrant protestors able to “wrongfoot the police”, asked Dominic Adler in The Telegraph. “The uncomfortable answer, for police forces, the Home Office and even the Security Service MI5, is simple: British policing dropped the ball monitoring ‘domestic extremism’.”

What next?
Police are examining whether intelligence was adequately shared before the demonstrations. Authorities are also considering restrictions on face coverings at future protests.

What happened
A Nobel Prize-winning AI scientist has said the systems may have “catastrophic” consequences for humanity, ahead of the publication of the UK Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill (UKASSB), which is due to be presented in parliament this week.

Geoffrey Hinton (pictured above), the so-called “godfather” of artificial intelligence, has argued that there is no way for companies to “safely develop ‘superintelligence’”, and that losing control over AI could “even lead to human extinction”.

Who said what
Sir Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said governments should “respond accordingly” to certain companies that are playing an “absurd form of Russian roulette” in the industry.

In July, OpenAI admitted that agents had escaped a security test and anonymously hacked Hugging Face, another tech company. This was a “warning shot”, said OpenAI, and “evidence that, without proper safeguards, highly capable” AI agents can “take dangerous actions that no human directed”.

The government said it was “exploring whether additional targeted interventions may be needed in future to address the most significant AI-related national security risks”.

What next?
The UKASSB will be put forward by Labour MP Alex Sobel as a private member’s bill in parliament today.

We are barrelling towards a major nuclear problem. Decades-old radioactive waste from discarded containers may be slowly seeping into the Atlantic Ocean and affecting the marine ecosystem. Scientists have conducted dives to collect samples and test the region to determine the extent of the pollution and whether the radioactivity has made its way into the food chain.

Between 1950 and 1990, “more than 200,000 barrels filled with radioactive waste were dumped in the depths of the North-East Atlantic”, said a release by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). Scientists first mapped the area where the barrels were dropped during a mission last summer. They recently completed a second mission where they “carried out 20 dives to depths of over 4,700 metres (15,419 feet), enabling direct observation of several barrels and their immediate surroundings” using a manned submersible called the Nautile.

The barrels “contain low- and intermediate-level radioactive material” including “process sludge, contaminated metal and laboratory equipment”, said Futura. CNRS researchers “were able to document the advanced state of deterioration of several barrels (and) observe that some of them had leaked their contents”, added the release.

The barrels were never meant to permanently seal up the radioactive waste. These containers were intended to “provide an initial period of confinement rather than act as permanent deep-sea vaults”, said Earth.com. Over time, the “radioactive contents were expected to be released gradually and dispersed in the ocean”.

“It’s too late to undo the damage inflicted on the environment by previous generations,” said Popular Mechanics. But “having a deeper understanding of how these systematic episodes of pollution impacted the world will help future generations avoid making the same mistakes”.