Month: February 2018

Rt Hon Karen Bradley MP, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland said:

Both parties have conducted discussions seriously and in good faith.

While substantive progress towards an agreement has been made, it appears that this phase of talks has reached a conclusion.

I would urge everyone to reflect on the circumstances which have led to this and their positions, both now and in the future.

The position of the UK Government remains the same: devolved government is in the best interests of everyone in Northern Ireland and is best for the Union. I believe the basis for an accommodation still exists.

As the Prime Minister said during her visit on Monday, we are ready to bring forward legislation to enable an Executive to be formed.

We will continue to work with everyone to make sure we do deliver this. We now need to consider practical steps.

In the continued absence of an Executive, other challenging decisions will have to be taken by the UK Government.

I will update Parliament when the House returns from Recess next week.

The Digital Forum, led by a US interagency task force, brings together technology experts and community leaders to improve terrorism prevention activities.

Secretary Nielsen and Home Secretary Rudd released the following joint statement:

Over the past 2 days, we have had the opportunity to meet with tech industry leaders in Silicon Valley to discuss our shared fight against terrorist use of the internet. Terrorists utilize social media to radicalise and recruit individuals around the world. We want to expand understanding of violent radicalisation and terrorist recruitment so more people can identify it—and more importantly—prevent it. At the Digital Forum on terrorism prevention, credible community voices learned directly from startups, researchers, and the technology sector how to deliver messages to disrupt terrorist narratives.

While in California, we had the opportunity to meet with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. This group represents the first time major companies have come together to work on research and technology solutions to combat the exploitation of the internet by terrorists. These companies have made notable progress on fighting back against the threat, and we look forward to engaging with them to continue advancing concrete action that will make it harder for terrorists to reach our people.

We believe that, by combining the talents and resources of government, community organizations, researchers, and industry, we can combat terrorist use of the internet, and make our communities more resilient against radicalisation to violence.