A Birmingham MP said the estimate of 400 – 500 Britons fighting in Syria was ‘nonsense’, claiming that more than twice as many British Muslims have travelled to Syria to fight for extremists. Ghaffar Hussain, managing director of the Quilliam Foundation an anti-extremism think tank, said that ISIS have plenty of Western recruits willing to partake in brutal violence. They were radicalised in the West before going to Syria. The ISIS message is slick and sophisticated. They’re the richest terrorist group in history with 2000+ European recruits. A former British diplomat in Iraq said British recruits originally travel with humanitarian ideals, but become brutalised by the conflict. He said, ‘They go out to try to protect civilians in Syria and enter into an underworld of violence. Others were impressionable young men escaping poverty and dead end jobs in the UK saying to themselves, ‘I could be a hero, or I could be a super villain.’

The head of NSPCC's helpline says it ‘beggars belief’ that information received by Rotherham council was not acted upon robustly. A report commissioned by Rotherham Borough Council and written by Professor Alexis Jay found that 1,400+ children were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013. Professor Jay said there had been collective failures by the council's leadership and senior managers. Also South Yorkshire Police failed to prioritise the issues. Five Rotherham men were jailed for sexual offences against girls in 2010, but police regarded many child victims with contempt. Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist (perpetrators were of Pakistani origin), others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so. Please pray that this expose will lead to better safeguarding of vulnerable children in the future and successful prosecutions of corrupt managers and officials.

The battle for Helmand contributes to a troubling security outlook for Afghanistan where the hard-line Taliban, in power from 1996 to 2001, are seeking to oust foreign forces and set up an Islamist state. Helmand province is the source of about half of Afghanistan's opium, and some areas have fallen under the control of drug dealers and the Taliban. In June, as many as 800 Taliban fighters were involved in some assaults on government offices and police outposts in Sangin. Afghan forces say they have killed 400 Taliban across Helmand since then. Please pray for wisdom for our government as they respond to the deeply worrying and barbaric attacks waged by ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) both with humanitarian and intelligence efforts. More: 

An average of one person a fortnight travels from the UK to Switzerland to receive help to take their own life, a study has suggested. Researchers from Zurich University said 126 Britons visited the country's clinics to die between 2008 and 2012. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal in the UK, but the Swiss permit assisted suicide in some circumstances. Britons accounted for a fifth of the foreigners going to Swiss right-to-die facilities over the period. The total number of foreigners going to the country to die rose from 123 cases in 2008 to 172 in 2012. Some 611 people from 31 countries travelled to the country over the five-year period to take advantage of its liberal laws on assisted dying. British patients were second only to Germans as the biggest national group to seek help to end their lives in Switzerland