Italian lawyers could win ‘wild west-style bounties’ if immigration clients go home

Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government to ask MPs to back controversial voluntary repatriation scheme

Italian lawyers will be paid bonuses if they successfully convince their immigrant clients to return home under a government plan that has been compared to a “wild west-style bounty”.

The incentive is in the latest security bill from Giorgia Meloni’s far-right government and goes to the lower house of parliament for final approval this week. It was passed by the upper house after fiery debate.

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French woman, 86, held by ICE after moving to US to marry 1950s sweetheart

The family of Marie-Thérèse, from Brittany, fear for her health after she was cuffed and placed in a detention centre

An 86-year-old French woman who moved to the US to marry her 1950s sweetheart is being held in a crowded detention centre in Louisiana after she was arrested by immigration agents and cuffed by her hands and feet.

The family of the woman, named only as Marie-Thérèse, said they feared for her health as French consular officials attempted to secure her release. One of her sons told the Ouest-France newspaper that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had treated his mother like a hardened criminal.

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Human rights groups decry US plan for Guantánamo camp for Cuban migrants

Exclusive: Dozens of organizations write to Congress after general announced plan to ‘deal with’ those fleeing any humanitarian crisis on the island

Dozens of US and international human rights organizations are decrying the Trump administration’s plans to establish a migrant “camp” for fleeing Cubans at the Guantánamo Bay military base if the island nation’s crisis worsens under pressure from the US, according to a letter to members of Congress on Friday.

The 85 groups plan to submit the joint letter, exclusively shared with the Guardian, to US senators and House representatives, expressing their “profound concern” with comments made last month by a top Department of Defense commander, and describing any prospect of further migrant detention at the base as “deeply troubling and unacceptable”.

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World held hostage by reliance on fossil fuels, Christiana Figueres warns – and climate health impacts are ‘mother of all injustices’

Exclusive: Former UN climate chief to co-chair Lancet Commission examining how sea-level rise is reshaping health, wellbeing and inequality

Countries are being “held hostage” by their reliance on fossil fuels, a former UN climate chief has warned, describing the health impacts of climate change as “the mother of all injustices”.

Christiana Figueres, an international climate negotiator who helped deliver the Paris agreement signed in 2016, made the comments as she was announced on Wednesday as co-chair of a Lancet Commission examining how sea-level rise is reshaping health, wellbeing and inequality.

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Farage says Trump’s Iranian ‘civilisation will die’ threats went ‘way too far’– UK politics live

The Reform UK leader says he is ‘shocked’ by the remarks which were ‘over the top in every single way’

The Green party is backing resident doctors who are on strike. This morning the party issued a statement on the dispute from its co-deputy leader, Mothin Ali, saying:

Rather than shifting goalposts or arm twisting resident doctors with threats over training places, Wes Streeting needs to get serious about resolving resident doctors long term concerns over pay, training and working conditions. The government’s 10-year plan for the NHS will go nowhere if the workforce feels unappreciated, devalued and demotivated.

I think I’m going to stay out of the selection of music by different bands. We live in a free country; people are going to say things. Let’s just let people listen to the music they want to.

People should choose their music and they don’t really they need advice from John Swinney unless they want to listen to The Jam or Amy McDonald.

Well, the government should go on and take their decisions within their powers, but I’m not going to give a running commentary on music taste.

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Two dead and one missing after trying to cross Channel to UK

First fatal incident this year occurred hours after £16.2m ‘stop the boats’ deal agreed between Britain and France

Two people have died and another is missing after trying to cross the Channel from France to the UK on Wednesday morning. It is the first fatal incident in the Channel this year.

The deaths occurred just hours after an interim £16.2m “stop the boats” deal was agreed between the UK and France which will be in place until May. Negotiations will continue for a longer-term deal to replace the previous three-year deal, which expired on Tuesday. According to reports, the home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, is trying to secure a “payment by results” agreement to reduce small boat crossings.

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Italian coastguard recovers 19 bodies from boat in sea near Lampedusa

Fifty-eight other people found alive during rescue involving inflatable craft in early hours of Wednesday

The bodies of 19 people have been recovered from an inflatable boat south of the island of Lampedusa by the Italian coastguard, a spokesperson told AFP.

Fifty-eight other people, including five children, were found alive during the rescue in the early hours of Wednesday and transported to Lampedusa by the coastguard, according to Roberto D’Arrigo.

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UK to pay France extra £16m in stopgap deal to patrol Channel beaches

Two-month arrangement aimed at preventing small-boat crossings comes as existing deal expires

The UK will pay France an extra £16.2m to keep police patrolling Channel beaches and prevent a surge in small-boat crossings after negotiators failed to agree a permanent deal before a midnight deadline.

The stopgap arrangement, which will last for two months, comes after French negotiators refused to agree to UK demands for further interventions and patrols to stop asylum seekers from reaching the UK via the Channel.

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At least 22 people die after six days adrift in boat en route to Europe from Libya

Survivors tell coastguard smugglers ordered victims to be thrown overboard after running out of food and water

22 people hoping to reach Europe from north Africa have died off the coast of Greece after six days at sea in a rubber boat, survivors told the Greek coastguard.

The coastguard said on Friday that 26 people, including a woman and a minor, were rescued by a European border agency vessel off the island of Crete.

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MEPs back plans for ‘return hubs’, raising fears of ‘human rights black holes’

European parliament votes in favour of sending refused asylum seekers to offshore hubs, in ‘historic setback for refugee rights’

People with no right to stay in the EU could be detained for up to two years or sent to offshore centres described by experts as possible “human rights black holes” under plans voted for by the European parliament on Thursday.

An alliance of mostly centre-right and far-right lawmakers voted for a proposal to increase returns of undocumented migrants to their home countries, in a further sign of strain on the grand coalition of centrist political forces that has traditionally driven EU lawmaking.

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EU healthcare workers say they ‘refuse to be instruments’ in deportation plans

Professionals from across Europe urge MEPs to reject plans, saying ‘climate of fear’ could stop people seeking care

More than 1,100 healthcare professionals from across Europe have urged MEPs to reject proposed measures aimed at increasing the deportation of undocumented people, warning they could threaten public health by transforming essential public services, including hospitals, into sites of immigration enforcement.

The draft plans, which are due to go to a vote on Thursday, have been in the works since last March, when the European Commission laid out its proposal to target people with no legal right to stay in the EU, including potentially sending them to offshore centres in non-EU countries.

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Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at prime minister’s questions – UK politics live

PM to face opposition leader and MPs in the House of Commons

Polanski says the government should be doing more to improve home insulation, and on the drive towards renewable energy.

And he says the government should commit to ensuring energy bills do not rise above the April-June price cap.

The government should guarantee right now that it will not allow energy bills to rise beyond the April-June price cap – instead setting aside approximately £8.4bn to prevent a rise of up to £300 per household that could be coming down the track.

No, it’s not cheap. But the alternative is unacceptable: if the price cap rises, we will see interest rate rises. Mortgage rates up. Bond yields up. And inflation up – and we will be back into the doom loop that has done untold damage to our economy and caused misery for households across the UK for years now.

There are ways to pay. Instead of scrapping the windfall tax on energy companies, as this government is planning to do, we should be strengthening it instead. We need a real, loophole-free windfall tax with no exemptions for reinvesting in fossil fuels. A robust tax that claws back every single pound of reckless profiteering from this crisis and repurposes it immediately to protect every home in the country. And while taxing extreme wealth in the ways we need to will take time to implement, there are levers the government could pull right now – like equalising capital gains tax with income tax and reforming the base, to raise £12bn.

It’s time for the government to act decisively, eliminate the uncertainty that is plaguing people and the markets and insulate us from some of the worst economic effects of Trump’s war.

This was not a war of self-defence, there was no imminent threat. Negotiations were ongoing. It was, as the BBC’s international editor said, a war of choice.

People across the Middle East are terrified of what Trump and Netanyanhu’s war will mean for them and their loved ones. And the repercussions are echoing across the world as instability spreads and oil prices spike.

People are already struggling so hard just to make ends meet. People feel like they’re running every day just to stay in the same place. The idea that yet again – for the second time in just a few years – that we are going to have to deal with another enormous spike in the cost of the basics is unacceptable.

It’s unacceptable because we didn’t need to be here. It’s unforgivable that just four years after we last saw an energy price shock, that one triggered by Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, far too little has been done to protect this country, its people, and its economy – from the impact of yet another energy price shock.

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Deaths of 22 children in Channel due to ‘catastrophic failure’ by UK and France, NGO says

Project Play finds UK taxpayers are funding ‘record child fatalities’ and ‘repeated violence’ against children in northern France

The deaths of 22 children while trying to cross the Channel in the last two years, along with the mistreatment of thousands of others, were due to “catastrophic failures” of the UK and French governments, according to a new report.

Project Play, an NGO that has worked with 2,192 children hoping to cross the Channel from northern France to the UK to claim asylum in the last two years, has documented the impact of the hostile conditions in northern France due to regular teargassing, evictions and dinghy-slashing by the French police.

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More than 600 people have died trying to cross Mediterranean in 2026, UN says

Deadliest start to a year in more than a decade, according to the International Organization for Migration

A least 606 people trying to reach Europe in search of refugee have been reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean since the beginning of 2026, marking the “deadliest start to a year” in more than a decade, the UN’s migration agency said on Monday.

The figure includes at least 30 people who are feared dead or missing after their boat capsized in severe weather off the coast of Greece on Saturday. Authorities rescued 20 people, including four minors, and recovered the bodies of three men and one woman, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), said.

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53 people dead or missing after migrant boat capsizes in Mediterranean

Only two survivors rescued after boat overturned off Libyan coast, UN migration agency says

Fifty-three people are dead or missing after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast, the UN migration agency said on Monday. Only two survivors were rescued.

The International Organization for Migration said the boat overturned north of Zuwara on Friday, in the latest disaster involving people attempting the perilous Mediterranean crossing in the hope of reaching Europe.

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Starmer says budget did not break manifesto tax pledge – as it happened

PM says: ‘We kept to our manifesto in terms of what we’ve promised. But I accept the challenge that we’ve asked everybody to contribute’

The Conservative party is attacking the budget on the grounds that Rachel Reeves is putting up taxes supposedly to fund more spending on benefit claimants. Even though the rationale for this claim is questionable, the Tories were making it before the budget was announced, and Kemi Badenoch firmed it up last night, claiming it was a “Benefits Street budget”.

On LBC this morning, asked if the budget meant “alarm clock Britain paying for Benefits Street”, Reeves said she did not accept that. She said 60% of the families that would benefit from the removal of the two-child benefit cap (the most expensive welfare announcement in the budget) were in work.

I don’t think children should be punished by this pernicious policy any longer. And the cost to society of this is huge, the cost for councils of temporary accommodation, when people can no longer afford the rent, putting families in B&Bs, kids having to move to school all the time because parents have moved from B&B to another lot of temporary accommodation, and there’s costs for years to come, because all the evidence shows that kids that are growing up poor are less likely to get into work and more reliant on the welfare state in the future for them.

So this is a good investment in those kids, to give them the chances that I want for my kids, and everyone wants for their kids. It also saves money for taxpayers on that accommodation, on those additional health costs, and ensuring that those kids grow up to be productive adults.

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Andy Burnham calls on Labour to rethink plans to make it tougher for asylum seekers to settle permanently – UK politics live

The home secretary’s plans ‘may leave people in a sense of limbo and unable to integrate’, Burnham said

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, is giving a speech in Salford this afternoon where he will set out details of his “good growth” plans, but he has already explained much of it overnight in a news release.

Explaining what his “new model of economic growth” is, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (the body Burnham runs) says:

Over the past decade, the city region has become the fastest growing part of the UK economy, driven by a high-performing centre unrecognisable from even 15 years ago.

Our trailblazing devolution deals and unique partnership approach have fuelled annual growth of 3.1 per cent – more than double the rate of the country as a whole. A recent report from Oxford Economics praised Greater Manchester’s growth journey, calling us a “trailblazer for local devolution.”

A new strategic partnership between GMCA and GMPF [Greater Manchester Pension Fund] – the first of its kind in the country – will prioritise local investment and align the GMPF’s investment to our integrated pipeline. Projects in the integrated pipeline will be able to access patient capital that aims for sustainable growth and long-term impact.

We’ll invest in a way that makes the most of every pound, delivering social as well as economic benefits.

Our Greater Manchester baccalaureate is transforming technical education, giving young people a clear line of sight to high quality jobs in our growing economy, and we’re helping residents to live healthier, happier lives and access new employment and training opportunities through our Live Well approach.

Underpinning all this is the Bee Network – our safe, green and affordable public transport system, which is seamlessly connecting people and places like never before. Next year eight rail lines will be brought into the network, which already includes bus, rail, tram, and active travel routes.

I appreciate the support, but I couldn’t have brought forward a plan of the kind I brought forward today [his Manchester “good growth” plan] without being fully focused on my role as mayor of Greater Manchester.

And I’m providing leadership on growth, which is what I think the country needs, and is helpful to the government right now.

And we’re doing this in advance of the budget, I hope, to really bring to life the growth story for the government.

I would just finish by saying this; I think part of the country’s problem is the political culture of Westminster, which is playing out in front of us right now. You go to Manchester, and we’ve built a new economy, and a new way of doing politics, and more of that is what the country needs.

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Wes Streeting defends asylum system shake-up despite his unease

Health secretary says he is not comfortable with some elements of policy but that it is the right thing to do for the country

Wes Streeting has admitted he is not comfortable with forcibly deporting families under the home secretary’s migration plans, while maintaining it is still the right thing to do.

The health secretary said he thought the number of forced removals would be low under the proposed model, which is similar to Denmark’s, because there would be an increased financial incentive for people entering the UK illegally to return to their country of origin.

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Reform’s plan to cut EU citizens’ benefits would risk trade war with Europe, Labour claims – UK politics live

As Reform announces what it claims are £25bn in savings through cuts, Labour says ‘Farage’s fantasy numbers don’t add up’

Alf Dubs, the Labour peer and former MP who came to the UK on Kindertransport in 1939 and who campaigns on behalf of migrants, told the Today programme this morning that he was “depressed” by the asylum politicies announced by the government yesterday. He explained:

I find it upsetting that we’ve got to adopt such a hard line – what we need is a bit of compassion in our politics, and I think that some of the measures were going in the wrong direction, they won’t help.

The hard line approach will not, in fact, deter people from coming here – at least on the basis of people I spoke to in Calais, for example – I don’t think it will deter them.

I think there is a proper case for children, there’s a proper case for family reunion – when there are children who are on their own and who’ve got family in this country, then I think the right thing to do is to have family reunion and bringing children over here.

But to use children as a weapon, as the home secretary is doing, I think is a shabby thing – I’m lost for words, frankly, because my concern was that if we remove people who come here, what happens if they’ve had children in the meantime?

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Shabana Mahmood tells MPs asylum system is ‘out of control and unfair’ amid Labour backlash over proposals – UK politics live

Labour MP calls government’s asylum plans ‘dystopian’ as home secretary announces measures in Commons

Momentum, the leftwing Labour group, has also denounced the government’s asylum plans. In a statement it says:

The home secretary’s new immigration plans are divisive and xenophobic.

Scapegoating migrants will not fix our public services or end austerity.

Draconian, unworkable and potentially illegal anti-asylum policies only feed Reform’s support.

The government has learnt nothing from the period since the general election.

Some of the legal changes being proposed are truly frightening:

Abolishing the right to a family life would ultimately affect many more people than asylum-seekers.

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