Natacha Bouchart tells PM sending Navy ships into French waters is ‘a declaration of maritime war’
The mayor of the French port city of Calais has told Boris Johnson to “calm down” and change strategy in dealing with migrants crossing from France.
“I consider Boris Johnson’s pronouncements to be a provocation,” said Natacha Bouchart, mayor of the town that is a main embarkation point for the small, overcrowded migrant boats seeking to cross the Channel this summer.
Continue reading...Children’s groups call for meal provision to extend to families barred from UK state support
Thousands of children from migrant families are at risk of hunger when schools reopen in the UK unless the free meal provision is extended, according to a group of 60 organisations.
The Children’s Society, Action for Children, Project 17 and Unison are among the organisations that have written to the education secretary, Gavin Williamson, calling on him to extend free school meals to pupils from low-income migrant families classed as having “no recourse to public funds”.
Continue reading...As France is taken off the government’s travel corridor list and new quarantine rules come into play, should UK holidaymakers cancel trips?
The UK government has removed France from its list of travel corridors, leaving hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers scrambling to rearrange their travel plans. A 14-day quarantine on return to the UK from France will come into effect from 4am on Saturday (15 August), leaving a window of little more than 30 hours for travellers to get home if they want to escape the measures.
The UK criteria for removing a country from the list is based on per capita case numbers. If these go above 20 per 100,000, the UK government categorises that country as high-risk. This Wednesday France reached 30.4, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, with significant numbers in recent days: 2,524 new cases were reported on Wednesday, up from 1,397 on Tuesday, and over 2,000 a day last weekend.
Continue reading...The US president’s hair-washing complaints have prompted a proposal on easing of shower-pressure standards.
The Trump administration presented rule changes that would allow showerheads to boost water pressure, after Donald Trump complained that bathroom fixtures did not work to his liking.
The Department of Energy plan followed Trump's comments last month at a White House event on rolling back regulations where he said he believed water did not come out fast enough from fixtures. ‘My hair … I don’t know about you, but it has to be perfect,' he said
Continue reading...India’s infections grow by nearly 67,000 in one day; Russia vaccine not yet completed its final trials; global deaths climb towards 750,000. Follow the latest updates
Hello everyone. I am taking on the global live feed from London and will be bringing you all the latest updates on what is happening around the globe. Please do keep in touch with me as I work and contact me if you have any questions, news tips or thoughts. Thanks in advance.
Twitter: @sloumarsh
Instagram: sarah_marsh_journalist
Email: sarah.marsh@theguardian.com
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. Thanks for following along.
My colleague Sarah Marsh will take you through the next few hours.
Continue reading...UK move takes effect as of 4am BST on Saturday; Pandemic has killed three quarters of a million people; Germany case jump shows ‘unsettling trend’; Iraq reports record daily Covid-19 cases
Britain’s decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from France will lead to a reciprocal measure, French junior minister for European affairs Clément Beaune said late on Thursday.
“A British decision that we regret and which will lead to a measure of reciprocity, hoping that things will return to normal as soon as possible,” Beaune said on Twitter at midnight.
Une décision britannique que nous regrettons et qui entraînera une mesure de réciprocité, en espérant un retour à la normale le plus rapidement possible @Djebbari_JB https://t.co/6pA0qDQun6
La France regrette la décision du Royaume Uni et appliquera des mesures de réciprocité dans le champ des transports. J’ai dit à mon homologue @grantshapps notre volonté d’harmoniser les protocoles sanitaires pour assurer un haut niveau de protection des deux côtés de la Manche. https://t.co/bH7LkqD3LB
Hi, Helen Sullivan joining you now.
I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next few hours. Get in touch on Twitter @helenrsullivan or via email: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com with questions, comments and news from your part of the world.
Continue reading...Fishing time in first half of 2020 almost double that in whole of last year, Greenpeace says
Supertrawlers vastly stepped up their fishing in the UK’s protected waters during the coronavirus lockdown earlier this year, while most of the UK’s smaller vessels were confined to port.
The amount of time supertrawlers spent fishing in marine protected areas in the first half of this year was nearly double that spent in the waters in the whole of last year, according to a Greenpeace investigation. There were 23 supertrawlers catching fish in UK protected areas in the period, none of them UK-owned.
Continue reading...Painstaking conservation effort to accommodate insect’s complex lifecycle pays off
The biggest reintroduction to date of the large blue has led to the rare butterfly flying on a Cotswold hillside where it has not been seen for 150 years.
About 750 butterflies emerged on to Rodborough Common in Gloucestershire this summer after 1,100 larvae were released last autumn following five years of innovative grassland management to create optimum habitat.
Continue reading...The UK cultural sector, so obsessed with being ‘world leading’, is standing on the brink. It needs to broaden its gaze
It’s a painful time to tell stories about the arts. This week, hundreds of venues across the UK were lit up in red – not in an inspired display of creativity, but as a cry for help as arts venues find themselves on the brink of collapse.
The protest culminated in the iconic chimney at London’s Tate Modern art gallery being made bright red, and illuminated with the words “Throw Us a Line” – a reference to the 1m jobs at risk in the live events sector following the Covid-19 pandemic and shutdown. A report from the digital, culture, media and sport select committee warned last month that the UK now faces the prospect of becoming a “cultural wasteland”.
Continue reading...Entrepreneur Xu Weiping is risking a fortune to build 2,000 3-metre square workspaces in east London
Welcome to cube city. Xu Weiping, a Chinese multimillionaire, has a vision for the future of office work in the post-Covid-19 pandemic world: thousands of office pods where each person works in their own self-contained 3m x 3m cube.
Xu reckons the coronavirus pandemic will have such a fundamental impact on the way people work that he is converting 20 newly constructed office buildings in east London into 2,000 of the individual cube offices.
Continue reading...Home Office says 14 people were flown out, while 19 of those due to be removed had their tickets deferred
A charter flight to remove asylum seekers who recently arrived in the UK on small boats took off on Wednesday morning carrying 14 people, the Home Office said, despite last-minute high court actions and other interventions just hours before takeoff.
Nineteen people due to fly did not board the plane. The Home Office said 14 people were placed on the charter flight destined for France and Germany.
Continue reading...Fatal derailment after heavy rains exposes growing danger posed by extreme weather
The derailment of a ScotRail train in rural Aberdeenshire with the loss of three lives adds Stonehaven to a grim roll call of names, instantly identifiable with tragedy to those associated with the UK railway: the likes of Potters Bar, Hatfield and Grayrigg. It will be no consolation at all to those grieving lost colleagues, spouses and parents to know just how far apart such tragic events have lately become.
The last time a passenger died in a train crash in the UK was the Grayrigg derailment in 2007, when a Virgin high-speed train went down an embankment in Cumbria, miraculously with just one casualty. Before Wednesday, the last time a driver had been killed in a crash was in 2004; and the last disaster with multiple fatalities, Potters Bar, was as far back as 2002.
Continue reading...Smoke seen billowing from track near flood-hit town amid reports of an engine fire
Emergency services have been called to a major train derailment near Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, where smoke could be seen billowing from the track amid reports of an engine fire and serious injuries.
Four passenger carriages came off the track at Carmont, just west of Stonehaven, as a Scotrail high-speed train travelled from Aberdeen to Glasgow Queen Street.
Continue reading...France cancels marathon as cases pick up; WHO warns displacement of people in Beirut risks accelerating spread; four new cases in Auckland
Jordan will close its only land trade border crossing with Syria for a week after a spike in Covid-19 cases coming from its northern neighbour, officials said.
They said the interior minister’s decision to close the main Jaber border crossing would come into effect on Thursday morning.
Britain’s NatWest is cutting at least 500 jobs across its retail business and closing one of its remaining offices in London as banks press on with cost-cutting in the face of a wave of expected loan losses due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The state-backed bank is finalising a voluntary redundancy round targeting cutting 550 full-time equivalent roles across its branches and ‘premier banking’ premium service, union Unite told Reuters.
Tens of thousands of people working for banks have risen to the challenge that the pandemic created. The banks’ response should not be a repeat of the austerity measures that we saw after the financial crisis.
Continue reading...GDP falls 20.4% – the worst of any G7 nation in the three months to June
Britain has entered the deepest recession since records began as official figures on Wednesday showed the economy shrank by more than any other major nation during the coronavirus outbreak in the three months to June.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said gross domestic product (GDP), the broadest measure of economic prosperity, fell in the second quarter by 20.4% compared with the previous three months – the biggest quarterly decline since comparable records began in 1955.
Continue reading...Coronavirus updates: New Zealand records first new local cases in 102 days; global deaths likely to pass 750,000 this week, says WHO
As we reported earlier, the Dutch health minister said he plans to introduce mandatory home quarantine for people identified by local authorities as having been in close contact with somebody infected with coronavirus, and for travellers returning from high-risk countries.
Health minister Hugo de Jonge said in a letter to lawmakers that mandatory quarantine could be imposed if people refuse to isolate voluntarily.
Germany has extended a partial travel warning for Spain to the capital of Madrid and the Basque region due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
The foreign ministry said it was warning against any unnecessary tourist trips to both regions because of a rising number of new infections and local restrictions put in place to contain the spread of coronavirus.
Continue reading...Convicting all the suspects would also have offered the police a measure of redemption
Convicting all of the suspects in the racist gang of five or six people that killed Stephen Lawrence would have delivered justice for his family, and some measure of redemption for the Metropolitan police. Scotland Yard’s decision to close the case means neither will get what they longed for.
For Doreen and Neville Lawrence the loss of their first child, Stephen, was a personal catastrophe that over the years turned into a symbolic case for the nation, and remains so.
Continue reading...Move to include local authorities in test and trace could allow politicians to pass blame in a Covid second wave
The saga of the attempts to set up an English test-and-trace system is perhaps the central story of the government’s Covid-19 failure.
At the heart of the tale is a prime minister who promised NHS test and trace would be a “world beating” operation. Next to him sits Matt Hancock, the health secretary whose record is now indelibly associated with the smartphone app that was meant to be integral to controlling the virus, but has yet to materialise. Other key actors include Serco, the multinational outsourcing company that has previously been contracted to run everything from prisons to air traffic control – and, at a cost of £108m, was recently put in charge of recruiting and training thousands of call centre workers to establish contact with infected people and ensure that anyone they had been close to went into self-isolation.
Continue reading...Live footage of people crossing Channel to UK is like ‘grotesque reality TV’, says MP
Britain’s television news broadcasters have been criticised by opposition MPs and campaigners over their coverage of migrants crossing the Channel, with claims that some of their reports dehumanise those taking the risk to make the journey.
Footage of Sky News and BBC Breakfast teams approaching and filming small boats trying to navigate the busy waters of the Dover strait was widely condemned on social media. The Labour MP Zarah Sultana said: “We should ensure people don’t drown crossing the Channel, not film them as if it were some grotesque reality TV show.”
Continue reading...Aleksandar Antonov made remarks about footballer believed to be Raheem Sterling in private group chat
With millions of players around the world, the Fantasy Premier League is meant to recreate the competitive excitement and experience of managing a football team in England’s top division.
Instead, it has triggered an off-pitch row after this year’s champion was disqualified for allegedly offensive comments made “in a moment of frustration” about a Premier League player, understood to be the Manchester City striker Raheem Sterling.
Continue reading...