Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The government has announced emergency action to try to stem a feared autumn resurgence of coronavirus, tightening laws to ban virtually all gatherings of more than six people in England.
Amid concerns that the current rules are both widely misunderstood and too difficult for police to implement, Boris Johnson will hold a hastily arranged Downing Street press conference on Wednesday to outline the new restrictions.
State TV says British-Iranian dual national to appear in Tehran court on Sunday
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe will appear in an Iranian court on Sunday after the country’s state media said she faced a new and unspecified charge.
The news came as a bombshell to the family of the British-Iranian dual national, who has been under effective house arrest ever since the coronavirus outbreak led to her release from prison after serving nearly four of her of her five-year sentence.
Brandon Lewis tells MPs internal market bill will ‘clarify’ Northern Ireland protocol
The government has admitted that its plan to reinterpret the special Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland will break international law.
The Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, astonished backbenchers when he told the House of Commons: “Yes, this does break international law in a very specific and limited way. We’re taking the powers to disapply the EU law concept of direct effect … in a certain very tightly defined circumstance.”
Inquiry into Ariana Grande concert attack to hear force did not declare major incident for three hours
Experts will tell an inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing that “significant flaws” by police led to a series of devastating delays in tending to victims.
The public inquiry into the terrorist attack was told on Tuesday the force did not declare a major incident until three hours after Salman Abedi’s attack at the Ariana Grande concert that killed 22 people and injured 260.
Rise in carbon capture as global warming speeds growth of forests would be negated by earlier deaths, say scientists
Live fast, die young is a truism often applied to rock stars but could just as easily describe trees, according to new research. Trees that grow rapidly have a shorter lifespan, which could spell bad news for tackling the climate crisis.
Trees grow faster in warmer conditions, and this should act as a natural brake on global heating, as they take up and store more carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. But the new study casts doubt on this beneficial cycle, finding that the faster trees grow, the sooner they die – and therefore stop storing carbon.
Downing Street is considering whether to reduce the maximum permitted size for social gatherings in England following a sudden rise in coronavirus cases, and warnings that people have “relaxed too much” in their precautions.
No 10 is looking at the current guidelines, which allow up to six people to meet outdoors, whether in a public outdoor space, or in a garden, or 30 if it is an event, to see whether the limits should be reduced, a source said.
The UK government response to the coronavirus pandemic is on track to cost £210bn for the first six months of the crisis, Whitehall’s spending watchdog has said.
Reflecting the scale of the emergency since March, the National Audit Office (NAO) said ministers had instigated more than 190 measures in response to the crisis so far, including emergency job support, additional NHS funding, and business grants.
Canada is seeing a worrying increase in the number of people infected with the coronavirus as schools across the country are starting to reopen, a top medical official has said.
Chief public health officer Theresa Tam said an average of 545 new cases had been reported daily over the last week, up from around 300 in July. She told a briefing:
This is concerning and I want to underscore that when cases occur, including in schools, it is a reflection on what’s happening in the community.
Brussels suspicions come as European commission chief warns Britain to abide by Northern Ireland protocol
Brussels’ plummeting trust in Boris Johnson has been laid bare in leaked diplomatic cables obtained by the Guardian, as the Brexit negotiations reopen in London with a warning from the European commission president that Britain must respect international law.
Ursula von der Leyen made her extraordinary intervention on Monday as Downing Street struggled to control the damage from disclosures suggesting it was backtracking on agreements made last year to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.
The government believes it may have paid out up to £3.5bn in wrong or fraudulent claims for the furlough scheme.
Jim Harra, the top civil servant at HM Revenue & Customs, said that his staff had calculated for the possibility that as much as 10% of the money might have gone to the wrong places.
Spain has become the first western European country to record more than half a million Covid-19 cases, logging a total of 525,549 infections as concerns also grow over the rise in cases in France and the UK.
The Spanish milestone comes amid a continuing surge in infections as millions of children begin returning to school after a six-month hiatus.
The health secretary, Matt Hancock, implored young people to stick to the rules as Covid-19 infections in the UK rose to their highest levels since early May.
It is not known why case rates are higher among young people, but England-level data shows they are rising steeply.
Seven Greek islands are being removed from England’s list of locations exempt from 14-day Covid quarantine, in a significant shift in the government’s travel corridor policy.
Speaking in the Commons on Monday, the UK transport secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that arrivals from the Greek islands will have to isolate for two weeks on their return to England from Wednesday at 4am but not those visiting the country’s mainland.
The Department for Transport press release about Grant Shapps’ announcement has now arrived. This is what it says about the inclusion of the seven Greek islands on the quarantine list for England.
The first changes under the new process were also made today, with seven Greek islands to be removed from exemption list – Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos. People arriving in England from those islands from Wednesday 9 September 04.00am will need to self-isolate for two weeks. Data from the Joint Biosecurity Centre and Public Health England has indicated a significant risk to UK public health from those islands, leading to Ministers removing them from the current list of travel corridors.
At the same time, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) has updated its travel advice for Greece to advise against all but essential travel to Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos. The rest of Greece remains exempt from the FCDO’s advice against all non-essential international travel.
Shapps says he is not lifting quarantine for Spain’s Canary or Balearic islands.
He says there might have been a case for this when quarantine was imposed on Spain. But the number of cases in country has risen sharply, he says, and now it has 127 cases per 100,000. He say it is not safe to reduce quarantine for those islands.
Lesvos, Tinos, Serifos, Mykonos, Crete, Santorini and Zakynthos removed from air corridor exemption list.
Fatigue, headache and fever are the most common symptoms of coronavirus in children, with few developing a cough or losing their sense of taste or smell, researchers have found, adding to calls for age-specific symptom checklists.
The NHS lists three symptoms as signs of Covid-19 in adults and children: a high temperature, a new, continuous cough, and a loss or change in the sense of smell or taste.
French people who reject mask-wearing are more likely to be older, educated women who support the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) protest movement and the controversial virus specialist Didier Raoult, and would refuse to have a coronavirus vaccination if one were available, according to a new study.
They also describe themselves as free-thinkers who believe the government is meddling too much in their lives, have a distrust of public institutions and often support conspiracy theories, it found.
Barbara Pomfret came to aid of group left homeless in Madrid after forced removal from UK
A British woman living in Spain who helped 11 Syrian asylum seekers who were left homeless and hungry on the streets of Madrid after being forcibly removed from the UK has said she is ashamed of the UK government’s behaviour.
The all-male group were left destitute after being put on a flight to Madrid by the Home Office last week. They had arrived in the UK in small boats from Calais and are part of a Home Office plan to remove almost 1,000 such arrivals.
Fatigue, headache and fever are the most common symptoms of coronavirus in children, with few developing a cough or losing their sense of taste or smell, researchers have found, adding to calls for age-specific symptom checklists.
The NHS lists three symptoms as signs of Covid-19 in adults and children: a high temperature, a new, continuous cough, and a loss or change in the sense of smell or taste.
UK on collision course with EU and Ireland over unilateral powers for British ministers
Downing Street has defended plans to give British ministers unilateral powers over Brexit arrangements in Northern Ireland, putting them on a collision course with the EU and Irish leaders in a week of crunch negotiations.
A No 10 spokesman said the measures were “limited and reasonable” and insisted the UK would remain compliant with the Northern Ireland protocol – despite anger from Brussels and Dublin at the plans leaked overnight.
WikiLeaks founder in court to face US accusations of stealing military secrets
The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, has appeared at the Old Bailey at the start of an extradition hearing on an 18-count US indictment that accuses him of recruiting hackers to steal military secrets.
Wearing a dark suit, tie and white shirt, Assange, 49, sat behind a glass security screen at the back of the court, his glasses pushed back on top of his head.