Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Climate protests including ‘funeral march’ due to take place across UK, with focus on airports
Climate demonstrations are due to take place across the UK this weekend, as the environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion launches its latest “uprising”.
This weekend’s events will include a “funeral march” in Lewes, East Sussex, to “mark the death and destruction wrought by humans on our natural world”. The march, described as a Procession for the Planet, will include mourners dressed in black and a jazz band.
Eva Harratt, 13, would love to go to the park to meet her friends but it is forbidden because she lives in Oldham, the town in Greater Manchester facing restrictions due to a rise in Covid-19 cases. And yet, in five days, she is expected to return to her 1,370-pupil school and sit in classes of 30.
She likes school, misses her friends and wants to go back, but her mother is in the most vulnerable category because of an autoimmune disease. “Returning to school, I feel, is just not an option for me. They don’t appear to have given much thought to families with shielding members, or how that may affect them. Personally, I would prefer for things to go back to normal as soon as possible, but in the current situation, it is just not plausible for me,” says Eva.
Volunteers accuse charity of excluding deprived and minority ethnic schoolchildren
Volunteers are accusing the National Trust of excluding deprived and minority ethnic schoolchildren from enjoying nature and visiting its properties with the planned sacking of the charity’s education officers.
The number of protests and petitionsare growing over the trust’s controversial “reset” involving the proposed loss of 1,200 jobs, including its learning staff, as the charity plans to stop providing any curriculum-based content or learning activities for schools.
Groups pitching to perceived desire for alternative output as trust in BBC falls
Rival efforts are under way to launch a Fox News-style opinionated current affairs TV station in Britain to counter the BBC.
One group is promising a news channel “distinctly different from the out-of-touch incumbents” and has already been awarded a licence to broadcast by the media regulator, Ofcom, under the name “GB News”. Its founder has said the BBC is a “disgrace” that “is bad for Britain on so many levels” and “needs to be broken up”.
Are asylum seekers living in luxury hotels, as the far right claims?
The quality of hotel accommodation varies. Most rooms are in budget hotels, which are being used during the pandemic because social distancing is not possible in accommodation the Home Office usually uses, especially those that have several beds or bunkbeds in one room.
Anger is mounting over a series of videos posted by far-right organisations in which activists enter hotels where asylum seekers are being held, knock on their doors to interrogate them and accuse them of wasting taxpayers’ money.
A video by Britain First, circulated widely on social media, shows a group of far-right activists entering a hotel in Bromsgrove, near Birmingham, and banging on bedroom doors, demanding to know what country the asylum seekers are from.
Some locals believe the ‘Zante 30’ were selfish while others say they did nothing wrong
They’ve become known – somewhat infamously - as the Zante 30.
Just as the pubs, cafes and shops on the Barbican in Plymouth were gearing up for a bumper bank holiday weekend, with visitors and city residents expected to arrive on the Devon waterside to drink, eat and be merry, the news came.
Bloc sources say Britain is trying to water down EU geographical protections
The UK government has renewed its attempt to reopen the chapter of the Brexit divorce treaty protecting specialty food and drink, such as Parma ham, roquefort cheese and champagne, in a move that left the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, “a little bit flabbergasted”.
The British proposal on protected status for food and drink was included in a draft free-trade agreement handed to Barnier by his opposite number, David Frost, last week, according to two EU sources.
The fast-fashion retailer Boohoo has been selling clothes made by at least 18 factories in Leicester that audits say have failed to prove they pay the minimum wage to workers, a Guardian investigation has found.
Third-party audit reports produced over the past four years make claims of “critical” issues over record-keeping and working hours at the time they were written, suggesting that in parts of the supply chain workers may be paid as little as £3-£4 an hour.
As schools in England and Wales get set to reopen amid continued controversy over safe conditions, attention has focused on potential evidence of coronavirus transmission in the classroom and on the experiences of other countries.
Research on the ability of children of different ages to catch and transmit the virus is contradictory, and differences in education systems and social conventions make comparisons difficult.
Stories from victims and survivors were horrific and needed to be heard. NGOs were ashamed that abuse was still happening on our watch. We apologised, made promises of improvement and change. We came together as a sector and rapidly acted. Policies, processes and training were improved across hundreds of organisations and thousands of staff around the globe.
Heavy rain brought flooding on Thursday, causing travel chaos for motorists and rail passengers
Torrential rain and flooding brought traffic mayhem as more heavy showers and thunderstorms are expected across parts of the UK on Friday.
Forecasters predict this bank holiday Monday could be the coldest on record for some parts of the UK as temperatures are expected to be well below average for the time of year.
There is a graph circulating in the care home industry that should send chills down the spine of the health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock. It predicts, under a worst-case scenario, a plunge in the demand for care homes by the end of 2021 that would leave 180,000 beds empty.
The forecast by consultants Knight Frank is not good news based on a healthier aged population, but rather is based on fresh waves of coronavirus killing thousands more people in the community and in care homes, creating a flight from the sector.
Covid-19 death tolls at individual care homes are being kept secret by regulators in part to protect providers’ commercial interests before a possible second coronavirus surge, the Guardian can reveal.
England’s Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the Care Inspectorate in Scotland are refusing to make public which homes or providers recorded the most fatalities amid fears it could undermine the UK’s care system, which relies on private operators.
The number of asylum applications received by the UK government between April and June nearly halved compared with the first three months of the year, fresh figures show, as the Covid-19 pandemic limited migration flows across the world.
There were 4,850 asylum applications made in the second quarter of the year, significantly down on the 8,455 received from January to March, Home Office statistics reveal.
Davey’s victory over Moran means the three biggest UK-wide parties are led by white men with seats in London, a fact which may not do much to realise the hopes all three have espoused to speak more effectively for the whole country.
Turning back to coronavirus, new figures from the Department of Health and Social Care show that 75.5% of close contacts of people who tested positive for Covid-19 in England were reached through the Test and Trace system in the week ending August 19.
That figure is up from 71.6% in the previous week. For cases handled by local health protection teams, 95.6% of contacts were reached and asked to self-isolate in the week to August 19. By contrast, for those cases handled either online or by call centres, 61.6% of close contacts have been reached and asked to self-isolate.
The jet engine maker Rolls-Royce made a record loss of £5.4bn in the first half of the year, after the collapse in international travel during the pandemic led to to a slump in demand.
The Derby-based company said it had originally expected to manufacture 450 engines during 2020 but now planned to deliver only 250.
Gatwick airport plans to cut around 600 jobs, which it says is due to the pandemic. Its chief executive Stewart Wingate said:
If anyone is in any doubt about the devastating impact Covid-19 has had on the aviation and travel industry then today’s news we have shared with our staff, regarding the proposed job losses, is a stark reminder.
We are in ongoing talks with government to see what sector-specific support can be put in place for the industry at this time, alongside mechanisms which will give our passengers greater certainty on where and when they can safely travel abroad.
A care provider group is calling on the government to reverse an “extraordinary” decision to allow health inspectors into care homes without regular coronavirus testing.
The National Care Forum (NCF) wants Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspectors to be included in weekly routine testing prior to on-site visits. The group, which represents 120 of the UK’s social care charities, said the current policy is “not credible” and “very counter-productive”.
For months central government and the regulator have been requiring care homes to essentially eradicate the movement of staff and the flow of people, including close family relatives, into homes.
Having done this, care homes are now being asked to let inspectors into homes without knowing whether or not they are Covid-positive.
Data showing fiscal deficit rose to £15bn in 2019-20 sparks row over case for independence
Scotland’s deficit has risen to nearly £2,000 per person after the gap between tax income and spending widened to become more than three times larger than the UK as a whole.
Data released on Wednesday showed Scotland’s fiscal deficit rose to £15bn in 2019-20, fuelling a row over the case for independence at first minister’s questions between Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Labour leader, Richard Leonard.
The UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, appears to have employed the services of a celebrity personal trainer after admitting he needed to lose weight after contracting Covid-19.
Germany will end mandatory coronavirus tests for travellers returning from high-risk areas abroad and again focus its testing strategy on people with symptoms or possible exposure to Covid-19 patients, the country’s health minister said today.
Health minister Jens Spahn said that over the summer vacation period the number of virus tests performed in Germany nearly doubled to 900,000 a week in part to identify people who caught the virus during trips abroad, the Associated Press agency reports.