Category Archives: UK news

Boris Johnson announces ‘support bubble’ plan for England – video

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The prime minister said single parents or adults living alone would be allowed to combine with one other household from midnight on Saturday.

It means about 11 million people will be able to go inside one other household without the need for physical distancing. Johnson it was a targeted intervention to help the most lonely and stressed it was still against the law for people who did not meet the criteria to go inside another household

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Neil Ferguson: earlier lockdown would have halved coronavirus death toll – video

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The Imperial College academic whose research prompted Boris Johnson to introduce the lockdown has said the death toll could have been halved if it had been introduced a week earlier. Ferguson told the Commons science committee the policies to protect care homes and the elderly ‘failed to be enacted’

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Toppling Edward Colston’s statue is unlikely to be enough to stop public anger

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Few imperial icons, including Churchill, will escape the need to reappraise Britain’s past

The toppling of slaver Edward Colston’s statue has electrified a longer term – and already deeply polarised – debate among British historians and academics, with some celebrating a “moment of history” as others warned of dark consequences for society.

Inaction over figures such as Colston had bred anger that would be felt “all over Britain”, said Andrea Livesey, a historian specialising in the study of slavery and its legacies and who described the events in Bristol as “wholly justified”.

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‘Ten years of watching people die online has left me so angry’: young protesters on why they are marching

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The UK’s Black Lives Matter protests have been spearheaded by a new generation of activists. Six demonstrators from a recent London march reveal what brought them to the streets

The killing of George Floyd by a white police officer took place thousands of miles from the UK. But the 46-year-old’s cry in Minnesota that he could not breathe has sparked widespread protest in Britain. In the past two weeks, there have been demonstrations across UK cities. The protesters, the vast majority of whom were under 25, chanted: “No justice, no peace, no racist police” and “the UK is not innocent”. The demonstrations were largely organised through word of mouth and social media rather than established anti-racism groups.

Protesters carried handmade placards with the names of Mark Duggan, Sean Rigg, Julian Cole and others killed or left disabled by British police. They chanted for the Windrush generation, the victims of the Grenfell tower fire, and decried the high Covid-19 death rate among members of the BAME community.

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Brexit: EU may veto UK trade deal lacking safeguards, leaked report reveals

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Draft resolution urges British government to ‘revise its negotiating position’

The European parliament could veto any trade deal between the UK and the European Union that lacks “robust” safeguards to ensure fair competition and strong standards on the environment and workers’ rights, according to a leaked document.

A draft resolution, seen by the Guardian, which will be put to a vote on Friday, underlines the implicit threat to block the EU-UK trade deal. Urging the British government to “revise its negotiation position”, the text states that a level playing field is the “necessary condition for the European parliament to give its consent to a trade agreement with the UK”. 

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Coronavirus live news: Argentina records more than 1,000 daily cases for first time

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WHO official walks back asymptomatic transmission comments; world faces worst food crisis in 50 years; UK NHS waiting list could hit 10m

Japan’s lower house of parliament has approved an emergency budget worth nearly over £230bn, doubling the scale of measures to pep up the world’s third-biggest economy after the coronavirus tipped it into recession, AFP reports.

Their raucous clucking deprives residents of sleep. They leave the neighbourhood “wrecked”. And food left out for them attracts “rats the size of cats” to an otherwise peaceful, leafy suburb.

New Zealand’s national lockdown to quell the spread of Covid-19 appears to have vanquished the virus, but it has had one unintended consequence: the re-emergence of a plague – not of frogs or locusts but of feral chickens, a flock of which is once again menacing an area of west Auckland.

Related: 'Like a Stephen King movie': feral chickens return to plague New Zealand village

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Coronavirus live news: Africa passes 200,000 confirmed cases after Burundi president dies of suspected Covid-19

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Asylum applications in Europe fall to lowest level for a decade as borders closed; world faces worst food crisis in 50 years

Louise Taylor and David Conn report:

Premier League clubs should be braced for a collective £500m loss of revenue because of the coronavirus pandemic, Deloitte has warned.

Related: Premier League clubs set for £500m collective loss due to coronavirus

Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak so far today include:

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Remains of earliest purpose-built playhouse found in east London

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Location of the Red Lion, which predated the Globe, has been subject of debate for years

Archaeologists believe they have found remains of one of the most elusive of all known Elizabethan structures – the earliest purpose-built playhouse in Britain and a prototype for a theatre that staged plays by a young William Shakespeare.

The Red Lion is thought to have been built around 1567 and probably played host to travelling groups of players. Its precise location has been the subject of conjecture and debate for a number of years, but archaeologists are as certain as they can be that they have found its remains at a site in the East End of London where a self-storage facility once stood.

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Babylon Health data breach: GP app users able to see other people’s consultations

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User alerted company after finding about 50 recordings of appointments that did not apply to him

Babylon Health has suffered a data breach involving confidential patient information, with users of its GP video consultation app allowed to see other patients’ appointments.

The breach emerged when one of its users discovered they had access to video recordings of other patients’ consultations.

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Prince Philip marks 99th birthday with Queen in lockdown in Windsor Castle

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Buckingham Palace release a new photograph of the royal couple ahead of his birthday

Prince Philip, the Queen’s husband, will mark his 99th birthday on Wednesday, with the royal couple still in lockdown due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The Queen, 94, and her husband of 72 years are maintaining social distancing rules at Windsor castle, west of London, because their age puts them in a high-risk category for Covid-19.

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Statue of 18th-century slave owner Robert Milligan taken down in London – video

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A statue of 18th-century slave owner Robert Milligan has been removed from its place in London’s docklands. The Canal and River Trust earlier said it was working with local authorities and a local museum to organise its safe removal.

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Neville Lawrence: black people still second-class citizens in Britain

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Exclusive: father of Stephen Lawrence says police’s promises to change have not been met

The father of Stephen Lawrence has said black people are still treated as second-class citizens in Britain, with police breaking promises to change made two decades ago after being shamed by the failure to find his son’s racist killers.

Neville Lawrence used a Guardian interview to back peaceful anti-racism protests, saying he was “pleased” by the mass marches sweeping the country, triggered by the US police killing of George Floyd.

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‘Call it out!’: global voices from George Floyd protests – video

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Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has been the trigger for a global wave of activism against prejudice and police brutality that has spread to more than 50 countries, becoming a mirror for racism and inequality in societies around the world. In Australia and Papua people protested for indigenous rights, as people took up the cry against injustices in New Zealand, Ghana, France, Germany and the UK

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Prince Andrew charity broke law by paying trustee £350,000

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Watchdog publishes highly critical report after charitable trust is required to return cash

A charitable trust supporting the work of Prince Andrew has been required to return more than £350,000 in payments made to a trustee after a public watchdog intervened.

The Charity Commission has revealed the Prince Andrew Charitable Trust broke the law by handing over large sums to the prince’s household to compensate for time spent on other activities by one of his employees.

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Britain will not seek to extend Brexit transition period, says minister

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Penny Mordaunt tells MPs she hopes to have post-Brexit deal agreed by autumn

The UK government will tell the EU on Friday it is not going to seek an extension to the Brexit transition period, the paymaster general, Penny Mordaunt, has said. 

She told the House of Commons in an update on Brexit talks that she and Michael Gove would “emphasise that we will not be extending the transition period” when they meet EU counterparts at a Brexit joint committee meeting on Friday. 

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Excess deaths in UK under coronavirus lockdown pass 63,000

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ONS figures show fewest weekly coronavirus deaths in England and Wales for eight weeks

Hundreds more deaths from Covid-19 in the north-west of England and in care homes have driven up the number of excess fatalities since the UK went into lockdown to more than 63,000, a toll believed to be greater than those anywhere else except the US. 

The number of deaths from the virus in England and Wales fell to 1,822 in the last week of May, the fewest for eight weeks, according to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). But the numbers remain relatively high in the north-west, where there have been fears of a resurgence of the virus. 

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Independent DfID ‘imperative’ for effective UK overseas aid, say MPs

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Report says merger with Foreign and Commonwealth Office could erode accountability and shift funds from poverty reduction

The Department for International Development (DfID) must be kept separate from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office if Britain is to help end extreme poverty and retain its reputation and influence overseas, MPs have warned.

The cross-party international development committee warned that reorganising the aid effort could impair the effectiveness of Britain’s £15.2bn aid budget, which includes tackling the coronavirus pandemic.

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Rape victim asks Madeleine McCann detectives to review her case

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Exclusive: Irish woman says an earlier assault by new McCann suspect is similar to that on her

An Irish rape victim has asked detectives investigating the disappearance of Madeleine McCann to review her case, after learning that a new suspect in the British girl’s abduction was convicted of a sexual assault bearing a similarity to her own experience.

Hazel Behan was working in Praia da Rocha, Portugal, 30 minutes’ drive from where Madeleine was abducted, when she was viciously assaulted by a stranger in her apartment in 2004. The assailant was never caught.

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Prince Andrew in war of words with US prosecutors over Epstein

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Row centres on whether Duke of York has cooperated with investigation into child sex offender

Prince Andrew has become embroiled in a war of words with US prosecutors investigating the disgraced financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawyers for the Duke of York issued a statement on Monday accusing the American investigators of misleading the public and breaching their own confidentiality rules in their handling of the inquiry.

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Trump move to take US troops out of Germany ‘a dangerous game’

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UK politicians and military experts warn decision could hand advantage to Russia

British politicians and European military experts have warned that Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw 9,500 troops from Germany risks handing a strategic advantage to the Kremlin and undermining the postwar western military alliance.

It would also affect the United States’s ability to operate in the Middle East and Africa – although there is scepticism as to whether the notoriously fickle president will be able to carry out the threat before November’s election.

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