Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Lledr valley, Snowdonia: Birdsong scatters like elegies here where once an old woman screamed her curses
This split rock with the wizened rowan growing from its cleft – I was first made aware of it by the old butcher from Dolwyddelan who gave me a lift along the valley one wet day when I was a young teenager on my first walking tour through Wales. He drew his Morris van to a halt, gestured towards it and gave me its name: Maen yr hen wraig sy’n melltithio – the stone of the old cursing woman.
In some earlier time, he told me, a woman would stand on top of it and scream imprecations at passersby. He showed me a kind of cave behind it. “Some say she used to live in there,” he added. He knew no more than those folk memories, which have hovered in my mind for 60 years.
Series of misunderstandings and protection from other African leaders meant Britain could only wound the regime
Britain’s 40-year effort to find a way to either influence or dislodge Robert Mugabe is one of the country’s great post-war foreign policy failures. It is a story spanning six UK prime ministers, nearly £1bn in aid and every conceivable strategy.
Whether the cause of that failure lies at the door of a colonial mindset in the Foreign Office, a failed land transfer policy, the collective weakness of the Commonwealth, a cowardly African political elite or simply the corrupt thuggery of Mugabe himself will be a matter of dispute for generations.
Moves follows speculation Northern Irish party leader could stand in snap election
Arlene Foster, the leader of the Democratic Unionist party, has ruled out standing as an MP if a general election is called.
She is currently an MLA – member of the legislative assembly – at Stormont but the seat of Northern Ireland’s devolved government has been suspended since 2017 after the collapse of a power-sharing deal between the DUP and Sinn Féin.
PM suggests he will break the law to avoid asking for extension of article 50 as his hopes of election by end of October recede
Boris Johnson’s shrinking options have narrowed further on Friday, after opposition leaders agreed to reject his demand for a snap general election, until a Brexit delay has been secured.
The prime minister reportedly wrote to Tory members on Friday evening pledging to break the law that will require him to seek an extension of article 50. “They just passed a law that would force me to beg Brussels for an extension to the Brexit deadline. This is something I will never do.”
Met police reopen investigation into apparent assault at central London hotel
The Met has reopened an investigation into an apparent assault on a rough sleeper by a Savoy Hotel security guard in December last year, after footage emerged of the doorman beating a man and jumping on his head.
The exclusive five-star hotel in central London has apologised after video of the attack was released on Friday, showing a guard in a black suit throwing a man to the floor and launching a brutal attack after he reportedly searched for coins in a decorative fountain.
The leader of the house was long considered a Commons curiosity but his charm finally wore off this week
In a week filled with memorable political images – Boris Johnson’s sideways glance at a fainting police officer, Sir Nicholas Soames blinking back tears after he was expelled from the Conservative party, or former minister Dr Phillip Lee unexpectedly crossing the floor of the House of Commons to join the Lib Dems – it was the image of a near-horizontal Jacob Rees-Mogg lounging across the front bench that lit up the internet.
As a tense emergency debate which would affect the livelihoods of millions of people continued around him, the newly appointed leader of the house leaned back and stretched his legs across several seats, his left hand lolled across a besuited midriff. With MPs agonising over the gravity of the current political crisis, the member for Somerset North East nonchalantly closed his eyes and rested.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s attorney says picture said to have been taken at Ghislaine Maxwell’s home is authentic and unaltered
A woman who accused Jeffrey Epstein of forcing her to have sex with his powerful friends has denied a claim by allies of Prince Andrew that a notorious photograph of them together was faked.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s attorneys rejected the claim as a “troubling assertion” and reiterated a request to interview Andrew about the late wealthy financier Epstein, who killed himself last month while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Eurozone growth came in unchanged on its third estimate: 0.2% growth in the second quarter of the year.
A minor beat on the headline year-on-year growth rate, remaining at 1.2% against 1.1% expectations, but otherwise no shocks.
Labour has confirmed that it will not vote for an election on Monday even if a bill intended to stop a no-deal Brexit passes before then.
If we vote to have a general election, then no matter what it is that Boris Johnson promises, it is up to him to advise the Queen when the general election should be. And given that he has shown himself to be a manifest liar, and someone who has said that he will die in a ditch rather than stop no deal, and indeed his adviser, [Dominic] Cummings, has been swearing and shouting at MPs saying they are leaving on 31 [October] no matter what, our first priority has to be that we must stop no deal and we must make sure that that is going to happen.
Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament for five weeks is legal, the high court in London has ruled.
In a judgment handed down by three of the most senior judges in England and Wales, the prime minister was found to have acted lawfully in the advice he gave to the Queen to suspend parliament from next week.
The ruling will be go to appeal at the supreme court, which has already announced it is prepared to hear any appeals on 17 September.
Earlier this week, a Scottish court turned down a similar legal challenge. A third claim seeking to overturn the prime minister’s decision to prorogue parliament until 14 October is being heard in Belfast.
Prorogation has never lasted longer than three weeks in the past 40 years and in most cases was only for a week or less, the London court was told.
During Thursday’s hearing, Lord Pannick QC, representing the legal campaigner Gina Miller, described the prime minister’s decision as an “unlawful abuse of power”.
Around 250 to 300 men being held in camps in Syria are believed to have come from UK
Britain and other European nations that are refusing to repatriate Islamic State fighters and put them on trial in their country of origin are creating a risk to regional security, the US defence secretary warned at the start of his visit to London.
Mark Esper said there were around 2,000 foreign fighters, many from Europe, held in north-east Syria, but asking the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces to keep them in makeshift jails was an increasing risk to the fragile security of the region.
Signatories including Diane Abbott and Alf Dubs say the rights of EU nationals should be guaranteed. Plus Richard Griffiths on his Swedish wife’s difficulty in getting settled status and Emanuele Maindron on her family being torn apart. And another contributor says spare a thought for non-EU nationals too
In his first statement as prime minister, Boris Johnson gave “unequivocally our guarantee to the 3.2 million EU nationals now living and working among us … that, under this government, they will have the absolute certainty for the right to live and remain”. In less than a day, the prime minister’s spokesperson rushed to clarify that this did not mean new legislation would be proposed. Instead Johnson would maintain the EU Settlement Scheme.
As campaigners have pointed out, the current scheme implies that migrants who fail to apply will lose their legal status and residency rights. Figures suggest at least 2 million EU nationals have not applied for settled status yet. In order to be given settled status, migrants have to prove they have lived in the UK for at least five years.
Teargas canisters made in the UK have previously been used on protesters in the territory
Hong Kong is no longer sending a delegation to next week’s DSEI arms fair in London, a month after it emerged that the UK government had invited representatives from the territory to visit.
The decision to pull out was confirmed in a parliamentary answer by Graham Stuart, a junior international trade minister, in response to a question from a Labour MP following a report in the Guardian last month.
Otago University researchers confirm the loch contains no monster – or dinosaur – DNA
The Loch Ness monster could be a giant eel, according to a fishy new theory that will keep Highland tourists guessing.
In one of the biggest DNA studies of its kind, a team of scientists from New Zealand’s Otago University found the presence of about 3,000 species in the deep murky waters of the Scottish loch.
The Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, has warned that there is “no such thing as a clean break” – Brexit deal or no Brexit deal – with difficult and complex negotiations on the future relationship with the EU whatever the outcome of talks. In a speech in Dublin to the British and Irish Chambers of Commerce, he has said:
If there is no deal – and I believe we may have to live with no deal for a period – then, at a certain point, we will have to begin negotiations again. The first and only items on the agenda ... will be citizens’ rights, the financial settlement with the EU and a solution to the Irish border.
Whatever happens, Ireland will not be dragged out of the single European market.
Recently, Prime Minister Johnson and I spoke by phone. We spoke of our shared desire to see the Northern Ireland political institutions reinstated. We shared our perspectives on the withdrawal agreement and agreed that our teams would establish one-to-one contact.
We will meet again in Dublin on Monday. Unfortunately, given political developments in the UK, there is a significant and growing risk of no-deal.
Here’s some more detail on the criticism of Johnson from the West Yorkshire police and crime commissioner, Labour’s Mark Burns-Williamson:
To use police officers as the backdrop to what became a political speech was inappropriate and they shouldn’t have been put in that position.
It clearly turned into a rant about Brexit, the opposition and a potential general election. There’s no way that police officers should’ve formed the backdrop to a speech of that nature.
Yes, because he’s used the pretence of an announcement around police recruitment for mainly a political speech.
AI and brain-scanning technology could soon make it possible to reliably detect when people are lying. But do we really want to know? By Amit Katwala
We learn to lie as children, between the ages of two and five. By adulthood, we are prolific. We lie to our employers, our partners and, most of all, one study has found, to our mothers. The average person hears up to 200 lies a day, according to research by Jerry Jellison, a psychologist at the University of Southern California. The majority of the lies we tell are “white”, the inconsequential niceties – “I love your dress!” – that grease the wheels of human interaction. But most people tell one or two “big” lies a day, says Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. We lie to promote ourselves, protect ourselves and to hurt or avoid hurting others.
The mystery is how we keep getting away with it. Our bodies expose us in every way. Hearts race, sweat drips and micro-expressions leak from small muscles in the face. We stutter, stall and make Freudian slips. “No mortal can keep a secret,” wrote the psychoanalyst in 1905. “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
UK pair accused of defrauding German state through ‘cum-ex’ share trading scheme
Two British investment bankers have gone on trial in Bonn in what German media have called “the biggest financial fraud trial” in the country’s postwar history.
The two British citizens, Martin Shields, 41, and Nicholas Diable, 38, are accused of having defrauded the German state of €447.5m (£405m) from London’s banking district with so-called cum-ex trading schemes, a complex shell game of share transactions.
Dr Tim Manfield tells inquest he has ‘beaten himself up’ for diagnosing Sarah-Jayne Roche with pulled hamstring
A doctor has expressed his regret at failing to spot that a runner diagnosed with a pulled hamstring had actually suffered a broken leg, telling her inquest he wished he could go back in time and order an x-ray.
Sarah-Jayne Roche, 39, pulled up while running the Cardiff half-marathon but went to hospital three times before it was realised that her femur was fractured.
Move comes as president gives Europe two-month deadline to save nuclear deal
Iran has said it will free seven crew members of a British-flagged tanker seized in the strait of Hormuz in July, as the country’s president gave Europe a two-month deadline to save its nuclear deal.
The seven, who are part of a 23-member crew comprising Indian, Russian, Latvia and Filipino nationals, were allowed to leave the Stena Impero tanker on humanitarian grounds and will be able to leave Iran soon, Iranian state television reported. The vessel’s owner said it had yet to receive any official confirmation of the release date.
How a teenager from north London ended up selling drugs in the Cornish flat of a heroin addict
At the start of last year, a 16-year-old north Londoner, Boy X, found himself in a terrifying situation. He owed a drug dealer £55 and did not have the funds to pay off the debt.
He was told the cannabis debt would double – and keep doubling – if he failed to pay. But the teenager was offered a way out: he could work for the dealer and his associates.
Drink more water, say experts as they argue study proves need for curbs on consumption
People who regularly consume soft drinks have a higher risk of an early death, researchers have found, with the trend seen for both sugared and artificially sweetened drinks.
While experts say the study cannot prove soft drinks are a driver of an increased risk of death, they say the work – which is the largest study of its kind – supports recent public health efforts to reduce consumption of soft drinks, such as the UK’s sugar tax.