Durham court heard Lyne Barlow’s £1.2m fraud also involved stealing financial identity of her mother
A rogue travel agent who defrauded 1,400 holidaymakers and pretended to have terminal cancer to deflect complaints has been jailed for nine years.
Durham crown court heard how the scale of Lyne Barlow’s fraud, which also involved stealing the financial identity of her mother and borrowing money from neighbours and friends that was not paid back, had been estimated at £1.2m.
Continue reading...Justice secretary facing a number of bullying claims says Miller’s allegations are ‘baseless and malicious’
Michelle O’Neill, the Sinn Féin leader in Northern Ireland and first minister designate, has said she is “encouraged” by what she is hearing about the prospects of the UK and the EU reaching a deal on the Northern Ireland protocol.
Speaking after a meeting with Micheál Martin, the Irish foreign minister and tánaiste (Irish deputy PM), in Belfast, she said:
I am very much encouraged by what we’re hearing, I think the tánaiste shares that same assessment and we want both sides to continue in earnest to get a deal, to close this out, to close it out as quickly as possible.
This was a useful and constructive conversation. Over eighteen months ago we outlined the parameters for the way forward. We set our tests and those continue to be our yardstick for measuring any deal between the EU and UK.
There will be no restoration of the NI executive until the protocol is replaced with arrangements that unionists, as well as nationalists, can support. Northern Ireland’s place in the UK internal market must be restored and our constitutional arrangements must be respected.
Continue reading...In several new productions, playwrights explore the cost of living crisis as their industry reels from funding cuts, cancellations and low wages
‘What galvanises me to get up in the morning and write is what is making me angry, upsetting me, frightening me,” says playwright Emily White. Like her previous plays, White’s next production, Joseph K and the Cost of Living, opening at Swansea Grand next month, seeks to make the political personal. It is a reimagining of Kafka’s nightmarish The Trial, whose protagonist is unexpectedly arrested but not told what for and always maintains his innocence.
White was a teenager when she first read the novel, about “being trapped in this kind of bureaucratic machine”, but she returned to it more recently after feeling that there was a “creeping authoritarianism” happening, with marginalised people’s rights “being clawed back by governments all over the world”. She continues: “In my version, it’s a story about state-led persecution of particular individuals and the reasons for that. And, in the background, we are very much today in Britain, in this world that we’re living in right now.” The play is set, she says, in a country that feels as if it is teetering on the brink of resistance and revolution. As such, the story incorporates food banks, homelessness, environmental protests, strikes and the government’s attempt to limit direct action.
Continue reading...Court rules against DWP in case where move to universal credit deprived claimants of £2,100 a year
Tens of thousands of disabled people across the UK wrongly deprived of benefits by the Department for Work and Pensions could share in compensation potentially totalling about £150m after an appeal court ruling.
Lawyers for two disabled men who first took the DWP to court five years ago have written to the government asking them to set out how they will compensate them and others who were left hundreds of pounds out of pocket each year after being moved on to universal credit.
Continue reading...Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, pleads guilty to three charges including an offence under the Treason Act
A man has admitted trying to harm the queen after being caught in the grounds of Windsor Castle with a loaded crossbow.
Jaswant Singh Chail, 21, pleaded guilty to three charges, including an offence under the Treason Act, during a hearing at the Old Bailey on Friday.
Continue reading...Former pop star has been freed halfway through 16-year sentence for sexually abusing three schoolgirls
A woman who was sexually abused as a child by Gary Glitter believes his release, midway through a 16-year sentence, is “not the justice she was promised,” her lawyer has said.
There was outcry on Friday as the 79-year-old left HMP The Verne, a low-security category C jail in Dorset, after eight years behind bars for sexually abusing three schoolgirls.
Continue reading...Paul Ansell says mystery impossible to comprehend as potential witness says she does not know anything
The partner of the missing woman Nicola Bulley has said every scenario has come to a “brick wall” as he pledged to “stay strong” for their daughters.
Speaking near the scene where she was last seen, Paul Ansell said the mystery of her disappearance was “absolutely impossible” to comprehend.
Continue reading...As it happened: Prime minister speaks in interview on TalkTV to mark his 100th day in office
On the subject of Rishi Sunak reaching his 100th day in office, my colleague Jessica Elgot has a great assessment of how it’s going. Here is an extract.
After Liz Truss left office, polls suggested that voters wanted to keep an open mind about Sunak and rated him significantly higher than his party.
That is now beginning to turn. According to senior Labour figures, their most recent focus groups, with swing voters in Southampton, Dewsbury and Bury last week, were described as being “utterly brutal for Sunak”, with participants engaging in “open mockery” of the prime minister. Even the most pessimistic members of Keir Starmer’s team say they have seen a decisive shift.
In the coming weeks, our new stop the boats bill will change the law to send a message loud and clear.
If you come here illegally, you will be detained and removed.
Continue reading...Forty families brought to UK after fleeing Taliban given only weeks to move to West Yorkshire
Hundreds of Afghan refugees who settled in London after fleeing the Taliban 18 months ago have been told they have only weeks to uproot and move 200 miles away, the Guardian can reveal.
The Home Office has told 40 families with 150 children who have lived for more than a year in Kensington, west London, that they must leave the capital for another hotel in Wetherby, on the outskirts of Leeds.
Continue reading...No one ever convicted of deadliest atrocity of Troubles, but injured and bereaved may be closer to knowing full story
The government’s decision to hold an inquiry into the 1998 Omagh bombing is the result of a long, lonely campaign by some of the injured and bereaved for truth and justice.
Chris Heaton-Harris’s announcement on Thursday about an independent statutory inquiry raises hope for the former, not the latter.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary rejects suggestion by Penny Wong that Britain needs to do more to confront its colonial past
James Cleverly has rejected suggestions Britain needs to do more to confront its colonial past, pointing out that he is “the black foreign secretary of the United Kingdom of Great Britain”.
He was responding to questions after a speech by the Australian foreign minister, Penny Wong, while on a visit to London this week in which she said Britain needed to reflect on its past.
Continue reading...PM says he wants new law barring people arriving without valid documents from claiming asylum
Rishi Sunak has said new laws will mean people arriving in the UK without valid documents will be deported “within days”, with asylum claims rejected and migrants returned.
The prime minister also said he was committed to the Rwanda deportation policy, despite legal challenges, replying “yes” when asked if it would ever go ahead.
Continue reading...Former Labour MP came up with ‘a series of scams’ to fund ‘galloping’ cocaine habit, court told
A former Labour MP accused of expenses fraud has been described as “thoroughly inadequate”, “thoroughly rotten” and “stuffing the parliamentary payroll with mates and cronies” who did no relevant work.
Jared O’Mara came up with “a series of scams” to help fund his “galloping” cocaine habit, prosecutor Richard Wright KC told a jury on Thursday.
Continue reading...Insiders say departure of popular BBC News presenters – with Martine Croxall also going – could prompt ageism row
Some of the BBC News channel’s most famous faces, including Jane Hill, Ben Brown and Martine Croxall, have been axed before the launch this spring of a channel that combines international and domestic news.
The trio have become familiar to UK viewers during times of political and economic turmoil and their departure could prompt a row about ageism, according to BBC insiders.
Continue reading...Former UK PM’s brother quits board of Elara Capital days after it was accused of using funds to manipulate share prices
Jo Johnson, the younger brother of the former prime minister Boris Johnson, has resigned as a director of a London-based investment bank allegedly linked to the Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s crisis-ridden business empire.
Lord Johnson, a former Conservative minister who was given a peerage by his brother in 2020, resigned from the board of Elara Capital on Wednesday just days after Elara was accused of using Mauritius-based funds to manipulate the share price of Adani-linked companies and obscure their ultimate ownership.
Continue reading...James Dyson and Tina Green, wife of Philip Green, among British business figures on register of overseas entities
Billionaires and business figures including James Dyson and Tina Green own UK property via overseas companies, according to a new register aimed at improving transparency.
The tycoons feature on a list that a Guardian investigation revealed last week includes the racing driver Lewis Hamilton, the Chinese government, a string of Gulf royals and at least 20 donors to the Tory party.
Continue reading...Advisers argue he has made progress, but the new intake are frustrated and voters believe he is ‘out of touch’
Rishi Sunak has now survived 100 days as prime minister – a pretty small feat by historical standards but twice the length of his predecessor’s term. But the circumstances he inherited – the lack of mandate, plummeting polls and an economy in freefall – have deeply constrained what he is able to do with his time in office.
Inside No 10, key advisers argue that Sunak has already made significant progress, that the economy is starting to recover, that he has set out a clear stall with five pledges on inflation, national debt, the economy, immigration and the NHS, and that he has largely taken the Tory party infighting off the front pages.
Continue reading...Government plan to educate owners and encourage fines not enough to effectively tackle air pollution
• Study links air pollution to mental ill-health
Politicians and campaigners have called for an urgent review of wood-burning stoves, which cause large amounts of pollution in urban areas.
The calls follow the admission by the environment secretary that the government had set weaker air pollution targets than it would like. The admission came as she announced a new environmental plan for England that held back from banning wood-burning stoves and settled instead for “educating” people on their use.
Continue reading...National Trust project shows family home of ‘nature’s engineers’ and how they have improved the environment for other wildlife
They can be seen chugging around their watery domain like small furry tugboats, gnawing away at saplings or nuzzling up to each other. The sound of babbling water and birdsong provides a pleasing soundtrack.
A new online tour is being launched on Thursday of an enclosure on the Holnicote estate in Somerset that is home to a family of five beavers. In what is billed as the first of its kind, the tour allows viewers to navigate through the 2.7-acre Exmoor enclosure where two adult beavers and their three offspring live and work.
Continue reading...Differing experts have urged the Monetary Policy Committee to both cut interest rates and to raise them
Turn up. Take the temperature of the economy. Raise interest rates. That’s the been the pattern from the responsible technocrats at the Bank of England for more than a year now – and they show no sign of stopping.
Between the depths of the global financial crisis in March 2009 and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, interest rates were changed only five times, and three of those were in response to unexpected shocks: one after the Brexit vote in 2016, and two at the arrival of the pandemic in 2020. There was one period of more than seven years when interest rates were pegged at 0.5%.
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