Force says it is discouraging the activity this year along with organised events because of Covid
A police force in the north of England is trying to discourage children from trick or treating this Halloween because of Covid-19.
South Yorkshire police (SYP) have produced a poster residents can print out and put in their windows saying “No trick or treaters”, with a picture of a silhouetted pumpkin crossed out like a no-entry sign.
Continue reading...‘Dad dos’, or ‘Dadchelor parties’ – one last blow out for a father-to-be – are on the up. Are they just an excuse for a bender, or a crucial celebration for the modern, hands-on father?
‘Take a moment to say goodbye to your old life.” This is what Kit Harington said earlier this year, when asked what advice he’d give to fellow new parents. The actor, best known as the angst-ridden bastard prince Jon Snow in the fantasy series Game of Thrones, regretted not having held a proper celebration before the birth of his son in January.
Harington said he would have liked to mark the occasion “with a kind of stag”. “You’re so prepped about gearing up for being a parent that you forget. And then it’s too late. It’s gone.” Yet it’s the kind of sob story that’s likely to invite eye-rolls from mothers, for whom this approach to having a baby is not a matter of negotiation.
Continue reading...As the bard of Barking tours a new album, he reflects on modern politics, his scraps with the Daily Mail and why he could do with listening a bit more
In an Exeter pub on a wet Monday morning, Billy Bragg is talking about a day at the Glastonbury festival in 2000. The BBC had signed up an unusual guest for its coverage – Boris Johnson. In the footage (still online), Johnson – then a year from becoming an MP – forgets to get off the train, gets a comedy henna tattoo in Sanskrit, and growls the Clash’s Bankrobber to Bragg in the car: “It’s your philosophy, isn’t it?” he says. “Leftwing approval of theft from capitalists?”
“He was trolling me the whole time,” Bragg remembers. “That’s what his MO still is. A wind-up merchant who became prime minister! How the fuck did that happen?” He shrugs. “Modern politics needs things he doesn’t have: accountability and empathy.”
Continue reading...UK environment secretary accuses France of using ‘inflammatory’ rhetoric in escalating dispute
Emmanuel Macron’s hopes of being re-elected president may be driving the diplomatic row with France over post-Brexit access to Britain’s fishing waters, the UK’s environment secretary has claimed.
George Eustice accused Paris of using “inflammatory” rhetoric in an escalating dispute over a shortfall in licences for French fishing vessels seeking to operate in the coastal waters of the UK and Jersey.
Continue reading...Surreal drawings by author of The Trial – which he demanded be burnt after his death – to be published
Stricken with self-doubt, paranoia and existential despair, the writings of Franz Kafka have taken generations of readers on what the author called “the descent into the cold abyss of oneself”.
A trove of 150 drawings, retrieved from a Swiss bank vault in 2019 after years of legal wrangling and presented to the public for the first time on Thursday, offers a more cheerful interpretation of the term “Kafkaesque”, however.
Continue reading...Ex-UK PM and almost 200 global figures write to G20 summit host calling for 240m vaccines to be shared
Gordon Brown has called on the British government and other G20 countries to urgently arrange a military airlift of surplus Covid vaccines to poorer countries before they expire, saying it is their “moral responsibility” to do so.
The former prime minister has organised a letter from more than 160 former world leaders and global figures calling for richer countries to send 240m vaccines stored in the US, Europe and Canada to countries struggling to vaccinate their populations.
Continue reading...Equalities minister Liz Truss will consult on plans to allow counselling for non-vulnerable adults
Consenting adults should be able to undergo so-called conversion therapy, the government has recommended.
Setting out proposals for how they plan to crack down on “coercive and abhorrent” practices that seek to change sexual orientation or gender identity, the Government Equalities Office said: “We recognise there is a plurality of experience in this area and that there are adults who seek counselling to help them live a life that they feel is more in line with their personal beliefs.”
Continue reading...Heads of man, woman and child found on site of Stoke Mandeville church built in 1080 and abandoned 800 years later
Statues of a Roman man, woman and child have been uncovered by archaeologists at an abandoned medieval church on the route of the HS2 high-speed railway.
The discovery was “utterly astounding”, according to Rachel Wood, the lead archaeologist at the site in Stoke Mandeville, Buckinghamshire. “They’re really rare finds in the UK,” she said.
Continue reading...Research reveals fully vaccinated people are just as likely to pass virus on to those they share a home with
People who are fully vaccinated against Covid yet catch the virus are just as infectious to others in their household as infected unvaccinated people, research suggests.
Households are a key setting for the transmission of Covid infections (pdf), with frequent prolonged daily contact with an infected person linked to an increased risk of catching the virus.
Continue reading...Chief scientific adviser to UK government says high level of cases ‘remains a concern’; Russia records over 40,000 new cases and record 1,159 Covid deaths
Stephen Reicher is a member of the Sage subcommittee in the UK advising on behavioural science, and he writes for us this morning saying that Covid measures give us choice – they are not restrictions on British life:
Regarding ventilation, I would institute a system whereby all public spaces were required to indicate their “clean air” status, just as kitchens in restaurants are required to indicate their hygiene status. I would also improve the messaging so that people know how important it is and how to know when they are safe. This wouldn’t amount to a restriction. It’s a protection. It doesn’t limit choice. On the contrary, in increasing the number of spaces that are safe, it gives us more choice.
Continue reading...Airline, which even barred some people who sought redress, commits to refunds within five working days
Ryanair has promised to start refunding customers for cancelled flights within five working days, after criticism of its reimbursements policy during the pandemic.
The Dublin-based carrier, which has previously described itself as a “no-refunds airline”, has also announced significant improvements to the way it treats customers whose flights are delayed or cancelled.
Continue reading...Cases may level off soon, but bets are off until after half-term – and NHS faces winter crisis regardless
The Covid pandemic has been a story of twists and turns, with the situation often developing quickly.
For much of October, confirmed cases in the UK have risen daily – largely driven by increases in England and Wales.
Continue reading...After three decades on the stage and screen, the star is still worrying about where his next job will come from. Meanwhile, at home, he frets about letting down his family
Mark Strong has a good face for villainy – spare and inscrutable, with thin lips and “eyes like tunnels”, as Arthur Miller might have put it. On camera, he gives a sort of fractional disclosure, expressions altering in tiny increments, so that watching him perform is often an exercise in judging how much good can reasonably be seen in the bad. He specialises in antiheroes and authority figures, from gangsters (Kick-Ass, The Long Firm) to heads of intelligence (The Imitation Game, Body of Lies, Zero Dark Thirty). His latest incarnation – as a surgeon who operates in the criminal underground in the TV drama Temple, now in its second series – melds these roles as he crosses and recrosses the line between conscientious and cruel.
Although highly regarded for his work across stage, film and TV, Strong is not a big winner of awards (though he earned an Olivier for his outstanding portrayal of Eddie Carbone in Miller’s A View from the Bridge in 2015). He comes across as somehow outside the system. He is reputable rather than starry, plays parts rather than leads and has retained the air of a jobbing actor. Surely at 58, after 30 years of nearly constant work and more than 100 screen credits, with a voice so sonorous and distinctive it draws you to the depths, he deserves a bigger breakthrough. Is he frustrated by the lack of leading parts?
Continue reading...David Henderson found guilty at Cardiff crown court of endangering safety of an aircraft
David Henderson, the businessman who organised the flight that crashed, killing the footballer Emiliano Sala, has been found guilty of endangering the safety of an aircraft.
The 67-year-old was convicted by a majority verdict of 10 to two by a jury at Cardiff crown court on Thursday.
Continue reading...Comments from French EU affairs minister come as British trawler is detained in France amid dispute
France will “now use the language of force” in an escalation of a row over post-Brexit fishing rights, France’s EU affairs minister has said, as French maritime police seized a British trawler found in its territorial waters without a licence.
One vessel was stopped off Le Havre in the early hours of Thursday morning, then rerouted to the quay and “handed over to the judicial authority”, while a second was given a verbal warning.
Continue reading...Teenager was convicted in July of murdering Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, in June 2020
A teenager who murdered two sisters in a London park has been given two concurrent 35-year jail sentences at the Old Bailey.
Danyal Hussein, 19, killed Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a random attack which he believed would act as a “sacrifice” to a demon named “the mighty king Lucifuge Rofocale” to enable him to win the lottery.
Handing out the 35-year minimum term on Thursday, Mrs Justice Whipple told Hussein: “You committed these vicious attacks. You did it to kill. You did it for money and a misguided pursuit of power.
Thomasin McKenzie, Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith star in a horror-thriller that takes a trip to the sleazy heart of London’s past
A trip to the dark heart of London’s unswinging 60s is what’s on offer in this entertaining, if uneven, film from screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns and director Edgar Wright, serving up a gorgeous soundtrack and some marvellous re-creations of sleazy Soho and the West End. There’s a tremendous image of the marquee for the 1965 Thunderball premiere in Coventry Street, and a show-stopping crane shot of Soho Square, apparently filmed from where the 20th Century Fox sign is now no longer to be found atop that company’s former premises.
Last Night in Soho is a doppelganger horror-thriller about a wide-eyed fashion student called Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who has brought her mum’s old Dansette record player and Cilla Black and Petula Clark LPs up to London from Cornwall on the train. Eloise has a fetish for the lost innocent glamour of the 60s but, moping all alone in her manky bedsit, finds herself stricken with neon phantasms. Like a ghost from the future, Eloise dreams her way through a portal in time back into 60s London clubland, where she witnesses Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), a blonde singer – exactly the kind of retro showbiz princess Eloise moonily idolises – who is being forced by her slick-haired manager Jack (Matt Smith) into having sex for money with creepy old men. Gradually, Eloise feels her identity merging with Sandie’s. Is she having a breakdown, or is this nightmare really happening?
Continue reading...Tax havens cost governments at least $245bn a year in lost revenue – and many of these havens are British. In fact, the country is leading the world in hiding legitimate money and laundering dirty cash. So how did we get here, and how has Britain managed to preside over a third of the world's lost taxes?
Continue reading...Industrial action abandoned as trade union leaders confirmed pay talks with ScotRail have been settled
Rail strikes planned for next week’s Cop26 climate conference have been abandoned after trade union leaders confirmed negotiations on a pay rise have been settled.
The announcement was made after talks between the RMT union and transport bosses on Wednesday.
Continue reading...No 10 threatens retaliation against French measures including port ban on British fishing boats
A major trade dispute has broken out between the UK and France after Paris banned British fishing boats from key ports, vowed to impose onerous checks on cross-Channel trade, and threatened the UK’s energy supply over a row over post-Brexit rights to UK waters.
The move prompted a dramatic response from Downing Street where a spokesperson for Boris Johnson said the UK government would retaliate over what was a described as a potential breach of international law.
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