Category Archives: UK news

Jeremy Clarkson criticises Covid scientists, saying ‘if you die, you die’

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Broadcaster complains about caution shown by ‘communists at Sage’ over reopening society

It is a long list that includes travellers, cyclists, animal rights activists, lorry drivers, George Michael and Liverpool. Now Jeremy Clarkson has opened himself up to more anger after he criticised “those communists at Sage” preventing opening up because, he argues, “if you die, you die.”

In an interview with the Radio Times, Clarkson gives his views on the pandemic and what should happen next. Many will find his thoughts typically boorish and insensitive.

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Dizzee Rascal charged with assault after domestic argument

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The rapper and producer is on bail after an incident at a residential address in Streatham

Dizzee Rascal, the award-winning rapper and producer whose real name is Dylan Mills, has been charged with assaulting a woman following a domestic argument.

In a statement, the Metropolitan police said: “Dylan Mills, 36, of Sevenoaks, Kent, has been charged with assault after an incident at a residential address in Streatham on 8 June. Officers attended and a woman reported minor injuries. She did not require hospital treatment.”

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Research into non-injectable Covid vaccines brings hope for needle-phobics

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Scientists say anxiety around needles could be playing role in vaccine hesitancy in the UK

The sight of a needle piercing skin is enough to chill a quarter of adult Britons and trigger up to 4% into fainting. But hope is on the horizon for needle-phobics as researchers are working on a range of non-injectable Covid vaccine formulations, including nasal sprays and tablets.

Almost every vaccine in use today comes with a needle, and the approved Covid-19 vaccines are no exception. Once jabbed, the body’s immune system usually mounts a response, but scientists in the UK and beyond are hoping to harness the immune arsenal of the mucous membranes that line the nose, mouth, lungs and digestive tract, regions typically colonised by respiratory viruses including Covid-19, in part to allay the fears of needle-phobics.

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Princess Latifa campaigner had ‘phone compromised by Pegasus spyware’

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Human rights activist David Haigh targeted in attack suspected to have been ordered by Dubai

A British human rights campaigner and lawyer who was fighting to free Dubai’s Princess Latifa had his mobile phone compromised by Pegasus spyware on 3 and 4 August 2020, according to a forensic analysis carried out by Amnesty International.

David Haigh is the first confirmed British victim of infiltration by Pegasus software, an attack suspected to have been ordered by Dubai, because of his connection with the 35-year-old princess, a daughter of the emirate’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed, and the Free Latifa campaign of which he was part.

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Exhibition to show 50 contemporary portraits of Holocaust survivors

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Imperial War Museum display shows survivors alongside younger generations of their families

When Kitty Hart-Moxon, 97, was recently asked to choose one object that symbolised the horrors she survived at the hands of the Nazis in Auschwitz, Belsen, and on death marches, she had no doubts.

A glass container encasing the preserved tattooed numbers she had cut out of her own arm and also that of her mother, Rosa Lola, which she keeps in a cupboard at her home in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, is a shocking, tangible reminder.

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Angela Rayner: ‘We don’t want to be an opposition, we want to be a government’

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Labour’s deputy leader opens up about being a carer, byelections, and achieving a ‘cultural shift’ in the workplace

Labour’s deputy leader, Angela Rayner, has said her own experience as a care worker helped to convince her more flexible working could be a “win-win” for staff and employers.

Speaking to the Guardian after announcing new policies last week on employment rights and flexible conditions, Rayner said she had helped negotiate family-friendly working when she was a trade union representative.

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Police appeal for information after teenager stabbed to death in Birmingham

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West Midlands police seek contact details of family of Brahane Yordanos, who do not yet know of her killing

Detectives are trying to find the family of a 19-year-old woman found fatally stabbed at her home in Birmingham. West Midlands police named the victim as Brahane Yordanos, from Eritrea in north-east Africa, on Sunday.

Just after 6am on Saturday, officers were called to Unett Street, Newtown, where the teenager was discovered with stab wounds. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

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Johnson faces rebellion over ‘intolerable’ hunger and poverty in home counties

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Steve Baker, MP for Wycombe, urged ministers not to ignore the cost of living crisis in constituencies like his

Boris Johnson faces another backbench rebellion over the Treasury’s spending this autumn, as a high-profile Tory MP hit out at “intolerable” levels of hunger and poverty in his affluent home counties constituency, and urged ministers to abandon plans to cut universal credit.

Steve Baker, a leading Brexiter and MP for Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, called on ministers not to ignore the cost of living crisis faced by people “in real trouble” in constituencies like his who had been “tipped over the edge” financially by the pandemic.

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The Guardian view on Fortress Europe: a continent losing its moral compass

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The increasingly draconian approach to irregular migration betrays the spirit of the 1951 refugee convention

Seventy years ago, the 1951 UN refugee convention established the rights of refugees to seek sanctuary, and the obligations of states to protect them. Increasingly, it seems that much of Europe is choosing to commemorate the anniversary by ripping up some of the convention’s core principles.

So far this year, close to 1,000 migrants have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean, more than four times the death toll for the same period in 2020. Many will have been economic migrants. Others will have been fleeing persecution. Increasingly, Europe does not care. All were “irregular”. And all must be discouraged and deterred through a strategy of cruelty.

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‘Highly likely’ Iran was behind fatal oil tanker attack – Dominic Raab

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Foreign secretary backs Israeli PM’s claims Iran was behind drone strike that killed Briton and Romanian

The UK has said it is “highly likely” that Iran carried out an “unlawful and callous attack” on a ship in the Middle East, which left a Briton dead.

The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the government believed the drone attack on the oil tanker off the coast of Oman was “deliberate, targeted, and a clear violation of international law by Iran”.

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Coronavirus live news: UK chancellor ‘pushes PM to relax holiday rules’; mass testing amid China outbreak

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Latest updates: Rishi Sunak says restrictions ‘out of step’ with international rivals, according to media reports; China battling worst caseload in months

As cases of the Delta coronavirus variant have risen and vaccination rates slowed, several US businesses and institutions have announced they will now require vaccinations from employees.

Major companies like Walmart and Disney said this week all employees must be vaccinated, while Joe Biden said all federal employees must be vaccinated or face masking, testing and distancing requirements.

Related: America mulls vaccine mandates – will they work?

Hackers have attacked and shut down the IT systems of the company that manages Covid-19 vaccination appointments for the Lazio region surrounding Rome, the regional government said on Sunday.

“A powerful hacker attack on the region’s CED (database) is under way,” the region said in a Facebook posting.

It is a very powerful hacker attack, very serious... everything is out. The whole regional CED is under attack.

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Home Office challenged over ‘sped-up’ removal of Vietnamese nationals

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Signs that detainees were victims of trafficking are being overlooked, say campaigners

Lawyers are challenging the Home Office policy of deporting people to Vietnam who could be victims of trafficking after the UK sent a second charter flight to the country within a matter of weeks.

The challenge follows concern from lawyers and charities that some victims of trafficking could be wrongly removed from the UK under a speedy processing system for migrants in detention known as “detained asylum casework”.

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EU citizens who applied to stay in Britain facing threat of deportation

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The Home Office appears to be in breach of the Brexit withdrawal agreement, says legal charity

European citizens who have applied for settled status are being detained and threatened with deportation, a development that contradicts assurances from ministers and appears to contravene the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

The Home Office has served EU nationals with removal directions even though they could prove they had applied for settled status, which should protect their rights to remain in the UK.

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Doggerland: Lost ‘Atlantis’ of the North Sea gives up its ancient secrets

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The land mass that linked Britain to continental Europe was rich in early human life until it flooded

The idea of a “lost Atlantis” under the North Sea connecting Britain by land to continental Europe had been imagined by HG Wells in the late 19th century, with evidence of human inhabitation of the forgotten world following in 1931 when the trawler Colinda dredged up a lump of peat containing a spear point.

But it is only now, after a decade of pioneering research and the extraordinary finds of an army of amateur archaeologists scouring the Dutch coastline for artefacts and fossils, that a major exhibition is able to offer a window into Doggerland, a vast expanse of territory submerged following a tsunami 8,000 years ago, cutting the British Isles off from modern Belgium, the Netherlands and southern Scandinavia.

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Police review teen killings in search of catalyst for spike in murders

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Pilot scheme hopes to discover patterns that will help prevent more deaths

Measures are being introduced to try to identify what is driving rising murder rates in the wake of a spike in teenage deaths in some of the UK’s homicide hotspots.

All homicides in London, Birmingham and south Wales will be reviewed by the authorities in an attempt to learn from the chaotic sequences of events that often preempt a death.

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Lily Allen: from chart-topping handbag kid to the heart of London’s West End

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The singer is back in front of a live audience this week, playing ‘a woman with a real point of view’ in a spooky new play, 2:22 – A Ghost Story

There, in the background, wearing drop pearl earrings, is 13-year-old Lily Allen dressed up as a little lady-in-waiting. Cinema audiences watching Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth when the film of that name came out in 1998 might have been concentrating on the queen’s courtly dancing in the middle of the frame, but yes, it really was Allen playing a mini royal favourite in director Shekhar Kapur’s lavish production.

Now, more than two decades later, the 36-year-old singer-songwriter is taking centre stage as an actress in the West End, appearing in a spooky new play, 2:22 – A Ghost Story, which opens this week.

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Is Covid-19 on the run in the UK?

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A fall in case numbers last month raised hopes that Britain may be reaching herd immunity, but experts warn against complacency, given uncertainty about new variants and autumn’s return to school

John Edmunds has been at the centre of the unravelling of the Covid-19 pandemic since cases first appeared in January 2020. A member of Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, and a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, he has consistently warned ministers about the threats posed by the disease.

These risks have often been clear in their nature. But today, 18 months after Covid-19 first appeared, he believes the nation stands at a point of maximum uncertainty about the future of the pandemic.

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Jimmy Savile: 10 years on, what has changed in uncovering abuse?

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As TV revisits the scandal, the author of an acclaimed play about it asks what the media and key institutions have learned – and whether survivors are now treated any better

Journalistic parlour game question: what are the most significant news stories of the past decade? Few would argue with the pandemic and Brexit. Not far behind, perhaps, is the Jimmy Savile scandal.

Not many stories change our world. This one did. It transformed how we deal with allegations of sexual assault. We reassessed our attitude to celebrity. We saw more clearly than ever how morally corrupt institutions could be. It was the harbinger of the #MeToo movement.

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Boris and Carrie Johnson expecting their second child

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In a message on Instagram, prime minister’s wife also reveals she had miscarriage at start of the year

Boris Johnson and his wife, Carrie, are expecting their second child, as the prime minister’s wife revealed she had a miscarriage at the start of this year.

The couple, who married in secret at Westminster Cathedral in May, had their son, Wilfred, in April 2020.

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