Manager posts critical statement on singer’s behalf after Panic on the Streets of Springfield airs
The Simpsons has earned the wrath of Morrissey after it parodied the former Smiths frontman in an episode of the show.
The singer was satirised during the episode Panic on the Streets of Springfield, which aired in the US on Sunday night. In the episode, Lisa Simpson becomes obsessed with a fictional band called the Snuffs and befriends its frontman, Quilloughby.
Continue reading...Sophie, who updated public on grieving royal family, and Edward look set to take on increasingly high profiles
In the immediate aftermath of the Duke of Edinburgh’s death, the royal who most regularly visited Windsor, gracing television screens and newspaper photographs, was the Countess of Wessex.
Through Sophie, 56, wife of Prince Edward, 57, the public learned how the royal family was navigating its grief.
Continue reading...More than 400 climate scientists sign letter that says activists are being targeted at pivotal time in fight against global heating
Peaceful environmental protesters are being threatened, silenced and criminalised in countries around the world including the UK and the US, according to some of the world’s leading climate scientists and academics.
More than 400 leading experts – including 14 authors from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – say that non-violent civil disobedience from groups like the school strikers, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement have transformed the debate around the climate crisis in recent years.
Continue reading...Ingenuity successfully takes flight, hovering at height of about 3 metres before touching back down
Nasa’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter has completed the first powered, controlled flight on another planet, the space agency has announced.
The small helicopter successfully took flight on the red planet on Monday morning, hovering in the air at an altitude of about 3 metres (10 feet), before descending and touching back down on the Martian surface.
Continue reading...Downing Street says next week’s visit won’t go ahead ‘in light of the current coronavirus situation’
Boris Johnson’s planned visit to India next week has been cancelled because of the country’s escalating coronavirus crisis, a joint statement by the UK and India has announced.
“In the light of the current coronavirus situation, prime minister Boris Johnson will not be able to travel to India next week,” said the statement, released by Downing Street.
Continue reading...East Kent hospitals trust admits failing to provide safe care for Harry Richford and his mother
An NHS trust has pleaded guilty to failing to provide safe care and treatment after the death of a baby boy.
Representatives for East Kent hospitals university NHS foundation trust were in court on Monday after the death of Harry Richford seven days after his emergency delivery.
Continue reading...Ankara records 318 deaths in 24 hours, while Gaza authorities have received 80,000 vaccine doses for population of 2 million people
Half of all adults in the US have received at least one Covid-19 shot, the government announced Sunday, marking another milestone in the nation’s largest-ever vaccination campaign but leaving more work to do to convince skeptical Americans to roll up their sleeves.
The Associated Press reports:
Almost 130 million people 18 or older have received at least one dose of a vaccine, or 50.4% of the total adult population, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Almost 84 million adults, or about 32.5% of the population, have been fully vaccinated.
The US cleared the 50% mark just a day after the reported global death toll from the coronavirus topped a staggering 3 million, according to totals compiled by Johns Hopkins University, though the actual number is believed to be significantly higher.
Guinea received on Sunday a shipment of 300,000 Sinovac Covid-19 vaccines purchased from China and is also set to receive a donation of 200,000 Sinopharm shots, Guinean foreign minister Ibrahima Khalil Kaba said.
Reuters reports:
Kaba gave no further details on the Sinopharm donation. Guinea is reporting 93 new coronavirus infections on average each day, 59% of the peak in March.
There have been 21,460 infections and 138 coronavirus-related deaths reported in the country since the pandemic began.
The scene has been made safe but members of the public are being advised to keep clear of the area
Beachgoers enjoying the warm April sunshine in Brighton were interrupted by police on Sunday afternoon after a possible unexploded mortar shell was found.
A large cordon was put in place by officers on the seafront.
Continue reading...Mary Lou McDonald says she is sorry the late Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle was killed by IRA bomb in 1979
The Sinn Féin president, Mary Lou McDonald, has apologised for the IRA’s 1979 murder of Lord Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh’s uncle.
Speaking after the funeral of Prince Philip, she told Times Radio she was sorry that Mountbatten, 79, had been killed when the fishing boat he was on was blown up by an IRA bomb.
Continue reading...With the poignant sight of the widowed Queen, the world glimpsed an era that is not just ending, but inevitably on its way
You could barely see her, but you could glimpse the future. Maybe it was the sepulchral gloom of the dark wooden stalls of St George’s chapel, or perhaps it was the restraint of a TV director keeping their distance, respecting the privacy of the moment, but the Queen was hardly visible in the live coverage of her late husband’s funeral on Saturday. Masked and in an unlit corner, the monarch was all but unseen.
When the camera did catch her, it made for a poignant sight: the widow alone, an image that “broke hearts around the world,” in the words of the Washington Post, but one that will resonate in the UK especially. Even the sternest republican has long admitted that an extraordinary bond exists between Elizabeth and the people who have been her subjects for nearly seven decades. Now, if anything, that bond will be strengthened.
Continue reading...Foreign secretary hints he believes same Russian cell behind Salisbury poisoning and Czech explosion
The British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, said the UK stood in “full support” of the Czech Republic after the country’s police announced they were hunting two Russians, suspected of carrying out the Salisbury poisonings, in relation to an explosion at an arms depot.
The Czech authorities said on Saturday they were seeking Alexander Petrov, 41, and Ruslan Boshirov, 43, in connection with a previously unexplained 2014 explosion at a munitions dump in Vrbětice, which left two dead.
Continue reading...Officials ‘astonished’ at level of public engagement a year into the pandemic
The steady stream of people at the two surge testing units in Finchley, north London, last week suggests that, more than a year after the pandemic hit, the public spirit to do something about Covid is still strong.
The effectiveness of surge testing is a more open question, however. The rapid testing of 5,000 households last week was an attempt to isolate the South African variant and others of concern. Yet although standard PCR tests come back within 24 hours, genomic sequencing tests to identify a Covid variant take 14 days – by which time the period of infectiousness is usually over.
Continue reading...UK’s greater inequality levels made impact worse for the less well off, study suggests
British households were plunged into the Covid pandemic with lower savings, more debt and weaker welfare support than their French and German counterparts, according to analysis revealing how inequality increased the impact of the UK crisis.
High levels of income inequality also weakened the financial resilience of poorer households as the pandemic hit. The greater exposure of British households, revealed in an analysis by the Resolution Foundation thinktank to be published in full this week, comes despite similar levels of average income with our European neighbours.
Continue reading...The realities of ownership are dawning as the UK’s lockdown eases and the dogs left at home need to be looked after
Pet cameras and activity trackers are flying off the shelves. Demand for anti-chew sprays, automatic feeders and water fountains for pets has rocketed, and dog walkers and sitters are being inundated with inquiries.
As lockdown restrictions ease, dog owners are snapping up products and services that will enable them to monitor and care for their pets while they are out at work.
Continue reading...The royal family have released a reading of The Patriarchs – An Elegy by Simon Armitage to mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. The poet laureate said that he wanted the poem to address the duke’s values and personality. ‘A lot of the commentary has been around duty and service – I saw it as a prompt for writing something dutiful, and in service of all people like him.’
Prince Philip’s funeral was an unusual affair, watched by the monarch from her familiar seat in the family chapel
Nearly everything about the setting itself must have felt touchingly familiar. Just before 3pm the Queen took her usual place in the corner oak pew under the ancient banners of the Knights of the Garter in St George’s Chapel, Windsor – her family’s “home” church. It was a seat she had occupied countless times for Sunday communion, for christenings and weddings and funerals. Only this time, for what must have seemed the first time, her consort and husband, her “strength and stay” of almost 75 years was not sitting beside her. During yesterday’s funeral service for Prince Philip, the monarch remained steadfast as ever, head down, perhaps grateful for her black mask, with only the ever-present cameras for company. In her bubble of one, however, socially distanced from the sparse congregation around her, it went without saying that she had never looked quite so alone.
Until last March the only funerals that many of us had ever watched on screens had probably been royal ones. Princess Diana’s, maybe the Queen Mother’s. The long months of pandemic have made virtual send-offs horribly commonplace, though. Death and farewells have come to Zoom and Facebook Live. That fact gave a particular poignancy to yesterday’s events, attended by only 30 of Philip’s family and closest friends, instead of the planned 800.
Continue reading...Actor did not want her professional or charitable work overshadowed by illness in final weeks, says friend
Helen McCrory, the Peaky Blinders actor who died from cancer on Friday, “swore friends to secrecy” as she underwent treatment, her friend Carrie Cracknell has revealed.
Cracknell, who directed McCrory in a 2014 production of Medea, said the performer did not want her illness overshadowing her family and professional life. McCrory’s husband, Damian Lewis, announced the news that his wife died peacefully at home aged 52.
Continue reading...Social distancing, face masks and only 30 mourners at service for the Duke of Edinburgh
When future historians come to retell the story of the pandemic, the image of the Queen sitting alone, masked and in mourning, will surely rank among the most poignant.
The Duke of Edinburgh’s final farewell at St George’s Chapel was like no other royal funeral. And though not a family like any other, with mourners limited to 30 and only the pallbearers not socially distanced, it was in no small way symbolic.
Continue reading...Richard Eyre, the National Theatre director who cast the actor in some of her earliest roles, pays tribute to her after her death
Part of the tragedy of Helen McCrory dying at such a young age, leaving a husband and two young children, is that professionally she had everything to look forward to. She had established herself as a very considerable actor in the theatre and on film and television.
She had a brightness about her, a luminosity: she was, in short, a star. She lit up a stage or a screen – you knew you were in the presence of a force of character and talent.
Continue reading...Tributes paid to dancer who left Royal Ballet a year ago amid allegations of sexual misconduct
Liam Scarlett, the internationally renowned choreographer, has died at the age of 35, a year after leaving the Royal Ballet amid allegations of inappropriate behaviour.
The cause of death has not been disclosed.
Continue reading...