Category Archives: UK news
Prince Philip set to remain in hospital into next week
Duke of Edinburgh was admitted to King Edward VII’s hospital in London after feeling unwell
The Duke of Edinburgh is expected to remain in hospital for “observation and rest” into next week, sources have said.
Prince Philip was admitted to King Edward VII’s hospital on Tuesday evening after feeling unwell and walked unaided into the medical centre.
Continue reading...Harry and Meghan turn away from Britain and towards world stage
Analysis: Couple’s treatment by a critical UK press made any return as working royals unlikely
The decision by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to permanently step down as working royals comes as no surprise.
When they first announced their wish to no longer perform royal duties, and to become financially independent – blindsiding Buckingham Palace by making their intentions public before matters had been negotiated with the Queen – it was hard to see how they could return.
Continue reading...Workers clear ‘huge, disgusting’ fatberg from London sewer
Public told to watch what they flush after workers take two weeks to free blockage
Members of the public have been urged to be careful what they flush after a “huge, disgusting” fatberg the weight of a small bungalow was cleared from an east London sewer.
Thames Water engineers and MTS Cleansing Services spent two weeks using high-powered water jets and hand tools to chip away at and eventually remove the rock-like heap, which was said to have smelled like composting festival toilets and rotten meat, from a conduit in Canary Wharf.
Continue reading...The path out of lockdown: can Boris Johnson keep his boosterism at bay?
England waits to see if PM will stay restrained or bow to backbench pressure with Covid plan
It was an uncharacteristically subdued Boris Johnson who announced from Downing Street that Britain had surpassed the first, phenomenally ambitious target of giving 15 million people a coronavirus vaccine: this was a success, yes, but it was “no moment to relax”, the prime minister said on Monday.
The boosterish rhetoric has been restrained for several weeks – gone is the talk that led to claims there would be normality by November last year, or that it would be “inhuman” to cancel Christmas. Now, escape from the third lockdown must be “cautious but irreversible”.
Continue reading...Harry and Meghan will not return as working royals, says palace
Duke and Duchess of Sussex to give up honorary military appointments and royal patronages
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will not return as working members of the royal family, Buckingham Palace has said.
Prince Harry and Meghan are also giving up their royal patronages. The announcement follows weeks of speculation about their future as the one-year review of their position, announced at the time they moved away from the UK, neared.
Continue reading...Uber drivers are workers, UK supreme court rules
Decision means drivers will be entitled to basic rights such as paid holidays, say lawyers
The UK supreme court has dismissed Uber’s appeal against a landmark employment tribunal ruling that its drivers should be classed as workers with access to the minimum wage and paid holidays.
Six justices handed down a unanimous decision backing the October 2016 employment tribunal ruling that could affect millions of workers in the gig economy.
Continue reading...Northern Ireland firms optimistic Brexit barriers will be eased
Business leaders buoyed by meeting with Michael Gove and EU counterpart on protocol glitches
Business leaders in Northern Ireland are optimistic that Brexit barriers preventing parcels, pets, potatoes and plants getting to the region from Britain will be eased after a meeting between Michael Gove and his EU counterpart, Maroš Šefčovič, on Thursday.
They said the UK and the EU had a legitimate reason to remove or ease the barriers because they were having an impact on daily lives, in breach of a pledge in the Northern Ireland protocol that states the “application of this protocol should impact as little as possible on the everyday life of communities in both Ireland and Northern Ireland”.
Continue reading...Human destruction of nature is ‘senseless and suicidal’, warns UN chief
UN report offers bedrock for hope for broken planet, says António Guterres
Humanity is waging a “senseless and suicidal” war on nature that is causing human suffering and enormous economic losses while accelerating the destruction of life on Earth, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said.
Guterres’s starkest warning to date came at the launch of a UN report setting out the triple emergency the world is in: the climate crisis, the devastation of wildlife and nature, and the pollution that causes many millions of early deaths every year.
Continue reading...Facebook is ‘schoolyard bully’ in Australia news row, says UK media boss
Trade group chairman says robust regulation is needed to rein in monopolistic tech firms
Facebook’s move to block all media content in Australia shows why countries need robust regulation to stop tech firms behaving like a “schoolyard bully”, the head of the UK’s news media trade group has said.
Henry Faure Walker, the chair of the News Media Association, said Facebook’s ban during a pandemic was “a classic example of a monopoly power being the schoolyard bully, trying to protect its dominant position with scant regard for the citizens and customers it supposedly serves”.
Continue reading...‘6.2cm-tall man’ offered priority Covid vaccine after NHS blunder
Liam Thorp, whose real height is 6ft 2in, was recorded as having a BMI of 28,000
A 32-year-old man with no underlying health conditions was offered a Covid vaccine early because of a blunder at his GP surgery which recorded him as being 6.2cm tall, giving him an astonishing body mass index (BMI) of 28,000.
The Liverpool Echo’s political editor, Liam Thorp, said he was left “really confused” after he was offered the jab this week seemingly ahead of the government’s rollout plan, and shared the “frankly surreal” experience in a Twitter thread which quickly went viral.
Continue reading...Rihanna angers Hindus with ‘disrespectful’ Ganesha pendant
Comments on singer’s Instagram account say wearing likeness of god is cultural appropriation
The singer Rihanna has angered the Hindu community with a “disrespectful” Instagram picture in which she wears a diamond-studded pendant featuring the Hindu god Ganesha.
Commenters on her Instagram account have called the wearing of the likeness of the god around her neck cultural appropriation.
Continue reading...Mindfulness, laughter and robot dogs may relieve lockdown loneliness – study
University of Cambridge researchers identify potentially effective interventions to help people
Robotic dogs, laughter therapy and mindfulness could help people cope with loneliness and social isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers at the University of Cambridge have found.
The team at the university’s School of Medicine, led by Dr Christopher Williams, reviewed 58 existing studies on loneliness and identified interventions that could be adapted for people living in lockdown or under pandemic-related social distancing measures.
Continue reading...Grenfell cladding makers did not reveal ‘disastrous’ fire test data
Inquiry hears Arconic failed to share results with certifiers despite being ‘legally obliged’ to do so
The company that made the cladding panels used on Grenfell Tower did not tell certifiers about a “disastrous” failed fire test on one of its products despite being “legally obliged” to do so, the inquiry into the fire has heard.
Claude Schmidt, the president of Arconic’s French arm, denied the test results were “deliberately concealed”, but agreed the omission amounted to a “misleading half truth” during proceedings on Wednesday.
Continue reading...England’s poorest areas hit by Covid ‘perfect storm’ – leaked report
Exclusive: government analysis reveals unmet financial needs of many people needing to self-isolate
- Why Leicester, Blackburn and Bradford have been hit hard by Covid
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A “perfect storm” of low wages, cramped housing and failures of the £22bn test-and-trace scheme has led to “stubbornly high” coronavirus rates in England’s most deprived communities, an unpublished government report has found.
A classified analysis by the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC), produced last month, concluded that “unmet financial needs” meant people in poorer areas were less likely to be able to self-isolate because they could not afford to lose income.
Continue reading...‘I’ve accepted the risk’: volunteering to be exposed to Covid in new trials
Healthy adult volunteers aged 18 to 30 will be exposed to virus in controlled environment
Human challenge trials for coronavirus are to begin in the UK, a world first in the global fight against Covid-19.
Healthy adult volunteers aged between 18 and 30 will be exposed to coronavirus in a controlled environment, to learn more about how their body reacts to the virus, how it is transmitted and how much of the virus is needed to cause infection.
Continue reading...Prince Philip admitted to hospital as precautionary measure
Duke of Edinburgh taken to King Edward VII’s hospital in London, Buckingham Palace says
The Duke of Edinburgh has been admitted to hospital after feeling unwell, Buckingham Palace said.
Prince Philip, who is 99, was admitted on the advice of his doctor and a palace statement said it was a precautionary measure.
Continue reading...TS Eliot winner Bhanu Kapil: ‘It’s hard to study something by standing in front of it’
The poet’s latest collection, How to Wash a Heart, was partly inspired by a news story about a liberal white couple taking in an Asian refugee
Bhanu Kapil’s fourth poetry collection, Schizophrene, relays a scene from India’s partition. A girl fleeing her childhood home glimpses, through a hole in the cart in which she’s hidden, countless women tied to trees on the newly drawn border with Pakistan, their stomachs cut out. “This story, which really wasn’t a story but an image, was repeated to me at many bedtimes of my own childhood,” Kapil writes. This image was, in fact, “a way of conveying information”.
Throughout her work, Kapil examines the intergenerational effects of a historical silence that has slowly lifted over the largest mass migrations in history, which was also one of the most violent. These images demonstrate how colonial violence embedded in the heart of the British empire breeds racial trauma for migrants within its own borders. As she writes, again in Schizophrene, “it is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space”.
Continue reading...Mass testing still a vital tool in Covid efforts despite UK vaccine success
Analysis: Operation Moonshot rhetoric has been toned down but tests will help spot variants
When the government’s Operation Moonshot plans for mass testing of the population for Covid-19 were first revealed, the intention was to use that as the route out of perpetual cycles of lockdown.
It was described as a £100bn-plus endeavour, with resources likened to the Manhattan Project, the top-secret wartime endeavour led by the US to develop a nuclear bomb.
Continue reading...Brexit forces Northern Ireland buyers to cancel orders for 100,000 trees
Exclusive: Ban on plants being moved across Irish Sea is major setback for tree-planting programmes in region
Orders for almost 100,000 trees have been cancelled by Northern Ireland buyers because of a post-Brexit ban on the plants being moved from Britain, the Guardian can reveal.
Leaders in the business say it is a major setback for tree-planting programmes in Belfast and elsewhere in the region.
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