Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Abandoning of polluting vehicles has accelerated since expansion of ultra-low emission zone announced
Drivers in London have abandoned diesel cars six times faster than those in the rest of the UK since Sadiq Khan announced plans for a massive expansion of the London’s clean air zone.
Research released days before London’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez) is rolled out across the capital shows there are about 128,000 fewer diesel cars on the city’s roads than in 2017, when the mayor announced plans to create one of the biggest clean air zones in Europe.
Londoners received tens of thousands of Covid jabs in just a few hours on Saturday as football grounds in the capital were transformed into mass vaccination centres.
Huge jab clinics have been set up at the London Stadium, Stamford Bridge, the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the Valley, home of Charlton Athletic, and Selhurst Park.
Mayor will say city could look at bidding for 2036 or 2040 Games as post-Covid morale boost for nation
Sadiq Khan is pledging to look at bringing the Olympics back to London within 20 years if he is re-elected as mayor on Thursday.
In a speech at an amateur boxing club in Earlsfield, south-west London, on Tuesday, Khan will set out the prospect of another London Olympics as a post-Covid morale boost that he argues would extend beyond the capital.
Metropolitan police chief stands firm after criticism from London mayor and home secretary
Britain’s most senior police chief defied pressure to resign as she dismissed “armchair” critics amid widespread outrage over officers manhandling women who were mourning the killing of Sarah Everard.
Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan police commissioner, was publicly rebuked by the home secretary, Priti Patel, and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, for providing an unsatisfactory explanation of why police broke up a vigil for Everard in London’s Clapham Common on Saturday, near where she was allegedly abducted before being murdered.
'I'm afraid this virus is out of control,' the mayor of London has said after declaring a major incident as the capital's hospitals struggle to cope with coronavirus patients. 'The NHS in London is at risk of being overwhelmed ... we could run out of beds,' Sadiq Khan said. The mayor told BBC News that as many as one in 20 people had the virus in some parts of the city. 'The best way you can help the NHS is by staying at home,' he said
Residents vow to stop Taylor McWilliams’s scheme to develop a site that looms over the famous Electric Avenue street market
The outcome of the fight may help shape London’s future skyline. In one corner is a Texan millionaire DJ and property developer who has put forward plans for a 20-storey office block in Brixton, next to a conservation area and the district’s famous Electric Avenue.
Taylor McWilliams’s property company Hondo, which owns most of Brixton market, claims the proposal will “deliver” 2,000 jobs in the area and generate £2.8m every year for the local economy.
The mayor of London has criticised the government's Covid tier system, calling it a 'blunt instrument being retrofitted around solutions that are not as effective as they should be'. The city will be placed in tier 3 from 16 December, meaning bars and restaurants must close.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, Khan said the majority of new infections in the capital were among school-age children. 'I see very few children of that age in pubs, bars and restaurants,' Khan said. He urged the government to close secondary schools so that pupils do not pass on the virus to older relatives over Christmas
London Underground cleaning staff are on the frontline of the fight against the coronavirus, but are among the lowest paid workers, writes Mike Cash, RMT general secretary
He is right to spot that they are among the lowest-paid workers. London underground cleaning is outsourced to a company called ABM. The cleaners do not receive the same pension provision as their Transport for London counterparts and they are not entitled to free travel on the network they clean. Their workloads have soared as the company has cut back their numbers every year since the contract began, leaving them desperately overstretched during the pandemic.
Transport for London (TfL) has secured a bailout from the government worth about £1.8bn just a fortnight after Boris Johnson said Sadiq Khan had “effectively bankrupted” the tube and bus service in the capital.
In a significant win for the London mayor, the government has backed down on demands for fare increases, an extension of the congestion zone to cover the entire city and the scrapping of free fares for children and over-60s.
Today, new figures show just 62% of contacts reached, that’s the equivalent to 81,000 people not reached circulating in society - even though they’ve been exposed to the virus. This is another record low.
And yesterday we learnt that consultants working on test and trace are being paid over £6,000 a day to run this failing service. In a single week this government is paying these senior consultants more than they pay an experienced nurse in a year.
In the Commons the Manchester MP Lucy Powell said there were was “unanimous fury” from local MPs earlier when they were being briefed on the situation by one of Matt Hancock’s ministerial colleagues.
Rights coalition calls on mayors to withdraw from U20, which coincides with anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s murder
Mainly leftwing mayors of some of the world’s biggest cities are being urged to boycott a G20 urban summit hosted by Saudi Arabia on the 2nd anniversary of the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
The Urban 20 (U20) is being held as part of the Saudi Arabian chairmanship of this year’s G20. Among the mayors slated to attend include, Berlin’s Michael Müller, London’s Sadiq Khan, New York’s Bill de Blasio, Paris’s Anne Hidalgo, Rome’s Virginia Raggi as well as the mayors of Los Angeles and Madrid.
Mayor says that action is needed before a second Covid-19 wave hits London
It is “increasingly likely” that lockdown restrictions will soon be needed to slow the spread of coronavirus in London, the capital’s mayor has warned.
London mayor Sadiq Khan said he was of the “firm view” that action should be taken before the virus spirals out of control, and leaders were considering measures already imposed in other parts of the UK.
The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has confirmed that the annual firework display on New Year's Eve will not go ahead because of concerns about large numbers of people gathering in the capital's centre. 'We simply can't afford to have [those] numbers of people congregating,' Khan told LBC's James O'Brien. About 100,000 people usually attend the display
Pet owners should not be alarmed by the news that a cat has tested positive for coronavirus, the government says. This is from Yvonne Doyle, medical director at Public Health England:
This is the first case of a domestic cat testing positive for Covid-19 in the UK but should not be a cause for alarm.
Tests conducted by the Animal and Plant Health Agency have confirmed that the virus responsible for Covid-19 has been detected in a pet cat in England.
This is a very rare event with infected animals detected to date only showing mild clinical signs and recovering within in a few days.
Here is more from the Defra news release about the pet cat testing positive for coronavirus.
The pet cat was initially diagnosed by a private vet with feline herpes virus, a common cat respiratory infection, but the sample was also tested for SARS-CoV-2 as part of a research programme. Follow-up samples tested at the APHA laboratory in Weybridge confirmed the cat was also co-infected with SARS-CoV2 which is the virus known to cause Covid-19 in humans.
Pet owners can access the latest government guidance on how to continue to care for their animals during the coronavirus pandemic.
Activists want London mayor Sadiq Khan to cancel Silvertown road tunnel project
Three Extinction Rebellion activists have locked themselves to a rig in the middle of the Thames to protest against a planned road tunnel underneath the river in south-east London.
The keys to the locks around the protesters’ necks have been delivered to the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, with a note asking him to come and talk to them. However, the mayor’s office issued a statement ignoring the request and confirming plans to build the Silvertown tunnel are continuing.
Arrests made as ‘guard our monuments’ demonstrators chant ‘Eng-ger-land’ and throw bottles
At least five people have been arrested in clashes between protesters and police in central London at a demonstration against perceived slights to British national heritage.
Scotland Yard said that as of 5pm on Saturday, they had arrested five people for offences including violent disorder, assault on police, possession of an offensive weapon, being drunk and disorderly and possession of class A drugs.
Steve Rotheram is the latest mayor to urge people to wear masks in public after Sadiq Khan called on the government to make them compulsory on transport in London during the coronavirus outbreak.
The metro mayor of Liverpool city region said wearing any type of face covering meant Britons were likely to “go further in protecting [themselves] and other people”.
Local elections and the London mayoral election have been postponed for a year to deal with the coronavirus outbreak. The government made the decision to push back the 7 May elections after the Electoral Commission said the health crisis would have an impact on campaigning and voting.
“We will bring forward legislation to postpone local, mayoral and police and crime commissioner elections until May next year,” a government spokesman said.