Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Scottish health board figures for tests on care home staff and residents reveal a “scandalous” postcode lottery, with significant divergence in how different parts of the country are coping with new testing policy.
Scotland’s health secretary, Jeane Freeman, pledged on 28 May to offer weekly tests to all 50,000 care home workers. Last Friday, after concerns were raised about the uptake of the policy, she sent a strongly worded letter to health board chief executives last Friday, telling them that directives were “not for local interpretation”, and that board-by-board data on the number of completed tests would now be published weekly.
Penny Mordaunt tells MPs she hopes to have post-Brexit deal agreed by autumn
The UK government will tell the EU on Friday it is not going to seek an extension to the Brexit transition period, the paymaster general, Penny Mordaunt, has said.
She told the House of Commons in an update on Brexit talks that she and Michael Gove would “emphasise that we will not be extending the transition period” when they meet EU counterparts at a Brexit joint committee meeting on Friday.
Force of history demands re-evaluation of colonial statues and street names
Cities have always been about apportioning and memorialising power; about writing force into space. Britain’s colonial and imperial past is inscribed into the bricks and mortar of every city and town in the country. Mostly this hidden text of power relations and wealth acquisition lies dormant in the half-forgotten significance of street names, in the knotty iconography of grand facades, in the barely read inscriptions on memorials and sculptures, in the nomenclature of grand public buildings. Forming the backdrop of lived lives, these omnipresent clues are rarely fully decoded. The most monumental of sculptures has a habit of fading away to near invisibility if it is sufficiently familiar.
At times, though, such associations are activated and become urgent. So it has been in the case of the long-running affair of Edward Colston, who made his fortune in the 17th century from the enslavement of thousands of Africans.
All four of the UK’s chief medical officers rejected suggestions from No 10 that the coronavirus threat level could be reduced because it contradicted evidence that showed the virus was still widespread, the Guardian has been told.
A senior source in one devolved government said the chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland discussed and refused Boris Johnson’s proposal.
The Conservative backbenchers Henry Smith has outraged opposition parliamentarians by saying that the objection to MPs returning to the House of Commons after next week’s recess (when the current, largely-virtual proceedings will end) has come from the “lazy left” and from “workshy” Labour and nationalist politicians.
Not that I should be surprised by the lazy left but interesting how work-shy socialist and nationalist MPs tried to keep the remote Parliament going beyond 2 June.
Henry this is an appalling thing to say, would you like to compare cases dealt with in this crisis? Hours helping with food, PPE, testing? Number of questions put down to ministers? Number of bill amendments written? Also calling people working at home workshy is quite something https://t.co/RROVCxbG7O
The government’s own public health advice has said that those who can work from home should and parliament has developed a system using technology to ensure the scrutiny of government whilst allowing people to work remotely.
Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, told the London assembly this morning that he is considering banning passengers from buses and tube trains in the capital if they are not wearing a face covering. He said that he was hoping to persuade the UK government, which is currently just advising people to wear face coverings on public transport, to toughen its stance. He told the assembly:
We don’t want confusion. When there is a crisis, what’s important is to have message clarity.
What you are allowed to do now depends on what part of the union you live in
The UK’s approach to Covid-19 now very much depends on what part of the union you live in after Downing Street’s decision to drop the “stay at home” slogan in favour of “stay alert” and its plans to begin lifting the lockdown this week.
The devolved administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff and at Stormont have all – in their own ways – opted to stick with “stay at home” while Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has described the move by Boris Johnson as “potentially catastrophic”.
Scotland's first minister for Scotland Nicola Sturgeon has rebuffed the UK government's new coronavirus advice, saying that she doesn’t know what it means, and that her country would not use it. She also announced that people in Scotland would be able to exercise more than once a day
The government was on Thursday evening urgently trying to regain control of the next phase of the pandemic crisis as it faced fierce criticism and warnings that mixed messaging was priming the public to give up on the lockdown.
Fake social media accounts also used to support Ron Paul’s presidential bid and the Occupy movement
Iran’s state broadcaster experimented with using fake social media accounts to influence the outcome of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum and other western elections, according to a report from Facebook released on Tuesday.
The Iranian network, one of eight to be suspended for so-called “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” by the social media giant in April, points to efforts by state-linked groups to try to use Facebook to influence foreign democratic contests years before Russia’s alleged campaign against the 2016 US presidential contest.
New law will also offer wider protection against race, sex, age and religious discrimination
The Scottish government has published a bill that would decriminalise blasphemy, more than 175 years after the last case was prosecuted.
The devolved administration in Edinburgh said the continued criminalisation of blasphemy, which falls under hate crime laws, “no longer reflects the kind of society in which we live”.
Scotland must adjust to the 'new normal' of living with Covid-19, which may include moving in and out of strict lockdowns at short notice, according to a document published on Thursday by the Scottish government, which sets out its framework for progressing beyond the current lockdown restrictions
Hundreds of asylum seekers in Glasgow have been given less than an hour’s notice to pack up their flats before being moved into city centre hotels, where they claim social distancing is “impossible”.
They have also had all financial support withdrawn, apparently because the hotels provide three meals a day, basic toiletries and a laundry service, in a move condemned by campaigners.
Chris Lewis is staying on usually uninhabited Hildasay until charity challenge can resume
A former paratrooper is isolating on a usually uninhabited Shetland island after lockdown measures were introduced when he was on a fundraising challenge to walk the UK coastline.
Chris Lewis, 39, has walked 12,000 miles since setting off from Llangennith beach on the Gower peninsula near his home city of Swansea, south Wales, in August 2017.
Scotland’s chief medical officer, Catherine Calderwood, has apologised after she visited her second home in Fife in breach of her own advice to avoid travel. Calderwood was pictured on Saturday with her family taking a walk with their dog in the East Neuk, a picturesque area on the Firth of Forth about 45 miles from her main home in Edinburgh
Scotland’s chief medical officer has been forced to step back from public briefings after a furious reaction to news she broke her own rules to twice visit her second home during the coronavirus outbreak.
But despite mounting calls for Catherine Calderwood to resign from her position, Nicola Sturgeon on Sunday insisted that she would continue to play a key role in guiding the Scottish government’s response to the crisis.
As warm weekend weather arrived in the UK, Matt Hancock said people needed to follow the rules on coronavirus or the government would be forced to ban all exercise outside
Gordon Jackson was filmed on train talking about Salmond and sexual assault trial
The lawyer who helped secure Alex Salmond’s acquittal over allegations of sexual assault has quit as the head of Scotland’s advocates body after a furore over remarks he made about Salmond and his accusers.
Gordon Jackson QC announced on Friday he was standing down as the dean of the Faculty of Advocates, one of the most powerful posts in Scotland’s legal profession, because he is under investigation for professional misconduct.
The UN climate talks due to be held in Glasgow later this year have been postponed as governments around the world struggle to halt the spread of coronavirus.
The most important climate negotiations since the Paris agreement in 2015 were scheduled to take place this November to put countries back on track to avoid climate breakdown. They will now be pushed back to 2021.
A Scottish sheep farmer has pleaded with the public to follow the government’s guidance to stay indoors to prevent putting farmers, who are ‘trying to provide for the nation’, at risk of coronavirus. Speaking in a video posted on Facebook, Emma Murdoch from New Galloway said: ‘Every gate you touch, every stile you touch, if you have the virus you are giving it to a farmer. If we are ill, how do we look after our livestock? How do we produce for the nation?'