Category Archives: Brighton

Messages of welcome to be delivered to refugees and asylum seekers

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Brighton organisation is inviting UK public to hand write notes of ‘solidarity’ after far-right violence

A Brighton-based organisation has promised to deliver handwritten messages welcoming refugees and asylum seekers who have recently arrived in the UK in the wake of far-right violence and anti-immigrant unrest.

Conversation Over Borders has invited the public to submit messages of “solidarity” online, which they plan to write by hand and deliver to people in accommodation hotels across the country.

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Green party launches election manifesto with ‘honest’ tax proposal

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Leaders outline ideas including wealth levy, rent controls, house-building, and water and energy firm nationalisation

The Greens have launched their election manifesto with an appeal to voters to help them into parliament as a challenge to what they termed the unambitious, “more of the same” policies of Labour.

Setting out their plans in Brighton and Hove, the location of one of the party’s key target seats, the co-leaders, Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay, said their proposals for higher taxes – mainly on wealthier people – were the only realistic way to improve public services and undertake vital environmental policies.

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Man jailed for at least 16 years over Speakers’ Corner gun attack plot

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Edward Little had travelled to London with £5,000 to buy weapon for attack on Christian preacher Hatun Tash

A dangerous extremist was 10 minutes from obtaining a gun that he wanted for an attack in Hyde Park in London when he was stopped in an armed police operation, a counter-terrorism chief has said.

Edward Little, 22, had travelled by taxi from his home in Brighton to London with £5,000 in cash when officers arrested him in September 2022.

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NHS trust under investigation accused of hypocritical email to staff

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CEO of University Hospitals Sussex urges staff to have courage to raise concerns, despite whistleblowers previously being sacked

The boss of a hospital trust being investigated by police for alleged negligence over 40 patient deaths has been accused of sending a hypocritical email urging staff to have the courage to raise concerns despite the dismissal of whistleblowing doctors.

Last week the Guardian revealed that the University Hospitals Sussex trust is under pressure to suspend surgeons whose cases are being reviewed by Sussex police in an investigation that involves more than 100 patients who either died or were seriously harmed between 2015 and 2021.

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The heat is on as Britain’s boom in seaside saunas stirs up some local sweat

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Hot boxes are popping up on the coast, as well as beside lakes and rivers, but not everyone is happy about the trend

Seaside saunas were just a wisp of a dream until 2018. Now anyone walking along a beach at one of the UK’s main resorts is likely to come across a converted horse box offering heat and steam as a respite from bleak skies and icy winds.

There are now 70 such saunas operating in the UK according to the British Sauna Society, mostly at beaches or lakes, fuelled by the growth in wild swimming and healthy living.

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Siân Berry to be Green candidate for Caroline Lucas’s Brighton seat

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Green members select the party’s former co-leader to stand in Brighton Pavilion at next election

The Green party has selected Siân Berry as its candidate to stand in Brighton Pavilion to replace Caroline Lucas MP.

Berry, Emily O’Brien and Dan Rue were vying to be the Green’s candidate in the Sussex constituency which Lucas, the former leader of the party, has represented in parliament since 2010.

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Brighton fire: police extend cordon around Royal Albion hotel

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Hotel continues to smoulder after blaze broke out on Saturday, with council advising people to avoid area

A police cordon around the Royal Albion in Brighton has been extended as the hotel continues to smoulder after a fire broke out on Saturday evening.

Fifteen fire engines from across the south-east were dispatched to the scene just before 5.30pm on Saturday and continued to battle the blaze long into the night.

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Fire breaks out at Royal Albion hotel in Brighton

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Emergency services working to put out blaze after being called to seafront hotel shortly before 5.30pm

A fire has broken out at a hotel in Brighton, with emergency services saying high winds are impeding their efforts to tackle the blaze.

East Sussex fire and rescue service (ESFR) was called to the Royal Albion hotel on the seafront at 5.24pm, and later tweeted that “15 fire appliances, one high volume pump and three aerial ladder platforms [were] in attendance”.

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I routinely gave Netanyahu gifts, Hollywood producer tells Israeli court

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Arnon Milchan begins testimony via video link in Israeli prime minister’s corruption trial

An Israeli producer of blockbuster Hollywood films has taken the stand in Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial, describing how he routinely delivered tens of thousands of dollars worth of champagne, cigars and other gifts requested by the Israeli prime minister.

Arnon Milchan, who appeared by video-conference from the UK city of Brighton, near where he is based, is a key witness whose testimony is essential for prosecutors who are trying to prove that Netanyahu committed fraud and breach of trust in one of three cases brought against him.

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Green party MP Caroline Lucas to stand down at next election

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Former party leader says she wants to ‘dedicate myself fully to climate and nature’

Caroline Lucas has said she feels more optimistic about the environment than when she first joined the Green party in 1986, as she prepares to retire from parliament after 13 years as her party’s only MP.

Lucas told the Guardian she felt “gratitude” for her career as the Greens’ first ever MP, adding that she took heart that many of the causes she has long championed were now the policies of both Labour and the Conservatives.

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St Mungo’s homelessness charity workers begin month-long strike

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Members of the Unite union will picket in London, Brighton, Bristol and Oxford after ‘pitiful’ pay offer

Workers at the homelessness charity St Mungo’s will begin a month-long strike on Tuesday in a dispute over pay.

Members of Unite who work at the organisation will mount picket lines outside its head office in Tower Hill in London and in Brighton, Bristol and Oxford. The union said the industrial action was over a “pitiful” pay offer of 2.25%, which was made in April 2023.

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England’s top beaches faced 8,500 hours of sewage dumping last year, study says

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Many blue flag beaches were covered in waste, and Brighton was among the worst-hit, Lib Dem report shows

England’s most celebrated beaches faced 8,500 hours of sewage dumping last year, new figures show.

Many beaches with blue flag status– an international mark of recognition that a beach is deemed safe and has good water quality – were found to have been covered in waste over the last 12 months.

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Refuse firm Lord of the Bins ordered to change its name by Tolkien franchise

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Two-man business contacted by lawyers of Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns rights to Lord of the Rings

A refuse firm in Brighton called Lord of the Bins has been ordered by lawyers to change its name after being accused of breaching trademark laws.

The two-man waste collection business was contacted by Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns the worldwide rights to The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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Revealed: child migrants racially abused and threatened with violence at Home Office hotel

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Whistleblower tells of threats and illegal detention in fresh revelations about failures that drove children into hands of criminals

Children seeking asylum in the UK were threatened and subjected to racist abuse by staff at a Home Office-run hotel, a whistleblower has claimed as pressure grows on the government to act over the growing crisis in the system.

The source, who worked in the Brighton hotel for more than a year, said that in such an environment of “emotional abuse”, scores of children, who had arrived in the UK without parents or a carer, were driven on to the streets and into the hands of criminals.

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Man who put on fat suit disguise to throw acid on ex-girlfriend jailed

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Medical student Milad Rouf imprisoned for 15 years for doorstep attack that disfigured junior doctor Rym Alaoui

A medical student who threw acid over his ex-girlfriend while disguised in a fat suit has been jailed for 15 years.

Milad Rouf put on the disguise, which also included makeup and sunglasses, before throwing sulphuric acid over Rym Alaoui, his ex-girlfriend and a former colleague, when she came to the door of her home in May.

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Sun, swimming, smoking and seagulls: a day in the life of beach hut Britain

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Across the UK, there are long waiting lists for a beach hut – and prices go up and up. A day on Hove promenade reveals why they are so popular and the problems that persist (mainly locks)

Everyone who meets Bonny Holland says the same thing: she really loves beach huts. “Bonny posts in our Facebook group about four times a day,” says the Hove and Portslade councillor Robert Nemeth, who founded the Hove Beach Hut Association. “I have to approve the posts.”

Inside Holland’s beach hut, the 62-year-old retired headteacher keeps a double-ring stove, a frying pan, a griddle pan, graffiti removal wipes, and, best of all, a loo. “You sit on this,” Holland says merrily, unfolding a portable toilet seat for my benefit, “and go in here.”

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‘You can’t cancel Pride’: the fight for LGBTQ+ rights amid the pandemic

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Lockdown hit LGBTQ+ communities hard but even as Pride events are called off there is hope and a promise that the parades will return

This month, for the second year in a row, there was no Pride parade in San Francisco, arguably the city most laden with history and symbolism for the LGBTQ+ community.

It is a decision Fred Lopez, who took over as executive director of San Francisco Pride at the beginning of last year describes as “heartbreaking”.

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Help, it’s 1,000 trillion degrees in here! The Big Bang artwork that makes scientists cry

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What would it have been like to be inside the Big Bang? We meet the ultra-hi-tech art duo who are using light, sound and sub-atomic astro data to recreate the biggest explosion ever

‘Step into the heart of the Big Bang,” says the advert for Halo, a walk-in, 360-degree, audiovisual installation about to open in Brighton. Come off it, I want to retort. You couldn’t “step” into the Big Bang without first travelling 13.8 billion years back in time and then being extremely miniaturised. After all, the universe was, according to one estimate, just 17cm in diameter at its inception.

What’s more, it was dark inside the Big Bang. In fact, there was no light at all. True, if you stuck around for 380,000 years, according to Nasa, you might have been able to see something because that was when free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms that would have allowed light to pass through. But who has 380,000 years to hang around waiting in the dark?

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Extinction Rebellion plans bank holiday weekend ‘uprising’

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Climate protests including ‘funeral march’ due to take place across UK, with focus on airports

Climate demonstrations are due to take place across the UK this weekend, as the environmental campaign group Extinction Rebellion launches its latest “uprising”.

This weekend’s events will include a “funeral march” in Lewes, East Sussex, to “mark the death and destruction wrought by humans on our natural world”. The march, described as a Procession for the Planet, will include mourners dressed in black and a jazz band.

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