Two fatalities reported after officers called to Walthamstow then Scratchwood Park
Two men have died in separate stabbing incidents in north London.
In the first incident, officers were called to Bromley Road, in Walthamstow, in the north-east of the capital, at 7.16pm on Thursday after reports of a fight. They discovered two men suffering from stab injuries when they arrived alongside the London Ambulance Service.
Continue reading...Allegations a security firm at Ecuadorian embassy gave footage to CIA come as 100 doctors urge Australia to protect him
Julian Assange’s fight against extradition to the US could last years, and his argument could hinge on reports he has been illegally spied upon and his sensitive information given to the CIA.
Meanwhile, more than 100 doctors from across the world have written to the Australian government, urging it to act and “protect the life of its citizen”, in a letter to be delivered to the foreign affairs minister on Tuesday, amid warnings Assange’s health continues to deteriorate.
Continue reading...With its rickety rides, fire-breathing dragons and Arthurian castle, the enchanted realms proposed for the Thames Estuary park are little Britain writ large. Will its High Street have a closed down library?
A circular building topped with a union jack dome rises from the trees on the Swanscombe peninsula in Kent. With its flag tightly wrapped around a glass bubble, it looks like a little Brexit capsule, safely sealed off from the free movement and free markets of the outside world.
This is the proposed entrance pavilion to the London Resort, a £3.5bn theme park planned for the Thames estuary. This walled kingdom of themed “lands” would rise from the muddy marshes by 2024, just as Boris Johnson nears the end of this term as PM. The first images of this planned dreamland were unveiled a few days before the election and the project now seems like a fitting metaphor for the result. Why elect a government that would address social welfare, tackle rising homelessness and fix the NHS, when you can build a parallel fantasy world instead?
Continue reading...Union says board agreed to salary increase after threat to escalate industrial action
Park attendants at seven central London green spaces will now be paid the London living wage after a wave of coordinated strikes.
Their union, United Voices of the World (UVW), said the board of Royal Parks – a charity which manages Hyde Park and St James’s Park, among others – agreed to increase workers’ salaries after it threatened to escalate industrial action on Thursday.
Continue reading...Family say they begged for help from authorities but no one seemed to be listening
Everybody failed 14-year-old Jaden Moodie, his family say. If the teachers or the social workers or the Home Office officials had acted differently, they believe, he would still be alive today.
After Wednesday’s verdict in the Old Bailey trial of Ayoub Majdouline, a 19-year-old drug dealer who in 2018 had been classed as a victim of modern slavery over concerns he was being exploited, Jaden’s loved ones held hands in court and said: “Yes. For Jaden, we’ve done it.”
Continue reading...Supt Robyn Williams may be sacked before appeal against conviction can be heard
A decorated senior Metropolitan police officer controversially convicted of possessing a child abuse video is facing a fast-track dismissal from the force, the Guardian has learned.
Supt Robyn Williams could end up being sacked within months for gross misconduct, before her appeal against her conviction can be heard.
Continue reading...Commissioner brings forward her retirement and will step down on New Year’s Eve
The London fire commissioner in charge of the highly criticised response to the Grenfell Tower fire has resigned following renewed calls from bereaved families and survivors of the disaster for her to quit.
Dany Cotton announced on Friday that she would be stepping down on New Year’s Eve, bringing forward her planned retirement in June. In October, after the public inquiry into what happened on the night of the fire found serious failings in the London fire brigade’s (LFB) preparation and response, Cotton refused to resign, saying she wanted to see out reforms. The inquiry concluded that the LFB’s delay in evacuating the burning building cost lives. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, also resisted calls for her to go.
Continue reading...The French president has defended calling Nato 'brain dead' during the opening day of the alliance’s summit in London, after he was reproached by Donald Trump, who said the comment was 'insulting'. Macron’s original condemnation of Nato’s 'brain death' stemmed from his anger at the lack of Turkish cooperation with the rest of Nato over its decision to invade Syria
Continue reading...French president is rebuked by Trump over Nato criticism after row with Turkey about Kurds
Nato disunity was on full display on the opening day of the alliance’s summit in London as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, accused Turkey of colluding with Islamic State proxies while Donald Trump described Macron’s criticisms of Nato’s “brain death” as insulting and “very, very nasty”.
The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for his part threatened again to veto Nato’s defence plan for the Baltics unless Nato endorsed its own assessment that Syrian Kurdish fighters on Turkey’s borders were terrorists, a definition that Macron and the Pentagon rejected.
Continue reading...Typhoon jets scrambled in response to plane that was not answering air traffic control
A huge bang heard across London and in Hertfordshire just after 4am on Sunday was caused by RAF jets going supersonic, the Met and the MoD said.
“Two Typhoon fighter aircraft from RAF Coningsby were scrambled at 0409 this morning, as part of the UK’s Quick Reaction Alert (QRA) procedures, after an aircraft lost communications in UK airspace,” said the Ministry of Defence. “The aircraft was intercepted and its communications were subsequently re-established. The Typhoons are returning to their base.”
Continue reading...The minke whale was discovered on Friday by a patrol boat under Battersea Bridge
An eight-foot whale washed up on the shore of the Thames yesterday, where it was found by a patrol boat under Battersea Bridge.
The minke whale was found on Friday evening at about 10pm by a Port of London Authority boat, but it is not yet known how it got there or why it died.
Continue reading...Giles Terera claims Ain’t Nothin’ But blues bar denied group of actors entry because they were black
A star of the hit musical Hamilton has accused a Soho bar of racial profiling, claiming that it denied a group of actors entry because they were black.
Giles Terera said the Ain’t Nothin’ But blues bar had allowed 10 white people next to them to enter, but that the group of eight black actors were turned away.
Continue reading...Attacker Usman Khan was close to radical preacher and had been part of 2010 plot to attack the Stock Exchange
A counter-terrorism specialist has described the criminal justice system as playing “Russian roulette” with the public, after it was revealed the London Bridge attacker had been released from jail after being convicted of terror offences.
Chris Phillips, a former head of the UK National Counter Terrorism Security Office, told the PA news agency:
The criminal justice system needs to look at itself. We’re letting people out of prison, we’re convicting people for very, very serious offences and then they are releasing them back into society when they are still radicalised.
So how on Earth can we ever ask our police services and our security services to keep us safe? I’ve said it a few times today, we’re playing Russian roulette with people’s lives, letting convicted, known, radicalised Jihadi criminals walk about our streets.
Sky News is reporting that the attacker was “a student and personal friend” of the radical preacher Anjem Choudary.
Choudary was released from prison last year after serving half of the five-and-a-half-year sentence he received in 2016 for urging support for Isis and pledging allegiance to the terrorist group.
Sky News understands 28-year-old Usman Khan who has been identified as the suspect in the London Bridge terror attack was a student and personal friend of the Islamist extremist Anjem Choudary
Continue reading...A man and a woman were killed in a terror attack in London carried out by an Islamist extremist who had been jailed for an al-Qaida inspired bomb plot and was recently released on licence.
Scotland Yard are investigating how 28-year-old Usman Khan was able to launch the attack in London Bridge on Friday, despite being known to the authorities and fitted with an electronic tag to monitor his movements. He was allowed out a year ago after serving time for his part in a plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange.
Continue reading...Police have detained one man after being called to reports of a stabbing
Owen Jones, the Guardian columnist, said he arrived the area minutes after the incident and saw people running away in fear. He said:
“I turned up as emergency services had arrived en masse in the area... Cordons were being put up and people were running away. The police were yelling: ‘keep moving’ and people were running away looking frightened. I was by London Bridge about to the cross the bridge
“One of my friends was evacuated from their office in the area.. I saw lots of people running down the streets towards me... it was a bad atmosphere and everyone in the area are quite worried. In these circumstances, no one knows what is going on. It was just a very chaotic - where I was, people were scared. They were genuinely very scared.”
Amanda Hunter, who witnessed the shooting from a bus and videoed the aftermath, described what she saw to BBC News. She said:
I was coming home on the 21 bus and all of all a sudden it stopped. There was some commotion and I looked out the window and I just saw these three police officers going over to a man. It seemed like there was something in his hand. I’m not 100% sure, but then one of the police officer shot him.
From there, I was able to take a video of the scene.
Continue reading...Arconic’s outlay on lawyers dwarfs amount spent on panels found to be main cause of fire spread
The Grenfell Tower cladding manufacturer has spent £30m on lawyers and advisers defending its role in the disaster in an outlay that dwarfs the amount spent on the panels a public inquiry has determined were the main cause of fire spread.
Arconic has been spending at a rate of up to £50,000 a day on lawyers and other advisers, according to corporate filings in the US seen by the Guardian. As well as the public inquiry, it is embroiled in a criminal investigation in the UK with detectives investigating possible corporate manslaughter and manslaughter cases, a civil suit in the US for wrongful death brought by survivors and a consumer protection inquiry in France, where the subsidiary that supplied the Grenfell panels is based.
Continue reading...Roy Harrison, who came to Britain from Jamaica aged six, fighting deportation notice
A man caught in the Windrush scandal has resorted to sleeping in a freezing bin shed because the Home Office has not regularised his status and is trying to deport him.
Roy Harrison, 44, arrived in the UK as a six-year-old. He had been abandoned as a newborn in Jamaica by his mother and left on his grandmother’s doorstep.
Continue reading...Printed in 1843, the hand-coloured card originally sold for one shilling and shaped the popular tradition
The world’s first printed Christmas card, an artwork created in 1843 that went on to spawn a global industry, has gone on show at the Charles Dickens Museum in London.
Designed by Henry Cole and illustrated by John Callcott Horsley, in the same year that Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published, the hand-coloured card shows a family gathered around a table enjoying a glass of wine with a message: “A merry Christmas and a happy new year to you.”
Continue reading...Expert warns of ‘huge inequality’ in capital, while Lithuanian males live shortest lives
Men from west London, one of the wealthiest areas of the UK, have the longest life expectancy of males in Europe with a newborn baby expected to live to the age of 82, according to statistics published to mark International Men’s Day.
The data from the EU department Eurostat suggests that only men from the city centre of the Spanish capital, Madrid, tend to live as long as the fortunate subset of Londoners.
Continue reading...Three PMs attend marketing sales event on how wealthy can snap up citizenship from $100,000
Three prime ministers took to a stage in the ballroom of a five-star London hotel this week offering the world’s wealthiest people “golden passports” and citizenship of their countries in return for hundreds of thousands of pounds of investment or flat “contributions”.
Allen Chastanet, the prime minister of the Caribbean island of St Lucia, told about 300 members of the super-rich elite and their advisers gathered at the Rosewood hotel for “global citizenship conference” that his country’s economic mission was “going after high net-worth individuals and giving them a comfortable place to live”.
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