Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Spain, Sweden and Canada have joined the growing list of countries to have reported cases of the more contagious coronavirus variant first identified in Britain.
Four cases of the variant have been confirmed in Madrid. All involve people who recently arrived from the UK, the Madrid regional government’s deputy health chief, Antonio Zapatero, told a news conference on Saturday.
‘UK caved in on fish to win a wider treaty’, industry bodies say, while leading Brexiter David Davis says one-day debate is ‘too fast’
Senior Conservative MPs late on Saturday expressed alarm at plans to rush the historic UK-EU trade deal through parliament in just one day, as fishermen’s leaders accused Boris Johnson of “caving in” at the 11th hour to clinch agreement on Christmas Eve.
And there were growing fears among senior Tories, who will spend the next three days poring over the 2,000-page agreement published on Saturday, that details in the fine print could still allow the EU to impose punitive tariffs on British exports if businesses fail to follow European rules.
Juan Andrés had braced himself for what promised to be an atypical holiday season. But the lorry driver from southern Spain never imagined that Christmas Day would be spent in his cab tucking into a ham and cheese sandwich – among provisions handed out by the British military – as he inched towards the Channel.
“I would describe it as a kidnapping,” said the 52-year-old when asked about the diplomatic impasse that left him stranded on British roads for nearly a week. As many as 10,000 lorries from across Europe were stuck after France temporarily closed its border over fears of a fast-spreading coronavirus variant, reopening only to those drivers who could show a negative coronavirus test.
The new variant of the coronavirus circulating in Britain has been detected in Sweden after a traveller from Britain fell ill on arrival and tested positive for it, the Swedish health agency said on Saturday.
A health agency official, Sara Byfors, told a news conference that the traveller, who was not identified, had kept isolated after arrival to Sweden and that no further positive cases had so far been detected.
Jordan has arrested a journalist over an article alleging that the coronavirus vaccine had arrived in the kingdom and that officials had received the jab, a judicial source said on Saturday.
“The state security court prosecutor ordered the arrest Thursday of journalist Jamal Haddad, editor of news website Al-Wakaai, for writing that government officials had been vaccinated against the coronavirus,” the source said.
Former MI6 spy exposed hundreds of western agents and settled in Soviet Union after escape from jail
The former British spy and Soviet Union double agent George Blake has died at the age of 98.
The RIA news agency reported that Blake died in Russia, citing the country’s SVR foreign intelligence agency. “We received some bitter news – the legendary George Blake passed away,” it said.
New Ross reinvented itself as a shrine to the Kennedy clan. Can towns linked to Biden, the most Irish American president since JFK, do the same?
After its factories died and its port withered, New Ross, a town perched by the River Barrow in south-east Ireland, decided in the 1990s to tap a unique asset: John F Kennedy.
The US president’s great-grandfather had sailed from the quays of New Ross to America during the 1840s famine, leaving behind a modest homestead that JFK twice visited, including a few months before his assassination in 1963. Like many Americans, not least the current US president-elect, Joe Biden, Kennedy was proud of his Irish connections and keen to re-emphasise the links.
Parliament should be recalled to deal with the crisis of coronavirus, not just that of leaving the EU
In January 1979, a beleaguered Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, returned from a Caribbean summit to a country that appeared in crisis. A week earlier, truck drivers had gone on strike, cutting off petrol supplies in the “winter of discontent”. When the prime minister arrived at London’s Heathrow airport, he held a press conference in which nothing memorable was said. Instead, in a phrase that has become code for political complacency, Callaghan became for ever associated with the following day’s Sun newspaper headline: “Crisis? What crisis?”
His fate was sealed. Callaghan lost the next general election to Margaret Thatcher. The lesson for politicians is the importance of perception in a crisis. If something feels like a crisis, it is effectively a crisis. Britain now confronts its most serious emergency since the second world war. It faces the unprecedented challenge of coronavirus while adjusting to a new diminished status outside the European Union. The country’s health service is at breaking point, and its future as a unified state is on the line. All this goes unmentioned by Boris Johnson, perhaps because he disingenuously promised that Brexit would save the NHS.
Five cases of the new coronavirus variant spreading fast across the UK have been found in Japan, and Russia has become the latest country to impose stricter quarantine on travellers from Britain.
Japan has avoided the huge infection numbers seen in countries from the US to Europe, but cases are rising sharply and daily numbers passed 3,000 for the first time this month.
Americans, Canadians and Britons among those lured by campaign to attract foreign tech workers
Finland has received more than 5,300 applications in a month for a groundbreaking scheme offering foreign tech workers and their families the chance to relocate to the Nordic country for 90 days to see if they want to make the move permanent.
“We’re not top of many relocation lists, but we know once people do come, they tend to stay,” said Johanna Huurre, of Helsinki Business Hub which devised the campaign. “There’s huge competition globally for talent, so we had to think creatively.”
Kim Logchies-Prins tells how employees gathered around canvas, sold for £1.5m, to give thanks
The owner of an art museum in Amsterdam who sold a prized Banksy painting for £1.5m to avoid laying off staff during the coronavirus pandemic has told how her employees gathered around the canvas to give thanks.
Kim Logchies-Prins, co-founder with her husband, Lionel, of the Moco museum of modern, contemporary and street art, said she joined 20 of the office staff to pay respects and say goodbye to Banksy’s Monkey Poison, following its sale to an anonymous US buyer at an auction in New York.
City’s murals of Maradona have become pilgrimage sites since footballer’s death in November
A month since the death of Diego Armando Maradona and the southern Italian city of Naples is looking more like a Maradonaland each day.
After renaming Napoli football club’s San Paolo Stadium and a train station in his honour this month, local authorities are planning a large museum, commissioning statues and dedicating an entire square to the Argentinian who took the city’s football team to glory and is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.
Kremlin critic says Lyubov Sobol detained after visiting Konstantin Kudryavtsev, the FSB agent tricked into speaking about poison plot
Russian police raided the home of opposition activist Lyubov Sobol early on Christmas Day and took her in for questioning, Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and his supporters have said.
Navalny’s supporters said they thought the police action was a response to her trying to knock at the door of an alleged FSB security agent in Moscow who Navalny says took part in the botched plot to poison him with novichok in August.
Last-minute agreement assessed as either a welcome economic boost or a bad move in a world that has become dominated by uncertainty
Britain should be congratulated for coming to a Brexit deal with the EU, but be wary of the very different world they are walking into, international analysts have said.
Outside Europe, politicians, experts, and media took a short break from Christmas and the pandemic to welcome the end of Britain’s long and torturous Brexit process, but there was little in the way of celebration.
Mosque beset by difficulties finally to allow in worshippers thanks to relaxation of Greece’s Covid restrictions
Christmas has been greeted with enthusiasm by Muslim worshippers in Athens after the modern Greek capital’s first official mosque – forced to close only days after its inauguration in November – was told it could reopen for the holiday.
Relaxation of a national lockdown to enable Greek Orthodox faithful to attend mass on Christmas Day means the mosque will also be able to operate.
Boris Johnson is confident he can sell the trade deal to Brexiters, according to the FT (paywall).
Sebastian Payne and George Parker report that Downing Street has been preparing the ground for weeks with the ERG, ensuring that senior backbenchers were aware of the shape of things to come and compromises being made.
Senior members of the group have already welcomed Johnson’s imminent deal as the “Christmas Eve Agreement”, a reference to the 1998 Belfast Good Friday Agreement that secured peace in Northern Ireland.
Indications from senior figures within the ERG suggest that many of its members will accept the compromises negotiated by Johnson and Lord Frost.
If they want help from the party to stay in parliament, then they’ll back the deal.
In case you’re just joining us, the final stage of the negotiations for a post-Brexit trade deal has been delayed after it emerged that the European commission was using out-of-date figures to calculate the reduction in the amount of fish that member states can catch in British waters after 1 January.
A deal was due to be announced early this morning but the announcement had to be postponed when officials noticed a discrepancy between two sets of fishing figures and realised that the numbers used in the negotiation appeared to be out of date.
People urged to turn off TVs and make noise during address, after rough year for royal family
Anti-monarchists in Spain are calling for noisy protests to drown out the king’s annual Christmas speech, urging people to turn off their televisions, bang on pots and pans or blast republican tunes, as the Spanish royal family seeks to turn the page on one of its most tumultuous years in recent history.
“There will be all sorts of protests by various collectives,” José Manuel García, of the republican group Encuentro Estatal por la República, told the news site Diario Público.
A team of French firefighters has been sent to Dover with 10,000 coronavirus tests for lorry drivers under a renewed Franco-British mission to let hauliers cross the Channel by Christmas Day as it emerged that fewer than 100 of the thousands of waiting vehicles were embarked on Wednesday.
France’s ambassador to the UK, Catherine Colonna, said the two countries were “neighbours, partners, allies and (yes) friends” and that 26 firefighters had brought thousands of rapid-turnaround tests to the port on Christmas Eve.
Italian Roberto Trignani is known for ‘awake surgery’ and other unorthodox methods
Playing the violin, watching cartoons and doing crosswords: these are just some of the activities patients have performed while having brain surgery under Roberto Trignani.
Trignani, the head of neurosurgery at Riuniti hospital in Ancona, Italy, was already known for his “awake surgery” techniques, which he has used roughly 70 times in the last few years. But he broke new ground in June this year when a 60-year-old woman prepared stuffed olives as he removed a tumour from her left temporal lobe.
Desperate relatives in Britain plead with Home Office for flexibility as paperwork holdups delay family reunions while deadline looms
The Home Office has said it will not allow a group of stranded refugee children to join their families in the UK if their cases do not make it through the Greek asylum system by 31 December when the EU family reunification programme comes to an end.
Around 20 children who are eligible to join their relatives in the UK under the current family reunification scheme are still waiting for their cases to be completed in Greece, before the UK government ends the programme when it leaves the EU on the 31st December.
Britain and Europe still seeking last-minute advantage in final stages of negotiations
A post-Brexit trade and security treaty with the European Union is within “touching distance”, Downing Street said on Wednesday night as Boris Johnson prepared to overcome final disagreements to unveil a hard-fought Christmas Eve deal.
The prime minister is expected to seal the deal following a final call with the European commission president Ursula von der Leyen – but the two sides were battling deep into the night to gain a last-minute advantage.