Exclusive: Five gardening teams shortlisted for Royal Horticultural Society’s new Railway Stations in Bloom award
Every year since 1964, towns across the UK have bloomed with hanging baskets and brightly coloured flowerbeds planted by residents.
They wield their trowels in aid of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Britain in Bloom competition, a coveted accolade for the 1,600 communities that enter each year.
Continue reading...Candidates have been selected for November’s midterms – have Republicans and Democrats made the right choices?
Primary season has official concluded in the United States, with Democrats leading the polls among voters amid widespread economic anxieties, a war with Iran and Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda continuing into the end of the year.
Democratic and Republican voters have selected contenders for key races in the 3 November midterms that will decide the balance of power in Congress, and the future of both parties. Democrats have been rocked by the primary victories of leftwing candidates. Republicans have doubled down on backing the president’s policies, despite his low approval ratings. And both parties are navigating the fallout from a series of scandals that have forced some candidates from the race, while others decided to press on.
Continue reading...Bridget Phillipson says Burnham’s past criticisms of US president not an issue as PM prepares to meet Trump at UN
Next month’s budget will be made more difficult by Donald Trump’s war with Iran, one of Andy Burnham’s cabinet ministers has said, while adding she did not expect the prime minister’s previous disparaging comments about the US president to be an issue.
Burnham is expected to meet Trump early next week at the UN general assembly summit in New York, the pair having previously spoken twice by phone since Burnham entered No 10.
Continue reading...The Warsaw event saw 26 teams compete across a series of demanding tasks, inspired - to varying degrees - by tram drivers’ day-to-day tasks
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It’s the grand final for gunzels. But despite having one of the largest tram networks in the world, Melbourne’s Tramaroos finished second last at this year’s European TramDriver Championship, just ahead of London.
The event, held in Warsaw on Saturday, saw 26 teams compete across a series of demanding tasks, inspired – to varying degrees – by tram drivers’ day-to-day work.
Continue reading...Shabana Mahmood is concerned about length and £144m cost of inquiry into intrusive police surveillance
Victims of intrusive police surveillance have accused the government of seeking to cut short the spycops public inquiry that has been examining widespread misconduct committed by undercover officers.
The independent judge-led inquiry is scrutinising how officers, who spied on tens of thousands of political activists over more than four decades, carried out abuses such as deceiving women into sexual relationships and fathering children.
Continue reading...Comments come after he accused King Charles of gaslighting him in response to claims made in new memoir
Earl Spencer has said the relationship between the press and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex “echoes” the way the media treated his sister Diana, Princess of Wales.
In an interview with the BBC to be aired on Sunday evening, Spencer described the press’s coverage of Harry and Meghan as having a “cancerous influence”, adding it would be “beholden on people to learn from Diana’s example”.
Continue reading...A Bondi Beach woman in her 90s, a 23-year-old in Wagga Wagga and a woman in her 70s in Mole River died within hours of each other on Saturday
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Three men have been accused of domestic violence-related murders after the deaths of three women in New South Wales on Saturday.
Sergei Mitnik did not apply for release on Sunday when he appeared in a bail court hours after being charged with the murder of an elderly woman inside a unit at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
Continue reading...Authorities accuse Ukraine of trying to disrupt poll and say 1,600 drones in total intercepted, while at least two people killed and oil refinery damaged
Hundreds of drones targeting Moscow and its surrounding region killed at least two people and damaged a major refinery on the final day of the country’s parliamentary elections, authorities said on Sunday.
The capital’s mayor said that more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted and shot down, 450 of which were aimed at Moscow.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Analysis ‘lays bare’ something midwives already know from their day-to-day work
About 20,000 disclosures of domestic abuse are estimated to be made to maternity services in England every year, analysis has found.
The figures are likely to be an underestimate of the true scale of disclosures, according to experts, highlighting the role maternity professionals play in identifying abuse.
Continue reading...Embattled Friedrich Merz faces nervous wait while far-right Alternative für Deutschland party targets further gains
Voters in two German states are going to the polls with the political future of the embattled chancellor, Friedrich Merz, hanging in the balance and an emboldened far right targeting further gains.
Coming two weeks after a seismic election in Saxony-Anhalt in which the anti-immigration, pro-Kremlin Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) scored its highest ever result in a regional poll, the nativist party is expected to drain support again from Merz’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
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