United Kingdom

In both countries 33% of adults hit the target on a daily basis, with Korea and Israel next highest in OECD figures

A £94 increase to the average annual household energy bill has come into effect after the regulator upped its price cap in response to a rise in global gas market prices.

The change, taking effect from 1 January, means average households are beginning 2024 with a 5% increase in energy bills – at the start of what could be the coldest three months of the year.

Every three months the energy regulator for Great Britain, Ofgem, sets a maximum price that suppliers can charge customers on standard variable tariffs for each unit of energy. wallet with money Glimmers of hope: your personal finance diary January-April 2024 Read more

The increase means that for the period 1 January to 31 March, the price cap is £1,928 a year for a typical household that uses gas and electricity and pays their bill by direct debit. That is up from £1,834 a year during the final three months of 2023.

Ministers have been told they will be “punished” by voters after analysis revealed the decline of vital flood defences across England.

The proportion of critical assets in disrepair has almost trebled in the West Midlands and the east of England since 2018, leaving thousands of homes and businesses more vulnerable to storms.

Transnational repression on British soil appears to be rising just as the U.K. navigates a world in which its exit from the European Union has left its economic and diplomatic powers seriously diminished. The government, now stacked with Brexit hardliners, is desperately seeking new commercial and political partners to help it deliver on the promised benefits of severing ties with the world’s largest trading bloc.

All this has led to some uncomfortable compromises. It’s difficult to stand up to superpowers (see China) or petrostates (see Saudi Arabia) when you know you may need to rely on them for investment and trade.

As cars and lorries snail interminably along the A30 in Cornwall – the county’s notorious trunk road – the words of the furious driver in John Betjeman’s poem, Meditation On The A30, seem befitting: “I can’t go on crawling like this!”

Such frustrations are especially acute in summertime when tourists compete with hauliers, tractors and local residents for space on the asphalt, many of them en route to the coastal hotspots of Perranporth and St Ives. But those days could soon be gone.

A £330m roadworks scheme is nearing completion, with National Highways creating an 8.7-mile stretch of dual carriageway between Carland Cross and Chiverton, parallel to the existing A30, bringing the promise of prosperity for the local economy, as well as fears for the environment at a time of global heating.

A clear majority of the British public now believes Brexit has been bad for the UK economy, has driven up prices in shops, and has hampered government attempts to control immigration, according to a landmark poll by Opinium to mark the third anniversary of the UK fully leaving the EU single market and customs unions.

The survey of more than 2,000 UK voters also finds strikingly low numbers of people who believe that Brexit has been of benefit to them or the country.

Public services will not recover until the 2030s even under a Labour government, and it will take a decade to clear the backlog in the NHS and the courts, a report says.

The study from the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive thinktank, outlines the challenges an incoming Labour government would face, with voters impatient for change within a first term.

“The next government will inherit one of the most challenging contexts in terms of public services of any new government since the second world war,” said Harry Quilter-Pinner, an IPPR director, warning that reform and higher spending would be necessary.

Some of the IPPR’s ideas include rolling out AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to the public sector to save an estimated £24bn a year, with a “right to retrain” for workers whose jobs are affected.

"Most of the kids who struggle in Bury are the products of crap parents and so what do we do to try to address that issue? On the left it would just be we’ll throw money at this and hope something sticks, somebody like me thinks about this more fundamentally," Daly says.

I’m lucky enough to be one of just 0.01% of the world’s population who speaks Welsh as their mother tongue. Its survival over 1,500 years is remarkable, living cheek by jowl with English, the most dominant language on Earth. The Welsh language faces a genuine threat; it is classed as “vulnerable” by the Endangered Languages Project and “potentially vulnerable” by Unesco. The latest census showed that despite huge expense and effort, in 2021 there were 24,000 fewer Welsh speakers in Wales than a decade earlier, with the proportion dropping to a record low of 17.8%.

Kerbside collections for small electrical goods such as toasters and hairdryers could be rolled out across the UK from 2026 under government proposals to boost recycling.

Ministers are also considering drop-off points in retailers where households can recycle unwanted items for free.

And shops and online sellers would be made to pick up unwanted or broken larger electrical items such as fridges when delivering replacements.

A 10-week consultation is taking place.

No new plans for onshore wind have been accepted in England since the government claimed it had “lifted” the de facto ban, new analysis reveals.

Renewable energy organisations warned at the time that this was likely. Despite the levelling up secretary, Michael Gove, having changed planning rules introduced in 2015 by the then prime minister, David Cameron, to stop onshore wind projects being blocked by a single objection, they still face higher barriers than every other form of infrastructure, including waste incinerators.

Analysis of the government’s renewable energy planning database shows that no applications for new onshore wind projects have been submitted since the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, claimed that the government would overturn the onshore wind ban in September 2023.

The finding is included in a review of 1,361 suppliers to the NHS, conducted by the Department of Health and Social Care, following a government commitment to eradicate modern slavery from the healthcare system.

The review highlighted specific areas of concern, including conditions in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, and noted that an estimated 100,000 Uyghurs and other ethnic minority ex-detainees in China may be working in conditions of forced labour.

The poet Robert Burns imagined a man toasting his lover with a “pint o’ wine”, and Winston Churchill was perhaps the most famous proponent of the pint bottle for champagne. Now, Rishi Sunak’s government has spied a “Brexit opportunity” to legalise the sale of wine by the pint once more – if it can persuade anyone to make the bottles.

Still and sparkling wine will be sold in 200ml, 500ml and 568ml (pint) sizes in 2024, alongside existing measures, under new rules, the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) announced on Wednesday. It said the change was made possible by Brexit.

However, the pint-sized move appeared to be the extent of a push towards imperial measures, after a government consultation into allowing more businesses to buy and sell using them resulted in no new action.

The UK government has said it is determined to bring down migration into Britain after an official estimate found it had reached a record of 745,000 in the year to December 2022, with people fleeing the war in Ukraine and China’s crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong cited as a factor.

A British national overseas visa scheme introduced to “reflect the UK’s historic and moral commitment” to Hongkongers received about 191,000 applications between its launch in January 2021 and September this year, with 96.7% (184,700) receiving approval.

Edmund Richards, who worked for 40 years as a miner, shakes his head sadly as he gazes at one of the many disused coal tips at the head of the Rhondda Fawr valley in south Wales. “They’re on the move,” he says. “No doubt. From time to time, inspectors will come and have a look, and say all is fine, but everyone around here knows they are on the move, on the slide.”

It isn’t always easy to spot the tips in this craggy landscape decades after most of the mines closed. Often, they are cloaked in scrub and trees but Richards, 80, says everyone who lives nearby knows where they are and is worried about them. “They need to get on and sort them out once and for all,” adds Richards. “It’s only a matter of time before something terrible happens.”

The issue of what to do about Wales’s 2,500 disused coal tips is back on the political agenda after the Labour-led Welsh government published maps pinpointing 350 situated close to homes and communities that it fears could put people at risk in the event of a landslip.

Less than three weeks into her new role as health secretary, Victoria Atkins left health campaigners aghast when she suggested her approach to tackling obesity would largely focus on dietary advice.

Obesity is a devastating public health problem harming millions of people in the UK that will never be resolved by tips on what to eat and what to avoid. Two in three adults are overweight or obese and the problem costs £100bn a year.

The Met Office has provisionally recorded the highest minimum temperature for Christmas Day on record – though much of the UK still had a grey and damp 25 December.

Temperatures measured at Exeter airport and East Malling, Kent, did not fall below 12.4C, beating the previous record of 11.5C measured at Waddon in Croydon in 1983.

In terms of maximum temperatures, the mercury hit 13.2C at Exeter airport and Merryfield in Somerset, making Monday the warmest Christmas Day since 2018, when meteorologists recorded 13.3C.

Previous Met Office research has found that record temperatures have been made more likely because of human-induced climate breakdown.

TL;DR, Feddit.UK is down, we’re working on making a fun replacement!

A number of days ago, feddit.uk had kicked the bucket.

The community on there had noticed months ago that the owner was inactive. This was around September (Going off of memory). So they arranged to set up a new community run by the same feddit.uk admins (except the owner, the only one who had host access) which would replace it. However, on the weekend as Quackhouse was going to be launched, the owner responded to an email and made two users admins. Emperor and GreatAlbatross. However, they did not have access to the console, just lemmy adminship. Ever since, the owner has been AWOL. The community were too afraid to go back to setting up Quackhouse incase the owner showed up again.

Unfortunately, that wariness and being afraid led to the worst case scenario happening - Feddit.uk has dropped offline. We believe the instance has reached some form of file size cap. It was basically an aeroplane flying with dead pilots before then. And it appears that aeroplane has crashed.

If you are from the feddit.uk refugee base, please join the new community whenever it is ready. Do not sign up now. We are busy and still setting up and don’t want an influx of new users just yet.

For now, sit tight. I’ll update this post whenever it’s up and running and ready for sign-ups. I am not posting the name for now so we don’t get overrun with sign ups. But we would love to invite you back to our community when it’s set up.

The new community will have it’s own unique identity that doesn’t have to piggyback off of Lemmy and Reddit for it’s name. But it will still aim to be the main UK lemmy instance that feddit.uk was. By all means, it will be a full lemmy instance, still federated, etc. It should be the same experience as feddit.uk. But we actually do have fun plans to create a nice sense of identity with that instance if all goes well! I will warn you, it does have a silly name, but that was the name that was decided upon.

We look forward to having new members. All are welcome, whether or not you were from Feddit.UK or not. We will have the theme be a UK-based lemmy instance.

I’ll try and remember to update this post when we are ready.

~20CX12