United Kingdom

English Defence League founder Tommy Robinson was pepper-sprayed by police as they arrested him at an antisemitism march in London.

Mr Robinson, 40, was detained by dozens of officers near the Royal Courts of Justice, from where the demonstration began on Sunday, after march organisers said he would not be welcome.

Mr Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who was still in police custody on Sunday evening, uploaded a video on social media of his partially closed eyes after officers used the synthetic pepper spray.

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: “The arrested man resisted as officers attempted to put him in handcuffs. He was warned repeatedly before PAVA spray was used.

Online anti-vaxxers, conflating Covid and MMR theories, are convincing parents against immunising their children

It is intended to be a world-leading research facility that will house some of the UK’s greatest collections of historical, botanical and zoological samples. Millions of ancient mosaics and pieces of sculpture, rare plant specimens and fossil remnants will be taken from the British Museum, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London and rehoused at Reading University’s Thames Valley Science Park in Shinfield, Berkshire.

London’s ageing buildings, crumbling storage space, and soaring land prices mean a move beyond the M25 is the only realistic way to protect the capital’s swelling backroom collections of scientific and cultural treasures while improving researchers’ access to them, say senior museum staff. The total price-tag for the venture could top half a billion pounds.

But this vast rehousing project has not been universally welcomed. Indeed, it has proved to be highly controversial among some groups, with researchers denouncing the proposals as acts of “cultural and scientific vandalism”. Others have accused management at Kew and the NHM of bullying staff into accepting the plan to rehouse collections.

King Charles’s estate has announced it is transferring more than £100m, including funds collected from dead people under the archaic system of bona vacantia, into ethical investment funds after an investigation by the Guardian.

The surprise announcement comes amid growing pressure on the king over the Duchy of Lancaster’s use of funds collected from people who die in the north-west of England with no will or next of kin.

On Thursday, the Guardian revealed some of the funds were secretly being used to renovate properties that are owned by the king and rented out for profit by his estate. The duchy conceded that some bona vacantia revenues are financing the restoration of what it calls “public and historic properties”.

However the king’s estate has also been battling separate questions over its management of another portion of bona vacantia funds that are given to its charities.

Article link

While Jeremy Hunt was keen to portray an optimistic picture of his autumn statement, bragging about tax cuts and how he was ‘growing the economy’, even though the facts show otherwise, new analysis has revealed just how bad it’s got for households under the Tories.

Analysis by the Resolution Foundation has revealed that this Parliament is set to be the worst on record for household income growth. The think tank found that incomes are projected to fall by 3.1 per cent from December 2019 to January 2025.

It said in its report: “That makes this the only Parliament that has seen an overall decline in real household incomes (the next worse being that of 2015-17, which saw growth of 1.0 per cent).”

The below chart illustrates just how bad this Parliament is for household income growth. So much for the Tories being the party of sound finances.

Editorialised headline: Man who anticipates making obscene piles of cash through deals with China sez we should do deals with China.

Britain has said the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands is not up for negotiation, after Argentina’s newly-elected president promised to “get them back”.

Javier Milei, who won a resounding victory in Argentina’s presidential election on Sunday, said Buenos Aires had "non-negotiable" sovereignty over the Falklands, the archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean which is known as Islas Malvinas in Argentina.

Mr Milei said during a TV debate in the run-up to the election that “we have to make every effort to recover the islands through diplomatic channels”.

On Tuesday a spokesperson for prime minister Rishi Sunak said: “The UK has no doubt about the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands, and indeed South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.

“The UK government will continue to proactively defend the Falkland islanders’ right to self determination.”

“With previous governments there was always an attempt to at least try to appear as if they were complying with domestic or international human rights law and to respect the courts and human rights institutions,” HRW director Yasmine Ahmed said. “Now there is no attempt to do this – in fact, it’s quite the opposite.”

“Rishi Sunak’s government must know that even scrapping the Human Rights Act will not prevent it from facing significant legal barriers to its Rwanda policy, but what we’re seeing is the UK moving towards a place where the government feels it can undermine the integrity of the judiciary, undermine or scrap human rights laws that don’t serve its current political agenda, and create new laws that do. This is a dangerous place to find ourselves in. This can start to look very much like authoritarianism.”

“Not only is the government talking about ripping up domestic human rights law and ignoring its international obligations, it has launched an open attack on the right to peacefully demonstrate, is locking up climate protesters, criminalising refugees and has given the police unprecedented powers over citizens,” Ahmed said.

Patrick Vallance, who was the government's chief scientific adviser during COVID, made a note in his diary on October 25, 2020, about a meeting involving then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Sunak, who was finance minister.

The diary entry shown to the inquiry recorded how Dominic Cummings, Johnson's most senior adviser during the pandemic, had relayed to Vallance what he said he had heard at the meeting.