United Kingdom

Joe Biden has shelved plans for a pact with Britain that could have paved the way for a full post-Brexit trade deal.

The US president has decided not to move forward with a “foundational” agreement prepared by the US Trade Representative’s Office, that would have included negotiations over 11 areas of trade and regulation, following opposition from his own party in the Senate.

Senate Democrats argued that it would not have provided sufficient protection for American workers, Politico reported.

The UK’s hopes for a free trade agreement (FTA) with the US date from before the Brexit referendum, and faced an early setback when Barack Obama told voters that Britain would be “at the back of the queue” for a deal if it left the EU.

But despite US support for an FTA in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016, the chance of a deal has now fallen to “zero” under Mr Biden, the Government believes.

A husband-and-wife team have won their bid to open the first spaceport for vertical rocket launches in the UK.

Up to 30 rockets will be launched each year from SaxaVord Spacesport on a former RAF base at the northern-most point of the Shetland Islands after it was granted the licence by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

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The spaceport is licensed from 2024 and caters for companies looking to launch satellites into polar, sun-synchronous orbits. So far, just under £30 million has been spent on developing the spaceport, which includes three launch pads and a hangar for assembling rockets.

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Tim Johnson, director of space regulation at the CAA, said: “Granting SaxaVord their licence is an era-defining moment for the UK space sector. This marks the beginning of a new chapter for UK space as rockets may soon launch satellites into orbit from Scotland.

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While Cornwall Spaceport became the UK’s first licensed spaceport, SaxaVord’s licence allows it to host vertical launches rather than horizontal launches of rockets carried by aircraft.

on youtube I watched a British reality show about airports and (mostly foreign) passengers being searched for anything illegal.

What I find troubling is that many of these passengers speak very little English and find it difficult to articulate an answer to what officers ask in English. I remember an Indian national who didn't speak any English that though he had the right visa to work in the UK, only to find he had been duped by an Indian scammer and was refused entry. He started crying and the crew filmed the whole scene.

This is humiliating to say the least and I wouldn't want this to happen to me if I visit the UK. My questions:

• Should a reality crew start recording me, do I have a right to my image and can I tell them to stop recording me? Do tv crews respect that?

• What about the police? Can they record my face, even if I don't consent?

• I also have a cultural question: If an officer at a British airport asks you if he can search your luggage and you say no and you ask him if you are under arrest, what happens then?

Campaigners for an assisted dying law are hoping to make 2024 a turning point in the public debate about the measure in the UK, amid a flurry of attempts to change the law across the British Isles.

Efforts to create new rights for terminally ill people to seek assistance in ending their lives are due to take place in the Isle of Man and Jersey in the new year, with a bill also being debated in Scotland.

Advocates claim they can achieve a “tipping point” next year should laws allowing terminally ill, mentally competent adults to choose an assisted death take a step closer. It comes after the Observer last week published an impassioned plea by actor Diana Rigg to legalise assisted dying, in a message recorded shortly before her death three years ago.

Interesting to see Jon Holmes’s radio satire translated onto the screen for the first time

we dont need to have a legislative response but that would also be pretty funny. I was struck by how evil that mcdonalds worker hosing down the homeless guy was but couldnt put my finger on the correct punishment. Obviously the worst offences deserve lifetime ‘never again will I’ but as time passes… I once swore to never eat burger king after they sacked me over something really stupid, but these days I happily spend money there and enthusiastically went for the plant based whopper for a few months before it got really boring. Likewise facebook, I will never. But it does seem to be popular despite how shit it is.

so in degrees of severity for any business:

a PR blunder like a stupid tweet or dumb error: a week. food poisoning: 6 months serious PR error: 1 year hosing down/assaulting the public: 3 years amazon plotting to destroy everyone: until next christmas when you need to sort shit out

whats the strongest boycott length but not a fundamental falling out/never again?

AWS saw direct sales hit £253 million in fiscal year 2022/23, according to figures from public sector spending researcher Tussell. Although AWS pocketed the largest increase among revenue raked in by strategic suppliers to UK government, it was a long way behind the leaders, largely construction and defense firms. Kier, for example, accrued £1.4 billion in revenue over the same period.

The leading tech supplier was Capital, whose revenue remained flat at £923 million. Atos was the second tech supplier, with £850 million, up 21 percent on the previous year.

Oracle and Microsoft also took a dramatically bigger slice of direct revenue from the government. The Redmond software giant won £114 million in direct revenue, up 36 percent, while Big Red got £290 million revenue, up 14 percent.

One of Britain’s biggest power grid projects has awarded contracts worth £1.8bn for a 190km subsea electricity superhighway to bring renewable power from Scotland to the north of England.

National Grid and Scottish Power plan to begin building the “transformative” £2.5bn high-voltage power line along the east coast of the country from East Lothian to County Durham from 2025.

The Eastern Green Link 1 (EGL1) project is one of Britain’s largest grid upgrade projects in generations and has been designed to carry enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of 2 million households.

A maximum indoor temperature working law giving people a day off if workplace temperatures surpass 30C should be mandated by government, a new report recommends.

The report by the Fabian Society thinktank highlights inequalities in who bears the brunt of the impacts of climate breakdown and puts responsibility on bosses and landlords to stop people from overheating.

An increasing number of people are dying from excessive heat in the UK. More than 4,500 people died in England in 2022 due to high temperatures, which was the largest figure on record. Between 1988 and 2022, almost 52,000 deaths associated with the hottest days were recorded in England, with a third of them occurring since 2016, data from the Office for National Statistics shows. During the same 35-year period analysed, more than 2,000 people died in Wales due to the warm temperatures.

Unilever, the maker of Marmite, Domestos and Vaseline, is to be investigated by the UK’s competition watchdog over concerns that consumers are being misled by the company’s “green” claims on some essential household products.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Unilever may be overstating how green certain products are through the use of “vague and broad” claims, unclear statements about recyclability, and natural-looking images and logos such as green leaves.

Sarah Cardell, the CMA chief executive, said: “Essentials like detergent, kitchen spray, and toiletries are the kinds of items you put in your supermarket basket every time you shop. More and more people are trying to do their bit to help protect the environment, but we’re worried many are being misled by so-called ‘green’ products that aren’t what they seem.

We know a song about that, don't we?

Well, whitewashing rather than greenwashing, but they have a long history...

The climate crisis could cause up to 10,000 extra deaths in the UK every year by the 2050s as a result of extreme heat and bring a host of tropical diseases, a stark report has warned.

The worst-case scenario, published in a damning document by the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on Monday, would see average temperatures rise by 4.3C, bringing an estimated twelvefold rise in heat-related deaths by 2070. It adds that deaths could increase by one-and-a-half times in the 2030s.

The figures come from UKHSA’s Health Effects of Climate Change (HECC) report, which examines the effects the climate crisis is already having on British health outcomes.

It states that diseases transmitted by insects – such as dengue fever or Zika virus – could also become widely transmissible across the UK due to the arrival of species native to hotter countries.

They are a disparate bunch. Archaeologists, environmentalists, historians, transport experts, countryside campaigners and druids.

But they will come together in the Strand in central London on Tuesday with a common purpose: to stop the bulldozers from, in their mind, wreaking havoc at one of the UK’s most iconic sites.

They will try to convince the high court over three days that the government’s plan to build a two-mile road tunnel close to the great circle of Stonehenge will permanently disfigure a unique and globally important landscape.

“It’s David and Goliath stuff,” said John Adams, the chair of the Stonehenge Alliance, which has fought against the tunnel and other road projects around the stones for more than 20 years. Though lots of disciplines are represented, they lack the heft of the government machine. “We’re up against the might of the Department for Transport, National Highways and so on. We’re a small organisation – mostly retired people. But the court case is critical. It’s the only thing keeping the earth diggers away,” he said.