Sorted by date Results 1 - 14 of 14
CLACTON-ON-SEA, England (AP) — Dorothy Carr is fed up with how things are run in her hometown. It's impossible to get a doctor's appointment through Britain's state-run health care system. Local buses have been canceled. There isn't enough public housing. Like many others in Clacton-on-Sea — a town on England's southeast coast where many older, white voters used to staunchly support the governing Conservatives — the retiree feels a deep sense of disillusionment with the party. Instead, Carr says she is probably voting for the populist Refor...
LONDON (AP) — A man wielding a sword attacked members of the public and police officers in a northeast London suburb Tuesday, killing a 14-year-old boy and injuring four other people, British authorities said. A 36-year-old man was subdued with a stun gun and arrested on suspicion of murder in a residential area near Hainault subway station, police said. The violence wasn't being treated as terror-related or a "targeted attack." Police said that the 14-year-old died at a hospital from his injuries. Two police officers were hospitalized for s...
LONDON (AP) — The British government's plan for a landmark smoking ban that aims to stop young people from ever smoking cleared its first hurdle in Parliament on Tuesday despite vocal opposition from within Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservative Party. The bill, a key policy announced by Sunak last year, would make it illegal to sell tobacco products to anyone born after January 1, 2009. If passed, the bill will give Britain some of the toughest anti-smoking measures in the world. Authorities say it will create modern Britain's "first s...
LONDON (AP) — Four men were charged Monday over the theft of an 18-carat gold toilet from Blenheim Palace, the sprawling English country mansion where British wartime leader Winston Churchill was born. The toilet, valued at 4.8 million pounds ($5.95 million), was an artwork titled "America" and intended as a pointed satire about excessive wealth by Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. It was part of an art installation at Blenheim Palace, near the city of Oxford, a few days before it vanished overnight in September 2019. The Crown P...
LONDON (AP) — U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Saturday promised to provide tanks and artillery systems to Ukraine, amid renewed missile attacks by Moscow targeting multiple Ukrainian cities for the first time in nearly two weeks. Nine people were killed and 64 others wounded in the southeastern city of Dnipro, where a Russian missile strike destroyed a section of an apartment building, said Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian presidential office. Infrastructure facilities were also hit in the western Lviv region and I...
LONDON (AP) — European leaders said Monday they will press for a unified international approach to dealing with a Taliban government in Afghanistan, as they looked on with dismay at the rapid collapse of two decades of a U.S.-led Western campaign in the country. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke to French President Emmanuel Macron Monday, stressing the need for a common stand, both on recognizing any future Afghan government and to prevent a humanitarian and refugee crisis. Both leaders agreed to cooperate at the U.N. Security Council,...
JOHANNESBURG (AP) — South Africa has suspended plans to inoculate its front-line health care workers with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after a small clinical trial suggested that it isn't effective in preventing mild to moderate illness from the variant dominant in the country. South Africa received its first 1 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine last week and was expected to begin giving jabs to health care workers in mid-February. The disappointing early results indicate that an inoculation drive using the AstraZeneca vaccine may n...
HONG KONG (AP) — Thousands of Hong Kongers have already made the sometimes painful decision to leave behind their hometown and move to Britain since Beijing imposed a strict national security law on the Chinese territory last summer. Their numbers are expected to swell to the hundreds of thousands. Some are leaving because they fear punishment for supporting the pro-democracy protests that swept the former British colony in 2019. Others say China’s encroachment on their way of life and civil liberties has become unbearable, and they want to...
LONDON (AP) — The head of drugmaker AstraZeneca, which is developing a coronavirus vaccine widely expected to be approved by U.K. authorities this week, said Sunday that researchers believe the shot will be effective against a new variant of the virus driving a rapid surge in infections in Britain. AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot also told the Sunday Times that researchers developing its vaccine have figured out a "winning formula" making the jab as effective as rival candidates. Some have raised concern that the AstraZeneca vaccine,...
LONDON (AP) — NATO on Tuesday joined a wave of countries and groups expelling Russian diplomats over the nerve-agent attack on a former spy in Britain. Russia denounced the actions as "boorish" and pledged to retaliate. The mass expulsions were a show of solidarity for Britain, which blames Russia for the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. Moscow vehemently denies responsibility and has vowed a "tough response" to the expulsions. More than 20 countries on Monday announced that they were expelling a total of more than 1...
LONDON (AP) — Britain's information regulator said Saturday it was assessing evidence gathered from a raid on the office of data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, part of an investigation into alleged misuse of personal information by political campaigns and social media companies like Facebook. More than a dozen investigators from the Information Commissioner's Office entered the company's central London office late Friday, shortly after a High Court judge granted a warrant. The investigators were seen leaving the premises early Saturday a...
LONDON (AP) — Gerry Adams, the divisive politician known around the world as the face of the Irish republican movement as it shifted from violence to peace, announced Saturday that he was stepping down as leader of Sinn Fein next year after heading the party for over 30 years. The 69-year-old veteran politician — who has been president of Northern Ireland's second-largest party since 1983 — told the party's annual conference in Dublin he would not run in the next Irish parliamentary elections. "Leadership means knowing when it is time for c...
LONDON (AP) — The cyberattack that spread malicious software around the world, shutting down networks at hospitals, banks and government agencies, was stemmed by a young British researcher and an inexpensive domain registration, with help from another 20-something security engineer in the U.S. Britain's National Cyber Security Center and others were hailing the cybersecurity researcher, a 22-year-old identified online only as MalwareTech, who — unintentionally at first — discovered a "kill switch" that halted the unprecedented outbreak. By th...
LONDON (AP) — An unprecedented "ransomware" cyberattack that has already hit tens of thousands of victims in 150 countries could wreak greater havoc as more malicious variations appear and people return to their desks Monday and power up computers at the start of the workweek. As a loose global network of cybersecurity experts fought a rearguard battle against ransomware hackers, officials and experts on Sunday urged organizations and companies to update operating systems immediately to ensure they aren't vulnerable to a second, more p...
