United Kingdom

    A stubborn Pret a Manger worker grabbed back chairs from a branch of the restaurant which were being used as a makeshift bridge over a flood puddle outside Hammersmith tube station. Commuters were forced to use the chairs from Pret a Manger to make a route over the enormous puddle following torrential downpours in London on Thursday evening. She says: Sorry i've got to take these before shrugging at the visibly annoyed bystanders before removing the chairs. People can then be seen wading through the water. One woman is pictured walking through the water in bare feet. One onlooker dubbed the attempt to stay dry "the most British thing I've ever seen as people politely queued up to cross the make-shift path. Flash floods hit the capital after heavy downpours struck...

    Indians are threatening to boycott British Airways after a family claimed they were thrown off one of its planes because their child was crying. The father, an Indian civil servant called AP Pathak, has accused the airline of racism as he claimed a crew member threatened to throw his three-year-old son out of the window if he did not stop crying. Mr Pathak said his family were offloaded, as well as another Indian family sitting behind them who had offered his son a biscuit. British Airways said the family were repeatedly asked to sit their child down and fasten his seatbelt, as it was stopping the plane from taking off. In a letter of complaint to India's aviation minister, Suresh Prabhu, Mr Pathak said he was subjected to humiliation and racial behaviour on the f...

    A formal decision to refer the former foreign secretary to an investigatory panel headed by a lawyer is expected this afternoon. Sources said they were sifting through a considerable volume of complaints from the public about the language used by Mr Johnson. But party leaders also hope referring the issue to the independent panel will cool the outbreak of Tory infighting that has given Jeremy Corbyn a breather from Labour’s anti-Semitism row. The party code sets out minimum standards of behaviour. It says elected Tories must lead by example to encourage and foster respect and tolerance and act in a manner which upholds the reputation and values of the party. In a Daily Telegraph column on Monday, Mr Johnson mocked the appearance of women who choose to wear the bur...

    Screen Grab Sergei and Yulia Skripal were attacked with novichok and found slumped on a bench in Salisbury in March The US state department will impose sanctions on Russia after it determined Moscow used a nerve agent to attack the Skripals. The US expelled a number of Russian diplomats as part of an international response to the attack, when the former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were taken ill in March. State department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said: Following the use of a 'novichok' nerve agent in an attempt to assassinate UK citizen Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal, the United States, on 6 August 2018, determined under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act of 1991 (CBW Act) that the Government of ...

    Boris Johnson’s joke about burka-wearing women looking like ‘letter boxes’ made me wince not least because I know there are so many women forced to dress that way at the behest of their menfolk and who hate how it makes them look. There are many worse things than giving offence, and one of them is to cordon off contentious topics and designate them no-go areas, while demanding punitive attitudes to people who make inappropriate jokes. So full marks to the former Foreign Secretary for getting this desperately needed public debate going. If he’d tackled the subject by writing something that wouldn’t upset even the most sensitive imam, then we might not now be having frank discussions in pubs, on phone-in programmes and on social media about two issues we need to spea...

    Theresa May included endorsements from senior figures including Dominic Raab, Michael Gove and Liam Fox Theresa May and her Cabinet have launched an attempt to persuade Tory members to back the Prime Minister’s Chequers plan which Brexiteers have labelled irrelevant. Mrs May has sent a letter outlining the case for her plan to the Conservative grassroots and has included endorsements from senior figures including Dominic Raab, Michael Gove and Liam Fox. But Eurosceptics questioned the decision to seek support for the Brexit blueprint given the fact the European Union had effectively rejected it as it stands. It came amid reports Mrs May is planning a crunch meeting with her senior ministers in September when they will discuss how best to prepare the UK for leaving ...

    Applications to build an additional 35,000 homes on green belt land were submitted last year, taking the total number proposed for construction on protected land to a record 460,000. New data from the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) released on Monday showed that more than 24,000 homes were constructed in the UK’s green belts in the past nine years. Its State of the Green Belt 2018 reportreveals that the number of finished homes constructed on the protected areas almost doubled last year to about 8,000. The government has pledged to protect green belt land but housing campaigners believe much more controlled land could be released to build badly needed affordable new homes. Most of the construction to date has been on brownfield sites within the green belt...

    Former minister asked to say sorry for comparing veiled Muslims to bank robbers. Boris Johnson has been told by Conservative party chiefs to apologise for his claim that Muslim women in burqas resemble letter boxes and bank robbers. The Tory chairman, Brandon Lewis, said he had asked the former foreign secretary to say sorry for his controversial remarks in an attempt to draw a line under the Islamophobia row. It came after Alistair Burt, the minister for the Middle East, who worked under Johnson, described the comments as offensive and said he would never have said anything similar. The former Conservative chairman Sayeeda Warsi has accused Johnson of “dog-whistle” Islamophobia and criticised the lack of action by the party on the issue. In June, Lewis said dive...

    Passengers are routinely facing unacceptable two-hour queues at Heathrow Airport's passport control, the boss of British Airways has said. In a letter to The Times newspaper, chief executive Alex Cruz called on Home Secretary Sajid Javid to take action to end the border farce. Tackling lengthy queues, which are significantly worse than elsewhere on the continent, should be a priority over plans for designated lanes for UK passport holders post-Brexit, Mr Cruz argued. Even EEA citizens wait almost an hour. This is unacceptable, yet Nick Jariwalla, the head of Border Force at Heathrow, said recently that things were unlikely to change and it was unreasonable for his team to be expected to meet their targets. Mr Cruz said the west London airport has missed its target...

    Samantha Lewthwaite, dubbed the White widow, was reported to be behind the Kenyan shopping mall massacre in 2013 which The defence secretary, Gavin Williamson, has announced that Britain’s first specialist army training team is being set up to help tackle sexual violence and the use of female suicide bombers in some of the world’s most dangerous countries. The expert unit will be deployed in the coming weeks to east Africa where the Islamist terror group Al-Shabaab has launched brutal attacks on the civilian population and military peacekeepers have sometimes struggled with local cultural sensitivities. The team, which will include female British soldiers, will work on helping local forces understand that, while child soldiers may pose a threat, they are victims of ...