United Kingdom

    Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon are meeting face to face in a Brexit showdown expected to be dominated by increasing predictions of no deal. In crunch talks in Edinburgh, the Prime Minister will claim Brexit can result in a brighter future for the whole UK and is promising a major funding boost for Scotland. But Scotland's First Minister, a fierce opponent of Brexit, is challenging Mrs May to set out her plan B for Brexit and claiming no deal or a blind Brexit is unacceptable. The PM is announcing a £1.2bn city deal for Edinburgh and southeast Scotland, with both the Scottish and UK governments committing £300m towards it. Speaking ahead of her visit to Scotland, she said: Today I have also announced a further £13m for investment in six science centres in the UK, ...

    Jeremy Corbyn has said sorry for the hurt caused by anti-Semitism in the Labour Party , in a video message. The Labour leader told supporters that people who deny anti-Semitism exists in the party are wrong, and part of the problem. But he did not commit to Labour accepting the full IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, a major sticking point in the row. He said: I'm sorry for the hurt that has been caused to many Jewish people. We have been too slow in processing disciplinary cases of mostly online ant-Semitic abuse by Party members. People who hold anti-Semitic views have no place in the Labour Party. They may be few: the number of cases over the past three years represents less than 0.1% of Labour membership of half a million. But one is too many. Our party must n...

    A woman was killed and a man suffered serious leg injuries after a horse-drawn cart crash in Staffordshire on Sunday. Police were called at roughly 1.05pm on Sunday to the fatal collision in the town of Hilderstone, which is roughly eight miles south east from Stoke-on-Trent. The collision involved a blue, four-wheeled, horse-drawn carriage that was being pulled by a single brown horse in the direction of Stone, where the driver, 55, was from. He suffered serious leg injuries and a woman, 60, was flown to the Royal Stoke University Hospital which has a specilaist trauma centre but she was later pronounced dead. In a statement Staffordshire Police said: Specialist officers are supporting the family at this difficult time. Officers have appealed for any witnesses t...

    Jeremy Corbyn has broken his silence over the antisemitism row engulfing Labour, acknowledging that there is a real problem but rejecting the idea that the party poses any threat to the Jewish community in the UK. Writing in the Guardian following a week of difficult headlines about the issue and amid growing calls for him to give a substantial response, the Labour leader accepted that the party’s incomplete adoption of an internationally recognised definition of antisemitism had caused genuine worries. Corbyn said he was confident the disagreement over the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition can be resolved through dialogue with community organisations, but gave no indication the party was about to switch policy. Addressing one of the key...

    Theresa May will publish scores of documents to prepare businesses and the public for a no-deal Brexit later in the summer but has denied putting the army on standby. No 10 rejected a report that soldiers are being lined up to deliver food, medicines and fuel in the event of shortages, insisting: There are no plans to involve the army in this. Downing Street instead revealed around 70 technical notices with advice to companies and consumers if the UK crashes out of the EU with no agreement would be issued in two sets in August and September. The prime minister’s spokesman rejected claims that plans to drip feed details of the preparations had been dropped because of fears it would scare voters too much. But he said: These notices will be published in August and Se...

    Russian hackers have attacked a Swiss lab that analysed Novichok nerve agent samples from the Salisbury, according to local media. The state-run Spiez laboratory near Bern was targeted by hackers believed to be linked to the Russian government ahead of a conference of chemical and biological warfare experts in September, the mass-market Swiss newspaper Blick reported. After Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury in March, the Swiss laboratory confirmed the British finding that they had fallen victim to the Soviet-developed military-grade nerve agent Novichok. Having created a fake email address to mimic the Spiez lab, the perpetrators sent a Word document to conference participants with malware embedded inside of it, the Federal Office for...

    Dixons Carphone says a data breach in 2017 was worse than originally thought and it affected 10 million customers. The firm also admitted that it has uncovered evidence that some of the data that was accessed may have been taken from its systems. It has assured customers that pin codes, card verification values and authentication data that could be used to make purchases have not been accessed and there is no evidence any fraud has resulted. The huge breach first came to light in June when Dixons Carphone revealed hackers had accessed 5.9 million payment cards used at Currys PC World and Dixons Travel, and 1.2 million personal data records. Biggest data breaches of the last 20 years. It meant that personal information belonging to millions of customers including t...

    Other A royal python which was found in a flat in Kensington, west London A woman got the fright of her life when she woke up to find a 3ft snake snuggled up next to her in bed. The royal python, believed to be an escaped pet, had curled up next to her as she slept. After jumping out of bed she rushed out of her bedroom and closed the door before calling the RSPCA for help on Monday morning. However, by the time the charity's animal collection officer Jill Sanders had arrived at her flat in Kensington, west London, the snake had slithered away and could not be found. Ms Sanders said: The poor resident must have had the fright of their life waking up to a snake in their bed. They jumped out of bed and closed their bedroom door to contain the snake but, when I arrive...

    Grenfell residents are angry after being told that the site of the tower tragedy in which 72 people died is to be handed back to Kensington and Chelsea council. A police investigation into the June 2017 inferno is expected to come to and end in the next couple of days after which the site, no longer considered a crime scene, will be handed back to the council. Adel Chaoui, from the survivors group Grenfell United, slammed the decision and said: It's a huge conflict of interest and distressing to the victims that RBKC, who are under investigation for corporate manslaughter, will have anything more to do with Grenfell tower, even in name. The Guardian reports that residents had hoped that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government would take on the sit...

    Special health measures are in place to keep mourners safe at the funeral of the  novichok victim Dawn Sturgess. There will be no pallbearers at the mother-of-three's cremation in Salisbury today, and her coffin will already be in place when people arrive. Public Health England has issued advice to prevent mourners from being exposed to the nerve agent that led to Ms Sturgess' death. Philip Bromiley, the vicar of Salisbury Diocese, told Sky News on Sunday: I have absolute confidence in Public Health England and also the funeral directors. They have been doing a lot of work, they have put various measures in place to make sure everyone is as safe as possible. The coffin will be in situ when we arrive. The family will have 15 minutes of quiet with Dawn's coffin. As f...