United Kingdom

    Emmanuel Macron says it will be possible for Britain to secure a bespoke trade deal but only if the UK accepts certain preconditions. The French president said that while a special solution could be secured, full access to the single market without accepting its rules was not feasible. The comments were made during an interview recorded for BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday. Macron has been in the UK for his first visit since taking office. On Thursday, at the end of a joint press conference with Theresa May at Sandhurst military training college, he rejected the idea of a tailored Brexit deal for Britain’s financial services sector. Macron said full access to EU markets would not be possible unless the UK pays into the EU budget and accepts all its rules. ...

    Normally, those asking for a signature from a royal receive a polite, No, I can’t. Though Meghan did pose for at least one selfie with a teen admirer during the visit. Caitlin, who had been waiting in the grounds of Cardiff Castle with hundreds of other well-wishers, didn’t mind the slight misspelling. I don’t really care, she told reporters. My heart is still racing. I’ve never got a royal autograph before. This is going to make everyone jealous. She thought it was great. She is so welcoming. She just seemed so easy with the crowd, Johnston said. Radio host Josh Andrews, 25, had painted a red and gold crown on his face and that seemed to work out for him, too. It’s a bit of Markle Sparkle, he said. I just wanted to see if we could get her to come over. She went, ...

    Boris Johnson’s idea of a bridge across the English Channel to boost economic links with France has been dismissed as far-fetched by a French minister, as No 10 distanced itself. The UK shipping industry also poured scorn on the notion, saying: Building a huge concrete structure in the middle of the world’s busiest shipping lane might come with some challenges. And the Foreign Secretary was accused of a masterstroke in diversion at the moment that the Brexit vote he inspired was pulling up the drawbridge from the major economies on the continent. The backlash came after Mr Johnson floated the prospect of a crossing at Thursday’s UK-France summit, saying it was ridiculous that the two countries were linked by the Channel Tunnel only. His aides claimed that, when he...

    The government may need to bring its 2040 ban on internal combustion cars forward to 2035 if it is to meet greenhouse gas emission targets, a new report has warned. According to the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), the government’s Clean Growth Strategy will not be enough to hit legally binding CO2 emission targets for the 10-year period from the beginning of 2023 to the end of 2032. As a result, the CCC’s latest report says the government should keep open the possibility that all car and van sales are battery-electric or hydrogen by 2035 five years earlier than the 2040 date to which the government has so far committed. The government hasn't yet clarified or even enshrined in law what exactly will be banned in 2040 after initially appearing to say that petrol an...

    A new car's first MOT will remain at the three-year point, after a Government proposal suggesting a car's first MOT should be after four years was scrapped with concerns over safety. Following a public consultation, the decision, which was set to take effect later this year, has been overturned. Fewer than half of the public consulted were in favour, with the main concern being the safety risk involved in delaying the first MOT of a car until its fourth year. The current three-year period needed before a car's first MOT was introduced in 1967, when it was reduced from 10 years. In the proposal, the Government said safer technology and improved manufacturing have resulted in new vehicles that stay roadworthy for longer. The government originally suggested the propos...

    When Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane suggested that the bank may have had a Michael Fish moment over Brexit, he was being unfair to weather forecasters. Mr Fish failed to predict the Great Storm in 1987. But he did not have a bias against thunder or lightning. As a weatherman he probably quite liked storms. He just failed to predict a tail event and we’ve all been there. The trap that the Bank of England is in danger of falling into is far more serious that of systematic cognitive bias. All of us have these types of biases and good economic forecasters are careful to be aware of their own prejudices. Not so the Bank of England. It has now come to embody anti-Brexit cognitive bias to such a degree that it endangers its credibility as an institution. In...

    This is the age of the zombie. The undead maraud around our popular culture. Stick on the telly, and they’re attacking Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. At the cinema, reanimated carcasses lurch through everything from Resident Evil to World War Z. The headlines might burst with blundering boastful strongmen, but our nightmares are full of blank-eyed walking corpses. Unthinking, unquestioning, neither alive nor dead, the zombie is horrific. It is also us. Britain in 2018 is stalked by zombie ideas, zombie politicians, zombie institutions stripped of credibility and authority, yet somehow still presiding over our lives. Nowhere is this more true than in the way we run our economy. This September marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers. In autumn 2008,...

    A builder kidnapped, raped and murdered his teenage niece before dumping her body in a locked freezer because he was jealous of her relationship with her Muslim boyfriend, a court heard. Mujahid Arshid, 33, allegedly tied up 19-year-old Celine Dookhran and another young woman, bundling them both into the boot of his car and taking them to a £1.5 million house in Kingston that he was renovating. He is accused of raping both women at the abandoned house before slitting their throats. The body of Celine, a Barclays bank clerk and aspiring make-up artist, was later found in a padlocked deep freezer at the house, but the other woman, who was badly wounded, managed to convince Arshid not to kill her and raised the alarm, it is alleged. Prosecutor Crispin Aylett QC said ...

    Mansfield MP Ben Bradley A Tory MP recently appointed to a prominent party position has apologised after is emerged he had written a blog post suggesting benefit-claimants should have vasectomies. Ben Bradley, who was promoted by the Prime Minister this month to become Conservative vice chairman for youth, wrote the UK could be drowning in a vast sea of unemployed wasters without a cap on welfare payments. In a 2012 post on his personal blog, titled consbradders32 and uncovered by Buzzfeed News on Tuesday, the Mansfield MP wrote: Sorry but how many children you have is a choice; if you can't afford them, stop having them! Vasectomies are free. Theresa May and new Conservative Party appointments He added: Families who have never worked a day in their lives having fo...

    A British supermarket believes it will be the first retailer in the world to make its own-brand products plastic free within five years. Iceland, the frozen food specialist, says it has worked with environmental charities and experts to develop paper and pulp alternatives that are fully recyclable, affecting more than 1,000 lines. We've created a monster, managing director Richard Walker told Sky News. Plastic does not degrade, it lasts for half a millennium. Every minute there's a truckload of plastic waste entering the ocean. It's ubiquitous, it's in everything, it's in up to 50% of what the average supermarket sells. The time to act is now. Take our ready meals. They are in a board carton sleeve which is good, made of paper, but the problem is the black plasti...