United Kingdom

Fish and chips is a British family favourite equally enjoyed around the table on a Friday night or out of the paper on an often overcast beach.

But the deep fried delicacy has seen the biggest price increase of some of the UK’s most popular takeaways, according to new figures.

The average price for a portion of fish and chips rose more than 50% to nearly £10 in the five years to July – while the cost of a kebab went up 44% and pizza 30%.

Chip shop owners cite a "perfect storm" of costs in recent years, including soaring energy bills, tariffs on seafood imports and extreme weather hammering potato harvests.

This all means a family of four won't get much change out of a £50 note once they've forked out for their tea and added some mushy peas and cans of pop.

People in crisis with mental health problems can now access services through NHS 111, giving them another way to get urgent help.

It makes the NHS in England one of the first countries to offer such a support service for mental health issues, as well as for physical problems.

The number connects to a local team of call handlers with mental health training, alongside nurses and clinicians who are available around the clock.

The team can organise a mental health assessment, send out a crisis team and flag up help available in the local area.

It is an increasingly common message from websites: browse for free - if you allow us to track your data and target you with personalised ads - if you don't, hand over some cash.

The model is known as "consent or pay" and, while it may be becoming increasingly common, questions remain over whether it is ethical or even legal.

The UK data regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has launched a consultation, external on the practice - it will report its findings later this year.

"In principle, data protection law does not prohibit business models that involve 'consent or pay,'" the ICO says on its website.

But it continues: "However, any organisation considering such a model must be careful to ensure that consent... has been freely given and is fully informed, as well as capable of being withdrawn without detriment."
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Newspapers such as MailOnline, The Sun, The Independent and The Times have all recently brought in "consent or pay" models.

"It's basically saying, 'We're giving people a choice. They can either pay and get ad-free access to our articles, or they can be tracked, or they can walk away and not read it,'" Philippa Donn says.

This question being considered by the ICO and others is - is that a fair choice?

More than 700 people in the UK have posted on a pro-suicide website looking for someone to die with, a BBC investigation has found.

The site, which we are not naming, has a members-only section where users can look for a suicide partner.

We have connected several double suicides to the “partners thread”.

Our investigation also found that predators have used the site to target vulnerable women.

In December 2019, Angela Stevens’ 28-year-old son, Brett, travelled from his home in the Midlands to Scotland to meet a woman he had made contact with on the partners thread.

The pair rented an Airbnb and took their lives together.

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Since her son’s death, she has spent years researching the pro-suicide site - in particular, the partners thread.

“It's a very dangerous place,” Angela says.

She compares it to a dark version of a dating app.

“Where else would you go to find a partner to take your own life with?” she says. “It’s just absolutely vile.”

The thread encourages users to end their own lives - and offers instructions on how to do it.

Archive version

Former President Donald Trump suggested on Truth Social that the streets of the United Kingdom were replete with death and destruction — and a Kamala Harris presidency would give the U.S. the same fate.

Moments after GOP defectors told Democrats in Chicago why they're voting for Democratic presidential nominee Harris over Trump, the MAGA leader bashed his opponent in a Truth Social screed.

"Kamala Harris supports the Environmental Extremists’ 'NET-ZERO' Energy Policy - A Radical Left Agenda to abolish Coal, Oil, and Natural Gas, and plunge MILLIONS into Poverty," he said, in his signature mixing of upper and lowercase fonts.

Trump then blamed net-zero "lunatics" for "currently destroying the Economies of many other Countries, including the U.K."

"Their Radical, Self-Destructive Policy has led the U.K. to the Worst Economic Growth since 1780, now causing Economic Chaos, Destruction, Riots, and Death in the streets of British Cities," he said.

The term net zero often refers to a goal of negating the amount of greenhouse gases produced by humans.

"There has been a widespread feeling that this summer was a big letdown, unusually cool and even cold at times. But was it really so bad?"

The consumption facility for illegal drugs including heroin and cocaine is set to open in Glasgow.

Stephen Chamberlain, once Mike Lynch's co-defendant in the U.S. fraud trial over the sale of Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard, has died after a road accident left him critically injured, days before Lynch went missing off the coast of Sicily, his lawyer said on Monday.

Chamberlain - Autonomy's former vice president of finance alongside chief executive Lynch - was hit by a car in Cambridgeshire on Saturday morning and had been placed on life support, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters earlier on Monday.

Previously: UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch among missing after luxury yacht sinks

British tech tycoon Mike Lynch is among the six people missing after a luxury yacht sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday morning.

The 56m (183ft) vessel was carrying 22 people - 10 crew and 12 passengers - including British, American and Canadian nationals. Emergency services rescued 15 people, including a one-year-old British girl. Local media reported the yacht, sailing under the name Bayesian, sank after encountering a heavy storm overnight that caused waterspouts, or rotating columns of air, to appear over the sea.

Mr Lynch, known by some as "the British Bill Gates", co-founded software company Autonomy, which was later bought by tech giant Hewlett-Packard for $11bn (£8.6bn).

LGBT+ books are being banned from UK schools after complaints from parents, librarians have revealed.

A six-month investigation by Index on Censorship, the results of which have been shared exclusively with The Independent, found that 53 per cent of UK school librarians polled had been asked to remove literature and in more than half of those cases books were taken off shelves.

The snapshot survey found that more than two dozen librarians had experienced such censorship, with one saying they had been told to remove every book with an LGBT+ theme after a single complaint from one parent about one book.

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LGBT+ charities, MPs and authors have warned the move represents a worrying regression on gay rights, “returning us to that world of prejudice that most of us thought we had moved on from”. Former MP Elliot Colburn, who received homophobic death threats while serving in Parliament, said preventing children from accessing material that speaks to their experiences represented a “clear and present danger to young LGBT+ people”.

Archive

A fundraiser launched to help the family of a father who was jailed for attacking police outside a hotel housing asylum seekers in Bristol has attracted anger online.

Among those to donate was Tristan Tate, the brother of self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, who has given £2,500.

Dominic Capaldi, 34, was jailed on Wednesday for 34 months after being caught on video footage throwing objects towards officers in the city’s Castle Park, while crowds chanted “send them back”.

The groundworker also targeted police who were trying to prevent protesters from gaining entry to the Mercure Hotel, which is used to house asylum seekers.

Created by his friend on Friday, the crowdfunder for Capaldi’s family aimed to raise £1,000 – but by Saturday lunchtime had raised more than £3,000 – claiming the sentence was unlawful.

The UK’s largest breed of spiders, which can grow to the size of rats and hunts fish, are making a comeback in Britain.

From near-extinction in 2010 - when only a handful remained as their wetland homes were destroyed by humans - the number of fen raft spiders are now steadily increasing thanks to recent conservation efforts.

The spiders are set to have their best year on record at nature reserves ran by RSBP.

The conservation charity revealed that the most recent survey estimates the total number of female spiders to be up to 3,750 across 12 sites in Norfolk and Suffolk Broads alone.

The spider can spin a web as large as 25cm and can grow to the size of a man’s hand.

Ambulances have been called out to Amazon warehouses more than 1,400 times in the past five years, the Observer can reveal. The figures, which were described as shocking by the GMB trade union, raise fresh questions about safety at the American giant’s UK workplaces.

Amazon centres in Dunfermline and Bristol had the most ambulance callouts in Britain, listing 161 and 125 across the period respectively.

A third of callouts by the Scottish Ambulance Service to the Amazon site in Dunfermline related to chest pains, with other callouts for convulsions, strokes and breathing problems recorded.

Ambulances have been called to Amazon Mansfield 84 times since 2019. More than 70% of those were for the most serious types of incidents – dubbed category 1 and 2, which can often relate to life-threatening conditions like heart attacks or strokes.

Attempted suicides or other serious psychiatric incidents were recorded at Amazon centres in Bolton, Chesterfield, Mansfield, Rugeley, London and many others.

Incidents related to pregnancies or miscarriages for workers on shift were also listed at several sites, as were traumatic injuries and suspected heart attacks. Other incidents included workers who were exposed to acids and hazardous gases, badly electrocuted or had severe burns over a significant part of their body.

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Amanda Gearing, a GMB organiser involved in that effort, said the figures were “shocking, but not surprising” and called on local authorities and the Health and Safety Executive to investigate the company’s working practices. “Amazon workers are routinely pushed beyond the limits of human endurance,” she said. “They’re forced to work to a hidden target that isn’t based on safe working but on a Hunger Games algorithm.”

“Even these worryingly high figures might hide how commonplace injury and illness is at Amazon. We know from our members in Amazon warehouses that first-aiders are actively discouraged from ringing ambulances – instead told to take taxis,” she said.

The number of incidents being recorded at Amazon fulfilment centres and warehouses appears to be higher than the reported figures recorded for major fast fashion warehouses.

In a Vice investigation before the pandemic, warehouses for the likes of Boohoo, Missguided and Pretty Little Thing, described as “Victorian” by union officials, recorded 10 ambulance callouts or fewer a year.

In 2018, a freedom of information request from the GMB union found that a Tesco warehouse in Rugeley, near Birmingham, recorded only eight ambulance callouts in three years versus the 115 logged at a nearby Amazon site. Both warehouses employed large numbers of workers at the time – 1,300 at Tesco’s site and around 1,800 at Amazon’s.

The head of the universities watchdog in England has said the “golden age of higher education” could be over and all options should be on the table as the funding crisis facing the sector is “significant”.

The Office for Students (OFS) interim chair, Sir David Behan, said increased tuition fees and lifting visa restrictions on international students could help revive embattled institutions.

“I think the resilience of the sector overall has been tested by a number of different forces ... the global pandemic, the impact of leaving the European Union,” he told the Sunday Times.

“We’ve had industrial action, the cost of living crisis, the increasing cost of pensions and decreasing number of international students, and then, finally, domestic undergraduate fees remaining frozen since 2012 ... and what it’s meant is that the fiscal deficit for some organisations is significant.”

He called on universities to explore mergers or partnership arrangements with other institutions, amid fears some institutions could be facing bankruptcy. “It’s important that universities revise their medium-term financial strategies ... They can’t just carry on,” he said.

One in four children are due to start school in September without being toilet trained, a charity has said.

A report by early years charity Kindred found pupils are losing, on average, a third of their learning time each day due to teachers diverting away from teaching and towards supporting children who are not school-ready.

Bristol charity ERIC - the children's bladder and bowel organisation - has now set up an "emergency intervention" campaign for those starting school next month.

ERIC CEO Juliette Rayner said that, while the problem had been a "growing issue" recently, "this year seems to be particularly bad".

"High street chains forced to shutter their doors, medicine shortages, no phone network, international shipping routes blocked, and the UK’s critical national infrastructure under constant threat. This is not the plot of a disaster movie, but rather the very real potential consequences if China invaded Taiwan.

Tension in the Taiwan Strait is increasing, and experts are now in general agreement that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will attempt to take Taiwan using force. 67 per cent of US experts polled in January by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) said they expected a crisis in the Taiwan Strait in the next six months..."