United Kingdom

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”.

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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..."

Anti-racism campaigners are planning to organise unity gigs in the towns and cities blighted by anti-immigrant riots to combat the growing influence of the far right in some parts of Britain.

Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) – the successor organisation to the Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement which helped turn the tide against the National Front in the 1970s – is planning to follow a concert in London in September, featuring singer-songwriter Paloma Faith, with a series of local gigs across the country over the next 12 months.

“We are doing the launch in London, which is home ground for us,” says Samira Ali, an organiser for LMHR and its sister organisation Stand up to Racism. “But we want to organise these gigs in the places the far right see as their territory because we want to show they are in a tiny, hateful minority.”

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Artists including Idles, Nadine Shah and Fontaines DC have backed an LMHR open letter calling for a “united cultural movement which will ward off the threat of the far right and strengthen communities damaged by the corrosive effects of racism”.

LMHR is hoping to replicate the DIY ethos of Rock Against Racism, which inspired local activists to put on gigs featuring black and white musicians. RAR organised 300 local concerts and five anti-Nazi carnivals in the 1970s, with more than 80,000 gathering to hear the Clash and Steel Pulse in Victoria Park, east London, in 1978.

“We’re going to be supporting people throwing gigs in their home towns,” said Alex LoSardo, another LMHR organiser. “We can help them with resources such as T-shirts, posters and stickers, and co-promoting their shows and linking them up with artists.

“The aim is to turn LMHR into a mass grassroots movement like it was in the Rock Against Racism days.”

"A UK satellite to support military operations successfully launched into space last night.

Named Tyche, the satellite is UK Space Command’s first satellite which can capture daytime images and videos of the Earth’s surface. 

The satellite will strengthen the UK’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities.  

As the conflict in Ukraine has shown, the use of space is crucial to military operations. Tyche is the first satellite to be launched under the Ministry of Defence’s space-based ISR programme, which will deliver a constellation of satellites and supporting ground systems by 2031.  

These satellites will not only support military operations, but also contribute to other government tasks, including natural disaster monitoring, the development of mapping information, environmental monitoring and tracking the impact of climate change around the world..."

Someone looted Lush.

"Don't worry darling, I got something for you"

A 15-year-old boy has become the first person to be charged with riot over the recent disorder that swept towns and cities across England.

Almost all those involved have so far been charged with violent disorder, which carries a shorter maximum sentence than the offence of rioting. On Wednesday a judge, the recorder of Hull, suggested that prosecutors should consider the riot charge for people alleged to have played a central role in the disorder.

On Thursday the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said that a 15-year-old boy had been charged with riot after disorder in Sunderland. It said more riot charges would follow.

The riot charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, whereas for violent disorder the maximum is five years. The boy’s defence lawyer, Chris Wilson, told a hearing that the new charge may have “far wider repercussions”.

The district judge Zoe Passfield adjourned his case for two weeks as she said the new charge must have come as a “surprise” to him. She told the teenager: “The prosecution now want to bring a further charge of riot.

“It is an unusual situation when a new charge is brought after the person has pleaded guilty and it opens up complications that I and the lawyers need to consider carefully.”

Pupils achieved their best A-level results in a generation on Thursday with marks that highlighted the growing gap between the strongest and weakest-performing parts of the country.

While the national exam grades were among the highest for decades, regional differences showed areas in the north lagging far behind the south-east. Private schools also continued to outperform state schools.

Students in London and the south-east of England recorded some of the most startling results – more than 30% of their A-level entries were awarded A* or A grades. But those in the East Midlands saw top grades creep up by just 0.2 percentage points to 22.5%.

The West Midlands, which had previously been among the worst-performing regions, enjoyed an above-average increase in top grades, but still remained far behind London and the south-east with 24.8% of entries gaining A* or A.

The gap between university application rates from London and the north-east of England, which had the lowest application rate, has also widened further. As a result, while more than half of school leavers in London go on to higher education, only one in three do so from the north-east.

The UK's economy grew by 0.6% between April and June as it continued its recovery from the recession at the end of last year.

The latest figure was in line with forecasts and follows a 0.7% increase in the first three months of this year.

Growth was led by the services sector, in particular the IT industry, legal services and scientific research. Services are the biggest contributor to the UK's economy, far outstripping manufacturing and construction, both of which saw output fall between April and June.

Archived version

Although the planning application will initially be handled by Tower Hamlets council, the national government could get involved if the proposal is rejected again and China appeals.

China has accused Britain of exaggerating allegations about Chinese spies and cyberattacks.

The embassy would be China’s biggest diplomatic legation in Europe and almost twice the size of its one in Washington.

This led some British politicians and security officials to warn that a bigger embassy and more Chinese diplomats could make it easier to increase the number of spies in the country.

A functioning society depends on equality before the law. If crimes are not treated equally and dispassionately by the justice system, we lose trust in democracy and each other. But as sentences begin to be passed on racists who rioted earlier this month, we see once again a blatantly unequal application of the law.

Let’s make a couple of obvious comparisons. One was highlighted this week by the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi). Had those sentenced for their part in the riots this week – who heeded the calls of racist organisers and rampaged through England’s cities – been Muslims inspired by Islamists, they are likely to have been prosecuted as terrorists, potentially facing much longer sentences. Assaulting people in the name of Islam appears to be treated as a far graver crime than assaulting people in the cause of Islamophobia.

How were the attacks on mosques, on a hotel housing asylum seekers and on those who have sought to defend refugees not terrorism? Instead, the riots have been prosecuted as though they were random thuggery, although they emerge from a long and organised campaign of hatred directed towards asylum seekers, immigrants and Muslims. Some of those convicted were reported as having been “caught up” in the disorder: they were portrayed as weak people gone astray. No such understanding is extended to jihadists. As Rusi explains, the UK has a genuine two-tier justice system. It treats some people – white, non-Muslim – as though they act from blind anger, and others – Brown, Muslim – as coordinated terrorists, even when they commit the same crimes.

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But there’s an even more obvious comparison with the way the racist riots have been handled, and that is with the prosecution of environmental protesters. It is true that only the first clutch of riot cases have so far gone to court, and longer sentences may yet be handed down. But what we have seen is that violent disorder and assaults on the police have so far attracted shorter prison terms than those imposed for peaceful protest. In fact, the longest sentence for a rioter to date (three years) is shorter than the sentences (four and five years) imposed last month on Just Stop Oil campaigners.

As the judge in the Just Stop Oil case pointed out, the protesters caused major disruption by blocking the M25. They inflicted an economic cost of £770,000. No one, including the defendants, expected them to escape punishment. But,whether you agree with Just Stop Oil’s tactics or not, by any standards their nonviolent protest, whose aim was to protect us all from harm, was a far less serious crime than the violence on the streets this month, whose perpetrators deliberately inflicted injury and massive, indiscriminate criminal damage. The riots did not just inconvenience people, they terrorised them. When civil disobedience is punished more severely than racist rioting, something has gone badly wrong.

Social media platform Bluesky says it has seen a surge in signups in the United Kingdom in recent days.

Since X owner Elon Musk made controversial comments about the riots in the UK, a number of influential figures said they would leave the platform or scale back their use, including home office minister Jess Philips.

Now, Bluesky says it has seen a 60% jump in general activity from accounts in the UK, with several MPs also joining the platform recently.

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"For 5 out of the last 7 days, the UK had the most Bluesky signups of any country," said Bluesky in a statement on Monday.