United Kingdom

LONDON (AP) — The head of the United Nations called Monday for maritime nations to agree on a course for the shipping industry to reduce its climate-harming emissions to net zero by the middle of the century at the latest.

The appeal by U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres came at the start of a meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London that’s seen as key for helping achieve the international goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit).

LONDON (AP) — New and expanded powers for British police took effect on Sunday, including measures targeting activists who stop traffic and major building works with protests.

Authorities have repeatedly condemned environmental protest groups, including Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, which have sought to raise awareness about the urgency of climate change by staging multiple high-profile protests at the busiest highways and roads. Their protests in recent years often caused serious disruption for motorists.

LONDON (AP) — More than 150 executives are urging the European Union to rethink the world’s most comprehensive rules for artificial intelligence, saying Friday that upcoming regulations will make it harder for companies in Europe to compete with rivals overseas, especially when it comes to the technology behind systems like ChatGPT.

LONDON (AP) — Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey got a thrill preying on other men and escalated his behavior from touchy-feely advances to hostile fondling and worse, a prosecutor told jurors Friday during Spacey’s sexual assault trial in London.

Spacey is “a man who does not respect personal boundaries or space, a man who it would seem delights in making others feel powerless and uncomfortable — a sexual bully,” prosecutor Christine Agnew said in her opening statement. “His preferred method of assault is, it appears, to grab aggressively other men in the crotch.”

LONDON (AP) — The U.K. government’s climate advisers on Wednesday slammed officials for their slow pace in meeting their “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions target and backtracking on fossil fuel commitments. They say Britain has “lost its clear global leadership position on climate action.”

LONDON, June 27 (Reuters) - Prince Harry's lawyer said on Tuesday a British publisher’s failure to call witnesses such as Piers Morgan was a fatal blow to its defence against allegations brought by the royal and others of unlawful behaviour by its tabloid papers.

The prince and 100 others are suing Mirror Group Newspapers(MGN), the publisher of the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Sunday People, over allegations of phone-hacking and unlawful information-gathering between 1991 and 2011.

27 June 2023; MEMO: An impact assessment of the UK government's Illegal Immigration Bill has found that the cost of sending one person to Rwanda could be almost £170,000 ($216,479).

Estimates have said that having one person in the asylum system costs £106,000 ($134,990), meaning it would cost around £64,000 ($81,503) more to fly someone out to Rwanda.

26 June 2023; MEMO: Iran's chargé d'affaires to the UK has announced that London has returned a third-century rock relief sculpture to the Islamic Republic, which had been smuggled out of the country in 2016.

In a tweet on Friday, Mehdi Hosseini Matin said that the Iranian embassy had received the ancient artefact, which dates back to the Sassanid Empire (224-641 CE), after it had been on display at the British Museum for three months.

LONDON, June 25 (Reuters) - The world's central bank umbrella body, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), called on Sunday for more interest rate hikes, warning the world economy was now at a crucial point as countries struggle to rein in inflation.

Despite the relentless rise in rates over the last 18 months, inflation in many top economies remains stubbornly high, while the jump in borrowing costs triggered the most serious banking collapses since the financial crisis 15 years ago.

BAMBER BRIDGE, England (AP) — The village of Bamber Bridge in northwestern England is proud of the blow it struck against racism in the U.S. military during World War II.

When an all-Black truck regiment was stationed in the village, residents refused to accept the segregation ingrained in the U.S. Army. Ignoring pressure from British and American authorities, pubs welcomed the GIs, local women chatted and danced with them, and English soldiers drank alongside men they saw as allies in the war against fascism.