The UK government has moved to neutralise the toxic impact of the “bedroom tax” on the Scottish independence referendum by handing powers to the Scottish government that will allow it to mitigate the measure. The Scotland Office has informed the Scottish government that it will transfer the power to set the cap on Discretionary Housing […]
Vince Cable bowed to political pressure on Friday to release details of the precise number of Royal Mail shares allocated to 16 priority investors in the flotation of the 500-year-old postal service. The investors were picked because they gave firm commitments to back the sell-off at an early stage. The business secretary revealed the number […]
Millions of pounds of British aid money to tackle poverty overseas has been invested in builders of gated communities, shopping centres and luxury property in poor countries, the Guardian can reveal. CDC, the little-known investment arm of the British aid programme, has invested more than $260m (£154m) in 44 property and construction companies in Latin […]
Nato has drawn up plans to strengthen military co-operation with the former Soviet states on Russia‘s southern flank after the Kremlin’s seizure of Ukraine‘s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea. Nato foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss the alliance’s response to the Ukraine crisis amid continued fears of Russia’s territorial ambitions and what the Americans term […]
Guinea faces an Ebola epidemic on an unprecedented scale as it battles to contain confirmed cases now scattered across several locations that are far apart, the medical charity Médecins sans Frontières said. The warning from an organisation used to tackling Ebola in central Africa came after Guinea’s president appealed for calm as the number of deaths […]
The International Court of Justice has ordered a temporary halt to Japan’s annual slaughter of whales in the southern ocean after concluding that the hunts are not, as Japan claims, conducted for scientific research. The UN court’s decision, by a 12-4 majority among a panel of judges, casts serious doubt over the long-term future of […]
Migrants and asylum-seekers detained in Greece are being forced to endure deplorable conditions, often with devastating effects on their health, according to a report from aid agency Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Doctors who have attended internment camps, police stations and coastguard facilities around the country described “a living hell” for thousands of immigrants denied fresh air, natural […]
Senior executives from some the world’s largest technology firms were meeting face to face with Barack Obama on Tuesday to press their case for a major rollback of National Security Agency surveillance. The White House is hosting the 15-strong delegation from Silicon Valley, which includes the chief executives of Apple, Yahoo and Google, less than […]
The home secretary, Theresa May, has said she wants a clampdown on the way EU citizens are permitted to come to the UK, but avoided confirming leaks coming from her department suggesting she wants a cap of 75,000 EU workers. At present the government cannot impose a limit on the number of EU citizens coming […]
Three in five adults say they drank alcohol in the past week, continuing a decline recorded by official figures over the past seven years. In 2005, 72% of men and 57% of women in Britain said they had drunk alcohol in the seven days before being interviewed, compared with 64% and 52% respectively last year, […]