Hillsborough EPG responsibilities could be cut

Hillsborough Emergency Policy Group responsibilities could be cut

Latest Stories

  • Facing the first loss of their voting lives, young Republicans are surprisingly hopeful, but want the GOP to work for Gen Z

    Five leaders of college Republican groups told Business Insider what they thought of President Donald Trump's election loss.

  • Honduran ex-president Zelaya stopped at airport with bag of money

    TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) -Former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya said on Friday that he had been "unjustly" detained at the Central American nation's Toncontin international airport for carrying $18,000 in cash, which he said was not his. Zelaya, who led Honduras from 2006 to 2009 and was an ally of late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, was deposed by the military in a June 2009 coup as he was preparing to hold a referendum on presidential re-election, which his opponents said was a ploy to stay in power.

  • Swedish government sidelines epidemiologist who steered country's no lockdown experiment as deaths rise

    The high-profile epidemiologist who led Sweden's no lock-down strategy in the spring appears to be being sidelined by the government after his prediction that greater immunity would mean a lighter second wave proved badly wrong. Anders Tegnell's biweekly press conference was on Thursday pushed into the shade by an overlapping press conference fronted by Sweden's Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, where new scenarios prepared by the Public Health Agency were announced. "There's certainly a split, and I'm pretty sure that many in the government have rather lost faith in the Public Health Agency," said Nicholas Aylott, an associate politics professor at Stockholm's Södertorn University. "By some counts, we've now got exactly the same level of spread of the virus that we had in the spring, and that's about as clear a refutation of Tegnell's strategy as you could wish for." Dr Tegnell has always insisted that his Public Health Agency has never pursued a herd immunity strategy, but he repeatedly suggested in the summer that his counterparts in Norway, Finland and Denmark would face a tougher task over the winter because of lower levels of immunity in their populations. This month, though, the number of deaths in Sweden has again begun to soar above that of its Nordic neighbours, with 630 deaths so far registered as a result of Covid-19. That is about ten times the per capita death rate in Norway -- where just 30 Covid-19 deaths were registered between October 28th and November 25th.

  • El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala stage mass raids on gangs

    The Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras have rounded up hundreds of suspected street gang members as part of a U.S.-backed effort known as “Operation Regional Shield.” The attorney general’s office in El Salvador has taken the lead, reporting that it obtained arrest warrants for 1,152 suspects, of whom 572 had been arrested by Friday. The U.S. Department of Justice noted that authorities in El Salvador and Honduras arrested three dozen suspected immigrant traffickers.

  • Biden reportedly considering a retired four-star general to lead US military, would be first Black defense secretary if confirmed

    If confirmed, Ret. US Army Gen. Lloyd Austin would be the first Black defense secretary for the United States.

  • OPEC+ panel's informal online talks postponed to Sunday - source

    OPEC+ is debating whether to ease oil output cuts from Jan. 1, as it previously agreed, or to continue producing at the same rate amid sluggish oil demand and the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The letter from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, seen by Reuters, had initially said Russian Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak will attend Saturday's informal consultations of the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee's heads. Novak was energy minister until earlier this month, leading Moscow's efforts to forge close ties with OPEC and clinch the deal on output cuts.

  • Government ready for 100 per cent increase in Hong Kong citizens coming to UK

    The Government is preparing for a 100 per cent increase in the number of Hong Kong citizens coming to Britain after Boris Johnson offered up to three million residents sanctuary. The Prime Minister said in July that Hong Kong's freedoms were being violated by a new security law and those affected would be offered the chance to settle in the UK and ultimately apply for citizenship. The Foreign Office estimated that 200,000 people would move from Hong Kong to the UK, but a leaked internal briefing paper warned of a "rapid rise in the issue of British National (Overseas) passports since June". BN(O) passport holders in Hong Kong were granted special status in the 1980s but currently have restricted rights and are only entitled to visa-free access to the UK for six months. Under the Government's plans, all BN(O)s and their dependents will be given the right to remain in the UK, including the right to work and study, for five years. They will be able to apply for settled status and, after a further year, seek citizenship.

  • Six US oil executives jailed for corruption in Venezuela after being lured to business meeting

    Men plead innocence following arrest in 2017 as State Department demands release

  • Biden's win hides a dire warning for Democrats in rural U.S.

    Democrats once dominated Koochiching County in the blue-collar Iron Range of northern Minnesota. “We’ve got to see if we can get the Democratic Party to moderate and accept the fact that rural Minnesota is not getting more conservative,” said Bakk, who announced last week that he would become an independent after serving 25 years as a Democrat. The party lost House seats in the Midwest, and Democratic challengers in Iowa, Kansas, Montana and North Carolina Senate races, all once viewed as serious threats to Republican incumbents, fell, some of them hard.

  • Norway to extradite suspect in 1982 attack on Paris Jewish restaurant

    Norway will extradite a man to France who is suspected of taking part in an attack that killed six people in a Jewish restaurant in Paris 38 years ago, the government said on Friday. In 2015, arrest warrants were issued against three former members of the Abu Nidal Organization, a splinter group of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), a source told Reuters at the time. The suspects were identified long after the attacks because of statements from other former members of the Abu Nidal group under a French judicial process that maintained their anonymity, the source said.

  • French police facing 'worst moral crisis in their history' after string of scandals and controversial ID law

    French police are going through the “worst moral crisis in modern history”, according to one of the country’s leading law enforcement experts, following a string of violent incidents in which officers have been accused of misconduct, brutality and racism. Decades of refusal by successive French governments to introduce UK-style independent oversight and systemic reform have brought its police to a perilous breaking point with swathes of an already sceptical population, according to eminent criminologist Sebastien Roché at CRNS. The French have long felt ambivalent about their force, which has come a long way since the dark days of 1961 in which officers under the command of police chief Maurice Papon, later convicted of crimes against humanity, massacred an estimated 200 Algerian protesters. “You’ll be covered,” he notoriously told his men. Hailed as heroes in the wake of terror attacks, they have been equally vilified as heavy-handed and trigger-happy in recent mass demonstrations, notably during the “yellow vests” revolt where intensive use of stun grenades and rubber bullets maimed dozens. However, in the past two weeks, the image of the French force has taken a battering of rare intensity, bringing to the fore long-held accusations of discrimination towards minorities, violence and a sense of impunity.

  • Alleged police beating of Black man angers French

    French authorities have suspended police officers accused of assaulting and racially abusing a Black man in Paris, after CCTV footage of the incident was released and caused an outcry. The music producer, who has identified himself as Michel, was beaten at the entrance to his studio. French President Emmanuel Macron was quoted by France's BFM TV as being "very shocked" by the CCTV and mobile phone images, which were obtained by the LoopSider news outlet and made headline news on French channels. The officers involved were suspended pending investigation at the interior minister's request. Michel told reporters he'd been walking in the street without a face mask, against French COVID-19 rules. When he saw a police car he went into his studio to avoid getting a fine. But the police followed him inside and arrested him, violently. The video purports to show them kicking and beating him, and he says they hurled racial abuse at him too. They then leave, and throw a tear gas canister into the studio. As anger grew, French soccer stars added to the chorus of condemnation. Kylian Mbappe tweeted that the video was "intolerable" and his fellow Les Bleus striker, Antoine Griezmann wrote: "My France is hurting." The alleged attack on Michel risks inflaming racial tension, and fuelling criticism of a draft law that would limit journalists' ability to show images of French police officers at work. The prime minister's office said on Thursday (November 26) it would set up an independent commission to propose a new draft of the legislation. Some "BlackLivesMatter" protests broke out in Paris in June, a month after the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in the United States. The movement resonates in France, in particular in deprived city suburbs, where rights groups say accusations of police brutality, often against people with immigrant backgrounds, remain largely unaddressed. And Paris police were already under fire this week after social media photos and videos showed officers hitting protesters as they cleared out an illegal migrants campsite in a central Paris square.

  • They're baaack: Trump and allies still refuse election loss

    Monday seemed like the end of President Donald Trump's relentless challenges to the election, after the federal government acknowledged President-elect Joe Biden was the “apparent winner” and Trump cleared the way for cooperation on a transition of power. On Thursday, after a Thanksgiving evening conversation from the White House with troops stationed overseas, Trump abruptly pivoted to angrily alleging — still without any evidence — that “massive fraud” was behind his defeat. Speaking to news crews gathered to watch the traditional holiday conversation with the military, Trump denounced officials in battleground states he'd lost as “communists” and “enemies of the state.”

  • WHO says would be 'highly speculative' to say COVID did not emerge in China

    The World Health Organization's top emergency expert said on Friday it would be "highly speculative" for the WHO to say the coronavirus did not emerge in China, where it was first identified in a food market in December last year. China is pushing a narrative via state media that the virus existed abroad before it was discovered in the central city of Wuhan, citing the presence of coronavirus on imported frozen food packaging and scientific papers claiming it had been circulating in Europe last year. "I think it's highly speculative for us to say that the disease did not emerge in China," Mike Ryan said at a virtual briefing in Geneva after being asked if COVID-19 could have first emerged outside China.

  • Ex-CIA boss says Ted Cruz ‘unworthy’ of Texas during Twitter row over Iran killing

    Pair arguing about killing of top Iranian nuclear scientist

  • What Now for Trump’s Border Wall?

    The verdict on the U.S.–Mexico border wall President Trump promised to construct is decidedly mixed as the year comes to a close.The “big, beautiful wall,” as Trump referred to it, reached 400 miles in length by the end of October, when the Department of Homeland Security held a ceremony hailing the achievement. But almost all construction was designed to replace existing barriers: Just nine miles of new fencing have been put up at previously empty sections of the border.This is not nothing, given that much of the existing border fencing was in need of an upgrade. Some stretches of the barrier were dilapidated, while new barriers will consist of steel bollards up to 30 feet high, with improved access roads, cameras, lighting, and other features that make breaching the barrier more difficult. However, the president’s efforts to vastly expand the length of the barrier failed, and was replaced by a more modest renovation.The story of the border wall renovation reads rather like Trump’s efforts in the 1990s to develop a real-estate tract on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. What Trump proposed as “Television City,” a gleaming development by the Hudson River that would include residential buildings as well as a massive skyscraper, foundered on bureaucratic inertia, fierce opposition by residents, and Trump’s own financial problems. Trump sold the real estate parcel to investors from Hong Kong, and the resulting development, Riverside South, is an unremarkable residential complex.Similarly, the fantastical visions of a wall running along the entire southern border that Trump sold on the 2016 campaign trail have not come to fruition. The Trump administration faced a continuous stream of lawsuits aiming to halt or slow construction. Democratic lawmakers opposed any funding for construction at all. Property owners on the border also fought the administration for attempting to seize their land through declarations of eminent domain.Trump’s attempts to fund the project have ended in a gambit to circumvent Congress. During budget negotiations in fall 2018, Democrats in Congress pushed to cap funding for border operations at $1.6 billion. However, Trump refused to approve the budget if it didn’t include $5 billion in border wall funds, and the spat led to the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history. By February 2019, the president caved and signed the budget bill without additional funding — instead, Trump resorted to declaring a national emergency at the southern border in order to divert Pentagon funds for wall construction.The Trump administration was able to turn back “caravans” of illegal immigrants arriving at the southern border that year. However, the national emergency declaration drew opposition from Republican senators including Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), concerned about a possible overreach of executive power. (Sasse ultimately voted against formally condemning Trump’s emergency declaration, arguing that the declaration did not exceed the bounds of what he considers to be an overly broad national emergency statute.)The Supreme Court in November 2020 agreed to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of the emergency declaration; it is possible that the Court will rule that the diversion of Pentagon funds to finance border-wall construction was unconstitutional.By the end of April 2020, the Trump administration had siphoned at least $10 billion in Pentagon funds for wall construction. According to planning documents obtained by the Washington Post in 2019, the administration estimated that construction of 500 miles of new barrier would average out to roughly $36 million per mile.After the budgetary maneuvers, court challenges, and other obstacles, the current barriers are scheduled to reach 450 miles by the end of the year if construction continues apace. The result is like the Riverside South development: nowhere near Trump’s grand ambitions, but nice enough.The project may sit idle during the Biden administration. Joe Biden has already promised to overhaul Trump’s immigration policies, including halting construction of the barrier once he takes office.“There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” Biden said at a meeting with black and Latino reporters in August.But it’s not yet clear if the incoming president will cease ongoing construction entirely. Federal contractors are at work on new sections of barrier, so the new administration would need to follow current regulatory law if it decided to terminate contracts.“Generally, the [contract] clauses treat the government more favorably, much more favorably, than if it was in the commercial world,” John Horan, a Georgetown University law professor specializing in government contracts, told Arizona Central in mid-November. “There is an established regulatory process to stop these contracts, if the president should so decide, in an efficient and orderly manner that will also fairly compensate the contractors for the work that has been performed.”Meanwhile, even before the election, progressive groups began urging Biden not only to stop construction but to tear down sections of barrier that have already been built.“The construction of this unlawful border wall has desecrated tribal lands, leveled wildlife preservations, and destroyed border communities,” ACLU staff attorney Dror Ladin told the Daily Beast in October. “Every unlawful mile of wall should be taken down, and the government must work with border communities to undo the damage that wall construction has already inflicted.”Just how much of the border wall is “unlawful” could be the subject of future legal battles. For example, should the Supreme Court rule that the Trump administration’s diversion of Pentagon funds toward barrier construction was unconstitutional, that could indicate that some sections of barrier were built illegally and thus give more leverage to Democrats' calling for their destruction.Of course, tearing down walls, like building them, is expensive. And rolling back Trump’s immigration policies may take time, as three people involved in developing Biden’s immigration policy have told NBC. Biden will take office amid an ongoing pandemic, and presumably vaccine-distribution efforts will be a priority.If history is any indication, government action on a border wall will remain somewhat detached from reality. Congress passed the Secure Fence Act in 2006, mandating the construction of double-layered fencing across 670 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, but the “second layer” never materialized. Just as President Trump’s promised wall, running from the Gulf of Mexico to California, turned out to be mostly an expensive renovation of existing barriers.Now, in a Biden administration, progressives will call to tear down the refurbished barriers. But their dream of toppling Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” was made impossible by Trump’s failure to build it in the first place.

  • Pictured: A doctor hugged a distraught elderly coronavirus patient on Thanksgiving, after warning the public America is headed for its 'darkest days' over Christmas

    Dr. Joseph Varon, of Houston's United Memorial Medical Center, has worked 251 days in the COVID-19 ICU. He said the 'darkest days' are to come.

  • French face three-year jail term for 'accent discrimination' in victory for regions versus Paris

    French people who discriminate against compatriots due to their accent face a maximum three-year prison term under a new bill seen as a victory for the country’s maligned provincial twangs over well-educated Parisian speech. The law, which was passed after its first reading on Thursday night, places discrimination due to accent on a par with race, gender or handicap. Those who flout it also face a €45,000 fine. Tabled by MPs in President Emmanuel Macron's centrist political party, the law notably seeks to counter prejudice in the workplace against regional and lower-class accents. The issues of “accent discrimination” came to a head in recent months after the appointment in July of Jean Castex, the new prime minister, who is a rarity among senior politicians in having retained his thick southwestern accent. Christophe Euzet, MP for the Mediterranean port of Sète and lead sponsor of the bill, said he had been appalled at the way Mr Castex, a former top civil servant and mayor of Pyrenean town Prades, had been mocked for his accent after taking the top government job. Northern French often equate southern accents with sun, aperitifs and idleness. Mr Euzet, a native of Perpignan with similar southwestern tones to Mr Castex, said it was time to end stereotypes in which a southerner is seen as "a fun guy ... not there to talk about serious things.” “Accents have no right of place in radio and television channels, in the world of politics and the helm of high office, administrations and French public businesses,” he added. Unlike in Britain, French media, in particular, has made no visible effort to employ newscasters and other prominent personalities with provincial twangs. During debates, MPs complained that TV personalities with southwestern accents were “relegated to the rugby column or the weather”. Patricia Mirallès, a Macron MP, whose parents were French from North Africa, recounted “painful” memories of being mocked for her pied-noir accent. Maina Sage, an MP from French Polynesia, denounced what she called “a form of racism” every time she opened her mouth in parliament. “Our nation, which often prides itself on the great diversity of its regions, paradoxically disappoints through the toned-down uniformity of public speech,” said Mr Euzet. The dominance of the Parisian accent is often equated with France notoriously centralised and urban administration whose failure to take into account the provincial mindset fuelled the “yellow vest” revolt two years ago.

  • U.S. appeals ruling that barred Postal Service changes before election

    The U.S. Postal Service (USPS), Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and President Donald Trump late Friday appealed a federal judge's ruling suspending service changes and requiring aggressive steps to ensure ballot deliveries ahead of the November presidential election, the Justice Department said. The government said it was appealing U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan's preliminary injunction orders issued in late September in a pair of legal challenges.

  • Donald Trump Jr. says he is 'all done with the Rona' and ends his COVID-19 isolation to celebrate Thanksgiving days after announcing his positive test

    Donald Trump Jr. tested positive for COVID-19 last week. Although he is asymptomatic, the CDC recommends sick people like him isolate for 10 days.