Tag: united kingdom

Face masks made compulsory at some UK hospitals amid flu surge

Compulsory face masks are being implemented in some UK hospitals due to escalating flu levels. Good Morning Britain announced the changes following an NHS chief’s plea for anyone exhibiting symptoms to don a mask in public.

Kate Garraway, presenter on the ITV show, stated this morning: “Four hospitals in England have declared critical incidents as a result of the record-breaking flu admissions. Face masks have also been made compulsory at some sites.”

Daniel Elkeles, chief executive of NHS Providers which represents NHS trusts, said earlier this week that the country is experiencing a “very nasty strain of flu” that has emerged earlier in the year than usual. He advised: “”When you were talking about anything like Covid, I think we need to get back into the habit that if you are coughing and sneezing, but you’re not unwell enough to not go to work, then you must wear a mask when you’re in public spaces, including on public transport to stop the chances of you giving your virus to somebody else.”

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The moment the earliest known man-made fire was uncovered

A stunning discovery at an archaeological dig in the UK is rewriting the timeline of when humans first made fire.

Researchers have discovered the earliest known instance of human-created fire, which took place in the east of England 400,000 years ago.

The new discovery, in the village of Barnham, pushes the origin of human fire-making back by more than 350,000 years, far earlier than previously thought.

The ability to create fire was the moment that changed everything for humans. It provided warmth at will and enabled our ancestors to cook and eat meat, which made our brains grow. It meant we were no longer a group of animals struggling to survive – it gave us time to think and invent and become the advanced species we are today.

The team say they found baked earth together with the earliest Stone Age lighter – consisting of a flint that was bashed against a rock called pyrite, also known as fool’s gold, to create a spark.

BBC News has been given world exclusive access to the prehistoric site.

Under the treetops of Barnham Forest lies an archaeological treasure, buried a few metres beneath the Earth, that dates back to the furthest depths of human pre-history.

Around the edges of a clearing, tangled green branches frame the scene like a curtain, as if the forest itself were slowly revealing a long-buried chapter of its past. Prof Nick Ashton of the British Museum leads me through the trees and we both step into his astonishing story.

“This is where it happened,” he tells me in a reverent tone.

We walk down onto a dirt floor carved into deep, stepped hollows of raw earth and pale sand.

This was an ancient fireplace at the heart of a prehistoric “town hall”, around which early Stone Age people came together hundreds of thousands of years ago.

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British Soccer Star Joey Barton Given Six Months Suspended Prison Sentence For ‘Grossly Offensive’ Posts on X

Former British soccer star Joey Barton has been given a six-month suspended sentence for making “grossly offensive” posts on the X platform.

In the latest escalation in the British state’s war on freedom of expression, 43-year-old Barton was found guilty last month at Liverpool Crown Court of six counts of sending a grossly offensive electronic communication with intent to cause distress or anxiety.

The conviction related to posts he made targeting the football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko, as well as the BBC broadcaster Jeremy Vine.

Sentencing Barton on Monday, Judge Andrew Menary KC said that “robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.”

”But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.”

Menary went on to describe Barton as “not a man of previous good character” and said he had carried out “a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful.”

While Barton’s comments could definitely be condemned as extremely unkind, most were intended as jokes or crass humor.

During an FA Cup tie in which Ward and Aluko were commentating, Barton described them as the “Fred and Rose West of football commentary,” a reference to the notorious British serial killers.

In another post, he mocked Jeremy Vine as a “bike nonce” and asked if he had visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island.

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Dystopian Horror: ONE IN FOUR British Teens Turn To AI ‘Therapy’ Bots For Mental Health

One in four British teenagers have resorted to AI chatbots for mental health support over the past year, exposing the chilling reality of a society where machines replace human connection amid crumbling government services. 

The Youth Endowment Fund (YEF) surveyed 11,000 kids aged 13 to 16 in England and Wales, revealing that over half sought some form of mental health aid, with a quarter leaning on AI. 

Victims or perpetrators of violence were even more likely to confide in these digital voids. As The Independent reported, “The YEF said AI chatbots could appeal to struggling young people who feel it is safer and easier to speak to an AI chatbot anonymously at any time of day rather than speaking to a professional.”

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Brits are warned they could be prosecuted if they take bananas washed up on beach after cargo containers fell off ship

Brits have been warned they face prosecution if they take bananas that washed up on a beach after falling off a cargo ship. 

Thousands of bananas appeared on Selsey Beach, West Sussex on Saturday night after 16 huge containers toppled off the Baltic Klipper near the Isle of Wight coast.

Stunned beachgoers soon flocked to the scene to investigate, as police quickly installed a cordon and urged people to steer clear of the fruit, which must be reported to HM Coastguard.

Those who fail to declare a wreck without a reasonable excuse face a £2,500 fine under the terms of the Merchant Shipping Act 1995. 

A spokesperson for the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said: ‘HM Coastguard is continuing to work with relevant authorities after 16 containers went overboard from the cargo ship Baltic Klipper in the Solent on December 6.

‘This includes working with the vessel’s owners, who are responsible for recovering the containers.

‘The public are advised to avoid the area and are reminded that all wreck material found in the UK has to be reported to HM Coastguard’s Receiver of Wreck.’

Eight of the containers were filled with bananas, while two were packed with plantain and one with avocados – five were empty.

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How the MI5 ‘allowed Britain’s top agent inside IRA to get away with murder’… these are the damning findings of a report into mole ‘Stakeknife’

Britain’s top spy inside the IRA was effectively allowed to get away with murder because the security services felt ‘a perverse sense of loyalty’ to him, a damning report has concluded.

The Daily Mail can reveal that the double agent codenamed ‘Stakeknife’ was even taken on holiday by his handlers to evade arrest when he was wanted by police.

The extraordinary revelation was contained in MI5 files disclosed to Operation Kenova, the nine-year police investigation into the man unmasked in 2003 as Freddie Scappaticci.

Once celebrated as Britain’s most prized asset in the intelligence war with the IRA, he is now thought to have cost more lives than he saved.

Directly linked to at least 13 murders, Stakeknife was a senior member of the terror group’s internal security unit, known as the ‘Nutting Squad’, which abducted, tortured and killed suspected informers.

Operation Kenova – led by Sir Iain Livingstone, the former Chief Constable of Police Scotland – slams MI5, accusing it of ‘serious organisational failure’ for trying to restrict the investigation. 

Sir Iain’s report, leaked to the Daily Mail, takes issue with a former head of MI5 for stating that the agency had ‘limited knowledge’ of Stakeknife’s activities. In fact, it says, MI5 was involved in running him ‘throughout the entirety of his operation as an agent’.

Astonishingly, the report reveals Stakeknife’s Army handlers ‘took him out of Northern Ireland on holiday when they knew he was wanted by [police] for murder’.

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Boris Johnson Urges Ukraine to Continue War

Trump’s proposal for peace in Ukraine has been met with an overwhelming condemnation from the world’s neocons. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reemerges from the shadows whenever he hears word that a war may be winding down. He played an instrumental role in persuading Zelensky not to negotiate a peace treaty with Russia when it was apparent that Ukraine could not easily win, and now, Johnson is urging Ukraine to continue the war.

“Imagine that you are Vladimir V. Putin and you are spending a calm Saturday in the Kremlin… You casually watch the television news, and you cannot help but smile at the incompetence of your opponents, at the astonishing weakness of the West. You have lost more than a million soldiers, killed and wounded, in your attempts to subdue Ukraine. You have still failed to capture more than 20 percent of the country’s territory. Your economy is faltering. And now they are talking about some new 28-point plan to end the war – and it could have been written entirely by the Kremlin,” Johnson warned.

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New discovery: The ‘sacred boundary’ surrounding Stonehenge

Some 4,500 years ago, people dug a series of deep, wide pits in the area near Durrington Walls in southern England. They were gemometrically arranged, forming a 2-kilometer (1.2-mile) wide circle that enclosed over three square kilometers (1.16 square miles).

Long mistaken for naturally occuring features, the circle of human-made shafts has now come to be understood as a colossal project that lends new dimensions to the Stonehenge landscape.

An invisible ring around Durrington Walls

Durrington Walls is just a stone’s throw from the small English town of Amesbury, and just three kilometers, or about half an hour on foot, from Stonehenge. Each pit or shaft is approximately 10 meters (32.8 feet) wide and 5 meters deep.

Of the 20 pits discovered so far, a new study suggests that at least 15 form a huge, even circle around the henge of Durrington Walls. A henge is a type of prehistoric earthwork consisting of a ring-shaped bank, fortified with an inward ditch, encircling a flat circular area.

They were likely used for ceremonial purposes, to congregate or perform rituals. At the center of Durrington Walls used to be a circular structure of wooden posts, driven deep into the ground and surrounded by a settlement.

The pits were discovered years ago, but the newest research is just now uncovering more details, and providing deeper understanding. Scientists have now been able to date the structure to about 2480 BCE using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL).

The OSL method is a fairly precise way of pinpointing a sediment’s last exposure to light — and by extension, the last time it was covered or buried — by measuring the natural radiation captured in certain minerals like quartz and feldspar. This technique relies heavily on the quality of the sample and has a margin of error of about 5-10%.

The recent study shows that the circular structure did not accidentally form over centuries, but was the result of intentional efforts in a planned, momunental project. The pits were actively used as part of the cultural landscape — and traces of humans, plants and animals indicate deliberate coordination.

A ‘sacred boundary’ mapped with astounding precision

None of the shafts examined can be attributed to natural erosion of the chalky landscape — the pits’ sheer size and number clearly suggest they were dug by humans. They form a near-perfect circle, and are spaced at even intervals. The width and distance of the pits follow a clear pattern.

This means that the humans involved were able to mark distances, count steps or measurements, and work out a coordinated plan — all before they started digging. And so, what at first glance seemed like an assortment of strange holes became a rare testament to the fact that numbers, measurements, and large-scale planning were already part of the daily lives of Neolithic people living in the area.

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How Britain entrenched Zionist impunity in Palestine

Are we seeing the final dismemberment of Palestine and the end of the Palestinian struggle for freedom? It is a distinct possibility, and if it happens it will be the culmination of a long and cruel colonial journey that was imposed on the Palestinians from the time of the Balfour Declaration in 1917 until today.

That pernicious and ill-advised decision to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine led inexorably to the current genocidal war on Gaza and Israel’s multiple human rights abuses against the Palestinians, ongoing since Israel’s establishment.

Balfour’s great crime in 1917 was not just to cede control of Palestine (which Britain did not own) to foreign colonists, but to do so specifically and, of all people, to a group of tormented, complex Jewish European Zionists with an acute sense of grievance about their historic persecution. The deep animus they held against a world, which had allowed it to happen, fed their belief that the world owed them recompense for their sufferings, and Britain’s offer of a ‘national home’ in Palestine was only their due.

It gave them a sense of entitlement to the country which bred an arrogant conviction that it belonged exclusively to them.

Such ideas, never questioned or rejected by Israel’s western supporters, but on the contrary indulged and accepted as valid, have led to the systematic depredations of Palestine and its people.

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US Under Secretary Warns Britain That the First Amendment Isn’t Negotiable

This week, Sarah Rogers, the US Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, touched down in the UK not to sip tea or admire the Crown Jewels, but to deliver a message as subtle as a boot in the face: stop trying to censor Americans in America.

Yes, really.

According to Rogers, the UK’s speech regulator, Ofcom, the bureaucratic enforcer behind Britain’s censorship law, the Online Safety Act (OSA), has been getting ideas. Dangerous ones. Like attempting to extend its censorship regime outside the United Kingdom and onto American soil. You know, that country across the ocean where the First Amendment exists and people can still say controversial things without a court summons landing on their doormat.

To GB News, Rogers called this attempt at international thought-policing “a deal-breaker,” “a non-starter,” and “a red line.”

In State Department speak, that is basically the equivalent of someone slamming the brakes, looking Britain in the eye, and saying, “You try that again, and there will be consequences.”

To understand how Britain got itself into this mess, you have to understand the Online Safety Act. It is a law that reads like it was drafted by a committee of alarmed Victorian schoolteachers who just discovered the internet.

The OSA is supposedly designed to “protect children online,” which sounds noble until you realize it means criminalizing large swaths of adult speech, forcing platforms to delete legal content, and requiring identity and age checks that would make a KGB officer blush.

It even threatens prosecution over “psychological harm.” And now, apparently, it wants to enforce all of that in other countries too.

Rogers was not impressed, saying Ofcom has tried to impose the OSA extraterritorially and attempted to censor Americans in America. That, she made clear, is outrageous.

It’s more than a diplomatic spat. Rogers made it painfully clear the US isn’t going to just write a sternly worded letter and move on. There is legislative retaliation on the table.

The GRANITE Act, Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny & Extortion, is more than a clever acronym. It is the legislative middle finger Washington can consider if the UK keeps pretending it can veto American free speech from 3,500 miles away.

The bill, already circulating in the Wyoming state legislature, would strip foreign governments of their usual protections from lawsuits in the US if they try to censor American citizens or companies.

In other words, if Ofcom wants to slap US platforms with foreign censorship rules, they had better be ready to defend themselves in an American courtroom where “freedom of expression” isn’t a slogan, it is a constitutional right.

Rogers confirmed that the US legislature will likely consider that and will certainly consider other options if the British government doesn’t back down.

Of course, the GRANITE Act didn’t come out of nowhere. Rogers’s warning didn’t either. It is a response to the increasingly unhinged state of free speech in the UK, where adults can be arrested for memes, priests investigated for praying silently, and grandmothers interrogated for criticizing gender ideology.

“When you don’t rigorously defend that right, even when it’s inconvenient, even when the speech is offensive,” Rogers said, “you end up in these absurd scenarios where you have comedians arrested for tweets.”

This is the modern UK, where “hate speech” has been stretched to include everything from telling jokes to sharing news stories about immigration. And now, under the OSA, that censorious spirit has gone global.

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