UK weather: Parts of UK could hit 25C as continental air brings possible record high temperature

A warm spell could enable the UK to break its record March temperature of 25.6C (78F) next week.

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  • Duchess of Cambridge pays final respects to Prince Philip in first royal funeral

    Kate has never attended a royal funeral until she accompanied her husband to Prince Philip's.

  • Disabled woman says Duke of Edinburgh’s Award transformed her life

    Myah Richards, who has cerebral palsy, said doing the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award increased her confidence and spurred her on to do new things.

  • UK warships to sail for Black Sea in May as Ukraine-Russia tensions rise - Sunday Times

    The deployment is aimed at showing solidarity with Ukraine and Britain's NATO allies, the newspaper reported https://bit.ly/32pc4BK. One Type 45 destroyer armed with anti-aircraft missiles and an anti-submarine Type 23 frigate will leave the Royal Navy's carrier task group in the Mediterranean and head through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea, according to the report. RAF F-35B Lightning stealth jets and Merlin submarine-hunting helicopters will stand ready on the task group's flag ship, the carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth, to support the warships in the Black Sea, the report added.

  • Family of three contract Covid from infected neighbours in hotel quarantine in Sydney

    Family of three contract Covid from infected neighbours in hotel quarantine in Sydney. NSW Health reclassifies three coronavirus cases to locally-acquired after testing showed they shared same viral sequence as infected family next door

  • Liam Williams vs Demetrius Andrade ring walks: What time will fight start in the UK?

    Everything you need to know ahead of tonight’s WBO world title bout

  • Prince Philip's great niece Princess Xenia of Hohenlohe-Langenburg: 'He was an idol to us'

    The historic family ties that prompted The Queen to invite German royalty Follow live updates from Prince Philip's funeral The Duke of Edinburgh's great niece, whose brother is in Windsor for his funeral on Saturday, has remembered Prince Philip as an "idol" for the younger generation of their family. Speaking from Munich, Princess Xenia of Hohenlohe-Langenburg said the Duke was a powerful role model to her and his "selflessness, lack of ego and sense of humour" will never be forgotten. Her tribute comes as the Queen prepares to say farewell to her husband of 73 years at Windsor Castle. "To all of us, he was an idol, he was somebody to look up to, we had enormous respect for him and it was always very exciting when he came to visit, and he came often," said Princess Xenia of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. "And this has become clear to me in the week since he's died - the way he lived his life, his motto, which was an unwritten motto for us, this discipline, this selflessness, this lack of ego, but also his sense of humour always underlying all of that.

  • Archbishop of Canterbury: Royal Family can't say goodbye in the way they hoped but Britons unite in grief

    The Royals have not been able to "say goodbye in the way they'd hope or planned" like millions this year, the Archbishop of Canterbury has lamented. The Most Rev Justin Welby, who will deliver a blessing at the Duke of Edinburgh's funeral, said members of the Royal Family were united in grief with Britons who had lost their loved-ones during the pandemic. He praised the household for sticking to the Covid-19 social restrictions and said this means it "represents all funerals" in the last year - which have been characterised by the "burden" of not being able to have ideal send-offs for relatives. "My first thought when I heard the news was for the family," he said. "This is like every other funeral and distinct from every other funeral. It's like every other funeral because the family is the family is the family. But it's distinct because they're having to bear this loss and sorrow in the glare of goodness knows how many people watching them around the world. "The Royal Family has behaved superbly, they've just kept to the rules. That means that they're going through what between six and eight million other people have gone through in this country alone over the last year - not really being able to say goodbye in the way they'd hoped or planned. And that's an extra burden. "But as people around the world watch them tomorrow, I think they can identify with this and feel that here is a funeral that represents all funerals in a wonderful way."

  • My night out in New York took me across the latest Covid dividing line

    My night out in New York took me across the latest Covid dividing lineAs restrictions ease, tensions linger about what you should and shouldn’t do. So booking a babysitter felt outlandishly exciting ‘Stepping out of the cab was like being dropped into Ayia Napa after spending a year in a monastery.’ New Yorkers wander among reopened restaurants, March 2021. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters

  • A beach town seized a Black couple’s land in the 1920s. Now their family could get it back

    A beach town seized a Black couple’s land in the 1920s. Now their family could get it backLos Angeles officials have announced an effort to return the valuable Manhattan Beach property to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard is a relative of the Bruce family. Photograph: Damon Casarez/The Guardian

  • Will the Tokyo Olympics go ahead in 2021?

    2020 Games have already been postponed by a year due to the coronavirus pandemic

  • In Pictures: Windsor remembers Duke of Edinburgh on day of his funeral

    Philip’s insignia, laid out on the altar of St George’ Chapel, provided a reminder of his family links and his many roles in the nation’s life.

  • Coronavirus in numbers: UK deaths rise by 35

    The Government said a further 35 people had died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Saturday, bringing the UK total to 127,260. Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have now been 151,000 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate. The Government also said that, as of 9am on Saturday, there had been a further 2,206 lab-confirmed cases in the UK. It brings the total to 4,385,938.

  • French medical academy wants to wait six months between Covid jabs

    France's Academy of Medicine has called for the delay between doses of the Covid-19 vaccine to be extended from six weeks to six months, in the case of the Pfizer and Moderna injections, in order to allow more people to get the first jab. Pushing the second injection back in the under-55 age bracket would "accelerate the vaccination campaign...and achieve herd immunity much faster with the same number of doses, while ensuring satisfactory individual protection", the National Academy of Medicine said in a statement on Thursday.The academy has no decision-making power in France, unlike the High Authority for Health (HAS), which can make such recommendations with the backing of the government. On Wednesday, the delay between the first two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which use new messenger RNA technology, was extended from 4 to six weeks."This will allow us to speed up the vaccination campaign without compromising public protection," Health Minister Olivier Véran explained to French weekly Journal du Dimanche.High-risk professionsThe Academy of Medicine said that, based on recent studies in the United States and United Kingdom, a single dose of the mRNA vaccine had been shown to provide very high level of protection against the coronavirus. With the more contagious British variant now the dominant strain in France, the academy said it made sense to delay second injections for those aged under 55 years with no history of immune deficiency, to allow more people in high-risk professions, such as teachers, to receive their first dose.In France, the only under-55s currently eligible for the vaccination are frontline priority workers (health workers, home care workers, firefighters) or those with pre-existing health conditions.Some scientists are reluctant to extend the delay between doses, fearing incomplete protection provided by the first injection may favour the emergence of new variants.The academy also called for the first injection to be postponed in the case of patients who had tested positive for the coronavirus within the preceding six months.

  • Roman Kemp reveals Justin Bieber used to be 'wildest' celeb party animal

    The Capital FM presenter is no stranger to celebrity nightlife.

  • U.S. Sikh group demands probe of possible hate bias in deadly Indianapolis FedEx rampage

    Half of the eight workers shot to death at an Indianapolis FedEx facility by a former employee before he killed himself belonged to the Sikh religious community, leading an advocacy group to urge a probe of possible racial or ethnic hatred as a factor. Law enforcement officials said Friday they have yet to determine what motivated the gunman, 19-year-old Brandon Hole, who was white, to carry out Thursday night's rampage, at a FedEx operations center near Indianapolis International Airport. The attack in Indiana's state capital, the third most populous city in the Midwest, was the latest in a spate of at least seven deadly mass shootings in the United States over the past month.

  • Land Rover driver at Prince Philip's funeral spent week ensuring he could drive at correct speed

    The servicemen in charge of the specially modified Land Rover carrying the body of the Duke of Edinburgh spent the past week making sure they could drive “at the correct speed”. And, no wonder, as leading the vehicle on its way to the steps of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on foot were the most senior members of the Armed Forces and the Band of the Grenadier Guards. Corporal Louis Murray was behind the wheel, with Corporal Craig French, as Land Rover Commander for the Royal Hearse, both 29 years old, alongside him. The two staff instructors from the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers had been picked “on a coin-toss” from a group of four who had been training for the purpose and were described by officials as a “trusted pair of hands”. Cpl French said it was his job to “ensure that the driver puts the vehicle in the right place at the right time and whether to speed up or slow down.” “We have done a lot of practice over the last few days and you get to feel what the correct speed is, and we know what pace we have to be at. It’s now like second nature.

  • An independent Scotland could turn to Denmark for inspiration

    An independent Scotland could turn to Denmark for inspiration. Instead of looking south, campaigners are looking north, to the egalitarian models of small Nordic nations

  • ‘Some messages have been just sobbing’: phone line helps headteachers with burden of Covid

    ‘Some messages have been just sobbing’: phone line helps headteachers with burden of CovidA group of former heads have set up a vital service for colleagues with nowhere to turn The head’s office at a primary school in Cheshire. Photograph: Nathan Stirk/Getty

  • Czech police hunt two men with names matching Skripal suspects

    The Czech police have issued a wanted notice for Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two Russian intelligence agents wanted in the UK for the 2018 attempted poisoning of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury. At the same time the Czech government announced it was expelling 18 Russian diplomats from Prague in connection with two explosions at an ammunition dump in 2014 that killed two people. Although the Czech police only said Petrov and Boshirov were wanted in connection with a “serious crime” the wanted notice said the two men were in the Czech Republic from October 11 to 16, 2014. On October 16 a massive blast ripped through an ammunition dump in the town of Vrbetice, killing two people and causing massive amounts of damage. Another explosion occurred at the same facility in December. According to the Czech authorities, all the 18 diplomats, who now have 48 hours to leave the country, are members of either the GRU, Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency, or the SVR, the foreign intelligence agency.

  • Father of teen arrested with AK47 in New York subway station was killed in police shootout

    The 18-year-old man from Ohio was discovered with assault rifle, bullets and a gas mask at Times Square station on Friday