Hundreds of police, rangers and military personnel deployed to tackle virus threatening pork export industry
Spanish authorities have deployed hundreds of police officers, wildlife rangers and military personnel in an effort to contain an outbreak of highly infectious African swine fever (ASF) outside Barcelona before it becomes a major threat to the country’s €8.8bn-a-year pork export industry.
Officials believe the virus, detected in the municipality of Bellaterra, may have begun to circulate after a wild boar ate contaminated food that had been brought in from outside Spain.
Vladimir Putin has claimed Russian forces have taken control of the strategic city of Pokrovsk in Ukraine, as he sought to project confidence before a key meeting on Tuesday with a US delegation to discuss a possible peace deal to end the war.
Dressed in military fatigues during a visit to a command centre on Monday evening, the Russian president hailed what he called the “important” capture of Pokrovsk – once a major logistical hub for the Ukrainian army – though Ukrainian officials later disputed the claim.
Leaving eight-year-old Lati-Yana Brown homeless and cut off from her mother should never have been sanctioned by the state
Britain’s long history with the Caribbean, from enslavement to the Windrush scandal, is marked by policies that have fractured families. The Home Office’s latest actions show little has changed. After the devastation of Hurricane Melissa, a tropical cyclone that made landfall across the Greater Antilles area in late October, eight-year-old Lati-Yana Stephanie Brown was left destitute in Jamaica. But after her UK-resident parents appealed for the Home Office to expedite her visa application, officials rejected it and Lati-Yana has been left to sleep on the floor of her elderly grandmother’s destroyed home.
But the rejection rested on factual errors, according to Lati-Yana’s mother, Kerrian Bigby. Dawn Butler, her MP, shared a letter with me raising concerns about “misrepresentations” in the decision notice, including the claim that Bigby does not have full parental responsibility for the child, which she says is false.
Nadine White is a journalist, film-maker and the UK’s first race correspondent
The former England cricketer Robin Smith has died at the age of 62 with his family and former county Hampshire saying they were devastated by his loss.
Smith played 62 Tests and 71 one-day internationals for England between 1988 and 1996 and was a resolute middle-order bulwark for the side during often difficult times for the team. He particularly excelled against pace, making his highest Test score of 175 against the fearsome West Indies attack at Antigua in 1994.
The revolutionary spirit in politics and architecture; histories of free speech and civil war; plus how the Tories fell apart and Starmer won
We live in a hyper-political yet curiously unrevolutionary age, one of hashtags rather than barricades. Perhaps that’s why so many writers this year have looked wistfully back to a time when strongly held convictions still made waves in the real world.
In The Revolutionists (Bodley Head), Jason Burke revisits the 1970s, when it seemed the future of the Middle East might end up red instead of green – communist rather than Islamist. It’s a geopolitical period piece: louche men with corduroy jackets and sideburns, women with theories and submachine guns. Many were in it less for the Marxism than for the sheer mayhem. Reading about the hijackings and kidnappings they orchestrated makes today’s orange-paint protests seem quaint by comparison.
Twenty-four tiny drawers of fun stuff sounds delightful – but not when you’re the one filling the thing
Maybe 10 years ago, I bought permanent Advent calendars for the kids: Scandi-looking Christmas houses with 24 tiny drawers, from Sainsbury’s. I think my original plan was that some of the draws could contain something other than chocolate, not because I’m the kind of almond mum who won’t let anyone eat sweets before breakfast, but because their dad and I are separated and have them half the time each, so it wasn’t unusual for them to wake up and have six Lindt chocolate balls to chomp through before they’d opened their curtains.
The tiny drawers are a curse. Some years I could only find stuff for one of the kids (erasers in the shape of hedgehogs; lip balm); other years, a different one was in luck (Lego Yodas; magnets). It was never, ever fair. One year, I found tons of different batteries for the drawers, and I thought it was the most genius thing I’d ever done, but they said: “How is this a fun gift? If we needed a battery, we’d just go to the kitchen drawer, which is supposed to have batteries in it.” I realised in about 2019 that I’d just have to start planning earlier, around July, if I wanted to strike the perfect balance of parity, festivity and usefulness, and that was a good year, actually. I found some tiny business cards with swear words on them that they could just leave around the house, and ear-splitting whistles and unisex lip balm. We have enough erasers and pencil sharpeners now to last until nobody ever makes a mistake because the written word is just a memory.
The site isn’t exposing misleading reporting – it’s revealing the bubble Trump increasingly inhabits
Donald Trump has used the mainstream press as a punching bag for many years, but in recent weeks his jabs have become even more frequent – and more ill-tempered.
Four years after workers at a Starbucks store in upstate New York became the first to unionize, hundreds of outlets followed – defying intense resistance from the coffee chain. What happened next?
2000Thousands of Starbucks baristas are on strike across the US, warning the world’s largest coffee chain to brace for the “longest and biggest” bout of industrial action in its history.
Barely a year after Brian Niccol, the Starbucks CEO, tried to draw a line under bitter divisions between its management and unionized workers, pledging to “engage constructively” with them, the American coffee giant is now grappling with an escalating strike during its lucrative holiday trading season.
The market-liberal economist/pundit Noah Smith has written a fun “stranger in a strange land” essay about his unusual fondness for the emerging species of “generative” artificial-intelligence bots. Smith points out that 100 years of science fiction has prepared us all to have convenient, convincingly intelligent, multilingual automaton life assistants; they are an accepted part of the background of almost all imagined futures, with exceptions like Frank Herbert’s Dune universe (wherein even basic mathematical computing is outlawed on religious principle). Read More
Politicians in Canada, like those in most countries, have had their moments of behaving badly in public. We’ve witnessed backbenchers all the way to prime ministers willing to either speak out, criticize, or occasionally swear at opponents. Many of these inappropriate comments were made in the hallowed halls of Parliament or provincial legislatures, which protected them from being sued in court. Read More
When the Carney government’s honeymoon is over, and its missteps on a variety of fronts become more evident, the search will begin in earnest for “alternatives.” Looking ahead, what might such alternatives be? Read More
WASHINGTON — President Trump has been working up to 12-hour days this month, according to non-public official logs the White House provided to The Post after the New York Times claimed there were “signs of fatigue” in his less detailed public schedule. The previously unpublished “private narrative” documents span 10 weekdays between Nov. 12 and...
The federal and Alberta governments recently released their much-anticipated Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlining what it will take to build a pipeline from Alberta, through British Columbia, to tidewater to get more of our oil to markets beyond the United States. Read More
Cristina Dorador is on an urgent mission in the world’s highest desert, the Atacama in Chile. As the rise of drug-resistant superbugs kills millions per year, Cristina has made it her mission to uncover new, life-saving antibiotics in the stunning salt flats she has studied since she was 14. Against the magnificent backdrop of endless plains, microscopic discoveries lead her team of scientists to question how critically lithium mining is damaging the delicate ecosystem and impacting Indigenous communities
British No 1 on home comforts of Bromley, joys of commuting and being ‘creeped out’ by paparazzi
Emma Raducanu has garnered many endorsement deals in her nascent career, but there is perhaps one elusive sponsorship that would be most pleasing to the British No 1 women’s tennis player: ambassador of the London Borough of Bromley.
During a roundtable discussion with tennis journalists at the end of a gruelling yet satisfying season, Raducanu is merely attempting to describe a quiet off-season spent in her family home when she finds herself delivering a sales pitch about the benefits of living in Bromley. “I’m just so settled,” she says. “I’ve barely been in the UK this year because I’ve been competing so much, but I think just spending really good quality time with my parents has been so nice. I have loved just being in Bromley. It just reminds me of when I was a younger kid and it’s the same bedroom, same everything.
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