Boris Johnson, the former British prime minister whose tenure was dominated and ultimately derailed by the coronavirus pandemic, apologized on Wednesday “for the pain and suffering and the loss” of those who died from the virus, as well as their families. Speaking before an official inquiry into his government’s handling of the crisis, Mr. Johnson […]
Read More
Boris Johnson, the ousted prime minister who led Britain through the pandemic, will testify before an official inquiry on Wednesday, giving his first detailed public account of how he grappled with a rampaging virus that divided his government, laid the seeds for his political downfall and nearly killed him. Mr. Johnson, who left Parliament earlier […]
Read More
The United States and 21 other countries pledged on Saturday at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, saying the revival of nuclear power was critical for cutting carbon emissions to near zero in the coming decades. Proponents of nuclear energy, which supplies 18 percent of electricity in […]
Read More
Jeff Zucker’s re-entry into the global news business has hit a snag. The British government said on Thursday that it would open a review of a pending deal to put Mr. Zucker, the former president of CNN, in control of The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, a pair of London’s most prestigious publications. The announcement […]
Read More
As book rollouts go, the one for Omid Scobie’s latest offering about the British royal family, “Endgame,” has been a hot mess — splashy, gaudy, tantalizing but ultimately a bit withholding — which is to say, par for the course for a putative tell-all account of the world’s most covered, least decoded family. The withholding […]
Read More
Britain’s only two pandas will soon be returned to China, officials said, in a send-off that has dispirited fans of the playful, waddling bears and signals what appears to be the end, at least for now, of panda diplomacy. “Bamboo bon voyage,” the Edinburgh Zoo of the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland said on its […]
Read More
For the past two years, Greece’s government has conducted delicate negotiations with the British Museum over the future of the Parthenon marbles, the ancient Greek antiquities brought to Britain in the early 19th century by Lord Elgin. Now, Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, appears to be throwing cold water on those discussions. On Monday evening, […]
Read More
The British government’s effort to salvage its contentious policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is drawing attention from the White House, which wants to make sure any revamped legislation does not undermine the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, according to two Biden administration officials. “Definitely all keeping an eye on Northern Ireland,” said […]
Read More
Before she died in 2013, Dolours Price, a Provisional Irish Republican Army guerrilla, started granting interviews. She described planting I.R.A. bombs and driving people to their executions, smuggling explosives and going on hunger strike in a British prison. But it was Ms. Price’s memories of girlhood in 1950s Northern Ireland that kept running through my […]
Read More
Every morning, Mohammed Al Muhandes wakes up in a hotel in Leeds, England, and wonders how to pass the day. Along with dozens of other asylum seekers, he eats the same breakfast each morning, then returns to his room or walks in a nearby park. The 9.58 pounds, or $11.90, he is given each week […]
Read More
Former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain, in his new role as foreign secretary, has vowed in a surprise visit to Ukraine, announced on Thursday, that his country will maintain military support for Kyiv “however long it takes,” an effort to offer reassurance amid fears that Ukraine is being forgotten as much of the world’s […]
Read More
In Britain, Armistice Day is usually an understated affair, marked only by two minutes of silence at 11 a.m. This year was considerably more eventful, as two very different protests descended on London. One, composed of hundreds of thousands of people calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, snaked peacefully through the west of the city […]
Read More
Britain’s Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that a policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful, delivering a major blow to the Conservative government, which has long described the plan as central to its pledge to stop small boat arrivals. Justice Robert Reed, one of the five judges who heard the case, said that […]
Read More
Digging Deeper: Lower energy bills are driving down inflation. Last year, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made wholesale energy prices soar, but price caps on bills in Britain meant that households felt these increases with a lag. The same has been true as wholesale prices have dropped this year. In October, the inflation rate was pulled […]
Read More
She lives in a French town near St.-Tropez that she calls “paradise,” where she and her young son have taken refuge from the war back home in Ukraine. But when Liudmyla Gurenchuk and her son needed to see doctors this fall, they made the 1,300-mile trek back to Kyiv, leaving the picturesque tranquillity of the […]
Read More
The ink has barely faded, and the paper has only slightly yellowed. For nearly 250 years, the letters, more than 100 of them, sat sealed in Britain’s National Archives, unopened and unexamined until a history professor stumbled upon them. He found, to his delight, a treasure trove bearing intimate details about romance and daily life […]
Read More
King Charles III will open a session of Parliament on Tuesday for the first time as monarch, outlining the British government’s legislative priorities as part of a tradition-steeped ceremony that will test his skill at displaying the political neutrality for which his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was famous. Drafted by the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, […]
Read More
The Bank of England held interest rates at the highest levels in 15 years on Thursday, though policymakers were again divided on the best course of action to stamp out high inflation. Six members of the central bank’s nine-member rate-setting committee voted to keep rates at 5.25 percent amid signs that inflation would continue to […]
Read More
The sheep came spilling over the hillside, emerging through the low mist where the green earth touched the gray sky, running down into the fields below. They were ready for their big moment. It was Shetland Wool Week, and visitors from around the world — most of them women and nearly all of them knitting […]
Read More
Two men in their 30s were arrested and released on bail on Tuesday in connection with the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree, the latest development in the investigation into who chopped down one of Britain’s most photographed trees, which had stood for two centuries in a dip in Hadrian’s Wall. The two additional arrests […]
Read More
In 1950, Alan Turing, the gifted British mathematician and code-breaker, published an academic paper. His aim, he wrote, was to consider the question, “Can machines think?” The answer runs to almost 12,000 words. But it ends succinctly: “We can only see a short distance ahead,” Mr. Turing wrote, “but we can see plenty there that […]
Read More
The question of how Britain will respond to President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, the $369 billion landmark legislation offering deep subsidies for green investment, has followed Jeremy Hunt, Britain’s finance minister, for most of the past year. Mr. Hunt urged patience and promised an answer when he updates the country’s budget in a few weeks. […]
Read More
In the 23 harrowing days since Hamas attacked Israeli civilians and soldiers, Israel’s Western allies have had to perform a delicate balancing act: expressing steadfast support for the country during its darkest hours, while navigating the growing public anger on their streets over the intensifying bombardment of Gaza. Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East have […]
Read More
Two hulking towers nearly 300 feet high rise from the steel-making complex that dominates the shoreline of the faded industrial city of Port Talbot in Wales. These two blast furnaces are centerpieces of Britain’s largest steel-making facility, a four-square-mile complex of cavernous factories and rusting metal conveyors on Swansea Bay that produce steel eventually used […]
Read More
Anthony Holden, a polymathic and prolific British author, journalist and poker player who found accidental fame as a royal biographer and critic of the monarchy, but who was happier writing books about Shakespeare, Laurence Olivier and Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart’s librettist, died on Oct. 7 at his home in London. He was 76. The cause […]
Read More
It might never be possible to know precisely how an economy is performing in any given moment. But recently it has gotten harder to get a clear picture of Britain’s economy, particularly the labor market. This month, Britain’s Office for National Statistics delayed the release of its flagship report on jobs to give itself more […]
Read More
There’s an argument that any leader would struggle with the conditions Mr. Sunak inherited: high inflation, increased borrowing costs and low growth. Across the world, incumbent governments of all stripes are finding their time is up — whether it’s the center-left Labour Party in New Zealand or the right-wing populist Law and Justice party in […]
Read More
Scotland’s former first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, who unexpectedly resigned this year and later became the subject of a police investigation, made another unusual announcement on Monday. “So this happened today,” she said on Instagram. “At the tender age of 53, I passed my driving test (first time!!).” The experience took her “well out of any […]
Read More
At the age of 13, she came to England from Nigeria with her relatives for what she thought was a summer vacation. It was only after they arrived in Bedfordshire, in the east of England, that she discovered there were no plans to go back. Because of what she describes as the “irresponsibility” of her […]
Read More
Deeper Into the Numbers: Core inflation eased slightly. Even though headline inflation failed to budge last month, it has fallen notably from its peak, which was above 11 percent a year ago. Still, price pressures are strong across the economy. Core inflation, a measure that strips out food and energy prices and is used as […]
Read More
Donald J. Trump was thousands of miles away from the vaulted chamber in Britain’s Royal Courts of Justice on Monday. But his words echoed in a lawsuit he has filed in London against Christopher Steele, a former British spy whose dossier of unproven links between Mr. Trump and Russia caused a political uproar back in […]
Read More