A homeowner was conned out of more than £100,000 by rogue builders who overcharged for roof repairs — before posing as police and trading standards officers to swindle him again.

Ships on the River Thames joined hundreds of vessels worldwide to sound their horns for 1.2 million "unsung heroes" stuck at sea during the coronavirus travel restrictions.

Questions have been raised over how coronavirus tests were counted after Health Secretary Matt Hancock hailed the "incredible achievement" of the Government in hitting its 100,000-a-day target.

A 5.5-magnitude earthquake has hit near southern Puerto Rico, jolting many people from their beds and causing damage across the island.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un did not undergo surgery or any other medical procedure, a South Korean official has said amid continued speculation about his health.

Police have arrested 13 people and issued 11 more with fines after breaking up two parties in Liverpool during coronavirus lockdown.

Social distancing at airports would lead to 1km-long queues for each jumbo jet, Heathrow's chief executive has claimed.

Air ambulances will be able to touch down at Kensington Palace for refuelling during the coronavirus pandemic after the Duke of Cambridge gave permission for them to use a private lawn.

Royal Mint to mark landmark anniversary of end of Second World War in Europe

FULL STORY: Patients kept awake during cancer surgery to protect them from coronavirus

Stargazers can expect to see up to 40 meteors per hour blaze through the night sky before sunrise on Wednesday

There are "questions to be asked" about where coronavirus came from, Boris Johnson's spokesperson has said.

In a bustling depot in north London filled with donated food, Phoebe Waller-Bridge compared the work of The Felix Project to "a rescue mission".

Two 20-year-old men were arrested on suspicion of public order offences

The Queen has spoken to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to discuss how the country is fighting coronavirus.

Blue Peter has honoured Captain Tom Moore with a gold badge for his fundraising efforts.

Online supermarket Ocado has revealed retail revenues surged by 40.4 per cent for the past two months as demand soared due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Hundreds of O2 and Vodafone customers have reported problems with the networks.

Europeans will see the worst economic shock since the Great Depression due to coronavirus, the European Union predicted.

A distressing video of an unidentified woman boxing her German Shepherd dog has sparked outrage on social media and prompted an investigation into alleged animal cruelty.

The UK could start easing its lockdown by relaxing stay-at-home orders and allowing some types of non-essential businesses to reopen, according to a new study.

More than a third of families with children living at home may have to cut back on spending for up to a year after the coronavirus lockdown measures end, a survey has found.

Up to 15,000 pubs face permanent closure if they cannot reopen before October, an industry boss has warned.

A number of McDonald's employees in America were shot on Wednesday after telling a customer to leave due to coronavirus restrictions, police said.

The nation is preparing to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day , with the Queen set to make a historic address to mark the occasion.

Boris Johnson has issued a stirring statement as the UK comes together to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) Day, calling for Brits to show the "same spirit of national endeavor" during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Queen's memories of her VE Day celebrations have been shared by Buckingham Palace to mark the 75th anniversary of the end of the war in Europe.

The state accuses the ride-hailing apps of flouting a labor law by classifying drivers as independent contractors instead of employees.

Peer review moves to Twitter, muddling public health information.

NASA has selected teams led by Blue Origin, Dynetics and SpaceX to develop lunar landing systems capable of putting astronauts on the moon by as early as 2024. "We want to be able to go to the moon, but we want to be a customer," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters today during a teleconference. "We want to drive down the costs, we want to increase the access, we want to have our partners have customers that are not just us, so they compete on cost and innovation, and just bring capabilities that we've never had before." Fixed-price contracts totaling… Read More

Scientists predict the explosive behaviour of two supermassive black holes almost to the hour.

A young wild horse likely wouldn't have survived the night if a group of animal lovers hadn't stumbled across the filly struggling — and failing — to drag itself out of a two-metre deep mud hole.

The back-and-forth continues.The Department of Homeland Security said Friday the United States will shorten the visa length for Chinese journalists working for non-American news outlets to 90 days. Previously, journalists with Chinese passports were granted open-ended visas. They can apply for extensions under the new rules, but renewed visas will also last just 90 days. The new limit won't apply to reporters from Hong Kong Macau, or to mainland Chinese citizens who hold green cards.It's the latest development in a media war between Washington and Beijing that has intensified during the coronavirus pandemic. American officials said the rules were meant to counterbalance the "suppression of independent journalism" in China, whose government expelled journalists from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post in March. Before that, the U.S. reduced the number of Chinese citizens employed by multiple state-controlled Chinese news organizations to work in the country. The New York Times notes the move wasn't unexpected; U.S. intelligence officials have long believed some journalists at Beijing-run outlets are spies, and the Trump administration has designated some Chinese news agencies foreign government functionaries.The heightened tensions between the world's two biggest powers didn't just show up in the media world Friday. U.S. lawmakers wrote to nearly 60 countries asking them to support Taiwan's participation in the World Health Organization, a move that likely won't sit well with China. And Washington also blocked a United Nations security council resolution calling for a global ceasefire during the pandemic because it indirectly referenced the WHO, which the U.S. has blamed in conjunction with China for failing to suppress the outbreak.More stories from theweek.com Outed CIA agent Valerie Plame is running for Congress, and her launch video looks like a spy movie trailer 7 scathing cartoons about America's rush to reopen Trump says he couldn't have exposed WWII vets to COVID-19 because the wind was blowing the wrong way

Couples with dashed wedding plans due to lockdown restrictions have been tying the knot on those tidy green spreads instead, including at least one loaner. Danielle Cartaxo and Ryan Cignarella were supposed to get married in West Orange, New Jersey, on April 11 at a venue with sweeping views of the New York City skyline. The two live in Wayne, Pennsylvania, about 100 miles away, but they had a marriage license issued in West Orange, where Cartaxo lived until she was 5.

WASHINGTON -- Shortly after admitting guilt to a federal judge in December 2017 for lying to the FBI, Michael Flynn issued a statement saying what he did was wrong, and "through my faith in God, I am working to set things right."It turns out that the only higher power that Flynn needed was Attorney General William Barr.Barr's extraordinary decision to drop the criminal case against Flynn shocked legal experts, won President Donald Trump's praise and prompted a career prosecutor to quit the case. It was the latest in Barr's steady effort to undo the results of the investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. Barr has portrayed his effort as rectifying injustice, and the president more bluntly as an exercise in political payback.In his decisions and public comments over the past year, Barr has built an alternate narrative to the one that Mueller laid out in his voluminous report. Where the special counsel focused on Russia's expansive effort to interfere in the 2016 election, the Trump campaign's openness to it and the president's determination to impede the inquiry, Barr has focused instead on the investigators. He has suggested that they were unleashed by law enforcement and intelligence officials bent on bringing political harm to Trump.Barr has also mischaracterized the findings of the Mueller investigation, questioned why it began in the first place, used legal maneuvers to undo its courtroom successes and opened his own investigation by a hand-picked prosecutor that could bring criminal charges against former U.S. officials who played a part in setting the original inquiry into motion. Mueller and Barr, once close friends, have been like two students standing shoulder to shoulder at a blackboard: What one has diligently written down, the other has tried to steadily erase.In an interview Thursday with CBS News, Barr said he considered the Flynn case to be "part of a number of related acts -- and we're looking at the whole pattern of conduct." (The same day, Trump called it "just one piece of a very dishonest puzzle.")Recent disclosures about the FBI's handling of the Flynn case raise questions about why the bureau's leadership sent agents to interview Flynn without coordinating with top Justice Department officials, the latest in a series of revelations about FBI abuses in politically charged investigations in recent years. Barr, however, even suggested that a theory of the case embraced by Mueller and his team might have made them blind to the facts."One of the things you have to guard against, both as a prosecutor and I think as an investigator, is that if you get too wedded to a particular outcome and you're pursuing a particular agenda, you close your eyes to anything that sort of doesn't fit with your preconception," he said. "And I think that's probably the phenomenon we're looking at here."But when Mueller made his findings public, many criticized him for doing the opposite. His conclusions, especially about whether Trump had committed any obstruction of justice offenses by impeding the inquiry, were dense, burdened by legalese and appeared to reflect a tortured debate among the special counsel's team. They delivered no easy sound bite that the president's opponents could seize upon -- allowing Trump to distort the judgments by calling them a vindication of his behavior.The Mueller report "bends over backwards" to show that the special counsel's team considered all of the legal and political ramifications of investigating a sitting president, said Matthew J. Jacobs, a former federal prosecutor and now a partner at Vinson & Elkins."It gives the benefit of the doubt to the subject of the investigation that in any quote-unquote normal criminal case doesn't happen and wouldn't exist," said Jacobs, who once worked for Mueller at the U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco.Barr's decision to drop the charges against Flynn was "unlike anything I've seen before," Jacobs said, adding that he saw no evidence whatsoever "that Gen. Flynn was set up or entrapped."In an unsolicited memo he wrote to the White House while still a lawyer in private practice in 2018, Barr unspooled his thoughts about what he called a "fatally misconceived" obstruction of justice theory the special counsel was reportedly pursuing as part of his investigation. Trump named him attorney general months later, but during his confirmation hearing, he pledged not to interfere with the work of Mueller and his team.Barr drew criticism for the way he characterized Mueller's findings last year in a four-page letter that -- for weeks -- served as the public's only picture of Mueller's 22-month investigation. Mueller privately wrote to the attorney general, saying he had mischaracterized the findings -- a letter Barr described as "snitty" -- and over time, Barr has repeatedly tried to emphasize the harm done to the investigative targets of the FBI and the special counsel's office.Barr's handling of the Mueller findings prompted a stinging rebuke in March from a Republican-appointed federal judge, who said the attorney general put forward a "distorted" and "misleading" account of the findings and lacked credibility on the topic.Barr has long insisted that he works independently of the White House, and in February, he said that Trump's public comments about the Justice Department sometimes made it "impossible" for him to do his job. Those comments came after Barr and other top department officials intervened to try to reduce a prison sentence in another case brought during the Mueller investigation: That of Roger Stone, a longtime friend of the president's who was convicted of lying to Congress, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in a bid to thwart a congressional inquiry that threatened Trump.The president has made it clear both to aides and foreign officials that he sees Barr as a crucial ally in the grinding battle against his perceived enemies. Last July, the day after Mueller's congressional testimony seemed to lower the curtain on a more than two-year drama that had imperiled the Trump presidency, Trump was on the phone with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine asking him to assist the attorney general in an investigation "to get to the bottom of" how the Russia investigation began."As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller," the president said. The requests to Zelenskiy helped form the basis of an impeachment case against Trump in the ensuing months.Weeks after that phone call, Barr was on a plane to Rome with John Durham -- the prosecutor leading the Justice Department's investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation -- to seek evidence from Italian officials that might bolster a conspiracy theory long held by Trump: That American intelligence and law enforcement officials plotted with American allies to try to prevent him from winning the presidency in 2016.They did not appear to find any evidence. It remains uncertain, however, what Durham will find over his investigation, expected to finish sometime this year, and what effect it will have on the legacy of the Mueller investigation.The president, of course, has not waited to pass judgment. He has long publicly complained that the Flynn case was a product of a cabal of former officials conspiring against him, and he seems certain to promote its collapse as he ramps up his campaign for reelectionOn Thursday, the day the Justice Department dropped the criminal charges against Flynn -- the first top White House official to have been ensnared in the Russia investigation -- Trump was on the phone with President Vladimir Putin of Russia to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.Trump boasted that the call came at an opportune time. Things are "coming in line showing what a hoax this whole investigation was -- it was a total disgrace.""I wouldn't be surprised," he said he told Putin, "if you see a lot of things happen over the next number of weeks."This article originally appeared in The New York Times.(C) 2020 The New York Times Company

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Labour Shadow Minister for the cabinet office Rachel Reeves has lead for the party on PPE procurement.

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South African Breweries, one of the world's largest brewers, says it may have to destroy 400 million bottles of beer as a result of the country's ban on alcohol sales that is part of its lockdown measures to combat the spread of COVID-19.