General news

• Battle of Waterloo: How I played a part in Napoleon's downfall

  20-06-2015 23:32
  
  So, here I sit, on my grey horse overlooking the battlefield at Waterloo. My mount, Champagne, is full of fizz and won’t stand still. This Lipizzaner from Hungary is gouging at the ground with one hoof, apparently keen to join the fray that is slowly unfolding below. She looks every inch the war horse. I probably also look the part in the red jacket and tall bearskin cap of the Scots Greys, except for one detail; my sword fell off on the way to the battlefield.
  
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• Britain to sign up to 1954 Hague Convention on protecting world's ancient cultural sites

  20-06-2015 23:32
  
  The Government is to sign up to the 1954 Hague Convention on protecting the world’s ancient cultural sites and create a fund to help with the recovery of monuments at risk from destruction and looting by Islamic State.
  
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• Selective secondary schools catering for the most talented pupils to be set up, says grammar school head

  20-06-2015 23:32
  A number of selective secondary schools catering for the country’s most able pupils will be set up within the next few years, according to one of the country’s leading grammar school heads.
  
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• We need to make contact with isolated Amazon tribes, say academics

  20-06-2015 23:32
  
  Making contact with indigenous tribes who have remained isolated from the modern world should be encouraged rather than forbidden, according to two anthropologists who have challenged official policy towards “uncontacted” people.
  
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• Children are the 'forgotten victims' of violence, says leading charity Refuge

  20-06-2015 23:31
  
  It is a “disgrace” that children are the “forgotten victims of domestic violence”, says leading charity Refuge, as new figures reveal that one-third of mothers are injured by the time they seek help, with much of the violence witnessed by their children.
  
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• How a new generation of sleeping sensors is getting wearable technology investors excited

  20-06-2015 23:31
  
  There’s nothing quite like a good night’s sleep. Doctors have always known it – and now big business is waking up to the fact.
  
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• Test-case wind turbine will ruin cathedral view, say Lincoln locals

  20-06-2015 23:31
  
  Lincoln Cathedral, an imposing building set on a hill in a county renowned for its lack of gradients, has defined the local landscape for hundreds of years. But plans for a wind farm on the nearby estate of vacuum-cleaner tycoon Sir James Dyson, with turbines twice as high as the cathedral, have raised fears that the area’s unique character could be destroyed.
  
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• Lib Dem leadership candidate Norman Lamb removes two campaign team members over 'push polling' claims

  20-06-2015 23:31
  
  The Liberal Democrats are engulfed by scandal after the leadership contender Norman Lamb was forced to remove two high-profile volunteers from his campaign team over potential breaches of the Data Protection Act.
  
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• Childcare Bill contains threat of two years in jail for parents, critics warn

  20-06-2015 23:30
  
  David Cameron’s flagship election pledge to extend free childcare to 30 hours a week has run into trouble on its first airing in Parliament, amid concern that parents and nursery staff could face “draconian” criminal penalties, including a two-year prison term, if they fail fully to disclose details of working arrangements.
  
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• We don't have enough MPs to shadow the government, senior Lib Dems admit

  20-06-2015 23:30
  
  Liberal Democrat leadership contenders Tim Farron and Norman Lamb have conceded that the post-election party has too few MPs to shadow the government.
  
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• Tory Government's £12bn Welfare Cuts Agreed

  20-06-2015 23:07
  
  Welfare cuts worth £12bn a year will be announced in next month's Budget, after the Government agreed "significant" spending reductions in the last few days. On a weekend during which tens of thousands of protesters marched against austerity , Chancellor George Osborne and Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith signalled they would press ahead with cuts. The welfare changes will include capping benefits at £23,000 a year for each family.
  
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• Charleston shooting: What is the Council of Conservative Citizens - group said to have inspired writer of racist 'manifesto'

  20-06-2015 23:02
  The writer of the ‘online manifesto’ being probed by federal investigators said his opinions were shaped after reading the website of the right-wing, white supremacist political organisation many have denounced as a hate group
  
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• Soldier dies in 'hit-and-run' crash

  20-06-2015 23:02
  
  A man killed in a road traffic collision was a young soldier who proudly took part in the Trooping the Colour to mark the Queen's birthday last week, a friend said.
  
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• Comedian Mel Moon: How the decision not to end my own life became an Edinburgh show

  20-06-2015 23:02
  
  It is less than two months until the Edinburgh Festival begins. A time when those previously mentally stable lose control as they chase elusive 5-star reviews. I am a comedian and for years I lived the experience of Edinburgh vicariously through colleagues who went. I celebrated their success and cried with them over their loss. Ok that’s a lie, In the main I read with bitterness their success and smugness their failures, but whilst doing so I made myself a promise, I would only ever go when
  
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• Spend more on weapons research or face 'disastrous' consequences, experts warn MoD

  20-06-2015 23:00
  
  Britain must heavily increase spending on defence research otherwise national security will be breached and troops killed by technologically advanced opponents, former ministers, soldiers and contractors have told The Independent on Sunday.
  
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• Anti-austerity protest: This is just the start of our campaign, say marchers

  20-06-2015 22:59
  
  Cries to end austerity echoed through the streets of central London as a reported 250,000 people campaigned against a new wave of government spending cuts.
  
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• Milan struggles to cope as Latin American gang violence starts afflicting general public

  20-06-2015 22:57
  
  Catching fare-dodgers is all in a day’s work for ticket inspectors on Milan’s suburban trains. But in retrospect Carlo Di Napoli is probably telling himself he might have known there’d be trouble laying down the law to a group of Latin-American kids.
  
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• Michael Gove instructing his civil servants on grammar

  20-06-2015 22:56
  
  Lord Chancellor Michael Gove has been accused of “patronising” his civil servants with an eccentric set of grammar rules and pet peeves designed to shape departmental correspondence.
  
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• Welcome to Chitral: Where Pakistan’s elite goes to play

  20-06-2015 22:55
  
  Siraj Ul-Mulk’s friends thought he was mad when he started building a hotel in the early 1990s, off the beaten track and carved out of a mountainside.
  
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• Greece crisis: Senior minister to offer new proposals to creditors ahead of EU summit

  20-06-2015 22:40
  
  A senior Greek minister has said that new proposals will be put to the country’s creditors ahead of an emergency EU summit set for 22 June. However, he warned that these are still unlikely to satisfy Athens’ creditors.
  
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• Lesvos: Visiting the tiny Greek island receiving tens of thousands of refugees

  20-06-2015 22:35
  
  The overcrowded makeshift camp, lacking bathrooms, food and blankets, is not how the refugees imagined Europe. But Greece is struggling to cope with the tide of boats arriving on its islands from neighbouring Turkey. Amid an economic crisis, the country has received more than 55,000 refugees since January, an almost tenfold increase on the 6,500 arrivals in the first five months of last year.
  
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• Chris Evans interview: Top Gear's new host on taking the show on a wild ride

  20-06-2015 22:30
  
  We’re going incredibly fast. I’m trying not to cry, as my knuckles whiten on the dashboard of a vintage Ferrari with a windscreen so low it might as well not exist. The wind blasts my face, making it hard to breathe.
  
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• Menswear: Finding the conviction behind all the crystal and the crocodile

  20-06-2015 22:27
  
  Is it really menswear if men aren’t wearing it? That idea occurred to me not because of the number of female models appearing on menswear catwalks for spring/summer 2016 – although, only three shows into the Milanese leg of the international collections, they had already made an appearance at Emporio Armani. Rather, the question feels relevant generally – you often wonder whose back these clothes will end up on, if anybody’s. Look at the front row: regardless of what they’re applaudin
  
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• Revealed: The Herefordshire hotel used for 'diabolical' experiments on US military students

  20-06-2015 22:25
  
  Behind the façade of a peaceful Georgian country manor hotel, nestling in 18 acres of rolling Herefordshire grassland, lay a dark secret involving a former medical director of the FBI which last week came to light at a medical board hearing in the US state of Virginia.
  
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• Fracking poses 'significant' risk to humans and should be temporarily banned across EU, says new report

  20-06-2015 22:23
  
  A major new scientific study has concluded that the controversial gas extraction technique known as fracking poses a “significant” risk to human health and British wildlife, and that an EU-wide moratorium should be implemented until widespread regulatory reform is undertaken.
  
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• England becomes first country worldwide to offer meningitis jabs to all babies

  20-06-2015 22:23
  
  England will become the first country in the world to protect babies against meningitis and septicaemia caused by the meningococcal B (MenB) bacteria from September, the Department of Health has confirmed.
  
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• MPs set to debate BBC licence as campaign launches to protect its funding

  20-06-2015 22:22
  
  Conservative MPs are growing increasingly confident of reforming the BBC ahead of negotiations over the renewal of its Royal Charter next year – prompting a campaign to protect its licence fee funding.
  
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• Labour leadership candidates could really do with a bit of charisma

  20-06-2015 22:18
  
  Wanted: Some political pizzaz
  
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• Three charged over cemetery murder

  20-06-2015 22:12
  
  Three teenagers have been charged with the murder of a schoolboy who was found dead in a cemetery.
  
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• Rugby player killed in hit-and-run

  20-06-2015 22:12
  
  A young man killed in an apparent hit-and-run in the early hours of this morning has been named as rugby player Ben Regan.
  
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• Trio Charged After Teen Found Dead In Cemetery

  20-06-2015 22:00
  
  Three men have been charged with murder over the death of a 14 year old boy whose body was found in a cemetery.
  
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• We cannot destroy Isis. We will have to learn to live with it

  20-06-2015 22:00
  David Cameron was right to point out, during a speech in Slovakia on Friday, the responsibility that families and communities have to detect and counter the radicalisation of young people by the so-called Islamic State (Isis).
  
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• US Supreme Court on trial: Has it become too powerful for the good of the country?

  20-06-2015 22:00
  
  This is the season of the United States Supreme Court. Its spell in the media sun doesn’t last long – just the two or three weeks before its judicial term ends on 30 June. But over that short period, on Mondays and Thursdays, the justices hand down their most keenly awaited rulings.
  
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• The Top Ten: Characters not originally the star

  20-06-2015 22:00
  
  This list started with Thomas the Tank Engine because, although his 70th birthday is being celebrated this year, he did not appear in Wilbert Awdry's 'Railway Series' until 1946. (A tank engine is one that carries its own water rather than pulling it in a tender.) Thanks to Philip Downer, who pointed out that Thomas was originally the Starr (Ringo, that is).
  
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• Heard the one about a college course for comedians?

  20-06-2015 22:00
  
  If further proof were needed that humour can be a very serious business, it came in last week’s revelation that Emerson College, a communications and arts school in Boston, Massachusetts, is about to offer potential undergraduates the chance to study for a degree in comedy.
  
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• Greece could still have a role in a multi-speed Europe

  20-06-2015 22:00
  
  Sometimes it is easier to see what will happen in three or four years’ time than what will happen in three or four days. And so it is with Greece. One of the things that many of us will have found distressing, alongside the hardships heaped on the Greek people, has been the tone of the debate between the country and the EU’s dominant economy, Germany: fury on the one hand, and something close to contempt on the other. This is not the ever closer union envisaged by the founders of the EU and
  
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• Bill Granger recipes: Stop reserving fish and seafood for special occasions - they're perfect for a light summer dinner

  20-06-2015 22:00
  I wasn't always a big fish eater. It's not all that surprising, really, when you think that I come from a family of butchers.
  
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• Trio Charged Over Teenager Jordan Watson's Death

  20-06-2015 21:53
  
  Three men have been charged with murder over the death of Jordan Watson whose body was found in a cemetery in Carlisle.
  
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• Ukip struggling after 'massive' election costs

  20-06-2015 21:51
  
  Ukip is in serious financial difficulties after it “lost control” of its finances during the general election campaign, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
  
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• Charleston shooting: Forgiveness combines with anger as people call for action on gun control and hate crimes

  20-06-2015 21:25
  
  It was nothing less than remarkable.
  
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• Glastonbury 'does not need Blur'

  20-06-2015 20:57
  
  Blur bass player Alex James has said Glastonbury does not need them to fill the Friday night headliner slot.
  
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• Rowntree backs Kendall for leader

  20-06-2015 20:48
  
  Blur drummer and former parliamentary candidate Dave Rowntree has backed Liz Kendall to be the Labour Party's next leader.
  
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• New Orleans shooting: Police officer killed by suspect he was transporting to prison

  20-06-2015 20:37
  
  A veteran New Orleans police officer has been shot and killed while transporting a suspect to the city jail.
  
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• Charleston shooting: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church - site of deadly shooting - to reopen for services on Sunday

  20-06-2015 20:33
  Congregation members say the historic black church where nine people were killed is going to re-open for Sunday morning service.
  
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• Murder probe after party stabbing

  20-06-2015 20:13
  
  A murder investigation has been launched after the death of a man who was stabbed at a party.
  
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• Mum 'Devastated' After Dog Mauls Baby To Death

  20-06-2015 19:29
  
  A family member, who did not want be identified, said the boy's mother was not in the house when the youngster was attacked. He said she had been at a family event following a bereavement, and had returned late at night to find the distressing scene. Superintendent Gillian Mitchell of Northumbria Police said: "Our thoughts are with the family of the baby at this difficult time.
  
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• Man arrested over fatal dog attack

  20-06-2015 19:21
  
  A man has been arrested in connection with the death of a three-week-old baby following a dog attack.
  
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• Man arrested over stabbing of woman

  20-06-2015 19:20
  
  A man has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a woman was stabbed at a house.
  
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• Red Devil 'owes rescuer a pint'

  20-06-2015 19:16
  
  The Red Devil parachutist who was saved in a mid-air rescue when his parachute did not open properly said he owes his team mate a pint of beer.
  
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• Charleston shootings: Australian comedian Jim Jefferies' stand-up routine on gun control seems particularly apposite at the moment

  20-06-2015 19:03
  Australian comedian Jim Jefferies provides an acerbic, expletive-laden take on America's gun control laws that feels particularly apposite following the Charleston shootings.
  
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