Reform-run councils once known for green policies expected to scrap climate pledges

Two councils that have been recognised for their work to cut emissions but are now under the control of Reform UK are expected to scrap climate pledges this week.Durham county council’s deputy leader, the former GB News presenter Darren Grimes, has proposed a motion to rescind a 2019 declaration of a climate emergency, in what it is believed would be a UK first.West Northamptonshire council, meanwhile, looks set to become the first Reform-led authority to scrap net zero targets.The energy secretary, Ed Miliband, warned MPs about the climate crisis on Monday, saying he would explicitly call out politicians who rejected net zero policies for betraying future generations in an unprecedented “state of the climate” address to parliament.In what is planned to be an annual event, the energy security and net zero secretary will set out the findings of a new Met Office-led report that says the UK is already facing extreme weather and its effects

Government not learning lessons from deaths of domestic abuse victims, report finds

The voices of women who have died at the hands of a partner or former partner in England and Wales are being ignored and the government is failing to heed warnings from their deaths, a damning report from the domestic abuse commissioner has revealed.An examination of how the government learns lessons from the deaths of domestic abuse victims has found that half of the national recommendations made in domestic homicide reviews (DHRs) are not put into action, with only a quarter fully implemented.The domestic abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, told the Guardian that a study of DHRs – carried out whenever anyone over 16 is murdered in a domestic setting – revealed a “deeply concerning” lack of oversight at the top of government.Between 2019 and 2021 DHRs made 110 national recommendations, the majority of which were for the Home Office. Of these only 25% were fully implemented, while a further 25% were deemed to be happening already, 21% were missing, 20% were partly met and 8% were not met

High-street slot machines reap record takings as councils call for power to curb spread

High-street slot machines are reaping record takings as operators expand apace on Britain’s high streets, reigniting calls for the government to give councils more power to curb their spread.Overall, betting and gaming revenues – excluding the National Lottery – reached £11.5bn in the year to March 2024, a 3.5% annual increase and the highest figure on record, according to statistics from the Gambling Commission that corrected previous figures.Of these, so-called adult gaming centres (AGCs) – high street slot machine arcades grew takings by 11% to £623m thanks to a flurry of new openings by the sector’s major players, Merkur and Admiral

Convert offices into flats, not nightclubs | Brief letters

Your article (Turn empty London office blocks into ‘late-night party zones’, report suggests, 13 July) misses the real opportunity to promote using those ghastly, unsightly Towers of Babel for something useful: housing. Forget partying, think existing. Let’s redeem the disasters of the past and give people somewhere to live.Janet TomlinsonAndover, Hampshire Jonathan Jones says: “This is where celebrity artists get it wrong: they think art is fun but art is suffering and madness” (Ed Sheeran’s Pollock homage has energy but no feeling or truth, 9 July). Is he not confusing “art” with “art criticism”?John WarburtonEdinburgh The correspondence on beards (Letters, 13 July) reminds me of when I was in the civil service and, at a meeting, one of our managers warned us: “Never trust a man with a beard

Measles cases are surging in Europe and the US. This is what the anti-vax conspiracy theory has brought us

It’s easy to say in hindsight, but also true, that even when the anti-vax movement was in its infancy in the late 90s before I had kids, let alone knew what you were supposed to vaccinate them against, I could smell absolute garbage. After all, Andrew Wakefield, a doctor until he was struck off in 2010, was not the first crank to dispute the safety and effectiveness of childhood vaccines. There was a movement against the diphtheria-tetanus-whooping cough vaccine in the 1970s in the UK, and a similar one in the US in the early 1980s. The discovery of vaccination in the first place was not without its critics, and enough people to form a league opposed the smallpox rollout in the early 1800s on the basis that it was unchristian to share tissue with an animal.So Wakefield’s infamous Lancet study, in which he claimed a link between the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine and autism, going as far as to pin down the exact mechanism by which one led to the other, was new only in so far as it had all the branding of reputable research, when in fact it was maleficent woo-woo, a phenomenon as old as knowledge

Resident doctors deserve real-terms pay rise after working through Covid, says BMA

The British Medical Association has defended resident doctors’ pay claim ahead of talks with the health secretary, saying they did not work through the Covid pandemic only to end up with a real-terms pay cut.Wes Streeting is due to meet BMA representatives this week as he looks to avert five days of strikes in England due to start on 25 July. Doctors voted to take the action in pursuit of a 29% pay rise which the BMA has said is needed to replace what they have lost over years of cuts.“We are still down compared to even the pandemic in 2020,” Dr Emma Runswick, a resident doctor in Greater Manchester and deputy chair of the BMA council, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Monday.She said doctors’ “reward” for working to get the country through Covid was a “real-terms pay cut” – suggesting this was not the treatment they had expected during the days when people lined their streets to clap for health workers