United Kingdom

LONDON, Dec 7 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Britain will in due course consider whether or not to impose a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab said on Tuesday.

U.S. government officials will boycott the Olympics in Beijing because of China’s human rights “atrocities”, the White House said on Monday. Beijing says Washington is plotting to disrupt the Games.

“I was asked whether I will go, I will not go and we’ll consider that (the level of wider representation) in due course,” Raab said.

LONDON, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Early indications suggest that the Omicron coronavirus variant is more transmissible than the earlier Delta variant, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told his top team of cabinet ministers on Tuesday.

"The prime minister said it was too early to draw conclusions on the characteristics of Omicron but that early indications were that it was more transmissible than Delta," Johnson's spokesman told reporters.

LONDON, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Britain's handling of the evacuation of vulnerable Afghans from Kabul after the Taliban seized power in August was dysfunctional and chaotic, a Foreign Office whistleblower said in evidence disputed by former foreign secretary Dominic Raab.

The government has repeatedly defended its airlift from Kabul against criticism that Britain potentially left thousands of eligible Afghans behind in the country after being caught out by how quickly the Afghan government fell.

LONDON, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Britain has found a further 101 confirmed cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant, the UK Health Security Agency said on Tuesday, taking the total number of cases to 437.

LONDON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Future pandemics could be even more lethal than COVID-19 so the lessons learned from the outbreak must not be squandered and the world should ensure it is prepared for the next viral onslaught, one of the creators of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine said.

The novel coronavirus has killed 5.26 million people across the world, according to Johns Hopkins University, wiped out trillions of dollars in economic output and turned life upside down for billions of people.

LONDON, Dec. 5 (Xinhua) -- The United States could rebrand itself by helping overcome the global COVID-19 vaccine shortage, the Financial Times said recently in an opinion article.

"The U.S. could show itself capable of giving the world's poor what they need, as opposed to lecturing from a distance," it said.

According to the World Bank's Multilateral Data Dashboard, though the U.S. has promised 1 billion doses of vaccines to the world's poorer countries, "just 111 million have been shipped, which is enough to give 5 percent of Africa one dose," the article said.

LONDON (AP) — A British court on Thursday dismissed an appeal by a newspaper publisher seeking to overturn an earlier ruling that it breached the privacy of the Duchess of Sussex by publishing portions of a letter she wrote to her estranged father.

The Court of Appeal in London upheld a High Court ruling in February that publication of the letter that the former Meghan Markle wrote to her father Thomas Markle after she married Prince Harry in 2018 was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful.

02 Dec 2021; MEMO: Members of Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Society (PalSoc) joined with students across the country on Monday to call on all UK universities to "end their complicity in Israeli apartheid".

Students demonstrated to show their solidarity with the Palestinian people and demand the university review its ties "with all corporations implicated in illegal Israeli policies" and "immediately severe formal links and partnerships with BAE Systems, Caterpillar and all other companies or institutions deemed complicit."

LONDON, Nov. 30 (Xinhua) -- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Tuesday that everyone over the age of 18 will be offered a booster vaccine by the end of January and another lockdown "extremely unlikely".

Speaking at a Downing Street news briefing on Tuesday, the prime minister said the rollout of booster programme will go in age order, and that there will be more than 1,500 community pharmacy sites in England offering the jabs.

LONDON (AP) — A U.K. parliamentary committee on Wednesday criticized government plans to deter migrants from trying to reach Britain in small boats, saying the measures will endanger lives without stopping dangerous journeys like the one that killed 27 people last week.