United Kingdom

BELFAST, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Northern Irish police have arrested three men in relation to the attempted murder of a senior detective shot in front of his son in the town of Omagh on Wednesday evening that they suspect was carried out by the New IRA Irish nationalist militant group.

Detective Chief Inspector John Caldwell is in a critical condition having undergone surgery overnight. He was shot a number of times by two gunmen while putting footballs in his car after finishing a coaching session with an under-15 soccer team.

LONDON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - A group of activists poured hundreds of litres of yellow and blue paint onto the road outside the Russian Embassy in London on Thursday to create an enormous Ukrainian flag ahead of the one year anniversary of Moscow's invasion.

The campaign group "Led By Donkeys" halted traffic before spreading more than 300 litres of paint across the road using wheelbarrows and brushes to make the 500 square metre (5382 square feet) flag.

"Ukraine is an independent state and a people with every right to self-determination," the group said in a statement.

LONDON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Britons may face shortages of salad staples, including tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, for up to another month, the government said on Thursday.

On Wednesday, Britain's biggest supermarket group Tesco (TSCO.L) followed rivals Asda, Morrisons and Aldi in imposing customer purchase limits on salad items after supplies were hit by disrupted harvests in southern Europe and north Africa due to unseasonal weather.

LONDON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia's Wagner mercenary force, said on Thursday that much-needed ammunition for his troops had been dispatched, after a public row in which he accused the military leadership of treason.

Prigozhin had on Wednesday published a grisly image of dozens of men who he said had been killed because commanders including Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov had withheld ammunition to spite him. Neither man commented but the ministry rejected the charge.

LONDON, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Russian mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin took a bitter public feud with the top army brass to a new level on Wednesday, publishing a grisly image of dozens of his fighters he said had been killed after being deprived of ammunition.

Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner private military company which is fighting on Moscow's behalf in Ukraine, has this week repeatedly accused the Russian defence ministry of deliberately starving his fighters of munitions in what he has called a treasonous attempt to destroy Wagner.

LONDON, Feb 22 (Reuters) - A British-born woman, who went to Syria as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State, lost her latest appeal against the removal of her British citizenship, but her lawyers vowed to keep fighting and said the case was "nowhere near over".

The British government took away Shamima Begum's citizenship on national security grounds in 2019, shortly after she was found in a detention camp in Syria.

LONDON, Feb 21 (NNN-AGENCIES) — The British government summoned Iran’s top diplomat in London to condemn “serious threats” to the lives of UK-based journalists after a Persian-language TV network was forced to relocate.

Charge d’Affaires Mehdi Hosseini Matin was hauled in “to make clear the UK will not tolerate threats to life and media freedom”, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said in a statement.

LONDON, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Dozens of British employers trialling a four-day working week have mostly decided to stick with it after a pilot hailed as a breakthrough by campaigners for better work-life balance.

Employees at 61 companies across Britain worked an average of 34 hours across four days between June and December 2022, while earning their existing salary. Of those, 56 companies, or 92%, opted to continue like that, 18 of them permanently.

LONDON, Feb 20 (Reuters) - His army has made three humiliating retreats in Ukraine in the past year and nearly 200,000 of his men have been killed or wounded according to U.S. officials, but Russia's defence minister is still in a job thanks to President Vladimir Putin.

The Russian leader has various reasons for keeping Sergei Shoigu, 67, in post, according to Western officials, veteran Kremlin watchers and former Western military commanders: he's ultra loyal, helped Putin become president, and decision-making on Ukraine is not his preserve alone.

LONDON (AP) — The amount of grain leaving Ukraine has dropped even as a U.N.-brokered deal works to keep food flowing to developing nations, with inspections of ships falling to half what they were four months ago and a backlog of vessels growing as Russia’s invasion nears the one-year mark.