United Kingdom

LONDON (AP) — A British appellate court opened the door Friday for Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States on spying charges by overturning a lower court decision that the WikiLeaks founder’s mental health was too fragile to withstand incarceration in America.

The High Court in London ruled that U.S. assurances about Assange’s detention, received after the lower court decision, were enough to guarantee he would be treated humanely. Assange’s lawyers say they will ask to appeal.

LONDON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Britain's governing Conservative Party was fined 17,800 pounds ($23,500) by the electoral watchdog on Thursday for failing to accurately report a donation which helped fund the refurbishment of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's official residence.

Johnson has faced intense scrutiny over how the financing of the refurbishment, estimated by some media to have run into hundreds of thousands of pounds on what the Sun newspaper has described as garish furniture and embossed wallpaper.

LONDON (AP) — The British government confirmed Thursday that an inquiry into an alleged lockdown-breaching Christmas party at the offices of Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson nearly a year ago will also look at two prior gatherings involving government officials.

In a statement to lawmakers, Cabinet Office minister Michael Ellis laid out the terms of reference for the inquiry Johnson ordered Wednesday following a week of allegations that officials flouted coronavirus rules that they imposed on everyone else.

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday ordered an inquiry and said he was “furious” after a leaked video showed senior members of his staff joking about holding a lockdown-breaching Christmas party.

The video has poured fuel on allegations that government officials flouted coronavirus rules they imposed on everyone else.

Johnson said that “I understand and share the anger up and down the country” at staff seeming to make light of lockdown rules.

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.