United Kingdom

11 August 2023; AA: The British economy saw a 0.2% growth in the second quarter of the year, beating economists' expectations of zero growth, official figures showed on Friday.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), gross domestic product grew 0.5% in June, helped by the manufacturing sector, and 0.2% from April to June as a whole.

9 August 2023; MEMO: The UK and Turkiye have struck an agreement to "disrupt and dismantle" human smuggling and trafficking gangs across Europe, as well as the supply of small boat parts.

LONDON, Aug. 9 (Xinhua) -- Police officers in Northern Ireland have been left "incredibly vulnerable" after the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) accidentally made public the private details of every staff member.

The surname, initial, rank or grade, work location and department of all PSNI staff, numbering around 10,000, were published online in error in response to a freedom of information request on Tuesday.

LONDON, Aug 8 (Reuters) - "Hostile actors" targeted Britain's Electoral Commission in a complex cyber incident that involved hackers accessing internal emails and copies of voter data, the commission said on Tuesday.

The Electoral Commission, the independent body which oversees elections and regulates political finance, said the incident came to light last year.

LONDON, Aug 8 (Reuters) - Russia's lack of ships and Western grain traders' shrinking appetite for business with Moscow are adding to rising costs of moving Russian wheat, at a time when the war in Ukraine has spilled perilously close to vital Black Sea supply routes.

President Vladimir Putin promised to replace Ukrainian grain with Russian shipments to Africa after Moscow in July ended an arrangement that gave Ukraine's food cargo safe passage in the Black Sea, imposing a de-facto blockade on its neighbour and attacking storage facilities, in an escalation of the war.

LONDON/WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (Reuters) - An elite group of North Korean hackers secretly breached computer networks at a major Russian missile developer for at least five months last year, according to technical evidence reviewed by Reuters and analysis by security researchers.

Reuters found cyber-espionage teams linked to the North Korean government, which security researchers call ScarCruft and Lazarus, secretly installed stealthy digital backdoors into systems at NPO Mashinostroyeniya, a rocket design bureau based in Reutov, a small town on the outskirts of Moscow.

LONDON, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- The British government on Saturday announced a new partnership with social media companies to tackle people smuggling content online, including criminals sharing information about illegal Channel crossings.

Figures show over 90 percent of online content linked to people smuggling is taken down when social media companies are notified, the government said in a statement.

LONDON, Aug 4 (Reuters) - Russia has doubled its 2023 defence spending target to more than $100 billion - a third of all public expenditure - a government document reviewed by Reuters showed, as the costs of the war in Ukraine spiral and place growing strain on Moscow's finances.

The figures shed light on Russia's spending on the conflict at a time when sector-specific budget expenditure data is no longer published.

LONDON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Greenpeace protesters draped the private home of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in black fabric on Thursday, stepping up their campaign against his government's policy on drilling for oil.

Sunak's record on environmental issues has come under scrutiny in recent months after he said he would take a "proportionate approach" to climate change that balances net zero ambitions with the need to keep consumers' bills down.

LONDON, Aug 3 (Reuters) - The Bank of England raised its key interest rate by a quarter of a percentage point to a 15-year peak of 5.25% on Thursday, and gave a new warning that borrowing costs were likely to stay high for some time.

Unlike the U.S. Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank - which also both raised rates by a quarter-point last week - the BoE's Monetary Policy Committee gave little suggestion that rate hikes were about to end as it battles high inflation.