United Kingdom

LONDON, March 23 (Reuters) - The Bank of England is expected to raise interest rates for the 11th time in a row on Thursday after a surprise jump in inflation dashed speculation that it might have been about to take a pause.

The BoE is trying to reconcile Britain's weak economic outlook and recent worries about global banks with stubbornly high price growth, and is due to announce its latest decision on rates at 1200 GMT.

Most economists had believed inflation was on course to fall steadily, after hitting a 41-year high above 11% in October.

22 Mar 2023; MEMO: The Refugee Council has said that the cost of detaining and accommodating people under the government's illegal immigration bill could be more than £9 billion ($10.6 billion) in the first three years.

The charity said that the figure is part of an impact assessment of the bill based on the Home Office being able to remove 30,000 people and send them to Rwanda, detaining people for 28 days and accommodating others.

22 Mar 2023; MEMO: More than 200,000 people have signed a petition calling for putting an end to the demolition of Palestinian homes as a first step towards dismantling apartheid, Amnesty International said yesterday.

LONDON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The United Kingdom's (UK) Parliament passed a key part of the government's new post-Brexit trade deal on Northern Ireland on Wednesday despite opposition from the region's major unionist party.

The vote was on the so-called "Stormont Brake," which offers Northern Ireland more power over new European Union (EU) laws. Members of the House of Commons (lower house of Parliament) voted by a margin of 515 to 29. Those voting 'no' included six Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) members.

LONDON (AP) — British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak faces a rebellion from some fellow Conservatives, including his two immediate predecessors, when lawmakers vote Wednesday on his deal with the European Union to revise the rules governing Northern Ireland trade.

Former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss said they would vote against the agreement, which is designed to resolve a thorny trade dispute that vexed U.K.-EU relations and triggered a political crisis in Belfast.

LONDON (AP) — U.K. inflation accelerated for the first time in four months in February as high food and energy prices hit consumers battered by the nation’s cost-of-living crisis.

The consumer price index jumped to 10.4% in the 12 months through February from 10.1% the previous month, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday. The figures surprised analysts who had forecast inflation would slow to 9.9%.

21 Mar 2023; MEMO: The Metropolitan Police in the UK capital London have been found to be institutionally racist, misogynistic and homophobic in a damning report led by Baroness Louise Casey.

In one of the incidents highlighted, a Muslim police officer said that he found bacon inside his boots in his locker but did not tell anyone at the time out of fear of reprisals.

LONDON, March 21 (Reuters) - Data from the early days of the COVID pandemic, briefly uploaded to a database by Chinese scientists, gives information on its origins, including suggesting a role for raccoon dogs in the coronavirus reaching humans, international researchers said.

The virus was first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, with many suspecting a live animal market to be involved, before spreading round the world and killing nearly 7 million people to date.

21 Mar 2023; MEMO: Britain, on Monday, said far-right Danish politician, Rasmus Paludan, will be denied entry to the UK to carry out a provocative act of burning a copy of the Muslim holy book, Anadolu News Agency reports.

Responding to a question by Wakefield Labour MP, Simon Lightwood, Home Office Minister for Security, Tom Tugendhat, said Paludan had been added to a "warnings index" and would not be allowed into the country to carry out a Quran burning.

LONDON (AP) — The Scottish National Party is finding Nicola Sturgeon a hard act to follow.

Scotland’s governing party is holding an acrimonious contest to replace Sturgeon, a leader who came to dominate Scottish politics, but hit an impasse in her fight for independence from the United Kingdom, and divided the party with a transgender rights law.