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Coronavirus predictions Sir: While precautionary advice regarding the coronavirus should be followed, Ross Clark is right (‘Feverish imaginations’, 29 February) to urge an open mind on the doomsday predictions which are edging us towards panic. In 1996 the then government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor Kenneth Calman, predicted that 500,000 people could die within a few
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Home At the beginning of the week 319 people in the United Kingdom had been found to be suffering from the coronavirus Covid-19, with five deaths by Monday evening; by the next day there were another 54 cases and another death. Of the total, 91 were in London. Testing was extended to anyone hospitalised with
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41/1A/10 is MISQUOTATION. 1D/24/33, 15, 34, and 38/16D are examples of common misquotations. First prize Dianne Parker, Dover, KentRunners-up Vincent Clark, Frant, East Sussex; Robin Vick, Harrow on the Hill, Middlesex
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It’s always tempting for governments to respond to economic trouble with a debt-fuelled spending splurge, but it’s a notoriously blunt tool. The root of the current problem is not financial panic but a rational response to the coronavirus. People are travelling less, staying away from shops and the workplace, delaying various projects, and they will
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Rishi Sunak unveiled his first Budget today. The Chancellor has promised a £30bn war chest for tackling coronavirus. There is also £6bn of new funding for the NHS, a new £2.5bn pothole fund and £5.2bn for flooding defences. Here is his full speech: I want to get straight to the issue most on everyone’s mind–
From our UK edition
Rishi Sunak has unveiled his first Budget. The Chancellor has promised a £30bn war chest for tackling coronavirus. There is also £6bn of new funding for the NHS, a new £2.5bn pothole fund and £5.2bn for flooding defences. Here are the main headline announcements: A promise to increase public spending by 2.8 per cent – the OBR says
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News broke this morning that the former head of the Equalities Commission Sir Trevor Phillips had been suspended from the Labour party over allegations of Islamophobia. Phillips has spent his career documenting the realities of race and integration in British life. The think tank Policy Exchange has now released the correspondence between Sir Trevor and
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Home After a Cobra emergency meeting about the coronavirus Covid-19, when the number of cases in the United Kingdom had reached 40, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said that they had ‘agreed a plan so that as and when it starts to spread — as I’m afraid it looks likely that it will — we
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We need career detectives Sir: Your lead article (Trial and error, 29 February) rightly condemns Tom Watson for pressurising police into investigating the spurious allegations of Carl Beech. What should urgently be abandoned is the fast-tracking of police officers into senior positions, and the promotion of uniformed inspectors into detective ranks without them having the
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Thirteen years ago, when John Reid became Home Secretary, he declared the ministry he presided over ‘not fit for purpose’. He was talking about border control but he might well have been referring to the department in general. When Theresa May became PM, things at the Home Office went from bad to worse. Her paranoid
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Heathrow’s nine runways When was a third runway for Heathrow first proposed? Heathrow was always planned to have multiple runways. On 10 April 1946, before the airport was even open, the Minister for Civil Aviation, Lord Winster, announced that the then London Airport was to have nine runways. Six would be in a Star of
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The unclued answers are all words inChambers, having their origin in Indonesia (clued by wordplay in the title). First prize Kailash Vernalls, Thame, OxonRunners-up Paul Davies, Reading, Berks; Mrs J. Smith, Beeston, Norfolk
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The government has released its official action plan to deal with the coronavirus epidemic, warning people that ‘we are all susceptible to catching this disease’. During a press conference at Downing Street this morning, the Prime Minister told reporters that the government’s plan involved four phases: ‘contain, delay, research, mitigate’. Boris Johnson said: ‘Let me be absolutely clear
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A cornerstone of any -functioning democracy is the separation of police and the courts on one hand, and government and parliament on the other. Where the latter are charged with making the law, they should never, ever be allowed to interfere with the enforcement of that law. Politicians have no power to tell the police
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Home The government told Britons returning from 11 quarantined towns in northern Italy to isolate themselves, for fear of spreading Covid-19, the contagious coronavirus fever. Random testing began at 11 hospitals. Thirty British and two Irish passengers from the cruise ship Diamond Princess quarantined at Yokohama had been flown to Britain and sent for another
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Devolved or decentralised? Sir: Paul Collier (‘Northern lights’, 22 February) conflates what devolution has come to mean, in UK terms, with decentralisation of authority. Thus it is adrift to imply that Edinburgh has benefited from a conscious decentralising of powers from central government. It was simply that Scotland as a whole got devolution and Edinburgh
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What a hole The World Health Organisation added processed meats to its list of ‘known’ carcinogens. A few of the other things which have been claimed to be linked to cancer in the past fortnight: A hole built into the wall of a NatWest bank branch in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, became an unlikely tourist destination with
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Each unclued light is a genus name of a TREE (i.e. ‘middle of the road’ = (s)TREE(t)). Cornus was also allowed at 2 Down.First prize John Honey, SurbitonRunners-up Ben Stephenson, London SW12; D. Page, Orpington
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After the vote for Brexit, it was often said that our departure from the EU was most likely to harm the very people who voted for it: the industrial workers of the Midlands and North. Didn’t they know that a vote for Brexit would, in itself, lead to 500,000 more job losses? Couldn’t they see
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Home The Budget, still scheduled for 11 March, had to be rewritten after Rishi Sunak was made Chancellor of the Exchequer when Sajid Javid resigned rather than agree to his special advisers being sacked and provision being pooled between No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street. Questions were asked about how far this was the
