News 05/03/26

Kristi Noem has been sacked as US homeland security secretary following what a Trump administration source described as the culmination of her many leadership failures.

Donald Trump announced on social media that she will be replaced by a senator from Oklahoma. He added that Ms Noem will take up a new post as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas in about three weeks. Posting on Truth Social, Trump praised her numerous and spectacular results in the role.

Slough Borough Council, which has effectively been bankrupt, is facing renewed scrutiny after a minister criticised the slow progress of its financial recovery.

Local government minister Alison McGovern said the council lacked resilience and strategic focus and will be the subject of a new external review. The authority has been under government review since 2021, when it announced a £56 million deficit. Council leader Dexter Smith said the fresh review will offer a new perspective on progress and provide insight into recovery efforts.

Labour MP Joani Reid has had her party membership suspended after her husband was arrested on allegations of spying, which he denies.

Reid has firmly denied any wrongdoing. A Labour Party spokesperson says she has agreed to fully cooperate with the party’s investigation into the matter. The party says the investigation will now continue formally.

Defence Secretary John Healey has twice declined to rule out Britain joining strikes on Iran when questioned by Sky News.

Speaking at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, he also said he had the option of deploying HMS Dragon to the Mediterranean for weeks. He was asked whether Britain could join the conflict in an offensive capacity.

A teenage boy has been seriously injured in a stabbing at a school in Nottingham.

Police were called to Nottingham University Academy of Science and Technology in Dunkirk Road at around 1.30pm on Thursday. The fifteen year old was taken to Queen’s Medical Centre with serious injuries. Another fifteen year old boy was arrested at the scene and the two teenagers are understood to know each other.

Donald Trump said he must be involved in selecting Iran’s next supreme leader after incumbent Ali Khamenei was killed by US-Israeli strikes.

Iranian officials suggested yesterday they were close to announcing a successor, with Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, considered a frontrunner. Responding to the reports, Trump told Axios: “They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela.”

Pop star Britney Spears spent the night in custody after being arrested by highway patrol officers at 9:28pm on Wednesday and released at 6:07am, according to Ventura County Sheriff’s Office.

Online records list her height as 5ft 5ins, weight as 125lbs (8st 13lbs) and occupation as “celebrity.” Spears has been scheduled to appear in court on 4 May.

Baroness Heather Hallett, chair of the UK public inquiry into Covid-19, defended the cost and length of the process on the final day of hearings.

She said completing the inquiry in under four years was “an extraordinary achievement,” despite criticism over its cost and duration. The inquiry, which cost just over £200m, examined the pandemic response across all four UK nations. Witness hearings began in June 2023 following its formal opening in 2022. Baroness Hallett said the results would show why the inquiry was necessary.

Gwent Police sold electric tuk-tuks they bought to help fight crime after just two years at a £28,350 loss.

The four three-wheelers had been purchased in 2022 using a Home Office fund to patrol Newport and Abergavenny and serve as safe spaces for reporting crimes. They were taken out of service in June 2024 and sold later that year for £5,950. A force spokesperson said the sale price was lower than anticipated, but recouping more money was beyond their control.

British Airways has announced an additional flight from Muscat to London Heathrow for passengers stranded in Oman or the UAE.

The airline had already operated a flight out of Muscat earlier today. However, flights from other Middle Eastern airports remain suspended. “We remain unable to operate flights from Abu Dhabi, Amman, Bahrain, Doha, Dubai and Tel Aviv,” the airline said, leaving many travellers still unable to return to the UK.The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has defended his decision not to authorise offensive strikes on Iran.

He reiterated that the “long-standing British position is that the best way forward for the regime and the world is a negotiated settlement with Iran, where they give up their nuclear ambitions.”

In addition, the government is sending four extra Typhoon fighter jets to Qatar, responding to requests “for further help” from allies in the Gulf, the prime minister confirmed.

Cyprus has ended an alert over security threats in the village of Akrotiri near an RAF airbase.

Residents had earlier been advised to stay indoors as a preventive measure, a Cypriot government official said. UK defence secretary John Healey is visiting the island after a drone strike on the RAF Akrotiri base early on Monday. President Nikos Christodoulides criticised response.

A plane crash in Maidenhead triggered a major emergency response including a medical helicopter and a fuel leak.

At 3:44pm on Tuesday March third South Central Ambulance Service called Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service to a light aircraft crash at White Waltham Airfield on Waltham Road. The pilot suffered significant facial injuries and was taken to Wexham Park Hospital.

A shoplifter who killed a security guard during a struggle at an Asda store while trying to flee with stolen alcohol has been jailed for five years and four months.

Former Royal Marine Alun Harris-Richards, sixty one, suffered a fatal heart attack while trying to stop Natasha Smith leaving. At the High Court in Edinburgh she admitted culpable homicide there.

Families of failed asylum seekers will be offered up to forty thousand pounds to leave the UK under a new pilot scheme announced by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood.

Payments of up to ten thousand pounds per person, capped at four per family, must be accepted within seven days or the government will seek to remove them forcibly. Home Office expects savings.

Israel and Iran have continued exchanges of attacks in the Middle East conflict, now in its sixth day. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said the nineteenth wave of its “True Promise 4” operation began this morning with a combined missile and drone strike on US and Israeli positions, according to state broadcaster Press TV.

Iranian forces said they hit a US oil tanker in the northern Persian Gulf, leaving it on fire, and warned that during war passage through the Strait of Hormuz would be under Iran’s control.

South East Water has been fined twenty two million pounds after repeated supply failures, according to the regulator Ofwat.

The watchdog began an investigation after a series of outages between November and January. Tens of thousands of households and businesses across Kent and Sussex were left without drinking water during that period. Ofwat says the penalty follows those repeated interruptions to supply which affected large numbers of customers and prompted the investigation into the company’s performance and reliability of service for homes and businesses across the region.

A majority in the United States Senate has blocked a resolution seeking to limit Donald Trump’s powers to continue the war against Iran without congressional approval.

Fifty three senators in the one hundred member chamber voted against advancing the bipartisan proposal. Meanwhile, a flight chartered by the UK government for British nationals wishing to leave Oman did not depart as planned. The aircraft had been due to leave the capital Muscat at 23:00 local time on Wednesday, which would have marked the first repatriation effort by the UK Foreign Office since the Middle East conflict began.

A nine year old boy suffered what has been described as fatal physical harm after he was operated on by a suspended surgeon at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

Jack Moate died two months after surgery carried out in 2015 by Kuldeep Stohr. During the operation Jack suffered significant blood loss and afterwards was left in continuous pain. His mother, Elizabeth Moate, said the hospital sent her son home and that he later died in agony.

Doctors and families say a new drug is transforming the lives of children born with a severe form of epilepsy.

Dravet syndrome can cause dozens of dangerous seizures every day and affects around one in fifteen thousand babies. Without effective treatment the outlook can be devastating, with uncontrolled seizures placing children at high risk of injury and death. The drug, called zorevunersen, is given through an infusion into the spine and works by managing the underlying cause in most cases, a faulty gene affecting the brain.

Plans to expand Langley Health Centre have been approved after what planners describe as a struggle to provide primary care for its 23,500 patients with existing facilities.

The extension will create nine new consulting rooms, a waiting room and offices. The car park will also be reconfigured to add two more spaces. Planning documents say the centre is struggling to provide face to face appointments while administrative facilities are stretched and storage is being used in clinical rooms.

Dentists in England are returning hundreds of millions of pounds to the government for NHS care that has not been delivered.

More than nine hundred million pounds has been handed back over the past two years, about one pound in every seven paid to dentists. Many have prioritised private work instead. The figures help explain why many patients struggle to access NHS dentistry, with more than a fifth reporting difficulty getting care when they need it. The government says improvements are being made this year and any returned money is reinvested in services.