Free Republic

About 10,000 people an hour signing up to offer homes to war-hit families and individuals, says minister.Almost 89,000 people have offered homes to Ukrainian refugees in the first hours of a government scheme that allows families and individuals to bring them to the UK. The website for registering interest in the scheme crashed for a short while because of the numbers offering homes. By 9am on Tuesday, 88,712 had joined the scheme. The Foreign Office minister, James Cleverly, said “10,000 people every hour” were signing up. A spokesperson said the Homes for Ukraine website “temporarily stalled” after it went live...

Scientists have found and filmed one of the greatest ever undiscovered shipwrecks 107 years after it sank. The Endurance, the lost vessel of Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, was found at the weekend at the bottom of the Weddell Sea. The ship was crushed by sea-ice and sank in 1915, forcing Shackleton and his men to make an astonishing escape on foot and in small boats. Video of the remains show Endurance to be in remarkable condition. Even though it has been sitting in 3km (10,000ft) of water for over a century, it looks just like it did on the...

Rolls-Royce will move ahead with a multibillion pound plan to roll out a new breed of mini nuclear reactors after securing more than £450m from the government and investors... The engineering firm will set up a venture focused on developing small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs, in partnership with investors BNF Resources and the US generator Exelon Generation with a joint investment of £195m to fund the plans over the next three years.... Ministers hope that the new generation of SMRs will be quicker and cheaper to roll out than traditional large-scale nuclear reactors – such as the 3,200 megawatt...

Over the years the Corby trouser press became part of British culture, and the target of lighthearted satire ...Peter Corby, who has died aged 97, was the inventor of the eponymous electric trouser press, a gadget which was once affectionately described in The Daily Telegraph as “faintly redolent of three-star hotels along with shortbread and coffee creamer”....t the time they were launched, the electric presses, equipped with jacket hanger and a tray for pocket change, were seen as cutting-edge and aspirational, company ads promising “no more baggy knees or wrinkles” and adding that the device was “perfect for women’s slacks...

The Covid-19 vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca was 79% effective in preventing symptomatic illness in a large trial in the US, Chile and Peru, the company said on Monday, paving the way for it to apply for US approval. It was 100% effective against severe or critical disease and hospitalisation and was safe, the drugmaker said on Monday, releasing results of the late-stage human trial study of more than 32,000 volunteers across all age groups. The data will give credence to the British vaccine after results from earlier, separate late-stage studies raised questions about the robustness of the...

Delays and confusion at the UK’s ports threaten to put hundreds of small and medium-sized exporters out of business...and cost the government millions of pounds in lost trade tariffs... 40% of trucks crossing the channel with empty containers..The collapse of Britain’s trade with the EU will continue into the summer after the failure to recruit up to 30,000 customs agents, despite government assurances that normal service has resumed, industry groups have warned....The warnings follow the most dramatic monthly fall in exports from the UK to the EU since records began 20 years ago. Exports tumbled by almost 41% as thousands...

Rolls-Royce has announced it has made progress towards creating the world's fastest all-electric plane. The aerospace company has successfully completed the taxiing of its ‘Spirit of Innovation’ aircraft, marking the latest milestone on its journey towards the record-breaking achievement. For the first time, the plane powered along a runway propelled by its electric powertrain and the latest energy storage technology developed to set world speed records. Rolls-Royce said this means the aircraft passed a critical test of its propulsion system, making major steps towards actual flight-testing. The first flight is planned for the spring, when the firm hopes the combination...

The first data on the UK Covid vaccine rollout suggests it is having a "spectacular" impact on stopping serious illness, researchers say.Within weeks, one shot reduces the risk of being admitted to hospital by at least three-quarters for the over 80s.Researchers said this was particularly impressive as this age group was the most frail and least likely to have a strong immune response.Monitoring of health staff also shows vaccination helps cut transmission. So far a third of adults have received a vaccination in the UK.... The data from Public Health England (PHE) and Public Health Scotland (PHS) has been published...

A first-hand account of Britain’s role in the 1953 coup that overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran and restored the shah to power has been published for the first time. The account by the MI6 officer who ran the operation describes how it took British intelligence years to persuade the US to take part in the coup. Meanwhile, MI6 recruited agents and bribed members of Iran’s parliament with banknotes transported in biscuit tins. Together the MI6 and CIA even recruited Shah Reza Pahlavi’s sister in an effort to persuade the reluctant monarch to back the coup to overthrow Mohammad...

The Lancet is one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world. Recently, they published an article on Covid patients receiving hydroxychloroquine with a dire conclusion: the drug increases heartbeat irregularities and decreases hospital survival rates. This result was treated as authoritative, and major drug trials were immediately halted – because why treat anyone with an unsafe drug? Now, that Lancet study has been retracted, withdrawn from the literature entirely, at the request of three of its authors who “can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources”. Given the seriousness of the topic...

Friday 8 May is the 75th anniversary of VE day- the end of the Second World War in Europe. Few people realised that a British theatre actor and manager, turned soldier, drafted the historic document of surrender which ended the conflict. For years, John Counsell’s twin daughters had no idea about the role he played. Jenny and Elizabeth Counsell, who are now 77, have spoken of their pride at his part in helping to bring the Second World War to an end.

A 99-year-old Second World War veteran has raised more than £13m for the NHS by completing 100 laps of his garden. Captain Tom Moore, who lives with his family in Bedfordshire, completed the final four 25-metre lengths with a special guard of honour by the 1st battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment....Capt Moore’s original target was to raise £1,000 ahead of his 100th birthday. But donations to his Tom’s Walk for the NHS fundraiser have since soared past £13m.…He has received multiple messages of thanks from NHS workers, sports personalities and politicians.... Moore, who aimed to complete the walk before he...

‘Grandfather of allergy’ survived three years in Japanese POW camp before pioneering medical careerDr William Frankland, a pioneering British immunologist who transformed the world’s understanding of allergies, has died aged 108. Frankland improved the lives of millions of hay fever sufferers by developing the idea of a pollen count. Until his death the oldest survivor of the Japanese prisoner of war camps, he published a scientific paper in September 2017 aged 105. Known as “the grandfather of allergy”, Frankland’s medical career spanned 70 years. He was a British army doctor in the second world war and spent three and a...

[UK]Army field hospital experts and contractors converted Excel into 4,000 bed mega-hospital in just nine days. London’s emergency coronavirus hospital at the Excel conference centre has been built from scratch over the last nine days in an unprecedented civil-military partnership and is ready to receive its first patients this week. Planning has involved soldiers with experience from Afghanistan and the west African ebola crisis, working in support of health service staff to create NHS Nightingale, which will be the largest hospital in the UK, with 4,000 beds at full capacity. The military team leader, Colonel Ashleigh Boreham, Commanding Officer, 256...

Each time I try to amend the grocery order, the website falls over, punch-drunk and exhausted. For a few terrifying minutes, it flounders. Then it stands up again and refreshes...When the madness passes, which it will, because all things do, I hope we remember how the supermarket staff really served us. It’s ironic how many of us slagged off these places for decades, told the masses to avoid them. Let’s all eat risottos of foraged acorns made with small-batch artisan butter from our bi-weekly farmers’ market! And then this happened, and the Aldi car park is full of Audis jam-packed...

Britain’s former envoy to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers who resigned as the UK’s EU ambassador in 2017 said in a lecture at Glasgow University that Johnson was repeating Theresa May’s “strategy errors” and would find himself boxed in by his campaign promises...Negotiating a trade deal with the EU in an unprecedentedly quick time is the centrepiece of the prime minister’s pledge to “get Brexit done”."This prime minister is now replicating the strategy errors of 2016 and 2017, which brought his predecessor down..This is diplomatic amateurism dressed up domestically as boldness and decisiveness.” ...While the UK could get a “quick...

Boris Johnson's decision to suspend Parliament was unlawful, the Supreme Court has ruled. Delivering its conclusions, the Supreme Court's president, Lady Hale, said: "The effect on the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme." She added: "The decision to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament was unlawful because it had the effect of frustrating or preventing the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification." Lady Hale said the unanimous decision of the 11 justices was that Parliament had not been prorogued - the decision was null and of no effect - and it was for the...

The UK's highest-ever temperature has been officially recorded in Cambridge, the Met Office has confirmed. Cambridge University Botanic Garden measured 38.7C (101.7F) on Thursday beating the previous UK record of 38.5C (101.3F), set in Kent in 2003. Daily temperatures have been measured by the weather station at the site in the south of the city since 1904.

The foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has ordered an independent, global review into the persecution of Christians of all nationalities amid claims that not enough is being done to defend the rights of nearly 200 million Christians at risk of persecution today. The unprecedented Foreign Office review will be led by the Bishop of Truro, Rt Rev Philip Mounstephen, and will make recommendations on the practical steps the government can take to better support those under threat. It will be specifically directed at the persecution of Christians, and not religious minorities in general, reflecting the foreign secretary’s view that since Christianity...

Leading surgeon says lack of hobbies and creativity in schools has affected children’s practical abilities. New medical students have spent so much time on screens that they lack vital practical skills necessary to conduct life-saving operations, a leading surgeon has warned. Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, said that a decline in hands-on creative subjects at school and practical hobbies at home means that students often do not have a basic understanding of the physical world. Kneebone said spending hours engaged in virtual worlds was no substitute for experience in the real world. “Partly it stops...