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      U.K. Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff, Sue Gray, Resigns

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      Ms. Gray said intense media scrutiny of her role meant she “risked becoming a distraction” to the new Labour government. Sue Gray, the chief of staff to Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, resigned abruptly on Sunday after weeks of speculation about turf wars in Downing Street, a media storm over her pay and questions over responsibility for a series of political errors.Ms. Gray, a career civil servant with decades of experience at the heart of government, said in a statement that it had “become clear to me that intense commentary around my position risked becoming a distraction to the government’s vital work of change.”Mr. Starmer thanked Ms. Gray in a statement for “all the support she has given me, both in opposition and government, and her work to prepare us for government and get us started on our program of change.”Ms. Gray has been appointed as the prime minister’s envoy for regions and nations, while the role of chief of staff will be taken by Morgan McSweeney, who masterminded the successful election campaign this summer for the Labour Party, and had served as Mr. Starmer’s chief adviser.The changes bring to an end a turbulent period of several months in which the presence of both Ms. Gray and Mr. McSweeney in Downing Street created two centers of power, prompting rumors of a fierce rivalry between them, although both denied any hostility.Ms. Gray’s departure also heralded a wider shake-up. The political director at Downing Street, Vidhya Alakeson, and the director of government relations, Jill Cuthbertson, have been promoted to deputy chiefs of staff. James Lyons, a former journalist who worked in communications for the National Health Service, and more recently at TikTok, will head a new strategic communications team.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Britain Shuts Down Last Coal Plant, ‘Turning Its Back on Coal Forever’

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      The Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last surviving coal-burning power station in a country that birthed the Industrial Revolution and fed it with coal.Britain, the nation that launched a global addiction to coal 150 years ago, is shutting down its last coal-burning power station on Monday.That makes Britain first among the world’s major, industrialized economies to wean itself off coal — all the more symbolic because it was also the first to burn tremendous amounts of it to fuel the Industrial Revolution, inspiring the rest of the world to follow suit.“The birthplace of coal power is turning its back on coal forever,” said Matt Webb, an associate director at the London-based research and advocacy group, E3G.On Monday, in the middle of England, the end of Britain’s coal era will be marked by the closure of the 2,000-megawatt Ratcliffe-on-Soar facility. Uniper, the power company that operated the plant, said the 750-acre site would be converted to a “low-carbon energy hub.”The closure comes 142 years after the world’s first coal-burning power plant began producing electricity at the Holborn Viaduct in London in 1882 and, in turn, accelerating Britain’s rise as a major industrial and imperial power.Coal is the dirtiest fossil fuel. When burned, it produces greenhouse gases that have heated the Earth’s atmosphere and supersized heat waves and storms. While it was long the cheapest and most abundant source of power in many countries, including Britain, it has been replaced in recent decades by gas, nuclear power and most recently, renewables, like wind and solar.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Commuters See ‘Islamophobic’ Message in Cyber Attack on Public Wi-Fi, Authorities Say

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      The British authorities are investigating after commuters at 19 train stations saw an Islamophobic message when they tried to log on to a public Wi-Fi system.The British authorities are investigating a cyberattack on Wednesday that they said displayed an anti-Muslim message on a public Wi-Fi system serving more than a dozen train stations around the country.Commuters who connected to a Wi-Fi service at stations for Network Rail, Britain’s national rail operator, were met with “Islamophobic messaging,” according to the British Transport Police, who oversee law enforcement on British rail networks. The police said they had received reports of the cyberattack just after 5 p.m. local time, and that they were leading an investigation into the incident. The service was quickly taken down, Network Rail said, and would remain down until security checks were completed.The issue emerged at 19 stations across Britain, including major transportation hubs in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and other cities, a spokesman for Network Rail said in a statement.Commuters attempting to log onto Wi-Fi at the stations were met with a webpage that said “We love you, Europe,” along with information related to terror attacks in Europe, The Manchester Evening News reported.The Wi-Fi was a “click-and-connect” service that did not collect any personal data and was operated by a third-party company, Telent, Network Rail’s statement said.Telent, a technology and communications company, on Thursday pointed to Global Reach, a provider that ran the Wi-Fi service’s landing page. Telent said in a statement that it had found that an “unauthorized change was made to the Network Rail landing page from a legitimate Global Reach administrator account.”British Transport Police were investigating the matter as a criminal case, Telent said, and no personal data was affected by the incident. But, as a precaution, it said, it had temporarily suspended all use of Global Reach services to confirm that none of its other customers had been impacted.Global Reach did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.Britain’s crime and cybersecurity agencies were also helping with the investigation, the Transport Police said on Thursday.The disruption follows another “cybersecurity incident” on Sept. 1 that targeted Transport for London, the agency that runs the city’s public transit network, in which hackers accessed the contact details of the agency’s customers, and potentially could view bank account details for some commuters. The cyberattack also affected the broadcasting of live train schedules online and payment systems.A 17-year-old was arrested in Walsall, a town in the West Midlands county of England, as part of the investigation into that attack, cybercrime authorities said this month. More

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      Harrods Will Be Sued by Mohamed al-Fayed’s Alleged Victims, Lawyers Say

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      Attorneys for 37 women said they would sue Harrods, the luxury department store, over the rape and sexual assault they say its former owner committed.Lawyers representing dozens of women who have detailed harrowing allegations of sexual assault by Mohamed al-Fayed, the former owner of Harrods, said on Friday that they would launch a civil case against the luxury British department store for allegedly enabling his abuse.At a news conference on Friday, a day after a bombshell BBC documentary and podcast laid out a pattern of sexual violence and rape of female employees during the time that Mr. al-Fayed owned the store, lawyers for at least 37 women said Harrods had “acquiesced to” an unsafe environment that had failed the alleged victims. About 20 of those women looked on from the audience.Mr. al-Fayed, who died last year at 94, was a billionaire tycoon who owned the iconic store from 1985 to 2010.“We will say it plainly, Mohamed al-Fayed was a monster,” said Dean Armstrong, one of the lawyers, adding, “But he was a monster enabled by a system, a system that pervaded Harrods.”Mr. al-Fayed was “enabled by unsafe systems of work which Harrods established, maintained, certainly acquiesced to, and, we say, facilitated during his chairmanship,” Mr. Armstrong said.Harrods, which is now owned by the state of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund, issued a statement shortly after the documentary was released on Thursday, saying it was “utterly appalled by the allegations of abuse perpetrated by Mohamed al-Fayed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Nigel Farage’s Anti-Immigration Party Has Big Plans. Can It See Them Through?

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      Nigel Farage, a Trump ally and Brexit champion, thinks his Reform U.K. party can become a major political force. At a conference on Friday, he will explain how.A week ago, he was the keynote speaker at a glitzy Chicago dinner for the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank with a history of denying climate science, where the top tables went for $50,000.On Friday, it was back to the day job for Nigel Farage, the veteran political disrupter, ally of Donald J. Trump and hard right, anti-immigrant activist whose ascent has alarmed both of Britain’s main political parties.In a cavernous exhibition center in Birmingham, in England’s West Midlands, Mr. Farage is set to address supporters of his upstart party, Reform U.K., at its first annual conference since its success in Britain’s July general election. He is expected to lay out a plan to professionalize the party and build support ahead of local elections next year.His ambitions are clear. But the jet-setting lifestyle of Mr. Farage, 60, whose visit to Chicago was his third recent trip to the United States, underscores the question hanging over Reform U.K.: Does its leader have the ability and appetite to build the fledgling party into a credible political force?Mr. Farage, a polarizing, pugnacious figure, is one of Britain’s most effective communicators and had an outsized impact on its politics for two decades before finally being elected to Britain’s Parliament in July. A ferocious critic of the European Union, he championed Brexit and helped pressure Prime Minister David Cameron to hold the 2016 referendum.“A fairly strong case can be made that Nigel Farage has been the most important political figure in all the elections of the last decade,” said Robert Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      El posible segundo atentado contra Trump genera alarma en el extranjero

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      Existe la preocupación generalizada de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense haya llegado a un punto crítico.[Estamos en WhatsApp. Empieza a seguirnos ahora]En los nueve años transcurridos desde que Donald Trump entró en la política estadounidense, la percepción global de Estados Unidos se ha visto sacudida por la imagen de una nación fracturada e impredecible. Primero un atentado contra la vida del expresidente, y ahora un segundo posible atentado, han acentuado la preocupación internacional, suscitando temores de una agitación violenta que podría desembocar en una guerra civil.Keir Starmer, el primer ministro británico, ha dicho que está “muy preocupado” y “profundamente perturbado” por lo que, según el FBI, fue un intento de asesinar a Trump en su campo de golf de Florida, a menos de 50 días de las elecciones presidenciales y dos meses después de que una bala ensangrentó la oreja de Trump durante un mitin de campaña en Pensilvania.“La violencia no tiene cabida alguna en un proceso político”, afirmó Starmer.Sin embargo, la violencia ha tenido un lugar preponderante en esta tormentosa y tambaleante campaña política estadounidense, y no solo en los dos posibles intentos de asesinato. Ahora existe una preocupación generalizada en todo el mundo de que las elecciones de noviembre no acaben bien y de que la democracia estadounidense, que solía ser un modelo para el mundo, haya llegado a un punto crítico.En México, donde este año se celebraron las elecciones más violentas de la historia reciente del país, con 41 candidatos y aspirantes a cargos públicos asesinados, el presidente Andrés Manuel López Obrador dijo en una publicación en la plataforma social X: “Aun cuando todavía no se conoce bien lo sucedido, lamentamos la violencia producida en contra del expresidente Donald Trump. El camino es la democracia y la paz”.En un momento de guerras en Europa y el Medio Oriente y de inseguridad global generalizada mientras China y Rusia afirman la superioridad de sus modelos autócratas, la precariedad estadounidense pesa bastante.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Guardian in Talks to Sell The Observer to Tortoise Media

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      The Observer, first published in 1791, could be bought by Tortoise Media, an outlet founded by a British media veteran that began publishing in 2019.The parent company of The Guardian said on Tuesday that it was in formal talks to sell The Observer, Britain’s oldest surviving Sunday newspaper, to the start-up Tortoise Media.A deal would signal that Guardian Media Group is willing to shed a pillar of the British media landscape — The Observer has run in print since 1791 — as it increasingly focuses on news of worldwide interest, delivered digitally.In an internal memo to employees, leaders of Guardian Media said that Tortoise had approached them with a “compelling” offer to buy The Observer. The approximately 70 employees of the Sunday publication were told about the talks on Tuesday.A final deal could be reached within about three months, according to a person briefed on the talks, who was not authorized to discuss the details publicly. The negotiations are ongoing and may not end in an agreement.For years, The Guardian, which was founded in Manchester in 1821, has sought to establish itself as a global media company. It established a digital U.S. edition in 2007, and has sought to expand aggressively across the Atlantic.Executives at The Guardian said that a deal to sell The Observer, which the company bought in 1993, would allow their company to focus even more on international expansion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Britain Awards 10 Contracts for Offshore Wind Projects

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      The successful outcome of the government auction for renewable energy projects may bolster a wind industry battered by rising costs.The British government on Tuesday awarded price support contracts for a series of offshore wind farms as part of a wider package for renewable energy, a reversal from a disappointing auction last year in which there were no takers for offshore wind projects.“The government has shown it takes renewable energy seriously,” Duncan Clark, the head of Britain and Ireland for the Danish wind developer Orsted, which received support for two projects in the auction, said in a statement.Overall the government awarded support for 131 renewable energy projects including onshore wind as well as solar and tidal power. RenewableUK, an industry group, estimates that the installations, if completed, could attract £14 billion, or about $18 billion, in investment and power nearly 11 million homes.The government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer is betting on offshore wind as “the backbone of the clean energy mission” to shift from oil and gas to renewable energy sources in a matter of years.The governing Labour Party realized that if it wanted to retain Britain’s leading position in offshore wind installation, it needed to substantially increase price supports to help developers tackle the estimated 40 percent increase in the costs of building these projects in recent years. Offshore wind is attractive in Britain because of abundant wind and large areas of shallow seabed off the coasts, especially in the North Sea. Investors are also attracted to the profits from these projects, which can cost billions of dollars.Stephen Bull, chief executive of Vargronn, which received support for a floating offshore wind farm off Scotland called Green Volt, said in an interview that the auction may not have reversed the impact of last year’s failure, but the results put Britain “on the right track.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More