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Boris Johnson’s government is expected to open England’s borders to allow US and EU travellers who are fully vaccinated against Covid to enter without the need to quarantine, according to reports.The plans, which would be a boost to the aviation and tourism sectors, are expected to be discussed by ministers at a Covid operations committee meeting on Wednesday.The prime minister confirmed his government was considering a travel corridor with the US that allows people to “come freely from the US in a way that they normally do” during a LBC interview.“We’re talking to [the US] the whole time,” he told LBC. “At the moment we’re dealing with a Delta wave, the US is dealing with a Delta wave, but be assured that we are on it the whole time. As soon as we have something to say about travel corridors you’ll be hearing from us.”Talks are also expected between Whitehall officials and the devolved administrations on whether the change would apply to England only, or all four nations of the UK.The changes are expected as soon as next week, while countries outside the EU and US could be allowed inbound quarantine-free travel at a later date, according to The Times.It comes after aviation firms claimed a trial has demonstrated the UK can safely exempt fully vaccinated US and EU visitors from self-isolation.Heathrow Airport, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic said their 10-day pilot scheme proved the vaccination status of travellers can be efficiently and accurately checked away from the border.Around 250 fully vaccinated passengers on selected flights from New York, Los Angeles, Jamaica and Athens earlier this month presented their credentials using paper or digital formats before boarding the plane.Some 99 per cent of their documents were verified as authentic, with just two passengers’ credentials rejected.In one case there was a discrepancy between the name on the vaccine card and the name on the passport, while another involved someone who had been fully vaccinated less than 14 days before travel.Currently, people arriving in the UK from amber list locations, such as the US, Jamaica, Spain, Italy and Greece, must have been had both doses of a coronavirus jab as part of theUK’s vaccination programme to avoid the requirement to self-isolate for 10 days. This excludes those who have been jabbed elsewhere in the world.The Department for Transport (DfT) has committed to holding a formal review of its rules for arriving travellers before Sunday. It is expected to announce when it will begin recognising vaccines administered in other countries.BA chief executive Sean Doyle said the trial provides “the evidence the government needs” to allow fully vaccinated visitors from low-risk countries to enter the UK without the need to self-isolate.He went on: “The UK needs to safely reopen its borders as soon as possible to ensure loved ones can reunite, business can thrive and global Britain is able to take advantage of the UK’s world-leading vaccination programme.”His counterpart at Virgin Atlantic, Shai Weiss, warned that continuing the UK’s “overly cautious approach” towards international travel will harm the economic recovery from the virus crisis and put half a million jobs at risk.He claimed the trial shows airlines would ensure an easing of the amber rules is “implemented smoothly at pace”.Heathrow boss John Holland-Kaye said: “The vaccine has been a miracle of science, and these trials have shown that we can allow fully vaccinated passengers from the EU and US to visit the UK without quarantine. There is now no reason to delay with rolling out the solution from July 31.” More

Britain’s most senior police officers were not consulted about Boris Johnson’s new plan to “beat crime” – or even aware it was being drawn up, The Independent can reveal.The measures, which the prime minister unveiled on Tuesday, include electronic tags on burglars, longer sentences for some crimes, and an extension of controversial blanket stop-and-search powers.But police bodies and victims’ advocates say they were not involved in the formulation of the “beating crime plan”, and were only sent the full details on Tuesday – a day after it had been distributed to members of the media.The 50-page document is believed to have been written by central government in a matter of days, and contains some measures that had not been requested by criminal justice agencies or experts.Anger is also growing among rank-and-file police officers, who lashed out at government “gimmicks” days after a vote of no confidence in the home secretary, Priti Patel, over a pay freeze.Martin Hewitt, chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), which represents the country’s most senior officers, said on Tuesday: “We received the plan today and will now be reviewing it carefully to understand how we deliver it operationally.”He said it appeared to contain a mix of issues where police had previously engaged with the government and “some new ideas”. Neither the NPCC, the Police Federation, the Police Superintendents’ Association nor the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners were formally consulted on the plan.Police chiefs were first informed of its existence, but not its full contents, in a briefing with the policing minister Kit Malthouse on Monday evening.The shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, told The Independent: “This just goes to show how out of touch, arrogant and dismissive of policing this Conservative government are. Little wonder that the plan itself is paper-thin and contains nothing new.“To not even consult officers on a plan for policing is ridiculous – perhaps they were worried about picking up the phone after the insulting zero per cent pay award offered this week.”Boris Johnson says stop and search policy is ‘kind and loving’In a letter delivered by hand to Downing Street on Tuesday afternoon, the Police Federation said its 130,000 members were “sick of gimmicks and government contempt for police”.“Just this weekend, we found out through a Sunday newspaper column about a new so-called beating crime plan,” said the letter to the prime minister.“We don’t need old ideas presented as new. We need genuine investment for the whole of the criminal justice system and genuine consultation over new ideas. Without that, this is just another ill-thought-out initiative.”Senior officers said many measures in the plan, including making the contact details of neighbourhood police officers available, were already in place, and money pledged for violence reduction units had already been spent.The £31m expansion of a project to reduce offending driven by drug addiction had been requested by senior police officers, but a controversial expansion of stop-and-search powers was not. When asked why a consultation had not taken place, the Home Office claimed it had been “talking to” the NPCC, senior officers and the National Crime Agency about the plan since late May.The government’s plan will relax the conditions needed for police to stop people without suspicion – a practice that critics say is ineffective and racially disproportionate – although the results of a 2019 pilot of the changes have never been published.Senior police officers, including the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick, have been vocal in their support of “intelligence-led” stop and search, but the section 60 powers being expanded allow anyone in a designated area to be searched if there are fears of violence.The plan also promises “league tables” for the time that local forces take to answer 101 and 999 calls, but critics have questioned how useful the measure would be in judging the quality of police responses.In a foreword to the plan, Ms Patel and the justice secretary, Robert Buckland, hailed it as the government’s “blueprint for cutting crime, increasing confidence in the criminal justice system as a whole and putting victims first”.However, victims’ advocates said they had not been consulted ahead of the document’s publication. Claire Waxman, the victims’ commissioner for London, said the proposals showed a “disappointing lack of commitment to victims” and would not ensure they receive justice.“Despite referencing victims over 100 times throughout this plan, there is very little of substance that will actually lead to an improved journey through the justice system,” she said.“How can we plan to send a higher volume of people through the system when the length of time for investigations, charging decisions and court dates are at an all-time high?”Downing Street did not answer The Independent’s questions on allegations that the plan was drawn up in a matter of days without consultation with police, but insisted it contained new measures and a “fresh commitment to the country, as we build back from the pandemic, to have less crime, fewer victims and a safer society”.The Home Office said: “Working hand in hand with the police has been a cornerstone of this government’s plans to deliver less crime, fewer victims and a safer society. Over the past two years, we have been working with the police to tackle homicide, serious violence, and neighbourhood crime.” More

It is “disappointing” that the US has kept in place a Covid-related travel ban with the UK, a government minister has said.Kit Malthouse, the policing minister and MP for North West Hampshire, said he wanted to see international travel return “as soon as possible”.On Monday the Biden administration announced it will maintain restrictions on a range of countries, including the EU and China, for the foreseeable future.Both the US and the UK have a high number of Covid-positive cases caused by the Delta variant, although new infections in the UK appear to be decreasing.“Given where we are today … with the Delta variant, we will maintain existing travel restrictions at this point,” White House spokesperson Jen Psaki told a press conference.”Driven by the Delta variant, cases are rising here at home, particularly among those who are unvaccinated and appear likely continue to increase in the weeks ahead.”Under current rules, British nationals are not allowed to enter the US if they have been in the UK and a number of other countries in the previous 14 days.The UK has the US on its “amber list” of countries and travel between the two countries has been frozen since March last year.Responding to the US move to keep restrictions in place, Mr Malthouse said British citizens will have to continue dealing with uncertainty around travel until the pandemic has subsided.He told Sky News: “Obviously that is for them to assess and we are assessing the likelihood of variants coming in from other countries as well. So, it doesn’t surprise me that they are doing similar. It is obviously disappointing.”He added: “We want to get back to international travel as soon as possible. I have got lots of family overseas who I would love to go and visit, particularly in Canada.”I am afraid that the tail-end of this virus, and let’s hope it is the tail-end, we are still coping with some of that uncertainty across the world and people will have to bear that in mind as they decide their travel plans or otherwise.”The US decision came despite intense lobbying efforts from the travel and tourism industries to salvage summer travel for Europeans and others covered by the restrictions.The extraordinary US travel restrictions were first imposed on China in January 2020 to address the spread of COVID-19 and other countries have been added since then – most recently India in early May.New Covid cases continue to rise in the US and Dr Anthony Fauci, who has led the country’s response to the virus, said earlier this week that things are “going in the wrong direction”.Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said the seven-day average of new cases in the US was up 53 per cent on the previous week. The more transmissible Delta variant, first detected in India, now comprises more than 80 per cent of new cases nationwide, the CDC said.Figures show there were 56,635 new cases reported nationwide on 26 July, up from 51,939 in the previous 24 hours.Positive cases have been steadily rising since the beginning of the month. More

Sending unsolicited explicit images to another device without the person’s consent should be made a specific sexual offence as part of a major shake-up of rules governing online abusive behaviour, according to the body responsible for reviewing legislation.The Law Commission has recommended that the Sexual Offences Act be amended to include cyberflashing – when someone sends an unsolicited sexual photo, or “d*** pic”, through file-sharing functions such as Apple’s AirDrop.There is currently no specific offence of cyberflashing, although the behaviour can be considered within the offences of harassment or public nuisance.“Pile-on” harassment over the internet, when more than one person sends harassing communications to a victim, should also be criminalised as part of the changes to existing laws, which the body said were “ineffective” at preventing “genuinely harmful behaviour”.Its recommendations include adapting the laws relating to encouraging or glorifying self-harm, and raising the threshold for “false communications” offences, to target those who deliberately spread theories about medical treatments which are known not to be true.A new law should also be considered which would criminalise the deliberate sending of flashing images to people with epilepsy with the intention of triggering seizures, the Law Commission said. Professor Penney Lewis, the organisation’s criminal law commissioner, said: “Online abuse can cause untold harm to those targeted and change is needed to ensure we are protecting victims from abuse such as cyberflashing and pile-on harassment.“At the same time, our reforms would better protect freedom of expression by narrowing the reach of the criminal law so it only criminalises the most harmful behaviour.”Caroline Dinenage, the digital and culture minister, said: ”We are putting new legal responsibilities on social media companies to protect the British public. But we have to be confident we can hold the individuals using these sites to threaten, abuse and spread hate accountable too.“I thank the Law Commission for its detailed recommendations which we will carefully consider as we update our laws for the digital age, protecting freedom of speech while making sure what is unacceptable offline is unacceptable online.” The first case of cyberflashing to be investigated by police came in 2015 after a commuter received two pictures of an unknown man’s penis on her phone via Airdrop as she commuted to work.Since then, reports of cyberflashing have increased year on year, with data suggesting the numbers have risen since Covid due to the digital nature of life in lockdown.A report by the University of Leicester found a third of women had complained of being cyberflashed, while a UN Women report said: “These incidents are likely to be rising as women and girls spend more time online during the pandemic.”A separate survey carried out by Glitch, an internet safety charity, last summer found 17 per cent of women or non-binary people had been sent unsolicited pornography.In March, the government announced it was seeking help from the public on how to tackle violence against women and girls in response to an outpouring of anger following the Sarah Everard case. The Home Office reopened a public consultation that it said would help shape an update of its strategy on tackling violence against women and girls after the home secretary, Priti Patel, acknowledged behaviour such as cyberflashing and upskirting had become a more pervasive problem in the last decade while the law had not been changed to reflect this. Additional reporting by PA More

Secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) papers appearing at a Kent bus stop is down to an individual’s mistake, an investigation has found.The investigation found no evidence of espionage and concluded that there has been no compromise of the papers, which included documents relating to the likely reaction of the Russians to the passage of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Defender through waters off the coast of Crimea and to the UK military presence in Afghanistan.The papers were found by a member of the public and handed to the BBC. The broadcasting company said that 50 pages of classified information had been found in a “soggy heap” behind the bus stop.MPs had been told that the leak was the result of a mistake by one individual who reported the loss to the MoD.Defence Secretary Ben Wallace told MPs: “We are confident that we have recovered all the secret papers.”He added: “The investigation has found no evidence of espionage and has concluded there has been no compromise of the papers by our adversaries.”The individual has since been removed from “sensitive work” and has already had their security clearance suspended pending a full review.Mr Wallace said: “The investigation has independently confirmed the circumstances of the loss, including the management of the papers within the department, the location at which the papers were lost and the manner in which that occurred.“These are consistent with the events self-reported by the individual.”He added: “For security reasons, the department will be making no further comment on the nature of the loss or on the identity of the individual.”Additional reporting by Press Association More

The government is expected to announce an effective amnesty for those who committed crimes during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in a bid to deal with the region’s bloody past.A statute of limitations ending all prosecutions related to the Troubles before 1998 is said to be one of the elements of a plan to be unveiled by Brandon Lewis on Wednesday afternoon.The move has been condemned by victims groups and political opponents, who warn that the “obscene” legislation which the government hopes will be voted on in the autumn would give a green light to future terrorist groups.A government source said the package of measures “will support Northern Ireland to move beyond an adversarial cycle that doesn’t deliver information or reconciliation for victims and survivors nor end the cycle of investigations against our veterans” but rejected claims it would effectively amount to an amnesty.The blanket approach was necessary since lawyers advising the secretary of state have warned that protecting one side from prosecution could be illegal and that clemency should be extended to those on both sides of the fighting, The Sun reported.More than 3,500 people died during the conflict, which stretched from the early 1970s to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in 1998, while tens of thousands more were left injured.Julie Hambleton, whose older sister Maxine was among 21 people killed in the 1974 blasts in Birmingham, has written to Boris Johnson on behalf of the Justice 4 The 21 campaign group to decry the planned legislation.“If one of your loved ones was blown up beyond recognition, where you were only able to identify your son or daughter by their fingernails because their face had been burned so severely from the blast and little of their remains were left intact, would you be so quick to agree to such obscene legislation being implemented?” Ms Hambleton asked.“You would do everything in your power to find the murderers and bring them to justice, which is exactly what we campaign for every day.”She added: “How is this considered to be a deterrent for any future terrorist organisations?”What your government is proposing is that no matter what city terrorists decide to wreak death and destruction upon, do not worry because the British government will let you walk away free without any fear of retribution of prosecution.“Earlier this month, Northern Ireland’s Public Prosecution Service (PPS) announced their intention to withdraw proceedings against two former soldiers – Soldier F for the murder of two men during Bloody Sunday in 1972 and Soldier B for the murder of 15-year-old Daniel Hegarty six months later.It followed a review of the cases by the PPS in light of a recent court ruling that caused the collapse of another Troubles murder trial involving two military veterans.The Crown cases against Soldier F and Soldier B hinged on evidence of a similar nature to that ruled inadmissible in April’s trial of Soldier A and Soldier C for the 1972 murder of Official IRA leader Joe McCann in Belfast.A legal challenge to the decision to withdraw proceedings against Soldier F is ongoing.In 2014, the Stormont House Agreement proposed a Historical Investigations Unit to examine unsolved murders during the Troubles and an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval for families to learn more about the fate of their loved ones.None of the proposals were implemented.Additional reporting by PA More

Customers may require Covid-19 certificates or vaccine passports to enter entertainment venues in England from autumn, according to reports.The government is said to be considering making the documentation mandatory in venues such as pubs, bars and restaurants, where it would be used by customers to prove they have had either both doses of a coronavirus vaccine or a negative test the day before in a bid to tackle the fourth wave of the coronavirus.It is hoped the move will increase vaccine uptake among the younger demographics, The Times newspaper has reported.Currently, 86.8 per cent of people in England have had a first dose of a coronavirus vaccine and 65.5 per cent have had both, according to official figures from Public Health England.However, vaccine uptake has slowed, recent figures show, with first doses halving in two weeks. The average number of doses given out per day is at the lowest since April.The prime minister, Boris Johnson, this week announced that the majority of social distancing measures will be lifted on 19 July, including enforced mask-wearing, despite a rise in cases related to the Delta variant.Capacity restrictions on pubs, restaurants and other public events are also expected to be lifted.The number of coronavirus infections linked to the dominant Delta variant have increased by 54,268 in the past week, a rise of 34 per cent, Public Health England has said. The variant now counts for 99 per cent of all cases that have been genetically sequenced.In total 216,249 confirmed and probable cases of the Covid-19 Delta variant have been identified in the UK, up from 161,981 cases in the previous week.Hospital admissions for 9 July are at 509, totalling 2,672 in the last week – a jump of 55.9 per cent.Britons are growing wary of the relaxation of rules: a poll by Ipsos MORI for The Economist on Thursday shows that nearly 70 per cent want to see face masks made compulsory in shops and on public transport for a certain period after 19 July, when the government plans to lift all restrictions in England and 64 per cent would like them to remain in place until coronavirus is controlled worldwide. More

The Home Office spent more than £370,000 to settle a top civil servant’s tribunal claim after he quit amid allegations of Priti Patel’s bullying, departmental accounts confirm.Former permanent secretary Sir Philip Rutnam accepted the six-figure sum earlier this year after launching legal action against the Home Secretary.He dramatically resigned in February last year, accusing Ms Patel of a “vicious and orchestrated” briefing campaign against him, claiming constructive dismissal and accusing her of bullying subordinates. An employment tribunal was due to hear his case in September.The Home Office’s annual report and accounts for 2020-21 confirm he received a payout of £340,000 plus legal costs – taking the spend to at least £370,000 plus VAT of an anticipated £6,000.Although the figures were previously reported, neither Sir Philip’s representatives nor the department would publicly disclose the amount at the time.The document, published on Thursday, said: “Sir Philip Rutnam resigned from his post as Permanent Secretary of the Home Office on 29 February 2020 and subsequently began legal proceedings against the department.“On 4 March 2021, the Home Office and Sir Philip signed an agreement to settle these proceedings. As part of this settlement, the Home Office made a special payment of £340,000. A contribution to his legal costs was also made of £30,000 plus VAT.”By Press Association More