Author: staff
The founders of more than 20 U.K. tech start-ups wrote to the government last month saying the restrictions, along with long notice periods and enforced gardening leave, were and “undermin[ing] the innovation that drives economic growth”. The options set out 11 months ago ranged from a total ban on non-compete clauses to a partial ban, such as allowing non-compete clauses only for workers earning more than a set salary threshold, or limiting their length. However, two of the six people quoted above said that the government would stop short of backing a specific option at this stage. Ministers are expected…
Italy’s cybercrime police spent Thursday responding to an ongoing cyberattack targeting the website of the Foreign Ministry, known as the Farnesina. Italian news agencies reported in the evening that the attack was believed to have been carried out by the pro-Russian hacker group NoName057(16). According to initial reports, the incident appears to have been a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, in which a website is flooded with fake requests to overwhelm its systems. However, the attack was “effectively mitigated” by security systems “without causing any disruption,” Farnesina, said in a statement. The ministry said it was closely monitoring the situation in…
Published on 08/10/2026 – 22:32 GMT+2 US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln returned to San Diego on Thursday after supporting the US war against Iran. The aircraft carrier spent a record 265 consecutive days at sea amid reports of difficult conditions for its crew. US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the carrier on Wednesday to present its crew with the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest military award given to a unit. He rejected suggestions that the ship had become “a symbol of dysfunction or a symbol of low morale or a symbol of a failed mission.” The carrier attracted national…
“The food was in very poor condition and I could only drink seawater that had been filtered. I had no other choice, it was never properly clean,” recalled Fredi Seprizal, an Indonesian who endured what he describes as “modern slavery” at sea and who spoke during the debate ‘Boosting the social dimension of sustainable fisheries’, held last week in the European Parliament. Seprizal’s was one of the most striking testimonies at the meeting, which took place on 30 September and was organised by Carmen Crespo (EPP), chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on Fisheries (PECH), and Virginia Battu-Henriksson, a member…
MGCS — which involves KNDS France, KNDS Germany, Rheinmetall and Thales — has been bogged down by years of delays, industrial disputes and political tensions. POLITICO reported in June that the next-generation tank project was increasingly doomed. Mandon’s admission comes only a few months after another high-stakes Franco-German defense industrial program — the Future Combat Air System — abruptly ended. However, answering a question from a far-right National Rally lawmaker, the French general pushed back against the word “failure” to describe the MGCS’s fate. “It’s not a complete failure; it’s an important decision by Germany, but our land forces have worked together for several…
Published on 08/10/2026 – 21:48 GMT+2 Former prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has won a legal challenge over police searches of his royal residences after officers admitted the warrants were “unlawful”, a High Court judge revealed on Thursday. The court must still decide whether police can keep items seized during the searches. Both the judge and police said the investigation is ongoing. Judge Nicholas Hilliard revealed on Thursday that police had acknowledged “the search warrants were unlawful”. However, he stressed that “the fact that the search warrants were quashed does not bring an investigation to an end”, adding that Thames Valley Police…
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide remain missing in wars, as experts who met in Baku warned that political will, not technology, is the obstacle to identifying them. The figures have continued to grow, rising 70% between 2019 and 2024, according to the ICRC. In Ukraine alone, around 280,000 people are registered as missing as of September 2026, with an estimated 10,000 new cases added every month, according to the same data. Government officials, forensic experts, and diplomats met at the fourth International Conference on Missing Persons in Baku, under the Baku Dialogue on Missing Persons, to discuss how countries…
More than half of the total cost of employing an average worker in Spain goes to public authorities, according to the Juan de Mariana Institute, a liberal think tank highly critical of the government. The institute estimates the tax burden at €53.60 for every €100 in labour costs. The figure comes from a report the think tank describes as an “economic autopsy” of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s time in office, as reported by The Objective. The report, written by the institute’s head of research, Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, estimates that €21,144 of the average employee’s €39,481 annual labour cost…
Published on 08/10/2026 – 13:28 GMT+2 Canadian poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2026, “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” The 76-year-old writer is known for her hybrid style, combining poetry and prose, as well as contemporary stories with ancient myth. The Academy stated: “Almost all her literary production has centred upon the intersection between the philologist’s obsession with words and the poet’s desire for new meaning. She has herself identified the etymology of words as…
“Its purpose is really essentially to train our allied forces so that we are ready and prepared, and we ensure the safety and security of our nuclear capability,” she told reporters. Following the previous NATO exercises, Moscow sent a letter to the alliance threatening to hit allied territory and mentioning the use of its nuclear arsenal — a move that NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte publicly rebuked last week. Tensions are rising as European countries accuse Russia of sabotage and growing so-called hybrid attacks across the continent. “Our intention is to really keep things calm,” said a senior NATO official, who…