
UK sanctions Russian spies for 'malicious' cyber activity
The latest EU measures, announced on Friday, included a ban on transactions related to the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline and lowering a cap on the price at which Russian oil can be bought.The UK joined the move to lower the price cap, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves saying Europe was "turning the screw on the Kremlin's war chest".They come as European allies hope to ratchet up the pressure on Russia to bring the three-year-long war in Ukraine to an end.But former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, a close ally of Putin, said his nation's economy would survive the sanctions and that Moscow will continue striking Ukraine "with increasing force".The EU sanctions are the 18th round of such measures since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in 2022.The UK Foreign Office said one of the intelligence units it had sanctioned - Unit 26165 - had been involved in targeting Mariupol, including a strike that hit the Ukrainian city's theatre, killing hundreds of civilians.It said it had also placed measures on intelligence officers who placed spyware on the phone of Yulia Skripal, who with her father was targeted by suspected Russian agents in Salisbury with the nerve agent Novichok.The Foreign Office added that Russia had targeted UK media organisations, telecoms companies, energy infrastructure and political institutions."The Kremlin should be in no doubt: we see what they are trying to do in the shadows and we won't tolerate it," Lammy said in a statement. "Putin's hybrid threats and aggression will never break our resolve."People or entities that are sanctioned can face a range of restrictions, including having financial assets frozen.European leaders are also looking for the US to place further pressure on Russia.Earlier this week, Donald Trump threatened Russia with severe tariffs if a peace deal was not reached within 50 days. The US president has become increasingly impatient with Putin. The Foreign Office also announced sanctions on three leaders of the "African Initiative", a social media campaign it said was founded, funded and employed by Russia to conduct disinformation operations in West Africa.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Independent
21 minutes ago
- The Independent
Crystal Palace have court date set to hear on European future
Crystal Palace is challenging UEFA's decision to demote them from the Europa League to the third-tier Conference League. The demotion is due to UEFA's multi-club ownership rules, specifically concerning John Textor's controlling stake in Palace and his previous ownership of Olympique Lyonnais. A closed-door hearing at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) is scheduled for 8 August, with a ruling anticipated by 11 August. If Crystal Palace's appeal is unsuccessful, Nottingham Forest, who finished seventh in the Premier League, will take their place in the Europa League. Crystal Palace supporters have protested UEFA's decision, including a demonstration at the organisation's headquarters in Switzerland.


The Guardian
22 minutes ago
- The Guardian
My message to doctors, after five days of strikes? Work with us: if you go to war with us, you'll lose
As five days of strike action by resident doctors come to an end, the BMA has written asking me to return to the negotiating table. I've responded, with the irony of their letter being that I never left the table. We are back to where we were two weeks ago, when I sat down in good faith and offered to work intensively with them over a few weeks to negotiate a package of measures that would make a real difference in meeting the costs of doctors' training, the costs associated with being a doctor and the lack of promotion opportunities. The only difference between now and a fortnight ago is the damage that the BMA has done to the NHS through its reckless strike action. Thanks to the hard work of NHS leaders and the heroic efforts of frontline staff who stepped up, including many resident doctors who showed up for work, the disruption was not as bad as it might have been. We managed to protect more operations and procedures than in previous years, and our accident and emergency response times improved during the period of strike action. But I do not want for a moment to play down the real impact of strike action on patients. The BMA has made no bones about the fact that it wanted to do damage to the progress we are making on cutting waiting lists and waiting times, and use the suffering of patients as leverage against the government. It cannot duck the consequences of its actions now. On Saturday, I spoke to a patient whose kidney cancer surgery has been postponed by a month until the end of August. I rang him personally to apologise because, having been through kidney cancer myself, I know exactly how it feels to wait, and the impact the fear and anxiety has on our families and close friends. It was just one of countless examples of cancer care that was affected, not to mention many other operations, appointments and procedures. We are still counting the costs of strike action on patients and stretched NHS budgets – budgets that doctors are relying on to deliver real improvements to their working conditions, as well as to patient care. Doctors are not the only staff I am responsible for in the NHS. The Royal College of Nursing will shortly publish a survey of its members and, without having seen the results, I have spent enough time with our nurses to know that they have not felt valued by the previous government and they are looking to Labour to deliver meaningful change to their profession. The GMB union has made similar representations on behalf of paramedics. Unite returned a negative ballot this week. Unison, the largest trade union in the country, knows better than anyone that staff right across the NHS are looking for material improvements to their pay and conditions. Many of them will never earn as much as the lowest-paid doctor. I have committed to work with them through the NHS staff council to make sure that we drive real change for their members, too. None of them have had a pay rise of 28.9%. Only resident doctors can claim to have received the highest pay rise in the public sector two years in a row. No wonder other NHS staff have looked on aghast at the action of the BMA. The BMA's demands, and the speed with which it launched a strike – and a five-day strike at that – have left many other NHS staff, most of them paid far less than doctors, dismayed and appalled. The BMA is now adding jobs to its pay dispute, presumably because its members agree that picking a fight on pay after a 28.9% pay increase is unprecedented and unreasonable, and they are more worried about whether they have jobs to go into. They are right to be concerned, but working with the BMA to address doctor unemployment and career bottlenecks are among a number of things we are able and willing to do to improve the lives of doctors. All I ask of the BMA is two things. The first is to drop this unnecessary and unreasonable rush to strike action. It harms doctors, it harms patients and it is fundamentally self-defeating, because it leaves the NHS with less money to address the issues that doctors care about. The second is to recognise that this government has a responsibility to all NHS staff and, above all, to patients. We can't fix everything for everyone everywhere all at once. Labour didn't break the NHS, nor did the doctors. Patients are looking to us to work together, as a team, to get their NHS back on its feet and build an NHS fit for the future. The past 12 months has shown what this government and the NHS can achieve when we pull together. Waiting lists are at their lowest levels in two years and it feels like the NHS is finally moving in the right direction. It should be clear to the BMA by now that it will lose a war with this government. It's not too late for us both to win the peace. Wes Streeting is secretary of state for health and social care Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.


The Guardian
22 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Court quashes conviction of man twice found guilty of Bedfordshire murder
The court of appeal has quashed the conviction of a man who has spent 28 years in jail for a violent murder he has always claimed he was innocent of. Justin Plummer, aged 54, was convicted of the murder of 38-year-old Janice Cartwright-Gilbert in 1998, a year after she was fatally attacked at the building site of her future home near Wilden in Bedfordshire. Her body was found in a burning caravan with multiple stab wounds, a knife and scissors sticking out of her neck, having been throttled by an electrical flex. Plummer was a prolific burglar engaged in a robbing spree at the time, and had clocked up 24 convictions in the four months leading up to the murder. But none of the convictions involved violence. There was no DNA linking Plummer to the crime, no stolen items recovered, and no eyewitnesses placing him at the scene. The original conviction relied almost entirely on footwear mark evidence – an imprint on Cartwright-Gilbert's head alleged to match a size 6 Nike Air Screech trainer that Plummer wore. The case also partly hinged on the prosecution's argument that Plummer's brother, Adam, had discussed his sibling being a suspect with their mother before he had been arrested and therefore Plummer must have been guilty. The expert witness who provided the trainer evidence, David Lewin, was a dentist unqualified in footwear forensics. At the original trial, the judge said in summing up: 'It was one of the clearest marks he had ever seen. No other shoe could have caused it.' But Lewin's method (using imaging overlays) was later ruled 'neither validated nor suitable … even by late 1990s standards'. In 2021, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) referred Plummer's conviction back to the court of appeal on these grounds. In 2023, Plummer, who slept on the floor in prison to protest his innocence, had his conviction overturned. The court ruled that the expert evidence was unreliable and that the verdict was unsafe. But Plummer was never released. The appeal court's ruling was immediately challenged by the Crown Prosecution Service and Plummer was convicted again at a retrial in June 2023. This time the prosecution relied on an alleged confession made by Plummer to a now deceased former cellmate, Christopher Dunne. Dunne, who had schizophrenia, was a police informant and had not been cross-examined at the original trial. Plummer's legal team argued that the hearsay evidence was inherently flawed and unreliable. On Wednesday, in less than 10 minutes, the court of appeal quashed the 2023 conviction. The three judges ruled: 'We consider that this conviction is unsafe because the Dunne hearsay evidence should have been withdrawn from the jury even if, which we have not decided, it was properly admitted in the first place. For the reasons we have explained, the Adam Plummer evidence does not support the Dunne evidence, but rather gives rise to further serious concerns.' Plummer's solicitor, Annalisa Moscardini, said: 'Justin Plummer is finally vindicated for his 28-year fight against this murder conviction. Due to his refusal to accept his guilt for a crime he has always been clear he did not commit, he has served far longer than his minimum term of 16 years. Justin's determination and resilience has finally paid dividends and he will sleep tonight a free man, for the first time in 28 years.' His barrister, Katy Thorne KC, said: 'Permitting a dead cell confession witness in a trial on an allegation of this age was simply unfair. Prisoners have all sorts of motives to give false cell confession evidence and law reform is needed to stop such evidence being part of criminal trials. Now Justin is being released with little support from the state. The system has to be reformed to give proper support to such victims of miscarriage of justice.'