Nadhim Zahawi's position as Conservative Party chair is "untenable", Tory MPs have warned despite the government's attempts to draw a line under the furore surrounding his tax affairs. The ex-chancellor is fighting for his political life after admitting that he had paid the HMRC a settlement over a "careless" error, but failed to clear up a series of questions about the investigation first revealed by The Independent in July. Foreign secretary James Cleverly claimed his colleague had been "open" about his taxes, but evaded questions on the row – insisting that he was "not an investigative journalist" and had been too busy shopping after an overseas trip to know any more details. But former party leader Iain Duncan Smith said Mr Zahawi must share more information and "get it all out now", while other senior Tories warned it was almost impossible for the party chair to continue in his job. |
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| Thousands of members of Unison, Unite and the GMB will walk out across England and Wales on Monday |
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| National Grid puts coal power plants on standby as freezing fog hits England |
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| Yellow weather warning for fog will be in place between 12.15am and 11am on Monday |
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| Orders given to block over 50 tweets link to BBC documentary and YouTube asked to block uploads |
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Why do we look for curses and conspiracies in celebrity deaths? |
I was at a house party when I found out that Amy Winehouse had died. Somebody announced it, and someone else turned the music down low. I remember sitting and reading the news on my phone, incredulous. She was so young. It was all so tragic. But then someone tutted. "She was 27," they said, as if an explanation had just dawned on them. "She's joined the 27 Club." Oh, we all nodded in unison, as if now it all made sense. But does it? The 27 Club is just one symptom of a rather bizarre malaise we have when it comes to celebrity deaths, writes Marie-Claire Chappet. We like to affix some cosmic reasoning to them, as if Winehouse had been "chosen" to join a morbid hall of fame alongside Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain – rock stars who all died at the same, cruelly early age. As sad as it was that a woman not yet 30 had died so tragically, it was as if we were arguing that it had a silver lining of sorts – she made the cut for an elite club. At times of collective grief for a famous person, we seem to fixate on patterns like these. Think the "Rule of Three"; a quasi-supernatural configuration that claims stars always meet their makers in threes – it's believed to have started when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died together in a plane crash in 1959. The "pattern" has borne out many times since. In 2016, for instance, we lost George Michael, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds within days of each other. |
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"In the face of climate and nature emergencies that require us to take greater care of the environment, we simply cannot allow such unsanctioned destruction to continue." |
– Tom Fyans, interim chief executive of CPRE (the Council for the Protection of Rural England), as developers have been accused of underhand tactics in clearing wildlife habitats from sites before planning applications are submitted or granted. Read more here |
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