News

News 5^th August
The huge blast in Beirut is said to come from a warehouse.  There were worries about this warehouse for many years as it had been storing some material taken from a ship.  One report says it was ammonium nitrate which is stored there and that is what exploded after a fire.  Ammonium nitrate is used on farms to help the soil but it is also used in explosives for mines.  It is very dangerous.  There were also fireworks in the same area.  The blast was enormous and flattened all the buildings nearby.  Windows were shattered up to 5 miles away and cars were thrown across the motorway.  They say they heard the blast in Cyprus which is nearly 120 miles away. They say 78 people are dead and more than 4 thousand are injured. 
Labour leader, Keith Starmer, says the Government is not doing enough to prevent the virus coming back in the Autumn and Winter.  The tracking and tracing system is not working and is only reaching about half of the people it should.  When the Government system sends information to the local areas, it does not tell the occupation or workplace of the person and how many people in that area have tested negative (do not have the virus).  The Government denies this and Starmer says this is a big problem as they are not admitting the failure and do not produce new plans.  Local Councils are now setting up their own systems because the Government system does not work.
Last week there were reports about Russian hackers who were targeting the UK elections.  We have now found out that the Conservative Secretary of State for International Trade, Liam Fox, was using a personal email account for secret documents.  This was easy for hackers to have access and a lot of key business information was stolen during the election.  He was supposed to be using only the secure email system in the Civil Service and never his own outside account.  This looks bad.