London's monthly murder rate has overtaken that of New York City for the first time, after the worrying surge of stabbings continued across the capital.

A drink-driver who hit and killed three teenage boys as they walked to a birthday party in west London, has been jailed for 13 years. Harry Rice, 17, George Wilkinson and Josh McGuinness, both 16, died instantly when Jaynesh Chudasama struck them at more than 70mph in Hayes. Chudasama had admitted three counts of causing death by dangerous driving.

Tucked behind Kensington Palace and protected by armed police at checkpoints on either end is the street known as Billionaire’s Row, the most expensive in London and perhaps the world. A private road owned by the Crown Estates, traffic is light and slow here, and a prohibition on photography is enforced by the private security guards who watch over every other house.

The anonymous letters arrived this weekend in plain white envelopes with second-class stamps, and were sent to people in at least six communities in England. Inside was a message so hateful that it sent out ripples of alarm and prompted a national counterterrorism investigation. The message said that April 3 would be “Punish a Muslim Day,” and that points would be awarded for acts of violence: 25 points for pulling off a woman’s head scarf, 500 points for murdering a Muslim and 1,000 for bombing a mosque.

Boris Johnson today suggested the UK could boycott this year's World Cup in Russia if evidence shows the Kremlin is behind the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. The foreign secretary said on Tuesday afternoon that it would be "difficult to see" how the UK could participate in the tournament as normal if Vladimir Putin's Russia was behind the poisoning of Skripal.

A London woman who survived breast cancer isn’t faring so well against city bylaw officers who fined her $2,260 for providing a service to patients that medical staff say is invaluable. For more than three years, the woman has been a regular at an outpatient clinic at St. Joseph’s Hospital, providing rides to and from the clinic to patients who aren’t allowed to drive after being sedated for procedures such as endoscopies and colonoscopies.

Duchess Catherine visited the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists as a royal patron when she ran into Professor Jacqueline Dunkley-Bent, who delivered her daughter, Princess Charlotte, and may have even assisted in the delivery of Prince George.

An 88-year-old military veteran has been praised for "extraordinary bravery" after fighting off a gang of five robbers to rescue a young woman from being mugged. John Nixon, a widower, told the Evening Standard he trained as a commando at the Achnacarry depot in the Highlands in the 1940s and fought in the Korean War.

New connected kiosks are replacing London's payphones. Every time you use them, you're allowing Google, BT and Primesight to track you through the city

UK-based ASI Data Science recently unveiled a new machine learning algorithm capable of identifying jihadist content with a staggering 94 percent accuracy. In London, reporters were given a first-hand look at the inner workings of the algorithm, though they were asked not to share the actual methodology.

Protesting students who targeted a Winston Churchill-themed cafe have inadvertently helped it become one of London's top-rated eateries. Last week a group of nine demonstrators stormed the Blighty UK cafe in Finsbury Park, north London, urging customers to boycott it for 'colonialism' and chanting 'Churchill was racist'. Their stunt has now backfired after five star reviews from supporters of cafe propelled it into the top 20 out of 1,180 cafes in the capital on TripAdvisor.

Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix’s Punk is Dead is a nostalgic, intelligent homage to the brief, hazy era of “pure” London punk. By Chris Kraus.

Council leader Claire Kober has quit. Rightwingers claim it’s a Momentum plot, but this was all about residents fighting to save their homes, says Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty.

Petrol and diesel cars are set to be banned in parts of east London under plans that could see motorists fined more than £100 for flouting the rules. Hackney and Islington councils are consulting on a scheme to ban petrol, diesel and older hybrid vehicles from entering nine streets in Hoxton and Shoreditch.

Ecuador is working on finding a way for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to leave its London embassy after five years. While the embassy stopped short of saying it wanted rid of Assange - who has infuriated Ecuador's president by criticising his political allies abroad - a veiled statement described the situation as 'untenable'. The South American country is looking for a third-party mediator to help them work out a settlement with Britain regarding Assange, the foreign minister said on Tuesday.

Accountancy firm KPMG has quit its advisor role on the Grenfell inquiry amid concerns over its appointment. Campaigners had called for KPMG to be removed, saying it failed to disclose a conflict of interest. KPMG is the auditor of three of the firms under scrutiny by the inquiry into the tower block blaze, in which 71 people died on 14 June last year.

A man died after he burst into flames on a street in Hull, England, on Wednesday, two weeks after London police issued a plea for witnesses of another similar incident. Daniel Lingwood, a resident of Hull, looked out of his window to see flames across the road, according to a local newspaper. He immediately rushed outside to help the victim, who has not been named.

Christine Keeler, the model and dancer whose liaisons with a British minister and a Soviet diplomat at the height of the Cold War shocked Britain and embroiled the government in a notorious political sex scandal, has died aged 75. Keeler's relationship with married Minister of War John Profumo, whom she met, aged 19, while swimming naked at the grand Buckinghamshire estate of his colleague William Astor, shocked socially conservative Britain in the early 1960s.

Buildings aren’t supposed to burn the way London’s Grenfell Tower did. This is what it felt like to fight a fire burning at 1,800 degrees—and to flee it. (3800 words, about 40 min)

London’s iconic red double-decker buses will soon run on a biofuel partially made from old coffee grounds. The fuel will be supplied by a demonstration project set up by Bio-bean Ltd., a London-based company that joined with Royal Dutch Shell Plc on the initiative. It will produce 6,000 liters (1,583 gallons) a year of the fuel. “It’s got a high oil content, 20 percent oil by weight in the waste coffee grounds, so it’s a really great thing to make biodiesel out of,” said Arthur Kay, founder of Bio-bean, in a phone interview.