Britain is to call for a third of the world's oceans to be protected from damaging activity by 2030. The ambitious target, announced at the United Nations General Assembly in New York, would ensure the marine environment has a "buffer" against the effects of climate change, plastic pollution and human exploitation. It's a significant victory for Sky Ocean Rescue which has campaigned for tighter marine protection.

A 13-year-old-boy in Bradford drove a stolen car at speeds of up to 100mph as he attempted to give police the slip, an officer said.The boy was behind the wheel of a Volkswagen Golf which was taken during a burglary in Shipley, near Bradford, Pc Benjamin Pearson said.

A teenager has been shot dead in the second youth murder in London within the space of 24 hours. Police were called to reports of a shooting in Walthamstow shortly after 11pm on Saturday night. The 19-year-old was driven by friends to a northeast London hospital, where he was pronounced dead around half an hour later. Officers believe they know his identity, but await formal identification and confirmation that next of kin have been informed.

Jeremy Corbyn has said he will back giving the British people a final say on Brexit in a new referendum if party members vote for it at Labour’s conference this week. The Labour leader said that while he had not called for it up to now he had been elected to “empower” members and would not “walk away from it” if they demanded a new vote.

A 13-year-old boy with a severe dairy allergy died after a schoolmate allegedly chased him with cheese and threw it down his T-shirt, an inquest has heard. Karanbir Cheema, from Greenford, west London, suffered a “serious allergic reaction” and was left “gasping for air”, ITV News reports. After going into anaphylactic shock, he fell unconscious and was rushed to hospital by paramedics, where he died ten days later.

Russian diplomats held secret talks in London last year with people close to Julian Assange to assess whether they could help him flee the UK, the Guardian has learned. A tentative plan was devised that would have seen the WikiLeaks founder smuggled out of Ecuador’s London embassy in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to another country. One ultimate destination, multiple sources have said, was Russia, where Assange would not be at risk of extradition to the US. The plan was abandoned after it was deemed too risky.

Emmanuel Macron has branded the leaders of the campaign for Brexit “liars”, in an extraordinary attack at the close of the Salzburg summit. The Leave victory was “pushed by those who predicted easy solutions,” the French president said, adding: “Those people are liars. They left the next day so they didn’t have to manage it.”

Documents uncovered by investigative journalists have provided the first public evidence that the suspects in the Salisbury novichok attack have formal ties to the Russian ministry of defence. British authorities have charged Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov with conspiracy to murder Sergei and Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey. The former Russian spy and his daughter were found collapsed on 4 March; the police officer fell ill after trying to help them. Prosecutors say Petrov and Boshirov work for Russian military intelligence, which President Vladimir Putin has denied.

The two men identified as suspects in the Salisbury nerve agent attack have appeared on Russia’s state-funded TV station RT, claiming they visited the “wonderful” English city as tourists to see its cathedral. In their first interview since being charged in the UK with attempted murder, the men said they may have approached Sergei Skripal’s house by accident on 4 March, but denied that they were carrying any poison or that they had committed any crime.

Launching a People's Manifesto for Wildlife, broadcaster Chris Packham said the UK is witnessing a "mass extinction in our own backyards" due to a lack of regard for the environment - such as building roads and houses through natural habitats and using pesticides in farming. A staggering 38,000 mountain hares have been killed on hunting estates across Scotland, and the manifesto warns the animals could become extinct in our lifetime.

A boy was left with serious head injuries after riding a playground roundabout as it was spun by the back wheel of a moped, in imitation of a popular YouTube video stunt. Tyler Brooke, 11, fainted as the centrifugal force generated by the spinning roundabout forced fluid and blood into his head, leaving his face bruised and his eyes bulging and bloodshot.

Electric and other ultra-low emission cars, vans and taxis could be given special green number plates to boost awareness and increase the use of environmentally “clean” driving. Green plates are already used in Norway, Canada and China on green vehicles including electric and hydrogen cars, making them both distinct and visible to other road others.

And meet the determined enthusiast bringing them back to life.

London mayor Sadiq Khan has called for another referendum on Britain’s European Union membership, adding his backing to an idea known as a “People’s Vote.” Britain is due to leave the European Union on March 29. But with Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plans still not accepted, some lawmakers, as well as union and business leaders are increasingly arguing for people to have a final say on any deal struck with Brussels.

A majority of Britons would now consider voting for a new centre-ground political movement amid soaring dismay at the state of the main parties, an exclusive poll has revealed. The exclusive research for The Independent found the number of those ready to back a new party has leapt in just four months after a summer in which Labour’s antisemitism crisis raged and the Tories tore themselves apart over Brexit.

UK news organisations have cited tweets from Russian trolls more than 100 times, a Guardian investigation has found, in stories about topics including Donald Trump, Donald Glover and Lena Dunham. In June the US Congress released details of 1,000 accounts that Twitter believes were run by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a state-backed misinformation operation based in St Petersburg, adding to more than 2,000 accounts the company had already identified.

Two thirds of girls and women aged 14 to 21 have been sexually harassed in public, according to a survey. The poll by charity Plan International UK examined the exposure of young females to conduct including catcalling, groping and upskirting. More than 1,000 girls and women were asked about their experiences in public settings, for instance when they are in the street, on transport, travelling to school or work, or in a park, bar or club.

The unusually hot summer of 2018 has proved challenging for farmers across the UK. Among other things, the scorching weather and lack of rain has damaged crops, and the grass used to feed farm animals too. Unfortunately the unusual may become more usual as the effects of climate change are felt more frequently across the world. The high ambient temperatures and humidity seen this year, as well as extreme weather conditions such as flooding, are a significant challenge to the future of farming.

Almost 4 million children in the UK live in households that would struggle to afford to buy enough fruit, vegetables, fish and other healthy foods to meet the official nutrition guidelines, a groundbreaking food poverty study reveals. The research, by the Food Foundation thinktank, says the diminishing ability of low-income families to pay for healthy food is consigning the least well-off to a greater risk of diet related illness, such as obesity and diabetes, as well as widening health inequalities across society.

Britain is one of the most heavily surveilled nations on Earth. And then there are the 'super recognisers'. This is how they found their men.

The number of deaths in England and Wales due to the synthetic opioid fentanyl rose by 29% in 2017, Office for National Statistics data shows. Forms of the drug - used to treat cancer pain - are often imported illegally from Chinese laboratories and sold to users via the dark web. Deaths from psychoactive substances like spice or mephedrone halved. Drug policy campaigners called on the government to fund drug treatment and stop criminalising users.

A giant balloon of a bikini-clad Sadiq Khan has been flown in London as part of a campaign to oust the capital's mayor. Campaigners raised £58,182 for the 29ft-long blimp, which was launched in Parliament Square earlier. Mr Khan said people were "welcome" to look at the balloon but he did not think the swimwear suited him.

A former chief of the UK’s naval staff has said the nation does not have enough ships to patrol its waters, warning of “disastrous” consequences after Brexit. Lord West of Spithead , former first sea lord, said the “insufficient” number of ships had been exposed by recent clashes between British and French fishermen over scallops. Rocks and smoke bombs were hurled at British fishing vessels in the English Channel during skirmishes on Tuesday. French mariners are angry about a domestic ban preventing them from harvesting the scallop-rich region while British boats have free rein to fish.

A small rise in the minimum wage in Britain’s main city regions would encourage employers to deploy workers more productively and help boost local economies by more than £1bn, says a thinktank. According to the study, by the Smith Institute, employers need the spur of a higher minimum wage to shake them out of a spiral of low productivity and low growth that depresses company revenues and has trapped about 2 million workers on the current minimum wage of £7.38 an hour...

New HIV diagnoses in the UK have fallen to their lowest level since 2000, figures show. There was a 17% drop in the number of new diagnoses last year, declining from 5,280 in 2016 to 4,363 in 2017, Public Health England (PHE) said. Numbers have reduced by more than a quarter (28%) since 2015 and are at their lowest since 2000, when there were 3,989.

More than a fifth of meat sample tests in 2017 found DNA from animals not on the labelling, the BBC has learned. Out of 665 results from England, Wales and Northern Ireland collected by the Food Standards Agency, 145 were partly or wholly made up of unspecified meat. The FSA said the levels were consistent with "deliberate inclusion" - but added testing had targeted those businesses suspected of "compliance issues".

While Britain braces for its exit from the EU in March 2019, HSBC announced on Monday that seven of its Europe-focused offices will move from London to Paris early next year.

Weeks of dry, hot weather have exposed the outlines of several archeological sites across the U.K., dating back thousands of years. Drier soil conditions have allowed archeologists to capture aerial photographs of previously hidden features from ancient times, to reveal farms, burial monuments, ditches, walls and vegetation patterns, or cropmarks. The patterns of these structures can be seen from the air as the vegetation dies back in dry conditions.

There is high public support for using the tax system to reduce waste from single-use plastics, the Treasury says. A consultation on how taxes could tackle the rising problem and promote recycling attracted 162,000 responses. Treasury Minister Robert Jenrick said the government was looking at "smart, intelligent incentives" to get plastic producers to take responsibility.

The UK will investigate allegations that British World War Two wrecks in Asia have been targeted by scavengers, the defence secretary says. Gavin Williamson said he was "very concerned" to hear claims that four shipwrecks off the Malaysian and Indonesian coasts had been looted. The Mail on Sunday said HMS Tien Kwang, HMS Kuala, HMS Banka and SS Loch Ranza were targeted for their metal.

Couples raising two children while working full-time on the minimum wage are falling £49 a week short of being able to provide their family with a basic, no-frills lifestyle, research has found. The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) called for an increase in the government’s “national living wage” to allow families to have an acceptable standard of living. Its Cost of a Child report, published on Monday, showed an 11% weekly shortfall for a couple raising two children at the point they are aged three and seven.

A refreshingly positive thank you note was left on an ambulance this week – and people are seriously loving it. The note, which was left on a vehicle in Wales, had £5 attached and saw a homeowner praising paramedics instead of attacking them. Twitter user Dewi Lloyd tweeted the note, saying: ‘Heart warming note left on one of the Flintshire Ambulances #Welshambulance’...

"We now have two large camps, pitted against each other, who have starkly different conceptions of what their societies are and where they need to head. In a very real sense, these two camps no longer speak the same language. There has been a rupture, and they can find no common ground." By Johnathan Cook.

A charity working to stop illegal evictions has urged the Metropolitan police to give its officers better training after they failed to arrest a landlord who allegedly forced his way into a family’s home with a crowbar and tried to drag them down the stairs. Roz Spencer of Safer Renting, an advice service for tenants backed by four London boroughs, said people were being evicted illegally every week in most British towns and cities, but the police nearly always failed to treat it as a crime.

Margaret Thatcher’s favourite free-market thinktank has called on the government to legalise cannabis, arguing that the move could generate more than £1bn in extra tax revenues every year, as well as savings in health and other public services. Britain’s black market in cannabis is worth £2.6bn annually, with 255 tonnes sold to more than 3 million people last year, according to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).