England

LONDON (AP) — Fastly, the company hit by a major outage that caused many of the world’s top websites to go offline briefly this week, blamed the problem on a software bug that was triggered when a customer changed a setting.

The problem at Fastly meant internet users couldn’t connect to a host of popular websites early Tuesday including The New York Times, the Guardian, Twitch, Reddit and the British government’s homepage.

(Reuters) --- Britain urged the European Union on Tuesday to help find an urgent solution to trade difficulties with Northern Ireland before the end of this month, saying there was no case for the bloc to prevent the sale of chilled meat in the province.

"There's no case whatsoever for preventing chilled meat from being sold in Northern Ireland. We think an urgent solution needs to be found," a spokesman for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told reporters.

LONDON (AP) — The European Union’s chief Brexit negotiator says the bloc is ready to act “firmly and resolutely” if the U.K. fails to honor its commitments under the divorce deal that was supposed to keep trade flowing after Britain left the EU.

Maros Sefcovic’s comments, published Tuesday in the Daily Telegraph newspaper, came a day before he holds talks with his U.K. counterpart on implementing the deal.

LONDON, June 7 (Xinhua) -- The so-called "Uyghur Tribunal" is neither legal nor credible, but just another anti-China farce concocted by a few individuals with the end goal of using Xinjiang to contain China, the Chinese embassy in Britain has said.

The Chinese side is firmly opposed to it, the embassy said in a statement released on Sunday.

A four-day hearing scheduled to end on Monday is conducted by the "Uyghur Tribunal" in London and claims to gather evidence on whether the Chinese government committed "genocide" in northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

(Reuters) --- British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday called for leaders of the Group of Seven (G7) rich nations to make a commitment to vaccinate the entire world against COVID-19 by the end of 2022 when they meet in Britain next week.

Johnson will host the first in-person summit in almost two years of G7 leaders - which follows a meeting of the group's finance ministers which wrapped up earlier in the day - and said he would seek a pledge to hit the global vaccination goal. 

(Reuters) --- British health minister Matt Hancock said on Sunday it was too early to say whether the government would stick to its plan to fully lift COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in England on June 21.

Hancock said there had been a "very significant" impact from the delta variant of COVID-19 first detected in India over the last month, which is now the dominant strain in England, according to official estimates.

(Reuters) --- The European Union's ambassador to the United Kingdom said on Sunday that levels of trust between the two powers was low ahead of Brexit talks on the Northern Ireland protocol this week, but added that he was confident it would improve.

"The levels of trust are low right now," Joao Vale de Almeida told Times Radio.

"We ultimately need to re-establish a minimum level of trust that allows us to find solutions, but this being said...I remain confident that we can get there."

LONDON (AP) — The world’s richest countries signed a landmark global agreement Saturday to confront tax avoidance and make sure that giant tech companies pay their fair share, Britain’s treasury chief said.

Treasury chief Rishi Sunak said finance ministers from the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations signed the pact on the second and final day of meetings in London.

(Reuters) --- British judge Brenda Hale will step down from Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal next month when her three-year term expires, the judiciary said on Friday, a move that may deepen uncertainty over the role of foreign judges in the semi-autonomous city.

The departure of Hale, a former president of Britain's Supreme Court, comes amid international concern over the effect on the city of a national security law imposed by China's parliament a year ago.

(Reuters) --- The top European Union court dismissed on Thursday Hungary's challenge against the opening in 2018 of a disciplinary procedure against Budapest for undermining democracy in the formerly communist country.

Budapest had challenged on procedural grounds a European Parliament vote three years ago stating that Prime Minister Viktor Orban's policies were posing "a clear risk of a serious breach by Hungary of the values on which the Union is founded."