The members of the Rooney family, who were based on Traveller sites in Lincoln, targeted vulnerable people, including some with alcohol or drug addiction, and deliberately looked for potential captives on the streets, Nottingham crown court heard.

The impact of the forced labour on the mental and physical health of the victims had been severe, prosecutors said, with some being malnourished, subjected to beatings and threatened. One of the victims was found to have been working for the family for 26 years. The Rooneys lured in their captives with offers of work and accommodation but once they accepted they were allocated dilapidated caravans mostly with no heating, water or toilet facilities, prosecutors said. Some victims reported having to use rudimentary toilets in the woods nearby. The convictions, the result of four trials, the details of which can now be reported after restrictions were lifted by a judge, have been revealed a day after the National Crime Agency (NCA) said modern slavery and human trafficking was far more prevalent than previously thought, with potentially tens of thousands of victims in the UK. The 11 gang members, convicted of fraud and slavery charges, used the money they made from their workers to pay for holidays to Barbados, cosmetic surgery and coaching at a Manchester United football school.(theguardian)…[+]

An Egyptian official says that a train collision in the coastal city of Alexandria has killed 25 people and injured 65 others. The head of the ambulance services in the city’s western sector, Dr Mohamed Abu Homs, said the collision took place in the western suburb of Khorshid on Friday. There was no immediate information on what had caused the collision. The trains collided head-on; one train was coming from Cairo and the other was coming from the city of Port Said, at the Suez Canal. Abu Homs said he feared the death toll and the number of injured could rise further.(theguardian)…[+]

French police are waiting to interview the man suspected of ploughing a car into a group of soldiers as he recovers from being shot during his arrest.

The suspect has been named as Hamou Bachir Benlatreche, a 36-year-old Algerian national, legally resident in France and unknown to the security services. He is in a serious condition in hospital after he was shot while being apprehended on a motorway in northern France. Benlatreche was driving the rented black BMW car used in the attack in Levallois-Perret, on the outskirts of Paris.

Detectives, who have linked the car but not the driver to the incident that left three soldiers seriously injured, have been searching his home in a north-west suburb of the French capital to establish a possible motive for the attack. A police source told Le Figaro the suspect had a stable and legitimate job and appeared to be “perfectly unknown”. “He doesn’t appear to have been in any Islamist shadows,” a source told the paper. A police officer told Agence France-Presse the suspect, who was shot five times after ramming a police vehicle trying to force him to stop, was still in hospital in Lille and not able to be questioned as yet.(theguardian)…[+]

At least 55 people are feared to have drowned off the coast of Yemen after being forced from a migrant boat by smugglers in the second such incident in two days, the UN migration agency has said.

Five bodies were recovered during an International Organisation for Migration (IOM) beach patrol in Shabwa province, and about 50 more people were missing.

On Wednesday the IOM said 51 people had been “deliberately drowned” in a similar incident. Survivors told the IOM that the smuggler pushed about 120 people into the sea after he thought he had seen some “authority-type” figures off the Yemeni coast. The passengers’ average age was about 16, the IOM said. “The utter disregard for human life by these smugglers, and all human smugglers worldwide, is nothing less than immoral,” said William Lacy Swing, director general of the IOM. “What is a teenager’s life worth? On this route to the Gulf countries, it can be as little as $100.”

Yemen is in the midst of a protracted civil war and an outbreak of cholera, but migrants and refugees continue to arrive in their thousands, hoping to pass through and reach wealthy Middle East countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE.(theguardian)…[+]

About 700,000 eggs from Dutch farms implicated in a contamination scare have been distributed to Britain and some supermarket products have been withdrawn, the Food Standards Agency has said. The FSA said investigations into the fipronil incident in Europe suggested it was “very unlikely” that the eggs posed a risk to public health, but the number of contaminated eggs estimated to have reached the UK is far higher than the 21,000 first estimated. Products withdrawn include salads from Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Asda plus sandwiches from Waitrose and Morrisons.

The FSA added that some of the products made from these eggs will have had a short shelf life and will have already been consumed, but some were still within the expiry date and were being withdrawn by the businesses involved.

The FSA said in a statement: “The decision to withdraw these products is not due to food safety concerns, but is based on the fact that fipronil is not authorised for use in food producing animals. The Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland are committed to ensuring that food is safe, and that UK consumers have food they can trust. “We are reminding food businesses of their legal responsibilities which include informing the FSA or FSS and relevant local authorities immediately if they have any reason to believe that a food which they have imported, produced, processed, or distributed does not comply with food safety requirements.”

A Sainsbury’s spokesperson said: “The safety of our products is our priority. Our supplier has made us aware that two salad bowls, which contain egg, may include very small traces of fipronil. The FSA has advised that this is unlikely to pose a health risk, but we’re withdrawing these products from sale on a temporary basis as a precautionary measure. We’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.”(theguardian)…[+]

Two US congressional staffers who travelled to London in July and tried to contact former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele were sent by a longstanding aide to Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House intelligence committee and a close ally of the White House. The trip has brought back to the surface a continuing struggle for control of the committee’s investigation into Moscow’s role in the 2016 US election. The reliability of a dossier compiled by Steele, containing explosive allegations of extensive secret collusion between Trump and the Kremlin, is a key part of that investigation.

The two staffers turned up unannounced at Steele’s lawyers’ offices while the former MI6 officer was in the building, according to a report by Politico on Friday. But the committee’s leading Democrat, Adam Schiff, said on Sunday neither he nor his Republican counterpart had been informed about the staffers’ London trip.

A congressional official insisted, however, that the staffers were in London on official committee business. He said they had been told to make contact with Steele’s lawyers, rather than Steele himself.(theguardian)…[+]

The French president’s wife, Brigitte Macron, will not be given an official “first lady” title or her own budget, the French government has said following a petition against a proposed change to her status. A “transparency charter” will be published in the next few days to clarify the position of Emmanuel Macron’s wife, but presidential aides insist her role will be strictly public and not political.

The Élysée has made no official announcement, but officials were forced to react after the petition opposed to the president’s spouse having an official title, status and budget was signed by more than 275,000 people in two weeks. During his election campaign, Macron promised to “clarify” his wife’s role to “end the hypocrisy” over the situation. One of Macron’s first actions after taking power was to set up a working party to examine the “first lady” position. A YouGov poll for the French edition of the Huffington Post in May suggested 68% of the French public was opposed to the head of state’s spouse being given an official role.(theguardian)…[+]

Millions of Kenyans stood for hours on Tuesday morning, waiting patiently to cast their votes in an election seen as a key test of the stability of one of Africa’s most important states. Long queues had formed in Nairobi, the capital, even before polling stations opened at 6am and the fiercely contested elections got under way.

The election pits the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, in power since 2013, against the veteran opposition politician Raila Odinga. No clear leader emerged during campaigning. Officials and politicians issued last-minute calls for calm, with many fearing violence during voting or, more likely, when the results are announced in coming days. An estimated 180,000 police officers and members of other security forces have been deployed around Kenya to ensure order.

But most voters who spoke to the Guardian at a dozen polling stations in wealthy and poorer areas in Nairobi said they were hopeful the current calm would continue, whatever the result. “Kenyans have become more mature in the way they vote. Many would prefer peace to violence. Especially young people are against all kinds of electoral violence,” said Boniface Odhiambo, 26, as he cast his vote in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum and an opposition stronghold.(Theguardian)…[+]

Theresa May’s official spokesman has called on Venezuela’s government to release political prisoners and show respect for democracy and human rights, after weeks of violence in the country. No 10 said Britain had condemned the government of President Nicolás Maduro for forcing through a constituent assembly that clearly did not represent the will of the Venezuelan people. “It is a tragedy that so many people have lost their lives in protests in Venezuela. We’re clear that urgent action must be taken to stop the situation getting worse,” the prime minister’s spokesman said.
“The UK has repeatedly called on the Maduro government to work with the opposition, release political prisoners and show respect for democracy and human rights.”

The situation in Venezuela has worsened since the government was granted sweeping powers to overhaul the country’s political system in a disputed recent poll that was boycotted by the opposition. Security agents seized two opposition leaders from their homes after they called for protests against the vote. Widespread protests against the government of the oil-producing South American country have been going since April amid spiralling prices for food and medicine because of low oil prices, with more than 120 people killed in the unrest.(theguardian)…[+]

Suspects on trial over last year’s coup attempt in Turkey will wear a brown uniform during their hearings, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced, after a controversy over a defendant wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “hero” during a court appearance.

The Turkish president made his announcement during a speech in the city of Malatya, days after nearly 500 defendants, including top generals and officers, appeared in court. It was the largest mass trial of suspects accused of masterminding and carrying out the attempted putsch last July, in which 250 people were killed and 1,400 wounded. “There will be no more coming to courts wearing whatever they want,” Erdoğan said, according to the daily newspaper Hürriyet. “They will be introduced to the world like that.”

A suspect accused of belonging to the Fethullah Gülen movement, which is widely believed in Turkey to have masterminded the coup attempt and is led by an exiled preacher in the United States, wore the “hero” T-shirt to his hearing.

Several people were detained afterwards for wearing the same shirt. At a rally on the anniversary of the coup last month, Erdoğan had called for the suspects to be dressed in orange jumpsuits like those worn by people incarcerated in the US prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Tens of thousands of people have been dismissed from their jobs or detained over alleged links to the Gülen movement in the months since the failed coup, and trials are ongoing for many of the top military officers and civilians accused by prosecutors of leading the putsch. The broad crackdown has gone beyond the alleged perpetrators, however, and has ensnared journalists, academics, judges and civil servants.(theguardian)…[+]