The UK government has said rules allowing EU nationals to live and work freely in the UK will end in the event of a no-deal Brexit on 31 October. Theresa May had considered extending freedom of movement to 2021 or allowing EU citizens to stay for three months before applying for a longer stay.

Those options have now been dropped, in favour of a new approach to be set out later. Boris Johnson said the UK would not “become hostile to immigration”.

The PM added that “immigration into the UK will be democratically controlled”.

However, the Three Million group, which campaigns for the rights of EU citizens living in the UK said: “Ending freedom of movement without putting legal provisions in place for those EU citizens who have not yet successfully applied through the settlement scheme will mean that millions of lawful citizens will have their legal status removed overnight.”

Freedom of movement allows EU citizens to live and work in other European Union countries. In a statement, the Home Office said: “EU citizens and their families still have until at least December 2020 to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme and one million people have already been granted status.(BBC)…[+]

A woman and her child were the first two cases confirmed with Ebola in Congo’s South Kivu region last week, opening a new front in the fight against the outbreak.

Health officials said on Friday that the latest cases were more than 700 km (430 miles) south of where the outbreak was first detected. Ebola has killed at least 1,900 people in Democratic Republic of Congo over the past year. This is the second biggest toll ever and militia violence combined with local resistance have made the outbreak harder to contain.

The 24-year-old woman had been identified as a high-risk contact of another Ebola case in Beni, more than 700 km north, last month, according to a government statement issued on Friday. She traveled by bus, boat and road with her two children to Mwenga, in South Kivu, where she died on Tuesday night, according to a slide from a presentation by health officials.

The woman had been vaccinated, the slide said. The Ebola response team, headed by the Congolese government, identified 120 contacts and vaccinated 20 on Thursday, the slide showed. The latest cases show the difficulty of containing the latest Ebola outbreak, which has continued to spread in eastern Congo despite the deployment of a highly effective vaccine. (Reuters)…[+]

Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Gary Grif­fith says de­spite his achieve­ments over the last year in of­fice, mur­ders and the fear of crime con­tin­ues to be his biggest chal­lenges.

The mur­der count for this year has equalled the last year’s fig­ure with the lat­est killing tak­ing place on Thurs­day night in Mor­vant. Grif­fith ac­knowl­edged that had it not been for the good work of his of­fi­cers, it could have been worse.

“There have been some sit­u­a­tions where based on prop­er in­tel­li­gence and prop­er op­er­a­tions some­times over 10-15 per­sons could have been killed in one night,” said Grif­fith. “Per­sons will try to crit­i­cise the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice based on what you would have seen with the homi­cide rate, but I can as­sure you that the homi­cide rate in re­la­tion to the pop­u­la­tion if you look at the num­ber of firearms we have and the oth­er sig­nif­i­cant fac­tors that we en­counter on a dai­ly ba­sis. The homi­cide rate could be well have been over 1,000 per an­num,” said Grif­fith.(Stabroeknews)…[+]