eBay will clamp down on the sale of e-bikes and e-bike batteries in the UK from 31 October, the BBC has learned.

The firm says that only “eligible business sellers” will be allowed to list them after this date.

It did not explain what the necessary criteria would be.

E-bikes, which have electrically-assisted pedals and are battery-powered, have soared in popularity, but incidents involving battery fires have also risen.

The London Fire Brigade recently said it recorded 155 e-bike fires in 2023, up by 78% from the previous year.

The brigade warned e-bike users to check their batteries after battery packs were officially classed as “dangerous” products by the UK’s regulatory body.

In June, a coroner also called for government action after the death of a man whose home caught fire when an e-bike battery pack he was charging overheated and ignited.

“Consumer safety is a top priority for eBay,” an eBay spokesperson said on Tuesday.

Earlier this year, it said it would also audit sellers to make sure they had the CE mark for safety documentation for listed e-bike products.

A quick look at the eBay platform reveals nearly 3,000 used e-bikes currently for sale in the UK.

The charity Electrical Safety First said it welcomed the firm’s change in policy.

But it suggested that new laws were also needed because of the fire safety risks posed by the vehicles.

“Whilst this voluntary move is welcome, we continue to call for online marketplaces to be legally obligated to take reasonable steps to ensure products sold via their sites are safe,” said a spokesperson.

The Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, which is currently making its way through Parliament, could potentially enforce this in future.

During Kamala Harris’s Tuesday appearance on The View, the vice president was asked what her biggest difference with President Joe Biden is—and she gave a surprising answer: She plans to appoint a Republican to her Cabinet.

Harris initially said that “not a thing comes to mind” that she would have done anything differently than Biden. But then she went on to elaborate.

“Listen, I plan on having a Republican in my Cabinet,” Harris elaborated. “You ask me what’s the difference between Joe Biden and me, well that will be one of the differences.”

Then, she appeared to take a jab at Biden, adding, “I don’t feel burdened by letting pride get in the way of a good idea.”

But not everyone thinks appointing a Republican to her Cabinet is a great idea for Harris, nor is that how they’d like to see her differentiate herself as a candidate.

Harris’s decision to appoint a Republican, if she chooses to do so, wouldn’t be entirely out of the ordinary. For example, Republican Ray LaHood served as secretary of transportation from 2009 to 2013 under President Barack Obama.

Harris has continued to court “Republicans for Harris” throughout her campaign, allowing several Republicans time to speak on the Democratic National Convention stage, including Republican Ana Navarro-Cárdenas of The View and Illinois Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger. Republicans Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney have announced they also plan to vote for Harris.

In a new survey from The New York Times/Siena College, Harris’s Republican support has nearly doubled over the past month.

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Donald Trump had as many as seven conversations with Vladimir Putin after he left the White House, according to explosive new reports that raise fresh questions about the former US president’s relationship with the Russian leader.

The claims stem from a forthcoming book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward, due to be published next week. The Washington Post, his longtime employer, first reported on the book’s contents.

Woodward’s book also reveals Trump secretly sent Putin Covid-19 tests for his personal use at the height of the pandemic, the report said.

The book, War, reportedly describes a scene earlier this year, when Trump told an aide to leave his Mar-a-Lago office so he could speak privately by phone with Putin. The unnamed aide cited in the book suggested the former president and Russia’s leader had spoken as many as seven times since Trump left the White House in 2021.

The reports raise new questions about Trump’s relationship with Putin with less than a month to go until the US presidential election.

Trump, the Republican candidate, trails his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, by more than three points, according to the Financial Times poll tracker, although they are locked in a virtual tie in all seven swing states that will determine who wins November’s vote.

A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster, Woodward’s publisher, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump campaign’s communications director Steven Cheung rejected the reports and launched a personal attack on Woodward, calling him a “truly demented and deranged man”.

Cheung said Trump gave Woodward “absolutely no access for this trash book”, adding: “Woodward is a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally.”

Harris told radio personality Howard Stern in an interview on Tuesday that the new reports demonstrated “who Trump is”.

“People in America were struggling to get tests and this guy is sending them to Russia, to a murderous dictator for his personal use?” she said.

“That is just the most recent stark example of who Trump is. He secretly sent Covid test kits for the personal use of Putin of Russia, an adversary to the United States, when he was talking about Americans should be putting bleach in their blood.”

Woodward, 81, became famous in the 1970s when he and fellow Washington Post reporter Carl Bernstein broke stories about the Watergate scandal, which led to then president Richard Nixon’s resignation. He has written more than a dozen bestselling books, including four volumes on the Trump presidency.

Trump has sued Woodward over a 2022 audiobook based on 20 interviews that Woodward conducted with the former president between 2016 and 2020. Trump has argued that publishing the tapes violates his copyright, while Simon & Schuster has repeatedly filed motions to dismiss the case.

Trump’s possible return to the White House could have major implications for Russia, Ukraine and the Nato alliance. The former president — who called Putin a “genius” after Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022 — has said he would end the fighting in Ukraine on “day one” if he is re-elected, but has not detailed how he would do so. In last month’s presidential debate, Trump declined to say that he wanted Ukraine to win the war.

Harris has accused Trump of pandering to Putin and told CBS News in an interview that aired on Monday night that she would not meet “bilaterally” with the Russian president unless his Ukrainian counterparts were offered a seat at the negotiating table.

ALDI has revealed the exact date its wooden toy range will hit stores just in time for Christmas.

Prices start from just £2.99 for the supermarket giant’s sell out range which includes more than 50 products.

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The German retailer’s range varies widely and includes items such as Wooden 2D Wheeled Animals and a Wooden Climbing Triangle and Cube.

Other gift ideas include a brand new Wooden Horse Box and a Beauty Station to let your child’s imagination run wild, both retailing for £24.99 each.

Shoppers will have to act fast, however, as the range sold-out when it was released last year.

The chain also laid out its top 10 wooden toys as gifts to “help mum, dad, and Santa’s little helper with what to choose.”

The list included, in no particular order:

• Wooden Kettle, Coffee & Hot Chocolate Maker 
• Wooden Kitchen Sets 
• Double Sided Easel 
• Wooden Climbing Arch and Slide 
• Wooden Toy Kitchen 
• Wooden Birthday Cake 
• Wooden Cupcakes and Doughnuts Assortment 
• Wooden Tabletop Assortment 
• Toy Roleplay Bags 
• Wooden Grocery Sets 

The discount retailer chain is also bringing back the wooden Cuthbert which previously caused a stir with M&S fans.

In 2021 M&S lodged an infringement claim against Aldi arguing the chocolate cake was too similar to its classic Colin the Caterpillar which has been around for 30 years with an unchanged design.

But Cuthbert returned to shelves in February 2022 after the two supermarkets called a truce in an agreed settlement. 

Aldi claims this years range of wooden toys is its “biggest ever” and that shoppers can expect the “same great value” as 2023’s set.

This comes as rival Lidl announced its own range of wooden toys.

Its set of products are expected to arrive in stores across the UK from October 17 with Aldi’s range available from October 10.

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How to save money at Aldi

Unlike other major supermarkets, Aldi does not have a rewards or point card system but that does not mean you cannot save on your shop. 

Every week the store releases a list of special buys, which are unique bargain products you find online at Aldi and in-store. 

The store releases a fresh range of deals every Thursday and Sunday, so be sure to check regularly to see what’s new. 

Meanwhile, the store also regularly sells fruit and vegetables at highly discounted prices, as part of its ‘super six’ deal.

It also does weekly saving offers on typically pricey items such as meat and fish.

1.5K

Independent reporting in Fall 2022 revealed that, between 2012 and 2021, at least 1,733 environmental activists were killed—amounting, on average, to nearly one killing every two days across ten years. This figure from the Global Witness study, Decade of Defiance, is “almost certainly an underestimate” because “conflict, restrictions on a free press and civil society, and lack of independent monitoring of attacks on defenders can lead to underreporting,” Global Witness asserted.

The killing of environmental activists has been concentrated in the Global South, with 68 percent occurring in Latin America. Three-hundred-forty-two killings occurred in Brazil, 322 in Colombia, 154 in Mexico, 177 in Honduras, and eighty in Guatemala. Outside Latin America, the Philippines accounted for 270 killings and India accounted for seventy-nine.

Indigenous land defenders are disproportionately impacted. The Guardian reported that 39 percent of those killed were from Indigenous communities, despite that group constituting only 5 percent of the global population. In Brazil, about a third of those killed were Indigenous or Afro-descendants, and in the Philippines, that number was about 40 percent. Additionally, 85 percent of the killings in Brazil occurred in the Amazon rainforest.

Grist’s report on the Global Witness study quoted Dinamam Tuxá of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), Brazil’s largest coalition of Indigenous groups: “There has been an increase in the amount of conflict—socio and environmental conflict—in our lands,” Tuxá told Grist, “It’s destroying communities and it’s destroying our forests.”

Although most of these killings cannot be traced to a specific cause, the Independent explained that a “big proportion of these attacks” are associated with opposition to “mining and infrastructure, including large-scale agribusiness and hydroelectric dams.” In 2021 alone, twenty-seven killings were linked to mining, thirteen to hydropower, five to agribusiness, four to roads and infrastructure, and four to logging. In total, Global Witness documented two hundred killings in 2021, down slightly from the 227 verified the previous year.

Threats to environmental activists are not limited to killings. Environmental activists also face beatings, arbitrary arrests and detention, strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs) brought by companies, sexual violence, and surveillance. A separate April 2022 report from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, as reported by Grist, documented more than 3,800 attacks on human rights defenders—including not only killings and death threats but also beatings, arbitrary arrests and detention, and lawsuits—between January 2015 and March 2021. Grist noted that many of these human rights defenders were “known in particular for defending their communities’ natural resources from mining, deforestation, water contamination, and other threats.”

Those who kill, injure, detain, or harass environmental activists often do so with impunity, due to insufficient or nonexistent criminal investigations, corruption, and intimidation. Nevertheless, the BBC reported that in Honduras a former energy executive was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison for the 2016 murder of activist Berta Cáceres. In 2021, the Escazú Agreement—the first human rights and environmental treaty in Latin America and the Caribbean—also went into effect. Mexico has ratified the agreement, but Brazil and Colombia have not.

In September 2022, the New York Times published an article by Oscar Lopez, reporting how Mexico was deemed the deadliest country for environmental activists by Global Witness. In October 2022, a short piece in the New York Times’s climate newsletter “Climate Forward” about why Latin America is so dangerous for environmental activists also cited Global Witness’s report. And on February 26, 2023, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Rafael Lozano and Anjan Sundaram about attacks on Mexican Indigenous communities fighting climate change that referenced Global Witness’s findings. Otherwise, the corporate media have largely ignored the Global Witness study about the deadly wave of assaults on environmentalists during the past decade.

Project Censored previously covered the 2014 edition of Global Witness’s report on the killing of environmental activists, Deadly Environment, which was also significantly under-reported by establishment news outlets in the United States.

Patrick Greenfield, “More Than 1,700 Environmental Activists Murdered in the Past Decade— Report,” The Guardian, September 28, 2022.

Stuti Mishra, “Over 1,700 Environmental Activists Murdered in 10 Years, Investigation Finds,” Independent, September 29, 2022.

Matt McGrath, “Over 1,700 Environment Activists Killed in Decade— Report,” BBC, September 29, 2022.

Joseph Lee, “Every Two Days, a Land Defender Is Killed. Most Are Indigenous,” Grist, September 30, 2022.

Matt Alderton, “NGO Reports ‘Deadly Decade’ for Environmental Defenders,” TreeHugger, October 12, 2022.

Student Researcher: Annie Koruga (Ohlone College)

Faculty Evaluator: Robin Takahashi (Ohlone College)