Andy Burnham says he is “confident” PC Andrew Harper’s killers can be excluded from the government’s early release scheme, as outcry over the case grows.

The prime minister has now ordered the justice secretary to find a way to bar Jessie Cole and Albert Bowers, who were jailed for 13 years for manslaughter in 2020, from early release.

It marks a shift from last week, when he said there was “nothing more” he could do without risking the collapse of the prison system.

The move comes after days of pressure to exclude Harper’s killers from the scheme, which is aiming to free about 5,000 offenders in England and Wales to make space in overcrowded jails.

Harper’s mother, Debbie Adlam, told the BBC she was in “turmoil” following conflicting reports about whether two of her son’s killers would be released from prison early, describing the handling of the situation as a “hash”.

Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp accused Burnham and Labour of “re-traumatising victims and their families with their constant U-turns”.

On Tuesday evening, an open letter signed by 50 chief constables, commissioners and law enforcement leaders called on Burnham to examine “every lawful option” to determine whether the earlier release of Harper’s killers can be prevented.

They welcomed the prime minister’s intervention, adding: “This provides an opportunity not only to examine every lawful avenue in PC Andrew Harper’s case, but to ensure similar concerns do not arise again.”

Burnham said a new plan to prevent more prisoners from being freed long before the end of their sentences would be presented to Parliament in September.

It comes after he initially announced some prisoners convicted of rape, serious child sex and other grooming offences would be barred from early release, after a review of the scheme he ordered after he became prime minister.

In an article published last week, external, Burnham said he had “wanted to go even further” but had “pushed to the very limits of what is possible to do”.

He added: “I know I can look people in the eye and say to them there is nothing more I could have asked for without risking the prison system reaching capacity and collapsing within months.”

But on Tuesday, Burnham insisted he had never accepted “there was nothing more that could be done” to prevent the early release of more offenders, including Harper’s killers.

“I came into office and started pushing on this issue, and I have pushed every single day in office,” he added.

Burnham said he would seek to hold talks with other political parties to build “consensus” on the approach to early releases.

West Ham were disappointed to be relegated to the Championship at the end of last season but a supercomputer has predicted they will make an immediate return to the Premier League

West Ham have been tipped to bounce straight back to the Premier League at the first time of asking. The Hammers are short-priced favourites to win the title and return to the top flight after the relegation last term.

And now, a supercomputer simulated by Casino Kings has Nuno Espirito Santo’s side topping the table ahead of their first game of the season at Burnley on Sunday.

The Clarets are also predicted to go straight back up, finishing as runners-up, while Wolves are tipped to finish just behind in third. The Molineux side are predicted to be joined in the playoffs by Norwich, Sheffield United, Wrexham, Southampton and Birmingham.

And it will be Cesar Peixoto’s men who prevail in the playoff final at Wembley, according to the supercomputer.

Newly-promoted Lincoln are predicted to go straight back down to League One, being joined by Blackburn and QPR in the drop zone.

West Ham have retained the services of talisman and skipper Jarrod Bowen for their Championship campaign, despite interest from the Premier League.

It’s their first stint in the Championship since 2012, when they beat Blackpool in the playoff final at Wembley to win promotion thanks to a late goal by Ricardo Vaz Te.

But it will be the first time the London Stadium has played host to second-tier football. The Hammers made a winning start to the season on Saturday as they beat Portsmouth 3-1 in the Carabao Cup.

Championship supercomputer table

1. West Ham
2. Burnley
3. Wolves
4. Norwich
5. Sheffield United
6. Wrexham
7. Southampton
8. Birmingham
9. Middlesbrough
10. Stoke
11. Millwall
12. West Brom
13. Bristol City
14. Derby
15. Swansea
16. Portsmouth
17. Charlton
18. Cardiff
19. Bolton
20. Watford
21. Preston
22. QPR
23. Blackburn
24. Lincoln

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Countdown to Kickoff: The Essential 26/27 Sky Sports Bundle

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Sky’s Essential TV and Sky Sports bundle includes at least 215 live Premier League clashes across the 2026/27 season, with more than 1,500 games from the EFL and beyond, plus F1, golf and darts.

This introductory offer saves £384 compared to the standard price, with every package also providing 100 regular channels alongside free Netflix and discovery+ subscriptions.

“As of now, I’m trying to live out whatever might be left of my life in as fun a way as I possibly can,” Davis wrote. “I always like to find the teachable moments in anything negative that happens. And cancer has not disappointed in that regard; there’s a lot I have learned from it, and I’m grateful for that.”

When I leave my Boston condo every day, I say good morning to the concierge, who works for a contracting company providing staff to residential buildings. When I conduct an interview in a nearby building, the people who clean that office at night are contractors. The person who serves me my lunch sandwich is a part-timer with no career prospects in that job.

When my best intentions to eat well are for naught and I gorge on Doritos, I remember that the tasters PepsiCo hires to test the chips’ addictiveness are contractors.

These are all examples of what I call “disposable jobs.” People who have them work at an employer’s site, but their employer makes no commitment to them regarding career prospects or job security. My research shows that employers treat more than 1 in 3 U.S. workers as disposable. That comes to just under 57 million full- or part-time workers out of the nation’s workforce of 162 million.

I am a labor economist. In my new book, Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment, I explain why this is happening, what forms it takes, how common it is, what the consequences are for people and for society, and what can be done about it.

Three different varieties

To learn more, I commissioned a nationally representative survey of over 6,000 people in late 2022. I also interviewed nearly 100 workers, employers and policymakers.

I found that there are three categories of disposable workers.

Marginal work is important due to its magnitude and because although those jobs look standard, they are designed to be disposable.

Who are marginal workers?

Staff attorneys are quintessential marginal employees. They’re hired by law firms as employees, but the central feature of their jobs is that they are not on the promotion ladder to partner. Unlike their career-track counterparts, they have no job security. They are often hired to do the grunt work on a specific case, with the understanding that there is no commitment to keep them on if business lags or the project ends.

Adjunct professors are another good example. This group includes part-timers who teach a small number of courses and full-time contract faculty, but in both cases they lack job security and aren’t on track to obtain permanent, tenured, academic jobs.

In 1970, people with tenure or tenure-track jobs constituted 73% of those teaching at colleges and universities. By 2021 only 32% had that status, and the rest were adjunct instructors or contract faculty.

Part-time marginal workers

Another example of marginal work is part-timers.

Employing part-time workers costs less than having full-timers on the payroll. Part-time jobs pay an hourly wage that is nearly 20% below what workers with full-time jobs earn after age, education, occupation and industry are taken into account. When benefits are considered, the gap rises by another 5%.

A second advantage of part-timers from the employer’s perspective is higher turnover, which provides an easy path to be able to adjust the size of the workforce and which enables them to avoid investing in career development.

When a team of researchers led by professor Susan Lambert interviewed 88 employers that pay low wages, they found that many use part-time work to make their workforces more “flexible.” One manager explained that high churn of part-timers gave the company so much flexibility that they didn’t need temp workers.

“Temp workers: We don’t need them,” he said. “Wait a day for turnover.”

Evidence that employers try to maximize the number of people working for them part time instead of full time and with benefits arose after the Affordable Care Act fully took effect in 2014.

The ACA requires that employers with 50 or more employees either provide them with health insurance or pay for them to buy it, but only for people who work 30 or more hours a week. Otherwise they pay, as of 2026, a penalty of US$3,340 per uninsured employee.

Another team of researchers compared trends in part-time work in three low-wage industries – retail, hotels and restaurants, before and after the ACA rolled out. They found that the use of part-timers increased by 500,000 in the years after the Affordable Care Act was implemented. This suggests that companies add to their part-time ranks to save on the health insurance costs of standard employment.

Forces behind this trend

Why do employers want many of their workers to be disposable? A primary motive is to save money. Employing freelancers and contractors means they can avoid mandatory benefits such as Social Security contributions and, for larger employers, contributing to the cost of health insurance.

Marginal workers, to be sure, do receive these benefits. But the high turnover built into their jobs means that their employers can invest less in their training and avoid the management costs otherwise associated with layoff severance and fair treatment on the job.

An additional motive for many employers is a lack of respect for what front-line employees can contribute. A 2023 report from the McKinsey consulting firm illustrated this tendency when it asserted that 5% of employees deliver 95% of “an organization’s value.”

This claim, which I believe is inaccurate, still speaks volumes about the attitude of McKinsey and the firms they interviewed regarding the other 95% of workers. They see those employees as disposable.

Less pay and job satisfaction

My survey showed that contractors, freelancers who work for employers and marginal employees all earn less than regular workers do.

In addition, the survey found that contractors and marginal workers are notably less satisfied with their jobs compared with regular workers, whereas freelancers, due to their ability to choose where and when to work, are more satisfied.

The public also pays a price for the use of disposable workers. As examples, researchers have found that hospital infection rates rise when cleaners are contract workers and that the use of contractors leads to a higher rate of industrial accidents.

Smoke could be seen from miles away

Firefighters are expected to remain at the sight of a recycling centre fire for a “prolonged period of time”. More than 25 firefighters were called to a large fire at the Biffa Waste Management Transfer Station in Marston Road, Eynesbury at around 10.52am today (Tuesday, August 11).

Around 200 tonnes of waste had caught on fire in the building. Smoke could be seen from miles away, including in St Neots.

Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue has provided an update on the fire. A fire spokesperson said: “At 10.52am on Tuesday, crews were called to a building fire on Marston Road, Eynesbury. More than 25 firefighters, including crews from across the county and over the border in Bedfordshire, are currently in attendance.

“The crews are dealing with a large, well-developed fire in a building involving recycled materials. Please be aware that we will be at this incident for a prolonged period of time.”

Nearby residents are asked to keep their windows and doors closed. They are also asked to avoid the area while firefighters deal with the blaze.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Sorry, North America. After winning the cosmic lottery with a pair of coast-to-coast total solar eclipses, now it’s Europe’s turn.

But look skyward anyway Wednesday and, if you’re far enough north in the U.S. and Canada, you might savor a partial eclipse as the moon nibbles away at the sun.

Totality will begin near the North Pole, then streak southward across Greenland, Iceland, Spain and a patch of Portugal. Daytime darkness won’t last more than a couple minutes at best — shrimpy compared with North America’s epic 2024 eclipse — but it is continental Europe’s first encounter with totality since 1999. Spain gets a much longer shot at totality next August, along with North Africa and the Middle East.

For the U.S., the Great American Eclipse of 2017 kicked off the sun-vanishing mania with more than two minutes of totality from Oregon to South Carolina. The amount of totality almost doubled in 2024, racing diagonally from Mexico’s Pacific coast all the way past Newfoundland.

America’s next coast-to-coast total solar eclipse isn’t until 2045. So catch a partial now if you can.

Here’s a list of some U.S. and Canadian cities in position to see a partial solar eclipse on Wednesday if skies are clear, in alphabetical order, with local times and the amount of sun coverage provided by NASA:

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—Anchorage, Alaska, with 28% coverage. Begins at 7:36 a.m. and ends at 9:09 a.m., peaking at 8:21 a.m.

—Bangor, Maine, with 24% coverage. Begins at 12:54 p.m. and ends at 2:49 p.m., peaking at 1:53 p.m.

—Detroit with 3% coverage. Begins at 1:03 p.m. and ends at 2:08 p.m., peaking at 1:36 p.m.

—Montreal, Quebec, with 18% coverage. Begins at 12:50 p.m. and ends at 2:38 p.m., peaking at 1:45 p.m.

—New York City with 9% coverage. Begins at 1:07 p.m. and ends at 2:38 p.m., peaking at 1:54 p.m.

—Philadelphia with 7% coverage. Begins at 1:11 p.m. and ends at 2:35 p.m., peaking at 1:53 p.m.

—St. Johns, Newfoundland and Labrador, with 53% coverage. Begins at 2:28 p.m. and ends at 4:37 p.m., peaking at 3:35 p.m.

—Toronto, Ontario, with 8% coverage. Begins at 12:55 p.m. and ends at 2:23 p.m., peaking at 1:40 p.m.

—Washington, D.C., with 4% coverage. Begins at 1:17 p.m. and ends at 2:27 p.m., peaking at 1:53 p.m.

—Winnipeg, Manitoba, with 5% coverage. Begins at 11:25 a.m. and ends at 12:40 p.m., peaking at 12:02 p.m.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

“Customers regularly describe the café as a ‘must-visit’ in Belfast, praising its relaxed atmosphere, standout breakfast menu and speciality drinks”

A busy Belfast cafe has been ranked as the UK’s most popular independent coffee shop.

A study conducted by Capital on Tap analysed more than 100 independent coffee shops, ranking them using a combination of Google review ratings, review volumes, average monthly Google search volumes and Instagram followers to see who came out top.

Two Northern Irish businesses made the top 3, with Neighbourhood Café coming away with the top spot and Established Coffee just around the corner ranking at third.

Ranking in first place, Neighbourhood was remarked for its “standout breakfast menu” and its status as a must try spot in Belfast City Centre.

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Captial on Tap said: “Neighbourhood Café in Belfast ranks as the UK’s most popular independent coffee shop. The café stands out for its strong online presence, with around 27,100 average monthly Google searches, one of the highest in the rankings, alongside 45,500 Instagram followers and a 4.6-star Google rating.

“Customers regularly describe the café as a ‘must-visit’ in Belfast, praising its relaxed atmosphere, standout breakfast menu and speciality drinks. The café’s signature nut butter latte receives particular praise, with many reviewers saying the coffee lives up to the hype.”

Following closely behind in third place, Established’s service, pastries and online popularity were a standout feature on the list.

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They continued: “Established Coffee in Belfast rounds out the top three with a 4.6-star Google rating, 12,100 average monthly Google searches and 36,500 Instagram followers. Alongside its strong online popularity, the café has built a reputation for its high-quality coffee and freshly baked treats.

“Customers often champion its friendly service, beautifully presented filter coffee and pastries, with several reviewers singling out its lemon meringue pie as one of the best they’ve tasted.”

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The judge overseeing the state trial of Luigi Mangione, accused of killing UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, has laid down the ground rules for court public and media access to the high-profile case.

Mangione returned to court on Tuesday ahead of his murder trial, which begins next month in New York. Dressed in a charcoal grey suit with his hair clipped short, Mangione sat silently at the defence table while his attorneys conferred with the judge.

In Tuesday’s hearing, Judge Gregory Carro decided that the 12-person jury would remain anonymous to the public due to the spotlight on the case, and that there would be an overflow room to meet media demand.

The case has attracted national attention, and has also created an online frenzy, with both his backers – many of whom see Mangione as a symbol of the backlash against US healthcare costs – and his critics analysing everything from his intentions to his appearance.

The spectacle is likely to intensify when jury selection for the trial begins on 8 September.

Mangione, if found guilty, could face decades behind bars. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, including second-degree murder and weapons-related offences.

He faces a separate federal trial next year, in which he has also pleaded not guilty.

Much of what is expected at the state trial – the prosecutor’s case, Mangione’s defence, and obstacles both parties face – were previewed in months of court filings and arguments.

Here’s what to know about the upcoming trial, and what questions remain.

Gomez co-stars in the series alongside Steve Martin and Martin Short, with the upcoming Britain-set sixth season set to star a plethora of British talent, including Jennifer Saunders, Martin Freeman, Simone Ashley, Jane Horrocks, Geri Halliwell, Jamie Demetriou, David Tennant, Richard Ayoade and Olivia Colman.

Frempong, who previously appeared in Too Much and Essex Girls, added: “I am extremely excited to be joining EastEnders! I have watched the show for as long as I can remember and have such vivid memories of gathering around the TV with my family, especially at Christmas, to watch all the drama unfolding on the Square, so it feels pretty surreal to now be a part of the action!