THE Met Office has issued an urgent travel warning – with four inches of rain set to hit as summer officially comes to an end.

A yellow rain warning will be in force force all day for Wales, southern England and the Midlands.

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Forecasters said a whopping 100mm could drench some parts of the warning zone, which stretches as far north as Cheshire and Yorkshire.

Other places could see 40-70mm of rain fall in just two or three hours.

Spray and flooding could lead to difficult driving conditions and some temporary road closures.

There is a small chance that some rural communities will temporarily become cut off by flooded roads.

Significant delays or cancellations to train and bus services are possible.

Homes and businesses could be flooded, causing damage to some buildings.

And there is a small chance of power cuts and loss of other services to some areas in the warning zone.

Met Office expert Jonathan Vautrey said: “With Sunday marking the autumnal equinox summer has now officially come to an end.

“We’ll also see our next batch of thundery rain moving its way into southern areas of England as well.”

“We do have a rain warning in force throughout today for this band of rain.

“It’s going to be moving across Wales, central southern areas of England.

“Some very heavy pulses are possible with some surface water issues, travel disruption.

“So it’s worth taking care if you are out and about or travelling during the day.”

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A leading government adviser has called on ministers to urgently address low childhood vaccination rates by investing in frontline services after new data revealed an “extremely worrying” decline in uptake.

Professor Sir Andrew Pollard, chair of the UK’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, said the government needed to increase funding, especially for frontline nurses and health visitors with local knowledge.

“The system for mopping up those who find it hard to access vaccination is not currently robust enough,” he told the Financial Times.

“We have to get this right, the future health of our children depends on it, and even their lives.”

The warning comes after data published by NHS England last week showed that uptake of all 14 key childhood vaccinations has fallen over the past year, with no vaccines meeting the World Health Organization’s target of 95 per cent coverage.

The share of children vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) by their second birthday fell to a 14-year-low of 89 per cent in the year ending March 2024.

The UK Health Security Agency last month warned of a back-to-school resurgence of measles after major outbreaks in London, the West Midlands and North West drove infections to the highest levels since 2012.

Pollard said the spread of measles was a “red flashing warning light” that other diseases would soon start spreading without urgent action.

Low vaccination rates are a global problem, with nearly three-quarters of children living in countries where low vaccine coverage is driving measles outbreaks.

Dr Mary Ramsay, UKHSA director for public health programmes, said disruption to healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic and complacency had caused vaccination rates to drop in England.

“While there is much focus on vaccine hesitancy . . . it is not driving the long-term decline we have seen in uptake,” she said.

“[It] is more likely a combination of some people being complacent about the risk of some diseases, but also about people’s lifestyles and finding time to ensure your child attends their appointment.”

A 2023 survey by UKHSA found that 88 per cent of parents were happy with the safety of vaccines for babies and young children, although rates were lower among ethnic minorities and people from lower social grades.

Pollard said a lack of access was the main reason for the decline, with parents finding it difficult to find available appointments and to travel to GP surgeries, especially if they have to take multiple children on public transport.

He added that some communities were unaware that vaccines are free, while others may have unfounded concerns over their safety.

MMR vaccination rates were lowest in London, which is home to 17 of the 20 areas worst affected by measles outbreaks. Hackney and the City of London had the lowest uptake across all local authorities in England, with coverage of only 68 per cent last year, down from 88 per cent a decade ago.

Dr Gayatri Amirthalingam, UKHSA immunisation deputy director, said London had “an ethnically and socio-economically diverse population and health inequalities persist”.

She added: “The population is also very mobile with many families moving in and out of the city and between boroughs, who may not immediately register with a new GP.”

The NHS launched a new vaccination strategy in December, promising a more flexible appointment system that would make “booking a jab as easy as booking a cab”.

Local health teams will also have more flexibility to offer immunisation services in local venues such as community centres, sport facilities and places of worship.

Steve Russell, NHS national director for vaccinations and screening, said too many children were still not fully vaccinated against preventable diseases such as measles and whooping cough.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the NHS and GP practices send reminders to encourage parents and carers of children not fully vaccinated to come forward, adding it continued to look at ways to further boost vaccine uptake through community pharmacists and health visitors.

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — On an island of windswept tundra in the Bering Sea, hundreds of miles from mainland Alaska, a resident sitting outside their home saw — well, did they see it? They were pretty sure they saw it.

A rat.

The purported sighting would not have gotten attention in many places around the world, but it caused a stir on St. Paul Island, which is part of the Pribilof Islands, a birding haven sometimes called the “Galapagos of the north” for its diversity of life.

That’s because rats that stow away on vessels can quickly populate and overrun remote islands, devastating bird populations by eating eggs, chicks or even adults and upending once-vibrant ecosystems.

Shortly after receiving the resident’s report in June, wildlife officials arrived at the apartment complex and crawled through nearby grasses, around the building and under the porch, looking for tracks, chew marks or droppings. They baited traps with peanut butter and set up trail cameras to capture any confirmation of the rat’s existence — but so far have found no evidence.

“We know — because we’ve seen this on other islands and in other locations in Alaska and across the world — that rats absolutely decimate seabird colonies, so the threat is never one that the community would take lightly,” said Lauren Divine, director of the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island’s ecosystem conservation office.

The anxiety on St. Paul Island is the latest development amid longstanding efforts to get or keep non-native rats off some of the most remote, but ecologically diverse, islands in Alaska and around the world.

Rodents have been removed successfully from hundreds of islands worldwide — including one in Alaska’s Aleutian chain formerly known as “Rat Island,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But such efforts can take years and cost millions of dollars, so prevention is considered the best defense.

Around the developed areas of St. Paul, officials have set out blocks of wax — “chew blocks” — designed to record any telltale incisor bites. Some of the blocks are made with ultraviolet material, which allow inspectors armed with black lights to search for glowing droppings.

They also have asked residents to be on the lookout for any rodents and are seeking permission to have the U.S. Department of Agriculture bring a dog to the island to sniff out any rats. Canines are otherwise banned from the Pribilofs to protect fur seals.

There have been no traces of any rats since the reported sighting this summer, but the hunt and heightened state of vigilance is likely to persist for months.

Divine likened the search to trying to find a needle in a haystack “and not knowing if a needle even exists.”

The community of about 350 people — clustered on the southern tip of a treeless island marked by rolling hills, rimmed by cliffs and battered by storms — has long had a rodent surveillance program that includes rat traps near the airport and at developed waterfront areas where vessels arrive, designed to detect or kill any rats that might show up.

Still, it took nearly a year to catch the last known rat on St. Paul, which was believed to have hopped off a barge. It was found dead in 2019 after it evaded the community’s initial defenses. That underscores why even an unsubstantiated sighting is taken so seriously, Divine said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is planning an environmental review to analyze eradicating the potentially tens of thousands of rats on four uninhabited islands in the far-flung, volcano-pocked Aleutian chain, hundreds of miles southwest of St. Paul. More than 10 million seabirds of varying species nest in the Aleutians.

The diversity and number of breeding birds on islands with established, non-native rat populations are noticeably low, the agency has said. Carcasses of least auklets and crested auklets, which are known for their noisy nesting colonies in rocky areas, have been found in rat-food caches on Kiska Island, one of the four islands, where rat footprints have been spotted on the wet, sandy shoreline.

If the agency moves ahead, it might take five years for the first of the projects to be launched, and given the intensive planning, testing and research required for each island, it could take decades to complete all of them, said Stacey Buckelew, an island invasive species biologist with Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.

But such efforts are important steps to help seabirds already challenged by stresses including climate change, Buckelew said.

The success of what was long called Rat Island, a tract in the Aleutians roughly half the size of Manhattan, shows how effective eradication programs can be. Rats are believed to have first arrived with a Japanese shipwreck in the late 18th century. Fur traders introduced arctic foxes there the following century.

The foxes were eradicated in 1984, but it was nearly a quarter century later when wildlife agents and conservation groups killed off the rats by dropping poison pellets from a helicopter. Those involved said that without nesting seabirds, the island was eerily silent compared to the cacophony of other, rat-free islands, and it even smelled different.

Since the eradication of rats, researchers have found native birds benefiting, even documenting species thought to have been wiped out by rats. The island is once again known by the name originally bestowed by the Unangan people native to the Aleutians: Hawadax. Researchers have found tufted puffins, which dig burrows into cliff edges and are defenseless against rats or foxes, as well as eagle and falcon nests.

During surveys before the eradication, researchers heard no song sparrows, but during a 2013 trip their sounds were almost incessant, Buckelew said at that time.

Donald Lyons, director of conservation science with the National Audubon Society’s Seabird Institute, described being in the Pribilof Islands and watching clouds of auklets return to their colonies in the evening — “tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of birds in the air at a given time.”

He said officials were right to take the alleged sighting of a rat on St. Paul so seriously. He credited the largely Alaska Native communities in the Pribilofs for their efforts to keep invasive species out.

“It’s just the abundance of wildlife that we hear stories or read historical accounts of, but really seldom see in kind of our modern age,” he said. “And so it really is a place where I’ve felt the wonder, the spectacle of nature.”

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In newly liberated but starving Naples, the American general Mark Clark hosted a banquet. He was served the humanlike flesh of a manatee taken from the municipal aquarium, which disturbingly resembled “a little girl who had been cooked”.

So, at least, runs the version of this often-told anecdote in Curzio Malaparte’s sensational semi-factual novel The Skin. Keith Lowe, however, has found that the aquarium remained open and stocked after the Allies occupied Naples in autumn 1943. It charged 20 lire to soldier-tourists to view the uneaten marine life. For Lowe, Mark Clark’s manatee menu symbolises the process “by which fiction becomes myth, myth becomes recollection, and recollection becomes history”.

During and after the Fascist breakdown and the retreat of German forces, the Italian port suffered more from this slide between fact, memory and legend than almost any other theatre of the second world war. Torrid literary reportage has fixed the image of what journalist Alan Moorehead called “the moral collapse of a people” into anarchy, crime and despair as authority broke down. In The Skin, or Norman Lewis’s celebrated memoir Naples ’44, or John Horne Burns’s novel The Gallery, the city figures as a lurid arena of violent chaos and lawless sleaze.

For sure, Lowe’s meticulous historical sleuthing reveals disorder on a monumental scale, with “theft, prostitution or illegal trading” the sole means of survival for many citizens. But he also recovers the hidden history of a Mediterranean metropolis that freed itself from German domination before the Allies arrived — only to find its dreams for social renewal dashed by the naivety, ignorance and mismanagement of its well-intentioned liberators.

Especially in Savage Continent (2013), Lowe has made a speciality of aftermaths: what happens as conflicts end, and the “dramatic, exhilarating and traumatic” events that follow. On 1 October 1943, the King’s Dragoon Guards drove to cheers and flowers into a joyful city. Soon, Naples became a template for both the sunny and shady sides of post-Nazi life — and an early warning that allowed the blundering Allies to raise their game as social rebuilders later in 1944.

Lowe begins with the mingled hedonism and horror of the months after liberation. The departing Germans had trashed the place — 300 sunk craft choked the harbour — and terrorised the people. “Miracles of reconstruction” with military value (rebuilding the shattered port, quashing a typhus epidemic) coincided with the neglect of civilian needs by an Allied Military Government (AMG) largely staffed by “well-meaning mediocrities”.

Naples turned into “a playground for foreign troops”, often drunk. One-fifth of the US 1st Armored Division contracted a sexually transmitted infection. Breakdowns in rationing and food distribution drove the spread of rampant corruption, “wholesale thievery” and large-scale prostitution: symptoms not of “moral collapse”, but rational behaviour as mass starvation loomed.

Naples 1944 then backtracks to the Fascist era and its finale in the stirring, often spectacularly effective, revolt of the Neapolitans themselves. During the “Four Days” of late September 1943, which “set the entire city alight”, audacious guerrilla exploits hastened the German exit. A closing section argues that Allied mis-steps, above all their eagerness to reinstate old elites, “smothered at birth” local hopes for reform. Lowe explains that foreign stereotypes, with Naples as an idyll of happy-go-lucky pleasure-seekers or “a paradise inhabited by devils”, played their part in blurring the Anglo-American vision.

Admirably, Lowe checks salacious myths against a vast range of Italian sources. He portrays the liberated city not as some grotesque pageant of vice but the stage for innumerable human dramas of heroism or compromise. If he judges the strategic bungles of the AMG harshly, Lowe recognises that exasperated Italian colleagues found officers “kind, patient and reasonable” — but way out of their depth.

“The prosecution of the war”, not civic revival, set their agenda. As this rigorous, but humane and colourful history, shows, that priority let a sclerotic status quo return. US politician Adlai Stevenson, who visited in 1944, warned that after a “total war”, “the peace must also be won”. Further north, the Allies applied that lesson. In Naples, they never did.

Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos by Keith Lowe William Collins £25, 400 pages

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Following major pushback from over a hundred civil society groups and thousands of petition signees, a pivotal amendment that would protect end-to-end encryption has been embraced by a prominent committee within the European Union’s (EU) Parliament. 

In November 2023, the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice, and Home Affairs (LIBE) amended a controversial regulation proposed in 2022. This regulation, as proposed by the European Commission, would have allowed European Union (EU) authorities to gather encrypted online data and cross-reference it with their databases in the name of preventing crimes against children, notably the spread of pictures depicting child abuse. 

The originally proposed regulation would have allowed for the mass-scanning of private phones and computers, going as far as to authorize the use of AI in checking and scanning private text messages.

While not perfect, the amendment seems to be sufficient to safeguard end-to-end encryption, according to Joe Mullin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). 

“Every human being should have the right to have a private conversation,” Mullin said. “That’s true in the offline world, and we must not give up on those rights in the digital world.” 

The new amendment prohibits client-side scanning, a form of bypassing encryption, and removes age-verification language that would have forced online users to provide identification cards before being granted internet access. Mullin noted, however, that the new language does leave the door open for such regulations in the future. Moreover, the approved amendment could lead to further government scanning of public material online—“less than desirable,” Mullin said, depending on how the process is conducted. In March 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that weakening encryption violates the fundamental human right to privacy. 

As of April 2024, the news of this amendment’s adoption has not been addressed in the corporate press, only by industry organizations, such as the Computer & Communications Industry Association, and by nonprofit groups such as the EFF.

Sources: 

Joe Mullin, “This Month, The EU Parliament Can Take Action To Stop The Attack On Encryption,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 14, 2023.

Christopher Schmon, “European Court of Human Rights Confirms: Weakening Encryption Violates Fundamental Rights,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, March 5, 2024.

Student Researcher: David Miller (Frostburg State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Andy Duncan (Frostburg State University)