UK News

Easter is on the doorstep, birds are nesting, some have already laid eggs, and the national campaign to protect them is now underway. A new element to this year’s operation will target those who take the eggs or chicks of birds of prey, to sell to illegal falconries.

Collecting wild birds’ eggs is illegal and no longer just a schoolboy hobby. The police say it remains the pastime of a minority of individuals, who take whole clutches of birds’ eggs from some of Scotland’s rarest birds. The eggs are then stored in secret collections. Operation Easter will, for the first time, be run...

Heavy rain has once again resulted in widespread flooding across the country. With climate change likely to cause further severe weather events in the coming years, methods of quickly predicting flooding will become increasingly important.

A team of engineers and scientists from the University of Exeter has developed a model, 1,000 times faster than existing flood prediction systems, which can rapidly predict when and where flooding will occur. The model uses artificial intelligence to ‘learn’, in the same way that biological neural networks in the human brain process data....

Reacting to George Osborne’s Budget, Richard Ayre, chairman of the Institute of Directors in the South West, said: “We applaud the Budget; it offers the South West still more positivity coming as it does so quickly after the Hinckley Point planning approval announcement.

“As a national policy, deficit reduction is a necessity, George Osborne has stuck to his guns and it’s just what we wanted to see.

“Businesses will be glad that the downward pressure on Corporation Tax will continue. Britain must become the most competitive place to do business, and this will undoubtedly...

Only one in five people (22%) had enough information on their Police and Crime Commissioner candidates to make an informed decision, a report published today by the Electoral Commission finds.

The independent elections watchdog recommends significant changes before the next PCC elections in 2016 and identifies wider lessons for the way elections and referendums are delivered.

Turnout

Turnout at last November's polls was 15.1% - the lowest recorded level of participation at a peacetime non-local government election in the UK.

The report found:

The...