Evening Briefing: Sunday 18 October 2026
- If you are waiting on the Budget: it is ten days away, and the author of the government’s review into young people out of work has now said ministers should cut benefits to pay for employment support. The chancellor is expected to use a tax on bank profits to fund cost-of-living measures including a new energy support package.
- If you have a child who might need A&E: the health secretary has asked the NHS to draw up urgent plans to end corridor care for children specifically, with new accident and emergency standards for children in England and corridor-care figures collected by age for the first time.
- If you drive or heat your home with oil: Brent reopened this evening at $108.82 after jumping 3.72% on Friday to $109.86, as reported attacks on shipping around the Strait of Hormuz hit a weekly record. Crude has spent much of the past eight months above $100.
Four Soldiers Named Among the Dead at the Alberta Base Fire
Four Canadian service members were killed and thirty-nine are in hospital, nineteen of them critically, after a grass fire ignited on a training range and strong winds drove it towards soldiers on exercise. The dead were named on Sunday ev…
French Arrests Double to 2,400 as Macron Speaks of Shame
About 2,400 people have been arrested and around a thousand police and gendarmes injured, the interior ministry says — double and sevenfold the figures available this morning — after 550,000 demonstrated against fuel prices, the cost of li…
St Petersburg Oil Terminal Struck as Kyiv Says Intelligence Is Back
Drones struck the St Petersburg Oil Terminal and the Ruchyi oil depot overnight, killing at least one person and injuring at least five, the city’s governor said. Separately the dispute reported this morning half resolved: Volodymyr Zelens…
Gulf States Invoke Joint Defence as Iran Holds Its Hormuz Terms
Gulf Cooperation Council foreign ministers, meeting in Manama, condemned Houthi attacks and invoked their joint defence agreement, under which an attack on one member concerns all six. Iran’s foreign minister said Tehran’s conditions for r…
Trump Endorses Netanyahu Nine Days Before Israel Votes
The American president has endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu for the Israeli election on 27 October, calling him “a Great Warrior Prime Minister, and an even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran”. He had withheld…
Farage Filmed Telling an Aide to Take the Deal Over a Candidate
The year-long undercover film was broadcast tonight. In footage released before it, the Reform leader is recorded discussing a mayoral candidate who had said a then-cabinet minister should “go home to the Caribbean”, telling his communicat…
Police Question a Reform Mayor Over Images Shown to a Colleague
Luke Campbell, the Reform mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire, was questioned under caution by Humberside Police this month over allegedly showing a senior female colleague four naked and sexualised images of himself in May. He has not been a…
Polanski Will Not Overturn the Zionism Motion and Is Not Sorry
The Green leader said he would not try to reverse the members’ motion declaring Zionism a form of racism, that party rules bar amendment until 2028, and that he respects “the democratic will of our members”. Asked whether Israel has a righ…
Milburn Says Cut Benefits to Pay for Youth Employment Support
The author of the government’s review into young people out of work and education says ministers should move money out of welfare to fund employment support: “We’ve got to have a different conversation about the welfare system, it just isn…
Health Secretary Calls the NHS Records Breaches a Disgrace
Yvette Cooper said staff accessing the medical records of the Nottingham attack victims, and possible breaches involving a man killed by a tiger, are “a disgrace” and that “there’s got to be proper respect for patients”. One trust has now…