Farage explotando el asesinato de Nowak en contra de los deseos de su familia, dice Starmer

• Keir Starmer has condemned rioting in Southampton on Tuesday night, saying it was “a time for serious work, not rage†in a direct attack on Nigel Farage's response to the murder of Henry Nowak.

• Alexis Boon, chief constable of Hampshire and Isle of Wight police, has said the force is “sorry for handcuffing and arresting Henry [Nowak]â€. (See 5.15pm and 5.39pm.)

• A former police officer has been forced to flee to a safe space after she was falsely accused online of being involved in the arrest of Henry Nowak.

For a full list of all the stories covered on the blog today, do scroll through the list of key event headlines near the top of the blog.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has said she wants to see the Oxford to Cambidge growth corridor become “a top-ten global innovation clusterâ€.

She welcomed the ambition in a speech to the scientific superpower conference where she said:

I am clear that in our modern economy – the impact of regional investment will be most powerfully felt if we focus on dense, interconnected city regions.

That is why at the centre of our plans are two critical regional growth corridors.

The Oxford to Cambridge growth corridor and the Northern Growth ccorridor.

These corridors share something in common and they share strong fundamentals.

They have world-leading universities, innovative firms, and real commercial momentum behind them.

Reeves also announced plans for a Greater Cambridge development corporation, which the Treasury said would “bring land together for development, invest in key sites and unlock stalled and derelict land – tackling housing affordability, cutting commuter delays, breaking down barriers to employment, and improving connectivityâ€.

Here is a fuller version of Alexis Boon, chief constable of Hampshire and Isle of Wight police, saying sorry for his officers arresting and handcuffing Henry Nowak. He told the BBC:

What was filmed there was a tragedy, an absolute tragedy. You can't help but be affected by it.

It's very difficult to watch. It's difficult footage to watch. And I really feel for the family at this time.

And I understand their point of view and why they're upset with the police.

We have said we are sorry for handcuffing and arresting Henry at that time.

What we have currently is an independent investigation into what happened.

I would just ask people not to prejudge an independent investigation or make assumptions, because it needs to consider all the evidence and let the officers talk about their point of view as well, so that there is a fair and independent investigation.

The key point here is that we arrested and handcuffed Henry. That is their point around dignity. And we have said sorry for that.

Alexis Boon, chief constable of Hampshire and Isle of Wight police, has said the force is “sorry for handcuffing and arresting Henry [Nowak]â€.

In an interview with the BBC, Boon said watching the bodycam footage of Nowak being arrested was “very difficult watchâ€.

He said:

What was filmed there is a tragedy, an absolute tragedy, you can't help but be affected by it.

I really feel for the family of Henry at this time.

Boon said he understood Nowak's family's “point of view and why they're upset with the policeâ€.

He said that was why the force have said “we are sorry for handcuffing and arresting Henry†at that time.

A former police officer has been forced to flee to a safe space after she was falsely accused online of being involved in the Henry Nowak murder, Jamie Grierson reports.

Christi Hill, who served as a police constable for 12 years, has criticised social media and AI platforms, including Elon Musk's Grok, for spreading the false claim that she was one of the officers who arrested Nowak as he lay dying after being stabbed by Vickrum Digwa. Hill and another officer have been wrongly identified online. The home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said on Tuesday that a male officer had been misidentified and that he had had to move out of his home.

Here is Jamie's story in full.

Paul Maskey, the Sinn Féin MP for West Belfast, has said that Keir Starmer's apology today over the killing of five people in the city in 1972 (see 2.37pm) is an “important moment†in the families' fight for justice. Maskey said:

Today, my thoughts are with the families of John Dougal, David McCafferty, Margaret Gargan, Paddy Butler and Fr Noel Fitzpatrick, as well as those relatives who sadly did not live to see this day.

For more than 50 years, these families have shown remarkable strength, perseverance and dignity in their pursuit of truth. Their tireless efforts have ensured that the reality of what happened in Springhill and Westrock on 9 July 1972 has been exposed and formally recognised.

The apology issued today by the British government is a significant acknowledgment of the grave injustice inflicted and represents an important moment in the families' long struggle for justice.

It is only because of their steadfast refusal to accept falsehoods and their determination to challenge the British government's narrative that we have reached this point.

The events of the Springhill/Westrock massacre continue to cast a long shadow over our community. They stand as a painful reminder not only of the lives that were taken, but also of the culture of impunity that surrounded the actions of the British Army.

This massacre is one of many tragic incidents that form part of Britain's legacy of conflict and loss in Ireland. It underlines the extraordinary lengths families have been forced to go to in order to secure truth, accountability and recognition.

Andy Burnham has issued this statement today about Henry Nowak in his capacity as mayor of Greater Manchester. He says there will be a further statement tomorrow.

Rightwingers argue that Henry Nowak was let down by the police because they took an accusation of racial abuse coming from a Sikh family more seriously than an accusation of stabbing from a white teenager. That was a key theme of Nigel Farage's TV statement yesterday (see 8.41am) and Kemi Badenoch's article in the Daily Mail today (see 10.10am).

But this argument is inherently flawed. Stephen Bush has a good column in the Financial Times today that leans heavily on the account of what happened given by the judge in his summary remarks at the end of the trial of Nowak's killer, Vickrum Digwa. (See 11.11am.)

Here's an extract. Bush says:

I'm not saying that the Hampshire police emerge blamelessly from this story … But I am saying that it is simply not tenable to suggest that the problem here was that the police were more preoccupied with accusations of racism than an act of murder. The police were taken in by the word of two people at the scene against the word of one. Unless what you want is for the police to treat any allegation of racism as automatically specious and malign, and to take the word of one white Briton over two people from an ethnic minority, Digwa's lie was always going to succeed briefly.

There is a reasonable debate to be had about how suspects are treated. But we should be clear that the issue here wasn't that the Hampshire police decided that an accusation of racism was more serious than a stabbing. It was that, faced with two people giving a false account of what had happened and one person telling the truth, they sided with two over one.

Vladimir Putin's representative in the UK has been summoned to the Foreign Office after a Russian drone struck a building in Romania, the Press Association reports. PA says:

The Russian ambassador in London Andrei Kelin was called in for a dressing down over the incident last week which left two people injured and violated the airspace of a Nato member state.

The incident saw a drone crash into a block of flats in the eastern Romanian city of Galati, near the country's border with Ukraine.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said: “Injuring innocent civilians on Nato territory is unacceptable and a stark reminder of the threat that Ukrainian civilians are having to endure on a daily basis.â€

Kelin was summoned to meet a senior official who “strongly condemned this grave escalationâ€, the spokesman said.

“Russia continues to show blatant disregard for civilian life, firing hundreds of drones and missiles into Ukraine and threatening its near neighbours. Recent warnings for diplomats to leave Kyiv were irresponsible and unjustified,†the spokesman said.

“The UK stands firmly with Ukraine, Romania and all of our Nato allies and we will defend every inch of Nato territory.â€

Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Cabinet Office minister, has rejected suggestions that Keir Starmer's use of disappearing messages in WhatsApp amounted to some sort of “cover-up†of information relating to Peter Mandelson.

Speaking at the start of the debate on the Mandelson files released on Monday, Thomas-Symonds said due process was followed when material was prepared for publication.

The Tory MP Edward Leigh said that Starmer was using WhatsApp all the time and that having disappearing messages on was contrary to the advice given after the Covid inquiry.

Leigh put it to the minister:

Everybody knows that a mistake was made. People are very forgiving to the prime minister who made a mistake. What they're not forgiving to is some sort of cover-up, that all these numerous text messages and WhatsApp messages have suddenly vanished.

In response to this claim, Thomas-Symonds said he did not accept there was a cover-up. He explained:

I reject it for this reason: this was a process that was quite rightly driven by and led by officials without political interference, working with the intelligence and security committee, that is very well respected across this house and is a cross-party committee.

There is not a single redaction in those documents that came about because of ministerial decisions, simply because we have not played that part in the process, nor should we have done. So I completely reject the idea of a cover-up.

Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, has confirmed that she, like Keir Starmer, uses disappearing messages in WhatsApp. On a visit today, asked about this, she said:

Like most ministers, I do have disappearing messages in WhatsApp, but everything in the humble address was fully complied with by ministers across government, including myself and other Treasury ministers, as you would rightly expect.