United Kingdom

The Benny Hill Show is to be banned from U.K. screens as “offensive, obscene pornography” under a controversial new British law. A list of sexual acts including “spanking” have been banned from UK entertainment and pornography for being “offensive, obscene or potentially life endangering” and The Benny Hill Show, a British sitcom that aired between 1955 and 1991 in over 140 countries has been deemed unsuitable for British screens in 2016.

Child trafficking victims and unaccompanied children are going missing from UK local authority care homes at an “alarming high” rate according to a new report According to research published last month by ECPAT UK and Missing People, of the nearly 760 trafficked or unaccompanied children who disappeared from care homes across the UK last year, over 200 have not been found.

Police chiefs have said that around 350 victims have reported child sexual abuse within UK football clubs, deepening the scandal that is currently rocking British football. The National Police Chiefs’ Council said on Thursday that a “significant number of calls” had been received after several former players reported sex abuse by coaches when they were children. According to the NSPCC, a hotline that was set up to help victims report the abuse had received 860 calls in its first week.

The United Nations has dealt a bitter blow to the UK government, ordering them to immediately release Julian Assange from his “illegal detention”. The UN rejected a UK appeal against its previous ruling in favor of Assange as “inadmissible,” which means that both the UK and Sweden will be forced to free the WikiLeaks founder with immediate effect. “Now that all appeals are exhausted, I expect that the UK and Sweden will comply with their international obligations and set me free,” Julian Assange said in a statement.

While the term 'stress test' has been applied almost mockingly to European and US banks in an effort to create confidence for investors (because if the government sees risks 'contained' then why worry), this morning's Bank of England stress test results highlighted "capital inadequacies" for three major UK banks. While Barclays and Standard Chartered fell short, it is taxpayer-owned Royal Bank of Scotland that is slumping on a need to cut costs, raise capital, and sell assets.