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Gun debate in Britain tends to focus on what is happening in the US, but more than 700,000 firearm owners live in England and Wales. Who are they, and why do some want laws relaxed?
“It’s frustrating for me that when you tell someone you own a gun you’re instantly labelled a weirdo. It’s like a secret society,” Callum Long-Collins explains from a gun shop in Botley Mills, Hampshire. He owns seven firearms, but did not want to show them in his own home in case it gave the wrong impression and scared the neighbours. “What people jump to is that I own guns for illicit reasons. But I have absolutely no intention of using a gun in the bad way – I just enjoy the sport of shooting,” he adds.

Long-Collins runs a YouTube channel called English Shooting, which campaigns for changes in gun regulations. Currently, firearms including manually-loaded rifles and shotguns are permitted for sporting and hunting purposes once a holder obtains a licence, issued by local police forces. But Long-Collins believes semi-automatic rifles and handguns should also be added to the list, and dismisses potential safety concerns. “[For most people] in the UK, you only see guns being used by the police or in video games. People aren’t going to know the procedures and the application process,” he says.

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A lawyer representing victims of the San Bernadino killers will file a legal brief telling Apple to cooperate with the FBI in its investigation.

Stephen Larson, a former judge, said he intends to file legal paperwork on their behalf next month.

The FBI has ordered Apple to disable the security software on the killer’s handset but the tech giant has refused. In a new statement FBI Director James Comey said the demand was “about the victims and justice”. “They were targeted by terrorists, and they need to know why, how this could happen,” said Stephen Larson.

He declined to say how many of the victims he was representing, but did add that he would not be charging them a fee.Fourteen people were killed and 22 injured when gunman Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik opened fire in California last December.

However, Apple chief executive Tim Cook has described the FBI’s order as “dangerous”, “chilling” and “unprecedented”. He has said the firm would have to build a new operating system in order to comply. “We strongly believe the only way to guarantee that such a powerful tool isn’t abused and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands is to never create it,” the firm states in a Q&A on the Apple website.

Facebook and Google have voiced support for Apple in the dispute. “We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist’s passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly,” said the FBI in its statement. “That’s it. We don’t want to break anyone’s encryption or set a master key loose on the land. “Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can’t look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don’t follow this lead.”

Last week anti-virus creator John McAfee offered to unlock the iPhone for them. “It will take us three weeks,” he told Business Insider, adding that he would eat his shoe on television if his team failed.

A fire which broke out at a building planned to house migrants in eastern Germany was greeted with cheers from some onlookers, police say.

The fire in the town of Bautzen in the early hours of Sunday morning destroyed the roof of a former hotel, which was being converted into a migrant shelter. Police said some of the crowd tried to prevent firefighters from extinguishing the blaze, which destroyed the roof.

The premier of Saxony, Stanislaw Tillich, described them as “criminals”. Police suspect arson. The investigation includes detectives who normally deal with extremist crimes. No-one was hurt.

Only a few days ago, protesters in another Saxon town, Clausnitz, blocked the arrival of a bus taking migrants to accommodation. They shouted, “We are the people”, the slogan of the 1989 peaceful uprising which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. The director of the Clausnitz migrant shelter is a member of the anti-immigrant Alternativ fuer Deutschland (AfD) party.

Police in Bautzen said many in the crowd watched the fire and commented with “unashamed delight”. Two drunken men were arrested after they refused to leave the scene.

The converted hotel was supposed to house 300 migrants. In a further sign of anti-migrant sentiment, police in the Brandenburg region are investigating the distribution of leaflets urging “absolute resistance” against “foreigner invasion”. The leaflets, put through letterboxes in the town of Nauen, are the suspected work of neo-Nazis. They also give instructions on making firebombs and using explosives.

On Saturday, police defended their response to events in Clausnitz after two videos surfaced online. The first video showed 100 hostile demonstrators preventing a bus from off-loading migrants into their accommodation on Thursday. A second appeared to show police roughly manhandling a boy from the bus into the building.

The regional police chief said there were too few police to keep the protesters away, and three of those inside the bus had provoked the crowd. Germany received over a million asylum claims in 2015 and has been widely admired for opening its doors. But with that have come increasing reports of anti-migrant incidents amid fears of a backlash, correspondents say.

The UK will be taking a “big gamble” with its security if it votes to leave the European Union, defence secretary Michael Fallon has claimed.

The “collective weight” of partnerships such as the EU made it easier to deal with global threats. David Cameron will face MPs later as he presents his case for the UK remaining within the 28-member organisation. But Mayor of London Boris Johnson has again insisted that the country has a “great future” outside the EU. Mr Johnson’s declaration on Sunday that he backs EU exit is being seen as a significant blow to Mr Cameron’s campaign to remain in the EU. The prime minister will outline details to MPs in a Commons statement, starting at 15.30 GMT, of last week’s deal with EU leaders on reforms to the terms of the UK’s membership, which paved the way for him to call a referendum on EU membership on 23 June.
He says the deal strengthens British sovereignty and the UK will be “safer and stronger” remaining in the EU.

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Russia has said bomb attacks which killed at least 140 people in Syria were aimed at “subverting attempts” to reach a political settlement.
Russia’s foreign ministry condemned the “atrocious crimes of extremists”. Sunday’s attacks hit the Shia shrine of Sayyida Zeinab, south of Syria’s capital Damascus, and the city of Homs.

So-called Islamic State (IS) said it carried out the attacks. Both targeted areas dominated by Islamic minorities reviled by IS.
Four blasts in Sayyida Zeinab killed at least 83 people, according to state media. A monitoring group reported that 57 people, mainly civilians, were killed in a double car bombing in Homs.

The UK-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) put the toll from the Damascus attacks at 120 and said they were among the deadliest to occur during the whole of Syria’s civil war. SOHR also reported on Monday that heavy fighting had cut off the government’s only supply route to the northern city of Aleppo. IS and other Islamist militia had cut the road between Aleppo and the town of Khanasser to the south-east, it said.
More than 250,000 Syrians have been killed in the conflict.

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