Ten Things You Need to Know Today: Saturday 2 Sep 2017

Donald Trump has asked Congress for $7.8bn (£6bn) as an initial
down payment to help with recovery efforts in Texas and Louisiana.
The authorities say there will be further requests for funds when
the full impact of Hurricane Harvey is clearer. The US President is
to visit Texas for a second time today. Some residents have been
allowed to return to their homes.

Councils are using bin men to “snoop” on households and report
families who fail to recycle, says The Times. An investigation
found that local authorities have ordered workers to rifle through
bins and to record when recycling was “contaminated” with food or
waste. Although infringements generally lead to fines of £60, in
some areas householders were threatened with penalties of up to
£20,000 for leaving out bins for too long.

A sacked Labour frontbencher claims the “floppy left” is failing
vulnerable children because it will not confront the truth about
sex crimes involving street-grooming. Sarah Champion  was
dismissed from the shadow cabinet by Jeremy Corbyn last month after
she wrote in an article for The Sun claiming that Britain “has a
problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white
girls”.

Tipsters who earn commission on the traffic they send to online
bookmakers are raking in money by deliberately recommending long
shot bets that are unlikely to win, reports The Guardian. The
tipsters have a strong vested interest in seeing their suggested
bets lose because they take up to a 30% cut of the losses their
followers make to bookmakers. Earlier this week, it was revealed
that the industry was harvesting people’s data to target low-income
gamblers.

Astronomers searching for signs of intelligent alien life in the
universe have revealed they detected 15 mysterious radio signals
from a dwarf galaxy three billion light years away. However, a
researcher said: “I don’t think they are coming from intelligent
civilisations.” The team is part of the Breakthrough Listen
project, set up by Professor Stephen Hawking to discover whether
we’re alone in the universe.

The pro-hunting lobby claims the National Trust is “painting
targets” by publishing details of hunting meetings. The trust came
under fire for posting on its website the times and locations of
legal hunts on its land. The field sports lobby said such
information would be invaluable to saboteurs and animal rights
activists, increasing the risk of violent disruption.

Kenya’s supreme court has declared Uhuru Kenyatta’s victory in
the presidential election invalid and ordered a new vote to be held
within 60 days. The court had heard that electronic voting results
were hacked and manipulated in favour of Kenyatta, who was declared
the election winner with 54% of the vote. The ruling sets up a new
race for the presidency between Kenyatta and the veteran opposition
leader Raila Odinga. 

The Yellow Pages will stop printing from January 2019 after more
than five decades, its owner has announced. Yell is to fully
digitise the directory business, bringing to an end the
publication’s 51-year run. The iconic yellow-papered publication
has run famous advertisements over the years, including the “JR
Hartley” campaign in the 1980s and the “French Polisher”.

A trade union claims that Sports Direct bosses asked warehouse
workers to press ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ emoji buttons to say how they
felt about their working conditions and then used fingerprint
recognition to identify unhappy workers. A spokesman asked: “Would
you risk having hours withheld, possibly losing your job and being
called in by management because you indicated dissatisfaction with
your work environment?”

The coastguard says the gas cloud which affected hundreds of
people on the East Sussex coast could have been caused by a
shipwreck. The unknown haze caused evacuations and led to 150
people seeing treatment for streaming eyes, sore throats and
nausea, after it hit the coast on Sunday. Some of those who
experienced it said they could smell chlorine, but the fire service
said it was “extremely unlikely” to have been the chemical.