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Former world heavyweight champion Joseph Parker says he is “focused and prepared” before Saturday’s fight against Fabio Wardley, who hopes to rely on his punching power to get through their bout at London’s O2 Arena.

READ MORE: ‘I watched Parker from the pub, now I’m fighting him’

Listen to Joseph Parker v Fabio Wardley on BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Sounds and the BBC Sport website & app on Saturday, 25 October.

Simon Calder took to This Morning to reveal an often overlooked destination in Europe that he dubbed ‘absolutely gorgeous’ and a ‘bargain’

Travel expert Simon Calder has been smitten with one particular destination since the 1980s. Now, this hidden gem is finally gaining recognition – yet Simon claims “prices are really back to kinda 1990s levels.”

Albania is emerging as a must-visit tourism hotspot, but as Simon revealed on ITV’s This Morning in a segment last year, he’s been championing it long before it became trendy. It comes as Wizz Air launches budget £20 flights to the country.

Speaking to presenters Ben Shepherd and Cat Deeley from his accommodation in Durres, Albania, Simon explained he had arrived the previous evening.

He said: “The sun has come out, it’s absolutely gorgeous and it’s one of the most historic and beautiful cities in Albania.”

Beyond its stunning scenery, Simon highlighted Albania’s “incredible bargains”, reports the Express.

A pizza and pint will set you back roughly £6, whilst his coach journey from the airport to his accommodation – spanning 30 miles – would have cost merely a couple of quid; had he not missed the final departure.

The country currently has sunny weather forecast for the next couple of weeks, with highs between 26-28C daily, allowing you to enjoy the summer for longer.

Simon also claimed Albania’s residents are amongst the most hospitable and warm-hearted you’ll encounter anywhere.

He revealed that once locals realised he’d missed his transport, they immediately rallied around to assist him in securing a taxi – even advising him on fair pricing to prevent any potential overcharging.

He noted that Albania currently sits outside the mainstream package holiday market, though he anticipates tour operators will catch on within the coming years.

Direct flights to Albania depart daily from key UK airports – and with this slice of paradise merely three hours away, it deserves a spot on your travel wishlist. If, like Simon, you fancy staying in Durres, then there’s plenty to keep you occupied.

Durres boasts a colossal Roman amphitheatre featuring preserved mosaics that visitors can explore and marvel at.

TripAdvisor gives this attraction top marks, with one reviewer calling it essential viewing.

One holidaymaker shared: “This place is absolutely wonderful. I noticed that a lot of people take pictures from the outside and do not wish to spend 200 lek which is little less then £2 to go and see it inside. I think it’s their loss and they choose not to support further recovery of this beautiful place.”

But if lounging on the beach is more your cup of tea, then Durres delivers on that front too – it’s packed with stretches of pristine white sand and sparkling turquoise waters.

Following a busy day of sightseeing, you’ll have built up quite an appetite, so why not sample some of Durres’s freshly caught seafood?

Gorgeous European train journey between two spectacular cities

‘I visited 17 European cities in a year — skip these 3 for a better time’

Squid, fish and octopus are all on offer and taste incredible thanks to being so freshly hauled in and prepared.

Another mouth-watering speciality is Japrak – minced meat and rice wrapped in vine leaves and slow-cooked to create rich, hearty flavours.

FRANKIE Bridge made a very cryptic comment about her stress levels being ‘at an all time high.’

This comes amid her feud with both Rochelle Humes and Myleene Klass.

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Posting a full-length selfie in the gym, the Loose Women star flaunted her washboard abs in a black crop top and matching leggings.

However, the star made a somewhat pointed hint at the feud and her current mood with her captions.

“After being prescribed meditation and relaxation on holiday by @balancedboss I’m back at the gym today.

“My cortisol was at an all time high. Stress levels max. So we took it back to basics while I was away.”

“I’ve come back feeling so much calmer and ready to start again.”

Making another hint of needing recovery time, she added: “Closely followed by my travel recovery ritual.”

Rochelle Vs Frankie

This comes after The Sun revealed a secret feud behind the scenes with her former bandmate Rochelle Humes.

All five members of The Saturdays insisted there was no bad blood when they parted ways in 2014.

However, The Sun previously revealed that Rochelle and Frankie’s 24-year friendship may have hit the rocks.

The duo were invited to watch the tennis at Wimbledon as As guests of sponsor Evian.

They mingled with other celebrities and guests just yards away from one another in a suite.

However, they failed to actually interact with each other as they enjoyed the delights of the hydrangea building nearCourtOne.

An insider told The Sun: “It was clear the women were keeping their distance. They sat on opposite sides of the suite and kept to themselves. 

“While Frankie posed for pictures with S Club’s Rachel Stevens, Rochelle took selfies with her husband Marvin and his I’m A Celebrity campmate Sam Thompson.

“Even though they were pleasant to each other when they did brush shoulders, they didn’t spend any extra time together than they had to, in between being amicable while passing each other en route to watch the tennis.”

How is Myleene involved?

We also told how Myleene was locked in a feud with both Frankie and her Saturdays’ bandmate Rochelle. 

Before all the drama, Myleene and Frankie – who both appeared on Loose Women – attended Rochelle’s hen do in 2012.

But the former Hear’Say star claimed she saw her fiance Graham Quinn, 51, and an unnamed celebrity “unzipping” each other at her birthday party.

Both of the stars were clients of her now ex-husband, who worked as a showbiz security manager.

Their continued friendship is said to have caused a rift as Myleene, 47, reportedly believes Rochelle took Graham’s side.

But they have not been seen on-screen together on the ITV show since an awkward episode last year.

At the time of the first report, representatives for Rochelle and Myleene did not reply to a request for comment.

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Keith Meister is worried. The 63-year-old orthopedic surgeon feels as if he’s screaming into a void, his expert opinion falling on deaf ears.

Meister, whose slight Southern twang sweeps into conversation through his 20-plus-year career in the Lone Star State as the Texas Rangers’ team physician, is a leading voice in baseball’s pitching-injury epidemic. Meister wants the sport to err on the side of caution and create change to save pitchers’ arms. The trend, Meister says, stems from the industry-wide push to increase speed, spin and break at all costs.

While MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Assn. bicker about what’s causing the problem and how to solve it, the doctor provides his perspective. He just wants the 17-year-old high schooler, the 23-year-old college pitcher, and the 32-year-old MLB veteran to stop showing up at his office.

“It’s not going to change at the lower levels until it changes at the highest level,” Meister said in a phone interview. “I don’t see a motivation within Major League Baseball to change anything that would enhance the level of safety.”

MLB asked Meister to sit on a committee examining the growth in pitcher injuries about 18 months ago, he said. Meister says the committee never met. (MLB did not respond to a request for comment about the committee.)

Injury is among the biggest risks for youth pitchers looking for the all-too-sought-after faster fastball. Their quest to emulate their heroes, such as hard-throwing veteran starters and stars Justin Verlander and Jacob deGrom, has caused them to need the same surgeries as the pros.

Trickling down, it’s the teenager, the budding pitching prospect desperate to land his Division I scholarship, who is hurt the most. MLB teams wave around multimillion-dollar signing bonuses for the MLB Draft. Those same pitchers hurt their elbows after pushing their abilities to the extreme, calling into action surgeons such as Meister.

“It’s an even bigger problem than it appears,” said David Vaught, a baseball historian, author and history professor at Texas A&M. “This goes back into high school or before that, this notion that you throw as hard as possible. … It’s so embedded, embedded in the baseball society.”

Tommy John surgery saves careers. But as pitchers across baseball push for higher velocity, more hurlers are going under the knife — for a first time, a second time and in some instances, a third or fourth procedure.

MLB pitching velocity steadily rose from 2008 to 2023, with average fastball velocity going from 91.9 mph to 94.2. According to Meister, the total number of elbow ligament surgeries in professional baseball in 2023 was greater than in the 1990s altogether. A 2015 study revealed 56.8% of Tommy John surgeries are for athletes in the 15- to 19-year-old age range.

“It’s like the soldiers on the front lines — they come into the tent with bullet wounds,” Meister said. “You take the bullets out, you patch them back up and you send them back out there to get shot up again.”

“It’s like the soldiers on the front lines — they come into the tent with bullet wounds,” Orthopedic surgeon Keith Meister said about performing Tommy John surgeries. “You take the bullets out, you patch them back up and you send them back out there to get shot up again.”

(Tom Fox / The Dallas Morning News)

MLB released a report on pitcher injuries in December 2024. The much-anticipated study concluded that increased pitching velocity, “optimizing stuff” — which MLB defines as movement characteristics of pitches (spin, vertical movement and horizontal movement) — and pitchers using maximum effort were the “most significant” causes of the increase in arm injuries.

Meister was interviewed for the report. He knew all that years ago. He was yelling from the proverbial rooftop as MLB took more than a year (the league commissioned the study in 2023) to conclude what the doctor considered basic knowledge.

“Nothing there that hadn’t been talked about before, and no suggestion for what needs to be changed,” Meister said to The Times Wednesday.

Although pitching development labs such as Driveline Baseball and Tread Athletics provide fresh ideas, Meister said he does not entirely blame them for the epidemic.

It’s basic economics. There’s a demand for throwing harder and the industry is filling the void.

However, Meister sees the dramatic increase in velocity for youth pitchers, such as a 10-mph boost in velocity within six months, as dangerous.

“That’s called child abuse,” Meister said. “The body can’t accommodate. It just can’t. It’s like taking a Corolla and dropping a Ferrari engine in it and saying, ‘Go ahead and drive that car, take it on the track, put the gas pedal to the metal and ask for that car to hold itself together.’ It’s impossible.”

On the other end of the arm-injury epidemic is the player lying on his back, humming along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” as an air-cast-like device engulfs his arm, pressurizing the forearm and elbow.

The noise of the giant arm sleeve fills the room of Beimel Elite Athletics, a baseball training lab based in Torrance — owned by former MLB pitcher Joe Beimel. It generates Darth Vader-like noises, compressing up and down with a Krissshhhh Hhhwoooo… Krissshhhh Hhhwoooo.

Greg Dukeman, a Beimel Elite Athletics pitching coach whose 6-foot-8 frame towers over everyone in the facility, quipped that the elbow of the pitcher undergoing treatment was “barking.”

For professional and youth players alike, this technology, along with red-light therapy — a non-intrusive light treatment that increases cellular processes to heal tissue — and periodic ice baths, is just one example of how Beimel attempts to treat athletes as they tax their bodies, hoping to heal micro-tears in the arm without surgical intervention.

With little to no research publicly available on how high-velocity-and-movement training methods are hurting or — albeit highly unlikely — helping pitchers’ elbows and shoulders, Meister said, it’s often free rein with little — if any — guardrails.

Josh Mitchell, director of player development at Beimel’s Torrance lab, said that’s not exactly the case in their baseball performance program. Beimel will only work with youth athletes who are ready to take the next step, he said.

“You got the 9- and 10-year-olds, they’re not ready yet,” Mitchell said. “The 13- and 14-year-olds, before they graduate out of the youth and into our elite program, we’ll introduce the [velocity] training because they’re going to get it way more in that next phase.”

Beimel uses motion capture to provide pitching feedback, and uses health technology that coincides with its athletes having to self-report daily to track overexertion and determine how best to use their bodies.

Their goal is to provide as much support to their athletes as possible, using their facilities as a gym, baseball lab and pseudo health clinic.

Joe Beimel pitched for eight teams, including the Dodgers, over the course of a 13-year career.

(Ted S. Warren / Associated Press)

Mitchell knows the pleasure and pain of modern-day pitching development. The Ridgway, Pa., native’s professional career was waning at the Single-A level before the Minnesota Twins acquired him in the minor league portion of the Rule 5 Draft.

The Twins, Mitchell said, embraced the cutting-edge technique of pitching velocity, seeing improvements across the board as he reached the Double-A level for the first time in his career in 2021. But Mitchell, whose bushy beard and joking personality complement a perpetually smiling visage, turned serious when explaining the end of his career.

“I’m gonna do what I know is gonna help me get bigger, stronger, faster,” said Mitchell, who jumped from throwing around 90 miles per hour to reaching as high as 98 mph on the radar gun. “And I did — to my arm’s expense, though.”

Mitchell underwent two Tommy John surgeries in less than a year and a half.

Mitchell became the wounded soldier that Meister so passionately recounted. Now, partially because of advanced training methods, youth athletes are more likely to visit that proverbial medic’s tent.

“There’s a saying around [young] baseball players that if you’re not throwing like, over 80 miles per hour and you’re not risking Tommy John, you’re not throwing hard enough,” said Daniel Acevedo, an orthopedic surgeon based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., who mostly sees youth-level athletes.

In MLB’s report, an independent pitching development coach, who was unnamed, blamed “baseball society” for creating a velocity obsession. That velocity obsession has become a career route, an industry, a success story for baseball development companies across the country.

Driveline focuses on the never-ending “how” of baseball development. How can the pitcher throw harder, with more break, or spin? And it’s not just the pitchers. How can the hitter change his swing pattern to hit the ball farther and faster? Since then, baseball players from across levels have flocked to Driveline’s facilities and those like it to learn how to improve and level up.

“Maybe five or six years ago, if you throw 90-plus, you have a shot to play beyond college,” said Dylan Gargas, Arizona pitching coordinator for Driveline Baseball. “Now that barrier to entry just keeps getting higher and higher because guys throw harder.”

MLB players have even ditched their clubs midseason in hopes to unlock something to improve their pitching repertoire. Boston Red Sox right-handed pitcher Walker Buehler left the Dodgers last season to test himself at the Cressey Sports Performance training center near Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., before returning to eventually pitch the final out of the 2024 World Series.

Driveline is not alone.

Ben Brewster, co-founder of Tread Athletics, another baseball development company based in North Carolina, said high-school-aged players have been attracted to his performance facility because they see the results that MLB players and teammates achieve after continued training sessions.

Tread Athletics claims to have a role in more than 250 combined MLB draft picks or free agent signings, and says it has helped more than 1,000 high school players earn college opportunities.

Kansas City Royals left-hander Cole Ragans achieved a 4.4-mph increase from 2022 to 2023, the largest in MLB that year. With the velocity increase after his work at Tread Athletics, Ragans went from a league-average relief pitcher to a postseason ace in less than a year.

Kansas City Royals left-hander Cole Ragans achieved a 4.4-mph increase from 2022 to 2023, the largest in MLB that year, after his work with Tread Athletics.

(Charlie Riedel / Associated Press)

So what makes Ragans’ development different from that of a teenage prospect reaching out to Tread Athletics?

“Ragans still could go from 92-94 miles per hour to 96 to 101,” Brewster said. “He still has room, but relatively speaking, he was a lot closer to his potential than, like, a random 15-year-old kid throwing 73 miles per hour.”

Meister knows Ragans well. When the southpaw was a member of the Rangers’ organization, the orthopedic surgeon performed Tommy John surgery on Ragans twice. (Ragans has also battled a rotator cuff strain this season and has been out since early June.)

“These velocities and these spin rates are very worrisome,” Meister said. “And we see that in, in and of itself, just in looking at how long these Tommy John procedures last.”

Throwing hard is not an overnight experience. Brewster shared a stern warning for the pitching development process, using weightlifting as an example. He said weightlifters can try to squat 500 pounds daily without days off, or attempt to squat 500 pounds with their knees caving in and buckling because of terrible form. There’s no 100% safe way to lift 500 pounds, just like there is no fail-safe way of throwing 100 mph. There’s always risk. It’s all in the form. Lifting is a science, and so is pitching — finding the safest way to train to increase velocity without injury.

“The responsible way to squat 500 pounds would be going up in weight over time, having great form and monitoring to make sure you’re not going too heavy, too soon,” Brewster said. “When it comes to pitching, you can manage workload. You can make sure that mechanically, they don’t have any glaring red flags.”

Brewster added that Tread, as of July, is actively creating its own data sets to explore how UCLs are affected by training methods, and how to use load management to skirt potential injuries.

MLB admitted to a “lack [of] comprehensive data to examine injury trends for amateur players” in its December report. It points to a lack of college data as well, where most Division I programs use such technology.

The Andrews Sports Medicine & Orthopedic Center based in Birmingham, Ala. — founded by James Andrews, the former orthopedic surgeon to the stars — provided in-house data within MLB’s report, showing that the amount of UCL surgeries conducted for high school pitchers in their clinic has risen to as high as 60% of the total since 2015, while remaining above 40% overall through 2023.

Meister said baseball development companies may look great on the periphery — sending youth players to top colleges and the professional ranks — but it’s worth noting what they aren’t sharing publicly.

“What they don’t show you is that [youth athletes] are walking into our offices, three or six months or nine months later.”

The president’s frequent attacks against Jerome Powell have sparked concerns about the independence of the central bank.

United States President Donald Trump has again attacked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, stepping up criticism that has sparked concerns over efforts to undermine the independence of the country’s central bank.

In remarks before religious figures at the White House on Monday, Trump called Powell a “knucklehead” and insisted that he should lower interest rates.

“He’s a knucklehead. Stupid guy. He really is,” Trump said, insisting that inflation is not currently a serious concern for the economy and that interest rates should be brought down to one percent.

The US president’s frequent barbs and threats to replace Powell have previously spooked markets, wary of what some investors see as an effort to bring the central bank and the crafting of monetary policy under greater political control.

The central bank chief has thus far refused to budge on the question of interest rates, saying that it is still too early to bring them down given sources of potential disruption such as changing tariff policy.

Trump said over the weekend that he is planning to place important US trading partners such as the European Union and Mexico under a 30 percent tariff starting on August 1, and has warned other countries they could face similar rates or worse if they do not swiftly come to individual agreements with the US.

Kevin Hassett, an economic adviser to Trump, also stated over the weekend that the president might be able to fire Powell for cause, citing higher-than-expected expenses for the renovation of the bank’s headquarters.

The Fed has been in the process of renovating two buildings for its offices in Washington, DC for several years, with a current cost estimate of $2.5bn, about $700m more than originally anticipated.

Such cost overruns are far from atypical in Washington, but officials in the Trump administration have pounced on them as a potential door to firing Powell, whom Trump has long criticised.

Trump’s top budget adviser Russell Vought said last week that the White House is “extremely troubled” by the expense of the project, which critics saw as an effort to pile additional pressure on the central bank. Vought played an important role in the controversial conservative blueprint for a second Trump term known as Project 2025, which envisions a radical restructuring of government and consolidation of greater power in the executive branch.

A spokesperson for the US Inspector General, a nonpartisan government watchdog, says that Powell has requested a review of the cost overruns.

The United States dollar has had its worst first six months of the year since 1973, as President Donald Trump’s economic policies have prompted global investors to sell their greenback holdings, threatening the currency’s “safe-haven” status.

The dollar index, which measures the currency’s strength against a basket of six others, including the pound, euro and yen, fell 10.8 percent in the first half of 2025.

President Trump’s stop-start tariff war, and his attacks that have led to worries over the independence of the Federal Reserve, have undermined the appeal of the dollar as a safe bet. Economists are also worried about Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax bill, currently under debate in the US Congress.

The landmark legislation is expected to add trillions of dollars to the US debt pile over the coming decade and has raised concerns about the sustainability of Washington’s borrowing, prompting an exodus from the US Treasury market.

Meanwhile, gold has hit record highs this year, on continued buying by central banks worried about devaluation of their dollar assets.

What has happened to the dollar?

On April 2, the Trump administration unveiled tariffs on imports from most countries around the world, denting confidence in the world’s largest economy and causing a selloff in US financial assets.

More than $5 trillion was erased from the value of the benchmark S&P 500 index of shares in the three days after “Liberation Day”, as Trump described the day of his tariffs announcement. US Treasuries also saw clear-outs, lowering their price and sending debt costs for the US government sharply higher.

Faced with a revolt in financial markets, Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, except for exports from China, on April 9. While trade tensions with China – the world’s second-largest economy – have since eased, investors remain wary of holding dollar-linked assets.

Last month, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced that it had cut its US growth outlook for this year from 2.2 percent in March to just 1.6 percent, even as inflation has slowed.

Looking ahead, Republican leaders are trying to push through Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act through Congress before July 4. The bill would extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, slash healthcare and welfare spending and increase borrowing.

While some legislators believe it could take until August to pass the bill, the aim would be to raise the borrowing limit on the country’s $36.2 trillion debt pile. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said it would raise Federal debt by $3.3 trillion by 2034.

That would significantly raise the government’s debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio from 124 percent today, raising concerns about long-term debt sustainability. Meanwhile, annual deficits – when state spending exceeds tax revenues – would rise to 6.9 percent of GDP from about 6.4 percent in 2024.

So far, Trump’s attempts to lower spending through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have fallen short of expectations. And though import tariffs have raised revenue for the government, they’ve been paid for – in the form of higher costs – by American consumers.

The upshot is that Trump’s unpredictable policies, which prompted Moody’s rating agency to strip the US government of its top credit score in May, have slowed US growth prospects this year and dented the demand for its currency.

The dollar has also trended down on expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates to support the United States’ economy, urged on by Trump, with two to three reductions expected by the end of this year, according to levels implied by futures contracts.

Is the US becoming a ‘less attractive’ destination?

Owing to its dominance in trade and finance, the dollar has been the world’s currency anchor. In the 1980s, for instance, many Gulf countries began pegging their currencies to the greenback.

Its influence doesn’t stop there. Though the US accounts for one-quarter of global GDP, 54 percent of world exports were denominated in dollars in 2023, according to the Atlantic Council.

Its dominance in finance is even greater. About 60 percent of all bank deposits are denominated in dollars, while nearly 70 percent of international bonds are quoted in the US currency.

Meanwhile, 57 percent of the world’s foreign currency reserves – assets held by central banks – are held in dollars, according to the IMF.

But the dollar’s reserve status is supported by confidence in the US economy, its financial markets and its legal system.

And Trump is changing that. Karsten Junius, chief economist at Bank J Safra Sarasin, says “investors are beginning to realise that they’re over-exposed to US assets.”

Indeed, foreigners own $19 trillion of US equities, $7 trillion of US Treasuries and $5 trillion of US corporate bonds, according to Apollo Asset Management.

If investors continue to trim their positions, the dollar’s value could continue to come under sustained pressure.

“The US has become a less attractive place to invest these days… US assets are not as safe as they used to be,” Junius told Al Jazeera.

What are the consequences of a lower-value dollar?

Many within the Trump administration argue that the costs of the US dollar’s reserve status outweigh the benefits – because that raises the cost of US exports.

Stephen Miran, chair of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, has said high dollar valuations place “undue burdens on our firms and workers, making their products and labour uncompetitive on the global stage”.

“The dollar’s overvaluation has been one factor contributing to the US’s loss of competitiveness over the years, and… tariffs are a reaction to this unpleasant reality,” he added.

At first blush, a lower dollar would indeed make US goods cheaper to overseas buyers and make imports more expensive, helping to reduce the country’s trade deficits. However, these typical trade effects remain in flux due to ongoing tariff threats.

For developing countries, a weaker greenback will lower the local currency cost of repaying dollar debt, providing relief to heavily indebted countries like Zambia, Ghana or Pakistan.

Elsewhere, a weaker dollar should boost commodity prices, increasing export revenues for countries exporting oil, metals or agricultural goods such as Indonesia, Nigeria and Chile.

Have other currencies done well?

Since the start of Trump’s second term in office, the greenback’s slide has upended widespread predictions that his trade war would do greater damage to economies outside the US, while also spurring US inflation – strengthening the currency against its rivals.

Instead, the euro has risen 13 percent to above $1.17 as investors continue to focus on growth risks inside the US. At the same time, demand has risen for other safe assets like German and French government bonds.

For American investors, the weaker dollar has also encouraged equity investments abroad. The Stoxx 600 index, a broad measure across European stocks, has risen roughly 15 percent since the start of 2025.

Converted back into dollars, that gain amounts to 23 percent.

Meanwhile, inflation – again belying predictions – has come down from 3 percent in January to 2.3 percent in May.

According to Junius, there is no significant threat to the dollar’s status as the world’s de facto reserve currency anytime soon.

But “that doesn’t mean that you can’t have more of a weakening in the US dollar,” he said. “In fact, we continue to expect that between now and the end of the year.”

June 22 (UPI) — Britain and its NATO allies will increase defense spending by at much as 5% of GDP in the next decade, officials have announced.

The alliance’s 32 member states agreed to the plan in advance of a heads of nations summit this week in The Hague. The meeting is scheduled to take place Tuesday and Wednesday, where the new spending increase is expected to be approved.

This is a boost from 2% of defense spending, and seen as a play to appease the Trump administration in addition to addressing a growing military threat from Russia and China.

The hike to 5% of GDP spending would bring NATO back to defense spending not seen since the Cold War. By comparison, Britain has said it has plans to increase that nation’s defense spending by closer to 3% by 2034, which would be a boost of .7%.

Britain was hesitant about the 5% agreed to be NATO and pushed for the timeline to 2035, which would move the increase beyond the next Parliament.

Spain was the last country to sign on to the NATO deal.

NATO secretary Mark Rutte was largely seen as the driving force behind the spending hike, and said the actual defense spending would amount to 3.5% of GDP and that the other 1.5% could be used for cyber security and other infrastructure.

ENGLAND will roll out the world’s first gonorrhoea vaccine campaign this summer.

The NHS said it will begin immunising against the sexually transmitted infection, also known as ‘the clap’, in August.

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Health chiefs reckon they can prevent around 10,000 cases per year with an existing meningitis vaccine.

Cases have tripled since 2012 and hit a record 85,000 in 2023.

Local sexual health clinics will offer the jab to gay and bisexual men, who are most at risk.

Patients will receive the 4CMenB vaccine for meningitis B, which has been found to nearly halve the chances of catching gonorrhoea in adults.

The jab is already routinely given to babies to protect them from MenB, but its protection wears off as they grow up.

Vaccination could also head off growing concerns about superbug versions of the infection, which are resistant to antibiotics.

Dr Amanda Doyle, of NHS England, said: “The launch of a world-first routine vaccination for gonorrhoea is a huge step forward for sexual health.

“It will be crucial in helping to reduce the rising rates of antibiotic resistant strains of the bacteria.”

Gonorrhoea is a bacterial infection spread by unprotected sex.

Many people do not have any symptoms but if it is left untreated it can spread and lead to infertility.

It is the second most common STI in Britain by new cases per year, after chlamydia.

The vaccine rollout was approved by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) after research by Imperial College London suggested it could prevent 100,000 cases and save the NHS £8million over the next 10 years.

Dr Sema Mandal, from the UK Health Security Agency, said: “In 2023 we saw gonorrhoea diagnoses reach their highest since records began in 1918. 

“Not only will this rollout protect those that need it most, but it will make the UK the first country in the world to offer this.

“STIs aren’t just an inconvenience – they can have a major impact on your health and that of your sexual partners.”

Public health minister Ashley Dalton added: “Once again our NHS is leading the way.”