mulls

The government is looking at ways to financially support the companies in Jaguar Land Rover’s (JLR) supply chain, the BBC understands.

JLR halted car production at the end of August after a cyber attack forced it to shut down its IT networks. Its factories remain suspended until next month at the earliest.

Fears are growing that some suppliers, in particular the smaller firms who solely rely on JLR’s business, could go bust without support.

One idea being explored is the government buying the component parts the suppliers build, to keep them in business until JLR’s production lines are up and running again.

‘Edible means it won’t kill you – it doesn’t mean it tastes good. This, however, does taste good,” says chef Carla Lamont as she snips off a piece of orpine, a native sedum, in her herb garden. It’s crisp and juicy like a granny smith but tastes more like cucumber. “It’s said to ward off strange people and lightning strikes; but I like strange people.”

We’re on a three-hectare (seven-acre) coastal croft on the Hebridean island of Mull. Armed with scissors, Carla is giving me a kitchen garden tour and culinary masterclass – she was a quarter-finalist in Masterchef: The Professionals a few years back. Sweet cicely can be swapped for star anise, she tells me. Lemon verbena she uses in scallop ceviche.

She points out a barberry bush whose small, sour berries, a Middle Eastern staple, she adds to jewelled rice, and a myrtle bush which, I learn, is different from the bog myrtle growing wild on the croft that, when the leaves are crushed, smells gloriously aromatic with hints of eucalyptus. Bog myrtle also protects your woollens from moths, wards off midges – and is a key ingredient in one of her cocktails.

“I had never grown anything before I came here. I was in a kitchen in the city and herbs came dried in a tub. Now, if I haven’t heard of something, I give it a go or thrust it at Jonny and say ‘Greenhouse.’”

Carla and Jonny, her husband, are part of a new wave of crofter chefs or field-to-fork farmers spreading across Scotland. Crofting is, essentially, small-scale subsistence farming, the crofter traditionally rearing a few animals and growing vegetables on the smallholding, and maintaining a job or two on the side.

Now, just as the architect-designed, off-grid bothy is a world away from the bare-bones huts that once gave shepherds shelter, the croft has been reinvented. Our back-to-the-land yearnings, fuelled by programmes such as This Farming Life and Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild, have turned crofting into a modern rural fantasy.

The new generation of crofters still juggle jobs, but today, that usually involves tourism rather than working for the local laird. For Jonny and Carla, it’s a restaurant called Ninth Wave and a cute cabin, the Sea Shanty (sleeps two from £800 a week).

They met 30 years ago when Carla, from Canada, answered an ad for a chef on the neighbouring island of Iona. Jonny’s nickname, Carla smiles, is “the lobster man”. Every day, he hikes two miles cross-country to his small boat, the Sonsie, returning with the catch that Carla cooks in the restaurant. They also cure, smoke and brine seafood and meat on Bruach Mhor croft. When Jonny’s not fishing, he’s working the land.

They grow about 80% of the fruit and vegetables for the restaurant in their kitchen garden, everything from cardoons to wasabi, and forage for wild herbs on the croft. They’ve counted more than 150 seasonal greens, herbs and edible flowers growing wild here. Bumping up the dirt track for lunch, the hedgerow is billowing with fluffy meadowsweet. “I’ll be harvesting it later for panna cotta,” Carla tells me.

“People don’t realise you can eat so many flowers.” The pots of blowsy blooms by the door, it turns out, are also on the menu. “Marigolds are edible and so are dahlias. You can eat the flowers and the tubers. The Mexicans used them as their main starch crop hundreds of years ago. They’re wonderful roasted; like a cross between a potato and a jerusalem artichoke.”

The restaurant was once the barn or bothy, with a dirt floor and tin roof, attached to their one-bedroom cottage. And while the produce for the menu might mainly be locally grown, reared or caught, the inspiration for Carla’s dishes comes from her travels. At the end of each season, the couple head off on food adventures, grazing their way through Latin America, Asia and the Middle East.

For lunch I’m tucking into a Mexican-inspired dish: Jonny’s lobster teetering on garden-grown roasted corn salsa, a creamy Yucatan avocado and hoja santo soup, laced with lemon verbena and Vietnamese coriander. “It’s not fine dining,” she shrugs, “it’s street food presented nicely.”

At the other end of the island, another restaurant on a croft is also making waves as much for its architectural wow factor as its pasture-to-plate menus. Jeanette Cutlack moved to Mull from Brighton in 2008 and ran a pop-up restaurant for 10 years in her home. Her dream, however, was to restore the abandoned croft and ruined barn down the lane.

With the help of an old university friend, Edward Farleigh-Dastmalchi, who founded London-based architects Fardaa, she began work. Croft 3 is now a destination restaurant, the old steading converted into a pared-back, cathedral-style dining space, open to the rafters with bare plaster walls and vast windows framing sea views; the project won a prestigious Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland award. Diners eat the simple, field-to-fork menus at long communal tables cut from a single Douglas fir. Starters such as crab arancini and lemon mayonnaise are served alongside spicy haggis, cornbread and salsa verde. Haggis is Jeanette’s speciality and she also runs haggis-making workshops.

Now that the land has been cleared, the 20-hectare croft is starting to bear fruit. Jeanette has planted a nectarine tree and kiwi vine. In a polytunnel, she and her family grow salad and herbs while a small flock of Hebridean sheep grazes the hill that is part of the land. Last September, hogget was on the menu for the first time. What they don’t grow or rear themselves, they source from neighbouring crofts and fishers.

Mull once lagged behind the Hebrides’ culinary powerhouse, Skye, but it’s starting to emerge from its shadow. A food and drink trail around the island highlights a growing number of artisan producers as well as gourmet pit stops such as pop-up turned permanent fixture Ar Bòrd (our table). Iain and Joyce Hetherington have converted their front room into a restaurant showcasing the local produce – from creel-caught shellfish landed at Croig on the island’s north coast, to organic vegetables grown by Carol Guidicelli on her croft at Langamull, near Croig, along with their in-house smoked venison. On the tiny community-owned island of Ulva, meanwhile, a short boat ride away, the Boathouse, recently revamped by Banjo Beale, winner of a TV interior design show, has become one of the hottest lunch spots, with diners crammed around picnic tables devouring plates of briny langoustine and crab claws on the water’s edge.

And then there is the well established but ever-evolving award-winning Sgriob-ruadh farm, where they produce Isle of Mull cheese, just a few minutes’ drive from Tobermory’s pastel-painted waterfront. The Reade family arrived on the island with five cows in the 1980s and rebuilt a rundown dairy operation, starting cheese production a few years later. The farm’s Glass Barn cafe is a fabulous, foliage-festooned space where you can sample signature cheese and charcuterie platters or a bowl of homemade soup and a cheese scone before taking the far from run-of-the-mill tour.

Our small tour group meets the US cheese-maker Troy by the pig pen. After hearing a potted family history, we move on to the milking parlour where he weaves in science and Willy Wonka-style invention. The milk, he explains, is pumped to the cheese-making shed next door via an underground tank. The warm milk, fresh from the cows’ udders, heats the water used by the cafe. Walking us through the cheese-making process, we head underground to the vast cheese cellar, meet newborn calves and piglets and learn about innovative sustainable farming initiatives.

The leftover whey from the cheesemaking was once used to feed the pigs – until they found a better use for it. In the farmyard a smart new micro-distillery uses the whey to make gin and “whey-ski” – possibly a pun too far, a barrel-aged spirit. The tour ends with a tasting. The gin has a surprisingly distinctive creaminess, the whey-ski is pure fire water.

“It’s not sweet like a bourbon,” Troy says as he pours another dram. “It’s more like an Irish whiskey.” I knock it back, thinking that’s the thing about Mull: for outside-the-box thinking and wild culinary innovation, it’s leading the way.

Ninth Wave: four-course lunch £80 (not open for dinner). Croft 3: two-course menu £42, three courses £50. The Boathouse: half lobster £25, langoustines £18 (a la carte). Ar Bòrd: three-course set menu £55pp. Isle of Mull Cheese tour: £20

US President Donald Trump reportedly opposed a stopover in New York by Taiwan’s president, says China visit under consideration.

Taiwanese President William Lai Ching-te has cancelled a trip to three allies in Central and South America after a planned stopover in the United States was reportedly nixed by his US counterpart, Donald Trump.

Lai was preparing to visit Paraguay, Guatemala and Belize in early August, with stopovers planned in New York and Dallas on the first and last leg of the trip, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

The Taiwanese leader’s trip was called off when US officials said they opposed his stop in New York, the newspaper said, citing three people close to the matter.

Lai’s office had never formally announced his trip to Latin America, but on Monday, it said the president had cancelled all overseas travel to focus on tariff negotiations with the US and a cleanup operation following a typhoon in southern Taiwan.

The president of Taiwan cannot officially visit the US, which does not recognise its government. But Taiwanese leaders have made use of “transit stops” in the US over the years to liaise with top administration officials outside Washington, DC.

In 2023, then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen used a transit stop to visit New York and Los Angeles while Joe Biden was still the US president.

Beijing, which claims democratic Taiwan as part of its territory, held military exercises in the Taiwan Strait after Tsai’s US stop-off to demonstrate its anger.

Trump’s reported decision to block Lai’s stopover follows news that the US president is angling for a trip to China himself, although he said he does not want a “summit” with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.

“The Fake News is reporting that I am SEEKING a ‘Summit’ with President Xi of China. This is not correct, I am not SEEKING anything! I may go to China, but it would only be at the invitation of President Xi, which has been extended,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Monday night.

Reuters reported that Trump may be aiming to visit China around the time of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, which runs from October 31 to November 1.

Whether the meeting will take place will depend on the outcome of ongoing trade talks between the US and China to resolve Trump’s tariff war launched earlier this year.

US and Chinese officials are in Stockholm this week to try to hammer out a tariff agreement before a “truce” expires on August 12, but they have many issues to discuss, including export controls, which could drag out talks.

Unification ministry in Seoul says allowing individual tours will not violate international sanctions.

South Korea is considering allowing individual tours to North Korea as it studies ways to improve relations with its neighbour, a spokesperson for South Korea’s Ministry of Unification says.

“The government is formulating and pursuing North Korea policies with the goal of easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and improving inter-Korean ties with various measures under consideration in the process,” the ministry said in a statement on Monday.

The announcement was made as Seoul takes more steps to ease tensions with its northern rival after the election of President Lee Jae-myung, who has pledged to improve strained ties with Pyongyang.

In a bid to ease tensions, Lee suspended anti-North Korea loudspeaker broadcasts along the border and ordered a halt to leaflet campaigns criticising the North’s leaders by anti-Pyongyang activists.

Koo Byung-sam, spokesperson for the Unification Ministry, which handles inter-Korean affairs, refused to comment on a “particular issue”. But he said he understood individual tours were not in violation of international sanctions, according to a report by the Reuters news agency.

South Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo newspaper also said Lee’s administration is considering resuming individual trips to North Korea as a negotiating card to reopen dialogue with Pyongyang.

It reported that Lee mentioned the proposal during a National Security Council meeting on July 10. The government subsequently began a review of the plan, the report added, quoting a senior official.

Tourism is one of a narrow range of cash sources for North Korea that are not targeted under United Nations sanctions imposed over its nuclear and weapons programmes.

Citing anti-Pyongyang broadcasters, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency also reported on Monday that the National Intelligence Service this month had suspended all of its decades-old broadcasts targeting the North Korean regime.

Lee said he will discuss further plans with top security officials to resume dialogue with North Korea, which technically is still at war with the South after the 1950-1953 Korean War ended with an armistice and not a peace treaty.

North Korea recently opened a beach resort in the city of Wonsan, a flagship project driven by leader Kim Jong Un to promote tourism. But the tourist area is temporarily not accepting foreign visitors, according to a note on Wednesday by DPR Korea Tour, a website operated by North Korea’s National Tourism Administration.

North Korea’s tourism industry appears to be struggling even after it lifted COVID-19 border restrictions, allowing rail and flight services with Russia and China.

Asked if South Koreans would travel to Wonsan, Koo said North Korea first needs to open the area to the outside world.

South Korea once ran tours to North Korea’s Mount Kumgang area but suspended them in 2008 when a South Korean tourist was shot dead by a North Korean soldier.

June 4 (UPI) — Ukrainian officials were set to update U.S. senators on Wednesday on the war and discuss arms purchases and efforts to pressure Russia to negotiate a peace deal, including a tough new bipartisan sanctions bill due to come to the floor of the upper chamber next week.

The delegation, which included Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Yuliia Svyrydenko, Deputy Defense Minister Serhii Boyev and Presidential Office head Andriy Yermak, arrived Tuesday, a day after a second round of Ukraine-Russia peace talks in Turkey broke up without a breakthrough.

Yermak said in a social media post that the delegation was bringing a “comprehensive agenda” of issues that were important to Ukraine to actively promote to members of both parties and President Donald Trump‘s team.

“We plan to talk about defense support and the situation on the battlefield, strengthening sanctions against Russia, including Senator [Lindsey] Graham’s bill. We will also discuss the Agreement on the Establishment of the Reconstruction Investment Fund, which we signed earlier,” wrote Yermak.

He said the delegation would also raise the issue of getting back Ukrainian children deported by Russia and support for the process.

The bill that Sen. Graham, R-S.C., plans to introduce in the Senate aims to ratchet up economic pressure on Russia, targeting its trade partners by slapping 500% tariffs on imports from countries that continue to purchase Russian products, including gas, oil and uranium.

China and India are the two biggest markets for Russian energy exports.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told Politico that he and Graham would host a closed-door meeting with the Ukrainians on Capitol Hill to which all Senators had been invited.

He said support for the sanctions bill was gaining very strong momentum with 82 members of the Senate split down the middle of the aisle agreeing to co-sponsor it.

Blumenthal said the secondary sanctions could be a “game changer.”

“It’s a pivotal moment in Ukraine — and crunch time for the Senate on this bill.”

He also pushed back on what he said was a growing but false belief that Ukraine was losing the war, saying recent offensive assaults deep into Russian territory, such as Sunday’s so-called “Operation Spiderweb,” in which Ukrainian drones destroyed 41 strategic Russian bomber aircraft, proved otherwise.

Blumenthal argued that such feats could help shift the dial among the administration’s foreign policy team, helping persuade them to bolster military and other assistance for Ukraine and to support the sanctions bill.

That in turn would help overcome the reservations of some lawmakers, he said.

“Events will move the White House — and maybe some of the president’s friends here [Capitol Hill]. Congress can move ahead. [Trump] doesn’t have to support it.”

Current U.S. flows of arms and equipment to Ukraine are all under drawdowns on assistance packages approved under former President Joe Biden, with no fresh approvals since as the Trump administration shifts to a more mercantile approach under which Ukraine will buy the weapons rather than receiving them as aid.