Around 235 million pounds (298 million dollars) is expected to be withdrawn from ATMs on Thursday as people fit trips to cash machines around casting their general election votes.

This is according to a forecast from UK Cash Access and Cash Machine Network Link reported on Wednesday.

The network expects the total to be lower than it was on Dec. 12, 2019, when the last general election was held.

On that date, which resulted in Boris Johnson returning to Downing Street as Conservative Prime Minister, 322 million pounds were withdrawn.

The Link said that early December tends to be a slightly busier time for cash machine withdrawals.

And on the general election date of June 8, 2017, which led to the then-prime minister Theresa May’s election gamble backfiring as the Conservatives’ Commons majority was erased.

Some 356 million pounds were taken out of ATMs.

On Thursday last week (June 27), 240 million pounds were dispensed from ATMs, according to Link’s figures.

The data is applied only to Link transactions, which are made in situations where a bank customer uses an ATM belonging to another provider.

The vast majority of ATMs across the UK were connected to the Link network.

Link said that the earlier part of the summer tended to see an upswing in cash machine transactions as people got out and about.

However the network often saw a dip in ATM transactions in August, as many UK residents headed off on holidays abroad.

Graham Mott, director of strategy at Link, said.

“Polling day traditionally itself doesn’t seem to make a huge difference to ATM use when compared to a normal Thursday at that time of year; people seem to fit voting around their normal routine.

“Early December is normally slightly busier than either early June or July but the vast majority of the fall in ATM use is due to people now doing less cash overall.

“They are increasingly using cards and their phones to make day-to-day payment transactions.”

In 2023, legislation was passed as part of the Financial Services and Markets Act, to protect access to cash.

A recent survey for Link indicated that nearly 48 per cent of people expected to see a cashless society in their lifetime.

However, according to Link’s data, the average UK adult still withdrew around 1,500 pounds from cash machines last year.

In June, banknotes bearing King Charles III’s portrait started to be issued.

This marked the first time that the sovereign had been changed on the Bank of England’s notes because the late Queen was the first British monarch to be depicted on a note in 1960.

The new banknotes are co-circulating alongside those featuring the late queen.

There are more than 4.6 billion Bank of England notes in circulation, worth around 82 billion pounds.

Mott said that 99.8 per cent of UK high streets had free cash access within 1 kilometre.

“Link will also make sure this is still the case by the time of the next general election, whenever that is.”

Georgian student Elene Deisadze was browsing TikTok in 2022 when she stumbled across the profile of a girl, Anna Panchulidze, who looked exactly like her.

Months later, after chatting and becoming friends, they both separately learned they were adopted, and last year decided to take a DNA test.

It revealed they were not only related but identical twins.

“I had a happy childhood, but now my entire past felt like a deception,” Anna, an English student at university, told AFP.

Far from an innocent case of separation at birth, the sisters are among tens of thousands of Georgian children who were illegally sold in a decades-long baby trafficking scandal.

The scheme, uncovered by journalists and families searching for lost relatives, saw babies stolen from their mothers — many of whom were told they had died — and then sold to adoptive parents in Georgia and abroad.

Journalists have found that the illegal adoptions took place over more than 50 years, orchestrated by a network of maternity hospitals, nurseries and adoption agencies that colluded to take the children from their parents, falsify birth records, and place them with new families in exchange for cash.

• -‘New reality’ –
  Elene and Anna, now 19, began unravelling their hidden past two years ago.

“We became friends without suspecting we might be sisters, but both of us felt there was some special bond between us,” Elene, a psychology student, told AFP.

Last summer, both of their parents independently told the girls they had been adopted — revelations they had long planned to make.

It was then that the pair decided to take the genetic test that would reveal they were identical twins.

“I struggled to process the information, to accept the new reality — the people who had raised me for 18 years are not my parents,” said Anna.

“But I feel no anger whatsoever, only immense gratitude to the people who raised me, and joy at finding my flesh and blood,” she added.

• -‘Buy a baby’ –
  The test for Elene and Anna was arranged with the help of Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze, who runs a Facebook group dedicated to reuniting babies stolen from their parents.

It has over 200,000 members — including mothers who were told by hospital staff that their babies had died shortly after being born, but then discovered years later they might be alive.

Museridze set up the group in 2021 in a bid to find her own family after learning she had been adopted.

She soon uncovered the mass baby-selling operation.

“Mothers were told their babies had died shortly after birth and were buried at a hospital cemetery,” Museridze said.

“In fact, hospitals had no cemeteries, and babies were being secretly whisked away and sold to adoptive parents.”

The new parents were often unaware that the adoptions were illegal and told fabricated stories about the circumstances.

“Some people, however, consciously chose to circumvent the law and buy a baby” to avoid decade-long waiting lists, Museridze told AFP.

She says she has evidence that at least 120,000 babies “were stolen from their parents and sold” between 1950 and 2006 when anti-trafficking measures by reformist president Mikheil Saakashvili eventually quashed the scheme.

In Georgia, new parents would pay the equivalent of many months’ salary to arrange the adoption, while babies trafficked abroad were sold for up to $30,000, Museridze said.

• –‘Virtually impossible’ –
  Elene’s adoptive mother, Lia Korkotadze, decided with her husband to adopt after learning they couldn’t have children a year into their marriage.

“But adopting from an orphanage seemed virtually impossible due to incredibly long waiting lists,” the 61-year-old economist told AFP.

In 2005, an acquaintance told her about a six-month-old baby available for adoption from a local hospital — for a fee.

Korkotadze said she “realised that was my chance,” and agreed.

“They brought Elene right to my house,” Korkotadze said, never suspecting there was “anything illegal.”

“It took months of excruciating bureaucratic delays to formalise the adoption through court,” she said.

The tale of Anna and Elene mirrors that of another set of twin sisters — Anna Sartania and Tako Khvitia.

They were separated at birth and sold to different parents, managing to reunite years later after finding each other on social media.

More than 800 families have been reunited thanks to Museridze’s Facebook group.

Successive Georgian governments have made multiple attempts to investigate the scheme and have made a handful of arrests over the last 20 years.

Interior ministry spokesman, Tato Kuchava, told AFP that an “investigation is underway” into Museridze’s revelations, but declined to provide further details.

Georgia’s Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, said last week in parliament that Tbilisi is among the world leaders in combating trafficking.

But Museridze says the state’s response has been lacking.

“The government did nothing tangible to help our efforts.”

Three people were killed on Sunday when their light aircraft crashed onto a motorway east of Paris, the police and gendarmerie said.

No car was hit in the crash of the plane onto the A4 motorway in Noisiel east of Paris which appeared to have been caused by the aircraft hitting an electric power cable, said a police source, asking not to be named, adding that the road had been blocked in both directions.

More Details Later

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday he was drawing up a “comprehensive plan” for how Kyiv believes the war with Russia should end.

There are no public talks ongoing between Ukraine and Russia and based on public statements by Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two sides appear as far apart as ever when it comes to the terms of a potential peace settlement.

Zelensky hosted a major international summit in Switzerland earlier this month — to which Russia was not invited — to rally support for Ukraine’s position.

“It is very important for us to show a plan to end the war that will be supported by the majority of the world,” Zelensky said on Friday.

“This is the diplomatic route we are working on,” he said at a press conference in Kyiv alongside Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar.

More than 90 countries sent leaders and senior officials to the two-day summit with Zelensky in Switzerland.

The vast majority of whom agreed to a final communiqué that stressed the need for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” to be respected in any settlement.

But some key countries that attended, like India, did not agree and others, like Russia’s ally China, boycotted the summit in protest at Moscow not being invited.

Ukraine has repeatedly said Russia must pull its troops out of its internationally recognised territory, including the peninsula of Crimea that Moscow annexed in 2014, before peace talks can start.

Meanwhile, Putin, who launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is demanding Ukraine effectively capitulate by evacuating even more territory across its east and south.

In Brussels on Thursday, Zelensky said he would put forward a “detailed plan” in a matter of months.

“We don’t have too much time,” he said, pointing to the high casualty rate amongst soldiers and civilians.

Russia’s troops are slowly advancing on the battlefield, claiming to have seized another small frontline village on Friday.

They currently occupy around a fifth of Ukraine and in 2022 claimed to have annexed four more regions, none of which they fully controlled.

Ukraine relies on Western financial and military aid to push back the invading Russian forces, but its troops are outgunned, outmanned and exhausted after more than two years of fighting.

In a major development, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may soon see the end of his long-standing legal battles. According to recent reports, the United States government is considering offering Assange a plea deal that would allow him to avoid extradition and potentially walk free.

Julian Assange was released from a high-security British prison on Monday, where he had been held for five years while fighting extradition to the United States. He traveled to the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific, where he is expected to plead guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information. This deal would significantly reduce his sentence.

Assange’s wife, Stella, confirmed that he would become a “free man” once a judge signs off on the plea deal. She expressed her elation and thanked supporters who have campaigned for his release for years. “We weren’t really sure until the last 24 hours that it was actually happening,” she told BBC radio​​.

Assange’s charter plane landed in Bangkok for a scheduled refueling stop before heading to Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, where he is due in court on Wednesday morning. He is expected to be sentenced to five years and two months in prison, with credit for the time he has already spent in British custody​​.

The court in the Northern Mariana Islands was chosen due to Assange’s unwillingness to go to the continental United States and its proximity to his native Australia. Under the plea deal, Assange is expected to return to Australia, where the government has stated that his case had “dragged on for too long” and that there was “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration”​​.

The United Nations welcomed Assange’s release, acknowledging the human rights concerns raised by his case. Assange’s mother, Christine, expressed her gratitude that her son’s ordeal was finally coming to an end. However, former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence criticized the plea deal as a “miscarriage of justice”​.

Assange has been wanted by Washington for releasing hundreds of thousands of secret U.S. documents through WikiLeaks in 2010. His supporters view him as a hero for free speech, while critics argue that he endangered lives and compromised national security. He faced 18 charges in the U.S., including espionage, and was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury in 2019​​.

The potential plea deal marks a significant step towards resolving one of the most high-profile legal battles in recent history. If successful, it would allow Assange to return to Australia and continue his work without the threat of extradition to the United States.