Healey plans £1bn support to bring down energy bills
Exclusive
Kiran Stacey
Jessica Elgot
John Healey is considering a major intervention to cut energy bills for poorer households at the budget, after ministers became alarmed at forecasts that show bills rising by hundreds of pounds in January.
The chancellor is working on plans to spend more than £1bn helping energy consumers, the bulk of which is likely to go towards increasing the discount given to households on certain benefits. Sources say final decisions have not been made, but Healey is set to rebuff a call by the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, to spend billions more on removing levies from bills altogether.
Energy officials are working up more radical changes to bills which could be implemented after the budget and would change how much companies could charge customers, rather than subsidising their bills.
If approved, the energy discount will form a major plank of the budget, which government sources say will be low-key but focused on reducing voters' cost of living.
The chancellor is facing a cash crunch as he looks to find money for an additional £4.7bn in defence spending and to rebuild his fiscal buffer, which has been eroded by higher borrowing costs. He is likely to raise taxes to pay for the additional spending, and is rumoured to be looking at higher bank taxes in particular.
Government sources had previously insisted the VAT cut to electricity bills that Andy Burnham announced soon after becoming prime minister would be the last support to be offered this year.
But they have become increasingly concerned by forecasts showing that the Iran war will push the energy price cap up by as much as £442 in January - entirely eroding the impact of the VAT cut.
As a result Healey has been considering
French police
fire teargas at
school protests
Jon Henley
Paris
Police fired teargas at protesters as 250,000 pupils, teachers and parents demonstrated in France on the biggest day yet of a campaign for better high school conditions that has been marred by violent clashes with police.
▲ Riot police face protesters demanding better learning conditions in Nantes
The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, yesterday said at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had been injured since the protests began more than a fortnight ago, calling the figures “the heaviest toll in decades paid by the school system”.
The country's president, nuel Macron, called key ministers to the Élysée
Dispatch Three years on, trauma of attacks still grips Israel
Emma Graham-Harrison
Quique Kierszenbaum Nir Oz
Keith Siegel spent many of the long hours in Hamas captivity in Gaza etching everything that happened after
7 October 2023 into his memory. For 484 days he recited to himself every place he was held, the dates he was moved and every attack or humiliation he endured or witnessed.
He aimed to store intelligence that could help Israeli forces free other hostages if he was released, to keep track of time as the days slid by, and to be able to tell his family what had happened to him. Now his body is free, but he cannot loosen those memories.
"I'm living a kind of dual life," he said in an interview in Tel Aviv. "I'm here for some of the time, and I'm in Gaza some of the time. It's very challenging to convey in words what it was like."
Siegel and his wife Aviva were among 251 people taken captive when Hamas militants broke across the border to launch a wave of attacks on kibbutzim, border towns, military bases and a music festival. Israel's security forces were caught by surprise and by the time they regained control of the area 1,209 people had been killed, the majority of them civilians, including 36 children, according to records kept by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The cemetery at Nir Oz contains two lines of fresh headstones, marking lives that all ended on that same date. A shared plot for a family of five,
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Plans to examine Arday's death are inadequate, say Cambridge dons
Richard Adams
Education editor
Senior Cambridge academics have attacked the university's plans to investigate Prof Jason Arday's death as inadequate, saying those responsible for "serious failures of leadership" should face consequences.
In a letter to Chris Smith, the chancellor of Cambridge, the academics say “it is not yet clear” how the proposed review would answer difficult questions about the university’s involvement in the events leading up to Arday’s death, including its handling of the criticism Arday suffered after his appointment as professor of sociology of education in 2023.
Arday died at his home in London on 14 August, nine days after he had resigned amid allegations of plagiarism and inconsistencies in statements about his career. An inquest will be held to determine the cause of death.
Arday's family said he was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years. Now, a letter signed by more than 40 professors, associate professors and fellows raises concern that Cambridge has backed away from initial promises by Prof Deborah Prentice, ▲ Prof Jason Arday died days after resigning amid plagiarism allegations and media scrutiny
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRIS RADBURN/AFP/GETTY
the university's vice-chancellor, for a "thorough and transparent" examination of the circumstances that led to Arday's appointment and treatment. Rather than reviewing the "lessons learned", the group wants the investigation to pinpoint the advice given and decisions made during and after Arday's hiring.
"The investigation must establish who authorised and directed the university's public promotion of Professor Arday; what assessment was made of the risks that accompanied it; who authorised any legal or other communications with journalists investigating the story; what the university knew as racist and ableist abuse and media hounding escalated; and how responsibility for Professor Arday's protection was allocated and exercised across the university," the letter states.
Cambridge last month announced a two-part review, with part one to be headed by Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England, focusing on the support given to Arday before his death.
But the university has yet to name a chair for part two, which will be “a broader review of institutional processes and practice” and only consider “the wider context” of Arday’s period at Cambridge, including general appraisals of recruitment and the support available to academics facing media scrutiny.
The group says the “scope and investigative character” of the second part of the review will be crucial in settling the decisions, structures and processes involved.
"To this end, it is vital that the university establishes a clear chain of responsibility for the institutional decisions made in the period following Professor Arday's appointment, through the events leading to his death and the university's subsequent responses," the letter says.
"The university should state clearly how responsibility will be acted upon if the review establishes serious failures of leadership or responsibility ... Serious findings must have consequences for the individuals and offices responsible.
"At the same time, individual accountability cannot substitute for the institutional changes required where failures arose from structures of decision-making, scrutiny or governance."
The University of Cambridge was approached for a response.
The exact details remain unclear but reports from Russia have suggested Darya Shipilova, an employee at the anti-plague institute in the city of Irkutsk, died on 2 October, two days after becoming unwell at work. According to Rospotrebnadzor, Russia's health watchdog, Shipilova died from "pneumonia of unknown aetiology".
However, there are other accounts: Alexey Tsydenov, the head of the neighbouring Buryatia region, initially said Shipilova had died of plague, before editing his social media post to say she had "possibly" died of the disease.
Russian authorities have denied this to the World Health Organization (WHO), stating: "No case of this dangerous disease has been recorded in the city of Irkutsk, Russian Federation."
If it is the plague, what are we talking about?
We are talking about a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, typically found in small mammals and the fleas that feed on them. It is the same organism that was behind the bubonic plague or "black death" that swept Europe in the 14th century.
However, the bubonic form is different from the pneumonic plague that some have suggested caused Shipilova's death. The former is more common, results in swellings called buboes and is spread by the bite of infected fleas, whereas the latter has a higher mortality rate and can be spread between people.
How might Shipilova have ended up with pneumonic plague?
One report in the media is that Shipilova was admitted with the disease after returning from Thailand, while another is that she became infected after breaking a test tube in the laboratory. Rospotrebnadzor has denied any such accidents at the institute.
How concerned should we be? It is worth noting that the plague is not a disease of the past.
"There are a few hundred cases of plague reported each year globally, usually in geographically restricted areas, particularly in Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo - although there are a small number of cases in the western United States, central Asia, Mongolia, etc," said Dr Malick Gibani at Imperial College London.
That might not seem reassuring, but we no longer have to rely on medieval medicine. Dr Simon Clarke at the University of Reading said: "Unlike many viral respiratory diseases, plague is caused by bacteria, and antibiotics such as fluoroquinolones and aminoglycosides work well against this pathogen if administered early enough and are often given prophylactically, post-exposure."
However, Prof Brendan Wren at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said there were multi-antibiotic-resistant strains emerging, “and if the laboratory is working on such a strain, then treatment options may be limited”.
There have also been reports that almost 200 people with whom Shipilova may have had contact are now under medical observation, and that quarantines have been imposed in a number of hospitals.
▲ An Irkutsk plague institute worker died two days after becoming unwell
"Isolation and monitoring are sensible strategies," Wren said.
Prof Alice Hughes at the University of Melbourne added the incubation for pneumonic plague was only one to three days and, as yet no one had shown symptoms.
However, Clarke said there were still unknowns: "Until more details emerge, it is difficult to assess whether this represents an isolated case, an occupational exposure, or evidence of wider transmission."
The UN health agency's spokesperson Christian Lindmeier has said the risk to others is low. "The WHO initial risk assessment from the information available estimates the risk to be moderate to low for Irkutsk, a low risk for the Russian Federation as a whole, and very low for the WHO European region," he said.
Dr Zania Stamataki of the University of Birmingham said the control systems used in the UK for hazardous organisms work mean laboratory-acquired infections were rare. But she added: "They are not impossible and this is why an incident warrants a full account of what happened."
Other experts also stressed a need for transparency. “I think it’s important that we see how this pans out and, ideally, there’d be good communication between the public health authorities and the wider global health community,” said Gibani.
News
Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining. The axe, right, featured in the film's 'Here's Johnny!' scene and is one of hundreds of items from the personal archive of director Stanley Kubrick to go on sale, including the clapperboard used in the film
政府指责激进左翼的“不屈法国”（La France Insoumise）党鼓励甚至策划了这场运动，因为多名该党议员出席了学校封锁活动。
📄 Original Section
Here's Johnny's axe! Key prop from The Shining on sale as part of Kubrick auction
Matthew Weaver
A special effects axe wielded by Jack Nicholson as he delivered his chillingly manic line "Here's Johnny!" in the 1980 horror movie The Shining is to go on sale.
Nicholson's character, Jack Torrance, uses an axe to hack out an opening in a locked door protecting his terrified wife Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall. It is also the murder weapon in the killing of Scatman Crothers' character, Dick Hallorann.
One of cinema's most famous axes could be yours for a list price of between £30,000 and £50,000.
The axe is one of hundreds of items from the personal archive of the director Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999.
The sale includes several lots from the film, including two sky-blue dresses worn by the twin sisters Alexa and Alexie Grady.
▲ The Guardian obituary of Stanley Kubrick described him as ‘enigmatic’
They appear in the frocks in a memorable scene where they invite Torrance's son, Danny, to "come play with us" as he pedals on his tricycle through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel.
A clapperboard used in the film is one of four from Kubrick's movies to also go under the hammer. The others are from 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Barry Lyndon and Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut.
The auction will take place at Bonhams in London on 3 February, after public exhibitions that start next week at Bonhams in New York, before going on to Los Angeles, Paris and then London on 18 January.
The lot expected to fetch the highest price is the model of a cosmic foetus, known as the “star child prop” from the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted to fetch as much as £800,000.
Claire Tole-Moir, the head of popular culture at Bonhams, said: "It is the final, enigmatic image of one of cinema's most influential science fiction films. It represents evolution, new beginnings, naivety and ambiguity. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not just one of Kubrick's finest films, it is a cinematic masterpiece, and so to be able to offer this iconic prop is incredibly exciting."
She said the auction gave “fans, collectors and historians the chance to own a piece of this remarkable collection” and that the exhibitions were “a landmark moment to get closer to some of the most iconic films ever made”.
There is also Kubrick's personal script from his 1960 film Spartacus.
The Guardian's obituary of Kubrick described him as enigmatic, obsessive and dictatorial, and his movies as deeply pessimistic. The auction includes his director's chair, valued at up to £12,000.
Tole-Moir said: "Few people had as
The ‘star child prop’ used in the final image from 2001: A Space Odyssey is predicted to fetch up to £800,000
much of an overwhelming impact on visual culture as Kubrick."
She pointed out that his work was so influential that it spawned the adjective Kubrickian, meaning to have “meticulous attention to detail, technical mastery, precision and a distinctive visual or creative style”.
She added that the lot that best illustrated Kubrick's personality was his chess set. "He valued chess for its combination of strategy, patience, discipline and intellectual precision, qualities that would become hallmarks of his film-making," she said.
"Later on, during breaks in filming, he would play games with members of the cast and crew, and has often been photographed alongside a chess board.
“Other directors’ collections have appeared at auction over the years, but Stanley Kubrick’s archive is truly distinctive in its depth, quality and intellect. It encompasses not only the extraordinary objects themselves, but decades of scholarship, research, documentation and deliberate preservation.
"It is hard to think of another collection of this calibre, nor a director who has inspired so many."
Lego scam highlights building problem of insurance fraud
Julia Kollewe
A fraudster who received more than £14,000 in insurance payouts after the supposed theft of Lego sets, fishing equipment and games consoles was behind some of last year's most high-profile bogus claims.
Investigators uncovered £1.34bn of fraudulent claims in 2025, a 14% increase on the £1.18bn recorded in 2024, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI).
▲ Valuable Lego sets were among the items Matthew Johnson claimed for
The Lego fraudster, Matthew Johnson, was sentenced to 28 months in jail and ordered to repay the money after an investigation by the City of London police's insurance fraud enforcement department (Ifed).
Johnson, of Misterton in Nottinghamshire, submitted false claims to Axa Insurance between May 2021 and January 2022, relating to alleged burglaries at properties in Shetland and Goole, East Yorkshire. He claimed Apple MacBooks, TVs, games consoles, fishing gear and large quantities of valuable Lego sets had been stolen, and received payouts totalling more than £14,000 across four claims.
Axa raised concerns after spotting inconsistencies in documentation provided by Johnson, including repeated use of the same receipts.
Mark Allen, the head of fraud and financial crime at ABI, said: "Anyone considering committing insurance fraud should be under no illusion - it's a serious crime with serious consequences, including a criminal conviction and imprisonment."
The ABI and police warned that insurance fraud pushed up the cost of premiums for all customers.
While the number of detected fraudulent claims fell by 2.7% to
93,900 cases last year, the value of scams rose sharply. The average value of a fraudulent claim in 2025 was £14,300, second only to the peak of £14,600 recorded in 2022.
Motor insurance remained the area with the highest level of claims fraud, accounting for 55% of all cases.
One fraudster who staged motor collisions involving women he met online was sentenced after running a deliberate “crash for cash” scheme, the ABI said.
DCI Simon Klust, the head of Ifed, said more than 250 fraudulent insurance claims were detected each day, but this was “likely to be just the tip of the iceberg”.
Blockades and baton charges as 250,000 join demonstrations across France
Continued from page 1
Palace for talks last night, French media reported.
The interior ministry said 200,000 people had taken part in mainly peaceful marches in cities including Marseille, Nantes and Lyon yesterday, with 56,000 more joining the biggest demonstration in Paris. Organisers put the total at 450,000.
Most passed off without serious incident, but some - including in Paris - ended in sporadic vandalism and running skirmishes with riot police, with officers firing teargas and carrying out baton charges to disperse protesters.
About 488 people were arrested yesterday, according to figures from the interior ministry reported by the newspaper Liberation. Forty-three police officers were reported injured.
Trade unions and rights groups have accused the police of using unnecessary force against the young protesters in recent days, with Amnesty International saying French authorities should “put an end to the disproportionate police repression”.
At yesterday's demonstration in Paris, students held aloft smoke flares and placards with slogans including "under our textbooks, anger" - a nod to a celebrated slogan "under the paving stones, the beach" from the May 1968 student riots. Other slogans included "schools with no money = country with no future".
One student, Anna, told reporters at the capital's Place de la Nation: "Our demands are simple: better study conditions, enough teachers, decent school buildings. The authorities' response has been catastrophic. There's enough violence already."
Yesterday's marches came after two weeks of protests that began in the northern suburbs of Paris and have snowballed nationwide. Besides the injuries to protesters and staff, 715 police officers had been wounded in the clashes, Lecornu's office said.
Demonstrators have set fire to dustbins outside their schools, destroyed bus shelters and hurled projectiles at riot police, who have responded with batons, teargas and riot-control rounds.
Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked since mid-September, while more than 6,100 people have been arrested, almost all minors. The justice ministry said more than 1,800 were being prosecuted, nearly 1,500 of them under 18.
The education ministry said more than 900 of the country's 3,700 high schools were blockaded or had been closed for the day yesterday, although ◀ Protesters are shrouded in smoke during demonstrations against poor learning conditions in Paris
PHOTOGRAPH: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/GETTY
Source: OECD
student groups put the number at 1,800. Some local education authorities moved classes online.
Océanne, 18, was among the marchers in Marseille. "We just want to save our education and be educated," she said, adding that she had suffered from absent teachers who were replaced either by "pointless substitutes" or not at all.
Many teachers were also demonstrating. In the western city of Rennes, Romain Dubourg said he and "about 30 colleagues" had "talked about the police brutality that we've witnessed, and decided to be there for our students if they need us".
Trade unionists also marched, with the head of the CGT union, Sophie Binet, urging members to "protect high school students". The Green party leader, Marine Tondelier, urged local officials and parents to wear white and "go and protect our children during demonstrations".
Anne Savinel-Barras, the president of Amnesty France, said: "The images and testimonies widely circulated over the past week raise alarming concerns about the dangerous use of teargas, batons and policing techniques." The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said police had launched 10 internal investigations into allegations of brutality since the protests started.
On Monday, a 15-year-old's hand was blown off as protesters battled riot police in northern France.
A 16-year-old lost the use of his right eye after he was seriously injured in the head last Wednesday during the blockade of a high school in Tours. The local prosecutor, Catherine Sorita-Minard, said the wounds were “compatible with the impact of a defensive bullet of the blast ball type”.
In another incident, a 14-year-old lost most of his teeth on Monday when a police officer appeared to fire a grenade at him at close range during a protest north-west of Paris. "His jaw is sealed shut, he can no longer speak and he eats through a straw," his mother told reporters.
Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students' core demands, which include ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the 8am to 6pm school day, and repairing ageing buildings.
He denied accusations of excessive force by police, saying officers had mostly acted “proportionately”. Lecornu told MPs yesterday “extreme violence” had come “knocking on high-school doors, and must be condemned. Setting fire to a school will not help repair it. Attacking a teacher will not help replace missing staff.”
But the protests, seven months before crucial presidential elections to choose a successor to Macron, have piled pressure on a government trying to reduce a ballooning budget deficit amid growing investor concern over France's mountainous debt and weak economic growth.
The government has accused the radical-left La France Insoumise party of encouraging and even orchestrating the movement after numerous LFI MPs attended school blockades.
'This is state violence' Police face accusations of 'deliberate' brutality
Angelique Chrisafis
Paris
Before dawn yesterday, outside the Lycée Sophie-Germain in central Paris, hundreds of teenagers dragged wheelie bins,
barriers and shopping trolleys to build a barricade outside the front doors of their secondary school.
Atop the piles of bins, pupils held banners calling for more funding and greater equality in French schools. They were also protesting against riot police, who have been accused by human rights groups of using disproportionate force against children in what is fast becoming the country's biggest youth movement in decades.
"Everyone hates the police," chanted a group of 15- and 16-yearolds. At least 215 teenagers, 715 police officers and 85 teaching staff have been injured in clashes in recent days, according to the government.
"We're teenagers with wheelie bins and the police have heavy weapons. It's totally mismatched," said Livia, 17, who is studying theatre at a school in northern Paris. "The police are extremely violent in France. This is state violence and it's horrible seeing police allowed to target children. It's important to remember this is institutionalised violence. It's planned and deliberate."
Ten investigations into possible cases of police brutality are under way after injuries allegedly involving the use of police weapons, including one 15-year-old who lost his hand, another who lost an eye and a boy whose jaw and teeth were shattered.
Lily, 17, who is studying social sciences in her final year of school and was demonstrating for more funding in what she called a discriminatory education system that left poorer children behind, said: "The policing is catastrophic. People have been mutilated by weapons. One boy has lost an eye - it's horrible.
"My parents support me being on the barricades and at the protests. They're worried about the policing, but they said they'd come and get me from the police station if I was arrested."
Teenagers nearby held cardboard signs protesting against the use of teargas by riot police. "A state that gases high school students is a weak state," read one banner. "Gas
France's declining Pisa scores
Average Pisa scores by subject, selected countries
Riot police confront a group of student protesters taking part in yesterday's demonstrations in Paris
PHOTOGRAPHS: YVES HERMAN/REUTERS
▲ Bally Bagayoko, centre, the mayor of the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, is escorted by students after joining their demonstrations yesterday
Source: OECD, Pisa 2025 results. Note: OECD average is of 23 selected countries
Why pupils are angry The facts behind the discontent
rapists, not children," said another sign in reference to calls for tougher laws against sexual violence.
The protest movement that began outside a school in a low-income Paris suburb has spread across the country, taking the government by surprise.
"In more than 20 years of teaching, I've never seen protests this big," said one teacher at Sophie-Germain who planned to join the Paris demonstration yesterday. "The students in central Paris have shown a great sense of solidarity with those in the Paris suburbs who face much worse conditions in their schools."
Isabella, 16, said she had the backing of her parents, who work in film and music. “Young people have been teargassed for doing nothing but trying to express their opinion,” she said. “Everybody told us school was the great leveller, but today that is not the case at all. A teenager in the banlieue [suburbs] of Paris is never going to have the same opportunities as a student from the city centre. That’s why we’re here today.”
Lionel, 17, who is in his final year at school and hopes to study English, said: "The aim isn't to riot or smash things up. We just want to protest peacefully."
Teenagers also chanted songs against Marine Le Pen, the far-right, anti-immigration candidate in the 2027 presidential election, who is high in the polls as Emmanuel Macron steps down after a decade in office. "We're also protesting against the growth of the far right," said Aislinn.
Justine, 17, who arrived at the barricade before dawn, said she hoped the protest would grow into a “massive” movement. “For years, there has been a mental health crisis among young people in France and anger at rundown schools and the stresses of the education system,” she said. “We need the government to listen to us and make radical change.”
Maya, an 18-year-old sports science student, had spent two days on a barricade at her university building in Bobigny in solidarity with school students and joined the Paris protest march yesterday. She had attended high school in Drancy in a building she said had mould on the walls, not enough chairs and absent teachers who often were not replaced.
"It's only when we spoke to other students at university who came from different types of schools in the countryside or city centres that we realised our experience was so different and that there was a real injustice to the conditions we had to learn in," she said.
Julie, 46, a self-employed parent of two high school students from Levallois, a suburb north-west of Paris, had joined her husband to accompany her sons to the march.
"We're here to support our children but also to protect them from what is going on with the police and the violence we've seen with the police these last few days," she said. "We've seen our own child teargassed many times in front of his school. It's unbelievable."
French school students say the education system is riven with inequality, that many buildings are in disrepair, class sizes are too big and there are not enough teachers. How accurate are these claims?
Is the French education system blighted by social inequality? Yes. A child born and schooled in a deprived neighbourhood in France has less chance of escaping their socioeconomic background than in most other developed nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Éric Charbonnier, a French education analyst at the OECD, said there was a marked gap between the performance of the most advantaged and disadvantaged school students in France. “And often disadvantaged students are in disadvantaged schools,” he said. This has raised issues of the quality of learning being delivered and the higher absenteeism of teachers.
Are French high school buildings dilapidated and rat-infested? Some are, namely in certain cities and low-income suburbs. Videos filmed by students and teachers have shown leaks, scurrying rats, holes in walls and ceilings, broken toilets and not enough chairs or tables, meaning teachers have to carry them from classroom to classroom.
Estimates in recent years have pointed to thousands of French schools at all levels, both primary and secondary, in need of repair. These include many 1960s school buildings. French regions are responsible for the upkeep of high school buildings but have asked for higher budgets from the government.
Are class sizes bigger than other comparable countries?
Yes, and often in urban areas. Charbonnier said: "There are an average of 29 students in French language lessons, compared with 26 across the OECD. However, this average masks substantial differences - particularly between large cities and rural areas."
Teachers and school students in Paris and its suburbs this week described many high school classes of 36 pupils or more but in ▲ Protesters make their point in a peaceful demonstration yesterday in Nice, south-east France
PHOTOGRAPH: VALÉRY HACHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
some rural areas it can be fewer. Figures from the French education ministry show class sizes have increased in recent years.
Are school days longer in France? Yes. "In terms of number of instructional hours, France really has more hours than most of the OECD countries," Charbonnier said. This is true of primary and all levels of secondary education.
Teaching is also squeezed into shorter periods, with 36 weeks of school per year, fewer than the OECD average. High school pupils at barricades have complained of having school days that run from 8am to 6pm, with many gaps during the day.
Are absent teachers not replaced?
Yes, sometimes. The education ministry has acknowledged that about 10% of teaching hours across the year are not delivered, for various reasons, and that it is urgent to fix this. The education union SNES-FSU estimated that more than half of all public middle schools and high schools were lacking at least one teacher at the start of September. On the barricades, protesting students said there were more absent teachers in low-income areas.
的一名发言人表示：“ 发电厂的数据中心潜在计划可以支持英国的经济增长，并有助于实现政府在北约克郡等地的工业更新雄心，以及 AI 主权。”
他们声称 NRDC 的断言是不准确的，“未经独立验证且……基于基础性错误”。
📄 Original Section
Does France spend less money on secondary education than its European neighbours?
No, France spends more than many other countries on high schools for children aged 15 and 18, but analysts question how the money is spent. For example, teachers' middle and end-career salaries are comparatively low.
Charbonnier said: “France’s expenditure on upper secondary education [lycées - or high schools] is 28% higher than the OECD average, while its spending on the first levels of education, including pre-primary and primary, is 11% below the average.” He said the reason for France’s higher spending on high schools included its large provision of costly vocational programmes which often lack recognition even within France.
Angelique Chrisafis
Paris
National
Asos 告知客户数据被黑客“完全攻破”
莎拉·巴特勒 (Sarah Butler)
丹·米尔莫 (Dan Milmo)
在线时尚零售商 Asos 正在调查其应用程序系统遭到未经授权访问的情况，此前购物者收到通知，称黑客已将其数据“完全攻破”。
Seventh man arrested over suspected terror plot at RAF Fairfield
Jamie Grierson
Dan Sabbagh
Vikram Dodd
A seventh man was arrested in London yesterday on suspicion of terrorism offences as part of the ongoing investigation related to threats to RAF Fairford, police said.
The 22-year-old British national was arrested in Westminster, central London, on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts under section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006, counter-terrorism policing said. The arrest comes as police investigate an incident eight days ago, when five men from London driving three white vans were arrested in a village outside the airbase used by bombers from the US air force.
On Sunday, the Pentagon withdrew all 12 of the B-1 Lancer bombers that had been based at Fairfield to the US. Some of the warplanes had only arrived at the base a week earlier, and refuelling aircraft had to be scrambled to complete the move.
There has been speculation that
Iran wants to target the Gloucestershire base, which was used for US bombing runs on the country earlier this year, but the US and UK governments appear to have divergent views about the security situation and the level of threat.
UK sources question whether Iran would have the capability to launch a Ukraine-style drone attack on US military aircraft at the base. On Monday, Downing Street insisted that the base was safe.
Some reports suggested the US feared a drone attack similar to Ukraine's attack on Russian airbases last year and did not want to leave its bombers stationed at Fairford.
On Monday Donald Trump said the aircraft had been moved out because "there were some threats".
The investigation by counter-terror police has progressed without yet making a breakthrough. The five men detained in Whelford, Gloucestershire, on 27 September were released on police bail a day later. No explosive devices were found in the three vans, though a barrel of petrol was recovered. One of the five men had called 999, and their intentions remain unclear.
On Thursday, a 25-year-old UK-Iranian dual national was arrested in Westminster on suspicion of terrorism offences. He was released on police bail on Saturday.
Yesterday the senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism policing, Vicki Evans, said: "This remains a live investigation and our specialist teams continue to pursue multiple lines of inquiry into the circumstances surrounding events near RAF Fairfield.
"Once again, I'd like to thank the public for their continued support and patience whilst we work through this highly complex investigation.
"We're acutely aware of the public interest in this investigation, and we are working around the clock, and at pace, to identify the motivation behind events in Gloucestershire. We remain committed to investigating all possible angles."
The 22-year-old man is being held under rules that allow detectives to bail him, as were the other six men who have been arrested.
People arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences can be held under two legal schedules that dictate how long they can be detained without charge.
Under the terrorism schedule a suspect can be held for up to 14 days but can not be bailed, giving police a fortnight to charge or release them.
The 22-year-old man arrested on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts is being held under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a spokesperson for counter-terrorism policing said. That means he could be released under investigation on bail, but detectives have much less time to hold him.
Drax datacentre could be 'one of the dirtiest', experts claim
Pippa Neill
Environment reporter
Drax's proposed datacentre in North Yorkshire could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year, analysis has shown.
Last year the energy company unveiled plans to convert part of its biomass power plant near Selby into a datacentre in response to the increase in demand for AI capability.
AI datacentres use large amounts of electricity to power servers and cooling equipment, and to run facility systems. There are 315 datacentres in the queue to connect to the UK's electricity grid, representing 73GW of demand. This is almost double the UK's peak winter energy demand.
In public documents, Drax said it was developing options for a 1.2GW datacentre, with 100MW coming from the electricity grid and the rest from its power station.
The power station burns millions of tonnes of wood pellets to generate electricity, which has been touted as a clean way of producing energy.
Based on information in Drax's 2025 annual report, the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimated that if built, Drax's datacentre would use 4.9m tonnes of wood a year. The campaign group calculated the total annual emissions would be 8.6m tonnes of CO₂ - nearly double the CO₂ emissions from all flights leaving Gatwick airport in a year - 4.79m tonnes in 2024.
Matt Williams, a senior advocate for the NRDC, said this would make the Drax facility “one of the dirtiest datacentres out there”.
Oliver Hayes, the head of policy at the environmental campaign group Global Action Plan, said: "Burning millions of trees to power server farms is indefensible."
Drax said the proposed datacentre could be fully operational from 2031 if it secured the necessary consents.
Williams said: "The government must urgently set minimum standards for datacentres and rule out dirty energy generation like burning trees."
▲ The Drax power station in North Yorkshire burns millions of tonnes of wood pellets to generate electricity
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY
There is growing pressure for more transparency over how energy-intensive datacentres will align with the government's net zero targets.
The government has ruled out issuing a moratorium on datacentres, claiming that doing so would send investment and good jobs abroad.
A Drax spokesperson said: "The potential plans for datacentres at Drax power station can support UK economic growth as well as helping meet the government's ambitions for industrial renewal in places like North Yorkshire, as well as AI sovereignty."
They claimed that the NRDC's assertions were inaccurate, "not independently verified and ...rooted in basic errors".
埃文和萨默塞特警方 (Avon and Somerset police) 的警探乔·巴比奇 (Jo Babbage) 赞扬了该少女向警方讲述自己的经历并在法庭上接受质询的勇气。
“她所展现出的勇气无论如何强调都不为过，”她说。
📄 Original Section
Asos customers told data 'fully compromised' by hackers
Sarah Butler
Dan Milmo
The online fashion retailer Asos is investigating unauthorised access to its app system after shoppers received a notification claiming hackers had “fully compromised” its data.
Asos said basic personal information including name and contact details might have been accessed by an unidentified third party, but it did not believe that payment card records or passwords had been compromised.
It said in a statement: “We are investigating unauthorised activity involving third-party platforms that we use to communicate with customers. We took immediate action to restrict access to the notification platforms and are working with our internal and external specialist advisers, as well as all relevant authorities.”
It added: "Our website and app are operating as normal, with no current disruption to any aspects of our operations."
The value of Asos shares dived on the London Stock Exchange, closing 9.56% down.
The message sent out to customers said: "Dear Asos DPO [data protection officer] and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance."
Snowflake is a cloud platform used to store, process and analyse data including transactions and demographic information such as clothing sizes and body measurements. It also enables push notifications to clients' phones.
The Telegram channel operated by the purported hackers, who have named themselves the Xuanye Group, carried a message assuring Asos customers that “payment information is not affected” and a further post stating “the app is safe to use”.
The UK National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, is offering its assistance to Asos.
Survivors of domestic abuse reveal 'bully' ex-partners behind far-right street patrols
Nic Murray
Rajeev Syal
During their relationship, Lisa's ex-partner was controlling. He kept her at home where he was emotionally and physically abusive towards her, including once attacking her with a machete. These days, he runs protests outside houses of multiple occupancy that he claims are housing asylum seekers.
He coordinates groups of men to patrol the streets, claiming to protect women but often using these patrols to target men of colour. “There’s nothing good about that man. He’s a bully in every way,” she says.
Lisa is one of seven women who have told the Guardian they are survivors of domestic abuse carried out by key figures in the anti-immigration street patrol movement. All have chosen to come forward to make the public aware of the patterns of violence behind this form of activism.
At least 14 street patrol groups have been set up in towns and cities across the UK, receiving tens of thousands of pounds in public donations, as well as political support. The deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, has previously called for more patrols to take place.
Wearing hi-vis jackets - and in some cases stab-proof vests and carrying handcuffs - these groups aim to be a visible presence conducting patrols through towns and cities. Some have used the patrols to target men of colour, stopping and questioning individuals and demanding to see identity documents.
Despite their rhetoric of protecting women, the Guardian has been shown evidence that indicates the severity of the abuse carried out by men in these groups. Some women we spoke to have been granted restraining or non-molestation orders. One moved town with the support of the police for her own safety.
Lisa met and began a relationship with a far-right activist when she was 16. "He likes power, and I feel like this is giving him some sort of power," she said. "It's all about power and control in everything he does."
He is one of the main figures behind the branch of the Raise the Colours movement in his town. The far-right anti-migrant campaign has hung flags from lamp-posts across the UK under the guise of “patriotism”.
Early in their relationship, Lisa's partner became abusive and controlling, sometimes stopping her leaving the house. This behaviour escalated after she became pregnant and had her first child. He would threaten her and her family if she tried to end the relationship. "I still have nightmares to this day," Lisa said.
The night she left him, he tried to attack her with a machete and gave her a black eye and several broken toes. Police attended the scene and arrested him, but it did not end there. "When I did get away, he was threatening me constantly," Lisa said. "I had met somebody else eventually, and I was getting phone calls saying he's going to kick the baby out of me when he sees me in the street."
Despite the severity of this abuse, it never resulted in a conviction.
Claire was in a relationship with an anti-immigration activist for several years, during which she made various calls to the police due to his abusive and violent behaviour, often while her children were present. He was verbally abusive to Claire while she was pregnant, as well as behaving aggressively towards hospital staff after the birth of their first child.
This abuse continued after Claire's pregnancy, including one occasion when he pulled her hair and gripped her by the throat.
He uses his elevated platform in the town to run street patrols, standing with other men outside schools as children come and go, and erecting St George's cross flags on lamp-posts.
The Guardian previously revealed police data indicating patterns of
Counter-protesters against an anti-immigration march in Portsmouth last month; above, a far-right blockade of Gosport marina in September
PHOTOGRAPH: JAMES VEYSEY/ SHUTTERSTOCK; SOPA/SHUTTERSTOCK; LAB MO/LNP
domestic abuse among 2024 rioters, and similar links can be seen for those involved in this vigilantism.
Last August, Reece McCarron founded the “Corby guard”, claiming he had been inspired after seeing someone “making advances to a young girl on the way from school”. On early patrols in the Northamptonshire town he was joined by James Kenna, who was subject to a domestic violence protection order in 2020.
A month later, McCarron broke into his former partner's house, swinging a machete around the kitchen and threatening to kill her. He was later charged with a string of offences including rape, actual bodily harm and intentional strangulation, which have been dropped after support for prosecution was withdrawn by the victim. In May, he was convicted of coercive control, as the prosecutor told the courts "the victim said that she was very scared he would kill her. She couldn't sleep for weeks."
In Greater Manchester, Adam Farrell and Jamie Thomason formed the Heywood community guard. Several schools in Heywood were forced to go into lockdown when the guard ran patrols outside their gates.
Farrell was jailed in 2022 after a racist attack on a man that caused life-changing brain injuries. Thomason has claimed he is “doing God’s work” protecting women and children. In 2018, he was convicted under section 4A of the Public Order Act after arriving at a former partner’s address, threatening to slit her throat and punching her car.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the abuse survivors
Trio who raped girl and fled to France in back of lorry are jailed
Steven Morris
Three men who raped a 17-year-old girl before escaping to France in the back of a lorry have been jailed.
Mehrab Safi, 21, Salman Habib-kheil, 19, and Awal Ahmadzai, 19, and a 17-year-old boy plied the girl with alcohol and all four raped her.
Safi was found guilty of two counts of rape and Habibkheil of one. Both men were convicted of arranging or facilitating the travel of a female with a view to exploitation. Ahmadzai was found guilty of one count of rape and one of sexual assault. The 17-year-old was convicted of one count of rape.
The victim had met Safi in Bristol during a trip she made in November to go Christmas shopping with a friend - her first trip to the city from her home in Somerset, Bristol crown court heard. Immediately after they left, Safi began messaging the girl. He told her he loved her and asked her to send indecent images.
Four days later, Safi, in collaboration with Habibkheil, arranged for her to be collected by a taxi and brought into Bristol. She was taken to his house where she was raped over several hours.
The victim's mother reported her missing and police found her and the 17-year-old boy at Safi's house. As officers arrived, the three men fled, eventually managing to make their way across the Channel in the back of lorry carrying frozen goods.
Footage from Safi's mobile phone showed the men laughing and gesticulating in the back of the lorry. They were held in France and returned.
The girl had been raped five times by the four offenders. In a victim personal statement, the girl said she felt like a different person now and could not leave her home alone.
Safi was jailed for 15 years while Habibkheil and Ahmadzai were each sentenced to nine years in a youth detention centre. The 17-year-old was sentenced to two years and seven months in youth detention.
The court was told the four were born in Afghanistan and displaced by the "brutality" of the Taliban regime.
Habibkheil had lost his father to the Taliban and was instructed by relatives to make his way to England. Ahmadzai is believed to have post-traumatic stress disorder.
The 17-year-old offender lost his parents and fled to the UK aged 11. The court heard he suffered “horrendous abuse” while en route.
Judge Cullum said their experiences did not excuse the harm they had caused to a "vulnerable" girl who had been "groomed and trapped".
DS Jo Babbage of Avon and Somerset police praised the girl's bravery in telling police her story and being questioned in court.
"It's impossible to overstate the courage she has shown," she said.
Nobel prize in physics awarded to Belgian for his work on neutrinos
Ian Sample Science editor
The Nobel prize in physics was awarded yesterday to a researcher who turned an enormous block of ice at the south pole into a detector for ghostly particles called neutrinos that reach Earth from outer space.
Prof Francis Halzen, a Belgian particle physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led work at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which made the first detection of high-energy, extraterrestrial neutrinos soon after it was switched on in 2013.
To build the observatory, scientists, technicians and engineers embedded thousands of basketball-sized light detectors into a cubic kilometre of ice to detect faint flashes of light that can result when neutrinos from space crash into atomic nuclei.
Announcing the prize, the Nobel committee said Halzen had won "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin". He receives a prize of 12m Swedish kronor (£900,000).
"It feels strange," Halzen told a press briefing. "I hope it reflects on the really courageous people who ▲ Scientists detected the particles at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the south pole, in 2013
PHOTOGRAPH: XINHUA/ALAMY
joined me in the beginning when no really respectable, conservative physicist would have joined me, but many talented people did."
Neutrinos are mysterious particles that are as elusive as they are ubiquitous. They pass through almost everything they encounter, from people to planets. Every second, billions of neutrinos from the sun pass unnoticed through the body. But every now and then a neutrino will interact with the nucleus of an atom in a collision that can be picked up by a sensitive detector.
Halzen realised that brief flickers of light from neutrino collisions could be detected in clear, glacial ice and in 1988 put forward a plan to convert a chunk of the south pole into a neutrino observatory. The detector uses Earth to shield against the background noise of cosmic rays, and has light sensors to detect neutrinos passing through the planet from the northern hemisphere.
After the first detection of high-energy, extraterrestrial neutrinos in 2013, scientists working on IceCube identified the first cosmic source of neutrinos 3.7bn light years away.
The observatory has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy. Until now, researchers have learned about the cosmos from light, other electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves. Neutrinos are considered messengers from the cosmos and provide fresh clues as to how the universe evolved.
Dr Patrick Dunne, an associate professor of physics at Imperial College London, said: "Detecting neutrinos from astrophysical sources opens up a new lens, so it isn't overstating things to liken this to when Galileo first pointed a telescope at the stars."
The observations of cosmic neutrinos have led some scientists to speculate that the particles could be used by alien civilisations to send 'I hope it reflects on the really courageous people who joined me when no respectable, conservative physicist would'
messages across the universe. Asked what he made of the idea, Halzen said: "We have enough realistic problems to deal with right now [to] make neutrino astronomy a reality rather than worry about this."
But he added that when astronomers have opened new windows on the universe, they often make unexpected discoveries. "I'm sure this will be true for neutrinos 50 years from now," he said.
On Monday, three scientists won the Nobel prize in medicine for optogenetics, a powerful technique that has allowed researchers to shed light on the workings of the brain. The Nobel prize in chemistry will be announced today.
They are big not only in size but in delicious goodness, made from the very finest materials obtainable to-day (including separated milk and rich-with-energy glucose).
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📄 Original Section
Sweet truths What the health of those raised on sugar rationing is revealing seven decades on
Linda Geddes
They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many foods
remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.
Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.
The lifting of postwar rationing inadvertently created a natural experiment, whose consequences scientists are only beginning to unpick. A flurry of recent studies suggest that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people's health.
“What makes the end of sugar rationing particularly interesting is the nature of the exposure,” said Dr Jiazhen Zheng at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China, who worked on several of the recent studies. “In September 1953, sugar availability changed quite abruptly at the population level, largely because of policy rather than individual choice.”
The first of this recent wave of sugar rationing studies was published in the journal Science two years ago. Dr Tadeja Gračner at the University of Southern California and her colleagues used data from the UK Biobank to compare the health of people born shortly before and after sugar rationing ended in the UK. Some had been exposed to this low sugar environment only in the womb; others remained exposed for months or years, while those conceived after rationing ended were not exposed at all.
1953
The year UK sugar rationing ended. By the second half of 1954, average sugar intake had almost doubled
Gračner found that the longer people had spent under rationing, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in mid to later life: those exposed to rationing throughout their first 1,000 days had a 35% lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20% lower risk of high blood pressure than those who had never experienced rationing.
Over the past few months, further studies drawing on UK Biobank data have linked reduced sugar exposure to lower risks of a growing list of health conditions.
"I have been more struck by the consistency across different organ systems than by any single effect estimate," Zheng said. "We have seen associations with cardiovascular disease, liver disease, respiratory health, dementia and, more recently, broader measures of ageing. Our ageing study, for example, found a lower overall incidence of diseases linked to the hallmarks of ageing and modestly younger biological and organ ages among people exposed to rationing early in life."
Gračner is not entirely surprised. "Many of these outcomes are connected," she said. "Diabetes, hypertension and obesity are major risk factors for cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline and several other conditions."
Perhaps more surprising is the suggestion that the effects could extend beyond physical health. In August, Prof Nophar Geifman at the University of Surrey and her colleagues reported that people who had spent their first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing had a 33% lower risk of being diagnosed with anxiety than those born after rationing ended. They were also less likely to report a preference for sweet foods decades later. “Early nutritional environments appear to have lasting relevance for mental health,” Geifman said.
How such a relatively brief difference in sugar exposure might leave traces detectable many decades later remains uncertain. Gračner said: "We can show that growing up with less sugar was protective decades later, but not how: whether through sugar itself, through taste preferences formed early, or through a metabolic response set in early life."
Her team's latest research, now under peer review, suggests growing up under rationing may weaken the influence of genes
---
希利计划采取重大干预措施以降低能源账单
能源部门已提交关于如何在未来几个月减轻家庭压力的方案。
据了解，最可能的解决方案是增加“温暖家居折扣”（warm homes discount）——这是一种向领取特定福利的家庭提供的 £150 能源账单折扣。据了解，希利正考虑将其进一步增加 £100, 这笔资金将由纳税人承担，而非像现有折扣那样由账单支付者承担。
Since the source text provided is an image reference (`
`) and the draft translation was omitted, I cannot provide a corrected translation without the actual content of the image. Please provide the text contained within the image or the image itself to proceed with the translation.
📄 Original Section
CUT THEM INTO SLICES
and make the most of these two big-value chocolate coated candy bars
MARS BAR 2 $^{1}$ $^{2}$
Children snack on carrots as a sweet treat in 1941, when sugar and chocolate, above, where still rationed. Below left and top, school pupils crowd a sweet shop in 1953, the year the restrictions lifted
“That points to a response that is not purely behavioural: early nutrition may act on physiological pathways such as metabolic programming, insulin sensitivity, appetite and satiety regulation, or adipose-tissue [fat tissue] development.”
that predispose people to a higher body weight. "Importantly, while we observe that people exposed to rationing do consume less free sugar in adulthood, we find that dietary difference is similar across genetic-risk groups," Gračner said.
Zheng's ageing study offers another potential clue. People exposed to rationing scored about a year younger on several measures of biological age. The researchers also found differences in proteins involved in pathways that help cells respond to nutrients and have been implicated in ageing.
Explaining the anxiety finding was trickier. Geifman said the brain developed rapidly in the womb and the first few years of life, which could make it particularly sensitive to its nutritional environment. High-sugar diets have also been linked to inflammation and an
altered gut microbiome - both possible routes through which sugar could affect brain function.
Since the 1970s, researchers have used famines to investigate the consequences of severe nutritional deprivation. Much of this research has focused on the Dutch “hunger winter” of 1944-45, when German restrictions left millions in the Netherlands facing severe food shortages. Because it began and ended abruptly in a previously well-nourished group, rations
were recorded and birth records survived, it has been possible to compare those exposed to famine in utero with those born before the crisis or conceived afterwards. "The most reliable findings [for those exposed to famine in the womb] are an increased risk of overweight, obesity and type 2 diabetes," said Prof LH Lumey of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health in New York.
Although the British rationing studies might appear to point in the opposite direction, the conditions were very different. Zheng said: "British sugar rationing was not famine, and it did not involve severe overall caloric deprivation. Rather, it selectively constrained sugar intake."
The lesson, then, is not simply that less nutrition is better.
Sugar intake under rationing was broadly comparable to current UK guidelines, which state that free sugars - those added to foods and drinks, or naturally present in honey and fruit juices - should not exceed 30g a day for adults and children aged 11 and over, with lower limits for younger children. "Sugars should not be added to food or drinks given to babies," the NHS says. In practice, average UK consumption is about twice the recommended level.
The question raised by these studies is whether keeping sugar intake closer to recommended levels may have benefits that extend much further into later life.
Healey plans major intervention to bring down energy bills
Continued from page 1
submissions from the energy department for how to ease the pressures on households in the coming months.
The most likely solution is understood to be increasing the warm homes discount - a £150 discount to energy bills offered to households on certain benefits. Healey is understood to be considering increasing it by a further £100, which would be funded by taxpayers, rather than bill-payers as the existing discount is.
Fahnbulleh, meanwhile, has been pushing for more sweeping action to reduce bills for all consumers by as much as £120 by removing all levies.
Under her proposals, the levies, which fund renewable energy and efficiency schemes, would be paid for through taxation instead.
She told the Guardian last week: "If we want a system that is resilient, if we want a system that can cope, if we want a system that ultimately can deliver the diversity of energy that we want, what is the fairest way in which we pay for it? ... So we have to ask that question. Every other country is asking that question, and ultimately we've got to come to a fair deal."
Removing levies from bills would reduce inflation but cost as much as £3.2bn and would be difficult for the government to unwind should energy costs come down in the future.
Meanwhile, officials in the energy department are working on more radical proposals for after the budget, including proposals to reduce tariffs for poorer households or ones that use less energy.
Burnham told the Labour party conference last week: "British businesses and billpayers pay some of the highest energy costs in Europe. Within 10 years, I want those costs to be in line with our neighbours. This
The chancellor faces a crunch as he looks for £4.7bn for defence spending and cash to rebuild his fiscal buffer
means reforming a broken energy market so it better serves the public interest."
A so-called “social tariff” would force energy firms to charge poorer households less for each unit of electricity they use than richer ones. But creating such a scheme would involve a large amount of data collection from tax authorities, the Treasury and energy firms - which is likely to take far longer than the next few weeks.
An alternative plan, known as a “rising block tariff” would also vary the tariffs which energy companies can charge, but by consumption levels rather than income. The idea, which was proposed by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank when Fahnbulleh ran it, would charge consumers less for a set amount of “essential” use and more once their consumption crossed that level.
Alex Chapman, head of economic and environmental policy at NEF, said: "The government must use the budget to put in place both targeted support for the most vulnerable and, critically, a safety net for all."
He added: “Repeated crises have exposed the flaws in our privatised energy system - these can only be fixed by fundamental reform. This means capturing the benefits of cheap renewables and offering every household a ‘block’ of essential energy at a truly protected and affordable price.”
Alfie Stirling, director of policy at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: "Energy support for this winter needs to tick three boxes. It needs to support the majority of households; within this it needs to target the most support towards those in greatest need; and - as far as possible - it needs to actually lower the price, thereby bringing down inflation.
"The UK does not yet have the right toolkit to respond effectively to energy price shocks - building better tools is now a critical priority for our future security and living standards."
A Treasury spokesperson said: "Decisions on tax are a matter for the chancellor to set out at fiscal events, rather than routinely commenting on rumour, speculation or proposals."
Reform MP raises issue of second homes - then buys one for £800,000
▲ Sarah Pochin bought a Grade-II listed property on Anglesey. The Welsh island, left, has seen a sharp rise in holiday properties and second homes in recent years
PHOTOGRAPHS: PA/ALAMY
Nadeem Badshah
A Reform UK MP bought an £800,000 second home on a picturesque Welsh island two days after raising concerns in parliament about the impact of second homes on rural communities.
Sarah Pochin has completed the purchase of a Grade-II listed property on the southern coast of Anglesey (Ynys Môn).
The MP for Runcorn and Helsby in Cheshire bought the property two days after she submitted a written question on 15 June to the housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, according to the Will Hayward newsletter.
Pochin asked Pennycook “what assessment he has made of the potential impact of second home ownership on housing availability in coastal and rural communities”.
Pennycook replied: "Excessive concentrations of short-term lets and second homes impact on the availability and affordability of homes for local residents to buy and rent, as well as local services."
According to the Land Registry, the purchase was made jointly with Pochin's husband, Jonathan. The couple, who have submitted plans at Anglesey county council for changes to the property, retain ownership of another home in Cheshire.
Anglesey, famous for its coastline and ancient Celtic history, has become a hotspot for second home ownership in recent years. The island had the largest increase in holiday home users among local authorities from 2011 to 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics.
As of March 2026, Anglesey county council recorded 2,635 furnished homes that were not an individual's sole or main residence. The local authority introduced a council tax premium on second homes in 2016. Initially set at 25% on top of the standard rate, it has since risen incrementally to the current 100% premium, seeking to address local housing affordability.
Critics have argued that second homes and short-term holiday rentals can adversely affect local communities by reducing housing supply, inflating property prices and putting a strain on infrastructure.
Pochin became Reform UK's first female MP after winning the Runcorn and Helsby byelection in May 2025. She previously served as a Conservative mayor and a local councillor on Cheshire East council, latterly as an independent, before joining Nigel Farage's party.
Reform UK did not respond to a request for comment.
在由 More in Common 主办的一场挤满了影子内阁部长的边缘活动中，提到詹里克时人们发出了呻吟声。当被问及是否会考虑接回詹里克或另外三名跳槽到改革英国党的保守党议员时，保守党副党魁亚历克斯·伯格哈特 (Alex Burghart) 表示：“不，不，不，不。” 问他是否对他们的离开感到宽慰？“是，是，是，是。”
Greens Labour 'unlikely' to form pact with party after Zionism row
Aletha Adu
Peter Walker
Senior Labour party figures said it is very unlikely their party would cooperate with the Greens in the future after they adopted a policy treating Zionism as a form of racism.
One Labour minister said they could not foresee how the two parties could work together, while a government official said Labour should formally rule out a future coalition or other arrangement.
There is also pressure within the Liberal Democrats for them to end existing arrangements with Zack Polanski's party, with some senior Lib Dems calling on the party to end its coalition with the Greens in Southwark, south London.
Green members voted at the party's conference on Sunday to adopt a binding policy which says Zionism should be treated by the party as racism, and which calls for a single Palestinian state in place of Israel.
After the vote, Bridget Phillipson, the Labour chair, called the move "shameful", saying it highlighted how vital it had been for her party to tackle antisemitism under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
While Phillipson's statement is backed by her fellow ministers, there is debate as to whether Labour should go further and formally rule out any ties with the Greens.
A source linked to the Jewish Labour Movement said Labour should "absolutely" rule out governing with the Greens, arguing the policy raised serious questions about whether its treatment of Jewish members could breach equality law.
It follows months of talk of possible cooperation between the parties.
Labour views the Zionism motion, and the criticism which has followed, as a means to simplify its political argument against the Greens at a time when Polanski's party has increasingly sought to attract disillusioned Labour voters on the party's left.
A major test of this will come tomorrow, with voting in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, where Polanski is seeking to win Starmer's former seat from Labour.
The Lib Dems and Greens already govern together in Southwark after May's local elections, with the Greens as the senior partner.
Following the Zionism motion, both Southwark parties released a “joint administration statement against antisemitism”.
It brought a scathing response from some senior Lib Dems. Tagging Victor Chamberlain, the Lib Dem deputy leader of Southwark, Sarah Ludford, a peer and former MEP for the party, wrote on X that she did not understand “how you think this greenwash is an adequate response to the Greens’ antisemitic ‘Zionism is racism’ motion”.
Tories' 'Britannia Shield' plan different to Israel's Iron Dome, insists Badenoch
Jessica Elgot
Deputy political editor
Kemi Badenoch has denied comparing a new air defence system proposed by her party to Israel's Iron Dome, despite using the term in her press release and a newspaper article.
The Conservative leader said the "Britannia Shield" would not be comparable to the missile defence system in Israel, which is primarily designed to counter short-range attacks.
The party has proposed allotting £1bn a year towards building the system, though the former army general Richard Barrons told Times Radio the cost of a system similar to Israel's would be upwards of £100bn.
In interviews at Conservative party conference in Birmingham, Badenoch admitted her party was “not out of the woods” despite the most unified and optimistic gathering in years - even though the Tories are still polling below their 2024 election defeat.
'We are designing something specific for the kind of threat that we face here'
Kemi Badenoch
Conservative leader
"We are feeling chipper because we are going back to first principles," she told the BBC. "We're not out of the woods yet." She added that "people at conference aren't happy because we're about to win an election. We're happy because we know who we are."
She also said she would rather have another general election than do a deal with Reform to form a government, as senior party figures attacked their rightwing rivals with a ferocity that appeared to make the chances of any pact more remote.
In her own conference speech today, Badenoch is expected to announce plans to cut - but not abolish - inheritance tax, which is levied at 40% on all estates with property worth more than £500,000.
She is expected to warn voters that the country is “running out of money”, adding: “Almost everything else flows from this. Our national debt currently stands at nearly £3tn and we are adding more than £100bn every year.
"This is crazy. Unless we start creating more value, unless we start growing our economy, something is going to break."
The Tories have pledged to cut employers' national insurance from 15% to 7.5% for people aged 21 to 24 in an effort to drive down the youth unemployment rate. Badenoch is expected to say she will fund the £2.3bn scheme through welfare cuts.
She also said it could be "difficult"
◀From left, Tom Tugendhat, Helen Whately, James Cartlidge and Alex Burghart sing the national anthem yesterday;
below, Kemi Badenoch backstage at the conference; and a delegate takes a selfie
PHOTOGRAPHS: IAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES; STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
to reverse Labour's planned changes to the pensions triple lock once they had been brought in - as it emerged her party could head into the next election without a social care plan.
But the Tory leader was forced to clarify her “Iron Dome” defence policy, as she tried to distance herself from using the term. She told Times Radio it was a “semantic argument” and that the new system would protect Britain from increasing threats.
Badenoch told BBC Radio 4's Today that the description had come from newspapers - although the party's press release described the system as "in essence a British Iron Dome".
In a piece authored by Badenoch in the Sun, which used an image of Israel's air defences on its front page, she wrote: "Modelled on Israel's 'Iron Dome', Britannia Shield will invest £10bn over 10 years in the radar, missiles and technology needed to detect these threats and stop them before they reach British soil."
But Badenoch told Today that was not the aim. "We are not building the Iron Dome. We are doing what other European countries are doing: Greece, Benelux countries - Belgium and the Netherlands - and Germany. We are designing something specific for the kind of threat that we face here."
The shadow defence secretary, James Cartlidge, likened the phrase to the brand name Hoover, which has come to generically refer to vacuum cleaners, when he was asked why Badenoch had denied the Conservatives were proposing an Iron Dome-style system.
Asked on Times Radio if the aim was to be able to intercept any attack over the entire country, Badenoch said: "It should, but it needs to protect critical national infrastructure ... Critical national infrastructure protects the entire country. If we lose even one thing, the entire country is in a real problem, and that's what we mean."
On whether she was ready for an election, Badenoch told Today she believed polls would improve but she admitted the party was still unpopular because of the previous government, even though her personal popularity had improved.
"I think people still associate the Conservative party with the things they didn't like about the previous government," she said. "I need to work hard to change that ... these things take time. I am the leader and I need to show that this party is different from the party that the people said no to two years ago."
A Labour source said: "It's no surprise Kemi Badenoch wants to forget how the Tories hollowed out our armed forces. But hoping her half-baked defence promise based on fantasy numbers will be forgotten just hours after it was made shows how unserious she is about our country's security. The Tories can never be given responsibility for keeping Britain safe again."
A detail from the 27-metre 'Birmingham tapestry', on display at the Conservative party's annual conference
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTOPHER THOMOND/ THE GUARDIAN
约克郡建筑协会 (YORKSHIRE BUILDING SOCIETY)
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📄 Original Section
'He's our villain' Party faithful weave unifying tale around Jenrick
Alexandra Topping
Political correspondent
As Kemi Badenoch basked in the Tory faithful's applause at the close of her pivotal speech at the Conservative party
conference last year, one member of her shadow cabinet looked less than enthused.
Robert Jenrick, who was bested by Badenoch in a leadership vote a year earlier, looked on and - as one shadow cabinet member now recalls - had to be prodded by Lord Ashcroft to applaud. "If you are plotting against someone, you at least pretend to like them," they say. "The thing about Robert is he's not even a good machiavellian."
Jenrick left the party a few months later, swiftly and publicly ejected by an ice-cold Badenoch after she got wind that he was planning to defect to Reform UK. This week, as the Conservative ranks enjoy their annual knees-up in Birmingham, the now Reform economy spokesperson has been accusing his old party from afar of “once again copying our policies”.
But while Jenrick may not be in Birmingham, members could be forgiven for seeing reminders of him everywhere they looked.
At the heart of the conference, depictions of Jenrick feature in the “Birmingham tapestry” - a 27-metre (88ft) illustration of the past two years in British politics, as seen through Tory eyes.
Casting Badenoch as a glorious 11th-century conqueror, it also depicts a tiny Jenrick wailing as he loses the leadership contest. Later, under the heading “Expelleth the Turncoat”, Badenoch can be seen banishing her tiny, sobbing rival, beside the photocopier where - legend has it - Jenrick’s letter of resignation was found.
"I think it's great fun. Every story needs a villain and he's ours," said one party member. "He's not a big figure here anymore, he's just a figure of fun."
Another member said they voted for Jenrick in the leadership election and felt let down by his plotting after he lost to Badenoch. "What he did was spiteful, petty and childish. I was a massive fan, but now I couldn't care less what he does," he said.
Referring to Jenrick's social media output, which frequently shows him confronting shoplifters and fare-dodgers, he rolls his eyes. "It's just attention-seeking isn't it? I do wonder now though, as Reform falter, if he regrets what he did. I hope so."
The schadenfreude at Jenrick's fading star is palpable. Shadow cabinet ministers bring him up unprompted, with unbridled delight. "I miss him like I would miss an abscess in my molar," remarks one senior Tory.
Others are surprised by their own strength of feeling towards a former colleague. “Nobody knew how much we hated Robert until he left the party,” says one senior member. Repeating the mantra that they are more united behind Badenoch than any other leader in years, some say Jenrick brought them closer together, because he “briefed against everybody”. Another adds: “Rob leaving was like pulling out a splinter.”
At a packed fringe event of shadow cabinet ministers hosted by More in Common, mentions of Jenrick are met with groans. Asked if he would consider taking back Jenrick or any of the other three Tory MPs who defected to Reform, Alex Burghart, the Tories' deputy leader, said: "No, no, no and no." Was he relieved they had gone? "Yes, yes, yes and yes."
Badenoch has made clear that neither Jenrick nor his fellow defectors (variously described by her team as “venal”, “mad” and “hopeless”) will ever be welcome back, going so far as thanking the reform leader, Nigel Farage, for doing her party’s “spring cleaning” for her.
Others suggest Reform were welcome to one of their former star players. "Good luck to his new friends in Reform," says one. "He'd elbow them into the path of an oncoming express train if it meant he got ahead".
Appreciating the tapestry in between conference sessions, Aphra Brandreth, a shadow minister for the environment, food and rural affairs, insisted her party was over Jenrick - though his spectre here suggests there may be some healing left to do. "Honestly I don't spend any time thinking about Robert Jenrick," she says with a smile. "He's gone, and we've all moved on."
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Welcome to the Tory pleasuredome: Kemi's on the warpath. But she ain't no Iron Lady
Just another day in Crapland. It's amazing what you can get used to. You can't say the Tories haven't put a lot of thought into their party conference. It takes some skill to make every day even more dismal than the last. You come expecting little and get less than you
bargained for. You might find yourself wondering if you are being gaslit. Small pockets of people roaming around aimlessly with a smile on their face, insisting that it is very heaven in this dawn to be alive and repeatedly crossing themselves before images of the beatific Kemi Badenoch.
I've come to realise I've got Kemi wrong. Sure, she's short-tempered and can't tolerate any dissent. But she's actually a supremely gifted entertainer. She would be far more successful taking her show to the Edinburgh fringe than Birmingham. Her act on the morning media round was one of her best yet. Understandably, every interviewer wanted to ask her about the Tories' overnight announcement of a £10bn Iron Dome to rival the Israelis' that would protect
She couldn't think why everyone was calling it an Iron Dome. Maybe it was the Tory press release calling it ... an Iron Dome?
the UK from any kind of drone and missile attack. How did she imagine she was going to build the Iron Dome for about a 10th of the money that all the experts said it would cost?
"Stop calling it an Iron Dome," Kemi dead-panned. She really is a comedy genius. "It isn't an Iron Dome. I've never called it an Iron Dome. It's a Britannia Shield." She couldn't think for the life of her why everyone was calling it an Iron Dome. Mmm. It might have been
something to do with the Tory press office releasing a statement calling it an Iron Dome? And her opinion piece in the Sun calling it an Iron Dome?
OK, we'll call it a Britannia Shield, said the radio and TV presenters. So when was it going to be operational, what would it look like and how much of the UK would it cover? Kemi laughed. She hadn't a clue.
Are you really just a one-woman band? Anna Foster asked on the Today programme. Your personal polls are higher than your party's. A polite way of saying the Tories are tanking in third place. Not at all, Kemi ad-libbed. Everyone knows who my shadow cabinet is. Er. I'm not sure I could name them all.
Back in the conference centre, the morning's entertainment was centred around the "Main Hall", AKA the converted cupboard. For Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, there were about 15 people in the room. The rest of the audience had disguised themselves as seats again. There was also no one to hear Rebecca Paul - me neither - talk about £50,000 handbags with a woman called Plum.
By the afternoon we lucky few were stretched out into the much-reduced Symphony Hall to prepare for war. First up was the shadow foreign secretary, Tom Tugendhat. "I am coming back to serve," SuperTug announced, matching the oratory skills of Andrew Griffith. He rather died on his arse. Then we got the special guest. The rightwing historian Niall Ferguson. A swivel-eyed, deranged Dr Strangelove. "A world war is coming," he said, trying not to show if he had become sexually aroused. All of which made the later speeches of Kemi-come-latelies Helen Whately and James Cartlidge somewhat redundant. There's no need to starve benefits claimants or build an Iron Dome when the apocalypse is already upon us.
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安德鲁被告知不得使用国王资金挑战逮捕决定
杰米·格里森（Jamie Grierson）
据一名宫廷消息人士透露，安德鲁·蒙巴顿-温莎（Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor）已被警告，不得使用国王的私人资金为其针对泰晤士河谷警察局（Thames Valley police）的法律行动提供资金。
“戒烟行动与健康”（Action on Smoking and Health）首席执行官海泽尔·奇斯曼（Hazel Cheeseman）表示：“英国吸烟人数首次低于十分之一。这是一个非常令人鼓舞的进展，表明通过持续采取行动减少吸烟可以取得怎样的成就。”
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来自布里斯托的精彩时光...
与大西部铁路（Great Western Railway）一起探索传奇之地。伦敦帕丁顿至布里斯托邓普尔米兹（Bristol Temple Meads）起价£25。
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Andrew told not to use king's money to challenge arrest
Jamie Grierson
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been warned not to use the king's private money to fund his legal action against Thames Valley police, according to a palace source.
The former Duke of York is challenging the legality of search warrants that led to his arrest in February, with a private high court hearing due to take place tomorrow.
Mountbatten-Windsor receives an annual stipend - the value of which has not been disclosed - provided by King Charles from his private funds.
A palace source told reporters it had been made clear to the former duke this stipend should not be used to fund the judicial review.
The source is reported to have said Mountbatten-Windsor's legal defence was a matter for him and his lawyers, and Buckingham Palace had no role in determining it.
The former royal was arrested on his 66th birthday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, following allegations he had shared sensitive information with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as the UK's trade envoy. He was interviewed under caution before being released under investigation.
A judge at the Old Bailey issued the warrants that allowed police to raid Mountbatten-Windsor's residence on the Sandringham estate and his former home, Royal Lodge.
On Monday, a judicial spokesperson confirmed that a hearing was due to take place at 2pm tomorrow at the high court, before Mr Justice Hilliard.
The spokesperson said the hearing would begin in private and concern an attempt by Thames Valley police to restrict access to court documents. It is not known whether Mountbatten-Windsor will attend.
A Thames Valley police spokesperson confirmed the force was "engaged in legal proceedings in relation to warrants previously obtained from the central criminal court", adding: "As these legal proceedings are currently ongoing, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further."
When Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on 19 February, the king issued a written statement saying "the law must take its course".
More than 1m people in Britain who never smoked are now vapers
Andrew Gregory
Health editor
More than 1 million people in Great Britain now vape despite never having been regular smokers, with rates nearly doubling in four years, according to figures that health experts describe as concerning.
About 5.4 million people aged 16 and above in England, Scotland and Wales (9.9%) used e-cigarettes daily or occasionally in 2025, Office for National Statistics data showed. Vaping was most common among those aged 25-34 (16.4%).
The ONS also found about 2.9% (1.1 million) of Britons who had never smoked cigarettes reported using an e-cigarette daily or occasionally.
The proportion of never-smokers who vape has almost doubled since 2021, when 1.5% of people who had never smoked reported using e-cigarettes.
Estimates published in the Lancet Public Health journal in 2024 suggested there were about 1 million people in England who vaped despite never having smoked.
But the data published yesterday marked the first time official ONS figures had shown that the number for England, Scotland and Wales had topped 1 million. The 2025 figure for Great Britain (1.1 million) was up from 940,000 in 2024, the ONS said.
▲ E-cigarette use among adults aged between 25 and 34 rose to 16.4%
Justin Webb, an associate professor of physical activity and health at London Metropolitan University, said it was “somewhat concerning that 1.1 million people who have never smoked reported using an e-cigarette”.
He added: "Vapes can help adults stop smoking, but they are not risk-free and their full long-term effects remain unclear.
"We need to preserve their value as a quitting aid while strengthening protection against uptake among children and non-smokers."
The ONS data showed 25-34 was the only age group in which there was a rise in e-cigarette use, increasing from 12.9% in 2024 to 16.4% in 2025.
That made those aged 25-34 the age group most likely to use e-cigarettes in Great Britain, overtaking 16- to 24-year-olds, who had the highest rates between 2021 and 2024.
Meanwhile, separate ONS figures covering all four nations of the UK showed about 4.9 million people aged 18 and over (9.8% of the adult population) smoked cigarettes in 2025. This was a decrease from 2024 (10.6%), continuing a long-term downward trend.
David Mais, from the ONS, said: "Fewer than one in 10 adults now smoke. This is the lowest proportion on record and continues the long-term decline in smoking.
"At the same time, e-cigarette use remains more common than smoking and has followed an overall upward trend since 2020.
"E-cigarette users are also getting older, with those aged 25 to 34 now overtaking 16- to 24-year-olds as the age group most likely to use them.
"This may reflect existing users getting older, growing popularity among this age group or a combination of both."
When it comes to smoking, men were more likely to smoke than women in the UK in 2025, continuing a trend observed in previous years. About 2.8 million men (11.3%) and 2.1m women (8.2%) were thought to be current smokers.
The largest reduction in smoking prevalence between 2011 and 2025 was among the 18-24 age group, from 25.7% to 7.2%, the ONS found.
Hazel Cheeseman, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said: "For the first time, fewer than one in 10 people in the UK smoke. This is really encouraging progress and shows what can be achieved through sustained action to reduce smoking."
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监管机构就 Instagram Instants 功能对 Meta 展开调查
丹·米尔莫 (Dan Milmo)
全球技术编辑
马克·扎克伯格旗下的 Meta 公司因在 Instagram 上推出一项类似 Snapchat 的功能，目前正因涉嫌违反英国数字安全法而接受调查。
“将这称为保护是对环境的‘洗绿’，”作者兼 Aftel 奇特气味档案库（Aftel Archive of Curious Scents）创始人曼迪·阿夫特尔（Mandy Aftel）说道。“制造濒危植物气味的合成版本并不能拯救该植物。”她表示，生产替代品并不能解决导致物种衰减的其他原因。
英国皇家植物园（Kew）的里安·史密斯（Rhian Smith）对此表示赞同。她以沉香属植物为例，表示 AI 可以帮助设计沉香的替代品，但野生来源的材料仍然备受推崇。“这并不能完全减轻野生植物物种所承受的压力。”
在其他方面，据称 AI 正在改变调香师的工作环境。克里斯蒂娜·阿加帕基斯（Christina Agapakis）通过重建保存花卉基因的工作，产生了一些可用于创造新气味的化合物。
但即使是 AI 也有其局限性：一种气味可能包含数百个分子，并根据植物的部位以及生长条件而改变。
“我们得到的气味只是那些已逝之物的幽灵碎片，”阿加帕基斯在谈到她的项目时说道。“我们必须记住，无论 AI 有多么强大，气味最终不仅仅是一个公式或数据集。”
与大西部铁路（Great Western Railway）一起探索传奇之地。伦敦帕丁顿（London Paddington）至温莎和伊顿中央站（Windsor & Eton Central）票价 £14.70 起。
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Three men spied on journalists as part of Iranian plot, court hears
Nadeem Badshah
Three men accused of being Iranian spies carried out surveillance and reconnaissance to target journalists in the UK as part of a plan to commit "serious violence", a court in London heard yesterday.
Mostafa Sepahvand, Farhad Javadi Manesh and Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori are charged with offences under the National Security Act.
Their “subjects” included Mojtaba Pourmohsen and Kambiz Hosseini, journalists for the London-based Persian broadcaster Iran International, as well as a founder member of UK Lawyers for Israel, Jonathan Turner, the court was told.
Sepahvand, 41, is alleged to have intended to physically carry out a "violent attack" against at least one of the targets, while Manesh, 46, and Noori, 57, assisted in planning.
Sepahvand has said he was threatened into conducting surveillance against his will, but the prosecution described this as an “entirely bogus claim”, telling jurors he did it to get paid and have his theft conviction in Iran "fixed".
In a voice note read out in Woolwich crown court, Sepahvand told an associate he would "finish off" a target if he was paid £150,000.
"They made me a promise and said: 'We'll sort out your matter/court case, and we'll give you £150,000 as well. Finish the job. We'll show you him/her [the target],' he said.
"This is an illegal job. It's something that constitutes a criminal offence, and it carries a heavy prison sentence. At the absolute minimum, they should transfer £10,000 for now.
"Wherever they tell me, I'll go there and stand there. If the person is inside, they pay the £150,000, and I'll finish him/her off."
The defendants were said to have visited addresses linked to their targets, taken photos and videos, and used platforms such as ChatGPT to research them online between August 2024 and March last year.
That they conducted the surveillance and reconnaissance is not disputed, the jury was told.
Sepahvand accepted he was doing so for the benefit of the Iranian regime ▲ From left, Farhad Javadi Manesh, Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori and Mostafa Sepahvand in court
ILLUSTRATION: JULIA QUENZLER/SWNS
but has claimed he was threatened or bullied into doing it, and that he "deliberately did a bad job of it", the prosecution said.
Manesh and Noori claimed they did not know they were assisting the Iranian intelligence service.
The three defendants are charged with engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service.
Sepahvand, of St John's Wood, north London, is also charged with engaging in surveillance, reconnaissance and open-source research with the intention to commit serious violence against a person in the UK.
Manesh, of Brent, and Noori, of Ealing, both in west London, are also charged with engaging in surveillance and reconnaissance with the intention that serious violence against a person in the UK would be committed by others.
The three men, who deny all the charges, were assisted by interpreters in the dock. The trial continues.
通过“加速你的技能”竞赛，让年轻人为 AI 赋能的职场做好准备
巴克莱生活技能项目（Barclays LifeSkills）在 Atlassian Williams F1 车队的支持下，正帮助 11-25 岁的青少年培养在 AI 赋能的职场中取得成功所需的人本技能。
Regulator investigates Meta over Instagram Instants
Dan Milmo
Global technology editor
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is under investigation for a potential breach of the UK's digital safety laws after launching a Snapchat-style feature on Instagram.
The UK's communications watchdog, Ofcom, is investigating whether the \$1.9tn (£1.4tn) company infringed the Online Safety Act (OSA) by failing to carry out adequate checks on whether its Instagram Instants product could show illegal content or be accessed by children.
Social media companies are required to carry out risk assessments before making significant changes to their service's design or operation. Breaching the OSA carries a range of potential actions, from a formal warning to a fine of up to 10% of global revenue.
George Lusty, the director of enforcement at Ofcom, said risk assessments were a vital step in
10%
The proportion of global revenue a company can be liable to pay in fines for breaching the Online Safety Act keeping tech platforms safe for users. "You wouldn't launch a new car without testing it properly, and it's the same for online services," he said. "Safety by design must be built in, not bolted on, and today's investigation shows we'll take action where we have concerns that providers are failing to comply."
Instagram's Instants feature allows users to send images that disappear after viewing. The company said it had conducted a risk analysis of Instants and talked to Ofcom on a number of occasions before launching it. It said the feature carried protections such as blocking forwarding and included all the safeguards under its teen account settings, the default mode for under-18s on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.
"We will of course cooperate with Ofcom during this investigation," a Meta spokesperson said.
The Molly Rose Foundation, a charity established by the family of Molly Russell, a teenager who took her life after viewing harmful content on Instagram, said it was crucial that Meta was “held to account for their failures under the Online Safety Act”.
Ofcom is already investigating Meta over failure to comply with a request for information related to its WhatsApp platform.
Zuckerberg's company is challenging Ofcom in court over the OSA. Meta is suing the regulator in the high court over how it charges tech companies fees to cover its operating costs, and in a further case, it is challenging Ofcom for placing Whatsapp and Instagram in a new category under the act that subjects them to additional duties.
Meta has also joined TikTok and Elon Musk's X in a court challenge over the amount of information Ofcom is demanding they provide under the online safety regime.
National
艺术评论：时尚至上的幻想之作，缺失了90年代的所有精髓
90年代：艺术与时尚
伦敦泰特不列颠美术馆 (Tate Britain)
★☆☆☆☆
乔纳森·琼斯 (Jonathan Jones)
即便在1990年代，杰克·查普曼 (Jake Chapman) 和迪诺斯·查普曼 (Dinos Chapman) 就被一些人斥为为了震惊而震惊的巨婴，然而，正是他们的作品让这场极其浅薄的展览在某些时刻接近了深度。他们的雕塑作品《针对死者的伟业》(Great Deeds Against the Dead) 基于戈雅 (Goya) 一幅描绘拿破仑战争暴行的版画，展示了被肢解、流血的裸体尸体被挂在树上。它提出了关于战争与艺术、痛苦的呈现，以及艺术是否能具有道德目的的问题。90年代最优秀的英国艺术就是这样的：初看张扬、庸俗、阴森，但又出人意料地充满智慧与情感。遗憾的是，这场展览两者皆无。
当然，这次展览对于更广泛的流行文化热潮也没有太多可言。一整间房子的派对照片描绘了俱乐部场景，但 90 年代的另一个重点无疑是英国主流流行音乐的复兴——我想恩宁富尔（Enninful）太高端了，以至于找不到空间给 Oasis 或 Blur，更不用说 Fat Les 了。
相反，我们看到的是高级定制。你显然可以将亚历山大·麦昆（Alexander McQueen）视为一名艺术家。但他那些主导了“身体恐怖”展厅的服装，仅仅是矫揉造作且自命不凡。如果这些作品表达了什么，那可能是对那些被迫穿着它们走在 T 台上的女性的厌恶。在同一个房间里，肖恩·埃利斯（Sean Ellis）为《Face》杂志拍摄的那些傲慢且糟糕的图像占据了整面墙。正是在这些作品的衬托下，杰克（Jake）和迪诺斯（Dinos）看起来才如此深邃。
或者是我错了？“青年英国艺术家”（Young British Art）是否真的配得上泰特美术馆（Tate）给予的这种轻视对待？毕竟泰特美术馆曾从这些艺术家身上获益匪浅。也许那真的只是一堆胡说八道。但即便你不认同我的观点，不认为那个时代的某些艺术具有强大且持久的力量，它也理应获得足够的空间被人们看到并评判。
Scents and sensibility Can AI save rare plants used to make perfume?
Amelia Hill
M any of the world's most expensive perfumes begin with a wounded tree. When some Aquilaria trees
are damaged, they produce a dark, fragrant resin that becomes agarwood, or oudh - an ingredient so valuable that wild trees have been illegally felled in its pursuit.
The result has devastated wild Aquilaria populations. But what if perfumers could create the smell without cutting down the tree?
Now scientists and biotech companies say advances in artificial intelligence could soon allow the fragrance industry to reproduce scents and compounds from endangered plants without repeatedly harvesting them.
"Being able to recreate the scent of an endangered plant would be a huge win for both the environment but also the brands," said Alex Wiltschko, the founder of Osmo, a Google Brain spin-off that has raised \$130m to develop AI capable of predicting and recreating smells.
Osmo had recreated the scent of a rare tree from a piece of bark "the size of a finger", Wiltschko said. A spectrometer analysed the sample, its AI reconstructed the chemical formula, and the scent was reproduced in its laboratory.
He claimed Osmo had trained its AI on more than 5m human responses to smells: "That means it can predict how combinations of molecules will be perceived."
The company BioHarvest Sciences says it has created a stable cell culture from an endangered south-east Asian fragrance plant, allowing its valuable compounds to be produced without cultivating ▲ Biotechnology firms say advances in AI mean they can now predict what new molecules will smell like
PHOTOGRAPH: PIXEL-SHOT/ALAMY
'This is greenwashing ... making a version of an endangered plant's smell does not save the plant'
Mandy Aftel
Natural perfumer or harvesting the original. The plant has not been named for commercial reasons but BioHarvest has announced an agreement anticipating production of 20 tonnes of the fragrance composition, with production potentially beginning next year.
"The challenge is that human demand can be effectively unlimited while biological supply is not," said Zaki Rakib, BioHarvest's chief executive. "We believe biotechnology can help close that gap."
But conservationists and perfumers say such claims risk giving advances in fragrance technology an environmental gloss they have not yet earned.
"Calling this conservation is greenwashing," said Mandy Aftel, an author and founder of the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents. "Making a synthetic version of an endangered plant's smell does not save the plant." She said producing a substitute did not address other causes of a species' decline.
Rhian Smith, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, agreed. She pointed to the Aquilaria. AI could help design an alternative to oudh, she said, but wild-sourced material remained highly prized. "It doesn't completely take the pressure off wild plant species."
Elsewhere, AI is claimed to be changing the world in which perfumers work. Christina Agapakis's work reconstructing genes from preserved flowers has produced compounds that can be used to create new scents.
But even AI has its limits: a scent can contain hundreds of molecules and change according to which part of the plant it comes from and the conditions in which it grows.
"The smell we got was this ghostly fragment of what had been lost," Agapakis said of her project. "What we have to remember is, ultimately, however powerful AI is, a smell is not simply a formula or dataset."
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Art review Fashion-heavy fantasy has none of what made the 90s matter
The 90s: Art and Fashion
Tate Britain, London
★☆☆☆☆
Jonathan Jones
Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their
work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print by Goya of Napoleonic war atrocities, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 90s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. This show, unfortunately, is neither.
You'd think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which its Millbank premises played a starring role - staging the Turner prize back when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing. At the start of the 90s, no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels.
A show spectacularly revisiting fin-de-siècle British art would be an interesting proposition. Instead, the former Vogue editor Edward Enninful has been invited to stage his fantasy version of that decade, mixing up art and fashion, with the emphasis very much on fashion.
There's more about Isabella Blow than Rachel Whiteread, who is represented by an early cast of the inside of a hot-water bottle. Damien Hirst has a couple of small, harmless-looking sharks balanced on a circular rail. There's no chance of understanding from this how his early work seemed to confront the tiger shark's maw of death. Perhaps his 90s art can still move, or perhaps it has become silly with time, but there is not enough of it to even begin to decide.
This is not a real
exhibition. It's a
magazine spread
with the breathless
superficiality of a
glossy layout
Great Deeds
Against the
Dead by Jake
and Dinos
Chapman, from
1994. Based
on a print by
Goya, it asks
questions about
war, art and the
representation
of pain
PHOTOGRAPH:
JAKE AND DINOS
CHAPMAN
Juergen Teller's 1996 photograph Kristen McMenamy No 3 is hung next to Sarah Lucas's 1997 work Chicken Knickers. Teller's picture depicts its subject smoking naked with a lipstick heart drawn on her,
This is not a real exhibition. It's a magazine spread. Not only are there style mags in the show, its design has the breathless superficiality of a glossy layout bigging-up its glib theme in a glamorous sweep of strikingly juxtaposed images. But setting fashion images alongside works of conceptual art is a terrible idea. If you take the fashion seriously, you reduce the art to another stylish pose. If you care about the art, the fashion looks pretty vacant.
▼Ravers at the Eclipse, Coventry, 1991 by Tony Davis; a collection of Vivienne Westwood's 90s designs, bottom left; and Pauline Bunny by Sarah Lucas, bottom right
PHOTOGRAPHS: TONY DAVIS; GUY BELL/ SHUTTERSTOCK surrounding the word "Versace". What is it saying other than "Buy Versace"? Now look at Lucas's photograph of a raw chicken stuck to someone's knickers. It's funny - a great deed against the dead chicken from an artist with a genius for estrangement, as one of her included "Bunny" series of sculptures also reminds you.
Chicken Knickers
by Sarah Lucas
Teller is exposed as just a clever stylist whose images lack poetry or meaning. His portrait of Kate Moss has none of the distance or mystery of Gary Hume's painting of her with a shiny, mirroring face. Hume provides one of the few moments when fashion and art genuinely overlap. But as pop art, his Kate is more a baleful, Richard Hamilton-like comment on celebrity than a celebration of Cool Britannia.
Not that the show has much to say about that wider pop cultural fizz, either. An entire room full of party pics depicts the club scene, but surely another point of the 90s was that mainstream British pop was revived - I guess Enninful is too sophisticated to find space for Oasis or Blur, let alone Fat Les.
Instead we get couture. You can obviously see Alexander McQueen as an artist. But his costumes dominating the room dealing with "body horror" are just mannered and pretentious. If they express anything it might be a hatred of the women forced to go on catwalks in them. In the same room, pompous, awful images shot by Sean Ellis for the Face take up an entire wall. It's next to these that Jake and Dinos look so profound.
Other fine artists don't fare so well. Helen Chadwick gets two tokenistic, eerie photoworks, while the death-obsessed art of Hamad Butt - shown beautifully at the Whitechapel not so long ago - is squeezed to the end of the gallery. Chris Ofili is namechecked with No Woman, No Cry; Tracey Emin gets one neon. Other artists are notable by their absence, including Mat Collishaw, Jeremy Deller and the late and missed Christine Borland.
Or am I wrong? Does Young British Art fully deserve the dismissive treatment that Tate, which did so well out of these artists, gives it? Perhaps it really was a load of codswallop. But even if you don't share my belief that some of the art of that time is powerful and enduring, surely it deserves enough space to be seen and judged.
After just seven rooms, it suddenly ends. I hoped what I'd seen was a prologue to more art, bigger art, with enough space to appreciate it. But no. That's it. You leave as dissatisfied as you might after flicking through a 30-year-old copy of the Face in a dentist's waiting room.
萨顿信托（Sutton Trust）慈善机构的百万富翁创始人彼得·兰普爵士（Sir Peter Lampl）表示，他因为萨迪克·汗（Sadiq Khan）的交通政策而逃往美国，并抱怨驾驶员在伦敦成了“贱民”。
另一位亿万富翁、石化公司英力士（Ineos）的所有者吉姆·拉特克利夫爵士（Sir Jim Ratcliffe）表示，他能理解为什么富人离开英国，并将这个国家描述为“在下滑”。吉姆爵士于 2018, 逃离英国前往摩纳哥，他抱怨道：“不幸的是，英国目前对财富有点‘眼红’。”
与此同时，其他人对超级富豪的抱怨以及每次宣布有人离开时往往随之而来的经济末日警告并不买账。税务分析中心（Centre for the Analysis of Taxation）主任阿伦·阿德瓦尼（Arun Advani）表示，他并不担心亿万富翁的流失。“亿万富翁的流动性很高，”他说。“每年都有许多富人离开，只是并不总是像现在这样被大肆报道。因此，几个被高度报道的例子本身并不表明发生了任何变化。”
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世界
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Going, going ... gone? Exodus of super-rich suggests UK no longer billionaires' playground
Helena Horton
Lauren Almeida
London was once world-renowned as the “billionaires’ playground”, where the world’s super-rich could relax in the
Georgian townhouses of Mayfair undisturbed by the grasping hand of the state.
But if recent complaints by fleeing ultra-high net worth individuals are to be believed, they have become Britain's most persecuted minority. They complain of Labour's stricter tax regime and the antipathy of others towards those with extreme wealth. One even suggested that he was leaving the country because of the outrages of London's low-traffic neighbourhoods.
"If I want to organise a gathering now, I have to take into account a lot of my friends are not here any more," said the financier Ben Goldsmith. "How the hell are we supposed to pay for health services and everything if we are driving out the highest rate tax-payers?"
This weekend, one of the UK's richest people, David Reuben, was revealed to have left the UK for Monaco. The 88-year-old is a property tycoon and Newcastle United shareholder who, along with his younger brother Simon Reuben, has a combined estimated net worth of nearly £28bn.
A spokesperson did not expand on why he left, but tax is thought to be a factor.
Sir Peter Lampl, the millionaire founder of the Sutton Trust charity, said he had absconded to the US because of Sadiq Khan's traffic policies, complaining that motorists are "pariahs" in London.
Another billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who owns the petrochemicals company Ineos, has said he can see why rich people are leaving the UK, describing the country as “on the slide”. Sir Jim, who fled Britain for Monaco in 2018, complained: “Unfortunately, the UK has got a bit of a green eye towards wealth at the moment.”
Others, meanwhile, are unimpressed by the ultra-wealthy's complaints and the warnings of economic doom that each new announced exit tends to bring. Arun Advani, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation, said he was unconcerned about billionaire flight. "Mobility among billionaires is high," he said. "Many wealthy people leave every year, it just isn't always reported as loudly as at the moment. So a couple of highly reported examples don't in themselves indicate anything has changed."
The multimillionaire Dale Vince said ultra-wealthy individuals need to “stop whingeing”. He confirmed he will be staying in the UK, and added: “The tax system is already skewed in favour of rich people. We have so many allowances, loopholes and exemptions.”
For better or worse, the data ▲ Other moguls who have left the UK include, clockwise from left: Lakshmi Mittal, John Fredriksen and Sir Peter Lampl
shows a clear trend; an analysis of Bloomberg's Billionaires Index has found that super-rich UK residents worth a combined £121bn (representing more than half of billionaire wealth) have either left or loosened ties with the UK since Labour came to power in 2024.
Among those who have left ▲ Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has said the UK is ‘on the slide’, while David Reuben, pictured with brother Simon, left, has gone to Monaco
PHOTOGRAPHS: CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY, DAVID M BENETT/GETTY IMAGES
are Lakshmi Mittal, Aston Villa co-owner Nassef Sawiris and shipping magnate John Fredriksen.
Rachel Reeves' removal of the "non-dom" system, which allowed individuals to only pay tax on income generated in the UK, is blamed for many of the exits. Others say they fear new taxes on property as well as hiked inheritance taxes.
Sir James Dyson, worth £12bn, faced criticism for absconding to Singapore in 2019, after telling the country to vote Brexit. He returned in 2021, and has been investing in businesses in the UK ever since. Also among the billionaires remaining in the UK are Denise Coates, who is worth £8bn and is the founder of gambling company bet365, and John Caudwell, who founded phones4U.
There are even some billionaires coming to the UK - albeit not universally popular ones.
The crypto billionaire
Christopher Harborne, who gave the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage a controversial £5m undeclared gift before he was elected as an MP in 2024, recently registered himself as a UK resident. So did Ben Delo, another crypto billionaire, who has given tens of millions to the party.
Philip Munro, partner at law firm Withers, said more entrepreneurs are asking about leaving the UK, and a steady stream of reports that their peers are also leaving has “concentrated their minds”. He blames tax changes and said inquiries are coming in for moving residency to Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, Dubai, and Greece.
Paddy Renouf, who runs luxury concierge service Serendipity, said his ultra-rich clients are still around and spending money, but conceded there was some “nervousness” among his clients.
He added: "Very wealthy people don't mind paying taxes if they can anticipate them. But there is a lot of uncertainty at the moment. It is bad if we do lose them."
Goldsmith agreed that there is “herd behaviour” caused by “social media hype” around the UK’s supposed hostility to the rich. He added: “People overestimate crime and tax, and they underestimate the downsides of living elsewhere.
“London was a hub for foreign billionaires. They pay a lot of tax, they hire a lot of people, they spend a lot of money, they are the most mobile people around, so getting money out of them is an art form. There’s nothing to force them to stay here; you have to attract them, and we were once good at that.”
Vince has less sympathy. Pointing at Ratcliffe's exit as an example, he said: "He got rich here and then made off to Monaco to save himself money.
"He avoided giving back to the economy that made him a billionaire and now he bangs on that it is a bad place to do business when he became a billionaire here! It's pathetic.
"He and anyone else who leaves here to not pay tax should be stripped of their honours."
Chanel show shouts with colour in Paris as joyful design chief flies high
Jess Cartner-Morley
Paris
"It's a good start," Matthieu Blazy said after a Paris show that marked a year of his tenure as artistic director at Chanel. "I am happy with where we are at."
Chanel now holds the top spot in the Lyst index of the world's hottest brands, which tracks demand and engagement across search and social media. Figures reported by
Bloomberg showed 16% growth in the first half of 2026, while in Vanity Fair's latest list of the world's 50 most powerful people, Blazy is the only fashion designer to make the cut.
Blazy's Chanel is about joy. Smiley and chatty in person, he enthuses about his team and the women he dresses, presenting a friendly face of Chanel that contrasts with Karl Lagerfeld's legendary acid tongue and Coco Chanel's controlled chic.
He got the idea for the stage set - 95 giant white birds suspended from the domed steel and glass ceiling of the Grand Palais in Paris - while on holiday in southern Italy with his partner, watching migrating flocks fly above the Crati River.
For the soundtrack of the show, Blazy had asked Nicole Kidman to read a passage “about time, about freedom” from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which he had read on that Italian holiday. Fashion was “women’s homemade remedy for the dark times”, he said.
After years when the decaffeinated
▲ Front row celebrities, from left, Alexa Dem
Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa and Pedro Pascal
Chanel's women's spring/summer 2027 show at the Grand Palais in Paris yesterday, with 95 white birds suspended from the domed steel and glass ceiling; above, right and below, models wear designs by the fashion house's creative director, Matthieu Blazy
PHOTOGRAPHS: ED ALCOCK/MYOP/THE GUARDIAN
aesthetic of quiet luxury dominated fashion, the new Chanel shouts with colours. A red and white embroidered jacket with a jade and turquoise skirt, plus bag and boots in navy and gold. The iconic two-tone pumps, but in zebra stripes and polka dots instead of the traditional camel and black.
The same model opened and closed the show carrying Coco (Gabrielle) Chanel's very own 2.55 handbag. "Gabrielle actually had very few bags in her own life, which is something I find quite beautiful," Blazy said.
The famous soft-shouldered Chanel suit came worn with nothing beneath, "like perfume" (Blazy will not have missed the allusion to what Marilyn Monroe famously said she wore in bed: Chanel No 5). "I like the idea that when you wear it directly on the skin, it makes a fetish of the suit. A little punk Chanel," he said.
A year of fabric innovation was behind the newest versions, smocked silk on an elasticated membrane, which “is my answer to what sporty could mean at Chanel”, Blazy said.
Former German intelligence chief under arrest over spying allegations
Kate Connolly
Berlin
A former head of Germany's foreign intelligence service has been arrested on suspicion of treason and spying on behalf of an overseas intelligence agency, in what prosecutors suspect could be the worst national security breach since the cold war.
August Hanning, 80, was head of the federal intelligence service (BND) - which operates outside Germany to gather information across the fields of political, economic and military intelligence - between 1998 and 2005.
He was arrested at his home in Nordwalde near Münster early yesterday. His former chief of staff, identified only as Manfred D, was arrested at the same time in Bavaria, on suspicion of “aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage”, according to a prosecutor’s statement. Media pictures showed Hanning, dressed in an open-necked white shirt, being taken from his redbrick house to a bullet-proof vehicle by masked officers.
Manfred D, who continued to work for Hanning's successors at the BND after Hanning's exit until the present day, is accused of using his role to gain access to classified information which he then handed to Hanning "in exchange for payment", the prosecutor's statement continued.
"The current findings suggest that, over the years, Manfred D provided Hanning with approximately 2,000 documents, many of which contained classified information to be used exclusively by the federal intelligence service for internal purposes, particularly for executive intelligence briefings," the statement said.
Prosecutors believe that Hanning intended to resell the documents as part of a paid consulting role he had built up after leaving the BND, prosecutors added. To what extent and to whom he disseminated them remains part of an ongoing investigation.
He is accused of using the information to "draft an analysis for an
◀ August
Hanning, who is believed by prosecutors to have intended to resell classified information
officer of a foreign intelligence service", prosecutors said. It was unclear if this information had reached its intended recipient, they added.
Hanning is also believed to have shared potentially sensitive political information, in part based on information passed to him by Manfred D, with a close contact from a separate foreign intelligence service.
Properties connected to both men were being searched simultaneously yesterday, including in Berlin.
The allegations prompted shock in German political and intelligence circles, where memories resurfaced of historic espionage scandals. Hanning is thought to be the most prominent person to be accused of treason in Germany since Günter Guillaume, one of Willy Brandt's personal aides, was exposed as a long-term Stasi agent in 1974. The "Guillaume affair" brought an abrupt end to Nobel peace prize-winning Brandt's career, who resigned as chancellor of West Germany.
Marc Henrichmann, chairman of the Bundestag's intelligence oversight committee, said in a statement to AFP: "Whoever allies themselves with the enemies of our liberal democracy will be found out." Suspicions over Hanning's activities emerged as a result of an investigation into the kidnappings of children from a prominent Hamburg business family, the focus of a major trial in the north German port city.
Investigators were led to Hanning over allegations, which he denies, that he helped Christina Block, the heiress of a steak restaurant dynasty, to organise the violent cross-border seizure in Denmark of her children from her estranged husband who has custody of two of them. Block denies the charges.
After he left the BND, Hanning worked as a global consultant in the fields of security and business. He is considered to have been well connected with government and business sectors in Russia and China, and also had contacts with top-ranking intelligence authorities in Israel.
Hanning was an officer stationed at the embassy-equivalent organisation for West Germany in communist East Berlin. After his role as president of the BND ended in 2005, he became the highest ranking official in Germany's security sector as the head of all security agencies under the federal interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.
基于此，图利佐将女性置于她名为《Mababu》（斯瓦希里语中意为“祖先”）的23幅场景摄影系列作品的中心。该系列将于明天起在布鲁塞尔的GC De Markten展出。在作品中，她塑造了金帕·维塔（Kimpa Vita）和恩津加女王（Queen Nzinga）等人物，她们在17世纪和18世纪初抵制欧洲对非洲的殖民。
Survivors of 7 October attacks struggle with their trauma as political fallout still grips Israel
Continued from page 1
a mother, father and their three young children, has been made into a garden with space left for their still-living grandparents.
Caretaker Shlomo Margalit, who will soon turn 89, points out the graves of three of his oldest friends, founding members of the kibbutz who came to Nir Oz from Haifa with him in the 1950s. "This is my life project, as well as my home," Margalit said, explaining why he
Wednesday 7 October 2026 The Guardia
Invisible heroines
Exhibition celebrates
African women
Page 27
House of Bolsonaro
The rise of Brazil's
far-right dynasty
Page 29
has come back to a place of such loss. He is waiting for a new house, and is for now staying in the former home of Gadi Moses, 82, who survived 482 days as a hostage.
The graves he tends are silent testament to both the brutality of the attacks and the scale of the state's failure, which in Nir Oz was staggering, even on a day of terrible failures. A five-person volunteer defence force held Hamas at bay for over two hours, Margalit said. When they had all been shot, the kibbutz was taken over and sacked, homes burned, families slaughtered and kidnapped.
Then, before the first Israeli soldier arrived, the Hamas forces, other Palestinian gunmen and civilian looters all left. Nir Oz had been forgotten by the army and ripped apart without the military firing a single shot to defend it.
In total 47 people were killed and 76 abducted to Gaza, including Shiri Bibas, her 10-month-old baby Kfir and four-year-old Ariel, who were killed in Gaza. The dead and hostages represented more than a quarter of the small community.
Revisiting that terrible day and the trauma that followed is painful and exhausting for Margalit, but he still accepts interviews for a simple reason. "I want people to know what really happened here," the 89-year-old said.
The third anniversary of the attacks falls just weeks before Israel's national elections, and much of the country is caught up in a furious debate about responsibility for the deadliest day in Israel's history and the conduct of the war that followed. Survivors and bereaved relatives are avoiding the political fray, still grappling
The cemetery at Nir Oz with the graves of 7 October attack victims including a family of five. Above left, a burned house with pictures of the inhabitants who were killed.
Above, the home
of Yocheved
Lifshitz, 88,
who was taken
hostage from
Nir Oz with her
husband, Oded
PHOTOGRAPHS:
QUIQUE
KIERSZENBAUM
/THE GUARDIAN
'We can't ignore the fact that Palestinians live here. We have to find a way we can live here with them'
Shlomo Margalit
Kibbutz co-founder with the trauma and the struggle to rebuild something like normality.
Aviva and Keith Siegel were abducted from their home by Hamas attackers on 7 October 2023
PHOTOGRAPH: QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM/ THE GUARDIAN
In Nir Oz, there is a terrible, almost irreconcilable struggle between re-establishing the kibbutz as a living community, and preserving physical testimony of the attack. The cemetery echoes with the sound of construction and families have already moved into several rows of new houses near the kibbutz entrance.
But on the other side of the compound paths still lead between blackened ruins and memorials to the dead. Some bereaved survivors want the homes of loved ones preserved this way as permanent monuments to mark their loss.
"There are families that can't [bear to] live here, but want a memorial place to come to visit," Margalit said. "On the other hand, can you build a new kibbutz where children grow up running around between burned houses?"
He is on the remembrance committee, and two years on they are struggling to reach a decision on this impossible choice. "Is there right or wrong here? No," he says. "We are dealing with that, trying to find an answer."
ne possible
compromise might
be a memorial
garden on the border
of the kibbutz.
For now, there are
plaques with the stories of families attacked, and a memorial house to remember the dead and kidnapped.
When the kibbutz took a collective decision to return and rebuild, Margalit and his wife knew they wanted to join. His only concession to the trauma was asking for a new home that did not face Gaza. "I've found myself building this place for the second time," he said. "I know when I'm gone, I will have done something with my life. I took part in putting this spot on the map."
The Siegels, who lived in the nearby kibbutz of Kfar Aza, also among the worst hit, are among those who have decided not to return as they focus on mental and physical recovery. Aviva was 62 when she was kidnapped, Keith was 64. "What happened to me in Gaza, what happened with Keith in Gaza, it's there all the time," Aviva. "I understand that it's going to be a process of healing.
"There's always things that remind me, and if I don't remember, then he reminds me. If I'm cooking lunch or making a cup of tea and I turn around and see Keith with tears in his eyes, because he just read something or let himself feel."
After the exhausting campaign to get Keith and other hostages home, she says she struggles to concentrate on the election. Keith's political focus is an independent inquiry into the attacks, to prevent other families suffering as his has.
"There needs to be an investigation to understand how this happened, in order to do everything possible that it won't happen again. So many people were killed, injured, traumatised."
The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has fiercely opposed an independent state commission of inquiry. Critics say he is afraid it would expose his own failings. The security officials who were in command that day have all stepped down yet, three years on, Netanyahu is still in power.
Bereaved father Yaakov Godo interrupted Netanyahu's speech at the official commemoration event this year, held on 5 October following the Hebrew calendar, to accuse him of negligence. "You did not protect my son on October 7th, you did not protect 1,200 people murdered in one day. Shame!" he shouted, before being led away.
Both US and Israeli officials have said Netanyahu rejected ceasefire deals that could have halted the war in Gaza and brought many Israeli hostages home sooner, but criticising the prime minister means venturing into a vicious political debate where age and loss offer little protection.
Yocheved Lifshitz, 88, was taken hostage from Nir Oz with her husband, Oded, whose magnificent cactus garden blooms at the heart of the kibbutz. He died in Gaza. She survived and since her return has been a vocal critic of Netanyahu. A candidate for Netanyahu's Likud party, Itzik Bonzel, said last month that he wished he could turn back the clock and return her to Hamas captivity. He later apologised, blaming grief for his son who died fighting in Gaza, but Lifshitz denounced it as a proxy attack driven by the prime minister.
Netanyahu, who is battling a corruption trial and could be more vulnerable legally if he loses power, is pushing to intensify Israeli attacks on Gaza and his coalition partners are calling for ethnic cleansing and annexation of Palestine. The war Israel launched in response to 7 October has killed over 74,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, including over 20,000 children.
Netanyahu has also waged a years-long campaign to dismantle institutions protecting democracy inside Israel's 1967 borders. Palestinians under Israeli military rule in the occupied West Bank do not have rights of Israeli citizens.
Many Israelis opposed to this rightwing vision of perpetual war consider this election the most critical since Israel was founded in 1948, among them Margalit.
Nir Oz, like many communities targeted by Hamas, had its roots in leftwing Zionist movements, and some saw their pain as bitter proof that war cannot offer security.
"I don't believe we can ignore the fact that Palestinians live here," Margalit said. "We have to find a way we can live here with them and be secure."
她的监禁经历与反抗精神也构成了她上个月出版的最新回忆录《女性永不停止战斗》（A Woman Never Stops Fighting）的基础。这本书是在她被囚禁期间秘密撰写的，手稿片段在狱友和信任联系人的帮助下被走私出伊朗。书中详细记录了她为争取人权而进行的斗争以及随之而来的牺牲，包括与孩子长期的分离。
Jim Bakker, US televangelist caught in fraud and sex scandal, dies at 86
Reuters
The US televangelist Jim Bakker, who built a multimillion-dollar empire and lived in opulence before being disgraced by a sex scandal, a conviction for defrauding followers and divorce from his television co-host Tammy Faye, has died aged 86.
The death of Bakker, whose journey from the TV pulpit to a prison cell in the 1980s inspired comparisons to the corrupt character of the fictional preacher-huckster Elmer Gantry, was revealed on social media by his second wife, Lori Bakker.
"It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening," she wrote on the Facebook and Instagram pages of her husband's latest television ministry.
She paid tribute to Bakker as a "pioneer of Christian television". The cause and circumstances of his death were not revealed.
Bakker revived his career as a television preacher after prison with a new wife and new television show in 2003, later becoming a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.
Bakker had been among the most popular of the Christian preachers who thrived on US television in the 1980s, achieving fame on the show the PTL Club. PTL stood for “Praise the Lord” and “People That Love”.
Bakker spent four and a half years ▲ Jim Bakker with his first wife Tammy Faye, with whom he built the PTL ministry PHOTOGRAPH: LOU KRASKY/AP
\$158m The amount prosecutors said Bakker had defrauded from followers of his TV ministry in prison after being convicted in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1989 of defrauding followers in a scheme involving holidays at his Heritage USA Christian theme park and resort.
Prosecutors painted him as a selfish and petty conman driven by greed and lust for power. "Those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests," the judge, Robert Potter, told Bakker before sentencing him.
Bakker had quit the PTL ministry in 1987 after revelations of a 1980 sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a former church secretary who later posed nude in Playboy magazine, and a subsequent \$265,000 (£200,000) payoff with ministry funds to gain her silence. Bakker was later defrocked.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, his first wife, had started with a small TV ministry that grew into an operation with 2,000 employees and the 2,300-acre (930-hectare) Heritage USA complex in South Carolina. At its peak, the PTL ministry drew 13 million viewers on 200 TV stations and made \$129m a year.
Bakker was convicted on all 24 fraud and conspiracy charges brought against him. Prosecutors said he defrauded followers of \$158m and had siphoned \$3.7m to bankroll a lavish lifestyle that included several homes, luxury cars, mink coats, diamonds and servants. The judge ordered Bakker to serve 45 years.
▲ Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as the Bakkers in a 2021 film
"I have sinned," Bakker told the court. "I have made mistakes. But never in my life did I intend to defraud anyone." Tammy Faye was never charged. She stood by Bakker at the trial, but divorced him in 1992 while he was in prison.
Bakker started his life over after leaving prison in 1994, renouncing the “prosperity gospel” he once preached. In 2003 he started a TV ministry with his second wife, Lori, whom he had married in 1998. In 2008, they began taping the Jim Bakker Show at a 600-acre development near Branson, Missouri. Bakker once again pleaded for donations.
In 2020, he drew the ire of US officials for selling false treatments for Covid-19. Bakker said in 2017 that Christians would launch a civil war if Trump were to be impeached. Trump later became the first US president to be impeached twice.
德国州议会首次出现纳粹时代以来由极右翼人士担任议长
凯特·康诺利
柏林
德国选择党（Alternative für Deutschland）已成为二战以来首个获得地区议会议长职位的德国极右翼政党。
在投票之前，左翼党（Die Linke）的伊娃·冯·安根（Eva von Angern）——该州议会任职时间最长的成员——将劳施当选议长与 20 世纪 30 年代赫尔曼·戈林（Hermann Göring）在帝国议会利用该职位促成阿道夫·希特勒（Adolf Hitler）上台的行为进行了类比。
她声称，选择党在该州的获胜所带来的负面后果已经显现，表现为游客人数下降以及教师撤回工作申请。
▲ 选择党的托比亚斯·劳施昨日在萨克森-安哈尔特州敲钟宣布变革
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Invisible heroines Congolese photographer uses costume and scenery to honour African women
Sarah Johnson
P amela Tulizo's latest series of photographs started with a question. "I asked myself, why are women in my community in
particular, and African women in general, so strong?" said Tulizo, an artist and photographer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). "Where does this strength come from?"
Growing up in Goma in eastern DRC, Tulizo was informed and inspired by the women she was surrounded by, including her mother, her sisters, her mother's friends and her neighbours.
Years later, when she began to look into the role of women throughout African history, she said: "I realised that perhaps women have been forced to be strong since the dawn of time, forced by circumstance to build that resilience."
Her research brought her to slavery, the “cruellest period in human history”, which she says is often just associated with the men who were forced across oceans to form workforces abroad. Women, she noticed, were largely invisible, their stories untold.
With that in mind, Tulizo placed women at the centre of her series of 23 staged photographs called Mababu (“ancestors” in Swahili), on show at GC De Markten in Brussels from tomorrow. In it, she portrays figures such as Kimpa Vita and Queen Nzinga, who resisted the European colonisation of Africa in the 17th and early 18th century.
“Because of racism, there’s always been this belittling of African women that portrays them as vulnerable, as victims, and suggests they lack strength or intelligence,” she said. “I wanted to end that narrative by showing that despite everything they endured, they remained strong and fought for freedom.”
Tulizo's path to photography has not been easy - in part, she believes, because she is a woman. She started her career as a reporter but decided to focus on photography when she felt she could not write about everything she wanted to cover.
When she began pursuing photography, there was nowhere for her to train in Goma. Instead, she took photos whenever she could, and became one of a handful of female photographers in the city.
"It wasn't easy at first because I didn't have a role model to follow, or anyone to guide me in my early days," she said. "The community didn't accept me right away - whether it was my parents, or even other photographers - since it was very much a male-dominated world.
"But facing so many obstacles motivated me to stick it out to the end and prove that I could be a woman and a photographer," she added.
In 2020, she won the Dior photography and visual arts award for young talents for her work Double Identity, a series that contrasted the common media portrayal of Congolese women as victims with their true identities.
Shaba and La Mulâtresse
Solitude from Mababu
▲ Clockwise from above: four other staged photographs from Mababu ('ancestors' in Swahili) - Lulu, Kahawa, Miwa and Reine Zingha - which aims to celebrate the resilience of African women throughout history
PHOTOGRAPHS: PAMELA TULIZO
'There's always been this belittling of African women that suggests they lack strength or intelligence'
Pamela Tulizo
Photographer
This allowed her to finance the creation in 2021 of a cultural centre in Goma for women and girls, Tulizo Elle Space. When renewed violence broke out in the region in early 2025, she fled and now lives in France.
She approached her Mababu series as if she were making a film, using cinematic staging with actors, costumes, makeup and outdoor sets to create vivid scenes.
In one set, a woman stands in Lake Kivu, surrounded by other women bound in bandages (wrapping the body being a common practice in funeral rituals). In another, a model poses boldly as La Mulâtresse Solitude, a leader in the fight against slavery in the French colony of Guadeloupe. The images, which were shot in Goma and Belgium, are defiant, aiming not to gloss over past suffering.
Fashion is another crucial element of the series, and Tulizo uses colour, accessories and styling to elevate women. In some images, where a woman is bound or suffering, she is still elevated through clothing, said Tulizo.
"To me, she remains a heroine, and fashion allows me to honour her, giving her the strength and power she deserves," she said.
Some of the photos incorporate images of natural resources. The titles of the opening works - Tumbako, Miwa and Pamba - refer to tobacco, sugar cane and cotton, three commodities that played a central role in fuelling the transatlantic slave trade.
"Slavery did not happen in a vacuum," said Tulizo. "It was driven by the pursuit of natural resources."
The photos echo what is happening today in eastern DRC, where decades of competition over rich mineral resources have brought about devastating conflict and sexual violence in the region.
"Regrettably, today we are experiencing a modern form of slavery driven by technology, development and global progress," said Tulizo. "Back then it was tobacco, sugar and coffee. Today it is war and sexual violence over lithium, gold and minerals.
"Everyone wants to conquer the world, to be the first to produce electric cars, or to be the leading global power with nuclear weapons. None of that is possible without these raw materials."
“Unfortunately,” Tulizo added, “humanity has not learned its lesson, and we are repeating the same mistakes in a modern form.”
▼ Narges Mohammadi has spoken about needing brain scans after being beaten by security services
'Severe blows': Nobel laureate defiant after time in Iranian jail
Deepa Parent
The human rights activist Narges Mohammadi has described being beaten so severely by Iranian security agents that she required two brain scans, before being held in solitary confinement for two months despite her grave injuries.
In an interview with the Guardian, the 54-year-old Nobel peace prize laureate said that during her arrest in December, security agents had "inflicted extremely severe blows to my head and body.
"They grabbed and forcibly pulled me by my hair, kicking and punching me repeatedly with such force that massive, painful bruises covered my entire body."
Mohammadi suffered dizziness, nausea and vomiting in the days that followed, but said authorities refused to allow a forensic examination of her injuries. "Despite the severe physical injuries and trauma I sustained, I was immediately transferred to a solitary confinement cell," she said.
“During the first few days in solitary confinement I was completely dazed and confused, had severe dizziness, was nauseous and was vomiting. They sent me from the detention centre twice for a brain CT scan in a hospital,” she said. “Despite this, they were not willing to allow the forensic medical examiner to come and prepare a report on my injuries.”
Mohammadi was temporarily released from prison for medical treatment in May having been found unconscious in her cell after a cardiac arrest. She said she feared that another imprisonment could endanger her life.
"A return to prison is always looming," she said. "Truthfully, it is a dangerous prospect. Imprisonment left me with severe physical damage to my heart, lungs and nervous system - injuries that have demanded ongoing medical treatment, medication, physical therapy and rehabilitation since I was transferred from Zanjan to Tehran.
"My medical treatment is far from over, and being sent back to prison under these conditions poses a grave threat to my life."
Mohammadi, who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2023 for her “campaign against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight for human rights and freedom for all”, was arrested on 12 December 2025 while attending a memorial gathering for the human rights lawyer Khosrow Alikordi in the city of Mashhad.
In February, a court sentenced her to a further seven and a half years in prison and two years of internal exile to the town of Khosf. She was subsequently transferred to Zanjan prison.
Over the years, Mohammadi has endured 14 arrests, 10 trials and five periods of solitary confinement. She said her health had deteriorated further after multiple operations over the past decade, after which she was repeatedly returned from hospital to prison.
Her experiences of imprisonment and resistance also form the basis of her latest memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, published last month. Written in secret during her incarceration, with fragments of the manuscript smuggled out of Iran with the help of fellow prisoners and trusted contacts, the book offers an intimate account of her struggle for human rights and the sacrifices that have accompanied it, including a prolonged separation from her children.
▲ Mohammadi at a memorial event for Khosrow Alikordi in Mashhad
Beyond the physical injuries, Mohammadi described the psychological toll of prolonged isolation, which she characterised as “white torture”. In a cell with nobody to speak to, nothing to embrace and no connection to the world, she said, even a prisoner’s sense of identity could begin to erode. “When you are cut off from your family and surrounding environment … a person’s perceptions undergo a kind of distortion,” she said.
Mohammadi is continuing to receive medical treatment after her transfer from Zanjan to Tehran. Despite the potential prospect of further imprisonment, she insisted she would remain in Iran and continue campaigning for human rights: "I have always chosen to stay in Iran, and I choose to stay even now."
She said she continued to draw hope from younger Iranians, particularly women. "They do not back down; they know their rights, understand them, strive to reach them and never relent," she said. "I have immense hope in younger generations, in the youth, and in women. I am certain that no power can erase hope from our hearts, and no power can sustain tyranny permanently."
German state speaker is first from far-right since Nazi era
Kate Connolly
Berlin
Alternative für Deutschland has become Germany's first far-right party to secure the position of speaker of a regional parliament since the second world war.
Tobias Rausch, a former estate agent, was elected in the first round of voting yesterday in Saxony-Anhalt, winning 48 of the 82 votes cast.
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, part of the AfD's more extreme wing, was elected as his deputy.
The AfD, which is classed as “right-wing extremist” by the eastern state’s intelligence agency, won nearly 44% of votes in elections last month, dealing a hammer blow to Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and his centre-right Christian Democrats.
Rausch's election to the role of president and speaker took place at the inaugural gathering of members in the state capital, Magdeburg. Twenty-nine voted against him and five abstained.
The AfD parliamentary group holds 39 seats, narrowly short of an absolute majority. Five politicians from the BSW, a small leftwing party that echoes the AfD's stances on Russia and immigration, had already said they would vote for Rausch.
Yesterday's result means that four MPs from other parties voted for the 35-year-old in the secret ballot, breaking the "firewall" - the agreement among other parties not to work with the AfD - and giving the party a chance to form a state government.
In his acceptance speech, Rausch promised to represent all voices and "take different opinions seriously and to try to take decisions in a transparent way". He was applauded by his own parliamentary group and the BSW. The other MPs did not respond.
Before the vote, Eva von Angern of the leftwing Die Linke and the longest-serving member of the state parliament, drew parallels between Rausch's election as speaker and Hermann Göring's use of that role in the Reichstag in the 1930s to facilitate Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
She claimed the negative consequences of the AfD's win in the state were already being felt in lower tourist numbers and teachers withdrawing job applications.
▲ Tobias Rausch of the AfD rings the changes in Saxony-Anhalt yesterday
反反犹太主义运动（Campaign Against Antisemitism）将继续在任何发现反犹太主义和极端主义的地方与其斗争。请关注 @antisemitism 以了解我们所看到的现状。
📄 Original Section
Ex-CIA officer admits fraud over gold bars and property
Associated Press
A former senior CIA official pleaded guilty in Virginia yesterday to abusing his position and government funds to enrich himself by acquiring Florida property and hundreds of gold bars worth tens of millions of dollars, according to court records.
David J Rush fabricated a “highly classified” government programme to justify the acquisition of luxury property in south Florida that he intended to resell for personal profit, according to a court filing.
Rush separately concocted a bogus "sensitive government activity" to obtain the gold bars, the filing says.
Prosecutors also accuse Rush of lying to colleagues and government contractors about his military and academic credentials and the fake programme he invented, falsely claiming it was authorised by high-ranking US officials.
Rush pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud during a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, court records show. He will be sentenced in January.
He directed someone else to transfer approximately \$145m to a holding company formed at his direction, then used the funds to acquire four "luxury" properties in Palm Beach and Hobe Sound, Florida, the court filing says. In previous court filings, prosecutors said Rush stashed more than \$40m worth of gold bars from the federal government at his Virginia home.
Several months ago, Rush tried to fraudulently authorise the release of \$100m from a government contract.
They also accused him of fraudulently claiming tens of thousands of dollars in compensation for military leave after he was honourably discharged from the US navy in 2015.
Rush was arrested after investigators searched his home and seized approximately 300 gold bars, roughly \$2m and about 35 luxury watches, according to an FBI agent's affidavit.
During a hearing in June, defence lawyer Jessica Carmichael said Rush was not initially charged with any crimes related to the discovery of the gold bars, which she described as “basically a non-issue”.
"Mr Rush never claimed they were his," Carmichael said.
Authorities say Rush lied about his education and military background on job applications, falsely claiming to be a former navy pilot who graduated with a bachelor's degree from Clemson University in South Carolina and a master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Investigators determined that he had not served as a navy pilot or attended either institution. Rush enlisted in the navy in 1997 and was honourably discharged from the navy reserves as a lieutenant in 2015, according to the FBI affidavit.
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House of Bolsonaro Close presidential race highlights rise of Brazil's far-right dynasty
Tiago Rogero
Rio de Janeiro
The weekend's elections in Brazil not only put Jair Bolsonaro's eldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro, in the lead in the presidential
race, but also underscored how far the former president has come in building a political dynasty.
As his far-right senator son heads into a runoff against the leftist incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a sweeping far-right victory in congressional races also secured seats for Jair Bolsonaro's wife, two of his sons and one of his brothers.
Few in the family have spent much time working outside politics since the patriarch led the way four decades ago, but the offices they now hold have had an upgrade.
The former first lady, Michelle Bolsonaro, 44 - who divided her time between campaigning and caring for her husband as he was under house arrest for attempting a coup - ran for public office for the first time and was elected senator.
Bolsonaro's second son, Carlos Bolsonaro, 43, was also elected senator for the first time. He is regarded as the most radical of the siblings - he ran his father's social media accounts and was indicted by police for leading a so-called hate cabinet that spread fake news and attacks on opponents.
His previous political career amounted to 25 years as a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro - starting at the age of 17, when his father put him up for a seat against his own mother, Rogéria Bolsonaro, who had divorced Jair. Carlos won. (Rogéria also ran last Sunday for a seat in the state legislature, using the Bolsonaro surname, but lost.)
The patriarch's fourth son, Jair Renan Valle Bolsonaro, 28, who dropped his two middle names on the ballot to run simply as Jair Bolsonaro, jumped from city councillor to federal congressman.
Of Bolsonaro's five children, only his 15-year-old daughter has never held political office. Even the former president's younger brother, Renato Bolsonaro, 62, nicknamed
the “brother who can’t win” after losing seven consecutive elections for lower-level offices, was elected. He went from fewer than 10,000 votes in a mayoral race two years ago to 380,000 votes for congress.
During the campaign, Renato caused some friction within the
▼ Flávio Bolsonaro holds a photograph of his father; left, a mural depicts Jair Bolsonaro and three sons in Rio; right, the ex-president and his popular wife Michelle
PHOTOGRAPHS: BRUNA PRADO/AP; MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP
family by saying that "Flávio is not Jair. He doesn't draw crowds." At the polls, however, Flávio ended up winning more votes than his father did in 2018 and 2022.
The number of Bolsonaros in office could have been even higher had "son 03", Eduardo
Bolsonaro, 42, not abandoned his seat in congress and gone into self-imposed exile in the US, where for more than a year he has lobbied for what Lula and many others see as Donald Trump's attempts to interfere in Brazil's elections.
Although Michelle is the most recent member of the family to enter politics, it is she who is often considered to be the leading figure among the Bolsonaros. In a July poll, she was named the most powerful woman in Brazilian politics. "She is a phenomenon," said Camila Rocha, a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, who has interviewed voters and studied the Brazilian right for a decade. "Even Bolsonaro voters don't like his sons very much, but many of them like Michelle, who is very charismatic."
The daughter of a housewife and a retired bus driver from the metropolitan region around Brasília, Michelle was working as a parliamentary secretary for another politician when, at 25, she met Bolsonaro, then a 52-year-old congressman. She is his third wife.
Michelle was at the centre of one of the most contentious moments of Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign when she said that she had been "humiliated", "disrespected" and "mistreated" by the senator.
Reports of friction between her and her stepsons are frequent. Given her popularity, Flávio had to apologise publicly. Although Michelle accepted it, the two did not campaign together.
Polls suggested Bolsonaro supporters would have preferred the former first lady as the presidential candidate, but the patriarch opted for his eldest son, and gave her the senate mission.
Michelle and Bolsonaro's sons were also widely seen as helping secure victories for other far-right candidates from Bolsonaro's party, which will have by far the largest bloc in the next congress.
“Although the family has been in politics for a long time, many voters still see the Bolsonaros as representing ‘renewal’ and an anti-system vote,” said Rocha. “So, to change everything, these voters want to throw a ‘bomb’ that blows up congress and Lula. And that bomb is the Bolsonaro family.”
捷豹的电动车型 Type 01，launched in New York last night and marks the culmination of a two-year rebrand that has been one of the most scrutinised in automotive history. 昨晚在纽约发布，标志着一项为期两年的品牌重塑计划达到顶峰，而这次重塑已成为汽车历史上受关注程度最高的案例之一。
First ever Ebola death reported in Kenya as virus surges in DRC
Rachel Savage
Kenya has reported its first ever Ebola death as the disease continues to spread rapidly through the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A Kenyan man who had been living in the DRC died after returning to Kenya, the health minister, Aden Duale, said yesterday.
The man fell ill about a month ago and had been treated in the DRC. He then travelled overland to the Ugandan capital, Kampala, before flying to Nairobi on 3 October.
Duale said the man was taken by a relative and a friend from the international airport to Nairobi hospital, where he was isolated, suffering from “fever, chills, intense fatigue, weakness, muscle pain, painful swallowing, sore throat and bleeding under the skin at the injection sites”.
He said the man was screened and confirmed positive for the virus, but "regrettably passed on last night".
Duale said officials had listed 28 contacts including family members and healthcare staff, but so far only the deceased had tested positive.
He added that authorities were looking for 23 other passengers and four crew members who were on the same flight and that "arrangements" for quarantine had been prepared.
"I wish to assure the public not to panic, as all systems are in place to mitigate the spread of the disease," he said.
Duale said a “safe and dignified burial” of the man had been planned for later in the day, in line with public health standards, but did not give further details.
Kenyans reacted furiously to government plans earlier this year to allow the US to set up an Ebola facility at Laikipia airbase, about 125 miles from Nairobi.
Starting in the DRC's north-eastern Ituri region in May, the outbreak has spread to seven other provinces in the country's north and east.
As of 2 October, 4,082 people had died among 8,463 confirmed cases in the DRC since the emergence of the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which there is still no vaccine nor specific treatment.
The response to the virus in the vast central African country has been hindered by instability, including clashes between armed groups; mistrust of authorities, which has led to violence against health workers and other officials; and a lack of resources amid huge cuts in international aid.
The charity Médecins Sans Frontières warned on Monday of an “alarming surge” in cases in North Kivu province which borders Uganda. The region now accounts for 40% of all new Ebola cases, the NGO said.
Uganda recorded 20 cases - almost all people who had travelled from the DRC - and two deaths, before being declared Ebola-free in August.
"It is like fighting a megafire," said Stéphanie Hoffmann, at MSF's Ebola treatment centre in Butembo. "Multiple outbreaks are developing at the same time, with varying intensity and in different locations."
The number of Ebola deaths in the DRC since May among 8,463 confirmed cases of the virus
The Butembo health zone is home to about 2 million people and only has four Ebola treatment centres, two of them opened recently, MSF said.
Hoffman said: "Because there are not enough beds available, we are sometimes forced to refer confirmed Ebola patients elsewhere, despite the significant risk this poses. In addition, standards of care in some peripheral facilities do not always meet requirements for treatment."
Additional reporting
Agence France-Presse
On 7th October 2023, the antisemitic, genocidal terrorist group Hamas invaded Israel, where they committed horrific atrocities. They killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, including nine-month old Kfir Bibas, who was murdered in Hamas captivity.
We remember the victims.
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Jaguar's electric car rebrand targets rich young US drivers
Alex Daniel
It has no rear window, will not fit into a UK parking space and - starting at £130,000 - is aimed squarely at rich tech industry buyers driving the wide open roads of America.
Jaguar's electric car, the Type 01, launched in New York last night and marks the culmination of a two-year rebrand that has been one of the most scrutinised in automotive history.
Bosses hope the vehicle will appeal to a younger, richer audience than the manufacturer's previous "shrinking and ageing" customer base of "men in their 50s", said Rawdon Glover, 58, Jaguar's managing director.
With an ultra-long bonnet, low roof and muscular design, the Type 01 is a sharp departure from its predecessor, the F-Type. It is also double the F-Type's starting price of £62,000.
Buyers are likely to be “urban” and “very design literate, very technology literate”, Glover said. “The person making this purchase will be choosing the car because it’s a bold choice.”
A JLR executive close to the project put it more bluntly: "It's the type of car that you park up and everybody stops and says: 'Fucking hell, what have you just turned up in?"
The launch comes at a critical juncture for parent company Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which has grappled with falling sales as cheaper Chinese rivals eat into its UK market share. It is still recovering from a massive cyberattack last year that cost the economy an estimated £1.9bn.
▶ With an ultra-long bonnet and muscular design, the Type 01 is a sharp departure from the F-type
PHOTOGRAPH: MARK FAGELSON
JLR recently announced 4,000 job cuts in an attempt to save £1.7bn over two years, citing “intense competition and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty”. The Guardian understands Jaguar employees working on the Type 01 were offered voluntary redundancy along with the rest of JLR’s non-manufacturing workforce.
The car will go on sale in early 2027, with the first deliveries anticipated in the second half of the year.
"It's really important that we put Jaguar back on a more solid financial footing," Glover said. Asked if doubling prices would be effective, he said it was better than "to toil away as we have done for the last two decades in the volume premium space".
Range Rover also unveiled its first fully electric model in September with a starting price of £154,070 compared with £107,530 for its combustion engine predecessor.
Waning demand in China, a key market, has also hit Jaguar. Glover revealed the Type 01 would not
Length of the Type 01 in metres - Jaguar's EV won't fit in a standard 4.8-metre UK parking space
launch there for "a couple of years. We've decided to hold off on that."
But he said China would eventually be “an important part of the equation ... it’s very difficult for any car manufacturer to exclude the single largest car market in the world”.
PB Balaji, JLR's chief executive, has said the parent company would pivot towards North America and target more sales to millionaires and billionaires to turn its fortunes around.
Glover admitted that the Type 01's launch "absolutely" could have been in Silicon Valley instead of New York, reflecting the type of buyer Jaguar is targeting. He took a prototype to the offices of Nvidia, the California-based AI company, whose boss, Jensen Huang, had a ride and "loved it".
At 2 metres (6ft 5in) wide the Type 01 would hog the British country lanes frequented by Jaguar's old customer base, while at more than 5.2 metres in length it will not fit in a standard 4.8 metre UK parking space.
天气周三 2026年10月7日
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Ikea to test online version of furniture buyback service
Sarah Butler
Ikea is to test an online version of its buyback service where the retailer offers vouchers for unwanted secondhand furniture.
The service will be tested in Spain and Portugal before the end of December and will be launched in the UK if it proves successful. Ikea already offers buyback in stores, including in the UK. The online version will extend it to a much wider audience, with Ikea predicting pre-owned goods are set to grab 16% of the UK homewares market by next year.
The new plan emerged as the world's largest furniture retailer takes on Vinted and eBay with its own secondhand online marketplace, which launches in the UK this week.
The platform, which is already online in other countries including Spain and Portugal with best-sellers including the Kallax shelving system and Malm chest of drawers, will enable shoppers signed up to the Swedish company's membership scheme to connect directly to one another to buy and sell pre-owned Ikea items locally.
The UK service will be free initially, but a "buyer protection fee" of about
5% of an item's price will be introduced later. At launch, buyers and sellers will arrange collection or delivery directly with one another through the marketplace.
"The secondhand market is growing and growing. It is now really significant," said Greg Lucas, the sustainability manager at Ikea's UK & Irish division.
"The way people furnish their homes has changed. Whether they are moving, redecorating or looking for a particular piece, more customers are considering pre-owned furniture alongside new and are actively searching for items that can help create a home that feels personal to them."
The secondhand home products market is now worth more than £4.5bn in the UK and is growing at about 6.5% annually. Ikea said its products accounted for about 9% of furniture sold on secondhand marketplaces in the UK.
Ikea said it was making the sale of used versions of its products easier by providing pre-filled product descriptions and price suggestions. The company also offers sellers 15% extra on the price of the item sold if they agree to be paid with an Ikea gift card.
The change is part of a revolution in retail of secondhand items. In 2025, 63% of UK consumers bought products through reselling platforms, up from 51% in 2024. The trend has boosted sales at Vinted, which began as a clothing resale site, as well as at Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree and smaller, more upmarket sites such as Vinterior.
The US secondhand site eBay recently bought UK fashion seller Depop for \$1.2bn (£900m). Pre-loved items now make up about a tenth of global fashion sales.
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📄 Original Section
Paramount completes controversial Warner Bros acquisition
Gaya Gupta
Paramount completed its \$111bn (£84bn) acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery yesterday, consolidating some of the world's most recognisable studios and news outlets after a bidding war with Netflix and months of legal turmoil.
The company, now called Sky-dance, will have David Ellison, the son of a billionaire tech boss, in charge, with the former chief executive of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, as co-executive. They will oversee Paramount and Warner Bros' movie studios, HBO Max, CBS News and CNN.
"Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry," Ellison said in a statement. "From the start, our ambition was to bring these two storied studios together and create a stronger competitor, with the talent, resources and reach to tell great stories in every genre, on every platform, for audiences everywhere. Now that ambition is a reality."
The consolidation of Paramount and Warner Bros combines two of the last five legacy studios in Hollywood; the others are Disney, Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures.
Although the merger was approved in June, California, New York and 10 other states sued Paramount over concerns that the move would "extinguish" competition.
As part of last month's settlement, Skydance is required to release a minimum of 30 films each year and more than 180 television shows. CBS News and CNN will also be required to maintain independent editorial boards. A trustee will monitor Skydance's compliance with the terms. Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, has said he would go to court if the company failed to comply.
The merger has also raised concerns about Ellison's influence over CNN after his overhaul of CBS News. Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle who was a megadonor to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. When David Ellison's Skydance Corporation acquired Paramount last year, he appointed Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion writer who launched an "anti-woke" media outlet, as head of CBS News, despite her lack of television experience.
The network has since faced accusations of bias towards Trump, though Ellison has defended his stewardship of CBS and CNN.
Business view
Nils Pratley
Sainsbury's can afford to leave
a deal with Morrisons on the
shelf until the price is right
W ould
competition
regulators
really smile
upon a
combination
of Sainsbury's and Morrisons? One must assume that the two companies believed the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) would give it a thumbs-up if asked; otherwise, they would not have initiated their now-aborted merger talks.
It's easy to list the arguments the duo could make. First, the combined market share of Sainsbury's (15.2%, on the latest numbers from Worldpanel analysts) and Morrisons (8.4%) would still be less than that of the mighty Tesco (27.8%).
Second, Aldi and Lidl are a stronger force in the land. Together, the German discounters represent almost a fifth of the UK market and, since they're backed by serious international buying muscle, their role as the UK's grocery price police might not be affected one jot.
Third, since Morrisons has already sold its petrol stations, the CMA needn't worry about the touchy issue of fuel. Fourth, at a push, Sainsbury's and Morrisons could argue that the UK's food security (a growing political worry) would improve if the latter's 18 food-processing factories were housed within a stronger company that could boost local production.
So, yes, one would probably bet that the CMA would ultimately
▲ The regulator is likely to look at drive times to supermarkets to judge local competition before approving a deal PHOTOGRAPH: MATTHEW HORWOOD/GETTY
The two could argue that the UK's food security would improve if Morrisons' 18 factories were housed in a stronger company approve some version of a deal. But what version? How many store disposals would be demanded?
The CMA, as in 2018, would presumably conduct a site-by-site analysis of driving times to judge local competition. The regulatory instinct, one suspects, would be to err on the side of intervention in light of the overall national picture. Never mind Tesco's size: it would still not be a simple decision for a competition regulator to sanction a supermarket set-up in which half the trade, or thereabouts, would be in the hands of just two companies.
Would a deal still make sense after the CMA's remedies? It's impossible for Sainsbury's and
Morrisons to know until they go through the process. That's the distraction factor for Sainsbury's. Does its chief executive, Simon Roberts, really want to spend a year bogged down in regulatory back-and-forth? The Asda episode sucked the life out of his predecessor's reign.
It's not as if Sainsbury's is struggling. The group is winning market share, profit margins are stable, there's enough spare cash for share buybacks, and the strategic headaches of its bank and Argos have been solved by selling both. While it would be preferable to square up to Tesco's buyers on more equal terms, life ain't bad.
Round at private equity-owned Morrisons, the calculation will be different. Five years after buying the chain for £7bn, owners Clayton, Dubilier & Rice will be thinking about how to exit a tricky investment. A sale will surely look easier than a stock market flotation, and the list of potential suitors is short: Sainsbury's is indeed the obvious candidate.
All of which suggests Sainsbury's can afford to do nothing, or wait for the deal to improve. It was the party that walked away from the talks, the FT reported. If a bargain is possible, the hassle of a CMA process might be worthwhile. But this is not a must for Sainsbury's.
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▼ The Shetlands are often the most expensive part of the UK for fuel because of the costs of transporting it
PHOTOGRAPH: HEMIS/ALAMY
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'It really hammers people' Scotland's islanders hit hard by record fuel costs
Patrick Greenfield
A s fuel prices reach their highest level in the UK since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Scotland's islanders are feeling the pain
more than most. On the mainland, the average price of diesel soared to a record high of £2 a litre last week, bringing the cost of filling an average family car to more than £110, according to the RAC. Petrol has risen by a third since the start of the Iran war in February, averaging 174.71p - increasing to 195.64p in motorway service areas.
In the Hebrides and Shetland, prices at the forecourt jumped even higher, with some fuel stations selling diesel for more than £2.20 a litre during the initial rise.
While European governments appear to have staved off a US export ban that could have sent prices even higher, in Shetland the lack of competition and the cost of shipping to remote areas have made it the most expensive place in the UK for fuel. The ramifications for island life have been immediate.
In the Outer Hebrides, Adam, 43, who lives in North Uist, says diesel has reached £2.28 a litre on the island, making his 45-mile round commute particularly expensive.
He and his wife have diesel cars that they need for work and for transporting their three children.
Adam says: "You accept that things are more expensive, especially food because there's more distance to travel and we are further from distribution centres. Same with getting things delivered here because you have to drive more miles. But when something like the price of diesel skyrockets, it really hammers people here more than other places."
In between work and dropping children off with his wife, Adam says they really rack up the miles. To cut costs, he says the family is having to buy the cheapest food they can, given that food prices are also dependent on the price of diesel that haulage companies pay.
"It's come down a bit in the last week or so. I never thought I'd look up at a £2.18 diesel price and think: 'Oh, quick, I'd better fill up now.' It's really bad. Although people think of this place as really tiny, you're in your car all the time. I average 15,000 miles a year, and my wife does even more because she's a health visitor. She gets the same mileage as someone who's a health visitor in the central belt, yet we pay a lot more," Adam says.
About 26,000 people live in the Outer Hebrides, mainly on the largest island, Lewis and Harris. Adam says rising prices have also hit accessibility to public services, which are already difficult to reach for islanders.
He says: "The Scottish government say they want to help repopulate places like this, but in reality they are not offering much practical support. For example, my daughter had a referral to a paediatrician for a hearing test so I had to take her to Stornoway for that. It involved booking ferries, driving more than 100 miles and staying in a hotel. We can claim some money back from the patient travel scheme but they only offer you £40-£50 for a hotel. Because of the costs of getting there, the NHS stops being free at the point of use because we can't be treated locally."
Bob, a postman who lives in Shetland, says that people in the North Sea archipelago are frustrated by rising fuel prices while also being a hub for the oil and gas industry.
"You are resigned to it. It's always been slightly more expensive than everywhere else, so you have to pay the prices. What can you do? Fuel poverty has always been an issue up here.
'I never thought I'd look at £2.18 diesel and think: "Oh, quick, I'd better fill up now." It's really bad'
Adam
North Uist resident
It's ironic in a sense given we are near where a lot of the oil and gas arrives from the North Sea. Yet we are paying higher prices than anyone else. It's the same with the windfarms," he says.
Bob adds that islanders often have no other choice but to drive, especially when getting to work.
“Most jobs are in Lerwick so unless you live in town you need to drive. There is a bus service but people who work don’t use it much because it’s difficult to make their hours,” he says. “I only ever drive small cars. I have a Fiat 500 so it’s not too bad. But an awful lot of people have big 4x4s up here because of the weather. Diesel prices will be having a big impact on them.”
Ryan, 25, from the Isle of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides, says the soaring costs mean many islanders are having to cut back.
"A lot of family and friends up here are taking fewer journeys than they would normally outside work. For a lot of people, it's a case of just going to work and going to the shops. Even those journeys are not short. The Western Isles span 130 miles. South Uist itself is about an hour top to bottom. A lot of us easily get through a few tanks a month on fuel. It's a lot of the money that's getting spent up here," he says.
Ryan works in a nearby hotel and is paid close to the minimum wage. With almost no public transport, he says he needs to drive to work. The cost of his commute has meant sacrifices. "Me and my girlfriend like to go to restaurants that are a bit of a distance away ... We've not done that in a while."
Islanders have started taking jerry cans to the mainland to stock up on cheaper fuel, even just to save a few pennies a litre, Ryan says. Normally, the cans are used in winter to stock up when high winds and choppy seas disrupt deliveries to the islands and pumps run dry.
"It's not often that diesel hits the £2 mark, let along £2.17 or whatever it is now. Whenever people say they're going to the mainland, they say: 'We're going to make sure we take our jerry cans,'" he says.
But even with the cost of living pressures, Ryan is not considering leaving. He says that people are pulling together in the latest surge of inflation. "People have a romantic view of the islands as being this quiet paradise where you can really get away from it all. But island life is quite hard, especially when costs are rising so significantly," he says. "But it's a nice place with a communal feeling. I think that's what's getting people through the situation. Everyone is in it together."
▲ Adam and his family, who live in North Uist. Islanders often need to drive long distances for work, while food prices are also affected by haulage costs
Large and beautiful butterflies attract far more attention than species that are smaller and dull. Now a study has shown this bias towards beauty results in the boring butterflies being overlooked in conservation programmes.
To understand the link between beauty and conservation, researchers surveyed more than 21,000 people from more than 100 countries, asking them to look at photos of European butterflies and rate their beauty on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their first impression.
The results, which are published in the journal Current Biology, reveal that larger, more colourful and patterned butterflies such as the yellow swallowtail were consistently rated more attractive than the smaller, brownish species such as the alpine grayling.
That bias also extended into scientific research, with more studies on attractive species and more funding and resources for conservation of showier species.
The authors argue that nature conservation programmes need to recognise beauty bias and give greater consideration to inconspicuous butterflies, which, while not as showy, play equally important functions within ecosystems. Kate Raviliou
即便对于那些仍由麦卡勒姆（McCullum）执教的球队来说，风向已经转变，但对于测试赛球队而言，这种变化更为剧烈——尽管这仅仅是因为他在被斯蒂芬·弗莱明（Stephen Fleming）取代之前所做的决定。红球球队在今年冬天的三次海外任务之前都将进行热身赛。12月在德班将由南非板球协会邀请队（Cricket South Africa Invitation XI）担任对手；而传统的总理邀请队（Prime Minister's XI）赛则从堪培拉移至墨尔本的交汇椭圆球场（Junction Oval），并将在3月墨尔本板球场（MCG）举办的第150场周年纪念测试赛前，使用粉色球进行比赛。
England's warm-up plans show healthy dose of reality
Dial has shifted, especially for Fleming's Test side, after last winter's light preparations and embrace of drinking Simon Burnton
L
ast year, England's winter started in New Zealand, where preparation for their first game in any format for nearly a month amounted to two relaxed training sessions, a cultural welcome ceremony involving local Māori elders and, before that, a team-bonding mini-break in Queenstown.
"Obviously there was a bit of golf played and a few drinks here and there and team meals and whatnot," Harry Brook said of that trip. "It was just about trying to spend a bit of time together. They've got some amazing golf courses and we were lucky enough to get on a couple of them. A couple of the other lads managed to get out and enjoy Queenstown. Everybody had a lot of fun."
Brook was not aware, as he answered that question, that the way England choose to prepare for their tours was to become one of the defining issues of the trip. A month after he had been on a golf course in Queenstown, Brook was in the sleepy, leafy Perth suburb of Caversham, where England played their one Ashes warm-up fixture against the Lions at Lilac Hill, a club ground and public park. Their next team-bonding mini-break, this time in the Queensland beach resort of Noosa, was just a humiliating two-day first-Test defeat away.
This was the master plan Brendon McCullum had initiated after his appointment as Test coach in 2022. "You've got to make it enjoyable, not just on the field but off the field, too," he said during his first winter in charge, after he curtailed a warm-up fixture in New Zealand to take his squad to watch one of his racehorses in action.
"We want guys to know that, when they board a plane to head overseas, they're going to have a great time. The results will hopefully follow. I always felt when I was playing that everything was based around the cricket and sometimes you forgot to enjoy yourself. We'll see how it works out but it's worth a crack."
We have now seen how it worked out; the only thing that cracked was the patience of McCullum's employers. Having stripped him of responsibility for coaching the red-ball side in July, on Monday Richard Thompson, the chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board, admitted the approach of eschewing warm-ups and embracing drinking sessions was a mistake. "There is a lot that was learned," he said. "The reality is in those decisions, mistakes were made and we've corrected that now."
The correction was revealed when McCullum said last month, at the end of England's summer, that he was now "trying to include a number of warm-up games" in their schedule to make up for the fact that "a lot of these guys just haven't played a lot of white-ball cricket". As a result, England will preface their one-day international series in Australia next month (after an ODI tri-series against Pakistan and Sri Lanka) with a game against a Western Australia XI at the Waca, the first time in six years they have scheduled a warm-up match before a white-ball series.
The obvious irony is that the green shoots of a new, more serious approach to big-series preparation will sprout in the very city where the previous method withered. The Waca is the venue many thought England should have used to ready themselves for the Ashes, just over the river from the Optus Stadium.
The pitches at both venues are overseen by the same curator, Isaac McDonald, whose ambition to nail “the characteristics of pace
'There is a lot that was learned ... mistakes were made and we've corrected that now'
and bounce" made the decision to warm up on the low, slow surface of Lilac Hill most puzzling.
If the dial has shifted even for the teams still coached by McCullum, for the Test side the change is starker still - albeit only because of decisions made while he was still in charge, before he was replaced by Stephen Fleming. The red-ball team will play warm-up games before all three foreign assignments this winter. A Cricket South Africa Invitation XI is lined up as opposition in Durban in December and the traditional fixture against a Prime Minister's XI moves from Canberra to Melbourne's Junction Oval, and is being played with a pink ball, in the buildup to the 150th anniversary Test at the MCG in March.
The two-match Test series in Bangladesh in February and March, itself preparation for the assignment that follows in Melbourne, will have its own preparatory fixture. It means in the space of a year England have gone from playing no significant warm-ups to scheduling a warm-up game at the end of a warm-up series preceded by a warm-up game. There has been a change of coach and a change of approach, but those are the easy parts. The real test is for results to change with them.
◀ Stephen Fleming's England will play a December warm-up match in Durban before their Test series against South Africa MATTHEW LEWIS/GETTY IMAGES
Lancashire have appointed former Sri Lanka coach and ex-England assistant Paul Farbrace as their new director of cricket following the worst season in the English county's history. Farbrace will arrive at Old Trafford after Lancashire's men finished second-from-bottom in Division Two of the County Championship. Farbrace, who will also oversee the women's team in his new post, joins from Sussex, where he guided the men's side to third place in Division One. The 59-year-old stood down as Sussex men's head coach at the end of the season and was poised to step into a part-time director of cricket post next month. But he will now try to oversee a revival at Lancashire. "I am absolutely delighted to be joining Lancashire Cricket, and I can't wait to get started," said Farbrace, who briefly led England's men on an interim basis in 2015. AFP
Golf Furyk plans changes to boost US Ryder Cup bid
The US Ryder Cup captain Jim Furyk conceded yesterday that his team's dismal foursomes record was "not an anomaly" and promised changes for next year's competition at Adare Manor in Limerick, where they will try to deny Europe a third consecutive victory. The US have won only three of 16 foursomes matches across the last two Ryder Cups. "There's some issues. We understand that. Not something I'm very happy with. I plan on making some changes," Furyk said in a press conference at Adare Manor. Furyk, who was named captain of the US team in April after Tiger Woods declined the role, has brought in a revamped qualification system and counts a new analytics team among the changes he hopes will boost their foursomes performance. Reuters
Air quality in Singapore's Marina Bay has been classified as 'unhealthy'
ROSLAN RAHMAN/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES
▼ Members of the all-women Power of Mama volunteer firefighting team in action in Indonesia
Singapore's haze hazard puts drivers in the hot seat
Smoky skies await F1 teams for this weekend's grand prix amid warning air pollution can impair reaction times
Adam Hancock
Singapore
Singapore's Formula One night race is an annual opportunity for the city-state to showcase its dazzling, illuminated skyline.
But this year the lights of the country's many skyscrapers will shine a little less brightly.
The south-east Asian nation is shrouded in a thick haze that has drifted from huge wildfires in neighbouring Indonesia, with Singapore now among the world's most polluted cities.
Haze is a recurring problem in Singapore during Indonesia's dry season, but conditions have worsened this year as a "super" El Niño exacerbates fires across parts of Sumatra and Kalimantan.
"Rainfall across the region has been about $80\%$ below normal since June, fuelling the most intense fire season in over a decade," said Wang Jingyu, an assistant professor at Singapore's National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University.
Air quality levels in Singapore were classified as “unhealthy” yesterday by the country’s National Environment Agency and F1’s travelling circus will be greeted by smoky skies when it arrives from Kuala Lumpur following Sunday’s eventful race at Sepang.
The polluted conditions are not expected to cause any disruption to the racing schedule this weekend, but an FIA spokesperson said that “there is a contingency in place” if the haze worsens and there “may be some restrictions on outdoor activity”, although those are unlikely to apply to members of the paddock and would instead focus on “entertainment activities”.
The organisers of the Singapore night race said they will ensure the availability of N95 masks on site if required and will “work closely with the relevant agencies” to make any decisions regarding the race weekend if the haze causes “visibility, public health or operational issues”.
The polluted air will add another challenge for drivers racing around the Marina Bay Street Circuit, already regarded as one of the toughest events on the F1 calendar because of its high humidity and tight, twisting track.
Chris Carlsten, a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia and an expert in the effects of air pollution on physiology, said prolonged exposure to the haze during the race could affect drivers' cognitive performance.
In one study, participants spent two hours in conditions with high levels of air pollution before completing a series of cognitive tests, including assessments of their reaction times. "Our findings show that the pollution effect is similar to that of an alcoholic beverage," Carlsten said.
The haze could also affect drivers' pre-race preparations, said Chris Tyler, a reader in environmental physiology at the University of Roehampton who has worked with F1 drivers including Oscar Piastri and Carlos Sainz. Drivers often exercise outdoors to acclimatise to the Singapore heat in the run-up to the race, but Tyler warned that "these are the sorts of environments where prolonged exposure to the
'Our findings show that the pollution effect is similar to that of an alcoholic beverage' pollution over a number of days could be somewhat detrimental".
Lewis Hamilton received similar advice in 2019, when the Singapore Grand Prix was last held in hazy conditions. The seven-time world champion said he had been advised not to go running outside in the days leading up to the race. Carlsten said he would advise all drivers to wear masks if the air quality remains poor, allowing them to “keep their lungs clean” before the race.
While the murky air is currently shrouding Singapore's striking skyline, it should not obscure the drivers' view as they weave their way through the illuminated city streets this weekend. The FIA said it has "no concerns" about visibility. A Formula One spokesperson said: "There is absolutely no risk to the event and the conditions where the event is taking place are not at any level of concern."
There is also little indication that the teams are worried, with several saying they have made no changes to their plans. Audi, competing in their first Singapore Grand Prix, said their drivers are trained to cope with a range of conditions, including “varying levels of air quality”.
For the hundreds of thousands of spectators expected to pack the circuit, however, the health implications are less straightforward. Unlike the drivers, who will spend only a relatively short period on track, fans could be exposed to the polluted air for several hours, particularly those attending the concerts and other events around the race.
George Russell's dwindling championship hopes have been dealt a further blow as he is set to start Sunday's
Singapore Grand Prix from the rear of the grid. Russell's heartbreaking power-unit failure in the closing stages of Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia left him 84 points adrift of his teammate Kimi Antonelli with seven rounds left to run. The British driver conceded that his chances of a maiden title
are now “exceptionally unlikely”, his slender hopes of a turnaround having been dealt another setback. It is understood that the 28-year-old will need to take a new power unit this weekend. That will take Russell over the limit on several components and the penalties are likely to leave him starting from the rear of the grid around the streets of Singapore. Antonelli won the Italian Grand Prix last month having taken a similar penalty and Russell will need something equally miraculous. Press Association
Rain could offer some respite from the smoky conditions, with thundery showers forecast for Singapore on Friday and Saturday afternoon.
Wang said short-term exposure to haze will generally cause only mild irritation in healthy people, probably in the form of a dry or sore throat, coughing or sneezing, but vulnerable groups, including elderly people, pregnant women and children, face a higher risk, with haze potentially aggravating pre-existing conditions such as asthma or triggering acute bronchitis.
Gauff blasts 'insane' wave of racist abuse after China win
Coco Gauff said she received an "insane" amount of racist comments on social media following a controversial point in her China Open match against the home player Sun Xinran.
Gauff stopped a rally after electronic advertising boards lining the court flickered during a point late in the first set of her 7-5, 6-1 third-round victory over Sun, a 16-year-old who recently won the US Open junior title.
"Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist," Gauff said on X. "The amount of racist comments/dms I've received in the last few hours is insane. Lastly, I'm not a cheater or a thief."
Sun appeared about to win the point when Gauff stopped playing. The chair umpire then ordered the point to be replayed. Gauff went on to take control of the match on Monday. "It's weird I'm getting hate for following the rules. Xinran is [an] incredible talent and player, I apologised for the situation at the end of the match and she completely understood," Gauff added in another post.
Sun, who was given a wildcard entry and was making her WTA Tour debut, appeared distraught after the loss. Gauff, who reached the fourth round of Wimbledon as a 15-year-old in 2019, sympathised with Sun. "I did not like to see her so emotional as I've been there and I really understand what it is like but this is just the beginning of an incredible career," Gauff said.
Novak Djokovic capped an outstanding week at the China Open with his first title for nearly a year. The 39-year-old profited from the retirement of his final opponent, Alex de Minaur, after only one game of the second set to win a seventh title in Beijing and maintain his record of never having lost at the tournament.
The 7-6, 0-1 victory means Djokovic has won at least one title in each of the past 21 years, while he now has 102 tour-level trophies overall. After Djokovic edged a tight first set on a tie-break, De Minaur returned from a medical timeout with strapping on his left thigh. It came as a surprise when he shook hands after winning the opening game of the second set.
Jannik Sinner has confirmed he will be out for the rest of the year to have treatment on a knee. Agencies
▲ Coco Gauff said: 'You can dislike me or disagree without being racist'
other bids are being seen as placeholders for the 2040 Olympics. That includes Germany, given the potentially tricky optics surrounding a centenary Games.
In a handbook published yesterday, the IOC said the bids would be based on a number of technical factors - including the venues and athlete experience, political and public support, and the ability to deliver a great Games and a long-term legacy - as well as their vision for the Olympics.
"I was fortunate to compete at five Olympic Games, across four continents. Each had their own character," said the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry. "Each host brought something unique through its people, its culture and the way it chose to stage the Games. But wherever the Games take place, one thing must never change: athletes have to be at the heart of everything we do.
"As an athlete, you spend years working to make your Olympic dream come true. The experience you have when you finally reach the Olympic Games stays with you for the rest of your life. That is why, for every future host, delivering the best possible experience for the athletes must always be the starting point."
Other countries interested in bidding for 2036 have until the end of October to confirm their intention before nominations close. The IOC said it would conduct feasibility assessments by March 2027 and in December 2028 its executive board would open a “targeted dialogue with a select number of preferred hosts”. In the summer of 2029, a vote will then be taken to select who will stage the 2036 Games.
The three-time semi-finalists Argentina are bidding to host the men's 2035 Rugby World Cup alongside Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. The 2027 tournament will be held in Australia with the United States due to host in 2031. Argentina are the only country to have reached a World Cup semi-final to have never hosted the tournament. While they have previously expressed an interest in hosting the World Cup, this is the first time that Argentina have become official candidates.
"We have the opportunity to show the world our passion for this sport, our ability to organise big events, and everything that our countries can offer," said Félix Páez Molina, the president of the Argentine rugby union. Spain have already announced their candidacy for 2035, while the 2019 hosts, Japan, have expressed intent to do so. AFP
Sport Football
▼ Lionel Mpasi starred for DR Congo at the World Cup this summer
Fifa under scrutiny over DR Congo's ineligible goalkeeper
Paul MacInnes
Fifa allowed the Democratic Republic of the Congo to compete at this summer's World Cup despite reports suggesting an internal investigation found that the country had fielded an ineligible player in qualifying.
The player in question, the goalkeeper Lionel Mpasi, starred for his nation at the tournament, including against England in the last 32. Mpasi, who was born in France and played for Les Bleus at youth level, had never completed the process of switching nationalities, Fifa reportedly found. No punishment was levied against the Congolese federation, Fecofa.
The news will again raise questions over the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, with a series of governance scandals having brought heightened scrutiny on his position. Fifa's investigative teams are independent and the president has no input into their proceedings. Fifa is understood to have denied that Infantino played a part in the decision-making process over Mpasi, but his name is likely to remain in focus owing to a former university associate, Véron Mosengo-Omba, being elected unopposed as president of Fecofa this May.
The Nigerian Football Federation submitted a complaint over the DRC apparently fielding ineligible players during a World Cup playoff tie between the nations, which the DRC won on penalties, in November.
According to reporting by the New York Times and Le Monde, Fifa investigators were aware of Mpasi's situation before the DRC defeated Jamaica in a final intercontinental playoff round in March. Faced with a series of possible responses, including banning the DRC from the playoffs, Fifa chose to reject the Nigeria complaint on the grounds it had not been submitted within the necessary timeframe.
Nigeria appealed against the decision and government representatives have suggested they could seek financial compensation for their loss, with a member of the national sports commission telling ESPN: "Nothing has been decided yet, but we will seriously consider seeking compensation from Fifa for all of the economic losses this has cost Nigeria."
Uefa has launched an investigation into claims a member of the Republic of Ireland coaching staff was spat at during the heated Nations League encounter with Israel on Sunday.
The governing body has confirmed that post-match reports by match officials “contained an allegation of an incident in or around the tunnel at half-time” and that it will be the subject of a disciplinary investigation.
Witnesses at the match, held in the Serbian town of Backa Topola, reported hearing a member of the Irish staff - understood to be the fitness coach, Damian Doyle - claim he had been spat at by an Israeli player as the teams went down the tunnel.
A spokesperson for the Israeli FA denied the reports, saying “no one had spat towards the coach”.
After the match Ireland's coach, Heimir Hallgrímsson, said his team had been subject to a number of apparent provocations in the buildup.
American and Caribbean confederation, which includes Jamaica among its members, said it “takes player eligibility matters very seriously and expects the applicable regulations and procedures to be applied consistently and fairly in all competitions”. In a statement it asked that any “concerns regarding player eligibility” be “thoroughly reviewed and addressed through Fifa’s appropriate governance and disciplinary bodies”.
Fifa, Concacaf, Caf, the Nigeria Football Federation and Fecofa, were all approached for comment.
Yesterday the Norwegian football federation confirmed it had submitted a three-pronged complaint to Fifa over its governance, including the decision to overturn a red card awarded to the USA's Folarin Balogun after an intervention by Donald Trump. The other instances cited by the NFF are the Fifa peace prize and the abandoned plan to sell a share in the World Cup to investors, known as the Fifa Forward Enterprise scheme.
High five ... high stakes England's manager, Sarina Wiegman (centre), cuts a relaxed figure with Liverpool's Grace Fisk after the Lionesses gathered for the World Cup qualifying playoff with Greece. The first leg is in Crete on Friday
'accidents' and we were clever enough to avoid it before it went too far. I felt it was their intention to intimidate us and make us do something stupid. I give big credit to how the players handled their emotions."
The investigation will probably extend the rancour that turned this double-header between Ireland and Israel into a geopolitical flashpoint. Hallgrímsson has asked that Uefa keeps Ireland and Israel separate from each other in future draws.
Cristiano Ronaldo has accused the Portugal head coach, Jorge Jesus, of twice breaking his word, saying a failed agreement to publicly explain his omission against Norway drove him out of the camp but insisting he remained available after any punishment.
In a lengthy statement, the 41-year-old gave his account of the dispute that prompted his departure from Copenhagen before Portugal's Nations League match against Denmark last week.
Ronaldo said Jesus had agreed a plan under which the forward would miss the Norway and Denmark matches to manage his fitness. However, on the day of the Norway game, the coach told him he would play for 30 minutes.
"Everyone knows the rest. I warmed up from half-time onwards, watched the minutes tick by and wasn't called on," Ronaldo said. "The manager had broken his word to me."
Portugal's captain and all-time leading scorer said a subsequent meeting with Jesus, attended by his club side Al-Nassr's sporting director Simão Coutinho, produced an agreement for the coach to clarify events at his next press conference.
According to Ronaldo, an eight-point document was prepared saying he had never demanded playing time, had respected Jesus's decisions and that the coach asking him to warm up without bringing him on had been a mistake. Ronaldo said the agreed notes did not require Jesus to apologise to him but said the coach's public remarks bore no resemblance to their private discussion.
"It was the second time he had broken his word to me," Ronaldo said. "I decided to leave the training camp without waiting for any further broken promises."
On Sunday, after Portugal's win over Norway, Jesus denied he had made any agreement with the player but left the door open for his return. Reuters
▲ Cristiano Ronaldo blamed coach
Jorge Jesus for his Portugal exit
▼ Kieran McKenna has no regrets about his surprise exit from Ipswich NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES
It was on the Portman Road pitch, bathed in bright early May light while immersed in the relief and joy of a third promotion in five years, that Kieran McKenna years, that Kierall-McKenna realised the moment was right. The thought had flickered earlier in the season that this might be his final campaign at Ipswich, only to be pushed into the subconscious by the Championship's remorseless grind. "But standing out there, I felt this was probably time," he says of those moments after QPR had been swept aside and a return to the Premier League assured. "Another big victory, a full stadium, in front of my family and the fans. It was an amazing way to go out on a high."
Five months later McKenna has no regrets about electing to cut things short while the going was so good. The golf bag lying outside his garage speaks of a man enjoying the break and, more pertinently, of something bigger. His son has recently become interested in the sport and sharing those moments with loved ones, whether out on the greens or spending part of the summer travelling along the East Anglian coastline in a camper van, were among the biggest reasons to pause a soaring career. At 40, McKenna had spent two decades immersed in coaching; it was time to appreciate life's essentials while continuing professional development at his own speed.
He had, as usual, been linked with moves away but the idea of a voluntary career break was hard for many to fathom when the decision was finalised in June. "For people on the outside it's maybe a bit more difficult," he says. "But those who know my path and my values, the ones closest to me who know me really well, I think they understood why I wanted to step out and what the benefits were of having a period like this."
Not everyone in football saw it that way: the phone has rung with proposals for his next move but McKenna says those overtures arrived “too soon, especially given the way I left Ipswich”. Leaving through the front door, a luxury rarely afforded, made him proud and there is no desperation to leap back into the fray. “I’m certainly in no rush,” he says. “I’m enjoying the time I’m having and hopefully an opportunity will come along that’s right. I have an idea what that would feel like but football doesn’t always follow your plan.”
Since early September he has dipped his toe back in. That has involved tuning back into the process of watching and assessing games, while travelling to spend time with Bayern Munich, the Wigan Warriors rugby team and Colorado Rapids, who are managed by his friend Matt Wells. He has been working on foreign languages, topping up an already competent level of Spanish. This week he is visiting clubs in Spain and, next Wednesday, he will begin work as
'Those who know me really well, I think they understood why I wanted to step out'
a technical observer for Uefa when Shakhtar Donetsk play AEK Athens at Stamford Bridge. "I wanted to give myself the best possibility to learn before taking on the next challenge," he says.
More than once McKenna repeats an assertion he made after promotion in May: that 2025-26 was the hardest of his four-and-a-half seasons at Ipswich, during which he masterminded a dizzying rise from League One to the top flight that marked him among football's hottest managerial properties. The pressure was heightened last season: Ipswich had gone down and were expected to bounce back, even though the remarkably close-knit core who had propelled them through the divisions were drifting away. In effect, he took two different teams to the top.
"You can see how it could really have gone in two distinct directions," he says, making a comparison with the fall Luton experienced after a brief reacquaintance with the elite. "We had the feeling internally that if we didn't work really hard to pull everyone together then it could have gone in a negative way."
McKenna pulled them over the line and reached the end of his own journey. Along the way he had come close to departing more than once but jumping ship earlier would have jarred. "I had a lot of different opportunities to leave," he says. "But I wanted to depart in the best way possible, with the club on a high, back in the Premier League and with a great chance to build for what will hopefully be a really successful period."
◀Kieran
McKenna led
Ipswich to three
promotions in
five years before
deciding to leave
in the summer
JOE TOTH/
SHUTTERSTOCK
The hardest aspect of his final day, he explains, was looking down a camera and addressing the supporters with a five-minute speech in which he did not attempt to suppress his emotion. He reels off a list of coaching staff and other colleagues with whom the goodbyes were touching, meaningful, joyful. Many of the friendships, particularly with members of the “really, really special team” that he led to those successive promotions, will be lifelong. The night before this interview, he spent most of a journey back from London speaking to one of them.
He laughs off the idea he would have relished getting his hands on the £200m summer transfer spend - not
to mention a new training ground whose design he influenced - that appears to have given his successor, Gary O'Neil, a better shot at survival. If anything, he suggests, it shows the club have begun their own new chapter. McKenna also emphasises the thought of potential reputational damage from a second relegation did not factor into his decision to quit. "It wasn't about the thought of a worst-case scenario or what could go wrong," he says.
It was about prioritising life where we meet, in the family's home a brisk half-hour walk from Portman Road. He and his wife chose to stay in Ipswich, where their two children attend school, having become more than mere itinerants passing through. It so happens Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson kept homes nearby after moving upwards. McKenna has hero status here too, in these unassuming yet football-crazed surroundings. Although he keeps a low profile and locations for socialising are chosen judiciously, the overwhelming affection of a town and county often rear up.
"Everyone is respectful; all we get is people coming up telling the story of how much the last few years have meant for them, their family and their friends, and wishing me the best," he says. "Moving down here together, going all in, making ourselves part of this community, it's been another of the really positive things. It's a little bit different living in the area where you were managing but it's the right thing for us at this time."
Has muscle memory ever taken him on an early-morning drive to the training ground? “You’d think it might, but it’s just a different life. You’re not setting the alarm for 5.30am and driving there in the dark. You’re getting up with the kids and having breakfast with them, and you’re around when they go to bed. Although the geography is the same, the life is different.”
'I want to take this period to reflect and be in the best position I can for the next role'
He does not think such a heady half-decade, in which a talent honed at Tottenham and Manchester United blossomed gloriously, has changed a grounded personality honed in rural County Fermanagh. “I probably feel about 20 years older,” he says. “But my friends at home were telling me in the summer that I haven’t changed since I was 10. I couldn’t have arrived at Ipswich with a better background as a coach but, on the other hand, if you’d given me a list of the things I’d have to deal with in the next five years I really wouldn’t have believed it. After going through so many things you’re wiser for the experience.”
Nonetheless the fact remains: taking a breather when the world is your oyster feels vanishingly rare in football management. Maybe everyone should do it. "But what's right for me, after two decades coaching, might be different for a manager who only stopped playing three years ago," he says. "It's been a massive body of work. You leave United, pick your bags up, get in the car and five-and-a-half hours later you're in Ipswich. At 35 you're leaving your family behind, checking into a hotel 10 days before Christmas; you absolutely throw yourself into the job for the next four and a half years and the family do the same. I want to enjoy the time we have now, take this period to reflect and be in the best position I can for the next role."
So what would that next iteration of McKenna's career look like, in a perfect world? He has been linked with any potential vacancies at Celtic and his old employers Spurs; his name will be circling once the season's sackings start, although Ipswich will be owed a sizeable fee for any role he takes this year.
"I'm always going to want to be somewhere where I can improve players, play attacking football and win games," he says. "But beyond that I'm a manager who wants to enjoy having that connection with a club, a community, trying to build something memorable. It was a really special opportunity at Ipswich and you want to do that again in your career. But you have to be ready to come in somewhere and get some short-term success as well."
The chance will surely arise soon; it does not take a giant leap to imagine McKenna in a Champions League dugout in the next few years if the stars align. Until then the self-growth will continue and there will always be dispatches from Portman Road, where his brother and children are regulars. McKenna would rather look forward and will not beat that path for now. "I think that'll be some way down the line," he says. "They're cracking on with the season. There's nothing that can lessen my pride and love for everything we've been through. Hopefully I'll be back in the stadium as an old hand, and some of the people will remember the times we had."
They are unlikely to forget; McKenna's aim is that, by then, at least one other set of supporters will have felt the magic too.
▼ Scotland players react in dismay after squandering a first-half lead ANDREW MILLIGAN/PA
Sturm warning rocks Pocognoli as Scotland slip to home setback
Scotland
Christie 31
Slovenia
Matko 56, Sturm 71
Ewan Murray
Hampden Park
The nature of this Scotland defeat felt far more significant than the fact it arrived at all. Sébastien Pocognoli is already in tricky territory, just four games into his tenure as Scotland head coach. Slovenia comprehensively outplayed the fragile hosts at Hampden, which leaves Pocognoli staring at a third-placed finish in a soft Nations League section. Brave new dawn or beginning of an error?
Scotland were defensively dis-organised. Their attacking play was timid. Long before full time, the Belgian had the look of a coach throwing darts blindly at a board. And missing. Wastefulness from Slovenia prevented Scottish embarrassment.
A scathing assessment arrived from Andy Robertson, who admitted his team were "outfought". The Scotland captain added: "They looked a lot fresher, a lot more hungry."
Pocognoli was more circumspect. "We didn't play the game we wanted to," he said. "We were not at the level we expect to be. I will not say everything is perfect or everything is bad but we need to improve many things."
A pre-match presentation to Robertson, who reached the 100-cap mark during Scotland's win in North Macedonia on Saturday, carried wider meaning. Gordon Strachan and Alex McLeish, Robertson's first two Scotland managers, were joined on the pitch by Steve Clarke. This marked a welcome return to the national stadium for Clarke, who departed the Scotland job in unsatisfactory
Slovenia 0 Scotland 0, North Macedonia 0 Switzerland 3
Scotland 0 Switzerland 3, Slovenia 2 North Macedonia 0
North Macedonia 0 Scotland 2, Switzerland 2 Slovenia 1
Scotland 1 Slovenia 2, Switzerland 3 North Macedonia 0
13 Nov Scotland v North Macedonia (7.45pm),
Slovenia v Switzerland (7.45pm)
16 Nov North Macedonia v Slovenia (7.45pm),
Switzerland v Scotland (7.45pm)
circumstances following failings at the World Cup. Clarke, bashful by nature, took as significant a bow as was ever likely before supporters.
Scotland find themselves in a post-Clarke state of flux. He was the manager who made this country relevant on the wider stage once again. There was, however, widespread criticism that Clarke's team lacked ambition. Pocognoli has been charged with not only maintaining decent results but also delivering an alternative brand of football. It is a fanciful quest, perhaps.
The first quarter mirrored the opening half when these teams met in Ljubljana. Scotland looked uncertain. Slovenia were perfectly comfortable. Adam Gnezda Cerin should have afforded the visitors a 13th-minute lead but failed to connect with appropriate force, allowing Jack Hendry to boot clear when just three yards from his own goal. This venue was eerily quiet.
Ryan Christie raised the mood. That the goal was horribly ugly mattered not a jot to the Scottish contingent. A short free-kick was played wide to Ben Gannon-Doak, whose deflected cross was headed on to a post by Hendry. Modern football's madness means Oli McBurnie will be credited with an assist for the header with which he was undoubtedly trying to score. The ball instead landed at the feet of Christie, who tapped home.
Robertson demonstrated his ongoing value before the break. Zan Vipotnik seemed certain to equalise before the full-back's rescue act, courtesy of a sliding block. Ominously for Scotland, Danijel Sturm had totally bamboozled their three-man defence when supplying Vipotnik.
It was impossible to argue Slovenia were not worthy of their equaliser, which arrived 11 minutes after half-time. It came from a Scotland throw-in, where possession was cheaply conceded. Sturm played through the centre and towards Aljosa Matko, who brushed Luis Binks aside as if the Brøndby defender was not even there. The Scotland goalkeeper Angus Gunn was weak in trying to deal with Matko's shot. Sturm should have sent Slovenia in front two minutes later but saved the blushes of a hilariously open Scotland defence by shooting over.
Slovenia were swaggering around their hosts. Pocognoli switched to a back four for the first time in this elongated international window shortly before Matko was denied his second goal of the night by an offside flag. The decision was not at all debatable.
Neither was the goal which took Slovenia ahead. This time Matko turned supplier, having rampaged down the right flank and crossed for the onrushing Sturm. Gunn was left with no chance as Sturm slammed the ball past him. Pocognoli was now subjected to Tartan Army boos.
Findlay Curtis and Josh McPake had penalty claims rejected for Scotland. Desperation had indeed become the order of the day. McPake was at least lively, having stepped from the bench. Too many of his teammates either underperformed or are not cut out for this level. It is up to Pocognoli to source answers, and sharply. This is no patient football domain.
Kane switches on the style after Coufal's odd own goal
Czechia 0
David Hytner
Wembley
It was a night that belonged to Harry Kane. Yet another one. It began with him being shown a replay of his first England goal during a pre-match interview with ITV - the header against Lithuania in 2015, just 79 seconds after he came on as a substitute for his debut. It ended with him reflecting on two more in what was a supremely comfortable Nations League victory over Czechia. Some things never change.
It remains a numbers game for Kane. They are getting bigger and ever more impressive. On the occasion of his 125th cap, the one that took him level with Peter Shilton at the top of the all-time England list, he moved to an astonishing 91 goals. Nobody will be surprised if he reaches the century. The only question appears to be when.
England know how to beat the game's smaller fry. Under Thomas Tuchel, they have played 16 matches against teams ranked outside the world's top 20. They have won 15 and drawn one - against Ghana at the World Cup. They have conceded only once - against the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also at the World Cup. Czechia, who are ranked No 50, were never in the contest.
Kane is similarly inevitable. The captain even claimed the assist for the breakthrough goal with a cross into the corridor of uncertainty that spooked Vladimir Coufal so severely he turned past his own goalkeeper. Kane's passing was very good.
Czechia 1 Croatia 2, England 2 Spain 3; Czechia 0 England 2, Spain 4 Croatia 1; Croatia 0 England 7, Spain 3 Czechia 1; Croatia 1 Spain 2, England 3 Czechia 0
12 Nov England v Croatia (7.45pm), Czechia v Spain (7.45pm). 15 Nov Croatia v Czechia (7.45pm), Spain v England (7.45pm)
When he was withdrawn in the 82nd minute, he left to a great ovation.
The victory meant that England virtually guaranteed their progress into the Nations League quarter-finals and, perhaps more importantly, saw them close out this elongated window with plenty of optimism. One of the main goals was to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the World Cup semi-final defeat against Argentina. It was mission accomplished.
Kane will break the caps record when England host Croatia in November and that will be the night when he is truly feted. As an aside, he would want to do it at Wembley rather than in Madrid against Spain where England's next-but-one game will be staged. Was that why he was so keen to play in all four of the matches during this window? It might have been a part of it.
Then again, Kane always wants to play. He was one of only three England players to start each of the matches in this series. The others were Manchester City's Marc Guéhi and Elliot Anderson. Was the City manager, Enzo Maresca, happy about that? Probably not. Does he have bigger problems at the moment? Yes.
Kane's act of drawing level with Shilton was the box-office detail. His name was on everybody's lips; his face on the big screen before kick-off. He was pictured alongside Shilton when his name was read out with the teams. The Wembley crowd roared.
Kane was at the heart of the opening goal, providing the teasing cross from the right and it was some finish from the player just inside the six-yard box. One that Kane would have
Harry Kane is England's joint most-capped men's player | Player | Era | Caps | Peter Shilton | 1970-1990 | 125 | Harry Kane | 2015- | 125 | Wayne Rooney | 2003-2018 | 120 | David Beckham | 1996-2009 | 115 | Steven Gerrard | 2000-2014 | 114 | Bobby Moore | 1962-1973 | 108 | Ashley Cole | 2001-2014 | 107 | Bobby Charlton | 1958-1970 | 106 | Frank Lampard | 1999-2014 | 106 | Billy Wright | 1946-1959 | 105 | Source: englandfootball.com
◀ Harry Kane rises above the Czechia defence to head home England's third goal from a Lewis Hall corner ADAM DAVY/PA IMAGES
Online today Next Generation 2026
We pick 60 of the best young talents in world football theguardian.com/football
been happy to call his own. The problem from a Czechia point of view was that it came from their right-back. Coufal could feel Eberechi Eze at his back as he faced towards his own goal, albeit the England winger was not that close. Coufal stretched and everybody had the time to have the same thought: you do not have to do this. Coufal did it. He could not check his momentum and steered firmly past his goalkeeper.
Trent Alexander-Arnold, who Tuchel recalled at right-back, was involved in the buildup and he caught the eye, especially when surging up and inside. He repeatedly got into advanced positions and there was one moment in the first half when he stormed into the No 9 position on to an Anderson pass. He just could not bring it under his spell. Alexander-Arnold had extended Lukas Hornicek with a whipped free-kick at the outset.
Jude Bellingham was excellent. Of course he was. There were fizzed passes from him that took the breath, getting England into dangerous positions, including one for Morgan Rogers in the 25th minute that the Chelsea attacker wasted. There were those strutting runs and it was Bellingham, as much as anybody, who advertised the fact that England were going to break through.
Anderson should have made it 2-0 after a Bellingham lay-off; Kane sparked the move and Alexander-Arnold's cross drove it. The second goal arrived before half-time and it had to be Kane. It would have been all about the buildup were it not for the identity of the scorer. Anderson's lofted ball up the inside right was a beauty and Rogers' first-time cross on the half-volley was even better, cut unerringly towards you-know-who in the middle. Kane was unmarked. Hornicek was helpless.
Kane wanted more. As usual. He got it. As usual. There was the moment shortly after the restart when he unloaded from the edge of the area and watched the shot kiss the top of the crossbar. Hornicek was beaten. Then he was for real.
It was Lewis Hall - impressive at left-back - who swung over the corner, which came after Hornicek kept out an audacious Bellingham flick. Only Jiri Slama knows why he gave Kane so much room in front of goal. It was always going to end badly for the Czechia defender. Kane rose and the header had too much power for Hornicek.
There was the minor irritation for Tuchel when Myles Lewis-Skelly got himself booked in the 53rd minute for pulling back Pavel Sulc. The midfielder will be suspended for England's next game and it was certainly not a great idea for him to get in the face of Michal Sadilek shortly afterwards.
England toyed with Czechia in the second half with Eze running through some of his party tricks. It was Kane who provided the substance.
England
4-2-3-1
Pickford; Alexander-
Arnold, Quansah,
Guéhi (Branthwaite 63),
Hall (Gibbs-White 72);
Anderson (Garner 63),
Lewis-Skelly 7;
Rogers, Bellingham
(Ngumoha 73), Eze;
Kane (Calvert-Lewin 82)
Czechia
4-2-3-1
Hornicek; Coufal
(Kricfalusi 84), Vitik, Hranac, Slama
(Zmrzly 68); Kral,
Sadilek (Macek 68);
Ambros (Hlozek 58),
Sulc, Lingr (Radosta ht);
Naderi
Referee Serdar Gozubuyuk (Neth)
南部企业联赛
布雷恩特里 1 沃尔顿与赫舍姆 3；埃布斯弗利特 1 福克斯通无敌 0；法纳姆 2 特鲁罗 2
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📄 Original Section
Ronaldo claims broken promises led to walkout
Cristiano Ronaldo has accused the Portugal head coach, Jorge Jesus, of twice breaking his word, saying a failed agreement to publicly explain his omission against Norway drove him out of the camp but insisting he remained available after any punishment.
In a lengthy statement, the 41-year-old gave his account of the dispute that prompted his departure from Copenhagen before Portugal's Nations League match against Denmark last week.
Ronaldo said Jesus had agreed a plan under which the forward would miss the Norway and Denmark matches to manage his fitness. However, on the day of the Norway game, the coach told him he would play for 30 minutes.
"Everyone knows the rest. I warmed up from half-time onwards, watched the minutes tick by and wasn't called on," Ronaldo said. "The manager had broken his word to me."
Portugal's captain and all-time leading scorer said a subsequent meeting with Jesus, attended by his club side Al-Nassr's sporting director Simão Coutinho, produced an
| agreement for the coach to clarify events at his next press conference. | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | Iceland | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 1 | +6 | 8 | Estonia | 4 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | +1 | 6 | Bulgaria | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | -2 | 4 | Luxembourg | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 7 | -5 | 3 | Estonia |
(0) 0 |
Iceland | (0) 0 | Luxembourg |
(0) 0 |
Bulgaria Balov 19 Iliev 34 | (2) 2 | C1
According to Ronaldo, an eight-point document was prepared saying he had never demanded playing time, had respected Jesus's decisions and that the coach asking him to warm up without bringing him on had been a mistake. Ronaldo said the agreed notes did not require Jesus to apologise to him but said the coach's public remarks bore no resemblance to their private discussion.
▲ Cristiano Ronaldo blamed coach
Jorge Jesus for his Portugal exit
MEN'S INTERNATIONALS
Algeria 2 Niger 1; China 0 Tajikistan 1; India 1 Uruguay 6; Jordan 0 Venezuela 0; Russia 3 Nigeria 3; South Korea 2 Uzbekistan 0
"It was the second time he had broken his word to me," Ronaldo said. "I decided to leave the training camp without waiting for any further broken promises."
The statement provided Ronaldo's account but on Sunday, after Portugal's win over Norway, Jesus denied he had made any agreement with the player but left the door open for his return. The Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters
UEFA UNDER-21 CHAMPIONSHIP QUALIFIERS
Group B Bulgaria 0 Scotland 2. Group D Republic of Ireland 3 England 1. Group F Northern Ireland 0 Greece 1.
Northern: Group A Accrington 1 Salford 1 (Accrington won 5-4 on pens); Sheff Wed 2 Sunderland U21 0. Group B Blackpool 2 Crewe 2 (Blackpool won 4-2 on pens). Group C Rotherham 0 Bradford 4. Group D Port Vale 2 Mansfield 0. Group E Shrewsbury 0 Stockport 2. Group F Grimsby 0 Burton 0 (Burton won 4-2 on pens). Group G Fleetwood 4 Barnsley 1. Group H Doncaster 1 Liverpool U21 0; Huddersfield 5 Rochdale 0
Southern: Group A Exeter 2 Oxford Utd 2 (Exeter won 4-3 on pens). Group B Stevenage 2 Leicester 1. Group C Wycombe 4 Bristol Rovers 1. Group D Peterborough 4 Ipswich U21 1. Group E Newport 2 Plymouth 2 (Plymouth won 5-4 on pens). Group F AFC Wimbledon 0 Barnet 0 (Barnet won 8-7 on pens). Group G Cambridge Utd 2 Northampton 1. Group H Crawley 4 Bromley 0; MK Dons 7 Brentford U21 1
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网球
ATP / WTA 中国网球公开赛（北京）
男子：单打：决赛：N 德约科维奇（塞尔维亚）击败 A 德米瑙尔（澳大利亚） 7-6 (7-3) 0-1 退赛
女子：单打：16强：M 安德烈耶娃（俄罗斯）击败 D 斯尼古尔（乌克兰） 6-2 6-2；E 亚历山德罗娃（俄罗斯）击败 L 诺斯科娃（捷克） 6-2 6-2；K 穆霍娃（捷克）击败 N 大坂直美（日本） 7-5 1-6 7-6 (7)；N 巴图科娃（捷克）击败 S 克劳斯（奥地利） 6-0 4-6 6-3
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📄 Original Section
NATIONAL LEAGUE CUP
Group B Hornchurch 1 Fulham U21 1 (Fulham U21 won 6-5 on pens). Group C Solihull Moors 2 Newcastle U21 1; Tamworth 1 Leeds U21 0
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赛程
足球
男子国际赛
阿根廷 对阵 贝宁（午夜）；哥伦比亚 对阵 秘鲁（12.45am）；
墨西哥 对阵 智利（3.30am）；美国 对阵 加拿大（1am）
板球
第三场女子2020国际赛
津巴布韦 对阵 西印度群岛，哈拉雷（11am）
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📦 已折叠版面非核心信息：赛事原始比分与赛马预测（《格雷格·伍德的赛马预测》— 点击展开）
📄 Original Section
Cricket
---
格雷格·伍德的赛马预测
伍斯特 1.05 King Roly 1.35 Kelijoe 2.05 Dundee Law
2.35 We're Out Of Aces 3.05 Lexington Wood
3.35 Sheezer Dancer 4.05 I Heard A Rumour 4.35 Brookside La
诺丁汉 1.29 Castlerock Girl 1.59 Nowshesdancing
2.29 Gainful 2.59 Northern Viola 3.29 Quisana 3.59 Norman
Invasion 4.29 Great Blasket (首选) 5.05 King Cherry
塞奇菲尔德 1.50 Military Cross 2.20 Flashy Boy
2.50 Jet Of Dreams 3.20 William Yeats 3.50 Character Testing
4.20 Cumnock
肯普顿 5.00 Silver Trumpet 5.30 Twelve Bars
6.00 Perpetually 6.30 Alpinara 7.00 Royal County Glory
Lucinow West Indies 171 (SE Rutherford 56, SD Hope 52). India 172-2 (SS Iyer 102 no). India beat WI by eight wickets.
---
体育
苏格兰队低迷
汉普登球场对
波科诺利发出嘘声
在斯洛文尼亚
逆转获胜之后
第 39 页 $\rightarrow$
第 38 页 $\rightarrow$
为何我选择离开
基兰·麦肯纳
谈带队将
伊普斯维奇升级——
随后离职
比赛报告与分析 第 40-41 页 $\rightarrow$
📄 Original Section
Tennis
ATP/WTA CHINA OPEN (Beijing)
Men: Singles: Final: N Djokovic (Ser) bt A De Minaur (Aus) 7-6 (7-3) 0-1 ret
Women: Singles: Last 16: M Andreeva (Rus) bt D Snigur (Ukr) 6-2 6-2; E Alexandrova (Rus) bt L Noskova (Cz) 6-2 6-2; K Muchova (Cz) bt N Osaka (Jpn) 7-5 1-6 7-6 (7); N Bartunkova (Cz) bt S Kraus (Aut) 6-0 4-6 6-3
England's flag bearer 'Best ever' Kane marks landmark with double
England
3
Czechia
0
Coufal 27og
Kane 40 57
Jacob Steinberg
Wembley
Jude Bellingham called Harry Kane England's best-ever player after the captain equalled Peter Shilton's record of 125 caps during last night's 3-0 win over Czechia in the Nations League.
Kane, who is only nine off a century of international goals after scoring twice in another fine display, was the star attraction as the Wembley crowd watched Thomas Tuchel's side close on a spot in March's quarter-finals. England's record goalscorer showed why he is in the running for the Ballon d'Or and the way the Bayern Munich striker passed another milestone earned him rave reviews from Bellingham.
"There's not much more you can say that hasn't already been said," the midfielder said. "From my perspective first and foremost he is an unbelievable human being, as a captain and a man.
"He is the best England player to ever wear the shirt and it is an honour to play with him. He is pretty unmatched. He is scoring goals for fun, he goes deep and he gets tackles in. He is only getting better."
Kane, who made the opening goal when he crossed for Czechia's Vladimir Coufal to put into his own net, said making his 125th appearance for his country goes down as one of the biggest achievements of his career.
"I think it's right up there," the
▲ Harry Kane after making it 2-0 at Wembley on the night he won his 125th cap, a joint record for England's men TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS
33-year-old said. “There are so many milestones throughout your career. This is even beyond my wildest dreams. To be joint at 125 is an extreme privilege. I love coming to every England camp. Tonight was a special night. It’s not about me, it’s about the team. To help the team with a couple of goals and a good team performance, it’s been the perfect night for me.”
The former Tottenham forward will break Shilton's record when England, who are 40
'I'm an anarchist at heart'
Bez on country life and Happy Mondays
→ Life & Arts
Behind the scenes of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child
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Wednesday
7 October 2026
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Healey plans £1bn support to bring down energy bills
Exclusive
Kiran Stacey
Jessica Elgot
John Healey is considering a major intervention to cut energy bills for poorer households at the budget, after ministers became alarmed at forecasts that show bills rising by hundreds of pounds in January.
The chancellor is working on plans to spend more than £1bn helping energy consumers, the bulk of which is likely to go towards increasing the discount given to households on certain benefits. Sources say final decisions have not been made, but Healey is set to rebuff a call by the energy secretary, Miatta Fahnbulleh, to spend billions more on removing levies from bills altogether.
Energy officials are working up more radical changes to bills which could be implemented after the budget and would change how much companies could charge customers, rather than subsidising their bills.
If approved, the energy discount will form a major plank of the budget, which government sources say will be low-key but focused on reducing voters' cost of living.
The chancellor is facing a cash crunch as he looks to find money for an additional £4.7bn in defence spending and to rebuild his fiscal buffer, which has been eroded by higher borrowing costs. He is likely to raise taxes to pay for the additional spending, and is rumoured to be looking at higher bank taxes in particular.
Government sources had previously insisted the VAT cut to electricity bills that Andy Burnham announced soon after becoming prime minister would be the last support to be offered this year.
But they have become increasingly concerned by forecasts showing that the Iran war will push the energy price cap up by as much as £442 in January - entirely eroding the impact of the VAT cut.
As a result Healey has been considering
French police
fire teargas at
school protests
Jon Henley
Paris
Police fired teargas at protesters as 250,000 pupils, teachers and parents demonstrated in France on the biggest day yet of a campaign for better high school conditions that has been marred by violent clashes with police.
▲ Riot police face protesters demanding better learning conditions in Nantes
The French prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, yesterday said at least 215 teenagers and 85 school staff had been injured since the protests began more than a fortnight ago, calling the figures “the heaviest toll in decades paid by the school system”.
The country's president, nuel Macron, called key ministers to the Élysée
Dispatch Three years on, trauma of attacks still grips Israel
Emma Graham-Harrison
Quique Kierszenbaum Nir Oz
Keith Siegel spent many of the long hours in Hamas captivity in Gaza etching everything that happened after
7 October 2023 into his memory. For 484 days he recited to himself every place he was held, the dates he was moved and every attack or humiliation he endured or witnessed.
He aimed to store intelligence that could help Israeli forces free other hostages if he was released, to keep track of time as the days slid by, and to be able to tell his family what had happened to him. Now his body is free, but he cannot loosen those memories.
"I'm living a kind of dual life," he said in an interview in Tel Aviv. "I'm here for some of the time, and I'm in Gaza some of the time. It's very challenging to convey in words what it was like."
Siegel and his wife Aviva were among 251 people taken captive when Hamas militants broke across the border to launch a wave of attacks on kibbutzim, border towns, military bases and a music festival. Israel's security forces were caught by surprise and by the time they regained control of the area 1,209 people had been killed, the majority of them civilians, including 36 children, according to records kept by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The cemetery at Nir Oz contains two lines of fresh headstones, marking lives that all ended on that same date. A shared plot for a family of five,
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News
Plans to examine Arday's death are inadequate, say Cambridge dons
Richard Adams
Education editor
Senior Cambridge academics have attacked the university's plans to investigate Prof Jason Arday's death as inadequate, saying those responsible for "serious failures of leadership" should face consequences.
In a letter to Chris Smith, the chancellor of Cambridge, the academics say “it is not yet clear” how the proposed review would answer difficult questions about the university’s involvement in the events leading up to Arday’s death, including its handling of the criticism Arday suffered after his appointment as professor of sociology of education in 2023.
Arday died at his home in London on 14 August, nine days after he had resigned amid allegations of plagiarism and inconsistencies in statements about his career. An inquest will be held to determine the cause of death.
Arday's family said he was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years. Now, a letter signed by more than 40 professors, associate professors and fellows raises concern that Cambridge has backed away from initial promises by Prof Deborah Prentice, ▲ Prof Jason Arday died days after resigning amid plagiarism allegations and media scrutiny
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRIS RADBURN/AFP/GETTY
the university's vice-chancellor, for a "thorough and transparent" examination of the circumstances that led to Arday's appointment and treatment. Rather than reviewing the "lessons learned", the group wants the investigation to pinpoint the advice given and decisions made during and after Arday's hiring.
"The investigation must establish who authorised and directed the university's public promotion of Professor Arday; what assessment was made of the risks that accompanied it; who authorised any legal or other communications with journalists investigating the story; what the university knew as racist and ableist abuse and media hounding escalated; and how responsibility for Professor Arday's protection was allocated and exercised across the university," the letter states.
Cambridge last month announced a two-part review, with part one to be headed by Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor for north-west England, focusing on the support given to Arday before his death.
But the university has yet to name a chair for part two, which will be “a broader review of institutional processes and practice” and only consider “the wider context” of Arday’s period at Cambridge, including general appraisals of recruitment and the support available to academics facing media scrutiny.
The group says the “scope and investigative character” of the second part of the review will be crucial in settling the decisions, structures and processes involved.
"To this end, it is vital that the university establishes a clear chain of responsibility for the institutional decisions made in the period following Professor Arday's appointment, through the events leading to his death and the university's subsequent responses," the letter says.
"The university should state clearly how responsibility will be acted upon if the review establishes serious failures of leadership or responsibility ... Serious findings must have consequences for the individuals and offices responsible.
"At the same time, individual accountability cannot substitute for the institutional changes required where failures arose from structures of decision-making, scrutiny or governance."
The University of Cambridge was approached for a response.
Siberian research laboratory How concerned should we be about possible plague death?
Nicola Davis
Science correspondent
After a 28-year-old lab technician reportedly died last week after an accident at a plague research laboratory in Russia, here is what we know so far.
---
What has happened?
The exact details remain unclear but reports from Russia have suggested Darya Shipilova, an employee at the anti-plague institute in the city of Irkutsk, died on 2 October, two days after becoming unwell at work. According to Rospotrebnadzor, Russia's health watchdog, Shipilova died from "pneumonia of unknown aetiology".
However, there are other accounts: Alexey Tsydenov, the head of the neighbouring Buryatia region, initially said Shipilova had died of plague, before editing his social media post to say she had "possibly" died of the disease.
Russian authorities have denied this to the World Health Organization (WHO), stating: "No case of this dangerous disease has been recorded in the city of Irkutsk, Russian Federation."
If it is the plague, what are we talking about?
We are talking about a disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, typically found in small mammals and the fleas that feed on them. It is the same organism that was behind the bubonic plague or "black death" that swept Europe in the 14th century.
However, the bubonic form is different from the pneumonic plague that some have suggested caused Shipilova's death. The former is more common, results in swellings called buboes and is spread by the bite of infected fleas, whereas the latter has a higher mortality rate and can be spread between people.
How might Shipilova have ended up with pneumonic plague?
One report in the media is that Shipilova was admitted with the disease after returning from Thailand, while another is that she became infected after breaking a test tube in the laboratory. Rospotrebnadzor has denied any such accidents at the institute.
How concerned should we be? It is worth noting that the plague is not a disease of the past.
"There are a few hundred cases of plague reported each year globally, usually in geographically restricted areas, particularly in Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo - although there are a small number of cases in the western United States, central Asia, Mongolia, etc," said Dr Malick Gibani at Imperial College London.
That might not seem reassuring, but we no longer have to rely on medieval medicine. Dr Simon Clarke at the University of Reading said: "Unlike many viral respiratory diseases, plague is caused by bacteria, and antibiotics such as fluoroquinolones and aminoglycosides work well against this pathogen if administered early enough and are often given prophylactically, post-exposure."
However, Prof Brendan Wren at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine said there were multi-antibiotic-resistant strains emerging, “and if the laboratory is working on such a strain, then treatment options may be limited”.
There have also been reports that almost 200 people with whom Shipilova may have had contact are now under medical observation, and that quarantines have been imposed in a number of hospitals.
▲ An Irkutsk plague institute worker died two days after becoming unwell
"Isolation and monitoring are sensible strategies," Wren said.
Prof Alice Hughes at the University of Melbourne added the incubation for pneumonic plague was only one to three days and, as yet no one had shown symptoms.
However, Clarke said there were still unknowns: "Until more details emerge, it is difficult to assess whether this represents an isolated case, an occupational exposure, or evidence of wider transmission."
The UN health agency's spokesperson Christian Lindmeier has said the risk to others is low. "The WHO initial risk assessment from the information available estimates the risk to be moderate to low for Irkutsk, a low risk for the Russian Federation as a whole, and very low for the WHO European region," he said.
---
What happens next?
Dr Zania Stamataki of the University of Birmingham said the control systems used in the UK for hazardous organisms work mean laboratory-acquired infections were rare. But she added: "They are not impossible and this is why an incident warrants a full account of what happened."
Other experts also stressed a need for transparency. “I think it’s important that we see how this pans out and, ideally, there’d be good communication between the public health authorities and the wider global health community,” said Gibani.
News
Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance in The Shining. The axe, right, featured in the film's 'Here's Johnny!' scene and is one of hundreds of items from the personal archive of director Stanley Kubrick to go on sale, including the clapperboard used in the film
PHOTO: BFA/ALAMY
Here's Johnny's axe! Key prop from The Shining on sale as part of Kubrick auction
Matthew Weaver
A special effects axe wielded by Jack Nicholson as he delivered his chillingly manic line "Here's Johnny!" in the 1980 horror movie The Shining is to go on sale.
Nicholson's character, Jack Torrance, uses an axe to hack out an opening in a locked door protecting his terrified wife Wendy, played by Shelley Duvall. It is also the murder weapon in the killing of Scatman Crothers' character, Dick Hallorann.
One of cinema's most famous axes could be yours for a list price of between £30,000 and £50,000.
The axe is one of hundreds of items from the personal archive of the director Stanley Kubrick, who died in 1999.
The sale includes several lots from the film, including two sky-blue dresses worn by the twin sisters Alexa and Alexie Grady.
▲ The Guardian obituary of Stanley Kubrick described him as ‘enigmatic’
They appear in the frocks in a memorable scene where they invite Torrance's son, Danny, to "come play with us" as he pedals on his tricycle through the corridors of the Overlook Hotel.
A clapperboard used in the film is one of four from Kubrick's movies to also go under the hammer. The others are from 2001: A Space Odyssey,
Barry Lyndon and Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut.
The auction will take place at Bonhams in London on 3 February, after public exhibitions that start next week at Bonhams in New York, before going on to Los Angeles, Paris and then London on 18 January.
The lot expected to fetch the highest price is the model of a cosmic foetus, known as the “star child prop” from the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted to fetch as much as £800,000.
Claire Tole-Moir, the head of popular culture at Bonhams, said: "It is the final, enigmatic image of one of cinema's most influential science fiction films. It represents evolution, new beginnings, naivety and ambiguity. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not just one of Kubrick's finest films, it is a cinematic masterpiece, and so to be able to offer this iconic prop is incredibly exciting."
She said the auction gave “fans, collectors and historians the chance to own a piece of this remarkable collection” and that the exhibitions were “a landmark moment to get closer to some of the most iconic films ever made”.
There is also Kubrick's personal script from his 1960 film Spartacus.
The Guardian's obituary of Kubrick described him as enigmatic, obsessive and dictatorial, and his movies as deeply pessimistic. The auction includes his director's chair, valued at up to £12,000.
Tole-Moir said: "Few people had as
The ‘star child prop’ used in the final image from 2001: A Space Odyssey is predicted to fetch up to £800,000
much of an overwhelming impact on visual culture as Kubrick."
She pointed out that his work was so influential that it spawned the adjective Kubrickian, meaning to have “meticulous attention to detail, technical mastery, precision and a distinctive visual or creative style”.
She added that the lot that best illustrated Kubrick's personality was his chess set. "He valued chess for its combination of strategy, patience, discipline and intellectual precision, qualities that would become hallmarks of his film-making," she said.
"Later on, during breaks in filming, he would play games with members of the cast and crew, and has often been photographed alongside a chess board.
“Other directors’ collections have appeared at auction over the years, but Stanley Kubrick’s archive is truly distinctive in its depth, quality and intellect. It encompasses not only the extraordinary objects themselves, but decades of scholarship, research, documentation and deliberate preservation.
"It is hard to think of another collection of this calibre, nor a director who has inspired so many."
Lego scam highlights building problem of insurance fraud
Julia Kollewe
A fraudster who received more than £14,000 in insurance payouts after the supposed theft of Lego sets, fishing equipment and games consoles was behind some of last year's most high-profile bogus claims.
Investigators uncovered £1.34bn of fraudulent claims in 2025, a 14% increase on the £1.18bn recorded in 2024, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI).
▲ Valuable Lego sets were among the items Matthew Johnson claimed for
The Lego fraudster, Matthew Johnson, was sentenced to 28 months in jail and ordered to repay the money after an investigation by the City of London police's insurance fraud enforcement department (Ifed).
Johnson, of Misterton in Nottinghamshire, submitted false claims to Axa Insurance between May 2021 and January 2022, relating to alleged burglaries at properties in Shetland and Goole, East Yorkshire. He claimed Apple MacBooks, TVs, games consoles, fishing gear and large quantities of valuable Lego sets had been stolen, and received payouts totalling more than £14,000 across four claims.
Axa raised concerns after spotting inconsistencies in documentation provided by Johnson, including repeated use of the same receipts.
Mark Allen, the head of fraud and financial crime at ABI, said: "Anyone considering committing insurance fraud should be under no illusion - it's a serious crime with serious consequences, including a criminal conviction and imprisonment."
The ABI and police warned that insurance fraud pushed up the cost of premiums for all customers.
While the number of detected fraudulent claims fell by 2.7% to
93,900 cases last year, the value of scams rose sharply. The average value of a fraudulent claim in 2025 was £14,300, second only to the peak of £14,600 recorded in 2022.
Motor insurance remained the area with the highest level of claims fraud, accounting for 55% of all cases.
One fraudster who staged motor collisions involving women he met online was sentenced after running a deliberate “crash for cash” scheme, the ABI said.
DCI Simon Klust, the head of Ifed, said more than 250 fraudulent insurance claims were detected each day, but this was “likely to be just the tip of the iceberg”.
News
French school
protests
Blockades and baton charges as 250,000 join demonstrations across France
Continued from page 1
Palace for talks last night, French media reported.
The interior ministry said 200,000 people had taken part in mainly peaceful marches in cities including Marseille, Nantes and Lyon yesterday, with 56,000 more joining the biggest demonstration in Paris. Organisers put the total at 450,000.
Most passed off without serious incident, but some - including in Paris - ended in sporadic vandalism and running skirmishes with riot police, with officers firing teargas and carrying out baton charges to disperse protesters.
About 488 people were arrested yesterday, according to figures from the interior ministry reported by the newspaper Liberation. Forty-three police officers were reported injured.
Trade unions and rights groups have accused the police of using unnecessary force against the young protesters in recent days, with Amnesty International saying French authorities should “put an end to the disproportionate police repression”.
At yesterday's demonstration in Paris, students held aloft smoke flares and placards with slogans including "under our textbooks, anger" - a nod to a celebrated slogan "under the paving stones, the beach" from the May 1968 student riots. Other slogans included "schools with no money = country with no future".
One student, Anna, told reporters at the capital's Place de la Nation: "Our demands are simple: better study conditions, enough teachers, decent school buildings. The authorities' response has been catastrophic. There's enough violence already."
Yesterday's marches came after two weeks of protests that began in the northern suburbs of Paris and have snowballed nationwide. Besides the injuries to protesters and staff, 715 police officers had been wounded in the clashes, Lecornu's office said.
Demonstrators have set fire to dustbins outside their schools, destroyed bus shelters and hurled projectiles at riot police, who have responded with batons, teargas and riot-control rounds.
Twenty-four schools have been burned or ransacked since mid-September, while more than 6,100 people have been arrested, almost all minors. The justice ministry said more than 1,800 were being prosecuted, nearly 1,500 of them under 18.
The education ministry said more than 900 of the country's 3,700 high schools were blockaded or had been closed for the day yesterday, although ◀ Protesters are shrouded in smoke during demonstrations against poor learning conditions in Paris
PHOTOGRAPH: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/GETTY
Source: OECD
student groups put the number at 1,800. Some local education authorities moved classes online.
Océanne, 18, was among the marchers in Marseille. "We just want to save our education and be educated," she said, adding that she had suffered from absent teachers who were replaced either by "pointless substitutes" or not at all.
Many teachers were also demonstrating. In the western city of Rennes, Romain Dubourg said he and "about 30 colleagues" had "talked about the police brutality that we've witnessed, and decided to be there for our students if they need us".
Trade unionists also marched, with the head of the CGT union, Sophie Binet, urging members to "protect high school students". The Green party leader, Marine Tondelier, urged local officials and parents to wear white and "go and protect our children during demonstrations".
Anne Savinel-Barras, the president of Amnesty France, said: "The images and testimonies widely circulated over the past week raise alarming concerns about the dangerous use of teargas, batons and policing techniques." The interior minister, Laurent Nuñez, said police had launched 10 internal investigations into allegations of brutality since the protests started.
On Monday, a 15-year-old's hand was blown off as protesters battled riot police in northern France.
A 16-year-old lost the use of his right eye after he was seriously injured in the head last Wednesday during the blockade of a high school in Tours. The local prosecutor, Catherine Sorita-Minard, said the wounds were “compatible with the impact of a defensive bullet of the blast ball type”.
In another incident, a 14-year-old lost most of his teeth on Monday when a police officer appeared to fire a grenade at him at close range during a protest north-west of Paris. "His jaw is sealed shut, he can no longer speak and he eats through a straw," his mother told reporters.
Lecornu has ordered his ministers to tackle the students' core demands, which include ensuring absent teachers are replaced, reviewing the length of the 8am to 6pm school day, and repairing ageing buildings.
He denied accusations of excessive force by police, saying officers had mostly acted “proportionately”. Lecornu told MPs yesterday “extreme violence” had come “knocking on high-school doors, and must be condemned. Setting fire to a school will not help repair it. Attacking a teacher will not help replace missing staff.”
But the protests, seven months before crucial presidential elections to choose a successor to Macron, have piled pressure on a government trying to reduce a ballooning budget deficit amid growing investor concern over France's mountainous debt and weak economic growth.
The government has accused the radical-left La France Insoumise party of encouraging and even orchestrating the movement after numerous LFI MPs attended school blockades.
'This is state violence' Police face accusations of 'deliberate' brutality
Angelique Chrisafis
Paris
Before dawn yesterday, outside the Lycée Sophie-Germain in central Paris, hundreds of teenagers dragged wheelie bins,
barriers and shopping trolleys to build a barricade outside the front doors of their secondary school.
Atop the piles of bins, pupils held banners calling for more funding and greater equality in French schools. They were also protesting against riot police, who have been accused by human rights groups of using disproportionate force against children in what is fast becoming the country's biggest youth movement in decades.
"Everyone hates the police," chanted a group of 15- and 16-yearolds. At least 215 teenagers, 715 police officers and 85 teaching staff have been injured in clashes in recent days, according to the government.
"We're teenagers with wheelie bins and the police have heavy weapons. It's totally mismatched," said Livia, 17, who is studying theatre at a school in northern Paris. "The police are extremely violent in France. This is state violence and it's horrible seeing police allowed to target children. It's important to remember this is institutionalised violence. It's planned and deliberate."
Ten investigations into possible cases of police brutality are under way after injuries allegedly involving the use of police weapons, including one 15-year-old who lost his hand, another who lost an eye and a boy whose jaw and teeth were shattered.
Lily, 17, who is studying social sciences in her final year of school and was demonstrating for more funding in what she called a discriminatory education system that left poorer children behind, said: "The policing is catastrophic. People have been mutilated by weapons. One boy has lost an eye - it's horrible.
"My parents support me being on the barricades and at the protests. They're worried about the policing, but they said they'd come and get me from the police station if I was arrested."
Teenagers nearby held cardboard signs protesting against the use of teargas by riot police. "A state that gases high school students is a weak state," read one banner. "Gas
France's declining Pisa scores
Average Pisa scores by subject, selected countries
Riot police confront a group of student protesters taking part in yesterday's demonstrations in Paris
PHOTOGRAPHS: YVES HERMAN/REUTERS
▲ Bally Bagayoko, centre, the mayor of the northern Paris suburb of Saint-Denis, is escorted by students after joining their demonstrations yesterday
Source: OECD, Pisa 2025 results. Note: OECD average is of 23 selected countries
Why pupils are angry The facts behind the discontent
rapists, not children," said another sign in reference to calls for tougher laws against sexual violence.
The protest movement that began outside a school in a low-income Paris suburb has spread across the country, taking the government by surprise.
"In more than 20 years of teaching, I've never seen protests this big," said one teacher at Sophie-Germain who planned to join the Paris demonstration yesterday. "The students in central Paris have shown a great sense of solidarity with those in the Paris suburbs who face much worse conditions in their schools."
Isabella, 16, said she had the backing of her parents, who work in film and music. “Young people have been teargassed for doing nothing but trying to express their opinion,” she said. “Everybody told us school was the great leveller, but today that is not the case at all. A teenager in the banlieue [suburbs] of Paris is never going to have the same opportunities as a student from the city centre. That’s why we’re here today.”
Lionel, 17, who is in his final year at school and hopes to study English, said: "The aim isn't to riot or smash things up. We just want to protest peacefully."
Teenagers also chanted songs against Marine Le Pen, the far-right, anti-immigration candidate in the 2027 presidential election, who is high in the polls as Emmanuel Macron steps down after a decade in office. "We're also protesting against the growth of the far right," said Aislinn.
Justine, 17, who arrived at the barricade before dawn, said she hoped the protest would grow into a “massive” movement. “For years, there has been a mental health crisis among young people in France and anger at rundown schools and the stresses of the education system,” she said. “We need the government to listen to us and make radical change.”
Maya, an 18-year-old sports science student, had spent two days on a barricade at her university building in Bobigny in solidarity with school students and joined the Paris protest march yesterday. She had attended high school in Drancy in a building she said had mould on the walls, not enough chairs and absent teachers who often were not replaced.
"It's only when we spoke to other students at university who came from different types of schools in the countryside or city centres that we realised our experience was so different and that there was a real injustice to the conditions we had to learn in," she said.
Julie, 46, a self-employed parent of two high school students from Levallois, a suburb north-west of Paris, had joined her husband to accompany her sons to the march.
"We're here to support our children but also to protect them from what is going on with the police and the violence we've seen with the police these last few days," she said. "We've seen our own child teargassed many times in front of his school. It's unbelievable."
French school students say the education system is riven with inequality, that many buildings are in disrepair, class sizes are too big and there are not enough teachers. How accurate are these claims?
Is the French education system blighted by social inequality? Yes. A child born and schooled in a deprived neighbourhood in France has less chance of escaping their socioeconomic background than in most other developed nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Éric Charbonnier, a French education analyst at the OECD, said there was a marked gap between the performance of the most advantaged and disadvantaged school students in France. “And often disadvantaged students are in disadvantaged schools,” he said. This has raised issues of the quality of learning being delivered and the higher absenteeism of teachers.
Are French high school buildings dilapidated and rat-infested? Some are, namely in certain cities and low-income suburbs. Videos filmed by students and teachers have shown leaks, scurrying rats, holes in walls and ceilings, broken toilets and not enough chairs or tables, meaning teachers have to carry them from classroom to classroom.
Estimates in recent years have pointed to thousands of French schools at all levels, both primary and secondary, in need of repair. These include many 1960s school buildings. French regions are responsible for the upkeep of high school buildings but have asked for higher budgets from the government.
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Are class sizes bigger than other comparable countries?
Yes, and often in urban areas. Charbonnier said: "There are an average of 29 students in French language lessons, compared with 26 across the OECD. However, this average masks substantial differences - particularly between large cities and rural areas."
Teachers and school students in Paris and its suburbs this week described many high school classes of 36 pupils or more but in ▲ Protesters make their point in a peaceful demonstration yesterday in Nice, south-east France
PHOTOGRAPH: VALÉRY HACHE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
some rural areas it can be fewer. Figures from the French education ministry show class sizes have increased in recent years.
Are school days longer in France? Yes. "In terms of number of instructional hours, France really has more hours than most of the OECD countries," Charbonnier said. This is true of primary and all levels of secondary education.
Teaching is also squeezed into shorter periods, with 36 weeks of school per year, fewer than the OECD average. High school pupils at barricades have complained of having school days that run from 8am to 6pm, with many gaps during the day.
Are absent teachers not replaced?
Yes, sometimes. The education ministry has acknowledged that about 10% of teaching hours across the year are not delivered, for various reasons, and that it is urgent to fix this. The education union SNES-FSU estimated that more than half of all public middle schools and high schools were lacking at least one teacher at the start of September. On the barricades, protesting students said there were more absent teachers in low-income areas.
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Does France spend less money on secondary education than its European neighbours?
No, France spends more than many other countries on high schools for children aged 15 and 18, but analysts question how the money is spent. For example, teachers' middle and end-career salaries are comparatively low.
Charbonnier said: “France’s expenditure on upper secondary education [lycées - or high schools] is 28% higher than the OECD average, while its spending on the first levels of education, including pre-primary and primary, is 11% below the average.” He said the reason for France’s higher spending on high schools included its large provision of costly vocational programmes which often lack recognition even within France.
Angelique Chrisafis
Paris
National
Seventh man arrested over suspected terror plot at RAF Fairfield
Jamie Grierson
Dan Sabbagh
Vikram Dodd
A seventh man was arrested in London yesterday on suspicion of terrorism offences as part of the ongoing investigation related to threats to RAF Fairford, police said.
The 22-year-old British national was arrested in Westminster, central London, on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts under section 5 of the Terrorism Act 2006, counter-terrorism policing said. The arrest comes as police investigate an incident eight days ago, when five men from London driving three white vans were arrested in a village outside the airbase used by bombers from the US air force.
On Sunday, the Pentagon withdrew all 12 of the B-1 Lancer bombers that had been based at Fairfield to the US. Some of the warplanes had only arrived at the base a week earlier, and refuelling aircraft had to be scrambled to complete the move.
There has been speculation that
Iran wants to target the Gloucestershire base, which was used for US bombing runs on the country earlier this year, but the US and UK governments appear to have divergent views about the security situation and the level of threat.
UK sources question whether Iran would have the capability to launch a Ukraine-style drone attack on US military aircraft at the base. On Monday, Downing Street insisted that the base was safe.
Some reports suggested the US feared a drone attack similar to Ukraine's attack on Russian airbases last year and did not want to leave its bombers stationed at Fairford.
On Monday Donald Trump said the aircraft had been moved out because "there were some threats".
The investigation by counter-terror police has progressed without yet making a breakthrough. The five men detained in Whelford, Gloucestershire, on 27 September were released on police bail a day later. No explosive devices were found in the three vans, though a barrel of petrol was recovered. One of the five men had called 999, and their intentions remain unclear.
On Thursday, a 25-year-old UK-Iranian dual national was arrested in Westminster on suspicion of terrorism offences. He was released on police bail on Saturday.
Yesterday the senior national coordinator for counter-terrorism policing, Vicki Evans, said: "This remains a live investigation and our specialist teams continue to pursue multiple lines of inquiry into the circumstances surrounding events near RAF Fairfield.
"Once again, I'd like to thank the public for their continued support and patience whilst we work through this highly complex investigation.
"We're acutely aware of the public interest in this investigation, and we are working around the clock, and at pace, to identify the motivation behind events in Gloucestershire. We remain committed to investigating all possible angles."
The 22-year-old man is being held under rules that allow detectives to bail him, as were the other six men who have been arrested.
People arrested on suspicion of terrorism offences can be held under two legal schedules that dictate how long they can be detained without charge.
Under the terrorism schedule a suspect can be held for up to 14 days but can not be bailed, giving police a fortnight to charge or release them.
The 22-year-old man arrested on suspicion of preparation of terrorist acts is being held under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a spokesperson for counter-terrorism policing said. That means he could be released under investigation on bail, but detectives have much less time to hold him.
Drax datacentre could be 'one of the dirtiest', experts claim
Pippa Neill
Environment reporter
Drax's proposed datacentre in North Yorkshire could produce nearly double the emissions of all flights out of Gatwick airport each year, analysis has shown.
Last year the energy company unveiled plans to convert part of its biomass power plant near Selby into a datacentre in response to the increase in demand for AI capability.
AI datacentres use large amounts of electricity to power servers and cooling equipment, and to run facility systems. There are 315 datacentres in the queue to connect to the UK's electricity grid, representing 73GW of demand. This is almost double the UK's peak winter energy demand.
In public documents, Drax said it was developing options for a 1.2GW datacentre, with 100MW coming from the electricity grid and the rest from its power station.
The power station burns millions of tonnes of wood pellets to generate electricity, which has been touted as a clean way of producing energy.
Based on information in Drax's 2025 annual report, the US-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimated that if built, Drax's datacentre would use 4.9m tonnes of wood a year. The campaign group calculated the total annual emissions would be 8.6m tonnes of CO₂ - nearly double the CO₂ emissions from all flights leaving Gatwick airport in a year - 4.79m tonnes in 2024.
Matt Williams, a senior advocate for the NRDC, said this would make the Drax facility “one of the dirtiest datacentres out there”.
Oliver Hayes, the head of policy at the environmental campaign group Global Action Plan, said: "Burning millions of trees to power server farms is indefensible."
Drax said the proposed datacentre could be fully operational from 2031 if it secured the necessary consents.
Williams said: "The government must urgently set minimum standards for datacentres and rule out dirty energy generation like burning trees."
▲ The Drax power station in North Yorkshire burns millions of tonnes of wood pellets to generate electricity
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY
There is growing pressure for more transparency over how energy-intensive datacentres will align with the government's net zero targets.
The government has ruled out issuing a moratorium on datacentres, claiming that doing so would send investment and good jobs abroad.
A Drax spokesperson said: "The potential plans for datacentres at Drax power station can support UK economic growth as well as helping meet the government's ambitions for industrial renewal in places like North Yorkshire, as well as AI sovereignty."
They claimed that the NRDC's assertions were inaccurate, "not independently verified and ...rooted in basic errors".
Asos customers told data 'fully compromised' by hackers
Sarah Butler
Dan Milmo
The online fashion retailer Asos is investigating unauthorised access to its app system after shoppers received a notification claiming hackers had “fully compromised” its data.
Asos said basic personal information including name and contact details might have been accessed by an unidentified third party, but it did not believe that payment card records or passwords had been compromised.
It said in a statement: “We are investigating unauthorised activity involving third-party platforms that we use to communicate with customers. We took immediate action to restrict access to the notification platforms and are working with our internal and external specialist advisers, as well as all relevant authorities.”
It added: "Our website and app are operating as normal, with no current disruption to any aspects of our operations."
The value of Asos shares dived on the London Stock Exchange, closing 9.56% down.
The message sent out to customers said: "Dear Asos DPO [data protection officer] and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance."
Snowflake is a cloud platform used to store, process and analyse data including transactions and demographic information such as clothing sizes and body measurements. It also enables push notifications to clients' phones.
The Telegram channel operated by the purported hackers, who have named themselves the Xuanye Group, carried a message assuring Asos customers that “payment information is not affected” and a further post stating “the app is safe to use”.
The UK National Cyber Security Centre, part of GCHQ, is offering its assistance to Asos.
National
Survivors of domestic abuse reveal 'bully' ex-partners behind far-right street patrols
Nic Murray
Rajeev Syal
During their relationship, Lisa's ex-partner was controlling. He kept her at home where he was emotionally and physically abusive towards her, including once attacking her with a machete. These days, he runs protests outside houses of multiple occupancy that he claims are housing asylum seekers.
He coordinates groups of men to patrol the streets, claiming to protect women but often using these patrols to target men of colour. “There’s nothing good about that man. He’s a bully in every way,” she says.
Lisa is one of seven women who have told the Guardian they are survivors of domestic abuse carried out by key figures in the anti-immigration street patrol movement. All have chosen to come forward to make the public aware of the patterns of violence behind this form of activism.
At least 14 street patrol groups have been set up in towns and cities across the UK, receiving tens of thousands of pounds in public donations, as well as political support. The deputy leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, has previously called for more patrols to take place.
Wearing hi-vis jackets - and in some cases stab-proof vests and carrying handcuffs - these groups aim to be a visible presence conducting patrols through towns and cities. Some have used the patrols to target men of colour, stopping and questioning individuals and demanding to see identity documents.
Despite their rhetoric of protecting women, the Guardian has been shown evidence that indicates the severity of the abuse carried out by men in these groups. Some women we spoke to have been granted restraining or non-molestation orders. One moved town with the support of the police for her own safety.
Lisa met and began a relationship with a far-right activist when she was 16. "He likes power, and I feel like this is giving him some sort of power," she said. "It's all about power and control in everything he does."
He is one of the main figures behind the branch of the Raise the Colours movement in his town. The far-right anti-migrant campaign has hung flags from lamp-posts across the UK under the guise of “patriotism”.
Early in their relationship, Lisa's partner became abusive and controlling, sometimes stopping her leaving the house. This behaviour escalated after she became pregnant and had her first child. He would threaten her and her family if she tried to end the relationship. "I still have nightmares to this day," Lisa said.
The night she left him, he tried to attack her with a machete and gave her a black eye and several broken toes. Police attended the scene and arrested him, but it did not end there. "When I did get away, he was threatening me constantly," Lisa said. "I had met somebody else eventually, and I was getting phone calls saying he's going to kick the baby out of me when he sees me in the street."
Despite the severity of this abuse, it never resulted in a conviction.
Claire was in a relationship with an anti-immigration activist for several years, during which she made various calls to the police due to his abusive and violent behaviour, often while her children were present. He was verbally abusive to Claire while she was pregnant, as well as behaving aggressively towards hospital staff after the birth of their first child.
This abuse continued after Claire's pregnancy, including one occasion when he pulled her hair and gripped her by the throat.
He uses his elevated platform in the town to run street patrols, standing with other men outside schools as children come and go, and erecting St George's cross flags on lamp-posts.
The Guardian previously revealed police data indicating patterns of
Counter-protesters against an anti-immigration march in Portsmouth last month; above, a far-right blockade of Gosport marina in September
PHOTOGRAPH: JAMES VEYSEY/ SHUTTERSTOCK; SOPA/SHUTTERSTOCK; LAB MO/LNP
domestic abuse among 2024 rioters, and similar links can be seen for those involved in this vigilantism.
Last August, Reece McCarron founded the “Corby guard”, claiming he had been inspired after seeing someone “making advances to a young girl on the way from school”. On early patrols in the Northamptonshire town he was joined by James Kenna, who was subject to a domestic violence protection order in 2020.
A month later, McCarron broke into his former partner's house, swinging a machete around the kitchen and threatening to kill her. He was later charged with a string of offences including rape, actual bodily harm and intentional strangulation, which have been dropped after support for prosecution was withdrawn by the victim. In May, he was convicted of coercive control, as the prosecutor told the courts "the victim said that she was very scared he would kill her. She couldn't sleep for weeks."
In Greater Manchester, Adam Farrell and Jamie Thomason formed the Heywood community guard. Several schools in Heywood were forced to go into lockdown when the guard ran patrols outside their gates.
Farrell was jailed in 2022 after a racist attack on a man that caused life-changing brain injuries. Thomason has claimed he is “doing God’s work” protecting women and children. In 2018, he was convicted under section 4A of the Public Order Act after arriving at a former partner’s address, threatening to slit her throat and punching her car.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the abuse survivors
Trio who raped girl and fled to France in back of lorry are jailed
Steven Morris
Three men who raped a 17-year-old girl before escaping to France in the back of a lorry have been jailed.
Mehrab Safi, 21, Salman Habib-kheil, 19, and Awal Ahmadzai, 19, and a 17-year-old boy plied the girl with alcohol and all four raped her.
Safi was found guilty of two counts of rape and Habibkheil of one. Both men were convicted of arranging or facilitating the travel of a female with a view to exploitation. Ahmadzai was found guilty of one count of rape and one of sexual assault. The 17-year-old was convicted of one count of rape.
The victim had met Safi in Bristol during a trip she made in November to go Christmas shopping with a friend - her first trip to the city from her home in Somerset, Bristol crown court heard. Immediately after they left, Safi began messaging the girl. He told her he loved her and asked her to send indecent images.
Four days later, Safi, in collaboration with Habibkheil, arranged for her to be collected by a taxi and brought into Bristol. She was taken to his house where she was raped over several hours.
The victim's mother reported her missing and police found her and the 17-year-old boy at Safi's house. As officers arrived, the three men fled, eventually managing to make their way across the Channel in the back of lorry carrying frozen goods.
Footage from Safi's mobile phone showed the men laughing and gesticulating in the back of the lorry. They were held in France and returned.
The girl had been raped five times by the four offenders. In a victim personal statement, the girl said she felt like a different person now and could not leave her home alone.
Safi was jailed for 15 years while Habibkheil and Ahmadzai were each sentenced to nine years in a youth detention centre. The 17-year-old was sentenced to two years and seven months in youth detention.
The court was told the four were born in Afghanistan and displaced by the "brutality" of the Taliban regime.
Habibkheil had lost his father to the Taliban and was instructed by relatives to make his way to England. Ahmadzai is believed to have post-traumatic stress disorder.
The 17-year-old offender lost his parents and fled to the UK aged 11. The court heard he suffered “horrendous abuse” while en route.
Judge Cullum said their experiences did not excuse the harm they had caused to a "vulnerable" girl who had been "groomed and trapped".
DS Jo Babbage of Avon and Somerset police praised the girl's bravery in telling police her story and being questioned in court.
"It's impossible to overstate the courage she has shown," she said.
Nobel prize in physics awarded to Belgian for his work on neutrinos
Ian Sample Science editor
The Nobel prize in physics was awarded yesterday to a researcher who turned an enormous block of ice at the south pole into a detector for ghostly particles called neutrinos that reach Earth from outer space.
Prof Francis Halzen, a Belgian particle physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led work at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which made the first detection of high-energy, extraterrestrial neutrinos soon after it was switched on in 2013.
To build the observatory, scientists, technicians and engineers embedded thousands of basketball-sized light detectors into a cubic kilometre of ice to detect faint flashes of light that can result when neutrinos from space crash into atomic nuclei.
Announcing the prize, the Nobel committee said Halzen had won "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin". He receives a prize of 12m Swedish kronor (£900,000).
"It feels strange," Halzen told a press briefing. "I hope it reflects on the really courageous people who ▲ Scientists detected the particles at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, located at the south pole, in 2013
PHOTOGRAPH: XINHUA/ALAMY
joined me in the beginning when no really respectable, conservative physicist would have joined me, but many talented people did."
Neutrinos are mysterious particles that are as elusive as they are ubiquitous. They pass through almost everything they encounter, from people to planets. Every second, billions of neutrinos from the sun pass unnoticed through the body. But every now and then a neutrino will interact with the nucleus of an atom in a collision that can be picked up by a sensitive detector.
Halzen realised that brief flickers of light from neutrino collisions could be detected in clear, glacial ice and in 1988 put forward a plan to convert a chunk of the south pole into a neutrino observatory. The detector uses Earth to shield against the background noise of cosmic rays, and has light sensors to detect neutrinos passing through the planet from the northern hemisphere.
After the first detection of high-energy, extraterrestrial neutrinos in 2013, scientists working on IceCube identified the first cosmic source of neutrinos 3.7bn light years away.
The observatory has paved the way for a new kind of astronomy. Until now, researchers have learned about the cosmos from light, other electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves. Neutrinos are considered messengers from the cosmos and provide fresh clues as to how the universe evolved.
Dr Patrick Dunne, an associate professor of physics at Imperial College London, said: "Detecting neutrinos from astrophysical sources opens up a new lens, so it isn't overstating things to liken this to when Galileo first pointed a telescope at the stars."
The observations of cosmic neutrinos have led some scientists to speculate that the particles could be used by alien civilisations to send 'I hope it reflects on the really courageous people who joined me when no respectable, conservative physicist would'
messages across the universe. Asked what he made of the idea, Halzen said: "We have enough realistic problems to deal with right now [to] make neutrino astronomy a reality rather than worry about this."
But he added that when astronomers have opened new windows on the universe, they often make unexpected discoveries. "I'm sure this will be true for neutrinos 50 years from now," he said.
On Monday, three scientists won the Nobel prize in medicine for optogenetics, a powerful technique that has allowed researchers to shed light on the workings of the brain. The Nobel prize in chemistry will be announced today.
They are big not only in size but in delicious goodness, made from the very finest materials obtainable to-day (including separated milk and rich-with-energy glucose).
National
Sweet truths What the health of those raised on sugar rationing is revealing seven decades on
Linda Geddes
They were born into a Britain still recovering from the hardships of war. Though the air-raid sirens had fallen silent, many foods
remained rationed, including sugar. Adults were restricted to about 3 tablespoons (40g) a day to stretch between cups of tea, baking and desserts; children were limited to less than a tablespoon. Babies and very young children were expected to have little or no added sugar.
Then, in 1953, the brakes came off. Separate restrictions on sweets and chocolate were lifted in February, followed by sugar in September. By the second half of 1954, average sugar consumption had almost doubled.
The lifting of postwar rationing inadvertently created a natural experiment, whose consequences scientists are only beginning to unpick. A flurry of recent studies suggest that spending the first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing may have left traces on people's health.
“What makes the end of sugar rationing particularly interesting is the nature of the exposure,” said Dr Jiazhen Zheng at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, China, who worked on several of the recent studies. “In September 1953, sugar availability changed quite abruptly at the population level, largely because of policy rather than individual choice.”
The first of this recent wave of sugar rationing studies was published in the journal Science two years ago. Dr Tadeja Gračner at the University of Southern California and her colleagues used data from the UK Biobank to compare the health of people born shortly before and after sugar rationing ended in the UK. Some had been exposed to this low sugar environment only in the womb; others remained exposed for months or years, while those conceived after rationing ended were not exposed at all.
1953
The year UK sugar rationing ended. By the second half of 1954, average sugar intake had almost doubled
Gračner found that the longer people had spent under rationing, the lower their risk of developing type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure in mid to later life: those exposed to rationing throughout their first 1,000 days had a 35% lower risk of type 2 diabetes and a 20% lower risk of high blood pressure than those who had never experienced rationing.
Over the past few months, further studies drawing on UK Biobank data have linked reduced sugar exposure to lower risks of a growing list of health conditions.
"I have been more struck by the consistency across different organ systems than by any single effect estimate," Zheng said. "We have seen associations with cardiovascular disease, liver disease, respiratory health, dementia and, more recently, broader measures of ageing. Our ageing study, for example, found a lower overall incidence of diseases linked to the hallmarks of ageing and modestly younger biological and organ ages among people exposed to rationing early in life."
Gračner is not entirely surprised. "Many of these outcomes are connected," she said. "Diabetes, hypertension and obesity are major risk factors for cardiovascular disease, cognitive decline and several other conditions."
Perhaps more surprising is the suggestion that the effects could extend beyond physical health. In August, Prof Nophar Geifman at the University of Surrey and her colleagues reported that people who had spent their first 1,000 days of life under sugar rationing had a 33% lower risk of being diagnosed with anxiety than those born after rationing ended. They were also less likely to report a preference for sweet foods decades later. “Early nutritional environments appear to have lasting relevance for mental health,” Geifman said.
How such a relatively brief difference in sugar exposure might leave traces detectable many decades later remains uncertain. Gračner said: "We can show that growing up with less sugar was protective decades later, but not how: whether through sugar itself, through taste preferences formed early, or through a metabolic response set in early life."
Her team's latest research, now under peer review, suggests growing up under rationing may weaken the influence of genes
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CUT THEM INTO SLICES
and make the most of these two big-value chocolate coated candy bars
MARS BAR 2 $^{1}$ $^{2}$
Children snack on carrots as a sweet treat in 1941, when sugar and chocolate, above, where still rationed. Below left and top, school pupils crowd a sweet shop in 1953, the year the restrictions lifted
“That points to a response that is not purely behavioural: early nutrition may act on physiological pathways such as metabolic programming, insulin sensitivity, appetite and satiety regulation, or adipose-tissue [fat tissue] development.”
that predispose people to a higher body weight. "Importantly, while we observe that people exposed to rationing do consume less free sugar in adulthood, we find that dietary difference is similar across genetic-risk groups," Gračner said.
Zheng's ageing study offers another potential clue. People exposed to rationing scored about a year younger on several measures of biological age. The researchers also found differences in proteins involved in pathways that help cells respond to nutrients and have been implicated in ageing.
Explaining the anxiety finding was trickier. Geifman said the brain developed rapidly in the womb and the first few years of life, which could make it particularly sensitive to its nutritional environment. High-sugar diets have also been linked to inflammation and an
altered gut microbiome - both possible routes through which sugar could affect brain function.
Since the 1970s, researchers have used famines to investigate the consequences of severe nutritional deprivation. Much of this research has focused on the Dutch “hunger winter” of 1944-45, when German restrictions left millions in the Netherlands facing severe food shortages. Because it began and ended abruptly in a previously well-nourished group, rations
were recorded and birth records survived, it has been possible to compare those exposed to famine in utero with those born before the crisis or conceived afterwards. "The most reliable findings [for those exposed to famine in the womb] are an increased risk of overweight, obesity and type 2 diabetes," said Prof LH Lumey of the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health in New York.
Although the British rationing studies might appear to point in the opposite direction, the conditions were very different. Zheng said: "British sugar rationing was not famine, and it did not involve severe overall caloric deprivation. Rather, it selectively constrained sugar intake."
The lesson, then, is not simply that less nutrition is better.
Sugar intake under rationing was broadly comparable to current UK guidelines, which state that free sugars - those added to foods and drinks, or naturally present in honey and fruit juices - should not exceed 30g a day for adults and children aged 11 and over, with lower limits for younger children. "Sugars should not be added to food or drinks given to babies," the NHS says. In practice, average UK consumption is about twice the recommended level.
The question raised by these studies is whether keeping sugar intake closer to recommended levels may have benefits that extend much further into later life.
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Healey plans major intervention to bring down energy bills
Continued from page 1
submissions from the energy department for how to ease the pressures on households in the coming months.
The most likely solution is understood to be increasing the warm homes discount - a £150 discount to energy bills offered to households on certain benefits. Healey is understood to be considering increasing it by a further £100, which would be funded by taxpayers, rather than bill-payers as the existing discount is.
Fahnbulleh, meanwhile, has been pushing for more sweeping action to reduce bills for all consumers by as much as £120 by removing all levies.
Under her proposals, the levies, which fund renewable energy and efficiency schemes, would be paid for through taxation instead.
She told the Guardian last week: "If we want a system that is resilient, if we want a system that can cope, if we want a system that ultimately can deliver the diversity of energy that we want, what is the fairest way in which we pay for it? ... So we have to ask that question. Every other country is asking that question, and ultimately we've got to come to a fair deal."
Removing levies from bills would reduce inflation but cost as much as £3.2bn and would be difficult for the government to unwind should energy costs come down in the future.
Meanwhile, officials in the energy department are working on more radical proposals for after the budget, including proposals to reduce tariffs for poorer households or ones that use less energy.
Burnham told the Labour party conference last week: "British businesses and billpayers pay some of the highest energy costs in Europe. Within 10 years, I want those costs to be in line with our neighbours. This
The chancellor faces a crunch as he looks for £4.7bn for defence spending and cash to rebuild his fiscal buffer
means reforming a broken energy market so it better serves the public interest."
A so-called “social tariff” would force energy firms to charge poorer households less for each unit of electricity they use than richer ones. But creating such a scheme would involve a large amount of data collection from tax authorities, the Treasury and energy firms - which is likely to take far longer than the next few weeks.
An alternative plan, known as a “rising block tariff” would also vary the tariffs which energy companies can charge, but by consumption levels rather than income. The idea, which was proposed by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank when Fahnbulleh ran it, would charge consumers less for a set amount of “essential” use and more once their consumption crossed that level.
Alex Chapman, head of economic and environmental policy at NEF, said: "The government must use the budget to put in place both targeted support for the most vulnerable and, critically, a safety net for all."
He added: “Repeated crises have exposed the flaws in our privatised energy system - these can only be fixed by fundamental reform. This means capturing the benefits of cheap renewables and offering every household a ‘block’ of essential energy at a truly protected and affordable price.”
Alfie Stirling, director of policy at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, said: "Energy support for this winter needs to tick three boxes. It needs to support the majority of households; within this it needs to target the most support towards those in greatest need; and - as far as possible - it needs to actually lower the price, thereby bringing down inflation.
"The UK does not yet have the right toolkit to respond effectively to energy price shocks - building better tools is now a critical priority for our future security and living standards."
A Treasury spokesperson said: "Decisions on tax are a matter for the chancellor to set out at fiscal events, rather than routinely commenting on rumour, speculation or proposals."
Reform MP raises issue of second homes - then buys one for £800,000
▲ Sarah Pochin bought a Grade-II listed property on Anglesey. The Welsh island, left, has seen a sharp rise in holiday properties and second homes in recent years
PHOTOGRAPHS: PA/ALAMY
Nadeem Badshah
A Reform UK MP bought an £800,000 second home on a picturesque Welsh island two days after raising concerns in parliament about the impact of second homes on rural communities.
Sarah Pochin has completed the purchase of a Grade-II listed property on the southern coast of Anglesey (Ynys Môn).
The MP for Runcorn and Helsby in Cheshire bought the property two days after she submitted a written question on 15 June to the housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, according to the Will Hayward newsletter.
Pochin asked Pennycook “what assessment he has made of the potential impact of second home ownership on housing availability in coastal and rural communities”.
Pennycook replied: "Excessive concentrations of short-term lets and second homes impact on the availability and affordability of homes for local residents to buy and rent, as well as local services."
According to the Land Registry, the purchase was made jointly with Pochin's husband, Jonathan. The couple, who have submitted plans at Anglesey county council for changes to the property, retain ownership of another home in Cheshire.
Anglesey, famous for its coastline and ancient Celtic history, has become a hotspot for second home ownership in recent years. The island had the largest increase in holiday home users among local authorities from 2011 to 2021, according to the Office for National Statistics.
As of March 2026, Anglesey county council recorded 2,635 furnished homes that were not an individual's sole or main residence. The local authority introduced a council tax premium on second homes in 2016. Initially set at 25% on top of the standard rate, it has since risen incrementally to the current 100% premium, seeking to address local housing affordability.
Critics have argued that second homes and short-term holiday rentals can adversely affect local communities by reducing housing supply, inflating property prices and putting a strain on infrastructure.
Pochin became Reform UK's first female MP after winning the Runcorn and Helsby byelection in May 2025. She previously served as a Conservative mayor and a local councillor on Cheshire East council, latterly as an independent, before joining Nigel Farage's party.
Reform UK did not respond to a request for comment.
Greens Labour 'unlikely' to form pact with party after Zionism row
Aletha Adu
Peter Walker
Senior Labour party figures said it is very unlikely their party would cooperate with the Greens in the future after they adopted a policy treating Zionism as a form of racism.
One Labour minister said they could not foresee how the two parties could work together, while a government official said Labour should formally rule out a future coalition or other arrangement.
There is also pressure within the Liberal Democrats for them to end existing arrangements with Zack Polanski's party, with some senior Lib Dems calling on the party to end its coalition with the Greens in Southwark, south London.
Green members voted at the party's conference on Sunday to adopt a binding policy which says Zionism should be treated by the party as racism, and which calls for a single Palestinian state in place of Israel.
After the vote, Bridget Phillipson, the Labour chair, called the move "shameful", saying it highlighted how vital it had been for her party to tackle antisemitism under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
While Phillipson's statement is backed by her fellow ministers, there is debate as to whether Labour should go further and formally rule out any ties with the Greens.
A source linked to the Jewish Labour Movement said Labour should "absolutely" rule out governing with the Greens, arguing the policy raised serious questions about whether its treatment of Jewish members could breach equality law.
It follows months of talk of possible cooperation between the parties.
Labour views the Zionism motion, and the criticism which has followed, as a means to simplify its political argument against the Greens at a time when Polanski's party has increasingly sought to attract disillusioned Labour voters on the party's left.
A major test of this will come tomorrow, with voting in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection, where Polanski is seeking to win Starmer's former seat from Labour.
The Lib Dems and Greens already govern together in Southwark after May's local elections, with the Greens as the senior partner.
Following the Zionism motion, both Southwark parties released a “joint administration statement against antisemitism”.
It brought a scathing response from some senior Lib Dems. Tagging Victor Chamberlain, the Lib Dem deputy leader of Southwark, Sarah Ludford, a peer and former MEP for the party, wrote on X that she did not understand “how you think this greenwash is an adequate response to the Greens’ antisemitic ‘Zionism is racism’ motion”.
Tories' 'Britannia Shield' plan different to Israel's Iron Dome, insists Badenoch
Jessica Elgot
Deputy political editor
Kemi Badenoch has denied comparing a new air defence system proposed by her party to Israel's Iron Dome, despite using the term in her press release and a newspaper article.
The Conservative leader said the "Britannia Shield" would not be comparable to the missile defence system in Israel, which is primarily designed to counter short-range attacks.
The party has proposed allotting £1bn a year towards building the system, though the former army general Richard Barrons told Times Radio the cost of a system similar to Israel's would be upwards of £100bn.
In interviews at Conservative party conference in Birmingham, Badenoch admitted her party was “not out of the woods” despite the most unified and optimistic gathering in years - even though the Tories are still polling below their 2024 election defeat.
'We are designing something specific for the kind of threat that we face here'
Kemi Badenoch
Conservative leader
"We are feeling chipper because we are going back to first principles," she told the BBC. "We're not out of the woods yet." She added that "people at conference aren't happy because we're about to win an election. We're happy because we know who we are."
She also said she would rather have another general election than do a deal with Reform to form a government, as senior party figures attacked their rightwing rivals with a ferocity that appeared to make the chances of any pact more remote.
In her own conference speech today, Badenoch is expected to announce plans to cut - but not abolish - inheritance tax, which is levied at 40% on all estates with property worth more than £500,000.
She is expected to warn voters that the country is “running out of money”, adding: “Almost everything else flows from this. Our national debt currently stands at nearly £3tn and we are adding more than £100bn every year.
"This is crazy. Unless we start creating more value, unless we start growing our economy, something is going to break."
The Tories have pledged to cut employers' national insurance from 15% to 7.5% for people aged 21 to 24 in an effort to drive down the youth unemployment rate. Badenoch is expected to say she will fund the £2.3bn scheme through welfare cuts.
She also said it could be "difficult"
◀From left, Tom Tugendhat, Helen Whately, James Cartlidge and Alex Burghart sing the national anthem yesterday;
below, Kemi Badenoch backstage at the conference; and a delegate takes a selfie
PHOTOGRAPHS: IAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES; STEFAN ROUSSEAU/PA
to reverse Labour's planned changes to the pensions triple lock once they had been brought in - as it emerged her party could head into the next election without a social care plan.
But the Tory leader was forced to clarify her “Iron Dome” defence policy, as she tried to distance herself from using the term. She told Times Radio it was a “semantic argument” and that the new system would protect Britain from increasing threats.
Badenoch told BBC Radio 4's Today that the description had come from newspapers - although the party's press release described the system as "in essence a British Iron Dome".
In a piece authored by Badenoch in the Sun, which used an image of Israel's air defences on its front page, she wrote: "Modelled on Israel's 'Iron Dome', Britannia Shield will invest £10bn over 10 years in the radar, missiles and technology needed to detect these threats and stop them before they reach British soil."
But Badenoch told Today that was not the aim. "We are not building the Iron Dome. We are doing what other European countries are doing: Greece, Benelux countries - Belgium and the Netherlands - and Germany. We are designing something specific for the kind of threat that we face here."
The shadow defence secretary, James Cartlidge, likened the phrase to the brand name Hoover, which has come to generically refer to vacuum cleaners, when he was asked why Badenoch had denied the Conservatives were proposing an Iron Dome-style system.
Asked on Times Radio if the aim was to be able to intercept any attack over the entire country, Badenoch said: "It should, but it needs to protect critical national infrastructure ... Critical national infrastructure protects the entire country. If we lose even one thing, the entire country is in a real problem, and that's what we mean."
On whether she was ready for an election, Badenoch told Today she believed polls would improve but she admitted the party was still unpopular because of the previous government, even though her personal popularity had improved.
"I think people still associate the Conservative party with the things they didn't like about the previous government," she said. "I need to work hard to change that ... these things take time. I am the leader and I need to show that this party is different from the party that the people said no to two years ago."
A Labour source said: "It's no surprise Kemi Badenoch wants to forget how the Tories hollowed out our armed forces. But hoping her half-baked defence promise based on fantasy numbers will be forgotten just hours after it was made shows how unserious she is about our country's security. The Tories can never be given responsibility for keeping Britain safe again."
A detail from the 27-metre 'Birmingham tapestry', on display at the Conservative party's annual conference
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTOPHER THOMOND/ THE GUARDIAN
'He's our villain' Party faithful weave unifying tale around Jenrick
Alexandra Topping
Political correspondent
As Kemi Badenoch basked in the Tory faithful's applause at the close of her pivotal speech at the Conservative party
conference last year, one member of her shadow cabinet looked less than enthused.
Robert Jenrick, who was bested by Badenoch in a leadership vote a year earlier, looked on and - as one shadow cabinet member now recalls - had to be prodded by Lord Ashcroft to applaud. "If you are plotting against someone, you at least pretend to like them," they say. "The thing about Robert is he's not even a good machiavellian."
Jenrick left the party a few months later, swiftly and publicly ejected by an ice-cold Badenoch after she got wind that he was planning to defect to Reform UK. This week, as the Conservative ranks enjoy their annual knees-up in Birmingham, the now Reform economy spokesperson has been accusing his old party from afar of “once again copying our policies”.
But while Jenrick may not be in Birmingham, members could be forgiven for seeing reminders of him everywhere they looked.
At the heart of the conference, depictions of Jenrick feature in the “Birmingham tapestry” - a 27-metre (88ft) illustration of the past two years in British politics, as seen through Tory eyes.
Casting Badenoch as a glorious 11th-century conqueror, it also depicts a tiny Jenrick wailing as he loses the leadership contest. Later, under the heading “Expelleth the Turncoat”, Badenoch can be seen banishing her tiny, sobbing rival, beside the photocopier where - legend has it - Jenrick’s letter of resignation was found.
"I think it's great fun. Every story needs a villain and he's ours," said one party member. "He's not a big figure here anymore, he's just a figure of fun."
Another member said they voted for Jenrick in the leadership election and felt let down by his plotting after he lost to Badenoch. "What he did was spiteful, petty and childish. I was a massive fan, but now I couldn't care less what he does," he said.
Referring to Jenrick's social media output, which frequently shows him confronting shoplifters and fare-dodgers, he rolls his eyes. "It's just attention-seeking isn't it? I do wonder now though, as Reform falter, if he regrets what he did. I hope so."
The schadenfreude at Jenrick's fading star is palpable. Shadow cabinet ministers bring him up unprompted, with unbridled delight. "I miss him like I would miss an abscess in my molar," remarks one senior Tory.
Others are surprised by their own strength of feeling towards a former colleague. “Nobody knew how much we hated Robert until he left the party,” says one senior member. Repeating the mantra that they are more united behind Badenoch than any other leader in years, some say Jenrick brought them closer together, because he “briefed against everybody”. Another adds: “Rob leaving was like pulling out a splinter.”
At a packed fringe event of shadow cabinet ministers hosted by More in Common, mentions of Jenrick are met with groans. Asked if he would consider taking back Jenrick or any of the other three Tory MPs who defected to Reform, Alex Burghart, the Tories' deputy leader, said: "No, no, no and no." Was he relieved they had gone? "Yes, yes, yes and yes."
Badenoch has made clear that neither Jenrick nor his fellow defectors (variously described by her team as “venal”, “mad” and “hopeless”) will ever be welcome back, going so far as thanking the reform leader, Nigel Farage, for doing her party’s “spring cleaning” for her.
Others suggest Reform were welcome to one of their former star players. "Good luck to his new friends in Reform," says one. "He'd elbow them into the path of an oncoming express train if it meant he got ahead".
Appreciating the tapestry in between conference sessions, Aphra Brandreth, a shadow minister for the environment, food and rural affairs, insisted her party was over Jenrick - though his spectre here suggests there may be some healing left to do. "Honestly I don't spend any time thinking about Robert Jenrick," she says with a smile. "He's gone, and we've all moved on."
Sketch John Crace
Welcome to the Tory pleasuredome: Kemi's on the warpath. But she ain't no Iron Lady
Just another day in Crapland. It's amazing what you can get used to. You can't say the Tories haven't put a lot of thought into their party conference. It takes some skill to make every day even more dismal than the last. You come expecting little and get less than you
bargained for. You might find yourself wondering if you are being gaslit. Small pockets of people roaming around aimlessly with a smile on their face, insisting that it is very heaven in this dawn to be alive and repeatedly crossing themselves before images of the beatific Kemi Badenoch.
I've come to realise I've got Kemi wrong. Sure, she's short-tempered and can't tolerate any dissent. But she's actually a supremely gifted entertainer. She would be far more successful taking her show to the Edinburgh fringe than Birmingham. Her act on the morning media round was one of her best yet. Understandably, every interviewer wanted to ask her about the Tories' overnight announcement of a £10bn Iron Dome to rival the Israelis' that would protect
She couldn't think why everyone was calling it an Iron Dome. Maybe it was the Tory press release calling it ... an Iron Dome?
the UK from any kind of drone and missile attack. How did she imagine she was going to build the Iron Dome for about a 10th of the money that all the experts said it would cost?
"Stop calling it an Iron Dome," Kemi dead-panned. She really is a comedy genius. "It isn't an Iron Dome. I've never called it an Iron Dome. It's a Britannia Shield." She couldn't think for the life of her why everyone was calling it an Iron Dome. Mmm. It might have been
something to do with the Tory press office releasing a statement calling it an Iron Dome? And her opinion piece in the Sun calling it an Iron Dome?
OK, we'll call it a Britannia Shield, said the radio and TV presenters. So when was it going to be operational, what would it look like and how much of the UK would it cover? Kemi laughed. She hadn't a clue.
Are you really just a one-woman band? Anna Foster asked on the Today programme. Your personal polls are higher than your party's. A polite way of saying the Tories are tanking in third place. Not at all, Kemi ad-libbed. Everyone knows who my shadow cabinet is. Er. I'm not sure I could name them all.
Back in the conference centre, the morning's entertainment was centred around the "Main Hall", AKA the converted cupboard. For Laura Trott, the shadow education secretary, there were about 15 people in the room. The rest of the audience had disguised themselves as seats again. There was also no one to hear Rebecca Paul - me neither - talk about £50,000 handbags with a woman called Plum.
By the afternoon we lucky few were stretched out into the much-reduced Symphony Hall to prepare for war. First up was the shadow foreign secretary, Tom Tugendhat. "I am coming back to serve," SuperTug announced, matching the oratory skills of Andrew Griffith. He rather died on his arse. Then we got the special guest. The rightwing historian Niall Ferguson. A swivel-eyed, deranged Dr Strangelove. "A world war is coming," he said, trying not to show if he had become sexually aroused. All of which made the later speeches of Kemi-come-latelies Helen Whately and James Cartlidge somewhat redundant. There's no need to starve benefits claimants or build an Iron Dome when the apocalypse is already upon us.
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Andrew told not to use king's money to challenge arrest
Jamie Grierson
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been warned not to use the king's private money to fund his legal action against Thames Valley police, according to a palace source.
The former Duke of York is challenging the legality of search warrants that led to his arrest in February, with a private high court hearing due to take place tomorrow.
Mountbatten-Windsor receives an annual stipend - the value of which has not been disclosed - provided by King Charles from his private funds.
A palace source told reporters it had been made clear to the former duke this stipend should not be used to fund the judicial review.
The source is reported to have said Mountbatten-Windsor's legal defence was a matter for him and his lawyers, and Buckingham Palace had no role in determining it.
The former royal was arrested on his 66th birthday on suspicion of misconduct in public office, following allegations he had shared sensitive information with Jeffrey Epstein while serving as the UK's trade envoy. He was interviewed under caution before being released under investigation.
A judge at the Old Bailey issued the warrants that allowed police to raid Mountbatten-Windsor's residence on the Sandringham estate and his former home, Royal Lodge.
On Monday, a judicial spokesperson confirmed that a hearing was due to take place at 2pm tomorrow at the high court, before Mr Justice Hilliard.
The spokesperson said the hearing would begin in private and concern an attempt by Thames Valley police to restrict access to court documents. It is not known whether Mountbatten-Windsor will attend.
A Thames Valley police spokesperson confirmed the force was "engaged in legal proceedings in relation to warrants previously obtained from the central criminal court", adding: "As these legal proceedings are currently ongoing, it would be inappropriate for us to comment further."
When Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested on 19 February, the king issued a written statement saying "the law must take its course".
More than 1m people in Britain who never smoked are now vapers
Andrew Gregory
Health editor
More than 1 million people in Great Britain now vape despite never having been regular smokers, with rates nearly doubling in four years, according to figures that health experts describe as concerning.
About 5.4 million people aged 16 and above in England, Scotland and Wales (9.9%) used e-cigarettes daily or occasionally in 2025, Office for National Statistics data showed. Vaping was most common among those aged 25-34 (16.4%).
The ONS also found about 2.9% (1.1 million) of Britons who had never smoked cigarettes reported using an e-cigarette daily or occasionally.
The proportion of never-smokers who vape has almost doubled since 2021, when 1.5% of people who had never smoked reported using e-cigarettes.
Estimates published in the Lancet Public Health journal in 2024 suggested there were about 1 million people in England who vaped despite never having smoked.
But the data published yesterday marked the first time official ONS figures had shown that the number for England, Scotland and Wales had topped 1 million. The 2025 figure for Great Britain (1.1 million) was up from 940,000 in 2024, the ONS said.
▲ E-cigarette use among adults aged between 25 and 34 rose to 16.4%
Justin Webb, an associate professor of physical activity and health at London Metropolitan University, said it was “somewhat concerning that 1.1 million people who have never smoked reported using an e-cigarette”.
He added: "Vapes can help adults stop smoking, but they are not risk-free and their full long-term effects remain unclear.
"We need to preserve their value as a quitting aid while strengthening protection against uptake among children and non-smokers."
The ONS data showed 25-34 was the only age group in which there was a rise in e-cigarette use, increasing from 12.9% in 2024 to 16.4% in 2025.
That made those aged 25-34 the age group most likely to use e-cigarettes in Great Britain, overtaking 16- to 24-year-olds, who had the highest rates between 2021 and 2024.
Meanwhile, separate ONS figures covering all four nations of the UK showed about 4.9 million people aged 18 and over (9.8% of the adult population) smoked cigarettes in 2025. This was a decrease from 2024 (10.6%), continuing a long-term downward trend.
David Mais, from the ONS, said: "Fewer than one in 10 adults now smoke. This is the lowest proportion on record and continues the long-term decline in smoking.
"At the same time, e-cigarette use remains more common than smoking and has followed an overall upward trend since 2020.
"E-cigarette users are also getting older, with those aged 25 to 34 now overtaking 16- to 24-year-olds as the age group most likely to use them.
"This may reflect existing users getting older, growing popularity among this age group or a combination of both."
When it comes to smoking, men were more likely to smoke than women in the UK in 2025, continuing a trend observed in previous years. About 2.8 million men (11.3%) and 2.1m women (8.2%) were thought to be current smokers.
The largest reduction in smoking prevalence between 2011 and 2025 was among the 18-24 age group, from 25.7% to 7.2%, the ONS found.
Hazel Cheeseman, the chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health, said: "For the first time, fewer than one in 10 people in the UK smoke. This is really encouraging progress and shows what can be achieved through sustained action to reduce smoking."
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Three men spied on journalists as part of Iranian plot, court hears
Nadeem Badshah
Three men accused of being Iranian spies carried out surveillance and reconnaissance to target journalists in the UK as part of a plan to commit "serious violence", a court in London heard yesterday.
Mostafa Sepahvand, Farhad Javadi Manesh and Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori are charged with offences under the National Security Act.
Their “subjects” included Mojtaba Pourmohsen and Kambiz Hosseini, journalists for the London-based Persian broadcaster Iran International, as well as a founder member of UK Lawyers for Israel, Jonathan Turner, the court was told.
Sepahvand, 41, is alleged to have intended to physically carry out a "violent attack" against at least one of the targets, while Manesh, 46, and Noori, 57, assisted in planning.
Sepahvand has said he was threatened into conducting surveillance against his will, but the prosecution described this as an “entirely bogus claim”, telling jurors he did it to get paid and have his theft conviction in Iran "fixed".
In a voice note read out in Woolwich crown court, Sepahvand told an associate he would "finish off" a target if he was paid £150,000.
"They made me a promise and said: 'We'll sort out your matter/court case, and we'll give you £150,000 as well. Finish the job. We'll show you him/her [the target],' he said.
"This is an illegal job. It's something that constitutes a criminal offence, and it carries a heavy prison sentence. At the absolute minimum, they should transfer £10,000 for now.
"Wherever they tell me, I'll go there and stand there. If the person is inside, they pay the £150,000, and I'll finish him/her off."
The defendants were said to have visited addresses linked to their targets, taken photos and videos, and used platforms such as ChatGPT to research them online between August 2024 and March last year.
That they conducted the surveillance and reconnaissance is not disputed, the jury was told.
Sepahvand accepted he was doing so for the benefit of the Iranian regime ▲ From left, Farhad Javadi Manesh, Shapoor Qalehali Khani Noori and Mostafa Sepahvand in court
ILLUSTRATION: JULIA QUENZLER/SWNS
but has claimed he was threatened or bullied into doing it, and that he "deliberately did a bad job of it", the prosecution said.
Manesh and Noori claimed they did not know they were assisting the Iranian intelligence service.
The three defendants are charged with engaging in conduct likely to assist a foreign intelligence service.
Sepahvand, of St John's Wood, north London, is also charged with engaging in surveillance, reconnaissance and open-source research with the intention to commit serious violence against a person in the UK.
Manesh, of Brent, and Noori, of Ealing, both in west London, are also charged with engaging in surveillance and reconnaissance with the intention that serious violence against a person in the UK would be committed by others.
The three men, who deny all the charges, were assisted by interpreters in the dock. The trial continues.
Regulator investigates Meta over Instagram Instants
Dan Milmo
Global technology editor
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta is under investigation for a potential breach of the UK's digital safety laws after launching a Snapchat-style feature on Instagram.
The UK's communications watchdog, Ofcom, is investigating whether the \$1.9tn (£1.4tn) company infringed the Online Safety Act (OSA) by failing to carry out adequate checks on whether its Instagram Instants product could show illegal content or be accessed by children.
Social media companies are required to carry out risk assessments before making significant changes to their service's design or operation. Breaching the OSA carries a range of potential actions, from a formal warning to a fine of up to 10% of global revenue.
George Lusty, the director of enforcement at Ofcom, said risk assessments were a vital step in
10%
The proportion of global revenue a company can be liable to pay in fines for breaching the Online Safety Act keeping tech platforms safe for users. "You wouldn't launch a new car without testing it properly, and it's the same for online services," he said. "Safety by design must be built in, not bolted on, and today's investigation shows we'll take action where we have concerns that providers are failing to comply."
Instagram's Instants feature allows users to send images that disappear after viewing. The company said it had conducted a risk analysis of Instants and talked to Ofcom on a number of occasions before launching it. It said the feature carried protections such as blocking forwarding and included all the safeguards under its teen account settings, the default mode for under-18s on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.
"We will of course cooperate with Ofcom during this investigation," a Meta spokesperson said.
The Molly Rose Foundation, a charity established by the family of Molly Russell, a teenager who took her life after viewing harmful content on Instagram, said it was crucial that Meta was “held to account for their failures under the Online Safety Act”.
Ofcom is already investigating Meta over failure to comply with a request for information related to its WhatsApp platform.
Zuckerberg's company is challenging Ofcom in court over the OSA. Meta is suing the regulator in the high court over how it charges tech companies fees to cover its operating costs, and in a further case, it is challenging Ofcom for placing Whatsapp and Instagram in a new category under the act that subjects them to additional duties.
Meta has also joined TikTok and Elon Musk's X in a court challenge over the amount of information Ofcom is demanding they provide under the online safety regime.
National
Scents and sensibility Can AI save rare plants used to make perfume?
Amelia Hill
M any of the world's most expensive perfumes begin with a wounded tree. When some Aquilaria trees
are damaged, they produce a dark, fragrant resin that becomes agarwood, or oudh - an ingredient so valuable that wild trees have been illegally felled in its pursuit.
The result has devastated wild Aquilaria populations. But what if perfumers could create the smell without cutting down the tree?
Now scientists and biotech companies say advances in artificial intelligence could soon allow the fragrance industry to reproduce scents and compounds from endangered plants without repeatedly harvesting them.
"Being able to recreate the scent of an endangered plant would be a huge win for both the environment but also the brands," said Alex Wiltschko, the founder of Osmo, a Google Brain spin-off that has raised \$130m to develop AI capable of predicting and recreating smells.
Osmo had recreated the scent of a rare tree from a piece of bark "the size of a finger", Wiltschko said. A spectrometer analysed the sample, its AI reconstructed the chemical formula, and the scent was reproduced in its laboratory.
He claimed Osmo had trained its AI on more than 5m human responses to smells: "That means it can predict how combinations of molecules will be perceived."
The company BioHarvest Sciences says it has created a stable cell culture from an endangered south-east Asian fragrance plant, allowing its valuable compounds to be produced without cultivating ▲ Biotechnology firms say advances in AI mean they can now predict what new molecules will smell like
PHOTOGRAPH: PIXEL-SHOT/ALAMY
'This is greenwashing ... making a version of an endangered plant's smell does not save the plant'
Mandy Aftel
Natural perfumer or harvesting the original. The plant has not been named for commercial reasons but BioHarvest has announced an agreement anticipating production of 20 tonnes of the fragrance composition, with production potentially beginning next year.
"The challenge is that human demand can be effectively unlimited while biological supply is not," said Zaki Rakib, BioHarvest's chief executive. "We believe biotechnology can help close that gap."
But conservationists and perfumers say such claims risk giving advances in fragrance technology an environmental gloss they have not yet earned.
"Calling this conservation is greenwashing," said Mandy Aftel, an author and founder of the Aftel Archive of Curious Scents. "Making a synthetic version of an endangered plant's smell does not save the plant." She said producing a substitute did not address other causes of a species' decline.
Rhian Smith, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, agreed. She pointed to the Aquilaria. AI could help design an alternative to oudh, she said, but wild-sourced material remained highly prized. "It doesn't completely take the pressure off wild plant species."
Elsewhere, AI is claimed to be changing the world in which perfumers work. Christina Agapakis's work reconstructing genes from preserved flowers has produced compounds that can be used to create new scents.
But even AI has its limits: a scent can contain hundreds of molecules and change according to which part of the plant it comes from and the conditions in which it grows.
"The smell we got was this ghostly fragment of what had been lost," Agapakis said of her project. "What we have to remember is, ultimately, however powerful AI is, a smell is not simply a formula or dataset."
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National
Art review Fashion-heavy fantasy has none of what made the 90s matter
The 90s: Art and Fashion
Tate Britain, London
★☆☆☆☆
Jonathan Jones
Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their
work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print by Goya of Napoleonic war atrocities, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 90s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. This show, unfortunately, is neither.
You'd think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which its Millbank premises played a starring role - staging the Turner prize back when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing. At the start of the 90s, no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels.
A show spectacularly revisiting fin-de-siècle British art would be an interesting proposition. Instead, the former Vogue editor Edward Enninful has been invited to stage his fantasy version of that decade, mixing up art and fashion, with the emphasis very much on fashion.
There's more about Isabella Blow than Rachel Whiteread, who is represented by an early cast of the inside of a hot-water bottle. Damien Hirst has a couple of small, harmless-looking sharks balanced on a circular rail. There's no chance of understanding from this how his early work seemed to confront the tiger shark's maw of death. Perhaps his 90s art can still move, or perhaps it has become silly with time, but there is not enough of it to even begin to decide.
This is not a real
exhibition. It's a
magazine spread
with the breathless
superficiality of a
glossy layout
Great Deeds
Against the
Dead by Jake
and Dinos
Chapman, from
1994. Based
on a print by
Goya, it asks
questions about
war, art and the
representation
of pain
PHOTOGRAPH:
JAKE AND DINOS
CHAPMAN
Juergen Teller's 1996 photograph Kristen McMenamy No 3 is hung next to Sarah Lucas's 1997 work Chicken Knickers. Teller's picture depicts its subject smoking naked with a lipstick heart drawn on her,
This is not a real exhibition. It's a magazine spread. Not only are there style mags in the show, its design has the breathless superficiality of a glossy layout bigging-up its glib theme in a glamorous sweep of strikingly juxtaposed images. But setting fashion images alongside works of conceptual art is a terrible idea. If you take the fashion seriously, you reduce the art to another stylish pose. If you care about the art, the fashion looks pretty vacant.
▼Ravers at the Eclipse, Coventry, 1991 by Tony Davis; a collection of Vivienne Westwood's 90s designs, bottom left; and Pauline Bunny by Sarah Lucas, bottom right
PHOTOGRAPHS: TONY DAVIS; GUY BELL/ SHUTTERSTOCK surrounding the word "Versace". What is it saying other than "Buy Versace"? Now look at Lucas's photograph of a raw chicken stuck to someone's knickers. It's funny - a great deed against the dead chicken from an artist with a genius for estrangement, as one of her included "Bunny" series of sculptures also reminds you.
Chicken Knickers
by Sarah Lucas
Teller is exposed as just a clever stylist whose images lack poetry or meaning. His portrait of Kate Moss has none of the distance or mystery of Gary Hume's painting of her with a shiny, mirroring face. Hume provides one of the few moments when fashion and art genuinely overlap. But as pop art, his Kate is more a baleful, Richard Hamilton-like comment on celebrity than a celebration of Cool Britannia.
Not that the show has much to say about that wider pop cultural fizz, either. An entire room full of party pics depicts the club scene, but surely another point of the 90s was that mainstream British pop was revived - I guess Enninful is too sophisticated to find space for Oasis or Blur, let alone Fat Les.
Instead we get couture. You can obviously see Alexander McQueen as an artist. But his costumes dominating the room dealing with "body horror" are just mannered and pretentious. If they express anything it might be a hatred of the women forced to go on catwalks in them. In the same room, pompous, awful images shot by Sean Ellis for the Face take up an entire wall. It's next to these that Jake and Dinos look so profound.
Other fine artists don't fare so well. Helen Chadwick gets two tokenistic, eerie photoworks, while the death-obsessed art of Hamad Butt - shown beautifully at the Whitechapel not so long ago - is squeezed to the end of the gallery. Chris Ofili is namechecked with No Woman, No Cry; Tracey Emin gets one neon. Other artists are notable by their absence, including Mat Collishaw, Jeremy Deller and the late and missed Christine Borland.
Or am I wrong? Does Young British Art fully deserve the dismissive treatment that Tate, which did so well out of these artists, gives it? Perhaps it really was a load of codswallop. But even if you don't share my belief that some of the art of that time is powerful and enduring, surely it deserves enough space to be seen and judged.
After just seven rooms, it suddenly ends. I hoped what I'd seen was a prologue to more art, bigger art, with enough space to appreciate it. But no. That's it. You leave as dissatisfied as you might after flicking through a 30-year-old copy of the Face in a dentist's waiting room.
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National
Going, going ... gone? Exodus of super-rich suggests UK no longer billionaires' playground
Helena Horton
Lauren Almeida
London was once world-renowned as the “billionaires’ playground”, where the world’s super-rich could relax in the
Georgian townhouses of Mayfair undisturbed by the grasping hand of the state.
But if recent complaints by fleeing ultra-high net worth individuals are to be believed, they have become Britain's most persecuted minority. They complain of Labour's stricter tax regime and the antipathy of others towards those with extreme wealth. One even suggested that he was leaving the country because of the outrages of London's low-traffic neighbourhoods.
"If I want to organise a gathering now, I have to take into account a lot of my friends are not here any more," said the financier Ben Goldsmith. "How the hell are we supposed to pay for health services and everything if we are driving out the highest rate tax-payers?"
This weekend, one of the UK's richest people, David Reuben, was revealed to have left the UK for Monaco. The 88-year-old is a property tycoon and Newcastle United shareholder who, along with his younger brother Simon Reuben, has a combined estimated net worth of nearly £28bn.
A spokesperson did not expand on why he left, but tax is thought to be a factor.
Sir Peter Lampl, the millionaire founder of the Sutton Trust charity, said he had absconded to the US because of Sadiq Khan's traffic policies, complaining that motorists are "pariahs" in London.
Another billionaire, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who owns the petrochemicals company Ineos, has said he can see why rich people are leaving the UK, describing the country as “on the slide”. Sir Jim, who fled Britain for Monaco in 2018, complained: “Unfortunately, the UK has got a bit of a green eye towards wealth at the moment.”
Others, meanwhile, are unimpressed by the ultra-wealthy's complaints and the warnings of economic doom that each new announced exit tends to bring. Arun Advani, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation, said he was unconcerned about billionaire flight. "Mobility among billionaires is high," he said. "Many wealthy people leave every year, it just isn't always reported as loudly as at the moment. So a couple of highly reported examples don't in themselves indicate anything has changed."
The multimillionaire Dale Vince said ultra-wealthy individuals need to “stop whingeing”. He confirmed he will be staying in the UK, and added: “The tax system is already skewed in favour of rich people. We have so many allowances, loopholes and exemptions.”
For better or worse, the data ▲ Other moguls who have left the UK include, clockwise from left: Lakshmi Mittal, John Fredriksen and Sir Peter Lampl
shows a clear trend; an analysis of Bloomberg's Billionaires Index has found that super-rich UK residents worth a combined £121bn (representing more than half of billionaire wealth) have either left or loosened ties with the UK since Labour came to power in 2024.
Among those who have left ▲ Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has said the UK is ‘on the slide’, while David Reuben, pictured with brother Simon, left, has gone to Monaco
PHOTOGRAPHS: CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY, DAVID M BENETT/GETTY IMAGES
are Lakshmi Mittal, Aston Villa co-owner Nassef Sawiris and shipping magnate John Fredriksen.
Rachel Reeves' removal of the "non-dom" system, which allowed individuals to only pay tax on income generated in the UK, is blamed for many of the exits. Others say they fear new taxes on property as well as hiked inheritance taxes.
Sir James Dyson, worth £12bn, faced criticism for absconding to Singapore in 2019, after telling the country to vote Brexit. He returned in 2021, and has been investing in businesses in the UK ever since. Also among the billionaires remaining in the UK are Denise Coates, who is worth £8bn and is the founder of gambling company bet365, and John Caudwell, who founded phones4U.
There are even some billionaires coming to the UK - albeit not universally popular ones.
The crypto billionaire
Christopher Harborne, who gave the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage a controversial £5m undeclared gift before he was elected as an MP in 2024, recently registered himself as a UK resident. So did Ben Delo, another crypto billionaire, who has given tens of millions to the party.
Philip Munro, partner at law firm Withers, said more entrepreneurs are asking about leaving the UK, and a steady stream of reports that their peers are also leaving has “concentrated their minds”. He blames tax changes and said inquiries are coming in for moving residency to Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, Dubai, and Greece.
Paddy Renouf, who runs luxury concierge service Serendipity, said his ultra-rich clients are still around and spending money, but conceded there was some “nervousness” among his clients.
He added: "Very wealthy people don't mind paying taxes if they can anticipate them. But there is a lot of uncertainty at the moment. It is bad if we do lose them."
Goldsmith agreed that there is “herd behaviour” caused by “social media hype” around the UK’s supposed hostility to the rich. He added: “People overestimate crime and tax, and they underestimate the downsides of living elsewhere.
“London was a hub for foreign billionaires. They pay a lot of tax, they hire a lot of people, they spend a lot of money, they are the most mobile people around, so getting money out of them is an art form. There’s nothing to force them to stay here; you have to attract them, and we were once good at that.”
Vince has less sympathy. Pointing at Ratcliffe's exit as an example, he said: "He got rich here and then made off to Monaco to save himself money.
"He avoided giving back to the economy that made him a billionaire and now he bangs on that it is a bad place to do business when he became a billionaire here! It's pathetic.
"He and anyone else who leaves here to not pay tax should be stripped of their honours."
Chanel show shouts with colour in Paris as joyful design chief flies high
Jess Cartner-Morley
Paris
"It's a good start," Matthieu Blazy said after a Paris show that marked a year of his tenure as artistic director at Chanel. "I am happy with where we are at."
Chanel now holds the top spot in the Lyst index of the world's hottest brands, which tracks demand and engagement across search and social media. Figures reported by
Bloomberg showed 16% growth in the first half of 2026, while in Vanity Fair's latest list of the world's 50 most powerful people, Blazy is the only fashion designer to make the cut.
Blazy's Chanel is about joy. Smiley and chatty in person, he enthuses about his team and the women he dresses, presenting a friendly face of Chanel that contrasts with Karl Lagerfeld's legendary acid tongue and Coco Chanel's controlled chic.
He got the idea for the stage set - 95 giant white birds suspended from the domed steel and glass ceiling of the Grand Palais in Paris - while on holiday in southern Italy with his partner, watching migrating flocks fly above the Crati River.
For the soundtrack of the show, Blazy had asked Nicole Kidman to read a passage “about time, about freedom” from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which he had read on that Italian holiday. Fashion was “women’s homemade remedy for the dark times”, he said.
After years when the decaffeinated
▲ Front row celebrities, from left, Alexa Dem
Nicole Kidman, Dua Lipa and Pedro Pascal
Chanel's women's spring/summer 2027 show at the Grand Palais in Paris yesterday, with 95 white birds suspended from the domed steel and glass ceiling; above, right and below, models wear designs by the fashion house's creative director, Matthieu Blazy
PHOTOGRAPHS: ED ALCOCK/MYOP/THE GUARDIAN
aesthetic of quiet luxury dominated fashion, the new Chanel shouts with colours. A red and white embroidered jacket with a jade and turquoise skirt, plus bag and boots in navy and gold. The iconic two-tone pumps, but in zebra stripes and polka dots instead of the traditional camel and black.
The same model opened and closed the show carrying Coco (Gabrielle) Chanel's very own 2.55 handbag. "Gabrielle actually had very few bags in her own life, which is something I find quite beautiful," Blazy said.
The famous soft-shouldered Chanel suit came worn with nothing beneath, "like perfume" (Blazy will not have missed the allusion to what Marilyn Monroe famously said she wore in bed: Chanel No 5). "I like the idea that when you wear it directly on the skin, it makes a fetish of the suit. A little punk Chanel," he said.
A year of fabric innovation was behind the newest versions, smocked silk on an elasticated membrane, which “is my answer to what sporty could mean at Chanel”, Blazy said.
World
Former German intelligence chief under arrest over spying allegations
Kate Connolly
Berlin
A former head of Germany's foreign intelligence service has been arrested on suspicion of treason and spying on behalf of an overseas intelligence agency, in what prosecutors suspect could be the worst national security breach since the cold war.
August Hanning, 80, was head of the federal intelligence service (BND) - which operates outside Germany to gather information across the fields of political, economic and military intelligence - between 1998 and 2005.
He was arrested at his home in Nordwalde near Münster early yesterday. His former chief of staff, identified only as Manfred D, was arrested at the same time in Bavaria, on suspicion of “aiding and abetting attempted treason and treasonous espionage”, according to a prosecutor’s statement. Media pictures showed Hanning, dressed in an open-necked white shirt, being taken from his redbrick house to a bullet-proof vehicle by masked officers.
Manfred D, who continued to work for Hanning's successors at the BND after Hanning's exit until the present day, is accused of using his role to gain access to classified information which he then handed to Hanning "in exchange for payment", the prosecutor's statement continued.
"The current findings suggest that, over the years, Manfred D provided Hanning with approximately 2,000 documents, many of which contained classified information to be used exclusively by the federal intelligence service for internal purposes, particularly for executive intelligence briefings," the statement said.
Prosecutors believe that Hanning intended to resell the documents as part of a paid consulting role he had built up after leaving the BND, prosecutors added. To what extent and to whom he disseminated them remains part of an ongoing investigation.
He is accused of using the information to "draft an analysis for an
◀ August
Hanning, who is believed by prosecutors to have intended to resell classified information
officer of a foreign intelligence service", prosecutors said. It was unclear if this information had reached its intended recipient, they added.
Hanning is also believed to have shared potentially sensitive political information, in part based on information passed to him by Manfred D, with a close contact from a separate foreign intelligence service.
Properties connected to both men were being searched simultaneously yesterday, including in Berlin.
The allegations prompted shock in German political and intelligence circles, where memories resurfaced of historic espionage scandals. Hanning is thought to be the most prominent person to be accused of treason in Germany since Günter Guillaume, one of Willy Brandt's personal aides, was exposed as a long-term Stasi agent in 1974. The "Guillaume affair" brought an abrupt end to Nobel peace prize-winning Brandt's career, who resigned as chancellor of West Germany.
Marc Henrichmann, chairman of the Bundestag's intelligence oversight committee, said in a statement to AFP: "Whoever allies themselves with the enemies of our liberal democracy will be found out." Suspicions over Hanning's activities emerged as a result of an investigation into the kidnappings of children from a prominent Hamburg business family, the focus of a major trial in the north German port city.
Investigators were led to Hanning over allegations, which he denies, that he helped Christina Block, the heiress of a steak restaurant dynasty, to organise the violent cross-border seizure in Denmark of her children from her estranged husband who has custody of two of them. Block denies the charges.
After he left the BND, Hanning worked as a global consultant in the fields of security and business. He is considered to have been well connected with government and business sectors in Russia and China, and also had contacts with top-ranking intelligence authorities in Israel.
Hanning was an officer stationed at the embassy-equivalent organisation for West Germany in communist East Berlin. After his role as president of the BND ended in 2005, he became the highest ranking official in Germany's security sector as the head of all security agencies under the federal interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble.
Survivors of 7 October attacks struggle with their trauma as political fallout still grips Israel
Continued from page 1
a mother, father and their three young children, has been made into a garden with space left for their still-living grandparents.
Caretaker Shlomo Margalit, who will soon turn 89, points out the graves of three of his oldest friends, founding members of the kibbutz who came to Nir Oz from Haifa with him in the 1950s. "This is my life project, as well as my home," Margalit said, explaining why he
Wednesday 7 October 2026 The Guardia
Invisible heroines
Exhibition celebrates
African women
Page 27
House of Bolsonaro
The rise of Brazil's
far-right dynasty
Page 29
has come back to a place of such loss. He is waiting for a new house, and is for now staying in the former home of Gadi Moses, 82, who survived 482 days as a hostage.
The graves he tends are silent testament to both the brutality of the attacks and the scale of the state's failure, which in Nir Oz was staggering, even on a day of terrible failures. A five-person volunteer defence force held Hamas at bay for over two hours, Margalit said. When they had all been shot, the kibbutz was taken over and sacked, homes burned, families slaughtered and kidnapped.
Then, before the first Israeli soldier arrived, the Hamas forces, other Palestinian gunmen and civilian looters all left. Nir Oz had been forgotten by the army and ripped apart without the military firing a single shot to defend it.
In total 47 people were killed and 76 abducted to Gaza, including Shiri Bibas, her 10-month-old baby Kfir and four-year-old Ariel, who were killed in Gaza. The dead and hostages represented more than a quarter of the small community.
Revisiting that terrible day and the trauma that followed is painful and exhausting for Margalit, but he still accepts interviews for a simple reason. "I want people to know what really happened here," the 89-year-old said.
The third anniversary of the attacks falls just weeks before Israel's national elections, and much of the country is caught up in a furious debate about responsibility for the deadliest day in Israel's history and the conduct of the war that followed. Survivors and bereaved relatives are avoiding the political fray, still grappling
The cemetery at Nir Oz with the graves of 7 October attack victims including a family of five. Above left, a burned house with pictures of the inhabitants who were killed.
Above, the home
of Yocheved
Lifshitz, 88,
who was taken
hostage from
Nir Oz with her
husband, Oded
PHOTOGRAPHS:
QUIQUE
KIERSZENBAUM
/THE GUARDIAN
'We can't ignore the fact that Palestinians live here. We have to find a way we can live here with them'
Shlomo Margalit
Kibbutz co-founder with the trauma and the struggle to rebuild something like normality.
Aviva and Keith Siegel were abducted from their home by Hamas attackers on 7 October 2023
PHOTOGRAPH: QUIQUE KIERSZENBAUM/ THE GUARDIAN
In Nir Oz, there is a terrible, almost irreconcilable struggle between re-establishing the kibbutz as a living community, and preserving physical testimony of the attack. The cemetery echoes with the sound of construction and families have already moved into several rows of new houses near the kibbutz entrance.
But on the other side of the compound paths still lead between blackened ruins and memorials to the dead. Some bereaved survivors want the homes of loved ones preserved this way as permanent monuments to mark their loss.
"There are families that can't [bear to] live here, but want a memorial place to come to visit," Margalit said. "On the other hand, can you build a new kibbutz where children grow up running around between burned houses?"
He is on the remembrance committee, and two years on they are struggling to reach a decision on this impossible choice. "Is there right or wrong here? No," he says. "We are dealing with that, trying to find an answer."
ne possible
compromise might
be a memorial
garden on the border
of the kibbutz.
For now, there are
plaques with the stories of families attacked, and a memorial house to remember the dead and kidnapped.
When the kibbutz took a collective decision to return and rebuild, Margalit and his wife knew they wanted to join. His only concession to the trauma was asking for a new home that did not face Gaza. "I've found myself building this place for the second time," he said. "I know when I'm gone, I will have done something with my life. I took part in putting this spot on the map."
The Siegels, who lived in the nearby kibbutz of Kfar Aza, also among the worst hit, are among those who have decided not to return as they focus on mental and physical recovery. Aviva was 62 when she was kidnapped, Keith was 64. "What happened to me in Gaza, what happened with Keith in Gaza, it's there all the time," Aviva. "I understand that it's going to be a process of healing.
"There's always things that remind me, and if I don't remember, then he reminds me. If I'm cooking lunch or making a cup of tea and I turn around and see Keith with tears in his eyes, because he just read something or let himself feel."
After the exhausting campaign to get Keith and other hostages home, she says she struggles to concentrate on the election. Keith's political focus is an independent inquiry into the attacks, to prevent other families suffering as his has.
"There needs to be an investigation to understand how this happened, in order to do everything possible that it won't happen again. So many people were killed, injured, traumatised."
The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has fiercely opposed an independent state commission of inquiry. Critics say he is afraid it would expose his own failings. The security officials who were in command that day have all stepped down yet, three years on, Netanyahu is still in power.
Bereaved father Yaakov Godo interrupted Netanyahu's speech at the official commemoration event this year, held on 5 October following the Hebrew calendar, to accuse him of negligence. "You did not protect my son on October 7th, you did not protect 1,200 people murdered in one day. Shame!" he shouted, before being led away.
Both US and Israeli officials have said Netanyahu rejected ceasefire deals that could have halted the war in Gaza and brought many Israeli hostages home sooner, but criticising the prime minister means venturing into a vicious political debate where age and loss offer little protection.
Yocheved Lifshitz, 88, was taken hostage from Nir Oz with her husband, Oded, whose magnificent cactus garden blooms at the heart of the kibbutz. He died in Gaza. She survived and since her return has been a vocal critic of Netanyahu. A candidate for Netanyahu's Likud party, Itzik Bonzel, said last month that he wished he could turn back the clock and return her to Hamas captivity. He later apologised, blaming grief for his son who died fighting in Gaza, but Lifshitz denounced it as a proxy attack driven by the prime minister.
Netanyahu, who is battling a corruption trial and could be more vulnerable legally if he loses power, is pushing to intensify Israeli attacks on Gaza and his coalition partners are calling for ethnic cleansing and annexation of Palestine. The war Israel launched in response to 7 October has killed over 74,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, including over 20,000 children.
Netanyahu has also waged a years-long campaign to dismantle institutions protecting democracy inside Israel's 1967 borders. Palestinians under Israeli military rule in the occupied West Bank do not have rights of Israeli citizens.
Many Israelis opposed to this rightwing vision of perpetual war consider this election the most critical since Israel was founded in 1948, among them Margalit.
Nir Oz, like many communities targeted by Hamas, had its roots in leftwing Zionist movements, and some saw their pain as bitter proof that war cannot offer security.
"I don't believe we can ignore the fact that Palestinians live here," Margalit said. "We have to find a way we can live here with them and be secure."
Jim Bakker, US televangelist caught in fraud and sex scandal, dies at 86
Reuters
The US televangelist Jim Bakker, who built a multimillion-dollar empire and lived in opulence before being disgraced by a sex scandal, a conviction for defrauding followers and divorce from his television co-host Tammy Faye, has died aged 86.
The death of Bakker, whose journey from the TV pulpit to a prison cell in the 1980s inspired comparisons to the corrupt character of the fictional preacher-huckster Elmer Gantry, was revealed on social media by his second wife, Lori Bakker.
"It is with a broken heart that I share that my beloved husband, Jim Bakker, went home to be with the Lord this evening," she wrote on the Facebook and Instagram pages of her husband's latest television ministry.
She paid tribute to Bakker as a "pioneer of Christian television". The cause and circumstances of his death were not revealed.
Bakker revived his career as a television preacher after prison with a new wife and new television show in 2003, later becoming a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.
Bakker had been among the most popular of the Christian preachers who thrived on US television in the 1980s, achieving fame on the show the PTL Club. PTL stood for “Praise the Lord” and “People That Love”.
Bakker spent four and a half years ▲ Jim Bakker with his first wife Tammy Faye, with whom he built the PTL ministry PHOTOGRAPH: LOU KRASKY/AP
\$158m The amount prosecutors said Bakker had defrauded from followers of his TV ministry in prison after being convicted in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1989 of defrauding followers in a scheme involving holidays at his Heritage USA Christian theme park and resort.
Prosecutors painted him as a selfish and petty conman driven by greed and lust for power. "Those of us who do have a religion are sick of being saps for money-grubbing preachers and priests," the judge, Robert Potter, told Bakker before sentencing him.
Bakker had quit the PTL ministry in 1987 after revelations of a 1980 sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a former church secretary who later posed nude in Playboy magazine, and a subsequent \$265,000 (£200,000) payoff with ministry funds to gain her silence. Bakker was later defrocked.
Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, his first wife, had started with a small TV ministry that grew into an operation with 2,000 employees and the 2,300-acre (930-hectare) Heritage USA complex in South Carolina. At its peak, the PTL ministry drew 13 million viewers on 200 TV stations and made \$129m a year.
Bakker was convicted on all 24 fraud and conspiracy charges brought against him. Prosecutors said he defrauded followers of \$158m and had siphoned \$3.7m to bankroll a lavish lifestyle that included several homes, luxury cars, mink coats, diamonds and servants. The judge ordered Bakker to serve 45 years.
▲ Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield as the Bakkers in a 2021 film
"I have sinned," Bakker told the court. "I have made mistakes. But never in my life did I intend to defraud anyone." Tammy Faye was never charged. She stood by Bakker at the trial, but divorced him in 1992 while he was in prison.
Bakker started his life over after leaving prison in 1994, renouncing the “prosperity gospel” he once preached. In 2003 he started a TV ministry with his second wife, Lori, whom he had married in 1998. In 2008, they began taping the Jim Bakker Show at a 600-acre development near Branson, Missouri. Bakker once again pleaded for donations.
In 2020, he drew the ire of US officials for selling false treatments for Covid-19. Bakker said in 2017 that Christians would launch a civil war if Trump were to be impeached. Trump later became the first US president to be impeached twice.
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World African art
Invisible heroines Congolese photographer uses costume and scenery to honour African women
Sarah Johnson
P amela Tulizo's latest series of photographs started with a question. "I asked myself, why are women in my community in
particular, and African women in general, so strong?" said Tulizo, an artist and photographer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). "Where does this strength come from?"
Growing up in Goma in eastern DRC, Tulizo was informed and inspired by the women she was surrounded by, including her mother, her sisters, her mother's friends and her neighbours.
Years later, when she began to look into the role of women throughout African history, she said: "I realised that perhaps women have been forced to be strong since the dawn of time, forced by circumstance to build that resilience."
Her research brought her to slavery, the “cruellest period in human history”, which she says is often just associated with the men who were forced across oceans to form workforces abroad. Women, she noticed, were largely invisible, their stories untold.
With that in mind, Tulizo placed women at the centre of her series of 23 staged photographs called Mababu (“ancestors” in Swahili), on show at GC De Markten in Brussels from tomorrow. In it, she portrays figures such as Kimpa Vita and Queen Nzinga, who resisted the European colonisation of Africa in the 17th and early 18th century.
“Because of racism, there’s always been this belittling of African women that portrays them as vulnerable, as victims, and suggests they lack strength or intelligence,” she said. “I wanted to end that narrative by showing that despite everything they endured, they remained strong and fought for freedom.”
Tulizo's path to photography has not been easy - in part, she believes, because she is a woman. She started her career as a reporter but decided to focus on photography when she felt she could not write about everything she wanted to cover.
When she began pursuing photography, there was nowhere for her to train in Goma. Instead, she took photos whenever she could, and became one of a handful of female photographers in the city.
"It wasn't easy at first because I didn't have a role model to follow, or anyone to guide me in my early days," she said. "The community didn't accept me right away - whether it was my parents, or even other photographers - since it was very much a male-dominated world.
"But facing so many obstacles motivated me to stick it out to the end and prove that I could be a woman and a photographer," she added.
In 2020, she won the Dior photography and visual arts award for young talents for her work Double Identity, a series that contrasted the common media portrayal of Congolese women as victims with their true identities.
Shaba and La Mulâtresse
Solitude from Mababu
▲ Clockwise from above: four other staged photographs from Mababu ('ancestors' in Swahili) - Lulu, Kahawa, Miwa and Reine Zingha - which aims to celebrate the resilience of African women throughout history
PHOTOGRAPHS: PAMELA TULIZO
'There's always been this belittling of African women that suggests they lack strength or intelligence'
Pamela Tulizo
Photographer
This allowed her to finance the creation in 2021 of a cultural centre in Goma for women and girls, Tulizo Elle Space. When renewed violence broke out in the region in early 2025, she fled and now lives in France.
She approached her Mababu series as if she were making a film, using cinematic staging with actors, costumes, makeup and outdoor sets to create vivid scenes.
In one set, a woman stands in Lake Kivu, surrounded by other women bound in bandages (wrapping the body being a common practice in funeral rituals). In another, a model poses boldly as La Mulâtresse Solitude, a leader in the fight against slavery in the French colony of Guadeloupe. The images, which were shot in Goma and Belgium, are defiant, aiming not to gloss over past suffering.
Fashion is another crucial element of the series, and Tulizo uses colour, accessories and styling to elevate women. In some images, where a woman is bound or suffering, she is still elevated through clothing, said Tulizo.
"To me, she remains a heroine, and fashion allows me to honour her, giving her the strength and power she deserves," she said.
Some of the photos incorporate images of natural resources. The titles of the opening works - Tumbako, Miwa and Pamba - refer to tobacco, sugar cane and cotton, three commodities that played a central role in fuelling the transatlantic slave trade.
"Slavery did not happen in a vacuum," said Tulizo. "It was driven by the pursuit of natural resources."
The photos echo what is happening today in eastern DRC, where decades of competition over rich mineral resources have brought about devastating conflict and sexual violence in the region.
"Regrettably, today we are experiencing a modern form of slavery driven by technology, development and global progress," said Tulizo. "Back then it was tobacco, sugar and coffee. Today it is war and sexual violence over lithium, gold and minerals.
"Everyone wants to conquer the world, to be the first to produce electric cars, or to be the leading global power with nuclear weapons. None of that is possible without these raw materials."
“Unfortunately,” Tulizo added, “humanity has not learned its lesson, and we are repeating the same mistakes in a modern form.”
▼ Narges Mohammadi has spoken about needing brain scans after being beaten by security services
PHOTOGRAPH: NARGES MOHAMMADI FOUNDATION
'Severe blows': Nobel laureate defiant after time in Iranian jail
Deepa Parent
The human rights activist Narges Mohammadi has described being beaten so severely by Iranian security agents that she required two brain scans, before being held in solitary confinement for two months despite her grave injuries.
In an interview with the Guardian, the 54-year-old Nobel peace prize laureate said that during her arrest in December, security agents had "inflicted extremely severe blows to my head and body.
"They grabbed and forcibly pulled me by my hair, kicking and punching me repeatedly with such force that massive, painful bruises covered my entire body."
Mohammadi suffered dizziness, nausea and vomiting in the days that followed, but said authorities refused to allow a forensic examination of her injuries. "Despite the severe physical injuries and trauma I sustained, I was immediately transferred to a solitary confinement cell," she said.
“During the first few days in solitary confinement I was completely dazed and confused, had severe dizziness, was nauseous and was vomiting. They sent me from the detention centre twice for a brain CT scan in a hospital,” she said. “Despite this, they were not willing to allow the forensic medical examiner to come and prepare a report on my injuries.”
Mohammadi was temporarily released from prison for medical treatment in May having been found unconscious in her cell after a cardiac arrest. She said she feared that another imprisonment could endanger her life.
"A return to prison is always looming," she said. "Truthfully, it is a dangerous prospect. Imprisonment left me with severe physical damage to my heart, lungs and nervous system - injuries that have demanded ongoing medical treatment, medication, physical therapy and rehabilitation since I was transferred from Zanjan to Tehran.
"My medical treatment is far from over, and being sent back to prison under these conditions poses a grave threat to my life."
Mohammadi, who was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2023 for her “campaign against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight for human rights and freedom for all”, was arrested on 12 December 2025 while attending a memorial gathering for the human rights lawyer Khosrow Alikordi in the city of Mashhad.
In February, a court sentenced her to a further seven and a half years in prison and two years of internal exile to the town of Khosf. She was subsequently transferred to Zanjan prison.
Over the years, Mohammadi has endured 14 arrests, 10 trials and five periods of solitary confinement. She said her health had deteriorated further after multiple operations over the past decade, after which she was repeatedly returned from hospital to prison.
Her experiences of imprisonment and resistance also form the basis of her latest memoir, A Woman Never Stops Fighting, published last month. Written in secret during her incarceration, with fragments of the manuscript smuggled out of Iran with the help of fellow prisoners and trusted contacts, the book offers an intimate account of her struggle for human rights and the sacrifices that have accompanied it, including a prolonged separation from her children.
▲ Mohammadi at a memorial event for Khosrow Alikordi in Mashhad
Beyond the physical injuries, Mohammadi described the psychological toll of prolonged isolation, which she characterised as “white torture”. In a cell with nobody to speak to, nothing to embrace and no connection to the world, she said, even a prisoner’s sense of identity could begin to erode. “When you are cut off from your family and surrounding environment … a person’s perceptions undergo a kind of distortion,” she said.
Mohammadi is continuing to receive medical treatment after her transfer from Zanjan to Tehran. Despite the potential prospect of further imprisonment, she insisted she would remain in Iran and continue campaigning for human rights: "I have always chosen to stay in Iran, and I choose to stay even now."
She said she continued to draw hope from younger Iranians, particularly women. "They do not back down; they know their rights, understand them, strive to reach them and never relent," she said. "I have immense hope in younger generations, in the youth, and in women. I am certain that no power can erase hope from our hearts, and no power can sustain tyranny permanently."
German state speaker is first from far-right since Nazi era
Kate Connolly
Berlin
Alternative für Deutschland has become Germany's first far-right party to secure the position of speaker of a regional parliament since the second world war.
Tobias Rausch, a former estate agent, was elected in the first round of voting yesterday in Saxony-Anhalt, winning 48 of the 82 votes cast.
Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, part of the AfD's more extreme wing, was elected as his deputy.
The AfD, which is classed as “right-wing extremist” by the eastern state’s intelligence agency, won nearly 44% of votes in elections last month, dealing a hammer blow to Germany’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, and his centre-right Christian Democrats.
Rausch's election to the role of president and speaker took place at the inaugural gathering of members in the state capital, Magdeburg. Twenty-nine voted against him and five abstained.
The AfD parliamentary group holds 39 seats, narrowly short of an absolute majority. Five politicians from the BSW, a small leftwing party that echoes the AfD's stances on Russia and immigration, had already said they would vote for Rausch.
Yesterday's result means that four MPs from other parties voted for the 35-year-old in the secret ballot, breaking the "firewall" - the agreement among other parties not to work with the AfD - and giving the party a chance to form a state government.
In his acceptance speech, Rausch promised to represent all voices and "take different opinions seriously and to try to take decisions in a transparent way". He was applauded by his own parliamentary group and the BSW. The other MPs did not respond.
Before the vote, Eva von Angern of the leftwing Die Linke and the longest-serving member of the state parliament, drew parallels between Rausch's election as speaker and Hermann Göring's use of that role in the Reichstag in the 1930s to facilitate Adolf Hitler's rise to power.
She claimed the negative consequences of the AfD's win in the state were already being felt in lower tourist numbers and teachers withdrawing job applications.
▲ Tobias Rausch of the AfD rings the changes in Saxony-Anhalt yesterday
Ex-CIA officer admits fraud over gold bars and property
Associated Press
A former senior CIA official pleaded guilty in Virginia yesterday to abusing his position and government funds to enrich himself by acquiring Florida property and hundreds of gold bars worth tens of millions of dollars, according to court records.
David J Rush fabricated a “highly classified” government programme to justify the acquisition of luxury property in south Florida that he intended to resell for personal profit, according to a court filing.
Rush separately concocted a bogus "sensitive government activity" to obtain the gold bars, the filing says.
Prosecutors also accuse Rush of lying to colleagues and government contractors about his military and academic credentials and the fake programme he invented, falsely claiming it was authorised by high-ranking US officials.
Rush pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud during a hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, court records show. He will be sentenced in January.
He directed someone else to transfer approximately \$145m to a holding company formed at his direction, then used the funds to acquire four "luxury" properties in Palm Beach and Hobe Sound, Florida, the court filing says. In previous court filings, prosecutors said Rush stashed more than \$40m worth of gold bars from the federal government at his Virginia home.
Several months ago, Rush tried to fraudulently authorise the release of \$100m from a government contract.
They also accused him of fraudulently claiming tens of thousands of dollars in compensation for military leave after he was honourably discharged from the US navy in 2015.
Rush was arrested after investigators searched his home and seized approximately 300 gold bars, roughly \$2m and about 35 luxury watches, according to an FBI agent's affidavit.
During a hearing in June, defence lawyer Jessica Carmichael said Rush was not initially charged with any crimes related to the discovery of the gold bars, which she described as “basically a non-issue”.
"Mr Rush never claimed they were his," Carmichael said.
Authorities say Rush lied about his education and military background on job applications, falsely claiming to be a former navy pilot who graduated with a bachelor's degree from Clemson University in South Carolina and a master's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York.
Investigators determined that he had not served as a navy pilot or attended either institution. Rush enlisted in the navy in 1997 and was honourably discharged from the navy reserves as a lieutenant in 2015, according to the FBI affidavit.
World
House of Bolsonaro Close presidential race highlights rise of Brazil's far-right dynasty
Tiago Rogero
Rio de Janeiro
The weekend's elections in Brazil not only put Jair Bolsonaro's eldest son, Flávio Bolsonaro, in the lead in the presidential
race, but also underscored how far the former president has come in building a political dynasty.
As his far-right senator son heads into a runoff against the leftist incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a sweeping far-right victory in congressional races also secured seats for Jair Bolsonaro's wife, two of his sons and one of his brothers.
Few in the family have spent much time working outside politics since the patriarch led the way four decades ago, but the offices they now hold have had an upgrade.
The former first lady, Michelle Bolsonaro, 44 - who divided her time between campaigning and caring for her husband as he was under house arrest for attempting a coup - ran for public office for the first time and was elected senator.
Bolsonaro's second son, Carlos Bolsonaro, 43, was also elected senator for the first time. He is regarded as the most radical of the siblings - he ran his father's social media accounts and was indicted by police for leading a so-called hate cabinet that spread fake news and attacks on opponents.
His previous political career amounted to 25 years as a city councillor in Rio de Janeiro - starting at the age of 17, when his father put him up for a seat against his own mother, Rogéria Bolsonaro, who had divorced Jair. Carlos won. (Rogéria also ran last Sunday for a seat in the state legislature, using the Bolsonaro surname, but lost.)
The patriarch's fourth son, Jair Renan Valle Bolsonaro, 28, who dropped his two middle names on the ballot to run simply as Jair Bolsonaro, jumped from city councillor to federal congressman.
Of Bolsonaro's five children, only his 15-year-old daughter has never held political office. Even the former president's younger brother, Renato Bolsonaro, 62, nicknamed
the “brother who can’t win” after losing seven consecutive elections for lower-level offices, was elected. He went from fewer than 10,000 votes in a mayoral race two years ago to 380,000 votes for congress.
During the campaign, Renato caused some friction within the
▼ Flávio Bolsonaro holds a photograph of his father; left, a mural depicts Jair Bolsonaro and three sons in Rio; right, the ex-president and his popular wife Michelle
PHOTOGRAPHS: BRUNA PRADO/AP; MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP
family by saying that "Flávio is not Jair. He doesn't draw crowds." At the polls, however, Flávio ended up winning more votes than his father did in 2018 and 2022.
The number of Bolsonaros in office could have been even higher had "son 03", Eduardo
Bolsonaro, 42, not abandoned his seat in congress and gone into self-imposed exile in the US, where for more than a year he has lobbied for what Lula and many others see as Donald Trump's attempts to interfere in Brazil's elections.
Although Michelle is the most recent member of the family to enter politics, it is she who is often considered to be the leading figure among the Bolsonaros. In a July poll, she was named the most powerful woman in Brazilian politics. "She is a phenomenon," said Camila Rocha, a researcher at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning, who has interviewed voters and studied the Brazilian right for a decade. "Even Bolsonaro voters don't like his sons very much, but many of them like Michelle, who is very charismatic."
The daughter of a housewife and a retired bus driver from the metropolitan region around Brasília, Michelle was working as a parliamentary secretary for another politician when, at 25, she met Bolsonaro, then a 52-year-old congressman. She is his third wife.
Michelle was at the centre of one of the most contentious moments of Flávio Bolsonaro's campaign when she said that she had been "humiliated", "disrespected" and "mistreated" by the senator.
Reports of friction between her and her stepsons are frequent. Given her popularity, Flávio had to apologise publicly. Although Michelle accepted it, the two did not campaign together.
Polls suggested Bolsonaro supporters would have preferred the former first lady as the presidential candidate, but the patriarch opted for his eldest son, and gave her the senate mission.
Michelle and Bolsonaro's sons were also widely seen as helping secure victories for other far-right candidates from Bolsonaro's party, which will have by far the largest bloc in the next congress.
“Although the family has been in politics for a long time, many voters still see the Bolsonaros as representing ‘renewal’ and an anti-system vote,” said Rocha. “So, to change everything, these voters want to throw a ‘bomb’ that blows up congress and Lula. And that bomb is the Bolsonaro family.”
First ever Ebola death reported in Kenya as virus surges in DRC
Rachel Savage
Kenya has reported its first ever Ebola death as the disease continues to spread rapidly through the north-east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
A Kenyan man who had been living in the DRC died after returning to Kenya, the health minister, Aden Duale, said yesterday.
The man fell ill about a month ago and had been treated in the DRC. He then travelled overland to the Ugandan capital, Kampala, before flying to Nairobi on 3 October.
Duale said the man was taken by a relative and a friend from the international airport to Nairobi hospital, where he was isolated, suffering from “fever, chills, intense fatigue, weakness, muscle pain, painful swallowing, sore throat and bleeding under the skin at the injection sites”.
He said the man was screened and confirmed positive for the virus, but "regrettably passed on last night".
Duale said officials had listed 28 contacts including family members and healthcare staff, but so far only the deceased had tested positive.
He added that authorities were looking for 23 other passengers and four crew members who were on the same flight and that "arrangements" for quarantine had been prepared.
"I wish to assure the public not to panic, as all systems are in place to mitigate the spread of the disease," he said.
Duale said a “safe and dignified burial” of the man had been planned for later in the day, in line with public health standards, but did not give further details.
Kenyans reacted furiously to government plans earlier this year to allow the US to set up an Ebola facility at Laikipia airbase, about 125 miles from Nairobi.
Starting in the DRC's north-eastern Ituri region in May, the outbreak has spread to seven other provinces in the country's north and east.
As of 2 October, 4,082 people had died among 8,463 confirmed cases in the DRC since the emergence of the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, for which there is still no vaccine nor specific treatment.
The response to the virus in the vast central African country has been hindered by instability, including clashes between armed groups; mistrust of authorities, which has led to violence against health workers and other officials; and a lack of resources amid huge cuts in international aid.
The charity Médecins Sans Frontières warned on Monday of an “alarming surge” in cases in North Kivu province which borders Uganda. The region now accounts for 40% of all new Ebola cases, the NGO said.
Uganda recorded 20 cases - almost all people who had travelled from the DRC - and two deaths, before being declared Ebola-free in August.
"It is like fighting a megafire," said Stéphanie Hoffmann, at MSF's Ebola treatment centre in Butembo. "Multiple outbreaks are developing at the same time, with varying intensity and in different locations."
The number of Ebola deaths in the DRC since May among 8,463 confirmed cases of the virus
The Butembo health zone is home to about 2 million people and only has four Ebola treatment centres, two of them opened recently, MSF said.
4,082
Hoffman said: "Because there are not enough beds available, we are sometimes forced to refer confirmed Ebola patients elsewhere, despite the significant risk this poses. In addition, standards of care in some peripheral facilities do not always meet requirements for treatment."
Additional reporting
Agence France-Presse
On 7th October 2023, the antisemitic, genocidal terrorist group Hamas invaded Israel, where they committed horrific atrocities. They killed some 1,200 people and took 251 hostages, including nine-month old Kfir Bibas, who was murdered in Hamas captivity.
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Jaguar's electric car rebrand targets rich young US drivers
Alex Daniel
It has no rear window, will not fit into a UK parking space and - starting at £130,000 - is aimed squarely at rich tech industry buyers driving the wide open roads of America.
Jaguar's electric car, the Type 01, launched in New York last night and marks the culmination of a two-year rebrand that has been one of the most scrutinised in automotive history.
Bosses hope the vehicle will appeal to a younger, richer audience than the manufacturer's previous "shrinking and ageing" customer base of "men in their 50s", said Rawdon Glover, 58, Jaguar's managing director.
With an ultra-long bonnet, low roof and muscular design, the Type 01 is a sharp departure from its predecessor, the F-Type. It is also double the F-Type's starting price of £62,000.
Buyers are likely to be “urban” and “very design literate, very technology literate”, Glover said. “The person making this purchase will be choosing the car because it’s a bold choice.”
A JLR executive close to the project put it more bluntly: "It's the type of car that you park up and everybody stops and says: 'Fucking hell, what have you just turned up in?"
The launch comes at a critical juncture for parent company Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), which has grappled with falling sales as cheaper Chinese rivals eat into its UK market share. It is still recovering from a massive cyberattack last year that cost the economy an estimated £1.9bn.
▶ With an ultra-long bonnet and muscular design, the Type 01 is a sharp departure from the F-type
PHOTOGRAPH: MARK FAGELSON
JLR recently announced 4,000 job cuts in an attempt to save £1.7bn over two years, citing “intense competition and ongoing geopolitical uncertainty”. The Guardian understands Jaguar employees working on the Type 01 were offered voluntary redundancy along with the rest of JLR’s non-manufacturing workforce.
The car will go on sale in early 2027, with the first deliveries anticipated in the second half of the year.
"It's really important that we put Jaguar back on a more solid financial footing," Glover said. Asked if doubling prices would be effective, he said it was better than "to toil away as we have done for the last two decades in the volume premium space".
Range Rover also unveiled its first fully electric model in September with a starting price of £154,070 compared with £107,530 for its combustion engine predecessor.
Waning demand in China, a key market, has also hit Jaguar. Glover revealed the Type 01 would not
Length of the Type 01 in metres - Jaguar's EV won't fit in a standard 4.8-metre UK parking space
launch there for "a couple of years. We've decided to hold off on that."
But he said China would eventually be “an important part of the equation ... it’s very difficult for any car manufacturer to exclude the single largest car market in the world”.
PB Balaji, JLR's chief executive, has said the parent company would pivot towards North America and target more sales to millionaires and billionaires to turn its fortunes around.
Glover admitted that the Type 01's launch "absolutely" could have been in Silicon Valley instead of New York, reflecting the type of buyer Jaguar is targeting. He took a prototype to the offices of Nvidia, the California-based AI company, whose boss, Jensen Huang, had a ride and "loved it".
At 2 metres (6ft 5in) wide the Type 01 would hog the British country lanes frequented by Jaguar's old customer base, while at more than 5.2 metres in length it will not fit in a standard 4.8 metre UK parking space.
Ikea to test online version of furniture buyback service
Sarah Butler
Ikea is to test an online version of its buyback service where the retailer offers vouchers for unwanted secondhand furniture.
The service will be tested in Spain and Portugal before the end of December and will be launched in the UK if it proves successful. Ikea already offers buyback in stores, including in the UK. The online version will extend it to a much wider audience, with Ikea predicting pre-owned goods are set to grab 16% of the UK homewares market by next year.
The new plan emerged as the world's largest furniture retailer takes on Vinted and eBay with its own secondhand online marketplace, which launches in the UK this week.
The platform, which is already online in other countries including Spain and Portugal with best-sellers including the Kallax shelving system and Malm chest of drawers, will enable shoppers signed up to the Swedish company's membership scheme to connect directly to one another to buy and sell pre-owned Ikea items locally.
The UK service will be free initially, but a "buyer protection fee" of about
5% of an item's price will be introduced later. At launch, buyers and sellers will arrange collection or delivery directly with one another through the marketplace.
"The secondhand market is growing and growing. It is now really significant," said Greg Lucas, the sustainability manager at Ikea's UK & Irish division.
"The way people furnish their homes has changed. Whether they are moving, redecorating or looking for a particular piece, more customers are considering pre-owned furniture alongside new and are actively searching for items that can help create a home that feels personal to them."
The secondhand home products market is now worth more than £4.5bn in the UK and is growing at about 6.5% annually. Ikea said its products accounted for about 9% of furniture sold on secondhand marketplaces in the UK.
Ikea said it was making the sale of used versions of its products easier by providing pre-filled product descriptions and price suggestions. The company also offers sellers 15% extra on the price of the item sold if they agree to be paid with an Ikea gift card.
The change is part of a revolution in retail of secondhand items. In 2025, 63% of UK consumers bought products through reselling platforms, up from 51% in 2024. The trend has boosted sales at Vinted, which began as a clothing resale site, as well as at Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree and smaller, more upmarket sites such as Vinterior.
The US secondhand site eBay recently bought UK fashion seller Depop for \$1.2bn (£900m). Pre-loved items now make up about a tenth of global fashion sales.
Paramount completes controversial Warner Bros acquisition
Gaya Gupta
Paramount completed its \$111bn (£84bn) acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery yesterday, consolidating some of the world's most recognisable studios and news outlets after a bidding war with Netflix and months of legal turmoil.
The company, now called Sky-dance, will have David Ellison, the son of a billionaire tech boss, in charge, with the former chief executive of Mattel, Ynon Kreiz, as co-executive. They will oversee Paramount and Warner Bros' movie studios, HBO Max, CBS News and CNN.
"Today is a historic day, not just for Skydance but for our entire industry," Ellison said in a statement. "From the start, our ambition was to bring these two storied studios together and create a stronger competitor, with the talent, resources and reach to tell great stories in every genre, on every platform, for audiences everywhere. Now that ambition is a reality."
The consolidation of Paramount and Warner Bros combines two of the last five legacy studios in Hollywood; the others are Disney, Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures.
Although the merger was approved in June, California, New York and 10 other states sued Paramount over concerns that the move would "extinguish" competition.
As part of last month's settlement, Skydance is required to release a minimum of 30 films each year and more than 180 television shows. CBS News and CNN will also be required to maintain independent editorial boards. A trustee will monitor Skydance's compliance with the terms. Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, has said he would go to court if the company failed to comply.
The merger has also raised concerns about Ellison's influence over CNN after his overhaul of CBS News. Ellison is the son of Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle who was a megadonor to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election. When David Ellison's Skydance Corporation acquired Paramount last year, he appointed Bari Weiss, a former New York Times opinion writer who launched an "anti-woke" media outlet, as head of CBS News, despite her lack of television experience.
The network has since faced accusations of bias towards Trump, though Ellison has defended his stewardship of CBS and CNN.
Business view
Nils Pratley
Sainsbury's can afford to leave
a deal with Morrisons on the
shelf until the price is right
W ould
competition
regulators
really smile
upon a
combination
of Sainsbury's and Morrisons? One must assume that the two companies believed the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) would give it a thumbs-up if asked; otherwise, they would not have initiated their now-aborted merger talks.
It's easy to list the arguments the duo could make. First, the combined market share of Sainsbury's (15.2%, on the latest numbers from Worldpanel analysts) and Morrisons (8.4%) would still be less than that of the mighty Tesco (27.8%).
Second, Aldi and Lidl are a stronger force in the land. Together, the German discounters represent almost a fifth of the UK market and, since they're backed by serious international buying muscle, their role as the UK's grocery price police might not be affected one jot.
Third, since Morrisons has already sold its petrol stations, the CMA needn't worry about the touchy issue of fuel. Fourth, at a push, Sainsbury's and Morrisons could argue that the UK's food security (a growing political worry) would improve if the latter's 18 food-processing factories were housed within a stronger company that could boost local production.
So, yes, one would probably bet that the CMA would ultimately
▲ The regulator is likely to look at drive times to supermarkets to judge local competition before approving a deal PHOTOGRAPH: MATTHEW HORWOOD/GETTY
The two could argue that the UK's food security would improve if Morrisons' 18 factories were housed in a stronger company approve some version of a deal. But what version? How many store disposals would be demanded?
The CMA, as in 2018, would presumably conduct a site-by-site analysis of driving times to judge local competition. The regulatory instinct, one suspects, would be to err on the side of intervention in light of the overall national picture. Never mind Tesco's size: it would still not be a simple decision for a competition regulator to sanction a supermarket set-up in which half the trade, or thereabouts, would be in the hands of just two companies.
Would a deal still make sense after the CMA's remedies? It's impossible for Sainsbury's and
Morrisons to know until they go through the process. That's the distraction factor for Sainsbury's. Does its chief executive, Simon Roberts, really want to spend a year bogged down in regulatory back-and-forth? The Asda episode sucked the life out of his predecessor's reign.
It's not as if Sainsbury's is struggling. The group is winning market share, profit margins are stable, there's enough spare cash for share buybacks, and the strategic headaches of its bank and Argos have been solved by selling both. While it would be preferable to square up to Tesco's buyers on more equal terms, life ain't bad.
Round at private equity-owned Morrisons, the calculation will be different. Five years after buying the chain for £7bn, owners Clayton, Dubilier & Rice will be thinking about how to exit a tricky investment. A sale will surely look easier than a stock market flotation, and the list of potential suitors is short: Sainsbury's is indeed the obvious candidate.
All of which suggests Sainsbury's can afford to do nothing, or wait for the deal to improve. It was the party that walked away from the talks, the FT reported. If a bargain is possible, the hassle of a CMA process might be worthwhile. But this is not a must for Sainsbury's.
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▼ The Shetlands are often the most expensive part of the UK for fuel because of the costs of transporting it
PHOTOGRAPH: HEMIS/ALAMY
'It really hammers people' Scotland's islanders hit hard by record fuel costs
Patrick Greenfield
A s fuel prices reach their highest level in the UK since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Scotland's islanders are feeling the pain
more than most. On the mainland, the average price of diesel soared to a record high of £2 a litre last week, bringing the cost of filling an average family car to more than £110, according to the RAC. Petrol has risen by a third since the start of the Iran war in February, averaging 174.71p - increasing to 195.64p in motorway service areas.
In the Hebrides and Shetland, prices at the forecourt jumped even higher, with some fuel stations selling diesel for more than £2.20 a litre during the initial rise.
While European governments appear to have staved off a US export ban that could have sent prices even higher, in Shetland the lack of competition and the cost of shipping to remote areas have made it the most expensive place in the UK for fuel. The ramifications for island life have been immediate.
In the Outer Hebrides, Adam, 43, who lives in North Uist, says diesel has reached £2.28 a litre on the island, making his 45-mile round commute particularly expensive.
He and his wife have diesel cars that they need for work and for transporting their three children.
Adam says: "You accept that things are more expensive, especially food because there's more distance to travel and we are further from distribution centres. Same with getting things delivered here because you have to drive more miles. But when something like the price of diesel skyrockets, it really hammers people here more than other places."
In between work and dropping children off with his wife, Adam says they really rack up the miles. To cut costs, he says the family is having to buy the cheapest food they can, given that food prices are also dependent on the price of diesel that haulage companies pay.
"It's come down a bit in the last week or so. I never thought I'd look up at a £2.18 diesel price and think: 'Oh, quick, I'd better fill up now.' It's really bad. Although people think of this place as really tiny, you're in your car all the time. I average 15,000 miles a year, and my wife does even more because she's a health visitor. She gets the same mileage as someone who's a health visitor in the central belt, yet we pay a lot more," Adam says.
About 26,000 people live in the Outer Hebrides, mainly on the largest island, Lewis and Harris. Adam says rising prices have also hit accessibility to public services, which are already difficult to reach for islanders.
He says: "The Scottish government say they want to help repopulate places like this, but in reality they are not offering much practical support. For example, my daughter had a referral to a paediatrician for a hearing test so I had to take her to Stornoway for that. It involved booking ferries, driving more than 100 miles and staying in a hotel. We can claim some money back from the patient travel scheme but they only offer you £40-£50 for a hotel. Because of the costs of getting there, the NHS stops being free at the point of use because we can't be treated locally."
Bob, a postman who lives in Shetland, says that people in the North Sea archipelago are frustrated by rising fuel prices while also being a hub for the oil and gas industry.
"You are resigned to it. It's always been slightly more expensive than everywhere else, so you have to pay the prices. What can you do? Fuel poverty has always been an issue up here.
'I never thought I'd look at £2.18 diesel and think: "Oh, quick, I'd better fill up now." It's really bad'
Adam
North Uist resident
It's ironic in a sense given we are near where a lot of the oil and gas arrives from the North Sea. Yet we are paying higher prices than anyone else. It's the same with the windfarms," he says.
Bob adds that islanders often have no other choice but to drive, especially when getting to work.
“Most jobs are in Lerwick so unless you live in town you need to drive. There is a bus service but people who work don’t use it much because it’s difficult to make their hours,” he says. “I only ever drive small cars. I have a Fiat 500 so it’s not too bad. But an awful lot of people have big 4x4s up here because of the weather. Diesel prices will be having a big impact on them.”
Ryan, 25, from the Isle of Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides, says the soaring costs mean many islanders are having to cut back.
"A lot of family and friends up here are taking fewer journeys than they would normally outside work. For a lot of people, it's a case of just going to work and going to the shops. Even those journeys are not short. The Western Isles span 130 miles. South Uist itself is about an hour top to bottom. A lot of us easily get through a few tanks a month on fuel. It's a lot of the money that's getting spent up here," he says.
Ryan works in a nearby hotel and is paid close to the minimum wage. With almost no public transport, he says he needs to drive to work. The cost of his commute has meant sacrifices. "Me and my girlfriend like to go to restaurants that are a bit of a distance away ... We've not done that in a while."
Islanders have started taking jerry cans to the mainland to stock up on cheaper fuel, even just to save a few pennies a litre, Ryan says. Normally, the cans are used in winter to stock up when high winds and choppy seas disrupt deliveries to the islands and pumps run dry.
"It's not often that diesel hits the £2 mark, let along £2.17 or whatever it is now. Whenever people say they're going to the mainland, they say: 'We're going to make sure we take our jerry cans,'" he says.
But even with the cost of living pressures, Ryan is not considering leaving. He says that people are pulling together in the latest surge of inflation. "People have a romantic view of the islands as being this quiet paradise where you can really get away from it all. But island life is quite hard, especially when costs are rising so significantly," he says. "But it's a nice place with a communal feeling. I think that's what's getting people through the situation. Everyone is in it together."
▲ Adam and his family, who live in North Uist. Islanders often need to drive long distances for work, while food prices are also affected by haulage costs
| Sun rises | 0710 | Sun sets | 1824 | Moon rises | 0303 | Moon sets | 1710 | New Moon | 10 Oct |
---
Lighting up | Belfast | 1846 to 0740 | Birm'ham | 1830 to 0720 | Brighton | 1825 to 0712 | Bristol | 1835 to 0723 | Carlisle | 1832 to 0727 | Cork | 1858 to 0746 | Dublin | 1847 to 0739 | Glasgow | 1838 to 0734 | Harlech | 1839 to 0730 | Inverness | 1834 to 0735 | London | 1824 to 0712 | M'chester | 1832 to 0723 | Newcastle | 1828 to 0722 | Norwich | 1818 to 0708 | Penzance | 1848 to 0733 | ---
Specieswatch
Large and beautiful butterflies attract far more attention than species that are smaller and dull. Now a study has shown this bias towards beauty results in the boring butterflies being overlooked in conservation programmes.
To understand the link between beauty and conservation, researchers surveyed more than 21,000 people from more than 100 countries, asking them to look at photos of European butterflies and rate their beauty on a scale of 1 to 10 based on their first impression.
The results, which are published in the journal Current Biology, reveal that larger, more colourful and patterned butterflies such as the yellow swallowtail were consistently rated more attractive than the smaller, brownish species such as the alpine grayling.
That bias also extended into scientific research, with more studies on attractive species and more funding and resources for conservation of showier species.
The authors argue that nature conservation programmes need to recognise beauty bias and give greater consideration to inconspicuous butterflies, which, while not as showy, play equally important functions within ecosystems. Kate Raviliou
---
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Formula One
Russell set to
start from back of
grid in Singapore
Page 36 →
Tennis
Gauff hits out after 'insane' number of racist comments
Page 36 →
Sport
Cricket
England's warm-up plans show healthy dose of reality
Dial has shifted, especially for Fleming's Test side, after last winter's light preparations and embrace of drinking Simon Burnton
L
ast year, England's winter started in New Zealand, where preparation for their first game in any format for nearly a month amounted to two relaxed training sessions, a cultural welcome ceremony involving local Māori elders and, before that, a team-bonding mini-break in Queenstown.
"Obviously there was a bit of golf played and a few drinks here and there and team meals and whatnot," Harry Brook said of that trip. "It was just about trying to spend a bit of time together. They've got some amazing golf courses and we were lucky enough to get on a couple of them. A couple of the other lads managed to get out and enjoy Queenstown. Everybody had a lot of fun."
Brook was not aware, as he answered that question, that the way England choose to prepare for their tours was to become one of the defining issues of the trip. A month after he had been on a golf course in Queenstown, Brook was in the sleepy, leafy Perth suburb of Caversham, where England played their one Ashes warm-up fixture against the Lions at Lilac Hill, a club ground and public park. Their next team-bonding mini-break, this time in the Queensland beach resort of Noosa, was just a humiliating two-day first-Test defeat away.
This was the master plan Brendon McCullum had initiated after his appointment as Test coach in 2022. "You've got to make it enjoyable, not just on the field but off the field, too," he said during his first winter in charge, after he curtailed a warm-up fixture in New Zealand to take his squad to watch one of his racehorses in action.
"We want guys to know that, when they board a plane to head overseas, they're going to have a great time. The results will hopefully follow. I always felt when I was playing that everything was based around the cricket and sometimes you forgot to enjoy yourself. We'll see how it works out but it's worth a crack."
We have now seen how it worked out; the only thing that cracked was the patience of McCullum's employers. Having stripped him of responsibility for coaching the red-ball side in July, on Monday Richard Thompson, the chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board, admitted the approach of eschewing warm-ups and embracing drinking sessions was a mistake. "There is a lot that was learned," he said. "The reality is in those decisions, mistakes were made and we've corrected that now."
The correction was revealed when McCullum said last month, at the end of England's summer, that he was now "trying to include a number of warm-up games" in their schedule to make up for the fact that "a lot of these guys just haven't played a lot of white-ball cricket". As a result, England will preface their one-day international series in Australia next month (after an ODI tri-series against Pakistan and Sri Lanka) with a game against a Western Australia XI at the Waca, the first time in six years they have scheduled a warm-up match before a white-ball series.
The obvious irony is that the green shoots of a new, more serious approach to big-series preparation will sprout in the very city where the previous method withered. The Waca is the venue many thought England should have used to ready themselves for the Ashes, just over the river from the Optus Stadium.
The pitches at both venues are overseen by the same curator, Isaac McDonald, whose ambition to nail “the characteristics of pace
---
'There is a lot that was learned ... mistakes were made and we've corrected that now'
and bounce" made the decision to warm up on the low, slow surface of Lilac Hill most puzzling.
If the dial has shifted even for the teams still coached by McCullum, for the Test side the change is starker still - albeit only because of decisions made while he was still in charge, before he was replaced by Stephen Fleming. The red-ball team will play warm-up games before all three foreign assignments this winter. A Cricket South Africa Invitation XI is lined up as opposition in Durban in December and the traditional fixture against a Prime Minister's XI moves from Canberra to Melbourne's Junction Oval, and is being played with a pink ball, in the buildup to the 150th anniversary Test at the MCG in March.
The two-match Test series in Bangladesh in February and March, itself preparation for the assignment that follows in Melbourne, will have its own preparatory fixture. It means in the space of a year England have gone from playing no significant warm-ups to scheduling a warm-up game at the end of a warm-up series preceded by a warm-up game. There has been a change of coach and a change of approach, but those are the easy parts. The real test is for results to change with them.
◀ Stephen Fleming's England will play a December warm-up match in Durban before their Test series against South Africa MATTHEW LEWIS/GETTY IMAGES
Sport In brief
Cricket
---
Farbrace takes over at struggling Lancashire
Lancashire have appointed former Sri Lanka coach and ex-England assistant Paul Farbrace as their new director of cricket following the worst season in the English county's history. Farbrace will arrive at Old Trafford after Lancashire's men finished second-from-bottom in Division Two of the County Championship. Farbrace, who will also oversee the women's team in his new post, joins from Sussex, where he guided the men's side to third place in Division One. The 59-year-old stood down as Sussex men's head coach at the end of the season and was poised to step into a part-time director of cricket post next month. But he will now try to oversee a revival at Lancashire. "I am absolutely delighted to be joining Lancashire Cricket, and I can't wait to get started," said Farbrace, who briefly led England's men on an interim basis in 2015. AFP
---
Golf Furyk plans changes to boost US Ryder Cup bid
The US Ryder Cup captain Jim Furyk conceded yesterday that his team's dismal foursomes record was "not an anomaly" and promised changes for next year's competition at Adare Manor in Limerick, where they will try to deny Europe a third consecutive victory. The US have won only three of 16 foursomes matches across the last two Ryder Cups. "There's some issues. We understand that. Not something I'm very happy with. I plan on making some changes," Furyk said in a press conference at Adare Manor. Furyk, who was named captain of the US team in April after Tiger Woods declined the role, has brought in a revamped qualification system and counts a new analytics team among the changes he hopes will boost their foursomes performance. Reuters
Air quality in Singapore's Marina Bay has been classified as 'unhealthy'
ROSLAN RAHMAN/ AFP/GETTY IMAGES
▼ Members of the all-women Power of Mama volunteer firefighting team in action in Indonesia
Singapore's haze hazard puts drivers in the hot seat
Smoky skies await F1 teams for this weekend's grand prix amid warning air pollution can impair reaction times
Adam Hancock
Singapore
Singapore's Formula One night race is an annual opportunity for the city-state to showcase its dazzling, illuminated skyline.
But this year the lights of the country's many skyscrapers will shine a little less brightly.
The south-east Asian nation is shrouded in a thick haze that has drifted from huge wildfires in neighbouring Indonesia, with Singapore now among the world's most polluted cities.
Haze is a recurring problem in Singapore during Indonesia's dry season, but conditions have worsened this year as a "super" El Niño exacerbates fires across parts of Sumatra and Kalimantan.
"Rainfall across the region has been about $80\%$ below normal since June, fuelling the most intense fire season in over a decade," said Wang Jingyu, an assistant professor at Singapore's National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University.
Air quality levels in Singapore were classified as “unhealthy” yesterday by the country’s National Environment Agency and F1’s travelling circus will be greeted by smoky skies when it arrives from Kuala Lumpur following Sunday’s eventful race at Sepang.
The polluted conditions are not expected to cause any disruption to the racing schedule this weekend, but an FIA spokesperson said that “there is a contingency in place” if the haze worsens and there “may be some restrictions on outdoor activity”, although those are unlikely to apply to members of the paddock and would instead focus on “entertainment activities”.
The organisers of the Singapore night race said they will ensure the availability of N95 masks on site if required and will “work closely with the relevant agencies” to make any decisions regarding the race weekend if the haze causes “visibility, public health or operational issues”.
The polluted air will add another challenge for drivers racing around the Marina Bay Street Circuit, already regarded as one of the toughest events on the F1 calendar because of its high humidity and tight, twisting track.
Chris Carlsten, a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia and an expert in the effects of air pollution on physiology, said prolonged exposure to the haze during the race could affect drivers' cognitive performance.
In one study, participants spent two hours in conditions with high levels of air pollution before completing a series of cognitive tests, including assessments of their reaction times. "Our findings show that the pollution effect is similar to that of an alcoholic beverage," Carlsten said.
The haze could also affect drivers' pre-race preparations, said Chris Tyler, a reader in environmental physiology at the University of Roehampton who has worked with F1 drivers including Oscar Piastri and Carlos Sainz. Drivers often exercise outdoors to acclimatise to the Singapore heat in the run-up to the race, but Tyler warned that "these are the sorts of environments where prolonged exposure to the
'Our findings show that the pollution effect is similar to that of an alcoholic beverage' pollution over a number of days could be somewhat detrimental".
Lewis Hamilton received similar advice in 2019, when the Singapore Grand Prix was last held in hazy conditions. The seven-time world champion said he had been advised not to go running outside in the days leading up to the race. Carlsten said he would advise all drivers to wear masks if the air quality remains poor, allowing them to “keep their lungs clean” before the race.
While the murky air is currently shrouding Singapore's striking skyline, it should not obscure the drivers' view as they weave their way through the illuminated city streets this weekend. The FIA said it has "no concerns" about visibility. A Formula One spokesperson said: "There is absolutely no risk to the event and the conditions where the event is taking place are not at any level of concern."
There is also little indication that the teams are worried, with several saying they have made no changes to their plans. Audi, competing in their first Singapore Grand Prix, said their drivers are trained to cope with a range of conditions, including “varying levels of air quality”.
For the hundreds of thousands of spectators expected to pack the circuit, however, the health implications are less straightforward. Unlike the drivers, who will spend only a relatively short period on track, fans could be exposed to the polluted air for several hours, particularly those attending the concerts and other events around the race.
---
Russell likely to start from back of grid
George Russell's dwindling championship hopes have been dealt a further blow as he is set to start Sunday's
Singapore Grand Prix from the rear of the grid. Russell's heartbreaking power-unit failure in the closing stages of Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia left him 84 points adrift of his teammate Kimi Antonelli with seven rounds left to run. The British driver conceded that his chances of a maiden title
are now “exceptionally unlikely”, his slender hopes of a turnaround having been dealt another setback. It is understood that the 28-year-old will need to take a new power unit this weekend. That will take Russell over the limit on several components and the penalties are likely to leave him starting from the rear of the grid around the streets of Singapore. Antonelli won the Italian Grand Prix last month having taken a similar penalty and Russell will need something equally miraculous. Press Association
Rain could offer some respite from the smoky conditions, with thundery showers forecast for Singapore on Friday and Saturday afternoon.
Wang said short-term exposure to haze will generally cause only mild irritation in healthy people, probably in the form of a dry or sore throat, coughing or sneezing, but vulnerable groups, including elderly people, pregnant women and children, face a higher risk, with haze potentially aggravating pre-existing conditions such as asthma or triggering acute bronchitis.
Tennis
Gauff blasts 'insane' wave of racist abuse after China win
Coco Gauff said she received an "insane" amount of racist comments on social media following a controversial point in her China Open match against the home player Sun Xinran.
Gauff stopped a rally after electronic advertising boards lining the court flickered during a point late in the first set of her 7-5, 6-1 third-round victory over Sun, a 16-year-old who recently won the US Open junior title.
"Hey everyone, you can dislike me or disagree about what happened without being racist," Gauff said on X. "The amount of racist comments/dms I've received in the last few hours is insane. Lastly, I'm not a cheater or a thief."
Sun appeared about to win the point when Gauff stopped playing. The chair umpire then ordered the point to be replayed. Gauff went on to take control of the match on Monday. "It's weird I'm getting hate for following the rules. Xinran is [an] incredible talent and player, I apologised for the situation at the end of the match and she completely understood," Gauff added in another post.
Sun, who was given a wildcard entry and was making her WTA Tour debut, appeared distraught after the loss. Gauff, who reached the fourth round of Wimbledon as a 15-year-old in 2019, sympathised with Sun. "I did not like to see her so emotional as I've been there and I really understand what it is like but this is just the beginning of an incredible career," Gauff said.
Novak Djokovic capped an outstanding week at the China Open with his first title for nearly a year. The 39-year-old profited from the retirement of his final opponent, Alex de Minaur, after only one game of the second set to win a seventh title in Beijing and maintain his record of never having lost at the tournament.
The 7-6, 0-1 victory means Djokovic has won at least one title in each of the past 21 years, while he now has 102 tour-level trophies overall. After Djokovic edged a tight first set on a tie-break, De Minaur returned from a medical timeout with strapping on his left thigh. It came as a surprise when he shook hands after winning the opening game of the second set.
Jannik Sinner has confirmed he will be out for the rest of the year to have treatment on a knee. Agencies
▲ Coco Gauff said: 'You can dislike me or disagree without being racist'
IOC sets out hurdles for 2036 Olympic hopefuls
Continued from back page
other bids are being seen as placeholders for the 2040 Olympics. That includes Germany, given the potentially tricky optics surrounding a centenary Games.
In a handbook published yesterday, the IOC said the bids would be based on a number of technical factors - including the venues and athlete experience, political and public support, and the ability to deliver a great Games and a long-term legacy - as well as their vision for the Olympics.
"I was fortunate to compete at five Olympic Games, across four continents. Each had their own character," said the IOC president, Kirsty Coventry. "Each host brought something unique through its people, its culture and the way it chose to stage the Games. But wherever the Games take place, one thing must never change: athletes have to be at the heart of everything we do.
"As an athlete, you spend years working to make your Olympic dream come true. The experience you have when you finally reach the Olympic Games stays with you for the rest of your life. That is why, for every future host, delivering the best possible experience for the athletes must always be the starting point."
Other countries interested in bidding for 2036 have until the end of October to confirm their intention before nominations close. The IOC said it would conduct feasibility assessments by March 2027 and in December 2028 its executive board would open a “targeted dialogue with a select number of preferred hosts”. In the summer of 2029, a vote will then be taken to select who will stage the 2036 Games.
---
Argentina lead RWC bid
The three-time semi-finalists Argentina are bidding to host the men's 2035 Rugby World Cup alongside Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. The 2027 tournament will be held in Australia with the United States due to host in 2031. Argentina are the only country to have reached a World Cup semi-final to have never hosted the tournament. While they have previously expressed an interest in hosting the World Cup, this is the first time that Argentina have become official candidates.
"We have the opportunity to show the world our passion for this sport, our ability to organise big events, and everything that our countries can offer," said Félix Páez Molina, the president of the Argentine rugby union. Spain have already announced their candidacy for 2035, while the 2019 hosts, Japan, have expressed intent to do so. AFP
Sport Football
▼ Lionel Mpasi starred for DR Congo at the World Cup this summer
DANIEL BECERRIL/REUTERS
Fifa under scrutiny over DR Congo's ineligible goalkeeper
Paul MacInnes
Fifa allowed the Democratic Republic of the Congo to compete at this summer's World Cup despite reports suggesting an internal investigation found that the country had fielded an ineligible player in qualifying.
The player in question, the goalkeeper Lionel Mpasi, starred for his nation at the tournament, including against England in the last 32. Mpasi, who was born in France and played for Les Bleus at youth level, had never completed the process of switching nationalities, Fifa reportedly found. No punishment was levied against the Congolese federation, Fecofa.
The news will again raise questions over the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, with a series of governance scandals having brought heightened scrutiny on his position. Fifa's investigative teams are independent and the president has no input into their proceedings. Fifa is understood to have denied that Infantino played a part in the decision-making process over Mpasi, but his name is likely to remain in focus owing to a former university associate, Véron Mosengo-Omba, being elected unopposed as president of Fecofa this May.
The Nigerian Football Federation submitted a complaint over the DRC apparently fielding ineligible players during a World Cup playoff tie between the nations, which the DRC won on penalties, in November.
According to reporting by the New York Times and Le Monde, Fifa investigators were aware of Mpasi's situation before the DRC defeated Jamaica in a final intercontinental playoff round in March. Faced with a series of possible responses, including banning the DRC from the playoffs, Fifa chose to reject the Nigeria complaint on the grounds it had not been submitted within the necessary timeframe.
Nigeria appealed against the decision and government representatives have suggested they could seek financial compensation for their loss, with a member of the national sports commission telling ESPN: "Nothing has been decided yet, but we will seriously consider seeking compensation from Fifa for all of the economic losses this has cost Nigeria."
Concacaf, the North and Central
Uefa investigates Israel-Ireland spitting row
Paul MacInnes
Uefa has launched an investigation into claims a member of the Republic of Ireland coaching staff was spat at during the heated Nations League encounter with Israel on Sunday.
The governing body has confirmed that post-match reports by match officials “contained an allegation of an incident in or around the tunnel at half-time” and that it will be the subject of a disciplinary investigation.
Witnesses at the match, held in the Serbian town of Backa Topola, reported hearing a member of the Irish staff - understood to be the fitness coach, Damian Doyle - claim he had been spat at by an Israeli player as the teams went down the tunnel.
A spokesperson for the Israeli FA denied the reports, saying “no one had spat towards the coach”.
After the match Ireland's coach, Heimir Hallgrímsson, said his team had been subject to a number of apparent provocations in the buildup.
"There have been a lot of those
Nigerian national sports commission
---
'We will seriously consider seeking compensation'
American and Caribbean confederation, which includes Jamaica among its members, said it “takes player eligibility matters very seriously and expects the applicable regulations and procedures to be applied consistently and fairly in all competitions”. In a statement it asked that any “concerns regarding player eligibility” be “thoroughly reviewed and addressed through Fifa’s appropriate governance and disciplinary bodies”.
Fifa, Concacaf, Caf, the Nigeria Football Federation and Fecofa, were all approached for comment.
Yesterday the Norwegian football federation confirmed it had submitted a three-pronged complaint to Fifa over its governance, including the decision to overturn a red card awarded to the USA's Folarin Balogun after an intervention by Donald Trump. The other instances cited by the NFF are the Fifa peace prize and the abandoned plan to sell a share in the World Cup to investors, known as the Fifa Forward Enterprise scheme.
High five ... high stakes England's manager, Sarina Wiegman (centre), cuts a relaxed figure with Liverpool's Grace Fisk after the Lionesses gathered for the World Cup qualifying playoff with Greece. The first leg is in Crete on Friday
'accidents' and we were clever enough to avoid it before it went too far. I felt it was their intention to intimidate us and make us do something stupid. I give big credit to how the players handled their emotions."
The investigation will probably extend the rancour that turned this double-header between Ireland and Israel into a geopolitical flashpoint. Hallgrímsson has asked that Uefa keeps Ireland and Israel separate from each other in future draws.
CARL RECINE/
GETTY IMAGES
Ronaldo claims broken promises led to walkout
Cristiano Ronaldo has accused the Portugal head coach, Jorge Jesus, of twice breaking his word, saying a failed agreement to publicly explain his omission against Norway drove him out of the camp but insisting he remained available after any punishment.
In a lengthy statement, the 41-year-old gave his account of the dispute that prompted his departure from Copenhagen before Portugal's Nations League match against Denmark last week.
Ronaldo said Jesus had agreed a plan under which the forward would miss the Norway and Denmark matches to manage his fitness. However, on the day of the Norway game, the coach told him he would play for 30 minutes.
"Everyone knows the rest. I warmed up from half-time onwards, watched the minutes tick by and wasn't called on," Ronaldo said. "The manager had broken his word to me."
Portugal's captain and all-time leading scorer said a subsequent meeting with Jesus, attended by his club side Al-Nassr's sporting director Simão Coutinho, produced an agreement for the coach to clarify events at his next press conference.
According to Ronaldo, an eight-point document was prepared saying he had never demanded playing time, had respected Jesus's decisions and that the coach asking him to warm up without bringing him on had been a mistake. Ronaldo said the agreed notes did not require Jesus to apologise to him but said the coach's public remarks bore no resemblance to their private discussion.
"It was the second time he had broken his word to me," Ronaldo said. "I decided to leave the training camp without waiting for any further broken promises."
On Sunday, after Portugal's win over Norway, Jesus denied he had made any agreement with the player but left the door open for his return. Reuters
▲ Cristiano Ronaldo blamed coach
Jorge Jesus for his Portugal exit
▼ Kieran McKenna has no regrets about his surprise exit from Ipswich NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES
'I wanted to depart in the best way possible'
The big interview
Kieran McKenna
The former Ipswich
manager reflects on his
unexpected decision to
leave, his lasting affection
for the club and ideas for
his next career move
Nick Ames
It was on the Portman Road pitch, bathed in bright early May light while immersed in the relief and joy of a third promotion in five years, that Kieran McKenna years, that Kierall-McKenna realised the moment was right. The thought had flickered earlier in the season that this might be his final campaign at Ipswich, only to be pushed into the subconscious by the Championship's remorseless grind. "But standing out there, I felt this was probably time," he says of those moments after QPR had been swept aside and a return to the Premier League assured. "Another big victory, a full stadium, in front of my family and the fans. It was an amazing way to go out on a high."
Five months later McKenna has no regrets about electing to cut things short while the going was so good. The golf bag lying outside his garage speaks of a man enjoying the break and, more pertinently, of something bigger. His son has recently become interested in the sport and sharing those moments with loved ones, whether out on the greens or spending part of the summer travelling along the East Anglian coastline in a camper van, were among the biggest reasons to pause a soaring career. At 40, McKenna had spent two decades immersed in coaching; it was time to appreciate life's essentials while continuing professional development at his own speed.
He had, as usual, been linked with moves away but the idea of a voluntary career break was hard for many to fathom when the decision was finalised in June. "For people on the outside it's maybe a bit more difficult," he says. "But those who know my path and my values, the ones closest to me who know me really well, I think they understood why I wanted to step out and what the benefits were of having a period like this."
Not everyone in football saw it that way: the phone has rung with proposals for his next move but McKenna says those overtures arrived “too soon, especially given the way I left Ipswich”. Leaving through the front door, a luxury rarely afforded, made him proud and there is no desperation to leap back into the fray. “I’m certainly in no rush,” he says. “I’m enjoying the time I’m having and hopefully an opportunity will come along that’s right. I have an idea what that would feel like but football doesn’t always follow your plan.”
Since early September he has dipped his toe back in. That has involved tuning back into the process of watching and assessing games, while travelling to spend time with Bayern Munich, the Wigan Warriors rugby team and Colorado Rapids, who are managed by his friend Matt Wells. He has been working on foreign languages, topping up an already competent level of Spanish. This week he is visiting clubs in Spain and, next Wednesday, he will begin work as
---
'Those who know me really well, I think they understood why I wanted to step out'
a technical observer for Uefa when Shakhtar Donetsk play AEK Athens at Stamford Bridge. "I wanted to give myself the best possibility to learn before taking on the next challenge," he says.
More than once McKenna repeats an assertion he made after promotion in May: that 2025-26 was the hardest of his four-and-a-half seasons at Ipswich, during which he masterminded a dizzying rise from League One to the top flight that marked him among football's hottest managerial properties. The pressure was heightened last season: Ipswich had gone down and were expected to bounce back, even though the remarkably close-knit core who had propelled them through the divisions were drifting away. In effect, he took two different teams to the top.
"You can see how it could really have gone in two distinct directions," he says, making a comparison with the fall Luton experienced after a brief reacquaintance with the elite. "We had the feeling internally that if we didn't work really hard to pull everyone together then it could have gone in a negative way."
McKenna pulled them over the line and reached the end of his own journey. Along the way he had come close to departing more than once but jumping ship earlier would have jarred. "I had a lot of different opportunities to leave," he says. "But I wanted to depart in the best way possible, with the club on a high, back in the Premier League and with a great chance to build for what will hopefully be a really successful period."
◀Kieran
McKenna led
Ipswich to three
promotions in
five years before
deciding to leave
in the summer
JOE TOTH/
SHUTTERSTOCK
The hardest aspect of his final day, he explains, was looking down a camera and addressing the supporters with a five-minute speech in which he did not attempt to suppress his emotion. He reels off a list of coaching staff and other colleagues with whom the goodbyes were touching, meaningful, joyful. Many of the friendships, particularly with members of the “really, really special team” that he led to those successive promotions, will be lifelong. The night before this interview, he spent most of a journey back from London speaking to one of them.
He laughs off the idea he would have relished getting his hands on the £200m summer transfer spend - not
to mention a new training ground whose design he influenced - that appears to have given his successor, Gary O'Neil, a better shot at survival. If anything, he suggests, it shows the club have begun their own new chapter. McKenna also emphasises the thought of potential reputational damage from a second relegation did not factor into his decision to quit. "It wasn't about the thought of a worst-case scenario or what could go wrong," he says.
It was about prioritising life where we meet, in the family's home a brisk half-hour walk from Portman Road. He and his wife chose to stay in Ipswich, where their two children attend school, having become more than mere itinerants passing through. It so happens Sir Alf Ramsey and Sir Bobby Robson kept homes nearby after moving upwards. McKenna has hero status here too, in these unassuming yet football-crazed surroundings. Although he keeps a low profile and locations for socialising are chosen judiciously, the overwhelming affection of a town and county often rear up.
"Everyone is respectful; all we get is people coming up telling the story of how much the last few years have meant for them, their family and their friends, and wishing me the best," he says. "Moving down here together, going all in, making ourselves part of this community, it's been another of the really positive things. It's a little bit different living in the area where you were managing but it's the right thing for us at this time."
Has muscle memory ever taken him on an early-morning drive to the training ground? “You’d think it might, but it’s just a different life. You’re not setting the alarm for 5.30am and driving there in the dark. You’re getting up with the kids and having breakfast with them, and you’re around when they go to bed. Although the geography is the same, the life is different.”
---
'I want to take this period to reflect and be in the best position I can for the next role'
He does not think such a heady half-decade, in which a talent honed at Tottenham and Manchester United blossomed gloriously, has changed a grounded personality honed in rural County Fermanagh. “I probably feel about 20 years older,” he says. “But my friends at home were telling me in the summer that I haven’t changed since I was 10. I couldn’t have arrived at Ipswich with a better background as a coach but, on the other hand, if you’d given me a list of the things I’d have to deal with in the next five years I really wouldn’t have believed it. After going through so many things you’re wiser for the experience.”
Nonetheless the fact remains: taking a breather when the world is your oyster feels vanishingly rare in football management. Maybe everyone should do it. "But what's right for me, after two decades coaching, might be different for a manager who only stopped playing three years ago," he says. "It's been a massive body of work. You leave United, pick your bags up, get in the car and five-and-a-half hours later you're in Ipswich. At 35 you're leaving your family behind, checking into a hotel 10 days before Christmas; you absolutely throw yourself into the job for the next four and a half years and the family do the same. I want to enjoy the time we have now, take this period to reflect and be in the best position I can for the next role."
So what would that next iteration of McKenna's career look like, in a perfect world? He has been linked with any potential vacancies at Celtic and his old employers Spurs; his name will be circling once the season's sackings start, although Ipswich will be owed a sizeable fee for any role he takes this year.
"I'm always going to want to be somewhere where I can improve players, play attacking football and win games," he says. "But beyond that I'm a manager who wants to enjoy having that connection with a club, a community, trying to build something memorable. It was a really special opportunity at Ipswich and you want to do that again in your career. But you have to be ready to come in somewhere and get some short-term success as well."
The chance will surely arise soon; it does not take a giant leap to imagine McKenna in a Champions League dugout in the next few years if the stars align. Until then the self-growth will continue and there will always be dispatches from Portman Road, where his brother and children are regulars. McKenna would rather look forward and will not beat that path for now. "I think that'll be some way down the line," he says. "They're cracking on with the season. There's nothing that can lessen my pride and love for everything we've been through. Hopefully I'll be back in the stadium as an old hand, and some of the people will remember the times we had."
They are unlikely to forget; McKenna's aim is that, by then, at least one other set of supporters will have felt the magic too.
▼ Scotland players react in dismay after squandering a first-half lead ANDREW MILLIGAN/PA
Nations League
Sturm warning rocks Pocognoli as Scotland slip to home setback
Scotland
Christie 31
Slovenia
Matko 56, Sturm 71
Ewan Murray
Hampden Park
The nature of this Scotland defeat felt far more significant than the fact it arrived at all. Sébastien Pocognoli is already in tricky territory, just four games into his tenure as Scotland head coach. Slovenia comprehensively outplayed the fragile hosts at Hampden, which leaves Pocognoli staring at a third-placed finish in a soft Nations League section. Brave new dawn or beginning of an error?
Scotland were defensively dis-organised. Their attacking play was timid. Long before full time, the Belgian had the look of a coach throwing darts blindly at a board. And missing. Wastefulness from Slovenia prevented Scottish embarrassment.
A scathing assessment arrived from Andy Robertson, who admitted his team were "outfought". The Scotland captain added: "They looked a lot fresher, a lot more hungry."
Pocognoli was more circumspect. "We didn't play the game we wanted to," he said. "We were not at the level we expect to be. I will not say everything is perfect or everything is bad but we need to improve many things."
A pre-match presentation to Robertson, who reached the 100-cap mark during Scotland's win in North Macedonia on Saturday, carried wider meaning. Gordon Strachan and Alex McLeish, Robertson's first two Scotland managers, were joined on the pitch by Steve Clarke. This marked a welcome return to the national stadium for Clarke, who departed the Scotland job in unsatisfactory
Slovenia 0 Scotland 0, North Macedonia 0 Switzerland 3
Scotland 0 Switzerland 3, Slovenia 2 North Macedonia 0
North Macedonia 0 Scotland 2, Switzerland 2 Slovenia 1
Scotland 1 Slovenia 2, Switzerland 3 North Macedonia 0
13 Nov Scotland v North Macedonia (7.45pm),
Slovenia v Switzerland (7.45pm)
16 Nov North Macedonia v Slovenia (7.45pm),
Switzerland v Scotland (7.45pm)
circumstances following failings at the World Cup. Clarke, bashful by nature, took as significant a bow as was ever likely before supporters.
Scotland find themselves in a post-Clarke state of flux. He was the manager who made this country relevant on the wider stage once again. There was, however, widespread criticism that Clarke's team lacked ambition. Pocognoli has been charged with not only maintaining decent results but also delivering an alternative brand of football. It is a fanciful quest, perhaps.
The first quarter mirrored the opening half when these teams met in Ljubljana. Scotland looked uncertain. Slovenia were perfectly comfortable. Adam Gnezda Cerin should have afforded the visitors a 13th-minute lead but failed to connect with appropriate force, allowing Jack Hendry to boot clear when just three yards from his own goal. This venue was eerily quiet.
Ryan Christie raised the mood. That the goal was horribly ugly mattered not a jot to the Scottish contingent. A short free-kick was played wide to Ben Gannon-Doak, whose deflected cross was headed on to a post by Hendry. Modern football's madness means Oli McBurnie will be credited with an assist for the header with which he was undoubtedly trying to score. The ball instead landed at the feet of Christie, who tapped home.
Robertson demonstrated his ongoing value before the break. Zan Vipotnik seemed certain to equalise before the full-back's rescue act, courtesy of a sliding block. Ominously for Scotland, Danijel Sturm had totally bamboozled their three-man defence when supplying Vipotnik.
It was impossible to argue Slovenia were not worthy of their equaliser, which arrived 11 minutes after half-time. It came from a Scotland throw-in, where possession was cheaply conceded. Sturm played through the centre and towards Aljosa Matko, who brushed Luis Binks aside as if the Brøndby defender was not even there. The Scotland goalkeeper Angus Gunn was weak in trying to deal with Matko's shot. Sturm should have sent Slovenia in front two minutes later but saved the blushes of a hilariously open Scotland defence by shooting over.
Slovenia were swaggering around their hosts. Pocognoli switched to a back four for the first time in this elongated international window shortly before Matko was denied his second goal of the night by an offside flag. The decision was not at all debatable.
Neither was the goal which took Slovenia ahead. This time Matko turned supplier, having rampaged down the right flank and crossed for the onrushing Sturm. Gunn was left with no chance as Sturm slammed the ball past him. Pocognoli was now subjected to Tartan Army boos.
Findlay Curtis and Josh McPake had penalty claims rejected for Scotland. Desperation had indeed become the order of the day. McPake was at least lively, having stepped from the bench. Too many of his teammates either underperformed or are not cut out for this level. It is up to Pocognoli to source answers, and sharply. This is no patient football domain.
Scotland
3-5-1-1
Gunn; Welsh
(Hickey 66), Hendry,
Binks ; Gannon-Doak
(Curtis 73), McGinn
(Ure 87), Ferguson,
Gilmour, Robertson;
Christie (McPake 72);
McBurnie (Bowie 66)
Slovenia
4-4-2
Oblak; Brekalo,
Bijol, Zec, Janza;
Karnicnik, Cerin,
Zabukovnik, Sturm;
Matko (Kuzmic 89),
Vipotnik (Celar 79)
Referee José María Sánchez (Sp) Attendance 34,466
Sport Football Nations League
Kane switches on the style after Coufal's odd own goal
Czechia 0
David Hytner
Wembley
It was a night that belonged to Harry Kane. Yet another one. It began with him being shown a replay of his first England goal during a pre-match interview with ITV - the header against Lithuania in 2015, just 79 seconds after he came on as a substitute for his debut. It ended with him reflecting on two more in what was a supremely comfortable Nations League victory over Czechia. Some things never change.
It remains a numbers game for Kane. They are getting bigger and ever more impressive. On the occasion of his 125th cap, the one that took him level with Peter Shilton at the top of the all-time England list, he moved to an astonishing 91 goals. Nobody will be surprised if he reaches the century. The only question appears to be when.
England know how to beat the game's smaller fry. Under Thomas Tuchel, they have played 16 matches against teams ranked outside the world's top 20. They have won 15 and drawn one - against Ghana at the World Cup. They have conceded only once - against the Democratic Republic of the Congo, also at the World Cup. Czechia, who are ranked No 50, were never in the contest.
Kane is similarly inevitable. The captain even claimed the assist for the breakthrough goal with a cross into the corridor of uncertainty that spooked Vladimir Coufal so severely he turned past his own goalkeeper. Kane's passing was very good.
Czechia 1 Croatia 2, England 2 Spain 3; Czechia 0 England 2, Spain 4 Croatia 1; Croatia 0 England 7, Spain 3 Czechia 1; Croatia 1 Spain 2, England 3 Czechia 0
12 Nov England v Croatia (7.45pm), Czechia v Spain (7.45pm). 15 Nov Croatia v Czechia (7.45pm), Spain v England (7.45pm)
When he was withdrawn in the 82nd minute, he left to a great ovation.
The victory meant that England virtually guaranteed their progress into the Nations League quarter-finals and, perhaps more importantly, saw them close out this elongated window with plenty of optimism. One of the main goals was to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the World Cup semi-final defeat against Argentina. It was mission accomplished.
Kane will break the caps record when England host Croatia in November and that will be the night when he is truly feted. As an aside, he would want to do it at Wembley rather than in Madrid against Spain where England's next-but-one game will be staged. Was that why he was so keen to play in all four of the matches during this window? It might have been a part of it.
Then again, Kane always wants to play. He was one of only three England players to start each of the matches in this series. The others were Manchester City's Marc Guéhi and Elliot Anderson. Was the City manager, Enzo Maresca, happy about that? Probably not. Does he have bigger problems at the moment? Yes.
Kane's act of drawing level with Shilton was the box-office detail. His name was on everybody's lips; his face on the big screen before kick-off. He was pictured alongside Shilton when his name was read out with the teams. The Wembley crowd roared.
Kane was at the heart of the opening goal, providing the teasing cross from the right and it was some finish from the player just inside the six-yard box. One that Kane would have
Harry Kane is England's joint most-capped men's player | Player | Era | Caps | Peter Shilton | 1970-1990 | 125 | Harry Kane | 2015- | 125 | Wayne Rooney | 2003-2018 | 120 | David Beckham | 1996-2009 | 115 | Steven Gerrard | 2000-2014 | 114 | Bobby Moore | 1962-1973 | 108 | Ashley Cole | 2001-2014 | 107 | Bobby Charlton | 1958-1970 | 106 | Frank Lampard | 1999-2014 | 106 | Billy Wright | 1946-1959 | 105 | Source: englandfootball.com
◀ Harry Kane rises above the Czechia defence to head home England's third goal from a Lewis Hall corner ADAM DAVY/PA IMAGES
Online today Next Generation 2026
We pick 60 of the best young talents in world football theguardian.com/football
been happy to call his own. The problem from a Czechia point of view was that it came from their right-back. Coufal could feel Eberechi Eze at his back as he faced towards his own goal, albeit the England winger was not that close. Coufal stretched and everybody had the time to have the same thought: you do not have to do this. Coufal did it. He could not check his momentum and steered firmly past his goalkeeper.
Trent Alexander-Arnold, who Tuchel recalled at right-back, was involved in the buildup and he caught the eye, especially when surging up and inside. He repeatedly got into advanced positions and there was one moment in the first half when he stormed into the No 9 position on to an Anderson pass. He just could not bring it under his spell. Alexander-Arnold had extended Lukas Hornicek with a whipped free-kick at the outset.
Jude Bellingham was excellent. Of course he was. There were fizzed passes from him that took the breath, getting England into dangerous positions, including one for Morgan Rogers in the 25th minute that the Chelsea attacker wasted. There were those strutting runs and it was Bellingham, as much as anybody, who advertised the fact that England were going to break through.
Anderson should have made it 2-0 after a Bellingham lay-off; Kane sparked the move and Alexander-Arnold's cross drove it. The second goal arrived before half-time and it had to be Kane. It would have been all about the buildup were it not for the identity of the scorer. Anderson's lofted ball up the inside right was a beauty and Rogers' first-time cross on the half-volley was even better, cut unerringly towards you-know-who in the middle. Kane was unmarked. Hornicek was helpless.
Kane wanted more. As usual. He got it. As usual. There was the moment shortly after the restart when he unloaded from the edge of the area and watched the shot kiss the top of the crossbar. Hornicek was beaten. Then he was for real.
It was Lewis Hall - impressive at left-back - who swung over the corner, which came after Hornicek kept out an audacious Bellingham flick. Only Jiri Slama knows why he gave Kane so much room in front of goal. It was always going to end badly for the Czechia defender. Kane rose and the header had too much power for Hornicek.
There was the minor irritation for Tuchel when Myles Lewis-Skelly got himself booked in the 53rd minute for pulling back Pavel Sulc. The midfielder will be suspended for England's next game and it was certainly not a great idea for him to get in the face of Michal Sadilek shortly afterwards.
England toyed with Czechia in the second half with Eze running through some of his party tricks. It was Kane who provided the substance.
England
4-2-3-1
Pickford; Alexander-
Arnold, Quansah,
Guéhi (Branthwaite 63),
Hall (Gibbs-White 72);
Anderson (Garner 63),
Lewis-Skelly 7;
Rogers, Bellingham
(Ngumoha 73), Eze;
Kane (Calvert-Lewin 82)
Czechia
4-2-3-1
Hornicek; Coufal
(Kricfalusi 84), Vitik, Hranac, Slama
(Zmrzly 68); Kral,
Sadilek (Macek 68);
Ambros (Hlozek 58),
Sulc, Lingr (Radosta ht);
Naderi
Referee Serdar Gozubuyuk (Neth)
Ronaldo claims broken promises led to walkout
Cristiano Ronaldo has accused the Portugal head coach, Jorge Jesus, of twice breaking his word, saying a failed agreement to publicly explain his omission against Norway drove him out of the camp but insisting he remained available after any punishment.
In a lengthy statement, the 41-year-old gave his account of the dispute that prompted his departure from Copenhagen before Portugal's Nations League match against Denmark last week.
Ronaldo said Jesus had agreed a plan under which the forward would miss the Norway and Denmark matches to manage his fitness. However, on the day of the Norway game, the coach told him he would play for 30 minutes.
"Everyone knows the rest. I warmed up from half-time onwards, watched the minutes tick by and wasn't called on," Ronaldo said. "The manager had broken his word to me."
Portugal's captain and all-time leading scorer said a subsequent meeting with Jesus, attended by his club side Al-Nassr's sporting director Simão Coutinho, produced an
| agreement for the coach to clarify events at his next press conference. | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | Iceland | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 7 | 1 | +6 | 8 | Estonia | 4 | 1 | 3 | 0 | 2 | 1 | +1 | 6 | Bulgaria | 4 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 5 | -2 | 4 | Luxembourg | 4 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 2 | 7 | -5 | 3 | Estonia |
(0) 0 |
Iceland | (0) 0 | Luxembourg |
(0) 0 |
Bulgaria Balov 19 Iliev 34 | (2) 2 | C1
According to Ronaldo, an eight-point document was prepared saying he had never demanded playing time, had respected Jesus's decisions and that the coach asking him to warm up without bringing him on had been a mistake. Ronaldo said the agreed notes did not require Jesus to apologise to him but said the coach's public remarks bore no resemblance to their private discussion.
▲ Cristiano Ronaldo blamed coach
Jorge Jesus for his Portugal exit
MEN'S INTERNATIONALS
Algeria 2 Niger 1; China 0 Tajikistan 1; India 1 Uruguay 6; Jordan 0 Venezuela 0; Russia 3 Nigeria 3; South Korea 2 Uzbekistan 0
"It was the second time he had broken his word to me," Ronaldo said. "I decided to leave the training camp without waiting for any further broken promises."
The statement provided Ronaldo's account but on Sunday, after Portugal's win over Norway, Jesus denied he had made any agreement with the player but left the door open for his return. The Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters
UEFA UNDER-21 CHAMPIONSHIP QUALIFIERS
Group B Bulgaria 0 Scotland 2. Group D Republic of Ireland 3 England 1. Group F Northern Ireland 0 Greece 1.
Northern: Group A Accrington 1 Salford 1 (Accrington won 5-4 on pens); Sheff Wed 2 Sunderland U21 0. Group B Blackpool 2 Crewe 2 (Blackpool won 4-2 on pens). Group C Rotherham 0 Bradford 4. Group D Port Vale 2 Mansfield 0. Group E Shrewsbury 0 Stockport 2. Group F Grimsby 0 Burton 0 (Burton won 4-2 on pens). Group G Fleetwood 4 Barnsley 1. Group H Doncaster 1 Liverpool U21 0; Huddersfield 5 Rochdale 0
Southern: Group A Exeter 2 Oxford Utd 2 (Exeter won 4-3 on pens). Group B Stevenage 2 Leicester 1. Group C Wycombe 4 Bristol Rovers 1. Group D Peterborough 4 Ipswich U21 1. Group E Newport 2 Plymouth 2 (Plymouth won 5-4 on pens). Group F AFC Wimbledon 0 Barnet 0 (Barnet won 8-7 on pens). Group G Cambridge Utd 2 Northampton 1. Group H Crawley 4 Bromley 0; MK Dons 7 Brentford U21 1
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NATIONAL LEAGUE CUP
Group B Hornchurch 1 Fulham U21 1 (Fulham U21 won 6-5 on pens). Group C Solihull Moors 2 Newcastle U21 1; Tamworth 1 Leeds U21 0
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Cricket
---
FIRST MEN'S TWENTY20 INTERNATIONAL
Lucinow West Indies 171 (SE Rutherford 56, SD Hope 52). India 172-2 (SS Iyer 102 no). India beat WI by eight wickets.
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Tennis
ATP/WTA CHINA OPEN (Beijing)
Men: Singles: Final: N Djokovic (Ser) bt A De Minaur (Aus) 7-6 (7-3) 0-1 ret
Women: Singles: Last 16: M Andreeva (Rus) bt D Snigur (Ukr) 6-2 6-2; E Alexandrova (Rus) bt L Noskova (Cz) 6-2 6-2; K Muchova (Cz) bt N Osaka (Jpn) 7-5 1-6 7-6 (7); N Bartunkova (Cz) bt S Kraus (Aut) 6-0 4-6 6-3
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Fixtures
Football
Men's internationals
Argentina v Benin (midnight); Colombia v Peru (12.45am);
Mexico v Chile (3.30am); United States v Canada (1am)
Cricket
Third Women's Twenty20 International
Zimbabwe v West Indies, Harare (11am)
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Greg Wood's racing tips
Worcester 1.05 King Roly 1.35 Kelijoe 2.05 Dundee Law
2.35 We're Out Of Aces 3.05 Lexington Wood
3.35 Sheezer Dancer 4.05 I Heard A Rumour 4.35 Brookside La
England's flag bearer 'Best ever' Kane marks landmark with double
England
3
Czechia
0
Coufal 27og
Kane 40 57
Jacob Steinberg
Wembley
Jude Bellingham called Harry Kane England's best-ever player after the captain equalled Peter Shilton's record of 125 caps during last night's 3-0 win over Czechia in the Nations League.
Kane, who is only nine off a century of international goals after scoring twice in another fine display, was the star attraction as the Wembley crowd watched Thomas Tuchel's side close on a spot in March's quarter-finals. England's record goalscorer showed why he is in the running for the Ballon d'Or and the way the Bayern Munich striker passed another milestone earned him rave reviews from Bellingham.
"There's not much more you can say that hasn't already been said," the midfielder said. "From my perspective first and foremost he is an unbelievable human being, as a captain and a man.
"He is the best England player to ever wear the shirt and it is an honour to play with him. He is pretty unmatched. He is scoring goals for fun, he goes deep and he gets tackles in. He is only getting better."
Kane, who made the opening goal when he crossed for Czechia's Vladimir Coufal to put into his own net, said making his 125th appearance for his country goes down as one of the biggest achievements of his career.
"I think it's right up there," the
▲ Harry Kane after making it 2-0 at Wembley on the night he won his 125th cap, a joint record for England's men TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS
33-year-old said. “There are so many milestones throughout your career. This is even beyond my wildest dreams. To be joint at 125 is an extreme privilege. I love coming to every England camp. Tonight was a special night. It’s not about me, it’s about the team. To help the team with a couple of goals and a good team performance, it’s been the perfect night for me.”
The former Tottenham forward will break Shilton's record when England, who are 40
South Africa in running to stage Africa's first Olympics
Sean Ingle
South Africa is in the hunt to stage Africa's first Olympics after it was named as one of seven countries that will formally present its case to host the 2036 Games in November.
However its bid, which would probably be spread across Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, is seen as a distinct outsider, with Qatar widely regarded as the frontrunner ahead of India and Hungary.
Turkey, Germany and South Korea make up the remaining countries that have been asked to present to the International Olympic Committee's future bid committee next month, marking the first stage of a process that will end with a vote in 2029.
Qatar's position at the top of the pecking order is partly down to the perceived strength of the bid and the fact that Asia will not have hosted a Games since Tokyo 2020. However a Doha Olympics would have to be moved from the Games' traditional July-August slot due to the heat.
India is seen as the closest challenger, although its bid to host in Ahmedabad is seen to have slipped back during the past 18 months.
As the Guardian reported last year, the Indian bid was given a wake-up call when it visited Lausanne in the summer of 2025, with concerns raised about mismanagement and governance issues at the Indian Olympic Association, the lack of detail in the bid and the country's dismal performance in the Paris Games.
If there is to be another strong challenger to Qatar, it could come from Hungary. Its bid, which is said to include not only Budapest but the Austrian capital, Vienna, and the Slovakian capital, Bratislava, is very well regarded. However it is unclear whether the new government in Hungary cares as much about hosting the Olympics as the previous prime minister, Viktor Orban.
At this stage most of the
▲ Kirsty Coventry, the IOC president, has outlined the criteria for 2036 bids\*
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