What happened
At least 12 police officers would be liable to face gross misconduct proceedings for their role in the Hillsborough disaster if they were still serving, according to a police watchdog investigation.

Who said what
The Independent Office for Police Conduct identified “fundamental failures” by South Yorkshire Police on the day of the disaster and “concerted efforts” to blame fans afterwards. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said Hillsborough was a “stain on our nation’s history”, as well as “one of the most significant failings in policing the country has ever seen”.

Nicola Brook, a solicitor acting for several bereaved families, said it was a case of “the truth finally acknowledged, but accountability denied” as the implicated officers had been able to retire “without scrutiny, sanction or consequence”.

What next?
No officers will face disciplinary proceedings because they all retired before investigations began, said The Independent. Charlotte Hennessy, whose father died in the fatal crowd crush, has called for the removal of former Merseyside and West Yorkshire police chief constable Sir Norman Bettison’s knighthood. Bettison was found to have “deliberately downplayed” his role in the disaster.

What happened
The number of people leaving A&E in England without any kind of treatment has tripled in six years, according to new analysis by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). More than 320,000 patients walked out between July and September this year, compared with just under 100,000 in the same period of 2019.

Who said what
RCN chief Professor Nicola Ranger warned that rising walkouts were “dangerous and a sign of a broken system”, blaming gaps in community and primary care that trap patients in hospital and leave staff “at breaking point”.

The reason most people are leaving is simple, said Anna Bawden in The Guardian – “frustration at waiting so long”. According to the RCN’s analysis, since 2016 there has been a 90-fold increase in the number of patients waiting in excess of 12 hours to receive treatment.

What next?
Government ministers say improved reporting and urgent care funding will reduce dangerous delays, but professional bodies warn that without major staffing and community care expansion, the number of walkouts will continue to rise.

“Experts have long debated the date that humans arrived in Australia,” said LiveScience. Now a study using DNA from both ancient and modern Aboriginal people across Oceania may have finally “settled the debate”.

The research, published last week in Science Advances, looked at an “unprecedentedly large” dataset of nearly 2,500 genomes to determine that humans began to settle in northern Australia about 60,000 years ago.

But “even more interestingly”, the study also added to growing evidence that along the way these “early human pioneers likely interbred with archaic humans”, including a species known as “the hobbit” – Homo floresiensis.

At the start of the millennium most paleoanthropologists believed Homo sapiens was the only human species that had managed to reach Sahul, an ancient landmass that includes modern-day Australia. “It seemed very unlikely that archaic humans had watercraft capable of crossing the ocean,” said the Natural History Museum.

But the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003 “changed things dramatically”. A team uncovered more than 100 fossils in a cave on “a remote Indonesian island” called Flores, including the partial skeleton of a female: still the most complete Homo floresiensis fossil to date. The adult female was just 1.05 metres tall, earning the species its nickname the hobbit.

Before the discovery, anthropologists had “assumed that the evolution of the human lineage was defined by bigger and bigger brains”, said anthropology professors Tesla Monson and Andrew Weitz on The Conversation. This, they believed, enabled early modern humans to perform “more complex tasks such as using fire, forging and wielding tools”. The discovery of the hobbits, with their “chimp-sized brain”, has forced scientists to throw these theories “out the window”.