What happened
Jemima Goldsmith has alleged that Russell Brand physically attacked her during their relationship, saying she experienced “violence, coercive control and abuse”. Goldsmith, who dated Brand for about a year from 2013, said she had called police to remove him from her home during an incident in 2014, but decided against pressing charges.

Her disclosure came a day after Brand was sentenced to more than 10 years in prison following his convictions for rape and sexual assault.

Who said what
Goldsmith said she’d remained “strongly and unequivocally” supportive of Brand’s victims and had previously helped journalists investigating allegations against him. She said she had chosen not to speak publicly about her own experience at the time because she feared that the resulting media attention would have affected her then teenage sons.

Since the end of the case Brand’s barrister, Ian Winter KC, has “come under fire” for having “peddled rape myths during his defence of the disgraced comedian”, said Martin Evans in The Telegraph. Winter told the court that the rape of a 21-year-old woman in Brand’s home in 2009 should only be “regarded as a man who went too far” and suggested that Brand must be innocent because none of his victims had “resisted or screamed or had even tried to leave”.

What next?
Goldsmith said she had not spoken to or seen Brand since 2014. Her claim adds another account of alleged abusive behaviour to the scrutiny surrounding Brand following his conviction.

What happened
The BBC will launch two new categories of Men’s and Women’s Footballer of the Year at the Sports Personality of the Year awards, the first for a specific sport since they started in 1954.

Five of the nine awards on offer – including the headline prize – will be decided by a public vote this year.

Who said what
The awards will bring “together all those moments that stopped us in our tracks”, said Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC’s director of sport. “What a year we’ve had.”

Harry Kane (pictured above), who won the men’s Ballon D’or last month, is the “odds-on favourite to win the overall BBC Spoty title”, said The Times. He would be the sixth men’s footballer to earn the honour, the most recent of whom was Ryan Giggs in 2009.

Amy Hunt, the sprinter who won four gold medals at the European Athletics Championships, world record holder for the fastest mile Josh Kerr, and double-gold-winning skeleton racer Matt Weston are “regarded as Kane’s main challengers”, according to The Telegraph.

What next?
The event is to be broadcast from Salford on 13 December and will be hosted by Clare Balding, Gabby Logan and Alex Scott.

Did you hear that the world is ending on Friday? That’s according to three 1960s physicists.

“Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve,” they said in an article in the journal Science published on 4 November 1960. “They will be squeezed to death.”

The Austrian-American physicist Heinz von Foerster and two of his colleagues wrote the paper that had the sobering title “Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, AD 2026”.

“The work was based on a simple observation,” said Science last month. It was that “the time it took for the human population to double in size kept getting shorter”. So, drawing on population estimates from about 400BC until 1958, the authors “came up with an equation that best described the trend”.

By 2020, they predicted, the human population would exceed 25 billion. The claims caused an “immediate stir”, said Alan MacEachern, a history professor from Western University in Ontario, Canada, on The Conversation. Many commentators thought the article was “strictly a tongue-in-cheek comment on population fears”.

Demographers “pointed out obvious flaws”, according to Science. Nevertheless, the article was “regularly cited” and its predictions continued to appear “remarkably accurate”. That was the case until about 1993, “halfway to the ‘doomsday’, when the global population began falling behind its forecasts”, added MacEachern.

Now the global birth rate is “slightly less than half what it was in 1960”, so “hopefully, we will all wake up on November 13 to an ordinary day”.