Three-quarters of people diagnosed with cancer will survive for five years or more by 2035, if a new national cancer plan for NHS England meets its target.

What is the plan?
England’s first national cancer plan was published in 2000. It introduced targets for waiting times, but those have been missed for more than a decade. The new strategy is a 10-year framework covering cancer prevention, diagnosis, treatment, care and research.

Around 11,000 people responded to the call for evidence, describing “personal battles against a healthcare system buckling under the cancer burden”, said Sky News health correspondent Ashish Joshi. Ministers have been studying progress in Denmark, which in 2000 had similar survival to the UK but has since “leapfrogged ahead”, said The Times.

How will it work?
NHS England will aim to meet all of its cancer waiting-time targets by 2029, partly through a major expansion in robot-assisted surgery – from 70,000 procedures a year now to half a million by 2035. Faster diagnostic tests and community-based diagnostic centres open for 12 hours every day of the week, where possible, will be used to detect more cancers at earlier stages.

If the plan succeeds, by 2035, 75% of cancer patients will be either “living well” with the disease under control or totally cancer-free within five years of diagnosis. The Department of Health said this would represent the fastest rate of improvement in cancer outcomes this century and would translate to 320,000 more lives saved over the lifetime of the plan.

What has the reaction been?
Outcomes in England have “lagged behind comparable countries for decades”, said Cancer Research UK, so it’s positive to see improving survival rates at the “centre of the plan”. However, meeting such ambitious targets will require “much faster progress”, and more information is needed about how the plan will be implemented, where responsibilities will lie and “whether bold promises will be matched with the resources required”.

The promise that the national cancer plan will “revolutionise the way we treat cancer” is both “bold and ambitious”, said Joshi on Sky News. But with cancer destroying “far too many lives”, it “cannot afford to be anything else”.

Vietnam has prepared a “Second US Invasion Plan” amid fears of an American “war of aggression” more than half a century after the end of the Vietnam War, according to a leaked internal military report.

“There’s a consensus here across the government and across different ministries,” said Ben Swanton, co-director of human rights group Project88, which published the classified document. “This isn’t just some kind of a fringe element or paranoid element within the party or within the government,” he told The Associated Press.

‘Hanoi’s duality’
Hanoi has “mastered the art of managing Donald Trump” since he has been in office, said Le Monde. Vietnam has adopted an “accommodating attitude”, permitting a $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) Trump-branded golf project and joining the president’s Board of Peace “without much hesitation”, as the country seeks a “favourable trade agreement ahead of its neighbours”. Yet “deep distrust remains”, exacerbated by Washington’s recent “renewed aggression” towards Venezuela and Iran.

As well as “exposing Hanoi’s duality” toward the US, the leaked report “confirms a deep-seated fear” of international intervention, said AP. With precedents such as the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the 1986 Yellow Revolution in the Philippines, the Vietnamese Communist Party fears a similar “colour revolution” against its internally unchallenged leadership.

‘Deliberate strategy’
Vietnam is “one of the world’s fastest-growing economies”, said the Financial Times. Its government has an “ambitious” annual growth target of 10% for this year and aims to turn Vietnam into a “developed country by 2045”. Hanoi has also agreed a “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership” with the EU in recent weeks, part of a “deliberate strategy” to “diversify and balance its diplomatic ties” and “avoid becoming too dependent on any single centre of power”, said DW. 

The country has to maintain a delicate “balancing act” between the US and China, with the former its largest export market, and the latter its largest two-way trade partner, said AP. But even though China’s influence is more immediate geographically, the leaked invasion plan implies that China is seen “more as a regional rival than a threat like the US”.

Sweden’s Lina Ljungblom scores an equaliser in the first women’s ice hockey match of the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics. Her team beat Germany 4-1 in the preliminary clash ahead of tomorrow’s official opening of the Games.

Sun Wei / AFP / Pool / Getty Images

Fashion exhibitions in 2025 felt like “tonics” to a “turbulent” year, said Wallpaper* – and 2026 promises even more “unmissable” shows.

Vivienne Westwood: Rebel – Storyteller – Visionary
County Durham’s Bowes Museum has an “impressive history” of Vivienne Westwood exhibitions, and this year’s iteration is expected to be the “most extensive” yet, said Belle Hutton in Wallpaper*. The show concentrates on the period between 1980 and 2000, and her rise to become “one of Britain’s greatest creative forces”.

Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show
This “immersive” show at the V&A Dundee explores “Scotland’s impact on the world of fashion”, said Kerry McDermott in British Vogue – from the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow to 2024, when Dior “memorably swapped Paris for Perthshire to stage a punk-inflected Cruise show in the grounds of Drummond Castle”.

Queen Elizabeth II: Fashion and Style
Elizabeth II was “internationally regarded as a fashionista”, said Connor Sturges in Condé Nast Traveller. This exhibition at Buckingham Palace is the “largest display” of the late Queen’s clothes ever mounted, featuring around 200 items, “half of which will be on display for the first time”, along with “behind-the-scenes” looks at outfit illustrations, some annotated by Elizabeth herself.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
“Outrageous design comes in spades” at the V&A’s Schiaparelli exhibition, said Charlie Colville in Country & Town House. One of the 20th century’s greatest creatives, Elsa Schiaparelli took pleasure in pushing boundaries with her surrealist designs, which often incorporate humour and surprise. The first UK exhibition devoted to the label, it is not to be missed.

I’m the Prime Minister of Spain. This Is Why the West Needs Migrants
Pedro Sánchez in The New York Times
“Imagine you’re the leader of a nation” facing a “dilemma” because people “crucial to everyone’s daily lives” inhabit your country but “don’t have the legal documents that allow them to live there”, writes Spain’s Pedro Sánchez. Some of my fellow world leaders “hunt them down and deport them”, but I’ve “chosen a different way: a fast and simple path to regularise their immigration status”. My reasons are both “moral” and “pragmatic”: “the West needs people” to keep our “economies and public services afloat”.

I studied the latest Epstein files. As a woman, this is what I felt
Helen Rumbelow in The Times
As I read “file by file, it all started to connect”, writes Helen Rumbelow. Clicking through the millions of photos, emails and other documents related to Jeffrey Epstein “is like taking the back off the world clock”. We go “behind the grand façade usually presented by men who run the planet” and “see their everyday exchanges making the cogs of the world turn, oiled by porn-saturated woman-hating”. Now, “women can finally open the box”.

How to deal with a friend who always plays the victim
Kate Lister in The i Paper
“There are all manner of red flags to look out for in our relationships” but one that can be “harder to spot early doors is the perpetual victim”, writes Kate Lister. This is the friend who’s “always at the centre of some terrible drama” and “resists actual solutions”, rather than “healing and moving on”. There’s “power in unjustly occupying the victim role”, so they “set up permanent residence on Victim Boulevard”. Don’t get stuck in a “perpetual victim triangle” with them.