What happened
Andy Burnham has refused to be drawn on the question of funding the security arrangements for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle following reports of their planned move back to the UK from the US. The prime minister referred to it as a “private matter” and his comments have left open the possibility that public money could contribute to the cost of keeping the couple safe despite Harry no longer being entitled to the same level of taxpayer-funded police protection he received as a working royal.

Who said what
Asked whether the government would pay for their protection, Burnham said: “It’s a matter for Harry and Meghan, and we wish them well in the move that they’re making.”

Provision of security has been a “long-running source of tension between Harry and the Home Office, the government department that would decide on such measures”, said Caroline Davies in The Guardian. The Times reported that as yet there are no plans to provide the couple and their family with taxpayer-funded armed protection.

What next?
The King’s second son has “long cited security concerns as a key reason why he and his family could not return to the UK, even on holiday”, said Jane Dalton in The Independent. The couple’s security bill could potentially run into millions of pounds, although the final arrangements have not been disclosed.

What happened
Hui Ka Yan – the founder of China Evergrande and once Asia’s richest person – has been sentenced to life in prison by a Chinese court.

Hui Ka Yan pleaded guilty in April to several charges, including embezzlement of assets and corporate bribery. An investigation by the Chinese authorities in 2024 found that Evergrande had overstated its sales by almost $80 billion between 2018 and 2020.

Who said what
Hui’s sentencing “marks a key moment in the fallout from Evergrande’s collapse, which shook China’s property sector and hit investors and domestic banks hard”, said the BBC.

Born in 1958 in an impoverished rural village in Henan province, Hui (pictured above) was raised by his paternal grandmother after his mother died when he was an infant. “While his sentence ends his rags-to-riches story, it does little for Evergrande’s creditors,” said The Times.

What next?
Evergrande, which delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange last year, has defaulted on most of its $300 billion (£220 billion) in liabilities. More than 50 individuals linked to Evergrande were also sentenced on Thursday, with their prison terms ranging from 20 months to 18 years.

Plastic products could soon have a built-in self-destruct feature. Scientists have found a way to incorporate bacteria into plastic that can completely break it down after activation. If this technique can be widely applied, it would greatly reduce the amount of plastic pollution in the environment.

The researchers have created a plastic that is capable of degrading quickly without producing microplastics, according to a study published in the journal ACS Applied Polymer Materials. The key is using microbes. Living plastics “contain dormant microbes capable of degrading the surrounding polymer”, said a release about the study. Previous living plastic designs “often depended on a single enzyme, which limited how efficiently the material could be broken down”. However, in the new study, scientists engineered the bacteria “Bacillus subtilis to produce two polymer-degrading enzymes that work together”.

The two enzymes team up to break down the plastic. The first enzyme “cuts the long polymer chains at random points, reducing them into shorter sections”, while the second enzyme “works from the ends of those fragments, breaking them down further into their individual monomer building blocks”, added the release.

With the embedded microbes and the enzymes, “plastics could effectively ‘come alive’ and self-destruct on command, turning durability from a problem into a programmable feature”, Zhuojun Dai, a corresponding author on the paper, said in the release.

While the researchers only incorporated the bacterial spores into one type of plastic, they eventually hope to “develop a method that activates them in water, where a significant share of plastic pollution accumulates”, according to the release. The same strategy “could be adapted for other materials, including plastics widely used in disposable products”.