The United States under President Donald Trump is, for the time being, the brightest star in a growing network of ultra-nationalist governments hoping to reshape the global order in their authoritarian mold. While MAGA America is the powerhouse, it’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Hungary that has been the backbone of the worldwide lurch rightward. Yet as Hungarians prepare to vote on April 12, Orbán and his Fidesz party seem headed for an electoral upset that could send shock waves across hard-right spheres.

Government ‘revered by authoritarians everywhere’

A “pro-Kremlin, anti-EU strongman” who has spent nearly two decades “building a template for Christian nationalist rule,” Orbán is now the “cornerstone of President Trump’s vision for Europe,” Axios said. In the 16 years since he was first elected, Orbán forged a “state apparatus — courts, media, election administration — loyal to his party” and has “never lost under the system he built.”

As the “center of the Trump administration’s shifting policy toward Europe,” Orbán’s Hungary “firmly” aligned itself with “far-right parties and immigration restrictionists in countries such as France and Germany,” said Al Jazeera. While this has “mired relationships in Europe,” it has also been a “source of inspiration for the U.S.”

“Whatever Hungary decides will resonate throughout Europe,” said Argentine President Javier Milei, a South American nationalist, during his address at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest. Orbán is a “beacon” for those who “refuse to accept that the West’s destiny is one of managed decline.”

CPAC-Hungary, where Milei spoke, has become an “important calendar event for Euro-Atlantic hard-right networking,” said Balkan Insight. The event hosted “667 foreign guests from 51 countries” who heard from “prominent European political figures” such as far-right Dutch PVV leader Geert Wilders and Alice Weidel of Germany’s ultra-nationalist AfD. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while initially scheduled to appear in person, instead sent a “warm message of support” in pretaped remarks played on the conference’s first day, Cleveland Jewish News said.

Orbán is “revered by authoritarians everywhere,” said Salon. But as a “path-breaking autocrat” who has demonstrated a “new soft fascism,” his potential loss is making many of those same authoritarians “nervous.”

Effects that would ‘reverberate well beyond Hungary’

Should Orbán’s government fall, the “dreams” of his authoritarian admirers in the MAGA movement “might be shattered” as well, said Vox. As a “close Russian ally,” Orbán’s loss would be a “considerable boon to the Ukrainian war effort — and a significant blow to the Kremlin.” Cumulatively, then, Hungary’s elections are “not just like any other vote,” and could end up as “one of the most significant elections of the entire year, and perhaps even the decade.”

An Orbán loss would prompt authoritarian allies to ask “what it could mean for them,” said Salon. “After all,” his “anti-democratic” domestic policies were designed to “not only prevent a defeat from happening” but to “keep people from ever wanting it to happen.” Such a defeat would “reverberate well beyond Hungary,” calling into question the “durability of a political system” marked by “hardline nationalism and an erosion of democratic checks” and “touted as a blueprint for reshaping Western democracy” by many conservatives, said Reuters.

“I am here for a simple reason,” Vice President JD Vance said at a pro-Orbán rally in Budapest this week: “I admire what you are fighting for.” But Vance’s visit may have ultimately done “more harm for Orbán than good,” The Guardian said. By asserting that the Trump administration would work with any eventual Hungarian elected leader, the vice president seemingly undercut Orbán’s campaign promise that “he — and his connections — were the only means of keeping Hungary safe in a volatile world.”

For some observers, Vance’s visit is unlikely to change the electoral calculus in Hungary, where “domestic issues such as the ⁠cost of living dominate the election,” said Reuters. No matter what happens in Hungary’s immediate future, Orbán’s global footprint will surely be felt for years to come.

Donald Trump’s threats to wipe out a civilisation and Israel’s alleged use of white phosphorus in Lebanon have once again shone a spotlight on the rules of war.

“Collective punishment on a population and the targeting of protected civilian infrastructure are prohibited under international law,” legal experts told ABC News of Trump’s threats, while his promises to take the country’s oil, “which could amount to pillaging” is also “barred under the law”.

In Lebanon, Human Rights Watch said it was able to verify that Israel was again using the “notorious weapon”, “reigniting accusations that it is breaking the laws of war”, said The Guardian.

When asked whether his threats constituted a war crime, Donald Trump answered, “You know the war crime? The war crime is allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon”.

So what constitutes a ‘war crime’?

War crimes are “violations of international humanitarian law” that, unlike genocide and crimes against humanity, “always take place in the context of an armed conflict, whether international or not”, said the United Nations.

These include cases of murder, torture, pillage, intentionally directing attacks against civilians and non-combatants such as humanitarian aid workers, as well as the deliberate targeting of religious and educational buildings, hospitals and, in some cases, vital infrastructure such as power stations and key transport links.

The use of weapons banned by international conventions, such as chemical weapons or cluster munitions, can also be considered a war crime.

What are the major conventions and treaties?

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols introduced in subsequent decades are international treaties that serve as the “most important rules limiting the barbarity of war”, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Ratified by all 196 UN member states, in times of war they protect non-combatants, such as civilians, medics, aid workers, and those who can no longer fight, including the wounded, sick or prisoners of war.

There are also additional conventions banning the use of biological weapons (1972), certain conventional weapons (1980), chemical weapons (1993), anti-personnel mines (1997), and cluster munitions (2008).

What happens if someone breaks the rules?

The International Criminal Court (ICC), established under the Rome Statute in 2002, “investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression”.

“Champions of the court say it deters would-be war criminals, bolsters the rule of law, and offers justice to victims of atrocities,” said the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) think tank. Yet it has, since inception, also “faced criticism from many parties” and has been fundamentally weakened by the refusal of several major powers to join.

As well as the US, Russia and China, non-signatories include India, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iraq, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Recent arrest warrants for national leaders including Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have “generated mixed reactions from Washington and raised questions over the future of the court”, said the CFR.

As “no formal ICC jurisdiction applies” to countries that have not signed up to the ICC, the “more immediate legal framework” remains the Geneva conventions of 1949 onwards, said The Guardian.

The Conventions and their Protocols contain stringent rules to deal with those who commit what are known as “grave breaches”, who must be pursued and tried or extradited, whatever their nationality.

The key point here, said Professor Andrew Clapham in OpionioJuris, is that the rules for offences deemed war crimes under the Geneva code apply to “everyone irrespective of whether their state has ratified the ICC Statute, and they can be tried in multiple states around the world, irrespective of whether those states are parties to the ICC Statute”.

“The idea that anyone can avoid accountability for grave breaches by sticking to non-ICC states for one’s trips is fallacious when that person is alleged to have committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions.”

Donald Trump has repeated his threat to pull the US out of Nato, after Britain and other allies refused to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Dismissing the alliance as a “paper tiger”, he told The Telegraph’s Washington correspondent that the idea of removing America from the defence treaty had now gone “beyond reconsideration”.

“We’ve been there automatically, including Ukraine,” Trump said. “And we would always have been there for them”. But, in an apparent misunderstanding of the limits of the alliance, the US president believes that, in the Iran conflict, “they weren’t there for us”.

What would it mean for Nato?

Nato, formed by the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949 by 12 founding countries, does not have its own army. Instead, member states pledged to provide collective defence and security. The US is Nato’s largest single military power, as well as funding 62% of its spending, so American withdrawal would dramatically weaken the alliance. Without Washington’s military might behind it, Article 5 – the treaty clause that states that an armed attack against one or more members will be considered an attack against all – would lose credibility .

Trump’s recent threats will further encourage Canada and the European member states in their efforts to rely less on the US for security – a shift that is a boon to their own domestic defence industries.

What would leaving Nato mean for the US?

The US would save money, both by ending its contribution to Nato spending and by no longer maintaining a presence in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. But it would also lose access to many military bases around the world, meaning the US Navy would have to “operate closer to America’s shores”, and US bombers would no longer be able to “reach targets halfway around the world”, said Modern Diplomacy. More broadly, the shift away from US global leadership would accelerate, with America increasingly divorced from an international framework.

Buyers for US arms could also dry up, as America’s former allies seek to re-arm elsewhere. The US spends more on its own military than any other country but that wouldn’t be enough to keep all its arms manufacturers afloat. Without crucial foreign sales, hundreds of thousands of US jobs would be at risk.

What would the process actually look like?

Leaving Nato wouldn’t be easy for the US because a 2024 law prohibits the president from doing so without the approval of a two-thirds Senate majority or an act of Congress. Even if all Republicans in the Senate voted for it, Trump would still need at least 14 Democrats to join them, and it’s unlikely he would even get unanimity from Republicans: Thom Tillis, Republican co-chair of the Senate NATO Observer Group, has already warned that leaving Nato would be an “enormous, enormous risk”.

Given the political obstacles, most Nato observers don’t think Trump will try to withdraw, “despite his obvious displeasure at alliance leaders”, said The Times. But he could use an executive order to suspend US participation, and eke that suspension out while legal challenges are mounted.

But, even without leaving, Trump could still “cause irreparable damage” to the alliance, said UnHerd. He could ignore an Article 5 request, withhold intelligence from Nato partners, cancel weapons deliveries, and limit the export of security-related technologies.

Americans may be unwittingly giving hackers an easy path to access their houses. Cybersecurity experts, including FBI cybercrime analysts, are warning about residential proxy networks found on many off-brand electronics. These networks often allow hackers to hide in plain sight.

What are residential proxy networks?

These software systems are “designed to route other people’s internet traffic through a user’s device,” said Cyber Magazine. The networks operate largely like “forged return addresses on envelopes — someone else’s internet traffic is rerouted through your connection,” said officials at Comcast’s Threat Research Lab to Cyber. As the networks engage with users, they “quietly launder illegitimate activity” while making it appear that your device is the “initiator of that traffic.”

Residential proxy networks can make their way onto a variety of home devices, as “TV streaming devices, digital picture frames, smartphones, tablets and routers are used to route traffic,” said the FBI. Many people who own such devices do not “realize their internet connection could be used by someone else without their permission.” The devices can sometimes gain internet access when the “owner of the device provides consent” unintentionally; other times, the owner “does not provide consent and is unaware their IP address is being used.”

Some of these devices “ship with residential proxy software preinstalled on them,” which can “happen with certain low-cost video streaming systems,” said The Wall Street Journal. In other cases, people might “download the code to their smartphones” without realizing it. And since the networks make it appear like illegal activity is coming from an innocent person’s home, there’s a “chance that law enforcement could come knocking at your door.”

How can people protect themselves?

The FBI has a list of tips to help people stay safe, urging Americans to “avoid TV streaming devices that claim to provide free sports, TV shows and movies,” as these “may contain malware or backdoors that hijack your internet network and can lead to identity theft,” said the agency. The agency also recommended people be wary of downloading free VPNs and clicking on pop-ups, which can “initiate malware installation on your device.”

In the midst of these continued cyberattacks, some ordinary Americans are fighting back. Benjamin Brundage, a senior at the Rochester Institute of Technology, began an investigation in 2025 as a “growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet” via a Chinese company called Ipidea, said the Journal. Using cat memes to “lighten the mood” while speaking to hackers, Brundage was able to find out significant information about the attackers, and law enforcement eventually “took action against the network.”

Brundage “identified 11 of the largest residential proxy companies, including Ipidea, that were vulnerable” to hackers, said the Journal. Other companies also assisted law enforcement in the investigation. Google “took legal action” against Ipidea to “take down domains used to control devices and proxy traffic through them,” said the tech company in a press release. While there are still “significant challenges for network defenders to detect and block malicious activities,” officials believe the action taken against Ipidea has reduced the “available pool of devices for the proxy operators by millions.”

The EU’s longest-serving current head of government has turned his country from a liberal democracy into something quite different. Orbán has been variously described as a populist strongman, an authoritarian capitalist, a “soft autocrat” and a “21st-century dictator”.

He himself announced in 2014 that he was building an “illiberal state”, parting from “Western European dogmas” and learning from Turkey, Russia and China. By then his Fidesz party had already rewritten Hungary’s constitution, modified its electoral system, and packed the courts and other institutions with party loyalists. Orbán's Hungary is seen as an inspiration to the populist Right across Europe and in the US, particularly to Donald Trump.

What is Orbán’s background?

Born in 1963, in a village some 35 miles west of Budapest where his father worked on a collective farm, he went on to study law in Budapest, and political philosophy at Oxford, on a scholarship. A former member of the Young Communists, he became a fierce critic of communist rule, co-founding Fidesz – originally a liberal centre-left youth movement – which demanded free elections and the withdrawal of Soviet troops.

In 1998, he led Fidesz to electoral victory, becoming Europe's youngest prime minister. A year later, Hungary joined Nato. By then, Orbán had already set about transforming Fidesz into a conservative nationalist party; but in 2002, he lost his re-election campaign to a Socialist coalition. According to his biographer, he resolved to return to power and change “the rules of the game” so that he’d never lose again.

How did he do that?

Fidesz was elected in 2010 with 53% of the vote, but quirks of seat distribution gave it a two-thirds majority – giving Orbán, as PM, considerable power to reshape the country. Ahead of the 2014 election, Fidesz passed a new electoral law that cut the number of seats from 386 to 199; districts were redrawn behind closed doors to favour Fidesz's rural strongholds. Voting rights were granted to ethnic Hungarians living in neighbouring countries, who voted over 95% for Fidesz.

He quickly muzzled the free press. In 2010, a new law created a media council with the power to levy heavy fines on outlets for “unbalanced” anti-government reporting. The biggest opposition newspaper, Népszabadság, was bought then shuttered in 2016 by a company linked to one of the PM's allies; TV and radio stations and websites also came under the control of friendly oligarchs. It’s estimated that today, Fidesz directly or indirectly controls 80% to 90% of the media.

Did Hungarians approve of this?

To a large extent, yes. Elections are free, if not fair, in the sense that opposition politicians are allowed to run, and ballots are counted correctly. And Fidesz has won three more general elections since 2010, never gaining less than 49% of the vote. Orbán has tried to unite the nation against perceived enemies, external and internal: refugees, particularly during the 2015 migrant crisis; the EU, with its “oppressive”, “imperial” system; gay people; “globalists” such as George Soros, the Hungarian-born US financier who has funded liberal causes across the world (and who paid for Orbán’s Oxford scholarship); and, more recently, Ukraine.

Orbán portrays Hungary as a “Christian democracy” under continual, existential threat – a canny policy in a country with a long history of foreign domination at the hands of Ottomans, Habsburgs and Soviets. Fidesz ideology is based on the pillars of “God, Nation and Family”: LGBTQ+ rights have been curtailed, and pro-natal tax breaks have been given to incentivise women to have children.

How are his relations with the EU?

Orbán's flouting of democratic norms has meant constant conflict with Brussels. In 2022, the EU parliament passed a symbolic resolution declaring Hungary to be a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy”. Brussels has frozen billions of euros in EU funding, and has launched legal challenges against laws passed by Fidesz; but has so far stopped short of invoking the “nuclear option” of suspending its voting rights in the European Council. Orbán has continually sought to hobble EU action against Russia, a close ally that provides nuclear technology, and low-priced oil and gas to Hungary.

In February, Orbán used veto powers to block a €90 billion EU aid package to Ukraine, which he blames for disrupting oil supplies, and also claims to view as a military threat. He said this month that Hungarians should “fear the EU more than Russia”.

Why is his rule under threat now?

In the elections on 12 April, Orbán faces a challenge from Tisza, the centre-right opposition party led by Péter Magyar, formerly of Fidesz.

The “Orbán model” relied on delivering rising living standards in return for political dominance; but the economy has stagnated and living standards have declined. Magyar’s politics are not dissimilar to Orbán's, but he paints the PM’s rule as corrupt and “feudalistic” – with some justification. Hungary is often described as a kleptocracy. A circle of oligarchs tied to Orbán dominates the economy and lucrative public contracts. Orbán’s son-in-law is one of Hungary's richest men. A recent scandal concerns György Matolcsy, the former national bank chief, who spent €210 million renovating the bank, and had a deluxe bathroom made for himself, complete with a golden toilet brush. The golden toilet brush has become a symbol of Orbán’s elite.

Will Orbán lose?

Tisza is leading by at least 10 percentage points in independent polls, probably enough to offset Fidesz’s structural advantages. However, while Orbán and Fidesz retain control of much of the media and the machinery of state, the outcome, and the PM’s willingness to accept defeat, are far from certain.

It’s no secret that artificial intelligence can sometimes offer less-than-stellar guidance. But AI might give people this bad wisdom for a sobering reason: to flatter, according to a new study. In some cases, AI may only reinforce people’s preconceived notions, but the words it generates can be outright harmful.

What did the study find?

The “sycophantic (flattering, people-pleasing, affirming) behavior” of AI chatbots can pose risks as people “increasingly seek advice about interpersonal dilemmas,” said the study published in the journal Science. In an analysis of 11 leading large language models, including AI bots from Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, chatbot responses to users were “nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal” behaviors.

The problem is not just that these chatbots “dispense inappropriate advice but that people trust and prefer AI more when the chatbots are justifying their convictions,” said The Associated Press. In one example, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was asked if littering in a park was acceptable if no garbage can was available, the bot “blamed the park for not having trash cans, not the questioning litterer who was ‘commendable’ for even looking for one.”

This example may seem trivial, but AI’s general tendency to “flatter and excessively confirm users’ opinions can lead to wrong decisions, harm relationships and reinforce harmful beliefs while decreasing the willingness to take responsibility or resolve conflicts,” said The Jerusalem Post. The proneness toward sycophancy is a “technological flaw already tied to some high-profile cases of delusional and suicidal behavior in vulnerable populations,” said the AP.

Why is this such a problem?

Many experts worry that this AI advice “will worsen people’s social skills and ability to navigate uncomfortable situations,” Myra Cheng, the study’s lead author and a computer science PhD candidate, said to the Stanford Report. If this behavior by AI is not corrected, some users may “lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations” and could also pose larger safety risks.

“Users are aware that models behave in sycophantic and flattering ways,” Dan Jurafsky, the study’s senior author and a Stanford University linguistics professor, told the Stanford Report. What many people are “not aware of, and what surprised us, is that sycophancy is making them more self-centered, more morally dogmatic.” This type of interaction with AI is a “safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.” All of this is also happening as AI use becomes more prevalent, especially among teenagers.

At least 33% of teens “use AI companions for social interaction and relationships, including conversation practice, emotional support, role-playing, friendship or romantic interactions,” according to a study from Common Sense Media. Another 33% of teens choose to “discuss important or serious matters with AI companions instead of real people.” Experts say when using AI you should avoid asking for advice on crucially important topics. “I think that you should not use AI as a substitute for people for these kinds of things,” Cheng told the Stanford Report. “That’s the best thing to do for now.”

Bereaved families could be in line for thousand of pounds of compensation from National Savings & Investments (NS&I) after the government-backed bank admitted failing to trace accounts of dead customers.

A “catastrophic operations failure”, said The Telegraph, meant money belonging to 37,500 dead savers has been withheld from their families.

NS&I has said claims with a total value of up to £476 million in customer deposits “may have been affected”.

The savings organisation’s chief executive Dax Harkins has stepped down following the scandal, and has been replaced by former HMRC boss Jim Harra.

What has gone wrong at NS&I?

NS&I has been accused of “short-changing bereaved families” after losing track of investments, delaying payouts, and withholding prizes for its popular Premium Bonds, said ThisIsMoney.

Some families, said The Guardian, had resorted to paying lawyers to “recover their money”. NS&I has apologised and said its search process “failed to identify” all products when handling bereavement claims, which it said has now been fixed.

It’s not the first bit of “negative publicity” for NS&I, said Sky News, after the bank’s £3 billion digital transformation project was criticised by MPs for exposing “the taxpayer to additional risk”.

Who is affected by the missing payments?

Pensions minister Torsten Bell told MPs that around three-quarters of the cases relate to the period between 2008 and 2025.

NS&I has said up to 37,500 bereavement claims may have been affected, adding that it received 211,800 new bereavement claims and repaid £4 billion last year.

How much are people owed from NS&I?

The cases cover accounts worth an estimated £476 million, according to NS&I, which “works out at roughly £12,693 on average per person”, said ThisIsMoney.

The government has indicated families should have their funds returned, including interest and compensation.

How can bereaved families claim?

The government has confirmed “impacted customers” will be remunerated, said Metro, but “exact details” haven’t been announced yet.

NS&I has confirmed it will ensure savers’ estates are “appropriately compensated” and will reveal more details in May. It has also hired 100 more staff members to contact those affected.

You “don’t need to do anything” if you have recently made a claim or have an ongoing one, said NS&I, as it will be responsible for contacting beneficiaries.

This also means those affected won’t need to use a claims management company or solicitor, said MoneyWeek, “to be reunited with their money”.

The “silver lining”, said The Guardian, is that the money is 100% safe as NS&I is government-backed. So the main issue is “marrying it up with the owner, not the security of funds”.

Disruption in the energy markets caused by war in the Middle East has led to calls for the UK government to decouple electricity prices from gas to boost the potential of renewable energy.

Britain’s expansion into renewable energy has been “nothing short of remarkable”, said The Sunday Times, but it is also a “nightmare to manage”. Despite the UK’s energy capacity predicted to be “three times” higher than demand by 2035, it will be “completely useless” if problems with “Dunkelflaute” – the “haunting” German name for the “dark calm” of scarce winds and low light – and energy transportation networks are not addressed.

What is the system?

The UK uses a “marginal pricing” system to buy electricity from the wholesale market, which is similar to the trading seen in commodity markets such as food, oil and gas.

In this system, electricity generators – such as power plants – “make ‘bids’ to sell electricity at a particular price”, said Carbon Brief. This allows the system to “match buyers with enough supply to meet their demand”.

These bids, depending on the estimated price, are placed in a “merit order stack”, ranging from cheapest to most expensive. This usually means cheaper, renewable energy is the first to be used.

Once the system is established, it will “accept the cheapest first and move upwards until enough is secured” in order to satisfy the demand, said Sky News. However, all providers get paid the same prices, which is “set by the last most expensive bid used to meet demand. In the UK, this is almost always gas-fired power stations, which are typically the most expensive source needed to fill the final gap in supply.”

What are the consequences?

There are some “obvious challenges” in the marginal pricing energy system, said University of Oxford researcher Hannah Ritchie on By the Numbers. As electricity prices are in effect “coupled” to gas prices, countries and their consumers are “at the whims of international fossil fuel markets. It’s hard to shield people from volatile changes in prices.”

The cost benefits of renewables are “not properly passed on to consumers” in this system. And this is not just about money. For many it makes “little sense” to support the rise of renewables if they are not making much difference to energy bills and the system disincentivises consumers from going green.

Fundamentally, for as long as electricity prices are coupled with gas, they will be “volatile” and “often high”, which “erodes a lot of the economic benefits” for consumers.

What are possible alternatives?

If electricity prices were decoupled from gas, household bills could be reduced by up to £203 a year, according to the think tank Common Wealth, said The Guardian. Its report proposes an alternative “single buyer model” that would remove low-carbon generators – renewables and nuclear power production – from the wholesale market. Instead, they would be paid “fair, fixed prices”. Gas would be placed in a “strategic reserve” to be used only when renewables could not meet demand.

Another option would be to introduce power-purchase agreements, which can have a “similar effect” to decoupling from gas, said Carbon Brief. Large users of energy could sign direct contracts with energy suppliers for a fixed price. In turn, this would take some electricity out of the wholesale market, “diluting the impact of gas prices”.

If we want lower prices organically, “we need to avoid turning gas on”, said Ritchie. By lowering demand in the system, we could theoretically bypass the need for gas altogether. Likewise, by improving the supply of renewables into the market, we could reduce dependency on fossil fuels. “Of course”, there is one fundamental problem: renewables often needs “backup to balance out the times when they’re not generating”. So “having other forms of energy storage is important”.

Much has been made of the closing of the Strait of Hormuz during the Iran war, given that the passage is a major lifeline for the global economy. But it is just one of five major waterways that play a significant role in world trade — several of which have their own history of conflicts.

Panama Canal

As the only entry in this list located in the Americas, the Panama Canal is a vital waterway for one main reason: It connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This shortcut lets ships “avoid the lengthy and hazardous voyage around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America,” said the International Trade Administration. Not forcing ships to circumvent an entire continent “contributes to the reduction of carbon emissions and helps mitigate the environmental impact of global maritime transportation.”

President Donald Trump has pushed for the U.S. to gain full control of the canal, but the “facts are that Panama has managed the canal incredibly well,” said the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The “revenues generated by the canal are important for Panama, representing about 4% of their GDP. They represent less than 1/10,000 of the U.S. GDP.”

Strait of Hormuz

The strait, which cuts between Iran, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, is one of the “world’s busiest oil shipping channels,” said BBC News. It is used by almost all of the world’s major oil companies, and in 2025, about “20 million barrels of oil and oil products passed through the Strait of Hormuz per day,” equivalent to nearly $600 billion of energy production per year.

The recent closure of the waterway could impact more than just gas prices, as the strait is also a “vital channel for imports to the Middle East, including food, medicines and technological supplies,” said BBC News. If it is not reopened soon, the ripple could “go far beyond the region, affecting energy markets, maritime transport and global supply chains,” said the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.

Strait of Malacca

Like the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia is a passage between two oceans: the Indian and the Pacific. It represents “one of the most strategically, economically and politically significant maritime chokepoints in the world,” said The National Bureau of Asian Research. The strait is important to the nations around it as well as “great powers with interests in the Indo-Pacific.”

But climate change is leading to “increasing heavy rainfall and extreme flood heights” around the strait, said a study from World Weather Attribution. This could threaten the strait’s “densely populated regions,” particularly near heavily populated countries like Sri Lanka.

Suez Canal

The Suez Canal is the “only place that directly connects the waters of Europe with the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean and the countries of the Asia-Pacific,” said CNN, making it an essential waterway for cargo. If the canal didn’t exist, ships in the region would have to “traverse the entire continent of Africa, adding hefty costs and substantially extending their journey times.”

An example of the canal’s importance was seen in 2021, when a cargo ship became stuck across the waterway, cutting off the shipping lane. Any disruptions “can have outsized impacts on global commerce and energy markets,” said the Atlantic Council, given that over $1 trillion goods are transported through the Suez annually.

Turkish Straits

The two Turkish Straits hold “strategic importance as the only waterway connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea,” said Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But crossing these two straits, the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, is not easy, as “strong currents, sharp turns and unpredictable changes in weather conditions make it all the more difficult to navigate safely.”

During a war, the straits also become vital due to a 1936 treaty regulating their passage, which “states that, at times of conflict, ‘vessels of war belonging to belligerent powers shall not pass through the Straits,’” said Arab News. The implication of this treaty has often demonstrated Turkey’s “ultimate say over any warship if it deems its movement to be a security threat.”

Britain’s largest energy company has seen a 50% rise in sales of solar panels as the war in Iran pushes up oil and gas prices, leading to fears that energy bills will spike when Ofgem sets its next price cap.

The head of Octopus Energy, Greg Jackson, told the BBC there has been a “huge jolt” in interest in solar panels as an alternative source of electricity.

Meanwhile, the government is in talks to relax current restrictions that ban the sale of plug-in solar panels, meaning they could be available in shops “within months”.

How much do solar panels cost?

Traditional solar panels, which allow you to generate your own energy and reduce your carbon footprint, cost an average of £6,100. This “hefty” up-front price tag means it generally takes at least 10 years to break even, said Money Saving Expert.

There are “various financing options” available, including subscription services, where a household might pay around £95 per month over a period of 20 years, although the interest payments mean this would “cost you more in the long term”, said The i Paper.

A solar battery, which can store excess power generated by your solar panels that you don't use at the time, would add around £4,500 to the set-up costs, although that would similarly be offset by the additional electricity. Batteries have been the “biggest game-changer in solar power”, said The Times. People used to miss out on free electricity if they were not at home while the sun was shining, but now a battery can store energy generated during the day for use in the evenings.

The next big game-changer could be plug-in solar panels. If plans to permit them to be connected to domestic sockets go ahead, they will retail for a single up-front cost of around £400. Typically smaller than traditional panels, they can be placed in sun-exposed areas like gardens and balconies, or on external walls.

Are they suitable for all homes?

Some more than others. North-facing roofs get very little direct sunlight, so they won’t be so efficient. South-facing roofs are ideal, and west or east facing surfaces can work fairly well. If your house is shaded by trees or other buildings between 10am and 4pm the benefits will be reduced. Large roofs are better as a solar panel typically measures two square metres.

Where you live makes a difference, too. The further south, the greater the potential savings, as southern homes generally enjoy slightly more daylight than those in the north.

It takes roughly a decade to recoup your installation costs so if you’re considering moving in the next few years, you won’t reap the full benefit yourself. Solar panels could increase the market value of your home, although experts are divided on how much: trade body Solar Energy UK estimates a boost of up to 2%, but according to The Eco Experts it could be as much as 14%.

Finally, if your property is listed or is in a conservation area you might need to get approval from your council’s building control team.

How much could you save?

Savings will depend on a number of factors, including system size and how much electricity you use. But according to Energy Saving Trust estimates, a typical household could save between £190 and £350 a year at current Energy Price Cap rates.

You can also save money by getting paid to export unused electricity you generate back to the National Grid, through the Smart Export Guarantee. Exact earnings will depend on how much unused electricity you are able to provide, and tariffs vary between providers.

Smaller and cheaper plug-in panels “could cut around £100 off household bills each year”, said The i Paper, meaning that the purchase price “could be covered within about four years by the savings they generate, with any additional electricity they produce being effectively free”.

Britain’s domestic energy prices are the second highest in Europe. Since 2020, the price per unit of electricity, which is measured in kilowatt hours (kWh), has risen from about 17p to 27p. Over the same period, the price per watt of panels has dropped by around 40% and the price of batteries fell by around 50%.

The United Nations has taken a major step in trying to correct a historic wrong. It’s calling for reparations for African nations that were subjected to the transatlantic slave trade, after voting to recognize slavery as a crime against humanity. Though African countries welcome the U.N.’s resolution, other nations, including the U.S., view the vote with skepticism.

What did the UN vote for?

The U.N.’s resolution was spearheaded by Ghana, one of the countries from which an estimated 12.5 million people across the African continent were captured by Europeans during the height of the slave trade. It declares the “trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement of Africans” to be the “gravest crime against humanity” due to the “scale, duration, systemic nature, brutality and enduring consequences that continue to structure the lives of all people through racialized regimes of labor, property and capital.”

Ghana’s president, John Mahama, “called on U.N. members to ‘engage in inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice, including a full and formal apology’ as well as measures of restitution and compensation,” said Bloomberg. The full scope of these reparations remains unclear, and a specific dollar amount wasn’t noted. Some believe reparations “should go beyond direct financial payments to also include developmental aid for countries, the return of colonized resources and the systemic correction of oppressive policies and laws,” said The Associated Press.

Why are some countries against this?

The resolution was largely well-received, passing 123-3. But the three countries to vote “no” were significant: Argentina, Israel and the United States. There were also 52 abstentions, including the United Kingdom and all members of the European Union. The U.S. vote comes as “policy groups, human rights organizations and academics have accused President Donald Trump of minimizing Black history,” said The New York Times.

Critics often point to Trump’s gripe against the Smithsonian, which the president has accused of “focusing too much on ‘how bad slavery was’ and not enough on the ‘brightness,’” said the Times. U.S. officials claim the decision to vote “no” on the resolution was not about race. The U.S. “strongly objects to the cynical usage of historical wrongs as a leverage point in an attempt to reallocate modern resources to people and nations who are distantly related to the historical victims,” Deputy U.S. Ambassador Dan Negrea said in a speech to the U.N.

The White House also “strongly objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy,” said Negrea. British officials used almost identical language: The U.K. is “firmly of the view that we must not create a hierarchy of historical atrocities,” British Ambassador James Kariuki said in his U.N. speech. The U.N. “should approach all historical injustices with the same seriousness, empathy and respect.”

Others felt the move by the United Nations was a necessary one. The resolution was “significant as it represented the furthest the U.N. has ​gone in recognizing transatlantic slavery as a crime against humanity and in calling for reparations,” Justin Hansford, a ⁠law professor at Howard University, said to Reuters. The action “marks the first vote on ​the floor of the U.N. I cannot overemphasize how large of a step that is.” And despite the backlash from some Western nations, the “longstanding calls for reparations,” said Reuters, have “gained momentum in recent years.”

The UK was once a “world leader” in organ transplants, said the BBC’s “File on 4 Investigates”. But it has “fallen behind”.

In 2024, the number of heart transplants carried out per million people in the UK was lower than in most European countries, thanks to a lack of investment, resources and “outdated” technology. Waiting lists for organs are at a record high, while family consent rates for donation have fallen dramatically since the “opt-out” presumed consent system was implemented.

What’s going wrong?

“Organ donation is in crisis,” said Martha Gill in The Observer. Last year, the waiting list for an organ reached its highest on record, according to NHS Blood and Transplant: an 8% year-on-year increase. “As a consequence, many will die waiting for a phone call.”

There are only five heart and lung transplant centres in England, and one heart transplant centre in Glasgow. Anyone living in Wales or Northern Ireland must travel for a transplant, and there is significant regional variation in waiting times.

Half of the six main centres have also “lost their top surgeon in the past two years”, said the BBC. Others are leaving for jobs abroad: a “brain drain” of experts. Without experienced mentors, junior surgeons are increasingly “risk averse” and only using the healthiest donated organs, said Jorge Mascaro, Birmingham’s former director of cardiothoracic transplants (now based in the US). “It’s getting worse.”

The number of organs donated in the UK per head is equal to, or greater than, most of Europe. But the NHS transplants far fewer hearts and lungs than most countries, said the BBC. “Some countries make use of twice as many.” Surgeons say this is down to a lack of equipment and new technologies used abroad, such as machines that can scan organs to check if they are diseased. Ice boxes are often still used to transport organs between hospitals, which can harden them.

Operations are also regularly cancelled thanks to a lack of theatre space, hospital beds or staff. Post-transplant patient care is crucial to prevent complications, but the NHS “continues to struggle” to provide long-term support: the UK’s five-year survival rates “lag behind”.

Has the opt-out system failed?

When the “opt-out” system of presumed consent was implemented in England in 2020, “expectations were high”, said Gill. But the number of donors has been “crashing”. In the year to March 2025, there was a 7% decrease in the number of deceased organ donors, according to the Organ and Tissue Donation and Transplantation Activity Report. Life-saving transplants also decreased by 2%.

Most people support organ donation in theory, and nearly half the population have signed the Organ Donor Register, according to Organ Donation. But relatives have the final say; family consent rates have dropped from 69% to 61% over the past five years. Surveys suggest a “common reason: they didn’t know what their relative wanted”, said The Observer. The types of deaths that make donation possible – usually traumatic, sudden deaths of young healthy people – make it even harder for families to decide.

The presumed consent of the opt-out system acts as a “weaker signal of underlying preference” than the active consent of an opt-in system, said researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in a 2024 paper. This “uncertainty” means families are “more likely to refuse consent”. Evidence suggests an opt-out model alone doesn’t boost donations: it must be accompanied by a framework of logistics, psychological support and education.

What can be done?

The NHS and campaigners are calling for “better education in schools”, said The Mirror: for organ donation to be included in curriculums, and campaigns particularly targeted at ethnic minorities (among whom the family consent rate is significantly lower).

Evidence suggests an opt-out model alone doesn’t boost donations. Countries must invest in healthcare infrastructure, psychological support for families, and public awareness campaigns to encourage people to discuss their wishes. Family consent rates increase to almost 90% if the deceased has done so.

A government-commissioned review of heart and lung transplant services, published in 2024, made various recommendations, including better holistic care, a single-service model across the multiple centres, and “rapid-short term actions to improve organ acceptance decision-making”, said NHS England.

NHS England has since been abolished; responsibility for transplant services now lies with the Department of Health and Social Care. In a statement to the BBC, the department said the government had inherited a broken NHS, and that it recognised the “systemic issues” facing transplantation. The government said it would write to the NHS demanding that it “urgently implement” the recommendations, to make transplant services “fit for the future”.

Energy bills are due to drop in April, but that may only be temporary respite as the Iran war pushes up prices.

Ofgem’s energy price cap will drop by 7% in April, taking typical gas and electricity bills for those on a standard variable tariff down from £1,758 to £1,641 per year.

In an “unusual move”, households on fixed energy deals will benefit from price drops due to the government scrapping the Energy Company Obligation portion of bill calculations, said the HomeOwners Alliance.

But wholesale energy prices are starting to “shoot up again”, said MoneySavingExpert, which is bad news for households in the coming months.

How are energy bills set?

Energy companies charge households for how much gas or electricity they use, based on a measurement called kilowatt hours.

You could be on a fixed-rate tariff that “sets the cost of energy for a certain amount of time”, such as one year, said CompareTheMarket. Many households are on variable tariffs that can “go up or down according to the market”.

The cost of a variable tariff is linked to industry regulator Ofgem’s price cap.

What is the energy price cap?

The price cap sets a limit on how much suppliers can charge for each unit of energy, and your daily standing charge if you are on a standard variable tariff.

The price cap is calculated every quarter by Ofgem based on a “range of factors”, said uSwitch, including wholesale and network costs. It is set to drop to £1,641 per year for a typical household paying by direct debit, a yearly saving of around £117.

But this is only the average, and “your bills might look very different depending on your circumstances”, said Which?.

This will relieve some of the pressure from high energy prices, but it is “probably going to be short-lived” due to the US-Iran war, said MoneyWeek.

The April price cap reduction “reflects the relatively low wholesale prices” between December 2025 and February 2026, said Forbes, and oil and gas prices have since “increased dramatically”.

Will energy bills rise in 2026?

Wholesale prices have “spiked” in recent weeks, said Octopus Energy, due to the Iran war, which has sharply reduced oil and gas supplies through the Strait of Hormuz.

Forecasts from energy consultancy Cornwall Insight suggest the price cap could increase by £322 in July to £1,963, pushing up bills. It reflects the surge in oil and gas prices.

Similarly, E.ON Next is forecasting that the July price cap will rise by £314 to £1,955 per year.

EDF Energy also predicts that “market volatility will flow through to the price cap”, and that it will rise to £1,937 in July, and above £2,000 later this year.

Higher energy prices will also impact when the Bank of England next cuts interest rates and it has already warned that the rising costs mean inflation is “higher than we expected, at least in the short term”.

Is there support available for rising energy bills?

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said the government will offer “targeted rather than universal support”, said The Independent.

You may already qualify for the Warm Home Discount, worth £150, if you are on pension credit or other benefits or Winter Fuel Payment, worth £300.

Energy suppliers may offer payment holidays or hardship grants, such as Octopus Energy’s Octo Assist and the British Gas Energy Trust fund from British Gas.

Help should also be available from charities such as Citizens Advice “if you’re struggling to pay for energy or think you may get into difficulty”, said Ofgem.

While the world is distracted by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, another conflict is erupting between Iran’s neighbours.

Pakistan has declared “open war” on Afghanistan after fighting intensified over recent weeks. In a dangerous escalation from cross-border skirmishes, Pakistan launched air strikes at the end of February, targeting major cities including Kabul. Afghanistan’s Taliban regime responded with drone attacks. Both sides blame the other for the conflict.

More than 1,000 people are estimated to have been killed or injured, and 100,000 displaced. In one air strike on a Kabul drug rehabilitation centre last week, 400 people were killed, according to Afghan officials. With a ceasefire to mark the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr set to expire, there are no signs of a desire for de-escalation.

What’s the background?

This is “not a sudden rupture of relations”, said Rabia Akhtar on The Conversation. It’s the “intensification of long-simmering, historical security concerns” along their disputed 1,600-mile border: the Durand Line.

Afghanistan has never formally recognised the border, drawn in 1893 through ethnic Pashtun areas. That’s caused “sustained and persistent tension” since Pakistan’s independence in 1947. The countries also took opposite sides in the Cold War, with Pakistan “embedded” in the US-led framework and Afghanistan maintaining “closer ties” with the Soviet Union (until it invaded). All of this “entrenched cross-border militant networks”.

When the Taliban retook power in 2021, Pakistan “anticipated a more cooperative security environment” than the series of US-backed Afghan governments. It hoped the Taliban, which it had covertly supported all along, would help “rein in” several militant groups, said The New York Times. This was a “strategic miscalculation”.

Instead, terrorist attacks within Pakistan increased, particularly by the Tereek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP, or Pakistan Taliban). The group took advantage of Pakistan’s political chaos to further entrench its power in the border lands and threaten the country’s all-powerful military. The TTP also took a share of the US military equipment left in Afghanistan when America withdrew. This, and the release of hundreds of its fighters from Afghan prisons, erased much of Pakistan’s efforts to defeat it.

What triggered this outbreak?

The TTP has been increasing its attacks in Pakistan as it grows in power, killing 4,000 people in the last four years according to Pakistani authorities. Last year was the most violent for militancy in a decade, according to the Islamabad-based Center for Research and Security Studies. The separatist Balochistan Liberation Army also claimed attacks that killed almost 50 people. Islamabad has long accused the Taliban of harbouring such groups, allegedly allowing them to operate from sanctuaries within Afghanistan.

Pakistan launched air strikes against alleged TTP hideouts in Afghanistan last year, warning it would no longer tolerate “safe havens” for fighters. It also accused its historic foe, India, of supporting the Taliban, allegedly with Indian-made drones used in recent attacks. India then effectively normalised relations with the Taliban.

Both India and the Taliban “vehemently deny” Pakistan’s accusations, said the BBC. They say the TTP is “an internal matter” for Islamabad: a “Pakistan-created problem”. That’s “done little but to further infuriate” Pakistani leaders.

Violent clashes erupted on the border in October, and Pakistan carried out air strikes before suspending trade with landlocked Afghanistan. A truce didn’t last long; after years of diplomatic efforts, Pakistan “now says that there is nothing to talk about”.

What’s the significance?

Middle Eastern powers that have been mediating between Afghanistan and Pakistan for years currently have “limited bandwith” to de-escalate, said Chietigj Bajpaee on Chatham House. Despite Pakistan’s “superior military”, the Taliban has “a significant capacity for asymmetric warfare”. And if Pakistan “perceives an Indian hand behind Kabul’s actions”, there could also be renewed hostilities between India and Pakistan – two nuclear-armed states.

Exacerbating tensions is “the forced repatriation of Afghan refugees” from Pakistan and Iran; an estimated 2.7 million Afghans were returned last year, further straining Afghanistan’s “stretched public services” and economic woes.

Pakistan has been “taking advantage of the West’s disengagement” and regional powers’ distraction, said the Financial Times. It is “enraged”. But all-out war “threatens stability” across Asia. There is “the very real risk” that Afghanistan becomes “an incubator for terrorism” again.

For the “shaky truce” to endure, the intervention of the US and China is required. Although “precedents for a settlement are not inspiring”, the stakes are “too high for the world to keep looking away”.

This super mineral is crucial for everyday health. But while many are taking it in supplement form in accordance with the latest social media trend, experts say there’s a healthier way of consuming the recommended amount in your diet.

Why is magnesium so popular?

The mineral is needed to “regulate our nerves, bones, immune system and blood sugar levels,” said The Independent. It is one of the most abundant minerals in the human body and is responsible for “more than 300 biochemical reactions,” including keeping the heartbeat steady and assisting in the production of energy and protein. Despite its abundance, the body does not naturally produce magnesium, so we need to acquire the mineral from food or supplements.

In the past few years, magnesium supplements have gone viral in social media wellness circles. It is the “key ingredient in #sleepygirlmocktails”, in which a powder is “stirred into tart cherry juice and prebiotic soda,” creating a “wellness cocktail for anxious millennials,” said Wired. People are “popping magnesium glycinate before bed instead of melatonin” because it “allegedly cures insomnia, constipation and existential dread.” Last year, Google searches for “which magnesium is best for sleep” and “which magnesium makes you poop” more than doubled.

Nutrients come “in and out of vogue in our society,” Whitney Linsenmeyer, a spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, said to Parents. Magnesium is “having a moment right now,” perhaps because it is an “important nutrient in supporting common health concerns” like sleep, anxiety and PMS.

Magnesium glycinate capsules are commonly used for sleep issues and anxiety. Magnesium citrate usage is trending for constipation relief. Many social media users have posted about their “lack of bowel movements” and how drinking magnesium citrate “went above and beyond (sometimes too far) to get them back on track,” said Parents.

Should we be taking the supplements?

Unless you have a magnesium deficiency, “magnesium supplements aren’t essential,” said Wired. If you are struggling with “migraines, insomnia or other conditions where research suggests health benefits,” they may be worth trying, but “first talk to a health care professional.” Instead of supplements, you can focus on consuming “magnesium-rich foods” such as legumes, leafy greens, whole grains, nuts, fruits and soy products. Dark chocolate is also a good source of magnesium.

Deficiencies can be difficult to detect, Louise Dye, a professor of nutrition and behavior at the University of Sheffield, said to the BBC. Still, it is believed that we’re not getting enough magnesium from our food. Over the past 60 years, “intensive farming practices have caused a significant depletion of the mineral content of the soil,” including a “decrease in magnesium of up to 30%.” Additionally, “western diets typically have a greater proportion of processed food, where numerous products are mostly refined,” leading to magnesium being “depleted by up to 80-90% in the process.”

Supplements can be risky, however, and “overdosing may even be deadly,” said The Independent. Too much magnesium from food “does not pose a health risk in healthy individuals because the kidneys eliminate excess amounts in the urine,” the National Institutes of Health said. But high doses of magnesium from dietary supplements or medications “often result in diarrhea that can be accompanied by nausea and abdominal cramping.” Other symptoms may include low blood pressure, thirst, drowsiness, muscle weakness and slow or shallow breathing. Extremely high doses can lead to irregular heartbeats or even cause the heart to stop altogether, according to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

At least half of the steel used in Britain should be made in the country, the government has said as it launched its new strategy for the struggling industry.

This is a “watershed moment”, said Sky News, and, in “economic and historical terms”, it’s “dynamite”.

What are they?

The strategy is an attempt to save Britain’s beleaguered steelmakers. At its heart is a new tariff on many steel imports and a reform of quotas on those imports. Imported steel quotas will be reduced by 60% and anything brought in above that level will be subject to a 50% tariff, said the Department for Business and Trade.

The government’s “ambition” is to raise the proportion of domestically produced steel to 50%, from its current record low of 30%.

Up to £2.5 billion will be given to steel producers that have effectively been nationalised and to support private steelmakers around the UK in their quest to produce lower carbon metal.

Why are the tariffs so important?

This is a “significant” moment, said Sky News, because these are “probably the biggest increases” in trade barriers imposed by a British government in “at least a generation”.

Other countries, “most glaringly” America under Donald Trump, have raised many of their tariff barriers, but Britain had “held firm”. For many ministers it was a “matter of national pride”, because they “felt that to raise tariffs, even in an environment where everyone else was, would be an abomination”. But now Britain is “dipping its toes into the waters of protectionism”.

Will they work?

A leading HS2 contractor has warned that raising tariffs on foreign steel imports will “exacerbate” cost pressures for the UK construction industry. Mark Reynolds, chair of construction company Mace, told The Guardian that with energy costs rising and an already depressed construction sector, the move is “ill-timed and unhelpful”.

But Gareth Stace, director general of UK Steel, said this was a “crucial moment” because “with global markets distorted by overcapacity and subsidy, a clear and ambitious domestic strategy is exactly what is required to ensure steelmaking not only survives in the UK but thrives”.

The Conservatives’ shadow business secretary Andrew Griffith described the measure as “red tape” and said that raising the cost of imported steel “means more cost for the construction industry, less infrastructure investment and is a further blow to the diminishing number of firms making things in the UK”.

The government’s approach to the industry has “always looked like a cross between inveterate, unshakeable optimism and the panicked thrashings of a drowning man clutching for a flotation aid”, said Eliot Wilson on CapX.

The tariffs are “not so much a strategy as a sticking plaster”. If the UK’s steel sector is “unable to compete on the world stage” we shouldn’t have a policy of “allowing it to survive financially” without “some notion of the limits of that”.

One of the most powerful and feared organisations in Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps plays central roles in the country's internal security, economy and foreign policy; it runs Iran's ballistic missile programme; and directs support to its network of allies.

The IRGC was founded soon after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as Islamists, nationalists and Leftists competed to set the course of the new republic. Initially, it was a street militia, designed to protect Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's leadership from the army and the police, which he did not trust. After a referendum, Iran became a constitutional republic, with universal suffrage, a president and a parliament, but one wrapped in a theocracy; ultimate authority rests with the supreme leader. The IRGC began to operate as a sort of parallel state, bypassing the government and answering directly to the leader.

How did it evolve?

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) transformed the IRGC into a conventional fighting force, with a structure similar to that of a Western military. Its soldiers fought alongside the regular army, the Artesh, supported by units from the Basij, the youth volunteer militia set up by the IRGC in 1980. The Guard and the Basij became known for their “human wave” attacks, in which waves of religiously inspired Iranian teenagers overran better-equipped Iraqi positions, incurring massive casualties (in some units, more than 40% of troops were “martyred”).

By the end of the war, the IRGC had built up great engineering and construction capabilities, for military logistics. To prevent a postwar collapse and to keep the IRGC funded, the government tasked it with rebuilding the nation. The result was Khatam-al Anbiya (“Seal of the Prophets”), today one of Iran's largest construction and industrial contractors.

How is the IRGC structured?

There are five main branches. It has about 200,000 troops in the three wings of its military service: ground forces, navy – which has a special responsibility for patrolling the Strait of Hormuz – and the aerospace force, which runs Iran's ballistic missile programme. In addition, there's the Basij paramilitary force, which claims it can mobilise some 600,000 volunteers, and the Quds Force, an elite unit tasked with spreading the influence of Iran and the Islamic Revolution abroad.

What does the Basij do?

It is best known in the West for enforcing Islamic codes and suppressing dissent: masked Basij gunmen on motorbikes patrol streets during periods of unrest. They were accused of beating, shooting, sexually assaulting and torturing Iranians during the 2009 election protests and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement in 2022. There are about 100,000 employees of the Basij, and a much larger number of volunteers. These are mostly young working-class men, who are paid cash bonuses for going on patrols, and also receive benefits comparable to those of party members in Communist states: access to welfare schemes, jobs, and university places for their children, for instance.

And the Quds Force?

The Islamic Republic has a constitutional commitment to “export the revolution”, and the Quds (Jerusalem) Force is the section of the IRGC tasked with that. It began sponsoring armed groups in the region in the 1980s: first, the Shia militias that would become Hezbollah during the Lebanese Civil War; in the 1990s, the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as Shia groups in Bahrain and Afghanistan. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Quds Force played a vital role in organising and aiding Shia militias fighting there against the US and its allies. Following the Arab Spring in 2011, the force was deployed to Syria, to prop up the rule of Bashar al-Assad; more recently, it has supported the Houthis in Yemen.

How about the IRGC's economic role?

It controls great swathes of Iran's economy, particularly in construction, energy and telecoms. Many of its interests are run via religious foundations, known as bonyads. US-led sanctions, since the 2000s, have actually bolstered the IRGC's position: it has developed sophisticated black-market and smuggling networks, orchestrating the sale of oil to China and drones to Russia, as well as, reportedly, smuggling drugs and alcohol. It is estimated that upwards of a third of Iran's GDP is controlled by the IRGC. “A lot of Revolutionary Guard commanders have become billionaire generals, more businessmen than military leaders,” opposition spokesman Shahin Gobadi told The Times.

What about its role in politics?

The IRGC is highly influential. Many former members have moved on to senior government roles – often appointed by the late supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who was closely involved with the IRGC. At least 16% of seats in the Majlis, the parliament, are held by veterans or active commanders. Former Guards tend to advocate a hardline foreign policy, and to support Iran's nuclear programme. Senior former IRGC officers include Ali Larijani, the head of the National Security Council, who was killed week. The IRGC's new commander in chief, Ahmad Vahidi, is the former minister of the interior.

What is happening to it now?

At least 30 IRGC generals were assassinated in the 12-day war with Israel last year; during the current war, the Israel Defence Forces claim to have killed 6,000 Guards, including the commander-in-chief – and the Basjij chief. Basij check points have been attacked by drones. Even so, the IRGC has played a leading role in launching missile and drone attacks. And its influence is arguably growing: Mojtaba Khamenei is said to have been the IRGC's choice as leader. Some analysts now describe Iran as a militarised “IRGC republic”.

Wales goes to the polls on 7 May but 58% of Welsh voters don’t know how their votes will be counted. In the hugely important Senedd election that could topple Welsh Labour’s 27-year grip on devolved power, there will be a new voting system – but that’s news to all but 7% of the electorate, according to polling by YouGov/Cardiff University.

Labour has “topped” elections in Wales for years, said Politico, but now looks headed for defeat. Some even predict a rout so heavy, the party could be “fighting for a reason to exist”.

How will Senedd voting work now?

The elections to the Welsh parliament – which can raise local taxes and has the power to make laws on healthcare, education, local transport, social services and culture – will be held under a new closed list proportional system.

From 1999 until now, the Senedd was elected using the additional member system that is also used in Scotland. Voters would cast two votes: one for a constituency candidate, and one for a party. The constituency votes were counted on a first-past-the-post basis, and a special formula was applied to the count of party votes to select 20 additional members of the Senedd, each representing one of five regions.

But this year, voters will cast one vote only – and for a party (or an independent), rather than an individual. Each political party will prepare a list of up to eight candidates for each constituency, and MS seats will be allocated on the share of votes that each party (or independent) receives. The number of MSs will increase from 60 to 96, and the number of constituencies will decrease from 40 to 16.

One of the advantages of the new system is the end of by-elections: if an MS seat becomes vacant during a Senedd term, it will be filled by the next candidate on their party’s list. Or, if the departing MS is an independent, it will be left vacant until the next election.

But as well as potentially confusing voters, as the YouGov/Cardiff University polling suggests, the closed list system also “reduces voter choice”, said the Institute for Government think tank. Voters can no longer “express a preference” for a particular candidate, which could be said “to reduce the direct accountability between voters and MSs”.

The new system may also “benefit emergent parties in Wales, to the detriment of more established parties, whose candidates are more likely to have a strong personal profile”. Many think this will help Reform, “who are recognisable at a national level but lack a well-established local party presence or well-known candidates across Wales”.

Who will win and which issues will decide it?

Three key issues will decide the outcome of this election, according to a Savanta poll for the BBC: the cost of living; the performance of health and social care services, and the level of immigration. There is some demographic variation: health and social care is “particularly important” to older voters and women, while immigration is the key issue for those who voted Reform at the 2024 general election. Younger voters also singled out “a fourth issue: housing”.

Reform and Plaid Cymru are currently neck and neck, said Wales Online, and projected to be tied on 28 seats each”, with Labour “just behind on 26”. The Greens and the Conservatives are each projected to get 10% of the vote – meaning the Greens could win MS seats for the first time – with the Liberal Democrats on 7%. The most common prediction is a Plaid minority government propped up by Labour, “blowing a hole in Labour’s status as the default governing party”, said Politico.

What does it all mean for Keir Starmer? 

Nigel Farage said yesterday that the Senedd vote “doubles up as a referendum on Keir Starmer’s premiership”. He claimed Labour’s “dominance in Wales and, in particular, the Valleys” would end on 7 May, and, if we get this right, “we will get rid of the worst prime minister any of us have seen in our lifetime”.

Labour’s Eluned Morgan, First Minister of Wales, has said this is not a time for a protest vote against the prime minister, and voters should “wake up” to the prospect of two pro-independence parties – Plaid Cymru and the Greens – ending up in power when so much is at stake for the economy and public services.

When the US and Israel attacked Iran, many turned to China to see its response.

For decades, Beijing had been the Islamic Republic’s most important economic ally, maintaining close diplomatic ties with Tehran through years of Western sanctions and international isolation.

But China’s relatively muted response to the US-Israeli strikes, its lack of military intervention and calls for de-escalation on both sides, has led many to question whether leader Xi Jinping is a fair-weather friend – or whether there’s a bigger game afoot: its delicate truce with the US, and their battle for global supremacy.

What is the background between China and Iran?

China was once “an important supplier of arms to Iran” before joining UN sanctions in 2007, said The Wall Street Journal. US officials say Chinese companies continued to be “a critical supplier of goods with potential military applications”, such as motors for Iran’s Shahed drones.

When in 2002 George Bush declared Iran part of an “axis of evil”, Beijing “saw an opportunity”, said Richard Spencer in The Times. It “began signing multibillion-dollar oil and gas deals” with Iran, culminating in a 25-year economic cooperation agreement in 2021 that centred on the sale of Iranian oil to China, reportedly worth $400 billion.

About 90% of Iran’s crude exports are sold to China every year, at a steep discount. In return, Iran “kept Washington bogged down in the Middle East”, said Geoffrey Cain in The Spectator. Its regional proxies “added just enough chaos to stop Washington focusing on China”. That was “extraordinarily useful” and cost Beijing “almost nothing”.

In 2023, China helped Iran restore diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia, among its other mediation efforts in the Middle East. It denounced what it called “unilateral” US sanctions and brought Iran into Beijing-backed diplomatic alliances. Beijing’s ties with Iran “blunted America’s efforts” to isolate Tehran, said Michael Schuman in The Atlantic. China has held regular joint military drills with Iran, and Chinese firms have even supplied chemicals used in Iran’s missile programme, according to Reuters.

How has China responded to the US-Israeli attacks?

Iran says China is helping in various ways, including with “military cooperation”. According to its foreign minister, China is a strategic partner in the war. But so far, China hasn’t provided any direct military support, or deployed any forces, or provided “new weapons assistance to any party involved”, said The Diplomat. It has “primarily engaged through diplomatic channels”.

China has expressed opposition to the US-Israeli strikes, emphasising that they could undermine regional stability. But that has been “notably more restrained” than after the strikes on Iran last year. Beijing has also criticised Iran’s retaliatory attacks on its Gulf neighbours, and its de facto blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

But it is also not willing to assist the US. Trump has demanded that China send warships to the Gulf. In response, the Chinese foreign ministry said Beijing called on “all parties to immediately cease military operations”.

Why has China’s response been so muted?

For Xi Jinping, “a hard-nosed pragmatism is at play”, said CNN. Iran “ranks below his top priorities”, including China’s fragile détente and trade truce with the US, ahead of the upcoming summit with Donald Trump in Beijing. China “sees no benefit in heightening tension with the US over Iran,” said International Crisis Group analyst William Yang.

Iran’s “strategic importance” to China is far more limited than many assume, as trade and investment flows are “eclipsed” by those with Saudi Arabia and the UAE. China might even appreciate Washington’s resources being diverted from the Indo-Pacific. A sustained campaign could “deplete America’s weapons supplies”.

Trump this week announced that he is delaying the summit, as he pressures China to send warships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But a delay could also be in China’s interests. “If the war drags on, added pressure on Washington could mean more leverage for China,” said The New York Times.

China also “gains diplomatically from the worldwide perception that America is an out-of-control bully”, said Spencer. It does not lose much “whatever happens to Iran” – except oil.

Despite its massive investment in renewables, China is heavily reliant on crude from the Gulf. And as much as 40% of its imports are shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.

China is better placed to weather the storm than most. It had “long braced for a Gulf oil supply shock”, stockpiling one of the world’s biggest oil reserves and diversifying its supply, said the BBC. Still, disruption is “putting its resilience to the test”.

This summer’s controversy-laden men’s Fifa World Cup took on a whole new layer of jeopardy when the US, the main co-host, attacked Iran, one of the competitors.

The football tournament, hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico and due to kick off on 11 June, had already been beset with criticism. There were worries about logistics and infrastructure, calls for a boycott over Donald Trump’s travel bans, and fears about fans’ safety in a US where Ice agents have been sweeping into cities for violent immigration crackdowns. Fifa itself has also been under fire – for its president Gianni Infantino’s sycophancy to the US president, and its “strategic partnership” with Trump’s Board of Peace.

Now Iran’s participation has been thrown into doubt by the war in the Middle East. Fifa seems unwilling to grant the Iranian football federation’s request to relocate its US fixtures to Mexico, and Trump has already said it would not be “appropriate” for the Iranian players to take part “for their own life and safety”.

Will Iran participate?

“When Trump has explicitly stated that he cannot ensure the security of the Iranian national team, we will certainly not travel to the United States,” said Mehdi Taj, the president of Iran’s football federation, on the Iranian embassy in Mexico’s X account.

Moving Iran’s fixtures to Mexico would be logistically tricky but not unprecedented. But then there’s the issue of the knockout stages: if the US and Iran both finish as the runner-up in their group, they would play each other in the last 32. Should Iran decide to withdraw, they would be the first qualifying team to do so since 1950.

As the schedule currently stands, Iran’s first group fixture is against New Zealand in Los Angeles on 15 June. New Zealand told The Athletic that it is continuing to “monitor the situation” but is making plans to play Iran “until we hear otherwise”.

What about other Middle Eastern teams?

Iraq has a chance to qualify for its first World Cup finals since 1986 but it needs to win a play-off against either Suriname or Bolivia on 31 March – in Mexico. With airspace currently closed over the Middle East, it’s hard to see how the Iraqis can travel to their match.

The Iraqi team coach, Graham Arnold, has called for the play-off to be postponed, and the country’s football chief, Adnan Dirjal, has, has written to Fifa to explain the “difficulty of the journey”. In the meantime, he has made plans for the team to travel Mexico by private plane, according to the BBC.

What else is a concern?

There are worries that Ice officers will be deployed at US World Cup venues, for security purposes. And there is alarm about the wave of violence in Mexico since the death of a cartel boss in Jalisco state. Guadalajara, the state capital, is due to host four games.

Last month, the EU Sports Commissioner, Glenn Micallef, urged Gianni Infantino to “help safeguard fans”, said Politico. He has since asked again as violence escalates in the Middle East but said there has been “no further communication from Fifa”. It’s “legitimate” to seek assurances from a “public security point of view”, particularly as “one of the hosts of this biggest sporting event in the world is party to a war,” he told the news site. “Let’s say there’s room for more clarity.”

Fifa also has “a lot to answer for” on its role with the Trump-backed Board of Peace, said Micallef. It may have pledged $75 million for football infrastructure in Gaza, but Europe would “prefer to partner up” with organisations that “respect the international rules-based order, like Unesco and Unicef” on such sports-related projects.

Safety and security at the World Cup is a “top priority”, said a Fifa spokesperson. We are “confident that efforts being made by Canada, Mexico and the US will ensure a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for everyone involved”.

British businesses are to be offered a £3,000 state bonus for hiring a young person who has been out of work for six months as the number of economically inactive young people nears one million.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said it was part of the government’s plans to “back Britain’s young people” after youth unemployment hit its highest level in more than a decade.

How bad is it?

According to the Office for National Statistics’ latest labour market overview, 14% of Britons aged 18 to 24 were unemployed in the final quarter of 2025, compared with 12.7% in the same period in 2024.

This growth has largely been driven by young people who are “economically inactive”, meaning those who are out of work and not seeking it. The most recent data from the ONS says the number of young people not in employment, education or training (Neet) between October and December 2025 reached 957,000, up from around 800,000 in 2019.

Why is it so hard to find work?

For many of those not in employment or training, “the challenge is not so much a lack of skills or visibility as the dearth of openings in a stagnating labour market”, said the Financial Times. “Young people say they lack work experience and something to talk about to employers,” said Sareena Bains, chief executive of charity Movement to Work. “Those opportunities are becoming few and far between.”

The tough labour landscape has been made worse by the roll-out of AI, which threatens to erase many entry-level jobs.

Business groups have also criticised the government’s decision to raise employer’s national insurance contributions and the youth minimum wage, as well as changes to workers’ rights, all of which could make companies less inclined to take a risk on a newcomer to the workforce over an experienced worker. In February, Huw Pill, the Bank of England’s chief economist, told the Commons Treasury Committee that changes around tax and the national living wage have had a “particular effect on those aged 16 to 18, and 18 to 21”.

Having analysed the effects of setting minimum wage rates by age, Alan Manning from LSE concluded that the evidence is “too weak” to blame youth unemployment on the minimum wage.

What else is to blame?

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has identified a “toxic cocktail” of “rising employment taxes, perverse incentives to claim benefits and a broken migration system”. The think tank’s Wasted Youth report found that businesses are turning to non-EU migrants while a growing number of young Britons are claiming benefits.

Health is another major factor. The share of Neet young people who report having a health condition that limits their ability to work rose from 26% in 2015 to 44% in 2025 – a 70% increase, according to The Health Foundation. This “mirrors trends among young people generally”, said the think tank. “Regardless of whether they are in work or education, 16–24-year-olds today are much more likely to report having a work-limiting health condition than they were in the past”. This increase is “driven primarily by mental health and neurodevelopmental conditions”.

What is being done?

As well as the £3,000 incentive for firms to hire young people out of work for six months, the government has also announced small and medium-sized businesses will get a £2,000 bonus if they take on a young apprentice, and jobs with training subsidised by the state are to be expanded to 22- to 24-year-olds.

Current policies to help Neet young people and expand apprenticeships were “not stacking up to the scale of the challenge”, Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning & Work Institute, told the FT.

A more radical proposal, backed by former home secretary David Blunkett and former chancellor Jeremy Hunt, is a Future Workforce Credit, a £670 million effective tax cut for employers hiring Neets that would cover 30% of their salary. CSJ modelling based on similar interventions suggests the approach would get 120,000 young people into jobs while saving £765 million in tax and welfare spending.

Researchers are calling for stricter regulations on how AI is integrated into children’s toys, after studies found they could be prompted to share everything from political propaganda to information on sexual fetishes.

What kinds of toys are using AI? 

A cuddly toy called Gabbo contains a voice-activated AI chatbot from OpenAI. The manufacturer, Curio, describes Gabbo as a “bright-eyed robot buddy” who is “built for curiosity”. Rival toy Luka is similarly “billed as an AI friend for generation alpha”, said The Guardian, while Miiloo can chat and tell stories in a high-pitched child’s voice.

As well as companionship, some products are pitched to parents as learning tools. A robot toy called Miko 3 is advertised as “The Ultimate Educational Partner for Kids”, and comes with a built-in touchscreen to play a host of Stem-focused games. Equipped with a camera and microphone, it is designed to recognise and remember a child’s face and voice.

What issues have arisen? 

Tests by the Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and NBC News found that Miiloo was able to give “detailed instructions” on how to light a match and how to sharpen a knife. When asked whether Taiwan is a country, the toy, which was manufactured by a Chinese company, lowered its voice and said: “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. That is an established fact.”

Alilo Smart AI Bunny engaged in graphic and detailed discussions of sexual practices, including fetishes and sexual positions and preferences. It advised which tools to use for BDSM and explained how “kink allows people to discover and engage in diverse experiences that bring them joy and fulfilment”.

Other causes for alarm are more subtle. Parents in a newly published Cambridge University study found that children often struggled to converse with Gabbo, because the toy didn’t notice their interruptions, spoke over them, or gave tonally inappropriate responses. When one five-year-old said “I love you” to the toy, it replied: “As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed.”

Such reports add to concerns that interaction with generative AI output could be “confusing” during a “developmental stage where children are learning about social interaction and cues”, said the BBC.

Should there be tighter regulation?

The developmental psychologists who carried out the Cambridge study are calling for AI toys that “talk” with young children to be more tightly regulated. They want to limit how far toys encourage children to befriend or confide in them and provide clearer privacy policies and tighter controls over third party access to AI models.

“A recurring theme during focus groups was that people do not trust tech companies to do the right thing,” said Jenny Gibson, the study’s co-author. So “clear, robust, regulated standards would significantly improve consumer confidence”.

She called for AI companies to revoke access to their platforms if toy manufacturers fail to implement appropriate guidelines and for the introduction of regulations to “ensure children’s psychological safety”.

However, she did not call for a ban on AI integration in toys altogether. “There are other areas of life where we do accept a certain degree of risk in children’s play, like the adventure playground,” she said. “I’d be loath to stop that innovation.”

The academics behind the study recommended that parents keep AI toys in shared spaces where parents and caregivers can supervise interactions, and read privacy policies carefully to understand how data can be used.

A power struggle in the Middle East is rippling across the Red Sea and fuelling Sudan’s bloody civil war.

Fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has “torn the country apart” since 2023, said The Times. Each side is backed by different Gulf countries and “their network of African allies”. Now, growing tension in the Gulf is causing the Sudan conflict to spread.

Violence on Sudan’s borders with Chad and Libya, increased fighting in South Sudan and massive troop mobilisation in neighbouring Ethiopia have been “raising the spectre of more conflicts”, ones marked with “the fingerprints of foreign actors”.

“The war is getting worse, and way more complex because of regional dynamics,” said Sarra Majdoub, a former UN security council expert on Sudan. “I don’t think it’s a civil war any more.”

How are Gulf states involved in Sudan?

“Gulf states have become increasingly prominent in the squabbles, civil wars and inter-country tensions in the Horn of Africa over the past decade,” said Brendon J. Cannon, professor at Khalifa University, on The Conversation.

The UAE has long been accused of supporting the RSF with weapons and funds. Experts believe it uses its ties to neighbouring countries, such as Ethiopia, South Sudan, Libya and Chad, to support the paramilitaries. But Saudi Arabia and Qatar back the SAF, along with Turkey, Egypt and Eritrea. Even Iran has played a role, allegedly supplying Sudan’s army with drones and missiles.

What is their motivation?

The UAE has been “funding proxy groups and wars in Yemen, Libya and Sudan as a way of securing strategic influence and gold assets”, said Nesrine Malik in The Guardian. It has established itself as a “global trading hub in gold”, said Middle East Eye, and Sudan offers “untapped” gold reserves; it is already Africa’s third-largest producer.

Access to Sudan’s ports is also an advantage in the “contest for control of the Red Sea”, Ahmed Soliman, from the Chatham House think tank, told The Times. Almost a third of global container shipping flows through the Suez Canal.

Sudan’s “geostrategic location” explains why “outside powers remain deeply invested”, said Shewit Woldemichael, International Crisis Group’s analyst for Sudan, on Al Jazeera. Sudan is “at the crossroads of the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, the Sahel and North Africa”. For some countries, Sudan’s war is an opportunity to advance their own interests “in a rapidly changing and contested regional order”.

How is the conflict spreading?

The frontier with Chad is “the border to watch”, Majdoub told The Times, “because of cross-border communities and how heavily everyone is militarised”. Chad has closed the border, which experts say has been a major entry point for weapons and foreign fighters for the RSF.

South Sudan, which gained independence in 2011, is also deteriorating back into civil war. Many suspect Sudan’s army has been supplying the breakaway state’s anti-government militias, according to the International Crisis Group.

But “the most worrying theatre for future conflict” is between Ethiopia and Eritrea, said The Times. The two signed a peace agreement in 2022, but Ethiopia has recently sent “tens of thousands of troops” north. Alliances have “crystallised” along the same lines as in Sudan: the UAE and Israel back Ethiopia, while Saudi Arabia and its allies have “thrown their weight behind Eritrea”.

What might happen?

Mounting tensions between Saudi Arabia and the UAE “overshadow” their joint peace proposal for Sudan and risk “merging multiple regional conflicts, with Sudan at the epicentre”, said Woldemichael

On the other hand, the crisis in the Middle East could also “create an opening”. Faced with the “unprecedented security threat” of Iran, the UAE and Saudi Arabia could "find reason to set aside some of their differences, including over Sudan” in the name of regional unity. This could “help revive stalled diplomatic efforts to end the war”.

Gulf states will “likely begin focusing inward on their own security” as the situation in the Middle East deteriorates, said Cannon on The Conversation. ”Sudan’s civil war may last even longer now that Gulf states are focused elsewhere. Neither side in the civil war will have the ability to land a knock-out punch.”

President Donald Trump’s consolidation of power across the federal government continues apace. With it, a similar form of conservative capture has been mirrored across the avenues of mass media in the U.S.

From the rolling public turmoil at The Washington Post and CBS to behind-the-scenes machinations at institutions like The New York Times, huge swaths of mainstream American media have begun embracing a decidedly conservative agenda. These are the media players helping fuel America’s rightward media pivot.

Bari Weiss, CBS

Perhaps the single most-watched media executive of the past year, Substack star turned CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss has marked her meteoric rise to the top of a premier television network with moments of controversy, conspicuous high-profile resignations and declining viewership. The network’s evening news under Weiss “is waving the American flag” and “not apologizing" for the network’s “pro-U.S. editorial stance,” Variety said.

Weiss’ claims to be “improving ‘free speech’ in the news” come as she is also “clearly moving CBS in a more conservative direction,” The Nation said. Weiss was “personally recruited by Paramount Chief Executive David Ellison” to lead CBS’s news operations, said The Los Angeles Times, after she founded the “conservative-friendly digital news site The Free Press.”

Larry and David Ellison, Paramount Skydance

Billionaire father and son duo Larry — founder of Oracle — and David — CEO of Paramount Skydance — Ellison control “one of the world’s largest audiovisual and news conglomerates.” This pair has the ability to “shape Hollywood’s rules” with its production studios and “influence the news” through both CBS and CNN, said El País.

The duo also controls “numerous entertainment channels that allow them to project their worldview,” said El País. Both Ellisons have been “repeated” visitors at Trump’s White House, CNN said. During the Ellisons’ ultimately successful bid to purchase Warner Brothers this past winter, David “offered assurances” to the White House that “if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN, a common target of President Trump’s ire,” The Wall Street Journal said.

Lachlan Murdoch, News Corp.

Scion of the powerful Rupert Murdoch-founded News Corp dynasty, eldest son Lachlan completed his bid to assume control of his father’s empire in September 2025. The move guaranteed the “empire’s various outlets, including Fox News, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, will remain conservative” after 95-year-old Rupert’s eventual death, The New York Times said.

Lachlan is seen as being the “most likely heir to preserve the conservative identity that defines his father’s portfolio” compared to siblings Prue, Liz and James, NPR News said. Still, Lachlan likely won’t seek the “‘kingmaker’ role in Republican political circles” that his father frequented. He’s “kind of a little bit more hands-off” in that respect, said biographer Paddy Manning to NPR in 2022.

Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post

After ushering in The Washington Post’s era of claiming “Democracy dies in the Darkness” during the first Trump administration, billionaire tech oligarch and Post-owner Jeff Bezos has taken a decidedly less antagonistic stance in the regime’s second turn in office. Over the past year, Bezos has seemed to be “pursuing a policy of appeasement” toward MAGA officials, instructing editorial page writers to focus on the “twin pillars of personal liberties and free markets,” The New Yorker said. Bezos’ shift means that Washington, D.C., a city that Democratic presidential candidates “generally carry with around 90% of the vote,” currently has “three conservative voices and no longer has a single liberal newspaper,” said The New Republic.

Brian Calle, LA Weekly

When the Seminal Media investment group purchased LA Weekly in 2017, it quickly installed Brian Calle, a “conservative-leaning former opinion editor,” to lead its new acquisition, said The Wrap. Calle’s tenure began with a series of deep layoffs, prompting a “furious counterattack” by former staffers who “alleged Calle heads a conservative conspiracy” to transform the “historically progressive” publication into “an alt-right rag,” said Columbia Journalism Review.

Calle, during his prior stint atop the editorial page at the Orange County Register, “pushed the paper’s editorial voice to the right,” while his time as VP at the “notoriously right-wing” Claremont Institute suggested his “conservative aims when it comes to the editorial future of LA Weekly,” said Knock LA. “Downplaying” his rightward inclinations is “exactly the opposite” of what Calle should be doing, said the right-leaning National Review in 2018 after he assumed control of the paper. “Prudent conservatism can save the LA Weekly.”

Patrick Soon-Shiong, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, after nixing a planned 2024 endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, justified his decision as righting an “unacceptable” wrong at the paper he purchased in 2018. “As you can see,” Soon-Shiong said during a podcast interview with arch MAGA personality Tucker Carlson, it was “because it’s a left lean, they wrote terrible stories about President Trump.”

Soon-Shiong’s appearance with Carlson came as the billionaire physician and investor “tries to attract more conservative readers to his newspaper,” which he says “has become too liberal,” said Politico. After “unsuccessfully angling for a place” in the president’s first administration, Soon-Shiong has “moved ever closer to Trump,” said Politico separately, “appearing in conservative media and accusing his own newspaper of editorial bias and becoming an ‘echo chamber’ for progressive politics.”

Homeschooling – or elective home education (EHE), as it’s officially known in the UK – has been rising steadily since the 1970s. Before universal education, many children were educated at home, which has always been legal. In the 1970s and 1980s, small numbers of parents started rejecting schools as overly rigid or exam-driven.

More recently, in the 2010s, the number of EHE children more than doubled and has continued to grow since the Covid pandemic. There were 126,000 children in EHE in England during the 2025 autumn term, according to the Department for Education – a rise of nearly 13% on the year before. They’re a tiny fraction of their total cohort (about 1.5%), but critics worry that it’s a sign of a wider crisis in the education system, and that EHE is only very loosely regulated.

Who is allowed to homeschool?

Under the Education Act 1996, all children between the ages of 5 and 16 in England and Wales have to receive a “suitable” full-time education, “either by regular attendance at school or otherwise”. But there’s no legal obligation to enrol a child in school; and all it takes to “deregister” is a letter or email. Local authorities aren’t allowed to carry out inspections or monitor the education parents provide. (Northern Ireland’s authorities have greater oversight powers; in Scotland, parents need the local authority’s consent to deregister; across the UK, parents of children with special educational needs need the school’s consent.) Parents aren’t required to teach the national curriculum, assess progress, or make children sit exams. Local authorities have a legal duty to identify children who aren’t getting an education, but they have little practical ability to do so.

Why are numbers rising?

The Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank believes rising EHE numbers are part of a more general “school engagement crisis”, with similarly rising numbers in absences, suspensions, permanent exclusions and “emotionally-based school avoidance” (also known as “school refusal”). The main reasons, one deputy headteacher told The Guardian, are “Covid, Covid, Covid”. Lockdown gave families a glimpse into the world of home education; as schools reopened, some children found the transition back to the classroom difficult. More than 170,000 children in England missed at least half their school sessions (half days) in 2023/24, which is a record high.

How about special needs provision?

It’s a big factor. “The system is broken and does not cater for a lot of children,” one EHE parent told the BBC. Special educational needs and disabilities (Send) provision is one of the biggest financial burdens on local authorities, costing more than £10 billion a year in England. Even so, it’s widely recognised that schools struggle to make good on their obligations to pupils with special needs, even if those have been officially recognised.

Why are parents doing this?

The modern EHE movement grew out of progressive education theories, and many proponents are interested in “child-centred learning”, “unschooling” and the like, although others take a more structured approach, often provided by specialised organisations. Religion is another motivator for some. There is, however, a worrying lack of data: the Department for Education didn’t start collecting figures until 2022. But, in a recent study of reasons given by parents, 21% said they homeschooled for “philosophical” or “lifestyle” reasons; 16% said they did it for the sake of their child’s mental health; 15% gave “school dissatisfaction” as their reason, including concerns over bullying and poor Send provision. But all of these were outranked by “other”, “unknown” and “no reason given”, which accounted for 40% of parents.

Why is more homeschooling a worry?

Primary schools, especially, are a key part of the social safety net: the wellbeing of EHE children is hard to assess. Sara Sharif, murdered by her father and stepmother in Woking in 2023, for example, had been deregistered. Because there are penalties for persistent absence but none for not going to school at all, there’s a parental incentive for deregistering repeat truants. Parents can avoid fines of up to £2,500, and schools – which are assessed on attendance and exclusion numbers – have been known to encourage this covertly (and illegally). It’s likely that many EHE parents do not have the intention or ability to provide an education at home – which makes it particularly alarming that some of the biggest rises have been seen in areas with high levels of deprivation.

Is it allowed in other countries?

Homeschooling is illegal in China, North Korea and Cuba, and also in less authoritarian countries such as Sweden and Germany. France has historically allowed it only in highly exceptional circumstances, and the rules were tightened still further in 2021 with legislation designed to combat “Islamist separatism”. In most countries it’s a tiny minority interest that the state either regulates or turns a blind eye to.

The main outliers are the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK, which recognise homeschooling as a parental right, and where social movements advocate it. The US is the world leader: 3.4% of children – around four million – are homeschooled. Religion plays an important part: 53% of parents cite the need for religious instruction (typically in evangelical Protestantism) as a key motivation, and the main advocacy group, the Home School Legal Defence Association, has close ties to the Christian Right.

Right-wing scepticism about “government schools” also plays a part, but so do worries about school shootings and racial inequality. US homeschoolers are still overwhelmingly white, although there was a marked increase of its incidence in Black, Latino and Asian-American households during the Covid pandemic.

How do homeschooled children perform?

Professionals agree that EHE can work well if parents have the time, resources and ability – but not all of them do. It's “like rolling dice”, an EHE officer told The Sunday Times. Reliable studies of educational outcomes are thin on the ground, since they’re mostly produced by advocacy groups. The Department for Education doesn’t collect data on the attainment of EHE children, and so hasn’t produced an assessment. However, it notes that a 2009 inquiry found that 22% of home-educated 16- to 18-year-olds in England weren’t in education, employment or training, compared with a national average of some 5%.

What is the government doing?

Successive inquiries have called for an official register of EHE children (none currently exists). The inquiry into the Sharif case called for safeguarding checks on the homes of deregistered children. Both these measures are included in the education bill that’s currently going through Parliament, along with a requirement that parents of children already deemed “at risk” will need the local authority’s consent to switch to EHE. However, EHE advocates are lobbying intensively for the bill to be watered down, arguing that it infringes their rights as parents.

Inflation is expected to rise again as the conflict in the Middle East intensifies. The cost of living measure had been falling back towards the Bank of England’s 2% target before the US and Israeli began their air strikes on Iran.

Falling inflation had boosted hopes of more interest rate cuts this year, but analysts have “quickly changed tune” as rising oil prices caused by the conflict threaten to push up prices generally, said The Independent.

The war has “consequences that extend far beyond the Middle East”, said the BBC, as the region plays a “key role in global energy supplies and shipping routes”. That could mean higher inflation, pushing up heating bills and the cost of supermarket shopping in the UK.

Save money on transport

“Drivers are continuing to feel the financial impact of the current conflict,” said the RAC. The average cost of unleaded petrol has risen to 139p per litre this week and diesel has reached 155p – the highest price since May 2024.

It may be worth trying to “cut commuting costs”, such as by sharing journeys, using public transport, cycling or walking, said Chase.

Consider fixing your energy bill

Wholesale gas prices are “spiking”, said MoneySavingExpert, which could push up UK energy bills. Those who are “risk averse” may want to choose a fixed-rate tariff now, said the website’s Martin Lewis, or if things settle, “there is always the chance fixes may get cheaper again soon”.

Consider your food shop

High energy and petrol prices also influence the price of fertilising crops, manufacturing and transporting products to supermarket shelves, said ITV. All of these make a difference to “how much our food costs”.

It is important not to panic buy, but you can save money by budgeting, looking out for coupons and special offers, said Chase. Non-perishable items such as rice, pasta and canned goods “often come with a lower per-unit cost when bought in larger quantities”.

Review your finances

The war in Iran and surrounding Gulf states is already pushing up swap rates, which is causing lenders to reprice mortgage rates upwards.

Average mortgage rates have increased to above 5% this week. So if you need to refinance or get a mortgage soon, you should “get your skates on”, said Claer Barrett in the Financial Times.

The conflict is also having an impact on financial markets, but rather than “watching your portfolio shrink on a smartphone app”, remember that you are investing for the long term and taking some investment risk can provide “the best chance of beating inflation”.

You can also “check how your savings are doing against inflation”, said Legal & General, as it may be time to switch as the rate rises, or if your returns “aren’t keeping up and are maybe even losing value”.

Donald Trump accused Tehran of “making us look a bunch of fools” and said he would “go in and take” an island from Iran. But this threat wasn’t made in 2026. Trump said it in 1988.

In an interview with The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee nearly 40 years ago, the now US president raged against the Iranians, saying: “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island.”

Situated northwest of the Strait of Hormuz, the strategically important shipping route in the Gulf, Kharg Island has long been seen as Tehran’s Achilles’ heel. Grabbing it today could “let Trump beat Iran without sending a single soldier”, said The Telegraph.

What is Kharg Island?

Roughly 15 nautical miles from the Iranian mainland, this small coral outcrop is widely regarded by Iranians as the “Forbidden Island”. It is just five miles long and three miles wide.

Beyond its “imposing steel fences and military watchtowers” is a “pristine landscape” where “millennia of diverse human history quietly coexist”, said Al Jazeera. It is also home to the “beating heart of Iran’s modern energy empire”.

It has history with the US. When Iranian militants kidnapped 52 US diplomats in 1979, advisers to President Jimmy Carter suggested seizing Kharg but the plan was rejected as being too inflammatory. In 2016, 10 US marines were held after straying into Iranian waters near the island.

Why is it important?

It processes 90% of the nation’s total oil exports, handling approximately 950 million barrels a year. So if the US captured the island, it could cause a huge problem for Iran’s economy for years to come.

“Seizing” Kharg Island would “cut off Iran’s oil lifeline, which is crucial for the regime”, Petras Katinas, from the Royal United Services Institute, told The Telegraph. It could be used as a bargaining chip as oil exports make up nearly 40% of the Iranian government’s budget, so this would “give the US leverage during negotiations”, regardless of “which regime is in power after the military operation ends”.

The move “would be reminiscent” of the US intervention in Venezuela, when it “effectively took control of the country’s oil sector”, oil analyst Tamas Varga told CNBC.

So why hasn’t Trump seized it?

Taking the island would make American and Israeli troops vulnerable to attacks by Iranian forces. In the longer term, it would damage any future regime’s chances of managing the economy, something Washington might be keen to avoid.

Neil Quilliam, from the Chatham House think tank, told The Independent it is “unlikely” Trump would take over the territory. Previous US presidents have “steered away from Kharg understanding its strategic importance to global oil markets”.

But if Trump did control Kharg Island, he could “pressurise the existing regime into compliance”, or “all-out collapse”, forcing any new government to “toe Washington’s line” if it wanted to “regain sovereignty over oil exports”, said The Telegraph.

Social media posts appeared last month calling for “red v blue” wars between schools, but instead of provoking fights between students, the posts appear to have made a deeper impact on their worried parents, leading experts to suggest practising an online strategy known as critical ignoring.

It’s a concept that experts are “increasingly teaching”, Sander Van Der Linden, a professor of social psychology, told the BBC, and it “will become more important in the face of AI-generated slop, where sometimes it’s better to just ignore low-quality stuff”.

What is critical ignoring?

It’s a behavioural strategy for managing information overload by consciously choosing to filter out low-quality, distracting, or manipulative content. People look for clues that allow them to ignore a post. While critical thinking analyses information, critical ignoring decides what to analyse in the first place, serving as a crucial filter.

Critical thinking is not enough “in a world of information overabundance and gushing sources of disinformation”, wrote Ralph Hertwig, Anastasia Kozyreva, Sam Wineburg and Stephan Lewandowsky on The Conversation.

The digital world “contains more information than the world’s libraries combined”, so “critically thinking through all information and sources we come across” would “utterly paralyse us”.

Also, “investing critical thinking in sources that should have been ignored in the first place” results in “attention merchants and malicious actors” getting what they wanted: “our attention”.

Doesn’t AI help with this?

To an extent. AI chatbots can help people understand what’s true and untrue on the internet, but they are tools, rather than perfect judges of truth.

ChatGPT has “introduced a new temptation” – the “feeling that I can get a clean answer to everything, instantly”, said Tom’s Guide. But this is where things “get tricky” because ChatGPT is “so fluent, so confident, so fast, it can make ‘done’ feel like ‘true’”, and “‘sounds right’ feel like ‘verified’ – even when it’s not”.

So it’s “up to us, as individuals, to stop ingesting the pink slime of AI slop, the forever chemicals of outrage bait and the microplastics of misinformation-for-profit”, said The Wall Street Journal. Critical ignoring is a widely recommended strategy for this.

But how do I do it?

The “key word” is “critical”, said Psychology Today, because it doesn’t mean “just ignoring everything”. Rather you should look quickly for clues that suggest the types of information most likely to be misinformation or disinformation.

The clues include signs that it’s polarising content, that it “appeals to intuition or common sense”, instead of “including facts or evidence”. Another red flag is if it doesn’t include sources, or those it does don’t seem credible. Does it seem to have been released “as a distraction”, or does it promote “the threat of a bogeyman or a scapegoat”?

Then there’s “lateral reading”, a more time-consuming strategy which “involves opening up new browser tabs to search for information” about the “organisation or individual behind a site” before “diving into its contents”, said The Conversation. Also, it’s always a good idea to not “feed the trolls”.

“Remember that your attention is a scarce resource”, said The Wall Street Journal, and “decide how much time you want to spend on screens in advance, then set a timer.”

A practice called “self-nudging” includes removing “distracting and irresistible notifications”, or setting “specific times in which messages can be received”, thus “creating pockets of time for concentrated work or socialising”, said The Conversation.

Or you can just “ask one question“ before engaging, said Tom’s Guide. “Would I care about this tomorrow?” If not, you can simply “move on”.

AI is losing its stock. More investors are opting to put their money into industries that are less likely to be affected by the technology and selling off shares of companies that are more likely to be impacted by AI. While this may not become a long-term investment choice, it points to skepticism about whether artificial intelligence truly benefits the economy.

What’s HALO trading?

“HALO” stands for “heavy assets, low obsolescence.” This means investing in “businesses less vulnerable to being supplanted by AI,” including companies operating “pipelines, utilities, transportation infrastructure, factories and ports,” said Bloomberg. Fast-food restaurants and commodity companies are included as well. These are companies that “you cannot type something in a prompt and disrupt,” Josh Brown, the chief executive at Ritholtz Wealth Management who coined the term, said to The Wall Street Journal.

HALO trading also goes hand-in-hand with AI scare trading, defined as selling “all things AI-linked,” said Bloomberg. Two specific developments are causing the rise of scare trading. The first is the concern that companies will lose valuation after announcing they are spending money on AI infrastructure, and the second is the fear that AI will “severely disrupt entire industries because AI agents will be able to replace white collar workers, shrinking the workforce and, by extension, consumer spending.”

AI scare trading has been “on a bender this year, steamrolling entire industries based on the flimsiest of evidence that the technology is coming for them,” said Axios. HALO trading, on the other hand, is a more recent occurrence and is why “many real-world sectors are outperforming this year, even as the overall market and especially tech stocks have floundered,” said CNBC. The two “top-performing sectors are energy and materials, which are surging more than 23% and 15%, respectively.”

What’s the future of investing?

HALO trading may be a temporary trend or “another iteration of the jitters that have periodically rippled through markets since the AI investing boom began,” said the Journal. Many investors are trading “on the expectation that AI will eat away at future revenue streams rather than current ones.” Much of the trading “has felt very whiplash-y,” Lisa Shalett, the chief investment officer of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, said to the Journal. We “don’t have any real idea” who the AI “losers are going to be.”

There are some recent signs that HALO trading has been decreasing. Tech shares have already “regained some ground this past week, with the Nasdaq besting the Dow industrials,” and stock values went up “after the news that the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down” President Donald Trump’s global tariffs, said the Journal. However, many HALO stocks “have room to run after years of underperformance, can benefit from easier monetary policy and fiscal stimulus, and could even realize improved margins from AI,” said CNBC.

What’s certain is that the “choppy trading of the past few weeks,” along with “lingering concerns that big tech companies are overspending to get ahead in a technological arms race,” indicates a “kind of evolution for the AI investing frenzy” in which investors are “more discerning,” said the Journal. A company’s previous success is not a good enough reason to continue investing in it.

“We are in a new chapter, and I think that chapter is going to be defined by companies proving” their longevity, said Jed Ellerbroek, a portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management, to the Journal. “Hype isn’t cutting it anymore.”

Former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams is “as culpable” for IRA bombings on the UK mainland “as the individuals who planted and detonated the devices”, the High Court in London heard yesterday.

Three men injured in IRA attacks in London are bringing a civil case against Adams, who has long denied being a member of the IRA or participating in its operations during the Troubles. He arrived at the Royal Courts of Justice wearing a bulletproof vest.

A lawyer representing the three claimants said they planned to demonstrate Adams was “intrinsically involved” in the decision-making that led to the bombings.

What is the claimants’ case?

Adams, 77, is being sued by three men who were injured in the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, and attacks on London’s Docklands and Manchester’s Arndale Centre in 1996.

In her opening statement, Anne Studd, representing the claimants, told the court that Adams was “directly responsible for and complicit” in the group’s terror attacks in the UK. She said the claimants would make the case that Adams “was an instrumental force” in the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland and the “ArmaLite and the ballot box” strategy of combining legitimate political activity with paramilitary violence.

While “there is no doubt that the defendant contributed to the peace in Northern Ireland”, the claimants will allege “he also contributed to the war”, she said.

On day one of the trial, the court heard that Bill Clinton, who was US president at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, believed there was “credible evidence” that Adams was involved at “the highest level” in the IRA in the 1990s.

What has Adams said?

In his opening submission, Adams’ lawyer, Edward Craven, told the court that Adams “emphatically, unequivocally and categorically” denies being involved in the attacks or being a member of the IRA, and blamed suggestions to the contrary on “people with an axe to grind”.

Adams, who will testify next week, has promised to “robustly challenge” what he described as “unsubstantiated hearsay statements”. Speaking outside the High Court after the first day of the trial, he said: “The only thing that I am guilty of is being an Irish republican committed to ending British rule in our country and seeking to unite the people of Ireland on the basis of freedom, equality, peace and solidarity.”

Last year, Adams won a defamation action against the BBC over a 2016 programme that claimed he had sanctioned the murder of an MI5 informant in 2006. During the four-week trial that examined his alleged membership of the IRA, he insisted under oath that joining the group was “not a path that I took”. The jury at Dublin’s High Court found that the BBC had not acted in good faith or in a fair and reasonable way. It awarded Adams €100,000 (£84,000) in damages.

Because the current High Court case is a civil rather than a criminal trial, a verdict will be decided by the judge “on the basis of probabilities”, rather than the higher “beyond reasonable doubt” threshold applied in a criminal court. If Adams loses, he will have to pay symbolic “vindicatory” damages of £1 each to the three claimants.

Economic abuse, a form of coercive control, plays a part in 51% of domestic abuse-related deaths in England and Wales. And, every 19 days, a victim of economic abuse loses her life, according to new research.

These findings are a “wake-up call”, said Surviving Economic Abuse, the charity behind the research. “Long overlooked” in standard risk assessments and “misunderstood by agencies that could have intervened”, economic abuse must now be “recognised as a serious and potentially fatal form of domestic abuse”.

What is economic abuse?

It’s a legally recognised form of domestic abuse, where one person – usually a partner or ex-partner – has control over another person’s access to money. This can include taking over the victim’s earnings, spending, bank accounts and credit cards, and often results in the building up of debts in the victim’s name. It can include controlling access to transport, property, food, clothing or technology – restricting the victim’s ability to work and stay connected. In some cases, it can also involve damaging belongings or refusing to contribute to household costs.

Last year, the BBC reported cases of economic abuse that included “crashing a car deliberately, taking control of benefit payments and threatening to share explicit images unless money is handed over”. One in six women in the UK has experienced economic abuse by a current or former partner, according to SEA, but many victims do not recognise it as abuse. Even if they do, they have often become so isolated by their abuser that they don’t feel able to talk about it. “It rarely happens in isolation” and is usually accompanied by physical, sexual and psychological abuse.

The reality of economic abuse can make it even more difficult for women to leave an abusive relationship. “They’re very scared to leave because of the financial side that holds them back,” MSP Pam Gosal told Holyrood magazine. Abused women she has tried to help often didn’t know what was in their name financially, what they could lose or what liabilities they could be left with. “You don’t know anything because you never, ever controlled the finances in a relationship.”

How does it contribute to deaths?

Although it is not a physical form of abuse, economic abuse can trap victims in dangerous situations, and “be an indication of escalating risk from a perpetrator”, said the SEA report.

And yet, the report found, agencies often missed opportunities to spot dangers linked to economic abuse. In over half of the domestic abuse-related deaths analysed in the report, economic abuse “was present”, but many of the women experiencing economic abuse were “failed” by those who “should have been there to help them”. Either because they missed the signs of economic abuse or because they did not understand the risk of this abuse, agencies “did not respond as they could have done”.

This is particularly noteworthy in the cases of victims to went on to take their own lives. Women who had experienced economic abuse from an intimate partner were significantly more likely to commit suicide than other abused women whose cases the report analysed. Risk assessments and safety planning should better recognise that “the nature of post-separation economic abuse (where it may start, continue or escalate after a victim has fled) can leave victims feeling hopeless”.

What can be done?

Economic abuse should be integrated into the government’s new guidance on best practice for domestic abuse risk management, recommends SEA. It also recommends specialist training on economic abuse for professionals involved in combating violence against women and girls.

This form of abuse “must be recognised, understood and acted upon across every agency, every review and every response”, said Sam Smethers, chief executive of SEA. “We cannot wait for another woman’s life to be lost.”

Long before the open warfare of recent months, the US and Iran have been locked into decades of low-level conflict. Since the revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has considered the US the “Great Satan” (Israel is dubbed the “Little Satan”). The leaders of the new Shia Muslim theocracy thought of America as an intruder in the Middle East, and an obstacle to the mullahs' goal of spreading their Islamic revolution. For decades, their political speeches and sermons have ended with the chant, Marg bar Amrika, “Death to America”. The US, for its part, has seen Iran as a fanatical and implacable foe.

What are the roots of the animosity?

Iran's antipathy towards the US is rooted in the events of 1953, when the CIA – together with Britain's MI6 – orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Considered a hero by many Iranians, Mossadegh had nationalised the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The US, fearing communist expansion into Iran, joined the UK in funding regime opponents, ensuring that their ally the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – previously a constitutional monarch – was installed as head of state. British and US access to oil was restored. But as a result, the Shah was considered a puppet of the West by many Iranians; he used an often brutal secret police force to keep Leftist and religious opposition groups in check.

How did the Iranian revolution come about?

The Shah's regime was corrupt and dysfunctional. And amid a sharp economic contraction in the late 1970s, protests paralysed the country. The protesters included secular left-wingers and nationalists as well as Islamists, but Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a fundamentalist cleric at that time exiled in France, emerged as the movement's undisputed figurehead.

The unrest forced the Shah to flee in January 1979; within weeks, Khomeini had returned. On 11 February, Khomeini assumed leadership and established the theocratic government that still rules. President Jimmy Carter gave the Shah permission to enter the US for cancer treatment, and resisted the new regime's demands for his return to stand trial. On 4 November 1979, enraged Iranian students broke into the US embassy in Tehran, taking 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days.

How did the US react?

The hostage crisis set the tone for post-revolution relations. President Carter ordered a rescue mission, which went wrong, resulting in a mid-air crash in Iran that killed eight US servicemen. Carter severed diplomatic relations, and although the hostages were released in 1981, relations have remained frozen ever since.

In the 1980s, a series of proxy struggles began. During the Iran-Iraq War, the US actively supported Iraq as the lesser of two evils, fearing Iranian victory and hegemony in the Gulf. In 1983, after a US peacekeeping mission in Lebanon turned into an intervention backing the country's Christian government, two truck bombs killed 241 American service personnel. A Shia militia mentored by Iran, Islamic Jihad, claimed responsibility, and the US designated Iran a “state sponsor of terror”. In 1988, the US navy mistakenly shot down an Iranian passenger jet in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people on board. It was during this period that Iran decided to develop nuclear weapons, which the US regarded as a grave threat to its main regional ally, Israel.

Have relations always been bad?

After 9/11, more moderate elements in Iran's government tried to advance dialogue, hoping to make common cause against al-Qa'eda and the Taliban. But in early 2002, President George W. Bush labelled Iran as part of the “axis of evil”, and began plans for regime change in Iraq; Iran, US officials suggested, would be next. In response, Iran formed an alliance that it called the “axis of resistance”, comprising Syria's government, the Shia militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories (which it had funded since the 1990s).

The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 initially alarmed Iran's leaders, but as the occupation fell into disarray, it became clear that it was a great opportunity for them. Iranian-aligned Shia militias and politicians soon became a leading power in Iraq – their fighters killed hundreds of US soldiers with improvised bombs. When President Obama took office in 2009, he sought to calm tensions.

In 2015, US-led negotiators and Iran's President Rouhani reached a deal to curtail Iran's nuclear programme. Iran agreed to slash the number of its uranium centrifuges (which turn uranium into a form usable in nuclear bombs) and submit to inspections. In return, sanctions would be lifted and more than $50 billion in frozen Iranian assets held abroad would be released. The deal was designed to prevent Iran from enriching large amounts of uranium until at least 2031. But it was dumped in 2018 by President Trump, who complained that it only limited Iran's nuclear activities until 2031 and didn't address the country's support for terrorism abroad. Instead, sanctions were tightened.

Why has the US attacked now?

The White House perceives Iran to be weak. US-led sanctions have helped to create the deepest economic crisis in its recent history. Major popular unrest flared up late last year and was put down with massive loss of life (perhaps as many as 30,000 killed). The 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel are also a crucial factor. Though Iran is not thought to have orchestrated them, its role as a patron of Hamas convinced many in the US and Israel of the need for military action; and the great damage done to Hamas and Hezbollah by Israel since has removed a deterrent to attacking Iran. The 12-day war on Iran in June last year, successfully prosecuted by Israel and the US, suggested that it could be attacked with relative impunity.

What about relations with Israel?

Before the 1979 revolution, Iran mostly maintained good relations with Israel. It was the second Muslim-majority country after Turkey to recognise the Jewish state, became its major oil supplier and cooperated on weapons programmes. Even so, anti-Zionist sentiment was widespread in Iran, stoked by its Shia clerics. And after the revolution, hostility to Israel became central to the ideology of the new Islamic Republic: Ayatollah Khomeini severed diplomatic ties, portrayed Israel as a Western colonial outpost and illegitimate occupier of Muslim land, and called for its elimination. (When Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, Iran cut off diplomatic relations with Cairo.)

Ideological opposition turned to proxy confrontation through Iran's support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and for Hezbollah, which fought Israel during its long occupation of southern Lebanon. Israel, in turn, has opposed Western rapprochement with Iran and carried out covert operations against its nuclear programme, including assassinations of scientists. Although no evidence shows Iranian involvement in planning the 7 October attacks, its leadership praised Hamas's fighters and confirmed Tehran's support “until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem”.

Hundreds of thousands of Britons have been stranded across the Middle East by the Iran conflict and many more could see holidays cancelled due to flight restrictions and airport closures.

However, people who purchased travel insurance to protect against such disruption might be out of luck.

Travel insurance often excludes protection against war, said the Daily Express, so “you may not be covered by your holiday insurance at all”.

How travel insurance works

Travel insurance typically covers a “range of possibilities”, said MoneyHelper, such as lost luggage, medical care and disruptions including delays and cancellations.

But unless you have a specialist policy, most standard travel insurance won’t include losses linked to a war, “meaning disruption to your trip”, said the Association of British Insurers. Extra costs you may have, such as food and hotels, may not be covered.

There may be some protections if government guidance on a destination changes after you booked, such as if the Foreign Office advises against travelling to a country.

If the guidance changed after you booked, said Axa, travel insurance coverage “may apply” and your policy may cover you for getting home or let you cancel your trip and get a refund for flights, hotel bookings and tours.

Travel disruption rights explained

It is always worth checking with your airline or travel provider when there is disruption such as delays or cancellations before claiming on your travel insurance. Most travel insurance policies “don’t cover claims if the losses can be recovered from another source”, said the Financial Ombudsman Service.

As the Foreign Office guidance changed on the Gulf, customers who have already booked have the right to cancel a package holiday.

If you are stuck in a destination such as Dubai or Abu Dhabi, package holiday operators “have an obligation to book you on the next available flight home”, said The Sun.

Airlines typically have to pay compensation if they are at fault for a delay. But those flying in and out of the UK and European Union, or with a non-UK or non-EU airline, should not expect redress, as the airlines are not at fault for the outbreak of war. However, there is a duty of care for airlines to look after affected passengers. This means they should help with rearranging flights and provide food, drink and accommodation.

But don’t rush to take a refund from your airline while you are stranded as “it manages down the problem at little cost to the carrier”, travel expert Simon Calder said in The Independent. You are better off hanging on to your ticket and “hope that eventually they come up with an alternative journey for you”.

It is also worth checking if the local destination is providing support. The United Arab Emirates has publicly said that it is “bearing accommodation and hosting costs for affected passengers” amid the Iran conflict, said Condé Nast Traveller, so many travellers “won’t need to pay for hotels at all” and won’t need to claim on insurance. However, you may still need your insurance for “extra expenses” such as missed onward connections or medical costs.

Nigel Farage has called for police to patrol polling stations on election days to crack down on family voting.

It would be “very easy” to address the issue, said the Reform UK leader – councils and returning officers in polling stations must enforce “the very specific legislation” banning the practice, with police officers making sure “the law is being obeyed”.

What is family voting?

Family voting is where one person fills out or influences the ballot paper for other family members, instead of each voter making an independent choice. The male head of a household is commonly the family member who directs or completes the vote for others.

This is different to Demeny voting, named after Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny, which is sometimes referred to as family voting. It is a form of proxy voting that allows parents or guardians to vote on behalf of their children.

Why is it controversial?

Electoral observers consider family voting a violation of democratic standards because it breaks the secret ballot principle, limits individual political freedom and often disproportionately affects women and younger voters.

When a husband enters a voting booth with his wife or children and marks their ballots for them or tells them exactly how to vote, even if they agree with the choice, the practice still breaks election rules, which usually require each person to vote privately.

In 2023, the United Kingdom passed the Ballot Secrecy Act, which made it an offence for a person to “accompany an elector into a polling booth; or position near an elector inside a polling station with the intention of influencing how they cast their vote”.

Being “coerced” by a relative to vote a particular way is “ugly” and “anathema to British values of open democracy and individual liberty”, said Khadija Khan in the Daily Mail. But Farage’s complaints are “all part of a well-practiced strategy of screaming foul whenever he is defeated in a democratic election”, said Byline Times.

Where does it happen?

Family voting has been documented by electoral observers in parts of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Balkans, and some Middle Eastern and African countries.

Democracy Volunteers, a non-profit group of election observers, said it had witnessed 32 incidents of family voting in the Gorton and Denton by-election last week, in 15 of the 22 polling stations it observed. This was an “extremely high” number, it said.

But the organisation “did not provide any information about the people involved”, said Full Fact. In response, a spokesperson for the acting returning officer in the by-election said: “Polling station staff are trained to look out for any evidence of undue influence on voters. No such issues have been reported today.”

And when David Bull, chair of Reform UK, was asked by the BBC if alleged “unprecedented levels of illegal family voting” had changed the result in Gorton and Denton, he replied: “If I’m being candid, probably not”, said Byline Times.

Democracy Volunteers said that postal votes are being undermined by family voting. It recommended either allowing “advanced in-person voting to take place in some locations” or for home voting to be supervised, to avoid disenfranchising voters who cannot reach polling stations.

Britain will deploy HMS Dragon and helicopters with anti-drone capabilities in Cyprus, Keir Starmer has confirmed.

In a post on X, Starmer said the UK was “fully committed to the security of Cyprus and British military personnel based there”. The prime minister said he had spoken with the president of Cyprus “to let him know that we are sending helicopters with counter-drone capabilities and HMS Dragon is to be deployed to the region”.

The deployment of extra protection follows criticism of the UK by Cyprus following a drone strike on the RAF base of Akrotiri, which forced locals to flee.

The government in Nicosia will make a diplomatic complaint and hasn’t ruled out renegotiating the status of British bases there after the attack “effectively dragged the island into the “unfolding crisis” in the Middle East, said Politico.

What is the UK’s history in Cyprus?

In 1878, Cyprus and its population of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots was transferred from the Ottoman Empire to British control. The Greek Cypriot majority wanted the removal of British rule and union with Greece, while Turkish Cypriots favoured continued British rule or partition.

In 1955, government and military installations and personnel were attacked by Greek Cypriot fighters. British reinforcements arrived and began a series of operations against the Greek Cypriots. By 1957, most of the Greek Cypriot leaders had been killed or captured and in 1959, the UK agreed for Cyprus to become an independent republic.

In the following decades, the island was “plagued with violence” between its Greek and Turkish communities, said the Imperial War Museum. In 1974, Turkey invaded and divided the island between Turkish Northern Cyprus and the Greek Cypriot Republic of Cyprus. It remains divided to this day.

So from imperial outpost to diplomatic headache, the Mediterranean island has occupied a significant place in British foreign policy. In 2010, a UK government minister said it was a “scandal and a tragedy” that the EU included a divided capital and divided island. A Greek Cypriot leader remarked that Britain bore much of the blame.

Why are British bases there?

When Britain “relinquished control” over Cyprus in 1960 a “condition of the handover” was that Britain retained two Sovereign Base areas: Akrotiri and Dhekelia, said The Telegraph. They cover “roughly 3% of the island” and are among the 14 surviving British Overseas Territories, such as Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.

The bases “enable the UK to maintain a permanent military presence at a strategic point in the Eastern Mediterranean”, said the British Army. RAF Akrotiri is an “important staging post” for military aircraft and its communication facilities are an “important element” of the UK’s global links. The Akrotiri base has been used in the past for military operations in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Why is Cyprus angry?

The drone attack was the first time one of the UK bases on Cyprus has been hit since a rocket attack by Libyan ⁠militants in 1986.

Expressing “dissatisfaction” towards Britain over the latest attack, a Cypriot government spokesperson, Konstantinos Letymbiotis, said that despite assurances to Nicosia, “there was no clear clarification” from Keir Starmer that the UK’s Cyprus bases “would under no circumstances be used for any purpose other than humanitarian reasons”.

Asked whether the Cypriot government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU Council, will seek to renegotiate the status of the bases, Letymbiotis said “in this context, we are not ruling anything out”.

A new single-pill HIV treatment has proved as effective as regimens of up to 11 tablets a day in suppressing the virus in hard-to-treat patients. It’s “a potential breakthrough for a growing cohort of long-term HIV survivors” who are resistant to standard treatments and struggle to keep to complex medication schedules, said the Financial Times.

Along with the rollout of a twice-yearly jab to prevent HIV infection, this represents “the latest advance in a scientific ‘golden age’ for treating the virus” – even as wealthy countries cut their funding.

How well does the new single-dose pill work?

Researchers recruited, from 15 countries, more than 550 people living with HIV for whom conventional therapies were no longer effective. They had a median age of 60, and many had other health conditions. Their HIV treatment involved taking between three and 11 pills a day. They were randomly assigned to continue their treatment or switch to the new single pill.

Almost 96% of those who switched continued to suppress the virus, without new signs of drug resistance, according to the study results published in The Lancet. That is a similar rate to the control group who stayed on their more complicated multi-pill treatment. But the “switchers” found the new regimen easier to follow, and experienced a decrease in some side effects, such as elevated cholesterol levels.

The findings are “game-changing” for people who have lived with the virus for decades and have conditions “associated with ageing”, said study lead Chloe Orkin, a professor of infection and inequities at Queen Mary University of London. “The participants found the regimen far more convenient.”

The pill, a combined dose of established HIV drugs bictegravir and lenacapavir, could be “transformative” for those who struggle to access clinics because of age or poverty, said Anne Aslett of the Elton John Aids Foundation. “The challenge now” is to ensure this treatment breakthrough is “complemented by political will, funding and community engagement”, she told the Financial Times.

How do the HIV-preventive injections work?

A twice-yearly jab of lenacapavir was shown in 2024 clinical trials to be 100% effective at preventing new HIV infections.

An injection like this has a clear advantage over daily prevention pills in poorer countries, where patients – particularly young women – might struggle to access clinics or feel stigmatised for seeking treatment. Last year, the World Health Organization recommended it; the director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described it as “the next best thing” to an HIV vaccine.

There was initial concern that the drug would not be affordable in poorer countries. In the US, it was launched with a price tag of more than $28,000 (£21,000). But last year, manufacturer Gilead granted licences to six manufacturers to produce generic versions of the drug in 120 low and middle-income countries at a cost of $40 (£29) per patient per year. This is a “historic breakthrough”, said Philippe Duneton of the Unitaid global-health initiative.

Meanwhile, in October, another long-acting HIV-preventive injection, cabotegravir (given six times a year), became available on the NHS in England and Wales. (It has already been made available in Scotland). This is a “cutting-edge treatment”, said Health Secretary Wes Streeting. “For vulnerable people who are unable to take other methods of HIV prevention, this represents hope.”

What other progress has been made?

Promising results have been seen with stem cell transplantation. Seven people have been declared HIV-free after receiving a stem cell transplant – and, significantly, two of them had received stem cells that were not actually HIV-resistant.

This “upends our understanding of what’s required” for a cure, said New Scientist. If HIV-resistant cells aren’t necessary to destroy the virus, then scientists have a wider potential pool of stem cell donors, and greater options in their search for an effective HIV cure.

Other trials are exploring ways to cure HIV by genetically editing immune cells.

People “hum into their phones, gargle with theatrical enthusiasm, dunk their faces into bowls of ice water, and poke at their ears”, said Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt on The Conversation. They are all trying to “activate” their vagus nerve, the new “favourite body part” of the internet.

Social media is abuzz with the transformational potential of vagus-nerve “training”. Stimulate it and reset it, wellness influencers claim, and you can improve your mental and physical wellbeing.

What is the vagus nerve? 

It’s the longest cranial nerve in your body. Its name derives from the Latin for “wandering” because its two branches rove through your entire body – travelling from the brainstem down into your neck, chest and abdomen, connecting to the heart, lungs, gut and the liver. It constantly relays information from your brain to your organs and back again, and is often described as an internal communication superhighway or our body’s intranet.

How important is it? 

As “signal updater” between brain and body, the vagus nerve is a part of the autonomic nervous system that regulates processes you don’t consciously control, such as heart rate, breathing and digestion. Within that system, it has a key role in the parasympathetic response – sometimes known as “rest and digest” – slowing heart rate and decreasing blood pressure. Put simply, when you feel calm, safe and relaxed, your vagus nerve is helping to make that happen.

The theory is that your body can sometimes get “stuck” or spend too long in the opposite sympathetic response – known as “fight or flight” – and stimulating the vagus nerve can prompt a return to calm.

Can stimulating it make you healthier?

Implanted devices that directly stimulate the vagus nerve have long been used to treat neurological conditions like epilepsy and treatment-resistant depression. More recently, trials of transcutaneous devices, often placed around the neck or in the outer ear, have shown promising results in treating conditions including diabetes, Crohn’s disease, fibromyalgia and irritable bowel syndrome.

This kind of non-invasive vagus-nerve stimulation (VNS) first entered the “mainstream consciousness” as a “biohacking tool” in the 2025 Netflix documentary “Don’t Die”, said Vogue. The film followed US tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s “longevity journey” and the “anti-ageing” crusader is shown wearing a VNS gadget that, he said, helps him manage stress and get to sleep.

From then on, the vagus nerve got “the trendy treatment”, said The Independent. Wearable devices swiftly appeared on the market that were said to enable VNS by sending a “specific level” of electrical current through the nerve that will “wake up” or “reset the system”, much like “rebooting a computer”.

I am cautious about claims that the vagus nerve can be “switched on like a light”, Arshad Majid, a professor of cerebrovascular neurology at the University of Sheffield, told Edwards and Baumgardt on The Conversation. There’s “not an on-off button” that these devices, or other DIY methods, like humming or gargling, can trigger. And, in some cases, trying to stimulate the nerve can “trigger headaches and even depression”.

That said, we are running various clinical trials on non-invasive VNS devices, and the “next few years of research” could “reshape” how we treat a range of conditions. But you should “maybe hold off on aggressively poking your ear” for now.

Many graduates who took out student loans feel they got “an incomprehensibly unfair deal that they did not understand and now cannot escape”, says John Blake, formerly of the Office for Students. The problems are worst for the estimated 5.8 million people who took out “Plan 2” loans, the main scheme from late 2012 to mid 2023. While the interest rate on other loans is set at the Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation, Plan 2 loans are charged at RPI plus up to 3%.

Then at the last Budget, Rachel Reeves froze the threshold at which repayment in England starts between April 2026 and 2030; it was meant to rise with inflation. This means that more people will have to pay, while interest has snowballed, even for those with hefty monthly repayments. The result is a large cohort of angry indebted graduates.

How do Plan 2 loans work?

They were introduced for students in England and Wales in 2012, after the coalition government tripled tuition fees from £3,290 to £9,000 per year (there are no fees for students from Scotland, and they’re capped at about half the rate in Northern Ireland).

While studying, each borrower was charged interest at the RPI rate plus 3%. Afterwards, it moved to tiered rates starting at RPI, rising up to RPI+3%, depending on earnings (those making £51,245 or more currently pay the full rate). However, borrowers don’t have to pay anything until they reach the repayment threshold, now set at £28,470. Then they pay back 9% of their earnings above the threshold. After 30 years, any outstanding balance is written off.

How does this affect people in practice?

To take one example, Patrick Ba Tin, 30, borrowed some £50,000 in student loans – around average as a total – and was told he would hardly notice the repayments. Now a regulatory analyst earning a decent wage, Ba Tin has paid £5,000 towards his loans since graduating, with the current rate at £300 per month. Even so, the loan is actually growing: he now owes £75,000 in total; he will probably have to keep paying for the full 30 years. Of course this affects his finances, and his ability to buy a home. A typical graduate from the Plan 2 cohort has to earn at least £66,000 a year just to make his or her debt go down. Nadia Whittome, a Labour backbencher, has only managed to pay off £1,000 of her £49,600 debt despite six years on an MP’s salary. And repayments come on top of already high tax rates. So a Plan 2 loan holder earning £51,245 will take home only 49% of their earnings above that.

How have loans changed since?

Plan 5 student loans replaced Plan 2 for courses starting in August 2023. These don’t charge interest above the rate of inflation: the rate simply follows the RPI. But borrowers have to start paying them back sooner – the repayment threshold is only £25,000, not far off the minimum wage – and the repayment term is ten years longer: 40 years. Under this system, in contrast to Plan 2, no one will have to pay back more than they borrowed in real terms, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that 79% of initial borrowers will repay their loans in full. However, lower earners will pay more and higher earners less than they would have under the previous system. Plan 5 will also be costlier for the taxpayer in the long run.

Is the system unfair?

It is harsh for holders of Plan 2 loans. A loan holder who started a course in 2022 will pay around £8,700 more on average than someone who took one out a year later. Tinkering with the repayment threshold, by Conservative and Labour governments, has made repayments unpredictable.

The finance guru Martin Lewis has called on Reeves to reconsider her repayment threshold freeze, saying it isn’t “moral” to change the terms of a loan; polls suggest half of Plan 2 loan holders think the product was “mis-sold” to them. The National Union of Students and The Times have also called for an end to the freeze, along with cuts to the Plan 2 interest rate and a cap on the total amount of interest payable. Arguably, the RPI measure shouldn’t be used at all: the government is phasing it out – because it is deemed about 1% too high – in favour of the Consumer Prices Index (CPI).

Beyond that, there is the wider issue of inter-generational unfairness. The Plan 2 cohort were the first to be hit with substantial tuition fees, which were not charged at all until 1998. In addition, young people face high property prices, and governments that arguably protect the finances of pensioners at the expense of younger generations.

Can Plan 2 loans be defended?

They are in some respects generous, and more like a graduate tax than a bank loan. They do protect low earners; and during the ultra-high inflation period after Covid, the government intervened to cap interest rates. More broadly, the student loan system reflects important trade-offs. Britain has a mass university system – some 50% of young people in the UK go into higher education – and it has to be paid for somehow. All the main parties in England have decided that those who benefit most directly – well-paid graduates – should bear much of the burden. The costs are considerable: the total outstanding Plan 2 debt is about £200 billion.

What is likely to happen?

Reeves has insisted that the student loans system is “fair and reasonable”, and that the freeze was necessary for getting “the balance right between tax and spending”. But sources suggest discussions are taking place about possible measures to make the loans fairer, perhaps by tweaking interest rates. Kemi Badenoch has announced that the Tories would abolish the “unfair” additional interest, at the cost of some £2 billion per year, paid for by cutting funding for “low-quality degrees”. But this – unlike raising the earnings threshold – would only benefit those earning enough to clear the debt within 30 years.

Is a graduate tax the solution?

The idea of funding universities with a graduate tax has been mooted since the 1960s, when economists pointed out that a relatively small group of people were getting an expensive benefit paid for out of general taxation. The idea came up again during the expansion of higher education in the 1990s, and at one time or another it has been backed by the likes of Gordon Brown and Vince Cable. In practice, the loans function much like a tax – repayments are collected through the tax system – and proponents argue that presenting them with a future tax obligation is less stressful than being saddled with a large debt.

Implementing a tax would raise major administrative issues, though. There is no register of graduates. And might it incentivise students not to graduate? Or encourage high-earning graduates to move elsewhere? There are already problems in this area: at least 70,000 loan holders living abroad were reported not to be making repayments in 2024. No country in the world imposes a pure graduate tax, though many use income-contingent loans. The UK loans are high, though, since people here contribute more to their education: only 23% of higher education is paid for by public funding in the UK, well below the OECD average of 67%.

The UK, Gibraltar and the EU are set to end “almost a decade of uncertainty for the British overseas territory since the Brexit referendum”, said London’s The Standard.

A draft treaty drawn up by the three governments aims to “protect British sovereignty, UK military autonomy and secure Gibraltar’s economic future”. Madrid will hope, however, that this deal drags the territory further towards Spanish control.

What is in the treaty?

Though not fully ratified, the draft treaty claims to tackle the “last major unresolved issue from Brexit”.

Under the new rules, the UK will allow Spanish border guards to check passports for those entering territory by air or sea. This means that these arrivals will present their passports to both British and Spanish authorities – in “dual border control checks” similar to those seen at Eurostar terminals at London’s St Pancras.

In effect, this “shifts the EU’s external border from the between Spain and Gibraltar to the Rock’s points of arrival”, said The Times. Gibraltar will not become part of the EU, but residents will be able to pass into Spain freely, and vice versa. The “barbed-wire fence” separating Gibraltar from Spain is “expected to be dismantled” after more than a century to create a “fluid border” for people and goods.

As a result, “the Rock effectively becomes part of the EU’s Schengen zone of passport-free movement”, said The Telegraph. By removing the land border, the “deal protects Gibraltar residents and Spaniards from post-Brexit rules”, meaning they are no longer subject to the visa-free travel limit of 90 days every 180 days.

In terms of customs, Gibraltar must now “align with EU single market rules” and be “subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice”. This means that “cigarettes and alcohol will no longer be as cheap on the Rock”. Gibraltar will keep its zero-VAT regime but a new “transaction tax” starting at 15% will apply to goods imported to the territory for sale.

Crucially, the draft agreement does not affect sovereignty of the territory. According to the treaty, the UK will “never enter into arrangements” where sovereignty would pass to another state against the “freely and democratically expressed wishes” of the Gibraltarian people.

Why now?

Gibraltar was ceded by Spain to the UK in 1713, under the Treaty of Utrecht, and the resident population is “heavily in favour of remaining a British overseas territory”, said The Independent. The last time Gibraltar voted on the issue of sharing sovereignty with Spain, in 2002, “almost 99% of Gibraltarians rejected the move”.

Spain had been due to apply the EU’s new automated “Entry/Exit” border system from April, which would include biometric checks on the border with Gibraltar, said the BBC. If no agreement had been reached, there would have been “mandatory passport checks” at air, land and sea borders, which would “devastate Gibraltar’s economy”, lead to “endless” entry queues and cost “hundreds of millions a year” to UK taxpayers, according to the proposed treaty.

Who will it affect?

Around 15,000 people – just under half of the territory’s 35,000 population – cross the border each day, mainly for work purposes. They will not need to have their passports checked and can pass through freely.

What has the reaction been?

The “safe and secure” proposals allow Gibraltar to “look to the future with confidence”, while “protecting our British way of life” and exploring “new opportunities for growth and prosperity”, said Fabian Picardo, the chief minister of Gibraltar.

British and Spanish diplomats hope “the treaty will improve bilateral relations”, said The Standard. However, Spain wants to “strengthen” its “legal claim on the Rock, leading the way for Madrid to wield greater influence over the territory”. Some in the UK, meanwhile, may see the deal as an “erosion of sovereignty”.

Any agreement that “hands Spain new powers over entry, residency, infrastructure or enforcement must be examined line by line by Parliament before it takes effect”, said shadow Foreign Office minister Wendy Morton.

What will happen next?

The treaty has been published in draft, so still needs to be reviewed by legal teams from all parties. Then it will have to be ratified by both the UK, Gibraltarian and European parliaments.

“Gibraltar’s government says it is hoping to provisionally apply the deal from 10 April,” said the BBC.

Artificial intelligence is increasingly entrenching itself in our society, and universities are no exception. From clubs and classes to professional events, AI companies have made themselves staples on campus, and it is not simply being used to cheat in class. Some experts worry that AI could influence higher education in new and potentially destructive ways.

How is AI being pushed in universities?

Google has worked with Purdue University, California Community Colleges and other schools to “offer AI courses, certificates and products such as its AI assistant Gemini,” while OpenAI has launched a “consortium with 15 leading research institutions,” and Microsoft is “offering eligible students 12-month subscriptions to its AI productivity tools at no cost,” said The Wall Street Journal.

Anthropic is also partnering with CodePath, the “nation’s largest provider of collegiate computer science education,” to “redesign its coding curriculum as AI reshapes the field of software development,” said the AI firm. The initiative will put its AI tools, such as Claude Code, “at the center of its courses and career programs,” said the company. The goal is to “enable students to learn to build with Anthropic tools” and “contribute to real-world open-source projects,” said the Journal. CodePath is incorporating the program into institutions that “cater to low-income and first-generation college students and include historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions.”

Even before making its way into the curriculum, AI clubs started popping up on campuses all over the country. These are not just intended for computer science and STEM students. At least 16 law schools have founded AI clubs in the past two years as “future lawyers seek to understand the rapidly expanding technology and how it will affect their careers,” said Reuters.

What is in store for higher education?

AI’s growing presence in universities is no surprise. Companies across industries have “pushed their employees to adopt AI tools, and many are now asking in job interviews how prospective hires use the technology and whether they are willing to learn,” said the Journal. “Three-quarters of employers expect the new graduates they hire to have used AI tools, though most say colleges haven’t prepared them sufficiently.”

But as more students embrace the power of AI, educators have become increasingly worried about cheating, leading to an AI Cold War. Some students are “turning to a new group of generative AI tools called ‘humanizers,’” which “scan essays and suggest ways to alter text so they aren’t read as having been created by AI,” said NBC News. In response, “companies such as Turnitin and GPTZero have upgraded their AI detection software, aiming to catch writing that’s gone through a humanizer.”

Tweaking AI copy in an attempt to sound more human is a troubling sign that the “technopoly is thriving,” said Ronald Purser at Current Affairs. “Universities are being retrofitted as fulfillment centers of cognitive convenience. Students aren’t being taught to think more deeply but to prompt more effectively.” Meanwhile, AI companies seem to “look at college students as a strapped customer base to hook when they are most stressed,” said Matthew Connelly, a vice dean for artificial intelligence initiatives at Columbia University, at The New York Times.

After US “bunker buster” strikes last June, Donald Trump said that it had been his “great honour to destroy all nuclear facilities and capability” in Iran. But as the third round of US-Iran nuclear talks kick off today in Geneva, “those grand claims” look “not so helpful” to America’s negotiating stance, said CNN.

With Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff saying Tehran is “probably” one week away from having weapons-grade nuclear material, “suddenly, it’s not about highlighting the success of a past mission but rather about building the case for a future one”.

Why is Trump talking about new strikes?

During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Trump said Iran wants “to start all over again” with its uranium enrichment programme and is “at this moment again pursuing their sinister nuclear ambitions”. “I will never allow the world’s number-one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon”, he said.

Asked why the US might have to strike Iran again even though Trump said he’s “obliterated” its nuclear capabilities, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said there were “many reasons and arguments that one could make for a strike against Iran”. It seems the administration is “still searching for a logically consistent one”, said CNN.

What does Trump want?

Trump has “repeatedly changed his messaging on his end game in Iran”, said the BBC, “veering from narrow nuclear issues to wider regime change”.

Tehran has signalled that it is willing to abandon its nuclear ambitions in exchange for an easing of crippling sanctions – the root cause of the economic instability that sparked the January uprising. But if the US goal is regime change, Trump may be hesitant to agree to anything that could improve Iran’s economic stability.

“A ground invasion is not on Trump’s agenda” and the Iranian regime “cannot be toppled by air and sea alone”, said Middle East expert Amin Saikal on The Conversation. Besides, the rule of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would only collapse “if a sizeable part of its security forces defected to the opposition”, and so far they have “remained quite loyal and solidly behind the leadership”.

What will Trump do?

The US has amassed its largest concentration of sea and air power in the Middle East since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The world “is on edge, waiting to see” what happens next but Trump provided “no clear signal” during his State of the Union address, said the BBC.

He could opt for calibrated strikes: “whack Iran once and see if that makes its government more amenable”, said Sky News. Or, with all the “military muscle” he has “mustered” in the region, he could launch a full-force attack. He has already said his generals believe such a war would be “easily won”.

Iran is vowing to respond to any attack with force and Trump may back away from new strikes if the Geneva negotiations make progress. But “having built up so much firepower, doing nothing would look weak”. It could “have consequences for America’s standing” and for Trump personally, “at a time when his approval ratings are cratering”.

Annuities are back in fashion among retirees amid high inflation and pension reforms. Sales of annuities worth more than £250,000 rose by 31% in 2025, said the Association of British Insurers (ABI), and sales of annuities valued at over £500,000 rose by 54%.

Once viewed as a “dull, poor value product”, said The Guardian, annuities are making a comeback. They have become “much more generous” in the past few years, said MoneyWeek, because of higher interest rates and also the government’s impending reforms that will include pension wealth in inheritance tax calculations.

Choosing an annuity rather than staying invested through drawdown when you retire means “a guaranteed income for life”, said the ABI, with the option of providing for loved ones “without worrying about potentially penal tax impacts”.

What is an annuity?

Annuities, said St James’s Place, are a way of “guaranteeing a regular income in retirement”.

They work like an insurance product, said Unbiased, so you swap some or all of your pension pot to purchase a product from an insurer who “agrees to pay you a regular income for the rest of your life or a set period”.

The income you receive depends on “a number of things”, such as your pension value, your age, health, and the rates at the time.

The main attraction is the “security” the products provide, so you know how much you will get each year, said RestLess, but they “won’t be right for everyone”.

Why have annuities become more popular?

The ABI has highlighted more interest in escalating annuities, where payments increase over time in line with inflation. This suggests people are “looking for protection against the erosion of income”, said Which? But it does mean accepting lower payments initially, and “it could take as long as 15 to 20 years to exceed what you would have got from a level annuity”.

Changes to inheritance tax rules on pensions have also given annuities a “new lease of life”, said The Guardian. The changes mean “unused pension savings” could be taxed as part of someone’s estate if they are worth more than the inheritance tax threshold.

Pros and cons of an annuity

Annuities provide “predictability, security, and simplicity”, said Unbiased, compared with leaving your pension invested where it may lose value.

But there are risks, as the amount you get depends on interest rates at the time and “may not be as much as you hope for”. Additionally, once purchased, said RestLess, “you can’t change your mind”.

It is also important to consider your tax bill, as the payments could push you into a higher tax threshold depending on any other income you receive.

There are ways to “combat the issue of inflexibility”, said Charles Stanley, by splitting your pension pot and annuitising in tranches. This could help “build up your guaranteed income as your needs increase” while growing the rest of your pension pot by remaining invested, but remember that investments can fall in value.

The arrests of Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have shone a spotlight on the centuries-old common-law offence of misconduct in public office. Neither man has yet been charged, and both deny wrongdoing, but should police investigations proceed to prosecution, this vague and complex offence could be challenging for lawyers to prove.

“Securing a conviction for misconduct in public office is a notoriously difficult task,” said The Telegraph. There are fewer than 50 convictions a year and none of those have involved “high-profile individuals”.

What is it?

The offence of misconduct in public office has been dated back to 1599. It’s a common-law offence, which means it was established by judicial precedent, rather than a specific Act of Parliament. It had fallen into disuse but was revived in recent times to catch corrupt police officers whose misconduct didn’t fall easily into other well-established offences. It carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The offence has four main elements, all of which must be proved:

· The individual is a public officer acting as such.

· The individual wilfully neglects to perform his or her duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself or herself.

· The conduct is to such a degree that it amounts to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder.

· The conduct is without reasonable excuse or justification.

The widely acknowledged problem with these elements is their vagueness. What constitutes a public duty is not defined and “the meaning of public trust is fairly elastic”, said The New Statesman. “Few would say it’s a satisfactory area of law.”

The Law Commission “has proposed that the offence be abolished”, and the government has included “some replacement offences” in the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, also known as the Hillsborough Law. But that bill is currently “stalled” in Parliament and “is not yet law (and may never be)”.

Who has been convicted for it?

The offence is clearly intended for charging those in trusted public office who have betrayed that trust. It was described by legal scholar Sir William Blackstone, way back in 1765, as “a crime of deep malignity”. In its modern incarnation, it has mainly been used to punish misconduct by junior and mid-ranking public officials, with police and prison officers accounting for 92% of convictions between 2014 and 2024, according to the Institute For Government.

In 2009, former MP Damian Green was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office but he was not charged. In 2016, former MEP Nikki Sinclaire was charged and tried but acquitted. Last year, independent MP Dan Norris was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, as well as sexual assault and rape, and investigations are still ongoing.

In 2019, former prime minister Boris Johnson was summoned to face a private prosecution for misconduct in a public office – over allegations that he has misled the British public about the cost of European Union membership in the run-up to Brexit. The High Court dismissed the case and the summons was overturned.

What could happen now?

As the law around the offence that both Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor are being investigated for is “famously vague”, it “complicates the task”, said Robert Hazell, a professor of politics and government at University College London, on The Conversation. If any charges are brought, lawyers “will have to devote more time and effort to understanding the elements of the offence, and then ensuring that they can prove each element.”

There are allegations that both men shared confidential government information with Jeffrey Epstein. Under this law, “if sensitive government material was shared without proper authority, the question would be whether that amounted to a deliberate breach of official duty”, said Simarjot Singh Judge, a managing partner at Judge Law. “Prosecutors would need to establish intent, seriousness, and whether the conduct crossed the threshold into criminal wrongdoing.”

Given the seriousness of this offence, convictions “typically result in an immediate custodial sentence”, said law firm K&L Gates in a briefing paper. Although the maximum sentence is life imprisonment, “sentences imposed to date have generally been lower”.

Keir Starmer will ask his independent ethics adviser to investigate whether Cabinet Office minister Josh Simons breached the ministerial code, amid allegations he was involved in a smear campaign targeting journalists.

Simons was director of the Labour Together think tank when it allegedly paid a PR firm thousands of pounds to investigate the personal, religious and political backgrounds of journalists who were digging into how its undeclared funding bankrolled Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign.

“I have heard of black briefings, but never heard of anything like this,” former Labour MP Jon Cruddas, who helped set up Labour Together in 2015, told Democracy for Sale. “This is dark shit.”

What is alleged?

In November 2023, The Sunday Times reported that the pro-Starmer think tank Labour Together had failed to declare £730,000 in political donations between 2017 and 2020. It was headed at that time by Morgan McSweeney, who would later serve as Starmer’s chief of staff in Downing Street. The think tank attributed the discrepancy to an administrative error.

An investigation by Khadija Sharife and Peter Geoghegan, published on Geoghegan’s Substack site Democracy for Sale, revealed that Labour Together paid PR firm Apco “at least £30,000” for material on the journalists. At the time of the payment, the directorship of the think tank had passed to Simons, a former policy adviser to Jeremy Corbyn who was elected MP for Makerfield near Wigan in 2024. In September 2025, Simons became a Cabinet Office minister.

Apco’s report, codenamed “Operation Cannon”, divulged personal information about the journalists involved, including claims about the “faith, relationships and upbringing” of Sunday Times reporter Gabriel Pogrund, said the BBC.

Labour Together then passed “some of Apco’s material” on to the security services, “raising serious questions about whether public authorities were drawn into an effort to discredit legitimate journalism”, said Geoghegan in The Guardian.

What has the response been?

For a think tank so closely aligned to a political party to hire a PR firm to investigate journalists is “highly unusual”, said Sharife and Geoghegan, and the revelations have “sparked” a “furious response” both inside and outside Labour.

While not denying that Labour Together hired Apco, Simons has said he was “surprised and shocked” that the report included “unnecessary information” on Pogrund. “I asked for this information to be removed before passing the report to GCHQ.”

Starmer has said he “didn’t know anything” about the Apco report, and has asked the Cabinet Office to “establish the facts”. An investigation has since been launched by its propriety, ethics and constitution group, but critics claim this is the government effectively marking its own homework. More than 20 Labour MPs have written to the PM and Labour Party general secretary Hollie Ridley, demanding an independent investigation.

How deep does this go?

Simons is not the only Labour figure who is “either directly or indirectly connected to what is fast becoming another crisis threatening Sir Keir’s grip on power”, said The Telegraph.

Labour Together’s influence “goes deep into the heart of the government”. It provides a “crucial source of funding” for the party’s frontbenchers, “spending tens of thousands of pounds” to pay for assistants for the likes of Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper, David Lammy, John Healey and Shabana Mahmood.

Another connection is Kate Forrester, who at the time the report was commissioned in late 2023 was a director of Apco’s London operations, while also serving on Labour Together’s advisory board. She is married to Paul Ovenden, who was Starmer’s head of communications at the time.

“This scandal cuts to the heart of Number 10,” said Geoghegan in The Guardian, but it also “raises broader questions”. Chief among these is London’s position as “the global centre of the private intelligence industry”, which is worth a reported £15 billion a year and yet “remains almost entirely opaque”.

While 2026 is less than three months old, this year has already seen its fair share of avalanches. This includes one that slammed into a train in the Swiss Alps, injuring five people, and a recent occurrence near Lake Tahoe that killed nine skiers — the deadliest in California’s history. And a major factor is contributing to how hazardous these avalanches are, according to scientists: climate change.

Why are avalanches getting worse?

A decrease in snow caused by a warmer planet may be making avalanches worse. People “might assume that increasing global temperatures would lead to fewer avalanches,” said The Independent. But rising temperatures can “increase the risk of avalanches,” especially at altitudes of 6,500 feet or higher.

At these higher elevations that see more snowfall, climate change can “increase the risk of ‘wet’ avalanches, which contain more liquid from rain or melted snow,” said The Independent. These are avalanches that “travel less far and more slowly than dry snow avalanches,” but they are also “denser, so they can exert greater pressure and impact,” Nicolas Eckert, a mountain risk specialist at the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment, said to Le Monde.

Scientists investigating the Lake Tahoe disaster are “pointing to a combination of heavy snow on top of an unstable snow pack as conditions that led to the avalanche,” said The New York Times. Some have also pointed to atmospheric ‘rivers’ that “occur when a high-altitude current of moisture flows from the tropical ocean regions.” These rivers over the Pacific Ocean are “becoming wetter and warmer,” and when they pass over the Western U.S., they could “lead to heavy snowfall in higher mountain elevations even as the number of snowy days decreases.”

In some areas of Europe, this lack of snow could be problematic. When it “does not snow for some time, the surface snow is exposed to warming during the day and colder temperatures at night,” said The Sydney Morning Herald. The snow’s crystals then become unstable, like “standing up a deck of cards on their end all the way across the snow pack,” Craig Sheppard, the program manager for the Mountain Safety Collective, said to the Herald. When the next snowfall arrives, it creates a “recipe for avalanches because you have snow sitting on a really weak grain.”

What can be done?

Many experts say the best solution is proper avalanche safety. About “90% of slides that cause an injury or death are triggered by the victim or a companion,” said The Associated Press. Avalanches travel fast and can’t be outrun, so the best “plan is to make sure you’re not in a place where one is at risk of occurring.” The National Avalanche Center allows outdoor enthusiasts to track avalanche threats and warnings across the U.S.

Despite avalanches happening less often these days, when they do, they are increasingly likely to be deadly. Over the “last 10 winters, an average of 27 people died in avalanches each winter in the United States,” according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Still, there is no way to determine the exact number of people in such avalanches, as “most nonfatal avalanche incidents are not reported.”

Gone are the days when China’s humanoid robots were something of a joke. Now these incredibly realistic pieces of technology look set to be commonplace around the globe. But should we welcome our new humanoid robot overlords?

In a “dazzling” performance, humanoid robots took centre stage in China’s Spring Festival Gala, which was on state-run TV, “showcasing how far the country’s robotics industry has come in a few short years”, said Futurism. With backflips and sophisticated choreography – including sparring with children using nunchucks – the performance was in stark contrast to the “awkwardly shuffling” humanoids of last year.

However, against the backdrop of privacy concerns, data collection and consequences for jobs, this “massive surge of interest” could risk an “impending bubble” for advanced robotic technology.

Are humanoids a realistic goal?

Machines with human likeness have appeared in “mythology and history for millennia”, yet the idea they could become “practical consumer products” is entirely realistic, said Eduardo B. Sandoval on The Conversation.

Progress in other fields have helped the sector develop rapidly. There have been major improvements to battery capacity, motors and sensors due to the electric vehicle industry, and the AI systems that control such hardware “have also become far more capable”.

Unitree, one of China’s leading robotic companies, currently advertises a base price of $13,500 (£10,000) for its G1 humanoid robot.

Where is the investment coming from?

In 2025, the global humanoid market was worth 17 billion yuan ($2.5 billion), said the South China Morning Post. China accounted for half of that figure.

China’s robotics industry is “bustling” and “home to the world’s deepest supply chain for humanoids”, said The Economist. According to research firm Omdia, more than 14,500 “automatons” were delivered globally last year, a near 400% rise on the year before. China’s two leading firms, Agibot and Unitree, “accounted for around three-quarters of the total”.

Indeed, the Chinese state will “probably remain the biggest source of demand for some time”. Though subsidies provide important financial platforms for expansion, the government’s “most important role by far is as a buyer”; it was the largest purchaser of humanoids last year.

Local governments are also integral cogs in the supply chain. Without them, it would be difficult to sustain or grow the industry, and keep the existing companies afloat. Some local governments have created dedicated centres where companies can allow their robots to practise specific tasks, and collect data for future training purposes. Investors actively select funding opportunities not just on analysis of the firm’s technological capabilities, but on the “local-government resources available to them”.

Though China is the market leader, Elon Musk’s Tesla is also trying to compete, said Forbes. The company has executed a “significant shift” away from electric car manufacturing to an “AI robotics platform”. The physical prowess of the Unitree and Agibot humanoids is clear to see, but investors are “wagering” that Tesla’s “differentiator” is the “sophisticated AI ‘brain’ that powers it”.

Should we be worried?

Looking beyond the dancing theatrics of the Spring Festival Gala performance, many are asking the “bigger question” of how advanced these systems really are, said Euronews, and “should Europe be concerned?” In the not too distant future, there is “likely” to be room for “robots in the shape of humans and animals” for “military and security organisations”, said Hans Liwång, from the Swedish Defence University.

China’s robotics market rush is certainly worrying some in the West, who believe that humanoids will “eventually become one of the largest industries in the world”, said The Economist. Investment trends are seemingly heading that way. Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, reckons that one billion models could be “wandering about by 2050, with annual spending in excess of $7.5 trillion”.

However, the Chinese display should be viewed with caution, and at the very least “through a lens of state propaganda”, said The Guardian. Though the length, complexity and scale of the gala performance was indeed impressive, and the first of its kind, “stage performance does not equate to industrial robustness, yet”, said Georg Stieler, from consultancy Stieler Technology and Marketing. The humanoids were programmed to enact a fixed routine “hundreds or thousands of times”, including very little “environmental perception”, an essential requirement for factory-grade development.

At 12.41am local time on 8 March, 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 set out from Kuala Lumpur, bound for Beijing. About 40 minutes after its departure, however, nearly all electronic communications from the Boeing 777 stopped: it disappeared from air traffic control radars; and by 2.22am, it had dropped off military radars, too. Half an hour later, the airline confirmed that it had lost contact with MH370.

In the days that followed, a huge Malaysian, and later Australian-led, search operation was launched; but it soon became clear that all 239 people on board – 227 passengers and 12 crew, including 154 people from China and 50 from Malaysia – were likely to have died. More than a decade later, the fate of MH370 and its passengers is unresolved.

What do we know about where it went?

For more than seven hours after it dropped off flight radars, MH370 sent “handshakes”, routine communications with a satellite network, confirming that it was still flying – meaning the plane had not suffered some sudden catastrophic event. Data from Malaysian military radar suggests that it made a sharp left turn soon after entering Vietnamese airspace; it then headed southwest, back over the Malayan peninsula, before flying northwest up the Strait of Malacca between Indonesia and Malaysia. There, it was lost beyond radar range.

Initially, the search operation centred on the South China Sea and the Strait of Malacca; but investigators later established (using satellite data, and a process of elimination) that MH370 turned sharply again and flew on for hours, to the southern Indian Ocean. There it descended steeply into the sea, presumably because it ran out of fuel. Underwater searches of that area have since covered more than 50,000 square miles of one of the world’s least-explored seafloors.

What have these searches found?

The official search involved nearly 60 ships and 50 aircraft from 26 nations, and lasted until January 2017. A private US company, Ocean Infinity, later resumed the search for five months in early 2018, working for the Malaysian government on a no-find, no-fee basis, and using underwater drones to scan the seabed. Nothing was found.

The first physical proof that MH370 had indeed crashed into the Indian Ocean had turned up in July 2015, on the French island of Réunion – beach cleaners found a “flaperon”, a large wing component, which was later confirmed to be from the airliner. Another flap from its right wing was found on Pemba Island off Tanzania; Other debris almost certainly from the plane was found from Mauritius to Madagascar. But nobody has yet managed to track down the debris to its point of origin, nor have they found the plane’s black boxes.

So what happened?

There are scores of theories, some plausible, many preposterous. In the absence of any distress call, hijack seems unlikely. Even so, it has been suggested that the plane was hijacked and flown to Russia, or the US airbase on the island of Diego Garcia; others have said it could have been shot down. Less fanciful theories include a mass hypoxia event – in which everyone was knocked out owing to oxygen deprivation caused by a sudden cabin depressurisation, while the plane continued flying on autopilot until it ran out of fuel.

The consensus among experts, however, is that the plane’s disappearance was probably the result of pilot suicide: either by the pilot, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, or First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid.

What evidence supports the theory?

The flight path, with its sharp turns, in no way resembles an autopilot flight plan; it is consistent with manual control. The turning off of all communications is more likely to have been a deliberate act than a total system failure. The circumstances suggest control was seized from within the cockpit, sometime between 1.01am and 1.21am, when the plane disappeared from radar. By this time – barring the unlikely event of two pilots acting in concert – one of the pilots must have either been dead, incapacitated or locked out of the cockpit.

Experts hypothesise that MH370 was deliberately and rapidly depressurised, rendering passengers dead within minutes. Passenger oxygen masks provide 15 minutes of oxygen at best; pilots have access to several hours’ worth. This would have allowed a pilot to keep flying for hours, without disturbances.

Do we know which pilot might have been to blame?

No. However, an FBI investigation discovered that Captain Shah had practised flying a very similar southerly path over the Indian Ocean using a Microsoft flight simulator; he had then deleted the record. The Malaysian police investigation presented him as a respectable family man, but it was widely deemed inadequate and designed to minimise embarrassment. Shah was described by friends as sad and lonely: his wife had recently moved out. By contrast, Hamid, the first officer, was widely seen as an optimistic person, with no history of mental health problems.

Who is leading the new search?

It is again being conducted by Ocean Infinity, which will collect a £56 million reward from Malaysia if it finds the plane, but nothing if it fails. The seabed surveying company will target a 5,800 square mile area it believes is most likely to contain the plane’s wreckage. Drones are using sonar, laser, optic and echo sound technology to look for debris on the ocean floor at depths of up to 6,000 metres.

But the precise crash zone is impossible to pinpoint from satellite data. And even if the debris, and the black boxes, are found, aviation experts will only learn more about technical data from the flight. The cockpit voice recorder is on a self-erasing two-hour loop, so – unless a pilot chose to (and was able to) provide some explanation at the end of the flight – it may contain little more than the sound of alarms blaring on the plane’s final descent.

Sepsis is one of the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. It can affect anyone, and is notoriously difficult to diagnose in the early stages, and to treat once it becomes life-threatening. Now scientists in Australia are getting close to unlocking the first specific sepsis treatment.

The current first-choice treatment for sepsis focuses on using broad-spectrum antibiotics to attack the pathogen causing the condition. But there are an increasing number of antibiotic-resistant pathogens that can cause sepsis. “This is the nightmare that keeps my colleagues working in public health awake at night,” one doctor told The Telegraph.

The new drug has been developed by researchers at Australia’s Griffith University to target and reverse the sepsis, rather than destroy the pathogen that’s causing it. Its recent Phase II human clinical trial in China showed “promising results in reducing sepsis”, said Science Daily. This is “a major step forward”.

What is sepsis?

Essentially, the body’s extreme response to an often minor bacterial, viral, fungal or parasitical infection. Our immune system goes into overdrive trying to fight the infection off, triggering inflammation that can impair blood flow and damage tissues and organs. Without treatment, sepsis can quickly lead to septic shock and multiple organ failure. Anyone can develop sepsis, but it’s more prevalent among the very young, the elderly, the diabetic, the immunocompromised and women who have recently given birth.

If you are treated swiftly, you can make a full recovery. But the longer you wait for a diagnosis, the higher the risk. Sepsis causes more than 10 million deaths a year worldwide: about one person every three seconds.

How is it diagnosed?

Sepsis is often called “the silent killer” because the wide variety of pathogens that can cause it may initially trigger very different symptoms, making it hard for medics to spot soon enough. Warning signs in a child – fever, chills, lethargy, fast heartbeat or breathing, blotchy skin and/or a rash that doesn’t fade (as with meningitis) – can mirror many less serious conditions. For adults, symptoms include slurred speech or confusion, extreme shivering, lack of urination, mottled skin, severe breathlessness and a feeling of doom.

There is currently no one diagnostic test; just different tests, that typically take hours, to confirm the presence, and possibly the type, of infection. The NHS is currently trialling a rapid blood test to identify if a patient has a viral or bacterial infection, which could speed up some diagnoses of sepsis considerably. Doctors who participated in the trial, which concludes in March, have already “witnessed the benefits”, according to The Guardian.

What is the new drug?

Known as STC3141, it is a carbohydrate-based drug administered as an infusion through a cannula. It works by “calming” and counteracting the “major biological molecule release” that occurs during the body’s immune overreaction, and helps to treat sepsis by “reversing the damage to organs rather than only managing symptoms”, said Science Daily.

The research team now plans to move onto Phase III effectiveness trials. “It’s hoped we could see the treatment reach the market in a handful of years, potentially saving millions of lives,” said team leader Mark von Itzstein.

What else might help?

Artificial intelligence may help medics detect sepsis earlier. US researchers at Northeastern University have been training an AI model on patient data collected at urgent care centres, in ambulances and in hospital. The model was able to predict septic shock with over 99% accuracy, according to a study published in Life last October.

“If sepsis is diagnosed in the emergency room, probably the best-case scenario is to pray because the survival rate is extremely low,” lead researcher Sergey Aityan told the university’s Northeastern Global News. “Our system is like an immediate second opinion, which is practically impossible to do in emergency settings with physical doctors.”

Our planet may be heading to a point of no return. Scientists predict that a domino effect of damage is on the horizon if there is no intervention, including “hothouse” level warming. Climate change is likely to worsen, especially with relaxed emissions regulations, which will lead to irreparable harm to the ecosystem and human health.

What’s ‘hothouse’ warming?

Earth’s climate is “departing from the stable conditions that supported human civilization for millennia” and barreling toward several tipping points, which “could commit the planet to a hothouse trajectory,” said an analysis published in the journal One Earth. “Most tipping interactions are destabilizing in nature,” and if “one element tips, it can trigger a cascade effect, pushing other systems past their thresholds.” This tipping may “already be underway or could occur soon for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, boreal permafrost, mountain glaciers and parts of the Amazon rainforest.” The shift could “raise global temperatures, accelerate sea-level rise, release vast stores of carbon and destabilize ecosystems.”

In the hothouse trajectory, “global temperature stays significantly above the 4°C rise of current worst-case climate scenarios for thousands of years, driving a huge rise in sea level that drowns coastal cities,” said The Guardian. Unfortunately, global temperatures are likely already as “warm as, or warmer than, at any point in the last 125,000 years,” and the progress is “advancing faster than many scientists predicted,” said Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates and one of the authors of the analysis, to The Guardian. “Policymakers and the public remain largely unaware of the risks posed by what would effectively be a point-of-no-return transition.”

What does the future hold?

Despite the warning, there is still a lot of uncertainty. Scientists “do not yet know the exact thresholds for many tipping elements, how feedback will interact with climate sensitivity, or how quickly tipping cascades might unfold,” said the analysis. Regardless, we “may be approaching a perilous threshold, with rapidly dwindling opportunities to prevent dangerous and unmanageable climate outcomes.” The risks are higher as the Trump administration is working to roll back caps on carbon dioxide emissions. The “added pollution could lead to as many as 58,000 premature deaths and an increase of 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055,” said The New York Times.

The U.S. is “currently the world’s second-largest climate polluter (after China) but is the nation that has pumped the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution,” said the Times. Time is of the essence now as the “boulder is going off over the edge of the cliff,” said Jillian Gregg, a study co-author and the CEO of Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates, to KLCC. “We are on this trajectory, and we don’t have recourse in how to get back.” However, even with evidence to show the dangers of climate change, we may be living in a “post-truth era in which too many people prefer pleasant lies over unpleasant truths,” said Reinhard Steurer, a professor of climate policy and governance at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, to Inside Climate News.

Keir Starmer has appointed Antonia Romeo as his new cabinet secretary, following the departure of Chris Wormald. The prime minister said that since he came into office, he has been “impressed by her professionalism and determination to get things done”.

Romeo will be the first woman to serve as the UK’s top civil servant in the role’s 110-year history. Despite investigations into her leadership style resurfacing, and criticism of the vetting process to fast-track her into the role, some believe Romeo could be the spearhead of Labour’s long-called-for cultural reset.

Who is Antonia Romeo?

Romeo has risen through the ranks of the civil service and spent “nearly a decade leading economic, public services and security departments”, said a government statement. She has been permanent secretary in three major government departments: the Department for International Trade, the Ministry of Justice and, most recently, the Home Office, a role she has held since April 2025.

Seen as “unorthodox and unconventional”, she is certainly “anything but the traditional stuffy Whitehall mandarin”, said Sky News. It is thought that she was instrumental in easing the overcrowded prisons crisis, instigating the Sentencing Review, among other initiatives.

During her career, and particularly as the UK’s consul general in New York in 2016-17, Romeo faced “multiple bullying complaints” and an expenses-related allegation, said the BBC. However, following investigations, government sources said there was “no case to answer”.

What has the reaction been?

In early February, Lord McDonald, the former head of the Diplomatic Service, launched an “unprecedented attack” on Romeo, “inviting Downing Street to go looking for bodies in Romeo’s resume”, said Politics Home. In a televised interview on Channel 4 News, McDonald said that “due diligence was vitally important”, and it would be an “unnecessary tragedy to repeat” the mistake of the appointment of Peter Mandelson.

“The underlying rumours around her are an example of sexist, misogynistic culture,” said Dave Penman, the general secretary of the FDA union. McDonald’s speech is “nonsense” and she has been “vetted within an inch of her life already”.

Amid the “vicious briefing war” surrounding Romeo’s appointment, the cabinet secretary’s allies have accused Foreign Office mandarins of preparing “misogynistic” briefings against her, said The Times. They “focused on her unapologetically ambitious personal style, charm, outgoing personality and her physical appearance”.

What now for the ‘Labour boys’ club’?

Starmer’s government has “faced accusations of being a boys’ club long before the Mandelson affair”, said Politics Home. “At the same time, Downing Street has been accused of overlooking women to give senior jobs to men.”

Now that former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney and Wormald are out of Downing Street, the PM is “surrounded almost entirely by female advisers”, said The Observer. Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson are acting chiefs of staff, Amy Richards is his political director and Sophie Nazemi is acting head of communications. “The boys’ club may be over but what will determine whether Starmer survives is not the rise of girl power but the ability to get stuff done.”

After the “political horror show” surrounding the appointment of Mandelson and then of Matthew Doyle to the House of Lords, there is “hope in Labour circles that the ‘boys’ club’ might have gone”, said Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC. Though Romeo is only one change to the advisory panel aiding the PM, it “matters profoundly that one half of the population” is “fairly represented”, and that there are “different perspectives in the rooms where decisions are taken”. There is the prospect that, “at least for now”, there is a “determination that things will change”.