There are many ways to put money away, but are you better off sticking with savings or placing funds in your pension?

Putting money into savings or pensions, said Flagstone, “helps grow your wealth for the long term”. And while pensions provide “generous tax breaks”, said MoneySuperMarket, they aren’t as “flexible” as savings accounts. So how do you decide which is “best for your nest egg”?

Pros and cons of pensions

You can get a pension through your workplace or set up your own self-invested personal pension to manage the pot yourself.

Pensions have “valuable tax advantages”, said PensionBee, including tax relief on money you put in as well as employer contributions on workplace schemes, but the money can’t be accessed until you are 55 – and this is rising to 57 in 2028.

Once you hit the minimum age, 25% of your pension savings can be taken tax-free, said MoneyHelper, which you are “free to spend or save in any way you like”.

Up to £60,000 can be put into a pension each year, said GoCompare, and the money is invested in the stock market so there is “no limit to how much your pension investments can grow”, depending on the performance of financial markets.

Additionally, earnings in your pension are tax-free and you only pay tax once you start making withdrawals.

The earlier you start “the more your fund can grow”, said Flagstone, but as with all investing, “you can lose your money”.

Should you stick with savings?

Relying on a pension, said GoCompare, means you won’t have “easy access to money in the short-term”.

In contrast, you could put money into a savings account to set funds aside for “the future, for emergencies or to buy expensive purchases like a new car or a holiday”, said Citizens Advice, plus you will earn interest on your money.

Savers can choose from easy access, regular saver or fixed accounts. Many let you “access your cash whenever you like”, said MoneySavingExpert, but some versions such as notice accounts or fixed rates may have restrictions.

There is also a personal savings allowance of £1,000 for basic rate taxpayers and £500 for those on the higher rate.

Unlike pensions, said MoneySuperMarket, savings accounts have “no age-related restrictions” plus interest can be earned tax-free through a cash ISA, which makes them an “appealing option for many savers”.

Up to £20,000 can currently be placed into a cash ISA and also into a stocks and shares ISA. An ISA can be beneficial, said LV=, for those with “shorter- to medium-term goals”, or “people who value flexibility and access to their savings”.

Many savers have benefited from high interest rates in recent years, said MoneyWeek, but if your savings are outside an ISA and above the savings allowance, your returns can easily be “eroded away further by tax and inflation”.

Benefits of both pensions and savings

Pensions will provide a “much higher return” than cash savings, but you won’t have access to it in the short-term and there is tax on withdrawals, unlike taking money from an ISA. The “real answer” is that you can have both.

The “ideal approach”, said GoCompare, is to “take advantage” of the benefits of both pensions and savings.

You could combine the tax relief and employer contributions that you get with a pension with the “flexibility and accessibility” of savings and tax-free withdrawals from an ISA to build a “balanced financial future”.

A mysterious new pro-Iran terror group has been linked to a series of recent attacks on Jewish communities and US financial institutions in the UK and Europe.

The only “catch”, said CNN, is that it “may be a mirage”.

Who are they and what have they claimed?

Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (HAYI), the Arabic name meaning “The Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right(eous)”, first appeared online shortly after the US and Israel launched their war on Iran at the end of February.

On 9 March, HAYI posted on the encrypted messaging app Telegram that “military operations” against US and Israeli interests around the world had begun. Two weeks later, a Telegram channel claiming to represent the group made an unsubstantiated claim of responsibility for an arson attack on four Jewish ambulances in Golders Green, north London.

It then posted videos of four other arson attacks in Belgium, Greece and the Netherlands, as well as threatening a further attack against the Bank of America building in Paris, before the channel was deleted.

Who is behind the group?

Examining the group’s digital footprint, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism found “no known references, neither online nor offline, to HAYI prior to 9 March”.

The Netherlands-based think tank highlighted “suspicious dissemination patterns” that were seemingly coordinated with the pro-Iranian online ecosystem. This raises the question “whether HAYI is a genuine terrorist group or merely serves as a façade for Iranian hybrid operations that enable plausible deniability”.

“This group is an Iranian creation,” Phillip Smyth, an analyst on the counterterrorism advisory board for Homeland Security Today, told The i Paper. “The scope of their actions, branding, and Iran’s own messages all demonstrate a clear link.”

For Western security experts, HAYI is “either a construct aligned with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) or an opportunistic network operating within the broader pro-Iranian online ecosystem”, said Radio Free Europe.

Do the attacks follow a pattern?

UK security officials have previously warned of a “rise in ‘gig-economy’ Iranian spies offered cash for operations across Europe”, and have been “actively investigating Iran’s use of social media platforms” to create “sleeper cells with the potential to carry out violent attacks”, said The i Paper.

The spate of arson attacks since the start of the war in Iran are “similar in nature to Russia’s so-called hybrid operations in Europe”, in which people have been recruited online “to carry out sabotage attacks”, said CNN. These are often perpetrated “by non-Russian nationals for small amounts of money and without full knowledge of who the operations serve”.

The series of “low-intensity” incidents involving Jewish and US targets have so far carried “limited material damage but strong symbolic impact, disseminated and amplified through channels linked to the pro-Iranian ecosystem”, said Decode 39.

These “operational and propaganda dynamics point to a possible hybrid model of terrorism in Europe: simple actions, local perpetrators and maximum ambiguity”.

The River Wye is at the centre of what lawyers are billing as the biggest environmental pollution case brought in the UK.

One of the country’s largest chicken producers and a water company appeared in the High Court on Monday, accused of polluting the Welsh river. It’s claimed that sewage spills and the spreading of chicken manure on farmers’ fields as fertiliser are responsible for the green algae choking the waterway.

More than 4,500 locals are taking part in the “landmark case” against Avara Foods and Welsh Water, said the BBC. Both companies deny responsibility, calling the claims “misconceived” and “misguided”. Leigh Day, the law firm bringing the action, said the court action is the “last avenue for justice”.

What has happened to the River Wye?

The Wye “used to be full of wild salmon”, said climate lawyer Chris Hilson on The Conversation. “Today it is full of algae.”

In 2020, conservation groups noticed the “once crystal-clear waters” had turned into a “pea soup”, said The Observer. They suspected chicken manure from local poultry farms was “sullying the water”.

The “tens of millions” of chickens in the area, thought to be about a quarter of the UK’s entire poultry population, create a “manure mountain” of “hundreds of thousands of tonnes”, said The Times. Until recently, manure from the Wye’s chicken sheds was spread as fertiliser on nearby arable fields. The legal claim alleges that, during periods of rain, nitrogen and phosphorus in the manure washed off the soil into waterways where, combined with sewage spills, it caused algae growth, robbing the water of oxygen and suffocating fish.

What’s the aim of the lawsuit?

Many of the chicken farms in the Wye area supply a Hereford processing plant belonging to poultry provider Avara Foods. Although it was arable farmers who spread the manure, the locals bringing the suit believe Avara and its subsidiary, Freemans of Newent Ltd, should be held responsible for the river pollution, and are seeking “substantial damages”.

The suit also names Welsh Water, claiming the Wye was polluted by its sewage spills and by its “sludge”, a by-product of sewage treatment, also being spread on farmers’ fields as fertilisers.

The group bringing the claim is also demanding action to clean up the river. This isn’t “what this river should look like and feel like and smell like”, Justine Evans, lead claimant and wildlife filmmaker, told the BBC. “There’s been systemic failure going on” and we need to “make polluters pay”.

What’s the defence?

Avara Foods claims its operations aren’t causing the pollution. It told its poultry suppliers in 2023 to stop spreading manure on their land, after the Environment Agency downgraded the Wye‘s health status to “unfavourable/declining”. It can’t be held responsible, it says, for arable farmers using chicken manure as crop fertiliser.

“We believe that this legal claim is based on a misunderstanding, as no manure is stored or spread on poultry-only farms that supply Avara Foods,” the company said. “Individual farmers are responsible for how nutrients are used in their arable operations. Avara is not involved in any arable operations and has no control over this activity.”

Welsh Water said it had invested £70 million over the past five years to improve its infrastructure on the Wye, and had reached “real improvements in water quality”. It intends “to defend this case robustly”.

What is the significance of the case?

Legal action against river polluters isn’t new but “there has never been a UK case with this many claimants”, said Hilson on The Conversation. “A large range of people suing can add legitimacy to a court case, making it harder to ignore.” It’s also a “strategic” lawsuit: not just about getting compensation but also about drawing attention “to the plight of some of the UK’s most cherished waterways” and securing “policy change to clear them up”.

The case now unfolding in court is “as much a detective story involving determined amateur sleuths and citizen scientists as a conventional legal battle”, said The Observer. And, at its heart, lies the question: “who almost killed the river Wye?”

The government is finalising plans to allow airlines to consolidate flight schedules, in a bid to stave off a summer of travel disruption caused by a shortage of jet fuel.

With the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz restricting global jet fuel supplies, and demand sending prices soaring, there is significant concern that shortages could cause last-minute cancellation of flights in the busy holiday season.

How bad is the shortage?

Refineries in the Middle East usually supply around 75% of Europe’s jet fuel, but production is “basically now almost zero”, Fatih Birol of the International Energy Agency said last Thursday. The week before, he’d warned that the continent had “maybe six weeks of jet fuel left”, if supplies remain blocked.

European countries are trying to replace supplies from the Gulf with imports from the US and Nigeria but, if they cannot do so in sufficient quantity, energy experts predict shortages at some airports, resulting in flight cancellations. The European Commission has said there is “no evidence of fuel shortages” in the EU, but has acknowledged there could be supply issues “in the near future”.

Many airlines had already secured much of their summer-season jet fuel before the Iran conflict doubled the market price. But others are now having to take emergency measures to counter spiralling fuel costs. “Airlines normally run at a single-digit operating margin and spend anywhere from 20 to 40% of revenues on fuel,” so rising fuel prices can quickly push them “into operating losses,” Alex Irving, a senior European transport analyst at financial-research firm Bernstein, told CNBC. German carrier Lufthansa, Scandinavian SAS, and Dutch airline KLM have already announced they are cancelling thousands of short-haul flights over the summer.

What is the UK government doing?

The British government is trying to get ahead of any peak-season flight disruption by giving airlines “rare freedoms to change flight schedules” well in advance, said The Times.

The plan is to temporarily relax laws that require airlines to operate part-full flights from UK airports or risk losing their lucrative take-off and landing slots. Doing this allows airline to consolidate flight schedules now, “before any potential fuel shortages”, minimising disruption and last-minute cancellations in the summer. Of course, it “may mean fewer available flight options than normal” but those flights are “less likely to be cancelled”.

On Friday, the Department for Transport said it was “working closely with the aviation industry to monitor risks and minimise disruption” and there was “no current need for passengers to change their travel plans”.

When will the threat to air travel end?

Even if the US and Iran were to reach a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz today, “the die is cast for summer travel”, because it will take months to resume jet fuel supplies, said CNN. “It’s going to take until at least July,” Matt Smith, an energy analyst for commodity platform Kpler told the broadcaster. “And even that may be optimistic at this point.”

Should US/Iran hostilities restart or the Strait of Hormuz remain completely blocked to shipping through the summer, then the landscape completely changes, said Politico. In this “worst-case scenario”, there would be outright fuel rationing, and many, many more flights would be cancelled.

The Chernobyl disaster occurred when technicians at the power station, near Pripyat in the north of Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, ran a test on reactor number four to simulate shutting it down during an electricity blackout. A combination of reactor design flaws and technician errors meant that it overheated, leading to a power surge, triggering an explosion.

The reactor's 192 tonnes of uranium fuel partially melted, destroying the reactor core. Graphite blocks inside caught fire, and the resulting explosion blew the reactor's 1,000-tonne concrete and steel lid into the air, then destroyed much of the turbine hall. Radioactive material spewed into the environment: iodine, strontium, caesium and some plutonium.

The World Nuclear Association says the disaster was caused by a “flawed” reactor design and lax safety – both consequences of “Cold War isolation”.

How did the authorities respond?

About 1,000 emergency workers and power station staff, largely untrained and poorly protected, were brought in during the first days of the accident to put out the fire. Soviet officials initially remained in denial; unable to comprehend the gravity of the situation and desperate to contain the bad publicity. But in early May, with the reactor fire still burning, and high radiation levels detected across Europe, the authorities moved to drastic action. A 30km exclusion zone was imposed. Bags of sand were dropped onto the reactor from the open doors of helicopters (analysts now think this did more harm than good).

When the fire finally stopped, men climbed onto the roof to clear radioactive debris. Many suffered from acute radiation sickness as a result. In total, at least 600,000 clear-up personnel (“liquidators”) from all over the Soviet Union were involved in the clean-up. During 1986, a huge concrete “sarcophagus” structure was built to confine the radioactive materials at the explosion site. This was largely successful; estimates suggest that at least 80% of the original radioactive material remains inside the reactor. (In 2017 a new structure was completed at a cost of £1.3 billion.)

What were the immediate effects?

The official death toll is just 31; two workers at the plant were killed that day. But in 2005, a UN report suggested a total of 4,000 people would eventually die because of radiation exposure. According to UN reports, 134 people, mostly plant workers and emergency workers, received a confirmed diagnosis of Acute Radiation Sickness.

Radiation destroys cell walls and other key molecular structures within the body. Symptoms can begin within one or two hours and may last for several months; they include vomiting, diarrhoea, headache, fever, dizziness, hair loss, and blood in vomit and stools.

The human cost of the disaster was documented by Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist, who interviewed some 500 eyewitnesses for her 1997 book “Chernobyl Prayer”. One of the most harrowing stories concerns a woman who stayed at the bedside of her dying husband, a firefighter. She described watching his body decay, his skin crack, boils develop. When she touched him – against doctors' orders – his skin came away in her hands.

And the wider effects?

Chernobyl is one of only two nuclear accidents rated at the maximum severity on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan. The longer-term effects have been mind-boggling in scale. Some 350,000 people had to be evacuated; about 500 hectares of forest turned red and died; roughly 15 million hectares of land were contaminated.

At least 5% of the reactor's radioactive fuel is estimated to have been carried into the air over Ukraine, Belarus and Russia – and the rest of Europe. Over 20% of Belarus's land was affected. Radioactive clouds spread, causing panic as far away as Germany and Britain; millions of litres of milk were dumped; livestock was destroyed or banned from sale. Around 5,000 thyroid cancers have been linked to iodine contamination of milk supplies by the accident, 15 of them fatal.

Chernobyl is often described as the most expensive disaster in history, with an estimated cost of $180 billion (£133 billion) for Ukraine alone. By 2003, about 3.3 million Ukrainians were receiving benefits as Chernobyl “victims”.

What is in Chernobyl now?

The Chernobyl exclusion zone encompasses the 2,600 sq km area within the 30km radius. It is under military control, and public access is restricted to prevent contamination. Today, the zone is one of the most radioactively contaminated areas on Earth; the reactor is still smouldering. It draws significant scientific interest for the high levels of radiation exposure in the environment – and, until the war, was popular with disaster tourists. Due to the lack of human activity, it has become a thriving nature sanctuary, with some of the highest biodiversity and thickest forests in all Ukraine. European bison, golden eagles, lynx and elk inhabit the area.

How did the disaster affect nuclear policy?

It kickstarted a global push for stricter nuclear regulation. Governments were nervous because similar reactors were in use around the world. The International Atomic Energy Agency, a UN-affiliated agency, was tasked with improving international safety standards for reactor designs, and with coordinating long-term radiation monitoring. The agency does not have the power to enforce these rules, but the disaster motivated many countries to comply with regulations.

Politically, the effects were also very significant. Chernobyl destroyed public trust and exposed systemic failures within the USSR, particularly in Ukraine. Mikhail Gorbachev maintained the accident was a more important factor in the fall of the Soviet Union than his programmes of liberal reform. Oddly enough, at least one of Chernobyl's other reactors remained in use until 2000.

When you are already scrolling on your phone, your credit card information is saved and shipping is free, it can be a little too easy to click ‘buy.’ Even if that purchase is small, these shopping slip-ups can quickly add up. Over time, they may push your well-laid financial plans off track.

Such incongruence between actions and intentions can also bring about feelings of guilt. According to a study by Liquid Web, “14% of shoppers have bought something within one minute of seeing an ad, and 85% regret an impulsive online purchase,” said Investopedia.

So how can you keep your focus on the big picture, instead of falling for the short-term high of shopping? Friction maxxing may be the answer.

What is friction maxxing?

In essence, friction maxxing refers to the practice of adding friction, or some degree of difficulty or inconvenience, to a task. The practice can apply in practically any area — it may look like “cooking from scratch instead of ordering a delivery, finding your way using road signs instead of just plugging in the [GPS] or reading a book rather than half-listening to the audio version of it,” said The Guardian.

The point is not to make your life harder, but rather to cause you to slow down and be more intentional about your time and choices. When it comes to finances, that might mean deleting your saved payment information from your favorite shopping sites, so you are forced to pause for a moment, get up and get your physical credit card; during this time, you could reevaluate whether the purchase really aligns with your broader financial goals.

How can adding friction help you spend less?

When spending “feels easy, it grows quickly,” so the idea is that by “adding small inconveniences, known as ‘friction,’” it “gives your brain a moment to assess whether a purchase is worth it,” said Empeople Credit Union. During this pause, you gain a little bit of space to more deliberately weigh your decision to purchase, and you may ultimately decide against it.

Course-correcting these seemingly small decisions can add up. While “each decision may add only a few dollars to a receipt,” when it reoccurs “over weeks and months, these minor deviations can total hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year,” said Yahoo Finance.

You can also introduce friction around your exposure to spending opportunities. After all, if you do not even know an item exists, you cannot feel tempted to buy it. After committing to “block social media and shopping apps from 5 to 9 p.m. on weekdays,” one finance writer reported cutting their spending “by $300 compared with the previous month,” which they then put into their family’s “sinking funds, rather than let it slip away toward impulse purchases,” said NerdWallet.

What are some easy ways to add friction to your financial life?

If you are intrigued by the idea of financial friction maxxing, there are some easy ways to institute it:

• Delete saved payment information
• Turn off one-click purchasing
• Get rid of shopping apps
• Cut back on time spent scrolling and on social media
• Institute a waiting period, such as 24 hours or even a week, before making a purchase

Investors are seeing the “lucrative land” on Britain’s golf courses as increasingly “ripe for redevelopment”, said The Times. And, with one in five golf clubs now estimated to be “financially vulnerable”, pressure is increasing on club owners to abandon their fairways and sell the land to housing developers.

“Rising maintenance, insurance and staffing costs” and “fluctuating” membership numbers have left many golf clubs “struggling to remain viable”, while the land they occupy, often on the edge of towns, is in “acute demand” for housing.

How much land do golf courses take up?

There are roughly 1,800 golf courses in Britain – accounting for over a quarter of the golf courses in Europe. In England alone, they occupy an estimated 270,000 hectares (667,000 acres): an area more than twice the size of Greater Manchester, and around 2% of the country’s total land area.

There is regional density: in Woking, Surrey, more than 10% of the land is taken up by golf courses; in St Andrews, Fife, there are 10 courses, and the London borough of Enfield has seven.

Given the amount of land golf courses occupy and the shortage of affordable homes, there is now a “furious debate” between “fairway and driveway”, said the BBC. The golf courses in Greater London, for example, cover an area the size of the entire borough of Brent, and the “area occupied by a single golfer could provide a home for around 380 people”, said architect Russell Curtis in his “Golf Belt” report.

What are the pros and cons?

“Courses are typically large, low-density sites” on the outskirts of towns, said The Times. Such well located pieces of land are naturally attractive to developers and councils trying to find space for new homes. A number of London courses “are very close to public transport”, Curtis told the BBC, so it “seems reasonable that at least some of those should be turned into housing”.

But it’s not an even picture. In Wales, for example, most courses sit in out‑of‑town or rural locations, and their lack of access makes them less attractive development prospects. Those opposed to this kind of development also point out that golf courses can be valuable havens for biodiversity. “Many courses provide tree cover, habitats for wildlife, pollinator‑friendly environments,” Gavin Anderson, from England Golf, told the BBC. They offer “opportunities for ecological improvement that can exceed what is possible on developed land or open fields”.

What does it mean for golf?

Golf clubs are enjoying mixed fortunes. Sixty have been forced to close in the past decade, said The Golf Business, and the Custodian Golf consultancy estimates that nearly 20% of those still operating are financially at risk.

And yet, membership of English golf clubs, particularly council-owned ones, is on the up – rising from 730,602 in 2024 to 750,071 in 2025, with junior membership growing by more than 34%. The sport’s supporters say this is down to efforts to make golf more inclusive, which would be undermined by mass sell-offs.

Developers buying up golf courses are going to take away the sport’s accessibility, Chris D’Araujo, who is campaigning to save Enderby Golf Course in Leicestershire from redevelopment, told the BBC. “All the private rich clubs, they’re going to still be about, but you are making it less affordable, and taking it away from the masses.”

The Department of Justice is throwing hot charcoal on the meatpacking industry’s grill, as the agency has reportedly opened an antitrust investigation that could have wide-ranging implications for the beef market. The probe, which comes following repeated pressure from President Donald Trump, is happening as beef prices continue to rise, causing consumers to have a negative view of the economy.

What is the investigation about?

The DOJ is looking into whether “large meatpackers that supply American consumers engaged in criminal anticompetitive conduct,” according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the investigation. The probe is “looking at all of the major companies that sell beef in the U.S.” Four companies currently control 85% of the country’s beef market share: the U.S.-based Cargill and Tyson Foods, and the Brazilian-owned JBS and National Beef.

The crux of the investigation is whether these companies “reached illegal agreements over how they purchase cattle from ranchers,” said Bloomberg. The Justice Department reportedly believes beef companies could be doing this to cut costs, as “beef processors have been losing money for the last 20 months as they pay producers higher prices for cattle.” The investigation appeared to come at Trump’s behest. The president said in November 2025 he would “order the Justice Department to investigate the meatpacking industry for alleged collusion,” said Axios.

Other food companies, like McDonald’s, have also accused “big beef packers of collusion and price-gouging,” said The Guardian. As of now, the probe remains a noncriminal investigation. None of the companies or their employees “have been accused of any wrongdoing and probes don’t always lead to charges or lawsuits being filed,” said Bloomberg. JBS “isn’t aware of any criminal investigation” and “operates in a highly regulated industry and is committed to complying with all applicable regulations,” a spokesperson for the company told the Journal. Cargill, Tyson Foods and National Beef haven’t commented.

What is the bigger picture?

Questions about the beef industry aren’t new, as ranchers have “long complained about anticompetitive conduct by the four companies,” said Bloomberg. Evidence of consolidation within the beef industry is “reflected in sharply increased spreads between cattle prices and wholesale beef prices,” said a U.S. Department of Agriculture report from 2024, with “stronger evidence of market power in the meatpacking industry.”

But a criminal investigation perhaps beginning “raises the stakes considerably for the companies and their executives, who face the prospect of steep fines and prison time,” said Bloomberg. A prior investigation “into alleged price-fixing during the Covid-19 pandemic closed without action.” The current high beef prices are “driven mostly by structural factors,” Dennis Follmer, the chief investment officer at Montis Financial, told Axios. Consumers “shouldn’t expect near-term relief.”

The prospect of Trump becoming directly involved due to rising prices remains on the table, as the president’s approval rating on the cost of living has been consistently falling throughout 2026. When Trump called for the DOJ to investigate meatpackers in November 2025, the average price of ground beef was $6.54 per pound, up 91 cents year-to-year, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It has continued rising since then and is currently $6.70 per pound.

Prosecutors in El Salvador have opened a mass trial of 486 alleged members of the infamous MS-13 gang on charges ranging from homicide and femicide to extortion and arms trafficking.

They have been accused of more than 47,000 crimes between 2012 and 2022, including an estimated 29,000 homicides. These trials encapsulate President Nayib Bukele’s “iron-fist approach” to fighting organised crime, said The Associated Press, in a country that has been in a state of emergency for four years.

But mass trials have been criticised by human rights organisations, including a group of UN experts who claim they “undermine the exercise of the right to defence and the presumption of innocence of detainees”. Many are held in custody for years before their trial, facing blanket rulings from unknown judges.

What is MS-13?

The MS stands for Mara Salvatrucha, thought to be a combination of “Mara” (“gang”), “Salva” (a shortening of Salvador) and “trucha” (“which translates roughly into street smarts”), said the BBC. “The 13 represents the position of M in the alphabet.”

The gang was formed “on the street corners of Los Angeles” in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants who had fled civil war, said Sky News. It only spread to Central America when the members were deported from the US.

Donald Trump designated the group a terrorist organisation last year and made “deportation agreements” with El Salvador to “exchange prisoners affiliated with the gang and others”.

The main aim of the mass trial is to target the “ranfla” – the “highest echelon” – of the gang, said The Times. Alongside its rival gang, Barrio 18, MS-13 at one stage controlled up to 80% of El Salvadoran territory through “extortion, drug dealing, contract killings and arms trafficking”. Prosecutors allege that the gang’s attempts to gain complete control amounted to a “parallel state, undermining national sovereignty”.

“Over three decades” Bukele’s government estimates the gangs have killed around 200,000 people, including many listed as disappeared.

Has a trial like this happened before?

The first “collective” trial of this magnitude took place in March 2025, said AP. At its conclusion, 52 members of Barrio 18 were convicted, with one individual sentenced to 245 years in prison.

In November, a similar trial found 45 members of a rival faction, Barrio 18 Sureños, guilty of several crimes and “handed down a 397-year prison sentence to one leader”.

What is the criticism?

Bukele’s “crackdown has drawn sharp criticism from human rights organisations”, said The Times. There is significant risk that, given the limited evidence specific to individuals, mass trials risk convicting innocent people.

Human Rights Watch estimated that El Salvador’s prison population has reached 118,000, “more than double the country’s capacity”. Set against “significantly worsening already poor prison conditions”, nearly 2% of the country’s entire population was incarcerated, “among the highest rates in the world”.

More than 500 people have already died in state custody under Bukele, and there have been reports of torture, said Agence France-Presse. Bukele has also acknowledged that “at least 8,000 innocent people” have been arrested under the crackdown, and have since been released, said AP.

Who is behind this?

President Bukele’s stance on criminal gangs has “made him the most popular elected head of state in the world”, said The Times. According to official figures released by his government, the rate of homicides fell from 7.8 per 100,000 people in 2022 to 1.3 last year, said Reuters.

Trump is a close ally. He said he had “the best relationship” with Bukele after the El Salvador president’s visit to the White House in 2025, said The Telegraph, despite previously accusing Bukele of sending MS-13 gang members to the US. Trump also signed a deal with Bukele last year, paying El Salvador between $6 million (£4.5 million) and $15 million (£11.3 million) to hold deportees in its prisons – “seemingly with little due process”.

What will happen next?

At the beginning of the trial, the judge stated that armed groups had disturbed “the peace of the Salvadoran population and the security of the state” for decades, and would be tried “with the full force of the law”.

Of the defendants, 413 of them are being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center (“Cecot”) in Tecoluca, and will watch proceedings on a screen. Cecot, a maximum-security prison built by Bukele in 2023, has “become a symbol of his controversial security policies”, said AP. The other 73 remain at large and will be tried in absentia.

Prosecutors say they have “overwhelming evidence” and will seek the maximum permitted sentence, said The Times. The trial could last up to six months.

“A little blue pill is creating a stir in Hollywood,” said Dipa Kamdar, senior lecturer in pharmacy practice at Kingston University, London, on The Conversation. “And no, it’s not Viagra.”

For several years now, celebrities have been singing the praises of propranolol, a beta-blocker originally designed for heart conditions which also helps with anxiety. Kristen Bell, Rachel Sennott and Natasha Rothwell have all mentioned taking the pill at red-carpet events over the past year. Four years ago, Khloé Kardashian admitted she borrows her mother’s medication to calm her nerves, while Robert Downey Jr started his 2024 Golden Globe acceptance speech by saying he had just taken a beta-blocker “so this will be a breeze”.

These A-lister endorsements have led, in part, to a surge in prescriptions, especially among young women and girls, with propranolol now the “go-to pill for dealing with all sorts of stressful situations, from public speaking to first dates”, said The Wall Street Journal.

How does it work?

The beta-blocker was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1967 for the treatment of heart problems including high blood pressure, arrhythmia (irregular heart rate) and angina. But it soon became clear the drug also reduced physical responses to anxiety, such as high heart rate, sweating, nausea and trembling hands. And while other medications prescribed for anxiety, like certain anti-depressants, can take weeks to work, propranolol can take effect within an hour.

Unlike drugs like Xanax or Valium, which “act directly on the brain and can leave people feeling sedated, foggy, or zoned out”, propranolol doesn’t address anxiety’s “underlying roots” but “blocks its physical symptoms” by slowing down the heart rate and lowering blood pressure, said The Boston Globe.

“It’s a beta-blocker, not a bravery booster”, said Kamdar. “It won’t fix your fear of public speaking or make you smoother on a first date – though it might stop your hands from shaking while you try.”

How widely is it used?

In the US, overall prescriptions are up 28% from 2020, while NHS England figures show an increase of 37.6% over the past decade, according to data seen by The Observer. The biggest rise in the UK has been among girls aged between 12 and 17 – up from 618,813 prescriptions in 2015 to more than 1.1 million in 2025. The second highest increase in use – at 81.7% – is among women aged 18 to 23.

The increasing popularity of beta-blockers among young women and girls “points to a generation that has grown up with the pressures of social media and an epidemic of gender-based violence, as well as the isolating effects of Covid”, said the outlet.

As well as its speed and availability, its appeal may also lie in the fact that, unlike other mental health medication, “culturally” propranolol is “portrayed lightly – as if it’s nothing more than a breath mint”, said The Boston Globe.

Are there any risks?

Compared to Xanax or Valium, propranolol is a non-addictive and low-risk medication. However, “it’s not without risks or side-effects”, said Kamdar on The Conversation. Because propranolol works to reduce blood pressure and heart rate, common side-effects include dizziness, fatigue, cold hands and feet, and vivid dreams. “More serious risks – though rare – include heart failure, breathing difficulties and allergic reactions”.

In the UK, where propranolol is licensed to treat anxiety, its effects have been “more scrutinised”, said the WSJ. The General Pharmaceutical Council has highlighted the risk of overdose following the death of a 17-year-old girl in 2023, who died after taking propranolol along with other pain-relief medication. The UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence anxiety-management guidelines recommend cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness and antidepressants as initial treatments.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is “close” to securing a $10 billion (£7.4 billion) fundraising deal from investors for his AI lab, codenamed Project Prometheus, said the Financial Times. The deal would make the company, which aims to explore how AI systems can be applied across physical industries, “one of the best-financed early-stage start-ups globally”, and marks the first time Bezos has served in an operational role since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021.

Project Prometheus will propel Bezos into the ranks of the AI titans heading firms with multi-billion-dollar valuations, such as Anthropic, OpenAI and Palantir. With the industry elite divided by ongoing legal feuds and conflicting political ideologies, the personalities of the individual CEOs look set to shape the course of AI as much as the technology itself. Here are the five names to watch.

Sam Altman

The OpenAI CEO is more and more becoming the “protagonist” of our times, said Lily Isaacs in The Observer. As with Faust, Victor Frankenstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer, we are beginning to “share the uneasy feeling that enlightenment carries within it the seeds of catastrophe”.

Launched by OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT is the chatbot that has “redefined the standards of artificial intelligence”, said Forbes. As the company nears a possible value of more than $1 trillion (£740 billion), “one of the biggest so-called risk factors” to the company is “Altman himself”, said Dave Lee in Bloomberg. Altman was fired by the board in November 2023, only to be reinstated days later.

Reading the year-and-a-half-long investigation by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker, the “overriding impression” of Altman is that he is a “borderline sociopath”, said Jeremy Kahn in Fortune. The piece raises questions on whether Altman “actually cares about AI safety” or whether his rhetoric is simply a “convenient pose” to win over funders and regulators.

Dario Amodei

“We should not deny that the disruption is going to happen” as AI use increases, Anthropic CEO Amodei told John Thornhill in the FT, but AI can only “diffuse at the speed of trust”. Trust, however, said Thornhill, is “in short supply”. “As the current frontrunner of the AI pack, Amodei is certain to come under increasingly fierce scrutiny.”

It is clear that he “wants to position himself as one of the good guys in the AI debate”, but that “grates with many Silicon Valley critics”, who argue that “his principles align with Anthropic’s commercial interests”. Amodei founded Anthropic – the creators of Claude – in 2021 alongside six other former OpenAI employees, including his sister Daniela, who is president. The company has recently raised $30 billion (£22.2 billion) at a $380 billion (£281.3 billion) valuation and is reportedly “heading for a giant stock market flotation later this year”.

Central to Amodei’s brand of Anthropic is that it is “fundamentally safer than that of its rivals”, said The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, that was one of the main reasons Amodei left OpenAI, citing “concerns about safety”. In recent months, he has also “compared the legal battle between Altman and Elon Musk to the fight between Hitler and Stalin”, as well as calling a $25 million (£18.5 million) donation by OpenAI President Greg Brockman to pro-Trump super PAC (independent expenditure-only political action committee) Maga Inc. “evil”.

Jensen Huang

Although the head of Nvidia may not be driving the AI revolution directly, his company is facilitating it, acting as the “hardware backbone” of the movement, said Business Insider. Huang’s “chip empire” is effectively “powering the generative AI boom”.

He founded the company in 1993, and has served as CEO ever since. Under his leadership, Nvidia – whose projected revenue opportunity for its artificial intelligence chips could reach $1 trillion (£740 billion) or more by the end of 2027 – has expanded partnerships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud to accelerate AI development. Nvidia’s hardware and software “now sit at the centre of nearly every major foundation-model program”, said Business Insider.

AI is “gonna create more jobs in the end”, Huang said during a recent panel at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, reported Fortune. “There’ll be more people working at the end of this industrial revolution than at the beginning of it.” He has previously commented that negative commentary surrounding AI is “extremely hurtful”, said Inc.

Huang is not without his quirks, having banned one-on-one meetings with staff who report directly to him, on the grounds they would “clog up his work schedule and slow him down”, said Fortune.

Alex Karp

Fewer people will have heard of the co-founder of Palantir, but to some he is the “scariest CEO in the world”, said Steve Rose in The Guardian.

The company recently released a 22-point “manifesto” summarising Karp’s recent book, “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”. In it, he extols the need for “hard power”, argues the inevitability of “AI weapons” and calls for the reversal of the “postwar neutering of Germany and Japan”. MPs have since called this a “parody of a ‘RoboCop’ film” and the “ramblings of a supervillain”. Arguably, what it does show is that “Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilisation”, said Aisha Down and Robert Booth in The Guardian.

The company is “at the heart of many of the world’s pressing issues”, said The Guardian. Palantir has “multibillion-dollar contracts” with the US Army and Ice, as well as partnerships with the Israeli military and the Ministry of Defence, said Al Jazeera.

Some NHS staff are “refusing to work” on the health service’s Federated Data Platform, which is provided by Palantir, due to the company’s “role in US defence and immigration enforcement”, said the FT. Ministers are exploring the possibility of a “break clause” in the company’s seven-year £330 million NHS contract, signed in 2023.

Elon Musk

The founder of xAI and Grok, such is the strength of Musk’s conviction in AI, that he believes it will put “immortality within human reach”, said Fortune.

But the “rapid rise” of his tech company xAI’s has “raised concerns”, said Harry Booth in Time. There were accusations of pollution from the Colossus data centres’ temporary gas turbines, and the now-infamous update to Grok “praised Adolf Hitler as a ‘decisive leader’ and began creating graphic rape narratives”.

French prosecutors summoned Musk for a voluntary interview on Monday, which he did not attend, over “alleged abuse of algorithms and fraudulent data extraction” by his AI chatbot Grok, as well as the “creation of sexual deepfakes”, said France 24. This is part of an ongoing probe first opened in 2025, with the company’s offices raided by the Paris prosecutor’s cybercrime unit in February.

Musk is also locked in a legal feud with Altman – with whom he cofounded OpenAI – accusing Altman of deceiving him into donating $38 million (£28 million) towards the company with the promise that it would remain a non-profit, said Business Insider.

Keir Starmer is to address the Commons this afternoon over the appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US, after it emerged that the Labour grandee was approved by the Foreign Office despite failing internal vetting.

Following an internal fact-finding review, No. 10 are said to be “confident it will show he was kept in the dark over the details of the process until Tuesday night and therefore did not mislead Parliament”, said The i Paper.

What happened?

Mandelson, a Labour veteran, has been a central figure in the party since the 1980s. He played a key role in New Labour and the 1997 landslide election victory, was MP for Hartlepool and held ministerial positions but was twice forced to resign.

Keir Starmer appointed Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador in Washington in December 2024, but he was sacked last September, after Downing Street said new information about the extent of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein had emerged.

But it’s since transpired that in January 2025 he had failed a “developed” security vetting carried out by UK Security Vetting (UKSV), a division of the Cabinet Office. The decision to overrule the UKSV was made by the Foreign Office without Downing Street’s knowledge, according to reports.

Civil servants at the Foreign Office were able to override security warnings by deploying a rarely used, high-level authority to grant clearance despite a recommendation to deny it. According to The Guardian, they acted on the understanding that the prime minister wanted the appointment to proceed.

Did Starmer know?

The so-called Mandelson files released so far show that Starmer was warned of the reputational dangers of the appointment, but there was no mention in any documents that Mandelson did not pass the security vetting process. More files are yet to be released.

At least two senior civil servants knew several weeks ago that Mandelson had failed security vetting for his US ambassador role, according to Sky News. A Cabinet Office spokesperson said that they didn’t pass the information to Starmer because they were waiting for legal checks on what information could be released.

Starmer said he was “absolutely furious” that he wasn’t made aware that Mandelson had failed the security vetting and described the situation as “completely unacceptable”. He insisted that he would have reversed the appointment had he known. Beth Rigby, Sky News’ political editor, said that although the PM is “normally not one to show emotion”, he was “near apoplectic”.

Who else knew?

The Foreign Office’s top civil servant, Olly Robbins, was “one of the few people who knew the true outcome of the vetting process”, said The Telegraph. He discovered this in January 2025 but decided to override the recommendation not to approve the peer for the US ambassador role, although he is thought to have “harboured private concerns about the appointment”. Robbins was sacked on Thursday after the revelations became public, and is said to be considering taking legal action.

As the Foreign Secretary, David Lammy had to formally give approval for Mandelson, to be given the go-ahead, but did so against his own wishes and was apparently unaware of the failed vetting, said the broadsheet. Allies of the foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, said she did not find out until the story broke on Thursday, two days after the PM found out.

The UK has rapidly decarbonised its energy sector, with emissions falling by about 54% since 1990. Fossil fuels supply only around a third of our electricity, but when it comes to the total energy mix – including heating, transport etc – we still rely heavily on oil and gas: they accounted for 74% of the total in 2024 (36.5% oil; 37.5% gas). And the nation is producing less of both than it once did.

In 1999, when production peaked on the UK Continental Shelf, Britain was a net exporter of oil, and was self-sufficient in gas. Today, only about 50% of UK oil comes from domestic sources; some 30% of the UK’s natural gas also comes from domestic sources. Whereas, of the imports: 76% of imported liquefied natural gas (LNG) comes from Norway; 17% from the US and about 2% from the Persian Gulf.

Is there much oil and gas left?

The UK Continental Shelf (largely in the North Sea, but also in the Irish Sea) is a mature basin: over the past 60 years, its most accessible oil and gas – about 47.7 billion barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) – has been extracted. Domestic production of oil and gas fell by 76% and 73% respectively between 2000 and 2024. Today there are over 280 active oil and gas fields, but 180 of these are expected to cease production by 2030. Estimates vary as to how much is left.

According to the energy consultancy Wood Mackenzie, there’s an estimated 2.3 billion BOE of recoverable oil and gas in the North Sea – enough to cover a sixth of the UK’s projected needs until its net-zero target date of 2050. Offshore Energies UK, an industry group, estimates there are around 7.5 billion BOE of oil. The North Sea Transition Authority, the industry regulator, is more cautious: it thinks the North Sea is home to 2.9 billion BOE of “proven and probable reserves” of oil and gas, with an extra 10.8 billion that may or may not be accessible.

How easily could it be recovered?

“Easy oil is over,” says Dr Mark Ireland, a geologist at Newcastle University. “What remains are smaller, sometimes more remote, and often more technically challenging or expensive resources and reserves.”

New exploration competes for investment with more accessible sources of hydrocarbons abroad, so the North Sea’s future depends on relatively high oil and gas prices, tax levels that aren’t too high and investor confidence. At present, a headline 78% tax rate and high costs mean British oil fields need global prices at nearly $40 (£29) a barrel just to break even, more than twice the threshold for Norway.

There are undeveloped fields, where oil or gas are confirmed but not yet produced. Furthest along is Jackdaw gas field, which could be connected to the UK within months; but that and Rosebank have not been approved.

Could more drilling lower prices?

Probably not. Oil and gas prices are set on international markets; and given the North Sea’s relatively small reserves, drilling there would not impact global prices. Nigel Topping, chair of the Climate Change Committee, says the best way to bring down bills is by “making clean electricity cheaper and reducing demand for oil and gas – not doubling down on declining resources”. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero wants to get Britain off “the roller-coaster of fossil fuel prices and onto homegrown power that we control”.

But might it be useful in other ways?

Yes. Advocates of further exploration point out that it would improve energy security: gas is pumped straight into the UK’s energy system, which insulates the nation from energy shocks, and potentially from price spikes such as the present one. Crucially, they point out, companies licensed to extract North Sea oil and gas would pay billions in tax – money that could be used, for instance, to lower domestic energy bills. (The industry has paid between £4.5 billion and £9 billion in annual tax in recent years.)

Domestic production is good for the balance of payments, too: the UK spent £36 billion on oil and gas imports in 2024, money lost to the British economy. And jobs are at stake. In the past decade, the North Sea workforce has shrunk from 450,000 to 160,000; the hope that jobs would be created in renewable energy to replace them has not yet been borne out.

Wouldn’t more drilling undermine our climate policies?

On the face of it, yes. Over the Jackdaw field’s lifetime, if you include both “operational” and “downstream” emissions (those caused by burning the gas), it will generate the equivalent of 35.8 million tonnes of carbon – nearly Scotland’s total emissions per year.

On the other hand, realistically, Britain is going to need a lot of oil and gas even if it does reach net zero by 2050, for domestic heating, transport – and to back up intermittent wind and solar. Shell, which owns Jackdaw, argues that “the UK will consume this gas, wherever it is produced” – and imported LNG from the US and Qatar is about a fifth more carbon intensive. Thus, arguably, domestic production can help reduce overall emissions.

So what should we do?

Opinion is divided. Reform UK, the Conservatives and most recently the SNP have all backed further drilling in the North Sea. Even Tara Singh, CEO of RenewableUK, the trade association for renewable power, has argued that the UK should continue, and even increase, North Sea gas production for energy security during the transition to net zero, to reduce imports. But Labour's 2024 election manifesto explicitly ruled out issuing new oil and gas exploration licences, although it does allow “tiebacks” for existing fields. (The Lib Dems and the Greens are also opposed.) The Energy Secretary Ed Miliband argues that Britain should show “climate leadership”, and that if it were to allow more licences and more drilling, it would undermine efforts to slow global warming and to move to low-carbon energy sources.

More than a quarter of women under 25 hold a negative view of men, according to a recent poll for The New Statesman, revealing what the magazine calls a “new radicalism”. This is seen as a challenge to the “prevailing narrative” that it is radicalised young men who are driving the so-called gender wars.

A “growing army” of female influencers broadly referred to as the femosphere is “urging” women to adopt a more cynical mindset when it comes to the opposite sex, “ditch their romantic delusions” and “be more aggressive in the dating game”, said Sarah Ditum in The Times.

What is the femosphere?

The term comes from the concept of the manosphere – a loose, online-based community of social media accounts, forums, blogs and podcasts that promote a view of “traditional masculinity”, with men in a dominant role and women subservient. “United in a belief that men are victims in a society that is designed for the benefit of women”, many of these spaces are “overflowing with rage”, said James Bloodworth in The Times.

The femosphere is a reaction to this with a message that “men are inherently selfish” and “only interested in one thing”, said Ditum. Manosphere terminology is gender-flipped: instead of “taking the red pill” (embracing the belief that society does not value men), the “pink-pill philosophy” encourages women to break with the egalitarian conventions of liberal feminism and see men as the “problem sex”.

What does that mean in practice?

Femosphere philosophy urges women to avoid casual relationships with men and to “adopt a more emotionally distant, calculated approach” to dating, said NBC News. Some of its content “frames” relationships as something to “win,” and advises followers to be “selective, guarded, and, at times, intentionally aloof”.

Mirroring the “pick-up artists” of the manosphere – those who offer manipulative strategies to persuade women to engage in sexual relationships – the femosphere has its “female dating strategists”, said The Guardian. Among them are the so-called “dark feminine” influencers who “encourage women to find men to support them financially” by cynically deploying behaviours associated with traditional femininity.

The appeal is understandable, feminist theorist Dr Sophie Lewis told the newspaper. The promise of liberal feminism that women could “have it all” has left many “saddled with both productive and reproductive labour”. The femosphere offers liberation from the “double shift”.

Is it a bad thing?

Femosphere influencers claim the movement is about “empowerment” of women rather than hatred of men, said NBC News. They see themselves as “pushing back against dating norms that have historically disadvantaged women” with a mindset that “encourages self-worth, boundaries, and higher standards in relationships”. But critics say it risks “turning dating into a transactional or manipulative experience”, where “authenticity” takes a “back seat to strategy”.

The “overarching belief” of the femosphere is the same as that of the manosphere, said The Guardian: “life is about survival of the fittest”. Men “will always hurt women and that will never change”, so “strategies are needed to conquer the opposite gender”.

Premium Bonds are one of the nation’s most-loved savings products, but falling prize rates mean savers could be better off putting their money elsewhere.

Government-backed National Savings & Investments has offered Premium Bonds since 1956, as a way to keep savings safe, with the “added thrill of a monthly cash prize draw”, said GoCompare.

But its prize rate dropped this month from 3.6% to 3.3%, cutting the chances of winning.

What are Premium Bonds?

Premium Bonds are a government-backed savings account. But rather than earning a guaranteed return in interest, savers are entered into a monthly prize draw with the chance to win a sum ranging from £25 to £1 million in cash.

The prize fund rate is the benchmark used by National Savings & Investments to set the number of prizes to be given away each month. The figure represents the rate of return for a bondholder with average luck. Some holders will earn a lot, some nothing.

But the odds of winning are so low that if everyone with £1,000 in Premium Bonds were lined up, “you’d need to walk past 60% of the line until you hit the first £25 winner”, said MoneySavingExpert,.

Pro: Safe, tax-free savings

Money in NS&I accounts is lent to the government, making it secure with Treasury-backed benefits. Money with other regulated financial institutions, such as banks, is protected under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) if a provider goes bust for up to £85,000.

As the maximum investment in Premium Bonds is £50,000, the protection level is the same as if you had an equal amount in a savings account.

Those who do strike lucky in the monthly draw can take the winnings tax-free, which could be a good way to safeguard savings from the taxman if you have used up all ISA and personal savings allowances.

Con: Low odds, won't beat inflation

The main allure of Premium Bonds is the chance to win up to £1 million, but even discounting the maximum, many of those with money in accounts will never win anything.

With the reduction in the prize rate, the odds of winning anything are 23,000 to one. The luck of the draw means a saver could win big, but they could also walk away with nothing at all.

Relying on luck and not fixed interest, over time and without a win, Premium Bonds savings may lose purchasing power as inflation rises. The poor odds of winning make it unlikely to beat such rises.

Pro: Easy withdrawal

They do offer the chance, no matter how small, of a holder becoming a millionaire, and savers get the monthly thrill of a prize draw. Plus there are no time limits, and money is free to be withdrawn at any time.

Con: Low returns

But Premium Bonds are “not the most lucrative choice” based on the return, said Fidelity. This is especially the case compared with top savings accounts, which may have suffered cuts in recent months, but still pay regular interest at more than 4%.

In contrast to Premium Bonds, savings accounts provide an “agreed rate of return”, said The Independent, plus savers may “attract higher long-term returns” by investing.

The £100k tax trap “might sound like a champagne problem” to some, said Becky Wilding in The Independent, but “those affected feel unfairly targeted”.

The affected are a growing number: Brits earning six-figure salaries are expected to exceed two million for the first time in the 2026/27 tax year, pulling tens of thousands more workers into a 60% tax rate.

What is the £100k tax trap?

In the UK, most people receive a personal allowance (tax-free income) of £12,570, but professionals earning between £100,000 and £125,140 lose that, creating a 60% effective tax rate. For graduates repaying student loans, the news is even worse: the tax rate can rise to 71% or higher.

The effect is also punishing for parents of young children because they lose tax-free childcare and free hours. The loss of their entitlement to 30 hours per week of free childcare can carry an annual cost of £9,600 per child.

Is it a big problem?

It means that it pays more to earn £99,999 than it does to earn £144,500, and “by any measure, this is farcical”, said The Telegraph’s investment editor James Baxter-Derrington. And “before you reach for your tiniest violin”, consider the overall impact, regardless of what you earn.

A nation that “tells people ambition doesn’t pay will soon run out of ambitious people”. And as they are the ones tending to earn the higher amounts of money – money that is taxed and spent in the economy – we will all be poorer should we lose them.

Above £125,140, the rate “falls back” to 47%, and a system where “rates rise and then fall” as income goes up is “indefensible”, said the Tax Policy Associates’ Dan Neidle in the Financial Times.

It is “one of the UK tax system’s most notorious quirks”, said Michael Healy on LBC, and it’s led to “distorted behaviour”. Four in five people earning £90,000- £125,000 have “actively taken steps” to earn below the £100,000 threshold. The arrangement can make small pay rises feel disappointing because you keep much less of them, and it affects bonuses and overtime decisions.

What can be done?

The government should “reform” thresholds and introduce a dedicated UK Equities Investment Scheme to provide income tax relief on UK-listed shares held in ISAs. It would mean that higher-rate taxpayers could “receive relief” of up to £8,000 annually, said Healy.

On childcare, the Centre for British Progress think-tank has suggested replacing the £100,000 cliff edge with a new 3% tax on income over £100,000 for each child receiving support. This means the cliff edge “disappears” and the “confiscatory jump” is “replaced by a smooth phaseout”, said the FT. Those just above £100,000 will hardly feel the effect, while higher earners “face a clear, proportionate trade-off”.

For taxpayers themselves, there is a fairly straightforward solution that’s “(legal!) and financially savvy”, said The Independent. You can increase your pension contributions to a level where your remaining taxable income is below £100,000, sacrifice salary for other employee benefits, such as additional days of leave, or make Gift Aid donations.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has proposed to increase defence spending by less than £10 billion over the next four years, despite the Armed Forces highlighting a £28 billion funding gap in the same period, and warning that Britain’s “national security and safety is in peril”, said The Times.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, a former Nato secretary-general, accused the Treasury in a speech on Tuesday of “vandalism” for inaction on defence. Leader of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, Robertson said that for the UK “building deterrence will not be quick or cheap”. He added that “the public need to face that uncomfortable fact or suffer the consequences of not being safe in a very turbulent world.”

With a fragile ceasefire in the Middle East and continued conflict in Ukraine, many fear that the government’s pledges to defence will prove difficult to fulfil.

What has the government pledged?

Minister of State for the Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard stated in the House that the government was undertaking the “largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War”, in response to Lord Robertson’s claims, but this is a “low bar”, said Ben Chu on BBC News. Defence spending has been on an “almost constant downward path since the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

The UK government currently spends 2.4% of GDP on defence, and Keir Starmer has committed to hitting 2.5% from April next year. This will then rise to 3% “at some point during the next parliament”, said The Times, though some critics think that the UK “should be hitting the 3% target now”.

More broadly, in June last year the government also committed to a Nato-wide agreement to spend 5% of GDP on national security. This figure will be split into 3.5% on “core defence” and 1.5% on “resilience and security” by 2035.

What state are the Armed Forces in?

In 1990, at the end of the Cold War, the Army had “153,000 regular soldiers in its ranks”, said the BBC. Now, it has less than half that number, just 73,790, according to the Ministry of Defence.

When it comes to recruitment, “Britain is at serious risk of being left behind” as other countries look to bolster their ranks, said Cahal Milmo and Jane Merrick in The i Paper. European neighbours Germany, Finland, Poland and France are “forging ahead with rearmament schemes” and programmes to increase numbers applying to their armed forces.

In the year to September 2025, the number of applications to the British Army Regular Forces (108,020) decreased by 36.6% compared to the previous year (170,380), according to the MoD.

In terms of equipment, in 1990, the Royal Navy had 13 destroyers and 35 frigates, which has since dropped to six and 11 respectively, said the BBC. Similarly, in 1990 the RAF had 300 combat jets. Though the current 137 Eurofighter Typhoons and minimum 37 Joint Strike Fighter F-35 Lightning IIs are “technically superior”, they are fewer in number. The use in combat of unmanned drones, which did not exist in 1990, is rising, and these also form part of the UK’s military aircraft.

How have recent ventures fared?

The “sad state” of the Armed Forces was illustrated by the delay in the deployment of HMS Dragon to the Middle East, said Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian. Even after the delay, the destroyer “needed further repairs almost as soon as it arrived”. It is the Navy’s “lone destroyer available to help protect British interests” in the Middle East, as the Navy’s “largest and most expensive” ships, the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales – which “cost more than £6 billion” – were unavailable.

On land, ministers are facing “scrapping” the Ajax armoured vehicle programme, due to health concerns for its operators. Its issues are “so serious that vibration and noise have made soldiers training on it sick, with some suffering hearing loss”. More than £6 billion has been spent on the project, and it is “already eight years late”.

The government is also “under increasing pressure” to deliver its “long-delayed” Defence Investment Plan, said The i Paper. This promises to “overhaul Britain’s military capabilities with about £300 billion of investment over a decade”, said the outlet. Though expected to have been released last October, due to concerns over the MoD funding gap, it is not expected “until June at the earliest”.

What needs to be done?

The war in the Middle East should be a “wake-up call” for the UK to recognise its “vulnerabilities”, said George Robertson in Prospect. “There are many.” Public attention is mostly focused on the tangibles – such as planes, tanks and ships – but they are the “baubles on the Christmas tree”. “We need to focus on the tree itself” by addressing “crises in logistics, engineering, cyber, ammunition, training and medical resources”.

“In the early 2020s, interest in GLP-1 weight loss drugs exploded,” said CNN. Now, “a new buzzword is taking over”: peptides.

Once a niche interest among powerlifters and bodybuilders, the injectable substances have flooded the online wellness sphere. Social media is awash with people raving about their effect on everything from weight loss to concentration. Athletes and wellness influencers hail peptides as a way to speed muscle recovery and slow ageing. Demand is surging and authorities are “starting to take notice”.

What are peptides?

Short chains of amino acids (small proteins) produced by our bodies to help regulate hormones, reduce inflammation and repair tissue. Synthetic versions are manufactured to mimic, or even enhance, those naturally occurring proteins.

Peptides are the P in GLP-1s (the class of weight-loss drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy). Plenty of long-established drugs, such as insulin, are peptide-based – but “grey-market injectable peptides” are “unregulated, experimental compounds”, said The Guardian. Some are “bootleg versions of approved drugs”, sold for “a fraction of their market price” online.

Unregulated peptides have “exploded onto the wellbeing market” since weight-loss drugs “became mainstream”, said the BBC. “The success of regulated GLP-1 drugs has ‘normalised’ using a needle, lowering the psychological barrier to self-injection,” said Dr Mike Mrozinski, a GP.

“The GLP-1s put it on the map,” Evan Miller, CEO of Gameday Men’s Health, told CNN. “And then people were like, ‘Well, what’s next?’”

Are they legal?

They are in “a legal and regulatory middle zone” known as the grey market, said the BBC. Many popular peptides aren’t considered medicines in the UK, so they’re unregulated by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency. As they’re not approved for human use, they aren’t subject to quality controls.

In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bars pharmacies from compounding peptides, but they can be bought from manufacturers in China, which export them under the label “for research purposes only”, or “not for human consumption” – a legal loophole. In practice, they are “packaged, dosed and marketed in ways that clearly anticipate human use”, said three public health experts from Australia on The Conversation. This creates “a parallel market”, outside clinical oversight and regulation.

According to US customs data, imports of hormone and peptide compounds from China reached $328 million in the first three quarters of 2025, up from $164 million in the same period the previous year, said The New York Times.

Are they safe?

Many peptides and cosmetic injectables are sold with claims that they can accelerate skin repair, improve wrinkles and even reverse aspects of ageing. But high-quality human evidence is limited. Most claims are based on “a handful of laboratory studies”, usually on animals, said the public health experts on The Conversation.

The FDA warns that they pose “serious safety risks” because of potential impurities, including the risk of allergic reactions. Recent analysis by Texas testing lab Finnrick of some products suggests that 8% could be contaminated. Bacterial endotoxins can do a “serious number on you”, Adam Taylor, anatomy professor at Lancaster University, told the BBC.

Using peptides is “unfounded and reckless”, Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, told The New York Times. Last year, two women were hospitalised after injecting unknown peptides at a Las Vegas anti-ageing festival.

They lack “reliable safety data and quality control”, said The Guardian. According to Taylor, users are “converting themselves into the guinea pigs or the lab rats”.

Who’s taking peptides?

Precise numbers are impossible to discern, but wellness influencers, bio-hackers and Silicon Valley tech bros are among those publicly endorsing the practice.

Unregulated peptides have “flooded some corners of the tech scene” in the US, said The New York Times. They’re showing up in “hacker houses, start-up offices and even ‘peptide raves’”. Tech podcaster and self-proclaimed “gym bro” Jayden Clark posted on X that “the elites all have a Chinese peptide dealer”. The term “Chinese peptides” has become a meme.

US podcaster Joe Rogan claims peptides BPC-157 and TB-500, a combination known as the “Wolverine stack” after the Marvel superhero, help with injury recovery. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, says he is “a big fan of peptides”. In 2024, RFK Jr said on X that he would end the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of peptides.

The price of crude oil could rise to $150 a barrel under a US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

Jorge Montepeque, managing director of oil traders Onyx Capital Group, said prices “should be $140, $150” if the naval blockade goes ahead, said The Telegraph.

The US blockade was due to begin at 3pm today UK time. Writing on social media, Donald Trump said that the US was going to start “BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz” and will “interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran”.

How will it work?

Under Trump’s plan, instead of having navy ships escort commercial vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, US forces will board and potentially seize any vessels that pay Iran’s toll, a move that would effectively close the strait off entirely.

The US Central Command said that its forces would not impede the freedom of vessels travelling to and from non-Iranian ports. It also pledged that it would release additional information to commercial mariners.

The president warned that “any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL”, but “at some point” an agreement on free passage would be reached. He said that other countries would be involved in blockading the strait, but did not specify which. Keir Starmer said the UK would not join the blockade.

What will the effect be?

The consequences for the global economy could be serious. There’s “little clarity” about how the US navy will take control of the strait without “reigniting” the conflict with Iran and “causing another shockwave” in the money markets, said Michael Evans in The Times.

The blockade “might risk worsening a war-driven global energy crisis”, said The Washington Post. Although Iran would “potentially suffer the most economically”, it may also “come as a blow to the rest of the world”, particularly nations in Asia, which “rely heavily” on oil and gas from the Gulf.

So the president is “once again playing loose with the fortunes of financial markets and the global economy as he struggles to find a way out of the war”, said Australia’s ABC News.

As for Trump, the plan “reflects his hope” that he can repeat the “model of his intervention” in Venezuela, said the Financial Times. There, the US “seized” the then president Nicolás Maduro in a military operation after a naval blockade of the Latin American nation.

“You saw what we did with Venezuela,” Trump told Fox News. “It’ll be something very similar to that, but at a higher level.”

What did experts say?

Initially, Trump’s plan will only affect the small number of vessels that are still navigating the waterway, shipping expert Lars Jensen told the BBC. If the US does blockade the strait, it will “halt a very tiny trickle” of vessels and “in the greater scheme of things, it doesn’t really change anything”.

But three legal experts in the US said the blockade could violate maritime law. One of them suggested the blockade, which will be enforced militarily, would violate the current ceasefire agreement.

The blockade is a good “counterpoint” to Iran’s closure of the strait, Dennis Ross, the former senior US diplomat and Middle East negotiator, said on X. It puts “greater pressure on Iran” and “great pressure on China to pressure Iran”.

But Vali Nasr, a former US official and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Financial Times that the plan will be “fine by the Iranians” because it “prolongs the chokehold on the global economy”.

Tehran might respond by shutting down the Bab el-Mandeb, a chokepoint off the coast of Yemen, said Nasr, and “then the US will have to deal with that”.

Airlines are feeling the strain of swelling oil prices resulting from the Iran war and closure of the Strait of Hormuz. To deal with higher operating costs, many companies are making changes that shift the burden to consumers, including higher baggage fees, more fuel surcharges and canceled routes.

How are higher gas costs affecting airlines?

Airlines and their customers across the U.S. are being impacted but especially those based in four major hubs: Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and New York City. In these locations, the average price for a gallon of jet fuel is currently $4.25, according to the aviation trade association Airlines for America. On Feb. 27, the day before the war in Iran started, the average price was only $2.50. Airlines are also “facing an increase in the amount of fuel their aircraft use because of extra miles required to avoid flying over the conflict zone,” said The Guardian.

Fuel is already an expensive cost for aviators and is “generally airlines’ largest expense after labor,” said Quartz. Airlines are feeling the pressure as a result. If prices were to stay at their current level, it would mean an “extra $11 billion in annual expense just for jet fuel,” said United CEO Scott Kirby in a memo to employees. For “perspective, in United’s best year ever, we made less than $5 billion.”

How are airlines adapting?

Many are adding “extra fees and surcharges onto already rising ticket prices” to “recoup costs as the war in Iran causes fuel costs to surge,” said The New York Times. Luggage is one common area where airlines are bumping up the price. Delta and Southwest announced they would “start charging $10 more to check a bag on U.S. domestic flights,” days after United and JetBlue said the same.

The company with the most notable baggage changes may be American. The airline said it would “raise the fee by $10 each for the first and the second checked bag for travelers booking domestic and short-haul international flights,” said The Detroit News. The company also “increased the cost of a third checked bag by $50 to $200” for fliers and additionally announced an upcoming $5 increase on checked bags for passengers flying economy.

Some airlines are also including pricing for the fuel itself. Canada’s second-largest airline, WestJet, announced it would “add fuel surcharges of up to 60 Canadian dollars, or about $43, to some flights,” said the Times. Air Canada unveiled surcharges of 50 Canadian dollars to certain warm-weather destinations. For passengers, the decisions from airlines resulted in “rising fares and fees, fewer flight options and difficult decisions about whether a trip is worth the cost,” said The Associated Press.

Airlines are also cutting the number of places they go. Several Asian airlines have stated they would “cut flights to mitigate fuel shortages and mounting costs,” said Business Insider. Ryanair, Europe’s largest carrier, is also “considering reducing routes,” while Lufthansa could ground up to 40 planes. Air New Zealand will “cut about 5% of its flights, or about 1,100, at the start of May,” and in the U.S., United and Delta are both cutting routes.

As the world creeps toward peak travel season, industry leaders are taking notice of the fuel shortages. ACI Europe, an association representing airports in the European Union, notes these shortages could “hit within three weeks, disrupting summer travel and ‘significantly’ harming the European economy,” said CNBC. For people who still want to fly, experts say “flexibility and careful planning can help offset these costs,” said the AP, and “fare-tracking sites can alert travelers to price changes.”

In 2022, Shan Hanes, the chief executive of the Heartland Tri-State Bank in Kansas, met a friendly investment adviser from Australia on WhatsApp. The adviser persuaded Hanes to invest a few thousand dollars in an online cryptocurrency-trading platform, which generated impressive returns. Hanes ended up investing all his own money, $60,000 from his daughter's college fund, $40,000 from his local church and $47 million from the bank he ran.

The “adviser” was, it transpired, not in Australia but most likely in Asia; the “trading platform” was fake; and Hanes had become the highest-profile US victim of a practice known in Chinese as sha zhu pan, a “pig-butchering scam”. Some money was recovered, but investors lost $9 million, the bank collapsed, and Hanes was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

How do the scams work?

“Long cons” have been around for ever, but these – in which the scammers invest a lot of time in building a relationship with the victim, a process they liken to fattening a pig for slaughter – have distinctive features.

Scammers actively seek out victims on social media: pig-butchering originated on regional Chinese dating sites around 10 years ago, but it has since spread to platforms such as Telegram, WhatsApp and LinkedIn. They create trusting relationships with their victims, sometimes of a romantic nature; one former scammer told The Economist she’d been trained to target people who were “rich but not good-looking”.

They rely heavily on crypto, which is easy to launder and difficult to recover. These and other online scams are increasingly run out of Chinese-linked “scam hubs” or “fraud factories” in Southeast Asia.

How did such operations develop?

Gambling – illegal on mainland China – is one of the main revenue streams for domestic and foreign-based Chinese mafias. Casinos and online gambling hubs for Chinese-speakers, based in Cambodia and Myanmar, were one of their main enterprises until 2019, when Cambodia tightened its regulations; Covid lockdowns then emptied the casinos. The criminal syndicates refitted their properties as centres where teams of workers – often trafficked and coerced – run online scams at scale.

Chinese citizens were their original targets, followed by Chinese communities around the world. But they soon expanded to other nationalities, which also meant expanding their trafficking activities. In the four years from January 2020, at least $75 billion was taken in crypto scams; estimates suggest the industry generates over $500 billion a year, comparable to the global drugs trade.

Why do they traffic people?

Many of the gangs’ voluntary workers went home during Covid; not enough locals had the necessary language and computer skills, and recruiting people into cybercrime isn't always easy. The scammers’ solution was to lure people – typically young graduates from developing countries – to cities such as Bangkok with fake offers of legitimate employment, then drive them to compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia or Laos, and put them to work under threats of torture, organ harvesting and sexual slavery.

A UN report this February found that there is a workforce of at least 300,000 people from 66 countries, about 75% of them in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia. Many live in vast compounds, like self-contained towns – some over 500 acres in size, heavily fortified, with armed guards. It's unlikely that all the workers are coerced, but many of them certainly are; some families have had to pay ransoms in cryptocurrency to get them out.

What are the nations doing about it?

Weak local governance, along with easy access to China, is the reason the gangs set up shop in the Mekong region in the first place. Myanmar's military junta doesn’t control the whole territory; much of it is controlled by insurgent groups and warlords; while Cambodian politics has been dominated by one family since the 1980s. Transparency International ranks both governments among the most corrupt in the world. Analysts calculate that Cambodia’s scam hubs generate earnings worth about 60% of the nation's GDP. According to the US Treasury Department, the Huione Group, a financial conglomerate with ties to Cambodia’s ruling Hun family, has provided the gangs with financial and practical services. Like Latin American “narco-states” before them, these countries are well on the way to becoming “scam states”.

Is there international pressure to close them down?

Influenced partly by stories like the kidnapping of the actor Wang Xing, and even a popular film about scam hubs, “No More Bets”, China has launched an aggressive crackdown. There have been heavily publicised rescues of coerced workers in the Mekong countries; under Chinese pressure, local law enforcement has dismantled notorious scam hubs like the KK Park complex in Myawaddy, Myanmar, thought to have been run by Macau-based triads. Thai forces shelled several other hubs during a border conflict with Cambodia last year. China has arrested hundreds of thousands of people over scams, and in January it executed 11 members of the “Ming family” crime group, who had been extradited from Myanmar.

Is the situation improving?

Experts worry that police raids on compounds in Cambodia and Myanmar are largely for show: the bosses are often tipped off in advance. In any case, they have globalised their operations, popping up as far afield as Peru and the Philippines. Police even closed down an operation targeting Chinese citizens on the Isle of Man in 2024. But developments in AI may mean that the scammers are getting less reliant on human trafficking for language skills. One report on AI-assisted scams found that they rose by 450% in 2024-25 compared with 2023-24. The scammers now often use “deepfakes” of increasingly good quality to groom their victims.

President Donald Trump loves raging against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, regularly chiding the military partnership for alleged financial delinquencies while at the same time boosting the interests of NATO’s primary antagonist, Russia. Now, as the U.S.’s war on Iran continues, NATO’s ostensible neutrality in that conflict has prompted him to renew his threat of leaving the organization altogether. Trump often tries to dictate reality by presidential fiat, but the legal process for leaving NATO is largely out of his hands and in Congress.’ The result is a Trump who’s more constrained on paper but not without a toolbox of other, less absolute options.

Why can’t Trump just leave NATO?

Trump has often threatened to leave the military alliance, but he has his own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, to thank for the legal inability to do so. In 2023, Congress enacted what “appears to be the first statute prohibiting the president from unilaterally withdrawing from a treaty (specifically, the North Atlantic Treaty),” said the government’s Congressional Research Service in a February 2026 report. This “might be understood as a rejection” of the position that presidents possess “exclusive power over treaty withdrawal.”

The bill ensures presidents cannot exit NATO “without rigorous debate and consideration by the U.S. Congress with the input of the American people,” said co-sponsor Rubio in a statement on Senator Tim Kaine’s site; Kaine (D-Va.) was the amendment’s other sponsor. Before this, any member nation could exit the treaty one year after notifying the U.S., which would then “inform the governments of the other parties of the deposit of each notice of denunciation,” said the NATO charter.

Per the bill, a bipartisan effort for which Rubio partnered with Kaine and others from across the aisle, a president may only exit NATO “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, provided that two-thirds of the senators present concur or pursuant to an Act of Congress.” This is a virtual impossibility, given the Democrats’ current holdings in the upper chamber.

The 2023 effort was “spurred by worries that Trump, if he returned to power, might try to quit the alliance,” said The Washington Post. Fast forward three years, and Trump “insists he would be able to do it anyway,” said Deutsche Welle.

What can he do then?

While it’s possible a constitutional challenge to Rubio’s 2023 bill would “likely favor the power of a president,” there are still “plenty of ways” Trump could “kneecap” the treaty “without leaving” or complying with the congressional restrictions, said DW. Even without an “official exit,” Trump’s “increasingly hostile stance toward the alliance may leave it weakened,” said CBS News.

If other member nations “can’t trust” that the U.S. will honor the treaty’s Article 5 mutual defense pact, then the alliance is “already broken in the way that matters most,” said political scientist Ian Bremmer on X. As soon as the group’s mutual defense pact is “questioned,” NATO “loses its potency” as a Russian deterrent, said Politico. Trump has, in that respect, “turned doubting NATO into official policy.”

The president is also “considering a plan to punish” some NATO member nations he deemed “unhelpful” during the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, said The Wall Street Journal. This would involve relocating some of the 84,000 American troops stationed in Europe and deploying them to “countries that were more supportive,” including Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.

Trump could also withdraw American military assets entirely and shut off funding for NATO operations. Or if he wants to be “very dramatic,” he might even “decide not to staff the position of Supreme Allied Commander Europe,” a post traditionally reserved for American officers, said DW.

The president could “just downgrade our participation,” said Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Europe and NATO policy, to Politico. He could skip summits, and the secretary of defense “won’t go to defense ministerials.”

With the “language” of its 2023 bill, Congress has “prevented” a “total” and “formal withdrawal from NATO,” said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to Politico. But the U.S. could “still be in NATO” with a president grasping “many different levers” so that the country’s impact would nevertheless be “diminished significantly.”

The countdown has begun to the introduction of new rules on how pensions are treated after someone dies.

In the “biggest shake-up of inheritance rules in a generation”, said The Telegraph, the value of a pension will, from April 2027, form part of someone’s estate after they die.

This could mean an inheritance tax bill for one in five households, said The Times, so “the countdown is on to protect their family wealth”.

What is the pensions death tax?

Putting money into a pension has traditionally been “one of the most tax-efficient ways to pass wealth on to loved ones”, said Rest Less. But any unused money in the pot from next year will fall into the scope of inheritance tax, “potentially reducing the amount families receive when someone dies”.

The proposals were announced in the October 2024 Budget by Chancellor Rachel Reeves. They aim to address concerns, said Dentons, that pensions were “increasingly being used as vehicles for inheritance planning, rather than for their primary purpose of providing retirement income”.

Who will be affected?

Inheritance tax is paid on the value of an estate above £325,000. Additionally, there is a £175,000 allowance for your main residence.

The tax “isn’t going to be an issue for most people”, said Royal London, but you may be affected if you own your own home and the value of your pension is added due to the potential total amounts.

The changes will still affect “most individuals” who have unused pension benefits when they die, said Tax Adviser. This means pensions can no longer be relied on as an “efficient means of passing” on wealth such as to your children. This could apply to millions who were previously free of it.

Inheritance tax receipts have already been rising due to “years of property price growth, asset inflation and frozen tax thresholds”, said The Times, so including pensions “will accelerate the trend”.

Beyond the potential charge, “of greatest concern”, said Wedlake Bell, is that payment of inheritance tax on pension assets will remain six months from the end of the month when the deceased died and interest on unpaid inheritance tax is currently running at 7.75%. The government has rejected calls to give bereaved families more time to pay.

Many families could face paying interest, said MoneyWeek, “due to administrative jams” involved in finding pension information and getting the right valuations.

How to prepare for the changes

If you are retired “it might make sense” to prioritise taking money from your pension before other assets, said Grovely Financial, especially if your goal is “inheritance tax mitigation”.

Another option, said MoneyWeek, is to “give away money while you are alive” so you can watch your loved ones enjoy it.

Up to £3,000 per tax year can be given as a financial gift, and tax-free gifts can be made to your children worth up to £5,000 for a wedding or civil partnership or £2,500 for a grandchild or great-grandchild.

Any money given outside of the gifting allowances is tax-free as long as you live for seven years after transfer. Gifting allowances can be used to pass cash on to loved ones, or alternatively, for extra net income.

Alternatively, there are life insurance policies that pay out to cover the cost of inheritance tax. They work in a similar way to other life insurance products: you pay premiums while you are alive “and there will be a payout when you die”, said The Independent.

A British computer scientist who pioneered a forerunner of cryptocurrencies has denied reports that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

An investigation by The New York Times used biographical details and writing style comparisons to make the case that Adam Back was the cryptocurrency’s enigmatic founder.

Who is Adam Back?

Back, a 55-year-old computer scientist from London, “has long been seen as a potential candidate to be Nakamoto”, said The Times. “A pioneer of early digital asset research in the 1990s”, he “has a long-standing background in cryptography, the techniques used to secure and verify digital information”. This includes developing Hashcash, “a proof-of-work system that later influenced Bitcoin” and was referenced by Nakamoto in his Bitcoin “white paper”.

Back dismissed The New York Times’ use of writing analyses to link him to the elusive Nakamoto as “a combination of coincidence and similar phrases from people with similar experience and interests”. In reference to the claim that he disappeared from Bitcoin message boards when “Satoshi” was at his busiest, Back insisted that he “did a lot of yakking” on the forums at the time. “I’m not Satoshi,” he said.

Why is Nakamoto’s identity a secret?

Since Bitcoin launched in 2008, Nakamoto has chosen to stay anonymous. All their communication was written under their pseudonym and no verifiable personal details have ever been released or revealed. Since 2011, they have given no public statements at all, their seeming disappearance giving them a “cult-like status among crypto enthusiasts”, said The Times.

This anonymity was very on-brand for Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency was designed to have no central authority; if the identity of a real person were known they could become a leader or figurehead, which might contradict the founding principle of decentralisation. There is a security element, too: Nakamoto is thought to own $78 billion worth of bitcoin, so remaining anonymous lessens the risk of extortion or kidnapping.

It’s also possible that the mysterious founder is not one person, but rather a team of developers or cryptographers. Either way, the years of speculation have added to Bitcoin’s profile and acted as a useful indirect marketing tool.

Has anyone else been suggested?

In 2014, Newsweek identified a Japanese-American systems engineer called Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto as the creator of Bitcoin. He disputed this, and the claim has “largely been debunked”, said the BBC.

The following year, Wired suggested Nakamoto could be a pseudonym for Australian computer scientist Craig Wright. Unlike Back and Dorian Nakamoto, Wright went public to assert he was indeed Nakamoto, until a UK High Court judge ruled he was not the Bitcoin founder and barred him from continuing to claim he was.

In 2024, an HBO documentary claimed that Canadian crypto expert Peter Todd was the real Nakamoto, a suggestion he described as “ludicrous”.

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 AI sycophancy 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”.