One of Germany’s most famous actors has claimed her TV presenter ex-husband spread deepfake pornographic images of her online – and triggered demonstrations demanding the government tighten up the laws on digital violence against women.

The case has gripped Germany, said the BBC and “exposed anger about what campaigners say are glaring gaps in criminal law”.

Secret online accounts

In bombshell allegations published under the headline: “You virtually raped me”, Collien Fernandes alleged in Der Spiegel last week that her former husband, Christian Ulmen, had secretly opened online accounts in her name and used them to share sexually explicit deepfake pornographic images of her with 30 other men. She also claimed he used computer-generated audio to impersonate her voice for phone-sex encounters with some of the men. Ulmen denies the allegations and has not been charged.

Fernandes had known about the fake images for many years, and in 2024, she’d talked about them, and the effect they’d had on her, in a documentary about deepfake abuse. That Christmas, after she’d reported the abuse to the police, she said Ulmen confessed to her that he was her abuser.

Ulmen has never “produced and/or distributed deepfake videos of Ms Fernandes or any other individuals. Any such claims are false,” his lawyers told the BBC. They also said Ulmen will be taking legal action against Der Spiegel for publishing “fake facts” and “inadmissible coverage based on suspicions”.

Call for tighter restrictions

Fernandes’ claims have shocked Germany, in a similar way that Gisèle Pelicot’s trial rocked France, said The New York Times. Crowds at rallies and demonstrations in several cities called for tighter legal restrictions on the creation and distribution of deepfake pornography. They said politicians had not done enough to prevent such digital abuse.

The scandal “is also putting political pressure on Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has long been accused of being out of touch when it comes to younger, female voters”, said the BBC.

Justice minister Stefanie Hubig has now announced plans to incorporate into German law an EU directive on banning non-consensual deepfake pornography, and to make both the production and distribution of it a specific criminal offence, punishable by up to two years in prison.

India has long recognised a “third gender” and was one of the first countries to allow people legally to self-identify as transgender. But its parliament has just passed controversial amendments to such laws, which remove the right to self-identification and narrow the definition of ‘transgender’.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government got the bill through both houses last week, despite a boycott by opposition parties and widespread protests by the LGBTQ+ community.

Virendra Kumar, minister for social justice and empowerment, says the amendments still protect people who “face severe social exclusion due to their biological condition”. But Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi called it a “brazen attack” on transgender rights.

‘Third gender’

People of a “third gender” have been recognised in India for thousands of years. They feature heavily in Hindu holy texts – the half-male, half-female deity Ardhanarishvara, for example – and were often revered under Muslim rulers of the Mughal Empire.

The most common third-gender group in South Asia are the hijras: often born male, they dress in traditionally female clothing, and many choose to undergo castration; others are born intersex. Hijras were traditionally “treated with both fear and respect”, said Harvard Divinity School but that “did not survive” colonial rule. The British, “shocked by third-gender people”, classified them as criminals in 1871. Criminalisation was repealed shortly after independence, but years of stigmatisation “took a toll”.

Hijras are expected to perform ritual roles at Hindu births and weddings but are otherwise “often treated with contempt” and “almost always excluded from employment and education”. They are “often stricken by poverty” and “victims of violence and abuse”.

But in 2014, India’s Supreme Court “officially recognised third-gender people as being citizens deserving of equal rights”. And that paved the way for the 2019 Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, which included the hijras and the kinnars, another third-gender group, along with transwomen and transmen in a more inclusive definition of transgender people. The act also affirmed the right to self-identify as transgender or non-binary.

‘A major reversal’

The new amendments to the 2019 law remove those rights to self-identify, requiring instead a medical certification of gender reassignment. It also limits the definition of transgender to intersex people and those from socio-cultural groups such as the hijras.

The government argues that the changes protect those facing “extreme and oppressive” discrimination, and strengthen laws against exploitation and trafficking. They say the definition of transgender is “too vague” and makes it difficult to identify the most marginalised; a narrower definition would help welfare benefits “reach those who need them”.

But critics say the new bill will exclude many, and that mandatory medical certification for those undergoing gender transition “undermines dignity and autonomy”. The amendments “appear to contradict the 2014 ruling”, which held that “requiring medical procedures for recognition was both unethical and unlawful”, said Delhi-based journalist Namita Singh in The Independent.

“It has shattered our identity,” transgender rights activist Laxmi Narayan Tripathi told reporters. India’s last census in 2011 recorded nearly half a million people in the “other” gender category. The true number is likely far higher; some estimates reach six million.

If India’s president signs the bill into law, it will be “a major reversal” of “hard-won rights”, said Jayshree Bajoria, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. It also puts people at risk by introducing additional offences of “coercing or alluring” people to be transgender. That’s “reminiscent of the colonial-era laws” that criminalised hijras.

This law, said N Kavitha Rameshwar in The Times of India, “seeks to be that one rogue wave that will wash away” a decade of progress in transgender rights, “as if it were all but a castle of sand”.

What happened

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (D) on Tuesday filed criminal charges against Kalshi, accusing the online prediction marketplace of “running an illegal gambling operation and taking bets on Arizona elections, both of which violate Arizona law.” The 20-count indictment alleges that Kalshi illegally accepted bets on sporting outcomes, political events and election results, among other “unlicensed wagering.”

Who said what

“Arizona will not be bullied into letting any company place itself above state law,” Mayes said in a statement. The criminal charges, the first filed by a state against Kalshi, mark a “new front in a high-stakes legal battle over whether prediction markets should be subject to the same rules as gambling companies,” The Associated Press said. President Donald Trump, whose son Don Jr. is a “strategic adviser” for Kalshi, has thrown his “support behind the multibillion-dollar prediction market industry.” Several other states have sued Kalshi and its rival, Polymarket.

The Arizona lawsuit “comes less than a week” after Kalshi filed a preemptive suit, asking a federal judge to rule that its wagers are “not gambling but instead something more akin to trading futures on commodities,” the Arizona Capitol Times said. The company argues its “contracts” can only be regulated by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission, “out of reach of state authorities.” CFTC chair Michael Selig appeared to agree, calling the Arizona suit a “jurisdictional dispute” that is “entirely inappropriate as a criminal prosecution.”

What next?

The outcome of the legal actions in Arizona and “at least nine other states” could have “sweeping implications for how sports betting — which makes up roughly 90% of Kalshi’s trading volume — is regulated in the U.S.,” the AP said. Legal experts predict the dispute over prediction markets “has a good chance of making its way to the Supreme Court,” Axios said.

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

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

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

What is the claimants’ case?

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

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

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

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

What has Adams said?

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

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

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

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

Businesses in the Australian state of Victoria will be “forced to allow staff to work from home two days a week” under what the state government described as “world-first” laws.

The “sweeping measures”, said The Times, will apply to employers of all sizes and put in place a “legal guarantee” that all Victorian workers who can “reasonably” work from home will be eligible.

However, the state government, which faces elections in November, has received concerns from small businesses that the law will restrict growth, and sparked fears that firms will move inter-state or abroad as a result.

Remote working no longer ‘under threat’

Working from home suits families because it “saves time and money and it gets more parents working”, said Victoria’s premier, Jacinta Allan. “If you can work from home for a small business, you deserve the same rights as someone working for a big bank.”

The government had previously indicated that small businesses “might be exempt from the laws”, but it was confirmed this week that staff working for this type of company would also be able to “benefit” from the measures, said The Times. The government had “insisted” that existing working-from-home rights “would be under threat” if new legislation were not introduced.

“More than a third” of employees “regularly” work from home, said the state government, and they can save on average A$5,308 “every year” from doing so. It also “cuts congestion” and “gets more people working: workforce participation is now 4.4% higher than before the pandemic”.

The law will come into effect on 1 September and be “enshrined” in the state’s Equal Opportunity Act, said Bloomberg. Businesses with “fewer than 15 workers” will have a delayed start of 1 July 2027 to “allow them to prepare for the change”.

Small business ‘backlash’

“It is hard to keep up with Australia,” said Pilita Clark in the Financial Times. It has recently passed “some of the toughest anti-vaping laws on the planet”, a “world-first ban on social media for kids under the age of 16” and banned “artificial stone used for kitchen worktops that is linked with lung disease”.

Even when the work-from-home law was in the planning stage, it was seen as “another groundbreaking move”; it is “shaking the politics of remote working in a way that governments elsewhere may find hard to ignore”.

Several business owners have been “calling for more staff to return to the office”, said the FT. For instance, Nuno Matos, chief executive of ANZ bank, said poor office attendance would be “reflected in lower bonus payments”.

In last year’s national election campaign the Liberal Party promised to “crack down on ‘unsustainable’ remote working patterns” to force staff back to five days a week in the office. That policy produced a “political spark” and Allan’s Labor Party has sought to benefit from it. Its working-from-home initiative will form a large part of her “re-election campaign” in November.

There has been a “backlash” from small business owners over the law, said The Guardian. It could place a significant “regulatory burden” on firms that “don’t necessarily have HR departments to engage with and to consult”, said Scott Veenker, acting chief executive of the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. “It’s just another added impost”, which could lead to businesses “moving operations interstate or potentially overseas. If you make business too hard, they’ll go elsewhere and that’s the last thing we need in Victoria right now.”

This is already happening, said Sumeyya Ilanbey in the Australian Financial Review. Investors are “fleeing Victoria” because of the plans, believing they will “entrench the state’s reputation as anti-enterprise”.

Politically, the law aims to “wedge the coalition opposition”. They face the choice of “opposing a plan that Labor is convinced is popular with many voters or backing it and losing faith with business supporters”.

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

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

What is it?

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

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

· The individual is a public officer acting as such.

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

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

· The conduct is without reasonable excuse or justification.

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

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

Who has been convicted for it?

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

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

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

What could happen now?

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

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

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

The “dangerous fanatics” of Palestine Action have been given a “free pass” to continue promoting hatred and committing acts of violent disorder, said The Sun. Last Friday, the High Court ruled that the government’s decision to proscribe the group as a terrorist organisation had been unlawful.

Palestine Action had, the three judges accepted, carried out some acts of terrorism, said Alistair Gray in the Financial Times. But they ruled that the challenge to the ban – which was put in place last July, after activists broke into RAF Brize Norton and damaged two planes – was successful on two main legal grounds. The first was that the decision to outlaw the group amounted to “unjustified interference” with the right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly. The second was that the decision, taken by then-home secretary Yvette Cooper, was “disproportionate”, because Palestine Action’s activities had not yet reached “the level, scale and persistence” to fall within the legal definition of terrorism.

‘Good intentions’

This ruling is “disturbing”, said Melanie Phillips in The Times. Between August 2024 and June 2025 the group was responsible for 158 “direct action events”, 28 of which caused damage to property exceeding £50,000, or required a significant police presence. In 2024, an activist allegedly attacked a police officer with a sledgehammer, fracturing her spine. Are ministers just supposed to wait around “until more people are injured, or someone even gets killed by these activities”, before they’re allowed to ban the group?

“There were clearly good intentions behind the proscription, but the problems with such a blanket measure became apparent as soon as the police began putting it into practice,” said The Daily Telegraph. Among the more than 2,700 people arrested, were many who would generally never be considered terrorists, from priests to pensioners. To class these people, however “ignorant or misguided” they were, as terrorists, in the same league as militants from al-Qa’eda or Islamic State, threatened to “make the ban look ridiculous”, and those locked up look like martyrs.

‘Fundamentally unsound’

“One does not have to endorse the vandalism perpetrated by Palestine Action supporters” to understand that the proscription of the group was “fundamentally unsound”, said David Littlefair on UnHerd. It’s notable that “the same people who might become apoplectic at citizens being disciplined over social media posts have been remarkably sanguine in response to thousands of pensioners facing prison time for poorly defined crimes”. Many seem now to feel “that the value of free speech as a concept is contingent on how annoying they find the speaker”.

The ban will remain in place while the government prepares to appeal, said Haroon Siddique in The Guardian. But the debacle has already been a “humiliation” for Keir Starmer’s beleaguered government – and “has transformed Palestine Action from a little-known protest group to one that is on the front page of newspapers”.

Prince Harry has returned to London for a High Court case against Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL) in which he will allege that the publisher’s behaviour left him “paranoid beyond belief”. The prince’s claims relate to alleged unlawful information gathering used in 14 articles between 2001 and 2013, which ANL “strongly denies”.

‘Highly intrusive’ and ‘damaging’

The prince is one of seven high-profile claimants – including Elton John and Liz Hurley – against ANL, which owns the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, as well as Metro and The i Paper. Other claimants include John’s husband, David Furnish, former Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, actor Sadie Frost and Doreen Lawrence, mother of the murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

ANL journalists are accused of “hacking mobile phone voicemails, tapping landline calls and ‘blagging’ personal information” about subjects without their knowledge or consent, said The Times. The trial is due to last nine weeks, and the total cost is “estimated to be about £40 million”.

On the second day of the trial, the claimants’ barrister, David Sherborne, claimed that the material the company obtained on Harry’s romantic relationships was “highly intrusive”, “damaging” and had “serious security implications”. Sherborne also alleged that ANL illegally obtained information about Hurley’s paternity battle with Stephen Bing, as well as “incredibly private” information about the surrogacy and care arrangements relating to John’s newborn son, said Sky News.

ANL has argued that the claims “should be dismissed”, owing to a six-year statute of limitations on privacy claims, said The Telegraph. The publisher believes the claimants “knew or should have known” about the existence of the articles in question “long before the cut-off date for claims to be brought”. The company denies using illegal means to obtain information, instead telling the court that Harry’s friends were a “good source of leaks” for journalists, divulging information about his private life.

Questions have also arisen over the reliability of witness evidence, said The Times. Private investigator Gavin Burrows, whose evidence is a “key part” of the claimants’ case, now maintains that he was “never instructed or commissioned by anyone at The Mail on Sunday or the Daily Mail to conduct unlawful information gathering on their behalf”.

‘Personal crusade’

This case is Prince Harry’s third “major court battle” accusing media groups of “unlawful behaviour”, said the BBC. In December 2023, he won 15 claims against Mirror Group Newspapers for “unlawfully gathering information for stories published about him”. In January 2025, The Sun agreed to pay “substantial damages” and issued an apology to the prince over claims of “unlawful intrusion into his life”.

This could be Harry’s final courtroom confrontation with the British press, but it is also his “biggest”, said Sky News. There are “reputations on the line” and “the stakes for all sides are high”. The duke sees this as his “personal crusade”, once saying that “changing the media landscape would be his life's work. That work is well under way.”

“For now, all parties are standing firm,” said The Guardian. The claimants are not backing down, despite the risk of having to pay ANL’s “enormous legal bill” if they fail to convince the court that the “evidence on which they rely is reliable for the purposes of their case”.

As for the defendant, while the Daily Mail banned the use of private investigators in its reporting in 2007, it still faces the “unedifying prospect of having 30 years of its journalistic practices examined in court”. Whatever the result, “the question is whether there really can be any winners”.

Chiara Ferragni, Italy’s most famous influencer, has been cleared of aggravated fraud following one of the country’s most high-profile celebrity trials, dubbed “Pandoro-gate”.

“The nightmare is over,” Ferragni said, after the “long-running scandal involving a charity Christmas cake” came to an end yesterday in a Milan courtroom, said the BBC.

‘Italian Kardashian’

Ferragni is an “O.G. fashion blogger turned influencer turned Italian Kardashian,” said Puck. Her blog, The Blonde Salad, which she started in 2009, “occupied an outsize portion of the industry’s collective consciousness”.

The first fashion influencer to “really make it”, Ferragni secured front-row seats at Milan Fashion Week, appeared on magazine covers and built a “multimillion-dollar business” selling her own products. In 2017, Forbes named her the world’s foremost fashion influencer.

However, more recently, Ferragni found herself in a harsher spotlight. She was accused of misleading her 28 million Instagram followers over a charity fundraiser involving pandoro, a brioche-style Veronese cake typically eaten by Italian families at Christmas.

In 2022 and 2023, “Ferragni partnered with Italian confectioner Balocco to market limited edition Pandoro ‘Pink Christmas’ cakes”, said CNN. The advertising campaign “suggested proceeds would go to the Regina Margherita children’s hospital in Turin” to support cancer research. However, it later emerged that the charitable donation was a €50,000 flat fee paid by Balocco to the hospital prior to the launch of the pandoro, while “the proceeds of the cakes would go directly to Ferragni”, in addition to a €1 million payment to two of her companies for sponsorship of the campaign.

When her fast-tracked trial began in November, prosecutors requested a 20-month prison sentence, alleging that the marketing of the campaign was deliberately misleading. Ferragni denied the charges, telling the court “everything we have done, we have done in good faith”, but she acknowledged that she had made a “communication error”.

Redemption arc

On Wednesday, she and two co-defendants were acquitted of criminal wrongdoing. But “most of the damage” had already been done before the case came to court, said Forbes. Ferragni has already paid a fine of €1.1 million to Italy’s antitrust authority, in addition to various other settlements , and her companies have been “bleeding millions”.

Pandoro-gate has already had legal ramifications. In 2024, the Italian government passed new legislation, dubbed the Ferragni law, imposing greater transparency requirements for influencers with more than one million followers promoting charity fundraisers.

The drama has “political” overtones, too, said Politico. Ferragni and her former husband, the rapper Fedez (real name Federico Lucia), were “famous for taking on progressive causes” and “pitting themselves against the more traditionalist Catholic mainstream” represented by conservative Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

As soon as the scandal broke, Meloni singled out Ferragni as the “wrong kind of role model”, criticising influencers “who make loads of money promoting expensive panettoni that are supposedly for charity”. Since his marriage to Ferragni “collapsed” under the “scrutiny” of the scandal, Fedez has “made an eye-catching lurch to engaging the political right”.

As for Ferragni, there could still be a “Martha Stewart–esque redemption arc in her future”, said Puck. The US lifestyle guru “did six months” in prison for her part in an insider trading scheme. She “emerged slightly humbled” and then “went on to amass more clout than ever”.

“Donald Trump loves a fight”, said Chris Blackhurst in The Independent. Despite having received an apology from the BBC over what he claims was a defamatory edit in an episode of the broadcaster’s “Panorama” series, the US president “can smell money”.

After much speculation, on Monday in Florida Trump filed a $10 billion (£7.5 billion) lawsuit against the BBC. The two counts, the first for defamation and the second for violating the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act, are each worth $5 billion (£3.75 billion).

What is the lawsuit about?

A leaked BBC memo earlier this year raised questions over the editing of an October 2024 “Panorama” documentary entitled “Trump: a Second Chance?”, which took two sections of a speech he made prior to the insurrection on 6 January 2021 – and spliced them together. The two snippets: “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol”, followed by a promise to “fight like hell”, arguably gave the impression of Trump inciting his followers to create the scenes of disorder that followed.

A spokesperson for the president claimed that the episode, broadcast when Trump was on the campaign trail, was “intentionally, maliciously and deceptively” edited in a “brazen attempt to interfere with the 2024 presidential election”. The “formerly respected and now disgraced BBC”, they alleged in a statement, has a “long pattern of deceiving its audience”, particularly in its coverage of Trump, “in service of its own Leftist political agenda”.

What are the key points of contention?

The question of jurisdiction is “at the core of the case”, said the Financial Times. Trump has filed the lawsuit in his home state of Florida, because there defamation claims must be made within two years of the incident; in the UK the time limit is one year. But BBC lawyers have argued that because the documentary was not aired in the US, US citizens could not have been affected by the content.

Trump’s lawyers claim, however, that BritBox subscribers, or those with a VPN, could have access to the material. They also assert that the BBC “had an agreement with Blue Ant Media”, a Canadian company, to “distribute the documentary in North America”, said Tom Witherow in The Times.

The president’s team needs to prove the BBC acted with “actual malice”, meaning they “knew the depiction was false, or acted with reckless disregard for the truth”, said the FT. To prove defamation also requires evidence of “extensive harm”. Trump claims the edit damaged his “brand value” and caused “injury to his future financial prospects”. Against this notion, the BBC is likely to “point out that he won the election” and that he was “acquitted in impeachment proceedings for alleged insurrection”, said The Times.

How has Trump handled such lawsuits before?

“Up until this year, it was unheard of for a sitting American president to sue a news outlet,” said Brian Stelter on CNN. “In just a few months, President Donald Trump has managed to make it seem normal.”

This is the first time Trump has tried to sue a UK media organisation, but he has “had some success in securing settlements” in legal action against US outlets, said the FT.

This year, CBS, owned by Paramount, paid the president $16 million (£11.9 million) to settle a suit against the editing of an interview on “60 Minutes”. In 2024, ABC paid $15 million (£11.2 million) in a defamation lawsuit, following comments by news anchor George Stephanopoulos that Trump had been found “liable for rape”, when in fact he had been determined liable for “sexual abuse” under New York law.

He also has a pending lawsuit against The New York Times for $15 billion (£11.2 billion), after refiling a defamation case in October. Trump also sued the newspaper in 2021 and in 2020: both claims were dismissed. A case against The Wall Street Journal relating to evidence released from the Jeffrey Epstein files, is also ongoing.

How could this one play out?

“BBC executives can be fairly confident of winning a court battle with President Trump”, said Jonathan Ames in The Times. However, its financial position is “considerably weaker”: the organisation will need to have “difficult pragmatic discussions” regarding legal fees that could rise to between $50 million (£37.2 million) and $100 million (£74.8 million) .

Even if a settlement is reached, that payout could be in the region of $10 million (£7.5 million), said Colin Freeman in The Telegraph. Indeed, compensation “may be the greatest humiliation of all” outcomes. Whatever the sum, “the prospect of the BBC helping fill the Trump coffers is unlikely to go down well with licence payers”. For supporters of the broadcaster, this will be seen as yet another “vendetta” by Trump against the media; to its critics, “it may signal time to end the licence fee system altogether”.

Whatever the result, Trump can spin a positive outcome, said CNN. If he wins, or the BBC settles, the financial benefits are evident. But even if he loses, the president “wins headlines” that, to his supporters, will look like he is taking “bold action” to “combat media misdeeds”.

Mark Jenner, a former undercover Metropolitan Police officer known as Mark Cassidy, has begun giving testimony to the Undercover Policing Inquiry. His appearance follows evidence already given by his ex-wife, the woman he deceived into having a relationship, and the whistleblower Peter Francis.

Jenner is one of 139 undercover police officers being investigated by the inquiry over their infiltration of thousands of predominantly left-wing groups from 1968 until at least 2010.

What is the inquiry investigating?

The inquiry was commissioned in 2014 by the then home secretary, Theresa May, to look into allegations of serious “historical failings” in the Metropolitan Police’s Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), with whom Jenner was associated, and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit. Both units have since been disbanded.

One of the most high-profile “spy cop” cases was that of Mark Kennedy, who had spent seven years undercover. During that time he had sexual and romantic relationships with “at least 11 women” who knew him as a fellow activist named Mark Stone, said The Guardian.

To date, it has been confirmed that “at least 25” of the 139 undercover officers being investigated by the inquiry “formed intimate relationships” with women. Four are alleged to have fathered children with women “who were unaware of their true identities”.

The inquiry is on course to become the most expensive in British legal history, according to documents seen by The Telegraph. The cost is set to pass £200 million before its conclusion, meaning it would overtake the £191 million set by the Bloody Sunday inquiry, published in 2010, and around five times more than the investigation into the 2017 Manchester Arena terror attack.

What did Jenner tell the court?

Yesterday, Jenner told the inquiry that he thought it had been necessary to have sex with women while operating undercover, but said sexual gratification was “definitely not” a perk of the job.

One of these women, Alison, whose real name has been withheld, was in a relationship with Jenner between 1995 and 2000. She believed him to be a fellow left-wing activist called Mark Cassidy. Jenner would spend the day with his then wife, then return to Alison in the evening, with each of them believing he was at work. The court had previously heard that requests made by Jenner for travel outside London to pursue the target group’s activities were actually holidays abroad with Alison.

He told the court his motivation for forming a romantic relationship with Alison was that she had “a landline telephone and knew a lot of people in Hackney, so her home made an ideal base for him to continue his undercover operation”. In response, she said that the claim was “complete nonsense” and “ridiculous”, as “everybody had a landline phone in 1995”.

After hearing Jenner’s first day of evidence, Alison said that “any illusions, or romantic memories of him being an anti-fascist, anti-racist, trade union activist” were “demolished”. Asked about the systemic extent of the “layers of lies”, Alison said: “I think his direct managers knew and covered it up. Or they didn’t know and they are entirely incompetent.” She told the inquiry that she believes there could be 50 or so women with similar experiences of undercover deceit.

Who else has testified?

Jenner’s ex-wife and mother of his children, identified only as S, said that her ex-husband and his fellow spy cops “prioritised personal gratification and their careers over the wellbeing of their families”, and claimed that the “deceit” and “collusion” of the cover up went “high up the chain”.

Earlier this month, whistleblower Peter Francis, who in 2013 revealed himself as a member of the SDS involved in the surveillance of the family of Stephen Lawrence, told the inquiry that it was “standard practice” to gather names of dead children from graveyards to create cover identities for missions.

His evidence revealed “serious wrongdoing” within the SDS, including the “targeting of black justice campaigns”, and officers were advised that “any crime up to actual bodily harm was acceptable”, said The Times.

What next?

Jon Savell, deputy assistant commissioner at the Metropolitan Police, acknowledged “the serious wrongdoing” and the “totally unacceptable behaviour” by some undercover officers, said the BBC. Managerial failings had caused “significant harm and distress” to the “women who were deceived into sexual relationships”.

Jenner, given the codename “Touchy Subject” by police, will be questioned by the inquiry for the next two days. Key questions are expected to centre around the “extent to which his superiors knew about, and approved, his long-term relationship with Alison”, said The Guardian.

Justice Secretary David Lammy has unveiled a watered-down version of his plans to dispense with jury trials for all but the most serious offences.

Under his original plan, offences carrying a sentence of less than five years would have been heard in new judge-only courts. But following “cabinet feedback”, this has been scaled back to offences with a penalty of less than three years.

The current crown court backlog stands at around 80,000 cases, said the Ministry of Justice, and without urgent action could exceed 100,000 by 2028. “We must be bold,” Lammy said today in setting out the government’s plans, to rectify a court system on the “brink of collapse”.

What did the commentators say?

Trial by jury is one of the “central reasons” Britain’s legal system has “garnered such high levels of trust and respect around the world”, said The Times in an editorial. Lammy is correct that the “status quo cannot go on”, but “fundamental changes” towards a system of “secrecy” would face “grave public apprehension”.

Even if Lammy drives through his proposals, “scrapping jury trials alone might not be enough to clear the backlog”. If less serious offences could be overseen by a judge and two magistrates, as recommended in Brian Leveson’s judicial review, trial times could be reduced from “two days to a few hours”.

“Destroying jury trials because everything else is broken is a terrible idea,” said Tristan Kirk in London’s The Standard. Lammy’s proposal is an “act of pure desperation” from the Labour government. There is a “serious risk” that overhauling the system will cost “huge amounts of money and time” for “limited benefit”. Jury trials are “worth nourishing and investing in, instead of being constantly eroded”.

Had this come from a Boris Johnson or Nigel Farage government, Labour would “say we were on a rocky road, with something like fascism at the end of it”, said a Sunday Times editorial. Once gone, it is likely juries will “never come back”. Departing from centuries of tradition exposes the deputy prime minister’s “short-term” thinking, abandoning what many Britons see as a right “in the interests of expediency”. “Trial by jury is sacrosanct. Scrapping it is an affront to justice.”

This is out of character for Labour, said an editorial in The Telegraph. It “beggars belief” that a party “so obsessed with the artificial construct of the ECHR” would abandon such a “long-standing right”. The answer should be to “address the problems of capital and funding” in the criminal justice system, instead of “dispensing with the core principles of English justice”.

But “David Lammy is right to slash the use of juries”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. “Archaic” and “inefficient”, they are “quaint relics of medieval jurisprudence”. We are falling behind many of our European neighbours, where judge-only courts have long been standard. Per 100,000 citizens, England and Wales imprison 145, compared to 71 and 54 in “jury-free” Germany and the Netherlands. “I do not believe that Britons are twice as criminal as Germans, or three times as Dutch.”

Labour’s reforms could be revolutionary for rape cases in particular, said The New Statesman. Currently, “women are being retraumatised for far too long” with delays of up to “half-a-decade” to have their cases heard in a system that “lets them down so badly”. Trying lower-level offences more efficiently will free up crown court time to make sure “the most serious crimes are heard quickly and fairly”. If reform isn’t enacted we risk perpetuating a system that “denies timely justice” and “fails to deter crime”.

What next?

Under the current proposals, magistrates will be allowed to hear cases with potential sentences of up to 18 months – as opposed to the current 12 – and this could still rise to two years, said The Telegraph.

The next stages of proposals aim to “create a new part of the crown court where there are no juries”, for sentences up to three years, said Sky News. This departs from the Leveson review, which proposed a panel of a judge supported by magistrates. Cases involving crimes that carry sentences of five years or more will still be heard in front of a jury.

Labour has been accused of breaking another manifesto pledge after a last-minute U-turn watering down a key protection in its flagship Employment Rights Bill.

Changes to the proposed legislation included the government ditching plans to give workers the right to claim unfair dismissal from day one of a new job. The decision has been described as a “complete betrayal” by one Labour MP and leaves the bill as a “shell of its former self”, according to Unite general secretary Sharon Graham. But it is hoped the compromise will be enough to win over sceptical peers in the House of Lords and get the bill passed into law by next April.

What protections does the bill offer now?

Protection against unfair dismissal, which currently only comes into effect after two years in a job, will now kick in after six months – in line with most European countries. A compensation cap on successful unfair dismissal claims imposed by the Tories will also be lifted.

Other rights, such as the right to claim sick pay and paternity leave, and to apply for flexible working, will be enshrined from day one, and zero-hours contracts will be banned. The threshold for calling a strike will also be lowered, with a union requiring only a simple majority of members who voted rather than at least 40% of those eligible to vote as the current law dictates.

The enforcement of employment rights will be overseen by a new Fair Work Agency, which will have the right to inspect workplaces, issue fines and bring legal action on behalf of employees.

What has the reaction been?

The TUC’s general secretary Paul Nowak said the bill is “essential to better quality, more secure jobs for millions of workers across the economy”. But opposition politicians and business leaders have warned the new provisions are likely to have the opposite effect.

With unemployment already at a near five-year high, “employers have stopped hiring, in part because a rising living wage and steep rises in their national insurance charges have made it too expensive, but also because the looming legislation makes it too risky”, said Matthew Lynn in The Telegraph.

“The measures could cost firms £5 billion a year and risk being passed on to staff through smaller pay rises and hidden taxes which reduce wages over time,” said The Sun.

“No company can plan, invest or hire with this level of uncertainty hanging over them,” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said. Even the tweaked legislation is still “terrible for economic growth” – a key mission of the Labour government.

What happens next?

Despite anger in some parts of the party over the changes, the focus among Labour MPs is “keeping the rest of the package intact”, particularly the end of zero-hours contracts, said The New Statesman.

Former deputy leader Angela Rayner, who led the passage of the bill through Parliament before she was forced to resign, reportedly plans to lay an amendment tomorrow to speed up the bill so it can be implemented as early as next year.

Several Labour MPs told The Guardian that they “fear that the climbdown by the government will embolden peers and critics of the bill to push for further changes”. “This can’t be the thin of the wedge and we won’t let it be,” said one.

The US president has the absolute right to grant pardons. But Donald Trump’s spree of pardons for loyalists and business allies has raised not only political eyebrows but also legal questions about abuse of power.

Since he began his second term in January, Trump “has begun to expand the pardon power both in nature and in scale”, said Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker. He has issued nearly 2,000 presidential pardons and commutations, compared to 238 in his first term.

On his very first day back in the White House, Trump pardoned hundreds of people charged with and convicted of storming the Capitol on 6 January 2021. Last month, he pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and dozens of others accused of trying to overturn the 2020 election. “More than any previous president,” Trump has “systematically deployed” pardons to “reward loyalists” and reassure “associates that they can violate the law with impunity”, said Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times.

‘Rewarding partisan allies’

Over the past decade, the presidential pardon power has been subject to “grotesque abuses”, said Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times. In his first term, Trump pardoned “lackeys and war criminals”, then Joe Biden “issued blanket and pre-emptive pardons for his family”, and now Trump has “outdone” himself, pardoning “a rogue’s gallery of donors, partisan allies and people with business ties to him or his family”.

Take the recent pardoning of Changpeng Zhao. The crypto billionaire had allowed his Binance platform to be used by terrorists and criminal organisations and had pled guilty to money laundering. Yet he had “also worked assiduously to boost the Trump family’s crypto business, and it certainly appears that he got a pardon in exchange for services rendered”.

Trump is using his pardon power as “part of his effort to put the country on an authoritarian path”, Rachel Barkow, a law professor at New York University, told The New York Times. “He is rewarding his partisan allies”, instead of using the power “even-handedly, with a regular process that is available to all”.

‘Separate tier of justice’

It might be “quaint these days” to reference America’s founding fathers but, when they granted unlimited pardon power, “they anticipated at least a modicum of presidential restraint”, said The Wall Street Journal. As such, there are no provisions in the US Constitution to rein in a president who embarks on a pardoning spree.

Trump could still overreach. If, for example, he were to pardon his former friend Ghislaine Maxwell (currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors), it would highlight – in a much more public way – the “separate tier of justice” he has built “for his allies and investors”, said Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker.

Congress can’t remove the presidential power of pardon without changing the Constitution, but it could seek to “circumscribe” it “around a few basic principles”, said Bloomberg. These could include barring self-pardons and pardons given “in exchange for anything of value”. And pardons “issued in conjunction with a case involving presidents or their family members should trigger the release of all relevant investigative materials to Congress, to ensure greater public transparency”.

Seeking to impose these principles “will surely invite legal challenges”. But it would be difficult “to oppose them on the merits. More to the point: doing nothing would be unpardonable.”

“Responsible Child”, the ripped-from-the-headlines story of a 12-year-old boy who stands trial for murder, is top of the Netflix film charts.

The TV movie, which first aired on the BBC in 2019, “explores the nuanced issue of what age children ought to be responsible for their actions in a legal context”, said Cosmopolitan. It is loosely based on the real-life story of Jerome and Joshua Ellis, who were 14 and 23 when they killed their stepfather in 2013.

Filmmaker Nick Holt had “started asking more questions about the age at which people can stand trial in front of a jury”, he told Radio Times in 2019, after witnessing the trial of a young boy first hand. “When it turned out it was 10, and I saw how it compared to other countries, I was even more surprised. It’s substantially out of kilter with the rest of the world.”

What is the age of responsibility in the UK?

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland the age of criminal responsibility – defined as the minimum age a person can be held legally responsible for a crime – is 10 years old. This means children under 10 cannot be arrested or charged with a crime, although they can be given a local child curfew, child safety order, or – in extreme cases of repeated offending – taken into care. In Scotland, the age of criminal responsibility was raised to 12 in 2019.

Since 1963, when the law first recognised a minimum age of criminal responsibility and set it at 10, “our understanding of how the adolescent brain develops – and how that affects decision-making – has increased”, said the BBC.

Nicholas Mackintosh, who chaired a Royal Society study on brain development in 2011, told the BBC at the time that there was “incontrovertible evidence that the brain continues to develop throughout adolescence”. Some regions responsible for decision-making and impulse control do not fully mature “until at least the age of 20”.

The Royal Society’s report cited concern among some neuroscientists that the age of criminal responsibility in the UK was set too low. The age has not changed since then.

How are children handled differently?

Under the current law, children in England and Wales aged between 10 and 17 “can be arrested and taken to court if they commit a crime”, but are still “treated differently from adults”, said the UK government.

Most will have their cases heard in youth courts, which have “specific rules in place to safeguard the child’s welfare and maintain anonymity”, said Lawtons Solicitors. Sentences are “less severe”, with imprisonment “only being imposed as a last resort for the most serious offences”. Those found guilty are sent to special secure centres for young people rather than adult prisons, with a greater emphasis on rehabilitation and preventing reoffending.

However, for very serious offences, or crimes in which a child is charged alongside an adult, cases can be heard by a crown court. Between 1995 and 2020, it is estimated that more than 7,000 children aged 10-14 have been tried at crown courts in England and Wales.

How does the UK compare to other countries?

The United Nations has repeatedly called for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised to at least 12 by all member nations, with 14 the most common age around the world, said the National Youth Justice Network.

This means England and Wales are outliers, with the current age of 10 being lower than any other European country. Portugal, at 16, has the highest age of criminal responsibility in Europe.

Sweden’s Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson went against the grain last month by announcing plans to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 14. This came after an “increase in cases of crime gangs recruiting children via social media and using them as hitmen”, said Reuters.

For a self-styled “President of PEACE”, Donald Trump has been remarkably bellicose on the home front, said Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. He has ordered hundreds of National Guard troops into what he insists are the “war-ravaged” cities of Portland and Chicago, to the outrage of the Democratic elected officials who run these places.

In response to their vocal opposition, Trump called for the governor of Illinois and mayor of Chicago to be jailed. Meanwhile, federal agents working for ICE and Border Patrol are conducting increasingly aggressive raids, said Melissa Gira Grant in The New Republic. Hundreds of them recently stormed an apartment building on Chicago’s South Side, rappelling from Black Hawk helicopters and leading away “zip-tied” residents, including children. Trump is effectively “waging war” on Chicago.

Democrat leaders only have themselves to blame, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. If they had stopped people rioting outside ICE facilities in Chicago, and harassing agents there, Trump wouldn’t have had the excuse that he wanted to send in troops. It was the same story in Los Angeles. These cities invest a baffling amount of energy in defending illegal immigration, said Byron York in the Washington Examiner. Chicago is a “sanctuary city”, which means it limits or denies cooperation with federal officials in enforcing immigration law. Now, its mayor has declared parts of the city an “ICE-free zone”. Yet polls show that a majority of the public support deporting illegal migrants. By enforcing federal law, “Trump is doing what most people want”.

There have been some protests outside ICE facilities, said Kimberly Atkins Stohr in The Boston Globe, but we’re talking crowds of dozens, not thousands. Local officials have been in no danger of being overwhelmed. Trump is now threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act if legal challenges obstruct troop deployments. But that law is meant only to suppress “rebellion” that local law enforcement can’t handle. In recent history, it has only been invoked once, in 1992, when California’s governor requested military help to quell the LA riots. Ultimately, “Trump wants a war”, and only the Supreme Court can stop him militarising our cities. Given that it has already granted him immunity from actions taken in office, I doubt it will “stand up to him now”.

MSPs’ decision to scrap Scotland’s centuries-old option of a “not proven” verdict in a jury trial has delighted many crime survivors but raised legal worries about justice and conviction rates.

The Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Bill will abolish the “legal idiosyncrasy” that allowed Scottish juries to deliver a third possible verdict, along with guilty and not guilty, said the BBC.

The bill also introduces another major change to jury procedures: “raising the bar for guilty verdicts” to a “two-thirds majority”, instead of a simple majority, in an attempt to “allay concerns of some defence lawyers” that removing the “not proven” verdict could “make it harder for their clients” to get a fair trial.

Improve ‘shamefully low’ rape convictions

Politicians hope that removing the “not proven" verdict will improve “the shamefully low conviction rates for rape and attempted rape”, said The Scotsman. In 2022-23, only half (48%) of such cases resulted in a conviction – well below the “overall conviction rate of 88%”, said London’s The Standard

“Not proven” is technically a differentiated acquittal: although the jury may not be convinced enough of the accused’s innocence to agree on a non-guilty verdict, the accused is considered innocent in the eyes of the law. “This unique and archaic” verdict has caused “confusion and distress for victims, families and the wider public”, said The Herald. It carries a sense of “uncertainty and incompleteness” and has “often felt like a legal limbo, leaving emotional scars that can last decades”.

It is called by many a “bastard verdict”, because juries see it as a “compromise between guilt and innocence”, said The Times. “Pioneering” research using mock trials has shown that “people choose ‘not proven’ for sometimes very different reasons”. Some juries who use it are “sending a signal to the alleged victim in the case, particularly a sexual offence case” that they don’t disbelieve them but there “just wasn’t enough evidence”, the researchers told the paper. But, for other – often disputatious – juries, it’s as a way of “bringing discussions to an end without further deliberation”.

‘Act of self-harm’

Critics of the changes to the Scottish judicial system worry about potential miscarriages of justice. “Scotland will now have a system where a person can be convicted despite five members of the jury having significant doubts about their guilt,” Stuart Munro of the Law Society of Scotland told The Times. Other countries that allow only guilty or not guilty verdicts require juries to reach a unanimous or near-unanimous guilty verdict, he said.

It also “ironic” that the Scottish National Party has introduced reforms that bring its country’s legal system “more in line with England”, said The Times. It’s a “predictable act of self-harm” to abolish a “legal construct that sets the Scottish criminal justice system apart – and ahead of – every other criminal justice system in the world”, said criminal barrister Thomas Ross in Scottish Legal News. “It is a capitulation to influential advocacy groups, with little regard for the resultant increased risk of miscarriages of justice.”

Alongside “haggis” and “square sausage”, the “not proven” verdict was one of the few things “unique” to Scotland. “We really must do much better than this.”

Keir Starmer has often been accused of lacking core beliefs, said George Eaton in The New Statesman, but there's no doubting his earnest commitment to human rights law. He wrote a book on the subject back in 1999, and once claimed: "There is no version of my life that does not largely revolve around me being a human rights lawyer." Which is awkward given the current furore over irregular migration and the mounting calls for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

These calls are no longer just coming from Nigel Farage and the Tories. Two former Labour home secretaries have pitched in as well: David Blunkett says we should suspend parts of the ECHR to speed up the deportation of failed asylum seekers; Jack Straw has warned that "the convention – and crucially, its implementation – is now being used in ways which were never, ever intended when... it was drafted".

Britain's departure from the ECHR "is starting to feel inevitable", said Daniel Hannan in the Daily Mail. The only question is whether the PM accepts it, or is "swept away by the tide". Withdrawal wouldn't be such a big deal. The UK was an open, liberal society long before the ECHR came into force. Claims that leaving it would somehow destabilise the Good Friday Agreement are nonsense.

Yet there's no good reason to suspend our commitment to these universal rights, said Sean O'Grady in The Independent. For all the talk of an "emergency", irregular arrival numbers are lower today than they were in 2022 – and small in relation to the numbers settling here through legal migration. It's not as if leaving the ECHR will stop people trying to cross the Channel.

The ECHR is not the main problem with our overwhelmed asylum system, said Fraser Nelson in The Times. "Legally, Strasbourg only has as much power over our law as Parliament wishes to give it." If, for instance, politicians feel our judges are being too generous in their interpretation of the right to family life, they can legislate to tighten guidance. In practice, the ECHR's impact is modest. Although critics claim the convention stops ministers expelling foreign criminals, data from 2016-2021 shows that just 3.35% of successful appeals were on human rights grounds.

More troublesome than the ECHR is the Refugee Convention, which obliges Britain to settle everyone with a "well-founded fear of persecution" – a definition that "covers much of the world's population". This treaty doesn't present such a "juicy" political target "as it doesn't include the word 'European'", but it's the one the small-boat arrivals are mainly relying on – and the one that most needs updating.

"The road to online hell is paved with good intentions," said Melisa Tourt in The Critic – as we're discovering, now that the Online Safety Act is coming into force. This legislation was conceived with the noble aim of protecting children from pornography and other harmful material online.

But the immediate effect of the sprawling "Online Surveillance Act", as it has been dubbed, has been to "smother the internet under a morass of bureaucratic fear", said Sean Thomas in The Spectator. The act requires platforms hosting content that could cause harm to children to introduce age-verification checks for its users; and it grants Ofcom the power to fine them up to 10% of their global revenues if they don't.

But what counts as harmful? The act's definition is vague. So, to avoid any risk of incurring Ofcom's wrath, chatrooms about cider have been silenced, and last week X age-restricted an MP's speech on grooming gangs. The internet is no safer now – the most harmful content is often not hosted on UK servers – but it is smaller and duller.

This act, drafted by Tory ministers, has become an unwitting threat to free speech. It certainly isn't perfect, said The Times, but something had to be done. Left to self-regulate, tech companies had simply "shirked their moral responsibilities" to prevent children from accessing pornography and other toxic content.

The statistics tell a grim story, said Bex Sander and Fred Harter in The Observer. Half of 13-year-olds have been exposed to pornography, often as a result of stumbling upon it. A quarter of child suicides have been linked to material the victims had found online. People are genuinely concerned about what their children are now seeing in the supposed safety of their own homes – which is why a large majority of British adults (69%) support age-verification requirements, for instance, according to YouGov polling.

Support may fall when the knock-on effects of the act become more apparent, said George Monaghan in The New Statesman. Already, many adults are angry that they now have to upload their driver's licence, a scan of their face or another form of ID, to access pornography online. Fearful that this could leave them exposed to extortion attempts by hackers, people are using a simple workaround – buying virtual private network (VPN) apps, so that they can browse such websites as if from another country, where age verification is not required.

Searches for VPNs have soared by 500%, and we can be sure that a lot of them are being bought by tech-savvy kids, said Martha Gill in The Observer. "If there is a lesson of the last decade, it is that you cannot domesticate the internet", no matter how hard you try.

A public inquiry is to examine the events surrounding the so-called "Battle of Orgreave" – where over 100 striking miners and police were injured in violent clashes and, after which, criminal charges against 95 miners were dropped amid allegations of police falsifying evidence.

Still one of the most contentious episodes in modern British history, what happened in June 1984 "cast a shadow over communities in Yorkshire and other mining areas", said Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. "The violent scenes and subsequent prosecutions raised concerns that have been left unanswered for decades."

What happened?

On the morning of 18 June 1984, about three months into a major strike over coalpit closures, 8,000 striking miners assembled for a mass picket at the Orgreave coking plant near Sheffield. They were met by 6,000 police officers from forces nationwide, led by South Yorkshire Police.

Things quickly turned violent. Miners threw stones and the police charged on horseback and hit miners with truncheons. Police snatch squads used batons and short shields – the "first time they had ever been used on the UK mainland", said The Guardian – and many miners were arrested.

"It wasn't frightening to start off with," Chris Skidmore, an "Orgreave veteran" turned campaigner told Sky News, "but then what I noticed was the amount of police officers who had no identification numbers on. It all felt planned."

"And it wasn't just one truncheon," said his fellow former miner and campaigner Carl Parkinson. "There were about 30, or 40. And it was simultaneous, like it was orchestrated."

Despite accusations of policy brutality and use of excessive force, it was the miners who were blamed for the violence, with then prime minister Margaret Thatcher talking of "mob rule". Charges of rioting and unlawful assembly were brought against 95 of the miners – but, the following year, all charges were dropped after police evidence was repeatedly discredited.

Why is this being revisited now?

South Yorkshire Police paid out more than £400,000 in compensation to some accused miners and their families in 1990, without any admission of wrongdoing. No police officer was disciplined and the events of the day, and its aftermath, were never officially scrutinised.

The Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign was formed in 2012 by ex-miners and trade unionists to expose "police violence, lies and cover-ups" surrounding the events of 18 June.

Its aim is to discover who was responsible for "organising and ordering the deployment of multiple police forces, including mounted police armed with truncheons, shields and dogs, against striking miners". It called for a public inquiry to find out how it was decided that "striking miners should be attacked and arrested at Orgreave and charged with riot and unlawful assembly, which carried heavy prison sentences". It's also demanded to know why key documents "and other evidence had been destroyed or embargoed until 2066 and 2071".

Responding to pressure from the campaigners, the government has announced that the inquiry – which is to be chaired by the Bishop of Sheffield, Pete Wilcox – will be a statutory one, meaning witnesses will be compelled to give evidence.

What has the reaction to the inquiry been?

South Yorkshire mayor, Oliver Coppard said the announcement of the public inquiry was a "landmark moment for justice and accountability. We owe it to the miners, their families, and our communities to ensure that the events of Orgreave are finally understood."

John Dunn, from the Orgreave Truth and Justice Campaign, said he hoped the inquiry will get to the truth of what happened. "How did 6,000 police know to be waiting in full riot gear and why were they given the instructions to run rampant through innocent people?"

But police in South Yorkshire have reacted less optimistically. "This will be long and protracted," said South Yorkshire Police Federation chair Steve Kent. "And the associated costs of this inquiry will lead to there being even less money in the policing purse, which will only have a negative impact on the public of South Yorkshire."

Private Eye editor Ian Hislop once called it a legal "weapon" deployed by the rich and powerful. But now the lifting of a super-injunction that blocked the reporting of the calamitous Afghan data leak for more than two years has "raised concerns about government use of the courts to suppress information", said The Times.

Injunction vs super-injunction

An injunction (or an interdict in Scotland) is a court order directing someone to take a particular action or preventing a person from doing something – such as reporting specific confidential or private information. It can be granted for a set period or on an undefined temporary basis. Breaching an injunction can be considered contempt of court, and punished by up to two years in prison or a substantial fine.

A super-injunction "adds an extra layer to this by banning the reporting of the existence of the order itself", said The Independent. "Under a super-injunction, a person cannot publicise or inform others about the existence of the order or the underlying legal proceedings."

How do you get a super-injunction?

Before granting a super-injunction, "the judge will need to be satisfied that there is a justifiable reason with a strong argument", said law firm Alston Asquith. A super-injunction is usually only granted when the publication of the existence of a regular injunction order "would defeat the very object of that injunction in the first place".

Super-injunctions are something of rarity, partly because of how difficult it can be convince a judge to grant one but also because of the sheer expense of trying to secure one. The prohibitive legal costs make them "a privilege of the wealthy and famous", said Alston Asquith.

Once granted, super-injunctions are "so protective of their subjects" that only a few of them have ever become public, said The New York Times. Those we do now know about include multinational commodities firm Trafigura, which in 2009 tried to stop The Guardian reporting on allegations that it was responsible for dumping toxic waste. Footballers John Terry and Ryan Giggs also used super-injunctions to block reporting on their extramarital affairs.

When can they be broken?

Given their highly restrictive nature, the only ways to reveal the existence of a super-injunction is if an existing order expires and a judge refuses to extend it, if the person who sought the super-injunction volunteers the information themselves or if it's disclosed in Parliament (as happened in Ryan Giggs' case): parliamentary privilege means MPs and lords are not bound by the rules of injunctions when speaking within the Houses of Parliament.

An injunction or super-injunction issued in the UK cannot be enforced in jurisdictions beyond the scope of UK courts, however. This has been a particular headache in the internet age, when overseas news publications and social media accounts are easily accessible from the UK.

Why was the Afghan super-injunction special?

The Afghan leak super-injunction has widely been described as "unprecedented". And there are three key reasons why, said London's The Standard. Firstly, "it is thought this was the first time that the government has sought such an order against the media". Second is the length of the proceedings, it having taken more than two years for the order to be lifted. Finally, this super-injunction was granted "contra mundum" ("against the world"), rather than against any specific media organisations, "meaning that any third parties who became aware of the proceedings were covered by the order, even if they were not named".

In effect, the "gagging power" of the government's super-injunction was "so wide-ranging that journalists were prevented from asking basic questions about how the leak happened, who knew what when and who should be held to account", said The Times.

"Parliament was misled and important scrutiny of a multibillion-pound operation to handle the fallout and rescue potentially endangered Afghans was impossible."

When a car burst into flames just off the M61 near Bolton in January 2023, it was "impossible to predict the turbulence" and "tragedy" to follow, said Channel 4 News.

The occupants of that vehicle – aristocrat Constance Marten and her partner Mark Gordon, a convicted rapist – have this week been found guilty of the gross-negligence manslaughter of their newborn baby Victoria, after "a lengthy, emotionally charged ordeal" that included a nationwide manhunt and two chaotic trials.

What happened in 2023?

A manhunt was launched when police found Marten's passport in the burnt-out Peugeot, along with evidence that a baby had recently been born in the back seat.

After 54 days living off-grid and using nearly £50,000 withdrawn from Marten's trust fund, the couple were finally apprehended near Brighton. Officers later found the body of baby Victoria in a shopping bag at an allotment where Marten and Gordon had been living. It emerged that she had died in a freezing-cold tent in the South Downs while sleeping rough with her parents.

How did the trials unfold?

The court cases that followed were "extraordinary", said the BBC's Helena Wilkinson, who reported on both trials. Twice in the dock over the death of their baby, the couple "appeared to be completely in love and still fiercely united" and "yet they had utter contempt for the court process".

Both defendants changed their legal representation numerous times, with Gordon eventually defending himself and even cross-examining his partner. The judge accused them of trying to "sabotage" and "manipulate" their second trial, which nearly collapsed a number of occasions.

The pair were found guilty in 2024 of concealing the birth of baby Victoria, of perverting the course of justice and of child cruelty. But the jury couldn't come to a decision about the most serious charge, so it was only this week that a second trial concluded with the guilty of manslaughter by gross negligence verdict. Marten and Gordon are due to be sentenced in September.

In his closing speech to the jury, Gordon claimed the couple were not on the run, but "were being chased". He told the court: "We were two vulnerable people, misunderstood and continuously persecuted due to racial and class stereotypes. But none of that stuff matters: love conquers all."

Why were the couple on the run?

Key to the couple's defence was the claim that they went on the run to avoid Victoria being removed from them once she was born; Marten's four other children, born between 2017 and 2021, had been placed into care in January 2022, after years of legal drama in the family courts. Marten claimed the children had been "stolen by the state" and her "number one priority" was to protect Victoria.

A key reason for the decision to place the children in care was a concern that Marten "was a victim of domestic violence at the hands of the convicted rapist and that the children were also at risk", said The Telegraph. In one incident, a judge ruled that Gordon had "caused her to fall out of a first-floor window when she was pregnant".

Eight months after the care ruling, Marten was pregnant again and "on the run from authorities" with Gordon, "beginning the fatal journey" that ended in Brighton, said the BBC.

A national review into Victoria's death has now been launched by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel to look at how "agencies can better safeguard children in similar circumstances".

A bedrock of the English justice system is the right to be judged by a group of your peers – a jury. But it is far from the norm worldwide.

As the backlog in the criminal courts continues to impede justice, the government is under pressure to come up with solutions – a task given to a former judge, Brian Leveson. His recommendations include removing the right to be tried by a jury of peers in certain cases. "I don't rejoice in these recommendations, but I do believe they're absolutely essential," he wrote. There is "a real risk of total system collapse in the near future", which could "lead to a breakdown in law and order".

Lawyers argue that restricting jury trials isn't practical and could lead to discrimination against minorities. But jury trials themselves are controversial, and not without concerns of bias. Many democracies worldwide do not rely on them at all.

Italy

The criminal law system in Italy is "often referred to as a hybrid", said the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender. It's a "composite of the two dominant Western models of criminal procedure": the US-UK "adversarial", in which two sides, prosecution and defence, present their cases before a judge and jury; and the European "inquisitorial", in which a judge investigates a case, collects evidence and questions witnesses.

In certain courts, professional judges work alongside "lay" judges – non-professional members of the public – to make decisions. These giudici popolari are selected from a list of eligible citizens: there is a minimum age and education level, and they cannot be members of the armed forces, police or clergy or allow religious beliefs any influence.

In 2009, the jury that found Amanda Knox guilty of murdering Meredith Kercher provoked "intense criticism" in the US, said Italian studies professor Sarah Annunziato on The Conversation. Journalists blamed the (later overturned) guilty verdict on "rampant anti-Americanism, media bias, an allegedly corrupt prosecutor, and the Italian justice system itself".

Germany

Jury trials were abolished in Germany in 1924 and most cases are tried by a professional judge or a panel of "lay" judges known as Schöffen. Councils compile lists of members of the public "deemed suitable", who are then chosen by committee for a five-year term, said The Guardian.

They must be between 25 and 69 years old, and "religious ministers, certain politicians and health professionals working in the court system are among those excluded".

France

Similarly, only the most serious cases are heard by juries in France. A criminal trial court, or cour d'assises, is comprised of three judges who deliberate with six jurors to reach a verdict, but only in cases that carry the longest sentences.

Cases that carry a maximum sentence of 15-20 years – i.e. "nearly all rape trials", said The Guardian – are tried by a panel of five judges at "département criminal courts". Dominique Pelicot, for example, was found guilty of his crimes against his wife Gisèle by a panel of five judges.

India

Jury trials, introduced under British colonial rule, were abolished after a landmark ruling in the infamous Nanavati case. A navy commander, Kawas Nanavati, was acquitted by a jury of murdering his English wife's lover despite "overwhelming evidence" – and his own confession.

The judge declared the verdict "perverse", said the BBC. He referred the case to the High Court of what was then called Bombay, which found Nanavati guilty. The trial amplified decades of concern about the jury system and its failure to deliver independent or impartial verdicts. It "wrote the death warrant of jury trials in India"; they were phased out before being officially abolished in 1973.

Most of Asia's common law jurisdictions (countries such as Singapore, Pakistan and Malaysia) have also abolished jury trials, amid concerns that juries are susceptible to bias.

In the early hours of last Friday, two activists from Palestine Action climbed over a fence into RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. They then filmed themselves riding unimpeded on scooters across the vast airbase – "a critical part of Britain's defence infrastructure" – and vandalising two Voyager air-to-air refuelling tankers. Reportedly, they smashed the aircraft with crowbars and sprayed paint into their engines.

Their aim, they said, was to "disrupt British military support for Israel". But their main achievement was to provoke the normally "glacial" Home Office into rapid action. By Friday evening, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, had let it be known that she planned to proscribe Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act; on Monday, she confirmed that it would be put to a vote in the Commons next week.

In a statement, Cooper said this "disgraceful" attack was just the latest in the long history of Palestine Action's "unacceptable criminal damage". And it's true that the group's tactics have become quite extreme, said Sian Bradley and Charlie Parker in The Times. It was set up in 2020 to take direct action against Elbit Systems, a weapons manufacturer it claims "profits from Israel's war crimes". Back then, its members limited themselves to scaling rooftops and vandalising factories. But since the start of Israel's offensive in Gaza, they have ramped up their actions. Last year, they were accused of assaulting two police officers at Elbit's Bristol site and causing millions of pounds worth of damage.

These extremists are not just hurling soup at paintings, said Tom Harris in The Daily Telegraph. They are sabotaging RAF aircraft and potentially undermining Britain's defence capability. If proscribing the group allows police to deal with this menace more effectively, "so much the better". It's a drastic step, though, said Karl Hansen in Tribune. It would place Palestine Action "in the same legal category as Isis, al-Qa'eda and neo-Nazi gangs", and criminalise anyone who belongs to the group, funds it, or publicly expresses support for it.

Cooper is setting a "dangerous precedent", said The Guardian. If the state can define a non-violent campaign "it disapproves of as terrorism, the boundary between civil disobedience and extremism becomes whatever a minister says it is". Palestine Action has caused a lot of damage, but its tactics do not include "threats to life". The Labour peer Shami Chakrabarti was right to ask: "When did criminal damage become terrorism?"

"When it comes to questions concerning the right to life, Westminster’s attention has been fixed on Kim Leadbeater's bill to legalise assisted suicide," said Fleur Meston on The Critic.

But there is a danger that "equally radical" proposals concerning the beginning of life "are going largely unnoticed". Indeed, "few commentators seem aware that we may be only weeks away from the de facto introduction of abortion up to birth in this country".

Labour MPs Tonia Antoniazzi and Stella Creasy have both tabled amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill. Their move "comes amid concern more women are being investigated by police on suspicion of illegally ending a pregnancy", said the BBC.

The MPs' amendments, in different ways, "decriminalise" abortion in all circumstances, said The Critic. Antoniazzi’s amendment "would remove any legal deterrent against women performing their own abortions at any gestation", while Creasy's proposal "would fully repeal the current underlying laws against abortion".

'Extreme' abortion laws

"Britain may soon have one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world", said Miriam Cates, the pro-life supporter and former Conservative MP, in The Telegraph. The proposed amendments effectively decriminalise abortion "up to the moment of birth".

In Britain, abortion is currently legal until 24 weeks of pregnancy. "But for the pro-abortion lobby this isn’t enough," said Cates.

A YouGov survey revealed that 70% of MPs think women should not be liable for prison sentences if they have abortions outside current restrictions. "Yet this is wildly out of step with public opinion", with just 1% of British people supporting abortion up to birth. "How is such a wildly unpopular opinion on the verge of becoming law?"

The issue has only intensified since the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, when face-to-face abortion services were suspended and women up to 10 weeks pregnant were allowed to access abortion pills by post.

But without in-person checks, they can easily be procured for pregnancies that have progressed beyond the legal limit. The pills-by-post scheme was meant to be a temporary measure, but "pro-abortion MPs hijacked an unrelated bill" in 2022 to make it permanent, despite warnings this would lead to "illegal abortions, dangerous late-stage terminations, coercion and undetected abuse".

'Traumatic' criminal investigations

Yet cases like Nicola Packer's, cleared last week of illegally terminating her pregnancy, expose the human cost of criminalisation, said The Guardian. "Already traumatised by discovering that she was 26 weeks pregnant, not about 10", as she believed when she took abortion pills prescribed through a remote consultation, Packer was then subjected to four years of "humiliating" criminal proceedings.

Packer's case is "an extreme one" but is "part of a growing trend". Around 100 women are believed to have been investigated over suspected illegal abortions in the last five years, with five cases coming to court in 2023 alone. "Before then, only three women were thought to have been prosecuted since abortion was made illegal in 1861."

And it is this surge in investigations, alongside an "influx of money and influence from anti-abortion activists invigorated by their triumph in the US", that has persuaded many people that "legislative change is now necessary".

"I am seeing first-hand, the implications of the sudden increase in prosecutions for abortion under these archaic clauses," said Dr Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, in The Independent.

Women are now "being criminally prosecuted on suspicion of ending their own pregnancies under a law passed before women even had the right to vote". Recent cases include a teenager "left completely broken" after going through the trauma of a stillbirth and then being forced to relive the events six years later at her trial.

Abortions that take place outside the processes enshrined in current laws usually involve "extremely vulnerable women – including victims of domestic abuse, women with a history of mental health problems, women not registered with a GP, and women who are socioeconomically disadvantaged or have difficulties accessing the health system", said Thakar.

"How can traumatic criminal investigations be the right course of action in a compassionate society that strives for equality, fairness and tolerance?"

It used to be considered a "distasteful hobby horse of the radical Right", said Oliver Moody in The Times. Yet in the past few weeks, the cause of reforming the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) has reached a "tipping point", driven by growing concerns about mass migration. Nine EU states, led by Denmark and Italy, have published an open letter demanding more sovereignty over how they combat irregular immigration and deport foreign criminals. They argue that, by blocking efforts to expel migrants, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg has "extended the scope of the convention".

This week, the Tory leader Kemi Badenoch went further, launching a review into whether the UK should leave the ECHR altogether. Whatever the method, said The Times, "Strasbourg's wings must be clipped". When the treaty was created in 1950, it was designed "to prevent a resurgence of fascism". Now, activist judges are using parts of the treaty (such as the Article 8 "right to respect for family life") to prevent governments from ejecting convicted criminals. Unelected judges have effectively assumed control over "national borders".

There may be a case for reform, said The Guardian. Even the ECHR's supporters concede the treaty is not "unchallengeable or holy writ". But Badenoch made it quite clear last week that the nuclear option – quitting the ECHR – is now basically Tory policy. ("I do believe that we will likely need to leave," she declared.) Many Tories believe that leaving it would regain the party's "squandered popularity" and beat back Reform. "This is nonsensical politics", but it would also be "dangerous for Britain". Abandoning our seven-decade commitment to human rights would "delight authoritarians", and undermine "Britain's reputation for reliability".

Badenoch would also face a significant obstacle, said D.A.T. Green in Prospect: withdrawing from the ECHR would breach the Good Friday Agreement, potentially jeopardising peace in Northern Ireland. A "wise" politician would drop this "hysterical" option and work with other European politicians to make Article 8 fit for purpose; that's what the Tories did in 2017 to resolve the "notorious issue of prisoner votes".

I'm no fan of the ECHR, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph, but let's not pretend leaving is "a skeleton key that unlocks every door". Other treaties, such as the UN Refugee Convention, are also used to challenge deportation orders. Would we have to leave them too? This isn't a simple problem, and anyone who pretends otherwise risks disappointing an already jaded British public – with a potentially perilous "impact on our democracy".

Sadiq Khan's recent call for possession of small quantities of cannabis for personal use to be decriminalised set himself on a collision course with the government.

In May, the Mayor of London backed a report by the London Drugs Commission, led by the Labour peer Charlie Falconer, which included 42 recommendations, including removing cannabis from the Misuse of Drugs Act – though it stopped short of suggesting full legalisation.

The current rules, said the report, were wasting police officers' time and souring police-community relations. But Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, poured cold water on the proposal, saying Labour had no plans to relax the laws on cannabis.

'Evidence-based reform rooted in common sense'

The report represents "yet another attempt to inject sanity into Britain’s archaic drug laws", said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian.

Among the many arguments it set out, it highlighted "the current law with respect to cannabis possession is experienced disproportionately by those from ethnic minority (excluding white minority) groups, particularly London's black communities". According to 2024 figures, Black people are four times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people, but are no more likely to be carrying cannabis.

Then there is the cost. Detainments for cannabis offences have set the taxpayers back well over £2.5 billion in the last decade. By contrast it is estimated that a regulated and taxed cannabis market could net the Treasury more than £1 billion annually.

"This isn't about promoting drug use, but about evidence-based reform rooted in public health and common sense", said Jon Robson, CEO and founder of Mamedica, a medical cannabis clinic, in City A.M. "Criminal sanctions have done little to reduce cannabis use, but they've caused real harm: young people burdened with lifelong records, patients denied treatment due to stigma and communities disproportionately targeted by outdated enforcement."

What is worse, this hardline approach is increasingly out of step with the rest of the Western world – and the British public.

A recent YouGov poll of 5,306 adults found that 54% of the British public think small amounts of cannabis for personal use should be decriminalised, compared to 34% who were opposed.

All the while, the UK is falling behind the likes of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Canada and numerous US states, which have either decriminalised or fully legalised recreational cannabis use in recent years. While not universally successful, these case studies have all recognised that "controlled regulation protects public health far better than prohibition", said Robson.

'Cannabis is a seriously harmful drug'

"Khan's plan for cannabis isn't just naive", said The Telegraph, "it's dangerously divisive."

He seems to believe that the "greatest harm arising from cannabis usage is that its policing might damage relations between the police and ethnic minorities, or that criminalising them might do more harm than the cannabis they consume", said The Spectator. "In this he is wrong.

"Cannabis, especially the very potent, high-THC cannabis which is now on the streets, is a seriously harmful drug" and "the production and distribution of it generates huge income for organised crime and even funds the people-smuggling trade".

In 2001, the commander of Lambeth police, Brian Paddick, briefly ran an experiment by empowering his officers to let off everyone caught with small amounts of cannabis with a caution. "It saved police time and enabled them to focus on more dangerous drugs", said Tom Calver in The Sunday Times, "yet as dealers flooded the borough, the number of cannabis offences actually rose by a third". A follow-up study by researchers at University College London concluded that the "total welfare of local residents likely fell" during the period.

As an NHS psychiatrist who witnesses on a daily basis the damage done by cannabis, "I see the tragic human fallout from our lackadaisical attitude towards cannabis", said Dr Max Pemberton in the Daily Mail. Research has shown that, "far from being the benign substance campaigners would have us believe, cannabis is a dangerous intoxicant that has a profound effect on the structure and function of the brain". The drug is to blame for about a third of psychosis cases in the capital, according to one study.

The whole idea of decriminalisation is "nonsensical", he said. "If we are going to accept that we have lost the war on this drug then, rather than turn a blind eye to its use, we must make it legal, regulate it and control it."

The automatic right to trial by jury could be denied to defendants accused of all but the most serious crimes, under new justice plans for England and Wales proposed by the government.

It's an "idea whose time has probably come", Courts Minister Sarah Sackman told The Times. Jury trial "will always be a cornerstone of British justice for the most serious cases" but "really bold and really radical" measures are needed to bring down the huge backlog of cases awaiting trial.

How bad is the court backlog?

The crown court case backlog is "scandalous", said The Spectator. There are almost 80,000 cases waiting to be heard in England and Wales, leaving defendants and victims in limbo. "Some defendants are already being told that there are no free slots before 2028."

"Given the acute scale of the problem," Sackman told The Times, "we are going to have to use every lever at our disposal" to fix it.

How would jury-less trials work?

Instead of a 12-person jury, cases could be tried before a judge and two magistrates in a new kind of court, similar to that recommended by The Times' recent Crime and Justice Commission report, which was published after consulting police officers, victims, judges, lawyers, and academics.

The idea of establishing an "intermediate court", now backed by five former lord chancellors and two former lord chief justices, is not a new one. It was first mooted more than 20 years ago and was, last year, promoted by former Tory justice minister Alex Chalk. Its proposed adoption by the government now is undoubtedly a result of the need to bring victims swifter justice.

Former Court of Appeal judge Brian Leveson is currently conducting a review of crown courts in England and Wales, which is "expected to feature" the intermediate courts proposal, and Sackman "will wait to see" what he recommends, said The Times.

Which crimes might have jury-less trials?

The proposed intermediate courts would hear cases involving so-called "either way" offences – where, currently, a defendant can either choose for their case to be heard by magistrates or opt for crown court and a jury trial. Typical "either way" offences include theft, drug possession, dangerous driving, fraud and some forms of non-serious assault, and these cases currently make up over 50% of the crown court backlog. The most serious cases – involving, for example, murder, manslaughter, rape, serious violence or sexual assault – would still be heard in a crown court, in front of a judge and jury.

What are the concerns?

In theory, more jury-less trials could mean more convictions: it's well known that opting for a jury trial "materially increases the chance of acquittal", said The Spectator. But the Bar Council – which represents barristers in England and Wales – has opposed the idea, saying that "altering the fundamental structure of delivering criminal justice is not a principled response to a crisis which was not, in truth, caused by that structure in the first place". Introducing intermediate courts "would be an unnecessary distraction in a system that is already stretched and under-resourced", and removing juries could have "some serious potential risks to public confidence in the administration of justice".

The Law Society, the professional body for solicitors, has echoed these concerns, saying the new courts would "waste money, time and energy".

The Scottish government has already piloted jury-less trials but only for rape and serious sexual assault cases and the pilot was quickly scrapped after a "backlash from the highest levels of the legal profession", said The Guardian. Although the aim was to tackle the persistently low conviction rates for these kind of cases, there was a "near-unanimous boycott" of the pilot scheme from lawyers across Scotland.

How else could the court backlog be tackled?

Alternative suggestions put forward by lawyers to ease the backlog of cases include "greater use of out-of-court disposals, such as cautions and deferred prosecution agreements, more hearings conducted virtually over video link, and maximum use of judges – including those who have retired but could be brought back into service", said London's The Standard.

Virginia Giuffre, who accused Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein of sexually exploiting her as a teenager, has died aged 41. She died by suicide at her farm in Western Australia on Friday, her publicist confirmed.

In a statement, her family said: "Virginia was a fierce warrior in the fight against sexual abuse and sex trafficking. She was the light that lifted so many survivors. Despite all the adversity she faced in her life, she shone so bright. She will be missed beyond measure."

The Epstein allegations

Giuffre became an advocate for sex trafficking survivors "after emerging as a central figure in Epstein's prolonged downfall", said The Associated Press.

She came forward publicly with her story after the initial investigation into Epstein's crimes ended in only an 18-month jail term for the late financier. He made a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution by pleading guilty to relatively minor state-level charges of soliciting prostitution.

In subsequent lawsuits, Giuffre said she was a teenage spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, President Donald Trump's Florida home, when she was approached in 2000 by Epstein's girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Giuffre said Maxwell hired her as a masseuse, "but the couple effectively made her a sexual servant" for Epstein and his associates. That included Prince Andrew, whom she says she was forced to have sex with three times while she was 17 and 18. "Ghislaine said, 'I want you to do for him what you do for Epstein'," Giuffre told NBC's Dateline in 2019.

Prince Andrew has always vehemently denied the accusations, claiming in a now infamous 2019 Newsnight interview that he had "no recollection of ever meeting this lady, none whatsoever". In 2022, he settled Giuffre's lawsuit out of court, agreeing to a "substantial donation" to her charity, though admitting no liability.

Unanswered questions

Giuffre's death "will leave questions that are now likely to remain unanswered", said the BBC. Her name will "always be associated with the scandals and criminality" surrounding Epstein and his associates. As a young woman "she had the strength to stand up to a toxic mix of power, money and privilege in the circle surrounding Epstein, who sexually exploited so many girls".

"In the end, the toll of abuse is so heavy that it became unbearable for Virginia to handle its weight," her family said in a statement issued on Saturday. But there will now be suspicions that "the long shadow of Epstein's poisonous misuse of wealth and influence has indirectly claimed another victim".

Giuffre's passing "will weigh heavily on all involved in this most shameful of episodes", said The Telegraph, and the accusations against Prince Andrew, though "unproven", will be "linked to him for life". For Prince Andrew, Giuffre's death "draws the most tragic of lines under a period of his life he hoped would end in redemption, and now will not".

"The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act 2010 refer to a biological woman and biological sex."

That was the judgement delivered today by the Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling that has ramifications for women's rights, transgender rights and equalities policy.

In a long-running legal battle, women's rights campaigners had challenged the Scottish government's interpretation of the word "sex" in the Equality Act to count trans women with Gender Recognition Certificates as women.

Courts in Scotland ruled, and then upheld, in favour of the Scottish government: that sex was "not limited to biological or birth sex". So, For Women Scotland, backed by J.K. Rowling, took their case "all the way to the Supreme Court", with "high hopes of a different result", said Politico. Today's ruling in their favour has implications way beyond Scotland – because the Equality Act applies across Britain.

What did the commentators say?

Despite claims to the contrary, the question under consideration was never "what is a woman?", said Catriona Stewart in The Spectator. Rather, the court ruled on how "woman" and "man" are defined "for the purposes of the law". That "may seem a pedantic distinction but, in a climate where lack of clarity has caused mayhem, pedantry is to be welcomed".

The Scottish government maintained that transgender people were entitled to sex-based protections. For Women Scotland argued that these protections only applied to biological women, and that broadening the definition of sex could complicate Equality Act exemptions which allow single-sex spaces, such as lesbian clubs and female changing rooms.

After "painstaking analysis", the Supreme Court ruled that including people with a Gender Recognition Certificates in the sex group would make the Equality Act read in an "incoherent way". But, since gender reassignment is already included as a separate protected characteristic, the act still protects trans people, not only against discrimination as a protected characteristic, but also "against direct discrimination, indirect discrimination and harassment in substance in their acquired gender", said Lord Hodge, the court's deputy president.

In an area of law that was beset with confusion, the ruling has brought "clarity and confidence" for women and for service providers such as hospitals, refuges and sports clubs, said a government spokesperson. "Single-sex spaces are protected in law and will always be protected by this government."

It is a "victory for women's rights", Trina Budge of For Women Scotland, told The Times. "Trans people are protected like anyone else is, but this clarifies women's rights."

The decision will mean that trans women "can no longer sit on public boards in places set aside for women", said The Guardian. It could also lead to "much greater restrictions" on their use of services and spaces reserved for women, and could "spark calls for the UK's laws on gender recognition to be rewritten".

I'm "gutted" by this judgement, said Scottish Greens activist Ellie Gomersall, a 25-year-old trans woman living in Glasgow. The ruling "undermines the vital human rights of my community to dignity, safety and the right to be respected for who we are", and "represents yet another attack on the rights of trans people to live our lives in peace", she told Sky News.

What next?

Edinburgh-based charity Scottish Trans is urging people "not to panic". "There will be lots of commentary coming out quickly that is likely to deliberately overstate the impact that this decision is going to have on all trans people's lives," the charity posted on Bluesky.

Both in Westminster and Holyrood, there's likely to be "renewed pressure" from "noisy campaigners" on both sides, said Politico.

We could see a revival of the Tories' 2024 election campaign promise to "rewrite the Equality Act". And, in Scotland, John Swinney may face demands to "resurrect" Nicola Sturgeon's abandoned efforts to make gender self-identification legal, said The Times. A Holyrood bill, intended to make it simpler for Scottish people to obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate, was blocked by a UK government order. This order is now "effectively annulled" by today's ruling, so Scotland's first minister will face "intense pressure from LGBT campaigners and factions within his own party" to push self-identification through.

If the story of Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine's arrest had broken a few days later, "you'd think it was an April Fool", said Toby Young in The Times. In late January, six uniformed police officers turned up at their house in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. They detained them in front of their three-year-old daughter, then took them to a police station and locked them in a cell for 11 hours.

The reason for all this? Their elder daughter's primary school, Cowley Hill, had lodged a complaint after the couple criticised its recruiting process for the new head. The school also complained that the pair had been "casting aspersions" on the chair of governors in a WhatsApp group. "Instead of telling the school that this was not a police matter – or, indeed, just guffawing", Hertfordshire Police questioned the couple on suspicion of harassment, sending malicious communications and causing a nuisance. After a five-week investigation, the couple were told that no further action would be taken.

Following a recent review, Hertfordshire's chief constable found that the arrests were "lawful", but could have been better handled, said Fintan McGuinness in the Watford Observer. The school had accused the couple of a campaign of harassment, and banned them from the premises last June. Even so, teachers claimed, harassment continued via email; so the police were contacted. Officers asked the couple to desist in December, to no avail – hence the arrest. The police ultimately found no offences had been committed; but said they'd had a duty to investigate.

Whatever the complexities, it is "outrageous" that the school reacted to parental grievances in this way, said the Daily Mail. And it's absurd that the police response was so "Orwellian". Hertfordshire Constabulary has "the worst burglary clear-up rate in the country". It should stick to solving real crimes. Some may dismiss this as a mere skirmish in the culture wars, said Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. I disagree: I think it's "a symptom of a disease". We have "lost sight of the wisdom that a bit of suffering, stress and criticism is part of the human condition". These things don't require intervention by the state – or anything except a little "inner resilience".

Donald Trump has gone to war with America's legal profession, said Ruth Marcus in The New Yorker. His goal is not only to avenge himself on perceived enemies, but to intimidate – and it seems to be working. Over the past few weeks, he has effectively threatened to put several major US law firms out of business, by signing executive orders terminating their federal contracts, instructing state agencies to end contracts with the firms' clients, and banning their lawyers from government buildings.

One of the firms, Perkins Coie, which worked closely with Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, has fought the order in court and won a restraining order. Two more followed last week. But another – Paul, Weiss, whose lawyers had investigated Trump's business dealings and sued alleged 6 January rioters – chose to capitulate. It struck a deal to get the order lifted, agreeing to give $40 million in pro bono services to Trump-approved causes.

I find it hard to sympathise with Perkins Coie, said Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review. For there's no denying that Democrats have engaged in some egregious "lawfare abuses" in recent years. And the two Perkins Coie lawyers who were at the forefront of the Clinton campaign scheme "to smear Trump as a Kremlin plant" have a lot to answer for. That said, they left the firm years ago, and there's no justification for Trump's vendetta. His retribution should be that he won the presidency – not least because the public disliked his opponents' lawfare tactics – and got to fire the officials who had persecuted him. But imposing punishments without trial? Violating the right to due process? In short, trampling the Constitution – in order to "destroy his enemies". That's a different matter.

The rule of law is on the line here, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post. Not content with targeting the four law firms, Trump last week issued a memo instructing his attorney general to punish any firm that pursues a case the administration deems "unscrupulous". The message to any who might dare to oppose him is clear: "You could be next." And by caving in to Trump, Paul, Weiss has already set a terrible precedent.

The silence of most other law firms has been deafening, said Deborah Pearlstein in The New York Times. Rather than show solidarity with their fellow litigation powerhouses, some have apparently even tried to poach their lawyers and clients. The wealthy, well-connected firms known collectively as Big Law are wrong to imagine that they can appease Trump, or go through the next four years without their clients taking positions that irk the administration. For their own sake, and that of American democracy, they need to stand up for themselves, join forces – and "fight back".

"Today was very nearly what the Tories were calling 'two-tier Tuesday,'" said Politico.

The Sentencing Council's updated guidelines for judges and magistrates in England and Wales, due to come into force today, advised courts to "normally consider" pre-sentence reports before sentencing people from 10 categories – including women and those from ethnic or religious minorities.

But after widespread criticism from both Labour and the Conservatives – with accusations of "two-tier justice" – the justice secretary demanded that the independent body U-turn on its guidance, and introduced emergency legislation to overrule it. Despite initially standing firm, the Sentencing Council "caved to government pressure" last night, said Politico, and suspended the guidance while Shabana Mahmood's bill is considered.

What are pre-sentence reports?

They provide courts with information about an offender's background and the circumstances surrounding the crime. Compiled by the Probation Service, the reports include a sentencing recommendation that "takes these factors into account, alongside the seriousness of the offence", said Daniel Alge, a senior lecturer in criminal justice, on The Conversation. But crucially, the judge or magistrate is "not bound by the recommendation".

Previously, pre-sentence reports were advised if the court was deciding between a community order or custody. The new guidance, published by the independent body this month after a consultation last year, included a revised list of the types of offender for whom a pre-sentence report might be particularly important.

Reports "will normally be considered necessary" for offenders in one of 10 cohorts, it said: women; a young adult; a sole or primary carer for a relative; a victim of domestic abuse; a victim of trafficking; an addict; someone suffering a serious chronic medical condition; and someone from an ethnic minority, cultural minority or faith minority.

What was the council's thinking?

"You are more likely to receive a custodial sentence if you are from an ethnic minority group, even after controlling for various offender and case characteristics," said Stephen Bush in the Financial Times.

There is "no statistically significant difference" as to whether someone is found guilty by a jury; there is, however, a "statistically significant difference at sentencing", being greatest for people in the "other" ethnic group. It is this disparity the council was seeking to address.

So what's the backlash?

Shadow justice minister Robert Jenrick said the guidance showed a "blatant bias against Christians and straight white men". He claimed it would "make a custodial sentence less likely" for those from an ethnic or religious minority, said Sky News.

That was a "gross oversimplification", said Joshua Rozenberg in the Law Gazette. But Mahmood "allowed herself to be wound up". On 20 March, the justice secretary "fired off a letter" to William Davis, lord chief justice and chair of the Sentencing Council. There is "a difference in sentencing outcomes for ethnic minorities", she wrote: "the disparity is clearly real."

While pre-sentencing reports "can be valuable in all cases", the government opposes "differential treatment on the basis of race or ethnicity".

She added: "A Muslim woman, like me, is safer in this country when she is treated no differently to her fellow citizens, regardless of the colour of her skin or the nature of her faith."

Ministers also argue that any action to tackle bias should originate from elected politicians and not a quango. "I'm very disappointed in the response of the Sentencing Council on this issue," Keir Starmer told GB News yesterday.

Then what happened?

The council "replied robustly", said Rozenberg. "I have seen it suggested that the guideline instructs sentencers to impose a more lenient sentence on those from ethnic minorities than white offenders," Davis wrote in a public letter. "Plainly that suggestion is completely wrong."

But judges must "do all that they can to avoid a difference in outcome based on ethnicity". They would be "better equipped to do that if they have as much information as possible about the offender".

The council refused to back down, so today Mahmood has introduced emergency legislation that would make the guidelines "unlawful". They "create a justice system where outcomes could be influenced by race, culture or religion", she said. "This differential treatment is unacceptable – equality before the law is the backbone of public confidence in our justice system."

But Mahmood was told it would be impossible to pass the bill through Parliament before the Easter recess, said The Guardian, so there would have been a "short, confusing period" during which the guidance would have applied. To avoid this "potentially chaotic process", the council confirmed it would not implement a guideline while there was a draft being considered that would make it illegal.

In a statement, it said it still believed the guidelines were "necessary and appropriate".

You have to watch what you say in America these days, said Andrew Sullivan on Substack. Hold the wrong views or turn up to the wrong protest rally and you could find yourself chucked out of the country, even if you're a legal permanent resident and have committed no crime.

Just ask Mahmoud Khalil. Immigration officers arrested the Syrian-born pro-Palestinian campus activist earlier this month in his flat in Manhattan, and whisked him off to a detention facility in Louisiana. Pending the result of a legal battle over his future, he's set to be deported – and other student visa and green-card holders could potentially face the same threat.

The Trump administration has launched a "McCarthyite" AI-assisted programme called "Catch and Revoke", which will scan social media accounts and news reports for signs of non-citizens allegedly engaging in antisemitism. "This is the first arrest of many to come," the president posted on social media following Khalil's detention. "We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathisers from our country – never to return again."

Deporting green-card holders is not a step that should be "taken lightly", said The Wall Street Journal. There are nearly 13 million of these people in America and they secured their residency status through a legitimate legal process. However, a green card does come with obligations. The law grants the secretary of state the power to deport an immigrant who either "endorses or espouses terrorist activity", or is a representative of a group that does so. Khalil would seem to have violated that term. He was a lead negotiator for the Columbia University Apartheid Divest group, which, among other things, has referred to Hamas's 7 October slaughter of Israelis as a "moral, military, and political victory".

As the "public face" of such a hateful outfit, Khalil fully deserves to be chucked out of America, said Josh Hammer in the Los Angeles Times. "The day the US loses the ability to deport non-citizens who espouse such toxic beliefs is the day the US ceases to be a sovereign nation-state."

I'm not going to defend Khalil's views, said Mona Charen in The Bulwark, but since when did we detain and expel people for saying things we find objectionable? America is supposed to be a nation that values law and due process. Immigration law specifies that aliens can't be deported for opinions or actions that "would be lawful within the US", unless the secretary of state determines that their continued presence "would compromise a compelling US foreign policy interest". No evidence has been presented that Khalil presents such a threat.

"Taking a law-abiding legal permanent resident into custody for speech crimes is un-American", and a clear violation of the First Amendment. If Khalil can be deprived of his basic rights in this way, then nobody's rights are secure. With luck, the bid to deport Khalil may fail in the courts, said Alex Shephard in The New Republic. But it has already helped advance Trump's wider mission – to "create an environment where anyone who holds an opinion that is deemed threatening or simply contrary to the administration and its allies is terrified of speaking out".

Smacking children is a "Victorian-era punishment" that "undoubtedly harms children's health" and must be banned, leading paediatricians have said.

The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health is urging the government to adopt an amendment to its Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill so that parents throughout the UK are no longer allowed to hit their child.

Scotland and Wales are among the 67 countries which have made smacking illegal, in 2020 and 2022 respectively. But in England and Northern Ireland, smacking your child is not illegal if it is a "reasonable" punishment and doesn't cause injuries, such as bruising.

What did the commentators say?

The murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif by her father and stepmother, who had subjected her to multiple beatings, had already renewed debates about corporal punishment, and smacking in particular.

When the Sharif trial began last October, Rachel de Souza, the children's commissioner for England, made "her strongest intervention yet on child safety", said The Guardian. She called for a ban on smacking in Scotland and Wales to be extended to England, as a "necessary step" that could "stop lower-level violence from escalating" in such horrific ways.

It's a topic that divides opinions: 52% of UK adults think it should be legal for parents to smack their children as a form of "reasonable chastisement", as long as it doesn't cause injury, according to a YouGov poll in January. But the percentage of adults who think this has fallen from 63% since 2019.

Among those who remain unconvinced that the government should be given more power to intervene in parenting choices, is Darren Lewis, assistant editor of The Mirror. I am "not a smacking fan", he said, but "a deeper discussion is needed". The health professionals who "arbitrarily" want to enforce a ban often "live in a completely different world, economically and socially, to the mums and dads navigating the trials and tribulations of parenthood".

What next?

The government has said it is "looking closely" at the impact of the changes to the smacking laws in Scotland and Wales, but it has "no plans to legislate on smacking at this stage", said the BBC.

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which has just completed its committee state in Parliament, represents "the single biggest piece of child protection legislation in a generation", a government spokesperson said.

Late one night in August 1999, Norfolk farmer Tony Martin heard the sound of a break-in at his dilapidated home, where he lived alone. According to his version of events, he grabbed an illegal pump action shotgun that he kept under his bed, and fired it into the darkness as he went down the stairs, said The Times. The body of 16-year-old Fred Barras would be found in nearby undergrowth the next day. Shot in the back, he had bled to death. Barras's accomplice, Brendan Fearon, was wounded, but managed to get away and raise the alert.

Barras and Fearon, both habitual thieves, had driven 70 miles from Nottinghamshire to rob the aptly named Bleak House, where Martin stored antiques; they were armed with a baseball bat and a chisel. But if Martin was acting in self-defence, as he claimed, police wondered why he had not fired a warning shot; and also why, having shot three times at the burglars, he had gone out in his car looking for them instead of dialling 999. Within days, he had been charged with murder. Many locals, however, sided with the farmer; they said there had been a rash of burglaries, and argued that, if the police couldn't protect them, householders must be free to defend themselves in their own homes.

His case became a cause célèbre. At his trial, jurors visited Bleak House – which was so overgrown with ivy and hogweed it could hardly be seen. Martin turned up to court each day with a teddy bear. He said he had been burgled multiple times before; police said he seemed not to have reported these crimes. The trial heard that he hated "gypsies" (Barras was from a Traveller family); and forensic evidence suggested that Martin had fired at least two of the shots not from the stairs, but from the ground floor. Prosecutors argued that he had anticipated the burglary and had been lying in wait, said The Daily Telegraph.

Unconvinced that he'd used only "reasonable force" to defend himself, the jury convicted him of murder in 2000. The following year, his sentence was reduced to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility, for which he served three years. His story, it turned out, was not that of a "folk hero", but of an unstable, isolated man whose depression and paranoid personality disorder had gone undiagnosed.

Tony Martin was born into a well-off Norfolk family in 1944, and was privately educated; but he had no talent for school work and, aged 17, he left school and went travelling. He worked as a steward on cruise ships before moving on to North Sea oil rigs. He finally came home in the 1970s to run the family pig farm, and later inherited Bleak House from an aunt. Over time, the farming got too much for him, however, and in the 1990s he became increasingly paranoid about intruders in particular. He'd boarded up his windows, acquired his gun and three rottweilers, and slept in his boots and his work clothes. Following his release from prison in 2003, he expressed support for the far-right BNP.

Karim Khan, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, has been barred from entering the US, becoming the first person to be hit by Donald Trump's sanctions against the beleaguered tribunal.

The US president has accused the ICC – formed in 2002 to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in member states – of abusing its power and threatening national security by taking "illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America and our close ally Israel".

An executive order signed by Trump last week imposed sanctions on designated ICC personnel that included freezing their US assets and barring them and their families from entering the US.

In December, ICC President Tomoko Akane warned that such measures "would rapidly undermine the court's operations in all situations and cases and jeopardise its very existence", said The i Paper.

What did the commentators say?

Trump's "vicious assault" on the Netherlands-based ICC is "no surprise", said The Guardian, but "goes even further" than sanctions imposed in his first term, "attacking the fundamentals of the court and endangering its functioning".

The EU has stated the US sanctions represent a "serious challenge" to the work of the ICC, which is currently investigating alleged crimes in 12 ongoing situations, including Darfur, Ukraine, Venezuela, Afghanistan and Myanmar.

The US – along with China, India, Russia and Israel – has never been part of the ICC but in recent years even its members have increasingly ignored its rulings amid a fracturing of the post-Cold War international rules-based consensus. Last year, Mongolia failed to execute an international arrest warrant against Russia's President Vladimir Putin after he landed in the country for an official visit, citing the country's energy dependence on its powerful neighbour.

While it has issued 33 unsealed arrest warrants – ranging from Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Putin to Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony – the court is "currently without a single trial ahead for the first time since it arrested its first suspect in 2006", said Time.

If nothing else, this shows how international humanitarian law "needs instruments that better reflect the nature of contemporary conflict, institutions which can apply them dispassionately, and the acquiescence of sovereign states to their jurisdiction", said Stephen Daisley in The Spectator.

To this end, "it is possible to be a liberal internationalist, concerned with the humanitarian dimension of conflict, and to welcome Donald Trump's intervention".

What next?

Banning Khan, a British citizen who was designated by Washington on Friday, "will be seen as retaliation" for the ICC issuing an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, said The Times.

But Human Rights Watch (HRW) has warned Trump's executive order appears "designed not only to intimidate court officials and staff involved in the court's critical investigations, but also to chill broader cooperation with the ICC".

The BBC reported the court's "technical and IT operations – including evidence gathering – could also be affected", while "observers have voiced fears that victims of alleged atrocities may hesitate to testify".

US sanctions could have a particularly "chilling effect" on banks and companies outside the US that do business with the court, HRW said.

One way to safeguard against this would be through an EU Blocking Statute, "regulation that aims to protect companies and individuals from the bloc from the effects of extra-territorial sanctions imposed by third countries", said Middle East Eye.

The ICC, which has received the backing of dozens of member states in recent days, could go further and charge Trump and other US officials behind the sanctions with obstruction of justice. This would mean the US president and senior members of his administration would not be able to travel to ICC member states, including most European countries.

With the process of bringing war criminals to justice being "slow, painful and often unsuccessful at the best of times", many have long "wondered how effective the ICC can really be", said The Guardian.

Trump's sanctions are a "perverse recognition of the importance of the court, and of international law more generally".

Police surveillance operations targeting political activists over a period of at least 40 years using highly questionable tactics are now the subject of a public inquiry, the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI).

Some 139 police officers from at least two units – the National Public Order Intelligence Unit and the Metropolitan Police's Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) – were given fake identities infiltrate more than 1,000 predominantly left-wing political groups, from 1968 on.

Some lived with, and even had sexual relationships with, members of the groups they had infiltrated. Four undercover officers are known (or alleged) to have fathered children while living under aliases.

Why was the SDS formed?

To gather intelligence about anti-Vietnam War protests. In the late 1960s there were violent clashes between police and protesters; on one occasion, in 1968, protesters had almost gained entry to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. Plans for further campaigns by hard-left activists had sparked concern at the highest levels of government.

The only way to gather intelligence on these demonstrations, the police concluded, was to attend preparatory meetings undercover, posing as supporters of the protests. In the event, subsequent protests passed relatively peacefully. But in the following decades, undercover officers infiltrated political groups ranging from the Socialist Workers Party to hunt saboteurs and animal rights groups, to anti-racist activists. Few were planning to commit serious crimes.

How did they infiltrate these groups?

Officers adopted fake identities – including those of about 80 dead children – and were issued with fake passports. They fabricated cover stories and immersed themselves in the groups, claiming to be sympathetic to their causes. Some moved into shared houses, living side-by-side with their targets.

Tactics varied according to the group they were targeting, but some of the methods used can be found in a 1995 "Tradecraft Manual", which was written by former undercover officer Andy Coles (brother of the broadcaster and priest Richard Coles). It suggests techniques for blending in with activists, whom it refers to disdainfully as "wearies": that officers should grow their hair long and wear "big sloppy jumpers", for instance.

"Being a little untidy, smelly and rumpled is a natural state for many of [them]", it states, adding that "the smell of fresh clothing from the suburban washing line" could arouse suspicion. The manual suggests that officers should "try to avoid" sexual relationships, and gives detailed instructions about how to go about adopting a dead child's identity.

How was all this exposed?

Initially, through a chance discovery during a holiday in Italy. Lisa Jones (a pseudonym) found a passport belonging to her boyfriend of six years, who went by the name Mark Stone. Inside it, she saw her boyfriend's photo beside a stranger's name: Mark Kennedy. She discovered that Mark wasn't the environmental activist he had been posing as for seven years, but an undercover police officer with two children.

The discovery set in motion a chain of events that led to the collapse of a major trial of environmental activists accused of conspiring to break into a power station; and to further revelations about such relationships. In 2015, the then-home secretary, Theresa May, ordered a public inquiry, following revelations that Scotland Yard had infiltrated the family of murdered teenager Stephen Lawrence.

What has the inquiry revealed?

The UCPI is one of the most complicated, often-delayed and expensive public inquiries in British legal history. Chaired by Sir John Mitting, it finally got under way in 2020. Three years later, it published an interim report, covering the period from 1968 to 1982, that was highly critical of the police. Mitting said that undercover operations to infiltrate left-wing groups, though carried out with government approval, were unjustified, and should have been rapidly shut down.

The report found that police infiltration was legally justified on grounds of public safety in the case of only three groups – (Provisional) Sinn Féin and two unidentified organisations – out of hundreds targeted. It also revealed the human costs of the undercover operations.

What sort of human costs?

Officers collected a "striking" and "extensive" amount of information about the personal lives of political activists, ranging from their body size and holiday plans to their bank details. Police targeted trade unionists, some of whom suffered years of unemployment as a result.

And at least six undercover officers had sexual relationships with women while on deployment between 1968 and 1982. Since then, the inquiry has heard evidence covering the 1980s and 1990s, including testimony from multiple further women who said they had been deceived into relationships with officers. It has also heard claims that crimes were committed or incited by serving undercover officers.

Is this still going on?

The police have sought to paint the scandal as largely historical: barristers acting for the Met Police apologised for the "indefensible" use of undercover officers to infiltrate political groups in the past.

Police guidelines have been rewritten to ensure that undercover officers stay within the law: intrusion must be proportionate to the perceived crime or harm; it is "never acceptable" to have sexual relationships while undercover. Since 2016 there has been an oversight body. But when Mitting asked, in 2020, whether police are still infiltrating political groups, he received no answer. He made clear that he expects the questions to be answered before the inquiry ends; it is expected to report by late 2026.

Observers have called for Lucy Letby to be released on bail after a panel of medical experts working with her defence team said they believe she did not commit the murders.

Letby, who is serving 15 whole life sentences for murdering seven babies and attempting to murder seven others, has lost two bids to appeal against her convictions, but the report offers her fresh hope in her quest to clear her name.

Who are the experts?

The 14 senior clinicians were gathered from around the world, and they include British doctor Neena Modi, a former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health.

The panel was assembled by Dr Shoo Lee, a retired doctor based at the University of Toronto, who heads the Canadian Neonatal Foundation.

What did they say?

Dr Lee said there were alternative explanations for each of Letby's convictions for murder or attempted murder, after the panel found that "in all cases death or injury were due to natural causes or just bad medical care".

For instance, he said infection killed Baby Seven, chronic lung disease complicated by antibiotic-resistant bacteria caused the death of Baby Nine, and traumatic delivery led to the death of Baby 15.

He accused the Countess of Chester Hospital of a "litany of failures", said Sky News, including "unsafe delays in diagnosis and treatment, poor skills in resuscitation and incubation, and the misdiagnosis of diseases".

He called into question the evidence of Dr Dewi Evans, who was the prosecution's lead medical witness, but Dr Evans has insisted that criticism of his evidence is "unsubstantiated".

The panel also questioned the prosecution's claim that Letby injected air into babies' bloodstreams, causing an air embolism that blocked the blood supply. Dr Lee said this claim has "no basis in evidence".

What does this mean for Letby?

The panel's findings have been sent to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which investigates alleged miscarriages of justice. The commission said yesterday that it's formally examining the case.

A barrister close to the case told The Guardian the report was so "game-changing" that Letby could be released on bail if the "court of appeal believed there was a real possibility of her convictions being quashed".

But such a development would be at least 12 months away and would be "strongly opposed" by the Crown Prosecution Service, added the broadsheet.

What did the families say?

A mother whose baby son Letby was convicted of trying to murder criticised the panel's "upsetting" and "disrespectful" report. "They said the parents want to know the truth, but we've had the truth", she told the Daily Mail, adding that "we believe the jury made the right decision".

Dr Lee said the report was intended to give the relatives "comfort and assurance in knowing the truth about what really happened".

One of Donald Trump's first acts as the 47th president of the United States was to signal an end to "birthright citizenship".

As part of a "sweeping crackdown" on both undocumented and legal immigrants, Trump signed an executive order to end the right to citizenship for some children born in the US, said The Guardian, but implementing his plan will not be straightforward.

What is birthright citizenship?

Birthright citizenship, also known by the legal term jus soli – "right of the soil" in Latin – is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, which rules that all persons born in the US and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" are citizens.

The 14th Amendment is already understood to exclude children born to invading armies or foreign diplomats, who are considered to be subject to the jurisdiction of their home country. But a minority of constitutional scholars argue that unauthorised immigrants or those on temporary visas should not be considered as subject to the jurisdiction of the US, either. Such a reading "conflicts with the clear text and a legal interpretation more than a century old", said CNN, but it has nonetheless gained ground in some conservative circles.

Trump has argued that birthright citizenship is a "magnet for illegal immigration", said Newsweek, and he believes that denying citizenship to children born to parents without legal status would deter unauthorised migration and enhance national security.

What does Trump want to do?

Trump's executive order wants children born in the US but without at least one parent who is a lawful permanent resident or US citizen to be no longer automatically handed US citizenship.

Federal agencies would be banned from issuing or recognising documentation proving US citizenship for such children, and his executive order targets children born to both unauthorised immigrants and people legally in the US on temporary visas. The order does not suggest that the new restrictions would apply retrospectively.

Will he succeed?

The president can "probably not" actually end birthright citizenship, said The Guardian. As a constitutional amendment, removing or changing it would require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress. And Trump could face "significant legal hurdles", said the BBC, because 18 states, along with the city of San Francisco and the District of Columbia, have already sued the federal government and challenged the executive order.

Ultimately, the question is likely to go to the Supreme Court. The highest court of the land has not made any ruling connected to the 14th Amendment since 1898, but "a new conservative supermajority has given Trump supporters hope", said CNN.

A pregnant woman living in Massachusetts with temporary protected status is the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit against Trump, accusing him of mounting a "flagrantly illegal" attempt to "strip citizenship" from millions of Americans "with a stroke of a pen", said The Independent.

How many people would it affect?

By 2022, the latest year for which data is available, there were 1.2 million US citizens born to unauthorised immigrant parents, according to the Pew Research Centre, but "as those children also have children", the "cumulative effect" of ending birthright citizenship would increase the number of unauthorised immigrants in the country to 4.7 million in 2050, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

"Move over, XL bullies," said The Times, there's a "new status dog" in town, and this breed currently has no restrictions.

Cane corsos – a powerful breed that can weigh up to eight stone (50kg) – are reportedly becoming more popular in the UK. The increase in their number has been linked to the recent ban on the XL bully breed, which came into force in February of last year, after a spate of attacks.

What is a cane corso?

The cane corso is said to be "descended from the Molossian war dogs of ancient Rome", said ITV News. Traditionally, the Italian mastiff was used as a guard dog and is recognisable for its imposing muscular appearance and strength.

As the breed is "highly territorial", said Pets4Homes, cane corso owners have a "great responsibility" to make sure their dog is kept under control, and to "keep people who come to their home safe".

Consequently, the dog is seen as unsuitable for "an inexperienced or first-time dog owner".

What are the concerns about the cane corso?

Canine behaviour specialist Rob Alleyne warned that the breed is "like an XL bully on steroids", said The Times. He described them as a "killing machine".

"Alarmingly", sales of many cane corsos across the UK are "linked to Romania", said The Sun, a country with a dubious record on animal welfare. In countries such as Romania and Serbia, dogs often undergo procedures to have their "ears cropped and tails docked", a practice that is illegal in Britain and which experts believe can "create severe behavioural problems".

Meanwhile, the breed is being "popularised by celebrities", said the Daily Mail. With figures such as footballer Marcus Rashford, actor Vin Diesel and reality TV contestant Jack Fincham showing off their dogs on social media, the cane corso has "come more into fashion".

What are the restrictions on dogs in the UK?

Currently, there are "over 20 pieces of legislation" that apply to dog ownership in the UK, said Blue Cross, with specific rules on what types of dog are considered dangerous, and therefore banned.

The five banned types of dog in the UK are the XL bully, pit bull terrier, Japanese tosa, dogo Argentino and fila Braziliero. However, they are defined by "what they look like, not by the dog's breed, the dog's parents' breeds, DNA testing or behaviour".

The cane corso is not currently subject to restrictions in the UK, so can be unmuzzled in public and owners do not need exemption certificates.

Once the XL bully was banned, it was "inevitable" attention would shift on to "another large, powerful breed", Samantha Gaines, RSPCA dog welfare expert, told ITV News.

The breed is also fairly accessible, sold "for as little as £75", while puppies are more expensive, at between £600 and £1,600, but with "more than 200 posts advertising litters" on the Pets4Homes website, The Times added.

A government spokesperson said they were working "at pace to explore measures to reduce dog attacks and promote responsible dog ownership across all breeds of dog".

An influencer has filed a US lawsuit, claiming that a rival social-media star has been copying her neutral "vibe".

Sydney Nicole Gifford and Alyssa Sheil are fighting a vicious battle of the beige, and other influencers are "watching closely", said The Independent, because their own incomes are also "tied up with the image they 'sell' online".

'Mental anguish'

Gifford, 24, who has 900,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram, met Sheil, 21 (440,00 followers on the same two channels) in Austin, Texas, in 2022, and they agreed to team up – or "collab" – on some content, said the Daily Mail. But, in early 2023, after a dispute over a photo shoot, Sheil blocked Gifford, and then Gifford's followers began to tell her that Sheil's content looked the same as hers.

In a legal complaint filed earlier this year, Gifford accused Sheil of duplicating her "neutral, beige and cream aesthetics" and mimicking everything from her Amazon product recommendations to her poses, outfits, tattoos, "and even her manner of speaking", said The Independent.

Or, to put it in influencer-speak, she accused Sheil of copying her "vibe": a "clean girl" aesthetic, based on a "minimalist wardrobe, organised lifestyle and neutrals galore", said the Daily Mail.

Gifford claims this alleged mimicry has cut into her influencer earnings and that she's owed as much as $150,000 (£117,000) in damages "for mental anguish and lost sales commission from Amazon", said The Independent.

She told US news site The Verge that she hopes her legal action will make all influencers "more mindful", adding that there are "so many instances of other creators" getting their content "completely replicated by people".

But an emotional Sheil, speaking to the same news site, said there are "hundreds of people with the exact same aesthetic", and what Gifford is doing was "coming across very gatekeep-y".

'Owning' the vibe

Experts are divided over how likely it is that Gifford's legal case will succeed. Her "kitchen-sink intellectual property complaint" could hold up in court, Jeanne Fromer, a professor of intellectual property law at New York University, told the The New York Times.

But it's open to question whether Sheil "carefully imitated" Gifford's content as a way to "siphon off some of her sales" or not, said The Verge, and the answer is probably impossible to prove without "combing through" Sheil's browsing history on TikTok, Instagram and Amazon.

The "clean girl aesthetic" is very popular on social media, so it’s "possible to argue" that it's "sheer coincidence" that the two influencers' content is so similar, said The Independent. And, even if it were established that their posts are "too similar for legal comfort", it's still unclear whether US copyright law has actually been breached.

Similar court cases have had "surprising outcomes" in the past, said The New York Times, with courts ruling different ways for different cases. There doesn't seem to be a test for copyright infringement that is "mathematically precise in any way", said Professor Fromer.

The case may not even make it to court, of course. "I suspect there will be discussions," Rose Leda Ehler, of the Los Angeles law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson, told the paper, and the two women will "probably figure out or resolve the matter" without a hearing.

But the case still poses an important question for the influencer industry, said The Independent: "what happens when another photogenic, algorithm-friendly aesthetic comes along" and, "when it does, who will own" the vibe?

Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in court on Tuesday to testify in a corruption trial that could see him imprisoned for up to a decade if he's found guilty.

The long-running legal troubles of Israel's prime minister "bitterly divided Israelis and shook Israeli politics through five rounds of elections" – even before the 7 October attack by Hamas, and the regional turmoil it sparked, "swept Netanyahu's trial off the agenda", said Reuters.

Now he has the dubious honour of becoming "the first sitting prime minister of Israel" to testify "in a criminal court", a "low point in the career of a man who has dominated his nation's politics for three decades", said The Times.

What is Netanyahu accused of?

Netanyahu was first indicted in 2019 on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. His trial, which began in 2020, involves three separate criminal charges.

Case 1000 centres on charges alleging that Netanyahu and his wife wrongfully received almost 700,000 shekels (£150,000) in gifts – including champagne and cigars – from Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and Australian businessman James Packer.

Case 2000 involves allegations that Netanyahu negotiated a deal, with the owner of Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, for better coverage in return for legislation to slow the growth of a rival newspaper.

Case 4000 brings charges alleging that Netanyahu granted regulatory favours, worth around 1.8 billion shekels (£395 million), to Bezeq Telecom Israel in exchange for positive coverage of himself and his wife Sara.

Netanyahu denies all charges and has pleaded not guilty in each case.

He has already been cleared in Case 3000, which centred on charges concerning the government's procurement of German-made submarines.

What has Netanyahu said about the trial?

Netanyahu has denounced the charges as an "ocean of absurdity", said The Times.

"I took criticism and attacks, insults, libel and lies, in a scope that very few people, and no one in Israel has ever faced," the Israeli PM said in court.

The trial is "at the heart of a deep political rift among Israelis about Netanyahu's character, and has led to half a decade of political instability", said The New York Times.

Netanyahu's supporters blame a "liberal deep state" that's "trying to oust him by judicial means, after failing to do so at the ballot box". His opponents, meanwhile, accuse him of "prolonging both the war and the trial to keep himself in power and out of jail".

The defence team has repeatedly sought to postpone proceedings since the trial began, nearly five years ago, citing Israel's precarious defence situation since the 7 October Hamas attacks. This week, however, judges rejected renewed calls to delay Netanyahu's testimony, following the fall of the Assad regime in Syria.

In 2022, in what some believe was a move directly linked to the trial, Netanyahu's far-right government "sought to curb the power of the court". This "sparked mass protests in Israel, and fears among Western allies for the country's democratic health", said Reuters.

Netanyahu "largely abandoned" this plan after war broke out, but he recently "revived some anti-judiciary rhetoric", as the date of his testimony approached.

"The Bibi Files", a new documentary, directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Alex Gibney, that looks into the charges against the Israeli PM "exposes not only Netanyahu's tangled web of media, politics and money, but also a devastating connection between the drive for political survival and a willingness to jeopardise the country's population and dismantle its institutions", said the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

What happens if Netanyahu's found guilty?

Netanyahu’s testimony is expected to continue, on and off, for several weeks.

The charges carry a maximum sentence of ten years' imprisonment, but Israel's legal system is "notoriously sluggish" and "a verdict is not expected until 2026 at least", said The Associated Press.

While opponents have called for Netanyahu to stand down, under Israeli law, a prime minister "is under no obligation" to do so "unless convicted". And, even then, "they could keep their office throughout an appeals process", said Reuters.

At the height of the first Covid lockdown in April 2020, an elderly war veteran set himself the target of walking 100 laps of his daughter's garden before his 100th birthday. Captain Tom Moore's determination and spirit touched the nation's heart, and he raised an unprecedented £38 million for NHS charities.

When he died just nine months later, his daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore and her husband vowed to carry on his good work, via a charitable foundation set up in his name. But whereas Captain Tom is remembered as a national hero, said Marianka Swain in The Daily Telegraph, the Ingram-Moores are now in danger of being regarded as a national disgrace. The Charity Commission began investigating their activities in 2022. Last week, its report was published, and it makes for depressing reading. The report says the couple repeatedly benefitted from The Captain Tom Foundation by blurring the distinction between its interests and theirs, said Jan Moir in the Daily Mail.

For instance, people who bought Captain Tom's memoir were led to believe that it was in support of good causes. And its publisher did offer to pay a slice of the £1.46m advance for the three-book deal to charity. But the couple declined and all the money was paid to Club Nook, a firm they had set up in April 2020 to manage Captain Tom's intellectual property. Hannah Ingram-Moore took an £18,000 fee to present an award on the Foundation's behalf, on top of the £85,000pa salary she was paid to run it. The charity's website was used to promote merchandise that was being sold by another company controlled by the Ingram-Moores; and then there was the building in the couple's garden. They let council planners believe it would be used by the Foundation, but it turned out to be a £200,000 spa for them.

It's sad that this affair should risk tarnishing Captain Tom's legacy; but what worries me is its impact on the charitable sector, said J.J. Anisiobi in Metro. Charities are already battling growing scepticism about how donations are spent. Scandals like this further erode vital public trust. The Ingram-Moores say the report is unfair; but they have a way out. To restore their reputation, and public faith in the sector, they could just donate the money they made to the charity

Essex Police has defended its decision to investigate The Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson for potentially inciting racial hatred online with a post on X.

The offending post seems to have become public knowledge after The Guardian was contacted anonymously by the person behind the complaint. It was a re-post of a photo of supporters of a Pakistani political party, posing with two Greater Manchester Police officers, said the paper. Pearson had called the supporters "Jew haters", apparently confusing them for pro-Hamas activists. The post was deleted soon after it was posted.

The row has sparked outrage from leading figures on the right. Boris Johnson used his Daily Mail column to call the police involvement "redolent of the Soviet Union at its worst". And the new Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, called for hate crime laws to be reviewed to protect free speech, said The Telegraph.

All this follows a summer in which hate speech laws were repeatedly in the spotlight, following the heavy sentences handed out to people convicted of inciting violence online in relation to the Southport riots.

What does the law say about posting on social media?

In the UK, online communication and activity is subject to a range of restrictions in law. These include the Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, both of which criminalise "indecent or grossly offensive" messages and threats; the Public Order Act 1986, which deals with offences of stirring up hatred on the grounds of race, religion or sexual discrimination, and the Terrorism Act 2006, which criminalises the publication and dissemination of material that could be seen as encouraging acts of terrorism.

Can you be arrested for 'offensive' social media posts?

For an offence to be committed under the Public Order Act 1986, the language must be "threatening, abusive or insulting" and "intended to or likely in all the circumstances to stir up hatred". Journalists can "fall foul of the act when reporting on extreme political statements", said Press Gazette.

Crown Prosecution Service guidelines state that the presence of prejudice or hatred towards a protected group "may sometimes elevate a communication that would otherwise not meet the high threshold" for "grossly offensive" content. However, the guidelines stress that any prosecutions must be in the public interest, and that "particular care must be taken where a criminal sanction is contemplated for the way in which a person has expressed themselves on social media".

What is a 'non-hate crime incident'?

Pearson has said she first thought her post was being investigated as a non-hate crime incident. This is an incident "motivated by hostility or prejudice towards people with a particular characteristic" but which does not "meet the threshold of a criminal offence", said The Guardian.

Non-hate crime incidents do not involve arrests or prosecutions, but are recorded as a form of information gathering, to help police build a broader picture of tensions and identify potential for escalation to criminal offences.

National Police Chiefs' Council chair Gavin Stephens defended the practice as "really important" at a recent policing conference, said the Wolverhampton Press & Star. Citing the role of social media in racially-fuelled riots, he said that "one of the things we're really clear on" is that "we do not to miss precursors to violence because we know the consequences can be severe".

What about free speech?

The difference between free speech and hate speech is a "complex area", said Stop Hate UK.

When it comes to online hate, "in order to strike a balance with freedom of speech, there is a high threshold for evidence to prosecute grossly offensive, obscene or malicious communications".

But there has been much debate about whether the current law goes far enough. The new Online Safety Act, due to come into force next year, introduces measures to regulate content and protect individuals online – including the requirement for social media platforms to remove "harmful content" and take action against online abuse and misinformation.

The act is being viewed by leaders as a "silver bullet to curb the threat of future violence", said the Christian Science Monitor. But it has already been "strongly criticised by all sides", with human-rights groups repeatedly warning that it threatens user privacy and harms free speech, while others, such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, "believe the law does not go far enough". The government is "forced to walk a difficult tightrope", said the international news site.

What are the penalties for going too far?

In response to the August riots, the CPS shared a video on X warning people to "think before you post", as the legal system "will prosecute when the legal test is met".

Indeed, a 53-year-old woman has already been sentenced to 15 months in jail for sending a communication threatening death or serious harm, after she posted on her local community's Facebook group: "Don't protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with adults in it."

But "prosecution is not the only concern", said Banner Jones solicitors. Employees in the UK "can face disciplinary action or even be dismissed from their job if they post inappropriate content on social media". Many companies now have a social-media policy and "any comments that damage the brand's reputation, including comments about customers or the business, could be grounds for dismissal".

Assisted dying is a broad term, which encompasses both assisted suicide and euthanasia. Assisted suicide is facilitated by another person, usually a physician providing a lethal medication so that a terminally ill person can end their own life (though it can also encompass helping a person to travel to another jurisdiction to die there). Euthanasia is the act of a medical professional actually administering drugs in order to end a person's life.

What is the law in the UK?

In the UK, both assisted suicide and euthanasia are illegal. In England and Wales, euthanasia is considered murder or manslaughter, and "encouraging or assisting" a suicide is illegal under the Suicide Act 1961. The CPS uses complex charging guidelines that mean people will mostly not be charged under the Suicide Act if they are motivated by compassion, and if the person they assisted had made a "clear decision" to die; but some prosecutions still occasionally occur. (The law in Scotland is broadly comparable.) Withdrawing or withholding care, or using strong sedatives that advance death, are regarded as legally distinct, if ending life is not the main aim.

Where is assisted dying currently legal?

It is legal, to some extent, in 11 nations, as well as in 11 US states and all but one of Australia's jurisdictions. The first country to legalise assisted dying was Switzerland, which made assisted suicide legal in 1937 on the proviso that those assisting do not have a "selfish" motive. No other jurisdiction followed suit until 1997, when the US state of Oregon passed a law legalising physician-assisted suicide in limited circumstances. In 2002, the Netherlands legalised both assisted suicide and, in a world first, euthanasia.

Since then, more jurisdictions have followed: besides the above, assisted dying is now legal in countries including Austria, Belgium, Canada, Colombia, Ecuador, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain; in total, at least 200 million people have access to it. As well as in the UK and Jersey, parliaments in France and the Isle of Man are considering such laws.

How do the regimes differ?

Mainly, in two respects: whether they allow euthanasia, or just assisted suicide; and how tightly drawn are the conditions in which they are permitted. Among the strictest is Oregon. There, a person seeking the right to die must be over 18, terminally ill and likely to live for less than six months; he or she must also be capable not just of making decisions, but of administering lethal drugs prescribed by a doctor.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Netherlands, where both assisted suicide and euthanasia are legal, if the patient is either terminally ill or enduring "unbearable suffering" without prospect of relief, including from mental illness; anyone over 12 can request it, though parental consent is required for minors under 16. Belgium has a similar law.

How widely used are these laws?

It depends on how liberal they are. In Oregon, in 2023, 560 people, mostly cancer patients, received prescriptions under the Death with Dignity Act; a reported 367 died from the drugs prescribed – about 0.8% of total deaths in the state. In California, which has similar laws, the rate was even lower (about 0.3%). By contrast, in the Netherlands, assisted dying accounted for 9,068 deaths in 2023 – around 5.4% of total deaths. Canada, meanwhile, has gained a reputation as the "world capital" of assisted dying, and is seen by many as a cautionary case. In 2022, the last year for which full figures are available, there were 13,241 "medical assistance in dying" (Maid) deaths, 4.1% of the total.

Why is Canada regarded as a cautionary case?

It's a classic instance of the "slippery slope". When Canada's first euthanasia bill, limited to those with terminal illness, was passed in 2016, ministers predicted "perhaps 100" deaths a year. Since then it has been extended to physical illness and disability which "cannot be relieved"; and deaths have risen to a level more than 100 times that predicted. In a 2022 survey, most of those ending their lives under Maid cited the "loss of ability to engage in meaningful life activities" as their reason; but more than a third said their decision was, in part, informed by a sense that they were a burden on family, friends or caregivers; 17% cited "isolation or loneliness". In some high-profile cases, people with disabilities have been reportedly pushed towards suicide; euthanasia has arguably been used in the place of a social safety net. One woman was offered Maid instead of an access ramp for her wheelchair.

What do defenders of the Canadian system say?

Advocates of the right to die view the increase in uptake in Canada as evidence of a system working as it should, effectively meeting demand; and they note that in the 2022 survey, 96.5% of people choosing to die faced terminal illnesses or imminent death. Only 463 chose to die because of a chronic condition, in a nation of 40 million. Banning euthanasia, advocates argue, prevents those who are physically unable to end their own lives from doing so.

How might the law change here?

On 29 November, a private members' bill put forward by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater will be debated by MPs. Full details of the bill have not yet been published, but it is expected to be similar to one proposed in the House of Lords earlier this year, which cleaved to the Oregon model: terminally ill adults with six months or less to live would be able to get medical help to end their lives. The last time MPs debated such a bill, in 2015, they voted against it by 330 to 118. It seems likely that there is a majority in favour today, though private members' bills are vulnerable to derailment. And it would certainly be controversial: Oregon's laws, though less contentious than Canada's, are still much criticised.

Keir Starmer has announced a review into how fatal police shootings are investigated after a police officer was cleared of murdering an unarmed man during a police stop in south London two years ago.

Sergeant Martyn Blake, 40, shot Chris Kaba, 24, in the head during a "hard stop" in Streatham Hill in September 2022. Kaba was driving an Audi Q8 "linked to a non-fatal shooting in Brixton the previous night", said The Times. Blake denied intending to kill Kaba, who was not carrying a firearm, and told the trial he believed that one of his colleagues could be killed by Kaba's car as he tried to flee.

Reacting to the verdict, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley said no police officer was above the law but expressed concern over "the lack of support officers face for doing their best".

How many UK police officers carry firearms?

In Britain, firearms are issued only to specially trained personnel within the police, known as Authorised Firearms Officers (AFOs). The rules are different in Northern Ireland, where all police officers are authorised to carry firearms.

In England and Wales, only about 4% of police are armed, amounting to 6,473 officers as of 31 March 2024.

According to the Metropolitan Police, an authorised firearms officer's duties typically include: responding to high-risk incidents and assisting in proactive policing operations where firearms support may be required, as well as providing "public reassurance" at events.

How common are police shootings in the UK?

Fatal police shootings are rare. In 2022/23, three people were fatally shot by police in England and Wales. Since 1990, police in England and Wales have shot and killed 83 people, according to Inquest, an independent organisation that monitors and records fatal police shootings.

When are police allowed to open fire? 

Under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, officers have the right to use "reasonable force" when necessary. More generally, police officers share the right to self-defence or the protection of others upheld by common law and Article 2 of the European Convention of Human Rights.

More specifically, the Police Conduct Regulations 2020 for England and Wales state that officers should only discharge firearms to "prevent a real and immediate threat to life". The guidance is to aim for a target's torso, when possible, but if it is "imperative the subject is immediately incapacitated", officers are allowed to aim for the person's head. In all circumstances, officers must not use excessive violence and must ensure medical aid is provided as soon as possible.

Police shootings are investigated by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, an independent watchdog. But officers can also face prosecution in the courtroom.

How are police shootings handled in court?

Under English law, police "theoretically have no greater protections than the ordinary subject when using force," said The Guardian; it must be proportionate, reasonable, and based on an honestly held belief of necessity. But the "received wisdom" is that juries are often "reluctant to convict cops 'standing up' for themselves".

No police officer in England and Wales has ever been convicted of murder after a shooting, although there have been a small number of criminal prosecutions.

Police officers can also be prosecuted under civil law. However, many officers want the burden of proof to be the criminal test: what the officer honestly believed as chose to act, rather than the lower burden of proof used in civil court, said BBC legal correspondent Dominic Casciani. Police chiefs argue that using the criminal burden of proof only would "end confusion".

Concerns about press freedom in Afghanistan are growing after the Taliban vowed to impose a law banning news media from publishing images of all living things.

State media outlets in the provinces of Kandahar, Takhar and Maidan Wardak have been advised "not to air or show images of anything with a soul – meaning people and animals", said Arab News, months after warnings that the Taliban's severe morality rules were creating a climate of fear.

Climate of fear

After it seized power in 2021, the Taliban set up a ministry for the "propagation of virtue and the prevention of vice". A 114-page document, published in the summer, set out morality laws that "cover aspects of everyday life like public transportation, music, shaving and celebrations", said Associated Press.

A UN report said the ministry's role was expanding into other areas of public life, including media monitoring, with controversial news rules for journalists including a ban on putting out any content seen to contradict the Taliban's extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

A spokesperson for the Taliban ministry said the prohibition on publishing images of living things will be introduced gradually because "coercion has no place in the implementation of the law". Efforts have already started to implement the law in the southern Taliban stronghold of Kandahar, the neighbouring Helmand province and northern Takhar, said the spokesperson, but the process "has not started in all provinces".

Dragged into darkness

Even before the new law was announced, Taliban officials in Kandahar were banned from taking photos and videos of living things. "Now it applies to everyone", said the ministry spokesperson. He added that the prohibition is currently "only advice", and the ministry would focus on "convincing people these things are really contrary" to sharia law and "must be avoided”.

Afghan journalists said they have been assured that they would be able to continue their work. One told AFP that the ministry has advised journalists to take photos from further away and film fewer events "to get in the habit".

The news is "sparking concerns about the consequences for Afghan media and press freedom", said ABC News. The rules are "bizarre", said The Independent and "no other Muslim-majority country imposes similar restrictions", including Iran and Saudi Arabia.

It is "dragging Afghanistan into darkness", said Shabnam Nasimi, the former policy advisor to the Minister for Afghan Resttlement, on social media, and remembering how the Taliban banned television between 1996 and 2001, she said it was "shameful that we stand by, watching history repeat itself".

The UK is on the brink of legalising assisted dying, a historic change that would have far-reaching ethical and legal implications.

Labour MP Kim Leadbeater's private members' bill, introduced to the House of Commons today, would permit assisted dying for terminally ill people in England and Wales. At a second reading next month, MPs will be given a free vote, as euthanasia is considered a matter of conscience. When the subject was last considered in 2015, members voted 330 to 118 against legalising assisted dying.

About three-quarters of the British public are in favour of legalising assisted dying, according to the largest survey of opinion on the issue, of over 10,000 people, published by Opinium Research on behalf of Dignity in Dying, a pro-assisted suicide group, in March. But when the perceived "right to die" is sanctioned by the state, it "does not stand alone", said The Times. It becomes "part of a web of other difficult choices and questions, which extend beyond any individual to alter the whole of society".

What is assisted dying and how does it differ from euthanasia?

Assisted dying is a form of euthanasia where a terminally ill person receives "lethal drugs from a medical practitioner, which they administer themselves", said the BBC.

It differs from assisted suicide, which is helping another person end their life (whether they are terminally ill or not). Under English law it is illegal to encourage or assist suicide; similar laws are in place in Northern Ireland. In Scotland, helping someone to die could lead to prosecution for culpable homicide. That includes helping them "travel to another jurisdiction to die".

How would the bill work if it becomes law?

The Choice at the End of Life for Terminally Ill Adults Bill is "expected to have strict eligibility criteria", said The Guardian. These would include confirmation of a patient's mental competence, assessment by two independent doctors and likely a requirement for drugs to be self-administered.

The proposed new law would apply only to patients in England and Wales with a medical prognosis of six months or less to live. Doctors may be able to opt out of participating in assisted dying if they believe it clashes with their religious beliefs, but others may find their roles fundamentally changed.

The Isle of Man currently stands to become the first British territory to legalise assisted dying, for patients who have less than a year to live and who have been a resident on the island for at least five years. The residency requirement is integral, according to Alex Allinson, a GP and politician leading the bill. It would ensure the Isle of Man does not "become a suicide tourism hotspot similar to Switzerland's Dignitas clinic", said The Daily Telegraph. A separate bill is under discussion in Scotland, which would allow adults who have been resident in Scotland for at least a year to seek assistance to end their life.

Why is Canada being cited as a warning?

Canada introduced assisted dying for terminally ill people in 2016, and in 2021 extended legislation to those with an incurable illness or a serious chronic health condition, even if it isn't life-threatening: "a far more nebulous definition", said The New Statesman. By 2027, it may also include those in severe mental distress.

Opponents of the UK's bill have cited Canada's expanding permissiveness as an example of a "slippery slope". There are concerns about the danger of people feeling pressured to end their lives, especially the elderly, vulnerable and poor. About 36% of Canadians who applied for medically assisted death said they believed they were a "burden on family, friends or caregivers", according to a report by Health Canada.

Campaign groups believe that the UK government's focus should be on improving access to proper palliative care to minimise that pressure. "Palliative care is in a desperate state," said The New Statesman. "The hospice sector's finances are the worst they have been in 20 years."

That position is echoed by the health secretary, who said: "I do not think that palliative care, end-of-life care in this country is in a condition yet where we are giving people the freedom to choose, without being coerced by the lack of support available."

This country is on the brink of profound change, said Catherine Pepinster in The Daily Telegraph – "a change to how we view life and death". 

Next week, legislation on assisted dying will be tabled in the Commons by the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater (who topped the ballot to introduce a private members' bill). And it has every chance of passing. 

'Compassion and common sense'

The law ought to pass, said The Independent, but it must include strong safeguards against abuse. It should specify that at least two doctors agree that the patient's medical condition is terminal, and that all reasonable treatment options have been exhausted. And, given the potential financial issues at stake, there must be legal checks that the patient hasn't come under undue pressure from family members. 

But the principle that terminally ill people – "in intolerable pain and suffering, physically and mentally" – should be permitted to choose how and when they die is surely right, "on the grounds of compassion and common sense".

The argument that individuals should have this choice is "powerful, so long as it stands alone", said The Times. However, if the "right to die" is sanctioned by the state, it "does not stand alone: it becomes part of a web of other difficult choices and questions" for society as a whole.

The role of doctors and nurses would be fundamentally changed. Disabled or elderly people might well find themselves under "insidious pressure" to end their lives rather than become a "burden" on family or society. Many fear that the scope of legalised assisted dying would expand beyond the terminally ill, as has happened in Canada and the Netherlands. And if the real aim is to allay the "terrors of the terminally ill", it would surely be far better to "improve specialist palliative care for all".

'We deserve to hear all perspectives'

Will MPs vote for assisted dying? It's likely, but not certain, said Katy Balls in The Spectator. In the last Commons vote, in 2015, the motion was easily defeated. "This time around, the political landscape looks rather different": the Commons is "stacked with Labour MPs and new blood". 

Keir Starmer – who voted in favour in 2015 – has made it clear that, since this an issue of conscience, there will be a free vote, with the Government remaining neutral. 

It's disappointing that Cabinet ministers have been officially instructed not to engage in the debate, said The Daily Telegraph. The question of assisted dying, and the efficacy of safeguards, is a profoundly important one. No doubt MPs on both sides are approaching the issue with the best of intentions. But we need a proper national conversation, not a "rushed parliamentary debate" – and "we deserve to hear all perspectives".