British electricity prices, which were among the lowest in Europe in the early 2000s, are now very high by global standards.

Only Denmark, Germany and Ireland have more expensive domestic electricity, while industry pays at least 50% more for electricity in the UK than it does in most of the rest of Europe – and over three times more than in the US. Although this is bad for everyone, particularly poorer households, arguably the real crisis is in industry.

Energy-intensive manufacturers have been hit hard, leading to the closure of factories such as the CF Fertilisers plant in Billingham, and the Ineos oil refinery in Grangemouth; the steel industry is on its knees. Lowering energy bills is one of the current Government’s core “missions”, but the short-term outlook isn’t great, with the typical domestic bill set to be 44% higher this winter than four years ago.

Why are British prices so high?

The short-term cause is the Ukraine War. The average household “duel-fuel” bill (of which electricity makes up a bit more than half) went from around £1,200 per year in 2020 to £3,549 in October 2022, then down again, before creeping up to £1,720 now. The underlying causes are complex: they include an ageing national grid; high network operating costs; a lack of storage; and the practicalities of being on an island (in Europe, electricity can be transmitted to where it’s needed more easily). Finally, there are “policy costs”: levies to support green energy and vulnerable customers. Of a typical electricity bill, under Ofgem’s price cap (the highest tariff providers can charge), about 20% consists of network costs; 15% is the energy supplier’s costs; 11% is policy costs; 5% is VAT; and suppliers’ profits are 2.4%. But the biggest chunk, around 45% of a bill, is the wholesale cost of energy, which is largely dictated by the price of natural gas, which is both high and volatile, for reasons beyond government control.

Why is it underpinned by the price of gas?

UK non-fossil fuel sources – wind, solar, hydroelectricity, bioenergy and nuclear – generated around 58% of the UK’s electricity last year, with wind alone providing around a third of the country’s power since 2023. And wind and solar are, in theory, very cheap. However, much electricity for the grid is bought short-term, with an auction for every half-hour period, and the price is determined by the most expensive provider for that moment. Electricity is bought from generators – wind farms, power plants – in “merit order”: cheapest first. But the price for all is set by the last or “marginal” generator needed; and in the UK that’s almost invariably a gas-powered turbine. This is known as “marginal pricing”.

Why on earth use this system?

Electrical grids must be exactly balanced between supply and demand. In the UK, gas-powered plants are the only practical means of topping up the grid during a sudden shortage. Nuclear reactors can’t quickly be switched on and off; wind and solar are intermittent, and we can’t yet store enough of their output. For now, the only way to be sure of keeping the lights on when there’s a surge in demand involves gas. As a matter of economics, many, from Boris Johnson to the energy supplier Octopus, have questioned marginal pricing. But both Labour and Tory governments have concluded that it is the most efficient system; it is used across most of Europe and the US.

So how much do renewables cost?

In theory, the green part of “policy costs” comprises under 10% of our electricity bills. But the true price is much higher. Connecting the grid to wind and solar farms is expensive, as is back-up and grid-balancing. In 2024/25, about £2.7bn was spent balancing the grid – for instance, paying wind farms to “curtail” generation when the system was overloaded. Besides, high gas-derived prices often govern real renewable prices anyway. The UK relies heavily on gas, because it got rid of coal-fired stations. Marginal pricing means gas set the price of electricity 98% of the time in Britain in 2023, compared with the European average of 58% (in France, prices are mostly set by cheaper nuclear, and in Poland, by coal).

What is the Government’s solution?

To help industry, Labour is exempting around 7,000 companies from some levies, with extra support for those in energy-intensive sectors such as chemicals, steel and glass. But its long-term plan is to take gas largely out of the electricity system: to reach “grid net zero” (95% carbon-free electricity) by 2030. The UK will need about twice the generating capacity as it did pre-renewables, and a much more complex, dispersed grid. It is investing several billion pounds in renewables, aiming to double onshore wind capacity, triple solar and quadruple offshore wind by 2030; it is also investing heavily in nuclear, in projects such as Sizewell C in Suffolk. At the same time, it aims to improve network capacity and boost grid storage, with vast batteries and pumped hydropower. The hope is that, in the future, the marginal price will seldom be set by gas – greatly driving down UK energy costs, cutting emissions and creating high-quality green jobs.

Is this realistic?

Many are sceptical. Dieter Helm, the Oxford energy economist, doubts that renewables will reduce bills long-term. Decarbonising the grid by 2030 would be a massive undertaking. Big British infrastructure projects usually run hugely over budget and schedule. Mechanisms for balancing a mostly renewable grid are untested, and will be expensive. Vast amounts will need to be invested – which will come, ultimately, from Britain’s electricity bills. Manufacturing is likely to be lost to nations with cheaper power. Although reducing emissions is a worthy aim, if those emissions only go abroad, it won’t help the climate. Helm thinks it would be better to move more slowly, and to be cautious about phasing out fossil fuels.

Marginal pricing: the alternatives

The present Government has looked into having a “split market” – separate pricing systems for renewables and the rest. A linked idea, which has been pushed and fought against by opposing armies of lobbyists, is “zonal pricing”: replacing a single national price for electricity with different prices for different zones, lower in areas with cheap generation nearby.

Industrial areas such as Teesside and Grangemouth that are near offshore wind farms could, with lower prices, attract energy intensive industries such as steel, fertilisers, or data centres. Wind farms would no longer need to be paid to be turned off. Octopus Energy CEO Greg Jackson thinks the scheme would bring costs down by £5bn a year. The Government rejected zonal pricing in July. It was deemed too politically difficult: it would risk creating a “postcode lottery”, with customers in some regions paying more than others. Ministers also concluded that it would be too difficult to implement. Marginal pricing is a fiendishly complex issue, but it was thought to be the best method of setting prices in a way that incentivises investors and generators, and ensures a reliable supply. Ministers are nervous of anything that might interfere with security of supply.

Oxford has been accused of behaving in a "slimy way" in the run-up to next month's Boat Race with Cambridge.

Four Cambridge rowers have been blocked from competing in the annual showdown, in what their team has described as a "desperate ploy" from their rowing rivals. The dispute "is being taken so seriously that the vice-chancellors of both universities are now said to be considering intervening", The Guardian said.

'A new low'

The "age-old rivalry" between the two university rowing teams took a "new turn" after the race organisers banned postgraduate teaching students from competing this year, said the Daily Mail. With only weeks until the big day, the ban prevents three Cambridge rowers – including former double world champion Matt Heywood – from taking part.

Oxford University – which hasn't won the women's Boat Race for six years, and has only won it once in that time with the men's team – successfully argued that the PGCE teacher training qualification does not meet the degree-level eligibility criteria because "it is a diploma and that is not a degree". Cambridge challenged the ruling but, after an initial reversal, the challenge was dismissed.

The ruling is "an insult to teachers everywhere" and a "desperate ploy" from Oxford to "gain an upper hand" in "the most slimy way", former Cambridge Blue and Olympic champion Imogen Grant said on Instagram. Her fellow Cambridge graduate, Olympic silver medallist Cath Bishop, described the move as "utter madness", a "crying shame" and a "new low" in relations between Oxford and Cambridge boat clubs.

The "composition of both crews has often been contested", said The Guardian, particularly when it's felt one boat club or other is "gaming the system by recruiting elite athletes to study easy degrees".

Also barred from the race – in a separate eligibility ruling – is Cambridge's Olympic champion Tom Ford. He "fell foul of rules" that exclude anyone who "first began a degree more than 12 years earlier", said The Spectator. This rule was introduced after double Olympic champion James Cracknell rowed for Cambridge in 2019 at the age of 46.

'Mutiny' in the crew

The Boat Race has also had its controversies on the water. In 1877, a 'dead heat' was declared, amid rumours that the finish judge, "Honest" John Phelps, had fallen asleep. "The truth is more interesting", said The Telegraph: without aligned finish posts, Phelps was "unable to tell for sure" who had won the closely fought race, so he simply "declared a draw".

Just over a century later, in 1987, a thunderstorm turned the Putney to Mortlake course into a "churning mass of wind and waves", said Cambridgeshire Live. The terrible conditions reflected the turmoil in the run-up to the event: the Oxford team was "rocked" by "mutiny" at their coach's regime, and five rowers quit weeks before the big day. The eventual, unfancied Oxford line-up lucked out in getting the more sheltered side of the river to row on, and their triumph over a water-soaked Cambridge was immortalised in the film "True Blue".

In 2001, umpire Rupert Obholzer ordered the race to be stopped and restarted for the first time in its history, as the two crews clashed oars amid heavy rain. Ten years earlier, said The Independent, Obholzer himself had "raised an eyebrow or three" when, as a member of Oxford's victorious crew, he was seen "offering a middle finger to the vanquished Cambridge" boat.

Damage to the brain's "control centre" might be behind the long-term breathlessness, fatigue and anxiety experienced by long Covid sufferers.

Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford used ultra-high-resolution scanners to study the brains of 30 people who had been admitted to hospital with severe Covid-19 early in the pandemic, before vaccines were available.

The results, published in the journal Brain, may help scientists and clinicians understand the long-term effects of Covid-19 on the brain and the rest of the body. They could also improve treatments for other conditions such as MS and dementia.

What did the study find?

Powerful MRI scanners, known as 7-Tesla or 7T, were able to study in fine detail the brains of those suffering from Covid, and compare them with the scans of 51 people with no history of infection.

Researchers found signs of inflammation in the brainstem, a "small but critical structure that governs life-sustaining bodily functions such as breathing, heart rate and blood pressure", said The Guardian.

What does it mean?

The scans suggest that severe Covid infections can provoke an "immune reaction" that inflames the brainstem, "with the resulting damage producing symptoms that can last for months after patients have been discharged".

The fact that these "abnormalities" were in the parts of the brain associated with breathing "strongly suggests that long-lasting symptoms are an effect of inflammation in the brainstem following Covid-19 infection", said Dr Catarina Rua, a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge and first author on the study.

The condition known as long Covid or post-Covid syndrome (PCS) can cause extreme tiredness, shortness of breath, brain fog, dizziness, heart palpitations and muscle aches lasting for 12 weeks or more, according to the Nice guidelines.

Those with the highest levels of brainstem inflammation were also found to have the highest levels of depression and anxiety – another key symptom of long Covid – "because of the tight connection between physical and mental health", said Professor James Rowe, also from Cambridge, who co-led the research.

Does it change how Covid should be treated?

There is still a lot to be learned about long Covid. This study doesn't "conclusively prove" the causes, but it does "point a finger at one possible suspect for some of the symptoms experienced", said Paul Mullins, a professor in neuroimaging at the University of Bangor. The results suggest it might be useful to "reduce inflammatory responses during initial Covid infection and response".

The researchers said the study might also be useful in understanding other conditions such as MS and dementia that are associated with brainstem inflammation.

After months of not-so-secret campaigning, the race to become the next chancellor of Oxford University is entering the home straight, with voting opening for students, staff and graduates next week.

The first ballot involves 38 candidates, ranging from political heavyweights such as Peter Mandelson and William Hague to an "anti-woke" Anglican clergyman and a Zumba teacher.

The former cricketer and Pakistani PM Imran Khan had been among the favourites to replace outgoing chancellor Lord Patten before his last-minute exclusion from the contest. A spokeswoman for the university refused to be drawn on why Khan had been barred from standing but pointed to requirements that the chancellor must be deemed "fit and proper" as the trustee of a charity, under the terms of Britain's Charities Act. Khan is currently serving time in a Pakistani prison on charges his supporters say are politically motivated.

It has added yet another twist to what is normally a low-key affair to lead one of the world's oldest and most prestigious academic institutions.

"Unpaid, onerous and irksome," said The Spectator: "no wonder many academics shrink at the prospect of the post", which former holder Roy Jenkins famously described as "impotence assuaged by magnificence".

"Yet such is its magnificence that so many others are attracted to the role, fully aware of all the politics and pressures that it brings."

Voting by a convocation

The position of chancellor of the University of Oxford has existed since 1224. A "largely ceremonial" role, according to the BBC, past officeholders include figures such as Oliver Cromwell, the Duke of Wellington, and former prime minister Harold Macmillan.

In all that time the post has never been held by a woman – but if former Tory leader Lord Hague wins, "he would be its 36th 'William'", said The Economist.

The forthcoming election features several notable firsts. One is that the incoming chancellor will be elected for 10 years, a departure from the previous convention that the post would be held for life. The second is that voting by "a convocation" of Oxford students, staff and graduates will take place online, a move which "has not only expanded the candidate pool, but also made it more international", said The New York Times. About 26,000 alumni of Oxford have registered to vote, with an additional 5,000 faculty and senior staff also eligible.

Initial voting will take place in the week commencing 28 October, using the alternative vote system, which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. The field of candidates will be reduced to five in a first round of voting, with a winner selected in a second round in late November.

The frontrunners

Some 38 candidates have put their name forward to replace Patten. According to The New York Times these range from an Anglican clergyman who presents himself as the "anti-woke candidate", to a left-wing activist who boasts that he has never "invaded any Middle Eastern countries" to a Zumba teacher who says her cardio training would help her face the rigours of the job.

But three peers "lead the pack", said The Spectator. New Labour architect Peter Mandelson, who studied at St Catherine's College, has sought to position himself as the candidate of the left, noting during his campaign launch that just two of the nine chancellors in the last century had not been Tories.

"I don't see why the Conservatives should have a monopoly on this position," he said, promising to use his links with the new Labour government to advocate for Oxford and the university sector more broadly.

It is perhaps fitting then that his biggest challenge is likely to come from former Tory leader William Hague. The "frontrunner", according to The Times, the former foreign secretary and now author credits his time at Oxford for "everything I've done in the last 42 years in government, the literary world and everything else". He said he'd "be more than happy to play a part in inspiring other people to have that same experience".

Jan Royall, who served in the same Labour cabinet as Mandelson, has pitched herself as the "candidate for welfare and widening access" and vowed to build on her work as principal of Somerville College, championing unconscious bias training and purging octopus from college dinners.

Other contenders include Margaret Casely-Hayford, the first Black British woman to be made a partner at a City law firm, Dominic Grieve, the former attorney-general, and former Tory universities and science minister David Willetts.

Elish Angiolini, Scotland's former lord advocate and head of St Hugh's College, is a "favoured internal choice", said The Spectator.

But "for all the whimsy of the fringe candidates, the chancellor's job is likely to go to one of a small circle of politically connected Oxonians", said The New York Times – "candidates not unlike Patten or his 158 or so predecessors".

The two most distant planets in our solar system look more like each other than was previously thought, experts have found.

Many people think of Neptune as being a rich blue colour, and Uranus more green, but a team from the University of Oxford found that the two ice giants, are actually a "similar shade of greenish blue", said Sky News.

The perception of Neptune as much darker and bluer than Uranus was "cemented" when pictures were sent back by the Voyager 2 probe after it flew by the two planets in 1986 and 1989, said The Times.

Although Voyager 2 was a "monumental success", said the Daily Mail, it "actually resulted in the modern misconception of what the two planets look like".

The images it took in single colours "combined to create composite images that showed the planets to be cyan and azure, respectively", said Space.com. But experts have found that the images of Neptune, which is named after the Roman god of the sea, were made "artificially too blue" when handled by Nasa.

Colour images of planets are "highly processed" and "may not reveal the true colour the human eye would see", explained Patrick Irwin, professor of planetary physics at the University of Oxford, who led the new study, on The Conversation. Particularly in the case of Neptune, the composites were often made too blue.

Although the "artificially saturated colour was known at the time amongst planetary scientists", and the images were "released with captions explaining it", that distinction "had become lost over time", Irwin added.

Other experts have welcomed the news. Dr Heidi Hammel, of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, told Sky News that the "misperception of Neptune's colour, as well as the unusual colour changes of Uranus, have bedevilled us for decades", but the new study "should finally put both issues to rest".

Experts have called for global regulation to prevent out-of-control artificial intelligence systems that could end up “eliminating the whole human race”.

Researchers from Oxford University told MPs on the science and technology committee that just as humans wiped out the dodo, AI machines could eventually pose an “existential threat” to humanity.

The committee “heard how advanced AI could take control of its own programming”, said The Telegraph.

“With superhuman AI there is a particular risk that is of a different sort of class, which is, well, it could kill everyone,” said doctoral student Michael Cohen. If it is smarter than humans “across every domain” it could “presumably avoid sending any red flags while we still could pull the plug”.

Michael Osborne, professor of machine learning at Oxford, said that “the bleak scenario is realistic”. This is because, he explained, “we’re in a massive AI arms race… with the US versus China and among tech firms there seems to be this willingness to throw safety and caution out the window and race as fast as possible to the most advanced AI”.

There are “some reasons for hope in that we have been pretty good at regulating the use of nuclear weapons”, he said, adding that “AI is as comparable a danger as nuclear weapons”.

He hoped that countries across the globe would recognise the “existential threat” from advanced AI and agree treaties that would prevent the development of dangerous systems.

“Similar concerns appear to be shared by many scientists who work with AI,” said The Times, pointing to a survey in September by a team at New York University. It found that more than a third of 327 scientists who work with artificial intelligence agreed it is “plausible” that decisions made by AI “could cause a catastrophe this century that is at least as bad as an all-out nuclear war”.

As the Daily Mail put it: “The doomsday predictions have worrying parallels to the plot of science fiction blockbuster The Matrix, in which humanity is beholden to intelligent machines.”

All in all though, said Time magazine when the New York University research came out, “the fact that ‘only’ 36% of those surveyed see a catastrophic risk as possible could be considered encouraging, since the remaining 64% don’t think the same way”.

Britain’s most high-profile head teacher has accused Labour MP Jess Phillips of “racist and bullying behaviour”.

Katharine Birbalsingh, founder of the Michaela Community free school in London and once-dubbed Britain’s “strictest head teacher”, posted a “sensational” four-page open letter to Labour leader Keir Starmer following a Twitter row over Tina Turner, said the Daily Mail.

Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson has defended her colleague, saying she was not racist. “Phillips did not refer to Ms Birbalsingh’s ethnicity in any of her posts,” added the BBC, noting that the head teacher had also “attracted controversy during her time as the chair of the Social Mobility Commission between November 2021 and January 2023”.

Who is Katherine Birbalsingh?

Birbalsingh was born in 1973 in New Zealand and grew up mostly in Toronto, with brief spells living in Nigeria and France. She told The Sunday Times that her upbringing was “typically immigrant”, with her parents “always working really hard, saving all their money, always doing the right thing, heads down”.

She was 15 when the family moved to England because her father, an Indian-Guyanese academic who was “warm but strict”, had begun lecturing at the University of Warwick.

She studied philosophy and modern languages at New College, Oxford. As an undergraduate she discovered her passion for education when she visited inner-city schools to encourage the children to apply to Oxbridge.

‘Tory teacher’

After graduating, Birbalsingh went into teaching in state schools in south London. In 2007 she set up an anonymous blog, To Miss with Love, where she wrote about her colleagues and children, soon getting up to 500 views a day.

She was invited to speak at the Conservative Party Conference in 2010, where she talked about a “culture of excuses” and “low standards” in classrooms. In a particularly headline-grabbing section of her speech at a fringe event, she was reported to say: “If you keep telling teachers that they’re racist for trying to discipline black boys and if you keep telling heads that they’re racist for trying to exclude black boys, in the end the schools stop reprimanding these children.”

After her speech hit the headlines she lost her teaching job. When she tried to open a free school in Brixton shortly afterwards, it was mobbed with placards saying “Tory teacher”. She was called a traitor and a Nazi, said The Times.

In 2014, Birbalsingh established Michaela Community School, a free school in Wembley Park, northwest London, which became notorious for its strict behaviour policy.

Speaking to The Times about her philosophy, she said that giving a child detention “is an act of love”. Many of her pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds have gone on to attend the country’s best universities, noted The Sun. In 2022, the school said 91% of all A-level exams were graded A* to B, with students heading to universities including Oxford, LSE, Imperial and UCL.

‘Powerful and visionary’

In October 2021, the government picked Birbalsingh to chair the Social Mobility Commission. Boris Johnson praised her as “powerful and visionary” but she admitted to The Times that she would not advise her pupils to “be like him”. The role included advocating for the social mobility agenda and holding to account key educational institutions.

Birbalsingh courted controversy in the role, once claiming that people from poor backgrounds should take “smaller steps” rather than aiming for elite universities, making progress “up the ladder – from the bottom and from the middle rungs”.

Tina Turner Twitter row

The latest row, between Phillips and Birbalsingh, dates back to May, when Birbalsingh posted a gif of Tina Turner, which included images of the iconic star alongside her abusive husband Ike, with the caption “good times”.

Phillips, the shadow minister for domestic violence and safeguarding, then tweeted: “Hold the line! Stay with me! Domestic abuse is never ok and we will defeat those who prop up the status quo.”

On Saturday, Birbalsingh wrote an open-letter to Starmer claiming Phillips had “inspired a vicious mob attack against me on Twitter” and “called into question my school’s safeguarding policies in a deliberative attempt to challenge my competence as a headteacher”.

“Her behaviour is a clear example of ‘unconscious bias’,” said Birbalsingh in the statement. “I mean that she hates me, despite not knowing me, because she subscribes to the idea that Black and Asian individuals in public life owe a duty to voice opinions that match with a left-wing view of the world, or they are worthy of her contempt.”

The head teacher added that she reported Phillips to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards.

Asked on Sky’s Sophie Ridge On Sunday if she thought Phillips was racist, her colleague Phillipson said: “No, I don’t. But I think it’s important that, if people have concerns, if they’re unhappy about the conduct of a member of parliament, that can be investigated as part of that process.”

Scientists believe they have discovered why the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine may cause blood clots in a very small number of people.

A team of researchers from Cardiff and the US found that a protein in the blood is attracted to a key component of the vaccine, the BBC reported. This, they suggest, causes a chain reaction in the immune system that can culminate in dangerous clots.

Professor Alan Parker, one of the researchers at Cardiff University, said the side effect occurs only in extremely rare cases because of a chain of complex events in those individuals.

His team found that the outer surface of the adenovirus used by AstraZeneca attracts the platelet factor four protein to it like a magnet.

Parker said: “The adenovirus has an extremely negative surface, and platelet factor four is extremely positive and the two things fit together quite well.”

He added that his team has been able to prove the link between the “key smoking guns of adenoviruses and platelet factor four”.

The scientists believe that the next stage of the process is “misplaced immunity”, but this needs to be confirmed in further research.

Sky News noted that the number of people affected is thought to be very small. In May, the UK’s medicines safety regulator said there had been 242 clotting cases and 49 deaths, with 28.5 million doses of the vaccine administered.

Nevertheless, concerns over rare blood clots have influenced how the vaccine has been deployed around the world. For example, the AstraZeneca jab was not offered to the under-40s in the UK and alternatives were used instead.

AstraZeneca claimed that clots were more likely to occur because of a Covid infection than the vaccine, and insisted that the complete explanation for why they occur had not yet been established.

Commenting on the findings, a spokeswoman for the company said the research is “not definitive” but “offers interesting insights”.

AstraZeneca added that the vaccine is thought to have saved more than a million lives around the world and prevented 50 million cases of Covid. The University of Oxford, which worked on the vaccine, declined to comment on the research.

1. European scepticism

Blame game?

Even the most ardent supporter of the government would struggle to deny that the UK’s pandemic response has had its fair share of low points. But in one regard the country has streaked ahead of its neighbours: vaccinations.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is the jewel in the crown of the jab rollout that has so far seen more than 30 million people receive at least one dose.

But despite the positive data emerging from the UK, the Oxford University-developed jab has repeatedly faced criticism and suspicion from European nations.

Why has the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine faced so much scrutiny?

2. Fresh concerns raised in US

US VS AZ

As scrutiny of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine continues to dominate headlines in Europe, US health officials have waded into the row to raise fresh doubts about the jab.

In what The Wall Street Journal describes as the “latest misstep by the British drug giant”, AstraZeneca has been left scrambling to update its efficacy data after the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) “took the rare move of publicly questioning” the accuracy of the company’s human trials.

The US government health agency issued a statement saying that the independent Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) had found that AstraZeneca “may have included outdated information” that “may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data”.

US health officials question AstraZeneca vaccine trial data

3. Trust in vaccine falls in Europe

Fear factor

Confidence in the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine has plummeted across Europe after a host of European governments suspended its use, a survey has found.

Polling by YouGov found that more than half of respondents in France, Germany and Spain now believe the vaccine to be unsafe – even after all three nations later reversed their decision to stop using the UK-developed vaccine.

In France, 61% of respondents said the vaccine was unsafe, an increase of 18 percentage points from February, while 55% of Germans and 52% of Spanish people felt the same way. Figures collected elsewhere are no more promising, with 43% of Italians saying that they also feel the vaccine is not safe for use.

Trust in Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine collapsing across Europe, poll reveals

4. UK cases in decline

glimmer of hope

A single dose of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine may have a “substantial effect” on curbing the spread of Covid-19 and provide sustained protection against the virus for at least three months, a new study has found.

Test results from the University of Oxford published in a pre-print report in The Lancet show that the first shot may reduce transmission among people who have had the jab by 67% while providing an average of 76% protection against symptomatic infections from three weeks until 90 days.

In a finding that appears to support the UK’s decision to delay second doses, the research also indicates “that spacing out the second dose by a longer period in fact further increases its efficacy”, reports Politico’s London Playbook.

What does Oxford vaccine efficacy mean for getting back to normal life?

Experts are pinning their hopes on an arthritis drug to save the lives of many thousands of Covid patients after new research found the treatment can cut the risk of death from the disease by about 15%.

The Oxford University-led study also found that tocilizumab “cut the time spent in hospital by five days when it was given to people ill enough to require help breathing”, The Times reports. And patients were “less likely to need mechanical ventilation”.

“Scientists say the drug could save the lives of one in 25 patients admitted to hospital with coronavirus,” ITV adds.

More than 4,000 patients were involved in the new research, part of the Recovery trial, the world's largest randomised study of potential Covid-19 treatments.

A total of 2,022 patients randomly allocated to receive tocilizumab, while the rest received standard care. The researchers found that 596 (29%) of the patients in the tocilizumab group died within 28 days, compared with 694 (33%) patients in the other group.

The drug also reduced the chance of progressing to invasive mechanical ventilation or death from 38% to 33% among those who were not on invasive ventilation when entered into the trial.

Tocilizumab is typically given to patients suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and is administered to patients intravenously.

The drug expected to be used alongside the steroid dexamethasone, which has been used to treat Covid patients for several months. When the two drugs are combined, they help the body’s defences against the disease.

“The double impact of dexamethasone plus tocilizumab is impressive and very welcome,” said Recovery trial co-chief Peter Horby, a professor of emerging infectious diseases at Oxford University.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock has greeted the research findings as “excellent news” and “further proof the UK is at the forefront of the global mission to find safe and effective treatments for this terrible virus”.

Oxford University and AstraZeneca are facing questions over their promising vaccine trial results after health officials revealed that key information about the ages of the test subjects was omitted.

During the Phase 3 trial, one group of test subjects was inoculated with two doses of the vaccine, spaced a month apart, while a second group was administered with a half-dose followed by a full one. In the first group, the protection rate was found to be 62%, but data from the second group showed that the vaccine was effective 90% of the time.

The reason for the wide discrepency has puzzled scientists. But they may now have their answer, after researcher Moncef Slaoui, who is spearheading the US’s vaccine distribution programme, told reporters that the age of participants in the second group “was capped at 55”, Bloomberg reports.

No age breakdown was given in the reporting of the results, which have been cast into doubt over the omission of the most at-risk age demographics.

Former Pfizer research and development president Geoffrey Porges researchers “said he thought it was unlikely the AstraZeneca jab would get approval in the US after the company ‘tried to embellish their results’ by highlighting higher efficacy in a ‘relatively small subset of subjects in the study’”, the Financial Times reports.

Meanwhile, David Salisbury, an associate fellow of the global health programme at Chatham House, told The Telegraph: “You’ve taken two studies for which different doses were used and come up with a composite that doesn’t represent either of the doses. I think many people are having trouble with that.”

And the admission earlier this week by AstraZeneca that the half-dose was administered by error during the trials will add to “questions about whether the vaccine’s apparently spectacular efficacy will hold up under additional testing”, says The New York Times - which suggests that AstraZeneca’s “spotty disclosures have eroded confidence” in the jab.

While most of the world descended into panic when the coronavirus pandemic first emerged, a group of scientists at Oxford University were springing into action to develop a vaccine to fight Covid-19.

Although late-stage trials indicate that competing vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna are slightly more effective, the Oxford jab has been heralded as a potential game-changer thanks to its ease of storage and lower price tag.

As countries including the UK now line up to reserve millions of doses, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, Andrew Pollard, said: “We have a vaccine for the world... this is an incredibly exciting moment for human health.”

Lesson in team work

The Oxford vaccine’s origin can be traced back to a meeting of the university’s academics in early February. “In China, a new virus was spreading rapidly. Soon it would be here,” says The Times. “This was it: the ‘disease X situation’.”

Following the meeting, Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at the university’s Jenner Institute, was put in charge of the scientists tasked with creating a vaccine to combat the then unknown virus.

The formation of the research team would set in motion what the newspaper describes as a “ten-month coronavirus marathon”.

“We had recently started thinking about an appropriate response to Disease X - how could we mobilise and focus our resources to go more quickly than we had ever gone before,” Gilbert recalls. “And then Disease X arrived.”

Also in that initial meeting with her were “Adrian Hill, a colleague in the Jenner vaccine institute, and Andrew Pollard, who had no academic expertise in the vaccine platform”, The Times reports. “His expertise, instead, was in something in its own way just as fiendishly complex: running large-scale clinical trials.”

How the jab was developed

In March, as the severity of the outbreak became increasingly apparent, Gilbert’s team was awarded a £2.2m grant from the UK’s National Institute for Health Research and the UK Research and Innovation funding agency.

This financial backing allowed Gilbert “to scale up her team’s efforts to move into coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine preclinical and clinical trials”, as The Lancet reported the following month.

Her team were also granted ethical approval for a clinical trial and conditional approval from the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to screen volunteers for trial enrolment.

“Ideally, we need the clinical trial to be taking place when the majority of volunteers have not been exposed to the virus,” Gilbert told The Lancet. “We will exclude volunteers who have a positive PCR test for Sars-CoV-2, or who have had fever or cough in the past month.”

After animal trials had shown that the vaccine was safe, the researchers began human trials on 23 April. A week later, the team partnered with Cambridge-based pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to enable mass production and rollout of the vaccine if the trials proved successful.

Trials and tribulations

The testing process for the Oxford jab was split into the usual three phases designated for clinical vaccine trials.

In Phase 1, the vaccine is tested on a small number of people to check whether it is safe. This is followed by a Phase 2 trial in which more more people are tested, and then Phase 3, which the BBC describes as “the big trial, involving thousands of people, to prove it actually protects people”.

The Oxford vaccine has now completed all three stages, with a total of 30,000 volunteers in the UK, US, Brazil and South Africa tested in Phase 3.

These final-stage trials found that the vaccine had an overall efficacy of 70.4%. But this rose to 90% among trial participants given a half dose followed by a full dose a month later, as opposed to the standard two full doses.

The more effective dosage level was discovered by chance, after the initial half doses was administered as a result of an error.

“The reason we had the half dose is serendipity,” Mene Pangalos, executive vice-president of biopharmaceuticals research and development at AstraZeneca, told The Guardian.

After noticing that side-effects were reduced in some trial candidates, “we went back and checked… and we found out that they had underpredicted the dose of the vaccine by half,” Pangalos said. Rather than restarting the trial, the researchers decided to push ahead and administer the full dose booster as scheduled.

It is not currently known why administering a half dose first makes the vaccine more effective.

Science journal Nature notes that the Oxford version is designed to trigger “an immune response not only to the Sars-CoV-2 spike protein, but also to components of the viral vector”. Some experts have suggested that if the first dose is administered in full, it “blunts” this reaction, making the vaccine less effective overall.

PR battle

The UK government has pre-ordered 100 million doses of the Oxford vaccine, and AstraZeneca has pledged to make a total of three billion doses for global distribution next year.

But “now that it looks like we will have a vaccine sooner rather than later, it’s becoming clear that the PR and comms surrounding it could be just as important as the logistics of distribution”, says Wired.

The next key step is to reassure “ordinary members of the public that the vaccine is safe”, and to reach out “to those who are reluctant to take it, either because of health concerns, or because they’ve been drawn into the vortex of fake news”, the magazine continues.

The importance of this PR push has been emphasised by Heidi Larson, director of the Vaccine Confidence Project.

“We need to bring the public along on the journey,” she says. “We’re at a very low trust level with our populations more broadly, and they don’t just want to know how good the product is, they want to know about the process.

“Now is the time to talk about the process, and deciding who gets it first and why.”

A coronavirus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford is between 70% and 90% effective at preventing people from getting Covid-19, according to preliminary data.

Results from Phase 3 trials show that the vaccine, made in partnership with Cambridge-based company AstraZeneca, is 70.4% effective on average. But researchers say that when administered at a half dose and then a full dose, rather than two full doses, the vaccine can be up to 90% effective.

The study, which involved more than 24,000 volunteers, showed there were “no serious cases among those who received the vaccine, including no hospitalisations”, The Telegraph reports.

At what stage of development is the Oxford vaccine?

The Oxford University vaccine has long been a front runner in the contest to find a coronavirus jab.

In early September, trials of the vaccine resumed after being briefly paused as a result of a reported side effect in a patient in the UK. The jab is in ongoing Phase 3 testing that has involved a total of around 30,000 participants in the US, UK, Brazil and South Africa.

The newly published results show that “there were 30 cases of Covid in people who had two doses of the vaccine and 101 cases in people who received a dummy injection”, the BBC reports. The researchers say this works out as equivalent to 70% protection.

When volunteers were given two high doses, the protection rate was 62%, but this figure rose to 90% among those given a low dose followed by a high one. “It’s not clear why there is a difference,” the broadcaster says.

Although very encouraging, the Oxford results fall short of those for jabs developed by US pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer and Massachusetts-based Moderna, both of which have been show to offer up to 95% protection in late-stage trials.

However, the Oxford vaccine is far cheaper, and is easier to store and transport, than the two rival versions.

The UK has so far purchased 40 million doses of the vaccine developed by Pfizer, and has also rushed to reserve five million of Moderna’s candidate.

But No. 10 has even more hopes invested in the Oxford vaccine, of which the UK has reserved 100 million doses.

How does the jab differ from the other candidates?

While the Oxford vaccine – called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 – “uses a different technology from the Moderna jab, the two vaccines both rely on stimulating cells to produce a specific protein, which in turn triggers an immune response”, The Guardian reports.

But unlike the Oxford jab, those developed by Modena and Pfzier use messenger ribonucleic acid, also known as messenger RNA, or mRNA.

Conventional vaccines are produced using weakened forms of a virus, but mRNAs use only the genetic code of the virus. In the Covid vaccines, the mRNA carries instructions for making the spike protein that protrudes from the outside of the coronavirus cell.

Once injected, the vaccine causes “protein-making machinery within the human cells to churn out this spike protein”, prompting the immune system to go into defence mode, the paper explains.

By contrast, the Oxford version is a conventional vaccine, using a harmless, weakened version of a common virus that causes colds in chimpanzees. Researchers have previously used this technology to produce vaccines against pathogens including flu, Zika and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers).

The Oxford team are now using the “harmless chimp cold virus to deliver genetic information from the coronavirus to human cells to trigger the production of the spike protein” that kick-starts the immune response, says The Guardian.

In a major boost for their version, the Oxford vaccine can be stored at fridge temperature, which “means it can be distributed to every corner of the world, unlike the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which need to be stored at much colder temperatures”, the BBC reports.

And AstraZeneca has said it is preparing to make three billion doses worldwide at a price of around £3 - a price tag that is considerably less than those for Pfizer’s (£15) or Moderna’s (£25) vaccines.

So will it end the pandemic?

Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, told The Guardian that “the positive results from the other developers means it is likely that there will be multiple vaccines on target, which is great news for the world”.

But concerns persist over how long the vaccine protection will last.

Since the Oxford jab “uses a live chimpanzee adenovirus to transport elements of Sars-Cov-2 into humans, it’s expected people will develop immunity to the viral vector, preventing the vaccine from being used for future top-ups”, The Independent reports.

“For a scenario where the Oxford vaccine gets rolled out across the UK, that might give people protection for six months to a year,” Professor Robin Shattock, who is leading a separate team of vaccine researchers at Imperial College London, told the paper. “But you then need something to come back and reboost people.”

Shattock believes that his vaccine could be used as a regular booster for maintaining immunity. And that could offer “a permanent route out of the pandemic”, The Independent suggests.

In the meantime, the Oxford vaccine needs to be approved by regulators, “who will assess the vaccine's safety, effectiveness, and that it is manufactured to high standard,” adds the BBC. “This process will happen in the coming weeks.”

Beatrice Melinek, post-doctoral research fellow in biochemical engineering at University College London (UCL) and Stephen Morris, research fellow in vaccine process analytics at UCL, on how the industry is evolving to deliver a response to Covid.

To bring Covid-19 under control a vaccine needs to be available to every nation, rich and poor – and it needs to happen quickly. But pharmaceutical breakthroughs are usually the result a slow process involving competition, secrecy, risky investments and extensive trials.

Changing any big industry to speed its processes up is going to be difficult. But there are signs that substantial changes are underway – and they may be here to stay.

Medical innovation is in fact often accelerated in a time of crisis. During the first world war, X-rays, developed two decades earlier, came into their own. Logistical approaches to triaging and treating the wounded were also pioneered, and obligatory vaccinations for typhoid were introduced in the French army.

The second world war saw the first mass-scale production of antibiotics. While the discovery was published in 1929, it was only in the late 1930s, with the looming prospect of war, that Oxford University began speeding up its work in this field.

It was no small challenge to take a manually intensive laboratory process involving a mould grown on a solid surface and transform it into an industrially viable process, and all within five years. The methods involved in this process also went on to form the foundation of the biotechnology revolution of the 1970s, which pioneered genetic engineering.

Making medicines is expensive, and it can take a very long time to get from the discovery of a drug to actually treating patients. With vaccines it’s a particular problem as the treatment needs to be administered to a huge number of healthy people. Add to this the high mutation rate of some viruses. The flu vaccine, for example, is only effective for one season.

It is difficult to introduce new technology to medicine. A major factor is regulation. It is critical that any medicine manufactured is safe and effective. The regulation of the biopharma sector is one of the strictest of any industry – the consequences of a mistake would be devastating.

If a medicine proves to be unsafe, not only does it put lives at risk but it can also damage people’s confidence in science and medicine more widely. The MMR vaccine, for example, was once incorrectly associated with autism, which caused lasting damage to people’s confidence in vaccination.

The majority of vaccines fail during development. Normally a ten-year timeframe would be required to bring a new vaccine to market. This is in large part due to developers and manufactures operating a risk-adverse business model, under which funding and facilities are committed sequentially on reaching defined milestones. For example, large-scale manufacture will not begin until the successful completion of clinical trials.

New approaches

The response to the Covid-19 pandemic has shown that it is possible to short-cut this time frame if funding is committed (in the form of pre-purchase agreements), enabling manufacturers to take significant commercial risk by manufacturing products at a large scale before clinical trials have been completed and evaluated.

This approach will enable significant stockpiles of new vaccines to be accumulated ready for use on approval.

The timeline can also be shortened by using new technologies for making vaccines. Traditionally, vaccines were made by taking the pathogen itself and then inactivating it, or by manufacturing a harmless close relative of the pathogen. These can then be inserted into the body. This involves complicated methods that have been in continual development for nearly 100 years, accelerating greatly during the second world war.

Clearly, either approach has risks, both for the patient and the manufacturer. For example, scientists may fail to inactivate the virus, or a harmless pathogen could mutate into a more potent form. The virus could also be accidentally released during production.

Recombinant DNA technology, joining together DNA molecules from different organisms and inserting them into a host, has become the workhorse for production of the most important classes of modern medicines: therapeutic proteins.

The same technology can be applied to vaccines by using just part of a virus – its structural proteins – and inserting it into the body. There, it acts as a vaccine by giving the immune system the opportunity to meet, recognise and prepare for the real virus. These types of vaccines are easier to scale up and safer than traditional ones.

Newer approaches that are currently being developed introduce only the genetic material for the vaccine into the body, either directly or using another virus. This allows the cellular machinery to manufacture the viral protein, again enabling the immune system to prepare to fight off the actual virus.

By their nature, these new approaches offer the advantage of increased development speed, but are still relatively unproven. Of the 34 Covid-19 vaccines currently being evaluated in clinical trials, 17 are of this type.

Chances of success

The ambitious timelines for a Covid vaccine would be far outside anything previously achieved. But there are reasons to be optimistic.

While most vaccines fail during development, there are more than 230 candidate vaccines for Covid-19 in development. But many of the technologies being pursued are new and unproven, so investing in them is a risk.

Importantly, the biotech industry, faced with major international health challenges, has a long history of collaboration. And there is evidence that, to meet the urgency of the global COVID-19 crisis, competition is reducing. Collaboration on technologies, between companies and between commercial, academic and regulatory partners is accelerating.

Manufacturers can also rely on initiatives that existed even before the pandemic, such as the University College London’s Vax Hub working to produce affordable vaccines by collaborating with Oxford University as well as the company AstraZenaca.

As the the two world wars have shown, biomedical innovation can be speeded up at a time of crisis. And if we are really lucky, some processes and initiatives involved in the production of a Covid-19 vaccine may be here to stay – benefiting people for decades to come.

Beatrice Melinek, post-doctoral research fellow in biochemical engineering at University College London (UCL) and Stephen Morris, research fellow in vaccine process analytics at UCL.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Samantha Vanderslott, university research lecturer at the University of Oxford, on the journey of vaccine development.

If you have been following the media coverage of the new vaccines in development for Covid-19, it will be clear that the stakes are high. Very few vaccine trials in history have attracted so much attention, perhaps since polio in the mid-20th century.

A now largely forgotten chapter, summer polio outbreaks invoked terror in parents. Today, restrictions on gatherings and movement in the efforts to control Covid-19 have been a huge strain on society, but in the 1950s, parents locked their children in stifling hot buildings during the summer with windows sealed shut because they were terrified polio would somehow seep through the cracks in the wall.

The development of the polio vaccine in the US in 1955 was a moment of global celebration.

Reaching that point involved millions of citizens raising funds to develop the vaccine, political goodwill by the bucket-load and a driven public-private scientific collaboration, with scientist Jonas Salk at the helm. Children across the US were enlisted in one of the largest clinical trials in history.

Clearly, setbacks and challenges occurred along the way, even once the vaccine was being rolled out. In a shocking episode called the “Cutter incident”, a failure in making and inspecting the vaccine by a California-based firm called the Cutter Laboratories led to children getting polio from the vaccine, which contained viable poliovirus.

The incident led to a major tightening of federal regulations to ensure production safety. It also resulted in new laws being passed that prevented vaccine manufacturers from being sued. (The fear was that drug manufacturers would not want to develop vaccines without being protected by the law.)

A lack of urgency for vaccine uptake quickly set in. It is taken for granted that children are vaccinated routinely, but this acceptance took time.

In the early era of vaccination, it was a tool against epidemics and people expected to be vaccinated during an outbreak. Through health education and communication, funding of immunisation services, and political support across party lines, vaccination was promoted as a central pillar of a public health globally.

Promise of an Aids vaccine

When the next big plague of the 20th century hit - Aids - naturally it was vaccination that would be looked to.

Within a short time of scientists confirming HIV was the cause of Aids in 1984, the US health and human services secretary, Margaret Heckler, announced that a vaccine would be ready in two years.

The high expectations and hope instilled in vaccination were not surprising, particularly following the eradication of smallpox from the planet in 1980. However, an Aids vaccine proved to be unattainable.

Unfortunately, many aspects of HIV infection make it very difficult to develop a vaccine. Instead, it has been antiretrovirals – a group of drugs that inhibit various steps in the HIV replication process – that have proved to be the most effective strategy for treating Aids.

The stigma of Aids was also an inhibitor for controlling the disease. Health officials at the beginning of the Aids crisis coyly referred to the transmission being through “bodily fluids”, instead of specifying blood and semen. This lead to misunderstandings about the disease being spread through touch.

New pandemic, same problems

Today, Covid-19 is the latest public health crisis that cannot be separated from politics and society. Fear of this disease, and whether it is taken seriously and seen as important to protect against, will play a major role in the support and uptake of a vaccine.

Most people want to return to a “normal life”, and a vaccine is the most reliable way to achieve this. However, the public’s desire for a vaccine is balanced against concerns about the speed of vaccine development, wariness about new types of vaccines, and mistrust of pharmaceutical companies, governments and the “health establishment”.

Public action in communities has been evident throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, in neighbours supporting the elderly and those unable to leave their homes by delivering groceries and medication, as well as compliance with government health messaging, and willingness to take part in medical trials.

But national political stakes for a vaccine remain high with politicians using “vaccine deals” to bolster popular support and win elections.

The acceptance of vaccines is fragile, so when leaders promote their country’s vaccine with clear political motivations, it can knock the public’s confidence and draw intense scrutiny. As with the polio vaccine of the past, the world is watching.

Samantha Vanderslott, university research lecturer at the University of Oxford.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Human trials of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine are facing delays in the US after a participant suffered a rare neurological condition, according to a leaked document.

The AstraZeneca report, seen by CNN, shows that the decision to pause the trials in early September was made after a previously healthy 37-year-old woman who had received two doses developed transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal cord that can cause paralysis.

The unidentified UK-based volunteer was given the jabs in June and August but was hospitalised after she started to suffer “difficulty walking, pain and weakness in her arms and a headache after tripping while running in September”, the Daily Mail reports.

She is understood to have recovered fully.

The internal report by AstraZeneca, which owns the rights to the so-called AZD1222 vaccine, also reveals that the trials had been stopped before after another participant developed transverse myelitis.

“The first pause, in July, was not publicly revealed and the trial was restarted after it was determined the volunteer had multiple sclerosis, a condition that can cause the same neurological reaction,” says The Telegraph.

Following the latest hold-up, trials have resumed in the UK, Brazil, India and South Africa, but remain suspended in the US.

The “concerns around neurological side-effects” of vaccines are “especially sensitive in the US”, according to the newspaper, which notes that an emergency influenza vaccine issued in 1976 caused 450 cases, of which 30 were fatal, of Guillain-Barre syndrome, which also causes inflammation of the spinal cord.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are reportedly “seeking to determine” what caused the case of transverse myelitis in the Covid trials before giving the green light for the testing to resume.

Rebecca Ashfield, senior project manager at the University of Oxford, and Pedro Folegatti, clinical research fellow at the University of Oxford, on the effort to develop the first Covid-19 vaccine.

Of the hundreds of potential Covid-19 vaccines in development, six are in the final stages of testing, known as phase three clinical trials. One of these - ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 - is the vaccine we’re developing at the University of Oxford.

To be approved, vaccines need to go through multiple rounds of testing to show that they’re safe and effective. A combined phase one and phase two trial of the Oxford vaccine has demonstrated that it is safe – with only short-term side-effects and no serious unexpected events reported – and that it elicits an immune response.

The purpose of a phase three trial is to assess whether this vaccine-induced immune response is strong enough to actually protect people from Covid-19. Proving this would pave the way for the vaccine to become publicly available.

How a phase three trial works

Usually a phase three trial has two groups, one receiving the vaccine being tested and the other a placebo or “control” injection, for example saline or a vaccine against a different disease.

To show that the vaccine is effective, there should be significantly fewer cases of the target disease in the vaccinated group compared with the control group. Depending on infection rates for the disease, a phase three vaccine trial may involve thousands to tens of thousands of volunteers.

For ChAdOx1 nCoV-19, clinical trial volunteers are located in countries across five continents: the UK, Brazil, South Africa, the US and India. The vaccine is being evaluated in these different regions and populations of the world to ensure that results of the trial are “generalisable” – that is, that its findings can be said to apply to people outside of the groups tested.

In the UK we’re testing the vaccine in health workers, as they’re more likely to be exposed to infection than the general population. The trial there also includes volunteers from the public who are over 70. Older people are at higher risk of developing severe disease, so it’s important to know if they respond to the vaccine.

Oxford and our international partners have already vaccinated approximately 17,000 people in the first three countries selected (the UK, Brazil and South Africa), with half receiving a control vaccine.

Most volunteers are receiving a booster vaccination one to three months after the first, as data from our phase one and phase two trial indicates that this strengthens the immune response – although it’s not yet clear whether two doses will be necessary to protect against Covid-19.

Once vaccinated, volunteers go about their daily lives, but are monitored to see if they get the disease.

Importantly, they are told to take the same precautions against infection as everyone else – this is because we don’t yet know if the vaccine works, and also because half of the volunteers will have received a control (non-Covid) vaccine.

Running phase three clinical trials in several different countries in record time is a huge logistical challenge. Working with experienced international teams has made the complex process of shipping equipment and vaccines manageable, but it’s been especially taxing due to travel and flight restrictions in the UK and elsewhere.

There are also lots of different operations that need to be coordinated. We’re testing the vaccine with our partners at three trial sites in Brazil and seven in South Africa, for example.

Will the vaccine be safe?

Most vaccines take at least five years to go through clinical trials, and there have been questions around whether Covid-19 vaccines are being “rushed through”.

The Oxford vaccine has completed a programme of pre-clinical safety testing in animals and is going through the same carefully regulated process as vaccines against other diseases. It will be tested in more volunteers in the planned clinical trials than many drugs or vaccines that are already licensed.

Vaccines like Oxford’s are being developed rapidly because of the coordinated efforts of large international teams of scientists and doctors. Safety, ethics and regulatory committees are speeding things up by prioritising approval processes ahead of those for other vaccines and medicines.

Nevertheless, the same rigorous standards are applied to candidate Covid-19 vaccines, ensuring no corners are cut in terms of vaccine safety.

When will we know if the Oxford vaccine works?

There’s a good chance we’ll know whether the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine is effective before the end of 2020. After the successful completion of phase three trials, regulatory bodies in each country will need to review the available data before approving the vaccine for general use.

AstraZeneca, the firm partnering Oxford to develop the vaccine, is overseeing a scaling up of manufacturing in parallel with clinical testing so that hundreds of millions of doses can be available if the vaccine is shown to be safe and effective.

Rebecca Ashfield, senior project manager at the University of Oxford, and Pedro Folegatti, clinical research fellow at the University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Huawei is among a wide range of private investors set to get a financial shot in the arm should the Oxford coronavirus vaccine succeed, it has emerged.

The Chinese tech giant was recently banned from Britain’s 5G network over security concerns, but an investigation by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) found that Huawei is also linked to the vaccine project, alongside Google’s investment arm and two of the professors leading the research.

The Oxford team are front runners in the “race for a Covid-19 vaccine”, with the 900-year-old university’s Jenner Institute “competing against a number of large, publicly traded pharmaceutical companies”, says the New York City-based newspaper.

But exactly which private investors are in line to win big financial rewards from the university researchers’ work?

Vaccitech

“Oxford’s researchers are encouraged to form companies to commercialise their work,” The Times reports. Two of the leading scientists now working on the vaccine project, Sarah Gilbert and Adrian Hill, did just that in 2016, when they co-founded Vaccitech.

Today, the pair are reported to own about 10% of the company, which has been valued at around $86m (£66m). Asked by the newspaper about her financial stake in the company, Professor Gilbert said she was “concentrating on the vaccine trials”.

Vaccitech’s “technology is integral to the Oxford jab and the government has invested about £5m”, which means the UK authorities should also receive a cut of the revenues if the vaccine is successfully brought to market, The Times adds.

The firm’s chief executive, Bill Enright, told the WSJ that Vaccitech and its investors would receive a “big chunk of the royalties from a successful vaccine as well as ‘milestone’ payments, but only after the pandemic is declared over”.

Oxford Sciences Innovation (OSI)

Vaccitech’s largest shareholder is OSI, a company linked to Oxford University that led the efforts to raise the cash for the Covid vaccine research.

OSI owns a 46% stake in Vaccitech and “has raised around £600m from outside investors”, the WSJ reports, citing investor documents and people close to both firms.

The outside investors reportedly include the Wellcome Trust; Temasek Holdings, which is owned by the Singapore government; GV, an investment company owned by Google’s parent company; and Fosun Pharma, a Chinese drugmaker best known in the UK for owning Wolverhampton Wanderers football club.

Huawei

Despite having recently been banned from any involvement in the building of the UK’s 5G network, Huawei has retained a 0.7% cent stake in OSI, according to the WSJ.

The investment was “made in October 2018, before Oxford in January 2019 said it wouldn’t accept any more money from the Chinese telecom giant”, the paper reports.

A Huawei spokesperson told the WSJ that the company “owns stakes in a range of tech and innovation partners around the world”. Meanwhile, Jim Wilkinson, OSI’s interim chief executive, said the Chinese firm “has no special access to information” about the project.

Braavos Capital

OSI’s biggest investor is a firm started last year by Andre Crawford-Brunt, a former Deutsche Bank global chief. “Braavos now has a nearly 20% share of OSI,” says the WSJ, citing people familiar with the firms. And “through its stake in OSI, Braavos holds about 9% of Vaccitech”.

Astrazeneca

The university team are developing the vaccine alongside the global pharmaceutical giant.

But John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford and one of the architects of the partnership, told The Times that “for the pandemic we’ve said we’re not taking any royalties and Astrazeneca are saying they’re not making any money”.

However, should there prove to be a market for regular vaccinations against coronavirus in the future, “there is some money to be made”, he added.

Astrazeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot told Bloomberg TV last week that the company could make a “reasonable profit” in the developed world from its involvement in the vaccine development and distribution.

Oxford University’s history students have been lectured by their professors for treating certain social groups with “patronising disdain”.

History dons said students had referred to the North as “backwards” and Irish people as “tribal” in exams.

Answers on the role of women “produced some bad answers” including essays which “implied that the only women with any agency were those who became queens regnant”, reports The Telegraph. Professors complained that students’ answers on British social history during the Early Modern period were “remarkably bad”.

And they complained that, of the students who took a paper in medieval Christendom and its neighbours, only 13 out of nearly 200 essays were on the role of women or gender, reports Fr24 News.

“The overwhelming majority of essays, that is, the other 185 essays, barely mentioned women,” examiners said. “Many exam scripts did not mention women once. The world of EWH2 seems to be a world in which only men are worth studying and writing about, that is, provided they were not slaves or serfs.”

The history students’ essays on class in modern and Victorian Britain were “particularly poor” with students showing “very little understanding of what class was”.

Even when students did examine the role of women, they took an “old-fashioned view” in which women’s lives were “determined by patriarchy unless they were Eleanor of Aquitaine or Matilda of Tuscany”. The remarks were made in examiner reports for preliminary exams.

Examiners warned that this should “worry everyone teaching the paper and everyone taking the paper”.

Oxford students have called for departments to diversify curricula and reading lists in recent weeks. “Students studying Politics, History, English, Philosophy, Linguistics, and Music... are pushing for better Black and minority ethnic representation on reading lists and to decolonise the focus of each course,” says The Oxford Student.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph

on the PM’s ‘command-and-control model’

Will Boris Johnson learn the real lesson of his first year in office?

“Earlier this week, Johnson spoke to a private meeting of Tory MPs, the first proper meeting since the crisis. They left feeling inspired and invigorated, as if they finally had their boss back. At Ronald Reagan’s funeral, Margaret Thatcher saluted his ability to pursue the heaviest of causes with a lightness of spirit and to embody what she called ‘the great cause of cheering us all up’. This is the Boris speciality, precisely what the Government and the country needs – more than almost anything else – right now. When he was in intensive care that night, his colleagues were terrified – for him and for the Government. If he went, they asked, who would follow? There was no answer. There still isn’t. What’s needed is a prime minister back in the saddle, with a Cabinet he trusts, pointing to a clear way out of a big mess. That’s precisely the sort of Government he promised a year ago. It’s his best hope now.”

2. Jess Phillips, Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley, in The Independent

on who is really in charge in Downing Street

Boris Johnson thinks he’s a comedian. There’s nothing funny about his lack of leadership

“A year of Boris Johnson is a difficult thing to judge. In normal times it probably wouldn’t be, but we are, in case you hadn’t noticed, in the grip of a global pandemic. It is hard to look at the situation that the country is in and see if it is better, worse or the same as a year ago, when everything has changed. I won’t try to critique the state of the economy (bad) or how things feel on the ground in the community (bad) in a Boris Britain because not even his harshest critic could blame a pandemic on him. So instead I will judge him on his performance as prime minister against things that other prime ministers had to deal with, and how well he has handled the crisis. The two are inextricably linked. I am a lively sort; I like an off-the-cuff gag. I don’t take myself too seriously and no one would describe me as spick and span, so you might think that I would like the blustering scruffy style of the prime minister. However, I find it repellent.”

3. Iain Martin in The Times

on looking on the positive side

Britain’s hand is stronger than doomsters think

“Have you heard the one about Britain’s response to Covid-19 being world class? Tyler Cowen, an American economist, not a comedian, this week made the case for positivity about our performance since the pandemic struck. For daring to suggest that Britain might not be irretrievably doomed, he was greeted with incredulity and more than a little mockery on social media... [But] you don’t need to be a jingoistic proponent of daft British exceptionalism to see that he has a point. Other countries are making advances too, but Britain’s performance has clearly been remarkable. On treatment, Oxford University played a leading role in establishing that dexamethasone, a cheap corticosteroid, reduces deaths in patients most ill with Covid-19... If the progress continues, it offers the tantalising prospect of Britain being among the first countries to begin vaccinating its population.”

4. Martin Kettle in The Guardian

on threats to British democracy

The Russia report reveals that MI5 and MI6 have lost their way

“The big reveal in the Russia report is about Britain, not Russia. It’s that shortsighted British politicians have encouraged this to happen. It’s that UK intelligence agencies chose to watch from the sidelines while it went on. In the report’s three key phrases, the agencies regarded the defence of Britain’s democracy as too much of a ‘hot potato’ to intervene; they were so busy on anti-terrorist work that they ‘took their eye off the ball’; and this all happened because the government in general, not just the agencies, fostered a ‘somewhat laissez-faire policy approach’ to Russia. This failure is crucial. First, because it says the UK’s intelligence agencies were not focused on hostile threats for which there was already clear public evidence. And, second, because it suggests uncertainty within government about the agencies’ proper purposes, which in the end prevented them from doing their job.”

5. Michelle Cottle in The New York Times

on who has the ear of the Democratic candidate

The Battle for Joe Biden

“Looking to get a sense of how Mr. Biden’s governing vision is shaping up, I spent several weeks talking with his advisers, his allies, his critics and other party players. I wanted to know how the rolling crises have, for instance, impacted his search for the perfect running mate - the big reveal of which is expected any day now! - as well as how various policy proposals are being revised and expanded. It was clear that, fundamentally, Joe is gonna be Joe. But he recognizes the need to respond to all the turbulence - and if there’s one thing Team Biden has a surfeit of, it’s people looking to influence how he does that... With Mr. Biden having spent the last half-century collecting friends, aides and advisers, not to mention this campaign’s fast-growing official staff, the org chart for Team Biden can be hard to decipher. His inner circle is defined differently depending on whom you ask, and even reasonably senior staffers aren’t always clear about who does what. But whether you think in terms of concentric circles or Venn diagrams or pyramids of power, there are legions of people offering counsel.”

Scientists have taken a leap forward in the race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine as initial trials suggest that an Oxford University-developed jab may provide a “double defence” against the coronavirus.

A senior source on the project told The Telegraph that blood samples taken from volunteers in the first phase of human testing indicate that the vaccine stimulates the body to produce both antibodies and “killer” T-cells.

The trial involved about 1,000 volunteers, who are “are understood to have shown encouraging levels of neutralising antibodies, thought to be important in protecting against viral infection”, says The Times.

“No serious side-effects” were reported, the newspaper adds, although as The Telegraph points out, “further work will be needed” to ensure that “the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine is safe”.

“The team is also evaluating the level of dose needed to produce an effective response,” according to The Telegraph.

“I can tell you that we now know the Oxford vaccine covers both bases - it produces both a T-cell and an antibody response,” the inside source told the paper. “It’s the combination of these two that will hopefully keep people safe. So far, so good. It’s an important moment. But we still have a long way to go.”

Another source close to the team confirmed that the presence of both antibodies and T-cells could act as a “double defence” against Covid-19.

Researchers have not yet proved conclusively that the combined immune response is enough to combat infection, but had the vaccine not produced both T-cells and antibodies, “it would have been a setback” to the Oxford project, The Times says. A source told the paper that “the Oxford team are very much still in the fight”.

The full findings of the phase one Oxford trial will be published in The Lancet on Monday.

Appearing on ITV’s Peston last night, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that in the best-case scenario, the vaccine would be available later this year. But the jab is “more likely” be ready in 2021, he added.

However, hopes that the jab may be ready sooner have been raised by David Carpenter, chair of the Berkshire Research Ethics Committee, which approved the Oxford trial.

Carpenter told The Telegraph that the vaccine team were “absolutely on track”, adding: “Things might go wrong but the reality is that by working with a big pharma company, that vaccine could be fairly widely available around September and that is the sort of target they are working on.”

The vaccine development is being supported by the UK government and pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which has reached agreements to supply up to two billion doses worldwide.

AstraZeneca shares jumped by 5.5% yesterday after ITV political editor Robert Peston revealed that there would be “positive news soon” about the outcome of the initial trials.

Antibodies taken from the blood of llamas can be engineered to target the Covid-19 coronavirus to create a treatment that could save countless lives, new research suggests.

Scientists led by a team from Oxford University have tested the virus-fighting potential of antibodies from Fifi, a llama living in Reading, in laboratory trials.

Transfusions of antibody-rich blood plasma from recovered Covid-19 patients are already being trialled in hospitals across the UK, “but the new findings herald the prospect of a more potent and easily available treatment”, The Telegraph reports.

Llamas, camels and alpacas “naturally produce quantities of small antibodies with a simple structure, meaning they can be turned into nanobodies”, the newspaper explains. The researchers found that these nanobodies bind tightly to the spike protein of Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, which blocks and prevents the viral invader from entering human cells.

The team behind the study - outlined in a newly published paper in the journal Nature - hope that “llama-derived nanobodies could eventually be developed as a treatment for humans struck down with a severe case of Covid-19”, says the Daily Mail.

However, the research is still in a very early stage, with “academics at the Rosalind Franklin Institute at Oxford University condensing a process which would normally take almost a year into just 12 weeks”, the newspaper adds.

Study leader James Naismith, a professor of structural biology and director of the institute, said that the “nanobodies have the potential to be used in a similar way to convalescent serum, effectively stopping progression of the virus in patients who are ill”.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Sean O’Grady in The Independent

on plans to paint the PM’s plane

As Boris Johnson steps aboard the newly decorated Clown Force One, the world is laughing at Britain

“There was a time not so long ago when British diplomacy was an understated, dignified affair. The country had a reputation as a sensible place, run by sensible politicians; a nation that stood for tolerance and the shrewd pursuit of the national interest, its modern world-class industries enjoying easy access to the planet’s largest single market. A country with a generous, internationalist disposition and one that took it’s obligations in the world seriously – including to international development. We enjoy tradition, but it does not define us. All that. Now we’re a floating, flying museum piece, trying to sustain the trappings of global power and prestige but without the economic strength or diplomatic influence to back it up. It’s like when ‘Emperor’ Bokassa of the poverty-stricken Central African Republic spent a third of his country’s GDP in an absurd coronation ceremony. In our case... we’ve just got an old Etonian buffoon leading us into the second childhood of the British Empire, making meaningless speeches about putting a tiger in the tank and giving us back our mojo – and hoping that we can’t hear the rest of the world as it laughs at us.”

2. Joanna Williams, author of Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity, in The Times

on the fall of Rhodes and its aftershock

Oxford is tying itself in knots over racism

“The word trauma does a lot of work in universities today. Rhodes Must Fall campaigners tell us that walking past a statue is traumatic. Students in Bristol say that sitting in Colston Hall or the Wills Memorial Building is traumatic, even if the seats are plush and the lectures engaging. It is perilous to challenge this narrative of emotional breakdown. Back at Oxford, [vice-chancellor Louise] Richardson’s offer of marks for distress has not saved her from criticism at the hands of 14 of her university’s academics. She has been taken to task for ‘ventriloquising’ Nelson Mandela after claiming that he would not have wanted the statue of Cecil Rhodes to be taken down. Increasingly, it is knowledge that is considered trauma-inducing. Decolonising the curriculum has been all the rage for several years. For subjects like literature, politics and philosophy this initially meant little more than checking course content to ensure greater diversity... But decolonisers need to be honest: unless teaching time is increased, every new addition means an existing work is dropped. Most important of all, the basis for inclusion in the curriculum needs to be merit, irrespective of the skin colour of the thinker.”

3. Ian Cobain, author of The History Thieves: Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation, in The Guardian

on the destruction of Britain’s dark history

Lying about our history? Now that’s something Britain excels at

“It was inevitable that some would insist that ripping the statue of slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth and disposing of it in a harbour in Bristol was an act of historical revisionism; that others would argue that its removal was long overdue, and that the act itself was history in the making. After more statues were removed across the United States and Europe, Boris Johnson weighed in, arguing that ‘to tear [these statues] down would be to lie about our history’. But lying about our history - and particularly about our late-colonial history - has been a habit of the British state for decades. In 2013 I discovered that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office had been unlawfully concealing 1.2m historical files at a highly secure government compound at Hanslope Park, north of London... The operation - and its attempts to conceal and manipulate history in an attempt to sculpt an official narrative – speaks of a certain jitteriness on the part of the British state, as if it feared that interpretations of the past that were based upon its own records would find it difficult to celebrate the ‘greatness’ of British history.”

4. Ross Clark in The Daily Telegraph

on the panic around ‘so-called’ infection spikes

We shouldn’t work ourselves into a frenzy about the threat of any ‘second wave’

“Look around the countries and places most affected by the virus, on the other hand, and there is not the faintest sign of a second spike – in spite of lockdowns being eased. Britain, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, New York: in each case new cases continue to tail off, even though shops, schools and in many cases bars and restaurants have reopened. It adds credence to the case made by Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, and our own government’s scientific advisers who argued initially that it is futile trying to stop this virus altogether: somehow or other it will eventually manage to infect everyone who is susceptible to it, up to a point where a country or community has gained herd immunity. You can suppress for a time by closing down the economy and forcing everyone to stay at home, but you will forever be left fire-fighting as outbreaks occur.”

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5. Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times

on a panic triggered by delusion

When Antifa Hysteria Sweeps America

“I’ve occasionally encountered mass hysteria in other countries. In rural Indonesia, I once reported on a mob that was beheading people believed to be sorcerers, then carrying their heads on pikes. But I never imagined that the United States could plunge into such delirium. Antifa, short for anti-fascists, hasn’t killed anyone and appears to have been only a marginal presence in Black Lives Matter protests. None of those arrested on serious federal charges related to the unrest have been linked to antifa. Still, the movement has a mythic status in some right-wing narratives, and Trump and Fox News have hyped the threat. (The Seattle Times caught Fox faking photos to exaggerate unrest in Seattle.)... These antifa panics are where racism and hysteria intersect, in a nation that has more guns than people. They arise when a lying president takes every opportunity not to heal our national divisions but to stoke them, when people live in a news ecosystem that provides no reality check but inflames prejudices and feeds fears.”

In the past few months, doctors have experimented with countless drugs in a desperate attempt to save the lives of patients with Covid-19. Until now, there was little evidence that any of them made much difference.

Innovative ebola therapies and designer drugs for people with HIV are among the treatments that have been pressed into service - but a new trial has found that the most effective by far is a cheap 60-year-old steroid used to treat arthritis.

“Dexamethasone is the first drug anywhere in the world that’s been found to reduce mortality from Covid-19,” reports New Scientist.

Boris Johnson has hailed the discovery as “a remarkable British scientific achievement”, while World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus described it as a “lifesaving scientific breakthrough”.

How effective is dexamethasone?

According to researchers, a ten-day course of dexamethasone was found to reduce deaths from Covid-19 by a third among people on ventilators and by a fifth among patients receiving oxygen but not ventilation.

“Half of all Covid patients who require a ventilator do not survive, so cutting that risk by a third would have a huge impact,” says BBC health correspondent Fergus Walsh.

In response to the findings, the UK government yesterday announced that the steroid was being made the standard treatment for Covid-19 in NHS hospitals.

How does it work?

Dexamethasone, which was developed in 1957, “is used to reduce inflammation in various conditions, including skin diseases, allergies and asthma”, say New Scientist.

According to ITV News, “the drug is also used in end-of-life care and can work to prevent the immune system from destroying blood platelets in people with blood disorders”.

These established uses may help to explain why the steroid is effective against Covid-19. The virus can cause inflammation of tissue in the lung and, in extreme cases, a “cytokine storm” - a dangerous overreaction of the immune system.

Dexamethasone “appears to help stop some of the damage that can happen when the body’s immune system goes into overdrive as it tries to fight off coronavirus”, says the BBC.

However, the drug does not have any beneficial effect for milder cases of the virus, nor does it prevent infection.

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How much does it cost?

Dexamethasone is both cheap and widely available.

At 50p per dose, “it costs in the order of £5 for a complete course of treatment in the NHS and substantially less than $1 in other parts of the world”, says Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford University who worked on the drug trial.

“The government has been stockpiling dexamethasone since March in case the trials were successful,” says The Telegraph. “There are already supplies for 200,000 patients, and enough to cope with any second wave of the virus.”

How was the breakthrough made?

In most of the world’s hospitals, the early days of the pandemic saw a wide variety of drugs being “given to those most in need and administered on an ad hoc basis while the doctors hoped”, says The Times science editor Tom Whipple. “Patients lived, patients died. And, afterwards, we were none the wiser.”

The NHS, however, took a different approach. “In a logistical feat no less impressive than the Nightingale hospitals, more than 10,000 patients across the country were recruited by Oxford University into a proper trial.”

Other treatments assessed for their potential to treat Covid-19 include convalescent blood plasma collected from patients who have recovered from the virus, as well as remdesivir and the malaria drug chloroquine.

Remdesivir has been found to increase the speed of recovery in some patients, but has no significant effect on mortality rates. Chloroquine, a favourite of US President Donald Trump, was found to do more harm than good.

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The public’s trust in the UK media has fallen dramatically during the past five years, especially among left-wing voters, new research has found.

Just 15% of left-leaning voters say they trust most news most of the time, down from 46% as recently as 2015, according to the latest digital news report from Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

This compares with 36% of right-leaning voters, among whom trust levels have fallen from 58%.

The rapid decline has come amid “enormous growth of social media audiences, rounds of cuts at almost every major news outlet, and strong criticism of media coverage of issues such as Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party”, says The Guardian.

“Britain now ranks below the likes of the US and Hong Kong when it comes to public trust in the media,” the newspaper adds.

“Even the most trusted brands like the BBC are seen by many as pushing or suppressing agendas, especially over polarising issues like Brexit,” the report’s authors say. “Trust in the news has fallen over 20 percentage points since 2015.”

A “silent majority” of Britons strongly want the news to be presented in a “neutral and detached” manner, they continue.

The study also found that photo-sharing app Instagram is set to overtake Twitter as a news source, the BBC reports.

Use of Instagram for news has doubled since 2018, with a quarter of people aged between 18 and 24 using the platform to get updates about the Covid-19 coronavirus.

However, the researchers also found that “social media platforms were also among the least-trusted sources” of news, the broadcaster notes.

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Which UK media publications have the widest reach? (% weekly usage)

1. BBC - 45%
2. The Guardian - 18%
3. MailOnline - 15%
4. Sky News - 10%
5. Local or regional news website - 9%
6. The Telegraph - 7%
7. HuffPost - 6%
8. The Independent/i100 - 6%
9. Buzzfeed - 6%
10. The Sun - 6%
11. Yahoo News - 6%
12. MSN News - 6%
13. Metro - 5%
14. Daily Mirror - 4%
15. Lad Bible - 4%
16. The Times - 4%

(Source: Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020)

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Jemima Lewis in The Daily Telegraph

on the need for black and white answers in 21st century politics

Nuance is no good in this age of self-righteous identity politics

“The word ‘gaslighting’ derives from a 1938 play by Patrick Hamilton about a sinister and controlling husband, but has been popularised more recently as part of the new lexicon of social justice. It means to manipulate a person using psychological trickery until they begin to question their own sanity. It’s funny, because I feel increasingly gaslit by the very generation that so rightly abhors this behaviour. Like the befuddled wife in Hamilton’s play, I am almost afraid to trust the evidence of my own senses. Things that once seemed, and still seem, self-evident facts have now been recast as faulty thinking, with no room for nuance or disagreement. Anyone who persists in clinging to wrong thoughts is ridiculed, threatened, berated and ostracised: a perfect template of the gaslighter’s art.”

2. Clemence Michallon in The Independent

on the issues J.K. Rowling failed to mention

J.K. Rowling, predatory men and the nuance we're all missing out

“Predatory men aren’t waiting for anyone’s permission. That’s… kind of their thing, really. In the hypothetical world described by Rowling, predatory men are eagerly waiting to be granted access to bathrooms to finally assault as many women and girls as they want. But here’s the thing: if someone’s predatory tendencies are such that they have decided to attack women and/or girls in public bathrooms, what makes us think that they’re currently being held back by some kind of rule keeping them out of the premises? This makes no sense. It also has nothing - absolutely nothing - to do with trans people or their rights... In the meantime, I will say this: trans rights are human rights. Someone’s struggle doesn’t come at the expense of your own. And for heaven’s sake, let people use the bathroom in peace.”

3. Philip Collins in The Times

on tips from abroad for the prime minister

How Boris Johnson can fix the schools crisis

“The process of recovery needs some dramatic and specific attention. In some cases, the rules about a child repeating a year could be relaxed. It may be better for some children simply to begin the year over again. As unpopular as testing is, it is vital. All children who are beginning secondary school in the autumn should be tested, to assess what maths and English help they may need. Once the need is defined, the best way to help is to give pupils individual tuition and mentoring. The government should establish a national tutoring service with help targeted in maths and in English, offered in the final year of primary school and the first years of secondary school, the critical phase for learning. Lee Elliot Major, professor of social mobility at Exeter University, has shown that good tuition can boost a child’s learning by the equivalent of five months during a single academic year... It is astonishing that, months into this crisis, there is no evident plan. The education secretary seems to have spent lockdown sitting at home alone doing nothing more than cause trouble for himself. It’s not that hard to work out what must be done and not impossible to do it.”

4. Simukai Chigudu, associate professor of African politics at the University of Oxford, in The Guardian

on the years-long campaign to topple a controversial statue

As one of Oxford’s few black professors, let me tell you why I care about Rhodes

“[Cecil] Rhodes’ imperialism gave rise to a pattern of settler colonialism in Southern Africa predicated on racial domination in political, economic and social spheres. In Rhodesia, 8 million disenfranchised black people eked out a living at subsistence level or below it, while 250,000 white people, barely 3% of the population, owned more than half of the country’s available land, and virtually all of its business and industry, before independence from colonial rule in 1980. Education, healthcare and housing were all segregated, with white people enjoying levels equivalent to those in western Europe or the United States. Rhodes’ statue, then, is no mere physical artefact. It is imbued with a noxious history. Its presence at Oriel College reframes Rhodes’ conquest as munificence to the university and fails to recognise the exploitation of African labour from which his estate was built. It belongs in a museum, where it can be properly historicised. More importantly, in 2015 and now, the calls for the removal of such statues open up discussions about how we talk about the dynamics of race and racism, inclusion and exclusion, and being and belonging in Britain.”

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5. David Studdert, Matthew Miller and Garen Wintemute in The New York Times

on a post-corona crisis that has been brewing for decades

Coronavirus Could Make America’s Gun Problem Even Deadlier

“Millions of Americans have experienced the coronavirus pandemic directly, as they or their loved ones suffered through infection. But for most of us, the experience is defined by weeks and months on end stuck at home. The shut-ins are testing the safety of our home environments. Stress and isolation combined with another feature of American life - easy access to firearms - could form a deadly brew... Several myths cloud public understanding of the connection between guns and suicide. Perhaps the most pernicious is the idea that people who really want to end their lives will find a way to do it, making the presence or absence of a gun somewhat irrelevant. Decades of research on suicide tell a different story. Suicide attempts are often impulsive, prompted by fleeting crises. A vast majority of people who attempt suicide survive and do not go on to die in a future suicide. But whether attempters get that second chance at life depends a lot on the method they use, which in turn depends on what is readily at hand. Firearms afford few second chances. In sum, methods matter.”

The coronavirus outbreak has had a devastating impact on the UK’s economy, wellbeing and some of its most famous institutions.

Accompanying the airlines and high-street retailers facing permanent closure are historic football clubs, world-leading universities and celebrated centres of local culture.

Universities

Universities were forced to close their doors in April, and many may not reopen for the rest of the year.

Further education institutions will also be hit by a £2.6 billion shortfall over the next academic year because of the coronavirus outbreak, according to an analysis by London Economics for the University and College Union.

The report estimates that there will be a 47% fall in lucrative international student enrolment in the next academic year, costing the sector £1.5 billion, The Times Higher Education says.

Almost three-quarters of UK institutions will be left in a “critical financial position where income only just covers expenditure”, but all institutions will be hit in some way.

The University of Cambridge, one of the country’s leading universities, announced in May that it would be suspending all physical lectures for the entire 2020-21 academic year, with the only face-to-face teaching planned to happen on a 1:1 or small group basis, reports the BBC.

Football clubs

English football chiefs and MPs have warned that clubs are facing a massive cash hole as a result of the pandemic, and many could be forced to fold. MP Damian Collins, formerly chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee, said that the government must help support lower league clubs, or see them collapse.

“In the next few weeks, we could see five to 10 EFL League clubs going into administration,” Collins told Sky Sports News in late May. “We saw the outcry last summer when two clubs, Bury and Bolton, were in trouble. If that happens there will be huge public demand to do something.

“Without the government stepping in, those clubs could go to the wall and there maybe others that follow.”

Despite some football restarting this month, there is a possibility that fans will not be allowed to attend matches until next year - starving clubs of, what is for many, their main income source, says the BBC.

“I can't see clubs offering contracts in that period,” said Alex Rodman, midfielder at League One side Bristol Rovers. He told BBC Radio 5 Live: “A lot [of the 1,400 players] could be lost to the game, which would be a massive shame.

“It’s a horrible situation for them to be in - to think that they need to go and possibly find another job that they maybe haven't known for the last six, eight or 10 years just to support their families - but it is unprecedented times and I'm sure there's many other people in the country who are in the same position.”

Theatres

Coronavirus has threatened the entire theatre industry, closing down everything from local amateur dramatics clubs to big West End productions.

British theatre is “on the brink of total collapse”, writes Sonia Friedman, the producer behind West End hits such as The Book of Mormon and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in The Telegraph.

“Without an urgent government rescue package, 70% of our performing arts companies will be out of business before the end of this year,” she wrote.

“More than 1,000 theatres around the country will be insolvent and might shut down for good.”

Even the biggest productions and theatres are not safe. London’s Globe theatre called for the government to step up with urgent funding “to shore up our cultural landscape” in May, warning it may otherwise face financial ruin.

The story of the Globe is particularly stark, says The Guardian. Despite its international success, attracting more than a million visitors annually, it may be forced to close without support.

“Despite being well-managed, well governed, and – crucially – able to operate without public subsidy, we will not be able to survive this crisis,” the Globe evidence states. That would be “a tragedy for the arts, for the legacy of England’s most famous writer, but also for the country, if our iconic site on Bankside stands empty”.

“We are a model for the non-subsidised arts sector… but in the face of a crisis such as this one, there is no mechanism to help us. This has been financially devastating and could even be terminal.”

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Cinemas

Like theatres, cinemas have suffered from the lockdown, and are expected to be among the last public spaces to open in July - though drive-in cinemas can open from next week.

Cineworld - the second-largest cinema operator in the world - has said it has found the pandemic “extremely challenging”, and smaller competitors have had a far rougher time, says ITV News.

A survey by the UK’s Independent Cinema Office found almost 40% of employers had made or expected to make redundancies, says the broadcaster.

The popular Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle is one independent cinema that is relying on donations to stay open.

CEO Holli Keeble told the BFI that “the current situation has left us exposed…when our doors closed in March, our income simply stopped, but many of our running costs haven’t”.

When a statue of 17th century slave-trader Edward Colston was dragged from its plinth on Sunday, the manner of its removal was criticised more than the motives of the protesters who carried out the act.

Conservative MP Caroline Nokes voiced the feelings of many in saying that while she had no quarrel with Colston’s “terribly symbolic” tumbling into Bristol Harbour, a more orderly approach would have been preferable.

“If we’re going to remove these historic artefacts then we should do it carefully,” she told ITV’s Good Morning Britain. “We should have a discussion about what happens to them next, how can we continue to learn from that history.”

Now, that discussion is in full swing.

More than 100 Labour councils have pledged to review the “appropriateness” of monuments in their areas, with London Mayor Sadiq Khan launching a “diversity commission” in the capital. And local Conservative leaders are under growing pressure to follow their lead.

Meanwhile, Black Lives Matter protesters have drawn up a “target list” of 60 statues across the UK, on a Topple the Racists website, the Daily Mail reports.

“Among them are leaders who held undeniably racist views and others who performed evil acts against people of colour,” says the newspaper. “But others also played a leading role shaping the cities and institutions that form modern-day Britain.”

For Alex Massie in The Times, the stumbling block is that there are “so many candidates” for removal. “Our great cities are stuffed with monuments to imperial conquest and many of our finest streets were built from the proceeds of exploitation and misery,” he points out.

Despite the toppling of Colston’s statue, the former slave trader “still has a significant presence” in Bristol, where “several buildings, schools and organisations are named after him”, says The Voice’s Vic Motune.

Yet total erasure is no solution, says Massie.

“Tear it down completely and you wipe it from the record,” he argues. Instead, we should build a “long overdue” Museum of Empire, to provide a new home for old statues, and an “unflinching yet dispassionate” look at Britain’s imperial past.

Historian David Olusoga agrees. A public monument says “this man was a great man who did great things”, he told the BBC. Statues like those of Colston should now be “put in a museum which is where, after all, we remember history properly”.

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Three monumental arguments

Robert Milligan

A statue of Milligan, “who owned two sugar plantations and 526 slaves in Jamaica” when he died in 1809, was removed from outside the Museum of London Docklands building on Tuesday, the BBC reports.

Museum bosses said the monument was “part of the ongoing problematic regime of white-washing history, which disregards the pain of those who are still wrestling with the remnants of the crimes Milligan committed against humanity”.

However, the removal has proved controversial, with critics calling for a boycott of Sainsbury’s, following reports that the supermarket chain funds the museum and “was responsible for the decision” to axe Milligan, says the London Evening Standard.

Cecil Rhodes

Oxford University’s Oriel College is resisting renewed demands to take down a statue of imperialist Rhodes (pictured above), who has long been a target of campaigners. As prime minister of the Cape Colony in what is now South Africa, Rhodes presided over an explicitly racist government.

Oxford City Council has now written to the university “inviting” it to apply for permission to get rid of the statue. And on Tuesday night, “about 1,000 people gathered outside the college to demand its removal”, The Times reports.

But Oxford vice-chancellor Chris Patten has defended the monument. “If it’s good enough for [Nelson] Mandela, it’s good enough for me,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

In 2003, the first post-apartheid president of South Africa merged his charitable activities with those of Rhodes’ estate to form the Mandela Rhodes Foundation. It was, Mandela said, “a symbolic moment in the closing of the historic circle”.

William Gladstone

Liverpool University yesterday removed the name of 19th century PM Gladstone from a student halls of residence.

Although “Gladstone is best known for his support for free trade and for home rule for Ireland”, his merchant father owned 2,500 slaves at the time of abolition in 1833, reports the Liverpool Echo.

In a letter to the university’s vice-chancellor, students said that the former British leader’s “views on slavery followed in continuity with the views of his father”.

However, The Guardian writer Patrick Wintour insists that Gladstone’s attitudes to slavery evolved. “By 1850 he said slave trade was by far the foulest crime that taints the history of mankind,” Wintour tweeted on Tuesday night.

The late Liberal statesman has also found an ally in Conservative MP Bim Afolami, who said the renaming decision was “completely nuts”.

The UK’s universities have slipped down an international league table for a fourth consecutive year to record the country’s worst-ever performance.

Almost three-quarters of British universities were downgraded in the rankings, compiled by data and research group QS. Oxford University fell from fourth to fifth place, while University College London slid two places to tenth.

Imperial College London was the only UK institution in the top 20 to be promoted, rising one spot to eighth place. Cambridge University held on to the No.7 spot, and the University of Edinburgh stayed in 20th.

So why the slide?

British universities have been hit by “a triple threat of Brexit, tightening budgets and unchecked expansion”, says The Guardian.

According to Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, the “crisis” has been driven by a lack of investment.

“The ratio between staff and students is moving in the wrong direction and will continue to do so most likely,” he told The Telegraph.

“Every member of staff is dealing with more students. That risks each student getting less personal attention. This is due to the financial resources, with staff costing a lot of money.”

Ben Sowter, director of research at QS, says the funding cuts “reflect the increasing competitiveness of the global higher education landscape”.

“Concerted efforts to ensure that Britain continues to remain an attractive place for talented academics and students to study in the future, and a national desire to continue collaborating with our European and global partners on transformative research projects, would serve the British higher education sector well,” he argues.

In April, UK university vice-chancellors warned that their institutions were likely to face “financial failure” in the wake of the coronavirus crisis without emergency government funding of at least £2bn.

Sowter believes that Brexit has also been a significant factor in the decline of British universities, noting that their performance in league tables has trended “consistently downwards” since the UK voted Leave in 2016.

“Numerous sources – from Ucas to the Higher Education Policy Institute – have drawn the same connection between Brexit and lower British appeal among the global international student community,” he said.

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Still, rankings themselves should be taken with a grain of salt, says The Australian newspaper’s higher education editor Tim Dodd.

“Students, and their parents… should note that gaming the rankings has become a speciality in itself and universities spend a lot of time and effort trying to do that,” Dodd says.

“In other words, a ranking tells you little more than how successful a university has been in playing the rankings game.”

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UK university rankings in the latest QS table

Oxford - 5th (4th last year)Cambridge - 7th (7th)Imperial College London - 8th (9th)University College London - 10th (8th)Edinburgh - 20th (20th)Manchester - 27th (27th)King’s College London - 31st (33rd)London School of Economics - 49th (44th)University of Bristol - 58th (49th)University of Warwick - 62nd (62nd)

The Oxford Covid vaccine has shown a strong immune response in adults in their 60s and 70s, further boosting hopes that a successful vaccine could be just around the corner.

Researchers say phase two findings, based on 560 healthy adult volunteers, are “encouraging”, the BBC reports. Larger trials to establish whether the immune response stops people developing Covid-19 are expected to deliver results in the next few weeks.

Two other vaccines - one develope by Pfizer and BioNTech and another by Moderna - have already demonstrated effective protection.

Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford

The Oxford Covid vaccine, long thought to be one of the leading Covid-19 candidates, has been found to trigger a robust immune response in healthy adults aged 56 to 69 and over 70, two of the most vulnerable demographics.

The trial demonstrated similar immune responses across all three age groups studied: 18 to 55, 56 to 69 and 70 and over.

The drug is based on an adenovirus - a mild virus found in chimpanzees - which has been modified to carry a spike protein from the new coronavirus. Harmless in isolation, it will prime the immune system to fight off similar proteins, allowing it to defend itself against Covid-19.

“We anticipate efficacy read-outs from phase 2/3 trials between now and the end of the year,” a spokesperson for manufacturer AstraZeneca said. “If approved within countries, doses of the potential vaccine could be available for use before the end of the year.”

Moderna vaccine

In an interim analysis published on Monday, US pharmaceutical firm Moderna revealed that its vaccine has an efficacy of 94.5%.

The results showed that only five of the 95 subjects who tested positive during trials had been given the vaccine, compared with 90 who had not been given any treatment.

There were around 30,000 people in the study in total, each receiving either two doses of the jab or two placebos.

Moderna will now apply to the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, for emergency-use authorisation in the coming weeks, The Guardian says.

Moderna also said that the vaccine has been shown to last for up to 30 days in household fridges and at room temperature for up to 12 hours. This suggests it can be “stored and transported much more easily than a Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine”, Sky News reports.

It also remains stable at -20C, equal to most household or medical freezers, for up to six months.

Pfizer vaccine

The German firm Pfizer, which hopes to have a vaccine out by Christmas, had earlier predicted a working vaccine by the end of October.

Despite missing this deadline, the company has taken a significant lead in the race to develop a vaccine with the announcement that the first interim results in large-scale trials show the treatment is 90% effective.

According to The Guardian, the firm’s analysis “shows a much better performance than most experts had hoped for and brings into view a potential end” to the pandemic.

The paper adds that the company has claimed that there have been “no serious side-effects while the high percentage of those protected makes the findings especially compelling”.

The vaccine has been tested on 43,500 people in six countries, with no safety concerns having been raised. The developers described it as a "great day for science and humanity".

BCG vaccine

Scientists in India say the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, which primarily provides protection against tuberculosis (TB), is also beneficial against coronavirus disease (Covid-19) among elderly people.

This vaccination has long been known to “enhance the innate immune response” to a range of other infections, including viruses that attack the respiratory system, says a research article published in The Lancet.

As trials were held in the Netherlands and Australia to evaluate its performance, a paper in the journal Nature, Professor Mihai Netea, who is leading the Dutch research, said that even if BCG doesn’t offer comprehensive protection against the coronavirus, it “may well be a bridge to a specific Covid-19 vaccine”.

Chinese vaccines

State media in China says hundreds of thousands of people have already received Covid-19 vaccine shots.

“Beijing’s government, including its military and several state-backed firms, has committed hundreds of millions of dollars and cleared regulatory barriers to accelerate research and development,” The Wall Street Journal says.

The result is no fewer than five potential vaccines. All use the traditional approach of injecting a weakened or deactivated virus to stimulate immunity.

Any found to be effective will be widely distributed within China and around the world, the government says - but Beijing may face some reluctance from overseas buyers.

“China has suffered from years of scandals – counterfeits run rampant and expired vaccines have been tampered with and repackaged,” The Telegraph reports. “Poor refrigeration in storage and transport have also ruined vaccines.” Even among Chinese consumers, the newspaper adds, “those who can afford it opt for imported over domestic vaccines”.

Coronavirus has triggered a financial crisis in universities that will upend student life, change the face of education, distort priorities for scientific research and damage local economies, according to economists and education experts.

Tuition fees - currently capped at £9,250 a year in England - are universities’ primary source of income, yet “they have no idea how many of the class of 2020 will show up in September”, says The Times. Reflecting the widespread mood, one 18-year-old told the newspaper that he would “prefer to have a gap year badly disrupted than my first year at university”.

Indeed, “a fifth of prospective students say they may defer their studies for a year”, creating a “potential £760m funding black hole”, the Daily Mail reports.

And the financial hit will be even greater if British universities are also shunned by foreign students, collectively worth £7bn in income. “Survey evidence suggests only 39% of Chinese students, the biggest group from overseas by far, are likely to come to the UK as planned,” according to The Times.

Campus life on hold

Students who do enroll next academic year are unlikely to receive a traditional university education - or to enjoy the typical social experience.

Half of the 24 elite Russell Group universities “said they had either already moved online or were planning for a ‘blended’ approach mixing online and face-to-face tuition next year” when quizzed by the i news site about their response to the pandemic.

Cambridge and Oxford are among the institutions planning to replace lectures with online courses, although both will continue to offer small-group tuition in person.

Other changes are likely to be extensive. At the University of Bolton, “students will walk through airport-style temperature scanners to get into all university buildings, where hand sanitiser stations will await them”, the i reports. Bicycles will also be provided so that students can avoid public transport.

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But despite such strategies, Zamzam Ibrahim, president of the National Union of Students, has questioned whether students will be getting value for money. This year’s students have already been sold short, she claims, with a recent NUS survey revealing that many felt the “quality of education has gone down massively”.

Ibrahim is calling on universities to “allow students to resit the year or reimburse their tuition fees to compensate for the disruption caused by the pandemic”, The Telegraph reports.

Academic freedom in peril

Refunds appear to be an unlikely prospect, however. Universities “are now in real crisis”, writes Glen O’Mara, a history professor at Oxford Brookes University, in an article for The Guardian. “If they don’t get more help, some of them could well fold in the near future.”

So far, the government has resisted calls for financial aid, which leaves “a lot of jobs at risk, both in universities and in the wider local and regional economies where universities are based”, Gavan Conlon of London Economics told the newspaper’s education editor Richard Adams.

A more profound consequence could be direct state influence over how universities are run.

“It’s a case of not letting a good crisis go to waste,” an unnamed senior university figure told The Times. “The government has grown weary of a sector refusing to reform itself. Now it has the chance to speed it up and orchestrate it from the centre.”

Ministers have already established a task force to decide which research projects, courses and universities could receive additional state funding, with priority to be given to those deemed to be contributing most to society and the economy.

But that, says The Times, is “code for ditching arts and other courses ministers consider to be poor value for money and refocusing on degrees to serve the local jobs market or post-coronavirus recovery”.

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The University of Oxford has dismissed a student union motion to ban discriminatory material from its reading lists.

In a statement, the university said that while students might be “confronted with views that some find unsettling, extreme or offensive”, free speech was the “lifeblood of a university”, reports The Times.

The Oxford University Student Union passed a motion last week condemning “hateful material” in mandatory teaching, as university newspaper The Oxford Student reported at the time.

The policy - titled “Protection of Transgender, Non-binary, Disabled, Working Class and Women Students from Hatred in University Contexts” - was put forward by Alex Illsley, co-chair of Oxford’s LGBTQ+ campaign.

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But while students backed the proposed ban, many Oxford academics criticised the motion in scathing posts on social media.

Richard Dawkins, an emeritus fellow at the university, tweeted that the campaigners were “sanctimoniously woke busybodies”, adding that “this juvenile nonsense is not only incredibly foolish, it is pathetically derivative (from America). Glad to say Oxford will have no truck with it.”

Professor Jeff McMahan, an expert in moral philosophy, told the university’s new independent newspaper The Oxford Blue that the SU motion was a “grave mistake”.

“The only way to deal with arguments with conclusions with which one disagrees is to determine why they are wrong and to explain it to others – that is, to refute them by counterargument,” he said.

The mysterious disappearance of priceless fragments of ancient biblical papyrus has led to the arrest of an Oxford University classics professor on suspicion of theft and fraud.

Dirk Obbink, an associate professor in papyrology and Greek literature at the university, was detained by officers from Thames Valley police.

The arrest concerns the alleged theft of papyrus fragments that had been housed at the Sackler Library in Oxford.

The Guardian reports that Obbink, 63, has denied any wrongdoing, and has said the claims are a “malicious attempt” to harm his reputation and damage his career.

Obbink was first accused of stealing and selling the ancient Greek texts written on fragments of papyrus in November 2019, according to the BBC. Obbink was suspended from duties at Oxford in October 2019, The Guardian adds.

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According to university newspaper The Oxford Blue, which first reported the arrest, 13 of the missing pieces have been located in the Museum of the Bible in Washington and another six in the collection of a man in California. Both are returning these fragments to Oxford.

The Museum of the Bible was founded in 2017 by the Green family, billionaire American evangelical Christians who own a chain of craft stores.

Carl Graves, director of Oxford’s Egypt Exploration Society, said the society had given statements to the police investigation about what had gone missing.

Graves said: “These are early fragments of the gospels or biblical fragments. They are testament to Egypt’s early Christian heritage and are early evidence of biblical scripture. We don’t value them monetarily but they are priceless and irreplaceable.”

The ancient Greek texts written on fragments of papyrus were originally found during the early 20th century in the Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus.

In a statement, Obbink previously told The Guardian: “The allegations made against me that I have stolen, removed or sold items owned by the Egypt Exploration Society collection at the University of Oxford are entirely false.

“I would never betray the trust of my colleagues and the values which I have sought to protect and uphold throughout my academic career in the way that has been alleged. I am aware that there are documents being used against me which I believe have been fabricated in a malicious attempt to harm my reputation and career.”

Students at Oxford University will replace clapping at student union events with “silent jazz hands” after concerns that applause could trigger anxiety.

Officials at the university’s student union say that clapping causes an “access issue” for some disabled students who have “anxiety disorders, sensory sensitivity and those who use hearing aids”.

Jazz hands - the waving of your hands around shoulder height - is a form used in sign language to signify applause.

The union’s welfare and equal opportunity officer, Roisin McCallion, said she proposed the motion to make the union’s democratic events “more accessible and inclusive for all, including people who suffer from anxiety”.

But her move has faced widespread condemnation. Broadcaster Piers Morgan said the union was populated by “imbeciles”, while Jeremy Vine posted a photograph of soldiers in the trenches during World War One, saying that they had managed to “ignore the difficulties caused by sudden noises 100 years ago”.

A former student told The Sun: “Oxford University Student Union is always seeking to be more accommodating. But this idea will not work and is completely ludicrous.”

This is not the first time that such a move has caused proposed. When students at the University of Manchester voted to ditch clapping and cheering at the union’s “democratic events” the story captured the attention of Jeb Bush, the brother of the former US president George W Bush. “Not cool, University of Manchester,” he said. “Not cool.”

Yahoo says that a condition called hyperacusis can make everyday sounds louder than they are for some. The NHS says that a hyperacusis sufferer’s relationships, work and “general wellbeing” can all be affected by the condition.

Deaf people can also face problems with applause because hearing aids can pick up on the sound, turning it into an irritating white noise.

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Britain is vulnerable to malicious actors at home and abroad who could interfere with the results of a general election, a new study warns.

Immediate action needs to be taken to reduce the risk of public “abuse and deception”, say the experts behind the Oxford Technology and Elections Commission report.

Lisa-Maria Neudert, lead researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, said there was growing recognition that “manipulation and propaganda which was only thought to happen in authoritarian regimes can happen in democracies like the UK”.

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What can be done to stop meddling?

“Regulators, industry and civil society must act in a coordinated way to protect democracy,” says Neudert.

The study calls for the Electoral Commission to verify social media accounts of candidates and campaigners, and for political parties to monitor and archive all digital communications they produce, says The Guardian.

Researchers also say that social media companies like Twitter and Facebook should warn promptly if and when they discover meddling and foreign interference around elections.

“We want social media companies to help us understand why such stories are so widely shared by their algorithms,” said Neudert. “They should be required to release information so we can understand why such disinformation so easily spreads.”

How likely is future interference?

There have been repeated warnings about the possibility of Russian interference in elections. The then prime minister Theresa May warned in 2017 of Russia “planting fake stories” to “sow discord in the West”, the BBC reports.

“Russia has repeatedly violated the national airspace of several European countries and mounted a sustained campaign of cyber espionage and disruption,” she said. “This has included meddling in elections.”

There is little doubt that Russia meddled in the 2016 US presidential election, with the US Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluding that the “Russian government interfered in our election in sweeping and systematic fashion”, says CNN.

The Guardian says there are also ongoing questions about the scale of the impact of microtargeted internet advertising during the EU referendum campaign.

On an LSE blog on the 2016 EU vote, Ewan McGaughey from King’s College London argues that “the extent of Russian-backed fraud means the referendum is invalid”.

And the new study’s authors at Oxford University believe the risk remains today. During the European Parliament election campaign earlier this year, they noted the online spread of “extremist, sensationalist or conspiratorial junk news”.

A majority of the UK's top universities have seen their global ranking fall for the second year in a row, as overseas enrolment declines sharply amid a tightening of immigration restrictions on international students.

The 2024 edition of the "Global 2,000" list by the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), which ranked 20,966 institutions to ascertain the 2,000 best-performing universities in the world, features 92 British institutions, one fewer than last year.

Cambridge and Oxford remain the first- and second-ranked universities in the UK, respectively. Their standings in the global list have not changed since 2022: Cambridge ranks fourth; Oxford ranks fifth. Along with University College London they are the only UK universities to make the top 20, with all other spots taken up by US institutions, with the exception of the University of Tokyo in 13th and France's PSL University in 19th.

Yet while the UK remains the university powerhouse of Europe, the overall trend continues to be downward. Only the University of Leeds has seen its position on the list rise over the past year, with seven institutions staying in the same place and the rest falling.

UK universities have been hit particularly hard by a sharp decline in international students, with analysis by the Financial Times of data from the university admissions service UCAS revealing the that a third of universities saw numbers enrolling from overseas fall last year.

UK universities rely on income from international students – who account for nearly half of all enrolments on taught courses – to subsidise domestic students on whom, according to Russell Group estimates, they make an average loss of £2,500 a year.

Tuition fees for domestic students are capped at £9,250 and have been "effectively frozen for a decade despite inflation", said the FT.

A "sudden fall in enrolments would make a wide range of courses uneconomic and cause severe financial dislocation at many institutions", said The Guardian.

The other main factor affecting university rankings is research, and once again the UK picture is "quite discouraging", said The Times.

Britain is slipping down the global research league for "the same reason our infrastructure is deteriorating", the paper said: "We're living off the past and running down our assets."

This matters because a "declining reputation for research is self-reinforcing". Fewer research grants and partnerships leads to further decline and less demand for places from foreign students, "further reducing income".

Here are the UK's top 20 universities:

1. University of Cambridge (world ranking: 4th)

2. University of Oxford (5th)

3. University College London (20th)

4. Imperial College London (29th)

5. King's College London (42nd)

6. University of Edinburgh (48th)

7. University of Manchester (51st)

8. University of Birmingham (89th)

9. University of Bristol (94th)

10. University of Leeds (106th)

11. University of Southampton (127th)

12. University of Glasgow (131st)

13. University of Liverpool (136th)

14. University of Nottingham (141st)

15. University of Sheffield (160th)

16. Queen Mary University of London (161st)

17. Cardiff University (162nd)

18. Newcastle University (167th)

19. University of Warwick (177th)

20. London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (204th)

Malala Yousafzai has become one of the world’s most powerful voices on female education - and now she is trying to use her influence to help refugees.

At the age of just 21, she has already written a handful of books, the latest of which recalls her own arrival in the UK. “It did feel as if we had landed on the Moon - everything looked, smelled, and felt different,” she writes in We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World Yousafzai.

Speaking about her new book, published earlier this month, she told Bustle: “What tends to get lost in the current refugee crisis is the humanity behind the statistics... I hope that by sharing the stories of those I have met in the last few years I can help others understand what’s happening and have compassion for the millions of people displaced by conflict.”

Yousafzai comes from the Swat valley, a deeply conservative region of northwest Pakistan where girls have periodically been banned from attending school. She has long campaigned for girls to be allowed an education, stepping up her efforts after the Taliban were driven out of the region in 2012.

But the growing prominence of her activism led Taliban gunmen to target Yousafzai, who had begun blogging anonymously for BBC Urdu when she was just 11. She was shot in the head as she returned home after an exam, and was then flown to the UK for life-saving treatment.

By the time Yousafzai recovered from her injuries, “she had become a global icon of the human toll of Islamist extremism, meeting with prime ministers and presidents”, says The New Yorker.

So what has she been doing since?

Yousafzai has continued her advocacy for girls’ access to education after starting a new life in Birmingham with her family, and in 2014 became the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Three years later, she won a place at Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall to read philosophy, politics and economics. At the end of her first year she was elected social secretary, organising events such as “an outdoor movie night, a jazz night, and a garden party”, according to the BBC.

In March last year, Yousafzai was able to return to Pakistan for the first time since the attack. “That was the highlight of 2018. I went home and saw my friends, my school teachers, my neighbours, my family members, everyone. We met like hundreds of people there and it was beautiful to see our home again,” she told Seventeen magazine.

“They had still kept [the house] as it was before and my school trophies, books, my bed cover, everything was still there and it was just so beautiful to see that. In a way, it was a sense of completion. I always felt like there was something missing in my life.”

In October, as she embarked on her second year at Oxford, Yousafzai told Vogue magazine that her “plan is to find a better balance between college work and social life”.

“I want to prioritise the activities that interest me the most and get a better idea of what I want my life to look like post-graduation,” she said.

“I don’t know yet what career path I will choose - but I know I’ll keep advocating for girls and women. If one girl with an education can change the world, just imagine what 130 million can do.”

Earlier this month, Yousafzai told The New Yorker: “When I’m in college, I’m focused on my studies, go to lectures, do my essays, and spend time with friends. Also, when I get time, then I do campaigning. I go to different countries, from Brazil to Iraq, and meet the girls who are fighting for their right to an education.”

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai has returned to Pakistan for the first time since she was shot by Taliban gunmen in an assassination attempt more than five years ago.

The 20-year-old education activist landed in Islamabad this morning for a four-day visit amid heavy security. She was later honoured by Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi at a special ceremony at his residence.

It is unclear if Yousafzai will visit her home town in the Swat Valley, where she was shot in the head by militants as she sat on a school bus with classmates in 2012.

In a speech after her meeting with Abbasi, the feminist campaigner said she had dreamed of coming back to Pakistan “every day for the last five years”, reports the country’s The Express Tribune.

“It’s the happiest day of my life,” she said. “I still can’t believe it’s happening. I don’t normally cry. I’m still 20 years old but I’ve seen so many things in life.”

Yousafzai was targeted by Taliban gunmen for campaigning for female education in the deeply conservative region.

Following the attack, she was transferred to hospital in the UK, where she made a full recovery.

Yousafzai continued her advocacy for girls’ access to education after starting a new life in Birmingham with her family, and became the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

In an interview with US talk show host David Letterman earlier this month, the Oxford University student said that she missed “the rivers and mountains” of the Swat Valley and that all she wanted was for her “feet to touch the ground of home”.

News of her arrival has been received enthusiastically by many Pakistanis, the BBC’s Pakistan correspondent Secunder Kermani reports.

“Some Pakistanis have long been critics of Malala, favouring conspiracy theories claiming she is ‘a Western agent’ or was actually shot by the CIA,” Kermani says. “For many other Pakistanis, though, Malala is a source of great pride, and now she’s finally come home.”

Politicians, journalists and celebrities were among those welcoming her back.

Faryal Niaz, a student at the Khushal Model School in Mingora, where Yousafzai studied before she was shot, said the activist was her idol, CNN reports.

“When girls like us go to school in Swat, the only reason is Malala Yousafzai,” the schoolgirl said.

A group of economists have revealed that appearing as a contestant on Love Island is more lucrative than a degree from Oxford or Cambridge.

Analysis by Frontier Economics, an economic consultancy, estimated that someone who appears on the show could expect to earn at least £1.1m from subsequent sponsorship and appearance fees, while completing an undergraduate Oxbridge degree would leave you with with a comparatively meagre average return of £815,000.

“If you’ve got an offer from Oxbridge and Love Island, you’re better off going on Love Island,” Kristine Dislere, who completed her masters degree in economics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, told the Financial Times.

In order to estimate how lucrative a stint on the show could be, Dislere and fellow economists made calculations based on a number of factors. These included the typical rates for sponsored Instagram posts, club appearances, how often they appear and how much their earnings will decrease every year.

According to Frontier Economics, contestants who have been in the villa for the full series can be expected to earn £2.3m over the next five years.

Winners can expect to earn more, but not much more. Their expected return is £2.4m.

Even for those slightly less lucky it's still a good proposition. Someone who is accepted onto the island (at any stage in the series) can expect to make an average of £1.1m once back out in the real world.

And it appears British school leavers “have instinctively come to a similar conclusion, with 85,000 applications to appear on the 2018 series, compared with only 37,000 applications for undergraduate degree courses at Oxford and Cambridge universities combined”, says the FT.

However, Dislere conceded, an academic path might actually be a better bet once acceptance rates are factored in. “One major thing we haven’t included are the odds of getting in [to Love Island], and the odds are stacked against you,” she said.

A portrait of Prime Minister Theresa May has been removed from her alma mater following protests from students.

The photograph of May - who achieved a second class degree in geography at St Hugh’s College, Oxford - “was put up as part of a display about high-achieving alumnae” in the university’s geography department, says Sky News.

But the image was quickly plastered with critical messages about issues including the Windrush scandal and the “hostile environment for immigrants”.

According to the BBC, one note read, “School of geography and hostile environment?” A picture of May and Donald Trump captioned “complicit relationship” was also stuck up beside the portrait.

The PM’s image was finally removed after students launched a Twitter campaign called “Not All Geographers”, reports Oxford University newspaper Cherwell.

But that decision was criticised by Universities Minister Sam Gyimah, who tweeted that it was “utterly ridiculous” that “even portraits are being no-platformed”.

The university faculty “should get a grip” and “put the portrait back in a more prominent place”, the minister said.

A university spokesperson said the portrait was taken down to avoid more protests but that it will be “re-displayed so it can be seen as intended”.

The Not All Geographers group, which garnered support from 21 of the academic staff, lamented what it described as an assault on internal democracy.

The group told Cherwell: “The main, and most basic, issue comes with the celebration of a sitting prime minister. Should a department align itself with the power of the day, when there are those who actively challenge it?

“It is unprecedented to celebrate state power in such a way (regardless of one’s political affiliation). For many geographers, the famous Doreen Massey being placed below her is also another kick in the teeth.”

A spokesperson for May said the PM recognised the “importance of celebrating women in public life” and of “public debate”, The Sun reports.

2019 Boat Race: Oxford vs. Cambridge

• When: Sunday 7 April
• Where: River Thames, London (races start at Putney)
• Race start times: Women’s Boat Race, 2.13pm; Men’s Boat Race, 3.10pm
• TV coverage: live on the BBC

Two-time Olympic champion James Cracknell will make history this weekend by becoming the oldest rower ever to compete in the men’s Boat Race.

The 46-year-old has been selected for the Cambridge University crew that will face Oxford University in the 2019 men’s race on Sunday 7 April.

Cracknell, who studies a Master of Philosophy degree in human evolution at Cambridge, retired from rowing in 2004. He won gold in the 2000 and 2004 summer Olympic Games.

Speaking to the BBC, he said: “I’ve had to get back to being able to move in a rowing boat. I am seven years older than one of the guy’s dads. I stopped rowing in 2004 and haven’t rowed since. If I can make it onto the start line it will be the proudest thing I have done in rowing.”

Cambridge hold the lead

More than 250,000 spectators are expected to line the banks of the River Thames on Sunday for the 2019 Boat Races.

Oxford and Cambridge will go head to head in the women’s and men’s races which start at Putney in south-west London and continue for 4.2 miles down the Thames before finishing in Mortlake.

In 2018 Cambridge won the men’s race by three lengths and the women’s race by seven lengths. Cambridge hold an 83-80 lead over Oxford in the men’s Boat Race and a 43-30 lead in the women’s Boat Race.

Here we look at the history of the Boat Race, the past winners, this year’s crews and the latest betting odds.

2019 Boat Race guide

What time are the Oxford vs. Cambridge boat races?

The women’s race starts at 2.13pm and the men’s race takes place at 3.10pm.

The Boat Race course

Sunday’s race from Putney to Mortlake will cover a lung-bursting four miles and 374 yards (6.8km) – three times the distance of the longest Olympic race. In such circumstances the winner is likely to be whoever can endure the most physical punishment.

First used in 1845, the current Championship Course has been used every year apart from 1846, 1856 and 1863 when the race was held in the opposite direction between Mortlake and Putney.

The Fulham/Chiswick side of the course is known as the Middlesex side and the Putney/Barnes side is known as the Surrey side.

According to the official website the Boat Race is rowed upstream, but is timed to start on the incoming “flood” tide.

How much do the rowers train?

Crews train for a total of 1,200 hours in preparation for the 600-stroke Championship Course, meaning that two hours of effort lie behind each stroke.

How many spectators will watch the race?

It is predicted that more than 250,000 people will line the banks of the River Thames to watch the 165th Boat Race.

Fan parks and best places to watch

Two fan parks will be open on Sunday - one at Bishop’s Park in Fulham and one at Wainwright. Bishop’s Park, open at 12pm, is located at the very start of the Boat Race while Wainwright is in the middle of the race at Furnivall Gardens, Hammersmith. Fans can enjoy big screen coverage of the races, street food, drinks and merchandise stalls.

Spectators wanting to watch the races from the river should head to the following locations: Putney Bridge, Craven Cottage, Putney Embankment, Barn Elms Boathouse, Thames Reach, Hammersmith Bridge, St. Paul’s School Boathouse, Chiswick Pier, The Emanuel School Boathouse or Dukes Meadow. See more details at theboatrace.com

Course map

What’s the weather forecast for the Boat Race?

The BBC forecasts light cloud and a gentle breeze on Sunday with a temperature of 13C between 1pm and 5pm.

Which TV channel will show it?

The BBC will present live TV coverage of both races.

2019 men’s blue boat crews

Crew averages (excluding Coxswain)

• Oxford: height 194.6cm (6ft 4in); weight: 90kg (14st 2lbs)
• Cambridge: height 194.6cm (6ft 4in); weight: 89.8kg (14st 2lbs)

Bow

• Oxford: Charlie Pearson (20 years old, 187cm, 84.3kg, British)
• Cambridge: Dave Bell (31 years old, 186cm, 84.5kg, British)

No.2

• Oxford: Patrick Sullivan (23 years old, 202cm, 90.7kg, British)
• Cambridge: James Cracknell (46 years old, 193cm, 89.7kg, British)

No.3

• Oxford: Achim Harzheim (26 years old, 192cm, 88.8kg, German)
• Cambridge: Grant Bitler (23 years old), 199cm, 95.8kg, American)

No.4

• Oxford: Ben Landis (24 years old, 190cm, 86.1kg, German/American)
• Cambridge: Dara Alizadeh (25 years, 194cm, 91kg, Bermudian/British/American/Iranian)

No. 5

• Oxford: Tobias Schroder (19 years old, 201cm, 98.7kg, British/Estonian)
• Cambridge: Callum Sullivan (19 years old, 195cm, 88.2kg, British)

No.6

• Oxford: Felix Drinkall (19 years old, 197cm, 84.3kg, British)
• Cambridge: Sam Hookway (28 years old, 197cm, 89kg, Australian)

No.7

• Oxford: Charlie Buchanan (22 years, 190cm, 78kg, British)
• Cambridge: Freddie Davidson (20 years old, 190cm, 85.8kg, British)

Stroke

• Oxford: Augustin Wambersie (23 years old, 193cm, 89.3kg, Belgian)
• Cambridge: Natan Wegrzycki-Szymczyk (24 years old, 203cm, 94.3kg, Polish)

Cox

• Oxford: Toby de Mendonca (20 years old, 175cm, 55kg, British)
• Cambridge: Matthew Holland (21 years old, 169cm, 53.6kg, British)

2019 women’s blue boat crews

Crew averages (excluding Coxswain)

• Oxford: height 177.1cm (5ft 10in); weight 71.1kg (11st 3lbs)
• Cambridge: height 178.9cm (5ft 10in); weight 72.3kg (11st 5lbs)

Bow

• Oxford: Isobel Dodds (22 years old, 172cm, 70.5kg, British)
• Cambridge: Tricia Smith (25 years old, 178cm, 69.9kg, British)

No.2

• Oxford: Anna Murgatroyd (24 years old, 178cm, 69.9kg, British)
• Cambridge: Sophie Deans (22 years old, 175cm, 69.7kg, New Zealand/Australian)

No.3

• Oxford: Renée Koolschijn (29 years old, 180cm, 73.8kg, Dutch)
• Cambridge: Laura Foster (20 years old, 185cm, 77.1kg, American)

No.4

• Oxford: Lizzie Polgreen (30 years old, 168cm, 60.7kg, British)
• Cambridge: Larkin Sayre (24 years old, 173cm, 71.8kg, British/American)

No.5

• Oxford: Tina Christmann (23 years old, 178cm, 72.2kg, German/Italian)
• Cambridge: Kate Horvat (23 years old, 185cm, 69.5kg, American)

No.6

• Oxford: Beth Bridgman (21 years old, 176cm, 70.4kg, British)
• Cambridge: Pippa Whittaker (27 years old, 182cm, 74.1kg, British)

No.7

• Oxford: Olivia Pryer (21 years old, 185cm, 77.3kg, British)
• Cambridge: Ida Gørtz Jacobsen (24 years old, 175cm, 71.9kg, Danish)

Stroke

• Oxford: Amelia Standing (19 years old, 180cm, 74kg, British)
• Cambridge: Lily Lindsay (22 years old, 179cm, 74.3kg, American/British)

Cox

• Oxford: Eleanor Shearer (22 years old, 160cm, 47kg, British)
• Cambridge: Hugh Spaughton (20 years old, 165cm, 57kg, British/Japanese)

The history of the Boat Race

Devised by Charles Wordsworth and Charles Merivale, two former Harrovians studying at Oxford and Cambridge, the event first took place at Henley-on-Thames in 1829. Despite issuing the original challenge, Cambridge, dressed in pink rather than their contemporary light blue, lost the encounter by a heavy margin.

The second race in the series, rowed between Westminster and Putney, didn’t take place until 1836 and for the next 25 years contests between the two universities were irregular. One obstacle to regular competition was disagreement over the race venue, with Oxford preferring Henley and Cambridge favouring central London.

The race became an annual event in 1856, and moved to the stretch of the river between Putney and Mortlake in 1864.

There’s mutiny afoot

The history of the race is not without internal discord. The Oxford camp split over the election of their president in 1959 when a group of disenchanted oarsmen pushed for the formation of two separate crews. The plan was for these two crews to race against each other for the right to represent the university in that year’s race. The mutiny was put down by Oxford’s college captains. Three of the dissidents returned to the team for the race, which Oxford went on to win by six lengths.

Another dispute, also in the Oxford team, came in 1987 when a number of international rowers withdrew in an argument over selection methods which they said were unfair. Despite the disruption Oxford went on to win once again – with a race-day crew filled out by reserves.

Winner and losers

Cambridge hold the men’s Boat Race trophy after last year’s victory and have an 83-80 overall lead against Oxford. In the women’s Cambridge lead Oxford by 43-30 after the win in 2018.

Boat Race betting odds

The latest prices according to Oddschecker, as of 1 April 2019.

Men’s race winner

• Cambridge: 1/3
• Oxford: 9/4
• Dead heat: 150/1

Mathematics and computer science students at the University of Oxford were given extra time to complete their final exams last summer in a bid to close a gender grade gap, it has been revealed.

Internal university documents seen by The Daily Telegraph reveal that officials opted to extend the exam time from 90 to 105 minutes because of evidence suggesting “female candidates might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure”.

The decision came in response to a persistent gender gap in the number of students getting top marks in the university’s final exams.

The gender grade gap is particularly pronounced in mathematics and computer science. Last year, 21.2% of female maths students graduated with first-class degrees, compared to 45.5% of male students.

University officials stressed that the exams were never intended to be a “time trial” and that there was “no change in length or difficulty of questions” on the paper.

However, “critics have slammed the changes as ‘sexist’,” the Daily Mail reports, on the grounds that they reinforce notions of women as the “weaker sex”.

Despite the backlash, the university said it intends to continue with the extra-length maths and computer science finals “for the foreseeable future” to measure the impact on results.

“The departments are not drawing any firm conclusions from the first year’s data,” the institution said in a statement. “However, third-year female students did show an improvement on their second-year marks.”

Studies have shown that a phenomenon known as “Stereotype Threat” can lead to women underperforming at traditionally male-dominated subjects.

Fear of conforming to stereotypes, for instance that women are worse at maths, can become self-fulfilling due to “the adverse effect of anxiety and excessive self-consciousness on performance”, says the British Psychological Society.

The university has previously explored other measures to close the gender grade gap by making testing methods more “female-friendly”.

Last year, the history department announced plans to allow all students to complete one of their five final exam papers at home, in response to evidence that the gender grade gap for submitted work was narrower than tests taken in a traditional exam hall setting.

However, “faculty members were reportedly sceptical of the policy”, The Independent reports, warning that it “increased the risk of plagiarism and acted as a ‘sticking plaster’ rather than a long-term solution to gender attainment gaps”.

Oxford and Cambridge universities are practising “social apartheid” by catering to elite white students, Labour MP David Lammy has claimed.

Nearly one in three Oxford colleges, and one in five Cambridge colleges, failed to admit even one black, British A-level student in 2015, according to newly released university data published by The Guardian. The elite universities educate many of Britain’s future leaders, with Oxford alone producing 27 prime ministers, according to Time magazine.

“This is social apartheid and it is utterly unrepresentative of life in modern Britain,” former education minister Lammy told The Guardian.

A spokesman for Cambridge said its admissions were based on academic considerations alone, adding that the greatest barrier to disadvantaged students was poor results. But Lammy told The Guardian that almost 400 black students get three As or more at A level each year. This raises questions about “whether there is systematic bias inherent in the Oxbridge admissions process that is working against talented young people from ethnic minority backgrounds”, he said.

The elite status of the universities may also be a contributing factor. A 2016 survey by Sutton Trust found 13% of state teachers wouldn’t advise their students to apply, because they were concerned they wouldn’t be happy, or felt they were unlikely to be accepted, according to The Daily Telegraph.

An Oxford University student who was dubbed “too clever for prison” after stabbing her boyfriend with a bread knife has been spared jail.

Medical student Lavinia Woodward was given a 10-month suspended prison sentence for the attack in December last year.

Woodward admitted she had a cocaine problem after punching her boyfriend and then hurling a glass, laptop and jam jar at him. The university is “considering disciplinary measures, including expulsion”, says The Times.

Judge Ian Pringle QC caused controversy earlier this year when he told Woodward that a jail term could damage her prospects of a medical career and would therefore represent too harsh a punishment.

Pringle said in May: “It seems to me that if this was a one-off, a complete one-off, to prevent this extraordinary able young lady from not following her long-held desire to enter the profession she wishes to would be a sentence which would be too severe.”

The judge’s remarks led to tabloid headlines of “too clever for prison” and suggestions he was showing Woodward undue leniency. Her defence lawyer, James Sturman QC, said the comments had been taken out of context and it was wrong to suggest that the defendant had been treated leniently because of her academic achievement.

In his sentencing remarks this week, Pringle told Woodward: "There are many mitigating features in your case.

“Principally, at the age of 24 you have no previous convictions of any nature whatsoever. Secondly, I find that you were genuinely remorseful following this event and, indeed, it was against your bail conditions, you contacted your partner to fully confess your guilt and your deep sorrow for what happened.

“Thirdly, whilst you are a clearly highly-intelligent individual, you had an immaturity about you which was not commensurate for someone of your age.

“Fourthly, as the reports from the experts make clear, you suffer from an emotionally unstable personality disorder, a severe eating disorder and alcohol drug dependence.

“Finally, and most significantly, you have demonstrated over the last nine months that you are determined to rid yourself of your alcohol and drug addiction and have undergone extensive treatment including counselling to address the many issues that you face.”

The sentence has been criticised by criminal justice campaigners, who said that the lenient ruling would deter men who had fallen victim to domestic abuse from coming forward.

“In terms of whether the genders were reversed, we would expect any man committing this type of crime to go to prison and rightly so,” Mark Brooks, chair of the charity Mankind Initiative, told The Daily Telegraph.

And John Azah, chief executive of the Kingston Race and Inequalities Council, said: “If she wasn't Oxford-educated, if she came from a deprived area, I don't think she would have got the same sentence and been allowed to walk free.”

A 21-year-old from Wolverhampton, UK, could lose his place to study at Oxford University because of issues with his citizenship.

Described by the university as a "brilliant student", Brian White has had to defer the offer to study chemistry and fears deportation if he is not granted leave to remain by the UK Home Office.

Born in Zimbabwe, White grew up in an orphanage until he was adopted at the age of six. He moved with his new family first to Botswana and then back to the UK, his adoptive father's home country, when he was 15.

According to the BBC, an application made in 2014 for naturalisation was rejected by the Home Office, because when White arrived in the UK, he was only granted limited leave to remain by the Home Office, not the required status of indefinite leave. A new application for indefinite leave to remain, made last year, is still pending, says The Guardian.

Despite the uncertainty over his future White continued to study for his GCSEs and A-levels, earning four A*s - the highest grade. He secured his Oxford place, but could not take it up as he was not classed as a home student and was therefore ineligible for the financial support available for UK students.

While White says he doesn't not feel unfairly treated by the Home Office, he is concerned that more than his studies are at risk.

"I'm not legally allowed to work, so I assume I would be deported to Africa," he told the Guardian.

"I don't know what I would do. I don't know anyone there. I'd have to start again. This is the most important thing to me right now. Everyone I know and love lives here."

The Home Office has said it understands the urgency of his case and will resolve it soon.

An online petition to the Home Office in support of the student has more than 90,000 signatures at time of writing and Oxford University is keeping its offer of a place open for the time being.

"I have had the personal pleasure of knowing Brian since the start of 2013, having met him at school and quickly developing a close friendship with him. He is possibly the hardest working person I have ever met, but it is his enthusiasm to help those around him that I am inspired by each and every day," his friend Luke Wilcox wrote on the petition website.

Journalist Caitlin Moran, who also hails from Wolverhampton, and author Philip Pullman are just two of the well-known personalities who have shared the petition.

Alan Rusbridger, principal of Lady Margaret Hall, the Oxford College that White is hoping to attend has also voiced his support.

Oxford won the 163rd university men's Boat Race, holding off Cambridge in an exciting battle that capped a day of drama on the Thames.

It was a fourth win in five years for the dark blues, "but not for a moment across the 4.2 mile course did victory look assured, even for a crew who began the race as the favourites with the bookmakers", says the Daily Telegraph.

"This was a gruelling, relentless haul, with Cambridge showing extraordinary resilience as they refused to be cowed, refused whatever Oxford did to be thrown off their dogged pursuit, refused to give up. But stronger, cleaner, smoother in their execution, it was the Oxford crew who ultimately prevailed."

It meant victory for brothers Jamie and Ollie Cook and the divisive figure of William Warr, who was accused of treachery after moving to Oxford after rowing for Cambridge in 2015.

Hundreds of thousands of people lined the banks of the Thames for what The Guardian calls "a sporting spectacle retains a curious appeal among millions with no particular interest in rowing or either university involved...

"Not all of them bray annoyingly, wear red trousers or sit on the Tory front bench," adds the paper.

However, things did not go according to plan, with an unexploded World War II bomb discovered near Putney Bridge having to be removed before racing could get underway.

And although Oxford won the men's race, disaster struck the crew in the women's race as Rebecca Esselstein missed her stroke and almost lost her oar at the start.

"Seven months of pain and preparation evaporated in five embarrassing seconds at the start of the women's Boat Race when Oxford's hopes of a third consecutive victory since their race moved to the Tideway were blown to smithereens," says The Times.

"At the finish, a disconsolate Esselstein slumped downwards, her hands gripping the side of her head and tears flowing. It was an unfortunate accident, one made more humiliating because it occurred in front of a television audience of several million."

Oxford has been beaten to the top slot in the best university rankings for the first time after a bruising year for the UK’s higher education institutions.

“No British rankings have ever placed any university other than Oxbridge at number one,” The Times said, after the paper’s Good University Guide handed the title of best university in the UK to St Andrews in Fife, Scotland.

The university, which boasts Prince William and Kate Middleton among its alumni, claimed the high grade “largely thanks to its consistently outstanding levels of student satisfaction” having “been homing in on the top of the rankings for several years”.

The paper added that St Andrews also “admits the best-qualified students”, as well as “top-ten ratings for degree completion rates, the proportion of high-class degrees awarded, staffing levels and the average spend on services and facilities per student”.

Professor Sally Mapstone, the principal of St Andrews, said: “As one community, we strive constantly for excellence, and have a strategy that hasn’t been afraid to believe St Andrews could challenge at the very top by combining the best teaching, world-leading research and an unswerving commitment to student satisfaction and achievement.”

Top 20 in full

1. University of St Andrews

2. University of Oxford

3. University of Cambridge

4. Imperial College London

5. London School of Economics and Political Science

6. Durham University

7. University College London

8. University of Warwick

9. University of Bath

10. Loughborough University

11. Lancaster University

12. University of Glasgow

13. University of Edinburgh

14. University of Bristol

15. University of Leeds

16. University of Southampton

17. University of Strathclyde

18. King’s College London

19. University of York

20. University of Aberdeen

Founded in the 15th century, St Andrews was Scotland’s first university and is “the third oldest in the English speaking world”, according to The Herald. “Teaching began in the community of St Andrews in 1410”, the paper added, before the university was “formally constituted by the issue of a papal bull in 1413”.

As well as ranking highly for student satisfaction, the university also came top in seven of the subject league tables: business management and marketing, computer science, English, Middle Eastern and African studies, philosophy, physics and astronomy, and international relations.

The rankings come following a difficult year for the UK’s university sector, during which “months of Covid curbs” saw students demand refunds on teaching and accommodation fees due to the necessity of home learning, The i said.

A study published by the London School of Economics and the University of Exeter in July found that pupils lost nearly a third of their learning time between March 2020 and April 2021 because of school closures and coronavirus disruption.

“Existing research shows that even a few days extra learning loss can have a large impact on education achievement and life outcomes”, the study said, adding that “these big losses of around 60 to 65 days are much bigger than those typically studied”.

Students attending university this year will receive “catch-up support to fill gaps in their learning”, said The i, as well as help with “socialisation issues” aimed at helping “students get to grips with the freedom of university life after nearly a year and a half of Covid restrictions”.

Top 20 universities in the world*

1. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

2. University of Oxford

3. Stanford University and University of Cambridge (joint)

5. Harvard University

6. California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

7. Imperial College London

8. ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and UCL (joint)

10. University of Chicago

11. National University of Singapore (NUS)

12. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU)

13. University of Pennsylvania, US

14. Lausanne, Switzerland

15. Yale University, US and the University of Edinburgh (joint)

17. Tsinghua University, China

18. Peking University, China

19. Columbia University, US

20. Princeton University, US

*According to Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings

Cambridge has come last in a new league table rating the success of individual universities in widening participation to students from all backgrounds.

The experimental “fair access” ranking, created by the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi), measures universities’ intake of both rich and poor students.

Universities that are part of the Russell Group - which usually rank near the top of most other higher education league tables - generally fare poorly in the new ranking, while more modern institutions perform well.

The best-ranked university is Hull, followed by Derby and then Edge Hill University in Lancashire.

Among the lowest ranking are “some of the country’s oldest and most prestigious universities”, including St Andrews, Bristol, Oxford and Aberdeen, reports The Guardian.

Although the overall number of young people attending university has risen from between 10% and 15% of the population in the 1980s to more than 45% today, there are still wide discrepancies in intake, with fewer students from disadvantaged backgrounds attending the most prestigious institutions, the newspaper adds.

Iain Martin, vice-chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and author of the Hepi report, said: “Widening participation and ensuring that students from all backgrounds are provided opportunities to study at a university that matches their talents and aspirations has been a pivotal part of English higher education policy and strategy for many years.

“While much has been achieved, it remains that we do not have an educational level playing field."

A spokesperson for Cambridge University said it welcomed “different interpretations of the data” on the “complex issue”, and pointed out that Hepi’s analysis relies on a single measure.

The bottom ten universities for class equality in the ranking are:

1. Cambridge
2. St Andrews
3. Bristol
4. Oxford
5. Edinburgh
6. UCL
7. Durham
8. Robert Gordon
9. LSE
10. Imperial College London

A number of UK universities have been ranked the best in the world in subjects that include English language and literature, geography and art and design.

This year's QS World University Rankings has the University of Sussex top for development studies, while Loughborough University comes joint-first for sports-related subjects.

London's Royal College of Art is top for art and design and the Institute of Education, part of University College London, is in first place for education.

The University of Oxford is rated top for five subjects: English language and literature; geography; anatomy and physiology; social policy and administration, and archaeology.

Globally, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) dominate the list, topping the standings in 15 and 12 subjects respectively.

Although the University of Cambridge fails to come first in any subject, it's named as the most consistently high performer – appearing in the top ten for the most subjects – followed by the University of California, Berkeley.

The rankings, which are based on 43 million research papers and 305,000 responses to an academic survey, "show the strengths of in-depth specialisms, rather than basing comparisons on an overall university ranking", says the BBC.

Ben Sowter, head of research for QS, says the UK does particularly well in these rankings which "drill down" to subject level.

"Subject rankings are becoming more and more influential" as competition for places increases globally, he adds.

Here's the list of the top university for each subject:

Accounting and finance: Harvard University, US

Agriculture and forestry: Wageningen University, Netherlands

Anatomy and physiology: University of Oxford, UK

Anthropology: Harvard University, US

Archaeology: University of Oxford, UK

Architecture: MIT, US

Art and design: Royal College of Art, UK

Biological sciences: Harvard University, US

Business and management: Harvard University, US

Chemical engineering: MIT, US

Chemistry: MIT, US

CiviI and structural engineering: MIT, US

Communication and media studies: University of Southern California, US

Computer science: MIT, US

Dentistry: The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Development studies: University of Sussex, UK

Earth and marine sciences: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

Economics and econometrics: MIT, US

Education: University College London (UCL), UK

Electrical and electronic engineering: MIT, US

English language and literature: University of Oxford, UK

Environmental sciences: University of California, US

Geography: University of Oxford, UK

History: Harvard University, US

Hospitality and leisure management: University of Nevada, US

Law: Harvard University

Linguistics: MIT, US

Materials science: MIT, US

Mathematics: MIT, US

Mechanical, aeronautical and manufacturing engineering: MIT, US

Medicine: Harvard University, US

Modern languages: Harvard University, US

Nursing: University of Pennsylvania, US

Performing arts: The Juilliard School, US

Pharmacy and pharmacology: Harvard University, US

Philosophy: University of Pittsburgh, US

Physics and astronomy: MIT, US

Politics and international studies: Harvard University, US

Psychology: Harvard University, US

Social policy and administration: University of Oxford, UK

Sociology: Harvard University, US

Sports-related subjects: Loughborough University, UK, and the University of Sydney, Australia

Statistics: Harvard University, US

Theology, divinity and religious studies: Harvard University, US

Veterinary science: University of California, US

British universities are among some of the most "international" in the world, according to Times Higher Education (THE).

Five of the top ten institutions in the magazine's list for 2016 were from the UK: Imperial College London; the University of Oxford; the University of Cambridge; University College London, and the London School of Economics.

The universities are ranked according to the number of foreign staff and students on campus and its international reputation - "outward-looking characteristics" that are increasingly important in the globalised world of academia and cutting-edge research, says THE's Ellie Bothwell.

"Today's universities are typically focused on attracting the best students and scholars from around the world, launching partnerships with overseas institutions and businesses, incentivising cross-border research collaborations and educating their students to become 'global citizens'," says the magazine.

Small but wealthy nations with an export-based economy dominate the top of the rankings, with Swiss universities taking the top two spots, followed by institutions in Hong Kong and Singapore.

As well as the UK, Canada and Australia also rank highly in the top 150, benefitting from the predominance of English as the lingua franca of research. The only non-English speaking university in the top 20 is the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington, deputy vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, which came seventh in the list, said being able to hire the brightest academics from around the globe and to collaborate with international institutions was raising academic standards.

"A diverse workforce makes for a smarter workforce," she told THE. "It makes for better outcomes in research and better outcomes for teaching."

Here are the 25 universities with the strongest international outlook:

1 ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland

2 Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland

3 University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

4 National University of Singapore, Singapore

5 Imperial College London, United Kingdom

6 University of Oxford, United Kingdom

7 Australian National University, Australia

8 University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

9 University College London, United Kingdom

10 London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom

11 King's College London, United Kingdom

12 University of British Columbia, Canada

13 University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

14 University of New South Wales, Australia

15 University of Zurich, Switzerland

16 Ecole Polytechnique, France

17 University of Warwick, United Kingdom

18 University of Melbourne, Australia

19 University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

20 University of Manchester, United Kingdom

The UK's top 20 universities for employability

17 November

The University of Cambridge has been named the top UK institution for preparing graduates for the workplace, according to this year's Global University Employability Ranking.

Oxford comes in at second place, but half of the top ten universities are based in London, according to the list, published by Times Higher Education.

Cambridge tops the table thanks in part to its formidable network of more than 400 alumni in influential positions around the world. Many Cambridge graduates go on to lead companies or become high profile political and cultural players.

Second-placed Oxford can boast at least 30 international leaders, 27 British prime ministers, 50 Nobel prize winners and 120 Olympic medalists from its graduate base, securing its reputation among employers.

However, there is also a reasonable spread of universities from the north to the south. The University of Manchester came fourth, beating Imperial, King's and UCL.

In seventh place comes the University of Edinburgh, the top university in Scotland, while the University of Bristol finishes joint ninth.

Less encouragingly, the global employability survey on which the results are based found that the reputation of UK university graduates has fallen behind that of Germany in 2016.

Only two UK institutions made it into the top ten world universities for employability: Cambridge (4th) and Oxford (7th). The top three were all based in the United States: California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

The top universities in the UK for graduate employability are:

1 University of Cambridge

2 University of Oxford

3 London School of Economics

4 University of Manchester

5 Imperial College London

6 King's College London

7 University of Edinburgh

8 University College London

=9 London Business School

=9 University of Bristol

11 University of St Andrews

=12 City University London

=12 University of Leeds

=14 Cardiff University

=14 The Open University

=14 University of Durham

=14 University of York

=18 London College of Law

=18 Manchester Business School

=18 University of Liverpool

Best universities in the world: UK tops league table

22 September

The University of Oxford has become the first UK institution to lead the annual Times Higher Education rankings, knocking the five-times champion, the California Institute of Technology, into second place.

Oxford topped the list because it has improved across the four main indicators that influence the rankings – teaching, research, citations and international outlook, Times Higher Education said.

Rankings editor Phil Baty welcomed the news but voiced his concern at the consequences of the UK's vote to leave the EU.

"As well as some top academics reporting they have been frozen out of collaborative research projects with EU colleagues, many are admitting that they might look to relocate to a university outside the country," Baty told the BBC.

"The UK must ensure that it limits the damage to academics, students, universities and science during its Brexit negotiations, to ensure that the UK remains one of the world leaders in higher education."

The University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, also feature in the top ten, while University College London (UCL) slipped from 14th place last year to 15th.

Overall, the UK takes 91 of the top 980 places in the 13th annual Times Higher Education rankings; 88 of these make the top 800 compared with 78 last year.

The list is dominated by US universities. Stanford University is ranked third, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology fifth, Harvard sixth and Princeton seventh. The University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago are joint tenth.

More broadly, the rankings show that institutions in Asia have made progress - two new names are now in the top 100 and another four join the top 200.

"The UK will have to watch out for Asia's continuing ascent. Although the notion of Asia as the 'next higher education superpower' has become something of a cliche in recent years, the continent's rise in the rankings is real and growing," says Baty.

The world's top 20 institutions:

1. University of Oxford, UK
2. California Institute of Technology, US
3. Stanford University, US
4. University of Cambridge, UK
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US
6. Harvard University, US
7. Princeton University, US
8. Imperial College London, UK
9. Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland

=10. University of Chicago, US

=10. University of California, Berkeley, US

1. Yale University, US
2. University of Pennsylvania, US
3. University of California, Los Angeles, US
4. University College London, UK
5. Columbia University, US
6. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, US
7. Duke University, Durham, US
8. Cornell University, US
9. Northwestern University, US

Only ten UK institutions have made it into the Times Higher Education's list of the world's top 100 most prestigious universities.

Bristol and Durham both slipped out of the rankings, taking the UK's total down from twelve.

Oxford and Cambridge remain in the top five, but both have slipped two places since last year. In fact, of the UK universities in this year's top 100, only the London Business School has improved on its 2015 placing.

The US continues to dominate the top of the list, which is compiled with the help of more than 10,000 academics. Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford take the first three places.

Asia has seen the biggest increase in terms of global reputation, with 17 institutions making it into the top 100, in comparison to ten last year.

Times Higher Education editor Phil Baty suggested the diminishing reputations of the UK's universities could be due to recent government decisions.

"Perhaps the UK's continued cuts in higher education funding – Higher Education Funding Council for England received a £150m budget slash this year – and a series of immigration measures affecting overseas students and scholars, are starting to have an impact on its global reputation," he said.

Paul Blackmore, professor of higher education at King's College London's Policy Institute, predicted that the rise in reputation of Asian universities was set to continue.

"We've had a highly Anglo-Saxon view of higher education for many years, and that can't be sustained for much longer," he said.

Here are the ten UK universities in the top 100:

University of Cambridge (4)

University of Oxford (5)

Imperial College London (15)

University College London (20)

London School of Economics and Political Science (24)

University of Edinburgh (38)

King's College London (43)

University of Manchester (49)

London Business School and University of Warwick (81-90)*

*Only universities in the top 50 are ranked. Those from 50-100 are ranked in groups of ten.

Top universities: UK leads the way in new European rankings

05 May

A list of the best European universities published today shows the UK continues to dominate top-quality higher education.

The latest Times Higher Education (THE) rankings includes 46 UK universities among the top 200 higher learning institutions in Europe. They were scored on key factors including teaching, research, influence and outlook for the future.

Britain is also home to the top three universities in Europe – Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London. University College London, the London School of Economics and Political Science, Edinburgh University and King's College London also make the top ten, with ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology appearing at number four, making it the highest-ranked university outside of the UK.

Nipping at the UK's heels is Germany, with 36 places in the top 200. Its highest-rated university, LMU Munich, came in at number ten.

When it comes to worldwide performance, however, the US dominates, occupying six of the top ten spots in the global rankings. The California Institute of Technology knocks Oxford off the top spot, while Stanford University pushes Cambridge into fourth place.

Rankings editor Phil Baty paid a cautious tribute to the UK's success, warning that restrictive immigration policies and low tuition fees in competing nations threatened the nation's ability to attract the brightest students and staff.

"For the first time this year, the UK saw international student numbers stagnate," he said, adding that anti-immigrant rhetoric was "leading many students to perceive that they are not welcome in the UK".

Top 20 European universities

1. University of Oxford, UK

2. University of Cambridge, UK

3. Imperial College London, UK

4. ETH Zurich – Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland

5. University College London, UK

6. London School of Economics and Political Science, UK

7. University of Edinburgh, UK

8. King's College London, UK

9. Karolinska Institute, Sweden

10. LMU Munich, Germany

11. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland

12. KU Leuven, Belgium

13. Heidelberg University, Germany

14. Wageningen University and Research Center, Netherlands

15. Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany

16. Technical University of Munich, Germany

17. Ecole Normale Superieure, France

18. University of Manchester, UK

19. University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

20. Utrecht University, Netherlands

Top ten universities in the UK

01 October

The UK was the "stand-out performer" in this year's Times Higher Education World University Rankings, according to its editor Phil Baty.

With 32 institutions in the top 200 worldwide, the UK was second only to the US, as all top ten UK institutions, with the exception of Manchester, saw their rankings rise from last year.

Oxford was the highest-ranked UK university as it climbed to second place in the rankings, while Cambridge (4th) and Imperial College London (8th) also made it into the worldwide top ten.

Edinburgh University jumped 12 places to 24th, while other big movers in the UK were LSE (23rd) King's College London (27th) and Durham (70th).

Despite this year's strong showing. Baty stressed the need for UK institutions to maintain higher education spending and to continue to attract overseas students. Speaking to the BBC, he said that "despite the UK's success, continued cuts to higher education spending and a series of immigration measures will hinder its performance in the long run".

His concerns were echoed by other leading UK academics.

America's dominance continues to wane, despite its prime spot as world leader (the California Institution of Technology – Caltech – once again tops the rankings). However, the positive trend seen in the UK was mirrored across Europe with a record number of European universities (105) included in the top 200. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich became the first institution from outside the US and UK to make it into the top ten.

Baty suggested that the significant movement seen in the US, UK and abroad was is some degree down to changes in the source rankings' data, with "improved coverage of research not published in English and a better geographical spread of responses".

The results will come as a boost to UK universities which saw their rankings slide in the recent QS World University Rankings released last month. Cambridge University, the UK's second highest ranked institution, fell to third, with Oxford in sixth position.

Top ten UK universities (worldwide ranking in brackets)

1 (2) Oxford

2 (4) Cambridge

3 (80) Imperial College London

4 (14) University College London

5 (23) London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)

6 (24) Edinburgh

7 (27) King's College London

8 (=56) Manchester

9 (69) Bristol

10 (70) Durham

Top ten universities worldwide

1 California Institute of Technology, US

2 University of Oxford, UK

3 Stanford University, US

4 University of Cambridge, UK

5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US

6 Harvard University, US

7 Princeton University, US

8 Imperial College London, UK

9 Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland

10 University of Chicago, US

Top 20 universities in the world

15 September

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has been named as the world's leading university, with just five British institutions making it into the top 20.

Harvard comes in second, while Stanford shares the third spot with Cambridge, the only UK university featured in the top five.

The QS World University Rankings, regarded as "the most authoritative of its kind", shows that British universities have slipped down the tables, says The Guardian.

One of the "biggest casualties" was Imperial College London, which dropped from second place in 2014 to eighth place this year – apparently due to a change in the methodology used to rate universities.

"Previously the QS rankings favoured universities strong in research, which is generated largely by the medical sciences, but changes have been made in order to give better recognition to institutions that are outstanding in arts and humanities but produce few citations," says the Guardian.

"As a result, Imperial, a leading research-intensive institution, which produces an impressive array of citations every year, dropped six places despite performing well in every other respect."

Oxford University and University College London, which came in joint fifth place last year, also slipped down the list to sixth and seventh place respectively. Meanwhile, Kings College London dropped three places from 16th to 19th.

US institutions make up half of the top 20, the UK makes up a quarter, while only five of the top 20 are based elsewhere in the world: two universities in Switzerland, two in Singapore and one in Australia.

1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US

2 Harvard University, US

3= University of Cambridge, UK

3=Stanford University, US

5 California Institute of Technology, US

6 University of Oxford, UK

7 University College London (UCL), UK

8 Imperial College London, UK

9 ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), Switzerland

10 University of Chicago, US

11 Princeton University, US

12 National University of Singapore, Singapore

13 Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

14 Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland

15 Yale University, US

16 Johns Hopkins University, US

17 Cornell University, US

18 University of Pennsylvania, US

19= Australian National University, Australia

19= King's College London, UK

Top 20 universities to study fashion design

25 August

The UK is officially the best place in the world to study fashion, home to four of the top ten institutions in a newly-released list aimed at aspiring fashion students.

Industry website Business of Fashion has released its first ranking of the world's fashion schools, and the UK has six entries in the top 20.

The universities were ranked according to three main factors – global influence, learning experience and long-term value. Business of Fashion subjected each institution to a "rigorous analysis" including a survey of more than 4,000 fashion students and alumni.

Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts London, was ranked number one in the world for undergraduate fashion courses. The university offers six BA courses in fashion design, with specialisms in womenswear, menswear, print, marketing and knitwear. Additional courses focus on related disciplines, such as fashion journalism, history of fashion and fashion communications.

Despite a recent protest by students annoyed that increasing enrolment numbers meant that some students' costly fashion collections were not featured in the college's prestigious press show, CSM remains the place to be for future fashion designers.

Three other London institutions – Kingston University, the University of Westminster and the London College of Fashion –also made the top ten. Nottingham Trent and the University for the Creative Arts Epsom represented the rest of the UK, at 14th and 17th respectively.

With six British universities in the top 20, the UK ties with the US as the most represented country on the list. Italy, often considered the home of fashion, features twice – the Istituto Marangoni in Milan and the Polimoda Institute in Florence –while haute couture paradise France failed to make the cut. China and Japan both featured, with Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and Israel rounding off the top 20.

Top universities for fashion, according to Business of Fashion:

1 Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UK

2 Bunka Fashion College, Japan

3 Kingston University, UK

4 Parsons The New School for Design, US

5 Fashion Institute of Technology, US

6 Polimoda, Italy

7 University of Westminster, UK

8 London College of Fashion, UK

9 Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia

10 Drexel University, US

11 Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Israel

12 Ryerson University School of Fashion, Canada

13 Stephens College, US

14 Nottingham Trent University, UK

15 Savannah College of Art and Design, US

16 Philadelphia University, US

17 University for the Creative Arts – Epsom, UK

18 Istituto Marangoni, Italy

19 Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, China

20 Hogeschool Van Amsterdam, Netherlands

The UK's top ten universities ranked by teaching satisfaction

27 May

Coventry University outshines Cambridge University when it comes to students' satisfaction with teaching standards, according to a league table published by The Guardian.

The former polytechnic came in second place, beaten only by Oxford University, with 92.7 per cent of students satisfied with the institution's teaching quality.

St Andrews and Dundee also featured in the top five, while the University of East Anglia, Bath, Keele, Glasgow and Exeter followed shortly behind.

Teaching satisfaction was among eight statistical measures used by The Guardian to compile a league table of the overall performance of UK universities, published this week. Other measures included the probability of each graduate finding a job and the amount each university spends per student.

Overall, Cambridge, Oxford and St Andrews dominated the top three spots, while Coventry reached number 15. The newspaper points out that this is "higher than many of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, including Birmingham, Edinburgh, York, Leeds, Glasgow, Cardiff, Nottingham and Newcastle" and "the highest position ever achieved by a former polytechnic in the Guardian league table of universities".

The only institution to fall out of the top ten was the London School of Economics (LSE), which dropped from 7th to 13th position, while the University of Exeter moved up from 12th to 9th place.

Top ten UK universities by teaching satisfaction

1. Oxford

2. Coventry

3. Cambridge

4. St Andrews

5. Dundee

6. University of East Anglia

7. Bath

8. Keele

9. Glasgow

10. Exeter

Top ten UK universities in The Guardian's overall league table

1. Cambridge

2. Oxford

3. St Andrews

4. Surrey

5. Bath

6. Durham

7. Warwick

8. Imperial College

9. Exeter

10. Lancaster

The UK's top ten universities ranked by job prospects

05 May

Cambridge and Oxford are outperformed by London universities when it comes to graduate job prospects, according to statistics from the Complete University Guide (CUG).

Graduates from Imperial College London currently have the best chance of finding a professional job within six months of leaving university, while St George's, University of London, is close behind in second place.

While Cambridge tops CUG's league table for overall best university, it comes in third place for job prospects. Oxford, second overall, languishes in seventh place for job prospects, beaten by Bath, Birmingham and the London School of Economics. Nevertheless, many Oxford graduates have gone on to find success in their chosen field; the university has produced 26 British prime ministers, at least 30 international leaders, 50 Nobel Prize winners and 120 Olympic medal winners.

Cardiff University, University College London and the University of Surrey also made it into the top ten for employment opportunities.

The league table shows that 89.9 per cent of graduates from Imperial College London were in professional jobs or postgraduate study six months after leaving in 2013.

The Daily Telegraph says Imperial's civil engineering graduates have gone on to work in high-profile national and international engineering projects, including China's Three Gorges Dam, London's new Wembley Stadium and the new Antarctic research station. Its computing department also has close ties to Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and BT.

The newspaper says that 100 per cent of graduates on St George's medicine programmes are in employment within six months of course completion.

At the bottom of the table, just 44.6 per cent of London Metropolitan graduates had found a professional job or entered further education within six months.

Top ten UK universities by job prospects

1 Imperial College London

2 St George's, University of London

3 University of Cambridge

4 University of Bath

5 University of Birmingham

6 London School of Economics

7 University of Oxford

8 Cardiff University

9 University College London

10 University of Surrey

CUG's overall top ten UK universities for 2016

1 University of Cambridge

2 University of Oxford

3 London School of Economics

4 Imperial College London

5 Durham University

=5 University of St Andrews

7 University of Warwick

8 University of Surrey

9 Lancaster University

10 University College London

The UK's top ten universities ranked by happiness

09 April

Students at the University of Bath are the happiest in the UK, according to this year's Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey.

Bath was rated highly by students in all 21 aspects surveyed, from quality of academic staff and degree courses to teaching facilities and community atmosphere.

Other measures of satisfaction, voted on by almost 14,700 students, included social life, extracurricular activities, accommodation and cheap amenities.

Sheffield University, which topped the chart last year, dropped down to third place, while Loughborough University leapt up to second place from 11th last year and ranked first for sports facilities.

Cambridge and Oxford appeared in the fourth and fifth spot respectively, while Surrey University jumped from 34th place in 2014 to joint sixth place, with University of East Anglia.

Dundee was rated the highest out of Scotland's universities, coming 12th in the UK, while Cardiff was the most popular in Wales, at joint 29th.

The average overall score for UK universities was down from last year by 0.8 per cent, from 75.5 to 74.7.

John Gill, editor of Times Higher Education, said this might be down to the growth of some universities. "The easing of student number controls has led to significant expansion by some universities and competition for students is set to increase further with the uncapping of student places this autumn," he told The Times. "This is putting new pressure on the student experience as institutions change in size and shape."

Times Higher Education also notes that 11 out of the top 20 universities are campus-based.

Top ten UK universities by happiness in 2015

1 University of Bath

2 Loughborough University

3 University of Sheffield

4 University of Cambridge

5 University of Oxford

6 University of Surrey

=6 University of East Anglia

8 University of Exeter

9 University of Leeds

10 Newcastle University

The UK's top ten universities ranked by reputation

12 March

The University of Cambridge has been ranked as the university with the best reputation in the UK, and is beaten only by Harvard University worldwide.

Times Higher Education (THE) has published the top 100 universities in the world by reputation, which features 12 UK institutions.

Cambridge and Oxford overtook the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University this year to take the second and third spots respectively.

Durham University and the University of Warwick also made it into the top 100 for the first time, boosting the number of UK universities from 10 to 12 since last year.

The US continues to dominate the table, filling 43 of the top 100 spots.

The list was compiled using a survey of 10,500 academics across the world. "The reputation league table is based on nothing more than subjective judgement," says THE, "but it is the considered expert judgement of senior, published academics – the people best placed to know the most about excellence in our universities."

Top ten world universities by reputation in 2015

1 Harvard University, United States

2 University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

3 University of Oxford, United Kingdom

4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States

5 Stanford University, United States

6 University of California, Berkeley, United States

7 Princeton University, United States

8 Yale University, United States

9 California Institute of Technology, United States

10 Columbia University, United States

Top ten UK universities by reputation in 2015

1 University of Cambridge (worldwide ranking: 2)

2 University of Oxford (worldwide ranking: 3)

3 Imperial College London (worldwide ranking: 14)

4 University College London (worldwide ranking: 17)

5 London School of Economics and Political Science (worldwide ranking: 22)

6 University of Edinburgh (worldwide ranking: 29)

7 King's College London (worldwide ranking: 31)

8 University of Manchester (worldwide ranking: 50)

9 Durham University (worldwide ranking: 81-90*)

=9 University of Warwick (worldwide ranking: 81-90*)

*Only universities in the top 50 were ranked. Those from 50-100 were ranked in groups of ten. London Business School and the University of Bristol came in the 91-100 group.​​​​

Oxford tops a list of UK universities that tested on animals in 2014. According to Cruelty Free International, it experimented on 226,739 animals. In second place was the University of Edinburgh, which tested on 200,861.

Mice, rabbits, guinea pigs, fish, amphibians and monkeys were among those used for research.

"The public will be shocked to learn that five of the UK's leading universities are responsible for testing on almost one million animals, despite an increasing number of universities recognising this isn't the way to do research," says Dr Katy Taylor, the director of science at the anti-vivisection organisation.

"We urge them to leave this archaic practice behind and move towards developing innovative and humane research methods for the 21st century."

Universities account for close to half of all animal experiments taking place in the UK. Cruelty Free International named top five as being:

Oxford University (226,739 animals)

University of Edinburgh (200,861)

University College London (176,901)

King's College London (165,068)

Cambridge (160,557)

The report claims some of the monkey experiments involved food or water deprivation, electrodes implanted in their skulls or limbs and loud noises being blasted at them while in their cages.

In a statement, the Oxford University said: "Each trial is designed to minimise the number of animals used." It added that animal care was provided around the clock and that "no procedure using animals should be undertaken lightly".

The research shines a light on vaccine development and the effects of heart disease, malaria and Alzheimer's disease, among others, continued the statement.

That was echoed by the University of Edinburgh, which said that "a small proportion of our research involves the use of animals as a vital component of the quest to advance medical, biological and veterinary science".

The other universities also said animal research played an "essential role" in developing major research breakthroughs in health and medicine.

A student-led campaign to have a statue of Cecil Rhodes removed from the grounds of Oriel College, Oxford, has been rejected after angry donors reportedly threatened to write the college out of their wills.

The campaign claimed the 19th century politician, who was the college's biggest benefactor, was an ardent imperialist whose actions in southern Africa paved the way for apartheid.

However, a consultation by the university revealed "overwhelming support" for the statue to remain.

"Following careful consideration, the college's governing body has decided that the statue should remain in place and that the college will seek to provide a clear historical context to explain why it is there," the university said.

According to a governors' report leaked to the Daily Telegraph, wealthy alumni were furious about the "shame and embarrassment" caused by the 690-year-old college's "dithering" over the issue.

Oriel reportedly now fears that if the statue is taken down, they will lose out on future gifts and bequests, including a proposed £100m to be left to the college in the will of one donor.

However, a spokesman told The Guardian that financial implications were not the primary consideration in the decision to keep the statue.

There have also been accusations of hypocrisy towards Ntokozo Qwabe, the leader of Oxford's Rhodes Must Fall campaign, who is himself a beneficiary of the Rhodes scholarship. In response, the student said he was "no beneficiary" of Rhodes as the money was the result of looting.

"I'm a beneficiary of the resources and labour of my people, which Rhodes pillaged and slaved," he said.

Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, classicist Mary Beard urged students to draw strength from the statue and others like it.

"The battle isn't won by taking the statue away and pretending those people didn't exist," she said. "It's won by empowering those students to look up at Rhodes and friends with a cheery and self-confident sense of unbatterability."

The man suspected of murdering his sister, mother and her partner has been found dead in woodland in Oxford, following a two-day manhunt.

Jed Allen was the prime suspect in the killing of Janet Jordan, Philip Howard and six-year old Derin Jordan who were found dead in their home in Didcot, Oxfordshire on Saturday. The victims suffered fatal knife wounds and were discovered after police were alerted by concerned neighbours.

The gruesome discovery sparked a manhunt involving more than 100 officers, police dogs and a helicopter, and the public were warned not to approach Allen. He was last seen on CCTV buying a bottle of water at Oxford train station on Saturday evening, soon after the murders took place.

The search for Allen focused on Oxford University Parks where he worked as a groundsman, but his body was discovered in nearby woodland on Monday by a member of the public. Officers have confirmed they are no longer looking for any other suspects in connection with the homicides.

Detective Superintendent Chris Ward thanked the public for their help during the investigation and said an inquest would be carried out in due course, the BBC reports. "My condolences go out to the families and loved ones," said Ward. "We have specially trained officers with the families and will continue to support them at this extremely difficult time.”

The 21-year-old was known to police before the attacks and often posed with weapons on social media. In one image, he is seen posing as X-men character Wolverine with kitchen knives in between his knuckles, and others posted on Instagram show him wielding a large hunting knife and an axe. He described himself as "lonely" and "sad" and is said to have struggled to come to terms with his parent's divorce, The Guardian reports.

The head teacher at All Saints primary school where Allen's sister Derin was in Year 1 said he was "shocked and devastated" to lose a child in such tragic circumstances. "She was a beautiful little girl, happy and gentle and smiley. She was a wonderful little child," said John Myers.