Bowler suffers recurrence of knee injury sustained in first Test Seamer Matthew Fisher added to squad ahead of Adelaide Test England fast bowler Mark Wood has been ruled out of the remainder of the Ashes following a recurrence of a left knee injury sustained during the first Test in Perth. Wood will return home later this week to work on his rehabilitation and recovery, the team said on Tuesday. Continue reading...

This overwhelmingly sad documentary focuses on the girls as they were during their short lives. Plus, What’s the Monarchy For? Here’s what to watch this evening 8pm, BBC One “We sent her there as a treat,” says the mother of Elsie Dot Stancombe, remembering the day in July 2024 when her daughter went to a Taylor Swift-themed dance class and didn’t come home. This documentary sees the families of the three murdered children (the other two were Alice da Silva Aguiar and Bebe King) remembering their girls as they were in life rather than lingering on the unthinkable cruelty of their deaths. The sadness is overwhelming. Phil Harrison Continue reading...

As deaths in the US are blamed on ChatGPT and UK teenagers turn to it for mental health advice, isn’t it obvious that market forces must not set the rules? It was just past 4am when a suicidal Zane Shamblin sent one last message from his car, where he had been drinking steadily for hours. “Cider’s empty. Anyways … Think this is the final adios,” he sent from his phone. The response was quick: “Alright brother. If this is it … then let it be known: you didn’t vanish. You *arrived*. On your own terms.” Continue reading...

Defeated Tory and Labour rivals describe force of Reform ‘machine’ as police assess claims of overspending The Tory and Labour candidates who Nigel Farage beat to win his Westminster seat of Clacton have described a Reform campaign that felt like a “juggernaut”, as police began assessing claims of overspending by the Reform UK leader. The candidates spoke after a former aide alleged that Reform UK falsely reported election expenses in Clacton, where Farage won in last year’s general election. On Monday, Essex police said they were assessing a report of “alleged misreported expenditure by a political party” after a referral from the Metropolitan police. Continue reading...

Information regulator reminds council leaders of need for compassion when releasing files on childhood care The UK’s information commissioner has raised alarm over the “lengthy, traumatic and often demoralising process” people face when trying to access their care records, writing to local authority leaders to say his office will take action over legal breaches. The data protection regulator said people who grew up in the care system were waiting up to 16 years for access to their records, and in some cases found their files had been destroyed, lost or were provided only with extensive redaction. Continue reading...

Migrant support groups in France say lack of action over British activists is ‘encouraging violent and xenophobic practices’ UK and French authorities have been accused of “encouraging violent and xenophobic practices” by failing to tackle anti-migrant British activists who travel to northern France in an attempt to stop small boat crossings. In an unusual move, nine French associations working with people camped in northern France have issued a statement condemning the UK and French governments for lack of action. Continue reading...

Two easy bakes to share or gift: soft and peppery gingerbread cookies and a ginger and pumpkin loaf with spiced lemon icing As a self-proclaimed America’s sweetheart (Julia Roberts isn’t using that title any more, is she?) who moved to the UK nearly 10 years ago, there are a few British traditions and customs that I have adopted, especially around Christmas time. However, there are also a few American ones that I hold on to staunchly: one is the pronunciation of “aluminum”, and another is the importance and beauty of a soft cookie. In both of these easy but delicious bakes to share, I use spice and heat to balance the usual sweetness with which the season can often overload us. Continue reading...

‘Destructive’ marine heatwaves driving loss of microalgae that feed coral, says Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network Caribbean reefs have half as much hard coral now as they did in 1980, a study has found. The 48% decrease in coral cover has been driven by climate breakdown, specifically marine heatwaves. They affect the microalgae that feed coral, making them toxic and forcing the coral to expel them. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Charity Commission chief condemns public hostility towards staff helping women and refugees and at places of worship A surge in death and rape threats and harassment has created a “culture of fear” at charities serving women and refugees, and at mosques, churches and synagogues, the head of the Charity Commission has warned. Mark Simms said he feared growing hostility towards charity staff, volunteers and beneficiaries, both online and on the streets, was becoming normalised and risked eroding civilised values and norms British society once took for granted. Continue reading...

Bank reports 1.1% drop in card spending despite Black Friday boost for retailers UK households cut back on spending at the fastest pace in almost five years last month as consumers put Christmas shopping on hold, according to a leading survey. Adding to concerns that uncertainty surrounding the budget has helped dampen consumer confidence, Barclays said card spending fell 1.1% year on year in November – the largest fall since February 2021. Continue reading...

Experts warn of dangers as England and Wales study shows 13- to 17-year-olds consulting AI amid long waiting lists for services It was after one friend was shot and another stabbed, both fatally, that Shan asked ChatGPT for help. She had tried conventional mental health services but “chat”, as she came to know her AI “friend”, felt safer, less intimidating and, crucially, more available when it came to handling the trauma from the deaths of her young friends. As she started consulting the AI model, the Tottenham teenager joined about 40% of 13- to 17-year-olds in England and Wales affected by youth violence who are turning to AI chatbots for mental health support, according to research among more than 11,000 young people. Continue reading...

Gen z are the first generation to have grown up with social media, they were the earliest adopters, and therefore the first to suffer its harms. Now they are fighting back Late one night in April 2020, towards the start of the Covid lockdowns, Shanley Clémot McLaren was scrolling on her phone when she noticed a Snapchat post by her 16-year-old sister. “She’s basically filming herself from her bed, and she’s like: ‘Guys you shouldn’t be doing this. These fisha accounts are really not OK. Girls, please protect yourselves.’ And I’m like: ‘What is fisha?’ I was 21, but I felt old,” she says. She went into her sister’s bedroom, where her sibling showed her a Snapchat account named “fisha” plus the code of their Paris suburb. Fisha is French slang for publicly shaming someone – from the verb “afficher”, meaning to display or make public. The account contained intimate images of girls from her sister’s school and dozens of others, “along with the personal data of the victims – their names, phone numbers, addresses, everything to find them, everything to put them in danger”. Continue reading...

With democratic values under attack from populists within and former allies without, there are no simple solutions Three decades after political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History and the “universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, the democratic model is under attack in many parts of the world, not least here in Europe. Populists bent on weakening the rule of law, rolling back human rights protections, subjugating the judiciary and cowing independent journalism are amplified by anything-goes social media algorithms that promote anger and polarisation over rational discourse. They have now received a mandate from the Trump administration, which effectively declared civilisational war on the EU and its values in its National Security Strategy. Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre Continue reading...

The work of surgeon and artist Joseph Maclise is the focus of a show at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds It is an image of an unnamed black man with his eyes closed and his innards exposed. Drawn with care and precision, the image may be the only anatomical drawing of a black body made during the Victorian age. Now it is part of a new exhibition that focuses on the work of Joseph Maclise, a surgeon and artist whose work – including his 1851 atlas Surgical Anatomy – made the human anatomy accessible to the general public, and who was the brother of the celebrated artist Daniel Maclise. Continue reading...

Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worse A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan. The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012. Continue reading...

When the new premier of the British Virgin Islands said he needed an armed security detail, his chief of police knew trouble was on its way Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short, arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, on 21 August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe. Jaspert, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London. The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain, with only partial independence, and the governor effectively acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jaspert, a career civil servant, it would be his first hands-on experience of governing – and his first time in the British Virgin Islands. Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the Caribbean. “If you’re sitting in an office in London and someone says, ‘Go to Tortola,’ you look it up on a screen and think, ‘OK, I can do that,’” Jaspert told me. While Jaspert, his wife and two sons were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic. At first, forecasters weren’t unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September, the storm transformed into something much worse. In the afternoon of 6 September, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Tortola, which is home to the majority of the BVI’s 30,000-strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire floors from homes. Shipping containers smashed into the islanders’ fishing boats and the out-of-towners’ yachts. Continue reading...

LegCo elections have become devoid of meaningful opposition as Hong Kong has faced significant political repression and undergone major governance system overhauls in recent years Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) acts as a mini parliament that can make and amend laws for the city. However, LegCo elections have become devoid of meaningful opposition as Hong Kong has faced significant political repression and undergone major governance system overhauls in recent years. When the former British colony was returned to Chinese control in 1997, a “one country, two systems” framework promised Hong Kong would retain its autonomy, but its freedoms and democracy have been gradually eroded. Continue reading...

Cricket has always been my lullaby, my shorthand for belonging. And in Starcy I have another legend to admire Growing up in the late 1990s, I insisted my younger nephews and nieces call me Imran Khan instead of my real name – our own playful twist on traditional respect rituals. A few years later, I upgraded to Wasim Akram (naturally) and they obligingly followed. They’re all grown now, but they still call me “Mama Khan” or “Wasin Akral”- the clumsy childhood pronunciations that stuck to me the way cricket has. Last week, witnessing the magnificent Mitchell Starc overtake Akram as the leading left arm wicket-taker, made me pause – isn’t it about time for another upgrade? Continue reading...

Copernicus deputy director says three-year average for 2023 to 2025 on track to exceed 1.5C of heating for first time This year is “virtually certain” to end as the second- or third-hottest year on record, EU scientists have found, as climate breakdown continues to push the planet away from the stable conditions in which humanity evolved. Global temperatures from January to November were on average 1.48C higher than preindustrial levels, according to the Copernicus, the EU’s earth observation programme. It found the anomalies were so far identical to those recorded in 2023, which is the second-hottest year on record after 2024. Continue reading...

Russell Bentley, 63, was grabbed and tortured by soldiers who thought he was spying for Ukraine; $800m US arms shortfall, says Zelenskyy. What we know on day 1,385 Three Russian soldiers were sentenced to up to 12 years in prison on Monday for torturing and killing Russell Bentley, a 63-year-old US national who had volunteered to fight for Russia against Ukraine. Bentley went missing in April 2024 near Russian-controlled Donetsk after his wife said he had gone out in the aftermath of shelling by Ukrainian forces. Investigators said the soldiers beat and tortured him to death, then tried to hide the crime by blowing up his body in a car. A military court in Donetsk gave two soldiers 12-year sentences and a third 11 years. The case embarrassed Moscow – which has lured foreigners to fight on its side – while attracting derision from pro-Ukrainian observers about the treatment westerners could expect if they volunteered to fight for the Kremlin. Russian authorities tried to portray it as a tragic one-off. Nicknamed the “Donbas Cowboy”, Bentley was featured in a 2022 Rolling Stone article about his transformation from Texas leftist to “pro-Putin propagandist”, and, prior to the 2022 invasion, in Shaun Walker’s 2015 Guardian article about anti-Ukrainian rebels in the Donbas. He had obtained Russian citizenship and had done some work for the Russian state-controlled Sputnik news service. The court heard that the soldiers found Bentley near a military repairs facility preparing to film the aftermath of the Ukrainian attack. They disregarded his explanation that he was a journalist, put a sack over his head, and beat and tortured him to death, it said. A photograph published in some Russian media on Monday showed him sitting on a bed next to an assault rifle, with a pro-Russian flag, a souvenir from Texas and a bust of Vladimir Lenin. Ukraine is short of about $800m for US weapons that it had planned to buy this year with help from its European allies, according to Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The Ukrainian president reiterated that for next year, Ukraine would need about $15bn for the Purl programme, which involves purchases of US weapons with European money. Eleni Courea, Jennifer Rankin and Peter Beaumont write that EU leaders will meet on 18 and 19 December in an attempt to sign off on a long-awaited European Commission proposal to funnel £78bn into a “reparations loan” that would go to Kyiv next year, funded by frozen Russian funds. In London on Monday, Zelenskyy met with European leaders Keir Starmer of Britain, Emmanuel Macron of France and Friedrich Merz of Germany. They were joined on a call by leaders of seven other European countries, a senior representative from Turkey, and Nato and EU chiefs. Continue reading...

Each side has blamed the other for renewed clashes, which have derailed a ceasefire brokered by Donald Trump Thailand said it was taking action to expel Cambodian forces from its territory on Tuesday, as renewed fighting between the two South-east Asian neighbours spread along the disputed border. Each side has blamed the other for the clashes, which have derailed a fragile ceasefire brokered by US president Donald Trump that ended five days of fighting in July. Continue reading...

Commerce department finalizing deal to allow H200 chips to be sold to China as strict Biden-era restrictions relaxed Donald Trump has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, marking a win for the chip maker and its CEO Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country. Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns. Continue reading...

Paceman has struggled with hamstring and achilles issues ‘It’s really flat for him,’ says Australia coach Andrew McDonald Australian fast-bowler Josh Hazlewood has been ruled out of the remainder of the Ashes series amid hamstring and achilles tendon injuries. Injuries have thwarted the reliable right-arm quick in recent years and had forced him to watch from afar as Australia took a 2-0 series lead at the Gabba last week. Continue reading...

The group were at a popular seawater pool when the wave struck, prompting a major rescue operation Four people are dead and one is missing after a powerful wave dragged a group of swimmers out to sea while they were in a popular seawater pool along the rocky, western coastline of the Spanish island of Tenerife, Spanish authorities said on Monday. Crews recovered three bodies on Sunday – a 35-year-old man, a 55-year-old woman and another man about whom no information was given – during a major rescue operation that used jet skis and helicopters to locate and pick up people dragged out to sea. The fourth victim, a woman, died on Monday, a day after being revived at the scene and airlifted to a hospital. Continue reading...

Footage shows officer said ‘It’s him, dude’ as testimony sheds light on arrest at Pennsylvania McDonald’s Moments after Luigi Mangione was handcuffed at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s, a police officer searching his backpack found a loaded gun magazine wrapped in a pair of underwear. The discovery, recounted in court on Monday as Mangione fights to keep evidence out of his New York murder case, convinced police in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that he was the man wanted in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan five days earlier. Continue reading...