A Florida "predator" was given a slap on the wrist after pleading guilty to luring rich men to hotels, pepper-spraying them, and robbing them of their luxury watches.
Russia bombarded Ukraine's capital city with drones and missiles Sunday night, killing at least one person and striking the entrance to a subway station where hundreds were sheltering.
A ninefold increase is the result of huge advances in our understanding – and brings the hope of fulfilling lives to many more people
Gina Rippon is an emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging and author of The Lost Girls of Autism
Soaring rates of diagnoses in various illnesses such as cancer and diabetes have stimulated a debate about whether medicine has an “overdiagnosis” problem. The claim is that individuals may be prematurely diagnosed with conditions that, although meeting criteria for a disease, will never cause symptoms or death during a patient’s lifetime.
Discussions of this problem in the world of physical medicine have mainly been described as compassionate, arising from concerns that many so-called diagnoses might be unnecessary (does being pre-diabetic really mean you are ill?) or even harmful (the worried well being driven to seek needless and possibly damaging surgical interventions). Now that there are ever-more sensitive screening tests, and access to predictive genetic information, are doctors handing out too many unnecessary sicknotes?
Prof Gina Rippon is emeritus professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Institute of Health and Neurodevelopment, Aston University, and the author of The Lost Girls of Autism and The Gendered Brain
Transformed from a second world war bunker into Germany’s buzziest dance venue, the acoustics at Open Ground in Wuppertal are raved about by DJs such as Floating Points – and may even be good for your health
It’s 8pm when DJ Lag steps up to the booth for his sound check at Open Ground, a dance venue in western Germany. It has been described as the “best-sounding new club in the world”, and when the first track plays you can hear why.
Rotund bass lines roll across the acoustically treated room, propelled by an extraordinarily powerful, horn-loaded bass enclosure named the Funktion-One F132. High-pitched melodies and intricate textures develop with startling clarity. And as for the call-and-response ad-libs – they sound as if the vocalists are standing only metres away.
Driving through Manchester one Sunday, at the wheel of a Nissan Micra, Foot suddenly woke from decades of anxiety, anger and misery. He talks about the friends who tried to help him, and the forgiveness he struggled to find
For three years and four months, Paul Foot has been living in a state of joy. He is in it now, he says, sitting across a table, overlooking London’s Regent’s canal. He’s wearing one of his trademark blue LF Markey boilersuits, and seems serene rather than ecstatic, half smiling. But that’s because the joy doesn’t spike or yo-yo. It’s a “constant”, so reliable that even when someone he knows dies, “there’s still a peace beneath it and a joy in it as well”.
Life was not always like this, and the story of how Foot, 51, overturned 28 years of “crushing, all-encompassing depression and anxiety” is told in his critically acclaimed 2023 show Dissolve, the filmed special of which is released this week.
Corporation aims to build ‘lifestyle brand’ for all ages around smash-hit cartoon character
Each episode may only last seven minutes, but the bite-size length of Bluey’s adventures has not held back the world’s most popular blue dog from creating endless money-spinning opportunities for the BBC.
Grateful executives are open about Bluey’s status as the golden goose driving a record £2.16bn in sales from commercial operations last year, spawning branding deals for everything from headphones to baked beans.
Jude Dibia’s Walking With Shadows has a gay character at its heart – a radical act that continues to influence the region’s literary scene
When Jude Dibia first tried to sell the manuscript of his groundbreaking novel Walking With Shadows20 years ago,he was aware of the silence around queerness in West African literature. While there had been books with gay themes, his is widely recognised as the first novel in the region to put a gay character at the heart of the story.
“The absence wasn’t just literary; it was societal,” Dibia says. “Queer people were living, loving, suffering, surviving – but largely rendered invisible or spoken of in hushed tones, if at all. That silence felt violent. It felt like erasure.
This small cutback is hardly a draconian austerity purge for a country that is broke. But the howls of outrage show a rational debate is unlikely
France is skint, but the French are in denial. To judge by the howls of outrage from the left and the hard right of the French political spectrum, you would think the prime minister, François Bayrou, had just taken a Javier Milei-style chainsaw to public services, announced Doge-style mass layoffs or imposed swingeing pay cuts.
But it was Bayrou’s suggestion that the French should give up two of their 11 cherished public holidays – Easter Monday and 8 May, the anniversary of the end of the second world war in Europe – and work instead to increase economic output and hence government revenue that provoked the anger.
Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre
It started in a strip joint and ended up bringing alternative comedy to our TV screens. Ahead of a new Edinburgh show, Peter Richardson tells us why his riotous creation still makes audiences laugh 40 years on
It was the moment comedy broke with sexism – yet it happened in a strip club. It was a fervour of free creative expression – yet it retained a commercial, careerist edge. It was one of the longest-running and most successful brands in UK comedy history – which few people could now recognise.
At the Edinburgh fringe this summer, The Comic Strip Presents … will be memorialised in a series of film screenings and Q&As with its creator and prime mover Peter Richardson. Richardson was the impresario behind the legendary comedy club The Comic Strip, which opened in 1980. When he and his star performers – Rik Mayall, Alexei Sayle, French and Saunders among them – created Channel 4’s The Comic Strip Presents … a couple of years later, he could legitimately claim to be the man who brought alternative comedy to television.
US comedian and Portia de Rossi have stayed in the UK since Trump’s re-election, and are considering getting married again in case the US overturns same-sex marriage
Ellen DeGeneres has confirmed that she moved to the UK because of Donald Trump, saying, “Everything here is just better”.
At a conversation event on Sunday at Cheltenham’s Everyman theatre – the comedian’s first public appearance since leaving the US – broadcaster Richard Bacon asked DeGeneres if it was true Trump had spurred her decision to relocate.
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