
Many hoarders are scared to seek help but one UK housing association is taking a more empathetic approach
At one end of the table sits Tony*, who showers at his local leisure centre in Birkenhead every day. His landlord won’t fix his bathroom because of his hoarding. Then there’s Sarah*, who ended up homeless with her three teenagers after their landlord evicted them because of hoarding. In her new home the problem has started again, but she says she’s petrified to ask for help in case she loses her property.
Sian Cowley, 35, who has struggled with hoarding for decades, says: “I’ve lived without central heating for two years. A lot of us live without the basics like hot water, heating and cooking because we are too scared to get people in to do repairs because of the threat of eviction.”
Continue reading...Damien says plants last longer, but Tolu doesn’t think things have to survive for years to be worthwhile. Who should turn over a new leaf?
• Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror
Flowers are a fleeting gesture. Why not buy plants that last years instead?
Continue reading...Passenger Ljubisa Karović was nearly sucked out of his seat when Boeing 737-800’s window blew out on flight from Greece
For nervous flyers, it sounds like the stuff of nightmares; for most, only contemplated in an action movie. But last week, a passenger really was nearly sucked out through a broken aircraft window mid-flight.
Ljubisa Karović was on a Ryanair-Air Malta flight leaving Thessaloniki in Greece when the adjacent window blew out of the Boeing 737-800, pulling his head and shoulders out of the plane. His wife and fellow passengers helped to keep him inside.
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On the Bradford-born producer’s self-assured second album, drum’n’bass rhythms power up angsty odes with shades of Arctic Monkeys, Kate Nash and myriad genres
Like another of the year’s biggest pop records, Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, the second full-length from the self-proclaimed “emotional junglist” Nia Archives is an album of two halves. The first documents its protagonist falling in love at breakneck speed; the second, the whiplash of sudden heartbreak. Unlike Rodrigo, Archives didn’t grow up starring on Disney Channel, a predestined route to success, but in Bradford, cutting her teeth on early 00s pirate radio, dancehall and landfill indie.
More than most major artists, Archives has carved out her own path. After leaving home at just 16 to move into a youth hostel in Manchester, she started teaching herself to make beats; eventually, she uprooted to Hackney and studied music production, and used her student loan to fund the promotion of her self-released debut single. Since then, she’s made history as the first electronic/dance act to win a Mobo in decades (after publicly campaigning for the inclusion of dance music at the awards in 2022). With her 2024 debut album Silence Is Loud, she became the first junglist to be nominated for three Brit awards, and the first to be nominated for the Mercury prize since 1997 – before she was born.
Continue reading...JD Salinger’s wry, subversive classic inspired novelist Joseph O’Connor to be a writer. He reflects on why this story of a disaffected teenager remains as fresh and transgressive as ever
In 1981, when I was 17, my first girlfriend gave me a paperback of her dad’s favourite novel. I’d never heard of it despite living in a home full of books. My parents loved the work of Edna O’Brien, Muriel Spark, John le Carré, Dickens. So did I. But encountering the first sentence of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye made the world burst into colour.
“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Continue reading...At the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre broke new ground in selling readers an angry rightwing perspective. Today, most of Fleet Street is run by his disciples
In 1986, 131 years after the Daily Telegraph was founded, its editor, Max Hastings, wrote a memo to senior colleagues about the newspaper’s nature and purpose. “The Daily Telegraph is … ‘nice’,” he said, “in the business of reassurance, of providing confirmation each morning for our readers that their world is looking pretty safe and stable.” He went on: “We are not a strident campaigning newspaper – our business each day is to seek to give our readers the fullest possible information about what is happening in the world, and to suggest what it might mean.”
In practice, under Hastings and many other Telegraph editors, this ethos produced a journalism of pervasive but usually understated conservatism: often focused on the English countryside, the value of hierarchy and tradition, the pleasures of seasonal pursuits such as foxhunting and gardening, the interests of farmers and retired military men – and cautionary tales about more reckless lives gone wrong, often presented through enjoyably detailed reports from the divorce courts. The Torygraph, as many non-readers called it, could be inward-looking and “numbingly dull”, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft, the historian of British conservatism, but it was “thoroughly respectable”. Many of its most renowned figures, such as Hastings’s predecessor as editor, Bill Deedes, were “mildness itself”.
Continue reading...⚽ Latest news in aftermath from dramatic day in Atlanta
⚽ Tuchel takes blame | Player guide | Golden Boot | Mail us
Thomas Tuchel had already shown this week he’s not someone who is prone to mere pleasantries after a game. The head coach shouldered the blame for England becoming too passive after taking the lead against Argentina, but at the same time said he had “no regrets”.
I don’t believe so much in an English thing and a curse or whatever. It’s repeating itself in different moments. It’s different coaches, different players, different situations.
What cost us today was that we were not active enough in any structure. I can understand these discussions are out there and of course a million coaches after the game know it better. You can discuss this with a million coaches. I have to make a decision on the pitch. It’s how I analyse the match and I take the responsibility.
Continue reading...Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m
The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.
Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.
Continue reading...Arrival of outgoing British leader in Kyiv comes as Zelenskyy faces outrage after removing Mykhailo Fedorov
in Madrid
Meanwhile, the EU’s top court has ruled that a controversial Spanish law that offered an amnesty to those who planned and participated in the failed and illegal push for Catalan independence does not violate the bloc’s rules.
Continue reading...Green leader says expected appointment shows new PM ‘won’t challenge the power of the bankers, or tax their wealth’
Couples could legally marry in forests, on beaches, at sea or in their gardens under new proposals, the Press Association reports. PA says a government consultation announced today, covering rules in England and Wales, could help cut the costs of weddings and mean two ceremonies are no longer required to cover different faiths. PA says:
The average wedding in England is estimated to cost more than £20,000, with venue hire alone typically accounting for around £6,000 without catering.
The system as it stands means some couples have two ceremonies – one where they feel their beliefs are best reflected and another making their marriage legal.
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