
Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the UK. But screening is not universal, and charities are divided over whether it should be extended. What do those living with the disease think?
Almost seven years into his retirement, David Bulteel should be enjoying the fruits of his 40-year career in the City. On paper, he has the lot: a tidy pension, delightful grandkids, a big house in the Buckinghamshire commuter belt. He’s naturally upbeat and driven, which he says was in part a reaction to the trauma of losing his right arm in a motorbike crash at 21. He was so energetic and enthusiastic in the office that his nickname was “Tigger”.
“My philosophy has always been that there’s no such thing as a problem that you can’t solve,” Bulteel, 70, tells me from his home, where he’s wearing two jumpers on one of the coldest days of the winter. “The reality now is that I’ve been living under a shadow for 13 years, which has had a huge impact not just on me but on my whole family.”
Continue reading...SNL is a US comedy institution – can a British version rise to the challenge of finding the funny in our comparatively beige politicians every week? We speak to the team hand-picked to do just that
It is the calm before the storm. The storm being the impending debut of Saturday Night Live UK, our very own version of the US’s headline-grabbing, agenda-setting, impossibly influential TV comedy institution. The calm is a group of performers and writers sitting round a table in a bare-walled boardroom in west London’s Television Centre, seemingly unperturbed by the gargantuan task of staging a live sketch show – most of which will be written in the week of broadcast – or the prospect of a scathing reaction to it. Can SNL UK breathe new life into our ailing comedy industry? Or will the format fail spectacularly on these shores? I come away convinced I’m more nervous about finding out than the cast and crew are about actually making it.
Perhaps they’re just having too much fun. For the past four weeks, 11 performers and 20 writers have been spending every weekday together in this very building, hashing out premises for skits, workshopping each other’s material and “finding the alchemy”, as cast member and standup Ayoade Bamgboye puts it. For another, actor and TikToker Jack Shep, it’s been like “comedy boarding school”.
Continue reading...Hedgehogs’ habitat is shrinking, they’re vulnerable to cars, and pesticides are affecting their food supply. Here’s how we can help them pull through
With stumpy, speedy legs, questing snouts and a fierce quiver of needles, hedgehogs are enchantingly strange, like fantasy creatures from a medieval bestiary. “It’s the nation’s favourite wild animal – every time there’s a vote or a poll, the hedgehog wins,” says ecologist Hugh Warwick, AKA “Hedgehog Hugh”, author of the Cull of the Wild and hedgehog champion.
Continue reading...Humiliating failure now looms, as symbolically damaging to US global standing and national self-esteem as Afghanistan or Iraq
Donald Trump menaces the world. He’s global public enemy number one. He’s steadily losing the illegal war with Iran he started but cannot stop. His violence-addicted Israeli sidekick, Benjamin Netanyahu, is terrorising Lebanon. And ordinary people everywhere, their security threatened, face a huge economic bill for his reckless folly.
Add Trump’s war-making to his daily debasing of democracy, appeasing of Russia, punitive tariffs, climate crisis denial and flouting of international law, and it’s clear this White House travesty has gone on long enough. Americans must put their house in order and act decisively to restrain someone who endangers us all.
Continue reading...From Gaza to Iran, the pattern is the same: precision weapons, chosen blindness, and dead children. The cost of failing to regulate AI warfare is already too high
There is an Israeli military strategy called the “fog procedure”. First used during the second intifada, it’s an unofficial rule that requires soldiers guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be lurking.
It’s violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.
Continue reading...Talk about your fears, normalise difficult emotions, get up and move: experts share their strategies for managing anxiety at different stages of life
We are living in an age of anxiety. A 2023 survey by the Mental Health Foundation found that one in five people in the UK experience anxiety all or most of the time. In 2024, 500 children a day were being referred for NHS anxiety treatment in England.
It is one of the epidemics of our time, says Owen O’Kane, a psychotherapist and the author of Addicted to Anxiety: How to Break the Habit. “When we look at what is happening in the world at the moment, the one thing we have an abundance of is uncertainty. If you look at a textbook definition of anxiety, it is an intolerance of uncertainty.”
Continue reading...Foreign minister says that Tehran ‘never asked even for negotiation’, after Trump’s earlier comments that the US was ‘not ready’ to make a deal
Iraq’s football team will travel to Mexico for a 2026 World Cup playoff match despite calls for it to be postponed due to the Middle East war, the country’s football association has announced.
“The national team will depart at the end of the week to Mexico via a private plane,” said Iraq football association president Adnan Dirjal in a statement, adding they had contacted Fifa to help facilitate the trip during the conflict in the region that has hampered flights.
Continue reading...UK and Japan among countries that are considering options but yet to commit warships to blockaded shipping route
Countries including the UK, Japan, China and South Korea have said they are still considering their options but without making commitments after the US president, Donald Trump, urged them to send warships to the strait of Hormuz to secure the vital shipping route.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump called on the UK, China, France, Japan, South Korea and other countries to send ships to the waterway, the world’s busiest shipping route, which is being violently blockaded by Iran.
Continue reading...Defence analyst says torpedo strike is a ‘humiliation’ for Modi’s government that disregarded a US defence partner
The distress call came in to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue coordination centre just after 5am. The ship in trouble, they determined, was well within Sri Lanka’s obligation for rescue, being just over 19 nautical miles off the coast of the southern city of Galle.
The navy swiftly mobilised and, by 6am, the first search and rescue boat was on its way, another soon close behind. It was hard to see through the thick morning mist but officers onboard kept their eyes peeled for a ship in the distance.
Continue reading...Israeli military also says on social media brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali was ‘eliminated in airstrike last week’
Israel’s military claimed on Sunday that the brother of the recent Michigan synagogue attacker was a Hezbollah commander responsible for managing weapons in a unit that has launched “hundreds of rockets toward Israeli civilians”.
In a statement posted on X, the IDF claimed that Ibrahim Mohamad Ghazali – brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali – was a Hezbollah commander within a specialized branch of the Badr unit.
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