United Kingdom

Life expectancy for people aged over 50 has started to fall, according to new research from Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) and the International Longevity Center (ILC).

The research reveals changes to the health and life expectancy of people over 50 will have a significant impact on the economy, with a subsequent fall in healthy life expectancy resulting in more people dropping out of work earlier than anticipated.

An artwork created by Banksy has been removed from a south London street less than an hour after it was confirmed to be a genuine installation.

The artist confirmed the piece – a traffic stop sign covered with three aircraft said to resemble military drones – was his in a social media post on Friday shortly after midday.

The Home Office has been banned from accommodating lone asylum seeker children in hotels apart from for very short periods “in true emergency situations” after a long-running high court case.

The home secretary’s practice of routinely and systematically accommodating these children in hotels has been ruled unlawful in an order finalised on Thursday. The order states that since December 2021 this practice has “exceeded the proper limits of his powers”.

Some of the children placed in hotels have been as young as 12 and many had recently arrived in the UK after traumatic journeys across the Channel in small boats.

News that children were being placed in hotels where some subsequently went missing, many within 72 hours of arriving in the UK, with some falling into the hands of traffickers, was revealed in the Observer in January this year.

The threat posed to democracy by AI-generated misinformation does not belong to some dystopian vision of the future, he argues.

"The future is here. It's happening.

"The planning, the violence and the age of the killers is beyond belief,"

“It’s like a bad Christmas cracker joke,” said one northern leader in England as the government announced its latest Network North transport project: fixing potholes in London.

The punchline, said Kim McGuinness, Labour’s candidate to be the mayor of north-east England, isn’t even funny. It’s “Tories celebrating widening the widening north/south divide”.

There was anger and exasperation on Wednesday after the Department for Transport (DfT) confirmed funding “for each London borough to ensure millions of road users enjoy smoother and safer journeys”.

The £235m of London pothole money was possible only because of £8.3bn of extra investment which came from scrapping HS2.

A Guantánamo Bay prisoner can sue the UK government in England and Wales over allegations that British intelligence services asked the CIA to put questions to him while he was being tortured in “black sites”, the UK’s highest court has ruled.

The supreme court said MI5 and MI6 were subject to the law of England and Wales and not – as the government had attempted to argue – the six different countries where Abu Zubaydah was held.

Campaigners have called the British Museum “astonishingly out of touch” after it announced a 10-year £50m partnership with BP to help fund one of the biggest redevelopments in its history.

On Tuesday the museum announced the energy company would be helping to fund its ambitious “masterplan” project, a redevelopment estimated to cost £1bn.

Traditionally, parts of Lancashire have very clearly articulated "r"s, similar to the stereotype of Cornwall and the West Country. The pronunciation of these "r"s towards the ends of words is called rhoticity.

In fact, historically, hundreds of years ago, people throughout England used to pronounce strong "r"s. But now, says the research paper, these strong "r"s are definitely dying out.

In Blackburn, young speakers do mostly say their "r"s, but they are, according to the research team, phonetically very weak and often difficult to perceive. And they pronounce them less frequently than older speakers.

The GMB trade union has called on the government and nuclear authorities to take “urgent action” to address concerns over safety at Sellafield.

The union has written to the energy minister, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) and Sellafield’s chief executive to demand greater investment into keeping the 11,000 employees at the vast nuclear rubbish dump in Cumbria safe.

Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed a catalogue of concerns over safety at the sprawling 6 sq km (2 sq mile) site in north-west England.

Sources familiar with risk reports at the site have said they showed that more than 100 safety problems are a matter of serious regulatory concern. They include fire safety deficiencies such as a lack of functioning alarms in parts of the site that contain radioactive material. There have been work stoppages due to a lack of suitably qualified staff trained in nuclear safety and increasing numbers of contamination and radiation protection incidents

As the 1906 UK general election results rolled in, it became clear that the Conservative party, after 11 years in power, had suffered one of the most disastrous defeats in its history. Of 402 Conservative MPs, 251 lost their seats, including their candidate for prime minister, defeated on a 22.5% swing against him in the constituency he had held for two decades.

Rising food prices, unpopular taxes and an opposition that promised to spend heavily on an expanded welfare state all contributed to the Tory downfall that year. But something else had tipped the opposition Liberal landslide over the edge – compulsory vaccination.

“Sheer vandalism” and “insane”. This is how leading historians on Monday described government plans to destroy millions of historical wills to save on storage costs.

The Ministry of Justice is consulting on digitising and then throwing away about 100m paper originals of the last wills and testaments of British people dating back more than 150 years in an effort to save £4.5m a year.

But Tom Holland, the classical and medieval historian and co-host of The Rest is History podcast, said the proposal to empty shelves at the Birmingham archive was “obviously insane”. Sir Richard Evans, historian of modern Germany and modern Europe, said “to destroy the original documents is just sheer vandalism in the name of bureaucratic efficiency”.

Ministers believe digitsiation will speed up access to the papers, but the proposal has provoked a backlash among historians and archivists who took to X, formerly Twitter, to decry it as “bananas” and “a seriously bad idea”.