News

So the latest since our last check-in is that the President has been having imaginary conversations with the head of the Boy Scouts of America and the President of Mexico. These were either bald-faced lies (most likely), possible signs of creeping dementia (not unlikely), or one of those flashbacks we were all promised when we were ingesting recreational chemicals back in our tossed salad days (pleasant to consider). Oh yes, and Trump has also been quoted as telling his wealthy...

An ozone layer just like that surrounding Earth has been detected surrounding a planet outside the solar system for the first time. The 'sunscreen' on the distant gas giant known as WASP-121b was identified by british scientists in groundbreaking research. It has a stratosphere - one of the main layers of our own planet's atmosphere - but is totally ununhabitable with temperatures hot enough to boil iron. But the discovery reported in Nature could help identify other worlds where life...

Green fingered protesters are fighting plans to build houses on London's oldest allotments, dating back to pre-Victorian days. Northfields Allotments, founded in 1832, faces a threat from plans to build a multi-storey social housing block and private apartments on the site. The site in Ealing, west London, consisting of 141 plots and with more than 70 people on the waiting list, would lose five per cent of its land if plans by Pathways Housing Charity are approved. During the 1970s...

This sickening footage shows a chicken producer which supplies Asda, Lidl and Nando's allegedly breaching animal cruelty laws. Secret filming at Cambria Farm in Taunton, Somerset, claims to show a worker dumping a live chick in a wheelbarrow full of dead birds. The chick was left for an hour before the same worker returns and snaps its neck, according to vegan campaign group Animal Equality. Dead chickens in a container at Cambria Farm in Taunton, Somerset. This sickening footage shows...

In a week of incredible soap opera antics at the White House, you may have missed the barely reported testimony of a businessman named William Browder to the US Senate Judiciary Hearing on Russian meddling in the US election. Whether Donald Trump’s weird tweets, weirder attack on transexuals in the armed forces and Anthony Scaramucci’s spectacularly bizarre ill-fated eight days as White House Communications Director can be put down to stupidity or conspiracy to deflect from some of the most...

Figures released by High Pay Centre are a ‘scandal’, says GMB union It would take a worker on a normal salary more than 150 years to earn the average yearly pay packet trousered by top chief executives FTSE100 companies, says GMB. Figures released by the High Pay Centre and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development today show the average pay received by CEOs of FTSE100 listed companies in 2016 was £4.5million. The average median full time wage in the...

The early Greeks - creators of Europe's first advanced civilisations - descended from migrants from modern day Turkey, reveals new research. An analysis of ancient DNA has revealed that Ancient Minoans and Mycenaens were genetically similar - with both peoples descending from early Neolithic farmers. Researchers say they likely migrated from Anatolia to Greece and Crete thousands of years before the Bronze Age. Modern Greeks, in turn, are largely descendants of the Mycenaeans, the study found. The researchers analysed tooth...

It's a thin and shaky cable that stretches between bemused interest and hysteric obsession and sometimes you just stand there in the middle, wondering which way to walk. Casual glances at a news subject's headlines with only an occasional long read is in the long run probably safer for mental health, and a damn sight better in terms of work productivity, yet it never seems to satisfy. You feel a permanent – perhaps not a hunger exactly – but a...

A gang of jihadis dubbed "the Three Musketeers" and based in the Midlands are facing jail for plotting a mass casualty terror attack in Britain. Naweed Ali, 29, Khobaib Hussain, 25, Mohibur Rahman, 33, hatched the plan involving meat cleavers and a pipe bomb on the encrypted Telegram app between May and August last year. Tahir Aziz. Four men Naweed Ali, Khobaib Hussain, Mohibur Rahman and Tahir Aziz were today convicted of terrorism offences at the Central Criminal Court in...