UK new finance minister John Healey. Britain’s new Finance Minister John Healey will present his first Budget on October 28, pledging to maintain the government’s fiscal rules despite growing pressure on public spending.Announcing the date on Friday, Healey said the Budget would focus on shifting resources away from central government and towards communities across the…
Image: Left/The Telegraph/Right/The Guardian In December 2011, a 44-year-old Swedish man named Peter Skyllberg disappeared while driving through the country’s frozen north. Weeks passed with no sign of him as winter temperatures plunged well below freezing. Then, in February 2012, a group of snowmobilers spotted what looked like the roof of a car protruding from…
pc: Study: Elephant-bone tool (NHMUK PV UNREG 4339) from intertidal deposits at the Boxgrove Waterhole Site Half a million years ago, people living in what is now southern England were doing far more than shaping stone into cutting tools. A newly analysed elephant bone from the famous Boxgrove archaeological site suggests they were carefully choosing,…
Thousands of bright yellow rubber ducks floated down a London canal in a cheerful race that drew smiles from spectators while raising money for a serious cause. The annual Cosmic Rubber Duck Race returned to Paddington Basin on the Grand Union Canal, where up to 3,000 numbered rubber ducks were released into the water and…
Staying neutral often feels like the safer option, in workplaces, in public life, in almost any situation where a strong opinion might invite criticism. King Charles III, speaking as Prince of Wales, described the opposite instinct with a self-deprecating joke. “I’m a dangerous person because I mind about things,” he said. He was not describing…
7 regions officially declared in drought across England/Image: Getty Images Drought has been declared in half of England after months of unusually dry conditions, as officials warn that sustained low rainfall is straining water supplies, rivers and the wider environment.The Environment Agency announced that seven areas are now officially in drought: East Anglia, Hertfordshire and…
In February 2015, British endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh entered the freezing waters of Antarctica’s Ross Sea wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks, completing a series of five short but record breaking swims in temperatures as low as minus 1.7 degrees Celsius. The swims were not simply a personal endurance challenge. Pugh, who serves…
In the early 2000s, Charlie Burrell and his wife Isabella Tree faced a difficult choice. After seventeen years of trying to farm 3,500 acres of heavy clay soil at Knepp Castle Estate in West Sussex, they were roughly 1.5 million pounds in debt, with intensive farming simply failing to turn a profit on land that…
Girlguiding unveils first uniform redesign since 1990. The UK’s largest youth organisation for girls, Girlguiding, has introduced its first complete uniform redesign in more than three decades, giving members greater flexibility over what they wear while keeping a shared identity across the organisation.The updated range means members only need to wear one top from the…
Everyone goes through periods when life feels genuinely hard, illness, money worries, loss, setbacks at work, moments when the future feels uncertain. The easy response is often to give up trying. Queen Elizabeth II offered a different way of thinking about those moments in her Christmas broadcast on the 25th of December 2008. “When life…