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Kim Aris tells the Guardian chance to speak with detained Nobel laureate was ‘public relations’ move from military leaders Myanmar’s former democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi appears to be in good physical and mental health but is living in near-complete isolation, her son has said after the first call with his 81-year-old mother in more than five years. “She still sounds certainly all there mentally, and physically she sounds strong,” Kim Aris said. “I don’t think she has anybody outside of the military or the police around her, so essentially she’s been held in solitary confinement from what I gather.” Continue reading...

Lake sturgeon may be among the longest-living vertebrates, second only to Greenland sharks, according to recent research. However, scientists note that follow-up work is necessary to clarify the species’ life span

The Cali Fund, set up to raise $1bn a year for biodiversity from drug companies, remains near empty Big pharmaceutical companies have been accused of “free-riding on nature”, after a landmark biodiversity fund that invites businesses to put some of their profits back into conservation was left virtually empty. The Cali Fund set out to raise $1bn (£750m) annually, by asking companies that profit from nature’s genetics to contribute towards conservation in low-income countries. But more than 18 months after the fund was launched, it remains far below this target. Continue reading...

Companies have rushed to supply the drug as a wellness treatment, but patients with serious illnesses aren’t able to get NHS prescriptions In 2022, a prodigiously talented young artist named Louis Petit was preparing to return to the UK, having been effectively exiled in the Netherlands as a teenager so he could access the medical cannabis he needed to control his epilepsy. Six years earlier, Louis, then 12, had been diagnosed with a rare form of the neurological disease when medical cannabis was still illegal in the UK. But in Rotterdam, where it was legal, doctors helped him discover that a medical cannabis oil called Bedrolite, in combination with the right mix of anti-epileptic treatment, could slow and eventually stop his seizures. This was something his neurologists in the UK had previously considered impossible. Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University and the author of The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...

The Covid pandemic shed an unforgiving light on health and social care inequalities. The lessons have yet to be absorbed The fear that so many felt as the death toll rose during the Covid pandemic was magnified for Fiona Walker. “I know from experience they wouldn’t have valued my life,” she says, in a new report on the treatment of people with learning disabilities during the crisis. The 1.5 million people in the UK with learning disabilities, and their families, had reason for concern. Death rates in England were four to six times higher than average for people with learning disabilities. As is now well established, the pandemic did not create inequalities; it exposed and intensified them. People with learning disabilities die on average 19.5 years earlier than people without, and deaths are almost twice as likely to be classed as avoidable. Continue reading...

Alliance for the Future, unveiled at Montreal summit and open to other countries, conceived for world ‘shaken by new storms’ Canada and Europe have announced a new alliance of like-minded nations to serve as both a “protective canopy under which our citizens can thrive” and a powerful hedge against the unpredictable nature of geopolitics, while welcoming other countries to join. Speaking to reporters on Friday from Montreal, the prime minister, Mark Carney, and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, called the new partnership the Alliance for the Future and said the “deepest possible partnership between Canada and the 27-member bloc had the potential to offer unprecedented stability and opportunity”. Continue reading...

Many Muslims saw their places of worship destroyed or abandoned during the sectarian violence of India’s partition in 1947. Now villagers of many faiths are coming together to revive them Gajju Khan is smiling as he sits in an unfinished building in the northern Indian state of Punjab in the late afternoon. The 87-year-old is hopeful that before he dies he will hear the azaan, the Muslim call to prayer, echo across his village once again when the mosque is completed. The last time he heard it here was when he was eight years old, living with his parents in Tira Maloya, a village in Chandigarh, not far from where he lives now. Bibi Rajinder Kaur, a Sikh, donated family land to build a mosque in her village. ‘There is no deed better than giving someone a place to worship,’ she says Continue reading...

Mageean won 2024 European 1500m title in Rome Athlete described as ‘an inspiration to so many’ The Irish middle-distance runner Ciara Mageean, who won European gold and competed at two Olympic Games, has died aged 34, her family have announced. The athlete, from Portaferry in Northern Ireland, died at 6.30am on Sunday. In a post on social media, her family said she was surrounded by her loved ones, adding: “A beloved daughter, sister, wife, friend and inspiration to so many, she will be deeply missed.” Continue reading...

Turkey has been hit by powerful thunderstorms and a fatal tornado this week with more heavy rain expected Heavy rain and strong winds will continue to affect parts of south-eastern Europe and Turkey over the next few days, as an area of low pressure in the region has allowed for the formation of powerful thunderstorms. During a particularly intense thunderstorm in Antalya, a coastal city in the south-west of Turkey, the formation of a tornado resulted in the deaths of four construction workers on Tuesday. Authorities in Greece and Turkey have released severe rainfall and flooding warnings, as a further 100-150mm (nearly 4-6in) of rain is expected this week in central Greece and western parts of Turkey, with locally higher totals possible. Travelling eastwards towards south Asia, strong winds and heavy rainfall have swept across the Indian regions of Odisha and Andhra Pradesh as Cyclone Arnab made landfall. With wind gusts in excess of 85mph (140km/h) and rainfall totals in some regions exceeding 200mm, the severe storm has prompted mass evacuations of more than 180,000 people, as well as widespread disruption to energy and transport infrastructure. The cyclone will weaken as it continues to traverse northwards over the coming days, though will continue to deliver heavy rain to parts of northern and central India as it does so. Continue reading...

Milwaukee’s first World Series championship is a rebuke to baseball’s oligarch class, whose insistence that small-market teams cannot compete has been laid bare as fiction For the entirety of the 2026 baseball season, the overlords of the game have stood on the single position that what has now happened could not happen, and the result was a year that has been treated like an appetizer for the main course of the offseason: the shutting down of the game until the players, after 40 years of resistance, finally agree to a salary cap. The insistence that the game had been predetermined undermined the Milwaukee Brewers, who spent 149 days this season atop the standings. Baseball dismissed Milwaukee’s 22-0 demolition of Seattle on 18 August, the 20-0 waxing of Cincinnati a month later, and the comprehensive dusting of their division – their fourth consecutive National League Central title and fifth in six years – by 14 games. Baseball’s owners, at their persuasive best, would have their paying customers believe that the Brewers’ franchise-record 103 regular-season wins also were an illusion, or worse, the dreaded outlier, even though Milwaukee have won 770 games since 2018, the fourth-most in all of baseball. Even when Milwaukee exhaled and made the Dodgers look old in a stirring four-game sweep, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported the owners’ position remained unchanged. Continue reading...

A Derren Brown-style experiment? A Ghostwatch stunt? Wild rumours have swirled around Bradley Walsh’s Million Pound Shot all week. The hoax has finally been revealed – and its message is terrifying In late October, some canny viewers began to wonder whether there was something strange about Channel 4’s latest gameshow. Bradley Walsh’s Million Pound Shot had been billed as a new big-money contest with a twist, but information about its pilot episode was strangely minimal. Television and radio producer Chuck Thomas wondered on X whether it could be a Derren Brown-style psychological experiment; a Ghostwatch-esque stunt; or even a dark TV comedy in the vein of the genre-bending series Inside No 9. Indeed, the timing – one day after Halloween – also seemed to point viewers towards some kind of parody or one-off drama. As more information was revealed about the show – including that its players would stake their own money, in a UK television first – Thomas considered whether this was in fact “an elaborate anti-gambling stunt”. It was an opinion shared by journalist Alistair Ryder, who posted that it was “more likely to be a stealth anti-gambling drama disguised as a gameshow than a modern Ghostwatch”, adding that the programme “could make for uncomfortable viewing in a completely different way”. Continue reading...

Paleontologists are still unraveling the secrets of the world’s most famous dinosaur, such as its outward appearance or the way that it hunted. With each new finding, our view of the “tyrant lizard king” has gotten a little clearer—and sometimes has radically shifted

The veil of secrecy surrounding an orbital mystery has been lifted after the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) released the clearest public view yet of China's secretive spaceplane. The photograph was taken on May 28, 2024, by a commercial Earth-imaging satellite from a distance of less than 56 miles (90 km). Continue Reading Category: Military, Engineering Tags: Spaceplane, China, Orbit

Australian workers expect the government to act to protect them from AI harms. There is a clear reform solution at hand Get our new political email, free app or daily news podcast Australia’s major political parties are edging towards rare consensus. Labor and the Coalition increasingly want to take a major bet on artificial intelligence. Yet, just as the parties are coming together, the Australian community is running the other way. Last year, only 30% of Australians believed the benefits of AI outweighed the risks. In 2026, community trust in AI appears to be falling even further. Continue reading...

Video appears to show Mao Zedong called a ‘dictator’ Dongpeng and Mengniu end deals with the player Kylian Mbappé has apologised after the Real Madrid forward was dropped by major Chinese brands for apparently joking about Mao Zedong in a video that has gone viral. There were also signs of broader repercussions, with the state-run Chinese digital newspaper The Paper reporting that public television was suspending broadcasts of matches from La Liga. The offending video shows Mbappé saying that the funniest internet meme he had seen involving him was of his face photoshopped on to that of “some guy – I think he’s a Chinese dictator”. This was an apparent reference to a meme of Mbappé superimposed on an image of Mao. Continue reading...

Ousmane Dembélé becomes our seventh winner as he beats Lamine Yamal into second and Vitinha into third on our list of the best players on the planet Premier League dominates list | How every judge voted | Our methodology | The top 100 female players for 2025 2024 edition | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 Continue reading...

Fujifilm recently announced a significant new investment in its magnetic tape manufacturing operations. The Japanese giant will spend 10 billion yen, or around $64 million, to expand production capacity at its Kanagawa Factory in the city of Odawara. The site manufactures magnetic tapes for data storage workloads, and the IT... Read Entire Article

Philadelphia police and FBI are conducting a massive investigation into the home where the late R.C. Horsch and his son lived, along with several women who’ve gone missing.

The MV Odyssey was billed as the ultimate escape from Donald Trump. Instead, the oil shock caused by his war has left passengers unceremoniously dumped in Cambodia The idea was a never-ending retirement at sea, a continuous voyage around the globe. The promise to the passengers of the MV Odyssey cruise ship – many approaching the autumn of their lives – was that on the open seas they could cut loose from the troubles of the world. But the world had other ideas. The end came in an announcement as stark as it was brief: they had seven hours to get off. They were going no further than Cambodia. Continue reading...

Kenya’s Sheila Chepkirui wins second women’s title USA’s Jessica Jessica McClain finishes in second Sweden’s Andreas Almgren wins men’s race on debut Sheila Chepkirui of Kenya won the women’s race of the New York City Marathon on Sunday for the second time, while Sweden’s Andreas Almgren claimed the men’s title in his first ever race over the distance. Almgren was making his debut at 26.2 miles after a successful career running half marathons and the 10,000m. He pulled away from Yemaneberhan Crippa of Italy in the final mile to take the victory in two hours, six minutes and one second. Crippa finished 13 seconds behind. Kamohelo Mofolo of Lesotho was third, edging out defending champion Benson Kipruto. Continue reading...