Victorian woman, 50, has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and one of attempted murder over a fatal 2023 beef wellington lunch. Follow live
Barrister ColinMandy SC asks his client why at one stage there were three properties in both Erin and Simon Patterson’s name when the couple had been separated for four years.
I always thought we would bring the family back together. That is what I wanted ... It was something tangible to say to Simon, I see a future for us.
I have not.
I’ve never had a needle biopsy anywhere.
I consulted Dr Google.
I alternated that with Don.
We did talk about it sometimes.
The kind of conversations that we had ... they would gently make fun of the fact that I was religious and I would try and evangelise back to them in a sense ... It was sort of all in good humour.
Zelenskyy says ‘no one cares’ if Putin is angry after hidden drones hit bomber fleet; Russians want truce to collect dead soldiers. What we know on day 1,196
Pardons signed for Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr, who freed 19 sharks and giant grouper from fisherman’s longline
Donald Trump has pardoned two south Florida shark divers convicted of theft for freeing 19 sharks and a giant grouper from a fisherman’s longline several miles from shore.
Pardons for Tanner Mansell and John Moore Jr were signed on Wednesday. They had been convicted in 2022 of theft of property within special maritime jurisdiction.
Critics had called for Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai to step down after reports of his son’s lavish spending
Mongolia’s prime minister has resigned after he failed to receive enough support in a vote of confidence in parliament, Mongolian media has reported. The country’s embassy in Washington confirmed it.
Prime minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai received 44 votes, well short of the 64 needed, according to news site ikon.mn.
Fringe Society CEO says venues could offer concertgoers ‘morning after’ shows or tempt residents who ‘want to hide’
Organisers of Edinburgh fringe events have been urged to be “pretty smart” and capitalise on the decision by Oasis and AC/DC to play gigs in the city midway through the festival.
There was surprise and irritation when it emerged the bands would be staging four concerts at Murrayfield stadium in mid-August when the world’s largest arts festival is in full flow.
Shock decision has raised fears ancient site with almost 2,000-year-old geoglyphs will be exploited by illegal miners
Archeologists and environmentalists have expressed their outrage at a shock decision by Peru’s culture ministry to cut by nearly half the protected archaeological park around the iconic Nazca Lines, excluding an area nearly the size of urban Lima, the country’s capital city.
The Unesco world heritage attracts thousands of tourists to see the massive hummingbird, monkey and whale figures in the desert in Peru’s second-biggest tourist attraction after Machu Picchu. Last year, archaeologists using AI discovered hundreds of new geoglyphs dating back more than 2,000 years, predating the famous lines in the sand.
Doug Burgum says Biden order that banned drilling in 23m-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska will be reversed
Millions of acres of Alaska wilderness will lose federal protections and be exposed to drilling and mining in the Trump administration’s latest move to prioritize energy production over the shielding of the US’s open spaces.
Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, said on Monday that the government would reverse an order issued by Joe Biden in December that banned drilling in the remote 23m-acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), the New York Times reported.
Hamit Coskun, found guilty of religiously aggravated public order offence, was ‘motivated at least in part by a hatred of Muslims’, judge says
A man has been fined after he set fire to a Qur’an outside the Turkish consulate in London, in an act that was deemed “motivated at least in part by a hatred of Muslims” by a judge.
Hamit Coskun, 50, who was found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence on Monday, called his prosecution “an assault on free speech”.
Election pitting liberal Lee Jae-myung against conservative candidate Kim Moon Soo comes after months of chaos following Yoon Suk Yeol’s short-lived imposition of martial law
Millions of South Koreans are voting for a new president in a snap election triggered by the impeachment of Yoon Suk Yeol, a conservative who now faces an explosive trial on rebellion charges over his short-lived imposition of martial law in December.
Pre-election surveys suggested Yoon’s liberal arch-rival, Lee Jae-myung, appeared headed for an easy win, riding on deep public frustration over the conservatives in the wake of Yoon’s martial law debacle.
Offer gives no ground on Tehran’s demand to continue to enrich uranium inside country, sources say
Iran is on the brink of rejecting US proposals on the future of its nuclear programme after the US draft insisted that Tehran would have to suspend the enrichment of uranium inside Iran and set out no clear route map for lifting US economic sanctions.
The US proposals were the first in written form since five rounds of indirect talks started, but Iranian diplomatic sources said the US proposals gave no ground on Iran’s demand to continue to enrich uranium inside the country.
Police believe remains are of Izabela Zablocka, from Normanton, and have launched murder investigation
Human remains have been found in a search for a woman missing for more than 15 years as police launch a murder investigation into her disappearance.
Izabela Zablocka, from Normanton in Derby, was 30 when she went missing in 2010. Originally from Poland, she had last made contact with family on 28 August 2010.
Claudia Sheinbaum defends decision to put 2,600 judges’ posts to vote despite record low turnout
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has defended the country’s unprecedented judicial elections after just 13% of Mexicans turned out to vote, a record low in a federal election.
Roughly 2,600 posts, from local magistrates to supreme court justices, were up for grabs on Sunday, as an entire judicial system was put to the vote for the first time in the world.
33-year-old ends time at Spurs to take first No 1 role
West Brom dismissed Tony Mowbray in April
Ryan Mason has left Tottenham to take over as West Brom head coach on a three-year contract.
Mason quickly emerged as a leading candidate for the Championship club after they dismissed Tony Mowbray on 21 April. Spurs’ rollercoaster 2024-25 campaign – in which they secured Europa League success – only ended on 25 May and forced West Brom to bide their time but Mason, after a short holiday, decided to accept their offer and take his first step into management.
Oncologists say patients rejecting proven treatments are dying needlessly because of increase in online ‘cures’
Cancer patients are snubbing proven treatments in favour of quackery such as coffee enemas and raw juice diets amid an “alarming” increase in misinformation on the web, doctors have said.
Some were dying needlessly or seeing tumours spread as a result, oncologists said. They raised their concerns at the world’s largest cancer conference in Chicago, the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (Asco).
The actor and director claims that an Austrian newspaper invented a recent interview with him
Clint Eastwood has released a statement to claim a recent interview with him is a fabrication.
Quotes from an alleged interview with the Oscar-winning actor and director had gone viral over the weekend and were picked up by a number of sites. Yet Eastwood has now said that he never spoke to anyone from German-language Austrian newspaper Kurier.
Proceeds from Chelsea sale earmarked for Ukraine aid
Government issues statement over recovery of money
The government says it is “fully prepared” to take Roman Abramovich to court to resolve the three-year impasse over the £2.5bn frozen from the sale of Chelsea.
In a rare joint statement, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, and the foreign secretary, David Lammy, confirmed the UK was ready to escalate its efforts to secure the money which has been promised to support humanitarian activity in Ukraine.
Prime minister seeks to shore up his fragile coalition and vows not to back down
Donald Tusk says he will call a vote of confidence in his government to try to shore up support for his coalition after a bruising setback in Poland’s presidential election.
In his first public comments since Sunday’s election result was declared, the prime minister sought to regain momentum as he promised to “get to work” and submit a number of draft laws.
Jesse Armstrong’s rushed Succession follow-up might be heavy on of-the-moment buzzwords, but it’s too smug to make any real point
Picture this: a group of very rich people gather at an ostentatiously large, secluded retreat. The SUVs are black, tinted, sleek. The jets are private. The egos are large, the staff sprawling and mostly unseen, the decor both sterile and unimaginably expensive. This is the distinctive milieu of Succession, the HBO juggernaut which turned the pitiful exploits of a bunch of media mogul failsons into Shakespearean drama for four critically acclaimed seasons. It is also the now familiar aesthetic of a range of eat-the-rich satires plumbing our oligarchic times for heady ridicule, if increasingly futile insight – The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out: Glass Onion, Parasite, The White Lotus and the recent A24 disappointment Death of a Unicorn to name a few. (That’s not to mention countless mediocre shows on the foibles of the wealthy, such as this month’s The Better Sister and Sirens.)
So suffice to say, I approached Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong’s first post-series project about four tech billionaire friends gathering for poker as one’s AI innovation wreaks havoc on the globe, with a sense of pre-existing fatigue. The market of ultra-rich satire is, to use the logic of Armstrong’s characters, saturated. (Or, to use their language: “I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.”) There’s more than a whiff of Argestes, the second-season Succession episode at a billionaire mountain retreat, to these shots of private cars pulling up to a huge chalet hugged by snowcapped peaks. And though Armstrong, who solely wrote and directed the film, continues his avoidance of easy one-to-ones, there’s more than a whiff of Elon Musk to Venis (Cory Michael Smith), an AI company CEO and the richest person in the world with a tenuous grasp on reality, a stupendous sense of nihilism and unrepentant need to assert his own virility (the landscape, he notes, is “so beautiful you can fuck it”).
More than a century on, the officer who was the victim of antisemitism is in line for a posthumous promotion
More than a century ago he was wrongly convicted of treason in a case that convulsed France and laid bare a rising tide of antisemitism.
On Monday, French politicians took the first step towards remedying the injustice – unanimously backing a symbolic effort to promote Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army captain, to brigadier general.
Sprinter has reported multiple incidents of verbal abuse
Growth of betting has been linked to abuse of athletes
Three-times Olympic champion Gabby Thomas said she was verbally abused at the Grand Slam Track meet in Philadelphia last weekend, the latest incident of harassment she has reported this year.
Thomas, who won gold in the 200m, and 4x100m and 4x400m relays in Paris, said in a post on X that a man followed her around the track shouting insults while she was taking photographs with fans and signing autographs.
Delegations in Istanbul agree swap of at least 1,000 prisoners, and Ukraine says Russia agreed to return some abducted children
Negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian delegations in Istanbul ended without agreement on a ceasefire on Monday, but with both sides agreeing to exchange more prisoners.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the two sides had agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each, with the possibility of swapping an additional 200 PoWs. He said an agreement had also been made to return the remains of killed service personnel, but added that this would take careful preparation.
Marcelo Gomes Da Silva must be in state for ‘fair’ chance for court to review merits on any contested issues, says judge
A Boston high school student who was detained by immigration agents on Saturday while he was on his way to volleyball practice must be kept in Massachusetts for at least 72 hours, a federal judge said on Monday.
Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, 18, entered the United States on a student visa, according to a lawsuit filed on his behalf after his arrest. While his student visa status has lapsed, he is eligible for and intends to apply for asylum.
Alisa Petrov, 15, last seen on 21 April, walked into Colorado Springs police department and identified herself
A 15-year-old Utah girl, who vanished in April, has been located safe and in good health in Colorado Springs, authorities confirmed late Sunday night.
According to Sgt Shaun Becker, Alisa Petrov walked into the Colorado Springs police department earlier that evening and identified herself. Officials stated she appeared to be unharmed and physically well.
The attack by a man hurling molotov cocktails struck at the heart of one of Colorado’s largest Jewish communities
The first 911 calls reporting the Colorado flamethrower attack were as horrific as they were unbelievable.
“There is a male with a blow torch setting people on fire,” a dispatcher advised the city’s police department, passing on the account of an eyewitness. Another official reported: “Multiple burns, potential terror attack.”
Exclusive: More schools identified as targets after controls on IDF action against Hamas operatives at civilian sites loosened
A series of recent deadly airstrikes on school buildings sheltering displaced people in Gaza were part of a deliberate Israeli military bombing strategy, with further schools identified as targets, the Guardian has learned.
At least six school buildings have been struck, reportedly killing more than 120 people, in recent months as part of a targeting effort by the Israeli military.
Kazakhstani beats Draper 5-7, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4 in fourth round
World No 62 reaches major quarter-final for first time
With his presence at the French Open hanging desperately in the balance, Jack Draper stepped up to the baseline, down two sets to one, hoping he would begin the new set with a clean slate to initiate his resurgence. Instead, he could only watch on helplessly as his opponent threaded four outlandish winners to break his serve to love.
It was that kind of evening for Draper, the fifth seed in Paris, who was thoroughly outplayed by a stupendous performance from the unseeded Alexander Bublik. The Kazakhstani held his nerve in front of an ebullient Court Suzanne Lenglen crowd to close out an immense 5-7, 6-3, 6-2, 6-4 win and reach a grand slam quarter-final for the first time in his career.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman charged with multiple felonies after allegedly shouting ‘Free Palestine’ as he attacked Boulder crowd
A man has been charged with a federal hate crime and multiple other felonies after he allegedly used a makeshift flamethrower and incendiary devices to attack a crowd of people who were raising awareness for Israeli hostages in Gaza, injuring 12 victims.
Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, is alleged to have shouted “Free Palestine” as he attacked the crowdon Sunday. The FBI said Soliman told police he planned the attack for a year and had specifically targeted what he described as the “Zionist group”, the Associated Press reported.
Manufacturing survey signals third monthly decline in output in a row amid uncertainty over tariffs
US manufacturers have warned that Donald Trump’s trade war is hitting production, pushing the dollar close to a three-year low against sterling on Monday.
The greenback suffered a fresh sell-off, after the closely watched ISM survey of the manufacturing sector signalled a third monthly decline in output in a row.
A vision of what war between the UK and another state such as Russia would look like is sketched out briefly but starkly on a page of the strategic defence review.
Such a conflict could involve attacks on the armed forces in the UK and overseas, air and missile attacks on critical infrastructure, and sabotage and efforts to manipulate information and undermine social cohesion.
After years as a directionless collection of celebrity footballers, PSG are a true team now. But they still represent one of the sport’s darkest trends
Paris Saint-Germain’s success in the Champions League final on Saturday was a victory for youth and adventure. It was a victory for a team built with a coherent vision, and a rebuke to those who believe the game is just about collecting the biggest names. It was a victory for Luis Enrique, a very fine coach who has suffered dreadful personal tragedy. It was a victory for forward-thinking, progressive, fluent football.
Full-back Aït-Nouri has one year left on his contract
Manchester City are optimistic of signing the Wolves full-back Rayan Aït-Nouri as part of their summer revamp. City are yet to bid for the Algeria defender but he is regarded as a primary target.
City’s chair, Khaldoon al-Mubarak, has said the club were not aggressive enough in the market last summer and want to complete most of their close-season business in time for the Club World Cup with their first game on 18 June. The Lyon midfielder Rayan Cherki is another target.
Incident took place where more than 30 people were killed on Sunday near Gaza Humanitarian Foundation hub
Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip opened fire as people headed towards a food distribution site a kilometre away at around sunrise on Monday, killing at least three people and injuring dozens, health officials and a witness said. The military said it fired warning shots at “suspects” who approached its forces.
The shooting occurred at the same location where witnesses say Israeli forces fired a day earlier on crowds of people heading towards the food distribution hub in southern Gaza run by the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Correspondent for far-right outlet was fired after accusing defense secretary of clamping down on press access
A pro-Donald Trump journalist says she was fired from her job after criticizing the president’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, over his attempts to restrict media access at the Pentagon.
Gabrielle Cuccia, the former chief Pentagon correspondent for the far-right, Trump-friendly media outlet One America News (OAN), says she was terminated shortly after she published a Substack post accusing Hegseth’s defense department of clamping down on press access. She had said the restrictions were disturbing, questioned the defense department’s motives in tightening media restrictions, and noted that Hegseth has yet to hold a formal press conference since taking office.
The actor, best know for voicing John Redcorn in the long-running animated series, was killed on Saturday in Texas
The actor Jonathan Joss, best known for voicing John Redcorn in King of the Hill, has died in a shooting.
San Antonio police confirmed to Variety that the 59-year-old died on Saturday after an incident. Officers were reportedly dispatched while the shooting was in process and found him near the road. After an attempt to revive him, he was pronounced dead on the scene.
Inquiry head accuses Swedish state of human rights violations, citing child-trafficking cases across four decades
Sweden should ban international adoption and apologise after thousands of children were illegally and unethically taken from their home countries including South Korea, Colombia, China and Sri Lanka over several decades, a government inquiry has found.
Presenting the damning findings of the almost four-year investigation, the head of the inquiry, Anna Singer, accused the Swedish state of “violations of human rights”, citing child-trafficking cases spanning from the 1970s to the 2000s.
Keir Starmer has promised to make Britain “battle-ready” as he unveiled a defence review designed to counter threats from countries such as Russia, which he warned directly threatened the UK every day.
Speaking from the BAE Systems shipyard at Govan, in Glasgow, the prime minister promised to spend billions more on weapons factories, drones and submarines – even if it meant raiding welfare or the aid budget once more to do so.
Explore the possibility of the UK reintroducing air-launched nuclear weapons by discussing with the US and Nato the possibility of purchasing F-35A fighters equipped with US B61-12 bombs that could be deployed in the event of a war.
Spending £15bn to develop new submarine-launched nuclear warheads – and committing to build 12 nuclear powered Aukus attack submarines in Derby and Barrow, starting in the 2030s.
Investing £1bn in air and missile defence, £6bn on munitions during this parliament and opening at least six new weapons factories in the UK as part of a programme to increase military stockpiles, which currently may only last a few days in a crisis.
Developing a home guard, modelled on the army reserves, to ensure the protection of airports, communications sites and other parts of the critical national infrastructure in the event of a major crisis.
Influencer accused of rape and human trafficking alleged to have gained citizenship via £96,000 investment scheme
Andrew Tate allegedly secured a “golden passport” from the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu the month he was arrested in Romania on charges including rape and human trafficking, it has been reported.
The 38-year-old influencer allegedly received the passport through a citizenship-by-investment programme that allows foreign nationals to buy citizenship for $130,000 (£96,000), according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and Intelligence Online.
Appointment of Northern Irishman behind Loewe hype machine sets storied fashion house on experimental path
Long before the designer Jonathan Anderson stepped down from his role at Loewe in March, it was rumoured he would be heading for Dior. So when it was finally announced – six months after Dior’s menswear designer left, and four days after its womenswear head, Maria Grazia Chiuri, showed a collection in Rome – it surprised no one.
Yet Anderson’s newfound position at luxury’s centre of gravity still sets Dior, a grand fashion institution, careering down an experimental path. As Delphine Arnault, the chair and chief executive of Christian Dior Couture, told Vogue Business: “For any house, having new artistic direction can be a challenge.”
I’m a 21st-century spinster: last year, I turned 54 and hadn’t had a relationship (or a good date!) for almost five years.
Before that, I’d taken dating for granted. Marriage was never my goal, and I don’t have children. Since college, there’d been a steady pattern of long-term, wonderful relationships. I’m lucky; I’m a woman who’s been loved.
Connexion
