Parents of disabled children fear that the government’s reforms to special needs education in England could mean they lose vital support, according to a new survey that highlights the high stakes facing ministers.
The poll of 1,000 parents of children with multiple complex needs including deaf-blind, autism and physical impairment, carried out for the disability charity Sense, found that half of the parents surveyed “feel nervous” about the upcoming reforms, and 45% said they were “worried my child’s support will be taken away” in any changes.
After months of community resistance, the president backed down. Leadership from below succeeded when politics as usual failed
For most politicians and journalists, the answer to nearly every question is to look up. Not at the moon, the stars or even the chimney tops, but at their leaders: the people who sit atop institutions, wield power and set the line that others follow. The top of the totem pole is the sole focal point, and the stories that count usually come from the heights of power.
Bend your neck back far enough and Davos becomes not a talking shop in a Swiss ski resort, but a gathering of world leaders; Keir Starmer flying into Beijing is a summit of great powers; even who should be the MP for Gorton and Denton is really all about the Labour leadership. For this piece, the Guardian’s research librarians counted how many times the words “leader” or “leadership” appeared across the British press. Over the past week alone, the rough total stands at 2,000. A third of those stories concern one man: Donald Trump.
Light scattering creates the shade we see when we look skyward, and studies show the process varies around the world
On holiday the sky may look a deeper shade of blue than even the clearest summer day at home. Some places, including Cape Town in South Africa and Briançon in France, pride themselves on the blueness of their skies. But is there really any difference?
Exclusive: Union claims some offenders are deliberately breaking probation terms in order to deal drugs in jail
Record numbers of offenders are being recalled to prison in England and Wales with union officials claiming that some are deliberately breaking the terms of their probation in order to deal drugs in prison.
Prison sources said that after the implementation of early release schemes, as many as 5,000 men were recalled in December alone – more than a third of the total number released in the year to June 2025.
Parents, teachers and young people share their views on whether social media restrictions would work in the UK
Pressure is mounting on the UK government to introduce a ban on social media for under-16s, after a decisive vote in House of Lords in favour of Australian-style restrictions.
Peers backed a Tory-led amendment to the children’s wellbeing and schools bill by 261 votes to 150, despite the government opposing the move. Ministers are already considering a ban as part of a consultation due to report by the summer and so the Lords amendment is unlikely to pass in the Commons. Starmer is also understood to want to wait until evidence from Australia’s ban, which came into force in December, has been assessed, though the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has urged him to “just get on with it”.
This crisp and punchy salad is a tribute to the late veg specialist Charlie Hicks and a shared love of the versatile Italian chicory puntarelle
Like many, I remember Charlie Hicks from Veg Talk, a weekly show that ran on Radio 4 from 1998-2005. The show, according to Sheila Dillon, came into being after her interview with Charlie, a fourth-generation fruit and veg supplier at Covent Garden market, for an episode of The Food Programme exploring where chefs bought their produce. Sitting at the kitchen table with her husband the following evening, Sheila recounted her day and Charlie’s enormous knowledge, enthusiasm and ability to communicate both. A few days after that, a similar conversation took place with her colleagues at Radio 4, which resulted in Veg Talk – what’s in and what’s out in the world of fresh produce. As well as Charlie’s market report, each episode included a feature called “vegetable of the week” and the participation of studio guests – Angela Hartnett, Alastair Little, Rose Gray, Darina Allen and Mitch Tonks, to name just a few – and took calls from listeners.
The show had its critics – in a 2005 interview with the Independent, broadcaster Andy Kershaw is quoted as saying, “This show should have been strangled at birth” – but it also had legions of fans (myself included), who tuned in mostly for Charlie’s expertise accumulated over a lifetime of working the markets, cooking with his wife, Anna, talking to growers and reading, so it was both practical and scholarly. Add to this his sharp humour, easy bantering relationships and warm voice.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said the UK’s relationship with his country had gone through “twists and turns” over the years but that a more “consistent” approach was in both their interests.
Ahead of talks with Keir Starmer during the first visit to China by a British prime minister in eight years, Xi said the two men would “stand the test of history” if they could “rise above differences”.
About two minutes of video, published on Wednesday by The News Movement, a digital news outlet, shows an incident on 13 January in Minneapolis in which officers appeared to grab Pretti and bring him to the ground during intense community protests against the federal crackdown in the city.
Holburne museum places renowned photographer’s pictures of ancient Roman statutes alongside his images of war and conflict
He is revered for his extraordinary black-and-white images documenting conflict, humanitarian crises and the tougher side of postwar Britain.
But an exhibition of work by photojournalist Sir Don McCullin opening this week at the Holburne museum in Bath focuses on a very different subject: Roman sculptures.
Mothers on social media are advocating a tough, no-nonsense approach to parenting. Does this teach children important lessons – or just make them feel isolated and ashamed?
A couple of weeks ago, a video posted on TikTok by Paige Carter, a mother in Florida, went viral. Carter explained that she had thrown her daughter’s iPad out of the window when she had been misbehaving on the way to school, and she films herself retrieving the tablet, now with a cracked screen. The video has been watched 4.9m times, and Carter was congratulated in the comments, with one person writing “Learning Fafo at an early age: top tier parenting.” Welcome to the parenting trend that doesn’t seem to be disappearing: “Fuck around and find out.”
In another video, when a small child announces he is going to leave home, his mother says “see ya”, shuts the front door behind him, and turns off the outside light – then opens the door to him screaming and pounding to be let back in (it has been liked 1.5m times). He had learned, said his mother, “the meaning of Fafo”.
Manners and respect are the norm for kids here. Treating them like a nuisance won’t do anything to help France’s declining birthrate
In French culture, seven is known as “l’âge de raison”, the age at which children know right from wrong and can take some moral responsibility. France’s national rail operator, it seems, puts the age at which a child can be trusted to behave in a non-annoying way onboard a train a bit higher.
In launching its new Optimum plus tariff earlier this month, offering spaces onboard its weekday TGV trains between Paris and Lyon with bigger, more comfortable seats, fancy food and no under-12s, SNCF was trying to appeal to the many business travellers who make that journey. But the move has sparked a backlash and a philosophical debate about the place of children in society, against the backdrop of a worrying decline in French birthrates. “We can’t on one hand say that we are not having enough children and on the other hand try to exclude them from everywhere,” argues Sarah El Haïry, France’s high commissioner for childhood.
Helen Massy-Beresford is a British journalist and editor who lives in Paris
Calls for independent external inquiry into brutal crackdown that some estimates suggest killed more than 30,000
A deep and painful inquest is under way inside Iran as politicians, academics and the security establishment try to come to terms with what has been described as a catastrophe after the violent protests and their even more violent suppression by the security forces.
The shape of the debate taking place in the heavily censored society is emerging, as selective newspapers and Telegram channels slowly open up to international audiences after the protests – which some estimates suggest could have left more than 30,000 dead – that have stunned many Iranians.
Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collective effort
Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes whose long thorny canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I’d spend hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice, until the tranquillity of that place had soaked into me.
After saying the US would attack if protesters were harmed, the president appears now to be tying the threat of airstrikes to Iran’s nuclear programme
Donald Trump has warned that Iran must come to the table to negotiate a deal over its nuclear programme or face the possibility of airstrikes and regime change, capping off a month of bellicose posturing and whiplash inducing u-turns from the US president.
The NSW police assistant commissioner, Andrew Holland, said investigators were confident Ingram, 37, may have been helped by “people that he knows in community given the temperatures” of more than 40C recorded in the area.
County spokesperson says warrant seeks number of 2020 election records while FBI declines to give further details
The FBI executed a search warrant at the election office in Fulton county, Georgia, on Wednesday for records related to the 2020 election, according to a spokesperson for the county and the FBI.
The warrant sought all ballots from the 2020 election in Fulton county, tabulator tapes, ballot images and voter rolls, according to a warrant obtained by the Guardian.
Lawyer for Guan Heng, whose exposed evidence of persecution of Uyghurs, says he is ‘textbook example of why asylum should exist’
A US immigration judge has granted asylum to a Chinese national who he said had a “well founded fear” of persecution if sent back to China after exposing alleged human rights abuses against Uyghurs there.
Guan Heng applied for asylum after arriving in the US illegally in 2021. He has been in custody since being swept up in an immigration enforcement operation in August last year as part of a mass deportation campaign by the Trump administration.
Couple killed near Kyiv and apartment block hit while US says territorial issue of Donetsk ‘very difficult’ to resolve. What we know on day 1,436
Russia has hit cities across Ukraine with drones and a missile, killing a couple near the capital of Kyiv one day after five people died in an attack on a passenger train. The attack came ahead of a fresh round of peace talks due at the weekend. Officials said four people, including two children, sought medical attention after the strikes overnight to Wednesday. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned the attack on the apartment block, as well as another strike with short-range rockets on what he described as a residential area without military targets in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia. “We will respond fairly to Russia for this and other similar attacks,” he wrote on social media. Russian strikes on other locations across the country included the southern port city of Odesa as well as the central city of Kryvyi Rih.
The territorial issue of Donetsk is “very difficult” to resolve, the US secretary of state has said, saying there is active work under way to reconcile the issue at US-mediated talks to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. “It’s still a bridge we have to cross,” Marco Rubio said on Wednesday. “It’s still a gap, but at least we’ve been able to narrow down the issue set to one central one, and it will probably be a very difficult one,” he told a US Senate foreign relations committee hearing, referring to the eastern Ukrainian region where Moscow wants Kyiv to surrender land. Rubio said the US may the join the new Russia-Ukraine talks this week but that said US participation would be more junior than last week when Donald Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner joined negotiations in Abu Dhabi that were Ukrainian and Russian officials’ first face-to-face talks on Trump’s plan to end the war.
Life will be particularly tough for Ukrainians over the next three weeks due to plunging temperatures and intense Russian attacks on the energy system that have already deprived millions of light and heat, a senior lawmaker said on Wednesday. “The bad news is that there will indeed be frosts, and it will be difficult,” Andriy Gerus, the head of the parliament’s energy committee, told the national TV channel, Marathon. “The good news is that we need to hold out for three weeks, and then it will get easier,” he added, citing predicted warmer temperatures and increased solar power from longer days.
Russian strikes against Odesa have escalated sharply in recent months as conflict centred on the Black Sea has heated up again after it had settled into stalemate, Peter Beaumont reports from the southern Ukrainian city. The biggest recent strike – on 13 December, in which 160 drones and missiles targeted energy infrastructure – left large parts of the city without water and electricity for days on end, marking the beginning of a period of almost daily attacks.
Ukraine has urged the European Union not to be afraid of taking “physical” action against Russia’s “shadow fleet”, pointing to the example of Venezuela-linked oil tankers seized by the US. Visiting Berlin, the Ukrainian presidency’s special representative for sanctions, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, also said on Wednesday that work was still needed on western components found in Russian weapons, which he said was proof that Moscow was circumventing sanctions. Calling for “robust actions”, he said that only increased pressure on Russia could help with negotiations to bring the war to an end. The volume of oil transported in 2025 by Russia’s “shadow fleet” – a flotilla of old oil tankers that aim to get around international sanctions – was the same as the previous year, Vlasiuk said.
The scariest part about getting scammed was not realising it was happening in the first place.
Perhaps naively, I never thought I would be the victim of a cyber scam. I’m reasonably digitally literate and have had it drilled into me to be wary of phishing emails and strange text messages. I’ve even received training at my workplace on how to safeguard yourself against hacking.
The laws have been criticised by tech startups, which say they go too far, and civil society groups, which say they don’t go far enough
South Korea has embarked on a foray into the regulation of AI, launching what has been billed as the most comprehensive set of laws anywhere in the world, that could prove a model for other countries, but the new legislation has already encountered pushback.
The laws, which will force companies to label AI-generated content, have been criticised by local tech startups, which say they go too far, and civil society groups, which say they don’t go far enough.
Add invisible digital watermarks for clearly artificial outputs such as cartoons or artwork. For realistic deepfakes, visible labels are required.
“High-impact AI”, including systems used for medical diagnosis, hiring and loan approvals, will require operators to conduct risk assessments and document how decisions are made. If a human makes the final decision the system may fall outside the category.
Extremely powerful AI models will require safety reports, but the threshold is set so high that government officials acknowledge no models worldwide currently meet it.
Firm’s fourth-quarter 2025 beat expectations as it lavishes investment on AI infrastructure and CEO faces questioning
As Meta spends billions on artificial intelligence data centers and its CEO prepares to testify in a landmark social media trial, the company is earning a pretty penny.
Meta reported strong financial results on Wednesday, beating Wall Street expectations of $58.59bn with $59.89bn in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2025. It reported earnings per share (EPS) of $8.88 – which also surpassed Wall Street expectations of $8.23 in EPS. Meta’s stocks jumped nearly 10% in after-hours trading after the release.
Mike Hawes casts doubt on Labour’s plan to double production by 2035, as Starmer visits China with carmaker delegation
A target of building 1.3m cars a year is likely to be missed unless a large new UK factory is built in the coming years, an industry group has said, as Keir Starmer prepares to hold trade talks in China.
Labour aims to have 1.3m vehicles rolling off production lines by 2035, a central ambition of its industrial strategy. That would nearly double the 764,715 cars and vans made in 2025, according to new data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).
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