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From bowl cuts to extreme mullets, punk dos to bad dye jobs, a terrible hairstyle can never be forgotten – even decades after it has grown out
It’s the late 1990s. Big, round, feathered fringes are a huge deal at my primary school. Most of my friends have one, influenced by Britney Spears or Emma Bunton. I, too, have a fringe. Mine, as you can see, appears more inspired by Kevin Keegan circa 1993.
Continue reading...Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:00:48 GMT
Hundreds of millions of pounds of dirty money are being deposited at post offices every year. So why are the police reluctant to investigate the scale of the problem?
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Leicestershire police won’t say who first told them about Jigar Gheewala, but you can see why, once they had heard of him, they decided to find out more. Gheewala was unemployed, had no apparent income, yet lived in a £1.3m house and sent his three children to private school. “He was a declared bankrupt, with a bank account that was absolutely not reflective of what it should be,” said financial crime supervisor Laura Panter of Leicestershire police’s economic crime team. “That was our starting point.”
Over the course of 2020, despite being on benefits, Gheewala’s bank account received more than £880,000 in cash in 200 different deposits. He was, it turned out, a money launderer, but not the kind you’ll see in the movies. Gheewala’s deposits had been made not in Liechtenstein or on Grand Cayman, but at various post office branches in Leicester, one thick wodge of banknotes after another.
Continue reading...Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:00:49 GMT
Sonam Wangchuk’s fast was spark that drove youth protest movement – and now he wants to cleanse the political system
For 26 days, India watched as Sonam Wangchuk wasted away. His hunger strike, held in solidarity with India’s “Cockroach” youth protest movement, would prove to be one of the most politically consequential fasts held in the country’s modern history.
Many in the country view the gruelling fast, which began on 28 June, as the crucial spark that helped propel the Cockroach movement into one of the most formidable challenges to the government of prime minister, Narendra Modi, in more than a decade.
Continue reading...Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:42 GMT
Creatine has become the go-to supplement for anyone wanting to give their fitness a boost and build muscle. It’s even made it out of the gym, with influencers touting its cognitive benefits. But what’s the science behind creatine, and does the evidence stack up? Madeleine Finlay hears from science editor Ian Sample and Dr Justin Roberts, professor of nutritional physiology at Anglia Ruskin University
Is it true that … we should all be taking creatine?
Athletes and fitness influencers use creatine, but what is it? And does it work?
Continue reading...Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:00:47 GMT
From killings in Gaza to the alleged use of a sonic weapon on a vigil in Belgrade, the Lebanese-British artist reveals how his work for activist group Earshot is inseparable from his art
Lawrence Abu Hamdan has a double identity. He is an artist who, in 2019, jointly won the Turner prize; and one of his works is, for my money, among the most striking on show at this year’s Venice Biennale. But he is also the director of a young NGO, founded in 2023, called Earshot, which investigates human rights abuses using sound evidence. In less euphemistic language, that means, on occasion, investigating horrific killings. He and his team might analyse the direction and position of bullets Israeli soldiers have fired at emergency workers in Gaza, or build evidence that a sonic weapon was likely used to disperse a mass silent vigil in Belgrade.
The foundational work he did in this field was a project with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture for Amnesty International. Back in 2016, he interviewed rare survivors of the unimaginably barbaric conditions in Syria’s Sednaya prison. There was a paradox at play in this murderous place – prisoners were held in complete darkness, and enforced silence, killed for making any sound. Listening was both the inmates’ only source of information, and a tool for survival and resistance. Their acute sonic memories of screams of distress and pain; keys turning in locks; bread being slapped down outside their cells; even of lice being snapped – helped Abu Hamdan and his colleagues build a picture of the prison architecture and its conditions, nearly a decade before it was opened to the light after the fall of the bloody Assad regime.
Continue reading...Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:00:47 GMT
Exclusive: Economic harm of CO2 pollution from Rosebank and Jackdaw forecast to far outweigh any boost to UK
The climate damage caused by developing the Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields under consideration by the UK government would destroy their economic benefits many times over, according to an analysis.
It estimates the economic damage caused by the carbon pollution from the oil and gas produced would be between £119bn and £336bn in the coming decades, compared with the £28.7bn in value to the UK estimated by Adura, the fossil fuel company promoting the new fields.
Continue reading...Tue, 25 Aug 2026 05:00:48 GMT
About 40% of £10bn from Affordable Homes Programme will now go on types of housing such as sheltered and shared ownership
Andy Burnham has backtracked on his proposal to rip up the government’s housing plans and boost social home building.
Ministers laid out plans on Monday to spend an initial £10bn from the 10-year Affordable Homes Programme on a mix of subsidised housing types in England, in line with the Starmer government’s policy.
Continue reading...Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:30:39 GMT
Death rate three to four times higher than among general population blamed on isolation of those leaving care
Profound isolation contributed to the deaths of more than 100 care leavers in England in a year, with a dramatic drop-off in support from social services at 18 leading to catastrophic consequences, a review has found.
A government-commissioned report into the early deaths of young people who left care described the problem as a national tragedy and said many were left on their own “at the height of vulnerability” before they died.
Continue reading...Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:01:41 GMT
Prime minister praised for rejecting US trade proposal as Trump shows little interest in retreating from dispute
Mark Carney said on Monday that while American negotiators saw the French language in Canada as an “irritant … in Quebec, these are rights,” days after receiving widespread praise from political leaders for rejecting a US trade proposal that many perceived as weakening the country’s Francophone culture.
The prime minister’s remarks came hours after the US president, Donald Trump, showed little interest in retreating from the spat, posting on social media that Canada had been “ripping off the United States of America for years” and threatening a swath of new, economically devastating tariffs on cars and trucks.
Continue reading...Mon, 24 Aug 2026 18:22:14 GMT
NHS has target of eliminating the cancer by 2040, but up to 4 million eligible women are not up to date with screening
Millions of women in England who have missed cervical screening appointments will be offered free home testing kits on the NHS.
The move comes amid concerns that only two-thirds of women attend in-person cervical screening appointments when asked to do so, leaving as many as 4 million women not up to date.
Continue reading...Tue, 25 Aug 2026 04:00:48 GMT