
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...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...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...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...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...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...UK prime minister ‘likely’ to attend UN general assembly, after meeting Zelenskyy and saying supply problem is ‘fixable’
Andy Burnham has said he is likely to go to the UN general assembly gathering in New York next month, a potential chance for the new prime minister to meet a host of world leaders.
While Downing Street say the plans are not definite, the prime minister told Bloomberg in an interview: “I’m looking forward to going to New York in September.”
Continue reading...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...Washington launches campaign to isolate Tehran but it is unclear whether it will apply measures to China
The US has threatened to impose severe sanctions against any country or entity maintaining economic ties with Iran, hoping to achieve with economic measures what military means have so far failed to do.
It is unclear, however, how far the Trump administration is prepared to go in confronting China, Iran’s biggest trading partner, which has signalled its resistance to US economic pressure to cut off links with an ally.
Continue reading...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.
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