Reports of escaped wallabies are on the rise, especially in southern England. But how easy is it to spot these strange and charismatic marsupials – and why would a quintessentially Australian creature settle here?

It was about 9.30 or 10 on a dark, late November night; Molly Laird was driving her pink Mini home along country lanes to her Warwickshire cottage. Suddenly, the headlights’ beam picked up an animal sitting in the road. “I thought it was a deer at first,” Molly tells me. “But when it moved, its tail wasn’t right, and it was hopping. It took me a while to realise, but I thought: that’s a kangaroo!”

Molly’s next thought was: “I’m going insane,” closely followed by, “No one’s going to believe me.” So she got out her phone and filmed it. Later, she posted the video on social media, where she was told it was likely to be not a kangaroo, but its smaller cousin, the red-necked wallaby.

The controversy over flags has faded from the national agenda – but street by street, late at night and with ingenious equipment, their raising and removal is the subject of a roiling dispute over local identity

The Christmas lights have gone up in Stirchley. A multifaith mix of stars and swirls add a festive air to the lamp-posts along the main street of this south Birmingham suburb. Stirchley is a modest kind of place, sandwiched between better known (and better off) areas such as Bourneville and Moseley, but there is plenty of evidence here of the lively community spirit that last year resulted in the area being named the best place to live in the Midlands.

Posters in shop windows along Pershore Road advertise a knitting group, a neighbourhood winter fair and the local food bank, while in the former swimming baths, now a community hub, friendly flyers for coffee mornings and choirs are stacked.

Terry Ball – renowned shoe salesman, friend to former mafiosi – has vowed to spend his remaining years finding ways to cheat authorities he feels have cheated him. His greatest ruse? A tax-dodging snail empire

It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy.

The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been cheerfully telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes.

Nootka lupins, introduced in the 1940s to repair damaged soil, are rampaging across the island, threatening its native species

It was only when huge areas of Iceland started turning purple that authorities realised they had made a mistake. By then, it was too late. The Nootka lupin, native to Alaska, had coated the sides of fjords, sent tendrils across mountain tops and covered lava fields, grasslands and protected areas.

Since it arrived in the 1940s, it has become an accidental national symbol. Hordes of tourists and local people pose for photos in the ever-expanding fields in June and July, entranced by the delicate cones of flowers that cover the north Atlantic island.

It borders Brazil, but French Guiana is now a remote outpost of the EU. It is home to Europe’s only spaceport, some of the most biodiverse forest on the planet and a military mission that is testing the limits of western power

Above me, a ceiling of rough wooden branches and tarp. To my right, an officer in the French Foreign Legion types up the daily situation report. In front of me a French gendarme named David is standing in front of a table full of large assault rifles, pointing out locations on a paper map. A generator hums. All around us, splotches of forest dot the hundreds of islands that make up the archipelago of Petit-Saut, a watery ecosystem three times the size of Paris.

Except Paris is 7,000 kilometres away from where I am, in Guyane, or French Guiana, a department of France in South America, just north of the equator.

The imposing concrete buildings that defined British postwar architecture held a vision of the future – but many fell into disrepair. A new book finds the finest examples

Richard Tice claims that allegations against Farage are ‘nonsense’ from people with ‘a political axe to grind’

Labour has described Richard Tice’s claim that the people saying Nigel Farage was racist or antisemtic towards them when he was a teenager at school are lying (see 9.22am) as “deplorable”.

Anna Turley, the Labour chair, issued this statement after the Tice interview on the Today programme.

It took serious courage for the victims of Nigel Farage’s alleged racism to come forward and tell their story.

It’s utterly deplorable that Richard Tice has dismissed this and suggested they are lying, despite Farage himself refusing to offer a categorical denial and saying he couldn’t remember everything that happened at school.

Health secretary has asked experts to investigate whether normal feelings have become ‘over-pathologised’

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has ordered a clinical review of the diagnosis of mental health conditions, according to reports.

Streeting is understood to be concerned about a sharp rise in the number of people making sickness benefits claims because of diagnoses for mental illness, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the Times reported.

He has asked leading experts to investigate whether normal feelings have become “over-pathologised”, the newspaper said, as he seeks to grapple with the 4.4 million working-age people now claiming sickness or incapacity benefit.

The figure has risen by 1.2 million since 2019, while the number of 16 to 34-year-olds off work with long-term sickness because of a mental health condition is said to have grown rapidly in the same period.

Streeting told the Times he knew from “personal experience how devastating it can be for people who face poor mental health, have ADHD or autism and can’t get a diagnosis or the right support”.

He added: “I also know, from speaking to clinicians, how the diagnosis of these conditions is sharply rising.

“We must look at this through a strictly clinical lens to get an evidence-based understanding of what we know, what we don’t know, and what these patterns tell us about our mental health system, autism and ADHD services.

“That’s the only way we can ensure everyone gets timely access to accurate diagnosis and effective support.”

The review, which is expected to be launched on Thursday, is set to be led by Prof Peter Fonagy, a clinical psychologist at University College London specialising in child mental health, with Sir Simon Wessely, a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatry, acting as vice-chair.

Updates from the day-nighter at the Gabba in Brisbane
Max Rushden: I was fearing for Crawley, not Duckett
Ashes top 100 | Get the Spin newsletter | Email Tanya

Australia: Jake Weatherald, Travis Head, Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith (capt), Cameron Green, Josh Inglis, Alex Carey (wk), Michael Neser, Mitchell Starc, Scott Boland, Brendan Doggett.

The speculation comes to a close but the debate will continue across the afternoon at least, as Australia turn to a horses for course approach with Nathan Lyon left out of a home Test for the first time in almost 14 years. The off-spinner was also omitted from the XI in Australia’s most recent pink-ball Test in the Caribbean, but it still feels like a huge call to leave out a bowler who has claimed 562 wickets. Michael Neser comes in to add more pace in the day-night Test, as well as reducing the length of the Australia tail.

Trump’s comments come after an hours-long meeting at the Kremlin between US envoys and Vladimir Putin failed to achieve a breakthrough

• Analysis: the Ukraine peace deal has stumbled yet again over an inevitable obstacle: Putin

The path ahead for Ukraine peace talks is unclear, Donald Trump has said, after what he called “reasonably good” talks between Russian president Vladimir Putin and US envoys which nonetheless failed to achieve a breakthrough.

After their hours-long meeting at the Kremlin on Tuesday, US special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, were set to meet top Ukrainian negotiator Rustem Umerov in Florida on Thursday.