2026 News Archive

Government plans network of nearly 200 specialist services to help those facing mental health crises.

The warning comes after the NHS sees a surge in patients and problems with equipment in high temperatures.

With bags packed and boarding passes at the ready, what can you do to keep your body clock on track?

Cases have passed 4,000 and health watchdog plans to go door to door to find patients in major response escalation The virus causing a massive outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo could be mutating, health officials fear, as confirmed cases pass 4,000. Africa’s public health watchdog said the time for incremental action was over as they announced plans to scale up every aspect of the response and go “door to door” looking for patients...

State department informs Congress of planned closures in Canada, Grenada, Japan, Indonesia and Cameroon The US state department is to shut five foreign consulates and missions across Asia, Africa, North America and the Caribbean, drawing criticism that it is leaving a diplomatic vacuum at risk of being filled by China. The US Congress has been served notice of the impending closures, which are being justified on cost grounds and follow a reassessment of the US’s bilateral relationships with a range of countries since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025...

David Owori, who played for the national team, died in hospital after he tried to stop robbers taking his phone The Ugandan football community is in mourning after the death of a player who was fatally injured during a robbery in the capital, Kampala, on Tuesday night. David Owori, who captained Sports Club Villa, a Uganda Premier League club, and represented the national team, was attacked after resisting an attempt to steal his mobile phone and other belongings near his home in Makindye division...

On their first earnings call since SpaceX's June public offering, executives said the company is pouring funds into rocket development, Starlink satellites and AI.

A brutal summer has exposed how much pressure European countries are under from forces largely out of their grip: war in Iran and Ukraine, record heat and more.

While many leaders compare the wildfire crisis to the second world war, governments fail to adopt the real lessons of pre-emptive wartime action As France and Spain battle historic wildfires, comparisons to the second world war abound. “One of the continent’s biggest evacuation efforts since World War II,” reports the Associated Press. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called the wildfires his country’s “most difficult situation since the second world war”. The images crossing all our screens certainly feel war-like – emergency aircraft and black smoke fill the skies, frantic civilians seeking shelter, historic towns lying in ruins, charred forests and burned-out vehicles, exhausted and sweat-soaked emergency responders...

Minutes after four top researchers said they were leaving, Google said that Demis Hassabis, the Nobel-winning scientist who led the company’s A.I. lab, was stepping into a new job.

TikTok did not give a detailed reason for the layoffs, which will shutter its Nashville office.

In African tech hubs, developers are picking China’s cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over more powerful U.S. ones.

Jeff Dean, who for years was one of Google’s most important executives, is leading the new artificial intelligence company with the backing of Google.

The voluntary review process will cover closed-source artificial intelligence models, but exclude those that publish the underlying code.

Sodium and lithium gas was detected in a plume thought to span tens of kilometres, created when part of a SpaceX rocket crashed into the lunar surface A telescope in Chile has captured evidence of the impact caused by part of a SpaceX rocket slamming into the moon while travelling at 8,690km/h (5,400mph). The European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope observed “spectral lines” – a colourful illustration of sodium and lithium gas – in the plume of lunar dust stirred up by the impact...

Researcher says simpler writing by AI is easier to read and digest, but this does not mean human authors are obsolete From Homer’s Odyssey to Agatha Christie’s crime fiction, humans have produced plenty of tales to grace the bookshelf. But research suggests artificial intelligence may now be providing some competition. In a study published in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, 1,682 adults were asked to read one of six short stories, three of which were written by humans and three by ChatGPT. Each AI story had a similar theme to one of the human-authored works...

Four-tonne piece of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket believed to have hit lunar surface on Wednesday at 5,400mph A four-tonne piece of a discarded SpaceX rocket that has been floating in space since last year is believed to have unintentionally crashed into the moon at high speed, in a collision that posed no danger to Earth but was expected to blast out a new lunar crater. The object, the height of a five-storey building, was part of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched two commercial lunar landers, one from the US and one from Japan, towards the moon in January 2025...

Research suggests addressing risk factors for poor cardiovascular health between the ages of 45 and 65 could help reduce risk of cognitive decline Scientists claim to have identified three health measures in middle age that can ward off dementia for more than a decade. Having normal blood pressure, no type 2 diabetes, and not smoking between the ages of 45 and 65 were associated with almost 13 additional years, on average, of dementia-free life, a study shows...

An episode this week focuses on the dangerous effects of warming, without mentioning climate change.

Looking for respite from European heat waves, summer tourists are flocking to the diplomatic hub. But city leaders are wary of overcrowding.

Highest-ever resolution pictures of our star could help show why its corona is millions of degrees hotter than its surface Golden bands and swirling vortices have been spotted on the sun in the most detailed images ever captured of the turbulent surface of our home star. Astronomers observed the sun with the Inouye solar telescope in Hawaii, the world’s most powerful solar telescope, and saw new features smaller than 20km (12 miles) across in a magnetically active region close to a sun spot...

They may keep your feet cool but some styles could be doing more harm than good.

Used to chronicling other people’s vacation disasters, a travel reporter faced the new normal on her own long-awaited family trip.

The actor portrays Mackenzie 'Mack' Boyd in the ITV soap and has also appeared in I Hate Suzie.

The reality TV contestant is back in prison after admitting a harassment charge regarding Georgia Harrison.

The TV panellist claims she has been treated unfairly due to her public support of Palestinian rights.

Despite a deadly public health crisis, most U.S. doctors, nurses and other health workers turn away many patients with alcohol and drug addiction without offering them science-based medications.

Addiction treatments are safe, effective — and rarely offered to patients. That's because many doctors and nurses still view people with alcohol or drug addiction with suspicion and hostility.

The comedian and broadcaster narrates the heartfelt and at times self-lacerating account of his relationship with alcohol A memoir chronicling the comic and broadcaster John Robins’s life in alcohol and his subsequent path to sobriety, Thirst is structured around the drinks that changed his life. There’s the bottle of Jacob’s Creek wine left out on a kitchen worktop which he helped himself to at the age of seven, secreting it into his orange juice, and the beer given to him at scout camp which he drank alone. There’s also his stomach-churning recreation, while on a comedy tour of Australia, of the white russians drunk by the Dude in The Big Lebowski using a gallon of milk, a litre of vodka and a bottle of Kahlua. As an adult, Robins, who is best known for his shows on Radio X and on BBC5 Live, romanticised pubs, which he saw as places of peacefulness and refuge. He even co-hosted the podcast The Moon Under Water where he invited guests to describe their ideal pub. Robins reveals that what kept him drinking for so long was the lie that he was in control. That he could, on occasion, get through a Dry January convinced him he couldn’t be an addict, although he got a wakeup call when a GP told him to “sort your fucking life out”...

After his fall from grace, media’s former enfant terrible is now sober and helping others with his addiction recovery newsletter and podcast, The Small Bow Every other Tuesday, AJ Daulerio wakes up at 5.30am and meditates for five to 20 minutes before beginning his multistep daily journaling protocol: reading a selection from a poetry anthology, then a passage from one of his daily wisdom readers (his go-to is a heavily annotated copy of Leo Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom); writing his Fear of the Day and gratitude list, then sharing his spiritual takeaway in a note to his three kids. After a banana and coffee, Daulerio trains Brazilian jujitsu before hitting a 9.45am meditation at Besant Lodge – a community center just below the Hollywood sign that once served as a meeting place for mid-century mystics – immediately followed by him leading a recovery meeting of his own through Zoom...

Yvette Cooper’s maternity reforms must change a system that too often fails women when they’re at their most vulnerable On the third day of being in labour with my first child, I entered a new state of being. It was time to dig deep. This is what I had learned in all the childbirth classes. As long as I remained calm, breathed as instructed, moaned through the pain, things would happen as they were meant to. My body knew what it was doing. Only, it didn’t. On the fourth day, I started to beg. This wasn’t right. Despite contraction after relentless contraction, I wasn’t dilating. I hadn’t slept, I couldn’t even sit down. I needed help. And still, they waited. For what, I never understood. Natalie Morris is the author of Mixed/Other: Explorations of Multiraciality in Modern Britain Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please..

Scientists have kept vaccines stable at room temperature for a year, which could transform global vaccination.

New images and footage of the Sun show "whirlpools" of activity that it has not been possible to see before.

A Colorado lab researching the ground-squirrels comes up with an innovative way to raise money after funding cuts.

A comprehensive assessment of England's waterways is the first in six years and shows little improvement.

Changing paved areas to grass and planting trees can reduce urban heat island effect by as much as 1C, study shows Add together all the UK’s household gardens and they cover an area three times larger than all the country’s nature reserves combined. But as the demand for car parking increases, many front gardens are being paved over, with research showing that this loss of green is adding to the urban heat island effect, particularly at night. In 2005, about 7.5% of the UK’s front gardens were paved; by 2025 that had risen to 55%, according to Royal Horticultural Society estimates. Those hard surfaces absorb heat during the day and then slowly release the heat overnight. By contrast, leafy green gardens release moisture into the atmosphere, which helps to cool the air as the water evaporates...

The FDA allowed some Zyn nicotine pouches to be marketed as "lower risk" than cigarettes. Public health experts agree they can help current smokers, but worry young people may become addicted.

He was among the first to perform microscopic surgery in the 1970s and revolutionized techniques to treat traumatic injuries.

Scientists at a biotech company have used gene editing to create two hypoallergenic beagles that don't trigger allergies Matt Walker couldn’t pet a dog without sneezing – until he and other scientists used a gene editing technique to produce a hypoallergenic beagle named Bailey. Now, he can feed Bailey spoons of peanut butter while she lies on his lap and play fetch with her in Central Park. His allergies didn’t go away: Bailey’s saliva and hair no longer contain a key allergy-causing protein...

Study of accidents in England and Wales shows e-scooter riders three times more likely to suffer traumatic brain injury than bikers Electric scooter riders are three times more likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries than motorcyclists, according to an analysis of accidents in England and Wales – which found women were particularly at risk of serious harm. Brain injuries accounted for more than a third of adult injuries on e-scooters, but riders also sustained more internal organ and blood vessel damage than did motorcyclists or pedal cyclists, the study found...

FIFA said Wednesday it had apologized for errors made over Gianni Infantino's failed plan to sell stakes in the World Cup and that senior staff in attendance at a crisis meeting in Morocco "reaffirmed their full support" for his presidency.

At a time of increased conflict between elephants and humans, as elephant habitats are converted to intensive agriculture, the Hurulu Eco Park is a place where the animals can graze unimpeded.

SpaceX's shares are unlocked Thursday, and some early employees could see a massive windfall. The BBC's Samira Hussain explains.

AI Security Institute says OpenAI and Anthropic models went rogue during a cybersecurity test and showed a new type of risk Explainer: Should we be alarmed at AI models going rogue in tests? Advanced artificial intelligence models have stunned the UK’s AI Security Institute (AISI) by carrying out a hacking campaign against real people during a cybersecurity test. The institute said the incident was unprecedented and involved sending targeted emails to software developers in an attempt to pass a cyber challenge...

Company is the third to report such an incident after Anthropic and OpenAI reported breaches during training Meta said on Wednesday that one of its AI models hacked ⁠another company during cybersecurity testing, after an error by its testing partner gave the model unintended internet access. The incident adds to a ⁠growing list of ⁠cases in ​which AI agents from major developers breached systems at other companies during testing, after Anthropic said last week that some of its models ⁠hacked three companies, and OpenAI disclosed that an AI agent breached the startup Hugging Face...

Neither the US or Oman have commented on the proposed agreement on the vital waterway.

A flood of companies are revealing AI models gained access to the internet - with real consequences.

The no-frills carrier agrees to be bought by US firm Apollo after a rival suitor drops out.

A man accused of killing a British aid worker and disposing of her body in a suitcase has appeared in court charged with homicide with intent.

Profit jump fuelled largely by unknown US refund amount as Japanese video game firm records quarterly sales drop Nintendo has reported a jump in profits, as the Japanese game maker’s earnings were buoyed up by a long-awaited refund on Donald Trump’s tariffs. The company said profits surged 53.5% to ¥147.4bn (£694m) over the three months to June, substantially beating expert forecasts for ¥77.8bn...

The United Nations has set a goal for near universal HIV diagnosis and treatment for all by 2030. No country in Asia has hit the mark — until this year.

Madeleine Finlay is joined by Ian Sample, Guardian science editor, to discuss three eye-catching science stories including an investigation that has identified four distinct types of thinker. Also on the agenda is the unprecedented cyclosporiasis outbreak in the US which has now been linked to two fatalities, and the funding cuts that threaten the iconic Jodrell Bank world heritage site, home to the Lovell telescope Clip: CSPAN Four types of thinker have been identified. Which one are you?..

Mexican influencer César Gastélum was shot dead while livestreaming in Culiacán, prompting online rumors that he was related to influencer Ana Gastélum.

AtlasHour keeps this story available in the permanent archive for context and future reference.

The United States, Iran and Oman are reportedly preparing a 60-day agreement focused on navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.

Former Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina has questioned whether people are better off after the 2024 political upheaval.

Sunken Nazi warships have emerged from the Danube as water levels drop during Europe’s scorching heatwave. In Serbia, dozens of World War II German battleships have become visible on the riverbed. The ships, of which there are thought to be up to 200, were deliberately sunk by the Germans as they retreated from the Soviets towards the end of the war. The river’s water levels plummeted last Thursday (30 July) to the lowest levels for 30 years in several countries, including Serbia and Romania. The record-low levels could lead to an energy crisis across several European countries, as low water continues to disrupt cooling systems. In Serbia, the country’s main hydroelectric plant can now only operate at 20% of its capacity.

After Roman Reigns' successful in-ring campaign at SummerSlam, the OTC is ready to take up another challenge to defend his World Heavyweight Champions.

Russian officials are probing a scheme where women marry soldiers shortly before deployment to claim death compensation, known as the "Black Widow" scam.

AtlasHour keeps this story available in the permanent archive for context and future reference.