Liz Truss considered cutting cancer care on the NHS in a desperate bid to find savings to pay for the tax cuts in her botched “mini budget”, according to a new book about her time in office.

The book, Truss at 10: How Not to Be Prime Minister by the renowned political biographer Anthony Seldon, is a 330-page long, largely excoriating account of Truss’s 45 days in Downing Street.

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The book reports that, as Truss’s mini budget unravelled around her, her policy director Jamie Hope and economic adviser Shabbir Merali huddled in Downing Street and discussed how the cuts she was contemplating could not be delivered. The book says:

“At that point, they were joined by fellow special adviser Alex Boyd, who was told that Truss and Kwarteng were thinking they could still sort out the black hole with severe cuts.

“We’ve been told that they’re looking at stopping cancer treatment on the NHS,” they told him.

“Is she being serious?” Boyd asked. “She’s lost the plot,” the

Fish and chips is a British family favourite equally enjoyed around the table on a Friday night or out of the paper on an often overcast beach.

But the deep fried delicacy has seen the biggest price increase of some of the UK’s most popular takeaways, according to new figures.

The average price for a portion of fish and chips rose more than 50% to nearly £10 in the five years to July – while the cost of a kebab went up 44% and pizza 30%.

Chip shop owners cite a "perfect storm" of costs in recent years, including soaring energy bills, tariffs on seafood imports and extreme weather hammering potato harvests.

This all means a family of four won't get much change out of a £50 note once they've forked out for their tea and added some mushy peas and cans of pop.

More than 700 people in the UK have posted on a pro-suicide website looking for someone to die with, a BBC investigation has found.

The site, which we are not naming, has a members-only section where users can look for a suicide partner.

We have connected several double suicides to the “partners thread”.

Our investigation also found that predators have used the site to target vulnerable women.

In December 2019, Angela Stevens’ 28-year-old son, Brett, travelled from his home in the Midlands to Scotland to meet a woman he had made contact with on the partners thread.

The pair rented an Airbnb and took their lives together.

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Since her son’s death, she has spent years researching the pro-suicide site - in particular, the partners thread.

“It's a very dangerous place,” Angela says.

She compares it to a dark version of a dating app.

“Where else would you go to find a partner to take your own life with?” she says. “It’s just absolutely vile.”

The thread

LGBT+ books are being banned from UK schools after complaints from parents, librarians have revealed.

A six-month investigation by Index on Censorship, the results of which have been shared exclusively with The Independent, found that 53 per cent of UK school librarians polled had been asked to remove literature and in more than half of those cases books were taken off shelves.

The snapshot survey found that more than two dozen librarians had experienced such censorship, with one saying they had been told to remove every book with an LGBT+ theme after a single complaint from one parent about one book.

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LGBT+ charities, MPs and authors have warned the move represents a worrying regression on gay rights, “returning us to that world of prejudice that most of us thought we had moved on from”. Former MP Elliot Colburn, who received homophobic death threats while serving in Parliament, said preventing children from accessing material that speaks to their experiences repre

Ambulances have been called out to Amazon warehouses more than 1,400 times in the past five years, the Observer can reveal. The figures, which were described as shocking by the GMB trade union, raise fresh questions about safety at the American giant’s UK workplaces.

Amazon centres in Dunfermline and Bristol had the most ambulance callouts in Britain, listing 161 and 125 across the period respectively.

A third of callouts by the Scottish Ambulance Service to the Amazon site in Dunfermline related to chest pains, with other callouts for convulsions, strokes and breathing problems recorded.

Ambulances have been called to Amazon Mansfield 84 times since 2019. More than 70% of those were for the most serious types of incidents – dubbed category 1 and 2, which can often relate to life-threatening conditions like heart attacks or strokes.

Attempted suicides or other serious psychiatric incidents were recorded at Amazon centres in Bolton, Chesterfield, Mansfield, Rugeley, Londo

A 15-year-old boy has become the first person to be charged with riot over the recent disorder that swept towns and cities across England.

Almost all those involved have so far been charged with violent disorder, which carries a shorter maximum sentence than the offence of rioting. On Wednesday a judge, the recorder of Hull, suggested that prosecutors should consider the riot charge for people alleged to have played a central role in the disorder.

On Thursday the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) said that a 15-year-old boy had been charged with riot after disorder in Sunderland. It said more riot charges would follow.

The riot charge carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, whereas for violent disorder the maximum is five years. The boy’s defence lawyer, Chris Wilson, told a hearing that the new charge may have “far wider repercussions”.

The district judge Zoe Passfield adjourned his case for two weeks as she said the new charge must have come as a “surprise” to him. She t

Social media platform Bluesky says it has seen a surge in signups in the United Kingdom in recent days.

Since X owner Elon Musk made controversial comments about the riots in the UK, a number of influential figures said they would leave the platform or scale back their use, including home office minister Jess Philips.

Now, Bluesky says it has seen a 60% jump in general activity from accounts in the UK, with several MPs also joining the platform recently.

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"For 5 out of the last 7 days, the UK had the most Bluesky signups of any country," said Bluesky in a statement on Monday.

While attention has inevitably been on the first rise in grocery price inflation since March last year, the latest till roll data from Kantar Worldpanel also contains valuable insights into the grocery market itself.

The figures highlight in particular the continued success of the biggest two players in the market, Tesco and Sainsbury's, in terms of pulling away from the rest of the pack.

Asda, on the other hand, looks to be in a very bad way.

Its market share during the period fell to 12.6%, down from 13.7% a year ago, which is an astonishing fall from grace.

It does not seem that long ago that Asda first overtook Sainsbury's to become the market's second-biggest player - an event celebrated by Tony DeNunzio, Asda's then chief executive, by giving all 125,000 UK employees an extra day off.

In fact, though, it was as long ago as August 2003 - when Asda, then owned by the US giant Walmart, had a 17% market share and Sainsbury's was at 16.1%.

However, following a t

Banknotes with a face value of £78,430 have raised more than 11 times that amount for charity following a series of auctions.

New £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes featuring King Charles III entered circulation in June.

A full set of the first issues were presented to the monarch, but hundreds of other low serial numbered banknotes have gone under the hammer.

One single £10 note with the serial number HB01 000002 sold for £17,000 during bidding.

During another lot, a sheet of 40 connected £50 notes - with a face value of £2,000 - sold for £26,000. That was a record for any Bank of England auction.

The four sales run by auctioneers Spink in London raised £914,127 in total.

Collectors seek banknotes which come as close to the 00001 serial number as possible, hence the large amounts raised.

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The proceeds will be shared equally between 10 charities chosen by the Bank:

The violent unrest that has caused so much damage in the UK has not in fact happened across the UK. It has almost been exclusively confined to England.

True, violent riots also took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but, interestingly enough, even there they were largely perpetrated by British loyalists, along with a few far-right extremists from Dublin.

The counter-protestors were seemingly mostly drawn from Northern Ireland’s Catholic community.

At least up until now, Scotland and Wales have remained peaceful. When considering why this is the case, we might look at how the English are positioned within the United Kingdom.

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After all the mess has been cleared from the streets, it would be advisable for the government and society as a whole, to have a debate about what “England” and “Englishness” stand for in a Union profoundly divided by rising nationalism and in a world where Britannia no longer rules the waves.

As riots swept the U.K. in recent days, far-right groups plotted attacks on immigration centers and swapped manuals for making petrol bombs on the fringe social network Telegram.

Social media platforms have faced intense criticism for hosting extremist rhetoric that has inflamed violent disorder since the killing of three children in Southport in a stabbing attack late July.

But while Elon Musk’s provocations on X (formerly Twitter) have grabbed the limelight, right-wing agitators have long enjoyed an unparalleled level of impunity on Telegram.

“The far right, fascists and neo-Nazis have long regarded Telegram as a safe space for the exchange of their views,” said Matthew Feldman, a specialist on right-wing extremism who teaches at the University of York.

Channels set up on Telegram following the killings in Southport amassed tens of thousands of members and were used to mobilize far-right rioters. Locations shared on the app were targeted for widespread violence and th

Senior police have described a “turning point” in the disorder seen across England in the past week, suggesting swift sentencing and a major public order operation acted as deterrents to far right-led agitators.

Thousands of anti-racist demonstrators gathered on Wednesday evening and created human shields to protect asylum centres, dwarfing a handful of anti-immigrant rallies.

But in a sign that unrest may continue, 5,000 public order officers will be on duty or on standby this weekend amid evidence of renewed plans by far-right activists to mobilise in cities across England and Wales.

“There are many potential events still being advertised and circulated online and those intent on violence and destruction have not gone away,” said Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).

Stephens cited a range of factors for his belief that a “turning point” had been reached after a week of violence following the killing of three girls in the seaside tow

The sight of scurrying looters and widespread rioting across multiple English cities may be an unusual one. But the disorder has a 21st-century precedent in another overheated August.

The television images will take many back to the 2011 riots, which engulfed London before spreading to other cities and were considered the worst week of public disorder to hit Britain for 200 years.

Then, like now, Keir Starmer was involved in quelling the disturbances. In 2011, he was the director of public prosecutions who kept the courts open for 24 hours a day to process offenders and allowed magistrates to pass longer and tougher sentences.

This time, as prime minister, he has accused far-right agitators of mercilessly exploiting the deaths of three girls to fuel attacks on asylum seekers and people of colour.

Below, we examine the parallels and differences between the riots which happened 13 years apart.

Welcome to this months financial report.

Everything is still ticking along nicely, so I'll make this short and sweet. If there's something else you want to know about all this then feel free to ask in the comments.

As can be seen from our graph on Open Collective we got £43.76 in and spent £49.99:

However, that's not the complete picture - the various outgoings are listed in the spreadsheet but to break it down further:

Hosting remains unchanged (total after VAT €40.68 - £34.74):

• Server - €29.00
• IP4 - €1.70
• Backup box - €3.20

In addition I've been reimbursed £10.57 for earlier hosting payments. This is the penultimate one of these. So, after next month the contributions will cover the outgoings.

Since Tom handed over the instance, we've largely been focused on ensuring the site is working properly and that the bi

Elon Musk could be summoned for a grilling by British MPs over X’s role in race riots that have rocked the U.K. over the last week, as well as his own incendiary comments about the violence.

Labour MPs Chi Onwurah and Dawn Butler, who are competing to chair parliament’s science, innovation and technology committee, both told POLITICO they’d press the billionaire X owner and other technology executives to answer questions about the role of social media platforms amid mounting unrest in the U.K.

Musk has spent days beefing with British politicians over the riots, and is locked in a war of words with Prime Minister Keir Starmer over the U.K's handling of them. Musk on Sunday wrote “civil war is inevitable” in the U.K. and claimed that the response by U.K. police has been “one-sided."

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Musk’s platform X (formerly Twitter) saw misinformation about the identity of the attacker — wrongly identified as an asylum seeker who had just arrived in the U.K. — spread widely in the

Malaysia has become the first country to issue a safety warning to its citizens about travel to the UK due to anti-immigration protests and riots.

The south-east Asian country's ministry of foreign affairs published an alert on Sunday advising Malaysians living in or visiting the UK to "stay away" from protest areas and "remain vigilant".

A police station was set on fire in Sunderland on Friday as officers tried to contain several hundred protesters on another night of disorder.

Video footage on social media showed flames coming from Sunderland Central police station.

Nick Lowles, from the organisation Hope Not Hate, posted a photo of the blaze on X and wrote: “A police station has been set alight in Sunderland tonight. A far right and racist protest has culminated in this. Shame on all those who continue to excuse these protests.”

The crowd, some of whom wore balaclavas, also threw beer barrels and stones at police who came under a sustained attack outside a mosque on St Mark’s Road.

An overturned car was set on fire and rioters set off fire extinguishers against officers. Northumbria police advised members of the public to avoid Sunderland city centre due to the “ongoing disorder”.

The protest, promoted by far-right activists on social media, began at the newly refurbished Keel Square. Social media f

Lab-grown pet food is to hit UK shelves as Britain becomes the first country in Europe to approve cultivated meat.

The Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have approved the product from the company Meatly.

It is thought there will be demand for cultivated pet food, as animal lovers face a dilemma about feeding their pets meat from slaughtered livestock.

Research suggests the pet food industry has a climate impact similar to that of the Philippines, the 13th most populous country in the world. A study by the University of Winchester found that 50% of surveyed pet owners would feed their pets cultivated meat, while 32% would eat it themselves.

The Meatly product is cultivated chicken. It is made by taking a small sample from a chicken egg, cultivating it with vitamins and amino acids in a lab, then growing cells in a container similar to those in which beer is fermented. The result is a paté-like paste.

Five supporters of the Just Stop Oil climate campaign who conspired to cause gridlock on London’s orbital motorway have been sentenced to lengthy jail terms by a judge who told them they had “crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic”.

Roger Hallam, Daniel Shaw, Louise Lancaster, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu and Cressida Gethin were found guilty last week of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance for coordinating direct action protests on the M25 over four days in November 2022.

Hallam received a five-year sentence on Thursday, while the other four were each sentenced to four years.

The sentences are thought to be the longest sentences even given in the UK for non-violent protest, exceeding those given to the Just Stop Oil protesters Morgan Trowland (three years) and Marcus Decker (two years and seven months) for scaling the Dartford Crossing.