‘Technical errors’ are embarrassing for Thames Valley police but unlikely to affect outcome of investigation

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has won his legal challenge against Thames Valley police over search warrants used to raid his home after they arrested him.

The former prince brought a judicial review of the legality of the force’s actions and those of the central criminal court, which granted the warrants.

Scott Chilton, who led Hampshire and the Isle of Wight police, barred from becoming a police officer again

A former chief constable showed a sense of entitlement, dishonesty and lack of integrity by having sexual relationships with two subordinate officers, including engaging in sexual activity while on call to lead major incidents, a misconduct hearing has ruled.

The panel found that the behaviour of Scott Chilton, 53, who retired as chief constable of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight before the hearing, amounted to gross misconduct.

Lawyers launch super-complaint after research shows officers frequently dismiss image-based abuse

Police forces are routinely failing to investigate complaints about the circulation of image-based abuse, previously known as “revenge pornography”, according to research that has triggered a super-complaint over the way such crimes are handled.

Lawyers have gathered evidence from 100 people who reported intimate images being shared online without their consent. Their research suggests that image-based abuse is still frequently dismissed or not recognised as criminal offending, despite being described by the former prime minister Keir Starmer as a national emergency.

On 14 January this year, army and navy squads faced an unprecedented challenge: one bomb on a Plymouth building site, another floating on a dredger in Exmouth. That afternoon, the clock started ticking

Everyone at Exmouth Marina knew there was an unexploded German bomb in the water. Old hands at the dock had been saying so since the end of the second world war. But the marina had been dredged and re-dredged and nothing had ever come up. It had started to sound like an old wives’ tale. The marina is a busy stretch of water: a commercial port until the late 1990s that had since been converted into a home to private yachts. A bomb, you’d think, would have a hard time staying hidden. But in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday 14 January 2026, 81 years after the end of the second world war, Steve Hockings-Thompson, the manager of Exmouth Marina, got a call from the crew of a dredging vessel telling him he’d better come out to the boat. “I thought: ‘Oh crikey. We’ve got a bit of an issue here,’” Hockings-Thompson told me recently.

He went out to the dredger, a squat barge that hauls silt and other debris from the marina floor on to a flat deck that resembles a steel sieve. Sitting on the deck was a huge hunk of metal, caked in mud and stones. As Hockings-Thompson got closer and saw its distinctive conical shape, he knew it was a bomb – a big one. The dredger was loaded with 20,000 litres of diesel fuel, so if the bomb detonated, it would be disastrous. He called the police, who quickly came to the scene. “And then,” he said, “all hell broke loose.”