Exclusive: Devon and Cornwall police formally apologise to nine women and settle claim without admitting liability

A police force alleged to have promoted and protected male officers despite knowing they were accused of domestic abuse has formally apologised and paid compensation to nine women, the Guardian has learned.

The women allege they were subjected to a range of abuse including rape, assault, threats, harassment and coercive control while in relationships with male officers from Devon and Cornwall police.

Some reservoirs in south at critical levels as water companies call for extended restrictions that would affect golf clubs, private schools and car washes

A severe drought has been declared in six areas of England, with some reservoirs at critically low levels, threatening public supplies.

Parts of Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Somerset, East Sussex and West Sussex have moved into severe drought, and urgent measures are being taken to secure public supplies of water after the UK experienced its hottest summer on record.

A dry summer has left the Bristol Channel island critically short of water, forcing visitor caps and talk of evacuating its 28 residents

Tom Carr was peering up at the clouds scudding around the island of Lundy, 10 miles off the coast of north Devon. “That one’s definitely got rain in it,” he said. “The mainland will be wet at the moment. And look over at Wales – it’s getting a real soaking just now.”

But above Lundy the sky was, stubbornly, blue. No significant rain has fallen here since the start of May, leading to perilously low water levels. Restrictions have been put in place, visitor numbers limited and there has been talk of the island – home to 28 people – being evacuated.

Teenagers Eva Wishart and Emily Smith launch project to breed and release 250 of the tiny animals by September

Children in Devon are being invited to become “citizen captive breeders”, rearing harvest mice at home for release into the wild to help revive endangered nature.

Wild Pets, a new conservation project launched by two 14-year-old friends, is seeking 20 Devon-based children to rear hundreds of mice after the duo’s own successful restoration efforts.

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.”