Of the dozens of countries approached to water down their laws, Australia appears to be the only one considering it, publishers’ group says

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AI has already been trained on the works of Australian artists including Kylie Minogue and Nick Cave without compensation, the peak global body for music rights has claimed, as the Australian government has been warned against giving in to “strong-arming” from tech companies seeking to weaken copyright law.

The International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP) – which represents Sony, Warner and Universal as well as thousands of independent publishers on six continents – has warned that of the dozens of countries approached to water down copyright laws, Australia appears to be the only to consider doing so.

Report reveals that a shady mobster-turned-informant may have been involved in helping cover up murder

An in-depth investigation by the New York Times is raising further questions about the high-profile OJ Simpson case, in which the former football player was accused in the 1990s of killing his ex-wife – and whether a shady mobster-turned-informant may have been involved in helping cover up the murder.

The Times’s investigation revealed that California prosecutors were unable to fully investigate whether Simpson, who was accused but not convicted of his ex-wife’s murder, may have had an accomplice at the scene of the crime.

Passengers urged to ‘share the carriage, not the noise’ as guidance sets out £100 penalties for nuisance behaviour

Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown on “headphone dodgers” who play loud music on public transport, as he extends his promise to give voters “breathing space” in the confines of a train carriage.

The prime minister will unveil a campaign against nuisance behaviour on public transport on Monday, alongside guidance allowing local transport authorities to levy fines of up to £100 for non-compliance.

Premium paid over French counterparts has risen to almost £30 a megawatt hour, analysis by lobby group finds

British steelmakers have been pushed further behind European rivals on electricity costs after the US-Israeli war on Iran caused a surge in global gas prices.

The premium paid by the British industry over its French counterpart has risen to almost £30 a megawatt hour (MWh), its highest level in three years, according to analysis by the lobby group UK Steel.

Family post emotional statements to Instagram a month after their son and brother died at a rehab facility

Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber have said they are “beyond heartbroken” in a tribute to their “sweet beautiful” son, Presley.

Their eldest child died aged 27 at a rehab facility on 20 September, according to Los Angeles county medical examiner records. The cause of his death has not been disclosed.

Antibody patterns in the blood may help doctors identify people at risk so they can be treated earlier, research shows

Patterns of antibodies in people’s blood could predict the onset of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) a decade before diagnosis, according to research that raises hopes for catching the condition early.

Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two main forms of IBD, are typically treated only after symptoms appear, when the gut has already been damaged. But scientists found that the immune system sends warning signals up to a decade before diagnosis, paving the way for potentially earlier detection and even prevention.

Judge orders government to notify her by 8pm ET Sunday whether its position changed from Friday’s court filing

Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on Sunday that “restoration work will begin” on 15 November to a historic public golf course in Washington DC despite a federal judge’s court order to pause his plans over environmental and historic preservation concerns.

US district judge Ana Reyes had ruled earlier this year that the federal government must give notice before any substantive construction work on the East Potomac golf course could proceed, and last week issued an order halting the removal of trees at the site, which she called “inexcusable”.

Wichita police awaiting toxicology results and mechanical exam of pickup truck driven by the 34-year-old woman

A woman who was arrested on Saturday after she drove a truck through a youth soccer game in Wichita, Kansas – killing a boy and a man – has been released from custody without charges pending further investigation, according to authorities.

In a statement on Sunday, the Wichita police department said investigators were awaiting the results of toxicology testing on the driver, whom the agency would only describe as a 34-year-old woman. Police said they were also waiting for “a mechanical examination” of the pickup truck that the woman was driving at the time she struck and killed six-year-old Cole Adrian and Nicholas Schafer, 35.

‘Meta owes us an explanation,’ group says as organizers fear censorship after account goes dark for several hours

The coalition leaders behind nationwide pro-democracy protests that have drawn millions of Americans to the streets in recent years were frustrated when its Instagram account was temporarily shut down during its latest demonstration on Saturday.

The No Kings movement’s account went dark for several hours while protests focused on increasing early voter turnout were underway, sparking censorship fears.

New video footage of Israeli settler assault on European delegation as Netanyahu attempts to raise doubt

Hours after Israeli militants attacked a delegation of European diplomats, French clerics and a visiting mayor in the occupied West Bank, Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, responded by questioning the delegation’s account of the assault.

“Serious accusations require serious evidence” was the all-caps headline of a social media post from the office of the prime minister. As news of the attack spread globally there was no pledge to find those accountable and bring them to justice.

Exclusive: Former health secretary says upfront investment in support is needed ‘if we are going to end the Neet crisis’

Ministers should cut welfare spending to fund more employment support if it wants to end the youth Neet crisis, the author of a government-led review has said.

Alan Milburn, the Tony Blair-era health secretary, told the Guardian he believed ministers should reduce benefits payments to help pay for more employment support, opening a potentially contentious debate within the Labour party over welfare cuts.

UK home secretary’s meeting comes after PM said he wanted to rejoin European law enforcement databases

The UK home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, will meet the EU’s home affairs commissioner on Monday for further talks just days after Andy Burnham said he wanted to rejoin European law enforcement databases from which the UK has been locked out of since Brexit.

According to the European Commission, they will discuss “migration, border management, law enforcement cooperation and counter-terrorism”, with the latest Frontex data published on Monday showing a 43% decline in small boats crossing the Channel.

From the attorney general stumping for Republican candidates to federal agents raiding the home of a Democratic congresswoman up for re-election, the department is violating longstanding norms

Donald Trump’s justice department has aggressively inserted itself into the midterm elections in the contest’s final weeks, shattering the department’s longstanding practice of political neutrality and leaving little doubt about the department’s willingness to help should the president attempt to subvert elections where his party is forecasted to lose seats and ultimately control of Congress.

In the last few weeks, federal agents have raided the home of a Democratic congresswoman up for re-election. It has touted criminal charges and arrests of non-citizens charged with voter fraud. The attorney general has hit the campaign trail to stump for Republican candidates. And the department gave California election officials 48 hours to investigate the citizenship of 20,000 people, and then sued the state when it refused to comply. The FBI also recently published a video criticizing Michigan senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and other Democrats, drawing an immediate rebuke from one watchdog, who said the video “has no place in a democratic society”.

Capt Smit Machchhar said he screamed for help as he reached to open the cockpit door on flight FZ1073

The captain of a flydubai flight who was attacked by a co-pilot who intended to crash the plane has described ⁠blocking axe blows to his head and screaming for help as he reached to open the cockpit door.

Capt Smit ⁠Machchhar has been hailed ⁠as a ​hero for his role in averting disaster on the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv last month, helping to thwart what the UAE ⁠attorney general has said was an attempted suicide attack by the co-pilot who had intended to crash the plane into Ben Gurion airport.

Ex-president urges Americans to defend congresswoman, saying ‘there’s no reason to believe it will stop with her’

Former US president Barack Obama condemned comments by Donald Trump’s “border czar” that the Republican presidential administration could “of course” strip Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of her citizenship and deport her.

Obama wrote Sunday morning, on X, that “the full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president.”

Two people killed and at least 17 injured as Russia and Ukraine continue to trade strikes on power infrastructure

Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Sunday thanked the Trump administration for resuming intelligence sharing between the two countries, but maintained the US had intentionally throttled its Starlink satellite internet access so that Donald Trump could send a “message” in his ongoing feud with the Ukrainian president.

In an interview on NBC, Zelenskyy said the US had “unblocked” intelligence on impending Russian ballistic missile strikes, which have pounded the country’s energy infrastructure as winter draws in.

In the three weeks since a health worker’s death in Siberia, officials have stonewalled the WHO – setting a worrying precedent for future pandemics

Is there a plague outbreak in Russia? If the answer were a clear yes, there shouldn’t be much reason to worry. With swift medical intervention, plague is treatable. But in the nearly three weeks since a worker at a Siberian plague research unit died of a mysterious respiratory illness, state officials have been consistently tight-lipped about what happened and whether there were any further cases.

It is this uncertainty that has the World Health Organization (WHO) and international community worried: partly because there is a – very small – risk of an outbreak, and partly because it is yet another warning that the international coordination we rely on to prevent pandemics is fraying along with the rest of international politics, and could easily fail to protect us in the future.

The education secretary is right that her job is not to ‘polish the status quo’. Next, she must decide what to change first

There is a good case to be made for the increased importance of speaking skills in our new age of machines. With the UK economy’s stronger-than-expected recent performance widely linked to AI investment, it is vital that people are equipped for the kinds of in-person, public-facing jobs that are least likely to be automated. A concerning decline in children’s language development, both in the UK and internationally, has been linked to high screen use. There is a grim irony in a situation where tech companies both compete with humans for contracts and undermine our ability to talk to one other.

The Guardian has previously backed efforts to more strongly embed speaking skills, or oracy, in British schools. In a speech on Thursday, Lucy Powell promised to give them equal status to reading and writing in English (education is devolved, so her main responsibility is for England, but there are parallel initiatives in the other nations). Yet with promised updates to the national curriculum postponed, and plans for special educational needs reform causing deep anxiety to families, schools and councils, the hardest questions for the education secretary are about priorities. Following negative feedback from schools, she has also asked Ofsted to look again at its new inspection framework.

Anthony Goodman argues that probation officers have increasingly lost their autonomy, while Joe Sim says rehabilitation will not work in a society divided by brutal social divisions. Plus letters from Chris Parsons and Tracey Burley

Your editorial on overcrowded prisons and probation (13 October) was most welcome as it highlights a crisis in community justice that shows little sign of abating. You say that problems date back to the failed part-privatisation of the probation service, but in reality political interference has been happening for far longer than that.

Having worked for years as a prison probation officer and then in an aftercare and resettlement unit for ex-offenders, I saw good practice and ongoing practical and emotional support that demonstrated all the important points raised by Enver Solomon in his recent Guardian article.

George Graham of Save the Children UK says the government has a clear opportunity to act and ensure that victims of conflict are helped

Amid allegations about advisers dealing with Roman Abramovich’s business affairs (Roman Abramovich aides falsified paperwork to disguise assets and dodge tax, records suggest, 12 October), another issue demands urgent government action – the £2.5bn from the sale of Chelsea FC, which has remained stuck in a Barclays bank account since May 2022.

The money was originally pledged to help victims of the war in Ukraine, no matter where they are in the world. Yet for over four years this huge sum of money has sat in limbo, accruing interest while victims of conflict go without desperately needed support. At a time of global aid cuts, rising food insecurity and growing humanitarian needs, the £2.5bn could make a transformative difference to the children and families we serve around the world.

Eugene Litvak says hospitals could rearrange scheduled admissions as part of efforts to prepare operationally for changes on 1 January

Your report (Millions of Medicaid recipients to face draconian requirements as of 1 January, 13 October) warns that millions may lose Medicaid coverage just as hospitals face rising uncompensated care and growing emergency department demand.

Protecting eligible patients from losing coverage through paperwork must remain the first priority. But hospitals also have a responsibility to prepare operationally for 1 January. They should not compound the coming increase in emergency demand with avoidable peaks they create themselves.

Female colleague says she was forced out shortly after incident with Luke Campbell, Hull and East Yorkshire mayor

A Reform UK mayor is under police investigation for allegedly showing “naked and sexualised” images of himself to a female member of staff.

Luke Campbell, a former Olympic boxing champion and the mayor of Hull and East Yorkshire, is understood to have been questioned under caution by Humberside police earlier this month.

It’s a perfect storm of protesters with heartfelt grievances and others set on conflict. The key here is the sense of betrayal that united them on the streets

The first thing I learned on the streets of Paris this weekend is that there is no arguing with teargas. I arrived at Place de la République just after 1pm yesterday. The mood was festive until police started firing volleys of teargas into the square from Rue du Faubourg-du-Temple.

I didn’t see the inciting incident – if there even was one – and tried walking into the cloud of CS gas hanging in the air. It was impossible. The gas clings to your nose and burns your eyes, and you quickly start struggling to breathe. I retreated towards the Boulevard de Magenta, blinking furiously to stop the stinging.

Oliver Haynes is a journalist and co-host of Sacré Bleu: the French presidential election podcast

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Exclusive: Play anonymously published in 1596 was collaboration between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, according to computer analysis

Dramatic new evidence concludes that the play Edward III should be added to William Shakespeare’s canon, and also that it was a major collaboration with his contemporary rival Christopher Marlowe.

The history was published anonymously in 1596, and it has long been thought that Shakespeare wrote at least a few scenes. However, Dr Rory Loughnane, a leading scholar and co-author of the research, told the Guardian that computerised textual analysis pushed the case “beyond any reasonable doubt” that the Stratford-born playwright was the principal writer.

Scrutiny committee looks into financing of Manchester Life project as PM promises ‘full transparency’

A £55m loan to Manchester City’s Abu Dhabi owner will be investigated as part of a review into a fund for housing projects while Andy Burnham was mayor.

The prime minister has faced weeks of scrutiny over his links to Manchester City’s super-rich owners after the club was found guilty of boosting its income by £900m in a nine-year breach of financial rules.

A barrowful of family fun with gourds galore and even a pumpkin cannon at a patch on the Berwickshire coast

ONS data for England and Wales shows 26% of heterosexual divorces in 2025 followed 20 years or more of marriage

Most couples are aware of the dreaded “seven-year itch”, when the honeymoon period wears off and real life starts to bite.

Now official data has shown that couples in England and Wales are more likely to split after 20 years. According to Office for National Statistics figures, more than a quarter of all divorces between opposite-sex couples happened after 20 years or longer of marriage.

Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant

The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.

The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.

Amid financial pressures on household and school budgets, the theatre company is expanding access with free plays

Six young actors step into the spotlight as a reverent silence descends on the hall at City Academy in Bristol. A boy steps forward to pose a central question: “What does it mean to be young in Britain in 2026?”

Union jack flags flash across the backdrop as three girls excitedly debate a Spice Girls reunion concert, before the focus swings back to the young boy wrestling with modern British identity. He rattles off a list of familiar cultural touchstones – fish and chips, cups of tea, Butlin’s, David Attenborough, Gogglebox and the England football team, naming heroes such as Jordan Pickford and Jude Bellingham.

Iboga root, central to several Gabonese ritual traditions, is believed to have huge potential for use in treating addiction and some mental illnesses

The temple is dark, its sandy floor edged with candles. People sit shoulder to shoulder beneath palm fronds hung from the rafters. Through the night, they swallow what they have come here for: a bitter root bark called iboga.

Tabernanthe iboga is a slow-growing central African rainforest shrub, the root bark of which has long been used in several Gabonese ritual traditions.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Exclusive: rules on same-sex wards could lead to delays in care, discrimination and animosity between groups, finds internal assessment

Trans people could face delays and a greater risk of “corridor care” under new NHS England guidance that means they will no longer be able to use same-sex wards, according to an internal report.

An NHS England impact assessment, seen by the Guardian, stated that trans people may also potentially experience discrimination and this could lead to them “avoiding accessing healthcare at all”.

The racist murder of a British Bengali schoolboy was a landmark moment. Now campaigners seek to build a multiracial alliance to combat the challenges of today

“For my brother Ahmed, British values meant standing up for others. It was doing right. It was supporting and looking after the underdog, whoever that may be, regardless of their colour or background,” Selina Ullah says, of the brother she lost to a senseless act of violence 40 years ago.

Ahmed Iqbal Ullah, a British Bengali schoolboy, was 13 when he was murdered in a racist attack in the playground of Burnage high school, in south Manchester, in 1986, after defending young pupils from bullying.

Global cooperation seems unlikely despite AI increasing the risk of digital fraud and the need to protect the financial system

Rogue French fridges were an unlikely talking point for the world’s leading economists, central bankers and finance chiefs meeting in a sultry Bangkok last week – helping to underline the spiralling cost of cyber-attacks.

Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, seized on news that supermarket chains across France had to chuck out piles of spoiled food after hackers accessed their fridge controls and turned up the temperature to 50C.

Leo thanks people for their prayers and says ‘delicate phase has passed’ as he recovers from operation on his lung

Pope Leo told a crowd gathered in St Peter’s Square on Sunday that he would “gradually resume” his activities, at his first appearance before the faithful since undergoing an operation to remove a cancerous tumour from his lung.

The Catholic leader, 71, was greeted with applause as he appeared unaided at the window of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace to deliver his Sunday angelus. It was his first public appearance since making the shock announcement at the previous Sunday’s address that a small nodule had been found on his lung.

Large cordon in place around Angel Row area of city centre after ‘shocking incident’ in the early hours of Sunday

A police officer is in hospital after being shot in the foot in Nottingham in the early hours of Sunday.

Nottinghamshire police said the officer had approached two suspects in the city centre when he was struck by a bullet. The force said the two suspects, a woman and a man, had fled the scene and were being sought by police.

Hundreds at Lisbon tent camp demand action, as Giorgia Meloni says march in Italy was exploited by ‘hooligans’

The angry protests that have convulsed Spain and France in recent weeks have spilled over to Italy and Portugal, with rioters clashing with police and setting property on fire in Milan, and a tent encampment springing up in Lisbon over the weekend.

A march in central Milan on Saturday to protest against rising living costs began peacefully but ended with masked rioters throwing stones, paving blocks and other objects at riot police and setting fire to barricades made from bar tables.

Lengthy meeting heard grumbles about ‘blue wall’ policies and ‘Ming vase’ tactics but no real rancour

As political showdowns go, this week’s gathering of Liberal Democrat MPs, billed by some as a crunch moment for Ed Davey, was a touch underwhelming. “I had expected a damp squib,” one attender put it. “It was damper than I thought.”

Far from generating a mass of opposition to Davey’s leadership, let alone a formal challenge to his position, the lengthy gathering in a Commons committee room on Tuesday evening brought a few minor grumbles, but little else.

Rapid coastal erosion threatens coastal homes and economies, and as Super El Niño rounds the corner, a town is reckoning with the reality of climate crisis

San Clemente is one of southern California’s most picture-perfect beach towns – a capital of American surf culture since the 1950s. In two years, 2028 Olympic surfers will compete at Lower Trestles, a world-class surfing beach.

But the town’s longtime cultural and economic driver, its beaches, are now under threat. As pounding waves driven by late-summer storms in the Pacific devour chunks of the California coastline, some of San Clemente’s beaches are growing narrower, the sand increasingly eaten away.

Green leader in England and Wales calls ‘debates about words’ unhelpful and denies recent motion was controversial

Zack Polanski has said Zionism in its current form is racist, that no country has a right to exist, and that the Green party motion on the issue was not controversial.

The leader of the Green party in England and Wales gave an unapologetic interview to the BBC on Sunday two weeks after his party approved a motion equating Zionism with racism.

Jason Powell also backed concentration camps as Reform councillors talk of executing grooming gang members

An aspiring Reform UK MP who advocated the use of concentration camps and said “you cannot be Muslim and British” has been suspended from the party.

The activist is one of a number featured in an ITV documentary, which will be broadcast in full on Sunday night and has already resulted in fresh questions about Reform’s vetting process.

In attempting to turn a public space in DC into an enclave for elites, Trump is moving the US capital closer to Graceland

When is a tree not a tree? When it’s an obstacle to a par-3. If a tree falls in the middle of a golf course, does it make a sound? Yeah, probably. I wasn’t there, but I have to assume, based on my limited knowledge of the laws of physics.

What I do know is that Donald Trump’s crusade to clear more than 400 trees for the purposes of redeveloping East Potomac Golf Links into a championship-level course isn’t happening. For now.

Dave Schilling is a Los Angeles-based writer and humorist

Bank’s chief knowledge officer says the tech could speed up economic development from centuries to decades

The World Bank is urging developing countries to kickstart the creation of “small AI” models, which can run on a mobile phone with low connectivity, to reap the full benefits of artificial intelligence.

While Silicon Valley big tech firms are focused on ever more sophisticated consumer products, Paschal Donohoe, the World Bank’s chief knowledge officer, said AI could also accelerate development for emerging economies – but only if it was adapted to local needs.

Health secretary says inappropriately looking up details about William Chapman, who died at Yorkshire Wildlife Park, is ‘total disgrace’

NHS staff who inappropriately accessed the medical records of a man mauled to death by a tiger should be sacked, Yvette Cooper said.

The health secretary said the incident – which followed reports earlier this year that staff had unnecessarily viewed details about the Southport attack victims and those murdered by Valdo Calocane in Nottingham in 2023 – was a “total disgrace”.

The Republican state attorney general appears uniquely ill-chosen as a candidate – but he is a political survivor who could yet frustrate Democratic dreams

Depending how you look at the situation, it is either predictable that Ken Paxton, Texas’s attorney general and Republican candidate for US Senate, is struggling in the polls – or impressive that he is not doing worse. Beloved by hardcore Maga voters and regarded with skepticism by the broader voting public, Paxton is also puzzlingly bland. Recently, Donald Trump told a crowd of supporters that the 63-year-old Paxton “may not dress right, he may not talk exactly perfectly, and he may not be the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen”. The president was endorsing him.

Yet it is Paxton’s ability to attract – and somehow scrape through – scandal that makes him a less charismatic, perhaps, but still kindred spirit of “Teflon Don”: nothing sticks. He has survived state prosecution (on securities-related charges that he settled without admitting guilt), impeachment by the Republican-led Texas legislature (on abuse-of-office charges of which he was later acquitted), and so many controversies that it can be difficult to pin down the most outrageous.

Style of emceeing based on high-octane, ad-libbed vocals has flourished thanks to its unique way of captivating crowds

For the 2015 freshmen cohort of the history degree programme at the University of Lagos, their classmate’s first-semester presentation was so captivating that they began calling him Toby Shang, after the 16th-century Chinese dynasty he had focused on.

His crowd engagement that day had been harnessed from his high school days as a ginger-man (energiser) in a three-man band and as a private tutor. By his final year at university, his viral catchphrases and infectious energy had resulted in a hit song, Shedibalabala. Today, he is one of the self-acclaimed “evangelists and pioneers” in the Afrobeats sub-genre some are now calling Afrohype or lamba.

They’re healthy, versatile, sustainable and available. Yet pea consumption in the UK is at a 50-year low. Here are the curries, dips, pasta dishes and even cakes that could turn all that around

It’s not good news for the pea farmers: pea consumption in the UK has fallen to a 50-year low. According to data from Defra, the average Briton ate just 37g of peas per week in 2025, down from 144g per week in 1975.

Though a classic British staple, peas are not for everybody. Apparently only 22% of gen Z associate peas with Britain at all (which is patently ridiculous: 90% of the peas we consume in the UK are grown here, while we produce about 160,000 tonnes for freezing alone each year).

Japanese space agency leading five-year mission to Phobos, one of ‘most important unclimbed mountains in the solar system’

Japan is to launch a spacecraft on the world’s first mission to bring back samples from Phobos, one of the two small, potato-shaped moons orbiting Mars.

Scientists hope the mission, which is expected to take five years, will provide clues to how Phobos and its smaller sibling Deimos formed, and hopefully even shed light on the origins of life in the solar system.

Barbara O’Neill, identified as a risk to public safety in Australia, dismisses antibiotics, vaccines and scientifically proven cancer treatment at UK conference

A roar of laughter erupts from a crowd inside a large conference room at the De Vere Cranage Estate hotel. The joke? The idea that visiting the doctor could help treat a serious illness.

On stage the controversial Australian proponent of natural remedies Barbara O’Neill is taking part in a question-and-answer session during a five-day wellness conference, where science mixes uncomfortably with Bible verse and potentially deadly pseudo-scientific practices.