Bite marks from a lion on a man’s skeleton, excavated from a 1,800-year-old cemetery on the outskirts of York, provide the first physical evidence of human-animal combat in the Roman empire, new research claims.

While clashes between combatants, big cats and bears are described and depicted in ancient texts and mosaics, there had previously been no convincing proof from human remains to confirm that these skirmishes formed part of Roman entertainment.

Prof Tim Thompson, an anthropologist and first author on the study at Maynooth University in Ireland, said: “This is the first time we have physical evidence for gladiators fighting, or being involved in a spectacle, with big cats like lions in the Roman empire.”

Excavations at the Driffield Terrace burial site, near York city centre, began more than 20 years ago and uncovered about 80 decapitated skeletons. Most belonged to well-built young men and bore signs of brutal violence, leading experts to suspect they had uncovered a gladiator graveyard.

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Dr John Pearce, an archaeologist from King’s College London and co-author of the study published in Plos One, said York doubled as a Roman town and legionary fortress at the time, making it the second largest population centre in Britain after Londinium.

He said: “These may be gladiators who trained in a gladiatorial school at York linked to the Roman legion based there, and their comrades from the arena or training ground took responsibility for burying them.”

If the researchers are right, their discovery raises questions about where gladiators fought their battles.

An arena probably exists beneath the city of York, but uncovering it will not be easy. “One of challenges with York is that so many old buildings are preserved, you can’t do the excavations underneath them,” Thompson said.

It is not the only mystery that remains. “This shifts the conversation,” Thompson added. “We now know that these events happened in the provinces of the Roman empire, but it raises other questions. How, for example, do you get a lion from Africa to York?”

A medieval cemetery unearthed near Cardiff Airport is continuing to confound archaeologists, as the mysteries surrounding it are multiplying.

The discovery of the site, dating to the 6th or 7th Century, was announced last year, with dozens of skeletons found lying in unusual positions with unexpected artefacts.

Now researchers have learned nearly all of those buried in the cemetery are women, and while their bones show signs of wear and tear - indicating they carried out heavy manual work - there are also surprising signs of wealth and luxury.

Another unexpected find has been a woman tossed in a ditch, in stark contrast to all the other people who were buried with great care.

"Every time we think we understand something, something else crops up and the picture gets more intriguing," said Andy Seaman from Cardiff University, who is leading the project.

Jewelry in a Roman treasure hoard found in Thetford Forest, East Anglia, indicates that Thetford was Pagan until the fifth century, which is longer than previously believed, reveals a new paper in the Journal of Roman Archaeology.

The Thetford treasure was first found by a metal detectorist trespassing on a construction site at Fison's Way on Gallows Hill, Thetford in 1979. It consisted of 81 objects, including 22 gold finger-rings, other gold jewelry, and 36 silver spoons or strainers. It is now in the collections of the British Museum and can be seen on display there.

The author of the research, Professor Ellen Swift of the University of Kent, argues that there is compelling evidence that the treasure was buried in the fifth century rather than the late fourth.

Swift says, "Since wider evidence found at the site confirms the religious context previously established by inscriptions on the spoons within the hoard, this means, remarkably, that the re-dating of the Thetford hoard suggests a Pagan cult center survived there into the fifth century. The site's economic assets, indicated by the value and variety of the hoard, also show that it may have wielded significant power and authority locally."

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The paper also shows that Britain was less isolated than previously believed, with the items in the treasure originating from across the Roman empire.

A series of exceptionally dry summers that caused famine and social breakdown were behind one of the most severe threats to Roman rule of Britain, according to new academic research.

The rebellion, known as the “barbarian conspiracy”, was a pivotal moment in Roman Britain. Picts, Scotti and Saxons took advantage of Britain’s descent into anarchy to inflict crushing blows on weakened Roman defences in the spring and summer of AD367.

Senior Roman commanders were captured or killed, and some soldiers reportedly deserted and joined the invaders. It took two years for generals dispatched by Valentinian I, emperor of the western half of the Roman empire, to restore order. The last remnants of official Roman administration left Britain about 40 years later.

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The study, published in Climatic Change, used oak tree-ring records to reconstruct temperature and precipitation levels in southern Britain during and after the barbarian conspiracy. Combined with surviving Roman accounts, the data led the authors to conclude that severe summer droughts were a driving force.

Little archaeological evidence for the rebellion existed, and written accounts from the period were limited, said Charles Norman of Cambridge’s department of geography. “But our findings provide an explanation for the catalyst of this major event.”

Southern Britain experienced an exceptional sequence of remarkably dry summers from AD364 to 366, the researchers found. In the period AD350-500, average monthly reconstructed rainfall in the main growing season was 51mm. But in AD364, it fell to 29mm. AD365 was even worse with 28mm, and the rainfall the following year was still below average at 37mm.

Prof Ulf Büntgen of Cambridge’s department of geography said: “Three consecutive droughts would have had a devastating impact on the productivity of Roman Britain’s most important agricultural region. As Roman writers tell us, this resulted in food shortages with all of the destabilising societal effects this brings.”

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By AD367, the population of Britain was in the “utmost conditions of famine”, according to Ammianus Marcellinus, a soldier and historian.

Norman said the poor harvests would have “reduced the grain supply to Hadrian’s Wall, providing a plausible motive for the rebellion there, which allowed the Picts into northern Britain”.

The study suggested that grain deficits may have contributed to other desertions in this period, and therefore a general weakening of the Roman army in Britain.

Military and societal breakdown provided an ideal opportunity for peripheral tribes, including the Picts, Scotti and Saxons, to invade the province.

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The researchers expanded their climate-conflict analysis to the entire Roman empire for the period AD350-476. They reconstructed the climate conditions immediately before and after 106 battles and found that a statistically significant number of battles were fought following dry years.

Perched high above the cliffs of South Ronaldsay, one of Scotland’s most remarkable ancient sites offers a window into life and death thousands of years ago.

Known as the Tomb of the Eagles, the Neolithic chambered cairn has fascinated visitors since its discovery in the 1950s, and is now set to reopen after a major funding boost.

Discovered by local farmer Ronnie Simison, the 5,000-year-old tomb revealed a treasure trove of human bones and artefacts, with the remains of some 300 individuals found buried alongside sea eagles. The striking find gave the site its dramatic name and cemented its place as one of Orkney’s most important archaeological landmarks.

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And now, thanks to almost £358,000 in fresh funding, a community trust on the island is set to become the first in Scotland to purchase an ancient monument. The move will secure the Tomb of the Eagles' long-term future as a key piece of local and national history.

The Tomb of the Eagles, a protected site that has long attracted visitors, has been closed since the pandemic after the family who managed it decided to retire.

Located on their land, the tomb was temporarily shut to the public, leaving the community of South Ronaldsay and Burray to find a way forward.

After much consideration, Orkney Isles Council determined that the best path for preserving the site was for the local community to purchase it.

Big food brands dramatically increased their spending on advertising last year, months before new junk food regulations aiming to curb Britain’s obesity crisis are due to come into force, the Observer can reveal.

Food companies spent an extra £420m in 2024, an increase of 26% year on year that coincided with a bumper 12 months for sales of snack foods. Shoppers bought an extra 45.4m packs of chocolate, cakes and crisps from the top-selling brands.

The spending bonanza came as campaigners said food corporations were switching tactics to circumvent the impact of the upcoming regulations, which will bring in a 9pm watershed for TV commercials showing unhealthy food products, and ban them online from October, after five years of delays.

Outdoor posters, audio advertising on podcasts and streaming services such as Spotify, and partnerships with social media influencers are not covered by the regulations.

The increase in spending and the suggestion it may have led to an increase in sales may fuel calls for further restrictions. James McDonald, the director of data, intelligence and forecasting at WARC Media, which monitors ad spend and recorded the 26% increase, said it was “not surprising that we saw sales lift in line with spend”. He added: “I think the timing is interesting, given the introduction of HFSS [foods high in fat, salt or sugar] regulation this year.”

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Health campaigners say food companies are adopting tactics similar to those used by the tobacco industry in the battle over cigarette advertising, by focusing on brands and logos rather than products. The advertising industry has argued that uncertainty over regulations threatens the sector and said ministers should legislate to exempt brand-only ads from the regulations.

Something was wrong with the squirrels of Appalachia. It was the fall of 1968, and they appeared to be making a sudden pilgrimage: attempting improbable swims across lakes, sprinting over highways and bursting into buildings. One squirrel, while fleeing, climbed into a critical piece of infrastructure and reportedly short-circuited power to much of Clarkesville, Georgia. “The squirrel,” the wire services reported, “was also extinguished.” The highways were lined with hundreds of dead squirrels. One scientist spotted 13 squirrels swimming due north across the reservoirs of North Carolina. Nothing could make them turn around. Assuming the squirrels must be starving, concerned citizens began sending boxes of acorns and hickory nuts to the afflicted areas, and grocery stores put up signs encouraging shoppers to feed the squirrels.

The problem was that the squirrels were, by and large, well-fed. There was no shortage of food. Yet by some estimates, 20 million squirrels were on the move. Wildlife officials were flummoxed. So they notified the Smithsonian Center for Short-Lived Phenomena.

The CSLP was a kind of clearinghouse for news of intriguing phenomena that scientists might want to study as they occurred—from volcanic eruptions to oil spills, meteorite strikes, sudden islands, unusual migrations and explosions in the populations of non-native species. Every day, an odd phenomenon occurred somewhere, offering a priceless natural experiment. But researchers worried they were missing most of them.

“For years, scientists have been aware of the almost total lack of the essential research information on the very earliest beginnings of natural events,” Sidney Galler, then assistant secretary for science at the Smithsonian Institution, told Newsweek about how the idea for the CSLP had come about. “We come in the middle and have to go back and attempt to reconstruct what actually happened.”

But now the Smithsonian had built an unprecedented network to help scientists get fast, accurate information about developing situations. “We have our finger,” said Robert Citron, the director of the center, “on the pulse of planet Earth.”

In its seven years of existence, the CSLP logged oil spills and ashened snowfalls, chased still-warm meteorites, laid the foundation of an essential global database of volcanic activity, and heralded the (erroneous) discovery of at least one prehistoric sea monster. And it left, in the archives of the Smithsonian, a rather large paper trail. Decades later, those archives are a window into a moment of epistemological uncertainty at the dawn of the environmental age, when nothing quite seemed to make sense anymore and concerned researchers were starting to piece it all together, one strange event at a time.

Wikipedia

Declassified CIA documents claim that the mystical Ark of the Covenant was located by a psychic decades ago in the Middle East as part of one of the intelligence agency’s experimental, secret projects in the 1980s.

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The CIA conducted experiments as part of the secret Project Sun Streak with individuals known as “remote viewers”, a type of clairvoyant, who claimed they could project their consciousness to receive information about faraway objects.

There is no credible scientific evidence that remote viewing exists, and it is generally regarded as pseudoscience.

In a remote viewing session on 5 December, 1988, remote “viewer #32” was tasked with identifying the coveted Ark, according to CIA documents recently circulating on social media. The documents were first declassified in August 2000. They allegedly did not know the object they were being tasked to find.

The psychic described a location in the Middle East that they claimed housed the object and said it was being “protected by entities”, says the CIA document.

“Target is a container. This container has another container inside of it. The target is fashioned of wood, gold, and silver,” they said, allegedly not knowing they were trying to find the Ark. “Similar in shape to a coffin and is decorated with seraphim.”

The declassified document shows several pages of drawings depicting one of the four seraphim standing out on the corners of the Ark, along with a drawing of mummies lined up on a wall.

“Visuals of surrounding buildings indicated the presence of mosque domes,” they added.

They said the object was hidden underground in dark, wet conditions.

“There is an aspect of spirituality, information, lessons and the historical knowledge far beyond what we now know,” remote viewer #32 continued.

They described the Ark as being protected by entities that would destroy individuals who attempted to damage the object.

“The target is protected by entities and can only be opened by those who are authorised to do so – this container will not/cannot be opened until the time is deemed correct,” the remote viewer continued.

“Individuals opening the container by prying or striking are destroyed by the container’s protectors through the use of a power unknown to us.”

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Joe McMoneagle, a US Army chief warrant officer and the first person to do remote viewing for the CIA, told The New York Post that they allegedly do not know what was scrawled down and are guided through the process by another person.

However, Mr McMoneagle does not believe that this remote viewing case is worth the paper it is written on, claiming the session is “bogus”.

“If someone claims that remote viewing proves the existence of something, such as the Ark of the Covenant, they must produce the Ark to substantiate their claim,” he added.

It’s been 25 years since China Miéville stepped into the literary spotlight with his novel “Perdido Street Station.”

Combining elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, the novel introduced readers to the fantastically complex city of New Crobuzon, filled with insect-headed khepri, cactus-shaped cactacae, and terrifying slake moths that feed on their victims’ dreams. It also sparked broader interest in what became known as the “new weird.”

After “Perdido”’s success (commemorated this year with a quickly-sold-out collector’s edition from The Folio Society), Miéville continued to meld genres in novels like “The City and the City” and “Embassytown.” But he stopped publishing fiction for nearly a decade, only to reemerge last year with The New York Times bestseller “The Book of Elsewhere,” co-written with Keanu Reeves. (Yes, that Keanu Reeves.)

Miéville is also a compelling observer and critic — of politics, of cities, of science fiction and fantasy. So while we started our conversation by discussing his breakthrough book, I also took the opportunity to ask about the relationship between science fiction and the real world, particularly what seems to be a growing tendency among tech billionaires to treat the science fiction they grew up reading as a blueprint for their future plans.

To Miéville, it’s a mistake to read science fiction as if it’s really about the future: “It’s always about now. It’s always a reflection. It’s a kind of fever dream, and it’s always about its own sociological context.”

He added that there’s a “societal and personal derangement” at work when the rich and powerful “are more interested in settling Mars than sorting out the world” — but ultimately, it’s not science fiction that’s responsible.

“Let’s not blame science fiction for this,” he said. “It’s not science fiction that’s causing this kind of sociopathy.”

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Getting back to your own writing, I know there have been whispers about a big new book coming from you. It sounds like it’s going to be out next year?

Yes, it will be out. I don’t know the exact date, but it will be out before the end of next year. I’m just doing the last bits on it now.

Is there anything you can say about it?

I will just say that I’ve been working on it for 20 years, and that’s not an exaggeration. I’ve been working on this book for considerably more than half of my adult life, and it is a very big deal for me, for it to be coming out. I’m very excited for it.

New archaeological research is revealing that, more than a thousand years before Britain became part of the Roman Empire, it was part of an extraordinary Mediterranean-based trading network.

Investigations being carried out by archaeologists from five European countries suggest that around 3,300 years ago, the western Mediterranean island of Sardinia started to become a powerful trading centre, eventually linking Britain, Scandinavia, Spain and Portugal in the West to what are now Turkey, Syria, Israel, Cyprus and Crete in the east.

A series of ground-breaking discoveries are revealing, for the first time, the remarkable role played by the island - one of the world's least known ancient civilizations, known to archaeologists as the Nuragic culture.

And it is showing the remarkable way in which Britain seems to have contributed to that civilization's development.

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The island (a series of chiefdoms) was rich in copper ore - which helped turn it into a Bronze Age mercantile and economic superpower (because copper was one of the two key ingredients needed to make high quality bronze, which was far stronger than copper on its own).

But the second key ingredient, needed to make high quality bronze, was tin - and one of the best sources of tin in the ancient world was Cornwall. Tin played a crucial role in human history - because it enabled the production of really strong manufactured goods and its acquisition usually necessitated and promoted long distance trade.

Recent scientific research has revealed that Cornish tin was being delivered, probably by Sardinian or Sardinian-connected merchants, to what are now Israel and Turkey.

What's more, a study of a shipwreck off the Devon coast has revealed that a Bronze Age ship, carrying Cornish tin ingot exports, were also carrying items from Sardinia or Spain. The English Channel appears to have been a Bronze Age highway for delivering Mediterranean copper ingots and Cornish tin ingots to Scandinavia and for transporting Danish amber to Britain, Ireland, Spain and the Mediterranean.

And a growing body of evidence now suggests that, at the heart of this Bronze Age international trade, lay Sardinia's mysterious Nuragic civilization.

All parts of the network prospered as a result of that trade - and recent archaeological excavations have found a Bronze Age settlement at one of the most likely ports used at the Cornish end of the maritime route, St. Michael's Mount near Penzance

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All the new research suggests that Sardinia itself acted as the major trading hub - with British, Scandinavian and Iberian raw materials and products (including tin, copper and amber) being shipped to Sardinia for transhipment to points further east like Crete, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon and Israel. In the other direction Sardinian and perhaps other ships are now thought to have carried Middle Eastern glass beads, Egyptian faience, Cypriot copper ingots, precious gemstones and other products to customers in the West.

In Britain, archaeologists have found Iranian and Egyptian beads, Scandinavian amber items, Aegean metalwork, Cypriot and Spanish copper ingots and Sicilian razors, all of which would have had to have been imported by sea.

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But there is one tantalising piece of evidence that ancient Sardinians themselves may have visited Britain - for there is an enigmatic and mysterious rock-cut tomb (the only one of its sort ever found in Britain) in northern Scotland, on the island of Hoy in Orkney, the nearest rock-cut parallel for which is in Sardinia.

Claims that researchers discovered previously unknown structures beneath the Pyramid of Khafre — the pyramid situated in the center of the Great Pyramids of Giza — using radar technology circulated online in March 2025.

The purported discovery was that of "five identical structures near the Khafre Pyramid's base, linked by pathways, and eight deep vertical wells descending 648 meters underground."

Users took to social media to express their excitement over the alleged findings, posting on social media platforms like X (archived), Instagram (archived) and TikTok (archived). Some referred to the discovery as "a vast underground city." One YouTube video sharing the claim stood at over 35,000 views as of this writing.

Despite the popularity of the claim, there is no evidence to support it. In addition, no credible news outlets or scientific publications have reported on this rumor.

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The researchers named in the recent claims, Corrado Malanga and Filippo Biondi, did publish a paper and book about their work using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to explore the Giza pyramid in 2022.

According to NASA, SAR is "a type of active data collection where an instrument sends out a pulse of energy and then records the amount of that energy reflected back after it interacts with Earth."

However, it does not appear that this research has been peer-reviewed or corroborated by credible archaeologists. Additionally, the research alludes to fringe theories about ancient civilizations and otherworldly intentions for the structures, which aligns with Malanga's well-documented interest in UFO and alien abduction research as well as Dunn's "power plant" theory.

A remarkable Iron Age hoard, unearthed in a Yorkshire field, is prompting archaeologists to reassess the wealth and power dynamics of northern Britain two millennia ago.

The discovery, dubbed the Melsonby Hoard, contains more than 800 items, including remnants of wagons, ceremonial spears, and pony harnesses, offering a glimpse into the lives of the elite in the 1st century AD.

Unearthed in 2021 near the village of Melsonby, North Yorkshire, by metal detectorist Peter Heads, the hoard lay undisturbed in two ditches.

Its sheer scale and the nature of the artefacts suggest a deliberate disposal, a practice laden with symbolic meaning for the people of that era.

Experts believe the Melsonby Hoard could be one of the UK's most significant archaeological finds, requiring years of meticulous study.

The discovery challenges previous assumptions about the distribution of wealth and power in pre-Roman Britain. While some believed such opulence was confined to the south, the Melsonby Hoard's richness indicates a more complex reality.

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Melsonby is around a mile from Stanwick, the powerbase of the Brigantes tribe who in pre-Roman times controlled a large part of what is now Yorkshire.

“The Melsonby Hoard is of a scale and size that is exceptional for Britain and probably even Europe,” Professor Moore said.

“Unusually it includes lots of pieces of vehicles and items such as the wine mixing bowl which is decorated in both Mediterranean and Iron Age styles.

“Whoever originally owned the material in this hoard was probably a part of a network of elites across Britain, into Europe and even the Roman world.

“The destruction of so many high-status objects, evident in this hoard, is also of a scale rarely seen in Iron Age Britain and demonstrates that the elites of northern Britain were just as powerful as their southern counterparts.”

Geography mattered on the Bloomberg site in the heart of the City, close to the Bank of England. The Walbrook, a lost river of London, had carved a deep valley into the landscape and the Romans constantly tried to reclaim the banks as the city grew and prospered. They did this by packing the ground with rubbish, building on it, then packing it again, three more times, so there is a stratigraphical layer cake of Roman trash going almost all the way back to London’s creation, in AD47 or 48. The river also waterlogged the ground, protecting the material from oxygen: leather, brooches, shoes, writing tablets, wood, animal bones and ceramics were all phenomenally well preserved. There are sandals that look fresher than last year’s Birkenstocks.

Site B2Y10 – to give it its academic name – was previously occupied by Legal and General, which dug deep in the 1950s, to create the biggest post-blitz rebuild in the City. Excavating archaeologists found the third-century Temple of Mithras, and oral histories from Londoners who witnessed the find in 1954 recall a magical atmosphere, when the secrets of the ancient past met the regeneration of the postwar present to create a sense of enormous hope and renewal. People queued for hours to see the temple. One woman who was pregnant at the time called her baby Mithra. As significant as that archaeological yield was, it was pretty haphazard – workers on the site were just picking things up and handing them in.

The Legal and General building had huge double basements, except on one side, where they had had to stay shallow for fear of jeopardising a Christopher Wren church on the opposite corner. “We were so excited by that single basement,” Jackson says. “We knew that in the layer underneath, that they hadn’t dug into, a lot of material would have survived.” Across 150 years of previous Roman recoveries in London, 19 writing tablets were found in total. In this one find, there were 400, of which 80 have already been deciphered. These are wooden frames, with an inset writing area about “the size of a Ryvita”, which would be filled with black wax, then written on.

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Then there are anomalies that tell us something about the limits of Roman understanding. Jackson shows me a black, pebble-like object with three indentations on it, in which someone has tried to make a hole, to turn it into a pendant. Finding the material unnaturally unyielding, the Romans decided these were “solidified thunderbolts”, she says. “It’s so interesting to think of Romans doing archaeology themselves.” Not very well, mind; it wasn’t a solidified thunderbolt, it was a neolithic hand-axe made of obsidian.

It’s a reminder that we modern humans are also capable of misreading the signs. In the 1954 excavation, for example, they found beads that were assumed to have been worn by a woman, but here, those same beads and amulets were found still on their original strings, alongside other material that indicates they were worn by a horse. “It might have been a lady horse,” Marshall allows. Horses wore amulets covered in sexual imagery – such as fist-and-phallus amulets, with a clenched fist gesture at one end and an unmetaphorical phallus at the other, which was thought to ward off the evil eye. Children also wore amulets to ward off plague.

Archaeologists have discovered that what was thought to be a single standing stone in a forest is part of a larger ceremonial site dating back 3,700 years to the Bronze Age.

The discovery in Farley Wood, near Matlock in Derbyshire, was made after excavations by Forestry England in partnership with archaeology series Time Team.

At 2m (6.6ft) tall, the Farley Moor standing stone was previously believed to be an isolated monument.

But Forestry England said excavations uncovered evidence of a ceremonial platform beside it and identified that five other nearby stones would once have been standing, creating a circle.

Dr Lawrence Shaw, Forestry England's lead historic environment adviser, said the discovery, which will feature in an episode aired on Time Team’s YouTube channel on Saturday, was "hugely significant and transforms our understanding" of the site.

According to Forestry England, the main stone was intentionally placed above a natural spring.

"What we've uncovered is evidence of a much more complex ceremonial landscape, which the original standing stone is part of," Dr Shaw explained.

"The stone platform predates the standing stone itself, suggesting continuous ritual use of this site over hundreds of years, strongly linked to the water and the importance it held for Bronze Age communities."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/25896587

Up to 1.2 million people with disabilities will lose thousands of pounds under the government’s welfare overhaul, experts have said, as campaigners warn the plan will exacerbate the country’s mental health crisis and push more children into poverty.

Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, laid out her long-awaited changes to the benefits system on Tuesday, announcing a set of measures aimed at getting more people into work and saving £5bn by reducing disability payments.

But with experts warning the plans will reduce the incomes of more than 1 million people, ministers are braced for the biggest rebellion yet of the Labour government, with as many as 30 MPs expected to vote against the plans within weeks.

In a sign of the growing pushback which ministers now face, Debbie Abrahams, the Labour chair of the Commons work and pensions committee, warned against “balancing the books on the backs of sick and disabled people”.

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But the most financially significant decision is Kendall’s plan to introduce drastically tighter limits for who can claim personal independence payments (Pips), which are intended to help people with their quality of life and are not connected to employment. The Pip savings will help the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, stick to her fiscal rules when she announces her spring statement next week.

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Ministers will not lay out where exactly the £5bn savings are coming from until next week, though officials indicated most would come from reduced Pip spending. The Resolution Foundation thinktank said the plan would see between 800,000 and 1.2 million people losing support of between £4,200 and £6,300 a year by 2029-30.

Louise Murphy, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation, said: “Around 1 million people are potentially at risk of losing support from tighter restrictions on Pip, while young people and those who fall ill in the future will lose support from a huge scaling back of incapacity benefits.

“While it includes some sensible reforms, too many of the proposals have been driven by the need for short-term savings to meet fiscal rules, rather than long-term reform. The result risks being a major income shock for millions of low-income households.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/19696007

OP contains the link to Parliament's official page for how to contact your MP. I'm a Labour supporter but I know these rerorms are a massive step in the wrong direction. I've already emailed my MP about this and I want as many people as possible to do the same.

The good news is the government has already watered down the worst aspects of the original suggestions. They've also introduced some positive reforms in the green paper which you can read and respond to here. We also know that MPs across the party and even up to the Cabinet are unhappy. This all suggests that further lobbying might be successful.

Some tips for lobbying:

• Tell personal stories. MPs are people, too: play on their emotions! They also get a lot of near-identical emails on lots of issues, especially big stories like this one. Personal accounts stand out from the crowd.

• Be clear what you're asking for. Stick to the point, don't ramble.

• Be polite. You might think your MP is totally evil and want to vent at them, but a sweary, shouty email is just not going to get read. One with actual threats might land you in trouble. Keep yourself safe!

• Don't write off your MP. Even Tories have friends and family who are disabled. It's worth lobbying them, too.

Thanks for reading. We can fight this! Every penny we claw back for people who need it is a win!

Something lurks in the shadows of our rural . Similar incidents play out in farms, stables, rural estates, golf courses, utility holdings, landfill sites and even nature reserves across the country. Large cats, mainly resembling black leopards (also known as panthers), but also sometimes mountain lions, and, very occasionally, lynx, are reported across such locations.

I became immersed in the possibility of big cats being present in Britain 24 years ago, after seeing what I’m convinced was a black leopard in Cumbria. It was walking side-on to me across rough pasture, about 70m away. I assumed it was a labrador, but then noticed no collar and no owners in sight. Its purposeful strides, low and long-bodied form, tubular tail and fluid movement were completely unlike a dog.

The suspected sightings are far and wide across the country. In Essex, a fisherman was hissed at by a black leopard (he noticed its rosettes) at 5am as he disturbed it cornering a muntjac deer. In Somerset, a dog walker watched a black leopard take down a roe deer in the adjacent field – she located the dragged and neatly eaten carcass three days later, when she felt safe to return. In Dorset, a woman watched a black leopard effortlessly descend a tree after targeting a squirrel’s drey 12m up.

Snippets of footage from the last two events are on the Big Cat Conversations website, but otherwise footage is rare, or just a pixelated blur.

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We must also look at the scientific evidence. Positive DNA results proving the presence of big cats in Britain are limited, yet do exist. There are six publicly known positive DNA results that match the leopard (Panthera pardus), two from recent years: from Gloucestershire in 2022, from a hair snagged on a barbed-wire fence in the vicinity of a sheep kill; and from Cumbria in 2023, when DNA was found on a carcass – again, of a sheep.We must also look at the scientific evidence. Positive DNA results proving the presence of big cats in Britain are limited, yet do exist. There are six publicly known positive DNA results that match the leopard (Panthera pardus), two from recent years: from Gloucestershire in 2022, from a hair snagged on a barbed-wire fence in the vicinity of a sheep kill; and from Cumbria in 2023, when DNA was found on a carcass – again, of a sheep.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/25783845

I read David Swift’s Scouse Republic alongside Michael Heseltine’s breezily optimistic account of urban regeneration, From Acorns to Oaks. It’s impossible to deny that the city has brilliantly swerved the abyss of “managed decline”. It’s now a hen-night destination, a regular stop-off for luxury cruises, a seat of learning. The Georgian Quarter, with its cobbled streets shining under Narnian lamp-posts, is one of the most popular filming locations in the country. But Swift’s account of that voyage from chaotic sailor town to imperial port, from the Beatles to the Toxteth uprising, does not look away from the dark and stormy passages. If you ever feel tempted to flirt with trickle-down economics, remind yourself that in 1841, when the city was the premier port of the empire after London, life expectancy in Liverpool was 26. Seventy-five per cent of the lads who volunteered for army service were rejected for being unfit.

This is a highly personal book. Swift’s Israeli in-laws provide the story with a baffled chorus. He has a terrific eye for the telling detail. I will forever be quoting his story about how, in 1904, trumpet-tongued Jim Larkin – hero of the Belfast dock strike – buried a letter “to the future socialist society” in a biscuit tin underneath the foundation stone of the Anglican cathedral. There are chapters on the origin of the scouse accent, a short history of Eric’s nightclub, observations on the significance of Jürgen Klopp’s Christianity and a long overdue analysis of that weird cocktail of truth, disinformation and racism – the legend of Purple Aki, an intimidatingly large body builder of Nigerian origin whose possibly harmless but unnerving kink is asking young men if he can feel their muscles. A lot of people think he’s an urban myth.

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The title – Scouse Republic – nods towards Liverpool exceptionalism of the “scouse not English” type. But if Liverpool is so exceptional, why should a non-scouser want to read this? For one thing, because scouse exceptionalism – the idea that the city is too different, too socialist – is a myth that Swift takes to pieces in a chapter called Good Rioters, Bad Socialists. Liverpool is different. It experienced large-scale immigration long before most of the country. It experienced the loss of empire more directly. In David Goodhart’s world of Somewheres v Anywheres, scousers – myself included – are definitely Somewheres.

Experts are investigating the discovery of a mysterious Roman artefact uncovered in an Iron Age settlement under an Ayrshire distillery.

Archaeologists believe the enamelled bronze brooch may have been placed in the foundations of the fortified roundhouse as a sacrifice during its construction to grant "protection" to the household.

The item, thought to have dated from about the second century AD, was found during an excavation at the William Grant and Sons Girvan Distillery at the Curragh in South Ayrshire in 2020.

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The brooch was thought to be a popular design among Roman military personnel, but examples of the artefacts have been more commonly discovered in present-day central Europe, the Rhineland and Switzerland.

It would have arrived in Scotland at about the time the Roman Empire was losing its grip on the south of the country.

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Jordan Barbour, who co-authored a report into the find, said it was unclear how the brooch passed from Roman hands to those of the Britons.

But he said it was a possible the artefact was a "trophy won in battle".

He said: "It's the only Roman artefact recovered from the site. If the inhabitants had established regular trade with Roman Britain, we might expect to find a greater variety of Roman objects, but this is a solidly native context.