Area’s MP says it would cost more than local council’s annual budget to remove the 10-metre high pile of waste Fly-tippers have dumped a “mountain of illegal waste” in Oxfordshire so large that removing it could cost more than the local council’s annual budget, the area’s MP has said. Hundreds of tonnes of waste, stacked 10 metres high, appeared in a field between the River Cherwell and the A34 near Kidlington. One charity called the huge dump of rubbish “an environmental catastrophe unfolding in plain sight”. Continue reading...

Armed forces and settlers used bombs, dogs, poison and machinery to attack people and infrastructure at key sites Israeli armed forces and settlers have attacked Palestinian water sources more than 250 times in the past five years, amounting to the most sustained assault on civilian water supplies in recent years, new research reveals. Bombs, dogs, poison and heavy machinery were among the weapons used to attack Palestinians and their infrastructure at drinking water, irrigation and sanitation sites in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip on at least 90 occasions between January 2024 and mid-2025, according to the Pacific Institute, a California-based nonpartisan thinktank tracking water conflicts. Continue reading...

(RNS) — Taylor Swift’s fans engage in global rituals showing how the pop superstar’s music creates a sense of belonging and near-religious devotion.

The massacres carried out by the RSF in El Fasher, Darfur, with the support of its UAE sponsors, will only stop when the international community acts, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik

Education secretary says mandatory test needed to tackle ‘shocking outcomes’ for many working-class children Bridget Phillipson has said she is ready to take on the unions in a battle over compulsory reading tests for 13-year-olds and more extracurricular activities for all children to prevent them becoming “stuck in a doom loop of detachment” from school. The education secretary said that teaching unions, who have argued the tests were “unnecessary and distracting”, should “really think carefully” about whether they could justify standing in the way of tackling the “shocking outcomes” that exist for many working-class children. Continue reading...

LONDON (RNS) — The king demonstrated that the simple act of showing up for another faith is a civic act worth preserving.

Fear of failure is damaging in a host of ways yet is rife in many schools. Drawing on self-worth theory, we explore whether fear of academic failure is higher in education systems with features that ...

Peers say ‘woeful’ record on prosecutions has led to a ‘low-risk, high-reward’ criminal culture Organised crime groups in the UK are making millions every year from illegally dumping and burning rubbish, peers have told ministers, after an inquiry found a lack of enforcement made it a “low-risk, high-reward” criminal enterprise. “Criminality is endemic in the waste sector,” a Lords committee told the government on Tuesday, after it found at least 38m tonnes of waste was illegally managed every year, “leading to serious environmental, economic and social consequences”. Continue reading...

Children with special educational needs more than twice as likely to be put in isolation, say Manchester researchers * ‘Publicly humiliated’: parents describe difficulty of children’s isolation at school One in 12 secondary pupils report being put into school isolation rooms at least once a week where they often spend in excess of eight hours, missing more than a full day of lessons, according to research. Children with special educational needs were more than twice as likely to be placed in isolation, otherwise known as internal exclusion, while students from low-income backgrounds were also disproportionately affected. Continue reading...

VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Oct. 23 ecumenical prayer service, drawing on the shared concern for care of God’s creation, marks the first time since the Reformation that the heads of the two Christian…

I grew up in Kabul and Karachi. In both, I learned the value of the quiet rituals observed while no one is watching