The Miami Grand Prix faces potential disruption from severe weather

The FIA has said it is “closely monitoring” the Miami Grand Prix amid speculation that it could be rescheduled owing to thunderstorms. While conditions are expected to remain dry for much of the weekend, the latest forecasts for Sunday indicate heavy thunderstorms sweeping through the race area.

The GP is due to get underway at 4pm local time (9pm BST), though this could be brought forward because of a lightning risk. An FIA spokesperson said: “We are closely monitoring the weather forecast for this weekend.

“Having faced a similar situation last year in Miami with threats of thunderstorms, we have a contingency plan in place and will activate it if needed to minimise disruption to the on-track programme.”

The Miami GP is set to be the first race back on the F1 calendar following a five-week break. This is down to the cancellation of races in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, amid continuing conflicts across the region.

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READ MORE: Max Verstappen and Oscar Piastri agree on brash warning over F1 rule changesREAD MORE: Miami Grand Prix weather warning set to cause F1 chaos

Despite mounting concerns over the race being rescheduled or called off entirely, Express F1 reporter Daniel Moxon suggests the FIA are not as troubled as some might believe. He said: “The FIA isn’t as worried about the threat of thunderstorms tomorrow as some headlines have made out.

“There’s been some talk online that Sunday’s race might get cancelled because of the chunk of angry tropical weather heading towards Florida. In reality, there are already contingency plans in place depending on what the forecast looks like on Sunday morning.”

“That includes potentially bringing the start time forward, like they did at the 2024 Brazil race. And if lightning does strike during the Grand Prix, bosses are confident that they can pause the race with a red flag rather than abandon it altogether.”

“As for now, it’s bright, sunny and hot in Miami currently with shelter from the sun more on people’s minds than anything else.”

According to the latest reports, the Grand Prix is still on track to take place at the Miami International Autodrome this weekend.

Sky Sports, HBO Max, Netflix and Disney+ with Ultimate TV package

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Sky has upgraded its Ultimate TV and Sky Sports bundle to now include HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, discovery+ and Hayu, as well as 135 channels and full Sky coverage of Formula 1.

Sky broadcasts every practice, qualifier and race throughout the season, as well as exclusive coverage of the Premier League, EFL, darts and golf.

Spark in Piccadilly will be celebrating eight years at its current site with a special celebration on Monday, 4 May, offering free cake, cocktails, and more in a full day of events.

The venue, which first opened in 2018, has grown into a hub for food, drink, retail, art, and community activity, attracting more than 430,000 visitors each year with 17 businesses currently running under its roof.  

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It first opened in 2018 on a temporary basis and its stay was last extended by five years last October, meaning it will remain in Piccadilly until 2030, ahead of a planned move to York Central.

Sam Leach, co-founder of SPARK, said that it was “brilliant” to celebrate the venue’s eighth birthday.

He said: “We are lucky to have such a brilliant team, a committed and ambitious group of traders and also have the fortune of working with so many community groups that bring such vibrancy, vitality and impact to Piccadilly, to York, and beyond.”

Monday’s birthday celebrations are set to begin from 8am and take place until late, with celebrations to include 80 free cupcakes from Crumbs Cupcakery, £8 cocktails all day, a complimentary photobooth, and a charity quiz night.

From 12pm to 9pm, eight guests each hour will receive a surprise drink token.

A special edition zine reflecting on eight years of SPARK’s journey, featuring stories from traders and the community, will also be available.

The birthday edition of Quingo, the venue’s popular quiz-bingo night, will begin at 6pm and raise funds for the Merchant Taylors’ Community Grant Fund.

For more, visit www.sparkyork.org or check their instagram page @sparkyork

Human remains found near a bridge in the Tampa Bay area on Sunday have been identified as Nahida Bristy, the second missing University of South Florida doctoral student, Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said Friday, according to CNN.

Bristy and her friend Zamil Limon, both 27, vanished on April 16. Limon’s body was found on April 24 on the Howard Frankland Bridge.

Limon’s roommate, Hisham Abugharbieh, was arrested a few days later and charged with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder with a weapon in the deaths of Limon and Bristy.

People in the UK are now spending fewer years in good health than they did a decade ago, according to a new analysis by the Health Foundation. The UK now sits near the bottom of a 21-country comparison, ahead only of the US.

A drop in healthy life expectancy is explained through many causes: obesity, alcohol, drugs, suicide, chronic disease, poverty and widening inequality. But one of the most powerful causes sits atop them all: housing. Where and how people live is one of the main factors explaining how health risks are created and distributed across society.

The UK Housing Review is an annual independent review of housing policy and evidence, written by housing experts and published by the Chartered Institute of Housing. Its latest edition, which we contributed to, identifies several interrelated ways that housing affects health.

A key one is affordability – housing costs shape where people can live, whether they can heat their homes, whether they can afford food and transport, whether they can move for work, whether they can leave unsafe or unsuitable housing and whether they live with chronic financial stress.

In the UK, housing costs are high by historical standards and poor housing remains widespread. The review notes that private rents are now at their highest recorded share of earnings, while millions of homes in England still contain serious health and safety hazards.

When housing is unaffordable, people are forced to make tradeoffs. For example, trading affordability for damp or overcrowded homes. They cut back on heating, food, medication, transport and social participation. They move further from public services, work and support networks. Affordability problems also force many people into cheaper, less secure, tenancies.

Poor housing quality directly shapes health. Cold, damp, mould, disrepair, poor ventilation and unsafe homes are directly linked to respiratory illness, cardiovascular risk, mental health problems and reduced wellbeing.

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The Building Research Establishment, an independent research organisation, has estimated that poor housing costs the NHS in England £1.4 billion each year. More than half of this is attributed to cold homes, which increase the risk of respiratory illness, cardiovascular problems and poor mental health. They are especially dangerous for older people, babies and people with existing health conditions.

But the wider costs are even greater. Poor sleep, stress, disrupted schooling, insecure work, social isolation and caring strain all affect mental and physical health. They increase pressure on families and, over time, on health, education and social care systems.

Historically in the UK, social housing has provided some protection to people unable to access good quality affordable housing in the open market. But the stock of social rented housing in the UK has declined. This means that people are increasingly dependent on (often expensive) market rental, where the quality, size and location of housing depend much more directly on income.

The rise of the private rented sector this century has meant that more households are exposed, not just to higher housing costs, but also to shorter tenancies and fewer protections than social housing traditionally provided.

The Renters’ Rights Act increases security, but does not remove “no fault” evictions altogether and does little to protect tenants from economic pressures that can result in eviction. The cognitive burden of worrying about eviction, arrears, repairs or the next rent increase is a direct health risk.

Recent evidence also suggests that insecure housing can result in measurably faster biological ageing, equivalent to the effects of more traditional health concerns like smoking.

Additional weeks of biological ageing per year from different factors

The number of people living in temporary accommodation has risen dramatically, reaching over 130,000 households at the beginning of 2025. This is a 156% increase compared with 2010, largely driven by the poor affordability and insecurity of the private rented sector and lack of social housing. Temporary accommodation is inadequate housing, particularly for children. Living in temporary accommodation was a contributing factor in the deaths of at least 104 children in England between 2019 and 2025, 76 of whom were under one year of age.

This is not about housing quality alone. Temporary accommodation reflects multiple risks brought together: poverty, overcrowding, poor conditions, instability, lack of space for safe infant sleep, poor access to services and wider racial and social inequality. The National Child Mortality Database identifies temporary accommodation as a contributing factor to vulnerability, ill health or death, not necessarily as the sole cause. Emerging evidence also links temporary accommodation with stillbirth and neonatal death.

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Housing health inequality

ONS data shows a very large difference in healthy life expectancy between the most and least deprived areas. In 2022-24, healthy life expectancy in the most deprived areas of England was just 49.8 years for men and 48.2 years for women, compared with 69.2 and 68.5 years in the least deprived areas.

Housing contributes to this difference, determining whether people live in homes that support recovery or deepen stress, whether children grow up in stable and safe environments, and whether older people can remain warm and independent.

If the government is serious about its stated aim to “halve the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions”, housing policy must become health policy.

That means investing in social housing, enforcing decent standards in the private rented sector, making homes warmer, safer and more accessible, and recognising temporary accommodation, overcrowding and insecurity as public health failures, not just housing management problems.

It also means changing the way that success is measured. Housing policy is too often judged by supply numbers, prices or tenure outcomes. These matter, but they are incomplete. A healthy housing system should also be judged by whether people can live in homes that are affordable, secure, decent, suitable and resilient to climate change.

The decline in healthy life expectancy is a warning light. It tells us that the UK is not only failing to keep people well for longer, it is failing to provide the foundations of health.

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Handheld versions of the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum are being released later this year, loaded with 25 classic games in each.

Handheld systems are all the rage at the moment, between Valve’s Steam Deck, the ROG Xbox Ally, and the more specialist Analogue Pocket, but now systems from over 40 years ago are getting in on the action.

Retro Games, a company known for miniature and full-sized recreations of systems like the Commodore 64 and Atari 400, as well as the recently unveiled white ZX Spectrum, has joined forces with Evercade developer Blaze Entertainment for two brand new handhelds.

The C64 Handheld and The Spectrum Handheld are set to launch in October, priced at £109.99 each. You can also grab a collector’s edition for £129.99 from Funstock, which includes a hard shell carry case and a specially designed Crash or Zzap!64 magazine from the era, but these are limited to 2,000 units.

Each handheld sports a 4.3 inch IPS screen with 800×480 resolution, and comes complete with a 3.5mm headphone jack and a USB port for keyboard or joystick support. At 13.6cm wide it’s bigger than a Game Boy Advance SP but a little smaller than a Nintendo DS.

The two systems emulate their classic console counterparts via their buttons as well, with the C64 rocking plastic fuction keys while the Spectrum sports the trademark rubber.

Like other devices from Retro Games, each system comes with 25 games built in. The C64 has the likes of Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe and Nebulus, while the Spectrum has Manic Miner, Head Over Heels, and Skool Daze. You can find a full list of all the games below.

Speaking about the systems, Blaze Entertainment CEO Andrew Byatt said: ‘The C64 and the Spectrum are two of the most iconic names in gaming history, with generations of players who hold them close to their hearts.

‘Bringing these experiences into a brand-new handheld form feels like a natural next step, and we’re proud to bring these to both longtime fans and a new audience discovering them for the first time. We are delighted to be working with Retro Games Ltd to make this happen.’

While be conducting an interview with Retro Game shortly, about the white Spectrum and their work in general, so we’ll be sure to bring these up then.

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