Prime Minister Andy Burnham has appointed Bridget Phillipson as Labour Party chair.

A Labour spokesperson said Phillipson, who is also minister for women and equalities, will work closely with deputy Labour leader Lucy Powell to modernise the party ready for the next general election.

Phillipson and Powell went head to head for the deputy leader position last year, after a race triggered by Angela Rayner’s resignation, with Powell emerging victorious following 54% support from the party membership, external.

Phillipson had been education secretary under Sir Keir Starmer but that job was also handed to Powell by Burnham when he appointed his cabinet last week.

Announcing Phillipson’s appointment, Burnham said she would help the party focus on preparations for a new digital campaigning environment.

“She will play a vital role in ensuring the Labour Party is match fit for the next election,” he said.

She replaces Anna Turley who was made a minister in the Home Office last week.

The leadership team, which also includes chief whip Anneliese Midgley, is expected to focus on culture change, and building the infrastructure and policy platform needed by 2029, which is the latest an election can be held.

Posting on X, Phillipson said she was honoured, external to take on the role.

“I joined our party as a teenager and saw first hand the difference a Labour government makes,” she said.

“I’ll work with members to build the election-winning machine that sees off Reform [UK] for good and secures a second Labour term.”

Welcoming her, Powell said: “Working together, we will ensure the party continues to lead the way in campaigning, with the strongest ground operation in British politics as we prepare for the next general election.”

An Islamic charity accused of being an outpost of the Iranian regime in London has the right to bring workers into Britain.

The Islamic Centre of England in Maida Vale appears on a Home Office list of organisations with approval to sponsor skilled worker visas.

Licensed visa sponsors have been officially vetted and approved by the Home Office to hire non-UK citizens.

The centre remains on the list despite claims it has been involved in spreading pro-Tehran propaganda and has successfully issued a number of certificates of sponsorship – documents required for migrant workers applying to enter Britain.

It is currently under investigation by the Charity Commission over alleged ties to Tehran.

The charity was reported to the watchdog earlier this year for hosting a ‘community bazaar’ where stalls sold pro-Tehran key rings and Hezbollah-themed phone cases.

Other stalls sold stickers featuring the silhouette of General Qassim Soleimani, former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). When Soleimani was killed in an American air strike in 2020, the centre hosted a candlelit vigil.

Shadow national security minister Alicia Kearns called for the centre to be immediately removed from the list.

‘This is a bona-fide backdoor into the UK for Iranian agents,’ she said.

‘For years I’ve worked to get the Islamic Centre of England, an indoctrination hub, shut down.’

Kasra Aarabi, director of research on the IRGC at United Against Nuclear Iran, a non-profit organisation, called its inclusion on the Home Office list ‘truly appalling’.

He added: ‘This is no ordinary mosque or charity. It operates as the UK office of the Iranian regime’s supreme leader. The situation is far worse than has been reported.’

In response, the centre insisted it was not a representative of ‘any government, political entity, or individual’.

A spokesman said: ‘Like many charities, faith organisations and other eligible institutions in the UK, the centre holds a Home Office sponsor licence, which allows it to sponsor skilled workers where it meets the requirements of the UK’s immigration system.

‘We recognise that questions have previously been raised about the centre and its perceived relationship with the Iranian government. The centre has consistently maintained that it is an independent UK charity and carries out its activities in accordance with UK law and its charitable objectives.’

A string of Islamic bookshops flogging anti-Semitic texts also appear on the visa list.

Some of the books being sold offer outrageous claims, such as one saying that Jewish people have a ‘wicked nature’, while other texts have been labelled as a radicalisation threat by our prisons.

One of those on sale is Milestones by Sayyid Qutb, an influential former Muslim Brotherhood leader who believed Islam should govern every aspect of society.

His work also denounces ‘world Jewry’.

Other texts include those by Hasan al-Banna, the Brotherhood’s founder, and Bilal Philips, a cleric banned by the Home Office, who offered advice on beating wives.

The books sold by these businesses are not illegal in the UK and in some cases are sold through a number of mainstream platforms.

There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of the businesses.

But Chris Philp MP, Shadow Home Secretary, said: ‘It is clear the ‘skilled’ visa route is being abused.

‘This is not skilled work by any definition – it is a blatant loophole, exploited by businesses who should never have been trusted with a sponsor licence in the first place.

‘We don’t want extremists in this country.

‘I would like to see these organisations lose their sponsor licence and anyone they have brought into the country who is still here on a temporary work visa deported.

‘The Government must urgently review this.’

Skilled worker visa certificates were introduced in 2020 as part of a post-Brexit immigration overhaul.

The scheme, overseen by the Home Office, allowed registered employers to bring workers into the country to fill jobs meeting a specific skill level.

Businesses such as vape shops and newsagents are among those to have been given licences, drawing questions over whether all those brought over are truly ‘skilled’.

Dozens of official certificates of sponsorship, the paperwork needed to apply for a skilled worker visa, have been issued by Islamic bookshops.

Home Office figures show that one of those stores, in Birmingham, has issued up to 16 skilled worker certificates since 2021.

A Home Office register says more than 120,000 organisations are licensed to issue certificates of visa sponsorship in the UK.

These organisations range from huge firms such as Barclays Bank to small corner shops and vape stores.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘The Islamic Centre of England has not sponsored any workers since 2022, and the Charity Commission is currently investigating this organisation.

‘We treat the threat posed by the Iranian regime and those who do its bidding with the utmost seriousness. That’s why we have fast-tracked a change in the law to outlaw support for the IRGC, equipping the police and intelligence service with more powers to disrupt those working on their behalf, and making it easier to prosecute them.

‘If wrongdoing is uncovered, those responsible will face the full force of the law, with the possibility of lengthy prison sentences, loss of licences and further civil action.’

Visitors will be able to see Father Christmas as well as enjoy food and drink along the trail

Tickets are now on sale for a major Christmas event in Cambridgeshire. Christmas at Wimpole will return with a brand-new light trail at the National Trust estate in 2026.

The event will take place between November 20 and January 3. It has been created by award-winning light trail producers, with seasonal music accompanying the visual displays.

Visitors will also be able to glimpse Father Christmas and enjoy food and drink at stalls along the way. A spokesperson for the event said it will be “bigger, bolder and more spectacular than ever”.

James Dakin, director of live experiences at RG Live, a subsidiary of Sony Music, said: “Christmas at Wimpole 2026 promises an evening of light, wonder and festive joy, set against the remarkable backdrop of the Wimpole Estate.

“It is the kind of experience that turns a simple winter walk into a shared Christmas moment, with bold new installations, beautiful details and plenty of surprises along the route. From the first glow of the trail to the Christmas Cathedral, we want visitors to feel fully immersed in the festive season and to create a night people will remember.”

Hilary Wilson, visitor experience manager, said: “Christmas at Wimpole is all about bringing people together and creating those special moments that make the festive season so memorable. Whether you’re visiting with family, friends or loved ones, the trail offers a chance to step away from the everyday, enjoy the magic of the estate, and soak up the spirit of Christmas.”

A study by Pepper Money ranked more than 300 locations across England and Wales using factors including house prices, mortgage affordability, rental costs and local earnings to determine where buyers can get the best value for money.

Middlesbrough topped the nationwide index, ahead of Burnley in Lancashire and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales.

Researchers found the town’s combination of lower-than-average house prices, affordable mortgage repayments and relatively strong earnings made it the most attractive location for aspiring homeowners.

The average first-time buyer property in Middlesbrough costs £123,831 — less than half the UK average of £261,700.

Pepper Money said local earnings compare well with house prices, making it easier for buyers to save for a deposit and keep mortgage costs manageable.

The North East emerged as the strongest-performing region overall, with the study suggesting it offers some of the best opportunities for people looking to buy rather than rent.

In total, 13 of the top 20 locations were in either the North East or North West, reinforcing the North’s reputation as one of the most affordable parts of the country for first-time buyers.

According to the research, every North East local authority except Northumberland has lower monthly mortgage costs than local rental prices.

Across the region, the average monthly mortgage payment is £699, compared with a national average of £1,310. In Middlesbrough this is estimated to be £157 per month cheaper than renting.

In Middlesbrough, County Durham and Hartlepool, mortgage payments also account for just 24% of monthly earnings – among the lowest proportions recorded in the study.

Pepper Money said the findings show that despite ongoing challenges in the housing market, there are still many parts of the UK where buying is more cost-effective than renting, with 41% of areas analysed proving cheaper to buy in than rent.

Researchers used Office for National Statistics data on earnings, property prices and rental costs, alongside mortgage affordability calculations, to compile the rankings.

After a wet weekend for most Scots, the end of July stays damp

Experts believe a dozen Scots areas will see rain on Tuesday, as millions of Brits will be soaked.

The Met Office believes more than 50 areas of the UK are expected to see rain on Tuesday (July 28) including 12 in Scotland. Rainclouds will move north-eastwards, drenching Northern Ireland, swathes of Wales, south west England, and northern England before hitting Scotland.

The heaviest rain will fall around 3am, when an orange rain cell is forecast to hit central Scotland and deliver 8-16mm of rain around the South Lanarkshire village of Douglas, the Met Office map shows. Once the heavy stops in mid-morning, scattered showers will persist for most of the day in Northern Ireland, north Wales, north west England, and Scotland.

However, it looks like it will stay dry in the Midlands, East Anglia, and southern England.

The Met Office forecast for Tuesday said: “Heavy rain in the north will ease and move away northeastwards on Tuesday, replaced by sunshine and locally heavy showers. England and Wales mostly dry with some hot sunshine developing.”

According to the Met Office’s map, 53 council areas will see some form of rain. It’s estimated 12 Scots, four Northern Irish, nine Welsh, and 28 English top-tier council areas will be hit by precipitation.

Temperatures are set to remain warm and typical for late July. Glasgow will see 20C, Edinburgh 21C, and Aberdeen 22C. Over the Irish Sea, Northern Ireland’s high will be 23C in Newry.

The 53 areas set to see rain on Tuesday are:

Scotland

• Aberdeen City
• Aberdeenshire
• Argyll and Bute
• City of Edinburgh
• Dumfries and Galloway
• Fife
• Glasgow City
• Highland
• Na h-Eileanan Siar (Western Isles)
• North Lanarkshire
• Scottish Borders
• South Lanarkshire

Northern Ireland

• Belfast City
• Causeway Coast and Glens
• Derry City and Strabane
• Fermanagh and Omagh

Wales

• Cardiff
• Carmarthenshire
• Ceredigion
• Conwy
• Gwynedd
• Isle of Anglesey
• Pembrokeshire
• Swansea
• Vale of Glamorgan

England

• Greater Manchester: Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, and Wigan.
• Merseyside: Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens, and Wirral.
• Other North West: Cumberland, Lancashire, and Westmorland and Furness.
• North East: County Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne, Northumberland, North Tyneside, South Tyneside, and Sunderland.
• South West: Cornwall, Devon, and Plymouth.

“Since launching the Music Photography Awards in 2022, we’ve deepened our commitment to the art form and re-examined how we interact with visual culture. Whether it’s the detail in a fine art photograph, honouring our roots with iconic image-makers, or working with a new wave of creators, we hope to present an Abbey Road, reframed.”

Detectives investigating the murder of Suzy Lamplugh have made one last plea for information as they prepared to shelve the 40-year-old investigation into her disappearance.

With the prime suspect now dead, the Metropolitan Police said they remain determined to ‘find her resting place and bring her back’.

Scotland Yard detectives expect to spend the next year contacting around 30 potential witnesses, who are still believed to be alive, after they initially called in with tip-offs and leads when estate agent Ms Lamplugh vanished in Fulham, west London, on Monday, July 28, 1986.

The 25-year-old’s body has never been found, and remains the Met’s largest active murder investigation.

Police have now told Ms Lamplugh’s family the case will become ‘inactive’ next year, but are hopeful advances in forensic testing or a key witness breaking their silence will finally solve the mystery.

Detective Chief Inspector Teresa Foster, who leads the Met’s cold case homicide team, said: ‘We’re not going to give up on trying to find where Suzy is. But yes, it is difficult.

‘It is going to take a change in forensics or technology, or a change of allegiance, or someone coming forward with new information. It is going to be very difficult now after 40 years.’

Asked what detectives hope to achieve as the case prepares to be wound down, she said: ‘It’s finding Suzy. For us and for Suzy’s family, it is finding her.

Suzy, pictured (right) for the last time alongside her siblings, brother Richard, and sisters Lizzie and Tamsin

The Lamplugh family – (left to right, back row) Richard, Lizzie, Suzy, Tamsin, Paul and Diane (seated)

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John Cannan was the prime suspect in the search for Ms Lamplugh’s killer. But he died in prison in 2024

Suzy Lamplugh (second left) with her siblings, (left to right) Richard, Tamsin and Lizzie

‘It’s finding her resting place and bringing her back.’

Ms Lamplugh was working for Sturgis’ estate agents in Fulham when she left the office to show a home to a potential client. The appointment marked in her diary was with a ‘Mr Kipper’.

Witnesses saw Ms Lamplugh standing outside the address in nearby Shorrolds Road, looking as if she was waiting for someone.

Around ten minutes later, a next-door neighbour heard someone leaving the property and saw Ms Lamplugh outside with a dark-haired man in a charcoal-coloured suit.

But by mid-afternoon, office colleagues had become concerned about her whereabouts and contacted police.

Her abandoned white Ford Fiesta was found, badly parked, a mile away from Shorrolds Road, at 10pm.

The vehicle was unlocked, the handbrake was off, and Ms Lamplugh’s purse was left  inside the car door.

She was never seen again.

A newly released family photograph of Ms Lamplugh, whose body has never been recovered  

Ms Lamplugh worked as an estate agent in Fulham, and lived in nearby Putney

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Her disappearance made headlines around the world

The prime suspect in the case, John Cannan, the middle-class son of a successful car salesman, died in prison in 2024 after being jailed for life in 1989 for the abduction and murder of newlywed Shirley Banks from Bristol.

I know why Jack the Ripper was protected for so long

 

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In 2014, we revealed the bombshell evidence identifying Aaron Kosminski as the fabled Jack the Ripper. Now, we can reveal his astonishing connection to the Freemasons and claims this motivated his killings and protected him from life in prison. 

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He had been out on licence from prison when Ms Lamplugh disappeared, having previously been jailed for raping a pregnant woman in front of her own mother and toddler, as well as two robberies.

He was identified as the key suspect in the Lamplugh case in 2002, but always denied involvement. No forensic evidence has ever been found linking him to what happened.

DCI Foster said she and her team remain ‘haunted’ by the fact the case – which unfolded on the doorstep of the case team’s headquarters in Putney – remains unsolved.

She said: ‘It does haunt me because we’ve never found her, she’s never been seen.

‘I think everybody at some stage, who lives in London, can think: That could have been me.’

She said the case was headline news around the world, and remembers hearing about it as a schoolgirl in New Zealand where she grew up.

‘This was a huge story then, and it was just shocking,’ she said.

A young Suzy, pictured alongside her family, including parents Diana and Paul 

‘I think for us that are invested in this, it upsets us. We’re very close to the family as well.

‘So yes, it does haunt that we can’t give answers, and we know that we’re up against it 40 years later.’

The Met has recently secured convictions of three historic killers – Janice Nix, who scalded her stepdaughter to death in the bath, and brothers Michael and Anthony Stewart for murdering a civil servant – following disclosures from family members.

And DCI Foster urged those with information about this decades-old case also come forward. 

In a direct appeal to anyone for witnesses, she said: ‘We’re not going to stop looking for Suzy.

‘If anybody has that information, you know we’ll take it forward, but we’ll also safeguard them, protect them in any way we can.’

Ms Lamplugh’s parents, Diana and Paul, died in 2011 and 2018 respectively without knowing what happened to their eldest daughter.

Their legacy is the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, a charity they set up in their daughter’s honour which focuses on personal safety, stalking and harassment.

DCI Foster said the surviving family members ‘totally understand’ that the investigation will eventually be deemed inactive.

But she said: ‘It’s not going to be closed.

‘I’ve said to the family that any information comes in from anywhere, we still raise it as an action.’

Hamza Parvaiz, of Manchester Road, died after falling from a cliff at Llandudno’s Great Orme on the evening of July 17.

At County Hall in Ruthin on Monday (July 27), an inquest was opened into the 28-year-old’s death.

It heard that emergency services were called to Marine Drive below the Great Orme shortly after 8.30pm after a person had seen Mr Parvaiz “lose his footing” while on a grassy coastal path, causing him to fall over a cliff.

The incident sparked a major emergency response, with North Wales Police, the Welsh Ambulance Service, RNLI and the Coastguard helicopter attending the scene.

Mr Parvaiz’s body was reached by an RNLI crew before being lifted up to a Coastguard helicopter.

A full inquest was adjourned until a later date.

Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation on the Greek island of Crete, has neither.

Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century.

Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.

Both languages are exactly the kind of puzzle that AI has recently been pulled into – not by replacing the linguists, but by supercharging their hunches. So does AI actually stand a chance of finishing what a century of human effort hasn’t?

A recent case shows both the appeal and the catch. In June 2026, a self-taught AI engineer and amateur linguist claimed a breakthrough on Linear A. It started from a single guess that one unknown word in a prayer inscription derived from a Semitic root meaning “to dwell” or “to inhabit”.

He then used AI-built programming scripts to test that sound-pattern against the rest of a collected Linear A corpus. He was reportedly able to assign values to 40 signs and compiled a 408-word lexicon, showing – in his view – that Linear A is an extinct member of the Semitic language group, which encompasses languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic.

The need for creativity

It’s worth being precise about what AI did and didn’t do here. It didn’t have the idea. The engineer did.

The AI was the research assistant. It rapidly cross-checked a human hypothesis against thousands of characters, work that would have taken a human months by hand. That division of labour is the pattern currently worth paying attention to, far more than any single claim that is still under review.

So where does AI actually help, and where does it hit a wall? It’s genuinely strong at large-scale pattern testing. It can check whether a hunch about one sign or word holds up across an entire archive in minutes instead of years. It can spot repeated sequences a human eye would miss, and restore damaged or fragmentary inscriptions by predicting likely missing characters.

AI also does something distinct called “cross-lingual transfer”, where a model trained on a known language can sometimes infer patterns in a closely related unknown one. This is similar to how knowing Spanish helps you guess at Portuguese.

Researchers have already used this kind of approach successfully on scripts such as Ugaritic, where the language family is known. Ugaritic is an extinct Semitic language, spoken during the late Bronze Age (about 1300-1190BC) in the ancient coastal city of Ugarit (in what is now Syria).

But there’s a hard ceiling: statistical pattern matching can’t manufacture meaning out of nothing. It needs an anchor – a known language family, or a bilingual text – to tell it which patterns are meaningful and which are coincidence.

Linear A and Etruscan are hard precisely because that anchor is missing or incomplete, and no amount of computing power invents one from scratch.

Scant evidence

With a large enough corpus, an AI model could hypothetically get fluent enough to converse with a Minoan or Etruscan speaker on the model’s own statistical terms. This means that it could recognise repeating patterns of words and other structural units of a language that would allow the AI model to repurpose the terms in a different context. One that might approximate a limited conversation, at least on the surface.

But the AI system still wouldn’t be able to hand a human a translation, because fluency and meaning aren’t the same thing here. The model can learn which signs follow which, and which words cluster together, without ever knowing what any of them actually refer to.

This is also why verifying any AI-assisted claim about these languages is so difficult, and it’s a problem bigger than any one case. Normally, you’d check a proposed translation or interpretation against native speakers, other texts or expert consensus built up over decades. None of that exists for a genuinely undeciphered language. Short of a time machine, there’s no way to check.

Small surviving corpora make this worse: Linear A’s entire surviving corpus is about 7,500 characters, short enough to fit on a single screen and with that little data, almost any hypothesis can find scattered matches to support it.

That is why claims in this space lean so heavily on independent expert scrutiny and peer-review rather than statistical confidence scores. It is also why “AI found a pattern” and “AI found the correct meaning” are very different claims that are easy to blur together.

None of this means that AI is a dead end for these languages. Quite the opposite: it’s a real accelerant, able to compress years of manual cross-referencing into mere minutes and let more people attempt these problems than institutional resources ever allowed.

But it doesn’t remove the two ingredients that decipherment has always required. One is a genuine comparative anchor. The other is rigorous human review, to tell a real breakthrough from an appealing coincidence.

Until one of those shows up for Linear A or Etruscan, AI’s role in deciphering languages will stay what it is today: a very fast assistant to a very old, very human puzzle.