Preston was born on June 16, 2022. He went into foster care five days after his birth.

The tot was the son of notorious convicted murderer Sarah Davey, who brutally tortured and killed a pensioner in Failsworth in Oldham in 1998. Ms Davey was 14 when she was jailed for the ‘unspeakably wicked’ murder.

The identity of Preston’s mother was never revealed to the jury. She has since been in and out of prison.

In April 2023, Jamie Varley, a former secondary school head of year, and his partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, adopted Preston when he was nine-months-old.

In the next four months up until his murder, Preston was used as a ‘plaything’ being routinely physically and emotionally abused, sexually assaulted and had indecent photos and videos taken of him.

He was killed when he was aged just 13-months-old. Varley claiming he had accidentally drowned in a bath at their Blackpool home on July, 27 2023.

But a post-mortem examination identified more than 40 injuries on his body, as well as internal injuries indicating sexual abuse. His cause of death was established as acute upper airway obstruction, suggesting something had been inserted into his mouth blocking his airway.

He had been admitted to hospital three times in the months before his death and a social services investigation is under way.

Susannah Streeter, chief investment strategist at the Wealth Club, said: “The digital signing of the interim agreement between the US and Iran, ahead of an official ceremony on Friday, is exerting a fresh downward force on (oil) prices, as new supplies are expected to hit the market just as demand has been weakened by rationing and energy-efficiency measures.”

Hollyoaks star Malique Thompson-Dwyer has shared a very honest post about his mental health.

The actor, who is 28, is best known for playing Prince McQueen in the Channel 4 soap.

Malique, who has also appeared in I’m A Celebrity and Celebs Go Dating, often shares pictures on his Instagram that give followers a small insight into the life he lives when he isn’t filming as Prince.

Recently, he took to his social media page to post an update on his life and how he’s been feeling.

The images Malique shared feature him out and about, on the Hollyoaks set, and with some of his loved ones. In the caption, the star admits that the last two years of his life ‘haven’t been easy’.

‘Life lately’, he begins.

‘Life is one big learning curve, full of lessons that shape into who you’re meant to be. The last two years haven’t been easy. Feelings of depression, body dysmorphia, anxiety, days where I couldn’t see a way forward. But God had a plan bigger than my pain’.

‘Here I am. Still standing’.

Malique added: ‘My faith in Jesus Christ, the gym, work, family, and learning to believe in myself again. Consistency and prayer changed everything. Praise the Lord.’

Offering some words of advice to anyone else in a similar position to him, Malique said: ‘Life is you vs. you. Get out of your own way. Buy the clothes. Book the flight. Learn to love yourself.

‘Nothing is impossible. I’m living proof.

‘If you’re in a dark place right now, it doesn’t have to be the end of your story.’

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Malique has played the role of Prince in Hollyoaks on and off since 2016.

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The character is the son of Goldie McQueen and Shane Sweeney and has endured a great deal of drama while living in the Hollyoaks village.

Prince returned to our screens in September 2021, and was accompanied by his fiancée Olivia Bradshaw.

Not keen on Prince’s new partner, Goldie was left devastated when the couple revealed their plans to move to New Zealand so Olivia could begin a teaching job. Goldie purposefully ruined Olivia’s job application, leaving her and Prince forced to stay in England.

Olivia and Prince began working at Hollyoaks High School, but Prince got fired after vodka bottles hidden by John Paul McQueen were found by students DeMarcus and Leah.

Most recently, Prince attempted to connect with Vicky Grant, but she made it clear that she wanted Prince to stop using steroids before their romance could continue.

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MORE: New romance for Jodie in Coronation Street – and it’s someone we know and love

MORE: Sarah is in for a big shock in Emmerdale as a familiar face enters her life

MORE: Shona McGarty appears to confirm romance with EastEnders co-star

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Ukraine hit a Moscow oil refinery for a second time in a week and disrupted commercial flights at Moscow airports in one of its biggest drone attacks since Russia’s invasion more than four years ago, Russian officials said Thursday.

The Russian Defense Ministry said that its air defenses overnight shot down 555 Ukrainian drones over multiple regions, with almost 200 intercepted as they were approaching the Russian capital.

Several drones hit the Moscow Oil Refinery on the southeastern outskirts of the city, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said.

The Russian Transport Ministry said that flights from four Moscow airports were halted.

The attack came hours after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he had held “an important coordination call” with U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron that may “bring about significant change.”

Zelenskyy said Wednesday his country had won key pledges of further support from world leaders attending the G7 summit in France.

″These last few days were very important for Ukraine because it is the reunification of the G7 around Ukraine,″ Macron told reporters as he and Trump left the Palace of Versailles near Paris.

″And now we will continue to advance to help Ukraine to resist″ and to build up its ″capacity to defend itself and capacity to counterattack,” Macron said.

The attack comes as President Vladimir Putin is in Kazan, 700 kilometers (430 miles) east of Moscow, hosting leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations as Russia seeks to bolster business and other ties.

The two-day meeting is set to consider ways to expand Russia’s “strategic partnership” with ASEAN nations that include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, East Timor and Vietnam, according to Kremlin foreign affairs adviser Yuri Ushakov.

Niger has been fighting a militant Islamist insurgency for a decade and in January suspected jihadists launched an attack on the same airport. Like its neighbours, Burkina Faso and Mali, Niger is run by a military junta that came to power in part because of the failure to deal with the violence.

BRUSSELS (AP) — U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Thursday that America’s allies in Europe must take the lead on the defense of their own continent and help turn NATO into “a read hard-line military alliance.”

At a meeting of NATO defense ministers, Hegseth called for a reboot of the 32-nation organization to turn it into a “NATO 3.0” capable of deterring any threat.

His remarks came a few weeks after the United States told its allies that it would no longer supply certain warships and aircraft if one of them comes under attack. European allies and Canada are trying to work out how to plug the gaps.

“NATO 3.0 is post-Cold War recognition that (NATO) needs to go back to a real hard-line military alliance that has real military capabilities capable of deterring right here on the continent and taking the lead for the conventional defense of Europe,” Hegseth said.

As part of that, he told reporters, the United States would be investing $1.5 trillion in its own defense in 2027, sending “a message to the world” that America is building an “arsenal of freedom.”

Hegseth said that this arsenal “first and foremost protects America and American interests but also backstops the strength of NATO and our allies.”

He said he would tell U.S. allies they “have to be willing to stand up and do something in a strong way about” the defense of their own continent.

NATO’s supreme allied commander, an American, is working on backup plans to defend Europe after the U.S. signaled on June 3 that it would no longer supply an aircraft carrier and support ships, aerial refueling planes and dozens of fighter jets, among other military assets, in a crisis.

The Trump administration insists that it needs to be able to plan for two simultaneous conflicts and wants more military resources at hand should a conflict break out with China in the Indo-Pacific region.

Under NATO’s collective security guarantee – Article 5 of its founding treaty – the 32 allies pledge that an attack on one of them will be considered an attack on all. It does not oblige them to provide military support, although many likely would.

In essence, the United States is scaling back how it might help should an ally trigger Article 5. The U.S. has by far NATO’s biggest armed forces. It does not intend to withdraw its nuclear weapons in Europe, which are key to NATO’s deterrence.

A new online petition is calling for changes to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment standards to better recognise the impact Type 1 diabetes can have on daily life

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A new online petition is urging reforms to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment criteria to better acknowledge how Type 1 diabetes affects everyday living. Over 14,400 individuals have already backed the petition, posted on the Petitions Parliament website, meaning it has now secured the right to a written response from the UK Government.

The petition contends that those living with the condition face a “relentless, 24-hour responsibility” encompassing blood glucose monitoring, insulin management and meticulous planning around diet, physical activity and stress levels, yet frequently fail to meet the criteria for disability benefits.

Launched by Emily Jones, the petition calls on the UK Government to revise PIP assessment criteria to explicitly encompass people with Type 1 diabetes and alleges there is insufficient understanding of the condition which may influence assessment results.

The petition states: “Managing Type 1 Diabetes is a relentless, 24-hour responsibility that requires frequent blood glucose monitoring, insulin adjustments, and careful planning around food, activity, and stress.”

It adds that the demands of managing the condition alongside full-time employment can lead to physical exhaustion and mental burnout, reports the Daily Record. Campaigners argue that broader access to PIP could enable people with Type 1 diabetes to fund technology not routinely supplied by the NHS and assist those who need to cut their working hours due to the condition.

PIP is a benefit designed to assist with the additional costs linked to a long-term health condition or disability. Eligibility is determined by how a person’s condition impacts their daily living and mobility requirements, rather than a particular diagnosis.

This means that having Type 1 diabetes does not automatically entitle someone to PIP, though those with the condition may still receive the benefit if they satisfy the assessment criteria. New figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) reveal that at the end of April, some 43,986 people were in receipt of PIP.

The petition remains open for signatures until 2 December and should it reach 100,000 signatures, it would be considered by the Petitions Committee for a parliamentary debate. The petition can be viewed in full on the Petitions Parliament website.

Just three miles from Stonehenge, archaeologists have made a remarkable discovery which sheds new light on the history of prehistoric religion.

For decades, it has been known that solar alignments formed a crucial part of the design of Stonehenge – but now, excavations near the world-famous monument have revealed that sun worship was a significant part of the Stonehenge area’s religious practice at least 450 years before the main phase of Stonehenge was constructed.

The discovery at Bulford in Wiltshire shows that by 3000 BC, prehistoric Britons were celebrating the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.

Now archaeologists are beginning to wonder whether similar rituals and celebrations may have been going on at the site of Stonehenge centuries before the famous stones were erected.

At Bulford, archaeologists, directed by a leading expert on the Neolithic era, Phil Harding of Wessex Archaeology, have unearthed a complex religious site consisting of 50 ritual pits – and what were almost certainly two timber monuments, exactly 120 metres apart, which were deliberately aligned with the summer and winter solstices.

The pits (ritually filled with feasting debris) and the timber monuments (probably 3.5-metre tall 50-centimetre diameter potentially highly decorated wooden posts) were dug and erected around 5000 years ago – and the posts prefigure what was to be constructed in stone 450 years later at Stonehenge itself (when the key stones at that famous monument were specifically positioned to mark the summer and winter solstitial alignments).

What’s more, Stonehenge’s circular earthen bank, built long before the famous still-surviving stone monument, but at the same time as the newly-discovered Bulford site, is roughly 115 metres in diameter – so it is now conceivable that early Stonehenge may have had similar solstice-marking’ totem poles’ externally on opposite sides of its still extant earthwork circle (Stonehenge’s original ‘henge’).

Apart from Stonehenge and Bulford, the only other precisely solar aligned monuments (of identical or older vintage) known in Europe are at a giant tomb in Ireland and in at least two temples in Malta.

Now scientists are likely to start redoubling efforts to search for such alignments at other sites.

“The solstitial alignment discovered at Bulford is likely to help encourage archeoastronomers to investigate whether there are similar solar alignments in even older monuments in Britain, Ireland, western France and elsewhere,” said archeoastronomer Dr Fabio Silva of Bournemouth University.

Interest in heavenly objects – stars, planets, the moon and the sun – were of immense importance to early civilisations and cultures. Yet, counterintuitively (within at least Europe and the Middle East), very early respect for the sun seems to have been a mainly Western European phenomenon, with early tombs often very roughly oriented towards the east, ie., towards the rising sun. Early sunrise-oriented tombs in Britain for instance date back to roughly 3700 BC.

While in the Middle East, where civilisation originated, huge respect for the sun and sun worship itself did not happen, on the whole, until slightly later – indeed, in ancient Egypt, not until around 2700 BC. But, significantly, star worship (rather than sun-worship) appears to have been equally important in both early prehistoric Western Europe and the Middle East.

The Bulford research is still in progress and will help archaeologists to understand the importance of cosmology in prehistoric religions.

Some of the ritual pits at the newly discovered site may, in some way, be connected to the solar alignment celebrations. It’s likely that those events featured communal feasting – and the pits certainly show evidence of that. Each of them is filled with feasting debris, broken pottery, goat/sheep and pig bones and flint artefacts.

But a cluster of them have more unusual contents – bones from giant wild cattle (aurochs) and red and roe deer, and in one specific pit, a very rare high status roughly circular flint knife (possibly symbolising the Sun) which had been placed in a deliberately vertical position, its now no-longer-extant wooden handle buried in the ground and its circular blade pointing upwards.

It is conceivable that the area around this pit was used by key people (potentially priests or others) to witness the crucial solstitial alignments.

The apparently extremely limited distribution of such neolithic era precise solar alignments in the world is as yet an unsolved mystery. As far as is known, they only occur in the Stonehenge area, a very major monument in Ireland (a huge tomb at Newgrange), in at least two very important temples on the small Mediterranean island of Malta and in a tiny number of locations elsewhere in the world.

In virtually all the areas they occur, they tend to be associated with extremely high status prehistoric sites and locales. That suggests that any highly developed prehistoric – and often probably un-connected – solar cults may well have been elite-associated and relatively uncommon (though high profile), rather than common and widely distributed.

The ongoing Bulford research is likely to shed further light on the nature of at least the Stonehenge area’s solar alignment tradition.

“The Bulford and other discoveries reveal that precise prehistoric solar alignments were very important in the Stonehenge area. Bulford itself pushes that phenomenon in that ritual landscape back by several hundred years,” said archaeologist Dr Amanda Chadburn, co-author of Stonehenge – Sighting the Sun.

WASHINGTON (AP) — JD Vance was supposed to be spending the week promoting his new book, the kind of event a potential presidential candidate like the vice president typically uses to speak to a wide audience about his life and values ahead of a campaign.

Instead, the rollout of Vance’s second book, “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” has been largely crowded out by something else he’s put his name on: the tentative deal to end the Iran war.

The Republican vice president has embraced the role of chief defender of the agreement he and President Donald Trump signed with Tehran, giving a series of interviews touting the memorandum of understanding as a success and releasing a video championing it.

It’s a striking emergence for a politician who was known for his skepticism of foreign military interventions and who seemed reluctant to speak on the conflict when Trump launched it in late February.

The vice president is poised to yoke himself further to the conflict’s outcome on Friday, when he’s expected to travel to Switzerland to kick off a new phase of negotiations with Iran. He was originally expected to attend a formal signing ceremony for the deal, but Trump formally signed it on Wednesday instead.

Vance becoming a hype man for the agreement seems to be an all-in gamble that, should he decide to seek the White House in 2028, voters will reward him for being the face of ending an unpopular conflict.

It’s also setting Vance up as the presumptive fall-guy should the deal with Iran falter.

Trump joked about such a possibility on Wednesday.

“If it works out, I’m going to take the credit. If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD,” Trump said.

Officials release text of the deal after backlash

The White House in a statement called Vance the president’s “right-hand man and an invaluable member of the President’s talented national security team.”

“That’s why the Vice President was trusted to lead these negotiations alongside Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner,” White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said. “What President Trump and his team achieved on the battlefield and at the negotiating table is nothing short of remarkable and will strengthen American security for years to come.”

But backlash, including from conservatives, began growing this week after the U.S. digitally signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran on Sunday.

Luke Schroeder, a spokesman for the vice president, said in a statement: “It’s unfortunate that some Republicans are attempting to undermine the President’s efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East and ensure Iran never has a nuclear weapon.”

Officials gave shifting answers about when they would release the text, but leaked copies of a draft were quickly met with anger and skepticism from Democratic and Republican U.S. lawmakers, as well as Israel and pro-Israel advocates. Their criticisms included concerns that the deal, meant to open a two-month negotiating period, seemed to offer Iran wins up front while guaranteeing little in return, and that Trump’s stated reason for launching the conflict, to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, remains unresolved.

Vance has reiterated that Iran must meet its obligations.

“If they don’t behave properly, they don’t get any of the benefits of this bargain,” he said Tuesday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends.”

In response to the backlash and mounting questions, the U.S. on Wednesday provided the text of the agreement to journalists.

The agreement states that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which is believed to be buried under rubble, must at minimum be diluted under international supervision. It also states that Iran shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons — a commitment it has made previously. But beyond stating that the U.S. and Iran will negotiate over Iran’s nuclear program, other commitments still need to be worked out.

Criticism on the right persisted after the text was released.

Conservative radio host Erick Erickson, a hawk who has defended the war, said Wednesday: “This is an American surrender.”

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a potential 2028 presidential candidate, criticized the agreement and said to reporters, “I think the president, unfortunately, is receiving bad advice.”

Trump’s ‘Operation Epic Fury’ has angered wings of his movement

The conflict, which has stretched into its fourth month, has cleaved Trump’s broad Make America Great Again coalition and angered both those who favored a harder line against Iran and those drawn to Trump’s “America First” foreign policy underscored by a message of “no new wars.”

Critics, including Republicans, have already started pointing fingers in Vance’s direction, questioning whether the deal resembles the 2015 nuclear agreement struck by Democratic President Barack Obama and whether this new agreement achieves Trump’s stated objectives for launching the war.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Trump ally and Iran hawk, had been skeptical of the agreement and referred to Vance on social media as “the architect of the deal.”

After the agreement was released, Graham issued a tepid statement of support, saying, “Whether or not the United States can reach an acceptable, verifiable deal with Iran regarding its nuclear program and other issues is yet to be determined, but I see little downside to trying.”

Ben Domenech, The Daily Wire’s opinion editor, said on Fox News that everything he was hearing about the deal “seems bad” and appeared to cast blame on Vance by alluding to his first book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”

“Are we going to backslide into being some kind of ‘hillbilly Obama’ kind of GOP?” Domenech said.

GOP allies say Vance can navigate the politics

The Trump administration has not offered formal briefings to Congress on the details of the memorandum, but Vance has quietly started doing outreach to some Republican senators on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, a close ally of Vance’s, said the vice president would be able to assuage even critics within his own party who are skeptical of the deal because “JD is just the president’s messenger, and the president’s going to prove them all wrong.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., said the deal “certainly adds to the national security and geopolitical chops” of Vance, who spent two years as a U.S. senator for Ohio before ascending to the vice presidency.

But Cramer acknowledged the risks if the agreement goes awry.

“I guess the nice thing is, if you’re not the No. 1 person, you can take credit and avoid risk, avoid the criticism, but probably not so easily,” Cramer said.

Vance argues Iran is not a quagmire like the Iraq war

In interviews this week, Vance has sought to speak directly to the skeptics in his party, a preview of the difficult explanations he may be pressed to make as a candidate on the war.

On Megyn Kelly’s show, the vice president said the critics “believe Iranian propaganda” about the deal. But he acknowledged some of the frustrations on the hawkish right while trying to reassure the anti-interventionists that the Iran conflict isn’t the war in Iraq, where he served as a Marine.

“We were never going to get the quagmire that a lot of people were worrying about because Donald Trump is just not George W. Bush,” he said.

Democrats have stressed that even as Vance becomes the face of the Iran deal, the fate of any administration official who harbors presidential aspirations — particularly hawkish Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has largely been quiet in the agreement’s final phases — will be tied to its outcome.

“I think any member of this administration is going to rise or fall on the basis of the Iran war and the handling of the economy, and I don’t think there are exceptions,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii.

___

Associated Press writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.

Digital icons are everywhere – and usually, we interpret these visual symbols in the blink of an eye. Who today doesn’t know that a wastebasket means “delete” and a magnifying glass means “search”?

Yet icons’ meanings can be deeply shaped by culture, experience and technological history. So what seems obvious to one person may be confusing to another.

They were originally designed to make computers look friendlier and less intimidating to the few people who had access to them. For example, the icons below first appeared in 1975 in the Pygmalion visual programming system.

Years later, they attained much wider visibility thanks to the Xerox Star 8010, a pioneering office computer that introduced many graphic interface concepts that are still used today.

Research my colleagues and I conducted examines how people perceive, understand and evaluate digital icons – including which visual characteristics make icons easier to learn and use. Pygmalion’s pioneering icons worked because they relied on existing knowledge of the office world.

This meant they reduced cognitive effort by relying on recognition rather than recall. The icons looked like the physical objects they were representing – and critically, objects the computer’s users were already familiar with.

Five secrets of a good icon

The designer Susan Kare, creator of many of the original Macintosh icons, said a good icon should either be instantly recognisable or so easy to remember that a user only needs to learn it once.

To Kare, designing icons was about solving “the little puzzle of making an image fit a metaphor”. More than 40 years later, that challenge remains.

Research, including work by my colleagues and me, suggests the most successful icons tend to share key characteristics that guide us from seeing to understanding almost instantaneously. Here are five of them.

1. They depict things we already know

Early computer icons worked because they borrowed from the office world that people already knew: folders, bins, documents, calculators, floppy disks. Psychologists refer to those as “concrete” icons because people to use their knowledge of the everyday world to interpret them.

However, only a limited number of functions can be represented as identifiable objects, and getting a close fit between pictures and functions is not always easy. The more complex the meaning becomes, the harder it is to design concrete icons.

To test this, can you guess the meaning of these four icons? (Answers at the end of the article.)

2. They mean what we think they mean

Psychologists talk about “semantic distance” – how closely an image matches its intended meaning. An abstract symbol for “privacy settings” or “cloud syncing” has a much larger semantic distance than using a bin to mean “delete”.

As digital functions become more complex, designing icons that communicate their meaning quickly becomes increasingly difficult.

3. They feel familiar

Another important feature of successful icons is consistency of use over time – which leads to familiarity. The icons shown below are widely used even though the objects depicted are no longer so widely in use. This highlights the point that icons are partly informative signs and partly shared learned conventions, whose success is based on collective familiarity.

Take the floppy disk “save” icon (below left). Younger users recognise the meaning without ever having seen the physical object that the icon originally represented. The same is true of traditional telephone handsets and perhaps even envelopes (now widely used to denote “email”). While the objects have been superseded, the icons remain.

4. They look good

A well-designed object can have a positive effect on our behaviour – and the digital world is no different. Well-designed icons are more likely to attract downloads, help us perform tasks more efficiently, and learn better and faster. They even make digital environments feel more pleasant to use.

Think of the difference between an app icon that feels cluttered and amateurish and one that looks clean, balanced and professional. Even before we know what the app does, the icon’s design can influence expectations of how well the app will work.

5. They are tested with real users

Although icons and symbols are on the rise as a global visual language, it’s important not simply to assume that icons work globally – and to understand what makes a good digital icon across languages, cultures, ages and digital experiences.

This is why the International Standards Organisation (ISO 9186) demands comprehensibility testing – because symbols should be understood without explanatory text whenever possible.

A bridge between perception and meaning

As we spend more of our lives in digitally mediated environments, icons do two jobs simultaneously. They help us interact with technology more efficiently, and shape how we feel about the experience.

A digital icon is not simply a small picture. It is a bridge between perception and meaning. The best icons make interfaces feel less intimidating, more intuitive and more approachable – creating a global visual language that crosses barriers of language and culture.

In other words, good icons do more than help us find our way around a digital world. They help make that world feel understandable, welcoming and human.

Icon quiz answers: 1. cloud syncing; 2. privacy settings; 3. algorithmic recommendations; 4. generative AI.