Helen Skelton is shutting down rumours that she and her Morning Live co-host Gethin Jones are more than just colleagues.

Last year, the BBC pair found themselves at the centre of rumours that they were secretly dating, after it was reported by The Sun they’d been spotted spending time together away from the TV studio.

During a new interview with The Times, the former Strictly Come Dancing star addressed the “wild” speculation head-on.

“We’re not,” she insisted, when asked if she and Gethin were an item. “We work together; he’s one of my best friends.”

Helen also revealed that, despite there being nothing going on between herself and her co-presenter, even some key people in her life have been taken in by the tabloid rumours.

“I’ve had my best friend congratulate me on our engagement,” she noted, before reiterating there’s nothing romantic going on between herself and Gethin.

Earlier this year, Helen told The Mirror: “[Gethin and I] just work together, we are not together. No, no, no. We are just work friends.

“They printed pictures of us at work and [claimed] that we’re together [but we were] at work together.”

Gethin previously told The Sun: “We are very supportive of each other, we like to look out for each other. I think that’s fair to say on and off camera.

“You sometimes could get… you might need a little pep talk every now and then. Because she’s very passionate.”

Helen was previously married to former rugby pro Richie Myler, with whom she shares three children, for nine years.

In April 2022, the Countryfile host announced that she and Richie had parted ways, telling her Instagram followers at the time: “Very sad to say that Richie and I are no longer a couple. He has left the family home. We will be doing our best to co-parent our small children.”

Helen later wrote in her memoir that the break-up had come as a huge “shock”, claiming: “I know that following break-ups, people often say they didn’t see it coming and it sounds like a cliché, but that was me.”

Months after the split, Helen confirmed she was set to take part in Strictly Come Dancing, telling HuffPost UK at the time she’d signed up for the show to bring some “joy” and “fun” back into her life.

Former child actor Daveigh Chase died as a result of AIDS, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner has said.

Daveigh was best known for her voice work in projects like Disney’s Lilo & Stitch and the English dub of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, as well as on-screen performances in the horror film The Ring and the psychological thriller Donnie Darko.

Earlier this month, it was confirmed that she had died at the age of 35, with AIDS having been named as her cause of death this week.

The coroner also listed “chronic polysubstance use” – the use of multiple drugs – as an “other significant condition” that contributed to Daveigh’s death.

It had previously been reported that Daveigh had died as a result of complications from bacterial meningitis and sepsis.

Daveigh’s father told NBC News that Daveigh, who retired from acting just over a decade ago, had been homeless and living near the Los Angeles hospital where she was admitted and later died.

He claimed she had also been suffering from severe malnutrition when she was admitted to hospital.

In a statement to BBC News shortly after her death, the late actor’s manager remembered Daveigh as “the greatest”.

“She was not very Hollywood,” he recalled. “She’d rather eat at Bob’s Big Boy and go home with the cats. She loved acting but wasn’t into the fame scene.”

Daveigh’s career began with a string of roles in shows like Sabrina The Teenage Witch, Charmed and ER in her younger years, before she was cast as Jake Gyllenhaal’s on-screen sister in Donnie Darko. Her character subsequently landed her own straight-to-video spin-off sequel, titled S Darko.

She also played Samara in The Ring, reprising the role in a 2005 sequel, The Ring and later portrayed Rhonda Volmer in the US drama Big Love, sharing the screen with the likes of Bill Paxton, Chloë Sevigny and Amanda Seyfried.

Her final on-screen work was in the indie horror Jack Goes Home and the thriller American Romance, after which she took a step back from her acting career.

The government’s long-delayed blueprint for how it will fund Britain’s armed forces is not enough to keep the country safe, according to a former army chief.

Keir Starmer will unveil the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) on Tuesday in one of his last major acts before he resigns as prime minister.

It is expected to contain an extra £15 billion for the armed forces over the next four years – £1.5bn more than former defence secretary John Healey was given before he dramatically resigned earlier this month.

But it is well short of the £28bn defence chiefs say is needed.

Crucially, the DIP will also not say how the UK plans to spend 3% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on defence by 2030, or hit Nato’s target of 3.5% by 2035.

General Sir Richard Barrons, who last year co-authored the government’s Strategic Defence Review, told Radio 4′s Today programme that ministers urgently needed to find more cash.

The former Commander of Joint Forces Command said: “In oder to defend the UK sufficiently well, sufficiently quickly, more has to be done sooner and that requires more money than is currently on the table.

“If the demand was for £28bn over the first four years and the settlement might be around £15bn over four years, that means either some things are not going to be bought or will be delayed, and it will mean that some forms of activity like training and infrastructure maintenance and logistics, things that cost real cash, will be done less well or perhaps not even done at all.”

He added: “The good news is that today’s British armed forces know perfectly well what they have to do, they understand this transformation, and all three services have really very good models for what they need to do.

“Their challenge is that in order to do it well enough and fast enough, they’ll need more money sooner.

“And what they’re going to see in the DIP today is a struggle, not just for the first four years, but until the government can articulate how the UK gets to spend 3.5% of GDP … by 2035.

“Until that trajectory is clear we don’t have a four-year slowdown, we have a 10-year slowdown.”

Barrons said the UK was also lagging well behind other European countries.

“If you look at most of our European allies in Nato, they are spending more money much faster on revitalising and beginning to transform their armed forces, and they’re looking at the UK, who were once an exemplar of a European nation in Nato, and we’re now about halfway down the spending table in Nato.”

He added: “We’re not keeping up with our allies, we’re certainly not keeping up with our enemies, and we know that the US is not going to come and save European security in the face of a Russian threat.

“So until we come to terms with the fact that we have to find more money for defence, and yes it will be at the expense of other things we like more, we are simply not going to be ready to defend this country properly.”

But speaking ahead of the DIP’s publication, Starmer said: “This game-changing investment will strengthen our armed forces on land, at sea and in the air, ensuring our servicemen and women have the cutting-edge capabilities they need to deter evolving threats and keep the British people safe.

“At the same time, we are backing British innovation, British industry and British jobs and delivering opportunity to every corner of the country.

“Today’s defence investment plan will help drive growth across the UK, giving our industrial base the confidence, certainty and support it needs to develop and scale the technologies that will keep our country safe and secure long into the future.”

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One in 11 people aged 65 and over have dementia in the UK, the NHS said. And according to Alzheimer’s Society, a person’s risk “roughly doubles” every five years after around 70.

But while it might take decades for symptoms to show, researchers increasingly think markers of coming dementia can begin years before diagnosis.

And a recent paper in Springer Nature has suggested that a biomarker in people’s blood – pTau181, which is linked to a higher dementia risk – might hint at a greater likelihood of developing the condition when seen in 45-year-olds.

“Although plasma pTau181 has been shown to accurately discriminate patients with Alzheimer’s disease from healthy older adults, there are few studies of plasma biomarkers among middle-aged populations,” the paper reads.

45-year-olds with elevated pTau181 were more likely to say they had concerns about their cognition than adults of the same age with lower pTau181 levels in this study.

They tended to be more worried about their memory and thinking, though this didn’t show up on cognitive scores.

Researchers call this phenomenon – the “self-reported persistent decline in cognitive performance with normal performance on objective cognitive tests, in the absence of another explanation” – subjective cognitive decline (SCD).

Scans and other investigations didn’t show any structural brain changes, usually linked to dementia, among those with more pTau181.

Speaking to the University of Otago, the study’s lead author, Dr Ashleigh Barrett-Young, said that this might mean signs of higher dementia risk begin years before the changes we associate with the condition start.

“This means there may be an important window for prevention, which remains one of the most promising approaches for Alzheimer’s disease,” she said.

Dr Barrett-Young added that their results might mean small changes in cognition –SCD – combined with elevated pTau181 aged 45 could hint at measurable issues later on.

“This highlights the need for careful research to understand how early changes relate to later outcomes.”

Dr Barrett-Young stressed that this theory needs more research.

She said “Understanding the earliest stages of disease development is essential for designing effective prevention and treatment strategies, even if clinical tools are still some way off.

“Importantly, biomarkers like pTau181 reflect risk, not certainty”.

We don’t know for sure whether those with a combination of higher pTau181 and SCD aged 45 will definitely face a higher dementia risk, either.

Writing for The Conversation, Dr Barrett-Young said: “Perhaps pTau181 increases during the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when people first start to notice their memory worsening, but no changes are shown yet in MRI scans.

“Or it could be that elevated pTau181 is not related to Alzheimer’s disease risk in midlife, and the protein is only useful for detecting Alzheimer’s in older adults. We don’t know enough yet, but will be following the same group of people as they get older to continue this research.”

Vladimir Putin has been mocked after trying and failing to fully seize Ukraine’s Donbas region “15 times”.

The Donbas, made up of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts to the east of Ukraine, has been mostly under Russian occupation since Putin launched his illegal invasion in 2022.

But the Kremlin has struggled to establish full control over the last 10% of the region – despite repeated attempts.

It comes as Putin’s grip on power is said to be weakening, especially as long-range drone strikes from Ukraine rock the everyday lives of the general Russian public.

His Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was quick to call attention to Putin’s failures on Monday.

“Since the start of the full-scale war, the Russian army has been given as many as 15 deadlines for capturing our Donetsk region,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly online address.

“Russia’s political leadership remains obsessed with Donbas. They have entertained this delusion – that they would fully capture Donbas – 15 times already.”

He claimed Putin has set multiple deadlines for his troops to capture the region but instead has endured more than 1.5 million casualties.

“In 2022, the deadlines were 31 March, then 9 May, 1 June, 15 September, and 31 December,” the Ukrainian president said.

“In 2023, Putin set two more deadlines for capturing Donbas: 1 March, and then, when that failed again, they moved it to 31 December. In 2024, there were again two such deadlines.”

Zelenskyy claimed Putin wanted to show US president Donald Trump – who has been trying, unsuccessfully, to end the conflict – that Ukraine would “supposedly fall”.

But he continued: “If Russia does not end its war, they will have to move this deadline again as well.

“If Putin wants to sacrifice another million of his soldiers to keep smashing against this wall, then the million Russians who have not yet been mobilised into the Russian army and are arguing in gas lines should think about what awaits them next.”

Away from the Donbas, Russia has captured all of the Luhansk region and a large proportion of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.

Together with the Crimea peninsula, which has been occupied since 2014, Putin holds around a fifth of Ukraine’s sovereign territory.

But Ukraine seems to hold the cards on the warfront at the moment.

Even Trump, typically sympathetic to Russia, has acknowledged: “Zelenskyy is doing pretty well. No matter how you look at it, he’s holding his own at least.”

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You might think that lifespans are getting longer and longer, but some experts think they’ve peaked. (In fact, UK life expectancies have dipped since the pandemic.)

And according to a new paper published in Nature Ageing, people born between 1950 and 1954 are experiencing slower biological ageing than later generations.

Speaking to Oncology Central, assistant porfessor Yin Cao, who co-authored the study, said: “Biological ageing isn’t just about the number of birthdays you’ve had — it reflects wear and tear happening inside the body at a cellular and molecular level. This can include changes that affect how cells and tissues function, such as chronic inflammation, weakening of the immune system and damage building up in cells over time.

“Our findings suggest that some younger adults may be experiencing these biological changes earlier than expected, and that this could be linked to the rising rates of cancers seen in younger generations.”

It comes after the BMJ Oncology found a “global surge in cancers among the under 50s over past three decades”.

This paper found that the bigger the gap between someone’s chronological age (years) and biological age, the higher the cancer risk.

This research used data from the UK Biobank, a long-standing project in which almost half a million participants have agreed to make their health data available to researchers, and the US’ National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) All of Us Research Program.

It involved information from over 154,000 UK young adults and more than 10,000 US participants.

Researchers worked out people’s biological age according to their systemic (whole-body) and organ-specific aging. They did this by looking at things like blood biochemistry markers and the levels of different kinds of proteins linked to certain organs.

Then, they compared participants’ biological ages to their chronological ones.

They found that people from the UK between 1965 and 1974 “had systemic aging that was 23% of one standard deviation higher compared with those born between 1950 and 1954”.

And those born between 1990 and 1999 “had systemic aging that was 92% of one standard deviation higher compared with those born between 1965 and 1969”.

Basically, that means older people’s biological ages seem closer to their chronological age.

That may matter because in this study, the faster biological ageing seen among younger groups was linked to 8% increased risk of early-onset cancers, particularly lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers.

And those with the most advanced biological ageing had a 15% higher risk compared to those with the least cellular wear and tear.

“If we can identify younger people with the highest cancer risk when they are still healthy, we can focus on prevention and early-detection strategies for the individuals who will benefit most from early interventions”, Cao told The University of Washington’s WashU Medicine.

Dr David Scott, director of Cancer Grand Challenges – which was involved with the research – added, “Right now, we don’t have a definitive answer to what’s driving the rise of early-onset cancers around the world, but studies like this are helping us piece together the bigger picture, showing that cancer may be influenced not just by changes inside individual cells, but by wider changes happening across the body as a whole.”