While 98.8% of Northern Ireland homes have 4G coverage from at least one mobile operator, the figure drops significantly when looking for coverage from all operators

On Thursday, MPs debated a motion which called on the Government and service providers to help improve mobile connectivity in rural areas across the UK

While geographic coverage is improving, Northern Ireland trails behind England, Scotland, and Wales for consumer choice and reliable indoor connection.

A key part of this comes down to differences in our planning laws, which are preventing service providers from erecting the required number of masts to expand coverage across Northern Ireland.

How does the phone coverage in NI compare to the rest of the UK?

According to a House of Commons Library briefing, data from July 2025 reveals a stark divide between urban and rural connectivity. While 98.8 per cent of Northern Ireland homes have 4G coverage from at least one mobile operator, the figure drops significantly when looking for coverage from all operators.

Access to all four major networks (EE, O2, Vodafone, and Three) is crucial for consumer choice and market competition. In Northern Ireland, only 75 per cent of premises have indoor 4G coverage from all four operators, which is the lowest figure in the UK.

The situation is most acute in the countryside. Only 50 per cent of rural premises in Northern Ireland have indoor 4G coverage from all operators. By comparison, 57 per cent of rural homes in England and 67 per cent in rural Scotland have full operator access.

Voice call reliability is also suffering in rural areas, with just 5 per cent of rural premises in Northern Ireland able to make indoor calls on all four networks.

What impact have NI’s planning laws had on the rollout?

The briefing suggests that differences in planning regulations may be a contributing factor to the slow rollout of infrastructure.

While the UK Government has introduced reforms in England to allow taller and wider masts to be built more easily, planning is a devolved matter. Notably, Northern Ireland does not have a “prior approval” procedure for building mobile masts.

In England and Scotland, “prior approval” allows developers to bypass the full planning application process for certain infrastructure, speeding up deployment. The lack of this mechanism in Northern Ireland means operators often face a more rigorous and slower planning process.

What is being done to tackle the poor signal?

Efforts are underway to close the gap through the Shared Rural Network (SRN), a £1 billion deal between the UK government and mobile operators to eliminate “not-spots”.

Mobile Network Operators have signed legally binding commitments to meet specific coverage targets by the end of January 2027.

Forecasts indicate that upon completion of the SRN, 4G geographic coverage from all operators in Northern Ireland is expected to rise to 85 per cent of the landmass, up from a pre-SRN baseline of 79 per cent.

However, the report notes that commercial viability remains a major hurdle. Low population density and difficult topography in rural areas make it expensive for operators to install masts, leaving Northern Ireland’s most remote communities reliant on government-subsidised interventions to stay connected.

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The owners of a Swiss bar, where a deadly fire broke out on New Year’s Eve, killing 41 people and injuring at least 115 others, were heckled by grieving families, as they appeared in court in Switzerland on Thursday.

Jessica and Jacques Moretti are under criminal investigation for involuntary manslaughter, as well as bodily harm and arson through negligence.

Claim: “There’s not much manufacturing. If you look at the UK, about 25 years ago – no, about 1995 I think it was – about 25% of our GDP was manufacturing, and Germany was about the same, 25%. So we’re going back what, 30 years? Today Germany’s still up there, 20-21% of its GDP is manufacturing, in the UK it’s down at about 8%. So manufacturing’s collapsed in the UK.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — Billions of American chestnut trees once covered the eastern United States. They soared in height, producing so many nuts that sellers moved them by train car. Every Christmas, they’re called to mind by the holiday lyric “chestnuts roasting on an open fire.”

But by the 1950s, this venerable tree went functionally extinct, culled by a deadly airborne fungal blight and lethal root rot. A new study out Thursday in the journal Science provides hope for its revitalization, finding that the genetic testing of individual trees can reveal which are most likely to resist disease and grow tall, thus shortening how long it takes to plant the next, more robust, generation.

A smaller gap between generations means a faster path to lots of disease-resistant trees that will once again be able to compete for space in Eastern forests. The authors hope that can occur in the coming decades.

“What’s new here is the engine that we’re creating for restoration,” said Jared Westbrook, lead author and director of science at The American Chestnut Foundation, which wants to return the tree to its native range that once stretched from Maine to Mississippi.

The American chestnut, sometimes called the “redwood of the East,” can grow quickly and reach more than 100 feet (30 meters), produce prodigious amounts of nutritious chestnuts and supply lumber favored for its straight grain and durability.

But it had little defense against foreign-introduced blight and root rot. Another type of chestnut, however, had evolved alongside those diseases. The Chinese chestnut had been introduced for its valuable nuts and it could resist diseases. But it isn’t as tall or competitive in U.S. forests, nor has it served the same critical role supporting other species.

So, the authors want a tree with the characteristics of the American chestnut and the disease resistance of the Chinese chestnut.

That goal is not new — scientists have been reaching for it for decades and made some progress.

But it has been difficult because the American chestnut’s desirable traits are scattered across multiple spots along its genome, the DNA string that tells the tree how to develop and function.

“It’s a very complex trait, and in that case, you can’t just select on one thing because you’ll select on linked things that are negative,” said John Lovell, senior author and researcher at the HudsonAlpha Genome Sequencing Center.

Breed for disease resistance alone and the trees get shorter, less competitive.

To deal with this, the authors sequenced the genome of multiple types of chestnuts and found the many places that correlated with the desired traits. They can then use that information to breed trees that are more likely to have desirable traits while maintaining high amounts of American chestnut DNA — roughly 70% to 85%.

And genetic testing allows the process to move faster, revealing the best offspring years before their traits would be demonstrated by natural growth and encountering disease. The closer the gap between generations, the faster gains accumulate.

Steven Strauss, a professor of forest biotechnology at Oregon State University who wasn’t involved in the study, said the paper identified some promising genes. He wants scientists to be able to edit the genes themselves, a possibly faster, more precise path to a better tree. In an accompanying commentary piece in Science, he says regulations can bog down these ideas for years.

“People just won’t consider biotech because it is on the other side of this social, legal barrier” and that’s shortsighted, he said.

For people who have closely studied the American chestnut, the work begs an almost existential question: How much can the American chestnut be changed and still be an American chestnut?

“The American chestnut has a unique evolutionary history, it has a specific place in the North American ecosystem,” said Donald Edward Davis, author of the American chestnut, an environmental history. “Having that tree and no other trees would be sort of the gold standard.”

He said the tree was a keystone species, useful to humans and vital to bigger populations of squirrels, chipmunks and black bears — hybrids might not be as majestic or effective. He was pleased that the authors included some surviving American chestnuts in their proposal, but favored an approach that relied on them more heavily.

“Not that the hybrid approach is itself bad, it is just that why not try to get the wild American trees back in the forest, back in the ecosystem, and exhaust all possibilities from doing that before we move on to some of these other methods?” he said.

Lovells said resurrecting the species requires introducing genetic diversity from outside the traditional pool of American chestnut trees. The study authors’ goal is tall, resilient trees and they are optimistic.

“I think if we only select American chestnut (tree genes), period, there’s going to be too small of a pool and we’re going to end up with a genetic bottleneck that will lead to extinction in the future,” said Lovell.

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The changes are due to come into effect from April

More than 2,000 families could be impacted by a reduction in the availability of childminders as a result of changes to how the profession is taxed, the head of the Northern Ireland Childminders Association has warned.

Patricia Lewsley Mooney was speaking to Belfast Live after she met with HMRC to raise the concerns of their members regarding changes to the ‘wear and tear’ tax discount as a result of the Government’s introduction of the Making Tax Digital system, which is due to be rolled out from April.

Under the current system, childminders can claim a 10 per cent discount on their tax bill to account for ‘wear and tear’ on their homes caused by operating their businesses.

HMRC have said that those using the new MTD system will be able to see an in-year estimate of how much tax they owe, understand their cash flow better, make more informed financial decisions for their business and reduce the risk of under or overpaying tax and that claiming actual costs may be more beneficial than the flat-rate deduction, ensuring that expenses accurately reflect the valuable work childminders do.

Childminders with a qualifying income of over £50,000 are required to use MTD from April 2026. These childminders, HMRC have said that, like any other business, they can continue to get full tax relief on the business proportion of their expenses when they join MTD, meaning their actual expenses will need to be recorded and deducted.

“Very few childminders in Northern Ireland will be affected this year, because in 26/27 it is anybody earning over £50,000.. Then, from 27/28, it will be £30,000, and by 28/29, it will be anyone earning over £20,000 moving onto the new system. So, while we have had one enquiry from a childminder who earns more than £50,000, it will be next year before we properly start to see the impact,” Patricia said.

“There hasn’t been a good enough lead-in time or understanding of what the process is like.

“We’ve done a UK-wide survey that tells us that 68 per cent of our childminders are still paper-based, so it’s going onto that Making Tax Digital and the cost of that, because many of them won’t have laptops or scanners and some of them don’t even have phones.”

HMRC said that childminders do not currently get a separate allowance from HMRC, and that administrative changes for childminders were announced at the Budget to record keeping and the way some expenses are calculated for childminders in MTD.

They also said that they are aware that childminders are uncertain about how these changes may affect them and may have seen misleading information online. They confirmed that they are supporting customers with a suite of guidance products, direct communications, webinars, live events and social media activity to help them to prepare. and are using targeted paid-for advertising and making direct contact with MTD customers by writing to them to explain the changes and how to prepare.

“Just after Christmas, we were told that the changes were coming in and that they were taking away the 10 per cent ‘wear and tear’ tax discount on childminders without any consultation,” Patricia said.

Patricia Lewsley Mooney refuted the claim by HMRC that childminders will still be able to claim for wear and tear under the new system.

“The only people that will be able to continue are those that are on the different income levels,” she said. “So anybody earning under £50,000 this year can still claim it next January, and those under £30,000 can claim it the following January. That means that anybody earning under 20,000 who will not be in the Making Tax Digital bracket will still be able to continue to claim the 10 per cent.

“My worry is that the majority of our childminders who are maybe earning 20 to £25,000 will decide to lower their capacity and go in under the threshold of £20,000 to be able to claim the 10 per cent wear and tear discount.

“That will put huge strain on a sector which is already straining at the sides with regard to capacity.”

Patricia said that this could have a detrimental impact on the availability of childcare places in Northern Ireland.

“We’ve done our own survey of 833 childminders, asking them how many families they work with. So, if we are saying that half of those decide to leave the sector, which the original survey said, then you’re talking about 2,034 families that would be affected.”

Lagan Valley MLA and member of Stormont’s Education Committee, Michelle Guy, said that the move was “alarming”.

“Childminders provide a vital source of childcare for parents in Northern Ireland. This is a sector that’s already under a lot of pressure, and everybody knows there is a childcare crisis. So to introduce a change that would have an impact on childminders to the extent that a number will decide that they can’t afford to be a childminder anymore, it’s something I’m very, very concerned about.

“I’m also concerned about how this has been rolled out. They have not engaged at all with our local childminding associations, and they haven’t done any proper impact assessment.

“This seems to have been done v ery quickly on the back of an envelope one day and issued in a statement in December, and that’s not good enough, there’s a real threat in terms of our economy here too with the need for childcare, if you start removing, and losing childminders from the the sector, then that’s going to have an impact on parents and their ability to go to work.

“This may especially impact some parents with kids with special educational needs because the flexibility a nd the type of care they get in a childminding setting will suit a lot of those families a lot better. I’m not sure that the reward they think they’re going to get from it will be worth it, so I just want the HMRC to really meaningfully engage, understand the impact of what they’re doing, and at the very least pause this move right now until we can have more conversations.”

Michelle Guy also expressed concern about the impact this could have on families in rural communities where access to childminders may be limited and called on the Finance and Education Ministers to work together to lobby on behalf of childminders in Northern Ireland.

An HMRC spokesperson said: “All childminders will still be able to claim for the same categories of expenses as they currently do, including wear and tear. Those in MTD may also be able to claim more than they currently do.”

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The death of Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 was never going to be the end of his menacing presence in the American political orbit. More than six years later, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has now released millions of the “Epstein files” to a hungry and impatient audience.

But the DoJ’s conduct has set new questions in motion, this time about its own agenda in protecting powerful figures, including – according to his political opponents – the US president, Donald Trump. The unfolding saga reveals unsettling truths about elite power networks and our own ability to critically assess information in an era of extreme overload.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act compelled the DoJ to release the files to the fullest extent possible. The content is harrowing and shocking. But there are also a number of troubling implications in the DoJ’s actions in the build up to, and since, the release of the files, as well as in the manner in which sensitive information was handled.

Despite a statutory deadline of December 19 2025, the DoJ only began drip-feeding documents on the deadline day itself, drawing widespread criticism. And while an initial DoJ report identified 6 million “responsive” documents, the deputy attorney-general, Todd Blanche, claimed on January 30 that the cumulative release of 3.5 million documents met all legal obligations. This leaves 2.5 million documents effectively missing.

There were, predictably, accusations of a cover up. At the very least, in stalling the release of the files and then turning a trickle into a flood, the DoJ could reasonably be accused of malicious compliance; trying to bury damaging needles in mountainous haystacks.

Beyond the missing files, congressional oversight has been throttled. Secure “reading rooms” were established where sitting members, without staff, were able to review unredacted pages taking only hand-written notes. Quite the task with 3.5 million documents.

Most disturbingly, the DoJ’s redaction process appeared inverted. According to Democrat lawmaker, Ro Khanna, who has scrutinised unredacted versions of the files, high-profile names were shielded, yet the full names and contact details of 43 victims were published alongside graphic photographs of young women and potentially minors.

The DoJ acknowledged these “mistakes”, but in combination with the delayed release and the missing files, alarm bells are ringing that this, too, forms part of a more sinister strategy to divert attention away from the content of the files themselves through chaos.

Gambling on the attention economy

The DoJ appears to be making two significant gambles on the attention economy of the digital age. The first relies on information and crisis exhaustion. Releasing a massive data dump creates a triage and narrative challenge that few journalists or activists can meet.

This is not necessarily new: the practice, known in the US as “backing up the truck”, which involved the government when asked to divulge sensitive public documents, releasing a truckload of documents in which they hid the sensitive ones, is a time-honoured and devious tactic well known to journalists.

In a world where attention is a commodity, the Trump administration appears to be betting that the public simply lacks the bandwidth to process the Epstein revelations amid a sea of manufactured and organic distractions.

Consider the current pulls on even a mildly engaged citizen in the US. Since the start of the year, ICE and other immigration agencies have escalated their activities in US cities, most notably in Minnesota where they have killed two Americans without, critics say, probable cause or likely sanction.

The US captured the leader of Venezuela in a legally dubious military raid, and implied other Latin American leaders could face the same demise. Trump ramped up his threats to annex Greenland.

Meanwhile millions of Americans have seen their health insurance premiums soar as a result of Republicans declining to extend healthcare subsidies.

It is little wonder that there have been observations in US media outlets that the public response to the Epstein revelations has seemed muted in comparison to audiences in the UK and elsewhere. With “perma-crisis” as the baseline, the administration appears to be betting that public focus will be dragged away by the next trending issue.

The partisan shield

Americans are, in fact, responding to the revelations. And while there has been an unusually bipartisan horror at the content of the files, this issue, as with so many others, has served to entrench divisions and resentment towards the partisan “other”.

This is at the heart of the administration’s second gamble. Research demonstrates that increasingly, our partisan identity forms a crucial part of our whole social identity. In effect, who we support defines a large part of how we see ourselves in the world. So strong is the connection, that challenges to our partisan beliefs feel like an existential threat to who we are.

Confronted with such a threat, we are more likely to double down on those beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence. So much so, that in extreme cases, people are able to see any contrary views as evidence of a conspiracy against them, their peers and their leaders. Trump has long understood this hold he has over his base.

The Maga community produced the loudest calls for the Epstein files, believing they would expose a “deep state” paedophile ring involving the Clintons and Hollywood elites. Indeed, Bill Clinton is in the files, mentioned multiple times, although he denies any wrongdoing and there has been nothing published to suggest he has been involved in any.

But to maintain their cognitive consistency, supporters must convince themselves that while the files condemn their enemies, the more than 30,000 references to Donald Trump are part of a broad conspiracy to defenestrate their leader.

Looming on the horizon to focus minds are the 2026 midterm elections in November. Republicans and the Trump White House may be gambling once more on the attention economy having long since consigned Epstein to history. Democrats will have to fight to maintain focus on Trump’s behaviour both in the files and about the files while tackling the barrage of injustices that, in reality, feel much more relevant to Americans in their day-to-day lives.

The other names in the files, those of the victims, remain much further away from any kind of justice.

Concern is growing for missing Olivia, and an appeal has been launched by police to locate her whereabouts

A missing 13-year-old girl has been spotted at a train station 100 miles away from her home. South Wales Police are appealing to the public for its help in finding Olivia, from the Shropshire area.

The teenager was last seen at Cardiff Central train station on Saturday, February 7. Police have released her photo, description, and what she was last seen wearing in the hopes it will trigger someone’s memory. They also said Olivia has links to three different areas in Cardiff.

A statement from South Wales Police read: “We are appealing for your help to locate Olivia.

“Olivia, 13, is from Shropshire but was last seen in Cardiff Central train station on Saturday evening (Feb 7).

“She was wearing black leggings, black trainers, a bright pink and blue jacket, and usually wears her hair in a high bun – as pictured.