By NATASHA ANDERSON, US SENIOR NEWS REPORTER

Published: 20:07 BST, 21 August 2026 | Updated: 20:18 BST, 21 August 2026

The brother of Hayden Panettiere’s on-off boyfriend Brian Hickerson has broken his silence to reveal the late actress’s final moments.

Brian administered Narcan to the star after he and his brother, Zach, found her unconscious in an AirBnB in Greenville, South Carolina, Zach told TMZ.

Zach said he was calling 911 while Brian gave Panettiere the medication, which is typically administered to reverse an opioid overdose.

The 38-year-old said he, Brian and the actress were planning to get lunch and go indoor golfing after he attended church.

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He called and texted Panettiere and his brother as he was leaving the Sunday service, but didn’t hear back form them, he recalled. 

Zach assumed the pair were sleeping so he drove back to the rental, but he didn’t have the door code to the unit so he couldn’t get in.

‘I knocked loudly which apparently woke Brian up from a nap they were both taking on the pull out couch bed in the living room. When we went in and tried to wake Hayden up for lunch, we realized she was unconscious,’ he said.

‘I immediately called 911 and Brian gave her Narcan. We then jointly performed CPR while 911 was on speaker until Fire and EMS arrived.’

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‘At that point we watched as they tried every measure possible to save her life,’ he added.

Brian Hickerson administered Narcan to Hayden Panettiere, pictured together, after he and his brother Zach found her unconscious in an AirBnB in Greenville, South Carolina

Zach Hickerson called 911 as Brian administered the drug

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Zach says he is ‘beyond heartbroken and devastated’ by Panettiere’s death.

He shared how over the past eight years the actress had become one of my ‘dearest and closest friends,’ adding they she was someone he loved and cared for deeply.

He urged for an end to the ‘assumptions, speculations and accusations’ that are swirling around the star’s death.

Zach claimed the ‘truth’ will come out once police have completed their investigation. 

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This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates. 

The site is “manifesting” roles for Meghan in the musical adaptation of 13 Going On 30, which has yet to debut in the West End; The Devil Wears Prada, which currently stars Vanessa Williams; Agatha Christie’s Witness for The Prosecution; and 2:22 A Ghost Story, which counts Lily Allen, James Buckley, Laura Whitmore, Sophia Bush, Stephanie Beatriz, Nathaniel Curtis, and more famous names among its stars.

EastEnders fans think Sean Slater’s confirmed comeback to the BBC soap spells the return of Lacey Turner’s character Stacey Slater, and it could be linked to a New Year twist

Could Stacey Slater be confirmed for a New Year’s Day twist on EastEnders?

Fans certainly think so, as they’re predicting that her comeback looms. Lacey Turner is currently not filming with the show, taking extended leave, while she’s also due to star in this year’s Strictly Come Dancing.

So when Sean Slater’s return was confirmed, fans questioned if Stacey’s own return was imminent. After all, Stacey left to live with her brother Sean in Brazil.

So with Sean coming back for good, surely Stacey will head back too? Fans think it confirms one of two flashforward theories linked to New Year’s Day 2027.

Now that fans know there’s a chance Stacey will be back sooner than we thought, they think she will return at New Year. The other theory that fans have speculated for months and now “seems plausible” is that Stacey could be the pregnant woman in her ex Max Branning’s bed.

So does Sean’s return confirm Stacey is coming back, and are fans right that she will be in the New Year episode? Fans are convinced with one writing: “Stacey is surely not far behind! Return at new year’s??”

Another fan said: “I just had a thought: what if Stacey returns close to new year heavily pregnant by some Brazilian boyfriend, and she cheats with Max while pregnant.” A third fan said: “Stacey will probably soon follow back wherever the Slaters set up home next.

“Lacey’s doing Strictly, an easy commute with both filmed at Elstree to film for NY return?” New Year or not, other viewers were sure a return for Stacey had been sealed.

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A fan said: “The prospect of a surprise Stacey comeback when Sean returns has really lifted my spirits. The queen of the square is back and I could not be more seated.”

Another posted: “If this doesn’t raise the prospect of Stacey coming back before earlier than we thought, I don’t know what does.” A further comment said: “Surely this means Stacey isn’t too far behind then?”

The theory kept on being shared as one fan posted: “Stacey looms! Return imminent?” Another said: “Does that mean Stacey isn’t far behind bc she went to Brazil to live with him didn’t she.”

Meanwhile, fans have wondered why Stacey won’t return sooner for the funeral of her cousin Zoe Slater, who is reportedly being killed off. Cast members were on location this week filming someone’s send-off, and it’s thought to be Zoe’s as the Slaters were out in force, minus Stacey.

EastEnders airs Mondays to Thursdays at 7:30pm on BBC One and BBC iPlayer. * Follow Mirror Celebs and TV on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .

At least 15 people have been killed in a Russian double-tap drone strike on a shopping centre in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, local officials have said.

Another 130 people – including 23 children – were injured in the city’s biggest mall. More people are also reported to be trapped in the rubble.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the “absolutely cynical and despicable” daytime attack in his home town was carried out in “two waves”, with the second strike targeting emergency workers at the scene.

Dramatic footage verified by the BBC shows the second drone hitting the already burning shopping centre in the Dnipropetrovsk region. Russia’s military has not commented.

Dnipropetrovsk regional head Oleksandr Hanzha said on Friday evening that there were now 15 confirmed fatalities, including two people who died later in hospital.

He said that 130 people were injured, including 29 who were in a serious condition. There are fears the death toll would rise further.

Rescuers teams from four other Ukrainian regions are being urgently deployed to help search for survivors.

Earlier in the day, Kryvyi Rih Mayor Oleksandr Vilkul said the Russian drones were flying at “extremely low altitudes”, describing the attackers as “animals”.

“There are missing people who are not responding to calls,” the mayor added.

This comes a day after 17 people were killed and more than 40 injured in a major Russian missile and drone attack on Ukraine’s capital Kyiv.

Blocks of flats and warehouses were struck overnight across the city, local officials said. A children’s hospital and school were also damaged.

Earlier on Friday, Ukraine’s military said it carried out strikes on an oil refinery and a military airfield deep inside Russia.

Ukraine has in recent months intensified attacks on Russian energy facilities, as well as on warehouses of the country’s largest online retailer Wildberries.

Kyiv describes them as legitimate targets because they help finance Russia’s war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and currently Moscow controls about a fifth of Ukrainian territory in the south-east.

The fire service attended the incident at the Waterworks in North Belfast

The fire service rescued a child who had got stuck in “dangerous” silt in a North Belfast park.

The Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service were called to the Waterworks off Antrim Road at 8.39pm on Thursday, August 20, following reports that a child had got stuck in the mud.

An appliance from Whitla and one from Westland Fire Station attended the scene along with a specialist rescue team.

Over the past few weeks a section of the water at the waterworks has dried up. It is understood that a football was kicked onto this area and the child had got stuck when going to retreive it.

Signs have been put up on fencing warning people that the silt that has been revealed is soft and could be dangerous.

The child was quickly rescued by firefighters upon their arrival.

A NIFRS spokesperson said: “Firefighters were called to reports of a casualty stuck in mud on Cavehill Road, Fortwilliam, Belfast. Firefighters used specialist rescue equipment to rescue the casualty. The incident was dealt with by 9.06pm.”

For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our daily newsletter here.

For the royal family, it is most likely to be the opposite.

Away over the pond, Harry and Megan were out of sight and largely out of mind – the only times they were noticed was when they made an embarrassing television appearance which could be laughed away.

Now, though, they are going to be back in our faces, demanding privacy through the most public of headlines as they create some form of a rival court to the House of Windsor.

Some people will dismiss this as an irrelevant soap opera, but that is not the case.

There is now going to be a never-ending debate about security and who pays for it, which in turn will lead to scrutiny of Harry’s finances – how can someone without a real job afford homes outside London, in Montecito and in Portugal as well as a £9.5m legal bill? Extravagance will not sit well with ordinary people struggling with a cost of living crisis.

And Britain, which is experiencing a never-ending churn of prime ministers, needs a stable royal family. Now public pressure has forced out Andrew – which Harry should take as a warning – the royals are trying to present a stable, worthwhile image as William prepares to take over from his father.

Harry and Megan letting off fireworks will damage all that.

We do not wish Harry ill, but we do hope for quiet, for a respect for his brother and father, and for the country.

The death of Jason Arday, following weeks of news coverage of his life and career, has prompted calls for a new inquiry into press standards. The University of Cambridge academic faced an overwhelming volume of comment from international news organisations, broadcasters, digital-native publications and the public on social media. His family said it all had a catastrophic impact on his life. I should underline from the start that I have enormous sympathy for what Arday went through, and my thoughts are with his family and friends.

Given the demands from some politicians and pressure groups for a public inquiry into the press’s actions in reporting on Arday, it is worth looking at how newspapers covered the emergence of the plagiarism allegations against him, the claims he made about his life and career, his resignation from Cambridge, his death and the reaction to it.

There is a lot of potential material to consider, and a variety of approaches could be employed. Here, I have looked at substantive articles published in the print editions of national newspapers. I haven’t included articles published solely on newspaper websites, nor newspapers’ social media or multimedia output. Nor have I analysed broadcaster or social media output. There is a vast amount of other content that could, and no doubt will in due course, be considered.

However, given that there is pressure for an inquiry into the press, it is sensible to begin with the print editions, which remain a core driver of newspapers’ news-gathering and commissioning processes.

I have looked at the number and type of articles published, and the key themes that they engaged with. I haven’t conducted a close textual reading, rather categorising the overarching themes of an article. I have only considered substantive articles produced by a search using data analysis by the company LexisNexis from July 25, the day the plagiarism allegations were first reported, until August 20. Where a story was repeated in different editions of the newspapers, I disregarded duplicates, and I discounted letters to the editor, promotions or indexes, as well as passing references in articles that were primarily about something else.

I wanted to focus on articles that were chiefly about Arday, his work or the fallout from the events of the past month. That said, I don’t disregard the impact that all of these additional pieces of output may have had on Arday – they contributed to the intense volume of content that has been created during these weeks.

The LexisNexis results produced a result of 553 articles from 14 publications. Cleaning the data produced a final corpus of 242 articles for consideration. The Times produced the most articles – 53 in the daily edition and a further eight in the Sunday Times.

The data about the articles, the date of publication, the type of article, and its themes were coded by hand; the figures in this article were created using AI to visualise the data. There were two peaks in coverage: after Arday resigned from Cambridge University on August 5 and following his death on August 14.

The start of the coverage

The plagiarism allegations were first reported by the Daily Telegraph, The Times and the Daily Mail on July 25. The Times and the Daily Telegraph continue to report the story regularly from the last days of July, with other newspapers starting to publish around the time of Arday’s resignation. In the days that followed, a significant number of articles were published.

Most of the articles are news stories about the developing situation. But there are also several opinion-led pieces too. The Times publishes 30 news stories and 13 opinion pieces, as well as news analysis, leaders, a review of Arday’s memoir, and the only interview with the academic.

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The coverage begins with questions about plagiarism in his academic work, but quickly moves to consider Arday’s wider claims about his life, pegged to the imminent publication of his memoir. From the very beginning, some newspapers frame questions about Arday’s work in the context of Cambridge’s efforts to diversify its academic workforce. The Daily Telegraph’s first story is headlined “Cambridge’s diversity pin-up in plagiarism row”. This sets the tone for much of the subsequent reporting.

From relatively early on, concerns are raised about the amount of reporting and comment the story is generating through both the press and social media. The Times journalist Giles Coren writes about Arday twice in his columns on August 1 and 11. On both occasions, he raises questions about the volume and impact of the coverage. Coren has subsequently been criticised for his choice of language – he referred to everyone “slaughtering” Arday – but he is clearly critical of the way the story is being covered.

Finally, there is the question of the proportionality of the coverage. To what extent were newspapers dealing with questions of legitimate public interest, rather than pursuing a story that had captured a degree of public enthusiasm, with consequent financial benefits to their publications?

While it is true that allegations of run-of-the-mill academic misconduct seem unlikely to interest journalists, it is also true that Arday was an emerging public intellectual. His media appearances – including on BBC Question Time and guest editing Radio 4’s Today – plus the publication of a mainstream commercial memoir featuring a range of extraordinary claims, meant he inevitably had a higher profile than his peers.

Many of the news stories in the sample do attempt to answer questions that are legitimate to ask. On the other hand, some people have expressed the view that the coverage was motivated by racism from the start – Arday’s former mentor at Cambridge Lord Simon Woolley referred to his friend being “hounded to death”.

Framing associated with race is present throughout the sample, and some articles explicitly accuse Cambridge of only appointing Arday as a professor because of the colour of his skin. For example columnist Julia Hartley-Brewer’s article in The Sun on August 7 was headlined “Prof hasn’t been hounded from job because he is black…it looks like he only got the job because he is black”.

There is no question that some journalists, opinion columnists in particular, viewed this story through the lens of wider battles over culture. Was it proportionate? I hope editors will reflect on that at some length. But as I pointed out at the beginning, the newspaper coverage is only a part of the volume of content created. All of those who’ve contributed to the firehose of comment need to reflect on their part in it.

The victim in all of this is unquestionably Arday. There may have been questions that he needed to answer about his life and work. But the penalty he paid for being caught at the heart of this firestorm was out of all proportion to any offence he may have committed.

The offer, which includes 10 per cent off flights, follows high demand from Yorkshire travellers flying from Leeds Bradford Airport after easyJet announced it would no longer be flying from the airport.

It can be redeemed using the code YORKSHIRE100, while the flight discount can be accessed with YORKSHIRE10.

The promotion covers departures until March 31, 2028, and bookings must be made by August 31, 2026.

Jet2 announces offer for discounted holidays from Leeds Bradford Airport

Steve Heapy, chief executive of Jet2, said: “We have been proudly operating from Leeds Bradford Airport since 2003, when we launched with just two aircraft, and since then we have grown to become Yorkshire’s leading airline and tour operator.

“Our longstanding commitment to the region has never been stronger and we want to say thank you to our loyal customers and independent travel agent partners by launching these brand-new offers today.”

The airline will base 15 aircraft at the airport by summer 2027.

Next year, Jet2 will introduce six new destinations from Leeds Bradford: Hurghada and Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt, Tunisia, Preveza, Santorini, and Tivat in Montenegro.

The company now operates its largest programme ever from the airport, offering 65 destinations.

Mr Heapy said: “Customers deserve the best experience and choice when it comes to their well-deserved holidays and that is what we look forward to continuing to provide from Leeds Bradford for many years to come.

“Whether it’s a sunshine getaway, a ski trip or city break escape, this offer makes booking that holiday even easier and we know our loyal customers will be delighted.”

Additional savings are available for single-parent families, who can use YORKSHIRE100SPF to save £100, and solo travellers, who can use YORKSHIRE50SOLO to save £50.

Bookings can be made directly through Jet2 or via independent travel agents.

Jet2 began operating from Leeds Bradford Airport in 2003 with just two aircraft.

Since then, it has grown to become Yorkshire’s leading airline and tour operator, employing thousands of people in the region.

The company said the scale of its current programme and the introduction of new destinations reflect its confidence in continued demand from customers and travel agents across Yorkshire.

Will you be taking advantage of this deal from Jet2? Let us know in the comments.

The Scarborough Spa Cliff Lift has been shut down after an independent assessment by specialist engineers identified problems with its infrastructure and critical components.

Carl Les, leader of North Yorkshire Council, said: “The lift is an important part of Scarborough’s history and identity, and we recognise the affection people have for this landmark attraction.

READ MORE: Emergency services called to incident in North Street, York

“We are now carefully reviewing the report and considering what options may be available.

“No decisions have yet been made regarding the scope of any future works, timescales or funding arrangements.”

Although the lift has undergone routine inspections and maintenance over the years, the latest engineering survey took a more detailed look at the condition of the tracks, carriages, and associated infrastructure.

Built during the Victorian era, the lift was constructed at a cost of around £8,000.

Its coastal location exposes it to salt-laden air, strong winds, and harsh weather conditions, all of which contribute to accelerated wear and corrosion.

North Yorkshire Council has said it will continue to review the findings and will provide further updates in due course.