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A mum is urging parents to be aware of the symptoms that could flag childhood cancer, after her son was diagnosed with leukaemia at just 13 years old and tragically died a year later.

Louise Bennett, from Rugby, Warwickshire, said her son Fred had initially seemed tired and off his food, which the family put down as typical teenage changes and tiredness with the school year coming to a close.

But when his glands began to swell, they took him to the GP thinking it might be glandular fever instead.

A blood test revealed he had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), and within hours he was preparing to begin treatment at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

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Around 1,900 children aged 0-14 are diagnosed with cancer in the UK every year, and cancer remains the leading cause of death from disease among children.

Yet survey findings from CCLG: The Children & Young People’s Cancer Association reveal that public awareness of childhood cancer is low.

Louise said: “I didn’t know anything about childhood cancer in terms of what to look for. I had memorised all the symptoms of meningitis. I knew about sepsis. I actually sent my husband a list of sepsis symptoms the day before we took him to the GP because that was in my mind.

“But a cancer diagnosis was completely off our radar.”

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Sadly, her son died in May 2020 – a year after his diagnosis – aged 14.

The most common types of cancer in children are leukaemia, brain tumours and lymphomas, according to Children With Cancer UK.

As the symptoms of childhood cancer can mimic common illnesses and viral infections, CCLG’s Child Cancer Smart campaign is encouraging parents and carers to look for patterns of symptoms rather than focusing on a single sign.

Dr Sharna Shanmugavadivel, a paediatric emergency medicine doctor and the Child Cancer Smart lead, has shared three patterns of change in a child’s health that may need investigating.

If symptoms don’t go away after two weeks or something doesn’t feel right, her advice is simple: “Trust your instincts and see a doctor.”

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Stay vigilant for three symptom patterns

1. Persistent symptoms

These are symptoms that do not improve or go away as expected and keep coming back after a child has been unwell.

Parents and carers should look out for symptoms that last longer than expected or where their child is taking more time than usual to recover from an illness, said CCLG.

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2. Progressive symptoms

Any symptoms that get worse, become more frequent, or change over time rather than improving as expected should be flagged with a GP.

Parents and carers should look out for changes in the way symptoms develop, for example, a child may start with one symptom, such as a headache, but over time the symptom may become more severe or additional symptoms may appear.

3. Clustered symptoms

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This refers to a group of symptoms that appear together rather than a single symptom on its own. Parents and carers should look out for combinations of symptoms, particularly when they occur at the same time, persist, or seem unusual for their child.

For example, a child who has ongoing tiredness alongside unexplained bruising, persistent pain, fever, or a lump may need further medical advice.

Symptoms can vary depending on the type of cancer, but these should definitely be checked out

Some of the more common signs and symptoms of childhood cancer include:

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• persistent tiredness or paleness,
• repeated infections,
• flu-like symptoms that don’t go away,
• unexplained bruising or bleeding,
• ongoing fever or night sweats,
• persistent aches or pains,
• unexplained lumps or swelling,
• limping or leg weakness,
• changes in bowel habits,
• unexplained weight loss,
• slow growth,
• and changes in behaviour.

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In news that will come as little surprise to anyone who’s binge-watched Apple TV+’s Widow’s Bay in the last five months, the hit comedy horror was the big winner at this year’s Emmys.

Across major and technical categories, the show came away with a total of 14 Emmys this year, the most for any single season of a comedy in the awards show’s history.

This included acting wins for cast members Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root and Matthew Rhys, who also made history as the first performer to win an Emmy for two leading performances in the same night, having also picked up a prize for his work in Netflix’s The Beast In Me.

Meanwhile, Hacks star Jean Smart set a new record of her own, as the first person to win Best Actress for every single season of a show’s run.

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With a total of eight wins across her career, she now equals Cloris Leachman and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ record for the most acting wins at the Emmys.

Here’s the full list of who won what at the 2026 Emmys on Monday night…

Outstanding Supporting Actress In A Comedy Series

Kate O’Flynn (Widow’s Bay)

Outstanding Lead Actress In A Comedy Series

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Outstanding Lead Actor In A Limited Series, Anthology Series Or TV Movie

Matthew Rhys (The Beast In Me)

Outstanding Supporting Actress In A Drama Series

Allison Janney (The Diplomat)

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Outstanding Lead Actress In A Drama Series

Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Comedy Series

Stephen Root (Widow’s Bay)

Outstanding Reality Competition

Outstanding Lead Actor In A Drama Series

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Outstanding Supporting Actor In A Drama Series

Outstanding Lead Actress In A Limited Series, Anthology Series Or TV Movie

Sally Field (Remarkably Bright Creatures)

Outstanding Lead Actor In A Comedy Series

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Matthew Rhys (Widow’s Bay)

Outstanding Writing For A Comedy Series

Outstanding Directing For A Drama Series

Outstanding Variety Series

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The Late Show With Stephen Colbert

Outstanding Directing For A Comedy Series

Outstanding Writing For A Drama Series

Outstanding Limited Series, Anthology Series Or TV Movie

Outstanding Drama Series

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Outstanding Comedy Series

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If one or both of your parents lives to 100 – or surpasses that mighty age – it might mean you’re likely to reap the rewards, too.

Not only do you get to spend more time with your parent(s), but a new study suggests children of centenarians are likely to also live longer – and they’re less likely to develop cardiovascular disease and hypertension, too.

What did the study find?

Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Boston University, and Tufts Medical Center analysed data from three long-running studies. A total of 2,319 centenarians’ offspring were compared with 2,703 controls (the offspring of people who lived to age 85 or younger).

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Compared with people whose parents had shorter lifespans, centenarians’ offspring had a 42% lower risk of early death, the study found. They also had a 33% lower risk of cardiovascular disease, and a 32% lower risk of high blood pressure.

Having a centenarian parent didn’t seem to affect cancer or stroke risk, however.

Daniel Lozano Gonzalez via Getty Images

“The overall consistency of these findings across these quite different studies was especially noteworthy and reinforces the idea that exceptional longevity runs in families,” said Eric Reed, a staff scientist in medicine and lead author of the study.

“This is not to say that lifestyle doesn’t count – healthy behaviours remain important for everyone.”

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Researchers said studying families with exceptional longevity can provide a window into the biology of healthy ageing and might even lead to treatments that could enhance lifespan, including in those who don’t inherit exceptional longevity from their parents.

Study co-author Paola Sebastiani, director of the Center for Quantitative Methods and Data Science at Tufts Medical Center, ended: “These findings bring us closer to understanding the biological factors that may help protect against age-related disease and promote longer, healthier lives.”

What can I do for my own longevity?

If you’re keen to try and ‘lifemaxx’, Dr Asiya Maula, a GP and functional and lifestyle medicine specialist at The Health Suite, previously shared three habits she swears by for healthy ageing and longevity.

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1. Regular strength training and general exercise

“Building and maintaining muscle mass is so important, especially as we age,” Dr Maula said.

“I try to stick to at least two strength sessions a week, plus making sure I do some kind of daily movement each day, whether that be a brisk walk, some yoga or swimming.”

2. Getting at least seven hours sleep a night

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“Good quality sleep is fundamental to living a healthy life so I always try to prioritise getting at least seven hours each night,” the doctor added.

“That means sticking to a regular bedtime routine and turning off my phone at least an hour before bed each night.”

3. Following a Mediterranean diet

“Finally, I like to stick to a Mediterranean diet that prioritises whole foods, healthy fats and lean protein,” the GP ended.

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“Numerous studies have linked a Mediterranean diet to a reduced risk of chronic disease and increased lifespan. It’s also not overly restrictive, so it doesn’t feel like a diet, but becomes a way of life instead.”

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Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. For more information on his work, visit lordashcroft.com

 Much has changed since we last looked at the idea of an alliance between Reform UK and the Conservatives. It was, for one thing, a whole prime minister ago (admittedly not as great a measure of political time as it once was), and the fortunes of several parties look different. Is the same true for the prospects of a united right?

A year ago, with a consistent ten-point poll lead and a divided opposition, Nigel Farage could credibly claim that he was going to win the next election and form a majority government with no help from anyone else. That lead has disappeared, and as we saw in Gorton and Denton, Caerphilly and Makerfield, the party’s opponents are willing to vote tactically to keep Reform out. This is not to say that a Reform majority government is impossible, but it is certainly not inevitable. Even if Labour’s Burnham bounce subsides, the damaging publicity around Reform’s finances is likely to endure.

Another factor is the removal of Keir Starmer, whose tenure was marked by a parade of unforced errors and an inability to articulate any kind of purpose: this, rather than the unpalatable but necessary decisions inherent in modern government, was the root of his unpopularity. Even allowing for the adage that elections are lost by governments rather than won by oppositions, Keir Starmer was the ideal incumbent for the Conservatives and Reform.

We might also consider recent policy announcements from the two parties, which suggest might they could find common ground in areas like net zero, welfare, defence and the European Convention on Human Rights.

All of that being the case, if Nigel Farage regarded coming to an agreement with the Conservatives as an unnecessary and avoidable risk, that is no longer the case – not because it isn’t risky, but because all options are risky. Leaders can employ a risk-averse “ming vase” strategy when blessed with double-digit polling leads, but when their party is level or slightly behind in the polls, that won’t cut it.

On the Conservative side, if they would once have been the junior partner in an alliance with Reform, they would now look much more like equals. In the new political landscape, should they look at such an arrangement with new interest? When we looked at a potential Conservative-Reform alliance last September, we found it was considerably weaker than the sum of its parts. Have the changing circumstances made a united right more viable?

The starting point is that a party leader will need the support, or at least acquiescence, of their voters for any kind of deal. We found previously that Conservative voters were much more likely to oppose working with Reform: any alliance would disproportionately damage the Tories. We have analysed this again based on people’s answers to two questions: first their preference in a head-to-head between Burnham and the other party’s leader (Badenoch if they are Reform voters, Farage if they are Conservatives); second their preference for a coalition comprising Reform and the Tories or between Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens. Based on this, we have three groups:

• Loyalists, who prefer the other right-wing party’s leader to Burnham and who prefer a Conservative-Reform coalition
• Defectors, who prefer Burnham to the other right-wing party’s leader and who do not prefer a Reform-Conservative coalition in the event of a hung parliament (they either prefer the left-wing coalition or say they don’t know)
• Waverers, who do not fall into either of these category

Last time, a slender majority of Conservative voters were loyalists; this majority has shrunk to a plurality of just 40 per cent. The growth has mostly come in defectors, who are up by 10 points to 31 per cent. While Reform voters remain broadly positive about such an arrangement, the proportion of loyalists among them has dropped 6 points to 75 per cent; waverers and defectors are both up slightly compared to last time. Not only do Conservative voters remain much less positive than Reform voters about a Conservative-Reform alliance, their disapproval is growing more quickly.

As the name suggests, we would expect loyalists to stick with a Reform-Conservative alliance and defectors to refuse to vote for it. If we assume that all the loyalists, half of the waverers and none of the defectors would vote for a Reform-Conservative alliance, then we would currently expect it to poll 28 per cent of the vote – much less than the share the two parties currently command between them.

Of course, the argument could be made that these defectors – of either shade of blue – are not actually going to end up supporting the party which they currently say they do. To assess this, we turn to our political map, where we have plotted the current support for each of the major parties, as well as the Reform and Conservative voters of interest. The size of the bubbles is proportional to the size of the voter group, and the closer bubbles are together, the more similar these groups are.

The Conservative defectors (who prefer Burnham to Farage and do not prefer a Tory-Reform coalition to a Labour-Lib Dem-Green one) are at around the “12 o’clock” point on the map, not especially close to any of the major party bubbles. However, they are still closest to the Conservative bubble and therefore have most in common with current Conservative voters. The Conservative waverer bubble overlaps with the overall Conservative bubble, suggesting that this is where the centre of gravity in Conservative opinion currently sits.

For Reform, the overall bubble and the Reform loyalist bubble largely overlap – unsurprisingly, given that three quarters of Reform voters are loyalists. However, the Reform waverer bubble overlaps with the bubble for people intending to vote for a party other than the major parties (mostly Restore Britain). Therefore, while the Conservative defectors look likely to end up voting Conservative at the next election (if there isn’t a unite the right alliance), the Reform defectors – and especially the Reform waverers – are closer to the bubble for “another party” than their own party’s bubble.

This suggests that the voters who Reform would risk losing from making a deal with the Conservatives are already at high risk of switching away from Reform (mostly to Restore Britain), whereas the Conservatives would risk losing voters who are otherwise not especially likely to switch away from their party.

We can confirm this with a simple question about whether people feel there is a political party which represents them. Overall, 49 per cent of people say that they can usually find a party which more or less represents their views, while 40 per cent say that none of the current parties really represent them. The remaining 11 per cent say they don’t know. The chart below illustrates how this question breaks down among the various groups of Conservative and Reform voters.

The Reform defector column here is the noteworthy: two thirds of these people – who are currently saying that they’ll vote for Reform – say that none of the British political parties represent them. That suggests that these voters will be difficult for Reform to retain. In contrast, the Conservative defectors divide evenly as to whether they feel any party represents them. Looking at the political map, one can understand it: these voters are in a “no-man’s land” between the Labour and Conservative bubbles, albeit closer to the Tories. We have written before about the challenge Badenoch faces in keeping her voter coalition together: she cannot make these centrist “12 o’clock” voters the cornerstone of policy offerings because that gives Reform a free hand on the right, but nor can she lose them.

Another question – how likely people are to vote for each party are to support each party at the next election on a scale from zero to one hundred – allows us to distinguish between committed supporters and floating voters. We can therefore derive three categories of voters for each party:

• Core voters, who say their likelihood of supporting that party is very high (75+ out of 100)
• Soft voters, whose likelihood to support is between 50 and 75
• Potential voters, who are currently intending to support a different party but who are at least slightly open (25-49) to supporting this party

Asking about the individual parties we find Labour slightly ahead, but with the combined Reform and Conservative vote share some 13 points higher than the Labour vote share. Notably, Reform have the smallest gap between their floor and ceiling and the highest proportion of their current voters being core voters, demonstrating that they retain a highly motivated base, but have limited scope for expanding their vote share.

When we ask the same question including a Conservative-Reform alliance in place of the two parties separately we find a somewhat different picture:

Merely because of facing a Conservative-Reform alliance, Labour’s vote share increases five points, and their ceiling also increases by five points. One might think that this is a manifestation of anti-right bloc tactical voting, but in fact only 8 per cent of these voters come from other parties on the left: 31 per cent of these new Labour voters would currently vote for the Conservatives, 29 per cent are undecided, and more than a quarter say they would not vote.

The Conservative-Reform alliance cuts Labour’s current lead from 7 points to 5 points. However, while the Reform vote share and the Conservative vote share add up to 41 per cent, the alliance only manages 28 per cent – some 13 points lower. This is even worse than a year ago, when we found that a Conservative-Reform alliance would poll 10 points less than the sum of its parts. The alliance also has a high floor and a low ceiling. Its ceiling is at 33 per cent, halfway between the Reform’s at 28 per cent and the Conservatives’ at 38 per cent. These are inauspicious numbers for a putative alliance.

If uniting the right has never been more important since we entered the era of five-party politics, it has also never been more difficult. An electoral alliance between Reform and the Conservatives would be doomed to fail, and the Conservatives have much more to lose from trying.

Full data at LordAshcroftPolls.com

The post Lord Ashcroft: Can the right unite? I’ve revisited the question after a summer of upheaval in the political landscape appeared first on Conservative Home.

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NEW YORK — A state lawmaker who gained national attention for his opposition to unchecked AI during a failed campaign for Congress this year is launching a $30 million effort to unite Democrats around regulating the technology, according to the organization’s new website.

New York Assemblymember Alex Bores is unveiling the organization — called “Who Decides” — on Tuesday to “build the winning Democratic answer to AI,” according to a website that was publicly available Monday night.

“Who Decides’ goal is that by 2028, Democratic candidates from the top of the ticket on down run with a common AI safety agenda,” reads an announcement on the site dated Tuesday. “That means addressing the harms people already see and the broader danger that increasingly powerful and out-of-control systems could destabilize our economy, our democracy, and our safety.”

It was not immediately clear whether Who Decides would be organized as a federal super PAC, 501(c)(4) nonprofit or other type of group. The website has a “donate” link that redirects to a webpage hosted by “Give Butter,” an organization focused on helping nonprofits fundraise. The announcement said the group would reject “corporate money or contributions from senior executives at frontier AI companies.”

Bores did not immediately respond to questions about the organization Monday night, including whether Bores, a sitting state lawmaker, personally fundraised for the group while holding public office. He is launching the organization with his former chief of staff, Anna Myers, the website says.

The apparent launch of Who Decides comes at a moment when the quickly-advancing technology has become a major political issue.

Last week, a former Anthropic researcher issued a dire warning that artificial intelligence has a chance of bringing about the end of humanity. The concerns from the researcher, Jacob Coxon, who also worked for OpenAI, were followed up by calls from the leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI, along with Elon Musk, to regulate the industry and slow development to build more guardrails.

Politicians have scrambled to respond, with both parties trying to coalesce around a policy agenda — and political message — on the rapidly evolving issue. Former President Barack Obama called last week for Democrats to focus on AI, and prominent party strategists from across the ideological spectrum gathered to begin mapping out a strategy.

President Donald Trump rejected recent calls from Republicans and Democrats to quickly regulate the industry in a spate of Monday social media posts.

“We don’t let five people write the laws for hundreds of millions of Americans,” Bores says in the launch announcement on the website, an apparent reference to the top executives in the AI industry. “There is no reason to let them write the rules for AI.”

The group says on the site it will focus on 11 states that it says will be key to the 2028 presidential primary and general election: South Carolina, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It says it will conduct quarterly national and state polls, host national conferences and partner with local groups in the states.

Earlier this year, Bores lost the primary for retiring Manhattan Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler’s seat. His campaign largely centered on a push to regulate artificial intelligence following his work to pass the RAISE Act in the state Legislature, which aimed to enact safeguards for the technology. His campaign attracted a combined $21 million from super PACs backed by dueling factions of the AI community, which spent both in support and opposition of him. Democratic Assemblymember Micah Lasher ultimately won the primary and is all but assured to win in November in the deep-blue seat.

“The lesson Bores and Myers took from those fights was that confronting the AI industry is fertile political ground and that public demand for answers on AI policy exists but remains scattered,” the website said, referencing his congressional campaign. “What’s missing is a coalition capable of turning that energy into a governing consensus before the technology, the economic dislocation, and the partisan battle lines harden.”

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