A relaxed environment has been part of McCullum’s England set-up since he took over the Test side in 2022 – an attempt to relieve players of the pressures of playing international cricket.

England were accused of a lack of adequate preparation for the Ashes, playing only one warm-up match against England Lions at a club ground in Perth before the first Test.

After the Ashes it was revealed Harry Brook was punched by a nightclub bouncer the night before a one-day international in New Zealand, while a mid-series trip to Noosa was heavily scrutinised.

A review by the England and Wales Cricket Board into England’s winter is under way, the culmination of which will confirm McCullum’s future, but there have already been some changes.

There will be a warm-up match when they travel to Australia for the 150th anniversary Test next year and preparation matches are also likely before next winter’s other tours.

England also added fielding coach Carl Hopkinson to their set-up for the World Cup after a host of dropped catches in Australia. That addition brought greater intensity to their training to the World Cup.

McCullum will now return home to New Zealand before any formal announcement on his future is made.

“We’ll allow this period to land and you look back on the last five or six months, which has been pretty intense, and you look at what you got right, what you got wrong and start trying to work out ways you can improve on the areas that you need to,” said McCullum.

“That’s just doing it with a bit of sound reason and logic when your emotions are out of it.

“I make no apologies for running an informal, positive environment but to call it a casual environment is not quite fair.

“But in the end people are always going to have their views on how you go about things and that’s the role of the leader.”

City of York Council approved Spark’s bid to stay at is site in Piccadilly for an additional five years last October.

The venue, which offers space in converted shipping containers for food and drink start ups along with events and meeting spaces, said its lease extension has now been officially signed off by the council.

A Spark spokesperson said the lease is “now signed, sealed and sorted”, as they thanked everyone who has supported the venue since it opened in 2018.

“This is our fourth extension from the council, but by far the longest yet,” they wrote on social media.

“We’re thankful this time for nearly five years of (hopefully) clear water ahead of us and a chance for some surety over our existence for our team and our traders.

“It feels like some kind of hard-earned acceptance from the powers that be for the value spark brings to York, and also validation for the hard work of so, so many people over the last 10 years.

“We’ve got lots planned across the next six months in terms of improvements to the venue and reinvestment in our spaces, but for now we just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone for supporting the project and turning up.”

How did we get here? Background to Spark’s five more years in Piccadilly

Spark first opened in 2018 and its stay in Piccadilly was previously extended in 2022.

The venue has said it plans to move to York Central eventually but this move would not be feasible until 2029 at the earliest.

Spark’s own estimates state it has supported around 65 fledgling businesses and around £5 million-a-year had been turned over there since it first launched.

The site has, however, faced backlash, including from its neighbours.

Objectors told the council’s meeting in October that neighbours faced the prospect of another five years of noise disturbing them despite being told the venue, which one branded a “grotesque monstrosity”, was temporary.

Recommended reading:

Twelve objections were lodged, including from people living nearby, to the council complaining about noise and smells from the venue as well as shipping containers being put in York’s historic city centre.

The council also received 11 historic complaints about noise from six different addresses since the venue opened, including two since its permission was extended in 2022.

Eighteen comments were lodged in support of the application, saying it was a valuable community venue that supported a variety of arts and campaigning groups alongside businesses.

Cllr Tony Clarke, Labour councillor for Guildhall which includes Spark, said it played an important social and economic role in the city but it had not been a good neighbour.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran have raised concerns among Democrats and others about diminishing American stockpiles of certain weapons, illustrating a long-standing production problem that some experts say could present challenges if another conflict emerges.

The Trump administration has repeatedly said American forces have all of the weapons they need to fight the Iran war, now in its second week. President Donald Trump posted Friday on social media that several defense contractors had agreed to quadruple production of weapons “as rapidly as possible,” although he did not detail the specific systems being manufactured.

Questions about the nation’s weapons stockpiles have grown as the U.S. campaign against Iran escalates, with many Democratic lawmakers arguing that Trump is waging a “war of choice.” Missile defense systems are under the most strain, according to experts, with Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, interceptors in high demand in Ukraine and Israel, respectively.

“I’m not particularly worried about us actually running out during this conflict,” said Ryan Brobst, a scholar focused on U.S. defense strategy at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It’s about deterring China and Russia the day after this conflict is over.”

The U.S. is using both systems to take down Iranian missiles fired in retaliation for the American and Israeli attacks, but U.S. officials have said they are struggling to stop waves of drones launched by the Islamic Republic and that they are bringing in an American anti-drone system proven to work against Russian drones in Ukraine. The system known as Merops also is cheaper than firing a missile that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars at a drone that costs less than $50,000.

Pentagon says the military has ‘everything it needs’

Sean Parnell, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in a statement that the U.S. military “has everything it needs to execute any mission at the time and place of the President’s choosing and on any timeline.”

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin posted on X late Friday that it had agreed to “quadruple critical munitions production” and “began this work months ago.” Trump and Lockheed did not offer a timetable of when the production increases would reach their target.

Some Democratic lawmakers, meanwhile, have questioned the long-term impact to the U.S. and its allies.

“We’ve been told again and again and again one reason that we can’t provide interceptors for the Patriot system or other munitions for Ukraine is that they’re in short supply,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told CNN on Thursday.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., told reporters that American supplies are dwindling after the military fought the Houthi rebels in Yemen and engaged in more recent conflicts under the Republican administration. The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee did not specify what type of munitions he was referring to.

“Our munitions are low. That’s public knowledge,” Warner said. “It will require additional funding, funding where we have other domestic needs as well.”

Already in high demand

Supplies of defense interceptors are the most taxed, said Brobst, who is deputy director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish Washington think tank.

The THAAD system is designed for defeating medium-range ballistic missiles, while the Patriot system is for taking down short-range ballistic missiles and crewed aircraft. About 25% of the entire THAAD stockpile was estimated to be used defending Israel from Iran’s ballistic missiles in the 12-day war with Iran last summer, Brobst said.

“These were already in very high demand and we had not procured enough before the conflict,” Brobst said. “And now we’ve probably used, between the two of them, probably several hundred more.”

The exact number of U.S. THAAD and Patriot systems is classified, with administration officials and Democratic lawmakers declining to offer details.

Demand for interceptors is likely falling as the U.S. and its allies take out Iran’s weapons’ capabilities, Brobst said. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters this week that the number of ballistic missiles fired by Iran was down by 86% from the war’s first day.

Other munitions in demand include cruise missiles and precision-guided missiles, known as “standoff” weapons, Brobst said. Their stockpiles are likely healthier, and their use probably peaked at the beginning of the war as U.S. forces hit Iran’s early-warning systems, air defenses and other targets.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said as much — that American forces used more “standoff munitions at the start, but no longer need to.” He told reporters Wednesday that they would be using “500-pound, 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound GPS- and laser-guided, precision gravity bombs.”

The U.S. has a healthy supply of those types of weapons, which are cheaper but require aircraft to fly closer to their targets, Brobst said.

But the U.S. military is moving to bolster its anti-drone capabilities in the region with the Merops system that flies drones against drones. It is small enough to fit in the back of a midsize pickup truck, can identify drones and close in on them, using artificial intelligence to navigate when satellite and electronic communications are jammed.

Root cause of the stockpile concerns

Brobst said the problem of not having enough advanced munitions, particularly interceptors, was around well before the war in Iran, though “this has definitely not made it get any better by using up these munitions.”

“Successive administrations over multiple decades did not procure sufficient quantities of these interceptors, and when that happens, companies don’t have an incentive to expand their production capacity,” Brobst said, adding that it takes “significant time” to ramp up production.

The administration in recent months has promised to boost defense spending and to speed up production, while calling on the Pentagon to call out defense contractors that underperform and insufficiently invest in building manufacturing.

Katherine Thompson, a former deputy senior adviser at the Pentagon during this Trump administration, said then-President Joe Biden had diminished some of the stockpile of interceptors by sending them to Ukraine.

“It was a short-term win for the Biden administration but a long-term strategic problem for the United States as a whole,” said Thompson, who left her Pentagon position in October and is now a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “I would hope that the Trump administration doesn’t make that same mistake here.”

Riki Ellison, chairman of the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance, said the U.S. military could shift interceptors from one part of the world to another or get them from allies if needed. He also noted the Pentagon effort to get defense contractors to boost production.

“We’re moving in that direction,” Ellison said. “That’s not going to be ready next week or anything, but it’s moving.”

___

Associated Press writer Emma Burrows in London contributed to this report.

The gut microbiome plays an important role in many aspects of health, from digestion and immune function to metabolic balance and neurological processes.

Several diseases have even been associated with changes in the microbiome’s composition, including inflammatory bowel disease, colorectal cancer, obesity and mental health disorders. As links between gut microbes and disease grow stronger, scientists are now looking at the emerging connection between the gut and the heart.

Heart disease remains the leading cause of death globally. Factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes are known to be risk factors. But researchers are increasingly finding that the balance of microbes in our gut may shape how these risks develop, and how heart disease progresses.

This newly recognised association, termed the “gut-heart axis”, has gained traction in recent years. It may help explain why diet and heart disease are so closely intertwined.

Large studies show that people with cardiovascular disease have distinct gut microbiome profiles compared with healthy people.

While no single “heart disease microbe” has been discovered, cardiovascular disease is consistently associated with a few key factors. These include reduced microbial diversity, loss of beneficial bacteria and an overgrowth of microbes linked to inflammation.

Microbial diversity refers to the variety and balance of different microbes living within the gut. Growing evidence suggests that a reduction in microbial diversity reflects deteriorating microbiome health, and may signal the onset of disease.

One recent paper examined the results from 67 studies that explored the gut microbiome in several cardiovascular diseases, comparing over 6,000 patients with acute coronary syndrome, atrial fibrillation, coronary artery disease, heart failure or stroke with healthy people. It showed that people with cardiovascular disease consistently had lower levels of the beneficial fibre-fermenting bacteria Faecalibacterium.

Microbial fingerprints of heart disease

Your gut microbes act as miniature factories that break down food components. In doing so, they produce hundreds of small molecules called metabolites, which can be taken up by other microbes or absorbed through the intestine into the blood stream. While some of these metabolites are beneficial to the body, others can be harmful in excess.

So, alongside studying what microbes are present in patients with cardiovascular disease, scientists are also looking at metabolites to understand what effect these can have on health.

One of the strongest links between the gut microbiome and heart disease involves a metabolite called TMAO (trimethylamine N-oxide). Certain gut bacteria convert nutrients found in red meat, eggs and dairy into a metabolite called trimethylamine (TMA). The metabolite is then processed by the liver and turned into TMAO.

High levels of TMAO in the blood have been associated with increased risk of heart attack, stroke and death from cardiovascular disease. Importantly, TMAO production varies between people depending on the type of microbe. This means two people can eat the same food but produce different amounts of this potentially harmful compound.

But not all gut-derived metabolites are harmful. Some may actually protect the heart.

A growing body of research is investigating indoles – compounds made when gut bacteria break down tryptophan. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid found in protein-rich foods such as poultry, eggs, dairy and nuts. It plays an important role in mood, sleep patterns and appetite.

The majority of tryptophan is absorbed by the body. But a small fraction of this amino acid is also broken down by gut bacteria and transformed into indole-derivatives. While some of these can contribute to inflammation under certain conditions, others appear to have powerful cardioprotective benefits.

One of the most promising is indole-3-propionate (IPA), which is thought to be produced mainly by the bacteria Clostridium sporogenes. Several studies have shown that people with higher blood levels of IPA have lower rates of type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

IPA also strengthens the gut barrier. This prevents harmful microbial products from leaking into the bloodstream. Research is ongoing to fully understand how and why tryptophan is broken down into beneficial or harmful metabolites.

Prevention and treatment

The discovery that our gut microbes help shape cardiovascular risk is transforming how scientists think about prevention and treatment. Researchers are now exploring how microbial “fingerprints” could one day be used in combination with known risk factors to identify people at risk, long before symptoms appear.

In the future, beneficial gut microbes (probiotics) could be used therapeutically to slow cardiovascular disease progression or eliminate microbes known to contribute to disease onset.

While this science is still emerging, it’s clear that the gut microbiome should be viewed as part of the whole body system that shapes our overall health. It points towards a powerful idea: caring for your heart may start not just with what you eat, but with how your gut microbes process it.

The Canadian prime minister has joined a growing list of Commonwealth leaders backing the removal of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of succession.

Mark Carney, who previously served as the governor of the Bank of England, condemned the former prince’s behaviour as “deplorable” and said his actions “necessitate” his removal.

While the Canadian prime minister acknowledged the possibility of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor – who is eighth in line to the throne – becoming King was small, he believed it was a “point of principle”.

The arrest of the former prince last month on suspicion of misconduct in public office reignited calls for him to be formally removed from the royal line of succession.

Any changes to the line of succession in the UK can only be made with an act of parliament and requires the agreement of the 14 other countries that also have King Charles as head of state.

Mr Carney did not release a formal statement, but was responding to questions from reporters in Tokyo on the final day of his tour of Japan.

He said that even though Mountbatten-Windsor is “well down” the line of succession, the “point of principle stands”.

The Canadian PM added: “I certainly think his actions are deplorable and have caused him to be stripped of his royal titles, certainly…necessitate his removal from the line of succession.”

He also said there is a process to remove someone from the line of succession, which he said should be followed.

Mr Carney has become the latest leader to back that move, after Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and New Zealand came out in support of the action in February.

Read more from Sky News:
Inside bombed-out Beirut
Badenoch’s scathing attack on PM

Speaking in February, Sky’s royal commentator Alastair Bruce said the procedure would not be straightforward.

He said: “It takes a lot of time, and I think parliaments across the world who have the King as head of state will not be looking forward to having to find time to do this.”

The former prince is currently eighth in line after Princes William and Harry and their five children.

The ex-Duke of York gave up his royal titles in October last year after new details about his links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein were released by the US Department of Justice.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has always denied any wrongdoing.

Manfield, coached by Nigel Clough, have giant-killing in their blood, and have already taken one Premier League scalp this season when knocking out Burnley in the previous round. Today, though, will be their biggest match in many generations. Not since 1992 have Arsenal been eliminated a team in the third tier, or lower – will The Stags make history this afternoon?

The BBC’s conspiracy thriller drama The Capture is back for a third season. The first two series had viewers hooked with a story that intertwined police investigations, facial recognition and deepfake AI technology.

As experts in facial recognition and AI, we’re separating the fact from the fiction ahead of the new season.

Fans of The Capture will be familiar with scenes of investigators using facial recognition software to identify the people they are tracking around London – the soldier Shaun Emery (Callum Turner) in season one and the Russian mercenary Nikolai Mirsky (Jack Sandle) in season two.

Real facial recognition

Real facial recognition work involves several steps. An operator first uploads an image into facial recognition software, which searches for the presence of a face. Features are then extracted from each detected face and compared against the features of faces from a stored database. Features are things that the algorithm has identified as important for recognition decisions and are probably not describable attributes of a face as we know it (such as eyes, nose, mouth).

It is not feasible, nor indeed ethical, to run a facial recognition system against all images on the internet. Not least because of the technical limitations of searching for, storing and processing such a staggering amount of data. In police or intelligence settings faces are searched against specific databases and a human almost always reviews the output because algorithms are not perfect. It is crucial that human operators are trained on the strengths and limitations of these systems and have the necessary skills to review the output.

In season two of The Capture, the fictional facial recognition software company “Xanda” claims their system can “recognise a face with up to 100% accuracy … from every corner of the world with equal precision”. But they are opposed to independent testing.

The best facial recognition systems are now extremely accurate, under increasingly difficult image scenarios. However, accuracy and demographic differences vary widely across different systems and testing parameters. Racial bias is a genuine concern and independent testing is of paramount importance.

In season two, Xanda’s technology claims it can literally “unmask” a face. In reality, some algorithms compare masked to unmasked faces with high accuracy, but they cannot recover information from underneath the mask. Attempting to do so would produce inaccurate and dangerous results.

In the show, patrolling officers receive images of targets, and eyewitnesses perform identifications. This reflects a genuine use of human facial recognition in forensic operations. Most humans make errors on facial comparison tasks involving unfamiliar faces. Super-recognisers (people with a naturally high recognition ability) and trained forensic examiners are more accurate. Familiar humans (people who know the target) often make accurate identifications even in low-quality photos.

Real deepfakes

Deepfakes are digitally manipulated videos, images or voices created with AI to make it appear that someone did something that they didn’t. This technology already exists. Real examples of misuse include fake political videos, non-consensual intimate imagery, child exploitation images and fraud.

Characters in The Capture frequently mistake deepfakes as genuine sources of information. In season one, manipulated video footage causes chaos for Emery, and in season two politician Isaac Turner (Paapa Essiedu) is the subject of a rampage of manipulated footage which the public believes is real.

When asked how Turner sounded in a faked call, a character replied “like Isaac Turner”. This acceptance of deepfakes is realistic. Human detection accuracy is around a coin flip: a 50% chance of a correct detection in scientific studies.

Turner’s wife (Charlie Murphy) was confused by the content of her husband’s deepfake speech, but complimented the way he spoke: “You did good though … Not what you said but the way you said it. You sounded … authoritative.” Cloned voices are typically rated positively and as more dominant than real recordings. Though in practice, deepfake videos tend not to be effective for the types of political activity depicted in the show, and manipulated imagery is not a new problem, as it suggests.

Depictions of deepfakes in The Capture involve almost instantaneous video manipulation and live broadcast. This is far from the current state-of-the-art. While the technology has improved, it is prone to producing obviously fake videos. Creating a high quality video requires a large and diverse collection of photos for the target person, along with iterative tweaks to the output. This is time consuming, and impossible to do in real-time.

Moreover, a capability that can hijack any CCTV or live TV feed and instantly play any content does not yet exist. Camera networks exist over a variety of different technical protocols, ownership arrangements, and access models. That complexity is a roadblock for the kind of point-and-click hijacking depicted in the show.

What next?

In season three, detective Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) will encounter further deceptive footage. How can she trust what she sees?

Real strategies to detect deepfakes include training humans to detect artifice, familiarity with the person depicted, and liveness checks that measure natural human responses to various changes in the scene.

In season two, Carey recognised genuine footage of Turner because he held the cross on the necklace around his neck, which his deepfake never did – idiosyncratic mannerisms may be missing in a deepfake.

Detection algorithms developed by the media forensics community and digital watermarks (“invisible” codes in imagery detectable by algorithms) are technological countermeasures that also help.

There are new AI techniques, such as the creation of realistic fake faces and agentic AI, where autonomous software systems perform tasks independently of human control. Will we see the face of an identity that does not exist to throw off the investigators? Could AI get out of hand and create deepfakes for its own purposes, providing a dilemma for both the good guys and the bad guys in the show?

These are the challenges we’d like to see Carey tackle, because they’re ones society will probably face in the near future.

The Irish actress, 39, is known for playing panicky student Clare Devlin on the Channel 4 comedy

Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan has said she has “no interest in body positivity” and that she finds it “boring” when people talk about her size.

The Irish actress, 39, known for playing panicky student Clare Devlin on Channel 4 comedy Derry Girls, stars in the Netflix regency series Bridgerton as Penelope Bridgerton.

Despite the success of the show, she has described how disappointing it is that so many people praise her body size and talk about her weight.

Fronting the cover of Elle UK’s April issue, Coughlan told the magazine: “The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity.

READ MORE: Unchosen teaser trailer shows NI actor Fra Fee star as escaped convict in new Netflix thrillerREAD MORE: ‘Outstanding’ comedy with How to Get to Heaven From Belfast star is a ‘must watch’

“When I was a kid growing up, I never thought about that. I didn’t look at actors and think about their bodies. So, I actually don’t care.

“There’s a lot of things I’m passionate about, it’s not one of them… That’s someone else’s thing. It’s not mine.”

The actress added that despite being a size 10, she will still be praised as someone who appears on screen as a plus-size actress, comments which she finds “boring”.

Speaking about the reaction to her nude scenes on the show, she said: “What was really bizarre was when I was shooting that series, I was exercising a lot because I knew I had to, so I had lost a bunch of weight – I was probably a size 10 and one of the corsets was a size 8.

“Then people talked about how I was plus size and I was like, ‘How f***** are we that I am the biggest woman you want to see on screen?’

“I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved (Bridgerton) because of your body’ and started talking about my body, and I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much’.

“It’s really hard when you work on something for months and months of your life, you don’t see your family, you really dedicate yourself and then it comes down to what you look like – it’s so f****** boring.”

Coughlan also told the magazine that she gives herself more “grace” since receiving her ADHD diagnosis.

She said: “It feels like I got the handbook to my brain that I wasn’t given when I was born.

“I understand things a bit better now, and I give myself a little more grace.”

Coughlan is also known for starring in the hit movie Barbie as well as Channel 4’s Big Mood, a role which secured her a Bafta nomination.

She also appeared in a National Theatre production of The Playboy Of The Western World alongside her Derry Girls co-star Siobhan McSweeney.

For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our What’s On newsletter.

Adam Quirk said his son Freddie “had such a short life but he touched so many people”.

A couple have paid tribute to their 18-month-old son who died unexpectedly. Freddie Quirk, from Netherton in Merseyside, was described by his dad Adam Quirk as a boy who “loved life” despite everything that was thrown at him.

Freddie died on Monday, February 23, after his mum Abbie Quirk found him unresponsive. Paying tribute, Adam, 28, told the Liverpool ECHO: ”He was just the definition of a cheeky little chappy. He loved life. He lit up the room with his smile and loved everyone.”

Freddie was born without an anus, a condition officially called imperforate anus. This is where some babies are born without any opening for excrement to leave the body. In people with the condition the rectum (the last part of the bowel) is closed off.

Freddie had to have surgery when he was one day old and later had a stoma bag fitted, but Adam says his son brushed off any difficulties he faced.

He said: “He was such a strong little boy, nothing fazed him. He was climbing everywhere, running everywhere. He was just a smart, happy baby.”

Adam said: “Abbie found him on her own. I was on my way to work at the time on the train. I’d only gone one stop and I ran back. I was told Freddie had passed away on my way back.

Advertisement

“It’s been a shock for everybody because we weren’t expecting it. He was a bit unwell on the Sunday before he passed, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“He was vomiting a little bit, but he was still drinking. We didn’t try giving him too much food because we didn’t want him vomiting it straight back up. He was still playing with his toys and wanted to be around us, so it was nothing unusual.”

The family don’t know Freddie’s exact cause of death. Adam said: “We don’t know how he died yet. His body was only released from the coroner’s office yesterday (Tuesday, March 3). They’ve given us a timeframe of six to nine months for a bit of testing to be done.”

Throughout this time, Adam and Abbie have been supported by Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Now Lydia Pennington, one of Abbie’s close friends, is running the Mersey Tunnel 10K later this year to raise money for the hospital’s charity.

A JustGiving page has raised over £1,600 so far. Adam said: “Lydia is one of Abbie’s friends from university. They actually live in Blackpool.

“They already said they want to do the Mersey Tunnel run and asked us if they could do some fundraising. The original target was £150 and I think that was surpassed like the first half an hour.

Abbie, 29, added: “It got raised to £500 and I think that only took another hour maybe. It’s just really heartwarming.”

Adam said: “Alder Hey, we could never, ever sing their praises enough. We got transferred from the Women’s to Alder Hey on Freddie’s first day of life when he went in for surgery.

“The nurses and doctors are absolute godsends. They made sure to sit with us when we needed it, leave us alone when we needed it. We can’t even think about how hard it would’ve been anywhere else.

“Freddie had such a short life, but he touched so many people and he loved everybody he met so intensely. Everyone who met him loved him.

“He had his tantrums but he loved life and loved us, loved everyone, and we loved him. We’re so incredibly lucky that we live so close to Alder Hey and we’ve had that support.

“My brother’s fiancée had an amazing idea – on Freddie’s birthday every year, July 1, we’re going to be buying presents for him as normal, but we are donating them all to Alder Hey.

“They’ve done so much for us, it’s only right that we do something for them. We just can’t put into words how important Alder Hey has been to us.”

Get more Daily Record exclusives by signing up for free to Google’s preferred sources. Click HERE.