Have you got what it takes to win the £5k prize?

Have you got what it takes to cross The Finish Line?

The popular BBC quiz is racing back to screens this year and are looking for contestants from Northern Ireland to take on the track and possibly win £5000.

The Finish Line sees contestants put through their paces in a race format, hosted by Roman Kemp and Sarah Greene.

Filming will commence later this year in Belfast and tests quizzing credentials as they literally race down the track on moving podiums.

A description of the show reads: “In each episode, players compete across a series of qualifiers and head-to-head races for the chance to win a cash prize.

“The aim of the game is simple – answer them fast and don’t come last, and make it to the finish line before your rivals.

“Knowledge and speed combine for gripping racing action with nail-biting finishes and plenty of tension.”

Roman Kemp said: “Belfast is calling once again, and we can’t wait to meet this season’s contestants. The Finish Line is back and better than ever.”

Sarah Greene added: “I’m thrilled to be coming back for series FIVE, with even more episodes.

“When you get so many Finish Line viewers asking if and how they can take part, the answer is ‘Apply right now!’ Roman and I can’t wait to welcome you to our beautiful Belfast studio as we say, ‘let’s race!’”

If you think you have what it takes, you can apply ay https://www.bbc.co.uk/showsandtours/take-part/the-finish-line

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Emergency services were called just after 3pm today (Sunday, July 26), to reports of a child coming off a scooter and landing in the road outside Firthmoor Community Centre on Burnside Road.

The child was treated at the scene before being taken to hospital by land ambulance.

An air ambulance was called after a child suffered head and facial injuries in a scooter crash on Burnside Road in Darlington. (Image: THE NORTHERN ECHO)

A spokesperson for North East Ambulance Service said: “We were called just after 3pm today to an incident outside the Firthmoor Community Centre on Burnside Road in Darlington, following reports of a child coming off a scooter and landing in the road.

“We dispatched two ambulance crews, a clinical team leader and a doctor in a rapid response car, who treated the patient with head and facial injuries before conveying to hospital with the doctor in a land ambulance.”

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SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) — Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced Sunday that it recalled its ambassador to Argentina after President Javier Milei insulted Brazilian officials while in their country.

The decision comes a day after Milei was in Sao Paulo participating in an event where Brazilian Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, a son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, was confirmed as the presidential candidate of his father’s party.

During his speech at Saturday’s event, Milei accused Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of being a “thief” and a “delinquent,” among other things. Milei also accused Supreme Federal Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes of being “trash” after he denied the Argentine president a visit to Jair Bolsonaro, who is under house arrest serving a 27-year sentence over a coup attempt.

The president of the Supreme Federal Court, Minister Edson Fachin, said Milei’s comments were a “disrespectful reference to a magistrate of the highest court in the country, made on Brazilian soil.”

A spokesperson for Brazil’s foreign affairs ministry said Ambassador Julio Bitelli was recalled for consultations following Milei’s statements.

Lula has not publicly addressed Milei’s remarks, but in an opinion piece published Sunday by The Washington Post in which he called U.S. tariffs against Brazil “a strategic mistake,” he asserted that “Brazil’s destiny is determined only by Brazilians without external interference, without subservience.”

Those comments come a day after Brazil’s Foreign Ministry denied visas to two U.S. State Department officials who sought to travel to the South American nation next week. The ministry did not offer an explanation.

Lula is seeking reelection and will run against Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro, whose family has many ties with the Trump administration.

The suspect has been named by police as 21-year-old Abdul Ballout, a German citizen of Lebanese background.

He was known to police and has committed a number of crimes, officials said. He had previously been sentenced to one year and 10 months in prison, but the sentence was commuted to parole.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the suspect had been radicalised.

German media outlets are reporting he is a supporter of Islamic State group (IS), and tried in the past – unsuccessfully – to join the organisation.

He attempted to travel to Mauritania via Turkey in May 2025 but failed, later travelling to Lebanon via Turkey with intention of heading to Syria and joining IS, according to the public prosecutor’s office.

While in Lebanon, he is alleged to have made contact with individuals he believed were IS members, and was later arrested in Lebanon in July 2025, where he spent three months in prison.

After his release, he returned to Berlin in November 2025, where he was arrested at the airport and held in pre-trial detention until May 2026 and had been ordered to take part in a de-radicalisation programme.

He is believed to be connected to the rented vehicle found abandoned in the park.

The police statement added that several people are reported to have been injured with stabbing weapons in the attack.

Warning: this article contains spoilers for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

Ten years at Troy. Ten more lost at sea. When Odysseus finally reaches Ithaca – in Homer’s poem and again, played by Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s new film – he doesn’t walk through the door and say who he is. He lies. He invents a stranger’s life story. He tests his wife Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway), his father, even his old nurse before he lets any of them see him as himself. For a man who has spent 20 years trying to get home, he is remarkably reluctant to arrive.

That reluctance is usually read as suspense, or cunning, or simple survival instinct. But there’s a more unsettling possibility: that Odysseus cannot tell his own story because, on some level, he cannot yet bear to know it.

The comparison Nolan suggests between Odysseus and a returning veteran isn’t new. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay built an entire body of work on it, arguing in Odysseus in America (2002) that Homer’s hero shows the same shattered trust, numbness and hypervigilance he observed in Vietnam veterans.

Countless essays since have asked some version of “did Odysseus have post-traumatic stress disorder?” It’s a fair question, but by now familiar enough to risk becoming reflex rather than insight. The more interesting question isn’t whether Odysseus suffered – Homer leaves little doubt that he returns a profoundly changed man. It’s why the poem refuses to let him simply say so.

Modern trauma theory gives us a vocabulary that can illuminate something the Odyssey explores with remarkable precision. Since the 1990s, scholars following American literary critic Cathy Caruth have argued that trauma isn’t defined by the event itself, but by the impossibility of experiencing it fully at the time, which means it can’t be narrated directly afterwards either.

Instead, trauma returns sideways, through repetition, disguise and fragmented forms of remembering, rather than as a clean account. Sigmund Freud had earlier described a related phenomenon: traumatic experience returning through repetition rather than straightforward recollection.

Read against that idea, the second half of the Odyssey looks less like a homecoming story with psychological colour added, and more like a structural performance of avoidance.

Odysseus doesn’t walk into his own hall and announce himself; he arrives disguised as a beggar. When his old nurse recognises a scar from a boyhood hunting accident, his first instinct is to threaten her into silence. When Penelope finally asks him for his story, he answers with another invented biography – a lie told so convincingly that she weeps at it. Even once the suitors are dead and husband and wife are alone, he still doesn’t tell her everything before announcing he must leave again.

The poem is oddly precise about who is and isn’t allowed to recognise Odysseus. Every human recognition in the Odyssey requires proof – a scar, a test, a story checked against memory.

Odysseus’s faithful hunting dog Argos alone recognises his master without a test. The old dog, dying on a dung heap, simply lifts his head and knows him – it’s a loyalty that predates Troy and requires no proof of explanation.

Through his tests and deceptions, Odysseus appears to be a man unable to fold what happened at Troy into a version of himself he can hand to the people who love him. He builds alternative selves rather than inhabiting the one who did those things.

Guilt, not just fear

Rather than asking whether Odysseus had PTSD, a more productive lens may be moral injury. This is not a diagnosis but a concept describing the damage of having caused, permitted, or failed to prevent something that violates someone’s own values.

Where PTSD centres on fear, moral injury centres on guilt. Odysseus loses every companion who sailed with him, narrating their deaths again and again, as though the retelling were unfinished business. His famous cleverness curdles into rumination: endless second-guessing of choices that got his men killed.

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Moral injury: violating your ethical code can damage mental health – new research

Nolan’s newly released film pushes toward a similar image. Athena, revealed late in the story, appears to be less a goddess than a manifestation of Odysseus’s memory of a priestess killed at Troy – guilt wearing a familiar face, not fear.

Seen this way, Odysseus isn’t primarily hiding from Ithaca. He’s hiding from having to say, out loud, what he did and failed to do at Troy.

This isn’t only a literary curiosity. Programmes like Bryan Doerries’ Theater of War have staged Greek tragedy for veterans for years, on the premise that these stories offer a sanctioned way to approach what people otherwise can’t say directly. The truth about violence and loss rarely arrives head-on. It has to be smuggled in.

Homer never resolves this. The poem ends with Odysseus preparing to leave home again, story still untold. The Odyssey has lasted 3,000 years less for its monsters than for something it understood early: wars end, but the story that would let a survivor be fully known again is often the one thing he cannot yet bring himself to tell.

The Birmingham to Dublin flight was given priority landing clearance following a reported medical emergency onboard

An emergency was declared aboard a Ryanair service shortly after its departure from Birmingham Airport, forcing the crew to request priority landing clearance.

Flight FR661, bound for Dublin, had taken off at 8.37am on Sunday (July 26) when a medical incident is understood to have occurred onboard. The pilots subsequently transmitted the 7700 squawk code, the standard signal used to alert air traffic control to a general emergency, before diverting for an expedited arrival, reports Birmingham Live.

According to AirLive trackers, the aircraft was approximately 8,000 feet above the Irish Sea when the distress code was broadcast.

The plane touched down safely on Runway 28L at Dublin Airport roughly 40 minutes after leaving Birmingham, with emergency ground crews stationed on the tarmac ready to meet the aircraft upon landing.

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The Birmingham-Dublin flight was given priority landing clearance after a medical emergency on board

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A Ryanair flight travelling from Birmingham to Dublin declared an emergency shortly after take-off following a medical incident onboard.

Flight FR661 departed Birmingham Airport at 08:37am on Sunday (July 26) before the crew notified air traffic control of the situation.

The aircraft transmitted the 7700 emergency squawk code, which signals a general emergency, and was granted priority landing clearance. Trackers from AirLive indicate that the plane was approximately 8,000 feet above the Irish Sea when the emergency code was transmitted, reports Birmingham Live.

The aircraft subsequently landed safely on Runway 28L at Dublin Airport, roughly 40 minutes after leaving Birmingham. Emergency ground crews were positioned and ready to meet the plane upon its arrival.

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GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) — Guyana’s government on Sunday appointed a group of international experts to investigate the recent sinking of a state ferry that killed dozens of passengers in the country’s worst maritime disaster on record.

The 87-year-old MV Barima capsized in Atlantic waters on June 18 after it departed the capital, Georgetown, en route to Port Kaituma, an Indigenous community near Venezuela.

Authorities have said they believe 179 passengers were aboard, but divers so far have found only 73 bodies, with another 76 people rescued. International teams are still trying to recover the vessel so experts can inspect it.

President Irfaan Ali said in a state address Sunday that the investigative team has been given widespread powers and is expected to operate independently.

Belize’s former attorney general, Phillip Godfrey Smith, was appointed chairman of the five-person team tasked with the investigation, including whether professional negligence is to blame. Other members include an attorney, a naval architect and maritime experts from Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

Local authorities have so far arrested three people, including the rescued captain, who was accused of testing positive for marijuana, along with another crew member.

Ali said the team will be asked to scrutinize the “passenger management including embarkation, manifest preparation, the possible overcrowding of the vessel, the storage of cargo, the availability and use of life saving equipment and adherence to passenger safety requirements.”

Dozens of people rescued after clinging to debris for hours have claimed that the ferry was overloaded with passengers and cargo including vehicles and large pallets. They also asserted that the MV Barima was taking in water but that crews had dismissed this as “normal.”

Ali said his administration wants the commission to determine whether there were “any acts of negligence, misconduct, dereliction of duty and other failures by any individual, entity or institution contributed to or caused the disaster, including neglect of its condition, maintenance history, sea tides, functioning navigation and communication equipment and other operational factors.”

Ali said authorities hope the commission will recommend institutional and operational reforms as well as any other measures necessary to strengthen maritime safety, “improve emergency preparedness and response and reduce the likelihood of similar tragedies occurring in the future.”