​​Lisa Harris, co-founder of food consultancy Harris & Hayes, says growing interest in sweetcorn is also partly down to the UK’s “unstoppable” appetite for South Korean food, which is “changing how we eat”.

Pereira has continued to champion corn, recently making a Brazilian lemonade – which uses limes instead of lemons – and pairing it with corn milk.

But Hejazi says its use in drinks and desserts is still “an emerging trend” and hasn’t yet hit the mainstream in the UK.

So, is it translating to real-life demand?

We’re not yet seeing sweetcorn milk stocked in supermarkets and corn lattes at mainstream coffee chains.

But Natalie TJ, who co-runs an Asian-inspired bakery in London, says her cornmilk matcha drink has been one of the most popular drinks this summer – second only to the bakery’s Hong Kong milk tea.

“Many coffee shops in Asia sell corn milk matcha,” she says, adding that customers have probably been seeking out the drink at the cafe as it is not as common as other matcha combinations in the UK.

A reduction in the number of health boards and a more streamlined NHS will have a positive impact, says Record View

An overwhelming case can be made for a cull of the many NHS boards we have in Scotland. A population of about five million does not need over 20 bodies in the health service, many with overlapping remits.

Duplication is rife and the amount of cash spent on chief executives and other senior staff could be diverted elsewhere. If John Swinney decides to consolidate the number of boards and reform the NHS in this way, he will have our support.

But reducing health boards should not be the only objective of overhauling the NHS. Transparency and openness have been lacking and there is a huge need for greater accountability.

The scandal of child cancer patients dying over water-related infections at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow is a national disgrace. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde refused to accept responsibility until the end of a public inquiry.

During this period, parents were cruelly gaslit and told their concerns were unfounded. At NHS Tayside, patients also feel betrayed over the scandal of the disgraced brain surgeon Sam Eljamel.

How he managed to continue working at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee when he did so much damage to vulnerable patients is breathtaking. Another public inquiry – again costing shedloads of public money – will ­hopefully get to the bottom of this fiasco.

The Sandie Peggie tribunal case in Fife, and the various scandals in NHS Lothian, further undermined public confidence in these boards. But public service reform should not be confined to the NHS.

We have more than 100 public bodies in Scotland spending ever-increasing amounts of taxpayers’ money. Whether they are quangos or government ­agencies, these bodies accumulate staff while their outcomes do not improve.

It is also worth asking if Scotland still needs 32 councils. The current structure of local government came about through Tory gerrymandering in the 1990s.

This model was tainted from the off and looks unwieldy decades on. There are two primary reasons for a fundamental shake-up of the public sector more broadly.

One, the government is facing a £4.7 billion black hole by 2030 and every pound has to be well spent. Two, saving money by stripping out waste could free up resources for ­frontline services.

It could result in more doctors and nurses being hired, or fund a tax cut for working and middle-class Scots. It is ironic that Swinney is preparing to downsize a state largely created by the SNP government.

But he has a mandate to govern for five years and an opportunity to push through bold change. The First Minister should remain focused on the task of bringing the public sector into the 21st century.

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By ED HOLT

Published: 01:23 BST, 29 August 2026 | Updated: 01:30 BST, 29 August 2026

Sarah Ferguson is reportedly moving back to the UK in a matter of days. 

The former Duchess of York, 66, has spent seven months living abroad and has been spotted across Europe in Switzerland and Austria.

But now, it is understood that Fergie is returning back to Britain and she will be  renting a £10,000-a-month, six-bed house in a gated community in the Home Counties.

A source said: ‘She’s had her eyes on a return for some time but it takes time to find the right new house.

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‘She hasn’t had to worry about accommodation for 20 years as she had Royal Lodge with Andrew. 

‘Now’s the right time to get back to her life.’ 

Fergie’s return to British soil is hot on the heels of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle who moved back to the UK with their young family on Wednesday after six years in California.

A source close to the former Duchess told The Sun that with everyone’s attention on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Fergie is hoping to ‘slip back under the radar’.

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Sarah Ferguson is reportedly returning back to the UK after spending the past seven months travelling across Europe 

Andrew and Fergie were both stripped of their royal titles last October by King Charles following intense public scrutiny about the former Duke of York’s friendship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein

Fergie could reportedly be moving into her new home as soon as Monday and removal vans picking up her belongings have been spotted at her ex-husband, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s, home in Sandringham.

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Andrew and Fergie were both stripped of their royal titles last October by King Charles following intense public scrutiny about the former Duke of York’s friendship with the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Fergie was evicted from Royal Lodge along with Andrew, where they lived for 18 years, in February this year.

During her time crisscrossing Europe, Fergie was spotted at a £2,000-a-night spa in Austria and at a Swiss Alpine chalet in Verbier owned by her late former lover Paddy McNally. 

Meanwhile, Andrew remains under a police investigation over his links to Epstein.

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He was arrested in February accused of misconduct in a public office.

The former Duke denies any wrongdoing.  

Within the space of a few minutes on August 26, the border crossing between Nepal and China – Rasuwagadhi on the Nepali side and Gyirong on the Chinese – was destroyed by a flash flood caused by a collapsed glacier. Villages, bridges and roads on both sides of the border were washed away.

Hundreds are dead and many more missing, including tourists and pilgrims. The full toll will not be known for days as the worst-hit areas are hard to reach. In the case of Tibet, given the history of China’s draconian control over information, the true toll may never be known.

Already impoverished, Nepal faces grave challenges of rebuilding once the relief effort is over. This is the first real test for the government that took power in March after a successful gen Z revolution swept away the traditional parties.

Prime Minister Balen Shah’s government has tried to avoid becoming dependent on either large neighbour, China or India, or trapped in their rivalry. It has asserted some strategic autonomy by dealing with New Delhi, Beijing and Washington on an even footing.

The fact that Nepal’s neighbour is Tibet, a previously self-governing region that China took over by force between 1950 and 1951 and has administered ever since, makes flooding in this border region harder to prepare for.

A militarised frontier

Despite warm relations with Beijing, and the Nepalese government’s assurances that it follows the “One China” principle and permits no support for Tibetans, China’s tight control over Tibet creates complications.

The region is administered as a militarised frontier. Access runs on permits and clearances, the area is closely watched by armed police and the military and outsiders – foreign journalists, independent researchers, at times even diplomats – are routinely kept out. Tibet is an information black hole.

Beijing’s anxiety extends across the border as Nepal is home to more than 10,000 Tibetan refugees and has long been the main escape route out of Tibet. China pressurises Nepal to police Tibetan activism, seal crossings and fold border management into a security partnership meant to insulate the plateau from the outside world.

The glacial and hydrological data from the Tibetan plateau, the information often needed to anticipate flooding, is also treated as strategically sensitive by China and is closely held. Nepal has no mechanism to receive real-time glacial lake and river data from the Chinese side and its officials have sometimes gone further, accusing Beijing of withholding it.

When a disaster in the Nepal-Tibet border region demands that rescuers cross quickly or that a warning travel downstream from an upstream lake, it runs into a system built for control rather than speed.

Growing evidence suggests the recent glacier collapse happened on the Nepalese side of the border, near the Langtang Lirung peak. But wherever the flood began, no warning reached the people in its path.

Officials in Nepal’s Rasuwa district said they had “no clue” it was coming. Some of this will have been down to the speed of the ice-avalanche flood, which may have left little to warn of. Nepal’s own monitoring stations upstream were swept away before they could send an alert.

But as I have argued in my own research, there is a deeper, more structural point to make here. There is no standing, obligatory system to move warnings through this border region in real time. Much of the data that could carry such a warning sits inside a region that China governs first for state security.

When a lake in Tibet burst in 2016 and flooded the Bhote Koshi river in Nepal, for example, no warning came either. Nepali hydrology officials said afterwards that China had for years failed to share “essential” data on the glacial lakes on its side of the border.

Cooperation between the two countries is not wholly absent, but it is thin and reactive. China and Nepal jointly monitor a single dangerous transboundary glacial lake, Cirenmaco. This is a system built for slowly forming lakes rather than a sudden avalanche in an unwatched valley.

Across this frontier, information moves only as far as security allows. But, as the latest disaster may show, the danger for Nepal is not only external. Nepal’s own reckless development – roads, dams and settlements pushed into fragile valleys – combined with corrupt officialdom and little early warning capacity of its own has raised the toll of every flood.

Borderlands the world over – India’s Himalayan frontiers among them – are often governed first as security zones, and disaster response tends to suffer for it. In 2025, after a terrorist attack in Kashmir, India suspended the Indus Waters Treaty and cut the flow of hydrological data to Pakistan. When monsoon floods struck months later, Islamabad said the suspension had made them worse.

Climate change is turning the Tibetan plateau into a source of cascading danger for everyone downstream, from Nepal to India and Bangladesh. Addressing it means treating the Himalayas as a shared ecological space that is a zone of contact rather than a zone of conflict.

Strengthening cross-border data-sharing and early-warning systems would reduce the lethality of earthquakes, landslides and floods. For the Nepalese government, this is where strategic autonomy will really be tested – not in choosing between Beijing and Delhi, but in insisting that the safety of its people is not hostage to the security anxieties of another state.

Floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters will occur again and again. The question is whether states in the region can improve at cooperating and prioritising people over border security.

Call the police if you know where he is

Police are searching for a man who is wanted and has links to Cambridgeshire. Lincolnshire Police is appealing for information to find John Price, 26.

Price is wanted on suspicion of involvement in an affray that took place in Grantham on June 16. The 26-year-old has links to Peterborough, Market Deeping and the surrounding areas.

Anyone with information should email Lincolnshire police on wanted@lincs.police.uk or call 101 and quote reference 26000350949.

Do you want more of the latest Cambridgeshire news as it comes in from across the county? Sign up to our dedicated newsletter to make sure you never miss a big story from Cambridge or anywhere else in the county. You can also sign up to our dedicated Traffic and Crime newsletters for the latest updates on the topics you are most interested in.

The government’s Cobra emergency committee met to discuss how to respond. After sign off from Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s de facto deputy Louise Haigh, the alert was sent at 19:00 on 14 August.

It triggered a backlash on social media with some vowing to opt out of further alerts in their phone settings, domestic abuse charities and survivors saying victims with hidden phones were put at risk, and confusion about alerts sent multiple times.

Dowden’s worry is that the wildfire alert was more like a public information campaign than an imminent threat to life across all of England and Wales.

“People need to know that when they receive an alert, it is a genuine imminent emergency,” the Conservative MP says. “If that confidence is lost, people will simply ignore it.”

A Cabinet Office report during trials in 2014 warned of this “cry wolf” effect, while pointing out there was strong support among the public for the alerts.

“Alerts should not be issued just because the government wants to be seen to be doing something,” Dowden adds.

The National Fire Chiefs Council said the alert heightened people’s awareness and public behaviour, while government insiders point out wildfire alerts are commonplace in many European countries.

“By following the guidance that was issued, people were able to take the necessary steps to keep themselves safe and front line services recorded a significant decrease in incidents in the following days,” a government spokesperson said.

But Frazer Rhodes, who worked in government across a decade to help build the technology and devise high thresholds for the alerts, feels a review is now necessary to avoid future ones backfiring.

He was in a bar in Halifax, West Yorkshire, with his wife when the sound of pinging phones began echoing around.

“Everybody around was just going, ‘what’s this?’ What’s this?’” he tells us. “Then my wife shouted, ‘he did that’.”

His wife’s joke aside, he said his “immediate thought” was whether it met the threshold for sending one. He explains: “At its heart are three criteria: urgency, severity and certainty. So, in simple terms, how bad, how soon, and how sure?”

Rhodes thinks the wildfire alert arguably met the bar for urgency and severity, but perhaps not for certainty of a threat to life.

“It should be very rare to get an alert,” he points out.