Politics

1) Typical electricity bills are set to fall by 7% in April

2) Streamers like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, ITVX, and Disney+ will soon have to comply with broadcasting accessibility standards

Entertainment

3) Bridgerton has officially returned to Netflix

4) The Brit Awards will hit our screens this Saturday

Life

5) We’re a matter of days away from a 6pm sunset – and the endless rain may soon go away

6) It turns out that being really, really good at birdwatching might help to prevent dementia

Parents

7) New changes to GP contracts will help to protect more children from life-threatening illnesses

Actress Julia Goulding has made a ‘bring back’ demand as fans share their concerns for her character Shona Platt

Coronation Street star Julia Goulding has made a ‘bring back’ demand as fans share their concerns for her character, Shona Platt, amid the arrival of Jodie Ramsey.

As viewers of the ITV soap know, the new character arrived in Weatherfield before revealing herself to be the long-lost sister of Shona Platt, and she’s already trying to ruffle feathers for her sibling and her family.

Jodie was actually first seen tied up in the back of a van being driven by Emmerdale returnee Graham Foster as the two long-running shows joined forces for a historic crossover, dubbed Corriedale, back in January, with the episode featuring a horror multi-vehicle crash.

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While not directly involved in the horror crash that unfolded between the residents of Weatherfield and the Dales, Jodie did end up injured as she escaped and tried to get away from DC Kit Green, who came across Jodie while trying to locate Emmerdale villain John Sugden.

It was then, later in the hospital, with Shona and David Platt also among those at the hospital, that Jodie was reunited with her long-lost sister and has since inserted herself into the Platt family, after David invited her to stay at No.8 Coronation Street.

Since then, it’s become clear that Jodie isn’t quite who she’s trying to portray herself to be and it has been suggested that the newcomer is keen to take over her sister’s life and claim it for her own.

Despite Jodie’s seemingly sinister intentions, Shona is buying her sister’s hurt over their past. “Jodie has been invaluable,” Julia said when talking about her latest storyline. “She’s providing Shona with a real sense of safety and a solid grounding during what is an incredibly turbulent time. With Harper being ill, having that sisterly support is exactly what Shona needs right now.”

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Asked if Shona’s newfound stability is making her blind to Jodie’s calculated behaviour, the soap star admitted: “I wouldn’t necessarily say the Platt family is the most stable environment! But compared to how she grew up, it definitely is. I think it’s a bit of both.

“She’s so happy to have her sister back and so determined to make amends for leaving her in the past that she’s letting Jodie get away with more than she should. At this stage, she’s either genuinely unaware or just choosing not to see it.”

Corrie spoilers for next week have recently revealed that Jodie will try an impersonate her sister. Shona and her husband David nervously watch as the hospital staff prepare Harper for her operation. At Jodie’s suggestion the Platts arrive to lend their support. Having found out that Harper has suffered a minor bleed, David and Shona panic. As the family tries to rally round, David loses his temper and orders them to leave.

Jodie hugs David before heading out, where she passes a new mum. When she assumes that Jodie is Shona, Harper’s mum, and that David is her husband, will Jodie put her straight? Soon, David and Shona emerge from the hospital to find the family in the car park waiting for news.

Once back inside the NICU, David and Shona watch over Harper with concern. Later, once back at the hospital the mum from the previous day approaches Jodie and enquires after Harper. As Jodie talks about her daughter’s operation, she’s horrified to realise Shona’s standing right behind her. How will Jodie explain this one?

Speaking about Shona’s reaction, Julia revealed: “Oh, she’s fuming initially! She’s like, “What are you playing at?” But Jodie is so good at talking her way out of things that Shona ends up believing her. It’s hard to get into that headspace sometimes because it feels so risky, but Shona just wants to trust her sister.”

When Jodie’s deception is finally exposed, Julia was asked how would you like to see Shona react, to which Julia admitted: “I’d love to see Shona kick off and bring back that ‘Bad Shona’ energy! She’s been made a lot softer on the street lately. I want to see the hard Shona return – the one people should actually fear!”

For years, Democrats have leaned on Michelle Obama’s famous line, ‘When they go low, we go high.’

As an ethos, it’s noble and dignified, but it’s also politically nullifying – because in the current climate dynamic, those who live by it may occupy the moral highground, but they don’t control the battlefield. 

Thus for so many years now we’ve seen Donald Trump’s Republicans define the narrative, while Democrats take solace from the fact that they’re playing by the rules. 

That ‘go high’ mentality confers moral superiority, sure, but it does not confer power. And as we all know, power is basically all that matters in politics.

For the best part of a decade, I have watched two sides of the same Democratic party navigate this exact issue. 

Last night’s rambling, record-breaking State of the Union Address brought the divide between those two sides into sharp focus.

Because what we witnessed on Tuesday was not about a speech, Trump’s strongman leadership, or even the USA.

It was about a Democratic party at a crossroads. One side committing to the ‘We go high’ rules. The other embracing the chaotic liberation of ‘When they go low, we raise hell’.

Treading a well-worn path was Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, applauding at points, rising politely, behaving as though this were just another presidential address.

Except it wasn’t. It really wasn’t.

Because blazing an unrepentantly contrarian trail were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib refusing to play Trump’s game – choosing instead to respectively boycott, protest, and reject the absurd spectacle.

But parts of the Democratic Party still responded as though this were a serious policy address delivered in good faith.

Vice Chair of the Senate Ethics Committee and senator of almost 16 years, Chris Coons, said he hoped for a ‘brief and unifying speech’.

To expect brevity and unity from Donald Trump is like expecting to win a gunfight with a bunch of flowers.

He attempted to speak solemnly – for a record-breaking 107 minutes in total – about law and order, and the threat of immigrants poisoning American communities.

It’s pretty galling to hear a man with 34 criminal convictions who’s been found liable for fraud and sexual abuse lecturing the country about morality.

And when he declared that the first duty of the American government is to protect citizens, I could only speculate about who exactly that applied to. 

Because American citizens have been caught up in raids by Trump’s aggressive Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.

A situation where armed federal agents in tactical gear and balaclavas turn up at homes before dawn, plunging entire communities into paralysing fear and sometimes targeting the wrong people.

More than 68,000 people have been taken into custody. More than 30 have died. 

I could go on, but the point is that the gap between his rhetoric and reality is – and always has been – titanic.

Donald Trump is a political force who thrives on rewriting the rules. The speed at which revered institutions have bent, broken, caved and capitulated in his second term has been breathtaking.

He has never operated within norms, nor does he fear outrage, or retreat when scolded – we have the whole of his first term to know that.

Anyone still clinging to the idea that behaving properly, respecting institutions and demonstrating civility will somehow restore normality are delusional. 

It would be pure folly to think that a strongly worded letter, or a show of bipartisanship, might inspire him to change course.

It hasn’t worked up to this point. It’s not working now. It will never work.

That was proven even before Tuesday’s speech, when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pleaded with Trump to ‘make his case’ on potentially striking Iran. 

We all know that any action in the Middle East will mirror his Venezuela raid, and almost his entire foreign policy – chaotic, violent, and potentially illegal.  

So to resort to cliché, it’s crunch time. This Democratic generational divide is undeniable, and it’s necessary. It’s not about style. It is about diagnosis. 

Because while I have deep respect for the older guard of centre-left American politics, from Biden to Warren, who have contributed immeasurably, their time was forged in a different political era. 

The younger generation of Democrats is often caricatured as theatrical, unserious and untested, but it instinctively grasps that standing up to applaud, nodding along to platitudes, and expressing disappointment at the lack of unity simply feeds the illusion that any of this is somehow normal.

They recognise that Trump is not an irregularity that can be corrected by etiquette and the modelling of good behaviour. 

Instead, they understand that they need to match his force, clarity and narrative, upholding their principles while also getting down in the dirt to fight.

Bill Gates has apologized to staff at his charitable foundation over his past friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, also admitting to two extramarital affairs, according to a report.

“I did nothing illicit. I saw nothing illicit,” the Microsoft founder told his employees in response to the Department of Justice’s release of the Epstein files, according to The Wall Street Journal, citing an audio recording of the latest biannual Gates Foundation town hall.

“To be clear, I never spent any time with victims, the women around him,” Gates said while apologizing to foundation executives for introducing them into Epstein’s orbit.

“It was a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein. I apologize to other people who are drawn into this because of the mistake that I made,” he said.

The tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist explained that he first met the pedophile in 2011, three years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida, but that he had not looked into the financier’s background and was only dimly aware of an “18-month thing” that limited his travel.

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He acknowledged that his then-wife, Melinda Gates, had expressed concern about Epstein in 2013, but that he had ignored her caution and continued to see him socially.

“Knowing what I know now makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior,” Gates said, according to the WSJ.

Alluding to his ex-wife, he added: “To give her credit, she was always kind of skeptical about the Epstein thing.”

Gates continued to map out the course of their relationship, saying he had met with Epstein in 2011, taken trips on his private jet and spent time with him in Germany, France, New York, and Washington, but “never stayed overnight” at his properties or visited Little St James, his now-notorious private Caribbean island.

He said he did not see Epstein again after 2014, although there were “ancillary issues” that Epstein continued to email him about, but Gates said he chose not to respond to them.

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Gates also said the women pictured with him in the files were Epstein’s assistants, whom the billionaire had asked to pose with him.

He said he had been drawn to Epstein initially because he “talked about the kind of intimate relationship he had with a lot of billionaires, particularly Wall Street billionaires,” whom, he said, could help Gates with his fundraising goals, which “made it easier for me to feel like this was a normalized situation.”

“It definitely is the opposite of the values of the foundation and the goals of the foundation,” Gates admitted. “And our work is very reputation-sensitive. I mean, people can choose to work with us or not work with us.”

A Gates Foundation spokesperson told The Independent: “This was a scheduled town hall with employees, which Bill does twice a year. In the conversation, Bill answered questions submitted by foundation staff on a range of issues, including the release of the Epstein files, the foundation’s work in AI, and the future of global health. 

“In the town hall, Bill spoke candidly, addressing several questions in detail, and took responsibility for his actions.”

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During the town hall, the billionaire also admitted to two affairs.

“I did have affairs, one with a Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events, and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities,” he said.

Melinda Gates spoke to NPR’s Wild Card podcast earlier this month about the release of the Epstein files and told host Rachel Martin that the scandal “brings back memories of some very, very painful times” in her marriage.

The couple, who have three children, divorced in 2021 after 27 years together.

Martin asked her guest about one of the emails released by the DOJ that suggested her former husband had sought treatment for a sexually transmitted infection and planned to supply it to his ex-wife too without her knowledge, asking what her “dominant emotion” was when she first heard about it, to which she answered: “Just unbelievable sadness.”

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A spokesperson for Bill Gates has vehemently denied the allegations in question and previously told The Independent: “These claims are absolutely absurd and completely false.

“The only thing these documents demonstrate is Epstein’s frustration that he did not have an ongoing relationship with Gates and the lengths he would go to entrap and defame.”

Unlike other powerful men linked to Epstein, Gates has shown a commendable willingness to speak frankly about his past mistakes.

“Every minute I spent with him, I regret, and I apologise that I did that,” he recently told Australia’s 9News, adding that he was “foolish to spend time with him” and is “one of many people who regret ever knowing him.”

“The more that comes out, the more clear it will be that, although the time was a mistake, it has nothing to do with that kind of behaviour,” he added.

A federal judge reprimanded Donald Trump’s administration for claiming that an immigrant seeking his release from custody was convicted for marijuana possession in 2009 — when he was 4 years old.

To support arguments for the man’s ongoing detention and removal from the country, government lawyers attached a document from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that they “indicated” was related to his criminal history.

They submitted the document in court filings “despite the differences in birthdate, birthplace, parents’ names, and immigration status,” West Virginia District Judge Irene Berger noted in her order to release him on Tuesday.

“This sloppiness further validates the Court’s concerns about the procedures utilized by the Respondents depriving people present in the United States of their liberty,” she wrote.

The viral rebuke, first reported by Politico, is the latest in a string of losses for Department of Justice lawyers and Homeland Security officials who are failing to keep up with court orders after thousands of arrests under Trump’s mass deportation efforts.

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Judges within the last week have held at least two government attorneys in civil contempt for failing to follow orders in immigration cases, according to documents reviewed by The Independent.

Last week, Minnesota District Judge Laura M. Provinzino held a federal prosecutor in civil contempt for “flagrant disobedience of court orders” in the case of a noncitizen swept up in Trump’s surge of immigration officers in the state.

Provinzino ordered Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Isihara to pay $500 a day until the government returned a man’s identification documents after his release. The contempt was purged after his documents were returned.

This week, Trump appointee Judge Eric C. Tostrud of Minnesota found the administration in civil contempt for transferring an ICE detainee to Texas in violation of his order and then releasing him without his belongings.

The judge ordered the administration to refund him $568 for the cost of a plane ticket home.

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The administration’s attempts to arrest and deport tens of thousands of people from the country — without giving them much of a chance to fight their cases before they’re indefinitely jailed in immigration detention centers — have triggered an avalanche of lawsuits that are overwhelming courts and prosecutors.

Dozens of new habeas corpus petitions — the lawsuits immigrants have filed to challenge the constitutionality of their arrest and detention — are hitting court dockets every week. Government attorneys are overwhelmed or quitting in droves under pressure to fight them at an unsustainable pace.

Judges have argued that it’s a crisis of the administration’s own making.

Officials “have chosen to avail themselves of these exact circumstances of which they now complain,” wrote California District Judge Sunshine Sykes, whose order this month commanded the government to let detainees challenge their detentions.

In New Jersey, government lawyers recently admitted to violating roughly 50 orders stemming from more than 500 cases.

“What do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks,” one government lawyer told a judge in Minnesota last month.

Julie Le, a lawyer for ICE who was drafted to help with the caseload in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, was removed from that detail days after her outburst in court.

The same month, Minnesota’s chief federal judge ripped into the administration after he found ICE violated nearly 100 court orders stemming from the recent surge of officers into the state, or “more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.”

“ICE has every right to challenge the orders of this court,” wrote Judge Patrick J. Schiltz. “But, like any litigant, ICE must follow those orders unless and until they are overturned or vacated.”

Officials at the Justice Department and DHS have labeled judges “activists” and “rogue” members of the judiciary in public statements criticizing the decisions but have rarely appealed them.

Cabin crew travel for a living, so we tend to trust their advice on making the most of our trips.

And this flight attendant’s top tip could be an invaluable one, especially if you’re travelling alone.

Esther Sturrus, who works for Dutch airline KLM and shares TikToks about her journeys, recommends always throwing a water bottle under the bed when you get into a hotel room.

Although unlikely, tourists can be targeted by thieves or intruders, with some travellers choosing to be vigilant in certain countries or in rooms on lower floors.

According to Esther, her hack lets you ‘check that no one is under the bed without looking’, easing your mind if you’re wary.

She advises rolling the bottle under the bed, adding in her video that it ‘has to come out on the other side’. If it doesn’t, you may want to exercise caution.