A galaxy has been discovered in a place where it shouldn’t exist, baffling astronomers with its location and age. This galaxy, strikingly similar to our Milky Way, challenges current understandings of the early universe.

Around a billion years after the Big Bang, the universe began to settle into its more stable state, and it hasn’t changed much since. Before this period, however, things were far more chaotic—at least, that’s what scientists believed.

Galaxies are a prime example of this assumption.

Roughly 50-80% of galaxies within 7 billion light-years of Earth are organized, with a characteristic rotating disc shape, like the Milky Way. In the universe’s early years, such orderly structures weren’t expected to exist.

Yet, new observations, detailed in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, reveal the surprising existence of such a galaxy.

A Surprising Discovery

Named REBELS-25, it appears at a redshift of z=7.31, meaning it dates back to a time when the universe was only 700 million years old. The oldest known galaxies are just a few hundred million years older.

True to its name, REBELS-25 defies expectations.

TEN million pensioners face losing the Winter Fuel Payment – if you are one of them call our team of experts TODAY.

We want to help the thousands of pensioners who are worrying about paying their energy bills with tips and advice. And we want to help determine if they may be in line for Pension Credit.

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Our Winter Fuel SOS Crew, including energy experts and consumer champions, are available today to answer your questions from 7am to 7pm, or you can email.

You can even contact on behalf of pension-age friends with their permission.

PENSIONS Minister Emma Reynolds has backed our Winter Fuel SOS campaign to help thousands of older people with their bills and heating costs this winter.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced in July that only households in England and Wales that receive Pension Credit or certain means-tested benefits will be entitled to the Winter Fuel Payment this year.

Previously it was available to everyone aged over 66.

Charity Age UK yesterday published an impact assessment that showed 800,000 hard-up pensioners are missing out on Pension Credit and will now also lose the Winter Fuel Payment. Many wrongly believe they aren’t entitled to it.

Backing our campaign to help older people register for Pension Credit, Emma Reynolds said: “It is vital we make sure that pensioners know about all the support they are entitled to.

Not only does Pension Credit top up income, it also opens up further support

Emma Reynolds

“Our drive to boost Pension Credit take-up has already seen a 152 per cent increase in claims and Sun readers can help spread the word.

“If you have a friend, neighbour or relative who is a pensioner and on a low income, telling them about Pension Credit could boost their income by an average of £3,900.

“Not only does Pension Credit top up income, it also opens up further support, such as the Winter Fuel Payment.”

Pension Credit can be back-dated by three months, which means the last date to claim and still get the Winter Fuel Payment is December 21.

As our Winter Fuel SOS experts take your calls, here we bust some Pension Credit myths.

What is Pension Credit?

If you are over state pension age Pension Credit tops up your retirement income to a minimum of £218.15 per week if you are single and £332.95 for couples. It also opens up access to other benefits.

I have savings and own a home, can I still get it?

You can still be eligible. You may even get help towards interest payments on your mortgage. How much you get depends on your income and savings.

Is there any point if I will only get a small amount?

Yes. If you get any amount of Pension Credit you may also be able to get help with other costs including Housing Benefit if you rent, a free TV licence if you’re over 75, help with your heating costs and more.

My mum has a severe disability, is there any additional help for her?

Yes, those with a severe disability could get an extra £81.50 a week if they get any of the following:

• Attendance Allowance.
• Armed Forces Independence Payment.
• The middle or highest rate from the care component of Disability Living Allowance (DLA).
• The daily living component of Personal Independence Payment (PIP).
• The daily living component of Adult Disability Payment (ADP) at the standard or enhanced rate.

I am a carer for my grandchild, is there any additional help for me?

Yes, if you’re a carer you could get an extra £45.60 if you get Carer’s Allowance or Carer Support Payment.

And, if you and your partner have both claimed or are getting Carer’s Allowance, you can both get this extra amount.

I was turned down for Pension Credit before, is it worth claiming again?

Definitely, especially if your circumstances have changed.

Is there a way of estimating how much I could get?

There is a Pension Credit calculator at gov.uk/pension-credit-calculator to help you work out how much you could be eligible for before applying.

Alternatively, you can contact the Pension Service helpline on 0800 731 046 if you’re not sure whether you’re eligible for extra amounts.

OK, so how can I apply and is it complicated?

Claiming is straightforward. You can do it:

• Online at gov.uk/pension-credit/how-to-claim.
• Over the phone by calling 0800 99 1234.
• By printing out and filling in a paper application form.

And if you need some extra support, a friend or voluntary organisation such as Age UK can help you make a claim.

Anyone wowed by Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (widely considered the finest documentary series ever made about the Troubles) will have been equally impressed by the production team’s latest film, Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher. The focus obviously had to be tighter in this one-off 40th-anniversary documentary about the October 1984 IRA attack on Brighton’s Grand Hotel where prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet were staying during the Conservative Party conference. Nevertheless the bombing was carefully put in context of the wider Troubles.

Thatcher survived unscathed but five people were killed – including the deputy chief whip, Sir Anthony Berry – and 35 were seriously injured. Berry’s children Jo and Edward are contributors to the documentary, alongside former party chairman John Gummer and his wife Penelope. Gummer was helping Thatcher prepare her conference speech in the prime minister’s hotel room when the bomb exploded at 2.54am.

However, the biggest interviewee coup here is the bomber himself, Patrick Magee. Now aged 73 and looking more like a tenured academic than the hard-eyed IRA fugitive of his 1980s police mugshot, Magee spoke clearly and unemotionally of his radicalisation and subsequent bombmaking career.

Indeed, Bombing Brighton put the events of the attack into the historical context of the republican hatred of Thatcher following her intransigence over the prison hunger strikes, in which Republican inmates starved themselves in their effort to be considered political prisoners.

Ten of them died as a result, mostly famously Bobby Sands. “She was a legitimate target,” said Magee, who went on to describe the rudimentary bombmaking process (“an alarm clock rigged to a detonator”). The one thing he adamantly would not discuss were the operational details of the attack, presumably so as not to implicate any so far unidentified co-conspirators.

The bomb was planted weeks before it exploded, Magee safely back in the Republic by this time and watching the news coverage of the attack in a County Cork pub. “It went down well,” he said

The Berry children had also been glued to their TV screens as news of the bombing was reported – but in acute anxiety rather than jubilation. Thatcher having declared that the conference would go ahead despite the devastation, they hoped in vain to spot their father during the TV coverage.

Other interviewees included former civil service mandarin Robin Butler ( the PM’s principal private secretary, he was in the room with her and Gummer) and Sinn Féin’s former publicity director Danny Morrison. The latter still grieved the dead hunger strikers (“I think about them every day”) and held Thatcher directly responsible for her attempted assassination, calling her “an impediment to peace”.

More surprisingly, Butler expressed a not entirely contrary opinion, in that he seemingly viewed her intransigence as a character flaw: “Her utter defiance did in the end cause her downfall.”

However, It is the testimonies of Magee and the Gummers that are at the heart of the film (for the first hour of its 75 minutes at least). “I thought John and Robin Butler and Mrs Thatcher were lying in a sticky mess,” said Gummer’s wife Penelope as the couple recalled searching for each other amidst the wreckage.

Four others were killed in the blast: Tory official Eric Taylor; Jeanne Shattock, the wife of another official, Gordon Shattock; Roberta Wakeham, the wife of chief whip John Wakeham; and Muriel Maclean, wife of Sir Donald Maclean, the president of the Scottish Conservatives.

The injured included Norman Tebbit, then trade secretary, and his wife Margaret, who suffered spinal injuries and was left permanently disabled.

Magee was planning a new mainland bombing campaign when he was arrested in Glasgow in 1985. Sentenced to eight life terms he was released in 1999 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement. “He’s free… my dad’s not free,” Jo Berry recalled thinking at the time. “How can this be justice?”

If the documentary had finished there, it would still have been an important, skillfully made piece of oral history. But there was a twist that elevated it into something more than a disinterment long-ago events. For, after his release, Jo Berry approached Magee for a meeting, the bomber initially intent on justifying his actions.

However, “something in my head clicked”, Magee recalled. “I killed this guy who had created this woman. I don’t know who I am any more.” The pair have since met on countless occasions to promote reconciliation.

Not everyone is convinced by Magee’s reinvention as a man of peace. “I have nothing to offer on the subject of this gentleman,” said Edward Berry. “But if my sister is on this particular journey and if it does good then that’s fine by me.”

As for those of us at home, this riveting, even-handed documentary challenged us to make up our own minds on that score.

‘Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher‘ is streaming on BBC iPlayer

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

General Atlantic’s chief executive said higher taxation of capital gains in the United Kingdom would not affect his firm’s approach to investing, and that dealmaking would improve next year regardless of who won the US election.

Bill Ford, who heads the global private equity firm with $83bn in assets under management, added that companies with market capitalisations of more than $10bn would drive the IPO market going forward.

“Investors want more market cap,” Ford said at the Financial Times Due Diligence conference in London, adding that small companies would struggle in the IPO market because “people want liquidity, and it’s very hard to generate sufficient liquidity when you’re a lower cap and you’re a long way from being included in an index”.

He added that the growth of the exchange traded funds market had been “negative for the IPO market” because “ETFs don’t buy IPOs, active investors buy IPOs”.

A drought in listings has persisted into this year in the wake of higher interest rates. Companies have raised about $26bn by going public in New York this year, roughly the amount that was being raised every six months in the years before the 2020-21 boom.

But Ford predicted that upcoming big-ticket listings, such as the expected flotation of Chinese budget fashion retailer Shein, could rouse activity.

“It’s the kind of IPO that could excite investors and . . . reopen an IPO market.”

The slump in listings has been part of a wider dearth of dealmaking that Ford put down to higher rates and t elections taking place in the US and elsewhere in 2024.

But he said next year would be an “active year” once the political uncertainty had subsided and the “rate cycle has turned”. He added that “we’re looking at a soft-landing scenario”.

He said the prediction was not contingent on who won the US election, although “everybody is hoping for a change in the antitrust environment. I know in the US, probably more broadly, that will allow strategic buyers to be more active . . . but I think it’s irrespective of who wins the election.”

Turning his attention to the taxation of carried interest — the share of profits that private equity investors get to keep on successful deals — Ford said he did not know that changes in the UK would “dramatically change what we do or our style of investing”.

Debates around the taxation of carried interest have long percolated through elections on both sides of the Atlantic.

The UK chancellor, Rachel Reeves, had put the industry on notice of her plans to close a “loophole” that has long allowed the windfalls to be taxed as capital gain. However, the FT recently reported that she was looking for a compromise after several warnings that boosting the rate could trigger an exodus of buyout executives.

“In the US the debate is, will it be the equivalent to ordinary income and what will that rate be? You know, everybody in the world would like lower taxes or higher taxes [depending on one’s political affiliation], but I don’t think it would change what we do,” said Ford.

“We’ve got to generate investment excellence for our clients to stay in business, we’ve got to produce the results they expect of us,” he added. “That more than taxes or anything else is what motivates us.”

Columbia Hillen

Sitting on my upper-floor verandah at the Hotel Norman Paris gazing down on cobbled streets, it’s hard to believe I’m just a minute’s walk from the ever-busy Champs-Élysées.

It’s soooo quiet.

Columbia Hillen

Formerly the Vigne Hotel, the building in the 8th arrondissement ten minutes from the Arc de Triomphe was purchased by hospitality entrepreneur Olivier Bertrand, renovated for a year and opened last September. It’s named after Norman Ives, a mid-20th-century painter and graphic designer who became a major player in American modernism. 

Located on the corner of Rue Balzac and Rue de Châteaubriand, the 37-room, 5-star boutique hotel stands out architecturally, crowned as it is by a large dome with a creamy stone facade and flower boxes on each floor. 

Columbia Hillen

Curved-glass windows and metal railings at its corner indicate where junior suites with balconies are located. 

Beyond the revolving entrance door and the velvet curtain embracing it, I step straight into a cozy lounge featuring wood and leather furnishings and eclectic artworks unearthed, I’m informed later, in antique shops nationwide, all emblematic of the era in which Ives flourished. 

Columbia Hillen

Here, courtesy of French architect Thomas Vidalenc, are vintage sofas in green, blue and tan, parquet floors, thick rugs with geometric patterns, ’50s furniture, low wooden tables and American paintings of the ‘70s.  A shelf is lined with vintage brass tea caddies, marble candle-holders, mini-busts and ornamental vases. There’s even a fireplace. A bar with a speckled grey and black counter bordered by potted wild banana plants, stone pillars and intricately carved wooden stools line one side of the room.

Columbia Hillen

It’s certainly a cozy place to relax. 

In contrast, the reception desk almost seems like an afterthought, tucked away as it is discreetly in a little side room.

Columbia Hillen

My room, 305, a corner suite, featured a terrace with olive plants in pots, two chairs and a coffee table. Inside, a gleaming lacquered rosewood headboard is balanced by soft natural wool curtains. 

Columbia Hillen

Furnishings include a leather lounge chair in the middle of the room, a checkered sofa, a glass-topped coffee table, a stand-alone TV and an oak bureau with a built-in mini-bar. Abstract paintings adorn the walls and floor-to-ceiling windows permit an abundance of natural light. Interestingly, a kettle offers multi-temperature settings for tea-making. My bathroom features a bathtub with shower and a mosaic-tile floor and a marble sink on a vanity of rosewood, glass and steel. 

Columbia Hillen

Dining is in the hotel’s ground-floor restaurant with a mirrored ceiling from which hang lines of balloon-like lamps. Classic in style with square wooden tables ribbed with metal, its mood is enhanced by a sofa with vibrant, multicolored cushions and abstract paintings on the walls. Seating is either on wood and leather chairs or banquette-style. A shelf displays a range of wooden sculptures and glass artifacts. 

Columbia Hillen

Guests can also enjoy alfresco meals, in an inner courtyard with a paved stone floor, wall heaters and decorative wood panels on the walls.

Breakfast is continental buffet with some cooked dishes such as eggs Benedict, mixed-grills and avocado on toast and due to the influence of Chef Thiou (nee Apiradee Thirakomen) you can also start your day with Thai tea and crêpes in condensed milk. While I didn’t eat dinner there, the restaurant offers a selection of Thai dishes. As added relaxation, the hotel also has a sauna and dipping pool, gym and two treatment rooms in an underground spa.

Columbia Hillen

Interestingly, Bertrand, the owner, seems to have been in a restless purchasing mood over the last few years, having recently taken over two other hotels in the same neighborhood, namely the Château des Fleurs, and Hotel Balzac just down the street from Hotel Norman.

Columbia Hillen

Together with his sisters, he also owns the renowned Parisian hotels, Saint James Paris and Relais Christine, as well as the high-end tea rooms, Maison Angelina. 

If you require an upscale hotel in a central Parisian location with easy access to shopping outlets, museums and art galleries, Hotel Norman may well be the place for you.