An intimate account of an unprecedented trial

If we believe her parents, Constance Marten and Mark Gordon, a baby girl was born on Christmas Eve, 2022, in the upstairs bedroom of Woodcutters Cottage in Haltwhistle, Northumberland. Her mother knelt against the double bed and gave birth without assistance or complication. The baby spent the first days of her life in the small stone-terraced cottage and then began her travels, mostly carried by her mother in a sling, hidden under a burgundy puffer jacket. She travelled far for a newborn, passing through bus stations and port towns, hotels and cafes, cities and fields, from north to south, west to east. We know she lived for at least two weeks, but we don’t know, and can never know, precisely how she died. She was called Victoria.

Noel Gallagher named a song after it, Marc Almond practically moved in and the Killers had a bathtub reserved for puking in – but was it rock’n’roll, or just a bit tragic?

In the early 2000s, a member of the New York dance-punk band Radio 4 was walking upstairs when he realised he’d forgotten the key to his room at London’s Columbia hotel. Rather than walk back down the several flights he’d already climbed, he drunkenly decided to jump all the way down to the reception level. When he regained consciousness, a bemused Courtney Love was staring down at his prone body. As was an irate hotel manager, who swiftly barred the band from staying there for years, before the crumpled musician was scooped up to go and spend a few days in hospital.

It was not easy to get barred from the Columbia hotel, but Radio 4 were not the only ones who managed it. Once, at 6am, members of Oasis decided to throw all the furniture in the bar out of the window, piece by piece. When items landed on the hotel manager’s Mercedes, the band had to scarper before the police arrived. It played such a significant part in Oasis’s story that Noel Gallagher wrote a song in tribute to it, Columbia, based on his escapades there back when he was a roadie for Inspiral Carpets.

Commons remain tone deaf as superinjunction lifts lid on data leak and £800m Afghanistan Response Route

I suppose we might have guessed something like this. In August 2021, the then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, had moaned about the “sea being closed” while on holiday in Crete. The fate of thousands of Afghans who had helped the UK and whose lives were in danger as the Taliban homed in on Kabul came a distant second. For Psycho Dom, it was a simple matter of priorities.

So no wonder a government official and/or a soldier had been less than diligent with the names of Afghans at risk. Following by example. Which one of us hasn’t accidentally emailed an entire spreadsheet of more than 18,000 endangered people to someone who might pass on their names to the Taliban? Such an easy mistake to make. Why bother to check a confidential file when you can just press send and go and grab yourself a coffee?

It may not be completely anatomically accurate, but the Victorian copy of the Bayeux tapestry is as much an emblem of its time as the 11th-century original

‘We’ve already got one,” sneers a snotty French knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With that holy grail of British history, the Bayeux tapestry, about to be lent by France to the British Museum, we could say the same. In 1885, Elizabeth Wardle of Leek, Staffordshire, led a team of 35 women in an extraordinary campaign to embroider a meticulous, full-scale replica of the entire early medieval artwork. With Victorian energy and industry they managed it in just a year and by 1886 it was being shown around Britain and abroad.

Today that Victorian Bayeux tapestry is preserved in Reading Museum, and like the original, can be viewed online. Are there differences? Of course. The Bayeux tapestry is a time capsule of the 11th century and when you look at its stitching you get a raw sense of that remote past. The Leek Embroidery Society version is no mean feat but it is an artefact of its own, Victorian age. The colours are simplified and intensified, using worsted thread, as Wardle explains in its end credits, “dyed in permanent colours” by her husband Thomas Wardle, a leading Midlands silk dyeing industrialist.

While Mstyslav Chernov was on the Oscars circuit with his first Ukraine war film, soldiers in his latest – made using bodycams – were dying. He explains why he needed to join them in the trenches

It was in Sloviansk, in the rear of eastern Ukraine’s frontline, that I first met journalist and film-maker Mstyslav Chernov. It was the autumn of 2023 and he was telling me about the film that would later win him and his team an Oscar: 20 Days in Mariupol, a horrifying documentary assembled from the news footage he and his team had gathered there, in the first month of the full-scale invasion. That September day of our interview, though – amid what would turn out to be Ukraine’s disappointing counteroffensive of 2023 – he was making his second film, one that took him to the heart of the combat zone, called 2,000 Meters to Andriivka. It is, if anything, even more powerful than its predecessor: a piece of frontline reporting that truly deserves the name, its footage gathered from soldiers’ own bodycams as well as from Chernov and his small crew on the ground among them. He puts the viewer into the trenches alongside the combatants. It is terrifying, bloody and heartbreakingly sad. You will not emerge from this film unchanged.

The soldiers on whom Chernov focuses are members of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade. They have a mission: to liberate the village of Andriivka, in the Donetsk region, and hoist the blue-and-yellow flag above it. Their sole route to this village is through a narrow strip of forest with flat, open fields either side. The wood, with its sketchy cover, is both their protection and, in many cases, their grave. The painful, dangerous advance through this 2km provides the structure of the film. And yet, for all that the film borrows the conventions of a thriller for its propulsive plotline, it is its tenderness, both in its gaze and in the relationships between the men that it depicts, that really destroyed me.

This isn’t the first time Afghans brave enough to work against the Taliban have been let down by Britain, but it might be the most shameful

The headline figures are eye-watering. Up to 100,000 Afghans could have been placed at risk after a British soldier, according to the Times, sent the names of 33,000 people who supported British forces to a contact he hoped would help verify their applications for sanctuary in this country. The story behind these numbers is one of real people who had already been living in fear for years, and who have been treated abhorrently by the British state.

As soon as it became clear that the information could fall into the Taliban’s hands and lead to these people and those close to them being targeted, the highly secret Operation Rubific was launched. This debacle occurred under the previous Conservative government, which obtained a superinjunction preventing several media organisations that were aware of the leak from reporting on it.

Diane Taylor writes on human rights, racism and civil liberties

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MoD tried to cover up error which gave details of Afghans who said they worked with UK and which led to £2bn scheme

• Afghan nationals: have you arrived in the UK under the Afghan Response Route?

Personal information about more than 33,000 Afghans seeking relocation to the UK after the Taliban takeover was released in error by a defence official – and the Ministry of Defence tried for nearly two years to cover up the leak and its consequences.

Fears that the individuals named would be at risk from reprisals from the Taliban led the previous government to set up a secret relocation scheme, the Afghan Response Route (ARR), involving 20,000 people at a cost in the order of £2bn.

Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, sentenced for act of criminal damage that sparked widespread sadness and anger

Two men who carried out a “moronic mission” to fell one of the most loved and photographed trees in the UK have been jailed.

Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, were each given prison sentences of four years and three months for an act of criminal damage that caused the Sycamore Gap tree to crash down on to Hadrian’s wall in Northumberland on a stormy September night in 2023.

BBC show’s producers Banijay UK say Torode’s contract will not be renewed after allegation, which he has denied

John Torode will not return to MasterChef after its producers confirmed his contract would not be renewed after an allegation of using racist language.

The Australian-born chef, 59, had confirmed on Monday evening he was the subject of an allegation that was upheld as part of an inquiry into the behaviour of his former co-presenter Gregg Wallace.

At the Mansion House dinner she will call for regulators to allow more risk to clear the way for economic growth

Rachel Reeves will say that rules and red tape are acting as a “boot on the neck” of businesses and risk “choking off” innovation across the UK without bold reforms.

In a speech to City bosses attending the Mansion House dinner at London’s Guildhall on Tuesday evening, the chancellor will heap further pressure on regulators to allow for more risk in order to boost economic growth.