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The Jaguar Type 01: a £150k gargantuan getaway vehicle utterly useless in the city

Too costly for most, too large for UK car parks, and wheels bigger than a warlord’s pickup truck. But it does come in ‘London red’

The cutting-edge car du jour, even while very few will ever buy one, is a good index of what the world’s coming to. It’s a dress-for-the-job-you-want principle, on wheels: drive for the world you want to inhabit.

That’s why when Tesla launched the Model X with a bioweapon defence mode (2016!), we should have been much more worried than we were, and it’s why the Jaguar Type 01 Grand Tourer EV has a lot to say.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 12:29:24 GMT
The Social Reckoning review – Aaron Sorkin’s jittery sequel with all-new evil puppet Zuckerberg

Jeremy Strong’s slow-talking Facebook founder turns into a cameo, background to a thriller about a whistleblower that somehow never mentions Trump

Here is a film for all those people who solemnly deplore social media in conversation but haven’t quite got round to deleting their accounts. Sixteen years have gone by since The Social Network, written by Aaron Sorkin and directed by David Fincher; this was the addictive, obsessive-compulsive movie about the birth of Facebook in Harvard’s macho-competitive cauldron of student sexism and nerdy self-pity, starring Jesse Eisenberg as the fast-talking, arrogant, not-necessarily-evil genius Mark Zuckerberg. Now Sorkin is back with a sequel of sorts, directing his own script – and now Zuckerberg is basically evil, but also weirdly slow talking, as if all the zinging, smart-alecky Sorkinesque dialogue energy of the first film has been siphoned away in early middle age and dispersed among the insurgents in the new cast.

Sorkin’s jittery, funny, syncopated style is unmistakable, as distinctive in its way as David Mamet, although he has one joke about “spatula” being a Yiddish word that he has borrowed from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It is the story of how in 2021, Zuckerberg’s Facebook empire was challenged by courageous whistleblower-employee Frances Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz, who were on a mission to tell the world how Zuckerberg, scared by falling revenue, changed the algorithm so that engagement was supercharged by rage bait and hate speech, malice and envy. Facebook, moreover, didn’t factcheck political ads, thus driving a huge, nationwide surge in extremist groups and teen bullying and becoming a major player in the Capitol riots. (Having said that, this film does not say aloud the word “Trump” and rather cravenly declines to specify Maga activity.)

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 13:00:04 GMT
All hail the Kult of Kemi – captain, coach and owner of the Conservatives | John Crace

The Tory leader is now too big for the party to allow her to fail, so everything she does is acclaimed a work of genius

Where’s AI slop when you need it? It could all have been so much simpler. Just ask ChatGPT to write me a leader’s speech in the style of Kemi Badenoch. Make it an hour and 10 minutes long, so plenty of room for padding. Go heavy on the slogans, cliches and the obligatory crap politician jokes. Ones we’ve all heard many times before. Not least at this conference.

Make the usual digs at Labour and put the boot in to Reform. The main aim of the speech is to try to reposition a party that is tanking in third place on 20% in the polls as the main opposition to the government.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 16:26:06 GMT
Cruel torment, depraved violence, evil turns: where did TV’s real baddies go?

From Carrie’s bullies to Cathy Ames, sympathetic backstories have made villains boring. It’s time to bring back truly awful villains – in all their deliciously sinful glory

The new Netflix adaptation of East of Eden largely sticks to the plot of the John Steinbeck novel. There are tweaks – the introduction of a wedding photograph, for example, which becomes a significant item – but otherwise, it is faithful to the book. That is, in terms of the plot. There has already been some discussion about what it has done to Cathy Ames, played with considerable ferocity by Florence Pugh. Cathy, who later changes her name to Kate, kills her parents by burning down the family house. She shoots her husband, Adam, and leaves her baby sons wailing and alone. She slowly poisons the brothel madam Faye, a woman who acts as a mentor to her and treats her as a daughter, while simultaneously tricking her into leaving her everything in her will. In the book, Steinbeck lets Kate reflect on killing Faye. She finds that she has “no feeling” about it at all.

She is a brilliant, brutal character, but on television, she becomes something else: complicated. Her cruelty remains intact, but Pugh and showrunner Zoe Kazan have fleshed her out and given reasons for her fury. They invent a scene that implies Cathy was abused as a child by two men in the woods, and when she takes her final bow, the series returns to this moment in flashback, suggesting that her campaign of destruction has been shaped by a life of trauma and pain. In Steinbeck’s hands, Cathy is cold and unfeeling. In the 2020s, Cathy is more sympathetic and less of a brute.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 14:11:15 GMT
‘He was devastatingly sexy’: Frasier’s Jane Leeves and David Hyde Pierce on the love between Daphne and Niles

From a breathless tango to a kiss that sent fans wild, the pair crafted a sensational seven-year TV crush. The real-life best friends talk first impressions, Casablanca moments – and having hot husbands

“Dr Crane, your glockenspiel has sprung to life!”

It was a crush. An unexpected one. The psychiatrist Niles Crane (snooty, conflict-avoidant, married to a high-society wife with a fear of buffets) fell for his father’s physio, Daphne Moon (working class, Mancunian, reckons she’s a bit psychic) the moment he met her in his brother’s Seattle apartment.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 10:53:33 GMT
Christa Pike awake and speaking after botched execution: what happens now? - The Latest

Christa Pike, a death row inmate who survived the state of Tennessee’s attempt to execute her last week, is conscious and speaking. The 50-year-old is recovering in hospital after surviving two lethal injections in a case that has shocked many in the US and prompted a debate about the death penalty. She was due to be the first woman executed in Tennessee in more than 200 years. Michael Safi speaks to the chief reporter for Guardian US, Ed Pilkington – watch on YouTube

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:20:53 GMT
Labour Send changes at risk as parents rush to secure support, say experts

Overhaul of special education in England could unravel, thinktank finds, because of ‘use it before you lose it’ dynamic

Labour’s flagship changes to special education in England are at risk of unravelling because parents are rushing to secure support for their children before the system changes, new analysis has found.

The Institute for Government (IfG) thinktank says the government’s plans to largely replace education, health and care plans (EHCPs) in England with more widespread support in mainstream schools may be too optimistic and take longer to complete than its 2030 timeline.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:00:00 GMT
‘I reside in Monaco’: billionaire said to have quit UK over potential wealth tax had already left

TaxWatch contradicts claims about David Reuben’s departure and questions stories of super-rich exodus

When the Sunday Times broke the news that David Reuben, one of the richest men in the UK, had apparently fled to the tax haven of Monaco, there was much pearl clutching. Reuben had moved from his Holland Park house in London to live full-time in the principality.

Labour’s tax regime was blamed and there were said to be fears there would be a cascading effect across the economy, with wealth draining from the UK. It was reported that he had probably left because of potential taxes on wealth in the upcoming budget.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:00:00 GMT
WHO says it does not have ‘full picture’ from Russia following suspected plague death

‘Transparent information sharing’ from Moscow is required to conduct full risk assessment, UN agency says

The World Health Organization has said it does not have the “full picture” from Russia following the suspected death from plague last week of a 28-year-old laboratory worker in Siberia.

Darya Shipilova died two days after falling ill with cold-like symptoms. She was an employee at the anti-plague research institute in the eastern city of Irkutsk, with some reports suggesting she was infected after a workplace accident.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 20:46:07 GMT
Gene therapy can partly restore sight in blind people, researchers reveal

Optogenetic therapy, based on Nobel prize-winning science, involves turning nerve cells on and off using light

A type of gene therapy based on Nobel prize-winning science is safe and can partly restore sight in blind people, researchers have revealed.

The approach, known as optogenetic therapy, harnesses the technique for turning nerve cells on and off using light that scooped the 2026 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine.

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Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:00:01 GMT

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