A new exhibition looks back at the ‘anti-communist’ witch-hunt that affected many Americans, in particular the Hollywood Ten

There’s no shortage of comparisons with the second Trump administration to the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany, but perhaps the more apt comparison is to the Red Scare in postwar America. Blacklisted, a new show at New York Historical, profiles the lives of the so-called Hollywood Ten, who were creatives caught up in the Communist witch-hunt – to disastrous consequences affecting their lives for decades thereafter. It brings to mind suggestive, and uncomfortable, parallels with politicized persecution in the US today.

“At this point, TV was just beginning to become influential,” said Anne Lessy, an assistant curator who coordinated the show. “There was a lot of anxiety around these mass entertainments and how much power they had, in part because the second world war effort had been so successful in propaganda. A lot of the blacklisted artists were important in those efforts.”

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Climate change will benefit basking sharks in the UK but creatures like the longest living animal may struggle.

For years, Israel contained its conflicts with Tehran, Hamas and Hezbollah. The broad assault on Iran highlights a shift in strategy.

It’s time for the legislative branch to step up.

The Women's Super League transfer window is open again - so which players could be on the move and what clubs are expected to be active in the market?

British Antarctic Survey finds one breed of seal has declined by 54% since 1977

Antarctic seal populations are drastically declining as the sea ice melts around them, new research has shown.

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) have been monitoring the seal population in the sub-Antarctic since the 1970s, looking in particular at three different seal species in the sub-Antarctic on Signy Island: Weddell seals, Antarctic fur seals and southern elephant seals.

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Parents have a way to bring back childhood. To make it work, we have to act together.

The 2026 tournament will feature more teams and more air miles travelled than ever, casting doubt upon ambitious climate goals

As next summer’s World Cup approaches, excitement is building for the biggest global soccer tournament ever held, but so too are concerns over the viability and environmental sustainability of the vastly expanded competition.

Held across 16 cities in the United States, Canada and Mexico, the 2026 World Cup will see the tournament expand from 32 nations to 48 competing for soccer’s most coveted prize. It will be a tournament of unprecedented scale both in terms of the number of teams, and the vast geographical expanse it will cover.

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Ellen Roome suspects her 14-year-old was taking part in a ‘blackout challenge’ when he died. But she can’t access his online accounts – so she has given up everything to take on the social media giants

The last day of Jools Sweeney’s life, 13 April 2022, was sunny and fun-filled. It was the Easter holidays and Jools, who was 14, had spent the day with a bunch of friends in Cheltenham, where he lived. They played football. They walked through fields to a lake and tried to reach the middle in a small wooden boat. Back home, he and a friend had pizza for dinner, then got the fire pit going and toasted marshmallows. At 8.46pm, his friend left, leaving Jools, an only child, on his own. Their laughter as they said goodbye was recorded on the Ring doorbell.

Jools’s mum, Ellen Roome, had been out all day but she had been in constant contact with her son. At 9.56pm she rang him to say she would be back soon – she rang three times but there was no answer. When she arrived home, less than 20 minutes later, with her then-partner, she went straight to Jools’s room, just to say hello, and for a moment, made no sense of what she saw. “I said: ‘What are you doing?’” says Roome. “I remember thinking he was messing around. Then I screamed and screamed.” Roome’s partner, a pilot trained in first aid, rushed upstairs and delivered CPR. The house filled with firefighters, paramedics, police officers, Jools’s dad who lived close by, and Roome’s dad, too. Jools was defibrillated. Eventually, a detective took the family aside and said they needed to stop treatment. “We were told that even if they brought him back, he’d be brain dead,” says Roome.

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New setting mists that provide a cool and comfortable finish are perfect for summer

I have never known a category soar as suddenly as setting spray. It existed for aeons, with the best of them (Urban Decay’s All Nighter, £29.50, which still has second-to-none longevity) rarely threatened by anything new. But countless sprays have launched in the past year, all of them promising to significantly increase the lifespan of makeup.

There’s an argument that “fixing sprays” and “setting sprays” have different purposes (locking down makeup versus providing a more unified, less powdery finish, respectively), but I dismiss it because it’s based on the generous assumption that the marketeers who name products according to popular Google search terms give a hoot for semantic nuance. Here, I mean sprays that do all of the above, drastically reducing makeup fade and wear, even during dancing, hot flushing or perspiring.

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