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The attack, captured on surveillance cameras, shows three masked men blocking the victim's car, before dragging him to the ground, and beating him.

A black Audi plunged into a river in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, China, on October 14 after swerving to avoid an elderly woman on an electric bike, trapping the driver inside as it sank.

Low-interest accounts hold over a fifth of the country's total savings, meaning millions of people have money which could be working harder for them.

The exact point where Essex ends and London begins is a field in the middle of nowhere - and it's not as easy to get to as you might think

It's a great place to stretch your legs this weekend

The production, titled Slam Frank, is a satirical play that exaggerates current cultural trends around inclusivity and identity politics, applying them to one of history's most tragic stories.

Sally was house-sitting for a friend when she posted an unassuming video on social media of herself playing with the dogs. But only minutes later, she fled the home after spotting someone in the hallway.

Basildon woman is at times left unable to move or even use the toilet

Smith said: 'I can only imagine how that makes the family feel. It's not about me but God, it gave me a heart attack when I first saw it.'

Its charming art-deco design attracts many people

We asked Echo and Gazette readers to share what they think is the happiest place to live in Essex.

We asked Echo and Gazette readers to share what they think is the happiest place to live in Essex.

There is an added element of adventure to living here too

Denise Richards' ex Aaron Phypers has been arrested outside of court over charges of 'spousal abuse' on Friday amid their ongoing divorce battle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: When teachers rely on commonly used artificial intelligence chatbots to devise lesson plans, it does not result in more engaging, immersive or effective learning experiences compared with existing techniques, we found in our recent study. The AI-generated civics lesson plans we analyzed also left out opportunities for students to explore the stories and experiences of traditionally marginalized people. The allure of generative AI as a teaching aid has caught the attention of educators. A Gallup survey from September 2025 found that 60% of K-12 teachers are already using AI in their work, with the most common reported use being teaching preparation and lesson planning. [...] For our research, we began collecting and analyzing AI-generated lesson plans to get a sense of what kinds of instructional plans and materials these tools provide to teachers. We decided to focus on AI-generated lesson plans for civics education because it is essential for students to learn productive ways to participate in the U.S. political system and engage with their communities. To collect data for this study, in August 2024 we prompted three GenAI chatbots -- the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT, Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model and Microsoft's latest Copilot model -- to generate two sets of lesson plans for eighth grade civics classes based on Massachusetts state standards. One was a standard lesson plan and the other a highly interactive lesson plan. We garnered a dataset of 311 AI-generated lesson plans, featuring a total of 2,230 activities for civic education. We analyzed the dataset using two frameworks designed to assess educational material: Bloom's taxonomy and Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content. Bloom's taxonomy is a widely used educational framework that distinguishes between "lower-order" thinking skills, including remembering, understanding and applying, and "higher-order" thinking skills -- analyzing, evaluating and creating. Using this framework to analyze the data, we found 90% of the activities promoted only a basic level of thinking for students. Students were encouraged to learn civics through memorizing, reciting, summarizing and applying information, rather than through analyzing and evaluating information, investigating civic issues or engaging in civic action projects. When examining the lesson plans using Banks' four levels of integration of multicultural content model (PDF), which was developed in the 1990s, we found that the AI-generated civics lessons featured a rather narrow view of history -- often leaving out the experiences of women, Black Americans, Latinos and Latinas, Asian and Pacific Islanders, disabled individuals and other groups that have long been overlooked. Only 6% of the lessons included multicultural content. These lessons also tended to focus on heroes and holidays rather than deeper explorations of understanding civics through multiple perspectives. Overall, we found the AI-generated lesson plans to be decidedly boring, traditional and uninspiring. If civics teachers used these AI-generated lesson plans as is, students would miss out on active, engaged learning opportunities to build their understanding of democracy and what it means to be a citizen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After another week of scandal, Andrew was finally forced to relinquish all of his remaining royal titles tonight.

The reclusive actor, 58, who in recent years has pivoted from Hollywood in favor of running a car dealership, cut a low-key figure as he strolled with his daughter Marina, 21.

It wasn't too long ago that Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson was the biggest and highest-paid star in Hollywood. 

A 12-time Oscar-nominated Tinseltown actor and a Scouse stand-up veteran most famous on this side of the pond might seem an unlikely combination.

A potential tragedy was narrowly averted at a Wikipedia conference in Manhattan when two volunteer editors tackled an armed man who stormed the stage and threatened to kill himself during a keynote speech (source paywalled; alternative source). The gunman, who claimed he was protesting Wikipedia's policy banning self-identified pedophiles, was disarmed and taken into custody after community members swiftly intervened. The New York Times reports: The armed man came striding up the aisle at a conference for Wikipedia editors Friday morning in Manhattan, several witnesses said. The man, draped in a multicolored flag, walked onto the stage and stood next to Maryana Iskander, the chief of the nonprofit group that runs Wikipedia, interrupting her speech. He announced that he was going to kill himself. He held a gun near his head and pointed it toward the ceiling. The audience of well over a hundred people panicked. "People started yelling, 'Get down, get down!' and people started ducking behind their chairs," said Bill Adair, a journalism professor who was there and is writing a book on Wikipedia. A man in an orange sweatshirt rushed the stage. He was not in law enforcement, but a Wikipedia contributor on the conference's "trust and safety team": Richard Knipel, the City University of New York's "Wikimedian-in-residence." He grabbed the gunman from behind. Another Wikipedian on the trust and safety team, Andrew Lih, had been standing watch in the aisle and charged forward, too. "I saw the gun he's holding go from pointing up at the ceiling to sweeping down toward the room, and as it swept across me I said 'Oh, my god,' and I ducked down, but I still kept moving" said Mr. Lih, a digital strategist who works with museums and libraries. "I grabbed his arm," he continued. "He was still clutching his gun pretty hard. I pried his fingers away from it, removed it from his hands and put it down." The gun was loaded, according to a senior law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a pending investigation. In seconds, a potential scene of bloodshed had been averted, a life may have been saved, and two volunteer editors of an online encyclopedia had become unlikely heroes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.