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Upcoming closures from May 9 to 11 on the A12, Dartford Crossing and M25 may affect some drivers across Essex this weekend.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday its well-known "billion-dollar weather and climate disasters" database "will be retired," a move that will make it next to impossible for the public to track the cost of extreme weather and climate events. The weather, climate and oceans agency is also ending other products, it has recently announced, due in large part to staffing reductions. NOAA is narrowing the array of services it provides, with climate-related programs scrutinized especially closely. The disasters database, which will be archived but no longer updated beyond 2024, has allowed taxpayers, media and researchers to track the cost of natural disasters -- spanning extreme events from hurricanes to hailstorms -- since 1980. Its discontinuation is another Trump-administration blow to the public's view into how fossil fuel pollution is changing the world around them and making extreme weather more costly. [...] The database vacuums loss information from throughout the insurance industry, among other public and private sources. According to the database, there were 403 weather and climate disasters totally at least $1 billion in the United States since 1980, totaling more than $2.945 trillion. As of April 8, there had not been any confirmed billion-dollar disasters so far in 2025, but it lists four events as having the potential to make the tally, including the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January. Between 1980 and 2024, there were nine such disasters on average each year, though in the past five years, that annual average has jumped to 24. The record for one year was 28 events in 2023. "What makes this resource uniquely valuable is not just its standardized methodology across decades, but the fact that it draws from proprietary and non-public data sources (such as reinsurance loss estimates, localized government reports, and private claims databases) that are otherwise inaccessible to most researchers," Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications for and co-founder of First Street, a climate risk financial modeling firm, told CNN via email. "Without it, replicating or extending damage trend analyses, especially at regional scales or across hazard types, is nearly impossible without significant funding or institutional access to commercial catastrophe models."

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The model who made an appearance as Britney Spears' astronaut lover in her iconic Oops!...I Did It Again music video has had a surprising career shift.

Dylan Veselic, a sophomore at Bay High School near Cleveland, was reportedly rushed to the hospital in an ambulance before being flown by helicopter to another center.

The jet had been about to take off from Gatwick to Vancouver when the co-pilot mistook his right hand for his left and pulled back on the lever operating the aircraft's thrust.

James Messham, 60, (pictured) died following the altercation aboard the MSC Virtuosa on Saturday. 'Carnage' was said to have unfolded before his death.

Nicole Smallman, 27, and Bibaa Henry, 46, were stabbed to death while celebrating the latter's birthday at Fryent Country Park in Wembley, North West London, in June 2020.

Olivia Wood, 29, was subjected to a campaign of psychological and physical abuse before she was killed by 33-year-old Kieron Goodwin, of Frome, Somerset.

Alibaba Group researchers have developed "ZeroSearch," a technique that enables large language models to acquire search capabilities without using external search engines during training. The approach transforms LLMs into retrieval modules through supervised fine-tuning and employs a "curriculum-based rollout strategy" that gradually degrades generated document quality. In tests across seven question-answering datasets, ZeroSearch matched or exceeded the performance [PDF] of models trained with real search engines. A 7B-parameter retrieval module achieved results comparable to Google Search, while a 14B-parameter version outperformed it. The cost savings are substantial: training with 64,000 search queries using Google Search via SerpAPI would cost approximately $586.70, compared to just $70.80 using a 14B-parameter simulation LLM on four A100 GPUs -- an 88% reduction. The technique works with multiple model families including Qwen-2.5 and LLaMA-3.2. Researchers have released their code, datasets, and pre-trained models on GitHub and Hugging Face, potentially lowering barriers to entry for smaller AI companies developing sophisticated assistants.

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This is going to sound like a Barbara Cartland novel but it actually happened. Donald Trump seized Peter Mandelson's hand and went all husky.

Three currently unknown British children are set to become overnight multi-millionaires when they are announces as the new stars of the Harry Potter TV series. 

TULLY POTTER: The new ROH Ring reaches its second evening with the best all-round cast I can recall in Die Walkure.

PETER HOSKIN: At the start of Revenge Of The Savage Planet, your undauntable astronaut is quite literally dumped on a faraway world full of fluorescent plants and weirdo creatures.

President Trump on Thursday attacked a law signed by President Joe Biden aimed at expanding high-speed internet access, calling the effort "racist" and "totally unconstitutional" and threatening to end it "immediately." The New York TimesL: Mr. Trump's statement was one of the starkest examples yet of his slash-and-burn approach to dismantling the legacy of his immediate predecessor in this term in office. The Digital Equity Act, a little-known effort to improve high-speed internet access in communities with poor access, was tucked into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that Mr. Biden signed into law early in his presidency. The act was written to help many different groups, including veterans, older people and disabled and rural communities. But Mr. Trump, using the incendiary language that has been a trademark of his political career, denounced the law on Thursday for also seeking to improve internet access for ethnic and racial minorities, raging in a social media post that it amounted to providing "woke handouts based on race."

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Romeo Beckham's girlfriend, 22, posted a photo of the Balearic Islands from a plane window to her Instagram on Thursday, captioning it: 'Back on the island for something exciting.'

The TV presenter, 53, is known for her iconic long dark fringe, heavy eye liner and thick layer of fake tan.

Addressing last night's national concert on Horse Guards Parade, the monarch reminded the world of the VE Day words of his grandfather, King George VI, about the quest for 'lasting peace'.

The Prince and Princess of Wales looked to be in high spirits as they joined King Charles and Queen Camilla at a concert commemorating VE Day on Thursday.

The famous comedy originally aired on BBC from 1968 to 1977,  and focused on a group of soldiers from the United Kingdom's Home Guard during World War Two.

In a historic first, the 69-year-old American missionary has been elected pope - the first American to ascend to the Catholic Church's highest office in its 2,000-year history.