The new Data (Use and Access) Act, which criminalises intimate image abuse, is a huge victory won fast in a space where progress is often glacially slow

For Jodie*, watching the conviction of her best friend, and knowing she helped secure it, felt at first like a kind of victory. It was certainly more than most survivors of deepfake image-based abuse could expect.

They had met as students and bonded over their shared love of music. In the years since graduation, he’d also become her support system, the friend she reached for each time she learned that her images and personal details had been posted online without her consent. Jodie’s pictures, along with her real name and correct bio, were used on many platforms for fake dating profiles, then adverts for sex work, then posted on to Reddit and other online forums with invitations to deepfake them into pornography. The results ended up on porn sites. All this continued for almost two years, until Jodie finally worked out who was doing it — her best friend – identified more of his victims, compiled 60 pages of evidence, and presented it to police. She had to try two police stations, having been told at the first that no crime had been committed. Ultimately he admitted to 15 charges of “sending messages that were grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature” and received a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years.

Aitana Bonmatí has been voted the best female player on the planet by our panel of 127 experts ahead of Mariona Caldentey and Alessia Russo

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Terry Ball – renowned shoe salesman, friend to former mafiosi – has vowed to spend his remaining years finding ways to cheat authorities he feels have cheated him. His greatest ruse? A tax-dodging snail empire

It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy.

The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe salesman called Terry Ball who has made and lost multiple fortunes, has been cheerfully telling me in great detail for several hours about how he was inspired by former Conservative minister Michael Gove to use snails to cheat local councils out of tens of millions of pounds in taxes.

Reports of escaped wallabies are on the rise, especially in southern England. But how easy is it to spot these strange and charismatic marsupials – and why would a quintessentially Australian creature settle here?

It was about 9.30 or 10 on a dark, late November night; Molly Laird was driving her pink Mini home along country lanes to her Warwickshire cottage. Suddenly, the headlights’ beam picked up an animal sitting in the road. “I thought it was a deer at first,” Molly tells me. “But when it moved, its tail wasn’t right, and it was hopping. It took me a while to realise, but I thought: that’s a kangaroo!”

Molly’s next thought was: “I’m going insane,” closely followed by, “No one’s going to believe me.” So she got out her phone and filmed it. Later, she posted the video on social media, where she was told it was likely to be not a kangaroo, but its smaller cousin, the red-necked wallaby.

The controversy over flags has faded from the national agenda – but street by street, late at night and with ingenious equipment, their raising and removal is the subject of a roiling dispute over local identity

The Christmas lights have gone up in Stirchley. A multifaith mix of stars and swirls add a festive air to the lamp-posts along the main street of this south Birmingham suburb. Stirchley is a modest kind of place, sandwiched between better known (and better off) areas such as Bournville and Moseley, but there is plenty of evidence here of the lively community spirit that last year resulted in the area being named the best place to live in the Midlands.

Posters in shop windows along Pershore Road advertise a knitting group, a neighbourhood winter fair and the local food bank, while in the former swimming baths, now a community hub, friendly flyers for coffee mornings and choirs are stacked.

The imposing concrete buildings that defined British postwar architecture held a vision of the future – but many fell into disrepair. A new book finds the finest examples

Richard Tice says testimony by about two dozen people about party leader’s school days is ‘made-up twaddle’

• Nigel Farage faces fresh claims of racism and antisemitism at school

Reform UK’s deputy leader has described a celebrated film director and a large and growing group of corroborating witnesses as liars over their allegations of Nigel Farage’s teenage antisemitism and racism.

With the bigotry row continuing to dog Reform, whose lead in the national polls has slipped in recent weeks, Richard Tice turned on those who claimed to have been abused and those who say they saw it.

‘Overwhelming’ evidence that Russian state planned attack on ex-spy Sergei Skripal that led to Sturgess’s death in 2018, says chair

Vladimir Putin is “morally responsible” for the death of a British woman killed after she sprayed herself with a nerve agent smuggled into the UK by Russian agents to assassinate a former spy, an inquiry has concluded.

Lord Hughes, the chair of the inquiry, said the assassination attempt on the former spy Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March 2018 must have been authorised by the Russian president.

Health secretary has asked experts to investigate whether normal feelings have become ‘over-pathologised’

The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has ordered a clinical review of the diagnosis of mental health conditions, according to reports.

Streeting is understood to be concerned about a sharp rise in the number of people making sickness benefits claims because of diagnoses for mental illness, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the Times reported.

He has asked leading experts to investigate whether normal feelings have become “over-pathologised”, the newspaper said, as he seeks to grapple with the 4.4 million working-age people now claiming sickness or incapacity benefit.

The figure has risen by 1.2 million since 2019, while the number of 16 to 34-year-olds off work with long-term sickness because of a mental health condition is said to have grown rapidly in the same period.

Streeting told the Times he knew from “personal experience how devastating it can be for people who face poor mental health, have ADHD or autism and can’t get a diagnosis or the right support”.

He added: “I also know, from speaking to clinicians, how the diagnosis of these conditions is sharply rising.

“We must look at this through a strictly clinical lens to get an evidence-based understanding of what we know, what we don’t know, and what these patterns tell us about our mental health system, autism and ADHD services.

“That’s the only way we can ensure everyone gets timely access to accurate diagnosis and effective support.”

The review, which is expected to be launched on Thursday, is set to be led by Prof Peter Fonagy, a clinical psychologist at University College London specialising in child mental health, with Sir Simon Wessely, a former president of the Royal College of Psychiatry, acting as vice-chair.

• Second Test, day one: England 325-9

• Starc takes six but Root and Archer add 61 for final wicket

It was one of the most intense opening days to a Test match in recent memory. The Gabba was like a cauldron, the air as thick as soup, and with the pink ball zipping around for Mitchell Starc as he continued his bulldozing start to the series, the pressure on England felt relentless.

And yet at 8.38pm local time this all melted away as Joe Root tickled Scott Boland for four to seal his 40th Test century and – far more notably – his first on Australian soil. Root insisted this tour was never about addressing the gap in his otherwise stellar CV but, even for the most self-effacing of masters, the sense of relief out in the middle was palpable.