When she got serious, she got very serious. The TV host boosted organ donations, closed down a school for abuse, founded two revolutionary helplines – and put assisted dying on the agenda for years to come

• From Childline to changing TV for ever: Esther Rantzen’s revolutionary life
• Esther Rantzen: from That’s Life! to Childline – in pictures

By no means should That’s Life! have ever worked as a television programme. For more than 20 years it functioned as an absurd grab bag of features that at times seemed specifically designed to induce tonal whiplash in its viewers.

To demonstrate this point, That’s Life! was the show that introduced the nation to Prince, a talking dog who could say the word“sausages”, but it was also the show that put pressure on the government to introduce mandatory seatbelt use for children. This was the show that invented a new animal as an April fool’s joke, only for coachloads of tourists to arrive at London Zoo to try to spot it. It was also the show that embarked on a vigorous three-month investigation into allegations of widespread sexual abuse by teachers at a boys’ boarding school, resulting in the school’s closure less than two weeks after the feature aired.

Brexit was a disastrous act of national self-harm. Britain needs EU membership to bring growth and security in an increasingly volatile world

Hope again. That was the prime minister’s message to the country this week. A national social care system, greater public control of water and energy, help for first-time buyers and a crackdown on rogue landlords and empty homes. With clarity and conviction, Andy Burnham set out a bold plan to put Britain on a new path, steeped in Labour values.

It felt like a conference speech that would be remembered for years to come, marking a decisive break with a broken political model that has let British people down for decades. And perhaps most encouraging of all was the prime minister’s promise to rethink Britain’s relationship with the EU.

Sadiq Khan is mayor of London

Every day, trillions of dollars, oil and gas and 99% of the world’s web traffic move through undersea pipelines that bear no state’s protection. With superpowers and corporations vying for control, should we be worried about this new wild west?

On Christmas Day 2024, six weeks before Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were due to disconnect themselves from Russia’s power grid, a Finnish engineer was just about to sit down to lunch when his phone rang. He was responsible for the Finnish side of the undersea cables that keep Finland and the Baltic states supplied with electricity, and one was malfunctioning. Within a couple of hours, authorities knew that a Cook Islands-registered tanker called the Eagle S, part of the shadow fleet carrying sanctioned Russian oil, in this case to Egypt, had sailed over the cable at the moment and location at which it had stopped working. The coastguard hailed the Eagle S. Were their anchors up? Yes, they replied – though they did not seem to check – and sailed on.

Three hours later the ship hit another four cables in quick succession, nearly hobbling internet provision in Finland and Estonia – and was minutes away from a major electricity cable and the Balticconnector, which supplies the two countries with gas. Finland scrambled the border guard, which pulled up alongside the tanker and demanded the crew take up its anchor. But the Eagle S was not in Finnish territorial waters: the authorities could not force the captain to comply, and they did not know who or what might come to his aid.

Judy Wearing has spent much of her life studying our follicles. She explains how our armpits betray our emotions, why some gentlemen really do prefer blondes and the reason we evolved to have eyebrows

As a PhD student at Oxford studying mating behaviour, Judy Wearing was suddenly struck by a thought: what was the purpose of pubic hair? The point of armpit hair? The function of each of our body’s furry patches? When the published literature failed to produce satisfying answers, Wearing began her own investigation. Her aim was to shed light on why exactly we evolved these particular patches, with pubic hair the most puzzling of all: was it for warmth, protection … or something else?

Wearing is still tangling with those questions, some 30 years after her student days. Now an author and editor (largely in the education sector), she has revisited her fascination with hair in Anxious and Hairy: The Evolution and Culture of Human Hair, exploring its unexpectedly dense and layered place in our history and psyche. Even Wearing was surprised by the places her research on hair took her, and the mysteries that still remain to be solved. “A lot of these questions, no one’s actually looked at,” she says over Zoom. Here is a mere snip of the fascinating facts she’s uncovered about hair.

Book clubs can be fun, fulfilling and interesting – but many members have seen a meeting or group go down in flames

For four years, Laura has been in a book club with other young mothers from her church. You might be picturing a docile scene of women drinking sweet tea – they live in the US south – and discussing a life-affirming family novel or chaste romance.

But you probably didn’t account for werewolf smut.

The Emirati royal is increasingly influential on the world stage. Some see him as a visionary. Others compare him to a Bond villain. Who is he?

On the night of 12 November 1993, a slim, young Brazilian named Royce Gracie stepped into an octagonal cage in Denver, Colorado, and found himself staring up into the eyes of a giant. Gerard Gordeau, a Dutch kickboxer, stood five inches taller, weighed almost three stone more than him, and had an extra decade of fighting experience under his belt. Now the pair were about to engage in bare-knuckle combat: no judges, no separation of opponents by size, no respite until someone either got knocked out cold or begged for mercy.

The fight lasted barely 100 seconds. In that time, Gracie calmly tripped Gordeau up, jumped on his back, and clutched at his throat, forcing the big man to hammer the floor in submission.

Seven hundred offenders from dozens of prisons in England and Wales expected to be freed on Thursday

• Enver Solomon: Releasing prisoners won’t solve the crisis in English and Welsh jails. Here’s what will

• UK politics live – latest updates

Prisoners have thanked Andy Burnham as they celebrated walking free from jail early.

The first wave of releases began on Thursday, with 700 offenders expected to be freed across England and Wales under the government’s plan to ease prison overcrowding.

Farage was speaking ahead of a rally in Doncaster

Just as a reminder of why prisoners are being released early, here is an explainer by Jamie Grierson which sets out how the scheme works, why it was introduced and the changes made by Burnham’s government:

Jamie writes:

The Labour government says it inherited a prison system on the brink of collapse, with fewer than 100 spaces left in the summer of 2024. No 10 says a lack of investment in the prison estate, with just 500 net places added over a decade, has led to a situation where adult male prisons are now at 98% capacity. It says the steps are necessary while it builds capacity.

Driver of East Midlands train, who died in June crash, received automatic warning after passing red light but train continued to accelerate

The train that ran into the back of another in the Bedford rail crash sped up after the driver received a warning he had passed a red light, rail investigators have reported.

The driver of the East Midlands train, who died in the crash in June, acknowledged the automatic warning but did not appear to act after passing a danger signal that was rarely ever red.

Benjamin Netanyahu says too early to tell who may have been behind plane incident as carrier halts all flights to Israel

The motive, background and affiliation of the Omani co-pilot who stabbed his captain in an apparent attempt to crash an Israel-bound flight from Dubai remains unknown, as international teams open investigations into the incident.

Israeli passengers intervened to stop the attack on Wednesday, restraining the co-pilot, while a reserve crew in the plane was able to stabilise the plummeting plane and ultimately land it safely in Saudi Arabia.