Revenues jumped 40% to nearly £2bn after debt-ridden utility hiked water bills sharply in April Thames Water has reported a leap in half-year profits to £386m after bills rose by nearly a third, even as it warned it faced huge funding uncertainties that could result in a rapid collapse into government control. Britain’s biggest water company on Wednesday said it had swung into profit for the six months to September, after losing £230m in the same period in 2024. Continue reading...

The reforms are being brought in to tackle unprecedented delays in the Crown Court.

Survey also reveals Britons’ favourite festive film, views on tear-jerkers and family cinema trips When Macaulay Culkin recently said he didn’t consider Die Hard to be a Christmas film – wading into one of pop culture’s most heated holiday debates – he was booed by a live audience. But it looks like the British people are behind the actor, with a survey revealing that Home Alone is the UK’s favourite festive film, while Die Hard has officially been voted not a Christmas movie. Continue reading...

A theatrical sensation since the 1960s, whose dramas included Arcadia, The Real Thing and Leopoldstadt, Stoppard also had huge success as a screenwriter The playwright Tom Stoppard, whose playful erudition dazzled the theatregoing world for decades, has died aged 88. One of a select band of writers from any discipline to earn his own adjective – “Stoppardian” – in the Oxford English Dictionary, he delighted in the most improbable juxtapositions: philosophy and gymnastics in Jumpers (1972); early 19th-century landscape gardening and chaos theory in Arcadia (1993); rock music, dissident Czech academics and the love poetry of Sappho in Rock ’n’ Roll (2006). Continue reading...