Former Sinn Féin leader, who is being sued for symbolic damages, also denies any prior knowledge of the attack

Gerry Adams has told the high court he was stunned by the 1996 Docklands bombing as he denied being at the nerve centre of the IRA’s operations.

The former Sinn Féin leader also denied having any prior knowledge of the bombing of the commercial district of east London, which shattered a 17-month old ceasefire.

Campaigners have been fighting proposals to build traffic tunnel under the world heritage site since 1994

A controversial plan to build a tunnel under the Stonehenge site has been officially cancelled after millions were spent on the doomed project.

Campaigners have been fighting proposals to dig a tunnel for cars under the location of the world heritage site since the idea was first proposed in 1994.

Psychologists at Cardiff University and King’s College London compared children given dolls with those given video games

Playing along with dolls can help boys and girls develop more sophisticated imaginations and better social skills, compared with children who play on electronic devices, according to research.

Psychologists at Cardiff University and King’s College London found that children given dolls gained a richer appreciation of other people’s beliefs and feelings, in contrast to those given a tablet loaded with video games.

The chancellor makes a compelling case for alignment with the EU, but her strategic analysis isn’t matched with political urgency in Downing Street

In an age of attention-grabbing algorithms and amplified outrage on social media, politicians have few incentives to make arguments at any length. That makes Rachel Reeves’s Mais lecture earlier this week refreshing as a detailed exposition of the chancellor’s thinking.

Ms Reeves returned to an argument she first made in opposition, about the growing need for government intervention to mitigate public anxiety and destabilising volatility in a dangerous world. She calls this “ securonomics ” and it is intended as a rebuttal to the laissez-faire, small-state theories that, as applied by Conservative governments, starved Britain of investment, amplified regional inequalities and created the fallacious case for Brexit.

In an age of demagogues and big tech, the work of one of Germany’s greatest scholars points the way to a new politics of the human

In his later years, Jürgen Habermas was sometimes described as “the last European” – a reference to his passionate commitment to the ideals of the European Union (although not always its modern reality ). The great German philosopher was also the last surviving exemplar of a generation of postwar intellectuals formed by the experience of the second world war. Like Jean-Paul Sartre in France, Habermas was as at home in the public square as the seminar room, debating the future of a continent that needed to be rebuilt ethically as well as physically.

In the new age of unreason, where brute exercise of power is explicitly prized above the force of moral argument, the loss of any such figure is to be mourned. But Habermas’s death at the age of 96, as the US and Israel wage an illegal war of choice, and the far right is in the ascendant in France and Germany, feels particularly poignant. A member of the Hitler Youth as a boy, Habermas then made it his life’s work to philosophically ground the democratic values which are now under threat again.

‘Serious risk of major ecological disaster’ as vessel drifts for weeks after being struck by suspected drone attack

A severely damaged Russian tanker carrying liquified natural gas that has been adrift in the Mediterranean for two weeks, raising concerns of an ecological disaster, has floated into Libyan waters, Italy’s civil protection agency said on Wednesday.

The Arctic Metagaz was part of a Russian “shadow fleet” used to circumvent sanctions imposed on the country’s oil and gas after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It was struck in a suspected drone attack close to Maltese waters earlier this month, causing a huge hole. The crew is believed to have been rescued between Malta and Libya.

Just three of Labour’s 20 MSPs in Holyrood voted for bill, despite support for legislation in House of Commons

Supporters of Scotland’s assisted dying bill have said they are frustrated a significant majority of Labour MSPs voted against the proposals, despite Labour’s substantial support for the measure at Westminster.

The Scottish bill was defeated in a late night free vote at Holyrood on Tuesday, five years after it was first proposed and a year after it was first tabled, by a larger than expected 12-vote margin.

A worldwide freezing order has been imposed on Paresh Raja, the owner of a UK mortgage provider

A £1.3bn worldwide asset freezing order has been granted against the tycoon accused of fraud after his UK mortgage lending business collapsed.

Paresh Raja, the founder and chief executive of Market Financial Solutions (MFS), is now barred from dissipating assets worth up to the suspected value of funds allegedly missing from his mortgage and buy-to-let lending company, after orders from courts in London and Dubai.

Technology secretary says government no longer prefers plan to allow tech firms to take copyrighted work

Actors, musicians and writers have welcomed the UK government’s decision to backtrack on plans to let AI firms use copyright-protected work without permission .

Technology secretary Liz Kendall said it no longer had a “preferred option” on copyright reform, having previously supported a proposal allowing tech companies to take copyrighted work – unless rights holders opted out of the process.