Student loans are in the news again. Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ decision to freeze the repayment threshold of Plan 2 student loans for 3 years after April 2027 has caused an uproar  among students who will now face higher repayment costs. This only adds insult to injury for those who borrowed from the government’s Student Loans Company between 2012 and 2023. As it stands, the vast majority of students will already be unable to pay back their Plan 2 student loan before the 40-y

New Yorkers have now experienced about two months under the new Mamdani administration. Last November, more than a million New Yorkers, including myself, headed to the polls and cast our ballots for Zohran Mamdani. The New York City mayoral election drew significant media attention from within the five boroughs and beyond. Mamdani stood out as markedly younger than his opponents, born in Uganda, and as New York City’s first Muslim mayor. Yet the aspect that drew the greatest

In 2016, Lord Heseltine spent several months in the Tees Valley area, producing an extensive 91 page report titled ‘ Tees Valley: Opportunity Unlimited ’. He concluded, despite the fact that “Four miles of the south bank of the Tees is a scene of desolation, a memory of industrial activity now gone...” that the “Tees Valley has an exciting future.” A decade on from this report, how are things looking for the region? In 2024 Lord Houchen was voted in as Mayor of the Tees Valle

While the United States and much of the world was focused on the fallout from the Epstein files, the second phase of the Gaza peace plan began . If the current Trump administration manages to deliver a breakthrough in the Middle East, it would be by far the president’s most significant achievement on the world stage so far. Talk of a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump may have died down, but his own desire for it remains obvious, as shown by his angry messages to the Norwegian prime

In 2025, British actor Simon Pegg was interviewed in the Criterion Closet , a renowned series where notable people from the filmmaking industry are invited to browse and discuss their favourite movies. One of Pegg’s ‘closet picks’ was David Lynch’s seminal thriller Blue Velvet , a dark and unnerving mystery set in the heart of middle America. Pegg says that his daughter hated the movie when he showed it to her, but then spoke about how he was delighted that she didn’t like it