Painting that inspired depiction on £20 note more likely the work of John Opie, says Romantic artist’s biographer

In 2020, Tate Britain hosted the launch of a new £20 banknote bearing representations of The Fighting Temeraire by JMW Turner and the artist’s most famous self-portrait. Now a leading expert has said the latter work, part of the Tate collection, is not by Turner at all.

Dr James Hamilton, who has published books on Turner and staged exhibitions at museums and galleries nationwide, said that while the painting does depict the English Romantic painter, it is likely to be the work of his contemporary, John Opie.

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Exclusive: Demand for blood to treat the rare disorder has soared by 132% in 10 years

Demand for blood needed to treat rare disorders such as sickle cell has soared by more than 130% in 10 years, forcing the NHS to ask for more donors to come forward.

Requests for haemoglobin S (HbS)-negative blood, the type most used in blood transfusions for sickle cell anaemia patients, stood at 82,181 units in 2015. But last year, more than 191,000 units were needed, a 132% increase.

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There are few places where history can be felt more powerfully than these pathways, walked by explorer, author and TV presenter Nicholas Crane

How often do you look down and wonder who created the path your feet are following? Or ask the cause of its curves and dips? Formed over thousands of years, paths form an “internet of feet” – a web of bridleways and hollow ways, drove roads and ridgeways, coffin tracks, pilgrimage trails and city pavements. Whether you’re hiking a National Trail or pottering along a National Trust footpath, there’s a good chance you’re following ancestral steps.

It’s thoughts like these that led me on a journey to track the evolution of British paths for my book, The Path More Travelled. Eleven thousand years ago ice age hunter-gatherers arrived from Europe’s heartlands, moving through the wilderness along broad “routeways”, that later widened to tracks when horses and then wheels were adopted in the bronze age. For more than 2,000 years, traffic moved no faster than the speed of a horse, until the internal combustion engine drove pedestrians off the road just over a century ago.

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Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Welcome to the Thursday news quiz, where curiosity is in full bloom thanks to our illustration by Anaïs Mims. Even the most carefully arranged facts can contain a hint of uncertainty, so beware the rogue question marks popping up among the petals of knowledge. Fifteen questions on topical news, pop culture and general knowledge await. There are no prizes, but we always enjoy hearing how you got on in the comments. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 247

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After Reform politicians were cheered and progressive rabbis booed at rally against antisemitism, some fear longstanding alliances are fracturing

Rabbi Charley Baginsky, the co-leader of Progressive Judaism, admitted she felt apprehensive before speaking at last weekend’s central London rally against antisemitism.

As she addressed the crowd, there were some boos. It wasn’t the first time – last year, on a similar stage outside Downing Street, Baginsky and her fellow co-lead, Rabbi Josh Levy, were jeered off stage.

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Exclusive: former deputy prime minister says investigation ‘clipped my wings’ as she settles £40,000 in unpaid stamp duty

Angela Rayner has been cleared by HMRC of deliberate wrongdoing or carelessness over her tax affairs, the Guardian can reveal, paving the way for a potential leadership bid as Keir Starmer’s grip on power unravels.

The former deputy prime minister has settled £40,000 in unpaid stamp duty after initially paying the lower rate, but has not paid any penalty as a result of the investigation. HMRC was also satisfied there was no tax avoidance.

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Health minister Mark Butler says six passengers who have tested negative for hantavirus will land in Western Australia on Friday

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Four Australian citizens who were aboard the MV Hondius, the cruise ship at the centre of the hantavirus outbreak, will soon be home after the government secured a suitable aircraft and crew for the journey.

The health minister, Mark Butler, said the citizens, along with a permanent resident and a New Zealand citizen, were due to take off from the Netherlands on Thursday and land in Perth on Friday afternoon local time.

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Researchers warn of a ‘real risk’ of unsafe conditions, with matches in Miami most likely to be affected, but the picture is mixed across the 16 stadiums

It’s set to be hot in North America this summer. The “seasonal temperature outlook” for the US, compiled by the National Weather Service, suggests every part of the country will experience temperatures above the historical average in June and July. It’s into this environment that 48 men’s national teams will arrive, all competing to win the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.

As the tournament approaches, the Guardian has taken an in-depth look at the meteorological conditions players could face, how they have changed since the last time the World Cup was held in North America in 1994 (when the US was the sole host nation), and the locations most likely to expose players to stressful levels of heat.

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In 2024, when she filmed a quick video in her car on a work break, she thought nothing of it. But in days she had become a meme. What followed was excitement, opportunity and a crushing pressure ...

Jools Lebron was in her car, taking a break from her job in a supermarket, when she posted the TikTok video that would change her life. “You see how I do my makeup for work?” she told her followers that day in August 2024. “Very demure, very mindful … A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”

“At first, it was like any other video,” she says, on a video call from her home in Chicago. “A few likes, a couple of comments. But then I started noticing the numbers moving faster than usual – faster than anything I had seen before. I remember refreshing my phone and just staring at it like: ‘Wait … what is happening?’”

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Two mothers fought British bureaucracy to obtain lifesaving cannabis medicines for their children. But most patients are having to go private – at huge cost

In the summer of 2012, Britain was in a festive mood. It was the year of the queen’s diamond jubilee and the London Olympics, and the country was celebrating. But for former hairdresser Hannah Deacon and her young family in Warwickshire, it was a summer of ambulances, hospital wards and doctors rushing in and out of emergency rooms.

Eight months earlier, Deacon had given birth to a healthy baby boy named Alfie. The early months of his life had been challenging for her and her partner, Drew, as they are for any first-time parents, but by the summer, Alfie was sleeping and feeding well, and it felt like the family was settling into the new rhythm. However, one night the couple woke up to find their baby’s little body gripped by a paralysing seizure.

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John Lithgow plays the gay and often nude septuagenarian father of Colman’s character in this bombshell-laden story of intergenerational queerness. She explains why her own dad would have ‘sat and cried all the way through it’

In Jimpa, Olivia Colman plays a woman called Hannah who leaves Adelaide with her husband and 16-year-old child to visit her father in Amsterdam. This is Jimpa – the word sticks better once you know it’s a compound of Jim and grandpa. At the airport, the teenager, Frances, who’s trans, drops a bombshell: they want to move to the Netherlands and finish their schooling there. Hannah and her husband, Harry, respond thoughtfully, not freaking out.

But once they arrive in Amsterdam, Jimpa, played by John Lithgow, brings enough drama for everyone – something he’s been doing for 40 years, since he left his family for a fuller queer life than Australia at the end of the 20th century could offer. The film revels in revealing the sort of lifestyle he enjoyed instead.

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King Arthur is said to have transformed into a chough when he died, its red feet and beak representing his bloody end

Decades after disappearing from the jagged cliffs around Tintagel Castle on the coast of north Cornwall, a bird with legendary connections to the area has returned.

The custodian of Tintagel, English Heritage, and local ornithologists have declared that choughs – charismatic corvids with red beaks and feet – are back.

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Ahmed al-Doush’s health said to be in sharp decline since his arrest in 2024 in relation to social media posts

The wife of a British national who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since 2024 for social media posts, has pleaded for his release as his wellbeing declines.

In November, the UN working group on arbitrary detention found Ahmed al-Doush was being detained arbitrarily under international law and recommended his immediate release, as well as the payment of compensation. The findings followed its eight-month inquiry

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Japan and Taiwan have enviable care systems because they had the courage to plan – some solutions are radical, most are hiding in plain sight

It’s mid-afternoon in Fujisawa. Schoolchildren, rucksacks on their backs, bound into a room where a group of pensioners welcome them boisterously, before sitting them down to help with their homework. This group of older people is looked after by some of the pupils’ parents. Up the road, a cluster of university students live above some over-75s. They get half-price rent in return for checking in on them on their way to and from studies.

This multigenerational community I visited in a small town not far from the port of Yokohama is one of 5,000 in Japan.

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Millions of documents chronicling generations of trauma saved from Gaza and East Jerusalem in 10-month Unrwa operation

East Jerusalem to Amman should have been an easy trip: a short drive down to the Dead Sea, across the border checkpoint and swiftly on to the Jordanian capital.

But in the early summer of 2024, the distance appeared an almost insurmountable obstacle to humanitarian workers from Unrwa (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees), as they sought to safeguard huge quantities of archival documents vitally important to decades of recent Palestinian history.

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niggyl :) has added a photo to the pool:

From above Pine Valley, peaks in the Du Cane Range, Mt. Gould (1481m) and The Minotaur (1355m). Cloud thickening from out of the west.

Mt Gould is a long narrow ridge but seen from this angle presents just a peak. However, all the lumps in the Du Canes are formed of Jurassic Dolerite on a sill of Triassic sandstone. Their shapes represent glacial cirques and aretes dating from the last Ice Age.

Du Cane Range, Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair National Park, Tasmania.

Ricoh GRiii, 18.3mm f/2.8 GR lens, 1/200th sec at f/11, ISO 200.

Chinese web giant Tencent struggles to earn a return on investment from GPUs – unless it uses them to power its advertising business. “If we buy GPUs and we deploy them into our ad tech, then that's a relatively short-cycle investment,” said Chief Strategy Officer James Mitchell during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call. “The GPUs yield better targeting, higher click-through rates and higher revenue and profit on a pretty accelerated basis,” he said. But the company views GPUs powering work on its Hunyuan foundation model as “important for our franchise.” Mitchell said Tencent is comfortable with this situation. “There's been many products within Tencent … that went through lengthy incubation periods where they had no return on investment, but we were confident in the franchise value creation,” he said. “And then over time, they had more lengthy harvesting periods where we've been able to drive very healthy returns on that sunk investment.” He predicted that AI will go through the same cycle But Tencent is struggling to make the wheel turn because it’s only had enough GPUs to power its own services, leaving its public cloud without enough accelerators to rent to customers. Mitchell said Chinese manufacturers will soon fill the gap. “As the supply of China design GPUs progressively ramps up, then we'll be remedying that situation,” he said. Chief financial officer Shek Hon Lo weighed in with an observation that two factors made it hard for Tencent to get all the GPUs it wants: US sanctions, and “limited fab capacity within China.” “That's now being addressed because the China designed ASICs are seeing more supply from fabs within China as well as more supply from fabs in neighboring countries,” he said. But Tencent still expects GPU procurement to be harder than buying CPUs, as Lo said the company has “very long-term” deals with CPU vendors. “We've been a big customer for Intel and AMD for many years,” he said. “We've been progressively growing our volume with them for many years, and they believe it will continue to progressively grow our volume for many years to come.” That remark will be cause for celebration at the US companies, which have watched other hyperscalers invest heavily in custom Arm silicon. Tencent posted another strong quarter, with revenue of RMB196.5 billion ($28.9 billion) representing 12 percent growth. The company’s Weixin and QQ messaging apps have 1.95 billion monthly combined users. Tencent has tweaked their mobile apps “to act as communication interfaces for controlling AI agents, allowing users to orchestrate agents from mobile for complicated task execution on PC and cloud.” Tencent’s Western rivals Google and Meta haven’t yet built similar apps. And they don’t experience the same hardware acquisition problems Tencent faces. ®

A Russian avant-garde troupe presents Dr. Seuss as you have never seen him presented before! Spokanki's work (especially this video) reminds me of the short avant-garde films for children that I was fortunate enough to get to watch as a kid in 1970s California.

Een Amerikaanse vrouw die een kinderboek over rouw schreef nadat ze haar echtgenoot had vergiftigd, is veroordeeld tot levenslang zonder mogelijkheid tot vervroegde vrijlating. Dat melden Amerikaanse media.

Kouri Richins (36) werd in maart schuldig bevonden aan moord, en volgens de rechter is de moeder van drie "te gevaarlijk om ooit vrij te komen".

Volgens het Openbaar Ministerie doodde Richins haar echtgenoot Eric Richins in 2022 door hem een cocktail te serveren met vijf keer de dodelijke dosis fentanyl, waardoor ze 4 miljoen dollar kon erven en nog eens 2 miljoen dollar zou ontvangen uit levensverzekeringen die ze in het geheim op zijn naam had afgesloten.

Ze zei dat haar kinderboek, getiteld 'Are you with me?', was geschreven na de dood van haar echtgenoot om haar drie zonen te helpen met de verwerking.

Met cameravallen bij een door palmen omzoomd riviertje in een Keniaans wildpark legde natuurfotograaf Will Burrard-Lucas een veel completer beeld bloot van de lokale fauna.