Cancer patients to receive ‘game-changing’ vaccine in new NHS trial

Patients in England with head and neck cancer will be fast-tracked onto a clinical trial for a “potentially transformative” new vaccine, under an initiative announced by the NHS.

The first patients have received the jab, which uses mRNA technology to train the immune system to fight cancerous cells, with more set to be enrolled at their nearest NHS hospital.

Head and neck cancer is a general term to describe forms of the disease in those regions of the body, and can include cancer of the mouth, throat or voice box. Around 11,000 new cases are diagnosed in England every year.

Aggressive forms are difficult to treat, with high rates of recurrence and two-year survival rates under 50 per cent.

The vaccine used in the study has been designed to create two proteins that are commonly found in head and neck cancers associated with high-risk types of human papillomavirus (HPV).

These types of cancer, known as squamous cell cancers, develop from flat, scale-like cells in the outer layer of the skin and other areas of the body.

More than 100 patients with advanced forms of the disease will be matched to the trial, known as AHEAD-MERIT (BNT113), which will run at 15 hospitals over the next year.

Health minister Karin Smyth described the plan as a “massive win for cancer patients”.

“These cancer vaccines could be game-changing for patients facing some of the most challenging diagnoses. By getting these trials running in our NHS, we’re putting ourselves at the forefront of medical innovation, improving outcomes for people living with cancer.”

NHS England has joined forces with life sciences company BioNTech to help identify potentially eligible patients to refer to NHS hospitals running the trial.

The trial is the third to be run through the NHS Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad, which is supported by the Cancer Research UK-funded Southampton Clinical Trials Unit.

Professor Peter Johnson, national clinical director for cancer at NHS England, said: “It’s fantastic that more patients with advanced head and neck cancers will now be able to access this potentially transformative vaccine, offering renewed hope of holding the disease at bay.”

Tamara Kahn, chief executive at Oracle Head & Neck Cancer UK, said the trial “offers crucial hope to those living with advanced stages of cancer”.

“While we advocate for HPV vaccination to prevent these cancers, those already fighting this devastating disease urgently need new treatments that could mean more time with loved ones,” she added.

Chris Curtis was diagnosed with HPV-related head and neck cancer in 2011 and set up a support charity, The Swallows.

The 67-year-old, from Blackpool, said: “As a survivor of HPV-related head and neck cancer, I know first-hand the physical, emotional, and psychological toll this disease takes not just on the patient, but on the entire support system around them.

“With this aggressive cancer, you live in the fear of reoccurrence every day – so anything that could help control the disease or give people peace of mind is groundbreaking – it’ll allow people to get on with their lives and move forward.”

The Cancer Vaccine Launch Pad – a partnership between NHS England, the Government and BioNTech – has already helped refer about 550 patients to trials for vaccines for bowel and skin cancers.

Dr Iain Foulkes, executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, said: “The Cancer Vaccines Launch Pad is an important route to fast-track promising mRNA vaccine technology into clinical trials.

“Research into personalised cancer treatments is vital. There are over 200 different types of cancer and it’s unlikely there will ever be a single cure that works for everyone.

“That’s why it’s vital that we support a wide range of research, so that more people can live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.”

Energy firms to pay compensation to customers for faulty smart meters

Households will be able to get compensation from suppliers for delays to smart meter installations, the energy watchdog has announced.

Ofgem has unveiled proposals to bring in rules that will see consumers eligible for £40 compensation if they have to wait more than six weeks for a smart meter installation, as well as faulty meters and those not operating in smart mode which are not fixed within 90 days.

It comes as part of a crackdown on broken smart meters, which has seen the regulator help enforce the repair or replacement of more than 600,000 faulty meters since July last year.

MoneySavingExpert.com founder Martin Lewis welcomed the proposals as he said “likely one in five” smart meters are faulty.

It is thought that millions of smart meters have been left in so-called “dumb” mode, where they have poor connectivity or stop automatically transmitting readings.

Ofgem said that by extending rules to cover poor connectivity, it will mean more consumers can get compensation.

Charlotte Friel, director of retail pricing and systems at Ofgem, said: “Millions of consumers rely on their smart meter every day for accurate billing, cheaper tariffs, automatic meter readings and real-time data to help keep track of spending.

“But we know many customers that want a smart meter wait too long to get one installed or face delays on repairs when it stops working – this needs to change.”

She added: “These new rules are about setting clear expectations of suppliers, incentivising them to boost smart meter standards, and protecting consumers from poor service if things go wrong.”

The plans mean that suppliers will need to improve smart meter standards or pay out from early 2026, according to Ofgem.

Mr Lewis said: “Far too many smart meters, likely one in five, don’t work as they should – a problem not just for all the homes with broken ones, but for the smart meter rollout.

“With so many dissatisfied customers, word-of-mouth is bad, so people tell their friends and neighbours not to get one.

“We need to shift firms’ focus from just installing smart meters to promptly fixing those that are broken – not just meters that go into dumb mode, but crucially all elements, including in-home displays that stop working.”

Under the new rules, micro-businesses will also be able to get compensation for smart meter issues.

Minister for energy consumers Miatta Fahnbulleh said: “Consumers are at the heart of our mission to deliver an energy retail market that works for everyone, as we accelerate towards a clean, homegrown power system to protect households against global fossil fuel price spikes.

“That’s why the government is taking action, alongside Ofgem, to ensure families are better protected when they get a smart meter installed.”

U-switch said its research found that one in five households with a faulty smart meter had been waiting more than two years to have their device fixed.

Richard Neudegg, director of regulation at Uswitch.com, said: “Building consumer confidence is key to convincing the remaining households to get a smart meter.

“These proposals by Ofgem bring more focus on getting faulty smart meters fixed, and give consumers the confidence to take the plunge.”

Ukraine latest: Trump says Putin won’t have to meet Zelensky

US leader Donald Trump says he will meet the Russian president even if Vladimir Putin refuses to meet Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

Mr Trump, when asked whether Putin would need to meet Mr Zelensky to secure a meeting with the US, said: “No, he doesn’t. No.”

Mr Putin has said he hopes to meet Donald Trump next week, possibly in the United Arab Emirates.

Earlier, a Kremlin aide confirmed the pair would discuss a ceasefire in the Ukraine war.

Despite Mr Trump suggesting there was “a good chance” of a summit involving Mr Zelensky, Mr Ushakov said that a trilateral meeting “was for some reason mentioned by Washington” but had not been discussed with the Kremlin.

The venue for the meeting has been decided and is due to be announced later, he added.

A face-to-face meeting would be the first between a sitting US and Russian president since Joe Biden met Mr Putin in Geneva in June 2021, eight months before Russia launched the biggest attack on a European nation since the Second World War.

First migrants detained under ‘one in, one out’ returns deal with France, Starmer confirms

The first migrants who arrived in the UK after crossing the English Channel have been detained under the new “one in, one out” deal with France, the prime minister has confirmed.

The first detentions came after people arrived in Dover on Wednesday, the first day the pilot scheme came into force.

The agreement, announced by the prime minister in a joint press conference with Emmanuel Macron last month, means that any adult migrant who crosses the Channel will now be at risk of return if their claim for asylum is considered inadmissible.

For each small boat migrant sent back across the English Channel, an asylum seeker will be allowed to enter the UK from France under a legal route.

UK officials aim to make referrals for returns to France within three days of a person’s arrival by small boat while French authorities will respond within 14 days.

Adults and families in France are now able to express an interest in coming to the UK through an online platform set up by the Home Office. They will have to meet suitability criteria, standard visa application process and security checks.

Posting to social media, the prime minister said: “We have detained the first illegal migrants under our new deal before returning them to France. No gimmicks, just results.

“If you break the law to enter this country, you will face being sent back. When I say I will stop at nothing to secure our borders, I mean it.”

The Home Office later released footage which showed some of those who were detained arriving at Western Jet Foil in Dover and being medically assessed.

Video also showed men, wearing dark grey tracksuit jumpers and bottoms, taken to Manston processing centre.

The government is hoping the new scheme will turn the tide on the numbers of people arriving in the UK after crossing the Channel, amid mounting tensions over the issue in recent days.

There have been protests across the UK opposing the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, with a number of people arrested after a protest outside a hotel in Canary Wharf in London on Sunday.

The Home Office said detentions began for those who arrived on Wednesday afternoon and they will be held in immigration removal centres until they are returned to France.

Home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “Yesterday, under the terms of this groundbreaking new treaty, the first group of people to cross the Channel were detained after their arrival at Western Jet Foil and will now be held in detention until they can be returned to France.

“That sends a message to every migrant currently thinking of paying organised crime gangs to go to the UK that they will be risking their lives and throwing away their money if they get into a small boat.”

However, there is confusion over whether the UK-France deal leaves open a loophole which would allow for human rights claims to hold up deportations.

The terms of the treaty indicated that migrants who had arrived in the UK via small boat could frustrate attempts to deport them to France, as the agreement contains a clause that says in order for people to be returned to France the UK must confirm they do not have an “outstanding human rights claim”.

Critics have argued this could risk bogus applications being made to frustrate the deportation process and cause delays.

Home Office sources said that migrants with an ongoing human rights claim would not be removed from the UK until their claim is complete in UK courts.

If, however, a claim hasn’t been commenced then an individual can be removed, with any further legal challenges being dealt with in the French courts.

It is also understood that people with claims that have been ruled as unfounded can be removed even where there is a possibility of future legal challenge.

Labour has put a pledge to crack down on the number of people coming to the UK on small boats at the centre of its plan for government.

But with boat crossings at a record high, and the asylum backlog still above 75,000, there is mounting pressure on ministers to take more drastic action – pressure which is exacerbated by the success of Reform UK in the polls.

Last week figures showed that the number of migrants arriving in the UK after crossing the English Channel topped 25,000 – the earliest point in a calendar year at which the 25,000 mark has been passed since data on Channel crossings was first reported in 2018.

Teacher banned from the classroom after doing student’s coursework

A teacher who wrote and submitted a student’s coursework for them has been banned from the classroom indefinitely.

Lauren Oliver, 35, taught health and social care at Oasis Academy Shirley Park for 12 years, but in June 2023 it was discovered she rewrote a student’s coursework and sent it to the exam board in November 2022.

A panel found the teacher was “guilty of unacceptable professional conduct” and was “dishonest” and “lacked integrity”.

She has been banned from teaching indefinitely, with the right to have the prohibition order reviewed in two years.

On 21 June 2023, the principal of the school was approached by a student who informed them Ms Oliver wrote their coursework five months earlier, a report revealed.

Ms Oliver had advised the student that her work was due to be sampled for moderation by the exam board and that she would instead write the work and submit it on her behalf.

The coursework that was submitted on behalf of the student was different to what they had originally produced, the report added.

Ms Oliver resigned on 20 October 2023, after admitting to her actions.

The report highlights Ms Oliver’s actions meant the student temporarily received a better grade than they otherwise would have attained.

Her actions may also have affected the student’s overall grade because their work could have been disregarded.

Ms Oliver had over a decade of teaching experience and was one of the lead internal verifiers at the school – meaning she was responsible for confirming to the exam board that the coursework was authentic.

Considering this the panel decided Ms Oliver was aware that completing a students work on their behalf and attributing it to them was “wrong”.

The panel found Ms Oliver “behaved in a dishonest manner” and concluded her “conduct was capable of causing reputational damage to the school and her colleagues.”

She was found to not uphold the professional and ethical standards expected of a teacher.

“Ms Oliver was in a position of trust and responsibility. Therefore, honesty and integrity were integral to her role. Notwithstanding this, Ms Oliver behaved in a dishonest manner,” the panel said.

The former teacher is now banned from the classroom and cannot teach in any school, sixth form college, relevant youth accommodation or children’s home in England.

OpenAI launches GPT-5, its first flagship update to ChatGPT model in years

ChatGPT has got its first major update in years in the form of GPT-5.

The GPT models are the AI technology that underpin ChatGPT. The new version will be available to all 700 million users of ChatGPT, its makers OpenAI said.

The last major version of GPT, number four, was released in 2023, though OpenAI has unveiled a number of smaller updates since then.

OpenAI has at once tried to present the new model as being transformative and safe. Chief executive Sam Altman has tweeted memes about the possible radical update it could include, for instance, but the introduction also stressed that the system is still a long way from replacing humans.

GPT-5 includes a host of upgrades including the ability to integrate different models and to automatically decide whether it needs to work harder on a given problem. But OpenAI said that it also had a range of performance upgrades, including better performance in writing software.

It comes as OpenAI and other major AI firms face questions over whether their products will be able to make good on the billions of dollars of investment they have asked for. Microsoft, for instance, said that the new system would be available across its products, such as its CoPilot AI assistant.

OpenAI is particularly emphasising GPT-5’s use in businesses. In addition to software development, the company said GPT-5 excels in writing, health-related queries, and finance.

“GPT-5 is really the first time that I think one of our mainline models has felt like you can ask a legitimate expert, a PhD-level expert, anything,” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said at a press briefing.

“One of the coolest things it can do is write you good instantaneous software. This idea of software on demand is going to be one of the defining features of the GPT-5 era.”

One key measure of success is whether the step up from GPT-4 to GPT-5 is on par with the research lab’s previous improvements. Two early reviewers told Reuters that while the new model impressed them with its ability to code and solve science and math problems, they believe the leap from the GPT-4 to GPT-5 was not as large as OpenAI’s prior improvements.

Nearly three years ago, ChatGPT introduced the world to generative AI, dazzling users with its ability to write humanlike prose and poetry, quickly becoming one of the fastest growing apps ever. In March 2023, OpenAI followed up ChatGPT with the release of GPT-4, a large language model that made huge leaps forward in intelligence.

While GPT-3.5, an earlier version, received a bar exam score in the bottom 10%, GPT-4 passed the simulated bar exam in the top 10%.

GPT-4’s leap was based on more compute power and data, and the company was hoping that “upscaling” in a similar way would consistently lead to improved AI models.

But OpenAI ran into issues scaling up. One problem was the data wall the company ran into, and OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever said last year that while processing power was growing, the amount of data was not.

He was referring to the fact that large language models are trained on massive datasets that scrape the entire internet, and AI labs have no other options for large troves of human-generated textual data.

GPT-5 acts as a router, meaning if a user asks GPT-5 a particularly hard problem, it will use test-time compute to answer the question.

This is the first time the general public will have access to OpenAI’s test-time compute technology, something that Altman said is important to the company’s mission to build AI that benefits all of humanity.

Altman believes the current investment in AI is still inadequate.

“We need to build a lot more infrastructure globally to have AI locally available in all these markets,” Altman said.

Additional reporting by agencies

Restriction zones for domestic abusers welcomed by survivors

Ministers will seek to introduce “restriction zones” that will limit where abusers can go, aiming to allow survivors to go about their daily lives without fear of seeing their offender.

Sexual and violent offenders could be restricted to certain locations and tracked with technology, and would face jail time for breaching the conditions under new proposals.

Until now exclusion zones exist to stop perpetrators from going to where their victims live.

A domestic abuse survivor has said she hopes that the new plans are not “just pillow talk” after feeling let down by previous governments.

Mother-of-two and survivor Leanne said she was “ecstatic” about the move, adding: “I hope change is actually going to happen, and it’s not just pillow talk, but if it happens, then, yeah, it’s a long time coming.”

She said from her experience she would have asked for restriction zones at the school where she would take her children, her local supermarket or near her family’s homes.

“These are places where I was confronted, even when he had restraining orders,” the 54-year-old said.

“If I could say those places, and I knew I could go to those places safely, happy days, I’m protected. I’ve been listened to.”

But she called for ministers to listen to survivors more, adding of the government approach: “So far, I’m loving what I’m hearing.

“Would I put a lot of faith in it? Probably not, because I don’t like being let down, and I’ve been let down by previous governments.

“So we can only have hope.”

The measure comes as the government plans to overhaul the prison system to curb overcrowding, which could see violent and sexual offenders released from jail earlier, and for more criminals to serve sentences in the community.

Tens of thousands of offenders would be tagged, prompting concerns from the victims’ commissioner for England and Wales over the Probation Service’s ability to cope with rising numbers.

The government has announced £700 million of funding until 2028/29 for the Probation Service to back up its reforms, as well as recruiting 1,300 new probation officers by March 2026.

For the new restriction zones, probation officers will work with survivors to decide on banned locations for perpetrators, and will carry out detailed risk assessments.

Justice minister Alex Davies-Jones announced the new measure at charity Advance in London on Friday.

The victims minister said perpetrators will be GPS monitored to have real-time data about where they are going, and will be subject to “virtual boundaries” which if breached could mean they go to prison.

She said: “We’re putting really strong safeguards attached to these so that we can give victims and survivors the confidence to carry on with their everyday lives.

“We’re going to be outlining more details on this as well as we’re bringing in the legislation in the autumn.”

Speaking at one of Advance’s women’s centres, director Amy Glover said the domestic abuse charity wants to see what the monitoring processes are, and how quickly a probation officer would intervene if a perpetrator was breaching conditions or doing something unsafe.

“What we can sometimes find when new safety measures are introduced for victim survivors, if they don’t work all the time, then they can actually create a false sense of security,” she said.

“So we’re just really interested to hear a bit more about how they will be rolled out and how we can ensure they’re working effectively.”

But of the measure, she added the reaction is “largely positive” as it flips the current responsibility on survivors on deciding to leave their safe, small exclusion zone area, to perpetrators having more restrictions.

“The aim of these restriction zones, which we really welcome, is to flip that so now he may have a smaller area of movement. She is able to go about her daily life more.”

The charity hosted the justice minister for a round table discussion about the issue, joined by survivors and reality star and campaigner Georgia Harrison.

The Love Island star, who campaigns on violence against women and girls after becoming a victim of revenge porn, backed the plan for restriction zones for offenders if implemented correctly.

“Why on earth should a survivor have to pick an area and stay there for the rest of their life?” she said.

“It makes so much more sense that a perpetrator will be subjected to a restriction zone and a survivor can go wherever they want and feel safe.

“If implemented correctly, it could just mean that not only are they actually physically safe, but they can live every single day feeling safe.”

The Refuge ambassador said that knowing your perpetrator is tagged and they are being monitored is the “best way possible” if prisons are overcrowded to figure out what works outside of jails.

“This does seem like a really good answer to one of those issues,” she said.

Ms Harrison also pressed the case for social media platforms to be helping and held accountable for needing to do more to prevent abuse online, which also affects victims of domestic abuse.

Ms Davies-Jones said: “As the victims minister, I get to meet with victims and survivors every single day who have been through the unimaginable, and I want to hear their experiences directly and learn from them so that we can make the system better for them, and finally put them back at the heart of the justice system.”