Presenter released on bail by Westminster magistrates court and told he faces Old Bailey trial on five charges

Russell Brand has appeared in court on charges of rape and sexual assault.

During a brief hearing at Westminster magistrates court on Friday, he was told he faced a trial at the Old Bailey in London on the five sexual offence charges.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission found video app breached GDPR and had submitted ‘erroneous information’ to inquiry

TikTok has been fined €530m (£452m) by an Irish watchdog over a failure to guarantee that European user data sent to China would not be accessed by the Chinese government.

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) regulates TikTok across the European Economic Area (EEA), which includes all 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

President says neither NPR nor PBS presents ‘fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events’

Donald Trump has signed an executive order that seeks to cut public funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, accusing them of leftwing bias.

The order, signed late on Thursday, directs the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which sends funds to NPR and PBS, to “cease federal funding� for the two outlets.

The actor has the prestigious job of reading the British jury’s verdicts on the night, after starring in a special Who episode with Rylan and Graham Norton

Doctor Who actor Ncuti Gatwa has been confirmed as the UK’s spokesperson for the Eurovision song contest 2025.

Gatwa will announce the British jury’s points for each participating country’s song. Previous spokespeople include Joanna Lumley, Fearne Cotton, Nigella Lawson and fellow Whoniverse star Catherine Tate.

Joan Partridge, in Redditch, is collaborating with cosmetics firm after post showing her beauty routine went viral

At 103 years old, dispensing pearls of wisdom is second nature to Joan Partridge. But even she was surprised when a video of her applying rouge found an appreciative audience of almost 200,000 on TikTok.

“I do my makeup every day, every morning, I think it is your confidence,� said Partridge, who is the eldest resident at Millcroft care home in Redditch, Worcestershire. Since the video went viral, Partridge has caught the attention of a cosmetics company which is keen to collaborate with her.

Thalia Holmes, 20, defeats Richie Kelly, 63, in final after former RAF technician misses a win (can you find it?)

BBC Two’s Monday evening show Chess Masters: The Endgame reached its final this week amid a continuing debate between experts, who found it patronising, and social players, novices and children who enjoyed its light touch and focus on personalities. The series was placed in a testing environment, the 8pm slot, sandwiched between the intellectual heavyweights Mastermind and University Challenge.

Viewer numbers, as supplied by Broadcast, peaked in the first week at 890,000, then gradually dipped to a low of 535,000 on Easter Monday before rebounding to 655,000, a 5.5% share of the viewing audience, for the final week.

Administration’s news ‘wire’ will promote press releases, posts by high-level officials and positive news about itself

The Trump administration has unveiled a news-style website that publishes exclusively positive coverage of the president on official White House servers.

White House Wire, published at the government domain WH.gov/wire, resembles the rightwing website the Drudge Report, with a list of headlines from right-leaning outlets praising the administration.

Following a rebrand and move to digital-first the total losses over eight years rise to nearly £125m

Evgeny Lebedev, the owner of the Standard, has pledged to provide funds to keep the newspaper company going after it lost nearly £20m in the year before it went weekly.

The paper, formerly the Evening Standard, which had been published daily in London for almost 200 years, was rebranded last autumn to make it a digital-first publication, supported by a weekly print edition, the London Standard.

Ciro Pellegrino of Fanpage, who has been critical of Meloni government, says notification provoked ‘horrible feeling’

A second Italian journalist whose news organisation exposed young fascists within the prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party was targeted with sophisticated “mercenary spyware�, according to an Apple notification received by the reporter.

Ciro Pellegrino is the second reporter at the investigative news outlet Fanpage to fall victim to an alleged spyware attack, after his editor-in-chief, Francesco Cancellato.

Roberts-Smith argues his unsuccessful defamation case against McKenzie and Nine newspapers should be retried because of a ‘miscarriage of justice’

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The Nine journalist Nick McKenzie was told about a legal action war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith planned to take ahead of his defamation trial, a court has heard, with the informant allegedly telling him “it’s always good to be on the front foot�.

On Tuesday the federal court of Australia heard that a friend of Emma Roberts had told McKenzie that Roberts-Smith was planning to notify and write to the Commonwealth director of public prosecutions (CDPP) about an alleged “breach� and to “restrain any further publications being made�.

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This article and headline were amended on 2 May 2025. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Nick McKenzie was told Emma Roberts planned to contact the CDPP. McKenzie was told that Ben Roberts-Smith planned to do this.

Exclusive: Sun reporter also wrote that former MP ‘must die’, according to claims in newly disclosed document

Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of Rupert Murdoch’s UK company, took a “deeply concerning interest� in the phone-hacking campaigner Tom Watson while one of her journalists wrote that he “must die�, according to claims in a newly disclosed court document.

Referring to a potential place for Watson on a parliamentary committee looking into unlawful behaviour, Brooks allegedly told Will Lewis, the then general manager of News Group Newspapers (NGN) – who is now the chief executive and publisher of the Washington Post – in June 2011 to pass on a message that the company would “go for broke if watson on – and downing street need to be warned�.

The next challenge for Julia Donaldson’s monster is to get its claws into parents and persuade more of them to read aloud

It is 21 years since Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler published The Gruffalo’s Child, the sequel to their bestselling Gruffalo picture book of five years earlier. While the pair have collaborated on numerous other stories, none is as iconic as the tale of the little brown mouse who outwits a succession of predators. There is no shortage of Gruffalo merchandise. But in an age of franchises and prequels, this author-illustrator partnership clearly decided that less was more.

It is reportedly thanks to her wish to support the National Literacy Trust that Ms Donaldson decided to bring the Gruffalo back after all. The new book will be published next year, and used in an international campaign to promote children’s reading. The depressing findings of a survey released this week, showing a steep decline in the proportion of UK parents who read aloud to their children, make this announcement particularly welcome. Another report, from the National Literacy Trust, found that the proportion of eight- to 18-year-olds who read for pleasure fell last year to a record low of 35%.

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A wholly disappointing episode has drawn attention away from a legitimate conversation about media coverage

The former England international Eni Aluko’s appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour prompted lines to be drawn between her and fellow pundit Ian Wright. “There’s a finite amount of opportunities and I think that men need to be aware of that,� said Aluko, when asked whether it was wrong that Wright was covering women’s football. The affair has been messy, with Aluko, a trailblazer in many areas, publicly apologising and Wright, a passionate champion of the women’s game beloved by players and fans for that support, rejecting the apology.

It has been a wholly disappointing episode that has, in focusing on Wright, drawn attention away from a legitimate conversation on whether the number of women pundits, commentators and presenters in football is improving.

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What has happened with 60 Minutes is a high-octane version of what’s happening everywhere in Trump 2.0

There have been so many red alerts for press freedom in the United States over the past few months that it can be hard to know which ones really matter.

The one at CBS’s 60 Minutes really matters.

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture

The broadcaster behaves like Starmer’s government: suppress the left, cave to your critics, and undermine your own survival

It’s no longer even pretending. Last week, the BBC, already the UK’s most prolific censor, instructed the presenter Evan Davis to drop the podcast he hosted in his own time about heat pumps. It was a gentle, wry look at the machines, with no obvious political content. But the BBC, Davis says, saw it as “steering into areas of public controversy�. It should cease forthwith.

So are BBC presenters banned from saying anything controversial? Far from it. Take an article published earlier this year by Justin Webb in the Times. It praised the “political genius� of Donald Trump, suggested that Democrats are now seen as the extremists, and claimed that Trump is widely regarded as “making [America] normal again�. The BBC was fine with that, and complaints about it were rejected.