World

Clair Birch says her £170,000 annexe was designed around her disabled daughter’s needs, but planning officials have rejected her appeal. (Photo: SWNS) A mother who spent £170,000 building a two-storey annexe for her disabled daughter could now be forced to demolish it after losing a planning appeal. Clair Birch, 59, built the one-bedroom annexe in…

In 1972, Howard Solomon set out to build a quiet retirement home in rural Florida, but the land he chose was far from ordinary. Instead of a conventional building site, he found a swamp, yet the challenging terrain did little to discourage him. Solomon adapted his plans and began constructing upwards, slowly transforming the property…

FILE – Prince Harry, and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, arrive for an event, during a visit to Bondi Beach, Australia, April 17, 2026. (Jonathan Brady/Pool Photo via AP, File) Netflix deals come and go. The British monarchy is forever. Probably.Five years ago, Patrick Freyne wrote a piece in The Irish Times whose…

In December 1986, the United States federal government completed a deal to buy Santa Rosa Island for $29.5 million. The 53,000-acre island, located 26.5 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, was bought by the National Park Service from its longtime private owners, the Vail & Vickers ranching partnership. Under the deal, the ranching…

Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “man in the arena” passage remains one of his most enduring reflections on courage, effort and failure. In his 1910 speech “Citizenship in a Republic”, delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, Roosevelt said: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and…

Priscilla Chan’s journey from the daughter of Vietnamese refugees to a Harvard graduate, paediatrician and major science philanthropist is rooted in a family story shaped by war and migration. Her grandparents put her parents, who were teenagers at the time, on boats to flee Vietnam during the war. Chan grew up in Massachusetts, where her…

Singapore has brought the memory of a vanished 1920s landmark into one of its newest housing estates, but the new Alkaff Lake is doing much more than recreating a piece of the past. Built inside Bidadari Park, the 1.8-hectare lake was inspired by the former Alkaff Gardens, which opened to the public in 1929. Today,…

Dubai is surrounded by dunes and for a country that has ample desert sand, one would think they would utilise it as a resource. However, the sand underfoot has long been a poor fit for ordinary concrete. Wind makes desert grains unusually fine, smooth, and rounded, so they do not interlock as easily as the…

Nitro_Camden’s Twitch stream took an unexpected turn after popular streamer StableRonaldo raided his channel and sent around 15,000 viewers his way. The 18-year-old streamer was celebrating the huge jump in viewers when the situation suddenly became serious. His mother entered the room after reportedly getting upset about the noise. What started as a big moment…

In a vineyard in Italy’s Puglia region, rows of grapevines grew beneath something more usually associated with power stations than agriculture: photovoltaic panels. The arrangement changed the amount of sunlight reaching the vines, but it also altered what was happening much closer to the ground. Soil stayed wetter, temperatures were less extreme and the air…