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Offering essay-writing services to students for a fee will become a criminal offence under plans to tackle cheating by "essay mills". The government says the move will protect students from the "deceptive marketing techniques of contract cheating services".

A California man is suing a psychic who he says falsely claimed she could remove a curse put on his marriage by a witch hired by his ex-girlfriend.

On a cool October evening, Renu Saxena brought her newborn daughter home from hospital in the southern Indian city of Bengaluru. It struck her just how fragile her baby was, her tiny veins glowing through her translucent skin. She had been born early, at 36 weeks, and weighed only 2.4kg (5.3lbs).

A former Facebook employee has told US lawmakers that the company's sites and apps "harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy".Frances Haugen, a 37-year-old former product manager turned whistleblower, heavily criticised the company at a hearing on Capitol Hill.

Three scientists have been awarded the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work to understand complex systems, such as the Earth's climate. Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi were announced as the winners at an event in Stockholm.

Some 216,000 children - mostly boys - have been sexually abused by clergy in the French Catholic Church since 1950, a damning new inquiry has found. The head of the inquiry said there were at least 2,900-3,200 abusers, and accused the Church of showing a "cruel indifference towards the victims".

The Australian founder of the global Hillsong Church will plead not guilty to charges of concealing child sexual abuse. Brian Houston, 67, was charged by police in Australia in August following a two-year investigation.

Stepping through Bab-al-Yaman, the enormous gate allowing access into Yemen's old walled city of Sana'a, was like stepping through a portal into another world.

An electrical implant that sits in the skull and is wired to the brain can detect and treat severe depression, US scientists believe after promising results with a first patient. Sarah, who is 36, had the device fitted more than a year ago and says it has turned her life around.

John Oliver discusses PFAS — a class of chemicals linked to an array of health issues — and why their widespread use isn’t as magical as it may seem. Connect with Last Week Tonight online... Subscribe to the Last Week Tonight YouTube channel for more almost news as it almost happens: www.yo

Frances Haugen, 37, who worked as a product manager on the civic integrity team at Facebook, was interviewed on Sunday by CBS. She said the documents she leaked proved that Facebook repeatedly prioritised "growth over safety".

Thousands of paedophiles have operated within the French Catholic Church since 1950, the head of a panel investigating abuses by church members says.

Pioneering Scottish photographer John Thomson took some of the earliest pictures of China on record. He was born in Edinburgh in 1837 and set off for the Far East in 1862 where he spent the next decade capturing images from all walks of life.

US radio host and prominent conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has lost another legal case after falsely calling a mass school shooting a "hoax". Twenty children and six adults were shot dead at Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut in 2012.

Europe's first mission to Mercury arrives at its destination in the coming hours. It'll be the briefest of visits, however.

Anup Shah has been announced as the winner of the Nature Conservancy 2021 Photo Contest, for his image of a western lowland gorilla walking through a cloud of butterflies in the Central African Republic.

At the 1896 Olympics in Athens, the first organised marathon involved only 17 athletes. Marathoning has come a long way since. The winner ran a time of 2:58:50 – nowadays this would be a respectable time for an amateur, but it's almost an hour slower than the fastest runners today.

Secret key material transfer After installing a to an iPhone 12 on iOS 15.

Artificial intelligence can tell whether it is going to rain in the next two hours, research suggests. Scientists at Google-owned London AI lab DeepMind and the University of Exeter partnered with the Met Office to build the so-called nowcasting system.

A cafe table where JK Rowling wrote sections of her Harry Potter books has been salvaged from a huge fire, which devastated the building.The blaze on Edinburgh's George IV Bridge last month badly damaged flats and businesses including The Elephant House cafe.

As midnight approached on 31 December 2006, most of Spain was preparing to celebrate the new year. Zaid Ait Malek spent the night evading police. He and his cousin had just completed a five-hour ferry crossing from Morocco hidden inside a truck.

In a small room, painted a light shade of pastel pink, nearly a dozen men and women are hard at work, hunched over desks that line the walls, their fingers flying at a frenzied pace over clattering keys. The soothing rhythm of typing punctuates the incessant drone of traffic.  

For football fans around the globe the pinnacle of the sport is the World Cup final. But what if that match was ultimately just the precursor to a game between the best humans and the best robots?