OVO Hydro, Glasgow
Florence Welch is backed by the folk-horror dramatics of a petticoat-clad choir – but quite capable of transfixing the crowd with her billowing voice alone

‘I’ve only sung this once before and it makes me shake,” Florence Welch admits, crouching alone at the far end of a long, narrow thrust stage. Watching her command this arena during the first of two sold-out shows in Glasgow in honour of Florence + the Machine’s sixth album Everybody Scream, it’s hard to imagine Welch fearing anything. Just seconds ago, she was racing barefoot, flouncy skirts gathered in one hand, ripping through Spectrum (the band’s first UK No 1, back in 2012) and its searing demand: “Say my name!”

But the new song she is steeling herself to sing presses on a bruise. With ratcheting intensity, You Can Have It All grieves an ectopic pregnancy which almost killed her, as well as a music industry that punishes its stars for motherhood. Over grungy electric guitar, her tempestuous voice billows like sails in high wind: “Am I a woman now?” It leaves the arena in stunned silence. She gives a wry curtsey.

As council declares it’s ‘no longer bankrupt’, people say closure of services have added to social isolation and crime

When Birmingham city council announced last week it was “no longer bankrupt”, after years of budget cuts and asset sales, one retired police officer was left feeling despondent.

Wendy Collymore had experienced first-hand the impact of the council’s cost-cutting drive on the UK’s second largest city when the adult day centre her elderly father attended was forced to close in 2024.

Who will speak out for values and rights and my fellow democracy activist now that opposition has been silenced in Hong Kong? I say Britain should

• Nathan Law is a politician and activist from Hong Kong

Waking up on Monday morning to the news of the pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai’s 20-year prison sentence for national security offences felt surreal. I could have easily been in his position if I hadn’t fled Hong Kong right before the implementation of the notorious national security law (NSL), under which Lai has faced the harshest penalty ever given. In fact, Lai chose to stay and stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Hong Kong in the face of an uncertain and repressive future. Now his family fears that he will die in prison.

A mix of emotions filled my mind. I was immensely disgusted by the audacity and malevolence of such punishment. This sentence has a transparently political end, but the Hong Kong and Chinese governments make no bones about it. Their sole purpose is to silence critics, and they have succeeded: civil society and domestic media, which should be the watchdogs of individual rights and government overreach, are dead silent on criticising the trial.

Podcast by Adam Batty and BBC 6 Music DJ Afrodeutsche follows the leads to Leeds

The hunt for clues about the life of the masked rapper MF Doom had taken Adam Batty to some strange places, none more so than a remote-control car shop in the market town of Otley, West Yorkshire.

Rumour had it that Doom, who died in Leeds in 2020, had spent thousands in the shop. Other sightings placed him in the indie venue the Brudenell Social Club.

MF DOOM: Long Island to Leeds is available on BBC Sounds from Tuesday 10 February.

Our current approach to mental health labelling and diagnosis has brought benefits. But as a practising doctor, I am concerned that it may be doing more harm than good

Someone is shot, and almost dies; the fragility of life is intimately revealed to him. He goes on to have flashbacks of the event, finds that he can no longer relax or enjoy himself. He is agitated and restless. His relationships suffer, then wither; he is progressively disturbed by intrusive memories of the event.

This could be read as a description of many patients I’ve seen in clinic and in the emergency room over the years in my work as a doctor: it’s recognisably someone suffering what has in recent decades been called PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. But it isn’t one of my patients. It’s a description of a character in the 7,000-year-old Indian epic The Ramayana; Indian psychiatrist Hitesh Sheth uses it as an example of the timelessness of certain states of mind. Other ancient epics describe textbook cases of what we now call “generalised anxiety disorder”, which is characterised by excessive fear and rumination, loss of focus, and inability to sleep. Yet others describe what sounds like suicidal depression, or devastating substance addiction.

The great topmost sheet of the mass, that where hardly a light had twinkled or moved, becomes now a sparkling field of rhythmic flashing points with trains of travelling sparks hurrying hither and thither. The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning … Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one.

Born of student disquiet after the 2008 crash, the group says it is reshaping economists’ education

As the fallout from the 2008 global financial crash reverberated around the world, a group of students at Harvard University in the US walked out of their introductory economics class complaining it was teaching a “specific and limited view” that perpetuated “a problematic and inefficient system of economic inequality”.

A few weeks later, on the other side of the Atlantic, economics students at Manchester University in the UK, unhappy that the rigid mathematical formulas they were being taught in the classroom bore little relation to the tumultuous economic fallout they were living through, set up a “post-crash economics society”.

Key Labour figures have rallied around the prime minister amid speculation over his leadership

Kemi Badenoch has said that Keir Starmer just received a “stay of execution” yesterday. Speaking to reporters on a visit this morning, she said:

[Starmer] is in a very dangerous place. The Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar said the quiet bit out loud.

Labour MPs and the Labour party have lost confidence in their leader, but the MPs are too scared of losing their jobs, so they’re not going to call an election, and they’ve given him a stay of execution. The sad thing is that the country is suffering from not being governed at all.

Seamus Culleton describes conditions as ‘torture’ as he pleads with taoiseach to raise his case with Donald Trump

An Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for five months despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record says he fears for his life and has appealed for help from Ireland’s government.

Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.”

As trust in Russia and China’s state broadcasters grows, director general warns of the dangers of cutting back the service

The BBC World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks with no future deal with the government currently in place, the corporation’s director general, Tim Davie, has warned.

In a last-minute pitch to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Davie said the uncertainty came as news organisations were cutting their international reporting and disinformation was “flooding the digital sphere at an incredible speed”.

The 12-year-old was stabbed by a stranger as he walked home from school in January 2025

Justice Choudhury KC is back from his deliberation and will make a decision about whether or not he will lift the reporting restriction shortly.

Leo Ross’s foster family is in court this morning to hear the judge pass his sentence, due this afternoon.