Verified News Online

UK PM Andy Burnham. Three members of a family died after getting into difficulty while swimming off the coast of Shoreham-by-Sea in West Sussex, while a young girl remains in critical condition in hospital, police said.Emergency services were called at around 2.40pm on Tuesday after reports of four people in difficulty in the water near Shoreham Fort, Sussex Police said.All four were brought ashore, but a man, a woman and a teenage girl were pronounced dead despite efforts by paramedics.Sussex Police said all four were from the same family and that their next of kin had been informed. The Coastguard also confirmed that it was not searching for anyone else.Father identified as Palestinian refugeeThe man who died was later identified as Hossam El-Khawwas, a Palestinian refugee who had come to the UK from the Rashidieh refugee camp in Lebanon, the Palestinian Embassy in London confirmed to the BBC.His wife, Zeina Alyan, and their teenage daughter, Sarah, also died in the incident. Their y..

Seth NabatPhoto: Society for Science Every year, nearly 1,900 of the nation’s most promising high school seniors submit original research to the Regeneron Science Talent Search (Regeneron STS), the oldest and most prestigious science and mathematics competition in the United States. According to the Society for Science, which runs the competition, the Regeneron STS recognises and empowers young scientists who are developing ideas that could solve society’s most urgent challenges. Started in 1942 as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the competition has a long history of identifying future leaders in STEM. Among the 2026 top ten winners was Seth Nabat, an 18-year-old from Winnetka, California, who earned tenth place and a $40,000 award for his innovative machine-learning project on particle collisions. Read on to know more about his invention here:A breakthrough in physicsSeth Jacob Nabat, a senior at William Howard Taft Charter High School in Woodland Hills, California, developed ..

AdvertisementUnited StatesWorldUnited States & CanadaMerck, Moderna claim encouraging melanoma vaccine trial resultsThe vaccine, intismeran autogene, showed ‘meaningful improvements’ for skin cancer patients when used with Merck’s Keytruda treatment, the firms say
1-MIN READ1-MIN ListenAgence France-PressePublished: 10:56pm, 19 Aug 2026US pharmaceutical firms Merck and Moderna announced on Wednesday encouraging results from a trial of their experimental vaccine against melanoma, potentially clearing the way for approval.
The vaccine, called intismeran autogene, showed “statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements” for skin cancer patients when used with Merck’s Keytruda treatment, the companies said in a statement.
Unlike conventional vaccines, so-called therapeutic vaccines like intismeran treat rather than prevent a disease, by training the body’s own immune system against a tumour or other invaders.
The news sent shares in biotech specialist Moderna soaring in ea..

AdvertisementHong Kong healthcare and hospitalsHong KongHealth & EnvironmentDoctor to the stars cleared over failure to record reason for using labour drugDr Liang Shuk-tak was accused of failing to properly record fetal head position, pelvis shape, and the reason for administering a labour drug in 2017
2-MIN READ2-MIN ListenFiona SunPublished: 10:38pm, 19 Aug 2026Updated: 10:50pm, 19 Aug 2026An obstetrician to the stars has been cleared of professional misconduct by Hong Kong’s medical watchdog over allegations she failed to properly record why she administered a labour-inducing drug to a patient who said the procedure left her traumatised.
Dr Liang Shuk-tak, who reportedly had delivered babies for actresses Brigitte Lin Ching-hsia and Cecilia Cheung Pak-chi, and Olympic diving champion Guo Jingjing, was accused of failing to “properly document” the fetal head position, maternal pelvis shape or size, and the reason for administering Syntocinon to the patient in the medical record in 2..

There is a saying among bibliophiles: Never judge a book by its movie. For true readers, nothing any director dreams up can ever match the cinema playing inside one’s head, to borrow a line from Anurag Kashyap’s greatest villain. Two rare adaptations that arguably hold their own against their source novels are Mario Puzo’s The Godfather and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.And yet one film that outshone the book that inspired it is 3 Idiots, loosely based on Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone, which captures the meat-grinder aesthetics of engineering education. There is a scene that hits a little too close to home when a student decides he has rolled the boulder long enough and commits suicide, unable to deal with the vagaries of engineering life. During his funeral, the film’s prodigal protagonist confronts the authoritarian dean and claims that it wasn’t suicide but “murder” caused by an institution and a society that created unbearable pressure that no post-mortem investigation c..

Origin Story: The Tocks Island Dam Controversy The US government once planned to flood a 40-mile stretch of the Delaware River valley to build a massive reservoir, only to cancel the project and turn the acquired land into a sprawling federal parkland. The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, a 70,000-acre national park spanning Pennsylvania and New Jersey, exists today as the unexpected result of the abandoned Tocks Island Dam project. What began as an ambitious mid-century plan to control floods and generate hydroelectric power ended in 1975, when regional authorities voted to cancel the project, leaving 40 miles of free-flowing river under the National Park Service.High water and a federal mandateThe push to dam the Delaware River gained national attention in August 1955, when Hurricanes Connie and Diane hit the eastern seaboard one after another. The floods devastated the Pocono region, killing nearly 100 people along Brodhead Creek alone. In response, Congress ordered the ..