The Virtual Grand National replaces the real-life National this afternoon with ITV providing life coverage of a lifelike simulation to substitute for the cancelled regular race. Express Sport brings you live updates with an animated Tiger Roll the favourite for victory.

The Virtual Grand National takes placed this evening in the absence of the real race at Aintree.

Potters Corner triumphed at the Virtual Grand National with an explosive finish in a boost to the NHS.

Profits of £2.6million have been donated to NHS Charities Together after Saturday's Virtual Grand National.

Horse racing in Britain is currently suspended amid the coronavirus pandemic - but when will racing resume?

Champion jockey Frankie, 49, looks back at his favourite festival on the horse-racing calendar, Royal Ascot

UNIVERSAL CREDIT claims have surged in recent weeks, as Britons have begun to feel the impact of the coronavirus crisis. How do earnings affect payments?

GEORGE SOROS made a chilling warning about the state of global markets in 2012 that has fresh relevance today as world leaders grapple with the unprecedented challenge of rebuilding the post-coronavirus economy.

The FA Cup has taken place this weekend but when is draw for the fourth round? Express Sport is on hand with the date, time and TV information for the draw.

Emiliano Sala was tragically killed in January 2019 in a plane crash over the British channel.

Peter Whittingham is fighting for his life in hospital, the South Wales Police have confirmed.

Peter Whittingham's death has taken the world of football by shock.

Peter Whittingham has died following a head injury from an accidental fall.

ALERT LEVEL: No Alert Level
Region: S
LOCATION: Lyell Highway, HAYES
STATUS: Going
TYPE: STRUCTURE FIRE
SIZE: Not Available
Number of Vehicles: 1
More Info: http://www.fire.tas.gov.au/i/20016273
RESPONSIBLE AGENCY: Tasmania Fire Service
UPDATED: Sat, 9 May 2020 18:13:18 +1000

MELANIA TRUMP, 50, has been the US First Lady since 2017. A style expert has explained how she ensures she stands out when she steps out with Donald Trump, 73.

MELANIA TRUMP may be in one of the most controversial families in the White House's history but her fashion and beauty style is almost always impeccable. But what's the secret to her thick, lustrous hair?

THE QUEEN has one of the most extensive jewellery collections in the world, and is particularly noted for her tiaras. The Belgian Sapphire is a particular favourite of Her Majesty's - and it has a scandalous former royal owner.

LASH extensions may be a distant memory for some as the UK lockdown continues and salons remain closed. But there are ways to give yourself longer lashes at home if you're missing the fuller flutter.

QUEEN ELIZABETH II has ruled Britain for nearly 70 years, and many of us cannot remember a time when she was not on the throne. And during her long reign, one item in particular has become synonymous with the monarch.

THE iconic gown Princess Diana wore to a state banquet at the White House in 1985 is currently being held in quarantine.

KATE MIDDLETON, 38, wowed fans by appearing in a video with a new mother and midwives. The Duchess of Cambridge did so ahead of UK's Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week.

PRINCESS ANNE, 69, appeared in a video on the Royal Family Instagram to celebrate the International Day of the Midwife. A video of the Princess Royal, the Queen's only daughter, was posted to the IGTV of the account.

KATE MIDDLETON wore a yellow dress with a tree-inspired pattern on This Morning today. The 38-year-old mum of three spoke about her new project.

THE QUEEN addressed the nation as part of VE Day celebrations today, and Her Majesty wore her Aquamarine Clip Brooches, making a sweet nod to her father, who gave her the jewellery.

West Ham signed Jarrod Bowen from Hull City for £22million on transfer deadline day.

Storm Ciara is threatening to cause chaos with this week's sporting events including Premier League football, Six Nations rugby and eight horse racing meets.

Leeds United take on Hull City on Saturday and Whites boss Marcelo Bielsa faces an important decision after Kiko Casilla was issued an eight-match ban.

Hull City host Leeds United in the Championship today and Express Sport is on hand with all the live stream and TV information.

Leeds continues their Premier League promotion push with a dominant 4-0 win against Hull on Saturday.

Leeds manager Marcelo Bielsa has admitted that he faces a selection headache for the Whites' Championship game against Huddersfield on Saturday, and he could drop striker Patrick Bamford in favour of youngster Tyler Roberts, with the 21-year-old scoring twice against Hull last weekend.

When talking about the impacts of climate change, we mostly hear about changes to land and the planet’s surface or atmosphere. However, most of the warming is going into the oceans where a lot of ecosystem changes are also occurring.

This update includes a couple of info graphics and charts as well as a video from an ocean and climate scientist that explains this further.

Read full article: Climate Change Affects Biodiversity

Into mid-2011, the world’s worst food crisis is being felt in East Africa, in Ethiopia, Somalia and Kenya.

Despite successive failed rains, the crisis has been criticized as avoidable and man-made. This is because the situation had been predicted many months before by an international early warning system. Both the international community and governments in the region have been accused of doing very little in the lead up to this crisis. In addition, high food prices have forced food out of the reach of many people, while local conflicts exacerbate the situation.

As the international organization Oxfam describes: 12 million people are in dire need of food, clean water, and basic sanitation. Loss of life on a massive scale is a very real risk, and the crisis is set to worsen over the coming months, particularly for pastoralist communities.

This page also presents news coverage from Inter Press Service on this crisis.

Read full article: East Africa Food Crisis 2011

The relationship between health and poverty is reasonably well known; one can exacerbate and contribute to the other in a vicious cycle.

This update, as well as including a few health stats updates, provides further information on noncommunicable diseases (which cause some two-thirds of all deaths each year) and more details on the relationship with poverty.

Read full article: Global Health Overview

A quick look back over the decade since the 9-11 attacks finds that the neo-conservatives have achieved the opposite of what they set out to do: rather than winning a war on terror and expanding their power even further, they have over-stretched their own nation, militarily and economically. The Bush Administration preferred to concentrate on Iraq rather than Bin Laden and the trillions of dollars spent on this (directly and indirectly) has contributed to the recent economic problems the country now faces. All terribly costly given there were opportunities to get Bin Laden a lot earlier.

Media coverage and public attitudes have also shifted in the past decade, now almost reflecting partisan lines. Rights groups around the world have long voiced concerns that the war on terror is also an excuse for governments to wage a war on freedoms. Bin Laden may be dead but are the terrorists winning?

Read full article: War on Terror

The global financial crisis has spawned a global protest movement campaigning against things like inequality, corporate greed, lack of jobs, etc. Although these protests have occurred for decades, they have typically been in the developing countries, or about the situation in developing countries. As such, many Western nations, who have strongly influenced the conditions in developing countries, have typically not paid much attention to such protests, no matter how large. However, this time, the global financial crisis has hit the ordinary citizens of Western nations quite hard, and inspired by the Arab Spring and protests in Spain, a global movement seems to have sprung up.

The global protests page had not been updated since the end of 2003, but has not included a brief overview of more recent protests such as the so-called Occupy Movement. The older content remains because it is interesting to note some of the parallels too, and it is perhaps important to note that these protests are unfortunately not new. Whether this time it can make a difference is too early to tell but a lot of people in wealthy countries this time are also participating.

Read full article: Public Protests Around the World

In the US the protest movement is symbolically against the top 1%. Income data from the US Congressional Budget Office, however, shows that it isn’t just the top 1% benefiting far more than the rest of American society, but the top 0.1% in particular.

High levels of inequality is generally believed to affect social cohesion. Some findings suggest that once nations are industrialized, more equal societies almost always do better in terms of health, well-being and social cohesion and that large income inequalities within societies destroys the social fabric and quality of life for everyone.

This update to the poverty page adds a section on inequality in the US, as well as adding some additional information about research showing globally some 147 multinational companies having core global influence and power.

Read full article: Poverty Around the World

A recent IAEA report on Iran’s nuclear program was portrayed by most Western mainstream media and politicians as new proof Iran is close to building nuclear weapons. The US Senate passed sanctions on Iran targeting its central bank in response.

However, the report does not say what the mainstream media and politicians claim. It has been much more guarded and much of it is about the state of Iran’s program up to 2003. After that period, the report is much more uncertain. Furthermore, many experts contend that the speculations (not definitive proof) that are in the report are misguided, too, leaning on unreliable sources, for example.

This update to the page on Iran has more information about this. Although the page is long, look for the new section about half way down under the heading of Regurgitating old stories as new information to justify sanctions?

Read full article: Iran

China, India and other emerging economies are often the focus points for climate change negotiations. Many rich nation politicians and their media often point to their rising emissions as proof that they urgently need to be bound to emission reduction targets in the same way rich nations are.

But what is often easily forgotten or omitted is that greenhouse gases can stay in the atmosphere for a very long time. In other words, historic emissions matter.

Historical data show that the majority of greenhouse emissions have been by rich nations, known as "Annex I" countries in climate negotiation speak:

Apart from China and India, the remainder of the top 10 historical greenhouse gas emitters have been from Annex I countries.

This is why 2 decades ago the climate negotiations started by understanding there were "common but differentiated principles" and why "Annex I" countries were initially given target emissions while the rest were to be given space to grow given the urgent need for poverty alleviation and development.

Furthermore, climate negotiations frameworks have always said developing nations need to avoid a polluting path to industrialization, so they can’t just use historic emissions injustice as an excuse not to do anything. At the same time, the dirty path to development was also the cheap and easy path which developing countries need to avoid, so it was also agreed that the Annex I countries should help developing countries in various ways. Needless to say much of this has not really happened.

These and additional charts have been added based on updated data up to 2008 on historical carbon emissions plus estimated emissions for 2009 and 2010.

Read full article: Climate Justice and Equity

US campaign financing rules have been relaxed even further in recent years, making a worrying problem about the state of American democracy worse (because those with money have even more ability to try and buy votes or influence policy).

Media coverage of this issue, though it may pop up from time to time, seems quite limited. Perhaps because it is estimated that television stations this year could make as much as eight billion dollars from political campaigns.

The state of US mainstream media has unfortunately been lamentable for many years, and after the issues around hurricane Katrina, it was thought that the media would be rejuvenated. Unfortunately it does not seem that way.

This page has been updated with further information about campaign financing issues and how limits in the US have been lifted making the problem worse. Also added were notes on US press freedom, and an info graphic on media ownership concentration.

Read full article: Media in the United States

It has long been known that advertisers will “photoshop” (slang for editing photos to touch up or airbrush out imperfections) photos to make the subject more attractive. But many have pointed out that this subtle manipulation often goes too far. Young people, girls in particular, are bombarded with images of how they are supposed to look, contributing to many social and health problems as a result.

The American National Advertising Division (the US advertising industry’s self-regulating watchdog) for example, recently moved to ban the misleading use of photoshopping and enhanced post-production in cosmetics adverts as it could be too misleading. In the UK some adverts have been banned because the effects of airbrushing has resulted in very misleading cosmetic adverts. France has even considered legislation to explicitly identify retouched images.

Some will claim it is up to parents to teach their children how to recognize these things, but parents cannot often win against an army of professional psychologists, marketers and others all focused on pushing their own images onto children, when studies also say that children are not old enough tell the difference between commercial and other content.

This page has been updated to add a section about this issue with further links, videos and examples.

Read full article: Media and Advertising

NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) monitors global surface temperatures on an ongoing basis. Their analysis shows temperatures around the globe in 2011 compared to the average global temperature from the mid-20th century. The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago.

Global temperatures have warmed significantly since 1880, the beginning of what scientists call the “modern record.” At this time, the coverage provided by weather stations allowed for essentially global temperature data. As greenhouse gas emissions from energy production, industry and vehicles have increased, temperatures have climbed, most notably since the late 1970s. In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average.

Click on the image to see the video:

Read full article: Global Temperature Anomaly, 1880 - 2011

Flexibility mechanisms were defined in the Kyoto Protocol as different ways to achieve emissions reduction as part of the effort to address climate change issues. These fall into the following categories: Emissions Trading, Joint Implementation and Clean Development Mechanism.

However, these have been highly controversial as they were mainly included on strong US insistence and to keep the US in the treaty (even though the US eventually pulled out). Some of the mechanisms face criticism for not actually leading to a reduction in emissions, for example.

The updates to this article includes a couple of videos summarizing some concerns about cap and trade.

Image ©: Centre for Science and Environment

Read full article: Climate Change Flexibility Mechanisms

Following the trend throughout the Middle East, the so-called Arab Spring appears to have spread to Syria. The government crackdown on anti-government demonstrators in Homs and other provincial cities began over a year ago and is thought to have claimed thousands of lives. Attempts at brokering ceasefires have predictably failed.

This page provides coverage of recent events via Inter Press Service’s news feed.

Read full article: Syria Unrest

Twenty years ago at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, countries adopted Agenda 21 — a blueprint to rethink economic growth, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection. Marking that anniversary, this year sees Rio+20, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, with aims to get bold agreements to address things like poverty, sustainable development, decent jobs, etc.

This page provides coverage of recent events via Inter Press Service’s news feed.

Read full article: Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development

The latest data covering global arms sales shows that sale of arms in 2011 increased to around $85 billion, 84% of which went to developing countries. This was almost double the arms sales compared to 2010 which was the lowest since 2004.

One major factor for the increase was the US sales of arms to Saudi Arabia. Most other major arms sellers otherwise saw a decrease in sales and the trend in recent years had been declining sales.

The global financial crisis has affected many countries, and many developing countries started to see a decrease in purchases in the last few years. However, just 10 developing countries account for some 85% of all sales to developing countries in the period 2004 to 2011, which the data covers. Saudi Arabia tops that list followed by India and the United Arab Emirates. (As well as concerns about some of the regimes in the top buyers, some of this spending is also said to be due to modernizing efforts.)

Updated graphs and charts on arms sales data are provided here.

The arms trade is big business. The 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council (US, Russia, France, United Kingdom and China), together with Germany and Italy, account for approximately 85% of all arms sold between 2004 and 2011.

Some of the arms sold go to regimes where human rights violations will occur. Corruption often accompanies arms sales due to the large sums of money involved.

Read full article: The Arms Trade Is Big Business

It seems the world is awash with money, even though most governments are facing economic pressures. Trillions are being hidden away by a very few global super elite in offshore bank accounts, avoiding billions in taxes such that constrained governments turn to austerity and other measures, inflicting more hardship on people who are typically already victims of the global financial crisis. Furthermore, it turns out that many of the banks we have all bailed out help with these offshore practices in various ways.

Tax avoidance by the super rich results in lost revenues in the order of hundreds of billions a year, which would (in theory at least) benefit most of society. But if you can afford an army of ingenious lawyers and accountants, it seems you can play by a different set of rules.

Recent high profile cases of companies and individuals avoiding taxes in recent years has resulted in governments claiming they will address this issue thoroughly. But that is as far as it seems to go.

This update includes additional figures and examples of recent tax avoidance issues that have come to light.

Read full article: Tax Avoidance and Tax Havens; Undermining Democracy

A recent study found that coral reefs will face severe challenges even if average global warming temperature rise is restricted to 2 degrees Celsius. This is a rise that most countries are struggling to negotiate and meet. But reefs are very sensitive to temperature changes, experts fear the window of opportunity to prevent massive reef loss is very small.

Read full article: Nature and Animal Conservation

19% of the world’s reptiles are estimated to be threatened with extinction according to a study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the Zoological Society of London. Reptiles include snakes, lizards, crocodiles, turtles and tortoises. But some species are at more risk than others. For example, freshwater turtles alone are at a 50% risk of extinction. Reasons vary, but include the usual suspects such as climate change and loss of habitat.

A recent study also estimated that some 100 million sharks are being killed each year — an unsustainable rate, given how long some species take to mature and reproduce. Much of the demand is driven by Chinese rising affluence and demand for shark fin soup in the mistaken belief it has various health benefits.

This small update to the biodiversity loss page has further details.

Read full article: Loss of Biodiversity and Extinctions

For a while now many European governments have resorted to austerity measures to deal with the recession and financial crises affecting them. This may have either been by choice, or pressured from the outside.

However, as has been warned countless times, excessive austerity rarely works. Furthermore, focusing on debts and deficits appears to miss the point that the economic problems were caused by a collapse in markets and banking sector in particular, resulting in less revenues for governments; not necessarily an excessive overspend by governments.

Some of the policies being forced through even when evidence appears to show they do not work lead many to think that austerity and structural adjustment policies are being ideologically pushed for — just as they were on most of the developing countries for almost 2 decades with devastating results.

Indeed, in the US, investigations have found billionaires pouring hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns to fix the debt making it appear as a grassroots movement. Fixing the debt of course happens to leave the elite less affected, so it works to their advantage to push for something like that.

Without more focus on appropriate economic growth, there is a real risk in going backwards, and even undermining democracy.

The global financial crisis page on this web site has been updated with new sections and videos on this issue.

Read full article: Global Financial Crisis

In recent years, global military expenditure has increased again and is now comparable to Cold War levels. Recent data shows global spending at over $1.7 trillion, despite the global economic conditions. It is still approximately 1% increase since 2008 when the financial crisis began, for example.

Not all nations have felt the impacts of the global financial crisis in the same way. Some have grown economically, including many Asian countries, which has allowed some of them to increase their military spending. There are geopolitical interests at stake for various powers, so economic troubles or not, military spending is seen as important to maintain, or at least to minimize possible reductions.

The highest military spender is the US accounting for 39% of the world’s spending, more than the next top 10 countries combined, and more than all its potential enemies, combined. But this represents a slight decline over previous years as other nations, especially China and Russia, increase their spending. At the same time, the US has reduced military spending for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, while Western Europe’s austerity programs affect their military spending budgets.

This update includes new and updated figures, graphs and charts exploring this further.

Read full article: World Military Spending