Offbeat

A 12-week-old kitten was rescued from inside a living room sofa after fire officers chopped it up with hacksaws and hydraulic cutters.

Welcome to the second volume of ghoulish tales from haunted Harrogate.

There’s no shortage of ghoulish tales to tell from across Harrogate at Halloween.

2017 has been an amazing year - if you're a fan of takeaway food.

It is a seasonal competition that is steeped in history after being launched for this first time more than 40 years ago.

‘What are black holes?’, ‘how did the world begin?’ and ‘how does the internet work?’ are among questions asked by kids parents struggle to answer, a study has found.

What a difference a week makes.

What causes terrorism? The combination of the horrendous terrorist attack in Manchester [and now, the attacks on London Bridge] and a British general election inevitably meant that this question would dominate political and media discourses. And so it has. Particular attention has, once again, been drawn to the role of western foreign policy, including that of the UK, as a driver of extremist violence.

Sometimes it can be bloody difficult to make your point. It’s a daily problem for politicians, but the stakes change on the election campaign trail; and as the stakes change, so does the speech.

There are more than 1m people with learning disabilities in the UK and the number is expected to increase. These are people who face exclusion from society more than ever – particularly when it comes to voting. Not enough is done to enable their participation in the most basic democratic right available to British citizens.

Following the political surprises of 2015 and 2016, there has been much reflection and debate on the accuracy of the polls in the run-up to the impending snap-election of 2017.

The 2015 general election left the Liberal Democrats on a precipice. The party was reduced to just eight MPs, a much shrunken local government base, and had been dethroned from its traditional position as the third party of British politics.

An article on The Independent is being widely shared on social media suggesting that a 30% increase in turnout among 18 to 24-year-olds would make the election of a majority Conservative government on June 8 rather unlikely. It followed a tweet by Alan Firth, a linguist at Newcastle University, commenting on an article by the vice president of the National Union of Students, Shelly Asquith. When contacted by The Conversation, Firth said that the calculations made in The Independent article reflected his own.

Labour’s election manifesto launch was overshadowed by fresh questions over how it would pay for a string ambitious promises costing billions of pounds.

Vox pops made up over one-third of all election news sources on the UK’s nightly television bulletins in the first week of the 2017 election campaign, our study has found. While politicians made up the majority of appearances, 36.4% of sources were members of the public expressing their views about the election.