The number of planning applications for new homes in England is at its highest level for four years, new data shared with BBC Verify suggests. Applications for 335,000 homes outside London were lodged in 2025, up by 60% on 2024, according to Planning Portal, the service people use to request permission. But there are warnings that more needs to be done to meet Labour's target of building 1.5 million homes by 2029, as separate government data released on Thursday suggests there has been a decrease in house building. The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said it had overhauled the planning system and removed long-standing barriers that have held back housebuilding. The increase in planning applications for new homes in England follows controversial reforms introduced by Labour, which allow development on some lower-quality green belt land, known as grey belt .

Nature is not a blocker to housing growth and the government risks missing both its housing and nature targets if it views it as one, a cross-party group of MPs has warned in a new report. The Planning and Infrastructure Bill overrides existing habitat protections, which the government has suggested is a barrier to its target to build 1.5 million houses by the end of this parliament. But in a report published on Sunday, the Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) found the measures outlined in the bill are not enough to allow the government to meet its goals. Using nature as a scapegoat means that the government will be less effective at tackling some of the genuine challenges facing the planning system, the report said. A Ministry of Housing spokesperson said it was fixing a failing system with landmark reforms, which would deliver a win-win for the economy and the environment.

Vanguard feels and smells like a new RV. It has long, gray banquettes that convert into bunks, a microwave cleverly hidden under a counter, a functional steel sink with a French press and crockery above. Once it is sealed and moved to its permanent home beneath the waves of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary early next year, Vanguard will be the world's first new subsea habitat in nearly four decades. Teams of four scientists will live and work on the seabed for a week at a time, entering and leaving the habitat as scuba divers. This week, we heard that Tom Brady had his dog cloned. The former quarterback revealed that his Junie is actually a clone of Lua, a pit bull mix that died in 2023.

The number of planning approvals for new homes in England is unacceptable, the new housing secretary has said, after official data showed permission for building homes fell to a record low during Labour's first year in office. Fewer than 29,000 projects were granted permission by councils in the year ending June 2025 - striking a blow to the government's promise to deliver 1.5 million homes by the next election. Steve Reed, who has taken over from Angela Rayner as housing secretary, said fixing the planning system won't happen overnight. Conservative shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly said that Labour had promised to'build, build, build' but their flagship planning reforms clearly aren't working. You can see the figures for your local area in BBC Verify's housing tracker.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, waves of South Vietnamese refugees fled to the United States, seeking freedom and safety. About 125,000 refugees were airlifted initially, with upwards of 800,000 refugees fleeing in the years following – many of whom ended up settling in the U.S. As of 2017, Vietnamese-Americans comprise approximately 3% of America's immigrants, and represent the sixth-largest foreign-born population. Upon resettling in the United States, many refugees encountered a language barrier which made navigating new lives in a new nation a challenge.

Google has a monopoly, and that's the official line of the US federal government. In fact, it has two of them, losing two separate antitrust cases that threaten to cripple the tech giant. The Department of Justice has proposed forcing Google to sell or otherwise divest itself of the Chrome browser as its first and preferred remedy. But who would buy it? Unsurprisingly, there are beaucoup business beaus lining up around the block for this browser bachelorette.

This year is the 10th anniversary of Lucas Pope's wrenching game about being a border officer in the functional communist country of Arstotzka, deciding when to turn desperate people away and when to risk your job but save your conscience by letting them slip by. It remains an impactful and illuminating exploration of how documentation can save or cost lives, and the moral and human cost of border enforcement. Your wife, Nour, has finally decided to risk getting out of Syria as the bombs keep falling – but you must stay behind, to look after your mother and grandfather. In this game, you are not the person fleeing but the person trying to survive back home, waiting for text message updates or an occasional photo and doing your best to give good advice from afar. An affecting work of interactive fiction told through the medium of the smartphone.

Conspiracy theorists have posted official White House videos of Mr. Biden on TikTok and offered debunked theories that he is a deepfake. The political consultant Roger Stone claimed on Telegram in September that footage showing him calling for violence ahead of the 2020 election, which CNN aired, was "fraudulent deepfake videos." Lawyers for at least one person charged in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol in 2021 have tried to cast doubt on video evidence from the day by citing "widely available and insidious" deepfake-making technology. "When we enter this kind of world, where things are being manipulated or can be manipulated, then we can simply dismiss inconvenient facts," said Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who sits on TikTok's content advisory council. Tech companies have spent years trying new tools to spot manipulations such as deepfakes.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Meta announced today that its artificial intelligence (AI) research framework, PyTorch, has a new home. It is moving to an independent PyTorch Foundation, which will be part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation, a technology consortium with a core mission of collaborative development of open-source software. According to Aparna Ramani, VP of engineering at Meta, over the next year the focus will be on making a seamless transition from Meta to the foundation.

Plans have been unveiled for a 3D-printed community of 100 new homes in the Austin area, Texas -- which would become the largest development of its kind in the United States to date when construction begins next year. The project is the result of a collaboration between real estate and homebuilding firm Lennar and ICON, a construction engineering company specialising in the development of large-scale 3D-printing technology. They are joined by the architectural firm BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group, who will be designing the houses which will be produced using so-called'additive manufacturing' -- in which objects are printed up one single layer at a time. According to ICON, their'Vulcan construction system' can produce resilient, energy-efficient homes both faster and with less waste than conventional building approaches, while also offering more freedom of design. Buildings and other structures can be built as large as 3,000 square feet using the system, they added.