On Celebheights.com, thousands of users measure the statures of the rich and famous. The methods are scientific and the debates are fiery

As someone brushing up on 6’3”, height is one physical insecurity I’ve never agonised over. Instead, it’s a source of frustration as I crunch my legs into airplane seats and wait for them to go numb.

Only after discovering Celebheights.com did I truly understand the depth of feeling – both excitement and rage – that height can inspire.

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New law aims to eliminate added costs that can be up to 25% of retail price

Sneaky fees that are estimated to cost consumers £2.2bn a year are to be banned from today under new consumer protection laws.

Businesses, including travel websites, ticket agencies and food delivery apps, will be required to include any mandatory fees in the headline price. Research has found these fees can be more than 25% of the product price.

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Anonymous donations made to Molly Rose Foundation, set up after Molly Russell, 14, took her own life after viewing harmful material on social media

Meta and Pinterest have reportedly made significant donations to the Molly Rose Foundation, a charity set up to campaign for internet safety.

The foundation was set up in the name of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017 after viewing harmful material linked to suicide and self-harm on social media platforms.

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Sharing secrets is a natural human instinct – and the boom in audio is providing new platforms for the juiciest stories

In the latest series of The White Lotus , childhood best friends Laurie, Kate and Jaclyn arrive at a luxury Thai hotel for a girls’ ­holiday. The trio appears to have a perfect dynamic, but on the first night, two friends descend into a gossiping session about the third, crystallising unspoken tensions in the group.

Gossip drives all kinds of dramas – it’s the central force behind every series of Bridgerton , the beating heart of teen drama Gossip Girl . Where would Jane Austen’s characters, or even Hilary Mantel’s imagining of Thomas Cromwell, be without insider secrets?

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LBC’s Iain Dale and historian Tessa Dunlop tackle Very Important Topics. Plus, deliciously chaotic fun at a much-loved East End cafe, and a vital but uncomfortable retelling of recent racism in Britain

Where Politics Meets History LBC
Down the Caff Down the Caff
Archive on 4: No Blacks No Irish Radio 4/BBC Sounds

I try, honest, but all these history podcasts just don’t do it for me. Also, while I’m in the confessional podcast booth, nor do many political ones either. The audio charts are full of both, but – sorry, clever bro-chatters! – they leave me cold.

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Cambridge scientist behind VR platform says it could help those put off by high cost of speech anxiety treatment

A free online platform that allows speakers to practise in front of thousands of virtual spectators has been released to help with the anxiety many feel when presenting to an audience.

Dr Chris Macdonald, the founder of the Immersive Technology Lab at Cambridge University and who created the online platform, said the approach was an attempt to reduce the lengthy waits or high costs people often face when seeking help.

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Diggs’ harrowing music is a world away from his Hollywood films and a Tony-winning run in Hamilton. But his band’s world-building – setting resource wars in imagined cyberpunk clubs – is no less dramatic

As a child, Daveed Diggs and his schoolfriend William Hutson drew pictures inspired by the space-age album covers of funk legends Parliament, filled with gleaming UFOs and eccentric interplanetary travellers. Diggs would grow up to become an actor, winning a Tony award as the first person to play the roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton . He’s since voiced Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid’s live-action remake and appeared in Nickel Boys , which was nominated twice at this year’s Oscars. But away from Hollywood and Broadway, he’s still dreaming up fantastical sci-fi worlds with Hutson – now through one of the most imaginative, harrowing projects in underground rap.

Along with Hutson’s college roommate Jonathan Snipes – who had a similar childhood experience, inspired by the otherworldly paintings adorning classical albums – the friends formed Clipping in Los Angeles in 2010. Over Hutson and Snipes’s production, Diggs weaves blood-soaked horror stories about racial violence or fables of enslaved people in outer space. On their new album Dead Channel Sky, he raps with mechanical precision over warped rave music, creating a noirish cyberpunk world of hackers, clubgoers, future-soldiers and digital avatars.

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Investigators fear it could be years before they get Axel Rudakubana’s search data which could hold vital clues

Police have been unable to see what Axel Rudakubana was searching online before his “sadistic” Southport attack as they are locked in a lengthy US legal process to obtain the data from Google and Microsoft, it can be revealed.

The missing internet history could hold vital clues about why the killer targeted young girls but it was deleted by Rudakubana 10 minutes before leaving home to carry out the “ ferocious assault ” on a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

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A gripping audio series about a killer-for-hire scam on the dark web is a reminder of how technology holds up a mirror to human nature

This column comes to you as a break from listening to a riveting podcast series called Kill List . It’s about a secret website that journalist and author Carl Miller discovered on the dark web, the slimy underbelly of the internet. The site essentially runs what one might call an “assassination market” or a murder-for-hire service. Customers identify and profile someone whom they wish to have killed and pay (in bitcoin, natch) for the service they require. Hence the title of the podcast series.

The story starts in 2020 in the early days of the pandemic lockdown when a gifted IT expert and hacker, Chris Monteiro, was browsing the site and found a security vulnerability that, once exploited, gave him complete access to it. Inside, he found a “kill list”, rather like an Excel spreadsheet, of 175 people all over the world whom clients wanted murdered. For each target, there was usually lots of detailed information – address, photographs, habits, routes regularly travelled etc. It looked, I guess, superficially mundane – until you read the “instructions” attached for each one. “How much bitcoin should I pay?” “Tell me the execution time in advance – I can’t be there.” “I would just like this person to be shot and killed. Where, how and what with does not bother me at all.” You get the idea.

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