A lawyer who paid £4,200 for a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill thinking it was a cheap copy accidentally ended up in a scandal because it was the stolen original. Nicola Cassinelli bought the black-and-white 1941 photograph of Churchill scowling down the lens – named The Roaring Lion – for his small art collection in 2022. The 34-year-old was pleasantly surprised when his £4,200 bid was accepted and two weeks later – after shelling out £2,000 to get it through customs and shipped to Genoa, Italy, it was his.

A former director of the CDC under Donald Trump says he believes COVID-19 may have been born in a North Carolina laboratory as part of a secret biodefense program. Robert Redfield has previously been a proponent of the ‘lab leak’ theory which posits the disease came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Now Redfield – a frequent critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci – says that the disease may have origins in the Tar Heel State.

A leading feminist writer ‘sent police packing’ when they visited her home to investigate one of her tweets as a ‘hate crime’. Julie Bindel said she was told by two Metropolitan Police officers that a ‘transgender man’ from Holland had reported one of her social media posts. They asked her to voluntarily attend the local police station to make a statement in an incident similar to the case of Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson.

Senior Russian politicians have declared President Joe Biden has taken a ‘big step towards World War Three’ after his administration reportedly gave the green light for Ukraine to blast targets inside Russia with US-supplied long-range missiles. The decision, which comes on the eve of the 1000th day of war in Ukraine amid the dying days of the Biden administration, heralded a torrent of apocalyptic warnings from Russian lawmakers. ‘This is a very big step towards the beginning of the Third World War,’ said Putin-loyalist Vladimir Dzhabarov, deputy chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the upper house and a retired security service general.

A teacher failed to sue her school for marriage and age discrimination after she was referred to as ‘Miss’ instead of ‘Mrs’ on letters addressed to her. Eniola Alabi told an employment tribunal she felt ‘embarrassed’ and ‘humiliated’ when her payslips failed to acknowledge her marital status. She told the tribunal that ‘Miss’ was ‘less’ than ‘Mrs’ and so this was an act of discrimination from bosses at the South London secondary school where she worked.

The terrifying final moments of a man mauled to death in a vicious XL bully attack have been revealed. Christopher Bell, 45, from Hull, today appeared at Newcastle Crown Court to admit a charge of being the owner of a dog which caused injury leading to death while dangerously out of control in a public place. Ian Langley, 54, died in hospital after Bell’s tan and white XL Bully called Titan suddenly lunged at his throat in Sunderland, on the evening of October 3 last year.