Neil Hopper was celebrated for continuing to do his job despite the loss of his lower limbs. But what the people he was treating didn’t know was that his injuries were self-inflicted. Now they and their families are asking questions

• Warning: this story contains graphic descriptions of bodily mutilation that some readers may find upsetting

Of all the things that happened in the fraught days after 72-year-old Liz Spooner had her leg amputated at the Royal Cornwall hospital in Truro in 2022, one memory remains vivid in the mind of her daughter, Faye Harrison. Liz’s surgery had taken much longer than anticipated, Faye remembers, and, delirious after the anaesthetic and morphine, Liz had begun to refuse food and medication. That’s when Faye was ushered into a side room with a consultant surgeon.

“He was smiley. He came across as quite charming and caring,” Faye recalls. He ran through a long list of the medications Liz was taking, and began explaining why she needed them. “I remember looking down – you look down at the floor a lot when you have these kinds of conversations – and I noticed he’d got metal sticks coming out of his trouser legs.” Faye blinks in disbelief at the memory. “I thought, blimey, he’s operated on my mum, but he’s also an amputee.”

Avtar spent decades wondering what happened to the mother he never got to know. Thousands of miles away, Nicci was haunted by the story of a half-brother given away before she was born. How did a chatbot bring them together?

As a small boy growing up in Amritsar, India, in the 1960s, Avtar Singh used to hear whispers. Your mum isn’t really your mum, the rumours would say. Your mum lives abroad. Avtar didn’t really pay any attention to it. “I thought, the neighbours are just making up stories.” But the stories were true: the woman raising Avtar was actually his grandmother. When he was too young to remember it, his father had emigrated to Canada to work as a teacher, leaving Avtar in the care of his paternal grandparents. His grandfather, a police officer, was a fearsome authoritarian, but his grandmother brought him up with tenderness, as if he were her own son. She called him by his nickname, Titu. He felt loved.

When Avtar was around eight years old, he was told about his family in Canada: his dad, his mum and a little brother were waiting for him there, and he would soon travel to join them. Just after his ninth birthday, Avtar found himself sitting on a plane, dressed in a three‑piece suit and tie. He was travelling alone. He had never flown before. He didn’t speak a word of English. He landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on Christmas Eve, 1968; his family met him at the airport and took him home. “I didn’t know what to think,” Avtar, now 66, tells me in a video call from his home in Abbotsford, British Columbia. “Before I knew it, it was the first week of January, and I was put in school.”

When Mark Lanier and his young client Kaley faced the tech giants in an LA courtroom earlier this year, it seemed a bigger battle than David v Goliath. But they scored a landmark victory, proving that the social media giants had created ‘addiction machines’ that harmed mental health. How did they pull it off?

When Mark Zuckerberg walked into a Los Angeles courtroom on 18 February flanked by an entourage bedecked in Meta Ray-Bans, some people laughed. If this was an attempt at product placement for the company’s newest range of smart glasses, it was jarringly ill-judged: Zuckerberg was about to testify before a jury in a landmark lawsuit that sought to prove that Instagram and YouTube are addictive by design, and he had passed a throng of bereaved parents on his way into the courthouse. But the prosecution team, led by Mark Lanier, were not laughing.

This was a serious trial. For the first time, the most powerful names in social media were being held to account for the inherent design of their platforms, rather than the content hosted on them. They were accused of deliberately and maliciously building products that keep children hooked, with disastrous consequences for the mental wellbeing of young people. It was a landmark case – a big tobacco moment for big tech.

Jenny Kleeman investigates ‘Biotech Barbie’ Cathy Tie, the controversial entrepreneur hoping to revolutionise human reproduction by letting parents edit their embryos

Meet Cathy Tie: serial entrepreneur, self-described “Biotech Barbie”, and the woman aiming to revolutionise reproduction by using Crispr to edit human embryos.

Beneath the tech-startup polish lies a provocative mission: to take the biological lottery out of the hands of nature and place it into the hands of parents.

The Canadian entrepreneur has always pushed the boundaries of gene editing, once attempting to turn horses into unicorns. Now she is set on modifying human embryos – something her controversial ex-husband was jailed for doing

On a Friday evening in late April, Cathy Tie, the Canadian serial entrepreneur and self-styled “Biotech Barbie”, is centre stage at New York City’s famous Carnegie Hall, performing Saint-Saens’ Piano Concerto No 2 on a gleaming Steinway grand piano, accompanied by an orchestra. Her floor-length pink tulle gown shimmers with gold sequins; her dark hair cascades in waves over her caped shoulders. The music is passionate, but Tie’s expression is impassive. Her eyes dart between the piano keys and the sheet music in a flurry of concentration, but the rest of her face is totally still. She isn’t lost in the music; she’s focused on the job.

After the last notes ring out, Tie stands up and breaks into a tight smile and a brief bow before walking off stage, only to immediately return to receive the slightly awkward Happy Birthday sung by everyone in the orchestra and auditorium. This is Tie’s 30th birthday party. She has hired Carnegie Hall to mark the occasion. And, as I discover at the cocktail afterparty, most of the people invited to this performance – including me – have either only just met Tie or don’t know her at all.

When DNA test results shattered everything Lavinia and Michelle thought they knew about their family history, they also revealed something never before documented in the UK

I like being a twin. It defines who I am,” Lavinia Osbourne tells me on the 49th birthday she shares with her sister, Michelle. “It’s amazing to have a twin and have a built-in friend for ever,” Michelle says. “I’ve been really blessed to go through this journey with someone else.”

Lavinia and Michelle know that those of us who haven’t shared a womb with a sibling can be fascinated by twins: their similarities, how they differ, whether there’s any kind of mysterious synergy between them.

Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’

When Karen Newton left home in late July 2025, she knew that international travellers were being locked up in immigration detention centres in the US. “I was aware,” she nods. “But I never thought it would have any impact on my holiday.” Karen, 65, had a British passport and a tourist visa. She hadn’t been abroad for eight years, and was keen for some guaranteed sun. “I really just wanted to get away from the house.”

She and her husband, Bill, 66, had an ambitious itinerary that would take them through California, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana and then on to Canada over two months. Las Vegas wasn’t to Karen’s taste: “Way too commercialised.” She much preferred Yellowstone, where they saw Old Faithful, the famous geyser, as it shot boiling water into the air, and got up close with some extraordinary wildlife. “There was a bison right next to the car. Another time, a wolf walked past.” Her eyes sparkle at the memory. “It was just amazing.”

How would you feel if your therapist’s notes – your darkest thoughts and deepest feelings – were exposed to the world? For 33,000 Finnish people, that became a terrifying reality, with deadly consequences

Tiina Parikka was half-naked when she read the email. It was a Saturday in late October 2020, and Parikka had spent the morning sorting out plans for distance learning after a Covid outbreak at the school where she was headteacher. She had taken a sauna at her flat in Vantaa, just outside Finland’s capital, Helsinki, and when she came into her bedroom to get dressed, she idly checked her phone. There was a message that began with Parikka’s name and her social security number – the unique code used to identify Finnish people when they access healthcare, education and banking. “I knew then that this is not a game,” she says.

The email was in Finnish. It was jarringly polite. “We are contacting you because you have used Vastaamo’s therapy and/or psychiatric services,” it read. “Unfortunately, we have to ask you to pay to keep your personal information safe.” The sender demanded €200 in bitcoin within 24 hours, otherwise the price would go up to €500 within 48 hours. “If we still do not receive our money after this, your information will be published for everyone to see, including your name, address, phone number, social security number and detailed records containing transcripts of your conversations with Vastaamo’s therapists or psychiatrists.”

It was only years later, when I heard the word workaholic being used seriously for the first time, that I wondered whether I had a problem

Have you ever heard a word that jolts you to attention? That word, for me, was “workaholism” – and when I heard it through my headphones earlier this year, listening to an audiobook on the tube, I felt a pang of something between recognition and panic. It transported me back to the worst time in my life.

In May 2016, when I was nearly five months pregnant, I travelled to rural Norway to make a short documentary for the Guardian. The Norwegian government was making asylum seekers – from mostly Muslim countries – take cultural education classes about women’s rights. I’d been invited to a class in Moi, a town by a lake framed with pine trees, 100km south of Stavanger.