Member of army squad sent with medics to assist suspected hantavirus patient recounts descent to remote island

The hardest part of the parachute jump, according to Capt George Lacey, is falling backwards through the air. It is Saturday and Lacey, and his squad of six plus two medics, have just leapt out of an RAF transport, 2,500 metres over the south Atlantic.

“The parachute can only go forward so quickly,” he says, meaning that it has to be pulled at precisely the right moment. “So you have to turn into the wind and basically fly backwards, which is a very weird sensation, as you can imagine.”

Chancellor ‘frustrated and angry’ at the effect on UK firms and families and says US went into war without a clear exit plan

Q: Why are you calling for an inquiry into Nigel Farage’s investment in a bitcoin firm?

Davey said that, in investing in crypto, Farage, the Reform UK leader, seemed to be copying Donald Trump. He said he thought MPs should be banned from promoting financial services or products.

[Farage is] now promoting this business. The question is, is he persuading people to put money into a risky business?

And the conclusion I draw from this example is that we need to change the rules for MPs. MPs should not be allowed to promote specific financial services or products in the way we’re seeing Nigel Farage doing.

We need to get together as a country. The defence challenges for our country are so serious, with war on our continent for the first time for a long time, with Russia invading Ukraine, surely that’s been the wake up call that we needed. The government hasn’t gone as fast as it should have given those circumstances.

Conservative leader promises biggest peacetime rearmament effort in UK history if her party is re-elected

The Conservatives would reinstate the two-child benefit cap and use the savings for a wide-ranging spending splurge on defence in what Kemi Badenoch said would be “the biggest peacetime programme of rearmament in our country’s history”.

Speaking at a defence conference in London, the Tory leader criticised the government for Britain’s “lack of readiness” for war, which has been exposed by recent world events.

It was the play that rocked a nation. The makers of the devastating drama, which transported theatre-goers from a Fife pub to a war zone, recall how it grew and grew

Within six months of its launch in 2006, the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) produced a globe-conquering hit. Inspired by tragic events at Camp Dogwood in Iraq, Black Watch was a humane portrayal of young squaddies on the frontline. As a pool table transformed into a tank, the audience were transported from a Fife pub to a war zone where nothing was more heartbreaking than a letter from home.

Vicky Featherstone (founding artistic director): On my first day at NTS in 2004, I bought a Glasgow Herald. On the front page was an article saying Tony Blair was going to get rid of Scotland’s individual regiments and turn them into the Royal Regiment of Scotland. On page three, there was a sad story about three soldiers from the Black Watch regiment who had been blown up by an IED along with an Iraqi translator. In the gap between page one and page three was a story that had to be told. I called up Gregory Burke and said, “Will you follow this story?”