Scarlett Vickers, daughter of Simon Vickers and Sarah Hall, was killed by a single knife wound to the chest, court told

A mother and father have appeared in court accused of murdering their 14-year-old daughter who, the court heard, was fatally stabbed.

Simon Vickers, 49, and Sarah Hall, 44, of Darlington, who have been charged with murder, appeared at Newton Aycliffe magistrates court in County Durham on Monday.

Walker Art Gallery replaces Tinted Venus with sculpture of black child to explore links to slavery and empire

Removing, albeit temporarily, one of the best-known, most popular sculptures from a gallery is undoubtedly a bold act, acknowledged the curator Alex Patterson. “We want to ruffle a few feathers,” she said. “If you’re going to do it, do it with a bang.”

Patterson is speaking to the Guardian in the sculpture gallery of the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, which normally has John Gibson’s 19th-century Tinted Venus stopping people in their tracks.

Let down by broken Tory promises of levelling up, some in Newton Aycliffe and across north-east turned to Reform

“He kept on saying, ‘My dad was a toolmaker and we were on the breadline,’” says Alan Webb, a retired toolmaker, laughing. “I mean, come on. I was a toolmaker and I wasn’t on the breadline.” Webb, 75, is having fun at the expense of Keir Starmer, who told voters about growing up in a pebbledash semi, the family having its phone cut off and, surely a few too many times, that “my dad was a toolmaker and my mum was a nurse”.

“He kept on saying it as if he was poor,” Webb says. “I was a toolmaker and I actually earned some good money up here.”

Police appeal for more information in case of Scott Clive, who disappeared from North Shields in October 2002

Police have arrested a man as part of an investigation into a 22-year-old murder mystery and appealed for people to come forward with information.

Scott Clive was 30 when he was last seen shortly after 11pm in the Borough Road area of North Shields, North Tyneside, on 10 October 2002.

Newcastle surgeons remove Archie Routledge’s pancreas while transplanting insulin-producing cells into his liver

A nine-year-old boy is settling back into family life after becoming the youngest person in the UK to undergo a marathon, life-saving surgical procedure that involved removing the pancreas and injecting its insulin-producing cells into the liver.

Archie Routledge, from Workington, in Cumbria, has a rare genetic condition that causes hereditary pancreatitis. It inflames the pancreas causing debilitating abdominal pain and significantly increases the risk of pancreatic cancer in later life.

Debbie Duncan says family ‘devastated’ by disappearance and condemns conspiracy theories online as ‘vile’

The mother of a teenager who went missing during a holiday in Tenerife has said words cannot describe the “pain and agony” her family are experiencing.

Debbie Duncan described 19-year-old Jay Slateras a beautiful boy who had his whole life ahead of him.