The Tory general election campaign hit more trouble on Saturday as Rishi Sunak faced accusations of using levelling up funds to win votes and Labour opened its biggest poll lead since the disastrous premiership of Liz Truss.

As Sunak tried to fire up his ­party’s campaign before the first crucial TV debate with Keir Starmer on Tuesday, it emerged that more than half of the 30 towns each promised £20m of regeneration funding on Saturday were in constituencies won by Tory MPs at the last election.

Some 17 of the £20m pots went to towns in areas won by the Conservatives in 2019, although two of those were no longer held by Conservative MPs when the general election was called.

Just eight awards were made to towns in Labour seats, although many of the party’s strongholds tend to be in more deprived areas in need of levelling up money.

The funding pledge led to accusations from Sunak’s opponents of “pork barrel” politics, while those involved in regeneration of the north said the announcement was more about winning votes than levelling up.

The row came as the latest Opinium poll for the Observer on Sunday gives Labour a 20-point lead – the highest level it has recorded since Truss was briefly running the country.

This is despite Labour having endured a torrid week on the election trail and days of infighting over whether veteran Diane Abbott should be allowed to stand again.

Labour is on 45% – up four points on last weekend, while the Conservatives are down two points on 25%. Reform is up on one on 11%, the Lib Dems down two on 8%, and the Greens down one on 6%.

The poll also showed more people (45%) thought the Tories’ big announcement last weekend – the reintroduction of a form of mandatory national service for 18-year-olds – was a bad idea than thought it was a good one (35%).

Some 28% said their opinion of Sunak had become more negative since the start of the campaign, against 18% who said it had become more positive. By contrast 28% said their view of Starmer had become more positive against 18% who said it was now more negative.

Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, an independent body representing business and civic leaders in the north of England, criticised the regeneration announcement. “This is nothing to do with raising prosperity. This is only about trying to win a few votes at election time,” he said.

Murison added that a separate announcement last weekend by the government to abolish the UK shared prosperity fund, which replaced EU structural funds, to help fund the national service scheme, had in reality been the last “nail in the coffin” for levelling up. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found the Conservative proposals would leave the UK’s poorest regions millions of pounds worse off.

Sunak said on Saturday that the party had allocated more than £15bn to overlooked areas across the UK since 2019 and had used established methodology to select the areas that would benefit. A Tory spokesman said the party was “providing more funding to the most deprived towns in the areas with the highest need of levelling up”.

The towns in Tory areas include Gainsborough in Lincolnshire. Edward Leigh, its veteran Conservative candidate, said money had been pledged to the town “following our lobbying”. He said it would be “the greatest boost the town has ever had”.

Justin Madders, who retained the seat of Ellesmere Port and Neston in the north-west of England for Labour in 2019, said “given their monumental failure to deliver on levelling up over the last four years, why would anyone believe this is going to make a difference now?”

Lib Dem Treasury spokesman Sarah Olney said: “It will take more than this desperate attempt at pork barrel politics to win over voters after years of failure on the NHS and cost of living.”

Starmer, in an interview for the Observer with his biographer Tom Baldwin, attempted to draw a line under the row over Abbott’s candidacy by lavishing praise on the veteran. “Although I disagree with some of what she says … I have actually got more respect for Diane than she probably realises,” he said.

Referring to Tuesday’s debate on ITV, Starmer suggested he would not be trying to land a knockout blow on Sunak, but was going to “keep it calm and measured”. He said: “Having carried this ming vase around for a while now, I am going to avoid the temptation to start juggling it.”

Starmer said Donald Trump’s 34 convictions last week were “off the charts and more the kind of thing you would find in fictional books than real life.” But he said it will be necessary to work with whoever is in the White House. “When you are serious about being in power you have to work with whoever other countries have as their leader.”

Last night the Tories announced a £1bn plan to bring more NHS care services into the community, meaning fewer people will have to see a GP. As well as modernising 250 GP surgeries, the party pledged to build 50 new community diagnostic centres on top of the 160 built in this parliament.

Labour renewed the row between the two main parties over tax, saying that chancellor Jeremy Hunt must rule out increasing VAT on things including food and children’s clothes, after he seemed to leave the door open to raising it.

In a recent interview with the Daily Telegraph, Hunt said the Tories would not raise “the main rate of VAT” for the duration of the next parliament. But the main rate does not apply to essential goods and services that are taxed at the zero or reduced rates of VAT.

One of the dangerous “fools” caricatured in a medieval printed satire called Ship of Fools is the Foolish Reader. He is shown in an illustration surrounded by his many learned volumes, but he doesn’t read any of them. This idiot, depicted with many others, including a Feasting Fool, a Preaching Fool and a Procrastinating Fool, was a warning to the wise by the German author Sebastian Brandt 530 years ago.

Now research at a London university has unearthed a rare English 1509 copy of this book once owned by the renowned English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. And the 1494 satirical allegory, which pokes fun at various kinds of public folly, sheds new light on Bentham’s influential ethics.

It also makes it clear that Bentham himself was not the sort of fool to ignore his own books, since he has left revealing notes and formulas inked in the margins of several pages.

Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, is the man who established the principle that the best actions are those that create “the greatest good for the greatest possible number”. He remains the presiding academic muse at University College London, set up by admirers in 1826 to honour his intellect and academic approach. Bentham’s ethics were also later an inspiration to liberal theorists such as John Stuart Mill.

Last month, UCL academics unveiled the most significant rediscovered books left to the university in Bentham’s will, including the translation of Brandt’s Ship of Fools and a maths textbook explaining Euclid’s propositions. Their contents, together with the philosopher’s own notes, indicate how some of his radical ­theories were first sparked.

Bentham’s famous formulas for good governance now seem like a response to both the idiocy depicted in Ship of Fools and the mathematical clarity of Euclid. Dr Tim Causer, principal research fellow at UCL’s Bentham Project, believes the books show that the philosopher’s repu­tation as a “cold calculator” is undeserved.

“He had a well-developed sense of humour,” said Causer, whose team is working on a new definitive edition of Bentham’s collected works. “From his correspondence, you can see he had a dry wit and a sarcastic turn of phrase.”

But Bentham’s love of sums is just as evident: “There’s a mathematical sense to a lot of what he does, and this collection is a real window into the intellectual and cultural world of one of the world’s great thinkers.”

Critical margin notes under one of Euclid’s geometrical propositions are in Bentham’s handwriting. “The truth of this assertion of the commentators is not so obvious,” a jotting suggests.

Also in the bequest is a rare copy of the last volume of The Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande by Raphael Holinshed (1577) – the text used by Shakespeare as a source for his history plays – and another history, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke by Richard Grafton (1548).

Masters student Isabel Evans from California, studying library and information at UCL, has identified what she thinks is Bentham’s signature on the frontispiece of this huge volume. “We are still verifying some of the handwriting,” she said last week, “but you can just see that it has been crossed out later.”

Evans’s detective work was prompted by a chance conversation when Causer learned from a colleague of the extent of the gifts made to the university after Bentham’s death in 1832. Causer realised many of the valuable titles had gone astray.

“It is really exciting. There are still slips of paper in some pages that Bentham put there 200 years ago,” said the university’s head of rare books, Erika Delbecque, who is overseeing Evans’s work. “It is a hugely significant because Bentham is so closely related to the history of the university.”

Causer is confident more of Bentham’s books could be tracked down with further research funding: “A long-term aim is to digitise the books and make them available as a virtual Bentham library, but in the first instance we are trying to find out where they are. Some of the books date back to the 15th and 16th centuries. They are really important works and are priceless.”

Bentham’s last will and testament also infamously included the highly unusual stipulation that his body be publicly dissected and preserved as an “auto-icon”. In keeping with the dead man’s wishes, his skeleton, dressed in his own clothes and topped with a wax head, is still on display in the UCL student centre.

A climate activist was arrested at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris after sticking a blood-red poster over Monet’s painting of poppy fields. The woman then revealed a T-shirt saying ‘L’enfer’ (hell). The action by a member of Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response) – a group of environmental activists and advocates of sustainable food production – was seen in a video posted to X. In the video she said of the poster covering Monet’s art that ‘this nightmarish image awaits us if no alternative is put in place’

Jerry Seinfeld misses ‘dominant masculinity’

There are few things certain in life except death, taxes and the knowledge that every single goddamn day you can look at the news and find a rich man complaining about how feminism and wokeness have ruined the world.

Today’s edition of Bigotry Is Acceptable Again comes via Jerry Seinfeld, who appears to be on a mission to make sure people don’t associate him with a much-loved sitcom from the 1990s but with being a boring reactionary obsessed with shaking his fist at progress.

Seinfeld’s lurch to the right hasn’t come out of nowhere: the billionaire comedian was never exactly woke. He famously dated a 17-year-old high school student when he was 38 and definitely not a high school student. Several years ago, he also took his family to a so-called Anti-terror Fantasy Camp in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank accused of “gamifying” apartheid, where they could shoot guns and pretend to be soldiers.

But while Seinfeld has never been a bleeding-heart liberal, it feels like he’s never been quite so vocally anti-progressive as he is now. Ever since 7 October, Seinfeld has advocated loudly for Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians, demonized pro-Palestinian protesters, and joked about suffering children in Gaza. “Save the children of Gaza,” he said in a mocking voice after getting heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters at a show. Along with cheerleading what the United Nations human rights council has described as genocidal violence, he has also apparently decided that a great tactic for publicizing his much-panned movie about Pop-Tarts is by complaining about the left.

In April, for example, Seinfeld told the New Yorker’s Radio Hour that comedy was dying because of the “result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people”. (Really hilarious comedy, my friends, is joking about dead Palestinian children.)

Then this week, Seinfeld decided to get nostalgic about “real men” on the conservative agitator Bari Weiss’s podcast. “I miss a dominant masculinity,” Seinfeld said. “Yeah, I get the toxic thing … But still, I like a real man.” The pair also talked about Israel and managed to display so little regard for the suffering in Gaza that an Israeli journalist wrote a disgusted column about it.

“The amount of empathy it would have taken for Bari Weiss and Seinfeld to stop and think that perhaps ‘the mob,’ as they referred to the pro-Palestinian movement … is also in pain is so miniscule, I am still astounded neither of them could muster it up,” Rachel Fink wrote in the Israeli paper Haaretz.

Oh, there’s more. Weiss and Seinfeld both got weirdly nostalgic about the 60s. “Obviously there were problems. [The] civil rights movement had yet to start, like a zillion. But the thing that was present that I feel like isn’t now is a sense of, like … a common culture,” Weiss said. Seinfeld agreed, saying the best thing about that era, which is when his Pop-Tarts movie was based, was “an agreed-upon hierarchy”.

I’m not sure hierarchies are ever “agreed-upon” – I rather think they’re imposed. Do Weiss and Seinfeld realize what it sounds like when they reminisce about an era before the civil rights movement when there was an accepted “hierarchy”; when Black people and gay people and women, they seem to be saying, all knew their place?

The answer to that question is probably: “Yes, and they don’t care.” Bigotry seems to be perfectly acceptable now and not something that impedes anyone’s career. A few weeks ago, the NFL player Harrison Butker gave a massively misogynist and homophobic speech at a Catholic college in Kansas, for example. He’s since doubled down on it, saying he doesn’t regret his remarks. Possibly inspired by Butker, the Jaws actor Richard Dreyfuss also recently made a number of sexist and transphobic comments at a Q&A. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Republican party has just endorsed the conspiracy theorist candidate Royce White, who has complained that “women have become too mouthy”.

Then, of course, there’s the convicted felon Donald Trump, who has said far too many bigoted things to list. It didn’t stop people voting from him in the past, and it hasn’t stopped megadonors from throwing cash at him now. Amazingly, even a guilty verdict might not stop Trump from becoming president again. Seinfeld and Weiss might get those old-fashioned “hierarchies” they love so much reinstated very soon.

Texas Republicans open to death penalty for abortion providers

As the feminist writer Jessica Valenti, who first drew attention to this new proposal, has noted, “extremists who would see women given the death penalty are dictating Texas Republicans’ abortion policy”. And it’s not just Texas: once-fringe abortion views are now entering the mainstream. “There are more legislators who are willing to hear these [extreme] bills or take them seriously,” the law professor Mary Ziegler recently told NBC News.

Indian airline gives female travelers option to choose seats next to other women

It’s a shame we have to resort to gender segregation instead of, you know, making it socially unacceptable for men to harass women on planes. Still, this feels like a smart move by low-cost carrier IndiGo. Which, by the way, isn’t the first company to trial this idea. In 2017, after a number of in-flight groping incidents, Air India instated a female-only row of seats on its domestic flights.

A Ukrainian cheerleading squad for women over 50 is going strong

They’re called the Nice Ladies and a documentary with the same name recently made its international premiere.

New York hospital fires nurse after her speech calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’

Hesen Jabr, who is Palestinian American, made the remarks while accepting an award for providing excellent care to patients suffering perinatal loss. As the artist Nan Goldin recently said in a Guardian interview: “These are chilling McCarthyist times.”

Two more US officials resign over Biden administration’s position on Gaza war

Alexander Smith, a contractor for the US Agency for International Development (USAid), said he was given a choice between resignation and dismissal after preparing a presentation on maternal and child mortality among Palestinians, which was cancelled at the last minute by USAid. (Just read that sentence again, will you, and really take it in.)

A growing number of Swifties are calling on Taylor Swift to break her silence on Gaza

Pretty sure Swifties will be waiting a looooong time. Taylor Swift doesn’t get political unless she knows it’ll help her brand and we all know that speaking out about Gaza doesn’t exactly do that: it makes you a target. Indeed, an Israeli rap duo recently called for the deaths of Dua Lipa, Bella Hadid and Mia Khalifa (who have all spoken out about Gaza) in a chart-topping anthem.

Girls in the US are getting their first periods earlier

A new study has found this to be a trend across all demographics, but it’s a lot more pronounced among girls from racial and ethnic minorities and those from lower incomes. This isn’t great: an earlier age of first menstruation is linked to a number of adverse health issues. Getting your first period before the age of 12, for example, is linked to an increase in breast cancer risk.

Female climbers increasingly reporting sexual harassment in the sport

You can scale a remote mountain and you still can’t escape sexual harassment.

The week in pawtriarchy

Politics may be grim, but it’s been a very good year for penguins. A zoo in England has just welcomed 11 Humboldt chicks: the highest number in a decade. Humboldt penguins are vulnerable to extinction so this news is brrrr-illiant.

Jess, 50

He decided to stay with me, but he has effectively withdrawn his affection. Our sex life is stagnant, boring and occasional

For the past six years, my husband and I have slept separately. I regularly ask him to return to our bedroom, but am met with indifference: he will grunt or change the subject. Our sex life is stagnant, boring and occasional. I am lucky if we do it once a month.

I think Rob withholds sex because he wants to punish me. Six years ago, feeling isolated in our marriage, I had sex with someone else. My mother had just died and Rob, preoccupied with work, was not there for me. In some ways, the fling was a cry for help. I wanted to make Rob notice me.

He decided to stay with me, but has effectively withdrawn his affection. We occasionally have sex, but I have to initiate it and he hardly ever takes me up on the offer. When he does relent, he only wants to do the missionary position and, once he orgasms, he considers it over. I have tried to explain to Rob that I only cheated because I wanted to feel desired, but he won’t accept that he played any part in my straying. He doesn’t trust me, even though I’ve told him hundreds of times that I’d never cheat again. Each time I bring it up in an effort to move on, he shuts down emotionally. After the affair, he slept on the sofa only occasionally. But now he’s there permanently. He’s become accustomed to the disconnection.

I’ve tried to coax Rob into bed by seducing him, stroking his neck and arm. I’ve made our room enticing, with satin sheets and candles. Once, I even surprised him by cooking dinner topless. He still he won’t let me back in.

Before the affair, we always held each other until we fell asleep. Two years ago, hoping to remind him of the smitten teenagers we once were, I had a constellation map made of how the stars were aligned when we started dating. We have been married for 33 years and raised four children, and I can’t imagine our lives apart. I know he’s scared to be vulnerable after the affair, but I feel I am the only one trying to resuscitate our marriage. I wish he would let go of his resentment and try a little harder. I am tired of apologising.

Rob, 49

A part of me wants to feel close to her, but I don’t want to put myself in a position where I could get hurt

I want to be able to reach out and connect with my wife, but something is stopping me. It’s difficult to put into words but the affair plays a big part in it. Our problems completely broke me: all I’d known since I was a teenager was to be a father, husband and provider. I’d changed careers and started working overdrive to fulfil the role of “man of the house”.

I thought if Jess ever cheated on me, I would be gone. But it was almost the opposite – it made me want to fight for our marriage. But that’s easier said than done. When she is affectionate, I pull away. We have sex once a month at most. When we argue about me working too much, I shut down in mind and body. When I was younger, I wanted sex almost every day, but now I just don’t have the urge. I think that is bound up with the rejection, which I felt acutely after the affair.

I appreciate all the ways Jess has tried to jazz up our sex life. I enjoyed it when I came home and she was topless, making us dinner. That did make me laugh. But I find it difficult to follow through. A part of me wants to feel close to her, but I don’t want to put myself in a position where I could get hurt, so I distract myself with work.

I realise that the longer this goes go on, the harder it will be to reconnect. In the past, it felt impossible to live without her, but it doesn’t now. Jess wants me around more but she often expresses this through rage – which makes me feel underappreciated and taken for granted in the relationship.

From the outside looking in, I think our marriage probably sounds quite hopeless. But I want to stay because, despite everything, Jess is the only person I want to be with. Six years ago, I couldn’t fall asleep without my wife by my side. Nowadays, I am used to sleeping without her. It’s hard to understand how we got here.

Would you and your partner like to share the story, anonymously, of your sex life?

“It will be a great adventure,” George Mallory wrote to his mother before leaving for the summit of Everest a century ago this week.

His disappearance, along with his climbing partner Andrew Irvine, has become one of the most alluring mysteries in the history of exploration. A final, tantalising glimpse of the pair through mist not far from the summit has inspired successive generations of historians, authors and film-makers with competing theories on a single question: did they reach the top?

Now there is a new mystery to solve about the fate of Mallory and Irvine: what has happened to their bodies?

Mallory’s was discovered in 1999 by American climber Conrad Anker who left it where it lay; researchers had also zeroed in on the location of Irvine’s resting place. But Jamie McGuinness, who has reached the summit five times from the Tibetan side, said that following an extensive search of the area during an expedition in 2019, he has concluded the bodies of both British climbers were removed at some point in the 2000s.

“Irvine’s body is almost certainly no longer up there,” said McGuinness. “We gave it a good search with drones, and we spotted several other bodies, so we know we weren’t missing anything of the right size.”

Mark Synnott, an American mountain guide and author of The Third Pole, was also part of the expedition and climbed to the location several Everest researchers agree was the most likely position for Irvine’s remains. He found nothing. Synnott said the team also examined the precise spot where Anker found Mallory’s remains 25 years ago but couldn’t locate Mallory either.

“We had GPS co-ordinates for where the body was,” Synnott said. “We flew the drone to that spot. We took photos. I looked at the pictures really carefully with Thom [Pollard], who had been there [in 1999].” Pollard was the last of the American team to leave the body and told Synnott that one of Mallory’s legs was still clearly visible. “I feel if Mallory’s body was still there, we would have seen it. It doesn’t make any sense. Why remove the body?”

All those with detailed knowledge of the story agree that if anyone removed the bodies of Mallory and Irvine, it was China’s mountaineering authorities. Negative publicity around corpses abandoned high on the mountain might have been one reason. Yet while Irvine’s remains were close to the modern climbing route, Mallory’s were some distance below and hard to locate. It is more likely connected to longstanding sensitivities in China about the sceptical western reaction to China’s ascent of the mountain more than 60 years ago. What’s more, China literally knew where the bodies were buried.

Sightings of Mallory and Irvine date back much further than 1999. In 1936, British pioneer Frank Smythe was looking at the upper part of the mountain through a high-powered telescope when he spotted what he firmly believed was a body that could only have been Mallory or Irvine. Its location was below where an abandoned ice axe had been discovered by another British expedition three years earlier. Smythe never publicly revealed his discovery. “It’s not to be written about,” he wrote to Mallory’s friend and fellow Everest climber Edward Norton, “as the press would make an unpleasant sensation”.

Seven years after Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit, a Chinese expedition ascended Everest via the more treacherous North Ridge that Mallory and Irvine had been trying to climb, a huge propaganda boost for China’s then-leader, Mao Zedong.

A climber called Xu Jing descended alone after becoming unwell. Hypoxic and freezing, he wandered off route and discovered a body in a sheltered rock crevice between 8,300 and 8,400 metres. The body was face up with arms by its sides. It could only have been Irvine’s. When Mallory’s body was found in 1999 it was on an open slope at 8,156 metres face down with his arms stretched above him, as though trying to stop a fall.

In 1975 Chinese climbers found not one but two, and possibly three, dead Britons when they reached the summit. The first hint of these discoveries came in 1979, during a friendship expedition between China and Japan. Wang Hongbao told a Japanese teammate that the remains of one English climber had been found below the North Col, most likely those of maverick adventurer Maurice Wilson. The other body was much higher, at around 8,100 metres. He was amazed by the climber’s clothing, which, when he touched it, crumbled away. The day after this conversation, Wang was killed in an avalanche.

These revelations accelerated the growing obsession with Mallory and Irvine’s fate, but despite corroborating evidence Chinese mountaineering authorities have consistently denied them.

The discovery of Mallory’s body and the trove of artefacts that came with it made headlines around the world in 1999 and gave the mystery a global profile. Jake Norton was one of the team that found him. “Until 1999 I don’t think the Chinese had given it much thought,” he told the Observer. “I’m not sure anyone really thought you could find much of anything up there.”

Norton returned to the mountain in 2001, and while they drew a blank looking for Irvine, the team found many more artefacts from the pre-war Everest expeditions. “My feeling is that Irvine was still there in 2001,” Norton says. “I just don’t think the Chinese were worried enough to do anything about it in the early 2000s.”

China started paying closer attention to Everest in the years leading up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Chinese climbers, mostly ethnic Tibetans, would carry the Olympic torch to the summit and China wanted to prevent demonstrations on the mountain calling for Tibetan independence. China has occupied Tibet since 1950, and in 1960, when China first climbed the mountain, Mao took a personal interest in ensuring that half the mountain was designated as Chinese.

McGuinness says that while at base camp in 2012 he asked a China Tibet Mountaineering Association (CTMA) official whether Irvine’s body had been removed for the Olympics. “He replied: ‘It was thrown off the mountain a lot earlier than that.’ ”

Synnott says he and other researchers have since heard the same story from other sources. Removing the bodies would of course remove any evidence, however unlikely, that Mallory and Irvine had beaten China’s climbers to the top.

Norton has heard conspiracy theories that the CTMA brought Irvine’s body to Lhasa and put them on ice but he doesn’t take them seriously. He says he doesn’t regret the discovery of Mallory’s body. “We had these intense debates where we discussed putting the items back in his pockets and just walking away. How would we feel if the positions were reversed? Ultimately, we would want our families to know what became of us.”

Healthier and more sustainable chocolate could hit store shelves after Swiss scientists and chocolatiers developed a recipe that swaps sugar for waste plant matter.

By mashing up the pulp and husk of a cocoa pod instead of just taking the beans, scientists have made a sweet and fibrous gel that could replace the sugar in chocolate, according to a report published in Nature Food.

This “whole food” approach makes a more nutritious product than conventional chocolate and uses less land and water, the scientists found – while still satisfying a sweet tooth.

“The cocoa fruit is basically a pumpkin and right now we’re just using the seeds,” said Kim Mishra, a food technologist at ETH Zürich and lead author of the study. “But there’s a lot of other marvellous stuff in that fruit.”

The researchers used the waste flesh and juice of the cocoa fruit to make a gel that can be added to chocolate instead of powdered crystalline sugar that is traditionally used.

Usually, “introducing moisture into chocolate is a complete no-go because you are essentially destroying it”, said Mishra. “We disrespected one of the most holy rules of chocolate-making.”

He said the results could make chocolate healthier and more sustainable, while also giving farmers a new revenue stream.

The study found that in a lab the new method used 6% less land and water but increased planet-heating emissions by 12% because it required an extra drying step that consumed large amounts of energy.

But by scaling up the process – and drying the pulp in the sun or using solar panels – they found that greenhouse gas emissions could fall.

Alejandro Marangoni, from the department of food science at the University of Guelph in Canada, who was not involved in the study, said the study was a “fairly comprehensive” proposal that now needs to be validated with a pilot.

Farmers in tropical countries often see only a small fraction of the profits generated by the $100bn chocolate industry. Because the processing of the pulp would have to happen in the countries in which the cocoa is grown, said Marangoni, the biggest benefits would probably be seen there. “If this was implemented, it would benefit the local countries … as a consumer, we’d hope they don’t screw up our chocolate.”

Chocolate is one of the most polluting foods a person can eat, ranking alongside some meats in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions emitted per kilogram of food. Mishra and his colleagues set out to reduce the waste in the production process and found they could also make it healthier.

But the bittersweet finding for chocolate lovers is that the new product lacks the fine-tuning ability that the industry has valued in powdered sugar.

The sweetness of the gel is comparable but you don’t reach exactly the same level, said Mishra. “Making this chocolate is all about balance – if you add too much of the sweetening gel, your chocolate is unprocessable; if you add not enough, your chocolate is not sweet enough.”

Despite this, he said the lab-based chocolate was “basically identical” to dark chocolate in texture and similar in taste to flavourful dark chocolates from South America. “The sweetness released in your mouth is slightly slower than if you eat traditional dark chocolate – and you have more of these fruity notes and acidity coming from the juice.”

Scientists have developed a spit test that could “turn the tide” on prostate cancer worldwide by spotting the disease earlier, detecting where men are at high risk and sparing others unnecessary treatment.

The number of men diagnosed with prostate cancer worldwide is projected to double to 2.9 million a year by 2040, with annual deaths predicted to rise by 85%. It is already the most common form of male cancer in more than 100 countries.

Early diagnosis is crucial but experts say the current standard PSA blood tests can miss men who do have cancer and also cause others to go through needless treatment or pointless further checks and scans.

Now researchers from the Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR) and the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust appear to have found a better alternative.

A study shows their new saliva test, which involves a DNA sample being collected in seconds, is more accurate than the current standard blood test. The findings are being presented this weekend at the world’s largest cancer conference.

“With this test it could be possible to turn the tide on prostate cancer,” said Ros Eeles, a professor of oncogenetics at the ICR. “We have shown that a simple, cheap spit test to identify men at higher risk due to their genetic makeup is an effective tool to catch the cancer early.”

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago, Eeles said the breakthrough came after decades of research into the genetic markers of the disease.

“Our study shows that the theory does work in practice – we can identify men at risk of aggressive cancers who need further tests, and spare the men who are at lower risk from unnecessary treatments.”

Scientists and doctors developed the spit test after studying the DNA of hundreds of thousands of men. It works by looking for genetic signals in the saliva that are linked to prostate cancer.

In the Barcode 1 trial, researchers recruited more than 6,000 European men to trial the spit test. All were recruited from their GP surgeries and were aged between 55 and 69 – an age at which the risk of prostate cancer is increased.

Once the saliva had been collected, the test calculated the polygenic risk score (PRS) of each of the men. The score is based on 130 genetic variations in DNA code that are linked to prostate cancer.

In those with the highest genetic risk, the test returned fewer false positives than the PSA test, picked up people with cancer who would have been missed by the PSA test alone, and picked up a higher proportion of the aggressive cancers than the PSA test, the ICR said.

The test also accurately identified men with prostate cancer that had been missed by an MRI scan.

Dheeresh Turnbull, 71, from Brighton, was one of the first men in the world to try the spit test, and discovered he had prostate cancer when he got the results.

He said: “I was completely shocked when I received my diagnosis as I had absolutely no symptoms at all, so I know I would never have been diagnosed at this stage if I hadn’t joined the trial.”

Turnbull underwent robotic surgery to remove part of his prostate and is doing well.

He said: “Because the saliva test revealed that I had a high genetic risk of developing the disease, my younger brother, who would have been too young to join the study directly, signed up and discovered that he also had an aggressive tumour in the prostate. It’s incredible to think that because of this study two lives have now been saved in my family.”

Eeles, a consultant in clinical oncology and cancer genetics at the Royal Marsden NHS foundation trust, cautioned that further research would be required before the test could be rolled out widely.

“Our next step will be for us to test the genetic markers we have identified that are associated with a risk of prostate cancer in diverse populations, to ensure this test can benefit all men.”

Ageing populations and increasing life expectancy mean the number of older men worldwide who are living for longer is rising. As the main risk factors for prostate cancer – such as being 50 or older and having a family history of the disease – are unavoidable, experts believe it will be impossible to prevent the surge in cases simply via lifestyle changes or public health interventions.

However, better testing and earlier diagnosis could help reduce the burden and save lives.

“Cancers that are picked up early are much more likely to be curable,” said Prof Kristian Helin, the chief executive of the ICR. “And with prostate cancer cases set to double by 2040, we must have a programme in place to diagnose the disease early.

“We know that the current PSA test can cause men to go through unnecessary treatments, and more worryingly it’s missing men who do have cancer. We urgently need an improved test to screen for the disease. This research is a promising step towards that goal, and it highlights the role that genetic testing can play in saving lives.”

Film actor Robert De Niro was scheduled to accept a leadership award from the National Association of Broadcasters, but the group has rescinded the award after the celebrity spoke out against Donald Trump outside his criminal trial in New York this week, the Hill and the Huffington Post report.

The National Association of Broadcasters did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for the group told The Hill on Thursday that their event was “proudly bipartisan” and said: “While we strongly support the right of every American to exercise free speech and participate in civic engagement, it is clear that Mr. De Niro’s recent high-profile activities will create a distraction from the philanthropic work that we were hoping to recognize. To maintain the focus on service of the award winners, Mr. De Niro will no longer be attending the event.”

In a statement to the Hill, De Niro did not protest the decision, and said he continued to appreciate the group.

“I support the work of the NAB Leadership Foundation and would like to express my appreciation and gratitude for what the Foundation has done and will continue to do for the good of us all, and I wish them well for their continued good work,” the Hill reported him as saying in the statement.

On Tuesday, De Niro, a longtime Democrat who recently voiced an ad for Democratic President Joe Biden, attended a Biden campaign event outside the Manhattan courtroom with two former law enforcement officers, Harry Dunn and Michael Fanone, who were at the US Capitol when it was attacked by Trump supporters on 6 January 2021.

Referring to Trump’s successful 2016 run for president, the Academy Award winner said Trump’s candidacy was initially laughed off as a joke.

“We’ve forgotten the lessons of history that showed us other clowns who weren’t taken seriously until they became vicious dictators,” he said. “With Trump, we have a second chance and no one is laughing now. This is the time to stop him by voting him out once and for all.”

If Trump returns to the White House, he said, Americans could see the civil liberties they take for granted evaporate as well as the end of elections.

“If he gets in, I can tell you right now, he will never leave,” said De Niro.

Fanone and Dunn delivered emotional remarks, saying violence at the Capitol had been fueled by Trump’s lies that the 2020 election was stolen. The speakers were heckled by a Trump supporter as pro-Trump demonstrators chanted in the background.

Trump campaign officials said the De Niro event showed desperation in the Biden camp.

“Joe Biden is losing nationally,” said Jason Miller, another Trump spokesperson. “President Trump’s numbers continue to rise. And the best that Biden can do is roll out a washed-up actor.”

In his most biting comments, De Niro spoke of Trump through the lens of the largely Democratic city whose voters know Trump well and roundly rejected him at the polls.

“We New Yorkers used to tolerate him when he was just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot, a two-bit playboy lying his way into the tabloids,” he said. “A clown … No one took him seriously. They take him seriously now.”

Reuters contributed to this report