LONDON (AP) — British pop star Cliff Richard said Monday he has been given the all-clear after treatment for prostate cancer.
The 85-year-old singer joined calls for Britain to introduce a national screening program for the disease.
Richard told “Good Morning Britain” that he was diagnosed a year ago after a health check for his insurance before a tour to Australia and New Zealand.
He said “the good fortune was that it was not very old, and the other thing is that it has not metastasized.”
Richard said the treatment was successful, but “I don’t know whether it’s going to come back.”
He said it was “absolutely ridiculous” that Britain does not have a wide prostate cancer testing program. The state-funded National Health Service currently offers routine screening for breast, bowel and cervical cancer.
The U.K. National Screening Committee has recommended a targeted prostate cancer screening program for men with a genetic mutation that puts them at higher risk. Several high-profile figures who have been treated for prostate cancer have called for a wider screening effort, including cyclist Chris Hoy and former Prime Minister David Cameron.
Richard came to fame in the 1950s and has had U.K. chart hits across seven decades, including “Summer Holiday,” “The Young Ones” and “We Don’t Talk Anymore.”
His intervention follows a call by King Charles III for people to get screened for cancer. The king, who announced in February 2024 that he had an undisclosed form of cancer, said early diagnosis and treatment will allow doctors to reduce his treatment in the new year.
“Early diagnosis quite simply saves lives,” the king said in a video message broadcast Friday.
FILE - Singer Cliff Richard poses for a photo as he arrives for day eleven at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, July 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Joanna Chan, File)
LONDON (AP) — The new head of the MI6 spy agency is set to warn on Monday of how Russian President Vladimir Putin’s determination to export chaos around the world is rewriting the rules of conflict and creating new security challenges.
Blaise Metreweli will use her first public speech as chief of the United Kingdom’s foreign intelligence service to say that Britain faces increasingly unpredictable and interconnected threats, with emphasis on “aggressive, expansionist” Russia.
“The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in the Russian approach to international engagement, and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus,” she will say, according to extracts released by the Foreign Office, which oversees MI6.
The MI6 chief, known as C, is the only employee of the secretive agency whose name is made public. Metreweli, who took over from Richard Moore at the end of September, was previously the MI6 director of technology and innovation — the real-world equivalent of the fictional James Bond gadget-master Q.
She plans to say that technological savvy and human intelligence are both key to combating hybrid threats, and MI6 officers “must be as comfortable with lines of code as we are with human sources, as fluent in Python as we are in multiple languages.”
The speech is the latest in a series of warnings by Western defense and security authorities about the growing hybrid threat from states such as Russia, Iran and China, whose use of cyber tools, espionage and influence operations they say threatens global stability.
Last week, the U.K. imposed sanctions on several Russian media outlets for alleged information warfare and two Chinese tech firms for “vast and indiscriminate cyber-activities.”
Metreweli is the first woman to hold the post since MI6 was founded in 1909.
Britain’s two other main intelligence agencies have already shattered the spy world’s glass ceiling. MI5, the domestic security service, was led by Stella Rimington from 1992 to 1996 and Eliza Manningham-Buller between 2002 and 2007. Anne Keast-Butler became head of the electronic and cyberintelligence agency GCHQ in 2023.
The spy chief’s warning came amid a flurry of diplomatic meetings aimed at ending the almost four-year war sparked by Russia’s invasion of its neighbor.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met U.S. envoys on Sunday in Berlin, and will meet later with the leaders of Germany, France and Britain. Kyiv’s allies are trying to bolster support for Ukraine amid Washington’s pressure to swiftly accept a U.S.-brokered peace deal.
In a separate speech, the head of the British military, Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, will say Monday that Putin’s aim is “to challenge, limit, divide and ultimately destroy NATO.”
“The war in Ukraine shows Putin’s willingness to target neighboring states, including their civilian populations ... threatens the whole of NATO, including the U.K.,” Knighton plans to say, arguing that Britain needs both a stronger military and more resilient infrastructure to meet the evolving threat.
FILE - A general view of the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in London, March 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)
