LONDON (AP) — Scientists have reacted with alarm to news that the British government will cut funding to the world-famous radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in northwest England that has been helping explore the cosmos for almost 70 years.
Government funding body U.K. Research and Innovation announced Monday that it will no longer fund the Lovell telescope, whose 250-foot-wide (76-meter-wide) parabolic reflecting bowl is a local landmark. It’s part of a network of seven radio telescopes across the country known as e-Merlin connected to the Jodrell Bank astrophysics center south of Manchester.
UKRI said the telescope array will not receive public funding after March 2028, following “a rigorous prioritization process to focus investment on the areas that will deliver the greatest long-term scientific capability, impact and value for the U.K.”
University of Manchester particle physicist Brian Cox called the cuts “devastating and irreversible.”
Paul Howarth, president of the Institute of Physics, said recent cuts to physics funding, including at Jodrell Bank, were “a terrible blow to the scientific community,” and urged new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to reconsider.
“For the sake of U.K. physics and our national reputation as a place to do science, conduct research and innovate, we would urge the new government to review this ruinous set of decisions,” he said.
The University of Manchester, which runs e-Merlin, said it was seeking other sources of funds from business, government or charities.
“But, if we don’t find those alternative sources of funding, then there is a risk that as of the end of March 2028, the Lovell Telescope will not be an actively functioning scientific facility for radio astronomy,” said Sarah Sharples, the university’s dean of science and engineering.
Completed in 1957, the Lovell telescope has played a major role in the history of radio astronomy, which studies distant space objects through the radio waves they emit. It tracked the progress of Sputnik when the Soviet Union launched Earth’s first artificial satellite in 1957, received the first images from the moon’s surface in 1966 and has helped scientists discover distant galaxies and study black holes, quasars, pulsars and gravitational lenses.
It also served as an early-warning system for Soviet missiles during the Cold War.
Jodrell Bank’s engagement center, open to the public and visited by generations of British schoolchildren, is not affected by the cuts.
FILE - The Lovell Telescope, right, at the Jodrell Bank Observatory points skyward on the 50th anniversary of space travel, Macclesfield, England, Thursday Oct. 4, 2007. (AP Photo/Jon Super, file)
FILE - Members of a conference to mark the 50th anniversary of space travel stand in the dish of the The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank Observatory, Macclesfield, England Thursday Oct. 4, 2007. (AP Photo/Jon Super, file)
DETROIT (AP) — Two people who attended a prestigious Michigan fine arts school reported conduct of a sexual nature by Jeffrey Epstein, a major donor, according to an investigation that also uncovered dozens of allegations spanning decades against nearly 50 other people.
Interlochen Center for the Arts operates a summer camp and performing arts school that draws students from around the world. It hired a law firm in 2024 to investigate reports of sexual abuse by faculty and staff. Subsequently, it expanded the work to include information about Epstein, the 66-year-old financier who killed himself in jail in 2019.
Interlochen removed Epstein's name from a lodge after he was convicted of sex offenses in Florida in 2008. The building, renamed the Green Lake Lodge, was recently demolished after the U.S. Justice Department released millions of pages about him that had been compiled over the years.
Sanghavi Law Office says it collected 70 accounts from alumni alleging “physical conduct of a sexual nature” by 47 faculty and staff members affiliated with Interlochen from the 1950s through the 2010s, most before 2000.
“The information gathered during this investigation is, simply, devastating,” the 97-page report says, noting that alumni reported grooming, flirting, sexual touching and sex.
Interlochen said it has provided names of people accused of misconduct to Grand Traverse County authorities in northern Michigan to determine what steps, if any, might be taken. None are currently employed there, and more than a third are dead.
“We are deeply sorry for the harm experienced by members of our community and extend our apologies to those impacted by abuse at Interlochen,” president Trey Davey and board chair Barrett Rollins said in a letter to the community posted online.
“While the vast majority of the incidents described in the investigation took place many decades ago, and reports of abuse at Interlochen have significantly decreased over the past 25 years, the passage of time does not diminish the experiences of our alumni,” they said. “Sexual abuse committed by an adult in a position of power or trust against a student is wrong, then and now.”
Interlochen today “is fundamentally different from the institution described in this report,” Davey and Rollins wrote, with comprehensive safety policies and a changed culture.
Epstein, who played the bassoon, was an Interlochen camper in 1967. He donated more than $400,000 to the school between 1990 and 2003.
Two women told investigators that Epstein engaged in conduct of a sexual nature with them, one of them at the Interlochen lodge that bore his name.
He brushed against her body “over her clothes, in a manner in which he indicated was accidental,” according to the report.
Epstein also paid for her to visit him in New York while she was a student. She said “every time he was ‘handsy’ with her, she would freeze until he would stop,” the report states.
The other woman said she gave Epstein a massage at his home, according to the report, and he may have asked her to remove her top. She never had any further contact with Epstein or his girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Outside of the school investigation, at least two Interlochen alumnae made allegations of grooming and abuse against Epstein and Maxwell, according to federal records and media reports. Their identities were not made public.
One testified against Maxwell in 2021 when she was convicted of sex trafficking. It’s unclear whether those women spoke to the law firm hired for the Interlochen investigation.
FILE - Documents that were included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files are photographed on Jan. 2, 2026. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick, File)
