On 26 April 1999, TV favourite Jill Dando was fatally shot outside her Fulham home in London. I was 15 years, and I remember feeling a sense of shock, shared by anyone who watched UK television at the time. A little over a year later, local man Barry George was arrested and charged with the murder. A murder he would be found guilty of and subsequently handed a life sentence for. Eight years into the sentence, the Old Bailey would clear Barry of the horrific crime.

I caught up with Barry’s sister Michelle Diskin Bates, who recalled her experience for Sorted magazine.

Michelle, what were your initial feelings and how on earth did you process it all?

My world went into a tailspin in May of 2000, when my brother was arrested for one of the highest-profile crimes in Britain in recent years, the murder of Jill Dando, much-loved BBC presenter. My mum didn’t tell me because she thought it would all blow over and I wouldn’t need to be b...

With a career spanning more than three decades, platinum-selling singer/songwriter and musician, Michael W. Smith is no stranger to the radical highs and lows that come with fame and fortune.

Since the early 1980s the 61-year-old American has won numerous awards including three Grammys, and counts Bono and George W. Bush as some of his closest friends. He performed at the Billy Graham memorial service earlier this year.

However, a number of challenges in his life almost caused him to throw in the towel last year after 35 years in the music business:

“I talked with my team at the beginning of 2017 and told them I’m not going to do another record unless I can write some stuff that really excites me. I was still grieving over my father who died in 2015 after suffering from dementia. The landscape changed in my life and I couldn’t write anything.

“I thought it would be two or three more years before I did any recording at all if I ever did record ever again.”

Fortunately, th...

Michael Bublé faced every parent’s worst nightmare when his son was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. The Canadian singer put his career on hold as he and his wife Luisana Lopilato cared for their sick boy, who was suffering from a rare form of liver cancer called hepatoblastoma. Two traumatic years later and five-year-old Noah is said to be responding well to treatment and Michael feels able to face the world again with his music.

His new album is quite aptly called Love and features a brand-new version of ‘When I Fall in Love’, made famous by Nat King Cole. Other tracks include new versions of standards ‘My Funny Valentine’, ‘When You’re Smiling’, ‘Unforgettable’, ‘La Vie en Rose’ and ‘I Only Have Eyes for You’. It also includes the self-penned original song ‘Forever Now’, plus a collaboration with Charlie Puth on ‘Love You Anymore’.

Michael and his wife recently welcomed their third child, daughter Vida. Alongside Noah, the couple have another boy, two-year-old Elias.

So ...

Tony Sharp provides an update on the Who Let The Dads Out? Initiative.

The battles are still being fought, snipers are still taking shots on the fringes, but surely the war is effectively over. In 21st-century Britain, men now know that it’s good to be seen caring for their infant child, that sporting a papoose in the style of Daniel Craig is as OK as emerging, bronzed and buff, from an azure sea.

Of course, die-hards remain, along with the odd self-publicist, who will always hark back to more gender-specific roles. But our world is changing, and fathers and father figures could change with it, to navigate the confusing landscape of how to parent a child and how to stay together as family. It can be scary, but it can be an exciting roller coaster of a ride too.

The Who Let The Dads Out? movement is part of this changing landscape, and is led by Mark Chester and myself, but with the support of many volunteers and partners. We are ‘men on a mission’, working as a catalyst for ch...

I’m going to be totally honest from the get-go and say I’m a competitive athlete and in the modern world of social media, your media presence is everything when it comes to achieving support or sponsorship. While I love sharing my story and believe it has the potential to inspire, motivate and encourage people, I’m also shamelessly seeking good publicity!

So, a quick overview of my story.

I’m 30 years old and an international competition climber on the GB paraclimbing team.

In August of 2010 I had an accident, a 35ft fall, which led to me breaking my back in two places, and dramatically smashing up my ankle. Following six months in Stoke Mandeville Hospital, a couple of eight hour-plus spinal operations and various other ops and procedures, I had reached a point where I shuffled around a bit on crutches but predominantly I was a wheelchair-user. With huge amounts of dedication, continued physiotherapy and gym work I reached a point where I was walking fairly effectively (...

The Lions were created a number of years ago by Gary Spicer and a travelling companion out of what Gary calls a minister’s frustration to release an entrepreneurial spirit in the Church in the UK. Gary kept asking himself, “How can we connect with that for the kingdom?” The conception came at Geneva Airport of all places, as a springboard to launch and pioneer the idea of a type of Dragons’ Den with the three Cs, Community, Church, Commerce at its heart to create a social impact and to release all the dreamers.

Initially accepting between 60 and 90 applicants, the candidates are whittled down to 15, for a six-weekend experience with people who have been ‘successful’ in their chosen fields, the “good, the bad, and the ugly” as Gary puts it, in the Belfry Hotel in the Midlands. There, they discuss things like the concept of their pitch, case studies of things that have gone wrong and those that have gone right, business plans, team dynamics, legal aspects of what they are doing a...

Nick Keith discusses the key to understanding feelings, plus strategies for seeing them more clearly and dealing with them through emotional intelligence (EQ)

The good thing about emotional intelligence (EQ) is that we can acquire it with practice. Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and editor who was educated and taught at Harvard, declared that IQ (intelligence quotient) was not enough to achieve success, in his best-selling book Emotional Intelligence: Why it can matter more than IQ(Bloomsbury, 1996).

For Dr Goleman, 80 per cent of a person’s success is down to EQ and 20% per cent to IQ. While IQ elicits a score for your intellectual ability, EQ provides a masterplan for success in life by helping to recognise and channel those troublesome emotions, intelligently.

And what of IQ? That first surfaced just over 100 years ago when William Stern, a German psychologist, coined the term in a book. It has been used as a way to measure intelligence through specific tests, many of them ...