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Hegseth is expected to announce the decision on Wednesday during a visit to the Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, where he will deliver his “State of the Force” address in front of junior officers and enlisted officials, the official said.

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Media outlets in the US have also reported on the move.

The Associated Press news agency, citing Pentagon officials, reported that Hegseth will direct all the military services to double the 10 percent reduction that he ordered last year to the roughly 800 flag and general officer positions. This would make it a 20 percent total decrease and is to be completed by January 1, 2027.

Fox News reported the new reductions could include any one-star general or above or officer of equivalent Navy rank.

The Washing Post reported that the cuts could affect the careers of “hundreds of current and rising military leaders following scores of firings and denied promotions”.

US President Donald Trump or Hegseth have fired, or pushed into retirement, more than two dozen military leaders since taking office in January 2025, including the Army’s top uniformed officer, General Randy George, in April.

The administration also fired the only two women serving as four-star officers, along with several other senior female officers. Other top officials have left through retirements and resignations, including the Army secretary, Dan Driscoll, who resigned this month after repeated clashes with Hegseth.

When the defence secretary first announced the effort to trim the highest levels of the military ranks, he argued it was intended to remove “redundant force structure to optimise and streamline leadership”. And in a memo released in May 2025, he added that his aim was to free the military from “unnecessary bureaucratic layers”.

At this time last year, Hegseth also declared an end to “woke” culture and announced new directives for troops that included “gender-neutral” or “male-level” standards for physical fitness.

Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed concern over Hegseth’s latest move in a statement. He said eliminating senior leadership positions must be done in consultation with Congress and warned that the planned cuts “should alarm every American”.

“Congress has been clear with the Secretary that he must consult this body and explain his reasoning for senior officer removals and promotion holds. To date, we have not received satisfactory answers,” Reed said.

“Our military is conducting major operations around the world, and the force is already under strain,” he added.

The number of general officer positions is set by law, but positions can be left unfilled if the administration does not submit nominees to Congress. %!s()

The changes, including restrictions for 16- and 17-year-olds on websites that allow infinite scrolling and algorithmic content, which can push harmful material into feeds, as well as tighter age-verification checks, will come into effect in March..

Nandy has now vowed to go further. “We shouldn’t accept that this is the end,” the culture secretary said before her speech at the Labour party conference, which will be introduced by Georgia Harrison, a campaigner against image-based sexual abuse. “This is a staging post to what must be a very active interventionist state, policing and regulating the online space so that people are safe.”

She said the UK would be “pioneers of tech as a force for good” and would promote online spaces that were “genuinely safe, inclusive and empowering”.

She praised the former prime minister Keir Starmer and the former technology secretary Liz Kendall for announcing the ban in June. But she felt there had been a “step change” in the government’s approach since Andy Burnham became prime minister in July and handed her the online safety brief.

Comparing social media to real-world civic spaces, she said: “If we were in a situation where we were saying our town centres are now so unsafe that we’ve decided that every child is going to have to stay in their bedrooms, people would rightly be up in arms.

“How have we got to a point where we’re saying these social media sites are so harmful and dangerous that we cannot conceive of any way of protecting our children except to remove them altogether? This ends now.”

A consultation on the ban, which will apply to apps such as TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube and Instagram, attracted more than 116,000 responses, with 85% of parents thinking the risk of social media outweighed any benefit.

Nandy said she had told families bereaved as a result of teenagers experiencing online harm: “I want you to understand that that era ends today, and we start a new chapter where we have an active and empowering state that shapes those civic spaces so that they work for us.”

The MP for Wigan said the government had already shown a willingness to take on the big tech companies – and risk disapproval from US authorities – with plans to hand established broadcasters and media companies greater prominence on digital platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. “That is a difference of opinion with the US administration, but we do reserve the right to take a different approach,” she said.

While new technologies had always “upended society”, the internet was the only one to have been “entirely outsourced to the private sector” with no role for the state, Nandy said. “It’s not acceptable to outsource this to [the X owner, Elon] Musk or anybody else,” she said.

In one of her first moves on online safety, Nandy ordered technology companies to her office, and she said she was “not surprised, but appalled” that representatives from X failed to attend.

She acknowledged “there really is a problem” with Ofcom’s ability to enforce regulations and make firms adhere to the Online Safety Act. “Laws are only as good as the ability to enforce them,” she said.

Nandy has welcomed a suggestion from the BBC director general, Matt Brittin, that a “public service algorithm” could compete with big tech, which she felt fitted “with [Burnham’s] vision about the UK being a world leader in tech as a force for good”.

“In order to do that, you’ve got to be in the game, investing [and] shaping the technology,” she added. “But I think to win the permission of the public to do that, they’ve got to hear from us loud and clear that we will take action to protect people, particularly children, right now.” %!s()

“I was raised to share one’s struggles if, in doing so, that might help others,” he recently told People. Reeve was diagnosed in the spring, but as of a Sept. 8 check-up, he is now cancer-free.

“Watching my parents up close take the adversity they faced in their lives and repurpose it into something hopeful left a major impact on my life and how I try to live it,” the anchor said, which inspired him to share his health story publicly.

Will was two years old when his father, Christopher, was paralyzed from the neck down after being thrown from a horse in 1995. Nearly a decade later, Christopher died in 2004 at the age of 52, and his mother, Dana Reeve, died in 2006 at age 44 from lung cancer.

He acknowledged that he’s “had a lot happen in my life. But none of it until now had happened to me in a way.” Reeve initially found a tender lump on one of his testicles in the shower in April. While he “assumed it was nothing or would go away,” it was his wife, Amanda Dubin Reeve, who urged him to get an ultrasound.

The following month, the GMA anchor underwent an orchiectomy to remove the cancerous testicle, which is a standard surgical procedure when someone is diagnosed with testicular cancer.

“I was more nervous about the unknown of the surgery rather than the overwhelming realization that I would be losing an essential part of my body forever,” he admitted to People.

Further testing revealed that the cancer spread to the lymph nodes in his abdomen, leading him to undergo a six-hour surgery in June to remove them and then two rounds of chemotherapy that concluded at the end of July.

“The irony is not lost on me that 20 years after my mom died of lung cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering, there I was in the same building getting treated for cancer,” Reeve shared, also praising Amanda for taking on “the role of wife and caregiver” during this difficult time, similar to how his mom cared for his dad.

After Reeve was declared cancer-free earlier this month, he’ll now have scans and bloodwork three to four times a year to monitor for any chance of cancer returning.

“My colleagues at ABC are like family to me and have been with me every step of the way,” he added. “I’m fortunate that I caught this early. Yes, I had to jump through some flaming hoops to get to the other side, but it could have been much worse had I ignored it or delayed going to the doctor.” %!s()

These are just two of the exhibits playing starring roles in a rather extraordinary contemporary art show called Living Labyrinths, at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (RAMM) in Exeter, aiming to celebrate the “cultural world” of fungi.

Lara Goodband, the head curator at the RAMM, said it had been five years in the making. She suggested the south-west England was a good place to focus on fungi.

“We have great weather for it, warm and damp,” Goodband said. “But also, I think people here have a special affinity for fungi.”

She said a wide range of people in the south-west were fungi fans, from the ecologists who study the role they play in soil health to the ravers who enjoy the hallucinogenic properties of some mushrooms and the storytellers who work with the fairytale associations of toadstools.

RAMM is also an excellent place for this deep dive because of its Victorian collections of fungi. Specimens of stinkhorn and bird’s nest fungi appear alongside the modern pieces.

Goodband said interest in fungi had risen sharply over the past few years, partly after the success of Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, which argued fungi provided a key understanding to the planet. “I think we’ve hit a moment,” said Goodband.

Among the highlights is a sound installation by the musician, composer and DJ Jason Singh, who spent hours hunkered down in two Devon woods, Fingle and Yarner, for his piece, The Intelligence Below.

He said he used biofeedback sensors to measure the electricity coming from mycelium – the rootlike networks of fungi – and translated these into sound.

Singh said: “So all the notes that you are hearing are translations of voltage being emitted from the living thing. This is music being generated by the living system of the mushroom.

“I’m interested in this idea that all living things generate and vibrate. This is a way for us to try to tune into and connect with other living things.”

Singh said he did get some odd looks from passersby when he was out in the woods collaborating with fungi. “But it’s magical being in a space recording mushrooms.”

Visitors to the exhibition will also be able to see watercolour studies by Beatrix Potter loaned by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her work was overlooked in her lifetime but is recognised by modern mycologists.

Near them is a recent work called In Balance by the artist Jo Pearl based on a fungus called Potteromyces asteroxylicola, named after Potter in 2023 when it was identified in the collections of the Natural History Museum.

Another new piece is by Gemma Anderson-Tempini, who worked with scientists from the University of Exeter’s MRC Centre for Medical Mycology to create a map of her own mycobiome, the fungi dwelling within the human body.

Like Singh, Anderson-Tempini ventured out into the Devon landscape to gather material for her piece, Myco-Mother, 2026.

She collected pieces of red sandstone from Exmouth and chocolate-brown soil from Killerton, which she ground up to create the watercolours she used.

Anderson-Tempini believes her work is a first. “Every one of us is carrying a fungal ecology and until now nobody had drawn it,” she said. “Fungi is fashionable but Sheldrake and the rest stayed outside the body in forests and soil. This work turns it inward.”

• Living Labyrinths opens on 3 October and runs until 21 February.