At least 53 people have been killed in a Houthi ballistic missile attack on a training camp for Yemeni government forces, making it the largest single loss of life since the country’s civil war reignited in September.

The attack on al-Alam camp in the southern Shabwa province was said to have injured more than 200 others, mostly young recruits, and described as a disaster by the country’s UN-recognised government. The injured were taken from the police and army training camp in the Jardan district to a hospital in the local capital, Ataq, where pleas for blood donations were made.

Nobody at the University of St Andrews in Scotland seems to remember how Raisin Monday became a giant foam fight. For 600 years, first-year students have taken part in the ritual of thanking older students for mentoring them through their first few weeks of university life.

Traditionally, freshers would give their elders a pound of raisins – hence the name. This Monday however, hundreds wore fancy dress as they streamed on to St Salvator’s lower college lawn at 11am armed with cans of shaving foam, covering one another in soapy clouds as they have for the past few decades. Groups of students dress as Smurfs, mice, bananas, grandmas, sunflowers and chefs to participate in the annual rite of passage.

Services for children in parts of England are in a “state of emergency”, according to a report that identifies what it claims to be the hardest places in the country for young people to grow up in.

The children’s commissioner, Rachel de Souza, said in some local authorities individual service failures or systemic problems meant “no child could reasonably be expected to thrive and those that do thrive do so against the odds”.

Four people have been arrested after a police officer was shot in the foot in Nottingham city centre.

The officer was struck by a projectile believed to have been fired from a shotgun after approaching two suspects in the early hours of Sunday morning.