People wanting to buy weight loss jabs online are to face stricter checks after some with eating disorders were given prescriptions.

A patient questionnaire will no longer be enough, the General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) has told online pharmacies.

Nor will an email chat or people sending in photos of themselves.

Instead, checks on someone seeking jabs such as Wegovy or Mounjaro will include verifying the person’s body mass index (BMI) in a video consultation, in person, or via GP or medical records.

“Verifying information through a phone call would not be appropriate when supplying medication for weight loss,” new guidelines state.

In addition, the prescriber should “actively” share all relevant information about the prescription with other health professionals involved in the care of the person making the request.

“If the person does not have a regular prescriber, such as a GP, or if there is no consent to share information, the prescriber should then decide whether it is safe to prescribe,” the guidelines say.

The National Pharmacy Association (NPA) is among those which called for more stringent rules after it became aware of people being prescribed the drugs when their weight was already low or they had an eating disorder.

Weight loss jabs, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, work by reducing food cravings.

People with a high BMI can get them on the NHS, while hundreds of thousands of people use online pharmacies.

If pharmacists do not stick to the new guidance they could face investigations or inspections.

In addition, conditions could be placed on a pharmacy and an improvement plan implemented.

Weight loss jabs have also now been added to the list of “high-risk” medicines requiring extra safeguards.

Duncan Rudkin, chief executive of the GPhC, said inspections and investigations had thrown up “too many cases of medicines being supplied inappropriately online and putting people at risk”.

He added: “This updated guidance will support online pharmacies to protect their patients, and we expect them to act now to make sure these safeguards are in place.”

The GPhC said it is working closely with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency and the Advertising Standards Authority to tackle inappropriate advertising and promotions.

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Nick Kaye, chairman of the NPA, which represents about 6,000 independent community pharmacies, said he hoped the updated advice would “help to protect the safety of patients”.

He added: “It is important to note that the vast majority of pharmacies, including online sellers, already adhere to good practise in this area.”

Phil Day, superintendent pharmacist at Pharmacy2U, said: “As the UK’s largest digital pharmacy, we support any move to improve patient safety, and have been working with the GPhC, CQC and other medical professional bodies to ensure that the appropriate safeguards are in place for this new generation of weight loss drugs.

“Further clarity on the provision and advertising of these services is a welcome step in the right direction for the market, and we are pleased to state that we meet the new GPhC guidance.”

A 15-year-old boy has died after being stabbed at a school in Sheffield.

Police were called to All Saints Catholic High School on Granville Road at 12.17pm on Monday after reports of a stabbing.

South Yorkshire Police said the boy “suffered serious injuries and despite the best efforts of the ambulance service, he sadly died a short time later”. The victim’s family has been informed.

A 15-year-old boy has been detained on suspicion of murder and remains in custody.

Speaking outside the force’s headquarters, Assistant Chief Constable Lindsey Butterfield said: “It is with great sadness that I share with you today, a teenager has died following the stabbing at a Sheffield school earlier today.

“Our thoughts are with the family of the boy, his friends and the whole school community.”

ACC Butterfield said the force’s officers are “working at pace to build a full picture of how this tragedy has unfolded”.

“We know that what has happened will cause significant distress and concern,” she said.

“I would like to reassure you that our officers will remain on scene and in the local area to offer reassurance to parents, staff and local residents as our investigation continues.”

‘Second school lockdown in a week’

It is the second time All Saints Catholic High School has gone into lockdown in a week, the PA news agency reported.

Headteacher Sean Pender sent a message to parents on 29 January, saying: “The reason for the lockdown was due to threatening behaviour between a small number of students where threats were made of physical violence.”

A 2023 Ofsted report rated the school, which had 1,398 pupils at the time, as “good”.

Inspectors found that most pupils behaved well and “a strong ethos of warmth and respect pervades this school”.

‘Avoid speculation’ – police

Meanwhile, ACC Butterfield warned the public to avoid sharing distressing content related to the stabbing on social media.

She said: “We urge you to be mindful that there are loved ones at the centre of this, and they are grieving the profound loss of a teenage boy in the most devastating of circumstances.

“We would therefore ask you to avoid speculation and the sharing of online content, which could be distressing to them and detrimental to our investigation.

“We urge anyone with any information that they believe can assist us to get in touch.”

Granville Road was closed from the tram stop to Fitzwalter Road, and police asked the public to avoid the area while emergency services carried out their work.

Education secretary Bridget Phillipson said she was “devastated” to hear about the stabbing.

“My heart goes out to his family, friends and the entire school community at this distressing time,” she said.

“We are in contact with the school and council to offer support. Investigations are now under way.”

‘Serious questions need answering’

Sheffield Heeley MP Louise Haigh has said “serious questions will have to be answered” after the “horrific news” of the fatal stabbing.

“A criminal investigation will now obviously take place, but serious questions will have to be answered about how this could have happened and I will be working with the school, the police and the council to make sure they are.”

South Yorkshire’s mayor, Oliver Coppard, said: “This morning a teenage boy went to school like thousands of others across South Yorkshire but won’t come home; a young man who was a member of our community, with his whole life ahead of him.

“The vast majority of our young people don’t carry knives, but one incidence of knife crime is one too many, because when we do see knife crime happen all too often the consequences are utterly devastating, as they have been today.”

A former British soldier who escaped from Wandsworth prison while awaiting trial for spying for Iran has been jailed for 14 years and three months.

Daniel Khalife, 23, sparked a nationwide manhunt after clinging to the underside of a food delivery lorry to break out of the Category B jail on 6 September last year.

He evaded capture for three days before he was spotted riding a stolen mountain bike along the canal towpath in Northolt, west London – about 14 miles away.

Khalife, who was a lance corporal in the Royal Signals, was being held on remand accused of using his role in the military to pass secret information to Iranian spies.

He was arrested after telling the British security services he wanted to be a “double agent” and claimed he had cultivated the relationship over more than two years in the national interest.

But he was found guilty of a charge under the Official Secrets Act and another under the Terrorism Act at the end of last year at Woolwich Crown Court, having admitted escaping from lawful custody part-way through his trial.

Sentencing as it happened

Sentencing Khalife, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told him: “When you joined the Army as a young man, you had the makings of an exemplary soldier. However, through the repeated violation of your oath of service, you showed yourself to be, instead, a dangerous fool.”

She added: “You embarked on the course of conduct I have described because of a selfish desire to show off, to achieve by unregulated means what you were told will be difficult for you to achieve by conventional promotion.

“The mere fact that you started on this dangerous and fantastical plan demonstrates your immaturity and lack of wisdom, that you thought it was appropriate to insert yourself – an unauthorised, unqualified and uninformed junior soldier – into communication with an enemy state is perhaps the clearest indication of the degree of folly in your failure to understand at the most obvious level the risk you posed.”

She said he would have been a blackmail risk for his whole career had he not been caught.

The judge said Khalife contacted MI5 and MI6 in his attempts to become a double agent but was ignored. She added: “The greater mischief in your offending is that, having failed to engage any response from the intelligence services of the United Kingdom, you continued betraying your country and exposed others to the possibility of harm.”

There was no reaction from Khalife, who looked down as the judge read out his sentence.

The court heard Khalife, from Kingston, in southwest London, joined the Army aged 16, before contacting an Iranian middle-man through Facebook.

Giving evidence, he said he wanted to prove himself after a senior officer told him he would not be able to work in intelligence because his mother was born in Iran.

Khalife left material in public locations in exchange for cash in an old-fashioned spy tactic known as the “dead drop” or “dead letter box”.

He told his handlers he would stay in the military for 25-plus years for them and twice travelled from his barracks, in Staffordshire, to the Iranian embassy in South Kensington, in London.

The court heard he flew to Istanbul, where he stayed in the Hilton hotel between 4 and 10 August 2020, and “delivered a package” for Iranian agents.

The contact continued while he was deployed to Fort Hood, Texas, where he received training in Falcon, a military communications system and even after he was arrested and released on bail.

Khalife told the jury he was an English “patriot” and “not a terrorist or a traitor,” claiming he “thought he could be James Bond” but had only passed on fake or useless information.

But prosecutors said he “exposed military personnel to serious harm” when he shared sensitive information including a handwritten list of serving soldiers, including some in the SAS and SBS special services.

Khalife’s spying activities will not go down in the “annals of history,” his barrister told the court at his sentencing.

Gul Nawaz Hussain KC reminded the judge how they described his actions as more Scooby Doo than James Bond, adding: “What Daniel Khalife clearly chose to do was not born of malice, was not born of greed, religious fervour or ideological conviction.

“His intentions were neither sinister nor cynical.”

Mr Hussain told the court some of the documents Khalife had forged to pass to the Iranians were “laughably fake”.

Police said he had been planning his “pretty audacious” escape for “quite some time” and the court heard he wrote in his prison diary of a “failed” attempt on 21 August last year.

Khalife, who got a job in the prison kitchen, said he used the trousers inmates wore as uniform, to make a rope, which he attached to the Bidfood lorry on 1 September to test prison security as it made its daily deliveries.

“When I had made the decision to actually leave the prison I was going to do it properly,” he said, describing how he concealed himself, resting his back on the sling as the vehicle was searched.

The driver Balazs Werner said two guards told him someone was missing as they checked the truck with a torch and mirror and he was surprised he was allowed to drive off and that the prison was not in lockdown.

Khalife said he waited for the lorry to stop, dropped to the ground and lay in the prone position until it moved off.

MI5, the Ministry of Defence and counter-terrorism police launched a nationwide manhunt, fearing Khalife would try to flee to Tehran or get to the Iranian embassy in London.

He used the phone at the Rose of York pub in Richmond before a contact withdrew £400 from a nearby cashpoint, which he used to buy a sleeping bag, a mobile phone and a change of clothes.

CCTV footage captured his movements as he bought clothes from Marks & Spencer, stole a hat from Mountain Warehouse, drank coffee at McDonald’s and even read about his escape in the newspaper.

The court heard that while he was on the run, Khalife was in contact with his Iranian handlers, who used the code name “David Smith”, and he sent the message: “I wait.”

When he was arrested on the footpath of the Grand Union Canal on 9 September Khalife told police: “My body aches. I f****d myself up under the lorry” and “I don’t know how immigrants do it”.

He told jurors his time on the run showed “what a foolish idea it was to have someone of my skillset in prison”.