Unorthodox campaign is challenging the ruling party’s 12-year reign with a bold democratic experiment
On a cool autumn evening, a team of Serbian student volunteers went canvassing in the housing estates of Krnjača, a Belgrade suburb. They were equipped with lanyards emblazoned with the word “victory”, a stock list of questions and a mobile app that mapped visited homes and the level of support in each.
The volunteers were part of a mass student movement, Student List, that has rocked Serbia with two years of constant protests. On Sunday, the group will represent the most serious challenge Aleksandar Vučić has faced in his 12 increasingly authoritarian years in power, by putting forward their own candidates in parliamentary elections.
During a summer fire that destroyed homes in Stourbridge, low pressure meant filling a water carrier took 40 minutes
Concerns have been raised about how drought affects the UK’s ability to cope with wildfires after MPs were told firefighters struggled for water supplies during this year’s record summer.
The government has been urged to set out water companies’ statutory responsibilities during major fire incidents to improve the country’s preparedness for the years ahead.
Rights groups say the planned 1.4km route, which ends at compound run by far-right settler group Elad, will displace Palestinians and reshape the cultural landscape
A fifth foreign company has pulled out of a plan to build a cable car from West to East Jerusalem that threatens to involve the seizure of land and property rights from dozens of Palestinian families along its route, but local authorities insist the scheme is proceeding as planned.
The project appeared to have stalled for four years until late September, just weeks before Israel’s 27 October elections, when the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA) issued a notice of intent to award a contract without a public tender to ROPES, a cable car engineering consultancy based in South Tyrol, Italy.
The head of the Australian federal police has condemned a “febrile” political environment that has seen one person charged every week over the alleged threatening of MPs, as Victoria announces new steps to protect politicians.
But the AFP and Victoria police insist they had no intelligence to suggest 43-year-old Brendan Nugent would go on to allegedly drive a Toyota LandCruiser into the independent MP Helen Haines in a targeted attack.
A group of self-appointed guardians wearing hi-vis and carrying selfie sticks watch over the animal that has been trapped for a month, drawing more than 1.6 million visitors
In South Korea, they call them jagyeongdan, a word that sits somewhere between a vigilante group and aneighbourhood watch.
Each night they don hi-vis vests, pick up their selfie sticks, and gather around the harbour in Busan to keep watch over an unlikely charge: a stranded shark affectionately known as Bukang-i.
Research shows how seeing bigger violations by others can lead people to increase their own rule-breaking
From politicians taking bribes to bullying and harassment in City firms, leaders have been quick to label those who break the rules as the odd “bad apple”. But new research backs up the idiom that one bad apple can spoil the barrel.
Researchers have found that when people go beyond the rule-breaking they see in others, general compliance can swiftly turn into widespread rule-breaking.
Given that water is 1,000 times denser than air, moving through those two mediums requires very different mechanics—or so one might assume. Yet birds like gulls and puffins can plunge into the sea, swim underwater, and leap back into the air to fly away. And now engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can do likewise.
The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is equipped with a central fuselage, two flexible wings, and a steerable tail. The body contains a battery and a waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies. The wings are made of thin membranes that are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles to help wick away water. And the tail is motorized, enabling it to change its angle to help the robot fly up or dive down.
In experiments carried out in a water tank and at Lake Geneva, a team led by Raphael Zufferey, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, identified combinations of wing size, flapping frequency, and tail angle that enable the robot to smoothly transition from swimming to flying.
The best results came with medium-size wings that were flexible enough to minimize flapping amplitude in water and also firm enough to keep the robot aloft in the air. The speeds and flapping frequencies were similar to those used by actual birds, and a pitch of 70 degrees—a relatively steep angle—allowed the robot to make the leap from water to air. Interestingly, although many diving birds paddle their feet to help them take off from the water’s surface, the team found that the bot didn’t need feet at all.
The engineers’ results could help pave the way for a new class of drones and vehicles that could fly to and sample from aquatic regions too dangerous for traditional vessels to access.
“Our dream vision is for oceanographers, marine biologists, and members of coastal communities to launch this robot from a boat, or from shore, and it would fly close to the area of interest, such as an iceberg or a port facility, or over a pod of whales,” says Zufferey. “It would dive into the water to take a measurement or collect a sample, and fly back to deliver the data at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Then it could go back out to dive for more.”
The researchers are now trying to design wings that can turn as well as flap. They will also test the robot’s performance under turbulent conditions, such as swimming in choppy waters and flying through wind. Then they hope to deploy the vehicle to help answer questions in ocean science.
“One of the major challenges in ocean science is collecting data both frequently and across many locations, which is something this robot could do in the future,” Zufferey says. “You could send this out not just every week, but every hour. It could fly out at high speeds, dive in, fly back, deliver its data, and go back out, multiple times.”
When Tristan Brown, an associate professor of history at MIT, first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed at Old South Meeting House, he had no reason to doubt its story. Descendants of the Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label in 1987, saying it had been recovered after colonial protesters threw tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.
But after a year of research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later. The decisive clue came when he read the Chinese text in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, as previous scholars had done. He found that the characters had been used phonetically, in slightly variant forms across contemporary sources, to represent the name of Smith, Archer & Co., a US firm that acquired Asian tea for shipment to American markets during the 1860s and 1870s.
COURTESY OF MIT GLOBAL HUMANITIES
Working with the Wells family, he traced the label to a relative who traveled from Michigan to California during the Gold Rush era before returning and operating a business known as the California Tea Store. Brown argues that claims for its revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s.
The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant, he says. Instead, what began as an inquiry into a supposed artifact of the Boston Tea Party became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made.
“History is never finished,” he says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.”
The average American throws out around 81 pounds of clothing each year, and there are few options for recycling it. MIT engineers hope to cut down on that textile waste with a new type of yarn.
The thermoplastic yarn mimics the properties of conventional elastic yarns, which typically combine spandex with polyester or nylon. Those fibers would have to be separated for recycling—a process that isn’t practical. But the MIT team found a way to create a similarly stretchy yarn from two variations of polyethylene, a material commonly used in milk jugs and grocery bags. Because they come from the same chemical family, the yarn can be melted as is. Svetlana Boriskina, who led the work as a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, says a garment made from this material could then be spun into new yarn for a next generation of clothing. Even after 10 cycles of melting and respinning, the yarn stays as strong and flexible as conventional thread.
“Now we have something that can be knitted and woven,” Boriskina says. “That is the next stage.” Someday, the researchers hope, a polyethylene garment could be dropped in a collection bin and sent to a recycling facility, promoting a more sustainable, circular textile economy.
A high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can help some people lose weight, and some research has shown that it may protect against colon cancer. But a new study suggests that such a ketogenic diet may also increase the risk of cancer in the small intestine.
This type of diet forces the body to burn fatty acids instead of carbohydrates for fuel, producing by-products called ketone bodies. One of these, BHB, was thought to be responsible for the protective effect observed against colon cancer.
Omer Yilmaz, director of the MIT Stem Cell Initiative, worked with colleagues including MIT postdocs Jessica Shay and Fangtao Chi to investigate whether the effects were similar in the small intestine. But instead, they found that mice on a ketogenic diet were more likely to develop tumors in that part of the gastrointestinal system than those on a control diet were.
Additional studies revealed that this tumor growth was driven by the way intestinal cells burn dietary fat for energy—a metabolic pathway called fatty acid oxidation. This pathway activates proteins that signal stem cells to multiply more rapidly.
“Having more stem cells means that when you injure the small intestine, it can repair itself better, but the downside is that having more active stem cells can lead to tumor formation,” Yilmaz says.
Though the researchers confirmed that a ketogenic diet suppressed the development of colon tumors, their findings suggest that ketone bodies are not involved. “These molecules are essentially metabolic bystanders,” Yilmaz says.
One implication is that commercial ketone supplements probably do little to either help or harm people who take them. But the deeper issue is “why the same diet has opposite consequences in two adjacent parts of the gut,” Chi says. “That is what we are working to understand next.”
Whatever they discover, as Yilmaz says, “the message here is that we need to be very careful in generalizing the effects that these diets can have.”
Strokes leave 5 million people with long-term impairments each year, and a growing shortage of physical therapists makes it hard for them to get the care they need. A new approach tries to solve that problem by combining artificial intelligence and human therapy.
Johannes Lachner, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Purdue University, and Noah Geiger, a former visiting student at MIT, developed a robotic system that uses generative AI and real-time force feedback to learn from real therapists. Drawing on what it’s learned, it gives patients just the right amount of assistance during physical rehabilitation exercises like reaching, lifting their arms, and performing tasks of daily living.
The goal is “not to replace therapists, but to extend their reach,” Lachner says.
“Initial robotic experiments have already demonstrated the feasibility of this approach,” he reports. “The next phase of the project aims to develop therapist-specific models and evaluate them in a long-term clinical study with the same patients who previously received manual therapy.” Beyond that, he envisions possible applications in contact-rich industrial settings or collaborative workspaces.
In corporate America, Stanley Anderson ’79 says, executives often assume that their peers grew up in privileged circumstances.
He did not.
“I spent my early years trying not to get recruited into gangs, getting shot at, watching my friends get murdered, and thinking that if I don’t leave, I will die,” says Anderson, who was raised in Chicago. “I was fortunate to survive.”
But he thrived, building an impressive career at the likes of HP, Intel, and the Palo Alto Research Center. Now he is applying his management expertise as CEO of Costa Pickleball, a Las Vegas–based startup that sells high-performance paddles in decorative designs. Beyond giving customers a way to, as he says, “bring their identity to the court,” he is also betting on technology: He’s developing a quieter type of paddle he expects will provide a competitive advantage.
Succeeding in today’s pickleball market will be tough, but Anderson thinks he has what it takes, partly thanks to an important lesson he learned at MIT: “There’s nothing you can’t accomplish if you are willing to put effort into it.”
These are images of quizzes I took in 3.091, Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry, in the fall of 1980.
One is my very first exam at MIT, and getting 49 out of 100 was a soul-crushing experience. I can still picture the TA, Leszek Pawlowicz, PhD ’87, returning my paper. He had a big smile on his face, and he said something to the effect of “I expect to see you double your score on the next quiz!”
Well, I got the message. Studying at MIT was not like studying in high school, but I got 100 on the next quiz and graduated with good enough grades to get me into grad school. All it took, it seems, was that initial kick in the seat of my pants, then a kind hand helping me up off the ground.
Recently, I connected with Leszek, and he replied with a charming note. It felt good to let him know how much his encouragement meant to me. A good TA can really have lasting impact!
Growing up on a small farm in Nebraska, Megan Donahue ’85 discovered the wider world by reading her way through her local library. Today, she is learning how the wider universe works by studying galaxy clusters.
Donahue discovered her passion for physics in that library at age 12 and started her path into astronomy thanks to “a providential interaction.” Through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, she got introduced to cutting-edge x-ray imaging—work she found “really cool.”
Now a professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University, she researches galaxy clusters and baryonic matter (matter made of protons and neutrons, as opposed to dark matter) in an effort to learn more about the composition of the universe and its evolution.
“Clusters of galaxies are very large scoops of the universe,” says Donahue, who served as president of the American Astronomical Society from 2018 to 2020. “It’s like taking a sample from the ocean. If you’re trying to find out the average composition of the ocean’s water, you’d want to study as big a scoop as possible.”
Alissa Totman ’13 was a sophomore when she joined MIT BrainTrust, a student-run organization that connects Institute undergraduates and people with brain injuries for support and socializing. “That group was a great way to learn about the human experience of what people go through when they experience a brain injury,” she says. And it laid the foundation for her life’s work.
Today, Totman is a physician specializing in brain injury medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where she treats adults with head trauma, stroke, brain tumors, and more.
She is also the founder of Synapse, a nonprofit focused on providing support for such individuals. The organization grew out of a group she started with Jaclyn Konopka ’14 during medical school at Stanford, and Totman launched it as a national service organization in 2016, while pursuing her master’s degree in public health at Harvard.
There are now chapters at 28 universities across the country—and Totman still runs the organization. “There’s a big need for more resources like this,” she says.
Tomás Villalón Jr. ’14 was raised in San Antonio, Texas, but vividly remembers smog hanging over the city his family came from—Monterrey, Mexico, a steel manufacturing and metal fabrication hub. Even as a child, he realized it was problematic to breathe that air.
“I’m motivated because I’ve seen what metal-making does,” says Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering. He started thinking about sustainable metallurgy senior year while working at Boston Metal, an MIT spinoff focused on decarbonizing steelmaking. In 2019 he cofounded Phoenix Tailings, which has developed an efficient process for extracting rare earth metals from mining waste.
“The mining ecosystem by itself makes over several billion tons of waste,” says Villalón, who serves as chief technology officer. (Others on the founding team are Michelle Chao ’17, Nick Myers, and Anthony Balladon.) “We have to get rid of this pollution.”
The company asserts that its proprietary electrochemical technique for processing rare earths generates no toxins and is carbon-free when fueled by renewables.
The billionaire Michael Bloomberg will spend $80m to help Democratic candidates in the midterm elections, US media reported on Tuesday, a significant infusion of cash for a party that has recently struggled with fundraising as it seeks to win control of Congress.
The reported donations came as Donald Trump announced on Tuesday he intended to spend a total of $400m to aid Republican candidates, with $300m already disbursed.
The hit Elizabeth Holmes documentary led to increased interest in the award-winning narrative series on Hulu as well as Bad Blood, a 2018 book on the scandal
Interest in Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos fraud scandal has surged amid buzz for You Can See Everything, the record-breaking documentary on the disgraced former CEO.
Viewership for The Dropout, the 2022 Hulu series starring Amanda Seyfried as Holmes, surged by 186% in September compared with the month prior, according to Variety, after the announcement on 6 September of the previously secret film’s first teaser.
Government expected to accept recommendations of review, which found three in five Jewish students had experienced prejudice
Schools and colleges in England will be expected to take a tougher stance against antisemitism after a report found that three out of five Jewish students said they had been affected.
Sir David Bell, the former chief inspector of Ofsted who was commissioned by the government to lead the independent review, said he found many cases of antisemitism going unreported or unchallenged by students and teachers.
Scott Kirby says wealth inequality is a ‘danger to society’ and calls for inheritance tax in recent interview
Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, is under scrutiny from conservative politicians and commentators for saying wealth inequality is a “danger to society” and calling for a national wealth and inheritance tax in a recent interview.
Talking to the New York Times, Kirby was asked about the growing public distrust of CEOs and whether he felt any responsibility to quell that distrust.
Advance warnings of missile attacks were seemingly suspended last week by the White House, but Ukraine’s president says: ‘Now it works’
The US has resumed sharing intelligence with Kyiv about Russian missile strikes, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday after a meeting with the US envoy Steve Witkoff in Norway.
He said Ukraine was again receiving advance warnings of ballistic missile attacks, which were seemingly suspended last week by the White House. “Now it works. It’s great,” he said, adding that the US move would save lives.
Exclusive: Admission from James Orr to undercover reporter came three months before party was given £72m
A senior Reform UK official raised questions about whether major donations from billionaire backers Christopher Harborne and Ben Delo would be legal under the proposed new foreign donors cap three months before they gave £72m to the party.
James Orr, who was then Reform UK’s head of policy and a Cambridge professor, discussed potential difficulties around future donations from Harborne and Delo in undercover footage captured by the investigative reporting group Verbatim.
The Jackdaw gasfield will be given the go-ahead on Wednesday, signalling Andy Burnham’s commitment to the North Sea fossil fuel industry and threatening to trigger a row with climate campaigners and Labour MPs.
Miatta Fahnbulleh and John Healey, the energy secretary and chancellor respectively, will make the announcement from Aberdeen on Wednesday morning after more than a year of deliberations over whether doing so would violate the UK’s climate commitments.
Woman says alleged assault at comedian’s London home was one of most painful experiences of her life
A woman has said she “couldn’t speak or breathe” when Russell Brand raped her at his London townhouse after picking her out from a crowd after one of his gigs, a court has heard.
She said the comedian looked “horrified” after the alleged attack so she assumed he would apologise but instead he told her: “Clear up the mess you’ve made.”
Counter-terrorism police say 24 and 25-year-old from central London detained under 2023 National Security Act
Counter-terrorism police have re-arrested two men from central London accused of helping Iranian intelligence as part of the investigation into events at RAF Fairford last month.
A 24-year-old UK national and a 25-year-old UK/Iranian national, both from Westminster, were detained on suspicion of assisting a foreign intelligence service in breach of the 2023 National Security Act, police said.
Mounting anxiety as Russia’s war on Ukraine reaches Nato’s borders with targeting of vessels transporting agricultural cargo
Nato is deploying additional military assets to the Black Sea amid the recent deadly escalation of Russian attacks on merchant shipping, as five more vessels were attacked on Tuesday.
Russia’s military said it struck three cargo vessels in Ukraine’s port of Reni and two other cargo vessels en route to Odesa.
Voters’ emphatic rejection of separation strengthens Mark Carney’s energy strategy in the face of a US trade war and threats
Canadians are proving to be a voice of sanity. In roundly rejecting the idea of separating from Canada, voters in the oil- and gas-rich province of Alberta sensibly backed the nation-building strategy of the prime minister, Mark Carney. He has put Alberta at the centre of his plan to make Canada an energy superpower that is “much less dependent on the United States”.
Donald Trump’s trade war and threats last week to make Canada the 51st US state were a fillip for Mr Carney in Alberta, a landlocked western province where Liberal prime ministers have historically been unpopular. The stakes were high: a successful separatist campaign would have handed Mr Trump leverage over Canada’s resource belt. The result instead lets Mr Carney cast Alberta’s mineral wealth as a national asset, rather than allow separatists to define it as a regional grievance.
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Five-month-old Esta High died at Leeds General Infirmary in November 2023 after doctors put her symptoms down to Covid-19
A baby girl who died from meningitis may have been saved if doctors had tested her for the infection sooner, rather than putting her symptoms down to Covid, an inquest jury has found.
Five-month-old Esta High died at Leeds General Infirmary in November 2023, days after she was taken into the emergency department with a high temperature and vomiting.
A man has been charged after the Australian MP Helen Haines was allegedly attacked with a car outside her electorate office in the state of Victoria.
Haines, who is an independent MP, has lost one leg as a result of the incident and surgeons were fighting on Tuesday to save the other leg. Police say 43-year-old Brendan Nugent has been charged with dangerous driving causing serious injury, intentionally causing serious injury and causing harm to a commonwealth public official.
Annie Kelly speaks to Guardian Australia political editor Tom McIlroy
Jurors in harassment trial told reporters who had written about far-right activist feared ‘vigilante attack’
Tommy Robinson told the Daily Mail’s editor he would make the paper’s journalists and their families “famous”, the harassment trial of the far-right activist has been told.
The threat was made in a voicemail message left on the phone of Ted Verity as Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, allegedly waged a campaign of harassment against journalists from the newspaper.
We are all beneficiaries of the slave trade, like it or not. The work that the Guardian is doing on the actions of its founders will enhance the historical record, but it is unlikely to change the broader picture identified by Eric Hobsbawm and others.
Elaine Hoare recalls her mother buying five fish for a shilling, while Michael Heaton draws readers’ attention to an Americanism
Your article (Whale meat curry for dinner? Study of bygone seafood recipes shows how UK tastes have narrowed, 13 October) reminded me of the call of “Fresh herring, fresh herring” from the herring man wheeling his cart in the back lane by our house in Douglas, Isle of Man, in the 1950s. My mother went to him with a bowl and bought herring for tea – five for a shilling, if I remember correctly. They were delicious. We cleaned them, scored each side three or four times, dipped them in oatmeal and fried them. We have a fish man from Grimsby call every Monday, but he never has herring.
Elaine Hoare Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire
• I am perplexed by the Marine Conservation Society’s suggestion that we should eat “wild-caught sea bass” as an alternative to cod (Scale back on hake and coley, seafood charity tells shoppers, 14 October). First, there is no such fish in Britain: “sea bass” is an Americanism they use to distinguish the marine bass from the several species of inedible freshwater bass in US rivers and lakes. We have only one species: bass. Second, it is insulting to suggest it as an alternative to cod. It is infinitely nicer than cod, but unsuited to battering.
Michael Heaton Warminster, Wiltshire
Our dependence on internet services of a few key tech companies leaves us vulnerable to cloud failures, bugs and more, experts say
It happened again. A power outage hit a datacentre in London, and things cascaded from there: multiple banking services faltered, court hearings were put on hold and patients reported temporary glitches on the NHS app.
The datacentre in question was in Google’s europe-west2-b zone, one of more than a dozen “zones” that the US search giant maintains in Europe to service its clients.
Officers are instruments of state whose job is to repress, rather than manage, public dissent
Familiar images of teargas clouds drifting across Paris squares, police baton charges against masked protesters and terrified teenagers floored – and worse – by stun grenades have once again focused the world’s attention on France’s policing methods.
While most of its western European neighbours generally favour police tactics that prioritise crowd containment and de-escalation, France has long responded to social movements that take to the streets with, at times, shocking physical force.
Union furious as bank scraps remote-first policy from February 2027, forcing all UK employees to come in at least twice a week
NatWest has ordered 13,000 staff to increase their in-office days from two days a month to two days a week, angering its staff union.
The banking group, which serves customers under the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Ulster Bank and Coutts brands, will require all of its nearly 40,000 UK staff to follow a strict two days a week office schedule from February 2027, abolishing a remote-first policy for thousands of employees.
Duke of Sussex says ‘there’s enough drama in the world’ without continuing to have issues with family
The Duke of Sussex wants to repair his difficult relationship with his father and brother, he has said.
Speaking to GQ magazine in New York, Prince Harry said of his complicated relationship with William and King Charles that from a family perspective it was a “massively relatable issue for so many people”.
Far-right presidential candidate’s TV debate swipe at rival backfires as people take to social media to parody it
To Flávio Bolsonaro and his publicists, it must have seemed an ingenious idea that would expose his rival’s supposed crookedness on the eve of Brazil’s presidential election.
But the far-right politician’s decision to attend a primetime television debate against his leftwing opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with the word “corrupto” (corrupt) written on the palm of his hand has backfired.
Lawyers tell inquiry that patients’ lives are at stake through improper use of Oxevision system for most vulnerable
Families bereaved by the misuse of an “intrusive” camera monitoring system for vulnerable patients used in half of England’s mental health wards have called for it to be banned to help prevent more avoidable deaths.
Lawyers for the families said “patients’ lives are at stake” by the continuing use of Oxevision, the Lampard inquiry into mental health deaths in Essex heard on Tuesday.
City’s Beatles Story museum to move to 100,000 sq ft new home and official ownership, along with Yellow Submarine makeover of Liverpool’s second-tallest building
Liverpool is to unveil a new 100,000 sq ft visitor attraction about the Beatles, in plans hailed as “extraordinary” by Paul McCartney, and by Andy Burnham as having “the kind of ambition I want to see more of across Britain”.
Opening in 2028, the project is a huge upgrade for the Beatles Story, a museum which opened in Liverpool’s Royal Albert Dock in 1990. Ownership will now pass to the Beatles company Apple Corps, making the Beatles Story the band’s first official fan experience in their home city.
The administration seems intent on stripping the congresswoman of her US citizenship and deporting her. It’s a terrible abuse of power
What do you think it is about Ilhan Omar, exactly, that seems to get under Donald Trump’s tangerine-tinted skin? The president has claimed he has a problem with the progressive Democratic congresswoman because she is “unpatriotic” to the US and “disrespectful … to Israel”. However, the extent of his animus towards Omar, the first Somali American in Congress, suggests there’s more to it. Trump has insisted he is “the least racist person there is anywhere in the world”, so I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she’s brown and Muslim. Truly, it’s a mystery.
Whatever the reason, Trump’s not a fan. The president has plenty of enemies, but few have been attacked as ferociously and consistently over the years as Omar. He’s called her “garbage”, among other nasty names, suggested (without evidence) that she married her brother, and said she “should be thrown the hell out of our country”. His supporters have echoed his calls to deport Omar, who fled war-torn Somalia as a child and became a naturalised US citizen at 17.
Television channels BBC Three and BBC Scotland are to close and the Radio 4 Extra radio station will be scrapped, as part of the corporation’s drive to cut £500m in costs.
Both TV channels are to move online as executives try to plug a funding crisis and adapt the broadcaster’s output for audiences that increasingly watch content on demand. All three outlets will close in the spring.
Is your television listening to every conversation? Filling your home with highly invasive ads? Some viewers have had enough of tech violating their privacy
When Dan had had enough of his television, he threw a rock straight through the screen. The offence? His smart TV was downloading its third update in three days. “It drove me crazy with what seemed like daily software updates that never fixed anything and ‘features’ that never seemed to work,” says the 71-year-old from Illinois. “And of course, constantly trying to push me to subscribe to paid-for services when all I wanted to do was watch over-the-air TV, play a DVD or stream something from my computer.”
Some may accuse Dan of being a luddite, but his master’s degree in computer science and decades of experience in telecommunications would suggest otherwise. “The tech is not intimidating,” he explains, “just increasingly enshittified.”
Conflict in Middle East is pushing jet fuel costs higher and many carriers are not hedged against such increases, Michael O’Leary says
Ryanair’s chief executive has predicted a record increase in European air fares next year, as airlines grapple with fuel bills pushed higher by the Middle East conflict.
Many carriers are not hedged against rising jet fuel costs, Michael O’Leary said, which he predicted would lead to airline bankruptcies and takeovers. He forecast these pressures would result in the price of plane tickets rising by as much as 20%.
Flutter says one in 10 UK and Ireland workers at risk of redundancy because of a ‘material increase in betting and gaming duties’
The gambling company behind Paddy Power and Sky Bet has announced up to 1,400 job cuts, blaming tax rises imposed by Rachel Reeves.
Flutter Entertainment revealed plans on Tuesday to restructure its UK and Ireland division, affecting staff in Leeds, Dublin and Sunderland. Redundancies are also expected to hit offices in Porto in Portugal and Cluj-Napoca in Romania.
Olivia Colman goes vulpine, Rupert Grint’s newborn is a monster and Joko Anwar makes a warmhearted violent ghost story set in an Indonesian prison
If I’d ever wanted children, the films showing at the 59th edition of the International Fantastic film festival of Catalonia in the coastal town of Sitges, south of Barcelona, would have soon set me straight. This year’s recurring themes were explosive parturition, chewed-up nipples and the fruit of the womb turning out to be at best sociopathic, at worst inhuman.
The theme was celebrated in an evil-kiddy exhibition at the Miramar Cultural Centre, marking the 50th anniversary of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s “fantaterror” classic Who Can Kill a Child?, some of which was filmed in Sitges itself. The expo traced the subgenre from 1956’s The Bad Seed, via Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, to this year’s Nightborn, in which poor Rupert Grint, as the hapless husband, is no match for the developing folk-horror bond between his depressed wife, their newborn “child”, and the spooky forest surrounding their house. Finnish director Hanna Bergholm, in her introduction, confessed it was inspired by her experiences of motherhood. Only up to a point, one hopes.
Services restored for most users, but power fault stalled hearings and left Revolut, Lloyds and HSBC customers unable to pay or move money
An outage at Google’s cloud services in the UK has caused widespread disruption, hitting courts and leaving millions of customers unable to access or send cash at banks including Lloyds, HSBC and Revolut.
Google blamed a “power event” for the failure at its London-based Cloud computing operations on Tuesday, which affected its “europe-west2-b zone”.
Italy’s deputy prime minister said police will be able to detain under-18s for 12 hours, even if they have not committed a crime
Nordic correspondent
As well as Steve Witkoff, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy will also meet the Norwegian prime minister, Jonas Gahr Støre and the Finnish president Alexander Stubb and Norway’s new King Haakon during his visit to Oslo.
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