Zheng breaks: Sabalenka 1-2 Zheng* (*denotes next server)
A lovely touch drop volley from Zheng and she’s got a sniff at 0-30 on Sabalenka’s serve. “It’s a good tactic on the slow clay,” says Chris Evert on the commentary. I could listen to her all day. And there’s an “ooooh” from Chrissie when Zheng’s forehand smacks the sideline for a winner! 15-40, two break points. Zheng unwinds with an inside-out forehand … and then comes forward a few steps to wallop another inside-outer and there’s the break!
Author and Charlottesville native Deborah Baker revisits the devastating events of 2017 and examines how they speak to a difficult past
Deborah Baker’s new book, Charlottesville, is about her home town in Virginia, where in summer 2017 white supremacists marched, violence erupted and a counter-protester was murdered. In dizzying detail, Baker charts and reports the chaos. In interludes, she examines the dark history of a city long linked to racist oppression, from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Robert E Lee and slavery to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and resistance to civil rights reform.
Putting it all together was a new challenge for a writer whose books include In Extremis, a biography of the 20th-century poet Laura Riding, and A Blue Hand: The Beats in India.
The Spurs and Spain defender talks about the suffering before Bilbao, Ange Postecoglou’s future and playing France in the Nations League semi-finals
Pedro Porro had to take a pee. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” the Tottenham Hotspur defender says and then he laughs, which he does a lot. It was late in Bilbao and in the home dressing room at San Mamés, up the tunnel and to the right, players divided by metal bars, the party had begun. But he had been selected for the drugs test and was stuck in a much smaller and much, much quieter room, drinking as much possible as quickly as possible until he could go. And that, he says, took ages. “It was hard for me. You’ve just won something huge, you have all your family there, all your teammates, all the people and … ”
And the party would have to wait. Porro missed those moments but at last they did all come together, the Europa League champions in their kit – “clean,” Porro adds swiftly – and winners’ medals round their necks, families joining them dancing downstairs at the Carlton Hotel, a mile east of the stadium where they won the tournament. Around 3am, someone turned the main lights on, so someone else turned them off again; some didn’t stop until they reached Tottenham High Road the next day, although he wasn’t one of them. “We wanted to carry on a bit, that’s normal,” Porro says, “although I had to go because my little daughter was tired. It had been a long, hard year and it was lovely to celebrate together.”
Since the war in Gaza and the expanding occupation of the West Bank, a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians feels more distant than ever. In this three-part series, the reporter Matthew Cassel travels along the 1949 Armistice border, or ‘Green Line’, once seen as the best hope for a resolution. He meets Palestinians and Israelis living just kilometres apart, but shaped by vastly different realities. This first episode begins in East Jerusalem, a city at the heart of the conflict
Everyone might be talking about the new title from gaming’s favourite plumber, but there’s at least one other interesting original launching with the new console this week
The interesting thing about console launches is that you never know what unexpected treasures will emerge from the first batch of games. Who could have foretold that the hero of the PlayStation launch would be a fireworks simulation (Fantavision), or that the most joyous title in the initial GameCube lineup would involve simians racing each other in giant transparent globes (Super Monkey Ball)?
The latest example could well be Konami’s Survival Kids, the only new third-party game in the Switch 2 opening wave. It’s the latest in the publisher’s cult series of tropical island survival sims, which began on the Game Boy Color and, despite never really attracting vast global success, continued on to the Nintendo DS under a new name, Lost in Blue. Now it’s back as a familyfriendly co-op survival adventure, in which groups of up to four players are shipwrecked on a mysterious archipelago, and must survive by gathering resources, crafting tools, finding food and exploring a series of lush, cartoonish environments. Four people can play online, but the game also supports Switch 2’s game sharing, which lets one person who owns the game connect wirelessly with other consoles to play together.
Yuccas are drought-tolerant, so excess moisture can lead to stress or root rot
What’s the problem?
My daughter has a yucca plant on her landing, and while the lower side looks fine, the taller side is struggling. She suspects her partner might have overwatered it. Any advice?
Diagnosis
Yuccas are drought-tolerant and sensitive to overwatering, and yellowing leaves, soft areas on the trunk or drooping stems are all indicators of this. Excess moisture often leads to stress or root rot. This may explain why the taller side, which perhaps has deeper roots so sits in wet soil longer, is suffering more noticeably.
New Zealand’s former PM made history as the first world leader to attend the general assembly meeting with a newborn. In the second extract from her book, she writes about her worry that the image would become a banner for ‘women doing it all’
Seventy-two hours after our daughter, Neve, was born, Clarke and I held a press conference to introduce her to the world. We planned the whole thing before I gave birth, and I’d been sure it would be fine. Kate Middleton did it, I’d thought. I can make it work.
Now that I’d just given birth, it did not feel fine.
Bruno Fernandes is pretty much the only person to come out of Manchester United’s season with any credit, and it turns out that has got Al-Hilal’s scouting boffins very excited, so much so that the Saudi club have reportedly offered a £100m transfer fee and a total wage package of £200m over three years to land the Portuguese. That sort of money for a player who turns 31 in September is not bad going for any party (apart from Al-Hilal), but Fernandes has – according to Fabrizio Romano – rejected the move as he “wants to play at [the] top level in Europe”. There’s a joke there somewhere about Manchester United and the “top level in Europe” but the Mill isn’t going to stoop. Fernandes was pictured at the birthday party of João Cancelo, who plays for Al-Hilal, over the weekend and now both have joined up with the Portuguese national side for their Nations League semi-final against Germany on Wednesday evening.
One man that could join Fernandes at Manchester United is Bryan Mbeumo after his 20-goal season for Brentford. The Cameroon international has interest from Champions League sides Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle but is said to favour a move to Old Trafford. United are expected to open talks with Mbeumo in the next few weeks but will likely have to sell before they buy: Marcus Rashford and Rasmus Højlund are both being linked with Inter, with the Dane previously shining in Serie A for Atalanta.
The UK’s economic growth will be slower than expected this year and next as the damage caused by Donald Trump’s tariff war hits trade and investment, according to a gloomy forecast by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The international body downgraded its expectations for this year and next from a forecast made in March, pushing down UK growth from 1.4% to 1.3% in 2025 and from 1.2% to 1% next year. Constraints on Whitehall spending and higher than expected inflation also played a part in a downgrade, the OECD said.
Coalition leaders call decision by Geert Wilders to withdraw from alliance over immigration policy ‘irresponsible’
The Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders has pulled his party out of the country’s four-party ruling coalition in a row over immigration and asylum policy, signalling the imminent end of the Netherlands’ 11-month-old government.
Wilders, whose anti-Islam Freedom party (PVV) finished first in parliamentary elections in late 2023, said on Tuesday he had informed the prime minister, Dick Schoof, that all PVV ministers would leave the government.
Adventurous Amber spotted by two men in a boat in Poole Harbour after travelling across Hampshire and Dorset
An adventurous dog who went missing for 36 days and covered about 100 miles before swimming to an island, has returned from her extended walkies after being rescued by a passing ferry.
Amber, a five-year-old retriever cross, had been rescued as a street puppy in Qatar by a charity and moved to the UK but went missing after only one night with her new foster family near Bramshaw, in the New Forest.
‘King of herrings’ is one of ocean’s longest fish and can grow to eight metres long, living at depths up to 500m in the open sea
At first it looked like a great silver streak on the sand. An oarfish, fantastically long and rarely seen, had washed up on Tasmania’s rugged west coast.
Oarfish, one of the ocean’s longest fish, are astonishing creatures that grow up to eight metres long. Nicknamed the “king of herrings” or more unkindly the “doomsday fish”, some legends and stories consider the animals to be harbingers of disaster.
A woman is forced to rethink her childhood after she learns that her mother was denied custody, in a decade blighted by homophobia
For a writer, the 1980s bear rich, dark fruit. The social and political turbulence of the decade provides the perfect landscape for Claire Lynch’s dual-timeline debut novel A Family Matter, which alternates between 1982 and the present day. On the surface, it is the story of a father-daughter relationship. Heron – an elderly man deeply fond of rules and routine – has recently received a terminal cancer diagnosis, but rather than share it with his grownup daughter, Maggie, who now has a family of her own, he chooses to bear the burden alone. As we learn that Heron raised Maggie by himself, it’s clear this urge to shield his only child from harm is a continuous theme. There is no mention of another parent, just that Heron was divorced many decades ago; it’s only when Lynch takes us back to 1982 that we discover the true story.
When Maggie was a toddler, her 23-year-old mother, Dawn, met another woman at a jumble sale. It was a chance encounter, and they clicked. Hazel, a newly qualified primary school teacher, had recently moved to the town, and Dawn was flustered by Hazel’s obvious life experience, feeling that “her mouth was full of all the things she would say if she wasn’t too embarrassed to put herself into words”. Hazel is equally smitten, and as the intensity between the two women grows, it isn’t long before their friendship develops into a romance. A secret romance to begin with, not just because Dawn is married to Heron and her life is dedicated to their beloved Maggie, but because 1980s provincial Britain was far more attached to the idea of a nuclear family than it was to the concept of true love. “You wanted to collect the set, the wedding, the house, the baby?” Hazel asks. “I didn’t know you were allowed not to,” Dawn replies.
Documentary on Columbia unrest of April 2024, when students set up an outdoor camp, is fascinating but much has been superseded by the arrest of student organiser Mahmoud Khalil after the re-election of Trump
The horror of Gaza is approached in this documentary via a story from the Joe Biden era – and it has arguably been overtaken by events. In 2024, students at New York’s Columbia University set up outdoor pro-Palestinian protest encampments, filling East Butler Lawn with tents; this was in the boisterous tradition of the 1960s anti-Vietnam-war campus demonstrations and the Occupy Wall Street movement, demanding an end to Columbia’s direct and indirect investment in Israel. The protests were led by the calm and personable figure of student Mahmoud Khalil and protesters were entitled to point out that Columbia had, after all, divested from Russia over Ukraine.
The protests carried on and spread to other universities in the US, and Columbia president Minouche Shafik came under immense pressure. The encampment escalated to the occupation of a university building, which gave the university authorities the pretext they needed for sending in the NYPD, and the protest was violently, acrimoniously (but not completely) halted.
A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly protected regions free of pesticides
Daniel Janzen only began watching the insects – truly watching them – when his ribcage was shattered. Nearly half a century ago, the young ecologist had been out documenting fruit crops in a dense stretch of Costa Rican forest when he fell in a ravine, landing on his back. The long lens of his camera punched up through three ribs, snapping the bones into his thorax.
Slowly, he dragged himself out, crawling nearly two miles back to the research hut. There were no immediate neighbours, no good roads, no simple solutions for getting to a hospital.
Clubs want to make money and engage fans, but what of the physical toll on tired players and environmental costs?
As the dust settles on Manchester United’s post-season tour of Malaysia and Hong Kong, the question must be asked: was it worth it? United may have pocketed around £10m from their six-day, two-match visit to Asia but what they lost was arguably worse. And no, we’re not just talking about their 1-0 defeat against the “Asean All Stars” in Kuala Lumpur, a scratch, invitational side that had never previously played together.
Omar Berrada, United’s chief executive, had excitedly hailed the tour as an “opportunity for us to collaborate with our valued commercial partners, and to deepen relationships with our fans”. That vision probably didn’t include Amad Diallo sticking his middle finger up at supporters, a gesture for which he refused to apologise, the winger insisting he did it in response to insults about his mother. Nor did it allow for Alejandro Garnacho sulking and yawning through his various off-pitch duties. It remains to be seen how many key performance indicators were met by the Argentinian, who finished the tour by posting a one-word caption on the runway as United departed home to Europe: “finally”.
England talisman’s majestic innings against West Indies shows he still has worlds he wants to conquer
The winning moment is perfect. Perfect in concept, in balance, in execution, in placement, in flourish. The ball disappears through mid-on, and before it has even reached the boundary the lid is off and the smile is unsheathed, and for some reason it matters a great deal that the stroke to complete a towering one-day chase of 309 is not a wallop or a swipe, but an artful on-drive for four.
But then for all his brilliance, there has always been a pleasingly jarring quality to Root in limited‑overs cricket, even a kind of quiet defiance. His match‑winning 166 against the West Indies on Sunday was perhaps his greatest white-ball innings, but above all it was simply a Joe Root innings, all gentle nudges and classical drives, timing over power, manoeuvrability over muscularity, a triumph of pure talent.
The slump in China’s manufacturing PMI (see opening post) is “a canary in the trade war coal mine,” says Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management.
The poor bird’s feathers have been “scorched by tariffs and global uncertainty”, Innes reports, explaining:
The Caixin Manufacturing PMI’s plunge to 48.3 isn’t just a weak print—it’s a body blow to the backbone of China’s economy: small and mid-sized exporters now caught in a brutal vice grip between faltering global demand and a Washington-led tariff regime that’s more carrot-and-stick diplomacy than ceasefire.
“There is no simple, single change, no matter how radical, that will deliver the fundamental reset that is needed for the water sector.”
“We have heard of deep-rooted, systemic and interlocking failures over the years – failure in Government’s strategy and planning for the future, failure in regulation to protect both the billpayer and the environment and failure by some water companies and their owners to act in the public, as well as their private, interest.
Hind Khoudary has been reporting from Deir al-Balah inside Gaza for Al Jazeera, and says that witnesses there told her there was “chaos” at the aid distribution point where at least 27 Palestinians have been killed after Israeli troops opened fire.
She reported for the news network that she had been told “There’s no process. There’s no system. You just need to run first to be able to get the food. The Israeli forces just opened fire randomly, shooting Palestinians … using quadcopters and live ammunition.”
A canny biography of the early career of this strange, brilliant novelist
Muriel Spark, born Muriel Sarah Camberg, was nothing if not protean. Her gravestone declares her a poet; posterity knows her as the author of 22 short, indelibly strange and subversive novels. In life, she was by turns an editor, critic, biographer, playwright, Jewish Gentile, Catholic convert, divorcee, abandoning mother, spy. As Frances Wilson observes in this canny biography, she looks in every photograph as if she is played by a different actor, so drastic are the changes in her face and style. From precocious Edinburgh schoolgirl to unhappy Rhodesian wife, spirited London bohemian to poised Roman socialite, Spark made an art of unsettling transformations. She was the queen of narrative control, not least the narrative of her own life.
She was also the enemy of biographers, a pursuer of lawsuits who managed to delay the publication of her own authorised biography by seven years (“a hatchet job; full of insults”, she said, unjustly), and went to war with the former lover who wrote two accounts of her life. And yet she didn’t hide her traces, leaving for researchers not one but two vast archives, of her personal papers and her working process, neatly organised in box files that total the length of an Olympic swimming pool.
From brooding, brutalist boxes to Scandi-inspired circular affairs with curved confessional booths, these astonishing churches are often located off the beaten track
The hike offers dramatic views of the Swiss Alps’ ‘murder wall’ – and poignant insights into the climbers who first braved it. For the son of one of those pioneers, it had a special resonance
A few years ago, my dad told me of a mountain where I could easily sense another world. “There is a special air and light,” he had said, vaguely. “You just have to walk close to it to feel and see it. Stand in one place and just look up.”
The mountain on my dad’s mind that day was the Eiger, Switzerland’s 3,970-metre ogre of limestone and ice. Like few others, the peak exerts a gravitational pull on climbers and it remains the chief symbol of the Bernese Oberland; its most notable feature, the 1,800-metre north face, is the largest in the Alps. This gigantic slab looms over the village of Grindelwald, to the south-east of the town of Interlaken, appearing at sunrise as an immense black spectre in a valley of green.
A badass surfer on Australia’s Gold Coast takes on a villainous tour guide who is ferrying unwary sightseers to view the sharks
Sean Byrne’s gonzo horror thriller premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section of this year’s Cannes film festival, in the sidebar where Cannes traditionally finds a place in its heart for genre or offbeat fare. Yet despite this stamp of authority – and a lead turn from Jai Courtney that could best be described as “gnarly” – I couldn’t get behind this movie, which has a bargain-basement straight-to-streaming feel to it.
The scene is the Australian Gold Coast where surfers come to catch gigantic waves. Hassie Harrison (from TV’s Yellowstone) plays a badass surfer named Zephyr, who travels around in her van as free as the wind sampling the most outrageous swells. She meets-cute with Moses (Josh Heuston), a nerdy guy who is very sweet and yet also kind of hot. When they part, Zephyr is to come fatefully into contact with the film’s horrible villain, a beefy, bullish guy called Tucker, played by Courtney, who has a business taking attractive twentysomething tourists wearing only swimming costumes out on his boat, promising them an intimate encounter with sharks. But the unspeakable Tucker, a great shark enthusiast himself, has some pretty unusual ideas about the food he wants to offer to bring these creatures up to his boat.
Half of those diagnosed will now survive for 10 years or more after advances in diagnosis and treatment
The proportion of people surviving cancer in the UK has doubled since the 1970s amid a “golden age” of progress in diagnosis and treatment, a report says.
Half of those diagnosed will now survive for 10 years or more, up from 24%, according to the first study of 50 years of data on cancer mortality and cases. The rate of people dying from cancer has fallen by 23% since the 1970s, from 328 in every 100,000 people to 252.
This extraordinary adaptation of Paris Lees’ memoir follows wild, witty teen Byron as they go from cottaging for cash aged 15 to finding solace in a raucous gang of trans and queer pals. You’ll never look at a loo brush the same way
The title suggests a generic experience of nascent womanhood, but What It Feels Like for a Girl is miles from your typical female bildungsroman. This adaptation of journalist Paris Lees’ excellent memoir about growing up in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire (or ‘Ucknall, as the book, with its mesmeric phonetic dialect, has it) chronicles the coming-of-age of Byron, who is seen by others as a boy. Initially, our protagonist doesn’t really push back on that; despite some early gender dysphoria – angrily dismissed by their macho father – the prospect of one day openly living as a woman is completely outside their frame of reference. On a visit to a nightclub, Byron (Ellis Howard) encounters future friend Lady Die, who makes a joke about someone being a transexual. “What’s a transexual?” asks Byron – smiling, mystified.
This is the early 00s, you see: pre Nadia’s Big Brother win, although a couple of years post Hayley Cropper’s Corrie debut. Still, in terms of the general public’s comprehension of trans issues, it is the dark ages. (Thanks to the current Y2K fashion renaissance, however, the aesthetics are positively aspirational: dumbphones, chokers, FCUK slogan tees, Kappa tracksuits.) Yet Byron’s eventual gender transition isn’t what makes this an extraordinary and at times deeply disturbing account of a partly misspent youth. The reason 15-year-old Byron is at the aforementioned club in the first place is because they are searching for their erstwhile boyfriend Max (Sweetpea’s Calam Lynch). But Max isn’t just Byron’s first love – he’s also their pimp. A chance encounter in a public toilet introduced Byron to cottaging; they then begin performing sex acts on strangers for money. Byron’s success in the field – and enthusiasm for the job – means they are soon headhunted by Max to meet the demands of wealthier clients.
Served in a comforting broth and topped with fresh herbs and grated pecorino, this versatile dish is one for all ages
There is something deeply nostalgic about this dish, although it wasn’t something I grew up with. Perhaps it’s the use of small pasta that makes me feel childlike, but either way, it is the kind of recipe that is immensely versatile: it can be an elegant, light spring meal finished with punchy extra-virgin olive oil, an extra sprinkle of pepper and a grating of pecorino, or you could label it kid-friendly and comforting. It’s not exclusively so, but I’d hazard a bet that they’ll enjoy it.
The whole tax and spending ship is an unseaworthy rustbucket. This spending review is a chance to fix it
Who in their right mind would want to be Rachel Reeves right now? Her spending review out next week will feel like austerity all over again. Even if, in reality, it’s not a cut but more spending, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies emphasises. After an uplift in everyday spending at the budget, here comes a much-needed capital slab of £113bn. Yet whatever the numbers say, painful cuts to most things will be the story and the feeling.
If you want to try your hand, the IFS has just put its “Be the Chancellor” gadget up on its site. Strap yourself into Reeves’s fiscal straitjacket and attempt a Houdini-like escape, as you decide on levels of borrowing, taxing, spending and debt. One thing it illuminates is how much even mere slivers of growth improve your position immensely. How far can you go? The febrile market meltdown point is unknowable, but Liz Truss was a useful crash dummy testing squillions on tax cuts without raising revenue. Donald Trump, plunging into an unexplored fiscal wilderness, beat a retreat when his monster tariffs sent the markets charging back out at him. He seems to be having another try.
Climate minister says greenlighting North West Shelf project until 2070 is not the leadership Pacific countries expect as Australia seeks to host summit
Vanuatu’s climate minister has expressed disappointment over Australia’s decision to extend one of the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas projects and said it raises questions over its bid to co-host the Cop31 summit with Pacific nations.
The UN is expected to announce which country will host the major climate summit in the coming weeks, with Australia pushing for the event to be held in Adelaide as part of a “Pacific Cop”.
Erin Patterson has told a court that the majority of the mushrooms in a beef wellington dish served in her Leongatha home came from a local supermarket, but says she also accepts the dish contained death caps.
Patterson also said in evidence that she wishes she never said to her Facebook friends in a private group chat “this family I swear to fucking god” in relation to her in-laws, saying she felt ashamed but hoped that sharing her frustrations would mean she had a “big cheer squad” for her problems.
Head coach planning mid-season training break in March
Move may exacerbate concerns about player burnout
Thomas Tuchel is planning a warm-weather training break for his England squad next March followed by a pre-World Cup boot camp in Miami in June because of concerns about the effect of high temperatures on the players during the tournament in the US.
The England head coach has altered the Football Association’s usual travel itinerary this week by taking his squad to Barcelona for a six-day training camp to work them hard in the heat before the World Cup qualifier against Andorra on Saturday. Similar trips are on the agenda for next year.
Problems caused by underinvestment are being seized on by the far right as evidence of ‘state failure’
Waiting for the M49 bus to the zoo, Wolfgang, 82, peers down at the crumpled concrete and metal rubble below, the remains of a Berlin bridge recently demolished after wide cracks were discovered.
Over the loud pounding of a hydraulic hammer crushing the concrete, the retired technician says he watched its construction about 60 years earlier from the window of his nearby flat. “Now we have to hope they’ll get their act together to build a new one, though I have my doubts I’ll be alive to see it finished,” he says.
Yoshua Bengio’s organisation plans to create system to act as guardrail against AI agents trying to deceive humans
An artificial intelligence pioneer has launched a non-profit dedicated to developing an “honest” AI that will spot rogue systems attempting to deceive humans.
Yoshua Bengio, a renowned computer scientist described as one of the “godfathers” of AI, will be president of LawZero, an organisation committed to the safe design of the cutting-edge technology that has sparked a $1tn (£740bn) arms race.
Our lives are blighted by illegal settlements, and 22 more have just been approved. Unless Israel is held to account, we will be erased
Issa Amro is a Palestinian human rights defender
Each of the 22 illegal settlements approved by Israel last week is another nail in the coffin of the peace process, hammered in by the complicity of western governments and corporations. Israeli settlements are not benign civilian neighbourhoods – they are primary instruments of dispossession, control and apartheid. Settlements are closed militarised zones on Palestinians’ stolen land, cutting off our access to our resources, our farms, our schools, our jobs and each other. Palestinian lands rapidly shrink, our livelihoods are devastated, our rights are systematically violated and our identity is undermined.
Western lawmakers look on, expressing commitment to peace through a two-state solution but choosing to do nothing to achieve this goal. Instead, their policies and inaction enable yet further settlement activity.
Issa Amro is a Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of Youth Against Settlements
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Is artificial intelligence coming for everyone’s jobs? Not if this lot have anything to do with it
The novelist Ewan Morrison was alarmed, though amused, to discover he had written a book called Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Intrigued by the limits of generative artificial intelligence (AI), he had asked ChatGPT to give him the names of the 12 novels he had written. “I’ve only written nine,” he says. “Always eager to please, it decided to invent three.” The “nine inches” from the fake title it hallucinated was stolen from a filthy Robert Burns poem. “I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth,” says Morrison. He is yet to write Nine Inches – “or its sequel, Eighteen Inches”, he laughs. His actual latest book, For Emma, imagining AI brain-implant chips, is about the human costs of technology.
Morrison keeps an eye on the machines, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and their capabilities, but he refuses to use them in his own life and work. He is one of a growing number of people who are actively resisting: people who are terrified of the power of generative AI and its potential for harm and don’t want to feed the beast; those who have just decided that it’s a bit rubbish, and more trouble than it’s worth; and those who simply prefer humans to robots.
He’s spent 24 hours immersed in slime, two days buried alive – and showered vast amounts of cash on lucky participants. But are MrBeast’s videos simply very savvy clickbait – or acts of avant garde genius?
Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers. And that number, 400 million, does not account for the people who watch MrBeast’s videos in passing, or who are aware of his cultural presence because of their children, or who just sort of know who he is but don’t have any intricate awareness as to why he is famous.
That number is the number of people who have made the volitional move of clicking that subscribe button, to ensure that they will a) not miss his latest videos and b) can be literally counted by potential advertisers as a more-or-less guaranteed audience. One last fact, before we move away from numbers and into more nebulous modes of consideration: his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (£3.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history. Jimmy Donaldson, at the risk of belabouring the obvious, is an incredibly big deal.
Morocco’s commercial centre has brought investment to the continent – but critics say it masks domestic inequality
For centuries, Casablanca was a significant trading hub for merchants from across the breadth of the Atlantic coast, given its geographical position between Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
These days, Morocco’s economic capital is merging those historical roots with a strong modern commercial identity. One such manifestation is the Casablanca Finance City (CFC) district, whose high-rise buildings stand as a symbol of the city’s dream of being a main gateway for international investment into Africa.
Sankirtan mandali troupes are usually male singers and dancers. But in Odisha, women are joining in to spread safety messages as the climate crisis turns their region into a tinderbox
For years, the women of Murgapahadi village in eastern India have quietly managed farms and children, collected flowers and firewood in forests, and kept households running while their husbands work away in cities. This year, many are educating too – in song as they work.
Forest officials are enlisting devotional song-and-dance troupes – sankirtan mandalis – to help in the fight against fires in the dry deciduous woods of Odisha state in soaring temperatures. Fires have already affected more than 4,500 hectares (11,120 acres) of forest in Odisha this year, up from about 4,000 hectares in 2024. Officials are using technology such as AI cameras and satellite data to track blazes but are also turning to the appeal of song to ask villagers not to burn leaves in the forest, apractice believed to benefit the soil, but which has led to uncontrollable wildfires in recent years.
Boiled eggs? Tofu? Avocado? Are these high-protein, low-sugar alternative mousse recipes the new way to make the chocolate dessert? TikTok certainly seems to think so. Guardian Australia staff put them through a taste test so you can decide if you should try making these at home – or give them a miss and keep scrolling instead
Victorian woman, 50, has pleaded not guilty to three charges of murder and one of attempted murder over a fatal 2023 beef wellington lunch. Follow live
Barrister ColinMandy SC asks his client why at one stage there were three properties in both Erin and Simon Patterson’s name when the couple had been separated for four years.
I always thought we would bring the family back together. That is what I wanted ... It was something tangible to say to Simon, I see a future for us.
I have not.
I’ve never had a needle biopsy anywhere.
I consulted Dr Google.
I alternated that with Don.
We did talk about it sometimes.
The kind of conversations that we had ... they would gently make fun of the fact that I was religious and I would try and evangelise back to them in a sense ... It was sort of all in good humour.
Zelenskyy says ‘no one cares’ if Putin is angry after hidden drones hit bomber fleet; Russians want truce to collect dead soldiers. What we know on day 1,196
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