Some experts paint a rosy picture of an A.I.-led future. Others are quick to jump on the doomsday bandwagon. Which side is going to remain in the public conscience longer?
The start of every football match brings a little flutter in the stomach. Will the stars perform? Will the referee have a good game by giving your players every decision? And will the football gods shine down on your team? A more pertinent question to ask this season, though, is how much football will we actually see?
We wrote about ball-in-play time a few seasons ago, revealing that fans were not seeing as much football as in previous years. We’re not saying our data nosiness led to referees adding more stoppage time, but there was a notable rise in ball-in-play time over the next two campaigns. It went up from 54 minutes and 49 seconds in 2022-23 to 58 minutes and 11 seconds in 2023-24. It’s still early in the 2025-26 season, but the pendulum may be swinging back the other way.
The city – the Sudanese army’s last stronghold in the west of the country – has withstood more than 500 days of attacks by paramilitary RSF
The besieged Sudanese city of El Fasher has been declared “uninhabitable” with new data indicating most homes are destroyed and critical levels of malnourishment among people trapped there.
The stark assessment comes as the city endures constant artillery and drone attacks, shoehorning its 250,000 starving people into a shrinking urban enclave.
Canadian club folded during Covid-19 pandemic in 2020
Players receive around £750,000 in unpaid income
Players from the former Super League club Toronto Wolfpack have finally been paid around £750,000 in unpaid salaries following a five-year legal battle, the Guardian can reveal.
The Wolfpack folded in 2020 during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic leaving their playing squad – which included the likes of Sonny Bill Williams – unemployed and without a contract. Some of those players were able to source deals for 2021 and continue playing but others retired from the sport altogether and had to take jobs outside rugby league to make ends meet.
“Last month, Jeremy Ngakia scored twice for Watford against Oxford to take his career goals total to three from 116 senior club appearances. Excluding players who scored only once, has anybody with 100+ appearances managed a higher percentage of their career goals in a single match?” wonders Peter Skilton.
Denis Boone writes in with the tale of Matthieu Chalmé. “French right-back Chalmé played 362 professional matches during his career, mostly for Lille and Bordeaux,” Denis writes. “He scored four career goals, with three of them coming in a single game. Chalmé netted all three goals in Lille’s 3-0 win at Ajaccio in March 2004, recording the most unlikely of hat-tricks.”
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Hamas handed over more bodies of deceased hostages to Israel on Tuesday, one sign of progress after a number of apparent setbacks in the day since US President Donald Trump touted his plan to end the Gaza war.
Legislative change comes five years after treaty suspended in response to city’s crackdown on pro-democracy activists
Exiled Hong Kong dissidents say they fear UK government plans to restart some extraditions with the city could put them in greater danger, saying Hong Kong authorities will use any pretext to pursue them.
An amendment to UK extradition laws was passed on Tuesday. It came more than five years after the UK and several other countries suspended extradition treaties with Hong Kong in response to the government crackdown on the pro-democracy movement, and its imposition of a Beijing-designed national security law.
A person living in New York tested positive for the mosquito-borne chikungunya virus in the first reported transmission within the US in six years, officials said on Tuesday.
He also threatened in another message to share explicit videos of Langston, writing, “I can send him a few videos of you as well. Oh, I still have them."
Ultra-slim and light smartphone feels special, but cuts to camera and battery may be too hard to ignore for most
The iPhone Air is a technical and design marvel that asks: how much are you willing to give up for a lightweight and ultra-slender profile?
Beyond the obvious engineering effort that has gone into creating one of the slimmest phones ever made, the Air is a reductive exercise that boils down the iPhone into the absolute essentials in a premium body.
Inspired by Gustav Klimt’s ‘golden phase’ and the religious icons of medieval Europe, US photographer Tawny Chatmon reimagines Black identity by upturning art history
From prosthetic testicles for dogs to sociable reptiles, a behavioural scientist explains what we get wrong – and right – about animal minds
In the 1970s a former Soviet naval officer named Igor Charkovsky popularised a concept which came to be known as dolphin-assisted birth. Likely inspired by New Age theories, he urged expectant mothers to dip in the ice-cold water of the Black Sea, commune with dolphins, and give birth underwater. In the “very near future,” he claimed, “a newborn child would be able to live in the ocean with a pod of dolphins and feed on dolphin milk”.
The oddest thing about Charkovsky was not so much his theory, but its remarkable resilience within both Soviet and western culture, as Justin Gregg sets out in his illuminating and lively new book. Gregg’s work is both a dissection and an ode to the irresistible allure of anthropomorphism, our tendency to apply human characteristics to non-humans, whether animals, objects, AI, or God. An expert on animal cognition who also teaches improv, Gregg deftly guides us through our alternately charming, destructive and wrong-headed fantasies about everything from marine mammals to our iPhones.
For years, I kept a stash of ‘nice things’, waiting for the right occasion to use them. The accident taught me to live now, rather than in the future
I used to have a drawer where the “nice things” lived: posh candles and fancy bubble bath; two flagons of Greek extra virgin olive oil; that Aesop handwash, to bring out for visitors. A bottle of fizz gathered dust on the kitchen side and, in the bathroom, an expensive moisturiser remained unopened. Life’s little luxuries, I believed, weren’t for enjoying now, but were to be saved for some unspecified “special” time in the future.
Then I was hit by a car. It happened in May last year, while I was walking down a quiet street soon after lunchtime in Bermuda, where I’d been sent on an assignment for work.
Two illegal migrants were taken into custody on Tuesday after crashing their vehicle into a Border Patrol vehicle in Chicago during an immigration enforcement operation.
A red SUV driven by a person suspected to be in the country illegally rammed into a Border Patrol vehicle before attempting to flee the scene in the city's Southeast Side.
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