FULL TIME: West Ham United 2-2 Liverpool. Jacob Steinberg was at the London Stadium this lunchtime, to witness what was surely the end of Liverpool’s title challenge. Here’s his report.
The final round of fixtures in League One are complete. Derby County are promoted as a result of their home victory over Carlisle, while Oxford and Barnsley confirm their spots in the play-offs. Barnsley only just made it through, despite conceding a 96th-minute equaliser, as Lincoln and Blackpool both failed to win. Cheltenham’s defeat at Stevenage condemns them to fourth-tier football next season.
Barnsley 1-1 Northampton Town
Derby County 2-0 Carlisle United
Exeter City 1-2 Oxford United
Fleetwood Town 3-0 Burton Albion
Lincoln City 0-2 Portsmouth
Peterborough United 3-3 Bolton Wanderers
Port Vale 0-0 Cambridge United
Reading 3-2 Blackpool
Shrewsbury Town 1-3 Leyton Orient
Stevenage 2-1 Cheltenham Town
Wigan Athletic 2-0 Bristol Rovers
Wycombe Wanderers 1-0 Charlton Athletic
Continue reading...© Photograph: Matthew Peters/Manchester United/Getty Images
© Photograph: Matthew Peters/Manchester United/Getty Images
Pre-match reading: Marlie Packer, the England captain, has given a terrific interview to Donald McRae.
“We’re in France and the crowd is going to be hostile,” she tells the Don. “But we know that can flip on its head because of the French crowd. If they’re not happy with the way their team are playing, they turn on them and give them a bit of a hard time.”
Continue reading...© Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
© Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
Documents show officials were told blood plasma harvested from US convicts was contaminated with viruses
• Read more: the true story of the UK infected blood scandal
A commercial blood product at the centre of the biggest treatment scandal in the history of the NHS was approved for use after government officials were told convicts were among the paid donors and virus contamination “should be assumed”,corporate filings reveal.
The product, given to haemophiliacs to enable their blood to clot, was injected into thousands of patients in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, including young children, who were infected with Aids and hepatitis C.
Continue reading...© Photograph: NHS Blood and Transplant/PA
© Photograph: NHS Blood and Transplant/PA
I have been using Kuxiu chargers for years now, primarily for travel. Their X55 series of chargers still has the best price-to-performance ratio of any charger on the market. For less than $40, you get a charger that chargers your iPhone, AirPods, and Apple watch; it comes with a 20W charging brick and a carrying case. It’s a foldable travel charger that works; sometimes that’s what is needed. But some sacrifices need to be made to get to that price point, so Kuxiu has just released two new premium products that give you better performance and higher quality finishes and still don’t break the bank.
more…
A home in an old office block clocks on a new look
How do Europeans live in such grey, beige places? I’m happy waking up in a pink room. Vibrant colours make you joyful; you will never be sad with pink and red,” laughs artist and gallery owner Carlos Rittner from his apartment in Mexico City.
From the exterior, the 1940s converted office block, which is a stone’s throw from the Zócalo plaza, the world’s largest city square, is modest, but step through the banana-yellow front door and you are instantly transported into an art installation.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Annie Schlechter
© Photograph: Annie Schlechter
Scientific studies cannot agree on the relative importance of genes and environment on how we turn out as adults
The eternal mystery of how much we are shaped by our parents – or how much we shape our children – was stirred again last week with the publication of a study that suggests that we are less like our parents than we had previously thought.
Led by René Mõttus of Edinburgh University’s department of psychology, the study looked at more than 1,000 pairs of relatives to establish how likely children are to inherit what psychologists call the “big five” or “Ocean” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
© Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Austrian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger has spent her life hunting for signs of life in the universe. Here she talks about aliens, space exploration and why studying cosmology is like eating pizza
Staring into the abyss… Am I really reaching anyone out there?” Lisa Kaltenegger is laughing about the unsatisfactory experience of teaching astrophysics over Zoom during Covid lockdowns, but she could be talking about her vocation: trying to discover if there’s life beyond our solar system.
Kaltenegger founded the Carl Sagan Institute in 2015 to investigate just that. A burst of sunny energy and infectious enthusiasm on a grey day, she’s speaking to me from the legendary extraterrestrial life researcher’s old office, now hers, overlooking the leafy Cornell campus in upstate New York. The institute brings together researchers across a range of disciplines to work out what signs of life on other planets might look like from here, so that we recognise them if (or when) we find them.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Naomi Haussmann/The Observer
© Photograph: Naomi Haussmann/The Observer
In New York, ‘reservation scalpers’ are making $80,000 a year, but I’m banking on a neighbour’s generosity
The land of restaurants is increasingly paradoxical. Every day, good ones close. Running costs are punitive and broke customers are eating at home more often. Yet still there are places where it’s next to impossible to bag a table; where to have even the remotest chance of doing so requires near superhuman levels of patience and determination, as well as no other demands whatsoever on your time – including paid employment.
I laughed when I read in the New Yorker’s annual food issue of the “reservation scalpers” who make $80,000 a year by hoarding bookings to then sell them on to the desperate-to-be-there rich. Only in Manhattan, I thought. But this didn’t stop me. Just moments later, I was urging my neighbour, Sue, who is to restaurants what Harry Houdini once was to padlocks and straitjackets – just you watch her bust her way in! – to try to get us a table at X (I won’t say its name, for obvious reasons). Sue is also a hoarder of reservations, with the key difference that she then shares them with (I flatter myself) beloved friends at no extra charge. So now we’re on tenterhooks, waiting and hoping – and hoping and waiting – for the hottest Sunday lunch in town.
Continue reading...© Photograph: BrianAJackson/Getty Images/iStockphoto
© Photograph: BrianAJackson/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Managing the barrage of upsetting material online is a challenge that service providers are struggling to meet, even if they try
Way back in the mid-1990s, when the web was young and the online world was buzzing with blogs, a worrying problem loomed. If you were an ISP that hosted blogs, and one of them contained material that was illegal or defamatory, you could be held legally responsible and sued into bankruptcy. Fearing that this would dramatically slow the expansion of a vital technology, two US lawmakers, Chris Cox and Ron Wyden, inserted 26 words into the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which eventually became section 230 of the Telecommunications Act of the same year. The words in question were: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” The implications were profound: from now on you bore no liability for content published on your platform.
The result was the exponential increase in user-generated content on the internet. The problem was that some of that content was vile, defamatory or downright horrible. Even if it was, though, the hosting site bore no liability for it. At times, some of that content caused public outrage to the point where it became a PR problem for the platforms hosting it and they began engaging in “moderation”.
Continue reading...© Photograph: KARRASTOCK/Getty Images
© Photograph: KARRASTOCK/Getty Images
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