© U.S. Justice Department
Firms agree deals with Beijing-based Baidu to take self-driving cabs to UK capital
Chinese robotaxis are due to be on the streets of London next year after the US ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber announced tie-ups with Beijing-based Baidu to deploy its self-driving technology.
Lyft is the third firm to announce plans to introduce self-driving taxis to the UK capital next year, following Uber and Waymo, the main operator of robotaxis in the US.
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© Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
© Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
© Photograph: Andy Wong/AP
In a match mercifully on Spanish soil, Villarreal bombarded Barça but were undone by profligacy and ill-discipline
Marcelino García Toral came bounding down the steps like an excited schoolboy when the bell goes. He flew past the substitutes and staff, skidded left, and sprinted up the line all wide-eyed and excited, shaking his fists and beaming. He had gone 15 or 20 metres, maybe 25 when he realised – just a fraction later than everyone else – that something had gone wrong again. So Villarreal’s manager put the brakes on and his head down, and turned back towards the bench feeling almost as silly as this was getting. This, he already suspected, was going to be one of those days.
They had been playing 16 minutes and the goal Villarreal had scored, the goal Jules Koundé scored for them, wasn’t a goal at all. Just as the chance they made after 80 seconds wasn’t, Nicolas Pépé putting wide from a yard out. Just as Ayoze Pérez’s opportunity on six minutes wasn’t a goal, Tajon Buchanan’s effort on 13 wasn’t, and Raphinha’s on nine minutes was. One moment – a dash, a tumble and a penalty and from nowhere Villarreal trailed Barcelona as two of La Liga’s best teams met on the Mediterranean, not in Miami. Barcelona beat Villarreal 2-0.
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© Photograph: Quality Sport Images/Getty Images
© Photograph: Quality Sport Images/Getty Images
© Photograph: Quality Sport Images/Getty Images
Researchers have realised the records are a ‘goldmine’ to study changes in environmental conditions
Yangang Xing had never heard of organ-tuning books, but his colleague Andrew Knight often played the pipe organ at churches as a teenager.
When the pair, who are researchers at Nottingham Trent University, set out to study how environmental conditions in churches had changed over time, Knight explained that all over the country many organs had notebooks full of data tucked away in their recesses.
This article was first published by The Reengineer
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© Photograph: Photimageon/Alamy
© Photograph: Photimageon/Alamy
© Photograph: Photimageon/Alamy
Chris Philp says Mary-Ann Stephenson is dismissing ‘legitimate concerns about mass migration’
Mary-Ann Stephenson, the new chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, has said that the “demonisation of migrants” is bad for Britain. (See 10.21am.)
This morning we have published a video report illustrating what she is worried about. It is about the rise in hate crimes, and it features the Muslim journalist Taj Ali visiting smaller more isolated minority communities around the UK to find out the impact this is having.
I remember thinking that the pandemic really showed just how dependent we all are upon the workers that keep our country going. But just because we are out of those times, does not mean that their sacrifice for all of us has stopped. Quite the opposite. So on behalf of everyone in the country, I would like to thank them and their colleagues who are heading out to work on Christmas Day to keep the rest of us safe and healthy. It’s a huge sacrifice, and it lets the rest of us celebrate Christmas with our families in peace.
We laid out 17 tables in a single-run through the first floor, decorated with 10 table runners, 60 miniature Christmas trees, 70 tea lights, a Christmas cracker for each person, and 93 hand-written place cards.
In the corner we set up a hot chocolate station for the kids with gingerbread, Christmas stickers, arts and crafts.
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© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
© Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Julie Christie remains as magnetic as ever in the mammoth big screen adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s once dangerous novel
There’s no more perfect illustration of the cinematic crossroads of the mid-1960s than the year Julie Christie had in 1965. First, she starred as an amoral model in John Schlesinger’s Darling, a snapshot of Swinging London that reflected the trendy, flashy, forward-thinking culture that had seduced young adults. Then she starred as an elusive Russian beauty in Doctor Zhivago, a three-hour-plus historical epic from David Lean that was as stodgy and old-fashioned as Darling was suggestive of the future. There was an appetite for both that year – credit Christie’s astonishing magnetism for that, at least in part – but a sense that one era was crashing into another and times were about to change.
It seems fitting, then, that Doctor Zhivago is about what happens when history takes a turn and a band of insurgents make a once-stable and familiar place seem completely unrecognizable. It’s easy to imagine a master like Lean, who’d just made Lawrence of Arabia a few years earlier, feeling a bit like his hero, Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), a celebrated poet whose work suddenly falls out of favor after the Russian Revolution. Though Doctor Zhivago was honored with a raft of Oscar nominations – and five wins, mostly in technical categories – many contemporary reviews had dismissed it as an ossified romance, disengaged with the harsh realities of early-to-mid-1900s Russia. Even 60 years later, it feels like a relic of an earlier era.
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© Photograph: Ken Danvers/MGM/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Ken Danvers/MGM/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Ken Danvers/MGM/REX/Shutterstock
Month-long ordeal ends but no details released on how they regained their freedom or who was behind abduction
A final group of 130 kidnapped Nigerian schoolchildren freed by the government on Sunday are expected to be reunited with their families in the central Niger state on Monday, ending a month-long ordeal that drew global concern.
Last month, unknown gunmen took an estimated 215 schoolchildren and 12 teachers from St Mary’s Catholic school, Papiri community in Niger state, which runs west from the capital, Abuja, to neighbouring Benin.
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© Photograph: Ifeanyi Immanuel Bakwenye/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ifeanyi Immanuel Bakwenye/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ifeanyi Immanuel Bakwenye/AFP/Getty Images
ONS finds households’ savings ratio has dropped to lowest rate for more than a year across third quarter
UK consumers saved less money during the third quarter of the year as higher taxes squeezed disposable incomes.
The households’ saving ratio – which estimates the percentage of disposable income Britons save rather than spend – dropped 0.7 percentage points to 9.5%, the Office for National Statistics said. That is the lowest rate for more than a year.
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© Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images
© Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images
© Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images
Following the publication of the novelist’s letters, we count down the best of his books, from the dark magic of The Witches of Eastwick to the misadventures of Rabbit Angstrom
Inspired by and drawing on three British novels (HG Wells’s The Time Machine, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Henry Green’s Concluding), Updike’s debut imagines a near future where the residents of a care home stage a revolt in which two antagonists, John Hook and Stephen Conner, struggle for supremacy. A curio.
Updike tropes Religion, death
© Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
© Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
Coach insists his methods are not about scoring rates
Paying off McCullum’s contract would cost seven figures
Brendon McCullum has stressed his desire to stay on as England head coach but acknowledged this is now a question for those higher up.
Australia winning this much-anticipated Ashes series at the earliest opportunity has thrust McCullum’s role into the spotlight but with a multi-format contract that runs up to the end of the 50-over World Cup in late 2027, removing him would cost English cricket a seven-figure sum.
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© Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/PA
© Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/PA
© Photograph: Robbie Stephenson/PA
From HIV to TB, scientists and doctors made breakthroughs in treatment and prevention of some of the world’s deadliest diseases
With humanitarian funding slashed by the US and other countries, including the UK, this year’s global health headlines have made grim reading. But good things have still been happening in vaccine research and the development of new and improved treatments for some of the most intractable illnesses.
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© Composite: Alamy/Getty Images/WHO
© Composite: Alamy/Getty Images/WHO
© Composite: Alamy/Getty Images/WHO
I grew up in a Muslim family in Dubai, but became obsessed with the Hallmark vision of Christmas, and with Macaulay Culkin. The reality was a disappointment only Home Alone could assuage
When I was eight years old, I was living in Dubai and desperate to experience a western Christmas. My family are Muslim, and Christmas was something we’d never celebrated – but after consuming countless festive Hallmark movies, I was hooked on the dream of having turkey, tinsel and, most importantly, presents. I also had an enormous crush on Macaulay Culkin, and thought if I could experience Christmas for myself it would somehow bring me closer to him.
After months of badgering my parents about why my twin brother and I deserved Christmas, they relented. My beautiful Iraqi-Egyptian mother took on the task with gumption, finding the largest, tackiest tree you can imagine.
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© Composite: Guardian Design; handout; Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design; handout; Getty Images
© Composite: Guardian Design; handout; Getty Images
Jenny Saville’s bruising paintings, Andy Goldsworthy’s immersive stones, Lee Miller’s surrealist shots and Diane Arbus’s unforgiving nudes – our critics highlight a spectacular year
• The best design and architecture of 2025
• More on the best culture of 2025
© Photograph: Lee Miller Archives
© Photograph: Lee Miller Archives
© Photograph: Lee Miller Archives
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