West Indies huddle, high five, and take the field. Plimmer and Bates swing their bats and march out after them.
Anthem time: New Zealand, arms round each other, are relatively restrained with their singing. West Indies, arms also wrapped around each other, are slightly more animated alongside Rally round the West Indies.
Medications like Ozempic ‘transformed’ diabetes care because they improved health outcomes, say experts
Obesity rates have decreased slightly in the US and while it’s too early to say whether the trend will hold and what’s causing the change, experts believe weight-loss drugs could be playing a role in continuing to lower obesity and reduce related health risks.
These medications – Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and others – are called GLP-1 agonists, and they were originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes. But they also show great promise for treating obesity and other health conditions, like heart disease, kidney and liver issues, sleep apnea, asthma, Covid complications and cancer, among others.
Maximum effect, minimal effort: how to make a sponge cake in the shape of a giant ring doughnut
When I want an impressive-looking cake with minimal effort, I always reach for my bundt tin; it does all the work for you and you get a beautiful cake every time. Most people worry about getting it out in one piece, and that moment when you turn it upside down can be panic-inducing, but just be sure to grease the tin and all the corners before dusting with flour, and it should pop out easily.
On a cold July morning in Canberra, a man rode his motorbike to meet a person he’d be chatting to on the hookup app Grindr – only to find four men who then allegedly assaulted him.
A month later, Queensland police alleged six people were robbed after being lured to meetings by someone using a fake profile on the app in Brisbane’s south.
The king and queen’s visit to Sydney and Canberra will be a long way from previous showstopping tours, including those by Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana
When Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip sailed into Sydney harbour on the SS Gothic on 3 February 1954, 1 million people – well over half the population of Sydney - lined the foreshore to greet their monarch.
She was 27, the mother of two small children and had been crowned just eight months earlier. It was the first time a British monarch had visited Australia: the world’s most famous – and most carefully curated – person had come to town.
Russian navy ships reportedly transferred 1,500 forces to Vladivostok, where they are being trained
South Korea’s intelligence agency said on Friday that North Korea has dispatched troops to assist Russia in its war against Ukraine, a development that could intensify the standoff between North Korea and the west.
In a statement on its website, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) said that Russian navy ships transferred 1,500 North Korean special operation forces to the port city of Vladivostok between 8 and 13 October and were now undergoing training.
Study finds that breaking up your exercise is more effective, but Tim Dowling remains to be convinced
Let me start by saying that I am not looking for ways to be more tired. I’m tired enough. However, a study suggesting that exercise punctuated by frequent breaks requires more energy than “steady-state” exertion has a certain counterintuitive attraction: I can exercise better by resting more.
The results of the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are striking. Volunteers on treadmills and stair climbers used 20-60% more oxygen when walking in bursts of 10-30 seconds than they did covering the same distance without stopping. This apparently has something to do with the sheer inefficiency of stop-start activity. “We found that when starting from rest, a significant amount of oxygen is consumed to start walking,” said the study’s author, Francesco Luciano. “We incur this cost regardless of whether we then walk for 10 or 30 seconds, so it proportionally weighs more for shorter rather than longer bouts.” Would this strategy, I wondered, work for me?
Road safety agency opens evaluation over reported collisions in low visibility
The US government’s road safety agency has opened an investigation into 2.4m Tesla vehicles with the automaker’s Full Self-Driving software after four reported collisions, including a fatal crash.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Friday said it was opening the preliminary evaluation after four reports of crashes where Full Self-Driving was engaged during reduced roadway visibility like sun glare, fog or airborne dust.
Do “romantic comedy friendships” still exist? I am perpetually hopeful, but losing faith. I love my alone time, and enjoy coffees with women in my neighbourhood and colleagues from work. But, although these encounters are mostly pleasant, they feel superficial.
Thoughts of missing out on my “tribe” have been overwhelming lately; even back at school, girls seemed to clump together. Most are still BFFs 20 years on and living in the same town, whereas I moved around a lot growing up. I’ve only ever had one or two friendships I’d consider genuine and, until recently, it has never been aproblem.
Captain angry with himself for his bad body language
Insists result ‘could have been different if we’d won toss’
Ben Stokes has admitted he behaved like “a grumpy old man” as England slid to defeat in the second Test in Multan, bowled out for just 144 on a disintegrating surface to lose by 152 runs in a game where his side were “up against it from the toss”.
The captain’s tantrum came on Thursday, when as Pakistan’s second innings neared its conclusion two straightforward opportunities to dismiss Salman Agha were put down. The batter went on to score more than 50 runs after his let-offs to take the game out of England’s reach.
A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement.
The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing IVF, according to undercover video footage. The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 (£38,000) for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence. Managers boasted their methods could produce a gain of more than six IQ points.
(Fiction) The band are at an artistic peak on their first album in 16 years: movingly melancholic, with a punchy sound to match the lyrics’ emotional impact
The latter-day history of the Cure is a peculiar thing. They ended the 90s in apparent disarray – the disappointing Wild Mood Swings drew their peak commercial years to a close, and a series of festival shows degenerated into drunken farce – yet the 21st century found them more revered than ever. You couldn’t move for younger artists paying homage: everyone from heavy metal bands to dance producers seemed to want to collaborate with frontman Robert Smith.
It was a kind of renaissance, and evidence of how hugely influential they were, but the Cure seemed unable to fully capitalise on it. They could always draw vast crowds, but a new album to rank alongside their back catalogue’s high points proved frustratingly elusive, and you wondered how many people were at their gigs to hear stuff from their eponymous 2004 album or 2008’s 4:13 Dream, both sprawling and uneven. Thereafter, their gigs came flecked with new songs but the release schedule fell silent. Last year, Simon Price’s definitive book Curepedia opened its entry on a prospective new album with the not unreasonable question: “Will it ever happen?”
Environmental groups are among those appalled at plans to expand into Guernica and the Urdaibai reserve – but others welcome it
A large and almost comically sinister fish named Guggenheim is on the loose in and around the ancient Basque town of Guernica, its jaws perilously close to snapping shut on a twitchy-looking tiddler called Urdaibai.
Images of the predator and its prey have been proliferating on posters, bus stops and walls in the area since last summer as fears grow over what the suggested outpost of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao could mean for Guernica and the adjacent Urdaibai biosphere reserve.
After Starstruck and Taskmaster, the new project sees Sidi play a profane, lowbrow version of Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff. She explains why her latest comedy creation is breaking-news proof
When Emma Sidi was in year seven, a classmate predicted she would one day become a comedian. Her reaction was one of total horror. “I was like: no! I thought she was being really rude and saying I was like an old man. I thought: wow, I really am so ugly and uncool.”
Twenty-one years later, on an unseasonably warm September afternoon, Sidi can appreciate the prescient compliment. She didbecome a comedian, and has spent the past decade refining her own gratifyingly flamboyant character comedy while making scene-stealing appearances in a slew of great British sitcoms (Starstruck, Ghosts, Black Ops, Stath Lets Flats, W1A, Pls Like). Even so, the 33-year-old does understand where her former self was coming from: there were vanishingly few comic female role models around in the early 2000s, and it’s not difficult to imagine why a preteen girl might have feared she was being likened to a sweaty middle-aged man ranting into a microphone.
The Rue Dix marketplace and restaurant in Crown Heights offers Senegalese fashion and flavor
Nilea Alexander and her husband, Lamine Diagne, started out with a neighborhood coffee shop in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Over the past decade, though, their modest enterprise has evolved into what they call “an experience”. Next door to Café Rue Dix, which serves Senegalese cuisine, pastries and lattes, is Marché Rue Dix, their marketplace-boutique stocked with goods sourced directly from Senegal, Diagne’s birthplace. The couple’s goal is to create a one-stop destination where customers leave with both a story and a piece of Senegal.
Rue Dix, or “10th Street” in French, is a nod to Diagne’s roots in Pikine, a city to the east of the Senegalese capital of Dakar. “Markets are very big in Senegal,” he said. Visitors to the cafe can order its signature dish, thiebou jen – a savory blend of jollof rice, vegetables and red snapper stew. And then they can head to the boutique, which offers everything from traditional Ataya tea and an asymmetric crochet skirt to a gilded brass arm cuff and a bucket bag made from rope and plastic.
Labour lets the Taylor Swift story rumble on, while KemiKaze, Honest Bob and Spurs just leave you feeling indifferent
Herbie is now 13 years old. Which, depending on how you measure it, makes him somewhere in his 80s in dog years. For his last birthday, friends gave him some treats that claim to improve his joints. Now, I took glucosamine for years in a bid to make my knees marginally less creaky and never noticed any improvement. But whatever ingredients – I’m guessing WD40 laced with amphetamines – they’ve put into these doggy ‘joint care’ chews, they appear to have had a miraculous effect. A while back, I wrote about how Herbie had torn a ligament in his back leg and that the vet had recommended surgery. A number of you wrote in to me to say not to bother with the operation. His leg would heal just as well on its own. We took the advice and – guess what? - you were absolutely right. So thank you for saving Herbie a painful operation and three months of rehab and for saving us £4K. But in the last few weeks, since taking the daily chew, Herbie’s recovery has taken another quantum leap forward. He is now running around with the energy and freedom of movement he showed when he was five years old. We can’t quite believe the change in him. Then maybe he’s just enjoying life as a minor celebrity since his memoir, ghosted by me, came out last week. He and I did have a minor falling out: he accused me of trivialising his contribution to public life – he began his career as a special adviser to Ed Miliband in 2014 and has since gone on to work in No 10 for every prime minister - for comic effect. Anyway, Herbie and I have since made up. So if you want to know what happened to the Pot Plants, what Larry the Cat is really like, who was behind the Kabul pet rescue and what goes on in meetings of Canines Anonymous, do please buy Taking the Lead. It’s the most accurate account of the last 10 years you will ever read.
At least 2,000 babies were born to Black GIs stationed in Britain during the second world war and a home was created for some of them: Holnicote House in Somerset. Those who grew up there are now telling their stories
When Carol Edwards and her daughter went on a walking weekend to Holnicote House, a hotel on Exmoor in Somerset, a guide gave them a tour of the property, explaining the estate’s 500-year history. “The story ended at about 1945,” Edwards says. “So afterwards, I said to him: ‘You missed a section out.’” Edwards knew this because she had lived at Holnicote House for the first five years of her life, along with 25 other children like her, immediately after the second world war. All of the children were orphans, all were mixed race: their mothers were white British women, their fathers were African American GIs who had been stationed in Britain during the war.
Edwards was one of what US newspapers would call “brown babies”. At least 2,000 of these children were born during the war, at a time when there were just 7-10,000 Black people in the entire UK. So these “brown babies” increased the population of Black Britons by about 25 per cent. Over half are believed to have been given up for adoption, but Holnicote House, which was requisitioned by Somerset county council in 1943, was the only children’s home specifically dedicated to them. Edwards, 79, has positive memories of her time there. “They cared for us and they loved us all,” she says. “We were all treated the same and never made to feel different … I really do feel quite privileged to have spent my first five years there. I think I was one of the lucky ones.”
Tesla and SpaceX chief’s behavior sets him apart from even the most politically active billionaires – serving as a Trump policy adviser and mega-donor
Less than a month before the presidential election, Elon Musk has made himself a near-constant presence in the race. At a rally for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk jumps with glee wearing a custom black Maga hat. On social media, he posts AI-generated images attacking Kamala Harris. Behind the scenes, he bankrolls one of the largest pro-Trump political action committees.
The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has emerged as a unique influence on the campaign in ways that set him apart from even the most politically active billionaires and tech elite. He is all at once a vocal Trump surrogate, campaign mega-donor, informal policy adviser, media influencer and prolific source of online disinformation. At the same time, he is the world’s richest man and the owner of one of the United States’ most influential social networks, while also operating as a government defense contractor and wielding power over critical satellite communications infrastructure.
Leg 3 of 6: So many potholes on the course but New Zealand are still maintaining that they want to stay on the left side. Their top speed is 40km/hr and they have a healthy lead. The Brits finish 24sec behind and you can sense their frustration in their communication.
Leg 2 of 6: This New Zealand team are so good. They have seemingly learned their lesson from the last two races and they team are constantly communicating on board and emphasising that they do not want to play catch up. They once again lead after the second leg and their opponents 13secs behind.
Republican nominee insults VP at event where she appeared remotely; Trump advisers reportedly gave exhaustion as reason for cancelling but a spokeswoman denies this
While Donald Trump is believed to have made gains among Black and Hispanic voters, a new poll shows the Kamala Harris continues to lead among the former group, the Guardian’s Anna Betts reports:
A new poll has revealed that Kamala Harris continues to lead Donald Trump among Black likely voters in battleground states.
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