Ndrangheta clans had infiltrated ticketing operations
The Italian third-tier club Crotone have been placed under judicial administration for a year because police found “sufficient evidence” of pervasive Mafia infiltration, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
Crotone, based in the southern Calabria region that is home to the powerful ’Ndrangheta Mafia, are seventh in group C of the Serie C league, on five points from four games. They played in Serie A for two consecutive seasons almost 10 years ago, and in 2020-21.
Redford achieved huge critical and commercial success in the 60s and 70s with a string of hits including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Way We Were and The Sting, before becoming an Oscar-winning director
Seann William Scott turns up to take over a small town murder, in this crime flick with a blokey, improv flavour
One might be forgiven for forming very low expectations for this crime flick given its poster’s generically moody imagery showing star Seann William Scott holding a gun with an electricity pylon in the background. What a nice surprise to discover this is in fact a comedy, better yet one that’s actually often funny, in a blokey, improv sort of way.
The conceit is that in the tiny Tennessee town of Colt Lake a man is murdered in the street, run over by a car so many times that he looks like meatloaf. Clueless but kindly local cop Sam Evans (Johnny Simmons) and his deputy DJ (Chance Perdomo) make a feeble stab at investigating, but are soon upstaged when special agent Bobby Gaines (Scott) suddenly shows up, representing a statewide taskforce, and takes over the case. Gaines’ methods may be a little on the violent side and not strictly by the book, but he gets confessions amazingly quickly and soon he works his way up the (admittedly) short crime food chain until he finds the main bad guy. There are a few twists but the crime plot is of much less significance than the southern-fried backchat: a constant patter of men insulting each other, maligning one another’s manhood, and generally describing each other as small town failures.
The ‘knowledge economy’ promised cultural and social growth. Instead, we got worsening inequality and division. Artificial intelligence will supercharge it
Recently, Palantir – a tech corporation that boasts no fewer than five billionaire executives – announced its Q2 earnings: over a billion dollars generated in a single quarter. Forty-eight per cent growth in its business compared with the same quarter last year, including 93% growth in its US commercial business. These elephantine numbers are maddening – and, in large part, a result of the company fully embracing AI.
The AI revolution is here and, as its proponents remind us daily, it will remake our world, making every company and government agency more efficient and less error-prone while helping us unlock hitherto unheard of advances in science and technology. Not only this, but if we play our cards right, big tech’s latest explosion could yield unprecedented economic growth.
Dustin Guastella is director of operations for Teamsters Local 623 in Philadelphia, and a research associate at the Center for Working-Class Politics
The next pandemic or geopolitical shock could be close at hand. To look after our people, we’re looking after our supply chains, agriculture and fuel reserves
Miika Ilomäki is chief preparedness specialist for Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency
In times of crisis, food is more than sustenance. It is a pillar of national stability. Finland has long understood this, not just because of policy, but because of who we are and where we live. Geography, a mild continental climate and our history have shaped a mindset where preparedness is essential. In a country with vast territory, a sparse population and long distances between communities, resilience must be built into everything we do.
This understanding is deeply rooted in our society, in individual households as much as government institutions. Today, Finland’s approach to preparedness is rightly seen as a model for Europe. But it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. What works for Finland, such as our high levels of food self-sufficiency, strong institutions and a culture of cooperation, may not work elsewhere. Still, our experience offers valuable lessons. Preparedness must be proactive, inclusive and deeply integrated into national strategy.
Miika Ilomäki is chief preparedness specialist for Finland’s National Emergency Supply Agency
Give cakes and cookies a fruity boost, lend breakfast a sweet lift – and save the rest to jar up as Christmas gifts
I have a lot of jam made with all kinds of berries – are there any bakes that would use some of it up? Anne-Lies, Gouda, the Netherlands “Jam is at the heart of many great British puddings and cakes, so there are never too many jars in my house!” says Emily Cuddeford, co-founder of Edinburgh’s Twelve Triangles bakery. Her first thought, though, would be to tip a jar of the sweet stuff into a buttered ceramic baking dish and top it with sponge: “Make a classic, equal-parts mix scaled to your dish by creaming, say, 180g butter and 180g sugar, slowly beating in an egg and a dash of vanilla or lemon zest, and finishing with 180g self-raising flour.” Spoon that on top of the jam and bake at 190C (170C fan)/375F/gas 5 until the sponge “bounces back” and a skewer comes out clean. Serve warm with cream or custard, and job’s a good ’un.
You’ll also want jam to fill or top cakes. “Obvious things are a Victoria sponge, but that doesn’t use much jam,” says the Guardian’s own Benjamina Ebuehi, so she’d be more inclined to spoon buttercream over the top of a coconut cake, for example, make a dip in the middle with the back of a spoon and pop some jam in there: “That’s a nice way to decorate a cake and it also uses up a decent amount of jam.” It wouldn’t hurt, either, to use berry jams to finish a classic school dinner traybake sponge: “Once it’s out of the oven, top with jam then scatter with desiccated coconut.” Otherwise, Ebuehi says, joy can be found in a nostalgic jam tart or Italian crostata (look out for Ebuehi’s blackberry version next week).
State broadcaster says it will withdraw from next year’s contest in Vienna unless Israel is excluded over Gaza war
Spain has become the latest country to say it will not take part in next year’s Eurovision song contest if Israel participates.
Board members of the state broadcaster RTVE voted in majority favour of boycotting the contest if Israel is among the countries fielding an entry next year.
US vice-president encourages ‘calling out’ anyone who celebrates Kirk’s murder, including notifying employers
A mass “doxing” effort to track down, intimidate and harass people perceived not to have sufficiently mourned the killing of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk was endorsed on Monday by JD Vance.
The US vice-president guest-hosted Kirk’s podcast on Monday and said that people who “see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder” should “call them out”. He added: “Hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”
Tel Aviv is known as Israel’s liberal capital; home to nearly half a million residents it’s also a holiday destination, with beaches, bars and nightclubs. But almost exactly 60km south is Gaza. Reporter Matthew Cassel speaks to Israelis in the city, to see what they think of the war, famine and genocide happening next door, and the growing international condemnation against it
We’re almost ready to start with heat one of seven in the men’s 800m. The first three in each heat go through to the semis, along with the three fastest losers. Djamel Sedjati of Algeria, the Olympic silver medallist, is the class of this field.
Hudson-Smith, we learn, tightened up on the bus to the stadium, hence his relatively poor run in the heat. Presumably he’ll have taken steps to recuperate and avoid the same problem; hopefully for him, two days was enough to get things sorted.
With the US no longer accepting refugees, Dzaleka’s residents have no prospect of relocation. Three women tell us what life is like in a camp designed for 10,000 people but which now holds more than 58,000
• Photographs by Amos Gumulira for the Guardian
Tears stream down Francine’s* face as she pulls her glove off. Her right hand is covered by a pale, mottled burn scar. Her fingers are stiff and unnaturally bent. Francine turned to sex work to survive soon after she arrived alone at Malawi’s Dzaleka refugee camp in 2015, having travelled there from Burundi.
On Christmas Eve in 2022, a client refused to pay. When she blocked the doorway, he grabbed a boiling-hot saucepan of beans and threw it at her, scalding her hand and chest.
Another senior Conservative has defected to Reform UK, with the former health minister Maria Caulfield saying she signed up to Nigel Farage’s party a month ago.
Although Caulfield is no longer an MP after losing her Lewes seat to the Liberal Democrats last year, it is another blow for the Tories, a day after Danny Kruger, a sitting Tory MP and the shadow work and pensions minister, announced he had moved to Reform.
High court judge issues arrest warrant, saying a suspect has been charged in relation to 2012 death of 21-year-old
A warrant has been issued for the arrest of a British national on suspicion of the murder of the Kenyan woman Agnes Wanjiru, who was found dead in the grounds of a hotel near an army base in 2012.
The high court judge Alexander Muteti issued the arrest warrant earlier on Tuesday in Kenya, with the prosecution telling the court a suspect had been charged with murder, and seeking the application for a warrant of arrest to facilitate his extradition to Kenya.
There’s real chemistry between Oh and Keira Jang as a mother and daughter living in a society where pastoral scenes hide a more brutal reality
Ann Marie Fleming’s dystopian fable opens, not with gnarly destruction, but birdsong and lush greenery. The sensorial calm of rustling ferns and blushing bell flowers envelop the frame, while the Ink Spots’ recording of I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire plays softly in the background. This music cue recurs throughout the film, with each appearance more menacing than the last. Indeed, something wicked is lurking within this Edenic cocoon.
Things start out innocently enough. We see Ellie (Sandra Oh), a radiant single mother, entrusting her daughter Kiah (Keira Jang) to the care of Daniel (Joel Oulette) as the pair of young adults head off on an important mission. It is quickly revealed, however, that the pastoral beauty of their surroundings comes with a price. In the aftermath of catastrophic environmental disasters, the human race has decided to become unplugged. Not only that, a method of population control is put in place where people are voluntarily euthanised after turning 50. Daniel and Kia, it turns out, are Witnesses, designated community workers who monitor these end-of-life procedures.
The claim is central to rationales for arming Israel even as leading human rights groups decry genocide in Gaza
More than nine months after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports that concluded Israel was committing genocide – and more than a month since key Israeli human rights groups asserted the same – the American political establishment remains in rigid denial while horrors continue nonstop in Gaza. Virtually all Republicans and most Democrats in Congress still support massive US arms shipments to Israel, so they certainly can’t admit that the weaponry is making genocide possible.
Central to rationales for arming Israel is the claim that it is the nation of “the Jewish people”.
According to a new survey, many people experience ‘tech regret’ – especially when it comes to surveillance devices they have bought
The most regretted house tech, according to a recent survey, is smart lighting and video doorbells, with speakers in third place. It’s pretty obvious why: smart lighting addressed itself to the unbearable onerousness of getting off your arse and turning on a light, a problem nobody ever had, or if they did, they probably had 99 more pressing concerns. The appeal of the video doorbell was that something interesting may happen; maybe it would catch someone doing a crime, or a heartwarming moment when your kid ran back for one last hug on their first day of school, and you could put that on TikTok and be famous for five seconds, or – ideal world – it would catch one of your friends bitching about you. It is amazing, in this world of hypersurveillance and connectedness, how rarely any of those things, or indeed, anything interesting or unpredictable at all, ever happens. It’s almost as if constantly watching one another doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
In fact, someone in the fitness industry once told me – he intoned this very conspiratorially, as if he was telling me a business secret that would make me millions – that tech-regret is at its fiercest in the wearables market. The great untold secret of the smartwatch is that, when they break, nobody ever replaces them. There’s a moment of raw panic. If nobody is counting your steps, did they even happen? How will you get through the day, if you don’t know how many quality-adjusted sleep minutes you got? Whither your resting heart rate? But then a day passes, and you realise that your watch was actually bullying you: pass-agg and patronising one minute (“Well done! Your move ring is way ahead of where it would normally be!”), hectoring the next (“only 375 more calories and you’ll have met your frankly pathetic target of 400 burned. Come on, it’s only 10 to midnight, you’ve got this!”). If there was a person in your life treating you like this, you’d bin them off.
New stadium hopefully on way but Irish game needs boost after postponed T20 league and run of cancelled series
For England this is the end of another unrelenting summer. Three Twenty20 internationals over the coming days will make it eight white-ball matches inside three weeks, excluding a rain-abandoned game against South Africa. Jacob Bethell is captain because Harry Brook merits a lie down in a dark room. For Ireland, their opponents in Malahide, north Dublin, it is a radically different story.
“It feels like the start of our winter programme,” says Paul Stirling, the Ireland white-ball captain. “We haven’t played a home international series since the West Indies in June. It feels like we’ve closed the summer.” Those three T20s in Bready three months ago included two washouts, adding to an already shrinking itinerary.
The public has paid almost £200bn to the shareholders who own key British industries since they were privatised, research reveals.
The transfer of tens of billions of pounds to the owners of the privatised water, rail, bus, energy and mail services comes as families face soaring bills, polluted rivers and seas, and expensive and unreliable trains and buses.
Investigation uncovers documents and satellite imagery that confirm children being taken to sites for patriotic indoctrination, weapons training and combat drills
Russia is running an extensive network of more than 200 camps to re-educate, Russify and militarise Ukrainian children, a new investigation has found.
The facilities, across Russia and occupied Ukraine, include camps as well as schools, military bases, medical facilities, religious sites and universities.
Israel has launched its long-threatened ground offensive into the densely packed streets of Gaza City, military officials have confirmed.
One Israel Defense Forces (IDF) official said troops had begun what he called the “main phase” of the offensive, with an overnight advance from the outskirts towards the city centre.
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