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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
In a case of contents outshining the container, the V&A’s national museum of everything takes the public up close and personal to a gallimaufry of precious things, from porcelain to poison darts, textiles to tiaras. Elegantly shoehorned into the gargantuan hangar that was originally the broadcasting centre for the 2012 Olympics, it’s an Amazon warehouse crammed with global treasures, setting visitors off on an odyssey of “curated transgression” through an immersive cabinet of curiosities.
Journalists find Swiss government rejected company over fears US intelligence might gain access to sensitive data
UK MPs have raised concerns about the government’s contracts with Palantir after an investigation published in Switzerland highlighted allegations about the suitability and security of its products.
The investigation by the Zurich-based research collective WAV and the Swiss online magazine Republik details Palantir’s efforts, over the course of seven years, to sell its products to Swiss federal agencies.
Rich Stockdale says model of ‘regenerative capitalism’ would maximise profits by planting trees, restoring peatlands, and installing windfarms across its estates
The founder of an investment firm buying large estates across Britain to restore woods and peatland has said it is “unashamedly and proudly” capitalist, and plans to make tens of millions of pounds in profit.
Rich Stockdale, the chief executive of Oxygen Conservation, said his model of “regenerative capitalism” was a “force for good” because it would offer investors significant profits by planting trees, restoring peatlands, operating solar farms and holiday homes and installing new windfarms across its estates.
As I enter the room, Lamine Camara picks up a football that he won’t let go of until after the interview. It’s a simple visual metaphor for a dream he has never let slip. “I only wanted football; I was focused solely on that,” says the Monaco and Senegal midfielder. His determination and talent convinced Génération Foot, Metz and Monaco to sign him. Although the hardest person to convince was not a sporting director or manager, but his own father.
“He didn’t want me to play football but it’s because he hadn’t seen me play,” says Camara. “He didn’t know anything about football but people came up to him and said: ‘Your son knows how to play. You have to help him.’” Eventually, on “one beautiful day”, Camara earned his father’s blessing and pursued a career in the game. His small stature was another hurdle and it deterred local club Casa Sports from handing him a contract.
Thousands of farms set to go bankrupt as grain farmers in particular hit by trade disruptions caused by price hikes
Donald Trump, having promised to “NEVER LET OUR FARMERS DOWN”, appeared to come through for them this month when he unveiled a $12bn aid package. Industry leaders say thousands of farms will still go bust this year.
While the US president has vowed to increase domestic farm production, and even claimed this formed a “big part” of his plan to lower grocery prices for Americans, many US farmers are grappling with mounting financial issues – compounded by Trump’s agenda.
A €90bn loan is a lifeline for Zelenskyy. But make no mistake – the bloodshed won’t end while the Russian president believes he can still win
Vladimir Putin’s marathon press conference on 19 December, an annual year-end event, offered no evidence that Russia may abandon the goals the president set for his “special military operation” against Ukraine in February 2022: conquering Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. True to form, Putin seemed unperturbed that nearly four years into the war his army had managed to fully occupy only Luhansk, despite having already taken control of more than a third of that region, as well as Donetsk, by 2015.
Putin’s unyielding stance shouldn’t be a surprise. Soon after the invasion, Russia’s State Duma adopted legislation incorporating these four Ukrainian regions into Russia – and this month the foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and the deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, reiterated Putin’s territorial claims.
Rajan Menon is a professor emeritus of international relations at the City College of New York and a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. He will be making his fifth visit to wartime Ukraine this spring.
This is the latest in the relentless purge of climate researchers who refuse to be co-opted by the fossil fuel industry
The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin would no doubt have understood and even appreciated the latest attack by the Trump administration on climate researchers and their work.
Professor Michael Mann is the presidential distinguished professor and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, and co-author with Peter Hotez of Science Under Siege; Bob Ward is policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science
Heavy rain and mountain snow forecast for northern and central parts, with river and flooding likely in Los Angeles
After prolonged heavy rainfall and devastating flooding across the Pacific north-west in the past few weeks, further flood watches have been issued across California through this week.
With 50-75mm (2-3in) of rainfall already reported across northern California this weekend, a series of atmospheric rivers will continue to bring periods of heavy rain and mountain snow across the northern and central parts of the state, with flood watches extending until Friday.
Danish foreign minister ‘deeply angered’ by move to send special envoy to territory Trump has threatened to annex
Denmark has said it will summon the US ambassador after Donald Trump announced he had appointed a special envoy to Greenland, the Danish autonomous territory he has threatened to annex.
“I am deeply angered by the appointment and the statement, which I find totally unacceptable,” the Danish foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, told Denmark’s TV2 in an interview, adding that the foreign ministry would call in the US ambassador in the coming days “to get an explanation”.
Vox doubles its seats in Extremadura as Socialist Workers’ party, mired in corruption scandals, loses 10 of its 28 seats
Spain’s ruling Socialist Workers’ party (PSOE), already reeling from a series of corruption and sexual harassment scandals, has suffered another blow with a disastrous showing in Sunday’s regional election in the north-western region of Extremadura.
The PSOE lost 10 of its 28 seats as the far-right Vox party doubled its representation on two years ago from five to 11 seats.
Michelle Williams put in a stunning performance in this tale of a dying woman’s quest to have an orgasm. It’s not just clever, tender and blackly comic – it’s a beautiful meditation on what it means to live (and die) well
Dying for Sex is about a fortysomething woman leaving her husband and having lots of experimental sex after she is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s about so much more than that. By the end, the sex scenes – many and varied though they may be – are just a bagatelle.
Partly this is because there is no false hope offered here. None of the sexy set pieces are a full escape from reality. The series is based on a true story and the podcast made about Molly Kochan’s decision to cram years of sexual experience into the little time she was told she had left before metastasised breast cancer killed her. Whatever Molly does, whatever we see her do – enjoy or not enjoy – we know it will not change the ultimate outcome. This is the frame in which all the scenes of sex parties, age-gapped hookups, discovery of “pup play” and mastering the tricky latches on cock cages in Molly’s pursuit of her first partnered orgasm are set.
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