Tech firms say they will be more transparent about vetting apps for app store in voluntary agreement with UK regulator
Apple and Google’s commitment to avoid discriminating against apps that compete with their own products under an agreement with the UK’s competition watchdog have been labelled “lightweight”.
The US tech companies have vowed to be more transparent about vetting third-party apps before letting them on their app stores and not discriminate against third party apps in app search rankings.
Manager says this season has been toughest of career
Liverpool lack right-back options for Sunderland game
Arne Slot has said it would be unacceptable for Liverpool not to qualify for the Champions League and that this season has been the toughest of his managerial career “by a mile”.
The Premier League champions lie sixth, five points off fourth place, although fifth is likely to yield a Champions League spot. Liverpool, who spent almost £450m on players last summer, are heavily reliant on Champions League income for their business model but have won once in seven league games before Wednesday’s visit to Sunderland.
The California governor has a record of failed pledges on housing, healthcare and more as he mistakes theatrics for leadership
Gavin Newsom has stumbled upon the perfect slogan for his likely upcoming presidential campaign: “Strong and Wrong.” In a recent interview, California’s governor said Americans prefer crude politicians like Donald Trump over leaders who cling to niceties and norms.
“Given the choice … the American people always support strong and wrong versus weak and right,” he said.
Gil Durán is a California journalist and author of the forthcoming bookThe Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and The War On Democracy. He was an adviser to several Democratic politicians
Most of us aren’t getting enough fibre in our diet, but, as our panel of experts explain, upping your intake is a case of taking baby steps …
Why is everyone talking about fibremaxxing? Chris, by email TikTok-born trends rarely go hand in hand with sage health advice, but that’s not to say upping our fibre – an often-forgotten part of our diets – is a bad idea. “Fibre needed its moment, so this is a good thing,” says dietitian Priya Tew. The non-digestible carbohydrate has two main functions: “There’s insoluble fibre, which is found in things such as whole grains, brown rice or vegetable skins, and I think about it like a broom,” Tew says, “in that it brushes the system out.” Then there’s soluble fibre (oats, beans, lentils), which she likens to a sponge: “It turns into this gel in your gut, and aids digestion and keeps us regular.” But that’s only part of the story, because fibre can also help lower cholesterol and stabilise blood sugar.
So, are you getting enough? “The aim is 25-30g fibre a day, but in reality most of us are maybe getting 15-18g,” Tew says, so we’ve got a little way to go. That said, some folk on the #fibremaxxing train have set their sights higher, which is where things can become problematic. “If you’re having too much fibre, you can end up feeling bloated, constipated or have abdominal pain,” she says, and that can occur when you increase your fibre intake too quickly: “The body needs time to get used to what’s happening.”
The proposed $10bn, 3,000-hectare green hydrogen and ammonia production facility, known as INNA, included a port, transport links to the coast and three solar power plants, and had been under evaluation by Chile’s environmental regulator for almost a year.
Downhill champion Breezy Johnson among the affected
‘A solution has been identified, and a fix put in place’
After days of embarrassing stories about Winter Olympic medals cracking, snapping, and even breaking in two after falling in the snow, organisers say they have finally fixed the problem.
Officials have also promised to repair any of the medals that were awarded in the opening three days of competition in Milano Cortina, after identifying on Monday that the issue stemmed from the medal’s cord, which is fitted with a breakaway mechanism required by law.
As trust in Russia and China’s state broadcasters grows, director general warns of the dangers of cutting back the service
The BBC World Service will run out of funding in just seven weeks with no future deal with the government currently in place, the corporation’s director general, Tim Davie, has warned.
In a last-minute pitch to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), Davie said the uncertainty came as news organisations were cutting their international reporting and disinformation was “flooding the digital sphere at an incredible speed”.
OVO Hydro, Glasgow Florence Welch is backed by the folk-horror dramatics of a petticoat-clad choir – but quite capable of transfixing the crowd with her billowing voice alone
‘I’ve only sung this once before and it makes me shake,” Florence Welch admits, crouching alone at the far end of a long, narrow thrust stage. Watching her command this arena during the first of two sold-out shows in Glasgow in honour of Florence + the Machine’s sixth album Everybody Scream, it’s hard to imagine Welch fearing anything. Just seconds ago, she was racing barefoot, flouncy skirts gathered in one hand, ripping through Spectrum (the band’s first UK No 1, back in 2012) and its searing demand: “Say my name!”
But the new song she is steeling herself to sing presses on a bruise. With ratcheting intensity, You Can Have It All grieves an ectopic pregnancy which almost killed her, as well as a music industry that punishes its stars for motherhood. Over grungy electric guitar, her tempestuous voice billows like sails in high wind: “Am I a woman now?” It leaves the arena in stunned silence. She gives a wry curtsey.
The documentary’s second week slump equates to around six tickets per cinema
Compared to its barnstorming US opening 10 days ago, when it charted at No 3 in the box office charts and made $7.2m (£5.76m), Melania’s UK start – No 29, £32,974 overall across 155 cinemas for a site average of £212.80 – was modest.
But the documentary has still dropped significantly in its second week of UK release, with tracking organisation Comscore confirming it has taken £4,091 from 62 locations, meaning a site average of £65.98 – or around six tickets per venue.
The boss of Britain’s biggest pharmaceutical company has said the government’s recent drug pricing deal is a “very positive step” but is unlikely to unfreeze a paused £200m investment in Cambridge.
AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, suggested that a UK-US deal on NHS pricing agreed in December would not be “sufficient” to restart the project to build a research site in the east of England, which was paused in September.
Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.”
Head of army says potential ‘peacemakers’ being trained, in what would be first outside force in Gaza since 1967
Indonesia has said it is preparing to send up to 8,000 troops to Gaza to be part of a peacekeeping force under Donald Trump’s Middle East plan.
The announcement by the army chief of staff, Gen Maruli Simanjuntak, makes Indonesia the first country to deliver a specific commitment to the international stabilisation force (ISF) envisaged as part of the second phase of the Trump plan.
Birdwatchers flock to Montréal for rare sighting of ‘vagrant’ bird that has made its home during a bitterly cold winter
On a quiet Montréal street of low-rise brick apartment buildings on one side and cement barrier wall on the other, a crowd has gathered, binoculars around their necks and cameras at the ready. A European robin has taken up residence in the neighbourhood, which is sandwiched between two industrial areas with warehouses and railway lines and, a few blocks away, port facilities on the St Lawrence River.
Ron Vandebeek from Ottawa, Ontario, is here on a frigid February morning hoping to see the rare bird, which was first spotted at the beginning of January.
Exclusive: Analysts say there will be oil spill catastrophe that could be far bigger than Exxon Valdez disaster
Decrepit oil tankers in Iran’s sanctions-busting shadow fleet are a “ticking time bomb”, and it is only a matter of time before there is a catastrophic environmental disaster, maritime intelligence analysts have warned.
Such an oil spill could be far bigger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster that released 37,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea, they said.
US captain reflects on her playing career in France and the need for greater competition as she prepares for a summer move to Denver
Lindsey Heaps is sitting in the heart of Lyon, a city that has witnessed her transformation from a self-described “baby” into the authoritative captain of the US women’s national team. Now wearing the iconic No 10 shirt for OL Lyonnes, inherited this season from Dzsenifer Marozsán, Heaps is reflective. She is a veteran, a leader who has won almost everything, yet she remains a student of the game, constantly seeking the “good struggles” that defined her early years.
The timing of our meeting is poignant. This month Lyonnes reasserted their dominance over the Première Ligue with a 1-0 victory against Paris Saint-Germain, before winning 4-0 against Saint-Étienne in a derby. The results leaves OL in a league of their own: 14 points clear of second-placed Nantes, with PSG cast adrift in fifth place, 17 points behind the leaders. For Heaps, these numbers are not just a source of pride; they are a symptom of a wider problem.
Sarah Mullally says Church of England has ‘fallen tragically short’ after predecessor resigned over significant failings
The new archbishop of Canterbury has pledged to rebuild trust and confidence in the way the Church of England deals with the abuse of children and vulnerable adults, saying that in the past it has “fallen tragically short”.
Sarah Mullally told a meeting of the C of E’s ruling body, the General Synod, that “proper independence” would be central to the way the church dealt with allegations of abuse on her watch as archbishop. The C of E has been criticised for dealing with allegations of abuse, and complaints about the handling of such allegations, internally.
Chiller about a skull-shaped Aztec whistle blends Final Destination-style deaths with a tender portrait of anxious adolescence
On the surface, this teen-courting, genre-savvy Irish-Canadian horror effort looks like the kind of project ushered into production after the Philippou brothers’ cursed-artefact chiller Talk to Me cleared up at the box office. However, rather than suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy relocate us to an autumnal, Springsteen-ready North American steeltown, where artsy high-schooler Chrys (Dafne Keen) inherits the locker of the star basketballer we’ve just seen flambeed in a prologue. The deadly doodad she finds there is a skull-shaped Aztec whistle with either “summon the dead” or “summon your dead” (there’s some linguistic quibbling) inscribed on the side. Naturally she puts it back, and everybody lives happily ever after.
I kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in the pummelling Antipodean predecessor, but whistleblowing soon makes everyone’s worst fears about dying literal. That development gives Hardy’s increasingly bloody kill scenes a Final Destination-like piquancy: your heart can only go out to the boy racer who perishes via car crash in his upstairs bedroom. One similarity to the Philippous’ film is the sympathy for insecure, troubled teens who couldn’t seem more unlike the usual disposable jocks and prom queens. Egerton observes courtship rituals with tenderness, quietly foregrounding Chrys’s struggles to come out to upright classmate Ellie (Sophie Nélisse); beneath the looming shadow of death, this is an attempt to live one’s truest life.
Brendon McCullum’s shades-on, feet-up, perpetually chilled persona as England coach, which has led to him being criticised for creating an unhealthily relaxed team culture, is carefully cultivated but entirely false, according to the former white-ball captain Jos Buttler. Buttler said that McCullum is actually “as sharp a coach as I’ve ever worked with”, and that “everyone in the dressing room knows the truth”.
While McCullum has been sceptical about the overuse of data in cricket he has recently adopted the use of walkie-talkies to relay information from the team’s analysts to their support staff and on to the pitch during matches, and Buttler insisted he has always been more involved in the action than it appears.
Moltbook, a social media site for AI agents, is nothing new. Still, the marriage of big tech and politics demands we take a stand
On a recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was shocked by the billboards that lined the freeway outside of the airport. “The singularity is here,” proclaimed one. “Humanity had a good run,” said another. It seemed like every other sign along the road was plastered with claims from tech firms making outrageous claims about artificial intelligence. The ads, of course, were rife with hype and ragebait. But the claims they contain aren’t occurring in a vacuum. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, recently said: “We basically have built AGI, or very close to it,” before confusingly qualifying his statement as “spiritual”. Elon Musk has gone even further, claiming: “We have entered the singularity.”
Enter Moltbook, the social media site built for AI agents. A place where bots can talk to other bots, in other words. A spate of doom-laden news articles and op-eds followed its launch. The authors fretted about the fact that the bots were talking about religion, claiming to have secretly spent their human builders’ money, and even plotting the overthrow of humanity. Many pieces contained suggestions eerily like those on the billboards in San Francisco: that machines are now not only as smart as humans (a theory known as artificial general intelligence) but that they are moving beyond us (a sci-fi concept known as the singularity).
In a park keeper’s lodge in Barrow-in-Furness, Full of Noises has hosted the likes of Julia Holter and Lonnie Holley – and is a model for why arts funding matters
Barrow-in-Furness sits on a windswept hook of Cumbrian coastline. It’s an industrial town surrounded by the Irish sea on three sides, known for its 140-year history of submarine building. The corrugated peaks of BAE Systems’ Dock Hall dominate the skyline over Barrow’s red-brick terraces, and roughly a third of working-age locals are employed in its sprawling complex. This militarised landscape is the unlikely home of Full of Noises, an experimental music and arts venue with a capacity of 40 whose first event featured krautrock legends Faust destroying an electric guitar with a pneumatic drill.
Having secured funding to launch a two-day festival in 2009, artistic director Glenn Boulter and four other local artists took on temporary custodianship of the crumbling canteen building on wind-lashed Barrow Island, “a building that’s part of this big military-industrial complex,” Boulter says. “It’s heavily security-controlled.” He recalls a game they would play on a nearby bridge, where they would pull their phones out as if to take photos and count the seconds until they were accosted by security. “For us, that was an interesting context to be working in.”
A trip to the pub with my favourite 89-year-old, followed by a get together with some errant wives ... It’s going to be a belter
This is the first time I’ve been single on Valentine’s Day since 1994. I didn’t give it a lot of thought – romance’s festival day has never been a great advert for the concept. In the best case scenario, it turns your real and important feelings into a commercial cliche, in the worst, it’s just a vivid and poignant reminder of how much you wish you were elsewhere, and at every point in between, it’s open season for restaurants to rip you off while you make dry conversation over drier chicken.
This year, however, I made a plan with two married friends. I did not anticipate how much I would enjoy bumping into their husbands around the place, going “guess where I’m going on Valentine’s Day? OUT WITH YOUR WIFE”, to see their astonished expressions, since, ensconced in long marriages, they can no longer remember what month it is, let alone if anyone has any plans.
As pressure builds before Calcutta Cup, Scotland’s coach may well have reached the point of diminishing returns
The witty Anglo-American author Ashleigh Brilliant passed away last September at the age of 91, but his best lines are timeless. Beleaguered sports coaches worldwide will all recognise one of his characteristically pithy observations: “I try to take one day at a time – but sometimes several days attack me at once.” To be responsible for an under-pressure national side must induce a similar feeling.
So what do you do when coaching life starts serving you lemons? After a while there are only two options: try to ride it out, or accept it might be wiser for someone else to have a go. It can be a delicate judgment, often shaped by non-sporting considerations. Unless it becomes apparent, as seemingly happened with the recently ousted All Blacks coach Scott Robertson, that your dressing room has already made the call for you.
Connexion
