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GB teenager Nowacki wins dramatic European gold
Hodgkinson leads home Broeders-Bol to qualify for 800m final
Leicester City put up for sale for more than £200m
LIV set to cancel season-ending Team Championship
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UK economy grows but experts warn of challenging months ahead
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Putin can no longer claim victory in Ukraine, Nobel Peace Prize winner tells BBC
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Who could replace White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt?
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'I worked really hard and it paid off': Elation, nerves and proud parents as students get results
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Kennedy Center board votes to add president’s name again — and throw in a ‘Trump Plaza’
Kennedy Center board votes again to renovate building and inscribe Trump’s name on it – report
The center has until next week to present plan to judge who had blocked earlier rehab and name change
The board of the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington is said to have voted once again to move forward with Donald Trump’s controversial plan to temporarily shutter the building for substantial renovations, as well as to inscribe the US president’s name on the facade of its building, despite a federal order for his name to be removed from the signage.
The board – mostly handpicked, staunch allies of the president – voted “to close the Kennedy Center’s main building, while keeping a newer addition to the campus, known as the Reach, open for limited programming and to operate as an active memorial to John F Kennedy”, according to the New York Times, which was first to report the results.
Continue reading...UK records hottest day of year as fifth summer heatwave reaches peak
Kew Gardens in London hits 38.1C and 40C-plus recorded in parts of Europe with continent trapped under heat dome
The UK has recorded its hottest day of the year so far with a provisional temperature of 38.1C in southern England as Europe sweltered under a major heat dome.
As temperatures on the continent surpassed 40C at the peak of the summer’s fifth heatwave, the thermometer at Kew Gardens in west London on Thursday surpassed the previous high of 38C on 28 June, the Met Office said.
Continue reading...Baby in surrogate dispute now in custody of parents, lawyer says
Kennedy Center board votes to close venue for two years, inscribe Trump's name on building
The Kennedy Center's board of trustees on Thursday voted to move forward with President Trump's plan to close the building for renovations and to inscribe his name on the building to commemorate the upgrades.
Family of Irish plane crash victim awarded $29m in damages
На вкус и цвет все фломастеры разные — способы управления средами на личном опыте
Знаешь, я прочитал ту статью про инфраструктурные релизы, идентичность и консистентность. Красиво написано, складно. Прямо как в душноватом учебнике. И даже местами правильно.
Чего там про фломастеры ...The showdowns and reunions highlighting the NBA’s 2026-27 season
A Fake Pregnancy and a Kidnapping: The True Story Behind A Child of My Own
A new Netflix documentary finds an unconventional way into the wild true story of a woman who pretended to be pregnant and kidnapped a newborn baby from a hospital.
A Child of My Own, out Aug. 13 on Netflix, follows Eleonor Alejandra Marin Mendoza, nicknamed Ale, who served more than 13 years in prison for kidnapping a baby in 2009 at the Mexico City hospital where she worked. Before taking the baby, Ale had faked being pregnant to her family and friends.
Ale does not deny the fake pregnancy or the kidnapping, saying in the documentary, “What did I do wrong to be here? Breaking the law, lying, deceiving, causing pain.”
Her retelling of the crime is so dramatic that the first 50 minutes of A Child of My Own are produced like a feature film, with professional actors playing out Ale's version of events. Then, it’s followed by interviews with the real-life Ale, the baby’s mother, Mayra Navarro, Ale’s partner, Arturo Garmiño, and a judge who presided over Ale’s case, Taissia Cruz Parcero.
Here’s what to know about the scandal that made headlines in Mexico, why Ale felt compelled to fake a pregnancy and kidnap a baby, and how she got caught.
The question of consent
The dramatized first half of the film is meant to represent director Maite Alberdi’s own journey exploring this subject as a documentary filmmaker, starting with meeting Ale in prison in 2022 while working on another project and learning her side of the story. And it is meant to represent Ale’s “fairy tale” version of events, “the story that she tells herself to survive,” says Alberdi. “She’s dreaming.”
Ale doesn’t deny taking the baby, but to this day, she insists that the baby’s mother Mayra agreed to give it to her. At the same time, Ale pretended to be pregnant, doctoring medical records to make it look like she had ultrasounds and binge-eating junk food to put on weight quickly so that her belly would expand. When it came time to “give birth,” her plan was to pretend to deliver at the hospital by herself and then surprise her husband at home with Mayra's baby.
Ale says she met Mayra in a hospital waiting room five months before Mayra was due to give birth. Ale claims that Mayra said she wanted to get an abortion, but told Ale that she decided she would rather give the baby up for adoption. The movie version of her story shows the two women in a hospital waiting room, making a pact that Mayra would give her baby to Ale. When the fictional Mayra gives birth, she thrusts the baby into Ale’s hands in the hospital and says she’s off to Chihuahua.
None of that was true, says the real Mayra later in the documentary.
“There was never a deal,” she says. “If you’re going to give away a baby, you wouldn’t do it inside the hospital, right?”
Parcero, a judge in the case, notes that after considering all of the evidence, “in the end, the only thing that didn’t fit was Mayra’s alleged consent or the claims that she had consented.”
She runs through the key evidence, like scans of Mayra’s appointment card that show that Ale and Mayra could not have made a pact at the hospital months before the birth because Marya had her checkups done at a different health center.
Mayra says she met Ale for the first time right after she gave birth. Ale came by her room and said she was doing a survey for the hospital. Mayra says she could not have fled to Chihuahua—or anywhere, for that matter—because she was running a high fever. She went to the bathroom to provide a urine sample to test for an infection, and when she came back, the baby was gone. Mayra assumed a nurse was bathing or feeding the baby: “Never, never did I think my baby was kidnapped.”
Police arrested Ale about eight hours later. Parcero recounts how authorities found Ale’s sweater with her ID badge in Mayra’s room. Security camera footage showed her entering the hospital with an empty shopping bag just before noon and then walking out of the hospital around 6:30pm with the newborn in a shopping bag. Police tracked down Ale, Arturo, and the baby in a nearby hotel room.
Arturo, who believed Ale had given birth to his child, spent two years and six months in prison before he was acquitted. “There was no malicious intent on his part,” Parcero says. "He wasn't an accomplice."
Why Ale faked a pregnancy
Ale says she pretended to be pregnant in a desperate act to please her husband and their families after the couple suffered three miscarriages. Arturo didn’t want to adopt, and Ale felt a lot of pressure to get pregnant and have a baby.
“I was afraid and scared that [Arturo] would leave me for failing to become a mother and that I’d be targeted and judged,” Ale says. “Actually, I was judged for something much worse in the end.”
Ale convinced her family that she was going to have a baby, and the movie version of her narrative shows her using medical records at her hospital to create her own ultrasounds. In home video footage played in court and featured in the documentary, Ale appears at her own baby shower, opening presents and caressing her swollen belly.
Alberdi points out that Ale faced pressure not only family pressure but also social pressure because in Mexican and Latin American culture, many “cannot understand a marriage without a baby.” Alberdi hopes Ale’s “extreme case” will make viewers think about “invisible pressures to be a mom.”
At first, it seems like the pressure is off Ale when she’s released from prison in 2023 at 39-years-old, after going in at age 26. She says she wants to work, take trips to the beach, and won’t try to get pregnant again.
“Before, I think, my desire to be a mom was more about pleasing others,” Ale says. Now she wants to know, “What else is out there beyond being a mom?”
Arturo and Ale stayed together when she got out of prison. But eventually, he asked her to have a baby again. “I would indeed like to have a child, not as much as before, but I still have that desire engrained in me,” he says in the documentary, explaining that he likes the idea of children as a way to carry on their parents’ legacy.
Alberdi said it was hard to learn that Arturo still wanted Ale to get pregnant.“[Ale] goes back to society after 13 years, and she has exactly the same pressure again from her husband,” she said. “It's so painful to see that nothing has changed in these years, and it's a sad ending.”
When Ale wouldn’t try to have children with him, Arturo pursued a relationship with another woman, and had a son with her. But he told Ale that he loved her more and wanted to be with her, and now Ale happily co-parents Arturo’s son. The documentary ends with the three playing at a playground.
Championship spending hits record levels and likely to go higher as playoffs expand
With a top-eight finish offering at least a playoff place, the temptation to spend big in pursuit of the Premier League will grow – but so will the risks
The Championship’s collective wage bill grew to a record £903m in 2024-25, according to Deloitte’s latest Annual Review of Football Finance. Clubs are paying players enormous sums in their pursuit of Premier League football. With the playoffs expanding this season, the number of owners willing to risk even more money in the hope of securing promotion is only likely to increase.
In isolation, the figure of £903m does not signify much. Compared to the Premier League’s £4.4bn salary outlay, it almost looks small. But England’s top division can afford that gargantuan commitment to wages whereas the second tier cannot. The 24 clubs in the Championship earned £942m, meaning salaries consumed 96% of revenue. If there was any surprise in their collective net debt being £1.4bn at the end of 2024-25, it was only that it had reduced from the £1.5bn it was a year earlier.
Continue reading...Cuba Throws a Birthday Bash for Fidel as His Legacy Lies in Ruins
"CBS Sunday Morning" launches new series of live events at the 92nd Street Y in NYC, debuting with Sylvester Stallone
Kennedy Center Board votes again to shut main building down — and add Trump's name back
The board voted to close the Washington, D.C., arts complex's main campus for a $250 million renovation — three months after a federal judge temporarily blocked a similar closure.
(Image credit: Alex Wroblewski)
Karoline Leavitt and the trap of MAGA womanhood
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
Karoline Leavitt, the 28-year-old firebrand who became the nation’s youngest-ever press secretary in 2024, is stepping down to “spend more time with her beautiful young children.”
President Donald Trump announced the news on Wednesday night in a Truth Social post, adding that Leavitt would remain an adviser and “an influential voice within the Republican Party.”
It feels fitting that Leavitt — whose public persona required her to perform both her job and her role as a wife and mom — is stepping down to parent. In MAGA’s conception of womanhood, there can be no higher calling. Not even serving the president.
For more than two years, however, Leavitt made a show of trying to do both. She returned to work on Trump’s reelection campaign only days after the birth of her first child and regularly shared photos of herself working while holding her son.
Leavitt also welcomed a daughter over the spring, amid what Fox News dubbed a White House “baby boom.” Officials and conservative media quickly turned the new mothers into advertisements for the pro-natalist movement: Proof that women could, and should, have both careers and children.
Leavitt is still being held up that way, even — perhaps especially — as she departs. “She’s been a role model to millions and millions of young women,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told Fox News on Wednesday. “A mother, a family woman, a press secretary, a patriot.”
MAGA’s rules for women
The MAGA movement tends to glorify traditional female roles — wife, mother, homemaker — while simultaneously (and confusingly) elevating ambitious, career-driven women like Leavitt.
At first glance, her prominence — and that of other women in Trump’s administration — would seem to rebut the charge that the movement is misogynist. In fact, that’s a line of defense that Trump himself has advanced.
But look a little closer, and you’ll see the structural contradiction at the heart of MAGA femininity: Female power is only legitimate when it’s exercised on behalf of Trump, and by women who conform to traditional expectations around gender, marriage, motherhood, and physical appearance.
To Trump, a female White House correspondent was a “piggy,” for instance. But a female press secretary who defended the slur was “knocking them dead.”
A female employee at a Trump golf course was asked to sign an NDA after reporting harassment. But the female attorney who allegedly pressured her to sign it was, according to Trump, “a rocket ship.”
A female politician rose to prominence championing the president’s deportation agenda. But to get there, she had to find her “Mar-a-Lago face” — and she was ousted after showing signs of personal ambition. (In fairness, she was also very bad at her job.)
It’s a very tricky little tightrope to walk. And lately, that strain has begun to show. While Trump began his second term with an unusually high number of female Cabinet members for a Republican president, women now hold only four of 23 Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions.
Trump’s support is also down among young women. In Congress, a bloc of prominent conservative female lawmakers recently broke from their party to censure Republicans accused of misconduct. Now, the MAGA movement is losing one of its fiercest female proxies in Leavitt.
Even at the height of her powers, however, Leavitt never really got her due. The luxurious office traditionally reserved for the White House press secretary instead went to another White House staffer. A dude.
One link for later
➨ Meet the latest and greatest exercise cult. It’s called HYROX — yes, in all caps — and it’s an eight-round agility and strength competition. Participants spend thousands of dollars on training, registration, and travel for these events, which tend to “subsume your entire existence.” That’s a very hard no for me, personally…but a lot of very fit and competitive people are apparently into it.
Before you go…
- Did you know…that the US attempted to assassinate longtime Cuban dictator Fidel Castro by poisoning his ice cream? And that’s somehow not even the weirdest or most far-fetched Castro assassination scheme.
- Today’s trivia: Who was the first woman to perform hip hop at the White House? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
- Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the German philosopher who wrote Critique of Practical Reason. That would be Immanuel Kant, whose work also arguably inspired one of the core conflicts in the Avengers films.
When Can LLMs Replace Humans in A/B Tests?
TL;DR: LLM predictions can stand in for human outcomes in A/B tests, but only by assumption, not by design....
The post When Can LLMs Replace Humans in A/B Tests? appeared first on Spotify Engineering.
What is the MMR vaccine and how does Trump’s executive order affect parents and children?
President’s order calls for several changes to childhood vaccinations – and experts say it’ll lead to confusion
On Monday, Donald Trump signed an executive order pushing for revisions to how children in the US are vaccinated.
The executive order calls for several changes. These include fewer vaccinations overall and a recommendation that the combined measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine be replaced with separate shots for each disease administered during separate medical visits. The latter direction is currently impossible to implement because no stand-alone shots for these diseases are licensed in the US.
Continue reading...Israeli troops force families from homes amid settler terror campaign in West Bank
Former PM of Israel calls events ‘concerted and meticulous attempt at ethnic cleansing’ against Palestinians
Israeli troops have forced two Palestinian families to leave their besieged West Bank homes, the day after a top Israeli commander personally promised he would end a violent settler campaign to drive them out.
Israeli soldiers also took over eight other homes in Qusra early on Thursday, telling the village’s mayor, Abdul Azim Wadi, that the buildings were needed for a days-long operation to remove the settlers. They later relinquished six. Settlers still roam the village.
Continue reading...Luigi Mangione hearing set to start amid discussions about possible guilty plea
Four taken to hospital and homes damaged in West Midlands fires
Grassfire covering about 16 hectares near golf course in Stourbridge was one of several large blazes in region
Four people have been taken to hospital and several homes damaged as fires tore through residential neighbourhoods in the West Midlands.
A 16-hectare (40-acre) grassfire near a golf course in Stourbridge was one of several significant fires in the region on Thursday – the UK’s hottest day of the year.
Continue reading...Israeli troops force families from homes amid settler terror campaign in West Bank
Former PM of Israel calls events ‘concerted and meticulous attempt at ethnic cleansing’ against Palestinians
Israeli troops have forced two Palestinian families to leave their besieged West Bank homes, the day after a top Israeli commander personally promised he would end a violent settler campaign to drive them out.
Israeli soldiers also took over eight other homes in Qusra early on Thursday, telling the village’s mayor, Abdul Azim Wadi, that the buildings were needed for a days-long operation to remove the settlers. They later relinquished six. Settlers still roam the village.
Continue reading...