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• United unable to financially compete with rivals

• Rashford back after Barcelona loan but could leave

Michael Carrick has stated that Manchester United will not make a £100m signing this summer due to their finances, with the manager also insisting that Marcus Rashford “is our player” despite the forward and club preferring him to depart.

In the current window United have invested a total of £85m on Youri Tielemans and Andrey Santos but have never spent £100m on a single transfer.

It is not enough now for war to kill, it must eradicate a people’s cherished and precious heritage too

Wars may not take summer holidays, but they do sometimes see exhaustion. As drones race back and forth across Ukraine and the strait of Hormuz, a grim stalemate seems to have invaded the earth beneath. Aerial bombardment knows limited resistance and even less victory or defeat. Ukraine, Russia, Israel, Iran and their allies seem able to defy diplomacy and drop bombs on each other for ever.

At which point the outside world can merely count some of the costs. Vladimir Putin’s known desire to eliminate Ukraine’s historical identity has led to its cultural devastation. Two weeks ago Unesco reported the destruction or dereliction of 545 of its historic buildings, including 156 religious sites and 43 museums. The attempted eradication of what Putin himself claims to be an intrinsic part of Russia’s own history is sickening.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

Federal court rules administration failed to plausibly show ongoing violation of civil rights law

A US federal ⁠judge ⁠has dismissed ​the Trump administration’s lawsuit that ⁠claimed ​Harvard ‌University failed ‌to protect Jewish ‌and Israeli students from harassment in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.

In a ruling on Thursday morning, US district ‌judge Richard Stearns in ​Boston said the administration’s lawsuit – ⁠filed in March – failed to plausibly ​show ​an ongoing ​violation ‌of ​federal ​civil rights law on Harvard’s campus.

Трейс ИИ-агента можно открыть в обычном "дереве" и найти медленный вызов или спан с ошибкой. Но по дереву трудно восстановить логику запуска: сколько раз агент обращался к модели, какие инструменты вызывал, где повторил шаг и какой ответ в итоге увидел пользователь.

В Proto Observability Platform уже были дерево, граф, флейм-граф и другие представления трейса. Они продолжали решать инфраструктурные задачи, но ответы о поведении агента приходилось собирать вручную из десятков спанов, транспортных вызовов и повторяющихся тел сообщений. Мы увидели это сначала на OpenTelemetry Demo 3.0, затем при отладке собственного «AI-аналитика» в связке с нашим MCP-сервером.

В результате мы добавили отдельное GenAI-представление с четырьмя режимами: лентой, графом шагов, графом вызовов и чатом. Дальше покажем, на какой вопрос отвечает каждый режим, почему одного универсального графа оказалось недостаточно и какие дефекты реальной GenAI-инструментации пришлось учитывать.

Federal court rules administration failed to plausibly show ongoing violation of civil rights law

A US federal ⁠judge ⁠has dismissed ​the Trump administration’s lawsuit that ⁠claimed ​Harvard ‌University failed ‌to protect Jewish ‌and Israeli students from harassment in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.

In a ruling on Thursday morning, US district ‌judge Richard Stearns in ​Boston said the administration’s lawsuit – ⁠filed in March – failed to plausibly ​show ​an ongoing ​violation ‌of ​federal ​civil rights law on Harvard’s campus.

Undercover officers working for West Midlands ‘special projects team’ planted evidence to convict men, lawyers claim

Lawyers representing four men convicted of terror offences are increasingly hopeful that revelations from the undercover policing inquiry could boost the chances of their case being reopened.

Ten years ago, Khobaib Hussain, Naweed Ali, Mohibur Rahman and Tahir Aziz were arrested and later convicted of plotting a terrorist attack in the UK after an elaborate covert police operation.

Investigation under way after incident left two passengers with severe injuries

Two people were seriously injured when a passenger train derailed between Haywards Heath and Lewes in East Sussex on Thursday.

The South East Coast ambulance service said two people had been taken to major trauma centres with severe injuries.

Kew Gardens in London hits 38.1C and 40C-plus recorded in parts of Europe with continent trapped under heat dome

• Europe heatwave – latest updates

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.

Можно ли сделать e2e тесты мощным инструментом раннего отлова багов, не потопив при этом CI и не всем не разругавшись?

Рассказываю, через что пришлось пройти, чтобы релизы были спокойные, пайплайны — зеленые, разработчики — довольные.

Как мы это внедряли, сколько сопротивления получили и что из этого выжило спустя четыре месяца.

SOLID в реальном мире: LSP без квадратов и прямоугольников Дисклеймер: статья для разработчиков уровня junior и middle, которые знакомятся с принципами чистого кода и SOLID. Примеры кода — PHP 8.1+.

Each year the Guardian runs a competition to find the invertebrate of the year. To find out more about the 2026 nominees, science editor Ian Sample hears from climate reporter Petra Stock, environment reporter Oliver Milman and Science Weekly co-host Madeleine Finlay. They each nominate an incredible invertebrate that you might never have heard of, and argue why their choice should come top. Vote for your favourite now and the winner will be unveiled on 17 August

Когда мы говорим про ПЛК, обычно представляем достаточно закрытое устройство: подключили модули ввода-вывода, написали программу на ST или LD, загрузили проект - и контроллер годами выполняет один и тот же цикл.

Но современные контроллеры все чаще совмещают PLC-runtime и Linux-среду, в которой можно запускать базы данных, MQTT, VPN, приложения на Python и C++, web-сервисы и даже контейнеры. Разберемся, зачем производители идут в эту сторону, что такая архитектура дает пользователю и какие новые риски создает.

Исправить слово или запятую в статье можно за несколько секунд. Но на моём сайте после такой правки запускался полный выпуск: установка зависимостей, сборка Nuxt и админки, генерация страниц, перезапуск приложения и итоговые проверки.

Последний успешный полный workflow перед запуском новой схемы шёл 12 минут 53 секунды. Для изменений в коде это нормально. Для исправленной запятой — слишком долго.

Я разделил два разных выпуска

Rare scheduling in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama underlines the renewed appetite in US for state killings

Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez was put to death by the state of Oklahoma, in the first of three executions scheduled for Thursday in a rare triple procedure that underlines the renewed appetite in the US for state killings.

Just one hour later, Darrell Hines was put to death by the state of Tennessee, and at 6pm local time in Alabama, that state executed Jeremy Williams.

One of the most famous teams in the world is about to change hands for the second time in less than a year for more than $12bn. Will anyone push back?

One of the most brutal lessons we must learn as fans is that the team we shed blood, sweat and tears for is seen by those who own it as just one of many assets. That gap has never felt as wide as it does this week. On Wednesday, ESPN reported that the Los Angeles Lakers are set to change hands, for the second time in 10 months, for $12.5bn, a sum that would be a record for any North American sports team. (The deal must be approved by the NBA’s board of governors before it can go through.) The buyers aren’t diehards who saved up every penny like the good Dr Jerry Buss in the 1970s. Those days are gone. If and when the deal is approved, the new owners will be venture capitalist Josh Kushner and his business partner, Bob Iger. Kushner is the younger brother of Jared Kushner, the titleless Wormtongue to Donald Trump’s Saruman. Iger used to run Disney. These men have connections across the political world and influence in every corner of the American empire. A franchise woven into a city’s identity should never become an asset vastly wealthy people move around like a chip around a poker table. But that is exactly what the Lakers are about to become. The way the deal came together should terrify anyone who still thinks sports belong to the fans.

Mark Walter took control of the team from the Buss family last October at a valuation of roughly $10bn. Now he is set to cash out around $2bn richer. That’s not how this is supposed to work. The old guard, like Buss, used to guard their NBA teams like heirlooms and pass them down. Walter is set to flip the team after less than a year.

A demo used to take me days to build — screenshots, narration, stitching it together in an external tool, chasing feedback — and every time the feature changed I'd have to start over. A few months ago, I handed most of that to an agent in GitLab Duo Agent Platform.

GitLab Duo Agent Platform is built for intelligent orchestration, running agentic workflows across the software development lifecycle, but it's flexible enough to take on repetitive work outside of development, too. When I pointed it at demo generation instead, it worked well enough that I think you should try the same thing with something on your own plate. I created this hands-on tutorial to help you get started. And one more thing: You don't need to be a developer to do this. We've seen an increase in interest from non-engineering roles in using GitLab to run agentic workflows like this one. If that's you, follow along to get started.

In this article:

• Why click-through demos are so effective
• The evolution: From VMs to external demo tools to agents
• The stages to create a demo
• How the demo generator works
• Demos are now in code
• How GitLab Duo Agent Platform made this possible
• Build your first agent

🎯 Try GitLab Duo Agent Platform today!

Why click-through demos are so effective

People connect faster when they see a feature in action rather than read about it. But live demos are hard: You need product access and enough familiarity to navigate confidently.

A click-through demo solves that. You take real actions yourself, guided by a short narrative at each step. Unlike video, it puts you in control of the pace. And unlike live access, which requires a real environment, it's just a link: free to share, reusable, and consistent every time.

Explore examples in the GitLab Demo Hub.

The evolution: From VMs to external demo tools to agents

Demos haven't always looked like this. Looking back over my career, here's how they have evolved:

• VMs (2000s): Shipped virtual machines pre-loaded with the product and demo content, later centralized on ESX servers.
• External tools (SaaS era): Moved to vendor platforms with built-in analytics, but still manual to build and tied to their infrastructure.
• Agentic (now): Agents can generate demos from a prompt, deployed on the same project that creates them, no vendor dependency.

Each layer made demos more accessible; the agentic layer is what makes them sustainable.

The stages to create a demo

Creating a click-through demo involves these stages:

1. Learn the feature: Read docs, dig through issues and Slack, sync with product managers and engineers to really understand what you're showing, and mainly understand the problem it solves and the customer impact and value.
2. Build the story: Build a real-world scenario that shows the customer impact — what problem this solves for them in their day-to-day work, and why it matters.
3. Set up the environment: Create a project and generate realistic demo data that supports the story; for example, seeded vulnerabilities for a security dashboard, or data for meaningful charts.
4. Capture the content: Take screenshots or record clips of the actual flow.
5. Write the narrative: Craft content that guides someone through each step, based on the story and customer scenario you defined in Step 2.
6. Build the demo: Work in an external tool to stitch everything together into a clickable walkthrough, add links to related assets, and define the call to action for each step.
7. Review with stakeholders: Share a draft, collect feedback, iterate.
8. Incorporate edits: Update the narrative, reorder steps, regenerate as needed.
9. Publish: Push to GitLab Docs, Demo Hub, and any other target location.
10. Announce: Share internally on Slack, embed in blog posts, post on social.

Together, these steps can take days, and the moment something changes in the product, you have to start over from Step 3.

An agent can help with almost all of these steps: reading docs, scanning issues, pulling context from Slack, populating demo data in the project, and pulling out what matters most. It can't fully replace the human who decides what to create and reviews the results before they ship, but it can do a remarkable amount of the groundwork.

In the agentic tool I built, the Click-Through Demo Generator, I focused on automating Steps 1, 2, 5, 6, and 9: the ones with clear inputs, predictable outputs, and previously fully manual execution. The other steps can also be handled by specialized agents.

How the demo generator works

The agent works like this: Drop screenshots into a folder in the project, optionally with a context.md for background on the feature, and trigger the workflow from an issue comment. The agent reorders and renames the screenshots, writes the narration, builds the demo with a built-in branded template, and opens a merge request. Review it, and once you merge it, the demo auto-publishes to GitLab Pages. If something needs to change, ask the agent to update it.

Under the hood, a Custom Flow gets triggered. The agent calls a custom tool I built to assemble the demo into an HTML template, overlaying each screenshot with its narration message box, and comments the merge request link back on the issue. A skill guides its writing so the narration follows GitLab's marketing messaging, focused on customer outcomes rather than our own features.

Here's the actual instruction text from that skill's SKILL.md that the agent reads and follows every time it writes narration:

"Great narration sells an outcome, not a UI tour. Someone who clicks through should understand what problem the product solves, why this approach is better, and what they could now do, without reading any docs.

Structure every demo as three acts: Open on the customer's pain, show the product solving it step by step, and close by naming the value they walk away with."

For demos in more languages, we just need to add a localization skill to the project, and every demo gets automatically localized from then on.

Publishing with a skill

Publishing to the Demo Hub, our production demo portal, is just as hands-off as publishing the demo itself. When a demo is ready to ship, you tag it as production in the development gallery. That's the cue for the agent to run a skill in this project that reaches into the Demo Hub project and does the rest: It writes a short description, stamps it with today's date, tags it as new, and opens a merge request adding the demo as a card. Merging that MR, and putting the demo live, is still a human's call.

Demos are now in code

A click-through demo is really just a set of files: HTML, screenshots, and config, which makes it a great fit to live in a repo. The demo is no longer trapped in a separate tool that only a few people know how to use. It lives in a GitLab project, which means it can be:

• Reviewed in merge requests
• Improved by teammates
• Versioned over time
• Updated by agents, not just humans

The demo becomes a team asset, not a one-person task. That's a big deal. More teammates can now create demos, review them, improve them, and publish them, without needing any special tool knowledge. If you can open an issue and approve an MR, you can use this workflow.

Want to try it yourself?

Fork the Click-Through Demo Generator project and read the README for the full setup. Custom Flows aren't copied over when you fork a project, so you'll also need to enable the Generate click-through demo flow (you'll need to be logged in to GitLab to view it) in your forked project. From there, the README walks you through everything else.

How GitLab Duo Agent Platform made this possible

This project would have been significantly harder without GitLab Duo Agent Platform.

GitLab Duo Agent Platform gave me the missing infrastructure: a Custom Flow that triggers from an issue comment, a container image I define with exactly the runtime and dependencies it needs, and built-in tools to work with GitLab directly, like opening merge requests and commenting on issues. The merge request is where I review the demo before merging it and letting the agent publish it to the Demo Hub.

In platform terms, this is agentic automation — the Custom Flow orchestrating the agent's behavior while GitLab’s built-in tools let it work with issues, project files, merge requests, and GitLab Pages without requiring separate integrations.

Custom Flows let you define your own multi-step workflow and extend the agent with custom tools, like the tool I built to assemble screenshots and narration into the demo's HTML template. You implement that capability yourself, and it runs as part of the flow, on GitLab's compute.

Everything happens inside GitLab: the request, the review, the output, the deployment. That's what makes the workflow faster, clearer, and easier to hand off.

Build your first agent

Zoom out from my own workflow for a second and focus on what happens when repetitive work gets handed to an agent with access to your GitLab data. For a team lead, that's fewer cycles spent producing collateral and more spent reviewing and deciding. The same shift shows up anywhere a team has a repeatable, well-scoped task sitting on top of GitLab context.

Start small and simple. The demo generator is just one example of the pattern, but you don't need to write code or use a Custom Flow to get started. Start with a single agent, give it one clear job, and see what it can do before reaching for anything more complex.

In this quick tutorial, you'll build your first agent, one that helps you plan your work and saves you time. Don't have access to GitLab Duo Agent Platform? You can start a free trial to follow along. Two tasks, about 10 minutes total:

Task 1: Create a custom agent. In the GitLab UI, create a custom agent called "Daily Planner." Tell it what priority means to you — for example, issues blocking a teammate, anything due this week, or "treat anything with the customer label as top priority regardless of due date." Have it look at your assigned issues and merge requests, apply those rules, and tell you what to tackle first, what's blocking others, and what can wait.

Task 2: Enable it and review. Enable the agent in your project, then open GitLab Duo Agentic Chat, select it, and ask it to plan your day. It has built-in access to GitLab, so it pulls your actual assigned issues and MRs itself. Compare its plan to what you'd have figured out yourself, and adjust the agent's instructions until the plan is genuinely useful.

Congratulations, you just built your first agent, and it's already making your day a little easier. This is where it gets fun: Start thinking about what else you'd hand it, another decision you're tired of making yourself. Keep going, and that single-purpose agent turns into the assistant that runs your whole workflow.

99% посетителей сайта — НЕ ЛЮДИ.

И это не «подозрительный трафик», а буквально: из 1,28 миллиона отданных страниц живые люди посмотрели меньше шести тысяч. Чувак, который это заметил (разработчик благотворительной базы PatronView) — вывел формулу: на каждую страницу, увиденную человеком, приходится ещё ≋214 загрузок, которые никто никогда не увидит. Ну то есть вообще никто. Новая норма, просто не все ещё заметили что декорации сменились.

Дальше будет куча цифр, немного паранойи и шрифт, который врёт роботам в лицо.

Rare scheduling in Oklahoma, Tennessee and Alabama underlines the renewed appetite in US for state killings

Carlos Cuesta-Rodriguez was put to death by the state of Oklahoma, in the first of three executions scheduled for Thursday in a rare triple procedure that underlines the renewed appetite in the US for state killings.

Just one hour later, Darrell Hines was put to death by the state of Tennessee, and at 6pm local time in Alabama, that state executed Jeremy Williams.

Readers recall the breathtaking sight and community spirit of the rare celestial treat – and the handmade contraptions they saw it through

On Wednesday evening, millions of people in Europe watched a rare solar eclipse. We asked some of them to share their photographs and experiences of this celestial treat.

Here are some of their responses.

Man dies in Bas-Uele after travelling from Haut-Uele, as head of WHO says outbreak on track to be deadliest ever

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to a sixth province, officials have said, a day after the head of the World Health Organization said the outbreak was on track to surpass the deadliest in history, which killed at least 11,000 people more than a decade ago.

The current outbreak has killed more than 2,100 people out of more than 4,500 cases, according to the latest government figures released on Tuesday. At the same point in the 2014-16 outbreak in west Africa, the previous most deadly outbreak, 755 cases had been recorded, according to WHO data.

Russia maintained an iron grip on Crimea since seizing it from Ukraine in 2014. Many Russian civilians go there to enjoy the beaches. But now Ukraine is hitting Crimea hard, upending daily life.

(Image credit: Igor Ivanko)

Интуитивно любой разработчик понимает: чтобы выпуски проходили спокойно, нужно написать автоматизированные тесты. Чем больше тестов, тем спокойнее проходят выпуски. Или нет?)) В этой статье я поделюсь нашим опытом построения пирамиды тестирования. Надеюсь, что она понравится читателям и станет первой из цикла статей об автоматизированном тестировании. Нам есть что рассказать!

Man dies in Bas-Uele after travelling from Haut-Uele, as head of WHO says outbreak on track to be deadliest ever

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to a sixth province, officials have said, a day after the head of the World Health Organization said the outbreak was on track to surpass the deadliest in history, which killed at least 11,000 people more than a decade ago.

The current outbreak has killed more than 2,100 people out of more than 4,500 cases, according to the latest government figures released on Tuesday. At the same point in the 2014-16 outbreak in west Africa, the previous most deadly outbreak, 755 cases had been recorded, according to WHO data.