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A trip to watch a strokeplay exhibition by England’s restored captain serves as a reminder of what can be lost amid the demands of leadership

My wife and I walked the kids down the hill to Edgbaston last Saturday afternoon, where our latest attempt at cricket indoctrination was the Birmingham Phoenix versus Welsh Fire game in the men’s Hundred.

Though a one-sided defeat for the hosts – the Phoenix women at least got the win earlier in the day – it was decent enough, with the youngest (six) the only one to get restless before some tactical popcorn lifted spirits towards the back end of the game. The kindness of strangers meant she was happy regardless, having been gifted two foam meerkat paws and a giant red/orange Phoenix flag that looks as if she now supports some obscure separatist movement in the Balkans.

The sponsorship deal between Cwmbran Celtic and the Welsh indie-rockers is part of a trend to monetise ‘adjacent audiences’ as much as it is a nostalgia trip

As someone born on the cusp of the gen X-millennial divide, I am the perfect target for today’s 90s nostalgia. I played my modest, teenage part in the Battle of Britpop (verbal skirmisher, Blur division); I fervently sang – and, God help me, believed – that Things Can Only Get Better. Super Furry Animals were a band I knew only distantly, via the transgressive thrill of that song they had with all the swearing in. And yet the news they’ll be shirt sponsor for a Welsh football club this season has managed to whisk me straight back to a time when things seemed simpler, kinder and more hopeful.

Nearly three decades have passed since Super Furry Animals last had their logo on a football kit. Back in 1999, their frontman Gruff Rhys and bassist Guto Pryce, both Cardiff City fans, persuaded their Bangor-born bandmates to lay down their north Wales allegiances for the duration of the Bluebirds’ Welsh Cup run – which was, incidentally, all they could afford. The cup shirts cost them £2,000 and were, according to Rhys, knock-offs made for ice hockey. This year’s beneficiaries are a more modest outfit: Cwmbran Celtic, just relegated from Wales’s second tier. Cwmbran is the town where the band send their stage props for repair, and given the props in question are giant inflatable bears, you wonder whether they could get one installed in goal.

Guardian journalist Ewan Murray and Sky Sports Golf commentator Ewen Murray on being mixed up by irate fans and ‘canteen commandos’

It started with an email in early 2011. “I don’t know what it is like in your country, sir,” wrote angry of Arizona. “But here in America we SPIT!!!”

The penny eventually dropped. Ewen Murray’s commentary on Sky Sports about Tiger Woods emptying his mouth on a putting surface in Dubai triggered a reaction fired directly towards Ewan Murray of the Guardian. Murray of Sky fame can still recall it.

Fifa’s president ended the World Cup on a high, but is now battling to save his job after a series of self-inflicted blows

Somosierra will be prime spot to view celestial alignment on 12 August, an event that poses logistical challenges

Little stirs in the mountains above Somosierra beyond the wind that lashes the flat peaks, the cows that graze on parched grass and the sun that beats down on the abandoned aerodrome where generations of glider pilots learned to ride air currents alongside squadrons of vultures and red kites.

But all this stillness will disappear, albeit temporarily, on the evening of 12 August, when swathes of northern and eastern Spain and the Balearic islands experience a total solar eclipse, the likes of which has not been seen here for more than 120 years.

Exclusive: anonymous flagging service says cases have surged, as watchdog says AI is making sexualised or ‘nudified’ content easier to produce

Children in the UK have reported a surge in explicit deepfake images featuring their likenesses, as a safety watchdog warned AI is making such content easier to produce.

The Report Remove service, which blocks intimate images from appearing online, said there had been a rapid increase in imagery that had been digitally manipulated or “faked” in some way, including with AI and nudification tools.

TUC will urge John Healey to order ‘root and branch’ assessment of watchdog amid claims its forecasts downplay investment benefits

The TUC is urging the new chancellor, John Healey, to order a “root and branch” review of the Office for Budget Responsibility, claiming the forecaster’s approach holds back investment.

With Andy Burnham promising “good growth in every postcode”, the union umbrella body is calling on Healey to use his first budget on 28 October to re-examine the assessments of the watchdog.

«Планируйте задачу с достаточным контекстом» — совет, который есть в каждой статье про агентов. Я споткнулся об одно слово: достаточным — это сколько?

Пока я не ответил на этот вопрос, любые фоновые агенты выдавали мне уверенное, гладкое «не то». Я кидал ИИ идею и ждал результат, к которому сам пришёл бы за вечер прототипирования. Оказалось, дело не в том, что модель слабая или обвязка кривая, а в том, какую часть работы я ей отдал, — продумывание.

Внутри: где для меня проходит граница между «придумать самому» и «делегировать», почему документация и архитектура работают стенками конуса, а роудмап — линией по его центру, и как всё это зашито в пятислойный харнес для Claude Code — от пустой папки с одним именем до папки с кодом, в который я ни разу не смотрел.

Возьмите функцию на комплексной плоскости, у которой производная существует всюду, кроме отдельных изолированных точек.

Что необходимо о ней знать, чтобы восстановить её целиком?

Ответ поразительный: достаточно списка точек, где функция не дифференцируема, и «силы» каждой поломки. Формулу написал шведский математик Гёста Миттаг-Леффлер, и она — одна из самых красивых в комплексном анализе.

В статье далее — электростатика на комплексной плоскости, спины у классических мультиполей, контрчлены как в квантовой теории поля, вывод в две строчки, самая дорогая ошибка Пуанкаре и разбор легенды о том, почему не бывает Нобелевской премии по математике. И картинки на matplotlib, разумеется, — с кодом.

Статья для тех, кто хочет по-настоящему понять суть основ комплексного анализа!

TUC will urge John Healey to order ‘root and branch’ assessment of watchdog amid claims its forecasts downplay investment benefits

The TUC is urging the new chancellor, John Healey, to order a “root and branch” review of the Office for Budget Responsibility, claiming the forecaster’s approach holds back investment.

With Andy Burnham promising “good growth in every postcode”, the union umbrella body is calling on Healey to use his first budget on 28 October to re-examine the assessments of the watchdog.

A horrific knife attack on a street in June sparked another summer’s night of racial violence, stoked by loyalist groups. How did the unrest erupt – and why do many fear it will happen again?

Shortly after 10.30pm on Monday 8 June, as a summer twilight lingered over Belfast, a horrific scene unfolded on Kinnaird Avenue: a man straddled and repeatedly stabbed a figure lying on the ground in a bloody assault that ended only after onlookers intervened.

Others captured the drama on cameraphones and uploaded the footage to social media. Once seen, the grainy images were hard to forget, and by dawn on Tuesday 9 June they were ricocheting around X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and other platforms.

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

From the world’s longest pleasure pier to Cloud Dancer, Mocha Mousse and Viva Magenta, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 What was written between 1 January 1660 and 31 May 1669?
2 Which UK resort has the world’s longest pleasure pier?
3 Sandra Day O’Connor was the first woman appointed to which body?
4 Which painkiller’s name is derived from the Greek for “poppy head”?
5 Which driver won the F1 title in a car bearing his own name?
6 The Trefoil Guild is an adult branch of which organisation?
7 Savak was the secret police of which state?
8 Inishmore is the largest island in which archipelago?
What links:
9 Cloud Dancer; Mocha Mousse; Peach Fuzz; Viva Magenta?
10 M (192); V (360); E (500); M (760); J (2,580); S (4,800); U (9,600); N (14,400)?
11 Bono; Billy Gibbons; Karl Lagerfeld; Roy Orbison; Anna Wintour?
12 Potatoes, tomatoes, maize and tobacco v cattle, wheat, bananas and sugar cane?
13 Ashoka chakra; crescent moon and star; lion holding sword; red disc?
14 Sly Stone and Kathy Silva; 4,150 people in 1982; Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce?
15 Cleopatra and Julius Caesar; Joan of Arc; Barbara Undershaft; Kitty Warren?

In this week’s newsletter: You’re all wrong about the most maligned seats in the house, which offer the purest form of moviegoing

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After so many years of doomy predictions about their coming demise, these are suddenly boom times for cinemas. A clutch of massive releases – most recently the all-time-record-breaking Spider-Man: Brand New Day – along with a heatwave that has transformed Britain’s parks into the Oklahoma dust bowl, has sent the nation sprinting (or at least fast-walking) to the air-conditioned environs of their local picture houses. In fact so packed are cinemas that, in order to find a free seat for Imax screenings of Spider-Man and the Odyssey, punters are having to resort to quite literally the lowest of the low: the front row.

Not that those same people are happy about it. Social media is full of grumblings from those lumbered with seats situated directly in front of the screen, often accompanied by pictures showing how vertiginous their views are: Agamemnon’s distended, helmeted head looming threateningly above them, say. I’m pretty sure a lot of these pictures are AI-generated fakes – mainly a chance to give Robert Pattinson a massive chin – but they are still spooking cinemagoers: Reddit is full of threads of panicked patrons asking just how painful their neck is going to feel after craning up at a screen for three hours.

A horrific knife attack on a street in June sparked another summer’s night of racial violence, stoked by loyalist groups. How did the unrest erupt – and why do many fear it will happen again?

Shortly after 10.30pm on Monday 8 June, as a summer twilight lingered over Belfast, a horrific scene unfolded on Kinnaird Avenue: a man straddled and repeatedly stabbed a figure lying on the ground in a bloody assault that ended only after onlookers intervened.

Others captured the drama on cameraphones and uploaded the footage to social media. Once seen, the grainy images were hard to forget, and by dawn on Tuesday 9 June they were ricocheting around X, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and other platforms.

The Dutch creator of the controversial trilogy set to detail struggles with neurological disease in homemade documentary, after spending six years ‘as a recluse’

Tom Six, the film-maker behind schlock horror phenomenon The Human Centipede, has revealed that he has been living as “a full-blown recluse” in a darkened Amsterdam apartment for six years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

In The End of Tom Six, a homemade documentary that the Dutch director said would be his final film, he says that the stress over his failure to find a distributor for the follow-up to the Centipede trilogy significantly exacerbated his condition.

• Other demands meant he was unable to commit fully

• Mike Yardy will step in for upcoming Pakistan fixture

Andrew Flintoff has decided to step down as the head coach of England Lions with immediate effect before his winter spell working in Australia’s Big Bash League (BBL).

The former all-rounder, 48, has been in charge of England’s second string since September 2024 and had been given the all-clear to leave this winter’s Lions tour of South Africa early to take up his new role at BBL side Sydney Thunder.