Actor best known for the 1960s box-office smash Casino Royale
Joanna Pettet, who has died aged 83, was a British-born, Canadian-raised actor who found fame in the 1960s after just a handful of films, including the James Bond spoof Casino Royale.
The 1967 film drew lukewarm reviews for its parody of the “official” 007 movies and suffered from a production history that included five directors, but it became a box-office smash with expectant audiences. In it Pettet played Mata Bond, the illegitimate daughter of Mata Hari and the retired Sir James Bond (acted by David Niven, one of multiple 007s featured). She is seen performing an exotic dance in a Buddhist temple, where Niven signs her up as a spy. “Do I get an exploding briefcase and a secret transmitter?” asks Pettet, who described the role as “campy”.
Cecil Alexander is competing at Commonwealth Games
Johnson-Thompson and Asher-Smith pull out of athletics
The Falkland Islands bowler Cecil Alexander called Argentina’s World Cup banner “disappointing” after his opening men’s singles match at the Commonwealth Games.
Alexander, 45, made the comments after a straight sets 10-3, 7-4 defeat by the former world No 1 Izzat Shameer Dzulkeple of Malaysia.
Domestic abuse incidents during the 2026 FIFA World Cup were at their highest recorded level compared with similar tournaments, the UK Football Policing Unit has said.
Four Republicans joined Democrats to approve the measure. And while it is not legally binding, the resolution represents growing frustration inside Congress over the war.
The Minnesota man who pleaded guilty to killing a top Democratic lawmaker and her husband was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison on Thursday, a little over a year after the political attacks.
Vance Boelter, 59, was sentenced to two consecutive life terms plus 40 years in prison after pleading guilty in June to the six counts related to the killings of the former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and the shootings of state senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette.
A new Brussels study highlights the pace at which EU countries are ageing. A more informed public debate is overdue
Europe is ageing at pace as birthrates fall and people live longer. A new report by the European Commission, published this month, notes that 2012 marked the first year in which fewer people were born in EU countries than people died in them. By the middle of this century, nearly one in three EU residents will be 65 or older. The numbers of those over 80 will almost triple from 6% to 15%. The old continent is getting visibly greyer.
The transition to a “longevity society”, as the report’s authors describe it, is something to be celebrated. Many people are enjoying healthier, richer lives for longer, and redefining the meaning and possibilities of old age. But the statistics and direction of travel also point to immense social challenges, with implications for the way we work, intergenerational fairness and the future funding of care. Sadly, amid fraught and at times toxic debates about immigration and the cost of welfare, Europe’s politics is struggling to meet the moment.
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When the ‘“department of government efficiency” was raging unchecked through the federal government in February 2025, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered his subordinates to find cuts of 8% a year for the next five years, theoretically trimming a total of $340m from the Pentagon budget.
The disclosure briefly sent Palantir and defense stocks tanking – though soon the plan evaporated, as if it never existed.
As the U.S. carried out a 12th night of strikes across Iran, President Donald Trump threatened "major military punishment" against the Houthis if their attacks on ships continue.
When the ‘“department of government efficiency” was raging unchecked through the federal government in February 2025, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, ordered his subordinates to find cuts of 8% a year for the next five years, theoretically trimming a total of $340m from the Pentagon budget.
The disclosure briefly sent Palantir and defense stocks tanking – though soon the plan evaporated, as if it never existed.
President’s remarks follow Houthi strikes on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and oil prices rising past $100 a barrel again
Donald Trump has said he is close to deciding whether to launch “a massive attack” against Iran, on a scale larger than strikes already witnessed during the months-long conflict with Tehran.
Speaking to the Axios news site, the US president said: “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.”
The Media Router is a tool that automatically selects the best image, video, or audio generation model for a request based on whether a developer prioritizes quality, speed or cost.
Richard Carapaz roars clear of breakaway to win stage 18
McNulty abandons, Wellens and Vermeersch struggle
Richard Carapaz won stage 18 of the Tour de France after a breakaway group of six riders duelled their way to the winter sports station at Orcières-Merlette, but uncertainty surrounds the health of race leader Tadej Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates XRG, which has been swept by a virus since Monday’s rest day.
After Adam Yates’s stage-long calvary on the road to Voiron, Pogacar’s team was further weakened by the abandonment of his American colleague, Brandon McNulty, who quit the Tour with 21km of Thursday’s stage remaining.
New tariffs will replace 10% global duty and come after US supreme court declared many of the earlier levies illegal
Donald Trump has imposed a fresh round of tariffs on more than 80 countries to replace a 10% global duty that was due to expire, provoking a wave of criticism and protests from US allies and major trading partners.
In the latest attempt to instate aggressive trade policies despite challenges from the US supreme court, the president has imposed tariffs of between 10% and 12.5% on dozens of countries, including the UK, Mexico, Canada, Australia, India, China and the 27 countries that make up the European Union. It in effect replaces the blanket 10% tariff that Trump imposed in February, right after the supreme court declared many of his earlier tariffs were illegal.
President’s remarks follow Houthi strikes on Saudi tankers in the Red Sea and oil prices rising past $100 a barrel again
Donald Trump has said he is close to deciding whether to launch “a massive attack” against Iran, on a scale larger than strikes already witnessed during the months-long conflict with Tehran.
Speaking to the Axios news site, the US president said: “I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it.”
The new tariffs will replace a 10% global duty set to expire on Friday, and comes as after the US supreme court declared many of the earlier levies were illegal
Donald Trump has imposed a fresh round of tariffs on more than 80 countries to replace a 10% global duty that was due to expire, provoking a wave of criticism and protests from US allies and major trading partners.
In the latest attempt to instate aggressive trade policies despite challenges from the US supreme court, the president has imposed tariffs of between 10% or 12.5% on dozens of countries, including the UK, Mexico, Canada, Australia, India, China and the 27 countries that make up the European Union. It in effect replaces the blanket 10% tariff that Trump imposed in February, right after the supreme court declared many of his earlier tariffs were illegal.
CEO Chris O’Shea defends Centrica’s plans as it reports rise in retail profits following focus on bigger margins
The owner of British Gas has claimed that most households would rather speak with an AI chatbot than deal with the company’s staff as it prepares to cut 1,300 jobs from its call centres.
Centrica, the supplier’s FTSE 100 owner, plans to cut 800 jobs as the company carries out a “targeted deployment of AI tools”, on top of the 500 cuts it confirmed last month.
Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics of last week's The Pulse issue. Full subscribers received the article below seven days ago. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
One thing I am hearing that’s top of mind for many engineering leaders is what is being done to deal with the continuous increase in code review load. It’s been a topic for a while, and more such conversations seem to be taking place.
For me, it began in January, when Opus 4.5 and GPT 5.4 started to write more and better code at most companies. Around then, Director-level folks started talking about the bottleneck of building software moving from coding to the review phase.
There’s been a boom in AI code review tools to deal with the increase in load since February, and an explosion of experimentation with and adoption of dedicated AI code review tools like CodeRabbit, Greptile, Qodo, SonarQube (now also Gitar). There’s also tools offered by coding harnesses themselves like Claude Code review, Cursor review, GitHub Copilot review. And then tools previously not involved in code reviews – but which have context on the codebase – are also adding this, like Sentry’s Seer AI reviews, Linear code reviews.
Larger companies are building in-house tools to improve the code review experience. Uber’s Code Inbox is one case:
Smart assignments are a feature inside Code Inbox for having reviews progress:
Smart assignment settings for Code Inbox
Then there’s Risk Profiles which estimate the impact of a change, and encourage devs to pay extra attention to risky ones:
Code Inbox tries to estimate the risk of a code change, and bring attention to it
We covered how Uber uses AI for software development, and it’s not just Uber: companies like Cloudflare (AI Code Reviewer), Faire (Fairey), and HubSpot (Sidekick) and many others have also built tools to make their code review flows more fluid, after finding that an in-house implementation worked better than integrating a vendor.
Another approach is thinking about how to verify code, instead of reviewing. This is easier said than done; in theory, thorough testing should be able to verify that code works as expected. But how much testing is ‘thorough’? What type of tests are we talking about? Integration and end-to-end as well? What about fuzz testing? Or formal methods? What about verifying that new tests exercise the functionality as expected? And how do we connect all of this with observability?
Too much thorough code review is burning out engineers, and resulting in sub-par code reviews. I hear a lot anecdotally that devs see others as no longer able to review code with intent, whereby, if the AI code review has no real comments, they just approve it. Meanwhile, those devs who put the same effort and energy into code review as before feel overloaded by AI slop PRs sent their way.
The problems exist, and the solutions feel more like experiments.
What are you seeing inside your company, and how are you dealing with the increase in code reviews? Share your ideas for practical, workable “replacements”?
Swedish nonprofit alleges cost to repair replica was $6,000 but Universal – which made $264m on film’s opening weekend – has not stumped up
The Swedish owners of a Viking longship replica that features in the Hollywood blockbuster The Odyssey say they feel “forgotten” after film-makers allegedly returned the vessel damaged and failed to foot the bill for repairs.
In nearly three decades at sea, the warship Glad av Gillberga – based on a wreck from around 1040 found in Denmark’s Roskilde fjord – has successfully sailed the North Sea, the Baltic and even voyaged to Canada.
Jordan referred Smith to the Justice Department for possible prosecution related to closed-door testimony about whether he had obtained records of lawmakers while investigating Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 presidential election loss. Lawyers for Smith deny the allegation and say he testified truthfully.
Electrical fault had damaged Briton’s world title hopes
‘I’m glad we found it. Spa and Silverstone exposed issue’
George Russell believes his Mercedes team have identified the problem with his engine that damaged his world championship hopes over recent races and left the driver fuming when it played a key role in him being knocked out of Sunday’s round in Belgium.
Russell has been struggling with issues with his electrical energy deployment for three races now, since the Austrian GP, particularly at Silverstone and Spa which are energy-dependent circuits. In Belgium he was furious after he lacked electrical energy when exiting turn one on the opening lap. It left him vulnerable to the chasing pack, notably the Ferraris which swept past and he entered Les Combes corner alongside Lewis Hamilton, who clipped the Mercedes, sending Russell out of the race.
Valentín Lavín Romero is the 14th mayor to be murdered since Claudia Sheinbaum became president in 2024
A mayor was shot dead on Wednesday in the Mexican state of Morelos after having survived a previous assassination attempt earlier this year. He is the 14th mayor to be murdered since Claudia Sheinbaum became president in October 2024.
Valentín Lavín Romero, who was from the Green party, an ally of the ruling leftwing Morena party, was wounded at the end of January when hitmen shot him at a petrol station on a motorway.
President Trump said Thursday on social media that Saudi Arabia must agree to join the Abraham Accords as a contingency on a U.S.-Saudi Arabia nuclear agreement. In a separate post, he threatened Iran and its Houthi allies with "major military punishment." CBS News' Kathryn Watson has more.
Во Франции обнаружили мертвым 69-летнего модельного скаута Даниэля Амара Сиада, связанного с осужденным за сексуальные преступления американским финансистом Джеффри Эпштейном.
Президент США Дональд Трамп в четверг заявил, что подписанное накануне соглашение США и Саудовской Аравии о сотрудничестве в ядерной области вступит в силу только в том случае, если Эр-Рияд признает Израиль. Саудовская Аравия пока этот аспект не комментировала.
A 5.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Texas panhandle, the state’s northernmost region, on Thursday, marking the strongest quake to hit the area since 1900.
The earthquake struck at around 5.21am at a depth of 3.5 miles (5.7km), according to the US Geological Survey (USGS). Its epicenter was about 27.8 miles south-east of the city of Spearman and approximately 68 miles from Amarillo.
