Latest from Bilwadeh
Wales Online
28 minutes ago
- Sport
- Wales Online
Western Force v British Lions Live: Kick-off time, TV channel and score updates
The British & Irish Lions' tour is finally under way and the famous side face off against Western Force today in the opener. Andy Farrell's men arrived Down Under at the start of the week, flying to the southern hemisphere following a 28-24 defeat to Argentina in Dublin. The result wasn't ideal preparations for the men in red but that will be behind them now and the game in Perth today will be firmly in their sights. Farrell has made 13 changes to the side beaten by the Pumas, with Welshman Tomos Williams selected at scrum-half and youngster Henry Pollock getting the nod at No.8. In the absence of Maro Itoje, Dan Sheehan captains the side on his Lions debut. Today's game, which kicks off at 11am UK time, is being shown live on Sky Sports Main Event but you can also follow live updates in our blog below. Scroll down for live updates. Lions: E Daly; M Hansen, G Ringrose, S Tuipulotu, J Lowe; F Russell, T Williams; P Schoeman, D Sheehan (c), T Furlong, S Cummings, J McCarthy, T Beirne, J Van der Flier, H Pollock. Replacements: R Kelleher, A Porter, W Stuart, O Chessum, J Conan, A Mitchell, H Jones, M Smith. Western Force: T Robertson, B Paenga-Amosa, O Hoskins, S Carter, D Swain, W Harris, N Champion de Crespigny, V Ekuasi; N White (c), A Harford, D Pietsch, H Stewart, M Proctor, M Grealy, B Donaldson. Replacements: N Dolly, M Pearce, T Tauakipulu, L Faifua, R Prinsep, H Robertson, M Burey, B Kuenzle.
Daily Record
28 minutes ago
- Sport
- Daily Record
SFA's amateur system risks another season of chaos for youth football
When the Scottish FA's Comet system crashed last year, you'd have thought it would have acted as ample warning against a repeat. Hundreds of matches were called off and a generation of volunteers were left in a state of frustration over their dealings with the SFA's complex computer registrations system. Several sources last year spelled out that Comet was overly complicated for the grassroots game. And too many people were stuck for too long in a 'computer says no' death loop. But roll on 12 months and with the new season six weeks away the computer pile-up is happening again with Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) checks. We can't overstate the importance of keeping kids safe but after last year's issues, there can be no excuse for another round of infuriating delays, exacerbated by the lack of any human helpline to streamline the process. Football is a moneymaker at the higher levels. And the SFA, which governs our national game, is not short of a few bob, with millions coming in via grant funding before any other revenue is even added up. That's why there is no excuse for failing to see this coming. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. The SYFA needs a team of professional administrators that can master any system or database required to run the game. Professionals must be available at the end of a phone to educate the officials of clubs who give up their own free time to bring youngsters into the game. And the SFA needs to sort this out well before next summer – or they will score a hat-trick of own goals that no one wants to see. Welcome back, Lewis Capaldi Lewis Capaldi's return to music with an unannounced performance at Glastonbury showed just how much he has been missed. The singer had been on an extended break from music since 2023 due to his mental health struggles. The break had followed a concert on the same Pyramid Stage two years ago, when his voice 'packed in' and fans had to help him finish his biggest hit, Someone You Loved. Everyone understood Lewis, who suffers from anxiety and Tourette's, needed to put his health first. It was wonderful to see him once more engaging with his fans in his modest way, despite his incredible talent. He's also back with a new single that deals head on with his troubles and highlights once again what a special talent he is.
NDTV
28 minutes ago
- NDTV
Padma Awardee Monk Accused Of Rape, Abortion, Threats By Bengal Woman
Kolkata: A woman in West Bengal has accused Padma Shri awardee monk Swami Pradiptananda, popularly known as Kartik Maharaj, of raping her on multiple occasions since 2013 on the pretext of offering her a job at a school. The monk, who is associated with Bharat Sevashram Sangha's Beldanga unit in the state's Murshidabad district, however, alleged a conspiracy to "malign his name and fame". Maharaj was among this year's recipients of the Padma Shri award - the fourth highest civilian award - that is given for distinguished service. The case against him comes against the backdrop of a political showdown in the state over another rape case involving a law student, by students and a staff member at her college in Kolkata. These incidents also follow last year's rape and murder of a trainee doctor at the state-run RG Kar Medical College and Hospital that had triggered nationwide protests. In her complaint with Nabagram police earlier this week, the woman alleged Maharaj had promised her a job at Chanak Adivasi Abasik Balika Vidyalaya - one of the ashram's schools - when the duo met in December 2012. The survivor said she was also accommodated at the school hostel in January 2013, with an assurance that she would soon be hired. "However, he would almost everyday take me to a room on the fifth floor of the premises and rape me," she said in her complaint written in Bengali. "On one occasion, Maharaj summoned me and asked me to stay at his ashram for five days. He raped me here as well multiple times. He then asked me to return home and promised to send me money every month," she added. The survivor said that after she got pregnant in 2013, the accused, along with some school staff, took her to a private nursing facility in Berhampore for an abortion. "He threatened me when I opposed the idea. In the presence of two (school) staff members, he spoke to a doctor at the nursing home and forced me to undergo an abortion," she alleged. The complainant said she hoped and waited to get hired but continued to be sexually assaulted by the accused. "He raped me across several branches of the ashram in Murshidabad. He kept promising me a job and I kept waiting. Eventually, I broke down mentally," she said. The woman said she reached out to the monk on June 12. "I called him and he asked me to wait at a particular spot in Berhampore at 7pm on June 13. He said two people would come to pick me up. When the two men arrived and I boarded their vehicle, they threatened me and asked me not to contact Maharaj again. They also abused me and pushed me from the vehicle," she alleged. The woman sought stringent action against the accused. Maharaj dismissed the woman's allegations against him. "Time will reveal everything. This is a conspiracy against me to malign my name and fame. There are so many women employed in our ashram and many female disciples. Ask them. Everyone will say we respect women like our mothers," he was quoted as saying by The Times Of India. On Friday, the alleged rape of a student by two other students and the staff member of South Calcutta Law College inside the institute sparked a massive political row between the ruling Trinamool Congress and opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the assembly elections next year. Four people, including the college security guard, have been arrested so far. A photograph of the prime accused - Manojit Mishra, a practicing lawyer - with TMC General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee gave the BJP fresh ammunition to target the ruling party. The TMC, though, denied having any connection with the accused now and sought "severe punishment" if he is found guilty. The incident at the law college brought back the horrific memories of the rape and murder of a trainee doctor inside RG Kar Medical College and Hospital in north Kolkata in August last year.
The National
28 minutes ago
- The National
Are you a doomscroller? It's time for us to focus on hope instead
By which I mean 'the activity of spending a lot of time looking at your phone or computer and reading bad or negative news stories', as the Cambridge Dictionary defines it. It's funny to observe myself wrestling with this term, which renders me as just another techno-addict. Of course not! I'm the realist in the room, facing the world with honesty and without delusion! But I also have to check myself on my doomscrolling preferences – how much gratification I'm getting out of them. Why, for example, do I constantly seek out stories and interviews about AIs becoming conscious agents, running out of human control? The tech-bros talk about their 'p-doom' factor (probability of doom) when predicting whether superintelligent AIs will act in our favour or not – often expressed as a percentage (1% to 99%). READ MORE: Mhairi Black: Labour MPs swayed by Keir Starmer's U-turn are kidding themselves That feels crude to me. I prefer to think that I am acknowledging the evolutionary shift that self-improving AIs might represent. So what might seem to others as doomscrolling, obsessively informing myself about what will supersede humanity, I see as readying myself for a coming new era. My other apparent 'scroll of doom' is climate worsening. Again, I'm checking my gratifications here. What does it mean to fill your attention span with worse-than-ever indicators of summer heat, ocean acidification and plankton die-off, irreversible tipping points, on and on? Again, I don't feel lost in doom. It's more that I'm preparing myself for an oncoming future of greater difficulties – ones that will compel profound transformations in what counts as a 'normal lifestyle', our consumptions, productions and values. I'm getting myself ready for things dropping out of, and into, my life. Fewer shiny objects, more community relationships; less international flying, more local flying. For me, the doomscroll (so-called) of hard climate news sets the ground for all the upheavals, at micro and macro levels, that are to come. Could the AI doomscroll be an answer to the climate doomscroll? One paper that popped up recently in my feed was examining renewable energy futures in Finland. The writers concluded starkly that the country simply couldn't provide enough clean electricity to meet current demand. So demand has to drastically reduce. Can AI help us with that? To move away from duplicatory and wasteful market economies, matching goods and services to needs and desires in radically more efficient, parsimonious ways? And can this be the better story of AI in our lives – not just as a supplanter of humans in their current jobs, but as a system supporting a wholly new texture of society? Well, that's my 'hopescroll' mentality, on a good day. It's not too far from Antonio Gramsci's axiom, 'optimism of the will, pessimism of the intellect', though I could happily re-write it as 'generosity of the will, clarity of the intellect' (the original always seems way too exhausting and antithetical). Do I have my bad days, when the scroll of high p-doom stories does what we all fear to my head and heart – which is to enervate and induce despair? Undoubtedly. The current conflagrations in Israel and Gaza, and the possibility of seeing the worst things imaginable on one's feeds from that atrocity, have been too much for me. I confess that I unfollow and skip posts to avoid any possibility of encountering it. This is hardly because I seek to minimise the importance of this genocide, as a collective act of violence and cruelty. The very opposite, in fact. It viscerally confronts me, video clip by video clip, with the appalling levels of violence that are deeply sedimented into modern societies – currently and historically. My adult life has been haunted, ever since I learned about them, by the nuclear bomb and the concentration camp. Both are industrialised, technoscientific forms of mass killing, one towards a people – and one towards all people. The history of near-misses at nuclear catastrophe, either by strategic mistake or malfunction in the weaponry, is long and unnerving. Daily life, as it putters along under this terminally lethal umbrella, teeters at the edge of absurdity. The traumatised and vengeful disproportionality of the Israeli state and its military forces' response to the Gaza border massacre is appalling and criminal enough. However, this conflict, and others, are triggering a new wave of nations commissioning tactical nuclear weapons – labouring under the delusion that they are somehow deployable in a theatre of war. This just deepens the absurdity of our times. We live on a planetary powderkeg stuffed to overflowing, liberally drenched in petrol, waiting for enough matches to be sparked. This is a scroll with so much doom, generating so much nihilism about the human condition, that one can barely even think about it, let alone flip fingers up the screen. A deathscroll is not bearable, even for we numbed ones. How do we escape from being caught up in these loops of despair? There's plenty of practical advice out there. Summarised: you should create deliberate friction and boundaries around your digital consumption. That means turning off notifications, deleting problematic apps, physically isolating your phone in another room or a bedroom drawer, using time limits within the phone. We should also realise that our brains have a defensive bias towards negativity, and consciously seek out positive or solutions-focused content which counteracts all that. But I can't help thinking that the ultimate solution is for us to raise our collective ambitions for how our societies function. I've always had hopes that Scottish independence would be part of that solution. Tom Nairn's theory of nationalism is that it's Janus-faced. One face looks back to the past, selecting resources from history to cope with the future to be faced; a future shaped by global developments, arriving at your doorstep. The main question is: who are we, in the face of these challenges? SO, independence is how we handle the future. And whereas imperial capitalism was the challenge of 19th and 20th centuries, now it's a combination of unlimited (and wonderful/dangerous) potential in computation and biotech, and the hard horizons of planetary ecological boundaries. There are defensive, or hedonist, responses to this turbulent vista. Faragists appeal to the status quo ante. Netflix (and lifestyle consumerism) sends you on escapist journeys. Independence has to be an answer and alternative to both responses – something beyond fearful and angry reaction, or seeking compensation from our entertainment bubbles. The Brazilian philosopher Roberto Unger often talks about the importance of 'institutional innovation' in a 'high-energy democracy'. By which he means a healthy nation has an appetite for building structures, organisations and enterprises. It knows the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Independence should be that very 'spirit to build'. But this means small-i indy has as much, if not more importance than large-I Indy. Community-owned renewable energy schemes are enthusing many at the moment because they are precisely that grip on the future that communities need. (Image: Submitted) A dynamic of confidence/competence is required to sustain a group through all the stages of such projects. And psychologically, when you're absorbed in this kind of community development – real, tangible, socio-economic – it banishes the attraction of siren calls towards gloom or boom. A national independence that can be a partner and enabler to these kinds of autonomy, exactly where and when they bubble up, would be a powerful and attractive vision. And, suffice it to say, this prospectus demands at minimum a 'hopescroll'– a digital feed of locally and globally sourced exemplars of community power, full of stories and tools that provide scripts for action. Beyond our wits to devise such a technology and service? I think not. The doomscroll is an inevitable expression of our digital modernity, both creative and destructive. But in Scotland, it could be otherwise.
Local Italy
28 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- Local Italy
Bezos, Sánchez say 'I do' in a divided Venice
"This city seems impossible! It can't exist and yet, here it is!" an enchanted Bezos told a La Repubblica journalist Thursday who got close to the magnate as he whizzed around the canals by boat. But protesters had a different view, wondering how long Venice can endure: While the billionaires party, activists say the fragile city is sinking, overrun by tourists, and a victim of depopulation as locals unable to pay soaring rents are forced out. "No Kings, No Bezos" read a sign in green neon projected on the St Mark's Campanile tower on Thursday night. Serenaded Sánchez late Friday posted a photo on Instagram -- under a new name, laurensanchezbezos -- showing her in a long flowing white dress and him in black tie, though it did not provide any indication where it was taken. Bezos and Sánchez, a former news anchor and entertainment reporter, celebrated their nuptials with guests including Kim and Khloe Kardashian, Oprah Winfrey and Orlando Bloom. The tech magnate, 61, and Sánchez, 55, are staying at the Aman hotel, a luxury 16th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal with a view of the Rialto bridge. Other A-list guests are staying at the Gritti Palace and the St. Regis. The couple exchanged vows at a black-tie ceremony on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore Friday afternoon, according to Italian media reports. The wedding is thought to have taken place in a vast open-air amphitheatre on the island, which sits across from Venice's iconic St Mark's Square. The newlyweds were to be serenaded by Matteo Bocelli, son of the famed opera singer Andrea Bocelli, reports said. Michelin-starred chef Fabrizio Mellino prepared the wedding dinner, while the cake has been made by French pastry chef Cedric Grolet, the Corriere della Sera said. Sánchez is alleged to have prepared 27 outfits to wear during the festivities. 'Enchanted' Wedding guests snapped by paparazzi as they hopped into boats included Jordan's Queen Rania, French luxury goods executive Francois-Henri Pinault, American football player Tom Brady, US fashion designer Spencer Antle, the singer Usher, and Ivanka Trump, daughter of US President Donald Trump, and her husband Jared Kushner. The guests reportedly lunched Thursday in the gardens of Villa Baslini, on the islet of San Giovanni Evangelista. The celebrations are set to end Saturday with a party likely at the Arsenale, a vast shipyard complex dating back to when the city was a naval powerhouse. Bezos and Sánchez are donating three million euros ($3.5 million) to the city, according to Veneto's regional president Luca Zaia, and are employing historic Venetian artisans. Venice's oldest pastry maker Rosa Salva is baking 19th-century "fishermen's biscuits" for party bags that will also contain something by Laguna B, renowned for its handblown Murano glass. Trump and her family visited a glass-blowing workshop on the small island of Murano on Wednesday, according to the owner. "They were amazed and enchanted by the magic of glass," Massimiliano Schiavon told the Corriere della Sera, adding that the family had a go at blowing glass. Venice, home to the oldest film festival in the world, is used to VIPs whizzing around in speed boats, and happily hosted the star-studded nuptials of Hollywood actor George Clooney in 2014. Some say this wedding too brings good business. Italy's tourism ministry said Friday it expected the wedding to bring the city nearly one billion euros, with about 895 million of that estimated to come from the "media visibility" generated. But critics say Bezos, one of the world's richest men and founder of a company regularly scrutinised for how it treats its workers, is different. "Tax Billionaires", read protest signs along canals. "In the time it takes you to read this, Jeff Bezos's wealth has increased by more than your monthly salary", they read in English and Italian. Environmental activists have also pointed to the carbon footprint of the mega yachts and dozens of private jets -- at least 95 -- bringing the rich and famous to the city. But Samuel Silvestri, a 55-year-old salesman, welcomed the extravaganza. "Over-tourism is caused by those people who come with a backpack and their own food, and contribute very little," he said, "not those who transform Venice into a mini-Monte Carlo. This marriage helps the image of the city." Italy's health ministry has issued a red heat alert for Venice for the weekend, part of a heatwave affecting much of southern Europe.
