The long read: From football clubs to water companies, music catalogues to care homes, private equity has infiltrated almost every facet of modern life in its endless search to maximise profits

UNIFIL says Israeli soldiers ‘deliberately fired at and disabled’ on-site monitoring cameras prior to Labbouneh attack.

The stops will take him to Coachella in California and Madison Square Garden in New York. Surely this is some brilliant, outside the box strategy and not the fickle whims of stupid man-baby.

In his new book, legendary journalist Bob Woodward offers a remarkable look behind the scenes at President Joe Biden’s blunt, profanity-laced assessments and interactions with the world leaders who have shaped his presidency, from Benjamin Netanyahu to Vladimir Putin.

Museums and Indian politician criticised Swan auction house in Oxfordshire over sale of human remains

Prepare for a storm season-long assault on immigrants, Harris, and climate science.

The leveling of Lebanese border towns is the continuation of Israel’s Gaza policy: total destruction and ill-defined objectives.

Another beluga whale has died at Marineland and four years into a provincial probe, Ontario's solicitor general is saying little about the investigation's progress. The latest beluga death is the fourth in the past year, provincial records show. Since 2019, 16 belugas and one killer whale have died at the Niagara Falls, Ont., tourist attraction, the only place in the country that still holds whales in captivity. And three out of five belugas that Marineland sold to Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut have died since being moved there in the spring of 2021.

Wasps released on Nightingale Island have protected Wilkins’ bunting by halting spread of mould-causing insects

As the Columbia University professor steps down, he addresses student protests and how ‘higher education has developed into a hedge fund’

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is putting the full weight of the Florida government behind an effort to defeat a ballot measure that would protect abortion access in the state — including by enlisting government lawyers in a campaign to silence a young mother with terminal brain cancer who is warning of the danger Florida’s strict ban poses to women like her. This November, Florida residents will have the opportunity to vote on Amendment 4; if passed, the measure will enshrine the right to abortion “before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health” in Florida’s constitution. The pitch is broadly popular with Floridians: A September poll showed the measure attracting support from 76 percent of voters. But DeSantis, who has signed two separate abortion bans into law — restricting the procedure first at 15 weeks, then 6 weeks gestation — is desperately trying to tank Amendment 4. First, he worked with the Heritage Foundation to add language to the ballot measure implying that relegalizing abortion would have a negative fiscal impact on the state. Amid that baseless warning, state agencies began spending public money on TV and radio ads peddling misinformation about the measure, as well as a website that claims Amendment 4 “threatens women’s safety.” Now, DeSantis is trying to keep a cancer patient named Caroline from sharing the story of her abortion, by threatening to criminally prosecute TV stations that carry the Amendment 4 ad featuring her story.

Because if we learned anything from the Terminator franchise, it's that cops are good.

Inquiry by Sheldon Whitehouse found White House and FBI ‘misled’ about inquiry into supreme court nominee

Roblox is facing accusations that it lied to investors about the number of people who use the platform. In a report published on Tuesday, the investment firm Hindenburg Research claims Roblox is “consistently overstating the amount of people on its platform by 25 percent to 42 percent or more.” Roblox, which went public in 2021, reported having 79.5 million daily active users in its most recent earnings report. However, Hindenburg claims Roblox “intentionally conflates” actual people with daily users, as that number could also include alt accounts and bots. The research alleges that Roblox can separate alt accounts from single users, even though the company’s disclosure says daily active users “are not a measure of unique individuals accessing Roblox.” Hindenburg is an activist short-selling firm that infamously publishes research when it says it’s identified something shady about a business, allowing it to make a profit as its share value declines. One example is from 2020, when Hindenburg accused the EV startup Nikola of fraud. Subsequently, an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) resulted in a four-year prison sentence for its founder, Trevor Milton. The firm also claims Roblox isn’t doing enough to protect children on the platform, alleging its “in-game research revealed an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.” Roblox shares dipped following the release of the report.

Internet forums are still alive and kicking and full of information. Here are the best niche communities I could find that are alive and well.

Qantas has apologised to passengers on a flight from Sydney to Japan after a sexually explicit film was played to the entire plane. Passengers on the flight to Haneda were shown the start of Daddio, a 2023 film starring Dakota Johnson. The film is rated R for “language, sexual material and brief graphic nudity” in the US, and MA15+ for “strong coarse language and nudity” in Australia. Technical issues meant individual movie selection was not available, so after a request from some passengers, the crew chose to play the film for the entire flight. Once passengers realised the content of the movie, crew members ended it and instead put a children’s film on screens. After the flight, some passengers shared the experience on social media. One described the movie as “40 minutes of penis and boobs”.

In 1934, a German paleontologist named a giant flying insect from the Carboniferous period Rochlingia hitleri, after Adolf Hitler, who had just taken power in Germany, and Hermann Röchling, an anti-semitic steel manufacturer and member of the Nazi Party. Three years later, an Austrian amateur entomologist named a brown, eyeless beetle from Slovenian caves Anophthalmus hitleri because he admired Hitler. In recent years, neo-Nazis have reportedly paid thousands for specimens, pushing the beetle toward extinction. Some researchers have argued for years that A. hitleri and other species names, including the many that honor racists and colonizers, are offensive and should be changed. A few societies have taken steps toward doing so. But not the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), and its stance has ignited fierce debate. In January, the commission, which arbitrates on the correct use of scientific names of animals, announced in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (ZJLS) that it will not consider changing animal names many researchers consider offensive. “If these names are not stable, you can create a massive confusion,” explains ICZN Commissioner Luis Ceríaco, a biologist at the University of Porto. But on 23 August, a series of editorials in the same journal pushed back, saying the decision was made without feedback from the community and wrongly prioritized tradition over ethics. It’s a matter of “eliminating the commemoration of people who caused untold human misery,” says one author, botanist Estrela Figueiredo of Nelson Mandela University’s Ria Olivier Herbarium. “In which other spheres of human endeavor is anything still named [after] Hitler? … The codes must change and adapt, like the rest of society.” Names identified as problematic include Hypopta mussolinii, a butterfly discovered in Libya and named after Benito Mussolini, the fascist Italian leader who invaded the country. And sometimes, organisms are named apparently with intent to mock: In 2017, researchers named a moth with pale blond head scales and small genitalia Neopalpa donaldtrumpi. The ICZN commissioners, who are in charge of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, argued in January that renaming animals because of cultural offense would disrupt the code’s chief goal: stability. Scientists would then use more than one name to refer to the same species.

More than a dozen states and the District of Columbia have filed lawsuits against TikTok on Tuesday, alleging the popular short-form video app is harming youth mental health by designing its platform to be addictive to kids.

Over the summer, as college administrators scrambled to unearth new cash for the onset of athlete revenue sharing, a svelte, bespectacled man visited with leaders at some of the most high-profile athletic departments in the country. He presented to them his solution for the unwieldy entity of college football. It is called Project Rudy. “His claim is that everybody will be saved,” said one power conference athletic director. As SEC and Big Ten leaders prepare to meet Wednesday and Thursday in Nashville for a historic summit of the industry’s two powers, there is an unreported undercurrent driving the discussion: Project Rudy. Spearheaded by former Disney executives-turned-investment professionals, Project Rudy is a super league-esque concept — separate and more simplified than the one made public last week — that incorporates football programs of the four power conferences in a 70-team structure. The model preserves the four power conferences, expands the postseason, overhauls scheduling, tiers revenue distribution and, most importantly, infuses as much as $9 billion of private capital cash into the system.

BP has abandoned a target to cut oil and gas output by 2030 as CEO Murray Auchincloss scales back the firm's energy transition strategy to regain investor confidence, three sources with knowledge of the matter said. The London-listed company is now targeting several new investments in the Middle East and the Gulf of Mexico to boost its oil and gas output, the sources said.