Since June, an app has allowed survivors, who are overwhelmingly women, to see exactly where their stalker is
On a large screen in a control centre in eastern Seoul, a dot representing a man closes in on a woman. The dot changes direction, and the distance reading between them falls from 845 metres to 792.
On the woman’s phone, the same map is loading. A probation officer rings her: the stalker is approaching, don’t panic, officers have been dispatched. The man is a stand-in and the scenario is staged, but the system is real.
Pro-democracy activists Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan were found guilty of ‘incitement to subversion’ in controversial national security case
Two pro-democracy activists who were put on trial for organising an annual Tiananmen Square massacre vigil in Hong Kong have been sentenced to seven years in jail, in one of the city’s most significant national security cases.
Chow Hang-tung, 41 and Lee Cheuk-yan, 69, were found guilty in August of incitement to subversion. The court found they had “incited other persons to organise, plan, commit or participate in acts by unlawful means with a view to subverting the state power”.
An American Chinese student studies Mandarin in Taiwan, in this heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family secrets
What is Taiwan? A former Japanese colony? A centre of the semiconductor industry? A democracy overseen by American imperialism? China’s next military target? An island of Austronesian Indigenous tribes? Is Taipei a cultural emblem of Taiwan, or just another booming global capital out of touch with the rest of the country? What stories will Lily Chen, an American Chinese student at Yale and Rebecca F Kuang’s funny and deadpan protagonist in Taipei Story, discover in this melting pot while spending 10 weeks learning Mandarin?
A prolific maverick with rare satirical wit, Kuang has built a career debunking authoritative institutions. Babel (2022) highlights the prejudices of the British empire through a fantastical Oxford translation institute; Yellowface (2023) transplants a heist thriller into the dark heart of American publishing; Katabasis (2025), a journey into the underworld, gives the academic inferno at Cambridge a new lease of death. Centring on a tough Mandarin language school, Taipei Story explores the torture, hilarity and pretension of learning a second language, but here Kuang also offers a heartfelt journey of self-discovery and family wounds.
The Supreme Court has blocked a federal judge’s ruling that would’ve restored Republican-drawn congressional districts in Missouri.
The decision, issued by justice Brett Kavanaugh, appeared to sound a death knell for efforts by the Missouri GOP to extract an additional Republican-leaning congressional seat for their party ahead of the midterm elections.
Insiders at the firm fear tech’s advancement could cause human extinction, while others are calling their declarations of concern a ‘setup’
A day after a former researcher at Anthropic made an apocalyptic declaration about artificial intelligence, more researchers and staff members at the AI startup publicly agreed with him and posted their own dire warnings.
In response, Elon Musk and other conservative figures on X, formerly Twitter, called the chorus of concerns a “setup” and a “psyop”.
It was a night for romance given the astonishing story that Sabah brought with them to Old Trafford for their Champions League debut. This is a club that did not even exist a decade ago and nobody saw their bolt to the title in Azerbaijan coming last season; in 2024-25, they had finished 41 points off the top. The job that their manager, Valdas Dambrauskas, has done since taking over in the summer of last year is extraordinary.
It was also a night for cold, hard reality. Manchester United were back in Europe’s elite competition after a two-year hiatus and in need of something to soothe them after the trauma of their last-gasp coughing up of two points in last Sunday’s Premier League draw at Everton. And before the extremely serious business of the derby here against Manchester City on Sunday. They got it on the back of a first-half performance that burned slowly before catching fire.
This spin-off from the US Office is so brilliant that it might even eclipse its mother show. And as for the hilarious Sabrina Impacciatore – just hand her all the awards!
Pity the poor TV writer foolish enough to make a show about journalism. The world is full of inaccurate and illogical medical dramas, but they survive because real life doctors and nurses only tend to grumble about them to themselves. But when you make an inaccurate and illogical show about journalists, real life journalists get to yell about it from the streets. This is probably why Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom ended so early, because we all got to bleat about it through our little megaphones.
The makers of The Paper must have been anticipating a similarly rough ride. It is, after all, explicitly a sitcom about the death of print media, and, Lord knows, nothing wounds us like staring the truth in the face. And yet last year’s first season emerged as one of the best new comedies on television.
The Paper was on Sky One and is on Now. In the US, it airs on Peacock. In Australia it airs on Binge and Foxtel.
Kevin Reddington says prosecution did not offer evidence that client’s killing of her children constituted murder
Lindsay Clancy’s lawyer on Thursday asked the judge who oversaw the Massachusetts woman’s murder trial to declare her not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, saying prosecutors had failed to prove that, despite being mentally ill, she knew killing her three young children would be wrong.
Defense attorney Kevin Reddington made the request to Judge William Sullivan six days after the trial ended in a deadlock, and as a fourth member of the 12-member jury went public to describe how a single juror had prevented the panel from reaching a unanimous verdict.
Canadian PM Mark Carney hosts president in Calgary, where he grew up alongside large Ukrainian community
Canada offered support on Thursday to boost Ukraine’s air defenses and help replenish its drone stocks, as the countries pledged to deepen their alliance during a visit by Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Mark Carney hosted the president of Ukraine in Calgary in the western province of Alberta, where the Canadian prime minister grew up among a large community of people with Ukrainian heritage.
Lawsuit brought by James Uthmeier, the attorney general, marks latest action by the state against big tech companies
Florida officials filed a lawsuit against Netflix, accusing the streaming giant of misleading parents about its collection of minors’ data and using features that encourage children to “binge watch” content.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday and led by James Uthmeier, the Republican Florida attorney general, marks the latest action by Florida against major technology companies. The red-leaning state has taken an increasingly aggressive approach toward big tech, particularly during the rise of artificial intelligence (AI).
Venice film festival The Venice fixture plays an illustrator haunted by his boyhood in Mario Martone’s part spooky, part sentimental oddity
It’s always good to see the veteran Italian star Toni Servillo at Venice; in fact, the festival is pretty much unthinkable without him. But this initially promising prospect – adapted from a novel by Domenico Starnone – is a minor, quibbling tonal oddity, unsure if it wants to be scary or sentimental. Servillo lends it as much gravitas as he can: his mere presence is valuable ballast and the streetscape scenes of Naples are handled with a connoisseur’s touch by director Mario Martone, whose previous Naples-set movie Nostalgia was far superior.
Daniele (played by Servillo) is a septuagenarian book illustrator whose old-fashioned, hand-drawn artistry is something he testily treasures. He has come back to his family home in Naples, to the gloomy apartment where he was brought up, just behind the train station, and where his grownup daughter Betta (Serena Rossi) now lives with her husband and their five-year-old son Mario (newcomer Lorenzo Perrotta), who is adorable and as bright as a button, but also borderline insufferable.
Veteran Frenchman bowed out in New York but the clash of two black players in the last four of the men’s singles is testament to his effect
The early days of this year’s US Open can be told in a series of farewells to competitors who plan to end their careers this year. The most moving of them all came in the form of Gaël Monfils’s grand departure inside Louis Armstrong Stadium against the wildly talented 20-year-old Learner Tien. Tien was competing in front of his home crowd, one of the Americans capable of a deep run, but for much of his straight-sets defeat the Frenchman had the American crowd in the palm of his hands.
Beyond the massive popularity he has garnered among tennis fans, one of the most striking parts of Monfils’s long farewell was seeing how highly nearly all of his fellow professionals, particularly his fellow black players, regard him. Frances Tiafoe says he spent his youth looking up to Monfils. Arthur Fils considers Monfils his older brother. Naomi Osaka’s nickname for Monfils, one of her idols, is simply “the Goat”. They all hold Monfils in such great esteem, and for good reason.
The brilliantly strange experimental band’s live show is a must-see spectacle powered by glorious noise and wild flair
Their masks light up now. To the extent there was a hard news event from Wednesday’s exhilarating sold-out New York debut of Angine de Poitrine, that was it. The Québécois duo went viral in corners of the internet earlier this year thanks in part to their microtonal, odd-metered take on hard-driving rock, but also because of those ostentatious costumes and masks – black and white polka dot tunics and jumpsuits with oversized papier-mache faces and exaggerated features, originally featuring golden glittery eyes and signature pyramid accoutrements. The new ones have all those same things but with the added ability to light up in a bright yellow at key moments.
A small detail, to be sure, but one got the sense that the weeknight crowd was reveling in it and many others at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge (LPR) – an appropriately French-named venue given the band’s home province. Wednesday was the first of the band’s two shows at the 700-capacity basement venue renowned for its sound system and commitment to adventurous programming. Both Angine shows had been sold out for many months, ever since a video of them playing in a French studio was uploaded to KEXP’s YouTube channel and went viral. At time of writing, the video is closing in on 20m views – a remarkable tally given that the music, by mass-appeal standards, is so magnificently odd.
Many mayors welcome power to impose tourist tax but industry warns of ‘irreparable harm’ and job losses
Ministers are facing a backlash from the hospitality industry after they announced mayors in England would be given sweeping powers to levy taxes on holiday accommodation such as hotels and Airbnbs.
The plan, presented on Thursday by Angela Rayner, the local government secretary, will allow mayors to impose a “tourist tax” without a cap on how much they can charge and with few controls on how they can spend it.
Veterans recall chaos and confusion as the attacks unfolded – followed by a ‘war on terror’ that left agency with a tarnished reputation
A generation of spies had lost an enemy but not yet found a role. Then came 9/11.
A decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, al-Qaida’s devastating attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 announced to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that the long era of battling communism, for which it had been founded, was officially at an end.
The defense says: ‘It’s about competition, not conspiracy’
A US prosecutor described China’s Huawei as a criminal enterprise that stole from US companies to build its telecommunications empire, as the trial against the tech company kicked off in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday.
“Theft, lies, cover-up,” Taylor Stout, a trial attorney from the US Department of Justice, said in the government’s opening statement. “For 20 years, that’s how Huawei, a massive Chinese telecommunications company, victimized American companies and abused the American financial system, all in an effort to dominate the telecommunications industry around the world.”
Governing body floating staging Ireland v Italy in US
World Rugby eyes commercial value in American fixtures
World Rugby wants a Six Nations match to be staged in the US and has offered financial incentives to the unions to do so – but England have effectively ruled themselves out on the grounds that fixtures at Twickenham are too lucrative.
The US will stage the 2031 World Cup and World Rugby is seeking to capitalise commercially despite mounting fears over the parlous state of rugby union in the host country. As a result, the governing body is desperate to raise interest in the sport’s profile by staging high-profile matches Stateside, with Baltimore hosting the fourth Test between South Africa and New Zealand on Saturday.
New event aims to revolutionise the sport with promises of bigger prize money and a greater role for athletes
Track and field’s brave new world begins in Budapest on Friday night. The action will be fast-paced and slick, with augmented reality showing athletes’ win percentages and javelins and hammers that glow, making them easier to see on a black infield. In the space of 48 hours, a top sprinter could earn $337,500 (£250,000) for just over a minute’s work.
It is all part of the new World Athletics Ultimate Championship, a three-day event with a prize fund of $10m which is designed to pit the best against the best, and kick off a minor revolution in the sport.
Young people still want partners and children. Governments must address the insecurity and isolation preventing them from building families
Why are people in one of the world’s richest, safest countries having so few children? Singapore is asking that question. In 2000, its fertility rate matched America’s at 1.6 children per woman. By 2025, it had dropped to 0.87 – almost half the US rate. Singapore’s leaders, worried about population collapse, have reached for the chequebook. Each child, including those born to unmarried parents, will get $55,000 in government support by the time they turn 17. Yet a quarter of Singaporeans say they do not intend to have children. Wealth and security, clearly, don’t guarantee more babies.
UN data shows that global fertility fell from 5.3 births per woman in 1963 to 2.2 in 2023. But this masks a growing divide. In some poor sub-Saharan African countries there are around six births per woman. Compare this with England and Wales, where the figure is just 1.39. More than half of the world – including a billion women in India and China – have a fertility rate below the global 2.1 “replacement level” needed to sustain populations without migration. But even in poor countries with high mortality rates and consequently higher replacement rates, births outpace deaths. In Nigeria, for example, the fertility rate of 4.4 exceeds its replacement rate of 2.6 children per woman.
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Family of late King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV reject committee’s choice of cousin and TV presenter as new monarch
A traditional Ugandan kingdom has become engulfed in a bitter succession dispute after the family of a king who recently died rejected the selection of a television news anchor as his successor.
King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, who became the world’s youngest reigning monarch when he took the throne in the kingdom of Tooro in 1995 at the age of three, died on 27 August in the US, where he was receiving cancer treatment.
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