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Not even the longest-running episodic series in television history can contain all the excitement of WWE. Count down the 10 most memorable moments to occur after Raw went off the air.
It’s been trumpeted as being high in fibre, comes in flavours as diverse as marshmallow and blue cheese, and is one of the UK’s fastest growing grocery products. But is popcorn really a healthy alternative to snack food staples such as crisps?
Popcorn has its benefits. For starters, it is a whole grain – a type of food linked to the prevention of cancers and heart disease due to their content of fibre, antioxidants as well as various vitamins and minerals.
“If you use a machine [at home] and you pop it in air and don’t add anything to it – or you are buying manufactured popcorn and it is cooked in a very, very small amount of oil – then I think it is a good snack,” said Clare Thornton Wood from the British Dietetic Association.
But, she warned, many popcorn products are not so innocent, having been cooked in fat and then doused with sugar, salt and flavourings. “If you take a packet of plain crisps and a packet of popcorn, they are coming in a similar sort of calorie value,” said Thornton Wood, noting that when it comes to popcorn’s nutritional value “there are better ways of getting antioxidants”.
A 32.5g bag of Walker’s ready salted crisps contains 10.4g of fat, 0.46g of salt and comes in at 171 calories. By comparison, 32.5g of Tyrrells sea-salted popcorn contains 6.3g of fat, 0.38g of salt and has 159 calories.
But what about “skinny” popcorn? Looking at Metcalfe’s sea salt offering, 32.5g contains 141 calories, 5.4g of fat, and 0.29 g of salt. Lower values than a bag of crisps, but still more than you might expect.
And for some of the more exotic popcorn products, the calories jump up: the same weight of sweet popcorn contains 174 calories, 10.3g of fat and 7.5g of sugar.
But, Thornton Wood points out, bags of popcorn generally weigh less than that of crisps, meaning that a bagful could contain fewer calories. “Popcorn is fairly moreish though,” she adds. “I think people have got to be a bit careful about portion control.”
To avoid the bittersweet side of the snack, Thorton Wood recommends popping corn at home using a fat-free machine. “Just put the kernels in, turn it on, it heats up and then it just pops them with the hot air,” she said.
Claiming to be a communications platform rather than a taxi service, Uber has expanded by ignoring existing rules. This has prompted protests against the ride-hailing company by drivers, run-ins with national authorities, and new laws designed to curb its activities. The decision by Transport for London to strip Uber of its licence last week was the latest in a long line of clashes between the US firm and the establishment.
In some cities around the world where it operates, Uber is on a collision course with regulators, while in others it remains firmly outlawed. In several places, however, the $70bn (£52bn) firm is actively negotiating its return – or already back up and running.
Austin, Texas
Uber suspended operations in Austin in May 2106 after the city’s voters rejected a proposal to allow the company to self-regulate its drivers, instead of upholding stricter regulations proposed by the liberal city council that required ride-sharing drivers to pass fingerprint-based security checks.
The state, rather than local city governments, is now responsible for regulating the ride-hailing industry, requiring local, state and national criminal background checks but not fingerprints. Now facing a competitive market in Austin, Uber said it “knows we have a lot of work to do in the city”.
Bulgaria
Uber suspended its activities in Bulgaria in September 2015 following mass protests and a threatened strike by Sofia’s traditional taxi operators, which accused the service of “unfair trade practices” because its drivers were working without a taxi licence, a professional driver’s licence or a defined legal status.
After a joint investigation by the tax and transport authorities, the competition commission fined Uber Bulgaria – which claimed 40,000 users – €50,000 (£44,000) for unfair competition and the supreme court banned it. New legislation requires taxi services to be provided by licensed carriers with qualified drivers hired on formal contracts.
A petition in support of Uber said the service was safe, reliable and affordable and polling has shown 77% public disapproval of the ban. But Uber shows no signs of returning to the Bulgarian market. Similar but legal app-based services such as TaxiMe and TaxiMaxim have since emerged.
Denmark
Uber pulled out of the Danish market, where it had 2,000 drivers and more than 300,000 customers, in April this year when fare meters and seat occupancy sensors became mandatory for all vehicles providing a taxi service.
Prosecutors had previously accused the company of helping its drivers – four of whom have since been fined up to DKr486,000 (£57,000) each – to break national taxi regulations during tens of thousands of rides ruled illegal. A further 1,500 drivers reportedly face similar charges.
A cheekily named alternative unrelated to Uber, Ubr City, is aiming to get round the new rules by claiming to be a courier company – passengers may only travel with “goods”, the definition of which is unclear – but it was reported to the authorities just hours after being launched.
But Uber wants to return. Its Nordic/Baltic representative Kåre Riis Nielsen said last month the company “has made mistakes” but was now “willing to play by the rules”, including ensuring its drivers declared their earnings for tax, paying them sick pay and other benefits, and adopting “digital versions” of meters and seat sensors.
Italy
Following a complaint and six-day strike by Italy’s taxi associations, a Rome court blocked the use of the Uber app in April for unfair competition. An appeal court lifted the ban in May – but only for the company’s premium Uber Black service, which uses fully-licensed professional drivers.
The company’s standard Uber X service and its Uber Pop app – for unlicensed drivers – remain outlawed. Uber Italia said it was “really happy” with the court’s decision but demanded “updated legislation so new technologies can improve citizens’ lives”.
Uber Black has only about 1,000 drivers in Rome and Milan, mainly because of the difficulty of obtaining a professional driver’s licence. Most of the app’s 139,000 riders over the last three months were foreigners. “Italy is probably the only country left without a low-cost solution,” said an Uber spokemsan Alessio Cimmino.
Hungary
Uber suspended its operations in Budapest in July 2016 when the nationalist government passed legislation making it impossible for it to operate following months of persuasive protests by Hungary’s taxi drivers.
The new legislation allowed the Hungarian national communications authority to block all internet access to “illegal dispatcher services”. Companies flouting the law face repeat fines of HUF200,000 (£560) and bans of up to a year.
Uber, which claimed 1,200 drivers and 160,000 customers in Budapest, says it hopes to return to the market. Regular taxi traffic is said to have increased by 50-60% since Uber pulled out, according to one local taxi firm.
Uber has said it will suspend its operation in Quebec if authorities there pass new legislation requiring Uber drivers to undergo a police criminal records check and do the 35 hours of training expected of regular taxi drivers.
Uber’s general manager in Quebec, Jean-Nicolas Guillemette, said the new requirements, coming on top of what the company has called the “most restrictive and severe regulations imposed on us in north America”, would deter part-time drivers and it would stop operating in the province next month if they were implemented.
The service claims nearly a million users and about 5,000 drivers. “Trying to impose the same thing that is currently done in the old taxi industry – I don’t think it helps us to move forward and serve the population,” Guillemette said.
Angela Giuffrida in Rome and Robert Tait in Prague contributed to this report.
Another year, another iPhone, except this time there are three of them. The iPhone 8 is the first out of the gate, but it’s overshadowed by the iPhone X looming in the wings, and while there are some new elements – a glass back – you could be forgiven for feeling a bit of deja vu.
Placing all the recent iPhones side by side, from 2014’s iPhone 6, to 2015’s iPhone 6S and 2016’s iPhone 7 and on to the 8, it’s clear very little has changed on the outside.
2014 design
The iPhone 6 on the left, iPhone 7 in the middle and the new iPhone 8 on the right.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The iPhone 8 is fractions of a millimetre larger in every direction than the iPhone 7. It’s also 10g heavier than the iPhone 7, 5g heavier than the iPhone 6S and 19g heavier than the iPhone 6. Some will tell you that you can notice the difference, but that it’s a good weight. You can’t, and it doesn’t matter.
Because of its 2014 design, the iPhone 8 looks and feels outdated compared to sleeker, more modern rivals, despite still being immaculately made. The large bezels top, bottom and at the sides make the iPhone 8 look almost retro, and not in a good way.
The back of the iPhone 8 is glass, which inevitably makes it more fragile, but to what degree remains to be seen. In terms of the device’s feel, the glass is a double-edged sword. It’s less slippery in the hand than the metal of the iPhone 7, but I found it slipping off sofas, desks and other not-quite-level objects more easily. You’ll probably want to buy a case.
The screen looks great for an LCD and now has Apple’s True Tone system from the iPad Pro, which alters the colours of the display based on the ambient light. Samsung and competitors have had similar systems on their smartphones for years, and it makes the screen more attractive but sacrifices colour accuracy.
Specifications
Screen: 4.7in LCD 1334×750 (326ppi)
Processor: Apple A11 Bionic
RAM: 2GB of RAM
Storage: 64/256GB
Operating system: iOS 11
Camera: 12MP rear camera, 7MP front-facing camera
Connectivity: LTE, Wi-Fiac, NFC, Bluetooth 5, Lightning and GPS
Dimensions: 138.4 x 67.3 x 7.3mm
Weight: 148g
Improved battery life
The iPhone 7 on the left, the iPhone 8 on the right, or is it?Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The iPhone 8 has Apple’s latest and best processor. The six-core A11 Bionic has two high-performance cores and four power-efficient cores and is apparently the most powerful so far because it can use a combination of all six at once.
Performance was excellent, but I struggled to see a real difference in day-to-day speed compared to the iPhone 7. But what I’m very pleased to be able to report is that Apple has finally improved battery life for the 4.7in iPhone.
We’re not talking a two-day battery here, but the iPhone 8 lasted just over 26 hours – setting off at 7am in the morning the phone would make it all the way through to around 9am the next morning without needing to be charged. That was while using it as my primary device and receiving hundreds of push notifications, taking 10 or so photos, watching a 45-minute burst of Netflix, making a short phone call, playing a quick game and listening to around 5 hours of Spotify with Bluetooth earbuds.
It was such a difference to the poor, 14-hour battery life of the iPhone 7 that I re-tested an admittedly year-old iPhone 7 with iOS 11 to see if the new software was responsible. It wasn’t – the iPhone 7 still doesn’t last until bedtime under the same conditions.
Anecdotally, I saw significantly better battery life on a cellular connection, with my hour-plus train journey in the morning consuming just 10% of the iPhone 8’s battery compared to 25% of the iPhone 7’s battery. If, like me, you spend a reasonable amount of the day actively using a smartphone on a 4G connection rather than wifi, then I suspect you will see similar results.
It’s worth noting that almost all of the iPhone’s rivals last longer between charges, and that while the iPhone 8 may last at least 24 hours when new, two years down the road it might be a different story as the battery starts to lose capacity.
The iPhone 8 can fast-charge via the Lightning port, but only if you use a USB-C Power Delivery charger.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
When the battery is dead, the iPhone 8 will charge much faster using a USB-C charger with Power Delivery, such as those used for the Google Pixel or USB-C charged laptops and tablets. Unfortunately neither the required USB-C to Lightning cable nor a fast charger comes in the box.
The big new feature for the iPhone 8 is wireless charging, something rivals have supported for five years. It works great, particularly using furniture with built-in wireless charging pads – you simply plonk it down on the spot and it starts to charge. I think it should be built into everything, so it’s good to see Apple finally get on board.
iOS 11
Control Centre on the iPhone 8.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
Not a vast amount has changed within iOS 11 compared to last year’s iOS 10, and most of the meaningful things are confined to the iPad.
For the iPhone 8 (and iPhone 6, 6S and 7 with an update), there’s the new Control Centre, which doesn’t actually turn off wifi or Bluetooth when you think it might, but works well for what it’s meant to be able to do. You still cannot get from Control Centre directly into the Settings app, an oversight that continues to baffle me, but you can customise a few things such as whether the flashlight toggle or low power mode switch is visible.
There’s a new optional setup routine for migrating from one iPhone to the next, if they’re both running iOS 11. Put them close by, they find each other via Bluetooth and then take a photo of the screen of one with the other. You’re prompted to run a backup on the old phone to then transfer it to the new phone. It works well as long as you have good wifi, but you still have to input passwords for your non-Apple accounts.
Overall, iOS 11 is pretty much the same iOS that we’ve seen for a few years, with a few small improvements here and there.
Camera
The camera on the iPhone 8 is excellent.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The iPhone 8 has an improved 12-megapixel camera on the back, which has a physically larger sensor and now has optical image stabilisation (OIS) – a feature previously reserved for the Plus variants of recent iPhones.
Overall this is certainly the best camera fitted to a 4.7in iPhone to date. OIS helps greatly with blur in the event of shaking hands or dim lighting and the larger sensor consistently picked up more light for better low-light photos.
Good lighting produced some brilliantly detailed and coloured photos. The HDR mode is now on by default and I got markedly better results with the iPhone 8 than I did the iPhone 7. If you’re upgrading from the iPhone 6S or earlier, you should be able to notice even off-the-cuff photos looking better.
The iPhone 8 easily has one of the best cameras on the market. I still get more consistently brilliant images from Google’s HDR+ system on the Pixel, but it is very close.
The 7-megapixel selfie camera is one of the best I’ve tested to date, preserving more skin detail than most rivals. While I like rich detail in my selfies, some might not find the iPhone 8 as flattering as they might want, but you can always soften details after the fact.
Also worth mentioning is the excellent 240fps slow motion video, which is now captured at 1080p resulting in markedly crisper videos, particularly when shot up close to an object.
Observations
One of the new wallpapers within iOS.Photograph: Samuel Gibbs for the Guardian
The stereo speakers are meant to be louder, but I couldn’t really tell; I suspect the kids at the back of the bus will love it
iOS 11 increased the size of some fonts used for marking out certain things such as the “Inbox” label at the top of the screen in Mail above the search bar – on the iPhone 8 it takes up quite a bit of space unnecessarily and is clearly designed to cater for the iPhone X’s notch
The iPhone 8 is water resistant, but there’s still no headphone jack
The glass back is a fingerprint magnet
The iPhone 8’s battery dropped by 15% while dormant for 8 hours overnight
Price
The iPhone 8 costs £699 with 64GB of storage or £849 with 256GB of storage, and comes in three colours: silver, gold and black (“space grey”).
For comparison, that’s £100 more for the cheapest version of the iPhone 8 than last year’s iPhone 7 (but the iPhone 8 comes with twice the storage). The Samsung Galaxy S8 with 64GB of storage costs under £540 and LG’s G6 with 32GB of storage costs under £430. Google’s £599 Pixel is about to be replaced.
Verdict
The iPhone 8 is the best iPhone released to date because it has much better battery life, an improved camera and wireless charging – but it’s inherently boring. It has glass on the back, sure, but even without sticking it in a case it’s difficult to tell for the casual observer.
So what you’re buying for your not inconsiderable £699 or more is a 2014 design with the guts of a more modern smartphone. Some will tell you that’s fine, that it’s meant to be boring, that it’s still an iPhone. But I think if you’re spending £700 you can and should expect more than that.
There are plenty of equally boring smartphones that cost under £200 (and some brilliant ones costing around £500). The problem is that if you’re an iPhone buyer looking for the latest Apple smartphone you probably won’t consider the notion of buying elsewhere, which leaves you stuck. Do you a) stick with the phone you’ve got, which is a good option if it’s still going strong; b) buy a £700 phone and live with the fact that it’s less exciting than a new paint job; c) buy an iPhone 8 Plus just for a change; or d) wait till November and take a punt on the even more expensive £999 iPhone X.
But just keep telling yourself: at least this year’s 4.7in iPhone lasts a good day on a single charge.
Pros: 24-hour-plus battery, great camera, wireless charging, fingerprint scanner, water resistant
Cons: 2014 design, boring, large bezels around the screen, no headphone jack, no fast-charger in the box, expensive
A review of the iPhone 8 Plus will be published 2 October.
President Donald Trump unveils his ‘middle class miracle’, a stunning tax plan with three brackets, zero tax on couples’ first $24,000 and a massive corporate rate slash. ‘The largest tax cut in American History.’ MAGA 🇺🇸
The UN has warned that robots could destabilise the world ahead of the opening of a headquarters in The Hague to monitor developments in artificial intelligence.
From the risk of mass unemployment to the deployment of autonomous robotics by criminal organisations or rogue states, the new Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics has been set the goal of second-guessing the possible threats.
Meanwhile nations seeking to develop autonomous weapons technology, with the capability to independently determine their courses of action without the need for human control, include the US, China, Russia and Israel.
Irakli Beridze, senior strategic adviser at the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, said the new team based in the Netherlands would also seek to come up with ideas as to how advances in the field could be exploited to help achieve the UN’s targets. He also said there were great risks associated with developments in the technology that needed to be addressed.
“If societies do not adapt quickly enough, this can cause instability,” Beridze told the Dutch newspaper de Telegraaf. “One of our most important tasks is to set up a network of experts from business, knowledge institutes, civil society organisations and governments. We certainly do not want to plead for a ban or a brake on technologies. We will also explore how new technology can contribute to the sustainable development goals of the UN. For this we want to start concrete projects. We will not be a talking club.”
In August more than 100 robotics and artificial intelligence leaders, including the billionaire head of Tesla, Elon Musk, urged the UN to take action against the dangers of the use of artificial intelligence in weaponry, sometimes referred to as “killer robots”.
They wrote: “Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”
Last year Prof Stephen Hawking warned that powerful artificial intelligence would prove to be “either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity”.
An agreement was sealed with the Dutch government earlier this year for the UN office, which will have a small staff in its early stages, to be based in The Hague.
Beridze said: “Various UN organisations have projects on robotic and artificial intelligence research, such as the expert group on autonomous military robots of the convention on conventional weapons. These are temporary initiatives.
“Our centre is the first permanent UN office for this theme. We look at both the risks and the benefits.”
The iPhone X might be the future of Apple’s smartphone design, but its lauded Face ID facial recognition system has an issue with people under 13: it’s much more difficult to tell them apart.
In a security guide published Wednesday, Apple recommends that children under the age of 13 do not use Face ID due to the probability of a false match being significantly higher for young children. The company said this was because “their distinct facial features may not have fully developed”.
While few young children are likely to be given a £999 iPhone, false matches are also more likely for twins and siblings. In all those situations, the company recommends concerned users disable Face ID and use a passcode instead.
For most users – those over 13 without “evil twins”, as Apple’s head of iOS Craig Federighi describes them – the bigger concern is deliberate attacks. Touch ID, Apple’s fingerprint sensor, was famously bypassed just two days after it was launched in the iPhone 5S, using a fake fingerprint placed over a real finger.
With Face ID, Apple has implemented a secondary system that exclusively looks out for attempts to fool the technology. Both the authentication and spoofing defence are based on machine learning, but while the former is trained to identify individuals from their faces, the latter is used to look for telltale signs of cheating.
“An additional neural network that’s trained to spot and resist spoofing defends against attempts to unlock your phone with photos or masks,” the company says. If a completely perfect mask is made, which fools the identification neural network, the defensive system will still notice – just like a human.
Apple is also confident that it won’t fall prey to issues of algorithmic bias that have plagued many attempts to use neural networks at scale. High-profile examples of such failures include the photo-labelling system that ltagged black people as gorillas, or the word-association model which states that men are computer programmers and women are homemakers.
Whenever its initial training exposed a demographic shortcoming, Apple says, it “augmented the studies as needed to provide a high degree of accuracy for a diverse range of users”. Time – and millions of people around the world using the technology – will tell whether the effort worked, but the company sounds confident.
One area the system will struggle with, however, is facial coverings. Apple says that “Face ID is designed to work with hats, scarves, glasses, contact lenses and many sunglasses,” but ultimately two things dictate whether or not it has a chance of success. The first is whether the coverings are transparent to infrared light, and the second whether the system can see the eyes, nose and mouth. While some fabrics are more transparent to infrared than they may seem, that means iPhone users who cover their faces may be forced to rely on a passcode when out and about.
Separately, Apple has also confirmed that the depth-sensing technology included in the iPhone X is not allowed to be used by developers to create their own facial biometrics, a possibility which had concerned many privacy activists.
The depth sensor data is not directly available to developers, but the camera API now allows them to receive a pixel-by-pixel measure of how far features in an image are from the lens, a system intended to be used to enable image manipulation such as Apple’s own portrait mode.
That could theoretically be used to build a standalone authentication feature, albeit one that is less precise than Apple’s own, but the company has updated its App Store policies to prevent developers from attempting to do so. “You may not attempt, facilitate, or encourage others to identify anonymous users or reconstruct user profiles based on data collected from depth and/or facial mapping tools,” the company’s developer guidelines now state.
Deep in southern Bolivia – where peaks andcacti soar and condors glide – is a cluster of white-washed homes and a former classroom turned shrine. Inside this school house, 50 years ago this October, the world’s most famous revolutionary, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was executed.
Today, the room where the 39-year-old was killed on 9 October 1967, is decorated with pictures, messages, flags and, weirdly, driving licences, by visitors who have paid homage to the Argentinian revolutionary. The chair, where it’s said Guevara was sitting when executed, is lost in the tableaux of eulogies and pictures pinned to the wall by Che’s admirers from around the world, who have made the pilgrimage to the village of La Higuera over the last 50 years (La Higuera Museum, 8am-noon, 2pm-6pm, admission £1).
With Roli Galarza Meneces as my guide, I had set off in search of where Che was captured by the Bolivian army. Roli’s father, a nurse, helped Che track down medicine for his asthma in the pretty colonial town of Samaipata, which is the gateway to the Che Trail we’re taking.
The school where Che Guevara was killed after being taken prisoner.Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
The Quebrada del Churo ravine is 3km north of La Higuera. There, we trekked down for an hour through gorse and banana palms under a blue sky to where Che’s men had hidden. Just beyond is a mosaic memorial and the fig tree the injured Che was hiding behind when apprehended by elite Bolivian troops. Roli scattered coca leaves at the site.
“I’m offering the coca to the spirit of Che to say thank you,” he said. “Che was unique; he was a failure but at least he tried. When I’m here I have a sense of injustice. It was 500 men against Che’s men.”
Emerging from the ravine we headed towards the high-altitude huddle of 17 homes at La Higuera via the same trail used by the captured Che. The walls of La Higuera’s buildings now beam with images of his face. Amid the painted propaganda, I met 70-year-old Irma Rosado at her Store Estrella. Irma was asked to take peanut soup to Che by soldiers guarding the CIA’s most-wanted in the school room. He was executed there by a volunteer sergeant at about 1.10pm.
“I was shaking so much,” she said. “I could hardly see his face as he had a beard like a goat. The only thing he said to me was ‘Gracias niña’.”
Statue and graffiti for Guevara in La Higuera.Photograph: Alamy
Guevara pitched up in Bolivia to foment revolution and arrived, in disguise, in La Paz in 1966, staying in room 504 at the Hotel Copacabana (Zona 9, Av Illampu, £30 a night). Ask at the hotel reception and they will show you the room. Che and his guerrillas then set up a base in the south of Bolivia before trying to secure local support and recruit fighters.
La Higuera’s two hostels expect plenty of Che pilgrims for the 50th anniversary commemorations. Casa del Telegrafista (rooms from £10pp, +591 6773 3362) is hosting a Che photo exhibition (until June 2018), and discussions. For gourmet meals (beef bourguignon marinated in red wine for two days) and Che conversation go to Los Amigos (rooms from £9pp). Both can arrange local guides.
Che’s corpse was helicoptered to Hospital Señor de la Malta at Vallegrande, 60km north of La Higuera. It’s a small town with cobbled streets and roofs carpeted with moss. Here, the Che route is structured and an official guide is required to see all three official sites – as the hospital is still functioning. There are six guided visits a day (£4.50pp) and guides can be found at the tourist information centre (Plaza Principal 26 de Enero, +591 7009 1023).
Casa del Telegrafista
Leo Lino, one of the guides, joined Roli and me and showed us the Vallegrande hospital’s backyard laundry where Che’s body was brought for identification and displayed to the world’s press. The walls and wash basin are scrawled with adoring graffiti. Leo told me locals light candles appealing to “San Ernesto” to cure illnesses: “Many people say their illness has been cured around here.” This belief in the miracles from a dead Che emerged when his lifeless eyes appeared to follow observers around the room. The scene, captured by Bolivian photographer Freddy Alborta, was likened to Andrea Mantegna’s Dead Christ by art critic John Berger in 1968.
Not everyone sees Che as a hero but in Vallegrande he is honoured every October, his death marked by concerts and events. For what’s on this year, check the Facebook page of Turismo Vallegrande Bolivia and the 50aniversarioche.bo website. On 9 October an official act of remembrance will be held in Vallegrande. Cuban first vice president Miguel Díaz-Canel will attend as well as Che’s four children (who all live in Cuba). Acts of homage will be held in La Higuera on 8 and 9 October.
As we entered the hospital’s former morgue on the tour, Roli whispered, “This is where they cut off Che’s hands.” They were severed by a doctor for fingerprint ID, though they later went missing, a cause célèbre highlighted in the documentary The Hands of Che Guevara.
From the morgue it was back out into the open air and to the garden of remembrance, which is decorated in memorial stones to honour the fighters who died during Che’s Bolivia campaign. Last October, a new Che museum opened, as part of the Centro Cultural Ernesto Che Guevara, next to the air strip where his body was dumped in 1967. The museum features photographs, posters and assorted artwork relating to Che and his campaigns. And behind the centre is the memorial building erected over the site where his body lay in an unmarked grave until unearthed in a search in the 90s.
Memorial building at the site where Guevara’s body lay in an unmarked grave.Photograph: Alamy
At the Café Galeria de Arte Santa Clara, on Vallegrande’s main plaza, under a vast portrait of Guevara in death, I asked Roli why Che’s Bolivia experiment failed.
“The locals were afraid to sell food to the guerrillas and they were afraid of dollars. Also, the US sent Green Beret Ralph “Pappy” Shelton to train the Bolivian army in counter-guerilla tactics.”
Just two weeks after their training, Che had been captured and the order came from Bolivian bosses: “Di buen día a Papá” (Say good morning to dad): the code to kill Che Guevara.
Che might have died 50 years ago but Bolivian president Evo Morales has revived his spirit and his name has been rehabilitated in Bolivia, Roli told me. As we left the trail, the walls of a nearby town, daubed with a slogan, seemed to speak this truth: “Che, more present than ever.”
• The trip was provided by Journey Latin America, which has 11-day holidays to Bolivia taking in the Che Trail, Santa Cruz, Sucre and La Paz, from £2,736pp, including flights, full-board during the Che Trail, breakfast daily, excursions and transfers. Rosario Tours run the Che Guevara Route
With the continuing collapse in online advertising revenues, websites are turning to other methods to pay their hosting bills – including using visitors’ computers and phones to mine cryptocurrency.
It’s a controversial practice, with some likening it to running malware on visitor’s computers, but it is a potentially lucrative endeavour for websites. The downside is that at best it slows down visitors’ machines, and at worst it can also drain their batteries or send their electricity bills soaring.
BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay, and US video streaming service Showtime, are two sites that were discovered to be sending mining code to users. The former owned up, posting in mid-September that the code was “just a test” and that the experiment was being done with a view to removing all adverts from the site.
The latter removed the code on Monday, shortly after a user noticed it and specialist press began reporting. But it has yet to answer questions on why the code was there from the Guardian and other media organisations.
Cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and its successors, are backed by a system of “miners”, who race to be the first to solve tricky computing problems in exchange for a reward for doing so. The rewards are large – the bitcoin network, for instance, gives away coins worth $7m to miners every day – but to be in with a chance, miners need to gather an extraordinarily large amount of computing power.
Not only is it expensive to buy those computers, it also consumes a huge amount of electricity to run them. As a result, the most profitable mining companies often have access to cheap energy, or some other efficiency boost – one firm, based in Iceland, saves money by letting the country’s naturally cold climate cool its computers.
Website-based mining short circuits that: the electricity bills are paid by the visitor, but it’s the website that gets the reward.
“Gaming and video sites typically are more resource intensive, so it seems to make little sense to run a miner at the same time without having a noted impact,” says Malwarebytes analyst Jérôme Segura. “Having said that, many people who consume copyrighted content are perhaps less likely to complain about an under-par user experience.
“The question at this point is: how far can publishers push the limits towards a really bad user experience? You may be surprised that for many, this is not really a problem at all and that double dipping is, in fact, a fairly common practice,” he added.
In the long run, such practices may simply push more users to install adblockers, Segura noted. It’s just as easy to block mining as it is to block adverts, using much the same techniques. Segura said: “There’s no question that users are annoyed by a rollout that did not include their opinion, even though many were actually favourable to this alternate solution to online ads.”
Showtime did not respond to a request for comment.
President Donald Trump addresses the NFL Kneeling controversy, North Korea, Venezuela, Puerto Rico and more at a joint press conference with President Mariano Rajoy of Spain 🇺🇸
President Trump Press Conference on NFL Kneeling Controversy, North Korea
Twitter has doubled the character limit on tweets to allow its users to convey more meaning or emotion – or, in the case of Donald Trump, more elaborate war threats to North Korea.
“This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160-character SMS limit,” said chief executive Jack Dorsey, announcing the update on Tuesday.
This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu
The decision was motivated by research carried out by the social network that showed you can convey double the amount of information per character in languages like Japanese, Korean and Chinese than you can in languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese or French.
“Our research shows us that the character limit is a major cause of frustration for people Tweeting in English, but it is not for those Tweeting in Japanese,” said Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen in a blogpost.
Twitter extends its character limit from 140 to 280.Photograph: Twitter
The team found that only 0.4% of tweets sent in Japanese hit the 140-character limit, while a much higher percentage of tweets in English (9%) hit the limit.
“When people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare we see more people tweeting – which is awesome,” Rosen added.
She acknowledged that some people have an “emotional attachment” to 140 characters – “we felt it, too” – but that when the team tried it they “fell in love with this new, still brief, constraint”.
Twitter is testing the new feature with a small subset of its 328 million users before deciding whether to launch it to everyone.
The announcement polarized Twitter users, with some arguing that the company should have prioritized an editing tool or a clampdown on white nationalists using the platform.
For others the focus was on Donald Trump who recently posted a tweet that North Korea has interpreted as a “clear declaration of war”.
In response to a speech by North Korea’s Ri Yong-ho at the United Nations on Sunday, Trump wrote that if the foreign minister “echoed” the thoughts of Kim Jong-un, the two men “won’t be around for much longer”. It was the latest in a series of hostile statements between the two countries.
Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!
Twitter’s terms of service forbid making violent threats, but the company refused to take the tweet down, arguing that Trump’s statement was “newsworthy” and in the public interest.
Close your eyes.
Imagine Trump using Twitter.
Now imagine Trump using Twitter with 280 characters.
Osaka’s Gate Tower Building is an amazing sight to see because … well, how should I put this? A highway goes through the building. It literally does, and there is a story behind it.
In this episode, John not only goes inside to see where the elevator takes him, he also drives through it — in a Lotus Seven. We’ll also go up the Umeda Sky Building and catch some fantastic angles of the city, skyline and Gate Tower Building.
We all have different ways to navigate when lost – whether asking a stranger for help, consulting an old-school map or simply following our nose.
But on a bike, the stakes are higher. One wrong turn and you’re in gridlocked traffic, with two lanes between your bike and the nearest pavement. In this moment, cyclists can be divided into two types: the few who stay calm and embrace getting lost, and the rest of us, who turn to a navigation app.
Although cyclists, of course, managed to navigate before smartphones, typing two addresses into a phone for real-time directions has changed the game for most of us.
Google Maps added a directions function for cyclists in 2010 in the US and Canada, and two years later across Europe. And while there are dozens of other apps now offering a similar service, Google Maps is the default for many. But the app seems to be falling behind expectations.
As someone with no sense of direction, I knew it wouldn’t be easy when I started cycling earlier this year. I was right; it took me months to memorise my eight-mile route from home in north London to work in Kensington.
I appreciated that the app gave me two warnings before I needed to turn off a road, and automatically recalculated my route if I accidentally went off course. But still, it wasn’t a smooth process. Google Maps thought I could cut across a dual carriageway with no breaks in its barrier, assumed I knew what it meant when it told me to “head west”, and thought nothing of taking me the wrong way down a busy one-way street.
It was annoying at best and at worst puts safety in the hands of an app, which could be dangerous for cyclists.
But cyclists don’t just want safety – they want convenience. Londoner Jack Dobson-Smith regularly cycles between Clapham and the City of London and would like to see Google Maps calculate routes where his bike is allowed on public transport and more choice of the type of routes he can take.
“Google tends to calculate the most common and comfortable cycle routes. It would be good to have an option which included the fastest route, regardless of comfort,” he says.
Elizabeth Eden, Southwark Cyclists infrastructure coordinator, says she doesn’t use Google Maps for cycling because it’s “pretty useless”. She wishes the app could indicate cycle parking, but her main reason for shunning the app is down to wanting to feel safe.
“Google Maps assumes that cyclists are car drivers who can occasionally use parks. The routes it suggests all go straight along main roads. The main use of a cycle app in London – at least for me – is identifying where the safe routes are.”
For this reason, Eden says she uses the app CycleStreets instead. It offers a choice of four different route modes, based on the type the user wants, and saves previous routes. It also tells you how many calories a route burns, how many traffic lights you will encounter, and how busy it is.
There are an increasing number of rival apps aimed at cyclists: Bike Citizens logs cyclists’ journeys to suggest good routes, or helps you explore a new city by taking a “cycle tour” created by locals; maps.me allows you to search areas and access maps offline, and tells you the most interesting places in new locations.
In my darker moments, when I have found myself three miles from where I’m supposed to be, soaked with rain and cursing at my phone, I have daydreamed about how Google Maps could crowdsource information so cyclists could help each other with local quirks, danger zones, and closed roads.
When I have used my initiative and hopped off my bike, crossed a road and saved myself five minutes of traffic, I’ve wished the app was able to alert me to these shortcuts. And when I have dragged myself out of bed, half-asleep, only to arrive somewhere early, I wish the app could estimate the journey time based on my average speed.
Being able to pick a route, however, seems to be the most sought after feature, according to my rudimentary market research. Cyclist Dan Krijgsman told me this is at the top of his wish list.
“I find the app will typically opt for fast and direct routes over safer, but more winding, back routes. Of course, it’s very much personal preference whether you prefer to weave down side streets, across parks and around the increasing number of strategically placed metal barriers, or high-tail it at 25mph down a bus lane.”
A Google spokesman pointed out that Google Maps can show streets with bike lanes (light green) and streets recommended for cyclists (green dashes), although the routes don’t always incorporate these. He also advised cyclists to use the “send feedback” option on the app for their comments.
• What are your favourite mapping and routing apps and methods? And what would you like to see from the next generation of mapping tools? Please share your tips in the comments below
Twitter has refused to take down a tweet by Donald Trump threatening North Korea, arguing that the statement by the US president was “newsworthy” and in the public interest.
Trump posted a tweet in response to a speech by North Korea’s Ri Yong-ho at the United Nations on Sunday, indicating that if the foreign minister “echoed” the thoughts of Kim Jong-un, the two men “won’t be around for much longer”. It is the latest in a series of hostile statements between the two countries.
The tweet has been interpreted by many, including Ri, as a “clear declaration of war” – and by some as a violation of Twitter’s terms of service.
Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!
Twitter’s terms of service currently forbid using the platform to make violent threats, either directly or indirectly. Any accounts that engage in such behaviour may be removed or subject to temporary suspension, it says.
Twitter on Monday released a statement saying the company would update its public policy on which tweets should remain in the public domain.
We hold all accounts to the same Rules, and consider a number of factors when assessing whether Tweets violate our Rules 2/6
In a series of tweets, the social media platform argued that Trump’s tweet did not meet the conditions for removal. However, the company pledged to “consider a number of factors when assessing whether tweets violate our rules” including re-evaluating tweets that are in the “public interest” or deemed “newsworthy”.
“This has long been internal policy and we’ll soon update our public-facing rules to reflect it. We need to do better on this, and will,” the company said.
It also emerged on Monday that an Iranian missile launch mentioned in a tweet by Trump on Sunday had not actually happened.
“Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel,” the president had tweeted. “They are also working with North Korea. Not much of an agreement we have!”
Iran just test-fired a Ballistic Missile capable of reaching Israel.They are also working with North Korea.Not much of an agreement we have!
The footage on which Trump had based his tweet, released by Iran’s state-run TV, was in fact believed to be from an unsuccessful launch in January. Two US officials have since confirmed that the video supposedly depicting a recent missile launch was indeed fake.
This ultra-thin wallpaper TV offers a revolutionary design that has no rival. View your favorite TV shows, movies and sporting events, with picture clarity and brilliant color unlike anything you have ever seen. Paper thin and incredibly lightweight, the OLED wallpaper TV from LG features image pixels that are self-lighting, making blacks more black, while allowing color to truly pop off the screen. LG wallpaper TVs creates a 360-degree immersive viewing experience, delivering crystal clear images from any viewing angle. Create the home entertainment experience you have only dreamt about, with LG wallpaper TV, designed to enhance the way you live.
LG SIGNATURE OLED Wallpaper TV: Simplicity. Perfection. 2017
The White House has announced a revised travel ban, imposing indefinite restrictions to entry into the US. North Korea, Chad and Venezuela made the list, but Sudan is no longer there. RT America’s Simone Del Rosario has the details.
Watch below the Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018) movie trailer starring Kaya Scodelario, Dylan O’Brien, Walton Goggins.Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller Movie directed by Wes Ball. The Hollywood movie Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018) is expected to be released on 26th January 2018 (USA).
Watch the official trailer from below.
Watch Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018) Trailer in HD
Jo&Joe is a new youth brand from hotel giant Accor which is hoping to muscle in on the Airbnb market by “blending the best of private-rental, hostel and hotel formats”. Aimed squarely at millennials, this is the first of 50 hostels scheduled to open by 2020. There are private rooms and dorms, and it’s moments from the beach of this Atlantic surfing resort. Watersports are the focus, with bookable surf and paddleboarding lessons (as well as yoga classes and a climbing wall), plus masterclasses and workshops through partners Roxy and Quiksilver. A bar, outdoor dining area (open to non-guests), guest kitchen and hammocks give the place a party vibe.
Mob is another new concept hotel with a “down with the kids” branding (full name: Mob Hotel – Of the People) and lofty ideals. It is not a hotel chain but a “virtuous movement’ no less. Marketing blurb aside, these are smart, lively places to stay with a strong focus on design (one of the creators was the co-founder of the successful MamaShelter group). The first Mob launched in Paris in March, and this second one opened this month in Lyon’s regenerated docklands. Inside a striking modern building with a honeycomb-like metal facade are 98 funky double and family rooms and a restaurant styled to please the Instagram-generation – industrial with theatrical flourishes such as a lifesize stag sculpture. Exercise and wellbeing classes are available (at a price) plus music nights. There are seven more openings in the offing in Europe and the US, starting with Washington DC in 2019. • Doubles from €99, house breakfast €14, mobhotel.com
Dock Inn Hostel, Warnemünde, Germany
This large hostel on the Baltic coast is made from stacked shipping containers. The industrial theme continues inside, with concrete walls, exposed pipes, and more containers. Warnemünde is a busy port and seaside town, and the hotel is 12 minutes’ walk from the beach, where there are opportunities to try outdoor sports, including standup paddleboarding and beach volleyball.
This modern conversion of an old apartment block was designed by Hungarians but has a distinctly international flavour. The mix of guests and locals in the hotel’s south-east Asian restaurant and a soon-to-open rooftop bar add to the convivial atmosphere. The 38 stylish rooms are modern with retro lighting and moody colour schemes.
• Doubles from €60 (20% discount for four nights or more) through i-escape.com
Generator Hostel, Rome
The most recent opening in the Generator chain of “hip hostels” is Rome. The affordable, design-led hostel is close to the Colosseum and Termini station, and has 75 rooms, ranging from dorms to doubles, with an industrial chic bar and lounge to make yourself at home in.
It’s not a destination traditionally associated with sleep, but getting a budget bed on the White Isle can be a real challenge. Amistat Hostel in San Antonio offers a cheap, chic place to dump your bags before hitting the clubs, with a mix of basic dorms and simple but tasteful doubles, as well a pool, bar, lounge and rooftop space.
The Icelandic capital may be hip but it comes at a price. The addition of the Oddsson Hostel is a welcome one then; affordable design-led accommodation with room for up to 250 people. The rooms are simple, but that minimal Scandi design permeates throughout, be it in the restaurant, bar, rooftop hot tubs or bespoke karaoke room. • Doubles with shared bathroom from £131, dorm beds from £30, oddsson.is
Q Factory Hotel, Amsterdam
Q-Factory is a music venue and rehearsal space in East Amsterdam, which recently expanded into running a hotel too. Rooms are simple but with plenty of touches to remind you you’re staying in a city renowned for its design, while the cafe and terrace provide a place to hang out for guests, and those working in the music businesses based in the building. • Doubles from €112.50, q-factory-hotel.nl
Steel House, Copenhagen
Another luxury hostel to recently open in a top city break destination, the industrial chic Steel House offers four- and six-bed dorms, as well as private rooms, a gym and a pool, right next to the trendy Vesterbro neighbourhood. The latest opening from the Arp-Hansen group, which owns a dozen mainstream hotels, it shows the direction that many chains are going in. • Doubles from £55, dorms from £14, steelhousecopenhagen.com
My Cocoon, Mykonos
A futuristic design hostel in a town not usually associated with budget accommodation (it’s the only hostel on the island), MyCocoon hopes to provide an alternative option for groups of friends hoping to save that cash for socialising. The hostel rooms range from a communal dorm for up to 46 people, down to private rooms that sleep between four to six, all with a spaceship style aesthetic, with beds fitted into sleek white pods. • Private room for four from €116, beds from €28, hostelmykonos.com
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