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The maverick, who transcended his sport and became a household name across the globe, died last week at his home in Clearwater, Florida , after suffering cardiac arrest aged 71.

EXCLUSIVE: A Somerset Council report estimates there are over 300 van dwellers in Glastonbury and locals say that is far too many.

A teenage girl gang has turned a once-thriving high street into a 'warzone' - with their 14-year-old ringleader boasting she's 'untouchable' because police refuse to step in.

After it began "peering into the distant universe" in 2022, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope "has discovered a rash of 'little red dots'," reports Science magazine. There's "hundreds of them, shining within the first billion years of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe, so small and red that they defied conventional explanation." "Only in the past few months has a picture begun to emerge. The little red dots, astronomers say, may be an entirely new type of object: a colossal ball of bright, hot gas, larger than the Solar System, powered not by nuclear fusion, but by a black hole..." The objects, which some astronomers are calling "black hole stars," could be a missing link in the evolution of galaxies and help explain the rapid growth of supermassive black holes that lie at their hearts. "The big breakthrough of the past 6 months is actually the realization that we can throw out all these other models we've been playing with before," says astronomer Anna de Graaff of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy... JWST couldn't resolve the dots into a recognizable shape, which meant they must have been tiny — less than 2% of the diameter of the Milky Way. "It was a mystery ... as to why they were so spatially compact," says Caitlin Casey of the University of Texas at Austin. An impossibly dense packing of stars would be needed to explain their brightness. "I was excited," Casey says... For Mitch Begelman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, the observations are a vindication. Earlier this month, he and a colleague posted a preprint on arXiv reviving a scenario for the formation of hypothetical "quasi-stars" that he and others had proposed 20 years ago. The first generation of stars, they calculated, could have grown to colossal size in the early universe, which was made up almost entirely of hydrogen, the raw material of stars. When a giant star ran out of fuel, they said, its core would have collapsed into a black hole, but the outer envelope of hydrogen was so dense it survived the blast, enclosing the newborn black hole. As the black hole chewed at its shroud of gas, the entire system glowed as a quasi-star larger than the Solar System. "That's what the quasi-star envelope is doing, it's force-feeding the black hole by pushing matter into it," Begelman says. Given how common little red dots appear to be in the early universe, theorists are beginning to wonder whether this giant-ball-of-gas phase is an essential part of black hole growth and the evolution of galaxies. "We're probably looking at kind of a new phase of black hole growth that we didn't know about before," de Graaff says. "If the red dots do turn out to be black hole stars, it will be precisely the sort of breakthrough expected from JWST — and the kind of discovery astronomers live for." Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the news.

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Last October, Keir Starmer sat on the sofa of the White Room and looked into the eyes of the families of hostages snatched by Hamas. It was, he said, a profoundly moving moment.

For several days I have been living in a country I do not recognise. It is assumed that I ought to be fiercely interested in women's football and in the death of Ozzy Osbourne. I am not.

Criminals used undocumented techniques and well-placed insiders to remotely withdraw money

A ring of cybercriminals managed to physically implant a Raspberry Pi on a bank's network to steal cash from an Indonesian ATM.…

Budget educational computing is now Google's game to lose

Microsoft is discontinuing support for its Windows 11 SE variant meant to compete with ChromeOS in the education space, leaving schools that chose Microsoft over Google in the lurch just four years after the cloud-based Windows variant was released. …

From these experiences, a series of short of NHS films will be created which aim to educate and empower individuals and to inspire more inclusive employment.

Coffee and Comics, in Old Road, is a quirky shop offering shelves of comics as well as an area to sit down and have lunch.

The single crystal-encrusted sock was used by the King of Pop at a concert in Nimes, a city in the south of France, in 1997.

New figures show that GB News beat both the Beeb and Sky News in terms of viewing figures during key slots in July.

The Black Sabbath rocker died aged 76 on July 22 and was laid to rest in a private funeral at his Buckinghamshire home on Thursday.

Hundreds gathered outside Manchester Piccadilly station on Saturday as supporters of far-right group Britain First prepared to march into the city.

Ralph sadly died in his sleep, and leaves behind his twin brother, a sister and his mum and dad

In Shanghai at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (which ran until Tuesday), the Chinese government "announced an international organization for AI regulation and a 13-point action plan aimed at fostering global cooperation to ensure the technology's beneficial and responsible development," reports the Washington Post. The theme of the conference was "Global Solidarity in the AI Era," the article notes, and "the expo is one part of Beijing's bid to establish itself as a responsible AI leader for the international community." CNN points out that China's announcement comes "just days after the United States unveiled its own plan to promote U.S. dominance." Chinese Premier Li Qiang unveiled China's vision for future AI oversight at the World AI Conference, an annual gathering in Shanghai of tech titans from more than 40 countries... While Li did not directly refer to the U.S. in his speech, he alluded to the ongoing trade tensions between the two superpowers, which include American restrictions on advanced semiconductor exports — a component vital for powering and training AI, which is currently causing a shortage in China. "Key resources and capabilities are concentrated in a few countries and a few enterprises," said Li in his speech on Saturday. "If we engage in technological monopoly, controls and restrictions, AI will become an exclusive game for a small number of countries and enterprises...." Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, Dr. Kao Kim Hourn, also called for "robust governance" of artificial intelligence to mitigate potential threats, including misinformation, deepfakes, and cybersecurity threats... Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterated the call for international collaboration, explicitly calling on the U.S. and China to work together... "We have a vested interest to keep the world stable, keep the world not at war, to keep things peaceful, to make sure we have human control of these tools." China's plan "called for establishing an international open-source community," reports the Wall Street Journal, "through which AI models can be freely deployed and improved by users." Industry participants said that plan "showed China's ambition to set global standards for AI and could undermine the U.S., whose leading models aren't open-source... While the world's best large language model is still American, the best model that everyone can use free is now Chinese." "The U.S. should commit to ensuring that powerful models remain openly available," argues an opinion piece in The Hill by Stability AI's former head of public policy. Ubiquity is a matter of national security: retreating behind paywalls will leave a vacuum filled by strategic adversaries. Washington should treat open technology not as a vector for Chinese Communist Party propaganda but as a vessel to transmit U.S. influence abroad, molding the global ecosystem around U.S. industry. If DeepSeek is China's open-source "Sputnik moment," we need a legislative environment that supports — not criminalizes — an American open-source Moon landing.

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Japanese walking is becoming the latest fitness craze - taking over trendy workouts like Pilates, yoga and spin classes.

Tired of having to choose between designer bags that cost a fortune and plastic high-street versions? Enter midi bags: styles made to last - without the price tags.

Evyatar David's family approved the use of the terrorist organisation's video on Saturday, which shows him bare chested on a dirty mattress inside a tunnel in Gaza .

Jo Taylor, 73, was stunned when she received a letter from Norwich City Council warning her over food regulations after she dished out the popular snacks at the annual NR2 Yard Sale.