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Runners who wear Nike's fastest shoes (file image) may have a 4 to 5 per cent advantage over others during races, according to a recent New York Times analysis.

HENRY DEEDES: He arrived here five months ago unelected. To many, he was simply a part-time occupant stubbornly claiming squatters' rights. Not any more

Jake and Hannah Graf are to be Britain's first transgender parents after announcing their baby girl due in April. They are using a surrogate and will protect their girl from the 'hatred' they experienced.

Zaquel da Silva Costa, a nine-year-old boy from Acre, Brazil, says his dream is to meet Santa Claus one day and he and his brother will settle for the meeting even if Santa does not bring a gift.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T doesn't want its home Internet speeds to be measured by the Federal Communications Commission anymore, and it already convinced the FCC to exclude its worst speed-test results from an annual government report. "AT&T this year told the commission it will no longer cooperate with the FCC's SamKnows speed test," The Wall Street Journal wrote in an investigative report titled "Your Internet provider likely juiced its official speed scores." AT&T already convinced the FCC to exclude certain DSL test results from last year's Measuring Broadband America report. The reports are based on the SamKnows testing equipment installed in thousands of homes across the U.S. "AT&T was dismayed at its report card from a government test measuring Internet speeds" and thus "pushed the Federal Communications Commission to omit unflattering data on its DSL Internet service from the report," the Journal wrote. "In the end, the DSL data was left out of the report released late last year, to the chagrin of some agency officials," the Journal wrote. "AT&T's remaining speed tiers notched high marks." "AT&T developed a best-in-class tool to measure its consumer broadband services," the company said in a statement provided to Ars. "This tool measures performance on all AT&T IP broadband technologies and is more accurate, versatile, and transparent. For these and other reasons, our tool provides better and more useful information to our customers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In 2001 Prince Andrew was said to be visiting the island of Phuket, Thailand, on a Christmas trip organised by Johan Eliasch, a Monaco-based tycoon behind the top sports brand Head.

The clique running the Labour Party clearly regarded compromise as betrayal, because it dilutes their ideology. But the real betrayal is to have failed to compromise and thus to have achieved nothing.

Throughout the campaign, Tory staff out on the road with Mr Johnson were always more optimistic than those based in London, because they saw at first hand the reception he got from the public.

DOMINIC SANDBROOK: To future generations, the names of toppled Labour strongholds will tell the story of Boris Johnson's tidal wave.

The Big Apple in December is glamorous and glittering - but that comes at a sky-high price. Here, Graham Boynton reveals why smart travellers should wait and visit New York in January.

Val Cenis sits in the French Alps just 20 miles over the hill from famous enclaves such as Val d'Isere. Robert Hardman took his family to enjoy the resort's 75 miles of marked pistes.

A new Netflix Christmas special has angered more than one million outraged viewers who say they are appalled by the streaming service's portrayal of a possibly gay Jesus.

Liberation, a daily newspaper in France, has edited the Prime Minister's face on to an image of the Queen for its weekend coverage of the latest development in the Brexit saga.

The Vatican invested $4.5 million on films in 2019, one of which was the Elton John biopic Rocketman (bottom right) which features scenes of gay sex and drug abuse, a report has revealed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 30 million people use a Roku device to navigate the constellation of streaming TV services. The company's portfolio includes the "stick" ($49.99), which resembles a USB drive; the "puck" ($79.99), a black square with smooth edges and minimal detailing; and a $400 smart TV with Roku's operating system. The more expensive options offer better image quality and such features as extra digital storage space. As the era of cable and satellite TV dims, Chief Executive Officer Anthony Wood says Roku is poised to keep capitalizing on the boom in streaming video. It's an independent player that can work well with all the entrants, he says, including new services from Disney and Apple and forthcoming ones from AT&T and Comcast. "It's satisfying to see the world be all in on streaming," says Wood. "That's nothing but excellent for Roku." Many investors on Wall Street agree: The company's stock is up more than 300% this year, and Roku is valued at over $17 billion. Having built the dominant box, Roku is under siege from companies that recognize the value of its business model. Google sells a competing smart TV operating system. Samsung sells more than a dozen smart TVs that don't use Roku's operating system. Comcast is giving its internet subscribers a free streaming box. AT&T is offering a box for its customers. Apple is investing billions in streaming shows designed in part to strengthen the appeal of its hardware. But Roku's biggest challenger is Amazon.com, which is vying for tie-in deals for its Fire TV with smart TV manufacturers and battling for supremacy in international markets. In September it announced a major expansion in Europe, where Roku is less dominant.

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Dressed as Harry Potter, California-based magician Zach King, 29, zooms around on a broom stick, seemingly levitating. But the 'reveal' at the end has left viewers even more confused.

Abbamonte, 53, who also works as a film producer/actress, says Jolie stole her idea for the first ever deaf superhero for the upcoming movie The Eternals.

In a wide-ranging interview with VentureBeat, Google AI chief Jeff Dean has discussed the company's early work on the use of ML to create semiconductors for machine learning, the impact of Google's BERT on conversational AI, and machine learning trends to watch in 2020. An excerpt from the interview where Dean talks about some of the trends one could expect to emerge, or milestones he thinks might be surpassed in 2020 in AI: I think we'll see much more multitask learning and multimodal learning, of sort of larger scales than has been previously tackled. I think that'll be pretty interesting. And I think there's going to be a continued trend to getting more interesting on-device models -- or sort of consumer devices, like phones or whatever -- to work more effectively. I think obviously AI-related principles-related work is going to be important. We're a big enough research organization that we actually have lots of different thrusts we're doing, so it's hard to call out just one. But I think in general [we'll be] progressing the state of the art, doing basic fundamental research to advance our capabilities in lots of important areas we're looking at, like NLP or language models or vision or multimodal things. But also then collaborating with our colleagues and product teams to get some of the research that is ready for product application to allow them to build interesting features and products. And [we'll be] doing kind of new things that Google doesn't currently have products in but are sort of interesting applications of ML, like the chip design work we've been doing. Further reading: AI R&D is Booming, But General Intelligence is Still Out of Reach.

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Euston Station evacuated this evening during Friday rush hour as fire engines are seen rushing towards the scene.

Car smash-and-grab ends with loss of payroll details for 20,000 employees

Facebook has lost a copy of the personal details of more than 20,000 of its employees after a hard drive containing unencrypted payroll information was stolen from an employee's car.…