Liverpool v Southampton, Brighton v Fulham, and more: football – live

The report via Peter Lansley has dropped from the City Ground.

As he rightly writes: “Manchester City continued their plummet from Premier League champions to scrambling to qualify for the Champions League, but the achievements of [Nottingham Forest] deserve full recognition”.

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Continue ReadingLiverpool v Southampton, Brighton v Fulham, and more: football – live

‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement

Participants view scenes of daily life as well as travel adventures – then process the emotions they trigger through art

One Monday in July, Samantha Tovar, known as Royal, left her 6ft-by-11ft cell for the first time in three weeks. Correctional officers escorted her to the common area of the Central California Women’s Facility and chained her hands and feet to a metal table, on top of which sat a virtual reality headset. Two and a half years into a five-year prison sentence, Royal was about to see Thailand for the first time.

When she first put on the headset, Royal immediately had an aerial view of a cove. Soon after, her view switched to a boat moving fairly fast with buildings on either side of the water. In the boat was a man with a backpack, and it was as if she were sitting beside him. With accompanying meditative music and narration, the four-minute scene took Royal across a crowded Thai market, through ancient ruins, on a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled rickshaw) and into an elephant bath with her backpacked companion. For Royal, these vignettes felt real enough to be deserving of a passport stamp.

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Continue Reading‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement

‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement

Participants view scenes of daily life as well as travel adventures – then process the emotions they trigger through art

One Monday in July, Samantha Tovar, known as Royal, left her 6ft-by-11ft cell for the first time in three weeks. Correctional officers escorted her to the common area of the Central California Women’s Facility and chained her hands and feet to a metal table, on top of which sat a virtual reality headset. Two and a half years into a five-year prison sentence, Royal was about to see Thailand for the first time.

When she first put on the headset, Royal immediately had an aerial view of a cove. Soon after, her view switched to a boat moving fairly fast with buildings on either side of the water. In the boat was a man with a backpack, and it was as if she were sitting beside him. With accompanying meditative music and narration, the four-minute scene took Royal across a crowded Thai market, through ancient ruins, on a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled rickshaw) and into an elephant bath with her backpacked companion. For Royal, these vignettes felt real enough to be deserving of a passport stamp.

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Continue Reading‘An ideal tool’: prisons are using virtual reality to help people in solitary confinement

Mao Zedong’s first Little Red Book had blue cover and less propaganda

Rare early editions of book by communist party chairman, who shunned the idea of wealth, set to fetch £1m at auction

The thoughts of Mao Zedong, published in 1964 under the title Quotations, are considered the blueprint for Chinese communism and a guidebook to the Cultural Revolution. The collected soundbites from his speeches and writings have become known the world over as the Little Red Book.

But the red-covered Quotations of the former Chinese Communist Party chairman, who died in 1976, aged 82, went through many ideological iterations before the official version was settled on. The original cover was also a different colour – in fact, had some of those earlier thought experiments been declared the final draft, we could now be talking about Chairman Mao’s Little Blue Book.

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Continue ReadingMao Zedong’s first Little Red Book had blue cover and less propaganda

Mormon church rocked by child sexual abuse allegations in California

Look-back window results in nearly 100 allegations against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) in the US has been rocked by a slew of sexual abuse allegations launched against it in California in the latest scandal to hit the organization that is better known as the Mormon church.

A three-year look-back legal window that allows adult survivors of sexual assault to file claims in California has produced almost 100 allegations of childhood sexual abuse by Mormon leaders.

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Continue ReadingMormon church rocked by child sexual abuse allegations in California

Marco Rubio: one-time Russia hawk makes stunning U-turn under Trump

The secretary of state was once a prominent Ukraine supporter and called Putin a ‘war criminal’ – not any more

Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, looked on as Donald Trump demanded more gratitude from the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and accused the embattled leader of “gambling with world war three”.

“You right now are not in a very good position,” Trump chided Zelenskyy during their confrontation in the Oval Office last week.

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Continue ReadingMarco Rubio: one-time Russia hawk makes stunning U-turn under Trump