Author: The Guardian

Floof burst into my life on a gloomy autumn night in 2015. I was new to London, walking home from my bar job in the teeming rain, when a pair of green eyes on a porch roof stopped me in my tracks. Closer inspection revealed a small fluffy cat – black as the night, totally drenched and yelling right at me. I helped her down, and in response she shadowed me for 25 minutes down the busy main road, screeching outside my front door with a determination that woke my flatmate. We let her in – “just for tonight”. But…

Toe spreading is a big thing,” beams Lily Allen before continuing to explain how she keeps her “toe daddies” happy. She is sitting on a sofa for her BBC Sounds podcast Miss Me? while casually chatting about delving into the world of selling foot content. After all, it’s only feet… right? And It’s not just Lily Allen’s toes that have been spreading all over the internet. In 2023, Margot Robbie told Cinemablend that she discovered people had become obsessed with her feet after the iconic trailer shot in Barbie. Fans were making compilation videos of her toes and one Reddit…

rightFU, PRL, PGP, PRB, IDP, TNT, CVC, RPA – drowned in the alphabet soup? Welcome to the new realm of English rugby, where there seems to be no big problem that an acronym can’t solve. It’s perhaps not entirely a coincidence that the Premier League’s director of rugby has recently undergone language lessons, given the additions made this summer.They were all said to have been called into a conference room and encouraged to be more strident in public opinion next season. Embrace and celebrate the gladiatorial nature of the sport instead of shying away from it. In short, make things…

Kamala Harris has re-established a crucial polling advantage over Donald Trump following this week’s debate, which a clear majority of voters believe she won, according to a range of surveys.The latest Guardian polling trends tracker shows the US vice-president regaining a small lead over the Republican nominee since Tuesday’s encounter in Philadelphia, a shift from surveys at the start of the week when the pair were essentially tied.The movement is supported by individual polls, some of which show Harris with a bigger lead than the 0.9% advantage displayed in the Guardian tracker.A Reuters/Ipsos poll, the first to be conducted since…

With the Grand Finals approaching next month, the sun is about to set on the Chinese Super League season, and while all 12 teams are heading into winter, one is facing a potentially grim situation.With IMG’s controversial tiering system coming online next month, replacing the traditional promotion and relegation system from 2025, only the 12 clubs with the highest scores across a variety of on- and off-field metrics will qualify for the Super League.Quick guideWigan secure a win with Leaders’ Shieldexhibitwigan Needing one more win to retain League Leaders’ Shield after defeating Wolves 38-0 leeds at Brick Community Stadium. The…

‘Let’s start in the front garden!” With the delirious energy of a zany scientist showing off his lab, Anthony Ussher, 42, takes me around the compartmentalised space that makes up the garden of James Brine House, a four-storey block of flats in east London. He pushes the fluffy seeds of a salsify plant into my hand while talking me through the street-facing section of the garden. What started as a few paving slabs salvaged from a skip is now a thriving, pocket-sized courtyard filled with unusual, edible plants. Ussher introduces me to fruits I’ve not met before, such as Nepalese raspberries…

SecondKnuckle boxing can best be described as its many contradictions. Known as the fastest growing combat sport in the world, it is also an ancient sport whose origins have been forgotten in prehistory. It’s bloody, but arguably less damaging to the brain than its gloved counterpart. It’s still relatively small in the world of professional sports in terms of fan numbers, but it’s racked up impressive box office numbers in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere.”It’s humane enough to be mainstream, but it’s also borderline brutal,” said David Feldman, founder and chairman of the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championships (BKFC). As the…

Fill the grid so that every row, every column and every 3×3 box contains the numbers 1 to 9

timeThe Cleveland Browns held a strangely celebratory press conference last week to announce the sale of naming rights to their stadium to Huntington Bank, a regional bank based in Columbus, Ohio. Over the next 20 years, the former Cleveland Browns Stadium will be renamed Huntington Bank Stadium. Never mind that Huntington Bank Stadium is a ridiculously generic name that doesn’t even attempt to maintain continuity with the arena’s two most recent nicknames, both of which mark it as a stadium rather than an athletic field; the real problem is, the Browns It hasn’t even been decided yet whether to renovate…

Moustafa Bayoumi: ‘Trump was flailing’For the entirety of this debate, Donald Trump never once uttered Kamala Harris’s name, a sign of enormous disrespect. What he did do was try to shush Harris with a “quiet, please”, silence her with an “I’m talking now. Does that sound familiar?” (an apparent reference to her famous line during the vice-presidential debate four years ago), and brazenly state that President Biden “hates her. He can’t stand her.”Harris smiled confidently at the ludicrous barbs.Meanwhile, Trump reacted to his own statement that he lost the 2020 election “by a whisker” first by stating: “I said that?”…