• Russian teen beats American 6-3, 6-4 at Indian Wells

• French Open champion, 19, assures world No 2 ranking

The rise of Mirra Andreeva has seemed inevitable ever since she burst on to the tour as a precocious 15-year-old more than three years ago, but this week, six months after her maiden grand slam triumph at Roland Garros, she has taken another massive step forward in her career. The 19-year-old will attempt to close out the most impressive week of her career by winning one of her most significant titles after thoroughly outplaying Jessica Pegula, the fifth seed, 6-3, 6-4 to reach the championship match of the WTA Finals at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden.

A year ago, Andreeva surprisingly failed to qualify for the WTA Finals, missing out by a paltry six points after bizarrely deciding not to compete in the final tournament week before the event. The world No 3 has been utterly supreme in her long-awaited debut appearance, bulldozing through elite opposition to reach the final without dropping a set. She has conceded just 18 games in four matches this week, including a 6-4, 6-0 demolition of the No 1 seed Aryna Sabalenka, winning 11 games in succession from 1-4 down.

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This tale of a young female spy in 1980s East Berlin is a visual delight. Around every corner is a fun comic twist

Is there any more alluring aesthetic in screen fiction than the iron curtain thriller? Any TV show dealing in 1980s cold war chic – Deutschland 83, Kleo, Star City, The Same Sky, the Russian bits of The Americans – probably has an irresistible mix of danger, absurdity and exotic kitsch. Moustaches! Wigs! Leather trench coats! Rigid patterned fabrics! Cassette players! Boxy cars! The chilly ennui of oppressed citizens and the flagrant risk-taking of secret agents, all somehow liberated by an existential inner emptiness! It’s just so much fun.

Honey pitches us straight into premium frosty paranoia with an opening scene in which British “press attache” – ie spy handler – Graham Anderson (Rory Kinnear, hoorah!) endures a nervous crossing back into East Berlin, during which he really, really does not want his car to be searched. The crowning indignity of his interaction with a chortling buffoon of a border guard is when the manchild in uniform eyeballs Graham’s wife, Anne (Sonita Henry – a slightly more niche hoorah if you saw her fine turns in Silo or The Chelsea Detective), in the passenger seat and decides to show off how closely the pair are being surveilled: “Good luck for your smear test on Thursday, Mrs Anderson!”

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On a night of Charleston glory, Cach Mercer topped the scores and Jaime Winstone came storming back from injury. But with a three-way tie at the bottom, who will miss out on the annual Blackpool extravaganza?

Here come our hostly trio, so let’s compare their couture. Emma Willis is in a black silky two-piece with bare midriff. Josh Widdicombe is in a brown double-breasted suit. Johannes Radebe has come as a Hare Krishna monk. Emma wins.

Cue clapalong titles. Which of these smiling pairs will be starved of fish and chips on Blackpool beach? Plenty of salt and vinegar for me please. And one of those little wooden forks.

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R3 Robotics builds robots that take EV batteries apart to recover the materials and components inside. We repositioned the company around recovering value and created an identity that behaves the same way: a custom wordmark with removed segments, modular graphics that separate and reassemble, and 3D exploded views that reveal what's hidden inside.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on back of photograph, "Dec 31, New Years Eve, Gena Kostewicz, Natrova"

Miklos Sesztak was van 2014 tot 2018 minister van Nationale Ontwikkeling in het derde kabinet van de toenmalige Hongaarse premier Viktor Orbán. Hij spreekt de verdenkingen van corruptie tegen.

The decline of the African National Congress shows that democracy is working.

The Washington Post reports on something peculiar about support for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang online after he'd told the world he'd been unfaithful to his wife (before reports of his second extramarital affair):


Joining the chorus online were voices of seemingly everyday people: a chef, a stock trader, a Hebrew teacher and several environmental activists. But at least 400 of them were fake, according to research from the nonprofit Midas Project, with links to a public relations firm involved in previous so-called "sockpuppet" campaigns... Many of the fake accounts, according to Midas Project executive director Tyler Johnston, replied to journalists, former U.S. officials and other prominent figures and backed not just Huang but Nvidia's push to sell its cutting-edge chips to Chinese firms.

Like other documented influence campaigns, the posts appeared to have limited reach; the most-viewed tweet garnered about 8,000 views and 32 likes. Still, some of the posts targeted lawmakers, including accounts for the [U.S.] House Select Committee on China, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts). "That's a place where you might not need a lot of views, but maybe the staffers who are running the lawmakers' account are paying attention to how their messages are received," said Johnston, whose group advocates for safe AI development...

There were other clues that helped identify accounts as being part of an apparently coordinated campaign, according to the Midas Project. Some of them were created minutes or hours apart, and had user names and profile photos refreshed at similar times. They also sometimes engaged on oddly specific issues ranging from Qatar to Nippon Steel's bid for U.S. Steel and a waste management plant in Oregon.... Any one one of the posts — often replies to other posts — might have not looked suspicious in isolation. But the various clues taken together, Johnston said, gave evidence that they were linked. Some of the accounts then rushed to delete posts after he posted his findings online, and at least 260 of them have been deactivated or suspended by X.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Simon (LitHub, 11/05/26), "A Dystopia For Our Times": "V for Vendetta figures the eponymous mono-lettered hero, explicitly as an anarchist, albeit one who also happens to be a mysterious swashbuckler in a Guy Fawkes mask." Though Guy Fawkes Night has passed, critique remains in season, and r/Comicbooks suggests Marvel / DC have "listened to Alan Moore's critique of supe media" in dystopian storylines that are hell-raised and compassionate or alienated and psychedelic. But Moore recently gave a lengthy interview underlining a long-standing pessimistic POV. So he has recent novels out, there's still the the Great Alan Moore Reread to reread, and fans may enjoy an old interview with Paula Yates (author of Rock Stars in Their Underpants) on The Tube, a show that featured interviews with Sting, Duran Duran, etc. and music scenes like Los Angeles and Berlin.