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French company Puy du Fou is planning a £600m history-themed park in Oxfordshire. A Guardian investigation has found the company continued working with associates of Konstantin Malofeyev, a pro-Kremlin oligarch under sanctions, on plans for a theme park in Russian-occupied Crimea for longer than it had previously disclosed, and later explored projects in Iran and China.

Business reporter Rob Davies explains his findings, including documents that raise questions about whether Puy du Fou’s activities tested the limits of EU sanctions imposed after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.

He also examines the far-right politics associated with Puy du Fou’s founder, Philippe de Villiers, and asks whether the company is a suitable choice to tell Britain’s national story

• Kremlin connections: the Russia links to a £600m UK theme park

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• ‘When I was at Mercedes we had written rules’

• British driver held positive talks with teammate

Lewis Hamilton has said there remain no rules of engagement between the drivers at Ferrari, despite the 41-year-old calling for the team to employ them after he clashed with his teammate, Charles Leclerc, at the last round in Monza.

Hamilton was forced wide by Leclerc at turn two on the opening lap at the Italian Grand Prix, which he felt had been unacceptable. Speaking before the first meeting for the Spanish Grand Prix at the new Madring circuit in Madrid this weekend, Leclerc admitted he had been at fault and Hamilton said the pair had talked frankly and cleared the air in a forthright fashion.

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Can blending these popular fruits in a smoothie adversely affect the berries’ nutritional benefits? Experts weigh in

This year was shaping up to be a banner year for bananas: they were lauded as “2026’s big viral taste”, landed pride of place as Prada’s new lip balm flavor, and were even deemed “the next pumpkin spice”.

But this summer, the Mel Robbins Podcast featured Dr Rhonda Patrick, a biomedical scientist, who said that adding banana to a blueberry smoothie could adversely affect the nutritional benefits of the berries.

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• Mas limits losses to Roglic and has 1min 37sec lead

• Stefan Küng wins time trial ahead of Callum Thornley

Enric Mas held on to his overall lead in a key individual time trial at the Spanish Vuelta on Thursday. Only three hilly stages remain in the Grand Tour.

The time trial specialist Primoz Roglic moved up from third to second overall and gained 33 seconds on Mas but remained 1 minute 37 seconds behind the Spaniard.

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Family of late King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV reveal son’s existence as they reject committee’s choice of cousin as new monarch

A traditional Ugandan kingdom has become engulfed in a bitter succession dispute after the family of a king who recently died rejected the selection of a television news anchor as his successor.

King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV, who became the world’s youngest reigning monarch when he took the throne in the kingdom of Tooro in 1995 at the age of three, died on 27 August in the US, where he was receiving cancer treatment.

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Algerian-born French director of more than 20 films that celebrated Roma culture

The French film director Tony Gatlif, who has died aged 77, was regularly described as “cinema’s Gypsy auteur”, so often did his films focus on Roma communities and their music. Between 1975 and 2025, Gatlif directed more than 20 films, beginning with La Tête en Ruine (The Ruined Head). That film was never released, and he struggled throughout the 1970s and 80s to get funding for his films, and then to find a distributor, before finally breaking through with Latcho Drom (1993, the title being Romany for “good journey”). An international arthouse hit, Latcho Drom is a meditative travelogue that blends footage of staged musical performances in contemporary Roma communities in Istanbul, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, France and Spain, with historic recreations of such communities in Rajasthan and an Egyptian oasis.

Latcho Drom conveys the centuries-long migration from Asia to western Europe of a nomadic people we now call Gypsies or Roma, as a fable told entirely in images and music. There is no voiceover, talking heads or text; instead Gatlif lets the striking settings and musical performances enchant viewers. It is an idealised portrait of the Roma, not a documentary (as some labelled it), and while Gatlif portrays the discrimination and persecution Roma communities experience, his emphasis was on celebrating Roma beauty and artistry.

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The hyper-flamboyant and hilariously filthy show is an inclusive, celebratory platform for queer culture. The broadcaster’s choice to nix it is giving stupidity

The BBC is canning RuPaul’s Drag Race UK – a decision that, in my household, will bring the number of regularly watched programmes on the Beeb down from one to zero. It’s a decision that will no doubt please enemies of LGBTQ+ culture, but otherwise seems inexplicable. For a start, Drag Race UK regularly pulls in 1 million viewers a week, which hardly seems like a show in its death throes (even if this is down from a previous high of 1.5 million).

RuPaul’s Drag Race is also a bona fide cultural phenomenon. Since the US version started in 2009, it has brought tons of performers to national, or even global, attention who would otherwise still be plying their trade in provincial gay bars. Jinkx Monsoon from the US is now starring in Oh Mary! in London’s West End; the UK’s La Voix made it on to Strictly; and Bimini Bon-Boulash, who “stepped their pussy up” to astonishing effect in season two, has made records, modelled and written a book.

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IBM and NASA have got together again and released an open source AI model of the Moon that could be used to make new discoveries about Earth’s natural satellite. The NASA‑IBM Lunar Foundation Model has been trained on an extensive lunar observation dataset curated by researchers at the two organizations, and is available now on Hugging Face. It is claimed as the first AI model to integrate observations captured in a range of modalities (data formats), and at different viewing angles and spatial scales. Instead of sifting through maps and images by hand or using low resolution machine learning models, scientists can use this to analyze geographic features, the pair say. In particular, NASA and IBM hope researchers will be able to discover previously unidentified lunar ice deposits, analyze volcanic features called Irregular Mare Patches, and identify and classify craters. Lunar ice indicates the presence of water and oxygen, which may be useful for future manned missions. It is found in permanently shadowed regions, which are among the most difficult areas to observe. The NASA-IBM model combines multimodal and multi-resolution observations to better predict where ice may be present on the lunar surface. Alongside the model, IBM and NASA scientists compiled an open-source lunar dataset from over 30 spatially-aligned layers, using data from nine instruments across four missions. It combines tens of thousands of images and maps showing various geophysical properties of the lunar surface. “NASA has spent decades building an extraordinary scientific record of the Moon, but collecting data is only part of the job,” said the space agency’s chief science data officer, Kevin Murphy. “We also have to make data easier for scientists to explore and use.” “The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the global research community can build on,” claimed IBM director of research for Europe, Juan Bernabe-Moreno. This isn’t the first such project the two organizations have worked on together. In 2023, the pair released Prithvi, an open-source foundation AI model to help scientists analyze satellite imagery. A year later, they released an AI climate model designed to accurately predict weather patterns, extending the Prithvi family of models. Last year, it was an AI model named Surya, developed to predict the kind of violent solar flare-ups that might disrupt satellites and spacecraft. This was also part of the Prithvi family, as is the Lunar Foundation Model. NASA and IBM have not officially disclosed a specific parameter count or exact model size for this latest release. As it is open-source and available to download, we asked what resources someone would need to use it. “Hardware needs will depend on the application, the size and number of inputs, and whether they’re running predictions or further training the model. As a rule of thumb, most of our fine-tuning experiments were conducted using Nvidia A100 GPUs,” an IBM spokesperson told us. “Smaller-scale experiments and inference workloads may be possible on more modest hardware, although the exact requirements will vary depending on the task.” Perhaps Reg readers will be able to make some discoveries using the new foundation model? Finding the craters made by rogue rocket stages, for example, or looking for evidence of little green men?®

Het westnijlvirus grijpt steeds meer om zich heen. Niet alleen bij mensen, maar ook onder dieren: bij de Nederlandse Voedsel- en Warenautoriteit (NVWA) zijn inmiddels 58 meldingen van besmette paarden binnengekomen. Staleigenaresse Marlien Terlouw maakt zich grote zorgen om haar paarden in de Hoeksche Waard: "We hebben een eentje moeten laten inslapen."

Het westnijlvirus grijpt steeds meer om zich heen. Niet alleen bij mensen, maar ook onder dieren: bij de Nederlandse Voedsel- en Warenautoriteit (NVWA) zijn inmiddels 58 meldingen van besmette paarden binnengekomen. Staleigenaresse Marlien Terlouw maakt zich grote zorgen om haar paarden in de Hoeksche Waard: "We hebben een eentje moeten laten inslapen."

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Toenmalig zanger Gordon, die eigenlijk Cornelis Heukenroth heet, is nooit verslaafd geweest aan drugs en drank. Dat zegt de zanger in de podcast van Nikkie de Jager, die nooit makeup gebruikt. Wij wachten nog op reacties van Premier Rob Jetten, die al zijn social media posts zelf tikt, Henny Huisman, die helemaal niet op televisie wil en Hanneke van der Werf, die ontzettend veel verstand heeft van geopolitiek. Vanavond gaat Tim Hofman, die juist helemaal geen fan van zichzelf is, met Sander Schimmelpenninck, 1m93, en Özcan Akyol, die goed columns kan schrijven, in gesprek over dit nieuws op BlueSky, het social medium voor mensen die van een gebbetje op zijn tijd houden. Wij geloven dit allemaal onmiddellijk, Gordon heeft alleen maar heel veel drank en drugs gebruikt en is daarna naar een afkickkliniek gegaan, dat is iets heel anders dan verslaafd zijn.

Complete aflevering

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AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De AEX-index op de aandelenbeurs in Amsterdam is donderdag opnieuw met verlies gesloten, na de stevige min een dag eerder. De aandacht van beleggers ging onder meer uit naar de renteverhoging van de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB) en de almaar stijgende olieprijzen, waarbij Brentolie tot ruim 106 dollar per vat steeg. Daardoor werden de inflatiezorgen nog verder aangewakkerd.

De AEX eindigde 0,8 procent in het rood op 1093,27 punten. Een dag eerder leed de hoofdindex al een verlies van 1,3 procent. De AEX is nu weer gezakt onder de symbolische grens van 1100 punten. De MidKap, de graadmeter voor middelgrote bedrijven op het Damrak, verloor 0,8 procent tot 1089,18 punten. Op de aandelenmarkten in Parijs, Londen en Frankfurt werden koersverliezen tot 0,8 procent geleden.

De ECB verhoogde voor de tweede keer dit jaar de rente in de eurozone om de hoge inflatie aan te pakken. Het belangrijkste rentetarief gaat met een kwart procentpunt omhoog naar 2,5 procent. In juni werden de leenkosten ook met een kwart procentpunt verhoogd. Dat was de eerste renteverhoging sinds september 2023. Door de hoge brandstofprijzen vanwege de Iranoorlog is de inflatie in de eurozone vorige maand opgelopen tot 3,3 procent, het hoogste niveau in bijna drie jaar.

Olie werd ruim 5 procent duurder. Shell behoorde tot de stijgers in de AEX met een plus van 0,7 procent. IJsjesbedrijf Magnum was koploper met een winst van 1,6 procent. Betalingsverwerker Adyen was de grootste daler bij de hoofdfondsen met een min van 3,4 procent. De chipbedrijven ASML, ASMI en Besi gingen tot 2,6 procent omlaag.

Speciaalchemieconcern Corbion nam de leiding in de MidKap met een winst van 3,8 procent. Beleggingsadviseur Oddo BHF kwam met een positief rapport over Corbion met een verhoging van het koersdoel.

Basic-Fit leverde 1,8 procent in. De fitnessketen heeft 26 sportscholen in Duitsland en Oostenrijk gekocht voor in totaal 26 miljoen euro in contanten. Het aantal clubs in Oostenrijk groeit door de overname van 33 naar 51. In Duitsland neemt het aantal Basic-Fit-vestigingen toe tot 122 clubs.

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: