They offer advice, referee card games and manage players’ tantrums – we caught up with some of the volunteer profs who keep the competitive game going at this year’s world championships

Professors may be the most revered characters in the fictional world of Pokémon (apart from perhaps the Gym Leaders). In Pokémon Red and Blue, Professor Oak greets the player in a pixelated lab coat, and later provides trainers with their first battle partner; since then, each successive generation of games has introduced another professor to aid and guide trainers through their journeys. If you’ve ever played a Pokémon game, they are often the first people that you meet, apart from your in-game mom.

But you may not know that there are also real-world Pokémon professors – volunteers who help organise the game’s competitive communities around the world. Instead of lab coats, they can be seen at events wearing red Pikachu-mascot shirts labelled “staff”, paired with black trousers and shoes.

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Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey might be the one to bear but a crop of competitors is starting to materialise

Reporting from fall film festivals used to be a more streamlined process – what’s good, what’s bad, what’s being sold, what has Oscars chances – but with each year, the season arrives with larger, more existential questions.

The 2025 run, from Venice to Telluride to Toronto, was notably underwhelming and took place months after Sinners went from box-office hit to legitimate contender and at the same time as One Battle After Another skipped festivals and went on to win best picture. The pipeline that had once birthed winners such as Birdman, Spotlight, 12 Years a Slave and The King’s Speech had no longer played as big of a part with Covid-affected Nomadland being the last fall festival film to win the top prize. Even without an awards hat on, there has been a more general lack of buzz, an excitement of something new that much harder to find as more films of considerably lower quality took up underserved space. If the trades are to be believed, a lot of it is down to studios choosing against the risk of bad buzz and potential embarrassment to A-listers because for every The Shape of Water or Poor Things, there’s a White Noise or Joker: Folie à Deux. So while this season might see new films starring Tom Cruise, Timothée Chalamet, Anne Hathaway, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Ben Affleck and Mikey Madison, none of them are braving a festival premiere.

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Shortcuts work against the rewards of friendship: authentic relationships can surely only be forged when you’re not expecting a return on your money

What price would you put on friendship? In these hyper-capitalistic times, where nothing is beyond being given a monetary value, perhaps even Mastercard wouldn’t dare to claim that it’s priceless. A YouGov survey found that 15% of Britons say they have no close friends, while nearly one in 10 (8%) have no friends at all. The numbers are similarly dismal in the US. As we face this contemporary crisis of connection, it is little wonder that friendship, or at least the possibility of it, is increasingly being marketed for sale.

There has been a striking increase in online platforms and apps that promise to introduce you – algorithmically, through social mixers or a combination – to your next BFF. There’s Cliq, PLY, standing for “People Like You”, and RealRoots which promises user satisfaction with the tagline: “Make new friends. Guaranteed”. Meanwhile, 222 boldly declares it is “not a friend-making service”, but a means to “explore serendipity” through social experiences with compatible people.

Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist

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A new Paramount+ series premiering Thursday turns pushy sports parents into glossy entertainment – with the children largely ushered off stage

Remember when pushy sports parents were deserving objects of our collective scorn? When Marv Marinovich and Jim Pierce were bywords for abusive fatherhood, Sarah Palin made the overbearing hockey mom a global punchline, and grim stories of pushy parents assaulting officials, kids and one another grabbed headlines and trained a harsh spotlight on youth sports? Well, the rebrand is in full swing.

Team Moms: Baseball is a glossy new reality series premiering Thursday that aims to recast the pushy sports parent as something well worth coveting, a sexy black hat with a designer label. From the makers of Love Island (ITV America), for Hollywood’s most rapacious studio (Paramount Skydance), with none other than basketball mom Kim Kardashian attached as executive producer, the Paramount+ series follows a cluster of parents whose sons attend Legendary Prep Academy – a Scottsdale, Arizona baseball hothouse with an intense focus on cultivating diamond gems. Anyone coming to this expecting genuine insights on a $40bn industry that’s now under siege from private equity, swallowing ever larger chunks of hard-earned family budgets along the way, should know up front: this is a closer cousin to Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise than ESPN’s 30 for 30.

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Roberto Hamidovic, 48, sent gangs of child pickpockets to target tourists in Paris Métro and Disneyland

A clan leader who sent gangs of child pickpockets to target tourists in the Paris Métro and popular attractions such as Disneyland Paris has been jailed for human trafficking.

Roberto Hamidovic, 48, likened to Fagin, Charles Dickens’s notorious criminal boss, ran a network of child thieves, mostly girls, some as young as 10, who brought in an average of €25,000 (£21,500) a day, according to police.

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From émigré roots to a titan of modern cinema, penning classics such as Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment, a new retrospective celebrates the father of film noir’s incredible career

Like all survivors, Billy Wilder never forgot where he came from or what he had left behind. He was born at the start of the 20th century in Austria-Hungary and died at the start of the 21st in California, the inscription on his gravestone a nod to his most famous line: “I’m a writer but then nobody’s perfect.” Wilder, though, had a habit of of making flawless films throughout his career, a point proved by Almost Perfect, a comprehensive retrospective of his work, running at the BFI Southbank from 19 October until the end of the year.

Wilder was an inveterate self-mythologiser, a film-maker with a brand long before there were opportunities for promotion through Instagram accounts and chicken shop dates. He told a story of living in Berlin during his fledgling years in show business and being kept awake all night by “a toilet that was on the blink”.

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Gisteren nog: Roel Maalderink als hoeder van uw privacy. Op het schild gehesen door Bits of Freedom, bewapend met een AI-bril, op jacht naar het voetvolk van Zuckerberg. Resultaat: Meta-personeel geconfronteerd met hoe kudt zo’n bril is. Een leuk filmpje, zowaar - wij schrokken ook. Koekjes van eigen deeg dus leuk, maar Meta waardeert de eigen bakwaren niet: VIDEO OFFLINE. Meta, blijkbaar nieuw op het internet, noemt de video pesterig en iets met harassment. Met overslaande stem: JA, DAT IS HET PUNT, MARK.

QUIZ: droeg Eerdmans al die tijd een AI-bril?

BERLIJN (ANP/DPA) - De Duitse economie zal dit jaar aanzienlijk sterker groeien dan eerder werd verwacht. Dat melden de vijf belangrijkste economische onderzoeksinstituten in Duitsland. Volgens de onderzoekers zal de groei dit jaar uitkomen op 1,3 procent. In het voorjaar werd nog op een groei van 0,6 procent voor de grootste economie van Europa gerekend.

De instituten DIW, Ifo, IfW, IWH en RWI komen elk halfjaar gezamenlijk met nieuwe ramingen die worden gepresenteerd aan het Duitse ministerie van Economische Zaken. Volgens de onderzoekers is die positievere verwachting vooral te danken aan een sterke export en de grote overheidsinvesteringen in defensie en infrastructuur. Daardoor kon zwakte bij de bedrijfsinvesteringen en consumentenbestedingen worden gecompenseerd.

In het voorjaar werd door de instituten nog gevreesd dat de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten en de sterk gestegen brandstofprijzen voor stevige economische tegenwind zouden zorgen. Maar die impact is dus zwakker dan verwacht.

UTRECHT (ANP) - Vanwege lage waterstanden kunnen schepen op de IJssel vanaf vrijdag tussen Zutphen en Westervoort alleen in de richting van Arnhem varen, meldt Rijkswaterstaat. Op plekken is de vaargeul in de rivier te ondiep.

De politie heeft woensdagavond in Middelharnis twee mannen aangehouden na een poging een oudere man op te lichten. Het slachtoffer had zijn pincode doorgegeven aan iemand die zich via de telefoon voordeed als een bankmedewerker, maar realiseerde zich later dat het foute boel was.

mountainfrog2000 has added a photo to the pool:

on Chikuhi line

de98lip has added a photo to the pool:

de98lip has added a photo to the pool:

mountainfrog2000 has added a photo to the pool:

at Sari station on Chikuhi line

Soms wordt een schrijver herontdekt. Zo’n tweede leven gun ik ook de Italiaanse schrijver Grazia Deledda.

Zijn oprechte menselijke verhoudingen mogelijk onder koloniale omstandigheden? Dat onderzoekt Yáng Shuāng-zi in haar veelvuldig bekroonde roman Reisdagboek Taiwan. „Als mensen in dit boek vooral willen lezen over eten en reizen is dat natuurlijk prima, maar misschien krijgen ze nog wat meer mee.”

The KGB security service of Belarus said the alleged sabotage operation was coordinated from neighboring Ukraine.