The 2025 Caribbean Premier League (CPL) delivered yet another high-voltage encounter as the St Lucia Kings pulled off one of the most remarkable chases in the tournament’s history. Their victory came at the expense of the Guyana Amazon Warriors, who not only squandered a dominant position but also walked away with an unwanted record for the very first time in CPL history.
Shepherd’s Power Show Sets the Stage
Guyana Amazon Warriors looked in complete control during the first innings, piling up a mammoth 202 runs. The highlight of their innings was an electrifying knock from Romario Shepherd, who unleashed his brute force to dismantle the Kings’ bowling attack. His blitzkrieg innings brought the crowd alive and seemed to have put the Warriors on course for a comfortable win.
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Kings’ Stunning Fightback
But the St Lucia Kings, known for their resilience, had other plans. Chasing over 200 is always a daunting task in the CPL, yet the Kings approached the innings with calculated aggression. Their top and middle order stepped up collectively, refusing to bow down to the pressure of the steep target. In the end, they completed a record chase, turning the match on its head and leaving the Warriors shell-shocked.
An Unwanted Record for the Warriors
For the Guyana Amazon Warriors, the loss was doubly painful. Despite setting a target of 202, they became the first team in CPL history to fail to defend a score above 200. For a side that has been among the most consistent performers in the league, the unwanted milestone will sting deeply.
Kings Carry Momentum
This win further cements the St Lucia Kings’ reputation as CPL’s comeback specialists. After winning their maiden title in 2024, they have continued to play with confidence and composure, showing that they are no longer underdogs but genuine title contenders year after year.
The result will go down as one of the defining moments of the 2025 CPL season, a game where individual brilliance met collective resilience, and history was rewritten in dramatic style.
Here’s an admission: I am 37 years old and have never learned to drive. I tried once, in the summer of 2021, and during my second lesson my instructor asked me if I played a lot of video games. When I answered yes, he said, “I thought so,” in a tone that was very clearly not complimentary. Regrettably, it turns out that hundreds of hours spent mercilessly beating my friends and family at Mario Kart and causing vehicular chaos in Grand Theft Auto do not translate instantly to real-life driving skills and judgment. I love racing games precisely because they are unrealistic.
Because I still don’t have my licence, I ride my bike everywhere. It’s a giant orange monster of a thing, big enough for my two children to ride on the back, and it looks ridiculous. It makes me look ridiculous, next to the Lycra-clad middle-aged men on their carbon-fibre frames who zoom past me on the regular. It’s not something I could ever take out into the countryside or down some mountain trail. For that, once again, I must turn to video games.
There are surprisingly few games about cycling, but rather like my abiding love for virtual golf, I have developed a longstanding mini obsession with them nonetheless. One of my all-time favourite games is Lonely Mountains: Downhill, a mountain-biking game that has you performing extremely precise adjustments to your trajectory down increasingly treacherous mountains, soundtracked by minimalist nature sounds and the sound of your rider smacking into boulders. Knights and Bikes is another lovable cycling-based adventure with the vibe of a 1980s summer holiday, starring a couple of kids exploring an island on two wheels.
Pedal (not) to the metal … Wheel World. Photograph: Messhof/Steam
Lately I’ve been playing Wheel World, from California developer Messhof (who also made the one-on-one fencing classic Nidhogg). You ride around a sizeable island on an easy-to-handle racing bike, keeping an eye out for hidden paths and ramps and bike parts and taking on local riders in races when you feel like it. It’s a low-octane, cartoon-coloured Forza Horizon on a bike; a game that captures both the freedom and peace of cycling. You don’t feel like you’re controlling a vehicle; you can’t control gravity and wind and the contours of the road. Instead, you just ride.
I’ve been recovering from an inconvenient, painful injury for most of this year (hence my periods of absence from the newsletter), so relatively undemanding, feelgood games are just what the doctor ordered. Wheel World is a racing game that calms the nervous system, a rare thing indeed. You are chosen at the start by an ancient bike spirit, and must challenge the island’s speediest champions to reclaim supernatural bike parts. Unlike in Lonely Mountains, none of this is particularly difficult – I was winning races effortlessly most of the time – but it feels really good to ride around, winding up hills and then freewheeling down towards the city at the centre of the island, heading out to the Provence-reminiscent farmland where you share the road with tractors. You don’t even have to worry too much about sticking to the tarmac.
I’ve played a few racing games that are structured like Wheel World, but none that feel like it. It made me feel entirely at ease. It’s a whole game-world constructed entirely around bike worship, with no complications and no distractions. Tooling your ride is half the fun, as every new part slightly changes how it feels to pedal around (and they come in fun colours). The soundtrack is exactly energetic enough during races and exactly absent enough when you’re riding around enjoying the vibe and looking for something to do. After five hours or so I was clearly overqualified to take on the final race, but I didn’t want it to end, so I spent another evening exploring everywhere I hadn’t been yet instead. Everywhere I went was explicitly designed for two-wheeled pleasure.
Sometimes in a period of physical or emotional recovery, you are in need of a huge game to get lost in; sometimes you just need something short and sweet with the power to lift your mood. Wheel World has helped me miss riding my real bike a little bit less.
What to play
Top Gear … Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. Photograph: Konami
Longtime readers will know that I have bounced off every Hideo Kojima game I’ve ever played, but our critic Tom Regan was delighted to return to Metal Gear Solid 3, which is being rereleased later this week as Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater. “Snake Eater is a leaner, meaner Metal Gear, a cold war caper owing just as much to James Bond as it does Apocalypse Now,” he writes. “Kojima makes no secret of his love of Hollywood, yet where his works often balloon into unwieldy epics, this game is still his most filmic achievement to date. It’s silly, self-contained and enjoyably campy, veering from the sublime to the ridiculous with admirable swagger. A seamless merging of cold war paranoia with anime-esque silliness.”
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Estimated playtime: About 20 hours
What to read
Snail’s pace … Hollow Knight: Silksong has been in development for seven years. Photograph: Team Cherry
According to Bloomberg (£), the reason that the much-anticipated Hollow Knight: Silksong has taken seven years to make is that its developers were simply having too much fun and didn’t want to stop. “It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping. We could have kept going,” said Team Cherry’s William Pellen.
An incredible quote from Sony’s PlayStation boss, Hermen Hulst, from a Financial Times interview (£), after last year’s Concord fiasco: “I would like for us, when we fail, to fail early and cheaply.”
Last week’s Gamescom convention in Germany broke attendance records, bringing 357,000 visitors to Cologne, according to organisers. Are in-person gaming events finally returning to a stable state after the pandemic years?
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Question Block
Long lost tale … Vagrant Story. Photograph: Square Enix
Reader Tom asks this week’s question:
“With all the remakes flying around, where is the Vagrant Story update that everyone (me) is crying out for?”
We’ve all got that one game, haven’t we? The one that we know would be positively transformed by modern tech if only someone would give it the green light? Vagrant Story isn’t completely pie-in-the-sky: Square Enix is a publisher that’s shown great respect to its back catalogue, and though a three-part mega-remake along the lines of Final Fantasy VII ain’t gonna happen, I give Vagrant Story a 50% chance of at least being rereleased, largely because Final Fantasy XIV’s Naoki Yoshida says it’s one of his favourite games. I’d expect it as a fan-pleasing surprise reveal in one of the big yearly showcases.
We’ve revisited the question of most-wanted remakes a few times over the years, so why not ask again: what games from the annals are you still waiting for someone to dust off and revive? And if you’ve got another question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
Warning: This story contains details of violence that may be disturbing to some readers. You can find resources and help for survivors at the U.S. Department of Justice website.
More than 40 percent of respondents to a new survey experienced a sexual assault or sexual harassment during recent Antarctic research expeditions, according to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
Antarctica is a common analog for spaceflight or stay on a future moon base or Mars settlement due to its remote nature. NSF pledged to work with its own participants, as well as to share information with other organizations working in remote environments, for assessment, prevention and follow-up.
“NSF is committed to fostering and maintaining a culture free from sexual violence wherever NSF-funded activities are conducted, including in Antarctica,” a spokesperson told Space.com over email about the report, which was released in July. “NSF is dedicated to keeping the USAP [U.S. Antarctic Program] community safe.”
In a report in Nature, a scientist and past participant in NSF polar work said the survey is “an important step” towards addressing issues with harassment. “Surveys like this play a critical role in documenting lived experiences that have too often been ignored or minimized,” said Asa Rennermalm, a physical geographer and polar scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Nature’s report added that NSF (like NASA) has been threatened with large budget cuts by the White House, and the entire government is also being targeted by the Trump administration for matters relating to diversity, equity and inclusion. These two factors, the Nature report added, make it unclear to what capacity NSF can respond to the findings.
The NSF spokesperson told Space.com, however, that the foundation pledged to use the survey results “as a way to ensure continuous program improvement based on lived experiences,” particularly because of the quality of the data collection.
Breaking space news, the latest updates on rocket launches, skywatching events and more!
Antarctica is an example of an isolated, confined environment — just like a spacecraft or a potential future base on the moon or Mars. A term for such locations, Isolated, Confined, and Extreme environments (ICE), simply put, includes zones where humans must work in an operational (and often dangerous) environment far from the usual supports of home.
Submarines, research bases and spacecraft are some examples of ICE and there are decades of studies regarding how to support individuals in these environments, according to a separate 2021 study in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.
The teams that will work best in ICE should be properly screened and selected to deal with “leadership, coping and interpersonal skills training … during and after long-duration missions,” the authors of the 2021 study said. The study was co-authored by the University of Southern California’s Lawrence Palinkas and the University of British Columbia’s Peter Suedfeld, who are frequently cited among both ICE researchers and space scientists.
Generally speaking, NASA has spent decades integrating studies of ICE to improve conditions for its astronaut training and living. For example: ISS crews are put through many rounds of ICE environment training before leaving, including working in caves, underwater habitats, and wilderness excursions. Astronauts in space speak with a psychologist at least once every two weeks, according to the Canadian Space Agency. Long-duration astronauts in particular are given rest days to pursue hobbies, call family or friends, and generally to relax.
Satellite imagery of McMurdo Station in Antarctica. (Image credit: DigitalGlobe via Getty Images)
Antarctic scrutiny
Regarding Antarctica, USAP has been under recent scrutiny by the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. The committee started an investigation after a 2022 report by NSF and partners, concerning sexual assault and harassment during NSF activities in Antarctica.
The House committee found “serious deficiencies” in 2024 with how NSF was managing USAP, and made recommendations for remedies. (The committee has also, more generally, investigated sexual assault, sexual harassment, blacklisting and similar activities in scientific programs since 2017.)
The new NSF survey, done alongside several external partners, canvassed 2,760 individuals who deployed with the NSF Office of Polar Programs between 2022 and 2024. Roughly 25% of those canvassed, or 679 people, completed the survey.
Participants, however, were asked to complete different inventories that had their own response rates.
For example, 521 individuals completed a “victimization inventory”, in which 40.7% of respondents said they had experienced at least one instance of sexual assault or sexual harassment. Among the victimization respondents, the survey found that more than half of those affected by these incidents (59%) were female. Responses were nearly evenly split (48% and 52%) between those deployed less than a year, and those deployed for between one and four years.
A “bystander inventory” generated 572 responses, in which nearly 70% (68.7%) of respondents said they had witnessed an incident of sexual assault or sexual harassment. Nearly half (44.5%) said the most recent incident they witnessed was part of a series of issues. (Broadly speaking, assault or harassment was classified into four categories by NSF: as “sexual harassment and stalking”, “unwanted sexual attention”, “sexual coercion, and “sexual assault.”)
NSF emphasized to Space.com that the Antarctic survey was not meant to be representative “of the specifics of spaceflights,” but the spokesperson noted that sharing the results may allow “other organizations operating in remote environments [to] learn and benefit from our approach.”
“It is essential to conduct a needs assessment or data collection to inform and guide strategic efforts, ensuring they are grounded in the strengths of an organization while also assessing risk factors that are specific to your environment and community,” the spokesperson added. “While prevention efforts can be adapted, it is critical to understand the dynamics of the participants.”
Recommendations of the Antarctic survey, in NSF’s words, include:
Decrease the prevalence of victimization and bystander incidents.
Increase both formal reporting and informal disclosures by decreasing barriers to reporting and improving trust, and accountability.
Increase positive norms related to intervening as a bystander.
Decrease norms that support and encourage behaviors.
Increase recognition of problem behaviors that can lead to perpetration of behaviors.
Increase supervisors’ engagement in and initiation of SA/SH prevention efforts.
The foundation has already implemented some of the report recommendations, including case tracking of incidents and better bystander intervention training. More details are available in a memorandum about the report.
“We are carefully reviewing the recommendations, and considering our next steps to ensure that we continue to take effective actions within our available resources,” the spokesperson added. For example, NSF said the program office is ready to assist those participants who experienced sexual assaults, and has a dedicated web page available for reporting and other needs.
The convent is a pressure cooker in this fevered, energetic account of a pivotal week in the life of the young Mother Teresa, which jump-starts the Orizzonti sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. Macedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska ticks down the days from seven to one and wrings a performance of flayed, hard-bitten intensity from Noomi Rapace, who marches down the corridors with a face full of fury. Rapace is a long way from her breakout role in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; tonally, though, not so much. If Mother Teresa never goes so far as to set about the sisters with an axe, the sense that she might injects Mitevska’s film with a pleasing dose of danger.
It is 1948, we’re in the broiling heart of Kolkata and Sister Teresa has tired of her teaching role at the Loreto Entally convent. “I’m a woman in a system run by men,” she complains to sympathetic Father Friedrich (Nikola Ristanovski), although she has also heard a call from the big man upstairs.
Teresa applies to the Vatican for permission to set up her own mission, but the response takes an age, her patience wears thin and she has a more immediate problem. When her heir apparent, Sister Agnieszka (Sylvia Hoeks), admits that she is pregnant, Teresa is duly scandalised. She loves Sister Agnieszka but is repulsed by her, too. “I would never jeopardise my mission for earthly pleasures,” she declares in one of many examples of overly on-the-nose dialogue.
Ahead of the film’s premiere, Rapace billed the film as a “punk-rock” reframing of the 20th-century saint, although the handling is arguably more Euro-metal than punk. There’s plenty of reverb guitar on the soundtrack, culminating in an extended headbanging session as the brides of Christ dance on the convent landing at night. It’s an approach that finally generates more heat than light and leaves Teresa exposed but not necessarily examined.
Watch a clip from Mother
Teresa, it’s clear, is desperate to strike her own path and tend to the poor and the needy. But are these motives purely altruistic? In the opinion of the writer Christopher Hitchens, this white saviour was not a friend of the poor but of poverty itself, and viewed the slums of Kolkata as a happy hunting ground for impressionable Catholic converts. Mother does little to disabuse us of that view, although its frequent God’s-eye shots of the action leave open the possibility that a higher power is guiding her hand and testing her faith. Teresa treats Agnieszka’s pregnancy as an infuriating distraction, another mess to be cleaned up before she can make her escape. It may, though, be the great moral challenge by which her mission is judged.
Time is running short and Teresa craves an answer. So now she picks up the pace, steamrolling through the convent like a heaven-sent Nurse Ratched. She’s wiping the blood off the sisters’ wimples. She’s plucking maggots out of the body of a wounded beggar, who giggles and masturbates throughout the procedure. Her eyes are glittering; her skin looks as taut as a drum.
Teresa is torn and the film is, too. As the clock ticks down to judgment day, Mother veers on and off the path of righteousness, constantly summoned back to its duties of presenting a faithful, fact-based account of its subject. But it’s at its best and most fun when it plays like a giallo horror movie: the lurid tale of a fanatical nun who’s confused God with Satan and herds her excitable flock right into the flames.
Google debuted its new-age video editor called Vids for the Google Workplace productivity suite last year. On Wednesday, the company is adding new features like AI avatars, automatic transcript trimming, and image-to-video tools. It is also releasing a free-to-use feature for consumers with limited features.
This version of the editor will have basic edit controls along with access to Google’s template library, font collection, and stock media library, but it won’t offer AI features at this time.
In the business world, startups like Sythesia and D-ID offer companies access to AI avatars and related tooling for the creation of training and educational videos. Google is debuting a similar feature for its Workplace customers through Vids. The core pitch is the same: if you don’t have enough budget to create videos, use our AI tools to make one.
Users can post a script, select an avatar from a range of voices and personas, and create a video. Google announced the AI avatars feature at Google I/O in May and released it in beta. Now, the feature is hitting general availability.
Google is also adding a video editing feature that automatically detects filler words like “um” or “ah” and long pauses. You can click on these words or pauses to remove them, and the editor will adjust the video accordingly.
Image Credits: Google
The company launched the image-to-video generation capability for Veo 3 in July. It is now adding that feature to Vids for users to create eight-second video clips.
Image Credits: Google
Google said that apart from these features, it is working on noise cancellation, Google Meet-like backgrounds and effects, and support for new sizing formats such as portrait, landscape, and square. However, the company didn’t specify the release date for these.
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Image Credits: Google
The new AI-powered features will be available to Workplace Business or Enterprise Starter users, a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscriber, or a Workspace for Education customer.
TAMPERE (Finland) – Lithuania couldn’t have started FIBA EuroBasket 2025 on a better note, finding their first win in the competition by beating Great Britain by 24 points (94-70) in Tampere, and setting a single-game record.
The whole team put up a collective rebounding masterpiece, breaking the record – since 1995 when data was first recorded – for most rebounds grabbed in a single FIBA EuroBasket game at 57.
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Lithuania open FIBA EuroBasket 2025 with convincing win
The previous two record-holders in such a category were Russia and Croatia, respectively finishing with a 54-rebound performance at FIBA EuroBasket 1995 against Finland and at FIBA EuroBasket 2013 versus Greece.
Rank
TEAM
OPPONENT
YEAR
REBOUNDS
1.
Lithuania
Great Britain
2025
57
2.
Russia
Finland
1995
54
=
Croatia
Greece
2013
54
4.
Poland
Iceland
2017
53
=
Türkiye
Iceland
2015
53
=
Slovenia
Croatia
2013
53
6.
Finland
Russia
2013
52
=
Montenegro
Hungary
2017
52
=
Germany
Italy
2007
52
=
Russia
Finland
2013
52
10.
Great Britain
Israel
2013
51
=
Spain
Czechia
2017
51
In the same game, Jonas Valanciunas moved up to fourth in the FIBA EuroBasket rebounding charts at 309 boards collected in the competition; surpassing Spain’s Marc Gasol.
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Reigning world champion Neeraj Chopra will spearhead India’s 19-member contingent for the World Athletics Championships 2025 in Tokyo next month, with rising sprinter Animesh Kujur making history as the first Indian male sprinter to make the cut.
As defending champion, Neeraj Chopra booked his place through a wild card entry. He will be joined in the men’s javelin throw by Sachin Yadav and Yashvir Singh, both securing berths via the world rankings.
India also gained direct qualifiers through entry standards – Avinash Sable (3000m steeplechase), Parul Chaudhary (3000m steeplechase), Gulveer Singh (5000m) and Praveen Chitravel (triple jump). However, Sable has been ruled out of the World Athletics Championships after an injury cut short his season.
Thirteen others made the cut through the rankings, including long jumper Murali Sreeshankar, who returned impressively after a year-long injury layoff, and javelin thrower Annu Rani, whose consistent 60m-plus efforts have underlined her form this season.
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The word skin has come to stand for superficiality and lack of depth, but human skin defies such connotations. For one thing, it is enormous, accounting for roughly 15% of a person’s body weight. Skin is also remarkable for its diverse roles: protection against pathogens, temperature regulation and, of course, sensation.
Nature Outlook: Skin
Like any part of the body, skin is fallible to disease. But scientists are making great strides in protecting and improving the organ’s health. Gene therapies, for example, are yielding remarkable results in correcting a rare disorder that results in fragile ‘butterfly skin’, enabling children with the skin condition to live active lives. People with psoriasis, who have long been faced with the need to take antibody medications their whole lives, could soon find longer-lasting relief in more-durable treatments. And acne that has beset generations of adolescents might yet be controlled by vaccines. Meanwhile, advances in artificial skin are making it possible to restore a near-natural appearance to wounded or badly burnt tissue.
Skin interacts with other parts of the body in complex and sometimes mystifying ways. People affected by atopic dermatitis, for example, are at greater risk of a range of mental-health disorders. There is also growing evidence that a common treatment for eczema — topical corticosteroid cream — can lead to agnonizing withdrawal symptoms in some people when they try to stop using it.
Dermatological researchers are exploring many other skin phenomena as well, including the biology of itching and how the skin defends itself against unfamiliar pathogens. Scientists are even developing artificial skin that could endow a humanoid robot with human expressions, including one that might pass for a smile. Clinical practice is also a target for progress — one dermatologist, for example, is calling for an urgent re-examination of how race and skin colour are considered when diagnosing and treating skin disease.
We are pleased to acknowledge the financial support of LEO Pharma in producing this Outlook. As always, Nature retains sole responsibility for all editorial content.
Pakistan Super League (PSL) management has formally initiated a comprehensive valuation process of all its commercial assets, reinforcing its commitment to transparency, fairness, growth and long-term sustainability.
Following the conclusion of a public tender process initiated in July, the contract for these valuation services has been awarded to Ernst & Young (EY MENA) one of the world’s leading professional services firms.
The valuation process will commence later this month and is expected to be completed within a five- week period. EY MENA will engage with all relevant stakeholders of the PSL, carry out market research, benchmarking exercises, and formulate projections and valuations.
The TORs for the exercise were approved by the PSL Governing Council and include, amongst other items, the following:
The Fair Market Value of all existing Franchises
The Valuation of commercial rights including Media, live-streaming and In-stadia sponsorships
The Valuation of Title Sponsorship rights
The Valuation of New Franchise teams
This process with respect to determining the Fair Market Value and renewal franchise fee for the existing franchises is in line with the terms and conditions of the existing franchise agreements which are nearing completion.
Speaking on the development, CEO PSL Salman Naseer said: “This valuation marks a pivotal step in the evolution of the PSL which has cemented its place as one of the leading cricket franchises in the world. By engaging an independent global leader like EY MENA, we are ensuring absolute transparency and fairness in determining the fair market value of our franchises and commercial rights.
“As we look toward the renewal cycle and addition of new team(s), this process will give current and prospective stakeholders complete confidence in the league’s growth trajectory and long-term sustainability. Once the valuation report has been reviewed internally, the PCB will take informed and strategic decisions that will shape the future of the league.”
The PSL continues to be a cornerstone of Pakistan’s sporting landscape, driving cricketing excellence, commercial success and global recognition. With the upcoming renewal cycle of commercial assets, PSL is poised to offer even greater opportunities for investors, fans, and players alike.
