Arsenal have agreed a deal with Valencia worth an initial £13m plus add-ons for defender Cristhian Mosquera.
Personal terms on a five-year deal have also been agreed in principle.
Mosquera is expected to fly into the UK in the next 24-48 hours for a medical and to finalise the move.
Arsenal are hopeful all will be sorted in time for Mosquera to be part of the squad that flies out to Asia for the club’s pre-season tour on Saturday.
Mosquera has effectively confirmed his departure from Valencia. “This is my home and it always will be,” he told Spanish radio station Radio Marca Valencia.
“I arrived here at 12 years old and I’m leaving as a man. I’m a bit sad.”
Arsenal’s summer window so far
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Sky Sports’ Dharmesh Sheth and Mark McAdam are joined by Ashley Young as they discuss what is potentially holding up transfer negotiations between Sporting Lisbon and Arsenal for star striker Viktor Gyokeres.
In
Kepa Arrizabalaga – Chelsea, £5m
Martin Zubimendi – Real Sociedad, £51m
Christian Norgaard – Brentford, £15m
Out
Jorginho – Flamengo, free
Kieran Tierney – Celtic, free
Nuno Taveres – Lazio, £4.3m
Marquinhos – Cruzeiro, undisclosed
Takehiro Tomiyasu – released
Thomas Partey – released
Sky Sports to show 215 live Premier League games from next season
Image: Watch more Premier League matches on Sky Sports ever before with 215 games live of the 2025/26 Premier League season.
From next season, Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage will increase from 128 matches to at least 215 games exclusively live.
And 80 per cent of all televised Premier League games next season are on Sky Sports.
Researchers suspect that two meteorites found in the Sahara Desert in 2023 may originally have come from Mercury, which would make them the first identified fragments of the solar system’s innermost planet.
The least studied and most mysterious of the solar system’s rocky planets, Mercury is so close to the sun that exploring it is difficult even for probes. Only two uncrewed spacecraft have visited it to date — Mariner 10, launched in 1973, and MESSENGER, launched in 2004. A third, BepiColombo, is en route and due to enter orbit around the planet in late 2026.
Scientists know little about Mercury’s geology and composition, and they have never been able to study a fragment of the planet that landed on Earth as a meteorite. In contrast, there are more than 1,100 known samples from the moon and Mars in the database of the Meteoritical Society, an organization that catalogs all known meteorites.
These 1,100 meteorites originated as fragments flung from the surfaces of the moon and Mars during asteroid impacts before making their way to Earth after a journey through space.
Not every planet is likely to eject fragments of itself Earth-ward during collisions. Though Venus is closer to us than Mars is, its greater gravitational pull and thick atmosphere may prevent the launch of impact debris. But some astronomers believe that Mercury should be capable of generating meteors.
“Based on the amount of lunar and Martian meteorites, we should have around 10 Mercury meteorites, according to dynamical modeling,” said Ben Rider-Stokes, a postdoctoral researcher in achondrite meteorites at the UK’s Open University and lead author of a study on the Sahara meteorites, published in June in the journal Icarus.
“However, Mercury is a lot closer to the sun, so anything that’s ejected off Mercury also has to escape the sun’s gravity to get to us. It is dynamically possible, just a lot harder. No one has confidently identified a meteorite from Mercury as of yet,” he said, adding that no mission thus far has been capable of bringing back physical samples from the planet either.
If the two meteorites found in 2023 — named Northwest Africa 15915 (NWA 15915) and Ksar Ghilane 022 (KG 022) — were confirmed to be from Mercury, they would greatly advance scientists’ understanding of the planet, according to Rider-Stokes. But he and his coauthors are the first to warn of some inconsistencies in matching those space rocks to what scientists know about Mercury.
A fragment of Northwest Africa 15915, a meteorite found in 2023 that the study authors also believe could have originated from Mercury. – Jared Collins
The biggest is that the fragments appear to have formed about 500 million years earlier than the surface of Mercury itself. However, according to Rider-Stokes, this finding could be based on inaccurate estimates, making a conclusive assessment unlikely. “Until we return material from Mercury or visit the surface,” he said, “it will be very difficult to confidently prove, and disprove, a Mercurian origin for these samples.”
But there are some compositional clues that suggest the meteorites might have a link to the planet closest to the sun.
Hints of Mercurian origins
It’s not the first time that known meteorites have been associated with Mercury. The previous best candidate, based on the level of interest it piqued in astronomers, was a fragment called Northwest Africa (NWA) 7325, which was reportedly found in southern Morocco in early 2012.
Rider-Stokes said that was the first meteorite to be potentially associated with Mercury: “It got a lot of attention. A lot of people got very excited about it.” Further analysis, however, showed a richness in chrome at odds with Mercury’s predicted surface composition.
More recently, astronomers have suggested that a class of meteorites called aubrites — from a small meteorite that landed in 1836 in Aubres, France — might come from Mercury’s mantle, the layer below the surface. However, these meteorites lack a chemical compatibility with what astronomers know about the planet’s surface, Rider-Stokes said. “That’s what’s so exciting about the samples that we studied — they have sort of the perfect chemistry to be representative of Mercury,” he said.
Most of what is known about Mercury’s surface and composition comes from NASA’s MESSENGER probe, which assessed the makeup of the planet’s crust from orbit. Both meteorites from the study, which Rider-Stokes analyzed with several instruments including an electron microscope, contain olivine and pyroxene, two iron-poor minerals confirmed by MESSENGER to be present on Mercury.
The new analysis also revealed a complete lack of iron in the space rock samples, which is consistent with scientists’ assumptions about the planet’s surface. However, the meteorites contained only trace amounts of plagioclase, a mineral believed to dominate Mercury’s surface.
A view of Mercury produced using images from MESSENGER’s primary mission. – NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
The biggest point of uncertainty, though, is still the meteorites’ age. “They are about 4.5 billion years old,” Rider-Stokes said, “and most of Mercury’s surface is only about 4 billion years old, so there’s a 500 million-year difference.”
However, he said he thinks this discrepancy is not sufficient to rule out a Mercurian origin, due to the limited reliability of MESSENGER’s data, which has been also used to estimate the age of Mercury’s surface layer.
“These estimates are based on impact cratering models and not absolute age dating, and therefore may not be entirely accurate,” Rider-Stokes said. “It doesn’t mean that these samples aren’t good analogs for regional areas on the surface of Mercury, or the early Mercurian crust that is not visible on the modern surface of Mercury.”
With more modern instruments now available, BepiColombo, the European Space Agency probe that will start studying Mercury in early 2027, may be able to answer long-standing questions about the planet, such as where it formed and whether it has any water.
Having material confirmed to have come from other planetary bodies helps astronomers understand the nature of early solar system’s building blocks, Rider-Stokes said, and identifying fragments of Mercury would be especially crucial since a mission to gather samples from the planet closest to the sun and bring them back would be extremely challenging and expensive.
Clues to planet formation
Sean Solomon, principal investigator for NASA’s MESSENGER mission to Mercury, said in an email that he believes the two meteorites described in the recent paper likely did not originate from Mercury. Solomon, an adjunct senior research scientist at Columbia University in New York City, was not involved with the study.
The primary reason Solomon cited for his doubts is that the meteorites formed much earlier than the best estimates for the ages of rocks now on Mercury’s surface. But he said he thinks the samples still hold research value.
“Nonetheless, the two meteorites share many geochemical characteristics with Mercury surface materials, including little to no iron … and the presence of sulfur-rich minerals,” he added. “These chemical traits have been interpreted to indicate that Mercury formed from precursor materials much more chemically reduced than those that formed Earth and the other inner planets. It may be that remnants of Mercury precursor materials still remain among meteorite parent bodies somewhere in the inner solar system, so the possibility that these two meteorites sample such materials warrants additional study.”
Solomon also noted that it was difficult to persuade the planetary science community that there were samples from Mars in meteorite collections, and that it took precise matching of their chemistry with data about the surface of Mars taken by the Viking probes to convince researchers to take a closer look. Lunar meteorites were also not broadly acknowledged to be in meteorite collections until after the existence of Martian meteorites had been demonstrated in the 1980s, he added, even though the Apollo and Luna missions had returned abundant samples of lunar materials more than a decade earlier.
Once samples are confirmed to be from a planetary body, Solomon said, they can provide crucial information not available from remote sensing by an orbiting spacecraft on the timing of key geological processes, the history of internal melting of the body, and clues to planet formation and early solar system processes.
Rider-Stokes plans to continue the discussion around these meteorites at the annual meeting of the Meteoritical Society, which takes place in Perth this week. “I’m going to discuss my findings with other academics across the world,” he said. “At the moment, we can’t definitively prove that these aren’t from Mercury, so until that can be done, I think these samples will remain a major topic of debate across the planetary science community.”
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Mitchell Starc became the fourth Australian to take 400 wickets in Test cricket during the Third Test between Australia and West Indies at Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica.
Starc reached the milestone in the fourth innings by trapping West Indian opener Mikyle Louis leg before wicket for 4 in the fifth over of the innings. The wicket came as part of a remarkable spell in which Starc reduced the West Indies to 7-5 in the first five overs of the innings.
West Indies would be shot out for just 27, the second lowest total in Test history. Starc himself ended with figures of 6-9 from 7.3 overs, which included a remarkable triple wicket maiden in the first over.
Starc becomes the fourth Australian to reach 400 Test wickets after Shane Warne, Nathan Lyon, and Glenn McGrath. He currently has the eighteenth most wickets in Test cricket, and is three behind Curtley Ambrose in seventeenth place.
EXCLUSIVE: Indian action star Vidyut Jammwal (Commando) has landed the role of Dhalsim in Legendary‘s live-action Street Fighter movie, based on the video games from Capcom, sources tell Deadline.
Reps for Legendary declined to comment. The project marks the Hollywood debut of an actor who we’re told has been deliberate about the project with which he wants to introduce himself in the U.S. market. First introduced in Street Fighter II in 1991, the character of Dalsim is a yogi with fire-spitting abilities — a fundamentally peaceful man who fights to support his family.
As previously announced, the Street Fighter cast will also include Andrew Koji as Ryu, Noah Centineo as Ken, Callina Liang as Chun-Li, David Dastmalchian as M. Bison, Cody Rhodes as Guile, Jason Momoa as Blanka, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as Balrog, Orville Peck as Vega, Andrew Schulz as Dan Hibiki, Roman Reigns as Akuma, and Hirooki Goto as E. Honda.
Plot details for the film, from Bad Trip helmer Kitao Sakurai, remain under wraps.
Launched in 1987, Street Fighter is a series of fighting games revolving around intense one-on-one battles between a diverse cast of martial artists, organized by the villainous M. Bison as a global fighting tournament. The games have sold over 55 million units worldwide since launch, making the franchise one of the most well-known and highest-grossing of all time.
Known for roles in a dozen blockbusters in India, including the Commando and Khuda Haafiz franchises, Jammwal boasts 22M followers across social media and is well known in India, even as he’s still looking to build his profile in the States. The international talent is repped by Wonder Street and Felker Levine.
John Wick Hex is being removed from Steam (and all other platforms) this week, according to a statement released by the game’s publisher, Big Fan Games.
“John Wick Hex will be removed from sale on all platforms beginning July 17th, 2025,” the statement shared on the game’s Steam page reads. “After July 17th, 2025, existing owners of John Wick Hex will still be able to access the game via their digital libraries (PC/Console) and/or physical copies (Console), however new purchases of John Wick Hex will not be possible, regardless of platform or storefront.”
Developed by Bithell Games and released in 2020, John Wick Hex is a cel-shaded tactical strategy game in which players take on the role of the king of revenge himself. The game plays a bit like a board game, and its combat is time-based, not turn-based, so in addition to managing health and ammo, players must also manage the most valuable resource of all: time. Each action eats up some of that time, from a fraction of a second to reload, to multiple seconds to bandage up wounds. Run out of time, and you fail the mission.
Big Fan Games’ statement didn’t detail the reason for the game’s impending removal, but given the fact that the publisher is mainly known for publishing licensed games, it’s possible the publisher’s license to use the John Wick IP has expired and not been renewed. John Wick Hex is currently the only official John Wick game on the market.
Polygon has reached out to Bithell Games for comment and will update when the company responds.
Nearly 150 artists, curators, and other cultural figures signed an open letter denouncing the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s decision to abruptly call off an exhibition centering on contemporary Franco-Creole, Caribbean French, and Guyanese art. The cancellation, which was formalized in a June 10 notice, followed months of planning and a series of tense text message exchanges between the museum’s director Chiara Parisi and guest curator Claire Tancons, Le Monde reported.
Slated to run from the end of October 2026 through the beginning of April 2027, the survey Van Lévé: Sovereign Visions from the Maroon and Creole Americas and Amazonia would have gathered the works of dozens of artists from across the French Caribbean region, including Julien Creuzet, who represented France at last year’s Venice Biennale; Gaëlle Choisne, who won last year’s Prix Marcel Duchamp; and the late Haitian-born painter Hervé Télémaque, Libération reported.
In late May, Tancons raised concerns to Parisi about an overlap between the runtime of Van Lévé and Maurizio Cattelan’s ongoing Endless Sunday exhibition, which is scheduled to run through February 2, 2027. The latter displays the artist’s 36-foot marble middle-finger sculpture “L.O.V.E.” (2010) in one of the same galleries where the group survey of Caribbean art would be partially held. Parisi told Tancons that the two shows would have to coexist in the same space.
“You have a large gallery. If you feel that your project can only exist on the condition of the Forum, then perhaps we should rediscuss the dates. And if you think that what we are proposing does not respect your vision, we would be very sad if you decided not to continue this wonderful adventure,” Parisi wrote to Tancons, who replied: “I don’t know how to work without respect for keeping one’s word, without respect for contractual terms.”
Centre Pompidou-Metz (photo via Getty Images)
The next morning, Tancons received an email from the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s general secretariat, which was followed less than two weeks later by the formal letter cancelling the exhibition due to a “particularly difficult budgetary context.”
In the wake of the exhibition’s termination, Tancons sent a letter to the French Ministry of Culture sharply rebuking the seeming hypocrisy of the museum’s decision.
“This brutal and shocking cancellation, which comes at a time when Paris Noir is triumphing in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, calls into question the double discourse regarding the artistic productions of Afro-descendant and Caribbean artists and the difficulty curators from their territories have in promoting their stories,” the curator wrote in a June 10 letter to the agency, according to Le Monde. The letter referenced the recently concluded survey Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou, which revisited the works of 150 African diasporic artists working across the Modern and Post-Modern cultural landscape.
“The cancellation announced by the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and presented as being for budgetary reasons, is a tell-tale sign,” reads the open letter decrying the rescission. Its signatories include artists who were slated to participate in the survey, like Tabita Rézaire, Jimmy Robert, Minia Biabiany and Raphaël Barontini.
“A female Guadeloupean exhibition curator will always be overly ambitious, even if her international reputation is well established and she fundraised to cover nearly half of the budget for her exhibition,” the letter continued, alluding to a $500,000 (€430,000) grant from the Ford Foundation for the show.
Hyperallergic has contacted Tancons, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and the Ford Foundation for comment.
The letter asserts that in spite of the cancellation, Van Lévé will move forward at a different venue. Echoing this sentiment, Biabiany, one of the signatories, told Hyperallergic in an email she is “convinced that another institution abroad is ready to welcome Van Lévé.” She had planned to exhibit the bamboo video work “Toli Toli” (2018) and an installation consisting of ceramic, sugarcane leaves and sound that will be shown at the São Paulo Biennale later this year.
Still from Minia Biabiany’s “toli toli” (2018), 10 min, video (courtesy the artist)
The Centre Pompidou-Metz did not directly contact any of the artists about the exhibition’s cancellation, Bianiany said.
She thinks an alternative venue in France would be “ideal” in terms of decolonizing present French history.
“It can mark a turn,” Biabiany said. “This being said, our voices exist with and without the French cultural world for sure.”
As the AI talent wars escalate, Google’s new arrangement with startup Windsurf shows tech companies see a lot of value in coding assistants
Alphabet Inc.’s Google closed out last week with a deal signaling to some analysts that the already heated war for artificial-intelligence talent is only getting hotter. It also underscored that there’s big money in offering tools for AI-based coding assistance.
The tech giant is hiring AI-coding startup Windsurf’s Chief Executive Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen, as well as some of its research and development team, the startup said in a statement on Friday. The agreement comes after the two companies made a deal for Google (GOOGL) (GOOG) to pay $2.4 billion for the AI talent and nonexclusive licensing rights to some of the startup’s technology, CNBC reported, citing an unnamed person familiar with the matter.
See more: Is Meta’s pricey AI hiring spree worth it? This analyst has doubts.
A spokesperson from Google DeepMind, which focuses on AI research and development, told CNBC that it’s “excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” and that the company is “excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”
Google did not immediately respond to a MarketWatch request for comment on the deal.
The $2.4 billion deal shows the “intensely costly war for talent in this sector,” Rosenblatt Securities analyst Barton Crockett said in a note to clients on Monday, as well as surging demand for AI coding assistants.
In June, Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced that the tech giant had hired several AI researchers from other companies, including from OpenAI, following its $14 billion investment in AI startup Scale AI earlier in the month. Zuckerberg reportedly offered some talent $100 million pay packages to join Meta’s superintelligence team.
In a previous note about Zuckerberg’s hiring spree, Crockett said: “It seems probably not great for the giants of [large language models] to bleed off their capital into the mutual-assured carnage of endless battles for talent.” However, it is possible, he said, that Meta “sees its efforts here as more one and done than ongoing.”
After the latest Google deal, Crockett said that “AI coding agents are emerging [as] the most sought after feature in GenAI at the moment.”
Meanwhile, the deal should benefit Alphabet’s cloud unit, according to analysts at Baird. The new Windsurf talent should help Google’s cloud business “compete more effectively with” Microsoft Corp.’s Azure platform and Amazon.com Inc.’s (AMZN) Amazon Web Services, the analysts said in a Sunday note to clients.
“By licensing one of the most enterprise-focused and secure agentic coding tools, Google should be able to enhance Gemini-powered tools and coding assistants with Windsurf capabilities,” the analysts said, which should help it take on Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer.
The Baird team said the deal shows “the importance of speed-to-market for enterprise GenAI tools,” while keeping Windsurf out of reach of competitors. Apart from boosting Google’s cloud business, Windsurf offers technology that Google engineers can use for their own projects, the analysts noted.
According to data from Sensor Tower cited by Visual Capitalist, 29% of ChatGPT queries in March and April were related to software development.
“We believe the deal also highlights the strategic importance of AI agents/agentic tools for productivity enhancements, not just in coding and software development workflows, but over time, across many corporate functions,” the analysts said, including sales, legal, and finance. “For its part, Windsurf also appears to be casting a wider net to bring agentic AI tools across more verticals to help enterprises.”
Overall, Google’s agreement with Windsurf “mirrors the [increasingly] popular partnership structure between large technology companies and some fast-rising GenAI start-ups that upgrades talent and provides access to key new GenAI products, without facing the scrutiny of equity ownership or acquisition,” the Baird team said.
See more: Meta’s stock hits a record high as Mark Zuckerberg goes on an AI hiring spree
Windsurf had previously discussed being acquired by OpenAI for $3 billion, but the deal fell apart after the ChatGPT maker’s largest investor, Microsoft (MSFT), did not agree to terms limiting it from accessing Windsurf’s intellectual property, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The deal between Google and Windsurf points to some problems for OpenAI, Rosenblatt’s Crockett wrote. For one, although OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft gives it the advantage of access to large amounts of compute, Crockett noted that the recent disagreement ended up helping OpenAI’s rival Google.
-Britney Nguyen
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