Former world No. 1 Kidambi Srikanth bowed out in the semi-finals of the men’s singles event at the Canada Open 2025 badminton tournament in Ontario on Saturday as India’s campaign at the BWF Super 300 tournament concluded.
Kidambi Srikanth, 49th in the men’s singles badminton rankings, won the first game but squandered the lead to lose 19-21, 21-14, 21-18 to Japan’s Kenta Nishimoto, the world No. 12 and third seed, in an hour and 18 minutes.
The Indian badminton player, who upset top seed Chou Tien-chen of Chinese Taipei in the quarter-finals, made a bright start against Kenta Nishimoto too. Despite trailing 18-16 at one stage, Kidambi Srikanth fought back to take the opening game.
Srikanth took the momentum into the second game and raced to a 9-4 lead before Kenta Nishimoto drew level at 14-all. From that point, the Japanese shifted up a gear and took the next seven points in succession to draw level in the match.
The decider, a tense one, swayed like a pendulum. Once 6-1 behind, a fruitful phase in the middle saw Srikanth lead 12-8. Kenta Nishimoto also responded to draw level at 18-18 before wrapping up the game and match.
This was Kidambi Srikanth’s fifth loss to Kenta Nishimoto in 11 meetings. The head-to-head was tied at five-all heading into Saturday’s fixture.
Kidambi Srikanth was the only Indian challenge left at the Canada Open.
Shriyanshi Valishetty was ousted in the quarter-finals of the women’s singles event on Friday, while mixed doubles top seeds Dhruv Kapila and Tanisha Crasto, the only Indian team in action, were knocked out in the first round.
Indian badminton players will be in action next on the BWF World Tour at the Super 750 Japan Open, which begins on July 15.
TV chef, artist and “talented rogue”, Peter Russell-Clarke, has died at the age of 89.
The host of the 1980s cooking show, Come and Get It, died peacefully on Friday with his wife of 65 years, Jan, and his two children, Peter and Wendy and their families, by his side.
His close friend Beverley Pinder said Russell-Clarke died from complications after a stroke.
“Adieu, Peter Russell-Clarke – the lovable larrikin artist and gentleman,” the PR executive and former Miss Universe Australia said in a statement. “We know him best as one of Australia’s first TV cooks. But Peter Russell-Clarke was a phenomenon – years ahead of his time.”
Born in the Great Depression, Russell-Clarke became a political cartoonist, creative director, actor, restaurateur, food ambassador for the UN and author of almost 40 recipe books, she said – in addition to his TV presenting.
“The mischievous Aussie larrikin with a full beard and eyes that twinkled found his happy place in television in the 70s and 80s,” she said.
“His lexicon, while teaching generations of Aussies how to cook, was peppered with ‘g’days’, ‘rippers’ and ‘you beauts’”, she said, adding that he often told viewers: “Whether you are cooking or painting, follow your imagination.”
According to the statement, Russell-Clarke once lived on the streets of Melbourne, foraging for discarded food behind Florentino restaurant on Bourke Street.
Pinder told Guardian Australia she had known Russell-Clarke since she was 22.
“The magic of Peter was legendary – it was magnetic,” she said. “He fascinated me. The way he engaged with people and kids, that easygoing, laconic style, making everyone feel so at ease, just won the hearts of generations of Australians.”
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“That Bohemian style made people feel so easy and connected all around him. I have two paintings of his and I’ll cherish those until the day I die.”
His collaborator, the former senator, Derryn Hinch, posted on social media platform X:
“G’Day. Me ol’ mate, Peter Russell-Clarke, the Egg Man, has died. He really was a talented likable rogue.”
Top 5 picks VJ Edgecombe (No. 3, 76ers) and Ace Bailey (No. 5, Jazz) hit the floor for summer action.
• Download the NBA App • Summer League: Complete Coverage
Saturday tipped off NBA summer action as the California Classic and Salt Lake City Summer League both delivered doubleheaders. With a 20-point pairing from the Grizzlies and VJ Edgecombe (No. 3 overall) going head-to-head with Ace Bailey (No. 5), here’s a sampling of the top individual performers:
Salt Lake City Summer League
Jaylen Wells & GG Jackson, Memphis Grizzlies
With the Grizzlies often sending seasoned rosters into summer action as their developmental conveyor continues to churn, Wells – a Kia Rookie of the Year finalist out of the second round – and Jackson – who has shown scoring promise throughout his two-season run – are the latest to pop off the page.
In a 92-80 victory over the Thunder, Wells continued building on his First Team All-Rookie campaign, putting up 20 points, four rebounds, three assists and two steals, offsetting inefficient shooting from the floor (5-for-14 FGs) with determined driving and a perfect (7-for-7) showing at the line. Jackson matched the 20 points, connecting on eight of his 15 attempts, including a solid 3-for-8 from 3-point range. He added three rebounds, limiting the turnovers to a pair in 28 minutes.
VJ Edgecombe, Philadelphia 76ers | Ace Bailey, Utah Jazz
Philadlephia’s VJ Edgecombe scores 28 points on 13-for-26 shooting with 10 rebounds and four assists in his NBA Summer League debut.
The No. 3 overall pick, Edgecombe landed with the 76ers and joins a roster looking to turn the page toward contention after a disastrous 2024-25 campaign. Bailey, a mystery man heading into Draft night after skipping all individual workouts, was plucked by new GM Austin Ainge for the developing core in Utah.
The Jazz stayed in front on the team side, winning 93-89, but Edgecombe unquestionably landed the strongest impression. The Baylor product delivered the day’s most prolific performance, pouring in 28 points on 13-for-27 shooting (48.1%), despite a 1-for-7 mark from range. And he added 10 rebounds, four assists, two blocks and a steal to boot.
Bailey’s overall line was more muted – eight points and seven rebounds while shooting 3-for-13 (1-5 3PM) – but the Rutgers forward delivered a huge on-ball block in the third quarter, sticking with the driver and forcing a floater up, up and onto the fingertips. The potential, as always, remains evident.
Nikola Topić, Oklahoma City Thunder
On the other side of the Grizzlies’ resounding victory, Topić made his stateside debut after the Thunder drafted him a year ago in the wake of an ACL tear overseas. The tall (6-foot-6) guard showed why he earned the commitment, racking up 14 points on 6-for-11 shooting (2-4 3PM) along with four assists and two steals, though the seven turnovers will need to come down.
California Classic
Kel’el Ware, Miami Heat
Kel’el Ware alley-oops home two of his 14 points on Saturday.
A standout early and often throughout last year’s run, Ware was right back at it in the Heat’s 82-69 rout of the Spurs, turning in the kind of robust line one wants to see from second-year talent: 14 points, seven rebounds, two steals and three blocks. Several of the plays earned a spot in the highlight reel, though the 5-for-14 shooting could stand to come up.
Cole Swider, L.A. Lakers
The Lakers couldn’t quite overtake a balanced Warriors effort on Saturday, ultimately falling 89-84 to a team whose high scorers topped out at 13 points. But Swider turned in an impressive individual outing on offense, dropping 24 points on 6-for-8 shooting from 3-point range (7-for-10 overall). Also racking up eight rebounds, Swider delivered a two-pronged performance that could slot in nicely alongside high-usage orchestrators LeBron James, Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves.
Among the more than 1,500 publications in the CNOM collection, around 650 are exclusive documents that highlight the CNOM’s activities and Morocco’s participation in the Olympic Games. The portal also provides access to the CNOM’s Studies and Documentation Centre and its Digital Olympic Academy.
“After several months of work on data migration, the CNOM is proud to be among the pioneering NOCs to join the OWL, contributing to the promotion of the Olympic values, providing access to its documentation related to sport and Olympism, and preserving its history and Olympic heritage for the widest possible audience,” Chekroun added.
“As the global centre of reference for Olympic knowledge, the development of the Olympic World Library Partner network represents an important strategic pillar for the Olympic Studies Centre moving forward,” said Bogner. “We know that many institutions in the Olympic Movement have important reference libraries, but struggle to make these visible and accessible. By joining the OWL network, not only do they benefit from a low-cost turn-key solution to professionalise the management of their library, they also maximise the visibility of their collection to a worldwide audience.”
About the Olympic World Library (OWL)
With more than 42,000 titles, over 15,000 digital documents and over 400,000 pages viewed per year, the OWL is the number-one resource for Olympic knowledge and literature. Its unique collection includes all publications by the IOC, the Organising Committees for the Olympic Games (OCOGs) and a large collection of academic books and articles covering all historical, cultural, social and economic dimensions of the Olympic Movement.
In 1854, the Republican Party was formally established at a meeting in New York City.
In 1885, French bacteriologist Louis Pasteur inoculated a human being for rabies for the first time — a boy, who had been bitten by a dog. The youngster didn’t develop rabies.
In 1919, a British dirigible landed at New York’s Roosevelt Field to complete the first airship crossing of the Atlantic. Six hours into the flight, the R-34’s commander discovered a stowaway.
In 1923, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was formed.
In 1942, diarist Anne Frank and her family took refuge in a secret section of an Amsterdam warehouse where they hid from the Nazis for two years. Finally discovered, they were sent to concentration camps. Anne died in a camp.
In 1944, a fire in the big top of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus in Hartford, Conn., killed 167 people, two-thirds of them children, and injured 682 others.
In 1957, Althea Gibson became the first African-American competitor to win a Wimbledon championship.
In 1971, Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong, one of the 20th century’s most influential American musicians, died at age 69.
Music legend Louis Armstrong entertains his wife, Lillian, in front of the Sphinx during a trip to Egypt in 1961. Photo by UPI
In 1976, women were first admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy. The other military academies soon followed suit.
In 1984, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in a TV interview, said it was a “probability” that many young people now paying into Social Security “will never be able to receive as much as they’re paying.”
In 1994, Forrest Gump opened in U.S. theaters, earning actor Tom Hanks his second Oscar for Best Actor.
In 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama met in Moscow with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, and announced an agreement to reduce nuclear arsenals.
In 2013, an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777 carrying more than 300 people hit a sea wall in front of a runway on approach at San Francisco International Airport — a crash that resulted in three fatalities and scores of injuries.
In 2021, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Mary Simon would be the country’s first Indigenous governor general.
Earth is a special planet. Day and darkness are created by the rotation of the Earth. Scientists have discovered something unexpected, though! Scientists say that because the Earth is currently turning more quickly than usual, days are getting shorter by a few milliseconds. These losses might not seem like much, but they have a big impact on the world’s timekeeping systems.
Why are earth days getting shorter? Atomic clocks typically incorporate leap seconds to adjust for the Earth’s decreasing rotation. But as the Earth’s rotational cycle continues to accelerate, researchers predict that we might have to eliminate a leap second for the first time by 2029. This knowledge could play a significant role in bringing man-made timekeeping systems into line with the planet’s functions. This demonstrates how the Earth’s subtle dynamism can affect time.
To create what we refer to as a day, the Earth rotates on its axis roughly every 86,400 seconds. That duration is by no means entirely consistent. Numerous natural phenomena, like as changes in the Earth’s geophysics or the gravitational pull of the moon and Sun, influence the Earth’s spin and cause minute fluctuations in time.
Both historically and currently, the Earth’s rotation is progressively slowing down. The Times of india story claims that the Earth rotated so quickly during the dinosaur era that a day only lasted roughly twenty-three hours. A day was still roughly half a second shorter than it is now, although it had grown slightly longer by the Bronze Age! Theoretically, it will take another 200 million years for the Earth to attain 25-hour days, according to scientists.
What change is happening to Earth’s rotation speed? Scientists have been astounded by the phenomena of Earth rotating faster since 2020. According to the international Earth Rotation and Reference Systems service (IERS) in Washington, D.C., this acceleration has been consistent, making days only a few milliseconds shorter. In the event that this happens, experts have predicted that, for the first time in history, we may need to eliminate a leap second from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) by 2029.
What’s a leap second? When the Earth’s erratic rotation changes, atomic clocks occasionally employ a leap second, which is a one-second alteration. Leap seconds are used to compensate for the discrepancy between atomic time and Earth’s spin. Leap seconds have only ever been introduced to account for the Earth’s rotation slowing down. We could be able to eliminate a leap second from atomic time for the first time in history if we keep spinning faster and faster. At that point, our clocks would also be able to keep up with the actual rotation of the Earth.
Which specific dates in July and august will be most affected? This trend of shorter days is expected to last until at least 2025, according to timeanddate.com. Additionally, scientists have determined three dates on which the Earth will rotate rapidly: 22 July 2025; 5 august 2025; 9 July 2025. Additionally, according to USA Today, on august 5th, a day might be up to 1.51 milliseconds shorter than a 24-hour period. Although this change may not be noticeable to humans, it is very important from a scientific standpoint, and reliable timekeeping methods are required.
Natural crystals fascinate with their vibrant colors, their nearly flawless appearance and their manifold symmetrical forms. But researchers are interested in them for quite different reasons: among the countless minerals already known, they always discover some materials with unusual magnetic properties. One of these is atacamite, which exhibits magnetocaloric behavior at low temperatures – that is, the material’s temperature changes significantly when it is subjected to a magnetic field. A team headed by TU Braunschweig and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now investigated this rare property (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.216701). In the long term, the results could help to develop new materials for energy-efficient magnetic cooling.
The emerald-green mineral atacamite, named for the place it was first found, the Atacama Desert in Chile, gets its characteristic coloring from the copper ions it contains. These ions also determine the material’s magnetic properties: they each have an unpaired electron whose spin gives the ion a magnetic moment – comparable to a tiny needle on a compass. “The distinct feature of atacamite is the arrangement of the copper ions,” explains Dr. Leonie Heinze of Jülich Centre for Neutron Science (JCNS). “They form long chains of small, linked triangles known as sawtooth chains.” This geometric structure has consequences: although the copper ions’ spins always want to align themselves antiparallel to one another, the triangular arrangement makes this geometrically impossible to achieve completely. “We refer to this as magnetic frustration,” continues Heinze. As result of this frustration, the spins in atacamite only arrange themselves at very low temperatures – under 9 Kelvin (−264°C) – in a static alternating structure.
When the researchers examined atacamite under the extremely high magnetic fields at HZDR’s High Magnetic Field Laboratory (HLD), something surprising emerged: the material exhibited a noticeable cooling in the pulsed magnetic fields – and not just a slight one, but a drop to almost half of the original temperature. This unusually strong cooling effect particularly fascinated the researchers, as the behavior of magnetically frustrated materials in this context has scarcely been studied. However, magnetocaloric materials are considered a promising alternative to conventional cooling technologies, for example for energy-efficient cooling or the liquefaction of gases. This is because, instead of compressing and expanding a coolant – a process that takes place in every refrigerator – they can be used to change the temperature by applying a magnetic field in an environmentally friendly and potentially low-loss approach.
What is the origin of this strong magnetocaloric effect?
Additional studies at various labs of the European Magnetic Field Laboratory (EMFL) provided more in-depth insights. “By using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, we were clearly able to demonstrate that the magnetic order of atacamite is destroyed when a magnetic field is applied,” explains Dr. Tommy Kotte, a scientist at HLD. “This is unusual as the magnetic fields in many magnetically frustrated materials usually counteract the frustration and even encourage ordered magnetic states.”
The team found the explanation for the mineral’s unexpected behavior in complex numerical simulations of its magnetic structure: while the magnetic field aligns the copper ions’ magnetic moments on the tips of the sawtooth chains along the field and thus reduces the frustration as expected, it is precisely these magnetic moments that mediate a weak coupling to neighboring chains. When this is removed, a long-range magnetic order can no longer exist. This also provided the team with an explanation for the particularly strong magnetocaloric effect: it always occurs when a magnetic field influences the disorder – or more precisely, the magnetic entropy – of a system. In order to compensate for this rapid change in entropy, the material has to adjust its temperature accordingly. This is the very mechanism the researchers have now managed to demonstrate in atacamite.
“Of course, we do not expect atacamite to be extensively mined in the future for use in new cooling systems,” says Dr. Tommy Kotte, “but the physical mechanism we have investigated is fundamentally new and the magnetocaloric effect we observed is surprisingly strong.” The team hopes their work will inspire further research, especially a targeted search for innovative magnetocaloric materials within the extensive class of magnetically frustrated systems.
Brescia were founded in 1911, when professional football in Italy was in its early stages, and earned promotion to the top flight two years later.
When Serie A was formed in 1929 to implement a stronger two-tier structure throughout the country, they were among the 18 clubs included.
A solid 10th-placed finish in that debut campaign was an early sign of the relative anonymity to follow. The industrial town of Brescia, population 200,000, has always been in the shadows of regional powerhouse Milan, 50 miles to the west, and the same was true on the football field.
So, for the next nine decades Brescia were remarkably unremarkable: a mid-size provincial club plodding along between relegations and promotions, never winning anything but always on the scene, with no major trophies and their sole ‘achievement’ was holding Italian football’s longest unbroken spell in Serie B (1947 to 1965).
An exceptional burst into the spotlight came at the turn of the century, when divinely pony-tailed genius Roberto Baggio – one of Italy’s greatest players – ended his injury-hit career with a successful four-season spell at Brescia.
The flamboyant forward was briefly joined by another iconic veteran, Spain’s Pep Guardiola, along with rising midfield star Andrea Pirlo, who was born locally and came through the club’s youth system to launch his legendary career.
Inspired by Baggio, Brescia flourished. Finishing eighth in 2001 was the club’s best season and led to a spot in that summer’s Uefa Intertoto Cup, a now-defunct tournament for Europe’s mid-ranking teams.
Stepping onto the continental stage for the first time, Baggio’s penalty was not enough to avoid defeat by Paris St-Germain on away goals in one of three finals – the other two ‘champions’ were Aston Villa and Troyes…yes, three champions…it was a strange tournament.
Baggio retired in 2004, Brescia were relegated a year later, and that was that: the club’s brief flirtation with the elite was finished and the previous routine of relegation-promotion-relegation was resumed.
MOSCOW, July 6 (Xinhua) — Russia’s cargo spacecraft Progress MS-31 successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS), Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos said Sunday on its website.
The automated docking took place at 00:25 Moscow time on Sunday (2125 GMT Saturday) at the Poisk mini-research module on the Russian segment of the ISS. The spacecraft is scheduled to remain in orbit for 167 days.
Launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on Thursday aboard a Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket, the Progress MS-31 delivered a total of 2,625 kilograms of cargo to the ISS.
The shipment includes 1,205 kilograms of dry goods for the crew, 950 kilograms of propellant for station refueling, 420 kilograms of drinking water, and 50 kilograms of nitrogen to replenish the station’s atmosphere.
In addition, the spacecraft delivered scientific equipment which will be used for research in various fields of space science. ■
