In the US, there’s only one sport where large men run at each other catching oddly-shaped balls: it’s what the Americans call “football,” as exemplified by Friday Night Lights and the NFL. For the rest of the world, that sport is rugby, and over the weekend, the US national rugby team faced New Zealand in the biggest rugby match to ever be held in the US.
In a deal described as “a massive moment for the north of England,” UK chancellor George Osborne announced that Manchester will get a directly-elected mayor in 2017. It will be the first mayor for a metropolitan area outside of London. “Giving cities power is part of our long-term economic plan to reduce the decades-old gap between north and south; London and the rest,” Osborne said.
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Your phone may soon be able to tell if you’re depressed—and maybe even help you feel better.
In its latest desperate attempt to convince the world to do something about climate change, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said to avoid “severe, pervasive and irreversible” consequences, the majority of the world’s electricity should produced by renewable energy by 2050, and the use of fossil fuels must be eliminated by 2100.
The Spice Girls released their first single, Wannabe, in 1996 but its legacy clearly lives on. Researchers at Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, and the University of Amsterdam named it the catchiest song of all time in a test of how quickly people can name a tune.
It has been 100 years since the start of the First World War, which was fought for four years and claimed the lives of more than 6000 soldiers a day. Countries in Europe began marking the centenary earlier this year and the Tower of London, pictured above, is awash in poppies in beautiful tribute to the men who died.
Chivas USA beat the San Jose Earthquakes 1-0 in not only the last game of the season, but its last game ever. The US Major League Soccer club, which only ever managed to attract about 7,000 fans per game, ceased to exist earlier this week. A replacement club will launch in 2017 with a new team, a new soccer stadium in California, and new ownership that reportedly includes Batman and Rain Man producer Peter Guber, venture capitalist Henry Nguyen—and Malaysian businessman Vincent Tan.
London is already the biggest city in the world to have any form of tax that restricts driving in the center—the congestion charge is currently £11.50 ($18.60) per day to travel into central London during the working week. Exemptions from the scheme include lower-emitting vehicles, motor bikes, and electric cars. The city also has a Low Emission Zone, which applies to the whole of Greater London throughout the year, and charges up to £200 a day for heavy-polluting trucks and buses that come into the capital.
Germany’s men’s soccer team won the World Cup in Brazil in the summer, becoming the first European team to do it on South American soil. The players’ reward was prize money of around $35 million. In 2011, Japan’s women’s national team won the World Cup in Germany, becoming the first Asian team to do so ever. Their reward? About $1 million.
Beyonce is teaming up with Britain’s Topshop—beloved on both sides of the pond for its incredibly fast copies of catwalk fashions—to produce a line of athletic streetwear. ”I have always loved Topshop for its fashion credentials and forward thinking,” the singer and fashion icon said. “Working with its development team to create and produce a technical and fashion-led collection is exciting and I’m looking forward to participating in all aspects of this partnership.”
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Global wine production this year is expected to be 271 million hectoliters, a decline of 6% from last year, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV), a trade group for the industry. In fact, wine production in 2014 is down in most places—except France.
For phonophiles out there, NASA recently launched its own SoundCloud page, filled with fantastic sounds and historic snippets from the US space agency’s 56-year history. The page includes conversations between Earth and the various space shuttles, sounds sent back from distant satellites, and some of the most famous words ever uttered. All the clips are downloadable. NASA even suggests making one your ringtone.
When Barcelona faces Real Madrid later on Saturday, it will not only be the biggest soccer match happening anywhere in the world (sorry, Seattle Sounders vs. LA Galaxy), but also the most expensive soccer game in history.
The numbers: British American Tobacco (BAT) reported that its revenues fell almost 10% in the first nine months of the year, compared to the same period last year. “The trading environment remains challenging due to continuing pressure on consumer disposable income worldwide and the slow economic recovery in Western Europe,” the company says. The Lucky Strike producer still makes around 17% of its total cigarette sales in Western Europe, and the swings in currencies affected the company significantly; at constant currencies, BAT’s revenues actually increased. The company also doesn’t seem to have had much traction with its e-cigarette brand, Vype, which launched last year in the UK.
Ever since Qatar was awarded the World Cup back in 2010, there’s been nothing but controversy. Most recently, there have involved allegations of corruption over the how soccer’s greatest tournament was awarded to Russia in 2018 and Qatar in 2022—Fifa’s ethics committee looked into the decisions but the federation’s president, Sepp Blatter, has suppressed the report. He’s lucky Fifa is based in Switzerland, which has an interesting definition of private corruption.
In January 2013, British prime minister David Cameron announced that, should his Conservative Party win the next election, he would renegotiate the terms of the UK’s four-decade-long membership in the European Union and hold a simple in-or-out referendum on whether it should remain part of the EU. With the next election now approaching in May 2015, Cameron promised he would have “one last go” at getting a better deal for the UK in Europe. He sounded weary, considering he hasn’t actually started trying yet.
More than a billion people around the world suffer from age-related long-sightedness, otherwise known as presbyopia—a blurriness in near vision experienced after the age of 40. But a solution may be imminent—for people who don’t mind having their eyes cut open.
We often shift between a phone signal, private internet connections, and public Wi-Fi networks. You pass by your local Starbucks, for example, and the phone remembers you’ve been there in the past and latches on to its signal—without you thinking too much about it. In June, the European law enforcement agency, Europol, backed an experiment in which a mobile hotspot was created in central London and people who logged on to it, thinking it a legit free Wi-Fi network, were asked to agree to terms and conditions, including a Herod clause that “the recipient agreed to assign their first-born child to us for the duration of eternity.” Six people signed up.
Barcelona’s soccer team today hosted a match in its legendary stadium, Camp Nou, where the club regularly plays in front of 98,000. Barcelona has won La Liga 22 times and the European Cup four times. Its opponents were much less renowned, though, in their own way, no less remarkable.
CDP, a British environmental nonprofit, receives data from almost 2,000 companies around the world showing what they do to fight climate change. From that, the group has compiled a list of the 187 best companies—firms such as Apple, Samsung, and BMW—into a kind of elite (and much smaller) Fortune 500 for environmentally-conscious companies, dubbed the Climate Performance Leadership Index (CPLI), and it says those companies are outperforming the rest of the market. The CPLI returned 37.5% from 2010-2014 (pdf) to investors, compared with 34.2% for the Bloomberg World Index.
English fans love their soccer. But with prices to watch the beautiful game so high in the country that invented it, the BBC reports more than 1,000 fans from England are traveling all the way to Dortmund—in Germany—to watch matches. One Chelsea fan, Jack, travels all the way from London, a car journey of around 7 hours. What gives?
French wine is having another bad year. Sales of Bordeaux abroad have fallen 18% to €1.8 billion ($2.3 billion) in the year to July, according to the comité interprofessionnel des vins de Bordeaux. Wine from Bordeaux, in the west of France, accounts for half the value of exports, so it’s both a huge part and an indicator for the rest of the country’s storied wine regions. Sales also fell in 2013, a long way off the heights of 2012—when revenues from Bordeaux totalled €4.3 billion.
