Spotlight

Pupils say LPS Hybrid’s combination of remote and in-person classes has transformed their school experienceTwo years ago, Ellie Ball could barely bring herself to attend school. Today, the 16-year-old is planning to take four A-levels and hopes to study astrolaw – “It’s basically space law,” she explains – at university.The transformation happened largely through a screen. Continue reading...

Autobiographical work Free Me aims to encourage victims to speak out in country where violence against women is risingThere are audible gasps in the auditorium in Nairobi as a husband launches a volley of blows and slaps on his wife and pushes her to the floor. “I wish I could spare you this,” the wife tells the audience. “My husband beat me up as if we were in a bar fight. Except, in a bar someone fights back.”The scene comes from Free Me, an autobiographical play by Gathoni Kimuyu, a Kenyan theatre and TV producer who lived through an abusive marriage. Continue reading...

Other western acts have attempted to crack country’s music scene since singer’s breakout success in 2018One week after announcing she was “cancer free”, the British pop star Jessie J did what any recovering patient would do and travelled thousands of miles around the world to perform for an audience of more than a billion people.On 29 May, the singer-songwriter, whose real name is Jessica Cornish, belted out a stage-rattling rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way on the stage of Singer, a hugely popular Chinese singing competition similar to The Voice. She also performed her new song, California, briefly adapting the lyrics to change California to Changsha, the Chinese city where Singer is hosted. Continue reading...

• TechCrunch has announced a strategic partnership with VivaTech 2026 to identify and spotlight promising European enterprise AI startups. • The collaboration aims to bridge the gap between Paris and San Francisco by providing selected founders with a platform to showcase their innovations. • This initiative matters as it creates a direct pipeline for European AI entrepreneurs to gain visibility and access to the U.S. market.

New film revives story of Taylor Parker, convicted in 2022 of cutting unborn daughter from womb of friend she killedIn an America so often saturated with brutal crime stories, it takes special circumstances to truly register shock.But the story of Taylor Parker, now sitting on a Texas death row after being convicted of murdering her pregnant friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock in 2020 and cutting her unborn daughter Braxlynn from her womb, is horrific in part because it appears almost against nature itself. Continue reading...

Four-part TV documentary examines the aftermath of Operation Peyzac, where officers posed as music industry figures to gather intelligence on crimeIt was the undercover police operation that led to 37 people being jailed for more than 400 years in total after officers set up a fake recording studio and record shop on a north London housing estate.Now, a four-part television documentary has brought Operation Peyzac back under the spotlight, prompting renewed scrutiny of the tactics used by undercover officers and calls for the operation to be examined by the UK’s ongoing spycops inquiry. Continue reading...

• The US Department of Labor (DOL) has proposed new regulations under ERISA to clarify fiduciary duties of prudence regarding the selection of designated investment alternatives. • The proposal establishes a process-based safe harbor for fiduciaries, specifically those incorporating alternative asset exposure, to prioritize decision-making processes over final investment outcomes. • This shift aims to mitigate litigation risks for fiduciaries and encourage the inclusion of diverse asset classes in retirement portfolios.

• The Tech Buzz newsletter published a piece focused on AI tooling and document workflows, with a featured mention of LlamaParse as an agentic document parsing engine. • The article says the product is designed to reliably extract complex information for AI apps and workflows, reflecting demand for infrastructure that helps models handle enterprise documents. • The development matters because document parsing remains a bottleneck for many AI products, especially in retrieval, automation and agent pipelines.