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A freeloading tanuki, mounting debt, and a town full of possibilities will sound familiar to fans of Animal Crossing. Alas, while you won’t find accountability from Tom Nook, Kyoto-based studio Denkiworks has stepped in to heal your financial trauma with a BMX-filled adventure in which a mammal finally pays the price for their years of bad behaviour. “Even Japanese people ask why it’s a tanuki,” jokes Liam Edwards, a game designer at Denkiworks. “They have such a mythological background to them; they’re almost like dragons in terms of their mythology.”In Tanuki: Pon’s Summer, you play as an adorable but irresponsible…

Karen Newman, vice president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, criticised the move, saying “it beggars belief”.She said: “We have contacted the Conservative Party to set out our concerns and call on them to rescind his selection and review their vetting processes.”Liberal Democrat MP Adam Dance, whose Yeovil constituency includes Crewkerne, said: “Residents deserve to feel confident in those seeking to represent them.”Public service is built on trust and elected representatives have a responsibility to bring communities together and uphold the highest standards in public life.”It is now for the Conservative Party to explain why it believes this…

As Homer tells us, Odysseus made an epic journey, against the odds, from Troy to his home in Ithaca. He visited many lands, but mostly dwelt with the nymph Calypso on her island. We can imagine that his wife, Penelope, would have asked him about that particular time. Odysseus might have replied, “It was nothing. In fact, it was less than nothing. Negative five years I dwelt with Calypso. How else could I have arrived home after only ten years? If you don’t believe me, ask her.” Quantum particles, it turns out, are just as wily as Odysseus, as we…

The 2026 World Series of Poker main event began July 2 at the Paris Las Vegas and Horseshoe Las Vegas and is streaming live on ESPN+. Check daily for updates as the field grows and then shrinks to the final table, which air on ESPN live Aug. 3-5. Lance Bradley have the updates all tournament long.August 4: Han Feng surges into second as two players eliminatedLucas Jumalon, the 22 year old poker pro from Spokane, Washington finished the first day of the 2026 World Series of Poker main event final table in the exact same place he started it. On…

Former P-Square manager Jude Okoye has responded to fresh allegations made by his younger brother, Peter “Mr P” Okoye, insisting he never diverted the group’s earnings and challenging authorities to jail him if he is found guilty. Jude’s response comes days after Mr P released a four-part video series on social media detailing the long-running financial dispute within the defunct P-Square group. In the videos, Mr P accused his elder brother of withholding financial records, delaying access to the group’s backend catalogue and mismanaging royalty payments, reigniting public interest in the family’s prolonged feud. P-Square, comprising twin brothers Peter and…

A suitcase is like the portrait in the traveller’s attic, accumulating more than its fair share of knocks and scrapes while we refresh ourselves on the road. We trundle them over cobbles, see them tumble from luggage racks on the train – and if we choose to fly, there’s a fair chance they’ll be mishandled before we reunite at the carousel.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.For our testing, we pushed 11 suitcases to the limit by dropping them on to a hard surface, as if they’d been…

Ogun State Governor, Dapo Abiodun, has commended the Inspector General of Police, Tunji Disu, for the prompt deployment of an operational police aircraft to support ongoing security operations in the state. Governor Abiodun had requested the deployment of the aircraft as part of efforts to further strengthen the state’s security architecture and sustain the fight against criminality and banditry. The request was swiftly approved by the Inspector General of Police. Receiving the aircraft and its crew on behalf of the Ogun State Government, the Secretary to the State Government, Mr Tokunbo Talabi, expressed the Governor’s appreciation to the Inspector General…

Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja The Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA) has announced a 30 per cent reduction in gas imbalance on the country’s Western Network following the conclusion of the first half of 2026 Nigerian Gas Network Reconciliation (NGNR) Workshop. The biannual workshop brought together gas transporters, suppliers, shippers and off takers to reconcile gas volumes traded between January and June 2026 as part of efforts to improve transparency, accountability and operational efficiency in the domestic gas market. A major outcome of the exercise, a statement from the organisation said, was the introduction of a Network Entry…

SpaceX has ramped up purchases of Tesla Megapack, spending $295 million on the battery storage devices in the second quarter and $329 million so far this year, according to the company’s earnings report released on Tuesday. The purchase illustrates just how interconnected Elon Musk’s universe of companies are. Musk, who is the CEO and largest shareholder of SpaceX, also runs Tesla. Musk’s artificial intelligence business xAI acquired his social media platform, X, in 2025. Earlier this year, SpaceX gobbled up xAI. The industrial-scale batteries are likely being deployed at the company’s xAI data centers. Before xAI merged with SpaceX, the…

A juvenile female of the mantid species Choeradodis rhomboidea was collected as part of an effort to catalog insects in the Amazon.Credit: Bernardo Ferraz/BioInsectaThe Amazon’s lush rainforest harbours a hidden world of tiny creatures, nearly all of them unknown to science. But now hundreds of scientists in Brazil are collaborating on a quest to count every species of insect in one expanse of the Amazon — the largest insect-biodiversity study to ever explore the forest from the ground to the canopy.Preliminary data suggest that the number of insect species could surpass 40,000, which is almost 0.7% of the widely accepted…