Racing honours Hunt family as outsider Glengouly hits jackpot at Cheltenham
This was an afternoon at the track when the big-race result was secondary to the cause it was supporting.For Faye Bramley it also marked a huge step forward in her training career as Glengouly, a 33-1 outsider, made all the running to win the Support the Hunt Family Fund December Gold Cup.The Hunt Family Fund was set up by the BBC racing commentator, John Hunt, and his daughter, Amy, after the murder of his wife, Carol, and daughters, Hannah and Louise, to raise awareness of violence against women and support causes relating to young women.Saturday’s race, the traditional feature of the December meeting, came at the end of a series of events over the past week, including a dinner and auction at Cheltenham on Thursday, which has raised nearly £500,000.Hunt called the race as usual for Radio 5 Live, and said afterwards that, like most of those watching from the stands, he had expected Glengouly to be swallowed up by either Jagwar, the 11-4 favourite, or Vincenzo, the 7-2 second-favourite, after the turn for home.
Sean Bowen had other ideas, and the champion jockey had kept enough back to repel their challenges on the uphill run to the line.The winner’s owners, the Cheeky Pups syndicate, pledged £10,000 of their prize money to the Hunt Family Fund, while for Bramley, who is in her first full season with a licence, the win with a £16,000 castoff from the Willie Mullins stable was a remarkable success with only her fourth runner at Cheltenham.“I’m gobsmacked,” Bramley said.“I can’t believe I’m even here, never mind having a winner.I couldn’t have been happier through the race as I know the horse inside out and I could tell he was loving it.
”Bramley trains from a yard owned by the former champion jockey, AP McCoy, and took out a full licence after running the stable for several years as a pre-training facility.“I’ve worked for AP for about eight years,” Bramley said.“But we got a bit bored of the pre-training and we just wanted to give it a proper go.He [McCoy] was behind the decision.This horse was quite hard to train, but he’s come to life.
”Jagwar was less than two lengths behind the winner on his first start since winning the Plate Handicap Chase at last season’s festival, but he was taken out of the Gold Cup betting by Paddy Power and pushed out to 40-1 (from 25-1) for the Ryanair Chase at the festival over Saturday’s two-and-a-half mile trip.Southwell: 12.00 Kamsinas 12.30 Henry Box Brown 1.00 Charles Ritz 1.
30 Liam Mera Kai 2.00 Strong Run 2.35 Tigers Moon 3.10 Tramuntana (nap).Carlisle: 12.
10 Cristal D’Estruval 12.40 Shadow Chaser 1.10 Stride On 1.40 Letos (nb) 2.13 Platin Moon 2.
48 Capricciose.Four winners at last December’s meeting here went on to register a success at the festival in March and Adam Nicol’s Minella Study will be steered towards the Triumph Hurdle on Gold Cup day after his easy win in the opening juvenile hurdle.Minella Study and One Horse Town, the odds-on favourite, went into the race with unbeaten records after two and four starts respectively and the pair were clear turning into the straight.It was Minella Study that found the better turn of foot and he flew the last on the way to a six-and-a-half length success.“He works very well,” Nicol said of the winner, who was introduced to the Triumph Hurdle betting at 20-1 by Paddy Power.
“I gave him a blow earlier in the week and he showed great speed.The thing about this horse is he doesn’t know he’s a racehorse yet.He’s going from strength to strength, he has speed and he travels.”
Disney wants you to AI-generate yourself into your favorite Marvel movie
Users of OpenAI’s video generation app will soon be able to see their own faces alongside characters from Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars and Disney’s animated films, according to a joint announcement from the startup and Disney on Thursday. Perhaps you, Lightning McQueen and Iron Man are all dancing together in the Mos Eisley Cantina.Sora is an app made by OpenAI, the firm behind ChatGPT, which allows users to generate videos of up to 20 seconds through short text prompts. The startup previously attempted to steer Sora’s output away from unlicensed copyrighted material, though with little success, which prompted threats of lawsuits by rights holders.Disney announced that it would invest $1bn in OpenAI and, under a three-year deal perhaps worth even more than that large sum, that it would license about 200 of its iconic characters – from R2-D2 to Stitch – for users to play with in OpenAI’s video generation app
Musk calls Doge only ‘somewhat successful’ and says he would not do it again
Elon Musk has said the aggressive federal job-cutting program he headed early in Donald Trump’s second term, known as the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), was only “a little bit successful” and he would not lead the project again.Musk said he wouldn’t want to repeat the exercise, talking on the podcast hosted by Katie Miller, a rightwing personality with a rising profile who was a Doge adviser and who is married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s hardline anti-immigration deputy chief of staff.Asked whether Doge had achieved what he’d hoped, Musk said: “We were a little bit successful. We were somewhat successful.”Doge created chaos and distress in the government machine in Washington DC, and by May more than 200,000 federal workers had been laid off and roughly 75,000 had accepted buyouts as a result of purges by Musk’s external team of often-young zealots
ICE is using smartwatches to track pregnant women, even during labor: ‘She was so afraid they would take her baby’
Pregnant immigrants in ICE monitoring programs are avoiding care, fearing detention during labor and deliveryIn early September, a woman, nine months pregnant, walked into the emergency obstetrics unit of a Colorado hospital. Though the labor and delivery staff caring for her expected her to have a smooth delivery, her case presented complications almost immediately.The woman, who was born in central Asia, checked into the hospital with a smartwatch on her wrist, said two hospital workers who cared for her during her labor, and whom the Guardian is not identifying to avoid exposing their hospital or patients to retaliation.The device was not an ordinary smartwatch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled
From ‘glacier aesthetic’ to ‘poetcore’: Pinterest predicts the visual trends of 2026 based on its search data
Next year, we’ll mostly be indulging in maximalist circus decor, working on our poetcore, hunting for the ethereal or eating cabbage in a bid for “individuality and self-preservation”, according to Pinterest.The organisation’s predictions for Australian trends in 2026 have landed, which – according to the platform used by interior decorators, fashion lovers and creatives of all stripes – includes 1980s, aliens, vampires and “forest magic”.Among the Pinterest 2026 trends report’s top 21 themes are “Afrohemian” decor (searches for the term are on the rise by baby boomers and Gen X); “glitchy glam” (asymmetric haircuts and mismatching nails); and “cool blue” (drinks, wedding dresses and makeup with a “glacier aesthetic”).Pinterest compared English-language search data from September 2024 to August 2025 with those of the year before and claims it has an 88% accuracy rate. More than 9 million Australians use Pinterest each month
UK police forces lobbied to use biased facial recognition technology
Police forces successfully lobbied to use a facial recognition system known to be biased against women, young people, and members of ethnic minority groups, after complaining that another version produced fewer potential suspects.UK forces use the police national database (PND) to conduct retrospective facial recognition searches, whereby a “probe image” of a suspect is compared to a database of more than 19 million custody photos for potential matches.The Home Office admitted last week that the technology was biased, after a review by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) found it misidentified Black and Asian people and women at significantly higher rates than white men, and said it “had acted on the findings”.Documents seen by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates reveal that the bias has been known about for more than a year – and that police forces argued to overturn an initial decision designed to address it.Police bosses were told the system was biased in September 2024, after a Home Office-commissioned review by the NPL found the system was more likely to suggest incorrect matches for probe images depicting women, Black people, and those aged 40 and under
Trump clears way for Nvidia to sell powerful AI chips to China
Donald Trump has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, marking a win for the chip maker and its CEO, Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country.Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns.Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday: “I have informed President Xi, of China, that the United States will allow NVIDIA to ship its H200 products to approved customers in China, and other Countries, under conditions that allow for continued strong National Security. President Xi responded positively!”Trump said the Department of Commerce was finalising the details and that he was planning to make the same offer to other chip companies, including Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel. Nvidia’s H200 chips are the company’s second most powerful, and far more advanced than the H20, which was originally designed as a lower-powered model for the Chinese market that would not breach restrictions, but which the US banned anyway in April
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