Charles

F1 faces a fresh challenge this weekend at the first Spanish Grand at the new Madring, a hybrid street circuit built on the Ifema complex near the city’s international airport.

Hamilton said: “It’s a massively challenging circuit. Of all the new tracks that I’ve gone to, this one, maybe Saudi, are the two closest in terms of how difficult it was to get on top of the car and find the right lines and such.”

Mercedes driver George Russell said: “It’s a crazy circuit, I would put it. Arguably one of the most risky circuits of the whole calendar.

“Because you have real high-speed corners, sort of Jeddah-esque, the walls are very close, so there’s no margin for error, but then you have other corners… where you’re coming from a high speed into a slow braking zone, you’re braking and turning at the same time, so locking tyres are going to be easy and if you lock up you’ll be straight in the wall.

“So, excited to try that out, I think it’s going to be really challenging for us as drivers, the race is going to be challenging to overtake, so on the whole it’s not an easy one.”

Russell heads into the race 66 points behind team-mate Kimi Antonelli after the Italian’s landmark victory in Monza from 19th on the grid.

The Briton acknowledged that his title hopes with nine or 10 races left, amid uncertainty about the end of the season, were fading fast.

“I would definitely need some luck and I need some good performances,” Russell said. “It’s not really something I’m thinking about, because he’s performing better than me, so he deserves to be leading the championship.

“There’s still a long way to go, but he’s yet to have a bad weekend in terms of performance.

“So he’s performing exceptionally well, my performances are better, but if I want to win this championship, I’m going to need some luck on the way. But it’s not something I’m focused on. I’m focused on driving faster and just finding more performance.”

Antonelli said: “I don’t really want to try thinking about the championship. I think Monza was the proof that I wasn’t driving thinking about, or worrying about the championship. I was just driving to win, to do my best. So that’s the mindset.”

The Italian said his win in Monza was “so far the best day of my life and definitely one I will remember forever”.

He said a day karting with Mercedes on Monday helped him move on from the excitement of the day before.

“After Monza, that night, that day overall, I was very excited. But then going karting on Monday helped me to go back to earth, just go back to the ground.

“It was a good day, good fun day with the team. It was also a way to remind myself where I came from, all the journey that was done.

“And then about pressure, I try to embrace it as much as possible. And I try to see it as a positive thing and try to see it as an opportunity too. That’s also what is helping me to stay calm under difficult situations.”

Antonelli’s penalty is caused by using too many engine components this season after reliability problems earlier in the year. Russell will take one at a subsequent race, most likely the Azerbaijan Grand Prix later this month.

Mercedes have chosen this race because they hope the long straights will give him a decent chance of recovering a strong result.

And the Italian, who leads Hamilton and Russell in the championship by 59 points, was the quickest on the race-simulation runs towards the end of the session.

The race runs were inconclusive as Mercedes used the hard compound tyres, Ferrari the softs and Verstappen the mediums.

Antonelli was more than 0.2secs quicker than Russell on average. Norris, also on the hard tyre, was just under 0.2secs slower than Russell.

Meanwhile, F1 has announced that it will host a three-day event for fans before next season in Milan on 18-20 February.

A successor to the F1 Live event in London’s O2 Arena in 2025, it will feature all 11 teams and their drivers as well as music and entertainment.

It’s summer in the city, the pubs are crowded, and the coast beckons. In a year that has so far brought five significant heatwaves, it is a fair description of the current holiday season.

But the same was true, too, of the much less frequent hot, dry summers of the past, including 186 years ago when Charles Dickens put pen to paper in anticipation of escaping London for the sea breeze in Broadstairs, Kent.

“There is no news in London – everybody is hurrying out of town – the two great theatres are shut up – and all the watering places are crammed with hot people,” he writes to his brother Alfred on 12 August 1840.

His letter, which is to go on public display for the first time, is one of several items of correspondence shedding light on Dickens and his holiday pursuits, from picnics on the Thames, beach showering on the Isle of Wight, and being ravaged by mosquitoes, bugs and other insects

“While Dickens rarely slowed down, he made sure to find time for holidays and days off, packing up plenty of his belongings and heading to the Kent coast or the West Country with his family,” said Emma Harper, deputy director at London’s Charles Dickens Museum, where the letters will go on display in the study where he wrote Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers.

“While Dickens loved London, he was very happy to escape its crowded hot pubs for the cooler climes of the coast, or if he decided to break his routine by taking a spur of the moment day off, he would consider this a holiday. He would take his work on holiday with him and sometimes even brought his favourite pieces of furniture along so he could write from the chair and desk that suited him best.”

He positively gloated about his successful mission to construct an outdoor shower cubicle near his “very pretty” holiday cottage in Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight in 1849, expressing no qualms about spoiling the view for others. He writes to the printer William Bradbury: “We have made all visitors in search of the picturesque, mad, by putting up an immense wooden caravan on the beach, to shut in a noble waterfall and convert it into a shower bath! With some five hundred feet of fall. Which we take, every morning, to the unbounded astonishment of the aboriginal inhabitants.”

Of an 1851 trip on the Thames with his son Charley “and three other young Eton Shavers”, he promises that if his friend Thomas Beard joins them, he will be “armed with a hamper from Fortnum & Mason’s”. They can dine on a bank, “and if you can come, you and I will console ourselves for our antiquity, after dinner, with a trifle of tobacco and champagne”.

Dickens “relaxed energetically”, said Harper, and he loved to travel. To his biographer John Forster he writes of a 1842 trip to Italy: “I see myself in a striped shirt, moustache, blouse, red sash, straw hat, and white trousers, sitting astride a mule, and not caring for the clock, the day of the month, or the day of the week.”

Reflecting on one long excursion, he tells Beard in 1845 of “the gentlemanly vagabond I have been, for the last six or eight months – the extraordinary beds I have slept in – and the bewildering amount of fleas, mosquitoes, bugs, and other insects I have unwillingly bepastured – these things have hardly left me any leisure in my holiday, until within the last four or five weeks. During the whole of which time I have been employed, chiefly, in lying on my back on sofas, and leaning out of windows and over balconies, in a sort of mild intoxication.”

Netflix’s latest true crime docuseries pays tribute to a special ‘powerhouse’ figure

Netflix’s latest true crime documentary includes a special tribute one of the high profile figures taking part.

The platform has released the latest instalment in the Conversations with a Killer series.

Previous entries have included closer looks at high profile criminals including Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy. Now, the most recent edition focuses on Charles Manson.

According to its synopsis, the three-part title draws on previously unreleased prison recordings, firsthand accounts, and archival footage, to trace Charles Manson’s rise as a cult leader, the 1969 murders that followed, and the media spectacle of his trial.

It features interviews with former Manson Family members and law enforcement alongside recorded phone calls with Manson himself. Also featuring is one of the extinguished journalists who covered the story at the time.

In the final moments of the last episode of the series, a special tribute is made for this person. A title card appears that reads: “In loving memory of Linda Deutsch.”

It appears after the production reveals what happened to other individuals who spent time behind bars for the ‘Manson murders’. But who was Linda Deutsch? Here’s all you need to know.

Who was Linda Deutsch?

Linda Deutsch was a journalist from New Jersey, who worked for Associated Press as a court reporter in Los Angeles. She was a well known figure in the industry and enjoyed an illustrious career.

While studying for a degree in English in 1965, she worked on the student newspaper The Outlook. There she held prominent roles as Features Editor, while also running the letters section.

Her very first professional front page byline, while working as an intern for her local paper was her coverage of the civil rights march where Martin Luther King Jr made the “I have a dream” speech.

When she joined the Associated Press in 1967, she was the only woman working out of the Los Angeles office. She would go on to report on high profile cases including Charles Manson, O.J. Simpson, Erik and Lyle Menendez, Phil Spector and Michael Jackson to name a few.

She also wrote a book concentrating on the Simpson case, called Verdict: The Chronicle of the O. J. Simpson Trial. While as demonstrated by the new Netflix series, was a regular talking head discussing Charles Manson’s trial.

In a tribute to her from her old college paper, The Outlook said she was “a powerhouse in the journalism industry and a positive figure for female journalists everywhere”. Deutsch successfully campaigned for equal pay and the right for female journalists to be referred to as ‘newswomen’ and not ‘newsmen.’

She was named a special correspondent in 1992 and retired in 2014 at the age of 71. Never forgetting her roots, she endowed journalism scholarships at her former school and they named their newsroom after her.

Deutsch did not get married or have children and said of her personal life: “I have a godson who means the world to me. And I have a very full life, but it never included marriage. I think my relationships mostly broke up because of my work.”

She died in 2024 at the age of 80, two years after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Conversations with a killer: The Charles Manson Tapes is streaming on Netflix

Joshua Kushner’s sudden rise to co-ownership of the most storied team in professional basketball might seem like it came out of the blue — but it’s been a long time coming.

A scion of the wealthy Kushner family whose older brother, Jared, is married to President Trump’s daughter, and whose father, Charles, is the U.S. ambassador to France, has successfully staked out his own lucrative business career.

He is worth an estimated $5.2 billion by Forbes.

And along the way, the New York-based entrepreneur and venture capitalist has exhibited a deep interest in sports investments.

Just this summer, there were reports that Joshua Kushner and new Laker’s co-owner Bob Iger, the former Walt Disney Co. chief executive, had hired investment bankers to consider a bid for the National Basketball Association’s expansion team in Las Vegas — before setting their sights on the Lakers.

Kushner already holds a stake that in the Miami Heat that he will divest, according to The Athletic, and previously sold a stake in the Memphis Grizzlies. His wife, model Karlie Kloss, has a stake in the WNBA’s New York Liberty.

Kushner’s Thrive Capital also was named the lead investor in FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s ill-fated plan this year to spin off a $20 billion commercial subsidiary to handle the soccer federation’s broadcast, sponsorship, ticketing and event operations.

Infantino withdrew the proposal last month after withering criticism that he was overly commercializing the sport, as well as of Kushner’s ties to Trump and his controversial presidency.

Kushner announced on X in April that he also was in the process of taking a stake in the San Francisco Giants. It was not his first interest in baseball. In 2017, he reached a preliminary agreement to buy the Miami Marlins for $1.6 billion, but the deal fell through.

Kushner’s father made his fortune in commercial and residential real estate, and early on his youngest son decided to go into business but forge his own career, even as he maintained his ties to Kushner Cos., the family firm.

After graduating from Harvard University, Kushner got his MBA from the school. But before he had even graduated in 2011, he founded his venture capital firm Thrive Capital. He also worked at top investment bank Goldman Sachs.

The venture capital firm reportedly scored with investments in Instagram, online eyewear retailer Warby Parker, music streaming service Spotify, payments processor Stripe and Elon Musk’s SpaceX long before it went public this year.

In 2012, Kushner displayed an entrepreneurial streak, co-founding Oscar, a health tech and insurer that is now publicly traded with a market capitalization of about $9 billion.

This year, Thrive raised $10 billion, it’s largest fundraising round yet, drawing investment’s from global billionaires such as India’s Mukesh Ambani, the world’s twelfth richest person, according to Bloomberg. Iger reportedly invested $175 million to purchase a 3.3% stake in Thrive.

Interest in the firm came after it scored a huge win with an investment in artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI in January 2023, just months after the debut of ChatGPT. At the time, the startup was valued at $29 billion, and now its valuation is approaching $1 trillion.

A lifelong Democrat, Kushner attended the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, a day after Trump’s first inauguration. Kushner has funded Democratic politicians and causes almost exclusively, including $250,000 in donations to the Growth Democrats PAC during the 2024 election cycle.

“It is no secret that liberal values have guided my life and that I have supported political leaders that share similar values,” Kushner told Forbes in 2017.

In 2024, Kushner and Kloss purchased the iconic Midcentury Modern home in Malibu known as the “Wave House,” designed by famed architect Harry Gesner. According to The Wall Street Journal, the couple paid $29.5 million for the six-bedroom, 6,200-square-foot house that abuts the Pacific Ocean—$20 million less than the asking price when it was listed for sale in 2023.

Kushner, however, has not been able to shed his controversial association with his family or the family real estate firm.

A property management company owned by the family in 2022 agreed to pay $3.25 million in civil penalties and restitution to settle a lawsuit brought by the state of Maryland. The suit alleged that tenants in thousands of rental units were charged illegal fees while failing to maintain the properties. In reaching the settlement, the company did not admit wrongdoing.

Kushner’s effort to fashion his own identity also has been tarnished by his controversial father.

Charles Kushner was made ambassador to France last year by Trump, but only after the president pardoned the New Jersey developer in 2020. The elder Kushner spent nearly two years in custody following a federal tax fraud investigation.

Not long after assuming his post, Kushner sparked a diplomatic clash with France, accusing the country of not doing enough to stem antisemitism in the country following the start of the Hamas-Israeli conflict.

Correspondent A.J. Perez, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News contributed to this report.