• The Independent

    Who is Darwin Blanch? The 16-year-old playing Rafael Nadal at the Madrid Open today

    The teenager, who has already lived in four countries and speaks four languages, plays just his second match on the professional tour against a living legend of the sport

  • Associated Press

    Study says it's likely a warmer world made deadly Dubai downpours heavier

    Circumstantial evidence points to climate change as worsening the deadly deluge that just flooded Dubai and other parts of the Persian Gulf, but scientists didn't discover the definitive fingerprints of greenhouse gas-triggered warming they have seen in other extreme weather events, a new report found. Between 10% and 40% more rain fell in just one day last week — killing at least two dozen people in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and parts of Saudi Arabia — than it would have in a world without the 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warming that has come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas since the mid-19th century, scientists at World Weather Attribution said Thursday in a flash study that is too new to be peer-reviewed. One of the key tools in WWA's more than 60 past reports has been creating computer simulations that compare an actual weather event to a fictional world without climate change, but in the Dubai case there wasn’t enough data for those simulations to make such a calculation.

  • Reuters

    US ban on worker noncompetes faces uphill legal battle

    The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's ban on "noncompete" agreements commonly signed by workers is likely vulnerable to legal challenges, experts said, as some courts have grown increasingly skeptical of federal agencies' power to adopt broad rules. The commission in unveiling the rule on Tuesday said agreements not to join employers' competitors or launch rival businesses suppress workers' wages and stunt their mobility and job opportunities. About 30 million people, or 20% of U.S. workers, have signed noncompetes, the agency said.