Take Two Interactive’s GTA V has become the most profitable media product since all time, thereby beating movies like Star Wars and Avatar. Grand Theft Auto V, from developer Rockstar Games, launched in 2013 and has since sold around 90 million copies across all platforms, and grossing in roughly 6 billion USD. For reference, movie hits such as Star Wars and Gone in the Wind harvested in more than 3 billion USD. “Far above the success of blockbuster movies like “Star Wars” or “Gone With The Wind,” which both collected more than $3 billion, adjusted for inflation”, website MarketWatch writes. “Even taking into account DVD and streaming sales would not put the biggest movie blockbusters in GTA V’s neighborhood, said Cowen analyst Doug Creutz, estimating those sales might add up to $1 billion to the films’ totals.” “I think it’s a wild outlier,” the analyst told MarketWatch in an interview over the phone. “I think maybe with the exception something Nintendo has made—Mario Brothers—but aside from that there’s never been a console game that’s sold so many units.” Please note that Creutz refers to the Mario game franchise as a whole, but not a single Mario game has managed to harvest 6 billion dollars on its own. GTA 5 Record run According to MarketWatch, the closest competitor for GTA V would be Activision’s Call of Duty series, but sales for this insanely popular shooting franchise fade in the light of GTA V’s sales. Back in July of last year, Take Two’s CEO Straus Zelnick talked about the insane success of the game, and his expectations for the upcoming Red Dead Redemption 2, which are said to be high, but not on the same level as GTA V. I don’t make assumptions like that,” Zelnick told Gamesindustry.biz. “What the team is doing is trying to make the best possible game they can, and if they succeed… Look, the reason, in my opinion, why GTA V has sold 80m units, and GTA Online had another record year 3-and-a-half years since its release, is because it stands alone in the generation. In every prior generation, there have been other titles that have clustered around GTA from a quality point-of-view. That’s clearly not the case now. If you are over 17 and you have a new generation console, you have GTA. Otherwise we wouldn’t have shipped 80m units. Can any other title achieve that? It seems unlikely. Do we have incredibly high hopes for Red Dead? We do. But we are not putting it in the context of GTA.” GTA V and its online component, GTA Online, are available now for PC and consoles.

THE FIRST PLAYABLE moments of Far Cry 5 are a chase—but you're the one being pursued. You're a nameless, silent police deputy fleeing from radical doomsday cultists who intend to gun you down. Feet pounding through the woods of rural Montana, you run, bullets whizzing past your head as you barely manage to escape. As I did this, I noticed something peculiar. While the intensity of the music and the scene's framing never changed, eventually my character stopped taking damage, and the semicircles on the screen indicating enemy attention faded. I stopped running. Nothing happened. I waited for my health to recharge, and I walked, calmly and serenely, away from a threat that didn't exist. The danger, it turned out, was just an illusion. Videogames are rife with trickery. It's a known truism of game design that if the player doesn't need to see it, it probably doesn't exist. Buildings in the background don't have roofs; the floor only extends to the final reachable hallway; there's no grass, green or otherwise, on the other side of the fence. What matters is only what's visible. The rest is a magic trick, all smoke and mirrors. But Far Cry 5 is a game full of more trickery than most. It's built on malignant illusions that are meant to confound you, but serve only to rob the game of both drama and substance. In every game, the experience only holds up as far as you can see it. In Far Cry 5, the experience doesn't even hold up that far. RELATED STORIES JULIE MUNCY You'll Find Far Cry 5 Provocative—Even if It's a Mess JULIE MUNCY The 10 (Well, 12) Most Anticipated Games of 2018 CHRIS KOHLER Hate First-Person Shooters? Even You Will Love Titanfall. Seriously. Far Cry 5, like its predecessors, is a game about fighting across wide outdoor spaces, reclaiming a lush and beautiful place through a series of pitched gunfights. It's battle tourism. But unlike earlier games, which took place in the types of scenery that Americans exoticize through ignorance—anonymous islands in the Pacific, war-torn countries in Sub-Saharan Africa—the fifth entry in Ubisoft's open-world series exoticizes Americans' own backyard. In rural Montana, a fictional county of good ol' boys and girls has been overrun by a fictional doomsday cult called the Project at Eden's Gate. (Anti-cultists have acronymized the group, calling its members "Peggies.") Your charge is to fight to liberate the American frontier from the murderous cult, and your compatriots are the people Far Cry 5 imagines populate rural Montana: eccentric hunters, doomsday preppers, and gun-toting preachers. In a 2016 Mother Jones expose on America's self-organized border militias, what reporter Shane Bauer found was a hotbed of paranoia—lonely men with guns and grudges wandering the Rio Grande River Valley looking for things that didn't exist. Their encounters are mostly with enemies that clearly don't exist. The people they do find, and who they insist are enemies that need monitoring, are likely not drug smugglers or criminals. Just poor migrants. Innocent people looking for a better life. Families. To operate in this paramilitary world is to surround yourself with illusions. In Far Cry 5, these phantom-hunters are your squadmates. The safest places are bunkers stocked with illegal weapons. Militiamen fight alongside you against the cult. Your most sympathetic allies are shellshocked veterans who dearly need good psychological care. The least sympathetic are gun-toting maniacs. Ignoring that the culture of doomsday prepping is largely motivated in real life by xenophobia and a paranoid fear of gun control, that its champions are not folk heroes but men like the Bundys, this game has built a world where these preppers and pretend soldiers are heroes. To do this, the game hangs everything on the militant violence of its cult. It doesn't matter that in real life cults are rarely outwardly violent, nor that they usually find ways to slot themselves into their communities in ways that appear constructive. In this world, the Peggies are unreal, even monstrous enemies, fueled by violence-inducing mind-control drugs and the flimsy propaganda of their mildly charismatic leader (a David Koresh lookalike named Joseph Seed) to go to war in the countryside. They're the embodiment of the paranoid illusions of real-world militiamen and preppers. But just like the chase at the beginning of the game, the Project at Eden's Gate is an illusion that falls apart under thirty seconds of sustained attention. This cult has no coherent doctrine, and its structure doesn't resemble real-world cults in the slightest. You never see people at worship, or play. There aren't any children. During the rhythms of play, the player will likely discover several barracks, wood cabins full of bunk beds and personal effects. But no one, even in the dead of night, will ever be sleeping. Some of these breaches of reality are normal in videogames, and can be acceptable under the right circumstances, but here they combine with the game's muddled, half-made-up politics and anthropology to construct the sense of a game entirely beholden to its own tricks but without the skill to properly hide them. And Far Cry 5 does all of this, wildly contorting its setting and its play, in the interest of hollowing out a real-world place and a real-world set of sociopolitical circumstances until it resembles a playground. All is done in the name of good fun. Running, sneaking, and shooting against the backdrop of rural Americana is, occasionally, fun. But it's never good. The flimsiness of the game's illusions, instead of providing freedom for the player, simply rob the game's violence of substance. From a distance, you would be forgiven for thinking that Far Cry 5, a game that advertised itself with charged imagery of patriotism and white supremacy run amok, would have something to say. Instead, it has nothing to say and offers the player little of interest to do. The only mildly compelling part of the game is its ending, and by then it's far too late to redeem the prior 20 hours spent wandering around a hall of mirrors. I'm no enemy of violence in games, but I do insist that violence be made to matter in games. There is not a single gunfight in Far Cry 5 that does anything to convince the player to care. All this game offers is an opportunity to stand alongside people most of us would find abhorrent in real life and shoot digital guns at unconvincing ghosts. Far Cry 5 is an amateur magic trick. And players deserve better.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has told the security forces to go after a criminal gang known as the Gulf Clan after the group was blamed for a bomb attack which killed eight police officers in north-western Colombia. The bomb went off on Wednesday as the officers were escorting officials handing back land to rural dwellers displaced by Colombia's armed conflict. The Gulf Clan is estimated to have about 1,800 members. It is Colombia's biggest drugs gang. It controls many of the routes used to smuggle drugs from Colombia to the US and as far away as Russia. The group also engages in extortion, illegal mining, human trafficking, forced displacements and murder. 'Barbaric act' "This barbaric act will not go unpunished," President Santos said, before telling the police to step up their efforts against the Gulf Clan, which is also known as Los Urabeños after the area where it is most active. Police General Gustavo Moreno said the bomb had been placed on a narrow dirt path and was set off remotely when a car carrying the officers drove past. He said officers had later intercepted radio communications in which the Gulf Clan boasted about the attack. Colombia's security forces have arrested or killed some of the top leaders of the gang in recent months, but it remains a powerful force and has reportedly also been recruiting both left-wing former Farc rebels disgruntled with the peace process as well as their right-wing former paramilitary rivals. Last Christmas, the Gulf Clan declared a temporary unilateral ceasefire and expressed its desire to negotiate with the government, but talks to convince its leaders to hand themselves in have so far not yielded any visible results.

More than 60 Brazilian members of congress from the opposition Workers' Party have formally changed their names. They have added the name "Lula", after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was jailed last weekend. The move, in tribute to the former president, was led by the head of the party, Gleisi Hoffmann. She will now be known as Gleisi Lula Hoffmann in official Congress documents and on the electronic voting board. The party's leader in the lower house, Paulo Pimenta, followed her example and is now called Paulo Lula Pimenta. Party colleagues followed their lead in droves, but so did some legislators from right-wing parties. They are adding Judge Sérgio Moro - who convicted Lula - to their names. The former president began a 12-year sentence for corruption on Saturday. Lula says the charges against him were politically motivated.

Eight Argentine police officers have been dismissed for blaming missing drugs on mice. Investigators discovered 540kg (1,191lb) of marijuana missing from a police warehouse in Pilar, north-west of Buenos Aires. The city's former police commissioner, Javier Specia, and fellow officers told a judge the drugs were "eaten by mice". Forensic experts doubted mice would see the drugs as food, and would have probably died if they had eaten it. A spokesperson for Judge Adrián González Charvay said that according to experts at Buenos Aires University, "mice wouldn't mistake the drug for food" - and even if they did, "a lot of corpses would have been found in the warehouse". The police officers will now testify in front of the judge on 4 May. The court will decide if the drugs are missing due to "expedience or negligence". A 6,000kg haul of marijuana has been in storage at the warehouse for the past two years. But Mr Specia's successor, Emilio Portero, noticed the missing drugs when he took over the commissioner role. Mr Portero alerted the police force's internal affairs division, who then searched the warehouse and found only 5,460kg remaining. Suspicion fell on Mr Specia after authorities discovered he did not sign the inventory for the impounded drugs when he left his post in April 2017. The former commissioner is also reportedly under investigation for not yet filing a sworn income statement for last year.

The "mummified" remains of a monkey have been discovered by workers redeveloping a former department store in the US state of Minnesota. The dead creature was found in the ceiling of the old Dayton Department Store building in Minneapolis. A spokeswoman for the building project said they were working with local museums to trace the origins of the spider monkey, as theories fly. A nearby town's mayor suspects his dad stole the critter in the 1960s. The photo was first shared by a construction worker on the Old Minnesota Facebook page. The "'perished primate' revealed itself in a ceiling", according to the post. Some commenters on the site suggested the monkey may have come from a pet store which was on the eighth floor of the 116-year-old building. Regan Murphy, the mayor of Robbinsdale, Minnesota, believes his late father was to blame for the animal's disappearance. The suburban Minneapolis mayor says that in the 1960s his dad Larry Murphy and a friend stole the simian from the pet shop. Both men have since died, but the widow of the elder Murphy says he was known for monkey shines in his youth. "He was an Irish boy. I think that says it all," Larry's wife Monica told WCCO-TV. "Monkeys are not house broken," she explained. "The monkey was discovered by [the friend's] mom, and she said 'Absolutely not. Can't have it, can't keep it." The two teenagers brought the monkey back to the shop and released it, according to Murphy family lore. Other curious items have been found in air ducts and in ceilings during the building's renovation, including papier mache Easter eggs and a stolen wallet that was recently returned to its owner.

A German aid worker has been abducted by unknown gunmen in Niger. The man and his Nigerien colleagues were travelling near the border with Mali on Wednesday when armed men on motorbikes surrounded their convoy. The four Nigeriens have reportedly been freed and no demands have been made by the kidnappers. It is not clear who was behind the incident, but Islamist militants have repeatedly carried out attacks in the region. The man was working for the German non-governmental organisation Help when he was travelling near Ayorou in the Tillaberi region of western Niger. BBC Monitoring's Africa security correspondent Tomi Oladipo says the area is a dangerous part of Niger where militants regularly target the army. In October four US soldiers were killed in Niger and an offshoot of the Islamic State (IS) group said it carried out the attack.

Three lionesses and their eight cubs have been found dead in Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park. The lions are suspected to have been fed poisoned meat, the Uganda Wildlife Authority said. The reason is unclear, and an investigation has been launched. The carcasses were discovered on Wednesday near a fishing village, a spokesperson told the BBC. They did not seem to have any physical injuries. Wildlife and Tourism Minister Ephraim Kamuntu will travel to the park later today to find out more about the incident. The lion population in Queen Elizabeth National Park numbers around 100. Uganda’s wildlife parks are one of the country’s most important sources of revenue, and the government is trying to boost tourism. The country celebrated Wildlife Day last month, with a renewed commitment to protecting the big cats.

Judges in France who annulled an Algerian immigrant's marriage to a French woman say they knew it was a sham because the groom "hardly smiled" in the wedding photos, the UK-based Times newspaper reports. It says the judgment was handed down in 2010 by Aix-en-Provence appeals court in south France, but has only now been made public after the bride overcame her family's reluctance to talk about it. "It took eight years to digest because it was a form of disgrace," the woman's lawyer is reported in French media as saying. "But she wanted to contact the media to alert other women so they can avoid falling into the same trap." The woman, a 48-year-old accountant of Algerian origin living in France's second-biggest city Marseille, said she had fallen in love with the man when he was working on a building site near her office. He was eight years her junior. She is quoted in a local newspaper (in French) as saying his behaviour towards her suddenly became hostile after the wedding. Her lawyer said her client was "committed to the marriage but he wasn't - he only wanted a visa".

South African authorities say a businessman who was filmed confronting one of the Gupta brothers in Dubai has been released by the authorities there. South African businessman Justin van Pletzen was detained for questioning in Dubai after a video circulated showing him asking Ajay Gupta - who is officially a "fugitive from justice" in South Africa - when he will return. "When are you going back to South Africa? The country is looking for you," Mr van Pletzen says in the video filmed outside the South African embassy in Dubai earlier this month. The wealthy Gupta family have been accused of using their close friendship with South Africa's former President Zuma to wield enormous political influence, and to win state contracts. The Guptas and Mr Zuma deny all allegations of wrongdoing.

Leading rights group Amnesty International has hailed sub-Saharan Africa as "a beacon of hope" in the campaign to abolish the death penalty. "Sub-Saharan Africa made great strides in the global fight to abolish the death penalty with a significant decrease in death sentences being imposed across the region," it said in a report published today. Its stance contributed to a decline in executions around the world, where nearly 1,000 executions took place last year, four percent fewer than a year earlier, Amnesty International said. Last year, Guinea became the 20th state in sub-Saharan Africa abolish the death penalty for all crimes, while Kenya abolished the mandatory death penalty for murder. Burkina Faso and Chad also took steps to repeal this punishment with new or proposed laws. “The progress in sub-Saharan Africa reinforced its position as a beacon of hope for abolition. The leadership of countries in this region gives fresh hope that the abolition of the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment is within reach,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty. The organization recorded a drop in the number of executing countries across sub-Saharan Africa, from five in 2016 to two in 2017, with only South Sudan and Somalia known to have carried out executions. While Botswana and Sudan resumed executions in 2018, this "must not overshadow the positive steps being taken by other countries across the region", Amnesty International said. "Elsewhere in Africa, Gambia signed an international treaty committing the country not to carry out executions and moving to abolish the death penalty. The Gambian President established an official moratorium on executions in February 2018," it added.

Researchers have found that a new kind of mosquito net substantially increases protection against malaria-carrying insects. The discovery was made by a team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in a two-year study involving more than 15,000 children in Tanzania. Scientists found that nets incorporating a chemical called piperonyl butoxide blocked the natural defences of mosquitoes against standard insecticides, reducing malaria cases by more than a third. The World Health Organization is now recommending the use of the new nets. Malaria causes well over 400,000 deaths a year, nearly all of them children under five in sub-Saharan Africa.

An Australian woman who faked having terminal cancer before scamming money from friends of her family has been jailed for three months. Hanna Dickenson, 24, accepted A$42,000 (£22,000; $31,000) after telling her parents that she needed medical treatment overseas. Her parents had received donations from their friends, a court was told. It heard Dickenson spent much of the money on holidays and socialising. A judge called the scam "despicable". Dickenson had pleaded guilty in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court to seven charges of obtaining property by deception. In sentencing, magistrate David Starvaggi said Dickenson had "engaged in conduct that tears at the very heartstrings of human nature". "People's desire to assist and social trust has been breached. These are people who worked hard and dug into their own pockets," he said. Blogger case comparison The court was told one person donated A$10,000 to Dickenson after being discharged from hospital following his own cancer treatment. Another person gave money on four separate occasions. The ruse was uncovered when another donor raised suspicions with police after seeing pictures of Dickenson on Facebook. Dickenson's lawyer, Beverley Lindsay, argued that her client should be spared jail because she had "turned her life around". She also compared the deception to one involving an Australian celebrity blogger, Belle Gibson, who was fined A$410,000 last year after falsely claiming to have beaten brain cancer. Ms Lindsay argued that her client's offending was less severe than Gibson's. However Mr Starvaggi said the cases were not directly comparable, and that the court needed to deter others from engaging in similar conduct. Ms Lindsay said her client was likely to appeal the sentence.

Belgrade's tribute to the first man in space has been removed after less than a week, following an outcry over the size of its head. The bust of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, erected on the street which bears his name in the Serbian capital, was removed by workmen on Tuesday, B92 news website reports. Locals said that the tribute, placed next to a branch of McDonald's and facing a shopping centre, was an "insult" to the man who orbited the Earth on 12 April 1961. It featured a tiny bust of Gagarin on top of a tall plinth, which led to complaints that the statue was out of proportion. Belgrade City Manager Goran Vesic says that a new work will be commissioned, and would only go up after getting the go-ahead from "all relevant institutions", B92 reported. It transpired that the city had no knowledge of the design, and neither had the Ministry of Culture nor the foundation which had financed it. However, Mr Vesic said that this time Belgrade would get it right. "Gagarin will have a memorial in Belgrade worthy of the contribution that he has made to humanity," he said.

A significant shift in the system of ocean currents that helps keep parts of Europe warm could send temperatures in the UK lower, scientists have found. They say the Atlantic Ocean circulation system is weaker now than it has been for more than 1,000 years - and has changed significantly in the past 150. The study, in the journal Nature, says it may be a response to increased melting ice and is likely to continue. Researchers say that could have an impact on Atlantic ecosystems. Scientists involved in the Atlas project - the largest study of deep Atlantic ecosystems ever undertaken - say the impact will not be of the order played out in the 2004 Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow. But they say changes to the conveyor-belt-like system - also known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc) - could cool the North Atlantic and north-west Europe and transform some deep-ocean ecosystems. That could also affect temperature-sensitive species like coral, and even Atlantic cod. Scientists believe the pattern is a response to fresh water from melting ice sheets being added to surface ocean water, meaning those surface waters "can't get very dense and sink". "That puts a spanner in this whole system," lead researcher Dr David Thornalley, from University College London, explained. The concept of this system "shutting down" was featured in The Day After Tomorrow. "Obviously that was a sensationalised version," said Dr Thornally. "But much of the underlying science was correct, and there would be significant changes to climate it if did undergo a catastrophic collapse - although the film made those effects much more catastrophic, and happening much more quickly - than would actually be the case." Nonetheless, a change to the system could cool the North Atlantic and north-west Europe and transform some deep-ocean ecosystems. That is why its measurement has been a key part of the Atlas project. Scientists say understanding what is happening to Amoc will help them make much more accurate forecasts of our future climate. Prof Murray Roberts, who co-ordinates the Atlas project at the University of Edinburgh, told BBC News: "The changes we're seeing now in deep Atlantic currents could have massive effects on ocean ecosystems. "The deep Atlantic contains some of the world's oldest and most spectacular cold-water coral reef and deep-sea sponge grounds. "These delicate ecosystems rely on ocean currents to supply their food and disperse their offspring. Ocean currents are like highways spreading larvae throughout the ocean and we know these ecosystems have been really sensitive to past changes in the Earth's climate." To measure how the system has shifted over long timescales, researchers collected long cores of sediment from the sea floor. The sediment was laid down by past ocean currents, so the size of the sediment grains in different layers provided a measure of the current's strength over time. The results were also backed up by another study published in the same issue of Nature, led by researchers from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. This work looked at climate model data to confirm that sea-surface temperature patterns can be used as an indicator of Amoc's strength and revealing that it has been weakening even more rapidly since 1950 in response to recent global warming. The scientists want to continue to study patterns in this crucial temperature-regulating system, to understand whether as ice sheets continue to melt, this could drive further slowdown - or even a shutdown of a system that regulates our climate.

The relentless campaign to find and sink Germany's WWII battleship, the Tirpitz, left its mark on the landscape that is evident even today. The largest vessel in Hitler's Kriegsmarine, it was stationed for much of the war along the Norwegian coast to deter an Allied invasion. The German navy would hide the ship in fjords and screen it with chemical fog. This "smoke" did enormous damage to the surrounding trees which is recorded in their growth rings. Claudia Hartl, from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, stumbled across the impact while examining pines at Kåfjord near Alta. The dendrochronologist was collecting wood cores to build up a picture of past climate in the area. Severe cold and even infestation from insects can severely stunt annual growth in a stand, but neither of these causes could explain the total absence of rings seen in some trees dated to 1945. A colleague suggested it could have something to do with the Tirpitz, which was anchored the previous year at Kåfjord where it was attacked by Allied bombers. Archive documents show the ship released chlorosulphuric acid to camouflage its position. "We think this artificial smoke damaged the needles on the trees," Dr Hartl told BBC News. "If trees don't have needles they can't photosynthesise and they can't produce biomass. In pine trees, needles usually last from three to seven years because they're evergreens. So, if the trees lose their needles, it can take a very long time for them to recover." In one tree, there is no growth seen for nine years from 1945. "Afterwards, it recovered but it took 30 years to get back to normal growth. It's still there; it's still alive, and it's a very impressive tree," Dr Hartl said. In other pines, rings are present but they are extremely thin - easy to miss. As expected, sampling shows the impacts falling off with distance. But it is only at 4km that trees start to display no effects. The Tirpitz sustained some damage at Kåfjord. However, a continuous seek-and-destroy campaign eventually caught up with the battleship and it was sunk by RAF Lancasters in late 1944 in Tromso fjord further to the west. Dr Hartl believes her "warfare dendrochronology" will find similar cases elsewhere. "I think it's really interesting that the effects of one engagement are still evident in the forests of northern Norway more than 70 years later. In other places in Europe, they also used this artificial smoke and maybe also other chemicals. So perhaps you can find similar patterns and effects from WWII." The Mainz researcher presented her research here at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna, Austria.

Theresa May has summoned ministers to an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the UK's response to the suspected chemical weapons attack in Syria. Ministers are expected to back her call to join military action threatened by the United States and its allies. Sources say the PM is prepared to take action against the Assad regime without first seeking Parliamentary consent. But there have been calls from opposition parties and some Tories for MPs to get a vote beforehand. The allies want to prevent a repeat of an apparent chemical attack in the formerly rebel-held town of Douma. Mrs May has said "all the indications" are that the Syrian regime of president Bashar al-Assad, which denies mounting a chemical attack, was responsible. Senior figures from Russia, which provides military support to the Syrian regime, have warned of a Russian response to a US attack. BBC political correspondent Iain Watson said Mrs May appeared to have made up her mind and that it was "a question of when, not if" there will be military action. If the cabinet approves UK involvement, that would open the way for British forces to join an operation against Syrian targets that US President Donald Trump has said in a tweet "will be coming". During a briefing on Wednesday, however, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders appeared to row back on President Trump's warning to Russia that it should "get ready" for missile strikes against its ally. She told reporters that the president had "a number of options at his disposal and a number remain on the table", but added: "We haven't laid out any specific actions we plan to take." MPs are due to return to Westminster from the Easter recess on Monday. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has said Parliament must be consulted before military action is taken, and has warned of triggering a "hot war between US and Russia over skies of Syria". Brexit Secretary David Davis, one of the MPs to oppose military action against President Assad when it was rejected by the Commons in 2013, said he was assured that evidence and intelligence, as well as a "proper plan", would be provided this time. The SNP's Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, told the BBC a Parliamentary debate should take place before - rather than after - military action has taken place because Mrs May does not have a majority in the House of Commons. Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith also called for Parliament to have its say before anything is agreed. But Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, who chairs the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that while "politically it may make sense", Mrs May did not need to ask for a vote. He added that a "very targeted operation" at Syrian chemical weapons stocks need not trigger a conflict with Russia. Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable did not rule out backing military action but he said Parliament would have to give its approval with conditions. But Conservative MP Chris Philp told the BBC's Newsnight that although a vote was "desirable", events can move too fast and it was not a necessity. Mr Philp also said that, even if there was a vote, a number of Labour backbenchers had already expressed their willingness to side with the government and back military action. "I wouldn't make any assumptions about the vote," he added. Medical sources say dozens of people were killed, including children, during the alleged toxic bombing of the formerly rebel-held town of Douma, in the Eastern Ghouta region.

A UN court has overturned the acquittal of Serbian ultra-nationalist Vojislav Seselj for crimes committed during the 1990s Balkans conflict. Appeal court judges in The Hague found him guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 10 years in jail. Seselj was acquitted two years ago of nine war crimes and crimes against humanity, following a trial lasting more than eight years. He will not return to custody as he has served 11 years in pre-trial detention. The presiding judge Theodor Meron told the court that Seselj, a close ally of then Serbian autocratic leader Slobodan Milosevic, was guilty "of instigating persecution, deportation and other inhumane acts". The tribunal ruled that a single speech by the academic turned far-right leader to Serb crowds in May 1992 had sparked atrocities against ethnic Croats in part of the Vojvodina province. Seselj, Serbia's deputy prime minister between 1998 and 2000, elected to represent himself legally but refused to attend the court in The Hague. He returned to Serbia in 2014 to undergo treatment for colon cancer. In 2016, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia acquitted Seselj of all charges against him, including murder and allegedly stoking ethnic hatred at the start of the wars that broke apart the Yugoslav federation. While prosecutors appealed against his acquittal, Seselj was elected as a member of parliament in Serbia. The unrepentant Serbian Radical Party leader has stuck to his nationalist line, telling news agency AFP last week he will never give up the idea of a "Greater Serbia", uniting all parts of Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia where Serbs live. Following his acquittal in March 2016, he said: "I do not feel guilty of anything."

The Pope has said he made "serious mistakes" over a case of alleged child abuse by Catholic clergy in Chile. In a letter to the South American country's bishops, Francis said he felt "sadness and shame" over comments earlier this year in which he accused the victims of committing slander. The letter, released by the Church in Chile, said the Pope would invite some of the victims to Rome. A Chilean bishop, Juan Barros, is accused of hiding abuses by a priest. Pope Francis made his controversial remarks during a visit to Chile in January. Defending Bishop Barros, he said: "There is not a single piece of proof against him. Everything is slander." Bishop Barros has not been accused of abuse, but of being present when another priest, Fernando Karadima, molested young boys in Santiago, starting in the 1980s. Father Karadima never faced prosecution as too much time had passed, but the judge who heard victims' testimony described them as "truthful and reliable". The Pope's comments in January prompted an angry response from some of the victims. They told reporters that the Pope's demand that they provide evidence was "offensive and unacceptable". At the end of his Latin American trip, the Pope apologised by saying he realised his words had hurt many. But he reiterated his belief that Bishop Barros was innocent. In the letter released by the Chilean Church on Wednesday, the Pope says he "made serious mistakes in assessing and perceiving the situation, especially due to a lack of truthful and balanced information". He said he hoped he could apologise personally to the victims, and invited them to come to the Vatican over the next few weeks. After his trip, Pope Francis sent Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna to investigate allegations of a Church cover-up of the abuse in Chile.

Rescue teams are searching for one of Germany's richest men, who has gone missing while skiing in the Swiss Alps. Karl-Erivan Haub, heir to the Tengelmann supermarket chain, did not return from an off-piste skiing expedition near the Matterhorn on Saturday. A Tengelmann spokeswoman confirmed on Wednesday that a "full-speed" search for Mr Haub had begun. The 58-year-old billionaire has been in charge of the firm since 2000. It owns various supermarket brands in Germany and Central Europe. In a letter published in the German newspaper Handelsblatt, the supermarket boss' brother, Christian Haub, said he was an experienced skiier and mountaineer. He said he was still hopeful his brother would be found, but that the Haub family - one of Germany's wealthiest - was "prepared" for bad news. If Mr Haub could not be located, "the business will continue to run smoothly and orderly", he added.

It was an idea to improve road safety: special strips on the asphalt would play a tune when cars drove over them at the correct speed. But residents of a nearby village in the Netherlands said the constant noise was driving them mad. One called it "psychological torture". Another said cars were going faster to see if the song played at double speed. After pressure, officials closed the "singing road" on Tuesday, just one day after it had been officially opened. For the road to play out the anthem of the northern province of Friesland, cars had to drive at the speed limit of 60km/h (40mph). 'You can't sleep' The sound was created when cars drove over strategically-laid rumble strips, which are usually deployed at the side of roads to warn drivers against veering off. But it quickly became clear that locals were not singing the same tune. "I'm going nuts. You can't sit outside and you can't sleep at night," Sijtze Jansma told RTL News. Ria Jansma told Reuters news agency: "Last Saturday night, taxis... tried to go across the lines as quickly as possible and we had the anthem playing all night at high speed." Sietske Poepjes, the local minister for infrastructure and cultural affairs, said the project on a stretch of the N357 road was a way to promote the city of Leeuwarden, this year's European Capital of Culture, while also testing a new paint for roads. "It works amazingly well. You can hear the melody," she told the BBC. "We were glad it worked but people should not be unhappy... Other roads are more suitable for this." The strips were installed on Friday and cost €80,000 (£69,800; $99,000), including the expenses for their removal, a spokesman for Friesland province said. "It was an experiment on how to influence the behaviour of drivers." But he added: "I was there myself and if you're living there it was unpleasant. "The idea is

Kidambi Srikanth has scaled the peak of the men’s BWF men’s singles rankings for the first time, his place at No 1 confirmed on Thursday to further underscore how potent a force he has become in world badminton. The 25-year-old shuttler’s prolific form in 2017, during which he won a record four Super Series titles, has helped him reach 76895 rating points, the best ever by an Indian male badminton player. Srikanth, who was crowned Sportsperson of the Year at the third Mahindra Scorpio Times of India Sports Awards (TOISA) in February, today displaced Denmark’s Victok Axelsen from the top spot. He was a member of the Indian team that won the country’s first mixed team gold medal at the ongoing Commonwealth Games in Australia, and looks primed to win his first individual medal at the CWG as India’s shuttlers promise a gold rush. It truly has been a remarkable rise for Srikanth, one of Dronacharya Pullela Gopichand’s pupils. His ascension to No 1 in the BWF rankings began during a successful 2016, in which he won two gold medals in the men's team and men's singles of the 2016 South Asian Games, followed by reaching the quarter-finals of the Rio Olympics. For his successful 2016, Srikanth was the recipient of the TOISA Badminton Player of the Year [People’s Choice]. Srikanth’s first Super Series title came when he beat Japan’s Kazumasa Sakai 21-11, 21-19 to win the Indonesia Open Super Series. A week later, beat world and Olympic champion Chen Long in straight games 22-20, 21-16 to claim the Australia Open Super Series. With these wins, he became the first Indian to claim back-to-back Super Series titles and subsequently broke into the top ten of the BWF men’s singles rankings for the first time in ten months, up to eighth. In October 2017, Srikanth became the second Indian after Prakash Padukone to win the Denmark Open, the second Indian, after Saina, and first male to claim three Super Series in a year. History was made a week later, when he lifted the French Open by beating Kento Nishimoto 21-14, 21-13. With this, Srikanth moved from No 4 to a No 2 in the BWF men’s singles rankings.

A wickedly fast fastball isn’t the anomaly it once was. A decade ago, Major League pitchers threw a grand total of just 196 triple-digit fastballs in a single season. Last year, 40 pitchers collectively threw 1,017. But while baseball’s hallmark pitch has increased in popularity, it hasn’t increased in velocity. Consider the confusion over the game’s fastest fastball ever. On paper, the honor goes to Yankees relief pitcher Aroldis Chapman, who clocked 105.1 miles per hour in 2010. But the record could have been set all the way back in 1974. Back then, Nolan Ryan was the first MLB pitcher to be tracked by radar during a game—and while his heater topped out at 100.8 miles per hour, the radar measured Ryan’s ball just before it crossed the plate. Had it eyed the pitch as it was leaving Ryan’s hand (as Chapman’s was), experts believe it might have registered at upwards of 108 miles per hour. Similar retroactive estimates have put Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller’s fastest fastball at 107.6 miles per hour—and that was all the way back in 1946. Walter Johnson, who played from 1907 to 1927, is also thought to have thrown pitches at a 100 mph or more. All of which is to say: Pitchers have been throwing north of 100-mph for the past 100 years. Over the same time period, advances in training, technology, nutrition, and, yes, drugs, have fueled a dramatic upward trend in world-record athletic performances, from the marathon to the long jump to the 50 meter freestyle. But when it comes to hurling a five-ounce, leather-wrapped sphere as fast as possible, humans appear to have plateaued. “I don’t see it going much higher,” says biomedical engineer Glenn Fleisig, research director of the American Sports Medicine Institute and an expert in the biomechanics of pitching. “I'm sorry to say that, but I don’t see it happening. Baseball isn’t like other sports, where we see people running faster or swimming harder or whatever, where today’s records are smashing the records from 10 years ago.”

In 2008, an Olympic year, Lee Sweeney's phone was ringing nonstop. For a busy physiologist at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, that may be expected, but the reason behind the calls wasn't exactly run-of-the-mill. The people on the other end of the line were athletes in search of a particular kind of fix: They wanted him to dope them -- via their genes. In the late 1990s, Sweeney made headlines because of his research on "Schwarzenegger mice," which were up to 30% stronger than their average counterparts. Sweeney had been able to isolate the gene responsible for activating a protein -- IGF-1 -- that controls muscle growth and repair. The main focus of his experiments was on how to limit the deterioration of muscles with age, but the results also appealed to athletes in search of a performance boost. Word got out, however, that he was not interested. Ahead of this year's Commonwealth Games, which started April 4, Sweeney's was not such a hot number for athletes in search of an unfair advantage -- possibly because he is now an adviser for the World Anti-Doping Agency. "At the beginning, when we first started publishing on this, we did get contacted by high-level athletes," said Sweeney, who's also director of the University of Florida's Myology Institute. "These days, it's mostly body builders and people desperate to increase their performance or abilities." Back then, gene therapy -- defined as the technique of using and manipulating genes in order to treat or prevent diseases -- wasn't as established as it is today and wasn't recognised as enough of a threat to be listed as a banned practice in sport. But it soon became known that gene therapies could one day be used for much more than disease. Responding promptly to the possibility, in 2002, the anti-doping agency established "gene and cell-doping panels" of expert scientists to discuss how best to head off the problem. In 2003, the organization banned "gene doping," which it defined as the "nontherapeutic use of cells, genes, genetic elements, or modulation of gene expression, having the capacity to enhance performance." This new frontier of doping presented a simple and dark idea: What if there was a way for dopers to never be caught? Now, almost 20 years later, the technology is has finally been used to treat patients with rare diseases -- such as severe combined immunodeficiency, chronic granulomatous disorder, hemophilia, blindness, cancer and neurodegenerative diseases -- by transferring missing genes into skeletal muscles, Sweeney said. "So because of that, it is now at a point where potentially it could be used by athletes. "It could be done today in athletes if some company and government would put the resources (in) to make it happen," he said. Getting inside your genes In the case of the "Schwarzenegger mice," Sweeney used the classic method of gene therapy, in which he modified the animals' DNA using a virus to deliver and insert the required gene that would make the mice stronger. Genes are delivered into an organism using a "vector," the most common being viruses, like that used by Sweeney, which have been modified to be safe and no longer cause disease. The vectors carry the desired gene into targeted cells and, there, unload the genetic material, which in turn instructs the organism to produce the protein the gene encodes. One example of a protein well-known to athletes is erythropoietin, commonly known as EPO, which regulates the production of red blood cells in the body, increasing hemoglobin and oxygen delivery to tissues. With the injection of external EPO, elite athletes -- often cyclists -- have been enhancing performance for years, but authorities have caught on. Anti-doping controls can now detect external EPO efficiently through blood and urine tests. If extra EPO is being produced organically by a cell's machinery, however, it is almost impossible to detect as a banned substance. But the technology is not quite at that level yet. "Making the viruses that are involved in doing the gene transfer is still difficult," Sweeney said, highlighting that the science is still complicated and not something athletes could readily do at home. Another way to dope an athlete's genes is through CRISPR, or CRISPR-Cas9, a technique that allows geneticists to edit specific parts of a person's genome by removing or altering sections of DNA -- also known as gene editing. The technique is rapidly developing, leading to a World Anti-Doping Agency announcement in October that it was expanding its "gene-doping" ban to "gene editing agents designed to alter genome sequences and/or the transcriptional or epigenetic regulation of gene expression." The ban went into effect in January. "There's a couple of ways you can use CRISPR-Cas9," Sweeney said. "One is to take cells from a person, modify those cells and put them back into the person, and that is probably the safest way to use it. "The other way to use it, which is to modify your existent DNA in the body, is potentially very unsafe." Sweeney pointed out that scientists do not know what unintended consequences could come from changing a specific gene in an individual, meaning the technology is not even ready for trials in patients with lethal diseases. In the case of gene-doping through gene therapies, using vectors for delivery, it's relatively easy to look for an extra copy of a gene and confirm that an athlete has been doped when you have access to a biological sample, such as blood, said Olivier Rabin, senior executive director of sciences and international partnerships at the anti-doping agency. In particular, Rabin said, the agency looks at white-blood cells and has developed a methodology that can be applied to search for different genes. Further detail was not provided, as it is kept confidential in order to catch athletes, he added. "Gene editing is a little more complex than gene therapy," Rabin added. The anti-doping agency is working on strategies to reveal the possibility of people editing their genes for performance enhancement, he said. Rabin highlighted that most of the agency's efforts focus on white blood cells as "pretty good markers of gene manipulation" because some evidence of manipulation will usually end up in the blood. Asked what it is doing to monitor and test athletes for gene doping, the International Olympic Committee did not comment directly but said, "We have nothing to add to the section on gene doping in WADA's prohibited list." The question now is whether the first few cases have, in fact, happened without our knowledge. Modern occurrence "I never heard anything about it except for one time, and it was around five years ago," said Sebastian Weber, coach of four-time Union Cycliste Internationale world champion (time trialling) Tony Martin. "There was some buzz around a substance called AICAR," or 5-Aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide ribonucleotide. AICAR is a performance-enhancing drug that the French Anti-Doping Agency suspected was used in the 2009 Tour de France; it stimulates mitochondria, the part in the muscles responsible for aerobic energy production. In cycling, for gene doping to be effective, techniques should target both EPO levels and red blood cell production to have a higher oxygen delivery to the muscles, Weber says -- but they would also need to increase the mass and number of mitochondria in order to actually produce energy from that oxygen. "Just because you have more oxygen, it doesn't necessary mean you also have the capacity to produce energy out of it," Weber said. As AICAR was a drug, it wasn't gene doping, but it led people to wonder about what was next, he says, after this "first step" toward stimulating the body's mitochondria. "That was the only time I heard people talking about the possibility of gene-doping." Tailoring to your genes There are other ways genetics -- and a deep knowledge of them -- could help athletes improve their performance, by understanding their physiology. For example, project GENESIS -- focused on how applied genomics in elite sports can improve performance -- and its offshoot, the RugbyGene Project, are trying to identify which genetic characteristics help athletes succeed. "We recognize it is not only genetic," said Dr. Alun Williams, an exercise geneticist at Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK who works on both projects. "Training, diet and other lifestyle habits are massive factors. But along with that, the evidence is that it's impossible to have success in sports without some genetic [factors] in your favor." The researchers of these projects are hoping to identify which genes help -- or hinder -- athletes in their specific disciplines, to develop their skills in a more tailored way. For example, if an athlete has shown to have a higher genetic vulnerability to tendon injuries, scientists and coaches could reduce certain aspects of their training load over the course of the season, give longer rest periods, reduce the number of matches played in a season, or provide specific exercises and pre-habilitation workouts. But Williams points out that the field is still at an early stage. "This picture where certain genes (or even two or three genes) are related to a particular characteristic, like the tendon injury, is still a small bit of a bigger picture," he said. "So it's very important that this information that is available is put into context." A different point of view Some experts argue that we're looking at it all wrong and that athletes will always use the most modern technology to seek out an advantage -- illegal or not. "Modern sports have been principally valued on the basis of record-breaking and being able to witness extraordinary performances," said bioethicist Andy Miah, the University of Salford Chair in Science Communication and Future Media and author of "Genetically Modified Athletes: Biomedical Ethics, Gene Doping and Sport." "Even if it's not a world record, it's about trying to see something special in what humans can do, and often, that is about transcending boundaries." We give athletes all sort of technology to do that, added Miah, who readily claims to "disagree with anti-doping." Instead of the current scenario, in which anti-doping keeps trying to catch up with doping, Miah suggests a safer form of performance enhancement. "If we can have a system where enhancement was actually medically supervised, then I think that is a much more safe and healthy.

Silicon Valley, the southern region of San Francisco Bay Area of California, is arguably the most expensive place in the United States to live. At the epicenter of all this, Palo Alto is a breeding ground for many unicorn start-ups and overvalued technology companies. The region has a median home price of roughly $2,598,200. To gain a perspective of just how outrageous real estate in Silicon Valley is, the median sales price of existing homes in the United States averages around $241,000. The meteoric rise in home prices has accelerated Silicon Valley’s real estate market into bubble territory. Even San Francisco’s median cost of a one-bedroom rental floats around $3,590 per month. As the housing bubble infects much of the San Francisco Bay area, we have stumbled across the latest installment of real estate insanity that could very well be an essential clue to what comes next. Take, for instance, a burned-out shack in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood listed on Monday for $799,000. The realtor said the asking price is reasonable — given the housing market dynamics and its geographical location, said KTVU FOX 2. Img he owners of an abandoned, fire-destroyed home in San Jose are asking $800,000 for the house and surrounding 5,800 square foot lot. Holly Barr Realtor Holly Barr told KTVU the owners of an abandoned, fire-destroyed shack reflects the value of the property, not necessarily the burnt down structure. She noted in the interview, the home caught fire more than two years ago, and has been dormant ever since. “They did leave it standing so you can remodel it versus tearing it down so you save a lot of money when you can leave a wall up and do a remodel versus a complete tear-down,” Barr told the station. The Bird Avenue address in San Jose’s Willow Glen neighborhood sits close to a proposed transit-oriented Google “village” of offices, research sites and retail stores. Barr’s realtor Facebook page describes the home and lot combination as a “Great opportunity to build your dream home!” Since the posting, Barr told KTVU she has received ten offers and expected a contract on the property by the end of the week. on Twitter Barr has yet to list the property on multiple listing services (MLS), a suite of services that real estate brokers use for completing transactions. However, she says, a home down the street recently sold for $1.6 million. Glancing at the current Glen San Jose real estate market (Zillow), the average price of a home is around $1,365,900 with total square footage around 2,500 sqft. Some Facebook users found the price of the shack as absurd. Here is what they said: “800k for that…What has this area come to when a family earning good money cannot even afford to buy even a burnt out wreak.Greed, pure greed from all concerned right here,” said Cally Jayne, a Facebook user. “And here we see a perfect example of unchecked free market capitalism. A Chinese billionaire will pay $850k without blinking an eye because all they are interested in is the land as an investment. Thousands of properties bought up like this with zero interest in actually living in that lot or renting or anything. The actual housing market shrinks as a result to the point where even Silicon Valley engineers are priced out. Years later, we’ll all shrug our shoulders and go “WHAT HAPPENED!?!” like it’ll be some big mystery,” said another Facebook user. Shocking, one Facebook user claims this million dollar neighborhood filled with shacks is located down the street from “homeless encampments every which way you turn!!!” Another user warns the neighborhood where the million dollar shack resides is “full of crime” and homeless people. About a hundred comments down, Facebook users started revolting against the realtor — showing pictures of their non-shack, McMansions for substantially less in other states… “This only cost me 250k to build but I’m in Texas lol,” said Gomez. ..And alas, the problem has been solved, the Bay Area has fewer people with much more money chasing the same houses, a classic symptom of a bubble. As for the burned out shack worth 3.3x than the median sales price of existing homes in the United State, well, that is also a sign of peak stupidity for whoever buys it next.