Leif Ames

Cryptocurrency exchange has begun to allow withdrawals after theft believed to have come from North Korea

Investors have pulled $3.6bn (£2.7bn) in funds from the cryptocurrency exchange Binance as it recovers from a record hack in which billions were stolen from customer accounts.

The platform was hit by a $6.3bn theft on Thursday, which has since been described as the biggest heist in history. Experts identified North Korea as the probable culprit.

UN-backed report finds even temporary rises above Paris agreement target could cause harm to glaciers and polar ice sheets

Earth’s icy regions face such dangerous melting that global heating should be brought back below 1C after an inevitable period of overshooting global temperature targets, a UN report has found.

Permanent and widespread losses of snow and ice expose a “persistent myth” that overshooting the 1.5C target of the Paris climate agreement – to 2C or 3C – could be manageable or even preferable to urgent cuts to emissions, the report found.

In a downpour against the Atlanta Falcons, Tampa Bay decided throwing was for losers. They were proved right

I don’t think I’m being cheeky when I say that passing is the most exciting part of football. A solid hit is nice, and a big run can thrill you, but this is a quarterback-centric game. When a QB is bad, teams usually lose and fans get bored. So, Sunday’s performance by Baker Mayfield and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers has me positively gobsmacked. I wouldn’t say their 16-0 win over the Atlanta Falcons was thrill-a-minute, but it certainly was historic. By completing a grand total of zero passes out of a paltry three attempts, Baker Mayfield led the Bucs to the first game with no passing offense since the Buffalo Bills beat the New York Jets 16-12 on 29 September 1974. If you are miraculously old enough to remember the NFL before the advent of the forward pass in 1906, first off, congratulations on being over 120 years of age. Please email me your full diet and exercise regimen. You’re probably on your feet (if standing is still something physically possible), cheering a bit of hard-nosed, classic football. The rest of us young whippersnappers still grinding through our first century are holding our noses.

Of course, Mayfield – a former No 1 overall pick – can throw. As recently as 2024 he threw for 41 touchdowns and 4,500 passing yards in a season. But Sunday’s game was played in pouring rain that led to farcical moments like this, and Tampa clearly decided that the ground game was the only way to go. That Tampa Bay could score at all, let alone 16 points, is a credit to Bucky Irving and Kenneth Gainwell running as if their lives depended on it. Irving finished the day with 170 rushing yards and one touchdown, while Gainwell had 140. Combined, they rushed 52 times for 324 yards – the most ever in a single game for the Bucs. They more than made up for Mayfield’s borderline irrelevance in the pocket. Mayfield made himself useful blocking for his runners, but otherwise, I probably could have started at QB for the Buccaneers and the game would have been the same, other than the high likelihood of me suffering at least one gruesome injury.

Despite the US president’s ratings being at rock bottom, undoing his legacy will be difficult, not least because the Democrats are in disarray

The stats and polling all suggest one thing: the Republicans are set for a hammering in the midterms. Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any US president going into a midterm election since Harry Truman. And it’s still dropping. The Democrats are projected to win by a margin of 11 percentage points, the largest swing by any party in almost 20 years. It is possible that the Democrats flip the Senate and secure a large majority in Congress. Those majorities would make a material difference, perhaps finally establishing oversight of the policies Trump has brought in during his second term: immigration enforcement, trade disputes, gutting the federal workforce, the Iran war, to say nothing of his own family’s corruption. The tide seems to be turning, and one question is on everyone’s mind: is the Trump era really ending?

“Nobody wants to jinx it,” wrote David Wallace-Wells of the New York Times, but: “All the signs we have suggest that, historic or not, these midterms are likely to mark the end of a political era.” What that gives way to is a much more complicated picture in which the US will be delivered from Trump himself, but remains a country riven and undermined by what he has unleashed. By the time he is gone, Trump will have been president for eight years, and a toxic force for more than 12. That is a long time even for a normal politician. Under one who shatters norms and forces himself into the centre of everything, Trump’s effect is as if he were president for decades.