Catch up with all the week’s football fixtures and results.

Alejandro Davidovich Fokina ended Rafael Jodar’s dream run at the Shanghai Masters on Sunday, battling back to beat ‌his fellow Spaniard 1-6, 7-6, 6-4 and clinch the biggest title of his career. In Wuhan, meanwhile, French ⁠Open finalist ⁠Maja Chwalinska ⁠won her first title on the WTA tour as she shook off early nerves to beat Sonay ‌Kartal 2-6, 6-4, 6-2 at the Wuhan Open final. The 25th-seeded Davidovich Fokina is set to climb 13 places to a career-high world No 13 when the rankings are...

When artificial intelligence agents first arrived, they came with a tantalising promise: autonomous “digital workers” that would finally free humans from corporate drudgery. As businesses across Asia are discovering, however, the reality is quite the opposite – more work, new friction and a whole new layer of management. When Xiao Mengjie, an AI product marketing manager at a Big Tech firm in Shanghai, recently assigned two AI agents what she described as a simple task, she expected efficiency....

The Kent Senior Trophy took centre stage on Saturday with clubs competing in the first round.

Wang Wei-hsuan made sure lightning did not strike twice at the SJM Macau Open, winning in a play-off almost a year after a sudden death shoot-out shattered his hopes of taking the title. Just 364 days after a heartbreaking loss to Germany’s Dominic Foos, the Taiwanese golfer got the better of South Korea’s Im Sung-jae in a final-round battle that went right down to the 72nd hole and beyond. Trailing by a shot heading down the par-5 18th at Macau Golf and Country Club, Wang chipped in for an...

Former Chinese table tennis teammates Zhang Jike and Liu Dingshuo have become embroiled in a public feud online, trading accusations of clout-chasing across their respective live-streams, despite having once shared the same provincial training ground. The dispute erupted when 28-year-old Liu took aim at Zhang during a recent broadcast without naming him directly, accusing the decorated Olympian of spending recent years “riding on the national team’s coattails, pulling seniority and stirring up...

On the face of it, Grand Slam Track should have worked. The brainchild of Michael Johnson, the four-time Olympic gold medal sprinter, the initiative was designed to give track and field a regular season narrative; to position track and field in the global spotlight and reward the world’s best athletes with the cash rewards and superstar profiles that their talents merited. Still, poor crowds for Grand Slam Track’s (GTS) April 2025 debut in Jamaica raised the first red flag. Attendances over the...

Manager Gareth Ainsworth admitted that even he was surprised at how badly his Gillingham team performed on Saturday.

Gillingham left Accrington empty-handed after conceding from a defensive mix-up and twice from corner kicks.

Whitstable came from behind to beat Isthmian South East leaders South Park and secure a fifth straight league victory.

Top seed Alexander Zverev fell to a relentless Alejandro Davidovich Fokina in the Shanghai Masters semi-finals on Saturday over three tense sets. Davidovich Fokina, ranked world No 26, fought back to win 5-7, 6-4, 6-3 and will play fellow Spaniard Rafael Jodar in the final on Sunday. The 20-year-old Jodar beat fifth-seed Daniil Medvedev, a decade his senior, 6-3, 6-4 to deny the Russian former world No 1 a chance to return to the championship match he won in 2019. Jodar, ranked 13th, started the...

Follow today’s football action, including Gillingham away to Accrington, in our live blog.

China’s proposed export bans and controls of artificial intelligence technologies aim to tighten Beijing’s grip in the strategically vital sector, casting a cloud over the commercial prospects of domestic model developers in the global AI race, analysts say. The new measures come as concerns mount globally over the risks of advanced AI systems, following a string of recent cyberattacks, while also underscoring AI’s growing national security importance for both Beijing and Washington. Zhang Yi,...

Former Olympic champion Mima Ito has been dropped from Japan’s latest national table tennis squad, replaced by 28-year-old breakthrough player Hitomi Sato, who finished runner-up at the recent WTT China Smash. Across the border, meanwhile, followers of rival powerhouses China have focused their attention on widely circulated Chinese media reports that the Japan Table Tennis Association plans to dismantle the high-profile mixed-doubles pairing of Sora Matsushima and Miwa Harimoto. Under the...

Alibaba Group Holding’s two major domestic online marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, plan to greatly expand the use of artificial intelligence across merchants’ operations next year, a senior executive said, as the e-commerce giant doubles down on the technology to drive growth amid a challenging consumer landscape. “Starting next year, AI will comprehensively enter the internal enterprise workflows of merchants,” Liu Bo, president of Tmall, said at the company’s Singles’ Day media briefing on...

Dutch semiconductor equipment giant ASML is expanding into next-generation hybrid bonding, a technique that creates dense electrical connections by directly joining chips or silicon wafers, according to a new report. Major Chinese companies are also adopting the technology to improve chip performance. ASML submitted 27 patent families related to hybrid bonding tools between December 2022 and November 2024, according to a report published by semiconductor and AI supply chain research firm...

Hong Kong will host a World Fencing League event next year, bringing the sport’s best and brightest to the city for one day in April, sources have told the South China Morning Post. The brainchild of 2016 US Olympic team foil bronze medallist Miles Chamley-Watson, WFL staged its inaugural event in Los Angeles earlier this year, and featured the likes of Hong Kong’s Ryan Choi Chun-yin, who captained Team Shield. Sources said the league was being pencilled in for the penultimate week of April, a...

The 0.1 second that stood between Yvette Kong Man-yi and qualifying for the 2012 Olympics was “unbearable”, the Hong Kong swimmer writes in her newly published memoir, The Unmeasured Human. It was, the 33-year-old recalls years later, “too small to feel and too large to survive unchanged”. Fourteen years on, Kong is grateful for the heartbreaking experience, telling the South China Morning Post that “challenge is fundamental to human growth and spirit”. “I needed to find the courage to try again...

Gareth Ainsworth knows Accrington inside out and has warned the Gills they must match the hosts’ intensity if they are to make it back-to-back wins.

Hyrox has warned fans that a group calling itself the Hyrox Association of Macau is not part of the global fitness brand and has no authority to run races in the city. The rapidly growing company said it had already taken official steps to stop the upstart organisation from copying it. According to local media, the new group hosted a dinner on Tuesday in the casino hub to mark its official launch, during which it reportedly unveiled plans for an inaugural “Macau Fitness Run Challenge” at the...

Alibaba Group Holding is gearing up for its annual Singles’ Day shopping festival on major online marketplaces Taobao and Tmall, with the company expecting a record one million global brands to take part this year. Pre-sales for the event open on Thursday, followed by the formal sale next Tuesday. The company projects more than 70 million products to feature, also a record for the festival. Created by Alibaba in 2009, Singles’ Day has grown into the world’s largest online shopping festival. Also...

Gillingham’s fringe players put in an impressive showing in midweek but manager Gareth Ainsworth is unlikely to tinker much with a winning formula.

Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek apologised and promised compensation to users after its services suffered a nearly five-hour outage on Thursday. DeepSeek will issue users a full refund for any consumption between October 8 and October 14 in the form of credits, according to a notice posted on the Hangzhou-based start-up’s application programming interface (API) platform. DeepSeek’s namesake chatbot and API services for its V4 Pro and V4.1 Flash models went offline on Thursday...

Opening batsman Zak Crawley has extended his Kent Cricket contract for the second time this year.

Chinese artificial intelligence lab Z.ai’s latest flagship model, GLM-5.3, may be sophisticated enough to “fake” its way through safety tests, according to a new report published Thursday, sparking new fears about the ability of artificial intelligence systems to shape their own development. The model, launched in August, showed an ability to consider how its behaviour during safety evaluations might influence how future versions of itself would be trained, according to AI safety organisation...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) is in discussions regarding a potential role in Elon Musk’s proposed Terafab project in Texas, according to company chairman and CEO C.C. Wei, although he stressed that TSMC would retain operational control of any partner factory. The plant “has got to be run by TSMC”, Wei said during the third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, has sent teams to Texas to assess expansion opportunities beyond its US hub in...

Chatham heavyweight Moses Itauma has a date set for his return to the ring.

A top American high school snapping up a talented Chinese teen basketball player once deemed “too short” to represent the national team has sparked debate online about the country’s rigid training and selection criteria. Zhang Yuchen, who has drawn similarities to Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry, left Guangzhou for Phoenix on Wednesday to join the CIA Bella Vista’s men’s basketball team. Winning both the Chipotle High School Basketball Nationals and the EYBL Scholastic titles last...

A Chinese start-up has unveiled a prototype extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light-source machine – a component often described as the “heart” of advanced lithography systems – marking an early but critical step in Beijing’s drive for self-reliance in chipmaking equipment. At the China International Industry Fair in Shanghai, Langdao Silex displayed its self-developed EUV light-source system. Ninety per cent of the machine’s components were localised, with the vast majority of core parts developed...

Gillingham manager Gareth Ainsworth believes his squad is the best in League Two.