Harry Waldock has grabbed his chance in Gillingham’s first team – and was rewarded with a special moment during Saturday’s win over Bristol Rovers.

When Chinese artificial intelligence developers want to train their next-generation frontier models, they all face the same daunting wall: they cannot legally buy the world’s most powerful AI chips. However, the country’s tech giants and start-ups have still managed to quietly keep pace with global rivals. Their secret is an elusive workaround: moving heavy training workloads across borders through the cloud. By setting up proxy entities in foreign jurisdictions, domestic firms have for years...

China’s Yu Zidi added another Asian Games gold to an already glittering resume on Monday, after Siobhan Haughey had defended her 200m freestyle title and Ian Ho Yentou grabbed silver in a fast 50m race. Yu moved through the gears in the women’s 200m individual medley at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre, and her time of two minutes, 06.10 seconds, was an Asian record. That mark had been set by compatriot Yu Yiting when she won the race in Hangzhou three years ago, but the record holder was no match for...

Their adrenaline pumping in the immediate aftermath of competition, sportspeople can tend towards hyperbole. Mike Tyson took the biscuit, poleaxing Lou Savarese, then calling out future opponent Lennox Lewis with the immortal line “I want your heart, I want to eat your children.” Not remotely as graphic, but after unfancied Bangladesh had ended New Zealand’s 17-match home unbeaten streak in a gripping 2022 Test, their excited seamer Taskin Ahmed praised his side for “giving 110 per cent”, a...

The sky is the limit for Chinese swimming starlet Yu Zidi after the teenage girl stormed to her maiden Asian Games gold medal on her regional multi-sport games debut on Sunday. Yu powered to the women’s 200 metres butterfly crown, leading from start to finish at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre before touching the wall first in a Games-record time of two minutes and 5.08 seconds, taking over the honour from compatriot Zhang Yufei, who set the time in Hangzhou three years ago. Yu, 13, was already three...

Hong Kong’s women made Asian Games history on Sunday, winning silver in the 4x100m freestyle relay, while China’s contingent dominated the day in the pool from start to finish. Olympian Siobhan Haughey pushed her team, who were in fourth after Gilaine Ma’s opening leg, into second, and Li Sum-yiu and Natalie Kan Cheuk-tung held their position to finish in three minutes, 36.59 seconds, a new Hong Kong record. The previous best of 3:39.10 was set in Hangzhou, where they claimed bronze, as they had...

Sheldon Kendall had never scored in the Football League before - within minutes of coming on, he had two.

There was something almost inevitable about the way the first day of competition at the Asian Games in Japan unfolded on Sunday, and the only real surprise would have been finding someone surprised by it all. That is until Hong Kong’s women came second in the 4x100m freestyle relay in the final event at Tokyo Aquatics Centre. Just the second silver the team has ever managed in the discipline, it was as unexpected as the city-record time that accompanied it. Much earlier in the day’s proceedings,...

Unbeaten Faversham Town moved up to third place with a derby win over Herne Bay.

Nine Kent clubs will be in Monday’s FA Cup third qualifying round draw.

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

Gillingham’s impressive form continued on Saturday with a win over Bristol Rovers at Priestfield.

Gareth Ainsworth believes Gillingham have “got something special” after they sent out a statement with a 3-0 win over Bristol Rovers at Priestfield.

Follow today’s football action, including Gillingham at home to Bristol Rovers, in our live blog.

Chinese action camera maker Insta360 is deepening its US footprint with a flagship store opening in New York as it navigates escalating price competition with DJI and industry-wide memory cost pressures. The Chinese GoPro rival was slated to plant its flag in the heart of Times Square with its first flagship retail store in the US on Saturday, a marquee launch as the firm looked to “leap to the next stage of growth”, co-founder Max Richter said. “The US market plays a very important role for us...

After all the meticulous preparation, the talking and the injury frights, Chloe Leung Wing-yee is ready for the clock to start ticking on her race of truth in the remote hills of Shinshiro City on Sunday. The little finger on her right hand that Leung broke following a racing crash in Italy in July has been a nuisance, but she has reconciled with the fact that it is just one more challenge, besides the slopes and corners that characterise a deeply technical course, to overcome in her pursuit of...

Alibaba Group Holding’s research arm, Damo Academy, has open-sourced an artificial intelligence model capable of identifying nearly 150 abdominal conditions – including cancers – by reading computed tomography (CT) scans, marking the latest step in the firm’s growing medical AI efforts. The vision-language model, called Damo Radar, was designed to analyse contrast-enhanced CT scans covering 18 abdominal organs and identify a broad range of diseases and other abnormalities, such as malignant...

Just one day before the official opening of the Asian Games, chaotic accommodation arrangements have surfaced on the cruise ship hosting athletes in Nagoya, with Chinese table tennis stars including Sun Yingsha and Wang Chuqin describing living on board as a “unique” experience. On Thursday, the Chinese table tennis team held their first practice session in Nagoya following a rocky arrival that significantly compressed their training and rest schedule. The team also had to quickly adapt to...

China is emerging as a key target for growth as the International Cricket Council seeks new fans worldwide, its chief executive says. While South Asia accounts for about 90 per cent of cricket’s billion-plus fans, the ICC is seeking to expand the sport’s fan base by 500 million and sees China’s 1.4 billion people as a potentially huge audience – helped by the steady progress of its women’s team. “The continued success of their women’s team has provided a major boost to cricket in the country,”...

Australian athlete Joanna Wietrzyk has issued a public apology after soiling herself during Hyrox Beijing, admitting she should have stepped off the track while announcing her retroactive withdrawal from the race and forfeiture of her points. The 24-year-old elite athlete completed Saturday’s race covered in faeces after organisers failed to intervene, leaving more than 1,000 subsequent participants to compete on the contaminated track and shared equipment. Wietrzyk previously posted “a win is a...

Chinese artificial intelligence models from seven major developers combined generate only about 10 per cent of the revenue reported for OpenAI and Anthropic, even as investor enthusiasm remains intense, according to US-based research firm Rhodium Group. The Chinese AI models earned an estimated US$10.7 billion in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from March to August, a fraction of the more than US$100 billion combined for OpenAI and Anthropic, according to the Rhodium report published on...

As market fears mount over waning Big Tech spending and calls to slow down frontier artificial intelligence development, Asia-Pacific semiconductor foundries are better positioned to withstand a potential downturn in AI investment than other tech hardware firms in the region, according to S&P Global Ratings. In a report published on Thursday, the rating agency said it had stress tested four key Asia-Pacific sectors – foundries, memory manufacturers, cooling component suppliers and original...

Zheng Qinwen’s sponsors have proved even more excited than her long-awaiting fans, kicking off a new round of commercial campaigns to capitalise on her 69-spot surge to world No 52 after her comeback run at the US Open. Following her amazing comeback victories at the year’s final grand slam event in New York, where she lost only to eventual champion Elena Rybakina in the quarter-finals, her sponsors posted celebratory campaigns, competing to highlight their early faith in her resilience. Among...

Huawei Technologies expects a major domestic shift towards its artificial intelligence computing infrastructure for model training next year, as its Ascend processors gain ground on Nvidia in China despite supply constraints, according to rotating chairman Eric Xu Zhijun. “I believe that starting from next year, a lot of the AI model training will be based on the SuperPoD or SuperCluster based on Ascend 950DT,” Xu told reporters during the Huawei Connect 2026 conference in Shanghai on...

Gareth Ainsworth believes Gillingham have turned a corner after finally getting the chance to build the team he wanted.

A big believer that elite sporting performance is entirely dictated by an athlete’s brain, Greg Koenig is busy convincing Cheung Ka-long that the Asian Games remain an important date in his calendar. Hong Kong’s first fencing superstar, Cheung has been there and done it over the past five years. He brilliantly won a pair of Olympic golds, first as an unfancied underdog, then as the foil king his rivals all wanted to dethrone, either side of becoming Asian Games champion in 2023. Of Cheung’s...

Promotion-chasing Kent wrapped up a seventh County Championship Division 2 victory of the summer in three days against Lancashire.

Athletes from multiple countries arriving in Japan for the 20th Asian Games were stranded at Nagoya airport because of a technical glitch, leaving some Chinese team members stuck for seven hours without food. According to state media, the plane carrying the country’s delegation from Beijing landed on schedule at around 12.15pm, with buses already waiting at Chubu Centrair International Airport to take them to their accommodation. However, athletes and officials soon found themselves trapped at...

Steve Evans will bring his familiar touchline intensity back to Priestfield on Saturday – but Gills boss Gareth Ainsworth says he has his respect.

Gillingham are close to welcoming back several injured players for Saturday’s visit of Bristol Rovers – but striker Ronan Hale remains a doubt.