“It’s a place where you really feel on the limit and that’s pretty awesome in an F1 car.”

That was Lewis Hamilton’s take on the Belgian Grand Prix in 2011. Back then, he was entering his final years with McLaren and only one championship trophy nestled in the cabinet.

As the summer break draws to a close and the second half of the season begins, the Briton holds a 24-point lead over rival Sebastian Vettel and has a fingertip on a fifth world title.

One of the most historic circuits on the calendar, the majestic Spa-Francorchamps is the perfect setting for battle to reconvene.

Long straights mixed with the challenge of fast, sweeping corners, this track located in a valley of the Ardennes mountains is as picturesque as a wish-you-where-here postcard, yet as brutal a test as any Formula 1 driver will face.

One year ago the roles were reserved between Hamilton and Vettel as the title battle rocked up in Belgium, with the German flying high with a 14-point advantage after victory in Hungary.

But it was the Mercedes man who seemed most recharged after the holiday recess. Equalling Michael Schumacher’s career record of 68 pole positions was the first strike, then a tense afternoon of cat-and-mouse on race day ended in a Hamilton win.

That victory was the first of three in a row for Hamilton

Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen could be one to keep an eye on after five consecutive podium finishes since the French Grand Prix in June. He also has the honour of being joint third in the all-time winners’ list at Spa, with four victories.

Is it time for the Iceman to step in and shake up a two-horse championship race?

Flashback quiz

One of the most memorable F1 races ever – the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix – is 20 years old this month. You can read all about the rain-soaked carnage, pile-ups and bust-ups of that eventful day here.

Out of the 22 drivers who started that day, only eight were classified finishers.

We want you to name those drivers.

There are two minutes on the clock to get guessing on this one.

Previously in F1: Round 12 – Hungary

The track

Back pocket facts

• Belgian Antoine-Joseph “Adolphe” Sax invented the saxophone in the early 1840s. Although the popular instrument didn’t immediately impress his peers, the musician also went onto to create the saxotromba, saxhorn and saxtuba.
• The Smurfs hail from Belgium. Comics artist Peyo came up with the original concept in 1958 after he couldn’t remember the word for salt, so instead jokingly referred to it as “schtroumpf.” “Les Schtroumpfs” was translated to “The Smurfs” for the American audience.
• Belgium’s dense road network is visible from space. The glowing highways have near-total streetlight coverage, with around 2.2 million bulbs illuminating the roads.
• The highest point in Belgium is smaller than the world’s tallest building. The Signal de Botrange on the High Fens plateau is 694 metres high, 134 metres shorter than the tallest building in the world – Dubai’s Burj Khalifa – which stands at an impressive 828 metres.

Holiday social

How to follow on BBC Sport

BBC Sport has live coverage of all the season’s races on BBC Radio 5 live and BBC Radio 5 live sports extra, plus live online commentary on the BBC Sport website and mobile app – including audience interaction, expert analysis, debate, voting, features, interviews and video content.

All times BST and are subject to change at short notice.

An Indonesian court sentenced a woman to 18 months in jail under a blasphemy law for complaining that a mosque near to her home was creating too much noise during its call to prayer.

Meiliana, 44, an ethnic Chinese Buddhist, was found guilty on Tuesday of “insulting Islam” and has been jailed for 18 months, a spokesperson for a district court in North Sumatra told reporters.

The court in the city of Medan said her comments, made in 2016, triggered riots that saw Muslims attack Buddhist temples, AFP news agency reported.

Meiliana’s lawyer said she would appeal the verdict. Amnesty International urged the court to reverse its ruling.

“This ludicrous decision is a flagrant violation of freedom of expression,” Amnesty’s executive director for Indonesia, Usman Hamid, said in a statement.

“Sentencing someone to 18 months in prison for something so trivial is a stark illustration of the increasingly arbitrary and repressive application of the blasphemy law in the country.”

In 2015, a review into practices employed by Indonesia’s estimated 800,000 mosques led by Vice President Jusuf Kalla concluded places of worship should turn down their sound systems and not broadcast lengthy sermons to avoid agitating people living nearby.

Blasphemy

Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of thousands of islands, has a larger Muslim population than any other country in the world, comprising about 220 million people.

While the country is officially pluralist, with six major religions recognised by the state, a recent rise in conservative interpretations of Islam prompted fears the blasphemy laws were being used to subjugate minorities and violate religious freedoms.

According to Indonesia’s 1965 criminal code, any person who “deliberately” abuses a religion in public may be sentenced to up to five years in prison.

Last year, the former ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta was jailed for two years on blasphemy charges after several Muslim groups accused him of insulting Islam.

The ruling was widely condemned as politically motivated. 

SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies

Castle Rock

type

TV Show

run date

07/25/18

performer

Andre Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Bill Skarsgard, Sissy Spacek

broadcaster

Hulu

seasons

1

Genre

Drama, Thriller

Warning: The following contains spoilers for Hulu’s Castle Rock. Read at your own risk!

Throughout this season of Castle Rock, Sissy Spacek’s Ruth Deaver, who suffers from dementia, has struggled to keep up with the world around her. But the latest episode of the Stephen King-inspired drama, “The Queen,” chronicles a day in her life (and her mind), and as it turns out, Ruth isn’t some helpless woman with a disease. She’s more like a time-traveler — or a “time-walker,” if you prefer Wendell’s (Chosen Jacobs) videogame term. Her days are fueled by memories, and though those flashes to the past can confuse her, she tethers herself to the present using chessmen gifted to her by Alan (Scott Glenn) years ago.

The episode’s writer, Castle Rock co-creator Sam Shaw, understood the stakes of Ruth’s disease on a personal level. Because of that, and because of the story’s self-contained nature, his process for writing the hour was “a little different,” he says. “You break episodes together as a staff, but at one point, [writer] Tom Spezialy was like, ‘We shouldn’t break this one. You just gotta take it and fight this fight alone.’ So I just had to hole up and figure the episode out.”

Below, Shaw breaks down Ruth’s journey and that devastating ending, what it was like crafting an episode that blends the past and the present, and why those chessmen made the perfect touchstones.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Why did you want to tell Ruth’s story and delve into her mind so deeply?
SAM SHAW: For personal reasons, I was thinking a lot about dementia, and I was reckoning with it outside of work. I knew that this episode was going to be an important part of the season, so it was looming on the horizon for a long time, and it was a profound experience to write it. It felt like an opportunity to tell a slightly different kind of horror story by trying to reproduce for the audience some of the sense of dislocation and deprivations of dementia, and to do it in a visceral way.

This is such a showcase for Sissy. What were your conversations about it like?
Sissy’s incredible. We spent a lot of time in the early going just talking about how we were going to represent her dementia on screen. There’s a documentary that Sissy loves that I’d never seen before called Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter that’s a slightly different look at dementia, and part of what’s fascinating about it is that it’s funny at times. There’s a lightness. We tend to think of stories about Alzheimer’s as these dirges. Having seen it up close, there’s no question there’s something profoundly tragic about the disease, but there are also people who find lightness and humor in dementia, and so we spent a lot of time just talking about what dementia would look like in this story.… I was nervous when I sent [my script] to her because I wasn’t entirely sure how she would take it, but it was really exciting that she connected with the episode really quickly.

This episode also had the tricky challenge of showing what Ruth’s going through. How did you work with director Greg Yaitanes on choreographing memory and time blending together on screen?
The craftsmanship of this episode was breathtaking to me on almost every level, at every department. But in particular, it fell to Sissy and to Greg to take an episode that could have been really cerebral and complicated and make it emotional and simple. And the truth is, there were like a thousand really wonky and minute decisions that had to be made at the writing level, and then at the production level.

For me at the writing level, I knew I wanted Sissy to play herself in all of the time periods. I didn’t want to cast younger Sissy, I didn’t want to de-age her or to use VFX or makeup.… But then there are a whole bunch of other questions you bump into, like, if she walks out of one room in 2018 into a memory in 1991, does her wardrobe change? Does her hair change? Her makeup? All of these are important questions, obviously for the wardrobe department, and for Greg as a director and also for Sissy in inhabiting the part.

So on a production level, how did it work? How did you guys figure it out?
It was interesting to me to think about the idea that people with dementia fall into their own time loops. They return to the same memories, and if you spend time with them, you can feel like you’re on your own merry-go-round. I loved the idea of putting the audience into that same headspace, where they’re forced to return to moments they’ve seen before, maybe extracting some new piece of information from the moment — or maybe not. Structurally, there are these moments throughout the episode that I almost thought of as islands. You paddle through choppyc waters and you arrive at terra firma, touchstones that help you orient. In a way, those are chess pieces for the viewer.

Speaking of which, why did you choose those chessmen to serve as her touchstones?
They’re called the Lewis chessmen, and they’re a reproduction of the famous chess set discovered in a Scottish coffin. I became really fixated on them in part because Sissy’s character, although it doesn’t ever get explicitly stated, was a teacher and studied Icelandic literature and sagas, so it felt like an apropos gift for her. One thing I hadn’t known about the development of chess is that originally the queen was the weakest chess piece on the chessboard. Its movements were really limited, and at some point the queen became the most powerful piece.

If you look at the original Lewis chess set, one thing that is really striking is the queen. They have this totally stricken look, and most of them have a hand up against the side of their face in sort of shock or grief or something, and so it feels like almost a physical expression of the horror of being a character who is fundamentally limited. This felt like an episode where we take the character who has been set aside and treated like the most limited character on the chessboard of this season of storytelling and let her, for this one hour, reign.

At the end of the episode Ruth notices the chess pieces, so is she deliberately letting herself live in the memory of Alan’s return and refusing to acknowledge her coping mechanism?
I should let the piece speak for itself, but an idea that was important to me was that it’s natural to think about dementia as a state of diminishment and deprivation, that life becomes thinner. This episode presents a vision of Ruth’s life that’s actually very full. She lives in this memory palace and she’s surrounded by the events of her own past — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse — and there’s this thought that dementia taketh away, but it also giveth in the sense that if there’s a gift for Ruth at the end of this episode, it’s that even though she’s lost this person who’s enormously important to her, she can still choose to live in that memory of him returning to her.

It’s like time travel.
Right. So that choice for her, which I think Sissy plays really beautifully, felt like the place to end this episode. I wouldn’t quite call it a happy ending, but she gets something at least in compensation for everything she’s lost.

Now, how did you convince Stephen King to let you kill off Alan Pangborn?
[Laughs] Well, we approached that choice with a real sense of humility, and we were prepared for Steve to nix the idea, so we went with our hats in our hands. It was really gratifying that he gave us the permission to tell the story we wanted to tell, and I hope it feels like an honorable and fitting end to the character. It felt like we were telling a love story about Alan Pangborn this season, and so it felt like we were ending his story with something more fitting than it would have been if he had gone out in a blaze of glory fighting some demonic force of darkness.

But was Ruth right about the Kid, then, that he was in some way channeling Matthew Deaver?
Part of the tightrope of this episode is it may be a story about a woman who, although her consciousness has diminished, has a clearer-eyed view of the Kid than anyone in our story, or it may be a story about someone with Alzheimer’s who is depressed and anxious and hatches a kind of very far-fetched idea about the provenance of Bill Skarsgård’s character. You just have to hang tight to find out, but I’ll say this: Everything that happens in the front story of this episode actually happens. We’re not gonna play fast and loose with the audience in terms of what Bill’s character says on screen, and the actions he performs.

Lastly, the title of the episode is “The Queen.” I know that’s referring to the chess piece, but is it also a reference to Sissy’s role in Carrie and her eventual status as prom queen?
[Laughs] There’s a little bit of the shoutout to prom and to Carrie in the title, for sure.

Castle Rock adds a new episode every Wednesday on Hulu.

Makayla Phillips got emotional on “America’s Got Talent” after paying tribute to her father.  

“My dad is absolutely, 100 percent my hero because he’s a firefighter,” the 15-year-old vocalist said Tuesday during the quarterfinals round. “His job is so incredibly tough, there are days where I am scared my dad won’t come home.”

Phillips brought the house down singing “Issues” by Julia Michaels, a rendition that judge Heidi Klum called better than the original. “That is the best compliment I can give you,” Klum said after giving her golden buzzer winner a standing ovation. 

More: ‘AGT’ makeup confidential: Howie Mandel invokes Omarosa, reveals he’s ‘sexiness’ of NBC hit

After her performance, Phillips wiped tears from her face. Her father was in the audience at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, along with her family. 

“It was even more incredible knowing that your family is right there next to you, supporting you, especially my dad,” she said. 

Her father, Todd Phillips, works for the Riverside County Fire Department in Mecca, California. The state has been plagued with destructive wildfires this summer. 

“I know that he is saving lives and helping people and it makes me so incredibly proud,” Phillips said of her dad. 

The feeling is mutual. “All the work you put in makes me and your mother very proud,” Phillips said to his daughter.

The singing sensation’s fate now lies in fans’ hands — viewers can vote until early Wednesday (7 a.m. ET).

“America’s Got Talent” will reveal which seven acts will advance to the semifinals on Wednesday night.

More: ‘AGT’: Feel the pressure, precision behind the scenes at a live show

Related: The enduring appeal of ‘America’s Got Talent,’ explained

 

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In light of accusations that his use of a racial slur led to the abrupt end of his four-decade long radio career, the former voice of the Indianapolis Colts, Bob Lamey, released a statement Tuesday night that acknowledged his use of “an inappropriate word.”

The statement comes in response to a report on WTHR.com that claims Lamey used the racial slur during the retelling of a story last week after a radio interview at Colts training camp. A complaint from a radio employee, WTHR.com reports, was made to the human resources department at Emmis Communications, which then contacted the Colts.

The team announced Lamey’s surprise retirement on Sunday. He had decided to return for what would’ve been a 32nd season earlier this spring.

“Bob Lamey, the former Voice of the Colts, retired from the Indianapolis Colts on August 18 following a career that spanned over four decades,” Lamey’s attorney, James Voyles, said in a statement.

“Bob was not fired by the Colts as some in the community have speculated. Bob has been in the sports broadcasting arena for almost 44 years and is 80 years old. It should be noted that Bob does want to acknowledge that while repeating a story while off-the-air last week to a friend at a local radio station, he used an inappropriate word that had been used in the story. Bob immediately apologized to the people involved for the comment and would hope that this error in judgment would not tarnish his long-held reputation in the sports community where he has been known as an accurate and passionate reporter.”

WTHR.com reported that after learning of the incident, the Colts approached Lamey on Saturday. A day later they announced his retirement. The Colts, as per organizational policy, do not discuss personnel matters publicly.

The radio employee told the news station that after his radio interview last week, Lamey told a story off-air from his days as a broadcaster at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. 

“He had asked me if the mics were off and I said, ‘Yeah, I turned everything off. You’re fine’,” the employee recalled, according to WTHR.com. “Bob Lamey’s describing this person saying he was asked in an interview, ‘Do you think anyone’s holding back their speed at IMS during quals? Do you think anyone’s holding back?’ And that person had replied ‘There aren’t any ‘blank’ in this race.”

She says Lamey didn’t say “blank” in retelling that story.

The radio station employee said Lamey apologized profusely after the incident.

WTHR.com reported that after learning of the incident, the Colts approached Lamey on Saturday. A day later they announced his retirement. The Colts, as per organizational policy, do not discuss personnel matters publicly.

In an unrelated incident, Lamey apologized in 2016 after accidentally cursing on live radio at the end of a Colts’ win.

“I’m extremely ashamed of myself and what happened last night on the game,” he said during a radio interview the following day. “It’s not normal for me.”

He added: “What I said was not necessary. It was out of place. It’ll never happen again.”

“Bob Lamey is a legend and icon, and his name is synonymous with Indianapolis Colts football,” Colts owner Jim Irsay said upon the team’s announcement that Lamey was retiring. “With his historic calls, familiar sayings and passion for football, he became part of the fabric of this entire community. No one has been more ‘Indianapolis’ than Bob Lamey. Even more so, he was very much a part of our team family, and he’s as dear to us as anyone who has ever worn the Horseshoe.”

British number one Kyle Edmund progressed to the last 16 of the Winston-Salem Open with a straight-set win over Argentina’s Leonardo Mayer.

Third seed Edmund won 6-3 6-3 in one hour and 13 minutes in North Carolina.

The 23-year-old, who has been named in the European Laver Cup team, did not face a single break point and won 93% of points on his first serve.

Edmund will face Spain’s world number 89 Roberto Carballes Baena in the next round on Wednesday.

Image: Paul Zimmerman/WireImage

Look, we’re all hoping there’s some truth to the possibility of romance between two main characters in Stranger Things Season 3 — and so is Millie Bobby Brown.

Brown, who plays Eleven in the beloved Netflix series, fully supports co-star David Harbour’s teased idea of characters Chief Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers falling in love, telling Variety she “would love for them to get together.”

Talking to the publisher at an Emmy nomination event for Stranger Things in New York on Tuesday, Brown said she was in full support of a love story between her onscreen counterpart’s guardian, Hopper, and friend Will’s mum, Joyce.  

“Listen, I would love for them to get together. Jopper is like my inspiration in life,” she said.

“Winona Ryder and David Harbour are like my parents. On set, they’re like, ‘Stop running, what are you eating, why are you eating that?’ David is like, ‘Another boy?’ And in the show, if they rekindle, that means Will and Eleven will be step-siblings. I would love that because Noah [Schnapp] is my boy best friend.”

Harbour teased fans about the undeniable chemistry between his character and Winona Ryder’s Joyce during a Q&A at a similar Emmy nomination celebration on Friday.

“It’s the summer of love in Hawkins, Indiana,” he said during the event at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

“It’s a really fun season where you’re gonna get to see these characters experience summer in Indiana, and there’s this sense of new relationships. It’s sort of a big celebration of love. That’s all I can say.”

Back in NYC, Brown also offered up a few thoughts on Season 3, confirming Harbour’s assertion that the next chapter will be more serious than the first two seasons. “It’s definitely going to get darker,” she said in a Q&A hosted by MTV’s Josh Horowitz after the screening.

Image: Paul Zimmerman/WireImage

“I think Eleven should sacrifice herself in some way,” she said, according to the publisher. “That’s how I kind of want that situation to go. I want to have her really sacrifice her powers. 

“If Eleven loses her powers, is she as powerful just as a character? I think that would be very cool. I want to build her to be a strong person without her powers…But right now it’s very about her powers and I think taking that away slowly could be cool.”

Stranger Things Season 3 will be dropping on Netflix in summer 2019. Now, back to dreaming about Joyce and Hopper, sittin’ in a tree. 

Additional reporting by Jess Joho.

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook says it foiled political influence campaigns originating out of Iran and Russia that targeted U.S. users ahead of the midterm elections.

The campaigns, which mimicked previous Kremlin-linked efforts to stir political discord around hot-button issues, also targeted users in the U.K., the Middle East and Latin America in a bid to sway world politics. 

This marks the first time Iran was implicated in a political influence campaign on Facebook. The social media giant says it has not found a connection between the Iranian and Russian campaigns but the campaigns deployed similar tactics.

“We believe these pages, groups and accounts were part of two sets of campaigns,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said in a conference call with reporters late Tuesday. “First a set of activity from Iran, including some with ties to state-owned media, and second a set of activity that the U.S. government and others have publicly linked to Russian military intelligence services.”

The revelation underscored the difficult task of protecting elections from foreign interference on social media, an effort that began after it was discovered that Russia waged a campaign to influence voters during the U.S. presidential election in 2016. After heavy criticism from lawmakers for failing to detect and purge election meddling, Facebook has made safeguarding elections around the world one of its top priorities. 

Facebook says it started investigating coordinated activity by a network of Facebook pages linked to Iran after being alerted by a cybersecurity firm FireEye. Facebook said it linked the network to Iranian state media using website registration information, as well as IP addresses and Facebook pages which had the same administrators. It removed 652 pages, groups and accounts for “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on Facebook and Instagram.

“Our systems have been able to find a lot of fake accounts that were attempting potentially to do bad things on the system and we feel like each time we get better at identifying this kind of activity upfront and putting barriers in place to those who would try to abuse these systems,” Zuckerberg said. 

According to FireEye, the Facebook content promoted Iranian political interests including anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian themes and advocated for U.S. policies favorable to Iran such as the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal but did not appear to be a “dedicated attempt” to influence the midterm elections. 

The growing activity on social media worldwide demonstrates how nation states are increasingly experimenting with online campaigns to influence and shape political discourse, FireEye said.

Twitter said late Tuesday that it removed 284 accounts for engaging in “coordinated manipulation.” The accounts in question also appeared to originate from Iran.

A 2018 report from the Oxford Internet Institute found disinformation campaigns on social media in 48 countries, up from 28 in 2017, despite efforts to combat the spread of false information.

Zuckerberg hinted more revelations of nation-state disinformation campaigns may come to light in coming months. “I think it’s safe to say we have a number of investigations going on, and we’ll update you when we know more,” he said.

Facebook told reporters it worked closely with law enforcement in the U.S. and the U.K. on the investigation, and briefed the State Department and the Treasury Department because of U.S sanctions against Iran.

Facebook was tipped off by FireEye in July to an organization called the “Liberty Front Press.” Facebook connected the group to Iranian state media and found it operated 147 pages, accounts and groups on Facebook and 76 on Instagram, reaching more than 200,000 followers. The group purchased more than $6,000 of ads and organized three events. The group also engaged in hacking accounts and spreading malware.

Facebook tied another set of accounts to Russian military intelligence. A third group, which Facebook did not identify but said it believed originated in Iran, shared information on Middle East politics in Arabic and Farsi.

 

The Facebook accounts and pages typically posed as news or other organizations which shared information in multiple countries without revealing their true identity.

The accounts which attempted to conceal their location were created in 2013. In 2017, they increased their focus on the U.S. and the UK. 

Sen. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the discovery underscores that other foreign governments are “following the Kremlin’s playbook” in targeting Facebook users to disrupt U.S. elections.

“This is further evidence that foreign adversaries are actively using social media to divide Americans and undermine our democratic institutions,” Warner said in a statement. “I’ve been saying for months that there’s no way the problem of social media manipulation is limited to a single troll farm in St. Petersburg, and that fact is now beyond a doubt.”

During and after the U.S. presidential election, Facebook unwittingly hosted hundreds of pages and accounts later connected to the Internet Research Agency in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Kremlin-linked operation also bought thousands of ads targeting Americans with politically divisive messages. Federal prosecutors indicted 13 Russians involved with the Internet Research Agency for their involvement in election meddling.

Last month Facebook detected and removed 32 pages and fake accounts which raised divisive social issues ahead of the midterms. Facebook did not definitively link the campaign to Russia, but said the tactics were similar those of the Internet Research Agency.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are scheduled to testify at a Senate hearing next month on foreign interference on social media.

“Russia is not the only hostile foreign actor developing this capability, and…addressing this threat requires technology companies, law enforcement, Congress, and the intelligence community working together,” Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement. “There is still much that needs to be done and I look forward to discussing it further at the committee’s Sept. 5th hearing.”

More: We read every one of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by Russians. Here’s what we found

More: Russian Facebook ads inflamed Hispanic tensions over immigration after Trump election

More: Russia exploited race divisions on Facebook. More black staffers, diversity could have have helped.

 

 

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