Josh Kerr broke one of track and field’s longest-standing world records Saturday, running a mile in 3 minutes, 42.66 seconds at the London Diamond League meeting to shatter Hicham El Guerrouj’s 27-year-old mark, completing an eight-month training project the British runner had publicly dubbed “Project 222.”

The record, previously set at 3:43.13 by Morocco’s El Guerrouj in Rome in July 1999, had stood as one of the oldest and most revered marks in outdoor track and field. Kerr’s winning time shaved 0.47 seconds off that record, finishing well clear of the field at London Stadium in a performance that fulfilled a goal he had announced publicly months in advance, naming the effort “Project 222” after his target time of 222 seconds, or 3 minutes 42 seconds.

Kerr, 28, executed the race with the help of pacemakers who guided him through the early stages at a precise, metronomic pace. His Brooks Beasts teammate Brandon Kidder led him through the first 800 meters, before Zan Rudolf took over pacing duties through the 1,000-meter mark. Kerr then closed out the race on his own, splitting laps of 54.75, 55.88 and 55.76 seconds to reach the bell before pulling away decisively over the final lap. American record-holder Yared Nuguse chased Kerr over the closing stretch but ultimately finished more than three seconds behind in a season-best time of 3:45.69, with Jake Heyward also unable to keep pace with the Scottish runner down the home straight.

Speaking to reporters on the track immediately after the race, Kerr was quick to credit the team around him rather than take individual ownership of the achievement. “That was not me, that was my team every single step,” Kerr said, referencing the extensive support Brooks, his longtime sponsor, had provided in developing a bespoke racing spike and speed suit specifically engineered for the record attempt.

Kerr’s build-up to the record attempt had been unusually public for an athlete targeting a world record of this magnitude. Speaking to the BBC ahead of the race, Kerr described the mile world record as one of the sport’s most significant benchmarks. “It’s been a huge goal of my career. It’s one of the oldest world records on the track and I think it’s one of the most important ones,” Kerr told BBC Sport. “It has stood the test of time and needs a huge amount of respect. With the training numbers that we’re putting up, I think this year is such a great opportunity to have a real crack at it while not giving up other opportunities.”

Kerr entered the 2026 outdoor season on the back of a successful indoor campaign, having won his third career world title by claiming gold in the indoor 3,000 meters in Toruń, Poland, holding off a late charge from Olympic 1,500-meter champion and 5,000-meter world champion Cole Hocker. That performance capped Kerr’s return from a torn calf muscle suffered during his failed defense of the outdoor 1,500-meter world title in Tokyo roughly six months earlier. With no outdoor world championship scheduled for 2026, Kerr and his team made the decision to redirect his focus toward El Guerrouj’s mile mark, a target Kerr said carried special significance given the record’s age and stature within the sport.

In an interview with Olympics.com ahead of the attempt, Kerr framed the pursuit as part of a broader mission to elevate the profile of middle-distance running. “This is the legacy I’m going to leave for the sport. Showing the next generation what it takes to go after big records like this and to dominate a distance where it’s hard to find the guy who will do that consistently,” Kerr said. “I’m here to do the big things and hopefully continue to elevate the sport as much as I can. Not announcing that is not in my character.”

Ahead of the record attempt, Kerr used a tune-up race at the LA Track Fest to sharpen his speed over shorter distances, clocking a personal best of 1 minute, 44.60 seconds in the 800 meters as part of his preparation. Kerr’s previous personal best in the mile stood at 3:45.34, a mark he set in 2024 when he broke Steve Cram’s 39-year-old British mile record at a Diamond League meeting in Eugene, Oregon, defeating Norwegian rival Jakob Ingebrigtsen in that race. Saturday’s world-record performance improved on that previous personal best by nearly three seconds, a substantial jump for an athlete already ranked among the world’s fastest milers.

Kerr’s rivalry with Ingebrigtsen has been a defining storyline of his career in recent years, dating back to his upset victory over the Norwegian in the 1,500 meters at the 2023 World Athletics Championships and continuing through their close battle at the Paris 2024 Olympics, where Kerr took silver behind Hocker. Cram, who set his own British mile record in 1985 and later became a BBC commentator, praised Kerr’s development following his 2024 Eugene performance, saying at the time that Kerr was “getting better and better and better.”

Saturday’s race also carried added weight given the venue. Kerr competed in front of a home crowd at London Stadium, a factor he had specifically cited as adding significance to the attempt. He is also set to compete for Commonwealth gold in the mile on home soil in the weeks following Saturday’s Diamond League meeting, giving the London record attempt additional context within his broader 2026 season plans.

With El Guerrouj’s mark now broken, Kerr’s 3:42.66 becomes the new benchmark for the men’s mile world record, a distance and event long considered one of track and field’s most storied and closely watched, dating back generations of milers who have chased sub-four-minute and record-setting performances on the world’s biggest stages.

A teenager driving for the first time since passing her test found herself trapped in gridlock for eight hours on the M25 in Essex this week, one of numerous drivers left stranded after a crash near a major shopping center triggered a full closure of part of Britain’s busiest motorway.

The disruption began around 5:30 a.m. local time Thursday following a crash near junction 31 for the Lakeside Shopping Centre in Grays, Essex. What was initially expected to be a routine incident response turned into a prolonged closure, with the affected stretch of motorway not reopening until 8:40 p.m. that evening. National Highways said the extended shutdown resulted from a combination of factors, including an oil spill that required roughly a quarter of a mile, or 400 meters, of road to be resurfaced, with the hot weather further slowing the cooling process needed before repairs could be completed.

Among those caught in the resulting gridlock was Beatrix, a 17-year-old from Romford, east London, who was making what should have been a 20-minute journey with a relative on one of her first drives since passing her driving test. Beatrix said she and her cousin lost all means of navigation early into the ordeal after both of their phones died, leaving them to rely on road signs alone to find their way. “It was me and my cousin in the car and both of our phones died. So, we didn’t really know how to get back and we were following road signs,” Beatrix said. “I’ve never driven on the M25… so, that was very scary.” Despite the pressure of the situation, Beatrix said she believed her driving instructor would have been impressed with how she handled the unexpected test of her still-fresh skills, even as one of her arms became sunburned from sitting in the stationary traffic for hours. Temperatures in Grays reached 29 degrees Celsius, or roughly 84 degrees Fahrenheit, on Thursday, adding to the discomfort for drivers stuck without air conditioning relief for extended periods. Beatrix added that her parents, unable to track her location and unaware of when she might eventually make it home, were “so worried” throughout the ordeal.

Beatrix was far from the only driver whose journey was dramatically extended by the closure. Rosie Potter, a 29-year-old civil servant, described what should have been a roughly hour-long drive from Lakeside to Colchester turning into a more than nine-hour ordeal. Potter left the retail car park at 1:30 p.m. and did not arrive home until 11 p.m. that night. She recalled growing increasingly anxious as evening approached without any resolution in sight. “I thought, ‘Oh no, am I gonna be stuck in my car overnight in the dark in an area that I don’t really know very well?’” Potter said. She described the practical difficulties of being trapped for so long without basic necessities. “You can’t sit there for eight, nine hours with your engine running and your aircon running,” Potter said. “There’s no water. There’s no access to any toilets. There’s no food. There’s nothing. There’s nothing around.” Potter also described encountering other stranded families in similarly difficult situations, including parents who had left home for a quick errand only to find themselves stuck for hours without supplies for their children. “There were people with babies that had literally nipped out to the shops and were then stranded for hours and had no milk, no bottles left for their children,” she said.

Some motorists sought refuge at the Thurrock service station, only to find themselves unable to leave the car park once traffic backed up further. Sara Tidy, a 63-year-old journalist traveling from Stansted Airport to her home in Benenden, Kent, described the scene at the service station as chaotic but at times almost communal, with drivers finding creative ways to pass the time. “Literally hundreds of cars” filled the area, Tidy said, describing children playing tennis in the car park to stay entertained during the wait. Tidy also spoke with members of a band who were traveling to a gig outside Norwich and risked missing their performance entirely because of the delay. “They had their drums and guitars and stuff on the tarmac to entertain themselves,” she said. Tidy also described encountering a woman in the car park who was in urgent need of medication and growing increasingly distressed as the hours passed without any clear resolution to the closure.

The scale of the disruption extended well beyond the immediate crash site, with severe congestion reported across Grays, Purfleet and the wider Thurrock area throughout the day. According to reporting on the incident, two lanes of the clockwise M25 and an associated entry slip road remained closed for most of the day, with queues stretching approximately 10 miles back toward Brentwood. One motorist, Graham Potter, described the scene as “absolutely ridiculous traffic gridlock at Lakeside,” noting that his daughter had been stuck in stationary traffic for seven and a half hours.

National Highways issued a public apology following the extended closure, describing itself as “deeply sorry” for the eight-hour waits drivers endured. Responding to affected motorists on the social media platform X, the organization confirmed it would undertake a formal review of how the incident was managed, from the initial crash response through the extended resurfacing work that ultimately kept the motorway closed for more than 15 hours.

The M25, which forms a roughly 117-mile orbital route around Greater London, is one of the busiest and most heavily trafficked motorways in the United Kingdom, and closures of this length are relatively rare even given the road’s history of periodic congestion and incident-related disruptions. Thursday’s closure adds to a string of recent M25 disruptions in the Essex area, though the combination of an oil spill, resurfacing needs and extreme summer heat made this particular incident notably longer and more disruptive than typical crash-related closures on the route. With National Highways now committing to review its handling of the incident, drivers affected by Thursday’s gridlock said they hoped the review would lead to faster resolution of similar closures in the future, particularly given the extreme heat and lack of basic amenities many described enduring throughout the day.

Players of Minecraft, one of the world’s most popular video games, began reporting widespread access problems Saturday morning, according to outage-tracking service Downdetector, which recorded a spike in user complaints beginning at 10:48 a.m. Eastern time.

Downdetector, which aggregates real-time reports from users to identify potential service disruptions across websites, apps and games, flagged the surge in a post on its social media account, prompting the hashtag #MinecraftDown to circulate among affected players. As of Saturday afternoon, neither Mojang Studios, the game’s developer, nor its parent company, Microsoft, had issued a public statement addressing the reported disruption.

Minecraft’s core online services are managed through a combination of Mojang and Microsoft account systems, which handle player authentication, marketplace access, multiplayer server connections and the Realms subscription service that allows players to host private, always-online worlds for themselves and friends. Because these systems are interconnected, disruptions affecting authentication or login servers can cascade into broader problems across multiple parts of the game, even when a player’s local, offline single-player experience remains unaffected.

Saturday’s reported outage adds to a pattern of periodic service disruptions that have affected Minecraft over the past year, with player complaints on outage-tracking platforms ranging from login failures and marketplace slowdowns to more significant server-side authentication problems. According to data from outage-monitoring service StatusGator, Minecraft has received dozens of user-submitted outage reports within individual 24-hour windows on multiple occasions in recent months, even during stretches when the game’s official status remained listed as fully operational, reflecting how difficult it can be for automated monitoring systems to catch every localized or intermittent disruption affecting a portion of the game’s global player base.

Some of Minecraft’s most disruptive outages in recent memory have specifically affected Realms, the game’s subscription-based multiplayer hosting service. In one previous incident, hundreds of players reported being unable to access their Realms servers after an outage began affecting login functionality, with many users encountering error messages when attempting to open the Realms tab within the game. That disruption, tracked heavily on Downdetector at the time, left affected players unable to reach their own privately hosted worlds even though other parts of the game continued functioning normally for many users.

Frustration among the Minecraft player community over the pace and clarity of official communication during past outages has also been a recurring theme on social media. Users posting on X during previous disruptions have criticized Mojang’s support account for slow or unclear updates during extended outages, with one user asking pointedly during a past incident whether it should take more than a day for the company to acknowledge that Realms was experiencing problems, and questioning whether future disruptions would be handled with similarly limited communication.

Common symptoms reported during past Minecraft outages have included failure to log in through the game’s launcher, error messages indicating the game “couldn’t connect to the Minecraft services,” extremely slow loading times when attempting to join servers or access the in-game marketplace, and, in some cases, players being forced into offline mode despite having a stable internet connection. Third-party launchers and modified clients that rely on Minecraft’s official authentication servers, such as the popular Prism Launcher, have also been affected during past outages, with some users reporting authentication failures even when attempting to verify server connectivity directly.

Minecraft remains one of the best-selling and most actively played video games in the world, with a global player base spanning both casual single-player users and large, persistent multiplayer communities hosted through Realms, third-party server hosting services, and Microsoft’s broader Xbox and PC gaming ecosystems. Given that scale, even relatively brief or partial outages affecting login or authentication systems can generate a large volume of user reports in a short period of time, as appeared to be the case with Saturday morning’s spike in Downdetector complaints.

As of Saturday afternoon, it remained unclear how widespread the reported outage was, which specific services or regions were most affected, or how long the disruption might persist before service is fully restored. Given the pattern established by previous Minecraft outages, affected players may see functionality return gradually as different systems, such as authentication, marketplace access and multiplayer server connections, come back online at different times rather than all at once.

Players experiencing issues were advised to check both the official Mojang Support account on X and third-party monitoring tools such as Downdetector for updates, since the game’s own status indicators have not always reflected ongoing incidents in real time during past disruptions. In the meantime, players affected by connectivity issues were encouraged to try standard troubleshooting steps, including restarting the game launcher, verifying account credentials, and checking for any pending software updates that might be contributing to login or connectivity problems on their end before assuming a broader service-wide outage is responsible.

Minecraft’s ownership under Microsoft, which acquired the game and its developer Mojang in 2014, means the title’s backend infrastructure is at least partly tied to broader Microsoft cloud and authentication services, a connection that has occasionally meant disruptions affecting other Microsoft products, such as Xbox Live or Microsoft account services more broadly, have coincided with reported Minecraft issues in the past, even when the underlying cause originates outside the game’s own dedicated infrastructure.

For now, the scope and cause of Saturday’s reported disruption remain unconfirmed, with affected players continuing to share their experiences on social media as they wait for either the outage to resolve on its own or for an official acknowledgment from Mojang or Microsoft regarding what, if anything, is affecting the game’s services. Given the frequency of similar incidents over the past year, some players expressed hope on social media that any official response would come more quickly than during past outages, when communication from the game’s support channels was sometimes criticized as slow or unclear relative to the scale of the disruption being experienced by the community.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to ICICI Bank Limited Q1 FY ’27 Earnings Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions]

Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. Sandeep Bakhshi, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of ICICI Bank. Thank you, and over to you, sir.

Sandeep Bakhshi
MD, CEO & Executive Director

Thank you. Good evening to all of you, and welcome to the ICICI Bank earnings call to discuss the results for Q1 of financial year ’27. Joining us today on this call are Sandeep Batra, Rakesh, Ajay, Anindya and [ Abhinek ]. At ICICI Bank, our strategic focus continues to be on growing profit before tax, excluding treasury through the 360-degree customer-centric approach and by serving opportunities across ecosystems and micro markets.

The profit before tax, excluding treasury, grew by 20.9% year-on-year to INR 189.75 billion in this quarter. The core operating profit increased by 15.6% year-on-year to INR 202.35 billion in this quarter. The core operating profit, excluding dividend from subsidiaries increased by 18.3% year-on-year to INR 191.25 billion in this quarter. The profit after tax grew by 15.9% year-on-year to INR 148.05 billion in this quarter.

Total deposits grew by 14% year-on-year and 2.2% sequentially at June 30, ’26. Average deposits grew by 14% year-on-year and 6.1% sequentially and average current and savings account deposits grew by 12.1% year-on-year and 4.7% sequentially during this quarter. The bank’s average liquidity coverage ratio, LCR