Diane Warren also revealed Taylor Swift is 'very particular about how she said certain things' while working on any lyrics

By Alvise Armellini and Angelo Amante ROME (Reuters) -Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said on Friday she had separated from

Nippon Steel has dropped its lawsuit against Toyota over a patent for a technology used in electric motors, saying wrangling among Japanese companies was not beneficial to keep the nation competitive

When word came through that Kylian Mbappe was available this summer, Manchester United were surprisingly quick to insist they weren’t interested. The Old Trafford club are actively looking for a forward and are one of very few clubs that could afford the 24-year-old’s fee and wages. It has been insisted to The Independent that the United hierarchy are similarly willing to make separate funds available for Harry Kane should he become buyable, so they would surely see the commercial logic in securing Mbappe. Instead, they have no current interest this summer and don’t see that changing. It was similar with Arsenal, especially as their budget isn’t as big as United’s. This is one of many contradictions to Mbappe’s career that has left both Paris Saint-Germain and the player’s camp considering a world-record offer from Al Hilal in the Saudi Pro League. It is difficult not to think it would be a waste; a needless squandering of a football great’s limited years in his physical prime, even if it is only for a season. This is not to besmirch the Saudi Pro League itself, before you even get to all of the other debates about how it is used politically by Mohammed Bin Salman. That is another warranted discussion in this, in how Mbappe himself would be politically used. This is not too much different from Qatar's ownership of PSG now. It is more that he would be outside Europe, outside the Champions League. The Saudi Pro League is aiming to be the second-best in the world after the Premier League, but it is clearly nowhere near there yet. It may have attracted a lot of headlines for its transfer business this summer, but it’s going to take a long time for that to translate into an actual audience. The legacy just isn’t there. The executives of one major broadcaster already confided this summer they would have no interest in paying for rights. The Saudi Pro League is still a football backwater, if a lucrative one. And yet it could well play host to a prime season for one of the greatest footballers who ever lived. If that currently feels like an exaggeration given Mbappe’s career so far, it is how he is looking at things, and it plays into this contradiction. While many footballers aren’t too bothered about the history of the sport, that isn’t the case with the 24-year-old. Mbappe is one of those obsessed with the lore of the game, and has consequently become obsessed with his own legacy within it. Those who know him say he was more anguished than most realised to lose the World Cup final in December, because that would have meant equalling Pele in winning his first two finals. This is how he sees his career. It is also why a move to Arsenal appeals, since he likes the idea of delivering such a great football institution to their first title in 20 years. The same outlook explains his ultimate ambition to become one of Real Madrid’s great names, alongside Alfredo Di Stefano and his boyhood idol Cristiano Ronaldo. He could instead play against the Portuguese for a season in Saudi Arabia, just when they were supposed to be going in opposite directions – and even if it is en route to Madrid. Ronaldo would not have even considered that at the same age. It could well end up ‘Mbappe: the lost year’, no matter what he wins. Many in football would say that already applies to his time at PSG, mind. The Qatari sportswashing project are so likely to win the French league every season that it isn’t really seen as a proper feat and barely has much of a global audience. It also means such a great player only features in about eight consequential fixtures a season. If even that. All of this as Erling Haaland has made himself a global megastar in the Premier League, scoring in front of a TV audience of hundreds of millions every week. Mbappe must surely envy that. In some ways, though, it isn’t a contradiction at all. That is for the same reason it just wouldn’t have been a consideration for Ronaldo. The game is very different than it was even in 2009. That point in its history was still the end period of an era where there was a remaining vitality to the European game. Clubs of genuine legacy and stature such as Lazio, Parma, Valencia and Borussia Dortmund would have at minimum been in the same financial sphere as one of the best players in the world, and at least offered him an option. It was only a decade before that point that Real Betis broke the world transfer record. This was a period where people could genuinely talk of the “big five” leagues. That description is now an irrelevance. The economic evolution of the game has meant it is now just the Premier League and a handful of other clubs in western Europe. They have just been buttressed by what is essentially a state competition in the Saudi Pro League, that in many cases offers a necessary financial counterbalance. This is the true cost of a Champions League that is itself becoming a closed shop and a Premier League that is becoming a Super League. This is what the global audience wants to see. And, without any checks or balances from football’s authorities, it could well mean not even getting to watch Mbappe for a prime season. A final contradiction is that the Saudi Pro League may further fall into this. For all the necessary sportswashing criticisms of the competition, the other side of it is that the country’s sporting authorities are legitimately trying to build a sustainable – if super-funded – league. They want it to become the next best league after the Premier League, and the plan was to go from great old names like Ronaldo to that next tier of good quality players like Ruben Neves in order to offer that substance. That has happened quickly but Mbappe would represent a drastic acceleration. Maybe too quickly. As excited as Al Hilal have been about the prospect of the signing in the weeks they have sounded it out, that isn’t quite shared within the rest of the Saudi Pro League. There is an argument it would look bad if he just departed for Madrid after a season, and that it would then leave a vacuum. The league would already be looking to constantly catch up with one season it had. And what a season it might be for Mbappe, even if one argument within his camp that these years will mean his career will be able to go on for longer. It is not like he has been suffering the physical rigours of the Premier League in his early twenties. It may all play into him becoming a Real Madrid legend, in exactly the way he wants. It might just play into something bigger too. Read More Kylian Mbappe’s Al Hilal transfer could spark chain reaction affecting every top club in Europe World-record bid made for Kylian Mbappe as PSG exit looms PSG attempting to hijack Bayern Munich’s bid to sign Harry Kane Erik ten Hag says Manchester United are making progress in striker search Premier League chief ‘not too concerned at moment’ about Saudi Arabia rise Football rumours: Premier League clubs scramble for Kylian Mbappe

By Andrew Osborn MOSCOW In the run-up to Monday's attack on Russia's road and rail bridge to Crimea,

Linebacker Eric Gentry deflected Francisco Mendoza’s pass in the end zone on a two-point conversion try with 58 seconds remaining, and No. 24 Southern California ended a two-game losing streak with a 50-49 win over California on Saturday

OpenAI may have discovered “something dangerous” that caused chaos at the company, Elon Musk has said. Recent days have seen ChatGPT creator OpenAI fire and then re-hire its chief executive, Sam Altman. Many of the circumstances of that decision still remain entirely mysterious, and it is not clear why OpenAI’s board removed Mr Altman. Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI, as part of his response to concerns that artificial intelligence could prove dangerous to humanity. But he has been critical of its recent direction, including its turn towards operating for a profit and no longer open sourcing its work. During the New York Times’s Dealbook conference, Mr Musk said that he had attempted to find out what happened behind the scenes at OpenAI, but had failed to do so. He had reached out to numerous people working at the company, including Ilya Sutskever, the OpenAI chief scientist and board member who is believed to have led the rebellion against Mr Altman, but had not heard anything. But he suggested that the company had found “something dangerous” that had caused Mr Sutskever to be concerned. He said that the most likely scenario was a worrying breakthrough that had led the company to try and avoid the danger. He was asked by journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin whether he meant that he thought something dangerous had been discovered within the company. Mr Musk said that would be his guess. In the same interview, Mr Musk once again criticised OpenAI’s move away from the open source and non-profit principles that it had been founded with. He also suggested that artificial intelligence companies were lying if they claimed their artificial intelligence systems were not trained on people’s data. But he said that any lawsuits over the issue will not be settled before we have a “digital god”, and would therefore be irrelevant. Earlier, he had told advertisers that left the company over antisemitic content to “go f*** yourself”. His profanity-laced remarks followed a moment of contrition in a New York Times DealBook Summit interview, as he first said “I’m sorry” for a tweet that agreed with an anti-Jewish post on X on Nov. 15. Musk has faced a torrent of criticism since he on Nov. 15 agreed with a user who falsely claimed Jewish people were stoking hatred against white people, saying the user who referenced the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory was speaking “the actual truth.” On Wednesday Musk said he had “handed a loaded gun” to detractors, describing his post as possibly the worst he had made during a history of messages that included many “foolish” ones. The Tesla CEO bristled at the idea that he was antisemitic and said that advertisers who left X, formerly known as Twitter, should not think they could blackmail him, saying “fuck you” numerous times. At one point he added the words “Hey Bob,” an apparent reference to Robert Iger, chief executive of Walt Disney, which pulled ads on X. The “Great Replacement” theory holds that Jewish people and leftists are engineering the ethnic and cultural replacement of white populations with non-white immigrants that will lead to a “white genocide.” Musk‘s post drew condemnation from the White House for what it called an “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.” Following the post, major U.S. companies including Walt Disney, Warner Bros Discovery and NBCUniversal parent Comcast suspended their ads on X. A report from liberal watchdog group Media Matters precipitated the advertiser exit, which said it found ads next to posts that supported Nazism. The platform filed a lawsuit last week against Media Matters for defamation. Additional reporting by Reuters Read More Elon Musk publicly tells advertisers to ‘go f*** yourselves’ Elon Musk mocked for trying to resurrect QAnon Pizzagate conspiracy Elon Musk set to meet Netanyahu and hostage families in Israel Elon Musk weighs in on Dublin riots claiming country’s PM ‘hates the Irish people’ Elon Musk’s antisemitic comments have pushed X advertisers over the edge Democrats accuse Elon Musk and X of profiting from Hamas propaganda

By Soo-hyang Choi and Josh Smith SEOUL (Reuters) -North Korea tested its latest Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Wednesday,

Fernando Tatis Jr. homered in the first, added a two-run single in the second and set a career high for hits while playing in his 400th career game, leading the San Diego Padres past the Athletics 8-3 in manager Bob Melvin’s return to Oakland

CHEONGJU, South Korea (Reuters) -The bodies of eight people trapped in a tunnel submerged by heavy rain in central South

Britney Spears, the dewy-eyed child star who became a global pop phenomenon and then melted down in full view of the world, tells her story Tuesday with the...

A terrible, terrible decision that did not pay off.