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Celtic suffered more Champions League pain at Parkhead as Lazio scored a stoppage-time winner soon after the home side were denied a goal following a lengthy VAR check. With the score at 1-1, substitute Luis Palma fired home in the 81st minute after Daizen Maeda had attempted an overhead kick from Alistair Johnston’s cross, and the VAR officials decided he was offside. There was a bigger blow to come when former Barcelona and Chelsea forward Pedro headed home from fellow substitute Matteo Guendouzi’s cross five minutes into stoppage-time to secure the Italian club a 2-1 win in Group E. Celtic had taken an early lead through Kyogo Furuhashi but Matias Vecino levelled following a 29th-minute corner. Brendan Rodgers’ side looked the likelier team to find a winner but their 10-year wait for a home victory in the Champions League group stage continues and the ninth defeat in that 11-game run would be the most difficult one to take after a largely encouraging performance. The tie was a resumption of hostilities from four seasons ago when Celtic triumphed home and away against Lazio in the Europa League, their victory in Rome sealed by Olivier Ntcham, who appeared on a massive pre-match banner among the home fans in the standing section. Celtic settled quickly and Furuhashi netted his first goal in eight Champions League appearances 12 minutes in. The Japanese striker’s finish went through the dive of goalkeeper Ivan Provedel after he was played through by a first-time pass from Matt O’Riley after positive play from Maeda. The atmosphere went up a notch but Celtic did not build on their advantage. Despite having plenty of possession in the aftermath of the goal, most of it was inside their own half and the occasional slack pass put them in danger. They had a chance on the break when Yang Hyun-jun played Maeda in behind but the Japanese attacker mis-kicked his ambitious effort. Lazio’s territorial advantage paid off when they won three headers in a row from Luis Alberto’s corner. Joe Hart appeared to have saved the third one from Vecino but the Lithuanian referee ruled the ball had spun behind the line before being clawed away. Celtic got back on the front foot and O’Riley forced a good save from a first-time strike before getting back to make an important interception to foil a counter-attack. The start of the second half was finely-balanced. Felipe Anderson failed to make the most of receiving the ball in yards of space inside the Celtic box before the home side came close from a free-kick. Provedel made a good stop from Reo Hatate’s low drive and Johnston fired over from the rebound. Cameron Carter-Vickers made his comeback from a hamstring injury after a seven-week lay-off when he replaced Nat Phillips while Palma came on for Yang, who had enjoyed some good moments but generally failed to make the most of his possession. Hart got down well to save Daichi Kamada’s 20-yard drive before Paulo Bernardo snatched at a half-chance at the other end moments after coming on. Celtic continued to make the running. Palma was briefly bearing down on goal before Alessio Romagnoli slid in to win the ball, Liam Scales attempted an overhead kick which flew over and Furuhashi was denied from close range. Palma thought he had scored what would have been one of the best-worked goals in the Champions League this week after a lengthy passing move that went from back to front and side to side. The Honduran winger was booked for taking his shirt off in celebration before the VAR team delivered worse news, and a crushing blow would soon follow to leave Celtic bottom of their group without a point. Read More Newcastle’s local heroes stun PSG to twist a tale of geopolitical tension Kylian Mbappe frustrated as PSG humbled by Newcastle in Champions League Man City rely on Julian Alvarez to beat RB Leipzig as Erling Haaland falters Is Celtic vs Lazio on TV? Kick-off time, channel and how to watch Champions League Kylian Mbappe frustrated as PSG humbled by Newcastle in Champions League Man City rely on Julian Alvarez to beat RB Leipzig as Erling Haaland falters

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The future was waiting outside my door, and it was an electric taxi named Saxophone. On Wednesday, 9 August, on the eve of a much-watched vote to expand the footprint of autonomous vehicles (AV) in San Francisco, I summoned a driverless taxi from the company Cruise for a test drive. The Cruise AVs, which began operating paid, Uber-like on-demand rides in June of 2022, are a frequent sight in my San Francisco neighbourhood, the Richmond. And they’re about to get even more ubiquitous: on Thursday evening, following a marathon seven-hour public comment session, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 3-1 to allow Cruise and Google parent company Alphabet’s Waymo venture to run paid rides, without a safety driver in the cabin, 24/7 on San Francisco streets. Much like the members of the public who turned out in droves to comment on the vote, I have mixed feelings about autonomous vehicles. I’ve been trailed, somewhat ominously, on backstreets by a Cruise AV as I rode my bike, with the robo-driver declining to pass me like most human pilots would. I’ve seen a homeless man approach the window of a robotaxi to ask for change, only to find no one inside, a metaphor of San Francisco inequality a bit too on the nose even for a writer like me. I decided, for the time being, to leave the public debating to the local officials and longtime San Francisco residents and start with the basics: what was it like to ride in one of these things? For a 0.8 mile, one-way ride to the local grocery store, I was charged $8.26, about a dollar per minute of driving time. The ride was smooth, though the Cruise AV would occasionally move in a way that was, while perfectly safe, not quite human, gliding without hesitation within inches of a parked SUV’s bike rack, hesitating ever-so-slightly within the normally smooth arc of a turn, accelerating with an almost imperceptible stutter after it dropped me off. Still, I was lucky. Earlier this month, an NBC reporter taking a test drive was stuck inside a Cruise that mysteriously stalled, then blocked two lanes of traffic as it idled at a 45 degree angle against the median. After I got home, driven by “Flora,” I looked it up and the price of my roundtrip was virtually identical to that of an Uber. I sat there thinking about the strange economics of 2023 San Francisco, where the product of billions of dollars of investment had delivered a service that was both an incredible technical leap, the stuff of the Jetsons, that also offered me no financial advantage, snatched a job from a rideshare driver, and took me on a round trip that would’ve been 15 minutes faster – and free – on a rusty old bike. The future had arrived, but was it one that I, or San Francisco, really wanted, let alone needed? Wednesday’s vote exposed how deeply divisive such technologies are in San Francisco, and the thorny considerations inherent in any attempt to carry out large-scale changes to the transit system. Human drivers are unsafe death machines themselves, killing thousands of people each year. And the need for green mass transit has never been higher. But are autonomous vehicles the best solution? The companies, at least, celebrated the decision as heralding a moment of great progress. “Offering a commercial, 24/7 driverless ridehail service across San Francisco is a historic industry milestone – putting Cruise in a position to compete with traditional ridehail, and challenge an unsafe, inaccessible transportation status quo,” Prashanthi Raman of Cruise said in a statement to The Independent. It was indeed major victory for the industry, though regulators warn there’s still much work to be done before autonomous vehicles flood the roads. “The conversation on how best to integrate AVs into our community is far from over,” said CPUC president Alice Busching Reynolds, who voted for the expansion. One commissioner, Genevieve Shiroma, wasn’t yet convinced, and argued the industry hasn’t given good enough data and has been too quick to brush off reports of driverless vehicles behaving strangely around first responders. “Imagine if one of those so-called anecdotes involved a member of your family in need of urgent medical attention, or was trapped in a burning building,” she said, adding, “All it takes is one real-life example.” Outside of the Public Utilities Commission building, protesters rallied and drew messages like ‘people not profits’ in chalk on the sidewalk, as AV company employees showed out in matching t-shirts. Inside, commissioners heard a mosaic of different opinions. “We are in desperate need of people coming to San Francisco,” Matthew Sutter, who has been driving a taxi cab for 31 years, told the commission. “You’re going to take away jobs with this thing.” Meanwhile, a man named Michael Martinez said expanding Cruise and Waymo’s footprint in San Francisco would mean the city, already one of the most expensive and unequal places to live in America, was “pimped out by yet another couple of large tech companies so that all their employees here wearing yellow shirts might get to cash out their stock options.” Numerous advocates pointed out how driverless cars could discriminate against disabled people, given that they sometimes drop people a few doors down from their chosen destination, and they don’t have drivers who are able to help people with wheelchairs or other mobility aides enter or exit a vehicle. A taxi driver can help someone carry their groceries to a front door, but an AV can only go from place to place. Others argued the technologies would in fact help disabled people, overcoming the “last mile problem” of public transit, when passengers aren’t able to get all the way to their destination, and that AVs would limit dangerous human errors like distracted driving. “Too often, patients don’t make it to my operating room because they have been killed by distracted drivers or road rage,” an orthopedic surgeon testified. A representative for Mothers Against Drunk Driving said Cruise and Waymo could be a “pillar” of stopping the “100 per cent preventable crimes” of drunk driving deaths. Robotaxis began operating paid taxi services in San Francisco in June of 2022, and since then, hundreds of Cruise and Waymo vehicles have filled the streets. The city, synonymous with Silicon Valley technology and innovation, is seen as the most important test yet of AV technology, a high-profile audition for a future of mass, autonomous transit. “Operating robotaxis in SF has become a litmus test for business viability,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt wrote on X in April. “If it can work here, there’s little doubt it can work just about everywhere.” So far, the experience has been mixed, with a fleet of up to 400 autonomous taxis at a time carrying out thousands of successful rides – and enraging some local residents and city officials, who say the robotaxis carry out bizarre and unsafe behaviour on a regular basis with little accountability. On 21 January, for example, San Francisco firefighters were battling a blaze on Hayes Street when they saw a driverless taxi from Cruise gliding towards them. The Cruise vehicle, a modified electric Chevrolet Bolt, was heading straight for their hoses. The firefighters made attempts to stop the vehicle, but couldn’t. First responders were only able to halt the car once they shattered its window, according to a letter from city officials. Local transit activists say Cruise and Waymo vehicles can be seen creeping creepily towards pedestrians on sidewalks, blocking buses, and getting in the way of first responders. “I’ve seen them not totally stop at a stop sign,” an activist with the local transit group Safe Street Rebel, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Independent. “I’ve seen them get too close to pedestrians. I personally have felt very unsafe crossing the road whenever there is one stopped. I see them stalled on the streets, too. I just saw that the other day one stalled, blocking an emergency vehicle. This is something that they just do on their own.” The group has carried “cone-ing” protests, placing traffic cones on top of empty AVs to temporarily stall them. According to data Cruise shared with CPUC earlier this week, between January and mid-July of 2023, Cruise AVs temporarily malfunctioned or shut down 177 times and required recovery, 26 of which such incidents occurred with a passenger inside, while Waymo recorded 58 such events in a similar time frame. Meanwhile, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transit Agency (SFMTA), between April 2022 and April 2023, Cruise and Waymo vehicles have been involved in over 300 incidents of irregular driving including unexpected stops and collisions, while the San Francisco Fire Department says AVs have interfered 55 times in their work in 2023. Last year, Cruise lost contact with its entire fleet for 20 minutes according to internal documentation viewed by WIRED, and an anonymous employee warned California regulators that year the company loses touch with its vehicles “with regularity.” (The company said at the time Cruise cabs have “fallback” systems directing them to turn on their hazard lights and pull over in the face of such problems.) Since being rolled out in San Francisco, robotaxis have killed a dog, caused a mile-long traffic jam during rush hour, blocked a traffic lane as officials responded to a shooting, and driven over fire hoses. Jeffrey Tumlin, San Francisco’s director of transportation, has called the rollout of robotaxis a “race to the bottom,” arguing Cruise and Waymo weren’t yet definitive transit solutions, and instead had only “met the requirements for a learner’s permit.” "The biggest concern is that someone is going to get really severely injured or killed because we cannot properly respond to an incident," San Francisco fire chief Jeanine Nicholson said in June. "Or if they can get in the way at an incident. We’ve really gotten lucky so far, but it’s only a matter of time before something really, really catastrophic happens." “We have 160,000 calls a year. We don’t have the time to personally take care of a car that’s in the way when we’re on the way to an emergency,” she added. Others worry the AV technology will cause another shock to workers in the city, displacing more transit jobs that were already turned upside-down or eliminated with the arrival of Uber and Lyft. “We’re already seeing it,” Jose Gazo, an Uber driver, told The San Francisco Standard in July. “With business going like this, we’re going to go homeless.” Not that taxis were a particularly worker-friendly technology in San Francisco, either. In 2010, the city began auctioning off driver medallions for $250,000 a piece. Declining taxi revenues, combined with a sky high cost of living, has left many San Francisco taxi drivers barely making survival wages in order to pay off debts on their cabs, even as the future of this investment looks increasingly doubtful. The autonomous vehicle companies insist that human drivers are the real risk. Car crashes are a leading cause of death in the US, according to the CDC, and Cruise and Waymo point to the fact that their AVs haven’t been involved in a single fatal accident in San Francisco. (Such deaths have occured in the US, though; an Uber self-driving vehicle with a backup driver was involved in a 2018 accident in Arizona that killed a pedestrian.) “Autonomous vehicles don’t get drunk or drowsy. They don’t text at the wheel,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana wrote in a July column in the San Francisco Chronicle. “We want our vehicles to improve road safety and to contribute to the city’s economic recovery and its Vision Zero goal of no street fatalities.” However, unlike their fleshy, distractable human cousins, autonomous drivers (and thus their corporate owners) cannot be cited by police for common moving violations like reckless driving or speeding. “The data to date indicates the Waymo Driver is reducing traffic injuries and fatalities in the places where we operate,” the company told The Independent in a statement. “In particular, in a million miles of fully autonomous operations, we had no collisions involving pedestrians or cyclists, and every vehicle-to-vehicle collision involved rule violations or dangerous behavior on the part of the human drivers.” “2022 was the worst year for traffic deaths in San Francisco in nearly a decade,” it added. “Waymo’s mission is to improve road safety and mobility for everyone.” Some city officials, meanwhile, say the companies are attempting to sell a safety record that hasn’t been fully open to public scrutiny, with the companies allegedly declining to share full data or giving city officials redacted reports. “Given that we do not have actual data, what we have is information from reports that have been made by members of the public, by city employees, by firefighters, by transit operators,” Julia Friedlander, senior manager of automated driving policy at the SFMTA, said at a Monday CPUC meeting. “And what we have seen is that things are not getting better. The monthly rate of incidents has been growing significantly over the course of 2023. You’ll see that June was the month with the highest number of incidents of all kinds.” The companies also argue AVs are a green solution. Cruise wrote in a 2022 blog post that “of the nearly 900,000 autonomous miles Cruise drove in 2021, not one added to CO2 emissions, and all were powered by 100% renewable energy.” Some, however, are sceptical of this claim, noting that any transit method that encourages individual car use over low-cost, mass public transit is inherently inferior. “This just adds more cars onto the road. It diverts our attention and financial investment and even legislative action to invest in public transit. It puts more cars on the road,” the Safe Street Rebel activist told The Independent. “We’re big fans of technology that actually benefits people,” she added. “Trying to graft unreliable technology onto a wasteful, dangerous, inefficient mode of transport is hardly looking to the future.” Read More Is this $6.6 billion flying car startup the future of green transit, or just another rich guy fantasy? Recalling a wild ride with a robotaxi named Peaches as regulators mull San Francisco expansion plan Waymo self-driving car kills a dog in San Francisco

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The tragic reality of Russia’s bloody war on Ukraine took centre stage in a rather unusual setting recently – the Eurovision song contest. The embattled nation was supposed to host the event but due to the ongoing and deadly conflict, it was relocated to Liverpool. Ukrainian performers not only attended the ever-popular show but made sure to use the opportunity to spread their message to the huge TV audience. Among them was Kyiv rapper Otoy, who lost his own brother on the frontline. The 24-year-old, whose real name is Vyacheslav Drofa, performed at Eurovision alongside other Ukrainian musicians, bringing awareness of the atrocities of the invasion to millions. He described the “adrenaline and emotion” coursing through his body as he took to the stage earlier this month, telling The Independent: “I have never felt such a level of solidarity and support for the Ukrainian people as I did in Liverpool. “That level of understanding and emotion at Eurovision – it was crazy. Everybody was with you and your country. It felt like, ‘We support you because you are going through hell’.” Otoy is no stranger to that hell, having received tragic news in March that a body discovered in Ukraine was his brother, who had gone missing the previous April while defending besieged Mariupol. “I don’t even know what I felt,” said Otoy. “When you’re hoping for a year that he’s alive and can’t find anything, then realise his body is in Kyiv and you should identify it. “In fact, this isn’t even a body – it’s a head, a bit of a leg, part of a hand, little bits of bones. We could only identify him through his teeth. It feels really bad, the worst emotions I had in my life actually.” The rapper’s music reflects his fury and he accuses Russia of trying to “destroy” Ukraine and its culture. “I feel a lot of anger inside of me because of the things the Russians are doing,” he said. “They already crossed all the red lines, there’s no way back, we should fight till the end. “If we stop now then give it 10 years and they’ll come back with a bigger army and then they’ll invade Poland, which is a member of Nato. We’re fighting a worldwide evil. “The reason we’re doing it is we are really tired of that Russian b******t – trying to destroy Ukraine, our culture, our musicians.” Not only has the 24-year-old tackled the war through his music, he volunteered on the frontline last summer by salvaging the bodies of dead soldiers and bringing them back to their families. He is also fundraising to provide military supplies to Ukrainian soldiers for the country’s planned counteroffensive. His day job is in IT, working as a UX director at a company that created RSFY, a mobile tracker of Russian army losses. The company also developed the app TacticMedAid, which provides medical instructions for people if they input their symptoms after getting injured. Otoy juggles all of these roles during Moscow’s frequent attacks on the Ukrainian capital. “It feels like a surreal dream I live in,” he said. “Every time when there’s some air or rocket attacks, or shelling, it feels like this type of nightmare. I think, give me a couple of minutes, then everything will be OK – but I never wake up because that has continued for more than a year.” He is hopeful the war will come to an end his year but says the road to recovery after that will not be easy. “It will be a hard time – receiving bodies back, lots of funerals, lots of rebuilding cities, people returning to their houses and realising there’s no home because it will have been destroyed,” he said. “After the war, I don’t know what people will do with their emotions, I’m really scared of this.” Otoy said he will continue to make music and apps when the conflict is over, and had nothing but praise for his countrymen and women as they continue to fight against Putin’s forces. “The only thing that helps me feel alive and some kind of emotions is the process of making music and to know that millions of Ukrainians will use the IT applications I work on,” he said. “Those are two things I’ll be doing until the end of my days. “I’m feeling proud about Ukrainians. People are staying in their country, for their homeland, until the end, until their last breath.” Read More Ukraine-Russia war – live: Don’t turn a blind eye to Putin’s invasion, Zelensky warns Arab leaders Britain says Russia will ‘pay the price’ for Ukraine invasion as fresh wave of sanctions unveiled Ukraine's president begins visit to Saudi Arabia, aims to enhance ties with Arab world The Body in the Woods | An Independent TV Original Documentary The harrowing discovery at centre of The Independent’s new documentary