Wales boss Warren Gatland believes England captain Owen Farrell's decision to step away from international rugby is a wake-up call to the abuse suffered...

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Taylor Swift is playing her last US shows on her Eras Tour in LA this month and as you can imagine there is an unprecedented demand for tickets. For those who missed out during the chaotic Ticketmaster US ticket sales back in January, fans remain determined to hear the popstar's biggest hits and are attempting to bag last-minute tickets for the sold-out shows at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood. Originally, face-value tickets sold for $49 to $449, but according to the LA Times, tickets for the first show were on sale from $800 to a whopping $11,000 each on StubHub. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter As the first show is due to take place tomorrow (August 3), tickets are continuing to rocket in price with the most expensive listing currently being priced at $25,677 for floor seats while a Level 1 suite is $102,070. Swifties have since been taking to social media to share their tips on how to secure face-value tickets on Ticketmaster which occasionally releases tickets last minute. @joecurtains how to get eras tour tickets day of for face value on ticketmaster: aka what I did to score floor seats only 2 hours before the show started. hoping this finds the right audience so fans can get in and beat the scalpers #taylorswift #erastour #swifttok #taylorsversion #tserastour #tickets #ticketmaster #erastourphilly #guide #howto #fyp #fypシ @Taylor Swift So who's in charge of the ticket prices? Well, there are a number of different factors at play. Promotors are the ones who officially set the prices and get money from ticket sales, but given it's Taylor Swift we're talking about she would also have a hand in choosing the venues and informing the promotor where to set prices. Venues charge a facility fee for hosting the concert and are paid by the promoters for this role, some venues have exclusive deals with certain promoters while others do not. And then there are the ticket companies like Ticketmaster who sell tickets with dynamic pricing where the price of a ticket changes according to demand - a move that has received criticism (though artists can opt out of this, as Swift did). On top of this, there is also the service fee for buying the ticket online, a processing fee that "covers miscellaneous expenses associated with online ticketing", and a facility charge for the venue to host the shows. According to Ticketmaster, input is given by the artist on the service fee and facility charge. Finally, there are the resellers who purchase tickets with no intention to attend the show but rather buy tickets to turn a profit by making listings on marketplaces like StubHub and SeatGeek. Prices can shoot up as there are no limits as to what the seller can charge. “This is a truly market-driven platform,” StubHub spokesperson Jessica Finn told LA Times. “So this is really about what sellers think that the price, the value of the ticket is, and what buyers think the value of the ticket is, and they effectively agree on it with a purchase... It’s very much a dynamic marketplace, prices go up and down and we don’t meddle with that.” A team of people or software bots can be used by the reseller to nab batches of tickets - hence why Swift decided for her UK tour to do album order presales, get fans to sign up for the general sale, and have staggered ticket sales throughout the day to try and stop bots and resellers. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

MotoGP championship leader Francesco Bagnaia said on Thursday that Marc Marquez's history at Germany's Sachsenring made the Spaniard favourite...

Max Verstappen completed the most dominant season in Formula One history with victory in Abu Dhabi. After a 19th win in 22 races, the PA news agency looks at how the triple world champion compares to the sport’s all-time stars. Among the greats Verstappen’s third world championship win put him in elite company as only the 11th driver with a hat-trick of titles to his name. Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton share the record of seven crowns apiece, with Juan Manuel Fangio their nearest challenger on five. Alain Prost and Sebastian Vettel won four apiece, with Verstappen alongside Sir Jack Brabham, Sir Jackie Stewart, Niki Lauda, Nelson Piquet Sr and Ayrton Senna on three. Only five drivers – Schumacher, Hamilton, Fangio, Vettel and now Verstappen – have won three in consecutive years. He has the chance next season to match all but Schumacher with a fourth straight title, the German having won five in succession from 2000 to 2004. Verstappen has also moved third all-time in terms of race wins. His 53rd, at the season’s penultimate race in Las Vegas, drew him alongside Vettel for that position and in only 184 races compared to the German’s 299. Abu Dhabi made it 54 out of 185 and means only Hamilton and Schumacher have won more races – Hamilton has 103 from 331 starts, despite now having gone two seasons without a win, while Schumacher finished with 91 in 306. Record breaker Verstappen set a notable record during the season with 10 consecutive race wins up to and including September’s Italian Grand Prix. That beat Vettel’s run of nine in a row in 2013, also with Red Bull, while Verstappen’s Abu Dhabi win in 2022’s final race and Sergio Perez’s early-season contributions ensured the team won a record 15 in succession. The Dutchman’s 19 wins broke his own single-season record of 15, set last year. Only 14 F1 seasons have even had 19 or more races in total. While the length of the season and the modern scoring system are both significant factors, his points tally of 575 is a huge record – again, his own 454 last season was the previous best. Unsurprisingly that brought with it a record winning margin, both outright (290 points) and by percentage with more than double the points of second-placed team-mate Perez (285). Verstappen also clinched the title with six grands prix remaining, equalling Schumacher’s record from 2002. His 86.4 per cent win rate was another record, shattering the 75 per cent mark set back in 1952 – F1’s third ever season – when Alberto Ascari won six of the eight races contested. He is the first driver to lead 1,000 or more laps in a season – smashing Vettel’s record of 739 in 2011 and equalling the combined total of McLaren’s dominant 1988 pairing of Senna and Prost. Verstappen was the only driver to complete every lap of this season, adding two second places and fifth in Singapore to his 19 wins.

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A right-wing commentator has complained that the main female character in a new video game is “unattractive” and blamed it on “woke” feminists. Fable is a series of action role-playing video games and a trailer for its newest release premiered on Monday (June 12). The trailer featured The IT Crowd actor Richard Ayoade starring as a veggie-growing giant named Dave, who looks set to play a starring role. But for right-winger Ian Miles Cheong it was the unnamed female main character that caught his eye for being “weirdly unattractive”. In a tweet, Cheong claimed there’s a current trend in video games where the female characters are intentionally made to be ugly and suggested it’s all down to “woke intersectional feminists”. Sharing a screenshot of the Fable character, he wrote: “This is the main character of the new Fable game from Microsoft. “Continuing the trend of weirdly unattractive female main characters in video games, because beauty is objectifying. This is what happens when you consult with woke intersectional feminists.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It didn’t take long for other people to completely ridicule and mock Cheong’s comments. One person joked: “(Seeing a video game character I don’t want to have hot steamy sex with) Western civilization has fallen.” Another pointed out: “Hi Ian, pro tip: you are not required to be sexually attracted to video game characters for the game to be fun. Hope this helps!” It’s not the first time Cheong has drawn criticism for his comments as he was previously absolutely annihilated by a history expert after claiming that the Nazis were “socialist”. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK Wells Fargo & Co has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a

Ukrainian forces said they had penetrated the "first line" of Russian strongholds in the Zaporizhzhia region, in a sign that Kyiv is edging closer to Moscow's sprawling network of fortified trenches along the southern front.