1. My favourite game: when Everton stayed up on the last day of the season
‘I’m not really a football fan – I’m an Everton fan.’
2. Grandmother and son wrongly accused of TV theft sue police over beating
‘A 68-year-old Missouri woman has filed a lawsuit against four police officers and their suburban St Louis department after they were captured in a since-viral video beating and arresting her and her adult son over a claim that the pair had stolen a television. The allegation turned out to be false. All four officers are white; the mother and son are black.
3. South-east Asia’s biggest synthetic drugs raid: 200m meth tablets found in Myanmar
‘The raids unearthed “unprecedented” methyl fentanyl, the sign of a new trend of synthetic opioid production emerging “on a scale nobody anticipated”, said Douglas. Fifty times stronger than heroin and up to 100 times more potent than morphine, fentanyl can be lethal from as little as two milligrams – the equivalent of a few grains of sand.’
4. Astrid Kirchherr: a stylish outsider who saw beauty in the Beatles
As the various obituaries that marked her passing testify, Astrid Kirchherr’s fate was to be forever associated with the Beatles, a group she met almost by accident and whose image she remade so audaciously.’
5. ‘Lie, lie, lie’: Former Jordan teammate gives withering assessment of The Last Dance
‘It appears that The Last Dance backlash has arrived. ESPN aired the final episode of the wildly popular Michael Jordan documentary on Sunday but one of the NBA superstar’s former teammates has already taken issue with the show.’
6. Roe v Wade plaintiff admits abortion rights reversal ‘was all an act’ in new film
‘McCorvey, who died from heart failure at the age of 69, revealed her role as an anti-abortion advocate was largely funded by ultra-conservative groups such as Operation Rescue. She went on to describe herself as “the big fish” in a “mutual” propaganda campaign.’
7. My favourite film aged 12: Dirty Dancing
‘Living in a drab town in the deepest suburbs of Surrey, I did know what it was like to be bored with your perfectly fine but humdrum life and hanker for something more exciting, however briefly. Although I was only 12 so my options were limited.’
8. Judge approves plan to retrieve telegraph on Titanic that sent distress signals
‘The company said an unmanned submersible would descend nearly 2.5 miles to the bottom of the North Atlantic, then slip through a skylight or cut the heavily corroded roof in order to retrieve the radio. A “suction dredge” would remove silt while manipulator arms could cut electrical cords, it said.’
9. Humans did not drive Australia’s megafauna to extinction – climate change did
‘When people first arrived in what is now Queensland, they would have found the land inhabited by massive animals including goannas six metres long and kangaroos twice as tall as a human. We have studied fossil bones of these animals for the past decade. Our findings shed new light on the mystery of what drove these ancient megafauna to extinction.’
10. Chinese man abducted as toddler 32 years ago reunited with parents
‘After Mao vanished, his mother, Li Jingzhi, quit her job and launched a decades-long search for her son that included sending out more than 100,000 flyers and appearing on numerous television shows. That long campaign helped 29 other families find their own missing children, and made her search one of the most famous in the country.’
How we create the antidote
Every day we measure not only how many people click on individual stories but also how long they spend reading them. This list is created by comparing the attention time with the length of each article, to come up with a ranking for the stories people read most deeply.
