Benedict Cumberbatch found himself channeling his character Sherlock Holmes on Friday when he bravely saved a Deliveroo cyclist from a gang of criminals. The attack took place close to 221B Baker Street.

Cumberbatch, who has played the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes since 2010, leapt from his Uber when he spotted four men assaulting a Deliveroo driver in London. "Leave him alone!" he shouted, the Sun reports.

Cumberbatch dragged the muggers off the Deliveroo driver and quashed their attempts to throw punches at him. "I did it out of, well, I had to, you know." Cumberbatch later said.

Google decided not to renew a controversial AI contract with the Pentagon after receiving backlash from its employees, reports say. The company's staff earlier said they didn't want the product to be used for war.

Diane Greene, the CEO of Google Cloud, said the tech giant won't renew its contract with the Pentagon, Gizmodo and the New York Times report citing sources.

According to the information, during a weekly staff meeting, Greene explicitly cited the backlash among Google employees over ties with the US Defense Department, as many of them said the policy runs counter to the company's 'Don't Be Evil' principle. The phrase served as the company's motto from its founding days but was dropped from the official code of conduct in 2015, following Google's reorganization, with Alphabet Inc. created as its parent company.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has reportedly warned Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman over his reforms, saying that reinstating movie theaters and bringing WWE wrestlers to the country were sinful projects.

The Sunni terrorist group said that Mohammad bin Salman replaced mosques with cinemas and gave up on religious texts in a statement on its Madad news bulletin, cited by SITE Intelligence Group. The influence of atheist and secular views has paved the way for corruption and moral degradation in Saudi Araba, the group said in its statement.

AQAP was especially unhappy about the WWE Royal Rumble event, which took place in the Kingdom in April. It said the American wrestlers exposed their private parts and wore signs of the cross before the mixed crowd of Muslim men and women. Other signs of degradation include daily concerts, movie screenings, and circus shows, the jihadists added.

The Israeli occupation forces at daybreak Thursday kidnapped the Palestinian activist Osama Shaheen, 35, from his home in al-Khalil's southern town of Dura, in the southern occupied West Bank.

According to the Palestine Prisoners Center for Studies, Israeli forces broke into the home of journalist Osama Shaheen, also the center's head, and wreaked havoc on the building before they kidnapped him.

Shaheen was released from Israeli jail just nine months ago after he had served a one-year administrative detention sentence, issued with neither charge nor trial.

I wrote an article on Envy, Asians, and Tariffs. Almost as soon as it was published, I received this email.

I am a regular reader of your articles published on LewRockwell.com, and most of the time I agree with you. I consider myself a "conservative" Libertarian. That is, I believe in the capitalist and free market system, small government, less regulation and less government intrusion into our private lives -- the same as a classic Libertarian. Where I part ways with your thinking is over the issue of tariffs. Tariffs are anathema, of course, to classical Libertarians, because tariffs violate their commitment to "free trade." The problem with that position is that we don't have free trade. Our manufacturers are required by government regulation to pay a minimum wage, to provide medical coverage, to limit the work day to 8 hours, to provide a myriad of other costly benefits to workers, and to permit unions to extort even more costly benefits out of the hapless factory owner, all of which drive prices up. Then, if Libertarians have their way, these put upon factory owners are required to try to sell their goods in the ostensible "free market" in competition with, say, Chinese factory owners, who pay their workers $10 per day, provide no benefits and require their workers to work 12 hour shifts. That's not a "free market!" The only way to rectify this and bring manufacturing back to our shores is to impose a tariff so that it costs just as much to make a product in China as in the United States.

But that would result in higher prices, you might say. Yes, it would. But we've paid a terrible price for the "low prices" we find at Walmart. We've ruined our own

Russia plans to dispatch its new cruise missile-launching warship to the Mediterranean to join the country's naval task force in the region.

Russia's Chief of Staff of the Black Sea Fleet Rear Admiral Viktor Liin told reporters on Friday that the Vyshny Volochok warship, which has already been added to the country's Black Sea Fleet, will join the Russian Mediterranean Squadron.

The commander noted that the warship will take part in navigational assignments and combat training, adding, "All of this will be part of preparations for further missions in the Black Sea and in the Mediterranean."

The Israeli Army has reported that thousands of protesters gathered in five locations along the Gaza Strip security fence; as the demonstration turned violent, one of the rioters fired at a military vehicle.

A 21-year-old woman, Razan Najjar, died of a gunshot wound to the chest during a protest in the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had to respond with live fire to the protesters' attempts to damage security infrastructure on the border.

The AP news agency reported, citing witnesses, that Razan Najjar was a volunteer medic that was treating injured protesters.

The latest controversy is maddening for many reasons

Tommy Robinson is a British political activist and "citizen journalist" who came to prominence in Britain almost a decade ago when he founded the English Defence League. The EDL was a street-protest movement in Britain whose aims could probably best be summarized as "anti-Islamization." It emerged in the town of Luton after a group of local Islamists barracked the homecoming parade of a local regiment returning from service in Afghanistan.

From their earliest protests the EDL's members sought to highlight issues including sharia law, Islam's attitudes toward minorities, and the phenomenon that would become euphemistically known as "grooming gangs." In reality these protests often descended into hooliganism and low-level violence (naturally helped along by self-described "anti-fascists"). The authorities did everything they could to stop the EDL, and the media did everything possible to demonize them. In a foretaste of things to come, very few people made any effort to understand them. And nobody paid any price for (indeed many people benefited from) claiming that the EDL was simply a fascist organization and that anybody who even tried to understand them must be a fascist too. The usual prohibition against sweeping generalizations doesn't seem to apply if the generalization tilts in that direction.

I observed an interesting dynamic at the recent Munk debate event at Toronto's Roy Thompson Hall between Jordan Peterson and Michael Dyson and Michelle Goldberg.The subject was "political correctness".

The usual outpouring of enthusiastic applause as Peterson walked on stage was conspicuously absent (there was just the polite regular amount, thank-you). Peterson is not a hometown hero, it would seem.

The Visa payment system has crashed, leaving some people unable to buy things or complete transactions.

Even shoppers not using Visa have been unable to make purchases, because the network provides payment systems for a range of shops and financial institutions.

Customers have reported arriving at tills to have their cards declined. Retailers say they have been left unable to take payments in shops, bars and other outlets, forcing them to resort to only taking cash or not making sales at all.

The payments look to customers like they are being declined, in the same way as when a card has insufficient funds. But the issues are actually a consequence of the global network of payments run by Visa.