The prime minister and Foreign Office were involved in arguing for the kick-off time for England's World Cup match against Mexico not to be moved earlier - as mooted by Fifa in the days before the game. Sir Keir Starmer instructed officials to make the case, backed by the Football Association, that the match should remain in its original time slot, as first reported by the Sun newspaper , external . Foreign Office officials were also in touch with British diplomats in Mexico City, to request they made representations against a change, to try to ensure that the 3,000 travelling England fans didn't miss the match. Fifa had been set to bring the match forward by six hours, due to a forecast of storms. In the end, Fifa stuck to the scheduled start time, but kick-off was then delayed by an hour because of the weather. Speaking at a Downing Street reception, Sir Keir said: "We had to battle with the FA to get it back to where it was, which was counterintuitive." The Football Association has not commented. Five and a half hours that left England's World Cup tie in chaos Bellingham scores twice as England reach World Cup quarter-finals The proposed time-change was said to have been prompted by fears about the potential impact of lightning and flooding around the Azteca Stadium, which holds more than 87,000 spectators. However, both the English and Mexican football associations objected to the time being changed less than 48 hours before kick-off, with concerns raised about the impact on fans' travel plans and the teams' preparations. The Mexican football manager, Javier Aguirre, called the proposals a "kick in the gut". After more than five hours of uncertainty, Fifa made clear that the time would remain as originally planned. England won the match, beating Mexico 3-2, setting up a quarter-final clash against Norway in Miami on Saturday. Sign up for our Politics Essential newsletter to keep up with the inner workings of Westminster and beyond.

Moxi shuttles medical supplies around hospitals In hospitals across the US, patients and staff have become accustomed to seeing a one-armed, four-foot high, friendly-looking white robot going about its business. Nurses have been known to greet Moxi, as the robot is called by its maker Diligent Robotics, with a "good morning", a high five or even a hug. Moxi – which shuttles medical supplies around hospitals – might respond by displaying its heart-shaped LED eyes and a beep beep greeting of its own. "We get a lot of feedback that Moxi feels like a part of the team," says Todd Brugger, chief operating officer at the Texas-based robotics company, which has around 100 of the wheeled robots in operation. But bringing Moxi into a hospital doesn't mean buying one of the machines outright. Instead, it is among robots available to rent or on a subscription basis. Robotics companies use the term robotics-as-a-service. As well as the robot itself, service, maintenance and upgrades are bundled into the deal. A human engineer sitting in a remote control room may be on hand to take control of the robot if needed. In Moxi's case, Brugger says: "It lowers the expense and the outlay for the hospital because you're not paying for the full purchase up front. Secondly, and I think more importantly, this tech is evolving very quickly… we're routinely evolving the software and capabilities of the robot." Robot rentals are becoming available for anything from a day to years for a variety of purposes, from Moxi's hospital deliveries to robot bartenders or autonomous weeders for farms. Increasingly this includes early humanoid models, designed to behave and look like humans, and operate in environments designed for people. Given humanoids are still a work-in-progress, they are currently rented out for clearly defined tasks. That often means entertainment. Depending on the model, a machine might dance, sing or serve guests at a wedding or corporate event. Ethan Qi, a Beijing-based associate director at Counterpoint Research, says an act like a humanoid dance routine is relatively simple to pull off. "You hire a real dancer to perform and video it. The video is then used to train the robot. Then the robot will know how to dance. But the engineer will still often go with the robot in case the environment or the platform isn't simple," he says. Renting allows buyers to keep up with rapidly changing tech But ambitions for humanoid rentals go beyond the entertaining dance routines that are shared on social media, often in China. How about a robot housekeeper subscription? California-based 1X plans to start shipping its home helper robot NEO later this year. "Early access" customers in the US can either pay $20,000 (£15,000) outright for their own robot, or $499 (£378) per month on a subscription basis. Dar Sleeper, vice president of product and design at the company, says: "While many customers will buy a NEO outright, a subscription significantly lowers the upfront cost, making it affordable for far more people." Part of the appeal of a rental over an outright purchase is the speed at which robotics technology is improving. If you splash out on a new humanoid now it is likely to soon be obsolete. Qi says: "Every year the robotics companies release a new model, a new iteration of the hardware. If you own a robot, you can't trade it for a new one, but if you rent a robot, you can always rent the newest." A rental also removes the need for deep technical expertise – you can simply take your problems to the manufacturer or rental platform. Qi says: "It helps to solve technical problems because customers don't know how to code the robots." 1X plans to offer its Neo robot for $499 per month It's not just humanoids that are driving demand for robot rentals. One company, Chicago-based Formic, has a fleet of more than 250 industrial robots operating on a robot-as-a-service basis. "Everything is included," says Shawn Fitzgerald, chief revenue officer at Formic. "If the robot arm burns out, that's on us and we need to come bring you a new one." He argues that Formic's flat monthly payment model "levels the playing field" for smaller companies that traditionally haven't been able to afford to buy factory robots outright. Formic is also currently testing humanoid robots for industrial uses. Alongside flat rates, other robot rental payment schemes are emerging. Marco Wang, an analyst at Interact Analysis, says that some companies have started requesting that rental fees be directly linked to how much human labour a robot can save them. For robot manufacturers, alongside the revenues, a rental scheme offers a way to trial their products in real-world scenarios and gather helpful data in the process. This is particularly important for humanoids: "The technology is still not there. It's still immature," says Wang. Agibot robots are available to rent in 17 countries Some firms in China – the early leader in humanoids and home to a growing number of rental schemes – have leased their creations to work in hotels, a helpful training ground for future domestic use. Others offer them to rent on cleaning service apps. Chinese firms have started offering rentals overseas, through partner businesses. Among the biggest, Shanghai's Agibot says its humanoids are available for rent in 17 countries, including the UK. However, while rentals are becoming more common, Shanghai-based Wang suspects outright humanoid purchases will dominate in China, encouraged by government incentives. He says: "There are a lot of humanoid robot orders from Chinese state-owned companies and a lot of orders driven by subsidies." In China and elsewhere, some companies may also prefer to buy robots outright for the prestige, to learn from the technology or because it is better for their bottom line. But for others, as robots become more sophisticated and the market grows, the convenience and affordability of a rental may be the answer. India's 'blue gold' starts a new drinks industry The ancient trick making food waste useful and tasty What is Helium-3 and could we get it from the moon?

The man who invented a sport and played tennis with Willy Wonka The sign on the tennis courts read 'no bikes and no skateboards'. How does that work, wondered young American Brad Parks, when his front wheels were like a skateboard's and the back ones like a bike's, and he wanted to play tennis? And could he even get on to the court in the first place as he would need to dismantle his wheelchair to get through the gate? But he had invented a sport and would do whatever it took to play it. Parks was on a family picnic when he had his lightbulb moment 50 years ago. His relatives were playing tennis in a park in Indiana and 18-year-old Parks was watching in a wheelchair having been paralysed in a freestyle skiing accident in Utah a few months earlier. His dad called him over to join in. "So I started hitting tennis balls," Parks tells BBC Sport. "I was in literally a hospital wheelchair which is what they gave you back in 1976, so you couldn't really move very well but I could hit balls. And right then I decided 'I'm going to give it a shot.'" He didn't just mean in that moment. Eventually he was going to devise a whole new sport of wheelchair tennis, introduce it to the world and see it played at Grand Slams and Paralympics. But first, he needed to find some people to play with. Perhaps even a Hollywood actor (more on that later). Brad Parks became good friends with Gene Wilder (left) after playing tennis together In those days, basketball was the go-to sport for wheelchair users and had been suggested to Parks while he recuperated in hospital but he had other ideas. Before his spinal cord injury - sustained when he had over-rotated on a backflip and landed heavily on to packed snow at a freestyle skiing competition - the Californian had been wanting to improve his tennis and now he had even more reason to. "If I'm going to be in a wheelchair the rest of my life I've got to be the best that I could be and I want to still live my life, I didn't want people to feel sorry for me so I wanted to play," he says. "So I thought well, maybe I could play tennis and then I could play with my able-bodied friends so that was my first thought." After that picnic, Parks started playing tennis nearly every day with friends, family and opponents that his parents found him to play. None of them used wheelchairs. Everything changed when he went back for his next hospital check-up and met physiotherapist Jeff Minnebraker, who had also been exploring the possibilities of tennis in a wheelchair "Instantly we bonded because we figured we were the only two guys who were playing wheelchair tennis in the whole world," says Parks. They started experimenting with rules. Should the court be smaller, should the balls be different, should the net height change? Because they started out playing against able-bodied players, they played some early versions where the non-wheelchair player would only get one serve or have to serve underarm or have more court to cover. But by the time they had decided to hold their first wheelchair tennis event in 1977 in Irvine, California, they had settled on keeping it very simple. The only difference between tennis and wheelchair tennis would be that the ball could bounce twice – and this remains today. Parks won that inaugural event and dominated the nascent years of the sport, which were often played on sub-standard public courts, with dust and dirt preventing wheel-grip. There were no umpires and tournaments were run by people who worked in rehab: "They weren't tennis people so nobody even really knew the rules." Early tournaments were held on public courts where the dust and dirt would make it hard to stop the wheelchair from sliding There were also attitudes to overcome. There had been progress since the photograph on display at the Wimbledon Museum where disabled man George Cayley is shown suspended from a frame in a harness playing tennis 100 years earlier, but wheelchair players were nevertheless an unusual sight. "Nobody ever kicked me off, but I would get questioned a lot," Parks says. "I can remember many times going to a court, and whoever was in charge of that court would go, 'What's going on here?... Do the wheels damage the courts?'" Those in power could also be dismissive. Parks recalls feeling "discouraged and disappointed" after a National Wheelchair Basketball Association commissioner told him he was wasting his time because tennis was not a feasible wheelchair sport - and that he had even written a thesis on the subject. But Parks stuck with it, tirelessly promoting the sport via demos at hospitals, tennis clubs and even in car parks. Several years later the commissioner would ask to sit next to him at a lunch to apologise for being wrong and to ask for Parks' advice on how to get his sport integrated with the mainstream governing bodies in the way wheelchair tennis had by then succeeded in doing. While the rules were simple, equipment was not so straightforward. Minnebraker was a talented engineer and had made himself a lightweight aluminium wheelchair. It was much lighter and more mobile than hospital wheelchairs, which weighed 60lb and had side-guards and back handles that impeded a player's swing. Parks remembers asking to try it out. He felt like he was "floating around" in the borrowed chair. But what struck him even more was that when he looked at Minnebraker, now sitting in Parks' hospital chair, he saw a disabled man. "I never saw that before because he's in my chair … he's not in this [other chair]," he says. "That chair was incredible in comparison … I said 'will you make me a chair' and he said 'no, but I'll teach you to make a chair'." And so he did and the pair eventually went on to set up a company making them, although he remembers it taking time to convert others to move away from the "comfort blanket" of their old-style chairs. The wheelchair Brad Parks started off playing tennis in is very different to the ones used in wheelchair tennis today Progress in developing the sport was slow but sure. In 1980, Parks helped form the National Foundation of Wheelchair Tennis and a 10-tournament circuit was created. He also wrote a book - Tennis In A Wheelchair - to help players and coaches. Two years later, the first tournament outside the US was held in France. Parks remembers the exact moment when he realised they had created something special, saying he "got shivers and probably teared up" when he looked out from the clubhouse at the 12 courts filled with players in sports wheelchairs at a tournament in Michigan in 1985. "Everybody was dressed like a tennis player," he says. "Everybody had two racquets. Some of them had coaches. "I said to myself, 'This is wheelchair tennis. Wheelchair tennis is for real, and it's here to stay, and it's going to be something someday.' And it just dawned on me as I'm sitting there looking out at this. It was really a great feeling. It was really the beginning of the sport." It helped Parks that some famous faces were also raising the profile of his sport. One time he was playing at a private club in New York where on the neighbouring court Hollywood actors Gene Wilder and Sidney Poitier were filming a movie. They got chatting and agreed to play doubles, even if Wilder later revealed to Parks he'd been reluctant to play, telling him: "I'm going 'oh no, there goes my day at tennis, I've got to do this charity work'". But it was a competitive match and they swapped numbers and Parks ended up becoming good friends and playing regularly with Wilder, who is probably best remembered for his title role in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Top professional players of the time also got involved at exhibitions, with Parks teaming up with American Davis Cup-winning captain Dennis Ralston at one such event and in years to come the sport was also promoted by others such as Yannick Noah, Arthur Ashe, Jimmy Connors and Martina Navratilova. Brad Parks and Dennis Ralston teamed up for doubles in an exhibition event In 1988, the International Wheelchair Tennis Federation (IWTF) was formed, with Parks becoming its first president, and the sport joined the Paralympics in 1992. Parks, who had previously won Paralympic gold in wheelchair racing, won the inaugural doubles with Randy Snow. In 1998, the IWTF was fully integrated into the International Tennis Federation, a first for a disability sport and a pivotal step for the sport's development, allowing it to thrive further as part of a fully inclusive governing body. Parks says he "would have held the sport back" if he had insisted on keeping control himself, which is what he thinks has happened in other disability sports. The first Grand Slam to hold a wheelchair event was the Australian Open in 2002 - where it was known as the Wheelchair Classic 8s - and by 2007 all four major tennis tournaments held them. Quad events began to be introduced and by 2019 were at all Grand Slams. These milestones were the culmination of Parks' tireless lobbying; the debt to him was formally acknowledged in 2010 when he became the first wheelchair athlete to be inducted into tennis' Hall of Fame. Meanwhile, the Brad Parks Award - the highest honour in wheelchair tennis - is awarded annually to an individual or organisation for outstanding contributions to the game. Parks, who had originally given himself a year to see if wheelchair tennis was feasible, is proud but modest about his own role 50 years on. "I was the head of the organisation, I was the first player to really play the game but it's hard for me to say Brad, you invented wheelchair tennis, but you know I was part of it," he said, pointing to others like Minnebraker. Today's players, though, do not hold back. "I think I'm in awe. Absolute awe," said Britain's 34-time Grand Slam champion Alfie Hewett. "It [wheelchair tennis] is not about accolades and the external things. It's actually just the life it's given me and the purpose that it's given me." And Gordon Reid, who has won 30 Grand Slam titles, added: "It's an incredible story and that little idea that he had 50 years ago has turned into a huge worldwide sport now. So yeah, [I'm] very thankful that he had that idea back in the day." So much has changed since the early days, not least the chairs which are much lighter and often feature a moulded seat that is more energy efficient for turning. And the sport continues to grow - the wheelchair event at Wimbledon, which begins on Tuesday, offers a prize pot of more than £1m, with the winners of the men's and women's singles earning £82,000. Its profile is also rising and the finals are now played on the 12,345-capacity Court One, compared to the 276-seat Court 17 that hosted the first wheelchair singles final 10 years ago. Parks says he is "very happy to see where we're at". "I'm jealous in a way but in a good way because I would have loved to have been able to play in [tournaments like Wimbledon]," he said. But that was never what his dream was about when he set out. "I just loved to hit tennis balls, and I wanted to share the feeling of hitting a tennis ball from a wheelchair," he said. "The thing that I feel really, really good about is that I really wanted other people to be tennis players. "I used to get disappointed when I thought that everybody was wheelchair basketball players. Tennis was not their main thing. And today I feel like tennis really stands on its own and they're tennis players. They just happen to be in a wheelchair." Live scores, results and order of play Get tennis news sent straight to your phone

This video can not be played Alison believed she was lucky not to have been killed in this crash The cost of damages paid out to people injured in the UK by e-scooters and e-bikes has topped £110m, the BBC has learned. It is only seven years since the first claim was made, with the biggest individual payout being for £20m. Such claims have also led to premiums for drivers being pushed up, to effectively cover the bill for insurers. Alison, not her real name, suffered a broken pelvis, wrist and finger as well as cuts and bruises when she was hit by a private e-scooter while crossing a road in Coventry last year. She hopes to get compensation for her injuries. "It was a lovely sunny day so we were all in a really good mood," she said. "Then the next thing I knew, it was just gravel and I was on the floor. "It was instant pain, you know when the TV does grey static? That's what my eyes were doing. "I was on a crossing. I thought it was safe, you just don't expect it." CCTV footage shows 47-year-old Trevor Chandler, from Coventry, riding his e-scooter directly into her as she and a friend crossed a road, leaving the scene shortly afterwards. Chandler broke his leg but escaped, before eventually being arrested and jailed for 15 months. His vehicle was destroyed. The organisation which settles claims like Alison's, the Motor Insurers Bureau (MIB), wants the sale of such vehicles to be better regulated and in some cases banned. The cost of payouts has been a major contributor to increases in annual premiums for ordinary members of the public, experts say. They have become a common sight on the UK's streets, but they have also become a significant hazard. Micromobility vehicles - which include, e-scooters, e-bikes, mobility scooters and now e-unicyles too - have become a concern for people navigating town and city centres. All are legally classified as motor vehicles. E-scooters are allowed in towns and cities where official trials are taking place, but only the vehicles which are part of the operator schemes can be ridden. Privately owned e-scooters can only legally be used on private land with the owner's permission. Regular police enforcement operations lead to hundreds being seized and destroyed every year, along with hundreds of e-bikes that have been adapted to go faster than 15.5mph, the maximum speed at which they can be legally ridden. The first claim paid by the MIB to a person hurt by an e-scooter was in 2019, while the first to someone hurt by an e-bike was in 2020. The MIB is a not-for-profit organisation which pays compensation to victims of accidents involving uninsured vehicles. The main insurance companies pay a levy to it and that means higher premiums for everyone paying motor insurance. In 2025, there were 168 claims for accidents involving both types of vehicle, the highest figure so far. In the worst single case, a child suffered catastrophic life-changing injuries and was paid £20m. The cumulative total paid out has risen from £51m to £110m in the past 12 months. Gloria Stephenson was killed while crossing a road in Sunderland in May 2025 In one of the most shocking cases, Billy Stokoe, 19, was jailed for six years and nine months after killing 86-year-old Gloria Stephenson when he hit her with his e-bike in July 2025 in Sunderland. Stokoe, who had been using a mobile phone and had taken cannabis, was convicted of causing death by dangerous driving. His case is being reviewed under the unduly lenient sentences scheme . In Coventry, Alison considered herself lucky not to have been killed. Her pelvis is better, but she has been told she will never have full movement in her wrist. She said she could not understand why e-scooters were still on sale online and in stores if those that were privately owned were illegal on roads and pavements. "It is frightening to think they are willingly handing these things over to people with no licence, no insurance, no nothing and just letting them go," she added. Hayley Sutcliffe, from the MIB, said more than half their claims were from pedestrians The MIB believes, at the very least, more needs to be done to raise awareness of the law. The organisation has donated money to some police forces for vehicles that are used in enforcement. Speaking in Stoke-on-Trent during a national police operation targeting the illegal use of micromobility vehicles, the MIB's Hayley Sutcliffe outlined how the increasing cost in claims made by those injured affected everyone. "Whilst we will compensate victims of any injuries from e-scooters or electric motor bikes, everyone else has to pay for that," she said. "It has a huge impact on your law-abiding citizens as well." PC Tom Cordell regularly takes part in enforcement operations for Staffordshire Police. He said ignorance of the law was not an excuse, but he believed most people riding e-scooters did know they should not be using them on pavements and roads. "I think the vast majority of people do know that they're illegal," he said. "They've been around for a long, long time now. This isn't something that's new and just come out yesterday". In statements, the government has repeatedly reiterated the law as it stands. However, speaking to the BBC earlier this year, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said the " genie was out of the bottle " and new laws could be introduced if parliamentary time became available. Tell us which stories we should cover in Warwickshire Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds , Facebook , external , X , external and Instagram , external . Teen e-motorbike killer's sentence challenged 'The genie's out of the bottle' - new e-scooter laws planned Are e-scooters safe and what are the rules? Motor Insurers Bureau Staffordshire Police