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Edition No. 79 · Sunday, May 3, 2026

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There Can Be Only One — And It's Filming in Scotland
News Scotland

There Can Be Only One — And It's Filming in Scotland

As Cavill, Gillan and Crowe roam Skye and Glencoe for the Highlander reboot, the real story is the windfall for Highland cafes, crews and a screen sector charging towards £1bn

By Damien Day

In a quiet cafe at Kintail last week, cook Grace Driver did what any of us would do when Russell Crowe walks through the door: she took a selfie. The Gladiator star, in Scotland to film a remake of the 1986 cult classic Highlander, has been turning up in supermarkets, gelaterias and gull-burger joints across the Highlands — and dropping Hollywood-sized takings into local tills in the process.

It is the cast that grabs the headlines. Superman star Henry Cavill leads as the immortal Connor MacLeod, with Inverness-born Karen Gillan playing his first wife Heather. Crowe, Dave Bautista, Djimon Hounsou and Trainspotting's Kevin McKidd round out an A-list line-up. But the real story unfolding from Eilean Donan to the Cuillins is what this production means for Scotland.

Filming has centred on the Isle of Skye, Glencoe and Eilean Donan Castle — the latter a returning location from the 1986 original. Crews have booked out campsites in Inverinate, taken over car parks at Kilt Rock and the Old Man of Storr, and sent caterers, drivers, electricians and security teams fanning out across the region.

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Sony's Ace robot beats elite table tennis players — and quietly redraws the map of what AI can do
AI News

Sony's Ace robot beats elite table tennis players — and quietly redraws the map of what AI can do

Published in Nature, the table-tennis-playing robot is the first AI to outperform humans at a competitive physical sport — a milestone that could echo from factory floors to assistive care

By Helen Cooper

For decades, the great milestones of artificial intelligence have happened on screens. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess in 1997. AlphaGo took down Lee Sedol in 2016. AI agents have since dispatched the world's best at StarCraft, Dota and poker. All of it, however, has unfolded in the tidy, frictionless world of pixels and rules.

Now Sony AI says its robot, Ace, has done something harder. It has won at a real, physical sport, against real, elite human opponents, on a real table, with a real ball.

In research published on the cover of Nature on 23 April, Sony AI reports that Ace defeated three of five elite table tennis players in full matches played under International Table Tennis Federation rules. In follow-up matches in December and March, it beat professionals too. It is, Sony says, the first autonomous system ever to play a competitive physical sport at expert human level.

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Paul Simon brings 'A Quiet Celebration' to Glasgow for two nights at the Armadillo
What's On Glasgow

Paul Simon brings 'A Quiet Celebration' to Glasgow for two nights at the Armadillo

The 84-year-old songwriter plays the 3,000-seat venue on 9 and 10 May — a remarkably intimate setting for one of the great catalogues in popular music

By Helen Cooper

Paul Simon — yes, that Paul Simon — will play two nights at Glasgow's SEC Armadillo next weekend, on Saturday 9 and Sunday 10 May. Both shows are scheduled to begin at 6.30pm. Tickets had been moving briskly at the time of writing, with limited availability through Ticketmaster and the usual resale platforms.

It is, by any reasonable measure, an extraordinary booking. Simon is 84. He has, more than once, suggested he was done with touring. And the Armadillo, beautiful Foster + Partners shell that it is, holds just 3,000 people — a fraction of the arenas an artist of his stature could comfortably fill.

That, really, is the point. The current run of dates is billed as 'A Quiet Celebration', and Simon has been clear that the tour is built for theatres and concert halls rather than stadiums. Audiences at recent European dates have reported a hushed, attentive room and a set that prizes nuance over spectacle. Glasgow gets two nights of that, in a venue where the back row is still close enough to see his hands on the guitar.

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Kraftwerk return to Glasgow: electronic pioneers bring 3D Multimedia Tour to the Royal Concert Hall
What's On Glasgow

Kraftwerk return to Glasgow: electronic pioneers bring 3D Multimedia Tour to the Royal Concert Hall

The German originators of synth-pop play their first Glasgow show in nearly a decade on 25 May — a homecoming of sorts for a city built on their basslines

By Helen Cooper

Glasgow has always had a soft spot for a good drum machine. So when Kraftwerk announced they'd be bringing their Multimedia Tour to the Royal Concert Hall on Monday 25 May, the city's electronic music faithful did what they always do: queued up, cleared the diary, and started arguing about which album is best.

The German pioneers — fronted, as ever, by founder Ralf Hütter — touch down in Glasgow as part of their first UK and Ireland tour since 2017. It's a 15-date run that opened in Dublin on 17 May and ends at Edinburgh's Playhouse on 9 June, taking in Belfast, Manchester, London's Royal Albert Hall and a clutch of grand old British theatres along the way.

Kraftwerk's fingerprints are all over Glasgow's musical DNA. The clean, mechanical pulse of Trans Europe Express and Computer World fed directly into the techno that powered the city's club scene through the late eighties and nineties — and arguably never left.

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DeepSeek V4 Pro lands with 1.6 trillion parameters and prices that gut the competition
AI Model Releases

DeepSeek V4 Pro lands with 1.6 trillion parameters and prices that gut the competition

Chinese lab's new flagship matches Western frontier models on maths and code while charging roughly a third of the price — and ships with a one-million-token context window

By Damien Day

For developers tired of watching OpenAI and Anthropic invoices climb each quarter, the calculation just changed overnight.

DeepSeek released its V4 series on 24 April, headlined by V4 Pro — a 1.6 trillion parameter behemoth that landed at number three on the independent Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, ahead of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7 and level with Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro.

The eyebrow-raiser is the price tag. V4 Pro costs $1.74 per million input tokens. OpenAI's new GPT-5.5 charges $5. Claude Opus 4.7 also charges $5. That is roughly a 65 to 73 per cent discount on Western flagships for comparable intelligence, and the lighter V4 Flash variant runs at just $0.14 per million input tokens — territory that effectively drops frontier-level reasoning into hobbyist budgets.

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