Editor’s Note: Earlier, we mistakenly reported that Simone Biles had set a new record for most world championship medals. She is one medal away from tying the record.

As of Thursday, Simone Biles is a step closer to being the greatest gymnast ever to have competed in the world championships.

Biles won her fifth world all-around title by dominating the field at the 2019 World Gymnastics Championships in Stuttgart, Germany. With the win, she now holds 22 world medals.

The 22-year-old is hoping to surpass Belarusian Vitaly Scherbo, who accumulated 23 medals at the world championship stage when he competed during the 1990s. After starting the day needing two medals to tie Scherbo, Biles now needs only one to match him. She’ll try to accomplish that in the upcoming individual events, which run through Sunday.

Biles competed Thursday in four disciplines against the top 23 gymnasts from the qualifying round. Her combined score was 58.999, earning her the all-around gold by a wide margin of more than 2 points.

Xijing Tang of China placed second with 56.899. Russian gymnast Angelina Melnikova collected the bronze, with an overall score of 56.399.

In last year’s competition, Biles won the individual all-around gold medal and scored the most points in the vault and floor events.

At this year’s championship, Biles placed first in the vault portion of the all-around event with a score of 15.233. She was also first on the balance beam, where she scored 14.633 points.

The native of Texas ended the 2019 all-around competition with a bang by placing first on the floor segment, with a score of 14.400 that secured her victory.

On Tuesday, Biles led Team USA to their fifth consecutive world title.

Athletes and celebrities flocked to Twitter to praise Biles’ 2019 performances.

Biles has four signature gymnastic moves named after her.Gymnasts must submit it for consideration and successfully land it at a major competition to have a move named after them. Two of those moves, the “Biles II” and the “Biles”, were added during Biles’s 2019 performances.

Despite her record-setting performance at the championships, both Biles and USA Gymnastics expressed disappointment at the points classification the “Biles” was assigned. The FIG Women’s Technical Committee said the move was given a lower score in order to dissuade gymnasts from attempting a potentially dangerous maneuver.

Paolo Zialcita is an intern on NPR’s News Desk.

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For some 40 years, women have been largely banned from attending soccer matches at Iran’s stadiums. But under pressure from FIFA, soccer’s governing body, Iranian authorities are allowing a few thousand women to watch a game Thursday at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium – in a section separate from men.

Women were permitted to buy about 3,500 tickets to watch a World Cup qualifier between the men’s teams of Iran and Cambodia.

The change comes after an Iranian woman set herself on fire and died last month, as she faced charges arising from her trying to enter the stadium to watch a match. The woman, 29-year-old soccer fan Sahar Khodayari, had dressed up as a man to try to get into the game. When security guards discerned that she was a woman, she was expelled and charged with “appearing in public without a hijab.”

The ban has been in place since 1979’s Islamic revolution, with only small groups of women allowed to attend a handful of matches in recent years.

Iranian sports journalist Raha Purbakhsh is among those who got a ticket to Thursday’s match. She told news service AFP that she last stepped into Azadi stadium about 25 years ago with her father.

“I still can’t believe it’s happening because after all these years watching every match on TV, I’m going to be able to experience everything in person,” she said. “I’ll be able to feel the stands, and closely watch the game itself.”

But some say it’s not enough. Amnesty International criticized Iran’s authorities for allotting so few tickets to women in a stadium that can seat 78,000. It’s not clear how many tickets have been made available to men.

“Iran’s decision to allow a token number of women into the stadium for tomorrow’s football match is a cynical publicity stunt by the authorities intended to whitewash their image following the global outcry over Sahar Khodayari’s tragic death,” Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa Research and Advocacy Director, said in a statement.

“Instead of taking half-hearted steps to address their discriminatory treatment of women who want to watch football, the Iranian authorities should lift all restrictions on women attending football matches, including domestic league games, across the country,” he said. “The international community, including world football’s governing body, FIFA, must also ensure that woman are permitted to attend all matches.”

FIFA statutes prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender. The governing body says the arrangement for Thursday’s match is a pragmatic solution as it works toward lasting change in Iran.

“It’s not just about one match,” FIFA’s head of social responsibility and education Joyce Cook told the BBC. “We’re not going to turn our eyes away from this. We’re totally focused on making sure women can attend this match on 10 October and working just as pragmatically to ensure women also can attend local matches in league football – but it’s about what follows as well. FIFA has a very firm stand – fans are equally entitled to attend matches.”

Iranian Vice President for Parliamentary Affairs Hossein-Ali Amiri said last month that some of the country’s stadiums were being prepared for the entry of women, by adding separate gates and seating.

The group Open Stadiums has long campaigned for women’s right to watch games in Iran’s arenas. The organization’s leader, who goes by the pseudonym Sara, told Reuters that many of the women who bought tickets to Thursday’s match aren’t actually soccer fans.

“[T]hey just want to break this discrimination,” she said. “For years [equal stadium access] has been a demand from the women’s rights movement in Iran and as a part of exclusion from the public spaces. It’s not just about football.”

“People are doing this just to show that if you give capacity to us, we will use it.”

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FIFA fined the Hong Kong Football Association Wednesday after fans protested the Chinese national anthem at a World Cup qualifying game against Iran. The Hong Kong and China national teams are separate, but FIFA plays the Chinese anthem because Hong Kong is considered an administrative region of China.

Disciplinary records said that Hong Kong supporters breached article 16 of the FIFA Disciplinary Code by disturbing a national anthem and using objects to “transmit a message that is not appropriate for a sports events.”

The Hong Kong Football Association has been ordered to pay 15,000 Swiss francs ($15,000 U.S.) and was given a warning. Hong Kong football officials can appeal the decision.

A video taken during the September game shows supporters facing backward and booing as China’s national anthem plays.

During halftime, Hong Kong fans surrounded the stadium, locked arms and sang “Glory to Hong Kong,” a song widely adopted as the protest anthem.

Though Hong Kong lost to Iran 2-0, protesters were happy to use the game to increase awareness to their cause.

“The emotion here is good, though we lost,” Hong Kong supporter Leo Fan told the AP. “We will fight till the end.”

The Hong Kong Football Association have yet to comment on their sanction.

During the 2018 World Cup qualifiers, Hong Kong was disciplined three times. All three incidents involved the booing of the Chinese national anthem. Hong Kong was fined twice, totalling about $15,000.

FIFA isn’t the only sporting federation to involve itself in the Hong Kong liberation movement. Earlier this week, the Houston Rockets‘ general manager Daryl Morey tweeted support for Hong Kong protesters. The Chinese Basketball Association then announced it will suspend cooperation with the Rockets.

The league’s commissioner clarified Tuesday that the NBA supports free speech, after the Rockets’ owner and an NBA spokesman denounced Morey’s statement.

Paolo Zialcita is an intern on NPR’s News Desk.

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Fat Bear Week 2019 officially ended Tuesday night. And the winner is….

Number 435, or if you prefer a name, Holly.

Fat Bear Week has been an annual event for the past five years in Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwestern Alaska. The idea is to publicize and celebrate the process of bears eating as much as they can to build up crucial fat reserves in advance of winter hibernation.

Park rangers made a game out of the process – a March Madness-style bracket matching bear against bear, each with photos proving girth and inviting the public to vote on the fattest bear in each pair.

The winners move on to the next round; the losers are out.

This year’s championship round pitted Holly against number 775, Lefty.

And in the end, it was no contest.

After 12 hours of online voting, Holly had about 17,500 votes while Lefty had about 3,600.

Katmai Conservancy Media Ranger Naomi Boak says Holly earned her title.

“It was very hard to get a good picture [of Holly] out of the water,” she says, “because she was a submarine for the entire month. She did not stop fishing, except to dig a belly hole big enough for her to sleep in.”

Holly and all of this year’s 12 contestants are coastal brown bears, who forage along the Brooks river. The Alaskan waterway has one of the largest concentrations of sockeye salmon in the world, and the bears there take full advantage.

This year’s week-long competition was a huge success – there was a record total of 187,000 votes cast, more than three times last year’s total.

Along with the novelty and fun of the event, Boak and her fellow Katmai Conservancy media ranger Brooklyn White hope it builds awareness of a natural process and the need to conserve the unique wilderness area of the Brooks River.

“Not all bears have this same kind of access to these salmon resources,” White says, “and to an ecosystem that has such clean water.”

White says many ecosystems, even within Katmai, are breaking down, caused by human encroachment to warming temperatures that are putting salmon under “heat duress.”

That was especially true this year, as Alaska endured an unusually dry summer.

“Because of the drought, the salmon were really delayed” in reaching the Brooks River,” Boak says. “[T]hey stayed in small creeks and streams that were very dry.”

She says the bears stayed around those streams because of the easy fishing and didn’t arrive at the Brooks until mid-September. Normally they’re there, gorging on salmon around the first of the month.

Because of the delay, Boak says the fat bears in this year’s competition are still eating and will continue doing so right up until late this month, or early November, when hibernation usually begins.

And when it does, it’s not — as many think — as simple as the animals merely going to sleep.

“[Hibernation] is a reduction in their metabolic rate,” says White, who’s worked on the Brooks River the past four years. “[The bear’s] heart rate lowers, the activity obviously is very minimal and it truly is just their body utilizing that fat to keep this baseline going.”

If the bears don’t have adequate fat stored, some may even die during hibernation, Boak says.

That’s why the fattest bears have the best chance at survival. That means when spring rolls around, they’ll be able to emerge from their dens to continue their life cycle.

And for Holly, it’ll mean emerging as a champion.

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Blizzard Entertainment, the game developer behind hugely popular titles such as World of Warcraft and Overwatch, has banned a professional esports player from competing and taken away his prize money after he expressed support for Hong Kong’s protest movement.

Ng Wai Chung, who lives in Hong Kong and plays under the name Blitzchung, is one of the top players in the Asia-Pacific region for the online card deck game Hearthstone.

Blitzchung made the comment on an official Hearthstone broadcast on Twitch, the video streaming platform, after his last game in the 2019 Hearthstone Asia-Pacific Grandmasters Tournament.

Blitzchung wore a gas mask and dark goggles during that interview last Sunday, evoking the gear activists have worn during months of street protests. Toward the end of the segment, he shouted the popular protest chant, “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times!”

In an announcement released Tuesday, Blizzard Entertainment said the player’s statement violated a tournament rule that prohibits any acts that “brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image [sic].”

Blitzchung, a Hong Kong native who started playing Hearthstone in 2015, was banned from participating in Blizzard esports for a year. He told several media outlets that his tournament winnings, said to be $10,000, have been rescinded. Blizzard also announced they will no longer work with the two Taiwanese streamers who interviewed the esports player on Twitch.

After his punishment was announced, Blitzchung spoke to his fans on his personal Twitch account.

“Today I lost Hearthstone, it’s only a matter of four years,” he said, referring to his years playing the game. “But if Hong Kong lost, it’s a matter of a lifetime.”

The gaming community has largely denounced Blizzard’s actions, accusing the California company of caving in to China. Some of them also note that Tencent Holdings Limited, a Chinese conglomerate, owns a 5% stake in Blizzard’s parent company.

Hearthstone is not the only piece of pop culture embroiled in Chinese political controversy. Yesterday, South Park was scrubbed clean from Chinese internet after the episode “Band In China” criticized the communist government’s censors.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of the animated show, responded to the ban with a faux apology.

“Like the NBA, we welcome Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom and democracy,” Parker and Stone wrote. “Xi doesn’t look just like Winnie the Pooh at all. Tune into our 300th episode this Wednesday. Long live the Great Communist Party of China! May this autumn’s sorghum harvest be bountiful.”

Parker and Stone’s comment referred to yet another Hong Kong-related controversy, which surrounds Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets’ general manager. Morey posted and quickly deleted a tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters, prompting the Chinese Basketball Association to announce it will suspend cooperation with the Rockets.

After the team’s owner and an NBA spokesman denounced Morey’s statement — prompting a separate backlash in the U.S. — the league’s commissioner clarified Tuesday that the NBA supports free speech.

As part of the fallout of that controversy, Tencent — which is a media partner of the NBA in China with a deal worth $1.5 billion — said they won’t be airing Rockets games.

NPR’s Jingnan Huo contributed to this report. Paolo Zialcita is an intern on NPR’s News Desk.

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NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is affirming the league will not censor players or front-office personnel, saying “freedom of expression” is paramount for the league, which has been criticized for its response to an employee’s tweet about pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Silver says the NBA is not apologizing for a now-deleted tweet from Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey that thrust the NBA into tumult over its business dealings in China in recent days.

“The long-held values of the NBA are to support the freedom of expression and certainly freedom of expression by members of the NBA community,” Silver says, speaking at a news conference near Tokyo on Tuesday.

“And in this case, Daryl Morey as the general manager of the Houston Rockets enjoys that right as one of our employees,” Silver adds.

Morey said on Sunday that he didn’t mean to offend anyone with his tweet expressing support for mass protests in Hong Kong. The tweet was quickly deleted after it was sent out on Friday but not before it attracted widespread attention in both China and the U.S.

But on the same day Morey spoke out, the Chinese Basketball Association, run by former Houston Rockets center and NBA Hall of Famer Yao Ming, suspended business dealings with the Rockets franchise.

And as NPR’s Scott Neuman reported, “Tencent, a media partner of the NBA in China with a five-year streaming deal worth $1.5 billion, and China’s state television also said they wouldn’t be airing Rockets games.”

Initially the NBA and other Rockets officials attempted to distance themselves from Morey’s tweet. This includes a statement by NBA spokesperson Mike Bass saying the league was aware Morey’s comments “have deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable.”

But critics are also taking issue with the NBA over its message, saying the league put out a separate statement in Mandarin that some bilingual speakers argue went further than the one in English and seemed to apologize on Morey’s behalf.

Ahead of Silver’s speech in Japan on Tuesday, the league’s response was seen as inadequate by many in both Western and Eastern hemispheres.

Critics in the U.S. are accusing the NBA of prioritizing profits over principles. And critics in China also cried foul, saying the league is being insensitive in handling a politically divisive issue.

All of this forced the NBA commissioner to put out another statement Tuesday ahead of his press conference, hoping to placate people who were “left angered, confused or unclear” by the league’s earlier response.

Silver clarified that the NBA will not begin “regulating what players and team owners say.”

What is less clear is what impact the controversy may have on the future of the league’s expansion into one of its most important international markets.

“We will have to live with those consequences,” Silver said of any potential repercussions. “It’s my hope that for our Chinese fans and our partners in China, they will see those remarks in the context of now a three-decade, if not longer, relationship. “

In addition to the Chinese actions against the Rockets, China’s state broadcaster CCTV has announced it won’t air games between the Los Angeles Lakers and Brooklyn Nets scheduled to tipoff in two games this week beginning Thursday, The Associated Press reports.

The AP adds:

“Basketball is wildly popular in China and those two teams — largely because of LeBron James starring for the Lakers and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s co-founder Joe Tsai now owning the Nets — would have almost certainly been a huge television draw.”

On Tuesday, China’s CCTV also called for Rockets and Morey to “offer a sincere apology to the Chinese public.”

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The Houston Rockets’ general manager apologized on Sunday for a tweet expressing support for Hong Kong protesters that has sparked a harsh backlash from China’s official basketball association.

“I did not intend my tweet to cause any offense to Rockets fans and friends of mine in China …,” Daryl Morey tweeted on Sunday. “I have had a lot of opportunity since that tweet to hear and consider other perspectives.”

On Friday, Morey took to Twitter to show solidarity with a months-long anti-government protest in the Chinese territory. He sent a tweet that read: “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”

It was quickly deleted, but not before it attracted notice in both China and the U.S.

Soon after, the Rockets’ owner, Tilman Fertitta, sought to distance the team from the controversy, tweeting that Morley “does NOT speak for the @HoustonRockets” and that the team is “NOT a political organization.”

And on Sunday, the Chinese Basketball Association — headed by former Rockets center and Hall of Famer Yao Ming, announced that it was suspending cooperation with the Houston team. Tencent, a media partner of the NBA in China with a five-year streaming deal worth $1.5 billion, and China’s state television also said they wouldn’t be airing Rockets games.

NBA spokesman Mike Bass said in a statement late Sunday that Morey’s original tweet was “regrettable.”

“We have great respect for the history and culture of China and hope that sports and the N.B.A. can be used as a unifying force to bridge cultural divides and bring people together,” he said.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz took exception to the apology, tweeting, “As a lifelong @HoustonRockets fan, I was proud to see @dmorey call out the Chinese Communist Party’s repressive treatment of protesters,” adding in a separate tweet, “We’re better than this; human rights shouldn’t be assisting Chinese communist censorship.”

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