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A retired police officer who was allegedly punched in the head by Sheku Bayoh has told the inquiry into his death that she believed he exhibited “superhuman strength” by lifting three other officers off the ground as he struggled against their restraint.Nicole Short, who burst into tears when asked to confirm her name at the start of the day’s proceedings, described being “overwhelmed by terror” as the “frightening” Bayoh came towards her with his fists up.Bayoh died in handcuffs and sustained multiple injuries after officers responded to calls from the public about a man brandishing a knife and behaving erratically early on a Sunday morning in Kirkcaldy, Fife, in May 2015.The independent inquiry, under Lord Bracadale and taking place in Edinburgh, is the result of years of campaigning by Bayoh’s family, who believe his death was caused by positional asphyxia because of the tactics used by police. They allege officers overreacted and were motivated by racial bias.Short, who was questioned on Tuesday about previous statements in which she described the father of two as “deranged”, “hellbent on hurting somebody” and “a frightening crazy man”, told Angela Grahame QC: “I had a genuine belief that he was going to finish me off.”Nicole Short arrives at Capital House in Edinburgh for the public inquiry into Sheku Bayoh’s death. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PAAsked if Bayoh seemed this way to her because he was black, Short responded: “Absolutely not.”She said Bayoh had walked away “completely unaffected” after being fired at with CS spray and pepper spray by PC Craig Walker and former PC Alan Paton, the first officers to respond to the incident. She described how she drew her baton at Bayoh who advanced on her with “a boxer’s skip”.As he closed the distance between them, “instinct kicked in” and she began to run, she told the inquiry. “I just remember feeling this almighty blow to the back of my head ... I tried to stay on my feet but I just couldn’t,” she said. Short, who is 5ft 1in and weighed 44kg (7st) at the time, said she “curled up into a ball” on the ground.She told the inquiry that it was only later,
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When 360 Hz won't cut it — Upcoming 500 Hz monitor targets PC gamers with beefed-up systems, various skill levels. A 24-inch PC monitor with the ability to update its image 500 times per second will be available soon, Asus and Nvidia announced Tuesday. The monitor should boost desktop monitors from the 360 Hz max native refresh rate they see today while putting a mysterious new spin on an old panel technology. Aptly named the Asus ROG Swift 500 Hz Gaming Monitor, it manages high refresh rates with lower resolution. The 1920×1080 screen leverages a new take on TN (twisted nematic) panels called E-TN, with the "E" standing for esports. According to Asus, the E-TN panel offers "60 percent better response times than standard TN panels," and in its own announcement, Nvidia claimed the E-TN panel brings "maximum motion
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Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted is here, and with it comes a massive list of changes in the form of patch notes. Season 17 is going to be a big one for Destiny. Not only are Guardians getting another subclass rework with Solar 3.0, but old events like Iron Banner and Solstice of Heroes are seeing reworks as well. Then, of course, there’s the new content like all the new Season of the Haunted’s activities and the upcoming dungeon. Let’s break down the six major additions coming in Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted. For the complete Bungie patch notes, scroll down. Season of the Haunted Season of the Haunted is focused around the Nightmares of the past, The Leviathan ship, and the former Cabal emperor, Calus. Guardians will re-board The Leviathan and work alongside the Crown of Sorrow to stop Calus’ mysterious plot. There’s a new public event called Nightmare Containment, set aboard the returning space ship. There are also new missions called Sever, which take place deep inside the underbelly. A new dungeon Season of the Haunted also includes the addition of another in-game dungeon, which launches on Friday at 1 p.m. ET. While the theme of the dungeon is still a mystery, we do know it’ll be the most rewarding dungeon to date, with a host of Legendary weapons, a new armor set, and some cosmetic items. This is purchased separately from the season. Solar 3.0 Image: Bungie The third class in the new Stasis system and the second revamped Light subclass, Solar 3.0 will let players burn and explode their way through The Leviathan and the rest of the world in Destiny 2. With new abilities, Aspects, and Fragments, all Guardians will finally be able to customize their Solar subclasses and make them their own. New PVP map and Iron Banner rework After years, Bungie is finally getting another Crucible map, set on Savathun’s Throne World. Iron Banner is also getting a major update, bringing Lord Saladin in-line with the game’s other vendors and making the loot more grindable. The game mode is also temporarily changing to Rift, a beloved capture the flag-type mode from the original Destiny. Better events Solstice of Heroes will now just be known as Solstice, and will come with a new twist on the European Aerial Zone, Bonfire Bash. Solstice will also be the first event to get new Event Challenges through the Event card, and come with a special event Title and Seal. All future events will have these benefits, and devoted players will even be able to get a year-long title for playing all events. Glaive improvements and balance adjustments Image: Bungie Glaives launched in a bit of an underwhelming state in Destiny 2: The Witch Queen — especially their Exotic variants. Bungie is buffing glaive projectile speed to make them easier to use, and making significant improvements to the three class-specific Exotics (improved Titan shield, Warlock healing, and Hunter damage). In addition to the glaive changes, there are a host of other balance improvements including general Exotic changes, a new airborne effectiveness stat, and more. Below we’ve listed the complete patch notes for Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted: Activities Freeroam The Legend and Master Lost Sector rotation has been updated. Payers can expect to see a Nessus Lost Sector! Xûr’s Treasure Hoard and Dares of Eternity Fixed a bug that would cause a flashing effect that could potentially have a negative impact on those with photosensitive epilepsy when interacting with the portal in a specific way. Iron Banner Iron Banner reputational changes, detailed here, are in effect to be more in-line with other reputational systems in Destiny 2. Completing challenges and donning Iron Banner gear, including Iron Banner armor ornaments in place of swapping out armor, earns an additional buff when ranking up that Iron Banner reputation. 4 event challenges have been added when playing Iron Banner. These will rotate daily. New intro quest added. All players must complete this once. A new Triumph and Seal has been added to ring in a new era of Iron Banner. Bounties and tokens have been removed from Iron Banner. Power level advantages are now disabled in Iron Banner. Rift returns as a new Iron Banner Seasonal mode. Learn more about Rift and its future here. Gambit Gambit Reputation: Activity completion now awards 75 reputation points from 50. Activity streaks award 20 reputation points per streak from 15. Overall gains should be 25-33% faster. Reduced the number of wins needed for the Gold Coins gilded Triumph for the Dredgen Seal from 50 to 30. Quality-of-life update to Gambit bounties: Daily Bounties: Added new bounty for collecting Heavy ammo. Updated defeating combatants with Stasis bounty to include freeze assists. Changed sending one of each type of Blocker bounty to sending Blockers of any size (with more progress given for sending bigger Blockers). Now players must bank 100 Motes as a team, versus the previous 25 Motes banked per player. Repeatable Bounties: Added a new bounty for defeating invaders as a fireteam. Added a new bounty for defeating Blockers. This includes final blows and assists when progressing through this bounty. Updated the defeating combatants with Stasis bounty to include freeze assists. Changed the defeating opposing Guardians with final blows or assists bounty to defeating opposing Guardians as a fireteam. Updated Gambit enemy variations. Vanguard Ops Fixed an issue where the incorrect names for Champions in the Warden of Nothing strike would appear. Identity theft is not a joke, Jim. Higher difficulty Battlegrounds and strikes can now be rejoined automatically after a disconnect. No, you still won’t be able to change your loadout when taking on Grandmaster Nightfalls. Trials of Osiris Trials Capture Zone and Freelance are no longer referred to as “Labs.” New Trials weapons can now be earned via Saint-14’s reputation rewards track before they can be decrypted from Trials Engrams. Complete matches of Trials of Osiris to earn reputation with Saint-14. Please make our favorite space uncle proud. Thanks. Crucible Control: Each player capturing a zone now gets +1 participation point. Elimination: Each round will now last 90 seconds, reduced from the previous 120-second marker. Mayhem: Super kills now reward players with 3 points instead of 2. Mayhem: Increased the score target to 200 from 150. Mayhem: Time limit has been reduced from 8 to 7 minutes. Rumble: Time limit has been increased from 8 minutes to 10. Showdown: Each round’s target score has been increased to 15 from 10. Crucible private matches will now default to match mode settings in Playlists. Fixed a bug that caused the Only One Ascends medal to be improperly awarded on capturing a zone. Raids and Dungeons Vow of the Disciple: Fixed an issue where players could get out of environment near the Caretaker encounter. Vault of Glass: Spoils of Conquest are no longer farmable on repeated clears. Last Wish: Fixed an exploit where players could pick up Diamond Lance to drop Riven’s Heart. Hasn’t Riven gone through enough? I mean... Last Wish: Fixed an issue where players could fight Kalli outside of the intended darkness phase. Garden of Salvation: Fixed an issue where players could continuously spawn combatants in one of the sides of the Sanctified Mind encounter. Gameplay and Investment Weapons Weapon Crafting: All element currencies other than Neutral Elements have been removed. Neutral Elements have been renamed to Resonant Elements. Weapon Crafting: The Masterwork visual has been added to crafted weapons. The weapon must be reshaped with an enhanced intrinsic and two enhanced trait perks in order to Masterwork. We heard y’all liked gold borders. Weapon Crafting: PvP kills will generate slightly more weapon level progression. Weapon Crafting: Reduced the amount of time
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This government’s public order bill would not be out of place in the statute books of Russia or Belarus. Yet the bill passed its second reading in parliament this week. Why does Boris Johnson criticise repressive policies in authoritarian regimes – and then emulate their tactics? One would hope he is more tolerant of dissent. Yet last year, a series of protests by Insulate Britain that blocked major roads in London led Mr Johnson’s home secretary, Priti Patel, to respond by trying to make her illiberal policing bill even more illiberal.Peers in the upper chamber thankfully voted down the amendments. But Ms Patel’s impulse to outlaw demonstrations did not go away. The public order bill repackaged the amendments, which the Labour peer and former Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti said were “modelled on anti-terror legislation – except they’re for protest”.Lady Chakrabarti has a point. The bill gives the police wide discretion to proscribe innocent behaviour and introduces a thoughtcrime that penalises the possession of material used in a sit-in protest. Members of the public – who may just be in the wrong place at the wrong time – face being convicted of a new offence of “going equipped for locking on”. The offensive equipment could be a tube of superglue or a bicycle lock. The proposed maximum penalty is an unlimited fine.The bill also, sinisterly, proposes control orders for protesters, presumably to shield the public from unwanted opinions. Individuals could be banned from participating in protests if they have twice before caused “serious disruption” (without even being convicted). Last year, parliament’s joint committee on human rights pointed out that it would be hard to justify pre-emptive action on individuals who may be intending to protest because it would be almost impossible to determine whether a particular restriction is necessary, let alone proportionate.Police will also be able to use suspicionless stop and search in almost any demonstration, flying in the face of evidence that stop and search is an overused and ineffective tool. This measure threatens to erode the trust between the police and communities that are disp
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Toyota is to slash global production of motor vehicles due to the semiconductor shortage. The news comes as Samsung pledges to invest about $360 billion over the next five years to bolster chip production, along with other strategic sectors. In a statement, Toyota said it has had to lower the production schedule by tens of thousands of units globally from the numbers it provided to suppliers at the beginning of the year. "The shortage of semiconductors, spread of COVID-19 and other factors are making it difficult to look ahead, but we will continue to make every effort possible to deliver as
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The FBI claims an Islamic State sympathizer living in Ohio plotted to assassinate George W Bush, but confidential informants helped federal agents foil the plan, according to court records.Details of the alleged scheme to kill the former president are laid out in a warrant that the FBI obtained in March to search the accused operative’s cellphone records, a 43-page document that was only unsealed in recent days.NBC News reported that the man named in the warrant – Shihab Ahmed Shihab – had been arrested.A spokesperson for Bush said in a statement Tuesday that the former president was unw
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When Google and Samsung announced Wear OS 3 last year, I had lots of questions about how well Google services would run on Samsung hardware. Of Google’s expansive suite of apps, I was most curious about Google Assistant. The only catch was it wasn’t available when the Galaxy Watch 4 lineup launched — and there were only vague promises as to when it would actually be available. But yesterday, Google Assistant finally arrived on the Galaxy Watch 4, and after a few hours of playing around with it, I’m cautiously optimistic. Google Assistant was already a feature on older Wear OS 2 watches. It just wasn’t great. Because Wear OS 2 watches struggled with underpowered hardware, Google Assistant was often laggy and never fully lived up to its potential. Asking for more than the most basic queries was a crapshoot. Meanwhile, Samsung’s Tizen watches had snappy performance but only offered up Bixby. And Bixby... is Bixby. Despite Samsung’s efforts, it’s just not as useful as other digital assistants. All this to say: once the Google Assistant was available for the Galaxy Watch 4, I installed it as fast as humanly possible. It’ll show up as an update in the on-wrist Google Play Store. Installing Google Assistant Setting up Google Assistant on the Galaxy Watch 4 isn’t hard. The only thing you have to do is make sure your phone and watch are running the latest software. Once that’s done, launch the Google Play Store app on your wrist. You can then either search for “Google Assistant” or scroll down to My Apps. Either way, you should see a button that reads “Assistant Update.” After that, follow the prompts to activate Google Assistant on your phone. It’s at this point that you can either opt in or out of Voice Match, which allows Assistant to create a personalized voice model on your device. You’ll also see a message alerting you that if you elect to have the watch listen for the “Hey Google” wake phrase, it’ll impact battery life. (More on this in a bit.) I told Bixby to take a hike by reprogramming my shortcuts. You can also take the extra step of reprogramming the watch’s home key (the one with the r
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Kant. Hegel. Wittgenstein. And now Grant Shapps. The latest addition to the western philosopher kings. Amazingly, we now have to accept that Michael Green, Sebastian Fox, or whatever the transport secretary is calling himself these days, is what passes for an intellectual giant in this government. The go-to man whenever the prime minister is in trouble. The Ponzi scheme genius who can spin gossamer lies into a greater truth. Or perhaps not.Nothing much rattles Shapps. There again, he has humiliated himself so frequently in his career that taking on Boris Johnson’s own humiliation is of little concern to him. Rather it’s a badge of honour. There is no indefensible position he won’t defend. When the Convict needs a fall guy who is a step up from the catatonic Nadine Dorries, the Shappster is proud to make himself available. A martyr to the cause.So it was Call Me Grant who was sent out to tour the studios on the morning media round to answer questions about the photos that seemed to prove Johnson had lied to parliament and the country. It was here that we began to see the full weight of Shapps’s philosophical talents. Because it turned out that a party was not always a party. The finest mind of this generation of halfwits kindly went on to explain why.It was like this. The Convict was just dead unlucky. Every time he happened to walk into another room, he would find people drinking and playing loud music. And he could never resist pulling a bottle of prosecco out of his red box and making a speech. Out of politeness more than anything else. There again, a briefcase could have magical properties. It could turn any party into a work seminar. God knows the number of Covid planning meetings Johnson had attended when he’d been under his desk, throwing up into a waste bin.So there was no party and there never had been a party. People were just looking at photos of the Convict and his legless hangers on, surrounded by empty bottles piled high, and jumping to conclusions. And Shapps could see why people even stupider than himself might do this. He didn’t blame them. There were times when he had felt angry about the photos. Though clearly not now, as Grant had a huge smirk across his face. He thinks the parties are as big a joke as his boss does.There were a few problems with all this. The parties clearly were parties as the police had already fined other people who had attended them. Ah, those parties, said the Shappster. Those weren’t parties. They were far, far worse than that. Bingeathons. Orgies. Everyone knew that no one in No 10 did a stroke of work after 4pm. Which had made the nightly Covid press conferences something of a lottery. And there was a shortage of chairs when people were crowded into a room but everyone had just socially distanced sitting on one another.Shapps pressed on with his philosophical masterclass. The Convict couldn’t have attended any parties, other than the one he had been fined for, because he hadn’t been issued with any other fixed penalties. The police had spent hours looking at photos and hadn’t spotted him in any of them. Grant corrected himself. Actually, the police hadn’t looked at any of the
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And returning characters confirmed. Developer Infinity Ward's next instalment in the long-running Call of Duty series, which was previously confirmed to be near-future sequel Modern Warfare 2 (not to be confused with the 2009 game of the same name), will launch on 28th October. Platforms have yet to be detailed. Activision Blizzard formally revealed Modern Warfare 2 and its logo in April - after months of rumours and even an official pre-announcement announcement in February. Following today's release date confirmation, specifics remain extremely light, but the gameplay-free trailer accompanying Activision Blizzard's announcement does include a description revealing a smidgeon more of what's in store. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Artwork Reveal. "Task Force 141 makes its massive return with a global squad of iconic veterans," it says. "These Operators include Captain John Price, Simon 'Ghost' Riley, John 'Soap' MacTavish, Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick and introducing Mexican Special Forces Colonel Alejandro Vargas." Luckily, leaks last month had a little more to say, suggesting that, alongside a single-player campaign and multiplayer mode, Modern Warfare 2 would also introduce a new "third mode", known as DMZ, reported to be an extraction-style mode similar to Escape From Tarkov. Additionally, serial leaker Tom Henderson claimed a number of fan-favourite maps from the original Modern Warfare 2 would return, including Highrise, Quarry, Terminal, and Afghan. Alongside the October launch of Modern Warfare 2 - which Activision Blizzard will be hoping helps boost flagging Call of Duty sales - a follow-up to battle royale spin-off Warzone, promising "groundbreaking innovations", is also due to be revealed later this year. Today's announcement comes as Activision Blizzard - which was acquired by Microsoft for $69bn in January - continues its attempts to put the last year of shocking allegations into its workplace culture behind it. Following a State of California lawsuit filing last July, which described the publisher as a "breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women", CEO Bobby Kotick became the focus of a damning report claiming he was aware of sexual misconduct within the company "for years". More recently, the parents of a former Activision Blizzard employee who committed suicide during a company retreat in 2017 launched a lawsuit suing the publisher for wrongful death, alleging the suicide was the result of sexual harassment by work colleagues. Yesterday bought the news that a group of 28 QA testers at Activision Blizzard's Wisconsin-based Raven Software studio had won their vote to unionise, despite the publisher's ongoing anti-unionisation efforts. Following that announcement, one team member said the victory meant employees at the beleaguered company would finally be able to "fight for respect, fight for better wages, better benefits, better work-life balance, fight for sustainability and job security, and continue to fight for our fellow workers in solidarity."
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Stellantis, the parent company of Dodge, Jeep, and Chrysler, has selected Kokomo, Indiana, as the site for its next electric vehicle battery factory. The plant will be built in partnership with South Korea’s Samsung SDI, which is a leading EV battery maker. The companies made the announcement Tuesday alongside Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb and several other local officials in Kokomo. The new facility will create 1,400 new jobs and cost $2.5 billion to construct, though Stellantis and Samsung are willing to spend up to $3 billion on the project, Mark Stewart, chief operating officer of Stellantis, said at the press conference. The cost will be split between the two companies. Stella
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YouTubeDrive is a Wolfram Language (aka Mathematica) package that encodes/decodes arbitrary data to/from simple RGB videos which are automatically uploaded to/downloaded from YouTube. S
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The BBC is preparing to announce further cuts to its output before the end of the month, with the corporation’s staff waiting to see whether their jobs will be on the line.The public broadcaster has already undergone multiple rounds of redundancies and cuts over the past decade as a result of continuous below-inflation licence fee increases. It now needs to find a further £285m in savings as a result of the announcement in January by Nadine Dorries, the culture secretary, that the licence fee would be frozen at £159 for the next two years.This means the corporation’s bosses are likely to announce further redundancies while still implementing cuts imposed on it by the last licence fee s
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In gods we trust — “Let me tell you the story of the space viking, Thor Odinson….”
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Netflix stock might be plunging toward the red, but the beleaguered streaming service is going all in on “The Gray Man.”With a record-setting production budget of $200 million, much of which presumably went to maintaining Chris Evans’ impeccable mustache, the upcoming action movie is one of the most highly anticipated on Netflix’s slate, given the star power in front of and behind the camera.Directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors behind “Avengers: Endgame” among other Marvel films, “The Gray Man” pits Evans against Ryan Gosling for a high-octane game of cat and mouse arriving in theaters July 15, before dropping on the streamer a week later.Gosling stars as Court Gentry, aka Sierra Six, a top black-ops CIA agent who goes on the run after uncovering damaging agency secrets. Fellow mercenary Lloyd Hansen (Evans) is tasked with leading the global manhunt to find him, while racking up a high body count along the way.“If you wanna make an omelette, you gotta kill some people,” Evans, clearly enjoying playing against the Captain America type, says in the trailer.“It’s hard to find somebody at Chris Evans’ level to step into a villain,” Joe Russo told Entertainment Weekly about casting the Marvel star. “It’s why you traditionally don’t get a Ryan Gosling versus Chris Evans movie. But he’s at a point where [playing the villain] is more entertaining to him than playing a hero, so we’re able to get two giant movie stars that face off against each other. They’re very complicated characters with competing agendas, and it’s a fight to the death.” Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, Regé-Jean Page, Jessica Henwick and Alfre Woodard also star in the espionage thriller. Adapted from Mark Greaney’s book of the same name, the film is meant to launch a new franchise centered around Gosling’s character, who presumably survives the mayhem to helm future adventures. But, of course, a film like “The Gray Man” is less about plot and more about two of the most famous working film actors wailing on each other in spectacular action set pieces around the globe. And, by that metric, the first look certainly lives up to the hype.
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We don’t always acknowledge it, but most people have an innate need for music. Think of all the technology that brings us music. For decades, most of the consumer radio spectrum carried music. We went from records, to tape in various forms, to CDs, to pure digital. There are entire satellites that carry — mostly — music. Piracy aside, people are willing to pay for music, too. While it isn’t very common to see “jukeboxes” these days, there was a time when they were staples at any bar or restaurant or even laundrymat you happened to be in. For the cost of a dime, you can hear the music and share it with everyone around you. Even before we could record music, there was something like a jukebox. Coin-operated machines, as you’ll recall, are actually very old. Prior to the 1890s, you might find coin-op player pianos or music boxes. These machines actually played the music they were set up to play using a paper roll with holes in it or metal disks or cylinders. Early Days That changed in 1890 when a pair of inventors connected a coin acceptor to an Edison phonograph. Patrons of San Francisco’s Palais Royale Saloon could put a hard-earned nickel in the slot and sound came out of four different tubes. Keep in mind there were no electronic amplifiers as we know th
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Equality campaigners have accused Emmanuel Macron of betraying his promise to stamp out violence against women and girls after the French government kept in place a new minister accused of rape by two women.Feminist groups led by the Observatory of Sexist and Sexual Violence in Politics organised a street demonstration in Paris on Tuesday against what they called a “government of shame”, after Damien Abad, the minister for solidarity and people with disabilities, remained in his job despite the rape allegations.Abad has denied the accusations, including one from a woman who said that in 2010 she blacked out after accepting a glass of champagne from him and woke up in her underwear in a hotel room with him. Abad said his disability – arthrogryposis, a rare condition that affects the joints – meant he was incapable of sexual assault.The government spokesperson Olivia Grégoire said on Tuesday combating violence against women and girls would be a priority for Macron’s second term, just as it was in his first. She said Abad would stay in government and it was up to the justice system to establish the truth.But campaigners warned the majority of rape and sexual assault cases in France were dropped by prosecutors. One of the women who accused Abad had her case dropped by prosecutors, which she contested. The other had not filed an official complaint, but prosecutors are looking into the case.The row over Abad, a rightwing politician who recently joined Macron’s centrist movement, has overshadowed the first days of the new government, which is led by Élisabeth Borne, France’s first female prime minister in more than 30 years.Madeline da Silva, co-founder of the Observatory on Sexist and Sexual Violence In Politics, which informed senior figures in Macron’s party about the allegations against Abad before his appointment, said he should not be in government.“For the simple reason of setting an example, and sending a message to women who are victims of sexual violence, Mr Abad should not have been made a minister,” she said. “Don’t tell us that no one knew … We reported this in writing to senior political figures who, by chance, now say they did
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Forecasters expect a busy 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, with a 65 percent chance of an above-average season. There’s also a wildcard in the mix that raises the risk of more severe storms in the Gulf of Mexico this year. Between 14 to 21 tropical storms could grow powerful enough to be named this season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in its season outlook briefing, which was released today. The average Atlantic hurricane season, which starts on June 1st, typically has about 14 named storms. Another prominent forecast from Colorado State University predicted 19 named storms this year. NOAA expects six to 10 storms to strengthen into hurricanes. NOAA also forecast between three to six major hurricanes, ranked as a Category 3 or higher with wind speeds of at least 111 miles per hour. There’s also a troubling development in the Gulf of Mexico. The Loop Current, a current of warm water, has moved surprisingly far north for this time of year. The current, which flows like a river within the sea, brings warmer water from the Caribbean to typically cooler waters closer to the US Gulf Coast. That’s especially worrying news for the season since hurricanes feed off heat energy. “It’s higher octane fuel,” says University of Miami oceanography professor Nick Shay. “It’s the 800 pound gorilla in the Gulf.” Shay is concerned that the Loop Current’s current behavior looks similar to the 2005 Atlantic Hurricane season — when hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma ripped through Gulf Coast communities. “In 2005, we have what is known as the hurricane Trifecta in the Gulf of Mexico,” Shay says. Both Katrina and Rita developed explosively into Category 5 storms after crossing paths with the Loop Current’s warmer waters. Hurricanes Ida in 2021 and Harvey in 2017 were also strengthened by the Loop Current. The Loop Current’s water is also saltier. Differences in temperature and salinity between the Loop Current and the rest of the Gulf limit ocean water mixing, which might normally bring surface temperatures down. As a result, the current holds onto heat at much deeper depths than the surrounding Gulf. Water tempe
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NEW YORK (AP) — The folks who hand out Tony Awards believe five is not enough for Angela Lansbury.The Tony Awards Administration Committee announced Monday that the legendary actor will receive a 2022 special Tony for lifetime achievement in the theater, making it her sixth.Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 in “Hotel Paradiso” and won Tonys for “Mame” in 1966, “Dear World” in 1969, “Gypsy” in 1974, “Sweeney Todd” in 1979 and “Blithe Spirit” in 2009. Other Broadway credits include “A Little Night Music,” “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” and “Anyone Can Whistle.”“Angela Lansbury’s contributions to the stage are insurmountable,” said Charlotte St. Martin, president of The Broadway League and Heather Hitchens, president and CEO of the American Th
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Collect data for our trillion dollar corporation for free, thanks! — Street View gets some new features for its 15th birthday. Enlarge / The "See more dates" option will soon appear on iOS and Android. Google Today is the 15th birthday of Google Maps Street View, Google's project to take ground-level, 360-degree photographs of the entire world. To celebrate, the company is rolling out a few new features. First up, Google is bringing historical Street View data to iOS and Android phones. The feature has long existed on desktop browsers, where you can click into Street View mode and then time travel through Google's image archives. When yo
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Niantic made a name for itself in the mobile gaming industry through the enduring success of Pokémon Go. Now the company is hoping to become something else: a platform for other developers to build location-aware AR apps on top of. This plan has been in the works since at least 2018, but it’s taking a big leap forward this week with the long-awaited release of Niantic’s location mapping software for AR, which it calls the Visual Positioning System, or VPS in a nod to GPS. The technology makes it so that AR experiences can be grounded to a physical location, like the front of a building or a park monument, rather than just floating aimlessly through a phone’s camera view. Developers can now use VPS as the tentpole feature of Niantic’s broader Lightship SDK, which also lets multiple devices access a shared AR experience — like a 3D multiplayer game — at the same time. VPS will be free during an initial public beta period and then switch later this year to a tired billing system that’s based on an app’s number of monthly users, according to Niantic spokesman Jonny Thaw. Niant
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Where to find Control Panels inside Command Cavern. Cut power to Control Panels inside Command Cavern is one of the Resistance challenges in Fortnite Chapter 3 Season 2. You will first need to patch The Imagined into a loudspeaker and collect Doomsday Control Keys before unlocking this Week 10 challenge. Completing this challenge will reward you with 23k XP, which will help you unlock skins from the new battle pass. Fortnite Chapter 3 Season 2 Resistance Story Trailer Control Panel locations in Fortnite Before you start searching for Control Panels, you must first establish a Device Uplink outside Command Cavern. Device Uplink locations near Command Cavern. Once you have established the Device Uplink, it's time to cut power to Control Panels inside Command Cavern. Even though the Control Panels appear as icons on your minimap when you get near them, you might be finding it difficult to actually spot one. This is because the three Control Panels in Command Cavern are located inside vents. You can find the first Control Panel by climbing the first set of stairs near the southern entrance to Command Cavern and turning right. Go into the vent located in the corner of this room, near some lockers, and through the next vent opening opposite it. To cut the Control Panel, just damage it with your pickaxe or gun. The first Control Panel is up the stairs by the southern entrance to Command Cavern. The second Control Panel can be found through a vent located near water, to the west of the southern entrance to Command Cavern. Look out for the vent near some yellow cannisters
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Netflix’s Exploding Kittens — The Game, a new mobile title based on the popular card game, will be available for free for Netflix subscribers on May 31st, the company announced Tuesday. The new game will be a different version than the one that’s already available on the App Store and Google Play, and at launch, it will have two exclusive cards. Down the line, Netflix plans to add cards based on the upcoming animated series that will be hitting the service in 2023. Netflix also revealed three additional mobile games that will all be available on Tuesday as part of the service’s growing library of mobile titles: Moonlighter, Townsmen — A Kingdom Rebuilt, and Dragon Up. Once all four of the titles are released, Netflix will count 22 games as part of its catalog. BIG NEWS: Today we’re launching Dragon Up, Moonlighter, Townsmen - A Kingdom Rebuilt exclusively on mobile for Netflix members around the world! ALSO - excited to share that in ONE WEEK we will also be launching Exploding Kittens - The Game EVERYWHERE pic.twitter.com/1mwmN14x2p— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) May 24, 2022 The company first launched its mobile games initiative in early November on Android and on iOS a week later, and has steadily added titles to the service since then. Netflix has also snapped up a few studios, including Oxenfree developer Night School. Netflix is going through a bit of a rough patch since it reported losing subscribers for the first time in over a decade, and it r
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The Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, have returned to the Cannes competition where they have won golden opinions over the decades: two Palmes d’Or (for Rosetta in 1999 and The Child in 2005) and other prizes including best screenplay for Lorna’s Silence in 2008, the Grand Prix for The Kid With The Bike in 2011, and best direction for Young Ahmed in 2019. But for me the dynamism of their work has fallen off in recent years, and there are sometimes issues with basic plot naivety and plausibility, for all the obvious research that has gone into their screenplays. In this film, for exam
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Tuesday May 24, 2022 by Ulf Hermann | Comments This is the third installment in the series of blog posts on how to adjust your QML application to take the maximum advantage of qmlsc. In the first post we've set up the environment. You should read that post first in order to understand the others. In the second post I've shown how to add type annotations to JavaScript functions. Now we need to make sure that all types we want to use in QML are visible at compile time. If you compile Qt Creator again, a
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Activision and developer Infinity Ward gave Call of Duty fans a tiny tease of this year’s game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, in a new video that reveals the game’s release date. According to a new teaser video that shows off artwork of the game’s principal cast, including Modern Warfare favorite Simon “Ghost” Riley, Modern Warfare 2 will be released on Oct. 28. That teaser also reveals a potential reveal date for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: June 8, a couple days before Geoff Keighley’s Summer Game Fest kicks off. Otherwise, the teaser is a drone-captured look at real-worl
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A pledge by Turkey’s president to cut all ties with the Greek prime minister – and a suggestion that Kyriakos Mitsotakis was dishonourable and lacking character – has raised fears of renewed tensions between the two Nato members.Calling off talks between the countries, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused Mitsotakis of deliberately antagonising Turkey when he addressed the US Congress during a visit last week to Washington.“This year we were supposed to have a strategic council meeting,” Erdoğan said in a televised address on Monday. “From now on there is no one called Mitsotakis in my book. I will never accept meeting him because we [only] walk on the same path as politicians who keep their promises, who have character and who are honourable.”The decision to freeze Greek-Turkish c
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Home _______ _______ __ _ ______ _ _ _ ____ ____ ____ |______ | |______ | \ | | ____ |\/| | |___ |--< [__] | |_____ |______ | \_| |_____| Version: 1 This software is an implementation of "FLENG", a low level concurrent logic programming language descended from Prolog. A cross-compiler for UNIX-compatible systems is provided to translate programs written in FLENG into executable code for Z80 CPUs running CP/M, the Commodore 64 and the "Uxn" virtual computer system. executable. As FLENG is quite minimal in features, a translator from "Flat Guarded Horn Clauses" or "Strand" (other concurrent logic languages) into FLENG is also available. The project is an experiment in implementing concurrent logic programming languages on very cons
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The at-home molecular COVID-19 testing company Detect is partnering with healthcare provider Carbon Health to give customers who test positive easy access to antiviral treatments, the companies announced today. The “Test to Treat at Home” program runs directly through the Detect app, which connects people who test positive for COVID-19 with Carbon Health. Then, they can set up appointments for virtual or in-person visits, depending on their location. At that appointment, a provider can prescribe an antiviral like Paxlovid, and patients can pick the drug up the same day — a timesaver for a drug that has to be taken within five days of symptoms starting. The program is modeled off the Biden administration’s Test to Treat program, which lets people get COVID-19 tests and antivira
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The government’s responses to the cost of living crisis are mainly long term and do not respond to the immediate and dire situations of people in the greatest need (Boris Johnson to stress work as the fix for cost of living crisis, 22 May). Many have incomes below the tax threshold and will therefore not benefit from any cut in income tax. The £150 council tax rebate and £200 loan will be welcome to some, but will have already been swallowed up by recent energy bills.An immediate and adequate increase in benefits could surely be brought into play. If not, as is the case with many of this government’s initiatives, saving money now will certainly result in massive future payments necessary to deal with the unfortunate outcomes, such as the results of going without sufficient food, bein
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The footballing authorities need to widen the scope of discussions in response to recent pitch invasions if they really want to control the unacceptable behaviour of fans (Authorities searching for solutions after pitch invasions cause disquiet, 20 May). The answer to this problem lies in large part with the clubs and their players.For several seasons we have witnessed players indulging in a series of increasingly histrionic acts when their team has scored a goal: sliding on their knees across the pitch, kicking corner flags and – worst of all – jumping over barriers to embrace their exulting fans. Equally deplorable are the responses of coaching staff and subs who encroach the pitch to join in this triumphalism. If fans resort to irresponsible and violent behaviour, they are doing lit
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Among the underutilized HTML elements is the q tag, for quotes. This should, depending on user agent, render with appropriate opening and closing quote marks, without needing to specify them by hand. This sounds really convenient, to avoid ambiguity when quotes are nested inside quotes inside quotes. I said, “Alex told Bobby, “according to Chris, “Danny said “No way am I the one who’s confused,” when asked,” direct quote,” yesterday morning,” emphatically. Lucky Danny.The browser might even somewhat intelligently choose pairs of quotes that alternate with each nesting. In practice, I’ve found they mostly pick double quotes for the outside, then single quotes for all inner quotes. Fortunately, we can add a custom style that defines a larger vocabulary of quote marks.I
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In this issue: The anti-abortion movement’s post-Roe future, the plant peddlers of Appalachia, the real effect of the child tax credit now that it’s gone, and more. By May 24, 2022, 12:40pm EDT Illustration by Julia Kuo for Vox Illustration by Julia Kuo for Vox Roughly a year ago, the government began dispatching payment
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After bottomless headlines about podcast licensing deals, I guess getting acquired is cool again. Or maybe Conan is just tired. I’m tired, and I didn’t even spend three decades as the “good king” of late night. On that note, I will be out for the next few days, so send all pitches and thoughts to Jake (nice ones, please!!). SiriusXM acquires Conan O’Brien’s podcast network So much for sticking to mid-tier deals, SiriusXM (though kudos on the misdirection). On Monday, the audio giant announced it has acquired Conan O’Brien’s production company, Team Coco, and locked the comedian down in a five-year talent contract. At a reported $150 million, the transaction is by no means the industry’s largest, but it’s a callback to the kind of M&A that was happening before top po
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Over the last 20 years Twenty20 cricket has risen from obscurity to dominate much of the cricketing world, but still the 20th season of the competition currently known as the Vitality Blast starts on Wednesday in the midst of a potentially existential crisis.Though all available tickets for finals day have long since been snapped up, disappointing sales have been reported for many of the less high-profile fixtures, and some are questioning its place in an overcrowded calendar since the England and Wales Cricket Board’s laser focus has switched to the Hundred, the rival micro-format which launched last summer.“The Hundred is completely on its own, but people want to play in T20 competitions around the world and the more successful they are in the Blast, the more likely they are to find
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It was, said the doctor, an avoidable delay that would haunt these parents for ever. When their two-year-old daughter first refused to eat, then began to go yellow with the signs of jaundice and then fell into a seizure, Kanchana and her husband, living in the Sri Lankan region of Haldummulla, knew she needed urgent medical care.But they faced a terrible obstacle. Sri Lanka is in the grip of the worst economic crisis in its history, declaring bankruptcy and with no foreign reserves left to pay for imports. As a result, the country has been unable to afford necessary fuel and in recent weeks, supplies have all but dried up. As the girl’s father searched for hours on Sunday for fuel for his tuk-tuk to drive her to hospital, he was faced with one empty petrol station after another.Eventuall
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REDDING, Calif. — Several people were injured when a bull jumped a fence and escaped an arena during a popular Northern California rodeo, authorities said. (Watch the video below.)The escape occurred Friday during the final section of the Redding Rodeo’s bull riding event, the Redding Rodeo Association said on Facebook.The bull leapt over a fence then ran through a crowd of spectators and across a parking lot before it was captured near a bridge about a half mile from the arena.At least six people were treated for minor injuries, including 15-year-old Jordan Greco, a sophomore at Redding’s Enterprise High School.Greco told the Redding Record Searchlight the bull’s horn’s clipped his leg as the animal charged through the arena’s VIP section.“Getting hit by a bull was an experi
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slow down, you move too fast — First-party PlayStation Plus classics launch at slower 50 Hz standard. A video of the slower PAL version of Ape Escape running on PlayStation Plus. Sony's confusing new multi-tiered PlayStation Plus subscription plan has now launched in multiple Asian territories (outside Japan) ahead of a worldwide launch planned for the coming weeks. But users in those regions are finding that some of the classic games on the service are unexpectedly running slower than they remembered. Video Games Chronicle has confirmed that first-party original PlayStation games (i.e., those published by Sony) available on PlayStation Plus in Asia a
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I can no longer honestly tell my kids that everything will be okay.Alex Majoli / MagnumMay 24, 2022, 12:30 PM ETSign up for Molly’s newsletter, Wait, What?, here.The teenagers are not alright, but then again, neither are the adults. Pandemic life has been profoundly jarring, and every generation has felt it. I hear about people fighting on airplanes and an increase in violent crimes, then I attend my Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on Zoom and try to figure out why going back to “normal” is so hard. My 80-year-old mother never got COVID-19, but more than two years of sitting at home seems to have hastened her descent into dementia. Meanwhile, many young children are struggling to keep up with their education or even learn how to socialize.Now imagine what this moment must be like for teenagers. In December, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a warning: Pandemic-related death, fear, loneliness, and economic uncertainty have worsened “the unprecedented stresses young people already faced.” It makes sense. Between unfamiliar hormones and trying to figure out who you are in the world, being a teen has always been incredibly hard. Pandemic teenagehood is even worse. Recently, I was reading a story in The New Yorker about child suicide when I learned that a friend of a friend’s teenager had died by suicide. I felt sick.Derek Thompson: Why American teens are so sadLiving through a pandemic that has claimed more than a million American lives is not the only thing that’s making young people miserable. They’re also very much not in denial about the likely coming climate disaster. In a survey of 10,000 people ages 16 to 25, more than 45 percent said that their fe
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For its design display every year, the Cannes Film Festival creates an original commemorative poster, which gets splashed across the buildings and billboards of the seaside Cote d’Azur town that lends the festival its streets and name for two weeks every summer. In the recent past, those posters have mostly featured film icons: Agnes Varda, Spike Lee, Ingmar Bergman, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo. This year, it’s Jim Carrey climbing a set of stairs overlaid with a blue sky flecked with wispy clouds. It’s an instantly recognizable image: the final moments of Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show. Carrey, as Truman Burbank, has unknowingly spent his life since birth living in a vast dome, every aspect of his existence engineered by a set of producers and broadcast live to a devoted audience. But now he’s discovered his faux existence and, climbing the steps, is about to enter the real world outside. Weir’s film didn’t play at Cannes when it was released nearly 25 years ago, so when the poster was unveiled a month ahead of the festival, some explanation was in order. “Peter Weir and Andrew Niccol’s The Truman Show (1998) is a modern reflection of Plato’s cave and the decisive scene urges viewers to not only experience the border between reality and its representation but to ponder the power of fiction, between manipulation and catharsis,” the festival’s website announced. A reasonable enough sentiment, if a bit broadly applicable to every film festival on earth. But then things take a left turn: “Just as Truman escapes falsehood as he rises, the Festival, with its famous ascending red carpet, offe
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Czech rider Jan Hirt of Intermarche-Wanty Gobert overcame problems with his bike and fought cramps to win the 16th stage of the Giro d’Italia on Tuesday, as the race headed into the mountains in its final week.Hirt’s maiden stage win came on a 202km ride from Salo to Aprica, where the riders reached an altitude of more than 5,000 metres on the climb.He was well behind the leaders but caught up before the summit of the Mortirolo in the Italian Alps. By the time Hirt crested the final climb on Valico di Santa Cristina, he was in the lead, with Thymen Arensman – who attacked earlier – 16 seconds behind, eventually crossing the line on his own seven seconds ahead of the Team DSM rider.“I wanted to try to do something nice today,” said Hirt. “Every time I hear Mortirolo I want to anticipate. I wanted to go in the breakaway today. There were difficult moments when the group split, so then we had to come back on the Mortirolo.“Then in the end on the last climb I had a problem with my bike, it was not shifting properly and the chain was jumping. Then I had cramps on the downhill. I had all these problems but I just wanted to fight all the way to the finish.”Overall leader Richard Carapaz of Ineos Grenadiers, Mikel Landa (Bahrain Victorious) and Jai Hindley (Bora-Hansgrohe) were in the group that sprinted for third – one minute and 24 seconds behind. Hindley eventually clinched third and received the time bonus that allowed him to cut Carapaz’s lead to three seconds going into Wednesday’s stage 17.Jai Hindley pips Richard Carapaz to third place and a time bonus in Aprica. Photograph: Michael Steele/Getty Images“It’s been a hard stage and at the end I’m happy. I thought I was going to win the sprint for third place,” said maglia rosa wearer Carapaz. “I eventually didn’t but it’s still a good day for me. I’ve lost a few seconds on Hindley but I gained more on [João] Almeida so the balance is positive,” he added, after moving 44 seconds clear of the Portuguese.
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HuffPost may receive a share from purchases made via links on this page. Every item is independently selected by the HuffPost Shopping team. Prices and availability are subject to change. If you haven’t gotten your hands on the widly popular Revlon One-Step Volumizer hair dryer and hot air brush, today’s your chance. Though it comes in other color options, the red color is currently on sale at Amazon for only $21.47 (originally $59.99!). With this handy brush, you can declutter your bathroom counter once and for all, as it has multiple functions that eliminate the need for a ton of tools to do your hair every day. Not only does it dry your hair, but it also styles and adds volume as you use it. The nondetachable oval brush is ideal for smoothing hair, preventing frizz and picking up follicles at the root, and it has round edges to create a voluminous, curled-ends look. Multiple heat settings allow for drying and styling versatility.The Revlon One-Step Volumizer hair dryer and hot air brushThis brush saves you a ton of hair styling time as it dries and styles, dries and adds volume to your hair in only one step. It has three heat settings so you can customize your styling experience to your hair's needs. This Line Of Haircare Is Target's Best Kept Secret
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Solar 3.0 is coming to Destiny 2: Season of the Haunted. Guardians will be able to take up new, flaming abilities against their enemies in the game’s second revamped Light subclass. In anticipation of the new season, Bungie released a short developer video discussing some of the new changes. Overall, Solar is moving away from the damage reduction it used to have — Overshields being a Void 3.0 thing — and instead focusing on the dual dichotomy of the sun: healing and burning. For example, all classes have access to healing grenades in Solar 3.0, spreading the healing identity to more than just Warlocks. Each class has its own specialty, with Titans focused on ability damage, Hunters focused on weapon damage, and Warlocks acting as burning combat medics. Below is a per-class breakdown of the new Solar 3.0 abilities highlighted in Bungie’s video. Titan Image: Bungie Titans have a new slam ability called Consecration, which appears to be an Aspect. The Titan can slide forward, flinging fire out along the ground; do an uppercut; and then slam back into the ground with a flaming smash. This looks like it takes the melee charge, but Titans can do this with throwing hammer or charge equipped. Warlock Image: Bungie Several times in the trailer, we see Warlock grenades shoot out additional fire bombs around the area. This is part of the Touch of Flame Aspect, which improves grenades in a variety of ways. Incinerator snap is a new Warlock melee, which causes them to actually snap like Roy Mustang in FullMetal Alchemist. The ability sends a wave of flames in front of the Warlock, burning all targets to a crisp. However, if there’s just one target, the damage will combine onto the single foe. Hunter Image: Bungie More than once in the new trailer, we see a Hunter dive down and touch the ground with the tip of their knife, causin
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While photos of the prime minister at a gathering on 13 November 2020 have raised questions about the credibility of the Partygate inquiry, they have also caused some to reflect on what they were doing that day.As England was under a 28-day “circuit-breaker”, its second lockdown, Boris Johnson appeared to be raising a glass at a colleague’s No 10 leaving drinks.Elsewhere, others were at relatives’ socially distanced funerals, delivering babies alone and looking after Covid patients.Here some of those whose lives were deeply affected by restrictions recall the date.‘I was allowed a few hours off work to go to the funeral’Dr Gareth Jones: ‘That photo made me unbelievably cross.’ Photograph: Gareth Jones/Guardian CommunityWhen I looked back through photos I realised that was the day we buried my Uncle Bob. There’s a picture of my wife and my son Zachary, who was born just before the first lockdown, stood outside the crematorium.Jones’s wife, Dr Helen Kalaher, and son Zachary outside Chester crematorium on 13 November 2020. Photograph: Gareth Jones/Guardian CommunityI’d only been allowed a few hours off work in the morning because I was on call in the Covid ward. My uncle was a massive, larger-than-life character whose funeral would have been packed out in normal circumstances. But there were around 20 of us and my auntie was still too unwell with Covid to attend.When they were both in the high-dependency unit in Chester with the virus, staff had wheeled their beds into the same room so they could spend their last few hours together. I stood at the back because of my exposure to Covid.It was heartbreaking not being able to hug Archie, my godson and Bob’s grandson, who was around 16 at the time, at the funeral. The whole thing felt horrible and wrong and then I went off back to the wards.I understand lots of the difficulties the government was facing, but that photo made me unbelievably cross this morning because of the sacrifices we were making. It’s made my blood boil. Gareth Jones, 40, respiratory consultant, Liverpool‘It’s a moment you can never get back’Xenia Davis and her newborn son, Rowan, in November 2020. Photograph: Xenia Da
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Waze has finally introduced support for Apple Music on iPhones, allowing you to control your music through the navigation app’s built-in audio player. This should make it easier for you to pause, play, and switch between songs while following the directions to your destination. You’ll also get access to Apple Music’s wide selection of playlists directly through Waze, which means you shouldn’t have to open the Apple Music app at all. Apple Music joins a host of other audio streaming services that already connect with Waze. The app first rolled out support for Spotify in 2017 and late
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Even BBC News is kicking Manchester United when it’s down.A graphic saying “Manchester United are rubbish” appeared on-screen Tuesday during a report on the French Open and remained on the news ticker for several seconds.The BBC’s Annita McVeigh later apologized, chalking the blooper up to a trainee learning to post updates for the news ticker accidentally publishing a random thought.UPDATE: BBC News have apologised.They say that a trainee was learning how to write text for the ticker and accidentally published them onto the BBC News Channel. pic.twitter.com/OkjPIkJAoo— Scott Bryan (
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poly-lt-wire-logo Image: Marvel Studios Christian Bale plays the iconic alien who wants to kill every god By May 24, 2022, 12:10pm EDT Monday’s new trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder gave us our first good look at the movie’s villain, Gorr the God Butcher, as a heavily made-up Christian Bale ominously intoned: “All gods will die.” Movie viewers are likely more familiar with Bale than with the character he’s playing, and that’s entirely reasonable. Compared to Thor mainstays like Loki, Malekith the Accursed, Surtur, etc., Gorr is a relative stripling, first appearing in comics a mere ten years ago. He’s only really had two stories about him. But it’s the sheer quality of those stories that’s remarkable, from the minds of writer Jason Aaron and artist Esad Ribić, that catapulted him to the ranks of the greatest Thor villains ever put on the page. Here’s the most important thing to know about Gorr: He wants to kill every god who has ever existed. Image: Jason Aaron, Esad Ribić/Marvel Comics Who is Gorr, and why is he called the God Butcher? A the dawn of all cosmic time, Gorr was an unremarkable alien from a planet so unremarkable that it had no name. His home was inhospitable to life, plagued by drought, famine, earthquakes, and wild beasts. Still, his people believed their gods were watching over them, listening to their prayers, and that misfortune was ineffable divine will. Gorr questioned those ways, and — after the slow, individual deaths of his wife and all of his children — cursed his people’s gods, for which he was banished from his tribe of starving nomads to wander alone until he died. He was then present for a divine visitation — two gods, locked in battle, slammed meteor-like from the heavens into the desert, exhausted from their combat and succumbing to their wounds. As Gorr approached, seeing wit
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You can now call public pay phones relics of the past in New York City.The nation’s most populous city removed its last public phone booth from a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan on Monday and shipped the once-ubiquitous device to a museum.The hulking silver and blue phone kiosk was the last of more than 6,000 that have been stripped from the city’s streets since 2015. The transition followed the city’s agreement to swap the coin-operated pay phones for kiosks that provide free digital calls, Wi-Fi and cellphone charging.These leaner, taller LinkNYC kiosks, known as Links, are funded through video advertising on the kiosks’ sides.As of Tuesday there were 1,860 active Links throughout the city’s five boroughs, according to a LinkNYC website, and plenty more are planned. CityBridge, a digital consortium that installs the kiosks, is required to activate “no fewer than 4,000” by 2026, The City reported last month, citing the city’s contract.Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who watched the last pay phone’s removal on Monday, described the event as bittersweet.A woman stands near a LinkNYC kiosk in New York City. These kiosks provide free Wi-Fi, phone charging and phone calls. The system is supported by advertising running on the sides of the kiosks.Richard Levine via Getty Images“I won’t miss all the dead dial tones but gotta say I felt a twinge of nostalgia seeing it go,” Levine wrote on Twitter.The removed artifact is headed to the Museum of the City of New York, where it joins other once-pervasive icons of a past generation, like typewriters, rotary phones, pneumatic tubes, and library card catalogs in an “Analog City” exhibit. This exhibit,
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If you deploy your applications in regions around the globe and need to keep database read latency low, you will want to physically have a database nearby. With PlanetScale Portals, you can now create read-only regions to support your globally distributed applications and better serve your users worldwide.Put your data where your users and applications are#Portals allow you to read data from regions closest to where you globally deploy your applications. Whether your application is deployed near Northern Virginia, Frankfurt, São Paulo, or any of our other PlanetScale regions, Portals can now provide lower read latency for your applications!Today, each database in PlanetScale reads and writes from a single region. But with Portals, you can add as many distributed read-only regions as you want. Without PlanetScale, it can be a hassle to set up a globally deployed database on your own. You might have to do capacity planning, deal with complicated pricing structures, and worry about your replication strategy or performance. Instead, with a couple of clicks, allow PlanetScale to operate your additional read-only regions for you.An example of the power of Portals#To make this more concrete, let’s look at the read latency between different regions:For an application deployed to Frankfurt, talking to a Northern Virginia database can add nearly an extra ~90ms PER query. By adding a read-only region in Frankfurt, we can reduce that to ~3ms per query. (Data based on select * from boo
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In this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they’ve been reading recently. This month, recommendations include Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novels, a guide to writing and some gripping spy novels. Tell us what you’ve been reading in the comments.Dean Atta, poet and authorRight now I’m almost exclusively reading queer books. It’s really important to me to see a variety of stories being told, as it reassures me that I can tell my own stories without them needing to speak for every queer person. Séan Hewitt’s memoir All Down Darkness Wide spoke to my formative years growing up under Section 28, having conflicting feelings towards my sexuality as a Christian. It’s a very tender book that looks at intimate relationships in Hewitt’s life and explores the nuances of two men existing outside traditional family structures. As a queer person you can be close to your family and yet still feel a distance when it comes to their understanding of your experience. Also in nonfiction, Body Work, Melissa Febos’ illuminating writing guide, has been a trusty companion of late. Febos explains how she wrote her books, which include Whip Smart, about her time as a professional dominatrix. And finally, Limbic by Peter Scalpello is a collection by a Glaswegian poet living in London – my opposite, as a London poet living in Glasgow. I was intrigued to see how Peter experienced my city and it’s uncanny; I relate to so much of it. He’s very candid about the gay scene in London, very open about sex and the lack of intimacy you can sometimes feel in a big city. It’s a very brave book that will ring true for many gay men and queer people, I’m so glad it exists in the world.Only on the Weekends by Dean Atta (Hodder, £8.99) is available now. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.Jessica, Guardian readerShirley Jackson. Photograph: API have just finished The Sundial by Shirley Jackson, published in 1958. It tells the story of a family who discover that the world is going to end and they are the only ones with a chance of survival – as long as they are inside the house when the day finally comes.Although the book can be classified as horror, I loved Jackson’s dark humour and the way she showcases the family dynamics. It’s set in a mansion where the characters live in their own bubbled reality, never fully satisfied, always thinking of the new world to come. I found the book so clever, scary and funny that it became a journey I got to experience alongside the family. And Jackson constantly teases the reader, having you flip between doubting and believing that this day will ever come.PD Smith, author and criticThe news in the last few months has been grim, with a war in Europe and the possible dawn of another cold war with Russia. My recent reading reflects this mood.Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male was written at the beginning of 1939, as Europe moved inexorably towards war. Described by Robert Macfarlane as Household’s “masterpiece”, the novel describes how the narrator attempts to assassinate a dictator and is then pursued relentlessly until
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Meta's ad transparency tools will soon reveal another treasure trove of data: advertiser targeting choices for political, election-related, and social issue spots. Meta said it plans to add the targeting data into its Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) environment for academic researchers at the end of May. The move comes a day after Meta's reputation as a bad data custodian resurfaced with news of a lawsuit filed in Washington DC against CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Yesterday's filing alleges Zuckerberg built a company culture of mishandling data, leading directly to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The suit seeks to hold Zuckerberg responsible for the incident, which saw millions of users' data harvested and used to influence the 2020 US presidential election. Jeff King, Meta's VP of business integrity, said that FORT would allow researchers to look at detailed targeting information for social issue, electoral and political ads. "This data will be provided for each individual ad and will include information like the interest categories chosen by advertisers," King said. Prior to this announcement, data for social, electoral, and political ads in the run-up to the 2020 election was available as part of a pilot program. This new release will expand the pilot and add data from all ads in those categories run globally since 2020, King said. The non-academic public has to wait until July to get their hands on that data in Facebook's Ad Library, and when released it will be in a summarized form. Included in the update will be data on total number of social, electoral, and political ads ran on a page using particular targeting data, percentage spent on the different issues, and whether the page uses a custom or lookalike audience. King said that Meta hopes the release will "help people better understand the practices used to reach potential voters on our technologies," and emphasized yet again that Meta is "committed to providing meaningful transparency, while also protecting people's privacy."  Zuckerberg sued for alleged role in Cambridge Analytica data-slurp scandal Meta to squeeze money from WhatsApp with Cloud API for businesses Your data's auctioned off up to 987 times a day, NGO reports Ad-tech firms grab email addresses from forms before they're even submitted In addition to Zuckerberg's personal legal woes, Meta is also facing legal challenges in the US and abroad related to its advertising practices. The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) and Digital Services Act (DSA) both take aim at big tech companies, of which Meta is an archetypal example.  The DMA focuses on preventing companies from abusing market power, while the DSA targets advertising directly. The DSA places particularly strict requirements on advertising transparency, which Meta's announcement today addresses. US legislators have also recently introduced a bill that would crack down on large advertisers like Facebook and Google. Big tech has been under the spotlight for how it handles advertising. Meta, in particular, was caught last year kicking transparency researchers from New York University's Ad Observatory Pro
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Pokémon Go will soon get its first Ultra Beast, according to a tease from the game’s official accounts. Niantic and The Pokémon Company teased the impending arrival of Nihilego, the Parasite Pokémon, in Pokémon Go but did not provide specifics on when and how the first Ultra Beast will come to the mobile game. There are two important events coming up in Pokémon Go, however. The game’s current season of content, the Season of Alola, will conclude at the end of May, and Niantic is promising a bonus end-of-season Special Research story sometime after June 1, with a $4.99 ticket that will unlock bonus rewards. More details on that Alola to Alola event, which runs May 25 to June 1, ar
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Pay the price — Zuckerberg and Facebook sold "as much access to users as possible," AG says.
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Just as the Jedi youngling would have to build their light saber, so is it a rite of passage for a true geek to build their own computer interfaces. And nothing makes a personal computer more personal than a custom keyboard, a bespoke mouse, an omnipotent macropad, a snazzy jog wheel, or a fancy flight yoke. In this contest, we encourage you to make your strangest, fanciest, flashiest, or most custom computer peripherals, and share that work with all the rest of us. Wired or wireless, weird or wonderful, we want to see it. And Digi-Key is sponsoring this contest to offer three winners an online shopping spree for $150 each at their warehouse! More parts, more projects. Make It Yours
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poly-lt-wire-logo Jorts (and Jean) in space! By May 24, 2022, 12:00pm EDT Image: Blackbird Interactive/Focus Entertainment Every morning, I wake up in my company-provided bed on the LYNX company space station, and I get a reminder that I owe the company $1.25 billion. This is the debt I incurred just for the privilege of having this job. With interest and fees, it averages out to $500k per day. Welcome to the 23rd-century workforce! So I suit up and set to work breaking apart spaceships with my future versions of a blowtorch and grappling hook. Scrap goes in the Furnace, composites go in the Processor, and electronics go on the Barge. I pick a ship and begin cutting off parts at conveniently labeled anchor points before guiding them to their destination. An automated voice chides me when I send something down the wrong chute and I watch the projected value of my work diminish. When I do everything right, I watch the value of my scrap accumulate. My goal is to make enough to break even for the day. If I can avoid penalties and rack up enough profit, I might even start paying down my monstrous debt. Image: Blackbird Interactive/Focus Entertainment via Polygon I’m happy as a productive member of the LYNX corporate family, generating value and efficiently meeting production goals. As I dutifully hack another chunk off the spaceship, I think back to the company-approved posters in my bunk, and I’m satisfied with performing a hard day’s work. And then I smack myself directly in the face with a chunk of ship. While I watch the oxygen leak out of my helmet through the newly formed crack, a warning reminds me that asphyxiation might prevent me from meeting my production goals. I jet back to the company vending machine to buy some more oxygen and a spacesuit patch kit — the cost gets added to my running tab. The next morning, I’m billed for the clone body the company gave me. Image: Blackbird Interactive/Focus Entertainment For a (presumably) straightforward physics-based sandbox game like Hardspace: Shipbreaker, that’s the extent of the corporate satire I expect. It’s a funny commentary and makes for an enjoyable experience, even if it’s not particularly unique. Shipbreaker is a meditative game when I’m not actively asphyxiating. I float around in space, untethered by gravity or concepts like up and down. I have to constantly reorient myself to get the best angle on a particular cut as I drift. Each ship presents me with a puzzl
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Today’s deals kick off with some great prices on Logitech gaming and streaming gear from Amazon’s deal of the day, and just like monkey see, monkey do, Best Buy is following suit and matching many of those prices. The selection of discounted Logitech products ranges from mice and headsets to steering wheels and a webcam. There’s even a Blue Yeti USB microphone kit with a Compass desk mount for $143.99 (about $46 off compared to buying them separately) that’s ideal for podcasting and streaming — and because Logitech actually owns Blue. A lot of these deals are great, but let’s di
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Google Lens, the search giant’s powerful image recognition software, is becoming slightly less cumbersome to use within the Chrome browser on desktop. Currently, if you want to use Lens on an image on a website, the browser opens a page of results in a new tab. But in the future, the browser will instead show results in a panel to the right of a webpage. Only when you want to find an image’s source will Chrome open a new browser tab. The search giant’s image recognition software has long been available on mobile, where it’s accessible via Google’s apps on iOS or the native camera
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Cockroach Labs has finally added a new command line tool with the release of version 22.1 of its eponymous database, out today. Although it was possible to deploy CockroachDB using something like Terraform (for example, deployment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) the process is often not particularly elegant. "Until this release we didn't have an API to control the database," Jim Walker, recovering developer and product evangelist at Cockroach Labs told The Register during 2022's EU Kubecon in Valencia, Spain. "It's really around control of environment: it's removing nodes, it's adding nodes, it's starting the cluster, it's stopping the cluster, the basic stuff. "And so it's really as simple as kind of building it out so that we can actually integrate with the workflows that people have, or the way that they're delivering software in their organization. Like how we work in the context of the CI/CD flow where you're provisioning hardware or TerraForm, you're setting up security over here, the database has got to get up and running. "That step with the database [for CockroachDB at least] was kind of a manual thing for a while there. And so we have an API." The update also includes Quality of Service prioritization and data domiciling features, which will be handy for a potentially massively distributed database with nodes that are not necessarily where lawmakers would like them The arrival of the API marks a step toward maturity for the database. Having been designed with distribution in mind from the outset, to run across clouds and be pretty much unkillable has proven attractive for investors (the company recently took $278 million in Series F funding, giving it a $5 billion valuation.) However, as with much of the cloud native landscape, the next challenge is integrating seamlessly into automated workflows. "It's been a matter of 'we had to build this awesome database' and now it's like 'how does it work with all the other things?'" said Walker. As well as the command line tooling, Cockroach Labs has applied the API to its CockroachDB Serverless product, aimed at luring developers to its world via a horizontally scalable (Postgres-compatible SQL) relational database. Pricing is based on how much is stored and the work done by queries, although small loads and data sizes of less than 5GB won't attract a charge. "I am fascinated by the serverless thing," said Walker, "I think it should be called Infrastructureless, eventually, I think that's really what this thing becomes… what we're doing it is we're preparing it so that it can actually work for huge massive applications." Other updates in this release include support for time-to-live (TTL) data: "Customers had requested this," said Walker, "to both optimize the db but also for use cases where they do not want data to live forever because of risk and other concerns." The automated expiration has been a feature of other database, such as Oracle's, so its arrival in CockroachDB is a further sign of the product maturing. Db2, where are you? Big Blue is oddly reluctant to discuss recent enhancements to its flagship database Database company Cockroac
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Big news! The Tilt team is joining Docker. The Tilt project is joining too. We think this is a great fit and I will tell you why. The Problem Modern apps are made of so many services. They’re everywhere. Every team we talk to is trying to figure out how to set up environments to run their apps in dev.  Simple `start.sh` scripts inevitably grow into mini bespoke orchestrators. They need to start servers in the right order, update them in-place, and monitor when one is failing. We built Tilt, a dev environment as code for teams on Kubernetes, to help solve these problems. Whether your dev env is local processes or containers, in a local cluster or a remote cloud, Tilt keeps you in flow and your feedback loops fast. So how does this make sense at Docker? When we started building Tilt in 2018, we thought of Docker as the container company selling Swarm to enterprises. In 2019, the Docker’s Next Chapter blog post announced a change in focus to invest more in great tools for developers and development teams to help them spend more time on innovation, less time on everything else.  Tilt interoperates with Docker Buildkit, Docker Desktop, and Docker Compose. Improvements to these tools help Tilt users too! We always had a hunch that our product roadmaps might overlap. And in the years since Docker focused on developers, we’ve been converging more and more. Once we started talking more with Docker, we found more in common than just a problem space including: A product philosophy around deeply understanding devs’ existing workflows, so we can make dramatic improvements in user experience that feel magic; An engineering philosophy around patterns and flexibility so devs can adapt their tools to their needs; A business philosophy around building a sustainable company so we can continue to make great free, open-source tools for every developer. So you could say we got along. What’s next? What Does a Combined Tilt + Docker Look Like? Tilt will remain open-source. It’s great! You should try it! We’ll still be responding to issues and hanging out in the community slack channel. But this has never been about Tilt the technology. Or even about Kubernetes. Our history is full of experiments. Dan Bentley and I started hacking on ideas in 2017. We knew we were unhappy about microservice dev. But we weren’t sure what the first stepping stone might be. This was more of a research project than a company. Some examples: Our first prototype was a more interactive, developer-focused CI. We almost trolled ourselves into becoming a Bazel company. We bought two lab coats, poster board, glue, and glitter so we could show off our prototypes at the GothamGo conference. We built many weird demos: (1) Mishell (an interactive multi-service shell) represented by a French-speaking hermit crab named Michel, and PETS (Process for Editing Tons of Services) represented by three cats overwhelmed by microservice dev. Our teammate Han Yu had a blast with mascot design (yeah to Docker for animal mascots): The first version of Tilt was a bare-bones terminal app to update containers in a Kubernetes cluster. It resonat
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Unions have warned of a “hammer blow to morale” across the public sector, after Downing Street said ministers would have to take into account the risk of stoking inflation when deciding this year’s pay awards.A readout of Tuesday morning’s cabinet meeting revealed that ministers “held a discussion on public sector pay”.It came as the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) became the first Whitehall department to announce a recruitment freeze, with the threat of more than 90,000 job cuts looming across the public sector.According to Boris Johnson’s official spokesperson, at the cabinet meeting “the prime minister said the public are understandably anxious about global cost of living pressures, and that the government will continue to support those most in need”.The spokesperson added: “The government has already pledged to increase public sector spending and is awaiting decisions by public sector review bodies. However, ministers made clear that the risk of triggering higher inflation must be part of considerations when deciding pay awards this year.”Trade unions reacted angrily to the suggestion public sector workers should bear the responsibility for restraining inflation.The TUC deputy general secretary, Paul Nowak, said: “These claims are nonsense. Making sure people can afford to pay their bills and put food on the table is not going to push up inflation. Inflation is being driven by rising energy costs, not pay demands.”He added: “Key workers in the public sector have endured a decade of wage cuts and freezes. At a time when staff shortages are crippling frontline services this would be a hammer blow to workers’ morale.”A cap on public sector pay awards, imposed by the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, during the pandemic, was only lifted last October, with effect from April.The call for pay restraint came as it emerged that Defra had frozen recruitment, initially for several months.An “official sensitive” briefing leaked to the Guardian revealed an effective recruitment freeze for all but essential roles in the department would come into effect on Wednesday.Senior officials who drew up the document admitted redundancies may be used “as a last resort”.They added: “Given what we will need to do over the coming years, we need to recognise that after this three-month period, our approach to recruitment won’t return to how it was.”Only certain roles approved by the department’s director general or chief executive in its arm’s-length bodies will be allowed to be filled. And appointments made through career entry schemes including apprenticeships and care leavers will only be permitted for “critical” jobs.Garry Graham the deputy general secretary of the union Prospect said it was “the first of many damaging recruitment freezes across the civil service” and that Defra was “already struggling to fulfil their obligations” to tackling climate change, supporting farmers and boosting trade after Brexit.He warned that officials would face “higher workloads and more pressure” and called on Johnson to “rethink these disastrous plans and properly resource our essential public
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New York City removed its last public payphone this week, discontinuing a relic from a more analog time.On Monday municipal officials removed the last remaining city-owned payphone, located in the Midtown area. New York City began ditching its payphones in 2015, with officials citing a need for digital innovation.“As a native New Yorker, saying goodbye to the last street payphone is bittersweet because of the prominent place they’ve held in the city’s physical landscape for decades,” Matthew Fraser, New York’s commissioner of the office of technology and innovation, said in a statement.“Just like we transitioned from the horse and buggy to the automobile and from the automobile t
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It’s a Vlad, Vlad situation Vampiric survival sandbox V Rising has, according to Steam’s player counts, en
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A French court has convicted six people for harassing a teenager online over her anti-Islam videos, in a case that has sparked debate about free speech and the right to insult religions.The girl, known as Mila, was forced to change schools and accept police protection due to threats to her life after videos in which she insulted Islam went viral in January 2020 and November the same year.The court handed sentences ranging from a three-month suspended prison term to four months with an electronic bracelet to the two men and four women, aged 19 to 39.They were ordered to pay damages of 3,000 euros ($3,200) each to Mila.“Their conviction was necessary,” said Mila’s lawyer Richard Malka, b
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Revised maps, fresh content and plenty more besides. Battlefield is as famous for its troubled launches as it
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Jimmy KimmelOn Jimmy Kimmel Live! the host returned after another bout of Covid to discuss the spread of monkeypox, something that Joe Biden has said we should all be concerned about. “Oh good, I was hoping to have something else to be concerned about,” he said.He then continued: “Speaking of viruses, Kellyanne Conway has returned to public life.”Kimmel spoke about the new tell-all book from “Donald Trump’s henchman”, which mentions that she was the one who told him to continue with his presidential campaign after the Access Hollywood footage was leaked. “We all lived crappily ever after – thank you, Kellyanne,” he said.But Trump’s spokesperson has claimed this isn’t true. “Kellyanne got Kellyanne-d today!” he said. “Now she’s the liar, according to him.”Conway joins a long line of previous Trump cronies who he has since turned against and called liars including Mark Esper, Bill Barr, John Bolton, Stephanie Grisham and Michael Cohen. “All the best people turn out to be the worst people,” he said.He then spoke about the list of 963 Americans who have been banned from Russia, including many politicians, such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, and celebrities, including Morgan Freeman. “What’s he gonna do?” Kimmel asked. “Narrate you to death?”The list also included John McCain, who died in 2018. “I guess they’re slow to get American TV,” he quipped.Starbucks also announced that it would close stores in Russia this week. “Starbucks was the only way the Russian military got wifi,” he joked.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert said he was feeling “a little unsettled about America’s future” after a poll showed that Americans are feeling “uneasy and worried” at the moment.“Our national bird is now the balding eagle,” he joked, before sharing that 74% of Americans say that things are going badly while 65% say Biden is slow to act when something bad happens. “Well yeah, he’s 79!” Colbert noted.Biden was recently asked if he had a message for Kim Jong-un to which he said “Hello” which was seen as “pretty disappointing” before then saying the US would support Taiwan if China ch
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Idina Menzel endeared herself to legions of Broadway theatergoers nearly two decades ago as Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the smash musical “Wicked,” for which she won a Tony Award. Still, the actor and singer hadn’t seen the show from the audience in years until she accompanied her 12-year-old son, Walker, and his basketball team to a performance last month. Watching actor Talia Suskauer play Elphaba in the current staging, she said, was a “very emotional” experience. “I had a real moment of pride, and really reflected on my life and what’s happened since then, how it changed my life,” Menzel told HuffPost at the launch of her women’s clothing line, Encore by Idina, last week. The show “was five years in the making, and it was a lesson in patience and belief in myself and the people around me. So I felt like I was finally able to take ownership of something that I was a part of, that changes people’s lives when they see it.” Menzel is best known to younger fans as the voice of Queen Elsa in Disney’s “Frozen,” in which she offered a powerful message of self-acceptance through the chilling ballad “Let It Go.” Now, she’s hopeful women of all ages will feel similarly empowed by Encore, available through QVC. The “sleep to street” c
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A profit warning from Snapchat’s developer has sent the company’s shares crashing nearly 40% in early trading, triggering the latest in a series of stock market routs that has wiped billions from the value of social media companies amid fears their revenues will be hit by a global economic downturn.“Since we issued guidance on 21 April 2022, the macroeconomic environment has deteriorated further and faster than anticipated,” the company said in an SEC filing published on Monday evening. Snap said it now expected second-quarter revenue and earnings below its guidance range, and told staff it would slow the hiring of new recruits. The company’s profit warning brought its shares down 40% after markets opened, to $13.41, well below the $17 level at which Snap made its initial public offering in 2017. In percentage terms, the fall marked its largest single-day drop ever, with the bad news spilling over to the wider industry: Google’s owner Alphabet fell 6%, Facebook 9% and Pinterest more than 20%.Concerns about a global economic slowdown have seen advertisers curb spending, which has knocked the valuations of tech companies that rely on marketing spend for the bulk of their revenues.In a note shared with employees on Monday, the Snap chief executive, Evan Spiegel, warned: “Like many companies, we continue to face rising inflation and interest rates, supply chain shortages and labour disruptions, platform policy changes, the impact of the war in Ukraine, and more.”Spiegel said the company would continue to invest in growth, and planned to hire more than 500 new team members before the end of 2022, a 10% increase in headcount. However, he added that department heads had been asked to find cost savings in their budgets.Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDesk“Our most meaningful gains over the coming months will come as a result of improved productivity from our existing team members, as we work together and help our new team members get to know Snap and learn how to contribute to their full potential.”For Snap, the profit warning is a sharp reversal in fortune. It was only in early February th
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The terrible, unprovoked war in Ukraine has destabilized that country’s economy and banking system, leading both Ukrainian politicians and citizens to more seriously consider cryptocurrency. I’m pretty skeptical of crypto, but I want to come by that skepticism honestly, and I want to understand more about what was happening there, so I’ve invited Michael Chobanian to the show. Michael is president of the Blockchain Association of Ukraine and founder of the Kuna Exchange, which lets people buy cryptocurrency and swap between them. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government set up wallets on Kuna and other exchanges to accept donations to the war effort in crypto; in April, Bloomberg reported it had received over $60 million in crypto donations. What’s more, earlier this year Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also signed a virtual assets bill into law, which will recognize cryptocurrency as an asset in Ukraine when the war is over. As president of the Blockchain Association, Michael lobbied for this law, which you’ll hear him talk about — especially in the context of how little faith he has in the banking system. He says several times that, even before the war, it couldn’t be trusted and that people were already using a combination of crypto and dollars for large transactions instead of Ukraine’s actual currency, which is called the hryvnia. Throughout the course of this conversation, you’ll hear dollars come up a lot. Michael says the most popular cryptocurrency in Ukraine is Tether, or USDT, a stablecoin that’s backed by the US dollar in what is supposed to be a 1:1 ratio: one dollar per tether coin. Now, there are lots of questions about how stable stablecoins really are — a stablecoin called Terra is currently crashing in value, and there’s a lot of controversy about whether Tether has the financial reserves to back its stablecoin. You’ll hear Michael express his reservations about USDT, but what I came back to several times is my main question about cryptocurrency, which is whether people only care about it because they care about dollars. We went back and forth on that; it’s a
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French rail operator SNCF has said it hopes to launch a Paris-Berlin high-speed service next year with Germany’s Deutsche Bahn to tap into a perceived willingness by passengers to take longer train trips.The SNCF chief, Jean-Pierre Farandou, said the operator hoped to begin offering one trip a day between the French and German capitals in December 2023.Several years ago, SNCF did not think travellers would be willing to take a rail journey lasting up to seven hours, but that was changing, he said.“Together with our German colleagues we’re going to take a chance and launch this train,” said Farandou.Both SNCF and Deutsche Bahn offer high-speed train services between Paris and Frankfurt, but for the moment you need to change to get to Berlin.Travelling by high-speed rail results in c
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British officials did not require Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe to sign a forced confession before her departure from Iran, but instead advised her that the Iranians would not allow her to leave unless she did so, the UK’s Middle East minister, Amanda Milling, told MPs.British officials also advised that it was standard Iranian practice for released detainees to have to sign such documents, Milling said.Zaghari-Ratcliffe has claimed the Foreign Office was complicit in forcing her to sign a confession in front of TV cameras after she had spent six years refusing to admit she was guilty. In a letter from her lawyers, human rights group Redress says she fears the confession will be used against her and other dual-national detainees held in Iran.In the Commons on Tuesday, Milling accepted that UK Foreign Office officials were present at the signing of Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s forced confession, but simply relayed to her the message from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) that she needed to sign it.Milling said: “Given the situation Iran put Nazanin [in] at the airport she took the decision to sign the document. No UK official forced her to do so. Iran has a practice of insistin
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Where you can show off your armour loadouts. This month's Assassin's Creed Valhalla update adds a fresh area to your Ravensthorpe settlement, tied into a neat new gameplay feature: gear loadouts. Constructing the new armory hut will let you show off up to five loadouts and easily swap between them via the game's main menu, so you can build gear for specific situations and shuffle amongst them on the fly. It's a handy feature which was also added post-launch to Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Valhalla's predecessor, and no doubt will also encourage a few people to go splash out further on some of this game's flashier cosmetic armour sets. Here's how it looks: A look at Assassin's Creed Valhalla's latest patch. The update - version 1.5.2 if you're counting - is available now on all platforms and weighs in at around 1.5GB on PlayStation, or just over 7GB on PC and Xbox. Also included are a few more rewards for the game's repeatable River Raids mode, such as new weapons and customisation options (is that a new hairdo I see?). Finally, dozens more bugs have been squashed. Valhalla shows no signs of slowing down its addition of free updates, following the arrival of more Mastery Quest challenge maps last month. There's also now the temptation of Assassin's Creed Origins to return to - coming to Xbox Game Pass and likely at 60fps on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S via a fresh update.
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NEW YORK (AP) — The dramatic story of an iconic movie costume from “The Wizard of Oz” thought lost for decades went through another plot twist Monday, when a judge blocked its planned sale at auction.One of the blue-and-white checked gingham dresses that Judy Garland wore in 1939 for her role as Dorothy was scheduled to be part of an auction of Hollywood memorabilia in Los Angeles on Tuesday, put up for sale by Catholic University of America. The dress was rediscovered at the school last year in a shoebox during preparations for a renovation.Auctioneer Bonhams listed a presale estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million for the dress before it was withdrawn.But U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe in Manhattan granted a motion for a preliminary injunction after a hearing in a lawsuit filed by a relative of Father Gilbert Hartke, who worked at the university and was given the dress in 1973.Hartke died in 1986; a niece, Barbara Ann Hartke, 81, filed a lawsuit against the school and the auctioneer earlier this month after media accounts that the dress was going up for auction.In her lawsuit, she said that as her uncle’s closest living relative, the dress belongs to her. She says it was given to him as a personal gift by actress Mercedes McCambridge.According to her lawsuit, the university “has no ownership interest in the dress as ... there is no documentation demonstrating decedent ever formally or informally donated the dress to Catholic University.”In a filing opposing the
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A little over a decade ago, there were some popular blogposts about whether Ruby was an acceptable Lisp or whether even Lisp was an acceptable Lisp. Peter Norvig was also writing at the time introducing Python to Lisp programmers. Lisp, those in the know knew, was the right thing to strive for, and yet seemed unattainable for anything aimed for production since the AI Winter shattered Lisp's popularity in the 80s/early 90s. If you can't get Lisp, what's closest thing you can get? This was around the time I was starting to program; I had spent some time configuring my editor with Emacs Lis
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Tottenham’s owner has invested £150m into the club as it prepares to back Antonio Conte in the transfer market this summer.The majority shareholder, Enic, has pledged the cash – via the issue of convertible A Shares and accompanying warrants – to provide “greater financial flexibility and the ability to further invest on and off the pitch”.The additional funds, in combination with revenue from a first full season at their new stadium at full capacity, comes on the back of Spurs returning to the Champions League after two years away.It will be music to the ears of Conte, who warned a
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It’s all about developers Microsoft’s Build developer conference is happening on Tuesday, May 24th. The keynote is set to begin at 8:15AM PT / 11:15AM ET. The conference, which will again be held virtually, will provide company updates on upcoming releases on Microsoft Office, Windows, and more. Rumors have been sparse so far, so don’t expect any hardware news. Instead, the event will likely feature some updates to Windows and primar
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The Cat S22 Flip takes the cell phone back to what it should be… a phone.  Made for those who want a device as simple to use as it is tough, the Cat S22 Flip features physical buttons and a large touch screen, letting you choose how you interact with it. The Cat S22 Flip’s ‘Snap it to End it’ calling gives you confidence that when it is closed the call is over. Android™ 11 (Go Edition) Programmable PTT Button IP68 & MIL-SPEC 810H Drop tested up to 6ft on to steel Waterproof to a depth of 5ft for up to 35 mins
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Suggests congestion is easing. The latest patch for Final Fantasy 14 has removed the automatic log out function when players are inactive for 30 minutes. The function was included last year to ease congestion in the ever-popular MMORPG, as players complained about long queue times due to overloaded servers. However, its removal in this latest patch suggests that congestion is finally easing. Despite advanced warnings, congestion hit a peak following the release of Endwalker in December last year, with producer Naoki Yoshida apologising to players for the long queue times. In an extreme move, the game was pulled from sale to stop new players joining. Then at the start of the year, Yo
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May 24, 2022 Series overview This article is part of the series systemd by example. The following articles are available. Introduction This is the fourth article in a series trying to understand systemd by creating small containerized examples. In Part 1, we created a minimal systemd setup in a container. In Part 2 we took a close look at systemd’s dependency management. In Part 3 we saw the basics of services and how to define them. In this post, we will see another way to add dependencies for units. This technique is most commonly used when adding new units to the system that should be activated during bootup. Recap of dependencies Let’s briefly recap systemd dependencies (see Part 2: Dependencies for more details). There are two types of dependencies: ordering dependencies, sp
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Microsoft is working on a native Arm64 version of Visual Studio 2022 and a miniature Arm PC. A preview version of an Arm native version of Visual Studio 2022 will be available “in the next few weeks” and is expected to ship fully later this year alongside Arm64 .NET support. While Arm devices like the Surface Pro X have been able to run Visual Studio through x64 emulation, some features haven’t been supported and performance has suffered, too. Developers will certainly be intrigued to hear more about native Arm support for Visual Studio 2022 and VS Code, and Microsoft is creating what it describes as an “Arm-native toolchain”: Full Visual Studio 2022 & VS Code Visual C++ Modern .NET 6 and Java Classic .NET Framework Windows Terminal WSL and WSA for running Linux and Android
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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild may be well over five years old now, but its community is still uncovering charming little details that have been tucked away by Nintendo. One such find has recently surfaced, and it involves the final memory Link uncovers towards the game's close. Those who have played through Breath of the Wild will know that Link slowly starts to regain his memories of the events before and during the Great Calamity as the game progresses (of course, this being Breath of the Wild, you could also blast through without collecting a single one of these memories if facing off against Ganon with the bare essentials is more your thing). Seven details worth noticing in Breath of the Wild. The final memory
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Microsoft Build Windows still rules the enterprise, and among all the Azure and Power Platform action during Microsoft's annual Build event for developers, the company had news for users of its flagship operating system. The first followed this week's revelation that Windows Subsystem for Android is now running on Android Open Source Project (AOSP) 12.1, and concerns the Amazon Appstore preview. After an inexplicable delay, Microsoft is finally adding additional countries on top of the US. Users in France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK will now be able to join in previewing the Amazon Appstore, although there appears to still be no official way to get access to apps outside of those brought to Windows 11 via Amazon. Ever keen to get developers on-side when it comes to Microsoft
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DODGY TICKERThe ticker on the BBC News channel went haywire on Tuesday morning, churning out random arrant nonsense such as “Manchester United are rubbish”, “Weather rain everywhere” and … actually, we don’t see the problem with this. Nevertheless, the corporation decided to issue an immediate apology, explaining that someone who didn’t know what the hell they were doing had typed the first thing that came into their vacant head and hit send, which was big of the BBC, because it’s not as though the Guardian has ever said sorry for The Fiver, and they’ve had more than 20 years to set the record straight. So let’s not get too judgmental here.A ticker of doom, earlier. Photograph: BBCThe BBC could have gotten away with it, too, keeping their heads down and riding it out, b
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In early 1983, a Düsseldorf band called Propaganda got a message: Trevor Horn wanted them to come to London. It was an enticing and deeply improbable turn of events. Horn was the UK’s hottest pop producer, a man who had unexpectedly turned the hopelessly drippy duo Dollar into a critical cause célèbre and piloted ABC’s debut The Lexicon of Love to platinum-selling transatlantic success, also making it the fourth biggest-selling album of 1982 in the UK.Propaganda, however, were no one’s idea of a pop band. They were electronic experimentalists, a product of Germany’s burgeoning post-punk Neue Deutsche Welle scene. As vocalist Susanne Freytag puts it, they were attempting: “To go away from American music and find a kind of identity – there was a lot of shame in our generation
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Hummus isn’t the side dip here, but rather the main dish, punched up to a verdant hue from the addition of fresh spinach and herbs. The green hummus is then topped with warmed, crisped dolmades that are quickly sizzled in olive oil along with olives and some more chickpeas. Add some feta, maybe some yogurt, and this dish just might leave you wondering, “Am I a chef at a Greek taverna?” Some practical notes: Because of its mild flavor, spinach is best in this hummus, as opposed to an assertively bitter, peppery green like arugula. Make sure to be very thorough when patting the dolmades dry before sizzling; it encourages them to crisp up and helps reduce oil splatter. —Christian ReynosoAll products featured on Bon Appétit are independently selected by our editors. However, when you
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There’s no question that Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) was an impressive piece of hardware when it was released in 2004, but for all its technical wizardry, it wasn’t able to shake Nintendo’s vice-like grip on the handheld market. Perhaps that explains why we still see so many nostalgia-fueled hacks for Nintendo’s Game Boy and Dual Screen (DS) systems, while PSP hacks tend to be few and far between. But looking at projects like this one that turn the PSP into a capable robot controller (video, embedded below) we can’t help but wonder if the community has been missing out. Thanks to an open source software development kit for the system, [iketsj] was able to write a WiFi controller program that can be run on any PSP with a homebrew-compatible firmware. T
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Microsoft has started testing its new OneNote design refresh. The software maker first teased the visual update last year, revealing that it will unify its OneNote and OneNote for Windows 10 apps into a single OneNote app. Beta testers can now get access to some of the new OneNote design changes as part of the traditional desktop version of OneNote. The design changes allow OneNote to slot in more seamlessly with the rest of the Windows 11 aesthetic. The navigation panes and full-screen mode are being updated, and the page list, section tabs, and notebook dropdown all look different, too. Microsoft is using its Mica effect, which is used in the Windows 11 theme and desktop wallpaper, for the general app window of OneNote.
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Microsoft is planning to support third-party widgets inside Windows 11 later this year. At its annual Build developer conference today, the software giant says it will open up access to Windows 11 widgets to developers as companions to their win32 or PWA apps. Currently, the Windows 11 widgets system is restricted to native widgets created by Microsoft, and the selection is rather limited. Microsoft has built widgets for its Outlook and To Do apps, but the rest are largely web-powered ones that present the weather, entertainment feeds, or news in the dedicated widgets panel for Windows 11. “We’re energized by the customer feedback on Widgets to date, people are enjoying the quick access to content most important to them in a way that is seamless without breaking their flow,” say
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Version 251 of the controversial systemd Linux init system is here, and you can expect it to feature in the next version of your preferred distro. The unified system and service manager for Linux continues to grow and develop, as does Linux itself. There is a comprehensive changelog on Github, so we will just try to pick out a few of the highlights. New releases of systemd appear roughly twice a year, so the chances are that this will appear in the fall releases of Ubuntu and Fedora. The new version now uses the GCC compiler's C11-with-GNU-extensions standard, nicknamed gnu11. This brings it into line with the Linux kernel itself, which uses the same standard as of version 5.18 – in turn facilitated by kernel 5.15 moving the minimum required GCC version to 5.1. Were we betting types, we'd wager that probably the most controversial changes in the new release revolve around the new systemd-sysupdate and kernel-install features. The former is still described as an experimental feature, so relax – for now. Change in packaging No, this does not mean that systemd is becoming a package manager. Like it or not, though, the nature of operating systems is changing. Modern ones are large, complex, and need regular updates, and as The Register has examined in depth recently, this means that the design of Linux distributions is changing radically. The prime example is the ever more mature ChromeOS, including Google's new move into the mass-market hardware space, ChromeOS Flex. What that means (in brief) is that the nature and use of package managers is changing. What is disappearing is their role as the tool that allow end-users to cust
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Exact locations to clear this Resistance challenge quickly. Collect Doomsday Control Keys from high security IO locations is one of the Resistance challenges in Fortnite Chapter 3 Season 2. You will first need to patch The Imagined into a loudspeaker before unlocking this Week 10 challenge. Luckily, you don't need to find the Doomsday Control Keys in the same match, so don't worry if you get eliminated before collecting both. Completing this challenge will reward you with 23k XP, which will help you unlock skins from the new battle pass. Fortnite Chapter 3 Season 2 Resistance Story Trailer Where to find Doomsday Control Keys in Fortnite Before you start searching for Doomsday Control Keys, you must first establish a Device Uplink near The Collider or The Fortress. Establish a Device Uplink at either The Collider or The Fortress. It doesn't matter which location you establish the Device Uplink at, as both The Collider and The Fortress areas contain the Doomsday Control Keys you must find next. Once you have established the Device Uplink, it's time to collect Doomsday Control Keys. Doomsday Control Key map locations. Chapter 3 Season 2 has arrived! New additions include the Prowler skin, along with the return of jetpacks and Choppas. As we enter Season 2's final month, it's a good idea to know how to get XP fast in Fortnite. You can also complete Resistance challenges, including collecting signal jammers and finding an energy fluctuation. Don't forget about the Seasonal challenges, which include planting saplings and call an Air Strike on a tank. Meanwhile Victo
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A Texas woman is allegedly on the run from accusations of murdering a professional cyclist amid a love triangle involving another professional cyclist.Anna Moriah Wilson, 25, was found dead in the bathroom of a home where she was staying in Austin, on 11 May. Just three days before she was supposed to participate in a 150-mile bike race in Hico, Texas, she was bleeding from numerous gunshot wounds, and empty bullet casings surrounded her, according to police records.A sworn statement from police said Wilson had a brief romantic relationship with Colin Strickland, a professional cyclist based in Austin. Wilson and Strickland reportedly had the relationship after Strickland broke up with Kaitlin Armstrong, 35, who had been his girlfriend for three years.The relationship between Wilson and Strickland ended when Strickland resumed his relationship with Armstrong, police said. However, on the night she was killed, Strickland had been hanging out with Wilson, according to police.Since then, police have identified Armstrong as the prime suspect in Wilson’s death, believing that she shot Wilson after Strickland dropped Wilson off at the home where she was staying.According to text messages obtained by the police, Strickland lied to Armstrong about his whereabouts that evening.“Hey! Are you out? I went to drop some flowers for Alison at her son’s house up north and my phone died. Heading home unless you have another good suggestion,” he wrote.After Strickland dropped Wilson home at about 8.30pm that evening, a dark sport utility vehicle with a bike rack was captured by surveillance footage, pulling up to the house a minute later.Police said the SUV appeared to be Armstrong’s.Armstrong has been missing from Austin since 13 May. Police have secured a warrant to arrest her on a count of murder, and the US Marshals Service – which specializes in capturing fugitives – is helping to search for her, even asking the public for help in finding her, said the arrest warrant.Authorities interviewed Strickland the day after Wilson’s body was found. He allegedly said he had been briefly involved in a relationship with Wilson months earlier.Strickland also told police h
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If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy. You won’t like him when He’s angry (Christ, that is) Just imagine for a moment what the world would’ve been like if Jesus, rather than forgiving us for our sins on the cross, had rolled out of the tomb with a proper nark on instead. That’s the basis of Polish author Jacek Piekara’s series of novels, now set to become third-person action adventure I, The Inquisitor, from developers The Dust. Somebody probably ought to consult the Archbishop of Canterbury for the PEGI rating, like. Watch the trailer below. Mordimer Madderdin is seeking an ancient evil in The Dusk's third-person action adventure I, Inquisitor. Set in the 16th century, I, The Inquisitor is described as “dark fantasy Renaissance” by the devs. You’ll play as Inquisitor Mordimer Madderdin (although who he’s madder than I’m not sure. Christ maybe?), and as you might expect from someone who inquires for a living, there’ll be detective elements to the game along with “grey moral choices” and some supernatural shenanigans. You can apparently be merciful in your dealings with other ch
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An international deal that would force the world’s biggest multinational companies to pay a fair share of tax has been delayed until 2024 amid fresh wrangling over the painstakingly negotiated agreement.Mathias Cormann, the secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that there were “difficult discussions” taking place that meant the deal could not come into force in 2023, as previously hoped.Cormann said he remained confident an agreement would eventually be implemented to let countries levy more tax on the world’s largest firms based on the sales generated within their borders.But the US billionaire investor, David Rubenstein, co-chairman of the Carlyle group, said he doubted whether the OECD-brokered deal would ever happen. “Global tax deals sound great but getting them implemented is very difficult,” he told a Davos session before Cormann’s comments.The deal – which Cormann called “historic and very important” – has two parts. Pillar 1 involves the reallocation of some profits from major multinationals such as US tech companies to countries where they made their sales, while Pillar 2 brings in a global minimum corporation tax rate of 15%.Cormann said there were “still some difficult discussions under way with relation to the technical aspects” of Pillar 1.“We deliberately set a very ambitious timeline for implementation to keep the pressure on and we think that has helped keep the momentum going.“But I suspect it is probably most likely that we will end up with a practical implementation from 2024 onwards.”Pillar 1 is facing opposition in the US Congress from Republican senators, and analysts have suggested the deal could fall if the Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterm elections. Rubenstein said he thought the agreement would not happen even if the Democrats keep control of the House.Sign up to the daily Business Today email or follow Guardian Business on Twitter at @BusinessDeskCormann refused to comment on political issues, but said the OECD deal would be better for US multinational comp
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Amid political firestorms over books deemed by rightwingers to be unsuitable for school libraries, the author Margaret Atwood has announced an “unburnable” edition of her most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.The Canadian author, 82, appeared in a short YouTube video to announce the project, attempting to flambé the one-off tome with a flame-thrower.Announcing the book, Penguin Random House said: “Across the United States and around the world, books are being challenged, banned and even burned. So we created a special edition of a book that’s been challenged and banned for decades.“Printed and bound using fireproof materials, this edition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale was made to be completely un-burnable. It is designed to protect this vital story and stand as a powerful symbol against censorship.”As described by the Guardian in 2010, the 25th anniversary of publication, The Handmaid’s Tale “tells the story of Offred – not her real name, but the patronymic she has been given by the new regime in an oppressive parallel America of the future – and her role as a Handmaid.“The Handmaids are forced to provide children by proxy for infertile women of a higher social status, the wives of Commanders. They undergo regular medical tests, and in many ways become invisible, the sum total of their biological parts.”According to the American Library Association, The Handmaid’s Tale is among books most often challenged or banned in US schools.In 2006, in an open letter to a school district which attempted to ban the book, Atwood said: “First, the remark: ‘Offensive to Christians’ amazes me. Nowhere in the book is the regime identified as Christian. As for sexual explicitness, The Handmaid’s Tale is a lot less interested in sex than is much of the Bible.”Atwood’s book has risen to new prominence thanks to a TV adaptation starring Elisabeth Moss and a 2019 sequel, The Testaments, which won Atwood a second Booker prize. “Handmaid” costumes, red cloaks with white headdresses, have become a familiar sight at protests for reproductive and women’s rights.The auction of an “unburnable” edition of The Handmaid’s Tale
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Seth Meyers on Monday briefly accepted the “alternative facts” of “prolific and shameless liar” Kellyanne Conway. (Watch the video below.)Lamenting yet another former Trump associate penning a “dishonest and self-serving” book ― Conway’s “Here’s the Deal” came out on Tuesday ― the “Late Night” host served up a clip of Conway at a March 6, 2020, press briefing.“It is being contained,” Conway told a reporter, referring to the COVID-19 virus that would soon spread to every corner of the world. “Do you not think it’s being contained?”“Congrats, Kellyanne, yo
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“I knew it was rotten, but it’s astonishing and infuriating. This is a denomination that is through and through about power. It is misappropriated power. It does not in any way reflect the Jesus I see in the scriptures. I am so gutted.”That’s what Jennifer Lyell, a survivor who was an executive at the Southern Baptist Convention and whose story of sexual abuse at a Southern Baptist seminary is detailed in a devastating 288-page report by Guidepost Solutions, told The Washington Post.The report concludes that for almost two decades, the men who ran the SBC’s executive committee, which
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Salone del Mobile Milano – the furniture fair where all the big developments in the design world are unveiled – is back next week for the first full production since 2018. A great sign that the normality that’s been discussed so much during the pandemic might finally be a reality. While Salone is the best place to discover new names in design, art and furniture, there are interesting projects this month focused on rediscovery. New uses for hemp and a revolutionary way to use wood also feature in our stories. Old is very much the new new in design.The future of furniturePieces from the Inky Dhow collection by designer Bethan Gray, launched at Salone next week Photograph: Bethan GrayThe most important furniture fair in the world is back this year and, with a 60th anniversary to celebrate, Salone del Mobile Milano is bigger and better. This is just a sample of the shows, talks and festival treats this year. Swine Studio has created an exhibition staged in the Triennale di Milano inspired by Citizen Kane. The spectacle – called Forest Tales – is for the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC). The show will feature a mountain of wooden crates as display cases for artworks which, from one particular angle, will look like a forest. Every piece featured will be low- or no-carbon. Fashion house Prada is hosting Prada Frames, a multidisciplinary symposium curated by FormaFantasma on the relationship between the natural environment and design, including talks by anthropologist Anna Tsing, journalist Alice Rawsthorn and author Amitav Ghosh. Flying the flag for British design, Bethan Gray launches the Inky Dhow collection, a range of textiles and ceramics spun from a drawing inspired by the striped sails of the Dhow boats sailing the gulf of Oman. Meanwhile, Tom Dixon celebrates his 20th anniversary with an exhibition of 20 previously unseen designs, some inspired by his signature collections such as Fat and Mirrorball, some from the depths of his never-ending imagination. Welcome back in style, Salone.The 60th edition of the Salone del Mobile Milano will be held at Fiera Milano Rho from 7-12 JuneThe hemp makeoverVollebak’s raw hemp hoodie, one of the new products championing hemp Photograph: VollebakHaving shaken off old-fashioned associations with hippies and stoners, the potential of hemp is now being investigated by more and more forward-thinking compani
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Introduction The story began with a tweet about a new eBPF-based Security Observability and Runtime Enforcement solution, named Tetragon, posted by the CTO of the company (Isovalent) that created it. With a very cute logo, eBPF, Kubernetes, Linux kernel runtime and real-time security enforcer, capable of hooking into all layers of the operating system and application stack, the solution seemed to hit the ground running right from the start. All the features the tool provides can be found at its website: [1]. The "transparent security observability across the stack from the lower level up into the applications. File access, networking, storage, syscalls, escalations, function tracers, ..." sounds interesting, but what really caught our eye was the enforcement capabilities. On the website, in the section "Automatic Mitigation of Privilege & Container Escapes", the authors claim that "Tetragon adds the ability to prevent privilege, capability, and namespace escalations in the kernel by detecting them and stopping the involved processes". To demonstrate its effectiveness, the authors show a portion of an apparently simple policy that is supposed to automatically detect a capability change to CAP_SYS_ADMIN and kill the responsible process. As a worthy opponent, an exploit (authored by theflow) for the CVE-2021-22555 vulnerability [5] (Netfilter bug leading to the privilege escalation, more about the bug can be found in an excellent write up at [7]) in the Linux kernel had been selected. The original version of the Tetragon blog post showed how the exploit process gets killed upon executing the exec
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Conservative MPs do not need any new information to judge whether Boris Johnson is fit to stay in office, and since they haven’t removed him yet there has to be a good chance they never will.Sue Gray’s report into breaches of lockdown regulations in Downing Street will embellish and illustrate a story that is already known. Laws imposed on the country in a public health emergency were flouted at the centre of government and the person ultimately responsible – the prime minister; lawmaker number one – was himself a lawbreaker. When asked about it in parliament, he lied.That much has been known for months. Johnson’s reprobate character has been displayed for years. That makes two categories of Tory MP. There are those who were truly appalled when they realised their leader was a scoundrel, and those who never objected to his malpractice on moral grounds, but worry that it is an electoral liability.If the first group were large enough to force their leader’s resignation, they would have done it already. The second group has enough data to infer that the Tory majority might be imperilled if Johnson leads his party into a general election, but no way of being sure. Byelection defeats, opinion polls and lost council seats prove that voters are unhappy now, but there is always the possibility they will cheer up again.Besides, there is no substitute leader with talents obvious enough to make ditching the incumbent a low-risk gamble. The stakes feel higher as the next elec
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Apparently Shakespeare is the latest victim of the culture wars, with some fearing the Bard is about to be thrown out of classrooms across England in the name of decolonisation. Wokeness has already culled the dead white man from American curriculums, we are told, so surely it won’t be long until we follow suit. Right?But the inconvenient truth – which isn’t quite so headline-worthy – is that decolonising the curriculum isn’t about burning copies of Macbeth, or chucking Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in the bin. It’s not even about only studying writers from marginalised identities. As a mixed-race English teacher who believes strongly in diversifying the English syllabus, for me, it’s about re-examining the lens through which we view canonical texts in the first place – shifting it to become more critical, more aware of the systemic forces at play both within and around a text. Decolonisation may sound radical, frightening even to some, but this is what great English teaching already does.So much of Shakespeare is about power: who holds it and who doesn’t and why. And this is the fundamental question of our divided and troubled age. Examination of gender is critical to studying Romeo and Juliet. The portrayal of race is fundamental in analysing Othello. Grappling with the antisemitism in the portrayals of Shakespeare’s Shylock or Dickens’ Fagin is key. Decolonising the study of Shakespeare is to take these questions one step further, removing them from the text and applying them to the world around us. To teach students, through literature, to challenge the status quo.Some people claim that educating students of colour about structural racism, or pupils from impoverished backgrounds about systemic inequality is defeatist: it teaches children to accept their subjugated position. But we do a disservice to young people if we fail to recognise that these structural disadvantages already hit them in the face as soon as they leave the school gates – and often before. Young black boys stopped by police in their school uniforms; pupils whose families can’t afford food; children whose parents are facing the wrath of a hostile environment. These young people don’t need to be taught that injustice exists because they see the results of systemic prejudice all around them – they are drowning in the impact of divisive and discriminatory policies. By refusing to acknowledge this, we neglect the chance to empower students to examine the power dynamics that dictate our world. To eventually enact change. Call me a biased English teacher, but literature is the perfect medium for this.The conflation of blackness with violence in Othello forms a platform to scrutinise systemic racism in Britain today – how white supremacy manifests and how this shapes pupils’ lives. The way Macbeth usurps authority is arguably a metaphor for the way some groups in society maintain a stranglehold of control over others – why not use this as an opportunity to question those in power, and even to examine our own positions?Undoubtedly, part of decolonising the curriculum must be about introducing texts written by alternative voices. Teachin
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In February, season two of HBO’s teen drama Euphoria reached a climax. “Well, if that makes me a villain,” proclaimed an unrepentant Cassie Howard, “then so fucking be it.” This much-memed line encapsulates popular culture’s preoccupation with baddies, from Netflix’s endless scammer series to Disney’s villain origin stories. Social media is pretty much a conveyor belt of villainy, too, with different echo chambers picking their own adversaries. Meanwhile, famous young women such as Britney Spears, who were once demonised, are now being reappraised as victims. And with hindsight’s perfect vision, it’s clear that plenty of characters in TV and film were not the “actual villain” either.We seem to be more accepting of some baddies than others. History is littered with famous probably-gay villains, from Alexander the Great to Roy Cohn, Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel and Trump’s favourite lawyer. But unlike LGBTQ+ heroes such as Alan Turing or Audre Lorde, they are seldom remembered or claimed as gay. The question of why that should be the case is the starting point of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. The book’s central argument is that, if we are to fully understand how today’s gay identities evolved, the lives of villains – the most deceitful, criminal, manipulative and power-hungry gay people – are just as important as those of gay heroes such as Oscar Wilde.Ernst Rohm, the world’s first out gay politician. Photograph: AlamyBad Gays is a continuation of the duo’s podcast of the same name, which profiles the “evil and complicated queers in history” – such as Ernst Röhm, the world’s first out gay politician – a Nazi – and J Edgar Hoover, the FBI director who helped harass political dissidents and gay government employees and was posthumously outed by his friend, Broadway star Ethel Merman. “We want to address our history and how gay identity came to be,” Lemmey says. “But if we’re ever going to understand our sexual identity in a way that is based around solidarity and friendship, we need to discuss gay people who were devious and ruthless, too.”The podcast began in 2019 when Lemmey, a Welsh author and film-maker, and Miller, a writer and historical researcher, were introduced to each other by friends. “While recording the podcast, we found that there were recurring themes,” says Lemmey. “We kept coming back to colonialism, race and the creation of the white homosexual identity. And also the same disclaimer, which was that concepts like ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ didn’t really exist before 1860.” That was when sexologists and early gay rights campaigners first coined the term “homosexual”, and began to conceive of homosexual and heterosexual as innate sexual identities.The pair discuss these issues more deeply in the book. The text still has the irreverent swishiness of the podcast – there is a reference to “evil twinks” in the first few pages. But a key difference is that the book tells a story about how white gay identity was formed, and is more focused on men, whereas the podcast – which has had five series and almost 1m downlo
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The only thing better than a good recipe? When something's so easy to make that you don't even need one. Welcome to It's That Simple, a column where we talk you through the process of making the dishes and drinks we can make with our eyes closed.I consider tteok to be my childhood BFF: best food forever. It’s impossible to sing enough praise of the Korean rice cakes with their irresistible gooey, chewy, almost candy-like pull and texture. If you’re the kind of person who keeps your freezer stocked with tteok, a move we cannot recommend enough, you’re probably well-versed in their versatility for dinner. But while classic, savory preparations have a place in my heart, my current favorit
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Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is seeing a surge in players, reportedly down to a meme. The Metal Gear Solid spin-off from Platinum
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More chapters of the Hunter x Hunter manga may be coming in the near-ish future, potentially ending a years-long hiatus for the series. A Twitter account said to be run by Hunter x Hunter author Yoshihiro Togashi posted a small update on Tuesday: a photo of the corner of a manga page with a sentence that roughly translates to “4 more episodes for the time being.” The account is brand-new, so it is unverified, although the bio claims that it is, indeed, official, and that Togashi will be using it to update his progress. One Punch Man artist Yusuke Murata says that the account is Togashi, and Polygon has reached out to Viz Media, U.S. publisher of Hunter x Hunter, for confirmation. The
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The Imagined has something to say. Patch The Imagined into a loudspeaker is the first Resistance challenge f
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