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Conservative lawmakers and activists are fighting President Joe Biden’s plan to conserve 30 percent of US land by 2030. Pictured here, from left to right: Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, and the late rancher Wayne Hage, a key figure of the Sagebrush Rebellion. Amanda Northrop/Vox A small but vocal opposition could obstruct an initiative to conserve 30 percent of US land by 2030. By May 13, 2021, 9:30am EDT This story is part of Down to Earth, a new Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis. Since January, when President Joe Biden announced a pledge to conserve 30 percent of US land by 2030, many have been wondering: Where will all that land come from? Today, just 12 percent of the nation’s territory is in protected areas. The Biden administration has begun to offer some clues. In a report last week, the Interior Department said it will meet that target by restoring degraded lands, offering voluntary conservation programs to private landowners, and — this is key — broadening the definition of “conservation” to include some existing working and tribal lands. Nowhere does the report indicate that private lands will be seized by the government, or that farmers, ranchers, and hunters will be cut off from public land. If anything, the report suggests more public land will be made accessible for recreation. Yet a small group of conservative activists is drumming up fear that the initiative, known as 30 by 30, is a move to seize private land and restrict access to federal acres. “We’re looking at a huge land grab that is fundamentally going to change land ownership in America,” Margaret Byfield, executive director of the property rights group American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), said in a May 6 Fox News segment. Byfield, whose parents were involved in anti-government land battles that date back to the late 1970s, claims 30 by 30 is a plot hatched by radical environmentalists, based on faulty science, to put more land under strict government control. And that argument has caught on in Congress. Late last week, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, a gun rights activist who once expressed support for the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, introduced a bill with 22 members of Congress called the 30 x 30 Termination Act. It seeks to nullify Biden’s pledge, among other aims. These arguments are nothing short of a “disinformation campaign” pushed by a loud minority, said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, an advocacy group, who’s followed the effort closely. Biden’s 30 by 30 plan is not a land grab, he said, and most Westerners even support the plan, according to a handful of recent polls. But small or not, these opposition efforts — par
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Believe it or not, the Josie and the Pussycats movie turned 20 years old in 2021. In the two decades since the release of the Archie Comics adaptation starring Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid, the movie has gone from belittled box-office flop to cult classic and critical darling. Why did a movie that hardly anyone saw in theaters become a generational touchstone for millions? Simple: Because it’s a movie about socialism. Yes, Josie and the Pussycats is technically also a movie about an all-female rock band caught up in a world-domination plot involving Parker Posey brainw
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Rejoice, goths and people who just like their gaming peripherals to look sleek: a black version of the PlayStation 5's DualSense controller has been announced, and will be available for purchase from next month. And for the flamboyant among you, there's also a bold red. Announced via the PlayStation blog, the two new colours are themed around space and are officially called "midnight black and cosmic red". The black apparently comes in "two subtly different shades of black with light grey detailing", and you can sort of see it when looking closely at the pictures
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9.57am EDT 09:57 Joe Biden will address the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and shutdown in a speech later this morning at the White House. The president’s remarks come as Colonial resumes sending gasoline to stations along the east coast, after a ransomware attack forced them to shut down for six days. Reuters has more details on the news: The Colonial pipeline, which carries 100 million gallons per day of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, resumed computer-controlled pumping late Wednesday after adding safety measures. It will take several days for deliveries to fully recover and interruptions are possible, the company said. The shutdown caused gasoline shortages and emergency declarations from Virginia to Florida, led two refineries to curb production, and had airlines reshuffling some refueling operations. The pipeline’s restart should bring supplies to some hard-hit areas as soon as Thursday, said energy secretary Jennifer Granholm. She predicted gasoline shortages could end in a couple of days. Updated at 9.59am EDT 9.41am EDT 09:41 Vaccinated people seriously do not have to wear masks outside, Fauci says Dr Anthony Fauci has offered a positive message to Americans wondering how many coronavirus-related precautions they can abandon now that they are fully vaccinated. Speaking to CBS News this morning, the president’s chief medical adviser said Americans who are fully vaccinated can ditch their masks when they are outdoors, unless they are in extremely crowded settings for long periods of time. CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) Dr. Anthony Fauci confirms, "If you are vaccinated, you don't have to wear a mask outside." 😷 pic.twitter.com/Wcy3AsPnnP May 13, 2021 CBS anchor Gayle King noted that she is fully vaccinated, but she still wears her mask in New York because everyone else around her still wears them. “We’ve got to make that transition,” Fauci said. “If y
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OpenZFS stands out in its snapshot design, providing powerful and easy-to-use tools for managing snapshots. Snapshots complement a backup strategy, as they are instantaneous and don’t require a backup window. Since snapshots are atomic, they are not affected by other processes and you don’t have to stop any running applications before taking a snapshot. What exactly is a snapshot? zfs(8) defines it as a “Read-only version of a file system … at a given point in time”. This is a powerful feature as there are many scenarios where it is convenient to access files from a certain point in time. Imagine taking a snapshot of your home directory at the beginning of the work day, and perhaps another one after lunch. Need a copy of that file you deleted last Tuesday? No problem. Perhaps you’re considering updating an application but fear the pain of clobbered libraries. Need to test some configuration changes but don’t want to permanently muck up the system? Or, perhaps you’re preparing for an operating system upgrade and want a quick way to revert to the pre-upgrade version should things go terribly wrong. Restoring data from a snapshot is quicker than restoring from a backup or waiting for a system administrator to restore a backup for you. While snapshots do not replace backups, they provide a quick and convenient method for accessing files from a specific point in time. The ability to access files from a certain point in time sounds great, but doesn’t that take a lot of storage space? Not necessarily. Because ZFS is a COW (copy-on-write) file system, the initial size of a snapshot is 0 bytes. Since snapshots record the differences between the time the snapshot was taken and the current state of the file system, the size of a snapshot increases over time, reflecting the size of the changes. In this article we’ll start with the basics: creating, using, and deleting file system snapshots. Subsequent articles will demonstrate snapshot clones, rollback, and other advanced features of snapshots. Creating a Snapshot Since snapshot operations occur on a file system, rather than on the disks that comprise a pool, the zfs command is used to manage snapshots. To create a snapshot, use the zfs snapshot subcommand. At its simplest, this command takes one argument: the name of the snapshot, where the @ symbol separates the name of the file system from the name of its snapshot. Think of it as specified-filesystem@named-point-in-time. While you can name the snapshot portion anything that makes sense to you in order to describe why or when the snapshot was taken, you must use the full ZFS name for the file system. To list the available file systems, use zfs list. Here, I’m interested in determining the file system name for my home directory: zfs list | grep dru tank/usr/home/dru 2.65G 272G 2.64G /usr/home/dru Next, I’ll become the superuser and take a test snapshot of my home directory. I specify the file system exactly as it appears in the above listing (tank/usr/home/dru) and name the snapshot test1-snapshot: su - Password: zfs snapshot tank/usr/home/dru@test1-snapshot I can now list t
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Alleged offences against female victim include rape, conspiracy to rape and indecent assaultThe charges follow a West Yorkshire police investigation into non-recent child sexual exploitation. Photograph: Mick Flynn/AlamyThe charges follow a West Yorkshire police investigation into non-recent child sexual exploitation. Photograph: Mick Flynn/AlamyThu 13 May 2021 09.38 EDTLast modified on Thu 13 May 2021 09.50 EDTTwenty-nine men have been charged with the sexual exploitation of a victim over a seven-year period in West Yorkshire.The men have been charged with various offences including rape, conspiracy to rape and indecent assault, after a West Yorkshire police investigation into non-recent child sexual exploitation.The alleged offending is said to have mainly taken place in Calderdale, although some offences also happened in the Bradford district, between 2003 and 2010 when the female victim was aged between 13 and 20.The men are due to appear at Bradford magistrates court on 7 and 9 July.Eight suspects who were arrested over the course of the investigation have been released without charge.Those charged are: Asad Ali, 37, of Brighouse, is charged with two counts of rape. Ajmal Aziz, 39 of Halifax, is charged with three counts of rape and attempted rape. Mohammed Jangier, 44, of Halifax, is charged with rape. Mohammed Asif, 36, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape Harris Ahmed Butt, 37, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape and two counts of indecent assault. Taukeer Butt, 36, of Halifax, is charged with three counts of rape. Muitasim Khan, 40, of Halifax, is charged with rape. Mohammed Hamza, 47, of Halifax, is charged with rape. Mohsin Mir, 40, of Halifax, is charged with three counts of rape. Javid Mir, 38, of Halifax, is charged with rape. Haroon Saddique, 37, of Bradford, is charged with two counts of rape. Zahir Iqbal, 41, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Sarfraz Rabnawaz, 35, of Bradford, is charged with two counts of rape. Wajid Addalat, 43, of Halifax, is charged with rape. Sajid Addalat, 45, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Nazim Hussain, 43, of Bradford, is charged with conspiracy to rape. Nadeem Saddiqque, 43, of Sheffield, is charged with rape. Saquab Hussain, 43, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Sadakat Ali, 48, of Bradford, is charged with rape. Ziarab Mohammed, 48, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Imran Raja Yasin, 41, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Zulfiqar Ali, 40, of Bradford, is charged with two counts of rape. Malik Abid Qadeer, 64, of Halifax, is charged with five counts of rape. Kamran Amin, 45, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Mohammed Akhtar, 51, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Ali Zulfiqar, 38, of Halifax, is charged with two counts of rape. Shafiq Ali Rafiq, 40, of Dewsbury, is charged with two counts of rape. Amir Shaban, 45, of Halifax, is charged with rape. Sakeb Nazir, 36,
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Sony Interactive Entertainment will release its PlayStation 5 DualSense controller in two new color schemes in June: Cosmic Red and Midnight Black. The new black DualSense controller “features two subtly different shades of black with light grey detailing to reflect how we view space through the night sky,” while the red version is “inspired by the unique vivid shades of red found throughout the cosmos,” said Isabelle Tomatis, senior director of PSVR, esports, peripherals marketing, and licensing at SIE, in a PlayStation Blog post. Both controllers feature “a subtle blue hue, that produces unique shades of red and black,” designer Satoshi Aoyagi said. Of course, the main draw
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Sony has announced its first new colors for PlayStation 5’s DualSense controller: a “cosmic red” model that features a two-tone red and black design, and an all-black “midnight black” version that brings to mind the classic PS2, PS3, and PS4 controller designs. Until now, Sony has only offered the DualSense controller in a black-and-white color scheme to match the PS5 (which features a similar contrasting theme), so the new color options are certainly welcome ones. The midnight black option is particularly notable: the primarily white DualSense was a big departure for Sony’s designs, which have largely trended toward black and gray consoles and controllers by default for the
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Photo illustration by William Joel | Photo by Juana Arias for the Washington Post The giant inflatable rodent that became the face of America’s labor movement By May 13, 2021, 9:30am EDT The 12-foot rat loomed over the entrance to the RV trade show in Elkhart, Indiana, the “RV capital of the world.”
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Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email. Manchester City are Premier League champions for the third time in four years. Jonathan Liew is on hand to discuss how Pep Guardiola shaped the team differently for probably his greatest English championship win. City’s title was sealed as a weakened Manchester United lost to Leicester City - but the race for the top four is still intriguing, as Arsenal win at Chelsea. What of Arsenal? Is there any cause for joy at the Emirates, short of potentially pipping Spurs to the Europa Conference League? And Cliv
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The palace has requested that an edited image of the British monarch be removed from the side of a bus dubbed the “Trump Train,” BuzzFeed News reported Wednesday. In the picture, the 95-year-old royal appears to be wearing one of former President Donald Trump’s signature “Make America Great Again” campaign hats and a brooch referring to the QAnon conspiracy theory. “Representations asking for the photo’s removal have been made,” the palace confirmed to HuffPost on Thursday. Greetings from The Villages, Florida. pic.twitter.com/4pBTUrHZdP— Donie O'Sullivan (@donie) May 7, 2021 It’s unclear if pro-Trump businessman Buddy Hall, who drives the vehicle across the countr
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If you’ve been curious about checking out the Microsoft Surface Duo foldable Android phone but didn’t want to pay its original $1,399 price — first off, I get you. The good news is that you no longer have to pay such a high cost to get one. Wellbots is selling the unlocked Surface Duo with 128GB of storage that works on Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile for just $690. Verge readers can score this deal by using the offer code THEVERGEDUO at checkout. Residents outside of California and New York won’t be charged tax on this purchase. If you want to double the storage, you can get the 256GB Surface Duo for $790. This phone released in September 2020 to less-than-stellar reception from Die
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Over the past several years, the Democratic Party has moved further left on US policy toward Israel, showing a greater willingness to criticize Israel and speak up in defense of the rights of Palestinians. But President Joe Biden doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo. And that gap between him and the more progressive members of his party is becoming a visible rift as the Biden administration struggles to address the escalating conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The recent fighting between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant group that has controlled Gaza since 2007, has so far left at least seven people in Israel dead from Hamas rockets and around 70 Palestinians, including 16 children, dead, more than 300 injured, and entire apartment buildings flattened in Gaza from Israeli airstrikes. The Biden administration has firmly and publicly denounced Hamas for firing rockets indiscriminately at civilians in Israel. Yet it has refused to say a single harsh word to Israel publicly for its precision bombing of civilian targets in Gaza, instead repeating the constant refrain that “Israel has the right to defend itself.” A summary of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s Tuesday call with his Israeli counterpart said that “He conveyed the President’s unwavering support for Israel’s security and for its legitimate right to defend itself and its people, while protecting civilians.” That kind of unwavering defense of Israel wouldn’t have ruffled many feathers in the Democratic Party 20 or maybe even 10 years ago. But times have changed. The party has changed. And now it’s doing more than just ruffling feathers. “By only stepping in to name Hamas’ actions — which are condemnable — & refusing to acknowledge the rights of Palestinians, Biden reinforces the false idea that Palestinians instigated this cycle of violence,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) tweeted on Wednesday. “This is not neutral language. It takes a side — the side of occupation.” This is becoming a problem for Biden, who promised to put human rights at the “center” of his foreign policy. Instead, he’s finding himself calcified in the US-Israel
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With the world facing a drought of crucial semiconductor components, Samsung Electronics has said it plans to dig a fresh borehole in the form of a new production facility, expected to open in Q2 next year. Construction has already begun on the new production line, dubbed P3 and based in the city of Pyeongtaek. Samsung said the facility will be tasked with producing 5nm logic semiconductors and 14nm DRAM using EUV lithography tech. Samsung's building site in Pyeongtaek News of P3's existence began circulating last August when Korean media claimed Samsung was about to commence construction work with aim to start mass production by the second half of this year. Assuming that building work remains on schedule, the facility should help alleviate some of the supply chain pressure affecting the wider tech sector. Earlier this week, Glenn O'Donnell, vice president at analyst firm Forrester, said the semiconductor crunch would last until 2023, driven by a surge in spending from data centre, cloud, edge computing, and cryptocurrency customers. FCC starts probing effects of semiconductor drought on the US telecoms supply chain If you said the semiconductor shortage will last until Q2 2022, you would be correct, according to Gartner US-based hard disk drive suppliers face further scru
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The Australian state of New South Wales will spend $38.5 million to send a plague of mice eating their way across farms and invading homes “into oblivion,” a move hailed by farmers and rural residents who say they’re at their wits end with a growing tide of rodents. Farmers and residents in rural communities for months had been calling on the state government to address the mouse plague. A year of consistent rain created near-perfect breeding conditions for mice, which can produce up to 500 offspring in a season, the Sydney Morning Herald noted. And breed they did. At least three hospital patients in rural New South Wales have been bitten by rogue mice, and farmers have posted videos to social media showing mice raining from the sky and running across hay bales like a dark brown mist. Farmers said they were worried about the winter crop surviving an onslaught of the hungry rodents, and said another wet season could lead to a resurgence later this year.  Even if grain’s in silos, mice can get to it. Like Tyler Jones discovered in Tullamore when cleaning out the auger and it started raining mice #mouseplague #mice #australia pic.twitter.com/mWOHNWAMPv— Lucy Thackray (@LucyThack) May 12, 2021 Mouse plauge is worsening - Maree Pobje from Tottenham has filmed an update, with even more mice pouring out 50m from her house. She says “it is disgusting the Gov isn’t helping with costs as we live in the middle of a plague riddling every surface in our house, clothes & food” pic.twitter.com/Gy7ZRg3Cov— Lucy Thackray (@LucyThack) May 11, 2021 The New South Wales government also said Thursday it would seek “urgent” approval to use an outlawed poison called bromadiolone to treat the scourge. The chemical is a potent anticoagulant banned in California after concerns from environmental groups that it can travel up the food chain and kill other animals like mountain lions, bobcats and golden eagles. “This is the equivalent of napalming mice,” the state agriculture minister, Adam Marshall, told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. “This chemical, this poison, will eliminate mice that take these baits within 24 hours.” NSW Farmers, a lobbying gro
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The Epic v. Apple trial will deliver a verdict on whether Apple is suppressing competition. But if you were watching Wednesday’s testimony, you could easily end up more confused about what its App Store actually allows. Apple says iOS users benefit from a locked-down, curated platform. It rejects “stores within stores” like the Epic Games Store, which could allegedly expose users to harmful and unvetted software. It’s also, however, fighting Epic Games’ claims that there’s no meaningful competition on its platform. So this morning, an Apple attorney grilled one of Epic’s witnesses about a slew of iOS-hosted gaming apps. The move might have helped rebut Epic’s complaints, but it also highlighted just how arbitrary Apple’s policies can seem. Apple attorney Karen Dunn was questioning Susan Athey, an economist testifying on behalf of Epic. Athey criticized Apple yesterday for not allowing more “middleware,” or third-party services like alternate app stores. Dunn countered with several options that might fit that bill. The list included Valve’s Steam Mobile and Steam Link apps; Microsoft’s Xbox iOS app; Sony’s PlayStation app; and a mobile gaming subscription service named GameClub. “GameClub is a direct competitor to Apple Arcade, and GameClub is available in the App Store today,” Dunn said. Apple is right to call these apps gaming services, but as testimony continued, it wasn’t clear they make good App Store alternatives. Steam Mobile lets players manage games for Windows, Mac, and Linux — but not iPhones or iPads. The Steam Link, Xbox, and PlayStation apps all let you play a catalog of games on iOS — but only if you’ve got a PC or console to stream them from. GameClub is a cross-platform mobile gaming service. But right after Apple mentioned the app, a GameClub executive posted (and then deleted) a tweet calling that comparison “absurd beyond measure,” thanks to restrictions on how GameClub can operate. Athey testified that Apple rejected GameClub over 100 times, and that Apple only lets GameClub feature games to which it has an “exclusive license.” When The Verge emailed GameClub business development VP Eli Hoda
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The climbers, a Swiss-Pakistani and an American, perished near the high-altitude “death zone.” Officials ruled out the coronavirus, which is overwhelming the country’s health system.Credit...Prakash Mathema/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesMay 13, 2021, 9:09 a.m. ETKATHMANDU, Nepal — Two climbers, a Swiss-Pakistani and an American, have died on Mount Everest, the first fatalities of a busy climbing season as a second wave of the coronavirus batters Nepal.The expedition company that organized their climbs, Seven Summit Treks, said both men were experienced mountaineers who lost consciousness around Mount Everest’s “death zone,” an area above 8,000 meters (about 26,000 feet) named for its thin air and brutal weather.When the climbers died on Wednesday, the wind had picked u
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The top US fuel pipeline on Thursday moved some of the first millions of gallons of motor fuels after a six-day outage following a crippling cyber-attack led to fuel shortages across east coast states.The Colonial pipeline, which carries 100 million gallons per day of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, resumed computer-controlled pumping late Wednesday after adding safety measures. It will take several days for deliveries to fully recover and interruptions are possible, the company said.The shutdown caused gasoline shortages and emergency declarations from Virginia to Florida, led two refineries to curb production, and had airlines reshuffling some refueling operations.The pipeline’s restart should bring supplies to some hard-hit areas as soon as Thursday, said energy secretary Jennifer Gran
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Create and run tests in Spearmint.Zero coding required.Easily create, and run tests intuitively using Spearmint. Access your app's file directory and codebase while enjoying a fully functional terminal and browser in-app. When you're ready to continue developing your application, your Jest test files will be in your app's __tests__ folder.A fresh take on testing.Writing tests is like eating your veggies: it's something everyone knows that they should do, but not everyone does. Spearmint.js provides a simple way to write tests that gives you confidence your React application will work in the way your users interact with it.Spearmint provides a user-friendly GUI for developers to easily generate tests with a few clicks of a button. It dynamically converts user inputs into executable test code through react-testing-library, jest, supertest, puppeteer, and axe-core.Fun fact: The origin of the word “debugging” comes from Grace Hopper removing a moth that was causing the Mark II Aiken Relay computer to malfunction. Did you know that moths are repelled by spearmint?Supports React, Redux, Hooks, Context, Puppeteer, Endpoint, and Accessibility Testing.Spearmint isn't just for React. Wri
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One of the biggest challenges of the pandemic has been keeping in touch with friends with social distancing and other Covid restrictions in place.But for some these changes instigated unlikely friendships with people they might otherwise never have met. Five Guardian readers share how these friendships have helped them get through the past year.‘I watched Star Trek Voyager with people I never met – for 172 days’Christopher Ince, 34, a university lecturer from London, braced himself for what would become months of social isolation when the first lockdown began in March last year. He decided to comfort himself by bingeing on a favourite TV show.“I randomly tweeted something about putting on the first episode of a TV series. I’m slightly afraid to say that it was Star Trek Voyager, but it was,” he says.Christopher Ince“A few minutes later someone on Twitter, who I’d been friendly with, responded to suggest we watch along in sync, which led to a small gang of people joining in. Some of us knew each other, some of us didn’t, but we’re all part of the LGBTQ+ community. The six of us ended up watching an episode alongside each other at 7pm, every day, for 172 days. We became a crew and wound up joking about ourselves as such.”What was supposed to be “a bit of a laugh”, as Ince puts it, became a support network. “The point of the show is a small group of people on one ship making their way alone through tough times for an extended period. They stick together and keep each other going. “A year on, we’ve watched all sorts of films and events together, gone to online museum openings, celebrated birthdays, and emotionally supported each other through b
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Boris Johnson’s promise of a public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic is welcome, but tardy and vague. It is scarcely surprising that the government has been dragging its feet, for no independent, objective and credible inquiry could be anything but devastating about the political handling of the crisis. The long and lethal litany of blunders and cover-ups presented in Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott’s book Failures of State beggars belief, even while it is so recent in memory.Official inquiries are rarely characterised by frankness or timeliness. Like the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, they tend to become drawn-out exercises in political point-scoring, at best detonating a weak charge long after the event. If the Covid inquiry does ever happen (Johnson hardly has a good track record of keeping promises), it is likely to be trammeled by evasion, foot-dragging and blame-shifting on a scale that will make Chilcot look terse and incisive in comparison.We can’t afford that. The guidance a proper inquiry could offer is sorely needed. Not only is the pandemic far from over – in many ways it is more dangerous now than ever – but we will be living with Covid, and the threat of new viral pandemics, for the indefinite future. A swiftly implemented inquiry last summer might have offered valuable lessons before the awful second wave hit in the winter.Besides, an honest inquiry is a moral obligation. The British population has suffered and endured so much over
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We've also changed the title to better indicate that we believe that this is the best book for beginners to learn Python, not only in the academic context of computer science. Part 2 of our Python course is codewithrepl.it, a series of Python projects in tutorial form that learners can work through and extend. We believe that working through first this book (to learn the fundamentals) and then the set of tutorials (to see what is possible and gain experience with various libaries) is the best way to learn Python in 2021.
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My daughter, Rory, was fully vaccinated on schedule from birth to first grade. When she was a toddler, our insurance didn’t cover immunizations, so I dutifully took Rory to the local health department for her shots. I would hug her wriggling body tightly as nurses zeroed in on her chubby thighs, the needle’s quick pinch causing Rory to cry.  As the nurses put cartoon character bandages on each of her legs, I would tear up, too. I hated to see her in pain — even momentarily — but I never hesitated when it was time for her vaccines. That changed when she was 6 years old. One morning, R
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Photo by Julia Gartland I grew up in a house pretty much devoid of candles, unacquainted with their simple pleasures until I flew the nest. My mother is very scent-sensitive (seriously, the woman can catch a whiff of a Reese’s peanut butter cup from 15 feet away) and is an insurance adjuster who’s seen too many house fires start from unattended candles. So, I discovered the
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App to feature virtual booths, avatars and leaderboards. Last month we heard that, rather unsurprisingly, this year's E3 will be an online-only event due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. We now have an idea of how that's going to work in practice, as the ESA has announced an online portal and app for E3 2021. In a press release, the ESA described the online portal and app as "a key hub for the duration of the show". It will feature hosted events, virtual booths, online forums, video conferencing, and even profile and avatar creation. The exhibitor booths will have special events along with VOD content and articles, and will act as "hubs within the portal for key announcements and game info
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Forty-five million Americans now owe a total of $1.7 trillion in federal and private student loans. For many people, that debt is the biggest drag on their adult lives. It prevents them from buying a home or starting a family or investing in their future. They are stuck in a perpetual loop. This crisis has led to calls to cancel all that debt and liberate an entire generation of Americans — something I instinctively support. But when you start to think about all the obstacles and trade-offs, you quickly realize how politically fraught such a proposal would be. Is there any way to do it fairly? What about the millions of people who spent decades paying down their loans? And what about the people who didn’t go to college because they didn’t want the debt — how would this land for
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If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Amazon’s new second-generation Echo Buds are the company’s second crack at true wireless earbuds. They’re smaller, lighter, and more comfortable than before, and now have more effective noise cancellation. The first time around, Amazon borrowed some of Bose’s tech to help the original Echo Buds block outside noise, but version two was built completely in-house. Hands-free Alexa voice commands still get top billing, but the most compelling thing about the Echo Buds is still their aggressive price — and the solid mix of features you get in exchange. The Echo Buds cost $99.99 or $119.99 (with wireless charging case) for a limited time, after which the prices will rise to $119 and $13
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Lenovo is starting a new line of accessories, called Lenovo Go: a lineup of chargers, mice and keyboards, and audio products designed for the new world of hybrid workers who’ll be both commuting to the office and working from home. The company is starting small with two products so far. There’s Lenovo Go Wireless Multi-Device Mouse, a travel mouse whose main claim to fame (other than portability) is support for wireless Qi charging (in addition to USB-C). There’s also the Lenovo Go USB-C Laptop Power Bank, which offers 20,000mAh of charging capacity at up to 65W, with the ability to charge up to three devices at once. Neither device is groundbreaking, but it’s the hybrid commuting focus that makes them interesting. Lenovo is specifically designing the devices so that workers
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The Roku Channel is getting its first batch of Quibi shows on May 20th, Roku has announced. There’ll be 30 so-called “Roku Originals” available to stream initially, but Roku says it eventually plans to release all 75 of Quibi’s titles on its service. They’ll be available to watch free of charge in the US, Canada, and UK, with ads inserted in between individual short-form episodes. Roku announced in January that it would be exclusively licensing Quibi’s library. Included in this first batch of shows are the seventh season of Reno 911!, the cooking documentary Shape of Pasta, Chrissy’s Court (starring Chrissy Teigen), and Kevin Hart’s Die Hart. In the US, The Roku Channel is available on iOS, Android, select Samsung TVs, Amazon Fire TV devices, and the web, in addition to
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The world’s biggest gaming showcase, E3, is going all-virtual for the first time in its history, with organizers revealing today how they plan to keep enthusiasts interested without the sights and sounds of the show floor. The virtual E3 will run from June 12th to June 15th. The showcase will include an online portal with access to virtual exhibitor booths with video content and articles, live streams, and social elements like forums, customizable user profiles, leaderboards, and “lounges.” Registration is free and opens later this month. This will be the second year in a row that E3 has not taken place in person in Los Angeles due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, the show’s cancellation was announced in March, and the show’s organizers, the Entertainment Software Associat
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California TodayThursday: A conversation about major cultural institutions and philanthropy in the aftermath of the pandemic.May 13, 2021, 8:57 a.m. ETImageCredit...Alex Welsh for The New York TimesGood morning.As California emerges from the pandemic, we’re beginning to get hints of the ways life will be different — permanently.Arts institutions of all shapes and sizes are in particular flux right now as they contend with the collision of long-brewing funding challenges and lingering effects of prolonged shutdowns.My colleague Adam Nagourney, who recently started a new beat covering West Coast cultural affairs, wrote about how that’s playing out in Los Angeles, especially after the death last month of Eli Broad, the towering philanthropist who, before his retirement three years ago,
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Target has temporarily suspended the sale of Pokémon cards and other trading cards in-store in response to reports of violent confrontations related to the collectibles, whose value has soared in the past year. The new policy will go into effect Friday, but customers began seeing signs in stores this week. Aggressive Pokémon card collectors hunting for rare cards to resell have caused problems for the retailer, which already set a limit on the number of card packs a customer could buy. Frenzied shoppers still have been camping overnight at some stores, and last week, a fight broke out at a Wisconsin Target over trading cards. “The safety of our guests and our team is our top priority,” a Target spokesperson told Polygon. “Out of an abundance of caution, we’ve decided to tempor
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The headlines speak mainly of “clashes”, “conflict”, and “casualties on both sides”. The politicians recite bromides about Israel’s “right to defend itself”– a right that Palestinians seemingly do not have. The US government calls for “all parties to deescalate”, with no acknowledgment that it is US funds – $3.8bn a year – that, in part, make Israel’s bombardment of Gaza possible. This is the familiar American routine when Israel goes to war.Yet before Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rockets came to dominate the news, what happened over the last week in Jerusalem was perhaps the most substantial Palestinian mass uprising in the city since 2017 – when Palestinian demonstrations led Israeli police to abandon their attempt to install metal detectors at the entranc
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Kayky is one of the hottest properties in Brazilian football. The 17-year-old signed for Manchester City last month and will join up with his new teammates next January after he finishes the season with Fluminense. He has already made his mark in Brazil, scoring goals for Fluminense in the Rio state championships, and becoming the club’s youngest debutant and youngest goalscorer in the Copa Libertadores.The transfer marks a shift in approach for the Premier League champions. Manchester City are now going down the Real Madrid route of snapping up young talents from Brazil before they have fully developed. The club have also signed 18-year-old midfielder Diego Rosa – who is currently on loan at Lommel, City’s sister club in Belgium – and the U17 World Cup-winning right-back Yan Couto
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In addition to the AF-P DX NIKKOR 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G VR lens I reported a few days ago, Nikon has slowly retired several other Nikkor F-mount lenses – they are already listed as “old product” on the main Nikon Japan website or listed on the discontinued section of the website (see previous reports on discontinued Nikon products): AF-S NIKKOR 16-35mm f/4G ED VR Nikon Japan: old product Adorama: out of stock B&H: out of stock AF-S NIKKOR 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR Nikon Japan: old product Adorama: out of stock B&H: out of stock AF-S NIKKOR 200mm f/2G ED VR II (previously reported here) Nikon Japan: old product Adorama: out of stock B&H: out of stock AF-S DX NIKKOR 16-80mm f/2.8-4E ED VR Nikon Japan: old product Adorama: ou
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Today, public feeling toward labor is more positive, and public feeling toward big business more negative, than at any time in five decades. What’s more, workers increasingly want to be in unions: over half of Americans say they would vote for a union at work, while only 11 percent of US employees currently belong to one – largely because labor laws remain stacked in favor of big business.Americans’ rising affinity for organized labor and antipathy toward big business opens up new possibilities for a more balanced economy and society – but not without reform to the labor laws that hold workers back. For instance, because penalties are negligible, Amazon management has repeatedly violated workers’ rights when workers acted collectively to improve their working conditions. When wor
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When asparagus season finally commences in Britain (from about the end of April to the end of June), we can often feel a bit guilty for giving those first spears anything but the simplest treatment: simmered until just done, drained and served, that’s it. Radical innovation, you might think, is best saved for the off-season, when the only available asparagus has journeyed thousands of miles and looks it. But variety doesn’t have to be complicated – there are lots of ways to liven up a serving of asparagus without overwhelming it. I don’t know exactly how many but, as usual, I stopped at 17.Arguably even the simplest treatments aren’t foolproof – the tapered shape of an asparagus spear presents an intractable culinary problem: even after trimming, the fat bottoms are always going to take longer to cook than the pointy tips. For years I resorted to standing them up in the water for a few minutes, so the bottoms got some extra immersion, but they alway fell over as soon as I let go. One day I thought: leave the rubber band on. Then I thought: maybe that’s what the rubber band is for?Hollandaise may be the traditional accompaniment, but Thomasina Miers serves simmered asparagus with an anchoiade, a garlicky sauce of anchovies and walnuts that will never go as wrong as hollandaise sometimes can. For a simple lunch, or a slightly complicated breakfast, try your simmered asparagus with a poached egg and polenta, as Bruce Poole does.Yotam Ottolenghi’s roasted asparagus with pine nuts and sourdough crumbs. Photograph: Louise Hagger/The GuardianYou can, of course, grill asparagus spears on a barbecue, but this will require your unwavering attention, otherwise they w
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Disposable barbecues have been banned across a swath of open countryside in Hampshire and Dorset after a campaign led by the New Forest national park authority.The move to ban the sale of disposable barbecues began last May in the wake of a catastrophic fire in Wareham Forest, Dorset, which burned slow worms and lizards alive and damaged more than 200 hectares (500 acres) of the site of special scientific interest. The fire was thought to have been caused by a disposable barbecue or a campfire.Disposable barbecues are increasingly popular. In just one weekend last summer in the New Forest national park alone, rangers working with the fire service extinguished more than 60 unsafe barbecues, many of which had been left unattended.After the Wareham Forest fire, Streets Ironmongers, a local business in Brockenhurst, removed disposable barbecues from sale. More than 50 retailers, including farm shops, corner stores and the national supermarket chains Waitrose, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury joined the campaign to remove them from sale across the national park.Landowners and charities have responded by banning barbecues and fires on their land, including Forestry England, the National Trust and the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust. The ban has been extended to New Forest crown land and Hampshire county council’s Lepe country park.Dorset council and Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council have put in new measures to control the use of disposable barbecues and have asked local retailers to withdraw them from sale.The New Forest national park authority is calling on the entire area to become a barbecue-free zone. But according to the authority, a number of su
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In August 2020, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) filed an audacious lawsuit against the nation’s largest and most powerful gun rights group. The suit alleges that several top leaders of the National Rifle Association (NRA) — including its CEO, Wayne LaPierre — engaged in a ridiculous amount of self-dealing with the organization. Among other things, the lawsuit accuses LaPierre of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private charter planes for himself and his extended family, accepting lavish gifts from NRA vendors, and spending $1.2 million in NRA funds on “personal expenses,” the list of which includes his golf club membership. Although the NRA initially denied the allegations, it filed a tax document with the IRS in November admitting it “became aware during 2019 of a significant diversion of its assets.” The tax return also says LaPierre reimbursed the NRA for $300,000 in travel expenses. James’s lawsuit asks the court to impose several steep penalties on the NRA, including dissolving its corporate charter — a sanction NRA’s attorneys have characterized as akin to the “death penalty” for a corporation. Needless to say, the NRA wants to avoid this outcome and has engaged in some fairly audacious legal maneuverings of its own to strip the state of New York of much of its power over the organization. Although the NRA is, by its own accounts, in strong financial shape and fully capable of paying off its creditors, the organization declared bankruptcy last January. The primary purpose of the NRA’s declaration, many outsiders surmised, is to cut many of its formal ties with New York and reincorporate it in the state of Texas, thus stripping James of much of her authority over the organization. On Tuesday, a federal bankruptcy judge agreed. Texas-based Judge Harlin Hale formally rejected the NRA’s attempt to use the bankruptcy courts in this way, ruling that “the NRA did not file the bankruptcy petition in good faith because this filing was not for a purpose intended or sanctioned by the Bankruptcy Code.” If you’re confused by this complicated web of corporate and bankruptcy law, fear not. It is arcane and conv
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difficult mode: engage — Waymo and Cruise have both applied for permits to deploy a commercial service. Enlarge / One of Waymo's sensor-studded Jaguar I-Paces observes a pedestrian crossing the road in front of it.WaymoThe day when robotaxis roam the streets of San Francisco looking for fare-paying customers is getting closer. This week, Reuters reported that both Waymo and Cruise have applied to California's Department of Motor Vehicles for permits to deploy driverless vehicles. The permit on its own isn't sufficient to begin operating a commercial robotaxi service, but it is an important milestone on the way to achieving that. For several months now, Waymo has operated a fully driverless commercial taxi service in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona. But as Ars alum Tim Lee wrote recently, "Suburban Phoenix is a terrible place to run a taxi service." A sun-blessed suburb in the Southwest, designed with the car in mind as the primary mode of transport, is as close to easy mode for an autonomous vehicle as it's possible to get, outside the confines of private test tracks or a gigantic retirement village. That in turn means that the Phoenix suburbs have
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A senior figure at MI5 has said the security service could not have prevented Usman Khan’s deadly attack at Fishmongers’ Hall, despite assessing that his threat level increased in the months leading up to it, an inquest has heard.Khan killed Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones at a prison education event at the hall in November 2019, within a year of being released on licence for terrorist offences. An anonymous MI5 officer referred to as Witness A told an inquest into their deaths that an intelligence service review of the attack concluded MI5’s actions were “sound”.Witness A said the review found “MI5 could not have taken any action that would have materially changed the outcome on this case”.She said if MI5 had had any intelligence of an imminent attack it would have passed this on to the police. She said: “If we had any intelligence of concern we would definitely have fed it through to our counter-terrorism colleagues.”Last week the inquest heard that MI5 increased Khan’s threat level from P4 to P3 after he was released from high security prison in December 2018. On Thursday the inquest at the Guildhall in London was told that P3 refers to individuals “that require further action to determine whether they pose a threat”.Police and probation officers responsible for the management of Khan told the inquest they were not aware that MI5 was monitoring Khan or that its officers attended multi-agency public protection arrangements (Mappa) meetings about him in 2019.Witness A confirmed that MI5 was at some of these meetings. “We did attend some Mappa meetings but I’m not able to confirm which meetings we attended,” she said.She said the service was in “receiving mode” during these meetings. She said it was necessary to separate covert investigations from overt management of men such as Khan, who at the time was one of about 3,000 “subjects of interest”.The witness also revealed that MI5 closed a four-and-a-half-year investigation into Khan in February 2015 while he was in prison for planning to set up a terrorist camp in Pakistan. Explaining the decision, she said: “It was assessed that the residual risk of Khan re-engaging in extr
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Bogotá, Colombia A protester clad in a dress featuring the national flag colours upside down blocks the road as the country enters its third week of anti-government protests Photograph: Chepa Beltran/LongVisual/Zuma Wire/Rex/Shutterstock Buenos Aires, Argentina Nurses gather to demand improved working conditions Photograph: Roberto Almeida Aveledo/Zuma Wire/Rex Tirana, Albania Muslims pray on the first day of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan Photograph: Gent Shkullaku/AFP/Getty Images
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Reports that the Jacksonville Jaguars may sign Tim Tebow as a tight end are true ― and Jacksonville Coach Urban Meyer is here to tell us why. (Watch below.) Meyer, who previously coached Tebow when he won the Heisman Trophy at quarterback for the University of Florida, told broadcaster Cris Collinsworth how a recent tryout for Tebow came about and why Tebow could actually join the team. Tebow, whose NFL career at quarterback fizzled, has never played tight end, is 33 years old and is coming off a few years of trying to make it in baseball in the New York Mets’ minor league system. “He w
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Stricken US bulk hydrocarbon conveyor Colonial Pipeline advertised for a new cybersecurity manager a month before that ransomware attack forced operators to shut down the pipeline as a pre-emptive safety measure. The job advert came to light in the wake of the ransomware attack, which shut down one of America's largest pipelines on Friday 7 May. "Employees find exciting opportunities to grow and develop their careers at a stable company which offers a generous compensation and benefits package that includes annual incentive bonuses, retirement plans, insurance coverage and a host of other fea
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A decade after the launch of the Istanbul convention, the landmark human rights treaty to stop gender-based violence, women are facing a global assault on their rights and safety, according to campaigners.This week marked 10 years since the first 13 countries signed up to the convention, seen as a turning point in efforts to address violence against women.Yet despite 46 countries signing the treaty, the world has become gripped by a pandemic of violence against women, exacerbated and exposed by Covid-19, according to a UN envoy.“The Covid pandemic revealed what was happening before,” said Dubravka Šimonović, UN special rapporteur on violence against women. She said across the world there had been a stark increase in calls to domestic violence helplines, reports of women missing or killed, and a lack of safe places for those fleeing abuse.“We have a pandemic of violence against women that was addressed properly in a huge number of states,” she said.The rise in violence against women and girls has been mirrored by a political backlash against the convention – the first international legally binding framework to prevent domestic violence, protect survivors and promote equality.In March, to widespread domestic and international condemnation, Turkey, the birthplace of the convention, announced it would be pulling out of the treaty from July.Turkey’s withdrawal from the convention capped years of escalating anti-feminist, anti-women and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric by its politicians, including the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.Erdoğan has publicly and repeatedly stated that he does not believe in equality between men and women and his government has increasingly linked women’s safety to remaining at home with their families and having more children.“We lost a safety net,” said Elif Ege, of the women’s refuge organisation Mor Çati in Istanbul. “The Istanbul convention was not implemented properly at all over the years … but it doesn’t mean it was completely ineffective; it was a significant tool in the hands of feminist organisations.”In Ukraine there has been strong opposition to the signing and ratification of the convention from religious groups who perceive it to be a threat to “family values”.Women protest outside the National Palace in Mexico City on International Women’s Day with placards showing names of victims of femicide
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People often ask about the difference in media approach between top-level footballers and golfers. The widespread understanding would be that football players, bereft of educational qualifications, have a cynical attitude towards the press drilled into them within clubs and treat reporters accordingly. Golfers, often with at least an element of the US college system on their CV, comprehend the need to keep both tour and individual sponsors happy and therefore treat media duties as a core responsibility.In some respects that generalisation is correct. In many others it is grossly unfair. Footballers encounter a level of media criticism that is rarely, if ever, bestowed on golfers. Premier League players are subject to a scrutiny, personal and professional, that would be totally alien even to Rory McIlroy. Golfers making front pages is a rare thing indeed but that shouldn’t lead us to believe they are all as pure as the driven snow.A bad on-course performance – Ryder Cups etc aside – only impacts on that one player. When footballers appear in front of a microphone following a dismal result, the ire of supporters funnels back through online channels. The cosiness of broadcast partnerships means you are not likely to see outbursts from golfers – aimed at their caddie, the course or otherwise – on mainstream coverage. Not good for the brand.In short, golfers lead a pretty charmed life. That was worthy of attention as the sport’s breakaway tour shot back to prominence last week. As has tended to be the norm with this project, it duly disappeared from broader discourse. And no wonder; when Phil Mickelson, a key target for the Saudi Arabia-backed Super Golf League, pe
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At New Story, culture and people are #1 and have been since we first started. As Head of People & Culture, your focus will be “full stack,” meaning you’ll own the People and Culture function and help us build a world-class culture. (The great news is that our starting point is an eNPS of 87.5.) We’re looking for a dynamic and strategic leader who can drive change throughout the organization. You’ll work to level up managers (and be wind in their sails), build relationships with future top talent, scale our team across the U.S. and Mexico and champion our culture and values. You’ll have a tremendous amount of autonomy and responsibility to work alongside our executives, managers, and team to bring in new ideas, iterate/stop legacy initiatives, and get creative along the way. You will be responsible for building and professionalizing people processes that are set to scale while maximizing engagement throughout the team member lifecycle. In addition, you will have the opportunity to lead new initiatives like partnering with DEI experts to promote diversity and inclusion initiatives and creating alignment in a remote work environment.  You must be a natural leader, with a track record of successfully scaling HR operations in a high-growth environment. You should have the ability to operate at high levels while being willing to get into the weeds of the work and provide excellent internal customer service to the team. To thrive in this role, you must be mission-driven
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"DisplayName field missing from registry" — If you can't make the morning Twitch stream, we still have tons of impressions to share. This is a familiar text crawl. But what's this? FemShep as an immediately available character option in Mass Effect 1? And a handsome real-time reflection applied to nearby glass? Yes, this is the Mass Effect Legendary Edition. BioWare / EA Same moment with DudeShep. BioWare / EA Updated warp sequence. BioWare / EA Updated march through the Normandy's interior. BioWare / EA Captain Anderson's facial rendering has only been slightly updated, and the game's original facial animation routines remain intact. But ME1's entire lighting model has been updated—which also means newly reflective eyes as they glance around. BioWare / EA Remastered DudeShep grapples with an early vision. BioWare / EA
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Just hours after Labour’s Marvin Rees won the Bristol mayoralty for a second term, his party lost its council majority, with the Greens gaining an unexpected 13 council seats.After the Greens came second in the mayoral race, swings from Labour to Green, including in seemingly safe Labour areas, unseated long-serving councillors and cabinet members. Labour had hoped to keep overall control of the council, but the Greens caught them up as the joint-largest party with 24 councillors apiece.Bristol has voted again for a Labour mayor and helped elect Dan Norris as the new Labour metro mayor for the West of England. The city returned four Labour MPs in 2019, who are yet to be seriously challenged by the Greens at a general election. It’s wrong to say Labour has lost its grip on Bristol, but this is still a major political shift for the city.It’s hard to draw definite conclusions about what caused this shift: the increasing importance of the climate crisis in voters’ minds, a strong Green campaign and factional infighting disrupting Labour’s one, demographic shifts over the last five years, including rapid gentrification of inner-city areas; some Labour voters being dissatisfied with Keir Starmer’s leadership, or the Labour mayor being a divisive figure? It’s too soon to say which of these had the most impact.While Bristol is often considered a hotbed of Momentum Corbynites, it’s important to remember that not so long ago the city had both a Tory and a Lib Dem MP, a Lib Dem-controlled council and elected a former Lib Dem independent mayor in 2012. It appears the Greens have attracted voters from Labour’s left, but also people who once voted Lib Dem.Since Marvin Rees was elected, Bristol has taken action on green issues. A clean air zone will be coming into force in October, charging polluting vehicles to enter the city centre. (The mayor wanted to ban diesel cars from entering, but the government overruled him). The council has consulted on low traffic neighbourhood pilots and closed major city centre roads to through traffic.In opposition, Green councillors have also made an impact. In 2018, Bristol became the first city to declare a climate emergency, and many other cities have followed suit. As a result, Bristol’s target is to be a carbon neutral city by 2030 – something Marvin Rees recently described as a “massively challenging” but necessary aim.The Greens have campaigned hard on the protection of green spaces in the building of new housing developments, as the Labour council has been criticised by some for not doing enough to safeguard nature and biodiversity during attempts to tackle the housing crisis.One theory for the Green surge is an increasing awareness of the need for action on the climate crisis. It seems some voters didn’t see Labour as the green option despite the steps they have taken over the last five years.Like many local parties nationally, Bristol’s Labour party has also had a chaotic few months, with last-minute replacements of council candidates who were suspended from the party. Labour sources told the Bristol Cable that disillusionment with Labour’s perceived direction, suspensions and candi
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A couple of months ago, we published a video for People Make Games that investigated working conditions at two outsourcing studios in Southeast Asia. These companies, Lemon Sky Studios from Malaysia and Brandoville Studios from Indonesia, are both routinely hired by AAA publishers to create huge amounts of art assets for some of the biggest video games in the business, from Gears of War 5 to The Last of Us 2.And according to that investigation, these studios are also relying heavily on excessive overtime, or crunch, in order to get this work done. Based on the accounts of 19 current and former employees, the video details working environments in whi
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What’s happening in Israel and Gaza is the near-inevitable result of a grim status quo. By May 13, 2021, 8:00am EDT Israeli police run after a Palestinian demonstrator at the al-Aqsa Mosque during Israel’s Jerusalem Day on May 10. Laurent Van Der Stockt/Getty Images Dozens have already died in the fighting between Israel and Ha
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Ford is finally ready to start rolling out over-the-air (OTA) software updates to its vehicles at scale. While Tesla and other automakers have offered OTA updates for years, Ford only delivered its first software updates to select Ford F-150 and Mustang Mach-E customers this year. But the automaker says it’s prepared to rapidly increase the number of vehicles capable of receiving software updates, with the goal of producing 33 million vehicles with the capability by 2028. Ford, which is fond of nonsensically attaching the phrase “Built Ford Tough” to its products, is playing it cool with the branding this time, simply calling its software updates “Ford Power Ups.” Over the past
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ZTE announced the Axon 30 Ultra alongside two other devices last month, and today reveals that the Ultra will go on sale June 4th starting at $749 / €749. Preorders begin directly through ZTE’s website on May 27th and include a free pair of ZTE’s Livebuds TWS earbuds. While ZTE has tried some more adventurous things in its other devices that have missed the mark — an early attempt at a dual-screen phone and the world’s first under-display selfie camera for starters — the company is playing it straight with the Axon 30 Ultra. The phone is outfitted with cameras aplenty and high-end features, including a top-shelf Snapdragon 888 processor and a large 144Hz fast refresh rate disp
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The new adviser on UK ministers’ interests has said he will resign if his advice is ignored, as he promised a long-delayed report that could lift the lid on whether Boris Johnson broke the rules on declaring political donations will be published by the end of May.Christopher Geidt was appointed two weeks ago to a government post that has attracted wide attention after his predecessor, Sir Alex Allan, quit in November 2020 when the prime minister overrode his finding that the home secretary, Priti Patel, bullied Home Office staff.The post has remained vacant for months, prompting speculation that Johnson was avoiding appointing a new adviser because of questions about whether he failed to d
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Pervis Staples, who co-founded the gospel group the Staple Singers, has died aged 85. He died on 6 May, a representative confirmed to Rolling Stone. No cause of death was given.His sister, Mavis Staples, told the magazine: “Pervis was one of a kind – comical and downright fly. He would want to be remembered as an upright man, always willing to help and encourage others. He was one of the good guys and will live on as a true Chicago legend.”Roebuck “Pops” Staples formed the Staple Singers with his children Cleotha, Pervis and Mavis in the late 40s. They sang in churches around Chicago and soon recorded for a variety of record labels, leading them to Epic in 1965 and Stax three years
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An auction of the estate of Kenzo Takada, who died last year, was a lot more popular than anyone expected.Credit...Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersMay 13, 2021, 7:51 a.m. ETThis week, the vestiges of a colorful life went under the hammer in Paris. Just over six months after his death at the age of 81, the designer Kenzo Takada’s estate was auctioned, and it turned out the fashion pioneer — the first Japanese designer to achieve success in the French capital — was still a major draw.In all, 414 lots of furniture and decorative objects from Mr. Takada’s home in Saint-Germain-des-Prés were sold during a live auction, and 132 fashion prototypes, patterns and sketches were presented in an online-only forum.When both events — a partnership between Artcurial and Christie’s — came to a close on May 12, Artcurial announced it had more than quadrupled its forecast, with sales in excess of $3 million (exact figure: $3,029,441), with 1,500 registered bidders in 28 countries.“It confirms Kenzo’s eye as a collector,” said Stéphane Aubert, the auctioneer. “It’s a beautiful homage and a wonderful recognition of him as an artist. Buyers were drawn to his taste, which gives the pieces an extra bit of soul.”ImageCredit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesIn the days leading up to the sale, Artcurial dedicated its entire second floor to a poignant restaging of several rooms in Mr. Takada’s luxurious Paris apartment and atelier, which were located on the sixth and fourth floors of a grand Haussmannian building across from the Hôtel Lutetia on the Left Bank.In a separate gallery on the first floor, under one of the designer’s monumental crystal chandeliers, a short runway featured several never produced kimonos, coats and dresses that Mr. Takada designed between 2005 and 2008, a dozen years after selling his namesake brand to the LVMH Group in 1993.“When we visited his apartment after his death, we had no idea what we would find but we didn’t expect there to be so much fashion,” said Clara Vivien, the fashion expert at Artcurial.ImageCredit...Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesThough this auction — an eclectic array of objects that included a series of 13 prints by William Eggleston, a wooden funerary horse dating to the Han dynasty, antique French table services and Harcourt glasses by Baccarat customized with Mr. Takada’s signature gold lotus — did not inspire the kind of frenzy seen at the sale of the Yves Saint Laurent estate, which saw fights over nondescript umbrella stands and never used pots and pans, every lot sold, often for several times the high estimate.At one point, a bidding war broke out over a small octagonal lacquered tray trimmed with galuchat by Katsu Hamanaka; valued at a high of 1,200 euros ($1,449), it sold to a European collector for 42,900 euros ($51,909). A four-piece ceremonial-style ensemble in ivory jacquard with colorful motifs was one of the fashion sale’s strongest performers: At 2,470 euros ($2,983), it was the second highest seller, after a trench in beige and black jacquard paired with a lavaliere blouse in ivory taffeta, which went for 3,380 euros ($4,081).Also on view: the designer
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Instagram removed and restricted posts related to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem after its moderators confused its name with a group designated as a terrorist organization. In an internal company message first obtained by BuzzFeed News, a lead on the company’s Dangerous Organizations and Individuals policy team called the removals “enforcement errors.” Facebook, which owns Instagram, provided a copy of the internal post to The Verge. In it, the employee wrote: “While Al-Aqsa (الأقصى) refers to a location, it is also unfortunately included in the names of several restricted o
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Boris Johnson is to write letters of apology to the families of 10 people killed during a British army operation in Ballymurphy in 1971 after his initial attempt to apologise backfired and angered them.The Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, made a public apology on behalf of the UK government in the House of Commons on Thursday, two days after the conclusion of an inquest into the shootings, and said the prime minister would write to the families.The families, however, are still requesting a public apology from Johnson as the head of the government, a spectacle Downing Streets appears
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Building a programming language from scratch is no easy feat. In addition to creating the compiler, defining the standard library, and supporting tools like editors and build systems, you need to design the language — will it be imperative or functional? What systems will the language be used for? Will it have metaprogramming capabilities? Zig, a member of our Open Source and Nonprofit Program, is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining optimal and reusable software. It’s simple yet robust, and has portable SIMD. For the team working on Zig, the decision to build a language that was intentionally designed for their needs wasn’t made lightly. To learn more about what inspired this journey, we sat down with Loris Cro, one of the team members working on the project.  Hannah: How did Zig lang get started and how did you get involved?Loris: I like to tell a joke version of the origin story where Andrew Kelley (creator of Zig) gets asked at his day job to clean up a C++ codebase so messy that inventing a whole new language is the only way to do it. But even if he really was in charge of a big C++ codebase, the truth is that he started working on Zig for other reasons, mostly related to his interest in real time audio processing. After a few years of working on Zig nights and weekends, he started getting enough donations from the Zig community to leave his job at OkCupid. In the meantime, I was working as developer advocate at Redis Labs and started getting invested in Zig because it was a beautiful alternative to C for writing Redis extensions. I ended up joining the Zig community, and, in a moment of frustration and boredom at the start of the pandemic, I started Zig SHOWTIME, an experimental take on online events for developers. Soon after, Andrew founded the Zig Software Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non profit corporation, and I joined him as vice president of community.Hannah: What makes Zig unique?Loris: Zig has one simple goal: be as efficient and portable as C (or more), and fix all the footguns and the limitations that plague its — and neighboring — ecosystems. We have the advantage of being able to observe what decades of systems programming have produced, and on the path to fix some of these problems, Andrew stumbled upon a few powerful ideas, like compile-time code execution. He does a great job at explaining the essence of Zig in a talk he gave a while ago titled "The Road to Zig 1.0."Zig is also a truly greenfield project from a social perspective. There is no big company behind Zig, and the non-profit foundation stands on its own legs thanks to a balanced mix of corporate and individual donations. We don't have any big tech company on our board of directors, and frankly, we like it this way. As for where this will take us, only time will tell, but I still remember being awestruck after seeing comptime and how well Andrew was able to direct the development, concluding that the success of Zig would be basically inevitable. Now we have started to attract some notable names like Frank Denis, a software engineer on Fastly’s OCTO team, author of libsodium, who contributed a full suite of crypto tools
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Twitter recently made a small but striking change to its interface: It changed the aspect ratio of cropped images on users’ mobile feeds, meaning many photos that would usually be cropped can now be displayed in their entirety. The sudden shift — one among a slew of changes Twitter began testing in March — gave many people the impression that the social media site had done away with automatic image cropping overnight. (In actuality, the old cropping ratio is still in effect on desktop browsers, and cropping is still happening on mobile but in a different ratio.) Once users started noticing, celebrations ensued, with an outpouring of art-sharing, meme-making, and gentle ribbing. The response provides an interesting lesson in how we use social media and why such unexpected changes often become opportunities for vital community building. Welcome to the vertical art party! Two of the fundamental truths about modern social media is that every platform has its own quirks, and that different communities of users evolve and transform these characteristics in a way that makes each platform unique. Whether they’re well-liked, core features (such as Twitter’s overall brevity) or inconveniences users must work around (like Twitter’s lack of an edit button), it’s how a platform’s users respond to and incorporate these traits into their daily lives that matters. On Tumblr, for example, users evolved the “gifset,” a bundle of interlocking animated images that tell a story and could really only exist as a creative entity on Tumblr. On Vine, the fact a video could only be six seconds long became the linchpin of the entire platform, spawning a new medium of microvideos that continue to shape internet culture. One of TikTok’s defining qualities is the ability to reuse audio from someone else’s videos; while lots of sites enable remixes, TikTok users, building off earlier apps such as Musical.ly (which merged with TikTok in 2018), routinely utilize each other’s original art as the basis for glorious strings of duets, virtual choirs, and other vocal creations. Less popular features and quirks can reliably unite an entire community in complaining. On Twitter, users have spent years lobbying for an image crop that works correctly. Twitter began to crop photos around 2014, when it introduced different default aspect ratios for users to apply to their own photos during uploading. At one point in 2015, it announced it would completely do away with image cropping; it later reneged on that decision, and by 2018 it was using AI image detection to automatically crop the images people added to their tweets, much to their chagrin. Until this recent change, the auto-crop feature typically forced all images, regardless of size and original framing, into a landscape orientation, often trimming photos in unpredictable and sometimes nonsensical ways. The desire to circumvent the Twitter crop grew so strong that elaborate tutorials emerged explaining exactly how to crop and display images so they’d show in their entirety without being placed on the algorithmic chopping block. Another way Twitter users evolved and adapted to the crop is the “open f
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For Labour, the future simply isn’t what it used to be. Last week’s election results have left the party even further from power than it was at the December 2019 general election. There is little indication that its leadership can identify a way forward. Worse still, the reaction to its first electoral defeat has been to reach for the familiar nostrums of the New Labour years. Peter Mandelson has been brought in to advise Keir Starmer’s inner circle, and all indications are that a reprise of the third-way strategy is being touted to fill the current strategic vacuum.In moments of defeat, there is a tendency to look back at what has worked in the past and assume it could be repeated again in the future. The third-way approach of New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was a political and economic strategy that brought remarkable electoral success over 20 years ago. It rested on a strategy of “triangulation” – the deliberate distancing of centre-left parties from their leftwing base and politics, and the creation of a new centrist synthesis of left and right that sought to transcend both categories. But far from representing the immutable truths of some enduring strategic playbook, the third way was peculiar to a particular moment in history, and it is fundamentally ill-suited to the world of the 2020s.Economically, this approach cannot be rerun because it depended on a very particular context – the “long boom” of the 1990s and early 2000s. The high growth of this period was the product of a unique set of circumstances, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the entry of the former Communist bloc into global markets at the same time as market reforms in China, creating a “great doubling” of the global workforce. This glut of cheap labour, alongside the liberalisation of trade and financial flows, the great wave of privatisation that fuelled the expansion of capital markets, and the rapid onset of financialisation and bidding up of asset values, gave rise to a synthetic boom.The third way was made possible in the context of this global economic boom that allowed policymakers to skim the surplus of economic growth to fund increases in social spending without fundamentally changing the distribution of wealth and power. But the approach was complicit with increased inequality, disinvestment, offshoring, deskilling, and the hollowing out of the industrial base. The great financial crisis of 2008, which definitively ended the long boom of the 1990s, exposed the inherent fragility of this economic model. Its social consequences are now written deeply into the regional economic inequalities that have become such an entrenched feature of British life.The economics of the current moment could hardly be more different or less propitious for a reprise of this strategy. Since the financial crisis, the global economy has been on life support; quantitative easing and asset-price inflation for the rich have been coupled with austerity for the poor. The decade that followed the crisis was marked by the slowest and most unequal economic recovery in living memory. By the close of 2019, just before the pandemic took hold, the global e
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My brother’s orange beach buggyI grew up in Lower Hutt in Greater Wellington. Lower Hutt is considered a bit of a national joke in New Zealand. It’s extremely suburban, not particularly picturesque and has a big river, but no real beaches. Apparently, my high school has a drug problem. I didn’t realise when I was there.The highlight of my teenage years was when I got my driver’s licence on the day I turned 15. My older brother had built a beach buggy – like you’d imagine from the 80s – out of orange fibreglass, with big wheels and roll bars to go over the dunes. When he was at work, I used to steal it and pick up my friends. I usually managed to get to where I wanted and back a
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NEW YORK (AP) — A man suspected of shooting three bystanders in New York’s Times Square was arrested Wednesday in Florida, four days after the gunfire wounded people including a 4-year-old girl out toy shopping in the tourist haven known as the “Crossroads of the World.” Farrakhan Muhammad was taken into custody while eating lunch in a McDonald’s parking lot near Jacksonville, police said. “While there is no joy today, there is justice,” New York City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said. Muhammad, 31, was listed Wednesday in an inmate database for the sheriff’s office in Bradford County, Florida. Information on a lawyer who could speak on his behalf was not immediately avai
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Start Date: 2021-04-02 Target Major Version: 3.x Reference Issues: N/A Implementation PR: N/A Drop IE11 support plan for Vue 3. Focus on backport compatible features back to Vue 2.7. We have been asked about IE11 support since the start of Vue 3's development, tracing back to end of 2018. Many users have asked whether Vue 3 will support IE11, and our original plan was to release Vue 3 and let it stablizie first, and add IE11 support at a later stage. During the long development process, we've also made research and experiments for IE11 compatibility on the side, but due to the complexity involved and amount of other work at hand, it's been de-prioritized
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A few final tests then it's bags packed for French Guiana – and about time too ESA, CSA and NASA's James Webb Telescope opened its giant primary mirror one last time on Earth ahead of being packed up for long awaited launch later this year. The 6.5m structure, comprised of 18 hexagonal mirrors, was commanded from the Northrop Grumman testing control room in California to expand and lock itself into place in the same way it will in space. The only difference will be the addition of some eq
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Caleb Kennedy was close to winning “American Idol.” Now he’s just idle. Kennedy, who had advanced to the Final Five of the talent competition, announced his departure on Instagram Wednesday as a video circulated showing him sitting next to someone wearing what appears to be a Ku Klux Klan hood. The show confirmed to the New York Post that Kennedy was out and apparently scrubbed several of his performance videos from its YouTube channel. “Hey y’all, this is gonna be a bit of a surprise but I am no longer gonna be on ‘American Idol,’” the 16-year-old performer wrote on Instagram. “There was a video that surfaced on the internet and it displayed actions that were not meant t
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An Afghan soldier firing a machine gun at Taliban positions across the street on Monday in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan.Credit...May 13, 2021Updated 7:13 a.m. ETAs bullets from a Taliban machine gun ricocheted through the street below, an Afghan soldier wearing an “I Heart Kabul” T-shirt took a brief rest. “There has been fighting day and night.”LASHKAR GAH, Afghanistan — The war is just on the other side of this wall, a partly destroyed cinder block barricade in southern Afghanistan.A week ago, a family lived in a house on the property. They have since fled and their home has been converted into a fighting position held by a half-dozen soldiers, along with their spent shell casings an
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EU citizens are being sent to immigration removal centres and held in airport detention rooms as the UK government’s “hostile environment” policy falls on them after Brexit, according to campaigners and travellers interviewed by the Guardian.Europeans with job interviews are among those being denied entry and locked up. They have spoken of being subjected to the traumatic and humiliating experience of expulsion, despite Home Office rules that explicitly allow non-visa holders to attend interviews.Confusion about whether EU citizens can explore the UK job market and then go home with an offer in order to apply for a work visa has added to the growing number of detentions. In other cases, visitors are clearly breaking rules, such as those now barring EU citizens from taking up unpaid internships.At least a dozen European citizens – mostly young women – were detained and expelled at Gatwick airport alone over 48 hours last week, two female Spanish detainees told the Guardian. Some were sent two hours’ drive away to Yarl’s Wood detention centre in Bedfordshire, where a Covid scare meant they were confined to their rooms.Other countries whose citizens have been held at a UK airport or detention centre include Italy, France, Bulgaria and Greece. It is understood one French man was held at Edinburgh airport for 48 hours recently, while the Bulgarian ambassador to the UK confirmed a number of his nationals had been held at immigration removal centres.The two Spanish women were detained at Gatwick on 2 and 3 February after arriving on separate flights from Valencia and Bilbao.María, 25, from Valencia, said that like many of those detained, she thought she was free to explore the job market at least until October, especially since she had lived and worked in the UK before.María said that when Border Force officials at Gatwick said they would expel her, she offered to pay for a flight home the same day. Instead, she was sent to Yarl’s Wood, where she spent three anxious days. “I’m still in shock,” she said.When the Guardian first spoke to María on Friday she was at Yarl’s Wood and scared that she had been exposed to Covid. Later that day she was
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Once Casey Stoney’s players were through the door it seemed as if they had entered another country. It was a land inhabited by some scary creatures, with the Madagascan hissing cockroaches, giant African land snails, a tarantula and a couple of snakes all making quite an impression on Manchester United’s squad.It was one of Stoney’s regular team-bonding exercises and United’s manager had spent months negotiating with the club’s security staff and risk assessors before a zoologist finally entered the room and opened his cages.The moment had come for the players to confront and overcome their fears and, leading by example, Stoney stepped forward first, her hand shaking slightly as the tarantula crawled across an outstretched palm.“You have to learn to be OK with being uncomfortable in certain situations,” said the former England captain. “Things like this bring people together and remind us we’re all in it together.”That was in 2019 when United were yet to reach their first birthday but, thanks to Stoney’s choreography, were heading for promotion from the Championship to the Women’s Super League.This season they finished a creditable fourth, narrowly missing out on Champions League qualification, before, on Wednesday afternoon, Stoney stunned her players by
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Kevin Good is the president of a small solar power company in Kansas – a state that tends to be so sunny you’d think he’d have it made.“I got into solar at maybe the worst point to do so in the last 50 years,” said Good, who runs Good Energy Solutions in Lawrence, a town of about 100,000.Kansas has about as much solar potential as Florida but lags far behind the state, powering only about 12,000 homes – or less than 2% of what is covered in Florida, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.That could be related to an ongoing debate in the states that is pitting utilities companies against solar energy.The Kansas utility Evergy has vastly expanded wind power in the state, but it is advocating for policies that would make customers less likely to install rooftop solar panels. That’s because if customers generate their own power, they won’t need to buy as much from Evergy.The fight has played out in state after state, from Arizona to California to Massachusetts – as power companies are threatened by the transition.In 2018, Evergy got permission from state regulators to collect fees from rooftop solar users, but Kansas’s highest court recently ruled that illegal. So, Evergy went back to regulators and asked them to approve different charges – a grid access charge and a minimum monthly bill. The regulators, at the Kansas Corporation Commission, rejected both proposals. They have told the company to work with solar advocates on a more holistic compromise.Andrew French, the chair of the commission, said in February that his state isn’t the only one in a standoff surrounding solar, particularly about how to rework a policy called net metering – where customers are compensated for power they send back to the grid.“This is not an issue unique to Kansas,” French said. “Others have implemented net metering 2.0 and beyond. I hope we will look at new models to try to figure out the appropriate way to value these resources.”Rick Gillam, a program director with the national solar advocacy group Vote Solar, said that Evergy is like most utilities in opposing customers reducing their usage of utility-supplied electricity. “Its gener
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Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy is, as a brief preamble to this book puts it, “perhaps the largest, strangest and most unwieldy self-help book ever written”. I am not sure there is any “perhaps” about it. I can certainly attest to its unwieldiness, in the form of its one-volume NYRB edition: so thick as to be almost cubic, my first copy disintegrated as huge blocks of pages became unmoored from the spine; my second copy had to be left behind in a previous dwelling as it was simply too heavy for my luggage. Never mind, I thought: I’ll buy a digital version. Reader, be very careful about doing this: the Kindle edition I bought off the obvious online retailer may be weightless, but mine had been edited by an idiot, or an algorithm: I was terribly excited when I came across a sentence beginning “but we weave the equal internet nevertheless, twist the same rope time and again …” Did Burton, I wondered, coin the word “internet”, only for it to remain unused for centuries? The OED didn’t think so, and looking at the same passage in another online version I saw that the original word was “web”.But one of the reasons that I was temporarily enticed by the possibility of “internet” being a Burtonian neologism was that his work, first published in 1621, connects almost everything that could be known about what we would today loosely call mental illnesses: it consists of citation after citation of various authorities, anecdotes and sources, threaded together with Burton’s eccentric wit and generous humanity. If someone were to produce a book of similar scope and ambition today and publish it online, half the text would be hyperlinks. As Burton put it himself, with crazy self-deprecation: “Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dunghills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, without art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, raw, rude, fantastical, absurd, insolent, indiscreet, ill-composed, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry; I confess all (’tis partly affected), thou canst not think worse of me than I do
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Well, it sure sounds like PlayStation Studios has been beavering away creating first-party games for the PlayStation 5, as an interview has revealed Sony currently has 25 PS5 titles in the works - half of which are new IP. Speaking to Wired, Guerilla confounder Hermen Hulst shared the numbers and said "there's an incredible amount of variety originating from different regions" in the pipeline, with a mixture of "big, small, different games". Eurogamer news cast: the Epic emails There are, of course, several first-party games we already know about - including Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Horizon Forbidden West, Gran Turismo 7 and God of War: Ragnarok. Yet that still leaves plenty of games unaccounted for. The way the PlayStation Studios brand
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A Saturday afternoon and I am in the kitchen, ministering to a steaming pot of pork and chorizo stew, much as a parent might attend to their baby in the bath. I know this dish intimately. I understand its rhythms, the way the garlic and smoked paprika, the pork and tomatoes will first shake hands and then drop into a deep hug if properly introduced. As a result, I never deviate from the set method, because that would feel like choosing to walk in the wrong direction in the misguided hope of eventually finding my way home.Except this time. Today I am making adaptations. It is forcing me to concentrate. Usually, the stew contains a tin of drained butter beans. Usually, the pork is cut into one-inch dice. Neither is true today, because this bubbling pot is not for this evening’s dinner. I d
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The backstory of Annie Clark’s sixth album as St Vincent already feels well-worn. We live in an age of prurient interest in – and boundless opinion-giving about – celebrities’ personal lives: announcing that the title of Daddy’s Home referred to her father’s release from prison after a 10-year stretch for stock manipulation was bound to have an overshadowing effect.Only the title track concerns her father’s imprisonment and release, although his presence lurks over the album in more subtle ways. Its sound was apparently inspired by his record collection, which evidently majored in the early 70s. The whole album is liberally dressed with a synthesised sitar sound that cropped up on dozens of the era’s soul singles, from Freda Payne’s Band of Gold to the Stylistics’ You Are Everything. There are dabblings in the fingerpicked acoustic style of the era’s confessional singer-songwriters, the mock-showtune stylings of Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman and the electric piano-driven funk of Donny Hathaway or Stevie Wonder. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Pink Floyd’s most successful album can’t fail to notice the influence of its more languid moments on Live
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Movies|‘La Piscine’ Review: Pretty, Rich People Behaving Poorlyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/movies/la-piscine-review.htmlCritic’s PickAlain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin are among the reasons this restoration of a French thriller is worth watching.Credit...Film ForumMay 13, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ET“La Piscine,” made in 1969, is best known in the United States for its remake, Luca Guadagnino’s frisky, borderline frivolous 2016 “A Bigger Splash.” The release of a pristine restoration of the original, directed by Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin, should bolster this striking movie’s reputation.Schneider and Delon play Marianne and Jean-Paul, a French couple vacationing in a roomy St. Tropez villa whose swimming pool — the “Piscine” of the title — is one of its eminent attractions. They sunbathe, splash and chase one another around the pool as if they were a brand-new couple. As it happens, they’ve been together for two years. The casual nudity and intimations of S-and-M in their relationship suggest an erotic thriller in the early days of its liberation from censorship norms.But as a thriller, it’s a very slow burn. Into the couple’s idyll drops Harry (Ronet), an old friend of Jean-Paul’s and an erstwhile lover of Marianne’s. A wealthy purveyor of pop music, he pulls up to the villa in a snarling Maserati with a surprise in tow: his teenage daughter Penelope, incarnated by the willowy, whispery Birkin.Almost 10 years after his landmark roles as Tom Ripley in “Purple Noon” and Rocco in “Rocco and His Brothers,” both in 1961, Delon still retained every iota of his ultra-sul
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A lot of electronic busy boxes that are built for children are simply that — a mess of meaningless knobs and switches that don’t do much beyond actuating back and forth (which, let’s be honest, is still pretty fun to do). But this Mission Control Center by [gcall1979] knocks them all out of orbit. The simulation runs through a complete mission, including a 10-minute countdown with pre-flight system checks, 8.5 minutes of powered flight to get out of the atmosphere that includes another four tasks, and 90 minutes to orbit the Earth while passing through nine tracking stations across the world map. That’s a lot time to keep anyone’s attention, but fortunately [gcall1979] included a simulation speed knob that can make everything go up to 15 times faster than real-time. This knob can be twiddled at any time, in case you want to savor the countdown but get into space faster, or you don’t have 90 minutes to watch the world map light up. The main brain of this well-built box is an Arduino Mega, which controls everything but the launch systems’ mainframe computer — this is represented by bank of active LEDs that blink along with the voice in the sound clips and runs on an Arduino Uno and a couple of shift registers. To keep things relatively simple, [gcall1979] used an Adafruit sound board for the clips. We love everything about this build, especially the attention to detail — the more important pre-flight tasks are given covered toggle switches,
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Building Modern Business Software in GoGo With The Domain Three Dots LabsSign up to our newsletter and get your copy of Go with the Domain e-book.You write business softwareOkay, we can’t know that for sure. But if you work on any web application or user-facing product, chances are you work with complex business domains.Go 2020 Survey shows that 74% of respondents write API/RPC services, and 68% use Go for web programming. We guess most of these applications are not trivial.What’s inside the bookIt’s 2017, and we join a startup. We work full-time in Go now, which starts getting popular.I
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Credit...Jacob Moscovitch for The New York TimesThe latest update on the labor market is scheduled to arrive Thursday morning when the government releases its weekly report on jobless claims.Analysts surveyed by Bloomberg expect that the number of new claims filed will fall slightly from the previous week.Last week, the Labor Department reported that 505,000 workers filed first-time claims for state benefits in the week that ended May 1. An additional 101,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not ro
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Britain’s economy will “power through in the months ahead”, according to a senior Bank of England policymaker, “moving swiftly from bounce-back to boom”.The recovery will resemble a bouncing tennis ball and outpace the US and the rest of the G7 this year, said Andy Haldane, the central bank’s outgoing chief economist.Such is the strength of the likely turnaround from last years slump – the worst in 300 years after the pandemic first hit – that inflation could return with a vengeance, wreaking a 1970s-style surge in prices that could turn a boom into a bust.Haldane, who has cons
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About 700 child deaths could be avoided each year in England by reducing rates of social deprivation, according to an NHS England-funded report.The research, which analysed the records of 3,347 children who died in England between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2020, identified a clear association between the risk of death and level of deprivation, for all categories of death apart from cancer.It concluded that more than a fifth (23%) of all child deaths might be avoided if children living in the most deprived areas had the same mortality risk as those living in the least deprived areas.“Our report finds strong evidence of a relationship between childhood mortality and social deprivation in England; backed up by other published evidence of widespread and consistent associations between povert
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Table of contents Overview Installation Usage Issues & Bug Reports Dependencies Contribution References Authors License Show Your Support Changelog Code of Conduct Overview Breathing gymnastics is a system of breathing exercises that focuses on the treatment of various diseases and general health promotion. Nafas is a collection of breathing gymnastics designed to reduce the exhaustion of long working hours. With multiple breathing patterns, Nafas helps you find your way to a detoxified energetic workday and also improves your concentration by increasing the oxygen level. No need to walk away to take a break, just sit comfortably, run Nafas and let the journey begin. Nafas means breath in Persian. Installation Source Code Download Version 0.4 or Latest Source pip insta
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Video A combination of brain implants and a neural network helped a 65-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down type out text messages on a computer at 90 characters per minute, faster than any other known brain-machine interface. The patient, referred to as T5 in a research paper published [preprint] in Nature on Wednesday, is the first person to test the technology, which was developed by a team of researchers led by America's Stanford University. Two widgets were attached to the surface of T5’s brain; the devices featured hundreds of fine electrodes that penetrated about a millimetre into the patient’s gray matter. The test subject was then asked to imagine writing out 572 sentences over the course of three days. These text passages contained all the letters of the alphabet as wel
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Help save lives and get a total of 35 games, comics, books and software for �15. As the world continues to struggle against the coronavirus pandemic, Humble has launched the Heal Covid 19 Bundle to support a number of charities aiding the hardest hit countries such as Brazil and India as well as the global medical effort to save lives.In total, you can get 35 different games, books, comics and software for just £15. All of the money raised will go to the charities Direct Relief, Doctors Without Borders, International Medical Corps and GiveIndia.As for the specific contents of the bundle, it's mainly comprised of games that many would consider some of the best indie and AAA releases in re
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Pocketing the savings. — Game publishers aren't "passing on the savings" from "cheaper" online storefronts. Monopoly control is a hot topic in the games industry these days. Lawsuits against Apple, Valve, and Sony all take slightly different tacks in arguing that these companies exercise unfair monopoly control over their platforms' market for downloadable games. Each suit also argues that this monopoly control leads to higher game prices for consumers. Platform holders charge higher commission fees than they would in a truly competitive environment, the arguments go, and those higher-than-normal publishing costs are passed on to consumers via higher-priced
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Physics movies affect many of us powerfully due to the combined impact of scenery and music, technical detail and philosophical dialogue, futuristic lighting and a multitude of other special effects, all of which elicit deep feelings and even help us to reflect on our lives. The following is a spoiler-free list of physics movies which must be watched in your life-time. For pedantic movie buffs: rating, cast and summary of the films have also been provided. Make sure to share the post and comment down below how many of the films you'd seen already. Also check: Best physics documentaries. Primer (IMDb 6.9) This 2004 film is based on the physics of time. The principles of time travel in the film are inspired by Feynman diagrams in which there is no difference between watching an
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Porto has been confirmed as the venue for the Champions League final after a deal to move the game from Istanbul to Wembley proved out of reach.Istanbul was due to host the match between Manchester City and Chelsea on 29 May but negotiations to take the final elsewhere began after Turkey was placed on England’s travel red list on Friday. City and Chelsea will get 6,000 tickets each for the match at Porto’s Estádio do Dragão.The UK government had been keen to bring the game to Wembley but talks hit complications. Notably, Uefa wanted staff, media and sponsors to be able to travel to the UK without quarantine and the government was reluctant to agree to the number of exemptions requested.Portugal is on England’s green list for travel, meaning fans City and Chelsea fans can attend wit
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Winning tip: When king coal ruled SomersetSomerset is saddled with stereotypes: cider, cheddar cheese and yokels who say ooh-arhh a lot. Few people know that for more than 250 years it was the centre of an advanced and highly mechanised coal industry covering an area greater than the Levels. The industry, its technology, characters, tragedies and distinctive way of life are on show at the superlative Radstock Museum. It’s a beautifully laid-out, informative, often poignant gem barely 10 miles from Bath, and much less predictable than that city’s museum offerings. Reopens 2 June, 2pm-5pm Wed, 11am-5pm Sat, 2pm-5pm Sun; then from 6 July 2-5pm Tues-Sun and 11am-5pm Sat, free entry until end of August, donations encouragedChristopher IngeBeauty and the beach, BournemouthArt nouveau and pre
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The Morning NewsletterHer ouster is a sign of the Republican Party’s growing discomfort with democracy.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesMay 13, 2021, 6:30 a.m. ETThe Republican Party’s big recent moves — the ouster of Liz Cheney from a leadership position and the passage of new state voting laws — do not have much immediate impact on Americans’ lives.Cheney’s removal doesn’t change congressional Republicans’ approach to President Biden’s agenda, and the voting laws will mostly start to matter next year. With Biden in the White House, Democrats controlling Congress and many Americans still focused on Covid-19, internal Republican debates can sometimes feel like an exhausting partisan sideshow.They are not. The last few months have the potential to be a turni
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A 21-year-old man charged with the murder of the police community support officer Julia James has appeared before Maidstone crown court and was remanded in custody.Callum Wheeler, from Aylesham, Kent, is accused of inflicting significant head injuries on James, 53, while she was out walking her dog. James was found dead in Akholt Wood, close to her home in the hamlet of Snowdown, near Aylesham, with her jack russell, Tony, at her side, on 27 April.Wheeler appeared via video link from Belmarsh prison for the short hearing. Wearing a light grey T-shirt, grey trousers and a face mask, he spoke only to confirm his name. No plea was entered and no application was made for bail.The judge Philip Statman set a trial date of 29 November, with a plea and trial preparation hearing scheduled for 8 Jun
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Exclusive Manchester City Council exposed online the number plates of more than 60,000 cars slapped with parking tickets, breaking data protection laws as it did so. In what appears to be a sincere if misguided attempt to provide public accountability over parking wardens, the council publishes income from parking tickets online in the open data section of its website. One Register reader, however, spotted a problem: in three of the 20,000-row spreadsheets, published every month between 2018 and early 2021, drivers' number plates were detailed alongside precisely where and when they were hit with parking tickets and which parking warden issued them. Naughty drivers who picked up parking tickets during April-July 2020 had their identities exposed, thanks to the
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I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed reading a book where my enjoyment wasn’t tied to the euphoric sense of achievement I got from finishing it. This is not because I don’t love reading, or would rather watch television. No, it’s because of a little app on my phone called Goodreads.Home to about 90 million readers worldwide, Goodreads is a website that lets users track their reading and broadcast their tastes to the world – or, in my case, a few friends and vague acquaintances. At its core, it’s a harmless concept: an online community for bookworms, and an opportunity to discover new books your friends have loved.It’s also extremely satisfying. Since joining Goodreads a few years ago, the annual roundup I receive tallying up the books I have finished that year has become
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On Tuesday, Gigi Buffon said it was time for him to “take away the distraction” of media speculation about his future, confirming that he would leave Juventus at the end of this campaign. On Wednesday, he went between the sticks and kept their season alive.Crushed 3-0 by Milan at the weekend, the Bianconeri went to Sassuolo knowing Champions League qualification was out of their hands. Dropped to fifth in the table, all they could do was try to win every game and hope someone ahead of them slipped up. Conceding a penalty after 15 minutes was not the ideal way to start.The sequence of events leading up to the spot-kick was indicative of the crisis of confidence at a club whose unwavering self-belief had been a defining trait of the previous nine years. Alex Sandro had enough time to choose a better option than passing to Adrien Rabiot on the edge of his own box but even after that, trouble could still have been avoided if the Frenchman had acted decisively.Instead, he dithered, got trapped between two opponents, turned back on himself and went to ground while jabbing the ball straight to Sassuolo’s Giacomo Raspadori. The striker accepted possession and made his move beyond Leonardo Bonucci, who lunged in clumsily and fouled him.A goal would have been just reward for the Neroverdi, who had created several opportunities already in an enterprising start, but Buffon denied them, plunging to parry Domenico Berardi’s penalty. Add one more record to the list: at 43 years, three months and 14 days old, the Juventus keeper had become the oldest player ever to save a spot-kick in the Italian top-flight.Gianluigi Buffon (centre) dives to his left to deny Sassuolo’s Domenico
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200 roasts, £70,000 in revenue and 642 cans of Diet Coke later 12 months of roasting landing pagesOver the last twelve months I've roasted the landing pages of 200 startups. Landing pages from indie makers, VC-funded scale-ups and profit-generating enterprise organisations, across multiple industries and audiences. With an average of 25 mins a roast, that's over 3.5 full days of roasting pages to increase conversion.What is a roast?Each roast was a personalised 20-minute video review of a landing page, identifying fixes to convert more visitors into customers. Based on best practice, testing insights, and my work as a conversion rate optimisation expert.But what did I learn about high-converting landing pages? And about running a productised business? And what can you learn from me? It turns out quite a lot...Why I started Roast My Landing PageRoast My Landing Page started as a pandemic side-project to allow me to support early-stage startups while generating a second-stream of income outside of my freelance marketing work. It ended up generating me over £70,000 of work, over 2,000 email subscribers, and an ever-growing list of insights into the pains and challenges of early stage businesses and the amazing people that run them.It's all about the foundersAnd it has really been about the founders! Every single person comes with their own story, passion, and ideas. They were eager to learn how to do justice to their product, service or email list, and showcase it to the world in the form a high-converting landing page.This post is for every founder
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I was just newly promoted to Software Engineer II / Mid-Level Engineer at my company. This is a huge deal for me because I planned my whole life around the notion that internal promotions are impossible. I thought that the only way to get a promotion was to get a new title along with a new job. Now that I know it's possible to get a promotion internally, here are some things I wish I knew when I was new to all of this. Last year, I wrote about 20 things I was working on getting from junior to mid. This is going to be an updated version of that with the wisdom of hindsight. I'm going to skip some of the more obvious advice. You know how to get a promotion. Figure out what the company values, act on it, and demonstrate the impact of your actions to your manager. In practice, it's a little more complicated than that. 1. You will never get a promotion or raise if there's no formal performance review process and career ladder. If you're working at a company without formal, regular performance reviews, you are basically walking blind. You have no idea when other people's performance is being evaluated or awarded. The person next to you might have gotten 3 raises while you've been at the same salary since you started. Even if you are an intrepid type that will walk into your manager's office and ask for a raise, they may inadvertently put you through many more hoops than your peers. As you would expect, this probably hurts folks from minoritized backgrounds more than their peers. We're less likely to be clued into this sort of secret knowledge, and people's personal biases come out a lot more when there is no transparent process in place. In case you're like me and have never worked at a company with a performance review process before, here's generally how my company does it: At the end of each year, we have to fill out a self-evaluation and give our peers feedback. This is all taken into account by our direct managers, who then write their own review and advocate for us. In these types of companies, it reflects well for managers to have engineers they manage level up. So, it's definitely in their interest to help you get to that next level as well. After the managers
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Fifteen questions on general knowledge and topical news trivia every Thursday lunchtime – how will you fare? The Beatles, a bard, a bear, an
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Seven people died in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on Sunday at a birthday party, after the boyfriend of one of the party guests showed up with a gun. The boyfriend came to the mobile home park where the party was being held and shot six adults, including his girlfriend. Five of them died at the scene, and another died later, at the hospital. Then he killed himself. He didn’t fire on the children who were there.The Colorado Springs shooting comes on the heels of another shooting in Austin, Texas, last month, when Stephen Broderick, a former police officer, killed his ex-wife, Amanda, her teenage daughter, Alyssa, and Alyssa’s boyfriend, Willie, in their home. At the time of the murders, Broderick was out on bail after being indicted for sexually abusing Alyssa. In her court petition asking for a restraining order against her stepfather, filed in June 2020, 10 months before he murdered her, Alyssa wrote that she feared the worst. “I’m afraid that to him, a protective order will just be a piece of paper … I’m afraid he might hurt me or my mom for coming forward.”There is a grim ritual to America’s mass shootings: the condemnations and calls for gun control from the left, the callous and often-parodied bromides of “thoughts and prayers” from the right. But the mass shootings that so often capture media attention and dominate the American conversation about gun violence are the ones that happen in public – those incidents where a person with severe mental illness, or a fanatical rightwing agenda, opens fire in a crowded public space, like a church, a school or a grocery store.But much of American gun violence, including multiple-fatality events, does not happen in those public places, and many of the perpetrators of mass shootings are not strangers to the people they kill. Instead, a disproportionate amount of America’s mass shootings are domestic violence incidents, in which a man (and overwhelmingly the perpetrators are men) who has already been abusive towards his family, murders the wife, girlfriend, mother, in-laws or children who he was already hurting. Often the victims, like Alyssa Broderick, were people who had already disclosed that t
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Burberry predicted it would take several years for long-haul travel to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, with the absence of wealthy tourists a severe blow to its UK shops.In normal times a shopping trip to Burberry is on the itinerary of international visitors but the hiatus caused by Covid-19 meant the luxury retailer’s sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa were down 44% on 2019 levels in the year to 27 March 2021.Julie Brown, Burberry’s chief operating and financial officer, said despite the easing of lockdown restrictions it was still a “very, very, muted” travel picture. “The UK was previously highly dependent on the traveling consumer,” she said. “It was approximately about two-thirds of our business prior to Covid, so a very material impact on the UK.“We are starting to see some local travel in Asia and, prior to this recent outbreak, travel resuming in Europe but I think long-haul travel will take some time to return. We certainly see that being a couple of years away.”But with sales rebounding in other markets, in particular within the Asia-Pacific region where they finished up 17%, overall sales fell 11% to £2.3bn. Adjusted underlying profits declined 9% at £396m, with the company reinstating its dividend at the same level as in 2019.Sign up to the daily Business Today emailThe shares were the biggest faller in the FTSE 100, down 8% at £19.38. Richard Hunter, head of markets at interactive investor, said Burberry had put a “tough year behind it”. The return of the dividend showed “management confidence”, he said, with the share price reaction likely reflecting profit-taking by investors after a gain of 52% over the past year.The update came as chief executive, Marco Gobbetti, declared the first phase of his revamp of the British label, best known for its trenchcoats and signature check, was complete. In 2018, he embarked on a plan to move the brand upmarket into the same orbit as Gucci and Dior.That year, Riccardo Tisci, the former Givenchy designer, replaced Burberry’s longstanding creative supremo, Christopher Bailey. Tisci’s collections designs, as well as advertising featuring people such as the Manchest
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One in 10 EU nationals in the UK are considering leaving after 30 June, the deadline for applications to remain lawfully in the country post-Brexit, according to a survey.Common reasons cited in the research included a lack of trust in the government and a feeling that the UK is a less welcoming place as a result of Brexit, with 30% of respondents saying they had concerns that their rights would not be upheld by public bodies.The research by the Independent Monitoring Authority for the Citizens’ Rights Agreements (IMA), a new statutory body set up under the EU withdrawal agreement, paints a
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Mobile genetic elements that can splice themselves throughout a genome may sometimes give rise to powerful factors regulating DNA transcription.Samuel Velasco/Quanta MagazineRoughly 500 million years ago, something that would forever change the course of eukaryotic development was brewing in the genome of some lucky organism: a gene called Pax6. The gene is thought to have orchestrated the formation of a primitive visual system, and in organisms today, it initiates a genetic cascade that recruits more than 2,000 genes to build different parts of the eye. Pax6 is only one of thousands of genes
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main Switch branches/tags 1 branch 0 tags Code Clone Use Git or checkout with SVN using the web URL. Open with GitHub Desktop Download ZIP Latest commit gvanrossum Add PDF of Language Summit presentation 97520fe May 12, 2021 Add PDF of Language Summit presentation 97520fe Git stats 6 commits Files Permalink Failed to load latest commit information. Type Name Latest commit message Commit time FasterCPythonDark.pdf Add PDF of Language Summit presentation May 12, 2021 Opcode reservations.md Reserve some super-instructions Apr 21, 2021 README.md Speed -> Ideas
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Linford Christie’s Olympic training unwittingly began many years before he began to take over the world, 100 metres at a time. As a child, he spent seven formative years in Jamaica’s most populous parish, St Andrew, where his grandmother, Anita, would send him off to the shops with a cunning technique to ensure that he came back promptly. “She’d spit on the floor and say: ‘Don’t let it dry before you come back,’” laughs Christie over Zoom. “She was most probably my first coach.” Christie has no recollection of ever getting in trouble upon his return, an indication that even in those days he ran like the wind.What he does remember is the warmth of life in Jamaica. The family home seemed to be vast, filled with sisters, his brother, cousins and aunties. The community was so tight that if he got up to any mischief, family friends would not hesitate to keep him in check. In Jamaica, his grandmother was in charge. “Growing up, she was everything,” he says. “She was the mother, the doctor, the dentist; you name it, my grandma covered it.”Christie’s parents moved to London when he was only two. His mother, Mabel, a seamstress by trade, became a nurse. His father, James, worked various jobs. Aged seven, Christie finally joined them in their west London home near Queens Park Rangers FC’s Loftus Road, where he would watch games through his back window or climb on to the roofs of flats nearby for a better view.As winter first fell, the cold would sometimes bring him to tears. But far more chilling was learning the N-word for the first time as it was viciously hurled at him. He constantly changed routes to school to avoid the white children who would s
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MSNBC anchor Ari Melber on Wednesday debuted a new way to describe Donald Trump. And it involved poking fun at the ex-president’s overhyped but ultimately underwhelming new blog, which he has been forced to post his screeds on after being banned from social media platforms for inciting the deadly U.S. Capitol riot. One-term Trump was now just a “failed blogger,” Melber said while picking apart the removal of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from GOP House leadership for daring to counter Trump’s election conspiracies. Cheney’s purge was “all to appease one blogger in Florida,” “The Beat” anchor added. He also tweeted the line: All to appease one blogger in Florida.— Ari Melber (@AriMelber) May 12, 2021 Melber said Cheney’s ouster “marks an inflection point for this post-Trump era that we’re all living through together.” House GOP leadership now has “a zero-tolerance policy for leaders who accurately rebut Donald Trump’s election lies,” he added. “Today is important and will actually be marked in the history books as a measurable turning point for this troubled party,” warned Melber. “It’s about the Florida blogger,” he continued. “It’s about his ego, his need to dominate even out of office, and the deceitful vanity of getting millions and millions of people to pretend you won because you can’t handle being the loser of the 2020 race, because that’s what you are, whether you have a new blog or not.” “Now if it all sounds a lit
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What is the point of the Republican party?This isn’t a flip question. It’s one prompted by the last four months of grappling with the fallout of the bloody insurrection on Capitol Hill, and by the last four years of grappling with the fallout of installing a fascist in the White House.So, for real: what does the GOP stand for? Apart from trying to seize back power, what does it want to do?The answer, as Liz Cheney has learned, is to pander to the ego of a single Florida resident who has no obvious or coherent political purpose.This might just explain why the party has been struggling so hard to respond to the last four months of the most tenuous Democratic control in Washington.The Biden team has not commanded the nation’s capital from a position of strength because of LBJ-like powers of persuasion, Democratic unity or structural majorities. They have succeeded because Republicans sorely lack – as George HW Bush used to put it – the vision thing.There was a time, not so long ago, when the GOP stood for small government, or big business, or at least big churches, or sometimes the little guy. They were for standing up to foreign enemies and domestic taxes.There was, for what it was worth, a contest of ideas and worldviews between the two sides of the aisle: between the notion that government could do big things, and that government should only do small things – that markets and businesses either needed regulation, or were marvelously efficient at solving all our problems.After four years of Donald Trump, that is no longer the world we’re living in. To be fair, three decades’ worth of upheaval – the colossal failures of the war on terror, the financial crisis, a historic pandemic, the climate crisis and a technological revolution – may have made matters worse.But here we are nonetheless at a point where the Grand Old Party has shrunk into a small old cult of personality, willing to twist and turn to the whims of its sociopathic former leader.Consistency meant nothing inside the cult. More billions of spending on a nonsensical border wall? The deficit hawks said no problem. More bullying business leaders by presidential tweet? The capitalist caucus said bring it on. More cozying up to the leaders of Russia, China and even North Korea? The defense hawks thought that sounded fine. Paying off porn stars with campaign dollars? The party of family values barely blushed.Each one of these big and small sellouts brought the party to the point where it fired Liz Cheney from the House leadership on Tuesday for stating the obvious: Trump lost the election last year and stoked an insurrection to save face.Cheney is a conservative’s conservative, who voted with Trump 92.9% of the time – more than the party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. But Cheney knows that if we cannot agree on democratic principles like free and fair elections, or the constitution, we cannot begin to debate the principles or policies that separate Republicans from Democrats.“I am a conservative Republican and the most conservative of conservative principles is reverence for the rule of law. The electoral college has voted. More than 60 state and federal court
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For the times of lockdown, Pedro Almódovar’s new short film is perhaps the most viable and relevant type of film production: a tale of someone isolated, regretful, anxious, unable to tell whether current arrangements are contingent or permanent, retreating into gestures of self-immolating despair. This theatrical piece is loosely based on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 stage play of the same name. It was adapted by Rossellini in the 40s, and also proved to be a jumping-off point for Almódovar’s own Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.Tilda Swinton plays a woman who is on the verge of something similar. Or maybe the verge is now long behind her. She is living in what appears to be an apartment in Spain, vividly and richly presented in soupy reds and oranges that pop on the screen, with a hint of retro – decor that could exist only in an Almódovar picture. The play has this woman speaking on the telephone, in anguish, to the lover who has just left her – and that’s what Swinton does, too, only with cordless earphones, while his bags are packed ready to go in the hall, and his dog, miserable and confused to be abandoned as well, leaps trustingly along behind her as she strides restlessly about the flat or down to a hardware store to buy an axe. She needs it for a bit of futile pseudo-violence, whose only effect can be to make her feel worse.Almódovar deconstructs both the woman’s state of mind – and perhaps his own emotional rhetoric as well – by at first keeping his camera well within this apartment and then by moving above it, revealing it to be a ceiling-less set constructed within the cavernous sound stage we see at the beginning of the film, some of whose kitchen drawers don’t open, and some of whose shelf adornments are fake. Like the woman’s life together with this departed man, this apartment is a phoney.The woman is beautiful, elegant, evidently a star of stage and screen, or a model – at any rate, she is talking wryly about how her mature looks are now fashionable again: producers now want her at the moment that her lover feels the opposite. She speaks in a kind of muted, hyper-cerebralised depression and rage, but seems only to want a real, face-to-face goodbye – isn’t it the least he can do? We might assume that she is the injured party and that he has strayed. But at one moment she concedes that you might call her an “adventuress”. So perhaps things aren’t all that clear.Swinton’s delivery has a theatrical style – it very much feels as if we could be watching a stage show – and there is something frozenly despairing about it; it is the voice of someone who is unwilling to relinquish her dignity or rationality and just give in to an aria of sadness. Even taking pills doesn’t completely allow her to let go – and there is something incidentally very sweet about the dog waking her up by slurpingly licking her ear. But she jiu-jitsus her loneliness and desertion into the raw material for performance and for self-expression.An elegant jeu d’ésprit from Almódovar, with a bleak hint that moving on from the present malaise will mean some kind of wholesale destruction.
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In this episode of Modern Masculinity, journalist Iman Amrani speaks to Chris, who after being diagnosed with schizophrenia spent a long time in the mental health system. They discuss medication, frustration at the system, and the importance of being listened to and heard. Dr Rufus May, a clinical psychologist, speaks about how he worked with Chris and other patients to show compassion and empathy, and how this can help people with mental health issues navigate society Watch other episodes of Modern Masculinity 
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Some projects use .C as a file extension for C++ source code. This is ill-advised, because it is can't really be made to work automatically and reliably. Suppose we have a file source.C with the following contents:class Foo {public:    int x;};Let's compile this with the default compiler on Linux:$ cc -c -o /dev/null source.CNote that that command is using the C compiler, not the C++ one. Still, the compiler will autodetect the type from the extension and compile it as C++. Now let's do the same thing using Visual Studio:$ cl /nologo /c source.Csource.C(1): Error C2061 Syntax error: Identifier 'Foo'In this case Visual Studio has chosen to compile it as plain C. The defaults between these
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In the piercing midday heat of southern Texas, farmhand Linda Villarreal moves methodically to weed row after row of parsley, rising only occasionally to stretch her achy back and nibble on sugary biscuits she keeps in her pockets. In the distance, a green and white border patrol truck drives along the levy beside the towering steel border wall.For this backbreaking work, Villareal is paid $7.25 per hour, the federal minimum wage since 2009, with no benefits. She takes home between $300 and $400 a week depending on the amount of orders from the bodegas – packaging warehouses which supply the country’s supermarkets with fruits and vegetables harvested by crews of undocumented mostly Mexic
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Rockets, airstrikes and mob violence: Why is this happening now, and how much worse could it get?Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Austin Mitchell, Soraya Shockley, Robert Jimison, Annie Brown and Daniel Guillemette; edited by M.J. Davis Lin, with help from Phyllis Fletcher; music by Rachelle Bonja and Dan Powell; and engineered by Chris Wood.More episodes ofThe DailyMay 13, 2021, 6:00 a.m. ETListen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherIn the past few days, the deadliest violence in years has erupted between Israel and the Palestinians.Tensions had been building for weeks and now they have come to a head. Hundreds of missiles are streaking back and forth between Gaza a
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And even that may not be enough. Removing patent restrictions has a limited short-term effect, Hotez told me. “You can lift all of the patents tomorrow, and it wouldn’t have an immediate impact … because it’s not so much intellectual property that’s the barrier, but the capacity, the human capital, to make these vaccines,” he said. Though patent protections have limited the ability of some countries to make vaccines, the list of nations that can actually manufacture them now is already short, and the kinds of investments, training, and negotiations needed to establish facilities and scale up production can be provided only by a unified, U.S.-led global response, Hotez said.Gettin
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But the rising average masks some growing variation in the Millennial experience. Millennials, in particular women, who have completed college are tending to get married older; Millennials who did not attend or complete college are often opting not to marry at all. Three decades ago, the marriage rate was above 60 percent for all adults older than 25. Now, it is roughly 65 percent for those with a college degree and 50 percent for those who finished only high school.The same kind of trend is affecting childbearing. Data compiled by the economist Caitlin Myers and published in The New York Times shows a sharp parenthood bell curve in the 20th century: Women would start becoming mothers in the
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