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3.58am EDT 03:58 Thailand on Sunday reported 2,101 new coronavirus cases and 17 new deaths, as the country struggles with a third wave of infections. The new cases took the total number of infections to 83,375 and total fatalities to 399 since the pandemic started last year. 3.47am EDT 03:47 The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany continues to fall, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Sunday. The RKI reported 12,656 new infections on Sunday, as well as a further 127 deaths, taking the total tally of fatalities to to 84,775. That is a good 3,600 fewer cases than a week ago. The seven-day incidence has dropped to 118.6 from 121.5 the previous day. The value indicates how many people per 100,000 people have been infected in the past seven days. Eight of the 16 federal states now have an incidence of less than 100. After Schleswig-Holstein, Lower Saxony, Hamburg, Brandenburg, Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Rhineland-Palatinate and Bremen also fell below this threshold, below which opening steps are possible in districts and cities with correspondingly lower numbers, and above which contact restrictions must be tightened. However, regional differences remain large. Schleswig-Holstein, with an incidence of 50, again has the lowest incidence. With an incidence of 180, Thuringia is still the federal state with the highest value, followed by Saxony with 172.8. 3.41am EDT 03:41 Christopher Knaus New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, will extend most of its Covid-19 restrictions for another week as it struggles to identify the missing link between a quarantine case and the recent, small outbreak. The state has again not reported any further community transmission, recording zero cases in the 24 hours to 8pm Saturday. But NSW Health said it was still unable to identify the link between a case in hotel quarantine and two cases in the eastern suburbs, which were connected by rapid genomic sequencing work last week. The state will therefore extend the restrictions by another week across greater Sydney, aside from one change, which will allow customers to shop without masks. Retail staff will continue to need to wear masks. Nurse Emeldah Mufara speaks to Margaret Donnellan before administering the AstraZeneca vaccine at the Sydney West Covid Vaccine Centre on 7 May, 2021 in Sydney, Australia. People over 50 are now eligible to receive the AstraZeneca Covid-19
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3.58am EDT 03:58 Michael Gove was asked on Sophie Ridge on Sunday whether there were any circumstances where Boris Johnson may agree to a second independence referendum. Here’s what he said: Sophy Ridge on Sunday (@RidgeOnSunday) Are there any circumstances where Boris Johnson may agree to a second independence [email protected] tells @SophyRidgeSky #indyref2 "is not an issue for the moment", and points out the SNP "di
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The tension in Birmingham’s Utilita arena was palpable on Saturday as the results of the West Midlands mayoral election went down to the wire. There was a brief moment of shock at the count when first preference votes showed a win for Labour’s Liam Byrne. Some initially mistook it as the result for the whole West Midlands combined authority and declared Byrne the winner.But the confusion was soon corrected. There would be no surprise triumph here for Labour. As the polls had predicted, it turned out to be a comfortable victory for the incumbent, the Tory former boss of John Lewis, Andy Str
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Another electoral test, another dismal postmortem for Labour. The least persuasive diagnosis of why the party has suffered some bitter disappointments is that offered by visitors from cloud-Corbyn-land who demand a return to the glorious days of the last leader. Labour has a lot of hard thinking to do, but the party’s mind will be wandering in precisely the wrong direction if it decides that the answer is to re-embrace Corbynism. For those with short memories, that was the suicidal experiment that crushed the party’s parliamentary representation down to its lowest level since 1935 and inflicted deep tissue damage to its reputation that is still hurting today.There are more useful conclusions that can be drawn. One is that simply hoping that Tory failures will swing the pendulum back to Labour is not a reliable strategy for success. This is essentially the bet Sir Keir Starmer made last year by concentrating his efforts on lambasting the government for incompetence. There was plenty of it to go at. Less than six months ago, when the government’s handling of the pandemic was especially dreadful, every Conservative I spoke to was dreading what they were calling “a Covid election” in the belief that they’d take a beating for their serial bungling.The impressive distribution of jabs came to their rescue. The Tories have unquestionably profited from a “vaccine bounce”. This provides a bit of an alibi for Labour’s performance, but it also serves as a warning. One of the lessons of the past 12 months – in fact, it is a lesson of the past 11 years – is that Labour is foolish to imagine that it will prosper simply by waiting for the Tories to get into trouble. They can massively screw up and still win elections for so long as Labour hasn’t changed itself enough to convince the country that it would be a superior government.Another lesson of these elections, and a profoundly troubling one for Labour, is that the party still hasn’t worked out how to respond to the realignment of Britain’s political geography that was in train before Brexit and then greatly accelerated by it. Given what happened at the 2019 election, when Boris Johnson drove a bulldozer through the red wall, the Tory triumph in the Hartlepool byelection was less a surprise and more the confirmation of a trend. It was still psychologically crushing for Labour to lose a town, an
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One of the wonderful things about working in the media, even as a painfully shy botanist, is the incredible stories people send me about their adventures in gardening. So when, after talking about bonsai on the radio, I received the most magical series of photos of a collection of 51-year-old bonsai from a listener, it really made my week. They had recently inherited these from their late mother, who first created them when the listener was born, each carefully crafted twist and turn of their branches produced by their mum over the course of their life, coding within a living tree a whole life story. It got me thinking about other treasured living heirlooms I have heard about over the years, and what a wonderful project it could be for the future.When it comes to living heirlooms, the easiest options would be houseplants, simply because these are easy to move. That’s probably why almost all the examples I have heard of have been potted specimens. However, there is an outdoor example I hear about now and then, which is of a favourite heirloom rose. As hybrid tea roses are often relatively small (a hard pruning will make them small enough to move) and will survive careful transplanting when fully dormant in late autumn, they can make a good choice.Fine fettle: Cymbidium orchids will thrive for years. Photograph: Antonel/AlamyWith houseplants, the oldest specimens I have ever seen (aside from bonsai) are probably aspidistras, which can easily live for up to a century or more. Part of the reason for this is that they are so darn hard to kill. They are able to plough on through years of neglect and live to tell the tale. I have seen similar long-lived claims for Boston ferns (Nephrolepis), and even Cymbidium orchids, which can grow to enormous sizes if you have the space.However, with all three of these examples, the plants simply regenerate by producing new clones of themselves from underground as older ones die off, so they never get all the wonderful character or architecture that non-clumping species provide. An excellent example of an alternative would be the beautifully rugged, twisted forms of mature cacti and succulents, and if you are worried about spikes and spines, you can just pick one of the soft, “leafy” forest cacti. I have seen one in the US that, it is claimed, is 111 years old, pouring out an annual waterfall of dazzling pink flowers. It’s magical to consider.If upright, tree-like plants are what you fancy, the Madagascar dragon tree, Dracaena marginata, is a great option. Their size can be controlled by keeping them in a smaller pot and over the years their contorted branches can develop a truly otherworldly character. Finally, my best mate Rob has a pair of parlour palms (Chamaedorea) inherited from his grandfather that, after more than half a century, are now a magnificent 6ft high with elegant arched trunks like bonsai coconut trees. All easy to grow, widely available and affordable specimens, which over years turn into living marvels that may well outlive you. Not exactly a quick project, of course, but a potential source of decades of joy. Follow James on Twitter @Botanygeek
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Pope Francis has given his backing to the campaign calling for the suspension of coronavirus vaccine patents to boost supplies to poorer countries.In a video message to the Vax Live event, Francis backed “universal access to the vaccine and the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights”. And he added his condemnation of the “virus of individualism” that “makes us indifferent to the suffering of others”.“A variant of this virus is closed nationalism, which prevents, for example, an internationalism of vaccines,” he told Vax Live, an online charity concert, which was aired this weekend in aid of the international Covid vaccination effort.The move is the latest development in an increasingly divisive battle over the proposal to relax patents taken out by pharmaceutical companies to cover the Covid vaccines they have developed. It is argued such a move would allow local drugs companies to make “copycat” vaccines without fear of being sued for infringing intellectual property rights, and therefore boost vaccine supplies in nations struggling to protect citizens from soaring Covid cases.The patent waiving proposal was given powerful support last week by the Biden administration in the US, which announced that it supported calls by India and South Africa – and many congressional Democrats – to drop intellectual property protections for coronavirus vaccines.“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” said Katherine Tai, North America’s trade representative. “The administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for Covid-19 vaccines.”However the idea is fiercely opposed by major drug makers who argue it would set a precedent that could threaten future innovations. Nor would the move speed up vaccine production, said Pfizer’s chief executive, Albert Bourla. Lack of vaccine manufacturing facilities was not the problem. “The restriction is the scarcity of highly specialised raw materials needed to produce our vaccine,” he argued.Bourla said Pfizer’s vaccine required 280 different materials and components that were sourced from 19 countries. Without patent protections, fledgling companies would start competing for the same ingredients. The result would be disruptions to the flow of these precious raw materials. “Right now, virtually every single gram of raw material produced is shipped immediately into our manufacturing facilities and is converted immediately and reliably to vaccines that are shipped immediately around the world,” he added.Other scientists have warned of the dangers of inexperienced operators attempting to start up the large-scale manufacture of vaccines. Mistakes could lead to inoculated people suffering side effects that might result in the subsequent rejection of vaccines by the rest of the population.To date, the UK and the EU have opposed the waiver with Charles Michel, president of the European Council, saying on Saturday that the bloc was ready to discuss a US offer to suspend patent protecti
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The pandemic has taught us a lot about ourselves. Too much, some might say. Too much, about the limits of a relationship forced to live between two people in a one-room flat, an indoor cat gazing out at the birds. Too much about our handwashing habits; too much about our children’s teachers’ front rooms. Too much about our children. Too much about love; too much about grief; too much about boredom – and its long, grey tail. Too much about fear and how we deal with it in ways that hurt us. Too much about what we eat when we are alone; too much about the awful way our bodies react when we hear the buzz of a text message. Too much about the barren ecosystems of our digital friendships. To
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If the Covid-19 era has taught us one thing about ourselves and our fellow humans, it’s that we really like coffee. More proof came on a Tuesday in early September last year when Pret a Manger launched its in-shop coffee subscription YourPret Barista. For £20 a month, you could have five drinks a day, every day, including coffee, tea and smoothies (redeemed with at least 30 minutes between each drink order). Pret had been expecting 2,000 or at a push 3,000 people to sign up on the first day. By 3pm, the scheme had already topped 15,000 subscribers.Clare Clough, Pret’s managing director in the UK, insists this was a pleasant surprise and that, not for a second, did the company wonder if
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We are witnessing a tipping point: the rise of Menopause Power: a growing activist movement which will change the Change in the same way that Period Power fought period poverty and stigma. On social media, on podcasts and in newspapers, there’s a huge menopause conversation, as confrontational as it is celebratory. I’ve just produced a Channel 4 documentary, Davina McCall: Sex, Myths and the Menopause, and there’s nowhere we don’t go: losing jobs to hot flushes, vaginal dryness, memory loss, orgasms after menopause, and the shocking misinformation we’ve been fed on hormone replacement therapy.But above all, we give the menopausal taboo the kicking it has long deserved. As Davina Mc
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Aberaeron, CeredigionFamous for the brightly coloured Georgian houses that line the town’s pretty quay, Aberaeron has become something of a foodie hub in recent years, with the Cellar Restaurant voted the best in Wales in 2019. Days are best spent on the water: choose from dolphin-spotting trips, boat tours of Cardigan Bay or even a RIB safari. On dry land, hire a bike to cycle the 3km former railway line to the mansion and pretty walled garden at Llanerchaeron. Base yourself at the Harbourmaster, a 13-room boutique hotel with a restaurant focusing on local Welsh produce. Doubles from £260 B&B, harbour-master.comMalton, North Yorkshire‘Bustling market town’: MaltonYorkshire’s gastro
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Czech Republic DispatchWas a huge blast at a Czech weapons depot sabotage by Russian spies? The villagers where it happened aren’t sure, but they do know they only want to watch James Bond films, not live inside one.Credit...Akos Stiller for The New York TimesMay 9, 2021, 3:00 a.m. ETVLACHOVICE-VRBETICE, Czech Republic — For nearly a century, local residents have wondered at the strange comings and goings at a sealed-off camp ringed by barbed wire and dotted with keep out signs on the edge of their village.The armies of Czechoslovakia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and the Czech Republic all made use over the decades of the 840-acre property, deterring trespassers with guard dogs and ar
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Epidemiological models have been a source of continual controversy from the start of the pandemic, often blamed for fearmongering and inaccuracy. How well have they done?Perhaps the most famous piece of modelling came from Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College London in March 2020, credited with provoking the full national lockdown. Unfortunately, there are repeated claims they estimated 510,000 deaths in Great Britain over two years, but that was a projection under the implausible scenario that nothing was done about the virus. Their model was, if anything, rather optimistic. Even short of a full lockdown, they projected maximum deaths in Great Britain of fewer than 50,000 and the actu
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The use of rape as a weapon of war is as old as warfare itself. In Bosnia in the 1990s, thousands of Muslim women were brutalised by Bosnian Serb forces, who set up “rape camps” as part of a policy of “ethnic cleansing”. In 2001, the UN’s Yugoslav war crimes tribunal redefined mass rape as a crime against humanity. Yet there have been many similar atrocities since then, including in South Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Myanmar.Now the world looks on – or rather, looks away – as it happens again. Today, in Tigray, in northern Ethiopia, large numbers of women and girls are again being subjected to “unimaginable” terror and suffering as a result of pervasive sexual violence. The word “unimaginable” is taken from a disturbing new report on Tigray by Parliament’s international development committee – a report largely ignored by the British government and media.Reporting from Tigray last week, where fighting erupted in November after government-led forces invaded to topple the region’s breakaway leadership, the International Rescue Committee charity warned the crisis was especially affecting women. “Women are having to engage in sexually exploitative relationships, receiving small amounts of money, food and/or shelter to survive and feed their children,” an IRC spokesman said.“Rape is being used as a weapon of war across the conflict. Multiple displaced people have given eyewitness accounts of mass rape. Women who are assaulted are in need of multiple levels of care, including emergency contraceptives, and drugs to prevent HIV in addition to psychological support. With 71% of hospital and medical facilities damaged and many looted, medical supplies are scarce,” the IRC said.Ethiopia’s prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, opened the way for this mass victimisation of women with his disastrous decision to attack. Once feted as a peacemaker, he will be remembered as the man who chose brute force to settle a political argument, in one of the world’s most fragile states, in the middle of a global pandemic.After failing to secure the quick victory he predicted, Abiy has minimised the scale of the emergency. The latest UN assessment tells a different
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This quietly satirical and unexpectedly moving debut feature from director and co-writer Christos Nikou, who cut his teeth as an assistant director on Dogtooth, was Greece’s entry for the international feature Oscar at the recent 93rd Academy Awards. A tale of epidemic memory loss, grief and possible new beginnings, it’s a deadpan tragicomedy that mixes the playful and the poignant in a manner as tasty as a spitter – the bittersweet apples treasured by cidermakers as the perfect fuel for fermentation.Straight-faced Aris Servetalis cuts a mournful figure, his physical presence invoking the joint spectres of Daniel Day-Lewis and Charlie Chaplin. As an outbreak of amnesia rolls across his homeland, his bewildered character, Aris, finds himself unable to remember his name, his occupation or his address. “It happened suddenly to him, like the others,” says the doctor who examines “Number 14842”, before placing him in a programme designed to rehabilitate those bereft of memory and on which his new friend (Sofia Georgovassili) is also enrolled.To create new identities, the programme’s participants are given a series of quests – instructions for mundane tasks that arrive as Mission: Impossible-style taped messages, requiring photographic proof of completion. From taking
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Taiwan’s Sun Moon Lake is so low that parts of it have dried and turned to grass. Jetties that normally float are sprawled awkwardly on dry land, and tour boats are crowded at the tail ends of pontoons still in the water.Usually one of the island’s most famous tourist destinations, the lake has recently become a star of a different kind. Following the worst drought in 56 years, it is now famous for all the wrong reasons. These days, Instagram influencers photograph themselves posing in a dust-coloured, dinghy half-buried in a cracked and cratered lakebed.Earlier this month, the resurfacing of a long-lost mobile phone (which still worked) made international news, while China’s hawkish tabloid, the Global Times, seized on the discovery of a suspected Qing dynasty tombstone to bolster the mainland’s claims of sovereignty over Taiwan.But away from the quirky headlines, the situation is dire. Other reservoirs across central and southern Taiwan are effectively empty, down to 5% or less. Last week, there were reports of mass fish deaths, a phenomenon seen in Australia’s drought.Taiwan has had drought before but observers are hoping the severity of this one – which has lasted 18 months, and threatens Taiwan’s economic lifeblood of semiconductor production – is enough to prompt real action on climate change.Taiwan relies heavily on seasonal typhoons to top up reservoirs, but in 2020 not one made landfall. And it could happen again.Dr Huang-Hsiung Hsu, executive officer at Academica Sinica’s anthropogenic climate change centre, says studies have suggested “fewer but stronger typhoons, drier springs, fewer rainy days, and stronger precipitation strength in the warming future, in addition to the expected significant temperature rise and heatwaves as everywhere around the world”.“[This will] mean a higher risk of water shortage and natural disasters such as flooding and landslide.” He said governments have not been sincere in their commitment to climate crisis policy, and he joined other observers who say the government is not prepared for the future.There are plans to redirect rivers and raise reservoirs, but in response to the current crisis autho
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As the longer-term psychological and social impacts of Covid begin to reveal themselves, one substantial group is already displaying a mental shift that could inflict lasting damage if only, mercifully, on other people. The pandemic did not merely change this demographic, it inspired in its members an identical quest: they must own property in Cornwall.With infections subsiding, the fixation has only intensified: searches for property in Cornwall, at 5m in a month, have overtaken those for London. Estate agents struggle with the demand, maybe 60 inquiries per house, with places bought unseen, rival bids, the rental market also soaring beyond local means and ostensibly unalluring properties sold in hours or less. A local headline announces: “Port Isaac bungalow sells in just five minutes as Cornwall housing madness continues.” A bigger, £4.5m house in Polzeath, no matter that its beach is indelibly associated with a glistening David Cameron, secured an offer from buyers who’d only seen it online.The competition is all the more striking given a parallel series of news stories depicting heightened local resistance to the arrival, quite likely in an outsize SUV, of yet more price-inflating and largely absentee second-home owners. Before that, Mark Jenkin’s acclaimed 2019 film, Bait, exploring tensions in a Cornish coastal community, might have generated in some buyers an awareness of what their new acquisition could permanently displace. Perhaps local disquiet is a small price for convenient beach access from a “lock up and leave”, as estate agents call properties whose main message to neighbours is, however, fuck off and die.In lockdown, the arrival of wealthy plague-dodgers prompted open hostility and a Facebook group called “You Shouldn’t Be Here”. A defiant Gordon Ramsay was noted in his Land Rover Defender (“tough, capable, unstoppable”). More recently, a Cornish resident told the Guardian about “people who have moved in with loads of money who think they own everything”. A sign in Malpas: “Respect Malpas and double yellow lines. Park legally and properly. If not, bugger off.” In St Agnes: “No more second homes, our village is d
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[Clive] had an interesting video about LED lights from Philips. You can’t buy them unless you live in Dubai. Apparently inspired by the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who wanted more efficient and longer-lasting bulbs. The secret? A normal LED bulb uses an LED “filament” at 1 watt each. The Dubai bulbs run at about a fourth of that which means they need more LEDs to get the same amount of light, but they should last longer and operate more efficiently. After exploring the brightness and color of different lamps, [Clive] tears one up and finds some surprises inside. The LEDs get over 200V each and the driver circuit has a lot of pairs of components, possibly to keep the size small for the high voltages involved, although it could be to improve reliabil
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Not a single European country has decided to support the UK government’s controversial asylum plans, with the UN on Saturday night criticising the proposals as so damaging they risked Britain’s “global credibility”.Six weeks after the home secretary, Priti Patel, unveiled a sweeping immigration overhaul that included deporting migrants who enter the UK illegally to safe countries such as “France and other EU countries”, sources have said the Home Office has been unable to persuade any European state to sign up to the scheme.The UN’s refugee agency will soon publish its detailed legal opinion into Patel’s asylum proposals that is likely to conclude her plans infringe international legislation and are unworkable. Despite this, Patel’s asylum proposals are to feature in the
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There is insufficient evidence to justify recommending herbal and dietary supplements to help people to lose weight.That is the emphatic view of researchers who will present studies on the effectiveness of supplements at the European Congress on Obesity (ECO) to be held online this week.“Even though most supplements appear safe for short-term consumption, they are not going to provide weight loss that is clinically meaningful,” said lead author Erica Bessell of the University of Sydney in Australia.Herbal supplements contain whole plants or combinations of plants, while dietary supplements contain naturally occurring single compounds. They can be purchased as pills, powders and liquids and have become increasingly popular as aids to losing weight.One recent estimate has suggested that 15% of Americans have tried a weight-loss supplement in an industry worth $40bn (£29bn) worldwide. Yet there have been few recent attempts to review the scientific literature on all available herbal and dietary supplements.Herbal supplements include green tea, white kidney beans, ephedra (a stimulant that increases metabolism), African mango, yerba mate (a herbal tea made from the leaves and twig
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If the announcement last week that Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced took observers by surprise, it nonetheless conforms to a growing trend of later-life separation. Bill Gates is 65, and his soon to be ex-wife is 56. In the UK the over-65s buck the trend of falling divorce rates. They’ve even earned their own demographic designation: silver splitters.A grey social revolution is under way with people in their late 50s and 60s increasingly leaving marriages just when they’re expected to be most settled. A number of factors are at play but two in particular stand out. One is children going off to college or leaving home. While the empty-nest syndrome may prompt melancholy, it can also end the obligation to “stay together for the children”. It’s probably no coincidence that the Gateses’ youngest child is 18.The other divorce-driver is the prospect of a long retirement. With life-expectancy continuing to extend deep into the 80s, that’s an awful lot of potential time to be spent with a partner about whom one has nagging reservations. The Gateses’ statement explaining their decision – they no longer “believe we can grow together as a couple in this next phase of our lives” – suggests the reservations won out.It used to be thought that by the Gateses’ age most of our growing was done. But just as we’re told that 60 is the new 50, which is in turn the new 40, this increasing sense of ageing youthfulness comes with an appetite for change. It’s a cultural shift that Dawn Kaffel has also witnessed up close in her position as a relationship counsellor in London.She estimates that she’s seeing two or three times the number of over-60s compare
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Joan Didion, philosopher-in-chief of the American west, once observed that the Pacific coast was a place “in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work out here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”Paul McDonough’s 1970s photographs from that coast, collected in a new book, Headed West, seem to share in that unease. In this picture, from a small resort town in Oregon, the cars on the beach, long noses toward the salt air of the ocean, look impatient to go further; the great American road trip has run out of road. In the foreground, their younger occupants are acting on instincts to make their mark here, however temporary, building castles in the sand to rival that great lump of rock rising out of the sea, and echoing the covered-wagon generations before them who staked unlikely claims to frontier land at the end of the Oregon trail.McDonough, now 80, has had Alzheimer’s disease for a number of years. The new book was in part an effort to order his archive while enough clarity of memory remains. He made his name as a street photographer in New York, characteristically up close and personal with faces in a crowd. Beginning in the late 1960s, he went west on increasingly frequent excursions to observe those who had gone to find a bit of light and space, a place to dream. His pictures capture the freedom and the vacancy of that impulse. Buildings are low-slung and sprawling, p
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A powerful Democrat-led House committee is pushing a federal judge to order Donald Trump to comply with a subpoena for his financial records, arguing he no longer has a viable claim to withhold materials now that he is out of office, according to a source familiar with the matter.The move from the House oversight committee, led by the chair Carolyn Maloney, marks the latest salvo from Democrats in their years-long pursuit to secure Trump’s tax records and related documents, in a case testing the scope and limits of Congress’s oversight authority.If successful, the committee would be a step
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My younger daughter celebrated her 18th birthday last week and I was reminded of something that the great children’s writer Judith Kerr said to me, well into her own 95th and final year: “We live our lives in two distinct halves,” she said, over lunch, with all her twinkling brightness intact. “The first half lasts until we are 18 and the second is all the years that follow.”Kerr, who grew up in Berlin and escaped the Nazis to England, had more reason than most to think of her childhood lasting as long as the subsequent 77 years, but her perception is more universally true.Science of
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Wake up time? 6.30am. I’ve never quite got the hang of sleeping in late. I stare at my eyelids for half an hour, then spring into my en-suite yoga studio to bang out some shapes: downward crab, the rancid ocelot…Breakfast? I’m trying the keto diet at the mo, so bread is off the menu, but it means I can eat as much bacon and avocado as I like. It’s the same with cream, so I’ll knock back half a pint with my coffee, then after it’s settled I’m back banging out shapes: backwards slab, a broken moose to finish.A Sunday stroll? Ideally I’d be on my own, naked, on a private beach tak
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Local WhatsApp groups have been one of the silver linings of the pandemic, creating community ties and support networks. Yet loan sharks are increasingly using these groups to extort money from their victims, according to England’s Illegal Money Lending Team (IMLT), an organisation that prosecutes illegal lenders and supports victims.Such lenders are also targeting their victims online – the IMLT’s 2020 victim statistics report shows that one in 10 victims met the loan shark via social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Snapchat and Facebook, or through dating websites. Criminals are also creating their own WhatsApp and Facebook groups that appear to be for local communities but are actually ways to maintain control over their victims, according to Tony Quigley, the head of the IMLT.
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Elon Musk has told viewers of Saturday Night Live that he “is the first person with Asperger’s” to host the US sketch show, before joking about his son’s name and smoking cannabis on a podcast for the first global livestream of the programme.During the opening, the billionaire entrepreneur spoke of how he sometimes posted strange comments on his social media, saying: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say ‘I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship, did you also think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?”’Musk also referred to an incident in 2018 in which he smoked a joint during an appearance on Joe Rogan’s show.“A lot of times, people are reduced to the dumbest thing they ever did. Like one time I smoked weed on Joe Rogan
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To veterans of financial bubbles, there is plenty familiar about the present. Stock valuations are their richest since the dot-com bubble in 2000. Home prices are back to their pre-financial crisis peak. Risky companies can borrow at the lowest rates on record. Individual investors are pouring money into green energy and cryptocurrency. This boom has some legitimate explanations, from the advances in digital commerce to fiscally greased growth that will likely be the strongest since 1983. But there is one driver above all: the Federal Reserve. Easy monetary policy has regularly fueled financial booms, and it is exceptionally easy now. The Fed has kept interest rates near zero for the past year and signaled rates won’t change for at least two more years. It is
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Blush, apparently, is “back”. For me, it never went away. The healthy flush it adds never gets old. A lot, however, has changed over the years. Shades, once limited to fairer skins, now run the gamut from pale pinks to deep plums. There is also a plethora of textures and finishes – powders (great for oilier skins), creams and gels (glorious on mature skins or for dewiness), shimmer (doubles as a highlighter) and for a natural day finish, semi-sheer glosses are magic. As is the staying power of today’s blushers. Hence you don’t need much. So go easy.I can’t do without…A hard-working cleansing balm that impresses with a light touchYes, I am well aware that I covered cleansing balms not so long ago… However, if I had known about this one – from the fastest- growing skincare
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Oh, what a lovely war! The summer silly season arrived early for the Brexiters and their Fleet Street cheerleaders, and didn’t they enjoy it! In a week that commemorated the death of Napoleon, and on the eve of today’s Europe Day, which celebrates peace and unity across a continent for which greater generations of Britons fought and died, they picked a foolish scrap with the French for old times’ sake, then claimed a spurious victory.It sometimes seems nothing changes, which is just how Little Englanders like it. The sad thing is, they do not realise how very stupid – and deeply insular – they make Britain appear to the rest of the world. Thousands are dying each day in India. Real battles threaten communities around the globe. But what’s the big news for foreigner-baiting tabl
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The Church of England is to review thousands of monuments in churches and cathedrals across the country that contain historical references to slavery and colonialism, with some expected to be removed.Guidance to be issued this week encourages the C of E’s 12,500 parishes and 42 cathedrals to scrutinise buildings and grounds for evidence of contested heritage, and consult local communities on what action to take.Although decisions will be made at a local level, the guidance stresses that ignoring contested heritage is not an option. Among actions that may be taken are the removal, relocation or alteration of plaques and monuments, and the addition of contextual information. In some cases, there may be no change.The guidance comes after Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, called fo
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Danish authorities say Mesbah Mshleem must take three of his children, the youngest a Danish-born five-year-old, and return to Damascus, to a home that no longer stands, in a neighbourhood destroyed by the war and often shut off to former residents. There is little hope of compensation for those losses.“I do not know what is left to go back to. How can I protect my children there?” says Mshleem, one of more than 100 Syrians living in Denmark who have effectively lost their refugee status. His lawyer had to challenge an order for his five-year-old to leave the country immediately and alone.Denmark has become the first European nation not to renew residency permits for the refugees, claiming some areas of Syria are now safe for families to return to. The decision stunned and terrified Sy
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Published May 5, 2021 12:55 p.m. ET Updated May 6, 2021 7:41 a.m. ET Click to Expand TORONTO -- Ontario teachers’ unions are sounding the alarm after the provincial government announced its holding consultations on whether or not to make online learning options a permanent choice for families once the pandemic ends. Union leaders and parents voiced their concerns during a news conference on Wednesday, saying the plans will undermine Ontario's publically funded education system and will harm students. “Their plan to make online classes permanent means a student could go from Kindergarten to Grade 12 without ever setting foot inside a school,” Sam Hammond, president of th
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Domaine du Vieux Pressoir Saumur Puy Notre Dame, Loire, France 2015 (£23, redsquirrelwine.com) A change in the season means a change in red wine style: away with the chunky, the rich, the powerful; in with the elegant, the fragrant, the refreshing. No wine style fits the latter brief better than the red wines of the Loire, especially those made from the increasingly fashionable (all over the world) cabernet franc grape variety. In a clutch of appellations such as Chinon, Bourgueil, and Saumur-Champigny, cabernet franc produces wines that combine a springtime sappiness and leafiness with currants and berries on a textural spectrum that runs from just-ripe and crunchy to supple and fine. For an energisingly vibrant example that is happiest showing off its just-on-the-right-side-of-tart summ
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The Pursuit of Love9pm, BBC OneA much-needed dose of period drama frivolity drops into the schedules with this adaptation of Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel, written and directed by Emily Mortimer. Set in the interwar period initially in Oxfordshire and then moving to the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War, Lily James stars as wild-hearted aristocrat Linda, who seeks out love at all costs, while her cousin Fanny (Emily Beecham) narrates from her more conservative viewpoint. We open as 17-year-old Linda plots to escape from her stern father (Dominic West). Ammar KaliaGods of Snooker9pm, BBC TwoA cracking three-part documentary series about snooker’s golden age begins with a biography of brittle bad boy Alex Higgins: the women, the booze, the outrageous pots and ridiculous hats. Put in con
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When Bernie Madoff died in April, at 82, he was serving a 150-year sentence. His fraud topped $17.5bn. The investors who trusted him were many and varied. Many went bankrupt, many lost their homes, some were driven to suicide. At sentencing, judge Denny Chin called Madoff’s crimes “extraordinarily evil”. He was not mourned. One investor announced: “Death is too good for him.”Madoff trafficked in carnage.Mark Madoff, his oldest son, killed himself.“Bernie,” he wrote, “now you know how you have destroyed the lives of your sons by your life of deceit.”Andrew Madoff, the youngest son, died of cancer.Mark’s suicide note concluded: “Fuck you.”Now, Madoff Talks chronicles how the former head of the Nasdaq exchange pulled off his monumental crime.Paperwork didn’t make sen
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Mr Ji, 72 Old Compton Street, London W1D 4UN. Bookings via mrji.co.uk. Small plates £3.95 – £7; all big plates £10. Cocktails £8 – £10You can learn a lot about a place from a trip to the loo. I once knew a journalist who told me that, if invited into the house of someone he was interviewing, he would always excuse himself at some point to check out the bathroom cabinet for prescription drugs. He said you could obtain vital information about people from the medicines they were taking. I suggested it was odd some journalists were held in such low regard. He agreed with me. I don’t think he quite got sarcasm.My educational trips to the loo are, in this period of outside dining, more benign. First, they reacquaint me with central heating. I’m a big fan of central heating. It’s w
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It started with a pot of basil on a windowsill, but soon Corrie Rounding was dreaming of onions and potatoes.The problem was where to find the space in which to nurture tiny seedlings into big, beautiful vegetables. Rounding’s second-floor flat in south London doesn’t even have a balcony, and waiting lists for inner-city allotments have rocketed in the pandemic.Nevertheless, Rounding, 29, will soon begin planting her own veg patch after agreeing to rent space from a neighbour who has more garden than he has time to cultivate.The simple and pleasing idea of linking up people who want to grow their own food with those who have unloved gardens or bits of garden is the brainchild of that neighbour, Conor Gallagher. This week he will launch AllotMe, a digital platform aimed at making renting garden space as easy as Airbnb has made renting a spare room.Gallagher, 30, who grew up in Belfast, said: “After I moved to London I saw how people wanted to eat more healthily, ethically and sustainably but faced barriers such as a lack of space or excessive cost.“So many people have no garden or access to outside space, and obtaining an allotment through traditional routes is difficult verging on impossible. There’s a huge desire for sustainable living but often no way of satisfying it.”As he spotted neglected gardens, especially unloved front gardens, he realised there were untapped reserves of outdoor space going unused: “So why not bring the two together?”Even before the website has been officially launched, hundreds of people have signed up to rent unwanted garden space.One in five local authorities have allotment waiting lists of more than 1,000 people, and two-third
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When California granted its voters the ability to recall a sitting governor, back in 1911, it meant to offer a stern reminder to over-entitled elected officials that they serve the people, not the other way around.The reality, though, has been a lot less edifying.Californians have voted in a governor recall election only once, in 2003, when Arnold Schwarzenegger unseated the unpopular Democratic incumbent Gray Davis. Both then, and now as Gavin Newsom finds himself against the ropes, the process has been driven by showbiz carnival barking and partisan sound and fury as much as it has by the high-minded democratic ideals of the Progressive Era.Last time, more than 250 people applied to run, and 135 of them ended up on the ballot, including a porn star, a 100-year-old woman sponsored by a discount store, a bounty hunter, a sumo wrestler, the Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt (who, in a wheelchair, said he’d prefer to be paralyzed from the neck down than paralyzed, like Davis, from the neck up), and the former child actor Gary Coleman.Adult film actress Mary Carey ran to replace Gray Davis in 2003. Photograph: Hector Mata/AFP/GETTYIMAGESIt didn’t help that the election rules, which had gone untested for close to a century, virtually guaranteed a freak show of candidates and platforms lured by a low entry bar and the promise of a single winner-take-all contest. With no requirement to win the support of a majority of the voters, the foreshortened campaign season was primed to reward attention-seeking over substance.Schwarzenegger himself reveled in the circus atmosphere, telling the late-night TV host Jay Leno as he announced his candidacy that it was the toughest dec
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America prefers to look forward rather than back. We’re a land of second acts. We move on.This can be a strength. We don’t get bogged down in outmoded traditions, old grudges, obsolete ways of thinking. We constantly reinvent. We love innovation and disruption.The downside is a tendency toward collective amnesia about what we’ve been through, and a corresponding reluctance to do anything about it or hold anyone accountable.Now, with Covid receding and the economy starting to rebound – and the 2020 election and the attack on the Capitol behind us – the future looks bright.But at the risk of being the skunk at the picnic, let me remind you: we have lost more than 580,000 people to Covid-19. One big reason that number is so high is our former president lied about the virus and ordered his administration to minimize its danger.Donald Trump also lied about the results of the last election. And then – you remember, don’t you? – he tried to overturn the results.Trump twisted the arms of state election officials. He held a rally to stop Congress from certifying the election, followed by the violent attack on the Capitol. Five people died. Senators and representatives could have been slaughtered.Several Republican members of Congress encouraged the attempted coup by joining him in the big lie and refusing to certify the election.This was just over four months ago, yet we seem to be doing everything we can to blot it out of our memory.Last Tuesday, the Washington Post hosted a live video chat with the Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley, a ringleader in the attempt to overturn the results of the election. Hawley had even made a fist-pump gesture toward the mob at the Capitol before the attack.But the Post billed the interview as being about Hawley’s new book on the “tyranny of big tech”. It even posted a biography of Hawley that made no mention of Hawley’s sedition, referring instead to his supposed reputation “for taking on the big and the powerful to protect Missouri workers” and as “a fierce defender of the constitution”.Last week, CBS This Morning interviewed the Florida Republican Rick Scott, another of the senators who tried to ov
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Big ring or small, Texas judges or not, Canelo Álvarez wasn’t going to disappoint a huge pro-Mexico crowd in another fight in Texas.The wildly popular Mexican added another belt in the super middleweight division, handing Billy Joe Saunders his first loss when the English boxer didn’t come out for the ninth round Saturday night.Álvarez set up another victory in his latest Cinco de Mayo bout with a staggering right hand in the middle of the eighth round, sending the raucous crowd of 73,126 at the home of the Dallas Cowboys into a frenzy as we waved his arms to encourage the noise while the round continued.Saunders’ corner waved in defeat before the ninth while treating a cut under his right eye. Álvarez (56-1-2, 38 knockouts) added Saunders’ WBO belt to his WBA and WBC straps.It was the first loss in 31 fights for the 31-year-old Brit, who was taken to the hospital with a suspected broken orbital bone, fight spokesman Anthony Leaver said.The Saunders camp had threatened not to show because of concerns that the ring would be too small, and didn’t want any judges from Texas, so close to neighboring Mexico. There weren’t.“I knew the fight was going to develop around the eighth round,” Álvarez, whose only defeated was to Floyd Mayweather Jr in 2013, said through an
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The dilemma My partner of two years told me that she had been single for 12 years before I asked her out, but then, six months into our relationship, she told me her last partner was the love of her life and, after they broke up, they continued to regularly have sex for 10 years. She also recently told me she still loves him, but is no longer in love and that he is incredibly good-looking. She maintains she was single for 12 years because they “just” had sex together regularly.I don’t understand how this could happen. You are with someone or you’re not. I am scared she will be unable to resist him and never really be able to love me. It is haunting. She has never said I am good-looking. She once said our sex is OK, but hopes it will get better and that, based on her own experience, sex gets better the longer the relationship. Should I be worried?Mariella replies It’s not ideal. All relationships should be judged on the here and now, rather than a partner’s past, and in this case I’m not sure yours is being allowed to.Lingering over a lover’s romantic history and exhuming details to deliberate over is an extremely dysfunctional pursuit, guaranteed to make nobody happy. We all have previous passions and unions, which are part and parcel of the rich blend we bring (or, in less constructive cases, the juggernaut we dump) into adult relationships. How we’ve been treated in the past and how much we’ve been damaged is hard to escape – and important to work through and understand. We all wrestle with the challenge of learning from relationships that don’t work in order to shape ones that do. A partner’s past can be embraced and navigated with confidence when you are secure that what you have now is solid enough to rely on.For long-term relationships to survive, you have to relinquish any form of ownership or censorship over your lover’s previous romantic history, and digging to find fault, or allowing it to create uncertainty, is a fool’s pursuit. For all those reasons I would normally, where someone is overly concerned about their partner’s past, advise they abandon such a backward-facing position and start looking ahead. It’s certainl
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The national mood is critical in determining the outcome of elections. Usually, we apply a calculation of economic satisfaction: has life got harder or easier in recent years and who do voters hold responsible? But in the extraordinary circumstances of a pandemic, the public sentiment towards the government has been understandably shaped by what voters make of the way it has handled matters of life and death. Right now, there is a palpable sense of relief as we appear to be re-emerging from the trauma of the past 16 months, with its terrible death toll and painful lockdowns. The vaccine rollout is continuing apace and far more successfully than in many other countries, infection rates are low and it feels as if life is gradually approaching something close to normal.The Conservatives were always going to benefit from this shift in the national mood; so have the Scottish and Welsh incumbent governments, with the SNP and Welsh Labour generally regarded by voters to have handled the pandemic well. While the Tories may have been in power for more than a decade, the country returned an 80-seat majority for Boris Johnson just 18 months ago, based on his “get Brexit done” campaign and his appeal as a fresh start, running as much against his Conservative predecessors as the opposition. Why would the voters who supported him change their allegiance so soon? The vaccine bounce has eclipsed concerns about the fumbled handling of the pandemic, Johnson delivered Brexit as promised and voters may feel it is too early to judge the government’s success on the other things that motivated them to support him.That is the context in which Labour’s performance in the local and mayoral elections in England should be evaluated. It is difficult for a leader of the opposition to be heard so soon after the election of a new prime minister to whom voters delivered a resounding majority and who is broadly considered to be performing well. The expectation that Labour could transform its fortunes just 18 months after its historic 2019 defeat, its worst showing in almost 100 years, was always unrealistic.But neither do the results suggest that Sir Keir Starmer has started to address t
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Those of us who have bought cheap TinyVNA devices for our RF experimentation will be used to the calibration procedure involving short-circuit, 50 Ω, and open terminations, followed by a direct connection between ports. We do this with a kit of parts supplied with the device, and it makes it ready for our measurements. What we may not fully appreciate at the level of owning such a basic instrument though, is that the calibration process for much higher-quality instruments requires parts made to a much higher specification than the cheap ones from our TinyVNA. Building a se
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While Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live, Dogecoin investors sold. When SNL first went live, the cryptocurrency hovered around 69 cents (nice). But as the show wore on, the price dropped. As of this writing, it is worth 56 cents, a 12 percent plunge. There was a slight recovery when Musk — on “Weekend Update,” SNL’s parody news program — explained to a bewildered Michael Che and Colin Jost what Dogecoin was. (“A hustle,” Che finally said, knowingly.) He also called himself the “Dogefather.” As if to celebrate, trading platform Robinhood promptly crashed for cryptocurren
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You can found an institution, or you can inherit it. You can found an institution or you can inherit it.The East Coast of the United States is about inheritance.[0] That means inherited wealth, like the Du Ponts, Forbes, and Mellon families. It means inherited names, like Kennedy, Bush, and Clinton. But most of all it means inherited institutions, like the media corporations of New York and the government bodies of Washington, DC.Why call them inherited institutions? Well, the related term legacy institution is in common parlance, and a legacy is a synonym for an inheritance. But the nomenclature is useful because it focuses attention not simply on the age of these institutions (which are indeed old) but on the manner in which they select a new leader: through inheritance.One way to inherit an institution is to pass it from parent to child, along with the fortune. That's the model that the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Company still follow, where the Murdochs and Sulzbergers named their successors from within the family.A more subtle way to inherit an institution is to win an election. Now, of course someone who attains political office through this route isn't always a familial heir, though it's more common than you might think. But when they inherit a seat they have inherited something they could never have built from scratch. In that sense they are a political heir. After all, most folks who assume political office in the modern US do not have the skills to organize anything like the Federal Reserve or the US Military from scratch, unlike George Washington or Alexander Hamilton. Their primary skill is getting elected, which is more like becoming popular on Twitter than creating Twitter. The banks they bail out are too big to fail, and the shoes they inherit are too big to fill.Read-Only CultureWhen an heir inherits an institution, it's like inheriting a factory. During normal times the factory continues to operate, the widgets keep coming out, and the career managers appointed by the original founder appear to have everything in hand. Nothing seems amiss. But something important has been silently lost, which is the founder's ability to invent the institution from scratch – or reinvent it in the face of a crisis, like COVID-19. We can also think of this as read-only culture, the ability to repeat wha
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May 05, 2021 A universe evolves over billions upon billions of years, but researchers have developed a way to create a complex simulated universe in less than a day. The technique, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brings together machine learning, high-performance computing and astrophysics and will help to usher in a new era of high-resolution cosmology simulations. Cosmological simulations are an essential part of teasing out the many mysteries of the universe, including those of dark matter and dark energy. But until now, researchers faced the common conundrum of not being able to have it all — simulations could focus on a small area at high resolution, or they could encompass a large volume of the universe at low resolution. Carnegie Mellon University Physics Professors Tiziana Di Matteo and Rupert Croft, Flatiron Institute Research Fellow Yin Li, Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. candidate Yueying Ni, University of California Riverside Professor of Physics and Astronomy Simeon Bird and University of California Berkeley's Yu Feng surmounted this problem by teaching a machine learning algorithm based on neural networks to upgrade a simulation from low resolution to super resolution. "Cosmological simulations need to cover a large volume for cosmological studies, while also requiring high resolution to resolve the small-scale galaxy formation physics, which would incur daunting computational challenges. Our technique can be used as a powerful and promising tool to match those two requirements simultaneously by mo
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Elon Musk opened his hosting gig on Saturday Night Live by acknowledging his public comments get him in trouble. “Sometimes after I say something I have to say ‘I mean that,’” he said. He pointed to his “69 days after 4/20 again haha” tweet, but didn’t mention the 2018 tweet that got him in hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Musk said he was the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL — something he hasn’t said publicly before. It did not appear he was joking, but it was a bit difficult to be sure how sincere Musk was being, given his history as both an internet troll and someone who doesn’t always know how to deliver a joke. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO joked that people sometimes don’t know what to expect from him. “I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship,” Musk said. “Did you think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?” Musk said his famous appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast where he smoked weed wasn’t his usual habit. And he appeared to relish the live audience: “I could say something truly shocking like ‘I drive a Prius.’” He also said the name of his youngest child, spelled X Æ A-12 is “pronounced ‘cat running across keyboard.’” Musk’s mother Faye also made an appearance during the monologue. “I’m excited for my Mother’s Day gift, I just hope it’s not Dogecoin,” she said. To which Elon replied “it is.”
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[This is a transcript of the video embedded below.] Quantum mechanics is weird – I am sure you’ve read that somewhere. And why is it weird? Oh, it’s because it’s got that “spooky action at a distance”, doesn’t it? Einstein said that. Yes, that guy again. But what is spooky at a distance? What did Einstein really say? And what does it mean? That’s what we’ll talk about today. The vast majority of sources on the internet claim that Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” referred to entanglement. Wikipedia for example. And here is an example from Science Magazine. You will also find lots of videos on YouTube that say the same thing: Einstein’s spooky action at a distance was entanglement. But I do not think that’s what Einstein meant. Let’s look at what Einstein actually said. The origin of the phrase “spooky action at a distance” is a letter that Einstein wrote to Max Born in March 1947. In this letter, Einstein explains to Born why he does not believe that quantum mechanics really describes how the world works. He begins by assuring Born that he knows perfectly well that quantum mechanics is very successful: “I understand of course that the statistical formalism which you pioneered captures a significant truth.” But then he goes on to explain his problem. Einstein writes: “I cannot seriously believe [in quantum mechanics] because the theory is incompatible with the requirement that physics should represent reality in space and time without spooky action at a distance...” There it is, the spooky action at a distance. But just exactly what was Einstein referring to? Before we get into this, I have to quickly remind you how quantum mechanics works. In quantum mechanics, everything is described by a complex-valued wave-function usually denoted Psi. From the wave-function we calculate probabilities for measurement outcomes, for example the probability to find a particle at a particular place. We do this by taking the absolute square of the wave-function. But we cannot observe the wave-function itself. We only observe the outcome of the measurement. This means most importantly that if we make a measurement for which the outcome was not one hundred percent certain, then we have to suddenly „update” the wave-function. That’s because the moment we measure the particle, we know it’s either there or it isn’t. And this update is instantaneous. It happens at the same time everywhere, seemingly faster than the speed of light. And I think *that’s what Einstein was worried about because he had explained that already twenty years earlier, in the discussion of the 1927 Solvay conference. In 1927, Einstein used the following example. Suppose you direct a beam of electrons at a screen with a tiny hole and ask what happens with a single electron. The wave-function of the electron will diffract on the hole, which means it will spread symmetrically into all directions. Then you measure it at a certain distance from the hole. The electron has the same probability to have gone in any direction. But if you measure it, you will suddenly find it in one particular point. Einstein argues: “The interpret
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I discovered six 0days that allow a remote attacker to get full RCE on a box with no user interaction. MouseTrap is a suite of vulnerabilities and accompanying exploits that targets the RemoteMouse application and service. As of the release date 05/06/2021, the vulnerabilities have not been patched. Vulnerabilities # It’s clear that this application is very vulnerable and puts users at risk with bad authentication mechanisms, lack of encryption, and poor default configuration. With 10,000,000+ downloads on the Android App Store alone, there are a lot of oblivious users who could be completely owned without ever realizing. Here are the vulnerabilities/weaknesses documented: CVE-2021-27569: An issue was discovered in Emote Remote Mouse through 3.015. Attackers can maximize or minimize the window of a running process by sending the process name in a crafted packet. This information is sent in cleartext and is not protected by any authentication logic. CVE-2021-27570: An issue was discovered in Emote Remote Mouse through 3.015. Attackers can close any running process by sending the process name in a specially crafted packet. This information is sent in cleartext and is not protected by any authentication logic. CVE-2021-27571: An issue was discovered in Emote Remote Mouse through 3.015. Attackers can retrieve recently used and running applications, their icons, and their file paths. This information is sent in cleartext and is not protected by any authentication logic. CVE-2021-27572: An issue was discovered in Emote Remote Mouse through 3.015. Authentication Bypass can occur via Packet Replay. Remote unauthenticated users can execute arbitrary code via crafted UDP packets even when passwords are set. CVE-2021-27573: An issue was discovered in Emote Remote Mouse through 3.015. Remote unauthenticated users can execute arbitrary code via crafted UDP packets with no prior authorization or authentication. CVE-2021-27574: An issue was discovered in Emote Remote Mouse through 3.015. It uses cleartext HTTP to check, and request, updates. Thus, attackers can machine-in-the-middle a victim to download a malicious binary in place of the real update, with no SSL errors or warnings. Update: The vendor has released an update, version 4.0.0.0 with new features, but did not patch any of the security vulnerabilities. I have contacted MITRE to update the CVE descriptions to note the new version number. Update 05/07/2021 1712: All CVE entries public and updated. Discovery # So, like any good story, this one begins with me figuring out how to troll strangers in a video game. My friend and I were discussing ridiculous methods of playing Rainbow Six Siege, such as playing with our G29 Racing Wheel, when I suggested using one of those Android apps that allowed you to control your mouse and keyboard on your computer, using just your phone. I tried it out, promptly died and lost us the game, and started wondering how it actually worked. I knew it used some sort of automatic
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Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk “ran human in emulation mode” pretty convincingly — as he promised to do on stage — on “Saturday Night Live” in his debut appearance as the “first person with Asperger’s” ever to host the program. He was arrogant, quirky — and funny. And his mom, Maye, even managed to squeeze in a promo for his pet investment in Dogecoin, as fans of the cryptocurrency held their breath everywhere. Musk doesn’t think he’s so bad, and that he has a great vision for the future. “I believe in a renewable energy future,” he declared. “I believe that humanity must become an interplanetary space-faring civilization. Those seem like exciting goals
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At least five of Tesla’s competitors bought ad time during Saturday Night Live hosted by Elon Musk, using the billionaire’s appearance to sell their own. non-Tesla EVs. Commercials for the Audi E-tron, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Volkswagen ID 4, and Lucid Air all aired within the first 30 minutes of SNL. Lucid Motors, a company founded by Peter Rawlinson, the former head engineer of the Tesla Model S who frequently clashes with Musk, teased its commercial earlier in the week. It was its debut commercial for the Lucid Air, a claimed 500-mile EV due later this year. In his opening monologue, Musk noted he’s the guy who made electric vehicles popular. The commercials were intended to remi
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The 100-foot-tall, 22-metric-ton Chinese Long March 5B rocket that launched the first chunk of Beijing’s new space station has reentered Earth’s atmosphere near the Maldives, China’s Manned Space Engineering Office reported. US Space Command, which helps locate man-made satellites in orbit around the planet, was tracking the rocket’s location. The agency said the rocket “re-entered over the Arabian Peninsula at approximately 10:15 p.m. EDT,” adding it was unknown if the debris impacted land or water. “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B re-entry can relax. The rocket is down,” tweeted Space Track, a website that had been using Space Command data to publish the rocket
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The remnants of China’s largest rocket have plummeted back to Earth, plunging into the Indian ocean near the Maldives, according to Chinese state media.Most of the debris burned up in the atmosphere, it reported, citing the Chinese Manned Space Engineering office.Parts of the 30-metre core of the Long March 5B rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10.24am Beijing time (2.24am GMT) and landed at a location with the coordinates of longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north, state media cited the office as saying.Space watchers around the world have been anticipating the arrival of the Long March 5B space rocket since it started to lose altitude last week amid concerns it was
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The Republican Party might be high on Donald Trump, but key voters, not so much, The Washington Post reported Saturday. Internal GOP polling data baring Trump’s weak numbers in key battleground districts were kept under wraps by The National Republican Congressional Committee at recent retreats for Republican lawmakers, sources told the Post. NRCC staffers reportedly held back the bad news even when a member of Congress asked directly about Trump’s standing at a retreat last month for GOP House members, according to the newspaper. The Post later obtained the full results, revealing that Trump’s unfavorable ratings were 15 points higher than his favorable ones in the “core distric
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Flakes are such an obviously good thing ...but the design and development process should be better. posted on May 08 2021 Flakes is a major development for Nix. I believe one of the most significant changes the project has ever seen. Flakes brings a standardized interchange format for expressions, and dramatically reduces the friction of depending on someone else’s code. However, it needs the community involved to shape and evolve in to a final and wonderful tool. The Nix community is about 18 years old now. Until recently (~6 years ago) the community was quite small. The project is now much bigger, and growing. The result is that, organizationally, we’re a bit immature. The RFC p
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A friend is six months into supporting a sixty person engineering group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of their teams believe they have urgent hiring needs. To spread hiring equally across the teams in need, or to focus hiring on just one or two teams until their needs were fully staffed? That was the question.It’s a great question, and captures a deeply challenging aspect of leading an organization. It’s fun to do initial discovery, learning from and about everyone. The rare moment when you choose to reorganize the team is painful but concludes quickly. What’s much harder is keeping the faith when you’ve played your cards and need to find space for your plans to come into fruition. Staying the course is particularly fraught when it comes to growing an organization, because some teams always need more than you choose to provide.When you talk about growing an organization, the conversation usually leads to hiring. While I believe hiring is a very important approach to growing organizations, I believe we reach for it too often. In order to prioritize hiring for scenarios where it’ll do the most good, over the past year I’ve developed a loose framework for reasoning about what a given team needs to increase performance.Four states of a teamThe framework starts with vocabulary for describing teams, their performance within their surrounding context. Teams are slotted into a continuum of four states:A team is falling behind if each week their backlog is longer than the week before. Typically folks are working extremely hard but not making much progress, morale is low, and your users are vocally dissatisfied.A team is treading water if they’re able to get their critical work done, but are not able to start paying down technical debt or start major new projects. Morale is a bit higher, but folks are still working hard and your users may seem happier because they’ve learned that asking for help won’t go anywhere.A team is repaying debt when they’re able to start paying down technical debt, and are beginning to benefit from the debt repayment snowball: each piece of debt you repay leads to more time to repay more debt.A team is innovating when their technical debt is sustainably low, morale is high, and the majority of work is satisfying new user needs.Teams want to climb from falling behind to innovation, while entropy drags you backwards. Each state transition requires a different tact.System fixes & tactical supportIn this framework, teams transition state exclusively by adopting the appropriate system solution for their current state. As a manager, your obligation is to identify the correct system solution for a given transition, initiate that solution, and then support the team as best you can to create space for the solutions to work their magic. If you skip to supporting the team tactically before initiating the correct system solution, you’ll exhaust yourself with no promise of salvation.For each state, here is the strategic solution that I’ve found most effective, along with some ideas around how to support the team while they come to fruition:When falling behind, the system fix is to hire more people until the team mov
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Myanmar’s military rulers have branded a national unity government formed by MPs forced to flee in the wake of the coup a terrorist group and blamed it for bombings, arson and killings as part of a propaganda campaign in state-controlled media on Saturday.Myanmar’s army overthrew the elected government on 1 February and detained elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, sparking months of protests during which hundreds of people have been killed by security forces. In response, local militias have been formed to confront the army while anti-junta protests have continued across the south-east Asian
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An inexorable trend over the last decade or more has been the exodus of AM radio stations from the low frequency and HF broadcast bands. The bandwidth and thus audio quality at these frequencies puts them at a disadvantage against FM and internet streamed services, and the long-distance advantage of HF has been reduced by easy online access to overseas content. The world has largely moved on from these early-20th-century technologies, leaving them ever more a niche service. Happily for medium- and long-wave enthusiasts there is a solution to their decline, in the form of DR
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It’s hard to find free and open access to scientific material online. The latest studies and current research huddle behind paywalls unread by those who could benefit. But over the last few years, two sites—Library Genesis and Sci-Hub—have become high-profile, widely used resources for pirating scientific papers.The problem is that these sites have had a lot of difficulty actually staying online. They have faced both legal challenges and logistical hosting problems that has knocked them offline for long periods of time. But a new project by data hoarders and freedom of information activists hopes to bring some stability to one of the two “Pirate Bays of Science.”Library Genesis (LibGen) contains 33 terabytes of books, scientific papers, comics, and more in its scientific library. That’s a lot of data to host when countries and science publishers are constantly trying to get you shut down.Last week, redditors launched a project to better seed, or host, LibGen's files.“It's the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can't afford to buy books and scientific journals. There's almost nothing else like this on Earth. They're using torrents to fulfill World Health Organization and U.N. charters. And it's not just one site index—it's a network of mirrored sites, where a new one pops up every time another gets taken down,” user shrine said on Reddit. Shrine is helping to start the project.Two seedbox companies (services that provide high-bandwidth remote servers for uploading and downloading data), Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox, stepped in to support the project. A week later, LibGen is seeding 10 terabytes and 900,000 scientific books thanks to help from Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox.LibGen also teamed up with another massive online archiving project, The-Eye, to facilitate the tracking, storage, and seeding of LibGen’s scientific archive. The-Eye is run by a user named -Archivist, who has previously tried to archive a petabyte of porn and the entirety of Instagram. and has archived 80 gigabytes of Apple videos deleted by YouTube in addition to the terabytes of data archived on The-Eye, which include conspiracy theory documents, old software, video game roms, books, and a lot more.“We're not only trying to get the Library Genesis main collection torrents healthier, but also trying to get the complete collection so that The-Eye can properly back it up AND distribute it out in all its glory,” shrine said on Reddit. “There is currently no one doing that, so I think it's a big step towards keeping the collection safe as well as making it available to more developers who want to do something with the collection.”Library Genesis is powered by Sci-Hub, an embattled website that provides users free access to scientific papers. Created in 2011 by hacker and scientific researcher Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub scrapes data from behind the paywalls of the world’s scientific journals and posts them for free online. Governments and private companies have attempted repeatedly to shut down Sci-Hub and sue Elbakyan, but the si
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Arizona’s Republican-run state Senate is pulling the plug — for now — on part of its controversial ballot recount plan that would have involved canvassers knocking on residents’ doors to ask them about their votes. The president of the state Senate also promised that if canvassers are sent out at some point in the future, they would not be armed. The move came after a Department of Justice official expressed fears about the recount operation, particularly the face-to-face voter interrogations. She warned in a letter that the move risked violating civil rights and intimidating voters. “Past experience with similar investigative efforts around the country has raised concerns that they can be directed at minority voters, which potentially can implicate the anti-intimidation prohibitions of the Voting Rights Act,” Pamela Karlan, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote in a letter Wednesday to Arizona Senate President Karen Fann. “Such investigative efforts can have a significant intimidating effect on qualified voters that can deter them from seeking to vote in the future,” she added. Several other attorneys also sent a letter to auditors last month warning they would consider suing if canvassers were dispatched to knock on doors, arguing it would violate laws, including the anti-Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, which prohibits voter intimidation, the Arizona Republic reported. In a reply on Friday, Fann told Karlan in a letter that the Senate would “indefinitely defer” that part of the audit. Fann left open the possibility that the Senate could undertake such canvassing in the future, but said voters and precincts would not be chosen based on race, ethnicity, gender, party affiliation or any other legally protected status. The audit crew would “not carry a firearm or other weapon when conducting canvassing,” Fann stated in her letter.  Yet Karlan had also expressed further concerns that the ballots aren’t secure as they are handled unsupervised by a private company with free access to voter information. “We have a concern that Maricopa County election records, which are required by federal law to be retained and preserved, are no longer under the ultimate control of elections officials, are not being adequately safeguarded by contractors, and are at risk of damage or loss,” Karlan wrote. Fann was comfortable with ballot security protocols, she wrote Karlan. The recount of 2.1 million votes of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, involves a highly partisan private company, Cyber Ninjas, with no experience in elections or ballots, hired by the state’s Republican Senate. Company owner Doug Logan, a conspiracy theorist and disciple of the “Stop the Steal” lie that the presidential election was rigged, retweeted messages months ago that any vote audit in Arizona would inevitably unearth hundreds of thousands of extra votes for Donald Trump. One of the ballot auditors is a former state lawmaker who attended the Capitol riot. Former Arizona Rep. Anthony Kern’s own name appears on the ballots he’s recounting as both a candidate for reelection (he lost) and as
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By all accounts, Marilyn vos Savant was a child prodigy.Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1946, the young savant quickly developed an aptitude for math and science. At age 10, she was given two intelligence tests -- the Stanford-Binet, and the Mega Test -- both of which placed her mental capacity at that of a 23-year-old. She went on to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the “World’s Highest IQ,” and, as a result, gained international fame.Despite her status as the "world’s smartest woman,” vos Savant maintained that attempts to measure intelligence were “useless,” and she rejected IQ tests as unreliable. In the mid-1980s, with free rein to choose a career path, she packed her bags and moved to New York City to be a writer.Here, she caught a break: when Parade Magazine wrote a profile on her, readers responded with so many letters that the publication offered her a full-time job. Shortly thereafter, she established “Ask Marilyn,” a now-famous weekly column in which she answered (and continues to answer, to this day) a variety of academic questions and logic puzzles. It was in the body of one of these columns that vos Savant ignited one of the most heated statistical battles of the 21st century.When vos Savant politely responded to a reader’s inquiry on the Monty Hall Problem, a then-relatively-unknown probability puzzle, she never could’ve imagined what would unfold: though her answer was correct, she received over 10,000 letters, many from noted scholars and Ph.Ds, informing her that she was a hare-brained idiot.What ensued for vos Savant was a nightmarish journey, rife with name-calling, gender-based assumptions, and academic persecution.The Monty Hall Problem: A Brief HistoryImagine that you’re on a television game show and the host presents you with three closed doors. Behind one of them, sits a sparkling, brand-new Lincoln Continental; behind the other two, are smelly old goats. The host implores you to pick a door, and you select door #1. Then, the host, who is well-aware of what’s going on behind the scenes, opens door #3, revealing one of the goats.“Now,” he says, turning toward you, “do you want to keep door #1, or do you want to switch to door #2?”Statistically, which choice gets you the car: keeping your original door, or switching? If you, like most people, posit that your odds are 50-50, you’re wrong -- unless, of course, you like goats as much as you like new cars, in which case you'll win 100% of the time.Loosely based on the famous television game show Let’s Make a Deal, the scenario presented above, better known as the “Monty Hall Problem,” is a rather famous probability question. Despite its deceptive simplicity, some of the world’s brightest minds -- MIT professors, renowned mathematicians, and MacArthur “Genius” Fellows -- have had trouble grasping its answer. For decades, it has sparked intense debates in classrooms and lecture halls.Historically, the Monty Hall Problem was predated by several very similar puzzles.In Joseph Bertrand’s box paradox (1889), three boxes are presented -- one containing two gold coins, one containing two silver coins, and th
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Clashes have erupted for a second night between Palestinians and Israeli police outside the Old City of Jerusalem as tens of thousands of Muslim worshippers prayed at the nearby al-Aqsa Mosque.At least 80 people were injured, including a one-year-old, and 14 were taken to hospital, the Palestine Red Crescent said. Israeli police said at least one officer was hurt.Islamic authorities estimated 90,000 people had gathered for nighttime prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam.The fresh violence came a day after more than 200 people were wounded in fighting around the mosque, prompting international calls for an end to the conflict.Tensions in Jerusalem have soared recently
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A hooded man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him in this illustration picture taken on May 13, 2017. Top U.S. fuel pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline has shut its entire network after a cyber attack, the company said on Friday. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Illustration/File PhotoTop U.S. fuel pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline shut its entire network, the source of nearly half of the U.S. East Coast’s fuel supply, after a cyber attack on Friday that involved ransomware.The incident is one of the most disruptive digital ransom operations ever reported and has drawn attention to how vulnerable U.S. energy infrastructure is to hackers. A prolonged shutdown of the line would c
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Donald Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen predicted that his ex-boss won’t give Rudy Giuliani “two cents” for legal fees to defend himself against any charges that might arise from a current federal investigation. “Let me be very clear: [Giuliani’s] going to get stiffed,” Cohen told Joy Reid in an MSNBC interview Friday. “Donald Trump does not pay legal bills. He doesn’t care about anyone or anything other than himself.” Giuliani’s advisers earlier this week reached out to Trump’s team to shake loose some of the former president’s $250 million in campaign cash to reimburse Giuliani for his work attempting to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s be
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China’s Long March 5B rocket is set to make what the U.S. military has described as an uncontrolled reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere this weekend — though its exact entry point remains unknown. U.S. and European tracking centers said Saturday that the rocket, which is traveling at 18,000 mph, is expected to plunge back through the atmosphere late Saturday or early Sunday. Chinese officials have offered assurances that the falling rocket will mostly burn up upon reentry and has “a very low probability of causing harm” to people or property. But as CNN noted, the European Space Agency has predicted a potential “risk zone” that encompasses a huge swath of the globe — includi
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Critic’s NotebookLive theater is set to return in England starting May 17, but many online offerings will remain.Credit...Jack HextallPublished May 6, 2021Updated May 8, 2021, 7:20 p.m. ETLONDON — Is watching a play on your laptop enough? This question will be put to the test starting May 17, when theaters in England reopen after a five-month shutdown.Some shows here are experimenting with filmed versions in advance of — or to run alongside — the same play in three dimensions, offering a choice to possibly skittish audiences who may be wary of entering a theater.When Ben Brown’s spy drama “A Splinter of Ice” begins a tour of British theaters on June 8, those who wish to can see
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Tristan da Cunha, here we come. Travel firm Tui will have given one tiny cheer at the end of last week, when the UK government finally confirmed the resumption of international leisure travel with a threadbare “green list” of far-flung countries, where desperate holidaymakers can safely venture without a 10-day quarantine on return.For those who want to stay in the northern hemisphere, at least Portugal made the cut, although Tui executives are doubtless examining the pool facilities in fellow green-lister the Faroe Islands right now. Tui, the world’s biggest tourism company, will give more details of the state of the holiday market when it reports first-half results on Wednesday.Inter
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07 May 2021In recent years many new build systems have emerged to replace traditional make. Although they all have different strengths and weaknesses, one common theme is improving execution performance of the build system. Traditional multiprocessor make systems are generally efficient at scheduling tasks within a given Makefile. Given a dependency graph, child processes can be executed when their dependencies are satisfied and processor cores are available. Unfortunately, this breaks down where multiple Makefiles are used across different directories or modules. The choice that a build system maintainer faces becomes: Using per-directory Makefiles allows developers to compile individual directories in isolation, but doing so means a full build needs to drain out child processes at various points in the build, because the engine cannot recognize dependencies natively; Using fewer Makefiles means more efficient full builds but more difficult isolated compilation, as the developer would need to change directories and specify the correct target to build. However, there's no reason that this choice is inevitable. If the full build can construct a single global dependency graph, but each directory still contains a partial dependency graph, a directory build can operate as well as traditional make and a full build can operate as efficiently as a newer build system. YMAKE attempted to build such a system, and do so without requiring any changes to per-directory Makefiles. Specifying the global graph requires a new syntax to logically graft a child directory into the dependency graph. The remainder of Makefile syntax does not need to change, and conditionals can be used to fall back to recursive navigation if a global dependency graph is not supported. This means that the build system does not require developers to install new build tools to compile, so it still benefits from the ubiquity of make, but having YMAKE just makes the existing build system faster. DIRS=dir_a \ dir_b !IFDEF _YMAKE_VER all[dirs target=all]: $(DIRS) !ELSE all: for %%i in ($(DIRS)) do cd %%i && make && cd .. !ENDIF Rules within Makefiles are unchanged. A regular r
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New York|3 Shot, Including a 4-Year-Old, in Times Square, Police Sayhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/nyregion/times-square-shooting-child.htmlThe police said that the child and two other victims, both women, were expected to survive.Credit...David Dee Delgado/Getty ImagesMay 8, 2021, 6:44 p.m. ETTwo women and a 4-year-old girl were shot in Times Square on Saturday afternoon, the police said.The women and the child, who were not related, were taken to Bellevue Hospital Center and were expected to survive, the police said.No arrests have been made in the shooting, which occurred at about 4:55 p.m. near Seventh Avenue and West 44th Street.“Thankfully these innocent bystanders are in stable condition,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Twitter. “The perpetrators of this senseless violence are being tracked down and the NYPD will bring them to justice. The flood of illegal guns into our city must stop.”The New York Police Department said the public should expect a heavy police presence in Times Square and traffic delays in the surrounding area.Videos and pictures posted on social media showed a helicopter circling above the neighborhood and officers combing through a restaurant.The Broadway show “Come From Away” said on Twitter that “everyone in the Schoenfeld, Golden & Boo
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Queen of colourDesigner Stine Goya is known for her designs that encourage self-expression, all made from sustainable fabrics. Check out her tracksuits, T-shirts and socks all showcasing the House of Goya logo. From £90, stinegoya.com What makes a classic?Lauren Cochrane’s book, The Ten: stories behind the fashion classics, documents the story of 10 key wardrobe pieces including the white T-shirt, jeans and the LBD, charting the story of each item’s creation, its journey to popularity, and why it matters today. (Welbeck, £14.99) guardianbookshop.com Heads, you winBind London specialises in athleisure headwear including wraps, durags and hijabs that protect against sweat, heat and moisture while being the first brand of its kind to cater for all hair types and textures. From £39.97, bindlondon.com
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source | all docs for | all versions | oilshell.org This doc addresses these questions: How do variables behave in Oil? What are some practical guidelines for using them? Oil Design Goals The Oil language is a graceful upgrade to shell, and the behavior of variables follows from that philosophy. Oil implements shell-compatible behavior. It enhances shell with new features like expressions over typed data, which will be familiar to Python and JavaScript programmers. It's a stricter language. Procs (shell functions) are self-contained and modular. In other words, they're understandable by reading their signature. We removed dynamic scope. This mechanism isn't familiar to most programmers, and may cause unintentional mutation (bugs). Oil has variable declarations like JavaScript, which can prevent trivial bugs. Even though Oil is stricter, it should still be convenient to use interactively. Keywords Are More Consistent and Powerful Than Builtins Oil has 5 keywords affect shell variables. Unlike shell builtins, they're statically-parsed, and take dynamically-typed expressions on the right. Declare With var and const This is similar to JavaScript. proc p { var name = 'Bob' const age = (20 + 1) * 2 echo "$name is $age years old" } Mutate With setvar and setglobal proc p { var name = 'Bob' setvar name = 'Alice' setglobal g = 42 } "Return" By Mutating Out Params With setref (advanced) "Out Params" are a more controlled version of shell's dynamic scope. They reuse the nameref mechanism. proc p(s, :myout) { setref myout = "prefix-$s" } Style guideline: In some situations, it's better to "return" a value on stdout, and use $(myproc) to retrieve it. Implementation detail: The out parameter name is "hidden" with a __ prefix. This avoids a problem with nameref cycle detection. Comparison to Shell Shell and bash have grown many mechanisms for "declaring" and mutating variables: "bare" assignments like x=foo builtins like declare, local, and readonly The -n "nameref" flag Examples: readonly name=World declare foo="Hello $name" foo=$((42 + a[2]))
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It isn’t uncommon to see a robot hand-controlled with a glove to mimic a user’s motion. [All Parts Combined] has a different method. Using a Leap Motion controller, he can record hand motions with no glove and then play them back to the robot hand at will. You can see the project in the video, below. The project seems straightforward enough, but apparently, the Leap documentation isn’t the best. Since he worked it out, though, you might find the code useful. An 8266 runs everything, although you could probably get by with less. The Leap provides more data than the hand has servos, so there was a bit of algorithm development. We picked up a few tips about building flexible fingers using heated vinyl tubing. Never know when that’s going to come in handy — no pu
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Sadiq Khan has been elected as mayor of London for a second term, following a victory that was less emphatic than predicted after a late increase in support for his Conservative opponent.As recently as March, polls had given Khan a 25-point lead over his Tory rival, Shaun Bailey, handing him 53% of the vote. That would have seen him win outright on the first round of counting, without the need to count the second preferences of voters. However, with polls tightening in recent weeks, insiders suggested the issue of crime had dented Khan’s lead.After the first day of counting votes on Friday, Khan had a lead of just 24,267 over Bailey. However, as counting progressed on Saturday, it became clear Khan was leading in most of the outstanding areas.When the first preference votes had been coun
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A longline style with shorts is a great summer look. Upcycled blazer, £168, Blond Gone Rogue at wearthlondon.com Wear with a T-shirt and trainers for smart-casual style. Flowy blazer, £69.99, pleated trousers, £49.99, T-shirt, £15.99, and trainers, £49.99, mango.com
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U.S.|As Texas Voting Restrictions Near Passage, Democrats Stage Protesthttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/us/texas-voting-legislature-protest.htmlThe former presidential aspirants Beto O’Rourke and Julián Castro spoke to a crowd demonstrating outside the State Capitol.Credit...Mikala Compton/ReutersMay 8, 2021, 6:29 p.m. ETAUSTIN, Texas — A day after the Texas House of Representatives voted to make it harder to cast a ballot in a state that already has some of the nation’s most restrictive voting laws, leading Democrats and hundreds of supporters gathered outside the State Capitol on Saturday to protest against legislation steaming toward approval in the Republican-led Legislature. “This is the single greatest attack on our democracy, not just in our lifetime, but perhaps in the lifetime of this very democracy,” said former Representative Beto O’Rourke, who was a Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 presidential primary.He was joined by a second former Democratic presidential aspirant, Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor.Saturday’s rally came a day after the State House of Representatives had voted, 78 to 64, to pass Senate Bill 7, which opponents continued to attack as an assault on voting rights despite a number of modifications added by Democrats. The bill now heads back to the State Senate, where representatives from the two chambers will meet in a conference committee to resolve differences between the two versions in the final three weeks of the session.Mr. O’Rourke, citing what he described as “a moment of despair,” reminded the crowd that the Texas bills are among more than 360 Republican-backed measures that are being consid
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Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), a noted vaccine skeptic, has once again cast doubt on the effort to inoculate Americans against the coronavirus on conservative radio ― this time by using real information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that has repeatedly been cited out of context by anti-vaccine campaigners.  The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, is an open-access system maintained by the CDC in order to track potential negative effects of immunizations.  As the VAERS website clearly states, the reports it contains have not been verified, and anyone with an internet connection can submit one. It’s not new; the CDC has been running it for three decades. But during the coronavirus pandemic, it has become a weapon for conspiracy theorists and anti-vaccination activists who use the numbers found there to spread misinformation about vaccines. Speaking with Vicki McKenna, a radio host in Madison, Wisconsin, Johnson brought up the VAERS system, saying, “We are over 3,000 deaths within 30 days of getting the vaccine. About 40% of those occur on day zero, one or two.”  McKenna, who has previously used her show to spread vaccine misinformation, chimed in to say that was “probably a number that’s lagging.” The senator said he was merely “asking questions” and “sticking up for people who choose not to get vaccinated.” CNN was first to report Johnson’s comments and, in statement to the network, a spokesperson for the senator sa
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A roguelike adventure through dungeons filled with dangerous monsters in a quest to find the mystifyingly fabulous Orb of Zot. Play Online Now! Or download for Windows, OS X, Android or Linux. Live games Loading... See all games... Latest News All news... Help & Community Community LearnDB and m
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U.S.|4 Dead in Shooting and Fire Near Baltimore, Police Sayhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/us/baltimore-county-shooting-fire.htmlTwo men and one woman died after a shooting and a townhouse fire, which were related, officials said. The police fatally shot the gunman.Credit...Kim Hairston/Baltimore SunMay 8, 2021Updated 6:28 p.m. ETFour people died, including a gunman who was shot by the police, after officers and firefighters responded to reports of a shooting and a two-alarm fire on Saturday in Baltimore County, Md., the authorities said.Around 6:40 a.m. on Saturday, the authorities respond
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Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) on Saturday granted posthumous pardons to 34 lynching victims. His office said it was the first time a governor had issued a “blanket pardon” of this kind. Some children were among those pardoned, including Howard Cooper, a 15-year-old Black boy who was hanged by a white mob in 1885, and 13-year-old Frederick “whose full name was lost to history,” Hogan said. The governor signed the pardons at an event memorializing Howard, who was killed after an all-white jury found him guilty of raping a white woman. The woman never testified, but the jury reportedly r
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JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli police on Saturday clashed with Palestinian protesters outside Jerusalem’s Old City during the holiest night of Ramadan, in a show of force that threatened to deepen the holy city’s worst religious unrest in several years. Earlier, police blocked busloads of pilgrims headed to Jerusalem to worship. Police defended their actions as security moves, but these were seen as provocations by Muslims who accuse Israel of threatening their freedom of worship. Competing claims in east Jerusalem, home to the city’s most sensitive Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy sites, lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have triggered major rounds of violence in the past. The unrest came a day after violence in which Palestinian medics said more than 200 Palest
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Scots voted to remain in the E.U., and they resent being dictated to by England. And they just plain don’t like Prime Minister Boris Johnson.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York TimesMay 8, 2021Updated 6:06 p.m. ETThe millions of votes cast across Scotland Thursday could be among the most consequential in recent times, and not because of their impact on things like health, education and fisheries. The greatest issue facing the country, and the one that was really at stake, was nowhere to be found on the ballot, and that is the future of its 314-year-old union with England.In the vote for parliamentary elections, the pro-independence Scottish National Party fell short of the majority it had hoped would create an irresistible momentum for a new referendum on breaking away from the United
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Euporie is a text-based user interface for running and editing Jupyter notebooks. Euporie is on pypi, so can be installed using pip: If you are using Windows, you may wish to install some optional python dependencies to render images and HTML tables: pip install euporie[tables,images] Execute notebooks in the terminal Autocompletion in code cells Rich output support, including: Markdown Tables Images Open multiple notebooks side-by-side Good performance with large notebook files Image Support Euporie will attempt to render images in the best possible way it can. The following methods are supported: Sixel If supported by your teminal, euporie can show graphical images in cell outputs This requires one of the following: imagemagik timg teimpy Kitty's termina
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Intersection-free Rigid Body Dynamics Zachary Ferguson1, Minchen Li2,3, Teseo Schneider1,4, Francisca Gil-Ureta1, Timothy Langlois5, Chenfanfu Jiang2,3, Denis Zorin1, Danny M. Kaufman5, Daniele Panozzo1 1New York University, 2University of California, Los Angeles, 3University of Pennsylvania, 4University of Victoria, 5Adobe Research ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH), 2021
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Political unionism in Northern Ireland has been thrown into further flux after the leader of the Ulster Unionist party announced his resignation.Steve Aiken’s move comes 10 days after the Democratic Unionist party leader Arlene Foster was forced to quit after an internal heave against her.The announcement from the South Antrim MLA, who will remain as leader until a successor is chosen, was also prompted by mounting discontent within the party over his stewardship.With Aiken’s decision coming so soon after Foster’s, unionism is set for a significant realignment ahead of next year’s Assembly election.The broader unionist and loyalist community in Northern Ireland has been significantly unsettled by the emergence of Brexit’s Irish Sea border and their political representatives ackno
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Former President Barack Obama said the family had lost “a true friend and loyal companion.”Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesMay 8, 2021Updated 5:41 p.m. ETBo, the Portuguese water dog who became the first presidential pet in the Obama White House, romping in the halls of power, died on Saturday.Bo, who was 12, had cancer, Michelle Obama said on Instagram. President Barack Obama said the family had lost “a true friend and loyal companion.”“For more than a decade, Bo was a constant, gentle presence in our lives — happy to see us on our good days, our bad days, and everyday in between,” Mr. Obama wrote on Twitter.“He tolerated all the fuss that came with being in the White House, had a big bark but no bite, loved to jump in the pool in the summer, was unflappable with chi
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When Angela Rayner secured Labour’s deputy leadership, her authentic working-class credentials and respect from the party’s left instantly made her an important figure in Keir Starmer’s vow to reunite after the internal warring under Jeremy Corbyn. Her sacking as party chair, however, risks reopening Labour wounds that are far from healed.While originally regarded as being on the party’s left flank when she entered parliament in 2015, Rayner has already shown some adept political skill in navigating the years of feuding.While she was seen as on the party’s left, she was also not regarded as a staunch Corbynite. Even as Corbyn’s shadow education secretary, she managed to dodge much of the warring.Many figures in the party actually regard her politics as much more steeped in the
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Willow Smith surprised Jada Pinkett Smith for Mother’s Day by paying homage to her mom’s former metal band, Wicked Wisdom.  During Wednesday’s episode of their Facebook Watch series, “Red Table Talk”  — which they host with Pinkett Smith’s mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris — Smith surprised the actor with a performance featuring members of her former band.  “When I was ... about 3 or 4, I went on tour with my mom and her band, Wicked Wisdom,” Smith says in a recording that played during the episode. “Wicked Wisdom was lit. This is the music that I grew up around, my mother was a  superwoman, she was a rock star, she was a warrior and a nurturer all-in-one.” “So unapologetically badass,” she added.  Smith went on to perform Wicked Wisdom’s song, “Blee
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An enhanced Sinclair BASIC interpreter for modern PCs N.B - SpecBAS.exe in root of this branch is a development/unstable build. For slightly more stability, download the latest release instead. Based on the 1982 Sinclair Spectrum's implementation of Dartmouth BASIC, SpecBAS will run programs for that computer with a reasonably high degree of compatibility. However, where the Spectrum was limited to 256x192 resolution with 8 colours (and two levels of brightness), SpecBAS offers flexible screen resolutions and 256 colours (32bit is a feature in development). Due to this, certain functions of the original language will not work as they did back in the 80s. The ATTR function is not implemented, as each pixel can be any colour from the palette rather
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Mikel Arteta expects to be backed heavily by the Kroenke family in his efforts to reverse Arsenal’s slide and accepts significant changes to a floundering squad will be required over the summer.Arsenal host West Brom on Sunday in what is virtually a dead rubber, with the sides having purely mathematical chances of qualifying for Europe and escaping relegation respectively. Thursday’s Europa League semi-final exit to Villarreal has put Arteta in a deeply uncomfortable position and only a handful of his core first-teamplayers seem assured of a place in his long-term plans.“The squad needs changing.” he said. “There were already a lot of changes in December, something that has not been done in years, but it tells us where we were. Things are going to have to change and the owners ar
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Google’s SRE book has become a Bible for software companies that want to learn better ops practices. It’s a well-written and informative book about concepts that weren’t talked much about previously in our industry. It’s also free to read online and is not part of a marketing or sales strategy with shady affiliate links or a “pay to upgrade” bonus edition.But one chapter in particular (Being On-Call) has advice that seems to only apply to seemingly utopian companies with unlimited resourcing and headcount. So I wanted to frame some of their concepts in a way that’s useful for smaller organizations, explore some even more basic principles around both technical and organizational aspects of managing sustainable on-call rotations for all sorts of software teams, and hopefully gi
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Here's how I built the first ultrasonic 3d scanner in the world that works in the air, using off-the-shelf components (< $100). 1 Four years ago, I was 15 and wanted to build an autonomous drone to deliver me Coke cans. For that, I needed an accurate 3D map of the surroundings of my drone to avoid walls and objects in its way. Lidars were too expensive and SLAM2 didn't work well. There were ultrasonic sensors, but they could only give out the distance to the nearest object in a 40° cone, which wasn't enough for me. But, if humans can locate the exact direction of a sound, why can't an ultrasonic sensor do it too? That would allow me to scan in 3d. First idea: one emitter and multiple receivers. A transmitter emits a wave, which bounces on objects, and two receivers triangulate
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Emma Hayes has been showing her Chelsea team films of geese flying in V formation and, by way of proving the point, does a decent impression of the birds honking encouragement to each other. Quite apart from enlivening a Zoom-enabled media address, the manager can think of no better way to limber up for Sunday’s Women’s Super League title denouement than reminding her formidable squad about the importance of teamwork.“I’ve shown the players geese videos,” says Hayes whose WSL leaders are two points clear of Manchester City before their final game at home to Reading. “I’ve shown them why geese fly in V formation, what everybody’s role is, how geese support each other and, most importantly, why you fly further together. That’s the bottom line. Geese wouldn’t be able to migrate to the sun without all travelling together. It’s the same for us.”Although Chelsea’s goal difference is slightly superior to that of Gareth Taylor’s side – who visit West Ham – Hayes is adamant victory remains imperative. A win on Sunday will not merely guarantee a second successive title but serve as an ideal warm up for next Sunday’s Women’s Champions League final against Barcelona.Among the reasons Chelsea are soaring is that Hayes’s band of internationals is studded with not only natural leaders but players capable of ensuring that leading roles on the pitch are regularly rotated.Geese take turns to head the V and by bearing the brunt of the wind resistance, make life easier for those flying behind. In a similar vein, Chelsea have relied on assorted individuals including the forwards Fran Kirby and Sam Kerr, the defender Magda Eriksson and the goalkeeper Ann-K
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Business|Cruise Line Threatens to Skip Florida Ports Over Proof-of-Vaccination Banhttps://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/08/business/norwegian-cruise-line-florida-desantis.htmlNorwegian Cruise Line plans to require Covid-19 vaccine documentation from its crew members and customers, but Florida recently enacted a law that bars businesses from doing so.Credit...Angel Valentin for The New York TimesMay 8, 2021, 4:35 p.m. ETNorwegian Cruise Line is threatening to keep its ships out of Florida ports after the state enacted legislation that prohibits businesses from requiring proof of vaccination against Covid-19 in exchange for services.The company, which plans to have its first cruises available to the Caribbean and Europe this summer and fall, will offer trips with limited capacity and require all guests and crew members to be vaccinated on bookings through at least the end of October.During a quarterly earnings call on Thursday, Frank Del Rio, chief executive of Norwegian Cruise Line, said the issue had been discussed with Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican. Mr. Del Rio said if the cruise line had to skip Florida ports, it could operate out of other states or the Caribbean.“We certainly hope it doesn’t come to that,” Mr. Del Rio said. “Everyone wants to operate out of Florida. It’s a very lucrative market.”The clash between Norwegian Cruise Line and Florida is one of the many that are likely to surface about how states and businesses address whether proof of vaccination will be required. While some states have yet to take a position on businesses requiring vaccines, others are already operating with such protocols in place.At many events in New York, such
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Jürgen Klopp has described Champions League qualification as unlikely for Liverpool. He has even spoken of it in the past tense in recent weeks. It remains, however, a possibility in the present. Sadio Mané’s first half header and Thiago Alcântara’s first goal for the club downed Southampton and heighten the anxiety clearly being felt in Leicester.The Premier League champions, for a few more days at least, can sniff blood in the form of Brendan Rodgers’ faltering fourth-placed team. This performance was not a convincing argument for their own prospects of ending a troubled season with a flourish but, after two wasteful draws, the end product was all that mattered for Klopp and his players.The curse of Liverpool central defenders continued with Ozan Kabak and fellow deadline-day signing Ben Davies, who has yet to play a single minute for the club, joining Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joël Matip on the sidelines with injury. Klopp therefore had little option but to deploy the inexperienced duo of Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams. Injury cost Southampton striker Danny Ings the opportunity to trouble his former team for the second time this season while Theo Walcott replaced the ineligible Takumi Minamino.With the notable exception of the heart of his defence, Klopp was able to field a seasoned team of internationals against opponents whose form has also nosedived in 2021. The yet-to-be-deposed Premier League champions started where they left off against Newcastle last time out at Anfield: controlling possession, crafting clear openings and allowing the visitors to escape punishment far too often. As the regular anguished shrieks from Ralph Hasenhüttl testified, however, Southampton were also guilty of squandering fine chances throughout an open and eventful first half.Mané should have edged Liverpool ahead when picked out unmarked on the edge of the Southampton area by Trent Alexander-Arnold’s pinpoint pass out of defence. The Senegal striker’s first touch took him inside Jannik Vestergaard but, with a clear sight of Fraser Forster’s goal, he blazed high into the Anfield Road stand to the visible annoyance of his manager.Forster, recalled in place
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Oh, Sergio. A reminder from Mr Guardiola to all boys – particularly those who are leaving the Etihad Campus at the end of the year. Term is not over. The final exam is not yet passed. And this really isn’t the moment to start having fun.This was an odd, increasingly gripping game. A 2-1 Chelsea win only delayed the inevitable title celebrations for Manchester City. But it carried a genuine significance for Thomas Tuchel, firming up the likelihood of a top four finish and ensuring his future employment to – shall we say? – at least November.Whatever happens from here, the last half-season has been a startlingly assured and lucid period of coaching-on-the-hoof from a man who really does look and sound like he’s enjoying himself to an indecent degree right now.It took a while to get there. At times in the first half Manchester City and Chelsea seemed to be dishing up the kind of weekend fare we might have witnessed under the Super League regime – players rested, feints and bluffs in play, a game with another game on its mind.At which point a football match broke out, pegged around an act of unexpected slapstick in first-half injury time from a man who has 182 Premier League goals to his name and has earned a degree of balls-of-steel arrogance.With 44 minutes gone Raheem
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Warren Gatland has insisted the squad he picked for the British & Irish Lions tour to South Africa would have looked different had the destination been New Zealand, and different again were it to be heading for Australia. It is always difficult to discern whether such claims are genuine or just easy soundbites to make a coach’s job sound more nuanced, but a quick glance at the age profile of this and previous squads suggests there may be something in it.If the last cycle of Lions tours is anything to go by, the pattern is for old against the Springboks, youngish for the All Blacks and positively wet behind the ears for the Wallabies.The Gatland era could be said to stretch across the same period (he was assistant coach the last time the Lions toured South Africa, in 2009, and has been head coach ever since). This squad is the oldest he has picked.The average age is 28.5, a shade more veteran than the 2009 party, whose average age was 28.1. Four years later, the squad for Australia was 26.1 and in 2017 for New Zealand it was 26.8. This might be said to fit neatly with typical conceptions of “how to beat” those rugby nations.Gregor Townsend, Gatland’s attack coach, represents a style of rugby received wisdom tells us is superfluous when it comes to beating the Springboks. He is happy to share a vignette from his time as a Sharks player in Durban. “Their mentality is based on running over the top of you,” he says. “I remember playing a pre-season friendly and John Smit was our captain.“We were struggling to get over the gainline running off 9. We came into a huddle and I said: ‘Guys, we need to be moving the ball wide.’ John looked at me and said: ‘No, Gregor, we just need to run harder off 9.’ That sums up South Africa.”In such debates about how a team is going to play, broadly speaking, they are attempting to position them on a spectrum from pragmatic to ambitious. Normally, everyone settles into a conclusion, as this week, that a “balance between the two” will be necessary to prevail.If you had to plump for one, though, you would expect this squad, much like their opponents in the Test series, to end up somewhat closer to the pragma
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History was made in Scotland on Saturday as the country elected its first woman of colour to serve as a member of the Scottish parliament (MSP).Kaukab Stewart won her race for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the Glasgow Kelvin constituency, describing the achievement as an “honour”.“It is without doubt an honour to be elected as the first woman of colour to the Scottish parliament,” Stewart said in her acceptance speech on Saturday.“It has taken too long, but to all the women and girls of colour out there: the Scottish parliament belongs to you too, so whilst I may be the first, I will not be the last.“I intend to be a voice for every single person in Kelvin that I’ve been elected to represent. Whether you voted for me or not, please know my door will always be open.”The Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, praised the historic win, saying she “could not be prouder right now”.“I am thrilled beyond words to see Kaukab Stewart elected. Party politics aside, this is a special and important moment. It has taken far too long, but @kaukabstewart is the first woman of colour to be elected to the Scottish parliament,” she tweeted.Party politics aside, this is a special and important moment. It has taken far too long, but @kaukabstewart is the first woman of colour to be elected to the Scottish Parliament. I could not be prouder right now. https://t.co/0mLToFErwh— Nicola Sturgeon (@NicolaSturgeon) May 8, 2021 Stewart beat the co-leader of Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie, to take over the seat from Sandra White, also of the SNP. Stewart won 14,535 votes, compared with 9,077 for Harvie.As the regional list seats were allocated into the early evening, Scottish Labour’s Pam Duncan-Glancy became the first permanent wheelchair-using MSP, representing Glasgow region. Duncan-Glancy told reporters: “I promise to do everything in my power to make sure that the path for the next disabled and permanent wheelchair-using MSP is nowhere near as hard as it has been for the first.”She congratulated Stewart describing it as a “fantastic result”. “It really has been an incredibly special day for equalities.”In Wales, Natasha Asghar became t
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Saturday Night Live will be live from New York— and streaming to 100 countries around the world for the first time ever, NBC announced. Elon Musk is hosting the show for the first time (in case you have not read anything else on The Verge dot com today), and Miley Cyrus will be the musical guest. “‘SNL’ is a global phenomenon and this livestream marks the first time audiences around the world will experience the show simultaneously along with the US,” Frances Berwick of NBCU said in a statement. “It’s incredibly exciting to create this worldwide event with host Elon Musk and
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Manchester United have missed out on a proposed new training kit deal worth £200m over 10 years after the Manchester-based company The Hut Group had concerns about the supporters’ campaign to boycott the club’s commercial partners in protest at the Glazers’ ownership, the Observer understands.Richard Arnold, United’s group managing director, was told on Friday that THG had pulled out of a contract which was due to start on 1 July.The branding of Myprotein, a Cheshire firm owned by THG, was due to appear on United’s training kit and replace the branding of AON, sponsors of the club
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← At the end of 1950's my great-grandmother was the last inhabitant of the family farm. One day she locked the door and went away never to return. When we visited the place couple of years ago, the easiest way to get there was to drive to the closest village, then proceed by foot. We had to pass through some fields, then through a forest. Finally, we've descended into a swampy gorge overgrown with vegetation. The path was barely passable. Blackberries and nettles were growing everywhere. We've walked down along the stream. We've passed the cellars, carved into soft tuff rock, that once belonged to the farm. Now they were empty, with no doors and half-filled with water. Then we have arrived at the farm itself. The stone-and-adobe walls were reduced to almost nothing. You could see them sticking out of the thicket here and there and that was it. Eerily, in this country without people, there was an improvised goat shed built out of sticks and plastic foil among the weed, leaning against the remnant of a wall. There were no goats, nor people, to be seen though. I've always considered this part of Slovakia, stretching roughly from the town of Krupina towards Veľký Krtíš and Lučenec, to be an enchanted land. It is wild and mostly empty, with hard-to-access depopulated villages and small farms all over the place. If you travel to the area you will experience a genuine post-apocalyptic feeling. Everything is seemingly falling apart. Nature is taking over. Unemployment rate is around 30%. The region has the highest support for neo-Nazi parties in the country. I never knew much about the history of the region and it was just by a coincidence that I've stumbled upon an interview with a person who wrote a study about what happened to this once populous and prosperous region in the second half XIX. and the first half of XX. century. It was so weirdly (but not entirely) reminiscent of some of the problems that developed societies are facing today that I'll try to recount the story in English to make it available to wider audience. In XIX. century the trend of having a single child took hold among protestants of the historical regions of Novohrad, Hont, Malohont and Gemer. Quite obviously, it was a measure against getting impoverished by splitting the family property. However, that can't possibly be the full explanation. First, catholics faced pretty much the sa
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Republican Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a bill into law to allow hunters and government-hired private contractors to kill up to 90% of the state’s 1,500 wolves. Little signed the bill on Thursday after it passed the state’s Senate and House with enough votes to override a veto, The Associated Press reported. The measure saw heavy backing from the agricultural industry, with supporters saying there are “too many” wolves in Idaho. “They’re destroying ranchers. They’re destroying wildlife,” said GOP Sen. Mark Harris, one of the bill’s sponsors, during a Senate debate last month. From 2018-20 there were an average of 113 confirmed cows and sheep killed by wolves in Idaho per year, out of 2.73 million cows and sheep in the state, Outside Online reported. In contrast, the state’s ranchers lose about 40,000 cows each year to causes including disease, weather and birthing complications. Though it’s possible the true number killed by wolves is greater, the “worst-case” scenario would mean that wolves are responsible for killing up to 0.02% of the state’s livestock. In addition to permitting the state to hire out the killing of more than 1,000 wolves, it also permits new methods of killing wolves, including shooting them from helicopters, chasing them on snowmobiles and ATV and using night-vision equipment. Opponents of the bill included some prominent organizations that normally support hunting, National Geographic noted, including the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and the Idaho Sportsmen group. Retired wildlife manager Carter Niemeyer, who worked as the wolf recovery coordinator for Idaho, told NatGeo that the legislation was “senseles
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The actor Scarlett Johansson urged the film industry on Saturday to “step back” from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as criticism of the opaque film industry group, which controls the influential Golden Globe awards, continues to mount for sexism and racism.In a carefully-worded statement, the Avengers star said the “HFPA is an organization that was legitimized by the likes of Harvey Weinstein to amass momentum for Academy recognition.”Johansson said that “as an actor promoting a film”, participating in the organization’s press conferences and award shows “has often meant facing sexist questions and remarks by certain HFPA members that bordered on sexual harassment”.“Unless there is necessary fundamental reform within the organization, I believe it is time that we take a step back from the HFPA,” she added.The actor’s stance follows a letter from the Netflix CEO, Ted Sarandos, on Friday to the organization stating that the streaming giant will not participate with the Globes unless the group pledges to reform itself.That was followed by the Amazon Studios chief, Jennifer Salke, who said in a statement that Amazon had “not been working with the HFPA since these issues were first raised, and like the rest of the industry, we are awaiting a sincere and significant resolution before moving forward”.A day earlier, about 75 of the insular HFPA’s 86 members voted for an inclusion and overhaul proposal put forward by the group’s board. In Febru
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Names: Clive Smallman and Mary HaropoulouYears together: 38Occupations: academicsClive Smallman and Mary Harapoulou were polar opposites when they first got together, they say. He was an agnostic Englishman while she was religious and Greek. Now, after almost 40 years together, while many differences remain, some things have shifted. Mary recalls the Greek proverb about adding a drop of water to wine. “It means that you dilute the feelings a little,” she explains. “You don’t harass, [demanding] ‘I want to do this or that’. You find the common ground.”They met in 1983 while both studying at Essex University. Mary wanted to learn squash and a mutual friend suggested Clive could coach her. He laughs remembering: “I always say I taught Mary to play squash and she taught me to swear in Greek.”He was intrigued by the “mysterious brown-haired, brown-eyed woman with a foreign accent”. He says: “I thought what a pretty girl and she was a pretty good squash player as well.”While Mary’s memory of those early days is rusty, she remembers enjoying his company – even if the fair-haired Clive wasn’t quite her usual type. “My stereotype is the George Clooneys of this world,” she laughs.Clive was intrigued by the ‘mysterious brown-haired, brown-eyed woman with a foreign accent.’ Mary Haropoulou, Santorini 1988. Photograph: Clive Smallman and Mary HaropoulouSlowly their friendship deepened. Clive took Mary home to meet his parents, and when she introduced him to his future father-in-law, he was immediately welcomed – even though Clive later discovered that Mary’s dad, Costa, had told the rest of the family: “Mary’s met a very nice boy – what a shame he’s not Greek.”‘I can’t have any secrets from him because he understands everything. If I speak Greek on the phone, he will get it,’ says Mary. The couple on their wedding day in 1990. Photograph: Clive Smallman and Mary HaropoulouBut when Mary finished her degree, she couldn’t get a job in the UK so she returned to Athens. They remained close, visiting when they could and writing letters to each other. Clive looked forward to receiving them each week: “I used to get these wonderful, cultural stories of different things which I’d never experienced.” Mary illustrated her missives, something which Clive still treasures. “I used to get one, sometimes two a week with these lovely drawings, particularly of Asterix and Obelix from the Asterix comics, and other cartoons, pictures and all sorts of caricatures.”After three years apart, Mary returned to the UK and the couple moved in together. It helped the relationship when Clive learned to speak her language. He says that, since she had to spend all day working in English, “it seemed only fair … that she had someone to chat to in the evening, so I learnt Greek”. He adds: “Occasionally when we have one of our moments, you’ll find Mary telling me off in English and I’ll be answering her in Greek – which is a bit perverse.” Mary laughs: “I can’t have any secrets from him because he understands everything. If I speak Greek on the phone, he will get it. That’s the downside to it.”Af
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After Thatcherism and Corbynism, welcome to Houchenism, the doctrine of Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen, and endorsed by a whopping 73% of Teesside voters. This 34-year-old northern loyalist is the Tory party’s contemporary version of Michael Heseltine, the lone standard bearer at Thatcher’s zenith of a willingness to intervene “at breakfast, lunch and supper”. Houchen is today’s Tory carrying the Heseltine torch, intervening to reinvent Teesside with the massive backing of his electorate. And a generation later, this Heseltine de nos jours has the backing, not the loathing, of the prime minister. It will not have escaped Boris Johnson’s notice, a self-described Brexity Hezza, that Houchen’s intervention is working big time, economically and politically.This do-it-if-it-works local Tory politician is reinventing the Conservative party as it attempts to deliver on its promise to level up. The string of initiatives Houchen has launched encompasses the ideological spectrum. Nationalisation? If that is the only way to keep and expand Teesside International Airport, of course, even if details of the public financing remain opaque. A free port for Teesside as a deregulatory free-for-all? Of course, if that means jobs and inward investment for his area.A green new deal? He is on it, proclaiming that a green industrial revolution is the avenue to hi-tech, well-paid, 21st-century jobs. Thus he has instigated the Net Zero Industry Innovation Centre, attracting the establishment of the National Hydrogen Transport Centre in partnership with Teesside University with the aim of making Teesside the UK’s hydrogen manufacturing hub. Wind farms? He is on them too, creating the Teesworks Offshore Manufacturing Centre, in which GE Renewable Energy has just announced it will create a plant to build state-of-the-art wind turbine blades. What Houchen is doing is a textbook example of a “super-cluster”, turning Teesside into a self-reinforcing virtuous circle of complementary industries in a public-private partnership, supported by the local university and FE colleges.OK, he has been backed to the hilt by Johnson, who insisted that his free-market-inclined chancellor and business secretary get with the programme, abandon their throwback, dead-end Thatcherism and write the cheques that make it all possible. There was general bafflement when Rishi Sunak announced that 750 Treasury jobs were going to Darlington and not the obvious centre in the north, Leeds. That missed the point. Darlington is part of Teesside and Houchen was being obliged.Teesside voters, and that includes Hartlepool, have noticed. They like what they see. It has imagination, verve and a vision. Of course they backed it on Thursday. Yes, it is true that the Blair government established One North East – one of the more dynamic regional development agencies that, for example, laid the foundations of the North East Technology Park (NETPark) in Durham, where a space innovation centre is to be based – and which the coalition government criminally abolished in 2010. But Blair as a Sedgefield MP and Peter Mandelson as a Hartlepool MP abjured the kind of aggressive activism of Houchen,
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Welcome to the party, pal! The 1980s action movie heroes are coming en masse to Warzone. After this week's tease that Rambo will be added to the battle royale, Activision has indicated Die Hard's John McClane is on his way, too. — Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) May 8, 2021 Activision even created a website for a fictional air conditioning repair company called Nakatomi Duct Cleaning, offering its services in Verdansk.The website says "A NAKATOMI CORP DIVISION MASTERING A/C DUCT CLEANING SINCE 1988", but the current Warzone map is set in 1984. Nah... I'm applying too much logic to Call of Duty h
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“We are called, all of us, for a time and for a season and God would have us use it wisely.”Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister and a Pentecostal Christian, flew in on a taxpayer-funded plane to deliver those words to a church on the Gold Coast.His sermon-like speech was given to the national conference of Australian Christian Churches – the umbrella body for the majority of churches in the country’s only Christian denomination showing growth: Pentecostalism.Pentecostals, including the more than 1,000 churches under ACC’s umbrella – which includes the Morrison family’s Horizon church in south Sydney – is now the second largest Christian congregation behind Catholics.
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When the Canterbury Bankstown council announced it had cancelled the annual and extremely popular Ramadan night markets in Lakemba, there was disappointment all round.The markets have grown to become a staple during Ramadan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset.The markets attract people from all over Sydney, who pour into Lakemba, for food stalls set up along Haldon Street for people to snack on late into the night, often hours after many have broken their fast. Above: Chips on a stick and Lebanese shawarma rolls are some of the popular takeaway foods people line up for at the annual Ramadan night markets. Below: Lebanese coffee being made in ho
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Whether you care to admit it or not, hair is important to self-image, and not being able to deal with it yourself feels like a real loss of independence. To help people with limited mobility, researchers at MIT CSAIL have created a hair-brushing robot that combines a camera with force feedback and closed-loop control to adjust to any hair type from straight to curly on the fly. They achieved this by examining hair as double helices of soft fibers and developed a mathematical model to untangle them much like a human would — by working from the bottom up. It may look like a hairbrush strapped to a robot arm, but there’s more to it than that. Before it ever starts brushi
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Californians pay for some of the most expensive electricity in the United States. They also live in one of the greenest states, at least from an energy perspective. California is only going to get greener. Meanwhile, electricity bills are expected to continue their rise. Some deny there is a link between the two.The facts show otherwise.A paper by the California Public Utilities Commission released earlier this year identified the state's plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by adopting more renewable energy as one big factor for bigger utility bills and expectations for further increases in electricity rates in the coming years.The report said that while the state's plans to
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This week, if you pottered along to the Mendip Hill near Cheddar, Somerset, you'd probably have caught a glimpse of something a bit off: a huge chalk artwork of a lycan.Local press reported the strange image on Monday, 3rd May after it popped up overnight - and seemingly had no idea what it was about or who made it. Its true nature was revealed when Resident Evil Village came out on Friday - it was a Capcom PR stunt. And a pretty cool one, I'll admit.The Somerset County Gazette sounded thrilled to find out one of their local hills had been used to promote a video game they'd never heard of with a 58m high and more than 100m long chalk lyca
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