The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

MPs urge Labour to ditch £330m Palantir software contract with NHS

Cross-party group backs call from science and technology committee to look at alternative options, citing ‘serious mistrust’

A second parliamentary committee has urged Labour to scrap Palantir’s £330m contract with the NHS, increasing pressure on the next prime minister over government deals with the US tech company.

MPs on the health and social care select committee want the NHS to cut ties with Palantir and find a replacement for its system, which is supposed to unify and analyse huge amounts of often highly sensitive NHS health data.

Continue reading...

LGBTQ+ cruise ship refused entry to Egypt days after Turkey turned it away

Scarlet Lady’s 2,000 passengers informed of change as one of those onboard pledges to ‘sparkle and spend elsewhere’

A LGBTQ+ cruise ship blocked from Turkish waters earlier this week has been refused entry into Egypt.

The Scarlet Lady’s 2,000 passengers, including the Broadway performer Patti LuPone, woke on Thursday morning to find a note placed under their cabin doors informing them that the ship was urgently looking for alternative ports.

Continue reading...

From Greek epics to biblical blockbusters: the 20 best mythological movies – ranked!

Ahead of the release of Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, we rate the top films based on myths, legends and fables

Featuring the young Henry Cavill as a Theseus who barely gets near a labyrinth, this Hellenic “reimagination” bags precious little deep mythological significance. But visuals ace Tarsem Singh at least gives it a strikingly theatrical and oppressive look. Unforgettable images include the Titans locked into their magical prison like ranks of table-football players, the sotto in su vision of the warring gods at the end and the campest Mount Olympus in cinema – like a gleaming Siegfried and Roy Vegas set.

Continue reading...

kottke.org

Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products

XKCD: What if chess included the offside rule? (If...

XKCD: What if chess included the offside rule? (If someone hasn’t done one already, I’d guess at least one person is working on a playable Football Chess game rn.)

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Maersk vaart weer door Rode Zee en Suezkanaal

KOPENHAGEN (ANP/RTR) - Het Deense scheepvaartconcern Maersk laat schepen tussen het Midden-Oosten en de Amerikaanse oostkust weer via het Suezkanaal varen. Hiermee zet de containerrederij een nieuwe stap in het herstel van de scheepvaartroutes door de Rode Zee.

De meeste grote rederijen stopten eerder met varen via het Suezkanaal toen Houthi-rebellen uit Jemen aanvallen uitvoerden in de Rode Zee. Schepen werden daardoor gedwongen om de aanzienlijk langere route rond Kaap de Goede Hoop in het zuiden van Afrika te nemen. De laatste tijd kijken scheepvaartconcerns echter weer naar de mogelijkheden voor een geleidelijke terugkeer naar de snellere vaarroute langs Egypte.

Maersk maakte maandag al bekend dat het enkele afvaarten via het Suezkanaal zou hervatten die worden uitgevoerd binnen zijn samenwerking met het Duitse Hapag-Lloyd.


Iran wijt nieuw geweld aan 'avonturen' VS in Straat van Hormuz

TEHERAN (ANP) - De Iraanse Revolutionaire Garde heeft de Amerikaanse "avonturen" in de Straat van Hormuz aangewezen als oorzaak van het oplaaiende geweld tussen beide landen. Volgens Iran moeten de Amerikanen stoppen zich te bemoeien met de vaarroutes in die zeestraat, anders zullen de Iraniërs "verwoestend reageren".

Iran wil de Straat van Hormuz zelf controleren, in samenwerking met Oman, het land dat aan de overkant van het water ligt. De Iraanse autoriteiten wijzen de schepen een vaarroute aan die langs de kust van Iran gaat. De Amerikanen hebben liever dat de schepen via de kust van Oman varen, verder weg van de Iraniërs. De gewenste controle van Iran heeft de afgelopen dagen geleid tot meerdere aanvallen op schepen die zich volgens Teheran niet aan de toegestane vaarroute hielden.

De Revolutionaire Garde stelt dat, na een geleidelijke heropening van de zeestraat, nu steeds meer schepen toestemming krijgen, maar alleen als ze zich aan de Iraanse voorschriften houden.


Pionier in afro-cosmetica, sponsor van soul en funk

Zijn middelbare school heeft hij nooit afgemaakt, maar als ondernemer slaagde George E. Johnson wel. De zwarte zakenman werd een icoon voor de Afro-Amerikaanse gemeenschap.

Found Slide -- Ira Richolson Collection

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Slide -- Ira Richolson Collection

date stamped on slide June 1990

Hawaii Parent

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Hawaii Parent

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Britain's cloud habit has become a billion-pound risk

Amid calls for digital sovereignty, a report warns that more than 60 percent of UK companies depend on cloud services for critical functions, and an outage in one or more of the big providers could prove costly. Researchers at the Cyber Monitoring Centre nonprofit found a high level of cloud dependence among British firms, rising to more than 80 percent among FTSE 100 firms, and say this means cloud outages will disproportionately affect some of the country's most economically important companies. Their report, The Cost of Downtime: UK Exposure to Cloud Infrastructure Failure, highlights Amazon as an example. Its European AWS cloud region (eu-west-1) in Dublin and its primary US cloud region (us-east-1) in Northern Virginia are identified as the largest aggregation points where failures could trigger widespread economic disruption for Brit businesses. It estimates that a 24-hour outage in either of these regions could result in revenue losses of £1 billion ($1.34 billion) and £650 million ($872 million), respectively. Those figures only include losses incurred by users of the affected clouds, rather than any firms or supply chains that might depend on the affected companies. While the Cyber Monitoring Centre picks out AWS in particular for that example, it notes that there were outages at datacenters belonging to all the big clouds in 2025, and an extended issue at any would likely be similarly costly because of the potential number of UK firms affected. In fact, 80 percent of those businesses using the cloud are dependent on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Cloud risk is also concentrated in a few cloud regions, the report says, with half of FTSE 100 companies dependent on UK and Ireland cloud regions, while the other half have exposure to other regions. Small companies tend to rely more heavily on the UK and Ireland regions. Anyone reading this might wonder what all the fuss is about. Aren't cloud services inherently more reliable than operating your own infrastructure? Those giant bit barns full of whirring servers have built-in redundancy so your workload will fail over to another if something goes wrong, and it is all watched over by trained staff with the right monitoring tools and skills to quickly fix any issues, right? Cast your minds back to last October, when a technical issue in the AWS us-east-1 region led to exactly the kind of scenario the report warns about. A flaw in the DNS management system for DynamoDB led to the failure of services that needed to connect to it, and many of these turned out to be vital AWS functions that other services depended on, with the effects rippling out from us-east-1 to impact Lloyds Banking Group and the UK government, plus many others in this country. The report points out that many cloud-dependent companies employ multi-region redundancy, but that may not have helped in the AWS incident because many of the firm's services are ultimately dependent on us-east-1 being online. AWS said of the mega outage in October that it would "look for additional ways to avoid impact from a similar event in the future, and how to further reduce time to recovery." According to the Cyber Monitoring Centre, its findings reveal a UK economy that is increasingly dependent on cloud infrastructure, with exposure concentrated at a small number of critical failure points. "This concentration creates systemic vulnerabilities that require coordinated action from companies, insurers, regulators, and policymakers to manage effectively," said Cyber Monitoring Centre CEO Will Mayes. "This isn't about stepping back from the cloud; it's about recognizing that cloud is now part of our critical infrastructure and designing, governing, and investing accordingly." Many companies also lack full visibility into their cloud dependencies, such as which providers and regions they rely on, and what revenue depends on those services. Addressing these issues should be a priority. The report also warns that multi-cloud strategies alone do not eliminate risk. Even firms using multiple providers often concentrate their critical workloads in a small number of regions. Companies should assess whether their cloud footprint truly distributes risk or simply creates operational complexity, it says. Parametrix, a provider of digital infrastructure insurance, also contributed to the research, citing its network of monitoring systems used to collect and analyze data on the performance and availability of critical infrastructure. Earlier this year, another report warned that Britain's public sector reliance on US tech companies such as the big cloud operators was creating security risks, because of the US CLOUD Act and because volatile politicians could cut off access to the cloud services that the public sector uses. ®