Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
NEW YORK (ANP) - Jefferies Financial Group behoorde dinsdag tot de winnaars op de beurzen in New York. Volgens zakenkrant Financial Times werkt de Japanse kredietverstrekker Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) aan plannen voor een mogelijke overname van de Amerikaanse investeringsbank. Jefferies is een belangrijke partner van SMFG en het Japanse bedrijf heeft al een groot belang in de Amerikaanse bank. Het aandeel Jefferies, dat dit jaar ongeveer een derde in waarde is gedaald, steeg meer dan 4 procent.
De algehele stemming op Wall Street was terughoudend na het koersherstel een dag eerder. De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde kort na opening 0,8 procent lager op 45.829 punten. De brede S&P 500 zakte 0,5 procent tot 6547 punten en de techbeurs Nasdaq verloor 0,5 procent tot 21.835 punten.
Maandag wonnen de drie beursgraadmeters ruim 1 procent door de hoop op een naderend einde van de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. President Donald Trump zei maandag de aanvallen op Iraanse energiefaciliteiten de komende vijf dagen op te schorten om ruimte te bieden voor onderhandelingen. Iran ontkende echter onderhandelingen te voeren met de Amerikanen. Ook heeft Iran volgens het Israëlische leger dinsdag meerdere raketten afgevuurd op Israël.
Olieprijzen
Door de aanhoudende onzekerheid rond het conflict gingen de olieprijzen weer omhoog, na de sterke daling een dag eerder. Een vat Amerikaanse olie kostte 4,7 procent meer op 92,30 dollar en Brentolie, de maatstaf voor olie uit het Midden-Oosten en Europa, werd 3,6 procent duurder op 103,60 dollar per vat. Maandag kelderden de olieprijzen nog tot ruim 11 procent.
Estée Lauder zakte 6 procent. Het Amerikaanse cosmeticamerk voert gesprekken met het Spaanse Puig Brands om het moederconcern van bekende merken als Jean Paul Gaultier, Nina Ricci en Charlotte Tilbury over te nemen. Puig heeft een marktwaarde van ongeveer 9 miljard euro. Door Puig over te nemen zou Estée Lauder beter de concurrentie aan kunnen gaan met de Franse rivaal L'Oréal.
De fabrikant van wifi-routers en netwerkswitches Netgear werd 14 procent meer waard. De Amerikaanse FCC heeft de import van in het buitenland geproduceerde routers verboden, omdat deze volgens de toezichthouder een risico vormen voor de nationale veiligheid.
WOLFSBURG (ANP/RTR) - Volkswagen roept bijna 100.000 elektrische auto's terug vanwege problemen met batterijmodules, maakte de Duitse transportautoriteit KBA dinsdag bekend.
De terugroepactie betreft zo'n 75.000 auto's uit Volkswagens ID.-serie en bijna 20.000 Cupra Borns die tussen februari 2022 en augustus 2024 zijn geproduceerd. Ongeveer 28.000 elektrische VW's worden in Duitsland teruggeroepen. Het is nog niet bekend of en hoeveel auto's in Nederland terug moeten naar de garage.
TEHERAN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Iran heeft de export van aardgas naar Turkije stopgezet, nadat Israël vorige week het South Pars-gasveld had aangevallen. Dat melden ingewijden aan persbureau Bloomberg. South Pars is het grootste gasveld ter wereld, Iran deelt het veld met Qatar.
Turkije kocht vorig jaar ongeveer 14 procent van zijn gas van Iran, blijkt uit cijfers van de Turkse koepelorganisatie voor aardgasdistributeurs. Het land importeert nog wel gas uit zijn belangrijkste leveranciers Rusland en Azerbeidzjan en kan putten uit voorraden, aldus de bronnen.
Het is onduidelijk hoe lang de leveringstop duurt. Het Turkse ministerie van Energie wilde geen commentaar geven tegenover Bloomberg.
Door de aanvallen in het Midden-Oosten en de vrijwel afgesloten Straat van Hormuz zijn de olie- en gasprijzen de afgelopen weken fors gestegen. De zeestraat is belangrijk voor het transport van energie uit die regio. Doorgaans vaart ongeveer een vijfde van alle olie wereldwijd door de Straat van Hormuz.
The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world
Continue reading...Moscow appears to step up spring offensive amid concerns international focus on Iran war leaves Kyiv more vulnerable
Russia has launched a fresh wave of missile and drone strikes on civilian areas across Ukraine, killing at least five people, as Moscow appears to be stepping up a spring offensive intended to break Ukrainian resistance along the front.
Moscow fired nearly 400 long-range drones and 23 cruise missiles overnight, Ukraine’s air force said, marking one of the largest attacks in weeks after a relative lull.
Continue reading...Nasa reports show repeated warnings of close calls before crash that killed two pilots and injured 41 others
Pilot safety concerns about New York’s LaGuardia airport were filed to aviation officials months before Sunday’s collision between an airplane and a firetruck left two pilots dead and 41 other people hospitalized.
According to the aviation safety reporting system administered by the US space agency Nasa, a pilot using the airport in the summer wrote, “Please do something,” after air traffic controllers failed to provide appropriate guidance about multiple nearby aircraft.
Continue reading...
When Austin Bell first visited Hong Kong in 2017, he was struck by the chromatic vibrancy of its public basketball courts. Coming from the U.S., where these surfaces are often the neutral and uninteresting textures of asphalt and other materials, he was compelled to document the range of vivid color combinations, especially within the context of high-rise neighborhoods and urban infrastructure.
Bell set out to capture 2,549 outdoor basketball courts around Hong Kong—every single one there is in the region. The resulting series, SHOOTING HOOPS, not only highlights the physical courts but conveys a unique portrait of the region and the spaces where people can mingle. “To me, basketball courts are one of the most interesting subjects for aerial photography because they look so different from above than the ground,” Bell tells Colossal. “Their flatness and geometric design become an almost extraterrestrial tableau—like concrete crop
circles.”
For such a densely populated place, Bell’s images are often devoid of people, giving the colorful scenes a subtle ghostly feel. Looking closely, though, you can often see passersby out and about, illustrating the abiding popularity of these urban recreation parks. “One of the newest ones is at a playground called Chung Sing, which is so named for the sound a bell makes, so the designers stylized the surrounding area with audio waveforms,” Bell says.
Bell captured the photos in 2019, trawling Google Maps’ satellite imagery and using his drone to explore spaces between buildings and trees. Over the course of 140 days of shooting during multiple visits, he took more than 40,000 photos. He often photographed from dawn to dusk, and it wasn’t unusual for him to shoot upwards of 100 courts in a day. Once, he meticulously planned a route and captured a mind-boggling 475 courts in a single day.
“The insane became mundane,” Bell says in a statement. “I had become an obsessive completist, unable to rest until I found every court in the city. My obsession was fueled by two desires: to show an unseen perspective of Hong Kong and to fully explore a city that I feel so captivated by.”
Find more on Bell’s Instagram, and purchase the photo book from his webshop.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Austin Bell Chronicles Every Single One of Hong Kong’s 2,549 Basketball Courts appeared first on Colossal.
A top result on Google for people searching for Claude plugins sent users to a site that recently contained malicious code in an apparent attempt to steal their credentials.
The news shows how the explosion of interest in generative AI tools is giving hackers new ways to attack users.
The malicious site was flagged to us by a 404 Media reader who was using Claude.
“I was googling to troubleshoot how to get my Claude Code CLI to authenticate its github plugin to my Github account and may have stumbled upon a malicious site hosted on Squarespace of all places,” the reader, Dan Foley, told me in an email.
Foley searched for “github plugin claude code” and the top result was a sponsored ad for a Squarespace site with the title “Install Claude Code - Claude Code Docs.”
When he clicked through, he saw a site that was pretending to be the official site for Anthropic’s Claude with identical design and branding.
The phony Anthropic help site had swapped some of the Claude Code installation instructions for others, Foley pointed out. That included a line users could paste into their terminal to allegedly install the software on a Mac. The command included an obfuscated URL, hiding what its real destination was. When Foley decoded it, he found it downloaded software from another site entirely.
ThreatFox, a platform for sharing known instances of malware, recently flagged that domain as sharing a “stealer”, a type of malware that steals users credentials. ThreatFox linked that domain to the stealer as recently as a few days ago.
Google’s ad center listed the advertiser behind the malicious sponsored search result as “Enhancv R&D,” which is based in Bulgaria, according to a screenshot of the advertiser profile Foley shared with 404 Media. The advertiser was also listed as being verified by Google, meaning they had to complete an identity verification process which requires legal documentation of their name and location.
Foley said he flagged the ad to Google, which removed the site from search results. The URL which pointed to the potential stealer is no longer online.
“We removed this ad and suspended the account for violating our policies,” a Google spokesperson told me in an email. Google said it has strict policies against ads that aim to phish information or distribute malware, and that it uses a combination of Gemini-powered tools and human review to enforce these policies at scale. Google claims the vast majority of these ads are caught before the ads ever run.
Malicious links included in paid Google ads that are pretending to be legitimate websites is not a problem that’s unique to AI. Hackers often try to get users to click malicious links by pretending to be whatever is popular on the internet at any given moment, be it a pirated movie or video game just before release or celebrity sex tapes. The fact that hackers are targeting Claude users reflects the growing popularity of AI tools and the hackers’ hope that users are not careful enough to check what they’re clicking when using them.
In January, we wrote about how hackers could similarly target users of the AI agent tool OpenClaw by boosting instructions for AI agents that contained a backdoor for hackers.