ozipital has added a photo to the pool:

A traditional approach to managing our bush land is to perform limited controlled burning of defined areas when the conditions are appropriate. The aim is to reduce fuel loads to prevent wild fires during the peak fire seasons by starting slow burning, slow moving fires which can be managed. Some plants also benefit from stimulation of germination. The technique has gained favour in recent times with Australian National Park Authorities. However, it is not my typical experience to be allowed to walk casually along a trail (although I have on a couple of occasions found myself driving through a controlled burn) in an area that is being burnt as was the case recently near Ormiston Gorge. I found the situation a little un-nerving but I was also fascinated by the flames and the effect of the smoke haze on visibility...

Op de N471 tussen Berkel en Rodenrijs en Rotterdam is een motorrijder onderuit gegaan. De man is naar het ziekenhuis gebracht.

Microsoft is killing Live chat in Teams about 18 months after launch as it seeks to "focus investments on newer customer engagement and communication experiences." The service will be retired on October 5, when customer messages will stop reaching Teams. Microsoft blocked new setups on August 6 and told users to remove the widget from their websites before retirement. Any remaining instances will be hidden afterward. Live chat was a relatively simple feature available with the Teams versions of Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard, and Premium. Companies embedded a chat widget on their websites, and messages from visitors were routed to a support team in Teams. Administrators could specify business hours and assign up to 25 users to handle conversations. Existing customer data and Teams channels will remain available, but no new conversations, escalations, or interactions will be possible. Microsoft pointed customers toward Dynamics 365 Contact Center with Live Chat and Copilot Studio's contact center AI tools instead. In March 2025, it was all going to be very different as Microsoft trumpeted the service's arrival. Brenna Robinson, General Manager, Microsoft 365 & Copilot, Small and Medium Business, wrote: "Today we're excited to take that customer experience to a new level with the introduction of live chat in Microsoft Teams – a faster and more engaging way for you to connect with your customers." Robinson has since become Microsoft's General Manager for AI Business Solutions. Live chat, meanwhile, has been wheeled into the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style warehouse where Microsoft stores everything that once seemed like a good idea. Microsoft has axed several Teams services over the last few months. In February, it announced the end of Teams live events, replaced by a Teams "events experience." The Teams Together mode, which placed users in a virtual meeting space, was also ditched. Live chat is another casualty of Microsoft's efforts to tidy Teams' unwieldy collection of features. The company has not elaborated on those "newer customer engagement and communication experiences," although its recommendation of Copilot Studio means AI is already waiting in the wings. ®

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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Officials try to find homes for residents as talks to save social assistance hub collapse amid government crackdown

Rome authorities are scrambling to find homes for hundreds of people sleeping in tents in extreme heat after talks aimed at saving Italy’s most high-profile centre for housing and social assistance collapsed amid a crackdown by Giorgia Meloni’s government on squatted buildings.

The approximately 400 evicted residents of Spin Time Labs, located in a 10-floor building in Rome’s Esquilino district occupied by grassroots groups since 2013, will not be allowed to move back in after its private owner refused Rome council’s offer to buy the property. The residents were forced out at the end of last month.

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Royal Albert Hall, London
There’s a new narration delivered by Tamsin Greig and the crack forces of the Monteverdi Choir, the ORR and world-class singers, all led by Mark Elder, but the 200-year-old piece remains a strange hybrid

Pirates! Princesses! Mermaids! Fairies! A magic horn! You name it and Carl Maria von Weber chucked it at Oberon – his fantastical, nonsensical, often farcical romp of a final opera, which sees a French knight and his Arabian beloved subjected to magical trials and hardships so that fairy king Oberon can win an argument with queen Titania.

You can see how it happened. The opera’s English libretto (the work was premiered at Covent Garden in 1826) is based on a German poem, itself adapting a French chivalric romance, is a patchwork whose lumpen dialogue (and, latterly, unpalatable attitudes) have rendered it all but unstageable in living memory. Enter Mark Elder, the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir to give Oberon a Proms premiere 200 years in the making.

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It remains unclear who created the viral posts that encouraged the would-be migrants to believe that they could get to Europe from Ceuta. But those who want to weaken the Spanish government, boost the European far right, and create turmoil inside the EU lost little time in promoting the photographs as soon as they arrived. [AP, The Atlantic; ungated]

Vanillasludge posted a photo:

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Met alle datalekken van tegenwoordig, zoals die bij CEVA Logistics, kunnen cybercriminelen data uit verschillende lekken aan elkaar koppelen en zo steeds overtuigender overkomen. Dat vergroot de kans dat mensen slachtoffer worden van cybercriminelen. Dat zegt IT-jurist en directeur van ICTRecht Arnoud Engelfriet, nu steeds meer bedrijven laten weten last te hebben van het cyberincident bij CEVA. Daarbij zijn mogelijk persoonlijke gegevens van Nederlandse consumenten buitgemaakt.

De Bijenkorf, Bol, Ace & Tate en Ajax lieten deze week weten hinder te ondervinden van het lek bij CEVA, omdat ze met het bedrijf samenwerken bij het leveren van bestellingen. ING meldde een soortgelijk incident. Eerder dit jaar werd onder meer Odido getroffen door een cyberaanval, waardoor persoonsgegevens van ruim 6 miljoen klanten zijn gelekt. "Deze hoeveelheid datalekken is schadelijk voor de maatschappij. Door die schaal is het mogelijk om veel meer dingen te doen, zoals iemand aanspreken bij naam", zegt Engelfriet.