Waking Up on Haight Street

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Waking Up on Haight Street

The Guardian

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

Farage under pressure over gifts from convicted fraudster - The Latest

As Nigel Farage awaits the findings of a standards watchdog investigation into a £5m gift he received from the cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne, fresh allegations about his finances have emerged related to benefits received from the crypto entrepreneur George Cottrell, who has previously been convicted of fraud.

The Reform UK leader says he is the victim of an ‘establishment hit job’ and that he has ‘done no wrongdoing’.

Lucy Hough speaks to senior political correspondent Peter Walker.

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‘It’s more than just fairy smut’: Inside the UK’s first romantasy bookshop

Between enemies-to-lovers and ‘shadow daddies’, BookTok has fallen in love with the spicy stories combining romance and fantasy. But there is more to the subgenre than sex, say the fans who queued for hours outside the brick-and-mortar Oxford store

‘We left Warrington at 5.15am this morning to get here,” Emma tells me, standing in a queue that stretches down Walton Street. It is just after 9am on a Saturday in Oxford, the students are still in bed and the tourists have yet to descend on the city, but this corner of Jericho is already buzzing.

Oxford is rarely short of literary pilgrims. Every year, visitors flock to the colleges and libraries that shaped writers including JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and Iris Murdoch. But this crowd is here for something a little different. Instead of queueing for the Bodleian, they’re swapping recommendations for dragon riders and faerie kingdoms. Women clutch tote bags emblazoned with quotes like “hot girls read smut”, and compare their favourite “morally grey” heroes.

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Prosecutors start laying out case against man accused in Charlie Kirk killing

Prosecutors call for 23-year-old Tyler Robinson, accused of fatally shooting Kirk in 2025, to face trial and death penalty

Prosecutors began presenting the case against Tyler Robinson in the killing of Charlie Kirk as part of a five-day hearing in a Utah courtroom that started on Monday morning.

The prosecution hopes to convince a judge that they have enough evidence for the 23-year-old accused of fatally shooting the far-right commentator last year to face trial and the death penalty.

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Jonathan Anderson delivers high-concept Dior collection that celebrates the sculptural

Hot on heels of creating Taylor Swift’s wedding dress, designer brings his re-energising razzmatazz to Paris catwalk

The one person in the fashion industry who doesn’t want to talk about Taylor Swift’s as-yet-unrevealed wedding dress is the man who actually knows what it looks like. “It was a big honour,” was all that Dior’s Jonathan Anderson would say about dressing America’s de facto royal wedding. “But no, I can’t tell you anything about it. It will all come out in due course. It was a joy to work with her and we became very good friends. It is an emotional thing, doing someone’s wedding.”

Instead, Anderson wanted to talk about a very different American artist, sculptor Lynda Benglis, whose sensual slumped hunks of smelted metal inspired his haute couture collection. A wooden pavilion built for the show in the gardens of the Rodin Museum was soundtracked with the flutter of paper fans along the front row, and the haughty silhouettes of couture seemed liquefied in the city heat. A skirt of silver-foiled petals lapped and shimmered like molten lava. A tailored Bar jacket trailed threads of chiffon at the hem like drips of ice-cream down a cone.

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The Register

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

Samsung floats 2028 launch for seaborne datacenter

Samsung expects to have its first floating datacenter (FDC) operational by the second calendar quarter of 2028. The Korean conglomerate is one of several companies pursuing waterborne bit barns, as recently covered by The Register. It has now put a specific date on those plans, according to the Seoul Economic Daily, which reports Samsung is weighing multiple candidate projects to commercialize an FDC the year after next. Samsung Heavy Industries, the group's shipbuilding and offshore engineering arm, announced partners for the project at the Posidonia 2026 maritime exhibition last month, including a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Greece-based Capital Clean Energy Carriers and Lloyd's Register. Under the agreement, Samsung Heavy Industries handles the technology development and construction, Capital covers project sourcing and investment, and Lloyd's Register manages regulatory and certification work. A rival Japanese partnership comprising Mitsui OSK Lines and Hitachi is taking a different approach, fitting datacenter infrastructure onto existing ships with a target of going live sometime in 2027. Samsung, by contrast, is building purpose-built vessels from scratch using established shipbuilding processes. The plan is for the first floating facility to run on onboard power generation systems or shore-based power, and to use seawater for cooling, supporting around 50 MW of compute capacity. The design has already received approval in principle from the American Bureau of Shipping and Lloyd's Register. But as floating AI datacenters are still unproven, the first unit built will effectively double as a proof of concept, assuming all goes to plan. Samsung acknowledges that offshore conditions can expose servers to vibration, inclination, high-salinity air, and rapid humidity fluctuations, all of which may significantly impact server stability and lifespan. To address this, Samsung Heavy Industries signed a joint development project (JDP) agreement with troubled server specialist Supermicro to conduct operational verification of AI server systems deployed in river and offshore environments. Samsung Heavy Industries argues global demand for datacenter infrastructure, particularly AI platforms, is set to grow rapidly. It cites credit rating agency Moody's estimate that the market for high-performance infrastructure could reach $3 trillion by 2030. Floating datacenters are being pitched as a way to sidestep some of the industry's biggest headaches: power constraints, heat dissipation, and land scarcity. "Floating datacenters represent a major new opportunity for the shipbuilding and offshore industries," said Samsung Heavy Industries CEO Sung-an Choi. "Through global partnerships, we aim to establish a leading position in the FDC market by moving proactively and building a differentiated market position." ®

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Stroomuitval in Tilburg blijkt gevolg van meetfout bij Enexis

TILBURG (ANP) - De afschakeling van een deel van het stroomnet in Tilburg zondag werd niet veroorzaakt door een plotselinge stroompiek, maar door defecte meetapparatuur. Dat heeft een woordvoerder van netbeheerder Enexis maandag gezegd.

Door een technisch mankement gaf de meetapparatuur een stroomafname aan die vijf keer hoger was dan in werkelijkheid. Enexis schakelde zondagochtend de stroom voor zo'n 18.000 klanten in en rond Tilburg af uit vrees voor overbelasting van het elektriciteitsnet.

Het was volgens Enexis nog nooit eerder gebeurd dat het bedrijf huishoudens om deze reden zonder stroom liet zitten. "Overbelasting kan zorgen voor grotere en langdurige stroomuitval, dus je doet dan liever een deel uit om te voorkomen dat die overbelasting ervoor zorgt dat dingen kapotgaan", legde een woordvoerster uit.


Dodental uitbraak ebola in Congo boven de 500

GENÈVE (ANP/AFP) - Bij de jongste uitbraak van het ebolavirus in de Democratische Republiek Congo zijn volgens de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) voor zover bekend 506 patiënten overleden. Het totaal aantal geregistreerde besmettingen staat op 1561. Ruim 250 patiënten zijn inmiddels hersteld. In het buurland Oeganda zijn twee mensen aan de Bundibugyo-versie van ebola overleden.

Afgelopen week is een kleine proef gestart in het 116 miljoen inwoners tellende Congo om te proberen behandeling mogelijk te maken. Dat is vooralsnog niet mogelijk met dit virus.


Met harde woorden vecht Solvinity, het bedrijf achter DigiD, het verbod op verkoop aan een Amerikaans bedrijf aan

Heeft staatssecretaris Aerdts zich laten meeslepen door „commotie in de media” toen ze de verkoop verbood van Solvinity, het bedrijf dat de technologie achter DigiD beheert? Solvinity zegt dat die indruk moeilijk te vermijden is.

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When the heat steals your smile

Like most outdoor laborers during peak season, Rashid drinks 15 to 20 liters of water daily to survive the relentless heat. (While this can seem like an excessive amount of water, a worker can sweat as much as 1 to 1.5 liters an hour from heavy labor in 45°C temperatures. To compensate for the loss of electrolytes through sweat, workers here consume yogurt and lime drinks with added salt, and eat pickles and other salty foods.) By mid-morning, sweat soaks through his clothes as his body's cooling mechanism works overtime. He chews on sugarcane during breaks, which provides quick calories — an ancient practice that sustained ancestors but now compounds health problems. Nothing about his general health seemed unusual at first. But when I asked about saliva — that often-overlooked component of oral health that most people never think about — there was a long pause. "My mouth is always dry," he said quietly in Urdu. "Even when I drink water until I feel sick. My mouth stays dry." Dentist Zain Azhar documents how extreme heat is ruining teeth. A long read in Earth Island Journal.

That's when something clicked into place that would fundamentally reshape my understanding of what I'd been observing in my practice. I'd documented this pattern of tooth decay in 37 patients by this point, all agricultural workers, all from the same climate-ravaged zones in the central-eastern state of Punjab. I just hadn't connected the dots to heat-induced dehydration and its catastrophic effects on oral chemistry. Their mouths weren't just dry — external climate forces were fundamentally turning them into hostile environments for their own teeth. I realized I was witnessing something far more systemic and urgent than a collection of individual dental problems. This was environmental collapse writing itself directly into human biological systems.