The Guardian

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

ICC staffer talks publicly about alleged sexual abuse by chief prosecutor Karim Khan

Female lawyer tells CNN’s Christiane Amanpour about alleged ‘escalation of attempts’ as second woman also speaks out

Two women who have accused the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, Karim Khan, of sexual abuse have spoken out about their claims against the prominent British lawyer.

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Thursday, an ICC staffer identified by her first name, Sarah, spoke publicly for the first time about her allegations, which have engulfed the court over the past two years.

Continue reading...

Worry Doll by Laura McPhee-Browne review – a sensual, sinister novel about the horrors of desire

Two women meet on a train and tumble into an all-consuming affair told from both sides – who have very different stories

I’ve been craving a sandwich: soft white roll, roast chicken, sharp cheese. A bright little cut of tomato. After I finish this review I’ll walk up to the supermarket and buy myself a hot chook. Sink my teeth in.

It wasn’t my idea. I caught the craving from Laura McPhee-Browne’s Worry Doll. One of her characters longs for the same sandwich, made just so: “there is a particular amount of cheese and chicken that she requires for it to feel the way she needs it to when she chews and swallows.” I know that feeling. There is nothing cheap about cheap pleasure. And Worry Doll understands pleasure.

Continue reading...

The Five-Star Weekend review – Jennifer Garner’s escapist holiday drama is the perfect beach watch

This adaptation of author Elin Hilderbrand’s novel looks absolutely beautiful. It’s a warm, pleasant show whose approach to putting this group of female characters front and centre is highly refreshing

The Five-Star Weekend is the perfect beach watch, adapted by Bekah Brunstetter from the perfect beach read of the same name by bestselling beach‑read author Elin Hilderbrand. It blends schmaltz, melodrama, jokes and genuine feeling in perfect proportions throughout its eight episodes. It is escapist entertainment that contains, in its tale of five female friends unwinding and spilling secrets over a faultlessly curated long weekend in Nantucket, absolutely nothing to distress us. Come on in, it says warmly with every gorgeous shot of island coastline, the water’s lovely.

The weekend is organised by a tradwife-inflected culinary influencer, Hollis (Jennifer Garner), who has recently lost her husband, Matthew (Josh Hamilton), in a car crash. This all happens off screen; after the police arrive at the house to break the news, we cut swiftly to six months later. It’s the equivalent of a children’s book killing off the parents without a backward glance so the fun can begin.

Continue reading...

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Sony Deletes More Movies From Accounts of People Who 'Bought' Them

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: In 2022, due to "evolving licensing agreements" with distributor StudioCanal, German and Austrian users had hundreds of movies disappear from their PS accounts, long after buying them through Sony. Then in 2023, it happened again in America, specifically when Sony ended its licensing agreement with Discovery after the Warner Bros. merger, which, of course, has since been bought by Paramount Skydance. That resulted in customers having hundreds and hundreds of episodes of TV shows deleted from their accounts. Nowhere in any of this were there refunds, of course. No recompense at all, actually. Just a thing you thought you'd bought taken away from you by the very people you thought you bought it from.

And now it's happening again. Due to another licensing agreement fallout with StudioCanal, hundreds of movies and TV shows are being ripped from the accounts of PS Store customers, and there appears to be fuck all that they can do about it. [Kotaku reports:] "This news was brought to people's attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, 'Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.' The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people's libraries."

As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it's perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period... but I can promise you that the public in general doesn't understand that. They think they're buying a thing, not a license.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Found Kodachrome Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Kodachrome Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

date stamped on slide, July 1971

Cherry Lips, Crystal Skies

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Cherry Lips, Crystal Skies

You Really Made Me Look For You

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

You Really Made Me Look For You

Todd Walker

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Todd Walker

Found Photograph

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Photograph

MetaFilter

The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

Don't automate the fun out of life

ARC-AGI-3 is a collection of turn based puzzle games compressed into a 64x64 4-bit pixel grid, each with a unique set of hidden rules.

It is also the public training, test, and evaluation set for an AI benchmarking competition, and frontier models have been doing abysmally at it. (hat-tip to Half as Interesting). Evaluating AI agents using games is not exactly new; many have tried benchmarking them via the game Baba Is You, and just today a new benchmark was published suggesting that the most advanced models can finally 100% the game... 's two intro levels. And more than 4 times more slowly than an arbitrary human solver. And just a few hours ago, Impossible Research self-reported their new Schema Harness was able to solve virtually all of ARC-AGI-3's public set.