Twee dagen nadat hij afkondigde dat de Amerikaanse marine schepen door de Straat van Hormuz zou loodsen, beëindigde president Trump die operatie alweer. Een akkoord met Iran zou in de lucht hangen, en hij wil afwachten of dat er komt.
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If in Argentina squad, Prestianni would miss two games
Benfica winger banned for racial abuse of Vinícius Júnior
Prestianni has one Argentina cap, from November
Fifa confirmed a global ban Wednesday for Gianluca Prestianni that will rule the Benfica winger out of two World Cup games in the United States if he is selected in Argentina’s squad.
Uefa imposed a six-game ban – with three games deferred on probation – on Prestianni two weeks ago for his verbal abuse of Real Madrid’s Brazilian forward Vinícius Júnior in the Champions League. Prestianni covered his mouth with his jersey while using the insult.
Continue reading...Suit says director used Q’orianka Kilcher’s features without permission after seeing her in advert for The New World
James Cameron and the Walt Disney Company are facing a lawsuit that claims the director based a key character in the Avatar franchise on a teenage actor without her permission.
The suit, filed by actor Q’orianka Kilcher, alleges that Cameron “extracted her facial features” and “directed his design team” to base the key Avatar character Neytiri on her appearance after seeing her in an LA Times advert for Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World. In the film Kilcher, who is Native Peruvian, played Pocahontas among a cast that also included Colin Farrell and Christian Bale.
Continue reading...A follow-up to 2021’s gory big-screen adaptation of the much-played fighting game might finally show us the tournament but it’s all far too unexciting
A sequel to 2021’s gory, garish big-screen transfer of Mortal Kombat was an inevitability not just because of how the industry typically works and not just because video game IP is arguably hotter than ever right now but because of something far more crucial. While the film – the second attempt to bring the game to the big screen after a dodgy Christopher Lambert-led 1995 version - was a predictable string of fight scenes pieced together with what could generously be described as a plot, it pulled a major, and to some rather shocking, punch. For all of the fight scenes it did show, it stopped short of showing us those one would naturally expect, denying us an actual Mortal Kombat tournament.
It was all laboured scene-setting, one reason why it didn’t connect with many critics and fans, other than it also not being very good, another little problem. The film was part of Warner’s Christopher Nolan-alienating Covid year, when its slate was launched on both the big screen and HBO Max simultaneously, and while it did so-so theatrical numbers, it was the platform’s most-streamed movie of the year, beating out grander titles such as Dune. The sequel is receiving a splashier rollout but its predecessor’s outsized small-screen success wasn’t just a sign of that particular strange time but also where fans might best enjoy these films, on TV late at night, expectations that much lower. Treated like a premium format blockbuster does not do a film like Mortal Kombat II any favours, its junkiness less charming and more distracting, a street fighter suddenly forced to go pay-per-view. While this one might actually be true to its title – there is a Mortal Kombat in Mortal Kombat II - there’s still nowhere near enough here to warrant an Imax screen.
Continue reading...
Guess the Wikipedia article from its categories. Every day there are 10 notable, diverse, and interesting people, places, and things to guess. It's a challenging test of general knowledge, and a source of new Wikipedia discoveries!
"It will be very difficult to put the pieces back together. This will have permanent consequences for the global energy markets for years to come... Governments will review their energy strategies. There will be a significant boost to renewables and nuclear power and a further shift towards a more electrified future, and this will cut into the main markets for oil." Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency.
He goes on to caution the UK against opening new oil fields in the North Sea: "They won't provide any significant quantities of oil and gas for many years to come. They will not lower the bills... I am not even talking about the climate change effects – just from a business point of view, making a major investment in exploration might not make business sense." In late March, Birol was cautioning that it would take "some time to come back to the normal days we had before the war was started." He is now telling us those days will never return. Background on the IEA.
He goes on to caution the UK against opening new oil fields in the North Sea: "They won't provide any significant quantities of oil and gas for many years to come. They will not lower the bills... I am not even talking about the climate change effects – just from a business point of view, making a major investment in exploration might not make business sense." In late March, Birol was cautioning that it would take "some time to come back to the normal days we had before the war was started." He is now telling us those days will never return. Background on the IEA.
AMD expects its PC CPU shipments to decline in the second half of the year because of the memory supply crisis, but hopes that expanding corporate sales will pick up the slack. During a conference call for the chip firm’s Q1 2026 financial results, chair and CEO Lisa Su outlined the effects the memory shortage is having, even on some of the biggest firms in the industry. “We are planning for second half PC shipments to be lower due to higher memory and component costs,” Su told analysts on the call. “Against this backdrop, we still expect our Client revenue to grow year-over-year and outperform the market, driven by the strength of our Ryzen portfolio and expanding commercial adoption.” As Reg readers will be aware, some types of memory have more than quadrupled in price since last year, due to the makers switching their factory capacity to favor HBM and other AI server memory types, rather than the DRAM and NAND flash used in desktops and laptops. AMD has so far been doing well here, with revenue from its Client and Gaming segment up by 23 percent compared with the same period last year, to $3.6 billion. But this is set to change. “We expect second half demand in gaming to be impacted by higher memory and component costs. We now expect second half gaming revenue to decline more than 20 percent compared to the first half,” commented CFO Jean Hu. As previously reported by The Register, the huge hike in memory costs is having an impact on PC sales, with analyst Gartner estimating that we will see a drop in shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026. Worst affected will be budget models, because vendors won't be able to build them at a price that will satisfy cost-conscious buyers – those looking for systems below about the $500 mark. Conversely, the forecast price rises triggered a buying spree among corporate customers, as organizations bring forward any planned hardware refresh cycles in an effort to purchase before the cost gets too high. This, and increasing adoption of AMD’s Ryzen chips inside corporate PC boxes could explain the firm’s expectation of higher client revenue. Su indicated that AMD was happy with the deal it was getting from its memory vendor partners, and said the company has secured enough supply to meet and exceed its targets. “We are expecting that there could be some demand impact as a result of the memory price increases on things like the PC business in the second half of the year as well as the Gaming business. So we're taking that into account in our overall model,” she said. “And we continue to work closely with the memory providers as well as our customers to ensure that every time we ship a CPU or GPU, then it's paired with the memory on the other side so that we don't have compute that is not being deployed.” “What we're focused on is ensuring that we continue to make good progress on the Commercial business and the premium segments of the market. So we believe that we will continue to grow on a year-over-year basis for the Client business compared to last year,” she said. AMD’s overall revenue for Q1 was $10.25 billion, up roughly 38 percent on the same period last year, which the firm attributed to strong demand for AI infrastructure. ®
