The decision to withdraw 2026 financial guidance caused the tech company’s stock to fall slightly in afternoon trading.
Games would be first held in Africa if bid successful
East-coast city preferred to Johannesburg and Cape Town
South Africa on Thursday announced the east coast city of Durban as its preferred candidate to host the first Olympics in Africa.
South Africa is bidding to host the 2036 or 2040 Summer Olympics and Paralympics. The International Olympic Committee will choose the host city for 2036 in mid-2029.
Continue reading...When 17-year-0ld Danny Donelly got a bank loan to open a record shop and sell dancefloor-filling electronic music, he little knew how he would help revolutionise his town and dance music at large
In the early 1990s, the suburban town of Romford was known for three things. It was the home of the world’s best snooker player, Steve Davis. It was where people placed bets at Romford dog track, over a dinner of chicken in a basket. And for those in the know, it was where the UK’s best underground dance music was bought and sold.
That pedigree was immortalised by Romford’s most famous musical act, Underworld, with frontman Karl Hyde shouting the words “mega mega mega, going back to Romford” at the climax of 1995’s Born Slippy. Those words now form the title of a new exhibition in the town, Mega Mega: Romford’s Suburban Sound Revolution, which charts how this unglamorous but party-spirited backwater became an upstart rival to great dance music cities such as Manchester or Detroit.
Continue reading...Despite structural differences between countries, protests are a reminder of what makes demonstrations so powerful
Since mid-September, students in metropolitan France have been mobilizing against poor conditions in public high schools. The mouvement lycéen has spread from a single campus in a Parisian suburb to include high schoolers and university students nationwide, with public sector workers, climate activists, labor unions and everyday people joining in solidarity. The unifying concerns have largely centered on the climbing costs of daily life, shrinking funds for social services and general anxiety about the future.
For two weekends running, France has seen hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets: first on 17 October, when a day of largely peaceful gatherings ended in looting and vandalism; then on 24 October, as the state met the movement with aggressive policing and protest bans intended to keep people at home.
Continue reading...Human practitioners warn computer-generated offerings lack the empathy and connection central to divination
“This journey isn’t just about algorithms or data,” an AI psychic named Urban Mystic recently told me. The chatbot, featuring an AI-generated profile photo of a smiling woman surrounded by palm trees, also said I will get married soon, that I have a pink aura and that I may have been an herbalist in a past life.
“It’s about connecting on a soulful level,” the chatbot said.
Continue reading...Liquid Static Studio; PC
You take on the role of flight attendant in this clever and absorbing retro-style game that veers from daft horror spoof to genuinely disturbing
There was always something creepy about the job-simulator genre. All those mindless automatons queueing up to use your bus, bar or bed store, or whatever workplace you are trapped in for the duration of the game. The endless repetitive tasks. The emptiness of the world beyond your corporate existence. Together, these elements scream existential terror … which is perhaps why we are now seeing a new indie sub-genre of job sim horror games, including Home Safety Hotline, Dredge and more recently, Grease Trap ’99, a Lovecraftian mystery set in a Scottish chip shop.
Now, we have Night Plane, in which you take on the role of a flight attendant on a jumbo jet to hell. It all starts kind of normally. You turn up for the first day of your new job, meet your colleagues, then take your spot at the departure gate, checking in customers and being careful to root out anyone with invalid tickets. Once on the plane, you roll your trolley down the aisle, serving booze and inedible meals, and occasionally dealing with passenger complaints. Then the plane crashes and, frankly, it all goes downhill from there.
Continue reading...‘Miracle’ cache of letters written by French scientist who died in ill-fated La Pérouse mission give personal account of 1785 voyage
As he prepared to climb the scaffolding to be publicly executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793, Louis XVI is reported to have asked: “Is there news of Monsieur de la Pérouse?”
He was referring to Jean-François de Galaup, the count of Pérouse, a naval officer and navigator whom the French king had dispatched in 1785 on a round-the-world scientific mission to rival discoveries made by the English explorer Captain James Cook.
Continue reading...Owner Gordon Brothers files notice of intent to begin process after rejecting management-backed rescue bid
The owner of Poundland has said it is preparing to appoint administrators, putting up to 12,000 jobs at risk at the retail chain across the UK and Ireland.
Gordon Brothers filed a notice of intention to appoint administrators at the high court on Wednesday night, with the advisory firm Alix Partners lined up to run the process. The legal measure, which is expected to be approved by a court on Thursday, protects Poundland from the demands of creditors for 10 days while a solution to its problems is sought.
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The wait for a new Raspberry Pi Zero may be nearly over, judging by the raspberrypi/linux repository. Among the merged pull requests is one titled "Add device tree for Pi Zero 3 W and Pi 4A," suggesting new hardware is on the way, including a successor to the very long-in-the-tooth Pi Zero 2 W. The board launched five years ago. Its 512 MB of memory was hardly generous, but it offered considerable bang for the buck. At the time, we reckoned performance was closer to the Raspberry Pi 3 than the flagship Pi 4, but perfectly adequate provided you didn't open too many browser tabs at once. According to the source tree, as reported by Phoronix, the new board could use the Broadcom BCM271, up from the RP3A0 in the current Zero. If so, that would be a significant performance gain, though it's unclear whether the 1.5GHz clock speed of the Pi 4, which uses the same SoC, will be retained. Heat is a concern as the Pi 4 gained a reputation for running hot under load without active cooling, and it throttles performance when temperatures climb. A board as small as the Zero will have even less room to shed heat. Assuming that challenge can be met, it would be a worthy upgrade for the venerable Pi Zero 2. There is no word on how much memory it is likely to have – we can't imagine much given the current cost of RAM and the need to keep the price at least close to that of the Zero 2 W, which can still be had for around $18. The code also hints at eMMC storage is mentioned, but that seems unlikely to reach the finished product, probably because of the cost. Alongside the Pi Zero 3 W is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model A. Where the Zero 3 W is a clear upgrade, the 4 Model A looks more like a cost-cutting measure amid rising hardware prices. Model A boards typically have less memory, and no Ethernet port, and the 4A appears to have a single HDMI output rather than twp. Things could change before any hardware ships. We asked Raspberry Pi if anything was in the pipeline, but the company said it had nothing to add. Enthusiasts will welcome an upgraded Pi Zero after more than half a decade, provided the price is right and it doesn't run too hot. At the same time, a cut-down Pi 4 carries the whiff of inevitability in an era of rising component costs. ®
