The Guardian

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Jeremy Thomas, British producer of The Last Emperor and Sexy Beast, dies aged 77

Thomas was noted for collaborations with directors including Bernardo Bertolucci and David Cronenberg

Jeremy Thomas, the distinguished British producer of films including Sexy Beast, High-Rise and the multi-Oscar-winning The Last Emperor, has died aged 77.

A representative for Thomas said he died on Friday “peacefully, at his country home in Oxfordshire, surrounded by his family and loved ones”.

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‘I could get laid every night of the week!’: punk icon Legs McNeil on booze, benders and dating Sinéad O’Connor

As he releases a tell-all book, the Punk magazine founder and self-described ‘fuck-up’ holds forth on 1970s excess, the American roots of punk and why the Beatles are ‘stupid’

Legs McNeil vividly remembers the reaction he got from the original CBGB bands in 1975 when they heard the name of the magazine he co-founded: Punk, the first publication ever dedicated to the form. “Absolutely no one wanted to be called a punk back then,” he said. “Not even the Ramones. Johnny Ramone demanded that we cross out every reference to punk in an article about them.”

Flash forward a few years and, “suddenly everybody wanted to be called a punk!” McNeil said. “The Ramones started running around telling everyone, ‘you know, we were the first punk band!’”

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IDF soldier filmed shooting Palestinian in leg amid West Bank settler standoff

Incident is latest to raise questions over Israel’s ability or willingness to stop violent settlers in occupied territory

An Israeli soldier shot a Palestinian man, wounding him in the leg, as settlers confronted villagers by grazing livestock on Palestinian-owned land in the town of Faqqua in the occupied West Bank.

Eyewitnesses said that a group of settlers had entered the area with their livestock, prompting residents to try to stop them. Israeli forces then intervened and, according to men at the scene, opened fire at residents. One of them shot Qassem Hussam, a Palestinian man in his mid-30s, wounding him in the leg.

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Nashville airport board unanimously approves name change to honor Dolly Parton

The city’s mayor and Tennessee’s governor threw their support behind the name change last month

The Nashville airport is to be renamed after Dolly Parton, a board of commissioners voted on Friday, in tribute to the Smoky Mountain singer who is estimated to bring $1.8bn each year to Tennessee through her Dollywood theme park.

The decision ensures that Parton, who died last month at 80 years old, will be memorialized with her name on an airport, although the renaming process will take time to complete.

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LIVE! Kwalificeren op de MADRING

verstappen en lawson in madrid

Gooi het slechtste van Singapore, Miami, Jeddah, Las Vegas en Zandvoort in de blender en je krijgt de Madring. Een circuit zonder ziel waar waarschijnlijk niet kan worden ingehaald. We moeten het er maar mee doen. En wie het er vooral mee gaat doen: Kimi Antonelli. Het fenomeen lijkt op Frodo, vreet heel veel pasta en is in de ban van de Madring. Vorige week bezorgde hij de liefhebber de mooiste race van het jaar en bezorgde hij zichzelf de mooiste overwinning uit zijn prille carrière. Dit jochie gaat dus wereldkampioen F1 worden en niks kan dat nog stoppen. Of er moet iets heel naars gebeuren. Mocht dat gebeuren, wat we natuurlijk niet hopen, dan zal dat wel op deze vreselijke baan gebeuren. Stijlloze voorspelling: er gebeurt niks naars met Antonelli en hij pakt gewoon pole. Toch houden we de rode vlaggetjes gereed want grote kans dat er alsnog wat naars gaat gebeuren. Kan wel een spannende kwali worden trouwens. Demo gehad, GAS EROP!
Update - Ehhh OKÉ: Lawson op P3 met softs, Verstappen dichtbij op P4 met mediums. Maar het is nog Q1.

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Pink Cockatoos, Yulara

ozipital has added a photo to the pool:

Pink Cockatoos, Yulara

Always entertaining and delightful to see.... if not entirely cooperative!

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Márquez wint sprintrace MotoGP in San Marino

MISANO (ANP) - Marc Márquez heeft zaterdag de sprintrace van de Grote Prijs van San Marino in de MotoGP gewonnen. De Spanjaard van Ducati versloeg de Italiaan Marco Bezzecchi. Jorge Martín, de Spaanse leider in de WK-stand, werd derde.

Door zijn overwinning nadert Márquez zijn landgenoot Martín tot op 14 punten in het kampioenschap. Bezzecchi staat 22 punten achter de leider.

Bezzecchi start zondag op pole. De Italiaan verbeterde het record van de snelste ronde op het circuit van Misano.


Dodental bij veerbootbrand Filipijnen fors opgelopen

MANILLA (ANP/AFP) - De Filipijnse kustwacht heeft nog eens 41 lichamen gevonden aan boord van de verbrande veerboot bij de Filipijnen. Daarmee is het dodental gestegen naar 76.

De lichamen van de omgekomen opvarenden worden overgebracht naar de haven van Coron, meldt de kustwacht.

Op het schip brak woensdagochtend brand uit tijdens een ruim twintig uur durende reis van hoofdstad Manilla naar de westelijke provincie Palawan. De boot had 117 passagiers en zeventien bemanningsleden aan boord, en strandde 7,5 kilometer voor de kust.

De brandweer kon vrijdag pas aan boord van het schip gaan. Meer dan veertig mensen werden gered.


The Register

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

Nvidia's Groq acquihire is on the DOJ's radar, but it's already too late

Nvidia spent a whopping $20 billion late last year to license Groq’s AI accelerator tech and hire away key members of its engineering team in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink deal. The acquihire technically left Groq’s core inference-as-a-service business intact, but was clearly architected in such a way as to fly under regulators' radar. Only it didn’t. This week, The New York Times reported that the US Department of Justice had launched an antitrust probe into the deal. It’s hard to argue that Nvidia didn’t strip the startup for parts. It may not have been a merger in the traditional sense, but without its engineering staff, Groq may as well be Nvidia’s puppet at this point. Despite this, Nvidia contends the deal is a great American success story. “The Groq story is a prime example of the American system working as designed to promote innovation, reward entrepreneurs, and benefit consumers. The law is designed to encourage America's startup ecosystem and promote the fundamental rights of inventors and workers to pursue their dreams,” an Nvidia statement provided to El Reg and other media reads. Whether the acquihire of Groq actually harmed competition is another matter entirely. But, even if the Justice Department did force Nvidia to unwind the team, it’s probably too late. What exactly did Nvidia buy? Nvidia’s Groq acquihire bought it two key assets: mature silicon and the talent necessary to continue its development. Groq – which, by the way, is completely unrelated to Elon Musk’s Grok model series – made a name for itself using SRAM-heavy dataflow accelerators to speed up LLM inference to hundreds and now thousands of tokens a second, something that GPU-based systems from Nvidia had struggled to do on their own. But while faster than GPUs, the accelerators couldn’t achieve rapid throughput. Think of it this way: If Groq’s LPUs were the F1 cars, Nvidia’s GPUs were more like a city bus. But combine the two and you get something more akin to a sport pickup. At GTC in March, Nvidia unveiled its LPX racks, which are powered by 256 Groq-3 accelerators. As we understand it, they are really lightly modified versions of the startup’s existing Groq-2 chip designs, which makes sense, because three months is absurdly fast to tape out new silicon. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang promised Groq-3 combined with its Vera Rubin GPU racks would deliver optimal performance across the entire spectrum of inference workloads. But, as we’ve discussed at length now, disaggregated compute architectures are not unique to Groq. Nvidia rival Cerebras is building similar systems with AWS and AMD, SambaNova is working with Intel, and d-Matrix and its partners are combining its in-memory compute platform with Nvidia GPUs to the same end as Nvidia’s Vera Rubin-LPX rack combo. The damage, if any, has been done Deals of this sort that are engineered to avoid regulatory scrutiny should get it anyway, several US senators have argued. While Nvidia didn’t outright buy Groq on paper, it may as well have. However, the real question for the DOJ is whether the deal was harmful to competition, and given the competitive landscape, proving harm may be easier said than done. But even if the DOJ found reason to litigate and was successful in unwinding the deal — it certainly wouldn’t be the first time regulators had torpedoed an Nvidia deal — it probably wouldn’t change much. Before Nvidia and Groq announced their licensing deal, the GPU giant was already laying the foundations for an ecosystem with its networking business at its center. In late 2024, the company contributed its MGX rack designs to the Open Compute Project (OCP) making it possible for any chipmaker to put their chips in racks originally designed for Nvidia GPUs. Then in mid-2025, GPUzilla opened its high-speed interconnect tech — the secret sauce that makes six dozen GPUs behave as one — to the broader industry through a licensing scheme called NVLink Fusion. As we recently discussed, the combination of open racks and Nvidia networking effectively meant that any chipmaker licensing the tech could slot their designs directly into Nvidia’s racks. If the DOJ blocked the acquihire and unwound the deal, Nvidia might lose direct control of LPU development and any revenues from the sale of the chips, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of its Groq LPX racks. Groq would just join the growing number of Nvidia hardware partners designing around the company’s AI factory ecosystem. In fact, if anything, the acquihire ensures that even if regulators eventually derail the deal, there will be plenty of alternatives lined up and ready to fill the void. ®