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Mullet Creek is located on the New South Wales Central Coast.
I know the definition of creek to be a small, shallow body of flowing water. I've never been able to correlate this with the naming of the enormous tributary that feeds the mighty Hawkesbury River.
I learned that the construction of the railway line between Hawkesbury and Woy Woy in New South Wales began in 1883 at a time when railway construction was at its peak. It was the final stage in the railway line connecting Sydney and Newcastle - and I love this most beautiful part of the journey.
Mullet refers to Australia's famous sea mullet, highly abundant in the estuarine and coastal waters of New South Wales. Massive annual migrations or 'mullet runs' made the fish a vital food source.
As the rail line runs right next to the creek, it gives the impression of actually being on the water.
Nestled near the Woy Woy Tunnel, the creek is famously adjacent to Wondabyne Railway Station, the only train station in Australia with no road access.
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WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump en de Israëlische premier Benjamin Netanyahu zijn dinsdag tijdens een telefoongesprek met elkaar in aanvaring gekomen over de te volgen koers ten aanzien van Iran. Dat meldden de Amerikaanse media Axios en The Wall Street Journal op basis van anonieme bronnen.
Het meningsverschil draaide naar verluidt om een herzien voorstel dat gericht is op het beëindigen van het conflict met Iran. Qatar en Pakistan hadden, samen met andere partners, een geactualiseerd vredesvoorstel gepresenteerd dat bedoeld was om de verschillen tussen Washington en Teheran te overbruggen.
Volgens Axios stond Netanyahu na het telefoongesprek "in vuur en vlam". Trump zou na het gesprek hebben gezegd dat Netanyahu "alles zal doen wat ik van hem verlang".
Trump liet onlangs weten dat hij een nieuwe militaire aanval uitstelt, aangezien er serieuze onderhandelingen gaande waren. Hij omschreef de gesprekken als een positieve ontwikkeling. Netanyahu is daarentegen sceptisch over onderhandelingen en wil de oorlog volgens de berichten hervatten.
Kyiv learns of five scenarios Russia has drawn up and will increase forces in the north, says Zelenskyy; Ukraine’s attacks heap pressure on Russian oil refining. What we know on day 1,548
Ukraine will send reinforcements to its northern regions and step up diplomatic pressure on Belarus to counter what Kyiv believes are Russian plans to launch a new offensive north of the capital, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said. Kyiv knew of five scenarios Russia had drawn up, Ukraine’s president added. “We analysed in detail the available data from our intelligence agencies on Russia’s planning of offensive operations in the Chernihiv-Kyiv direction,” Zelenskiy said. “Our forces in this sector will be increased.”
Oleksandr Syrskyi, Ukraine’s top army commander, said Kyiv had data that the Russian general staff was actively calculating and planning offensive operations from the north. The dictator Alexander Lukashenko allowed Russian troops to march on Ukraine from Belarus in 2022. Zelenskyy said it was “already tiresome that there is constantly such a threat to Ukraine that the Russians may at some point drag Belarus into an expansion of the war. They should understand there will be consequences for them and they will be significant.”
In the initial full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine successfully repelled a huge Russian armoured column that attempted to attack Kyiv from the north. Ukraine’s border guards spokesperson, Andriy Demchenko, told Ukrinform news agency on Wednesday: “As of now, we haven’t detected any movement of equipment or personnel directly at our border, but of course, we can see the pressure Russia is putting on Belarus.”
Virtually all major oil refineries in central Russia have been forced to halt or scale back fuel output following Ukrainian drone attacks in recent days, Reuters has reported, citing official data and its own sources. The combined capacity of refineries that have fully or partially shut down exceeds 83m tonnes per year, or about 238,000 tonnes per day, accounting for around a quarter of Russia’s total refining capacity. The share of the refineries in Russia’s fuel output is over 30% for gasoline and about 25% for diesel. Moscow has introduced a gasoline exports ban, while the Ukrainian strikes have reduced Russia’s crude oil exports – adding pressure to Moscow’s federal budget, where oil and gas accounts for roughly a quarter of revenue.
Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, spoke to Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday as the UK government scrambled to reverse a public relations disaster over its latest package of sanctions on Russian oil and gas. After a storm of negative publicity and a row in parliament, Starmer and ministers were forced to spend Wednesday explaining why the package initially exempts diesel and jet fuel made in other countries using Russian oil. Starmer insisted sanctions on those products would be phased in to keep the market stable.
However, Ukrainian officials expressed disappointment, write Peter Walker and Luke Harding. One former senior government figure described western sanctions policy against Russia as “too little too late”. They added: “I’m not sure I understand the logic behind this British decision. The only way Ukraine can stop the war is to put physical sanctions on Russia and destroy its infrastructure.”
Zelenskyy said Ukraine had been in contact with Britain on Wednesday and said the issue of sanctions was “always very sensitive … We conveyed our signals on the matter to London. We expect that everything will be discussed this week on a bilateral level.” Zelenskyy later posted that he had spoken to Starmer by telephone and thanked him for the support provided for Ukraine. The two sides were “working to reinvigorate substantive diplomacy”. No 10 said Starmer had “reaffirmed the UK’s steadfast support for Ukraine”. A spokesperson added that “as a result of the UK’s actions to date, there will be less Russian oil on the market, with Russia weaker as a result”.
The EU is set to disburse €3.2bn to Ukraine next month, the first such payment under a giant loan approved in April, Brussels said on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Initial testing found evidence of metals in water samples, months after province’s residents began reporting unusual numbers of dead fish washing ashore
Papua New Guinea’s government has warned communities not to fish from parts of the New Ireland coastline as preliminary tests show evidence of metals in some water samples, after months of residents reporting dead marine life in the area.
On 7 May the fisheries minister, Jelta Wong, said initial testing conducted by an independent company detected various metals in water samples taken from affected areas around Kafkaf village and Larairu lagoon in New Ireland, an island in eastern PNG.
Continue reading...US and Taiwanese presidents have not spoken directly since Washington shifted diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979
US President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would speak with Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, an unprecedented move for a US leader that could roil US relations with China.
US and Taiwanese presidents have not spoken directly since Washington shifted diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979.
Continue reading...Surveillance that misses a haemorrhagic fever or fails to consider endemic risks at a departure port will be blind to something far more dangerous
Two rare disease outbreaks within two weeks – Andes hantavirus and Bundibugyo Ebola – have caused deaths and triggered costly international responses. Together they expose a gap not in our ability to respond, but in our willingness to anticipate, prevent and use precaution.
The hantavirus outbreak on a cruise expedition in the south Atlantic played out slowly. Three weeks passed between the death of one passenger on 11 April and the linkage to hantavirus on 2 May. In that time, passengers onboard the MV Hondius continued their itinerary, having been advised that the man had probably died of natural causes. They toured remote islands and ate together at the same tables. More than 30 passengers disembarked at St Helena and flew in different directions.
Continue reading...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Wednesday published exploit code for an unfixed vulnerability in its Chromium browser codebase that threatens millions of people using Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and virtually all other Chromium-based browsers. The proof-of-concept code exploits the Browser Fetch programming interface, a standard that allows long videos and other large files to be downloaded in the background. An attacker can use the exploit to create a connection for monitoring some aspects of a user's browser usage and as a proxy for viewing sites and launching denial-of-service attacks. Depending on the browser, the connections either reopen or remain open even after it or the device running it has rebooted.
The unfixed vulnerability can be exploited by any website a user visits. In effect, a compromise amounts to a limited backdoor that makes a device part of a limited botnet. The capabilities are limited to the same things a browser can do, such as visit malicious sites, provide anonymous proxy browsing by others, enable proxied DDoS attacks, and monitor user activity. Nonetheless, the exploit could allow an attacker to wrangle thousands, possibly millions, of devices into a network. Once a separate vulnerability becomes available, the attacker could use it to then compromise all those devices.
"The dangerous part here is that you can just have a lot of different browsers together that you can in the future run something on that you figure out," said Lyra Rebane, the independent researcher who discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it to Google in late 2022 in an interview. He said using the exploit code Google prematurely published would be "pretty easy," although scaling it to wrangle large numbers of devices into a single network would require more work. In the thread of Rebane's disclosure to Google, two developers said in separate responses that it was a "serious vulnerability." Its severity was rated S1, the second-highest classification.
Since its reporting 29 months ago, the vulnerability remained unknown except to Chromium developers. Then on Wednesday morning, it was published to the Chromium bug tracker. Rebane initially assumed the vulnerability was finally fixed. Shortly thereafter, he learned that, in fact, it remained unpatched. While Google removed the post, it remains available on archival sites, along with the exploit code. Google representatives didn't immediately respond to an email asking how and why it published the vulnerability and if or when a fix would become available. The exploit works by abusing Chromium's Browser Fetch API to open a service worker that remains persistently active. A malicious website can trigger it through JavaScript, creating a connection that can be used "for monitoring some aspects of a user's browser usage and as a proxy for viewing sites and launching denial-of-service attacks," reports Ars.
Depending on the browser, those connections "either reopen or remain open even after it or the device running it has rebooted," effectively turning the device into part of a "limited botnet."
The unfixed vulnerability can be exploited by any website a user visits. In effect, a compromise amounts to a limited backdoor that makes a device part of a limited botnet. The capabilities are limited to the same things a browser can do, such as visit malicious sites, provide anonymous proxy browsing by others, enable proxied DDoS attacks, and monitor user activity. Nonetheless, the exploit could allow an attacker to wrangle thousands, possibly millions, of devices into a network. Once a separate vulnerability becomes available, the attacker could use it to then compromise all those devices.
"The dangerous part here is that you can just have a lot of different browsers together that you can in the future run something on that you figure out," said Lyra Rebane, the independent researcher who discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it to Google in late 2022 in an interview. He said using the exploit code Google prematurely published would be "pretty easy," although scaling it to wrangle large numbers of devices into a single network would require more work. In the thread of Rebane's disclosure to Google, two developers said in separate responses that it was a "serious vulnerability." Its severity was rated S1, the second-highest classification.
Since its reporting 29 months ago, the vulnerability remained unknown except to Chromium developers. Then on Wednesday morning, it was published to the Chromium bug tracker. Rebane initially assumed the vulnerability was finally fixed. Shortly thereafter, he learned that, in fact, it remained unpatched. While Google removed the post, it remains available on archival sites, along with the exploit code. Google representatives didn't immediately respond to an email asking how and why it published the vulnerability and if or when a fix would become available. The exploit works by abusing Chromium's Browser Fetch API to open a service worker that remains persistently active. A malicious website can trigger it through JavaScript, creating a connection that can be used "for monitoring some aspects of a user's browser usage and as a proxy for viewing sites and launching denial-of-service attacks," reports Ars.
Depending on the browser, those connections "either reopen or remain open even after it or the device running it has rebooted," effectively turning the device into part of a "limited botnet."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.