• Fifa association with Panini goes back to 1970

• 2030 World Cup will be final tournament

Panini World Cup sticker albums will become a thing of the past following the centenary finals in 2030 after Fifa announced a new partnership on Thursday.

The Fifa association with Panini already stretches back more than 50 years, with the first World Cup sticker book published ahead of the 1970 finals in Mexico, and will have reached 60 years by 2030.

Continue reading...

As Trump ramps up pressure by cutting off fuel to the island, Havana’s refuse is rarely collected, forcing residents to burn it in the streets despite the pollution

As thick smoke spread through the narrow streets of Havana, seeping into homes, schools and shops, Carlos Blanco, a chef, opened his bedroom window to see what was going on. “I saw a mist. But it wasn’t mist – it was smoke,” he says, describing the toxic smog emanating from a smouldering mountain of rubbish.

As the US oil blockade on Cuba enters its fourth month, choking off most of the island’s fuel supplies, growing mounds of waste lie on street corners across Havana. Amid fuel scarcity, authorities have opted to ration petrol by reducing waste collection, leaving less than half of Havana’s rubbish trucks operational.

Continue reading...

Would you know how to respond if someone was taken critically ill? Experts explain the basic skills we can all learn and how to perform them with confidence

“If you learn one thing, it should be how to resuscitate,” says Richard Webber, an associate clinical director of St John Ambulance and practising NHS paramedic in the south of England. “We know that for every one minute delay in restarting the heart, there is a 10% reduction in survivability.”

Continue reading...

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

Continue reading...

Global game celebrates centenary event in London as players of all ages showcase their skill, style and speed

“Table tennis is very good for the mind as well as the body, whatever age you are,” says 73-year-old Wang Qi, the oldest competitor at the Table Tennis Team World Championships in London.

Incredibly the Fiji player, who hails from China, is 61 years older than the youngest player, Enya Hu, from Switzerland. Age is evidently no barrier in this increasingly popular sport.

Dimitrije Levajac of Serbia plays a defensive shot in his victory over Luka Mladenovic of Luxembourg in the early round robin stages at the Copper Box Arena.

Continue reading...

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De natuurbrand die op 29 april uitbrak op het Artillerie Schietkamp (ASK) in 't Harde is veroorzaakt door een oefening met springstoffen. Dat meldt de Koninklijke Marechaussee (KMAR) op basis van feitenonderzoek naar de brand. Er zijn geen aanwijzingen gevonden voor strafbare feiten.

De brand ontstond volgens de KMAR tijdens een geplande oefening waarbij munitie tot ontploffing werd gebracht. "Uit het feitenonderzoek komt naar voren dat de eenheid de oefening correct had aangevraagd en dat het springplan vooraf was goedgekeurd door de relevante autoriteiten van het ASK," aldus de Koninklijke Marechaussee.

Het meest aannemelijke scenario voor het ontstaan van de brand is een technische samenloop van omstandigheden. Er zijn tijdens het springen van de mijnen vermoedelijk gloeiend hete deeltjes, zoals glasvezelresten van oudere mijnen en resten van de gebruikte brandfakkels, uit de springkuil geslingerd.

Oefening

Op dronebeelden van de oefening is te zien dat direct na de ontploffing op verschillende plekken rondom de springput brandhaarden ontstonden. Volgens de KMAR breidde het vuur zich door specifieke omstandigheden "zeer snel uit tot een grote vuurzee."

Met het rapport is het feitenonderzoek onder leiding van het Openbaar Ministerie Oost-Nederland afgerond. De resultaten worden overgedragen aan Defensie met het oog op mogelijke aanpassingen van de protocollen en voorschriften.

De Koninklijke Marechaussee zegt op dit moment nog bezig te zijn met onderzoek naar drie andere branden die onlangs op militaire oefenterreinen woedden. Het gaat daarbij om een brand die op 21 april uitbrak op de Ederheide. Bovendien worden twee branden onderzocht op 30 april op de Oirschotse Heide en op de Weelterheide.

Als het over AI gaat, gaat het al snel over grote, maatschappelijke en meetbare risico’s zoals banenverlies, schrijft Thom Egberts. Maar moeten we ons niet wat meer zorgen maken om de invloed van AI op ons denken en doen in het dagelijks leven?

Middle powers need to tread skilfully around the biggest blocs, writes Yvette Cooper.

AMD hopes to win over enterprise AI customers with a more affordable datacenter GPU that can drop into conventional air-cooled servers. Announced on Thursday, the MI350P is the House of Zen’s first PCIe-based Instinct accelerator since the MI210 debuted all the way back in 2022. Until now, AMD’s best GPUs have only been available in packs of eight and used socketed OAM modules that weren’t compatible with most server platforms. By comparison, The MI350P can slot into just about any 19-inch pizza box design that offers enough power and airflow, making it a much easier sell for enterprises dipping their toes into on-prem AI for the first time. The 600-watt, dual-slot card is essentially a MI350X that’s been cut in half. That means the CNDA-based GPU is packing 4.6 petaFLOPS of FP4 compute and 144 GB of VRAM spread across four HBM3e stacks delivering a respectable 4 TB/s of memory bandwidth. AMD supports configurations ranging from one to eight MI350Ps, though a lack of high-speed interconnects on these cards means it’ll be limited to PCIe 5.0 speeds (128 GB/s) for chip-to-chip communications, potentially limiting its potential in larger models. AMD hasn’t shared pricing for the cards just yet, but at least on paper, the MI350P is well positioned to compete with either Nvidia’s H200 NVL or RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell PCIe cards. Compared to the 141 GB H200, the MI350P promises about 38 percent higher peak performance at FP8, while eking out a narrow VRAM capacity advantage. But the H200 does pull ahead when it comes to memory bandwidth. With six HBM3e stacks to the MI350P’s four, the nearly two-year-old card’s memory is still about 20 percent faster. Nvidia's H200 also supports high-speed chip-to-chip communications over NVLink, while the MI350P doesn’t use AMD’s equivalent Infinity Fabric interconnect. However, all this assumes you can still find H200 NVLs in the wild. Since last summer, Nvidia has been pushing its RTX Pro 6000 Server cards on enterprise customers. As of writing, the card is Nvidia’s most powerful Blackwell-based accelerator offered in a PCIe formfactor. Compared to the RTX Pro 6000, the MI350P’s price starts becoming a bigger factor than performance. Workstation versions of the RTX Pro, which ditch the passive cooler for an active one, routinely sell for between $8,000 to $10,000 apiece, making it one of Nvidia’s more affordable datacenter-class GPUs. Depending on how pricing shakes out, AMD may have to push hard to be competitive. Having said that, the MI350P is still the better-specced part, delivering 2.3x higher peak flops, 2.5x the memory bandwidth, and 50 percent more vRAN of the RTX Pro. Now, this all assumes peak FLOPS and memory bandwidth, which is rarely realistic. The tensors used by AI workloads are rarely the ideal shape for squeezing the maximum number of FLOPS out of a chip. This is why we run for Maximum Achievable MatMul FLOPS (MAMF) and Babel Stream memory bandwidth benchmarks as part of our AI test suite. AMD seems to understand that peak FLOPS don’t really translate cleanly into real-world performance, and in the marketing materials shared with El Reg prior to publication, compared the MI350P’s theoretical performance against its real-world delivered performance. It’d be nice to see Nvidia and others adopt similar practices regarding accelerator performance claims, though we suspect getting everyone to agree on the best way to measure this might not be easy. The MI350P’s launch comes as AMD prepares to address a very different and likely more lucrative segment with its first rack-scale compute platform, codenamed Helios. That system is due out in the second half of the year, and is aimed primarily at large hyperscale and neocloud deployments. The system packs 72 of its all-new MI455X GPUs into a single double-wide OCP rack that behaves like an enormous accelerator. The platform will be AMD’s first crack at Nvidia’s NVL72 racks, which launched alongside its Blackwell generation nearly two years ago. ®