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‘A Pavarotti rebirth’: the Samoan tenor taking over the world’s most gilded opera stages

Born on a tiny, impoverished South Pacific island, Pene Pati remembers going to school without food. Now he is performing in operas at La Scala and the Met

Along roads of scarlet hibiscus and exuberant tropical foliage are the white churches of Samoa. On Sundays the choir, singing in pure harmony, rises up to the cathedral ceilings in one soaring voice of divinity.

Pene Pati, once a child in those churches, is now a commanding, magnetic presence on the world’s greatest gilded stages – a universe away from the tiny, impoverished South Pacific island of Upolu, where he was born. A tenor specialising in the lyrical repertoire and bel canto, he is booked out until 2029, from the Metropolitan Opera to La Scala to Royal Albert Hall. Last month he received the pinnacle of arts awards in France, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres – a medal, he joked in a subsequent interview, that he’d been wearing around the house, much to his wife’s disdain.

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US strike on alleged drug boat kills two people in eastern Pacific Ocean

Attack brings death toll to at least 207 since administration began targeting people it calls ‘narcoterrorists’

The US military attacked a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Wednesday, killing two men, as the Trump administration wages a months-long campaign against alleged traffickers in Latin America.

The latest attack brings the number of people who have been killed in boat strikes by the US military to at least 207 since the administration began targeting people it calls “narcoterrorists” in early September.

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Sacred Heart

RWYoung Images has added a photo to the pool:

Sacred Heart

Catholic Church, Toolleen, Victoria, Australia

Fokke & Sukke

F & S

Well It's Just That I've Been Losing So Long

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Well It's Just That I've Been Losing So Long

Charles Demuth, In Vaudeville: Two Acrobat-Jugglers

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Charles Demuth, In Vaudeville: Two Acrobat-Jugglers

Love, Red Blue, Robert Indiana

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Love, Red Blue, Robert Indiana

Found Photograph

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Photograph

handwritten on back of photograph, “Carl and Sherry, 11/26/81"

Found Ektachrome Slide

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Ektachrome Slide

date stamped on slide October 1965

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Fedora Linux 43 Exposes 20-Year-Old Microsoft Outlook Security Failure

BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade.

The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook itself. Still, the discovery has sparked discussion among Linux admins and security folks because many users likely assumed their email traffic was encrypted simply because Outlook claimed SSL/TLS was enabled. The incident also highlights how stricter defaults in modern open source infrastructure can expose ancient assumptions and questionable behaviors that quietly survived for decades.

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