In a park keeper’s lodge in Barrow-in-Furness, Full of Noises has hosted the likes of Julia Holter and Lonnie Holley – and is a model for why arts funding matters

Barrow-in-Furness sits on a windswept hook of Cumbrian coastline. It’s an industrial town surrounded by the Irish sea on three sides, known for its 140-year history of submarine building. The corrugated peaks of BAE Systems’ Dock Hall dominate the skyline over Barrow’s red-brick terraces, and roughly a third of working-age locals are employed in its sprawling complex. This militarised landscape is the unlikely home of Full of Noises, an experimental music and arts venue with a capacity of 40 whose first event featured krautrock legends Faust destroying an electric guitar with a pneumatic drill.

Having secured funding to launch a two-day festival in 2009, artistic director Glenn Boulter and four other local artists took on temporary custodianship of the crumbling canteen building on wind-lashed Barrow Island, “a building that’s part of this big military-industrial complex,” Boulter says. “It’s heavily security-controlled.” He recalls a game they would play on a nearby bridge, where they would pull their phones out as if to take photos and count the seconds until they were accosted by security. “For us, that was an interesting context to be working in.”

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Moltbook, a social media site for AI agents, is nothing new. Still, the marriage of big tech and politics demands we take a stand

On a recent trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, I was shocked by the billboards that lined the freeway outside of the airport. “The singularity is here,” proclaimed one. “Humanity had a good run,” said another. It seemed like every other sign along the road was plastered with claims from tech firms making outrageous claims about artificial intelligence. The ads, of course, were rife with hype and ragebait. But the claims they contain aren’t occurring in a vacuum. The OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, recently said: “We basically have built AGI, or very close to it,” before confusingly qualifying his statement as “spiritual”. Elon Musk has gone even further, claiming: “We have entered the singularity.”

Enter Moltbook, the social media site built for AI agents. A place where bots can talk to other bots, in other words. A spate of doom-laden news articles and op-eds followed its launch. The authors fretted about the fact that the bots were talking about religion, claiming to have secretly spent their human builders’ money, and even plotting the overthrow of humanity. Many pieces contained suggestions eerily like those on the billboards in San Francisco: that machines are now not only as smart as humans (a theory known as artificial general intelligence) but that they are moving beyond us (a sci-fi concept known as the singularity).

Samuel Woolley is the author of Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity and co-author of Bots. He is a professor at the University of Pittsburgh.

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As pressure builds before Calcutta Cup, Scotland’s coach may well have reached the point of diminishing returns

The witty Anglo-American author Ashleigh Brilliant passed away last September at the age of 91, but his best lines are timeless. Beleaguered sports coaches worldwide will all recognise one of his characteristically pithy observations: “I try to take one day at a time – but sometimes several days attack me at once.” To be responsible for an under-pressure national side must induce a similar feeling.

So what do you do when coaching life starts serving you lemons? After a while there are only two options: try to ride it out, or accept it might be wiser for someone else to have a go. It can be a delicate judgment, often shaped by non-sporting considerations. Unless it becomes apparent, as seemingly happened with the recently ousted All Blacks coach Scott Robertson, that your dressing room has already made the call for you.

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The prime minister is hosting a meeting of his cabinet as he attempts to push forward following a bruising week for his leadership

Yesterday Wes Streeting, the health secretary, published his private WhatsApp messages exchanged with Peter Mandelson. Under the terms of the humble addressed passed by MPs on Wednesday last week, they would have been published anyway. But Streeting, one of the cabinet ministers most friendly with Mandelson, was potentially more at risk from what might come out than most of his colleagues, and so he decided to pre-empt the humble address by publishing them anyway.

The full set of messages is on the ITV News website here. And here is our story, by Peter Walker and Pippa Crerar.

I think that actually Rachel has done a very good job as chancellor.

I don’t agree with – if that’s what, I haven’t seen the detail of the messages – but I think we’ve seen the stability that is essential.

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Chinese driver Shi Wei, also known as ‘Tie Dou’, will return as the first F1 ACADEMY Wild Card entry of the 2026 season.

etsu2 has added a photo to the pool:

Het kan er de komende uren chaotisch uitzien op de shorttrackbaan in Milaan: twaalf teams met elk vier schaatsers doen in meerdere rondes mee aan de gemengde aflossing.

Een jaar na de machtsovername door de strijdgroep M23 leeft de Oost-Congolese stad Goma nog altijd in isolement. Gesloten banken, een gesloten luchthaven en verhoogde belastingen drukken zwaar op het dagelijks leven. „Het is overleven hier in Goma.”

If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea -- if it's caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily.

People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years. "This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women that shows that drinking two or three cups of coffee per day is associated with reduced risk of dementia," said Aladdin Shadyab, an associate professor of public health and medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn't involved in the study.

The findings, published Monday in JAMA, don't prove caffeine causes these beneficial effects, and it's possible other attributes protected caffeine drinkers' brain health. But independent experts said the study adjusted for many other factors, including health conditions, medication, diet, education, socioeconomic status, family history of dementia, body mass index, smoking and mental illness.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI, sovereignty drives continental drift of datacenter capacity

London will lose its dominance in colocation datacenters this decade with Frankfurt claiming the top spot by 2031, according to the EU Data Centre Association (EUDCA).…