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Vredeshandhavers UNIFIL gewond bij aanval in Zuid-Libanon

ADSHIT AL-QUSAYR (ANP) - Bij een aanval op Zuid-Libanon zijn meerdere vredeshandhavers van de VN-vredesmacht in Libanon (UNIFIL) gewond geraakt. Dat meldt de woordvoerder van UNIFIL aan het door de staat gerunde Nationale Nieuwsagentschap van Libanon.

"Een projectiel is vanavond ontploft op een UNIFIL-locatie nabij Adshit al-Qusayr, waardoor een aantal vredeshandhavers gewond is geraakt", aldus de woordvoerder. Om hoeveel personen het gaat en in welke toestand zij verkeren is onduidelijk.

Eerder meldde het Libanese ministerie van Volksgezondheid dat een Israëlische luchtaanval op de Zuid-Libanese plaats Shaqra aan vijf mensen het leven heeft gekost. Twee anderen raakten daarbij gewond.

Israëlische aanvallen op Libanon hebben sinds 2 maart aan ruim 1200 mensen het leven gekost.


Pakistan wil gesprekken Iran en VS in komende dagen organiseren

ISLAMABAD (ANP/DPA) - Pakistan is bereid in de komende dagen gesprekken tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran te organiseren. Dat heeft de Pakistaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Ishaq Dar, verklaard. De oorlog van Israël en de VS tegen Iran gaat zijn tweede maand in.

Dar gaf geen verdere details over het tijdsbestek van de gesprekken, maar stelde dat de VS en Iran beide hun vertrouwen hebben uitgesproken in de rol van Islamabad. Volgens Dar hebben ook de Chinese minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, Wang Yi, en VN-secretaris-generaal AntĂłnio Guterres hun steun uitgesproken voor het vredesinitiatief.

De aankondiging volgde op een bijeenkomst van de ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken van Pakistan, Saudi-Arabië, Turkije en Egypte, die als doel had beide partijen aan de onderhandelingstafel te krijgen.

Pakistan deelt een grens van ongeveer 900 kilometer met Iran en heeft zich sinds het begin van de oorlog aangeboden als bemiddelaar.


The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Rachel Reeves to tell G7 accelerating shift to clean energy is best defence against energy price shocks

Starmer to convene major energy industry and insurance figures to draw up emergency plans amid continued blockade of strait of Hormuz

Rachel Reeves will warn G7 nations they must move faster on clean energy to insulate economies against global price shocks from oil and gas as she and the energy secretary Ed Miliband meet G7 finance and energy ministers on Monday.

Keir Starmer will also gather major energy industry and insurance figures to thrash out what emergency measures might be needed to contain the continuing crisis from the blockade of the strait of Hormuz.

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Keir Starmer to launch local elections campaign with focus on cost of living

PM will also cite Iran war as reason to stick with Labour, as party adopts new slogan: ‘Pride in Britain’

Keir Starmer will say that a vote for Reform UK will put at risk progress Labour is making on the cost of living, arguing that Britain’s values are being tested in a volatile world.

Launching the party’s local elections campaign with a new slogan: “Pride in Britain”, Starmer will urge voters to stay the course with Labour. A dire set of results are predicted for the party in Wales, Scotland and English councils, especially in the north-east of England and London.

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Chesney the kangaroo found three days after hopping away from farm

Marsupial escaped from enclosure at Wisconsin’s Sunshine Farm on Wednesday after he was spooked by stray dogs

How does a kangaroo escape a petting zoo?

It’s not the opening line to a dad joke. If you’re Chesney the kangaroo, you scale an 8ft (2.5-meter) fence and go on the lam for three days, giving your keeper sleepless nights and sending residents of a small Wisconsin town on a search that would end happily on Saturday.

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Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Bluesky's Newest Product: an AI Tool That Gives You Custom Feeds

"What happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you...?" asks Bluesky? "We've just started experimenting, but we're sharing it now because we want you to build alongside us."

Called "Attie" — because it's built with Bluesky's decentralized publishing framework, AT Protocol (which is open source) — the new assistant turns natural language prompts into social feeds, without users having to know how to code. (It's part of Bluesky's mission to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.")

Engadget reports:

On the Attie website, examples include prompts like, "Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network" or "Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design."

"It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software," [writes Bluesky's former CEO/current chief innovation officer, Jay Graber, in a blog post]. "You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described."
Graber added that Attie is a separate app from Bluesky and users don't have to use the new AI assistant if they don't want to. However, since Attie and Bluesky were built on the same framework, it could mean there will be some cross-app implementation between the two or any other app built on the AT Protocol.

"Attie is open for beta signups today, and we'll be sharing what we learn along the way," Graber writes in the blog post. "To learn more about Attie, visit: Attie.AI. Come help us find out what this can be."
The blog post warns that "Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it's enhancing it," since "The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy..." And in a world where "signal is getting harder to find... The major platforms aren't trying to fix this problem."

They're using AI to increase the time users spend on-platform, to harvest training data, and to shape what users see and believe through systems they can't inspect and didn't choose. We think AI should serve people, not platforms...

An open protocol puts this power directly in users' hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise. We built the AT Protocol so anyone could build any app they imagine on top of it, but until recently "anyone" really meant "anyone who can code." Agentic coding tools change that. For the first time, an open protocol can be genuinely open to everyone...

The Atmosphere [Bluesky's interoperable ecosystem] is an open data layer with a clearly defined schema for applications, which makes it uniquely well-suited for coding agents to build on... Bluesky will continue to evolve as a social app millions of people rely on. Attie will be where we experiment with agentic social.

AI is an accelerant on whatever it's applied to. I want it to accelerate decentralizing social and putting power back in users' hands. But I don't think the most interesting things built on AT Protocol will come from us. They're going to come from everyone who picks up these tools and starts building.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MetaFilter

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DaxDuckDex

If you happen to be on a desktop browser, try a DuckDuckGo search for (for example) Minnesota Wild or Easter Bunny or Twilight Sparkle or Ada Lovelace and keep your eye on the mascot in the upper left corner. Then (regardless what you're browsing with) check DaxDuckDex for a catalog of known search terms which trigger these easter eggs.

Sometimes Hope Sinks Like a Stone

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Sometimes Hope Sinks Like a Stone

Dorothy Norman, Charles Demuth

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Dorothy Norman, Charles Demuth

xiffy

Public posts from @xiffy@mastodon.nl

de Eiffeltoren in de verte. op de voorgrond een dikke volvo in een typisch Parijse laan