blowblowblow has added a photo to the pool:
ozipital has added a photo to the pool:
It's not often you have the opportunity to photograph a low flying Whistling Kite at a beach as was this one near the Broome Bird Observatory.
John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:
Despite the inclement looking weather, sun is coming. No-one is on Shelly Beach at Caloundra looking north but it will clear and what a beautiful walk. Typical of Pacific Ocean beaches in Australia. Just beyond the beach behind me, ringed by a wide rock platform is another long headland like the one in the distance. It is also a great place for exploring except on a very high tide. That headland marks the end of Moreton Bay and the open Pacific proper.
Camera settings still not reporting correctly, I hope flickr are onto it!
:format(webp)/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data152623020-4c4d07.png)
The state department will revoke B1 and B2 visas issued between 2016 and 2026, whose holders have sought or are now seeking asylum
Donald Trump’s administration said on Monday it planned to revoke the non-immigrant visas of foreigners who have applied for or are currently seeking asylum status in the US, marking its latest step in a sweeping immigration crackdown.
A state department spokesperson said it was coordinating with the Department of Homeland Security “to identify and revoke the non-immigrant visas of foreigners who have come to the United States claiming to be short-term visitors, but then file for asylum to stay here permanently”.
Continue reading...Putin decree lets Russian state scoop up companies that come under attack; ‘dig into our stocks’ of Patriots, British PM urges allies. What we know on day 1,644
Ukraine has targeted four more warehouses of Ozon – Russia’s second-largest online retailer after Wildberries, which has itself been crippled by Ukrainian attacks. Ozon’s shares fell by almost 30% on Monday after it reported strikes in southern Russia that brought to six the number of its facilities targeted within three days. Ozon said a logistics hub in Makhachkala in Dagestan was on fire and had halted operations after a drone attack in which “several people” were injured. Another was on fire in Enem on the outskirts of the city of Krasnodar, while workers were evacuated from warehouses that came under attack in Adygeysk, in the Adygeya region, and in Nevinnomyssk in the Stavropol region.
In earlier events, drone strikes halted work at an Ozon logistics centre in the Samara region and another in the Orenburg region. Financial analysts said that unlike privately owned Wildberries, which has the backing of state-owned bank VTB, Ozon’s main shareholder AFK Sistema has a large debt and is unlikely to provide substantial support. Before the latest Ozon attacks, Vladimir Putin promised state help in the restoration of warehouses “at a new technological level” and asked the government to design a programme to help the sector. The EU imposed sanctions on Ozon’s and Wildberries’ financial units on 24 July.
Putin has geared up the Russian state to seize control of companies like Wildberries and Ozon, as well as fuel companies and transport operators, by deeming them too poorly protected from Ukrainian attacks. Special powers set out in a presidential decree will allow the state to take charge of them at a time when Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks on oil refineries and e-commerce warehouses. The state will be able to seize physical and financial assets, and assume formal ownership rights, if entities responsible for such facilities are judged to have failed to protect them and are too slow to repair them after any attack. It applies to fuel, energy, industrial, communications, transport and logistics facilities and other objects regarded as critically important for security and economic stability.
The Ukrainian military struck a Russian Mig-29 fighter plane and two Russian vessels in the Black Sea, Ukraine’s drone forces commander Robert Brovdi said on Monday. It is the third Russian warplane hit in two days. Brovdi said on the Telegram app that one of the vessels attacked was a tanker and the other was a bulk carrier. Ukraine’s military struck a Russian military plant at Kamensky in the Rostov region, causing a fire, the Ukrainian general staff said. The plant produces solid rocket fuel for Russian weapons.
The Perm oil refinery, Russia’s seventh-largest by volume, has shut down after a Ukrainian drone attack on 21 August, two industry sources told Reuters. The primary CDU-4 unit, which accounts for almost 40% of the plant’s capacity, stopped working on that day. Repair works could take between one and two weeks. Another primary refining unit, CDU-5, which accounts for 34% of the plant’s capacity, has been idle since a 29 July drone attack. Lukoil, which controls the refinery, did not reply to a request for comment. The plant usually makes millions of tonnes of petrol and diesel.
Andy Burnham urged Ukraine’s allies to “dig into our own stocks” to provide it with more Patriot interceptor missiles, saying it “needs more help to protect its people right now”. The British prime minister chaired his first meeting of the “coalition of the willing” in Kyiv as Ukraine celebrated its independence day. Burnham said the coalition was “doing everything we can all do and working with our allies outside of this coalition to dig into our own stocks and help others dig into their stocks”. He called on the US Congress to “ratchet up” economic pressure on Russia as it struggles with a record budget deficit and declining oil revenues.
Ten Ukrainian prisoners of war who were thought to be missing in action have been released in a prisoner exchange, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. He did not mention Russia in his statement, saying only that the prisoners had been released via Belarus, one of Moscow’s closest allies. Russia did not immediately say if Kyiv had returned soldiers in the exchange.
Continue reading...
IBM has revealed it is working on a chip with processor cores that can execute instructions for its own mainframe chips and for the Arm architecture – and for the LinuxONE architecture too for good measure. Big Blue says the unnamed chip will be built on a two-nanometer technology node, include 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, plus AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. “Each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently,” the computing veteran promises. In a blog post, IBM’s Vice President for the zSystems Ecosystem Meredith Stowell pointed out that “The Arm ecosystem includes more than 22 million developers worldwide and supports a rapidly growing portfolio of cloud-native, AI, analytics, infrastructure, and enterprise applications.” IBM’s Z platform is powerful and very well suited to demanding applications. But while mainframes are a big business for IBM, the overall market is small. Rocket Software, a vendor that provides mainframe modernization tools, yesterday told The Register that it is aware of 42 IBM mainframe users in Australia – and that the land down under is therefore a market it needs to prioritize. Commercial application vendors therefore won’t rush to prioritize z/OS and IBM knows it. Big Blue also knows that major hyperscalers have introduced their own Arm processors and that customers are flocking to them in part because almost all major open source infrastructure, cloud-native, and AI tools run on the architecture. George Cozma, an analyst at TechInsights, told The Register that while the mainframe market is “small in unit terms” it remains “strategically important.” “Customers do not casually replace these systems because core applications, decades of operational practice, and data gravity make migration expensive and risky,” he wrote. But while Z is important, the analyst feels it “sits outside the mainstream software targets that define modern cloud and AI infrastructure.” This new chip, Cozma said, represents “ending the platform’s historical isolation from the broader computing mainstream. While IBM Z’s core strengths – reliability, security, and virtualization – remain the gold standard for mission-critical operations, they are tethered to an architecture that has increasingly diverged from the modern software development lifecycle.” IBM is therefore trying to get the best of all possible worlds: continuity for the small group of ISVs that currently make mainframe products and their customers, expanded software choice for existing IBM customers that also makes Z a more interesting choice for the mainframe-curious, and the nine-nines resilience of the mainframe for more workloads. IBM suggested the new chip will arrive in 2028. Big Blue released its most recent generation of mainframes, the z17, in 2025, and typically delivers new models every three years. The chip therefore looks a good candidate to power z18 machines. One last thing: Cozma pointed out that IBM has form developing dual-architecture chips. “Back in the deep, dark annals of the mid-1990s, IBM developed the PowerPC 615, a chip that could run both PowerPC and x86 code, with the active ISA selected at boot,” he wrote. “The chip was reportedly intended for Apple during the clone era, but it was never sold publicly.” ®
