LONDEN (ANP) - Niet ver van de Straat van Hormuz, voor de kust van Oman, is een olietanker getroffen door een "onbekend projectiel". De Britse maritieme organisatie UKMTO laat weten dat door de aanval brand uitbrak aan boord van het schip dat in zuidelijke richting voer.

Er zijn voor zover bekend geen gewonden gevallen. UKMTO waarschuwt scheepvaart in de Straat van Hormuz "uiterst voorzichtig" te zijn.

Nieuwssite Axios meldt op basis van Amerikaanse bronnen dat de tanker zou zijn getroffen door twee Iraanse raketten. Hier is geen bevestiging van en het nieuws kon niet onafhankelijk worden geverifieerd.

Iran en de VS tekenden zo'n drie weken geleden een memorandum van overeenstemming, waarin onder andere werd afgesproken dat de Straat van Hormuz weer zou worden heropend voor de scheepvaart.

Sindsdien zijn er toch nog verschillende aanvallen geweest op schepen in de strategisch belangrijke zeestraat.

locater16 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup's AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item's molecular profile to an AI model equipped with a pharmaceutical database. In seconds, the AI identifies the medication from its molecular profile -- or reports that it's phony.

Pharmacies were using the system in more than a dozen countries, including Ghana, Kenya, Myanmar, and Alonge's native Nigeria. But that morning in South Africa, it didn't work. "I was shocked," Alonge says... So Alonge immediately asked his engineers to shrink the AI model down to a smaller, low-power, unconnected version that could run entirely on his Android phone. They produced it 2 hours later, and that saved the demo. More importantly, the work birthed a new version of his device, which can authenticate a pill in places without broadband, computers, or even reliable electricity. It also turned Alonge into an advocate for this kind of "small AI." "The article goes on to detail other immediately useful 'small' AI applications without any subscription or billion dollar data centers needed," writes locator16. For example, Bala Murugan and colleagues at Vellore Institute of Technology in India developed a drone-based system that photographs cashew plants and identifies disease-indicating splotches on the plants. The key advantage is that all processing happens on the drone itself, so farmers do not need a computer, broadband connection, or cloud server access.

In a Uruguayan vineyard, researchers developed small-AI systems to identify ant infestations. The article doesn't go deep into the deployment details, but it presents this as another example of a narrow, localized model trained to recognize a specific agricultural threat. Small AI has also been used to detect the presence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes in multiple countries. This is especially useful in regions where public-health teams may lack reliable network access or expensive lab infrastructure, but still need fast, local detection.

In parts of Brazil without access to more complex medical equipment, researchers have used small AI to run electrocardiograms from an Arduino device. The article also describes Marcelo Jose Rovai's work on a TinyML model that generates electrocardiograms in a patient simulator lab. Rovai also describes a newer experiment using an Arduino UNO Q with a Qualcomm chipset. The device runs a language model locally, collects sensor data, and analyzes it to detect tiny pools of water where mosquitoes might breed -- while using only about 3 watts of power.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Supreme Court allowed Texas to enforce a law requiring app stores to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps. Tech industry groups argue the law broadly restricts young people's access to digital speech, but the court let a 5th Circuit order stand without explanation or noted dissents. CNN notes that the Supreme Court's decision "doesn't resolve the case but rather will allow Texas to enforce the law while the litigation continues to play out." From the report: "A minor child who downloads a software application from an app store agrees to contractual terms of service, including whether the child's location will be tracked, whether the child's privacy will be protected, whether information from the child's phone can be sold by the developer, and whether the child waives the right to sue," Texas told the Supreme Court in urging the court to allow its law to take effect.

But the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members include Apple and Google, said the law would effectively bar young people from accessing a wide range of content, "be it a book by Ernest Hemingway or J.K. Rowling, a Taylor Swift album, or a subscription to National Geographic." Allowing the law to take effect, the group said, would have "profound consequences for the protection of digital speech."

[...] In the new case, involving Texas' age verification for apps, a federal district court blocked the law's enforcement in December -- days before it was set to take effect. But a three-judge panel of the conservative 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals put that decision on hold in early June, allowing the state to enforce it. By declining to take up the emergency appeal from the computer and student groups, the Supreme Court has left the 5th Circuit's decision in place.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Na een loopbaan van 23 jaar bij de nationale ploeg kondigde Ronaldo (41) zondag aan: dit wordt zijn laatste WK. Portugal verloor een dag later in de achtste finale van Spanje. Maar is het ook zijn afscheid als international? „Ik stop zodra ík het wil, niet wanneer jullie dat willen.”

Last 16 tie will be the first international meeting between two modern legends who may yet go on making history

As Mohamed Salah savoured the feeling of Egypt’s historic victory over Australia, the narrative had already moved on. The former Liverpool forward could not contain his delight after his scuffed penalty helped to seal a redemptive shootout triumph in Dallas for the Pharaohs on Friday.

“I decided last minute. I am more experienced than others and I wanted to give them confidence,” said Salah, who had missed in Egypt’s last two shootouts, including the World Cup qualifying playoff against Senegal four years ago.

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Ukrainian president says long-range attack an ‘important achievement’ while also pleading for better air defences. What we know on day 1,595

Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s Omsk oil refinery – the country’s largest, located deep in Siberia – in what would be one of Ukraine’s longest-range attacks of the war, Kyiv’s military said. Local Russian authorities confirmed the strike, which came on the eve of a crucial Nato summit. The strike caused a fire at the Omsk refinery, about 2,700km from Ukrainian-held territory and close to Russia’s border with ⁠Kazakhstan, the Ukrainian military’s general ⁠staff said. The Omsk region’s governor, Vitaly Khotsenko, said Ukraine had attacked the refinery and that Russian air defences had destroyed most of the drones involved in ⁠the strike. There were no casualties and emergency services were working at the scene, he said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the attack ‌as an “important achievement” for Ukraine’s armed forces, adding in his nightly video address: “Siberia, too, is now within reach of Ukrainian precision strikes.” The Ukrainian defence technology company Fire Point said its upgraded FP-1 drones carried out the attack and described it as a record for strike drones “not only in Ukraine, but worldwide. Prior to this, the Omsk oil refinery had remained out of reach for Ukrainian drones.” Ukraine’s military also ​hit Russia’s Ust-Luga and Vysotsk ports, which handle oil exports on the Baltic Sea, as ​well as targets in ‌the Kaluga and ​Yaroslavl regions, local governors ​said.

Russia fired missiles and drones into apartment buildings in Kyiv for the second time in a week on Monday, killing at least 21 people and exposing the city’s critical ⁠shortage of US-made interceptors, Ukrainian authorities said, just ​days after a huge attack on the Ukrainian capital killed at least 27. Rescuers were digging bodies from the rubble of a Kyiv high-rise ripped open in the latest bombardment. The attack came on the eve of a Nato summit in Turkey where Donald Trump is due ⁠to hold talks with Zelenskyy in a renewed push for peace. The US president said on Monday ​that a ⁠resolution to the ⁠war ​in ‌Ukraine ‌was “getting closer than ‌people realise”.

Zelenskyy pleaded for Nato to boost Ukraine’s air defence against Russia’s ballistic missiles, saying in the aftermath of the strikes: “It is simply absurd that in the modern world, production has still not been organised to the extent that is necessary to protect people from ballistic terror.” He also said Kyiv expected “decisions” on Ukrainian air defence at the Ankara summit. Earlier, Nato chief Mark Rutte said: “Allies and Nato partners must continue to ensure Ukraine gets what it needs.”

Ukraine hopes to sign major defence deals with at least seven Nato countries by the end of the year, according to a top official, highlighting a new aspect of Kyiv’s foreign policy intended to show it can be a provider as well as a recipient of military hardware and expertise, reports Shaun Walker. Kyiv has signed “drone deals” with six countries in recent months.

Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry said it had summoned ⁠Russia’s ambassador ⁠to ​protest against what it said was a Russian drone strike on ⁠a fuel station belonging to state oil and gas company Socar in ⁠Ukraine’s Mykolaiv region on Sunday. The ministry said other Socar-owned facilities in Ukraine, including an oil depot in Odesa, had previously been damaged ‌in military strikes. “The continuation of such incidents, despite repeated warnings, indicates the ​deliberate nature of these attacks,” it said in a statement on Monday. There was no immediate response from Russia.

Poland has provided €3.8bn ($4.3bn) in military aid to Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the Polish defence minister said, calling the amount “worth boasting about”. The announcement came as Poland’s defence ministry began declassifying its military donations to Ukraine amid an ongoing diplomatic dispute between Warsaw and Kyiv over second world war-era massacres.

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Victims with cuts and gunshot injuries rushed to hospital after fighting between prisoners from two drug gangs

Clashes at a Sri Lankan jail have killed 26 people, including seven guards, and wounded more than 100 in the country’s deadliest prison riot in years, officials said.

Victims with cuts and gunshot injuries were rushed to Negombo hospital, north of the capital Colombo after overnight fighting between prisoners from two drug gangs, police said on Monday.

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Man on bridge refuses to come down after posting tax complaint on social media

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Police in Melbourne are stuck in a standoff with a man on top of a major inner-city bridge after a dangerous graffiti stunt, with traffic slowing to a crawl.

Emergency services were called to the Bolte Bridge at 3am on Tuesday over reports a graffiti artist had climbed up one of the bridge’s 120-metre high pillars.

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iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

dumpsterdiversanonymous has added a photo to the pool:

Another great find at the Friend of the Library book sale. Commercial and fine art magazine from Zurich. Articles in English, German, and French. Nice article about printmaking by painters and sculptors at the Met. Cover relief print by Eduard Prussen from Cologne Volkshochschule.