LAS VEGAS (ANP/RTR) - De Grote Prijs van Las Vegas blijft nog zeker tien jaar op de Formule 1-kalender staan. De organisatie achter de race heeft het contract met Formule 1 met tien jaar verlengd.

De eerste race over de bekende Strip in de Amerikaanse gokstad vond plaats in 2023. De drie edities van de nachtrace, waarvan er twee werden gewonnen door Max Verstappen, hebben honderdduizenden bezoekers getrokken en hadden een economische impact van 3,2 miljard dollar (2,75 miljard euro) op de stad.

De vierde editie van de Grote Prijs van Las Vegas staat gepland op 22 november van dit jaar en wordt de twintigste van de 22 races van het seizoen.

BRUSSEL (ANP/AFP) - Amerikaanse en Europese functionarissen zijn er na twee dagen onderhandelen niet in geslaagd overeenstemming te bereiken over een hoge vertegenwoordiger voor Bosnië en Herzegovina. Dat bevestigde de vertrekkende gezant Christian Schmidt, die aangeeft dat het overleg binnenkort wordt voortgezet.

De hoge vertegenwoordiger, ingesteld als onderdeel van het vredesakkoord van 1995 dat een einde maakte aan de Bosnische burgeroorlog, houdt toezicht op de uitvoering van de akkoorden en beschikt over verregaande bevoegdheden in het Balkanland.

De gezant wordt aangewezen door een stuurgroep van de Vredesuitvoeringsraad. In die raad zijn 55 landen vertegenwoordigd. Europese landen, Rusland en de Verenigde Staten verschillen de afgelopen jaren van mening over de rol en de toekomst van de hoge vertegenwoordiger.

De VS lieten na het stuklopen van de besprekingen weten hun rol in Bosnië te heroverwegen. Dat doet het land vanwege "de Europese besluiteloosheid en het feit dat de Vredesuitvoeringsraad zijn verantwoordelijkheden afschuift."

WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - De Verenigde Staten hebben sancties ingesteld tegen de Cubaanse president Miguel Díaz-Canel. Dat valt te lezen op de website van het ministerie van Financiën. Ook zijn sancties ingesteld tegen leden van de familie Castro, onder anderen tegen de zoon en kleinzoon van oud-president Raúl Castro.

Onduidelijk is wat de sancties behelzen, maar zeker is dat de VS hun druk op het communistische land opvoeren. De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump noemde Cuba donderdag opnieuw een mislukt land toen hem werd gevraagd naar de sancties en zei dat de VS graag zien dat Cuba een "goed gerund land" wordt.

De Cubaanse minister van Buitenlandse Zaken Bruno Rodríguez noemt de sancties op X "verwerpelijk". Amerikaanse acties om een conflictsituatie te creëren zijn gedoemd te mislukken, aldus Rodríguez. "Elke bedreiging van de onafhankelijkheid en soevereiniteit van Cuba zal beantwoord worden met meer eenheid en vastberadenheid van onze bevolking."

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide May 1970

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:

PHL-ORD

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Anthropic is urging leading AI labs to consider slowing development, warning that frontier models are advancing fast enough that they may soon be able to improve themselves without direct human intervention. The company says a global ability to pause or slow AI development would "likely be a good thing," citing internal data about accelerating model capabilities. From a blog post: Using public benchmarks and previously unreported data from within Anthropic, The Anthropic Institute is showing that AI is already accelerating the development of AI systems. To take just one example: today, Anthropic engineers on average ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021-2025.

The technical trends discussed in this piece suggest that AI systems are going to become much more capable in coming years. These trends have huge implications. AI that can build itself would be a major development in the history of technology -- one that could bring enormous good for the world in science, healthcare, and beyond. But full recursive self-improvement also might increase the risks of humans losing control over AI systems. If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important. [...]

If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe. Without a global coordination mechanism, companies and governments will have to make difficult decisions about safety while under competitive and geopolitical pressures.

We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. The Anthropic Institute will conduct research -- in collaboration with many others -- and take actions to help build the systems that a credible slowdown or pause would require. These systems would enable frontier AI developers to verify that others globally have actually stopped or slowed, and that a bad actor could not use the auspices of a coordinated slowdown to jump ahead in secret. If such systems existed, we expect that we would slow down or temporarily pause, if other developers at or near the frontier also did so in a verifiable manner...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new npm supply-chain attack has infected 36 packages with Rust-based infostealer malware called IronWorm. According to BleepingComputer, the malware "targets 86 environment variables (key-value pairs) and 20 credential files that may contain OpenAI, AWS, Anthropic, and npm credentials, vault configuration files, SSH keys, and Exodus cryptocurrency wallet files." From the report: According to researchers at supply-chain and devops company JFrog, IronWorm is written in Rust, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and communicates with the operator over the Tor network. The Rust-based malware self-propagates by using stolen credentials for publishing on npm; this includes secrets associated with npm's Trusted Publishing workflow. Once it compromises a developer or CI environment, it can publish trojanized versions of packages owned by the victim, which then infect additional developers and CI systems.

This behavior is conceptually similar to Shai Hulud, which had its code published on GitHub recently. Although JFrog researchers did not find a clear connection between IronWorm and Shai Hulud, they observed the same commit names in both supply-chain attacks. This opens the possibility that the new malware is an evolution of TeamPCP's payload, since IronWorm appears to be "a custom, carefully built implant from an operation with its own infrastructure."

[...] The company provides a list of all impacted package names and their versions in the report and recommends that developers upgrade to fixed releases, rotate their keys, and enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for all accounts. At the same time, Endor Labs and StepSecurity have spotted a very similar but distinct attack involving a JavaScript-based malware named binding.gyp, performing registry poisoning and GitHub Actions infection, unfolding during the same time-frame.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Public Theater, New York

Susanna Kaysen’s retelling of her time in a psychiatric hospital in the 60s became an Oscar-winning movie in the 90s and now it’s an elegant, if limited, play

In 2021, the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann (perhaps best known, as a solo artist, for her contributions to the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia) released an album called Queens of the Summer Hotel, a collection of somewhat narrative tunes inspired by Susanna Kaysen’s bestselling memoir of mental health struggle, Girl, Interrupted. Mann had been commissioned to write the songs for a stage adaptation that took years (and the duration of a pandemic) to materialize. Now finally at the Public Theater in Manhattan, Girl, Interrupted is a sturdy showcase for Mann’s gorgeous, shimmering-sad compositions, but perhaps a less successful conduit for Kaysen’s arguments.

The press materials for Girl, Interrupted are careful to stress one point of distinction: this is a “play with music”, not, strictly, a musical. The former term has been around for a long time, but eludes exact definition. It’s a “know it when you see it” (or hear it) kind of a thing. Girl, Interrupted, though, fits rather comfortably under the rubric of the traditional musical. The songs may not advance the plot, exactly, but they do offer crucial insight into the inner lives of the troubled young women encountered by a fictionalized Susanna at McLean, a storied psychiatric hospital in suburban Boston.

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Star makes for reliably charming lead in Netflix’s basic throwback, but co-star Brett Goldstein, and his co-written script, lack in fizz

Netflix has become something of a safe space for Jennifer Lopez, a one-time box office heavyweight who has now secured a more reliable at-home following on the platform. Middling action films The Mother and Atlas might have turned critics off but both drew blockbuster streaming numbers, while more recent theatrical efforts such as Marry Me and Kiss of the Spider-Woman struggled to reach earlier highs. The arrival of her latest Netflix vehicle, to-the-point romcom Office Romance, is likely to be another smartly packaged win for the star, harking back to a genre she once dominated in the 2000s with hits like Maid in Manhattan and The Wedding Planner. It’s similarly by-the-numbers, but what gives it something of an alleged unique selling point is its unusual R rating and the promise of more “raunch” than usual.

But the film is far tamer than those involved seem to think, an inconsistent mix of sugar and spice, the right tone never quite clicking into place. Ted Lasso’s Brett Goldstein, acting as both leading man and co-writer, tries to introduce British humour (awkward bumbling, football jokes, calling people cunt affectionately) into an American setting but it never blends together as smoothly as we want or expect from such high-gloss material. Lopez looks and acts the part, movie star charisma dialled up to 11, but the film around her is too unsure and ungainly to match.

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US secretary of state Marco Rubio says anyone providing services to listed entities ‘is at risk of sanctions themselves’

The United States has announced fresh economic sanctions on Cuba’s president and some of his immediate family, alongside members of the Castro family, in Washington’s latest ramping up of pressure on its communist-led neighbour.

Among those targeted were the son and a grandson of former president Raúl Castro, who no longer holds an official position but remains a key figure on decisions about the future of the island.

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You may have recently seen on your socials the edges of a classic too-hard-to-explain-to-your-partner YouTube and beyond saga involving stolen Star Wars Legos, YouTube gonzo journalism and (surprise) an over-enthusiastic Utah police department but haven't been able to get your hands around it. 404 Media is here to sort you out.

Jason Koebler has done all the leg work (404 doesn't seem to do gift links, so I will include some of the many many many sources he has collected). The very short version is in 2003 a man tried to sell a large collection of (mainly, I gather) Star Wars-themed Lego sets under consignment at a Bricks & Minifigs location (which valued the collection at $200,000). The store was then bought back from the franchiser by B&M corporate, who refused to return the sets or any money. A YouTuber (who I hope isn't problematic) named Reckless Ben got really involved, eventually getting arrested in Utah for stalking by an extremely credulous police department. TechDirt's Mike Masnick, who concludes, reasonably, that 'everyone in this LEGO dispute should have spoken to a lawyer earlier than they did' in a post that covers everything you need. Or just read the Wikipedia entry. Or the Reddit megathread. It's the gift that keeps on giving. If videos are your thing, get the basics in Reckless Ben's first video (90min). Eventually, Patreon got involved via a legal threat, and thus we are rewarded with a video from Jack Conte telling Bricks & Minifigs to pound sand.

The Las Vegas Grand Prix will remain on the F1 calendar through 2037 following the new long-term extension.

F1.com has all the details on the new contract announced for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, with a 10-year extension meaning that the event will continue on for many years to come.