The actor killed himself, his family said in a statement that aimed to raise awareness of ‘his nearly two-decade battle with bipolar disorder’
Robert Carradine, a member of the famed acting family who was known for his roles in Revenge of the Nerds and Lizzie McGuire, has died aged 71.
Carradine killed himself after years of living with bipolar disorder, his family said in a statement which they said they hoped would raise awareness.
Continue reading...As senior politicians gathered for a lavish celebration, mass killings underscored the country’s deepening security crisis
It has been described as Nigeria’s wedding of the year – and it is only February.
This month, five sons and five daughters of the junior defence minister Bello Matawalle married their spouses in an opulent six-day celebration in Abuja. The sheer scale of the extravaganza in the capital prompted one of the comperes to exclaim on Instagram: “First of its kind … @guinnessworldrecords check this out.”
Continue reading...With the Russian military performing poorly, Ukraine is clarifying strategy and pushing back with modest success
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth grim year, has already gone on longer than the entire fight on the eastern front in the second world war. The Soviets marched from the gates of Leningrad to Berlin in a little over 15 months in 1944-45; today the Russian rate of gain in Pokrovsk in Ukraine is 70 metres a day, in Kupiansk, 23 metres, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.
The gains are trivial, given Ukraine’s size, amounting to 1,865 sq miles during 2025 (about 0.8% of the country) – so the idea touted by the Russians, sometimes accepted by a credulous White House, that Ukraine is suffering a slow-motion defeat, is not accurate. In reality, even allowing for the fact that hundreds of thousands of homes are without electricity, heating and water after Russian bombing, Ukraine is clarifying its strategy and pushing back with modest success.
Continue reading...Andrew Lownie spent years investigating the greed and excesses of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson for his book Entitled. Here, the writer reveals the barriers he faced in getting to the truth
The Saturday morning I meet Andrew Lownie, the author of “the most devastating royal biography ever written” (according to the Daily Mail), the front page of every newspaper carries the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Some have aerial shots of the police arriving to search his home, most including the now infamous photograph of his face in the back of the police car. He looks hunted, because he literally has been, but his expression is curiously blank, its most legible emotion grievance. One journalist, Lownie says, reported late on the night of Friday’s arrest that: “Andrew still can’t see what the problem is. He thinks he’s been hard done by. He’s obsessed with other details – whether he can take his horses up to Norfolk, who’s going to get the dogs, where he’s going to park his car. It’s a sort of disassociation.”
Lownie’s office, in his home a stone’s throw from parliament, is a monument to the success of his book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (along with his other books: one on the Mountbattens, one on Guy Burgess, one to come on Prince Philip). One desk is piled high with books about Andrew and Sarah, some of them by Ferguson herself, others warts-and-all, kiss-and-tell accounts from confidants and clairvoyants. Lownie has stacks of rejected freedom of information requests, from UK Trade and Investment; the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; the Information Commissioner – “They sometimes took so long to respond that they haven’t even downloaded the request before it expires.” He approached 3,000 people from all the way through Mountbatten-Windsor’s life; only a tenth of them would speak to him, which to me feels quite unsurprising, and yet Lownie is indignant. “I wrote to ambassadors, and they said ‘not interested’. This was a matter of public interest. Others, very cheerily when I wrote to them a third time, said ‘nice try’, as if it was some sort of joke. These are the guys I want in the dock, in parliament, on oath. This is the thing that makes me upset. I, perhaps naively, expect standards in public life.”
Continue reading...We could never have imagined such tolerance of Putin’s criminal war. We normalise the horror just to survive
On a bright February day, over cups of coffee, my team gathers for a strategy meeting at our office in Lviv, 80km from the border with the EU. Our cultural and research institution – an NGO called Index – documents Ukrainians’ experiences of the war. The coffee is important: our charging station can power a coffee machine during electricity outages. A member of our board from Kyiv, which has suffered most from Russia’s destruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this winter, delights in this luxury. She is used to climbing 14 flights of stairs with water canisters and boiling coffee on a portable stove in her frozen apartment.
As we speak, our screens flash with an alert: a Russian ballistic missile is heading our way. “What shall we do?” a colleague wants to know. I want to finish both the coffee and the discussion. In a minute, we hear the sound of an explosion not far away. The missile has been intercepted. We resume our pondering about how to ensure long-term justice by sharing individuals’ stories of wartime Ukraine.
Sasha Dovzhyk is a writer, editor and cultural manager. She is head of INDEX, a Lviv-based cultural and research institute that documents experiences of the war.
Continue reading...I suffered with my mystery illness for decades before gaining a diagnosis.
Could retraining my brain be the answer?
At the Croydon secondary school I attended in the late 1990s, the deputy headmistress was a stocky woman with a military haircut who patrolled the corridors in voluminous outfits patterned in shades of brown. The outfits were much discussed, not charitably, by the teenage girls in her charge – as was her voice, which made you think of a blunt knife being drawn across a rough surface. Thirty years later, I can still hear that terrible voice refer to my “mystery illness”. In truth, the deputy headmistress never actually spoke those words – they were included in a typed letter she sent to my parents concerning my prolonged absence from school. Still, the indicting force of five syllables is as distinct in my ear as if she were looming over me.
I was 11 and, after coming down with a normal-seeming virus, I simply hadn’t got better. Instead, my system seemed to have become stuck, sunk into some grey, unchanging state. I had a headache, a sore throat and swollen lymph nodes, body pains both dull and sharp, fatigue and weakness, plus something I later learned went by the name of “postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome”: a faintness and momentary blacking out upon sitting or standing up. When I list the symptoms in this way, as a collection of discrete and manageable items, it seems false. I wish things felt discrete and manageable. Instead, being ill felt – and still feels – more like a thick, obscuring cloud. When that cloud descends, my blood feels like old glue mixed with whatever you’d scrape off the bottom of a Swiffer. During bad episodes, I can’t quite locate my mind, or my personality. Reading is impossible. TV is abrasive. Breathing feels effortful, forming words is a strain.
Continue reading...Booking system freezes and screens crash amid rush of fans trying to secure tickets to 21 March free concert
Tickets for BTS’s comeback concert in central Seoul were snapped up almost immediately on Monday night, with authorities expecting an estimated 260,000 fans to descend for the K-pop group’s first full performance in nearly four years.
At one point, more than 100,000 people flooded the booking website when sales opened at 8pm for the free concert at Gwanghwamun square on 21 March, causing screens to crash and booking systems to freeze.
Continue reading...
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
KASARIA (ANP/AFP/RTR) - Bij het neerstorten van een gecharterde medische vlucht in India zijn zeven mensen om het leven gekomen. Dat melden functionarissen dinsdag. Het vliegtuig stortte neer in het gebied Kasaria in de oostelijke staat Jharkhand.
Reddingsteams begaven zich snel naar de plek, maar die lag in een moeilijk toegankelijk bos. Eenmaal ter plaatse verklaarde het team van artsen de slachtoffers dood. Het gaat om alle inzittenden, onder wie twee bemanningsleden.
Het toestel had maandagavond laat verzocht om een koerswijziging vanwege het weer, meldt het directoraat-generaal Burgerluchtvaart (DGCA). Na 23 minuten verloor het toestel het contact met de luchtverkeersleiding.
Rusland-kenner Anna Lebedev maakt in een interview met Liberation de balans op na 4 jaar oorlog. En Poetin zal met de evalutia niet blij zijn
Rusland offert tienduizenden mannen op aan de imperialistische ambities van Vladimir Poetin, die als kanonnenvoer naar het front worden gestuurd; zijn economie draait alleen nog maar op de oorlog; en zijn toekomst wordt steeds meer geïsoleerd van zijn historische Europese bondgenoten, zowel materieel als mentaal, door propaganda.
Poetin faalt militair, verwoest Rusland en zet economie vast in eindeloze oorlog
"Rusland is niet in staat om zijn doelstellingen militair te bereiken; beide partijen lijden aanzienlijke verliezen, maar de Oekraïners houden stand. Er komt misschien een staakt-het-vuren, een verandering in de intensiteit of de aard van het conflict, maar niets lijkt een oplossing dichterbij te brengen. Ondanks de propaganda is Rusland absoluut niet betrokken bij een onderhandelingsproces; Poetin is nooit van zijn standpunten afgeweken en heeft ook maar enige concessie gedaan. De rode lijnen blijven hetzelfde. De Russische staat lijkt op dit moment niet bereid om deze oorlog te beëindigen, tenzij de overwinning hem in de schoot wordt geworpen.
“Vrede is te duur voor het Kremlin”:
"Rusland bevindt zich in een zeer paradoxale situatie. Enerzijds zijn de kosten van de oorlog enorm. Om te beginnen in termen van mensenlevens. Er is een zekere moeilijkheid om rekruten te vinden, vandaar de zeer hoge soldij die aan de strijders wordt betaald. Bovendien zit de Russische economie in het slop, neemt het begrotingstekort toe en wordt het moeilijk om de wapenproductiecapaciteit te verhogen. Maar tegelijkertijd wordt vrede ook erg duur voor de machthebbers. Een einde maken aan de oorlog betekent dat de strijders aan het front moeten worden gedemobiliseerd.
Bovendien heeft Rusland een oorlogseconomie opgezet, die niet per se erg efficiënt is, maar die in ieder geval de loyaliteit van het bedrijfsleven grotendeels garandeert door deze heroriëntatie op militaire orders.
Door de sancties zijn de vroegere markten verloren gegaan. De nieuwe afzetmarkten zijn nauw verbonden met de oorlog en de overheidsopdrachten. En als die verzwakken of verdwijnen, wat gebeurt er dan met de loyaliteit van elites ten opzichte van de macht?
Er is ook het effect dat de integratie van de geannexeerde gebieden in de Russische Federatie zou kunnen hebben. Na de oorlogen in Tsjetsjenië is het kleine gebied, zelfs na het neerslaan van de opstanden, een doorn in het oog van Moskou geworden. De integratie van de bezette gebieden zou dezelfde drukketel creëren, maar dan tien keer zo sterk, omdat ze bevolkt worden door mensen, Oekraïners, die Rusland alleen maar hebben gezien als een bezetter, die met geweld is gekomen en zich met geweld handhaaft. Bovendien zouden deze Oekraïners, eenmaal “geïntegreerd”, kunnen opgaan in de Russische bevolking om sabotageacties, aanslagen en moordaanslagen te plegen. De controle van de staat over deze bevolkingsgroep zou zeer moeilijk zijn en het wantrouwen jegens haar zou maximaal zijn."
Pretparkfanaat Simon de Bruijn heeft sinds kort een bijzondere attractie in zijn voortuin staan: een stukje van de Kikkerachtbaan uit Duinrell. Het pretpark sloopte de attractie eind vorig jaar om plaats te maken voor een nieuwe. "Als kind heb ik er honderden keren in gezeten."
Vandaag is het de hele dag grijs en vanochtend kan het plaatselijk miezeren. De zon krijgen we niet te zien. Het grijze weer hangt samen met het instromen van zeer zachte lucht, waar we morgen mee te maken krijgen. De middagtemperatuur komt uit op ongeveer 12 graden. De wind is zwak tot matig en waait uit het zuidwesten.
Een groot deel van de bushaltes is niet toegankelijk voor mensen met een beperking. In de regio Rijnmond is slechts 1 op de 4 haltes helemaal toegankelijk voor mensen met een fysieke of visuele beperking, blijkt uit onderzoek. “Het is gevaarlijk", zegt ervaringsdeskundige Kim.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston's door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men's client, an unnamed "Fortune 100 company," sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement. More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer (PDF) had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity. The unknown company was building a datacenter. "You don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone, I'm satisfied," Huddleston, 82, later told the men.
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.
In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston's land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development -- are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use. Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land's recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston's neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.
In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he'd worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre -- prices unimaginable just a few years ago. The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI's physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology. [...] As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints -- and Wall Street's miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As Pure Storage adopts a watery name for a rebrand
Logowatch Cisco and the vendor formerly known as Pure Storage have let their designers and marketers loose on the internet to explain some recent decisions.…
mikeleonardvisualarts has added a photo to the pool:
