The Italian is now a clear favourite to win the Drivers’ Championship title after securing a memorable win in Monte Carlo.
Kimi Antonelli delivered a fifth straight Grand Prix win around the streets of Monte-Carlo to extend his lead in the Drivers’ Championship to a mighty 66 points.
Check out some of the most striking photos from this season's Monaco Grand Prix, which was won in stunning fashion by Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli.
Relive the action from Monaco at the 2026 Monaco Grand Prix with plenty of off-track F1 moments – McLaren’s milestone, football fever, and more.
Firefox has merged initial support for Vulkan Video decoding, giving the browser a more cross-platform path for GPU-accelerated video playback beyond Linux's long-running reliance on VA-API. Phoronix reports: Firefox on Linux has long been focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that isn't universally supported by Linux graphics drivers. This has left to efforts like NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver to layer VA-API atop NVIDIA NVDEC interfaces to enjoy GPU-accelerated video playback in Firefox. Smaller Arm/embedded graphics drivers also have been largely left out of the game in the VA-API space. But with Vulkan Video we are beginning to see more adoption and in a cross-platform manner.
[...] The Firefox 153 release due out in July will have Vulkan Video decoding support available. The Vulkan Video activity in Firefox Git culminated this week with the work of NVIDIA engineer Tymur Boiko and Red Hat's Martin Stransky. Firefox 153.0 is expected for release on 21 July with this Vulkan Video support assuming no last minute issues.
[...] The Firefox 153 release due out in July will have Vulkan Video decoding support available. The Vulkan Video activity in Firefox Git culminated this week with the work of NVIDIA engineer Tymur Boiko and Red Hat's Martin Stransky. Firefox 153.0 is expected for release on 21 July with this Vulkan Video support assuming no last minute issues.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Bending Spoons, the Italian app studio behind acquisitions like Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Evernote, and AOL, has filed to go public in the U.S. after growing into a subscription-heavy app conglomerate with more than 500 million monthly active users. TechCrunch reports: In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bending Spoons said it ended the year with $1.31 billion in revenue and has generated $601 million in Q1, a 132% year-on-year jump. The company gets the majority of its revenue from subscriptions, which account for 84% of its business. It generated $27.4 million in profit in Q1 2026. The company raised funding at an $11 billion valuation last year, up from $2.8 billion in 2024. In April, Reuters reported that the company could seek a $20 billion valuation with the IPO.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Jeff Bezos is backing Flourish, a new "neuro AI" startup with $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, that aims to reinvent AI by studying the brain's architecture and building systems that learn continuously while using far less power than today's large language models. The company's long-term bet is that neuroscientists and AI researchers working together can uncover the brain's "core algorithm" and eventually create brain-inspired AI that runs on a tiny fraction of current compute. Wired reports: Rob Williams knows how to pitch Jeff Bezos: You write a press release as if your product has already been built. Bezos reads it and gives a thumbs up or down. Williams went through this process a lot as an executive on Amazon's "S-team," in charge of software products such as Alexa, until his departure last fall. But the pitch he made a few weeks later -- in December 2025 -- was different. Now he was collaborating with Thomas Reardon, a neuroscientist and repeat startup founder, and approaching Bezos as a funder, not a boss. Here's what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom: "Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain."
A month later, I'm lunching with Reardon and Williams in the Flatiron neighborhood in New York City. Reardon gets right to the point. AI has dug itself into a hole, he says. Though increasingly powerful, large language models are greedy consumers of computer power and data. Though the inspiration for LLMs was rooted in biology, current frontier models have little in common with the human brain. A person uses about 20 watts of energy to process information; a single chip in an AI training cluster uses more than 30 times that amount. The hyperscalers require thousands of chips and gigawatts of energy, enough to power small cities. And those models need to suck up virtually all of what humans have written. Each new model requires more, more, more. For all of that, the models don't learn. Once you train them, they're stuck. The goal, Reardon tells me, is to build "a synthetic artificial intelligence brain that runs on 50 watts or less." It should adapt to its conditions, be as nimble as a human mind, and burn a tiny fraction of an LLM's compute power and energy. The proof of concept is thriving inside our skulls. "There's something fundamentally wrong with saying, "I need to basically read every book ever written 20 times over in order to learn English,'" Reardon says. "A human baby does it with a couple hundred thousand utterances."
Reardon and Williams haven't figured out yet how to build systems that match the magic of a human brain. What they have is a belief that an expert, well-resourced team -- of AI researchers and neuroscientists working essentially side by side -- can find the answer. The neuroscientists will conduct original wet lab experiments with some of the most advanced lab equipment available, to hunt for usable intel on the brain's architecture. They plan to release the models they're currently developing as near-term products on the path to a full reinvention of AI. The fuzziness of the proposal didn't bother Jeff Bezos. After reading Williams' two-pager, he chipped in $50 million. Other funding came from Lux Capital, Google Ventures, and Catalio, among others. Bezos then almost doubled his initial stake and told Reardon he'd have given more if they'd asked. Now with a war chest of $500 million and a reported valuation of $2.5 billion, Flourish just needs to invent a new way to do AI.
A month later, I'm lunching with Reardon and Williams in the Flatiron neighborhood in New York City. Reardon gets right to the point. AI has dug itself into a hole, he says. Though increasingly powerful, large language models are greedy consumers of computer power and data. Though the inspiration for LLMs was rooted in biology, current frontier models have little in common with the human brain. A person uses about 20 watts of energy to process information; a single chip in an AI training cluster uses more than 30 times that amount. The hyperscalers require thousands of chips and gigawatts of energy, enough to power small cities. And those models need to suck up virtually all of what humans have written. Each new model requires more, more, more. For all of that, the models don't learn. Once you train them, they're stuck. The goal, Reardon tells me, is to build "a synthetic artificial intelligence brain that runs on 50 watts or less." It should adapt to its conditions, be as nimble as a human mind, and burn a tiny fraction of an LLM's compute power and energy. The proof of concept is thriving inside our skulls. "There's something fundamentally wrong with saying, "I need to basically read every book ever written 20 times over in order to learn English,'" Reardon says. "A human baby does it with a couple hundred thousand utterances."
Reardon and Williams haven't figured out yet how to build systems that match the magic of a human brain. What they have is a belief that an expert, well-resourced team -- of AI researchers and neuroscientists working essentially side by side -- can find the answer. The neuroscientists will conduct original wet lab experiments with some of the most advanced lab equipment available, to hunt for usable intel on the brain's architecture. They plan to release the models they're currently developing as near-term products on the path to a full reinvention of AI. The fuzziness of the proposal didn't bother Jeff Bezos. After reading Williams' two-pager, he chipped in $50 million. Other funding came from Lux Capital, Google Ventures, and Catalio, among others. Bezos then almost doubled his initial stake and told Reardon he'd have given more if they'd asked. Now with a war chest of $500 million and a reported valuation of $2.5 billion, Flourish just needs to invent a new way to do AI.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Nominations are open for this year’s Tiny Awards. “The Tiny Awards exist because we thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the sorts of personal web projects that tend to get overlooked.”
Het politiewerk in de haven verandert door wereldwijde spanningen en technologische ontwikkelingen. Jarenlang maakte de Zeehavenpolitie zich vooral druk om drugscriminaliteit, tegenwoordig vragen cybercriminaliteit, dronetechnologie, ondermijning en milieudelicten om meer aandacht.
Double can mean many things. It may imply a duplicate, symmetry, a reflection, a twin, a splitting, or even a shadow self. There is an inherent duality that forms around two parts, which may or may not be in concert with one another. Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank was the first to describe the concept in an essay published in 1914, and Sigmund Freud ran with the idea in his 1919 book The Uncanny.
For Freud, the phenomenon illustrated how the unconscious is actually a kind of second consciousness. Scottish psychoanalyst R.D. Laing drew on this foundation in his study of schizophrenia in the book The Divided Self, which delves into the nature of “real” and “false” selves. And in a literary sense, the concept has generated enduring works of fiction, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Stephen King’s The Dark Half.
For Paris-based artist Xie Lei, the double inspires a new body of work in a titular solo exhibition at Musée Denys-Puech in Rodez, France. Through feather-light brushstrokes, deep shadows, and glowing hues, the artist renders spectral figures in oil paint. “What I’m trying to achieve is to transport the viewer into another world and give them the impression of diving into and participating in the painting,” Xie says.
Some canvases like “Resistance” appear to be underwater, yet also feel elemental and weightless, as if the scenes are unfolding in an alternate realm. “Double I” portrays blurry figures that could be engulfed in flames or perhaps a glowing wheat field, embracing but also possibly combating one another. Disembodied hands often reach out to grasp faces or limbs, such as in “Observance” and “Disappear II.”
Throughout Xie’s work, there is a sense of transformation, even transfiguration, as twins or reflections hover between dreams and reality. “The silent are neither entirely present nor truly absent; they are on the threshold and remain in an in-between state,” says a statement. “Contact is never a firm grip, but rather a suspended touch that preserves a slight distance.”
Double marks Xie’s receipt of the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2025, which is awarded annually to an artist working in France, and the show runs from June 12 to October 25. He also has forthcoming solo exhibitions later this year at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles and the Song Art Museum in Beijing. See more on Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Phantasmic Figures Grapple with Their Doubles in Xie Lei’s Dreamy Oil Paintings appeared first on Colossal.
GENÈVE (ANP/AFP) - VN-mensenrechtenchef Volker Türk dringt er bij de Verenigde Staten op aan dat het land de sancties tegen Cuba moet opheffen. Volgens Türk raken de sancties vooral de meest kwetsbare Cubanen en brengen ze levens in gevaar.
Cuba heeft al jarenlang te kampen met Amerikaanse sancties, maar president Donald Trump heeft deze de afgelopen maanden enorm opgeschroefd. Hij probeert de Cubaanse regering zo onder druk te zetten. Ook dreigt Trump de macht over het eiland over te nemen.
"Kinderen sterven omdat dokters geen toegang hebben tot essentiële medische middelen en medicijnen. Dit is onaanvaardbaar", aldus Türk. Sinds de Amerikaanse brandstofbeperkingen van begin dit jaar heeft Cuba vaak te maken met stroomonderbrekingen die regelmatig langer dan twintig uur duren.
Recente cijfers over de volksgezondheid laten zien dat kindersterfte in Cuba is verdubbeld sinds de brandstofbeperkingen zijn ingevoerd. Ook zijn de overlevingskansen voor kinderen met kanker gedaald.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Leden van de Vereniging van Effectenbezitters (VEB) kunnen een vergoeding tegemoetzien voor koersverlies op aandelen van SNS Reaal toen het bedrijf in 2013 werd genationaliseerd. De VEB heeft daarover een schikking getroffen met de bankverzekeraar en de toenmalige accountant KPMG.
De vergoeding voor VEB-leden met een geldige claim is ten minste 400 euro. Voor leden die meer dan 2000 euro koersverlies hebben geleden, komt nog een aanvullende tegemoetkoming. De VEB erkent dat de vergoeding mogelijk maar een deel van het geleden koersverlies dekt, maar adviseert leden deze toch aan te nemen. "Gezien de complexiteit van de zaak en de inmiddels ruim twaalf jaar aan juridische procedures is het resultaat redelijk en goed verdedigbaar", aldus de VEB. De schikking heeft volgens de vereniging niets te maken met schulderkenning of aansprakelijkheid.
De schikking komt ruim drie jaar nadat rechters oordeelden geen bewijs te hebben gevonden voor wanbeleid bij SNS Reaal in de periode die voorafging aan de nationalisatie van de bank en verzekeraar. Beleggers zagen in een eerder verschenen rapport genoeg aanwijzingen van slecht bestuur, maar de ondernemingskamer in Amsterdam ging daar niet in mee. Het vaststellen van wanbeleid zou beleggers, aangevoerd door de VEB, hebben geholpen bij het eisen van een schadevergoeding. Die is nu dus alsnog gekomen.
Het ministerie van Financiën nationaliseerde SNS Reaal in 2013 om te voorkomen dat het financiële concern zou omvallen. De geredde onderdelen werden in een verzekeringstak en een banktak ondergebracht. Die eerste werd verkocht aan het Chinese Anbang en werd later weer doorverkocht aan Athora en NN. De banktak heet tegenwoordig ASN Bank.
ARNHEM (ANP) - Bij de Gelredome in Arnhem wordt opnieuw geprotesteerd tegen de komst van Ye naar Nederland. De Amerikaanse rapper geeft maandagavond een concert in het stadion, zijn tweede in Nederland sinds 2013. Het protest is met een handvol demonstranten een stuk kleinschaliger dan dat van zaterdag. Toen waren er enkele tientallen betogers.
Ter hoogte van Ingang Noord heeft het Centrum Informatie en Documentatie Israël (CIDI) een groot scherm neergezet. Daarop worden allerlei "kwalijke" uitspraken van Ye, beter bekend als Kanye West, getoond. De uitlatingen gaan onder meer over Joden en mensen uit de lhbtq-gemeenschap. Concertbezoekers bekijken de quotes en fotograferen de actie. Sommigen steken daarbij hun duim omhoog. Een enkeling gaat in gesprek met de demonstranten.
In meerdere landen zijn optredens van Ye afgezegd vanwege zijn antisemitische en pro-nazistische uitspraken. Zo maakte hij onder meer een nummer met de naam Heil Hitler en prees hij de Duitse nazileider. Via zijn website verkocht de artiest T-shirts met een hakenkruis erop. Later bood hij excuses aan en zei hij dat zijn uitspraken voortkwamen uit een bipolaire stoornis die hij kreeg na een auto-ongeluk.
Nationaal Holocaustmuseum
Het protest van zaterdag verliep rustig. Twee mensen werden aangehouden vanwege het verstoren van de openbare orde, maar volgens de politie waren het geen demonstranten. Ook stuurde de politie drie mensen weg, omdat ze borden droegen waarop complottheorieën over onder meer de Holocaust stonden.
De burgemeester van Arnhem, Ahmed Marcouch, nodigde Ye uit om samen naar het Nationaal Holocaustmuseum in Amsterdam te gaan en een krans te leggen bij het Namenmonument. De organisatie achter het Holocaustmuseum, het Joods Cultureel Kwartier (JCK), zei niet aan een bezoek mee te willen werken. Ye zelf heeft nog niet gereageerd op het initiatief.
Post on Facebook received more than 900 comments, with one Italian writing that they were ‘ashamed’
A US tourist has warned visitors to Rome after paying €44 (£38) for two ice-creams in the Italian capital.
Nicole Ann, from Florida, advised fellow tourists to “avoid Don Nino”, an ice-cream parlour on a street off Piazza Navona. She claimed she had ordered two small cups of ice-cream but instead was charged for two large cones topped with trimmings that were allegedly not requested, including macarons, cannoli and panna (whipped cream).
Continue reading...Paris and Berlin conclude firms involved unable to agree on way forward in blow to Europe’s common defence push
France and Germany have concluded that the companies involved in building a joint fighter jet will not be able to reach an agreement and have abandoned the project, officials in Berlin have said in a blow to Europe’s common defence efforts.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Germany chancellor, Friedrich Merz, had “reached the shared assessment that the companies will not be able to come together”, an official told Agence France-Presse. “They acknowledge this reality.”
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Het project ter waarde van 100 miljard euro liep afgelopen jaar al vast door een felle ruzie tussen het Franse Dassault en Duitse Airbus. Nu concluderen Frankrijk en Duitsland dat de onenigheid niet op te lossen is en het gezamelijke gevechtsvliegtuig er niet komt.
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Valeria Kondor has added a photo to the pool:
Lino print on brown paper and gold foil
14x21cm
Hard cover bound art book
2026 may
