"The drought of upcoming Star Wars movies is coming to an end soon," writes Cinemablend. In May the The Mandalorian and Grogu opens, and one year later there's the release of the Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars: Starfighter.

But "there are some insiders who already believe that Starfighter will be a bigger hit than The Mandalorian and Grogu..."

According to unnamed sources who spoke with Variety, there's a "sense" that Star Wars: Starfighter, which is directed by Deadpool & Wolverine's Shawn Levy, will be a more satisfying viewing experience. These same sources are allegedly impressed by the early footage they've seen of Ryan Gosling's performance and also suggested that Levy has "recaptured the franchise's spirit of fun." Furthermore, the article states that there's concern that because The Mandalorian and Grogu is spinning out of a streaming-exclusive series, it might not have as much appeal to people who aren't already fans of The Mandalorian... Star Wars: Starfighter, on the other hand, will be accessible to everyone equally. It's set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, which is an unexplored period for the Star Wars franchise onscreen. It's also expected that most, if not all of its featured characters will be brand-new, so no knowledge of past adventures is required.
Slashdot reader gaiageek reminds us that 2027 will also see a special 50-year anniversary event in movie in theatres: a "newly restored" version of the original 1977 Star Wars.

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It started Friday when all U.S. federal agencies were ordered to "immediately cease" using Anthropic's AI technology after contract negotiations stalled when Anthropic requested prohibitions against mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. But later Friday there were even more repercussions...


In a post to his 1.1 million followers on X.com, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth criticized Anthropic for what he called "a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon."

Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic's models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic... Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of "effective altruism," [Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei] have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission — a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic's defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable...

In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic... America's warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final.

Meanwhile, Anthrophic said on Friday that "no amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position." (And "We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.")
Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action — one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. We are deeply saddened by these developments. As the first frontier AI company to deploy models in the US government's classified networks, Anthropic has supported American warfighters since June 2024 and has every intention of continuing to do so. We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government... Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement.

Anthropic also defended the two exceptions they'd requested that had stalled contract negotiations. "[W]e do not believe that today's frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America's warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights."


Also Friday, OpenAI announced that "we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized that the agreement retains and confirms OpenAI's own prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance — and requires "human responsibility" for the use of force including for autonomous weapon systems. "The Department of War agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the Department of War also wanted. "

We are asking the Department of War to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

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Interesting Engineering reports:

US tech giant Google announced on Tuesday that it will build a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota. The new facility will be powered by 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy from wind and solar, coupled with a 300-megawatt battery, claimed to be the 'world's largest', with a 30-gigawatt-hour (GWh) capacity and 100-hour duration... The planned battery would dwarf a 19 GW lithium-ion project in the UAE...

Form Energy's batteries work very differently from most large batteries today. Instead of using lithium like the batteries in electric cars, they store electricity by making iron rust and then reversing the rusting process to release the energy when needed... Form's iron-air batteries are heavier and less efficient than their counterparts; they can only return about 50% to 70% of the energy used to charge them, while lithium-ion batteries return more than 90%. However, Form's batteries have one distinct advantage. They are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, costing about $20 per kilowatt-hour of storage, which is almost three times as cheap... It will store 150 MWh of electricity and can supply to the grid for up to 100 hours, delivering about 1.5 MW at peak output.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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There's already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica's ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles produced by lower-energy neutrinos interacting with matter:



When they do, the neutrinos produce charged particles that travel through the ice at nearly the speed of light, creating a blue glow called Cherenkov radiation... "Within the first couple years, we should be making much better measurements," [said Erin O'Sullivan, an associate professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a spokesperson for the project.] "There's hope to expand the detector, by an order of magnitude in volume, so the important thing there is we're not just seeing a few neutrino point sources, but we're starting to be a true telescope. ... That's really the dream."

The scientists spent seven years planning the upgrade, according to the article. "To drill holes a mile and a half deep takes about 30 hours, and 18 more hours to return to the surface," the article points out. "Then, the race begins because almost immediately, the hole starts to shrink as the water refreezes." ("If it takes too much time, the principal investigator says, "the instruments don't fit in anymore!")

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft de dood van de Iraanse ayatollah Ali Khamenei via Truth Social bevestigd.

"Khamenei, een van de kwaadaardigste mensen ooit, is dood", schrijft hij. "Dit is niet alleen gerechtigheid voor het Iraanse volk, maar voor alle geweldige Amerikanen en mensen uit vele landen over de hele wereld die zijn gedood of verminkt door Khamenei en zijn bende bloeddorstige SCHURKEN".

Een hoge Israëlische functionaris meldde eerder op zaterdag dat de Iraanse leider is omgekomen bij Amerikaanse en Israëlische aanvallen op Iran en dat zijn lichaam was gevonden. Iran weersprak dat.

TEL AVIV (ANP/AFP) - In verschillende delen van Israël waren zaterdagavond meerdere explosies te horen, nadat het Israëlische leger meldde dat Iran een nieuwe reeks raketten had gelanceerd.

Journalisten van het Franse persbureau AFP melden een reeks explosies in het centrale deel van Israël en in onder meer de steden Jeruzalem en Ramallah op de Westelijke Jordaanoever. Ook in Tel Aviv meldt een verslaggever een grote explosie te hebben gehoord. Volgens Israëlische hulpdiensten raakte in die stad zeker één persoon zwaargewond. Het slachtoffer zou in kritieke toestand verkeren.

Medisch personeel en veiligheidstroepen zouden ook zijn opgeroepen na meldingen van een inslag van een ballistische raket in centraal Israël, schrijft The Times of Israel. Er is nog niets bekend over mogelijke slachtoffers door de inslag.

Iran heeft bevestigd nieuwe aanvallen te hebben uitgevoerd op Israëlische bases en het ministerie van Defensie. Eerder op zaterdag voerde Iran al verschillende aanvallen uit op onder meer Amerikaanse bases in het Midden-Oosten. Het ging daarbij om vergelding voor Amerikaanse en Israëlische aanvallen op Iran.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - Volgens president Donald Trump is een groot deel van de Iraanse leiding omgekomen bij de gezamenlijke Amerikaanse en Israëlische aanvallen op Iran. "Een groot deel wel, ja. We weten niet alles, maar een groot deel wel. Het was een zeer krachtige aanval", zei hij zaterdag in een telefoongesprek met ABC News.

Trump sprak zich verder optimistisch uit over het verloop van de operatie. "Het gaat zeer goed", aldus de president. Op de vraag hoe lang de operatie zal duren, antwoordde hij: "Zo lang als we willen, eigenlijk. Maar het heeft al zoveel schade aangericht. Ze zijn in wezen uitgeschakeld."

Over een mogelijke nieuwe Iraanse leider zei Trump dat de VS "een zeer goed idee" hebben wie dat zou kunnen zijn. Israël beweert dat ayatollah Ali Khamenei is omgekomen en dat zijn lichaam is gevonden. Teheran spreekt dit tegen.

tintinetmilou has added a photo to the pool:

Kawagoe

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Fab 2026.
Hakuba, Japan.
Fomapan 100, Ricoh 35ZF.

Starting with the news 2026 is Mothra Year, Wikizilla's video review of "The Luminous Fairies and Mothra" has more details than a quick review of the book at The Japan Times, but the Wikizilla entry for the book has even more. On Youtube, there's also an interview with the book's translator. In 2023, the novelizations of "'Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again' by Shigeru Kayama" appeared in English thanks to the same translator, interviewed then too. Related, because these books are a little of both: in 2025, AskMe suggested "✨LESS OBVIOUS✨ books that have been adapted into movies," and looking from the opposite direction, Jim Knipfel reflected on "The Art and History of Movie Novelizations."

There were a lot of seamstresses, and then there weren't. The best of the webpages I found looking at this shift in history:

Kittie Knox did so much and died so young: a bicycle racer, a pathbreaker, and a seamstress who made her own knickerbocker suits to ride in. Rosa Parks was also also a seamstress; one of her works was recently conserved with some delicate custom patching. We know there must have been more African American seamstresses and dressmakers, and that they will have been under-reported; a museum specialist went looking and found mostly echoes. But also a thesis on The Fall of the American Dressmaker 1880-1920 (pictures start on p 41, pictures of full size recreated dressmaker-style formal dresses on p 60). In the substructure of the Gilded Age, the poor base under the gilded crust, garment and textile workers have been unionizing and striking in the US since at least 1824. Seamstresses -- the word is always unstable, I find -- are between dressmakers (roughly, a claim to be a designer of dresses) and factory or piecework garment workers. "Seamstress" has been used to refer to people at both ends of that, and menders too; and often a seamstress did any of those jobs as available. SO all of that was in the back of my mind when reading the recent data-dive from The Pudding on how the mass manufactured women's clothing size system works (and doesn't). The first half of the article is framed in a series of plots sharing one X-axis, "Waistline in Inches". It walks us through how, even if only the waistline measurement counts, current production is not good at providing clothes for everyone, or even letting us know what's likely to fit beforehand. The second half of the article is about learning how to sew, and a little bit how to fit, your own clothes, and revisiting the limitations of mass fitting models given that. But even this understates the limitations of a single scale for clothes. Who dealt with that when clothes did fit? Seamstresses.

Coordinated daylight assault on Tehran sparked Iranian retaliation and plunged the region into wider conflict

• US-Israeli attack on Iran – live updates

• US and Israel strikes on Iran – what we know so far

The bombs and missiles started falling on Tehran in full daylight, at about 9.15am, after the working day had started and the streets and offices were full.

Bombing campaigns in the modern era usually start at night, to heighten the target’s sense of disorientation and minimise the effectiveness of air defence.

Continue reading...

• Section of fans reacted as play paused at Elland Road

• Guardiola: ‘Respect the religion, respect the diversity’

• Leeds coach calls it ‘disappointing … we need to do better’

Pep Guardiola has called on football supporters to “respect religion and diversity” after fans booed a brief stoppage in play at Elland Road to allow Muslim players to break their Ramadan fast.

Play was halted in the 13th minute of Manchester City’s 1-0 win against Leeds after the sun had set to allow the Muslim players to eat. At this point, despite a clear message on the big screen, fans audibly jeered the situation.

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The radical cleric took over as supreme leader in 1989 and is likely to be replaced by hardline figures

• US-Israeli attack on Iran – live updates

• US and Israel strikes on Iran: what we know so far

When he appeared in public for the first time in five years in October 2024, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had an uncompromising message: Israel “won’t last long”, he told tens of thousands of supporters at a mosque in Tehran in a Friday sermon.

“We must stand up against the enemy while strengthening our unwavering faith,” the then-84-year-old told the gathering.

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Een zorginstelling aan de 1e Middellandstraat in Rotterdam-West is zaterdagavond ontruimd. Bewoners kregen rond 20:00 uur last van een sterk geurende, prikkende stof. De veiligheidsdiensten kwamen ter plaatse en hebben de eerste verdieping ontruimd.

Op door NRC geverifieerde beelden zijn de gevolgen te zien van Israëlisch-Amerikaanse bombardementen die deze zaterdag op een wijk in de Iraanse hoofdstad Teheran werden…

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