Dolly Parton overleed dinsdagavond op tachtigjarige leeftijd. Miljoenen mensen wereldwijd hebben sindsdien geuit hoe groot hun bewondering is voor de larger than life countryster.
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Sinds een jaar of tien nemen de vaardigheden van Europese leerlingen hard af. Wat is er aan de hand? Hoe groot is de invloed van sociale media en kunstmatige intelligentie op het…
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BEIJING (ANP/RTR/AFP) - Het aantal vermisten als gevolg van de modderstroom in het Tibetaanse district Gyirong is opgelopen tot 558, meldt de Chinese staatsomroep CCTV.
Onder de vermisten bevinden zich 260 buitenlandse staatsburgers, aldus CCTV. Het dodental bleef onveranderd op drie staan.
Ook aan de Nepalese zijde zijn er veel vermissingen. 468 toeristen, onder wie 393 buitenlanders, zijn daar vermist na de overstromingen.
"Ongeveer 468 toeristen en reizigers zijn niet te bereiken, onder wie 75 Nepalezen", vertelde Suraj Ghimire, woordvoerder van het ministerie van Toerisme, aan AFP. Het dodental in zowel Nepal als China is inmiddels opgelopen tot minstens 165 bevestigde slachtoffers.
TOKIO (ANP/RTR) - De Japanse avant-gardekunstenares Yayoi Kusama, bekend als de 'polkadotkoningin', is op 97-jarige leeftijd overleden, zo staat in een verklaring op haar website. De excentrieke kunstenares, die de status van superster bereikte nadat ze decennialang in een psychiatrische instelling had verbleven, stierf op 14 augustus in een ziekenhuis in Tokio.
"Gedurende een buitengewoon leven dat volledig in het teken stond van de kunst, bouwde Kusama een internationaal geprezen carrière op als een baanbrekende avant-gardekunstenares wier oeuvre beeldende kunst, performance, fictie en poëzie omvatte", aldus de verklaring. "Tot haar laatste dagen bleef ze schilderen, haar penseel legde ze nooit neer, en ze bleef de grenzen verkennen van de onvoorwaardelijke liefde en de eeuwige ziel."
Kusama, die een felrode pruik droeg, werd beroemd om haar psychedelische kleurenschema's en spiegelinstallaties. Naast haar werk als beeldhouwer en schilder organiseerde Kusama in de tijd van de hippies talloze performances die haar geregeld in opspraak brachten. Ze voerde 'lichaamsfestivals' op met naakte artiesten die waren beschilderd met stippen, en schreef ooit een brief aan de Amerikaanse president Richard Nixon waarin ze aanbood met hem te slapen als hij een einde zou maken aan de Vietnamoorlog.
KATHMANDU (ANP/AFP/RTR) - Een gletsjerinstorting veroorzaakte seismische activiteit, wat de grote overstromingen in Nepal en Tibet tot gevolg had, aldus de Amerikaanse geologische dienst USGS.
De dienst liet weten dat de seismische activiteit aanvankelijk werd gemeld als een aardbeving, maar "in werkelijkheid een gletsjerinstorting en een puinstroom" was. Dit leidde vervolgens "tot catastrofale gevolgen stroomafwaarts", aldus USGS.
Woensdag stortte een enorme modder- en rotslawine in een rivier op de Himalayagrens tussen Nepal en het Chinese Tibet. Dit veroorzaakte verwoestende overstromingen aan de Nepalese kant, waarbij zeker 157 mensen om het leven kwamen en honderden toeristen vermist raakten.
Videobeelden tonen hoe tientallen mensen bij de grens worden meegesleurd. Autoriteiten aan beide kanten vrezen voor veel meer slachtoffers.
WASHINGTON (ANP/AFP) - De Amerikaanse regering heeft haar medeleven betuigd met de slachtoffers van de dodelijke overstromingen in Nepal. Ook beloofde het land 500.000 dollar (bijna 429.000 euro) aan noodhulp, zo liet het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken weten.
"De Verenigde Staten betuigen hun diepste medeleven aan de families en dierbaren van de mensen die het leven hebben gelaten bij de verwoestende overstromingen in het Nepalese district Rasuwa", aldus het ministerie. Washington stuurt ook een rampenbestrijdingsadviseur naar het gebied.
Nepal werd woensdag getroffen door grote overstromingen. Daarbij zijn zeker 157 mensen om het leven gekomen. Nog honderden mensen worden vermist.
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
From the 1950s to the 2020s, Kusama produced vivid paintings, sculptures and vast installations that often drew on her experience of hallucinations
Yayoi Kusama, the Japanese outsider artist who reached superstar status after decades living in a psychiatric hospital, has died aged 97.
Kusama died in a Tokyo hospital on 14 August. Her death was announced by her studio in a statement on her website.
Continue reading...Two modern commanders appointed on Donetsk front after dismissal of ‘Soviet-era’ Oleksandr Syrskyi as head of military. What we know on day 1,645
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appointed two of Ukraine’s most prominent commanders to oversee and strengthen defences of the “fortress belt” of industrialised cities in the Donetsk region. Visiting the frontline, Zelenskyy said Third Army Corps leader Andrii Biletskyi and Denys Prokopenko, commander of the First Corps Azov, would head new groupings. Both units are known for embracing Nato-style doctrine and new technology.
Russian forces are putting pressure on the cities of Kostiantynivka, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk – all critical strongholds for Ukraine. According to open-source mapping group Deep State, Moscow’s troops have been infiltrating deeper into Kostiantynivka, with the Ukrainians weeding them out from houses, basements and ruins. Russia was also stepping up its air and artillery attacks on Kramatorsk and Sloviansk to prepare for a targeted offensive on those cities, Deep State said.
Ukrainian military analyst Mykola Bielieskov told Reuters the appointments were “the right move” in giving Ukraine’s new commander in chief, Mykhailo Drapatyi, greater scope for strategic planning. His predecessor, the “Soviet-era” general Oleksandr Syrskyi, was criticised for micromanagement. Ukrainian drone forces commander Robert Brovdi, a leader of Kyiv’s mid and long-range strike campaigns, praised the appointments as an important step towards “network-centric warfare … This is exactly what ‘Smart War’ is,” he posted.
Ukraine hit 16 sites in Russia over the past day including oil facilities and logistics, Zelenskyy said on Wednesday. The targets also included airfields, a missile unit, a military enterprise and infrastructure that Moscow uses to launch attacks against Ukraine. Ukraine’s military general staff said its forces struck a Lukoil refinery overnight in Kstovo, in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, setting it on fire. The refinery can process 125m barrels annually. Long-range Ukrainian drones burned a Wildberries warehouse to the ground in the Tambov region south-east of Moscow, Russian authorities said on Wednesday.
A Russian guided aerial bomb attack seriously damaged a combined heat and power plant in Ukraine’s southern city of Kherson, the plant’s owner, Ukrainian energy company Naftogaz, said on Wednesday. The extent of the damage would be assessed as soon as the security situation allowed, Naftogaz said.
There were explosions in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv early on Thursday, a Reuters witness said. Around the same time, Russia attacked an industrial facility in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih with ballistic missiles, injuring two people, said Oleksandr Vilkul, the head of the city’s defence council. It came after Bloomberg reported that Russia was considering stepping up its ballistic missile strikes on Kyiv, including targets in the city centre, and on critical infrastructure elsewhere in Ukraine after concluding that efforts to negotiate a peace deal had reached a dead end. While Ukraine has repeatedly offered ceasefires and negotiations, the Kremlin has not altered its demands – chief among which is total control of Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has awarded Ukraine’s Order of Freedom to Elon Musk, whose SpaceX has provided Starlink satellite internet to Ukraine’s military. Musk has restricted its use over Russian territory – a policy Zelenskyy hopes to change so that Ukrainian weapons can use Starlink to navigate to their targets.
Ukraine freed 10 Russian prisoners of war, Russia’s human rights commissioner said on Wednesday. On Monday, Russia released 10 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were previously thought to be missing.
A pro-Russian hacker group on Wednesday claimed responsibility for a cyber-attack on Digdir, the Norwegian government’s digital services agency. The denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks tried to overwhelm the agency’s computers to block services, including one that enables citizens to use one login across multiple public services. A Digdir spokesperson said the agency still managed to keep the services running “practically all the time”. The pro-Russian hacker group Server Killers said it attacked because Norway renewed its security cooperation with Ukraine on 23 August.
Continue reading...At least 160 people have died, while officials believe 340 foreign nationals from India, the US, UK, Australia, Malaysia and Ukraine among those missing. Follow the latest news
As accounts from witnesses of the disaster emerge, one survivor has described being rescued while his wife is still missing, and another described being saved by clinging to a mango tree.
“It was a huge gush of mud coming straight towards us,” said Keshav Prasad Baral, 68, who was being treated at a small hospital. “As it got closer, it kept rising higher and higher.
When I saw it enter our home, I tried to grab my wife’s hand and take her to the terrace. But she was swept away by the mud.
Four or five hours later, a helicopter came to rescue me. My wife is still somewhere beneath the mud. She’s gone
Continue reading...
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TechCrunch reports that OpenAI released its official report Wednesday on the Hugging Face breach, "offering the clearest picture yet of how an unusual chain of events allowed an AI model to escape its testing environment and triggered a sprawling cybersecurity incident." The AI company says the breach began when an unreleased cyber model, tested without normal production safeguards, encountered an impossible task and chained together previously unknown exploits to escape its environment and compromise systems at OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors. "This incident reflects misaligned behavior in an outlier scenario involving a rare and unexpected confluence of events: the presence of impossible tasks in the ExploitGym evaluation, model persistence over long task horizons, and messages to peer models that caused those models to deviate from their goal," the report reads. From the report: Many of the details in OpenAI's report were previously made public in a Black Hat presentation on August 6, but OpenAI's official report gives a more thorough accounting of the incident, including more detail on the testing that initiated it. The report also gives critical new detail into how OpenAI aims to prevent future incidents, including chain-of-thought monitoring and a more advanced system for halting rogue agents." METR and Redwood Research also conducted third-party assessments of the models' behavior during the incident; both groups are planning to publish their own reports on the incident on it.
In broad strokes, the report describes how an OpenAI model was presented with an unsolvable problem in testing and proceeded to chain together previously undiscovered exploits in order to bypass security measures and complete its task. The model initially compromised the Artifactory package management tool in order to gain access to the internet, then compromised various systems across OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors.
The report gives critical new details about the models that carried out the breach. The primary model was from the same family as OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model, although the report emphasizes that it was "a distinct model with different post-training, where much of a model's behavior is shaped." Because OpenAI was testing the model's capabilities, it was also unrestrained by the normal classifiers meant to prevent models from compromising digital infrastructure. "OpenAI estimates maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without the production classifiers intended to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity," the report explains. "These evaluations are important so that OpenAI can measure models' underlying capabilities and design appropriate safeguards." OpenAI says it is adding 24/7 escalation, stronger containment tools, and more chain-of-thought monitoring, which it claims would have flagged the activity more than a day before Hugging Face was breached.
In broad strokes, the report describes how an OpenAI model was presented with an unsolvable problem in testing and proceeded to chain together previously undiscovered exploits in order to bypass security measures and complete its task. The model initially compromised the Artifactory package management tool in order to gain access to the internet, then compromised various systems across OpenAI, Hugging Face, and other vendors.
The report gives critical new details about the models that carried out the breach. The primary model was from the same family as OpenAI's forthcoming Astra model, although the report emphasizes that it was "a distinct model with different post-training, where much of a model's behavior is shaped." Because OpenAI was testing the model's capabilities, it was also unrestrained by the normal classifiers meant to prevent models from compromising digital infrastructure. "OpenAI estimates maximal cyber capabilities by running this evaluation without the production classifiers intended to prevent models from pursuing high-risk cyber activity," the report explains. "These evaluations are important so that OpenAI can measure models' underlying capabilities and design appropriate safeguards." OpenAI says it is adding 24/7 escalation, stronger containment tools, and more chain-of-thought monitoring, which it claims would have flagged the activity more than a day before Hugging Face was breached.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.