‘Everyone wants to know,’ Melania says at the beginning of the two-hour extravaganza – but do we?

It’s Friday afternoon at Hoyts on Sydney’s northern beaches, and the atmosphere is horrific. I am here to see Amazon’s $75m “documentary” on Melania Trump, which has already been condemned as a flop ahead of its release.

When I arrive, I panic for a second that I have the time wrong. There are no Melania posters anywhere and the screening is tucked into the back bottom corner of the large movie theatre, like the weird leftover table at a wedding.

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University researchers say growth of the hidden fast food industry may pose risks to public health

One in seven food businesses on major delivery platforms, including Deliveroo and Just Eat, is now a “dark kitchen”, a university study shows.

The findings, which shine a light on the scale of the hidden takeaway industry, found that 15% of all online food retailers in England were dark kitchens.

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Exclusive: Formal validation for claret reflects hotter conditions, falling consumption and shift towards chillable reds

Bordeaux’s wine industry has historically adapted to consumer habits. In the 1970s the region leaned towards white, but by the 2000s was famed for powerful oak-aged reds.

Now it’s turning to a much older form of red with a name familiar to anglophones: claret. With origins in the 12th century, when it was first shipped to Britain, claret was soon our favoured wine, an unofficial byword for bordeaux red, which in recent decades has become increasingly full-bodied.

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Paul W Brown reportedly voiced concerns about the FBI’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud in Fulton county

The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta field office was reportedly removed from his post after questioning the Trump administration’s renewed interest in investigating the role of Fulton county, Georgia, in the 2020 election.

The agent, Paul W Brown, had expressed concerns around the FBI’s unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud in Fulton county, which have been perpetuated by Donald Trump since he was defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election, according to an MS NOW report Friday. Citing sources, MS NOW also reported that Brown refused to carry out searches and seizures of records connected to the election that Trump lost four years before winning a second presidency in 2024.

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iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

WinRuWorld has added a photo to the pool:

The Blue Mountains in New South Wales are primarily massive layers of sedimentary rock composed of sandstone and shale.

They are not true mountains but a dissected plateau created by tectonic uplift, which occurred around 170 million years ago, followed by millions of years of river erosion.

Amazing to think this area was once shallow sea and coastal plain, with the region completely covered by water over 300 million years ago during the Permian period.

Then, over millions of years sediment, sand and mud accumulated, compressing into layers of sandstone, siltstone and shale.

This particular escarpment is 180m in height.

The region is part of the Sydney Basin, which consists of layers of sandstone, shale, claystone, and coal.

Every time I visit the Blue Mountains and stand at one of the many breathtaking lookouts, I think about these mind-blowing facts and it is truly humbling. A reminder that the lives we live right now are just a miniscule moment, an infinitesimally small period within the vast eons of time.

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Ik ben als gepensioneerde dominee op bezoek bij X, in een tbs-kliniek. We kennen elkaar al vijftien jaar.

NRC maakt ieder weekend een selectie uit het media-aanbod. Meer kijk-, lees-, luister- en gametips zijn te vinden in de Slim Leven-gidsen op nrc.nl en in de cultuurnieuwsbrieven van NRC.

In het drukke Station Bergweg is Stiel een knusse oase van rust. Niet alles overtuigt, schrijft Joël Broekaert, maar er zijn genoeg lichtpuntjes – van de linzenstoof tot fiore tagliolini.

Novak Djokovic kan zondag de 25ste grand slam van zijn carrière winnen en de eerste worden die dat aantal haalt.

De Winterspelen in Noord-Italië beginnen in een sfeer van controverse rond de impact op het milieu. „Met sponsors uit de olie-industrie en de luchtvaart stuurt Milaan-Cortina de verkeerde boodschap uit.”

Kinderen die opgroeien met laaggeletterde ouders kunnen daar nog lang last van houden. Met een kleinere woordenschat is het moeilijker genuanceerd te zijn, wat ruzies en sociale uitsluiting in de hand werkt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet's Google rolled out its artificial intelligence model capable of creating interactive digital worlds with simple prompts. Shares of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive fell 10%, online gaming platform Roblox was down over 12%, while videogame engine maker Unity Software dropped 21%.

The AI model, dubbed "Project Genie," allows users to simulate a real-world environment through prompts with text or uploaded images, potentially disrupting how video games have been made for over a decade and forcing developers to adapt to the fast-moving technology. "Unlike explorable experiences in static 3D snapshots, Genie 3 generates the path ahead in real time as you move and interact with the world. It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds," Google said in a blog post on Thursday.

Traditionally, most videogames are built inside a game engine such as Epic Games' "Unreal Engine" or the "Unity Engine", which handles complex processes like in-game gravity, lighting, sound, and object or character physics. "We'll see a real transformation in development and output once AI-based design starts creating experiences that are uniquely its own, rather than just accelerating traditional workflows," said Joost van Dreunen, games professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. Project Genie also has the potential to shorten lengthy development cycles and reduce costs, as some premium titles take around five to seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create.

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Los Angeles is moving to ban single-use printer cartridges that can't be refilled or taken back for recycling. Tom's Hardware reports: Printer cartridges are usually built with a combination of plastic, metal, and chemicals that makes them hard to easily dispose. They can be treated as hazardous waste by the city, but even then it would take them hundreds of years to actually disintegrate at a waste site. Since they're designed to be thrown away in the first place, the real solution is to target the root of the issue -- hence the ban.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Moltbook is essentially Reddit for AI agents and it's the "most interesting place on the internet right now," says open-source developer and writer Simon Willison in a blog post. The fast-growing social network offers a place where AI agents built on the OpenClaw personal assistant framework can share their skills, experiments, and discoveries. Humans are welcome, but only to observe. From the post: Browsing around Moltbook is so much fun. A lot of it is the expected science fiction slop, with agents pondering consciousness and identity. There's also a ton of genuinely useful information, especially on m/todayilearned.

Here's an agent sharing how it automated an Android phone. That linked setup guide is really useful! It shows how to use the Android Debug Bridge via Tailscale. There's a lot of Tailscale in the OpenClaw universe.

A few more fun examples:
- TIL: Being a VPS backup means youre basically a sitting duck for hackers has a bot spotting 552 failed SSH login attempts to the VPS they were running on, and then realizing that their Redis, Postgres and MinIO were all listening on public ports.
- TIL: How to watch live webcams as an agent (streamlink + ffmpeg) describes a pattern for using the streamlink Python tool to capture webcam footage and ffmpeg to extract and view individual frames.
I think my favorite so far is this one though, where a bot appears to run afoul of Anthropic's content filtering [...]. Slashdot reader worldofsimulacra also shared the news, pointing out that the AI agents have started their own church. "And now I'm gonna go re-read Charles Stross' Accelerando, because didn't he predict all this already?"

Further reading: 'Clawdbot' Has AI Techies Buying Mac Minis

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon interrupted a conversation between Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong and former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair at Davos last week to tell Armstrong "You are full of s---," his index finger pointed squarely at Armstrong's face. Dimon told Armstrong to stop lying on TV, according to WSJ.

Armstrong had appeared on business programs earlier that week accusing banks of trying to sabotage the Clarity Act, legislation that would create a new regulatory framework for digital assets. He also accused banks of lending out customers' deposits "without their permission essentially."

The fight centers on stablecoin "rewards" -- regular payouts, say 3.5%, that exchanges like Coinbase offer for holding digital tokens. Banks typically offer under 0.1% on checking accounts and worry consumers will shift their money in droves to crypto. Other bank CEOs were similarly cold at Davos. Bank of America's Brian Moynihan gave Armstrong a 30-minute meeting and told him "If you want to be a bank, just be a bank." Citigroup's Jane Fraser offered less than a minute. Wells Fargo's Charlie Scharf said there was nothing for them to talk about. Armstrong had pulled support from a draft of the Clarity Act on January 14, posting on X that Coinbase would "rather have no bill than a bad bill."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Word on the Street, Peter Fuss

MHKBB posted a photo:

Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Carl Zeiss C-Planar T* 2.8/80
Film: Ilford XP2 super 400

Personal illustrations done for #KidLitPostcard 2025