The Student List has shown my generation, who protested against the Milošević regime in the 1990s, how we should have done it

On Halloween, a few days after a student-led movement swept aside an illiberal, seemingly invincible regime in my native Serbia, I was sitting on the Vienna tram and watched various friendly and malicious monsters getting on and off around me. Witches, devils and unicorns were politely making their way to their respective parties.

Not all monsters wear fancy dress. Later that evening, I walked past a Serbian restaurant; in front of it stood a group of grumpy-looking men. They were smoking, spitting and swearing. I recognised the hardened, couldn’t-care-less attitude, the smell of corruption, the penchant for violence. Yet they looked as though their lives were coming to an end. These men are the losers of the revolution that is taking place in Serbia. Their smuggling routes and deals are under threat. Their criminal networks no longer function.

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After some so-so albums, can U2’s new one, Carnaval de Luz, restore them to glory? They discuss male egos, working with Dolly Parton, and explain why, despite Trump, they still believe in democracy – at least in their band

La Petite Maison, in Nice, has a certain reputation as a five-star celebrity haunt. Beyoncé eats here. So do Elton John, Tom Cruise, Harry Styles and Leonardo DiCaprio, their meals presided over by the restaurant’s founder, Nicole, variously described in print as “eccentric”, “unique” and “truculent” (she’s standing by the entrance when I arrive, and suffice to say, doesn’t look like someone you’d much enjoy being on the wrong side of).

It’s enough of a celebrity haunt that the arrival of U2 – still incontrovertibly one of the biggest bands in the world 40 years after they could first reasonably have called themselves such – causes barely a murmur of interest among their fellow lunchtime diners. Then again, Bono is a regular. He was eating on the outdoor terrace the night of Nice’s terrorist attack, on Bastille Day in 2016, in which 86 people were killed. “I climbed through that window and hid under there,” he nods, pointing to a table at the rear of the restaurant. “Nicole,” he adds, “didn’t hide.”

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At 15, having the cool 31-year-old PE teacher single me out felt thrilling. It took years to see his praise for what it really was

I was 15 when Paul joined my high school in Queensland, Australia, as a PE teacher. He was fun and handsome, and seemed much younger than his 31 years. I was obsessed with dance, and when Paul complimented me on my gymnastics, I was thrilled the “cool” teacher had noticed me.

He’d always stop for a chat. I was the only child of a single mum and though she was there for me, I didn’t confide in her. But he was easy to talk to and I quickly developed a crush.

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In 1986, Bamber was convicted of the murders of five members of his family. He has always protested his innocence. This year, with the help of leading experts, we have re-examined some of the most compelling evidence

• Warning: this piece contains crime-scene photographs

The White House Farm massacre is one of Britain’s most notorious and horrifying crimes. On 7 August 1985, five members of the Bamber family were shot dead at their farmhouse in Essex, England. This Wednesday marked exactly 40 years since Jeremy Bamber was convicted of the murders of his adoptive parents, his sister and her six-year-old twin boys. He was initially jailed for a minimum of 25 years, later upgraded to a whole-life sentence.

If Bamber did kill his family, it is right that he remains in prison. But there have always been questions about the safety of his convictions, and these have grown recently. My late reporting partner, Eric Allison, formerly the prisons correspondent for the Guardian, spent years investigating the case and we began reporting on these questions together. If Bamber isn’t guilty, the idea of an innocent man spending 41 years and counting in prison, wrongfully convicted of killing his loved ones, is horrifying.

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Rescuers were unable to save the whales after they became beached on a remote and rocky part of the country

More than 40 pilot whales died after a mass stranding event on New Zealand’s remote east coast, conservation officials said on Friday, despite rescue efforts by volunteers and conservation workers.

The Department of Conservation (DoC) said 43 whales had died in the mass stranding along the Ngawi coast on the south-eastern tip of the North Island.

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Dit jaar is een nieuw tijdperk begonnen: AI-modellen bereikten het niveau van de beste wiskundigen. Wat betekent dit voor de wetenschap? En welke rol blijft er over voor de mens?

Wie aan techno denkt, denkt al snel aan donkere ravebunkers, een harde bas en Berlijn. Maar de basis van dit muziekgenre is futuristisch, hoopvol en komt uit Detroit.

Na een koude nacht met temperaturen landinwaarts net iets boven het vriespunt, is er vandaag vrij veel zon en blijft het droog. De temperatuur stijgt vanmiddag pas naar 9 of 10 graden en daarmee is het aan de frisse kant voor de tijd van het jaar. Later vanmiddag volgt wat meer bewolking. De wind waait zwak tot matig uit het oosten.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific Ocean where debris naturally accumulates, is full of tiny bits of plastic -- so full, in fact, that it seems to be changing the color of the ocean. [...] To better understand how microplastics may have influenced the ocean's color, [Daniel Koestner, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway] and his colleagues looked at 20 years of satellite data from the spot in the ocean with perhaps the most of plastic -- the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a zone between Hawaii and California where trash trapped by ocean currents accumulates.

Between 2002 and 2022, the researchers found, waters near the garbage patch have gotten brighter in both blue and green wavelengths compared with surrounding areas. The results, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday, don't yet prove that microplastics have directly brightened the ocean, the researchers emphasize, though their findings are backed up by lab experiments with microplastics. But without taking direct ocean samples, it's hard to know for sure what's causing the ocean's color to change.
"We're still one step away from proving definitively that microplastics are causing the shift in color that that we're seeing," adds study co-author Shea Cheatham, a Ph.D. student also at the University of Bergen. "We just have to get in there [to the garbage patch] to verify."

The hope is that detecting these color shifts could help identify other areas around the world where microplastics have accumulated.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new selection of geometric and psychedelic illustrations by YoAz. Bold color relationships, intricate linework and carefully balanced compositions turn familiar shapes into vivid graphic worlds. This collection reflects an ongoing exploration of symmetry, rhythm and visual storytelling through contemporary illustration.

Nation-state actors and criminals likely exploited the PHP2SHELL vulnerability before its disclosure, according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince. “These vulnerabilities, like the PHP vulnerabilities that were disclosed the other day, had been in the wild for years,” Prince said on the company’s third quarter earnings call. “We're going back through our logs looking for any evidence that hackers or nation-state actors or others had been using them in the past. I know that we're going to find examples of that.” That was just one of the warnings he offered on the call, among them that some of Cloudflare’s customers believe AI agents are “a bane to their business and want to keep them away.” To explain why, Prince hypothesized that he could use an agent to find him a restaurant to eat at after he finishes his day of investor relations duties. “It might go and scour the internet and look at 1,000 different restaurants' websites, pull down 1,000 different menus, and then I might choose to only go to one of those,” he said. “The problem is that 999 of those restaurants have now had a cost that is just been applied to them, but they are not getting any benefit.” The CEO admitted that web searches have always driven some low-value traffic but feels the volume of agentic activity – which Cloudflare has previously predicted will be one thousand times greater than clicks from humans – means the problem is now at a different scale. Prince also had bad news for Kubernetes aficionados, because he thinks containers might become another casualty of the agentic age. The CEO allowed that containers are “a significant improvement over bare metal or even virtual machines,” and said they fueled the growth of hyperscale clouds and mobile applications. But he thinks containers are already cooked. “The container-based architecture of the hyperscalers and neoclouds just can't keep up in a cost-effective way with the new agentic paradigms of today,” he argued, again citing the 1000:1 ratio of bot:human traffic Cloudflare expects to see online any year now. That’s a Cloudflare-centric view, because Prince pitched the company’s serverless “Workers” service as an alternative to containers. The company also offers products that can either block agents, ameliorate the cost and traffic impacts of agentic activity, or allow organizations to monetize traffic generated by AI. Prince said demand for those products is growing fast, claiming that since July 1st, “approximately five percent” of the web opted in to Cloudflare’s content protection products. The CEO said Meta is already a customer, and said Zuck’s new “Muse” agents will benefit Cloudflare by creating more agentic traffic that third parties want to tame. He also pointed to year-on-year revenue growth of 39 percent, which saw quarterly revenue reach a record $782.5 million. And he thinks there are better days ahead, due to the terrible state of security. “It may seem like the sky is falling with the number of new security vulnerabilities that have been reported over the last few weeks,” Prince said. “I wish I could tell you we were through the worst, but we're not.” He thinks Cloudflare can profit from security misery because the extent of its activities and client base mean it is “among the first to receive quiet disclosure of new vulnerabilities” and remediates them before disclosure. Investors thought this all made sense, and in after-hours trading sent Cloudflare shares up by around 15 percent, meaning it recovered and then improved on losses that it incurred earlier after major US indices dropped around four percent as investors who worry tech stocks are overvalued. ®

Clay burrows hoping to save little dragon from incredibly lethal heat. One of Canberra's rarest residents, the grassland earless dragon, is being given a new lease on life with clay homes built to help the critically endangered species survive another scorching summer.

niggyl :) has added a photo to the pool:

Looking from New Pelion Hut across the snow and wind-swept Pelion Plains to the crenelated spines of Mount Oakley (1286m) emerge from another snow shower.

Fabulous day to be in the wilds.

Leica Q2 Monochrom, Summilux 28mm f/1.7 ASPH, 1/5000th sec at f/5.6, ISO 200

braart has added a photo to the pool:

The unicorn

Keith Midson has added a photo to the pool:

My place