The Guardian

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Trump threatens to ‘blow up’ Oman amid talks over strait of Hormuz

US president calls on US ally to ‘behave … or else we’ll have to blow them up’ in casual aside during cabinet meeting

Donald Trump has threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” in a casual aside during a cabinet meeting, as the US scrambles to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

The US president made the threat after reports of talks between Iran and Oman about jointly charging a toll for ships passing through the crucial waterway, which has been all but closed since the start of the US-Israel war on Iran.

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Jakub Mensik labels French Open heat ‘insane’ after collapsing at end of five-set win

  • Mensik offered wheelchair to get back to locker room

  • Djokovic calls for more night games on hot days

Jakub Mensik claimed it was “insane” for players to compete in such hot conditions at Roland Garros and after collapsing on court due to cramps and being escorted back to the locker room in a wheelchair at the end of his dramatic 6-3, 2-6, 6-4, 1-6, 7-6 (11) second-round win over Mariano Navone. Novak Djokovic called on organisers to use common sense and push more matches to later in the day during extreme heat.

“It’s insane to play in this weather and especially in front of the sun,” Mensik said. “To be there for more than four and a half hours, that’s just insane, and even with the breaks you don’t have that much time, the ballboy cannot bring you a towel during the changeover. You have just one minute, which obviously before, when you sit, it’s already just 30 seconds. So there is not that much time to cool yourself down.”

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Nasa images show wildfire damage to island dubbed ‘Galapagos of California’

The satellite visuals reveal vast burn scars after blaze tore through rare ecosystems on Santa Rosa Island

Images from a Nasa satellite showcased the devastating scars left behind by a wildfire that consumed roughly a third of Santa Rosa Island, one of the five islands that make up Channel Islands national park off the southern California coast.

Taken on 20 May, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (Modis) took the false-color image of the burn area, showing swaths of blackened land.

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Kumamoto Central Police Station - Japan

on the water photography has added a photo to the pool:

Kumamoto Central Police Station - Japan

This facility was originally built and famously known as the Kumamoto-Kita Police Station. The Kusabacho building (now the Central Police Station) is globally celebrated for its striking modern design. Designed by the legendary architect Kazuo Shinohara and completed in 1990 under the "Kumamoto Art Polis" initiative, it is often called the "glass police station". The front facade is wrapped entirely in reflective half-mirror glass, utilizing a distinct steel-frame design expanding outward on the upper floors to house a custom martial arts hall.

Tokyo Skytree – Light Above the Silence

T.Marko has added a photo to the pool:

Tokyo Skytree – Light Above the Silence

Rising through the darkness of Tokyo’s night skyline, the illuminated Tokyo Skytree becomes a glowing vertical path between earth and sky. The contrast between the deep black surroundings and the cold blue-golden lights creates a cinematic atmosphere, emphasizing both scale and solitude in the heart of the city.

Formula 1 News

Formula 1® - The Official F1® Website

Watch Round 10 of the 2026 F1 Sim Racing World Championship

Catch all the action from Round 10 of the 2026 F1 Sim Racing World Championship.

this isn't happiness.

ART, PHOTOGRAPHY, DESIGN & DISAPPOINTMENT INSTAGRAM ★ ELSEWHERES

Heating up, Katie Scarlett







Heating up, Katie Scarlett

Papercuts, Michelle Thompson






image modified

Papercuts, Michelle Thompson

The five major food groups, Rob Hann







The five major food groups, Rob Hann

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Malware dev tries to steal Claude users' secrets, writes npm slop, leaks own GitHub private token

An npm-slop package “mouse5212-super-formatter” targeting Claude users and acting as a stealer reached 676 downloads before being removed from the registry - and after making a major vibe coding blunder. The AI-generated malware leaked its own GitHub private token, thus allowing OX Security researchers to trace the stolen files and analyze the malware before issuing this warning: “We’re going to see more threat actors getting into the game – uploading more sloppy malwares, mostly mimicking APT groups to get a slice of the cake until npm starts automatically blocking malware completely.” According to researchers Moshe Siman Tov Bustan and Nir Zadok, the sloppy code writer created their GitHub account earlier this month, just hours before uploading their first malicious version to npm and shortly after testing out the information-stealing capabilities on a “test” repository. The GitHub account was deleted after the attack. All versions of mouse5212-super-formatter are affected, according to the threat hunters, so if you installed it, immediately revoke your GitHub access tokens and assume any unusual files in the “/mnt/user-data” directory have been compromised. This is the storage directory that Anthropic’s AI coding tool Claude uses to handle file uploads, downloads, and code/data outputs. The script purports to be an internal “archive deployment sync” utility that validates a GitHub repository, captures a “network status” snapshot, and then synchronizes local workspace files with a remote tracking tree. In reality, however, it’s a stealer. “It authenticates to GitHub (using an environment token or a hardcoded fallback), checks whether a target repository exists, creates it if needed, then recursively walks a local directory and uploads every file through the GitHub Contents API,” Bustan and Zadok wrote. It stores the stolen files under random per-run folder names, which allows for multiple stealing sessions, and exfiltrates the sensitive info using base64 encoding. The malware also writes a phony network connection log to make it look like a diagnostic - not theft - tool, and uses “intentionally bland” and/or technical comments and commit messages “to reduce suspicion,” the researchers wrote. It does this instead of using redundant or Russian-language comments that would be a dead giveaway the attacker used AI to write the malicious code. Then again, leaking your own tokens also isn’t super stealthy behavior or best practices when it comes to writing malware. ®

Argonne flexes spare supercompute to build private AI inference service

Boffins at the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago on Tuesday unveiled a new AI inference service cobbled together from spare supercomputing capacity. The hope is that the service can help researchers across the US, including DoE labs and those working on the Genesis Mission, advance scientific discovery across a range of fields. Argonne is home to some of the world’s largest supercomputing clusters, including the No. 3-ranked Aurora supercomputer. But its compute capacity also includes several smaller, AI-optimized systems. As of writing, the lab’s inference service is running atop two clusters: The first is the Sophia system, comprising 192 Nvidia A100 GPUs, most with 40 GB of memory. The second, dubbed Metis, is arguably the more interesting. That system features 32 of SambaNova’s SN40L AI accelerators. Moving forward, Argonne says that the inference service will also be extended to the Nvidia GH200-based Tara and B200-based Minerva systems. The inference service provides researchers with access to a range of large language models (LLMs) through a chatbot-like portal. Models include OpenAI's GPT-OSS, Google’s Gemma family, Meta’s Llama herd, and a variety of domain-specific and custom models, like AuroraGPT. And at least for some of its services, Argonne appears to be using Open WebUI, a popular self-hosted chatbot service we’ve explored on numerous occasions. Argonne envisions researchers harnessing these models to securely analyze large datasets and experiment with integrating generative AI into their workflows. “By making AI inference available as a shared resource, we are enabling researchers to apply AI at scale to their data, their simulations and their experiments without having to build and maintain their own infrastructure,” ALCF director Michael Papka said in a statement. Critically, the service enables DoE researchers to experiment with chatbots in a secure manner that doesn’t expose data to public services like ChatGPT. According to Argonne, researchers are already using the service to analyze experimental data in real time to predict things like plasma disruptions in fusion energy research. Boffins are also using the tech to sift through large quantities of data generated by particle accelerators and telescopes to narrow the search radius of the most likely candidates. By doing so, researchers can make better use of available supercomputing capacity, rather than wasting cycles brute forcing the problem. While LLMs and other generative AI models still struggle with hallucinations and other erroneous behavior, there’s a growing corpus of research to suggest that the technology can be used to automate research or supplement traditional climate or physics models. For example, before it was air-gapped, the eggheads at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory tasked El Capitan, the world's most powerful publicly known supe, to develop a new tsunami forecasting model. Meanwhile, Nvidia has demonstrated that AI climate models can identify storm cells faster and more accurately than existing models. ®

Television Commercial Summertime

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Television Commercial Summertime

The Lark Motel, Bozeman, Montana

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The Lark Motel, Bozeman, Montana

Omaha, Nebraska

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Omaha, Nebraska

Three Different Faces

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Three Different Faces

Better Come Quick

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Better Come Quick

kottke.org

Jason Kottke's weblog, home of fine hypertext products

American Wealth, Sliced Up

Using the Federal Reserve’s Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 data, Ryan Thorpe imagines a pizza party with 100 guests and 100 slices of pizza as a stand-in for the United States:

We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up the slices the way wealth is divided among American households:

• 1 person gets 30 slices
• 9 people get 3.7 slices each
• 40 people get 0.75 slices each
• 50 people get 0.05 slices each

Dig in! But watch out for “those people” trying to steal your 0.05.

I checked the math and it’s not quite 100 slices…it’s ~96.1 I whipped up a pizza pie chart (embedded above) so you can visualize how much each person gets. Is this the kind of party we Americans want to attend on a daily basis?

  1. I imagine Thorpe rounded off some numbers for clarity.

Tags: infoviz · pizza · Ryan Thorpe · usa · wealth

MetaFilter

The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

Trump's Executive Order: Signed, Sealed, and... Soiled

Forbes YouTube video In this Forbes YouTube video, Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office and then—without taking any questions—his aides quickly usher the press out of the room. But not before an unmistakable sound is heard at timestamp 0:34. The reactions from those present—including a woman in green covering her nose and fanning herself with a folder—seem to confirm the worst. Was this the most undignified Oval Office moment ever captured on camera? Or just another Tuesday in the Trump administration?

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Oprichter Apple-keten Amac doet stap terug

UTRECHT (ANP) - Oprichter Ed Bindels van Apple-keten Amac doet een stap terug. Hij is niet langer topman van de Nederlandse verkoper van Apple-producten, maar gaat bij het bedrijf verder als voorzitter van de raad van commissarissen. Volgens Amac was de topfunctie voor Bindels niet meer te combineren met zijn werkzaamheden bij de door hem opgezette horecagelegenheid Liemès en het recent geopende Apple Museum.

Bindels richtte Amac in 2005 op. Het bedrijf groeide uit tot een keten van 47 winkels in Nederland. "De afgelopen twee jaar heb ik mij voornamelijk gefocust op het Apple Museum", stelt Bindels. "Dat is in april succesvol geopend en dat momentum willen we vasthouden. Daarnaast is Liemès onlangs uitgebreid met twee nieuwe eventruimtes en daar gaat ook veel tijd en energie in zitten."

De dagelijkse leiding bij Amac is nu in handen van Roelof de Rijk, die sinds 2013 bij de keten werkt. Hij werd vorig jaar al aangesteld als zogenoemde managing director. Bindels en De Rijk zijn samen eigenaar van de keten.


Weer springt een Gronings dorp bij: Warffum vangt vier nachten asielzoekers uit Ter Apel op

De gemeente Het Hogeland kreeg een acuut verzoek van asielminister Bart van den Brink. De burgemeester constateert dat „opnieuw Groningse gemeenten solidair” zijn met Ter Apel en ziet elders in het land „onvoldoende steun”.