Greg Adams Photography posted a photo:
Sunrise over the Sydney Opera House with a Tall Ship in the foreground
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Thomas Hawk posted a photo:
Journalist Will Coldwell tells the story of how a British businessman was imprisoned in Dubai – and how his family finally got him home
When Albert Douglas found out he was facing a long prison sentence in Dubai, he tried to escape the UAE … and failed. What followed was years of court proceedings, time in prison and even, Douglas says, beatings and torture.
In recent years, scores of business owners, unsuspecting tourists and influencers have been detained in Dubai – caught up in an opaque legal system, charged with breaking laws they may not even have been aware of.
Continue reading...Nato promises not to lose sight of Ukraine conflict; Russia attacks Kyiv. What we know on day 1,512
The Netherlands will spend 248m euros ($293m) on producing drones for Ukraine, Dutch defence minister Dilan Yesilgoz-Zegerius said on Wednesday. “Drones play a crucial role on the modern battlefield. Ukrainians deploy them with incredible skill to repel the incessant Russian attacks,” she said after meeting her counterparts from Nato countries and the alliance’s secretary general Mark Rutte in Berlin on Wednesday. “Thanks to the good cooperation with Ukraine, we are learning directly from this. This also offers opportunities for our business community,” she added. The drones will be manufactured in the Netherlands and Ukraine.
Rutte and Kyiv’s top allies vowed Wednesday they would not lose sight of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia and called on others to urgently boost their support for the country. With the outbreak of the US-Israel war against Iran, fears have grown that international support for Kyiv is waning, more than four years since Moscow’s full-scale invasion. American-led talks to end Europe’s deadliest conflict since the second world war have stalled since the start of the Middle East war, at a time US support for Ukraine was already weakening under US president Donald Trump.
Russia’s defence ministry warned on Wednesday that European plans to step up drone supplies to Ukraine are dragging those countries deeper into a war with Russia. The ministry said it believes governments in a number of EU countries have decided to increase the production and supply of drones to Ukraine, a move Moscow views as a step that is escalating the conflict. It published a list of factories and enterprises in several European countries it alleges manufacture drones or drone components, and gave their addresses, including sites in Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, Israel and Poland, among others.
Russian forces attacked Ukrainian capital Kyiv with missiles early on Thursday, killing a 12-year-old child, injuring several people, including emergency crew members, and damaging buildings, mayor Vitali Klitschko said. “As a result of the enemy attack, a 12-year-old child has been killed,” Klitschko wrote on Telegram. “At the moment, 10 people are injured. That includes several medics.” He said a large fire had broken out in a building in the Obolon district in the north of the capital, while debris had fallen in several locations. Tymur Tkachenko, head of the city’s military administration, said at least four people had been injured.
A Russian strike on an apartment building in Ukraine’s Black Sea port of Odesa killed one person and injured six on Wednesday, the head of the local military administration said. Serhiy Lysak, writing on Telegram, said apartments from the fifth to the seventh floor of the building were damaged. He posted photos showing at least one apartment badly damaged and debris strewn throughout the building’s interior.
Ukraine’s defence ministry said on Wednesday it was introducing a new model of operations integrating drone warfare with infantry activity and pointed to successes announced by its top commander in retaking territory from Russian forces in the south of the country. Top commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said Kyiv’s forces had regained control of nearly 50 sq km (19 sq miles) of its territory from Russia in March, building on its gains since the start of the year. Drones have assumed a prominent role in the four-year-old war pitting Kyiv against Moscow. Both sides have also devoted resources to developing ways to intercept drones and upgrade air defences.
A Ukrainian unit told AFP on Wednesday that it has carried out more than 100 attacks on the front using ground robots, after president Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently hailed the capture of a Russian position thanks to this new method. “In total, there have already been over 100 such operations,” said a source within the NC-13 company, which specialises in the use of these combat machines and is part of Ukraine’s 3rd Assault Brigade. “These operations include the elimination of enemy personnel, the destruction of shelters, command posts, and other enemy infrastructure objects. These are no longer isolated incidents, but systematic combat operations,” the source said. The systems allow the replacement of infantry assaults – which can result in soldier deaths – but also to detect and engage targets and prevent enemy infiltrations, the source said.
Continue reading...DEN BOSCH (ANP) - Steeds meer huishoudens willen overstappen naar een nieuwe energieleverancier. Dat komt naar voren uit de Nationale Benchmark Energieleveranciers van onderzoeksbureau Multiscope. Volgens de onderzoekers betreft het 1,7 miljoen huishoudens.
Vorig jaar hadden 1,3 miljoen huishoudens de intentie om over te stappen. In 2024 waren dat er nog 1,1 miljoen. De prijs is voor de meeste Nederlanders de doorslaggevende factor (55 procent). 24 procent verandert van energieleverancier als ze een aanbieding krijgen, volgt verder uit de cijfers.
Door de Iranoorlog zijn de energieprijzen de laatste tijd hard gestegen. Volgens een recente peiling van de Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM) betaalt een gemiddeld huishouden bij het afsluiten van een nieuw jaarcontract nu bijna 400 euro per jaar meer dan een maand terug. Mogelijk dat mensen hierdoor meer om zich heen kijken en zoeken naar energieleveranciers waar ze voordeliger uit zijn.
Loyaliteit
Ook de loyaliteit richting een huidige aanbieder neemt in sommige gevallen fors af, constateert Multiscope. Klanten van Oxxio willen slechts in 51 procent van de gevallen blijven, volgens het onderzoek. Ook bij Energiedirect is de intentie om te blijven er niet bij veel meer dan de helft (58 procent).
De resultaten van het onderzoek van Multiscope sluiten aan bij eerdere berichtgeving van onder meer de Consumentenbond. Die meldde vorige maand een toename van het aantal bezoeken aan webpagina's over energiecontracten en -kosten en de pagina waarop consumenten de kosten van verschillende energieleveranciers kunnen vergelijken. Van die laatste waren de bezoekcijfers ruim 70 procent hoger in de eerste helft van maart ten opzichte van de laatste helft van februari. Ook de website Overstappen.nl werd vaker bezocht in de zoektocht naar andere energieleveranciers.
WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Verenigde Staten hebben aangekondigd hun sancties tegen de Iraanse oliesector aan te scherpen. Dat verklaarde de Amerikaanse minister van Financiën Scott Bessent in een persbericht.
De sancties zijn met name gericht op de transportinfrastructuur, waaronder een twintigtal personen en entiteiten die banden hebben met het netwerk van oliemagnaat Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani.
"Het ministerie van Financiën voert krachtige maatregelen uit in het kader van de operatie 'Economische woede' en richt zich daarbij op de elites van het regime, zoals de familie Shamkhani, die zich ten koste van het Iraanse volk proberen te verrijken", aldus Bessent.
Mohammad Hossein Shamkhani is de zoon van Ali Shamkhani, een naaste adviseur van de voormalig hoogste Iraanse leider Ali Khamenei; beiden kwamen op de eerste dag van de oorlog om het leven.
:format(webp)/s3/static.nrc.nl/images/gn4/stripped/data146938838-8dab08.jpg)
Leo in Canberra has added a photo to the pool:
We left Innamincka in the morning flying north towards Channel Country and Birdsville. Within minutes the stark reds and yellows of the desert criss-crossed by the lines of dried creeks came into view. From around 5,000 feet, Australia is transformed into magically abstract compositions eerily recognisable from Indigenous artworks.
John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:
My Window Wednesday image yesterday was taken from this side of the jetty on Coochiemudlo Island which is situated ten minutes by ferry off the coast of Victoria Point in Moreton Bay, Queensland. You can see one of the ferries just arriving at the jetty.
I regard Coochie as one of the most relaxing places easily reached in the region. It only more or less has a cafe and a Bowls Club and the rest of the small island is mostly an idyllic bedroom community devoid of noise and unpleasantness with a few holiday homes thrown in. Arrive on the ferry and immediately your stress and blood pressure drop. Read about it below. Relaxation and quietude personified. Image taken December 2025.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coochiemudlo_Island
Services giant’s staff accused of assaults, inappropriate religious practices
Police in the Indian city of Nashik conducted a sting operation at Tata Consultancy Services and allegedly found instances of sexual harassment and other revolting behavior.…
With most of it not fit to sell, this op shop fixes donated items to reduce landfill. Every year, lots of new textile items are imported to the Australian market...about 1.55 billion of them. Fast fashion is a leading contributor to overproduction and makes reuse difficult. (An op shop is what is called a thrift store in the US or a charity shop in Britain.)
Splendid isolation: how I stopped time by sitting in a forest for 24 hours. "When you're actually in it, the reality of the solo is, at least at first, one of total boredom. I cannot stress enough how little there is to do when you have confined yourself to the inside of a small circle of stones and sticks in a forest. But it is an instructive kind of boredom, insofar as boredom is the raw and unmediated experience of time. It is considered best practice not to have a watch, and to turn off your phone and keep it somewhere in the bottom of a bag so as to avoid the temptation to constantly check how long you've been out and how long you have left. And as you become untethered from your accustomed orientation in time – from always knowing what time it is, how long you have to do the thing you're doing, when you have to stop doing it to do the next thing – you begin to glimpse a new perspective on the anxiety that arises from that orientation. Because this anxiety, which amounts to a sort of cost-benefit analysis of every passing moment, is a quintessentially modern predicament."
"The word that comes to mind is immanence – a term I learned as a philosophy undergraduate and which I did not remotely understand until I began to have these experiences of being alone in nature. In his 1836 essay Nature, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson identifies precisely this sublime phenomenon. "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister," he writes, "is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them." It's a phenomenon that he views as both an apprehension of the divine and a return to the child's perception of the world. "In the woods," he writes, "a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child." " ---- "One of Roberts's major themes was the idea that our particular civilisation, at our particular time, was unusual in not having as part of its cultural repertoire some ritual whereby during periods of change or upheaval people went out alone into nature. When he talked about the practice of the wilderness solo, he talked about it in such terms – as a ritual whereby you stepped out of the flux of the world, in order to gain some perspective on the flux, and your place within it. A word he used a lot in talking about his work, and in describing the experience and value of the nature solo, was "re-enchantment". He was of the opinion that most people, most of the time, lived life in a state of disenchantment. What he wanted to do, above all, was to help people strip away the layers of hard rationalism that accrued around the adult mind, so that they could return to a more childlike engagement with the world. And in reaching this state, he said, this place of re-enchantment, we could come to see ourselves not as separate from and in control of nature, but as part of it."
"The word that comes to mind is immanence – a term I learned as a philosophy undergraduate and which I did not remotely understand until I began to have these experiences of being alone in nature. In his 1836 essay Nature, American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson identifies precisely this sublime phenomenon. "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister," he writes, "is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them." It's a phenomenon that he views as both an apprehension of the divine and a return to the child's perception of the world. "In the woods," he writes, "a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child." " ---- "One of Roberts's major themes was the idea that our particular civilisation, at our particular time, was unusual in not having as part of its cultural repertoire some ritual whereby during periods of change or upheaval people went out alone into nature. When he talked about the practice of the wilderness solo, he talked about it in such terms – as a ritual whereby you stepped out of the flux of the world, in order to gain some perspective on the flux, and your place within it. A word he used a lot in talking about his work, and in describing the experience and value of the nature solo, was "re-enchantment". He was of the opinion that most people, most of the time, lived life in a state of disenchantment. What he wanted to do, above all, was to help people strip away the layers of hard rationalism that accrued around the adult mind, so that they could return to a more childlike engagement with the world. And in reaching this state, he said, this place of re-enchantment, we could come to see ourselves not as separate from and in control of nature, but as part of it."
Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind into its robotic dog Spot, giving it more autonomous reasoning for industrial inspections like spotting spills and reading gauges. Spot can also now recognize when to call on other AI tools. IEEE Spectrum reports: Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legged robots at any appreciable scale; there are now several thousand hard at work. Today the company is announcing that its quadruped robot Spot is now equipped with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a high-level embodied reasoning model that brings usability and intelligence to complex tasks.
[T]he focus of this partnership is on one of the very few applications where legged robots have proven themselves to be commercially viable: inspection. That is, wandering around industrial facilities, checking to make sure that nothing is imminently exploding. With the new AI onboard, Spot is now able to autonomously look for dangerous debris or spills, read complex gauges and sight glasses, and call on tools like vision-language-action models when it needs help understanding what's going on in the environment around it. "Advances like Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 mark an important step toward robots that can better understand and operate in the physical world," Marco da Silva, vice president and general manager of Spot at Boston Dynamics, says in a press release. "Capabilities like instrument reading and more reliable task reasoning will enable Spot to see, understand, and react to real-world challenges completely autonomously."
You can watch a demo of Spot's new capabilities on YouTube.
[T]he focus of this partnership is on one of the very few applications where legged robots have proven themselves to be commercially viable: inspection. That is, wandering around industrial facilities, checking to make sure that nothing is imminently exploding. With the new AI onboard, Spot is now able to autonomously look for dangerous debris or spills, read complex gauges and sight glasses, and call on tools like vision-language-action models when it needs help understanding what's going on in the environment around it. "Advances like Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 mark an important step toward robots that can better understand and operate in the physical world," Marco da Silva, vice president and general manager of Spot at Boston Dynamics, says in a press release. "Capabilities like instrument reading and more reliable task reasoning will enable Spot to see, understand, and react to real-world challenges completely autonomously."
You can watch a demo of Spot's new capabilities on YouTube.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Grazia Magazine US Spring 2026 editorial featuring 18 trailblazing women of Los Angeles.
Two coffee makers AND a trap door