In Iran zijn er sinds eind december weer grootschalige protesten tegen het regime van ayatollah Khamenei. De Iraniërs zijn klaar met het strenge islamitische regime.
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Sundance film festival: the actor plays a pickpocket who steals from the wrong person in a leisurely, straightforward crime thriller with a sting in its tail
Noah Segan’s light-footed crime noir The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is a film obsessed with the gap between the old and new. There are memories shared about how things used to be, and some older characters refusing to keep up with digital progression, while there are eye-rolls from the younger generation, poking fun at those losing touch with how the world now operates. I’d argue that the theme is often a little overplayed, a classic case of writer-director Segan – a frequent Rian Johnson collaborator – telling rather than showing. But his film makes a convincing case for the old, a brisk throwback to a 70s-era character-led thriller, made with borrowed flair from yesteryear.
The title is itself partly borrowed from a Simon and Garfunkel song and speaks to a protagonist of a dying breed, a pickpocket who prides himself on the old ways; though he might swipe smartphones, he doesn’t own one. He’s played by John Turturro, an actor who hasn’t enjoyed many a lead role of late – his last was in the ill-received Big Lebowski “sequel” The Jesus Rolls and that’s only because he wrote and directed it himself. But this is a welcome step up, or step back up, for someone deserving of something more substantial to tear into. Fittingly, he’s someone who would have arguably had a more prominent career as a leading man in a different time.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
Continue reading...New Zealand could see more deadly landslides as climate crisis triggers intense storms, experts warn
As it grapples with two fatal tragedies, questions emerge over how to protect the country from more landslides – its deadliest natural hazard
New Zealand could experience an increase in landslides – its most deadly natural hazard – as global warming triggers more intense and frequent storms, experts have warned in the wake of two landslide tragedies in the North Island.
New Zealand’s landscapes are scarred with the evidence of landslides – they are responsible for more than 1,800 deaths since written records began – more than earthquakes and volcanoes combined.
Continue reading...Kazakh No 5 seed beats Polish second seed 7-5, 6-1
Rybakina to play Jessica Pegula or Amanda Anisimova for place in final
Elena Rybakina took a significant step towards her second grand slam title as she overpowered and outplayed the second seed Iga Swiatek in the quarter-finals of the Australian Open, advancing 7-5, 6-1 to end Swiatek’s hopes of completing the career grand slam this year.
This immense victory sends Rybakina, the fifth seed and 2023 Australian Open finalist, into her fourth grand slam semi-final. It has been nearly four years since the 26-year-old made her first breakthrough by winning Wimbledon in 2022, and although she has won numerous big titles and established herself as one of the best players in the world, she has failed to drag herself over the line at the grand slams.
Continue reading...Democrats and a couple of their Republican colleagues are demanding Noem’s resignation over federal killings in Minneapolis – key US politics stories from Tuesday 27 January at a glance
Top Democrats issued a clear message to Donald Trump this week: either he fires Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, or they will impeach her.
The ultimatum came after a majority of the House Democratic caucus signed on to articles of impeachment introduced earlier this month in response to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both US citizens fatally shot by federal agents during the increasingly violent immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota’s largest city.
Continue reading...The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, co-directed by Daniel Roher, delves into the world of AI through the lens of personal anxiety
Are we barreling toward AI catastrophe? Is AI an existential threat, or an epochal opportunity? Those are the questions top of mind for a new documentary at Sundance, which features leading AI experts, critics and entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, with views on the near-to-midterm future ranging from doom to utopia.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, directed by Daniel Roher and Charlie Tyrell and produced by Daniel Kwan (one half of The Daniels, the Oscar-winning duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once), delves into the contentious topic of AI through Roher’s own anxiety. The Canadian film-maker, who won an Oscar in 2023 for the documentary Navalny, first became interested in the topic while experimenting with tools released by OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot ChatGPT. The sophistication of the public tools – the ability to produce whole paragraphs in seconds, or produce illustrations – both thrilled and unnerved him. AI was already radically shaping the filmmaking industry, and proclamations on the promise and peril of AI were everywhere, with little way for people outside the tech industry to evaluate them. As an artist, he wondered, how was he to make sense of it all?
Continue reading...Three boys in Texas die after falling into icy pond, while outages mean many in US south still without power
A colossal winter storm was responsible for more than 40 deaths as it brought more snow to the north-east and maintained icy conditions in the south, leaving many across the US without electricity.
The deaths were registered in more than a dozen states afflicted by severe cold, according to reports. There were still about 550,000 power outages in the nation on Tuesday morning, according to poweroutage.us. Most of the outages were in the south, where weekend blasts of freezing rain caused tree limbs and power lines to snap, inflicting crippling outages on northern Mississippi and parts of Tennessee. Officials warned that it could take days for power to be restored.
Continue reading...Drone strike on Ukrainian passenger train kills five and Poland urges Musk to cut Russia’s Starlink access. What we know on day 1,435
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused nearly 2 million military casualties – killed, wounded or missing – between the two countries, according to a study published on Tuesday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a US thinktank. Moscow’s forces have borne the brunt of the losses, with as many as 325,000 killed out of an estimated total of 1.2 million casualties since the war began nearly four years ago. Ukrainian forces have also suffered major losses – between 500,000 and 600,000 casualties, of which between 100,000 and 140,000 were killed – from February 2022 to December 2025. “Combined Russian and Ukrainian casualties may be as high as 1.8 million and could reach two million total casualties by the spring of 2026,” the thinktank said. UN monitors say civilian casualties have reached almost 15,000 verified deaths since 2022 but that the actual total “is likely considerably higher”.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told NBC in February 2025 that his country had lost nearly 46,000 troops since 2022, with tens of thousands missing or taken prisoner, numbers which analysts consider an underestimate. Russian losses remain a closely guarded state secret, with the last official figures from the Ministry of Defence released in September 2022 putting the toll at 5,937, according to Agence France-Presse. The BBC’s Russian service and the Mediazona outlet, which rely on publicly available data such as death notices, have identified more than 163,000 Russian soldiers killed in four years of war, while acknowledging that the actual number is likely higher.
A Russian drone strike on a passenger train in north-eastern Ukraine has killed five people in an attack denounced as terrorism by Zelenskyy. Prosecutors said fragments of five bodies had been found at the scene of the strike on the train, which occurred on Tuesday near a village in the Kharkiv region. In a post on Telegram, Zelenskyy said the train was carrying more than 200 passengers, including 18 in the carriage that was hit. “Each such Russian strike undermines diplomacy, which is still ongoing, and hits, in particular, the efforts of partners who are helping to end this war,” he wrote.
The train bombing was part of a wave of Russian drone and missile attacks that left 10 dead across the country and dozens wounded, with the injured including two children and a pregnant woman. Three were killed and 32 wounded in a drone strike on Odesa that also inflicted “enormous” damage on a power facility, according to the private energy firm DTEK. The energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, said 710,000 residents of Kyiv remained without electricity and heating in the aftermath of Russian attacks – conditions which could turn deadly in the freezing winter cold. Other casualties occurred in the regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
Poland’s foreign minister has urged Elon Musk to cut Russia’s access to the Starlink satellite internet service, which the tech billionaire owns. Radosław Sikorski – who is also the country’s deputy prime minister – spoke out after the US-based Institute for the Study of War said that the Russian army uses Starlink satellites to guide its drone attacks deep into Ukraine. He posted on X: “Hey, big man, @elonmusk, why don’t you stop the Russians from using Starlinks to target Ukrainian cities. Making money on war crimes may damage your brand”. Musk denied in 2024 that Starlink terminals had been sold to Russia; according to Ukrainian intelligence services, the Russian army has obtained terminals through third countries rather than any official contract with Musk.
Continue reading...Singer’s former assistant alleges he sexually assaulted her when she worked for Manson Records between 2010–2011
A judge in Los Angeles has reinstated a lawsuit against heavy metal star Marilyn Manson under a new law enabling old sexual assault cases to be heard in court.
The lawsuit, filed in May 2021 by a former assistant to the musician, had been dismissed in December because it exceeded the statute of limitations, a maximum time period for initiating legal proceedings after the related events took place.
Continue reading...Authorities say suspect, who escaped from facility in 2024, ran from traffic stop and fired shots at helicopter
A shooting involving a border patrol agent near the US-Mexico border in Arizona has left an accused smuggler in critical condition, local authorities said Tuesday.
Border patrol agents attempted to stop a car at about 7am, Pima county sheriff Chris Nanos said at a press conference. Several people exited the car and ran off, and the vehicle drove away, Nanos said. About half an hour later, agents relocated the car and attempted to stop it again. The driver fled on foot, and a border agent chased after him.
Continue reading...
Scientists have released DinoTracker, a free AI-powered app that identifies dinosaur footprints by analyzing shape patterns rather than relying on potentially flawed historical labels. "When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper," said Prof Steve Brusatte, a co-author of the work. "But it's not so simple, because the shape of a dinosaur footprint depends not only on the shape of the dinosaur's foot but also the type of sand or mud it was walking through, and the motion of its foot." The Guardian reports: [...] Brusatte, [Dr Gregor Hartmann, the first author of the new research from Helmholtz-Zentrum in Germany] and colleagues fed their AI system with 2,000 unlabelled footprint silhouettes. The system then determined how similar or different the imprints were from each other by analysing a range of features it identified as meaningful. The researchers discovered these eight features reflected variations in the imprints' shapes, such as the spread of the toes, amount of ground contact and heel position. The team have turned the system into a free app called DinoTracker that allows users to upload the silhouette of a footprint, explore the seven other footprints most similar to it and manipulate the footprint to see how varying the eight features can affect which other footprints are deemed most similar. Hartmann said that at present experts had to double check if factors such as the material the footprints were made in, and their age, matched the scientific hypothesis, but the system clustered prints with those expected from classifications made by human experts about 90% of the time. The findings have been published in the journal PNAS.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple quietly released its first update to iOS 12 since 2023 to keep iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation working on older hardware through January 2027. The update applies to legacy devices like the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6/6 Plus, and 2013-era iPads. Macworld reports: The update appears to be related to a specific issue. According to Apple's "About iOS 12 Updates" page, iOS 12.5.78 "extends the certificate required by features such as iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation to continue working after January 2027." Meanwhile, the iOS 16 update says it "provides important bug fixes and is recommended for all users."
When iOS 13 arrived, it dropped compatibility for the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus, as well as the 2013 iPad Air and iPad Mini 3, so users of those phones should specifically take note. To update to the latest version, head over to the Settings app, then General and Software Update, and follow the instructions. Further reading: Apple Launches AirTag 2 With Improved Range, Louder Speaker
When iOS 13 arrived, it dropped compatibility for the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, and iPhone 6 Plus, as well as the 2013 iPad Air and iPad Mini 3, so users of those phones should specifically take note. To update to the latest version, head over to the Settings app, then General and Software Update, and follow the instructions. Further reading: Apple Launches AirTag 2 With Improved Range, Louder Speaker
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A data breach at SoundCloud exposed information tied to 29.8 million user accounts, according to Have I Been Pwned. While SoundCloud says no passwords or financial data were accessed, attackers mapped email addresses to public profile data and later attempted extortion. BleepingComputer reports: The company confirmed the breach on December 15, following widespread reports from users who were unable to access SoundCloud and saw 403 "Forbidden" errors when connecting via VPN. SoundCloud told BleepingComputer at the time that it had activated its incident response procedures after detecting unauthorized activity involving an ancillary service dashboard. "We understand that a purported threat actor group accessed certain limited data that we hold," SoundCloud said. "We have completed an investigation into the data that was impacted, and no sensitive data (such as financial or password data) has been accessed. The data involved consisted only of email addresses and information already visible on public SoundCloud profiles."
While SoundCloud didn't provide further details regarding the incident, BleepingComputer learned that the breach affected 20% of all SoundCloud users, roughly 28 million accounts based on publicly reported user figures (SoundCloud later published a security notice confirming the information provided by BleepingComputer's sources). After the breach, BleepingComputer also learned that the ShinyHunters extortion gang was responsible for the attack, with sources saying that the threat group was also attempting to extort SoundCloud. This was confirmed by SoundCloud in a January 15 update, which said the threat actors had "made demands and deployed email flooding tactics to harass users, employees, and partners."
While SoundCloud didn't provide further details regarding the incident, BleepingComputer learned that the breach affected 20% of all SoundCloud users, roughly 28 million accounts based on publicly reported user figures (SoundCloud later published a security notice confirming the information provided by BleepingComputer's sources). After the breach, BleepingComputer also learned that the ShinyHunters extortion gang was responsible for the attack, with sources saying that the threat group was also attempting to extort SoundCloud. This was confirmed by SoundCloud in a January 15 update, which said the threat actors had "made demands and deployed email flooding tactics to harass users, employees, and partners."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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of course that's what happened. of course