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Here we go again. And, no, we are not talking about the start of the new Scottish Premiership season or the preliminary round of the Carabao Cup – although that Tranmere v Rochdale shootout was a cracker. Yes, after a week of talk about money, greed and Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother, the hot topic around the water cooler on Monday was again Gianni Infantino and, more specifically, the English and Welsh FAs’ decisions to row back on their support of a stalling ship. Along with Finland, they’re the first of Uefa’s 55 members to withdraw their letters of support for next year’s Fifa overlord elections.

I write to you with my deep regret on hearing about the death of the heroic and granite-made Franco Baresi. Two moments stand out to me, both off the pitch, and show what a great man he was. The first was when Arrigo Sacchi, the Milan manager, dropped his intensity in training, fearing he was overworking the players; Baresi convinced Sacchi to up it instead for the sake of the team, with spectacular results. The second was an older Baresi reflecting on his 1994 World Cup final loss to Brazil, which he appeared in 25 days after knee surgery. Rather than lamenting his lot, having missed a penalty and lost the final, Baresi instead recalled watching the 1970 final between Italy and Brazil, only the second game he had seen on TV. The first game was the West Germany v Italy semi-final, where he recalled watching the players who ‘to me, they were Martians’. He said: ‘I would never have thought 24 years later, at 34 years old, I would have the possibility to play in that same game, the final, against Brazil, the same team. It was a dream that came true.’ Rest in peace” – Nick Kinsella.

I was wondering if Gianni Infantino might revist his Big Sale Opportunity by allowing smaller, club-level contestants from less lucrative leagues to participate in a seriously revamped World Cup, replacing their boycotting national sides. For instance, from the lower leagues of Scottish competitions. Mainly to render possible the wonderful hypothetical headline result of the last match of the (?) 2038 edition: Fifa Forward Final fiasco … East Fife 4, Forfar 5” – Russell Richardson.

Steve Bennett’s comment on Newcastle United’s new kit (Friday’s Football Daily letters) made me think of West Bromwich Albion’s similarly ‘bar-coded’ Premier League strip from the 2020-21 season, at the end of which they were relegated. Newcastle may have to hope that isn’t an omen” – Derrick Cameron.

This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions. 

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From Europe’s deadly heat to floods in Asia, it’s been a terrifying summer. Environment writers Jonathan Watts and Ajit Niranjan answered Reddit users’ questions about their work – and their sources of hope

Extreme weather supercharged by the climate crisis is fuelling an explosive wildfire season in Europe and extreme rainfall across Asia this summer.

Global heating made hot, dry and windy weather stoking wildfires at least 20 times more likely in Spain and twice as likely in France. EU officials have said wildfires could still be burning until early November in what threatens to be a record-breaking year for the area of land burned.

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Juan Jesús Vivas says influx seen as ‘at least encouraged or permitted’ by Rabat, as Spain demands EU solidarity

• Explainer: why is Ceuta a migration flashpoint?

A growing chorus of voices have accused Morocco of helping to fuel the crisis in Ceuta, with the leader of the Spanish enclave describing last week’s border crossings as an attack on Spain’s territorial integrity that was seen as being “if not orchestrated, at least encouraged or permitted by Morocco”.

Spain’s interior ministry said late last week that 48,300 of the roughly 50,000 people who had turned up in Ceuta, a tiny Spanish territory in north Africa, had been sent back to Morocco. The extraordinary influx had overwhelmed the city of 84,000 and set off a political crisis across the EU as some member states laid blame on Spain.

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A new book, Homes for Our Time, by Philip Jodidio, showcases the quiet revolution in green residential architecture

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Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek is lining up $5 billion in financing to expand into AI datacenter silicon, targeting a slice of a market it expects to be worth up to $80 billion next year. The fabless chip producer is perhaps best known for its Arm-based smartphone and Chromebook chipsets, plus wireless silicon for Wi-Fi products. But the firm is the latest to see a "compelling growth opportunity" in the market for compute to power AI and so-called agentic AI in particular. MediaTek is targeting application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) rather than GPUs and reckons it can capture 15 to 20 percent of the market. The company's board has also approved $5 billion in financing to secure supply chain capacity and fuel an expansion from AI ASIC chips to full-scale systems and platforms, MediaTek stated. Chief exec Dr Rick Tsai spelled it out during an analyst call for the company's Q2 2026 earnings. "Recently, the release of increasingly capable frontier AI models, together with the rapid transition toward agentic AI, has become a key driver of compute demand across both cloud and edge AI," he stated. "Agentic AI, which executes a series of actions, including planning, reasoning, execution, and self-correction, further increases workloads. This represents a compelling growth opportunity for MediaTek, as we are well-positioned to support both the scaling of AI datacenters and the proliferation of agentic AI experiences across a broad range of edge devices." MediaTek says that its first ASIC family has been developed in "close partnership with major US cloud service provider customers," and is scheduled to enter production in the fourth quarter of this year. A second AI accelerator design is also progressing well and aims to offer a step up in compute performance. The chip biz expects its AI datacenter ASIC revenue to exceed $2 billion in 2026, scaling substantially next year, primarily driven by increasing customer demand for its technology, which boasts optimized performance for TCO and performance per watt at scale, Tsai claims. "With close collaboration with our advanced packaging partner, the yield and reliability of the second ASIC are on track for high-volume production in 2028. We're confident in capturing additional market share when this ASIC ramps up," Tsai told analysts. But MediaTek will be facing competition from rivals such as Broadcom and Marvell, which already design ASICs for the AI market, and even Google, which announced plans to start selling its custom tensor processing units (TPUs) to some customers earlier this year. According to a Bloomberg Intelligence report from January, the market for AI ASICs is projected to expand at a 27 percent compound annual rate to reach $118 billion by 2033, and grow from just 8 percent of the total AI accelerator arena in 2024 to 19 percent in 2033. MediaTek reported Q2 revenue of NT$152.18 billion ($4.68 billion), up just 1.2 percent year-on-year, but operating income was down by 22 percent to NT$22.87 billion ($705 million). ®

The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) is the latest UK public sector outfit to admit that cybercriminals made off with its data, including the names and work email addresses of police officers, justice staff, government partners, and customers. The legal lookup service relied upon by police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK said it discovered the "data security incident" on July 26 and is investigating alongside specialist cybersecurity firms and the National Crime Agency. According to the PNLD, the leaked information includes the names, organizations, and work email addresses of police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners, and customers. It insists there is "no evidence" that passwords or other authentication data were compromised. The breach also affected Ask the Police, a public-facing legal advice website operated by PNLD. There, the fallout appears limited to the names and email addresses of people who previously submitted questions through the service. That's about where the explanation ends. PNLD has yet to say how attackers got in, when the data was stolen, how many people were affected, or whether anyone tried to shake it down before the information appeared online. West Yorkshire Police, which operates PNLD, did not immediately respond to The Register’s questions. However, the breach appears linked to the same extortion crew that last week claimed responsibility for a similar breach of the Department for Education (DfE). The group, which calls itself "ExfilSquad," currently lists both the PNLD and DfE among its latest victims on its dark web leak site, seen by The Register. For PNLD, the crooks claim to have lifted a 1.9 GB dataset containing roughly 135,000 law enforcement contact records, including names, email addresses, and police force areas. The DfE listing boasts of around 600,000 parent and staff contact records, plus another 7,000 from its Turing Portal. The education department confirmed last week that more than 607,000 records had indeed been exposed. The DfE has confirmed that the compromised information was limited to customer service contact details from its Customer Help Portal and Turing Scheme, and said no other departmental data had been accessed. Like most cyber-extortion outfits, ExfilSquad doesn't exactly do understatement. Its leak site warns victims that once data appears there, it is "NEVER leaving the public eye," before suggesting any ransom would amount to little more than a rounding error compared with the legal bills that might follow. The DfE and PNLD's confirmations don't validate everything ExfilSquad posts on its leak site. It also lists Microsoft as a victim, alleging a 13 GB haul containing millions of records, password hashes, internal support tickets, and access permissions. Having two organizations confirm breaches claimed on its leak site makes ExfilSquad harder to ignore. Whether the gang's other boasts are equally well founded, or simply the usual cybercrook embellishment, remains to be seen. ®

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has stated "we simply will not fly it" if claims about the costs of the repurposed Mars rover engineering model prove anywhere near accurate. Isaacman was responding to the Planetary Society's chief of space policy, Casey Dreier, who had run the numbers on his plan to send a robot to the Moon, built from parts of engineering models of the successful Mars rovers Perseverance and Curiosity. Dreier estimated that the Polar Rover for Observation, Mapping, and In-Situ Exploration (PROMISE) mission, as discussed by Isaacman in a June presentation, would cost between $723 million and $1.33 billion. Dreier's figures include a low-end launch and landing cost of $234 million and a high-end estimate of $320 million. PROMISE is intended to put a rover on the Moon for a fraction of the usual cost. There are engineering testbeds for both Perseverance and Curiosity, dubbed OPTIMISM (Operational Perseverance Twin for Integration of Mechanisms and Instruments Sent to Mars) and MAGGIE (Mars Automated Giant Gizmo for Integrated Engineering) respectively. While not 100 percent identical to what was sent to Mars, the pair are designed to be close enough to allow engineers to perform activities such as plotting drives on simulated Martian terrain and seeing how the hardware will react to commands sent from Earth. NASA bosses looked at the engineering models, considered ways to score easy "wins," as Isaacman put it, and came up with an idea. Engineering models are common enough in spaceflight. A Development Test Model (DTM) of Voyager can be found hanging in the Exploring the Planets gallery at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. The DTM's bus was liberated in 1987 for developing NASA's Magellan Venus spacecraft. The Register also paid a visit to a test model of the European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter on a 2022 visit to the agency's Darmstadt site, which looked more like an explosion of wiring than a simulacrum of a spacecraft. MAGGIE and OPTIMISM are at least recognizable as engineering testbeds for Curiosity and Perseverance, but getting a hybrid using parts from both models into a state where it can do useful science on the Moon would be a challenge. As well as qualifying the components for launch and spaceflight, engineers would have to prepare hardware built for use on Earth to withstand lunar conditions. Power and communications would also need work: NASA has a "spare" plutonium radioisotope power system, but the rover would require substantial adaptation to use it. Then there are the consequences of taking engineering models away from active missions. "Regardless of whether one agrees with every estimate… one thing is clear: PROMISE is far from a 'freebie,'" Dreier stated. Isaacman did not challenge individual elements of Dreier's breakdown, although he excluded launch and landing because those costs "are a reality for any mission." Even so, he said, "if PROMISE costs even 20 percent of your low-end estimate, we simply will not fly it." "That said, it would be crazy not to take advantage of hardware taxpayers have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in." That hardware has already been taken advantage of. It was designed to be a testbed and used for that purpose. Repurposing them for a one-off mission to the Moon could prove more troublesome and expensive than designing a rover that can be mass-produced. ®

"AI's decimation of call center jobs has begun," reports Bloomberg:


Companies including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft Corp., Uber Technologies Inc. and Hyatt Hotels Corp. are using automated chat and phone systems to handle work that previously required humans. In some cases, they've already wiped out sizable chunks of their customer service operations, together representing thousands of workers.


The specter of automation has long loomed over the call center industry, which employs millions worldwide from the U,S, to India to the Philippines. But until recently, generative artificial intelligence wasn't good enough to move the needle. Now, AI advancements — and pressure on executives to show they're embracing the new technology — have prompted corporations to deploy the tools more widely. Customer service employment in the U.S. is declining and will likely continue to do so as more tasks are automated, Forrester analyst Kate Leggett wrote in a report earlier this year. While it's impossible to determine the future job losses, she estimated that almost half of customer service roles will be affected by 2030.

Globally, the steepest job cuts are expected to hit countries like the Philippines, where many Western companies have outsourced their most easily automated work. Salespeople at multiple tech companies told Bloomberg that they routinely pitch call center AI tools as a way of lowering labor costs, undercutting a common industry claim that AI is primarily a way to help workers become more productive rather than kill their jobs... Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the nation's largest lender, has shed hundreds of workers from its chat support line as it wove AI into the system, according to people familiar with the work. This amounted to tens of millions of dollars in savings per year, one of the people said...

Microsoft is both one of the largest vendors and adopters of customer service automation tools. This has helped the software giant trim its customer service workforce — a mix of contractors and full-time staff — from about 50,000 to 40,000 in recent years, according to a person familiar with the operations. "If something happened with little Johnny's Xbox in the middle of the night, we can now solve that with AI," Judson Althoff, who runs Microsoft's sales and service operations, said in an interview. Althoff said in April that AI is saving the company about $750 million per year in customer service costs. More complex problems still require human support, but the company is constantly expanding what can be fixed automatically, he said in the interview.

Two examples from the article:

Last year Hyatt fired 30% of its in-house customer support staff for the Americas, according the hotel-industry news site Hotel Dive.

Last week Bloomberg reported Uber had cut 10% of its customer service jobs as part of effort to "embrace artificial intelligence," according to the article. "Today, Uber pushes users to submit support requests through their apps, where they're met with an AI chatbot."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In een woning aan de Troelstraweg in Dordrecht is maandagmiddag een brand ontstaan. De trappenhal van het appartementencomplex staat vol met rook. Een persoon is nagekeken door de ambulance vanwege het inademen van rook.

De eigenaar van een bekende Rotterdamse kringloopwinkel is door de rechtbank veroordeeld tot honderd dagen celstraf voor wraakporno. Maar terug naar de gevangenis? Dat hoeft hij niet.

sz-da has added a photo to the pool:

Mount Tō (塔ノ岳)

24 x 25s exposures, stacked in Sequator

Jonathan Paz was initially nervous when he started working at the surveillance company Flock. It was his first tech job. But he was interested in the company’s mission. Flock’s cameras, which constantly scan the license plate of every vehicle driving past, were for finding missing people. Staff at the company were able to solve real issues.

In his job as a government affairs manager a couple of years ago, Paz represented Flock in public hearings, with the goal of getting a city to purchase Flock cameras. These sorts of hearings are happening on a near constant basis all across the country, as cities and towns participate in a national conversation about whether they want Flock cameras in their community or not.

“My job was to make sure that we were not only defending the company, but also representing the product as best as possible and making sure that we can get approved at council,” Paz said. He would get flown out to different cities and towns to help get Flock across the finish line. He was the break-in-case-of-emergency button.

In one case, Paz went to a place that was planning on purchasing Flock cameras but there was a lot of community pushback. Those people did not want these cameras in their community. Paz realized his job was to “make sure that this resistance doesn't become a vote reflected in the vote of the council.”

“That's kind of what started unraveling for me very quickly: this facade that we were helping these democratically elected boards” represent the people who voted for them.

Before Flock, Paz had a career in social justice work, including as an activist, union organizer, and an elected city councilor in Waltham, Massachusetts, he said. He focused in part on municipal broadband. At the time he held some “techno optimism, that maybe technology can be the answer to some of these existential crises of our time,” he said.

He ran for mayor but didn’t win. After that, he went to the 2023 National League of Cities conference in Atlanta, Georgia, a large meeting for municipal officials. Flock is headquartered in Atlanta.

This is where a Flock representative pitched him the idea of joining the company, Paz said. To him, Flock’s technology made sense. Flock sold cameras, and they helped find missing people. It definitely wasn’t part of some broader surveillance apparatus.

He joined Flock and found the company had a startup culture. Things moved fast and the people were “brilliant.” 

At the time, Paz thought Flock “had a deep respect for civil rights and liberties.” There was an emphasis on catering to the values of whatever municipality or agency they happened to be working with. “We were honoring and respecting the wishes of the people,” Paz thought. His coworkers at Flock would speak about the company’s mission and how it was helping to solve crime. 

Then things changed. Beyond Paz’s evolving feelings around his own job’s purpose, 404 Media revealed how local cops were performing Flock searches for Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE). 

“Throughout this whole time, I'm expressing my concern within the company,” Paz, who also happens to be the son of immigrants, said. “Do we work with ICE? Are we working with ICE? Are there plans to work with ICE? And throughout the whole time, the company line was ‘we don't work with ICE.’”

Journalists around the country followed our reporting, including 9NEWS in Denver which found evidence Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had direct access to Flock’s cameras. At the time, Flock strongly denied such direct access by federal agencies existed. Eventually, Flock came clean: CBP did have direct access, as part of a pilot program. So did ICE.

404 Media then reported the Secret Service and the Navy’s criminal investigation division had access too.

“That was what I was sold and lied to about,” Paz said. “I didn't know that there were these mechanisms inside the company that were essentially fighting to get this pilot to happen.”

Come July 2025, Paz quit Flock. Paz said he “rejected tens of thousands in company equity and a severance package from Flock.” After leaving Flock, he founded an organization to help pay rent, food, and legal fees for people impacted by ICE’s mass deportation effort. Now he is running for Congress in Massachusetts’ 5th District.

404 Media asked Flock for comment on what exactly workers in Paz’s previous role do when it comes to helping convince cities to buy Flock. A company spokesperson told 404 Media in an email “Our conversations with communities are valuable and give us direct feedback from the people we serve. That input has helped us enhance product controls and refine our positions on important matters of public policy.”

The statement added: “We will continue investing in public engagement and continue to make improvements to Flock based on our dialogue with communities nationwide. The decision to adopt Flock technology rests solely with each community.”

Compleet gestoorde taferelen bij de Veerplas in Haarlem waar de 21-jarige Lizzy afgelopen donderdag te maken kreeg met een totale gek. Een 'donker getinte' man van rond de 30 begon daar uit het niets in te slaan op haar hoofd, terwijl ze in de auto zat met de deur open. Toen haar vriend tussenbeide kwam vroeg hij deze vrouwenmepper nog waarom die deed wat hij deed. Diens antwoord was even verwarrend als de hele aanval: "Dat weet ze zelf dondersgoed." Lizzy had deze engnek echter nooit eerder gezien. Hierna reed de man met ontbloot bovenlijf weg op een zwarte omafiets. Maar de vrouwenmepper zou niet alleen een vrouwenmepper zijn, maar ook een mannenmepper. Zijn signalement komt namelijk overeen met de dader van een andere mishandeling twee uur eerder op dezelfde locatie. Daarbij raakte een 66-jarige terreinmedewerker zwaar gewond, tragisch genoeg een paar weken voor zijn pensioen. Dus weet u meer van deze mensenmepper, ZSM melden bij de politie kan HIERRR.

In Lizzy's eigen woorden

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is also covered in one of the earth’s two ice sheets. The other cloaks Antarctica. Greenland’s encompasses around 80 percent of the nation’s land mass, spanning more than 650,000 square miles. But it’s also melting at an accelerating rate due to climate change, losing an annual average of 261 gigatonnes—one gigatonne is equivalent to 2.2 trillion pounds—contributing to rising sea levels that impact the rest of the world. And Greenland’s massive icebergs are a reminder of this exceptional scale.

On July 25, a mammoth iceberg literally made waves as it flipped over off the coast of Ilulissat, Greenland. A video taken from town went viral online, and AfarTV, which has a livestream camera set up near the entrance to the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ilulissat Icefjord, captured the event in high definition. “Large icebergs can remain grounded or trapped near the mouth of the icefjord while they melt, fracture and become small enough to move into Disko Bay,” AfarTV says. “It is not known precisely when this particular iceberg originally separated from the glacier.”

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Watch a Monumental Iceberg in Greenland Do a Somersault appeared first on Colossal.

NEW YORK (ANP) - Bristol Myers Squibb behoorde maandag tot de winnaars op de beurzen in New York. Beleggers reageerden enthousiast op mediaberichten dat het Amerikaanse farmaceutische concern gesprekken zou voeren met de grotere Britse rivaal AstraZeneca over een mogelijke fusie. Een samenvoeging zou een van de grootste farmaceutische bedrijven ter wereld opleveren, met een geschatte waarde van omgerekend bijna 350 miljard euro. Het aandeel Bristol Myers Squibb steeg 4 procent.

In Londen waren aandeelhouders van AstraZeneca (min 7,3 procent) minder enthousiast over de mogelijke fusiedeal.

De algehele stemming op Wall Street was opnieuw positief na de koerswinsten op vrijdag. De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde kort na opening van de markt 1,2 procent hoger op 53.095 punten. De S&P 500-index won 0,4 procent op 7519 punten en techgraadmeter Nasdaq klom 0,2 procent tot 25.430 punten.