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We should not say goodbye to Fukui too soon - during lunch, we looked at the sakura forecast for Kanazawa and made an impromptu decision: let us revisit Aratazaka in Awara Onsen again and see what differences are there since our last visit a couple of days ago.
OMG - The sakura blossoms are in full bloom (nearly 100%) and locals are out enjoying hanami, without any tourists (except us)! So this is what hanami in Japan is all about - peaceful.
Ukraine targets St Petersburg in wave of strikes; Keir Starmer to host Volodymyr Zelenskyy and EU leaders for talks. What we know on day 1,565
Ukraine fired hundreds of drones at Russia early on Saturday, leaving one person dead and setting an oil depot ablaze on the final day of Russia’s flagship economic forum in St Petersburg, officials said. Many of the drones targeted St Petersburg itself, the second Ukrainian attack on the city in less than a week, with Ukraine’s SBU security services saying it had hit a naval base.
The strikes come a day after the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, rejected Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s proposal for a meeting, drawing criticism from the Ukrainian president, who accused him of “choosing war again”.
More than 140 drones were shot down over the Leningrad region, which surrounds St Petersburg, governor Aleksandr Drozdenko said. The city’s governor, Alexander Beglov, issued a rare call for residents to stay indoors during the attack. “Russian air defences prevented any damage. The condition of the three injured is assessed as minor and they have been discharged,” he said.
Russian air defences intercepted a total of 376 drones over the regions of “Belgorod, Bryansk, Kaluga, Kursk, Leningrad, Novgorod, Oryol, Pskov, Rostov, Ryazan, Smolensk, Tver, and Tula, the Moscow region, Crimea Republic, Abkhazia Republic, and over the waters of the Azov and Black Seas”, Russia’s defence ministry said.
Ukraine’s SBU said it had targeted St Petersburg’s Kronstadt naval base, as well as “the Russian Navy’s 15th Arsenal in the Leningrad region”. The attacks also sparked a fire at an oil depot in the southern town of Ust-Labinsk, while drone debris killed a man in the western Tver region, according to local officials.
Zelenskyy described the strikes as a “just response” to Russian aggression against Ukraine. “It is time to end this war. But Russia’s ruler wants to keep fighting. That is why Ukrainian sanctions against this aggression are working,” he said on X. “Any manifestation of injustice against Ukraine will receive a just response.”
Russia renewed its strikes on Ukraine early on Saturday. A Russian drone killed a 64-year-old man in the southern Mykolaiv region, while a strike on the nearby Zaporizhzhia region wounded a 10-year-old boy and his father, regional authorities said. Russian drone and artillery attacks in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region killed one person and left three others wounded, regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha wrote on Telegram.
Russian forces also attacked two civilian search and rescue vessels in Ukrainian waters, causing injuries, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister Oleksiy Kuleba said on Saturday. “The enemy launched strikes on two boats of the maritime search and rescue service which were carrying out a humanitarian mission within the Ukrainian sea corridor,” he wrote on Telegram, referring to a Black Sea route used to take vessels to Romanian ports. “Unfortunately, there are injured. Evacuation by boats of the Ukrainian navy is currently under way.”
The UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, will host Zelenskyy, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz for talks in Downing Street on Sunday to discuss support for Ukraine. The Ukrainian leader will visit the UK with the French president and German chancellor after a week of heightened hostilities and Vladimir Putin’s rejection of his proposal of face-to-face talks on Moscow’s war. The three countries meeting the Ukrainian leader are some of Kyiv’s staunchest allies. The UK and France are leading the “coalition of the willing” initiative to provide security guarantees for Ukraine as part of a peace process.
Continue reading...TOLEDO (ANP) - Tijdens een festival in de Amerikaanse staat Ohio zijn zaterdagmiddag acht mensen gewond geraakt nadat zij werden beschoten. De politie van de plaats Toledo meldde dat agenten in de omgeving van het Old West End Festival "meerdere slachtoffers van een schietpartij" hadden aangetroffen. "Veel slachtoffers zijn voor behandeling naar nabijgelegen medische voorzieningen gebracht", stelde de politie snel na het schietincident in een bericht op Facebook.
De lokale nieuwszender WTOL 11 meldde iets later dat het om acht slachtoffers gaat. De burgemeester van Toledo, Wade Kapszukiewicz, liet aan de zender weten dat alle slachtoffers het naar verwachting zullen overleven.
De politie zegt "op zoek te zijn naar de verdachte of verdachten".
Het Old West End Festival is een tweedaags evenement in het historische centrum van Toledo met onder meer livemuziek en eetkraampjes.
Twee bezoekers van het festival vertelden aan de Amerikaanse zender WTOL 11 dat zij schoten hoorden en vervolgens paniek zagen uitbreken. Zij omschreven de situatie als "totale chaos". Een van de twee zei minstens tien schoten te hebben gehoord.
Friday the Open Source Initiative welcomed the EU's new tech sovereignty package, noting that "over a third of the 29-page document is devoted to Open Source."
The nonprofit OSI — maintainers of the Open Source definition — submitted their official feedback in February, and notes that "many" of their key requests were addressed, "as well as some exciting new announcements!"
One of the biggest barriers to Open Source adoption has been public procurement. Too often, tenders have been designed around proprietary solutions, ignoring the benefits of Open Source and locking public institutions into closed ecosystems. The OSI called for procurement rules that prioritize interoperability, reusability, and vendor independence. The package takes a major step forward in this area. The EU pledges to make the public sector an anchor consumer for Open Source solutions. The Commission plans to reform procurement rules to remove barriers for Open Source, provide better guidance to EU countries on procurement criteria to avoid excluding Open Source, and uphold the "public money, public code" principle when procuring software development. Both proposals align with the OSI's feedback. The next critical step is the EU's public procurement law reform. The OSI will continue advocating to ensure these pledges translate into action.
Beyond procurement, the OSI highlighted challenges faced by Open Source communities in Europe, particularly difficulties accessing investment and expertise to commercialize and scale projects. The Commission has responded by committing to ensure Open Source companies are considered for funding under the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF). It also plans to create "Open Source business accelerators" that will offer mentorship, training, legal and licensing consulting, and business development support, including marketing. Additionally, the Commission will work to raise industry awareness of Open Source solutions by leveraging the EU's existing business support networks. These measures directly address the OSI's concerns and could significantly boost the Open Source ecosystem in Europe...
[I]n our feedback, we called for the continuation of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative that has funded many Open Source projects, and for the creation of a European Sovereign Tech Fund to fund ongoing maintenance and features development to meet the EU's needs. We also highlighted the need to mainstream Open Source in other funding opportunities (like the €100bn+ Horizon Europe programme). The Commission's strategy addresses these requests. The NGI will be scaled up under the new name "Open Internet Stack." A new Open Source Maintenance Instrument will fund the "maintenance and security upkeep of essential components." The Commission will also create a list of critical and security-relevant Open Source dependencies to inform funding decisions and promote Open Source solutions as the default approach in Horizon Europe funding.
Friday's announcement from the Open Source Initiative notes that the EU is already leading by example in Open Source adoption. It applauds the EU for "deploying a Matrix-based communications system and the openDesk collaboration environment internally, trialing an alternative operating system to replace Windows, which is currently widely used in EU institutions, and expanding its presence on the Fediverse, with Commissioners and key departments already joining the EU's Mastodon server.'
The nonprofit OSI — maintainers of the Open Source definition — submitted their official feedback in February, and notes that "many" of their key requests were addressed, "as well as some exciting new announcements!"
One of the biggest barriers to Open Source adoption has been public procurement. Too often, tenders have been designed around proprietary solutions, ignoring the benefits of Open Source and locking public institutions into closed ecosystems. The OSI called for procurement rules that prioritize interoperability, reusability, and vendor independence. The package takes a major step forward in this area. The EU pledges to make the public sector an anchor consumer for Open Source solutions. The Commission plans to reform procurement rules to remove barriers for Open Source, provide better guidance to EU countries on procurement criteria to avoid excluding Open Source, and uphold the "public money, public code" principle when procuring software development. Both proposals align with the OSI's feedback. The next critical step is the EU's public procurement law reform. The OSI will continue advocating to ensure these pledges translate into action.
Beyond procurement, the OSI highlighted challenges faced by Open Source communities in Europe, particularly difficulties accessing investment and expertise to commercialize and scale projects. The Commission has responded by committing to ensure Open Source companies are considered for funding under the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF). It also plans to create "Open Source business accelerators" that will offer mentorship, training, legal and licensing consulting, and business development support, including marketing. Additionally, the Commission will work to raise industry awareness of Open Source solutions by leveraging the EU's existing business support networks. These measures directly address the OSI's concerns and could significantly boost the Open Source ecosystem in Europe...
[I]n our feedback, we called for the continuation of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative that has funded many Open Source projects, and for the creation of a European Sovereign Tech Fund to fund ongoing maintenance and features development to meet the EU's needs. We also highlighted the need to mainstream Open Source in other funding opportunities (like the €100bn+ Horizon Europe programme). The Commission's strategy addresses these requests. The NGI will be scaled up under the new name "Open Internet Stack." A new Open Source Maintenance Instrument will fund the "maintenance and security upkeep of essential components." The Commission will also create a list of critical and security-relevant Open Source dependencies to inform funding decisions and promote Open Source solutions as the default approach in Horizon Europe funding.
Friday's announcement from the Open Source Initiative notes that the EU is already leading by example in Open Source adoption. It applauds the EU for "deploying a Matrix-based communications system and the openDesk collaboration environment internally, trialing an alternative operating system to replace Windows, which is currently widely used in EU institutions, and expanding its presence on the Fediverse, with Commissioners and key departments already joining the EU's Mastodon server.'
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
In this video essay, author and Youtuber Toby Hendy (AKA Tibees) discusses The Great Automatic Grammatizator, an eerily prophetic 1950s sci-fi story by Roald Dahl, best known today for children's books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG. The story is about a text-generating machine and its effects on society, and some of the dialogue is shockingly similar to the arguments we're having about LLMs today. (SLYT.)