Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter could miss its planned 2027 start date because the transmission infrastructure needed to power it is awaiting regulatory approval. Research company Aterio warns that Project Lighthouse, being developed by Vantage in Port Washington with Oracle as tenant, faces a real risk of slipping beyond Big Red's target of delivering capacity to customers in the second half of next year. Separately, Oracle reportedly sent a force majeure notice to a Blue Owl Capital subsidiary developing Project Jupiter in New Mexico. Bloomberg reported that Oracle was seeking to defer payments if the campus failed to come online as planned, rather than withdraw from the project. Oracle says the development remains on schedule. Aterio said of this and the Wisconsin facility: "The regulatory record points to the potential for dates later than company guidance, and Oracle's stretched finances, together with its force majeure notice on Project Jupiter in New Mexico this week, raise the potential for slippage on its largest campuses." Oracle has been offered the opportunity to comment. The Register has already reported that Oracle could face more than $100 million a year in financing costs to guarantee the power commitments behind the Wisconsin datacenter campus, which is rated at 902 MW of computing load and 1.3 GW of total electricity demand. The immediate obstacle is American Transmission Company's (ATC) application to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin (PSC) for approval to build the campus's grid connection. ATC is planning more than $2 billion in transmission infrastructure projects tied to datacenter developments across Wisconsin, ranging from high-voltage power lines and substations to upgrades to existing facilities. Construction of the transmission infrastructure requires PSC approval. "The problem is power. The campus cannot run until ATC connects it to the grid, and ATC cannot start building until the PSC approves its application," Aterio said. The PSC closed the original case after withdrawing its finding that ATC's application was complete. ATC refiled in September, restarting the approval process. Aterio's earliest scenario puts partial power in October 2027 and full supply in August 2028, although it considers that timetable highly unlikely. Its base case puts partial power in December 2027 and full supply in October 2028. An extended regulatory review could push those dates to June 2028 and April 2029. Even December 2027 power delivery would leave little room for testing and commissioning before Oracle's deadline. "In practice, a datacenter does not enter service as soon as first grid power arrives. Each building's electrical and cooling systems have to be energized, tested and commissioned before it can carry customer load. That will take time. We therefore expect the campus's load to ramp up mainly from the first quarter of 2028," Aterio said. Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that Tencent had signed a $7 billion deal to lease around 100,000 AI processors from Oracle. For context, Oracle reported $55.7 billion in total capital expenditures for its fiscal 2026, which closed at the end of May. Its total revenue was $67.4 billion. Capex guidance for the 2027 financial year is up to $95 billion. ®

OpenAI has fired two safety researchers and a program manager for allegedly mishandling sensitive company information. The ChatGPT maker confirmed the dismissals to The Register, saying an internal investigation found the trio had violated company rules governing access to and handling of confidential information. "We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing and handling sensitive company information," an OpenAI spokesperson said. "Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work." At least some of the information was allegedly shared with an outside organization that evaluates AI systems. OpenAI said its investigation found other misconduct beyond that disclosure, but has not described it or identified the organization. The ChatGPT creator said the employees were not dismissed for raising AI safety concerns. The firings come after a messy few months for OpenAI's safety teams, including an incident in which one of its agents compromised infrastructure belonging to AI platform Hugging Face. OpenAI subsequently brought in external experts to investigate what happened and published findings detailing the agent's behavior and the security failures that allowed it to reach Hugging Face. The incident also prompted a much wider trawl through OpenAI's logs for other examples of agents interacting with external systems. This week, OpenAI said it has now notified more than 100 organizations about activity linked to its agents. Being contacted doesn't necessarily mean an organization was hacked or that private data was accessed. OpenAI said the notifications cover cases where agents interacted with third-party systems without authorization or in ways that warranted alerting their operators. OpenAI's investigation has also found cases where its agents sent training and evaluation data to third-party services. In 53 instances, images originally uploaded by ChatGPT users ended up on image-hosting sites. On September 20, an agent contacted an external chatbot through insufficiently filtered DNS traffic in a training environment intended to block live internet access. OpenAI's monitoring system spotted the behavior within 15 minutes and a human reviewer picked up the alert three minutes later, but the run wasn't actually killed for another two and a half hours. OpenAI has also scrapped the planned release of GPT-6.1 Astra after concluding the model didn't meet its safety bar around remaining within the scope and authorization of tasks it was given. The US biz hasn't said whether the allegedly mishandled material concerned any of its recent agent incidents, whether the outside organization was involved in investigating them, or whether any customer or user information was exposed. ®

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Gezellige video's plus dito tekst in de mail over de crackproblematiek in Amsterdam-Oost in de buurt van de 'crackstrip', waarover u al in Het Parool las dat de politie niets doet. Knip, plak, derhalve.

"We kennen allemaal het toenemende probleem van de crackheads in Amsterdam Oost.

Nu loopt er al weken lang een crack head rond in ons appartementencomplex in Amsterdam Oost. Wat startte met het openscheuren van pakketjes, ging naar het stelen van fietsen, fatbikes, scooters, en nu naar het inslaan van ramen van auto's met een hamer om 7u30 's morgens in een residentieel gebouw. Wat is zijn volgende stap?

Het zijn telkens dezelfde mannen, de politie kent ze erg goed, ze 'wonen' volgens mij onder boom nummer 3 van links in het Oosterpark, maar ze willen/kunnen hem enkel oppakken als we hem op heterdaad betrappen. Ik ben benieuwd hoe de politie dit dan in z'n werk ziet gaan als we een man met de hamer tegenkomen in een gesloten parkeergarage, ik zal het vast niet meer kunnen navertellen.

De politie weigert reacties/updates te geven, ze zijn afwezig of ziek en annuleren gemaakte afspraken bij hen op het bureau. Jammer dat het dan via de media moet lopen, zoals recent ook in het studentencomplex in Oost.

Ik ben benieuwd wat de politie, justitie en de gemeente Amsterdam van plan is om dit op te lossen. Maar die lijken te druk op hun roze wolk, ze zijn ook op ziekteverlof of gaan verder met discussies over bomen planten en medicijnen geven aan crack heads, wachtend op Lisa 2.0, dit keer in Amsterdam Oost.  

Tijd om te emigreren lijkt me."

[naam bij redactie bekend]

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It comes as Western retailers face the risk of state asset seizures, which Putin defended as a response to the EU freezing its state funds.

Marina Khankhalaeva is the founder of Tusgaar Buryad-Mongolia, an exiled movement advocating for the republic of Buryatia’s independence.

De Palestijnse student uit Gaza die geschorst werd door de Universiteit Maastricht, heeft volgens het Openbaar Ministerie geen strafbare feiten begaan. Er was onrust ontstaan nadat hij een video plaatste op sociale media waarin hij naar een documentaire kijkt over de aanslagen door Hamas op 7 oktober 2023, en lijkt te zeggen ‘dit ben ik’.

Via muziek willen de zussen Luna (23) en Donna (20) van Leeuwen emoties losmaken rond het thema klimaat. Op 11 oktober organiseren de jonge musici de eerste Klimaat Concert Dag. Aan de hand van de vier seizoenen willen ze het publiek informeren, maar vooral laten voelen wat klimaatverandering betekent voor de jongste generatie en de planeet.

Swiss glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026, bringing total losses since 2021 to 19.4%. Researchers say some glaciers are now collapsing from within as meltwater carves out large cavities. The Guardian reports: Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the report, said many people do not realize how fast glaciers are retreating, or that just one generation ago some now-barren sites used to sit beneath hundreds of meters of ice. The scientists have not yet compiled a formal tally of lost glaciers this year but said they had witnessed the death of a number of small ones. "I visited one last week and it's so impressive to stand in this moonlike landscape where there was a big layer of ice -- an extensive glacier -- just a few years ago," said Huss. "And now it's a rock desert where there's some scattered blocks of old ice still lying around and melting on the hot rocks."

The report, a collaboration between the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and the Swiss Commission for Cryosphere Observation, found the mean thickness of individual glaciers fell by between 2.5 metres and 4 metres in 2026. Huss said scientists were increasingly seeing glaciers collapse from the inside -- the result of internal streams beneath the ice that excavate caverns -- rather than simply retreating from surface heat. [...] Analysis published by MeteoSwiss on Tuesday found the summer half-year from April to September was the hottest and driest it had been since records began in 1864. In that time, humanity has filled the atmosphere with 1.8tn tons of carbon dioxide and heated the planet by about 1.4C.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The year’s best roundup of the funniest animal photos is back with its list of 2026 finalists, taking on a kind of blooper reel-like quality with some of the goofiest happenstances and candid moments photographers captured. Nikon Comedy Wildlife Awards 2026 celebrates the wild, wonderful, and wily in habitats around the world.

From Tanner Mansell’s “Spicy Orangutan” snapped in Borneo to a damselfly appearing to wave at British photographer Lee Frost through a window in a nibbled leaf, this year’s top contenders are not only silly, but immanently relatable, illustrating how for all of our differences, we all share this incredible planet.

At more than 10,000 photos, the competition received its highest ever number of entries this year from photographers in 112 countries. “What began as a small effort to raise awareness of wildlife conservation has grown into something far bigger than we ever imagined,” says awards co-founder Tom Sullam. “We use humour to get people to feel empathy towards wildlife, and it’s that empathy that creates behavioural change for the better.”

Nikon will announce the competition winners on December 8. In the meantime, see all 40 finalists, plus portfolios, videos, and youth submissions on the contests’s website. Additionally, cast your vote for the Sterna People’s Choice Award.

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 Wild Hijinx and Hilarious Happenstance Reign in the 2026 Comedy Wildlife Awards appeared first on Colossal.

In this video, Patrick Hicks tells the story of the development of the classic educational video game The Oregon Trail and how Prince (you know, the genius musical artist) was one of the first people in the world to play the very first version of the game.

The basic story is that a college history major (Don Rawitsch) teamed up with two friends (Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger), both of whom were math majors and had some programming experience, to make a computer game to liven up the history class that Rawitsch was student teaching. While developing the game, Heinemann & Dillenberger tested it out with some kids at the high school at which they were student teaching…and one of those kids was Prince Rogers Nelson.

Paul would later say that he heard about Prince before he even met him. One of the other teachers told him, “There’s this kid here who basically is running his own business. He’s this amazing musician who plays all these instruments and writes his own songs.” And then later, Paul realized that that was Prince.

But listen to Hicks tell the whole thing…it’s a good story. And if you want to hear a lot more of the story, here’s Gaming Historian’s feature-length documentary (the Prince anecdote is at ~24:00).

You can play the familar 1980s version of the The Oregon Trail online.

Tags: Oregon Trail · prince · video · video games

MENTOUGOU (ANP) - BMX'ster Laura Smulders heeft de vijfde wereldbekerwedstrijd van het seizoen gewonnen. De Europees kampioene was in het Chinese Mentougou de beste in de finale. Het is de dertigste wereldbekerzege van de 32-jarige Nijmeegse.

Smulders bleef in de finale de Britse wereldkampioene Bethany Shriever en Siena Pal uit Australië voor. Michelle Wissing eindigde als zevende en Merel Smulders als achtste.

Bij de mannen eindigde Jason Noordam als zesde in de finale. De zege ging naar de Fransman Arthur Pilard. Jaymio Brink werd uitgeschakeld in de halve finales.

Ook de zesde wereldbekerwedstrijd wordt dit weekend in Mentougou verreden.

There looked to be mixed fortunes for McLaren on Friday at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, with Oscar Piastri admitting that the team appeared to have taken a step through the day.

Friday saw Mercedes’ new package of upgrades break cover in Malaysia, but the day did not go entirely to plan for the Silver Arrows, with some of their rivals getting out of the blocks faster in both practice sessions.

The Green party is holding its largest-ever conference, while its leader runs as a candidate in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection

Zack Polanski also insisted his authority as leader of the Green party of England and Wales does not depend on winning next week’s Holborn and St Pancras byelection, amid suggestions that the party’s popularity has peaked.

Polanski, who is trying to take Keir Starmer’s former seat from Labour, described the contest as “probably 50/50 right now” and “really on a knife edge”.

This will be our biggest and most exciting Green party conference ever, coming on the back of a year of unprecedented membership growth and extraordinary electoral success.

Greens have turned hope into electoral wins – in councils, boroughs, in mayoral elections and with our exciting breakthrough in Gorton and Denton.

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Derbyshire county council accused of ‘worst kind of double speak’ as it denied banning local democracy journalist but said his inquiries will be ignored

Rows over potholes and a viral story about a garden gate have led to Reform UK’s latest confrontation with local media, after one of its councils announced it would refuse to engage with a reporter behind the stories.

Reform-run Derbyshire county council has been accused of setting a “dangerous precedent” after withdrawing all cooperation with Eddie Bisknell, a Derbyshire Live journalist who is publicly funded to cover local democracy.

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Een kapper uit Rotterdam is in maart van dit jaar korte tijd gegijzeld gehouden in Papendrecht waarbij losgeld werd gevraagd. Na twee dagen is het slachtoffer weer vrijgelaten. Het is niet bekend of het geld is betaald.

Een kapper uit Rotterdam is in maart van dit jaar korte tijd gegijzeld gehouden in Papendrecht waarbij losgeld werd gevraagd. Na twee dagen is het slachtoffer weer vrijgelaten. Het is niet bekend of het geld is betaald.