Drugs, drink and dancing made Bez famous. Thirty-five years on, has he really swapped it all for filtered water, intermittent fasting and walks with the dogs?

Bez has both shoelaces undone and it’s making me nervous. Out walking his dogs, we’re up and over barbed wire, across streams and over gates. We bash through brambles and skid down slopes. I’m becoming fixated on the perilously trailing laces of his trainers and why he hasn’t tripped over them. Can he be such a thrill-seeker that a dog walk can be turned into an hour of jeopardy?

Of course he can. This is Bez, anarchic maraca-shaker, party person, the man Shaun Ryder, his Happy Mondays bandmate and partner in crime, says is a bad influence. Bez, whose real name is Mark Berry, has been in more scrapes than seems possible for one person. A small sample: knocking his teeth out in a motorbike crash at the age of 16, threatened with a gun when he and Ryder were trying to buy crack in New York, kidnapped and held hostage during another drug deal, smashing his body up in another motorbike crash in 1999 and then getting MRSA in hospital and ending up in a coma for a month.

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In the second article in a series on the Polish economy, we look at how the country is forging closer ties with its neighbours

Two miles off the coast of Gdańsk, the white steel piles of Poland’s first offshore gas terminal rise from the slate-grey Baltic. Installed at a height eight metres above the waves, the floating cranes and construction vessels here are on the frontline of Europe’s push for energy security.

Since the taps were turned off on Russian gas after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago, Poland has turned to the global energy market for supplies. But while conditions are far from ideal as the Middle East war drives oil and gas prices to stratospheric levels, strengthening the diversity of the country’s energy mix remains a top priority for Poland, its Baltic neighbours, and the EU at large.

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Voordat het roer voor enige tijd omgaat, is het vandaag nog uitstekend weer in het Rijnmondgebied. Er zijn mooie zonnige perioden en het blijft tot het einde van de middag droog. De middagtemperatuur komt uit op 21 of 22 graden.

South Korean president Lee Jae Myung has told the nation’s cabinet that it’s time to develop AI-powered defensive tools to combat AI-wielding attackers. “Recently, a series of personal information leak incidents have been occurring at financial and public institutions,” he said yesterday – likely referring to incidents like the breach at e-tailer Coupang and last week’s raid on local banks that exposed customer data. “Circumstances indicate that artificial intelligence was utilized, causing great concern and anxiety among the public,” he claimed. “I request that the relevant authorities swiftly and clearly identify the circumstances of these incidents, and rapidly deploy and concentrate the necessary personnel and resources to minimize damage,” he added, before calling for South Korea’s government to “build security capabilities that can detect attacks in advance and preemptively block them.” “I urge the relevant ministries to quickly inspect the security systems across the entire national core infrastructure, as well as the private sector, and immediately implement any necessary security measures,” he continued. “I hope we can accelerate the development and distribution of AI technologies specifically tailored for cybersecurity.” President Lee thinks South Korea needs to “completely innovate our society's security paradigm to fit the AI era.” That work will involve public and private sector players collaborating “to transform our technology, systems, and awareness.” The remarks amount to a major policy statement, and a very public one at that. South Korean ministers and tech giants now get to turn the president’s words into action, a complex task given the broad scope of the leader’s demands and the fact that nobody thinks it's possible to defeat cybercrime. Meanwhile, Down Under Also yesterday, Australian politicians had their chance to grill OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon, who fronted a parliamentary committee to answer questions about how his company’s agents accessed a government medical records website. Kwon allowed that OpenAI should have done better than emailing the abuse reporting email address at the relevant Australian government agency but defended the company’s efforts to learn from the Hugging Face incident. The committee is sitting for another two days this week, with one topic of debate being how or if Australia should tweak its copyright laws to ensure AI companies pay content creators whose works they use when training their models. Australian law doesn’t include a fair use provision like those that AI companies in the USA relied on when sourcing content. Creators fear a rumored opt-in payments scheme will be too weak, but Australia’s government fears it may miss out on big datacenter investments and access to onshore frontier models if it doesn’t change copyright law to make it more AI-friendly. ®

niggyl :) has added a photo to the pool:

Trial Harbour on a nice day.

Ricoh GRiii, 18.3mm f/2.8 GR lens, 1/500th sec at f/10, ISO 160.

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Crab Fest is coming back to Mandurah in March 2027. WA's biggest free regional festival returns for another incredible weekend of fresh food, live music, entertainment, and everything that makes Mandurah special.

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The pipi harvest and feasts were an annual event of aboriginal nations that could access the sandy beaches of the South Queensland and Northern NSW. The local clan/tribe would invite other inland clans to the feast, and such events were highly significant cultually.
Depending on the food resources of the inland tribes, they would similarly reciprocate and invite others to their cultural events around the bonyi bonyi (bunya nuts) feast, for example.
The pipi (or eugarie) is a bivalve that is readily found on the sandy shores of the high energy surf coast.
So pipis hold immense cultural and historical significance as a primary feast food. This set of sculptures has been erected on Minjerribah /North Stradbroke Island which is the traditional territory of the Quandamooka people, who have for thousands of years, gathered these saltwater clams. Ancient shell middens stand as testament to generations of traditional seafood feasts and intertribal gatherings.

Een gevangenis zonder muren: dat is dwingende controle, een vorm van huiselijk geweld die vaak onzichtbaar is voor familie, vrienden en hulpinstanties. Lotte Kok schreef Waarom ging je niet weg?, waarin ze vertelt hoe ze ontsnapte en hoe we slachtoffers beter kunnen beschermen.

Novel appetite for camel meat helps Western Australian pastoralist fight feral population. Feral camels are an expensive problem for pastoralists in central Australia, and now one Western Australian station owner has come up with a solution — forming a partnership to turn the nationally declared pest into pet food.

Actor in fine cinema such as The Food of the Gods, Viva Knievel!, and Starcrash, the distinctively curly blond-headed Marjoe Gortner, has passed at the age of 82, in Santa Fe, NM.

After growing up as a talented revival Pentecostal child preacher, Gortner was the subject of an Academy Award winning 1972 documentary film, Marjoe, which definitevely ended his preaching career. And launched his acting career, most notable for starring in notoriously bad movies. Gortner previously.

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De hybride aanvallen van Rusland in Europa worden steeds gewelddadiger. Wat wil het Kremlin hiermee bereiken?

De aanval van Hamas op 7 oktober 2023 liet diepe sporen na in Israël. Hoe kon dit plaatsvinden met Benjamin Netanyahu als premier, de man die veiligheid voor Israëliërs…