The gift from Italy has sparked fierce debate among defence analysts and opposition politicians who question its true cost and purpose

Indonesia has received its first aircraft carrier, a former Italian warship that the government says will strengthen the archipelagic nation’s maritime security and disaster response capabilities.

The 41-year-old former ITS Giuseppe Garibaldi, with capacity for short takeoff and vertical landing aircraft and helicopters, arrived Friday morning at a naval base in North Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok port, where it was welcomed with a military ceremony.

Continue reading...

In February that year, the Slovenian government officially deleted 25,000 citizens, turning them overnight into illegal immigrants

So much of your daily life – your job, your health, your home – hinges on the fact that your name is in a government database. Are you a legal citizen of your country, with everything that entails? You are, until an anonymous bureaucrat hits a key one night and strips it all away, turning you into an illegal immigrant. It happened in Slovenia in 1992.

“I took my son to register for secondary school. The clerk rifled through the papers, then stared at me as if refusing to see the boy standing right next to me. Finally, she said: ‘But you don’t have a son. He doesn’t exist.’” I can’t forget the look on the face of the woman who was telling me this story. It was a mixture of deep hurt and bewilderment, with a pause after every sentence, as if she were walking through a minefield. During the research for my book Erased, I compiled countless stories like this: stories I once would have thought impossible.

Miha Mazzini is a writer, film-maker and anthropologist

Continue reading...

I was at the mercy of the mountain, heading towards a 20-metre drop, about to discover what it felt like to die

Growing up in Sweden, I was as comfortable on skis as I was walking on my feet. As a teenager, I became a professional free skier, a style that features jumps and tricks. In my 20s, I moved into content creation. Now, at 38, I spend the winter months filming extreme ski videos with my photographer wife, Sofia.

In March this year, we’d been staying at the base of the Lyngen Alps, northern Norway. Nonstop rain had prevented us from filming but, finally, we had fresh powder and clear skies. The plan was for me to go up the mountain with a friend, Lovisa, and make our way down as the sun was setting. Sofia would film us from the bottom using a drone.

Continue reading...

This Guy-Ritchie-directed gangland drama is deathly dull. It’s a charm-free watch with awful characters and humour so genital-based that at one point Helen Mirren yells a penis joke at a sausage

MobLand. It sounds like a regional nightclub. Or a boyband. But it’s not. It’s a Paramount+ crime drama starring Pierce Brosnan as an Irishman unable to speak in a convincing Irish accent. This is his tragedy. His cross to bear. And now it’s ours, too, because MobLand is back for a second series, with Brosnan – as the veteran gang boss Conrad Harrigan – once again battling other gang bosses while attempting to say things like “Oi love ye loike a tramp loves paraffin” without his vowels shrivelling into tiny raisins of pseudo-Hibernian shame. Does he succeed? Oi tink not! But there are bigger problems afoot, to be sure.

Created by Ronan “Top Boy” Bennett and directed by Guy Ritchie, the first series of the London-set MobLand (feel the width of that capitalised L!) was a sustained roar of nothing much; a rumble through every possible modern gangster drama cliche in the Every Modern Gangster Drama Cliche book. You know the sort of thing: car chases through suspiciously empty city streets; convoluted drug deals with mumbling eastern Europeans; tiny-eyed endomorphs in flat caps bellowing “Oi” in slow motion as they hurtle through the air to the strains of something unconscionable by Kasabian.

Continue reading...

After ​the writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life

Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a frantic friend, who told her the man she had married just a year earlier, and who had set off the previous night for a speaking engagement nearly 400 miles away, had been hurt. “What kind of hurt?” she panicked. Turning on the television, she was assaulted by blurry images of chaos on stage as audience members surged to the rescue. Her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, had been stabbed multiple times and was fighting for his life.

Within days of desperately chartering a plane to fly her to Rushdie’s hospital bedside, not knowing if he was alive or dead, Griffiths – a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths – had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. “When it had become likely that I was going to survive,” says Rushdie drily, “I said to Eliza we need to make a record of this. By which I meant something very modest: maybe she would take a picture of me on her iPhone every couple of days just to document the recovery, but Eliza had bigger ideas.”

Continue reading...

Het weer ziet er vandaag niet verkeerd uit met bewolking en af en toe zon. Op de meeste plaatsen blijft het droog met alleen vanochtend nog een kleine kans op een bui. De temperatuur stijgt vanmiddag naar 18 of 19 graden, met dan ook een groter aandeel voor de zon. De zuidwestenwind is ook vandaag merkbaar aanwezig en zal vanmiddag opnieuw stevig zijn met een windkracht 4 tot 6.

Twee vrouwen zijn donderdagavond zwaargewond geraakt na een aanrijding met een tram in Rotterdam-Delfshaven. Ze zijn met spoed naar het ziekenhuis gebracht.

Twee vrouwen zijn donderdagavond zwaargewond geraakt na een aanrijding met een tram in Rotterdam-Delfshaven. Ze zijn met spoed naar het ziekenhuis gebracht.

In de natte Nederlandse bodem is leer uit de Romeinse tijd goed bewaard gebleven. „Het zadel uit Valkenburg is het meest complete ooit gevonden.”

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het effect op de economie van een Nationale Investeringsinstelling (NII) is waarschijnlijk beperkt. Dat stellen deskundigen van het Centraal Planbureau (CPB), slechts enkele dagen nadat het kabinet plannen naar buiten bracht voor de oprichting van zo'n instelling.

Op Prinsjesdag stelde het kabinet dat voldoende beschikbaarheid en toegankelijkheid tot financiering voor innovatieve ondernemers dé achilleshiel is van de Nederlandse economie. Daarom gaat het kabinet een Nationale Investeringsinstelling oprichten. Daarvoor is 3,3 miljard euro beschikbaar. De nieuwe instelling zou projecten en bedrijven aan geld kunnen helpen waar de markt dit nalaat.

Volgens het CPB, een belangrijke adviseur van het kabinet, zijn nut en noodzaak van zo'n instelling echter onderwerp van een breed maatschappelijk debat. Het kan inderdaad "meerwaarde" hebben bij het toegankelijker maken van financiering. Maar voor bredere maatschappelijke doelen, zoals verduurzaming, defensie en infrastructuur, zouden andere overheidsinstrumenten, bijvoorbeeld het verstrekken van subsidies, vaak geschikter zijn.

Knelpunten

"Ook als de NII wordt opgericht om financiering voor bedrijven toegankelijk te maken, is een NII geen oplossing voor alle knelpunten die bedrijven bij investeringen ervaren", stellen de deskundigen van het CPB. Zo'n instelling, ook wel nationale investeringsbank genoemd, heeft volgens hen alleen toegevoegde waarde als zij investeringen mogelijk maakt die private investeerders anders niet zouden doen.

"Hoeveel investeringen die eigenlijk wel rendabel zijn geen financiering kunnen krijgen, is moeilijk vast te stellen", voegen ze daaraan toe. Het zou ook goed mogelijk zijn dat ergens best financiering voor te vinden is, maar dat een investering wordt gehinderd door andere knelpunten, zoals gebrek aan personeel of stikstofruimte.

In Den Haag leeft al langer de wens om een nationale investeringsbank op te richten. Ook veel economen en andere prominenten, onder wie oud-ASML-topman Peter Wennink, maakten zich eerder hard voor de komst van zo'n instelling. In andere landen zijn volgens de voorstanders ook al nationale investeringsbanken om de economie te helpen bij grote ontwikkelingen zoals de digitalisering en de energietransitie.

Slapeloosheid, somberte, razernij – de overgang kan mayhem zijn. Dat komt niet alleen door hormonen: hoe de menopauze wordt begrepen, beleefd en behandeld, hangt ook samen met de idealen en opvattingen van de maatschappij. Dat zegt wetenschapshistoricus Rina Knoeff, die een boek schreef over tweeduizend jaar overgang.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

ajpscs posted a photo:

"Once you see it, you can't unsee it”

EXPOSE MORE
the SQUARE
© ajpscs

ajpscs has added a photo to the pool:

"Once you see it, you can't unsee it”

EXPOSE MORE
the SQUARE
© ajpscs

Reuters reports that a former Google DeepMind employee "became the latest AI researcher to warn that the technology could 'kill all humans', saying time could be running out to avoid the outcome:

Public alarm about the potential danger posed by AI is growing, after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said last week he had resigned, in part because the "people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Anthropic scientist Evan Hubinger then responded to Coxon's comments, saying he was correct and that he believed there was a greater than 10% chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade.

"I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research," Bilal Chughtai wrote on X. "I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome." Chughtai, who co-authored research papers while at Google DeepMind, worked there as a research engineer and left the company in July 2026, according to his LinkedIn profile.



Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg "said it's up to each AI company to make sure its technology is safe," reports the Associated Press, "distancing himself from calls by rival companies for a coordinated slowdown in the development of advanced artificial intelligence.
AI companies are already motivated to develop their models in a safe way and face "significant liability" to prevent them from causing harm, Zuckerberg said. "Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens," he wrote on X... Zuckerberg said Meta delayed releasing its Muse AI agent for several months to ensure its safety and security. "We didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would," he said.

Companies should prioritize building safe AI models instead of systems that can automatically improve themselves, a function known as recursive self-improvement, Zuckerberg wrote. "Committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely."
But Zuckerberg also agreed that engaging independent evaluators and advisors "is industry best practice," adding that Meta Superintelligence Labs "already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work...

"I believe the key to building a positive future for everyone is maintaining the right balance of power. This is within our power to do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CineGeist is an open-source movie recommender built on one idea: people are terrible at describing their own taste but great at reacting to specific films, so it never asks abstract questions. While building it I shipped a "wildcard" discovery feature, then measured that it fired for 0 out of 3,000 users. Its distance threshold sat below the floor of what the vector space can actually produce, a reminder that in dense high-dimensional data your intuitions about "far" are simply wrong. Try the live demo and read the code: github.com/arijitgupta42/cinegeist

Read All

John from Brisbane has added a photo to the pool:

Brisbane reputedly has seven ancient hills like Rome not counting the mountains in its western suburbs. In fact, one suburb is actually called Seven Hills. It probably has more, we are a hilly city. But today's shot is taken from Whites Hill which is in the semi inner suburbs and covered by the large Whites Hill Reserve in open forest with lots of koalas and lower down, many sports and playgrounds. And there through a nice gap in the trees is a fine view of the centre of the city encapsulated by the big S of the Brisbane River which can't be seen here.

Stueyman has added a photo to the pool:

Unsealed road down to the Peel-Harvey estuary, and the jetty for Coopers Mill