Jon Siegel has added a photo to the pool:
Somewhere in the Nagano countryside, we stopped by for a walk and to look at this beautiful red bridge over a small river on the temple grounds.
ajpscs has added a photo to the pool:
"Once you see it, you can't unsee it”
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We appear to be entering a new era, in which political desperation at home leads to increasingly unhinged threats abroad
Donald Trump was in Nebraska on Monday, and though his long rally speech had elements of a performance, this was no Bruce Springsteen album. He offered another dark meditation on a world spiraling out of control, one in which the destruction of American cities is increasingly a possibility, unless Americans trust him to use the vast powers of the presidency to annihilate his foes.
The president drew fury when he suggested that Iran could launch a nuclear attack and “take out” Los Angeles or San Diego. California leaders reacted with scorn at Trump’s alarmism.
Ted Widmer, a former White House speechwriter, is the editor of American Speeches, and the recently published The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, both published by the Library of America
Continue reading...Chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski Island in Antarctica declined by two-thirds since 2011, likely due to climate crisis
The world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011, most likely due to the climate crisis, a new study has revealed.
Scientists warned the rapid demise of chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands in Antarctica, increased the risk of a wider ecosystem collapse.
Continue reading...British billionaire warned Epstein was a ‘sexual deviant’ decades before FBI closed in on the abuser
Sir James Goldsmith’s links to Hilton Head, South Carolina, adds to mystery of Jane Doe 4, who claimed she was abused by Epstein in the 1980s
For Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire Goldsmith family was a gateway to elite society and he wanted to be in their circle.
The disgraced financier, who died in prison in 2019 facing sex-trafficking charges, longed for a billionaire’s lifestyle and cultivated the family’s friends, bankers, business associates and advisers.
Continue reading...At Conservative conference, some worry about becoming a one-woman party, while others say party should thank their lucky stars they have her
Kemi Badenoch has long said that the Conservatives were “under new management”, but in a TV interview to mark the end of a party conference at which she has been front and centre of more or less everything, she took the analogy further.
“Your viewers will know that sometimes you have a football team that’s disappointing,” the Tory leader told GB News. “There’s a new captain, there’s a new coach, there’s a new owner, effectively – which is all me.”
Continue reading...Veteran leftwinger has been ‘in exile in the east’ in Russia and not been to Holborn and St Pancras constituency since campaign began
George Galloway has been elected seven times to parliament, but his attempt to succeed for an eighth this week, in the London seat formerly held by Keir Starmer, is undoubtedly his most curious effort yet.
Since the byelection campaign began, the leader of the Workers party of Britain has yet to set foot in the UK, let alone the Holborn and St Pancras constituency, because he is in what he describes as “self-exile” after being questioned by counter-terrorism police at Gatwick airport a year ago.
Continue reading...New ‘support and training centre’ prompts concern in region but China says it is ‘not directed at any third party’
Satellite images show attack jets stationed at a new Chinese military facility in Laos, which opened last week and gives Beijing’s air force its first foothold in mainland south-east Asia.
Images provided by the commercial satellite provider Vantor show eight light attack aircraft positioned at Ban Keun airport alongside what appear to be more than a dozen military vehicles lined up in rows.
Continue reading...The big question facing Andy Burnham is not whether Brexit has harmed Britain, but if a rapidly changing Europe will keep the door open if the UK decides it wants back in
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It was lobbed into the national conversation without fanfare or warning, almost a footnote in the UK prime minister’s first speech as leader to his governing Labour party’s annual conference. But Andy Burnham has kicked off a quiet U-turn on Brexit.
By stating bluntly that the decision to leave Europe’s core political community had done “more harm than good”, Burnham broke a taboo in his own party, in effect, discarding his predecessor’s paralysing ‘red lines’ on Europe, and signalling he will not be bound by these constraints after the next British election.
Continue reading...
Het Sub-Antarctische eiland Zavodovski telt niet langer de grootste pinguïnpopulatie op aarde. Een half miljoen keelbandpinguïns zijn er in 15 jaar tijd verdwenen. Door klimaatveranderingen zijn ze de hongerdood gestorven.
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Het Schadefonds Geweldsmisdrijven moet Jasper van den Hoek een uitkering doen omdat hij slachtoffer is van zijn (groot)vader, die hem door incest bij zijn moeder verwekte. „We gaan er snel en met zorgvuldigheid mee aan de slag.”
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Het COA kan het weer eens niet meer aan en dat gaat nu zelfs ten koste van vrouwen, kinderen en mensen die medische zorg behoeven. En daarom slaat het COA alarm: "Het COA kampt met een acuut tekort van honderden opvangplekken. De situatie in de asielopvang is ‘zeer kritiek’." In Trouw zegt bestuursvoorzitter Remco Bakker zelfs: "De rek is er aan alle kanten uit." Dat is niet zo gek als de instroom vorige week nog rond de 900 lag en deze week weer, de situatie in Ter Apel druk en vol en oorlogachtig is, de omstandigheden in de opvang voor kinderen verschrikkelijk zijn, de dwangwet een helleding is, andere COA-locaties van ellende maar open blijven, dwangwetweigeraars steeds talrijker worden en de dwangsomcentjes richting nieuwe records gaan. Het asielsysteem piept en kraakt en knelt en is kapotstuk omdat het probleem maar blijft en blijft en niet weggaat. Maar hee, gelukkig krijgen we er op een gegeven moment misschien wel één hele asielmaatregel bij!
Training the largest AI models is no longer simply a question of adding more GPUs. As clusters grow, power availability is becoming a hard physical constraint, forcing infrastructure teams to consider how a single training workload can operate across multiple data centres. That creates a very different networking problem. Traditional datacenter interconnect was designed to move traffic between sites. AI training demands something more exacting: huge, synchronous flows, minimal packet loss and tightly coordinated communication between GPUs. If one part of the cluster stalls, the impact can ripple across the entire job. In this interview, The Register’s Tim Phillips speaks with Rakesh Chopra, SVP, Silicon and Systems Architecture, Cisco Fellow, about what Cisco calls the “Scale-Across” imperative and why it believes distributed AI infrastructure requires a new approach to routing. Rakesh explains how the demands of AI are changing the role of the network, from simple transport to an integral part of the compute system. He discusses the challenge of making geographically separate facilities behave more like a single deterministic machine, and why buffering, high-speed coherent optics and tightly integrated silicon matter when workloads span long-distance fiber links. The conversation also looks inside the cluster itself. Rakesh outlines how Cisco’s Silicon One architecture and Intelligent Collective Networking are designed to manage synchronized bursts of GPU traffic, reduce bottlenecks and improve job completion time. Power efficiency is another central theme, including the trade-off between network consumption and the energy available to GPUs. Security and longevity also come into focus. The interview covers hardware-accelerated MACsec and IPsec, as well as the role of programmability in helping infrastructure adapt as AI workloads continue to evolve. For infrastructure and datacenter leaders planning for larger, more distributed AI environments, the discussion offers a practical view of the networking challenges that emerge once one site is no longer enough. Watch the full interview below.
PARIJS (ANP) - Lidstaten van het Internationaal Energieagentschap (IEA) hebben na overleg beloofd om sneller olievoorraden vrij te geven onder afspraken die stammen uit maart. Daarmee hopen ze iets te doen tegen de sterk gestegen dieselprijzen, die onlangs in meerdere landen recordhoogtes bereikten.
Leden van het IEA, waaronder Nederland, spraken in maart na het begin van de oorlog tegen Iran af samen ruim 400 miljoen vaten uit strategische reserves vrij te geven. Volgens de in Parijs gevestigde coördinator voor energiecrises kunnen daar nog ongeveer 100 miljoen vaten van op de markt worden gebracht.
De landen hebben ook afgesproken het vrijgeven van dieselvoorraden prioriteit te geven, gezien de schaarste van die brandstof door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten en schade aan Russische raffinaderijen na Oekraïense aanvallen. Volgens het IEA hebben landen nog aanzienlijke strategische voorraden olie en brandstoffen. "Het IEA staat klaar om meer van deze voorraden op de markt te brengen als dit nodig is", schrijft het agentschap.
LONDEN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Vijf oud-handelaren van de Britse bank Barclays die waren veroordeeld in een reeks fraudezaken, hebben een overwinning behaald bij het hof van beroep in Londen. Eerder werden ze veroordeeld voor het manipuleren van rentetarieven. Rechters hebben die veroordelingen in hun hoger beroep nu vernietigd.
De zaken gaan over een omvangrijk fraudeschandaal met de rentetarieven Libor en Euribor. Libor staat voor een rentetarief dat banken bij elkaar in rekening brachten als ze elkaar geld uitleenden. Het Euribor-tarief is een tegenhanger daarvan. Oud-handelaren Alex Pabon, Jay Merchant en Jonathan Mathew werden in 2016 veroordeeld voor samenzwering tot fraude en kregen een gevangenisstraf voor hun rol bij het manipuleren van de Libor. Philippe Moryoussef en Colin Bermingham werden in 2018 en 2019 veroordeeld voor het manipuleren van de Euribor.
De geschrapte veroordelingen van het vijftal volgen op het eerder al teruggedraaide vonnis van voormalig handelaar Tom Hayes van de bank UBS.
PARIJS (ANP) - Bij de protesten en ongeregeldheden die sinds eind vorige maand vooral op en rond Franse scholen zijn geweest, zijn volgens binnenlandminister Laurent Nuñez 6629 aanhoudingen verricht. Bij uit de hand gelopen manifestaties zijn volgens de bewindsman 761 politiemensen gewond geraakt. Daarnaast raakten 215 scholieren en 89 medewerkers of leden van het onderwijzend personeel gewond.
Enkele scholieren zijn zwaargewond geraakt. De minister zei in het parlement tegen een commissie dat er achttien onderzoeken zijn ingesteld naar het optreden van agenten van de nationale politie. Hij vindt niet dat de politie over het algemeen buitensporig hard heeft opgetreden. De betogingen zijn op veel plaatsen door relschoppers gekaapt en ontaard in extreem geweld.
In een aantal plaatsen wordt nog steeds betoogd en zijn er ongeregeldheden, maar volgens het ministerie van Onderwijs is het woensdag rustiger geworden. De felste betogingen waren telkens op dinsdag.
De twee opvangboten voor asielzoekers in Maassluis verdwijnen hoogstwaarschijnlijk volgend jaar. De overeenkomsten van de schepen lopen af en de gemeente wil die niet meer verlengen. "Wij vinden verdere asielopvang in Maassluis niet in het belang van de stad en haar inwoners, en willen daarom geen asielopvang in Maassluis."
De twee opvangboten voor asielzoekers in Maassluis verdwijnen hoogstwaarschijnlijk volgend jaar. De overeenkomsten van de schepen lopen af en de gemeente wil die niet meer verlengen. "Wij vinden verdere asielopvang in Maassluis niet in het belang van de stad en haar inwoners, en willen daarom geen asielopvang in Maassluis."
Howdy, it's hump day and we're rolling along. Today we've got an update on a very strange case involving a man whose image was resurrected from the dead via AI and made to appear in front of a judge to announced "forgiveness" of his murderer. 404 Media contributor Matthew Gault had a long conversation with the man's sister, who wrote the words and generated the video, and she said that swaying the judge was the entire point.
THE BIG STORY
Her AI-Generated Video Swayed the Judge. The Court Said it Carried 'Undue Emotional Weight'
A man convicted of manslaughter in Arizona will be resentenced because an AI-generated video of his victim speaking from beyond the grave was ruled to have carried “undue emotional weight” as an impact statement. An appellate court in Arizona ruled that the manslaughter charge will remain, but the judge must reconsider the length of the man’s prison term because of AI.
In 2021, Gabriel Horcasitas shot and killed Christopher Pelkey during a road rage incident. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter. During Horcasitas’ sentencing hearing, Pelkey’s sister Stacey Wales played an AI-generated video of her brother as part of her victim’s impact statement. In the video, which she scripted with her own words that she made an AI generated likeness of Pelkey say, the AI avatar of Pelkey forgives his killer and said they “could have been friends” in another life.
“I loved that video,” the judge said while handing down the maximum sentence of 10 and a half years.
Wales told 404 Media that her intent with the video was to sway the judge. “Isn’t that what you want human connection to be?” she said. “Do you ever come out of a movie and say: ‘Well, that was too emotional. That was too powerful. Human connection is powerful, and trying to convey that to somebody that's never known another person, this person on the earth, to convey their lifetime of 37 years down to a two-hour sentencing event is hard to do, and I think that victims and victims' families should be afforded every opportunity.”
Read the rest of this story here.
MORE FROM 404 MEDIA
A flock of new laws incoming. Several recently introduced pieces of legislation would, if passed, dramatically curb federal agencies’ access to Flock cameras, with the lawmakers referencing reporting by 404 Media in their explanations for why the legislation is needed. “At a time of growing concern about the unchecked power of artificial intelligence, Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” Bernie Sanders said.