Ex-US and French ambassadors Lynne Tracy and Pierre Lévy were among those to speak to the BBC of their time in Moscow "Being the ambassador to Russia was probably the hardest assignment of my career," Lynne Tracy, who represented the US in Moscow from 2023 and 2025, tells the BBC. US, UK and European diplomats once played a crucial role in Russia, defusing tensions even at the worst moments of the Cold War. But now, deemed "unfriendly" by President Vladimir Putin's government, Western ambassadors are under constant surveillance, isolated and increasingly cut off from the country they were sent to understand, as the war in Ukraine grinds on through its fifth year. The BBC has spoken to five
BBC World2h ago
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Actor Tom Skerritt, pictured above in 2018, has died. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images hide caption There's no avoiding the word rugged with Tom Skerritt. There was the mustache, the jaw, the crinkly eyes, and the cool authoritarian bearing he brought to memorable roles as commanding officers, dads and cops. Skerritt died of natural causes on Wednesday, according to a statement from a representative. He was 93 years old. He was Captain Dallas in Alien . Viper in Top Gun . An enlistee in the original movie M*A*S*H ( playing one of the few characters who didn't transition to the later television series.) A Vietnam vet in the Cheech and Chong stoner classic, Up In Smoke . He played small town
NPR News2h ago
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Smart ring maker Oura has sued Indian rival Ultrahuman again, seeking to block U.S. sales of its Ring Pro (pictured above) just months after the redesign helped the Bengaluru-based startup return to the American market following an import ban. The case is the latest in a string of patent disputes Oura has brought against competing smart-ring makers, including Samsung and RingConn. In a complaint filed Thursday in a federal court in Texas, Oura alleged that Ultrahuman’s Ring Pro infringes two of its patents covering the ring’s design and internal components, including its battery and sensors. Oura is seeking monetary damages and a permanent injunction that would stop Ultrahuman from selling
TechCrunch2h ago
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Most people know Sonic 06 has cut content, but few realise just how much... During the process of building Marathon Recompiled , we’ve ended up digging deep into many of Sonic 06’s core systems, including the rendering. The appearance of 06’s various areas varies from pretty good, like in Crisis City, to utterly flat and depressing in Castle Town. It really makes you wonder what exactly went wrong? If you look at what limited footage we have of beta content, we can see many effects that aren’t present in the final game. Kingdom Valley had full bump maps, Castle Town had more complex geometry and plants, and New City’s collision implies a very different building layout at some point in
Lobsters2h ago
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Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor of the US state of Ohio, has called an attack ad against her that features her estranged mother "despicable". Acton commented on the campaign ad from her Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, on Wednesday evening, saying: "This is despicable, what he's done". In the ad Acton's mother, Donna Arthur, says Acton "lied her entire life". But it does not mention that Arthur's husband was charged with raping Acton when she was a child and that Acton and her brother were then removed from Arthur's custody. Since it launched on Monday, the ad has generated political backlash and cast a national spotlight on the race. Acton and Ramaswamy are both
BBC World14h ago
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A US judge has ordered President Donald Trump to answer questions under oath in his defamation lawsuit against the BBC by 11 December. Trump is suing the BBC over an episode of Panorama that edited together two different sections of a speech he gave before the riot at the US Capitol in 2021. Charles Tobin, a lawyer representing the BBC, said in court that "we still haven't been able to depose the plaintiff" with two months left in the discovery period. Trump cancelled a previous deposition on 16 October, citing "matters of national importance" while he was campaigning in Georgia. The judge in the case, US Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett, said that Trump must sit for the deposition by 11
BBC News14h ago
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A new startup launched today with the definitely not terrifying mission of creating genetically enhanced dogs for the United States military, law enforcement, and emergency first responders. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril’s Palmer Luckey and Colossal Biosciences cofounder Ben Lamm. The startup has raised $200 million to “rebuild America’s domestic supply of elite working dogs” and reduce dependency on European dog breeders for military canines. Lamm tells WIRED that Warhound is in the process of gene-editing its first batch of dogs. The startup has already collected blood samples from specific "top-performing” military, police, and first responder dogs in the United States, and its
Wired2h ago
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submitted by JRepin to science 4 points | 0 comments https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251 cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/54366801 The scientific literature can be viewed as an “information commons:” an intangible resource that “no one owns and is shared by everyone.” There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. The latter are gone not because of the well-known “tragedy of the commons,” but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600–1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge
Lemmy / Science2h ago
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If someone invented a machine that did nothing but roam the streets at night and hunt down orphans, and if that machine somehow led to Getty going bankrupt as a byproduct, it would probably still get a cheer out of me. I don’t like orphan killing machines, but I’ll take a silver lining whenever I can. I guess I’m an optimist like that. Soon all stock photo image sites will close and we will just have AI images for everything. Uplifting news? That are good and have new stuff for free with no attribution? Example please? Getty and Shutterstock Unite in AI-Driven Era: A New Chapter for Stock Photography
Lemmy / Technology2h ago
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Karachi’s last two African elephants remain in captivity. Their sisters are already dead. Will they survive? At Karachi Zoo, Jude Allen sang, You Are My Sunshine, to an elephant he could not save. Noor Jehan, the 17-year-old African elephant, was suffering. Allen recalls massaging her legs, nursing her bedsores and spending her final days beside her. She died on April 22, 2023, surrounded by a few activists. Allen, 45, had held various corporate jobs while volunteering as an animal caregiver since an early age. But Noor Jehan changed something in him, he said. “The day this wild African elephant rested her painful forehead on mine, and I hugged her for the first time – it all made sense,”
Al Jazeera2h ago
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IGUAZÚ NATIONAL PARK, Argentina — Few times in my life have I felt the enormity and power of nature. Standing at the edge of Iguazú Falls, on the Brazil-Argentina border, was one of them. Iguazú isn't just one imposing fall, but a complex of cascades spanning more than a mile across both countries. A rain-soaked October in Brazil has sent near-record volumes of water surging over its towering cliffs. Scientists link the relentless rains to this year's Super El Niño , causing extreme weather events across the globe. But what a spectacular force of nature for the lower-than-average number of tourists who braved the deluge this month. The roar of the rushing Iguazú river under your feet
NPR News14h ago
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Apple’s Mac Mini M4 has become a popular mini-yet-mighty desktop computer for running local agentic AI 24/7—so much so that it’s been out of stock for months . But with the introduction of the new Mac Mini M6 , the older M4 is no longer as scarce (there was no M5 Mac Mini), and the base model (256-GB hard drive, 16-GB unified memory) is on sale for $649—$150 off MSRP and $250 cheaper than the M6. It’s a good deal for a computer that is plenty powerful for most people, and some M4 Mac Mini configurations can even handle AI tasks. But—and it’s a big but—shoppers should be aware that the M4’s original base price was $599 when it launched in 2024. However, with Apple raising prices on hardware
Wired14h ago
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckgel5xp2xv9t?post=asset%3Ac8185d02-3e14-4e83-9a99-6d3be2de04bd#post Not in Librewolf, at least. Ublock and Noscript enabled. Site still shows. You probably don’t have these filter lists enabled: 📒 HaGeZi - Multi PRO mini 🔐 HaGeZi - Threat Intelligence Feeds - Mini Most of my experience with PHP is from pen testing so most of my orders look something like $_GET [0] ?> Wait till you learn about this new CGI thing, you’ll be amazed about what it can do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Gateway_Interface
Lemmy / Programming2h ago
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Exclusive: Sasan Ghandehari’s partnership with religious foundation raises questions about past dealings with republic criticised by Nigel Farage Nigel Farage’s newest billionaire donor was in business with a powerful Iranian religious foundation under the authority of the country’s supreme leader, raising questions about his past dealings with the hardline republic. Hossein Ghandehari, also called Sasan, was little known in the UK until he pledged to give millions to Reform UK this summer and donated £50,000 to Farage to cover the cost of two passes for the Davos World Economic Forum. He has said he is moving his tax residency from Switzerland to the UK in order to make “regular payments”
The Guardian / World14h ago
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Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies? | Hacker News Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login Ask HN: If the models are so good, why doesn't OpenAI just start 100 companies? 64 points by ex-aws-dude 7 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 67 comments Title is a bit of an exaggeration but the question is more: if the frontier models are so good, why even sell them as your primary money maker? Is selling tokens really the best strategy? Especially with commodification and prices declining wouldn't that indicate there is more money to be made on the application-side of the models rather than the utility side help CoolestBeans
Hacker News / Ask2h ago
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A rare escalation this month exposed the increasingly lethal arsenals the two Koreas are building up across the world’s most heavily fortified border.
New York Times / World2h ago
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Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. If you buy something from a link, The Verge may earn a commission. See our ethics statement. Canva is diving even deeper into AI with the launch of an image generation model that competes directly with those from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. The model, called Canva Craft , uses a two-stage architecture that allows it to plan a design before generating an image, allowing for “greater precision, consistency and control,” according to an announcement on Thursday . Canva Craft can generate images at up to 2K resolution and in more than 30 aspect ratios. In addition to generating social media posts and
The Verge / AI2h ago
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The AI aggregator leaked nearly 23TB of user data, or 17.6 million files, our researchers discovered. The information includes exactly what you’d expect: AI prompts, the machine’s replies, images, videos, and various corporate documents. Part of me is morbidly curious what kinds of support tickets get generated for sex dolls, but the other part of me thinks it’s best to not know. “how would you get a small cylinder unstuck from one of your dolls? it is imperative that the cylinder remain unharmed” What a great question, it’s not just about the cylinder but the nature of freedom itself! You are right to want to remove the cylinder from your doll… Step one rotate the doll 180 degrees to
Lemmy / Technology14h ago
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After renaming Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps following Trump’s executive orders , Google CEO Sundar Pichai might be drawing the line at the Atlantic Ocean. As reported earlier by The Washington Post , Trump said at a Wednesday night rally that he would “probably pass” on renaming the Atlantic after he contacted Pichai about it, to which Pichai allegedly replied, “Please don’t ask us to do that.” Trump claimed Pichai said, “No, no, no. This time, I’m not doing it,” adding “Oceans are different, sir.” The Verge reached out to Google for comment, but didn’t immediately get a response. Apple has joined Google in making Trump’s name changes on its maps, but some other map
The Verge14h ago
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Hey HN, we recently open sourced our Consumer Agent Testing Tool to help teams iterate against proprietary assistants like Muse and Instinct. We built this to reduce our own frustrations with building an MCP/API for these agents to consume. The problem: testing against these tools is hard! Agent memory + account statefulness make reproducibility, in the ways required for repeatable/reliable outcomes, between agents and the APIs/MCPs they interact with very challenging. The solution: CATT lets devs test their services against a surrogate Muse or Instinct agent (not affiliated with either of these companies). Testers define starting conditions, approvals, and success conditions for their
Hacker News / Show2h ago
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It’s easy to criticize US automakers and their tepid approach to electric vehicles under the current administration and the expiration of the EV tax credit . It’s also easy to look at the rest of the world’s embrace of EVs and wonder if the US is entering a “Malaise 2.0” era. Which is why GM wants the world to know that it is still focused on its end goals of electrification, autonomy, and improving vehicle quality while reducing development time. At this year’s GM Forward event, company executives announced that its hands-off, eyes-off Super Cruise technology will expand across the lineup and be available on nearly every vehicle. This will include the pickup trucks and the crossovers, and
Ars Technica14h ago
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CleanSlop Ship vibe-coded apps with confidence 31 followers Ship vibe-coded apps with confidence 31 followers Visit website CleanSlop helps you ship vibe-coded TypeScript apps with confidence. Sign in with GitHub, connect your repos and run a scan. It maps the codebase (call paths, module dependencies, background jobs, data stores, external services) and surfaces the problems that matter: things that work in a demo but break with real users, like unbounded work, slow operations blocking a request, and jobs that quietly get dropped. You get a short list of real risks worth fixing, not hundreds of findings to triage. View more Agentic CleanSlop Launching today Authenticate, scan and fix your
Product Hunt2h ago
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