Pelican Press

Blues star De Koning won't rush free agency call Blues star De Koning won't rush free agency call Carlton star Tom De Koning is putting no timeline on deciding whether he stays at the Blues or accepts a monster contract with St Kilda. Source link #Blues #star #Koning #won039t #rush #free #agency #call Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Biden’s Gaza pier injured far more troops than previously known Biden’s Gaza pier injured far more troops than previously known By Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than 60 service members were injured as a part of former President Joe Biden’s floating aid pier in Gaza, a Pentagon Inspector General report published on Tuesday said, a number significantly higher than had been previously disclosed. The pier, announced by Biden during a televised address to Congress in March 2024, was a massive endeavor that took about 1,000 U.S. forces to execute. But bad weather and distribution challenges inside Gaza limited the effectiveness of what the U.S. military says was its biggest aid delivery effort ever in the Middle East. The pier was only operational for about 20 days and cost about $230 million. While there were no deaths or known direct attacks on the pier, the Pentagon had said three U.S. troops suffered non-combat injuries in support of the pier in May, with one medically evacuated in critical condition. But the new report by the Pentagon Inspector General said that the number was actually 62. “Based on the information provided, we were not able to determine which of these 62 injuries occurred during the performance of duties or resulted off duty or from pre-existing medical conditions,” the report said. The pier became a sore point in Congress, where Republicans branded it a political stunt by Biden, who was under pressure from fellow Democrats to do more to aid Palestinians after months of staunchly supporting Israel’s punishing war on ******. While it brought in sorely needed aid to a marshalling area on Gaza’s shore, the 1,200-foot-long (370-metre-long) floating pier had to be removed multiple times because of bad weather. The Inspector General said that the U.S. military did not meet the standards for the equipment. “Nor did they organize, train, and equip their forces to meet common joint standards,” the report said. Challenges to aid delivery in Gaza persist. The United Nations and ************ representatives at the International Court of Justice have accused Israel of breaking international law by refusing to let aid into Gaza, after Israel began on March 2 to cut off all supplies to the 2.3 million residents of the ************ enclave. Israel has defended its blockade against aid entering Gaza, alleging that ****** steals supplies intended for the civilian population and distributes them to its own forces, an allegation that ****** denies. (Reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart; Editing by Saad Sayeed) Source link #Bidens #Gaza #pier #injured #troops #previously Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

SpaceX launch 28 Starlink satellites on 470th Falcon 9 rocket launch – Spaceflight Now SpaceX launch 28 Starlink satellites on 470th Falcon 9 rocket launch – Spaceflight Now SpaceX launch 28 Starlink satellites on 470th Falcon 9 rocket launch Spaceflight NowSpaceX rocket launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida: What time is the nighttime liftoff? Florida TodaySpaceX Falcon 9 carrying Starlink satellites launched from Florida WESHSpaceX launches Starlink mission from Florida on Tuesday FOX 35 OrlandoSpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 28 Starlink satellites to orbit from Florida (photos) Space Source link #SpaceX #launch #Starlink #satellites #470th #Falcon #rocket #launch #Spaceflight Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Waratahs coach wields axe for must-win Reds battle Waratahs coach wields axe for must-win Reds battle Dan McKellar has placed his bumbling NSW Waratahs on notice, wielding the axe for the side’s Super Rugby Pacific do-or-die derby with the Queensland Reds. Fed up after losing all five games on the road this campaign and submitting 40-17 to the ACT Brumbies last start in Canberra, McKellar has made a whopping six changes for the Reds’ visit to Sydney. Most significantly, Wallabies hooker David Porecki returns from a chronic calf injury while Tane Edmed will make his first start since round three after replacing playmaker Lawson Creighton for Friday night’s must-win battle at Allianz Stadium.Powerhouse lock Fergus Lee-Warner is also back from a foot injury, replacing Jake Gordon’s caretaker captain Hugh Sinclair, who, like Creighton, has been unceremoniously dumped from the match-day 23 altogether. With the third-last-placed Tahs’ season on the line, skipper Gordon backed McKellar’s hardline selection approach. “Dan’s pretty clear on what he expects,” Gordon said after recommitting to the Waratahs and *********** rugby for at least two more years on Wednesday. “Same with the whole coaching team and I guess if you are not willing to meet that, yeah, he’s definitely happy to make calls. “But I think he’s been fair in his decision making.” Centre Lalakai Foketi, flanker Jamie Adamson, second-rower Ben Grant and hooker Ethan Dobbins, who has made way for Porecki, are the other players dumped. “It’s all about performance,” McKellar said. “I say to the players, it’s never personal. It’s about making individuals better and us better collectively as a team, and that’s our job as coaches and as players. “It’s great to have ‘Porks’ (Porecki) back. A leader in our group, outstanding set piece, top three or four in the world for his lineout throwing and his physicality.”When he’s at his best, he plays nice and physical. And again, he just has a strong presence within the group, provides others with a little bit of comfort.” Wallabies centre Hunter Paisami (corked leg) is out for fourth-placed Reds, but former Test teammate Filipo Daugunu will return from injury. Daugunu will play outside centre while Dre Pakeho shifts to his preferred No.12 spot to replace Paisami. Daugunu (leg) had been in terrific form before injury and will give the Reds a needed jolt after their morale-busting, last-minute loss to Fijian Drua in Suva last week. Josh Nasser is also back from injury in a boost to their hooking stocks while Tom Lynagh returns to the starting line-up after Harry McLaughlin-Phillips wore the No.10 jersey in Fiji. Source link #Waratahs #coach #wields #axe #mustwin #Reds #battle Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

‘This is the technology we need’ ‘This is the technology we need’ A team of researchers from the University of Missouri may have cracked the code on “forever chemicals” using a surprisingly common household material to remove PFAS from drinking water. According to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances are synthetic chemicals used to manufacture everyday products from cosmetics and clothes to nonstick cookware and food packaging. These substances have made their way into the environment and even the human body. Per the Environmental Protection Agency, PFAS can be found in food and drinking water. Because PFAS are so widespread, people are commonly exposed to these chemicals through contaminated food, drinking water, and everyday products. The researchers reported that peer-reviewed studies show that exposure to PFAS could lead to health risks, including delayed development in children, decreased fertility, and *******. On top of that, PFAS and can take anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years to break down. Professor Feng “Frank” Xiao, an associate professor in the College of Engineering, and his team found a simple solution to this problem by heating the PFAS with common granular activated carbon, a material found in household aquariums and water filters. In their study, they heated the PFAS with common GAC at 572 degrees Fahrenheit (300 degrees Celsius) and achieved 90% mineralization of the PFAS, successfully degrading the chemicals into harmless, inorganic fluorine. Watch now: How bad is a gas stove for your home’s indoor air quality? “Once GAC is involved, the thermal degradation of PFAS occurs much faster, and the mineralization is more intense,” Xiao said. GAC is made from heated carbon-rich materials such as coal and wood and is commonly used to filter harmful chemicals from contaminated air and water. It’s an effective and affordable material and can be bought online for a few dollars per pound. “It’s not an expensive process compared to reverse osmosis, and it can be done at local scale with a regular furnace,” Xiao explained. Scientists have spent about a decade searching for ways to remove PFAS from the environment or break them down into harmless compounds. Xiao’s discovery offers a cost-effective and sustainable way to degrade PFAS into harmless fluorine, especially since GAC is affordable and reusable. How often do you worry about the quality of your drinking water? Never Sometimes Often Always Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. According to Xiao, the real-world application of his team’s discovery is that now there is an efficient and effective way to filter forever chemicals and other contaminants from the water that people drink. “This is the technology we need,” he said. The best thing individuals can do about forever chemicals is upgrade their cookware and choose plastic-free options for everyday products. Nonstick cookware and everyday products are often made with PFAS, so going plastic-free and switching to nonstick cookware alternatives such as cast iron reduces exposure to them. While this filtration method is still under laboratory testing, the breakthrough marks a hopeful step toward cleaner, safer water for all — and a future less marred by forever chemicals. Join our free newsletter for weekly updates on the latest innovations improving our lives and shaping our future, and don’t miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet. Source link #technology Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

What Makes This Conclave Unpredictable What Makes This Conclave Unpredictable A diverse electorate of cardinals is meeting in a conclave to pick the next pope. Though Francis appointed most of them, they may not choose another pope like him, as Jason Horowitz, the Rome bureau chief of The New York Times, explains. Source link #Conclave #Unpredictable Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Second US Navy jet is lost at sea from Truman aircraft carrier – CNN Second US Navy jet is lost at sea from Truman aircraft carrier – CNN Second US Navy jet is lost at sea from Truman aircraft carrier CNNAnother Navy jet falls into sea, marking fourth major mishap in months The Washington PostAnother fighter jet is lost at sea after it falls off USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier NBC NewsFighter jet slips off the hangar deck of a US aircraft carrier in the Red Sea, one minor injury AP NewsSuper Hornet Goes Overboard During Failed Landing on USS Harry S. Truman, Crew Safe USNI News Source link #Navy #jet #lost #sea #Truman #aircraft #carrier #CNN Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

The Storyteller Chef Zach Green’s new culinary event receives $27,500 in council funding The Storyteller Chef Zach Green’s new culinary event receives $27,500 in council funding The Storyteller Chef Zach Green’s new culinary event set on Hearson’s Cove, Staircase to the Moon: A Three-Year Cultural and Culinary Journey, has been funded to the tune of $27,500 by the City of Karratha. Source link #Storyteller #Chef #Zach #Greens #culinary #event #receives #council #funding Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

A Caltech professor who led Nvidia’s AI lab says AI can’t replace this one skill A Caltech professor who led Nvidia’s AI lab says AI can’t replace this one skill Anima Anandkumar says the one skill AI can’t replace is human curiosity. The Caltech professor tells students to use AI as a tool, not fear it. She says great programmers who guide AI will be in high demand — but bad coders will be in trouble. One of AI’s leading researchers has a simple piece of career advice for young people worried about future-proof skills in the ChatGPT era: be curious. “I think one job that will not be replaced by AI is the ability to be curious and go after hard problems,” Anima Anandkumar, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview with EO Studio that aired on Monday. “So for young people, my advice is not to be afraid of AI or worry what skills to learn that AI may replace them with, but really be in that path of curiosity,” Anandkumar added. Anandkumar, a former senior director of Nvidia’s AI research and principal scientist at Amazon Web Services, left the private sector in 2023 to return full time to academia. She has served as the Bren Professor in the computer science and mathematics department at Caltech since 2017. “I can’t imagine a world where scientists will be out of jobs,” Anandkumar, who previously helped build an AI-based weather model, added. “A scientist tackles open problems — from subatomic matter to galaxies — and there’s an endless list of those.” She also said that while labs like Google’s DeepMind are exploring “AI scientist” models, she believes the real limitation is practical validation, not a lack of ideas. Still, she’s skeptical of the hype around fully autonomous AI scientists. “The bottleneck is going to the lab or going to the real world and testing them. That is slow, that is expensive,” she said. Coding is changing, but great programmers still win Anandkumar also shared career advice for those in software development, which is being significantly disrupted by AI. “A bad programmer who is not better than AI will be replaced,” she said. “But a great programmer who can assess what AI is doing, make fixes, [and] ensure those programs are written well will be in more demand than ever.” Her point echoes what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in March: students should “get really good at using AI tools” as models increasingly take over routine code generation. New graduates are feeling the pressure, though. A 2025 Handshake survey of over 3,000 college seniors found that 62% of those familiar with AI tools said they were worried about how those tools might affect their careers, up from 44% the year before. Among computer science students, 28% described themselves as “very pessimistic” about their job prospects, citing shrinking openings and fiercer competition. Job postings fell 15%, while applications jumped 21%. Meanwhile, some tech leaders are openly sounding the alarm. Victor Lazarte, a partner at investment firm Benchmark, recently warned that AI is already replacing workers, and said lawyers and recruiters should be especially concerned. Anandkumar, by contrast, stresses that the key advantage still lies with humans who guide the systems. “You have the agency as a human to decide what tasks AI does, and then you’re evaluating and you’re in charge,” she said. “Don’t be afraid of AI,” she added. “Use it as a tool to drive that curiosity, learn new skills, new knowledge — and do it in a much more interactive way.” Read the original article on Business Insider Source link #Caltech #professor #led #Nvidias #lab #replace #skill Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Old Angst Resurfaces in Poland About Abandonment by the U.S. Old Angst Resurfaces in Poland About Abandonment by the U.S. In the decades after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Poland became perhaps the most pro-American country in Europe. It joined NATO in 1999, hosts some 10,000 American troops and has benefited hugely from U.S. political and military support. Now, in just a dizzying few months, Poland has begun confronting a new era, with new anxieties. President Trump has threatened to abandon the longtime U.S. commitment to European security and is implementing tariffs that imperil the global economy. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, wants NATO troops out of Poland and has threatened further aggression beyond the war in Ukraine, Poland’s neighbor to the east. Poland has responded forcefully. It is taking more of a leadership role in the European Union, increasing its already significant military spending and organizing a Swiss-style program of training ordinary citizens in civil defense. It is also cautioning countries in the rest of Europe that they, too, must pay more for their own security because the United States under Mr. Trump is no longer willing to foot so much of the bill. Security is perhaps the one issue that unites Poland ahead of a presidential election that begins in three weeks. More broadly, Poland’s location on NATO’s eastern edge makes it a crucial bulwark against Russian encroachment on Europe. Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland declared in March that given “the profound change of American geopolitics,” Europe “would be safer if we had our own nuclear arsenal.” The statement shocked many because it implied that Poland and Europe could no longer rely on the American nuclear umbrella for protection. “We see the architecture of global security and the global economy trembling under our feet, and we are a country that has benefited hugely from both globalization and Western solidarity,” Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and former defense minister, said in an interview. A New Era of Insecurity The most sustained answer to Poland’s long history of warfare with Russia has been its membership in NATO, and the U.S. military backing it brings. Poles broadly view American military commitments as securing their freedoms, said Mark Brzezinski, a former American ambassador to Poland. Now, countries like Poland, which is especially vulnerable through its long borders with Ukraine and Belarus, “have new challenges that make us nervous,” Mr. Sikorski said. Central to Polish anxiety is Mr. Trump, who has talked of reducing the presence of American troops in Europe. The cohort in Poland is part of roughly 85,000 U.S. troops in Europe altogether. Poland’s concerns were heightened last month when the U.S. Army announced that it would reposition some troops from a base in southeastern Poland, close to Ukraine, as “part of a broader strategy to optimize U.S. military operations.” European leaders understand that some U.S. troops may be rotated elsewhere, but they fear that too large a reduction will convey a message of weakness to Moscow. The Kremlin has demanded that NATO pull its troops out of countries that joined after 1997, including Poland, but despite threats to do so, Russia has not dared to attack even those bases used to support Ukraine. The departure of American troops “would send a signal to Russia that this is a gray zone for Washington,” said Michal Baranowski, a top official working on defense industrial strategy at Poland’s ministry of economic development and technology. “And we Poles will not live in a gray zone ever again. And there should be no gray zones in the European Union, either.” Poles see the U.S.-Europe relationship as mutually beneficial and are puzzled by the Trump administration’s stated contempt for Europe, which can feel to some like betrayal. For decades, the U.S. helped protect Europe from Russia, and in return, Europe deferred to American leadership on security and bought weapons from U.S. manufacturers. “That’s a deal that works both ways,” Mr. Sikorski said. Under former President Joe Biden, the United States established a permanent military presence in Poland in March 2023. The forward headquarters for the U.S. Army’s V Corps is at what is called Camp Kosciuszko, named after a Polish general who fought for American independence against Britain. Another U.S. base in Poland, an Aegis antimissile defense installation that serves as part of America’s own defense against ballistic missiles, was transferred last July to NATO command as part of the alliance’s missile defense shield. That move was another effort at shifting the burden for Europe’s defense away from the United States, even before Mr. Trump took office. Karolina Wigura, a Polish historian and philosopher, put it bluntly: “Poles are anxious,” she said, particularly after Mr. Trump praised Mr. Putin and humiliated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in late February in the Oval Office. “You feel insecure, you feel one step from Yalta,” she said, referring to the infamous 1945 conference where the dying American president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, handed over Eastern Europe to Russia’s dictator, Joseph Stalin. “The old angst re-emerges,” Ms. Wigura said, “that Russia will attack us and the West will betray us.” Poland’s Response Mr. Tusk, a former president of the European Council in Brussels, has been a loud advocate of more military spending by E.U. member nations, both collectively and individually, to support Ukraine and strengthen Europe’s own military capacity. Poland is already spending 4.5 percent of its gross domestic product on defense — the highest among major European nations — and is aiming at 5 percent, Mr. Trump’s demand for NATO countries. The United States is spending 3.4 percent. Mr. Tusk is trying to form a coalition of European countries that understands the deep threat to European security from Mr. Putin’s Russia and is willing to spend more to build a European deterrence less reliant on Washington. The likely candidates, Mr. Baranowski said, are Poland, France, Britain, Italy; the Nordic and Baltic nations, which are also geographically close to Russia; and most important, the biggest economy in Europe — Germany. Its new conservative chancellor, Friedrich Merz, planned to visit Poland directly from his first foreign visit, to France. Poland has already identified military projects worth as much as 40 billion euros, or $46 billion, that could be funded as part of a new €150 billion E.U. loan program for defense, Mr. Baranowski said. In Poland, Mr. Tusk has advocated a rapid increase in training for civil defense. He called for military training for a month, with salary, for any citizen who wants it. Informed by the combat lessons taken from Ukraine, the program is expected to handle 100,000 volunteers a year by 2027. Mr. Tusk also proposed legislation to streamline military investment and construction. Unified on Security Poland is facing a crucial presidential election, with the first round in three weeks. The country remains polarized between Mr. Tusk’s party, Civic Platform, and that of the former government, the right-wing nationalist Law and Justice party. But on military spending and defense, the country is largely united, experts said. The number of Poles who believe that the U.S. would come to their rescue is declining, said Wojciech Przybylski, chief editor of Visegrad Insight, an independent think tank focusing on Central Europe. “So we’re at a pivotal moment for our own security,” he added. In a sign of Poland’s eagerness to solidify ties to America, the government has endorsed a previous deal made by Law and Justice with Westinghouse and Bechtel, two major American companies, to build Poland’s first nuclear-power station. The invasion of Ukraine shows that Europe, 10 times richer than Russia, must spend on its own security to deter Moscow from risking “a similarly irrational attack” elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Sikorski said. “Europe cannot build what the U.S. has, which is the capacity to strike any target anywhere in the world,” he said. “But we don’t need that. We don’t need to be as good as the United States. We only need to be better than Russia.” Source link #Angst #Resurfaces #Poland #Abandonment #U.S Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

I had a passionate crush on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Could it still thrill me 19 years later? | Games I had a passionate crush on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Could it still thrill me 19 years later? | Games For a 10-day ******* the summer of 2006, in between handing in my resignation at my first job on a games magazine and returning to Scotland to start university, I did almost nothing except eat, sleep and play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on my Xbox 360. I hauled my TV from the living room of my small, unpleasantly warm flatshare into my bedroom so I could play uninterrupted; it was all I could think about. My character was a Khajiit thief, a kind of manky lion in ******-leather armour with excellent pickpocketing skills. One afternoon, I decided to see whether I could steal every single object in the smallish town of Bravil, and got caught by the guards a couple of hours in. I did a runner, dropping a trail of random plates, cheese wheels and doublets in my wake, and the guards pursued me all the way to the other side of the map, where they finally got entangled with a bear who helpfully killed them for me. I bet a lot of you will have had a similar experience with a Bethesda game – if not Oblivion, then Skyrim or perhaps Fallout 3. There’s something intoxicating about these role-playing games, the way they lay out their worlds for you like a buffet, inviting you to gorge. Go where you like! Learn some weird spells and try them out on bandits! **** into a cave to fight a necromancer and end up getting ambushed by vampires! Open-world games such as this are exhaustingly common now but Oblivion was the first one I ever played. Lately I’ve been devouring it all again, after Bethesda surprise-released a remake last Friday. I say it was a surprise. In fact, the Oblivion remake/remaster has been one of the games industry’s worst-kept secrets for months, just behind the Switch 2. Nonetheless, I am thrilled about it. Oblivion has, over two decades, become at least as famous for its technical weirdness and amusing glitches as for its pioneering design, and I was relieved to find Bethesda has not tried very hard to fix it. Characters still get stuck in walls, repeating their asinine lines of dialogue. The facial animations are still off. The game crashed on me two minutes into Patrick Stewart’s opening lines as the soon-to-be-murdered emperor of Cyrodiil, and I have twice fallen through the world into the endless void beneath. Weird stuff happens all the time, and it’s rarely intentional. They’ve even preserved an infamous voice-acting blooper. It is a perfect time capsule of 00s accidental gaming comedy, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. A game of choice with no consequence … The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Photograph: Bethesda Game Studios I remembered Cyrodiil as enormous and picturesque, full of gently glowing magical ruins and rivers that caught the light in just the right way. By 2025 standards, though, it is weeny, perhaps the size of the opening section of any current game’s gigantic map. (I’m thinking particularly of Avowed, the recent Elder Scrolls-alike from fellow Microsoft studio Obsidian.) The imposing-looking Imperial City at the centre is a village of tiny interconnected districts with around 30 people in it. I don’t know how I managed to spend more than 100 hours in such a relatively small space as a teenager, but as I rode around last weekend I found, unexpectedly, that I still knew it intimately. I’d meet a new character and remember details of some quest I hadn’t thought about for years, or ride around a corner on my armoured horse and know exactly where I was from the view. In Oblivion, your character develops according to what you do with them. You don’t meaningfully have to choose between magic, stealth and strength; pick up a greatsword and start using it and your heavy-weapons stat will start increasing. (The trick back in the day was to crouch into a sneak position, use a rubber band to pull the controller’s analogue sticks together, and spin around in circles until your stealth stat hit maximum.) This is part of what makes it feel like a buffet: you can become a master thief, run the mages’ guild and be a combat arena champion all at once. It is a game of choice with no consequence, beguilingly frictionless and generous. A small world that revolves entirely around you. I have a theory that the Bethesda RPG spell only really works once. You get one life-consuming experience with an Elder Scrolls, and then whatever you play next feels like a repeat; I played Skyrim and Fallout 3 for ages but never finished either. It turns out Oblivion is still my game; I can lose myself in it for hours where newer, more sophisticated open-world games start to get on my nerves. I still hate the Oblivion Gates, portals to a generic hellscape where you have to spend a tedious 20 minutes fighting demons in towers with flaming corpses hanging from the ceilings; their vibe is very 00s metal album art. But the beauty of a game like this is that you can effectively ignore the entire plot and fool around as you please. The Oblivion remaster illustrates that old games don’t always need fixing. It looks different, but it’s got the same soul. I imagine my teenage self would say the same about me. What to play One of the best puzzle games I’ve ever played … Blue Prince. Photograph: Dogubomb/Raw Fury If you haven’t yet played Blue Prince, stop whatever you’re doing and download it now. You are the teenage heir to a giant mansion, with one catch: if you want to keep it, you must find its secret 46th room. Also, every time you go to sleep, the mansion resets, so your route through it will be different every day, drafting each room from a random selection of blueprints, occasionally finding a chamber you’ve never seen before. I spent 40 hours playing through this with my eldest son, who acted as note-taker, and it is up there with the best puzzle games I’ve ever played. Even after you’ve found Room 46, there are deeper mysteries to probe at; a couple of people I know have truly gone off the deep end with it. Its sedate pace and intellectual challenge were both ideally suited to playing during a ******* of convalescence. Wonderfully, your reward for playing is always more knowledge. Available on: PC, Xbox, PS5 Estimated playtime: 30-plus hours What to read Enjoyably bizarre … Split Fiction. Photograph: Electronic Arts Sydney Sweeney is to star in a film adaptation of Hazelight’s co-op game Split/Fiction. How is that going to work? My partner and I are halfway through this game and, though it’s a blast to play and enjoyably bizarre when it wants to be, the plot and characterisation are … not the most complex. Via Video Game Chronicle, some details on October’s Ghost of Yotei, the sequel to the gorgeous but bloated Ghost of Tsushima. “The game will see the player hunt down the Yotei Six, a group of warriors who have caused death and destruction across Japan,” they report. “As the player hunts them down, a sash worn by the protagonist, Atsu, will display the names of the Yotei Six that she is pursuing.” How very Arya Stark. Call of Duty’s Warzone has become famous for it’s odd celebrity tie-ins, which have allowed you to, say, gun down dozens of peers as Nicki Minaj or Lionel Messi. The latest choice? Seth Rogen, as part of a new (lord help us) “weed-themed” content package. A very important essay here from Gizmodo: isn’t it past time we got a good Predator game? skip past newsletter promotion Sign up to Pushing Buttons Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion What to click Question Block A divergence … Isabela Merced and Bella Ramsey in season two, episode three of The Last of Us. Photograph: Warner Bros Discovery This week’s question comes from reader Toby: “Video game movies and TV shows are all the rage, and I’m curious to see how they adapt The Last of Us Part II. I thought the interactive medium really enhanced its emotions and themes. Can its story still have the same impact in a passive medium? On that note, what great video game narratives do you think absolutely cannot be adapted into a movie or a TV series?” I have just watched the third episode of the second season of The Last of Us, and it’s clear that they’re diverging more from the game’s plot this time than they did in season one. They kind of had to, because as you point out, the game’s impact largely comes down to playing it from both points of view, which won’t necessarily work on TV. That said, the first game also owed a lot of its emotional heft to the fact that you, Joel, were the one doing terrible things, whether you as a player agreed with him or not. The TV series couldn’t pull those same levers, so it expanded The Last of Us by showing new perspectives, going into deeper detail on things that wouldn’t have been practical or fun to play through; I’m thinking particularly of that wonderful episode about Bill and Frank, which would never have worked in a game. This is the art of the adaptation: finding something fresh to offer. On that basis: there is no great video game narrative that couldn’t be adapted for film or TV by a sufficiently talented and understanding writer. The key word there is adapted, not transliterated – because a film or show has to offer a new interpretation or perspective. That said, there are plenty of games whose plots are simply too bad to ever make for a good TV show or film. It’d take a true visionary to get anything worth watching out of, say, Heavy Rain. If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on *****@*****.tld. Source link #passionate #crush #Elder #Scrolls #Oblivion #thrill #years #Games Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

The Vote for the Next Pope Is Also a Referendum on Francis The Vote for the Next Pope Is Also a Referendum on Francis They buried him. They mourned him. And they have gathered to pick his successor. But it’s still all about Pope Francis. More than two weeks after Francis died, the cardinals who will begin voting in the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday to pick the next pope have been signaling whether they want to follow Francis’ lead, turn back or find some compromise between the two. In homilies, public and private conversations, and most of all in remarks to their fellow cardinals in daily meetings behind the ******** walls, the people who will choose the next pope have been holding what amounts to a referendum on Francis’ legacy. They have also been considering whether they want to perpetuate the so-called “Francis effect,” the idea that a charismatic, inclusive person of moral conscience on the geopolitical stage might draw new followers and lure lapsed Catholics back into the church. “There are various wishes” within the group, said Cardinal Anders Arborelius of Sweden, who has been mentioned as a potential candidate for pope. Some want to elect a pontiff “who can follow in the footsteps of Francis. Some others said, ‘No, no. Not at all.’” There is plenty in Francis’ legacy to fight over. During his 12-year pontificate, he made global headlines for landmark declarations that encouraged liberals, whether Catholic or secular. Of gay priests he said, “Who am I to judge,” and he allowed the blessing of same-sex couples. He raised his voice for migrants, implored world leaders to face a warming climate and criticized what he saw as the excesses of capitalism and the exploitation of the poor. Within the church, he expanded the College of Cardinals to what he called “the peripheries,” nations far from the ******** with the fastest-growing populations, as well as to some places where Catholics are an overwhelming *********. He struck a deal with the ******** government, in the hopes of increasing the church’s presence, although some critics believed it compromised the church’s independence in China. He invited laypeople, including women, into meetings of bishops that he envisioned as the church’s main decision-making bodies. He reformed the ******** bureaucracy that governs the church, introduced measures to increase transparency of the church’s infamously murky finances, and enacted decrees to increase accountability for church leaders who committed or covered up cases of ******* abuse. Some cardinals want to move ahead with those upheavals, or even leap forward with ******* changes. Others want to roll them back. But the largest rifts may be over the contentious issues in which Francis walked up to the line, but didn’t cross. Those include long stashed but controversial issues such as the ordination of women as Catholic deacons, the requirement of celibacy for priests, and the church’s teachings about homosexuality and the use of birth control. In the wake of Francis’ papacy, the stakes extend beyond the Catholic church. He was a rare mediagenic leader who could be as popular with secular audiences as he was with the faithful, someone viewed by many as an ethical compass in an increasingly confusing political landscape. While many world leaders have moved to shut their doors to migrants and abandon the care of the poor, Pope Francis stood for openhearted acceptance, a position that resonated with churchgoers as well as some of those who had never gone to Mass. Yet it was that very popularity outside the church doors that sometimes made him a lightning rod for his opponents within the church. “There’s a need to return the church to Catholics,” Cardinal Camillo Ruini, a conservative lion of the old guard and an Italian power player under John Paul II and Benedict XVI, said in an interview with Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper. He added that “those who are most favorable to Francis are mostly laymen while those against are often believers.” Others said that the conclave should not be a global popularity contest. Cardinal Mauro Piacenza said he found all the outcries for a Francis sequel “sentimental.” Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller of Germany, a conservative who ran the church’s office on doctrine until Francis fired him, said those who wanted “a pope for everybody,” who would continue in Francis’ direction, were generally “the media and all the former opponents against the church — the atheists.” But the conservatives are in the *********, at least among those who will cast their ballots for a pope. Francis had deep support inside the church, particularly among the cardinals of voting age. He appointed 80 percent of them, and most are committed to continuing at least partly along the path he mapped out. “Since we are now at a time when we are all rethinking the nature of the Church, I hope that the new Pope will be someone who is moving in the same direction” as Francis, said Cardinal Tarcisio Isao Kikuchi, the archbishop of Tokyo. If not, some cardinals fear that the church will become further isolated from modernity and the reality of the lives of its members. “This cannot be the time that panders to the instinct to turn back,” Cardinal Baldassare Reina, an Italian elevated to that role by Francis, said in his homily in St. Peter’s Square last week. Among Francis’s many appointees from around the globe, that instinct was strong. Even if the cardinals select a pope they believe will take up the baton from Francis, “I don’t think there’s any guarantee that the future will be just a straight line carrying on from Francis,” said Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the ********’s foreign minister and a close aide to Francis. “The next pope will have his own convictions and his own contribution to make. And it may be that he will emphasize different things than Francis has emphasized.” Given that Francis was a complicated leader who sometimes contradicted himself and did not meet the expectations he raised, the cardinals do not stack up neatly for or against him. They are fragmented into groups formed around ideology, region, **** issues, cultural differences, common languages and personal vendettas. The result, some church analysts say, could be more of a compromise candidate. That could be a pastor in the mold of Francis, but one who is more disciplined in his public statements, or a pope who makes up for a lack of personal charisma with a skill for steady governance. The cardinals with a shot at becoming pope have, for the most part, steered clear of speaking publicly about the divisive issues that Francis raised, but did not decide on, such as permitting women to become deacons, married men to become priests or divorced and remarried Catholics to receive communion. Francis himself was considered traditional and gave little indication before his election that he would be such a boundary-pushing pope. There are multiple permutations, but what is certain is that the next pope will leave his own mark. The real question, some church analysts say, is whether the pope’s vision trickles down to the people leading the parishes where everyday Catholics practice their faith. “The tragedy of Pope Francis is that people listened to him, they loved him, they thought, this is the kind of priest I want in my parish,” said the Rev. Thomas J. Reese, a veteran ******** analyst. “And they went to their parish and they did not find Francis.” Emma Bubola and Josephine de La Bruyère contributed reporting from Rome Source link #Vote #Pope #Referendum #Francis Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

OpenAI reverses course and says non-profit arm will retain control of firm | Technology OpenAI reverses course and says non-profit arm will retain control of firm | Technology OpenAI has reversed course in the process of transforming into a for-profit entity, announcing on Monday that its non-profit arm would continue to control the business that makes ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) products. Previously, the company had sought more independence for its for-profit division. “We made the decision for the nonprofit to stay in control after hearing from civic leaders and having discussions with the offices of the Attorneys General of California and Delaware,” said CEO Sam Altman in a letter to employees. Altman and the chair of OpenAI’s non-profit board, Bret Taylor, said the board made the choice for the non-profit to retain control of OpenAI. A press release from the company said that the for-profit portion of the company, through which Altman has been able to raise billions to fund OpenAI’s work, would transition to a public benefit corporation, a mission-driven designation for a corporate structure that is still aimed at profit but also “has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission”. The non-profit would retain control over the public benefit corporation as a large shareholder, according to the press release. skip past newsletter promotion A weekly dive in to how technology is shaping our lives Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. after newsletter promotion OpenAI’s co-founders, including Altman and Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, originally started it as a non-profit research laboratory on a mission to safely build what’s known as artificial general intelligence, or AGI, for humanity’s benefit. Nearly a decade later, OpenAI has reported its market value as $300bn and counts 400 million weekly users of ChatGPT, its flagship product, according to a report the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in the startup. OpenAI faced a number of challenges in converting its core governance structure. One major roadblock was a lawsuit from Musk, who accuses the company and Altman of betraying the founding principles that led Musk to invest in the charity. Musk fell out with Altman and started his own competing AI company, xAI, which recently purchased X, formerly known as Twitter. OpenAI has cast Musk as a sore loser in the dispute, embittered by a rival’s success. Source link #OpenAI #reverses #nonprofit #arm #retain #control #firm #Technology Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

‘Don’t tax Bluey’: Ambassadors to US warn against Trump movie tariffs – Politico ‘Don’t tax Bluey’: Ambassadors to US warn against Trump movie tariffs – Politico ‘Don’t tax Bluey’: Ambassadors to US warn against Trump movie tariffs PoliticoTrump, Jon Voight meeting led to Hollywood tariff proposal, his manager says CNBCTrump’s Hollywood tariff threat is already unraveling CNNAfter Trump vows tariffs on foreign movies, the ********* film industry says he’s lost the plot CBCNewsom Asks Trump to Work With Him on $7.5 Billion Tax Credit for Hollywood The New York Times Source link #Dont #tax #Bluey #Ambassadors #warn #Trump #movie #tariffs #Politico Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

‘The crux of all evil’: what happened to the first city that tried to ban smartphones for under-14s? | Smartphones ‘The crux of all evil’: what happened to the first city that tried to ban smartphones for under-14s? | Smartphones At 3.12pm on a sunny spring afternoon in St Albans, Yasser Afghen reaches for the iPhone in his jeans pocket, hoping to use the three minutes before his son emerges from his year 1 primary class to scroll through his emails. As he lifts the phone to his face, Matthew Tavender, the head teacher of Cunningham Hill school, strides across the playground towards him. Afghen smiles apologetically, puts his phone away, and spends the remaining waiting time listening to the birdsong in the trees behind the school yard. A one-storey 1960s block with 14 classrooms backing on to a playing field, Cunningham Hill primary feels like an unlikely hub for a revolution. But a year ago, Tavender and the school’s executive head, Justine Elbourne-Cload, began coordinating with the heads at other primary schools across the city, then sent a joint letter to parents and carers across St Albans: the highly addictive nature of smartphones was having a lasting effect on children’s brains. The devices were robbing children of their childhood. Could parents, the letter asked, please avoid giving them smartphones until they turned 14? One of the fathers who received the letter was Matt Adams, the founder and editor of the St Albans Times, who wrote an article highlighting the initiative. The story was picked up nationally (“St Albans wants to be the first smartphone-free city for under-14s,” said the Times), and then internationally. People in Singapore, Australia and South Africa all heard about an ambitious attempt by parents and teachers in a small suburban city, 23 miles from central London, to fight off the reach of global tech companies. A year later, it’s clear that St Albans is still far from a smartphone-free city for under-14s. And yet, something small and potentially significant has shifted. In December 2023, when Tavender did a survey of his year 6 pupils (aged 10-11), 45 of 60 pupils already had smartphones – 75%. A year later, this has dropped to just seven – 12%. A similarly stark drop has been noted by heads at other schools in the city. His aim is for this trend to continue. In fact, he hopes that the smartphone resistance movement accompanies his primary schoolchildren into secondary school, so that in time the sight of a child carrying a smartphone in St Albans will trigger a frisson of shock, akin to the vision of a child with a **********. When Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness was published last year, Tavender was immediately receptive. Haidt, an American social psychologist, notes that depression and anxiety for adolescents in the US rose by more than 50% between 2010 and 2019, with a 131% increase in the suicide rate for girls aged 10-14; he argues that the “new phone-based childhood that took shape roughly 12 years ago is making young people sick and blocking their progress to flourishing in adulthood”. Tavender was already worried by the rapidly changing nature of the problems he and his colleagues were facing. Most dispiriting, he says, was having to deal with law enforcement. Fifteen years ago, when he started teaching at the school, it would have been unthinkable for a teacher to have to talk to the police and families about the sharing of a nude image. ‘It’s the girls who are struggling more.’ Photograph: Halfpoint Images/Getty Images Out of sensitivity to the children involved, he is vague about the incident that caused the school the biggest headache, but explains that a photo had been taken as a joke, and was quickly shared with a large number of people. The school spent hours ringing up dozens of parents. “It wasn’t done in a ******* way … it was just boys mucking about. There was no malice in it. But it was sent very widely around St Albans. Once it’s sent, it’s sent everywhere. We had to say: ‘Please check your child’s phone – you need to delete that image,’” he says. “It was awful for the families.” During informal conversations with primary school heads across the city, he was learning that his colleagues were confronting similar problems. “Everyone has experienced something, either with police involvement, or other agencies. Teachers at infant schools are dealing with children watching inappropriate content as young as five and six,” he says. He also had a more general sense that behaviours were changing, even among the school’s younger pupils. He has noticed more body image concerns, more pupils worrying about monitoring their steps and talking about calorie-counting apps. Teachers have recorded greater levels of school avoidance. “A few years ago we didn’t see this at all; now, it’s not huge numbers but we have seven or eight children who really struggle to be in school.” He sees this as the combined result of Covid and children’s increasingly screen-based childhood. He was concerned, too, about declining concentration. “It’s the TikTok brain.” Sats preparation study sessions have had to be broken up into shorter chunks to allow children to cope, he says. Haidt also writes of fragmented attention spans, warning of the opportunity cost of time wasted responding to streams of content from friends and unknown people online, posting material in a never-ending quest for likes; children, he argues, become less adept at reading facial cues, and more reliant on the simplicity of emotions expressed through emojis. The outrage cycles of social media push children quickly into a defensive mode, he writes, while online lives make them more vulnerable to public shaming. In the classroom, teachers are also finding that “We get a lot more ‘nos’. If a child is playing [an online] game, they can turn it off and start again if they don’t win. If they’re watching something on YouTube and they don’t like it, they move on to something else. They’re used to getting immediate feedback, generally positive, and if they don’t get it they can just swipe and move on. We’re seeing children with less resilience to things they don’t want to do,” he says. At one meeting I attended, he told the parents that executives in Silicon Valley don’t let their children access social media. “They know something we don’t know,” he says. Last February, he heard a radio interview with a primary head teacher in Dorset talking about a campaign to encourage parents to give their children “brick” phones; he called him to ask for advice and was put in touch with the newly launched Smartphone Free Childhood movement, an initiative set up by parents in Suffolk, which campaigns for a ban on social media for children under 16 and a ban on smartphones for children under 14. ‘We’re seeing children with less resilience to things they don’t want to do’ … Matthew Tavender. Photograph: Anselm Ebulue/The Guardian Then, in May, at the start of the summer term, Tavender and his colleague Elbourne-Cload convened a parents’ meeting. “It was the most well-attended meeting we’ve ever had,” he says. “About 80 people turned up; normally we get about 40 to 50. We tagged it on to the end of a meeting about reading – which is the most critical thing in primary education – and just eight people turned up to that one.” The teacher who was leading the reading session was disconcerted to see crowds of parents outside the door, all staring at their phones, waiting for the meeting about phone use. One father interrupted the presentation to accuse the teachers of being anti-tech, Tavender tells me, but mostly there was a sense of optimism that the parents could do something to translate their sense of latent worry into positive action. In the absence of help from the government or action by tech firms, they felt suddenly empowered. A few days after the meeting, the St Albans primary schools consortium sent out their letter. The schools were already smartphone-free areas, the letter explained, but the idea was to “change the ‘normal’ age that children are given smartphones”. “By ‘smartphones’, we refer to phones that are able to access the internet, as opposed to mobile phones that can only text and make phone calls.” Parents should “resist pressure” from their children, and work together to “reset the expectation and remove social peer pressure”. The letter ended with an emotive plea: “Our children’s futures are so important, to you and to us. In a world where fast-changing technology is actually impacting the development of our children’s brains, it is up to us to stand up for them, and their futures. If not us, then who? Yours faithfully, St Albans Primary Headteachers.” A month later, last June, I went to a second after-school meeting, for parents who had been unable to make the first one. Tavender, with his grey V-neck jumper (an adult version of school uniform), grey trousers and greying beard, is not an obviously revolutionary figure. He talks about his fondness for watching golf. His delivery style is a bit wearily monotone, as if he’s reminding the room for the 15th time of what he considers to be acceptable behaviour in the lunch ******. So his presentation is not in the least rabble-rousing, but somehow the parents are totally gripped. “When you’re ready for your child to stop being a child, give them a smartphone,” he tells them, running them through a series of slides provided by Smartphone Free Childhood. “WhatsApp is the crux of all evil, in my mind.” Particularly worrying were the recent changes to the app’s settings, allowing users to create ******* groups. He had noticed children taking part in a “first to 1,000 challenge”, which involves trying to create huge group chats. Photographs get shared with ever-widening circles of people; no one really knows who else is in the group. “We’ve had issues with children being asked for indecent photos at 10 years old. We’ve had instances where someone adds an older cousin, who then adds another friend who then starts posting ************, violent crimes,” he says. “We cannot manage that as parents. But we also can’t say we can’t do anything about it, because we can.” ‘Some parents have refused to send their kids to school for a week when a phone was confiscated.’ Photograph: Maskot/Getty Images Outside the windows of the big assembly hall, the low sound of cooing wood pigeons is audible. The deserted residential streets smell of lavender and roses, with a faint undertone of wood smoke; ivy is growing up the telephone pylons. But for all the semi-rural calm, there is no escape here from the headaches of modern parenting. “When we were at school, at least when we went home the bullies couldn’t get us there; now you can’t get away from it,” Tavender says. “I’m not trying to go back to the halcyon days of proper bullying where we got beaten up and got given wedgies,” he adds, prompting a few snorts of laughter. “It’s the girls who are struggling more. Phones seem massively more negative for girls.” Most powerful is his readiness to talk about his own struggles. “I’m addicted to my phone. I absolutely am.” He admits that he and his wife, also a teacher, now regret giving their daughter a phone when she moved to secondary school. He describes an evening a few months earlier when he was watching golf on television, while also playing with his phone; his wife was next to him watching a film on her iPad, and also texting friends; his daughter was drawing on a Chromebook, while messaging on her phone. He tells them this to reassure parents that he isn’t judging them. “There were three of us on six devices. We didn’t talk for two hours. We’ve got to model better behaviour to our children.” By the end of the meeting, many parents have agreed to become ambassadors and work to persuade fellow parents to sign the Smartphone Free Childhood pact, in which they promise to delay purchasing their child a smartphone until they turn 14. Campaigners would like to see access to social media sites – Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok – restricted until 16. There are already age verification processes, but the rules are poorly enforced: most platforms have a minimum age of 13, but six in 10 children aged eight to 12 who use them are signed up with their own profile. A recent Children’s Commissioner report found that the 69% of children aged eight to 15 spend up to three hours a day using an internet-enabled device, while 23% spend more than four hours on them. Will Ashton, who runs a digital marketing agency in London, and who also has a son in year 4 and another in year 2, has taken on responsibility for a lot of the campaigning. He is well aware that the success of the movement depends on the rapid reach made possible by Instagram and WhatsApp, the apps the parents most mistrust. “One of the ironies of this is that I’ve never spent more time on my phone,” he says. He would like parents to hold off on getting their children smartphones until 16, arguing that smartphone use should be seen as an adult pursuit, like drinking, smoking or driving. His children are allowed time on iPads, with carefully curated parental controls. “I haven’t heard a counterargument yet that feels compelling. This isn’t anti-technology. It’s about allowing children to have access to material that is appropriate for their age.” Adams, the local newspaper editor who turned the original letter into a global story, was also already uneasy about smartphone use among children. He had noticed how footage of a recent machete stabbing outside a local college, featuring crowds of identifiable teenagers, had gone viral. A few weeks later, at his daughter’s school, there had been a suicide attempt; teachers tried to handle the issue with discretion, but by the end of the school day, pupils had shared the details with each other over WhatsApp. “I didn’t want to be having conversations about these things with a 12-year-old,” he says. He feels proud of the enormous attention his original article has drawn to the campaign (and mildly irritated that his publication was never credited). And he understands why an affluent city such as St Albans is leading on the issue. “It’s a bubble: it voted overwhelmingly against Brexit. It has a very educated, erudite, informed population.” In 2024, St Albans was voted the second-best place to live in England. A separate poll last year named the Suffolk town of Woodbridge as the happiest place to live in Britain. The two towns are current hubs for the Smartphone Free Childhood movement. Woodbridge residents Daisy Greenwell and her husband, Joe Ryrie, launched their campaign in February 2024, after Greenwell wrote an emotional Instagram post urging fellow parents to delay giving phones to their children. The movement publishes a leader board showing which counties and which schools are doing best at collecting parental pledges. So far the highest take-up has been in London and the home counties; Cunningham Hill school, where more than 50% of parents have signed the pledge, is one of the most engaged schools in the country. (Although Tavender says that his school is not hugely affluent, its targeted funding for disadvantaged students, the so-called pupil premium, is allocated to only 20% of the roll.) ‘St Albans has a very informed population’ … editor of the St Albans Times, Matt Adams. Photograph: Anselm Ebulue/The Guardian “It’s not surprising that middle-class parents are the ones who’ve got more time to think deeply about this stuff; it’s probably nearer the top of their worries list than it might be for a lot of parents,” Ryrie says. Campaigners recognise that for families who don’t have money for separate wifi access, or to buy laptops or other alternative screens for children’s homework, a smartphone ban can seem a peculiar luxury. But Ryrie argues that research suggests disadvantaged children suffer more from uncontrolled access to the internet; Haidt writes that a child’s average screen time and social media use rises in single-parent and low-income families. Without further regulation, there could be a risk of a “digital divide between kids who are exposed to the online world without guardrails and parents who have more time to monitor their children’s use,” Ryrie says. When Jamie Oliver campaigned for healthier school dinners a decade ago, some parents passed their children burgers and chips through the school railings, but this campaign hasn’t triggered much opposition. No parent is that sad to be told they shouldn’t rush to spend hundreds of pounds on an item that may introduce years of rows over screen time; even among parents who haven’t read or heard of Haidt, there’s a growing understanding of the risks of smartphones. “I don’t think there are many less controversial topics in Britain today,” Ryrie says. A few weeks after the primary school heads in St Albans announced their smartphone-free goal, headteachers from 18 out of the 20 secondary schools in Southwark, south London, said they were collaborating to dissuade parents from buying children smartphones before year 10 (aged 14 or 15) at the earliest. Jessica West, headteacher of Ark Walworth academy, said teachers were being forced to take action, in the absence of effective legislation. “Many requests for stronger measures have been made to big tech companies but action is woefully slow and that leaves our children at risk,” she said. In July 2024, Eton said it would be giving its first-year boarders (aged 13) basic brick phones that could only send and receive texts. In February 2025, 103 primary schools in Barnet, north London, announced that smartphones would no longer be allowed on the premises and 23 secondary schools in the borough said they were committed to removing smartphones entirely from the school day. Smartphone Free Childhood’s message had spread quickly beyond St Albans and Woodbridge. Six months after the Southwark initiative was announced, Mike Baxter, head at City of London academy, said pupils had been issued with mandatory phone pouches. Any pupil found with a smartphone out of its pouch and switched on would have it confiscated for a week. “We’re confiscating about 15 a week,” he says. The school is doing random bag searches. “You have to rigorously implement it.” Next year, the school will prohibit ownership of smartphones for all children in year 7; any child who comes to school with one will have it removed for a month. Year by year this policy will continue rolling upwards, to years 8 and then 9. Some of the students have protested, but the sanctions are severe. “If a child refuses to hand their phone in, they go to our reintegration room. If they come in the next day with a different phone, then we say: you’re back in the reintegration room.” There has been anger from a few parents, who have refused to send their children into school for the entire week when the phone was confiscated; on a couple of occasions, parents have come into the school and taken school property – a school iPad, a radio – which they’ve held as ransom, asking the school to return their child’s phone. “In both situations, we’ve just called the police,” he says. “You have to relentlessly follow it through.” Very few teachers argue in favour of phones. In a letter to the Guardian last month, one teacher described the movement to ban phones in schools as “disappointing”, arguing that staff should help students learn how to use digital devices to learn to “think critically and navigate online spaces filled with disinformation supercharged by artificial intelligence”. But his is a ********* voice. “Everyone accepts there’s a major problem,” Baxter says. Among some of Tavender’s older pupils there is a wistful regret that the school’s campaigning zeal has meant that they will not be getting a smartphone any time soon. Julia Laurence, who sells advertising space for publishing, has told her 10-year-old daughter that she won’t be getting a phone before she’s 14. “She’s got this idea that once you start walking home from school alone, you get a phone. But all the parents in her class have agreed, none of them will get a phone. It’s made it so much easier for us,” she says. Her daughter told anyone who would listen that it was an extremely unfair development. Her mother shrugs. “It’s something I’ve been worried about probably since she was born. I feel like we’re the ones making the change.” ‘I’ve worried about it since my daughter was born’ … Julia Laurence. Photograph: Anselm Ebulue/The Guardian George Dill, 10, and his brother Thomas, eight, have also been told by their parents, Graham and Rachel, both school teachers, that they won’t be getting smartphones until they are at least 14 and ideally not until they are 16. When I meet them in their home, they are standing on the sofa in the sitting room waving golf clubs around, playing a hazardous indoor putting game with their father. When I ask them if they’d like to have a smartphone, their eyes flick instantly towards their parents. “Sort of,” George says. “What would you say, if I said I was going to buy you one tomorrow?” his father asks. “I would think you might actually be lying,” George replies. Thomas says his father spends too long on his phone, when he should be doing things like playing football with them. He screws up his eyes, lifting his hands to his face, and mimicks a man manically twiddling his thumbs on an imaginary phone. “I’m not too overly impressed by my own phone use,” Graham agrees; he resents the frequency with which he is messaged by his employers, often late at night or around 6am. He has resisted letting his sons have screens even during long car journeys; during a recent seven-hour drive to Cornwall, they played a protracted game where they scored points for shooting white Teslas with guns made from their fingers. “The most amazing ideas in history come from boredom. Every time your phone goes ping it takes maybe two minutes to recover full concentration.” “There should be a time limit for different ages,” Thomas says. “The point is that if you don’t have a phone, you don’t have square eyes.” A year after St Albans primary heads launched their campaign, plenty has happened to shift their movement to something more mainstream. The television series Adolescence attracted renewed political attention to the dangers of hidden online bullying. About 99.8% of primary schools and 90% of secondary schools have now instituted a ban on smartphone use in school hours. The government is in the process of implementing the 2023 Online Safety Act: a series of rules around social media, search and gaming apps and websites will come into force on 25 July. Ofcom says this should prevent young people from encountering the most harmful content relating to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and ************ (although campaign groups believe the regulations do not go far enough). The parent-power model of the Smartphone Free Childhood movement has sparked 32 offshoots globally – from Kazakhstan and Nigeria to Costa Rica. But a quick walk around St Albans suggests that there may not yet have been a fundamental shift. Teenagers in school uniform queueing up for hot drinks in the city centre after school awkwardly balance iPhones, school bags and coffee cups. Nationally, Virgin Media O2 reported a doubling in sales of brick phones last October, which they attributed to parental concerns over online safety. But in the St Albans Three mobile store, the three courteous shop assistants know nothing about the campaign to free St Albans’ under-14s from smartphones. “It tends to be mostly elderly people that ask about brick phones,” one salesperson says. They estimate that the average age of a child getting a phone from their parents is still about 11, when they switch to secondary school. Leading on the issue … St Albans. Photograph: eye35/Alamy In a Hollywood version of the St Albans story, there would be a triumphant ending, perhaps with parents hiring a steamroller to crunch their children’s tech, or with teachers facilitating a penitent visit from the founders of WhatsApp, who fly over from California to visit pupils and parents at Cunningham Hill, offering their apologies in a drizzly playground. Tavender, played by Martin Freeman, would be feted for his David and Goliath-style success, just as Alan Bates was when the Post Office scandal was televised. I’m not sure that production companies will be in a bidding race for the rights to this story quite yet. But as well as celebrating the fall in smartphone ownership in year 6 from 75% to 12%, Tavender is delighted that the number of parents buying children smartphones has also dropped in lower years. In December 2023, 30% of year 5 students had smartphones; a year later this had dropped to 4.8% – just three children. He thinks the movement will expand organically. “It will take a few years to really show the impact.” He has also noticed fewer parents ignoring their children at pickup time in favour of their mobiles. But he is disappointed that secondary schools in the city have not signed up to take a similarly coordinated approach, although most of them do now have clear restrictions on smartphone use. He’s aware that this is a movement that has taken off in the south-east mostly; he says colleagues in York and Middlesbrough have barely heard of the Smartphone Free Childhood movement. He regrets the failure of tech companies to do more to protect children and is mournful that government smartphone initiatives have been watered down. But mostly he feels happy to have played a small part in beginning to shift mindsets. “Overall it’s been a success, but it’s a long journey,” he says. Outside in the playground the father of a nine-year-old girl quietly admits he has only this week bought her a sim card to use in a secondhand smartphone. He works in a restaurant and he and his wife both work shifts; sometimes their daughter has to wait by herself for them to get home. He has rows with his teenage son about screen time, but he feels it’s a necessity for his daughter. “I hate the ding, ding noise of alerts from his friends. His TikTok use is killing me,” he says. “But there are reasons why she needs one. Sometimes she’s home alone for 20 minutes. You have to be practical.” In the *** and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email *****@*****.tld or *****@*****.tld. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Source link #crux #evil #happened #city #ban #smartphones #under14s #Smartphones Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Southern Ports supports Foodbank Albany with donation match for Tour of Albany open road cycle ride Southern Ports supports Foodbank Albany with donation match for Tour of Albany open road cycle ride A Southern Ports pledge to an open road cycle event later this month has meant that Foodbank Albany will have double the funds to help feed people doing it tough in the Great Southern. The ports authority promised to match any donations made to the Tour of Albany cycle event in the lead up from April 30 to May 7. Run by Perth Integrated Events Team, the open road event, which will take place on Saturday May 24, is now in its seventh year. The 2025 event is the first time Foodbank Albany has been supported, with the proceeds usually donated to MSWA. Foodbank WA chief executive Kate O’Hara said she is thrilled for Albany Foodbank to be chosen this year, in light of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis that makes it harder for people to provide for their families. “This collaboration reflects our shared commitment to making a tangible difference in the lives of those struggling to put food on the table in the Great Southern,” she said. “We are grateful for our strong partnerships, which recognise the crucial work Foodbank Albany does in the region and how they help to drive meaningful change.” The Albany branch of Foodbank has provided the equivalent of 389,529 meals by distributing 216,189kg of food to vulnerable people this financial year and supports school breakfast programs, charity partners and a mobile Foodbank van. More than $2000 — the equivalent of 4180 meals — has been raised for the charity as of May 7. Southern Ports chief executive Keith Wilks said the campaign is an extension of the organisation’s formal 12-month support partnership, inked in June 2023. “I’m thrilled we could extend our long-standing support of Foodbank for the Tour of Albany’s matched giving campaign from April 30 to May 7, 2025,” he said. “I know the funds raised will deliver a positive and lasting impact for those needing emergency food relief across the Great Southern region.” The Tour consists of three lengths cyclists can chosen from — Piccolo 40km, Medio 88km and Gran 140km — beginning at Emu Point, through the outer fringes of the city, and back along Frenchman’s Bay Road. The Gran ride also includes the Lower Denmark Road towards Anvil Beach. Donations can be made on the Raisely — Tour of Albany website. Source link #Southern #Ports #supports #Foodbank #Albany #donation #match #Tour #Albany #open #road #cycle #ride Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Palantir Stock Crashes After Earnings but It Could Still Soar 300%, According to a Wall Street Analyst Palantir Stock Crashes After Earnings but It Could Still Soar 300%, According to a Wall Street Analyst Palantir stock crashed after the company reported its first-quarter financial results. Management highlighted continued demand for its artificial intelligence platform, AIP. Dan Ives at Wedbush says Palantir will be a trillion-dollar company in two or three years. Palantir Technologies (NASDAQ: PLTR) stock had plunged 14% as of 10 a.m. ET on Tuesday, May 6, as investors reacted to its first-quarter financial results. The company reported solid results amid continued demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) platform, but the market clearly had higher expectations. Nevertheless, technology analyst Dan Ives at Wedbush Securities thinks Palantir stock will surge 300% over the next two or three years. Here’s what investors should know. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue » Palantir reported strong first-quarter financial results that exceeded estimates on the top line. Its customer count climbed 39% to 769 and the average existing customer spent 124% more. Revenue increased 39% to $884 million, the seventh consecutive acceleration, driven by strong momentum across the commercial and government segments. Meanwhile, non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings increased 62% to $0.13 per diluted share. Chief Revenue Officer Ryan Taylor attributed the strong results to “unrelenting demand” for its artificial intelligence platform, AIP. Importantly, the company believes AIP is unique in its ability to operationalize AI, meaning it helps businesses move AI capabilities from prototype to production more effectively than other solutions. After seven quarters of accelerating sales growth, that claim is clearly resonating with buyers. Importantly, management also raised its full-year guidance, such that revenue is forecast to increase 36% in 2025. The company initially anticipated 30% sales growth this year, but ferocious demand for AIP has already exceeded management’s expectations. Nevertheless, the stock fell sharply following the report, indicating that investors expected more from Palantir. Image source: Getty Images. What makes Palantir’s data analytics platforms unique is an ontology-based architecture. An ontology is an analytical framework that defines the relationship between digital data and real-world objects, letting clients find nuanced patterns in complex information. “Our foundational investments in ontology and infrastructure position us to uniquely deliver on AI demand,” Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar told analysts. Story Continues Certain analysts share that opinion. Forrester Research recently recognized Palantir as a technology leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms, awarding AIP better scores than similar products from Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft. “Palantir is quietly becoming one of the largest players in this market,” wrote lead analyst Mike Gualtieri. Dan Ives at Wedbush believes that advantage positions Palantir as a major beneficiary of the AI revolution. “Look, I believe this is going to a trillion-dollar market cap in the next two to three years,” he told CNBC after the company’s first-quarter financial report. That forecast implies 300% upside from its current market value of $250 billion. However, most Wall Street analysts are far less optimistic. The consensus estimate says Palantir’s adjusted earnings will increase at 26% annually through 2026. That makes the current valuation of 230 times earnings look absurdly expensive. Not surprisingly, most analysts see the stock as overvalued despite its post-earnings decline. The median target price of $98 per share implies 8% downside from its current share price of $107. Personally, I think Ives is correct in predicting Palantir will eventually be a trillion-dollar company. But I also believe the stock is wildly overvalued at its current price-to-earnings multiple. So, patient investors can buy a small position today, provided they plan to hold the stock for several years and are comfortable with the idea of a sharp decline. Before you buy stock in Palantir Technologies, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Palantir Technologies wasn’t one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004… if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $611,589!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005… if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you’d have $697,613!* Now, it’s worth noting Stock Advisor’s total average return is 894% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 163% for the S&P 500. Don’t miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 5, 2025 Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool’s board of directors. Trevor Jennewine has positions in Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Microsoft, and Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool recommends the following options: long January 2026 $395 calls on Microsoft and short January 2026 $405 calls on Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Palantir Stock Crashes After Earnings but It Could Still Soar 300%, According to a Wall Street Analyst was originally published by The Motley Fool Source link #Palantir #Stock #Crashes #Earnings #Soar #Wall #Street #Analyst Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]

Deja vu! Pacers pull off another playoff miracle with another Tyrese Haliburton game-winner – IndyStar Deja vu! Pacers pull off another playoff miracle with another Tyrese Haliburton game-winner – IndyStar Deja vu! Pacers pull off another playoff miracle with another Tyrese Haliburton game-winner IndyStarPacers 120-119 Cavaliers (May 6, 2025) Final Score ESPNDoyel: This fight-back wasn’t 8 points in 9 seconds. But it’ll join it in Pacers playoff lore IndyStarTyrese Haliburton makes last-second 3 to complete Pacers’ wild comeback, take surprising 2-0 lead over Cavs Fox NewsCleveland Cavs score in NBA playoffs | Cavaliers vs Pacers Game 2 recap, highlights Akron Beacon Journal Source link #Deja #Pacers #pull #playoff #miracle #Tyrese #Haliburton #gamewinner #IndyStar Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Aguia fires up gold processing at high-grade Colombian mine Aguia fires up gold processing at high-grade Colombian mine Small-cap gold miner Aguia Resources is making a big splash at its Santa Barbara project in Colombia, with gold now flowing, a maiden drilling campaign on the launchpad and processing upgrades coming thick and fast. The company is regularly mining 15 tonnes per day (tpd) from its underground workings through to an onsite processing plant and is on its way to a 50tpd uplift by July. All the early signs are stacking up for it to achieve consistently high-grade gold. Trial mining by previous operator Boyateca showed head grades of up to 24 grams per tonne (g/t) gold. Aguia is seeing similar results from its current operations. While an official grade reconciliation is pending, Aguia expects the recovered grades to mirror the historic results. The current processing plant is geared to treat 30tpd and Aguia plans to double its mining output to match that capacity by mid-May. The doubling of throughput will come on the back of two key upgrades. The company is close to completing a new 5.5-kilometre water pipeline to enable a steady water flow for processing and the final piece of underground scraping equipment to ramp up vein extraction rates is being commissioned. All the equipment for the improvements is onsite and should be ready to go before the end of the month, paving the way for the company to move onto its next milestone target of scaling up to 50tpd throughput by July. To hit its higher processing target, Aguia is banking on the imminent arrival of a primary crusher. The new equipment is the last missing part in a crushing circuit that already includes secondary and tertiary units, which have boosted capacity to 30tpd. When the new unit is in play and underground feed ramps up, Aguia says it is quietly confident the new circuit will have the scope to exceed its design capacity. This would allow the company to lift output well beyond its initial targets. Turning to the financials, Aguia recently completed a $3 million placement to an Asian based institutional fund and should be comfortably funded until cash flow starts to kick in. The company has jumped a critical bureaucratic hurdle by securing full government approval to sell its gold domestically and internationally. The timing of the government stamp of approval had been an unknown quantity, but having it now allows Aguia to get on with its first gold sales against a backdrop of soaring gold prices, currently nipping at the heels of all-time highs at US$3400 (A$5223) per ounce. Aguia has been very efficient in its use of capital and achieved a level of success on a very tight budget at the Santa Barbara gold project. Having our CEO William Howe in country during this process has been instrumental to the success so far. We are now at the inflection point beyond which we expect to be earning significant cash. The company expects to fire up a 25-hole maiden diamond drilling program at Santa Barbara next week. The first drill campaign on the project is designed to test beneath existing workings as well as along strike. The company expects the drill bit to intersect known high-grade veins and potentially discover new ones. Management is excited at the prospect of discovering any treasures lurking beneath the mine’s rugged surface. If drilling confirms the continuity and grade of the underground veins, Aguia could find itself sitting on a much larger prize than it initially thought. The assay data will form the basis of an all-important maiden JORC resource, targeted for later this year. Most of Aguia’s time in the past few months has been focused on bringing Santa Barbara back online and generating some juicy cash flow. The company has also moved forward on its plan to become an organic phosphate producer from its Pampafos deposit, which is part of its Três Estrades project in southern Brazil. In a shrewd play to sidestep the hefty $26M price tag outlined in last year’s feasibility study, the company secured a 10-year lease on the fully functional Dagoberto Barcelos processing plant, which is 100km from Três Estradas. The move comes with a reasonable monthly fee and a one-off BRL$5M (A$1.36M) payment, giving Aguia a fast-track route to production without the financial sting of building a plant from scratch. The original study tipped the project to churn out $22M in annual EBITDA with a quick 2.9-year payback at its full 300,000tpa capacity. Aguia plans to turbocharge the existing 100,000tpa facility by installing a hammer mill and second dryer – minor upgrades that could triple throughput and bring those projections within striking distance. Feedstock will initially come from Pampafos, but Aguia is already drilling its nearby Mato Grande and Passo Feio prospects, just 3km and 8km from the plant respectively, aiming to slash transport costs and boost margins. A second processing facility is also on the cards, potentially setting up a multi-plant phosphate play to meet the booming demand for organic fertilisers in-country. With Santa Barbara starting to hit its straps and Três Estradas just warming up to become a second significant cash flow stream in the next few months, Aquia appears to have finally moved on from its cash-constricting construction phase. The company seems to be firmly on an upward cashflow generating trajectory. Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: *****@*****.tld Source link #Aguia #fires #gold #processing #highgrade #Colombian Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Pixel Gun 2 is coming to iOS and Android early next year Pixel Gun 2 is coming to iOS and Android early next year Pixel Gun 2 will release on mobile and PC early in 2026 The chaos returns in a refined form Lots of new mechanics to explore More than a decade after its explosive debut, Pixel Gun 3D is finally getting a follow-up. GDEV’s Studio Cubic Games has officially announced Pixel Gun 2, launching in early 2026 on iOS, Android, and Steam. Designed for seamless cross-platform play, this long-awaited sequel reimagines the voxel-based shooter with sharper visuals, tighter controls, and faster, smoother matchmaking, all without losing the chaotic charm that made the original a cult hit. While you wait, check out this list of the best shooters to play on Android right now! Pixel Gun 2 stays true to the sandbox-style mayhem the series is known for. But this time around, everything feels more refined. From skill-driven loadouts to upgraded shooting mechanics, the focus is on more responsive gameplay and a better-balanced experience. From min-maxing your gear to combining weapons in the wild, the sequel encourages creativity and chaos in every firefight. The launch version will feature a mix of iconic maps from Pixel Gun 3D as well as some brand-new arenas. A reworked free-to-play economy makes progression more about skill than spending, and upgraded anti-cheat systems ensure the battlefield stays fair. One unified account will carry progress across platforms, so you can switch between mobile and PC without missing a beat. There’s also plenty coming after launch. Additional modes are in development for post-release seasons, with ongoing content updates planned to keep things fresh. And if you’re still grinding through Pixel Gun 3D, don’t worry – the original isn’t going anywhere. Regular updates will continue, meaning you can enjoy both side by side. The announcement comes as Pixel Gun 3D celebrates 12 years of blocky carnage. With more than 300 million installs, three million monthly users, and over $230 million in lifetime revenue, it’s one of the most successful mobile shooters of all time. Pixel Gun 2 aims to build on that legacy while welcoming a new generation of frag-hungry fans. That’s all we know for now. If you’re interested, you can head to Pixel Gun 2’s Steam page for more information. Source link #Pixel #Gun #coming #iOS #Android #early #year Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

’90s WWE wrestler arrested for trying to buy child ************: District Attorney General ’90s WWE wrestler arrested for trying to buy child ************: District Attorney General WARREN COUNTY, Tenn. (WTAJ) — A former fan favorite WWE wrestler from the 1990s landed himself in legal trouble when he was indicted on attempted aggravated ******* exploitation of children. Michael Droese (Photo from District Attorney General Chris Stanford, 31st Judicial District) Michael Droese, better known to wrestling fans as Duke “The Dumpster” Droese, was indicted by a Warren County Grand Jury in May, according to a release from District Attorney General Chris Stanford, 31st Judicial District. It was alleged that Droese used a Coinbase account in an attempt to purchase child ************ on the dark web, the release reads. Coinbase, however, recognized what the transaction was and declined the payment. The company then sent a tip to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). According to Stanford, the FBI alerted the Warren County Sheriff’s Department of Droese and the tip they were given March 29. Within days, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation began investigating, which quickly led to Stanford charging Droese. Woman escaped after being kidnapped from outside a Pennsylvania bar, police report Stanford continued by explaining the charges as attempted, since Droese’s transaction was never processed. At the time, Droese was employed as the DUI Coordinator for the 31st Judicial District Adult Recovery Court Program, the release states. Droese served the program for several years in various capacities. Upon learning of the indictment, Droese was terminated from his position effective immediately. Stanford noted that Dorese, though working through the public court system, was never given duties that mandated any contact with children. Stay up to date with the latest news in the palm of your hand. Click here to download the WTAJ app for Apple and Android devices. After the indictment, Droese peacefully surrendered himself to law enforcement, according to Stanford. Droese was booked on his charges and released after posting a $10,000 bond. Droese’s next court date is set for May 28. He wrestled as Duke “The Dumpster” Droese in WWE (then WWF) from 1994 to 1996. He would then return in 2001 for one night only in a special attraction battle royale at WrestleMania 17. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to WTAJ – www.wtaj.com. Source link #90s #WWE #wrestler #arrested #buy #child #************ #District #Attorney #General Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Papal Conclave: Voting due to start to elect a new pope – BBC Papal Conclave: Voting due to start to elect a new pope – BBC Papal Conclave: Voting due to start to elect a new pope BBCWhat time does the 2025 conclave start? See May 7 schedule USA TodayCardinals to begin choosing new pope in largest ever conclave The GuardianCardinals choosing the next pope have been offered a dossier on candidates – with a subtext CNNMichelangelo meets James Bond: high-tech in Sistine Chapel to keep conclave secret Reuters Source link #Papal #Conclave #Voting #due #start #elect #pope #BBC Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Gods vs Horrors lets you take on cosmic creatures using mythological gods across a roguelike card battler, out now Gods vs Horrors lets you take on cosmic creatures using mythological gods across a roguelike card battler, out now Recruit mythological gods and strategise your plan of attack Inspired by Slay the Spire and Super Auto Pets Free demo with a single purchase to unlock Oriol Cosp has officially launched Gods vs Horrors, a new single-player roguelike that takes inspiration from Slay the Spire and Super Auto Pets combined. The card autobattler tasks you with building the right synergies for your gods so you can take on all manner of atrocities as the new Warden of Realms. The fate of the world rests in your hands, essentially – no pressure, right? In Gods vs Horrors, you can look forward to strategising the most efficient positioning for the gods you recruit, buffing them up across different mythologies while trying to boost your Devotion level so you can recruit even more gods in the process. There’s an element of short-term versus long-term benefits here – will you spend Divine Essence to boost your powers, or save it for later to add to your Devotion level instead? Based on the footage available online, it does seem to take inspiration from Hearthstone’s Battlegrounds mode with a bit of Balatro thrown into the mix, with an interesting blend of 170 gods and a variety of relics to tinker around with. The so-called “horrors” are also pretty horrific, it seems – not to mention there are six different bosses with their own environmental effects to contend with. Nobody said saving the world would be easy. If you’re on the lookout for something similar though, why not take a look at our list of the best CCGs on Android to get your fill? In the meantime, if you’re eager to join in on all the fun, you can do so by checking out Gods vs Horrors on the App Store and on Google Play. It’s free-to-play for the demo with no ads, so you can give it a go first before deciding if it’s your cup of tea. A single purchase unlocks the whole thing at $9.99 a pop or your local equivalent. Source link #Gods #Horrors #lets #cosmic #creatures #mythological #gods #roguelike #card #battler Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Cameras to tackle dangerous driving habit in this *********** state Cameras to tackle dangerous driving habit in this *********** state Tailgating drivers in Queensland will be warned by new roadside monitors, but offending motorists won’t be issued fines. Source link #Cameras #tackle #dangerous #driving #habit #*********** #state Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content]

Stratolaunch’s Talon-A2 prototype goes hypersonic after dropping from world’s largest airplane (photos) Stratolaunch’s Talon-A2 prototype goes hypersonic after dropping from world’s largest airplane (photos) When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Stratolaunch’s Talon-2A hypersonic vehicle during one of its first two hypersonic test flights, in either December 2024 or March 2025. | Credit: Stratolaunch/Julian Guerra Stratolaunch Systems has gone hypersonic — twice. Stratolaunch took its uncrewed Talon-A2 prototype to hypersonic speeds for the first time this past December, then repeated the feat in March, the company announced on Monday (May 5). “We’ve now demonstrated hypersonic speed, added the complexity of a full runway landing with prompt payload recovery and proven reusability,” Stratolaunch President and CEO Zachary Krevor said in a statement on Monday. “Both flights were great achievements for our country, our company and our partners.” Stratolaunch’s Roc carrier plane — seen here with the dart-shaped Talon-A2 hypersonic vehicle still attached — has a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters). | Credit: Stratolaunch/Brandon Lim Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen established Stratolaunch in 2011, with the goal of air-launching satellites from a giant carrier plane called Roc, which has a wingspan of 385 feet (117 meters). That vision changed after Allen’s 2018 death, however; the company is now using Roc as a platform to test hypersonic technology. Hypersonic vehicles are highly maneuverable craft capable of flying at least five times the speed of sound. Their combination of speed and agility make them much more difficult to track and intercept than traditional ballistic missiles. The United States, China and other countries view hypersonic tech as vital for national security, and are therefore developing and testing such gear at an ever-increasing pace. Stratolaunch, Roc and the winged, rocket-powered Talon-2A are part of this evolving picture, as the two newly announced test flights show. They were both conducted for the U.S. military’s Test Resource Management Center Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) program, under a partnership with the Virginia-based company Leidos. On both occasions, Roc lifted off from California and dropped Talon-2A over the Pacific Ocean. The hypersonic vehicle then powered its way to a landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base, on California’s Central Coast. “These flights were a huge success for our program and for the nation,” Scott Wilson, MACH-TB program manager, said in the same statement. “The data collected from the experiments flown on the initial Talon-A flight has now been analyzed and the results are extremely positive,” he added. “The opportunity for technology testing at a high rate is highly valuable as we push the pace of hypersonic testing. The MACH-TB program is pleased with the multiple flight successes while looking forward to future flight tests with Stratolaunch.” Stratolaunch’s Talon-2A prototype lands at Vandenberg Space Force Base during a hypersonic test flight in either December 2024 or March 2025. | Credit: Stratolaunch/Brandon Lim Stratolaunch’s statement didn’t provide a payload list for the two flights, and a Department of Defense press release about them was similarly vague. But we do know at least one piece of tech that Talon toted — Northop Grumman’s Advanced Hypersonic Technology Inertial Measurement Unit, which is designed to help hypersonic vehicles navigate. “Survivability of the navigation unit, also known as a hemispherical resonator gyroscope, is a major accomplishment due to the harsh environment hypersonic speed presents and the intense forces experienced as the technology operates within Earth’s atmospheric boundary,” Northop Grumman representatives said in a different statement. “This technology collected hours of critical ground and flight data, pivotal for future development.” Related stories: — Stratolaunch launches 1st rocket-powered flight of hypersonic prototype from world’s largest airplane — Stratolaunch flies world’s largest airplane on 2nd test flight — Stratolaunch starts building Talon hypersonic plane for Mach 6 flights Stratolaunch isn’t the only American company providing the U.S. military and other customers with a testbed for hypersonic tech: California-based Rocket Lab flies a suborbital variant of its workhorse Electron rocket called HASTE (Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron) for this purpose. HASTE has flown three times to date, on each occasion from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia. And the cadence could pick up in the near future: Both the U.S. and U.K. militaries recently picked Rocket Lab as a potential partner for their hypersonic-tech programs. Source link #Stratolaunchs #TalonA2 #prototype #hypersonic #dropping #worlds #largest #airplane #photos Pelican News View the full article at [Hidden Content] For verified travel tips and real support, visit: [Hidden Content]