Death Stranding 2 Arrives This June; Different Edition Contents Detailed
Death Stranding 2 Arrives This June; Different Edition Contents Detailed
dveio17d ago
I started playing Death Stranding right after its release, could spent around ~15hrs until I unfortunately had to stop.
This year, I was finally able to re-start and finish the game.
I personally think Death Stranding is such an underrated game in the books. I found it to be a true masterpiece.
I can’t wait for the evolution of Death Stranding 2 and the Decima Engine now only being used for PS5 hardware.
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Labour has moral duty to get sick into work, MPs say
Labour has moral duty to get sick into work, MPs say
Joshua Nevett
Political reporter
PA Media
The group of Labour MPs wrote to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall
The government has a “moral duty” to help long-term sick and disabled people to work if they can, Labour MPs have said, as ministers plan to reform ********.
The Get Britain Working group of 36 Labour MPs said the country faced “hard choices” to overcome a “crisis of economic inactivity”, in a letter to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall.
The letter comes before Kendall is expected to set out changes to the ******** system, aimed at cutting the benefits bill.
The chancellor has earmarked several billion pounds in draft spending cuts to ******** and other government departments ahead of the Spring Statement.
There is unease over the plans within the party, with Labour MP Rachael Maskell warning against “draconian cuts” that risk “pushing disabled people into poverty”.
Maskell told the BBC she had picked up “deep deep concern” among Labour MPs.
She said: “I look in the past at what Labour has achieved in this space and believe that we can hold onto our values, ensure that we’re helping people and not harming people.”
In a letter to Chancellor Rachel Reeves, a dozen charities have argued there was “little evidence to suggest cutting benefits increases employment outcomes”.
The charities – including Disability Rights ***, Citizens Advice, Scope and Sense – urged Reeves to “think again about cuts to disability benefits”.
They said: “There are disabled people out of work who want to work given the right support. And for some disabled people, work isn’t appropriate.
“Changes to ******** must start here. Not with cuts.”
But ministers are worried about the surge in the number of people claiming benefits since the Covid pandemic and the cost to the taxpayer.
As of January, 9.3 million people aged 16 to 64 in the *** were economically inactive – a rise of 713,000 since the pandemic.
The Department of Work and Pensions says some 2.8 million people are economically inactive because of long-term sickness.
Last year, the government spent £65bn on sickness benefits and that figure is forecast to increase by tens of billions before the next general election.
Some of the reforms to the ******** system have already been announced and include plans to use 1,000 work coaches to help the long-term unemployed into work.
In its letter, the Get Britian Working group said the cost of worklessness among the long-term sick and disabled “goes far beyond economic necessity”.
“It is a moral duty,” the letter said.
The letter said the group – most of whom were elected for the first time at last July’s general election – was formed to “press for fundamental change to our ******** system to support work”.
“We believe reforming out broken system is not only necessary, but also a truly progressive endevour,” the letter said.
On Sunday, Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden said the ******** system was “not fair on the taxpayer”, as he confirmed changes to sickness benefits would be revealed soon.
“We don’t believe it is good that if somebody could work with a bit of support that they’re left to live a life on benefits,” McFadden told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme.
He said 2.8 million people were currently on long-term sickness benefits and added that, if the government did not act, the level would rise to more than four million.
“We can’t allow that to happen,” he said.
Speaking to Sky News on Sunday, Conservative shadow home secretary Chris Philp said too many people were being signed off sick.
He said the benefits system needed to be made tougher and suggested it was too easy for people to get ******** payments.
“I think it’s gone far too far and it is costing us billions and billions of pounds a year,” he said.
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How Baldur's Gate 3's Thief Rogue Plays Into the Game's Rule Changes
How Baldur's Gate 3's Thief Rogue Plays Into the Game's Rule Changes
Baldur’s Gate 3 comes with some rule changes from Dungeons and Dragons, but the Thief subclass still carries the spirit of the original.
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On ‘Mayhem,’ Lady Gaga Wants You to Party Like It’s 2009
On ‘Mayhem,’ Lady Gaga Wants You to Party Like It’s 2009
But over the past few months, Gaga has stoked anticipation for her sixth pop LP with a wildly successful (if relatively anodyne), chart-topping Bruno Mars duet, “Die With a Smile,” and two of her hardest-hitting singles in a decade: the deliciously warped “Disease,” a churning, industrial pop dirge that highlights Nine Inch Nails as an influence on this album, and “Abracadabra,” a latex-tight dance-floor incantation with a chorus that finds her speaking in tongues like the high priestess of her own self-referential religion: “Abracadabra, amor ooh na na / Abracadabra morta ooh Gaga.” It is, of course, an expertly executed sequel to her 2009 smash “Bad Romance,” just as the following track, the skronky, gloriously hedonistic “Garden of Eden” plays out like an even more vivid return to the club she visited on her first hit, “Just Dance.”
Throughout its 14 tracks, “Mayhem” dances on the line between clever self-referentiality and less inspired rehashing. The corrosive “Perfect Celebrity” is a sonic highlight that nonetheless butts up against the album’s thematic and lyrical limitations, returning to one of her favorite, and now tired, topics: the damage inflicted by fame. Is the opening line — “I’m made of plastic like a human doll” — a winking throwback to the “Chromatica” track “Plastic Doll,” or a bit of recycled imagery?
For the first time since her semi-misunderstood 2013 bacchanal “Artpop,” Lady Gaga commits to the clenched-fist conviction and over-the-top excess that made her a star in the first place. She sounds locked in all throughout “Mayhem,” even during its most middling and questionable material, which begins around the eighth track and carries through the second half. The midtempo “LoveDrug” gets lost in lyrical clichés, while the slow-crawling electro ballad “The Beast” feels written expressly for placement in the trailer of an instantly forgettable direct-to-streaming erotic thriller (though Gaga sings the heck out of it just the same).
Still, her riskier moves usually pay off. “Killah,” an outré collaboration with the French D.J. and producer Gesaffelstein, stretches a sex-is-death metaphor to truly absurd extremes, but Gaga, vamping like an even more cartoonish version of David Bowie circa “Young Americans,” gives the song a goofy urgency that’s hard to resist.
While there’s a lot of superficial gore and carnage on “Mayhem” — and much of it is enjoyably campy, like the lite-disco “Hollaback Girl” throwback “Zombieboy” — the album’s underlying conflicts are internal. In the elaborately choreographed video for “Abracadabra,” two opposing Gagas wrestle for control; on the wrenching “How Bad Do U Want Me,” the other woman is a shadow self.
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Bella Ramsey Relied On A Classic Meme Song To Get Through TLOU Season 2’s Darkest Scene
Bella Ramsey Relied On A Classic Meme Song To Get Through TLOU Season 2’s Darkest Scene
After two years, The Last Of Us Season 2 premieres on April 13, and some of the actors are doing their best to cope with the more difficult scenes. Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie, took comfort in a classic meme jingle on set–and it apparently worked.
Some of the cast and crew from The Last Of Us spoke with Variety ahead of the premiere, with Ramsey explaining that they get nervous before the show’s big emotional scenes. To get themselves in a mood that would balance out the darkness of a particular scene, they would listen to the Buckwheat Boyz classic, “Peanut Butter Jelly Time”.
“I was on the floor, my eyes absolutely burning with these menthol tears, and I’m just saying, ‘Peanut Butter Jelllll-y.’ You’ll probably be able to tell which one that is when you watch it,” Ramsey said. They didn’t specify which scene, but given the gravity of the source material, you’re not short on moments that take Ellie to her limit.
During the same interview, Druckmann told The Last Of Us fans that there might not be a third game, but given the length of Part 2’s story, it will take at least two seasons to tell on TV, maybe more.
Joining Ramsey this season are Joe Pantoliano (Memento, The Matrix), Alanna Ubach (Euphoria, Bombshell), Ben Ahlers (The Gilded Age, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), Hettienne Park (Don’t Look Up), Robert John Burke (RoboCop 3), and Noah Lamanna (Star Trek: Strange New Worlds).
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Reds crave home base return ahead of Waratahs test
Reds crave home base return ahead of Waratahs test
Queensland Reds prop Alex Hodgman is pining for home after a “reality check” loss to the Crusaders wound up their second lengthy tour less than a month into the Super Rugby Pacific season.
The Reds were erratic and error-prone in a 43-19 defeat in Christchurch on Sunday that left both teams with 2-1 records.
The result meant New Zealand teams avoided a rare winless round after Fijian Drua, Moana Pasifika and the ACT Brumbies all notched tight victories over Kiwi rivals.
Les Kiss’s side spent the week in New Zealand after flying straight from Perth and will touch down in Brisbane on Monday having missed the build-up to and impact of ex-tropical cyclone Alfred on the region.
The Reds also toured the *** in the final weeks of the pre-season, Hodgman admitting he couldn’t wait to return to his young family.
“We’ve just been looking at the footage and it’s crazy to see,” he told AAP of the high winds and rain that devastated southeast Queensland and northern NSW.
“Straight from Perth to Christchurch … man, it’s been a long tour.
“On the back of the *** tour; it feels like we’ve been away for a bit, so I just want to get home.”
The Reds expect to resume training on Wednesday at Ballymore ahead of Saturday’s clash with the undefeated NSW Waratahs.
Former Reds star Taniela Tupou – recruited by the Waratahs from the defunct Melbourne Rebels – will make his first appearance for the arch rivals at Suncorp Stadium.
Hodgman said it was important his men didn’t get distracted by the occasion.
“Especially after that game yesterday; it was a good reality check for us to say, ‘OK, this is what we need to do’.
“I have a feeling getting home’s going to help that.
“We had the vision to do it but didn’t execute. This week against the Tahs … it’s understanding balance.
“Making educated decisions that make it go from a 50-50 to a 90-10, by using your vision.
“The Tahs are undefeated but it’s internal … the mental side and time back home is going to be the best thing for us and bring us together.”
Test centre Hunter Paisami is available after serving a two-game suspension for a dangerous tackle.
Steadying flyhalf Tom Lynagh, who copped a head knock against the Western Force last week, should also be fit after being a late scratching against the Crusaders.
The Reds are also without injured Test aspirants Lukhan Salakaia-Loto, Josh Flook, Jock Campbell and Seru Uru.
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Greenland leader says Trump’s threats “mean you don’t want to get as close” to the U.S.
Greenland leader says Trump’s threats “mean you don’t want to get as close” to the U.S.
Facing President Trump’s repeated assertions that Greenland should be brought under U.S. control, the island’s Prime Minister Mute Egede said that Mr. Trump was, “very unpredictable, in such a way that people feel insecure” as global power dynamics shift.
Egede’s interview with Denmark’s public broadcaster, DR, was published Monday, one day before voters on the vast but sparsely populated island go to the polls for an election that is under increasing scrutiny due to Mr. Trump’s rhetoric.
Greenland is a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, with its own parliament, and Egede is the leader of the Ataqatigiit party, which wants independence.
“We deserve to be treated with respect, and I don’t think the American president has done that lately since he took office,” Egede said in the interview with DR.
“The recent things that the American president has done mean that you don’t want to get as close to (the U.S.) as you might have wanted in the past,” he said. “We need to draw a line in the sand and spend more effort on those countries that show us respect for the future we want to draw.”
Trump says he won’t rule out military force to take Greenland
02:55
Egede’s interview with DR took place before Mr. Trump made his latest remarks about Greenland on social media, the AFP news agency reported.
“The United States strongly supports the people of Greenland’s right to determine their own future,” Mr. Trump said in a post late Sunday. “We will continue to KEEP YOU SAFE, as we have since World War II. We are ready to INVEST BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to create new jobs and MAKE YOU RICH — And, if you so choose, we welcome you to be a part of the Greatest Nation anywhere in the World, the United States of America!”
In an address to Congress earlier this month, Mr. Trump spoke more forcefully about Greenland, where the U.S. military has its northernmost base.
The island’s location, between the U.S., Russia and Europe, makes it strategic for both economic and defense purposes, especially as melting sea ice has opened up new shipping routes through the Arctic region. Greenland also has natural gas, oil and highly sought after mineral resources.
“We need Greenland for national security and even international security. And we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it,” Mr. Trump told Congress. “But we need it really for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it — one way or the other, we’re going to get it.”
“We don’t want to be Americans, nor Danes; We are Kalaallit,” Egede said in response to Mr. Trump’s address, using the Greenlandic word for the island’s indigenous people. “The Americans and their leader must understand that. We are not for ***** and cannot simply be taken. Our future will be decided by us in Greenland.”
Haley Ott
Haley Ott is the CBS News Digital international reporter, based in the CBS News London bureau.
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Marco Rubio says most USAID programs are now dead – Business Insider
Marco Rubio says most USAID programs are now dead – Business Insider
Marco Rubio says most USAID programs are now dead Business InsiderThe Diseases Are Coming The AtlanticRubio says Trump administration canceling 83% of programs at USAID and intends to move remaining ones to State Department CNNTrump administration scraps over 80% of USAID programs, top diplomat Rubio says Reuters
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1,972-Piece Lego Mario Kart Display Model Revealed On Mario Day
1,972-Piece Lego Mario Kart Display Model Revealed On Mario Day
Lego celebrated Mario Day by revealing its latest Nintendo display model for adults: Mario & Standard Kart. The 1,972-piece replica of Mario and his iconic red racing kart releases May 15 and is available to preorder now at the Lego Store for $170. Like several previous Nintendo display models for adults, Mario Kart: Mario & Standard Kart is exclusive to the Lego Store at launch, but the exclusivity window appears to be shorter this time. Amazon was briefly taking preorders for the upcoming set with a launch date of July 1; we’ll update this article if Amazon or other major retailers list the Lego Mario Kart display set.
$170
At nearly 2,000 pieces, the Mario Kart display model is one of the largest Super Mario Lego sets. Compared to the smaller-scale Mario Kart playsets for kids that launched in January, the finished build has a lot more detail. This is the most realistic recreation of the mustachioed character’s modern design–his head and arms are posable–and the kart looks ripped straight from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
The completed model measures in at approximately 12.5 inches long, 7.5 inches wide, and 8.5 inches tall. The set can be displayed flat or at a drifting angle with the included, buildable display stand.
Like other Nintendo display models, Mario & Standard Kart comes with a physical instruction booklet and support for an interactive guide in the Lego Builder app on iOS and Android. With the free app, you can watch each step of the build process in 3D and manipulate the diagram to look at the work-in-progress from any angle you desire.
The new display model will bring the total number of Mario Kart-themed Lego sets to six. As mentioned, the five existing building kits are playsets geared toward kits. Mario’s Standard Kart is one of those five kits, though the $20 build is substantially smaller and less detailed at just 174 pieces. Here’s a list of all six Lego Mario Kart sets:
All Lego Mario Kart Sets
Mario & Standard Kart comes in a ****** box, which Lego uses to mark display-oriented builds for adults. It will be the seventh Lego Nintendo display model. The recently revealed Lego Game Boy will likely be the eighth when it releases later this year.
All Lego Nintendo Display Models for Adults
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NYT Strands hints and answers for Tuesday, March 11 (game #373)
NYT Strands hints and answers for Tuesday, March 11 (game #373)
Looking for a different day?
A new NYT Strands puzzle appears at midnight each day for your time zone – which means that some people are always playing ‘today’s game’ while others are playing ‘yesterday’s’. If you’re looking for Monday’s puzzle instead then click here: NYT Strands hints and answers for Monday, March 10 (game #372).
Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.
Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.
SPOILER WARNING: Information about NYT Strands today is below, so don’t read on if you don’t want to know the answers.
NYT Strands today (game #373) – hint #1 – today’s theme
What is the theme of today’s NYT Strands?
• Today’s NYT Strands theme is… What’s the magic word?
NYT Strands today (game #373) – hint #2 – clue words
Play any of these words to unlock the in-game hints system.
LAST
PAST
REST
SING
TANK
BRASH
NYT Strands today (game #373) – hint #3 – spangram
What is a hint for today’s spangram?
• Said with a wave of a wand
NYT Strands today (game #373) – hint #4 – spangram position
What are two sides of the board that today’s spangram touches?
First side: left, 5th row
Last side: right, 6th row
Right, the answers are below, so DO NOT SCROLL ANY FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THEM.
NYT Strands today (game #373) – the answers
(Image credit: New York Times)
The answers to today’s Strands, game #373, are…
TADA
SHAZAM
ABRACADABRA
PRESTO
ALAKAZAM
SPANGRAM: CASTING SPELLS
My rating: Moderate
My score: 1 hint
The Strands trend for very long Spangrams continues, with CASTING SPELLS taking up a large chunk of today’s puzzle.
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The large block taken up by the theme words made for an easier than normal search. The only challenge was navigating the high number of As and coping with the return of an earworm I’d only just shaken…
The song ABRACADBRA by Steve Miller had only just left my head after its appearance in the Connections category #1 SONGS FROM 1982 a couple of days ago and now it’s returned – competing for headspace with Lady Gaga’s song of the same name. Frankly, I need some kind of vanishing magic spell to rid me of this agony.
How did you do today? Let me know in the comments below.
Yesterday’s NYT Strands answers (Monday, 10 March, game #372)
VOLUME
BACK
POWER
HOME
MUTE
GUIDE
CHANNEL
SPANGRAM: REMOTE CONTROL
What is NYT Strands?
Strands is the NYT’s not-so-new-any-more word game, following Wordle and Connections. It’s now a fully fledged member of the NYT’s games stable that has been running for a year and which can be played on the NYT Games site on desktop or mobile.
I’ve got a full guide to how to play NYT Strands, complete with tips for solving it, so check that out if you’re struggling to beat it each day.
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The OA review: The late director David ****** echoes through this TV show
The OA review: The late director David ****** echoes through this TV show
Prairie Johnson (Brit Marling) returns home with secrets to tell
JoJo Whilden/Netflix
The OA Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij Netflix
Like many film fans, I was heartbroken by the recent death of David ******. A trailblazing director and painter, he was perhaps the most influential visual artist of the past 50 years, responsible for haunting works of film and TV like Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway and, of course, Twin Peaks. “Visionary” seems too small a word to describe him.
While reading tributes to ******, I stumbled across a list of TV shows influenced by his work. One of those…
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Constance Marten and Mark Gordon retrial begins
Constance Marten and Mark Gordon retrial begins
Daniel Sandford & Helena Wilkinson
News correspondent
PA Media
A young baby girl would still be alive today if it were not for the “reckless and ultimately grossly negligent conduct” of her parents, a jury has heard.
Constance Marten, 37, and Mark Gordon, 50, deny manslaughter by gross negligence and causing or allowing the death of a child.
They are facing a retrial at the Old Bailey. The couple’s baby was found dead in a shopping bag covered in rubbish in 2023.
Opening the case, prosecutor Tom Little KC said Mr Gordon and Ms Marten “put their relationship and their views of life before the life of a little baby girl”.
“Their desire to keep their baby girl led inexorably to the death of that very baby,” he said.
During the previous trial, Ms Marten and Mr Gordon were found guilty of concealing the birth of a child and perverting the course of justice.
The jury heard the couple, who have been in a relationship since 2016, have four other children who were all taken into care.
Mr Little told jurors that the couple gave birth in “secret”.
The barrister said they then decided in the middle of winter and in “obviously dangerous weather conditions they would deprive the baby of what it needed – warmth, shelter, protection and food and ultimately safety”, the barrister said.
Mr Little said the couple did not seek any medical assistance for the baby before, during or after birth and would carry their baby in a reusable supermarket bag on occasions.
When the hunt by the authorities to find them intensified “so their desperation increased and so did the risks and the dangers to the baby”, the prosecutor said.
Ms Marten appeared in the dock for the first day of her retrial. Mr Gordon was not at court.
Judge Mark Lucraft KC told the jury that it was hoped that Mr Gordon would join them on video link, adding “the fact he is not here does not mean anything to you at all”.
Julia Quenzler
Constance Marten appeared in court for the first day of her retrial, but her co-defendant Mark Gordon did not
The jury heard that at the end of 2022, the couple had moved around various locations in South Yorkshire, Bolton, Essex, London and the South Coast of England, and they stayed in various properties including a holiday cottage in Northumberland, a hotel in Cheshire, and another hotel in Manchester.
The court also heard that a car the defendants used had broken down, prompting them to switch to a new car, which later caught fire on the M61 between junctions three and four in Greater Manchester.
“They didn’t remain at the scene with their towering inferno vehicle,” said Mr Little.
Police found a number of “burner” phones in the car, Ms Marten’s passport, a placenta wrapped in the towel, and a large amount of baby items including newborn clothing, suggesting the baby was already born by then.
After abandoning the burning vehicle, the couple then walked in the rain along the banked wooded area beside the motorway for about 200m and were given a lift by a member of the public to a Morrisons supermarket close to the Bolton Interchange Station, where they were caught on CCTV footage shown to the jury.
The couple first came to public attention in January 2023 when police launched a very public manhunt after evidence of a recent birth was found in a burnt-out car near Bolton.
The couple were eventually found in Brighton on 27 February but there was no sign of the baby.
The newborn – who they called Victoria – was found dead two days later in a shopping bag in an allotment in the Hollingbury area of Brighton.
The retrial continues.
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Death Stranding 2 On The Beach Release Date—Platforms, Editions & Price
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach Release Date—Platforms, Editions & Price
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach is the sequel from the mind of Hideo Kojima. Its release date was finally confirmed, and if you want to hear more about the follow-up, we’ve got the main details you need to know.
Hideo Kojima springs to mind when I think of auteurs across any medium of media. He’s produced and directed games featuring over-the-top mecha combat, hallway-based horror, and most notably strategic stealth and surrealism. Death Stranding was arguably his most “out there” work to date, and Death Stranding 2’s release will inevitably try to one-up it.
With a stellar cast and even a curious homage to Solid Snake, let’s check the latest on one of the biggest PS5 releases coming soon.
When is Death Stranding 2 On The Beach Coming Out?
No words. Credit to Kojima Productions
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach has a June 26 release date—making it one of the Summer’s biggest launches if it meets its announced release date.
Originally, Death Stranding 2 was a rumor. The worst-kept secret became official at The Game Awards 2024. Screenshots, trailers, and gameplay have been shown off periodically over the last several years, but a release date was notably lacking.
This was until Kojima Productions unveiled an official Death Stranding 2 release date. It was great news, and fans also got to see the full extent of the action title’s Collector’s Edition.
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach Platforms
A Death Stranding 2 On The Beach PlayStation 5 exclusive launch is happening, with PC, Xbox, and any other platforms having to miss out for now.
It’s a rare PlayStation-only launch. Exclusives are seemingly coming few and far between in 2025. Death Stranding 2 On The Beach can only be purchased on its June 26 release date for PS5.
But all is not lost if you’re a PC player without a PS5 console. The original Death Stranding was one of a few PlayStation-exclusive titles that eventually came to PC. Sony has made a habit of releasing its recent library of exclusives on PC—exposing titles to a wider audience, and making more money.
Meaning, a Death Stranding 2 On The Beach PC port is not out of the question a year or two from now.
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach Editions & Price
You must choose between Death Stranding 2 On The Beach’s Standard Edition ($69.99/£79.99), Deluxe Edition ($79.99/£79.99), and Collector’s Edition ($229.99/£249.99).
Look at each Death Stranding 2 edition below, and see which one is the one for you.
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach Edition
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach Prices
Standard Edition
$69.99/£79.99
Deluxe Edition
$79.99/£79.99
Collector’s Edition
$229.99/£249.99
Death Stranding 2 On The Beach is without doubt one of the biggest games (on paper) in 2025. Expect more to be added as it looks to shake the reputation of being a walking simulator. Are you picking up the sequel? What did you think of the OG Death Stranding? Let us know.
Check out even more exciting game releases coming in 2025: Elden Ring Nightreign, Atomfall, Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Tales of the Shire A Lord of the Rings Game, and The First Berserker Khazan.
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Majorana 1: Microsoft under fire for claiming it has a new quantum computer
Majorana 1: Microsoft under fire for claiming it has a new quantum computer
Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum computer
John Brecher/Microsoft
Last month Microsoft announced, with fanfare, that it had created a new kind of matter and used it to make a quantum computer architecture that could lead to machines “capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”.
But since then, the tech giant has increasingly come under fire from researchers who say it has done nothing of the sort. “My impression is that the response of the expert physics community has been overwhelmingly negative. Privately, people are just outraged,” says Sergey Frolov at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Microsoft’s claim rests on elusive and exotic quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes (MZMs). These can theoretically be used to create a topological qubit, a new type of quantum bit – the building blocks of information processing within a quantum computer. Because of their inherent properties, such qubits could excel at reducing errors, addressing a big shortcoming of all quantum computers in use today.
MZM’s have been theorised to emerge from the collective behaviour of electrons at the edges of thin superconducting wires. Microsoft’s new Majorana 1 chip contains several such wires and, according to the firm, enough MZMs to make eight topological qubits. A Microsoft spokesperson told New Scientist that the chip was “a significant breakthrough for us and the industry”.
Yet researchers say Microsoft hasn’t provided enough evidence to support these claims. Alongside its press announcement, the company published a paper in the journal Nature that it said confirmed its results. “The Nature paper marks peer-reviewed confirmation that Microsoft has not only been able to create Majorana particles, which help protect quantum information from random disturbance, but can also reliably measure that information from them,” said a Microsoft press release.
But editors at Nature made it explicitly clear that this statement is incorrect. A publicly available report on the peer-review process states: “The editorial team wishes to point out that the results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices.”
In other words, Microsoft and Nature are directly contradicting each other. “The press releases have said something totally different [than the Nature paper],” says Henry Legg at the University of St Andrews in the ***.
This isn’t the only unorthodox aspect of Microsoft’s paper. Legg points out that two of the four peer reviewers initially gave rather critical and negative feedback which, in his experience, would typically disqualify a paper from publication in the prestigious journal. The peer-review report shows that by the last round of editing, one reviewer still disagreed with publication of the paper, while the other three signed off on it. A spokesperson for Nature told New Scientist that the ultimate decision to publish came down to the potential they saw for experiments with future MZMs in Microsoft’s device, rather than necessarily what it had achieved so far.
It is also unusual that one of the reviewers, Hao Zhang at Tsinghua University in China, had previously worked with Microsoft on MZM research, says Legg. That work, published in Nature in 2018, was later retracted, with the team apologising for “insufficient scientific rigour” after other researchers identified inconsistences in the results. “It’s quite shocking that Nature could choose a referee that only a few years ago had a paper retracted,” says Legg.
Zhang says there was no conflict of interest. “I have never been an employee of Microsoft, nor was I affiliated to [the firm]. Among the 100+ authors of the recent Microsoft paper, I have worked with three of them before,” he says. “That was seven years ago, and at that time, they were students of TU Delft [in the Netherlands], not Microsoft employees.”
Microsoft says its team wasn’t involved in selecting reviewers and wasn’t aware of Zhang’s participation until after the review process was complete. Nature also stands by the decision, with a spokesperson saying “the quality of the advice received can be seen from the reviewers’ comments”.
Review issues aside, both Legg and Frolov have more fundamental objections to Microsoft’s methodology. Experiments with MZMs have proven extremely difficult to perform over the past few decades, because imperfections and disorder in the device can produce spurious signals that mimic the quasiparticles, even if they aren’t present. This has been a challenge for researchers associated with Microsoft, including in the retracted 2018 paper – the retraction notice explicitly references new insights concerning the effects of disorder. To address this, in 2023, Microsoft published a procedure in the journal Physical Review B called the “topological gap protocol”, that it claimed would tease out these differences.
“The whole idea of this protocol was that it’s a binary test for whether or not there’s Majoranas there,” says Legg. His own analysis of the code and data that Microsoft used to implement this protocol in 2023, however, showed it to be less reliable than expected, with a data formatting change being enough to turn a fail into a pass. Legg says he raised these issues with Microsoft before the publication of its Nature paper, yet the firm still used the protocol in its new research.
Nature’s spokesperson says that the journal’s editorial team is “aware that some have called into question the validity of the topological gap protocol used in the Nature paper and other publications. This was an issue that we were also aware of during the peer-review process.” Through that process, reviewers determined that this wasn’t a key issue after all, says the spokesperson.
Microsoft says it will respond to Legg’s analysis of its 2023 paper if asked to do so by Physical Review B. “The criticism can be summarised as Legg constructing a false straw man of our paper and then attacking that,” said Chetan Nayak at Microsoft. He disputes Legg’s work on several points and says that the 2023 paper “showed that we could create the topological phase and Majorana zero modes with high confidence” and the new paper only strengthens those claims.
A Microsoft spokesperson says that in the year since the Nature paper was submitted for review, the firm has built on that confidence and not only created a multi-qubit chip, but also tested ways to manipulate those qubits, as would be required for a working topological quantum computer. The firm will be releasing further details at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in March, says the spokesperson. “We look forward to sharing our results along with additional data behind the science that is turning our 20-plus-year vision for quantum computing into a tangible reality.”
But for Frolov, the claim that imperfect results from the past can be neglected because the firm has gone on to build more sophisticated devices rests on faulty logic. Legg shares this view. “Fundamental problems of disorder and material science aren’t going to go away just because you start fabricating some fancier device,” he says.
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Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic
Trump’s Call to Scrap ‘Horrible’ Chip Program Spreads Panic
As President Trump addressed Congress last week, he veered off script to attack a sensitive topic, the CHIPS Act, a bipartisan law aimed at making the United States less reliant on Asia for semiconductors.
Republican lawmakers had sought and received reassurances over the past few months that the Trump administration would support the program Congress created. But halfway through Mr. Trump’s remarks, he called the law a “horrible, horrible thing.”
“You should get rid of the CHIP Act,” he told Speaker Mike Johnson as some lawmakers applauded.
The CHIPS program was one of the few things to unite much of Washington in recent years, as lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worked with private companies to draft a bill that would funnel $50 billion to rebuild the U.S. semiconductor industry, which makes the foundational technology used to power cars, computers and coffee makers. After President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. signed it into law in 2022, companies found sites in Arizona, New York and Ohio to construct new factories. The Commerce Department vetted those plans and began to dole out billions of dollars in grants.
Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to upend years of work. Chip company executives, worried that funding could be clawed back, are calling lawyers to ask what wiggle room the administration has to terminate signed contracts, said eight people familiar with the requests.
After the speech, Senator Todd Young, the Indiana Republican who championed CHIPS, said he reached out to the White House to seek clarity about Mr. Trump’s attack because the criticism was “in tension” with the administration’s previous support.
“If it needs to transform into a different model over a ******* of time, I’m certainly supportive of that,” Mr. Young said last week. “But let’s be clear, the CHIPS and Science Act, at least the chips portion, has mostly been implemented. It has been one of the greatest successes of our time.”
The United States pioneered the semiconductor industry, designing the first microchips and the processes for making them, allowing it to become an early tech leader. But in the 1980s, companies began outsourcing most production to Asia.
U.S. lawmakers began pushing to rebuild domestic chip production after the pandemic created a global chip shortage that forced some U.S. auto factories to shutter, resulting in the CHIPS Act.
But the Trump administration has already taken steps to whittle away at the program.
In late February, Michael Grimes, a senior official at the Department of Commerce and former investment banker at Morgan Stanley, conducted brief interviews with employees of the CHIPS Program Office, which oversees the grants.
In interactions some described as “demeaning,” Mr. Grimes asked employees to justify their intellect by providing test results from the SAT or an IQ test, said four people familiar with the evaluations. Some were asked to do math problems, like calculate the value of four to the fourth power or long division.
Last week, the Commerce Department laid off 40 of the CHIPS office employees, nearly a third of the entire team, these people said.
The administration has also begun discussing changes to projects that received chip-related subsidies, according to three people familiar with the internal conversations. The Biden administration gave preferential treatment for recipients that hired unionized construction workers and provided child care for employees, guidelines that could be changed, the people said.
The reviews and layoffs were previously reported by Reuters and CNBC.
On Wednesday, the day after Mr. Trump’s speech, the Semiconductor Industry Association organized a call with member companies, said three people familiar with the discussion. During the call, people chalked up Mr. Trump’s frustration with the law to personal animus with Mr. Biden.
Some said that Mr. Trump’s criticism could create challenges by drawing public attention to their projects, according to the people. But many also expressed confidence that their legal agreements with the Commerce Department couldn’t be changed.
The Semiconductor Industry Association declined to comment.
So far, the Commerce Department has signed contracts to grant more than $36 billion in federal subsidies under the CHIPS Act. Samsung, Intel, Micron, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, known as TSMC, and others in response have pledged to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. chip-making facilities.
Mr. Trump has proposed replacing those incentives with tariffs that increase the cost of making chips overseas. On Tuesday, he said that the threat of tariffs had compelled TSMC, the world’s biggest maker of advanced semiconductors, to increase its U.S. investment by $100 billion and double the number of plants it is building in Arizona, to six.
“We don’t have to give them money,” Mr. Trump said. “We just want to protect our businesses and our people, and they will come because they won’t have to pay tariffs if they build in America.”
It’s unclear how much of a factor tariffs played in TSMC’s plans. The company had already acquired land and drafted plans to expand its footprint in Arizona once it had the customers to support three additional plants, said three people familiar with the CHIPS Act. TSMC is investing earlier than previously planned, partly because customers like Apple and Nvidia committed to buying more U.S.-made chips, the people added.
TSMC and Intel declined to comment. Micron and Samsung didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Lawyers and industry executives have said that tariffs on chips themselves are not very effective because the United States imports few chips directly. Chips are typically sent directly to electronics factories, generally in Asia, where they are placed in laptops, cellphones and appliances before being imported into the United States.
Some in the chips industry have been formulating plans to try to convince Mr. Trump of the law’s value since the election, including at the industry’s annual gathering in San Jose, Calif., in November. The initial legislation was spurred partly by a request from officials during the first Trump administration that TSMC invest in the United States, which kick-started an effort from Congress to secure funding for the company.
That soon snowballed into a broader effort to fund the industry, as other companies and lawmakers wanted to participate.
“We need to go and make sure that our colleagues in Washington remember that, embrace that and continue to invest in our incredible industry,” said Deirdre Hanford, the chief executive of Natcast, a nonprofit created by CHIPS to oversee semiconductor technology development.
The risk of losing funding has caused some industry executives to complain that the government was too slow to provide subsidies in the first place. While the law went into place in August 2022, the Biden administration spent months carefully vetting each project. Most of its largest grants were finalized after the election.
“Is it perfect? No,” said Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat, during a Washington tech and policy conference last week. “But without it, there would not have been another fabrication facility built in America.”
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Brightstar kicks off maiden Laverton gold pour
Brightstar kicks off maiden Laverton gold pour
Brightstar Resources has started a gold processing campaign with the company’s maiden gold pour expected this week from gold-bearing ore hauled to Genesis Minerals’ Laverton mill.
Brightstar is hauling ore from its high-grade Second Fortune underground mine and existing lower-grade open pit stockpiles at its Lord Byron mine under an ore purchase agreement.
An estimated 60,000-tonne parcel at a blended grade of 2 grams per tonne (g/t) has been delivered to the Laverton mill for processing.
Management last year originated an ore purchase agreement with Genesis, allowing for up to 500,000t of ore to be processed this year and in the first three months of 2026.
Ore is expected to be sourced from the run-of-mine from its operating Second Fortune underground mine, existing mined stockpiles from its Lord Byron open pit operation at Jasper Hills, along with ore anticipated to be mined in the next few months from its Fish underground project.
The company’s operating Second Fortune underground mine has historical production of an average 10,000 tonnes per month at 3.6g/t and is estimated to contribute 12,000 ounces to 15,000 ounces of gold in the campaign.
The Second Fortune mine contains a mineral resource of 165,000t at a superb grade of 10.9g/t gold for 58,000 ounces.
The Fish underground mine is expected to contribute a total 188,000t of ore, which is categorised within the measured and indicated categories of the resource at an expected 4.4g/t to produce 26,000 gold ounces across the next 13 months.
First blast firing at Fish to begin the development of the portal and the underground decline for access is scheduled for April, with material expected to be accessed within six weeks.
Fish also has a JORC-compliant resource estimated at 225,000t at a stellar 5.7g/t gold for 41,000 ounces.
Stockpiles at Lord Byron comprise about 200,000t going 1g/t gold. Brightstar estimates the mine will add a further 6000 ounces of the booming commodity to the production mix.
The commencement of production and cash flow this year is a major milestone for Brightstar as we continue to ramp up gold production and mining operations. Second Fortune production will soon be complemented by Brightstar’s second underground mine, Fish, once it is in production from April.
The company expects to deliver regular ore parcels to the mill for processing throughout the term of the ore purchase agreement. It estimates the continual cash flow received across the next 12 months will support its aggressive development and exploration plans across the company’s Menzies, Laverton and Sandstone hubs.
Brightstar plans to update the market on the first processing parcel’s recovered ounces following final reconciliation within the next four weeks.
In the interim, mining and haulage are continuing towards delivering a second parcel of ore.
Management indicates it is pushing full steam ahead with its exploration activities, planning to drill more than 100,000 metres with a reverse circulation rig at Sandstone and a further rig at its Cork Tree Well.
A definitive-feasibility study is nearing completion for its wider Laverton-Menzies development and is expected to outline the company’s multi-mine development strategy to grow production in the near term.
The company remains both hedge-free and debt-free and is ideally placed to benefit tremendously from its full exposure to the existing high gold price.
With the price continuing to ***** at elevated levels near $4600 per golden ounce in good-old Aussie dollars, Brightstar is in an enviable position to cash in on the ore purchase agreement with Genesis due to the excellent gold grades within its Second Fortune and Fish underground projects.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: *****@*****.tld
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What is Alexa+: Amazon’s next-generation assistant is powered by generative-AI
What is Alexa+: Amazon’s next-generation assistant is powered by generative-AI
Powered by generative AI, Alexa+ is a reinvention of Amazon’s hugely successful voice assistant.
As well as giving you answers to specific questions and performing set tasks, it remembers your personal information and takes context into account while also allowing you to speak more naturally when seeking to get things done.
The result is a more personalized assistant that delivers better outcomes and learns from your behavior in order to make more relevant suggestions.
Read on to discover what it’s capable of doing and why it’s an exciting development.
This article was correct as of March 2025. AI tools are updated regularly and it is possible that some features have changed since this article was written. Some features may also only be available in certain countries.
What is Alexa+?
The virtual assistant, Alexa, was announced alongside Amazon’s debut Echo device in November 2014 and it has allowed users to perform all manner of tasks from discovering the latest weather forecasts to finding facts from trusted sources.
Accessed by simply uttering, “Alexa”, it has proven to be a popular conduit for the playing of songs and podcasts and, thanks to a wide range of skills, many of which have been added by third-party developers, it has been possible to significantly widen the scope of the service.
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Alexa+ takes the assistant to the next level using models from Anthropic, which makes both Claude and Amazon’s generative foundation model Nova.
Allowing you to adopt a more conversational tone when communicating with the assistant, Alexa+ is better at understanding what you’re asking of it. Since it keeps track of your activities (from what you’re buying and how you pay to what you’re listening to and watching), it’s also proactive, capable of figuring out what you may want and when.
(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
What can you use Alexa+ for?
Alexa+ can be used in the same way as Alexa today. You can ask questions, get it to play songs from a service such as Amazon Music, Spotify or Apple Music, react to purchase recommendations by Amazon and manage your smart home among many other things.
But it’s the way that it carries out those tasks that differentiates the new from the old. One of the most frustrating things about Alexa is often having to repeat a request, either because it hasn’t understood what you’re trying to say or has misunderstood it and delivered something wildly different to what you expected.
Alexa+ is better at understanding you and one of the reasons for that is because you can feed it information which it will retain. You can tell it what you like and don’t like, share facts and key dates such as birthdays and the types of food you enjoy. You can also share photos, messages, emails, documents and calendar events, and get Alexa+ to draw upon the information for use in its responses and suggestions.
What can’t you use Alexa+ for?
Alexa+ is primarily driven towards being an assistant so it’s good at keeping you organized, helping to make sense of information and carrying out tasks (it will go as far as suggesting recipes, organizing a food delivery or making a restaurant appointment for you). It also ties in with smart home devices such as Amazon’s Ring and Fire TV.
So while it will deliver personalized news summaries, remind you of events, manage your calendar, summarize emails and documents, create and send emails and texts and help entertain you, it won’t be an effective work buddy, generating reports and creating spreadsheets and the like. It won’t create code either. And since it relies on cloud-based processing, it won’t be an effective service if you want to operate it offline.
How much does Alexa+ cost?
Alexa+ costs $19.99 and the reason we’re not providing the price for the *** and Australia here is because it’s currently US-only. If you like in America, though, and like the idea of using Alexa+, you should consider a Prime subscription at $14.99 a month (or $139 annually) instead. This gives you Alexa+ for “free” alongside all of the other benefits of Prime. You can also get Alexa+ as part of the Kids Plus package for $5.99 a month, again only in the US.
Where can you use Alexa+?
Early access is being restricted to the Echo Show 8, 10, 15 or 21 but Alexa+ will become available on all Alexa devices except the Echo Dot 1st Gen, Echo 1st Gen, Echo Plus 1st Gen, Echo Tap, Echo Show 1st Gen, Echo Show 2nd Gen, and Echo Spot 1st Gen.
Alexa+ will also be available in a new mobile app for iOS and Android as well as at Alexa.com.
(Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)
Is Alexa+ any good?
We haven’t reviewed Alexa+ in full but the Alexa+ demo showed its power and TechRadar’s Senior Editor for AI, Graham Barlow, said it looked a lot more fun to talk to than ChatGPT or Siri.
It has much more of a personality than its rivals shown by its penchant for making jokes and throwing in funny comments which, Graham said, was evidence that “Amazon may have just found a niche”.
But more than that, it can carry out tasks well. And since it offers powerful AI integration in the home – if, that is, you primarily stick with Amazon products such as Ring – Graham reckons “it’s looking like Amazon is going to own the AI in your home”.
Use Alexa+ if…
You should use Alexa+ if you already have an Echo device, an Amazon Prime subscription and live in the US – you may as well because it’s free and you’ve nothing to lose. It’s also useful if you’re looking for a conversational AI assistant that is capable of learning your habits and using such data to deliver relevant responses and suggestions. And it’s great if you have an Amazon-focussed smart home or just want to better organize your life.
Don’t use Alexa+ if…
Don’t use Alexa+ if you’re worried about sharing personal information with a generative AI assistant – to get the most out of it, that’s what you’ll need to do. And go elsewhere if you want a virtual work colleague capable of knocking out a report or some amazing C++ code. Avoid if you don’t want to get sucked further into Amazon’s ecosystem, too.
Also consider
ChatGPT can also be used to hold conversations and better organize your life with the bonus of being capable of producing reports and code.
Siri is having a hard time at the moment but it’s a natural go-to if you use an Apple device.
Claude powers Alexa+ via Amazon Bedrock so why not go direct and see what it’s capable of doing.
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National Gallery in Athens temporary closed after MP attack
National Gallery in Athens temporary closed after MP attack
March 10, 2025
Arts, Culture, FEATURED
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The National Gallery in Athens has announced its temporary closure following the attack on a number of art works by an ultra-religious MP earlier on Monday.
“The operation of the National Gallery–Alexandros Soutsos Museum is temporarily suspended due to the attack on works of art by the Niki party MP for Thessaloniki II Nikolaos Papadopoulos,” a statement said on Monday afternoon.
“A new announcement from the National Gallery will follow later in the day,” the statement added.
Police has arrested Nikolaos Papadopoulos, MP with religious-fundamentalist nationalist party Niki after he raided the National Gallery in the morning and destroyed art works shouting “they are insulting our religion.” – Details HERE on KTG
demned by other political parties.
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While the Islamists of HTS of Syria’s interim president Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa also known by …
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A great South African playwright
A great South African playwright
Athol Fugard, who has died aged 92, was widely acclaimed as one of South Africa’s greatest playwrights.
The son of an Afrikaner mother, he was best known for his politically charged plays challenging the racist system of apartheid.
Paying tribute to Fugard, South Africa’s Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie hailed him as “a fearless storyteller who laid bare the harsh realities of apartheid through his plays”.
“We were cursed with apartheid, but blessed with great artists who shone a light on its impact and helped to guide us out of it. We owe a huge debt to this late, wonderful man,” McKenzie added.
Fugard wrote more than 30 plays in a career that spanned 70 years, making his mark with The Blood Knot in 1961.
It was the first play in South Africa with a ****** and white actor – Fugard himself – performing in a front of a multiracial audience, before the apartheid regime introduced laws prohibiting mixed casts and audiences.
The Blood Knot catapulted Fugard onto the international stage – with the play shown in the US, and adapted for British television.
The apartheid regime later confiscated his passport, but it strengthened Fugard’s resolve to keep breaking racial barriers and exposing the injustices of apartheid.
He went on to work with the Serpent Players, a group of ****** actors, and performed in ****** townships, despite harassment from the apartheid regime’s security forces.
Fugard’s celebrated plays included Boesman and Lena, which looked at the difficult circumstances of a mixed-race couple. Having premiered in 1969, it was made into a film in 2000 starring Danny Glover and Angela Bassett.
His novel, Tsotsi, was made into a film, winning the 2006 Oscar for best foreign language movie.
The premier of South Africa’s Western Cape province, Alan Winde, said that Fugard had a “penetrating, sharp wit”, and his “acute understanding of our country’s political and cultural make-up is unmatched”.
“He will be sorely missed,” Winde added.
Other well-known plays by him include Sizwe Banzi Is Dead and The Island, which he co-wrote with the actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona, in a powerful condemnation of life on Robben Island, where anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela was imprisoned.
In a simple tribute on X, Kani posted: “I am deeply saddened by the passing of my dear friend Athol Fugard. May his soul rest in eternal peace. Elder ”
Fugard won several awards for his work, and received a lifetime achievement honour at the prestigious Tony awards in 2011, while Time magazine described him in the 1985 as the greatest active playwright in the English-speaking world.
“Apartheid defined me, that is true… But I am proud of the work that came out of it, that carries my name,” Fugard told the AFP news agency in 1995.
Fugard feared that the end of apartheid in 1994 could leave him with little to do, but he still found enough material to write.
In a BBC interview in 2010, he said that he shared the view of the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu that “we have lost our way” as a nation.
“I think the present society in South Africa needs the vigilance of writers, every bit as much as the old one did.
“It is a responsibility that young writers, playwrights, must really wake up to and understand that responsibility is theirs, just as it was mine and a host of other writers in the earlier years.”
Additional reporting by the BBC’s Elettra Neysmith.
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Mo Vaughn, fearsome slugger named in Mitchell Report, admits to using HGH: Exclusive
Mo Vaughn, fearsome slugger named in Mitchell Report, admits to using HGH: Exclusive
Former slugger Mo Vaughn told The Athletic that he used human growth hormone in an effort to extend his career, confirming for the first time information disclosed in 2007 in the Mitchell Report.
“I was trying to do everything I could,” Vaughn told The Athletic about his desire to stay on the field. “I knew I had a bad, degenerative knee. I was shooting HGH in my knee. Whatever I could do to help the process …”
Vaughn’s revelation came during a recent interview, in which he relayed how his relationship with his son Lee, 12, rekindled his love for the game after a long estrangement from the sport. The one-time AL MVP said he did not consider getting named in the Mitchell Report a stain on his legacy. Nor was it the reason he distanced himself from baseball. His anger toward the game, Vaughn said, stemmed from his belief that if not for a series of injuries, he could have accomplished more.
Assembled at the behest of former commissioner Bud Selig to detail the ******** use of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances by major-league players, the Mitchell Report offered evidence that Vaughn made three separate purchases of HGH in 2001. Vaughn did not consent to an interview with the author of the report, former U.S. Sen. George J. Mitchell of Maine.
Vaughn’s physical troubles began two batters into the 1999 season opener, his debut with the Anaheim Angels after signing a then-record six-year, $80 million free-agent contract. Chasing a foul pop toward the Cleveland dugout, he fell down the steps and injured his left ankle and knee. He later missed the entire 2001 season with a ruptured biceps tendon, and his knee issues forced him out of the game in May 2003.
The Mitchell Report states that the person who provided Vaughn with HGH, former Mets batboy and clubhouse employee Kirk Radomski, said, “he did not sell Vaughn steroids because Vaughn was ‘afraid of the big needles.’”
Vaughn said the HGH injections required smaller needles.
Major League Baseball did not ban human growth hormone until 2005, nearly two years after Vaughn’s final game. The league, in conjunction with the Players Association, became the first sport to institute in-season, unannounced random blood testing for the substance in 2013.
Former pitcher Andy Pettitte, another player the Mitchell Report named for using HGH, admitted in 2007 to trying the substance. Like Vaughn, he said his goal was to recover from an injury, which in his case was an elbow problem.
“I felt an obligation to get back to my team as soon as possible,” Pettitte said. “For this reason, and only this reason, for two days I tried human growth hormone. Though it was not against baseball rules, I was not comfortable with what I was doing, so I stopped.”
Pettitte’s admission is perhaps one reason he has struggled to gain traction in the Hall of Fame voting, receiving 27.9 percent in his seventh year on the ballot, with 75 percent required for induction. Vaughn, who was the 1995 American League MVP but overall was not as accomplished as Pettitte, fell off the ballot in 2009, his first year of eligibility, after receiving only 1.1 percent of the vote.
Vaughn played 12 seasons, primarily for the Red Sox, with stops with the Angels and Mets. The three-time All-Star finished with 328 home runs and a lifetime average of .293.
GO DEEPER
How Mo Vaughn rediscovered his love for baseball through his 12-year-old son
(Top photo of Mo Vaughn playing for the Mets in 2002: Christopher Ruppel / Getty Images)
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2024: the year misconfigurations exposed digital vulnerabilities
2024: the year misconfigurations exposed digital vulnerabilities
Imagine the impact of a sudden service disruption on your business. Customers unable to access your platform, transactions put on hold, and your team racing against the clock to fix the issue. These aren’t far-fetched scenarios — they’re the kinds of challenges many organisations faced in 2024 when small configuration errors cascaded into major outages.
Our increasingly digital world has provided incredible opportunities for growth and efficiency, but it’s also introduced new vulnerabilities. Configuration changes have always had the potential to take out services but with more of the digital landscape managed and configured with code, the propensity for mistakes is now much higher. The missteps of 2024 were a stark reminder that even minor errors can disrupt operations, dent user trust, and create lasting challenges for businesses across all industries.
This makes digital resilience more than a best practice—it’s a critical necessity. By examining the high-profile outages of 2024 and understanding their causes, businesses can take actionable steps to build stronger, more reliable systems and safeguard their digital experiences.
Identifying the “route” cause
When it comes to configuration-caused outages, businesses were challenged by two key trends over the last year that elevate the importance of digital resilience in the face of disruptions: continuous improvement and delivery (CI/CD), and the accelerated deployment of modern applications and cloud services.
The first trend, CI/CD, characterises modern software engineering best practices. It allows product and engineering teams to make small modifications and improvements faster and with greater frequency, but on the flipside, the rapid pace shortens the time available for end-to-end testing. In addition, the ever-changing nature of application code makes its behaviour unpredictable, even on a day to day basis.
The second trend is the accelerated deployment of modern applications and cloud services, which are inherently distributed in design, including their underlying infrastructure. Digital applications comprise of many components that are orchestrated together to deliver a single, seamless experience. These components are often developed by different agile teams and may reside on either owned or unowned (third-party) infrastructure. In these environments, we often observe instances where a team making a change is doing so to improve their own patch or portion of the application, but may not have complete visibility into what flow-on impact their change might have on the rest of the infrastructure.
While the resulting misconfigurations may be unintentional, software configuration outages can have a significant impact relative to the size of the change. So, what does this look like in practice for organisations?
2024 – the year of outages
In the networking space, unintended misconfiguration of routing policies has been a recurring issue over many years. A service provider, for instance, may mistakenly insert themselves into a traffic path by advertising a prefix it doesn’t own or control and is unable to handle the sudden traffic influx, leading to timeouts and other connectivity-related failures for end users. One example took place in October last year, when a number of OVHcloud services were subject to a faulty configuration that impacted several regional telecom providers.
With accelerated cloud adoption, configuration errors have also become an increasingly common issue in the cloud, impacting security functionality, performance, and availability. Last year, for example, two Azure resources were impacted: one in January, when an erroneous configuration change triggered a dormant defect that resulted in a 7-hour long degradation of the Azure Resource Manager; and one in July, when a configuration change impacted backend connections to compute and storage resources, ultimately impacting services such as Confluent, Elastic Cloud, and Microsoft 365. Later in the year, Salesforce also suffered a similar incident that prevented global users from accessing the cloud service when critical information was left out of an updated configuration file.
It isn’t just the network or cloud infrastructure where configuration errors occur. Problems also manifest within the applications themselves. Notably in July last year, an issue with a single CrowdStrike configuration file resulted in system crashes and “blue screens of death” (BSOD) on affected Windows systems worldwide – but there were other incidents as well. A series of temporary issues with ChatGPT pointed to configuration changes and re-architecture to improve the user experience. And Square merchants experienced payment problems when a new feature configuration could not be interpreted by Android devices.
Digital resilience in the face of disruption
In 2024, many configuration changes not only degraded digital experiences but also disrupted the delivery of the service completely. It’s this subset of incidents that produced the biggest lessons of 2024 that shouldn’t be repeated in 2025.
For product owners and operations teams, the drive to continuously improve remains as important as ever, but user experience needs a ******* focus. Automation and assurance technologies both have a role to play here. These solutions can compare ongoing patterns against known outage patterns, providing visibility and correlating signals to allow early detection of degradations or disruptions to an application or other IT asset. In the case of a configuration change gone wrong, this could be the difference between a speedy rollback and a lengthy troubleshooting process.
Successfully implementing a configuration change on the first attempt is key for businesses across all industries and indicates that the organisation has access to ample data and insights – all the way from the end user to the cloud, allowing them to adequately assess the potential impact of changes made at any point in the end-to-end delivery chain.
Be it caused by a misconfiguration or otherwise, lessons can be learned from the outages of 2024 and minimising the occurrence and impact of any disruption will be core to achieving digital resilience in 2025.
Mick Hicks is a Principal Solutions Analyst at Cisco ThousandEyes
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Greenland heads to the polls as Trump eyes territory
Greenland heads to the polls as Trump eyes territory
Adrienne Murray
BBC News, Copenhagen
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Questions around independence – and what pace it should go at – has taken centre stage in campaigning in Greenland
Residents of Greenland head to the polls on Tuesday in a vote that in previous years has drawn little outside attention – but which may prove pivotal for the Arctic territory’s future.
US President Donald Trump’s repeated interest in acquiring Greenland has put it firmly in the spotlight and fuelled the longstanding debate on the island’s future ties with Copenhagen.
“There’s never been a spotlight like this on Greenland before,” says Nauja Bianco, a Danish-Greenlandic policy expert on the Arctic.
Greenland has been controlled by Denmark – nearly 3,000km (1,860 miles) away – for about 300 years. It governs its own domestic affairs, but decisions on foreign and defence policy are made in Copenhagen.
Now, five out of six parties on the ballot favour Greenland’s independence from Denmark, differing only on how quickly that should come about.
The debate over independence has been “put on steroids by Trump”, says Masaana Egede, editor of Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq.
The island’s strategic location and untapped mineral resources have caught the US president’s eye. He first floated the idea of buying Greenland back during his first term in 2019.
Since taking office again in January, he has reiterated his intention to acquire the territory. Greenland and Denmark’s leaders have repeatedly rebuffed his demands.
Addressing the US Congress last week, however, Trump again doubled down. “We need Greenland for national security. One way or the other we’re gonna get it,” he said, prompting applause and laughter from a number of politicians, including Vice-President JD Vance.
Reuters
Donald Trump again said he wanted the US to get Greenland “one way or another” in his Congress address last week
In Nuuk, his words struck a nerve with politicians who were quick to condemn them. “We deserve to be treated with respect and I don’t think the American president has done that lately since he took office,” Prime Minister Mute Egede said.
Still, the US interest has stoked calls for Greenland to break away from Denmark, with much of the debate focused on when – not if – the process of independence should begin.
Greenland’s independence goal is not new, Nauja Bianco points out, and has been decades in the making.
A string of revelations about past mistreatment of Inuit people by the Danes have hurt Greenlandic public opinion about Denmark. Earlier this year, PM Egede said the territory should free itself from “the shackles of colonialism”.
But it is the first time the subject has taken centre stage in an election.
Getty Images
Prime Minister Mute Egede, right, is pushing for a more gradual transition towards autonomy for Greenland
Inuit Ataqatigiit (IA), the party of Prime Minister Mute Egede, favours gradual steps towards autonomy. “Citizens must feel secure,” he told local media.
Arctic expert Martin Breum says Egede’s handling of the challenge from Trump and strong words against Denmark over past colonial wrongdoings “will give him a lot of votes”.
Smaller rivals could also gain ground and potentially shake up alliances.
Opposition party Naleraq wants to immediately kick-off divorce proceedings from Copenhagen and have closer defence dealings with Washington.
Pointing to Greenland’s EU departure and Brexit, party leader ***** Broberg has said that Greenland could be “out of the Danish kingdom in three years”.
Naleraq is fielding the largest number of candidates and has gained momentum by riding the wave of discontent with Denmark.
“Naleraq will also be a larger factor too in parliament,” predicts Mr Breum, who says party candidates have performed well on TV and on social media.
However, the centre-right Demokraatit party believes it is too soon to push for independence.
“The economy will have to be much stronger than it is today,” party candidate Justus Hansen told Reuters.
Greenland’s economy is driven by fishing, and government spending relies on annual subsidies from Denmark.
Talk of Trump and independence has overshadowed other key issues for voters, says newspaper editor Masaana Egede.
“It’s an election where we should be talking about healthcare, care of the elderly and social problems. Almost everything is about independence.”
According to recent polls, almost 80% of Greenlanders back moves towards future statehood.
About 44,000 people are eligible to vote, and given the low numbers and few polls, results are difficult to forecast.
Even though a majority of Greenlanders favour independence, a survey has shown that half would be less enthusiastic about independence if that meant lower living standards.
One poll found that 85% of Greenlanders do not wish to become a part of the United States, and nearly half see Trump’s interest as a threat.
EPA
Tensions between Greenland and Denmark have been heightened over past mistreatment of Inuit people by the Danes
One fear among some Greenlanders, says Masaana Egede, is how long the Arctic island could remain independent and whether it would break off from Denmark only to have another country “standing on our coasts and start taking over”.
Experts say it is this worry that could steer votes towards keeping the status quo.
Although Greenland’s right to self-determination is enshrined into law by the 2009 Self-Rule Act, there are several steps to take before the territory could break away from Denmark, including holding a referendum.
This means getting full independence could take “about 10 to 15 years,” says Kaj Kleist, a veteran Greenlandic politician and civil servant who prepared the Self-Rule Act.
“There is lot of preparation and negotiations with the Danish government before you can make that a reality,” he adds.
Whatever the election’s outcome, experts do not believe Greenland could become independent before Trump’s second term is over in 2028.
The results are expected in the early hours of Wednesday.
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Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Nikola Jokić for NBA MVP? What our experts are thinking
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Nikola Jokić for NBA MVP? What our experts are thinking
A few weeks remain in announcing the NBA’s most valuable player, but what Nikola Jokić recently has brought into focus is the hard choice voters will have to make.
Jokić’s historic triple-double, 31 points, 22 assists and 21 rebounds, in the Denver Nuggets’ overtime win over the Phoenix Suns on Friday had never been done before and stands representative of the kind of season the reigning and three-time MVP is putting together.
Meanwhile, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the best player on arguably the best team and deserves to be considered for the NBA’s top individual honor. (The Cleveland Cavaliers may finish with the league’s best record, but none of their stars’ numbers are good enough for consideration.)
Also, what has happened in Los Angeles recently has thrust a certain 40-year-old and four-time league MVP into the conversation once again. Or has it?
The Athletic’s NBA experts Joe Vardon, Sam Amick, David Aldridge, Mike Vorkunov and Fred Katz shared their thoughts on the MVP race.
Vorkunov: This is a razor-thin race and will be the NBA’s equivalent of the men’s 100-meter dash at the 2024 Summer Olympics. While I don’t have an official MVP vote, I’d have Jokić as the winner. It’s a hard decision, for sure, and Gilgeous-Alexander is the best player on the team with the league’s second-best record. He leads the league in scoring — by a whopping two points per game — and his shooting efficiency numbers are the highest of his career. But Jokić is having as great a season for a team with significantly less talent.
The beauty of the Thunder is their overwhelming talent, but in Denver, Jokić is the system. He’s averaging a triple-double and shooting a ridiculous 43 percent from 3. The Thunder have three players in the top 20 of estimated plus-minus (EPM) and a few more behind them. Jokić has led the Nuggets to the third-best record in the Western Conference with Jamal Murray struggling for a good portion of the season and a 36-year-old Westbrook playing an important role. The advanced analytics don’t give us a clear winner — Gilgeous-Alexander leads in EPM, while Jokić leads in DARKO daily plus-minus (DPM) — so the tiebreaker here is the help around each.
It gets back to the old, annoying, ambiguous word: valuable. No one has been more valuable in the NBA this season than Jokić.
Amick: Gilgeous-Alexander might win, and truth be told, I might vote for him. But the longer I’ve looked at Jokić’s body of work and pondered the phenomenon that is voter fatigue, the more I’ve realized that it is imperative to analyze his case as if he hadn’t already won the award three times before — or, really, as if he hadn’t ever won it at all.
The irony of that edict, of course, is that one has to compare this MVP-caliber season to his others to truly understand why it must be appreciated and, potentially, honored. To wit …
Points: He’s averaging a career-high 28.8 per game. His previous high was 27.1 in his 2021-22 MVP campaign.
Rebounds: He’s at 12.9 per game, his second-best mark in his 10 seasons. His career high is 13.8 during his 2021-22 campaign.
Assists: He’s dishing out 10.5 per game. His previous high was 9.8 in his 2022-23 MVP campaign.
Efficiency: A true-shooting percentage of 66.0, the third-highest of his career behind his 70.1 mark when he took second in MVP voting behind the Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid in 2022-23 and the 66.1 he posted during his second MVP campaign. His career-high 3-point percentage of 43.0, on a career-high 4.5 attempts per, is 4.2 percent better than his previous high (38.8 during his 2020-21 campaign).
On-off: Entering Sunday, the Nuggets were 20.2 points better, per 100 possessions, when Jokić is on the floor. That swing, which is now significantly better than Gilgeous-Alexander’s on-off mark (15.5), is better than two of his MVP seasons (8.9 in 2020-21 and 16.3 in 2021-22; he had a mark of 20.4 last season). In terms of value — the literal description of the award — this stat is always among the most telling.
Player efficiency rating (PER): He was at 32.5 entering Sunday, a league-leading mark and the second-best mark of his career (32.8 in 2021-22 was his high).
Don’t get the wrong idea: There is no verdict just yet. But everyone needs to be clear-eyed about what we’re seeing: An all-time great who has been on a historic tear these past four seasons, could be argued as someone who should have won the last four MVPs, and is playing better than he ever has. That’s not the kind of reality that should be overlooked.
At this point, my top five would be Jokić, Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Jayson Tatum and LeBron James.
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Aldridge: In our current societal spasming, where it is better to be loud and ill-informed than quiet and knowledgeable, I’ll be accused of not coming strong to the mic when I say it’s a coin flip right now between Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić. There’s a clear case to be made for either man.
Gilgeous-Alexander leads the league in scoring and is close to joining the “180 Club,” by virtue of his current splits (52.5/37.2/89.9 entering play Sunday), on a career-high usage of 33.6, per Basketball-Reference.com. He is unstoppable; he can get to his spots whenever he wants, and you can’t affect his shot. He’s mastered, the way Stephen Curry has, the seemingly diametrically opposite way of being both his team’s alpha male and one of the guys. He insists his teammates be there for every walk-off interview.
He finished second to Jokić in the MVP vote last year; who’d object if they reversed roles this year?
Yet you have to stop here, when you’re ready to give it to Gilgeous-Alexander, and reiterate how incredible Jokić remains.
Jokić is averaging a triple-double – and, yes, that’s amazing. But he’s also on pace to shatter his individual career highs in 3-point percentage (43.9) and steals (1.8 per game). Along with the aforementioned, he’s excelling in true-shooting percentage and other advanced stats. And, his usage is still near his career highs.
I was at Jokić’s career-best 56-point game against the Washington Wizards in December. What was remarkable was how … unremarkable it seemed. The Nuggets were playing terribly, and Murray was out and injured. So, Jokić, basically, took every shot in the third quarter. Denver was so bad at the time that Michael Malone couldn’t take him off the floor — and he scored from every conceivable way. He never sped up, never took a bad shot.
Katz: I hold one strong opinion about the 2025 NBA MVP — and it’s not about who I believe should win. With a quarter of the season to go, Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić are too close, a race reminiscent of the one from 2017, when Russell Westbrook and James Harden both posted historic stat lines.
This year’s NBA MVP race evokes memories of the 2017 race between Russell Westbrook and James Harden. (Thomas B. Shea / USA Today)
Around this time that year, Harden was the presumed leader, despite Westbrook pacing to become the first player to average a triple-double in more than half a century. By mid-April, Westbrook had jumped him, not just because of gaudy box scores — both he and Harden posted a combination of points, rebounds and assists that had never before occurred in NBA history — but because of a slew of clutch performances over the final month of the schedule.
I don’t know for whom I will vote. All I can say now is that, while I’m thrilled to compare narratives to history, I won’t use history to influence my choice.
It doesn’t matter to me that the MVP used to go to the best player on the best team, nor do I care about how four MVPs in five years would affect Jokić’s all-time standing. It’s irrelevant that some MVPs of the past have been subpar defensive players, a defense used to support Jokić, who is a smart, handsy defender but isn’t at the level of Gilgeous-Alexander.
The NBA has evolved. Why can’t the voters do the same?
What I know is this is a one-season award. As I always have, I will vote for it in a vacuum. And come April, my vote could go to either of those two.
Vardon: I think I will vote for Gilgeous-Alexander, or is it Jokić, when the time comes.
I don’t want to talk about them. I want to talk about a player who’s gone from off my ballot to the top three.
There was a graphic on one of the national broadcasts recently which showed that LeBron James, at age 40, has averages of roughly 25 points, eight rebounds and eight assists, which were very close to the numbers he put up during his previous MVP season with the Miami Heat in 2012-13. At his age, with his mileage and even considering the extra basketball he played last summer in leading Team USA to Olympic gold, James is easily deserving of a legacy vote, where his name appears in the top five as a lifetime achievement nod or something. Except, James is doing this for the Lakers while leading them from the middle of the Western Conference to second place.
Yes, I realize a perennial MVP contender in Luka Dončić fell into his lap last month, but the Lakers’ resurgence began before the shocking trade, and James was in the middle of it. Almost inexplicably, James is trying on defense this season, and L.A. has benefited from that. He’s shooting nearly 40 percent from 3-point range and playing nearly 35 minutes per game. And with Anthony Davis gone, James has made his presence felt more on the interior and near the rim.
I thought when Dončić arrived and got settled, he, and not James, would be the Lakers’ best player. But that hasn’t quite been the case. With the Milwaukee Bucks floating in that 4-5 range and the Boston Celtics’ depth taking away from Jayson Tatum’s case, I think James’ production, plus the Lakers’ team performance, vaults him ahead of Tatum and Antetokounmpo. At least I did until he suffered a groin injury Saturday. Now, I want to see how the Lakers finish and how available James is down the stretch.
The Lakers have five back-to-backs remaining, and there is concern James could miss a chunk of time. All I am saying is, if the Lakers are in second place in the West at season’s end, and if James returns with enough time to see that through, he would be very high on my ballot.
(Top photo of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokić: Joshua Gateley / Getty Images)
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