Aggregator

Why, I can hear Americans yelling, on the eve of the nation's 250th birthday, did the country's very own princess, Miss Americana choose… Dior for the most significant dress of her life?

Taylor Swift may have assembled one of the most star-studded weddings in modern history, but if there's one thing more dazzling than the A-list arrivals, it's the gossip already spilling out.

Some of the world's biggest stars in sports, film and music flocked to Madison Square Garden on Friday night to watch Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce get married.

Taking to Instagram on Saturday, Michelle posted a video with her daughters in honor of Malia turning 28 on July 4 and many felt she looked like the girls' sister rather than their mother in the clip.

Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate "is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland," remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added "It would be disingenuous to say otherwise.") But in 2026 the EU now requires a country-by-country compliance report, and the New York Times notes that Microsoft "was most likely the first major U.S. technology company to make a so-called country by country report of its finances to comply..." Like other big companies, Microsoft uses transactions between subsidiaries to shift profits around to reduce its tax bill. The report revealed a consistent pattern: high returns in low-tax jurisdictions and slim margins in higher-tax ones. The report showed the sometimes absurd results. Microsoft said it had generated almost 40 percent of its pretax income in tax-friendly Ireland, where it employed about 3 percent of its global work force. In higher-tax Germany, the largest economy in Europe, Microsoft earned barely half of 1 percent of its global profits, it said. Excluding Ireland, the company said, it generated less than 2 percent of its worldwide pretax earnings in Europe... [In Luxembourg Microsoft said it had $283 million in pretax income with only 34 employees.] [America's] Internal Revenue Service is challenging profit-shifting transactions used by Microsoft, and is seeking back taxes of nearly $29 billion4. The company has said it disagrees with the I.R.S. and said in a securities filing that it "will vigorously contest" the proposed tax bills. This week a Microsoft blog post offered their own "context," arguing that tax is "one important measure of contribution, but it is not the only one. "Our investments, partnerships, infrastructure, and long-term presence in countries around the world also reflect a commitment to helping strengthen the economies and communities where we operate, today and for the future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The engaged couple, who welcomed a child earlier this year but have not disclosed their name or gender, looked in good spirits as they soaked up the sights.

Some of the A-list guests have offered a first glimpse into how the couple overhauled the space into their own fairytale 'countryside retreat.'

Harry, 32, performed the final date on his London Wembley residency on July 3, the same day his ex was getting married to Travis Kelce thousands of miles away in New York.

MIKE KEEGAN IN MEXICO CITY: FIFA's attempt to bring England's kick-off with Mexico forward by six hours was halted by a series of barriers.

MATTHEW LAMBWELL AT WIMBLEDON: He can't play on Court 18 any longer. Arthur Fery requested his lucky court for this third round match and pulled off an epic, comeback five-set victory.

Defence sources have told The Mail on Sunday the year-long delay to the defence investment plan means it is now 'almost impossible' for the RAF to have a replacement aircraft ready by 2030.

A man who died after plunging from the 13th floor of a seaside tower block in Essex had an 'argument' moments before falling.

The Three Lions face the co-hosts for a place in the quarter-finals at the Azteca Stadium, where Mexico have lost just two of 89 competitive matches and which sits at high altitude.

At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to "better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today." The FSF's summer newsletter shares this update: We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phones supported by the Lineage project, an Android-based volunteer-led mobile phone operating system with much free software already in it. Our current, primary focus is on the radio blobs that control WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, and cellular communications. The software freedom issues with mobile computing have been around for a long time, with the most challenging issue being the baseband/modem firmware that relies heavily on proprietary software. This creates a technical and legal maze that is nearly impossible to break free from, but that doesn't mean we should ever stop working to create free systems. It certainly doesn't mean we shouldn't liberate the software that we know can be free software. Now, half a year into this project, lead developer Rob Savoye has extracted firmware from over 200 Lineage install packages, processed 85GB of files, and imported the results of these analyses into a PostgreSQL database for cross-device comparison... [M]uch of the software and blobs we need to work through are shared across multiple devices; this means even greater strides for mobile phone freedom... As insurmountable as it may seem at times, every blob we manage to free up will be progress. The FSF has proven time and time again that it can bring the free software philosophy to life, not just by advocating for it, but by making it so. The bulletin also describes how waves of botnets from "aggressive LLM scrapers, vulnerability scanners, poorly optimized CI/CD servers" inspired the FSF to create a new free-as-in-freedom automated monitoring tool: In our efforts to combat the botnets, we optimized several detection rules to ban abusive behavior. We found the upper limit of fail2ban and replaced it with reaction, an efficient alternative with our configuration that uses ipset. We also split several monolithic machines into many separate machines so that when a web service is overwhelmed the other functions of the service do not go down with it... We found quite a few ways to respond to and prevent botnet attacks, but still faced a significant related challenge: communicating when a website or service is down... Uptime Kuma is a human-readable, automated monitoring addition to our systems... You can check out our recently-launched self-hosted Uptime Kuma instance at https://status.fsf.org/. When you see the page, you will also likely say, "Wow! The FSF and GNU sure do run a ton of services!" and you would be right... If you maintain websites and services, and are looking for a simple way to communicate publicly with your users, consider using Uptime Kuma or another free software solution instead of choosing a proprietary monitoring solution." There's also an article on the state of free-as-in-freedom videogame console emulators.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sir Sadiq Khan joined thousands on the capital's Pride in London march, as advocates warned rights were 'being taken away from trans people'.

Monaco has long been a favoured home of celebrities, aristocrats and the ultra-rich, with its tax haven status, sun-soaked Mediterranean location and crime-free reputation.

Madison Square Garden has reportedly let go of employees who violated the strict nondisclosure agreement for Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's wedding.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce finally said 'I do' - and it didn't take long for guests to start spilling what happened behind the velvet curtain, including intimate details of the couple's vows.

The Conservatives unveiled a national petition to force Labour Ministers to order the Bank of England to ditch controversial plans for the design of future banknotes.

Benedict's Law will be published by the Department for Education on Monday and follows years of campaigning by the family of Benedict Blythe, who died aged five from anaphylaxis.