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Rachel Kelly answers our burning questions, what's she reading now, what would she take to a desert island, what gave her the reading bug, and what book left her cold?

Anthony Cummins reviews the best Literary Fiction out now.

Sara Lawrence reviews the best Contemporary fiction out now.

Gin with breakfast, animal abuse and a £1m fortune. A new book says that, far from being penniless eccentrics, the Durrells were just cruel colonisers.

In her poignant book, Caroline Elton recounts the highs and lows of caring for her autistic brother, Lionel.

Geoffrey Wansell reviews the best Thrillers out now.

Anthropic cut AI coding assistant Windsurf's direct access to its Claude models after media reported that rival OpenAI plans to acquire the startup for $3 billion. Anthropic co-founder Jared Kaplan told TechCrunch that "it would be odd for us to be selling Claude to OpenAI," explaining the decision to cut access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.7 Sonnet models.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elon Musk spread an outlandish conspiracy theory about Donald Trump amid their bromance break up.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, was charged Thursday with 118 counts, including attempted murder and assault, after allegedly injuring at least 15 people in an anti-Zionist- attack in Boulder last weekend

When Kanisha Collins, 24, was diagnosed with pancreatitis at Royal Chesterfield Hospital in December, she didn't think to question their expert judgment.

American Pie star Jason Biggs has opened up about his past battle with drugs and alcohol - which was so bad he ended up doing cocaine out of a trash can. 

Circle Internet Group surged 168% in its NYSE debut, raising nearly $1.1 billion after pricing its IPO at $31 and opening at $69. "At one point, shares traded as high as $103.75," notes CNBC. From the report: The New York-based company priced its IPO late Wednesday far above this week's expected range of $27 to $28, and an initial range last week of between $24 and $26, valuing the company at some $6.8 billion before trading began. Trading volume by the end of the session was about 46 million, far exceeding the number of freely floating shares available for trading. Circle joins Coinbase, Mara Holdings and Riot Platforms as one of the few pure-play crypto companies to list in the U.S. This marks the company's second attempt at going public. A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. "To realize our vision, we needed to forge relationships with governments, we needed to work with policymakers ... because if you want this to work for mainstream, it's got to work in mainstream society and you need to have those rules of the road," CEO Jeremy Allaire told CNBC's "Money Movers" on Thursday. "We've been one of the most licensed, regulated, compliant, transparent companies in the entire history of this industry, and that's served us well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Kremlin turned its sights on Britain on Thursday with its ambassador Andrei Kelin insisting the UK military's advanced technology helped Ukraine to hit targets inside Russia.

Elon Musk has just taken his new feud with President Trump is the next level, essentially promising to strand NASA's astronauts on the International Space Station.

Plus: Plankey's confirmation process 'temporarily delayed'

Sean Cairncross, President Donald Trump's nominee to serve as national cyber director, doubled down on taking offensive cyber actions against foreign adversaries during a Senate homeland security committee nomination hearing on Thursday, and refused to condemn the president's proposed cuts to the main US cyber defense agency.…

Darren Shuttleworth-Long, 52, from Swindon was sleeping peacefully next to the banned breed on his sofa on April 26, but was woken up after it started biting him.

The multi-millionaire businessman said he no longer believed that working for Reform to win power at the next general election was 'a good use of my time'.

A neighbour is complaining that not only have we removed their fence, but that our new fence is so high we should have got planning permission.

Cheers icon George Wendt's cause of death has been revealed two weeks after his shock passing aged 76.

According to 9to5Mac, "Apple is working on supporting the ability to export notes in Markdown from Apple notes, which is something third-party apps have supported for years." Apple enthusiast and co-creator of the Markdown markup language, John Gruber, is not a fan. From a blog post: Some people find this surprising, but I personally don't want to use a Markdown notes app. I created Markdown two decades ago and have used it ever since for one thing and one thing only: writing for the web at Daring Fireball. My original description of what it is still stands: "Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers." Perhaps an even better description of Markdown is Matthew Butterick's, from the documentation for Pollen: "Markdown is a simplified notation system for HTML." The other great use case for Markdown is in a context where you either need or just want to be saving to a plain text file or database field. That's not what Apple Notes is or should be. I can see why many technically-minded people want to use Markdown "everywhere." It's quite gratifying that Markdown has not only become so popular, but after 21 years, seemingly continues to grow in popularity, to the point now where there clearly are a lot of people who seemingly enjoy writing in Markdown more than even I do. But I think it would be a huge mistake for Apple to make Apple Notes a "Markdown editor," even as an option. It's trivial to create malformed Markdown syntax; it shouldn't be possible to have a malformed note in Apple Notes. I craft posts for Daring Fireball; I dash off notes in Apple Notes. [...] But Markdown export from Notes? That sounds awesome. Frankly, perhaps the biggest problem with Apple Notes is that its export functionality is rather crude -- PDF and, of all formats, Pages. Exporting and/or copying the selected text as Markdown would be pretty cool. Very curious to see how they handle images though, if this rumor is true.

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