These are the most common holiday scams you need to look out for - and how much money you could LOSE
With the summer holidays in full swing and millions of Brits preparing to head away - but there are certain scams that tourists keep on falling for.
Simon Cowell's pal Lucy Spraggan reveals he also considered signing up for SAS: Who Dares Wins but she had to warn him off tough series due to health concerns
Simon Cowell's close pal Lucy Spraggan says the music mogul considered signing up for Channel 4's SAS: Who Dares Wins - but she told him he has 'no chance'.
Denise Richards' daughter Sami Sheen reveals the debilitating mental illness she's battling amid mom's divorce
Sami Sheen, the daughter of Denise Richards and Charlie Sheen, revealed her intense battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in a TikTok clip over the weekend.
Tom Lehrer, Satirical Songwriter and Mathematician, Dies at Age 97
Satirical singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer died Saturday at age 97. The Associated Press notes Lehrer had long ago "largely abandoned his music career to return to teaching math at Harvard and other universities."
Lehrer had remained on the math faculty of the University of California at Santa Cruz well into his late 70s. In 2020, he even turned away from his own copyright, granting the public permission to use his lyrics in any format without any fee in return.
A Harvard prodigy (he had earned a math degree from the institution at age 18), Lehrer soon turned his very sharp mind to old traditions and current events... He'd gotten into performing accidentally when he began to compose songs in the early 1950s to amuse his friends. Soon he was performing them at coffeehouses around Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he remained at Harvard to teach and obtain a master's degree in math. [Lehrer also "spent several years unsuccessfully pursuing a doctorate..."]
He cut his first record in 1953, "Songs by Tom Lehrer"... After a two-year stint in the Army, Lehrer began to perform concerts of his material in venues around the world. In 1959, he released another LP called "More of Tom Lehrer" and a live recording called "An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer," nominated for a Grammy for best comedy performance (musical) in 1960. But around the same time, he largely quit touring and returned to teaching math, though he did some writing and performing on the side. Lehrer said he was never comfortable appearing in public...
He did produce a political satire song each week for the 1964 television show "That Was the Week That Was," a groundbreaking topical comedy show that anticipated "Saturday Night Live" a decade later. He released the songs the following year in an album titled "That Was the Year That Was"... [Lehrer's body of work "was actually quite small," the article notes, "amounting to about three dozen songs."] He also wrote songs for the 1970s educational children's show "The Electric Company." He told AP in 2000 that hearing from people who had benefited from them gave him far more satisfaction than praise for any of his satirical works...
He began to teach part-time at Santa Cruz in the 1970s, mainly to escape the harsh New England winters. From time to time, he acknowledged, a student would enroll in one of his classes based on knowledge of his songs. "But it's a real math class," he said at the time. "I don't do any funny theorems. So those people go away pretty quickly."
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Rio Ferdinand hits out at the BBC's Lionesses coverage after snubbing star pundit for the big game - despite her playing 172 games for England
Rio Ferdinand has hit out at the BBC for omitting a top pundit from their coverage of the UEFA Women's Euro 2025 final. Ferdinand recently stepped away from his own punditry role at TNT.
Taunted to the tune of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, Epping's mums refused to back down: RONAN O'REILLY
Blink and you'd have nearly missed them. It was just after 4pm when the rent-a-crowd from Stand Up To Racism (pictured) descended on The Bell Hotel on the edge of Epping.
Man arrested for scaling fence near White House as bomb squad deployed amid protests
A bomb squad has been deployed to investigate what authorities have called a 'suspicious package' located near the White House.
Shareholder revolt over Wise plans to move listing to New York
Wise's planned departure has been described as a 'hammer blow' to the City and will make it the latest in a string of UK-listed companies upping sticks for the US.
Huawei Shows Off 384-Chip AI Computing System That Rivals Nvidia's Top Product
Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: China's Huawei Technologies showed off an AI computing system on Saturday that can rival Nvidia's most advanced offering, even though the company faces U.S. export restrictions. The CloudMatrix 384 system made its first public debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a three-day event in Shanghai where companies showcase their latest AI innovations, drawing a large crowd to the company's booth. The CloudMatrix 384 incorporates 384 of Huawei's latest 910C chips, optically connected through an all-to-all topology, and outperforms Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 on some metrics, which uses 72 B200 chips, according to SemiAnalysis. A full CloudMatrix system can now deliver 300 PFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, almost double that of the GB200 NVL72. With more than 3.6x aggregate memory capacity and 2.1x more memory bandwidth, Huawei and China "now have AI system capabilities that can beat Nvidia's," according to a report by SemiAnalysis.
The trade-off is that it takes 4.1x the power of a GB200 NVL72, with 2.5x worse power per FLOP, 1.9x worse power per TB/s memory bandwidth, and 1.2x worse power per TB HBM memory capacity, but SemiAnalysis noted that China has no power constraints only chip constraints. Nvidia had announced DGX H100 NVL256 "Ranger" Platform [with 256 GPUs], SemiAnalysis writes, but "decided to not bring it to production due to it being prohibitively expensive, power hungry, and unreliable due to all the optical transceivers required and the two tiers of network.
The CloudMatrix Pod requires an incredible 6,912 400G LPO transceivers for networking, the vast majority of which are for the scaleup network."
Also at this event, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba released a new flagship open-source reasoning model Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 which has "already topped key industry benchmarks, outperforming powerful proprietary systems from rivals like Google and OpenAI," according to industry reports. On the AIME25 benchmark, a test designed to evaluate sophisticated, multi-step problem-solving skills, Qwen3-Thinking-2507 achieved a remarkable score of 92.3. This places it ahead of some of the most powerful proprietary models, notably surpassing Google's Gemini-2.5 Pro, while Qwen3-Thinking secured a top score of 74.1 at LiveCodeBench, comfortably ahead of both Gemini-2.5 Pro and OpenAI's o4-mini, demonstrating its practical utility for developers and engineering teams.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Huawei Shows Off 384-Chip AI Computing System That Rival Nvidia's Top Product
Long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: China's Huawei Technologies showed off an AI computing system on Saturday that can rival Nvidia's most advanced offering, even though the company faces U.S. export restrictions. The CloudMatrix 384 system made its first public debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), a three-day event in Shanghai where companies showcase their latest AI innovations, drawing a large crowd to the company's booth. The CloudMatrix 384 incorporates 384 of Huawei's latest 910C chips, optically connected through an all-to-all topology, and outperforms Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 on some metrics, which uses 72 B200 chips, according to SemiAnalysis. A full CloudMatrix system can now deliver 300 PFLOPs of dense BF16 compute, almost double that of the GB200 NVL72. With more than 3.6x aggregate memory capacity and 2.1x more memory bandwidth, Huawei and China "now have AI system capabilities that can beat Nvidia's," according to a report by SemiAnalysis.
The trade-off is that it takes 4.1x the power of a GB200 NVL72, with 2.5x worse power per FLOP, 1.9x worse power per TB/s memory bandwidth, and 1.2x worse power per TB HBM memory capacity, but SemiAnalysis noted that China has no power constraints only chip constraints. Nvidia had announced DGX H100 NVL256 "Ranger" Platform [with 256 GPUs], SemiAnalysis writes, but "decided to not bring it to production due to it being prohibitively expensive, power hungry, and unreliable due to all the optical transceivers required and the two tiers of network.
The CloudMatrix Pod requires an incredible 6,912 400G LPO transceivers for networking, the vast majority of which are for the scaleup network."
Also at this event, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba released a new flagship open-source reasoning model Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 which has "already topped key industry benchmarks, outperforming powerful proprietary systems from rivals like Google and OpenAI," according to industry reports. On the AIME25 benchmark, a test designed to evaluate sophisticated, multi-step problem-solving skills, Qwen3-Thinking-2507 achieved a remarkable score of 92.3. This places it ahead of some of the most powerful proprietary models, notably surpassing Google's Gemini-2.5 Pro, while Qwen3-Thinking secured a top score of 74.1 at LiveCodeBench, comfortably ahead of both Gemini-2.5 Pro and OpenAI's o4-mini, demonstrating its practical utility for developers and engineering teams.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Luke Littler celebrates making darts history - and £200k payday - on stage with his girlfriend... after confirming relationship with subtle gesture on live TV
The 18-year-old secured £200,000 in prize money and became the youngest player ever to complete darts' prestigious Triple Crown, by defeating James Wade 18-13.
Protesters in Epping 'want their voices heard' and 'won't stop' until migrant hotel is closed as 'two tier' Starmer starts snooping on social posts
Over 1,000 are expected outside The Bell Hotel amid a growing clamour for it to be closed after an Ethiopian asylum seeker staying there was charged with sexually assaulting a schoolgirl.
Sopranos star reveals mental health issues almost 'destroyed' his life
A Sopranos star has revealed his struggle with mental health issues nearly 'destroyed' his life and family.
Shirtless Tom Brady shows off ripped physique on yacht in Ibiza as NFL legend, 47, enjoys offseason vacation
Fox Sports analyst and seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback Tom Brady was spotted enjoying himself in the sun off the coast of Spain.
Jennifer Lopez's skirt DROPS to the floor in shock wardrobe malfunction on stage: 'I'm glad I had underwear on'
Jennifer Lopez didn't let anything like a little wardrobe malfunction upset her performance in Warsaw on Friday.
The Lionesses' smiling assassin - with her wedding photos on her shinpads: Why 'unique' Chloe Kelly doesn't miss when the big moments come after firing England to the Euros crown AGAIN
TARA ANSON-WALSH: An eerie calm descends on the Letzigrund Stadium as Chloe Kelly walks into the penalty area to take England 's fifth spot-kick against Sweden i the quarter-finals.
England 1-1 Spain AET (3-1 pens): Lionesses WIN Women's Euros - again! - after dramatic penalty shootout as Chloe Kelly bags winning spot kick
IAN HERBERT AT ST JAKOB-PARK: As the sun began to set across this stadium on Sunday night, Chloe Kelly stepped up to the penalty spot with a look of absolute certainty on her face.
Researchers Quietly Planned a Test to Dim Sunlight Over 3,900 Square Miles
California researchers planned a multimillion-dollar test of salt water-spraying equipment that could one day be used to dim the sun's rays — over a 3,900-square mile are off the west coasts of North America, Chile or south-central Africa. E&E News calls it part of a "secretive" initiative backed by "wealthy philanthropists with ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley" — and a piece of the "vast scope of research aimed at finding ways to counter the Earth's warming, work that has often occurred outside public view."
"At such scales, meaningful changes in clouds will be readily detectable from space," said a 2023 research plan from the [University of Washington's] Marine Cloud Brightening Program. The massive experiment would have been contingent upon the successful completion of the thwarted pilot test on the carrier deck in Alameda, according to the plan.... Before the setback in Alameda, the team had received some federal funding and hoped to gain access to government ships and planes, the documents show.
The university and its partners — a solar geoengineering research advocacy group called SilverLining and the scientific nonprofit SRI International — didn't respond to detailed questions about the status of the larger cloud experiment. But SilverLining's executive director, Kelly Wanser, said in an email that the Marine Cloud Brightening Program aimed to "fill gaps in the information" needed to determine if the technologies are safe and effective.âIn the initial experiment, the researchers appeared to have disregarded past lessons about building community support for studies related to altering the climate, and instead kept their plans from the public and lawmakers until the testing was underway, some solar geoengineering experts told E&E News. The experts also expressed surprise at the size of the planned second experiment....
The program does not "recommend, support or develop plans for the use of marine cloud brightening to alter weather or climate," Sarah Doherty, an atmospheric and climate science professor at the university who leads the program, said in a statement to E&E News. She emphasized that the program remains focused on researching the technology, not deploying it. There are no "plans for conducting large-scale studies that would alter weather or climate," she added.
"More than 575 scientists have called for a ban on geoengineering development," according to the article, "because it 'cannot be governed globally in a fair, inclusive, and effective manner.'" But "Some scientists believe that the perils of climate change are too dire to not pursue the technology, which they say can be safely tested in well-designed experiments... "
"If we really were serious about the idea that to do any controversial topic needs some kind of large-scale consensus before we can research the topic, I think that means we don't research topics," David Keith, a geophysical sciences professor at the University of Chicago, said at a think tank discussion last month... "The studies that the program is pursuing are scientifically sound and would be unlikely to alter weather patterns — even for the Puerto Rico-sized test, said Daniele Visioni, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Cornell University. Nearly 30 percent of the planet is already covered by clouds, he noted.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
From agony to ecstasy: Lionesses fans had heads in hands before Euros penalty shoot-out glory saw crowd explode in celebration
Fans who had gathered in south London to cheer them over the line had been through every emotion when sheer relief and euphoria took over at the end of an eventful shoot-out.
Homeowners forced to fork out tens of thousands after their £400k newbuild was left destroyed by extreme flooding
Families thought they had bought their dream homes with expansive views across the western fells of the Lake District.