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Officials were supposedly forced to replace 66 hand-sewn Stars and Stripes flags last month, at a cost of £800 each, ahead of the President's three-day visit in September.

In the past few days there has been a sudden and alarming coarsening of political language. Words and phrases have been tossed about which until now were almost entirely alien to our traditions.

There are a number of RSPCA branches in Essex, along with the affiliated Danaher Animal Home, with pets looking for forever homes.

Surrounded by beautiful countryside, this tranquil patch of Essex has often hosted some of the biggest names in music

There are a number of RSPCA branches in Essex, along with the affiliated Danaher Animal Home, with pets looking for forever homes.

A VITAL bus service has reduced its route and will now finish seven miles short of its previous destination.

In an appalling new race scandal, a group of Scotland Yard officers were also caught on camera dismissing rape victims and revelling in the use of force.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Thinking Machines Lab,a heavily funded startup cofounded by prominent researchers from OpenAI, has revealed its first product -- a tool called Tinker that automates the creation of custom frontier AI models. "We believe [Tinker] will help empower researchers and developers to experiment with models and will make frontier capabilities much more accessible to all people," said Mira Murati, cofounder and CEO of Thinking Machines, in an interview with WIRED ahead of the announcement. Big companies and academic labs already fine-tune open source AI models to create new variants that are optimized for specific tasks, like solving math problems, drafting legal agreements, or answering medical questions. Typically, this work involves acquiring and managing clusters of GPUs and using various software tools to ensure that large-scale training runs are stable and efficient. Tinker promises to allow more businesses, researchers, and even hobbyists to fine-tune their own AI models by automating much of this work. Essentially, the team is betting that helping people fine-tune frontier models will be the next big thing in AI. And there's reason to believe they might be right. Thinking Machines Lab is helmed by researchers who played a core role in the creation of ChatGPT. And, compared to similar tools on the market, Tinker is more powerful and user friendly, according to beta testers I spoke with. Murati says that Thinking Machines Lab hopes to demystify the work involved in tuning the world's most powerful AI models and make it possible for more people to explore the outer limits of AI. "We're making what is otherwise a frontier capability accessible to all, and that is completely game-changing," she says. "There are a ton of smart people out there, and we need as many smart people as possible to do frontier AI research." "There's a bunch of secret magic, but we give people full control over the training loop," OpenAI veteran John Schulman says. "We abstract away the distributed training details, but we still give people full control over the data and the algorithms."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A social media headline published to our Facebook page stated that 'Scientists finally admit Covid vaccines were ineffective'. This did not accurately reflect the full headline or the content of the article...

Discovers debt it didn’t fully understand, leaving skilled migrants and students in limbo

New Zealand’s Institute of IT Professionals has discovered it is insolvent and advised members it has no alternative but to enter liquidation.…

Volodymyr Zelensky warned of the danger after part of the site, which must be powered up to stop further spread of radioactive materials, was forced to run on two diesel generators.

Food delivery rider Diego Galdino has begun taking the law into his own hands to try and stop pickpockets terrorising the streets of the capital.

Renewables generated 54% of the EU's net electricity in Q2 2025, with solar power emerging as the leading source at nearly 20% of the total mix. Electrek reports: According to new data from Eurostat, renewable energy sources generated 54% of the EU's net electricity in Q2 2025, up from 52.7% year-over-year. The growth came mainly from solar, which produced 122,317 gigawatt-hours (GWh) -- nearly 20% of the total electricity generation mix. June 2025 was a milestone month: Solar became the EU's single largest electricity source for the first time ever. It supplied 22% of all power that month, edging out nuclear (21.6%), wind (15.8%), hydro (14.1%), and natural gas (13.8%). [...] In total, 15 EU countries saw their share of renewable generation rise year-over-year. Luxembourg (+13.5 percentage points) and Belgium (+9.1 pp) posted the most significant gains, driven largely by solar power growth. Across the EU, solar made up 36.8% of renewable generation, followed by wind at 29.5%, hydro at 26%, biomass at 7.3%, and geothermal at 0.4%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Blake Lively looked very slender in new photos shared with her Instagram followers this week as she continues her social media return amid her legal war with Justin Baldoni. 

Meghan Markle's estranged father has revealed he is 'fine' after fears a huge earthquake had trapped him on 19th floor of his Philippines apartment block.

Researchers have unveiled two new hardware-based attacks, Battering RAM and Wiretap, that break Intel SGX and AMD SEV-SNP trusted enclaves by exploiting deterministic encryption and physical interposers. Ars Technica reports: In the age of cloud computing, protections baked into chips from Intel, AMD, and others are essential for ensuring confidential data and sensitive operations can't be viewed or manipulated by attackers who manage to compromise servers running inside a data center. In many cases, these protections -- which work by storing certain data and processes inside encrypted enclaves known as TEEs (Trusted Execution Enclaves) -- are essential for safeguarding secrets stored in the cloud by the likes of Signal Messenger and WhatsApp. All major cloud providers recommend that customers use it. Intel calls its protection SGX, and AMD has named it SEV-SNP. Over the years, researchers have repeatedly broken the security and privacy promises that Intel and AMD have made about their respective protections. On Tuesday, researchers independently published two papers laying out separate attacks that further demonstrate the limitations of SGX and SEV-SNP. One attack, dubbed Battering RAM, defeats both protections and allows attackers to not only view encrypted data but also to actively manipulate it to introduce software backdoors or to corrupt data. A separate attack known as Wiretap is able to passively decrypt sensitive data protected by SGX and remain invisible at all times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People living on Canal Side, in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, say they are fed up of van-dwellers pitching up on a 500m stretch of road which allows overnight parking.

The British West End star, 38, previously joined the show as a guest judge in 2021, and is set to appear once again as part of Movie Week later this month.

The model, 27, showed off her famous pins in a tiny pair of Adidas shorts and a leather overcoat as she headed out for the evening.

Apple has paused development of a cheaper, lighter Vision Pro headset to shift resources toward AI-powered smart glasses aimed at competing with Meta. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports: The company had been preparing a cheaper, lighter variant of its headset -- code-named N100 -- for release in 2027. But Apple announced internally last week that it's moving staff from that project to accelerate work on glasses, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The company is working on at least two types of smart glasses. The first one, dubbed N50, will pair with an iPhone and lack its own display. Apple aims to unveil this model as soon as next year, ahead of a release in 2027, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Apple is also working on a version with a display -- something that could challenge the just-released Meta Ray-Ban Display. The Apple version had been planned for 2028, but the company is now looking to accelerate development, the people said. [...] Apple's glasses will rely heavily on voice interaction and artificial intelligence -- two areas where it hasn't always excelled. It was slow to introduce the Apple Intelligence platform and had to delay upgrades to its Siri voice assistant. The Apple glasses are expected to come in a variety of styles and run a new chip. They'll include speakers for music playback, cameras for media recording, and voice-control features that will work with a connected phone. Apple has also been exploring a suite of health-tracking capabilities for the device. The priority shift to glasses is just the latest change to the company's headset strategy following an underwhelming debut by the Vision Pro. The $3,499 product, which melds virtual and augmented reality, is seen as too heavy and expensive to be a mainstream hit. It's also short on both video content and apps. Apple executives have acknowledged the product's shortcomings in private, viewing it as an overengineered piece of technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.