The Essex village that's 'slowly moving on' after family murdered 40 years ago
A TV dramatisation of the murders brought the village back into the spotlight
Olly Murs says 'we've been trying for years' as he offers insight into Mark Wright friendship
Olly Murs has joked that his pal Mark Wright is 'jealous' of him and his new ripped body - and that they have been 'trying for years' to double date before his second child is born
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu claims Gaza City expansion plan is 'best way to end the war'
Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed his plan to take over Gaza City is the 'best way to end the war' in the Middle East.
Google fixing Gemini so it doesn't channel paranoid androids quite so often
Brain the size of a planet and probably trained on Sci-Fi that’s full of anxious and depressed robots
Google is aware that its Gemini AI chatbot can sometimes castigate itself harshly for failing to solve a problem and plans to fix it.…
How 12 'Enola Gay' Crew Members Remember Dropping the Atomic Bomb
Last week saw the 80th anniversary of a turning point in World War II: the day America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
"Twelve men were on that flight..." remembers the online magazine Mental Floss, adding "Almost all had something to say after the war."
The group was segregated from the rest of the military and trained in secret. Even those in the group only knew as much as they needed to know in order to perform their duties. The group deployed to Tinian in 1945 with 15 B-29 bombers, flight crews, ground crews, and other personnel, a total of about 1770 men. The mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (special mission 13) involved seven planes, but the one we remember was the Enola Gay.
Air Force captain Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk did not know the destructive force of the nuclear bomb before Hiroshima. He was 24 years old at that time, a veteran of 58 missions in North Africa. Paul Tibbets told him this mission would shorten or end the war, but Van Kirk had heard that line before. Hiroshima made him a believer. Van Kirk felt the bombing of Hiroshima was worth the price in that it ended the war before the invasion of Japan, which promised to be devastating to both sides. " I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese."
In 2005, Van Kirk came as close as he ever got to regret. "I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life..."
Many of the other crewmembers also felt the bomb ultimately saved lives.
The Washington Post has also published a new oral history of the flight after it took off from Tinian Island. The oral history was assembled for a new book published this week titled The Devil Reached Toward the Sky: An Oral History of the Making and Unleashing of the Atomic Bomb..
Col. Paul W. Tibbets, lead pilot of the Enola Gay: We were only eight minutes off the ground when Capt. William S. "Deak" Parsons and Lt. Morris R. Jeppson lowered themselves into the bomb bay to insert a slug of uranium and the conventional explosive charge into the core of the strange-looking weapon. I wondered why we were calling it ''Little Boy." Little Boy was 28 inches in diameter and 12 feet long. Its weight was a little more than 9,000 pounds. With its coat of dull gunmetal paint, it was an ugly monster...
Lt. Morris R. Jeppson, crew member of the Enola Gay: Parsons was second-in-command of the military in the Manhattan Project. The Little Boy weapon was Parsons's design. He was greatly concerned that B-29s loaded with conventional bombs were crashing at the ends of runways on Tinian during takeoff and that such an event could cause the U-235 projectile in the gun of Little Boy to fly down the barrel and into the U-235 target. This could have caused a low-level nuclear explosion on Tinian...
Jeppson: On his own, Parsons decided that he would go on the Hiroshima mission and that he would load the gun after the Enola Gay was well away from Tinian.
Tibbets: That way, if we crashed, we would lose only the airplane and crew, himself included... Jeppson held the flashlight while Parsons struggled with the mechanism of the bomb, inserting the explosive charge that would send one block of uranium flying into the other to set off the instant chain reaction that would create the atomic explosion.
The navigator on one of the other six planes on the mission remember that watching the mushroom cloud, "There was almost complete silence on the flight deck. It was evident the city of Hiroshima was destroyed."
And the Enola Gay's copilot later remembered thinking: "My God, what have we done?"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Essex school set to demolish and rebuild building after 'severe flood damage'
Plans have been resubmitted after concerns about the building being too close to homes
Jennifer Lopez's concert crashed by grasshopper as insect crawls up her NECK in nerve-wrecking moment
The 56-year-old pop diva even smiled broadly as the little insect made its way down to her cleavage-boosting halter top
Former Trump adviser says Putin will walk out of Alaska summit as a 'loser'
Robert O'Brien, who served as a national security adviser in President Donald Trump 's first administration, has claimed that Putin will walk out of his summit with Trump a 'loser.'
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Antiques Roadshow: VJ Day Special on BBC1: Poignant keepsakes of the Forgotten Army brought a lump to the throat...
The words are inscribed on war memorials across the country: 'When you go home, tell them of us and say, For your tomorrow, we gave our today.'
Hospice leader in mid Essex appointed as chief executive after months in interim role
Michelle Kabia has been confirmed as the permanent chief executive of Farleigh Hospice.
Bride slammed for 'tacky' and 'cringe' note to wedding guests ahead of the big day: 'Horrible idea'
A bride-to-be has been 'torn apart' over a 'tacky' and 'cringe' note she sent out to guests who declined her wedding invitation or failed to RSVP on time.
Nvidia and AMD reportedly chipping in to Washington’s coffers with 15 percent fee for China sales
Trump administration’s licenses come with an IOU
Nvidia and AMD will reportedly be allowed to resume sales in China if they cough a license fee amounting to 15 percent of sales.…
Shane Warne's son reveals the cheeky restaurant move his cricket legend dad pulled - and every Aussie wishes they could do it
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How Python is Fighting Open Source's 'Phantom' Dependencies Problem
Since 2023 the Python Software Foundation has had a Security Developer-in-Residence (sponsored by the Open Source Security Foundation's vulnerability-finding "Alpha-Omega" project). And he's just published a new 11-page white paper about open source's "phantom dependencies" problem — suggesting a way to solve it.
"Phantom" dependencies aren't tracked with packaging metadata, manifests, or lock files, which makes them "not discoverable" by tools like vulnerability scanners or compliance and policy tools. So Python security developer-in-residence Seth Larson authored a recently-accepted Python Enhancement Proposal offering an easy way for packages to provide metadata through Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOMs). From the whitepaper:
Python Enhancement Proposal 770 is backwards compatible and can be enabled by default by tools, meaning most projects won't need to manually opt in to begin generating valid PEP 770 SBOM metadata. Python is not the only software package ecosystem affected by the "Phantom Dependency" problem. The approach using SBOMs for metadata can be remixed and adopted by other packaging ecosystems looking to record ecosystem-agnostic software metadata...
Within Endor Labs' [2023 dependencies] report, Python is named as one of the most affected packaging ecosystems by the "Phantom Dependency" problem. There are multiple reasons that Python is particularly affected:
- There are many methods for interfacing Python with non-Python software, such
as through the C-API or FFI. Python can "wrap" and expose an easy-to-use
Python API for software written in other languages like C, C++, Rust, Fortran,
Web Assembly, and more.
- Python is the premier language for scientific computing and artificial
intelligence, meaning many high-performance libraries written in system
languages need to be accessed from Python code.
- Finally, Python packages have a distribution type called a "wheel", which is
essentially a zip file that is "installed" by being unzipped into a directory,
meaning there is no compilation step allowed during installation. This is great
for being able to inspect a package before installation, but it means that all
compiled languages need to be pre-compiled into binaries before installation...
When designing a new package metadata standard, one of the top concerns is reducing the amount of effort required from the mostly volunteer maintainers of packaging tools and the thousands of projects being published to the Python Package Index... By defining PEP 770 SBOM metadata as using a directory of files, rather than a new metadata field, we were able to side-step all the implementation pain...
We'll be working to submit issues on popular open source SBOM and vulnerability scanning tools, and gradually, Phantom Dependencies will become less of an issue for the Python package ecosystem.
The white paper "details the approach, challenges, and insights into the creation and acceptance of PEP 770 and adopting Software Bill-of-Materials (SBOMs) to improve the measurability of Python packages," explains an announcement from the Python Software Foundation. And the white paper ends with a helpful note.
"Having spoken to other open source packaging ecosystem maintainers, we have come to learn that other ecosystems have similar issues with Phantom Dependencies. We welcome other packaging ecosystems to adopt Python's approach with PEP 770 and are willing to provide guidance on the implementation."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Environment groups are too white and middle class, says green boss
Asad Rehman (pictured), who became the first person of colour to lead Friends of the Earth this week, said more needed to be done as he pledged to develop a diverse movement.
One of Britain's worst paedophiles dead at 72: Monster who filmed himself abusing children as young as three dies in prison
Anthony Barron, formerly of Grove, Oxfordshire, was sentenced to life in prison in 2007 after pleading guilty to 87 charges of sexual offences against children.
I was eight when a serial killer strangled me. As I watched him butcher my family... I knew what I had to do
Shasta Groene was eight years old when serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan III butchered her family and spent weeks torturing her in the woods, where he also killed her brother. A new book tells her story
Wave goodbye to 'Wet Wipe Island': First mass removal from the River Thames is launched to clear London's 180-ton problem
The underwater 'island', which is the size of two tennis courts and weighs the same as two double decker buses, is said to have harmed the wildlife and ecology of the river.
Up, up and away! Skies above Bristol fill with dinosaurs, aliens and cows for annual balloon festival
Hundreds of dedicated early risers were up at dawn on Sunday to enjoy Bristol's annual balloon festival - as the skies were filled with dinosaurs, aliens and cows over the weekend.
Revealed: The reason why Gen Z are breaking the bank to go on holiday... and how much they go over budget
Holidays used to be about making memories. But for younger generations, this is the real reason they are breaking the bank to go abroad.