Five MSPs were 'secretly filmed by camera hidden in Holyrood toilets'
At least five male MSPs have been contacted by police as potential victims of an alleged secret camera in a Holyrood toilet, it has been reported.
Moment Eastern European 'Bonnie & Clyde' steal £5K Rolex and jewels and cash... as they hit THREE jewellery shops across UK in a month
The pair are understood to have targeted two jewellers in the West Yorkshire town of Bradford and at least one in nearby Huddersfield on the same day last week.
Beta Blockers for Heart Attack Survivors: May Have No Benefit for Most, Could Actually Harm Women
"A class of drugs called beta-blockers — used for decades as a first-line treatment after a heart attack — doesn't benefit the vast majority of patients," reports CNN. And in fact beta-blockers "may contribute to a higher risk of hospitalization and death in some women but not in men, according to groundbreaking new research..."
Women with little heart damage after their heart attacks who were treated with beta-blockers were significantly more likely to have another heart attack or be hospitalized for heart failure — and nearly three times more likely to die — compared with women not given the drug, according to a study published in the European Heart Journal and also scheduled to be presented Saturday at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Madrid... The findings, however, only applied to women with a left ventricular ejection fraction above 50%, which is considered normal function, the study said. Ejection fraction is a way of measuring how well the left side of the heart is pumping oxygenated blood throughout the body. For anyone with a score below 40% after a heart attack, beta-blockers continue to be the standard of care due to their ability to calm heart arrhythmias that may trigger a second event...
The analysis on women was part of a much larger clinical trial called REBOOT — Treatment with Beta-Blockers after Myocardial Infarction without Reduced Ejection Fraction — which followed 8,505 men and women treated for heart attacks at 109 hospitals in Spain and Italy for nearly four years. Results of the study were published in Mem>The New England Journal of Medicine and also presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress. None of the patients in the trial had a left ventricular ejection fraction below 40%, a sign of potential heart failure. "We found no benefit in using beta-blockers for men or women with preserved heart function after heart attack despite this being the standard of care for some 40 years," said Fuster, former editor-in-chief of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and past president of the American Heart Association and the World Health Federation...
In fact, most men and women who survive heart attacks today have ejection fractions above 50%, Ibáñez said [Dr. Borja Ibáñez, scientific director for Madrid's National Center for Cardiovascular Investigation]. "Yet at this time, some 80% of patients in the US, Europe and Asia are treated with beta-blockers because medical guidelines still recommend them...."
While the study did not find any need to use beta-blockers for people with a left ventricular ejection fraction above 50% after a heart attack, a separate meta-analysis of 1,885 patients published Saturday in The Lancet did find benefits for those with scores between 40% and 50%, in which the heart may be mildly damaged. "This subgroup did benefit from a routine use of beta-blockers," said Ibáñez, who was also a coauthor on this paper. "We found about a 25% reduction in the primary endpoint, which was a composite of new heart attacks, heart failure and all-cause death."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Turkish trans drag queen is among 'global talent' being handed special British visas
Kübra Uzun has received the coveted visa and is a transgender drag artist and 'LGBTQIA+ rights activist' from Istanbul, who goes by the stage name of Q-BRA.
Lil Nas X's father reveals star's heartbreaking request from jail after nude public 'breakdown' and arrest
The 26-year-old music artist spent multiple days in jail last week for stripping nude on a major street in Los Angeles and allegedly assaulting police officers.
The Essex pier a 'must visit attraction' named among the best in the UK
It comes after it was recognised as one of the best amusement parks in Europe
Tributes to Scientist among the death and funeral notices from Essex Chronicle this week
Our thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one
It's time for a United Ireland. The government in Dublin don't want to discuss this but they must... and reunification talks need to begin immediately: ARCHBISHOP EAMON MARTIN
Archbishop Eamon Martin does not believe a United Ireland inevitably leads to a return to violence.
Internet sleuths reveal millionaire CEO is 'jerk' tennis fan who snatched US Open star's hat away from child
Piotr Szczerek has been named online as the top chief executive at the centre of the furore, after a viral video appeared to show him swiping the memento from the child.
Sadistic crimes of the 'Brookyln Vampire': How 'Grey Man' cannibal serial killer strangled girl, 10, then wrote to her mother revealing which body parts he had cooked and eaten
He not only murdered, but mutilated and cannibalised children, leaving a trail of letters and confessions that shocked even seasoned detectives.
Are AI Web Crawlers 'Destroying Websites' In Their Hunt for Training Data?
"AI web crawlers are strip-mining the web in their perpetual hunt for ever more content to feed into their Large Language Model mills," argues Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at the Register.
And "when AI searchbots, with Meta (52% of AI searchbot traffic), Google (23%), and OpenAI (20%) leading the way, clobber websites with as much as 30 Terabits in a single surge, they're damaging even the largest companies' site performance..."
How much traffic do they account for? According to Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN) force, 30% of global web traffic now comes from bots. Leading the way and growing fast? AI bots... Anyone who runs a website, though, knows there's a huge, honking difference between the old-style crawlers and today's AI crawlers. The new ones are site killers. Fastly warns that they're causing "performance degradation, service disruption, and increased operational costs." Why? Because they're hammering websites with traffic spikes that can reach up to ten or even twenty times normal levels within minutes.
Moreover, AI crawlers are much more aggressive than standard crawlers. As the InMotionhosting web hosting company notes, they also tend to disregard crawl delays or bandwidth-saving guidelines and extract full page text, and sometimes attempt to follow dynamic links or scripts. The result? If you're using a shared server for your website, as many small businesses do, even if your site isn't being shaken down for content, other sites on the same hardware with the same Internet pipe may be getting hit. This means your site's performance drops through the floor even if an AI crawler isn't raiding your website...
AI crawlers don't direct users back to the original sources. They kick our sites around, return nothing, and we're left trying to decide how we're to make a living in the AI-driven web world. Yes, of course, we can try to fend them off with logins, paywalls, CAPTCHA challenges, and sophisticated anti-bot technologies. You know one thing AI is good at? It's getting around those walls. As for robots.txt files, the old-school way of blocking crawlers? Many — most? — AI crawlers simply ignore them... There are efforts afoot to supplement robots.txt with llms.txt files. This is a proposed standard to provide LLM-friendly content that LLMs can access without compromising the site's performance. Not everyone is thrilled with this approach, though, and it may yet come to nothing.
In the meantime, to combat excessive crawling, some infrastructure providers, such as Cloudflare, now offer default bot-blocking services to block AI crawlers and provide mechanisms to deter AI companies from accessing their data.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
I thought it was a joke when I was told my best friend Kate Spade had taken her own life. This is the last thing she said to me - and what the woman behind the brand was really like
Kate Spade's iconic accessories gave her fame and fortune... yet in 2018 she took her own life. Now the woman who really knew her reveals the truth of the private person.
Fresh twist as friends of Freddy Brazier reveal his surprising next move following baby news... and tell KATIE HIND of key role his father Jeff is playing
As I revealed in yesterday's Mail on Sunday, Freddy is preparing to become a dad himself, as an ex-girlfriend of his is expecting their baby.
Teen used ChatGPT for homework help... it ended up persuading him to take his own life, lawsuit claims
Adam Raine, 16, died by suicide on April 11 after spending the preceding seven months talking with ChatGPT about self harm in graphic detail, per a wrongful death lawsuit filed by his family.
Starmer's new economic adviser who has backed new taxes on inheritance and the targeting of pensions - as fears of huge Labour tax hikes grow
Baroness Minouche Shafik is set to be hired as the Prime Minister's chief economic adviser in the latest revamp of No 10's top team.
Comedian Ed Byrne's quiet life in Essex village 'home to a dragon'
There's been many alleged sightings of dragons
Donald Trump continues to defy nasty health rumours as he heads out to play golf for second day in a row
President Trump was spotted heading out to play golf on Sunday morning as bogus conspiracy theories about his health continue to swirl online.
Experts predict Millie Bobby Brown, 21, could inspire Gen Z and millennials to adopt
Experts believe her decision could spark a ripple effect, inspiring younger generations to expand their view of what family can look like and what it truly means to be 'ready' for parenthood.
What Happened When Unix Co-Creator Brian Kernighan Tried Rust?
"I'm still teaching at Princeton," 83-year-old Brian Kernighan recently told an audience at New Jersey's InfoAge Science and History Museums.
And last month the video was uploaded to YouTube, a new article points out, "showing that his talk ended with a unique question-and-answer session that turned almost historic..."
"Do you think there's any sort of merit to Rust replacing C?" one audience member asked... "Or is this just a huge hype bubble that's waiting to die down...?"
'"I have written only one Rust program, so you should take all of this with a giant grain of salt," he said. "And I found it a — pain... I just couldn't grok the mechanisms that were required to do memory safety, in a program where memory wasn't even an issue!" Speaking of Rust, Kernighan said "The support mechanism that went with it — this notion of crates and barrels and things like that — was just incomprehensibly big and slow. And the compiler was slow, the code that came out was slow..."
All in all, Kernighan had had a bad experience. "When I tried to figure out what was going on, the language had changed since the last time somebody had posted a description! And so it took days to write a program which in other languages would take maybe five minutes..." It was his one and only experience with the language, so Kernighan acknowledged that when it comes to Rust "I'm probably unduly cynical. "But I'm — I don't think it's gonna replace C right away, anyway."
Kernighan was also asked about NixOS and HolyC — but his formative experiences remain rooted in Bell Labs starts in the 1970s, where he remembers it was "great fun to hang out with these people."
And he acknowledged that the descendants of Unix now power nearly every cellphone. "I find it intriguing... And I also find it kind of irritating that underneath there is a system that I could do things with — but I can't get at it!"
Kernighan answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2009 and again in 2015...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Mom 'intentionally' left 15-month-old baby in sweltering 95F car to die while she worked
Vanessa Esquivel (pictured), 27, has been charged with murder after her 15-month-old child died in a hot car while she went to work.