Aggregator

They are a former child star who landed a memorable role in Casualty at age 11.

Senior Republicans called on the new President to intervene in the £9 billion deal, which would see the UK hand over the Indian Ocean islands to Mauritius.

The nine-page document, which was published online last year also stated that 'black mark' was no longer deemed acceptable as part of expressions that use 'black in a negative way'.

The walkers - an American and a Canadian citizen - were rambling through the Jacumba Wilderness on Wednesday when they were ambushed.

The Labour Chancellor was probed with the question by Laura Kuenssberg on the BBC this morning where Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch also received a grilling.

Wynne Evans was caught on film by The Mail on Sunday making a vile sexual comment about one of the show's female hosts, it emerged on Saturday.

For the first time in America, an empty self-driving car has been involved in a fatal collision. But it was "hit from behind by a speeding car that was going about 98 miles per hour," a local news site reports, citing comments from Waymo. ("Two other victims were taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. A dog also died in the crash, according to the San Francisco Fire Department.") Waymo's self-driving car "is not being blamed," notes NBC Bay Area. Instead the Waymo car was one of six vehicles "struck when a fast-moving vehicle slammed into a line of cars stopped at a traffic light..." The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration requires self-driving car companies, like Waymo, to report each time their vehicles are involved in an accident, regardless of whether the autonomous vehicle was at fault. According to NHTSA, which began collecting such data in July 2021, Waymo's driverless vehicles have been involved in about 30 different collisions resulting in some type of injury. Waymo, however, has noted that nearly all those crashes, like Sunday's collision, were the fault of other cars driven by humans. While NHTSA's crash data doesn't note whether self-driving vehicles may have been to blame, Waymo has previously noted that it only expects to pay out insurance liability claims for two previous collisions involving its driverless vehicles that resulted in injuries. In December, Waymo touted the findings of its latest safety analysis, which determined its fleet of driverless cars continue to outperform human drivers across major safety metrics. The report, authored by Waymo and its partners at the Swiss Reinsurance Company, reviewed insurance claim data to explore how often human drivers and autonomous vehicles are found to be liable in car collisions. According to the study, Waymo's self-driving vehicles faced about 90% fewer insurance claims relating to property damage and bodily injuries compared to human drivers... The company's fleet of autonomous vehicles have traveled more than 33 million miles and have provided more than five million rides across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin... In California, there are more than 30 companies currently permitted by the DMV to test driverless cars on the open road. While most are still required to have safety drivers sitting in the front seat who can take over when needed, Waymo remains the only fleet of robotaxis in California to move past the state's testing phase to, now, regularly offer paid rides to passengers. Their article adds that while Sunday's collision marks the first fatal crash involving a driverless car, "it was nearly seven years ago when another autonomous vehicle was involved in a deadly collision with a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, though that self-driving car had a human safety driver behind the wheel. The accident, which occurred in March 2018, involved an autonomous car from Uber, which sold off its self-driving division two years later to a competitor." In other news, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was attacked by a mob in Los Angeles last night, according to local news reports. "Video footage of the incident appears to show the vehicle being stripped of its door, windows shattered, and its Jaguar emblems removed. The license plate was also damaged, and the extent of the vandalism required the vehicle to be towed from the scene." The Los Angeles Times reminds its readers that "Last year, a crowd in San Francisco's Chinatown surrounded a Waymo car, vandalized it and then set it ablaze..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Parents have such a profound impact on our sense of self and, like Jenni Murray's mother, can cause lifelong issues concerning food and weight

Before my breast cancer diagnosis, my diet was... if not terrible, pretty close to it. I was a trainee breast surgeon either working long hours, fuelled by Red Bull, out drinking with colleagues or sleeping.

Edward Castor, 22, left his terrified mother with bite marks to her arms and burns to her face before he turned on the police officers trying to deal with the incident.

Fashion Designer María Undo wore her dream wedding dress that she designed herself, but after posting stunning photos not everyone on the internet was a fan.

Ali Mozaffari, 37, of Golders Green, London, was witnessed raping a woman on the beach, to the west of Brighton Palace Pier, at around 5.40am on September 10 2023.

After Ivanka Trump was seen sporting a red Suzannah London coat dress at an inauguration event, it's fair to say UK fashion is having a moment Stateside.

Donald Trump fired a warning shot at Central and South American nations on Sunday if they refuse to comply with his plan to send flights of deported migrants back to their country of origin.

This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints." If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through. Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it." Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured... But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification... [Doctorow says this is "why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web"] IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform... But then Doctorow argues that "Legacy social media is at a turning point," citing as "a credible threat" new systems built on open standards like Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto): I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse — it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet — and not just the Fediverse — then you should share this goal, too... Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks — the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky. Doctorow argues that federated and "federatable" social media "disciplines enshittifiers" by freeing social media's captive audiences. "Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first report of vandalism was made on Saturday afternoon where a tribute to PC Ian Broadhurst, shot and killed in Leeds on Boxing Day 2003, had been damaged.

As January draws to a close, nine million Brits are this week thinking about pouring their first glass of wine of the year. If you're one of them, I'm here to ask you whether you really want to.

A United Airlines flight from Nigeria was forced to make an emergency landing after six people were injured following an unexpected mid-air jolt.

Speaking about obesity and diabetes, RFK Jr. said he would rather provide people with organic food three times a day than hemorrhage trillions of dollars on Ozempic shots.

The Conservative leader revealed that she had given a 'brick' phone to her 11-year-old daughter who had had just started secondary school.