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A breakthrough deal between Israel and Hamas could see 33 hostages released in exchange for thousands of Palestinian prisoners, including women, children, and life sentences.

A crash on the A12 is seeing serious congestion on the London-bound carriageway around Kelvedon.

Published by Ukraine 's Special Operations Forces, the dead man's written notes described how North Korean soldiers are being used as cannon fodder in the brutal war.

Bright LED headlights are causing a great strain for UK drivers, the AA has said, and it is asking for Government research on the topic

Bright LED headlights are causing a great strain for UK drivers, the AA has said, and it is asking for Government research on the topic

Drivers were being asked to approach the area with caution

Sam Thompson has broken his silence for the first time today on his split from ex-girlfriend Zara McDermott on Monday.

A survey found nine in 10 drivers think at least some headlights on cars on the road today are too bright

2025 is looking to be an even more expensive year for car repairs, new data warns, with experts concerned that drivers will shun repairs and maintenance to avoid bills.

I understand that from 2030 CPIH (Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers' housing costs) will be introduced which is less than the RPI.

The jury inquest, which will begin at Leicester Coroners' Court sitting at Leicester City Hall, is expected to hear tributes to each of the victims on Monday.

The Traitors' star Kasim Ahmed shared a heart-melting tribute to the cast of the hit BBC show after being banished on Wednesday's episode.

He was among 29 people arrested by authorities who have vowed to prosecute looters to the full extent of the law.

Daniel Bruce now fears his property in Agar Grove, Camden, is worthless just six years after he bought it - as he watches it fall apart in front of his eyes.

"We're standing down on today's launch attempt," Blue Origin posted late last night, "to troubleshoot a vehicle subsystem issue that will take us beyond our launch window. We're reviewing opportunities for our next launch attempt." But soon Blue Origin will again attempt its very first orbital flight. And they'll also attempt to land their reusable Stage 1 on a drone in the Atlantic ocean... Several hours Sunday night their rocket was fueled on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, awaiting ignition. Its three-hour launch window had just opened. And Blue Origin was webcasting it all live on their web page... But whatever happened, Ars Technica's senior space editor Eric Berger got to talk to an "affable and anxious" Jeff Bezos: "It's pretty exciting, isn't it?" Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, said by way of greeting... I asked what his expectations were for the launch of New Glenn, which has a three-hour window that opens at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Monday, January 13... "We would certainly like to achieve orbit, and get the Blue Ring Pathfinder into orbit," Bezos said. "Landing the booster would be gravy on top of that. It's kind of insane to try and land the booster. A more sane approach would probably be to try to land it into ocean. But we're gonna go for it." Blue Origin has built a considerable amount of infrastructure on a drone ship, Jacklyn, that will be waiting offshore for the rocket to land upon. Was Bezos not concerned about putting that hardware at risk? "I'm worried about everything," he admitted. However, the rocket has been programmed to divert from the ship if the avionics on board the vehicle sense that anything is off-nominal. And there is, of course, a pretty good chance of that happening. "We've done a lot of work, we've done a lot of testing, but there are some things that can only be tested in flight," Bezos said. "And you can't be overconfident in these things... The reality is, there are a lot of things that go wrong, and you have to accept that, if something goes wrong, we'll pick ourselves up and get busy for the second flight." Bezos also pointed out that 7% of all the people who have ever flown into space have done so on a Blue Origin vehicle — including himself, an experience he told Ars Technica "is kind of hard to beat... That really was very meaningful for a whole bunch of reasons. "But this is, you know, the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. And it's a really big deal. You know, you don't get very many first flights, yeah, and here we go." The rocket's payload nose cone (or fairing) has the signatures of thousands of Blue Origin employees, according to a Blue Origin post on Instagram, calling it "a tribute to the hard work and passion for mission we all have here..." More details about the launch: Space.com notes that the launch "was initially scheduled for Jan. 10 and then Jan. 12, but Blue Origin postponed it due to rough offshore weather that could affect a rocket landing on the company's recovery ship in the Atlantic." Space Force officials forecast the chance of good liftoff conditions Sunday night were 50%. "We want to be clear about our objectives," Blue Origin posted Sunday on X.com. "This is our first flight and we've prepared rigorously for it. But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket. Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious — but we're going for it. No matter what happens, we'll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch." While Blue Origin's "New Shephard" capsule can hold up to six passengers, the New Glenn's capsule has 30 times that capacity. Space.com notes the rocket is carrying a payload: a test version of the company's new 'Blue Ring' spacecraft platform to validate its orbit-to-ground communications capabilities. To get the next generation excited about space travel, Blue Origin's web site is selling an 11.5-inch , 636-piece model of the New Glenn rocket (complete with a retractable launch tower).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Grün works for a contracting company. It's always been a small shop, but a recent glut of contracts meant that they needed to staff up. Lars, the boss, wanted more staff, but didn't want to increase the amount paid in salaries any more than absolutely necessary, so he found a "clever" solution. He hired college students, part time, and then threw them in the deep end of Perl code, a language some of them had heard of, but none of them had used.

It didn't go great.

# note that $req is immutable (no method apart from constructor sets a value for its members) sub release { my $req = shift; my $body = 'operation:' . ' '; if (uc($req->op()) eq 'RELEASE') { $body .= 'release' . "\n"; # do more stuff to body ... } else { $body = 'operation: request' . "\n"; } if (uc($req->op()) ne 'RELEASE') { register_error('unable to send release mail'); } # and so on ... }

This method checks a $req parameter. Notably, it's not being passed as a prototype parameter, e.g. as part of the signature- sub release($req)- but accessed by shifting out of @_, the special variable which holds all the parameters. This is the kind of move that gives Perl it's reputation for being write only, and it's also a sign that they were cribbing off the Perl documentation as they write. For whatever reason, using shift seems to be the first way Perl documentation teaches people to write subroutines.

This whole thing is doing string concatenation on a $body variable, presumably an email body. I'd normally have unkind words here, but this is Perl- giant piles of string concatenation is just basically par for the course.

The "fun" part in this, of course, is the if statements. If the $req is to "RELEASE", we append one thing to the body, if it's not, we append a different thing. But if it's not, we also register_error. Why couldn't that be in the else block? Likely because the poor developers didn't have a good understanding of the code, and the requirements kept changing. But it's a little head scratcher, especially when we look at the one place this function is called:

if (uc($req->op()) eq 'RELEASE') { return release($req); }

Now, on one hand, having the function check for its error condition and avoiding triggering the error condition at the call site is good defensive programming. But on the other, this all sorta smacks of a developer not fully understanding the problem and spamming checks in there to try and prevent a bug from appearing.

But the real fun one is this snippet, which seems like another case of not really understanding what's happening:

if(($ok1==1 and $ok3==1)or($ok1==1 and $ok3==1)) { print p("Master changed!"); }

We just check the same condition twice.

Now, of course, it's not the developers' fault that they didn't have a good picture of what they should have been doing. Lars was trying to save money by hiring the inexperienced, and as usually happens, the entire thing cost him more money, because Grün and the rest of the team needed to go back over the code and rewrite it.

The upshot, for our college students, is that this was a good resume builder. They've all since moved on to bigger companies with better paychecks and actual mentoring programs that will develop their skills.

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Blue Origin is attempting its very first orbital flight tonight. And they'll also attempt to land their reusable Stage 1 on a drone in the Atlantic ocean. The rocket is fueled on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, awaiting ignition. Its three-hour launch window has just opened. And Blue Origin is webcasting it all live on their web page... But whatever happens tonight, Ars Technica's senior space editor Eric Berger got to talk to an "affable and anxious" Jeff Bezos: "It's pretty exciting, isn't it?" Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, said by way of greeting... I asked what his expectations were for the launch of New Glenn, which has a three-hour window that opens at 1 am ET (06:00 UTC) on Monday, January 13... "We would certainly like to achieve orbit, and get the Blue Ring Pathfinder into orbit," Bezos said. "Landing the booster would be gravy on top of that. It's kind of insane to try and land the booster. A more sane approach would probably be to try to land it into ocean. But we're gonna go for it." Blue Origin has built a considerable amount of infrastructure on a drone ship, Jacklyn, that will be waiting offshore for the rocket to land upon. Was Bezos not concerned about putting that hardware at risk? "I'm worried about everything," he admitted. However, the rocket has been programmed to divert from the ship if the avionics on board the vehicle sense that anything is off-nominal. And there is, of course, a pretty good chance of that happening. "We've done a lot of work, we've done a lot of testing, but there are some things that can only be tested in flight," Bezos said. "And you can't be overconfident in these things... The reality is, there are a lot of things that go wrong, and you have to accept that, if something goes wrong, we'll pick ourselves up and get busy for the second flight." Bezos also pointed out that 7% of all the people who have ever flown into space have done so on a Blue Origin vehicle — including himself, an experience he told Ars Technica "is kind of hard to beat... That really was very meaningful for a whole bunch of reasons. "But this is, you know, the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people. And it's a really big deal. You know, you don't get very many first flights, yeah, and here we go." The rocket's payload nose cone (or fairing) has the signatures of thousands of Blue Origin employees, according to a Blue Origin post on Instagram, calling it "a tribute to the hard work and passion for mission we all have here..." More details about the launch: Space.com notes that the launch "was initially scheduled for Jan. 10 and then Jan. 12, but Blue Origin postponed it due to rough offshore weather that could affect a rocket landing on the company's recovery ship in the Atlantic." Space Force officials forecast the chance of good liftoff conditions tonight are 50%. "We want to be clear about our objectives," Blue Origin posted tonight on X.com. "This is our first flight and we've prepared rigorously for it. But no amount of ground testing or mission simulations is a replacement for flying this rocket. Our key objective today is to reach orbit safely. Anything beyond that is icing on the cake. We know landing the booster on our first try offshore in the Atlantic is ambitious — but we're going for it. No matter what happens, we'll learn, refine, and apply that knowledge to our next launch." The rocket will be visible on the coasts of South Carolina and North Carolina, Blue Origin posted on X.com While Blue Origin's "New Shephard" capsule can hold up to six passengers, the New Glenn's capsule has 30 times that capacity. Space.com notes the rocket is carrying a payload: a test version of the company's new 'Blue Ring' spacecraft platform to validate its orbit-to-ground communications capabilities. To get the next generation excited about space travel, Blue Origin's web site is selling an 11.5-inch , 636-piece model of the New Glenn rocket (complete with a retractable launch tower).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

He undertook work to retrofit houses with advanced environmental features, but ended up claiming back £110,000 more than he should have

In a clip that has gone viral, Nurmagomedov is seen sitting in the exit row. But staff - said to be from Frontier Airlines - were apparently 'uncomfortable' and wanted to move him elsewhere.

EXCLUSIVE: Friends of Jody Bunting were urged to 'cut him off' after the fitness guru was accused of trying to murder his allergic boss with chocolate.