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NEW figures have revealed that Braintree District Council have issued zero fines, despite receiving over 30 dog fouling complaints.

A POPULAR wedding venue which was ‘left with no other choice’ to close last month is now on the market for millions of pounds.

Queen Margrethe II concluded her 85th birthday celebrations with a lavish banquet dinner at Fredensborg Palace. But glaringly absent was her daughter-in-law, Queen Mary.

Katie Piper has opened up about being verbally insulted by prisoners as she filmed her latest TV documentary series. 

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Arete Glacier Initiative has raised $5 million to improve forecasts of sea-level rise and explore the possibility of refreezing glaciers in place. Off one atoll, just south of the Maldives' capital, Male, researchers are testing one way to capture sand in strategic locations -- to grow islands, rebuild beaches, and protect coastal communities from sea-level rise. Swim 10 minutes out into the En'boodhoofinolhu Lagoon and you'll find the Ramp Ring, an unusual structure made up of six tough-skinned geotextile bladders. These submerged bags, part of a recent effort called the Growing Islands project, form a pair of parentheses separated by 90meters (around 300 feet). The bags, each about two meters tall, were deployed in December 2024, and by February, underwater images showed that sand had climbed about a meter and a half up the surface of each one, demonstrating how passive structures can quickly replenish beaches and, in time, build a solid foundation for new land. "There's just a ton of sand in there. It's really looking good," says Skylar Tibbits, an architect and founder of the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which is developing the project in partnership with the Male-based climate tech company Invena. The Self-Assembly Lab designs material technologies that can be programmed to transform or "self-assemble" in the air or underwater, exploiting natural forces like gravity, wind, waves, and sunlight. Its creations include sheets of wood fiber that form into three-dimensional structures when splashed with water, which the researchers hope could be used for tool-free flat-pack furniture.Growing Islands is their largest-scale undertaking yet. Since 2017, the project has deployed 10 experiments in the Maldives, testing different materials, locations, and strategies, including inflatable structures and mesh nets. The Ramp Ring is many times larger than previous deployments and aims to overcome their biggest limitation. In the Maldives, the direction of the currents changes with the seasons. Past experiments have been able to capture only one seasonal flow, meaning they lie dormant for months of the year. By contrast, the Ramp Ring is "omnidirectional," capturing sand year-round. "It's basically a big ring, a big loop, and no matter which monsoon season and which wave direction, it accumulates sand in the same area," Tibbits says. The approach points to a more sustainable way to protect the archipelago, whose growing population is supported by an economy that caters to 2 million annual tourists drawn by its white beaches and teeming coral reefs. Most of the country's 187 inhabited islands have already had some form of human intervention to reclaim land or defend against erosion, such as concrete blocks, jetties, and breakwaters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, Ivanka was thousands of miles away soaking up the sun on a stunning beach in Costa Rica with her husband, Jared Kushner's family.

Selected schools in Essex and border towns were named in a trial which is happening during the summer term

An investigation has been launched into the vicious murder of a man in Ecuador's Amazon rainforest, allegedly carried out by a baying mob seeking justice over an alleged shooting.

A police and crime committee for The London Assembly said the Met had consistently raised concerns about the occasion.

Thousands of mourners have gathered for a Rosary prayer vigil in front of St Peter's Basilica, at the Vatican, to commemorate the life of Pope Francis, who died at the age of 88. 

Brian Beneker, who worked as a freelance writer on the CBS show, reached a settlement after he filed a claim alleging he wasn't given a permanent position because of DEI policies.

The couple, a man and a woman, ate at the Jade Palace Restaurant in Hamilton, Lanarkshire at around 3.45pm on April 18 and are alleged to have left without settling their bill.

Her young daughter, Eloise, will join ITV 's Lorraine Kelly today on her show for the No Butts initiative after it was launched by Dame Deborah in 2021.

Liverpool-born Cardinal Vincent Nichols has been Archbishop of Westminster and head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales since 2009.

Women, scientists say, can tell if they're going to be friends with another woman within just four minutes of meeting them - and they're guided by smell as much as any other sense.

Monika Solerska, Tomasz Reczycki, and Adam Czerwinski, who all pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice in 2022 by burying Tomasz Dembler's body, have been sent back to Poland.

Police in Liverpool linked Joshua Caldwell to the major drugs conspiracy after having previously found images of firearms on a confiscated phone.

Lucy Grant, 17, was already 'blue and quite stiff' by the time paramedics arrived and was declared dead at her family home in Johnstone, Scotland.

Researchers have uncovered a new supply chain attack called Slopsquatting, where threat actors exploit hallucinated, non-existent package names generated by AI coding tools like GPT-4 and CodeLlama. These believable yet fake packages, representing almost 20% of the samples tested, can be registered by attackers to distribute malicious code. CSO Online reports: Slopsquatting, as researchers are calling it, is a term first coined by Seth Larson, a security developer-in-residence at Python Software Foundation (PSF), for its resemblance to the typosquatting technique. Instead of relying on a user's mistake, as in typosquats, threat actors rely on an AI model's mistake. A significant number of packages, amounting to 19.7% (205,000 packages), recommended in test samples were found to be fakes. Open-source models -- like DeepSeek and WizardCoder -- hallucinated more frequently, at 21.7% on average, compared to the commercial ones (5.2%) like GPT 4. Researchers found CodeLlama ( hallucinating over a third of the outputs) to be the worst offender, and GPT-4 Turbo ( just 3.59% hallucinations) to be the best performer. These package hallucinations are particularly dangerous as they were found to be persistent, repetitive, and believable. When researchers reran 500 prompts that had previously produced hallucinated packages, 43% of hallucinations reappeared every time in 10 successive re-runs, with 58% of them appearing in more than one run. The study concluded that this persistence indicates "that the majority of hallucinations are not just random noise, but repeatable artifacts of how the models respond to certain prompts." This increases their value to attackers, it added. Additionally, these hallucinated package names were observed to be "semantically convincing." Thirty-eight percent of them had moderate string similarity to real packages, suggesting a similar naming structure. "Only 13% of hallucinations were simple off-by-one typos," Socket added. The research can found be in a paper on arXiv.org (PDF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A 'British' man has been killed in a Costa del Sol street shooting.