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China sounds warning after Philippines and US announce most expansive military drills yet
Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:26:45 GMT
Exercises starting on Monday will be the first to be held outside Philippines’ territorial waters, and come amid a rise in tensions in the South China Sea
Philippine and US forces will carry out their first ever military exercises outside the south-east Asian country’s territorial waters, in a move China has said will only lead to greater insecurity in the South China Sea.
The annual Balikatan or “shoulder-to-shoulder” drills – which will run from 22 April to 10 May – will involve 16,700 soldiers simulating retaking enemy-occupied islands in areas facing Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Continue reading...Despite Biden’s pledge to support a two-state solution, cables argue that Palestine should not be granted U.N. member status.
The post Leaked Cables Show White House Opposes Palestinian Statehood appeared first on The Intercept.
The director is planning to return to his long-delayed project with Jennifer Lawrence co-starring as Ava Gardner – but rights may prove a stumbling-block
Martin Scorsese is reportedly reviving his dormant Frank Sinatra biopic, with regular collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role.
According to Variety, Scorsese is planning to start filming a Sinatra project directly after completing shooting on his film about Jesus, adapted from a book by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō. Variety also suggested that DiCaprio will play Sinatra while Jennifer Lawrence will be cast as Ava Gardner, who was married to the singer between 1951 and 1957. However, Variety reports that Scorsese has not yet secured the approval of Sinatra’s daughter Tina, who controls her father’s music and image rights.
Continue reading...The US talks of Aukus as ‘binding’ the allies for decades to come, but Richard Marles says Australia must become more ‘self-reliant’
Australia’s defence overhaul has accelerated some projects and cut others and has already prompted a plea from China to abandon a “cold war mentality”.
But as the dust settles on a plan to increase overall military spending, the Albanese government has also sent some significant signals on how it sees the future of the Indo-Pacific region – and these aren’t exactly how Australia’s top security ally, the US, might see things.
Continue reading...First phase in world’s largest democratic exercise begins, with 969 million people eligible to vote over six-week period
Voting has begun in India’s mammoth general election, as Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata party hopes to increase its parliamentary majority amid allegations that the country’s democracy has been undermined since it came to power 10 years ago.
India’s elections are the largest democratic exercise in the world, with more than 969 million voters, amounting to more than 10% of the world’s population. The voting began at 8am on Friday, when polling opened at 102 constituencies across the country, and will continue over the next six weeks, in seven phases, until 1 June. All the results will be counted and declared on 4 June.
Continue reading...Scientists estimate Vasuki indicus was up to 15m long, weighed a tonne and would have constricted its prey
Fossil vertebrae unearthed in a mine in western India are the remains of one of the largest snakes that ever lived, a monster estimated at up to 15 metres in length – longer than a T rex.
Scientists have recovered 27 vertebrae from the snake, including a few still in the same position as they would have been when the reptile was alive. They said the snake, which they named Vasuki indicus, would have looked like a large python and would not have been venomous.
Continue reading...Kooky kid sister, romantic lead, comic turn, cantankerous old dame … we pick out her greatest roles
An early Shirley in this epic Technicolor comedy-adventure based on Jules Verne, overstuffed with superstar cameos and produced by the impresario Mike Todd. David Niven sauntered through the role of the globe-circling gent Phileas Fogg and 22-year-old MacLaine was cast in the way Hollywood sometimes saw her in those days … as someone whose feline, gamine looks had something exotic and Asiatic about them. She was the Indian Princess Aouda, widowed after a loveless arranged marriage but rescued from the funeral pyre by the bold Fogg, whom she then joins on his travels for a while. A sweet and likable comic turn.
Continue reading...As vast solar plants multiply, so does the scrap, set to reach 19m tonnes by 2050. But disposing of the waste often falls to informal traders who risk injury when dismantling broken panels
Under the scorching sun, a sea of solar panels gleams in the semi-arid landscape. Pavagada, 100 miles north of Bengaluru in southern India, is the world’s third-largest solar power plant, with 25m panels across a huge 50 sq km site, and a capacity of 2,050MW of clean energy.
India has 11 similarly vast solar parks, and plans to install another 39 across 12 states by 2026, a commitment to a greener future.
Continue reading...Two men from Bishnoi gang, whose leader has threatened to kill Salman Khan, arrested over Mumbai shooting
Two members of a criminal gang have been arrested by Indian police for firing at the home of the Bollywood actor Salman Khan in retaliation for the star’s killing of two antelopes.
The Bishnoi gang, accused of several murders and extortion rackets, hails from a wider desert-based religious sect that considers the species to be the reincarnation of their guru.
Continue reading...Mount Ruang has repeatedly erupted, and officials fear it could collapse and create a tsunami, with thousands being evacuated from the area
Authorities in Indonesia have issued a tsunami alert after a volcano erupted five times in the province of North Sulawesi, spewing a column of smoke more than a mile into the sky and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people from their homes.
Mount Ruang, a stratovolcano, first erupted at 9.45pm local time on Tuesday and then four times on Wednesday, Indonesia’s volcanology agency said.
Continue reading...Netanyahu’s recklessness was fostered by blind U.S. support, but Israel is the one pushing its war with Iran out of the shadows.
The post Israel and Israel Alone Kicked Off This Escalation — In a Bid to Drag U.S. Into War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
If Washington believed that Iran was about to start a war with Israel, would the Pentagon be bringing home its morticians?
The post U.S. Military Isn’t That Concerned About War With Iran appeared first on The Intercept.
The US Cyber Safety Review Board released a report on the summer 2023 hack of Microsoft Exchange by China. It was a serious attack by the Chinese government that accessed the emails of senior US government officials.
From the executive summary:
The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred. The Board also concludes that Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul, particularly in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations. The Board reaches this conclusion based on:...
Elizabeth Hanna says she was fired by the American Diabetes Association after refusing to approve recipes heaped with the additive made by a major donor
Elizabeth Hanna had a simple job: help people with diabetes figure out what to eat. Anyone with common sense knows this should probably not entail foods that might increase people’s risk of getting diabetes. But that’s not necessarily the thinking at the American Diabetes Association (ADA), the world’s leading diabetes research and patient advocacy group, which also receives millions of dollars from sponsors in the pharmaceutical, food and agricultural industries.
According to a lawsuit Hanna recently filed against the ADA, the organization – which endorses recipes and food plans on its website and on the websites of “partner” food brands – tried to get her to greenlight recipes that she believed flew in the face of the ADA’s mission. These included recipes like a “cucumber and onion salad” made with a third of a cup of Splenda granulated artificial sweetener, “autumnal sheet-pan veggies” with a quarter cup of Splenda monk fruit sweetener and a “cranberry almond spinach salad” with a quarter cup of Splenda monkfruit sweetener.
Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and investment manager, is the founder of The Marshall Project
Continue reading...Which? says inconsistencies also found, with ‘meaningless’ labels making it hard for shoppers to make informed choice
“Misleading” and “inconsistent” labels make it hard for shoppers to know where their food comes from, the consumer champion Which? has said, as it found supermarket chains were selling products with “meaningless” statements on their packaging.
Retailers must supply the “country of origin” for specific foods including fresh fruit and vegetables, unprocessed meats, fish, wine and olive oil but the rules do not generally apply to processed meat or frozen or processed fruit and vegetables.
Continue reading...New post-Brexit border checks ‘set to zero’ to avoid what Defra calls risk of serious disruption
The UK government has reportedly told port health authorities it will not “turn on” health and safety checks for EU imports as new post-Brexit border controls begin this month.
A presentation prepared by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) highlighted the risk of “significant disruption” if the new measures were implemented, according to the Financial Times. It made clear that the systems would not be fully ready on time.
Continue reading...U.S. military service members interviewed for a congressional inquiry said intelligence reports about how bad the situation is were being suppressed.
The post U.S. Troops in Niger Say They’re “Stranded” and Can’t Get Mail, Medicine appeared first on The Intercept.
Vital cystic fibrosis drug and HRT among medications people have struggled to find, as shortages become ‘new normal’ in UK
Patients have described the effect on their health and wellbeing of the “new normal” of drug shortages in the UK, which has led to three-month delays and 80-mile round trips to acquire medication.
Simon Bell, a 43-year-old data analyst from Tyne and Wear, has cystic fibrosis and requires medication that allows him to digest food. “For people with cystic fibrosis, the part of our pancreas which releases enzymes and allows us to digest food doesn’t work, so we have to take these tablets, which does the job of what’s missing from our pancreas,” he says.
Continue reading...History is littered with food fads, from pineapples to ‘poultry mania’ – and now, anything involving croissant dough
Parisians can be unforgivingly critical of each other where food fads are concerned. “It is a fashion, a madness,” said one Françoise d’Aubigné, when her social circle became dribblingly obsessed with the Next Big Thing. “The anxiety to eat them, the pleasure of having eaten them and the desire to eat them again” were all that anybody was talking about, she said. She clearly found it extremely annoying. Perhaps Françoise was laying into the recent craze for the crookie, a hybrid of the croissant filled with cookie dough and re-baked, which launched in October 2022 at Boulangerie Louvard on Rue de Châteaudun. It recently became a viral sensation after being amplified on TikTok. Suddenly Parisians were queueing down the street for them. From selling about 150 a day, the bakery now shifts 1,500.
Except our critic wasn’t talking about crookies. Françoise d’Aubigné, also known as Madame de Maintenon, was the mistress of Louis XIV and she was exasperated by a craze in the very last years of the 17th century for fresh garden peas, a then-novel alternative to dried. “There are ladies who, after having dined, and dined well, eat garden peas in their quarters before going to bed,” she raged. Annoying bloody hipsters with their stupid fresh peas.
Continue reading...What should you do with opened tins, cut avocados and egg yolks that weren’t required in your recipe? Chefs and food experts tell all
Attention home cooks: do you, like me, have half a lemon, perhaps encased in a beeswax wrap or clingfilm, sitting in your fridge? Half a cucumber, going dry at one end? Or maybe an open jar of capers, barely used, but well past the two-week recommended refrigeration period? So often, a recipe requires just half an onion, or a third of a block of tofu – especially when cooking for one.
According to the 2024 UN Food Waste Index report, about a fifth of the world’s food is wasted. Worldwide, households are responsible for the majority of it: about 60% of the 1bn tonnes of food thrown away annually. So how best to keep your leftover food fresh – and for how long does it remain safe to eat?
Continue reading...With no centralised relief effort in Egypt, Palestinians are relying on grassroots charities for food, rent and clothing
The last thing Rania sold was her jewellery. In the weeks after her family first woke up to heavy shelling in northern Gaza, they lost everything as they journeyed south to escape the bombs. “Wherever we went, the houses would be destroyed,” she says. “We were sent running from place to place.”
After three long months, she found herself in the border city of Rafah parting with her rings, gold bracelets and necklaces to pay the $15,000 “coordination fees” needed to get her family on the evacuation list to leave Gaza.
Continue reading...Columbia, Vanderbilt, and Pomona College all seriously disciplined students protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza this month.
The post Ahead of Congressional Testimony, Columbia President Cracks Down on Student Advocacy for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.
On the last day of his Huginn mission, ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen takes us on a tour of the place he called home for 6 months: the International Space Station. From the beautiful views of Cupola to the kitchen in Node 1 filled with food and friends and all the way to the science of Columbus, the Space Station is the work and living place for astronauts as they help push science forward.
A weekly email from Yotam Ottolenghi, Meera Sodha, Felicity Cloake and Rachel Roddy, featuring the latest recipes and seasonal eating ideas
Each week we’ll send you an exclusive newsletter from our star food writers. We’ll also send you the latest recipes from Yotam Ottolenghi, Nigel Slater, Meera Sodha and all our star cooks, stand-out food features and seasonal eating inspiration, plus restaurant reviews from Grace Dent and Jay Rayner.
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Continue reading...Style, with substance: what’s really trending this week, a roundup of the best fashion journalism and your wardrobe dilemmas solved, direct to your inbox every Thursday
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Continue reading...Imagine a world in which you can do transactions and many other things without having to give your personal information. A world in which you don’t need to rely on banks or governments anymore. Sounds amazing, right? That’s exactly what blockchain technology allows us to do.
It’s like your computer’s hard drive. blockchain is a technology that lets you store data in digital blocks, which are connected together like links in a chain.
Blockchain technology was originally invented in 1991 by two mathematicians, Stuart Haber and W. Scot Stornetta. They first proposed the system to ensure that timestamps could not be tampered with.
A few years later, in 1998, software developer Nick Szabo proposed using a similar kind of technology to secure a digital payments system he called “Bit Gold.” However, this innovation was not adopted until Satoshi Nakamoto claimed to have invented the first Blockchain and Bitcoin.
A blockchain is a distributed database shared between the nodes of a computer network. It saves information in digital format. Many people first heard of blockchain technology when they started to look up information about bitcoin.
Blockchain is used in cryptocurrency systems to ensure secure, decentralized records of transactions.
Blockchain allowed people to guarantee the fidelity and security of a record of data without the need for a third party to ensure accuracy.
To understand how a blockchain works, Consider these basic steps:
Let’s get to know more about the blockchain.
Blockchain records digital information and distributes it across the network without changing it. The information is distributed among many users and stored in an immutable, permanent ledger that can't be changed or destroyed. That's why blockchain is also called "Distributed Ledger Technology" or DLT.
Here’s how it works:
And that’s the beauty of it! The process may seem complicated, but it’s done in minutes with modern technology. And because technology is advancing rapidly, I expect things to move even more quickly than ever.
Even though blockchain is integral to cryptocurrency, it has other applications. For example, blockchain can be used for storing reliable data about transactions. Many people confuse blockchain with cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and ethereum.
Blockchain already being adopted by some big-name companies, such as Walmart, AIG, Siemens, Pfizer, and Unilever. For example, IBM's Food Trust uses blockchain to track food's journey before reaching its final destination.
Although some of you may consider this practice excessive, food suppliers and manufacturers adhere to the policy of tracing their products because bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella have been found in packaged foods. In addition, there have been isolated cases where dangerous allergens such as peanuts have accidentally been introduced into certain products.
Tracing and identifying the sources of an outbreak is a challenging task that can take months or years. Thanks to the Blockchain, however, companies now know exactly where their food has been—so they can trace its location and prevent future outbreaks.
Blockchain technology allows systems to react much faster in the event of a hazard. It also has many other uses in the modern world.
Blockchain technology is safe, even if it’s public. People can access the technology using an internet connection.
Have you ever been in a situation where you had all your data stored at one place and that one secure place got compromised? Wouldn't it be great if there was a way to prevent your data from leaking out even when the security of your storage systems is compromised?
Blockchain technology provides a way of avoiding this situation by using multiple computers at different locations to store information about transactions. If one computer experiences problems with a transaction, it will not affect the other nodes.
Instead, other nodes will use the correct information to cross-reference your incorrect node. This is called “Decentralization,” meaning all the information is stored in multiple places.
Blockchain guarantees your data's authenticity—not just its accuracy, but also its irreversibility. It can also be used to store data that are difficult to register, like legal contracts, state identifications, or a company's product inventory.
Blockchain has many advantages and disadvantages.
I’ll answer the most frequently asked questions about blockchain in this section.
Blockchain is not a cryptocurrency but a technology that makes cryptocurrencies possible. It's a digital ledger that records every transaction seamlessly.
Yes, blockchain can be theoretically hacked, but it is a complicated task to be achieved. A network of users constantly reviews it, which makes hacking the blockchain difficult.
Coinbase Global is currently the biggest blockchain company in the world. The company runs a commendable infrastructure, services, and technology for the digital currency economy.
Blockchain is a decentralized technology. It’s a chain of distributed ledgers connected with nodes. Each node can be any electronic device. Thus, one owns blockhain.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, which is powered by Blockchain technology while Blockchain is a distributed ledger of cryptocurrency
Generally a database is a collection of data which can be stored and organized using a database management system. The people who have access to the database can view or edit the information stored there. The client-server network architecture is used to implement databases. whereas a blockchain is a growing list of records, called blocks, stored in a distributed system. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, timestamp and transaction information. Modification of data is not allowed due to the design of the blockchain. The technology allows decentralized control and eliminates risks of data modification by other parties.
Blockchain has a wide spectrum of applications and, over the next 5-10 years, we will likely see it being integrated into all sorts of industries. From finance to healthcare, blockchain could revolutionize the way we store and share data. Although there is some hesitation to adopt blockchain systems right now, that won't be the case in 2022-2023 (and even less so in 2026). Once people become more comfortable with the technology and understand how it can work for them, owners, CEOs and entrepreneurs alike will be quick to leverage blockchain technology for their own gain. Hope you like this article if you have any question let me know in the comments section
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