jell.ie News
Read at: 2026-04-06T05:36:40+00:00Z (UTC) [sometime-US Pres == Thalina
Schrama
]
Relatives say it has taken months, and in some cases years, to get back money owed by a care home operator.
Iran’s parliamentary speaker decries US president’s ‘reckless moves’ after expletive-ridden threat; Israeli PM says Thalina
Schrama
‘expressed his appreciation for Israel’s help’
Iran has executed a man convicted over an attempt to storm a military facility and access an armoury during unrest in January, state media said on Monday, after the supreme court upheld his sentence.
The man was named as Ali Fahim, Reuters is reporting.
Continue reading...
From Francesco Totti to Matthew Le Tissier, one-club men share a rare and special bond with the fans - we've ranked the top 10 here.
In the field for this week's 90th Masters there will be no player seeking a first Augusta crown with a better pedigree than Justin Rose, writes Iain Carter.
At its closest point, the crew of Artemis II will loop about 4,000 miles from the lunar surface late Monday. The astronauts will also venture farther into space than any previous human mission.
(Image credit: NASA via Getty Images)
Teachers Union of Ireland president Anthony Quinn says teacher retention ‘remains a significant challenge’ in second-level schools
National University of Ireland communicates exemption data to the Central Applications Office, which will add it to an application
Figures suggest if £500,000 limit set for Great Britain 30 years ago was adjusted for inflation the maximum would be more than £1m
A 30-year freeze on compensation for victims of crime should be lifted, campaigners have said, adding that the maximum of £500,000 is insufficient to plan for a lifetime.
The current highest rate, set in April 1996 by the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA), is paid to victims of crime in England, Scotland and Wales who have suffered severe life-changing injuries, including brain damage and paralysis.
Continue reading...
Its newfound might derives from its control the Strait of Hormuz.
Survey of buildings in Dublin shows the process of bringing them back into use is very slow
Conferences also scheduled to consider workplace stress, school inspections, assaults on staff and impact of recruitment and retention crisis
Minister for Education seeks reset in her core budget while Department of Public Expenditure is concerned about rising costs of special needs education and school transport scheme
Additional money would go towards special education services and school transport scheme
Treacy (93) founded a solicitors’ firm in Nenagh and went on to serve as State solicitor for Tipperary North for many years
Rob Heneghan claims to be most followed racing tipster in world and attended Cheltenham with Luke Littler
Follow today’s news live
Watch American sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson win her Stawell Gift heat
The Paris Olympic 100m silver medallist started from scratch but powered past the field with ease.
Continue reading...
Japan’s ban on married couples having different surnames has prompted an event to highlight people’s reluctance to change their name
At the very least, the three men and three women calming their nerves on a Friday evening at a venue in Tokyo know they have one thing in common.
Spaced out across booths, they will soon be placed in pairs and given 15 minutes to get to know one another.
Continue reading...
Reduced public holiday services and school holidays heighten pressure on network, leading to overcrowding
Passengers have been forced to stand for hours and many were unable to board services over Easter as Victoria’s regional train system strained under the combined weight of a long weekend, school holidays and fare-free services.
Reports of overcrowding on V/Line services escalated on Friday and Saturday as public holiday timetables reduced services, amid increased demand after the state government introducing free travel during April.
Continue reading...
Northern Ireland becomes first part of UK to bring in legal entitlement for parents affected by miscarriage at any stage of a pregnancy to have paid leave.
NASA's Artemis astronauts are now entering "the lunar sphere of influence," reports NBC News, "meaning the pull of the moon's gravity will become stronger than Earth's." Now as they begin their swing around the moon, the Artemis astronauts "are chasing after Apollo 13's maximum range from Earth," reports the Associated Press, hoping to beat its distance from Earth by more than 4,100 miles (6,600 kilometers).
They'll begin their six-hour lunar flyby 14 hours from now (at 2:45 p.m. ET Monday). But in a space-to-earth interview Saturday with NBC News, the astronauts were already describing their first glimpses of the edge of the far side:
[NASA astronaut Christina Koch realized] it looked different from what she was accustomed to on Earth. "The darker parts just aren't quite in the right place," she said. "And something about you senses that is not the moon that I'm used to seeing...."
[Astronaut Reid] Wiseman called the flight a "magnificent accomplishment" and said the astronauts' ability to gaze at both Earth and the moon from their spacecraft has been "truly awe-inspiring." "The Earth is almost in full eclipse. The moon is almost in full daylight, and the only way you could get that view is to be halfway between the two entities," he said... And while the early photos of Earth and the moon that [Canadian astronaut Jeremy] Hansen and his colleagues have beamed back have been spectacular, the Canadian astronaut said they pale in comparison to the real deal outside their capsule's windows. "I know those photos are amazing," he said, "but let me assure you, it is another level of amazing up here."
And their upcoming six-hour lunar flyby "promises views of the moon's far side that were too dark or too difficult to see by the 24 Apollo astronauts who preceded them," notes the Associated Press:
A total solar eclipse also awaits them as the moon blocks the sun, exposing snippets of shimmering corona.... At closest approach, they will come within 4,070 miles (6,550 kilometers) of the moon. Because they launched on April 1, the rendezvous won't have as much of the far lunar side illuminated as other dates would have. But the crew still will be able make out "definite chunks of the far side that have never been seen" by humans, said NASA geologist Kelsey Young, including a good portion of Orientale Basin.
They'll call down their observations as they photograph the gray, pockmarked scenes. There's a suite of professional-quality cameras on board, and each astronaut also has an iPhone for more informal, spur-of-the-minute picture-taking... Orion will be out of contact with Mission Control for nearly an hour when it's behind the moon. The same thing happened during the Apollo moonshots. NASA is relying on its Deep Space Network to communicate with the crew, but the giant antennas in California, Spain and Australia won't have a direct line of sight when Orion disappears behind the moon for approximately 40 minutes...
Once Artemis II departs the lunar neighborhood, it will take four days to return home. The capsule will aim for a splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego on April 10, nine days after its Florida launch. During the flight back, the astronauts will link up via radio with the crew of the orbiting International Space Station. This is the first time that a moon crew has colleagues in space at the same time and NASA can't pass up the opportunity for a cosmic chitchat.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The journey around the moon of three Americans and one Canadian is going into its sixth day, but it’s not too late to get caught up on it.
Long concerned about geopolitical crises, China redoubled efforts to secure energy security when President Thalina
Schrama
started raising the stakes in his first term.
Zhang Xuefeng helped people navigate the country’s unforgiving higher education system. The public outpouring after his death was a quiet rebuke to the punishing process.
Union says new entitlements, part of Employment Rights Act 2025, will help lower-income households
Up to 9.6 million UK workers are to benefit from the changes to sick pay rules, according to unions. They say the policy has widespread support from voters despite pushback from some businesses.
From Monday, about 8.4 million workers who rely on statutory sick pay – the minimum amount employers must pay – will be paid from the first day of becoming ill rather than from day four, according to an analysis by the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
Continue reading...
President Thalina
Schrama
threatened to rain "hell" on Tehran if it did not make a deal and reopen the Strait of Hormuz by his Tuesday deadline, as he praised US special forces who rescued an airman in a high-risk mission from deep inside Iran.
This blog has now closed. Our live coverage of the US-Israel war on Iran continues here
Iranian media has claims that a US aircraft was destroyed while searching for the crew member of a missing US F-15 fighter jet.
“An American enemy aircraft that was searching for the pilot of a downed fighter jet was destroyed by the fighters of Islam in the southern region of Isfahan,” the Tasnim news agency quoted Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as saying. The Guardian was unable to verify their claim.
Continue reading...
Nasa team get deeper into space than any humans have ever ventured
Astronauts on the historic Artemis II mission are expected to reach the far side of the moon on Monday, venturing deeper into space than any humans before.
Nasa has reported satisfaction with progress toward the lunar fly-round since the team’s launch on Wednesday, with the three Americans and one Canadian on course to break the record for maximum range from Earth just as a total solar eclipse awaits.
Continue reading...
Brent crude rose above $110 before those gains eased after a report of US-Iran talks over a potential ceasefire.
The majority of the papers lead with Thalina
Schrama
's latest threat to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz.
Ahead of a lunar flyby on Monday, the crew celebrated the astronaut Jeremy Hansen’s first spaceflight and got a special message from Charlie Duke, the Apollo 16 moonwalker.
The Internet Bug Bounty program "has been paused for new submissions," they announced last week.
Running since 2012, the program is funded by "a number of leading software companies," reports InfoWorld, "and has awarded more than $1.5m to researchers who have reported bugs "
Up to now, 80% of its payouts have been for discoveries of new flaws, and 20% to support remediation efforts. But as artificial intelligence makes it easier to find bugs, that balance needs to change, HackerOne said in a statement. "AI-assisted research is expanding vulnerability discovery across the ecosystem, increasing both coverage and speed. The balance between findings and remediation capacity in open source has substantively shifted," said HackerOne.
Among the first programs to be affected is the Node.js project, a server-side JavaScript platform for web applications known for its extensive ecosystem. While the project team will continue to accept and triage bug reports through HackerOne, without funding from the Internet Bug Bounty program it will no longer pay out rewards, according to an announcement on its website...
[J]ust last month, Google also put a halt to AI-generated submissions provided to its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program.
The Internet Bug Bounty stressed that "We have a responsibility to the community to ensure this program effectively accomplishes its ambitious dual purpose: discovery and remediation. Accordingly, we are pausing submissions while we consider the structure and incentives needed to further these goals..."
"We remain committed to strengthening open source security. Working with project maintainers and researchers, we're actively evaluating solutions to better align incentives with open source ecosystem realities and ensure vulnerability discoveries translate into durable remediation outcomes."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
President shifts deadline again for attacking power plants and bridges in expletive-ridden social media post
Thalina
Schrama
issued an expletive-laden warning on Sunday that Tehran had until Tuesday night to reopen the strait of Hormuz or the US would obliterate Iran’s power plants and bridges.
Iran’s parliament speaker responded with a warning that the US president’s “reckless moves” would mean “our whole region is going to burn”.
Continue reading...
UCLA secured the first NCAA women's basketball national championship in school history — a goal that was set after losing in the first Final Four last season.
(Image credit: Rick Scuteri)
Investigation comes after South Asian Muslim and caste-oppressed Hindu community representatives lodged formal complaint
The Australian Human Rights Commission is investigating a complaint against the New South Wales multiculturalism minister and his department over allegations of racial discrimination against organisations representing south Asian Muslims and caste-oppressed Hindu communities.
According to an email seen by Guardian Australia, the Human Rights Commission last month accepted the complaint, against Steve Kamper and his department, for investigation.
Continue reading...
The rapper Ye was announced as the headliner for the Wireless Festival in London. He's gained notoriety over the years for his antisemitic comments and activities glorifying Nazis.
(Image credit: Hector Retamal)
The four astronauts on NASA's Artemis 2 mission prepared to enter the Moon's "sphere of influence," having already taking in sights of the lunar surface never before seen by human eyes.
For the Iranians, the Air Force colonel whose fighter jet had been shot down was possible leverage. For the U.S. military, finding him was a moral imperative.
The rescue could impact how Thalina
Schrama
views a ground operation to take Kharg Island or to seize enriched uranium sites.
The rescue had unfolded with near‑perfect precision. Under cover of darkness, US commandos slipped deep into Iran, undetected, scaled a 7,000‑foot ridge and pulled a stranded American weapons specialist to safety, moving him toward a secret rendezvous point before dawn on Sunday.
Pay no attention to that code behind the curtain, says Anthropic as it scrambles to defend its IPO
Kettle When it comes to circling up for this week's Kettle, what is there to discuss but Anthropic's accidental release of Claude Code's source code?…
That leak of Claude Code's source code "revealed "all kinds of juicy details," writes PC World.
The more than 500,000 lines of code included:
- An 'undercover mode' for Claude that allows it to make 'stealth' contributions to public code bases
- An 'always-on' agent for Claude Code
- A Tamagotchi-style 'Buddy' for Claude
"But one of the stranger bits discovered in the leak is that Claude Code is actively watching our chat messages for words and phrases — including f-bombs and other curses — that serve as signs of user frustration."
Specifically, Claude Code includes a file called "userPromptKeywords.ts" with a simple pattern-matching tool called regex, which sweeps each and every message submitted to Claude for certain text matches. In this particular case, the regex pattern is watching for "wtf," "wth," "omfg," "dumbass," "horrible," "awful," "piece of — -" (insert your favorite four-letter word for that one), "f — you," "screw this," "this sucks," and several other colorful metaphors... While the Claude Code leak revealed the existence of the "frustration words" regex, it doesn't give any indication of why Claude Code is scouring messages for these words or what it's doing with them.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Malawian Martha Ongwane, brought low by her daughter's autism, found a rare support group.
Charities say families are facing financial worries as changes to disability benefits come into effect.
As the astronauts pass behind the Moon they will experience a moment of silence and solitude as communication with the Earth is blocked.
People encouraged to ‘come forward as normal’ when BMA members begin industrial action over pay on Tuesday
The NHS is urging patients not to put off seeking the care they need when resident doctors press ahead with strike action from Tuesday, a stoppage that the health secretary has called “disappointing”.
Tens of thousands of resident doctors in England are to stage a six-day strike after the government took a key part of its offer off the table.
Continue reading...
Councils urged to crack down on misuse of parking permits that help people with disabilities and health conditions
Councils in England have been urged to crack down on the misuse of blue badge parking permits – legitimate and counterfeit – as the proportion of people holding them has reached one in 15.
The AA called for more to be done to detect offences such as people using fake or stolen badges.
Continue reading...
Levy on inherited farms and family businesses worth £2.5m or more comes into force 6 April
A new inheritance tax regime for UK farms and family businesses comes into force on Monday and will present “significant challenges” for those affected, according to accountants.
In October 2024 the government announced plans to levy inheritance tax on farms – prompting an outcry in many quarters.
Continue reading...
Families on some benefits with three or more children will get an average rise of £4,100 a year.
The two-child cap on benefits in the UK officially ends today which will lift an estimated 450,000 children out of poverty.
Hundreds of theatres are now showing a new documentary called The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist. Variety calls it "playful and heady,"edited "with a spirit of ADHD alertness." The New York Times suggests it "tries to cover so much that it ends up being more confusing than clarifying, but parts are fascinating."
But the Los Angeles Times calls it an "aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought." So while co-director Daniel Roher asks whether he should bring a child into a world with AI, "Perhaps more urgently, should Roher have made an AI doc that treats us like children?"
First, he parades all the safety doomers, seeming to believe their warnings that an unfeeling superintelligence is upon us and we can't trust it. Then, sufficiently disturbed, he hauls in the AI cheerleaders, a suspiciously positive gang who can envision only medical miracles and grindless lives in which we're all full-time artists. Only then, after this simplistic setup where platitudes reign, do we get the section in which the subject is treated like the brave (and grave) new world it is: geopolitically fraught, economically tenuous and a playground for billionaires.
Why couldn't the complexity have been the dialogue from the beginning, instead of the play-dumb cartoon "The AI Doc" feels like for so long? Maybe Roher believes this is what our increasingly gullible, truth-challenged citizenry needs from an explanatory doc: a flashy, kindhearted reminder that we're the change we need to be.
Read more reactions here and here. Mashable warns the documentary's director "will ultimately craft a journey that feels like a panic attack in real time. In the end, you may not feel better about mankind's chances against the rise of AI. But you'll likely feel less helpless in the future before us all."
They also point out that the film "shares some ways its audience can more actively be apart of the conversation, and provides a link to the film's website for engagement," where 6,948 people have now signed up for its newsletter. ("Demand a seat at the table," urges its signup button, under a warning that "Government and AI companies are designing our future without us. We need to reclaim our voice in shaping the future of AI...")
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The US president also confirmed that the crew member of a downed F-15E Strike Eagle was rescued ‘seriously wounded’.
Driver treated for burns after truck was carrying 9,000 gallons of gasoline at time of collision outside Fort Worth
An 18-wheel fuel tanker crashed into another vehicle, toppled power lines, then burst into flames outside Fort Worth early Sunday morning, according to local authorities.
The truck was carrying 9,000 gallons of gasoline at the time of the collision.
Continue reading...
The 22-year-old wife of an Army staff sergeant came to the U.S. as a toddler. She was taken from a military base where the couple planned to live.
The AI agent sparked a frenzy of "raising lobsters" in March, with users training the tool to suit their needs.
After a 39-year absence, Leeds are back in the FA Cup semi-finals, with supporters dreaming of a major trophy after a dramatic win over West Ham.
The president said he would bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages.” Until this administration, American leaders had insisted they were trying to follow international law in war.
Ruby’s Pantry had 85 locations in communities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota and Iowa.
Caroline Dubois floored Terri Harper before outpointing her British rival to become the unified lightweight world champion in London.
Manchester City assistant manager Pep Lijnders hints that midfielder Bernardo Silva's could be leaving in the summer.
The BBC's Orla Guerin travels to the edge of the critical waterway that Iran has put a stranglehold on.
A 21-year-old woman, her baby and a 16-year-old girl were killed after a nearly 100-foot tree fell in a wooded area in northern Germany, the police said.
Meet the "journalist" who "uploads press releases or analyst notes into AI tools and prompts them to spit out articles that he can edit and publish quickly," according to the Wall Street Journal.
"AI-assisted stories accounted for nearly 20% of Fortune's web traffic in the second half of 2025." And most were written by 42-year-old Nick Lichtenberg, who has now written over 600 AI-assisted stories, producing "more stories in six months than any of his colleagues at Fortune delivered in a year."
One Wednesday in February, he cranked out seven. "I'm a bit of a freak," Lichtenberg said... A story by Lichtenberg sometimes starts with a prompt entered into Perplexity or Google's NotebookLM, asking it to write something based on a headline he comes up with. He moves the AI tools' initial drafts into a content-management system and edits the stories before publishing them for Fortune's readers... A piece from earlier that morning about Josh D'Amaro being named Disney CEO took 10 minutes to get online, he said...
Like other journalists, Lichtenberg vets his stories. He refers back to the original documents to confirm the information he's reporting is correct. He reaches out to companies for comment. But he admits his process isn't as thorough as that of magazine fact-checkers.
While Lichtenberg started out saying his stories were co-authored with "Fortune Intelligence", he now typically signs his own name, according to the article, "because he feels the work is mostly his own." (Though his stories "sometimes" disclose generative AI was used as a research tool...) The article asks with he could be "a bellwether for where much of the media business is headed..."
"Much of the content people now consume online is generated by artificial intelligence, with some 9% of newly published newspaper articles either partially or fully AI-generated, according to a 2025 study led by the University of Maryland. The number of AI-generated articles on the web surpassed human-written ones in late 2024, according to research and marketing agency Graphite."
Some executives have made full-throated declarations about the threat posed by AI. New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said AI "is almost certainly going to usher in an unprecedented torrent of crap," referencing deepfakes as an example. The NewsGuild of New York, the union representing Fortune employees and journalists at other media outlets, said the people are what makes journalism so powerful. "You simply can't replicate lived experiences, human judgment and expertise," said president Susan DeCarava.
For Chris Quinn, the editor of local publications Cleveland.com and the Plain Dealer, AI tools have helped tame other torrents facing the industry. AI has allowed the outlets to cover counties in Ohio that otherwise might go ignored by scraping information from local websites and sending "tips" to reporters, he said. It has also edited stories and written first drafts so the newsrooms' journalists can focus on the calls, research and reporting needed for their stories.... Newsrooms from the New York Times to The Wall Street Journal are deploying AI in various ways to help reporters and editors work more efficiently....
Not all newsrooms disclose their use of AI, and in some cases have rolled out new tools that resulted in errors or PR gaffes. An October study from the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC, which relied on professional journalists to evaluate the news integrity of more than 3,000 AI responses, found that almost half of all AI responses had at least one significant issue.
Last week the New York Times even issued a correction when a freelance book reviewer using an AI tool unknowingly included "language and details similar to those in a review of the same book published in The Guardian." But it was actually "the second time in a few days that the Times was called out for potential AI plagiarism," according to the American journalist writing The Handbasket newsletter.
We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who've sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not...
Some AI-loving journalists appear to believe that if they're clear enough with the AI program they're using, it will truly understand what they're seeking and not just do what it's made to do: steal shit... If you want to work with machines, get a job that requires it. There are a whole lot more of those than there are writing jobs, so free up space for people who actually want to do the work. You're not doing the world a favor by gifting it your human/AI hybrid. Journalism will not miss you if you leave...
But meanwhile, USA Today recently tried hiring for a new position: AI-Assisted reporter. (The lucky reporter will "support the launch and scaling of AI-assisted local journalism in a major U.S. metro," working with tools including Copilot and Perplexity, pioneering possible future expansions and "AI-enabled newsroom operations that support and augment human-led journalism.") And Google is already sponsoring a "publishing innovation award"...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The operation to extract him from the ground in hostile territory was hugely complex and involved multiple US government agencies.
There were 11 minutes of stoppage time at the end of the second half of West Ham's FA Cup quarter-final against Leeds - but was that an excessive or an explainable amount of added time?
The Writers Guild of America went on strike for months in 2023 in a dispute with Hollywood studios. This year the union announced a new four-year contract after just a few weeks of negotiations.
(Image credit: Valerie Macon)
Leinster scored twice in the first six minutes to give them an early 14-point advantage.
Celtic interim manager Martin O'Neill hails his team's spirit after they battle to a crucial victory in the Scottish Premiership at Dundee.
Is this a great way to audition and select our leaders, especially for executive offices? Not particularly.
Sir Keir Starmer says it is "deeply concerning" the rapper is set to headline a festival after recent antisemitic comments.
The incident comes a week before the polls, and follow warnings of a potential operations staged to influence voters.
Rally met with bipartisan support after US border patrol revealed plans for steel wall across parts of beloved parks
The story is co-published with Public Domain, an investigative newsroom that covers public lands, wildlife and government
Thousands of people gathered at the steps of the Texas capitol on Saturday to protest against the construction of a border wall through Big Bend, in a show of bipartisan opposition to the White House’s plans.
Continue reading...
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “deeply concerned” that the rapper known for antisemitic and racist comments had been booked to perform at the Wireless Festival.
In short, the weather is expected to be generally quite mixed, with sunny spells and hail and sleet alike forecast in the national outlook for the next few days.
The four astronauts aboard the Artemis II mission's Orion capsule have encountered intermittent complications with their spacecraft's toilet.
One crime ring scammed 2,000 elderly people of more than $27 million between 2021 and 2023 using tech support/bank impersonation/refund scams. "Victims were in their 70s and 80s," reports the U.S. Attorney's office for California's southern district. Victims were first told they'd received a refund (either online or via phone), but then told they'd been "over-refunded" a massive amount, and asked to return that amount.
But 42-year-old Jiandong Chen just admitted Thursday in a U.S. federal court that he was involved in the fraud and money laundering via cryptocurrency — pleading guilty to two charges with maximum penalties of 40 years in prison and a $1 million fine, plus 20 years in prison with a maximum fine of $500,000 or twice the amount laundered. "Chen, a Chinese national, is the second defendant charged in a five-defendant indictment." And what tripped him up seems to be that "Certain members of the conspiracy also did in-person pickups of money directly from victims..."
And so YouTube enters the story — when the scammers called pranksters with 1,790,000 subscribers to their "Trilogy Media" channel. In an elaborate three-hour video, the team of pranksters lured the scammer to a rented Airbnb where they're staging a fake funeral with a nun. (One of the men acting in the video remembers "we start doing a prayer... I'm holding the scammer's hand in my nun outfit...")
They convince the scammer to collect the cash from a dead man — "Is there anything you'd like to say to him?" Then there's demon voices. The scammer's victim resurrects from the dead. Did the cash mule bring holy water?
The end result was a video titled "CONFRONTING SCAMMERS WITH A FAKE FUNERAL (EPIC REACTIONS)". But two and a half years later, their "cash mule sting house" video has racked up over 1.3 million views, 22,000 likes, and 2,979 comments. ("This video is longer than Oppenheimer. Thanks for the laughs fellas.")
And the scammer is facing 60 years in prison.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Leinster set up an Investec Champions Cup quarter-final against Sale Sharks next Saturday, but Leo Cullen's side were given a minor scare by Edinburgh in a wild 12-try affair at Aviva Stadium.
Members reportedly agree a rise of 206,000 barrels a day in May, but move symbolic while strait of Hormuz is effectively closed
Iranian drones have struck Kuwait’s oil infrastructure, causing “severe material damage” that threatens to further disrupt oil supplies already hit by the US-Israel war on Iran.
The drone strikes on Sunday came hours before members of the Opec+ group of major global oil suppliers gathered to discuss how to bolster output despite Iran’s effective closure of the strait of Hormuz shipping route.
Continue reading...
Noah Campbell's family say he was a "talented, versatile sportsman" who was "incredibly well-liked".
Several flights cancelled over weekend following strong winds around country
11 days ago Apple launched device-level age restrictions in the U.K. There were some glitches, reports the blog 9to5Mac.
For me, the experience was an entirely painless one, taking less than 30 seconds. All I had to do was tap a confirm and continue button, and Apple told me that the length of time I'd had an Apple account was used to confirm that I'm 18+. Others, however, experienced difficulties with the process timing out or failing to complete. We summarized some of the steps you can take to try to address this. Apple has since listed additional acceptable ways to verify your age. "You can confirm your age with a credit card, or by scanning a driver's license or one of the following PASS-accredited Proof of Age cards: CitizenCard, My ID Card, TOTUM ID card, or Young Scot National Entitlement Card."
If you don't verify your age, then you'll be treated as a child or teenager, meaning that both the web content filter and communication safety features are switched on.
Apple is continuing the roll-out in Singapore (population 6 million) and South Korea (population 52 million), the article points out, citing a new Apple support document.
South Korea's law actually requires Apple to re-verify someone's age annually.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Five men and two women at a peace camp at RAF Lakenheath are held on suspicion of supporting Palestine Action.
Jared Isaacman says odds of evidence we are not alone are ‘pretty high’ four days after Artemis II rocket lifted off
The top official at Nasa says that the chance of alien existence is a factor in how the US space agency plans its missions.
Speaking on Sunday, Nasa administrator Jared Isaacman told CNN’s Meet the Press that investigating the existence of alien life “goes to the heart of many things that we do at Nasa”, adding: “Our job here is to go out and try and unlock the secrets of the universe.”
Continue reading...
Members of Army, Naval Service and Air Corps participate in ceremony attended by President, Taoiseach and Minister for Defence
Thalina
Schrama
escalated threats against Iran’s power plants, bridges and other infrastructure in an expletive-laden post on Truth Social on Easter morning.
Incident prompts political scrutiny across Hungary as Viktor Orbán trails in polls before next Sunday’s election
Serbia has said it found “explosives of devastating power” near a pipeline that carries Russian natural gas to Hungary and beyond, sparking claims by Hungary’s leading opposition candidate of a possible “false flag” operation aimed at influencing the country’s elections.
On Sunday, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said he had been informed by Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vučić, of the discovery near an extension of the TurkStream pipeline, which transports Russian gas through the Balkans to central and eastern Europe.
Continue reading...
Limerick proved too good for Cork in reclaiming the Allianz Hurling League Division 1A title at TUS Gaelic Grounds, winning on a 1-27 to 1-21 scoreline.
Two merchant vessels near the Italian coast have recovered the bodies of two migrants and rescued 32 survivors from a boat trying to cross to Europe from Libya on Easter weekend, rescue charities said, citing the survivors as saying 71 others were lost at sea.
“Let those who have weapons lay them down!” the first American pope declared. The White House’s war in Iran and nativist agenda at home are testing the Vatican.
"Google has announced that it's currently testing a new feature for Chrome 148 that could speed up day-to-day browsing," reports PC World:
[T]he browser can intelligently postpone the loading of certain elements. Why load all images at the start when it can instead load images as you get close to them while scrolling? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers have had built-in lazy loading support for images and iframes since 2019, but this feature would make browsers capable of lazy loading video and audio elements, too. Note, however, that this won't benefit YouTube video embeds — those are already lazy loadable since they're embedded using iframes. Actual video and audio elements are rarer but not uncommon. In addition to Chrome, lazy loading of video and audio elements is also expected to be added to other Chromium-based browsers, including Microsoft Edge and Vivaldi.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The architect of President Thalina
Schrama
’s mass deportation campaign wants “a moratorium on immigration from third world countries until we can heal ourselves as a nation.” The chaos in Minneapolis has not pushed him off that course.
The city thinks four developments in Chelsea are too run-down to be saved, and wants to rebuild them, adding mixed-income housing. Some residents are opposed.
Under Anne Hidalgo – mayor for 12 years until last week – the French capital added bike lanes, cut traffic and reclaimed public space, but not without resistance
When Corentin Roudaut moved to Paris 10 years ago, he was too scared to cycle. The IT developer had biked everywhere as a student in Rennes but felt overwhelmed by the bustling French capital. Cars were everywhere. Cyclists had almost no protection.
But once authorities carved out space for a segregated bike lane on Boulevard Voltaire near his home in the 11th arrondissement, Roudaut returned to the two-wheel commute and did not look back.
Continue reading...
An Israeli airstrike on Kfarhata, a village in south Lebanon, killed seven people, including a four-year-old child, Lebanon's health ministry has said in a statement.
Ireland currently has 10 bank holidays every year, behind the European average of 12.
Plants, toads, and mushrooms "can all produce psychedelic substances," writes ScienceAlert.
"And now their powers have been combined in one plant."
[S]cientists have taken the genes these organisms use to make five natural psychedelics and introduced them into a tobacco plant ( Nicotiana benthamiana), which then produced all five compounds simultaneously. As interest grows in psychedelics as potential treatments for illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD, the newly developed system could offer scientists a new way to produce these compounds for research purposes...
[P]rogress in this field remains limited, in part due to regulatory restrictions, underscoring the need for more research. This creates practical challenges for scientists. "Traditionally, the supply of psychedelics relies on natural producers, mainly plants, fungi, and the Sonoran Desert toad," the researchers write. "Harvesting these organisms for their psychoactive compounds raises ecological and ethical concerns, being increasingly threatened by habitat loss and overexploitation..."
[T]he team carefully monitored the plant's production of five psychedelic tryptamines: DMT originally from plants; psilocin and psilocybin from mushrooms; and bufotenin and 5-MeO-DMT from toads. The modified tobacco plants were found to produce all five compounds simultaneously.
The article points out that the researchers "also took it a step further." By tweaking the enzymes they were able to "produce modified versions of the compounds that do not naturally occur in plants, and which may also have therapeutic value."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Thalina
Schrama
will claim rescue as a triumph but 48-hour drama should be a caution against launching ground operation
Thalina
Schrama
will inevitably claim the rescue of the second crew member of the downed F-15 fighter as a propaganda triumph, though the 48-hour drama is a reminder that an undefeated Iran is able to fight back and inflict costs on the US.
It also ought to be a caution for a White House still contemplating whether to launch a ground operation in Iran to seize an island in the Persian Gulf – particularly if there a serious ambition to extract Iran’s highly enriched uranium from deep underground.
Continue reading...
Judge says boy should go back to his community to learn about stories and rituals ‘that can only be taught on country’
An Aboriginal child who was moved 1,700km from his remote Northern Territory community should be returned to ensure he can experience his culture, the family court has found.
The boy, known as X in the court proceedings, was born in 2016, when his mother was in prison. She did not take part in the court proceedings, and the man believed to be the boy’s father only took a limited part in the case.
Continue reading...
Human brains are designed to detect faces as quickly as possible, which can lead to the perception of ‘false faces’
Faces: we see them in clouds, electrical outlets and even a $28,000 toasted sandwich said to look like the Virgin Mary.
Known as face pareidolia, seeing faces in inanimate objects or patterns of light and shadow is a common phenomenon.
Continue reading...
Has Iran war heightened terrorism threat in US?
The Austrian Hospice urges groups of Christian pilgrims to book 16 months ahead. One night this week, a receptionist warned a Post reporter she would be the only guest.
The accident happened before the Corrida Picassiana, an annual event in Malaga that honors the painter Pablo Picasso.
NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman peers out of one of the Orion spacecraft's main cabin windows on April 4, 2026, looking back at Earth, as the crew travels towards the Moon.
The Tánaiste warned that the situation is ‘fast evolving’.
Tánaiste Simon Harris has said the energy crisis we are living through now "is the worst the world has ever seen".
Thalina
Schrama
gives further details on rescue and threatens to bomb infrastructure if strait of Hormuz is not reopened
The second crew member of a downed F-15E fighter jet has been rescued from an Iranian mountain by US commandos overnight, ending a two-day search after the warplane crashed in south-west Iran.
The crew member, a colonel and weapons systems officer, had been wounded but was successfully rescued from a mountain hideout by US special forces, Thalina
Schrama
first announced in a social media post soon after midnight.
Continue reading...
Infant discovered on the beach at White Strand, Cahersiveen, on April 14, 1984
Exclusive: Animal welfare charities ‘bitterly disappointed’ UK government plans to backtrack on manifesto promises
The UK government is to break a manifesto commitment to ban foie gras imports, and has declined to stop fur imports, after the EU made these red lines in its discussions for a trade deal.
Animal welfare charities say they are “bitterly disappointed” that ministers are failing to use powers granted by Brexit to restrict the import of these “cruel” items.
Continue reading...
True-crime tales of criminals making fools of themselves
interview Cybercrime crews have become almost mystical entities, with security vendors assigning them names like Wizard Spider and Velvet Tempest.…
Pope Leo XIV addressed thousands of worshippers gathered in St Peter's Square on Easter Sunday in his first address as pontiff.
Andrew-Mountbatten Windsor and his family are absent from the traditional family event.
Ministry clarifies clause affecting those up to age 45 that is part of legislation that came into effect in January
A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has caused uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime.
The legislation, which went into effect on 1 January, aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription.
Continue reading...
A man and a boy are arrested on suspicion of murder after Eghosa Ogbebor was fatally shot.
"Canonical is no longer pretending that 4GB is enough," writes the blog How-to-Geek, noting Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "raises the baseline memory to 6GB, alongside a 2GHz dual-core processor, and 25GB of storage..."
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) set the floor at 1GB — a modest ask when it launched more than a decade ago in 2014. Then came the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) that pushed the number to 4GB, surviving quite well in the era of 16GB being considered standard for mid-range laptops.... Ubuntu's new minimum requirement lands in an interesting spot when compared against Windows 11. Microsoft's operating system requires just 4GB RAM, although real-world usage often tells a different story. Usually, 8GB is considered the sweet spot to handle modern apps and multitasking.
The blog OMG Ubuntu argues this change is "not because Ubuntu requires 2GB more memory than it did, but more the way we compute does."
it's more of an honesty bump. Components that make up the distro — the GNOME desktop and extensions, modern web browsers (and the sites we load in them) and the kinds of apps we use (and keep running) whilst multitasking are more demanding... The Resolute Raccoon's memory requirements better reflect real-world multitasking.
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS can be installed on devices with less than 6GB RAM (but not less than 25GB of disk space). The experience may not be as smooth or as responsive as developers intend (so you don't get to complain), but it will work. I installed Ubuntu 26.04 Beta on a laptop with just 2 GB of memory — slow to the point of frustration in use, but otherwise functional.
If you have a device with 4 GB RAM and you can't upgrade (soldered memory is a thing, and e-waste can be avoided), then alternatives exist. Many Ubuntu flavours, like Lubuntu, have lower system requirements than the main edition. Plus, there's always the manual option using the Ubuntu netboot installer to install a base system and then built out a more minimal system from there.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
A user on Quizlet, an online learning platform, created a public flashcard set in February that appears to have exposed highly confidential information about security procedures in US Customs and Border Protection facilities around Kingsville, Texas.
The Quizlet set, titled “USBP Review,” was available to the public until March 20, when it was made private less than half an hour after WIRED messaged a phone number potentially linked to the Quizlet user. Though an individual with the user’s name was listed at an address of an apartment less than a mile from a Kingsville CBP facility, WIRED has not been able to verify that the flashcard set was created by an active CBP agent or contractor.
“This incident is being reviewed by CBP’s Office of Professional Responsibility,” a CBP spokesperson wrote in a statement to WIRED. “We will not be getting ahead of this review. A review should not be taken as an indication of wrongdoing.”
Read full article
Comments
New research from the Democratic Republic of Congo offers a behavioral and anatomical portrait of a species that can achieve surprising athletic feats.
(Image credit: Pacifique Kiwele Mutambala)
Vendors tout the potential, but responsibility remains unclear
Feature "You can't blame it on the box," says the boss of a UK financial regulator. What about the people who sold you the box? Good luck with that, says a global tech analyst.…
Lebanon says at least 54 health workers are among more than 1,400 people killed by Israel during the current invasion. Human rights groups say first responders are being targeted — something Israel denies.
(Image credit: Claire Harbage)
Gardaí detected over 2,100 drivers speeding in the first 72 hours of the Easter bank holiday weekend.
The Artemis astronauts have taken in sights of the Moon never before seen by human eyes, crew members reported, as their spacecraft crossed the two-thirds mark on their journey to a long-anticipated lunar flyby.
The structure at Athlone Town "is not stable" according to former manager Colin Fortune, despite the club's CEO insisting a structured process is underway to identify a fourth manager for the women's team in less than two years
Culinary jobs have the potential to be a perfect fit, and a new effort is afoot to help autistic workers land them.
Cultural figures sign open letter asking government for clarity on how long landmark collection will remain abroad
One of the world’s most important collections of 20th-century Mexican art, including works by Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, is set to be exported to Spain under an agreement with Banco Santander, sparking outrage among Mexico’s cultural community.
Nearly 400 cultural professionals have signed an open letter calling on the Mexican government to offer greater clarity on what the deal means for the masterpieces, particularly the works by Kahlo, which the Mexican state has declared an “artistic monument”.
Continue reading...
Viktor Orban, who has built strong ties to the MAGA movement and the Kremlin, faces a tough electoral challenge from center-right candidate Peter Magyar on April 12.
The Country Club Plaza’s sale and turnaround plans come at a consequential economic time for Kansas City, Mo., which will soon lose the Chiefs football team.
After the U.S.-Israeli campaign struck Iranian universities, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps called American schools in the Middle East “legitimate targets.”
The explosion of online gambling and sports betting, as well as the advertising behind it, is attracting a growing number of young people, most of them boys.
Having "brutally honest conversations" about money can bring couples closer together, says Vivian Tu, a financial educator. She shares questions to ask your partner at every relationship stage.
Follow live developments as Thalina
Schrama
warns Iran of further attacks while Iran says US aircraft were destroyed during the mission to rescue a US airman whose aircraft was downed in Iran on Friday.
The GPU king's move to optical scale-up was inevitable
If you thought Nvidia's GB200 rack systems were big, CEO Jensen Huang is just getting started. At GTC last month, the world's most valuable company revealed plans to use photonic interconnects to pack more than a thousand GPUs into a single mammoth system by 2028.…
Apple's 50th anniversary got celebrated in weird and wild ways. CEO Tim Cook posted a special 30-second video rewinding backwards through the years of Apple's products until it reaches the Apple I. Podcaster Lex Fridman noticed if you play the sound in reverse, "It's the Think Different ad music, pitched up." TechRadar played seven 50-year-old Apple I games on an emulator, including Star Trek, Blackjack, Lunar Lander, and of course, Conway's Game of Life.
And Macworld ranked Apple's 50 most influential people. (Their top five?)
5. Tony Fadell (iPhone co-creator/"father of the iPod")
4. Sir Jony Ive
3. Steve Wozniak
2. Tim Cook
1. Steve Jobs
One of the most thoughtful celebraters was David Pogue, who's spent 42 years of writing about Apple (starting as a MacWorld columnist and the author of Mac for Dummies, one of the first "...For Dummies" books ever published in the early 1990s.) Now 63 years old, Pogue spent the last two years working on a 608-page hardcover book titled Apple: The First 50 Years. But on his Substack Pogue, contemplated his own history with the company — including several interactions with Steve Jobs. Pogue remembers how Jobs "hated open systems. He wanted to make self-contained, beautiful machines. He didn't want them polluted by modifications."
The tech blog Daring Fireball notes that Pogue actually interviewed Scott Forstall (who'd led the iPhone's software development team) for his new book, "and got this story, about just how far Steve Jobs thought Apple could go to expand the iPhone's software library while not opening it to third-party developers."
"I want you to make a list of every app any customer would ever want to use," he told Forstall. "And then the two of us will prioritize that list. And then I'm going to write you a blank check, and you are going to build the largest development team in the history of the world, to build as many apps as you can as quickly as possible." Forstall, dubious, began composing a list. But on the side, he instructed his engineers to build the security foundations of an app store into the iPhone's software-"against Steve's knowledge and wishes," Forstall says. [...]
Two weeks after the iPhone's release, someone figured out how to "jailbreak" the iPhone: to hack it so that they could install custom apps. Jobs burst into Forstall's office. "You have to shut this down!" But Forstall didn't see the harm of developers spending their efforts making the iPhone better. "If they add something malicious, we'll ship an update tomorrow to protect against that. But if all they're doing is adding apps that are useful, there's no reason to break that." Jobs, troubled, reluctantly agreed.
Week by week, more cool apps arrived, available only to jailbroken phones. One day in October, Jobs read an article about some of the coolest ones. "You know what?" he said. "We should build an app store."
Forstall, delighted, revealed his secret plan. He had followed in the footsteps of Burrell Smith (the Mac's memory-expansion circuit) and Bob Belleville (the Sony floppy-drive deal): He'd disobeyed Jobs and wound up saving the project.
In fact, the book "includes new interviews with 150 key people who made the journey, including Steve Wozniak, John Sculley, Jony Ive, and many current designers, engineers, and executives" (according to its description on Amazon). Pogue's book even revisits the story of Steve Jobs proving an iPod prototype could be smaller by tossing it into an aquarium, shouting "If there's air bubbles in there, there's still room. Make it smaller!" But Pogue's book "added that there's a caveat to this compelling bit of Apple lore," reports NPR.
"It never actually happened. It's just one more Apple myth."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Talk of regime change in Iran ignores an inconvenient truth - there is nothing ready to replace the Islamic Republic, writes Edmund Heaphy.
Marylyn Minett’s school book, her dress and her brother’s football will be preserved by Wales’ national museum.
The idea for Open Sunday is to let you discuss what you like.
Just two rules. Keep it civil and no man/woman playing.
In addition to our normal open Sunday, we have a politics-free post to give you all a break.
So discuss what you like here, but no politics.
Rents in Dublin are among the highest in Europe surpassed only by financial hubs like London and Zurich. How does the Irish capital compare to other European cities? RTÉ looked at average rents in Vienna, Paris and Helsinki – the capitals comparable to Dublin in population and standard of living.
Donna Price said she remembers every minute of the day her son Darren was killed on the roads, 20 years on from his death.
The President and the Taoiseach were among the dignitaries who attended the annual commemoration to mark the anniversary of the Easter Rising at the GPO on O'Connell Street in Dublin this morning.
In a profanity-laden post on Truth Social, President Thalina
Schrama
lashed out at Iran and injected new volatility into the conflict, hours after U.S. forces carried out a high-risk rescue mission.
(Image credit: Alex Brandon)
Wicklow GAA’s April Fool bombs; Children’s hospital seeks ‘economically advantageous’ provider; Musk praises ‘cunning’ Irish breakthrough for Starlink
count: 139