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Posted by Agnès Poirier

The festival is a celebration of cinema and a frantic trade show all at once. After 25 years, I can’t help but go back

Nothing prepares you for the shock that is the Cannes film festival: the adrenaline, the fatigue, the elation and the emotion, but also the hunger, the anger, the magic and the ridicule. For young cinephiles, and for almost everybody who works in the film industry, it is the mecca of cinema and has been so for nearly eight decades. Anyone going for the first time this week, as I did 25 years ago, should not listen to the old grognards – Cannes’ battle-worn veterans – who will lament that the festival has become an abominable circus and swear this year will be their last. It is a circus, and you can bet they will be back for as long as their knees can take it. For there is nothing quite like it.

Born to counteract Benito Mussolini’s Venice film festival, its first edition was planned for September 1939, but Adolf Hitler had other plans. The previous year, under pressure from Berlin and Rome, the Venice film festival’s top prize, the Coppa Mussolini, was handed to Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Olympia, prompting the French, British and American delegates to walk out. Hence Cannes, conceived as the festival of the “free world”. More than 80 years later, for all its sins, it has remained faithful to that founding promise.

Agnès Poirier is a political commentator, writer and critic for the British, American and European press

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Posted by Aakash Hassan and Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi, Guill Ramos in Manila and Rebecca Ratcliffe in Bangkok

Families turn to dirty fuels such as firewood, bringing fears over air pollution and fragility of energy transition

In the ramshackle lanes of a south Delhi slum, Afshana Khatoon crouched wearily on her haunches and began lighting a small pile of firewood.

She had only just returned from six hours spent trudging through the urban forests and dry parks of India’s capital looking for kindling to turn into a makeshift stove. As the unforgiving summer heat soared above 40C, she had walked for miles, piling the sticks and fallen branches into a bundle on her head while sweat ran down her face.

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Posted by Petra Stock

The behavioural cue of ‘flexible self-protection’ is a way to establish whether an animal feels pain, scientists say

Do insects feel pain? Crickets certainly seem to, according to new research which finds they stroke and groom a sore antenna in much the same way as a dog nurses its hurt paw.

Associate Prof Thomas White, an entomologist from the University of Sydney, said the experience of pain was a “longer, drawn-out, ouchy feeling”, that differed from a hardwired nerve response.

Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter

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Posted by Carlos Mureithi in Nairobi

Court cases in Kenya point to a growing market for ants as exotic pets in Asia and Europe that has implications for conservation and biosecurity

In the biblical text Book of Proverbs, King Solomon describes the harvester ant as a model of wisdom and industriousness: “Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!”

Almost 3,000 years later, the thriving international parallel market for a distinct species of the ant native to east Africa has been thrust into the global spotlight after a series of convictions in Kenya for ant smuggling.

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Posted by Guardian staff and agencies

Chinese government appears to be using the workaround of a different character to represent part of the secretary of state’s name, to allow him to visit the country for the upcoming Trump summit

US secretary of state Marco Rubio is heading to Beijing with president Donald Trump despite being under Chinese sanctions – a breakthrough that might have been made possible after China changed his name’s transliteration.

As a US senator, Rubio, who is visiting China for the first time, fiercely championed human rights in China, which retaliated by imposing sanctions on him twice – adopting a tactic more often used by the US against adversaries.

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Posted by Warren Murray with Guardian writers and agencies

Civilian deaths in several regions and baby girl has leg blown off; Kallas says Putin’s weakening position could mean ‘opportunity for ending war’. What we know on day 1,540

Russian forces launched attacks in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region on Tuesday, killing at least six people, regional officials said, after the expiry of a ceasefire. Ukrainian officials said Russia launched more than 200 drones overnight, putting an end to hopes that the three-day ceasefire that ended on Monday would be extended.

A drone attack on an apartment building in the president’s home town, the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, killed two and injured four, including the dead couple’s nine-month-old granddaughter whose leg was severed, said the regional governor and local military administration head.

North-east of Kryvyi Rih, an aerial bomb strike killed four and injured three, said officials. “After the end of the partial three-day ceasefire, Russia continues to kill and maim Ukrainians and pressure on it must therefore in no way be weakened,” said Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president.

Zelenskyy said drones were intercepted over several regions but reported damage to energy facilities, apartment buildings, a kindergarten and a civilian locomotive. In Kyiv, debris from a downed drone fell on the roof of a 16-storey residential building in the northern Obolon district, sparking a fire, said the mayor, Vitali Klitschko. Two people were hurt in the central Cherkasy region, and damage was also recorded in the Zhytomyr region, farther west, and in the Chernihiv region on the Russian border.

Two people were injured in strikes on the south-eastern city of Dnipro and the southern city of Kherson. Russian drones also hit energy infrastructure in the Mykolaiv region, causing blackouts in the region, said Vitaliy Kim, the regional governor.

Zelenskyy said Ukrainian forces struck gas facilities in Russia’s central Orenburg region more than 1,500 km (900 miles) from Ukraine’s borders. “Overall, Ukraine’s current position on the frontline, in our long-range [strikes] and in our joint results with our partners are at their highest level in years. We must maintain this level and continue to achieve results,” Zelenskyy said in an address to the nation.

Zelenskyy said Kyiv was working with its allies in Europe to develop technologies to defend against ballistic missiles, adding that 13 countries and Nato representatives had participated in talks on the issue on Tuesday.

Signs that Vladimir Putin’s position is weakening could open a window to ending the war in Ukraine, the EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said on Tuesday. Putin over the weekend suggested that the war in Ukraine was “heading to an end” after more than four years of bloodshed. “What his statement really shows is that he’s not in a strong position,” Kallas said after a meeting with EU defence ministers. “So I think there’s an opportunity for ending this war.”

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Tree Crews, M, Garden, Lemon Tree

May. 12th, 2026 06:18 pm
ranunculus: (Default)
[personal profile] ranunculus
PG&E's tree crews have been here for the last couple of days. Mostly it has been ok, except for one crew member who managed to park completely blocking the driveway and then run his tracked vehicle up onto my circle skinning back the surface.  The second day I believe the same guy managed to ignore company protocol and drop a tree on the boundary line fence smashing it.  So much for their vaunted "professional" tree crews. 

M came home today, which is very nice. He is here for a month before abandoning me for the rest of the summer to be in lovely Alaska where it won't be hot like it is here. 

The garden loves the warm days and is growing fast. My soil amendments this year seem to be working well so far.  Planted the old lemon tree today. I bet it is a LOT happier in the ground.  I added a mix of compost and coconut coir around it to help keep the soil fertile and light. Looks like the compost was very much needed as there were almost no worms in the dirt.  I'll top it with a good thick layer of wood compost and horse manure in an attempt to keep building the soil.  That approach is certainly working on the trees at the top of the garden. Hardpan is turning fluffy up there.  One of my apples was yellow and sickly last year, but having a thick layer of horse manure compost around it this winter has turned the tree dark green and very happy. 

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Posted by Shrai Popat in Washington and Robert Mackey

FBI director also dismisses allegations of unexplained absences as Democrats challenge him over Atlantic report

Embattled FBI director Kash Patel has denied under oath recent allegations of excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job, dismissing them as “baseless” during a fiery congressional hearing.

Democrats challenged him over the “extremely alarming” reports, first reported in the Atlantic mid-April, which they argued would a mount to a “gross dereliction” of duty. The FBI director has sued the magazine, and the author of a story it published, filing a defamation lawsuit in US district court for the District of Columbia that seeks $250m in damages.

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Posted by Uwa Ede-Osifo and agencies

Collins, a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the NBA, died after eight-month battle with glioblastoma

Jason Collins, the retired NBA player who made history as the league’s first openly gay athlete, has died after a short battle with stage 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, his family announced on Tuesday. He was 47.

“Jason changed lives in unexpected ways and was an inspiration to all who knew him and to those who admired him from afar,” Collins’ family said in a statement released through the NBA. “We are grateful for the outpouring of love and prayers over the past eight months and for the exceptional medical care Jason received from his doctors and nurses. Our family will miss him dearly.”

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Spam Resistant Forges

May. 12th, 2026 12:44 pm
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Posted by feld

There is a lot of consternation lately about the growing onslaught of low-quality (spam) and completely AI submitted bug reports, pull requests, etc. This is unrelated to AI scrapers which can be another problem, but I'm more interested in the concerns about the bottleneck of "code review".

Perhaps you can't take my advice and shutdown your public repos. I've experienced firsthand the burden of dealing with 100% human-made spam getting published on our GitLab which no amount of captcha or email verification can stop. Unfortunately, "open registration" is a pretty big vulnerability. If you opt instead to require admins to approve accounts, you're just asking someone to sit there all day and click APPROVE or DENY hundreds to thousands of times. (It really gets that bad!)

We don't yet have a functional "federated" git forge and I'm skeptical it will ever work well. To me this feels like reinventing the wheel, and the benefits appear limited.

We're Pretty Good At Dealing With Spam

I mean email.

James Zawinski, 1995

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

Think about it. It's an open federated network and for the most part we've really been successful at keeping spam at bay. The trends change every couple years and we have to adapt (spam coming from GMail/Outlook now?), but we have tools at our disposal that do a reasonable job of managing the spam problem.

Why aren't we using these tools?

A: Because nobody's changing the UX so we can.

A Modest Proposal

You are either going to be horrified or enamored with this idea.

We're going to pretend Forgejo is our platform. Here's what a solution would look like:

  1. Closed registration, invite-only, maybe approved registration for listed domains or automatic via a specific OAuth provider. (onboarding should be frictionless for trusted / company users)
  2. Issues and pull requests from unknown users will be opened via email. The web interface should expose mailto: links for issues and pull requests. This means we get to use all our normal anti-spam tools as our first layer of defense.

Note

You can embed your issue template in the mailto URL! We have the technology! You could even sneak a canary in here and automatically reject the submission based on its absence or existence!

  1. These submission from unknown users go into a queue to be approved by a global administrator or the specific org/project users with a Maintainer role. This is like a mailing list manager requiring approval to post. The submission can also be marked private so it gets accepted but isn't made public which is useful for security-related issues.
  2. Once approved, there is now a user account registered for that email address, but it has the "Disable Sign-In" flag set. The issue/pull request becomes public and normal actions take place. i.e., email notifications to stakeholders and watchers. This user can't fill up your server with spam snippets, wiki junk, or fake repos.
  3. If the team likes the user's contributions they can opt to promote them to a full user and grant them sign-in access, trigger their password reset email.

That's it. That's the whole thing. We still get the nice web interfaces and tooling. Spam can be reduced to a trickle. Users have to send their first submission as an attachment created with git format-patch, but that's as high as the friction gets.

Isn't this as burdensome as open registrations with approval?

A: No, because we get to filter out spam first and each repo could have its issue/pr emails rotated automatically. Maybe we change them once every hour, but allow the previous and next values to work. Just glue TOTP into the address: submit+%PROJECT_ID%-%TYPE%-%TOTP%@yourgit.com

Now they can't keep hammering the same address because it keeps changing. New email address submitting for the first time? Greylist them for a while. Greylist them longer if they or their domain keep submitting with more unknown email addresses. You might not ever see these bots and by the time they get their message through the TOTP expired and their submission is rejected anyway.

Get creative. This might not be perfect, but it can be refined in good time.

Replicating an artist works

May. 13th, 2026 09:04 am
queervanilla: (Shocked Pluto)
[personal profile] queervanilla posting in [community profile] art
I'm a beginner artist and I really, REALLY, REALLY like how the artist Itousa does colors. I would really like to replicate the same thing in my works but what level of color theory do I need to pull this off.

Examples Under Cut )
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Posted by Shrai Popat in Washington

FBI director also dismisses allegations of unexplained absences as Democrats challenge him over Atlantic report

Embattled FBI director Kash Patel has denied under oath recent allegations of excessive drinking and unexplained absences on the job, dismissing them as “baseless” during a fiery congressional hearing.

Democrats challenged him over the “extremely alarming” reports, first reported in the Atlantic mid-April, which they argued would a mount to a “gross dereliction” of duty. The FBI director has sued the magazine, and the author of a story it published, filing a defamation lawsuit in US district court for the District of Columbia that seeks $250m in damages.

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Posted by Associated Press

Collins, a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the NBA, died after eight-month battle with glioblastoma

Jason Collins, the NBA’s first openly gay player, who went on to become a pioneer for inclusion and an ambassador for the league, has died after an eight-month battle with an aggressive form of a brain tumor, his family announced on Tuesday.

Collins spent 13 years as a player in the league for six different franchises, including the Boston Celtics and the New Jersey Nets. He revealed in 2013 that he was gay, an announcement that came toward the end of his playing career.

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Posted by Petra Stock

The behavioural cue of ‘flexible self-protection’ is a way to establish whether an animal feels pain, scientists say

Do insects feel pain? Crickets certainly seem to, according to new research which finds they stroke and groom a sore antenna in much the same way as a dog nurses its hurt paw.

Associate Prof Thomas White, an entomologist from the University of Sydney, said the experience of pain was a “longer, drawn-out, ouchy feeling”, that differed from a hardwired nerve response.

Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter

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Posted by Fiona Harvey Environment editor

Party held out prospect of act while in opposition but plan did not make it into election manifesto

Ministers should bring forward a new clean air act that would ban wood burning, clear diesel vehicles from the roads and force councils to cut pollution, a group of more than 60 charities have urged before the king’s speech on Wednesday.

Labour held out the prospect of a clean air act while in opposition in 2023, but this was dropped from the final election manifesto, and the government has made no move to reinstate it.

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Posted by Tom Knowles

Despite concerns super-rich are leaving due to tax burdens, 88% of those surveyed were proud to live in UK and would pay more to fund public services

Nine in 10 UK millionaires are proud to live in Britain and three-quarters would be willing to pay more tax to ensure public assets get the funding they need, according to research.

Despite widely reported concerns that the wealthy are choosing to leave the country owing to higher taxes, the survey found millionaires were much more concerned about medical workers moving away than wealthy people emigrating.

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Posted by Denis Campbell Health policy editor

Researchers find 50+ hours a week can be detrimental to health but lighter responsibilities have positive effect

The stresses and strains of caring for someone for 50 hours or more a week leads to “accelerated cognitive decline” in middle-aged and older people, research shows.

However, providing care for only five to nine hours a week has the opposite effect, boosting brain health so much that the benefits last until older age.

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Posted by Petra Stock

The behavioural cue of ‘flexible self-protection’ is a way to establish whether an animal feels pain, scientists say

Do insects feel pain? Crickets certainly seem to, according to new research which finds they stroke and groom a sore antenna in much the same way as a dog nurses its hurt paw.

Associate Prof Thomas White, an entomologist from the University of Sydney, said the experience of pain was a “longer, drawn-out, ouchy feeling”, that differed from a hardwired nerve response.

Sign up to get climate and environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as a free newsletter

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