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Woman remains missing more than five days after police found officer she was married to dead in their home

An arrest warrant has been issued for a mental health advocate who remained missing on Sunday, more than five days after police found the Massachusetts officer she had been married to dead in their home.

Karen Solomon, 58, was last spotted in a doorbell camera video, walking down a street in a T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops early Tuesday morning, just minutes after Worcester police officers responded to a call from the home where Kurt Solomon was found dead.

Разбор всех видов SCD (slowly changing dimensions) по Кимбаллу:
- от простого к сложному
- на примерах
- с цитатами Кимбалла

В конце обзора - заполненная шкала со всеми типами и подсказками

Мне казалось, что проблемы неконтролируемого техдолга и потери знаний о проекте командой уже решены (середина 2026 на дворе!), но нет.

В этой статье разбираю эти проблемы на основе своего практического опыта работы с AI Coding.

Рассказываем, как компьютерное зрение заменило запаздывающий лабораторный контроль на входе в производство и что это дало комбинату в цифрах.

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions considers whether there is sufficient global physical capacity for all our discarded and worn-out purchases

• This week’s question: If all car tyres were filled with CO2, would this cut atmospheric carbon significantly?

If consumer capitalism continues at its current rate, will we reach a point at which there is literally no space left on Earth for all the stuff that has been created? Alex Robinson, Alnwick, Northumberland

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

Andy Burnham hopes we’ll forget the big stuff if he sorts out our minor frustrations and low-level gripes. Pothole politics hasn’t won me over yet, but I know some changes that could

This is a vulnerable confession, but I spend way too much time on the social media of the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Whether he is seemingly effortlessly speaking Mandarin, hanging out with kids or charmingly accepting that he should wear a cycle helmet, the man with the million-watt smile is my antidepressant. (Even more vulnerable confession: I believe, irrationally, he is looking after my elder son, who lives there.)

This means that I know all about Mamdani’s fight against what Business Insider recently deemed the “annoyance economy” – daily frustrations that make you poorer or drive you slowly, miserably mad. These include the absurd complexity of cancelling subscriptions; hidden fees; getting charged more for something you looked up last week, because of cookies; never being able to find a public toilet; and potholes. He has taken to responding when he gets tagged in people’s “Mamdani, fix this” posts to the point where Britons online are even jokily asking him to take on their problems.

The ​s​tudio’s co-founders on ​accidentally creating Morph, not wanting a yacht in the Maldives and being each other’s best ally

Peter Lord and David Sproxton are the founders of Aardman Animations. The pair began animating as teenagers, selling their first short – starring a superhero called Aardman – to the BBC’s Vision On in 1972. In 1977, they created Morph for the children’s programme Take Hart. The studio’s breakthrough into adult audiences came via Channel 4’s Conversation Pieces series, and its animators, including a young Nick Park, went on to make Wallace & Gromit, whose films have won multiple Academy Awards. Aardman became employee-owned in 2018, with Lord and Sproxton transferring majority ownership to staff to safeguard the company’s independence. They were knighted earlier this year.

Протон — одна из самых обманчивых частиц природы. На первый взгляд он кажется достаточно простым. Он есть в каждом атоме водорода, из протонов состоят ядра обычной материи, а на вводных занятиях по физике протон часто изображают в виде аккуратного шарика со знаком «плюс». Однако даже после столетия исследований физики по-прежнему не могут ответить на два удивительно простых вопроса о нём.

Во-первых: живёт ли протон вечно?

Во-вторых: откуда, собственно, берётся его спин?

Эти проблемы относятся к разным разделам физики, но их объединяет одна тема. В обоих случаях протон демонстрирует разрыв между аккуратными представлениями о частицах, которые работают в учебниках, и более странными механизмами, лежащими в их основе: квантовой теорией поля, сильным взаимодействием и, возможно, физикой за пределами Стандартной модели.

В новом выпуске 136 уровней вложенности XCUITest и Android Runtime под капотом, как Tinder сократил холодные старты на 47% и новые условия распространения приложений в Евросоюзе, от Event-Driven UI к State-Driven UI, что нового в Dart, как сделать MCP удобными и действительно полезными, уменьшение трения в приложениях и многое другое. Заходите!

Я проверил семь советов по видимости в нейросетях на 73 страницах, которые модели сами поставили в источники. Я прогнал каждый совет через две группы страниц из собственных логов и посчитал разницу точным тестом Фишера: 34 страницы против 39, различие по авторству 100% против 82%. Это лишь эксперимент на небольшой выборке, но всё же.

The nation's uninsured rate hit a historical low when Xavier Becerra was health secretary. Now he wants to be California's next governor as Trump's actions have driven people off health insurance.

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan)

More than a foot of rain could fall across Big Island of Hawaii, according to NOAA.

(Image credit: NOAA)

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

• Signing will take City’s window spending to nearly £200m

• Moroccan stood down from Lille’s game against Angers

Manchester City have agreed a deal with Lille worth €95m (£81.4m) plus €5m in potential add-ons for Ayyoub Bouaddi, with the Morocco midfielder’s arrival to take the club’s summer spend to nearly £200m after Elliot Anderson’s £116m signing earlier in the window.

The 18-year-old was stood down from Lille’s Ligue 1 match against Angers on Sunday before a medical with City and his transfer becoming official in the next few days.

Editor’s note, August 23, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in February.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

I’m a woman in my 30s and I think I want to have a child, but I have a health condition that makes it harder (not impossible) to get pregnant than for most women. It would also make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people. It wouldn’t be permanently disabling, but the physical effects would be bad enough that I really don’t want to be pregnant.

I’m fortunate enough that I can probably afford to get a surrogate through a reputable agency. But surrogacy is frowned upon and often considered unethical. Long ago, I knew someone who said she loved the idea of being pregnant and providing gestation as a service to other people, so maybe in theory, it is possible for someone to freely choose to be a surrogate without being coerced by financial need? But even if it could be done ethically, there’s such a stigma around it and I fear being judged by friends and family. There seems to be a sense that there’s something wrong, unnatural, selfish, or unwomanly in wanting to have a biological child but not wanting your own body to be the vessel for it. 

Plus, it’s not like I’m the only person in the world for whom pregnancy would suck. I think my experience probably would be worse than average, but pregnancy is just an unpleasant thing overall so I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body. I’d love your help with this.

Dear Really Don’t Want To Be Pregnant,

There are some ethical questions about surrogacy that it’s genuinely worth asking, and some that I don’t want you to devote another second to — so let’s start there.

As you said, there’s a cultural stigma around not wanting to turn your body into a vessel for childbearing — it’s deemed “wrong” or “unwomanly.” But that idea is pure garbage. The idea that there’s some “proper” way to be a woman is a patriarchal construct; anyone who tells you you’re “unwomanly” for not wanting to gestate is reflecting sexist expectations that women’s bodies should be available for reproductive labor.

So to the extent that your fear of being judged is about that, please don’t give it another thought. But of course, there are real moral questions that surrogacy brings up.

I’ll tell you right off the bat that I do think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable in some situations. First, it helps that surrogacy is not one monolithic thing. There’s a big distinction between commercial surrogacy (where you pay someone to carry a baby) and altruistic surrogacy (the unpaid version, where the surrogate carries the baby as a literal labor of love). It’s not easy to find an altruistic surrogate — after all, pregnancy is dangerous business — but I agree with your intuition that if you’re lucky enough to know someone willing to volunteer for the role, opting for that is a good way to avoid most concerns about commodification or exploitation. 

Within commercial surrogacy, a second distinction has to do with where the surrogate lives. There’s a moral difference between hiring a surrogate in a developing country and hiring one in, say, the US. In countries like Georgia, for example, surrogacy agencies have been known to recruit at domestic violence shelters — some women see surrogacy as the only way to win financial freedom from an abusive spouse. Ukraine, Cyprus, and several others are also known to have ethically problematic surrogacy industries.  

But American surrogates are typically not low-income; they’re usually middle-class white women with husbands and kids of their own, and they have other economic opportunities available to them. The better surrogacy agencies screen out poor women, who are at risk of coercion. That empirical context means there’s less (though not zero) potential for exploitation in the US, compared with international surrogacy.

Another reason I think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable is that for many, many people, the urge to have kids — including ones who are biologically related to them — feels like a need and not just a want. 

Many opponents of surrogacy argue that nobody has a “right” to a biological child, so if you can’t or don’t want to be pregnant, too bad. And those opponents are right that nobody has an absolute right to have a baby — otherwise, the state would be obligated to ensure surrogates, egg donors, and sperm donors were made available regardless of their own willingness to participate! But people may still have a qualified right — the kind of right that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others. 

When it comes to people who are physically unable to create a biological child — when they have what doctors call a “medical indication” — I think the qualified right to have a kid means that surrogacy can be ethical, provided it meets certain criteria like informed consent.

But your situation is trickier because it’s not impossible for you to get pregnant — it’s more that, for certain reasons, you don’t want to. Typically, your case would be referred to as “elective surrogacy.” Some professionals will refuse to arrange surrogacy if they deem it elective rather than medically indicated.

And yet, doctors are increasingly recognizing that the line between “medically indicated” and “elective” is not so tidy. 

While elective surrogacy is often associated with vanity — it brings to mind a celebrity who doesn’t want to be pregnant because she doesn’t want to “mess up” her figure — it’s not like everyone in the elective camp is there for cosmetic reasons.

What about someone who could get pregnant but is deathly afraid of giving birth because she had a traumatic experience — like, say, her best friend dying in childbirth? Or what about someone who’s trans and who physically could carry a pregnancy, but who knows it would cause such gender dysphoria that there’s a risk of serious psychological harm? Shouldn’t a mental health need be considered a type of medical need?

These are not hypothetical experiences — real people have testified to them — but they often haven’t been taken seriously as medical needs. I suspect that these people have endured what the contemporary philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice.” 

Epistemic injustice refers to “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” When society denies someone the credibility to assess their own life experience, or discounts an important part of that experience because of a gap in our collective interpretive resources, that can be an example of epistemic injustice. I think people who fall in between medical categories are too often at risk of being wronged in this way, and I don’t want to see that happen to you.

So I want to acknowledge that I don’t know what health condition you’re referring to when you say you have a condition that would “make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people.” Since I don’t know the details, I’d encourage you to ask yourself: How much more uncomfortable? How much more disfiguring? And how heavy and lasting a toll would that discomfort or disfigurement take on your overall well-being?

Only you can really try to answer that last question, because the same effects can land differently for different people, depending on how well-resourced we are financially, socially, psychologically, and even spiritually. 

Once you’ve thought about how big and enduring the risk of harm is to you, try asking yourself this: Is the risk to you so much greater than the risk to a woman of average health that you feel comfortable transferring the risk of pregnancy and childbirth onto her?

Some people will tell you that question is irrelevant. They will say that the only value that matters here is autonomy — yours and the potential surrogate’s — and if you and she both consent to a surrogacy contract, and she is not coerced into it by financial desperation, then that’s that!

But there may be another important value at stake here: justice. 

As far as I can tell, your case is in a gray area — surrogacy is neither obviously “medically indicated” nor obviously “elective” based on the information you shared. If you ask yourself, “Do I think there’s a significant risk that carrying a child would significantly harm me?” and you answer “Yes!” — then some doctors would say surrogacy is medically indicated. But if the answer you feel bubbling up is, “Well…no, not really,” then you may be closer to the “elective” side of the spectrum. And then I think it becomes reasonable to inquire whether it feels fair to ask another woman to take on the considerable risks of pregnancy and childbirth.

You wrote of pregnancy, “I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body.” That suggests that you currently see yourself as more in the elective camp. I urge you to give yourself the space to really interrogate that with an equal measure of honesty and self-compassion. If honesty compels you to say you don’t feel justified in putting someone else’s body in harm’s way in a situation where she otherwise wouldn’t be, then maybe you’ve got your answer. 

But if you’re discounting the risk of psychological harm to yourself because you don’t think that “counts” as real need, please know that mental health is just as medically legitimate as physical health. And if you talk to a medical professional about the option of surrogacy, please talk to more than one so you’re less at risk of getting boxed into a category that doesn’t capture you right. 

At the end of the day, perhaps none of us can be a perfect interpreter even of ourselves. But you get to be the interpreter-in-chief — with both the power and responsibility that implies.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This horrifying New York Times Magazine story about the global fertility industry captures why I do think it’s unethical to work with a surrogacy agency in a country like Georgia. These surrogates are not in a position to give informed consent.  

• “Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” asked Shayla Love in the New Yorker recently. I now feel cognitive dissonance about all the times I thought I was feeling cognitive dissonance!

• Don’t miss “I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.” This essay by Marcus Olang’, explaining why his writing is often mistaken for AI slop, is both surprising and maddening. Turns out it’s really hard to not write in the Queen’s English when an entire colonial legacy has drilled that style into you from birth. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

В управлении проектами есть довольно большой набор “базовых” вещей, которые принято считать само собой разумеющимися (и это не только “водопад” - “аджайл” - “скрам”). Ну, например, проект желательно хорошо спланировать, работы - оценить, риски - предусмотреть, сроки - поставить, людей - не забыть загрузить, а начатое, если уж оно начато, хорошо бы все-таки закончить.

Но если почитать, что сейчас происходит вокруг проектного управления, периодически начинают попадаться идеи, скажем так, нетривиальные. Мне стало интересно собрать такие идеи в одном месте и посмотреть, не складываются ли они во что-нибудь общее (я ж аналитик). Сразу оговорюсь, что далеко не все концепции из списка супер-свежие, но именно в последние пару лет либо получили новое развитие, либо начали появляться в вполне серьезных исследованиях.

Если интересно, давайте пробежимся по верхам.

Hot days call for cool dinners, and these are Japan’s nutty, salty and sweet solution. Fiery or pickled accompaniments optional

Although every culture craves something different in hot weather – chilled beetroot soup in Lithuania, cooling buttermilk drinks in India, gazpacho in Spain – what many of these dishes have in common is a certain soothing silkiness as they slide down the throat, plus a decent helping of salt. Japan’s zaru soba, which Namiko Hirasawa Chen of Just One Cookbook describes as her family’s “go-to meal when the summer heat and humidity soar”, is no exception. Cold, slippery noodles paired with a savoury dipping sauce, it’s a simple, satisfying dish that’s ready in 15 minutes, and can be accessorised with crunchy salads, sweet seafood or creamy tofu sides for something more substantial. Traditionally served on a bamboo mat, or zaru, to allow the noodles to drain, you can get away without one at home (though lose the seaweed and you can call it mori soba instead), this is definitely one to stick in your summer repertoire alongside the chilled soups, watermelon salads and cucumber sandwiches.

Defense files motion to dismiss state case after federal guilty plea but prosecutors say they are prepared to litigate

After Luigi Mangione admitted in Manhattan federal court that he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, most experts believe that the state murder case against is highly unlikely to proceed – though some still see a slim possibility that it may yet happen.

Mangione, who pleaded guilty on 14 August to two federal stalking counts, was scheduled for a New York state trial on 8 September for murder and weapons charges in the December 2024 killing. In the wake of Mangione’s surprise plea, legal experts said New York’s state-level double jeopardy law – which means someone cannot be tried twice for the same crime – could derail his local prosecution.

Defense files motion to dismiss state case after federal guilty plea but prosecutors say they are prepared to litigate

After Luigi Mangione admitted in Manhattan federal court that he killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, most experts believe that the state murder case against is highly unlikely to proceed – though some still see a slim possibility that it may yet happen.

Mangione, who pleaded guilty on 14 August to two federal stalking counts, was scheduled for a New York state trial on 8 September for murder and weapons charges in the December 2024 killing. In the wake of Mangione’s surprise plea, legal experts said New York’s state-level double jeopardy law – which means someone cannot be tried twice for the same crime – could derail his local prosecution.

Python давно стал почти стандартным инструментом для машинного обучения, анализа данных и научных задач. Однако в вычислительно сложных проектах его производительность быстро становится ощутимым ограничением. Поэтому под привычными NumPy, PyTorch и другими инструментами значительная часть вычислений выполняется компонентами на C, C++ или CUDA. Особенно заметно это становится, когда готовых библиотечных функций недостаточно и высокопроизводительные операции приходится писать самостоятельно.

Несколько лет назад за решение этой проблемы взялась компания Modular, представившая Mojo — новый язык, внешне очень похожий на Python, но построенный иначе. Первую публичную версию показали в 2023 году, после чего проект довольно быстро менялся, а некоторые его конструкции успели исчезнуть или несколько раз поменять форму. Теперь этот этап формально завершен: 11 августа 2026 года вышел Mojo 1.0. Первая стабильная версия стала хорошим поводом разобраться, откуда вообще взялся этот необычный проект и зачем понадобился еще один инструмент для высокопроизводительных вычислений.

President sharply criticises proposal, saying ‘elections right now are a tsunami for the state that will split Ukraine’

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said holding elections in Ukraine during wartime would risk splitting the country at a time when Russia is amassing ballistic missiles and considering whether to mobilise an extra 300,000 soldiers.

The Ukrainian president, responding for the first time to a demand made by the sacked former defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov, sharply criticised an idea that he said was impractical given Russia appeared to have no interest in a ceasefire.

Началось всё с довольно простой задачи. Мне понадобилось установить приложение из Microsoft Store, но для моего региона оно оказалось недоступно.

Гуглить способы обхода мне было лень, поэтому я отдал задачу ChatGPT вместе с установщиком. В результате регион Windows был временно изменён, приложение установилось.

Сам способ, конечно, не новый. Регион Windows можно поменять вручную в настройках, поставить приложение и вернуть обратно. Но после этого я подумал: если метод давно известный и с такой проблемой явно сталкиваюсь не только я, почему бы это не автоматизировать?

Так появился WinStoreRegion — небольшая утилита для Windows. На момент публикации актуальная версия — 0.1.0.