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Firefighters in the Gironde region of France said the situation had "stabilized", after a week of wildfires caused by a major heatwave across Europe.

(Image credit: Emma Da Silva)

Contender, largest tagged male great white, heading north as overheating oceans alter range of several shark species

The largest tagged male great white shark in the Atlantic Ocean has been identified traveling up the US and Canada coastline amid a surge in sightings of sharks that are increasingly shifting their movement patterns due to the overheating of the oceans.

The great white shark, named Contender, is nearly 14ft long and weighs more than 1,650lbs. The hulking fish has been pinged in several locations off North Carolina and Maine as he headed north for the summer, with Contender’s last known location located off Nova Scotia in Canada on 11 July.

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When asked by a reporter at Camp David about negotiations with Iran, Trump said the US would be “hitting them very hard”.

“We just want to win,” he said. “We’re doing very well, trying to be nice, as nice as you can be in a situation like that, but, you know, they’re being decimated. They have no Navy. They have no air force, they have no anti-aircraft. They don’t have any capability. They have some, but very little.”

Senators Warren and Van Hollen attack Republican ‘rubber stamps’ in Congress for surrendering authority to Trump. Plus, could AI take your job? Some workers in China already know the answer

Good morning.

Senior Democrats accused Republicans in the US Congress of becoming “gelatinous blobs” who will not stand up to Donald Trump and “rubber stamps” for his war on Iran.

What else is happening in Washington? Trump has said a deal has been reached for Hamas to disarm and for Israel to withdraw its forces from Gaza. However, briefings from both sides exposed disputes over its implementation that could prove difficult to overcome.

What has Blanche said? Blanche has already said publicly that the payout fund to compensate victims of so-called government weaponization is not moving forward amid bipartisan backlash. But Cornyn and Tillis had sought assurances in writing, something Blanche has refused to do. Cornyn also sought to clarify the terms of the tax immunity portion of the agreement.

More than 80 loved ones spoke of horrors of learning about Robert Bush’s crimes, including mother of a miscarried baby

A funeral director has been jailed for 20 years for leaving dozens of bodies – including a miscarried baby – “rotting” in his mortuary and giving bereaved families the wrong ashes.

Robert Bush, the owner of Legacy Independent Funeral Services in Hull, pleaded guilty to 67 offences spanning 12 years and affecting hundreds of families, including 30 counts of preventing a lawful and decent burial.

Всем привет! Это Денис Сметнев. Сегодня необычный кейс из новой реальности книжного рынка. Представьте, что выходит книга, а вместе с ней появляется возможность переписываться с главным героем! Например, с Гарри Поттером или Мастером и Маргаритой. Интересно? Да, и очень необычно в продвижении. Мы решили проверить гипотезу: что будет, если оживить главного героя психологического технотриллера через ИИ и позволить читателям с ним пообщаться. Получили 277 935 визитов на сайт, 653 живых диалога с персонажем и 2 010 проданных книг. 

Democrats Warren and Van Hollen attack Republican ‘rubber stamps’ in Congress for ceding authority to Trump

Senior Democrats accused Republicans in the US Congress of becoming “gelatinous blobs” who won’t stand up to Donald Trump and “rubber stamps” for his war on Iran.

Elizabeth Warren, a US senator for Massachusetts, and Chris Van Hollen, a US senator for Maryland, argued that the Republican-controlled Congress had surrendered its constitutional authority to the president.

Cherry pops and citrus zings in this twist on a Hemingway special

A bright, citrus-forward riff on the classic Hemingway special, with cherry depth and a clean white rum base.

Daniel Emson, bar manager, The Culpeper, London E1

Cities in North America hosting 14 concerts in August and September – and economic impact is set to be significant

BTS’s “Army” fanbase is descending on New York this weekend as the K-pop supergroup continues their first world tour after a four-year hiatus, sparking an economic boom wherever they land.

After shows in South Korea and Europe, the group are back in North America, with 14 shows in six US cities in August and September.

She lit up screens as Sex Education’s steamy sci-fi writer, wowed Streep in the West End and now she’s starring in the return of TV’s feelgood footie hit. The star talks about pretending to be sporty – and why she’s a total cheese string

By the time its third season came to an end in 2023, Ted Lasso was a Big Deal. The cosy comedy about an indefatigably positive American football coach gee-whizzing his way into the hearts of a London football team had won 13 Emmys and racked up more than 25bn minutes of viewing.

Contributing exactly zero minutes to this staggering stat was Tanya Reynolds, who joins the series in its fourth season as Ted’s assistant coach, Alice.

After her star turn in Phantom Thread, everyone expected a move to Tinseltown – but the actor embraced indie European films instead. It’s because of a lifelong instinct to be bold, she says

Back when she was a rising actor, Vicky Krieps had her fill of people telling her what not to do. When she got pregnant in her 20s, she was advised not to have the baby as it would derail her career, but she did it anyway. When, after playing a fashion designer’s muse in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, she went back to making low-budget French films, she was, she says, “actually laughed at. It just seemed absurd to these people that I would turn my back on Hollywood and invest so much energy and passion in something that wasn’t giving me money.”

Yet Krieps’s determination to forge her own path has reaped rewards. For the last decade she has had one foot in the Hollywood mainstream, appearing in Fede Álvarez’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web and M Night Shyamalan’s Old, while keeping the other firmly in independent cinema where she has freedom to experiment. Krieps also does her utmost to avoid the pantomime of red-carpet events. On the occasions she does make an appearance, she will stick out her tongue or give photographers the finger. “I always smile when I’m doing it. But I’m telling them: ‘Guys, this is really ridiculous and the shouting is a bit much. Just talk nicely to me.’”

“Ooooh, a jar, a tiny little jar,” the overlapping voices of the popular social audio say in a hushed, awed tone, evoking an intrusive thought. “Keep the jar with the other jars.”

Jess Lynch, an artist in Toronto, made the audio on a whim. Among her friends, she’s known as the one whose dishwasher is always filled with jars. 

Not just any old jar, mind you. Lynch has standards. “It’s gotta be a solid mason jar,” she said. “It’s gotta have a lid.” Other qualities that make a container worth keeping? A good seal, watertight, completely see-through, no sticky labels. If it doesn’t meet her standards, it goes straight to recycling. 

Still, she savors the chance to take a container for another spin. “I love reusing,” Lynch told Vox. “Why would I go to the dollar store and buy to-go cups that have to go in the garbage when I could take my little pasta sauce jar that I picked out from dinner last night [and] fill it up with a little savvy B?”

When other people started using the clip as a soundtrack for showing off their own jar stashes, she realized she had struck a chord. The community of collectors is legion.

More than half of American grocery shoppers reuse their glass containers, according to an EcoFocus survey commissioned by the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI). Nineteen percent reuse them for food storage, 14 percent repurpose them for tasks such as organizing and crafting, and another 20 percent reuse them and then recycle them later. Meanwhile, about 30 percent choose to recycle them immediately after use. (Whether you reuse it a hundred times or throw it in the recycling right afterward doesn’t affect how recyclable the glass is, per GPI president Scott DeFife, because the material is “endlessly recyclable.”) 

People who stockpile jars, bottles, and other containers often hold onto them with some glorious intended future purpose in mind. What once held store-bought pasta sauce could stow lentils, leftovers, or that pickling project you’re definitely about to start. Perhaps all of those glass olive containers could become a set of chic matching centerpieces for a dinner party you throw down the line. And there’s nothing better to hold a propagating plant stem than a buxom bottle. The container may be empty, yet it’s full of possibility. 

The satisfaction of stashing

Monica Chavez, the content creator behind House of Esperanza, said she began saving jars when she was a kid. “I come from very humble beginnings,” she told Vox. “We didn’t have much growing up, so repurposing, recycling, and finding a use for everything was critically important.” Sour cream containers held leftover food. Old coffee tins became planters. 

And that sensibility stuck with her, which she describes as, “Yeah, this is a cute jar, I am going to get the most out of it. … It’s that human need to make use of the things you spend your money on.”

Chavez will go out of her way to acquire the right container. She finds that the jar for the Rao’s sauce sold at Costco, for instance, is a more useful shape than the one at grocery stores. She’ll even pay a little bit more if it means she can hold onto the vessel. For example, she buys Oui yogurt, which comes in glass jars with a foil top. “I bought a set of bamboo lids and now I repurpose those,” she said, adding that the jars can store overnight oats, salsa, or other food, or be used by her daughter when she’s watercoloring. Chavez has noticed companies being more savvy about packaging “their products in a way so that the product can continue to live on in those people’s homes…and then it kind of becomes free branding for them.”

Yoplait, the manufacturer of Oui, is definitely aware of the appeal of its container. It has an entire page on its website dedicated to “jar crafts” such as wedding table centerpieces, mini topiary trees, and beauty organizers. Jam company Bonne Maman similarly has a webpage filled with DIY “hacks” for its iconic jars with red gingham tops. “Reusing your empty jars is the perfect way to enjoy Bonne Maman, even after the last spoonful!” it says.

While Chavez has “a lot of jars in rotation constantly,” she also regularly culls her collection. “If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time,” she said. She’ll often list them on Facebook Marketplace or in a “buy nothing” group. “Let them live on somewhere else instead of immediately trying to recycle them,” she said.

Rachael Engelhardt of Trader Joe’s Kitchen and Food With Hardt is a big-time stockpiler who said she’s currently “at max capacity” with her jar collection. But when one of them goes home with a friend or the lid gets rusty, there’ll be an opening in her cabinet for more. She regularly puts them to use because “I have to justify keeping them all in my kitchen.” One of her most coveted containers to reuse is a spice grinder — if she buys one that holds, say, black peppercorns, it might end up grinding up an entirely different seasoning later. 

Lynch, Chavez, and Engelhardt all seem to actually take advantage of the various jars and bottles they stash. But for others, that’s not quite how it goes.

“I’ve seen desirable jars and I’ve saved them, like, one-off,” Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and a principal at Design With Science, told Vox. “Only usually, in fact, always in the past, it comes to a point where I’ve had it for a while and I realize, I’ve never put anything in this jar. I think it’s time for it to be recycled, and off it will go.”

Augustin said that many of these containers seem “inherently potentially useful” but, when it comes down to it, “we probably actually have better options.” As she sees it, jars might appeal to people’s nostalgia, or folks might like the look of it, or want to believe they are the kind of person who will reuse vessels. But when those containers gather dust rather than color-coordinated art supplies or heirloom seeds, it might be time to admit defeat. You don’t need an increasingly crowded shelf of empty jars reminding you of your failure to meal prep or make eye-catching terrariums. In that case, the ultimate container — the recycling bin — can relieve you of this burden.  

The impact of reusing jars on the planet

Even though this practice falls under the dictionary definition of “reuse,” is it actually helping the planet? Not particularly. Paul Ferraro, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies human behavior and public policy, said that this kind of “consumerism-sided decision-making has very little effect on the environment, positively or negatively.”

Ferraro gets the impulse. “These minor decisions make us feel better psychologically,” himself included, he told Vox. But individual choices such as plastic versus glass or paper versus plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way compared to collective changes in how we manage our environment,” he said. It’s not that these decisions are utterly meaningless; more that they’re overall “without significant impact,” he said. 

If reusing jars you already have keeps you from buying a slew of Tupperware online, great. But if the hunger to acquire new and better reusable vessels has you ordering glass containers from e-commerce sites and getting them shipped overnight, you might be canceling out any of that good when you account for packaging, emissions, and manufacturing.   

Ferraro “would not encourage anybody to waste much time” agonizing over specific decisions like glass versus plastic —“worrying about whether there’s an optimal choice for packaging is misplaced energy.” The calculations that go into it are complicated and very variable, with little to show for it in the end. Glass has higher upfront environmental impacts than plastic, per Ferraro: producing it is energy intensive, and it’s heavier so it costs more to transport. The concern with plastic, meanwhile, is what happens after its disposal — if it’s treated as litter, it’ll break down and leach microplastics into the environment. And your ability to recycle it depends on the recycling practices where you live. “So by and large, the rule of thumb is if I’m going to reuse that glass and it’s going to displace other purchases that I would have made, then the glass can be a better choice,” he says. “But the difference is going to be tiny.” 

Of course, it’s much easier to commit to reusing containers than, say, utterly changing the way the United States manufactures products — the latter feels a little above our individual pay grade. But if you want to do your part as an individual to stop climate change, Ferraro says forgoing a cross-country plane ride “would be vastly more impactful on the environment than any of my consumer decisions throughout the whole year,” he said. Ensuring your home is well-insulated is another more effective choice. 

So if you’re torturing yourself by holding onto containers you’ll never use for the sake of Mother Earth, release your chains and toss them in the recycling bin. But for many collectors, it’s not about that. 

Lynch said that she thinks of the spirit of her grandmother whenever she puts something from her jar collection to good purpose. “Every time I find a new use for something that I have hung onto for a while, I feel vindicated,” she said. “Like, oh, I knew there was a reason I was keeping this.”

Волей случая мне повезло принадлежать к интересной породе людей. Мы не прочь встать в выходной пораньше, уехать из города в лес, где на поляне (или опушке) можно обменять небольшую сумму кровных на бумажную карту окрестностей с отмеченными на ней точками. И затем, вооружившись компасом, потратить несколько следующих часов жизни на блуждание по полям, лесам и болотам в поисках этих точек. Чаще в компании, чем в гордом одиночестве.

Со стороны это обычно такие мероприятия выглядят, как толпа бездельников, скитающихся по разным зарослям, уткнувшись в карту, примерно так:

During visit to Ghana, Sarah Mullally expresses regret and says controversial fund symbolises Christian belief in repentance

At a former British castle where thousands of enslaved Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic, the archbishop of Canterbury expressed “lament” for the Church of England’s involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery and reaffirmed her commitment to a controversial £100m fund for affected communities.

Sarah Mullally made the comments during a visit to the Cape Coast castle, a 17th-century fortress built by Swedish traders, but occupied by the Danish and the Dutch, before the British seized it in 1664.

Вам нужен OCR. В техобзорах рекомендуют Tesseract, на Хабре все пишут про VLM, идете на Hugging Face — там PaddleOCR-VL, DeepSeek-OCR, Dots.OCR, Qwen2.5-VL, и каждая называет себя SOTA. Прибавим к этому vLLM, SGLang, TGI, Native HF Transformers, и вот вы зависли между десятками комбинаций. Мы протестировали девять моделей на трех движках инференса на рукописном русском и отразили в таблице, какая модель под какую задачу лучше подходит.

Велком под кат за таблицей и историей ее создания

During visit to Ghana, Sarah Mullally expresses regret and says controversial fund symbolises Christian belief in repentance

At a former British castle where thousands of enslaved Africans were held before being shipped across the Atlantic, the archbishop of Canterbury expressed “lament” for the Church of England’s involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery and reaffirmed her commitment to a controversial £100m fund for affected communities.

Sarah Mullally made the comments during a visit to the Cape Coast castle, a 17th-century fortress built by Swedish traders, but occupied by the Danish and the Dutch, before the British seized it in 1664.

Вместо запросов, которые вызываются из JavaScript, <usermedia> предлагает декларативный подход, при котором действие инициирует сам пользователь. Это позволяет сократить объём шаблонного кода, повысить безопасность и упростить повторный запрос доступа для пользователей, которые ранее его запретили. Тем самым элемент решает давнюю проблему, связанную с восстановлением отклонённых разрешений.

The Royal Mint Court residents’ association tried to fight decision to grant planning permission

• UK politics live – latest updates

Construction of a new Chinese super embassy in London can go ahead after the high court dismissed a challenge to the government’s decision to grant planning permission.

The Royal Mint Court residents’ association (RMCRA) brought legal action against the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, and the London borough of Tower Hamlets.

Harry Kane, Rodri, Lamine Yamal, Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi are the frontrunners for the annual prize

By WhoScored

Seventy-three goals in 64 games for club and country – the second most prolific season by any player in history after Lionel Messi’s 82-goal campaign in 2011-12 – not bad for a man who once sat on the bench alongside Jamie Vardy in the Championship. Harry Kane was not a teenage prodigy like a few of the other players on this list but here he is crashing football’s top table at the age of 33.

Leftwing Democrats are having their political moment in the sun, with Zohran Mamdani in New York, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and the endless calls for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to run for president in 2028. Has Democratic socialism shifted from the political fringe to the mainstream? And can this group lure back the all-important swing voters? Jonathan Freedland speaks to Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of the Nation magazine, founding editor of Jacobin and author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality

President Trump says a deal has been reached for Hamas to completely disarm and Israeli forces to withdraw from Gaza. And, the U.S. economy slowed some, but Americans continued to spend.

(Image credit: Andrew Harnik)

Инновации рождаются из смелых гипотез, но далеко не каждая из них превращается в успешный продукт. Одни идеи не доходят до реализации, другие выходят на рынок слишком «сырыми». Чтобы избежать этого, важно проверять жизнеспособность решений до этапа разработки.

В этой статье я хочу рассказать, как мы проверяем инновационные продуктовые концепции до начала разработки и почему даже несколько юзабилити-сессий могут дать достаточно сигналов, чтобы увидеть потенциал идеи, ее ограничения и основные риски.

Ben Cohen says his ice-cream company has been silenced by corporate ownership – and a boycott of Magnum brands could force a sale

Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream in the tub is still great, but the brand’s newest chocolate-covered ice-cream bar on a stick?

“It ain’t the same,” Ben Cohen, the company co-founder, told the Guardian. Sure, the chocolate coating is still thick enough, but the ice cream itself is “kinda fluffy”, Cohen said – an insult in the ice-cream world that suggests extra air was added to cut costs.

Playing as recent arrival Lena, your challenges include learning a new language and uncovering family secrets – its developer hopes it will spread ‘a little more compassion’

The cosy house-sorting sim has become a much-loved staple of the PC indie scene. Titles such as Unpacking, A Little to the Left and Momento charm players with their detailed interiors and quiet narratives of lives lived and shared within the same four walls. For Clean Start, Polish developer Serious Sim has taken a different approach – here you play as domestic cleaner, Lena, an immigrant who has arrived in an unspecified western country with little knowledge of the local language, and a family to support back home.

From here, you’re tasked with cleaning a series of houses and apartments, polishing tables, tidying shelves and scrubbing muddy pawprints from kitchen floors. It seems you’re able to rearrange the rooms, giving them a personal feel, which is after all one of the most pleasing elements of the genre. You can also, we are reassured, pet the dog.