Hong Myung-bo, who led South Korea to the semi-finals of the 2002 FIFA World Cup, knows a thing or two about the demands of top-level football. In a recent interview, he praised Son Heung-min's work ethic, talent, and dedication to the game. Hong emphasized that Son's contributions to Tottenham Hotspur and the South Korean national team should not be underestimated.
Political Bureau Meeting In-Depth Analysis | Six Positive Signals: First Mention of "Unconventional Counter-Cyclical Adjustment", Reiterating "Moderately Loose" for the First Time in 14 Years
Another area of concern in China-EU relations is the growing strategic competition between the two powers. The former Foreign Minister underscored the need for strategic communication and coordination to manage differences and prevent misunderstandings that could escalate into conflict. Enhancing mutual trust and understanding through dialogue and cooperation is essential in promoting stability and peace in the region.Syria civil war: Why Israel captured Syria’s tallest peak? Netanyahu’s SECRET plan reveals...
Systems Approach A few weeks ago I stumbled onto an article titled "Traceroute isn’t real," which was reasonably entertaining while also not quite right in places. I assume the title is an allusion to birds aren’t real , a well-known satirical conspiracy theory, so perhaps the article should also be read as satire. You don’t need me to critique the piece because that task has been taken on by the tireless contributors of Hacker News, who have, on this occasion, done a pretty good job of criticism. One line that jumped out at me in the traceroute essay was the claim "it is completely impossible for [MPLS] to satisfy the expectations of traceroute." Not only is this something I know to be incorrect, but I have a vivid memory of how we came to make MPLS support traceroute when we were designing the Tag Switching header among my colleagues at Cisco in 1996. (MPLS, or Multiprotocol Label Switching , is the IETF standard that followed fairly directly from the design of Tag Switching, and the headers are nearly identical.) This was a heated debate, which is why I remember it so well today. It was a classic “design by committee” situation and we know how those things generally turn out ( 48-byte cells , anyone?), although I think this one was better than most in the end. So let’s wind our time machine back to 1996 and I will reconstruct the process that led to the MPLS header being what it is today, complete with its configurable support of traceroute. I joined Cisco in 1995 to be part of the team that was tasked with figuring out how the new and exciting (at the time) technology of ATM could be “integrated” into the IP-centric product line of Cisco. There were plenty of ideas already floating around, with IP-over-ATM standards developing at the IETF and the ATM Forum. By early 1996 there were half a dozen engineers at Cisco sharing ideas on what this “integration” might look like when Yakov Rekhter sent around a two-page document outlining the basic ideas of Tag Switching. When I read it, the idea seemed like a qualitative improvement on everything else I had seen or discussed, and my colleagues agreed. We fairly quickly lined up executive support to flesh out those two pages into an architecture and proceed to implementing it on the Cisco product line of both routers and ATM switches . We started working through the details that would need to be nailed down before any sort of implementation could start. One essential detail was the packet header format for tag-switched packets. It’s important at this point to acknowledge some of the related ideas that were around at the time. After Yakov’s two-pager paper had won support of our design team, but before we had said much about it in public, a startup called Ipsilon came out of stealth mode with a flurry of announcements. They had also figured out a way to combine IP routing with ATM switching, cleverly calling their approach IP Switching. Their design was quite different from ours, but they made a splash with it, including the then-novel idea of publishing several informational RFCs to describe the protocols that made their system work. It’s fair to say that the executive support for Tag Switching was much easier to obtain thanks to the amount of buzz around Ipsilon. We later realized that the central idea of Tag Switching, which was to associate fixed-length labels with variable-length IP prefixes from the routing table, had been invented and published by Girish Chandranmenon and George Varghese in SIGCOMM 1995 . They called it “threaded indices." That paper definitely pre-dated Yakov’s two-pager, so I think they can be considered the true inventors of this core aspect of Tag Switching and MPLS. But neither Yakov’s paper nor the 1995 SIGCOMM paper addressed the issue of how you encode a fixed-length label in an IP packet. We had a big base of ISPs who bought the fastest routers they could get their hands on in 1996 and they had opinions Ipsilon’s approach relied on the ATM cell header to carry fixed-length labels, which was a fine idea if you were happy to send all your traffic around in 48-byte cells, but that was not what most of our customers wanted. Of course, there was nothing like a single customer viewpoint, but we had a big base of ISP customers who bought the fastest routers they could get their hands on in 1996 and they had opinions. Many of them hated ATM with a passion – this was the height of the nethead vs bellhead wars – and one reason for that was the “cell tax.” ATM imposed a constant overhead (tax) of five header bytes for every 48 bytes of payload (over 10 percent), and this was the best case. A 20-byte IP header, by contrast, could be amortized over 1500-byte or longer packets (less than 2 percent). Even with average packet sizes around 300 bytes (as they were at that time) IP came out a fair bit more efficient. And the ATM cell tax was in addition to the IP header overhead. ISPs paid a lot for their high-speed links and most were keen to use them efficiently. So a problem we faced with Tag Switching/MPLS was that we were about to introduce a “label tax” by putting an additional header on top of the IP header to carry our fixed-length labels. There was an incentive to keep that header as small as possible–for some members of our design committee, that was the most important consideration. But we needed to fit quite a few things aside from a label into the header. Labels were intended to simplify packet forwarding, so you couldn’t (normally) ask a router to look beyond the label header. Hence, any field that influenced forwarding had to be in the label header. One such field was a “class of service” modeled on the “type of service” (ToS) found in the IP header. ToS usage was not standardized at this point, but it was used for things like marking routing protocol packets for priority handling on arrival at an overloaded router. (These bits would get thoroughly redefined in the later work on Differentiated Services .) The obvious choice would have been to include a full byte of ToS in the label header. But the pressure to minimize the header along with the lack of widespread usage of ToS led to us compromising on three bits, initially called “Class of Service” and later renamed to “Experimental” in RFC 3032 . This was in recognition of the fact that any attempt to offer different classes of service to IP traffic was decidedly an experiment in 1996. This decision would prove rather painful when the Diff-Serv standards emerged (using six bits of the ToS byte) and we tried to map them onto MPLS. (As an aside, I think my work at the intersection of MPLS and Diff-Serv was probably my most productive contribution to the IETF.) The other field that we quickly decided was essential for the tag header was time-to-live (TTL). It is the nature of distributed routing algorithms that transient loops can happen, and packets stuck in loops consume forwarding resources – potentially even interfering with the updates that will resolve the loop. Since labelled packets (usually) follow the path established by IP routing, a TTL was non-negotiable. I think we might have briefly considered something less than eight bits for TTL – who really needs to count up to 255 hops? – but that idea was discarded. Which brings us to traceroute. Unlike the presumed reader of “Traceroute isn’t real,” we knew how traceroute worked, and we considered it an important tool for debugging. There is a very easy way to make traceroute operate over any sort of tunnel, since traceroute depends on packets with short TTLs getting dropped due to TTL expiry. You copy the IP TTL into the label header as the packet enters the tunnel (when the label header is added); decrement the TTL in the outer label header at every hop; and then copy the outer TTL back to the inner header (IP TTL) when exiting the tunnel. This means that the TTL does exactly what it would have done if there were no tunnel, and if it was going to expire mid-tunnel, that is what happens. ISPs didn’t love the fact that random end users can get a picture of their internal topology by running traceroute There is the small matter of what to do with your “ICMP time exceeded” message in the middle of a tunnel, which RFC 3032 explains in detail. In other words, MPLS doesn’t prevent traceroute from working. Interestingly, the earlier tunneling protocol GRE allows the same treatment as MPLS but doesn’t require it (ie, GRE can break traceroute, or not). But there is another twist to this story. ISPs didn’t love the fact that random end users can get a picture of their internal topology by running traceroute. And MPLS (or other tunnelling technologies) gave them a perfect tool for obscuring the topology. First of all you can make sure that interior routers don’t send ICMP time exceeded messages. But you can also fudge the TTL when a packet exits a tunnel. Rather than copying the outer (MPLS) TTL to the inner (IP) TTL on egress, you can just decrement the IP TTL by one. Hey presto, your tunnel looks (to traceroute) like a single hop, since the IP TTL only decrements by one as packets traverse the tunnel, no matter how many router hops actually exist along the tunnel path. We made this a configurable option in our implementation and allowed for it in RFC 3032. We also had an internal joke about giving ISPs the option to increment the TTL on egress, so that a tunnel would appear to have negative hop count. No-one wanted their network looking inefficient by having too many hops. (This is a terrible idea given the real purpose of TTL in discarding looping packets, but we had a good laugh anyway.) Anyway, the non-support of traceroute over tunnels is a choice by operators, not a baked-in feature/bug of MPLS (or other tunnel technologies). There is plenty more to this story, such as how we came to think of labels as a stack, but that can wait for another time. Part of me wishes we hadn’t worked so hard to keep the minimal MPLS label header down to 32 bits. But we didn’t break traceroute except for ISPs who wanted it broken, and we managed to deploy MPLS into the networks of almost every ISP without them complaining about the label tax. We didn’t get everything right by any means but we made a set of trade-offs that worked for most of our stakeholders. ® Larry Peterson and Bruce Davie are the authors behind Computer Networks: A Systems Approach and the related Systems Approach series of books. All their content is open source and available for free on GitHub . You can find them on Mastodon , their newsletter right here , and past The Register columns here .
Switching gears to the automotive industry, Xiaomi has unveiled the first images of its highly anticipated SUV, marking the company's foray into the competitive automotive market. The release of the real-life images of the SUV has generated significant buzz among tech enthusiasts and automotive enthusiasts alike. Xiaomi's entry into the automotive sector signals its ambition to diversify its product portfolio and compete with established players in the industry.
The wait is over, with all X users now able to access Elon’s non-woke “Grok” AI chatbot , which had thus far only been available to X Premium subscribers. Which is fewer than 1% of the platform’s users . With Grok, users can now ask questions, generate images (which is now even better with X’s new Aurora integration ), analyze posts to get more context as to their meaning, generate sassy responses (via “Unhinged Fun” mode ), and more. Though whether AI chatbots have a real place within social media apps remains to be seen. The latest wave of generative AI tools has seen Meta jam its AI chatbot into virtually all of its apps , while LinkedIn has also been adding more and more AI elements to “assist” in your posting process. But is it really assistive to get AI tools to generate posts on your behalf, which you then, post to social media apps that are foundationally built around actual social, human-to-human interaction? I guess, an argument could be made as to what defines “social” interaction in this context. But the concept of social media, thus far, has been that it gives everyone an opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions, thereby democratizing media to some degree. In which case, posting AI generated posts and images seems to run counter to that. Right? As such, I’m not sure that I see the long-term value of the integration of gen AI into social apps. Am I saying that the potential of generative AI overall is overblown? Well, no, as there are a heap of ways in which AI can be used to streamline workflows, improve processes, etc., and it will be transformative in many sectors and applications. But generative AI, via the offerings that are currently available at least, is only really of value when you know what you want from it, and you have enough of your own expertise and insight to analyze its outputs. For example, gen AI will make it easier for lawyers to research cases, as they’ll be able to, say, ask it to come up with alternative angles for argument, which they may not have considered, and then find cases that establish precedent for those approaches. That could save a heap of time, but you still need to understand enough about legal process to know if the output it provides is correct, and how to cross-check the case examples in order for this to actually be of benefit. As such, it’s unlikely to turn an untrained person into a viable legal representative, but it could help to make an existing expert better at what they do. That’s the case in virtually all applications, with AI being assistive, not replacive. But the AI hype train is all about how AI will soon think for itself, and outsmart everybody, and come up with ever more efficient ways to put more people out of the job. But it won’t. Artificial general intelligence (i.e. computers that think for themselves) is nowhere close to reality , while the current AI models are little more than smart spreadsheets. As such, it’s not the revolution that the hype machine suggests, though it does have unique, practical value in many cases. I just don’t see social media being one of them. I get why Meta is working on AI, as a potential tool to simplify its next-level AR and VR experiences, by enabling people to build their own digital worlds without coding knowledge. I can see the future there, but I don’t see any significant value in AI chatbots, beyond novelty usage. And I don’t see why people are going to use Grok in any significant way. Sure, there are some semi-interesting use cases, like analyzing X trends, and maybe using Grok to seek out info on broader X usage trends and analytics. There will be some niche uses for it, but for the majority of people, I doubt the addition of Grok is going to truly enhance their X experience. Or their Facebook experience, or IG. Because as much as the platforms seem excited by image generators, and bots that’ll pretend to be your friend, I don’t believe that most people care about using AI to create random visuals, or talk to recreations of people that aren’t actually real. Because none of these uses are “social”. They’re not representative of your experience, they’re not connecting you with the wider world, they’re not demonstrating your perspective. They’re just bots, and bots have always been an annoyance on social apps. And even with an AI re-brand, I don’t think that makes them any more appealing.Zanu-PF rolls out ED2030 campaign drive
It was revealed that Lin Jing En had fallen on hard times after a series of unfortunate events, leading to his current state of homelessness. Rumors circulated that he had been betrayed by close friends and abandoned by the entertainment industry, leaving him with no choice but to roam the streets in search of sustenance.ANN/THE STRAITS TIMES – On the south side of Austin, Texas, engineers at semiconductor maker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) designed an artificial intelligence (AI) chip called MI300 that was released a year ago and is expected to generate more than USD5 billion in sales in its first year of release. Not far away in a north Austin high-rise, designers at Amazon developed a new and faster version of an AI chip called Trainium. They then tested the chip in creations including palm-size circuit boards and complex computers the size of two refrigerators. Those two efforts in the capital of Texas reflect a shift in the rapidly evolving market of AI chips, which are perhaps the hottest and most coveted technology of the moment. The industry has long been dominated by Nvidia, which has leveraged its AI chips to become a USD3 trillion behemoth. For years, others tried to match the company’s chips, which provide enormous computing power for AI tasks, but made little progress. Now the chips that AMD and Amazon have created – as well as customer reactions to their technology – are adding to signs that credible alternatives to Nvidia are finally emerging. For some crucial AI tasks, Nvidia’s rivals are proving they can deliver much faster speed, and at prices that are much lower, said analyst at Futurum Group Daniel Newman. “That’s what everybody has known is possible, and now we’re starting to see it materialise,” he said. The shift is being driven by an array of tech companies – from large competitors such as Amazon and AMD to smaller start-ups – that have started tailoring their chips for a particular phase of AI development that is becoming increasingly important. That process, called “inferencing”, happens after companies use chips to train AI models. It allows them to carry out tasks such as serving up answers with AI chatbots. ABOVE & BELOW: Nvidia has leveraged its artificial intelligence chips to become a USD3 trillion behemoth. PHOTO: THE STRAITS TIMES PHOTO: ENVATO “The real commercial value comes with inference, and inference is starting to gain scale,” said chief executive Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm, a mobile chipmaker that plans to use Amazon’s new chips for AI tasks. “We’re starting to see the beginning of the change.” Nvidia’s rivals have also started taking a leaf out of the company’s play book in another way. They have begun emulating Nvidia’s tactic of building complete computers – and not just the chips – so that customers can wring the maximum power and performance out of the chips for AI purposes. The increased competition was evident on December 3, when Amazon announced the availability of computing services based on its new Trainium 2 AI chips and testimonials from potential users including Apple. The company also unveiled computers containing either 16 or 64 of the chips, with ultrafast networking connections that particularly accelerate inferencing performance. Amazon is even building a kind of giant AI factory for the start-up Anthropic, which it has invested in, said chief executive of Amazon Web Services Matt Garman. That computing “cluster” will have hundreds of thousands of the new Trainium chips and will be five times as powerful as any that Anthropic has ever used, said founder and the chief compute officer Tom Brown of the start-up, which operates the Claude chatbot and is based in San Francisco. “This means customers will get more intelligence at a lower price and at faster speeds,” he said. In total, spending on computers without Nvidia chips by data centre operators, which provide the computing power needed for AI tasks, is expected to grow 49 per cent this year to USD126 billion, according to Omdia, a market research firm. Even so, the increased competition does not mean Nvidia is in danger of losing its lead. A spokesperson for the company pointed to comments made by Nvidia’s chief executive Jensen Huang, who has said his company has major advantages in AI software and inferencing capability. Huang has added that demand is torrid for the company’s new Blackwell AI chips, which he says perform many more calculations per watt of energy used, despite an increase in the power they need to operate. “Our total cost of ownership is so good that even when the competitor’s chips are free, it’s not cheap enough,” he said in a speech at Stanford University this year. The changing AI chip market has partly been propelled by well-funded start-ups such as SambaNova Systems, Groq and Cerebras Systems, which have lately claimed big speed advantages in inferencing, with lower prices and power consumption. Nvidia’s current chips can cost as much as USD15,000 each, and its Blackwell chips are expected to cost tens of thousands of dollars each. That has pushed some customers towards alternatives. Executive director Dan Stanzione of the Texas Advanced Computing Centre, a research centre, said the organisation planned to buy a Blackwell-based supercomputer next year but would most likely also use chips from SambaNova for inferencing tasks because of their lower power consumption and pricing. “That stuff is just too expensive,” he said of Nvidia’s chips. AMD said it expected to target Nvidia’s Blackwell chips with its own new AI chips arriving next year. In the company’s Austin labs, where it exhaustively tests AI chips, executives said inferencing performance was a major selling point. One customer is Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, which says that it has trained a new AI model, called Llama 3.1 405B, using Nvidia chips but that it uses AMD MI300s chips for providing answers to users. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are also designing their own AI chips to speed up specific computing chores and achieve lower costs, while still building big clusters of machines powered by Nvidia’s chips. In December, Google plans to begin selling services based on a sixth generation of internally developed chips, called Trillium, which is nearly five times as fast as its predecessor. Amazon, sometimes seen as a laggard in AI, seems particularly determined to catch up. The company allocated USD75 billion this year for AI chips and other computing hardware, among other capital spending. At the company’s Austin offices – run by Annapurna Labs, a start-up that it bought in 2015 – engineers previously developed networking chips and general-purpose microprocessors for Amazon Web Services. Its early AI chips, including the first version of Trainium, did not gain much market traction. Amazon is far more optimistic about the new Trainium 2 chips, which are four times as fast as previous chips. On December 3, the company also announced plans for another chip, Trainium 3, which was set to be even more powerful. Founder and the chief technology officer Eiso Kant of Poolside, an AI start-up in San Francisco, estimated that Trainium 2 would provide a 40 per cent improvement in computing performance per dollar compared with Nvidia-based hardware. Amazon also plans to offer Trainium-based services in data centres across the world, Kant added, which helps with inferencing tasks. “The reality is, in my business, I don’t care what silicon is underneath,” he said. “What I care about is that I get the best price performance and that I can get it to the end user.”THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) — Greece’s second largest city, Thessaloniki, is getting a brand new subway system that will showcase archaeological discoveries made during construction that held up the project for decades. The 9.6-kilometer inaugural line will officially open on Nov. 30, using driverless trains and platform screen doors. Construction began in earnest in 2003 and unearthed a treasure trove of antiquities in a vast excavation beneath the densely populated city of a million residents. “This project offers a remarkable blend of the ancient and modern, integrating archaeological heritage with metro infrastructure,” Christos Staikouras, the transport and infrastructure minister, told reporters Friday on a media tour of the subway. Tunneling followed ancient commercial routes through the center of the port city that has been continuously inhabited since ancient times. It exposed a Roman-era thoroughfare, ancient Greek burial sites, water and drainage systems, mosaics and inscriptions and tens of thousands of artifacts spanning centuries, also through Byzantine and Ottoman rule. The tunnels had to be bored at a greater depth than originally planned, adding cost and delays, to preserve the ancient discoveries. Key pieces of what was found have been put on display along the underground network of 13 stations including a section of the marble-paved Roman thoroughfare at the central Venizelou Station. “The project faced substantial delays and many challenges, including over 300,000 archaeological finds, many of which are now showcased at various stations along the main line,” Staikouras said. The Thessaloniki metro was first conceived more than a century ago and its completion has been greeted with quiet amazement by residents who for years used the metro project as a punchline for bureaucratic delays and undelivered promises. Government officials said the cost of the metro so far has reached 3 billion euros ($3.1 billion) for the completed first line of the subway system and most of a second line which is currently under construction and due to be delivered in a year. The construction consortium was made up by Greece’s Aktor, Italy’s Webuild and Japan’s Hitachi Rail.
As the audience applauded and cheered for Liang Xiang and Wang Tao, it was evident that their victory was not just a personal triumph, but a triumph for the sport of badminton as a whole. Their skillful play, sportsmanship, and commitment to excellence have inspired a new generation of players to strive for greatness and push the boundaries of what is possible on the badminton court.
Eyewitnesses at the scene reported that the driver, a young man in his early 20s, appeared to be distracted behind the wheel, engaging with his phone moments before crashing into a group of pedestrians waiting to cross the street. The impact was so forceful that it sent two of the victims flying several feet, while the third was trapped under the vehicle.
1 2 Kolkata: In a remarkable achievement for biodiversity research, the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI) has identified a new species of parasitic wasp, Ceraphron initium , in Nagaland. The discovery, along with the identification of four additional parasitic wasp species in the Western Ghats, underscores the critical ecological role these tiny insects play in maintaining environmental balance and supporting sustainable agriculture . Parasitic wasps , though often overlooked, play an indispensable role in regulating pest populations and maintaining ecological balance. These discoveries not only highlight India's abundant biodiversity but also provide valuable insights into sustainable agriculture practices.The findings were published in prestigious journals, including the European Journal of Taxonomy and Zootaxa, and mark significant progress in understanding India's rich natural heritage. A team of ZSI scientists, led by Kaomud Tyagi, discovered Ceraphron initium during a SERB-funded field survey in Nagaland. The species, belonging to the enigmatic Ceraphronoidea superfamily, was confirmed through meticulous morphological analysis by researchers Amit Kumar Ghosh, Vikas Kumar, and Dr Rameshkumar Anandan. The discovery sheds light on the "dark taxon" group—a term used to describe species that have remained undocumented due to their minute size (0.8 mm to 1.5 mm) and complex morphology. Advanced technologies and cutting-edge methodologies enabled researchers to identify this species, which is characterized by distinct wing patterns, pigmentation, body structure, and unique male genitalia. Dr Dhirti Banerjee, Director of ZSI, emphasized the significance of the finding: "This discovery highlights the incredible diversity of insect species in India and their crucial roles in ecosystem stability . It also underscores the need for sustained research and conservation efforts to preserve our natural heritage." Dr Banerjee added that future studies will focus on the molecular and bioecological aspects of these insects, which are vital for sustainable agriculture. In another major discovery, a ZSI team led by Dr Rajmohana K identified four new species of parasitic wasps—Calotelea acuta, C chitraka, C foveata, and C fulva—in the Western Ghats. These Hymenopteran wasps are known to regulate insect populations, thereby contributing to ecosystem health. The discoveries increase the total number of Calotelea species in India to 25, reinforcing the ecological importance of these lesser-known insect groups. ZSI scientist Kaomud Tyagi said,"These findings are a testament to the rich biodiversity of India and emphasize the need for continued exploration and study of our natural ecosystems." The detailed findings of Ceraphron initium have been published in Zootaxa, featuring high-resolution images, comprehensive descriptions, and an analysis of the species' ecological significance. Similarly, the research on the four newly discovered wasp species was published in the European Journal of Taxonomy. ZSI plans to focus on molecular studies and extensive taxonomical research on parasitic wasps better to understand their roles in agriculture and ecosystem health. These discoveries serve as a reminder of the importance of preserving India's natural habitats. The newly identified species underscore the need for increased awareness and action to protect the country's incredible biodiversity that supports life and agriculture.
Residents who saw a coal tip landslide narrowly miss their homes have said they do not want to live there if the risk of another one remains. Dianne Morgan, who lives directly below the tip in Cwmtillery, Blaenau Gwent, said she would prefer the council to "compulsory buy [her] home", while others said they wished to move. Torrential rain during Storm Bert last month forced some people in the former mining village to evacuate after a river of slurry and debris washed down the road. The Welsh government will announce a Bill on Monday, which if passed, would mean a new authority takes responsibility for disused tips ensuring they don't threaten human welfare. "People here don't feel safe and I don't think we'll be able to sell this home either at the moment. At some point we were going to move from here and downsize but that's not going to happen now," Ms Morgan said. Ms Morgan added she had sought assurances from the council that no further slips would occur once work has been carried out to make the tip safe. "Our feeling here as residents of the area is that they should just remove the tip," Ms Morgan said. Following the incident the council said it had started remedial works to address the immediate issues. Despite knowledge of the tip's existence, residents said they were never told it had been categorised as a tip with the potential to impact public safety. The Welsh Government will propose new legislation that ensures a more effective approach to the management of coal tips. The Disused Tips Authority for Wales would take responsibility for the assessment, registration, monitoring and management of all tips. Since a coal tip landslide in Tylorstown, Rhondda Cynon Taf following Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis in 2020, there has been a drive to improve coal tip safety. The Law Commission found that current law, which was introduced following the Aberfan disaster in 1966, is no longer adequate. Around 2,500 existing coal tips across Wales - the vast majority in the south - have been categorised based on the risk they pose to public safety and the environment. The UK government has promised £25million for coal tip safety work to be carried out in Wales. However, it is claimed the sum is nowhere near enough . Local authorities are responsible for coal tips that are on public land, while other landowners are responsible for the maintenance of tips on private ground. The Mines Remediation Authority - formerly known as the Coal Authority - is responsible for maintaining a number of tips, including one on the site of the former Caerau colliery in Bridgend County. Robert Sullivan from the Mining Remediation Authority said: "Many of these sites were remediated in a period when climate change wasn't really considered and as a result, the Mining Remediation Authority is conducting a review of climate change adaptation of our sites which includes looking at what we can do to better manage these sites during periods of heavy rainfall. "We're looking at the installation of remote smart monitoring such as rain gauges and we’re also looking at what we can do in terms of flood alleviation. "One of the key factors of tip management is the control of ground water and surface water, so we're trying to alleviate that problem without having created a detrimental impact on people." Analysis by Steffan Messenger, Environment Correspondent: If you follow the news in Wales you'll have probably seen the video many times. Shaky footage, hastily filmed on a phone of a hillside above the village of Tylorstown in Rhondda Cynon Taf (RCT) giving way. "Wow" the man behind the camera gasps - echoing the sentiments of a nation. The landslide in 2020 reopened a painful scar on the Welsh psyche, and kickstarted a process - both practical and political - to shore up the country's old coal tips. It's hard to believe how little was known then about exactly how many there were, where they were located, who owned the land and what condition they were in. There's been a major effort in recent years to plug those knowledge gaps and today's announcement brings legal reforms and a new organisation to manage the situation in future. But questions remain over how to foot the bill for a long-term fix, with the leader of RCT council telling BBC News in October as much as £800m could be needed over the coming decades. Another discussion point is around the involvement of private firms offering to fund remediation work at certain tips by selling the coal they dig out as they go.Winchester high school committee to make recommendation in January
As fans eagerly await the next season of football, the FIFPro Best XI serves as a reminder of the incredible skill, passion, and dedication that players bring to the beautiful game. While debates and discussions may ensue over the selection of the team, one thing is certain – the FIFPro Best XI represents the pinnacle of football excellence and the highest honor for players around the world.Monetary easing by central banks across developed and emerging economies trundled along in November with markets warily gearing up for a new year that could bring tectonic shifts to the global policy making backdrop. Four of the six central banks overseeing the 10 most heavily traded currencies that held meetings in November lowered their lending benchmarks. Central banks in New Zealand and Sweden each shaved 50 basis points off their interest rates while the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England delivered 25 bps cuts. Policy makers in Australia and Norway decided to leave interest rates unchanged, while their peers in Switzerland, Japan, Canada and at the European Central Bank held no rate setting meetings. The outcome of the U.S. election, which will see a return of Donald Trump to the White House on January 20, is expected to fuel fresh trade tensions that could boost U.S. inflation and curtail growth. The latest moves come ahead of some potentially sizeable shocks for the global economy, with politics set to become increasingly unpredictable, said James Rossiter, head of global macro strategy at TD Securities. “The name of the game in 2025 is now uncertainty, especially in the U.S. and Europe,” said Rossiter. “Central banks are going to have to adapt their strategies quickly.” The latest moves across G10 central banks brings the year-to-date tally of rate cuts to 650 bps, nearly matching the 2020 total of 655 bps, after major central banks delivered no cuts between 2021 and 2023. Across emerging markets, 12 of the Reuters sample of 18 central banks in developing economies held rate-setting meetings in November. South Korea, Mexico, South Africa and the Czech Republic delivered 25 bps cuts each while China, Indonesia, Turkey, Malaysia, Israel, Hungary and Poland kept rates unchanged. Brazil extended its rate hiking cycle, lifting its key interest rates by 50 bps. S&P Global Ratings emerging market chief economist Elijah Oliveros-Rosen said that a changing outlook of fewer rate cuts from the Fed in the wake of the U.S. election would shape policy making in developing economies. “We also expect greater caution among most major EM central banks, and we’ve therefore toned down our expectations for their interest rate cuts in 2025,” Oliveros-Rosen said in a note to clients. “On balance, we expect a stronger U.S. dollar against most EM currencies in 2025 than in 2024.” The latest moves in emerging markets took the tally of cuts since the start of the year to 1,810 bps across 46 moves – outstripping the total of 1,765 bps of easing in 2022, after 945 bps in 2023. Total hikes for emerging markets so far in 2024 stood at 1,350 bps. Source: Reuters (Reporting by Karin Strohecker and Sumanta Sen, Editing by William Maclean)FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — The NFL removed New England Patriots safety Jabrill Peppers from the commissioner exempt list on Monday, making him eligible to participate in practice and play in the team’s games. Peppers missed seven games since being placed on the list on Oct. 9 after he was arrested and charged with shoving his girlfriend’s head into a wall and choking her. The league said its review is ongoing and is not affected by the change in Peppers’ roster status. Braintree, Massachusetts, police said they were called to a home for an altercation between two people on Oct. 7, and a woman told them Peppers choked her. Police said they found at the home a clear plastic bag containing a white powder, which later tested positive for cocaine. Peppers, 29, pleaded not guilty in Quincy District Court to charges of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon and possession of a Class “B” substance believed to be cocaine. At a court appearance last week a trial date was set for Jan. 22. “Any act of domestic violence is unacceptable for us,” Patriots coach Jerod Mayo said after the arrest. “With that being said, I do think that Jabrill has to go through the system, has to continue to go through due process. We’ll see how that works out.” A 2017 first-round draft choice by Cleveland, Peppers spent two seasons with the Browns and three with the New York Giants before coming to New England in 2022. He was signed to an extension this summer. He played in the first four games of the season and missed one with a shoulder injury before going on the exempt list, which allows NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to place a player on paid leave while reviewing his case. AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl
ByteDance Donates 25 Million RMB to Support Compilation and Digitization of "The Collection of Confucian Classics" at Peking University
