Our writers with the latest news and reaction as the last 16 stage begins
Australia lost to Egypt on penalties in one of the more disastrous shootout cock ups. Changing goalkeepers is a bold move, especially when Mat Ryan made a right Shilton of himself.
Jonathan Wilson was there.
Continue reading...EchoStar's satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and "facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless's 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T... under which EchoStar agreed to sell about 50 megahertz of its nationwide spectrum for $23 billion." Some context from Deadline.com: Charlie Ergen, who co-founded EchoStar and Dish, recently returned as chairman and CEO to steer the company through its recent challenges... Even prior to the merger, Ergen had been working to pivot from the pay-TV business, where Dish now has just 5 million subscribers and streaming sibling Sling TV has another 2 million, toward wireless telecom. With wireless spectrum hitting the market due to the Sprint-T-Mobile merger and then Elon Musk's Starlink looking to ramp up in the sector, it seemed more attractive than the cord-cutting-ravaged pay-TV business. But it is still entails plenty of risk, especially given how tightly regulated the spectrum is due to security concerns. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Knee injury sustained in singles loss on Monday
‘I’m heartbroken to have to withdraw’
Serena Williams will not compete with Venus Williams in the doubles after she was forced to withdraw from their first-round match due to the knee injury sustained in her singles return at Wimbledon.
Williams had been in a race to be fit to face Camila Osorio and Solana Sierra on Saturday afternoon. But she has not recovered from twisting her knee in the first set of her opening-round singles match against Maya Joint, which she lost 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-3.
Continue reading...A decade in the making, the 1976 bicentennial had a cathartic impact on the wounded national polity
It felt like a proper jamboree – a coming together of diverse peoples who thought they had something to celebrate. But the defining moment of the 1976 bicentennial, the US’s last epic birthday celebration, came two years before.
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford declared in his presidential inauguration speech of 9 August 1974. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”
Continue reading...Officials rescued seven other people after a sudden storm led to a boat sinking on Geneva Lake
Three children died after a boat capsized on Wisconsin’s Geneva Lake during inclement weather on the eve of the US’s semiquincentennial celebrations, and seven other people had to be rescued by emergency responders, according to officials.
A recreational motor boat with 10 passengers, including four children, sank on Friday afternoon as the boat “attempted to navigate to safety as weather conditions deteriorated” amid an intense, sudden storm, the city of Lake Geneva police department said in a statement.
Continue reading...Exclusive: £20bn of ‘potential’ £30bn AI investment touted by UK ministers appears to have been hypothetical
It was to be the biggest undertaking in Britain for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Stargate UK – a multibillion-pound UK datacentre project – would represent “a major step forward in the US-UK technology partnership”.
But the plans were paused in April, with an OpenAI spokesperson citing concerns over regulation and high energy costs.
Continue reading...23-time champion fails to recover after defeat by Joint
Serena and Venus pull out of Saturday evening match
Serena Williams will not compete alongside Venus Williams in the doubles after she was forced to withdraw from their first-round match due to the knee injury sustained in her singles return at Wimbledon.
Williams had been in a race to be fit to face Camila Osorio and Solana Sierra on Saturday afternoon. But she has not recovered from twisting her knee in the first set of her opening-round singles match against Maya Joint, which she lost 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-3.
Continue reading...Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands in repositories, README files, Makefiles, or other content consumed by AI agents. If executed — particularly in auto-approve or CI environments—the commands can steal credentials, compromise developer systems, or enable software supply chain attacks. According to researchers at Adversa AI, the 11 popular open source AI coding agents tested, only one successfully blocked all of the Bash trick techniques.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Pardons issued to nine people charged with violating Clean Air Act as extreme heat smothers much of US
Donald Trump on Friday issued pardons to 11 men – two convicted fraudsters and nine charged with having violated the federal Clean Air Act by disabling or otherwise modifying trucks’ emissions controls.
Those executive pardons – coming amid US semiquincentennial celebrations blanketed in extreme heat exacerbated by greenhouse gas emissions – were among a broader wave of acts of clemency from Trump during his second presidency, chiefly for those he considers to be aligned with him.
Continue reading...⚽️ Kick-off time: 12pm local/1pm EDT/6pm BST/3am AEST
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Whatever happens to Canada now – within comedic/catastrophic reason – this World Cup will go down as an unqualified success. So far, they’ve won their first match at a finals; they’ve qualified from a group for the first time; and they’ve won a knockout game at their very first attempt. Nobody’s seriously expecting Jesse Marsch’s team to win the whole darn thing, so the co-hosts will be approaching everything from here on in as a free hit. Any more success will/should be considered an extremely pleasant bonus.
Morocco will be setting their sights a little higher. Four years ago, the Atlas Lions broke through all sorts of barriers: not only was their fourth-place finish their best at a World Cup by some distance, in doing so they became both the first African and Arab nation to reach the semi-final stage. Since then, they’ve won (well, been awarded) the Africa Cup of Nations; in four years time, they’ll co-host the World Cup. It’s a banner period for them, and currently ranked sixth in the world – ahead of historical powerhouses Portugal, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, and only behind five previous World Cup champions – they’ll see no reason why they can’t go super-deep again.
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