Eyekaytee

Heads up Brisbane- This Friday from 8am, all 6 lanes of the Story Bridge will be shut down for a planned protest. Cyclists, scooters & walkers want a lane of their own & are making their point in peak hour. [Olympia Kwitowski]

The European Commission welcomes the adoption of the 17th EU sanctions package against Russia, signaling continued support for Ukraine amidst its war. The key elements and objectives of this package include:

1. Anti-Circumvention Measures: Targeting Russia's "shadow fleet" by listing an additional 189 oil tankers, bringing the total to 342. These vessels are subject to port access bans and service prohibitions, significantly hampering Russia's ability to export oil outside the price cap regime (reducing deliveries by 76% since listings began). The package also adds 31 new companies supporting Russia's military-industrial complex or sanctions evasion.
2. Additional Listings: Adding 75 new individuals and entities undermining Ukraine's territorial integrity, primarily from the Russian military and defense sectors. New listing criteria are being used. This extends previous efforts to target those enabling Russia's war effort.
3. Trade Measures: Expanding restrictions on dual-use and advanced technology exports aimed at cutting off key technologies for military use, including specific chemical precursors (like chlorates) linked to Russian missile propellants and high-precision CNC machine tool components.
4. Sakhalin Exemption: Extending the exemption from the oil price cap for the Sakhalin-2 project's crude oil shipments to Japan until June 2026, based on energy security concerns.

The Commission emphasizes that these sanctions are working, pointing to:

• Russia selling resources cheaply and buying necessities expensively.
• Significant economic strain: high inflation (above 10%), soaring deficits, interest rates at 21%, and depletion of the National Wealth Fund.
• A near 80% drop in oil and gas revenues compared to pre-war levels (falling from €100 billion in 2022 to €22 billion in 2024).
• Reduced trade with the EU (Russia losing over 60% of its pre-war trade).

The Commission highlights the need for continued vigilance against sanctions circumvention, working with G7 partners and third countries through coordinated lists (Common High Priority Sanctioned Goods and Economically Critical Sanctioned Goods) and ongoing outreach efforts.

• DHL presents the "Extended Range Electric Vehicle" (EREV) developed with Scania for the first time at the International Transport Forum in Leipzig

• Key insights after approximately 22,000 kilometers driven: The vehicle provides the necessary operational flexibility and energy reserve, operates 90% of the time in electric mode, and enables stable operations

• Savings of nearly 16 metric tons of CO2e during the testing period

• DHL CEO Tobias Meyer: 'We need pragmatic solutions like the EREV and quick political decisions to enable such bridging technologies. We want to decarbonize the transport sector now and regulation should not hinder but support us to do so.'

Devstral is an agentic LLM for software engineering tasks built under a collaboration between Mistral AI and All Hands AI 🙌. Devstral excels at using tools to explore codebases, editing multiple files and power software engineering agents. The model achieves remarkable performance on SWE-bench which positionates it as the #1 open source model on this benchmark.

It is finetuned from Mistral-Small-3.1, therefore it has a long context window of up to 128k tokens. As a coding agent, Devstral is text-only and before fine-tuning from Mistral-Small-3.1 the vision encoder was removed.

Learn more about Devstral in our blog post. Key Features:

Agentic coding: Devstral is designed to excel at agentic coding tasks, making it a great choice for software engineering agents.

lightweight: with its compact size of just 24 billion parameters, Devstral is light enough to run on a single RTX 4090 or a Mac with 32GB RAM, making it an appropriate model for local deployment and on-device use.

Apache 2.0 License: Open license allowing usage and modification for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Context Window: A 128k context window.

Tokenizer: Utilizes a Tekken tokenizer with a 131k vocabulary size.

Learn more about Devstral in our blog post.

https://mistral.ai/news/devstral

Gemma 3n includes the following key features:

Audio input: Process sound data for speech recognition, translation, and audio data analysis.

Visual and text input: Multimodal capabilities let you handle vision, sound, and text to help you understand and analyze the world around you.

PLE caching: Per-Layer Embedding (PLE) parameters contained in these models can be cached to fast, local storage to reduce model memory run costs. Learn more

MatFormer architecture: Matryoshka Transformer architecture allows for selective activation of the models parameters per request to reduce compute cost and response times. Learn more

Conditional parameter loading: Bypass loading of vision and audio parameters in the model to reduce the total number of loaded parameters and save memory resources. Learn more

Wide language support: Wide linguistic capabilities, trained in over 140 languages. 32K token context: Substantial input context for analyzing data and handling processing tasks.

Mistral AI summary:

The European Union is making another attempt to create a truly unified single market by addressing internal trade barriers. The European Commission's latest strategy, set to be published, aims to streamline regulations and reduce friction for businesses operating across EU countries. The plan includes measures such as uniform packaging labeling, digitizing paperwork, and making it easier to set up new businesses. The Commission estimates that a 2.4 percent increase in intra-EU trade could offset the impact of a 20 percent tariff-induced drop in U.S. exports. Political support for this initiative is strong, with EU countries tasking the Commission to draw up this strategy.

However, the plan has its limitations. The financial sector is largely excluded, and services, which make up a significant portion of Europe's GDP, face challenges in cross-border expansion. While the strategy includes measures to smooth access to services, cultural and linguistic differences across the 27 member countries pose additional hurdles. The Commission has proposed measures to ensure the strategy's implementation, including appointing high-level representatives in each country and reviewing progress by the end of 2026. Despite these efforts, the success of the single market strategy ultimately depends on the cooperation of member countries.

“The worst thing about these kind of attacks, which is kind of the point, is the fear factor. The attacks are brutal: the two carpenters that were killed at the safari camp were beheaded. There is enormous fear from communities from the brutality of the attack,” said Colleen Begg, managing director of Niassa Carnivore Project, whose headquarters were attacked in the 29 April raid.

Hamas still holds 58 hostages.

from 10b0t0mized: I miss the days when I had to go through a humiliation ritual before getting my questions answered.

Now days you can just ask your questions from an infinitely patient entity, AI is really terrible.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/38011266

Sydney (AFP) – A vast bloom of toxic algae is killing more than 200 species of marine life off the southern coast of Australia, scientists and conservation groups say.

The algae -- Karenia mikimotoi -- appeared in waters around South Australia state in March, causing mass deaths in species including sharks, rays, crabs and octopuses.

"There are carcasses littering beaches," said Brad Martin, a manager of the non-profit fish conservation group Ozfish.

"It is common for our volunteers to say: 'We walked for one kilometre along the beach and saw 100 dead rays and other marine life'," he told AFP.

Beaches on wildlife-rich tourist draws such as Kangaroo Island, Yorke Peninsula and Fleurieu Peninsula have been affected.

The bloom stretches across 4,400 square kilometres (1,700 square miles), Martin said -- an area larger than Japan or Germany.

Karenia mikimotoi has been detected around the world since the 1930s, including off Japan, Norway, the United States and China where it has disrupted local tourism and fishery industries, causing millions of dollars worth of damage.

But Martin said South Australia had not previously experienced a toxic algae bloom of this scale or duration.

The South Australian government said the event is thought to have been driven by a marine heatwave, as well as relatively calm marine conditions.

Marine biologist Shauna Murray, who identified the algae species for the authorities, said it damages the gills of fish and prevents them from breathing.

"It is not pleasant," said Murray, from the University of Technology Sydney.

"It will probably take some time for the ecosystem to recuperate."

While conditions usually ease towards the end of April, there had been no relief yet, South Australian Environment Minister Susan Close said this month.

"We need a big change in weather to break this thing up -- there is nothing we can do to precipitate this," she told national broadcaster ABC.

In the meantime, South Australian authorities have urged beachgoers to avoid swimming in water that is discoloured or foamy, warning that it can irritate the skin and affect breathing.

Climate change has led to an increase in the frequency and duration of marine heatwaves across Australia, which significantly affects marine ecosystems.

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