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The Secretary said, "State heads should ensure that BIS Certification is enforced on required products for consumer safety," an official statement said. He also discussed the time dissemination project by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) to reduce India's reliance on Western countries for time accuracy. Nidhi Khare, Additional Secretary in the Consumer Affairs Ministry, stressed the use of digital technology to protect consumer rights, reduce the pendency of cases in consumer commissions, and the importance of moving towards mandatory e-filing. She highlighted the work of the ministry on misleading advertisements, endorsement guidelines, e-commerce platforms, and direct selling guidelines, and urged consumers to be cautious of misleading ads on all platforms. She also made consumers aware of gambling games, products without BIS Certification, and influencers promoting products, the statement added. 5G is now available both on Android and iPhone in India. But is it any good? We discuss this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts. https://www.gadgets360.com/internet/news/centre-directs-states-enforce-bis-certification-consumer-products-digital-technology-3936380

Google has quietly ended 'software' support for smart displays from brands like LG, Lenovo and JBL that featured the company's Assistant built-in and other company services.Google announced the implementation of its Assistant on more smart screens in January 2018, as part of the CES show that year. Combining smart speaker functions with a touch screen, these devices came from the likes of JBL, Lenovo and LG with the built-in virtual assistant . On these screens, users have found Google services such as YouTube, Duo or Photos, in addition to the virtual assistant itself, but their experience on them is going to change, since the technology company has stopped providing software updates . Specifically, in the 'Make Duo calls with a speaker or screen' section of Google Nest Help, when referring to compatible devices, the page in Spanish only indicates that it is available on the "Google Nest Hub and Google Nest Hub Max."It is on the English page where the reason is clarified : "Google no longer provides software updates for these third-party smart displays: Lenovo Smart Display (7", 8" and 10"), JBL Link View and LG Xboom AI ThinQ WK9 SmartDisplay". In February 2019, Google announced changes to its strategy with manufacturer partners and its Android Things ecosystem, following the success of third-party Assistant-enabled devices. But since the end of that year, it began to withdraw support for different services and limit them to Nest Hub devices, which also work with another operating system ( FuchsiaOS ), owned by Google. https://www.europapress.es/portaltic/software/noticia-google-finaliza-soporte-pantallas-inteligentes-terceros-asistente-integrado-20230410165549.html

A long-awaited sequel to a 1994 classic that can't hold up against its predecessor. By James O'Connor on August 3, 2020 at 6:00PM PDT In the 26 years since Revolution Software released Beneath A Steel Sky, the adventure game has come full circle. After the genre struggled to adapt into 3D and was briefly declared dead by pundits, the genre's resurgence occurred on two main fronts--the simplified, story-driven 3D games of Telltale, which focused on choice and consequence over puzzles, and retro-styled 2D games released like Unavowed, Kathy Rain, and Broken Age, which included a lot of the esoteric puzzle-solving the genre used to be known for. Beyond A Steel Sky, the long-awaited sequel to the 1994 original, is an attempt to bridge the gap between those two styles--but unfortunately, it ends up feeling like some of the messier 3D adventure games from 20 years ago rather than another classic like its predecessor. Beyond A Steel Sky brings back Robert Foster, the protagonist of the first game, and picks up 10 years after his escape from Union City and LINC, the half-mechanical, half-organic being that runs it. Robert has returned to the "gaplands" surrounding the city, where he lives a happy, earnest life within a small society. However, he's soon forced to return to Union City after a young friend, Milo, is kidnapped by a huge robot and taken somewhere in the sprawling metropolis. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic Australia, but references to the country are unfortunately fleeting, despite the game's aesthetic invocation of the British colonization of the country--the gaplanders are largely people of colour, and Union City is predominantly white. At first, it's great to be back in the world of Steel Sky. The nods to the first game start flowing in from the first moments--like the original game, the opening is made up of comic panels drawn by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons, whose most famous work receives a few fun nods and Easter eggs throughout the game. Joey, Robert's robotic sidekick, also returns, and seeing these two characters reunited is one of the game's highlights. The city, which is rendered in glorious 3D is lovely, too--the skyline stretches far into the background, and the cel-shaded aesthetic suits it. You get a good visual sense of the sort of place Union City is--one with the outward veneer of a glowing metropolis, but with a dark side of corporate maleficence beneath it. The city is run by the Council, a mysterious body that dictates what people drink, how they act, and which areas they're allowed to travel between, and it becomes clear as you play how much control they're exerting over the po[CENSORED]tion. Unfortunately, many of the game's ideas and themes aren't examined in much depth. The QDOS system (pronounced like kudos with a Q), which dictates a citizen's worth, seems like the basis for a clever mechanic of social climbing when it's first introduced. But rather than requiring you to integrate yourself within the rules of society, you can overcome any obstacle by solving traditional "use X on Y" adventure game puzzles. There's a disconnect between the ambitions of the game's world-building and its actual plot, which lacks urgency, and Union City ultimately feels like less of a cohesive location than it did in the first game. While the city is presented as huge, you're only given a handful of small environments to explore, and you're left to infer the city's size from the skyboxes. It's frustrating to be promised such a wide-open world and then be offered so little of it. A working prior knowledge of Beneath A Steel Sky isn't required to enjoy the sequel for most of its run-time, but the final hour or so makes it very clear that Revolution is aiming to tell a single story, and the game's ending is very much a conclusion to the first game's narrative. While it's good to see some loose ends tied up, it means that the story started by the sequel ultimately fizzles a bit, despite some fun dialogue between the interesting cast of characters you encounter.The puzzles, at least, offer some inventiveness. Early on, Robert gets his hands on a hacking tool, which leads to some fun situations where you can change the operating procedures of machines. You might, for instance, hack a door by going into a menu and switching whether it opens or stays closed when an unauthorized person uses its hand scanner. It gets more complicated, and enjoyable, when you're hacking multiple items at once--you can switch programming notes between different robots to make them act differently, or access a schematic by moving it from a file server on a computer to a hologram display. Some of the more traditional puzzles are clever, too. One highlight was a section where you have to explore a stranger's house and learn enough about them to successfully pass off as them when interviewed. Another is the opening hour of the game, which feels like an adventure game mixed with an escape room as you move through a single, closed environment, trying to figure out how everything interacts. Other areas offer less interesting solutions, though, and there is a bit of an overreliance on your crowbar throughout the game--it gets a lot more action than anything else in your inventory, and it's rarely used for anything more exciting than opening a door or jamming a gear. You control Robert with full 3D movement in Beyond A Steel Sky, and as such the game is best played with a controller. But every now and then I found I'd need to swap to mouse or touch screen controls, as the controllerwould fail to register button presses in some menus or wouldn't work properly when using in-game computer terminals. Movement can feel a bit stiff, and interacting with moving targets or people is frustrating--if they move away while you try to bring up the inventory object you want to use, you'll have to run after them again.Beyond A Steel Sky has also launched in an extremely buggy state, and in my playthrough, I encountered a particularly extreme example of one that broke my game. As I rode in an elevator that would have taken me towards the game's finale, Robert fell through the floor when it reached the top, plummeting back down to the ground. If I pushed forward I could clip through the glass tube the elevator floor had ridden up, then call the elevator again, only to experience the exact same issue. Other times, I found myself trapped in the glass. I tried multiple solutions to this issue, including loading an earlier save file and playing back to that point again, making different decisions on the way, but nothing prevented me from falling. I was unable to finish the game and had to watch a video of someone else completing the final section to get closure. While this is a specific problem that I expect will be identified and patched out (even if none of the patches so far have addressed it), it's certainly not an isolated issue, and even if I hadn't encountered this specific problem, there are plenty of others to note. Audio would sometimes cut in and out during conversations, and NPCs would sometimes float over me during conversation cutscenes; sometimes the camera would get stuck inside walls during those same conversations. All of my save files display playtimes that do not match up at all to how long I actually played the game. Often choosing to interact with a person or object would mean that Robert would turn around and walk away, very slowly, with control taken away from me until he reached an arbitrary destination. Textures frequently popped in late, lagging behind camera angle changes in cutscenes--the game is poorly optimized, which can impact its ability to sell the grandiosity of Union City. If you have access to Apple Arcade and badly want to follow up on Robert Foster and Joey, play the mobile version instead--it doesn't look nearly as good as the PC version, and still has awkward controls, but at least you'll be able to finish it. That's not to say that it's free of bugs, as the game's camera still flips out on occasion, and it's both harder to control and far, far less visually rich. But it's also much cheaper, and more consistently stable. Beneath A Steel Sky remains a genre classic in 2020, an enjoyable, gorgeous game with smart puzzles and a lot on its mind. This sequel might have modernized the series' visuals and mechanics, but it's nowhere near as satisfying or exciting. Those with fond memories of Beneath A Steel Sky will enjoy being able to revisit Robert and Joey's friendship, but little else of what made the original such a classic remains in the sequel. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/beyond-a-steel-sky-review-foster-the-future/1900-6417510/

Scavenger Studio's semi-open-world adventure game is equal parts poetry, memoir, and mindfulness exercise.Some games demand a specific kind of real-life setting to really be absorbed. Horror games beg for the lights off and headphones on, while co-op games are often more enjoyable when played together on a couch rather than online. Season: A letter to the future requires its own special circumstances--a calm, peaceful environment--and if you can provide that, you'll find in it a special stillness, a pensive story, and a memoir from a fantasy land worth experiencing. Sometimes the language of open-world games is obvious, especially if you've played a few of them. Excitingly, Season doesn't feel like such a game, as its approach to gameplay and story are fresh and largely disinterested in giving you boxes to check. You play as Estelle, a young woman who sets off to observe and record a part of her world on the precipice of a new season. In this unnamed world, which is like ours but also definitely is not ours, a new season doesn't mean just a change in temperature; it means a total rebirth of the state of things. The game is deliberately unclear regarding exactly why, when, or how seasons emerge, and it seems at least sometimes they are influenced by people rather than natural things that happen to those people. Seasons seem to be more defined by the particular circumstances of a society--the breakout of war or widespread sleep, for example--more than they are snow days or fallen foliage. For Estelle, it's important to document the outgoing season as all will be lost when the new season begins, even as no one seems sure what that season will usher in itself. For the people of Tieng Valley, a lush farming village that's largely been evacuated due to an imminent dam collapse, the beginning of the season may even be a matter of life and death. Equipped with a camera, audio recorder, scrapbook, and bicycle, Estelle treks into the valley to interview the last remaining locals, capture the state of the vista in its final days, and reflect on things like memory, community, and grief. These, and other themes, are delivered through thoughtful monologues and conversations that allow for players to insert themselves in the story. Biking through the wide-open valley after a linear introduction, you can stop anywhere and take pictures of anything. You'll find the world casually split into sections: a cemetery, a temple, a path to a farm house, and so on. In your scrapbook, each named location gets its own dedicated pages as you discover them, and what you put on those pages is up to you. You can capture photos of cows grazing after their human companions have moved out, focus on the juxtaposition of industry and nature on the eve of the dam collapse, or create a portrait of a grieving widow as she packs up her late husband's best suit. It's all equally valid and other than a few puzzle-like sections where you'll need to find specific items, there are no wrong answers. Simple camera tools like zoom, focus, and color filters allow you to frame and present a moment just as you intend, and, if you like it enough, you can include it in your scrapbook. The same is true of capturing audio--you just point and shoot--and these audio clips become mementos you can include in your travel log. Capturing some images and audio brings out Estelle's inner thoughts, which often become writings you can jot down, too. Capture enough of these "keepsakes" of any location, and you'll unlock additional drawings, stamps, and other musings that can be reshaped and resized to further decorate your scrapbook. The idea is that, by the end of Estelle's journey, the scrapbook will serve as a detailed moment frozen in time, left to pass onto future generations so they can understand their own would-be ambiguous history.Her entire journey will take anywhere from 6-12 hours, with that variance largely owing to how much you let yourself soak in the various scenes. Season is tranquil at all times, and given Estelle's often wiser-than-her-years thoughts on her experience, the delicate but impactful music, and incredible pastel comic book visual style, it's a game that is best enjoyed by players who would rather sit and reflect on what they've seen, heard, or touched rather than those who might play it like a game to beat. It does have a definitive ending, and Estelle's journey matters most once you see it and understand it all, allowing the game's various themes to come to shore not like a monsoon, but like a delicate wave reaching up the beach. Season more often reminded me of a book of poetry than a video game. Thus, though Season is fun to play, sometimes I found my gamer brain clashing with Season's intentions. Implicitly, the game welcomes you to skip plenty of sights or landmarks. You need not fill out the scrapbook very much at all if you only care to "finish" the game, so it's left up to you to decide when you've seen enough. Once you've met the remaining denizens of Tieng Valley, the story's poignant conclusion becomes available. So how much else you see in between is really freeform and made available without judgment. Naturally, those who are enjoying the game would likely get more out of it the more they see, but sometimes I had to stop myself from obsessing over finding every monologue prompt hidden in a forest or every photo op along a path. The game so often feels like a mindfulness meditation that I felt like a failure when I couldn't focus the right way, even though I seemed to be the only one making such judgments--the game never stresses completion percentage or anything of the sort. As an avid bicyclist, I was really impressed by the game's use of this mechanic. Pedaling uphill uses the DualSense controller's adaptive triggers to mimic the strain one might feel in real life, and on the other side, soaring downhill was authentically refreshing, with the music and ambient noise combining to give me the same feeling of contentment and present-mindedness I feel whenever I take my own real-life bike down the slopes of Portland. Only toward the very end did I have technical issues with the bike, as it got stuck on some geometry a few times when I was navigating a more narrow space. Otherwise, it's very well executed in-game and authentically liberating. A bike does not leave much of a mark on the world, so it fits right in with Estelle's mission, as she's there to observe the fateful valley, not trample on it. Seldom has it ever been the case that biking in a game isn't meant for stunt jumps or trick multipliers, so pedaling around Tieng Valley feels enchanting. Season captures the invigorating sense of freedom riding a bike so often provides. Season captures the invigorating sense of freedom riding a bike so often provides. Taking pictures, recording sound, and building a scrapbook becomes not just the physical travel guide to a place soon to be underwater. It also acts like an insightful mirror, reflecting back onto the player not just what they experienced, but how they interpreted it. The in-universe pressure of capturing the world "as it was" comes with the unspoken understanding that it's subjective. How I view this place and its people is likely to be different than how you'd see them, and the game's directive is not to suggest who got it right, but just to ask us to reflect on things people have said or environments we've found ourselves in. Once, a character asks Estelle to close her eyes for a moment as the forest sways gracefully and she sings a song. I either could or could not choose to oblige, and either seems beautiful in different ways. Season has a lot to say about a number of things, and though authorial intent is there to be unraveled, Scavenger Studio seems to expect players to find their own voices along the way, both literally through dialogue options as well as figuratively through their scrapbook's final composition. There's a flashback early in the game where Estelle, already on the road in realtime, is speaking to someone from her village before she left. This character likens her mind to a library. "When I die, this library will burn down. But which book should we check out first?" she asks, inviting Estelle to interview her and learn who she is and was before the season changes and likely alters who she will become. Among countless contenders, this line has stuck with me in the days since I finished the game. Season is largely about memories: those we leave behind, those we hold dear, even those we struggle to forget. Memories make us eternal, and the game's way of record-keeping tells a narrative that each player ultimately writes for themselves. As Estelle pieces together her scrapbook made by my hand, I often found myself asking why I took a particular image, what I liked about a specific sound. What memories or feelings was I conjuring, even subconsciously, that led me to present Estelle's world in the ways I did, and what did that say about how I see my own world? Season asks a lot of introspective questions, provides few definitive answers, and hopes players are willing to breathe it in, consider it carefully, then exhale slowly as they reflect on both the game and themselves. It's unconventional even in a sea of indies that are constantly trying new weird things, but it works. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/season-a-letter-to-the-future-review-the-meditation-game/1900-6418020/

AMD's upcoming Radeon Pro W7900 graphics card which will be powered by the RDNA 3 GPU architecture has been spotted in Puget Bench. AMD's Next-Gen Radeon Pro Graphics Card Spotted: Radeon Pro W7900 With RDNA 3 GPU Architecture AMD is already working on the successor to its Radeon Pro W6000 series graphics cards in the form of the flagship Radeon Pro W7900. As the name suggests, the graphics card will be aiming next-gen workstations with its brand new RDNA 3 GPU architecture and also house the Navi 31 GPU that has been used on the Radeon RX 7900 XTX & 7900 XT Gaming cards.Now while the specifications remain unknown, we can definitely expect the Radeon W7900 Pro to offer huge amounts of VRAM. The Radeon Pro W6900X (Apple-Exclusive) & the Radeon Pro W6800 double the VRAM to 32 GB versus the 16 GB featured on consumer variants. If the same is the case with the Radeon Pro W7000 series, we can expect up to 48 GB of memory on the flagship Radeon W7900 Pro. That will be the same amount of memory as the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada graphics card & AMD has been able to offer as much memory as NVIDIA's top 24 GB RTX 4090 on its 7900 XTX card too. As for the GPU configuration, we might be looking at the full-fledged Navi 31 GPU die for the AMD Radeon Pro W7900 graphics card though the final specifications can always change unless they are officially announced. The full Navi 31 GPU offers a total of 48 WGPs, 96 CUs, and 6144 cores. There are also 6 MCD's which will feature 16 MB Infinity Cache per die and 96 MB in total across a 384-bit wide bus interface.NVIDIA RTX 4090 168.6 AMD RX 7900 XTX 160.7 NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada 149.7 NVIDIA RTX 4080 148.2 AMD Pro W7900 135.3 Now if we compare the AMD Radeon Pro W7900 graphics card to the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada in the same benchmark, we see that the NVIDIA option is around 11% faster purely in the GPU score. The scores can change as mature drivers for the Radeon Pro W7000 series arrive but AMD has priced the Pro lineup very competitively so even if there's a 10% advantage to NVIDIA, the Radeon Pro might end up having the value advantage. AMD Radeon Pro Workstation Graphics Lineup: GRAPHICS CARD NAME RADEON PRO WX 7100 RADEON PRO WX 8200 RADEON PRO WX 9100 RADEON PRO W5700 RADEON PRO W5700X RADEON PRO VII RADEON PRO W6800X? RADEON PRO W6900X? GPU Polaris 10 Vega 10 Vega 10 Navi 10 Navi 10 Vega 20 Navi 21 (Big Navi) Navi 21 (Big Navi) Process Node 14nm 14nm 14nm 7nm 7nm 7nm 7nm 7nm Compute Units 36 56 64 36 40 60 60? TBA Stream Processors 2304 3584 4096 2304 2560 3840 3840? TBA ROPs 32 64 64 64 64 64 TBA TBA Clock Speed (Peak) 1243 MHz 1500 MHz 1500 MHz 1930 MHz ~1850 MHz TBD ~2550 MHz TBA Compute Rate (FP32) 5.7 TFLOPs 10.8 TFLOPs 12.3 TFLOPs 8.89 TFLOPs 9.5 TFLOPs 13.1 TFLOPs (FP32) 6.5 TFLOPs (FP64) TBA TBA VRAM 8 GB GDDR5 8 GB HBM2 16 GB HBM2 8 GB GDDR6 16 GB GDDR6 16 GB HBM2 16/32 GB GDDR6 TBA Memory Bus 256-bit 2048-bit 2048-bit 256-bit 256-bit 4096-bit 256-bit 256-bit Memory Bandwidth 224 Gbps 484 Gbps 512 Gbps 448 Gbps 448 Gbps 1024 Gbps 512 Gbps 512 Gbps TDP 150W 230W 250W 205W 240W 250W 250-300W? 250-300W? Launch 2016 2018 2017 2019 2019 2020 2021 2021 Price $799 US $999 US $2199 US $799 US $999 https://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-pro-w7900-graphics-card-with-rdna-3-gpu-for-workstation-pcs-spotted/

Sony’s MLB The Show franchise has been in a somewhat odd position the last couple of years. Since going multiplatform in 2021, the series has become more successful than ever, but the games themselves have been rather underwhelming. MLB The Show 22 in particular was one of the most conservative annual sports updates I’ve ever played, adding almost nothing of significance to the franchise’s (admittedly solid) core experience. Honestly, the bar hasn’t been set all that high for MLB The Show 23. Is Sony’s San Diego Studio happy to keep coasting on their success with another easy walk this year? Or are they aiming to uncork something big with MLB The Show 23? Time to see if this year’s game has its bases covered…When it comes to the on-field action, MLB The Show 23 doesn’t feel much different from the last couple entries in the series. The Zone-style hitting introduced in MLB The Show 20 and the Pinpoint Pitching added in MLB The Show 21 both return here. As before, Zone hitting requires you to aim your swing more precisely, in exchange for more solid contact if you line things up right, and Pinpoint Pitching tasks players with tracing shapes with the right analog stick in order to put the ball over the plate. Neither mechanic has changed much, but both still work well (particularly Pinpoint Pitching). San Diego Studio claims the Competitive gameplay style has changed, with more of an emphasis on mastering inputs and fewer cheap hits and foul balls, but I didn’t notice a big difference.MLB The Show 23’s biggest gameplay changes affect fielding, with San Diego Studio actually opting to make things a bit more difficult to manage this year. Fielder stats now have more of an effect on how fast a player is on the hop and chucking the ball is potentially more complicated as the green zone on the throw meter now changes based on the player and situation. Needless to say, these aren’t the most exciting updates. The makers of MLB The Show 23 have argued these changes were necessary as past games allowed you to be almost supernaturally good at shutting down opponents, but honestly, I don’t think most people cared that much. Fielding isn’t what most people play baseball games for, so keeping things simple yet functional is usually best.Visually, MLB The Show 23 hasn’t changed much either. This is still a fine-looking game, and the presentation of the new Storylines mode is well-handled (more on that in just a minute) but this is still the same engine San Diego Studio has been using for years at this point. Compared to other top video game sports franchises, MLB The Show is starting to show its age. Despite the somewhat critical tone of the above paragraphs, make no mistake, MLB The Show 23 is, by and large, still a joy to play. No other baseball series has ever captured the intense back-and-forth between pitcher and batter, and a wide array of options make this one of the most accessible sports franchises around. I understand San Diego Studio not wanting to fix what isn’t broke, but I wish this series delivered more surprises on the field. Don’t worry though, MLB The Show 23 does offer some new pitches when it comes to modes and features. This year’s standout rookie is the new “Storylines” mode, which focuses on the history of the pre-integration Negro Leagues. MLB The Show has done historical challenges in the past, but they tended to be somewhat scattered and easily overlooked. Storylines mode brings everything together under one banner, with a series of challenges devoted to different players, each of which comes with its own partially-animated intro. These intros are narrated by Negro Leagues Baseball Museum president Bob Kendrick, who proves to be a consistently engaging and entertaining historical guide.Needless to say, San Diego Studio had a fine line to tread when it comes to the subject matter covered by this year’s Storylines mode. This is largely a celebration of the Negro Leagues and its often-underappreciated players, but the hardships they faced aren’t glossed over. Kendrick and San Diego Studio also keep things surprisingly real. For instance, the series of challenges devoted to Jackie Robinson could have been a simple hagiography, but they make clear that he wasn’t actually the best player in the league and was instead chosen to break the color barrier because of his off-the-field personality and wholesome image. Overall, this year’s Storylines mode was a fascinating, and fun, addition that provided a lot information without ever feeling like a stodgy homework assignment. While I already knew something about names like Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige, I very much enjoyed learning about lesser-known players like Rube Foster and Martin Dihigo. Hopefully, this format returns in future MLB The Show games, because there’s certainly a lot of rich baseball history to cover.Elsewhere, San Diego Studio have also completely revamped how the MLB Draft works in Franchise and March to October modes. You can now set scouting priorities from week to week and the draft itself is a more dynamic and exciting event. Unfortunately, while the Draft adds a lot to Franchise mode, it feels less consequential when playing March to October. An innovative season mode that lets you play through various highlights with your favorite team, March to October has long been one of MLB The Show’s best features, but it’s been a while since San Diego Studio has brought anything truly new to it. That said, the most neglected part of the new game is the Road to the Show career mode, which is unchanged from last year outside of a few tweaks.While not all the game’s modes get equal love, with the additions of Storylines, MLB The Show 23 feels closer to the total package you get with other top-tier sports franchises. If you’re into the Grand Old Game at all, this one should keep you busy into extra innings. This review was based on a PS5 copy of MLB The Show from publisher Sony. https://wccftech.com/review/mlb-the-show-23/

Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Defence Minister Yoav Gallant By Charlene Anne Rodrigues BBC News Israeli's defence minister has been sacked after he spoke out against controversial plans to overhaul the justice system. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned Yoav Gallant to a meeting and told him he no longer had faith in him as defence minister. The plan to limit the powers of the judiciary led to months of protests. Tens of thousands of protestors returned to the streets on Sunday night following Mr Gallant's dismissal. In Jerusalem, police and soldiers used water cannon against demonstrators near Mr Netanyahu's house.The leaders of the protest accuse Mr Netanyahu of behaving like a dictator and destroying the security of Israel. The new law makes it harder for courts to remove a leader deemed unfit for office, which has angered many who consider it in the interests of the incumbent, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption. The leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, described Mr Gallant's sacking as a new low for the government, while Mr Gallant himself has described the planned legislation as an "immediate and tangible danger" to state security. In a brief televised statement on Saturday night, Mr Gallant said members of the Israeli Defence Forces were angry and disappointed, with an intensity he had never seen before. Shortly after his dismissal a day later, Mr Gallant wrote on Twitter: "The state of Israel's security has always been and will always be my life's mission." The defence minister had won the backing of some fellow members of Mr Netanyahu's Likud party, but others on the far right had called for him to go. The law is part of the right-wing coalition government's contentious plan to limit the powers of the judiciary. The reforms include plans that would give the government full control over the committee which appoints judges, which he has said will pass in the Knesset next week. Far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir supported Mr Netanyahu's move, saying,"The prime minister decided on the necessary step and I congratulate him for that." It includes enabling parliament to overrule decisions made by the Supreme Court - a move that critics say will undermine the independence of the judiciary and could be used for political ends. But Mr Netanyahu says the reforms are designed to stop the courts overreaching their powers and that they were voted for by the public at the last election. Israel's opposition leader Yair Lapid described Mr Gallant's sacking as "a new low" for the government. "Netanyahu can fire Gallant, but he can't fire reality or fire the people of Israel who are fronting up to resist the coalition's madness," Mr Lapid added. Former defence minister Benny Gantz praised Mr Gallant, who he said had put the security of the country above all interests. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65080919

Watch: Zebra roams the streets of Seoul before being tranquilised and returned to the zoo A zebra has been returned to its home at a zoo in South Korea's capital, Seoul, after spending three hours on the loose. The male zebra, named Sero, which means vertical in Korean, broke free from Seoul Children's Grand Park Zoo on Thursday afternoon. Police, fire officials and zoo staff were all involved in trying to safely capture him. Videos posted online showed the animal trotting past traffic on a busy road. Sero was also seen wandering down a street and poking his nose into garbage bins in a residential area close to where he escaped in the city's east.The young zebra, who was born at the zoo in 2021, was able to escape after breaking the wooden fencing around his pen, according to the Seoul Gwangjin Fire Station. Sero was eventually trapped by officials using a safety fence after he entered a narrow alleyway. He was tranquilized before being taken back to the zoo in the back of a truck. An official at the Children's Grand Park Zoo told the Associated Press that the zebra has been assessed by vets and is in a stable condition. According to its website, the zoo houses more than 400 animals from 38 species, including Korean dogs, monkeys and donkeys. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65056899

Asset manager Blackrock and a group of institutional shareholders are to sue car maker Volkswagen for €2bn (£1.7bn) over its emissions scandal. Investors, including sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, are expected to file a complaint in a court in Braunschweig, Germany, on Friday. They are to claim that VW failed to disclose its use of software defeat devices on diesel cars in a timely way. VW has faced a flood of legal actions over the scandal. In September 2015 the US Environmental Protection Agency found that many diesel VW cars had a software "defeat device" that could detect emissions testing and change how the car performed to improve the test results.The shareholder claims relate to the drop in Volkswagen's share price after the scandal broke. Between September and October 2015, Volkswagen AG preference shares lost about 45% of their value, and are still about 28% down. Blackrock, one of the world's largest asset managers, said: "On behalf of their investors, a number of Blackrock-managed collective investment schemes are pursuing, alongside other institutional investors, legal action against Volkswagen AG in connection with Volkswagen's failure to disclose to investors its use of 'defeat devices' that mani[CENSORED]ted emission tests. "In light of the ongoing legal proceedings we cannot comment further on the matter at this point." Norway's Oil Fund, which is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, the California State Teachers' Retirement System, the Greater Manchester Pension Fund, and State Street are part of the action against VW. The complaint will be filed by law firm Quinn Emanuel. The case is being funded by Bentham Europe, which is also backing a complaint brought in June by institutional investors. In May Volkswagen more than doubled its provisions for the diesel emissions scandal to €16.2bn (£12.6bn). In the same month Norway's sovereign wealth fund said it was planning legal action against VW. In June, VW agreed to pay $10.2bn (£6.9bn) to settle some of its US claims, and in September Australia launched legal action against the car maker. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-37379874

An espresso martini with parmesan has gone viral – part of a wider trend including blue cheese negronis and a stilton-washed gin. Are any of them any good?One of the main features of a viral cocktail is provocation. When someone puts parmesan cheese in an espresso martini, as a man called Jordan Hughes recently did on TikTok, you have to wonder: is he just trying to make me angry? Sometimes the online posters themselves don’t seem to know. In his viral espresso-martini-with-parmesan video, Hughes, a self-described “cocktail guy” who is also known as @highproofpreacher, claims a bartender friend told him to do it. “He could just be trolling me,” he says, “but we’re going to try it anyway.” This is another feature of the viral cocktail: never ask why.Cheese-based cocktails in general are having a moment, although it might be fairer to say we are still living through the afterglow of the moment they were having about two years ago, when trendy bartenders made extensive use of a technique known as “fat washing” with insufficient regard for the consequences. Simply put, you can infuse any alcohol with fat – butter, bacon, sesame oil – thereby leaving behind certain flavour compounds. If you are so minded, you can do this with cheese. Genuine cheese-infused cocktail recipes tend to be complicated and perversely technical – “The liqueur is made by delicately cooking the cheese with verjus, sugar, and a spirit via sous vide” – and the ingredients are often maddeningly specific. I decided it might be worth trying some of the most approachable ones I could find. Many still called for particular local cheeses and designer gins. Much substitution was required.then grates parmesan all over it, then tastes the result. “I regret to inform you that was kind of awesome,” he says. I regret to inform you: he is wrong.This should come as no surprise. None of the ingredients in a normal espresso martini – a shaken blend of vodka, espresso and coffee liqueur – suggest parmesan cheese might be a good addition. It looks wrong, it feels wrong and it tastes wrong, even if it’s not quite as revolting as you might think. But I also regret to inform you there are far more disgusting cheese cocktails out there.Elsewhere on TikTok, a man produces one of these, without giving reasons. I think he might be trolling me, but I’m going to try it anyway. Following his instructions, I put a lump of blue cheese into a glass of brandy and microwave it for 30 seconds, straining the grey, lumpy result through a cheesecloth before popping it in the freezer. A few hours later, this infusion is lumpier still, as if it has undergone some kind of reaction. As a precaution, I strain it again.Cheese with everything? Well, probably not … Photograph: Baluma Productions SRL/Shutterstock It is with a heavy heart that I add this glop to an otherwise ingestible negroni. This combination of bitter citrus and ripe cheese, which might work on a plate, should not be sharing the same glass. It tastes like a compostable food waste sack on the night before bin day.Two bad experiences on the trot should be enough for anyone, but I regret to inform you we cannot simply stop here.The “bubbles and silk” by wine and cheese blogger Wendy Crispell is, in my hands, an unholy combination of lemon juice, simple syrup (a mixture of sugar and water), fizzy pink wine, Angostura bitters and a spirit washed with brie (ie, cheese left in some gin in the fridge). Even after four hours of steeping, not that much brie flavour has transferred to the gin, which is a mercy. It wouldn’t ruin a good drink, but this is not a good drink.The stilton-washed gin, also a Crispell concoction, I have made is a lot more pungent. I shake it with ice and Angostura bitters (the recipe technically calls for black walnut bitters and celery bitters, but I don’t have either) and garnish with apples and grapes. When poured into a chilled martini glass, the smell of this is enough to drive my family from the room. If your drains smelled this way you would call a plumber. I didn’t need a new reason to never eat a Waldorf salad again, but I have one now.By this point I am beginning to feel a little unwell. Unsure whether I can stomach another cheese cocktail, there is one more I want to try. This one doesn’t technically have any cheese in it, anyway.According to a recipe supplied by liquor.com, this was created by a Brooklyn bartender – or “beverage director” – called Piper Kristensen. It contains no burrata, but it makes use of the water the soft cheese comes in. The idea is that this salty whey serves the same textural purpose that egg white does in a whisky sour.Kristensen’s formulation calls for “mandarin distillate” and “gomme syrup”, but we’re not in Brooklyn now; we’re in my kitchen. So the adapted recipe goes like this: equal parts simple syrup, lemon juice and cheese water to two-and-a-half parts cheap gin. Pour over ice, shake, serve, hesitate, drink. The burrata water actually does give the drink the foamy head the recipe predicted. And the best thing I can say about burrata water is that it’s mostly inoffensive – a little milky, a little saline, with no aftertaste capable of ruining an otherwise perfectly good drink. My only criticism would be that the burrata martini really doesn’t seem like a breakfast drink. But it isn’t bad. After a first, cautious sip I think: I could actually finish this. After another sip, I do. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/apr/10/tim-dowling-tries-cheese-cocktails-like-a-food-waste-sack-the-night-before-bin-day

Security measures were increased after a Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israelis in the occupied West Bank By Yolande Knell BBC News, Jerusalem The Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have announced a joint commitment to take immediate steps to end a surge in violence. The move has emerged from rare talks in Jordan, also attended by US and Egyptian officials. The meeting agreed to support confidence-building steps and "to work towards a just and lasting peace". As the talks took place, a Palestinian gunman shot dead two Israelis in the occupied West Bank. The Israeli military said it was pursuing the gunman and reinforcing troop numbers in the West Bank, deploying two additional battalions. It confirmed that one of those killed in the village of Hawara, near Nablus, was a soldier.terrorists and maintain Israel's security". More than 70 killed this year Since the start of this year, more than 60 Palestinians - militants and civilians - have been killed by Israeli forces, and on the Israeli side, 13 people have been killed in attacks, all civilians, except for a paramilitary police officer. The recent flare up in violence has included two Israeli military raids - in Jenin refugee camp and Nablus Old City which killed 10 and 11 Palestinians respectively - in the most deadly operations of their kind since 2005. In both cases, the IDF said the aim was to arrest wanted men who had carried out shooting attacks targeting settlers or soldiers and were planning further attacks. Palestinian militants and civilians were killed. Last month, a Palestinian shooting attack outside a synagogue in a settlement in occupied East Jerusalem killed six Israelis and one Ukrainian citizen - the deadliest attack of its kind since 2008. There is particular concern about rising tension in the coming weeks when the Islamic holy month of Ramadan will again overlap with the Jewish Passover holiday. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64779504

Huawei FreeBuds 5i turned out to be very successful TWS headphones, considering their price. They offer balanced, pleasant and conductive sound, LDAC codec support, effective active noise cancellation, good battery life and fast charging. The Huawei FreeBuds 5i have a comfortable shape and a light weight. And the IP54 protection allows you to use them for sports. The only possible complaint about the Huawei FreeBuds 5i is the absence of Huawei AI Life's own app on Google Play. Its installation can be a bit tricky for users who have never installed third-party applications. 4 reasons to buy Huawei FreeBuds 5i: Balanced and pleasant sound (considering the price) Effective active noise cancellation system Comfortable shape and IP54 protection Long duration battery 2 reasons not to buy Huawei FreeBuds 5i: Huawei AI Lifeapp is not available on Google Play You are very picky about sound qualityfast transition: What is in the box? What do the Huawei FreeBuds 5i look like? Are the Huawei FreeBuds 5i easy to use? How about the sound quality, microphone and noise cancellation? How long do they last without recharging? DryThe Huawei FreeBuds 5i come in a small white and red box with an image of the earbuds in the corresponding color and a HiRes Audio certification mark. The box contains a standard set: the earbuds themselves in a case, three pairs of different-sized silicone tips (you shouldn't lose them, we'll explain why later), a USB Type-A to Type-C cable, and documentation. What do the Huawei FreeBuds 5i look like? Externally, the Huawei FreeBuds 5i are very similar to the previous model, the Huawei FreeBuds 4i. These are compact in-ear TWS headphones with touch-sensitive "legs" that house microphones and charging contacts. The headphones are made entirely of shiny plastic. We had a blue version for the review, and it shows no fingerprints. Blacks accumulate them very actively. There is nothing interesting on the outside of the earphones: only the Huawei logos on the tactile areas. Inside, the legs have contacts for charging, microphones, and left-right earphones. Another microphone is located at the top of the headphones, above the sound guide.The sound drivers are set at an angle, as they should be. They are short, but quite wide and do not have a standard oval shape. Unfortunately, third-party tips do not attach to headphones. So you don't have to lose the ones that are included. There are meshes on the sound guides to prevent dirt from entering the earpiece. In addition, there is protection at the tips. There are offset holes near the sound guides.The charging case is compact, oval and flat. It only weighs 33g without headphones. It can be carried comfortably in your pocket, it is almost invisible. In the blue version of the headphones, the case has a nice matte texture and small darker spots. Thanks to this, you will have a well-groomed appearance for a long time. The front has the Huawei logo and an LED indicator for charging or connection mode. On the side there is a single button that activates the connection mode.The lid has a very clear fixation and self-closing in both positions, it does not wobble at all. The earbuds in the case are held by strong magnets and won't fall out even if the case is shaken. The only not so convenient thing is the glossy surface of the headphones. It's hard to get them out. After several tries, it turned out that the best way to get them out is to pull on the silicone tips.At the bottom of the case there is a Type-C connector for charging.There is a proprietary Huawei AI Life app for all settings. Unfortunately, it is not available on Google Play, so you need to download the APK file from the official website by scanning the QR code on the manual. It's not very comfortable. The app has a noise reduction mode switch: noise reduction, off, and surveillance mode (transparency mode). The noise reduction itself has three modes: maximum, balanced, and comfortable. There are also settings for touch gestures and software updates. The Connection Center is responsible for configuring the priority device and switching when two devices are connected simultaneously. In the "Sound quality" option you can select the priority of the sound quality or the connection. Next is thethe equalizer. Although it is very primitive: in fact, there is only the possibility of enhancing the low or high frequencies. "Headphone Search" allows you to play the sound on each of them. This is really useful if the headset gets lost somewhere in the room. The earphone fit test will help you choose the best pair of earphones. In the "Settings" option, you can activate the "Usage detection" function: playback will stop automatically if you remove the earphone from your ear. You can then turn on low audio delay and see what codec is used for streaming. This is really useful if the headset gets lost somewhere in the room. The earphone fit test will help you choose the best pair of earphones. In the "Settings" option, you can activate the "Use detection" function: playback will stop automatically if you remove the earphone from your ear.There is a 55mAh battery inside each earbud, and the case is equipped with a 410mAh battery. Huawei promises that the headphones can work up to 6 hours with noise cancellation and up to 7.5 hours without it. Together with the case, these figures are 18.5 and 28 hours, respectively. They support fast charging: 15 minutes in the case provide 4 hours of music. It takes one hour to fully charge the headphones and just under two hours to charge the case. Actual operating time depends on volume, data codec, etc. I got about 5 hours with LDAC, volume at about 85%. https://gagadget.com/es/huawei-freebuds-5i/223940-huawei-freebuds-5i-auriculares-intrauditivos-tws-con-cancelacion-activa-del-ruido/#ergonomics

The Google Now Launcher personalization application will stop working this April, a decade after it arrived on devices with the Android operating system, as verified by 9to5Google.Born as Google Experience Launcher in 2013 and included in the Nexus 5 family devices, it was renamed Google Now Launcher in 2014, when it began to be compatible with Android 4.1 devices and later versions. This application presented an interface with a variety of cards that could be used to access personalized information and news chosen by Google based on the user's location and tastes. Google Now Launcher lost certain features in 2017, when they began to be integrated into the launcher for Pixel devices. However, Google continued to support the app on Android devices.The latest 14.14 beta version of the Google app reveals that it "will stop working in April", without specifying a specific date. What is indicated in the start interface is that the device will start using the terminal's default 'launcher'. This has been verified by 9to5Google, who has recalled that the newer terminals will not be affected by this discontinuation, since they have the functionalities offered by Google Now Launcher integrated as standard. He has also commented that the application will continue to function, with the difference that it will not be updated periodically. https://www.europapress.es/portaltic/software/noticia-desaparece-aplicacion-personalizacion-google-now-launcher-20230406103630.html

A slight adventure with likable characters is marred by a lack of meaningful choice and horrific bugs.Next Stop Nowhere gets off to a promising start. You play as Beckett, a sci-fi courier who pilots a spacecraft and is best friends with an AI program. While visiting a bar, he meets Serra, and gets embroiled in her family drama when he learns that she’s trying to track down her wayward thief son before the authorities can get to him. The game is framed as a sort-of road trip through space, where the choices you make will change how the story plays out. At first, the charming characters and intriguing plot are enough to pull you from one location to the next. But unfortunately, a lack of meaningful consequence and a plethora of horrific bugs make for a trip not worth taking. Next Stop Nowhere is, by design, a very simple game. You guide Beckett by touching where you want him to go, and the points you can interact with in each map are highlighted with big white circles. There are, essentially, no puzzles--moving forward is simply a matter of interacting with every object signposted in a room, and it’s all but impossible to get stuck. It’s a slightly awkward control system, as I found that Beckett often did not go where I wanted. There are also a handful of sections where you fly your ship through dangerous areas, piloting it with simple touch controls between floating debris and avoiding other ships that try to ram you. These sections offer some variety, although there are only a few of them. Judging the distance between your ship and the objects you’re trying to avoid is difficult and the degree of control you are offered is quite limited, but they’re also the best indicator the game gives of the vastness of the space you’re exploring--each of the game’s locations is otherwise very small. This is an adventure game that focuses largely on the choices you make, and how (or whether) they impact the story. Choices rarely have huge ramifications, and I never found myself having to think about what to do for long. Most decisions boil down to dialogue responses to things other characters say, and framing what sort of relationship you want Beckett and Serra to have. A few of the choices you have to make are framed as though they have major implications within the story, like if you should wipe a robot’s memory or try to reprogram it to be nicer, or whether you should hold a character captive or let them go after they hack into your ship’s computer. However, by the time the credits roll, most of these decisions end up feeling inconsequential to how things played out--if they factored in at all. Next Stop Nowhere certainly has character, at least. Beckett and Serra are both likable, thanks in large part to the excellent vocal performances of Joshua Alexander and Elizabeth Saydah, and the game is at its best when the two characters are simply chatting about their lives and interests, joking and sharing anecdotes. Serra’s complicated relationship with her son, Eddy, makes the search for him more exciting than it would be otherwise, as the details of the crime he committed aren’t interesting. Instead, I was compelled by the promise of an awkward family reunion and learning more about Serra’s interesting backstory and complex characterization. Serra is a character who is clearly trying to move on from the sins of her past, and having the player decide how Beckett will react both to the person Serra has been, and weightit against who she is right now, is the game's most successfully realized element. The striking art style, sharp character designs, and boppy soundtrack all help to make the game intermittently charming, until the game’s numerous bugs and issues set about sapping any good will built up.The plot in my play-through of the game ended up being all over the place due to a mix of bugs and writing problems. As I got near the end, it became clear that my choices were either being ignored or reversed. In one instance, my ship’s on-board AI (named Cody) was hacked, and Beckett made a huge deal about not being able to operate the ship without it. I walked into my cockpit, accessed my map, and picked the next location… and without any fanfare, we took off. Cody was restored in the next cutscene as though nothing had ever happened, and characters that hadn’t been on the ship previously were suddenly there. In another instance, a character needed a med pack to heal an injury, and in the next location I picked one up from a convenience mart. When I returned to the ship, the game informed me that I had failed to procure anything to heal the character with--but then they were fully cured anyway. In another, the game crashed in a cutscene after I made certain dialogue choices and then crashed in the same spot again when I reloaded; it wasn’t until I changed my choices that I was able to progress. Sometimes the music would suddenly cut out, or a character would start vibrating in the background during a cutscene, or something else would happen necessitating a restart. On a few occasions, the game would tell me that I had made a certain choice earlier that I most assuredly didn’t. These are just a few examples--it’s hard to know which choices the game ignored or reversed, because consequences for your actions rarely stretch beyond a few lines of dialogue anyway. There’s one instance early on where you have to choose between two locations to visit, but this ends up being an isolated example, and I found myself caring less about the choices I was making as the game progressed. The game even has the temerity to set up a Mass Effect 2-style scenario near the end that should, in theory, rely on your knowledge of the game’s characters to delegate tasks, but your choices have absolutely zero impact on how things play out. While I suspect that things could play out ever-so-slightly differently if I ran through the whole game again, I’m in no hurry to do so. No Caption Provided Most of these issues hit late in the game, and the first half is distinctly, noticeably more well put-together than the back half. As the game moves towards its conclusion, it starts introducing new plot concepts and characters that aren’t given much room to breathe, and some seemingly-interesting characters are introduced and then shuffled out of the game so fast that it feels like a waste to have introduced them at all. There’s a romantic tension between Beckett and Serra that I enjoyed early on, but I couldn’t tell you what happens to them at the end of the game; the final cutscene played both of their dialogue simultaneously so that it overlapped, making it impossible to parse. By this point, it felt like the game was flat-out messing with me; for the proceeding hour and a half, I’d had to restart the game five times because cutscenes didn’t progress properly, and my investment in the story had flatlined. With all the bugs ironed out, Next Stop Nowhere would have been a pleasant, albeit inessential, jaunt with some interesting characters and a disappointing lack of consequence. In its current state, it’s a broken, frustrating experience on top of that. As an Apple Arcade exclusive, Next Stop Nowhere isn’t asking for additional payments beyond your subscription, but right now it’s not worth the time you’ll have to invest to finish it. I like Beckett and Serra, and I’d love to be on board with their road trip through space; unfortunately, the game gets a flat tyre midway through that it never replaces. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/next-stop-nowhere-review-bugs-on-the-windshield/1900-6417543/

The first foray into virtual reality for Guerrilla's beloved franchise is a big success, even if it doesn't do anything new.Horizon Call of the Mountain and PlayStation VR 2 are inextricably linked. The Guerrilla- and Firesprite-developed title is a successful virtual reality game thanks to the tech housed in the PSVR 2, and the PSVR 2's capabilities are best showcased by the game. Admittedly, the barrier to entry for experiencing it all is very high: You'll need to own a PS5, purchase the $550 headset, and then get the $60 game on top. But those who do will be treated to a game that's an impressive technical showpiece and an enjoyable Horizon game in its own right. Call of the Mountain takes place in the same vibrant setting that you're used to exploring as Aloy. However, for this game, the protagonist is Ryas, a member of the Shadow Carja who has been imprisoned for questionable actions. Ryas is busted out of prison and sent on a perilous journey to figure out why the machine animals of Horizon's worlds are acting out. This is a familiar narrative beat for a Horizon game, and a lot of the story is carried by Ryas. Ryas' brother went missing while also trying to solve this particular mystery, so he has a personal stake in going out of his way to help those around him in order to figure out what's going on, even if the people he's working withtreat him like an outsider. My interest in Call of the Mountain was primarily in seeing how it utilized the new hardware, so it caught me by surprise when I found myself invested in Ryas as a character. The game does a great job of slowly unpacking his story and showing that there may have been more to his history than it initially seems.He also serves as a good tour guide. As you clamber around towering structures, be they derelict buildings or rusting metallic behemoths of old, and explore different parts of the world, he'll occasionally offer context and history to provide further color to the landscape around you. He's not the scholarly type, so much of what he talks about comes from the perspective of someone who has heard tales of battles or knows aspects of other cultures. It's a nice balance that means you're constantly being told things while also letting Ryas act as a stand-in for you. He also questions some of his own preconceptions about things he has always been told or believed, and--as a member of the maligned Shadow Carja--watching his small steps of growth across the journey is interesting, even if it isn't profound. Ryas might not be a learned man, but he's certainly a capable one, as becomes evident when you're tasked with scaling structures and battling enemies. Ryas is a Climber and, as the title of his profession suggests, he's all about climbing. This is achieved through the Sense controllers, which--as mentioned in our PSVR 2 review--are very capable input devices that, in addition to all the buttons, triggers, and analog sticks you'd want to be able to properly engage with a game, include finger-tracking. Call of the Mountain maps your real hands to the virtual ones and then empowers you to grip onto climbable edges (highlighted in white) by holding down the triggers and physically moving your real arms to shift your virtual character around.Virtual reality climbing games are a dime a dozen--it's a very familiar mechanic--and there's nothing here that really pushes the mechanic forward. That said, it's executed very well. The Sense controllers make the act of clambering feel tactile and satisfying, and the PlayStation 5 and the PSVR 2 headset render the world around you with a fidelity compelling enough to instill a sense of tension and peril as you move around. As I scaled cliffs, shimmied across dangling ropes, and leaped across large gaps, I was cognizant of where I looked because, at times, I got vertigo when looking down. On the odd occasion where my virtual hands didn't properly grasp a handhold or ledge, I always had a sense of terror wash over me, even if it was very brief since the game is quite forgiving about correcting or using your other hand to panic recover. That sense of danger was particularly potent in situations that required me to take a running jump off an edge, or use a tool to swing across a chasm--my tip: Don't look down. Generally, that feeling of being connected to the world through the Sense controller and PSVR 2 headset held true in other interactions. My chosen movement method in Call of the Mountain involved moving my arms up and down to simulate walking, which sounds stupid and looks stupid, but felt like a good middle ground between instantly teleporting and directly controlling the character. The latter of those is available as an option, but I found it to be nauseating, literally. There are a variety of other options available that allow you to tweak how your character moves and turns, so you may be able to find the sweet spot for you. Combat changes the setup to be more on rails, with the player being able to move along a predefined path on the battlefield. Usually, it's just a big circle around the arena, and you're either dodging the attacks of nimble Watchers while trying to fire arrows into their eye, or desperately trying to get out of the way of a rampaging Thunderjaw. Horizon's encounter design, which is built on attacking weak points to strip metallic beasts of their armor and themechanisms that allow them to do deadly attacks, works very well in Call of the Mountain. Most engagements are a dance of dodging fireballs, gunfire, tail swipes, and claw strikes, using your senses to identify the most vulnerable spots, and letting loose a flurry of arrows to bring them down. Again, bow and arrow mechanics in a VR game are hardly new or innovative, but it's executed very well. There's a layer of strategy in selecting the best type of arrow for the enemy you're facing, and then having the wherewithal to quickly reach over your shoulder and pull it out while trying to avoid damage. The real star of the show, however, is the visuals, and by extension, the immersive quality of playing Horizon Call of the Mountain. Again, this is a collaborative effort between the game and the hardware it's running on--both the PS5 and the PSVR 2. Call of the Mountain is one of the best-looking VR games I've ever seen, and being in its world is a genuine thrill--whether I was up close looking at the details on tools I was crafting to aid me on my journey, or marveling at a distant vista of verdant trees, rushing waterfalls, and collapsed architecture reclaimed by nature. At every turn and climb, there's something impressive to see, whether that's the world or the creatures that inhabit it. And it's even more impressive when the bigger set-pieces come into play, so it's easy to get caught up in just seeing the sights. As a result, Call of the Mountain ticks the box for that other kind of VR game that exists in abundance: the virtual tourist experience. Again, it's nothing new, but Call of the Mountain does it very well, transporting players to a world they're familiarwith, but allowing them to experience it with an unprecedented level of intimacy. The ongoing refrain of "familiar done well" is the defining quality of Call of the Mountain. There's nothing revolutionary in the game that moves VR gaming forward and it doesn't do anything unexpected, so it ends up being exactly what it looks like: a well-made Horizon game in VR that has good climbing and shooting, as well as pretty environments to look at. As a showcase of what can be done with the PSVR 2, it more than handily serves its purpose. https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/horizon-call-of-the-mountain-review-new-heights/1900-6418028/

It looks like Tony Todd’s at it again! The voice actor for Venom in the upcoming Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 has somewhat casually leaked information about the game in the past, and now he may have let slip the release window for the anticipated title.Looks like September! Massive publicity coming in august. Commercials start dropping in august so I’m told. Hold on to your … and hold breath! Gonna be necessary.” It may seem odd for Tony Todd to just out and reveal a Spider-Man 2 release window like this, but Hollywood actors play by different rules than most of the gaming industry and don’t seem to be as concerned about embargoes. Let’s not forget the multiple times Norman Reedus let slip that Death Stranding 2 was happening. Todd has doubled down on his leak of the Spider-Man 2 release date in further tweets, so it doesn’t seem like this was a mistake or bad wording. Actors, whattaya gonna do?Of course, still take this with a grain of salt until Sony makes it official. That said, a September Spider-Man 2 release wouldn’t be that surprising, as Sony itself has already said the game is coming sometime this fall. September is definitely on the early end of what you might consider "fall," but it would still fit. Here’s what Sony had to say back in December… "Speaking of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, let’s kick things off with some exciting news from developer Insomniac Games confirming the release window for the web-slinging sequel. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches on PS5 in fall 2023. Following the events of Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the Spider-duo of Peter Parker and Miles Morales are back in the next blockbuster action chapter of the Marvel’s Spider-Man series. Much is still to be revealed about the game, and going off the quality of the past two titles, we’re bound to be in for a fantastic new original Spider-Man adventure." What do you think? Does Venom have the goods? For now, all we know for sure is that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 launches on PS5 in fall of 2023. https://wccftech.com/spider-man-2-launching-september-massive-publicity-august-venom-actor/

Watch: Mourners sing at funeral for sisters killed in occupied West Bank By Lucy Williamson and Marita Moloney In the West Bank and London The father of two British-Israeli sisters killed in a shooting in the occupied West Bank embraced their bodies while mourners sang songs of grief at their funeral on Sunday. Maia and Rina Dee, 20 and 15, were killed on Friday when suspected Palestinian gunmen opened fire on them in their car in the Jordan Valley. Their mother, Leah, is in a critical condition following surgery. The attack came amid soaring Israeli-Palestinian tensions and violence. The low rhythmic songs swelled and swayed with the crowd, who were packed beneath the white rafters in the prayer hall at a cemetery in the settlement of Kfar Etzion.Many at the funeral were teenagers - some from the school Rina went to. At the front, by a low podium, the family gathered, talking together and holding each other for long moments in silence. The bodies were brought out, one covered in black cloth, one in blue - a Star of David embroidered on each, in gold and silver. They were embraced by their father, Rabbi Leo Dee, originally from Radlett in the UK. He then sat back, his face contorted in pain, his hands reaching out to touch his remaining three children. Rabbi Dee also spoke, questioning how he would explain to the girls' mother what had happened to their "two precious gifts" when she wakes up. He told those assembled that "today the Jewish people have proven we are one". "A simple, quiet family is devastated," he said. "The whole country hurts." Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was among the mourners.Maia and Rina Dee were shot as their drove from their home in the settlement of Efrat to Tiberias The family live in Efrat, having moved from London nine years ago. The car carrying the two sisters and their mother crashed after coming under fire. They were then fired on again at close range, Israeli media reported. Israeli public broadcaster Kan reported that 22 bullet casings were found, apparently from a Kalashnikov assault rifle. The victims were travelling in one of three cars on their way to Tiberias in the Galilee for a family holiday. Israeli military personnel blocked roads in the area and said they had "started a pursuit of the terrorists" responsible. Speaking to the BBC on Saturday evening, Rabbi Dee described his daughters as beautiful, smart and po[CENSORED]r. He said he had not been able to sleep since their deaths. "Every time, I had nightmares and woke up," he said, "but the reality was worse than the nightmare, so I went back to sleep. Recurring nightmares... that's how it went." He said Maia, who was volunteering for national service in a high school, was "wonderful, beautiful, had a lot of friends... she was very keen to do a second year of volunteering". Rina, he said, was "beautiful, fun, very smart, top grades in every subject, very po[CENSORED]r with friends, sporty... very responsible, she would take responsibility for many things". "When it came to sweeping out the youth club floor, if other people didn't turn up, she would be there by herself for three hours on a Friday morning, to make sure it was done," he said. Rabbi Dee heard news of the attack without realising his own family were involved, he said. He called his wife and daughters, but they did not answer. He then saw a picture online of the car that was attacked. "And we could just see one of our suitcases in the back seat," he said. "There was a massive panic and screaming." He then drove to the scene. He was not allowed access but was handed his daughter's ID card, which confirmed the worst. Rabbi Dee has said he and his three remaining children "will get through this".Rabbi Mordechai Ginsbury, from the Hendon United Synagogue in north London, said he spoke briefly with his close friend Rabbi Dee before the funerals. "Naturally, as are we all, [he was] devastated, shocked at how just in a few moments with an act of absolute evil and madness - insanity - things can change around," he told the BBC. "The loss of two gorgeous daughters, and his wife now lying critically ill in a hospital in Jerusalem. "But through the sadness there's still that determination that he has to find any positives one can find, to try and be strong for his remaining children." Rabbi Ginsbury added that Rabbi Dee felt "supported and embraced by a blanket of warmth and love" from within Israel and from people across world who had contacted him. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who described the incident as a terror attack, sent his condolences to the family in a tweet naming the sisters on Saturday. The UK's chief rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said that "no words can describe the depth of our shock and sadness at the heart-breaking news". After the two sisters were shot, Israel Police commissioner Kobi Shabtai called on all Israelis with firearms licences to start carrying their weapons. Also on Friday, an Italian tourist was killed and seven other people were wounded, including three Britons, in a suspected car-ramming attack in Tel Aviv. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-65224751

A baboon has been killed after being on the loose for over two weeks in a Taiwan city, sparking an outcry and allegations of animal cruelty. The olive baboon was believed to have escaped from a zoo, and was first spotted on 10 March in Taoyuan city. After several unsuccessful attempts, authorities captured the primate on Monday with a tranquiliser dart. But it died shortly after, with officials saying the animal had been found with gunshot wounds. That has prompted criticism of authorities' actions.Search teams had been set up across the region in the past fortnight, as the baboon zig-zagged through various districts. Local media outlets reported that those tracking it were armed with tranquiliser darts, while others were put on "baboon watch" shifts. The baboon was reportedly already seriously wounded when it fell into a net trap laid by officers from the city's agriculture bureau on Monday. Japanese city battles mystery monkey rampages Watch: Zebra on the loose after escaping from Seoul zoo Members of the public have questioned why officers failed to pay attention to its injuries - which the agriculture bureau said were initially missed. Public outrage about the death of the animal - which had not harmed anyone during its wandering - has also been fuelled by a lack of transparency from authorities. Police have launched an investigation into how it died. One hunter who had been assigned to the search admitted to local media that he had fired his shotgun, but said he only used it under the instruction of a different government agency. Taiwan's Business Today also reported that locals also took issue with the "flippant" reaction of an agriculture bureau official, who was caught on camera as he photographed the wounded animal, saying, "I want my preschool daughter to be able to tell her classmates, 'My dad caught the baboon, I didn't lie to you.'" The public criticism prompted Taoyuan's mayor Simon Chang to issue a statement on Tuesday. He said those responsible would face legal consequences. "Some of our colleagues did not manage the situation in a prudent and professional manner," he wrote on his Facebook page on Tuesday. "They have failed to uphold our respect for animal welfare which is expected of agricultural authorities." The incident has also highlighted the lack of zoo regulations in Taiwan. Zoos in Taiwan are managed by the education department rather than animal experts, as they are legally considered "social education institutions". An opposition lawmaker called the baboon's death a "tragedy of administrative failure". Baboons are generally indifferent to humans, but they do attack when provoked, and are potentially very dangerous because of their sharp teeth and claws. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65096467

Volkswagen is facing €8.2bn ($9.1bn; £7bn) in damages claims from 1,400 German investors over its emissions scandal, a state court has said. The regional court in Braunschweig near VW's Wolfsburg headquarters said it received 750 lawsuits on Monday alone. A year ago, an investigation in the US found that VW had cheated emissions tests for diesel cars by using special software. VW faces a flood of actions and has set aside €16.2bn to cover the lawsuits. The court said it brought in extra staff to process the claims submitted by shareholders, who were concerned that 18 September, the day VW's mani[CENSORED]tions were uncovered a year ago, may be the deadline to file.It said most of the cases were bundled actions containing claims from multiple plaintiffs, in many cases private investors. Shareholder claims The scandal broke after an investigation found that many Volkswagen cars being sold in America had software in diesel engines that could detect when they were being tested. The so-called "defeat device" changed the performance of the engines accordingly to improve results. The German car giant admitted cheating emissions tests in the US and this summer agreed to pay $10.2bn to settle some of its US claims.Earlier this month, Australia launched legal action against the carmaker and last week asset manager Blackrock and a group of institutional shareholders said they would sue VW for €2bn. The German states of Hesse and Baden-Wuerttemberg have said they will also take legal action. The claims relate to the drop in Volkswagen's share price after the scandal broke. Between September and October 2015, Volkswagen AG preference shares lost about 45% of their value, and are still down by about 28% Hesse finance minister Thomas Schaefer said the fall in VW's share price had cost the state about €3.9m. Criminal probe Earlier this month, a VW engineer pleaded guilty to involvement in the scandal. James Liang, a German national, pleaded guilty to violation of the clean air act, a wire fraud count and a consumer fraud count and became the first to be charged as part of the US Justice Department's year-long criminal probe into the firm's rigging of federal air-pollution tests. He could face five years in prison, although by co-operating with the US federal government he could reduce his jail time. His trial will be held in January. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-37429466

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts.Could rocks be conscious? Why are some things conscious and some not? Nigel J G Baptiste, Worcs This question, posed on 2 April, was obviously asked a day late. Ted Green, Melbourne I’ve just asked a rock. It showed no sign of either understanding the question or attempting a reply. So, no, I don’t think rocks are sentient. salamandertome I just asked my grandson. I didn’t get a response. seedysolipsist It is very difficult to define consciousness. Sam Harris (quoting the philosopher Thomas Nagel) says that a creature is conscious if there is “something that it is like” to be this creature. It doesn’t seem that rocks have the complexity we associate with being aware, but we might be wrong. SeaTurtle01 Rocks have consciousness, it’s just that not all people have the capacity to engage with it. Richard Haynes According to Spinoza, if you ask a rock why it’s rolling down a hill, it’ll tell you it’s because it wants to. Wormlover Of course they are. Proof: the phrase “as dumb as a box of rocks”. Logically, it takes a certain level of intelligence to be dumb! Gobsheisse Is there a way I can tell if a relationship is right for me? Read more Consciousness comes from having a brain. lisamarie3 This is not a legitimate question since all things are conscious. In the eco-arts and science of green switch natureness, since forever and before, nature is its wordless attraction (love) to begin life and dance it into being. Attraction is conscious of what it is attracted to, otherwise it would not know what to bond or attach to, moment by moment and grow to be our spacetime universe this instant where all things are attached and happen all at once. This means that all things are alive and are conscious since we are. It’s our stories that subdivide things. Mike Cohen The answer is they are, and here’s the proof: We don’t know what consciousness is, or what causes it, or have any way of measuring it and therefore have no principled way of determining if any entity other is conscious or not. There are certain things that seem to correlate with consciousness – having a brain, reacting to stimuli, perceived similarity to ourselves, etc – but these don’t really help us because all arguments based on these apparent correlates are essentially circular. It is a basically unsolvable problem because it is a metaphysical one. We have no way of telling the difference between something that is conscious and something that isn’t. If we developed an embodied AI that in every way could act in a humanlike way, how could we ever tell the difference between something mimicking consciousness through a complex simulation of human behaviour but with no inner experience and something that behaved in the same way but did possess a subjective experience of the world? We can’t, not even in principle. Ditto with rocks. The most we can say is that we have no reason to assume they are and therefore it seems more economic to assume they’re not. However, like a lot of assumptions that seem based on rock-hard common sense, that’s probably just something I tell myself to avoid going mad in a fit of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. I tell myself the people reading this are conscious for very much the same reason. QuesoManchego. I am an associate professor of philosophy at Durham University and leading proponent of panpsychism. We have been trying for several decades now to explain how consciousness could emerge from physical processes in the brain, and have got precisely nowhere. As a result, academic philosophers have of late been exploring an alternative approach to consciousness which turns this on its head: panpsychism. Instead of explaining consciousness in terms of matter, we account for the emergence of matter by postulating very simple forms of consciousness at the base of reality. This doesn’t entail that rocks are conscious, but it does mean that consciousness exists beyond the realm of biology. Philip Goff As a geologist, no, rocks are not conscious. They are not aware of their being, nor do they make conscious decisions. But also as a geologist, who has spent a long time working on granites here in my home of Cornwall, there is something special about them. The granites define a certain type of landscape and therefore character of place. They come with their myths and legends and are said to whistle different ways in certain weathers. Generations of artists and writers have been inspired by the granites – look no further than Ithell Colquhoun’s The Living Stones. Could rocks be conscious? Maybe … Beth, Cornwall Is the body key to understanding consciousness? Read more Short answer is to change word “conscious” to “aware”. Only objects that are alive, and have a metabolism, can be aware. Machines can register a surround and remember it, but they are not aware. They simulate consciousness but don’t possess it. Jack Klein. Consciousness is measured by behavioural measures, neuro-imaging techniques or psychological measures, such as questionnaires. Note that all of these are themselves defined by “experience”, making experience synonymous with consciousness. As far as anybody knows, neuronal activity is required for experience. When rocks grow neurons, perhaps they will be conscious. Pablo Miller, Crozet, VA Rocks could not be conscious. Some people will claim that this is because they lack some mysterious neurobiological or quantum property, or even a non-physical mind substance, that only conscious beings possess. But the explanation is simpler: unlike people and animals, rocks have no way to see, feel, think, or do, so they have nothing to be conscious of. David Silverman One could argue that rocks are conscious. That even though they don’t have a brain or nerves they are somehow aware. To do this we can compare rocks to a couple of things. Plants don’t have a brain like animals, yet it has come to light recently that their root system is akin to a brain. Also, like rocks, many plants move slowly enough as to seem inanimate to us. However, in certain locations like Death Valley there are rocks that at least seem to move. Another thing we can compare rocks to are slime moulds. Slime moulds can solve mazes and learn despite being single-celled and without a brain. If a scientist performs the double-slit experiment where photons are fired at background with or without an observer, photons seem to be able to tell whether they’re being observed. If everything is conscious even down to the subatomic level then it would make sense that rocks are conscious. Brock Lynch Although some alive things react to a stimulus, not all are able to make a choice as to how they react. My version of sentience would be having the capacity to make a choice in how they react or think. We have no evidence that rocks make choices. Squirls I am the editor of the special topic area on the neuroanatomy of consciousness and the will, for MDPI’s NeuroSci journal. The philosophical debate surrounding consciousness has been ongoing for millennia, and in all likelihood will continue indefinitely. Views on the importance of a proposed immaterial mind and the material nature of the brain have been repeated and used to justify more practical philosophical arguments. Much of this debate depends on a person’s cultural background or scepticism more so than any scientific evidence. Plato argued that the soul is a separate, non-physical entity that is the seat of our thoughts; Descartes claimed that the pineal gland of the brain was the location of a mysterious junction between the nonphysical soul and the physical body. Our modern interpretation of scientific data describes consciousness as an epiphenomenon of brain processing. Sensory information is input into our biological system, the brain processes that information, and we output motive functions to react to the sensory information. Based on various classical neurological experiments that indicate a delay in our conscious decision-making and experience of the environment, consciousness is considered to be present in this middle processing step. While almost all of us are willing to extend that subjective experience to other people, the philosophical concept of solipsism argues that the only consciousness is our own brain, while other philosophies and religions claim that there is only one consciousness that we all share. Whether we can extend our subjective experience of consciousness in our brain to other structures – such as the delocalised neurons of insects, the intercellular organisation of plants or the crystalline structure of rocks – is something more difficult to answer definitively. Humans are wont to create categories with strict boundaries and make rules that govern our thinking based on those categorisations. Unfortunately, the natural world does not exist within categories and instead exists along a gradient with no clear demarcations. Even within ourselves as individuals, we can experience the same concepts in innumerable different manners. Take the case of a musical piece and the many ways it exists within our reality. One can hear one of Bach’s fugues, for instance, and process it as music which can elicit emotions;. one can analyse the music theory and experience the mastery of thought involved; we can also convert the sound waves into a visual representation. Similarly, Michelangelo’s David can be experienced visually for its representation of a human figure, or through X-ray crystallography to understand the atomic interactions of its substrate, or it can conjure moral narratives. Clearly, we exist not as a monolithic consciousness, because we experience the world in so many different ways. The nature of those different experiences may be a starting point for understanding consciousness not as emergent aspects of our brains, but as fundamental elements of reality. For a truly scientific investigation of consciousness, I would argue that we must provide the space for other hypotheses among the many concepts yet unknown to science. Researchers have devised rigorous experiments to identify statistical anomalies in human perception in the hopes of identifying unknown methods of non-material interactions that may point to a fundamental form of consciousness. These forms of consciousness may involve electromagnetic waves that interact at a distance, while some physicists may argue that the statistical models used to understand quantum physics allow for non-deterministic aspects of our reality. As an analogy, if neuroscience were to take the same approach as cosmologists, does there exist a fundamental “consciousness particle” like the “dark matter” and “dark energy”? Like the exchange of gluons within the nuclei of atoms that contribute to the mass that holds the universe together, is there a particle interaction that creates a subjective experience at the level of subatomic particles? An electron existing in the orbital of free hydrogen has a different experience of reality from an electron present in a covalent bond between two hydrogen nuclei. Is each electron in the universe experiencing something unique in its own corner of spacetime? Can this be said to be both “subjective” and “experiential”, and thus giving that electron a highly rudimentary form of consciousness? If so, is our consciousness the result of an additive function of the atomic structures and interactions that make up our bodies? In the end, consciousness of rocks may be as much about semantics as about any scientific investigation. Does a rock have a subjective experience based on its unique place and its surroundings? That depends on how your consciousness chooses to interpret the words. I, for one, hold that neither consciousness nor free will exist and subscribe to an ultra-deterministic view of the reality we experience together as our particles are inextricably tied together from the origin of this universe, duly entangled for infinity. However, if a rock were ever to choose to speak to me, as a scientist I would be receptive to the experience and excited to learn of its perspective. James Sonne More readers’ answers here … as 2023 gathers pace, and you’re joining us from Pakistan, we have a small favour to ask. A new year means new opportunities, and we're hoping this year gives rise to some much-needed stability and progress. Whatever happens, the Guardian will be there, providing clarity and fearless, independent reporting from around the world, 24/7. Times are tough, and we know not everyone is in a position to pay for news. But as we’re reader-funded, we rely on the ongoing generosity of those who can afford it. This vital support means millions can continue to read reliable reporting on the events shaping our world. Will you invest in the Guardian this year? Unlike many others, we have no billionaire owner, meaning we can fearlessly chase the truth and report it with integrity. 2023 will be no different; we will work with trademark determination and passion to bring you journalism that’s always free from commercial or political interference. No one edits our editor or diverts our attention from what’s most important. With your support, we’ll continue to keep Guardian journalism open and free for everyone to read. When access to information is made equal, greater numbers of people can understand global events and their impact on people and communities. Together, we can demand better from the powerful and fight for democracy. Whether you give a little or a lot, your funding is vital in powering our reporting for years to come. If you can, please support us on a monthly basis. It takes less than a minute to set up, and you can rest assured that you’re making a big impact every single month in support of open, independent journalism. Thank you. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/apr/09/readers-reply-could-rocks-be-conscious-why-are-some-things-conscious-and-some-not

A Palestinian child walks near cars burnt near Hawara By Tom Bateman BBC News, Hawara Homes in Hawara are charred black alongside burned-out cars cloaked in a layer of ash. The air tastes acrid as people speak of the night their town burned. Residents told the BBC a mob had gone on an hours-long rampage armed with iron bars and rocks before torching buildings, cars and trees. On Sunday the Palestinian town was subjected to one of the worst cases of mass Israeli settler violence in years, hours after two settlers were shot dead by a Palestinian gunman. The settlers attacked our house, they smashed the windows and burned my nephew's cars and trucks. They tried to break into my car showroom and set it on fire," said Abdel Nasser al-Junaidi, speaking outside his home. He described how he had rushed his children up to the rooftop to try to keep them safe. The army did nothing to protect us. It supported the settlers and protected them. The shooting was from both settlers and soldiers. We were terrified. What happened was a horrific and barbaric attack," said Mr al-Junaidi. The scale of the damage becomes clear when you keep walking the length of this town that sits astride Route 60 - the main highway running north-south through the occupied West Bank. A mob torched buildings, cars and trees Home after home is wrecked, shop-fronts are torched as are dozens of cars- including many in a used car lot that went up in flames. The Palestinian health ministry says 37-year-old Sameh Aqtash died after being shot in the stomach during an attack by settlers in Zaatara on Sunday night. Dozens more were wounded. One family had to be rescued by paramedics after becoming trapped in their house when settlers laid burning tyres outside their front door, blocking the route out. Israeli-American killed in West Bank amid unrest Several hundred metres away from the highway, an extended family tried to take refuge as their home came under attack. "My wife, my brother's wife, and our young children were in the house, they were screaming, and the children were crying, and they were crying out for protection from the settlers' oppression, and we could not reach them," said Oday al-Domadi, speaking to the BBC in the remains of his burned-out lounge. He rushed home from his work in Nablus after hearing that settlers were planning a march of "revenge" after the killing earlier of two Israeli settlers in the town. Hillel and Yagel Yaniv lived in the settlement of Har Bracha, which is 1.9km (1.2 miles) south of Nablus. "There were about 30 masked settlers carrying pistols who were destroying the house… The moment we entered the house, they discovered us, threw stones at us and broke my brother's shoulder. "I shouted at the soldiers to protect the children and prevent the settlers from frightening them, but the soldiers responded by shooting at me and shouting at me to stay at home," said Mr al-Domadi, who eventually managed to ensure his children were safely in another part of the building. "The worst thing is what the kids experienced - the terror and the panic they felt. Afterwards, they were trembling in fear and sheltering in my lap, begging me to stay beside them." The Israeli army has defended its handling of the violence but a military official said, "The wisdom of the deployment could be challenged." Israeli soldiers carry the coffin during the funeral of two Israeli brothers, Hillel and Yagel Yaniv Human rights groups have long blamed violence against Palestinian civilians on an atmosphere of impunity surrounding settler violence in the occupied West Bank, particularly in some of the most ideological settlements in the area around Hawara and Nablus. They say this has been now amplified with the powerful pro-settler, far-right component of Israel's new government. Israel's police routinely says it investigates such cases but campaigners say these are often a whitewash. Alongside waves of Israeli military search and arrest raids in Palestinian cities, and growing numbers of Palestinian armed attacks against Israelis, there is growing concern about a slide into uncontrollable violence. It increasingly feels like a tipping point is being reached, particularly amid increasing signs that the Palestinian Authority is unable to regain a grip on its limited security control of key cities, despite American-led attempts to help it do so. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-64757990

The high consumption of RAM memory made by the Google Chrome browser has become a meme (and rightly so). Actually, currently it is established that 8 GB would be the minimum and 16 GB the desirable, in terms of RAM. If you want to expand the RAM memory of your computer, we bring you memory kits with up to 40% discount. Crucial DDR4 SODIMM 8GB (2×4GB) Currently, a laptop with 4 GB of RAM is hard to see on the market, although a few years ago it was relatively common. If your laptop has 4 GB, you will see that, with few Chrome tabs, the equipment is heavy. Crucial offers us for a very attractive price this RAM memory kit that has a really attractive price. We are talking about a DDR4 type RAM memory kit in SODIMM format , which is used by laptops. This memory kit has a total capacity of 8 GB distributed in two modules of 4 GB each. These memories work at a frequency of 2666 MHz , which is the minimum for this RAM standard. Note that changing the laptop's RAM is not complicated at all. You just have to remove a few screws, remove the "old" RAM and install the new one. Gigastore DDR3 SODIMM 16GB (2×8GB) If you have a laptop from 5-6 years ago, it probably uses DDR3 type RAM and hopefully it will have 4 GB of RAM. We have been searching and we have found this Gigastore kit of two 8 GB modules, which add up to a total of 16 GB of RAM at a great price.As with previous memories, these are in the SODIMM format , which is the standard format for laptops. There is nothing special about these memories, they are a "basic" kit to improve your laptop. If you add this kit and change the HDD (which your laptop most likely has) for an SSD, you can extend the life of the equipment for a good season. This is one of the most prominent RAM memory manufacturers on the market and has been offering very high quality products for years. Now it offers us a kit of two modules of 16 GB each, which add up to a total of 32 GB of RAM memory . Note that these memories work at a frequency of 6000 MHz. One of the peculiarities of these memories is that they offer support for AMD Expo , the alternative to Intel XMP 3.0 (which these memories also support) and which is introduced with the Ryzen 7000. They also have a high-quality aluminum heatsink and RGB lighting fully customizable. Actually, DDR5 does not contribute much (at the moment) with respect to DDR4, but these new memories are twice as expensive as the previous standard. https://hardzone.es/ofertas/amazon/memoria-ram-ddr3-ddr4-ddr5-febrero-2023/