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How water instilled a dream city

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Back in Nineteen Thirteen, William Mulholland completed the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 233-mile engineering masterwork transporting water from the Owens Valley, a dry lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada across the desert to a barren south-western corner of California that would become the home of filmmaking, and transformed the land’s fertility. In Aqua, award winning, Italian filmmaker and writer Chiara Barzini gives insight into the founding of Hollywood, the building of great water systems. Her hometown Rome, abound with empty aqueducts and pipes, representing someone’s dream of turning dry soil into a fertile lucrative and fertile agricultural … Continue reading How water instilled a dream city

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Ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the colonies

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Ruthless is a revelation of Britain’s industrial revolution the result of its machines, which produced goods with miraculous efficiency and exploitation that enabled it. Was it the country’s natural abundance, which provided coal for its engines, ones for its furnaces and food for its labourers? Or was it Britain’s colonies, where a brutalised enslaved workforce produced cotton for its factories? Historian Edmond Smith reveals how the world’s first industrial nation was founded on the ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the planet. This economic system linked the plantations of the Caribbean with the colossal cotton mills of northern England, applied … Continue reading Ruthless exploitation of technology, people and the colonies

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Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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This is the amazing memoir of one of the greatest storytellers of our time, over six decades of writing, from 1961 onwards, with her towering influence, who wrote New York Times bestseller’s and modern classics like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or The Testaments or Alias Grace (1996) are a reproach to the Swedish Academy. In 1939, with a world war under way, born in Ottawa and raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents- Carl, an entomologist father, and Margaret Dorothy, a former nutritionist mother. She and her siblings were taken by their mother to throw tin cans at a large … Continue reading Imaginations: Connections between real life and art

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Amur Tigers

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In the forests of northeast Asia home to fish owls, brown bears, musk deer, moose, wolves, raccoon dogs, leopards and tigers, and by the end of Cold War, only a few hundred tigers stepped quietly through the snow of the Amur Rive basin. Soon, the Soviet Union fell, bringing catastrophe, without the careful oversight of a central authority, poaching and logging took a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species Amur Tiger. Slaght in his book Tigers Between Empires, dealing with the isolated population inhabiting the Amur  basin in Siberia, parts of the river separate inland China from Russia’s eastern … Continue reading Amur Tigers

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Spy Thriller

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New York Times Bestselling author, Daniel Silva,  in An Inside Job, his legendary veteran Mossad spy Gabriel Allon must solve the perfect crime with speed and finesse, to track down a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. In today’s Israel, a former spymaster and produ patriot like Allon should have better things to do than chase works of art. Allon has been awarded a commission to restore one of the most important paintings in Venice,  but he discovers the body of a mysterious woman floating in the waters of the Venetian Lagoon, and finds himself in a desperate race to recover the … Continue reading Spy Thriller

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Critical technology safeguarding

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A Dutch court suspended Nexperia’s former chief executive Zhang Xuezhen – who founded its Chinese owner Wingtech – citing mismanagement. Wingtech’s shares trade on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and it is partially owned by the Chinese government. According to court papers released by the Dutch authorities last month in relation to the government’s takeover of Nexperia, US authorities had raised concerns about the boss of the chip company before it was taken over. The documents contained evidence that Dutch authorities had told Nexperia, it may be able to secure an exemption from the US list if there was a change … Continue reading Critical technology safeguarding

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White Label World Expo 2025

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Droyts  who makes fine soaps located in a Victorian cotton mill in Chorley, Lancashire, using traditional century-old methods to produce moisturising glycerine soaps, which is vegan friendly, suitable for all skin types, honed and carved by hand at the White Label Expo, London 2025. http://www.droyt.com Iconic Bricks made in Hampshire can compete with any branded products like Lego. White Label World Expo, an international trade show specialising in bespoke private labels, offers latest innovation and gives an insight to trending online retail and e-commerce, held today at ExCel, London organised by Fortem International Ltd, attracting several hundreds and thousands  of professional, entrepreneurs … Continue reading White Label World Expo 2025

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Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new

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The Palace of the Republic, that once housed the East German Parliament, is demolished. A grandmother’s laughter passes from life into memory and the furniture that once made a home is taken to the tip. A friendship drops into silence. Old ways are erased by the new  In this fascinating collection of essays, most of them written for her column in the Frankfurter  Allgemeine Zeitung, Winner of the International Booker Prize Jenny Erpenbeck meditates, with a sense of both deep melancholy and wry humour, on the disappearance and impermanence of things. Recalling the shop that used to darn tights in the … Continue reading Restoration or Erasure: Old ways are erased by the new

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Free Will and Prediction are vital to intelligence, brain and life itself

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For some AI researchers a large neural net that predicts next words seems to produce a system with general intelligence, although neuroscientists believe that the brain evolved precisely to predict the future- the “predictive brain” hypothesis. Blaise Agüera Y Arcas, vice president of Google, programmer and founder of its research team Paradigms of Intelligence,  in What Is Intelligence, prediction is fundamental not only to intelligence and the brain, but to life itself – by exploring the wide-ranging implications. The radical perspectives on the computational properties of living systems, the evolutionary and social origins of intelligence, the relationship between models and reality, … Continue reading Free Will and Prediction are vital to intelligence, brain and life itself

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David Szalay’s Flesh wins the Booker Prize

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David Szalay’s 349-page novel Flesh which explores contemporary masculinity through the eventful life of a Hungarian man won the Booker Prize for 2025 beating 153 rivals. Irish writer Roddy Doyle the chair of the 2025 judging panel and his fellow selectors Ayobami Adebayo, Sarah Jessica Parker, Chris Power,and Kelly Reid unanimously voted for Szalay from a shortlist of six contenders. Continue reading David Szalay’s Flesh wins the Booker Prize