All posts tagged: shut

Ryanair flights cancelled as Spain airport to shut impacting thousands of Brits

Ryanair flights cancelled as Spain airport to shut impacting thousands of Brits

Published by Sam Flores

An airport in Spain is due to shut from next week, with all scheduled flights cancelled. Santiago de Compostela Airport in northwest Spain will be closing for over a month, from April 23 to May 27. The planned closure is so that multi-million-pound maintenance work can take place at the base. During this time, the whole airport will be closed to air traffic. There are usually 30 flights from the UK to Santiago de Compostela Airport each week including from airports London Stansted, London Gatwick and London Heathrow, reports The Sun. Airlines that fly from the UK to the destination include Vueling, Ryanair and Iberia. Each airline tends to use aircraft that hold an average of 180 passengers. And with 30 flights a week, this means around 5,400 Brits could be impacted by the cancellations, according to The Sun. The other routes from the airport mainly include other spots in Spain such as Barcelona and Madrid. Click here to get the biggest stories straight to your inbox in our Daily Newsletter In a statement on …

Alicia Vikander on her Vladimir Putin movie: ‘It is essential not to shut down conversation’

Alicia Vikander on her Vladimir Putin movie: ‘It is essential not to shut down conversation’

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter It’s no wonder Alicia Vikander said yes to starring in The Wizard of the Kremlin – Olivier Assayas’s new political thriller about the turbulent beginnings of the Russian Federation. By the end of her first 10 minutes on screen, the Swedish actor has performed a punk rock song at a house party while holding a naked man on a leash, and been lowered from the rafters as some kind of metallic deity in a stage adaptation of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. “It’s a supporting role, but I get to have some very distinct moments,” she agrees, flashing a grin. Neither background nor the subject, hers is the kind of tricky, underwritten character that Vikander is able to make deftly three-dimensional with her mix of edge and subtle vulnerability. For years now, directors have sought her for exactly that kind of nuance. Now …

The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up?

The noise we make is hurting animals. Can we learn to shut up?

Published by skeptic

Other, similarly nifty A/B tests followed. One was led by David Luther, a biologist at George Mason University (who also worked with Phillips on the covid-19 study in San Francisco). In 2015, these researchers took 17 white-crowned sparrows at birth and raised them in a lab. To teach them their species’ songs, they played the nestlings recordings of adult sparrows singing, at low and high pitches. Six of the nestlings heard the songs without any interference; with the other half, the researchers played the sounds of city noise at the same time. The results were stark. The lucky birds that were spared the traffic noise learned to perform the quieter, sweeter, more complex songs. But the birds that had traffic noise blasted learned only the higher, faster, more stressed-out songs. From the cradle, noise changed the way they communicated. Humans hate noise too You can’t pull the same experiment with humans, raising them in a lab to see how noise affects them. (Not ethically, anyway.) But if we could, we’d likely find the same thing. …

Last One Laughing UK star says Jimmy Carr forced to shut down moment that was cut from show

Last One Laughing UK star says Jimmy Carr forced to shut down moment that was cut from show

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Last One Laughing UK star Amy Gledhill has detailed one of the moments that was left on the cutting room floor – because it was too “filthy” for television. The hit Prime series returned for a second outing last month, with 10 comedians – including last year’s champion, Bob Mortimer – entering the studio and attempting to make it through the day without laughing. Gledhill was one of the newer faces among them, and in an appearance on co-star Alan Carr’s Life’s A Beach podcast, she admitted that a scene which she considered to be one of her funniest moments didn’t make the final edit. The 38-year-old explained: “The thing that I did that I thought might have been funny hasn’t made it into the show because it was too mucky. Me and Sam [Campbell] did an improv in the bed.” …

A Single Strike Won’t Shut Off the Gulf’s Desalination System

A Single Strike Won’t Shut Off the Gulf’s Desalination System

Published by skeptic

Across the region, facilities tied to water and power—including desalination plants—have been damaged or exposed to risk as Iranian strikes extend beyond traditional targets. A single strike, however, is unlikely to shut off the gulf’s water supply. The system is designed to absorb isolated disruption, but sustained or multisite attacks would begin to strain supply far more quickly. “In the Gulf, desalination is built with enough breathing room that losing one plant doesn’t immediately show up at the tap,” says Rabee Rustum, professor of water and environmental engineering at Heriot-Watt University Dubai. In Kuwait, Iranian drone attacks have damaged two power and desalination facilities and ignited fires at two oil sites. Other sites, including Fujairah in the UAE, have been identified as potentially exposed. “Striking desalination plants would be a strategic move, but it would also come very close to, and in some cases cross, a red line,” says Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer at the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. Water infrastructure, Krieg explains, occupies a distinct category. “Water infrastructure is not …

Suspected Illegal Gambling Operation Shut Down in San Antonio

Suspected Illegal Gambling Operation Shut Down in San Antonio

Published by skeptic

Bexar County deputies say they’ve dismantled what they believe was an illegal gambling operation on San Antonio’s North Side, arresting three people and detaining eight others during a coordinated raid. The operation took place on Tuesday at a location in the 400 block of West Hildebrand Avenue. According to the sheriff’s office, investigators had been watching the site for some time before obtaining a warrant and moving in. Dozens of machines seized during raid When deputies entered the building, they say they found a substantial gambling setup, seizing about 50 machines. That volume matters. In past cases, law enforcement has used the number of devices to distinguish between small, informal operations and larger-scale illegal game rooms that may generate significant revenue. Officials described the machines as the type commonly seen in so-called “eight-liner” operations, which have long existed in a legal gray area in Texas but are often ruled illegal when they function as games of chance rather than skill. Authorities have not yet said whether cash was seized or how much money the operation …

The Real Reason OpenAI Shut Sora Down Is a Warning to Every AI Startup

The Real Reason OpenAI Shut Sora Down Is a Warning to Every AI Startup

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech OpenAI unceremoniously killed off its text-to-video AI app Sora last month, bringing an abrupt end to months of brain-melting AI slop. Even what was supposed to be a groundbreaking $1 billion deal with Disney was caught in the crossfire. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, it wasn’t the massive bills or the legal liabilities arising from rampant copyright infringement that inspired it to kill the app. Instead, the company was desperately looking to free up computing resources to power its coding and enterprise products based on its upcoming AI model, code-named Spud. To executives’ frustration, compute remains a finite resource and infamously hard to come by, despite the industry pouring billions of dollars worth of borrowed cash into buildouts of enormous data centers. That should serve as a warning to every startup in the space, large or small: not attracting users is a problem, but if they show up in droves, it’s going to be a bottleneck and potential …

NAPTE, Realscreen Summit Shut Down Amid Industry Consolidation

NAPTE, Realscreen Summit Shut Down Amid Industry Consolidation

Published by Daniella Wilson

Brunico Communications has shut down its U.S. television events business, including NAPTE and its Kidscreen and Realscreen Summits. “This decision was deeply considered and stemmed from the market consolidation that continues to progress and have structural impacts on the content production business,” Russell Goldstein, president and CEO of Toronto-based Brunico, said in a statement on Tuesday. The move follows NATPE, a onetime storied trade show, and the Realscreen TV conferences and markets being combined in one Miami event in Feb. 2026 for one last time. Kidscreen and Realscreen will continue as kids and unscripted content publications, respectively. With the closure of the U.S. events, Claire Macdonald, NATPE’s executive director, and Jocelyn Christie, Kidscreen’s publisher, will leave Brunico. Napte in Miami returned in 2024 after the assets of The National Association of Television Program Executives were acquired by Brunico, which also operates the Banff World Media Festival. The acquisition followed NAPTE filing for bankruptcy protection in Oct. 2022 after running into a financial wall due to the forced cancellations of the 2021 and 2022 U.S. TV markets amid the pandemic.  NAPTE …

Why OpenAI really shut down Sora

Why OpenAI really shut down Sora

Published by skeptic

OpenAI’s decision last week to shut down Sora, its AI video-generation tool, just six months after releasing it to the public raised immediate suspicions. The app had invited users to upload their own faces — so was this some kind of elaborate data grab? According to a new WSJ investigation, the real explanation is considerably more boring: Sora was a money pit that nobody was using, and keeping it alive was costing OpenAI the AI race. So what happened? After a splashy launch, Sora’s worldwide user count peaked at around a million and then collapsed to fewer than 500,000. Meanwhile, the app was burning through roughly $1 million every day — not because people loved it but because video generation is so costly to run. Every user who dropped themselves into a fantastical scene was drawing down a finite supply of AI chips. While a whole team inside OpenAI was focused on making Sora work, Anthropic was quietly winning over the software engineers and enterprises that drive revenue. Claude Code, in particular, was eating OpenAI’s …

LaGuardia plane crash: New York airport shut down as Air Canada ‘pilot and co-pilot die’ | World | News

LaGuardia plane crash: New York airport shut down as Air Canada ‘pilot and co-pilot die’ | World | News

Published by Sam Flores

A pilot and co-pilot have been killed after an Air Canada passenger plane collided with a fire truck on a runway at LaGuardia airport in New York, NBC News reports. LaGuardia Airport, which handles over 30 million passengers a year, has been closed whilst investigation work takes place. The Federal Aviation Administration says there will be no flights in or out of the airport until 2pm ET (6pm GMT). The aircraft, arriving from Montreal, had slowed to 24 mph when it collided with a vehicle operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages the airport. The incident occurred on Runway 4 at LaGuardia Airport late last night. According to a spokesperson for the New York City Fire Department, firefighters responded to reports of a plane striking a vehicle on the runway at 11.38 pm ET (3.38 GMT). The flight had departed from Montréal–Trudeau International Airport shortly after 10.30 pm ET (2.30 am GMT). The FAA identified the aircraft as a Bombardier CRJ-900 twin-engine jet and confirmed it is investigating the …