Day night test match

PUNGGYE-RI, North Korea — North Korea carried out what it said was the demolition of its nuclear test site Thursday, setting off a series of explosions over several hours in the presence of foreign journalists. The blasts at the test site in the sparsely populated northeast were supposed to build confidence ahead of a planned summit next month between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump. But Trump canceled the meeting on Thursday , citing the "tremendous anger and open hostility" in a North Korean statement released earlier in the day. The explosions were centered on three tunnels into the underground site and a number of observation towers in the surrounding area. North Korea held a closing ceremony afterward with officials from its nuclear arms program in attendance. The group of journalists that witnessed the demolition, which touched off landslides near the tunnel entrances and sent up clouds of smoke and dust, included an Associated Press … [Read more...] about North Korea destroys nuke test site in front of journalists

Health officials sit at an empty government-run Covid-19 screening clinic in Jung District, central Seoul, on Wednesday. [YONHAP] Anyone who tests positive for Covid-19 will have to quarantine for five days, not seven, from early May. The mandate could be entirely lifted in July, meaning that people won't have to isolate even if they come down with the virus. Under the current system, patients must report their infection to local health authorities and quarantine for a week. If they refuse to isolate, they face up to a year in prison or 10 million won ($7,700) in fines. The mask mandate for high-risk facilities could also be lifted in July. Since March 20, the Korean government has allowed people to unmask on public transportation, but masks are still required at hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, welfare centers for the disabled and mental health centers. Visitors to pharmacies in large supermarkets or subway stations, however, do not have to wear masks. If the … [Read more...] about Mandatory quarantine to be cut to five days from May

close Video LA Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs dies He was 27 years old. It may have been the ultimate tribute to Tyler Skaggs, the Los Angeles Angels pitcher who was found dead in a Texas hotel room earlier this month. Every Angels player wore Skaggs' number 45, his mom Debbie Hetman threw out the first pitch -- a perfect strike -- then Angels pitchers Taylor Cole and Félix Peña combined on a no-hitter as Los Angeles beat the Seattle Mariners 13-0. The Angels capped the evening by laying their No. 45 jerseys on the pitching mound after the game. LATE ANGELS PITCHER TYLER SKAGGS, WIFE OPENED UP ABOUT WEDDING AND FAMILY PLANS BEFORE HIS DEATH The late Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs' mother, Debbie Hetman, center in red, throws the game's ceremonial first pitch, at a baseball game between the Angels and the Seattle Mariners on Friday, July 12, 2019, in Anaheim, Calif. (Associated Press) "Tonight was in … [Read more...] about Angels pitchers combine for no-hitter on night honoring Tyler Skaggs

My husband’s boss, an executive at a multinational firm, came to our city on vacation and invited us to dinner. We made reservations at our favorite restaurant. When the bill came, the boss’s husband picked up the check and said: “We’ve got this.” We thanked them and said we hadn’t intended for them to pay. The next day, my husband received an email from his boss saying he just saw the credit card charge, which was larger than expected. He planned to ask the restaurant if there was an error. We were embarrassed; we ordered more to drink than them. So, we pulled up the menu online, totaled our share with tax and tip, and sent them a check. (It was $37 more than their share.) We apologized for not insisting on splitting the bill. Did we do the right thing? WIFE Well, you didn’t do the wrong thing, but you may have overreacted. In your view, the boss believed he was overcharged by about $40. That seems like small potatoes to make a fuss about, considering he hadn’t bothered to check … [Read more...] about The Boss Paid for Dinner, and Then Complained the Next Day. What Do We Do?

On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.” Bush’s Woodridge … [Read more...] about What It Takes to Make a Student

Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now . ‘Horrible and Familiar’ An armed assailant shot and killed six people at a Nashville elementary school on Monday. Stephen Colbert called the situation “horrible and familiar, and horrible because it is so familiar,” noting that the tragedy was “the 130th mass shooting of 2023, and 2023 is only 87 days old.” “Not doing anything about this is an insane dereliction of our collective humanity. And the obvious solution here is one President Biden has proposed: an assault weapons ban. We’ve had one before, from 1994 to 2004 — and it worked. During that ban, the risk of dying in a mass shooting was 70 percent lower than it is today. That just makes sense. Fewer guns equals fewer shootings.” — STEPHEN COLBERT “It’s not complicated. It might be hard, but it’s not complicated. That’s … [Read more...] about Stephen Colbert Calls Nashville Shooting ‘Horrible and Familiar’

By now, plenty of us know that artificially intelligent virtual assistants like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard can pull off sensational stunts, such as winning coding contests, passing bar exams and professing love to a tech columnist. But I wondered: How helpful are the bots, really, as actual assistants? It’s worth asking because our first rodeo with virtual assistants didn’t go so well. Older A.I. bots like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa had more than a decade to improve, but they ended up stagnating and are now used mostly for setting timers and playing music. ChatGPT and Bard, on the other hand, use so-called large language models that recognize and generate text based on enormous data sets scraped off the web. They are trained to compose sentences on the fly as if they were human, which potentially makes them far more versatile as assistants. To test that theory, I came up with a list of tasks that people might ask of a human assistant. I prodded friends who … [Read more...] about How ChatGPT and Bard Performed as My Executive Assistants

JAMIE Oliver’s new TV show was under fire last night after it emerged teenage boys were told to perform a sex act before one ­episode. The lads in Jamie’s Dream School – which has celebrity ­experts trying to inspire drop-out kids – were asked to produce a sample of their semen for a ­science lesson. But last night family ­campaigners and watchdogs branded the stunt “distasteful” and “weird”. And they claimed the ­controversial “homework” was exploiting the boys aged 16-18 to get good viewing figures for the Channel 4 show. The bizarre lesson was devised by telly doc Robert Winston, the UK’s leading fertility expert and man behind hit shows The Super Life of Twins and How Science Changed Our World. He claims the homework ­assignment was a good way to get them interested in science. Lord Winston said: “I got some boys to bring in a sample of ­seminal fluid for the class to look at under the microscope. “Instantly the kids of both sexes were very excited. It’s as close to … [Read more...] about Jamie Oliver’s Dream School blasted over sex act task

Sports Video games NBA Gamers The cramped room in Midtown Manhattan was packed wall-to-wall with YouTubers—a relentlessly cheery bunch—the lot of them excitedly live-streaming, likes and comments bobbing across their screens. It was August, and the crowd was previewing the latest product from the NBA 2K video game series—NBA 2K18, which was released Friday to those who pre-ordered—and the event was crowded with elite gamers, social media stars, 2K staffers and, pocked about the room, honest-to-God, in-the-flesh NBA players. Security stood at the front door. Booze flowed from a bar in the back. TVs pinstriped the length of the room, cutting it into even rows. That was the main attraction, with the gamers lining up, jostling through the morass of people to get their turn on the joysticks (all of this, of course, beamed over the internet to 2K devotees). In a room full of presumed NBA fans it was somewhat disorienting to see these NBA players—Brooklyn Nets guard … [Read more...] about Virtual Meets Reality: Inside NBA 2K and Pro Basketball

In 1980 an ecologist and an economist chose a refreshingly unacademic way to resolve their differences. They bet $1,000. Specifically, the bet was over the future price of five metals, but at stake was much more -- a view of the planet's ultimate limits, a vision of humanity's destiny. It was a bet between the Cassandra and the Dr. Pangloss of our era. They lead two intellectual schools -- sometimes called the Malthusians and the Cornucopians, sometimes simply the doomsters and the boomsters -- that use the latest in computer-generated graphs and foundation-generated funds to debate whether the world is getting better or going to the dogs. The argument has generally been as fruitless as it is old, since the two sides never seem to be looking at the same part of the world at the same time. Dr. Pangloss sees farm silos brimming with record harvests; Cassandra sees topsoil eroding and pesticide seeping into ground water. Dr. Pangloss sees people living longer; Cassandra sees rain … [Read more...] about Betting on the Planet