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New Aston Martin simulator ‘like something from Star Wars’ – Krack | RaceFans Round-up

In the round-up: New simulator 'like Star Wars' - Krack • Pirelli likes 'flexibility' of new C6 • Play NZ anthem when McLaren wins - Lawson



  • RaceFans Round-up

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Every way Verstappen can clinch the championship at the Las Vegas Grand Prix | Formula 1

Max Verstappen is poised to clinch the 2024 drivers' championship if he finishes ahead of Lando Norris one more time. Here's how he can seal a fourth title at the next race.




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A one-line spoiler-free review of everything I watched in the cinema in October 2024

I’ve ditched the usual blurb about “not being a movies person, but anyway…” because since I started going to the cinema regularly in 2022 I’ve turned into the kind of guy who downloads the London Film Festival brochure and meticulously...




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I’ve been reading 2000AD again and Thistlebone and Brink are great!

Borag Thungg! When things like Woolworths go bust, people who haven’t been to Woolworths for years feel sad and say “Why can’t the old things I liked survive?”. So at the start of the pandemic I worried about things going...




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Michigan needs new ideas for high absenteeism and falling student scores

Education choice is succeeding in other states




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Licensing reforms would ease Michigan’s pain

Let anesthesiology assistants work for themselves




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Cut taxes to make Michigan more attractive

Even blue states are doing it; what’s the matter with this state?




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Michigan development program not a pretty site

Taxpayers lose with poorly designed site preparation program




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Whitmer’s 2,000 days of FOIA inaction

‘Michiganders should know when and what their governor is working on’




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Mackinac Center Unveils 101 Recommendations to Revitalize Michigan

Sound public policy ideas are needed for families and businesses to thrive




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Protect Michigan from federal overreach

Uncle Sam’s got his hand in The Mitten




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Innovation under siege: Federal regulations threaten Michigan colleges

Department of Education targets ed tech companies and foreign-owned vendors




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Michigan Democrats’ top priority has been special business favors

Party platform calls corporate welfare ‘unsustainable,’ but its policies are a different story




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GM looks to revitalize itself in Europe with direct sales, which Michigan makes illegal

21 states allow manufacturer-to-consumer sales with no restrictions




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Protect Michigan's Presidential Votes

Lawmakers should resist National Popular Vote




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One year after the UAW strike, Michigan is worse off

Six weeks of labor action led to a year of job losses




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New Search experiences in EEA: Rich results, aggregator units, and refinement chips

Following our latest update on our preparations for the DMA (Digital Markets Act), we're sharing more details about what publishers can expect to see in regards to new search results in European Economic Area (EEA) countries, and how they can express interest in these experiences.




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Improving Search Console ownership token management

This post discusses an update to Search Console's user and permissions to improve the accuracy and reflect the actual state of unused ownership tokens.




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Configure your shipping and returns directly in Search Console

This post discusses a new and easier way to add shipping or return information directly in Search Console.




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New Search experiences in South Africa: Badges and refinement chips

We're sharing more information about our new search experiences in South Africa, and how South African platforms can express interest and participate.




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Hide ribbon in SDL Trados Studio 2014

I am not one of those who criticize the ribbon in Microsoft and other software. On the other hand, while the large monitor of my desktop PC offers a plenty of working space, I cannot say the same about my … Continue reading




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Congratulations Dr. Eran Chintaka!

It gives me great pleasure to congratulate Eran Chinthaka on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University on the topic User Inspired Management of Scientific Jobs in Grids and Clouds. His advisor was Prof. Beth Plale.

Eran is of course one of the founding team members of Apache Axis2 in the Lanka Software Foundation. Of the original 6 person core team who created Axis2, he's the 3rd to finish his Ph.D. (joining Srinath (back in WSO2) and Jaliya (in Microsoft Research)) and the other three are getting close to finishing up their PhDs too. Eran worked in WSO2 for a couple of years before leaving for his Ph.D. and I hope that when he finishes his Wall Street stint he'll come back home and join us again :-).

Congratulations Dr. Chinthaka!




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Launching WorkInSriLanka.lk Initiative

Over the last many months, I've been privileged to be part of a fantastic team of volunteers working on a new effort:

This is an effort to help people who are considering moving to Sri Lanka to work and live. 

Me? Move to Sri Lanka?? What?!

Yes, Sri Lanka. No more war. No more bombs. No one trying to (systematically .. yeah we have our share of crazies) kill anyone. Great weather. Majorly improving infrastructure. A second airport (with no flights yet .. but that's ok everyone's gotta start at the bottom!). A real, honest-to-goodness highway (dinner in Galle tonite?) and many more coming. Apartments everywhere. Parks all over Colombo.

Compare that to where you're living? Do you go thru a metal detector to your workplace? Not in Sri Lanka any more. We had a long period of that .. but no more .. war finished in 2009, nearly to the day today (May 18th is the anniversary).

Anyway :-). Our objective is to first be a one-stop-site for anyone who's considering moving to Sri Lanka. Everything you need to know from what kind of jobs are available, how much does housing cost, how much do cars cost to kids schooling to visa stuff. All there, all in one place. All done in an objective, volunteer, independent kind of way. The site is still in its infancy of course .. more to come but its got a lot of stuff already!

With regards to jobs- if you're a senior person returning we will even help you get into the "network" to get into the loop of things. We have a pretty connected set of friends who are helping to get that done. We're also partnering with pretty much every industry body so that we can reach into all of those networks.

Going beyond the information portal we want to become an advocacy group to promote what's good about moving to Sri Lanka and also to work hard on breaking down more barriers. Even ex-Sri Lankans returning have some major barriers in the system now and we want to work towards removing them. 

This was a totally volunteer group of people from all over the place. Check us out at the site!

We had a fantastic launch event on Tuesday (May 14th) evening. We had the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka come and give the keynote talk and then had a superb panel. More on that coming soon at the site itself.

Check it out and give us your feedback - plenty of places in the site to do that. Enjoy surfing!







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North Korea, The Interview and Movie Ethics

Its been quite a while since I blogged .. I'm going to try to write a bit more consistently from now (try being the key!). I thought I'll start with a light topic!

So I watched the now infamous The Interview two nights ago. I'm no movie critic, but I thought it was a cheap, crass stupid movie with no depth whatsoever. More of a dumbass slapstick movie than anything else.

Again, I'm no movie critic so I don't recommend you listen to me; watch it and make up your own mind :-). I have made up mine!

HOWEVER, I do think the Internet literati's reaction to this movie is grossly wrong, unfair and arrogant.

Has there ever been any other Hollywood movie where the SITTING president of a country is made to look like a jackass and assassinated in the most stupid way? I can't think of any movies like that. In fact, I don't think Bollywood or any other movie system has produced such a movie.

When Hollywood movies have US presidents in them they're always made out to be the hero (e.g. White House Down) and they pretty much never die. If they do die, then they die a hero (e.g. 2012) in true patriotic form.

I don't recall seeing a single movie where David Cameron or Angela Merkel or Narendra Modi or any other sitting president was made to look like a fool and gets killed as the main point of the movie (or in any other fashion).

I believe the US Secret Service takes ANY threats against the US president very seriously. According to Wikipedia, a threat against the US president is a class D felony (presumably a bad thing). I've heard of students who send anonymous (joking) email threats get tracked down and get a nice visit.

So, suppose Sony Pictures decided to make a movie which shows President Obama being a jackass and then being killed? How far would that go before the US Secret Service shuts it down?

In my view the fact that this movie was conceived, funded and made just goes to show how little respect the US system has for people that are not lined up in the US way. Its fine for the US government, and even the US people, to have no respect for some country, its president or whatever, but I have to agree with North Korea when they say that this movie is a violation of the UN charter:

With no rhetoric can the U.S. justify the screening and distribution of the movie. This is because "The Interview" is an illegal, dishonest and reactionary movie quite contrary to the UN Charter, which regards respect for sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs and protection of human rights as a legal keynote, and international laws.
– NORTH KOREA NATIONAL DEFENCE COMMISSION SPOKESMAN
    (From: http://www.itv.com/news/story/2014-12-27/north-korea-insults-obama-and-blames-us-for-internet-outages/.)

    Would all the Internet literati who hailed the release of the movie act the same way if Bollywood produced a movie mocking Obama and killing him off? If not, why the double standard??

    Its disappointing that thinking people also get caught up in the rhetoric and ignore basic decency. Just to be clear- I'm not saying North Korea is a great place. I have no idea what things are really like there. What I do know is that I don't trust the managed news rhetoric that is delivered as fact by CNN, Fox, BBC, Al Jazeera or anyone any more about any topic. This is after observing how Sri Lanka was represented in various of these channels during the war and after being here to observe some side of it myself. After Iraq (where are those WMDs now?) you'd think that smart people wouldn't just believe any old crap that's put out .. I distinctly remember watching the news conference (broadcast on BBC) immediately after Colin Powell made his speech with pictures to the UN Security Council where the then Iraqi Foreign Minister (can't remember his name - fun looking dude) went thru each picture and gave an entirely different explanation. We now know who was telling the truth. I try hard not to get caught up in any of the rhetoric as a result now.

    There's an entirely different topic of whether the North Koreans attacked Sony Pictures' network and whether the US government hackers shut down their Internet. It seems that the general trend (as of today) is that it wasn't the North Koreans, despite what the FBI said: http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/27/tech/north-korea-expert-doubts-about-hack/index.html.

    So I'm with the North Koreans on this one: This movie should not have been conceived, funded and produced. I don't condone the hackers' approach for trying to stop it; instead Sony Pictures should've had more ethics and not done it at all. So, IMO: Shame on you Sony Pictures Entertainment!




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    Internet of Things - protocols and access keys

    I've just read this article from Mark O'Neill on the 10 concerns for the Internet of Things. Mark brings up some very interesting aspects and concerns. I'd like to comment on two of those: protocols and access keys.

    His primary concern is protocol proliferation. I agree this is an issue. Mark explicitly mentions CoAP, MQTT, AMQP and XMPP. Interestingly he doesn't mention HTTP, which I have found to be heavily used by devices, especially the new generation of Raspberry Pi based systems. Many Arduino's also use HTTP.

    I will admit to a strong bias. I think that MQTT is the best of these protocols for IoT devices, with CoAP a distant second.

    Let's get XMPP out of the way. I love XMPP. I think its a fantastic protocol. Do I want to create XML packets on my Arduino? Er... nope. Even on 32-bit controllers, there is still the network traffic to consider: suppose I'm using a GPRS connection and I have thousands of devices deployed: minimizing network traffic is important for cost and efficiency, and XMPP was not designed for that.

    AMQP is not an appropriate protocol for IoT devices and was not designed for that. It is designed for "the efficient exchange of information within and between enterprises". It was certainly not designed for lightweight, non-persistent, non-transactional systems. To that end, my own system (WSO2) will be providing efficient bridging for AMQP and MQTT to enable lightweight systems to get their data into wider enterprise contexts. I also demonstrated HTTP to MQTT bridging with the WSO2 ESB at the MQTT Interop held last week at EclipseCon.

    How about CoAP vs MQTT. Firstly, CoAP is more appropriate to compare to MQTT-SN. It is UDP only, and designed to emulate a RESTful model over UDP. My biggest concern with CoAP is this: most people don't actually understand REST - they understand HTTP. If I had a dollar for every time I've come across supposedly RESTful interfaces that are really HTTP interfaces, I'd be a rich man! 

    Interestingly, despite MQTT having been around for 10 years, the Google Trend shows that it has only recently hit the public notice:
    However, as you can see, it has quickly overtaken CoAP. In terms of traffic, it is a clear winner: every Facebook mobile app uses MQTT to communicate with the Facebook servers.

    The other area I'd like to comment on is access keys. I agree this is a big issue, and that is the reason I've been working on using OAuth2 access keys with MQTT and IoT devices. I recently gave talks about this at FOSDEM, QCon London, and EclipseCon.  The EclipseCon talk also covered a set of wider security concerns and the slides are available here. OAuth2 and OpenID Connect are important standards that have got incredible traction in a short period of time. They have evolved out of 10+ years of trying to solve the distributed, federated identity and access control problems of the Internet. 

    In my presentation I strongly argued that passwords are bad for users, but worse for devices. Tokens are the correct model, and the OAuth2 token is the best available token to use at this point. There was considerable interest in the MQTT interop session on standardizing the use of OAuth2 tokens with the protocol. 

    My personal prediction is that we will see MQTT and HTTP become the most-used IoT protocols, and I strongly urge (and hope) that OAuth2 tokens will become the de-facto model across both of these.







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    Treat For Legal Interpreters and an Archive for Translators As Well

    OpenCourt is an experimental project run by WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, that uses digital technology to make Quincy District Court more accessible to the public.

    Full Article

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    Five things your translator should know when translating legislation into English

    Translating the legislation or regulations of a country, company or university into English requires certain skills and know-how. This post lists five things your translator should know when translating legislation into English. 1. How to apply English drafting conventions Conventions on headings, numbering, referencing and capitalisation differ from one legal language to another. For instance, […]




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    Thibault de Montaigu, lauréat du prix Interallié pour « Cœur »

    Un arriere-grand-pere heroique, un pere fantasque... Avec << Coeur >>, l'ecrivain raconte le destin flamboyant de ses aieux dans un livre aussi intime que romanesque et recompense par le jury de l'Interallie.




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    Text Line Detection and Segmentation: Uneven Skew Angles and Hill-and-Dale Writing

    In this paper a line detection and segmentation technique is presented. The proposed technique is an improved version of an older one. The experiments have been performed on the training dataset of the ICDAR 2009 handwriting segmentation contest in order to be able to compare, objectively, the performance of the two techniques. The improvement between the older and newer version is more than 24% while the average extra CPU time cost is less than 200 ms per page.




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    Choice of Classifiers in Hierarchical Recognition of Online Handwritten Kannada and Tamil Aksharas

    In this paper, we propose a novel dexterous technique for fast and accurate recognition of online handwritten Kannada and Tamil characters. Based on the primary classifier output and prior knowledge, the best classifier is chosen from set of three classifiers for second stage classification. Prior knowledge is obtained through analysis of the confusion matrix of primary classifier which helped in identifying the multiple sets of confused characters. Further, studies were carried out to check the performance of secondary classifiers in disambiguating among the confusion sets. Using this technique we have achieved an average accuracy of 92.6% for Kannada characters on the MILE lab dataset and 90.2% for Tamil characters on the HP Labs dataset.




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    The Iceberg Effect: Behind the User Interface of Mobile Collaborative Systems

    Advances in mobile technologies are opening new possibilities to support collaborative activities through mobile devices. Unfortunately, mobile collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. These difficulties are caused in part by their unclear requirements and developers' lack of experience with this type of systems. However, several requirements involved in the collaborative back-end of these products are recurrent and should be considered in every development. This paper introduces a characterization of mobile collaboration and a framework that specifies a list of general requirements to be considered during the conception and design of a system in order to increase its probability of success. This framework was used in the development of two mobile collaborative systems, providing developers with a base of back-end requirements to aid system design and implementation. The systems were positively evaluated by their users.




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    The Architectural Design of a System for Interpreting Multilingual Web Documents in E-speranto

    E-speranto is a formal language for generating multilingual texts on the World Wide Web. It is currently still under development. The vocabulary and grammar rules of E-speranto are based on Esperanto; the syntax of E-speranto, however, is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language). The latter enables the integration of documents generated in E-speranto into web pages. When a user accesses a web page generated in E-speranto, the interpreter interprets the document into a chosen natural language, which enables the user to read the document in any arbitrary language supported by the interpreter.

    The basic parts of the E-speranto interpreting system are the interpreters and information resources, which complies with the principle of separating the interpretation process from the data itself. The architecture of the E-speranto interpreter takes advantage of the resemblance between the languages belonging to the same linguistic group, which consequently results in a lower production cost of the interpreters for the same linguistic group.

    We designed a proof-of-concept implementation for interpreting E-speranto in three Slavic languages: Slovenian, Serbian and Russian. These languages share many common features in addition to having a similar syntax and vocabulary. The content of the information resources (vocabulary, lexicon) was limited to the extent that was needed to interpret the test documents. The testing confirmed the applicability of our concept and also indicated the guidelines for future development of both the interpreters and E-speranto itself.




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    Modeling Quality Attributes with Aspect-Oriented Architectural Templates

    The quality attributes of a software system are, to a large extent, determined by the decisions taken early in the development process. Best practices in software engineering recommend the identification of important quality attributes during the requirements elicitation process, and the specification of software architectures to satisfy these requirements. Over the years the software engineering community has studied the relationship between quality attributes and the use of particular architectural styles and patterns. In this paper we study the relationship between quality attributes and Aspect-Oriented Software Architectures - which apply the principles of Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) at the architectural level. AOSD focuses on identifying, modeling and composing crosscutting concerns - i.e. concerns that are tangled and/or scattered with other concerns of the application. In this paper we propose to use AO-ADL, an aspect-oriented architectural description language, to specify quality attributes by means of parameterizable, and thus reusable, architectural patterns. We particularly focus on quality attributes that: (1) have major implications on software functionality, requiring the incorporation of explicit functionality at the architectural level; (2) are complex enough as to be modeled by a set of related concerns and the compositions among them, and (3) crosscut domain specific functionality and are related to more than one component in the architecture. We illustrate our approach for usability, a critical quality attribute that satisfies the previous constraints and that requires special attention at the requirements and the architecture design stages.




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    Software Components, Architectures and Reuse




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    Hierarchical Graph-Grammar Model for Secure and Efficient Handwritten Signatures Classification

    One important subject associated with personal authentication capabilities is the analysis of handwritten signatures. Among the many known techniques, algorithms based on linguistic formalisms are also possible. However, such techniques require a number of algorithms for intelligent image analysis to be applied, allowing the development of new solutions in the field of personal authentication and building modern security systems based on the advanced recognition of such patterns. The article presents the approach based on the usage of syntactic methods for the static analysis of handwritten signatures. The graph linguistic formalisms applied, such as the IE graph and ETPL(k) grammar, are characterised by considerable descriptive strength and a polynomial membership problem of the syntactic analysis. For the purposes of representing the analysed handwritten signatures, new hierarchical (two-layer) HIE graph structures based on IE graphs have been defined. The two-layer graph description makes it possible to take into consideration both local and global features of the signature. The usage of attributed graphs enables the storage of additional semantic information describing the properties of individual signature strokes. The verification and recognition of a signature consists in analysing the affiliation of its graph description to the language describing the specimen database. Initial assessments display a precision of the method at a average level of under 75%.




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    Gilets Jaunes… des fachos-gauchistes et pis c’est tout ?

    Les images sont « belles », elles tournent en boucle sur les réseaux sociaux, elles tendent à vouloir accréditer la thèse d’un mouvement composé d’ultra des deux extrêmes. La chose devrait donc être entendue, pour les « bons » militants ; rassurons-nous...




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    No Comment : les mariachis se réunissent à Mexico pour battre le record du monde de chant

    No Comment : les mariachis se réunissent à Mexico pour battre le record du monde de chant




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    No Comment : en Serbie, des centaines d’œufs jetés sur le siège d’Euro Lithium Balkan

    No Comment : en Serbie, des centaines d’œufs jetés sur le siège d’Euro Lithium Balkan




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    An architectural view of VANETs cloud: its models, services, applications and challenges

    This research explores vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) and their extensive applications, such as enhancing traffic efficiency, infotainment, and passenger safety. Despite significant study, widespread deployment of VANETs has been hindered by security and privacy concerns. Challenges in implementation, including scalability, flexibility, poor connection, and insufficient intelligence, have further complicated VANETs. This study proposes leveraging cloud computing to address these challenges, marking a paradigm shift. Cloud computing, recognised for its cost-efficiency and virtualisation, is integrated with VANETs. The paper details the nomenclature, architecture, models, services, applications, and challenges of VANET-based cloud computing. Three architectures for VANET clouds - vehicular clouds (VCs), vehicles utilising clouds (VuCs), and hybrid vehicular clouds (HVCs) - are discussed in detail. The research provides an overview, delves into related work, and explores VANET cloud computing's architectural frameworks, models, and cloud services. It concludes with insights into future work and a comprehensive conclusion.







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    Hiking with a backpack is the workout of 2024. An exercise scientist says it’s worth the extra effort - The Globe and Mail

    1. Hiking with a backpack is the workout of 2024. An exercise scientist says it’s worth the extra effort  The Globe and Mail
    2. Military-Inspired Workout Has 'Huge Wins' for Women, Says Personal Trainer  MSN
    3. How Rucking Can Turn Your Walks into a Full-Body Workout  Verywell Health
    4. What Is Rucking and Is It Better Than Regular Walking? Here's What Personal Trainers Say  EatingWell
    5. Rucking: Why It’s a Great Workout & How to Get Started  Athletech News




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    Last supermoon of 2024 to shine over Central Alberta this week - Central Alberta Online

    1. Last supermoon of 2024 to shine over Central Alberta this week  Central Alberta Online
    2. 4 of 4: Last supermoon of the year to light up Canadian skies  Global News Toronto
    3. Beaver Moon 2024: See the final 'supermoon' of the year rise next to the 'Seven Sisters'  Livescience.com
    4. See 2024’s Final ‘Supermoon’ And ‘Fireballs’: The Night Sky This Week  Forbes
    5. How and when to catch the last supermoon of 2024  National Post








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    UN chief warns COP29 summit to pay up or face climate-led disaster for humanity - The Globe and Mail

    1. UN chief warns COP29 summit to pay up or face climate-led disaster for humanity  The Globe and Mail
    2. Climate Summit, in Early Days, Is Already on a ‘Knife Edge’  The New York Times
    3. At COP29 summit, nations big and small get chance to bear witness to climate change  The Globe and Mail
    4. Terence Corcoran: COP29 hit by political ‘dunkelflaute’  Financial Post
    5. COP29: Albania PM goes off script to ask 'What on Earth are we doing?'  Euronews