UK Seeks Military Hotline With Russia Over Fears of Accidental Clash

UK Defence Secretary Wes Streeting has called for direct communication with Russia's military to prevent dangerous miscalculations. The push comes amid heightened tensions, fuelled by accusations of state-sponsored terrorism, that have raised security concerns across Britain. London wants to reopen diplomatic channels with Moscow, but Russia is reportedly resisting and prefers less engagement with the UK. Meanwhile, France and Germany are pursuing renewed ties with Russian authorities.

Sonia Gandhi Recalls Grief Over Son Who Died Shortly After Birth in Memoir

In her memoir, Sonia Gandhi writes about the loss of her first son, who died shortly after being born. She describes how she and her family came to love him deeply despite his brief life. Gandhi also recounts that Rajiv Gandhi, who she says was raised to keep a stiff upper lip, broke down and wept alongside her. The passage offers a personal look at the couple's shared grief. The reflections form part of her broader account published in the book.

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Esha Singh leads India to team gold at ISSF World Championships

India won the women's 25m pistol team gold at the ISSF World Championships. Esha Singh topped the Indian squad with a score of 590. Manu Bhaker and Divya Subbaraju also contributed key scores to the team effort. Both Esha and Manu have qualified for the individual final, raising hopes of more medals. The results also open up chances to secure Olympic quota places.

Kerala minister walks out as full Vande Mataram is sung at event

A Kerala minister reportedly walked away from an event when Vande Mataram was sung in its full version. The minister is said to have responded to the moment by telling others not to lecture him on patriotism. The incident drew attention because of the contentious debate around the national song's full rendition. The report is based on the Indian Express account of the episode. Further details about the event's setting and any official response are not available in the provided text.

Benchmarking Node.js setTimeout at Scale: Memory, Lateness and Restart Risks

A DEV Community article argues that the question of how many setTimeout calls Node.js can handle depends on the specific machine, so it offers a benchmark script rather than quoting figures. The author deliberately withholds personal results, since they would not transfer to other servers, Node versions or workloads. The benchmark measures per-timer memory cost, lateness relative to scheduled times, and the effect of many pending timers on event-loop delay. It recommends running the script at several sizes, adding background CPU load and using realistic payloads for more representative results. The article also flags that pending timers are lost when a process restarts, a risk that cannot be measured by the script itself.

Kolkata Police Reconstruct Violence That Broke Out at Abhishek Banerjee Birthday Event

Kolkata police have reconstructed a violent incident linked to clashes that erupted on Friday night. The fighting involved workers and supporters of the BJP and the TMC during celebrations marking Abhishek Banerjee's birthday. The reconstruction is part of the investigation into how the confrontation unfolded. Further details about the investigation and any resulting action have not been specified in the source report.

CloudSlasher Aims to Turn Cloud Cost Visibility into Actionable Optimization

The author, a developer who built their own technology products, found that cloud spending was hard to trace and wanted to make cost optimization more actionable. That experience led to the creation of CloudSlasher, a platform intended to go beyond cost dashboards. The piece argues that knowing a resource is expensive does not show teams whether it can be changed safely, since operational context such as production dependencies and performance needs matters. Because AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes each use different resource models, pricing, and APIs, building a multi-cloud tool poses engineering challenges. The article outlines these considerations, including resource discovery, utilization analysis, and preserving provider-specific context.

Germany's public energy register lists 9.7 million installations with operator contacts

Germany's Federal Network Agency maintains the Marktstammdatenregister, a public register that legally must record every energy installation in the country. The records cover solar parks, wind turbines, home batteries and biogas plants, each with GPS coordinates, capacity, commissioning dates and voltage level. Operating companies' business contact details are also included, and the data is published under Germany's open data license. The author describes a JSON endpoint behind the website that can be queried without authentication, and shows how filters can isolate utility-scale solar parks. The article also promotes a paid scraping tool built on this endpoint and notes that private individuals are anonymized while GDPR still applies to downstream use.

How to Calculate Topsoil Volume in Cubic Yards With a Simple Formula

A short guide explains that a topsoil calculator needs only one multiplication and one division, with most errors coming from measurement rather than arithmetic. Volume in cubic yards is found by multiplying length, width, and depth in feet, with depth in inches divided by 12, and then dividing by 27. Worked examples include a 4 by 8 foot raised bed at 6 inches deep, needing about 0.59 cubic yards, and a larger 10 by 12 foot bed at 4 inches, needing about 1.48 cubic yards. Round beds are handled by computing circular area from the diameter, and irregular shapes should be split into rectangles and summed. The author recommends averaging several depth readings and ordering about 10 percent extra soil to allow for settling.

How a Gauge-to-Millimetre Converter Works: Wire Formula and Lookup Tables

A gauge number is not a direct thickness, so a converter combines one formula with several lookup tables. For American Wire Gauge, diameter in millimetres equals 0.127 multiplied by 92 raised to the power of (36 minus AWG) divided by 39, which yields roughly 2.05 mm for 12 AWG. Sheet metal uses the agreed Manufacturers Standard Gauge table instead of a formula, and its millimetre values differ by metal, such as 16 gauge copper versus 16 gauge brass. Needle gauges are also fixed by an international standard, so they are best handled with a lookup table. The author notes that gauge numbers run inversely to thickness in all three systems, which can look like a bug to new users unless explained.

UK Employers Must Run Company Car and Van Benefits Through Payroll From April 2027

From 6 April 2027, UK employers will have to report most benefits in kind, including company cars, vans, fuel and private medical cover, through payroll. Tax and employer National Insurance on these benefits will be collected from each month's pay instead of through the annual P11D process. Employment-related loans and living accommodation are initially excluded from the change. The shift means fleet and HR records must be accurate every month, not just once a year. One company has begun linking fleet and HR data by employee number and running parallel calculations to catch errors before the deadline.

Unbounded queue kept a delivery text executor at one thread during a slow SMS morning

A delivery company's service sends customers a text with their two-hour delivery window using an asynchronous Spring executor configured with a maximum of fifty threads. When the SMS provider slowed sharply one October morning, the texts went out hours late, and drivers had already left cards at customers' doors. A thread dump revealed only one active thread, because the executor's default unbounded queue never filled, so the pool never grew beyond its core size of one. The team fixed it by raising the core size and restarting, which cleared the backlog in about ten minutes. They then moved notifications to a RabbitMQ queue with explicit consumer concurrency, bounded their remaining executors, and added monitoring with an alert on the age of the oldest queued task.

AMD Launches On-Premises AI Coding Platform Instinct Coder 355 with Dell and Spectro Cloud

AMD announced on November 9, 2026 Instinct Coder 355, a turnkey on-premises AI coding platform built with Dell and Spectro Cloud. Each node is a Dell PowerEdge server with AMD EPYC CPUs and eight Instinct MI355X GPUs, and AMD says it can support up to 85 developers, with 50 working concurrently. The system runs a local GLM-5.3 model and can route harder tasks to frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, integrating with tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Visual Studio Code. AMD claims up to 75% lower total cost of ownership than cloud frontier models, a figure drawn from its own announcement and a Spectro Cloud benchmark run on the previous-generation MI325X hardware. The platform's roughly $450,000 hardware cost makes it best suited to heavy-use teams and organisations that cannot send code to cloud APIs.

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Pygame or Arcade: Trading Teaching Clarity Against Rendering Performance in Python Games

The article compares Pygame and Arcade, two Python libraries for game development, by building the same mini-game in each. It assesses them across setup overhead, rendering pipelines, physics and collision handling, map and asset scaling, and the balance between learning curve and long-term maintenance. Pygame exposes every game loop tick and pixel operation to the developer, which suits teaching but relies on CPU-bound drawing that slows as sprite counts grow. Arcade uses OpenGL-backed batch rendering to draw many sprites in a single GPU call, which the author argues favors building functional indie games. The piece concludes with a decision rule: choose Pygame for fundamentals education and Arcade for performant production projects.

Karnataka minister Priyank Kharge mocks RSS over Tipu Sultan remarks

Karnataka minister Priyank Kharge criticised the RSS in remarks noting that Tipu Sultan fought four Anglo-Mysore wars against the British. The comments were made as a rebuttal to the organisation's views on the historical ruler. Kharge's remarks drew attention to the military record of Tipu Sultan during the conflicts with the East India Company. The exchange highlights ongoing political debate in Karnataka over how Tipu Sultan should be portrayed in history.

What an AI receptionist should do when it lacks the answer

A well-built AI receptionist admits when it doesn't know, collects the caller's name and number, and logs the call for staff follow-up. A poorly configured one may guess at prices or hours, and a confident wrong answer can be worse than no answer at all. The article argues that this behavior depends on how the agent is set up rather than on the underlying AI model. Key safeguards include stating the limitation plainly, offering a concrete next step such as a callback, and recording unanswered questions so the business can close the gaps. The author recommends testing agents with simulated callers and checking whether every stated figure appears in the agent's source data.

KKR co-owner calls for IPL to shift to a January start

Lalit Modi, a co-owner of Kolkata Knight Riders, has argued that the Indian Premier League has earned the right to influence the cricket calendar. He proposed moving the tournament to a January start or adopting a structured October-to-April competition window. The suggestion reflects a push to give the league a more central place in scheduling decisions. The article is reported by ESPNcricinfo and presents Modi's position as stated in the original piece.

Seven lessons from syncing live football data into a no-code website

The author runs Footgoal, a football site covering fixtures, results, live scores, standings and top scorers for several top European leagues, built on a no-code website builder. To cut wasted API calls and rate-limit errors, the sync now compares fresh data with stored records and writes only the differences. Bulk updates sometimes reported success without saving every item, so each write is repeatable and followed by a verification pass that re-writes anything still mismatched. Match status was simplified to date-based logic (future means upcoming, a final score means finished), since a dropdown-style field didn't return plain text through the API. Other fixes included re-checking the next few rounds more often early in the season, correcting a homepage list that showed matches months away, and confirming the live site actually changed after publishing. Live scores and full league updates now run as separate jobs, and provider IDs are stored instead of matching teams by name.