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Travel scams are on the rise - from fake tour guides to AI voice clones, these are the dangers holidaymakers need to spot

Daily Mail - Science & tech

You're viewing the US edition You can switch to the UK or AU homepage at any time using this menu. Queen Elizabeth's in-flight requests revealed - from a favourite drink to her secret weapon to fight jet lag The down-to-earth Cotswolds pub - serving pizzas and Negronis - that has its much fancier rivals truly'Stumped' Here's how to book with confidence and make the most of your package holiday Austria's 007 heaven: As the unveiling of the next Bond edges closer, how the film franchise's coolest attraction lets fans relive Daniel Craig's thrilling Spectre chase at 3,000M Would YOU go on a first date abroad? Singletons reveal what happened when they agreed to holiday with someone they'd just met The tiny European island with incredible beaches set for a tourism boost from The Odyssey - and it's not in Greece Is this the five-bed'secret' retreat - boasting its own pool, terrace and 60 acres - that Tom Holland and Zendaya stayed in on the lavish Beaverbrook estate after tying the knot (again)? The secret UK getaways where you can escape Britain's summer crowds, from glorious Welsh mountains to sleepy Norfolk villages Forget the overcrowded Canary Islands, this is why GREECE is the best place to visit this summer: Delicious food, gorgeous beaches, the friendliest locals. I've stayed in countless Greek hotels over the past 40 years - here are my top ten... Is this the world's most luxurious cruise ship?


Plans for the world's first octopus 'megafarm' are CANCELLED amid concerns the 'sentient' animals can feel pain and emotions

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Arielle Charnas left carnage in her wake when her fashion brand imploded. Now comes the influencer's shameless second act... Killer Massachusetts mom's coded courtroom signals: Lindsay Clancy's surprising demeanor as potential jurors are reduced to tears in trial over murder of three children My fiancé made a taboo demand ahead of our wedding night... it's obscene, I can't bring myself to do it: DEAR JANE Watch married SWAT officer's brazen remarks after he's caught on video having sex with blonde cop at school: Toe-curling new footage revealed Which food additive is most likely to fuel bowel cancer? Like many wives, there's only one way for me to orgasm - and my husband finds it humiliating. Kylian Mbappe admits he will be in'pain for a while' as he releases emotional 520-word statement after France's World Cup heartbreak Plans for the world's first octopus'megafarm' are CANCELLED amid concerns the'sentient' animals can feel pain and emotions Married elite NYC lawyer, 45, is caught red-handed with underling, 29, in passionate Central Park rendezvous... then tracked down at $2.3m home he shares with wife nearby Timothee Chalamet left'uncomfortable' by lookalike links to sexually explicit OnlyFans content... and the rumors he's fueling Strip club heiress finally confesses forbidden secrets her father kept hidden... and reveals the day she uncovered the astonishing truth behind the G-strings Meghan says she tells Archie and Lilibet to'pick' fruit from their garden if they want dessert - but later insists'we always have a nice, as my husband would say, pud' Plans for the world's first octopus'megafarm' are CANCELLED amid concerns the'sentient' animals can feel pain and emotions READ MORE: Scientists say scampi carries'hidden climate cost' Plans for the world's first octopus'megafarm' have been cancelled amid a flurry of ethical and environmental concerns. Nueva Pescanova, a Spanish seafood group, was aiming to build the aquaculture project in the maritime hub of Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands.


Watch: Protesters clash with police ahead of G7 summit in Geneva

BBC News

Protesters clashed with police forces during a demonstration against the upcoming G7 summit in Geneva. Tear gas and a water cannon were deployed to disperse the large crowd after protesters smashed windows and set a car on fire. What needs to be understood is the message, the basic message regarding all these countries that oppress us through money and power, said one protester who was disappointed to see the protest turn violent. The G7 summit starts on 15 June in Évian-les-Bains and will bring together the leaders of Britain, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and the European Union. Pope Leo XIV says Barcelona's iconic Sagrada Família is a masterpiece of stones, colours and light during his visit to Spain.


Cruise ship hit by hantavirus outbreak docks in Rotterdam

BBC News

MV Hondius, the Dutch cruise ship hit by a deadly hantavirus outbreak, has docked at its final destination in Rotterdam. Only the ship's crew were aboard for the last leg of the journey, as all passengers docked off the ship in the Canary Islands between 10 and 11 May. Rotterdam port harbour master René de Vries said 25 mobile homes kitted out with catering and satellite communications would be available for the crew to self-isolate in. Three people - a Dutch couple and a German woman - died after travelling on the ship, with two of them confirmed to have had the virus. The World Health Organization has so far reported 10 cases in total, eight confirmed and two suspected.


Eurovision winner Dara arrives to screaming fans in Bulgaria

BBC News

Bulgarian pop star Dara was met by a crowd of fans in Sofia airport on Sunday, celebrating her historic Eurovision win. The 27-year-old's tune Bangaranga won Bulgaria its first ever title in the song contest. Thank you for being here, she told fans as she arrived in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, before adding I cannot wait to dip my toes in this atmosphere. Russia launched one of the biggest air strikes on Kyiv since the start of the war with several apartment blocks hit. Why is the Princess of Wales in Italy this week?


A New Hantavirus Vaccine Is in the Works

WIRED

Since 2023, Moderna and Korea University have been developing a new mRNA vaccine for hantavirus. The work has been promising so far, but a finished product isn't likely coming any time soon. US-based pharmaceutical company Moderna confirmed that it has been working on the development of hantavirus vaccines in collaboration with the Vaccine Innovation Center of Korea University College of Medicine (VIC-K). This comes after an outbreak of hantavirus occurred on a Dutch cruise ship that sailed from Argentina and disembarked its passengers and crew in the Canary Islands on May 10. At least three people aboard the MV died, and several cases were reported as serious.


Tenerife resort town awaits hantavirus-hit cruise ship

Al Jazeera

Days before the cruise ship affected by a hantavirus outbreak is set to dock in southern Tenerife in the Canary Islands, locals are expressing a mix of concern and calm. According to Oceanwide Expeditions, there are currently no symptomatic individuals on board the ship. Iran's president says he has spoken to the country's Supreme Leader


Why the Hantavirus Cruise Ship Outbreak Isn't Likely to Become a Global Crisis

WIRED

Here's What You Need to Know About the Hantavirus While the outbreak aboard a cruise ship in the Atlantic is concerning, the virus isn't easily transmitted through casual contact. Cruises are so closely associated with illness that the highly contagious norovirus is commonly called the "cruise ship virus." But a ship headed for Spain's Canary Islands has attracted global attention due to a rare outbreak of hantavirus that's left three dead. While alarming, health officials and infectious disease experts say the risk to the general public right now is low because hantavirus is less contagious than other respiratory diseases like the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic . "This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently," Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention at the World Health Organization, said at a press conference on Thursday.


Covariance-adapting algorithm for semi-bandits with application to sparse rewards

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We investigate stochastic combinatorial semi-bandits, where the entire joint distribution of outcomes impacts the complexity of the problem instance (unlike in the standard bandits). Typical distributions considered depend on specific parameter values, whose prior knowledge is required in theory but quite difficult to estimate in practice; an example is the commonly assumed sub-Gaussian family. We alleviate this issue by instead considering a new general family of sub-exponential distributions, which contains bounded and Gaussian ones. We prove a new lower bound on the expected regret on this family, that is parameterized by the unknown covariance matrix of outcomes, a tighter quantity than the sub-Gaussian matrix. We then construct an algorithm that uses covariance estimates, and provide a tight asymptotic analysis of the regret. Finally, we apply and extend our results to the family of sparse outcomes, which has applications in many recommender systems.


A Theoretical Comparison of No-U-Turn Sampler Variants: Necessary and Sufficient Convergence Conditions and Mixing Time Analysis under Gaussian Targets

arXiv.org Machine Learning

The No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) is the computational workhorse of modern Bayesian software libraries, yet its qualitative and quantitative convergence guarantees were established only recently. A significant gap remains in the theoretical comparison of its two main variants: NUTS-mul and NUTS-BPS, which use multinomial sampling and biased progressive sampling, respectively, for index selection. In this paper, we address this gap in three contributions. First, we derive the first necessary conditions for geometric ergodicity for both variants. Second, we establish the first sufficient conditions for geometric ergodicity and ergodicity for NUTS-mul. Third, we obtain the first mixing time result for NUTS-BPS on a standard Gaussian distribution. Our results show that NUTS-mul and NUTS-BPS exhibit nearly identical qualitative behavior, with geometric ergodicity depending on the tail properties of the target distribution. However, they differ quantitatively in their convergence rates. More precisely, when initialized in the typical set of the canonical Gaussian measure, the mixing times of both NUTS-mul and NUTS-BPS scale as $O(d^{1/4})$ up to logarithmic factors, where $d$ denotes the dimension. Nevertheless, the associated constants are strictly smaller for NUTS-BPS.