complex

Days after a photo went viral showing damage that the aircraft carrier USS Truman incurred during a February collision with a freighter was apparently painted over, the Navy released an explanation.

“The exterior cosmetic damage to USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) sustained from the collision will get repaired during the ship’s upcoming Refueling Complex Overhaul (RCOH) at Newport News Shipbuilding as planned,” a Navy official said. “Immediately following the collision, while in Souda Bay, Greece, new bulkheads were installed inside each of the damaged spaces to establish weathertight integrity.”

The carrier is expected to begin RCOH in the next twelve months. We have reached out the Navy for a firmer date.

Truman was damaged during a collision with the cargo ship M/V Besiktas-M off the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea.

A photo taken at the time showed multiple large tears through a sponson on the starboard side of the stern end of the ship near one of the aircraft elevators. It was unknown at the time whether there was damage elsewhere. You can see the damage in the following photo taken at the time.

About a week after the collision, Truman was back at sea conducting routine operations after being in port in Greece for repairs. The Navy announced at the time that Truman waas conducting routine operations in the Mediterranean after leaving Greece’s Souda Bay following a so-called Emergent Repair Availability (ERAV). The carrier first arrived in Souda Bay for the ERAV, which was immediately preceded by a more comprehensive damage assessment, on Feb. 16.

The photo showing the painted-over damage was taken on Monday, during U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to the vessel in Norfolk, Virginia, to celebrate the Navy’s 250th birthday. Though the event was attended by thousands, the damage was partially hidden from view by a huge Navy banner.

It was not until the photo appeared on social media that questions were raised about the existing damage and why it hadn’t been repaired. We reached out to the Navy on Monday and finally received the aforementioned response.

“The U.S. Navy’s ability to rapidly repair its warships anywhere in the world is a testament to our lethality and the warfighting advantage of relationships with Allies and partners,” the Navy official added on Friday. “RCOH is a multi-year project, performed only once during a carrier’s 50-year life and includes refueling of the ship’s two nuclear reactors, as well as significant repair, upgrade and modernization work.”

We will continue to monitor the progress of repairs to the Truman and provide updates when available.

Contact the author: [email protected]

It’s getting close.

Chaminade Prep in West Hills expects to begin demolition soon of the 4.8 acres of buildings it acquired in 2018 that will become its.sports fields. Next year construction will begin on a baseball field, pool and training fields that could be completed by 2027, according to athletic director Todd Borowski. Both projects need final approval from the city before work can begin.

Buildings from the old shopping center have been abandoned and the property is fenced.

Chaminade has phases planned for construction that will include a pedestrian bridge to link its main campus across the street with the new fields. A new softball field will replace the current baseball field. There will be new campus classrooms and a new school entrance.

Here’s a video from the school explaining all the building that will soon begin.

Chaminade is the second Mission League school adding new sports fields. Harvard-Westlake is scheduled to open its River Park complex next year that includes a gym, fields, pool and parking.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba announced his resignation on Sunday due to pressure from his ruling party following recent election defeats, including the July upper house elections.

Ishiba’s departure will initiate a leadership contest within the Liberal Democratic Party. The LDP president’s path to premiership is not guaranteed, as the ruling coalition has lost its parliamentary majorities, opening a possibility for an opposition leader to become prime minister of Japan.

Ruling – Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)

SANAE TAKAICHI, 64:

If chosen, Takaichi would be Japan’s first female prime minister.

A party veteran who has held a variety of roles, including economic security and internal affairs minister, she lost to Ishiba in the LDP leadership race in a run-off vote last year.

Known for conservative positions such as revising the pacifist postwar constitution, Takaichi is a regular visitor to the Yasukuni shrine to honour Japan’s war dead, viewed by some Asian neighbours as a symbol of past militarism.

Takaichi stands out for her vocal opposition to the Bank of Japan’s interest rate hikes and her calls to ramp up spending to boost the fragile economy.

SHINJIRO KOIZUMI, 44:

Heir to a political dynasty with a hand in governing Japan for more than a century, Koizumi would become its youngest prime minister in the modern era.

Koizumi ran in the last year’s party leadership race, presenting himself as a reformer able to restore public trust in a scandal-hit party.

Unlike Takaichi, who left government after her defeat in that contest, the Columbia University-educated Koizumi stayed close to Ishiba as his agriculture minister, overseeing a widely publicised attempt to curb soaring rice prices.

In his only other cabinet post, as environment minister, Koizumi called for Japan to get rid of nuclear reactors in 2019. He faced ridicule that year for remarks that climate policy needed to be “cool” and “sexy”. Little is known about his views on economic policy, including on the BOJ.

YOSHIMASA HAYASHI, 64:

Hayashi has been Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, a pivotal job that includes being top government spokesperson, since December 2023 under then-premier Fumio Kishida and Ishiba.

He has held a variety of portfolios, including defence, foreign and agriculture minister, often being tapped as a pinch-hitter following an incumbent’s resignation.

A fluent English speaker, Hayashi worked for trading house Mitsui & Co, studied at the Harvard Kennedy School and was a staffer for U.S. Representative Stephen Neal and Senator William Roth Jr.

Hayashi ran for the LDP leadership race in 2012 and 2024. He has repeatedly called for respecting the BOJ’s independence on monetary policy.

Opposition – Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan

YOSHIHIKO NODA, 68:

Former Prime Minister Noda is the leader of the biggest opposition group, the centre-left Constitutional Democrats.

As premier from 2011 to 2012, he worked with the LDP to push through legislation to double Japan’s consumption tax to 10% to help curb bulging public debt – earning a reputation as a fiscal hawk. The consumption tax was raised to 10% in 2019 for most items.

In the upper house election in July, Noda reversed course and called for a temporary cut to the consumption tax for food items. He has repeatedly called for phasing out the BOJ’s massive stimulus.

Opposition – Democratic Party for the People

YUICHIRO TAMAKI, 56:

Tamaki’s centre-right party is one of the fastest-growing in recent elections.

A former finance ministry bureaucrat, Tamaki co-founded the Democratic Party for the People in 2018 and advocates increasing people’s take-home pay by expanding tax exemptions and slashing the consumption tax.

He supports boosting defence capabilities, stricter regulations for foreigners’ land acquisition and constructing more nuclear power plants.

Tamaki has called on the BOJ to be cautious about phasing out stimulus, saying it should wait until real wages turn positive and help underpin consumption.

Based on a Reuters report

The BBC is set to release a brand-new drama called The Guest, which follows the complex and dangerous friendship between two women.

At the end of last year, the BBC revealed a brand-new drama was in the pipeline called The Guest.

Now, the wait is nearly finished as the four-part series is scheduled to launch on September 1, with another BBC drama in the works to drop next year.

The programme centres on two women, a thriving business owner, Fran (portrayed by Eve Myles), and a woman she hires as her cleaner, Ria (Gabrielle Creevy).

As Ria rapidly develops an unlikely bond with Fran, she becomes captivated by her self-assurance and poise.

Yet, when an unforeseen incident takes a dramatic twist, their lives become entangled through perilous schemes and mutual secrets, reports Wales Online.

A synopsis hints: “What follows is a compelling and manipulative game of cat and mouse. But just who is playing who?”

Prior to the series launch, Reach Plc chatted to Eve and Gabrielle about their roles in the programme and why they think audiences are drawn to intense female bonds.

Eve, 47, remarked: “Because it’s complex, it’s not easy, it’s not actually an easy thing to talk about or to try and describe or explain, it’s about something very, very intoxicating. It’s about two women sharing something very important.

“Like myself and Gabby, Fran and Ria are also incredibly vulnerable, never mind the strengths you see from both of them, they both have great strengths, but they both have great weaknesses.”

Eve detailed the unlikely bond between Fran and Ria, explaining that their contrasting backgrounds add a layer of intrigue and mystery for some.

She further elaborated: “It’s not about a boss and a cleaner it’s about two women who share this part of their lives together, they share secrets together, they go through something very traumatic together then they’ve got to fix that, or not and what that does to them.

“They open up to each other when they don’t expect to, and that’s thrilling, that’s dynamic. There’s something really poignant and dangerous about these two women.”

Matthew Barry, the writer of The Guest, expressed his excitement about the project: “I’m beyond excited to be re-teaming with Nicola, Davina and the whole team at Quay Street Productions and the BBC to bring The Guest to life.

“As well as being an exciting thriller, at its core this is an examination of class, social mobility and the growing disparity between those at the top and bottom of our society.”

The Guest, will premiere on BBC One at 9:00 PM on Monday, September 1.

Aug. 20 (UPI) — A humanoid robot can now perform complex tasks with a large behavior model without needing hand programming for each task.

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute announced this breakthrough Wednesday in a press release.

In a video jointly released by the two organizations, Atlas performs a long, continuous sequence of complex tasks that require combining object manipulation with locomotion. By adopting LBMs, new capabilities that would have been laboriously hand-programmed in the past can now be added quickly and without writing a single new line of code.

The video shows Atlas using whole-body movements, such as walking, crouching, and lifting, to accomplish a series of packing, sorting, and organizing tasks. Throughout the sequences, researchers interject unexpected physical challenges mid-task, such as closing the lid of a box and sliding it across the floor, requiring Atlas to self-adjust in response.

Humanoid robots that have demonstrated this capability before typically separate the low-level walking and balancing control from the control of the arms for manipulation. But a single large behavior model has direct control of Atlas, treating the hands and feet almost identically.

This breakthrough is the result of the October 2024 joint research partnership between Boston Dynamics and TRI, which was designed to use their combined strengths and expertise to speed the development of smart robots.

The project, co-led by Scott Kuindersma and Russ Tedrake, is conducting research to answer fundamental questions about humanoid robots and large behavior models, to advance the field’s understanding of large models for whole-body control, including advanced manipulation and dynamic behaviors.

“This work provides a glimpse into how we’re thinking about building general-purpose robots that will transform how we live and work,” Kuindersma, vice president of Robotics Research at Boston Dynamics, said in a statement. “Training a single neural network to perform many long-horizon manipulation tasks will lead to better generalization, and highly capable robots like Atlas present the fewest barriers to data collection for tasks requiring whole-body precision, dexterity, and strength.”

Humanoids can help in many ways.

“One of the main value propositions of humanoids is that they can achieve a huge variety of tasks directly in existing environments, but the previous approaches to programming these tasks simply could not scale to meet this challenge,” Tedrake, senior vice president of Large Behavior Models at Toyota Research Institute, said in a statement. “Large behavior models address this opportunity in a fundamentally new way — skills are added quickly via demonstrations from humans, and as the LBMs get stronger, they require less and less demonstrations to achieve more and more robust behaviors.”

Humanoid robots have been an ongoing challenge. The World Humanoid Robot Games highlighted this, showing that tumbling robots is the norm.

The games featured more than 500 robots from 16 countries, including Japan, the United States and Germany, competing in 26 events.

One robot was disqualified from a 1,500-meter race when its head fell off in mid-stride.

“Keeping [the head] balanced while in movement is the biggest challenge for us,” said Wang Ziyi, 19, a member of the Beijing Union University team.

July 14 (UPI) — A fire at an assisted living complex in Massachusetts is under investigation Monday after it left several dead and injured Sunday night.

Jeffrey Bacon, Fire Chief of the city of Fall River, confirmed Monday nine people died and 30 have been hospitalized as a result of the five-alarm blaze that broke out around 9:30 p.m. EDT at the 100-unit Gabriel House Assisted Living Residence.

Bacon also explained that firefighters found heavy fire conditions upon arrival, and that some residents were hanging out of windows awaiting rescue.

One of the injured victims remains in critical condition, and five firefighters also sustained minor injuries due to the incident.

Bacon credited EMS, police and his department for saving lives while working in a coordinated effort during a press conference Sunday.

The Massachusetts Department of Fire Services announced Monday that a notification center has been established at St. Anne’s Hospital in Fall River, and that anyone who goes there should enter through its Emergency Department.

Initial investigation indicates blast caused by a gas leak, but similar recent incidents have led to suspicions of drone attacks.

At least seven people have been injured in an explosion at a residential building on the outskirts of the Iranian city of Qom, according to several Iranian news outlets.

At least five emergency vehicles were dispatched after Monday’s blast to the Nasim Pardisan residential complex to attend to the injured, Iran’s Student News Network (SNN) reported, quoting Dr Mohammad Javad Bagheri, head of Qom’s Emergency Services.

The state-affiliated Fars News Agency said the explosion happened at one of the buildings in the complex and damaged four residential units.

The explosion shattered windows of neighbouring buildings, and firefighting and police forces were deployed to the site, according to Fars.

Images and videos posted on social media showed several damaged vehicles next to the building.

انفجار در یکی از مجتمع‌های مسکونی پردیسان قم ۷ مصدوم برجا گذاشت.
به گفته اورژانس و آتش‌نشانی، حادثه صبح دوشنبه رخ داده و علت احتمالی آن نشت گاز بوده است.
🔗https://t.co/pg6uSrkMbW pic.twitter.com/Z8XP3ZbosU

— خبرگزاری مهر (@mehrnews_ir) July 14, 2025

Translation: An explosion in one of the residential complexes in Qom’s Pardisan left seven people injured.

According to the emergency services and fire department, the incident occurred on Monday morning and the probable cause was a gas leak.

Preliminary investigations indicated a gas leak may have caused the incident, but a detailed probe is being carried out to ascertain the source of the blast, Fars reported.

In recent days, some accounts on social media have linked such incidents across the country to last month’s Israeli war against Iran.

Fars quoted an unnamed official as saying people “should not worry about this narrative-building”, adding that if any hostile acts were to occur, “news of it would immediately be announced to the public.”

Similar explosions have been recorded across Iran since the June 24 ceasefire, which led to speculation that Israeli drone strikes launched from inside Iran might be responsible for the incidents. But authorities have rejected such speculation.

The latest incident came four days after an explosion occurred at a residential building in western Tehran’s Chitgar suburb, which was extensively bombed during the 12-day war. Many high-rise buildings in that district were built by Iran’s armed forces.

Authorities said the Chitgar explosion, which injured at least seven people, was also caused by a gas leak.

The next day, Iranian media reported the death of Ali Taeb, a senior Muslim scholar and veteran of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. No cause of death was provided, and officials have not commented.

Taeb was a former representative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei at the Sarallah Headquarters, the heart of the domestic security structure of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and a frequent target of Israeli attacks during the 12-day war.

He was also brother to Hossein Taeb and Mehdi Taeb, two senior figures within Iran’s theocratic establishment and the IRGC.

Several other explosions were also reported, including in the Janat Abad district of Tehran and another in western Iran’s Kermanshah.