Dior Names Jonathan Anderson Creative Director of Women's, Men's Collections
French fashion brand Dior named Jonathan Anderson as creative head of its women's, men's, and haute couture collections, unifying its creative direction under one designer for the first time since founder Christian Dior held the reins.
The haute couture brand, part of luxury conglomerate LVMH, in April appointed Anderson as artistic director of its men's collections. The business said Monday that Anderson will also assume the creative direction of women's collections.
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Associated Press
15 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Hegseth will skip a meeting on organizing military aid to Ukraine in a first for the US
WASHINGTON (AP) — For the first time since the U.S. created an international group to coordinate military aid to Ukraine three years ago, America's Pentagon chief will not be in attendance when more than 50 other defense leaders meet Wednesday. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who returned from a national security conference in Singapore on Sunday, will not arrive in Brussels until Wednesday evening, after the Ukraine Defense Contact Group's meeting is over. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss scheduling details, confirmed that Hegseth also will not participate by video conference. It is the latest in a series of steps that the U.S. has taken to distance itself from the Ukraine war effort. And it comes on the heels of French President Emmanuel Macron's warning at the security conference last weekend that the U.S. and others risk a dangerous double standard if their concentration on a potential conflict with China is done at the cost of abandoning Ukraine. France and other NATO nations are concerned that the U.S. is considering withdrawing troops from Europe to shift them to the Indo-Pacific. Macron said abandoning Ukraine would eventually erode U.S. credibility in deterring any potential conflict with China over Taiwan. Hegseth's predecessor, Lloyd Austin, created the group after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Since then, more than 50 member nations have collectively provided Ukraine with some $126 billion in weapons and military assistance, including over $66.5 billion from the U.S. Under Austin's leadership, the U.S. served as chair of the group, and he and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff attended monthly meetings, which were both in person and by video. Hegseth has upended that position by stepping away from a leadership role, providing no new military aid and now abandoning the gathering altogether. During his first meeting with the group and a subsequent NATO defense ministers gathering in Brussels in February, Hegseth warned that Ukraine should abandon its NATO bid and its push to reclaim all Russian-occupied territory. And he signaled that President Donald Trump is determined to get Europe to assume most of the financial and military responsibilities for Ukraine's defense. Since Trump took office, there have been no new announcements of U.S. military or weapons aid to Ukraine. Hegseth also turned leadership of the group over to Germany and the United Kingdom. While he will not attend Wednesday's session, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, head of U.S. European Command and NATO's supreme allied commander, will be there. In Washington, meanwhile, a senior Ukrainian delegation led by First Deputy Prime Minister and Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko is in town for talks about defense, sanctions and postwar recovery, said Andrii Yermak, the head of Ukraine's presidential office. The Ukrainians met with U.S. special envoys Steve Witkoff and Keith Kellogg, discussing recent talks with the Russians and conditions on the battlefield, Yermak posted on social media. Svyrydenko and Yermak also are expected to meet with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials Wednesday. ___ Associated Press writer Tara Copp in Washington contributed to this report.
Geek Tyrant
32 minutes ago
- Geek Tyrant
New JAMES BOND Game From IO Interactive Officially Titled 007 FIRST LIGHT — GeekTyrant
IO Interactive has revealed the official title for its highly anticipated standalone original James Bond video game, 007 First Light . The announcement was accompanied by a teaser image, with the official reveal of the game set to take place this week. The game will feature "a wholly original Bond story," which is said to put players "into the shoes of the world's favorite Secret Agent to earn their 00 status in the very first James Bond origin story." IO Interactive CEO and co-owner Hakan Abrak previously discussed the game and he revealed that they won't be using the likeness of any actor who has portrayed 007 in the past. He goes on to confirm that the creative team will also be creating a completely new story for their original version of Bond. He explained: "It's important to mention: doing a licensed game is new to us. We've only done our own, original IPs (intellectual property), right? We've created these characters... ourselves, from scratch. 'So, I think for us to really embrace this fully, and really, as I said before, we don't like to work 'mechanical.' It's not just because it's a big IP, or it's a licensed game, and commercially this is interesting... It means nothing to us. We've taken a lot of non-commercial risks before. 'So, for us, it's about... we need to feel it, deep inside. The passion needs to be there, so it was very important for us that it wasn't a movie adaptation. So, it wasn't a game about... a specific movie, where the story has already been told." "It's very important that we could create a digital Bond. A Bond for the gaming industry... So it's a completely original story. This felt really, really important for us and we conveyed that to [James Bond owner] EON and they agreed that the result would probably be better doing it like that. "There's always excitement around a new Bond. It's amazing, what they have done with the franchise over the years. Every Bond kind of defines a generation and it's amazing how they kept reinventing themselves over so many years. So, we're not only inspired by one movie, or games and whatnot. 'We're inspired by the whole thing, and just sucking things into us to make an original Bond, an original story, but that is absolutely true and recognizable in the values there is in Bond. I'm really looking forward to creating a new community that the gamers can call their own." I'm looking forward to seeing what this game will entail, and we'll learn more soon!
Forbes
34 minutes ago
- Forbes
How To Love Your (Agentic) Database Administrator
An Internet Geek Developers love meritocracy. Software engineering professionals don't judge individuals by the way they look, the way they dress and whether or not they have a purple-green hair dye rinse on their head (spoiler alert, it's actually considered a good thing)... and they never have. They tend to classify their counterparts and contemporaries on the basis of their skillset, their ability to show technical competency and their enthusiasm for the combined arts of coding and data science. If there's one chink in that argument, it's a possible hierachy between the developer community and the operations team. While the developers get to build, program and create, the Ops team are assigned the responsibility to underpin, maintain and manage. Some developers occasionally regard the sysadmins, database administrators and testing team as less skilled; the rise of DevOps has sought to unite these two streams and platform engineering is also aiming to create and reinforce bonds, but fractures inevitably exist. Could a new wave of agentic AI services in the data management space actually help elevate the status of this essential function and, just maybe, actually help elevate the status of this role to the tier that it deserves? Lithuania-based tech writer Jastra Kranjec says we're on the cusp. Citing the multiplicity of management consultancy reports in this space that suggest AI agents are about to really start helping us work (Capgemini's Top Tech Trends of 2025 survey points to their use to boost efficiency and develop automation), Kranjec says that AI agents have now 'evolved from experimental tools' into mainstream business solutions. 'Last year, even major enterprises like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and PwC began integrating them into their operations, proving them as one of the top AI trends. Moreover, this is just the beginning of AI agents` growth, with market projections showing a surging adoption in the years ahead. Last year, the AI agent industry was valued at around $5.1 billion. This figure is projected to soar by a whopping 821%, reaching $47 billion by 2030,' wrote Kranjec. While such massive percentage projections make for dizzying reading, perhaps we should centralize our focus on the actual jobs agentic AI can now take on. In the data management and manipulation space, that brings us back to the poor database administrator, could the AI DBA be about to become the real hero? Stewart Bond sees a role for this exact job function. In his role as VP of data intelligence and integration software at technology analyst house IDC, he projects that AI can now take on a central role in data orchestration and administration. 'The rise of agentic AI orchestration is expected to accelerate, and companies need to start preparing now,' said Bond. 'To unlock agentic AI's full potential, companies should seek solutions that unify disparate data types, including structured, unstructured, real-time and historical information, in a single environment. This allows AI to derive richer insights and drive more impactful outcomes.' Bond makes his comments in order to contextualize new services stemming from data streaming company Confluent. The organization has now come forward with new Confluent Cloud capabilities that are said to make it easier to process and secure data for faster insights and decision-making. Looking at exactly which products and tools are now on offer, snapshot queries is a new service in Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink designed to bring together real-time and historic data processing to make AI agents and analytics smarter. Confluent Cloud network routing works in concert with this technology to simplify private networking for Apache Flink (an open source data stream processing framework for running computations in 'bounded' - those with a defined start and end - and unbounded data stream environments) and this all sits alongside IP filtering to adds access controls, thereby securing data for agentic AI and analytics. 'Agentic AI is moving from hype to enterprise adoption as organizations look to gain a competitive edge and win in today's market,' said Shaun Clowes, chief product officer at Confluent. 'But without high-quality data, even the most advanced systems can't deliver real value. The new Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink features make it possible to blend real-time and batch data so that enterprises can trust their agentic AI to drive real change.' Clowes agrees with the proposition that Confluent didn't necessarily build this technology to enable, create or innovate the true arrival of the agentic DBA, but he concurs, if the continued extension of the company's platform makes this 'job position' a reality, then it will surely serve IT stacks in every industry for the better. We can certainly suggest that agentic AI is driving widespread change in business operations from the DBA, right upwards through the developer function to the application and user interface. 'However, for AI data agents to make the right decisions, they need historical context about what happened in the past and insight into what's happening right now. For example, for fraud detection, banks need real-time data to react in the moment and historical data to see if a transaction fits a customer's usual patterns. Hospitals need real-time vitals alongside patient medical history to make safe, informed treatment decisions. But to leverage both past and present data, teams often have to use separate tools and develop manual workarounds, resulting in time-consuming work and broken workflows. Additionally, it's important to secure the data that's used for analytics and agentic AI; this ensures trustworthy results and prevents sensitive data from being accessed,' explains Confluent, in a technical product statement. To address these challenges, the company says that snapshot queries in Confluent Cloud let teams unify historical and streaming data with a single product and language, enabling consistent, intelligent experiences for both analytics and agentic AI. With the company's Tableflow service integration, teams can gain context from past data. Snapshot queries allow teams to explore, test, and analyze data without spinning up new workloads. This makes it easier to supply agents with context from historic and real-time data or conduct an audit to understand key trends and patterns. 'The rise of the Agentic DBA is already happening… and there are some very 'human' reasons behind it. Dealing with disruptions like anomalies, outages, or performance optimizations is distracting (to say the least) for DBAs and data infrastructure teams,' enthused Karthik Ranganathan, co-founder & CEO of cloud-native open source database company Yugabyte. 'DBA agents are trained to respond and optimize automatically, allowing human workers to focus on more strategic business value tasks.' Ranganathan says that agentic DBAs are capable of anything from performing query execution patterns to analyzing resource trends to mentoring cloud cluster health, which means all these tasks can now be dealt with automatically. This allows DBAs to avoid 'alert fatigue' and learn from previously taken actions when their workload permits. 'The agentic DBA is a natural extension of modern databases, such as distributed SQL databases. The point of a PostgreSQL-compatible distributed database is to deliver cloud-native apps that scale effortlessly, are never offline and automate tasks like backups behind the scenes. The rise of the agentic DBA, which fine-tunes performance on the fly, will need to be part of any cloud-native distributed database going forward,' stated Yugabyte's Ranganathan. There are many technologies in this space now coming forward. If you're lucky enough to get invited to an Oracle welcome keynote on a Sunday night at its tech events, this is the kind of technology that the company talks about volubly. With so many database functions now ripe for moving to automation such as patching, maintenance checks, upgrades and perhaps also data normalization and deduplicatoin, it's no surprise to hear the database giant talk about database automation. Does IBM make something in this area too? Usually, is the safe answer. May this year saw the company announce its answer to database automation challenges in the form of Db2 Intelligence Center, an AI-powered database management platform designed specifically for Db2 database administrators and IT professionals managing databases. 'We've spent years talking to Db2 database administrators, understanding their pain points, frustrations and the complexity of their workflows. The feedback we have captured is loud and clear: DBAs are tired of fragmented tools that don't integrate with each other. They're tired of the endless libraries of scripts where each DBA maintains his or her own variations and they're tired of constantly reacting to problems and manually troubleshooting, as opposed to being proactive in their database management approach,' said Ani Joshi, senior product manager for Db2, IBM data & AI. Db2 Intelligence Center is a unified, intelligent management console purpose-built for Db2 administrators. It combines advanced monitoring, AI-powered troubleshooting and query optimization into an integrated service that simplifies and accelerates many aspects of Db2 management. With these (arguably) not insignificant automations now coming to the fore, some may ask whether we will have succeeded in making the role of the human database administrator redundant. The answer to that question is, obviously, of course no, don't be silly. What we're seeing here are the mechanical repetitively rote tasks that a DBA has to undertake, now taken out of their workflow to some degree (in some cases totally) and so creating a new DBA role that can start to work more closely with the developer team, provide more business-centric value through increased proximity to commercial teams while also now working to innovate and create new data services. If all that doesn't make you love your DBA just that little bit more, then you just might need a hug.
