Latest news with #Hydra
Daily Mail
21 hours ago
- General
- Daily Mail
The little-known Greek island that's just as beautiful as Santorini - but much more peaceful over the summer
A hotspot for tourists, Santorini has long been regarded as the perfect destination to soak up the sun and Greek culture. But there's a little-known island that's just as peaceful, located in the southern Aegean Sea. Hydra, which is one of the Saronic Islands of Greece, is just as beautiful as Santorini - and is less crowded. The secret idyllic island is just 75-minutes from Athens, with donkeys on hand to transport the luggage of visitors. This is due to the breathtaking location being protected by a preservation order, which bans the use of vehicles and motorbikes, with the exception of ambulances and fire brigades. It means traffic noise is unheard, allowing your ears to tune into the sound of the tranquil waves as they crash against the shore and the unbeatable ambience of nature. With neoclassical mansions standing as a backdrop to the island, it's filled with alleyways that lead into gorgeous courtyards. The island has a healthy and diverse range of animals and is even home to the largest herd of working equines in the world. Near Hydra's port, you'll find the Historical Archives Museum, showcasing the island's proud naval history. From attention-grabbing naval paintings, to handwritten notes dating back to Hydra's participation in the Greek War of Independence, the museum is a step back in time. Aside from history and Hydra's stunning port, there's also the chance to explore its olive groves on horseback, visiting ancient chapels on route. As many as 300 chapels are dotted across the charming island, which is a stone's throw away from Dokos Island, should you wish to set sail and explore. Underwater, the island is home to fascinating ancient sea wrecks and underwater cliffs. Meanwhile, while some residents of Santorini have warned the picture-perfect island is being swamped, other locals have claimed that the Greek holiday hotspot is struggling to bring in enough tourists. Last year a tourist operator branded the season their 'worst ever' in the 18 years that they had lived on the island. 'The truth is that the island is empty. Right now is like never before, it's the worst season ever,' said Gianluca Chimenti. Put off by videos of queues of cruise ship passengers and visitors shuffling through the streets in the hot sun, would-be tourists were opting to avoid staying on the island for long periods, he claimed. He told CNN travel: 'The problem is that the social media is showing something completely different from what is the reality.' Many of those flocking to the island's main attractions were cruise ship passengers, with Santorini a key stop on Greek cruises' itineraries. But, when the crowds were gone, Chimenti said, 'the hotels right now are more or less under 30 per cent of a normal season.'
Time of India
26-05-2025
- Time of India
Encroachers target old panchayat layouts in Hyd; 64 complaints filed in a day
1 2 Hyderabad: Old gram panchayat layouts on the outskirts of Hyderabad are increasingly falling prey to land encroachments, with 64 complaints filed in a single day via Hydra Prajavani, the city's public grievance platform. Over 60% of these complaints related to the illegal occupation of plots in older layouts, many dating back decades, where roads and parks have allegedly been converted into private or agricultural land. Complainants reported that encroachers are using Dharani passbooks to claim ownership and obstruct access for legitimate plot holders. In numerous instances, they are demolishing park boundaries and internal roads to extend their control over the land. Hydra Commissioner AV Ranganath reviewed several cases using Google Maps and instructed officials to conduct ground inspections. "Unless a layout is officially revised, its original roads and parks remain legally protected. We will examine each case and act after hearing both parties," he stated. Key complaints included — Korremula, Ghatkesar (Rangareddy) wherein 47 acres within a 1987 layout were allegedly encroached upon using Dharani passbooks, despite prior court orders. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Где два мира сливаются воедино SAUDI Забронировать Undo Another pertained to Peddamberpet, Abdullapurmet wherein the main road in a 500-plot layout was blocked following the renaming of the layout, cutting off access to the highway. Similarly in Reddy Enclave, Alwal, 667 square yards of designated park land were encroached upon, even beneath high-tension power lines. Court orders in the matter were ignored. And in Asifnagar, Mehdipatnam–Mallepally Road, around 3,800 square yards of dargah land were illegally occupied. Illegal construction continues despite notices issued by the GHMC. In Hayathnagar, the only park area in a 1966 layout was encroached upon and residents are calling for the protection of the 3,620 square yards of open space
Washington Post
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
A splendid exhibition looks at small animals, raising big questions
A curious figure from Greek mythology ornaments the top of an elaborate cabinet, made to store shells, small stones and other natural curiosities. He is muscular and wields a large club and is almost certainly Hercules. The creature he is battling is more mysterious. The lower body looks to be the Nemean lion, slain by Hercules as part of his atonement for having murdered his wife and children, but it is topped by what appears to be the several heads of the Hydra, another beast slaughtered by the hero. 'Blurring boundaries was absolutely fascinating to them,' says Stacey Sell, who along with Alexandra Libby and Brooks Rich curated the National Gallery of Art exhibition 'Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World' in which the cabinet is displayed. By 'them' she means the Dutch and Flemish artists of the late 17th and early 18th century, who were processing a sudden surge of knowledge about the natural world into images that blur the boundaries between art and science, curiosity and fear, literal truth and fanciful imagination. It is a splendid show and while it is not huge — it features some 75 prints, drawings and paintings, most of them quite small — it feels like just the right show at just the right moment. The National Gallery has even installed a pop-up gift shop outside the exhibition entrance, a sign that its leaders anticipate popularity. The National Gallery was once a leader in exhibitions of Dutch art from the golden age, but that ended with the retirement in 2018 of Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., the long-serving and greatly esteemed curator of northern baroque paintings. Now it's back with a show that is focused and smart, bringing together virtuoso miniature paintings with samples including preserved insects and taxidermy borrowed from the Smithsonian. The side-by-side comparison of painted and real life is part of the pleasure of the show, but even more engaging are the dualities and contradictions raised by the cabinet that features that strange image of Hercules. Near the mythical hero on the top of the decorative wooden box of drawers are astonishingly lifelike metal casts of beetles and a lizard, molded from the actual bodies of the creatures. Also featured in the exhibition are examples of lepidochromy, the process of using actual butterfly wings to 'print' an image of a butterfly. Using real insect wings to leave an impress of color, or the actual bodies of animals to cast their three-dimensional likeness, may feel like cheating, shortcuts to absolute verisimilitude that distinguishes these works from actual art. But the artists on view, including Joris Hoefnagel, Jan van Kessel the Elder, Albrecht Dürer and Wenceslaus Hollar, had no need to 'cheat.' They could build up verisimilitude freehand just as easily as someone else could 'print' a butterfly (the process involved pressing the wings onto a sticky page until the colors transferred). Viewers of these printed works would certainly have prized their accuracy, but perhaps something else was going on, too. Creating an image was a way of understanding the natural world, the horizons of which were expanding as European powers colonized the Americas, Africa and Asia. But it was also about taming it and owning it, and the direct impress of the actual creature on the page or the metal suggests a literal sense of ownership. Animals could be made up in the mind — like the Nemean-Hydra figure — but they could also be physically owned, in the menageries of wealthy collectors, and in the small drawers of cabinets like this one. Throughout the exhibition, fear goes hand in hand with wonder. Creatures, dead or alive, brought back from the colonies were expanding knowledge of the world, breaking down old categories and systems of thought. The first room is devoted to Hoefnagel's four-volume survey of the animal kingdom called 'The Four Elements,' which included some 300 meticulous and breathtaking watercolors made late in the 16th century. Hoefnagel was borrowing the classical elements — air, water, earth and fire — for his basic taxonomy, and insects for some reason fell into the 'fire' category. This was part of an inheritance, both classical and Christian, that was at times useful and often a distraction from actually looking at the world. Stories like that of Noah's ark provided a convenient template for making images of animals cohere into a meaningful visual narrative. But these painted creatures carried the legacy of Aristotle along with mounds of medieval misinformation, often with an incrustation of religious moralizing. An inscription on Hoefnagel's painting of a hedgehog (a European animal that appears along with a guinea pig from the New World) references the old parable of the fox (which has multiple tricks to survive) and the hedgehog (which has only one, rolling itself into a ball). Long before Isaiah Berlin wrote a famous 1953 essay allegorizing this duality, painters like Hoefnagel were interpreting it with Latin inscriptions that suggest that the hedgehog's limited and purely passive form of defense is a greater strength than the manifold wiles of the fox. 'I wrap myself in virtue,' says the hedgehog, which suggests that passivity in the face of power is a good thing, which undoubtedly it is if you are the one with the power. These kinds of inscription were reflexive thinking, a bit like rolling the mind up in a ball when faced with the immense task of making sense of new worlds. Looking back at this period from the far side of the dwindling Enlightenment, it is too easy to think of the classical and Christian traditions as a nuisance to be waved away by scientists and philosophers creating a new world of rationalism. But these tiny works, in many cases marvels of observation and analysis, remind us that the Renaissance was never just about suppressing old forms of magical thinking, but rather, accommodating them into new forms of rational discovery. Perhaps the presence of Hercules next to realistically rendered insects and reptiles isn't an accidental mash-up of the mythological and the scientific, but an honest affirmation of the brutal struggle to tame these systems of thought into something compatible and sustainable. (Spoiler alert: We have largely failed in this endeavor.) The story of this art cannot be told without engaging with colonialism, and the curators deserve heroic commendation for doing so at a moment when the Trump administration is policing language and attempting to scrub history of any chapters embarrassing to those who have benefited from the legacies of oppression. Colonialism didn't just provide the raw material for these works; it offered the basic mental paradigm for making sense of it. Exploring the world and Christianizing it were conjoined into one worldwide labor. The boundary between knowing and owning was blurred. In many cases, the shells, fossils and animal samples that made it into European cabinets of curiosity were first gathered by people working under colonial duress and perhaps enslaved. 'For many Indigenous communities, animals and plants are sacred relatives,' reads the wall text in one room of the show. So, collecting specimens had at least a dual nature: gathering knowledge for one people while dispossessing meaning from another. The last room of the show features a new film by Dario Robleto, 'Until We Are Forged: Hymns for the Elements.' The title refers to Hoefnagel's rare and invaluable book of animal miniatures. The film is an ecstatic, 43-minute paean to the work done by institutions like the National Gallery to preserve and pass on the legacy of art and knowledge, which takes on cosmic and spiritual significance. Museums, where the treasure of colonialism is stored, are transformed into places of empathy and connection. 'Every fragment of the past raises questions: What right do we have to forget?' asks the narrator of the film in a long string of existential queries. 'Can we repair our legacies of destruction and harm? What new sensitivities must we invent to bridge the gap of loneliness that keeps life apart?' It's a smart film and its message is very necessary at the moment, but it will also divide audiences. Some may find the rhetoric too superheated and ostentatiously poetic (think Ken Burns on steroids). Others, more cynical to be sure, will disagree with the very premise of a moral dimension to the museum world. But they are not likely to see the film unless actively searching for something to find objectionable. One object not to missed is a collaboration with curators from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History made to imitate a painting by Van Kessel, the grandson of Jan Brueghel the Elder, and a masterful painter of miniatures. The collage of real things helps make sense of the image, in which there is more conceit and artifice that one might think, including a curiously abstract space in which there are shadows, but no background or sense of up or down, just a white emptiness that makes each sample seem separated by 'the gap of loneliness.' I confess the collage unnerved me. The samples are held in place with pins, a standard procedure for displaying insects. To 'pin it down' is now colloquial for demanding a clear, unequivocal statement, definition or answer from someone. Clarity, offered freely, is a kindness to others, but to pin down an idea is often a form of aggression. The thing pinned down must be inanimate or dead, and then becomes a possession. The only thing missing is life itself, which was of course the reason we tried to pin it down in the first place. Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World. Through Nov. 2 at the National Gallery of Art. 202-737-4215.
Newsroom
24-05-2025
- General
- Newsroom
Short story: The Dart, by Miro Bilbrough
A lacework of crosses and dashes notched the counter person's fingers and hands as I watched these elegant inky gloves tap in my details and issue me a window emergency exit-row seat, never mind that I am short. Her tatau, she explained, was a malu pattern signifying shelter, protection and connection to her ancestors. Cultural respect! she summed up, statuesque in her green-and-black koru print uniform, to which I silently added, Female agency! And that is how I found myself two thirds of the way down the plane reading the special safety card on how to disarm the emergency door. Studying the multitude of arrows while making a note of my abbreviated memory for instructions and directions, I turned to the human dart who had recently lowered himself into the seat next to me, smiled out of the side of his face, and otherwise remained tacit. The doubling of his clothes was compelling. A black kerchief knotted pirate style under a cap, black tights with a sheeny damask of scales under neatly rolled-up cargo trousers, a further layering of dark cloth on top. The whole ensemble precisely curated. Excuse me but we're in this together, this disarming the door in an event of an emergency thing, I said by way of introduction. He darted his eyes at me and away. His smile disappeared all other primary features, enveloped and garlanded them. His cheek was gaunt and crosshatched with acne, young. Of course, he replied amiably and reached for his own disarm the door card. A silent perusing but not absorbing ensued. Is it just me or is this hard to understand? I offered. I could feel my neighbour's humour quicken on the other side of the arm rest. His whole body was fleet with it, fleet and elliptical. Not just you. These arrows seem to be going in different directions, you know, conflicting. I thought so too. So…if I turn the handle to the left and it collapses on me… The Dart's eyes danced up to mine and back down to his sneakery feet. …You will be my assistant while I am struggling with the door, I summarised. Your assistant, he agreed, andlaughed a laugh of no confidence and as we considered the exit. I sensed we might make a good team, just not for disarming doors while our plane fell from the sky. The door had boiled down the infographics into just two arrows and an illustration of itself falling inward: the Exit Plan for Dummies. Returning to my laminated card, I found the legend 'strong but heavy'.The Dart's pleasure in the slipperiness of language equalled my own as the adjectives merged object and handler into one formidable entity, a Hydra. 13 kilos, I mused, my dog's sixteen and I can lift him. What sort of dog? Whippet, brindled. Mine's an American Pitbull. My dog's nemesis. Nice. Strong but Heavy, The Dart concluded. Over the Sounds, I abandoned the elliptical vision of my neighbour for the blissful tablecloth of islands, isthmuses and water. I soaked these in while the Dart talked about his life as a deep-sea fisherman, and I recounted swimming straight off the road at Tahunanui. He didn't like ocean swimming, he said, not given what he knew about the creatures that inhabited the depths; the fish he had encountered, their bodies half munched off. The cooling islands pulled at my attention. I drank them in in gulped drafts. Fresh water was a different story. When people came to stay, he took them to Siberian Flats on the Wangapeka. He did a brief imitation of the uninitiated emerging from the freezing waters. One detail ceded another. His family had just been given notice on their fourth rental when his father was diagnosed with cancer. The Dart resigned from life on the boats. At this I relinquished the serpentine forms out the window in favour of his own. How long did you nurse him? The Dart made a self-correcting face. Assistant nurse, actually. To my mother. She was awesome. Two years. He was good with it though. I wondered how that might be possible. The air in front of me thickened with impressions, with intimations of a dead man, with cliché and archetype, before becoming just air again. He taught me so much. I shot a look at the Dart as he touched the pounamu at his neck. I had fallen into the rhythm of his scuttled looks and glances. It was, I found, more than enough. My own father had died two years earlier and although I had only attended him on that bed-bound journey for a matter of weeks, I knew that the Dart and I had experienced the grace and beneficence of a father who dies well. I feel like I'm in pause—The Dart left the word unstoppered as he fumbled before the large something that lay behind it, the fish from submarine depths that would not be landed. I've never stuck at any job since school. I'm afraid maybe I don't know how to commit. Maybe you get bored? I do. It was time to tell him my name. I'm Van, returned The Dart. Good name. Gender neutral with a touch of swagger. I like it. A stealth-ambition crept up on me on behalf of a young man who had left school early for mystery and the sea, who knew boredom, impatience, kindness, and death and who was, amongst other things, a serial renter like me. Don't settle, I said lightly to disguise the urgency that had taken hold at the fugitive view of possibility unfolding like that recent cloth of land and sea. Whatever you do, make sure it is so challenging you might feel—whatever—just don't settle. Yeah, said Van softly. I had entered the zone of zealotry and futility, of the old trying to pass inscrutable shit on to the young. I had no idea if he knew what the hell I was talking about or even if I did. The air hostess appeared at the front of the plane to announce our descent, and minutes later again to announce that we had landed. Those of you that have experienced any disturbance during the flight may disembark first, she intoned and, addressing the rest, please let those who have felt disturbed go ahead. Van and I exchanged incredulous looks. The flight had been smooth. What hell new euphemism was this? My ears experienced some disturbance, I said, inclining toward him. My legs feel a bit disturbed, he fired back, flexing his knees. The plane sat in suspense as a large woman lumbered up the aisle. Then another, a bundled form that emerged from behind us with a lot of bags and out past the airhostess. The number of bags made you feel suspicious about the self-diagnosis. On cue, the rest of us were on our feet. I parted with Van in Arrivals where my father's best friend Des was nowhere to be seen. Two years on, he and I were going to scatter half my father's ashes in the Rangitikei where the blue-grey cliffs that forms its banks is made of a clay called papa. In a hurry to catch a bus to his cousin's wedding, Van stayed with me to scout for my meet until I reluctantly urged him on his way. I passed Van as he doubled back in, and I exited for Pick Ups and Drops Offs where Des was waiting. I wasn't sure what Van had come back for, but we smiled at each other, full face this time. The slender thread of fate that connected us was being yanked one last time, but who knew? Seeing him in long shot in the Arrivals and Departures Hall I thought he really was as svelte as a dart, Van, but for now less directional. Asked what was on her mind when she wrote her story, the author replied, 'I was thinking, as I routinely do, about how to capture what I once heard the writer Sebastian Barry describe as the tincture of a person. His Irish accent made the descriptor indelible, and I knew immediately what he was talking about. How to get such a thing is another matter. It is basically impossible and that is why I write. It was extra impossible in The Dart's case. We had been seated side-by-side, so our glancing encounter was conducted in profile. But then, peripheral vision is a gift. 'I was thinking that the counter woman was maybe playing her own playful diversity game, never mind the orthodoxies of the seating plan. I struggled with her arresting beauty and the way her personal authority outstripped her station: how to suggest those things on the page without heading for homily. Reading a late draft, my friend Janine recognised her instantly from her own transits through Nelson airport. Queenly, was the word she used to describe her.'
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Where Will Cardano Be in 1 Year?
Cardano enables fast, low-cost transactions for a growing ecosystem of smart contracts and decentralized applications. Cardano's ADA token is one of five cryptocurrencies the U.S. intends to hold in a strategic crypto reserve. Several network upgrades expected this year may serve as a catalyst for Cardano's price to climb into 2026 and beyond. 10 stocks we like better than Cardano › In the rapidly evolving cryptocurrency landscape, it takes a lot to stand out among countless competing blockchain networks. Cardano (CRYPTO: ADA), launched in 2017, has transformed from a niche project into the ninth-largest cryptocurrency, boasting a $26 billion market capitalization. Yet its remarkable rise hasn't been without challenges. Despite an impressive 56% price increase during the past year, Cardano's ADA token is down more than 40% from its 52-week high, underscoring its speculative and volatile nature. Does the recent weakness present a buying opportunity for investors, or does it signal further downside? Let's explore where the Cardano might be in one year. Cardano is a Layer-1 blockchain, which means it operates as an independent and decentralized network that is not tied to any other cryptocurrency. It was created by Charles Hoskinson, a co-founder of Ethereum, aiming to build an improved and more advanced blockchain network, addressing Ethereum's early shortcomings, including scalability bottlenecks and governance challenges. Cardano gained credibility through robust, research-driven development, leveraging peer-reviewed academic papers with innovative industry best practices. Unlike proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin, which require energy-intensive mining, Cardano employs an energy-efficient proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which it calls "Ouroboros," allowing users to stake their ADA tokens to help validate transactions. The result is an environmentally efficient network that prioritizes security and is estimated to use just a fraction of Bitcoin's mining energy consumption. Cardano also has a fixed supply of 45 billion coins, designed to promote scarcity while maintaining a low per-token price, strengthening its long-term value proposition by encouraging adoption and minimizing inflation risks. Another Cardano innovation is its layered architecture that separates transaction settlement from computation for enhanced flexibility. The latest Hydra protocol, Cardano's Layer-2 scaling solution, has handled more than 1 million transactions per second (TPS) in testing, making it one of the fastest blockchain networks. This potential makes Cardano particularly attractive for high-throughput applications like real-time smart contracts, decentralized finance (DeFi), gaming, and microtransactions. A full Hydra deployment within the next year is a catalyst for investors to watch. Cardano is moving forward with its Midnight sidechain, a privacy-focused layer operating alongside the mainnet, which is expected to launch later this year. Midnight uses zero-knowledge proofs to offer secure, compliant smart contracts for sensitive sectors like finance and healthcare, which could help drive institutional adoption and ecosystem growth. These developments are a tailwind for the Cardano market price. The good news for Cardano is that cryptocurrencies as an asset class are benefiting from a favorable regulatory environment. The Trump administration has adopted a strongly pro-crypto stance, forming a working group to draft clear industry regulations, a shift from the recent years of regulatory uncertainty. Cardano was even included with a select group of cryptocurrencies for a planned national crypto reserve alongside Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple's XRP, and Solana, signaling its strategic importance and market confidence. Nevertheless, as strong as Cardano's framework and network potential may be, the crypto market is fiercely competitive, with multiple blockchains vying for dominance in adoption and share of digital transactions. Beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum, Cardano still trails other cryptocurrencies such as Solana and XRP, which are larger in terms of market capitalization and excel in various utility functions. There are also smaller blockchains that have posted stronger growth in key on-chain performance metrics. Notably, Cardano's total locked value (TVL), representing the value of all blockchain assets, including tokens and decentralized applications (dApps), at $323 million, pales in comparison to emerging cryptos such as Avalanche, with a TVL of $1.5 billion, and Sui with $2 billion. It's unclear if Cardano's speed, low-cost transaction structure, and decentralized governance model are enough for it to win market share. I'm bullish long-term on Cardano, viewing the blockchain's credibility and underlying security as its key advantages within the universe of cryptocurrencies. The ecosystem's growth, coupled with potential catalysts including the Hydra and Midnight updates, positions its ADA token to reclaim the $1.32 52-week high price level as an upside target during the next year. Investors should expect volatility to continue, but Cardano is one cryptocurrency built to last with a bright long-term future. Before you buy stock in Cardano, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Cardano wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $642,582!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $829,879!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 975% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 172% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of May 19, 2025 Dan Victor has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Avalanche, Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, Sui, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Where Will Cardano Be in 1 Year? was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
