The number of people aged 100 or more in Japan has exceeded 100,000 for the first time, according to the health ministry.
Figures show Japan is now home to 107,677 centenarians, the highest number in the world, of whom 88% are women. The oldest woman is Kishimoto Fuyo, a 114-year-old from Kyoto City and the oldest man is Kato Hikaru, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto.
Health Minister Kenichiro Ueno said he was "delighted that so many people are living long, healthy and active lives", citing progress in medicine and technology.
But Kenichiro also warned of the challenge the country faces in maintaining a sustainable social security system.
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SwitzerlandChocolate!
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SwitzerlandBon voyage!! Can't wait to see one of the famous @steve-miller travelogues!!
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Word association threadshadows
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Word association threadcompany
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Canada calls his bluffCanada invited to become first 'associate member' of the EU
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced on Wednesday that Canada has been invited to become the first āassociate memberā of the EU.
She announced the move during her 2026 State of the Union address in Strasbourg, to an audience including not only MEPs but also Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who attended her speech in the midst of a trade war with the US.
Since late August, the Canadians have been pushing hard for the Europeans to build a closer relationship with them, though full EU membership is not an option as Canada is not a European state.
During her speech before the MEPs on Wednesday, von der Leyen invited the country to become āthe first associate member of the European Union".
āWe share one ocean, one set of values, one way of seeing the world. And we will now build our shared future as well,ā she added.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/09/16/canada-to-become-first-associate-member-of-the-eu
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Roman road buildersThey were busy bees.
A multidisciplinary team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark, Queen Mary University of London and other European institutions analyzed a data set representing almost 300,000 kilometers (186,000 miles) of Roman roads across the former empire, creating the most detailed quantitative picture yet of how the Roman road network was structured.
Testing an imperial network
The study, published in Nature Communications on Sept. 15, challenges the idea that roads of the empire were uniformly straight and the famous saying that "all roads lead to Rome." The analysis draws on "Itiner-e, The Digital Atlas of Ancient Roads" and applies network centrality, a method for measuring how important a given point is to overall connectivity, to model the empire's road system.
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A new doomsday approachesMoonbat posted this link next door. Long but readable.
The first few paragraphs:
Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessorās ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
Two reports have come out about this incident, one from OpenAI itself, and another one from METR and Redwood Research. The METR/Redwood investigationās scope was limited to how the second civilization of AIs pwned Hugging Face (but it didnāt look at how the third civilization pwned OpenAI itself, which seems like an even more concerning incident). These two reports are 38 and 91 pages long respectively, and itās kinda hard to parse the storyline.
Iāve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
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Word association threadhotel
