Pitcher Griffin Canning signed with the New York Mets as a free agent in the offseason, but in one scary moment, his season may have ended on Wednesday.
Day: June 27, 2025
Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Agriculture and China’s Fufeng Group have signed an investment agreement to construct a deep corn processing plant in the Zhambyl region of southern Kazakhstan.
According to the ministry, the project will establish a vertically integrated industrial park with an annual corn processing capacity of up to one million tons. The complex will feature a starch production facility, three bio-fermentation plants, a coal-fired thermal power station, and a wastewater treatment plant. Future plans include facilities for producing hydrochloric acid and liquid ammonia.
The site will also manufacture amino acids and feed additives such as lysine, glutamine, glutamic acid, leucine, and threonine. The output will be primarily aimed at export markets in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.
Fufeng Group will invest approximately $350 million in the initial phase of the project, with the total investment expected to reach $800 million.
Production is scheduled to begin in 2029, with plans to scale up to five million tons of processed corn annually by 2032. The company intends to purchase 500,000 tons of locally grown corn starting in 2025 and to sign forward contracts with Kazakhstani agricultural producers in 2026.
This investment follows a broader trend of Chinese capital flowing into Kazakhstan’s agro-industrial sector. As previously reported by The Times of Central Asia, Chinese biopharmaceutical firm Yili Chuanning Biological Co. is investing $500 million in a major corn processing project in the Almaty region. That initiative will utilize advanced biotechnology to produce amino acids, probiotics, and biodegradable materials, including medical and packaging products.
Exclusive: Operation Wedlock lasted up to 20 years and took MI5 teams across world amid panic about ‘another Philby’
Britain’s spy chiefs were forced to launch one of the most sensitive and risky investigations since the cold war over fears a senior officer at the foreign intelligence service MI6 was a double agent for Russia.
The extensive hunt for the alleged mole, called Operation Wedlock, was run by MI6’s sister agency, MI5, which deployed a team of up to 35 surveillance, planning and desk officers, who travelled across the world.
Bridge that spans Brisbane River and includes solar panels and shade along its length hailed as a transformative piece of urban infrastructure
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The newest bridge spanning the Brisbane River – the longest cable-stayed pedestrian bridge in the country – has taken out top honours in the 2025 Australian Institute of Architects Queensland awards.
A week after Sydney’s new network of city metro stations collected architecture’s most prestigious prize in New South Wales, Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point Bridge was lauded at Friday night’s award ceremony as another example of the significant value of state governments investing in architecture to realise major infrastructure projects that raise the bar beyond the realm of mere functionality.
When Mariska Hargitay was 3, she and two of her brothers survived the car accident that killed their mother, bombshell movie star Jayne Mansfield. The kids were asleep in the back seat; the three adults in the front—Mansfield, her companion at the time, and the car’s driver—were killed instantly. Mariska’s two brothers, injured, were carried away from the scene. It wasn’t until later that one of them, 6-year-old Zoltan, realized Mariska wasn’t with them: she was pinned beneath the passenger seat, with a head injury. If Zoltan hadn’t spoken up, Mariska might not have been found until it was too late.
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That’s just one of the details revealed in Hargitay’s touching documentary My Mom Jayne, in which the actor, now 61, summons scraps of facts and remembrances to piece together the truth about her own identity, and in the process make peace with the mother she never knew. Hargitay has known since her 20s that the man who raised her, and loved her deeply—actor and bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay—was not her real father. Only now is she reckoning with the scope of that truth. My Mom Jayne hopscotches through Mansfield’s early life and career: She became a mother at age 16, and lived in Texas with her young daughter and her first husband until she could stand it no longer—she wanted to be a movie star so badly that she was drawn to Hollywood, where she eked out a living with small film parts. Then, in 1955, she landed a starring role on Broadway, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? That opened the door to bigger film roles, but like the star she obviously emulated, Marilyn Monroe, Mansfield wanted desperately to be considered a serious actor. With her moonbeam-colored hair and exaggerated, breathy speaking voice—which her children recall as seeming strange and upsetting, so different from the mom they knew at home—she settled, somewhat unhappily, for being a curvaceous sex symbol.
Hargitay, who would build her own career as an actor on TV’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, never felt comfortable with either her mother’s persona or her life choices. Mansfield was only 34 at the time of her death, in 1967. She and Mickey had divorced shortly after Mariska was born, though he and the woman he married after the divorce, Ellen Siano, would end up raising Hargitay and two of her brothers after Mansfield’s death. (Hargitay’s two other half-siblings also appear in the documentary, helping her cover some gaps that her research couldn’t fill.)
Though Hargitay makes it clear that the life her father and stepmother made for the family was a happy one, she also explains how unsettled she had felt for most of her life, unable to comprehend her mother’s motivations and feeling resentment about truths that were hidden from her. Yet by the end of My Mom Jayne—by which time we’ve also met Hargitay’s biological father, onetime Las Vegas entertainer Nelson Sardelli, in a sequence that’s not likely to leave a dry eye in the house—Hargitay’s catharsis is complete. When Hargitay finally, and tenderly, tells her mother, “I see myself in you for the first time,” we, too, know more about this charming, ambitious performer whose star never burned as brightly as she’d hoped. She wasn’t our mom. But her unruly secrets reflect the uncomfortable truths that are so often hidden in our own histories. Families are made of fallible humans. That’s their tragedy, and their glory.
So many naked bodies, yet no one is having good sex?
Trump has touted role in bringing two countries together, but vagueness of agreement has drawn scrutiny
The Vice President’s wife said she was “not plotting out next steps” as a potential first lady.
Photos of 12 men who became Catholic priests in the US [deltaMinutes] mins ago Now
For a team that has proven to have both a high ceiling and a high degree of volatility, will fans ever see the Mets at their best?