Esteban Ocon has announced that he is to leave Haas at the end of the 2026 campaign, following weeks of speculation over the Frenchman’s F1 future.

fjo3 quotes a report from The Guardian, written by Tove Danovich: Every year, the night sky is becoming 10% brighter. Eighty percent of people live under light-polluted skies. And while the UN declared a healthy environment -- clean air, clean water -- to be a human right, I believe we also all have a right to darkness as well. This doesn't mean turning off every streetlamp. But do we really need bright white floodlights at the front of every garage? Replacing lights with ones that are bright enough to do the job -- and no brighter -- might make it so I wouldn't have to get in my car and drive for hours to see the night sky as it actually shines above us. To preserve the darkness would mean rules and enforcement around the warmth of the lights, where they point, and how bright they can be. It would mean not putting in three lights when one would do. If we recognized that darkness is something we need, we'd become more careful about chasing it away.

[...] Access to darkness is about more than stargazing. The night is its own habitat. Artificial lights confuse animals who use the moon to navigate, whether they're baby sea turtles navigating toward a parking lot instead of the ocean or moths who fly in circles around a lightbulb. Lightning bugs and frogs need darkness to complete their courtship rituals. Migrating birds get thrown off course by the bright lights of big cities. But the effects of light pollution linger even after it's daylight again, becoming visible. Research has shown light pollution is breaking the relationship between plants and pollinators, changing the time of year trees break into flower, and disrupting circadian rhythms for all living creatures. This includes humans. Whether it's artificial lights indoors or creeping in through the window at night, studies have found that we need darkness in order to rest, recover and stay healthy.

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British Transport Police (BTP) spent more than £320,000 putting half a million commuters through live facial recognition cameras, only for the system to identify precisely nobody it was looking for. Figures obtained by civil liberties group Liberty through Freedom of Information requests, and reported by The Guardian, show BTP's six-month trial scanned more than 500,000 faces at London railway stations and generated just one alert. That turned out to be a false positive, meaning the technology produced no correct matches and no arrests directly resulting from an LFR alert. The exercise wasn't exactly light on resources either. According to the figures, deployments swallowed almost 100 hours of police officers' time and cost more than £320,000. Privacy campaigners at Big Brother Watch told The Register the results would be funny if the implications weren't more serious. "The figures from the British Transport Police's live facial recognition pilot would be laughable, if they didn't have such troubling implications for our rights and freedoms," said Jasleen Chaggar, senior legal and policy officer at the campaign group. "Millions of Londoners use the city's stations every day and may have already found themselves caught in a digital police line-up, likely without even realizing." Then there's the small matter of what taxpayers got for their £320,000. "It's not fair to subject innocent people to intrusive identity checks during their commute, but it's even more insulting to waste almost 100 hours of officers' time and £320,000 of public money when it produces such meagre results," she said. "The pilot figures show that replacing officers with AI surveillance does not improve Londoners' safety and British Transport Police should drop their use of live facial recognition." But BTP isn't dropping it. In fact, the trial has been extended until November and expanded from Network Rail stations onto the London Underground. The system uses NEC's NeoFace M40 facial recognition tech, and cameras scan people passing through a designated area, comparing their faces against a police watchlist. When the software thinks it has spotted someone on that list, it generates an alert for an officer to review before deciding whether to stop the person. BTP says it cannot identify people who aren't on a watchlist and that it immediately deletes their biometric data. It also says deployments are intelligence-led and targeted at crime hotspots where officers believe "high harm offenders" are likely to pass through. That claim of a targeted approach isn't convincing everyone. Sarah Simms, senior policy officer at Privacy International, told The Register the results of the trial show just how many innocent passers-by can have their faces processed along the way. "We are deeply concerned by the results of the British Transport Police's live FRT trial. It reaffirms how invasive and disproportionate live facial recognition tech is and why it shouldn't be permitted. Thousands of people have their highly sensitive facial data processed in public spaces as they go about their daily lives, sometimes unknowingly. It also undermines claims of it being a targeted measure." Simms also pointed to the lack of legislation specifically governing the technology as BTP continues to expand its use. "What's further concerning is that they continue to extend these deployments when there is no specific legal framework in place to regulate facial recognition, which is essential to ensure there are restrictions and safeguards on its use to protect people's rights," she said. Those assurances haven't put the wider controversy around police facial recognition to bed. Earlier this year, UK police temporarily suspended deployments after independent testing raised concerns about racial bias at some operating thresholds. BTP's own experiment has produced a rather different problem so far: after scanning more than half a million faces, the only person its cameras picked out was the wrong one.®

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Meerdere gewonden in Arnhem waarover de NOS doodleuk kopt dat het gaat om 'een steekpartij', maar waar we op de beelden zien dat iemand met een machete staat te slashen. Dankzij de Gelderlander weten we dat groepen 'jonge, uitgeprocedeerde asielzoekers' het met elkaar aan de stok hadden. Een flink aantal psychisch getroebleerde knettergekke Syriërs teistert Arnhem (en de rest van Nederland trouwens) al langer. Burgemeester Ahmed Marcouch luidde al eens de noodklok en dat doet hij nu weer: "Het staat wel vast dat het om minderjarige en jonge vluchtelingen gaat. Het zijn vluchtelingen die al lang niets meer in Nederland te zoeken hebben en gewoon het land uit moeten." Zo zo!

'Steekpartij in centrum' ja

PARIJS (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De inflatie in Frankrijk is in september fors gestegen door de hoge brandstofprijzen vanwege de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. Volgens het Franse statistiekbureau Insee steeg de inflatie in de op een na grootste economie van de eurozone naar 3,4 procent op jaarbasis. Dat is het hoogste niveau in meer dan twee jaar.

In augustus bedroeg de Franse inflatie nog 2,6 procent. De prijzen voor diesel in Frankrijk stegen onlangs naar recordniveaus. De Franse regering heeft gezegd maatregelen te nemen om huishoudens te steunen.

In Spanje is de inflatie deze maand naar 4,9 procent gegaan, het hoogste niveau sinds begin 2023.

Vrijdag komen cijfers over de inflatie in de eurozone. Economen rekenden in doorsnee op een toename tot 3,7 procent. Dat is ruim boven de doelstelling van 2 procent die de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB) hanteert. De ECB heeft de rente dit jaar al twee keer verhoogd om de inflatie aan te pakken. Mogelijk wordt de rente nog verder verhoogd.

WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - De Amerikaanse militaire missie in Irak is volledig beëindigd volgens het Pentagon. De Verenigde Staten zullen nog wel trainingen geven en ondersteuning in inlichtingen bieden aan Irak.

De Iraakse veiligheidstroepen zullen verantwoordelijk zijn voor het onderdrukken van IS en de veiligheid van Irak in zijn geheel. Experts en veiligheidsfunctionarissen hebben hun zorgen geuit over een mogelijk veiligheidsvacuüm dat kan ontstaan.

Iraakse en Koerdische functionarissen zeggen dat de terugtrekking van de VS mogelijk een opleving van IS kan aanwakkeren. Ondanks de val van hun zelfbenoemde kalifaat bijna een decennium geleden, is er nog wel een netwerk van IS-leden in het land aanwezig. Daarnaast ondersteunt Iran sinds de val van Saddam Hoessein verschillende sjiitische milities in Irak.

De Amerikaanse troepen vielen Irak in 2003 binnen en brachten Saddam Hoessein ten val, waarna er onder meer een burgeroorlog ontstond.

The fire erupted Friday evening while the vessel Triumf was sailing in the Pacific Ocean off the eastern coast of Kamchatka.

Zo’n vijfhonderd tot achthonderd tieners hebben ernstige obesitas. Voor een kleine groep – tien à twintig patiënten per jaar – wordt een maagverkleiningsoperatie mogelijk in twee klinieken. De basisverzekering vergoedt dat sinds afgelopen juni.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: