Worse, it creates incentives to block democracy.

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo of the “Tranquill Waterfall” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during a visit to “Glover Garden” in Nagasaki, Japan. As you stand at the entrance to Glover Garden, the serene waterfall signals the historical oasis waiting inside. The centerpiece is the Glover Residence, an elegant 19th-century wooden structure that blends Georgian and Japanese elements. It is believed to have inspired John Luther Long’s 1898 story “Madame Butterfly..”

Of je nu naar school moet, naar je werk of misschien wel naar een bruiloft? Wie afhankelijk is van het openbaar vervoer, staat woensdag voor een flinke uitdaging. Ook in onze regio worden de gevolgen gevoeld, blijkt uit een rondgang op Rotterdam Centraal. Hoe gaan regiogenoten om met een dag zonder trein, tram, bus en metro?

In Schiedam is donderdagavond een tunnel ondergelopen na regenval. Op beelden is te zien dat er diepe plassen liggen. Agenten die poolshoogte kwamen nemen, reden zich vast.

Brothers, convicted of parents’ killings and denied parole last year, permitted to apply for another hearing earlier than expected

Erik and Lyle Menendez will be before a parole board again in March, about 17 months earlier than expected.

The brothers were originally sentenced in 1996 to life in prison for the 1989 fatal shootings of their father, Jose Menendez, and mother, Kitty Menendez, in their Beverly Hills mansion. A Los Angeles judge reduced their sentences to 50 years to life in May 2025, making them eligible for parole because they were under age 26 when they committed their crimes.

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Venice film festival: Affleck’s third film as a director is a diverting gothic anthology about mysterious strangers, murder and – pointedly – wronged men

Gather ye ’round the glowing screen for a Casey Affleck campfire tale. It contains superstitions and murder and human oddities of all stripes. An old hermit in his shack. Something nasty in the woodshed. If you like the first tale, fill your boots, settle back, because here comes another and another; each sparked by the embers of its neighbour and playing out with the same deliberately theatrical panache. Affleck’s picture roams and rambles like a creepy cracker-barrel Jackanory.

Actually there is much to relish in Company, Affleck’s third film as a director, even if many of its elements feel like off-the-peg eccentricities; a little too laundered and self-consciously strange. It begins in tried and tested fashion with the arrival of a mysterious stranger on a dark winter’s night. The stranger takes a seat and spins a tale, at which point December 1975 melts into 1953, then 1903, before finally the film crosses the ocean to Europe at the tail end of the plague. Nick Nolte is a hermit pining for his lost daughter, while Ben Mendelsohn plays a mean, mordant farmer who reaches for his handgun too readily. Both men, one suspects, are destined for a bloody end.

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Hé maar dit is toch een beetje gek hè. Hanneke van der Werf is door D66 op Buitenlandse Zaken gezet en in die hoedanigheid sloeg ze al een internationaal pleefiguur doordat ze haar eigen standpunten over de aanval van Trump op Iran niet opeens niet meer wist. Dat komt natuurlijk omdat ze gewoon van een briefje voorleest wat Jan Paternotte en Sjoerd Sjoerdsma haar vertellen, maar dat voorlezen ging afgelopen zondag een beetje mis toen ze bij Pauw & De Wit opeens pleitte voor Nederlandse aanvallen op Russische installaties. Een beetje mal natuurlijk, en terwijl de Russische ambassade gisteren in zijn smerige vuistje lachte, stuurde Hanneke er een raar tweetje uit en vandaag stond ze zelf om een hoekje te wachten hoe Jan Paternotte de meubelen voor de roze microfoon probeerde te redden door te doen alsof iedereen weleens 'we' zegt als ie 'ze' bedoelt. We denken zeker dat we helemaal gek zijn bij D66.

Ook vandaag in Den Haag

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The Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University hosts free-to-the-public exhibitions and programs inviting a journey across multiple centuries and continents titled The Otherworld is Home. Inspired by the Yorùbá proverb, “Life is a journey, the otherworld is home” (ayé l’àjò, ọ̀run n’ilé), the museum-wide presentation explores themes of personal reclamation, cultural identity, spiritual passage, and connection across Africa’s many diasporas.

The three simultaneous exhibitions below offer opportunities to explore the enduring resonance of African artistic traditions and their continued influence on contemporary life. These exhibitions are activated with a full slate of programming that may be found on the museum’s events page.

African Art: Ancient Roots, Enduring Values

Featuring more than 40 classical and neoclassical works, this exhibition highlights how African artists use traditional craftsmanship to connect the tangible and spiritual worlds. “This exhibition and essay explore how, what, and why African works of art . . . work: how they move and affect us; what roles they perform; and the ways they may acquire different purposes, meanings, and values as they travel across oceans and cultural, political, and religious boundaries over time and space,” writes guest curator and scholar of African and African diaspora arts Henry John Drewal.

Iké Udé: Sartorial Anarchy

Artist Iké Udé’s ongoing photographic series Sartorial Anarchy merges clothing and objects from different times and places to upend recognizable signifiers of cultural and individual identity. The Nigerian born artist, now living in New York City, transforms himself into a multifaceted amalgam of many identities in these photographic self-portraits. According to the artist, “In each image, I married disparate costumes from widely diverse traditions, countries, and time frames. And in mixing eras and cultures, I was able to bring harmony, as it were, to their similarly irreconcilable differences.”

Thresholds

Thresholds brings together the work of Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Portia Cobb, Stephen Hamilton, and Daniel Minter to dynamically explore the depth, complexity, and resilience of Black cultural memory. The artists create at a threshold between the seen and unseen, the present and the ancestral, and the place left behind and the place arrived at. Working across several media, they present their work alongside African works from the Haggerty’s collection to create a “call and response,” a participatory exchange in which one voice calls out and others answer in turn. Building on a shared yet continually unfolding cultural memory, where the past remains active and unresolved, these practices become sites of inspiration, critical reflection, and renewal.

To learn more, visit marquette.edu/haggerty-museum.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article ‘The Otherworld Is Home’ Explores Personal Reclamation, Cultural Identity, and Spiritual Passage appeared first on Colossal.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Financiënminister Eelco Heinen mist volgende week het laatste deel van de Algemene Politieke Beschouwingen (APB) omdat hij naar Dublin gaat voor overleg met collega's uit andere landen. Dat meldt de bewindsman dinsdagavond in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer.

Tijdens de APB debatteren fractieleiders over de plannen die Heinen dinsdag op Prinsjesdag presenteert. Het debat vindt plaats op woensdag en donderdag. Heinen vertrekt donderdagavond om 19.00 uur naar de Ierse hoofdstad om vrijdag bij de Eurogroep en Ecofinraad te zijn.

Premier Rob Jetten voert tijdens de APB het woord namens het kabinet.

Google DeepMind has released AlphaGenome Atlas, a free research database containing AI-generated predictions for the effects of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations in the human genome. Built from its AlphaGenome model, the atlas is designed to help scientists interpret both protein-coding and harder-to-understand regulatory DNA. Fortune reports: AlphaGenome Atlas, as DeepMind calls the database, is a precomputed catalogue of what each substitution of a single DNA base is likely to do to the machinery that switches genes on and off. Until now researchers had to run such a model one variant at a time or had to test variants in the laboratory, a process that was painstakingly slow. It would have taken many human lifetimes to discover the consequences of all 9 billion possible single-letter mutations. The Atlas promises to make the job of biologists and medical researchers considerably easier, potentially speeding up the understanding of genetic diseases and the hunt for possible cures.

Pushmeet Kohli, DeepMind's vice president for research and head of its AI for science team, told reporters on a briefing call that this was the first time any researcher in the world could reach a comprehensive map of human genetic variation "by simply opening a browser." Kohli also framed the release as helping to complete the unfinished business of the Human Genome Project, which in 2003 succeeded in mapping the entire human DNA sequence. "As the saying goes, we bought the book," he said, "but we did not understand how to read it."

Atlas is available for non-commercial use from today through a website Google DeepMind has set up for it. The company said it would be available for commercial use through a licensing arrangement through Google Cloud "soon." Kohli said that Google DeepMind's sister company,ÂIsomorphic Labs, which is using AI for drug discovery, would have access to Atlas but that it would also require a commercial license for access. He did not specify exactly what the terms would be for commercial licensing. A paper describing the Atlas and how it was created is being released on bioRxiv, a repository for biomedical preprint academic papers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.