Satirical website the Onion plans to turn rightwing commentator Alex Jones’s misinformation site Infowars into a parody of itself under a leasing agreement provisionally approved by a Texas court.
Under a proposed deal with court administrators, Infowars would be leased by Global Tetrahedron, a Chicago-based company that owns the Onion, for $81,000 a month for six months, with an option to renew for another six months.
PM admits he made mistake in choice of ambassador as he makes high-stakes statement to parliament over scandal
Keir Starmer has accused Olly Robbins of deliberately and repeatedly obstructing the truth about the Mandelson vetting scandal before a high-jeopardy appearance of the sacked top official before MPs on Tuesday.
Six days after the prime minister said he had learned that his pick for Washington ambassador had failed security vetting, Starmer admitted his decision to appoint him had been a fundamental mistake.
Installation and pre-approval without consent looks dubious under EU law
One app should not modify another app without asking for and receiving your explicit consent. Yet Anthropic's Claude Desktop for macOS installs files that affect other vendors' applications without disclosure, even before those applications have been installed, and authorizes browser extensions without consent.…
DEN BOSCH (ANP) - In Den Bosch werd maandagavond gedemonstreerd op de Beverspijken, op een bedrijventerrein waar een toekomstig azc moet komen. Het was het derde protest daar in een week tijd.
Rond 19.00 uur waren er volgens een verslaggever van het ANP zo'n 250 demonstranten aanwezig. De betogers droegen veel Nederlandse vlaggen bij zich. Op een spandoek was 'fietst jouw kind hier straks nog veilig?' te lezen. Er was veel politie, onder meer te paard en met busjes.
Een halfuur later ging de groep naar een nabijgelegen rotonde. Daar werden ze omsingeld door de politie. Daarna blokkeerde de groep de weg richting de rotonde en werd iets richting de politie gegooid. Niet veel later vertrok de groep demonstranten richting het centrum van het nabijgelegen dorp Engelen.
Einde demonstratie
Een uur later keerde de groep terug en eindigde de demonstratie. De politie laat weten niet te hebben ingegrepen en meldt dat de betoging zonder noemenswaardige gebeurtenissen is verlopen.
Zaterdag heeft de Bossche burgemeester Jack Mikkers nog negen personen een gebiedsverbod opgelegd. Een dag eerder kregen twee anderen eenzelfde verbod. Tot dinsdag 07.00 uur mogen zij niet op bedrijventerrein De Vutter komen.
Bij een protest op donderdag werden twee personen gearresteerd. Toen werden er stenen gegooid en probeerden betogers de eerdergenoemde rotonde te bezetten. Eerder die week probeerden demonstranten tijdens een ander protest de A59 te betreden. In de hoop de demonstratie van maandag onder controle te houden had de gemeente Den Bosch op de eigen website aanwijzingen voor de demonstranten gepubliceerd.
MADRID (ANP) - De Spaanse tennisser Carlos Alcaraz heeft maandag tijdens een gala in Madrid voor het eerst de Laureus Award voor sportman van het jaar gekregen. De prijs voor sportvrouw van het jaar ging voor de eerste keer naar de Belarussische tennisster Aryna Sabalenka. De onderscheiding geldt als de Oscar van de sport. Er waren geen Nederlandse sporters genomineerd.
Alcaraz besloot het jaar als nummer 1 van de wereld en won in 2025 onder meer Roland Garros en de US Open. Sabalenka was eveneens de mondiale nummer 1 en veroverde de titel op de US Open.
Alcaraz en Sabalenka zijn de opvolgers van de Zweedse polsstokhoogspringer Armand Duplantis en de Amerikaanse turnster Simone Biles.
Max Verstappen
Duplantis was dit jaar opnieuw genomineerd, net als tennisser Jannik Sinner, voetballer Ousmane Dembélé (Paris Saint-Germain), wielrenner Tadej Pogacar en motorcoureur Marc Márquez. Bij de vrouwen waren naast Sabalenka voetbalster Aitana Bonmatí (Barcelona), zwemster Katie Ledecky en atletes Melissa Jefferson-Wooden, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone en Faith Kipyegon genomineerd.
Voetballer Lamine Yamal van Barcelona kreeg de award voor beste jonge sporter en Formule 1-coureur Lando Norris ontving de prijs voor doorbraak van het jaar. Snowboardster Chloe Kim werd uitgeroepen tot actiesporter van het jaar. Golfer Rory McIlroy kreeg de award voor comeback van het jaar en Champions League-winnaar Paris Saint-Germain werd sportploeg van het jaar.
In 2022 werd Max Verstappen als eerste Nederlander sportman van het jaar. Rolstoeltennissters Diede de Groot (2024) en Esther Vergeer (2002 en 2008) werden in het verleden uitgeroepen tot parasporter van het jaar. Johan Cruijff ontving in het verleden de 'Lifetime Achievement Award' en de 'Spirit of Sport Award'.
De Franse autoriteiten onderzoeken onder meer de seksuele beelden die gebruikers via Grok kunnen genereren. Musk noemde het onderzoek eerder „achterlijk”.
Subscribe to 404 Media to get The Abstract, our newsletter about the most exciting and mind-boggling science news and studies of the week.
Salmon exposed to cocaine swim farther and behave differently than unexposed fish, according to the first study to observe the effects of cocaine on fish in the wild rather than a laboratory setting.
Many waterways around the world are contaminated with a host of legal and illegal substances that are consumed by humans and then excreted into sewage systems. As global demand for cocaine skyrockets, traces of the drug—including its main metabolite, benzoylecgonine—are flowing into lakes and rivers where they can be absorbed by wildlife, such as Atlantic salmon.
Previous research in laboratory conditions has already linked cocaine exposure to behavioral changes in aquatic species, but this connection has never been explored in fish in the wild. Now, scientists have demonstrated that cocaine and benzoylecgonine “can accumulate in the brains of exposed Atlantic salmon—an ecologically and economically important species of high conservation concern—and disrupt the movement and space use of these fish in the wild,” according to a study published on Monday in Current Biology.
“We were motivated by a major gap in the scientific literature: almost everything that was known about the impacts of cocaine pollution on animal behaviour relies on data that has been collected in laboratory settings,” said Michael Bertram, an author of the study and an associate professor in the department of wildlife, fish, and environmental studies at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, in an email to 404 Media.
“We wanted to know whether environmentally realistic exposure to cocaine and its major metabolite, benzoylecgonine, actually changes how fish move in the wild under real ecological and environmental conditions,” he continued.
To fill this knowledge gap, Bertram and his colleagues obtained more than a hundred Atlantic salmon “smolts”—the term for young fish—that were raised in a hatchery until they were two years old. The team divided them into three groups of 35 fish each and equipped every fish with an implant and tracking tags. The “cocaine group” received a slow-release chemical implant of cocaine, the “metabolite group” received a slow-release benzoylecgonine implant, and a third “control group” carried a dummy implant with no chemicals.
The three groups were released simultaneously on April 12, 2022 at the same site on the south-western side of Lake Vättern in Sweden, alongside 200 other smolts that were not involved in this experiment. Over the course of roughly two months, the exposed groups moved much more than the control group, especially the metabolite group; they traveled 1.9 times farther per week than the unexposed smolts.
“We expected an effect of contaminant exposure on the movement of salmon, but the scale of the changes seen still surprised us,” Bertram said. “The strongest response was close to a two-fold increase in movement, and the most unexpected result was that benzoylecgonine, the main metabolite of cocaine, produced the clearest effect rather than cocaine itself.”
Indeed, the study found that the metabolite group swam almost nine miles farther per week than the control week in the final two weeks of the 8-week experiment, whereas the control group was more settled down by that point.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that environmental levels of a cocaine metabolite that is commonly found in aquatic ecosystems can alter the space use and swimming activity of fish in the wild,” the team said in the study.
It’s not clear why the metabolite group was so restless, given that benzoylecgonine is considered psychoactively inactive in humans. The compound is a long-lived byproduct of cocaine made by the liver and excreted in urine, which makes it the easiest biomarker to look for in a typical drug test. The possibility that this metabolite may have a greater impact on some species in the wild is disturbing, in part because it is frequently found in higher concentrations in natural environments than its parent compound (cocaine).
“The results suggest that benzoylecgonine may be more biologically important than it is often assumed to be,” Bertram said. “Our findings raise new questions about whether metabolites can sometimes be as disruptive as, or even more disruptive than, the parent compound in aquatic wildlife.”
The team emphasized that much more research is required to understand the pressures that cocaine and other substances might be introducing both to individual species and to whole ecosystems.
“The next steps are to work out the mechanisms by which cocaine and its metabolite disrupt behaviour and movement in fish in the wild, test how general this effect is across other species and systems, and use higher-resolution tracking to see whether these movement changes affect predation risk, migration, reproduction, or survival,” Bertram said. “That is really the key question now: not just whether behaviour changes, but what those changes mean ecologically.”
For example, this particular study focused on hatchery-raised smolts that were released into the wild, but future studies could test out the effects of these contaminants on fully wild populations as well, which have their own unique behavioral characteristics. Unraveling the effects of these human-sourced substances is even more urgent given that the global use of illicit drugs increased by roughly 20 percent over the last decade, suggesting that “the environmental impact of these substances is likely to grow,” according to the study.
“The behaviour and movement of wildlife underpin habitat use, feeding, predator exposure, and population connectivity, so altering these processes could have wider consequences for food webs and population dynamics,” Bertram concluded. “For species already under pressure, an added stressor like this could be highly detrimental, although the long-term effects on fisheries and ecosystems still need to be tested directly.”
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg, written by writer Austin Carr: Allbirds is pivoting to artificial intelligence. The San Francisco brand, whose wool running shoes were once the sneaker du jour among the tech crowd, announced last week that it was expanding into AI computing infrastructure. The bizarre strategic shift was immediately greeted with a surprising frenzy on Wall Street, where shares of Allbirds soared 582% last Wednesday before dropping the next day. [...] Of course, the absurdity of Allbirds' situation echoed familiar Silicon Valley tropes -- from the endless startup pivots of the 2010s to the more recent boom-and-bust cycles of arbitrarily valued crypto coins. But it immediately reminded me of the marketing ploys of the dot-com crash. After all, some of the more iconic fails ended up being retailers such as Pets.com, Webvan, etc., riding the web wave with little to show for it beyond terrible margins.
One particular comparison from that period stands out as relevant to Allbirds: Zap.com. The holding company behind it, Zapata Corp., had a long and convoluted history, but was essentially selling fish-oil products by the time it decided to reinvent itself as an internet portal. It amassed a variety of web properties -- in media, e-commerce, gaming and so on -- and even once tried to acquire the search engine Excite. Spoiler alert: Zap flopped. Jen Heck, then a young employee at one of Zap's up-and-coming portfolio entities, remembers how quickly the hype of that web 1.0 turned to hell. As absurd as Zapata's pivot sounds today, it seemed feasible during the excitement of the internet revolution. "We went from like, 'Wow, this life thing is just so easy,' to it all ending so suddenly," Heck recalls. The ones who survived that tech bubble, she says, actually had differentiated products and the right creative thinkers building them -- and weren't just cynically jumping on the latest hot trend. "'Internet' was the magic word then, and 'AI' is the magic word now," Heck says.
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/20195836/200426VER_2033165535_Musk.jpg)
