The prime minister faces a standards investigation over Mandelson affair and testimony from Morgan McSweeney
Keir Starmer has told Labour MPs to “stick together and fight together” as ministers launched a massive operation to shore up his fragile position before a critical day for his premiership.
The prime minister faces the double threat of a standards investigation into his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US and a potentially damaging testimony from Morgan McSweeney, his former chief of staff.
Bloomberg reports that Microsoft is ending revenue-sharing payments to OpenAI (paywalled; alternative source) and making the partnership non-exclusive. "The rapid pace of innovation requires us to continue to evolve our partnership to benefit our customers and both companies," Microsoft said Monday in a blog post. Bloomberg reports: The revised deal is meant to simplify a complicated relationship between two partners that has been foundational to OpenAI's rise and the broader AI boom. OpenAI has since pursued partnerships with multiple cloud providers, including Microsoft rival Amazon.com Inc., to meet its growing computing needs to build and service AI software to a wider audience. As part of OpenAI's restructuring last year as a for-profit business, Microsoft received a 27% ownership stake in the AI startup.
MADRID (ANP) - De Belgische tennisser Alexander Blockx heeft zich verrassend geplaatst bij de laatste zestien van het masterstoernooi in Madrid. De nummer 69 van de wereld rekende in twee sets af met de Canadese favoriet en nummer 5 van de wereld, Félix Auger-Aliassime: 7-6 (3) 6-3.
De 21-jarige Blockx, die nog nooit een toernooi won op de ATP-tour en ook geen finale haalde, maakte vooral in de tweede set indruk met harde en zuivere services, waarop Auger-Aliassime geen antwoord had. De Belg treft in zijn volgende partij de Argentijn Francisco Cerundolo. Auger-Aliassime won in zijn carrière al negen ATP-toernooien; hij verloor in januari nog de finale van het ABN AMRO Open in Rotterdam.
BOEDAPEST (ANP/BLOOMBERG/RTR) - Wizz Air verwacht voor de komende maand genoeg vliegtuigbrandstof te hebben, ondanks waarschuwingen uit de sector over mogelijke tekorten. De budgetvlieger denkt daarnaast haar volledige en uitgebreidere zomerschema te kunnen uitvoeren zonder vluchten te annuleren.
"Ik denk niet dat we zonder brandstof komen te zitten", zei topman Jozsef Varadi maandag. Eerder deze maand waarschuwde de internationale luchtvaartbrancheorganisatie IATA nog voor vluchtannuleringen in Europa eind mei vanwege een dreigend kerosinetekort. Door de blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz komt de laatste tijd veel minder kerosine op de markt.
Wizz Air ziet het aantal zomerboekingen bovendien stijgen, zei Varadi. Andere vliegtuigmaatschappijen kondigden de afgelopen weken juist dalingen in vooruitboekingen aan.
Door de stijgende kerosineprijs hebben verschillende luchtvaartmaatschappijen, waaronder KLM en Lufthansa, vluchten geschrapt.
WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft een nieuw Iraans voorstel voor een definitief einde aan de oorlog besproken met zijn veiligheidsadviseurs, meldt het Witte Huis. Woordvoerder Karoline Leavitt wilde nog niet zeggen wat Trump van het plan vond.
In het voorstel staat dat de Straat van Hormuz wordt heropend en dat er pas later verder wordt gepraat over het Iraanse nucleaire programma. De VS houden volgens Leavitt sowieso vast aan hun eerdere eisen. Trump heeft eerder gezegd dat Iran al zijn verrijkt uranium moet overdragen en dat het land moet beloven nooit kernwapens te ontwikkelen.
"Ik zou niet zeggen dat ze het overwegen", zei Leavitt over het Iraanse plan. "Ik zou zeggen dat er vanochtend een discussie was, waar ik niet op vooruit wil lopen. Ik weet zeker dat jullie meer over dit onderwerp direct van de president zullen horen."
Oké, het is een beetje repetitief, maar het werkt wel aanstekelijk! Rachid Taha was trouwens meer dan een rai-zanger: hij experimenteerde in zijn jonge jaren ook met funk en rock.
The number of pro se legal cases, meaning trials where a defendant or plaintiff represents themselves in court without an attorney, have increased dramatically since the wide adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude, according to a pre-print research paper.
The authors of the paper, titled “Access to Justice in the Age of AI: Evidence from U.S. Federal Courts,” which has yet to undergo peer review, argue more people are representing themselves in court because they’re able to use AI to do a lot of the work that previously required a lawyer. The authors, Anand Shah and Joshua Levy, also say that these pro se cases are “heavier,” meaning each case includes more motions that demand more work out of judges and the justice system. Overall, they argue, the use of AI tools and the increase in pro se cases could put a new burden on the courts.
“If generative AI dramatically lowers the cost of self-represented litigation, the resulting surge in filings could overwhelm a system that depends on human judgment at every stage of adjudication,” Shah and Levy say in the paper.
The paper draws on administrative records covering more than 4.5 million non-prisoner civil court cases between 2005 and 2026 and 46 million Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) docket entries matching those cases. It found the share of pro se cases was pretty stable at 11 percent until 2022, after LLMs like ChatGPT became widely used, at which point it started to rise sharply, up to 16.8 percent in 2025.
“This stability seems to reflect a structural barrier: for most people, self-representation is prohibitively hard,” the paper says. “Filing a federal civil complaint requires identifying the correct jurisdictional basis, pleading sufficient facts to survive a motion to dismiss, and navigating procedural requirements that vary by context and case type. The widespread, public diffusion of capable LLMs changes that calculus. Without a law degree and at de minimis cost, any person with an internet connection can not only obtain interactive, case-specific legal guidance—drafting complaints, identifying statutes, navigating procedure—but also generate passable legal documents, particularly so after the release of GPT-4 in March 2023.”
The researchers note that the paper is necessarily descriptive, meaning it assumes the rise is due the the prevalence of AI tools, but does not link individual cases to individual LLMs. “We do not claim to identify a causal effect of GPT-4 on pro se filing, only that the observed time series is difficult to rationalize without generative AI playing a role,” the paper says.
To support their argument, the researchers also used a random sample of 1,600 complaints drawn from the eight year period between 2019 (prior to the prevalence of generative AI) and 2026 which they ran through the AI detection software Pangram. They found a rise from "essentially zero” in the pre-AI period to more than 18 percent in 2026.
Notably, it’s not just that there are more pro se cases, but that the “intra-case activity” for those cases, meaning the total volume of activity in those cases as measured by docket entries—filings, motions—are up by 158 percent from the pre-AI period. This means the workload for courts could be even higher that it appears based on the rise in pro se cases alone.
The paper also found that the post-AI rise in self-representation is mostly coming from plaintiffs as opposed to defendants, meaning people are mostly using AI to file complaints rather than respond to them. “Plaintiff-side pro se case counts averaged 19,705 per year from FY2015 to FY2022 and reach 39,167 in FY2025, nearly doubling,” the paper says. “Defendant-side pro se counts fall slightly over the same window, from 4,650 to 3,896.”
“Imagine that you have just a latent level of complaints that could exist in the world, people are constantly getting hurt at work whatever it happens to be,” Levy told me on a call. “But that distribution of potential cases is sort of unchanged over time. But what LLM allowed people to do was it lowered the cost of entry to the courts. Basically, it made it much easier to file many templatable complaints.”
On the one hand, the increase in the number of cases is good because it potentially gives more people with legitimate grievances access to the justice system that they didn’t have previously. On the other hand, a dramatic increase like this could burden the system and make all cases, not just AI-enabled pro se cases, take longer to resolve
“Whether or not it's a net social benefit is an open question,” Levy said. “But if we remain democratically committed to people having access to the courts as a matter of course then we think that the LLMs have this trade-off. The door to the courts opens wider but maybe the queue to enter gets longer.”
Anecdotally, when we were writing an article about lawyers getting caught using AI in court, we decided to not include pro se cases because there were so many, and to focus only on cases in which actual lawyers were caught using AI. The database we used for that article currently contains 1,353 cases; 804 of them are from pro se cases.
To handle this surge in demand for the Federal courts, Federal courts have to somehow increase its supply, or the courts’ capacity to take on cases. Unfortunately, as the paper notes, “there is no easy margin along which to ‘buy’ extra judge capacity. Already case backlog is becoming a persistent feature of the federal judicial system, there is no coming influx of judges to supply additional capacity, and federal courts in the United States cannot wholesale decline to hear cases.”
Levy suggested that one possible solution is to allow judges to use AI tools to do some of their “templatable” work as well, while still ensuring that human judges do the actual judging.
We’ve covered manyinstances of lawyers getting caught using AI in court, often because the AI hallucinated a citation of a case that didn’t actually exist. Judges are pretty mad when this happens and have issued fines for this behavior several times.
Tijdens Koningsdag kan je in Rotterdam op veel festivals dansen en feesten op alle soorten muziek. Op de meeste festivals is het gezellig druk. Maar de organisator van een kleiner evenement in Rotterdam-West komt hopelijk net uit de kosten.
ラーメン ビかいち — ramen. Non serve leggere altro.
Un ingresso piccolo, quasi nascosto sotto tubi, motori e strutture che sembrano più importanti del locale stesso.
Ma l’odore arriva prima degli occhi: grasso, intenso, inequivocabile.
Dentro si mangia ramen. Fuori lo sai già.
ラーメン ビかいち — ramen. You don’t need to read anything else.
A small entrance, almost hidden under pipes, vents and machinery that feel bigger than the place itself.
But the smell gets to you first: rich, greasy, unmistakable.
Inside, it’s ramen. Outside, you already know.
