PARIJS (ANP/AFP) - Christine Lagarde sluit niet uit dat ze voor het einde van haar tweede termijn vertrekt als president van de Europese Centrale Bank (ECB). Ze houdt de mogelijkheid open om een "Europese stem" te laten horen tijdens de Franse presidentsverkiezingen volgend jaar, zegt ze tegen zakenkrant Les Echos.

Eerder dit jaar schreef Financial Times dat Lagarde voor oktober 2027, het einde van haar termijn, zou vertrekken. In meerdere mediaoptredens zei de Française dat ze als een kapitein van een schip de ECB niet zou verlaten ten tijde van onrust over inflatie door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten.

Op de vraag of een eerder vertrek mogelijk is als de situatie normaliseert, antwoordt ze tegenover Les Echos: "Het is mogelijk. Ik denk dat er een Europese stem nodig is bij de Franse presidentsverkiezingen." Ze voegde eraan toe dat Frankrijk "moedige beslissingen moet nemen" en ze denkt dat een kleinere Franse betrokkenheid bij Europa een "pijnlijke weg" is voor het land.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De Tweede Kamer heeft ingestemd met een wet die regelt dat mensen die dat nodig hebben, in het stemhokje hulp kunnen krijgen van een stembureaumedewerker. Mensen met een fysieke beperking mogen momenteel al geholpen worden bij het stemmen door een bekende.

Verschillende fracties uitten hun zorgen over het onderscheid dat door de wet zou ontstaan tussen mensen met een fysieke beperking en mensen met een andere beperking. Dat ziet binnenlandminister Pieter Heerma anders, gezien er voor die laatste groep nu helemaal geen bijstand in het stemhokje mogelijk is. "De bestaande kloof wordt verkleind", zei hij daarover.

Het is volgens de bewindsman niet verstandig om hen ook te laten helpen door een bekende, omdat het om een veel grotere groep gaat. Anderzijds is het niet mogelijk om mensen met een fysieke beperking hulp te bieden van een stembureaumedewerker, omdat dit in strijd is met het VN-verdrag Handicap.

DARFUR (ANP/AFP) - Een vrachtwagen die werd gebruikt door de Verenigde Naties om hulpgoederen te vervoeren is aangevallen met een drone in Soedan. Daarbij is 50 ton aan hulpgoederen verloren gegaan, meldt de VN.

Het gebeurde in West-Darfur, waar sinds 2023 veel wordt gevochten tussen het regeringsleger en de Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Een woordvoerder van de VN zegt dat de hulpgoederen "duizenden" mensen die de hulp dringend nodig hebben nu niet zullen bereiken.

De organisatie slaat met enige regelmaat alarm over de situatie in Soedan. VN-mensenrechtenchef Volker Türk beschuldigde de RSF eerder van het plegen van genocide in de stad El-Fasher en recent zei de organisatie een herhaling van dat geweld te vrezen in El-Obeid.

Een maand geleden vielen bij een aanval op een hulpkonvooi van de VN vijf doden.

SAINTE-MARIE-LA-MER (ANP/AFP) - In het zuiden van Frankrijk zijn bijna 3000 mensen geëvacueerd om natuurbranden. De brandweer probeert met blushelikopters en blusvliegtuigen het vuur bij de plaatsen Sainte-Marie-la-Mer en Canet-en-Roussillon onder controle te krijgen.

Ongeveer de helft van de evacuees verbleef op campings in de omgeving. Twee brandweerlieden raakten lichtgewond bij de bluswerkzaamheden. Volgens minister van Infrastructuur Laurent Nunen zijn sinds woensdag 1200 brandweerlieden bezig het vuur te bestrijden.

Frankrijk kreeg in juni te maken met recordhitte. Tijdens een elf dagen durende hittegolf klom de temperatuur tot boven de 40 graden in veel plaatsen, waardoor de kans op natuurbranden toeneemt.

Verschillende politici vinden dat de regering te weinig heeft gedaan om de Fransen te beschermen tegen de hittegolf. Parlementsleden van de Groenen hebben daarom een motie van wantrouwen ingediend.

As it was foretold: the Trump regime gutted the NOAA and now weather forecasts are less accurate. An atmospheric scientist: “The forecasts I’m able to offer you are less accurate than they would otherwise be.”

In de Tour de France, die komend weekend van start gaat in Barcelona, lonkt voor het zesde jaar op rij een tweestrijd tussen Jonas Vingegaard en Tadej Pogacar. Beide renners gooiden hun programma overhoop om plezier te blijven houden in hun sport. „Mentaal gaat het uitstekend met me.”

There have been plenty of memorable off-track moments at Silverstone – here are some of the most viral from previous Grands Prix.

Lewis Hamilton has been looking ahead to what might be possible at his home event, the British Grand Prix at Silverstone – a track at which he has experienced record-breaking success.

Better title: "cheaters outraged that they got caught."

The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) -- which is slated to take place in Sydney, Australia, in December 2026 -- bans peer reviewers from uploading papers they referee to AI chatbots, as the practice breaches confidentiality. [...] To enforce the policy and catch illicit AI use in peer review, the event's organizers have included deliberately concealed instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review.

The instructions tell an LLM to use telltale phrases -- such as "This work addresses the central challenge" and "The claims of the paper" -- in a peer-review report. [...]

"Designing a trap that presumes bad faith corrodes the relationship the whole system depends on," Sören Auer, a computer scientist at Leibniz University Hannover, wrote on LinkedIn. "You do not build a healthy reviewing culture by treating your reviewers as suspects."

But others see merits in the approach. A similar prompt-injection effort has caught hundreds of reviewers misusing LLMs in submissions for next week's 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea, according to Nihar Shah, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and scientific integrity chair of that conference.

Culture of trust, uh huh.

In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed down the "black chamber" -- the State Department's code‐breaking office -- on the principle that the way to make men and nations trustworthy was to trust them. As he later told aide McGeorge Bundy, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Welcome to the LGBTQIA+ News Post for July 1, 2026. I know I've been gone for a while from posting, but life has been very difficult. No clouds in my stones, let it rain, I hydroplane in the bank..

The Bad News The United States Supreme Court, in the cases of Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., has ruled that state laws creating bans on transgender students playing in sports leagues that match their gender presentation are upheld. One of the implications is that Title IX equality requirements should be based on apparent gender as determined at birth and not by gender presentation. The judgement went 6-3, with the decision being written by Brent Kavanaugh, with additional concurring opinions written by Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. The three dissenting justices had their dissent written by Justice Sotomayor. The entire opinion can be read at this link. Kavanaugh finished his opinion with this bit of 'please don't kill me' drivel:

"We emphasize one last point. Most of the biological female and transgender student-athletes who are involved in transgender sports disputes around the country are teenagers or in their early twenties. Those student-athletes want to play sports. Their desire to compete warrants respect. No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.

Thomas's concurrence actually approves of conversion therapy, using in it the sentence:

"Because "gender dysphoria" is a mutable mental state that is the object of psychiatric treatment [emphasis mine], it does not resemble the immutable characteristics on the basis of which our precedents have applied heightened scrutiny— race, sex, or national origin."

Gorsuch's concurrence specifically states, flat out, that Bostock support the decision:

Second, Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U. S. 644 (2020), supports, not undermines, the Court's conclusion. There, Cite as: 609 U. S. ____ (2026) GORSUCH, J., concurring 3 we faced the question whether firing an employee for being homosexual or transgender amounted to "discriminat[ion] . . . because of . . . sex" in violation of Title VII. Id., at 650– 651, 655 (internal quotation marks omitted). In answering that question, we took two things as given. One, everyone agreed that firing an employee counts as "discrimination" in violation of Title VII if done because of sex. See id., at 681. Two, we read the word "sex" in Title VII to refer to biological sex. Id., at 655. Given all that, the only issue we had to resolve was whether discriminating against individuals for being homosexual or transgender qualifies as discrimination "because of " their biological sex. We held that it does. The statutory phrase "because of " does not require biological sex to be the only cause animating discrimination. Instead, that phrase merely requires biological sex to be one such cause. Id., at 656–659. And, as we detailed in our opinion, discriminating against a person for being homosexual or transgender necessarily entails discriminating against that person at least in part because of his biological sex. Id., at 660.*

Justice Sotomayor's dissent includes this little bit of brilliant commentary:

In either event, because unresolved factual questions prevent the Court from assessing the merits of B. P. J.'s equal protection claim at this time, the Court should allow the District Court to address those factual questions in the first instance. Yet in an opinion unencumbered by fact or law, the majority today cuts off that process prematurely, deciding instead that B. P. J.'s case must end now.

The killer of transgender University of Washington student Juniper Blessing has been found incompetent to stand trial and has been ordered to undergo competency restoration treatments in order for him to stand trial. The state of Florida has two of his congressional reps, Randy Fine and Greg Steube (both of who are rabidly homophobic and transphobic) writing letters to two bodies that oversee Irish dance organizations in the US, claiming (I shit you not) that having a trans girl competing should not be allowed because she has a biological edge. They cite no science. The Attorney General of Florida, James Uthmeier has threatened legal action against the competition in Orlando they are complaining about, along with the aforementioned letters. The bar is buried in the crust of the Earth, and these three fucksticks are renting drilling equipment for digging. Professional jackass and multiply-indicted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has walked back his previous support and now calls for restrictions on IVF fertility treatments. I mean, as long as those 'restrictions' are on the doctors not being shitty people, I could almost agree with him, a phrase that makes me nauseous. (This is also happening as he is seen jetting off to Iceland with his alleged mistress after campaigning on "Christian Values".) In Kansas, a transgender woman, Kris Ripper, was charged with operating a motor vehicle without a valid license. The reason: after updating her license after last year's Kansas law requiring sex on birth certificate on your driver's license, she updated it. When she was stopped for driving in the rain without headlights (they turned off automatically and she was unaware), she was pulled over, and the officer in question questioned if her license was real because he believed that she did not appear to be male, as the license stated. No citation was issued at the time of the stop; she received a failure to appear notice afterwards. The charges have, thankfully, been dropped. Sad News Transgender Filipino-American Kataluna Enriquez, the first openly transgender woman to participate in the Miss USA Pageant, was in an automobile accident and hospitalized for two weeks. Best wishes for her recovery. It was determined that actress Daveigh Chase, best known for her voice acting as Lilo in Lilo and Stitch and Chihiro in the dubbed version of Spirited Away, as well as performance in the US remake of The Ring as the murderous ghost Samara, had died of complications from AIDS, including sepsis and bacterial meningitis. She also had been homeless before her death, and was a drug user. Drag queen Jade Sotomayor (no known relation to the Supreme Court Justice), who participated in the first season of RuPaul's Drag Race, has reportedly been involved in a severe car accident and remains in critical condition. The Good News A federal judge in California has ruled that the Justice Department likely cannot lawfully obtain confidential medical records identifying transgender minors who received gender-affirming care at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford. The entire decision can be read at this link. Another federal judge, this one in DC, has certified a class of transgender service members and prospective service members for the purposes of a suit against the Orange Shit's ban on trans people serving in the military. The State of New Jersey previously had executive orders in place to protect its trans residents, which the new governor, Mikie Sherrill, affirmed she would continue. But executive orders can be revoked by a governor. Well, as of today, through the passing of two bills, the State of New Jersey has just passed a transgender shield law. Gov. Pritzker of Illinois signed three Trans Rights bills into law, and then went to march in a Pride parade. The deeply divisive, controversial Senatorial candidate from Maine, Graham Platner, has come forward to pledge to protect trans kids at the Portland Pride March. He stated "If people want to come after me and say, 'It's a bad thing that you think people should be free and equal and treated with dignity,' let them make that argument. That's the argument of a fascist. That's the argument of a bigot. And if fascists and bigots hate me, then I welcome that." (While he admits that he's had a really problematic history talking about the LGBTQIA+ community, he also has said, "Today I find that stuff abhorrent, and I am sorry that I ever used it.") For a while, it seemed that Mayor Zohran Mamdani of NYC was going to help trans adults in the city, but avoiding ticking off the idiots in DC. Well, that's changed, as he's going to give $15 million for trans youth care. The Daughters of the American Revolution have gotten a bit more revolutionary by voting to not exclude transgender women from membership. The announcement includes the phrase, "Transgender Americans are patriots, family members, volunteers, historians, and descendants of Revolutionary War ancestors just like anyone else." The child of neo-Nazi Derek Black, close friend of David Duke, has released a book entitled The Klansman's Son, and in that book has come out as transgender. The article deadnames her; she is using the name Adrienne now. In Hungary, tens of thousands of people turned out for the first Pride celebration in Budapest in years after the electoral loss of Viktor Orbán. While there was a march last year for Pride, it was a protest march, not a celebratory one. Boldog Pride-ot! The Cinnamon Roll Report Zendaya has stated that the thing that got her falling in love with Tom Holland was his appearance of Lip Synch Battle performing "Umbrella". Apparently, it was his confidence that sent her swooning. (You can see her falling in the video. It's brilliant.) Be well, friends. If you have news I missed or you want to share your personal triumphs, bring them here! Let us know your joys, so that we can offset the sadness and horror. When the sun shine, we shine together Told you I'll be here forever Said "I'll always be your friend" Took an oath, I'ma stick it out 'til the end Now that it's rainin' more than ever Know that we'll still have each other You can stand under my umbrella You can stand under my umbrella