MASHHAD (ANP/AFP) - Grote mensenmenigten zijn volgens Iraanse media op de been in de noordoostelijke stad Mashhad voor de uitvaart van de overleden hoogste leider van het land, ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Menigten met vlaggen en spandoeken bevolken de brede wegen die leiden naar het mausoleum van de Imam Reza (765-818) waar Khamenei later op donderdag wordt bijgezet. De gouverneur van de regio verwachtte dat er 15 miljoen mensen bijeen zouden komen voor de uitvaart. Die is vertraagd door de drukte in de stad.

Khamenei werd eind februari met naasten om het leven gebracht door gerichte Amerikaanse en Israëlische luchtaanvallen op zijn hoofdkwartier in Teheran. Doel was het regime van de sjiitische geestelijkheid te 'onthoofden', maar dat is niet gelukt.

De zesdaagse massale rouwplechtigheden in Teheran, Qom, Najaf, Karbala en ten slotte Mashhad tonen volgens de regering de populariteit van de martelaar Khamenei.

NEW YORK (ANP) - Jeansmerk Levi Strauss stond donderdag bij de dalers op de beurzen in New York. De bekende spijkerbroekenfabrikant presteerde afgelopen kwartaal beter dan verwacht en verhoogde voor de tweede keer op rij de omzetverwachting voor het hele jaar. Ook keert het bedrijf meer dividend uit. De winstverwachting viel echter wat tegen en beleggers lijken de resultaten aan te grijpen om winst te nemen in het aandeel. Het aandeel Levi's, dat dit jaar 18 procent in waarde is gestegen, werd ruim 4 procent lager gezet.

De algehele stemming op Wall Street was wisselend. De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde kort na opening 0,1 procent lager op 52.288 punten. De brede S&P 500 steeg 0,3 procent tot 7505 punten en de techgraadmeter Nasdaq won 0,4 procent tot 25.993 punten.

Meta will build its first Canadian data center in Alberta, investing $9 billion in a 1-gigawatt facility that can scale to 1.8 gigawatts to support its AI infrastructure needs. The project will rely on new generation and grid infrastructure funded by Meta, including a long-term agreement tied to a new natural gas power facility. The company says it will offset electricity use with clean and renewable energy investments. Reuters reports: Meta has doubled down on AI, pledging hundreds of billions of dollars to build large AI data centers in the U.S. The Alberta announcement represents the company's 33rd data center globally. Executives made the announcement in Calgary alongside Premier Danielle Smith and other Alberta government officials, who have spent several years courting Silicon Valley tech giants with the aim of spurring a large-scale investment in the oil-and-gas province. Alberta's technology minister, Nate Glubish, told reporters there are currently several other gigawatt-scale data center proposals in various stages of development in the province. "This is the first of its kind, the first of its size, the first of its scale, but it won't be the last," Glubish said.

Meta, like other tech giants, is facing rapidly expanding power needs due to the growth of AI, and Alberta is rich in natural gas which sells at a significant discount to the U.S. benchmark. The province's cold climate also makes cooling the massive super-computers and related data center infrastructure more cost-efficient. The 20 existing small- to mid-scale data centers in Alberta already pull from the province's energy grid, which is 60% powered by natural gas. The provincial government is giving new proponents the option to build their own power sources to avoid limits on power capacity. Meta said Wednesday it will fully fund new generation and grid infrastructure for its Alberta data center, which will consume about as much electricity as 800,000 homes. Gary Demasi, Meta's vice president for data center development, said the company will offset that electricity use by investing in clean and renewable energy. He also said the data center will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system, meaning its total water use will be less than that of a typical golf course.

[...] The company has partnered with Alberta-based Pembina Pipeline , which announced last week it will go ahead with its Greenlight Electricity Centre, a new natural gas-fired power-generation facility in Sturgeon County which will be in service in late 2030 and with which Meta has a long-term tolling agreement. Until that project is operational and for the next decade, Alberta-based power producer Capital Power will provide 250 megawatts of electricity for the site using its existing natural gas-fired fleet. The project will require approximately 150 million cubic feet per day of natural gas, according to Pembina, helping to create demand for Western Canadian natural gas producers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Questions swirl about origins of gifts, loans and donations as even party supporters wonder if it can weather the storm

• UK politics live – latest updates

• Why is Farage quitting as an MP, only to stand again?

Scrutiny is mounting on Reform UK’s finances.

On Tuesday, amid an investigation by parliamentary standards into an undisclosed £5m gift, Nigel Farage announced he would resign and trigger a byelection in his constituency of Clacton-on-Sea.

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US president contested judge’s order to release money after Carroll’s 2023 sexual abuse and defamation trial against him

A Manhattan federal appeals court late on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump’s latest bid to delay the payment of more than $5m to E Jean Carroll following her successful 2023 sexual abuse and defamation trial against him.

The US court of appeals for the second circuit made its decision hours after Trump filed paperwork fighting Manhattan federal court judge Lewis Kaplan’s order releasing this money – which has been held in a court-controlled account since June 2023. Trump denies all wrongdoing.

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"The Dementia Values and Priorities Tool is designed to help you communicate your wishes regarding future care if you are living with dementia. After answering a series of questions related to the changes commonly seen in the progression of dementia, the tool will provide you with a document that can be added to your existing advance directive and shared with others. The interactive online tool is available in English and Spanish" and the printable PDF version is available in Spanish, English, and Chinese.

Entering your name and date of birth on the first screen of the tool is optional. Provided by Compassion & Choices, a US advocacy group that advocates for access to Medical Aid in Dying, for access to palliative sedation, and regarding other end-of-life concerns. Compassion & Choices's guidance on Advance Directives suggests:

Review your advance directive annually (or at minimum, every 5-10 years) and update when any one of the "5 Ds" has occurred: Death of a loved one, Divorce, a new Diagnosis, Decline in health or you reach a new Decade.

In haar nieuwe Parade-voorstelling ‘2 Fast 2 Funny’ rekt theatermaker Bibi Roos de grenzen van taal en van het publiek op. Dat doet ze via haar schaamteloze alter ego Funny Bergman, die zorgt voor verwarring.

A visual identity inspired by the physical act of analog writing, where the letter, chance, and imperfection become the foundation of a contemporary visual language for literature.

Microsoft has quietly fixed the “RoguePlanet” zero-day in Microsoft Defender, closing the latest hole exposed by security researcher Nightmare Eclipse after months of public sparring over the company's handling of vulnerability reports. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, was addressed through an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine rather than via its monthly Patch Tuesday bundle. Microsoft said customers should ensure they're running the latest engine version to receive the fix. The flaw first surfaced in June when Nightmare Eclipse published both technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code, claiming RoguePlanet worked against fully patched Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems. According to the researcher, the bug exploits a race condition in Microsoft Defender to spawn a command prompt with SYSTEM privileges, granting an attacker complete control of the local machine if the timing is right. "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss," Nightmare Eclipse wrote at the time. "I have managed to get a 100 percent success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others." The researcher also claimed the exploit worked regardless of whether Defender's real-time protection was enabled. When The Register first covered RoguePlanet in June, Microsoft would only say it was investigating the claims. That probe has now ended with a fix, although Redmond hasn't publicly explained what changed under the hood or whether the bug had been exploited outside of proof-of-concept demonstrations. RoguePlanet became the seventh Windows zero-day publicly disclosed by Nightmare Eclipse since April as part of an increasingly acrimonious campaign against Microsoft's vulnerability disclosure and bug bounty programs. The researcher, who claims to be a former Microsoft employee, has repeatedly accused the company of ignoring reports, deleting accounts used for submissions, and treating independent researchers with contempt. After Microsoft initially warned that publishing exploit code could carry legal consequences, security researchers pushed back hard enough that the company issued a clarification saying it had no intention of pursuing action against people conducting or publishing legitimate security research. Nightmare Eclipse, meanwhile, alleged that Microsoft removed repositories hosting the RoguePlanet proof-of-concept from GitHub and GitLab before relocating the exploit to a self-hosted repository. With CVE-2026-50656 now patched, Microsoft has closed every public zero-day Nightmare Eclipse disclosed earlier this year. Whether that also closes the increasingly bitter chapter between Redmond and one of its most prolific bug hunters is another question entirely. ®