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Coming into the tournament, Croatia head coach Zlatko Dalic warned that losing an open match “can destroy everything” for a team in a major tournament. History informed this dramatic stance, with Croatia opening Euro 2024 with a 3-0 defeat to Spain and subsequently bowing out in the group stage.

2018’s run to the World Cup final kicked off with a win over Nigeria; in 2022, a draw against Morocco put both teams on their paths to the semifinal. Just how destroying will that opening 4-2 loss to England prove to be?

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As Steve Clarke and his team prepare to take on Brazil and earn a place in the last 32, debate rages about their style

It may seem distinctly Scottish that the creation of football history could come with grumbling over the manner in which that was achieved. On Tuesday afternoon, the movable feast that is the best-third-place table at this World Cup had Scotland second and in a strong position to advance to the knockout phase for the first time. Heavy defeat against Brazil on Wednesday in Miami could damage that position but it remains perfectly feasible that the 1-0 win over Haiti and three points will take Scotland into uncharted territory. Denis Law did not emerge from a tournament group with Scotland. Neither did Kenny Dalglish. The 1974 World Cup team were unbeaten yet still on an early flight home. This has been a weight on the shoulders of Scotland teams for decades.

In a rare departure from sharp analysis, Rory McIlroy stated last week that Scotland had benefited from the expansion of the World Cup by means of qualification. In fact, they topped their section so would have participated regardless of size. What is undeniable, however, is that the path towards the last 32 can be almost laughably simple for some. Victory over Haiti was rightly expected, as was defeat by Morocco and – while not a certainty – so would be another loss to Brazil.

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• Footage shows defender keeping hand in pocket

• Partey denies allegations of rape and sexual assault

Djed Spence appeared to be the only England player not to shake Thomas Partey’s hand before the World Cup game against Ghana in Boston. There had been doubts over whether Thomas Tuchel’s squad would snub the former Arsenal midfielder in the pre-match ritual.

Partey is scheduled to go on trial next year at Southwark crown court after he was charged with five counts of rape and one of sexual assault last year. He was later charged with two further counts of rape. Partey has denied all the charges, with his lawyer insisting that he welcomes the chance to clear his name.

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• 41-year-old heavily criticised after DR Congo draw

• ‘It felt like I’d already retired from football,’ he adds

Cristiano Ronaldo savoured the end of a “difficult, dark week” after scoring twice in Portugal’s 5-0 rout of Uzbekistan and becoming the first player to find the net in six World Cups.

Ronaldo and Portugal had come under heavy criticism after a flat draw against Democratic Republic of the Congo. There had been a particular spotlight on the 41-year-old Ronaldo, who had not scored in 10 major tournament games before Tuesday’s fixture. There have long been question marks over his continued ability to lead Portugal on this stage, but after the final whistle he shouted into a television camera: “I’m back, I’m back.”

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Under the volcano, Salvo

Grave of the fireflies, Elger Esser

The European Parliament's economic committee has backed a digital euro designed to reduce Europe's dependence on US-controlled payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard. The ECB-backed currency is targeted for launch by 2029 after a full parliamentary vote and negotiations with EU member states. Euronews reports: Under the proposal, consumers would be able to hold digital euros in a dedicated wallet, subject to a holding limit that has yet to be determined. The system would support both online and offline payments and is intended to offer a high degree of privacy, with the ECB unable to directly identify users from their payment data.

The ECB would provide the underlying infrastructure, while commercial banks and payment service providers would offer digital euro services to customers. Financial institutions are expected to be compensated for their participation in the scheme, while merchants will pay fees that are expected to be lower than those associated with current card transactions.

How that compensation should be structured remains one of the most contentious issues ahead of negotiations with EU member states, according to three sources familiar with the discussions. [...] The European Parliament is expected to formalise the committee's position during a plenary vote in Strasbourg in early July. Negotiations with the EU's 27 member states would then begin, with lawmakers aiming to reach a final agreement before the end of the year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Modern SSDs have a limited number of write cycles before they expire. Now, OpenAI is scrambling to fix a flawed logging implementation that has been shortening the lives of Codex users' solid state drives (SSDs) with excessive data writes and lowering the devices' value by a significant amount of money. A bug report opened last week for the company's Codex coding agent warns of the consequences in its title: "Codex SQLite feedback logs can write ~640 TB/year and rapidly consume SSD endurance #28224." "On my machine, after about 21 days of uptime, the main SSD has written about 37 TB," wrote developer Rui Fan, a project management committee member of Apache Flink. "Process/file-level checks show Codex SQLite logs are the main continuous writer. "That extrapolates to roughly 640 TB/year. On a 1 TB SSD, that is about 640 full-drive writes per year. Some consumer SSDs are rated around 600 TBW, so this could consume roughly a full drive's warranted write endurance in less than a year." SSDs have a limited lifespan, often measured in terabytes written (TBW). This number varies by model and capacity. Samsung's 2025 9100 PRO SSDs, for example, promise 600 TBW for the 1 TB SSD. And after that point, we expect their performance to degrade and failure becomes more likely. The problem with Codex is that it has been writing so much logging data to SSD storage that users have become concerned they're shortening the life of their hardware. Another developer posting in Rui Fan's thread remarked, "Codex analyzed the disk usage and says this bug cost me $38.64 in drive value of my Samsung 990 2 TB NVMe." This dev subsequently cited the Codex-generated estimate of the overall cost of this bug: "This regression plausibly burned low-single-digit millions of dollars of SSD endurance across users during the March-June Window." Codex's economic impact assessment assumes a cost of $0.13 per TB written to SSDs. This is based on this formula: TB written × (SSD price / SSD TBW). So given a 1 TB SSD, we estimate that Rui Fan incurred a cost of $12.33 for 37 TB of squandered storage. (Cost per TBW = SSD price / SSD endurance = $200 / 600 TBW = $0.333 per TB written.) A more spacious and more costly SSD with a higher TBW rating would cost less per wasted byte (e.g. $0.25 per TB for a $300 / 1200 TBW 2 TB Samsung 9100 PRO SSD). In December 2025, Codex devs announced plans to add telemetry by default (except where disallowed by law) to the Codex CLI. But this issue has to do with local diagnostic logging, which was introduced around the time the app debuted last year and is also on by default. The logs stay on the device unless included by the user in a feedback report. Concerns about excessive write operations using OpenAI's Codex have been surfacing in the project's GitHub repo for several months. A spokesperson for OpenAI confirmed that company engineers are aware of the problem and are working to fix it – something evident from several recent pull requests intended to address the problem. We're told that these logs are intended to help OpenAI engineers diagnose issues and that the problem was the result of high-volume data that was being stored in a way that created far more disk activity than anticipated. While purported fixes have been landing and the company has made some progress, users continue to file problems. The issue appears to date back to work done in February to write app-server SQLite logs at TRACE level, which emits more verbose logs than, say, ERROR level. We note that Codex, presumably running GPT-5.3, reviewed this particular series of commits. That makes it all the more surprising that the code was so ill-conceived. ®

Aankomende woensdag en donderdag geldt niet alleen code oranje vanwege de verwachte hitte, het RIVM geeft ook een ‘smogwaarschuwing’ af voor deze dagen.