PARIJS (ANP) - De radicaalrechtse presidentskandidaat Marine Le Pen wil Frankrijk naar eigen zeggen pas losmaken van de gezamenlijke NAVO-verdediging van Europa als de oorlog in Oekraïne voorbij is. Eerder zei ze nog dat in haar eerste vijf jaar als president te willen regelen.

"Zolang er een oorlog woedt op Europa's stoep, is het niet het moment om daartoe actie te ondernemen", zei Le Pen donderdag tegen nieuwsplatform Politico. "Maar ik blijf natuurlijk van zins om dat te doen."

Le Pen ligt volgens opiniepeilers ver voor op andere kandidaten om president Emmanuel Macron in mei op te volgen. Eerdere campagnes van de Rassemblement National-leider liepen uiteindelijk wel meermaals stuk op een monsterverbond van uiteenlopende politieke tegenstanders. Maar de kansrijke uitgangspositie van de NAVO-critica maakt andere NAVO-landen bezorgd.

Politieke tegenstanders betichten de RN al lange tijd van heulen met Rusland. Le Pen probeert dat van zich af te schudden en spreekt zich scherper uit over Moskou.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Na twee oorlogen die de afgelopen jaren hebben geleid tot minder energie voor Europa, is er nog steeds niet genoeg aandacht voor de weerbaarheid van het energiesysteem. Dat heeft topvrouw Manon van Beek van hoogspanningsnetbeheerder TenneT donderdag gezegd tijdens een symposium van de Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM) over het Europese energiesysteem.

Als Europa op energiegebied weerbaarder wordt, kunnen we sneller handelen als bijvoorbeeld het energienet wordt gesaboteerd, aldus de topvrouw. Daarvoor moet Europa wel meer onderling samenwerken en informatie met elkaar delen.

Weerbaarheid gaat volgens haar ook over meer onafhankelijkheid. Door de oorlog in Oekraïne importeert de EU minder Russisch gas en is Europa afhankelijker van andere landen, maar door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten worden nu veel minder brandstoffen door de Straat van Hormuz vervoerd. Dat heeft geleid tot hogere energie- en brandstofprijzen in onder andere Nederland.

The beta for the hotly anticipated World of Warcraft: Forever has been marred by fans of the streamer Asmongold who have filled the game’s public spaces with spam and slurs. To fix the issue, a player named Solastro created a mod called OlympusMute that hides any chats from players associated with Asmongold’s multiple associated guilds and fandom.

OlympusMute, named after the main Asmongold guild Olympus, is a client side mod that creates a mute list designed to prevent players from seeing anything from players associated with Asmongold. It works simply by hiding chat messages from players with Olympus in their name. It also auto-declines group and guild invites from the muted players. 

The mod, essentially, is an attempt at a nuclear block. It “hides all player chat from muted players: Say, Yell, Emote, Whisper, General/Trade/custom channels, Guild, Party, Raid, Raid Warning, and Instance chat” and “hides their chat bubbles in the open world,” according to its description.

There are good reasons players may want to never hear from Asmongold or his guild. “Turned on @Asmongold stream for 3 minutes and just instantly see them harassing some random player and spamming shit like this in stormwind,” X user @mrfishpsirit said in a post on X. The account shared screenshots of chat bubbles calling to “deport all greenskins” and sexually assault Palestine. Asmongold himself replied to the post with a list of slurs he’d invented for the game’s fictional races.

WoW: Forever’s server architecture makes Asmongold’s fans hard to avoid. In most MMOs, players are grouped into servers — WoW calls them “realms.” In the past, influencers and streamers like Asmongold would pick a server and collect all their fans in one place. People who didn’t want to play with them simply avoided that server.

But Blizzard changed how servers work for WoW: Forever. Instead of realms, the game will group players together based on rulesets. In the new system, these massive personality driven guilds are much harder to avoid.

It’s more than just slurs too. Players have reported that Asmongold’s players are spamming guild invites to people as they log in for the first time, attempting to absorb them into the mass. Their chat also fills public spaces and trading channels with spam. OlympusMute wants to be an elegant solution to these problems. It doesn’t boot Asmongold’s players from the server, but it does keep them out of a player’s face.

Wat kan Nederland leren van Afrika en Azië over de aanpak na extreem weer? In Zuid-Limburg – dat vijf jaar geleden werd getroffen door zware regenval en overstromingen – hebben het World Wildlife Fund en het Rode Kruis de handen ineengeslagen voor een project dat ervaringen uit andere landen naar Nederland brengt.

Meta became the latest to dip its toes into the fraught world of hardware AI widgets this week after it unveiled a Tamagotchi-sized handheld AI companion called the Muse Charm. The Social Network now joins several hardware startups which have attempted to use handheld devices to bring agentic AI to a more mainstream audience. The Humane AI pin and Rabbit’s r1 are just two examples. The Muse Charm follows a similar trajectory. The handheld device appears to be roughly the size of an Apple Watch and features a cute, inoffensive teddy bear shaped avatar that will communicate through voice interactions with the user. Meta’s choice of avatars here may have been influenced by the “sensual” chatbot controversy involving underage youths earlier this year. What sets Meta apart from many AI hardware startups is that it has direct control over the hardware, software, and models used. Many early AI widgets relied on off-the-shelf models from the likes of OpenAI. Meta hasn’t said which of its Muse models will run on the device, but given its diminutive size, we suspect, at most, it’ll run voice-to-text and text-to-speech models locally while the avatar’s responses will be generated by its Muse LLMs running in the cloud. Meta’s Charm is expected to ship for Christmas just in time to relive the nostalgia of unboxing your first Tamagotchi. We can only hope that Muse Charm’s avatar won’t die from neglect if you take a break to escape the AI hype cycle and touch some grass. Pricing, which could make or break a tchotchke like this, remains a mystery. It’s also unclear what value over a standalone app it might provide. Most folks these days carry a perfectly capable slab of glass and silicon in their pockets everywhere they go. This was a common criticism of the Rabbit R1. While the physical form factor had its charm, many felt it was an expensive gimmick that could have been an app, which Rabbit launched this week. Of course Meta isn’t the only major model dev searching for a Trojan horse to get the general public hooked on their AI models. OpenAI has tapped famed Apple designer Jony Ive to design its first AI handheld. Meta does have the advantage of having built physical hardware before, which has clearly given it a head start not only on handheld AI assistants and wearables, but also on the privacy headaches that come along with them. Strapping cameras to people’s faces, perhaps to no one’s great surprise, has enabled abuse, while Meta’s glasses have earned the less-than-flattering moniker “pervert glasses.” This public relations debacle has led Meta to release a new version of its Meta Glasses that ditches the camera entirely, but it seems just on that one model. ®

‘If you’re not in the internal market, you don’t get the same protection,’ says French minister of policy designed to curb Chinese competition

France is leading a push to exclude the UK from the EU’s “Made in Europe” policy that could result in British companies losing out in the race to supply European countries with low-carbon technologies and electric cars.

The plans were raised by Andy Burnham when he met the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, on the sidelines of the UN general assembly earlier this week.

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Hundreds of thousands are expected to die, millions to go hungry. This is not just about weather patterns, but about injustice

Some warnings are so grave that it is almost impossible to fully comprehend them. The descriptions of a super-sized, “Godzilla-level” El Niño already heating our planet would sound hyperbolic were they not issuing from eminent scientists. They say that the weather pattern, which occurs roughly every two to seven years, may be the strongest in at least a millennium. With its peak yet to come, the temperature rise in the Pacific Ocean has already surpassed the previous high.

The consequence will be huge amounts of heat in an atmosphere already experiencing frighteningly higher temperatures due to the human-caused climate crisis. Next year is almost certain to be the hottest on record globally, breaking this year’s record. The World Food Programme has warned that 50 million people are likely to be pushed into acute hunger. Others estimate that the extra heat from El Niño alone will cause the deaths of 450,000 people by February, from Nigeria and Indonesia to the US. That extraordinary toll is in addition to those killed by the wildfires, droughts and floods it is likely to bring – and also to deaths caused by global heating.

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Lamb

Er gaan dagen voorbij dat wij niet aan senator Eric Kemperman denken, en dat zijn gelukkig heel veel dagen. Maar helaas, niet alle dagen. Eerst dook Kemperman op toen hij zijn werk liet doen door lobbyisten, later sloot hij zich aan bij FvD en nu heeft NRC ontdekt dat hij langskwam bij Elsfest 2.0, een demonstratie die (na enig aandringen) zelfs te lijp was voor BVNL en volstrekt voorspelbaar uit de hand liep met rellen en vrolijke liederen als 'Hamas, Hamas, Joden aan het gas'. "Kemperman wil zijn aanwezigheid bij het extreemrechtse protest niet toelichten. „Na het verschijnen van jouw artikel zal onze voorlichter beslissen of hij hierop wil reageren via onze eigen kanalen”, laat Kemperman via Whatsapp weten." En de grap is dus: deze complete idioot houdt 1 van de 75 zetels bezet die je nodig hebt om dit land een beetje normaal te kunnen besturen en is in maart 2023 indirect gekozen dankzij mensen die op BBB stemden omdat ze tegen het stikstofbeleid waren. En zo ziet u maar weer: de Eerste Kamer moet kapot.

Meteen in het begin

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