De rechter heeft vier jaar cel opgelegd aan een asielzoeker die zich wilde vergrijpen aan twee vrouwen in Rotterdam. Dat gebeurde op 28 februari 2026 in de Agniesebuurt en in Schiebroek.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Vrijwel alle Nederlandse hoofdredacties en een meerderheid van de Nederlandse journalisten hebben in hun werk te maken met juridische druk. Dat blijkt uit een onderzoek van PersVeilig in samenwerking met Ipsos dat vrijdag is gepresenteerd. Aan het onderzoek deden 33 hoofdredacties en 471 journalisten mee.

Vrijwel alle hoofdredacties (94 procent) geven aan ooit een dreigende brief, mededeling of telefoontje te hebben ontvangen waarin met juridische stappen is gedreigd. Ruim de helft (56 procent) van de journalisten in Nederland heeft te maken gehad met juridische druk tijdens hun werkzaamheden.

De druk bestaat bij journalisten vooral uit dreiging met juridische stappen, rechtszaken of schadeclaims. Het gaat ook om sommaties, de inschakeling van een advocaat, verzoeken tot verwijdering, aanpassen of tegenhouden van publicaties en klachten bij de Raad voor de Journalistiek. In bijna een op de drie gevallen wordt er naast juridische druk ook een andere vorm van druk uitgeoefend, zoals dreigen met fysiek geweld (16 procent) of negatieve publiciteit (16 procent).

Bijna de helft van de respondenten zegt dat de gevallen waarbij druk wordt uitgeoefend gevolgen heeft voor het werkplezier. Daarnaast zegt 17 procent er gezondheidsproblemen door te ondervinden. Hoofdredacties geven aan in 61 procent van de gevallen publicaties aan te passen of niet te publiceren. Het gaat soms om kleine wijzigingen, zoals het achterwege laten van kleine details of bepaalde namen.

DHAHRAN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Het Saudische staatsolieconcern Saudi Aramco heeft zeker twee raffinaderijen in Europa verteld dat ze volgende maand geen aardolie ontvangen. Dat meldt persbureau Bloomberg op basis van ingewijden. Normaal gesproken krijgen deze Europese klanten volgens contract vaste leveringen uit Saudi-Arabië, maar de olie-export is verstoord door een aanval op een belangrijke pijpleiding in het land.

De beslissing zou betrekking hebben op alle Europese inkopers van Saudische olie. Saudi Aramco reageerde niet direct op een verzoek om commentaar van Bloomberg.

Na een aanval sloot Saudi-Arabië vorige week een oliepijpleiding die van het oosten naar het westen van het land loopt. Na de blokkade van de Straat van Hormuz won die pijpleiding aan belang, omdat die de Saudi's de mogelijkheid biedt om via de havenstad Yanbu aan de Rode Zee olie te blijven exporteren. Volgens een bron van Bloomberg wordt de pijpleiding binnen enkele dagen weer opgestart, maar kan het tot zes weken duren voordat die weer als vanouds werkt.

In de voorstelling ‘AI&IK’ onderzoekt Eran Ben-Michaël of een vriendschap met AI mogelijk is. De mix van stand-upcomedy en gesprekken met zijn zelfgebouwde AI-model zorgen voor een interessante insteek, maar een diepzinnigere uitwerking had niet misstaan.

Sergiy Galyonkin has added a photo to the pool:

Sightseeing boats and their reflections beside brick warehouses on the waterfront in Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan.

INTERVIEW Percona CEO Peter Farkas reckons AI caught the database industry off guard and that agentic workloads may eventually require a new kind of database – once anyone works out what those workloads actually need. Farkas spoke to The Register at the company's Percona Live event in Amsterdam, where members of the often-fractious open source database community gathered to discuss best practices, case studies, and the future. Percona provides software and support across a growing range of open source database technologies. Over its 20-year history, it has worked with MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Valkey, and Redis. MySQL's first release arrived in 1995. The PostgreSQL project marked its 30th anniversary in July 2026, although its roots in the POSTGRES project stretch back further. Both databases therefore have decades behind them and represent mature, stable options – just as the conservative world of database administration prefers. The surge in AI services, however, is introducing workloads that these systems were not designed around, and Farkas believes none of the current choices are ideal. Of the current selection, Farkas said: "It's definitely not the best that we can have. It's the thing that we have right now." "I think AI definitely caught the industry off guard," he said. Farkas pointed to "iteration-focused workloads" in which an agent might make 150 attempts before a person or another system selects the best result. "A human would probably not push 150 options just so someone or another AI can pick out the winning one," he said. For now, organizations must select technology capable of handling these workloads without assuming that today's choice will remain the best fit. Farkas was careful not to favor a particular database. "Everything needs a database," Farkas said, though coming from the CEO of Percona, that is perhaps unsurprising. "If the new buzzword is blockchain or NFT or cloud or whatever, behind all of those things, there's a database, and AI is no exception. "AI needs a database, and AI is going to use the databases that we have for the time being, but I do believe that the best solution for AI or agentic workloads does not exist at this point, as there's just not enough time for something to become as mature as the trusted database software." The rapid pace of change sits uneasily with a database industry accustomed to products maturing over decades. AI development, by contrast, still has the feel of technology being flung at a wall to see what sticks. Farkas laughed when asked when such a solution might emerge. "I don't have a crystal ball," he said. He believes the AI market must mature before its requirements become clear enough for anyone to build a clean-slate database designed around them. Organizations are still deciding where AI belongs in their technology stacks, he said, including whether to run models themselves or use cloud services, and whether every use case needs a large language model rather than a smaller model with a lighter footprint. "It's easy to experiment with something that can just do everything, but that also means that the resources being consumed are outsized compared to the result," Farkas said. Farkas became CEO of Percona in October 2025, succeeding Ann Schlemmer. He had previously worked at Percona as director of support until 2016. In December 2021, he co-founded FerretDB, an open source service that converts MongoDB wire protocol queries into SQL for PostgreSQL or SQLite. MongoDB sued FerretDB in May 2025, alleging patent infringement, false advertising, and trademark misuse. FerretDB disputes the allegations. Asked what lessons he had brought from FerretDB, Farkas replied: "Lots of PTSD from courtrooms." Farkas also brings experience of working across multiple open source communities – useful as Percona shifts from a company primarily associated with MySQL to a database-agnostic, multi-tech business. Doing so has its own challenges. He noted that different communities work in markedly different ways. "We had multiple attempts at adding Postgres to our portfolio," he recalled, "but we had some wrong ideas that were based on the MySQL experience on how to engage with that community." "They have very different preferences. They have very different red flags they are looking for. For example, if you call something 'Percona TDE for Postgres', that is not going to fly: 'What is this nonsense? This is vendor lock-in! This is just one company trying to push their crap!' Whereas in the MySQL space, that's totally normal, and we needed to unlearn these things." Could Percona eventually extend its open source approach to AI? "Frankly, AI is a vendor lock-in situation," Farkas replied, pointing to services such as Gemini and ChatGPT. He argued that there is not yet a mature, enterprise-ready way to run open-weight agents, although Percona is exploring what it might contribute in that area. "Percona is not anti-AI," he said. "Percona is anti-rebranding Postgres or MongoDB as the AI database." ®

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"Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by
New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools tells "the story of the nonprofit Code.org and its charismatic, Harvard-educated leader, Hadi Partovi," according to their review:

Thirteen years ago, Partovi... delivered a worrying message: Kids who didn't learn to write code would be left behind. And the long-term success of the United States economy depended on training these students to fill a million open tech jobs.... Fast-forward to 2026, and now we're dealing with AI, and tech is reading from a similar playbook.
Asked by The74's Greg Toppo, "Does this moment seem different to you?", Singer replies, "This moment is different, but also similar.


"We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against Flock cameras, against data centers, that there's this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them... And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids' compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there's a different climate.


And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say "We've partnered with OpenAI." "We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School," or "We've partnered with Microsoft, and we're going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot." It's amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data's going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don't learn anything.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we're in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn't we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we've learned about the push for all the other things that came before?


Two Slashdot posts are cited in the book, both submitted by long-time Slashdot reader theodp (Slashdot UID #442,580), who even gets a shout-out in the book's "Acknowledgements" section (along with consumer advocate Ralph Nader).


Ironically, one member of Amazon's "Vine" program received a free copy of the book in exchange for a review — and apparently misunderstood its topic, writing that it made coding "feel approachable and even fun... [T]his is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.