The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

EU says Trump plan to ban US diesel exports would ‘negatively impact both sides’

US president’s suggested 90-day export ban before midterm elections could bring even higher fuel prices across Europe

The EU has warned Donald Trump against plans to ban US diesel exports to the global market, saying the move would negatively affect Europe and the US.

The European Commission has reacted with “concern” to reports this week that the US president could prevent diesel from reaching the global market.

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The eyes have it: Rory Stewart’s ‘magnificently strange’ Newsnight moment goes viral

Clip of the former Tory MP staring intently at fellow panellist is shared widely online

Rory Stewart has been an Afghan NGO leader, a Conservative leadership candidate, a Harvard professor, a popular podcaster, and the deputy governor of an Iraqi province. This week, he created a moment that drew wider attention than any of them: he fixed a beady gaze on a fellow Newsnight panellist for the longest four seconds in television history.

Stewart, who now co-presents The Rest Is Politics with Alastair Campbell, appeared on the BBC programme on 18 September – but in the last few days, a clip of the moment in question has taken on a life of its own on social media.

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Beverly Buchanan review – ramshackle mini barns and shanties bursting with brutal history

Spike Island, Bristol
Inspired by the shacks and sheds of the American south, Buchanan’s exceptional sculptures combine folk art and minimalism to memorialise the survival of enslaved people

When she was a kid, Beverly Buchanan visited tenant farmers and sharecroppers across the American south-east with her dad. There in the fields she saw shacks and sheds, shanties and shotgun houses. More than 100 years after the abolition of slavery, she saw in this rough improvised architecture a symbol of survival and perseverance, of a people making their own way against the odds.

Buchanan spent the rest of her life – a life marked by multiple chronic illnesses before she died in 2015 – translating that architectural heft into art. This show at Spike Island is filled with ramshackle, half-broken, semi-dilapidated little sculptures, each one based on the buildings of the south. There are houses made of scrap wood, churches made of cardboard, tiny barns hammered together and splashed with paint or covered with buttons. The one large sculpture here is great, a shed seemingly on the verge of collapse, but Buchanan’s physical condition forced her to work on a smaller scale as she was often stuck at home for long periods.

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Japan teenager Shin Ohashi overcomes Covid and fever to smash breaststroke world record

  • Swimmer wins 200m gold at Asian Games with 39C fever

  • Says Covid helped him rest and ‘was a good thing’

The Japanese teenager Shin Ohashi said a bout of Covid helped him smash the men’s 200m breaststroke world record in a time of 2min 4.83sec at the Asian Games on Thursday.

The 17-year-old won his second gold of the Games in Tokyo despite running a temperature of about 39C just days before the competition began.

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After so long in Trump’s sights, hopeful Greenlanders breathe a collective sigh of relief

Locals hope agreement signed this week is step towards independence and end to US threats to annex island

Greenland’s prime minister, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, and Múte B Egede, the foreign minister, received a hero’s welcome when they landed back in Nuuk from New York on Wednesday night – and a nation took a collective sigh of relief.

Colleagues, friends and members of the public turned out to greet them at an airport where, just 20 months ago, the landing of a Trump-branded plane containing Donald Trump Jr had kickstarted a geopolitical crisis that the people of Greenland now hope is over.

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De NPO gaat tóch naar het Eurovisie Songfestival met een kandidaat. Er zijn nog veel vraagtekens

De keuze van de NPO om in 2027 een Nederlandse artiest naar het Songfestival te sturen, maakt veel los. Er zijn nog veel vragen over de invulling. „We hebben er vertrouwen in dat het tijdig lukt om een kandidaat te vinden die ons land vertegenwoordigt in Burgas.”

De Speld

Uw vaste prik voor betrouwbaar nieuws.

Jetten benut kort onderonsje met wereldleiders: ‘What do you think: Klaver or Eerdmans?’

​Rob Jetten heeft zijn dagen in New York rond de Algemene Vergadering van de Verenigde Naties ten volle benut. Zo zag hij kans om wereldleiders in korte, informele onderonsjes naar hun mening te vragen. “What do you think: Klaver or Eerdmans?”, vroeg hij aan de Braziliaanse president Lula da Silva, die zich kwam voorstellen. “Left or right?”

Ook Emmanuel Macron moest eraan geloven. De Franse president, die graag met Jetten wilde overleggen over de Russische dreiging, kreeg een spervuur aan vragen van de Nederlandse premier over zich heen. “PRO or JA21? I prefer PRO, but Dilan doesn’t want that. So maybe JA21?” Macron zuchtte luid en liep door naar Pedro Sánchez.

“The minority coalition doesn’t really work”, zei Jetten. “I don’t know, what do you think?”, vroeg hij aan Donald Trump, die vervolgens aan een lange tirade over minderheden begon.

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MetaFilter

The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

Polaris Music Prize Winners for 2026!

The shortlist is here; Angine de Poitrine won the whole shebang.

Winner(s): Angine de Poitrine Nominees: Aquakulture Begonia Beverly Glenn-Copeland Bibi Club Charlotte Cornfield Les Louanges Peaches Rochelle Jordan Tanya Tagaq Canada has two distinct music awards: the Junos, which tend to celebrate more mainstream Canadian artists, and the Polaris, which celebrates the weirder more diverse artists.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

Talk of AI in KDE sets the community ablaze

A proposal to make KDE an "AI-native" desktop has gone down like a house on fire: screams, flames, people running for safety. There may be no survivors.* Last weekend was KDE's annual Akademy conference and it included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE. We noted that it seemed likely to polarize the audience. It looks like this was a considerable understatement. In the days since, a debate over proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions descended into bans and a deleted thread. An outside campaign called for KDE to prohibit AI altogether, a GNOME developer proposed a similar policy for that project, and KDE developer Nate Graham apologized for his role in the uproar. The Akademy talk was titled "A lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE" and the slide deck [PDF] is now available. It ends by saying: "The question is not whether AI. It is how. You choose how much AI – and which." It seems almost calculated to provoke an argument rather than invite discussion. We do not know if the authors intended this – we attempted to contact both of them, but they have not yet responded. Graham opened a discussion on Invent, KDE's GitLab instance, about proposed restrictions on LLM-assisted contributions. Although we are not a member, we watched this with some interest over the weekend. It rapidly became heated. Moderators issued warnings, restricted further comments, and eventually removed the thread. There is an archive of the discussion, but we warn you, it contains some highly offensive language, albeit censored by the member who quoted another member's tweets on X. As events unfolded, the participant who drew attention to the posts was banned first. The author of the offensive material was banned later after their identity was verified. The discussion is gone, but the argument continues. One response was an outside initiative called KDE for People, which called on the KDE project to adopt a No-AI policy. Around 250 people signed it before its organizers closed it to further signatures. GNOME developer Jordan Petridis has also published The GNOME LLM Policy That I Want, proposing that LLMs be barred from creating or modifying anything submitted to GNOME or hosted on its infrastructure. This mentions the recent ballot on AI usage in Debian. We reported on the developer referendum about a month ago, noting that the broad spread of anti-AI options in the ballot was likely to split the vote. (This likelihood was dismissed in the comments.) Well, as The Register's Asia-Pacific desk reported a few days later, Debian did not ban AI contributions. Graham subsequently explained his involvement in a post titled KDE and AI, and you, and me. He opens by saying: "So I accidentally triggered an online shitstorm in the process of trying to craft a set of more restrictive LLM usage guidelines for KDE. Sorry about that." He notes that the Akademy talk met "what I'm told was a fairly chilly reception" and that "the next day, a workshop was held about the topic, also receiving a chilly reception." Every couple of years, the KDE project sets three goals for the next two years. Earlier this week, after Akademy, it chose its latest three: you can see them in the last column of the goal-setting Kanban board. The ones chosen are: KDE for Enterprise and Deployments (Issue #5) Better documentation (Issue #2) Next Generation Styling for KDE (Issue #3) We see no mention of AI in there. In context, that may come as a relief to parts of the community. Bootnote *A tip of the black Borsalino to the late great Terry Pratchett, for two different "house on fire" references we combined. ®

Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Duizenden Spanjaarden de straat op om frustratie huizenmarkt

MADRID (ANP) - Meer dan 10.000 mensen zijn in Madrid spontaan de straat opgegaan in protest tegen de alsmaar duurder wordende huizenmarkt. De demonstratie kwam op gang nadat Maricarmen Abascal woensdag uit haar appartement werd gezet. De 87-jarige vrouw had daar 71 jaar in gewoond. Dit meldt de Spaanse krant El País.

Abascals verhaal leidde tot veel verontwaardiging en frustratie in de samenleving over de huidige Spaanse huizenmarkt. De politie had al drie keer eerder geprobeerd de vrouw uit het appartement te zetten, omdat zij een enorme huurverhoging niet kon betalen. Buren en activisten probeerden haar uitzetting te voorkomen. Abascal werd uiteindelijk op een brancard door de politie naar buiten gebracht. Ze ligt momenteel in het ziekenhuis, waar ze wordt behandeld voor uitputting en stress.

De demonstratie in Madrid vormde het middelpunt voor een bredere beweging. Het platform #Niudeshuciomás, wat 'geen enkele uitzetting meer' betekent, riep op tot protesten in andere Spaanse steden.