Blurred Alley

takekazu has added a photo to the pool:

Blurred Alley

In India wordt onderwijspersoneel opgesloten om nieuwe examenfraude te voorkomen

Zondag doen 22 miljoen Indiërs die dokter willen worden opnieuw toelatingsexamen. In mei werd die toets na grootschalige fraude ongeldig verklaard. De overheid heeft zeer verregaande maatregelen genomen om herhaling te voorkomen.

Inflatie, dalende vraag. Toch brengt Heineken plots een nieuw speciaalbier uit

Zeer speciaal, een nieuw bier van Heineken. Zeker in een krimpende markt. Wat is het precies voor bier? En waarom nu?


The Guardian

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

Giant cranes and a dragon boat festival: photos of the day – Friday

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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Post your questions for Vini Reilly of the Durutti Column

Ahead of the band’s first new album in 16 years, the hugely influential guitarist will be taking your questions for the Guardian Film & Music reader interview

At the end of July, the Durutti Column will release their first new music in 16 years: the stunningly beautiful Renascent. It’s a prime time for Vini Reilly, Bruce Mitchell and Keir Stewart to return as the Durutti influence is everywhere: sampled by Blood Orange on his latest album Essex Honey; cited by Harry Styles on his new LP Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, as well as by Mark William Lewis and Yung Lean; played on The Bear.

Not that the group need the endorsements: since 1978, they have been one of the UK’s most distinctive acts, their dreamy instrumentals offering a sunlit alternative to the crags of post-punk, as last year’s reissue of their debut, The Return of the Durutti Column reminded us. The record’s deviation from the norms of the era, wrote Alexis Petridis in a five-star reappraisal, “ultimately worked in its favour: other than the sound of the primitive rhythm tracks, there’s nothing to tie the music here to a specific era, which means it hasn’t dated.”

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Man released by police after boy, three, critically injured in zoo crocodile enclosure

Cambridgeshire police say 30-year-old man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder is not fit to be interviewed

A man arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after a three-year-old boy ended up in a crocodile enclosure has been released because he is not fit to be interviewed, police have said.

The 30-year-old man from Norfolk has been bailed while detectives from the major crimes unit conduct further inquiries, Cambridgeshire police said.

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‘I paid $800 for my ticket but it was worth it’: England fans enjoying early World Cup vibe

Some supporters are breaking the bank to follow Thomas Tuchel’s team and early indications are that it’s worth it

They came, they saw and they went to the rodeo. For those England fans who made it to Dallas, watching Thomas Tuchel’s side see off Croatia in their opening match of the 2026 World Cup was the experience of a lifetime.

“I’ve never been to a World Cup game before so I thought it was something I couldn’t miss out on,” says Oli Lee, a music producer from Kent who now lives in Los Angeles and is otherwise known as one half of the Snakehips duo who had a UK top-five hit in 2015. “I paid $800 (£604) for my ticket but it was all worth it. We had a bit of a session in Dallas – I ended up jumping in a pool with my phone in my pocket but it’s still working somehow!”

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‘People think I’ve vanished’: Mary Earps on signing for London City and feeling forgotten

Former England goalkeeper discusses why it was time to leave Paris, the lure of her new club and when she will know it is time to stop

When Mary Earps signed for Wolfsburg eight years ago, shortly after they had played in the Women’s Champions League final, there was no club photographer available for her unveiling, meaning her agent popped out to buy a scarf from the club shop before taking a makeshift announcement image. So when the former England goalkeeper’s latest club, London City Lionesses, announced her Women’s Super League return with a glamorous photoshoot on a boat on the Thames in front of landmarks such as Tower Bridge, she was struck not only by how much the women’s game and her life have been transformed, but by the bold scale of her new team’s ambitions.

“The energy and effort put into the shoot, I would never have imagined this even five years ago,” says Earps, whose move to London City from Paris Saint-Germain was confirmed on Friday. “All I keep saying is: ‘I’m so excited,’ but that shoot just poured petrol on the excitement fire. Wow, if that’s what they do just to say: ‘Hey, by the way Mary’s arrived,’ then imagine hopefully what we can do [in the future].”

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Midwives on frontline of childbirth deaths crisis denied visas for key summit

Outcry as experts from African and Asian countries – where mortality is highest – prevented from attending Portugal conference on prevention

Visa rejections have threatened progress on mother and baby health after experts from struggling countries were barred from talks, global midwife leaders have said.

Politicians, donors and UN agencies convened this week at the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) congress in Lisbon, Portugal, a key conference to discuss the millions of avoidable mother and baby deaths every year.

Emily Maclean is a midwife

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The Register

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

Vercel debuts eve open source agent framework, tries to fix shadow AI with Passport

Vercel introduced an open source agent framework called eve at its Ship event in London this week, along with other new features including Passport, an attempt to put employee apps created with AI under enterprise control. Agents are dominating the AI conversation currently, and in particular custom agents. Agent frameworks that simplify coding already exist, though eve has a few notable characteristics. The coding languages are TypeScript and Markdown, and an agent is a directory with files that define the instructions and skills, the model provider, the tools, the authentication, the channels, and the schedule. Agents are sandboxed on isolated VMs by default. The framework also includes a simple testing tool that exercises the agent and evaluates the result. Code is on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. There are plenty of existing agent frameworks, but Vercel CTO Malte Ubl told us that with eve, simplicity is a feature, with users able to take a "fill in the blanks" approach. "The life cycle of the agent is completely orchestrated by the framework, and as a developer or builder you have to put things in the right places, but then everything magically works," Ubl said. "It's a system where you don't have to understand every little bit about what sandboxes are and how to compact context windows… All these things are quite complex; you don't have to understand any of it." Agents built with eve deploy to Vercel by default, using the same command that works for web applications: vercel deploy. That said, the company says it is not tied to its platform. "We are 100 percent committed to making it work everywhere," Ubl told us, though an early user has already raised an issue about it requiring a Vercel login even when set to use a different model provider; it is early days and this may be a bug. Providers for LLMs and sandboxes are configurable. An eve project also runs locally with: npx eve dev. What LLM does eve use? "You can connect any model that AI SDK connects to, which is all the models," Ubl said, where the AI SDK is a Vercel SDK. There is also an option to use Vercel's AI Gateway, which has a single endpoint for multiple model providers and can improve reliability by switching to another model if one fails. The company also previewed Enterprise Apps and Agents, which have four components. Vercel Connect replaces static secret credentials with short-lived tokens accessed by OAuth or an API. Vercel Passport uses OpenID Connect to put all the applications and AI agents in a team behind an identity provider such as Okta or Microsoft Entra. Enterprise Managed Users uses directory sync to enable Vercel in a team to be managed by the organization's identity system. Finally, Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) lets organizations use Vercel's platform running on AWS infrastructure provisioned by the customer. According to Vercel, Passport was a highly requested feature because of the number of employees who create applications hosted by Vercel but outside the control of the organization. A typical scenario is that an employee builds an application with AI assistance, and the AI agent defaults to using the Next.js React-based framework and Vercel hosting. It is a variety of shadow IT – or shadow AI – where staff create vibe-coded applications using company data but outside the organization's IT policy or control. Vercel itself is an AWS customer so its platform should work well using BYOC, but there are some trade-offs, Ubl said. One is that "we don't allow your compute to assume AWS roles… If you are really deep in the AWS IM [Identity Management] security system, then Vercel doesn't give this to you," he told us, "but we do always issue an OIDC token for every invocation of the compute, so you can use that to configure your AWS policies." Second, with BYOC, "we become a management vendor," Ubl said, which means giving Vercel access to that part of the customer's AWS infrastructure. All Vercel deployments are immutable, which means "every time you push to Git you get a new infrastructure from scratch," Ubl told us. He considers this ideal for AI agents. Other aspects of the platform have also been optimized for agents. "We try to be close to what the agents do," he said. A common critique of Vercel is that since it runs on AWS, using Vercel means paying a premium for hosting that would be cheaper when purchased directly. According to Ubl, that premium is mitigated by Vercel's efficient use of those resources, "especially at low scale, and especially compared to Lambda," the AWS serverless platform. Vercel said last year that it cut its Lambda costs by up to 95 percent by reusing idle instances. Ubl claimed AWS customers need "more than 35 percent utilization to match Vercel's price." Another Vercel competitor is Cloudflare, which, unlike Vercel, hosts on its own datacenters and has an efficient serverless platform using Workers, based on V8 isolates, a feature of the V8 JavaScript engine used by Google Chrome and the open source Chromium project. Ubl said that whereas Cloudflare Workers are unique to Cloudflare, Vercel "is a more normal platform, we don't run some bespoke runtime that we create ourselves, we just run Node.js or Python or PHP and it runs on a VM (virtual machine)… We offer standard PostgreSQL, VPC peering, AWS, S3 and not bespoke." This is a bit of a war of words. Cloudflare engineering director Steve Faulkner in February described the Next.js tooling, sponsored by Vercel, as "entirely bespoke." Since then the situation has improved, with an Adapter API that is stable in Next.js 16.2, meaning other providers no longer need to reverse-engineer the build output, but adapters for AWS and Cloudflare are still under development, with completion expected by the end of 2026. ®