Frankrijk is voornemens de Russische commentator Ksenia Fjodorova, die de afgelopen weken veel kritiek oogstte vanwege haar uitgesproken pro-Kremlin standpunten, het land uit te zetten. Woensdag ontving haar advocaat het deportatiebevel.
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Asian Football Confederation may hold balance of power
Uefa to hold emergency meeting on Thursday
The Asian Football Confederation has accused Fifa of undermining the foundations of football by failing to consult the confederations over their plan to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors.
In a letter sent on Thursday by president Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa to AFC’s 47 members, which has been seen by the Guardian, Fifa’s unilateral actions in doing a deal with Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital to buy 20% of a new company that would control the commercial rights of all global tournaments is roundly condemned.
Continue reading...I couldn’t help choking up when the writer Katriona O’Sullivan told me her life story. Now I’m on a mission to get everyone to read her memoir
In more than 30 years of live broadcasting, I’ve only once sobbed on air. This was the other week, during a radio interview with a professor of psychology called Katriona O’Sullivan. That’s what she is now, a professor at Maynooth University in County Kildare. Before that, she was at Trinity College Dublin, where she also got her PhD. Before that, she was to be found on the access programme through which she got into Trinity. Before that she was living a life of chaos in Dublin, a single mother with next to nothing.
She was in Dublin escaping an even more chaotic life in Birmingham, which had followed a childhood in Coventry, growing up in harrowing, grinding, distressing, miserable, terrifying poverty. No single adjective feels adequate here, so I’ve thrown in as many as I can think of.
Continue reading...To understand the experience of life, don’t look to the mind. Look to the body
In a 1982 article, the American feminist scholar Elizabeth Spelman coined the term “somatophobia” to describe the strange human delusion that we are minds rather than bodies.
Forty years later, artificial intelligence is everywhere, offering the most powerful illusion yet that intelligence can exist without flesh. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a recent study believe that tools like ChatGPT possess some consciousness and feeling. We are living in the age of somatophobia. Now is the moment to resist it.
Continue reading...Wild Inside looks back on the incredible year when an escaped zoo owl managed to bring New Yorkers together
Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl gained a cult following after leaving his life in captivity at the Central Park zoo in 2023 and surviving, against all odds, for more than a year as a free bird in Manhattan.
Birdwatchers tracked his every move, capturing his vast wingspan and luminous orange eyes with their cameras. His fans got tattoos in his honor. And now, Wild Inside, a new documentary chronicling Flaco’s year about town, is set to premiere this week.
Continue reading...TONGEREN (ANP/BELGA) - De voortvluchtige Nederlandse drugscrimineel Jos Leijdekkers, alias Bolle Jos, is in België veroordeeld tot veertien jaar celstraf in het omvangrijke drugsproces Costa. Van alle verdachten die donderdag hun straf hoorden, heeft de rechter hem de hoogste gevangenisstraf opgelegd.
De straf valt een jaar lager uit dan de eis van het Openbaar Ministerie.
Nathan Steveniers, die volgens het Openbaar Ministerie een leidende rol had in de organisatie van Leijdekkers, kreeg van de Tongerse rechters een gevangenisstraf van acht jaar.
Drugssmokkel
De zaak draait om drugssmokkel via de haven van Antwerpen en het witwassen van drugsgeld. De verdachten worden verantwoordelijk geacht voor de invoer van minstens 25 ton cocaïne, met een straatwaarde van ongeveer 3,5 miljard euro.
Voor alle ruim vijftig verdachten samen eiste het Openbaar Ministerie in totaal 451 jaar gevangenisstraf.
Sierra Leone
Leijdekkers zou op dit moment verblijven in het West-Afrikaanse land Sierra Leone. Nederland heeft het land gevraagd om zijn uitlevering. Voor de gouden tip die leidt tot de aanhouding van Leijdekkers heeft de Nederlandse justitie 200.000 euro uitgeloofd. Ook staat de Brabander op de lijst van meestgezochte criminelen van Europol.
Leijdekkers werd in Nederland veroordeeld tot 24 jaar cel voor drugshandel en het geven van een moordopdracht. Ook in België is hij al meerdere keren bij verstek veroordeeld tot in totaal bijna tachtig jaar cel.
Aan verschillende Belgische sleutelspelers in de zaak legde de rechtbank hoge straffen op. Ex-rijkswachter Willy Van Mechelen is tot negen jaar cel veroordeeld, zijn zakenkompaan Tom Bastiaanse tot twaalf jaar. Geert Frisson, voormalig lid van een motorbende, moet een celstraf van dertien jaar uitzitten.
ARNHEM (ANP) - Nederland doet met zestig sporters mee aan de Europese kampioenschappen atletiek in Birmingham. Dat meldt de Atletiekunie donderdag. De EK zijn van 10 tot en met 16 augustus in het vernieuwde Alexander Stadium.
Femke Broeders-Bol is de blikvanger van de Oranje-formatie, die uit 32 mannen en 28 vrouwen bestaat. De Amersfoortse stapte na haar succesvolle jaren op de 400 meter horden over naar de 800 meter. Broeders-Bol deed afgelopen weekend niet mee aan de NK om zich volledig op de EK te kunnen focussen.
Wereldkampioene kogelstoten Jessica Schilder hoopt voor de derde keer op rij de Europese titel te behalen. Andere medaillekandidaten zijn Nadine Visser (100 meter horden) en Lieke Klaver (400 meter). Niels Laros en Minke Bisschops ontbreken vanwege blessures.
Twaalf medailles
Twee jaar geleden, tijdens de vorige EK in Rome, behaalde Nederland een recordaantal van twaalf medailles en eindigde het team als zesde op de medaillespiegel. Dat was voor Nederland het meest succesvolle EK ooit. Er deden toen 59 atleten mee.
"We reizen naar Birmingham met een brede en veelzijdige ploeg, waarin ervaren internationale medaillewinnaars, sterke estafetteteams en opkomende atleten die zich op Europees niveau blijven ontwikkelen samenkomen. Rome was historisch, maar Birmingham is een nieuw kampioenschap met nieuwe uitdagingen. Onze ambitie is om in meerdere onderdelen mee te strijden om finales en medailles, terwijl we blijven bouwen richting de Olympische Spelen van Los Angeles in 2028", zegt Chiel Warners, technisch directeur van de Atletiekunie, in een persbericht.
Een man uit Engelen die vannacht de auto van zijn buurman in het water heeft geduwd ziet zijn dorp veranderen. “Heel moeilijk om aan te zien.”
“Ik herken mijn eigen dorp niet meer”, zegt de man terwijl hij bij de overburen een rookbom door de brievenbus gooit, omdat ze een poster op het raam hebben met de woorden ‘samen leven’. “Engelen is altijd een rustig dorp geweest, en nu verandert dat helemaal buiten ons om.” Hij kalkt het woord ‘hoer’ op een auto in de straat. “Ik zie het gewoon voor mijn eigen ogen gebeuren.”
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IT is going remote while sucking up more power. Most corporate IT is now off-premises for the first time, according to Uptime Institute, while the average rack power density has crested above 11 kW for the first time as server fleets are gradually replaced with more powerful hardware. Uptime’s Global Data Center Survey 2026 reveals how the industry is managing to adapt to challenging circumstances, with the usual evergreen concerns over rising costs plus staffing and skills shortages. The survey polls more than 800 datacenter owners and operators across multiple countries, with more than half (52 percent) in North America and Europe. Off premise dominates: Every year, Uptime asks its enterprise respondents to estimate what percentage of their IT workloads are run in-house versus in third-party facilities. For the first time, third-party sites have the larger share, accounting for 46 percent of IT workloads, compared with 44 percent residing in enterprise-owned corporate server farms. Those figures don’t add up to 100 percent, as some respondents (10 percent) say they are using IT rooms and server cabinets rather than a dedicated facility. Uptime’s experts estimate that, by 2028, the proportion of workloads in self-owned server halls will remain the same, while those running in third-party sites will expand to 48 percent, eating away at those currently based in IT rooms and server cabinets. More power: While the headlines have featured AI infrastructure pushing IT infrastructure power density to 120 kW per rack or even higher, the reality is that most datacenters and servers operate at a much lower level than that. This year, the average of the most typical rack densities now surpasses 11 kW, as a gradual ongoing shift toward higher-powered hardware was compounded by a small number of new high-density facilities with racks above 30 kW. Without those few high-density facilities skewing the average, it sits at 7.8 kW, just slightly up from 7.5 kW in 2025. The majority of facilities still do not have any racks of 30 kW or above, Uptime finds, but more respondents (24 percent) now say they have some of these, compared with 19 percent last year. The increase was mostly in the 50-plus kW ultra-high-density range, including some respondents deploying AI and GPU servers into racks configured for above 100 kW. The trend for rising rack density will continue as organizations upgrade their infrastructure with newer hardware. Updated servers boost both workload capacity and energy performance, but maximizing these benefits means a corresponding rise in overall system power, Uptime states. Refresh shortened: Some operators are also pursuing more aggressive technology refresh timelines of less than 4 years, the report claims. If true, this would be the reverse of what some hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Google and Meta have been doing in recent years, extending lifecycles out to 6 or 7 years to save on depreciation expenses. Outages: When it comes to outages, this year’s report shows improvement for the sixth year in a row, with the number of respondents who experienced an outage in the past three years down by three percentage points. But Uptime warns against complacency, noting that many of the factors behind outages, such as reduced or unstable power availability, local grid reliability, supply chain constraints, and extreme weather, are on the increase. The flip side is that the costs of any outages that do occur continue to rise. This is because organizations have become more dependent on digital infrastructure, the report says, and so outages may have more financial impact than in the past. Overall, 71 percent of survey respondents reported that their most damaging outage cost at least $100,000, compared with 57 percent a year ago. Staffing shortage: Staffing has long been an issue for datacenter operators, and this year the greatest skills gaps reported were in electrical (38 percent of respondents), junior level operations (38 percent), operations management (35 percent) and mechanical roles (34 percent). However, more than half (53 percent) of operators report difficulties finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, up from 46 percent a year ago. Finally, Uptime found that financial pressure and resource constraints continue to grow among operators. In fact, the high prices of power, staff, and equipment, particularly for AI-related infrastructure, is the primary issue. Alongside that are escalating concerns over capacity forecasting, power availability and supply chain disruptions. ®
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the missile landed in an uninhabited area and did not pose a direct threat to civilians.