Bij een tussentijdse verkiezing staat Nigel Farage, de leider van Reform UK, donderdag tegenover de satirische kandidaat Count Binface. Zijn kandidatuur laat zien dat gebrek aan ernst een serieus probleem is voor het VK.

There has been a leadership change at Cadillac, with Marcin Budkowski joining the squad as Team Principal.

Perhaps you are travelling to see the celestial rarity? Or maybe you are making an event of it at home?

• How to safely watch the solar eclipse

On Wednesday evening, millions of Europeans will experience a solar eclipse.

A wide band of north and central Spain, plus some of Portugal and parts of Greenland and Iceland will experience a rare total eclipse.

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Amid doubling prices and fraying tempers, shoppers hunt for elusive eyewear to prepare for rare eclipse of sun

• Europe solar eclipse – latest updates

A secretive WhatsApp group was pinging with notifications throughout Wednesday, letting its members know where in London the latest “drop” would take place.

The group’s focus, rather than being for an illicit substance, was for the much-coveted eclipse glasses, which have prompted a frantic rush on shops before the celestial event.

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First time director Dylan Meyer’s female twist on the genre is let down by silly stereotypes and jokes that land with a thud

Want to feel old? Superbad turns 20 next year. It’s been decades since the stoner comedy ruled the box office. In fact, the genre’s best theatrically-released film of recent years – the hilarious buddy movie One Of Them Days – didn’t feature any weed smoking at all despite hitting all the usual outlandish beats of a stoner flick. If the streaming success of Hulu’s recent R-rated bong-ripper Pizza Movie is anything to go by, audiences would rather watch this particular strain of movie on the couch where they can spark up in peace.

The Wrong Girls aims to reverse that trend with a nationwide US theatrical roll-out by Neon, the arty distributor which propelled Parasite and Anora to Oscar glory. Best friends Molly (Alia Shawkat) and Frankie (Kristen Stewart) live in a PeeWee’s Playhouse coded stoner cave with macrame decor, a life-size cut-out of Céline Dion, multiple cat towers and a contraption called the bong-o-tron – a complex rig of tubes and bubbling conical flasks – that fills the entirety of their coffee table. Being high all the time gives them a daffy kind of magical thinking, as they drive around town belting out power ballads and imagine that they are under the ocean with all manner of friendly sea creatures.

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Neocloud operator CoreWeave remains bullish about its prospects, claiming that changing patterns of AI use will create sustained demand for its cloud services. The New Jersey firm is among the most prominent rent-a-GPU businesses spawned by demand for AI training infrastructure, but is now attempting to move up the technology stack – a shift consultants at McKinsey said neoclouds would need to make to survive. "AI is no longer confined to frontier model labs. It is becoming embedded in software, industrial systems, financial markets, enterprise workflows, and national security missions," claims CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator. Intrator also claimed that deploying AI applications is turning compute from a large upfront requirement into a recurring expense. "For the last several years, many organizations treated a model like a deliverable. Train it, deploy it, and move on. Enterprises no longer operate that way," Intrator told analysts on a conference call for CoreWeave's financial results for the second quarter ended June 30. "Training, inference, evaluation, and improvement now form a single continuous loop. Models and agents in production generate real-world data. That data informs evaluation, driving new experiments, which improve the model or application before being redeployed into production." CoreWeave's pitch is that this continuous cycle is changing both the demand curve and the economics of AI. "Compute is no longer a one-time requirement concentrated at the beginning of a model's life. It becomes an ongoing requirement that grows with every application in production and every cycle of improvement," Intrator said, adding: "Our AI native platform was built for this." CoreWeave expects its managed inference services, launched only a few months ago, to reach an annual recurring revenue run rate of at least $250 million by the end of 2026. Yet all is not rosy. Revenue rose 112 percent year-on-year to $2.575 billion, but operating expenses reached $2.624 billion, resulting in a $49 million operating loss. Interest and other costs helped widen the net loss to $626 million. Most of that growth also came from existing clients rather than new ones. According to CoreWeave's Form 10-Q [PDF] filed with the SEC, approximately 93 percent of the revenue increase was attributable to expansion within its existing customer base, with the remainder attributable to new customers. In fact, the firm concedes that just three customers accounted for 36 percent, 26 percent, and 10 percent of quarterly revenue respectively – 72 percent between them. It also warns that "while we have historically experienced significant growth in revenue over the last three years, we cannot predict whether we will maintain this level of growth or when we will achieve positive net income." The company is also carrying substantial debt. As of June 30, total indebtedness stood at $35.6 billion, helping to push quarterly net interest expense up 140 percent to $640 million. CoreWeave also had $10 billion available to borrow under its revolving credit and delayed-draw term loan facilities, according to its Form 10-Q. Nor can it stop spending on infrastructure. CoreWeave expects 2026 capital expenditure of between $35 billion and $39 billion. CoreWeave also warned that it faced competition from much larger and more established cloud operators, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google, "a number of which are also our current customers," which it may not be able to compete with because of the resources they can bring to bear on building infrastructure and AI development. Investors nevertheless welcomed the results, sending CoreWeave's shares up almost 19 percent in early Wednesday trading, according to MarketWatch. "The opportunity ahead is generational. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI," stated Intrator. "Our conviction in our strategy has never been stronger, and our execution continues to reinforce it." ®

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De aandelenbeurs in Amsterdam is woensdag met een verlies de handel uitgegaan. Techinvesteerder Prosus was een negatieve uitschieter na kwartaalcijfers van het Chinese internetconcern Tencent, waarin het AEX-bedrijf een groot belang heeft. Beleggers wereldwijd reageerden ook op nieuwe cijfers over de inflatie in de Verenigde Staten.

De AEX sloot 0,4 procent lager op 1112,28 punten. De MidKap steeg juist 0,1 procent tot 1122,15 punten. De beurzen in Frankfurt, Parijs en Londen gingen tot 0,5 procent omlaag.

Prosus verloor bijna 6 procent en eindigde onderaan bij de hoofdfondsen. Tencent maakte bij de kwartaalcijfers bekend de uitgaven aan AI-projecten te verdubbelen. De vrije kasstroom was negatief doordat de kapitaaluitgaven in het afgelopen kwartaal meer dan verdubbelden.

ABN AMRO

ABN AMRO was met een plus van 5 procent de sterkste stijger in de AEX na goed ontvangen kwartaalcijfers. De bank voerde de winst in het tweede kwartaal met bijna een derde op. Daarbij verstrekte ABN AMRO meer hypotheken en meer leningen aan bedrijven. De kosten daalden juist bij de reorganiserende bank.

Op de financiële markten waren de ogen ook gericht op de inflatiecijfers in de Verenigde Staten. De prijsontwikkeling in 's werelds grootste economie was grotendeels in lijn met de verwachtingen van economen. De inflatie in juli koelde ook iets af in vergelijking met de voorgaande maand.

Arbeidsmarkt VS stimuleren

Op de markten voor kortlopende schulden wordt de kans op een renteverhoging door de Federal Reserve in september nu kleiner ingeschat. De meevallende inflatie geeft de centrale bank in de VS mogelijk meer ruimte om de arbeidsmarkt te stimuleren door de leenkosten voorlopig niet te verhogen.

De olieprijzen bleven vrijwel onveranderd, in afwachting van nieuws over het conflict tussen Iran en de VS.