Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google's president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a "competitive paradox" as it seeks to spur growth while restricting the technologies needed to achieve that goal.

He warned against erecting walls that make it harder to use some of the best technology in the world, especially as it advances quickly. EU leaders gathered Thursday for a summit in Belgium focused on increasing European competitiveness in a more volatile global economy. Europe's digital sovereignty push gained momentum in recent months, driven by fears that President Donald Trump's foreign policy could force a tech decoupling.

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MHKBB posted a photo:

Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Carl Zeiss C-Planar T* 2.8/80
Film: Kentmere Pan 200

By partnering with CodePath, AI biz aims to modernize how people learn to program

Can using AI teach you to code more quickly than traditional methods? Anthropic certainly thinks so. The AI outfit has partnered with computer science education org CodePath to get Claude and Claude Code into the hands of students, a time-tested strategy for seeding product interest and building brand loyalty.…

Oxide says AMD’s Turin EPYCs are coming, switch revamp under review, more open hardware in the works

Remember that giant green rack-sized blade server Oxide Computer showed off a couple of years back? Well, the startup is still at it, having raked in $200 million in Series-C funding this week as it prepares to bring a bevy of new hardware to market with updated processing power, memory, and networking.…

Men appeared in photo lineup assembled in New York and had no apparent connection to late sex offender

Ro Khanna, a California Democratic representative, read a list of six names on the House floor earlier this week and said they were “wealthy, powerful men that the DoJ hid” in the recently released files related to Jeffrey Epstein. After questions from the Guardian, the Department of Justice said that four of the men Khanna named have no apparent connection to Epstein whatsoever, but rather appeared in a photo lineup assembled by the southern district of New York (SDNY).

Khanna, along with Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican representative, pushed the justice department to unredact names in the files, arguing that some names were being unlawfully redacted. Massie claimed credit on X earlier this week for forcing the justice department to remove redactions on a file that listed 20 names, birthdays and photos, including those of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Khanna then read some of those names on the House floor.

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Johnny Flynn and John C Reilly offer casting heft, but this moody, technically sound tale of an unfolding epidemic in 1870s Wisconsin lacks emotional substance

There is some very concerted image-making and mood-making in this technically accomplished yet unsatisfying drama from first-time, Norway-based director Dara Van Dusen. It is a sombre tale of the American old west, adapted by Dusen from the novel by Stewart O’Nan, and somehow has the feel of a short film indulgently taken to feature length. Its visual gestures and set pieces, although striking and often shocking, felt for me disconnected from any emotional truth – a truth that sustained, developed storytelling may have provided.

The setting is a frontier town in Wisconsin in 1870, and Jacob (Johnny Flynn) is both sheriff and pastor – although he wears neither badge nor religious garment. He has seen traumatising service in the civil war, in which he appears to have achieved high rank, although some in the town are suspicious of his Norwegian background. He is married to Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and they have a young child.

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• Briton triumphs by nearly a second in Milano Cortina

• First British man to win individual winter gold since 1980

And on the seventh day, Great Britain finally won their first medal of the Olympics. At nine o’clock on Friday night Matt Weston, the man his teammates call “Captain 110%”, won the gold in the men’s skeleton after four faultless races across the two days of competition.

The 28-year-old broke the track record at the Cortina Sliding Centre four times in the space of four races, and won in a final combined time of 3min 43.33sec, almost a full second ahead of the runner-up, Germany’s Axel Jungk. Weston is the first British man ever to win the Olympic skeleton title. And he did it all despite starting the year with a four-inch tear in his right quad that meant he had to miss pre-season training.

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I know I probably say this every time I post videos like this, but I wish I’d gotten into art & art history earlier than I did. Channels like Behind the Masterpiece are so good at making this stuff come alive and their Brief History of Japanese Art scratches my recent interest in Japan itch quite nicely. I was lucky to see some of the pieces from the video on my Japan trip last fall, including the Big Buddha in Kamakura, hand scrolls, sumi-e, and so many woodblock prints. (via open culture)

Tags: art · art school · history · Japan · video

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn vrijdag met kleine uitslagen gesloten na de zware koersverliezen een dag eerder. Beleggers op Wall Street hebben een lang weekend voor de boeg, want op maandag is de Amerikaanse beurshandel dicht voor President's Day.

De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde aan het slot van de handelsdag een plusje van 0,1 procent op 49.500,93 punten. De brede S&P 500 steeg licht tot 6836,17 punten en de technologiebeurs Nasdaq daalde 0,2 procent tot 22.546,67 punten. Op donderdag werden nog verliezen tot 2 procent op de koersenborden gezet.

De aandacht van handelaren ging onder meer uit naar cijfers over de inflatie in de Verenigde Staten. De consumentenprijzen in de grootste economie ter wereld stegen in januari met 2,4 procent op jaarbasis, wat iets minder sterk is dan verwacht. In december bedroeg de inflatie nog 2,7 procent. Bij een afzwakkende inflatie heeft de Federal Reserve meer ruimte om de rente verder te verlagen.

Airbnb

Bij de bedrijven stond Applied Materials in de belangstelling met een koersstijging van ruim 8 procent. De grootste fabrikant van chipapparatuur in de VS presteerde afgelopen kwartaal beter dan analisten hadden verwacht en kwam met een sterke verwachting voor het lopende kwartaal.

Vakantiewoningverhuurplatform Airbnb was eveneens in trek met een plus van 4,7 procent. De omzet viel in het afgelopen kwartaal hoger uit dan verwacht door een toename van het aantal overnachtingen en hogere prijzen. Coinbase Global werd 16,5 procent hoger gezet. De cryptobeurs zag de omzet in het afgelopen kwartaal iets harder dalen dan voorzien, maar de winst viel wel hoger uit.

Pinterest

Rivian Automotive was ook een uitblinker met een koerssprong van 26,6 procent. De elektrische vrachtwagenfabrikant leed in het vierde kwartaal van 2025 minder verlies dan gevreesd. Ook verwacht het bedrijf dit jaar flink meer trucks te leveren dan in 2025.

De cijfers van het socialemediabedrijf Pinterest vielen juist zwakker uit dan verwacht en het aandeel kelderde bijna 17 procent.