Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that both countries have now “resolved all issues” connected to the downing of an Azerbaijani passenger jet in late 2024.

De Tilburgse familie Moonen staat al generaties op de grootste kermis van de Benelux, die deze vrijdag weer begint. Het volksfeest van overgrootvader is uitgegroeid tot stadsgroot evenement waarvoor meer dan tweehonderd attracties gekeurd zijn. Aan de knoppen zit, veel eerder dan gehoopt, de vierde generatie Moonen. „Ik hoop dat ik hem wat heb kunnen meegeven.”

De herdenking van de Slag bij Grunwald begon in 1998 en is inmiddels uitgegroeid tot de grootste historische veldslag die in Polen – en misschien wel Europa – wordt nagespeeld. „We versloegen het sterkste leger van die tijd. Daarna werd Polen een grootmacht.”

Deze week stond er diplomatiek „géén klein bier” op het menu in Brussel, in de woorden van een topambtenaar bij de Europese Commissie. Tot in de vroege uren werd er gesteggeld over klimaatplannen. Terwijl de uitstootplannen politiek gevoelig liggen, lijkt Europa het roerend eens over meer autonomie door elektrificatie.

Het is volop zomer en ik schrijf deze column onder een schaduwrijke boom in een tuin vol vrolijk fluitende vogels.

Incoming PM has deigned to answer some quickfire TikTok questions – also revealing his stance on socks with sandals

It was Tony Blair who wrote that the “leader sets out for the people what they need and not simply what they want. Otherwise, the leader is just a follower.”

The incoming Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, must have been channelling his predecessor when, this week, he started to set out his views on the big issues facing the UK: should milk go in the cup before the tea? What items belong in a Christmas dinner?

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By relaxing visa rules, Beijing has two things on its mind – boosting its economy and improving its self-image

Walk through central Beijing today and one thing quickly becomes apparent: foreigners are back. They are taking photos outside the Forbidden City and sitting in cafes around Gulou and Sanlitun. The shift is visible online, too; YouTube is increasingly filled with videos titled “China Shocked Me” or “My First Week in China”. Most of the creators are tourists, not China specialists or journalists, and many of them are encountering the country for the first time.

The resurgence is striking because to many outside observers China’s story has become one of closure and increased security – of intensifying strategic rivalry with the west, expanded anti-espionage enforcement and increasingly constrained foreign reporting, including the withholding and revocation of visas for US journalists. Yet on the ground, another story is unfolding. When it comes to its relationship with the rest of the world, Beijing increasingly appears to be betting on direct exposure: come to China and judge for yourself.

Zichen Wang is deputy secretary-general at the Center for China and Globalization, a thinktank in Beijing. This article was co-written by Hao Wu, an assistant professor at the School of International Studies at Peking University

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Earlier this week, Linux project leader Linus Torvalds told AI haters to fork off, and invited anyone who didn't like his comments to fork the kernel. Well, here you go: linux-0.11-rs, a total reimplementation of the Linux kernel, done in langage de programmation du jour, Rust. No, this isn't really a response to the Emperor Penguin's challenge – for a start, it looks like it was done with AI – but the timing was irresistible. The new project is by an undergrad student at Beihang University in Beijing, China, under the handle Poseidon. Never mind not being a fork – Poseidon's kernel isn't even really a port of Linux. It's a rewrite, and a rewrite of a very early version. It's based on Linux kernel 0.11, whose source code you can peruse on this mirror. This was an early kernel from December 8, 1991 – just a few months after the initial release, Linux 0.01. Version 0.11 was the last release of that first year of Linux. It was followed by version 0.12 in January 1992, then the version number jumped to 0.95 in March, as the young Torvalds started counting down to kernel 1.0 – which arrived two years later. If you read the 0.11 release notice, Torvalds said: "Linux-0.11 has a few rather major improvements, but perhaps most notably, is the first kernel where some other people start making real contributions." He goes on to say: "This is a major milestone, since it makes the kernel much more powerful than Minix was at the time." It's also when "Ted Ts'o shows up as a coder." Poseidon's Rust rewrite is quite a lot bigger than the original. The hackers of the "Orange Site" have been dissecting it with much greater expertise than this vulture can offer. User "dminik" fed it to an automatic code analyzer, and Pajecawav's Ghloc reckoned that it's just over 47,000 lines of Rust. Dminik breaks that down: "It's about 15k lines of code for the kernel and the rest is various utilities, libraries and programs that can run on the kernel." In other words, linux-0.11-rs is more complete than just the kernel. It also includes the core OS as it stood at the end of the year it first appeared. "Poseidon" also credits a tutorial on writing an OS kernel in Rust, which implies to us that this was not an entirely bot-driven effort. Some work has gone into it. Some of the Hacker News commentators call it a waste of tokens, or more pointedly a waste of water and electricity, but it seems to be a kid having some fun, playing around and experimenting. For us, that's a good thing. We hope that they found the exercise instructive. The Reg FOSS desk is not a fan of bot-slop, but we do approve of exploring and learning and having fun. At least for as long as code-generating LLMs are cheap and plentiful, it will be very hard to prevent youngsters and students from playing around and experimenting with them. Nobody is ever going to deploy anything on a bot-generated rewrite of a prototype kernel from 35 years ago – and don't forget that the original was itself written by a 22-year-old who was doing it "Just for Fun." ®

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Nu ook echt voor iedereen & de rest van Nederland: zomervakantie. De sleurhut (Beyerland Vitesse 400-2) uit de stalling, Adilette-slippers aan de tenen, bier in de koeling, file op de Route du Soleil, klapband, ANWB, hitte, blauwalg, Kronenbourg, u kent het allemaal wel. Er is nieuwe muziek van Yard Act, Waylon Wyatt, The Menzingers, wat bonusmateriaal van Metallica en een gedicht van Novica Tadic. Vakantie makkers. Bijna. Prettig weekend.

Waylon Wyatt

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Novica Tadic - Night Passes

Poor us, we are all kings
when we gaze at the starry sky.

The noise of the crowd grows faint
on the town square and in our blood.

The voice will re-enter the angel’s trumpet.
Once again hell will rise on its feet.

The Menzingers

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Quicksand

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Motionless in White

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Bonus

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