Without a reckoning about the epic strategic error of leaving the EU, there is no serious debate about the country’s future place in the world

While the Labour party was in meltdown last week, Donald Trump was visiting China. By the time Wes Streeting had sent his resignation letter to Keir Starmer, the US president had completed a two-hour bilateral meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, and moved on to sightseeing.

The events unfolded in parallel, but in the competition for media and Westminster attention the superpower summit couldn’t rival manoeuvres against the prime minister. That is normal. A domestic crisis will always bump foreign events off the news agenda.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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England wins highest percentage per entry at International Wine Challenge, with Kent the country’s best region

English wines won the highest percentage of gold medals per entry in a global competition, with experts describing the improvement as remarkable.

At the International Wine Challenge, English wines are winning more gold medals than ever. In 2025, the country won 10, but this year it was awarded 25.

M&S Champagne Delacourt Vintage Blanc de Blancs 2017, France

M&S Collection Barossa Valley Shiraz 2024, Australia

Exceptional Botrytis Riesling 2017, Aldi, New Zealand

Exceptional Asti NV, Aldi, Italy

Fletcher’s LBV Port 2021, Aldi, Portugal

Tesco Finest Picpoul de Pinet 2024 Les Costières de Pomerols, France

Tesco Finest Barolo 2021 Fratelli Martini Secondo Luigi, Italy

Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Rioja Gran Reserva 2018, CVNE, Spain

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Coming so soon after the visit by US president Donald Trump, the optics and outcomes of the meeting between China and Russia will be closely scrutinised

Xi Jinping welcomed Russian president Vladimir Putin with pomp and pageantry as the pair kicked off talks in the Great Hall of the People on Wednesday morning, days after the Chinese leader hosted Donald Trump in the same location.

Chinese soldiers stood in position as a military band played the Russian and Chinese national anthems for the leaders in central Beijing. Children waving Russian and Chinese flags and cheered “Welcome, welcome!” in Chinese, before the pair entered the Great Hall.

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Garry Sanders has added a photo to the pool:

With the Scottish Pipe band leading the parade from the Royal Hotel, Herberton.
The Royal Hotel at Herberton established in 1880 and claims to be oldest continuously licenced hotel in Queensland.

Garry Sanders has added a photo to the pool:

The highest hotel in Queensland.
Built 1927

Garry Sanders has added a photo to the pool:

The oldest hotel in North Queensland established in 1900.

Op het Caribische eiland Saba wordt nog altijd druk gezocht naar Erik Matthijsen. De 53-jarige ambulanceverpleegkundige van de Ambulancedienst Zuid-Holland Zuid werd een week geleden voor het laatst gezien. "Het is onwaarschijnlijk dat hij levend wordt gevonden", zei de gezaghebber van Saba eerder al.

PaaS platform Railway says Google temporarily suspended its account on Wednesday without cause, inducing a major outage. Railway automates code deployment by taking a GitHub repo and doing all the work needed to get it running from the cloud. It’s struggled to do that for the last few hours and the company’s status page tells the sad tale, starting with an update time-stamped May 19, 22:29 UTC that said the company is “investigating a widespread service disruption” that meant “Users may be experiencing errors including ‘no healthy upstream’, ‘unconditional drop overload’, login failures, and inability to access the dashboard.” Angelo Saraceno, a solutions engineer for Railway, told The Register the company noticed a problem at around 22:00 UTC. He said the company’s resources appeared to have been deleted and appeared not to exist. Google has since explained it suspended the account, making Railway’s resources invisible. “Our contacts at Google were confused, customers are irate,” he added. We are livid and still trying to get all the details Ironically, in 2024 Railway decided to shift much of its infrastructure into colocation services after Google “caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business.” Those problems resurfaced in 2025 after more trouble at Google Cloud that again impacted Railway’s services. But Railway kept its control plane in Google Cloud and still has a dependency on databases that run there. Those resources see it spend an eight-figure sum each year. Yet Saraceno said when this incident commenced, it took an hour for Google’s support team to engage. “We are livid and still trying to get all the details,” he said before advancing a theory that Railway somehow triggered an enforcement rule. Railway’s status page says that as of 22:43 UTC the company “escalated this directly with Google.” Oh, to have been a fly on the wall during that escalation! Railway’s most recent status update, at the time of writing, is an 03:05 May 20 missive that states “More workloads are coming back online. Some users may still experience intermittent issues during the recovery. Non-enterprise deploys remain paused; enterprise deploys are unaffected.” The Register has contacted Google to ask if and why it blocked Railway’s account. You know the drill: We will update this story if we receive more than corporate platitudes. Cloud providers might rightly block a customer’s account over unpaid bills or inappropriate use – but usually do so after giving fair warning. Railway told us this incident came out of the blue. Google has form taking down customers without cause: In 2024 it infamously wiped out all rented infrastructure used by Australian pension fund UniSuper. Railway’s status page includes apologies to its customers, despite the problem being at Google’s end. “Our customers don’t care if it is Google,” Saraceno said. “We have to own our uptime.” ®

LONDEN (ANP) - Regeringen van EU-landen bespreken of voormalig president van de Europese Centrale Bank Mario Draghi of voormalig bondskanselier Angela Merkel de EU zou kunnen vertegenwoordigen in mogelijke onderhandelingen met de Russische president Vladimir Poetin over de oorlog in Oekraïne. Dat meldt de Britse zakenkrant Financial Times.

De ministers van Buitenlandse Zaken bespreken volgende week de kwaliteiten van de mogelijke kandidaten tijdens een EU-bijeenkomst op Cyprus, aldus het bericht, dat zich baseert op anonieme bronnen.

Goeie vraag — en eentje die deze zomer best relevant is, want piloten staken regelmatig en automatisering is een hot topic in de luchtvaart. Even kort en helder:

Het korte antwoord: ook de piloot

Op elke commerciële vlucht naar Malaga of Santorini deze zomer zitten twee gekwalificeerde piloten in de cockpit. Zij zijn juridisch en operationeel de gezagvoerders — niet de computer ( EASA Air Ops regelgeving).

Wat doet de computer dan wél?

Moderne toestellen ( Airbus A320, Boeing 737, die je richting Malaga of Santorini brengen) gebruiken de autopilot voor het overgrote deel van de vlucht — vaak 90% of meer van de tijd in de lucht. De piloten programmeren de route via het Flight Management System en monitoren de systemen ( Smithsonian Air & Space).

Wat doet de piloot écht zelf?

• Taxiën, opstijgen en landen — vrijwel altijd handmatig, zeker op een uitdagende luchthaven als Santorini (JTR), met zijn korte baan van 2.125 meter, zijwind en een aanvliegroute langs de caldera ( SKYbrary - Santorini Airport)
• Beslissingen bij turbulentie, weersomstandigheden, ATC-instructies en noodgevallen
• Eindverantwoordelijkheid voor alles wat er gebeurt

Malaga (AGP) is technisch makkelijker, maar ook daar landt de piloot handmatig — een automatische landing (autoland) wordt alleen gebruikt bij extreem slecht zicht en vereist speciale certificering van zowel piloot, toestel als luchthaven.

De realiteit

Zie het zo: de computer is een hele goede co-piloot die het saaie werk doet (rechtuit vliegen op kruishoogte), maar de mens neemt de cruciale beslissingen en doet de moeilijke stukken. Volledig pilootloze passagiersvluchten zijn er voorlopig nog niet — Airbus werkt wel aan "single pilot operations" voor de toekomst, maar dat ligt nog jaren weg en stuit op flink verzet van piloten en regelgevers ( Reuters over Airbus single-pilot plannen).

Dus: geniet van je vakantie — er zit een mens aan het stuur