Ruim een op de vier werknemers in Nederland heeft een migratieachtergrond. Dat vraagt om extra aandacht voor diversiteit. Maar verschillen je organisatie binnenhalen, leidt niet als vanzelf tot mensen die elkaar accepteren en waarderen.

Wanneer het verdrag voorlopig kan worden ingevoerd, is nog niet bekend. De Europese Commissie riskeert met de tijdelijke invoering een confrontatie met het Europees Parlement.

• 66-year-old rapper is longtime women’s sports supporter

• Team did not attend Trump’s State of the Union address

The rapper Flavor Flav will host a Las Vegas event in July to honour the US women’s ice hockey team’s gold medal at the Milano Cortina Olympics and celebrate all other female Olympian and Paralympian achievement.

The Hall of Fame rapper announced on X on Thursday that he will host a She Got Game weekend event from 16-19 July in partnership with MGM Resorts to honour the women’s hockey team as well as other female athletes.

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TOKYO (ANP) - De Japanse keizerstroon staat niet open voor vrouwen. Dat heeft premier Sanae Takaichi gezegd in het parlement. Ze verwees daarbij naar een oordeel van een expertpanel uit 2021 dat het "gepast" is de troonopvolging te beperken tot mannelijke nakomelingen.

In Japan mogen alleen mannen de troon bestijgen. Prinses Aiko wordt daarom overgeslagen in de troonopvolging. Zij is de dochter van keizer Naruhito en keizerin Masako. De jongere broer van Naruhito, kroonprins Akishino, staat eerste in de lijn van opvolging. Zijn zoon prins Hisahito staat tweede. Ook Hisahito's oudere zussen kunnen niet opvolgen.

Al decennialang wordt er in Japan gediscussieerd over de strikte regels voor troonopvolging. Peilingen laten zien dat de meeste Japanners openstaan voor een vrouwelijke keizer. Takaichi's conservatieve regeringspartij houdt echter vast aan troonopvolging via de mannelijke lijn.

Takaichi is de eerste vrouwelijke premier van Japan.

UTRECHT (ANP) - Schaatsbond KNSB wijst geen vervanger aan voor Jutta Leerdam in aanloop naar het WK sprint. Dat meldt een woordvoerder van de KNSB. De olympisch kampioen op de 1000 meter gaf donderdagavond aan haar seizoen te beëindigen en geen gebruik te maken van de aanwijsplek. Femke Kok kreeg de andere aanwijsplek voor het WK en zal daar wel gebruik van maken.

Dat betekent dat op het NK sprint, komend weekend in Heerenveen, bij de vrouwen niet één maar twee plekken voor het WK sprint te verdienen zijn. Bij het NK allround zijn er bij de vrouwen juist geen WK-tickets meer te verdienen, omdat de KNSB besloot niet twee maar drie schaatssters een aanwijsplek te geven. Mocht een van die drie ziek worden of zich om een andere reden afmelden, dan komt de winnaar van het NK allround alsnog in aanmerking, zo laat de KNSB weten.

Bij de mannen is er op het NK 'gewoon' één startplek voor de sprinters en één startplek voor de allrounders te verdienen. De wereldkampioenschappen sprint en allround vinden van 5 tot en met 8 maart plaats in Heerenveen.

De hypotheekrente is in de laatste week van februari voor de zevende week op rij gedaald, meldt De Hypotheekshop. De versnelling die vorige week werd ingezet, hield daarmee onverminderd aan. Daardoor kwam het belangrijkste tarief van een hypotheek van tien jaar met Nationale Hypotheek Garantie (NHG) uit op 3,7 procent. Dat is de laagste stand sinds begin december.

In de afgelopen anderhalve week pasten volgens De Hypotheekshop vrijwel alle veertig actieve aanbieders hun tarieven aan. Februari liet daarmee het hoogste aantal renteverlagingen zien sinds april 2025. Ook de daling van de gemiddelde hypotheekrente, van 3,8 procent naar 3,7 procent, was de grootste sinds april 2025.

De Hypotheekshop verwacht dat de daling ook volgende maand doorzet. Maart is historisch gezien de maand waarin geldverstrekkers het meest sleutelen aan hun rentetarieven. Met de Open Huizen Dag op 28 maart willen aanbieders volgens De Hypotheekshop scherp in de rentelijstjes staan.

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was not merely blocking social media or foreign websites; it was a total communications shutdown.

Unlike previous Iranian internet shutdowns where Iran’s domestic intranet—the National Information Network (NIN)—remained functional to keep the banking and administrative sectors running, the 2026 blackout disrupted local infrastructure as well. Mobile networks, text messaging services, and landlines were disabled—even Starlink was blocked. And when a few domestic services became available, the state surgically removed social features, such as comment sections on news sites and chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective seems clear. The Iranian government aimed to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This escalation marks a strategic shift from the shutdown observed during the “12-Day War” with Israel in mid-2025. Then, the government primarily blocked particular types of traffic while leaving the underlying internet remaining available. The regime’s actions this year entailed a more brute-force approach to internet censorship, where both the physical and logical layers of connectivity were dismantled.

The ability to disconnect a population is a feature of modern authoritarian network design. When a government treats connectivity as a faucet it can turn off at will, it asserts that the right to speak, assemble, and access information is revocable. The human right to the internet is not just about bandwidth; it is about the right to exist within the modern public square. Iran’s actions deny its citizens this existence, reducing them to subjects who can be silenced—and authoritarian governments elsewhere are taking note.

The current blackout is not an isolated panic reaction but a stress test for a long-term strategy, say advocacy groups—a two-tiered or “class-based” internet known as Internet-e-Tabaqati. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the country’s highest internet policy body, has been laying the legal and technical groundwork for this since 2009.

In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no longer a default for citizens, but instead a privilege granted based on loyalty and professional necessity. The implementation includes such things as “white SIM cards“: special mobile lines issued to government officials, security forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state’s filtering apparatus entirely.

While ordinary Iranians are forced to navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. This tiered access is further enforced through whitelisting at the data center level, creating a digital apartheid where connectivity is a reward for compliance. The regime’s goal is to make the cost of a general shutdown manageable by ensuring that the state and its loyalists remain connected while plunging the public into darkness. (In the latest shutdown, for instance, white SIM holders regained connectivity earlier than the general population.)

The technical architecture of Iran’s shutdown reveals its primary purpose: social control through isolation. Over the years, the regime has learned that simple censorship—blocking specific URLs—is insufficient against a tech-savvy population armed with circumvention tools. The answer instead has been to build a “sovereign” network structure that allows for granular control.

By disabling local communication channels, the state prevents the “swarm” dynamics of modern unrest, where small protests coalesce into large movements through real-time coordination. In this way, the shutdown breaks the psychological momentum of the protests. The blocking of chat functions in nonpolitical apps (like ridesharing or shopping platforms) illustrates the regime’s paranoia: Any channel that allows two people to exchange text is seen as a threat.

The United Nations and various international bodies have increasingly recognized internet access as an enabler of other fundamental human rights. In the context of Iran, the internet is the only independent witness to history. By severing it, the regime creates a zone of impunity where atrocities can be committed without immediate consequence.

Iran’s digital repression model is distinct from, and in some ways more dangerous than, China’s “Great Firewall.” China built its digital ecosystem from the ground up with sovereignty in mind, creating domestic alternatives like WeChat and Weibo that it fully controls. Iran, by contrast, is building its controls on top of the standard global internet infrastructure.

Unlike China’s censorship regime, Iran’s overlay model is highly exportable. It demonstrates to other authoritarian regimes that they can still achieve high levels of control by retrofitting their existing networks. We are already seeing signs of “authoritarian learning,” where techniques tested in Tehran are being studied by regimes in unstable democracies and dictatorships alike. The most recent shutdown in Afghanistan, for example, was more sophisticated than previous ones. If Iran succeeds in normalizing tiered access to the internet, we can expect to see similar white SIM policies and tiered access models proliferate globally.

The international community must move beyond condemnation and treat connectivity as a humanitarian imperative. A coalition of civil society organizations has already launched a campaign calling for “direct-to-cell” (D2C) satellite connectivity. Unlike traditional satellite internet, which requires conspicuous and expensive dishes such as Starlink terminals, D2C technology connects directly to standard smartphones and is much more resilient to infrastructure shutdowns. The technology works; all it requires is implementation.

This is a technological measure, but it has a strong policy component as well. Regulators should require satellite providers to include humanitarian access protocols in their licensing, ensuring that services can be activated for civilians in designated crisis zones. Governments, particularly the United States, should ensure that technology sanctions do not inadvertently block the hardware and software needed to circumvent censorship. General licenses should be expanded to cover satellite connectivity explicitly. And funding should be directed toward technologies that are harder to whitelist or block, such as mesh networks and D2C solutions that bypass the choke points of state-controlled ISPs.

Deliberate internet shutdowns are commonplace throughout the world. The 2026 shutdown in Iran is a glimpse into a fractured internet. If we are to end countries’ ability to limit access to the rest of the world for their populations, we need to build resolute architectures. They don’t solve the problem, but they do give people in repressive countries a fighting chance.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system.

News article.

After the Barcelona Shakedown and two weeks of pre-season testing in Bahrain, it’s almost time to kick off F1’s new era with the Australian Grand Prix – but before that, Drive to Survive returns to our screens on Netflix for one last look at 2025. Having watched all eight episodes from Season 8, F1.com presents five of the many standout moments…