Bondskanselier Friedrich Merz ligt onder vuur van zowel president Trump als Duitse kiezers. Tijdens een ontmoeting met burgers in Hanzestad Salzwedel blijkt hoe moeilijk zijn partij het kan krijgen bij de komende deelstaatverkiezingen. „We worden niet meer gerespecteerd als economische macht.”

Veel zwembaden hebben last van de hoge energiekosten. In het Drentse Vries doen ze het anders. Zwembad de Leemdobben, dat vrijdag vijftig jaar bestaat, gebruikt geen gas meer om de baden mee te verwarmen. Zonnepanelen, zonnecollectoren en warmtepompen doen het werk.

Het kabinet wil de maximale WIA-uitkering verlagen omdat het aantal langdurig zieke werknemers toeneemt. Steeds vaker ook vallen mensen uit met mentale klachten. Bedrijfsartsen bepleiten meer aandacht voor preventie. „Je maakt zieke mensen niet beter door hun uitkering te verlagen.”

Een 72-jarige man uit Zuidland is door een nepagent en handlanger opgelicht. Dat gebeurde nadat het slachtoffer overtuigd werd dat zijn geld en sieraden veiligen zouden worden opgeborgen door de polite. De daders zijn goed op beeld door alerte buren.

Dankzij alerte buren is er een goed screenshot van een nepagent die een 72-jarige bewoner van Zuidland oplicht. De bejaarde man overhandigt aan deze verdachte een envelop met daarin geld en sieraden die hij thuis bewaart. De oplichter en zijn handlanger, die het slachtoffer al die tijd aan de lijn heeft, beweren namelijk dat de bezittingen van de man door hen veilig zullen worden opgeborgen.

Jews in Britain are facing a wave of hate spread by hostile states, and some homegrown. We can only tackle it by working together

Another week, another attack on British Jews; and rather than synagogues being petrol-bombed in the middle of the night, now it is ordinary Jews being stabbed in broad daylight. It’s been described as this country’s biggest national security emergency for almost a decade by the UK’s terrorism watchdog. Finding a solution will mean some hard questions, not just for government and police but for wider society too.

The immediate move is, of course, more policing and more funding for security. The first job of government is to protect its people, and this should be done without question. Prosecutions should be expedited through the courts, as they were with the riots that followed the Southport attack. But physical protection is, in a way, the easy part.

Dave Rich is director of policy at the Community Security Trust and the author of Everyday Hate: How Antisemitism is Built into Our World – and How You Can Change it

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Policing and government policy are essential, but not sufficient to address rising hate crime against Jews

The stabbing of two men in north-west London on Wednesday by an attacker described as seeking anyone “visibly Jewish” would be horrifying under any circumstances. That it comes amid rising antisemitic crime in the area, in the UK and around the world makes it all the more frightening.

A community persecuted throughout history faces a fresh wave of hatred and abuse. Shock and grief are mixed with fear, with some British Jews asking whether they can be safe in the UK. This is the third attack in five weeks in the same part of Golders Green alone. Last October, two people were killed in an attack on a synagogue in Heaton Park, Manchester, on Yom Kippur. In December, two men were found guilty of plotting to infiltrate and open fire on a march against antisemitism in the same city. That month, a pair of gunmen killed 15 people at a Hanukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney.

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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There’s also this interview with Turan by Nick Ames from last July to get stuck into. He’s learned from the best.

With Simeone and Luis Enrique I had very valuable chats and discussions. They were excellent teachers but I also believe good students should improve on what they have been taught. I have a lot of positives in my pocket and now I’m trying to put them into practice on the pitch.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The system prompt for OpenAI's Codex CLI contains a perplexing and repeated warning for the most recent GPT model to "never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query."

The explicit operational warning was made public last week as part of the latest open source code for Codex CLI that OpenAI posted on GitHub. The prohibition is repeated twice in a 3,500-plus word set of "base instructions" for the recently released GPT-5.5, alongside more anodyne reminders not to "use emojis or em dashes unless explicitly instructed" and to "never use destructive commands like 'git reset --hard' or 'git checkout --' unless the user has clearly asked for that operation."

Separate system prompt instructions for earlier models contained in the same JSON file do not contain the specific prohibition against mentioning goblins and other creatures, suggesting OpenAI is fighting a new problem that has popped up in its latest model release. Anecdotal evidence on social media shows some users complaining about GPT's penchant for focusing on goblins in completely unrelated conversations in recent days. Update: OpenAI has published a blog post explaining "where the goblins came from."

In short, a training signal meant to encourage its "Nerdy" personality accidentally rewarded creature-heavy metaphors, causing words like "goblins" and "gremlins" to spread beyond that personality into broader model behavior. OpenAI says it has since retired the Nerdy personality, removed the goblin-friendly reward signal, and filtered creature-word examples from training data to keep the quirk from resurfacing in inappropriate contexts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.