It is the most extracted solid material on Earth – but this extraction can threaten ecosystems and livelihoods

Malé is one of the world’s most overcrowded cities, but it faces double pressure. As well as a growing population, the capital of the Maldives is also threatened by rising sea levels. Owing to climate breakdown, its living space is shrinking.

So the justification for a land reclamation project seemed clear. Take sand from elsewhere in the archipelago and use it to build up the land available for Malé’s people. What could go wrong? After all, it’s only sand, right?

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With my usual espressos off the menu, I was looking at a future of sluggishness and headaches. Then I embraced an alternative caffeine delivery system

For reasons purely related to vanity, I’ve had to give up coffee. It’s not for ever, unless it takes me for ever to get my teeth whitened, so I’m not minded to wean myself off caffeine entirely. But it’s not for a short enough time that I can simply stop whining and weather the low-level headache, the mental sluggishness and the frankly unbearable taste of water.

No problem, I thought: I will survive on energy drinks. What’s embarrassing about that? What could possibly be shameful about going into a Tesco, picking up a black and neon green can of Monster Energy, its name in a satanic font, at 8.05am? What could conceivably make anyone give me the fish eye, that I’m setting off the age-verification flashing light, and a dude is having to come over and attest that I am indeed over 16? All of that social opprobrium was before I’d even opened an energy drink and had to taste it.

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Gert-Jan Segers, de altijd integere ex-ChristenUnie-leider die tegenwoordig integere opinies maakt bij de EO en zich op integere wijze laat betalen door uitbaters van Polenhotels, een soort Donald Pols avant la lettre eigenlijk, heeft naar eigen zeggen 100.000 euro verdiend in slechts twee uur tijd. De vraag is natuurlijk. HOE DAN?

A) Alle meloenen die hij tijdens Rutte 3 en 4 heeft doorgeslikt en weer uitgepoept gepekeld aangeboden via de OnlyFans van Heleen van Royen
B) Naar de hogepriesters van de roddelpers gegaan en verteld waar Ali B. verstopt zit 
C) Alle donaties van Voor Ons Nederland gejat
D) Op Polymarket tientje ingezet op wat voor slipje Mirjam Bikker draagt
E) Gehackt (ja ja)
F) Het is geen magisch geld. Er zijn risico's aan verbonden, dus zorg ervoor dat je goed begrijpt hoe het werkt voordat je eraan begint. Als je interesse hebt, kun je hem een bericht sturen en dan legt hij het uit.
G) Anders, namelijk...
UPDATE - Gert-Jan Segers noemt eigen tips waardeloos

Met het mooie weer trekken Nederlanders massaal de natuur in. Maar let op, want het tekenseizoen draait ook weer op volle toeren. Volgens het RIVM komen teken in heel Nederland voor, vooral in gebieden met bomen, struiken, hoog gras en dode bladeren. Na een wandeling wordt mensen aangeraden zichzelf goed te controleren. Maar hoe zit dat eigenlijk met honden en katten?

Kunnen ook zij de ziekte van Lyme oplopen na een tekenbeet? We legden die vraag voor aan dierenarts Piet Hellemans. Zijn antwoord is duidelijk: "Ja."

Zelden erg ziek

Toch hoeven baasjes niet direct in paniek te raken als ze een teek op hun huisdier vinden. Volgens de dierenarts worden honden en katten maar zelden echt ziek van Lyme. "Er worden wel eens antilichamen tegen Lyme gevonden bij honden en katten, maar het gaat eigenlijk nooit gepaard met ziekte of ziekteverschijnselen. Ze kunnen er wel ziek van worden, maar meestal verloopt een infectie zonder symptomen."

Dat betekent volgens Hellemans niet dat je achterover kunt leunen. Integendeel. "Mijn uitdrukkelijke advies is om honden en katten altijd preventief te behandelen en je dieren degelijk op teken te checken."

Let op!

Volgens de dierenarts zijn er drie manieren om je huisdier te beschermen: een anti-tekenband, druppels via een pipet of speciale tabletten die vaak tot twaalf weken werken. Daarbij geeft hij een belangrijke waarschuwing aan kattenbezitters. "Maar let op: het teekwerend middel van je hond mag je absoluut niet aan je kat geven! Deze zijn namelijk erg giftig voor katten."

Dagelijks controleren blijft volgens hem essentieel. Vooral achter de oren, in oksels, liezen, onder de kin en tussen de pootjes verstoppen teken zich graag.

Bron: RTL Nieuws

tokyobogue has added a photo to the pool:

tokyobogue has added a photo to the pool:

The Musk v. Altman trial entered its third week Monday, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former OpenAI co-founder and renowned AI researcher Ilya Sutskever taking the stand. Nadella testified that Elon Musk never raised concerns to him that Microsoft's investments in OpenAI violated any special commitments, and said he viewed the partnership as clearly commercial from the start. He also described OpenAI's 2023 board crisis as "amateur city."
Meanwhile, Sutskever testified that he had raised concerns about Sam Altman because he feared OpenAI could be "destroyed." He expressed concerns about Altman's behavior to the board, in part because he said he felt "a great deal of ownership" over the startup. "I simply cared for it, and I didn't want it to be destroyed," Sutskever said. CNBC reports: Nadella said he was "very proud" that Microsoft took the risk to invest in OpenAI when "no one else was willing" to bet on the fledgling lab. Musk, who testified late last month, said Microsoft's $10 billion investment was the key tipping point that made him believe OpenAI was violating its nonprofit mission. He testified that the scale of the investment bothered him, and it prompted him to open a legal investigation into OpenAI. "I was concerned they were really trying to steal the charity," Musk said from the stand.

Nadella said he did not believe Microsoft's investments in OpenAI were donations, and that there was a clear commercial element to their partnership from the outset. He said during the partnership's early years, Microsoft gave OpenAI sharp discounts on computing resources, and Microsoft believed it would reap marketing benefits from doing so. During a separate video deposition that was played on Monday morning, Michael Wetter, a corporate development executive at Microsoft, said the company has recognized approximately $9.5 billion in revenue to date through its partnership with OpenAI as of March 2025.

[...] Nadella said he was "pretty surprised" by the board's decision [to fire Altman in November 2023], and that his priority was to try and figure out how to maintain continuity for Microsoft customers. Immediately after Altman was removed, Nadella said he made an effort to learn more about what happened, adding that he suspected jealousy and poor communication was at play. During conversations with OpenAI board members after the firing, Nadella said he was simply trying to understand the language in the OpenAI's statement about Altman being "not consistently candid" while communicating with the board. That language, Nadella said, "just didn't sort of suffice, because this is the CEO of a company that we are invested in and we're deeply partnered with, and so I felt that they could have explained to me what are the incidents or what is the detail behind it." There must have been instances of jealousy or miscommunication that could have justified pushing out Altman, Nadella said. He wanted more depth from the board members after the remark about candor, but no such information was available, he said. "It was sort of amateur city, as far as I'm concerned," Nadella testified.

[...] Musk testified that he is not entirely against OpenAI having a for-profit unit, but he said it became "the tail wagging the dog." He repeatedly accused Altman and Brockman of enriching themselves from a charity while also reaping the positive associations that come from running a nonprofit. "Microsoft has their own motivations, and that would be different from the motivations of the charity," Musk said from the stand. "All due respect to Microsoft, do you really want Microsoft controlling digital superintelligence?"

During a videotaped deposition shown in court last week, former OpenAI director Tasha McCauley recalled a discussion with Nadella and her fellow board members after the 2023 decision to dismiss Altman as OpenAI's CEO. "To the best of my recollection, Satya wanted to restore things to as they had been," McCauley said. The board members didn't think that was the right move, she said. But as a court witness on Monday, Nadella said he never demanded that the board reinstate Altman as OpenAI CEO. Recap:

Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight)
Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven)
Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six)
OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five)
Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four)
Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three)
Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two)
Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Twee private inlichtingenbureaus onderzochten in het geheim medewerkers van het Internationaal Strafhof in Den Haag. Voornaamste doelwit was de advocaat die in 2024 de hoofdaanklager van de rechtbank, Karim Khan, van seksueel misbruik beschuldigde.

Na de kabinetsvergadering van deze dinsdag verklaarde de Britse premier aan te blijven. Er is geen formele procedure voor een leiderschapswissel ingezet, ondanks toenemende druk in de Labourfractie.

Apple and Google have taken a big step toward securing cross-platform texting, ending years of messages bouncing around in glorified plaintext. Apple announced this week that encrypted Rich Communication Services (RCS) messaging is rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. The feature works across supported carriers and adds end-to-end encryption to cross-platform chats that were still taking the scenic route through carrier-era messaging infrastructure. Users will know it's enabled when a lock icon appears in RCS conversations. Apple says E2EE RCS messages cannot be read while traveling between devices, bringing Android-to-iPhone chats closer to the protections offered by WhatsApp and Signal. The move lands as other platforms head in the opposite direction. Earlier this month, Meta confirmed it was backing away from parts of its encryption rollout for Instagram DMs, telling The Register that "very few" people actually used the feature and suggesting privacy-minded users head over to WhatsApp instead. Apple, meanwhile, appears content to lean harder into the privacy angle, finally plugging one of the more obvious holes in modern messaging security. That gap has been hanging around for years. While iMessage chats between Apple devices were already encrypted, conversations involving Android phones could fall back to SMS or unencrypted RCS, depending on carrier support. Google had offered encrypted RCS chats inside Google Messages for years, but only when both sides used Google's ecosystem. Apple joining the party means cross-platform RCS encryption is finally starting to span the two largest mobile ecosystems. The rollout is still marked as beta, and carrier support varies by region, so not everyone will get encrypted chats immediately. UK availability remains unclear for now, as none of the major UK networks currently appear on Apple's published compatibility lists for the feature. Still, after two decades of the mobile industry insisting that interoperability and security could not coexist, cross-platform texting may finally be catching up with the rest of modern messaging. ®