Tol, blokkades, invoerheffingen, accijnzen en afpersing. De geschiedenis ligt vol met handelsbeperkingen, ziet NRC’s huishistoricus Bart Funnekotter.
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DEN HAAG (ANP) - Sinds stichting Animal Rights vijf jaar geleden aan de bel trok over het aantal kippen dat op transport naar slachthuizen sterft, is er weinig veranderd. Dat meldt de organisatie in een persbericht.
In 2020 waren circa 575.000 dieren dood bij hun aankomst in slachthuizen. In 2025 lag dat aantal op 458.500 kippen. In 2024 waren dat er 491.136, in 2023 ruim 435.000, in 2022 458.030, in 2021 439.504 en in 2020 dus circa 575.000.
Volgens Animal Rights is er geen structurele daling zichtbaar in die aantallen en daarom trekt de organisatie aan de bel. "Het lijkt erop dat zowel de pluimveesector, als het landbouwministerie, als toezichthouder NVWA het wel prima vinden zo. Animal Rights vindt dat onacceptabel en verwacht actie van de minister en staatssecretaris."
South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said the Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise would end on 21 August at the request of the US
South Korea’s military has confirmed that joint military drills with the US will be cut short, days after Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon to scale back the exercises.
In a statement on Wednesday, South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said at the request of the US side, the Ulchi Freedom Shield (UFS) exercise – which began on Monday would end on Friday, six days earlier than originally planned.
Continue reading...Victorian court of appeal to consider whether triple murder and attempted murder guilty verdicts should be quashed
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Limited accomodation during sequestering ‘issues of convenience’, Patterson’s barrister says
Kidd says Patterson’s case must be considered in the context of other cases where jurors had unsupervised access to “outsiders”. He says in this case the jurors were under the supervision of the jury-keeper at all times.
They are not, in our submission, a principled response.
If there has been no breach, then where’s the fundamental irregularity?
There’s no evidence that that’s occurred here.
Continue reading...Murder trial of Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis, 63, former South Side Compton Crips gang leader, opens in Las Vegas
For nearly 30 years, the unsolved murder of 25-year-old rapper Tupac Shakur has sparked lawsuits, theories and conspiracies.
Now, decades after his death in a September 1996 drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, local prosecutors are finally offering a detailed official account of Shakur’s killing, accusing Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a 63-year-old former South Side Compton Crips gang leader, of being the “on-the-ground, on-site commander of the effort to kill Tupac”.
Continue reading...Nixon bested Alexander Vindman to win Democratic nomination and now faces Republican Ashley Moody in November
In an upset for the Democratic establishment, progressive Angie Nixon won the party’s US Senate primary in Florida, beating former army intelligence officer Alexander Vindman.
Nixon, a state representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, had significantly less funding going into the primary – with $975,000 to Vindman’s $16.3m at the end of July, according to Florida Politics.
Continue reading...I went out to dinner and a show with a friend the other day, enjoying some pizza and then wandering over to watch a mediocre blues/country/folk band. This friend was my first roommate from when I first moved out at 19. He lamented that being in his fifties, it was harder to develop new friendships.
Around those formative years of my early teens, I moved around quite a bit, from Calgary, to Toronto, to Ottawa. In under two years, I went to four different schools, needing to make new friends each time. It’s not easy being an awkward 13 year old, trying to fit in.
Perhaps trying to make friends can be difficult at any age.
For me, technology has always been a fruitful avenue for connection for much of my adult life. That roommate? I met him on a BBS. Many of the friends I’ve since met have been through technical avenues like work, conferences, and blogging.
Blogging throughout the aughts connected us to others around the world as we shared what we learned through our creative endeavours. Those connections led to employment, career advancement, and friendship.
As we rolled into the 2010s, much of that community had moved to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. I say moved because while our sites may have continued to exist, the conversations were no longer happening there. We were blogging less and tweeting more. (E.g. in 2013, I only wrote two blog posts.)
In my head, I have associated social media to a form of advertising. They are a way of continuing to stay top of mind in each other’s lives. “Out of sight, out of mind,” as they say. [Perhaps that feels icky to hear. Nobody likes to be reduced to or thought of as advertising.] The connection isn’t formed by having an account. It’s not even in the follows. It’s the conversations that happen. Social media makes it easier because it allows for social (and parasocial) relationships to develop due to semi-regular volleys back and forth—like a public chatroom.
It’s been frustrating to see these platforms shift away from connecting people and optimize for an algorithm that puts random content in front of me. With the recent transition away from social media—by others and myself—I’ve wondered how to keep those connections and form new ones.
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I’ve realized that in simplifying this blog, I’ve made it harder to create and maintain connections. No comments means it is harder for people to quickly respond to a topic. Sending an email creates enough friction that many people avoid doing it. People don’t necessarily want a one-on-one conversation with someone they’ve never met. It also privatizes the conversation preventing others from joining in. No analytics or webmentions means that I don’t see when other people are responding to me, making it harder for me to reply in kind. No webrings or blog rolls makes it harder for people to discover other people. That hyperlink was and is a foundational part of the web and I’ve not taken advantage of one of the best tools to promote connectivity in this medium.
The simplicity I have created to maintain this blog has made it more difficult to maintain connectivity in the world.
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Is this blog about more than just being a loudmouth, voicing my own thoughts, stories, and opinions into a vacuum? Should I be doing more to build connections? And to be clear, these connections aren’t just for me; they are for you, too. You might find a new site to follow and eventually a new friend because of those links.
Knowing me, I’ll end up somewhere in the middle. I’m not starting a revolution or a movement. I’m not looking to raise my pitchfork and ensure everybody has a blog. There are easier things that can be done, though. I can spin out more tendrils, more links, more connections to others.
It’s about consideration—not in some attempt to recreate a nostalgic past that has been lost. It’s about consideration in how we curate and connect. There are many amazing people, a few of whom I’m grateful to call friends, and this blog (and yours, and others) is one of the ways in which we can build and maintain a space that feels genuine, authentic, and connecting.
Postscript: it’s interesting to see how my relationship with social media continues to seesaw over the years, as I’ve observed with others, as well. Like therapy, sometimes it takes me years of chewing on an idea before I can fully digest it. Or maybe it’s like advertising, where I need to see the same thing over and over again before I buy into it.
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Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub's status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation -- error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub's incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot.
The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.
Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.
The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.
Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:
