LONDEN (ANP) - Bij de donderdag gehouden gemeenteraadsverkiezingen in het Verenigd Koninkrijk lijkt Labour, de partij van premier Keir Starmer, op een groot verlies af te stevenen. Winst is er, zoals verwacht, voor Reform UK, de anti-immigratiepartij van Nigel Farage.

Rond 05.00 uur lokale Britse tijd waren de resultaten bekend van 21 van de totaal 136 lokale volksvertegenwoordigingen. Op dat moment had Labour 186 zetels verloren en Reform UK er 255 gewonnen. In totaal zijn er zo'n 5000 zetels te verdelen. Het merendeel van de uitslagen komt in de loop van vrijdag.

Bij de verkiezingen werd gestemd voor lokale overheden in Engeland en in Wales en Schotland vonden parlementsverkiezingen plaats. Er werd al rekening gehouden met een flink verlies voor Labour. Mogelijk wacht Starmers partij een recordverlies.

De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump meldt op Truth Social dat "drie Amerikaanse torpedobootjagers van wereldklasse zojuist, onder vuur, zeer succesvol de Straat van Hormuz zijn uitgevaren".

Dat is volgens hem gebeurd nadat de "Iraanse aanvallers volledig werden vernietigd". De torpedobootjagers liepen daarbij geen schade op. Het bericht volgt op wederzijdse aanvallen tussen de VS en Iran, ondanks het staakt-het-vuren. De Iraanse staatstelevisie zei later "dat de situatie op de Iraanse eilanden en kustplaatsen aan de Straat van Hormuz weer normaal was."

"Een normaal land zou deze torpedobootjagers hebben laten passeren, maar Iran is geen normaal land. Ze worden geleid door waanzinnigen en als ze de kans kregen om een kernwapen te gebruiken, zouden ze dat zonder aarzeling doen. Maar die kans zullen ze nooit krijgen. En net zoals we ze vandaag weer hebben uitgeschakeld, zullen we ze in de toekomst nog veel harder en veel gewelddadiger uitschakelen als ze hun deal niet SNEL tekenen!", aldus Trump.

Onderhandelingen

Volgens hem is het staakt-het-vuren met Iran nog steeds van kracht. Dat zei hij tegen een verslaggever van ABC News, die dat op X meldt. Trump noemt de vergeldingsaanvallen slechts 'een lieve klap'.

Later vertelde Trump aan verslaggevers dat de VS aan het onderhandelen zijn met Iran. Pakistan zou hem gevraagd hebben om Project Freedom niet uit te voeren gedurende de onderhandelingen met Iran. Die missie is bedoeld om commerciële schepen weer door de Straat van Hormuz te laten varen.

Volgens Amerikaanse media op donderdag heeft Trump dit project tijdelijk stopgezet na druk van Saudi-Arabië en Koeweit. De Golfstaten zouden geen toestemming hebben gegeven om hun vliegbases en luchtruim hiervoor te gebruiken.

Reform runaway winners in north-east, likely pushing Labour into opposition in Hartlepool, with other losses for Starmer in Chorley, Wigan, Redditch and Tamworth

• Election 2026 live: latest news updates

• Full results from England, Scotland and Wales

The scale of the electoral challenge facing Labour was laid bare overnight as the party haemorrhaged councillors at the local elections and Reform made significant gains.

Keir Starmer’s party went into Thursday’s local elections expected to lose up to 1,850 councillors, with senior figures describing the contest as “tough”.

Continue reading...

Their microtonal rock has been a huge viral hit – but are they really 333-year-old aliens inspired by Borneo monkeys? The Quebecois duo tell all

Recently, Angine de Poitrine had to get new heads. The alien-looking rock duo were not in fact born with the monochrome polka-dotted complexions and extruded faces that millions of listeners have obsessed over since they went viral this spring. Guitarist Khn has a long, twangable nose and double-necked guitar/bass; drummer Klek’s dangly proboscis bounces along to his stone-cold playing. Both are apparently 333-year-old time travellers primarily inspired by a solemn musical quartet of monkeys from Borneo. Over months of hard gigging, their handmade papier-mache masks had gone soggy from the musicians’ laboured breathing. “When I looked at mine, I was like: Jesus Christ, did I really play that much with this?” says Klek. “It was falling apart. It was like putting a Christmas box outside when it’s raining.”

But when the masks disintegrated, it was important that their more robust replacements still looked lived-in. “People have fallen in love with the band as it’s always been,” says Khn. “So we’re not gonna change everything [because] we have a bigger budget now. We’re emotionally attached to our old beaten-up costumes that have been in car accidents and are full of snot. We think people love the fact that you can feel they have lived.”

Continue reading...

Some people wear elaborate clothes and spin their sabers like in the movies, but if you fight theatrically you’ll lose

I grew up in the suburbs around Paris and started fencing when I was five. I kept it up until I was about 22, but then began looking for something else. I started running marathons instead. The good thing about running is that you can go whenever you want – but that also means you can put it off all the time. I wanted a sport that had more structure.

I considered options like the canne de combat, a martial art in which people fight each other with a wooden cane. But then I listened to a podcast that mentioned plans to create a fighting sport using lightsabers. I thought: I’m a geek. I like Star Wars. I’ve done fencing. Let’s try it.

Continue reading...

A booming tech sector has disrupted translation jobs in publishing – but they could be needed for a while longer yet

In February 2022, while he was plugging away at rendering the US writer Dana Spiotta’s novel Wayward into French, the literary translator Yoann Gentric decided he needed a bit of light relief. He would test whether AI could put him out of work.

Gentric had been grappling with a short non-verbal sentence that described the book’s protagonist’s feelings upon opening a window: “Bright, sharp night air, bracing.” He put the prompt into DeepL, a neural-network-powered machine translation engine that regularly outperforms Google Translate in accuracy assessments.

Continue reading...

He has been besieged by birds, had 120m crabs try to crawl up his trouser leg and stayed cool beside an erupting Icelandic volcano. As David Attenborough turns 100, we celebrate his most extraordinary adventures

Today, David Attenborough turns 100. He is, without question, Britain’s greatest national treasure; a man who has devoted his career to helping the public engage with the natural world. But his story is also the story of television. Attenborough joined the BBC just as television ownership hit its biggest period of growth, then went on to shape the medium, both on and off camera, over the next decades. He is as important a figure in television as you will ever find, and here are his wildest moments.

***

Continue reading...

Kawsar Ahmad, 53, and Zeinab Ahmad, 31, set to apply for bail in Melbourne as Janai Safar, 32, due to face Sydney court on separate charges including joining a terrorist organisation

Two Australian women charged with committing crimes against humanity including slavery offences during the rule of Islamic State in Syria have faced a Melbourne court.

Kawsar Ahmad, 53, also known as Abbas, and her daughter Zeinab Ahmad, 31, were arrested by officers from the Victorian joint counter-terrorism team at Melbourne airport on Thursday.

Continue reading...

Seven days ago, the US-Iran ceasefire was holding but negotiations seemed stalled, or inching forward at best. Then, Donald Trump and the US launched Project Freedom

It has been a week of dizzying, whiplash news in the Iran war.

Seven days ago, the US-Iran ceasefire was holding but negotiations seemed stalled, or inching forward at best. With the strait of Hormuz effectively choked off by Iran, and the US Navy blockading Iranian ports, there was talk of a one-page memorandum being passed between Washington and Tehran to break the stalemate.

Continue reading...

De radicaal-rechtse partij van Nigel Farage staat op een grote voorsprong in de eerste resultaten van de lokale verkiezingen. De definitieve uitslag volgt pas in de loop van vrijdagmiddag.

De eigenzinnige Anna Weber-van Bosse werd in de 19de eeuw gegrepen door de natuur. Als een van de eerste vrouwen studeerde ze aan de universiteit. Later ging ze met haar man wereldwijd op onderzoek uit.

Trump schiet alle kanten op op zoek naar een uitvlucht uit zijn Iran-oorlog. Maar de president bewees deze week ook dat hij zijn ontevreden partij nog altijd volledig in de hand heeft.

De dag begint met veel hoge bewolking, maar er zijn in de ochtend al zonnige perioden. Vanmiddag wisselt de zon vooral af met wat stapelwolken. Soms is het dus bewolkt, maar de zon is er ook vaak bij. Het wordt vanmiddag 17 tot 19 graden.

tintinetmilou has added a photo to the pool:

Yodobashi camera

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Amazon Web Services is working to address a power outage that has created “impairments” to services served from the notorious US-EAST-1 region. A May 7 incident report time-stamped 5:25 PM PDT (00:25 UTC Friday) states that AWS spotted problems in the use1-az4 availability zone of the US-EAST-1 Region. A subsequent update states “EC2 instances and EBS volumes hosted on impacted hardware are affected by the loss of power during the thermal event.” An update time-stamped 6:47 PM PDT reveals“We continue to work towards mitigating the increased temperatures to its normal levels,” but warns “Other AWS services that depend on the affected EC2 instances and EBS volumes in this Availability Zone may also experience impairments.” At 8:06 PM PDT Amazon said it was "actively working to restore temperatures to normal levels ... though progress is slower than originally anticipated." The cloudy concern said it made "incremental progress to restore cooling systems" but users of EC2 Instances, EBS Volumes, and other services are "experiencing elevated error rates and latencies for some workflows." AWS has also shifted traffic away from the stricken AZ, and suggested companies shift workloads into other US-EAST-1 availability zones. Good luck getting that done because the update admits “Customers may experience longer than usual provisioning times.” US-EAST-1 is arguably AWS’s problem child, as it was the site of major outages that took big chunks of the internet offline in 2021 and then again in October 2025 . AWS execs have told The Register the region isn’t inherently more fragile than other parts of the Amazonian cloud, but often runs things at bigger scale than elsewhere and therefore imposes extra stress on services. The Register will update this story as the situation evolves. ®