Some take their criticism even further. Reacting to Flock's changes, an EFF statement calls it "Too little, too late," while calling it Flock's admission that their technology needs reforms. But...
To be clear, our position has long been that police, at a minimum, need to get a warrant, signed by a judge, in order to search for historic ALPR data regarding specific vehicles. For us, it's common sense: if police want to dip into historic ALPR data like they were going back in time to retroactively follow your comings and goings, they need a warrant.
There's also nothing stopping Flock from rescinding these latest reforms.
This all leads to the bigger and more important issue: We should not be letting companies decide how much privacy we deserve... It shouldn't be up to Flock or any other ALPR vendor to decide how long police can collect and retain data on millions, if not hundreds of millions, of innocent people. We need lawmakers to step up and pass laws that restrict police's use of surveillance technology.
After all, the surveillance business model is the problem, and a few company-imposed slapdash reforms aren't going to change that.
Here are all the timings – along with all the additional information you need – for the 12th Grand Prix weekend of the 2026 season from Zandvoort in the Netherlands.
CEUTA (ANP) - Spanje gaat 1500 tijdelijke opvangplekken voor migranten verzorgen in de Spaanse exclave Ceuta bij Marokko, zegt migratieminister Elma Saiz volgens persbureau EFE. Eind juli staken daar tienduizenden mensen de grens over, van wie er nog 5000 tot 8000 zouden zijn achtergebleven. Zondag demonstreerden honderden van hen tegen de omstandigheden waarin zij nu leven.
De migranten zouden veelal op het strand slapen en van de politie niet het stadscentrum in mogen. Ook zouden er ziektes zijn uitgebroken.
Na de massale oversteek van eind juli werd voor zaterdag opnieuw zo'n poging aangekondigd op sociale media. Daarbij waren uiteindelijk veel minder mensen betrokken en voor zover bekend wist niemand Ceuta te bereiken. Wel werden volgens Marokkaanse media honderden arrestaties verricht.
De Spaanse krant El País meldt dat Juan Vivas, de hoogste bestuurder van Ceuta, de overheid maandag beschuldigde van passiviteit. Hij dreigde met juridische stappen als de situatie binnen dertig dagen niet verbetert.
Actrice Hayden Panettiere is zondag overleden in Greenville, in de Amerikaanse staat South Carolina. Volgens de Daily Mail werd de 36-jarige ster onwel aangetroffen in een loftappartement, nadat er een melding was binnengekomen over een mogelijke overdosis.
Rond 13.51 uur lokale tijd kreeg de alarmcentrale een oproep. Een centralist meldde dat Panettiere een hartstilstand had; korte tijd later werd ook gesproken over een vermoedelijke overdosis. De melding kwam volgens de krant van een bekende van de actrice, die haar bewusteloos had aangetroffen.
Agenten en ambulancepersoneel probeerden Panettiere nog te reanimeren. Zij voerden borstcompressies uit in het appartementencomplex in Greenville, maar konden haar niet redden. Iets meer dan veertig minuten na de eerste noodoproep, om 14.32 uur, werd zij ter plaatse dood verklaard.
De politie en de lijkschouwer onderzoeken de doodsoorzaak. In een eerste verklaring wordt gemeld dat er vooralsnog geen aanwijzingen zijn voor een misdrijf of andere verdachte omstandigheden.
Panettiere, bekend van onder meer de series Heroes en Nashville, zou vrijdag 37 jaar zijn geworden. De actrice had volgens de Daily Mail een knipperlichtrelatie met vastgoedmakelaar Brian Hickerson.
Meer dan tien jaar leek geld iets waar je haast geen prijs voor betaalde. Overheden stapelden schulden op tegen bijna nul procent, huizenkopers sloten hypotheken af waar hun ouders alleen maar van konden dromen, en beleggers namen steeds meer risico om nog íets van rendement te vangen. Die wereld bestaat niet meer, en volgens een verse analyse komt hij ook niet meer terug.
De Amerikaanse tienjaarsrente schommelt medio augustus rond 4,7 procent, vlak onder een 19-maands piek. In Duitsland ligt de tienjaarsrente boven de drie procent. Dat zijn geen paniekniveaus, maar het zijn wel de niveaus die golden vóór de kredietcrisis van 2008 — de periode van gratis geld ligt daar precies tussen.
Waarom de rente zo hardnekkig hoog blijft
Centrale banken hebben de piekinflatie van 2022 grotendeels teruggedrongen en zijn voorzichtig begonnen met verlagen. Toch weigeren de lange rentes te dalen. Beleggers eisen een dikkere vergoeding voor inflatierisico dat ze niet meer vertrouwen, en overheden overspoelen de markt met nieuwe staatsobligaties om defensie, vergrijzing en investeringsplannen te financieren. Meer aanbod, kritischer publiek, hogere prijs.
Na meer dan een decennium van bijna gratis kapitaal moet iedereen zich aanpassen aan een wereld waarin geld weer een echte prijs heeft.
Wat het kost aan de keukentafel
Een structureel hogere kapitaalmarktrente sijpelt overal in door. Een greep uit wat Nederlanders concreet gaan merken:
Hypotheken — twintigjaars rentes met NHG zitten volgens Vereniging Eigen Huis medio augustus rond 4 procent, ver boven de sub-2 procent van 2021.
Bedrijven — herfinancieren van bestaande leningen wordt duurder, waardoor uitbreidingen en overnames op de plank blijven liggen.
Overheden — oude, spotgoedkope leningen lopen af en worden vervangen door dure nieuwe. Rentelasten verdringen ruimte voor zorg, onderwijs en klimaat.
Pensioenen — hogere rentes zijn goed voor de dekkingsgraden, maar de overgang naar het nieuwe pensioenstelsel loopt precies door deze bewegende markt heen.
Winnaars en verliezers op de beurs
Voor beleggers is de nieuwe werkelijkheid dubbel. Verse obligaties leveren voor het eerst in jaren weer een fatsoenlijk rendement op, terwijl bestaande obligaties met een lage coupon juist in koers dalen zodra nieuwe series met hogere rentes verschijnen.
Aandelen krijgen het ook zwaarder. Hoge rentes drukken de waardering van bedrijven waarvan de winst grotendeels in de verre toekomst ligt — precies het profiel van tech- en groeiaandelen die jarenlang de kar trokken. Vastgoed en private equity, twee categorieën die enorm profiteerden van goedkoop geleend geld, zijn opeens veel kwetsbaarder geworden.
De echte stresstest moet nog komen
Een tienjaarsrente van vier à vijf procent hoeft op zich geen ramp te zijn, zolang economieën blijven groeien. Het probleem ontstaat als die groei afzwakt terwijl de rentelasten hoog blijven. Overheden zitten dan klem tussen oplopende rente-uitgaven en dalende belastingopbrengsten, bedrijven schuiven investeringen door, en beleggers krijgen tegelijk klappen in aandelen én obligaties.
Dat scenario is niet onvermijdelijk, maar het is wel voor het eerst in vijftien jaar weer een reëel risico. De wereld die zich aan gratis geld had gewend, moet nu leren rekenen met een prijskaartje.
Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
“Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,” an Amazon spokesperson told me in a statement.
The world’s AI companies are constantly looking for, and spending extreme resources to locate, more material to train their AI models. With books, that sometimes means destroying them in the process, something that large parts of the public have spoken up against, and which we can now confirm Amazon is doing.
In July, I published a story about booksellers who reported a historical spike in sales starting in the past year. They suspected this spike in sales was due to AI companies acquiring any books they can in search of new training data. Printed books are valuable as training data because a lot of the text they contain is not readily available on the internet, which AI companies have already scraped. The data is also conveniently organized and, if the book was printed before 2022, is guaranteed to be free of AI-generated text, which can make any AI model that is trained on it worse via a recursive process called “model collapse.”
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Do you know work at a facility where you scan books? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at @emanuel.404. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.
These booksellers suspected AI companies were behind these large bulk purchases because of the high number of books they were buying, the seemingly random choice of books, and the fact that these buyers, unlike libraries and universities, did not seem price sensitive at all. But booksellers couldn’t say for certain who was behind the large purchases because the marketplaces where they sell their books keep the buyers anonymous. When an order comes in, a bookseller ships the sold books to a warehouse operated by the marketplaces, where books are sorted and then sent to the buyer.
In July, one bookseller told me they received a very large order of around 1,000 books on Biblio, one of these marketplaces. The seller agreed to put an Apple AirTag provided by 404 Media in one of the books included in this order so we could see where the book was going. And by extension, which company, AI or otherwise, was behind this massive order.
404 Media granted the bookseller anonymity because they worried sharing this information would harm their business. Biblio did not respond to a request for comment.
1
California
The shipment of books we tracked flew out of an airport in California.
2
Milwaukee
Next time we see it is right outside Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport.
1901 E College Ave, South Milwaukee, WI 53172
3
Distribution center
We then saw it in a warehouse belonging to a specialized shipping and distribution company Trifinity, right outside Kenosha Regional Airport, 30 miles south.
5312 104th Ave, Kenosha, WI 53144
4
Colorado Springs
It then starts heading West via truck. We see it on a highway outside Colorado Springs.
5
Truck Stop
It stops for the night at a trucking travel center.
2195 Hwy 6 and 50, Grand Junction, CO 81505.
6
Amazon warehouse: LAS8
The next day it arrives at an Amazon warehouse called LAS8.
5801 Nicco Way, Las Vegas, NV 89115.
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The bookseller sent the shipment to Biblio, and it arrived at a California airport. It then traveled by plane to Milwaukee International Airport in Wisconsin. Later that day, the book traveled to a warehouse belonging to a specialized shipping and distribution company called Trifinity, right outside of Kenosha Regional Airport, about 30 miles south. The book remained there for about two weeks, at which point it began traveling west by what appeared to be a truck. I could see the book travel via the highway and spend a night over at a trucking travel center around Grand Junction, Colorado. The next day, the book arrived at its final destination, an Amazon warehouse called LAS8 in Las Vegas.
LAS8 is one of several large Amazon warehouses in the area, each with a different specialty. LAS7, right across the street, for example, is a fulfilment center, while LAS8 appears to mostly operate as one of Amazon’s “print on demand” operations, which will print and ship books to Amazon shoppers as they are buying them. Initially, I was confused about why the book would arrive there, but Amazon employees who work at this location and who discuss working conditions there with other Amazon employees online explain that the the north end of the LAS8 warehouse, where I saw the book arrived, housed a different Amazon operation with a different code: VGT3.
Many Amazon warehouses have unique symbols to represent that specific site. VGT3’s symbol, painted on the entrance to the site and inside, is of a Tyrannosaurus rex, the massive carnivorous dinosaur, with its mouth open, holding an open book.
The entrance to Amazon's VGT3 facility.
“I work at VGT3 here in Vegas, and all we do is scan books,” one Amazon employee wrote on a forum for Amazon workers. “Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the bar codes. We didn't have rates, but now we do, but it's not stressful.”
“Working at VGT3 is nice all we do is scan books,” another Amazon employee wrote. “It's so cool.”
I saw VGT3 employees online talk about how working in this operation is a good but boring job because workers do the same, easy, repetitive tasks all day. I also saw some discussion indicating that VGT3 jobs are desirable for this reason, and because the warehouse sometimes offered night shifts. Earlier this year, some employees expressed concerns that Amazon would shut down the site because they had worked through the books they had and weren’t getting enough shipments of new books, though the site is still operational today.
That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs.
Elsewhere online in 2024, booksellers who sell their books on Amazon said they received a spike in orders to be shipped directly to the VGT3 location for a customer named “Amazon FC.” This was so unusual given its size they suspected the orders were some kind of scam. An Amazon representative chimed in to say they checked and that the orders were legitimate.
Like other major tech companies, Amazon is developing its own large language models (LLMs). Amazon considers its family of models branded Nova to be “frontier” models, meaning it considers them to be competitive with other cutting edge LLMs from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. These models require massive amounts of training data in the form of human-written text. Internally, Amazon also used an AI coding agent called Kiro to develop its own software.
We first learned that AI companies wanted to scan millions of books for training data because of a lawsuit from book authors against Anthropic, which revealed Anthropic’s “Project Panama.” The goal of the project was to acquire books from commercial bookselling marketplaces, cut the spines off the books, and scan them. It’s possible to scan books without destroying them, but cutting the spine makes it cheaper and faster. Additionally, the judge in the lawsuit ruled it was fair use and not a copyright violation for Anthropic to scan a book for training data in part because it destroyed the original, printed copy. Essentially, it’s the customer’s right to take physical media and store it digitally, and destroying the original copy means that copy isn’t duplicated and resold, and isn’t cutting into the publisher’s business.
We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked, but they are rare, meaning there are not many copies of them in circulation. Sometimes that’s because not many copies of them were ever printed, and sometimes because they are in a foreign language not many people speak. As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
“There are different types of value,” the bookseller said. “There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There's historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”
Amazon provided its statement above but did not respond to questions about why it cut the books it scanned, how many facilities like this it has across the world, and their response to the backlash from people upset that AI companies are destroying books.
New species and regional instability are factors – but decisions made in the US and Britain are also costing lives
Did you know that there is a major Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and it’s on track to be the deadliest ever? It is already the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history, with the fastest community transmission we have ever seen. It’s estimated that there have been at least 4,900 cases and more than 2,300 deaths, giving a mortality rate close to 50%. The situation is bad. That’s the consensus among global health experts.
Yet this Ebola outbreak isn’t attracting much media or public attention. If I compare it with working on the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the current silence is astounding. That year, Ebola was one of the most Googled terms in the world, covered regularly on broadcast news in many countries outside the region, attracting newspaper headlines and magazine covers. Perhaps everyone is just tired of disease after the pandemic – Covid-19 fatigue, as it’s called. Trust me, no one wants to hear about infectious diseases.
Prof Devi Sridhar is chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh
The actor, who previously said he would not play Captain Jack Sparrow again for ‘$300m and a million alpacas’, is being lined up for sixth film in the series according to producer Jerry Bruckheimer
Johnny Depp is in talks to return as Captain Jack Sparrow in a sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film, according to the producer of the series, Jerry Bruckheimer. Bruckheimer told Deadline: “We’re talking with Johnny, we’re working on a screenplay, and hopefully we can get this done.” This is despite the actor having said under oath in 2022, during the notorious televised trial of the defamation case he brought against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, that Disney had dropped him from the series and he would not play Sparrow again even if he were offered “$300m and a million alpacas”.
Depp first appeared as the charismatic, roguish, rum-swilling Captain Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003, and it has become his most recognisable – and profitable – role. Taking its name and golden age of piracy setting from a ride at the Disney World theme park, the swashbuckling adventure also featured Keira Knightley, Orlando Bloom and Geoffrey Rush, and grossed more than $650m (£480m) at the worldwide box office.
The UN rights chief voiced alarm Monday at the rising civilian toll of escalating hostilities in Yemen, urging restraint and an immediate de-escalation to avoid plunging the country back into a full-scale war.
“I urge all parties to halt immediately any actions that risk returning Yemen to full-scale conflict,” Volker Türk said in a statement, as renewed fighting between the Houthi rebels and the government undermined a 2022 truce.
The latest game from ‘reality-inspired’ studio the Pixel Hunt sees you transporting precious human cargo – and deciding what to do with it
Ithaca has one hell of an opening: Penelope, a disillusioned environmental lawyer, stops her car at a petrol station. But upon returning, she discovers something shocking: the unconscious body of an oil company CEO in her boot, his hands hog-tied together, dangling limply towards the vehicle’s number plate.
This tantalising eco-thriller setup is a long way off the typical knights-and-castles fantasy fare of most role-playing games, more How To Blow Up a Pipeline than Dragon Quest. But road-trip RPG Ithaca arrives via refreshingly original developer the Pixel Hunt, a French outfit that specialises in what it calls “reality-inspired” games. The studio has made a number of arresting works in recent years. One was about a Syrian refugee couple making a perilous migrant journey across Europe; another tackled the life-shattering effects of child sexual abuse. The climate crisis was always in the back of Pixel Hunt founder and Ithaca writer Florent Maurin’s mind. After all, he says, it is the uber problem of our day, the problem that touches all others. It was just a case of when, and, more importantly: “What do we say about it?”
Feyenoord heeft maandagmiddag een besloten oefenwedstrijd tegen het Belgische Westerlo met 2-1 verloren. De Rotterdamse goal werd gemaakt door Shaqueel van Persie.
Gezonde mensen merken doorgaans niks van het westnijlvirus, maar het kan dodelijk zijn. De bewuste donor heeft voor het virus werd vastgesteld bloed gedoneerd aan een patiënt, waardoor die mogelijk ook besmet is.
De plannen van de VS en Israël voor Gaza lijken te botsen: Trump wil Israëlische terugtrekking, Israël verschanst zich juist. Volgens analisten is de tegenstelling tussen de bondgenoten helemaal niet zo groot.
Als twee beveiligers in mei 2025 (!) om 22:45 de poorten van een nachtclub in Tilburg sluiten, openen ze zonder het te weten de poorten van de hel. Één vent was het kennelijk niet met de openingstijden eens en probeerde zelf de poort weer te openen voor z'n vriendjes. Daarop beveiligden de beveiligers wat zij moesten beveiligen om vervolgens belaagd te worden door een groep van zeven beukende beulen: "Eerst werd één beveiliger geslagen. Hij kreeg een bloedneus en een bloedend oor, en werd misselijk. Toen zijn collega hem wilde helpen, sloegen de mannen ook hem meerdere keren met vuisten op zijn hoofd." Drie van de zeven beulen zijn al gepakt, vier anderen kunnen nu gepakt worden want er is BEELD. De huidskleurencollectie is als volgt: twee van hen zijn donkergetint, één is lichtgetint en één is geen licht maar wel licht (van huidskleur). Dus bent u beul of kent u beulen: melden kan HIER.
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