[...] The National Security Agency, the U.S. government's powerful eavesdropping agency, has been using Mythos as far back as April despite the blacklist, Axios has reported. Late last month, the New York Times said that NSA analysts had been testing Mythos in classified settings and coming away impressed with its capabilities. But when Anthropic rolled out a public version of Mythos called Fable, which included what it described as cybersecurity safeguards, the White House suddenly demanded that it ban foreigners from running it. This triggered a global shutdown of the model that was lifted only last week.
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Forecaster says curtailing rising costs such as health and pensions ‘are today’s challenge, not just tomorrow’s’
Policymakers must act to prevent public debt rising unsustainably in coming decades as the population ages and defence spending rises, the government’s independent economic forecaster has said.
In a fresh illustration of the challenges facing the prime minister in waiting, Andy Burnham, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said that without government action “debt would move on to what would be an unsustainable, ever-upward path from around the 2040s”.
Continue reading...Passengers say they paid extra for outside views but were seated beside blank cabin walls instead
A federal judge on Monday rejected United Airlines’ bid to dismiss a lawsuit by passengers who complained they paid extra money to sit in window seats – only to discover their seats had no actual windows.
US district judge James Donato in San Francisco rejected United’s defense that “window” referred to the location of a seat relative to the cabin wall and aisle, and the carrier also contended it never contractually promised that seats in the window position would have views outside.
Continue reading...Fans across Belgium watched 4-1 win in early hours
Victory ‘a real slap in the face for Trump and Infantino’
Belgium fans reacted with jubilation after the national team trounced the USA in a World Cup game that was overshadowed by the controversy over Donald Trump’s lobbying to overturn the suspension of the striker Falorin Balogun.
Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, has yet to comment on the national team’s triumph, but the official Instagram account of his cat offered a sardonic, albeit indirect sign of satisfaction. Maximus, De Wever’s beloved cat, was shown lying on a rug holding a soft toy in the image of the US president. “I slept really well last night. And you?” reads the speech bubble in Dutch.
Continue reading...The dreaded bloodsucker will be getting his fangs into the Edinburgh fringe this year – in a deeply creepy, liberty-taking show with a sisterly twist. We meet its director
Who is your Dracula? Max Schreck’s toothy Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi in a tux, the lantern-jawed host of Hotel Transylvania? This notorious shapeshifter “exists for us even before we know who he is” says theatre director Yngvild Aspeli, who is bringing a puppet bloodsucker to the Edinburgh fringe this summer. “There were stories of vampires long before Bram Stoker but he gave new life to them.”
After watching her deeply creepy show Dracula: Lucy’s Dream, that eerily waxen, lifesized puppet has for me become as indelible as top-hatted Gary Oldman or gorily grinning Christopher Lee. It matches Jonathan Harker’s assessment of the count in Stoker’s novel: “The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.” I saw the show on tour in Paris several months ago and it still haunts me: I could swear this Drac disintegrated then reappeared before my eyes, such is the technical sophistication of Aspeli’s French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire. Thanks in part to Emilie Nguyen’s spectral lighting, stunning transformations take place, with the actors and puppets frequently becoming indistinguishable.
Continue reading...David Streever had emailed acting ICE director after an immigration officer fatally shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good
An upstate New York resident sued US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for sending federal officers to his house with a warning over an email he sent to the agency’s one-time head.
David Streever, who is a US citizen, was on a trip to Finland when two officers showed up to his Rochester home in June and presented his wife with a warning notice informing him that the email he sent months earlier was considered a threat, his attorneys said. Streever sent the email in January to Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE, after an immigration officer fatally shot Minneapolis resident Renee Good in a confrontation caught on video during an anti-ICE demonstration.
Continue reading...As a non-monogamist, it’s refreshing to see a film that reflects modern attitudes to non-conventional relationships, instead of using them as a punchline or cautionary tale
What is the chief obstacle that must be overcome in most modern-day big-screen romcoms? Lack of attraction? Misaligning schedules? Or, perhaps, heteromonogamy? If that wasn’t the dominating norm of human relationships, many movie plots would be much swifter to resolve. What if Elizabeth Olsen didn’t have to choose between Callum Turner and Miles Teller in Eternity? Or Twilight allowed Bella to be in a throuple with Edward and Jacob? Even though both films have fantasy narratives, their predestined outcome is as real as it gets – a man and a woman (re)marry and live happily ever after.
For a long time, alternative relationship structures were relegated to fan fiction, undeserving of mainstream fictional representations where conflict and resolution are both inscribed in coupledom. Even the films that challenged mononormativity, such as Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, sustain the cautionary tale: opening up your relationship will eventually break it. As a practising non-monogamist, I yearn to see my values represented on screen as something more than a cautionary tale. Recently, the love triangles of Past Lives (implied) and Challengers (consummated) have suggested that perhaps Hollywood itself may be opening up. Then came The Invite, a poly-romcom just in time for the Week of Visibility for Non-monogamy.
Continue reading...Court shortens electoral ban but custodial sentence could complicate far-right leader’s campaign hopes
A French court of appeal has upheld Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European parliament funds but shortened her ban on running for elected office, potentially reopening a narrow path for the far-right leader to run in the 2027 presidential race.
However, the court also handed Le Pen a three-year jail term, with two years suspended and one year in which she must wear an electronic ankle tag for monitoring. This could make a presidential campaign politically and logistically difficult.
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Just one exposure to cocaine produces changes to the brains of mice that persist for at least two weeks, and perhaps longer, according to research that will be presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026 on Tuesday.
The results suggest that cocaine, a popular drug used by an estimated 25 million people around the world, may rewire the genomes inside cells of the brain’s reward system, called dopaminergic neurons. The finding that could shed light on the mechanisms that drive addiction, and possibly inform treatments in humans.
People can become hooked to cocaine the first time they try it, but it is far more common for addiction to set in on repeated exposures. Decades of research has identified many of the neurochemical pathways activated by cocaine, but much less is known about the disruptive impacts, also known as brain “insults,” on the genomes inside neurons.
“We essentially knew there were some unknown phenomena that were going on in the dopaminergic neurons that were not clear,” said Ana Pombo, Bloomberg distinguished professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University, and guest group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, in a call with 404 Media.
“We were actually interested to know if there is any long-term memory [of exposure], and this has not been studied,” continued Pombo, who presented her team’s research on Tuesday at FENS, Europe’s largest neuroscience meeting. “There's virtually no data we know of looking two weeks after this first exposure. Our experimental design was a shot in the dark.”
Like almost all cells, neurons contain copies of the genome, a genetic sequence unique to each individual organism that folds in complex structures. To observe cocaine’s impacts on the structure of the genome, Pombo and her colleagues studied the neurons of mice exposed to cocaine compared to a control group of unexposed mice. The team used an approach called genome architecture mapping that identifies where parts of the genome are in close proximity, or touch each other, which captures critical information about changes to its overall structure.
After 24 hours, the genomes of the exposed mice showed several changes relative to the control group. Even more significantly, some of those shifts were still present after two weeks. The experiment hints that one cocaine exposure is enough to imprint long-term injuries into the genome, which may prime the brain for a stronger addictive response to the drug on a second exposure.
“This would be like a silent injury, where the genome is altered,” Pombo said. “It looks like everything is normal, the mouse or the animal is going about its life, but if another exposure came along, it would have much more consequences.”
The experiment exposed cocaine’s impact on the brain at the genome level, but it also raises a host of other questions, such as how long these changes last and how they vary between individuals and species. To that end, the team are working toward repeating the experiment on longer timescales, such as six months or more, as well as with different animals.
“There’s going to be some elements of stochasticity,” Pombo said. “Each individual may respond slightly differently, depending maybe also on the time of the day, what's going on, or what's happened the day before.”
“The big question for us, where we believe we can contribute is really understanding the susceptibility, and trying to shed light on why some individuals become addicted and many don't,” she continued. “So many people that get exposed to cocaine don't become addicted. Only a small portion do. Why does this happen?”
The more scientists learn about the underlying mechanisms, the more they can parse that question—and perhaps, figure out ways to reverse the injuries done to the brain to help treat addiction.
“By looking at what parts of the genome are altered, we can identify candidate mechanisms that drive the alteration,” Pombo concluded. “We can also hypothesize ways in which it would be possible to somehow revert or encourage the system, at least the nuclear part, to reverse to the original status.”
BERLIJN (ANP) - Duitse brouwerijen hebben vorig jaar een recordhoeveelheid alcoholvrij bier geproduceerd. De productie van bier zonder alcohol steeg met 6,5 procent naar 616 miljoen liter, meldt het Duitse federale statistiekbureau. Tegelijkertijd daalde de productie van bier met alcohol met bijna 6 procent tot 6,8 miljard liter.
Ondanks de groei van alcoholvrij bier blijft de productie van bier met alcohol dus nog altijd veel groter. De cijfers wijzen wel op een verandering in het drinkgedrag van consumenten. Volgens het statistiekbureau kiezen steeds meer mensen, vooral jongeren, voor alcoholvrije alternatieven vanwege een gezondere levensstijl. Daarnaast drukken hogere kosten voor levensonderhoud op de bestedingen aan alcohol. Daarmee sluit de ontwikkeling in Duitsland aan bij een bredere wereldwijde daling van de alcoholconsumptie.
Die ontwikkeling heeft drankproducenten de afgelopen jaren fors onder druk gezet en gedwongen hun kosten te verlagen en hun assortiment aan te passen.
New Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books: A Tradcath Wedding. “He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me.”
In de Tour de France zijn het vaak de kopmannen die alle aandacht opeisen, maar voor de echte heldenverhalen moet je bij de renners zijn die zich wegcijferen voor die kopmannen. Zo bewijst ook deze superknecht, die in de derde etappe van de Ronde van Frankrijk blusdekens haalde voor de hele ploeg.
“Dit is heroïsch”, jubelde wielercommentator Karsten Kroon toen de knecht zich liet afzakken om bij de ploegleiderswagen de dekentjes op te halen. Met zijn handen vol dekentjes keerde de held vervolgens terug in het peloton om stuk voor stuk zijn teamgenoten te voorzien van het vuurwerende voorwerp.
Uiteindelijk liepen de collega’s van de heldhaftige knecht en de renner zelf slechts tweedegraads brandwonden op, waardoor de volledige ploeg vandaag gewoon kan opstappen in etappe 4.
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