Vijftien jaar geleden begon voormalig operazangeres Maartje de Lint met Zing-Cirkels voor mensen met breinproblemen. En het werkt. De maandelijkse dagen in het Amsterdamse Concertgebouw trekken nu internationale aandacht.

Een crowdfundactie is gestart om lekken van gegevens van Odido-klanten zo snel mogelijk te stoppen. Dat meldt BNR nieuwsradio.

Wanneer het verdrag voorlopig kan worden ingevoerd, is nog niet bekend. De Europese Commissie riskeert met de tijdelijke invoering een confrontatie met het Europees Parlement.

Twee weken geleden sprak de rechtbank in Den Bosch de producenten van de Stint vrij van het bewust op de markt brengen van een voertuig dat gevaarlijk zou kunnen zijn. Het elektrische karretje kwam in 2018 in opspraak kwam na een dodelijk ongeluk in Oss.

Kamagurka laat elke week zien hoe Bert Vanderslagmulders vordert met het schrijven van een boek.

Iran is slowly emerging from the most severe communications blackout in its history and one of the longest in the world. Triggered as part of January’s government crackdown against citizen protests nationwide, the regime implemented an internet shutdown that transcends the standard definition of internet censorship. This was not merely blocking social media or foreign websites; it was a total communications shutdown.

Unlike previous Iranian internet shutdowns where Iran’s domestic intranet—the National Information Network (NIN)—remained functional to keep the banking and administrative sectors running, the 2026 blackout disrupted local infrastructure as well. Mobile networks, text messaging services, and landlines were disabled—even Starlink was blocked. And when a few domestic services became available, the state surgically removed social features, such as comment sections on news sites and chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective seems clear. The Iranian government aimed to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This escalation marks a strategic shift from the shutdown observed during the “12-Day War” with Israel in mid-2025. Then, the government primarily blocked particular types of traffic while leaving the underlying internet remaining available. The regime’s actions this year entailed a more brute-force approach to internet censorship, where both the physical and logical layers of connectivity were dismantled.

The ability to disconnect a population is a feature of modern authoritarian network design. When a government treats connectivity as a faucet it can turn off at will, it asserts that the right to speak, assemble, and access information is revocable. The human right to the internet is not just about bandwidth; it is about the right to exist within the modern public square. Iran’s actions deny its citizens this existence, reducing them to subjects who can be silenced—and authoritarian governments elsewhere are taking note.

The current blackout is not an isolated panic reaction but a stress test for a long-term strategy, say advocacy groups—a two-tiered or “class-based” internet known as Internet-e-Tabaqati. Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace, the country’s highest internet policy body, has been laying the legal and technical groundwork for this since 2009.

In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no longer a default for citizens, but instead a privilege granted based on loyalty and professional necessity. The implementation includes such things as “white SIM cards“: special mobile lines issued to government officials, security forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state’s filtering apparatus entirely.

While ordinary Iranians are forced to navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. This tiered access is further enforced through whitelisting at the data center level, creating a digital apartheid where connectivity is a reward for compliance. The regime’s goal is to make the cost of a general shutdown manageable by ensuring that the state and its loyalists remain connected while plunging the public into darkness. (In the latest shutdown, for instance, white SIM holders regained connectivity earlier than the general population.)

The technical architecture of Iran’s shutdown reveals its primary purpose: social control through isolation. Over the years, the regime has learned that simple censorship—blocking specific URLs—is insufficient against a tech-savvy population armed with circumvention tools. The answer instead has been to build a “sovereign” network structure that allows for granular control.

By disabling local communication channels, the state prevents the “swarm” dynamics of modern unrest, where small protests coalesce into large movements through real-time coordination. In this way, the shutdown breaks the psychological momentum of the protests. The blocking of chat functions in nonpolitical apps (like ridesharing or shopping platforms) illustrates the regime’s paranoia: Any channel that allows two people to exchange text is seen as a threat.

The United Nations and various international bodies have increasingly recognized internet access as an enabler of other fundamental human rights. In the context of Iran, the internet is the only independent witness to history. By severing it, the regime creates a zone of impunity where atrocities can be committed without immediate consequence.

Iran’s digital repression model is distinct from, and in some ways more dangerous than, China’s “Great Firewall.” China built its digital ecosystem from the ground up with sovereignty in mind, creating domestic alternatives like WeChat and Weibo that it fully controls. Iran, by contrast, is building its controls on top of the standard global internet infrastructure.

Unlike China’s censorship regime, Iran’s overlay model is highly exportable. It demonstrates to other authoritarian regimes that they can still achieve high levels of control by retrofitting their existing networks. We are already seeing signs of “authoritarian learning,” where techniques tested in Tehran are being studied by regimes in unstable democracies and dictatorships alike. The most recent shutdown in Afghanistan, for example, was more sophisticated than previous ones. If Iran succeeds in normalizing tiered access to the internet, we can expect to see similar white SIM policies and tiered access models proliferate globally.

The international community must move beyond condemnation and treat connectivity as a humanitarian imperative. A coalition of civil society organizations has already launched a campaign calling for “direct-to-cell” (D2C) satellite connectivity. Unlike traditional satellite internet, which requires conspicuous and expensive dishes such as Starlink terminals, D2C technology connects directly to standard smartphones and is much more resilient to infrastructure shutdowns. The technology works; all it requires is implementation.

This is a technological measure, but it has a strong policy component as well. Regulators should require satellite providers to include humanitarian access protocols in their licensing, ensuring that services can be activated for civilians in designated crisis zones. Governments, particularly the United States, should ensure that technology sanctions do not inadvertently block the hardware and software needed to circumvent censorship. General licenses should be expanded to cover satellite connectivity explicitly. And funding should be directed toward technologies that are harder to whitelist or block, such as mesh networks and D2C solutions that bypass the choke points of state-controlled ISPs.

Deliberate internet shutdowns are commonplace throughout the world. The 2026 shutdown in Iran is a glimpse into a fractured internet. If we are to end countries’ ability to limit access to the rest of the world for their populations, we need to build resolute architectures. They don’t solve the problem, but they do give people in repressive countries a fighting chance.

This essay originally appeared in Foreign Policy.

This is new. North Korean hackers are posing as company recruiters, enticing job candidates to participate in coding challenges. When they run the code they are supposed to work on, it installs malware on their system.

News article.

After the Barcelona Shakedown and two weeks of pre-season testing in Bahrain, it’s almost time to kick off F1’s new era with the Australian Grand Prix – but before that, Drive to Survive returns to our screens on Netflix for one last look at 2025. Having watched all eight episodes from Season 8, F1.com presents five of the many standout moments…

Another eagerly anticipated season of Drive to Survive has arrived on Netflix ahead of the 2026 F1 campaign. But how much do you know about what’s involved in the filming, production and editing process? With help from Box To Box, who produce the show, F1.com takes you through some of the standout figures…

The group reimagines Corsica’s ancient music for modern female voices with fresh spiky arrangements that remain heavy with the pain of the past

From London via Corsica/Occitania
Recommended if you like Arooj Aftab, Maria Callas, the choral tragedy of Prioritise Pleasure-era Self Esteem
Up next New single Dieus Sal la Terra out now

Idrîsî Ensemble are a useful corrective to the stereotyping of medieval music as smooth, pious and sleepy. Hearing the howls of this London-based group – sometimes powered by up to 19 members – you’re reminded of song’s inexhaustible capacity for conjuring fresh pain.

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A mission to grow plants in the desert; a potato’s adventures; a film-maker’s dreams; wartime bravery; a feminist fantasy and more

The Wonder by Tom Percival, Simon & Schuster, £12.99
Daniel’s wet grey day seems like it will never get better – until he hears music and everything changes. A subtly beautiful picture book about finding small moments of joy and wonder.

The Big Green by Ken Wilson-Max, Otter-Barry, £12.99
Heading into the desert to plant seedlings with their family and neighbours, Maryam and Issa help to build the Great Green Wall of Africa in this rhythmic, colourful picture book, a rich celebration of community environmental action.

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Tapalpa deserted and scared by day of terror in which feared drug lord’s reign came to an end during military raid

Two days before one of the world’s most powerful drug lords was killed while trying to flee a chalet in the hills outside Mexico’s second biggest city, the Tapalpa Country Club posted an advert on Instagram inviting lovers to visit a place where they could “inhale peace [and] exhale stress”.

“Date idea: Escape to Tapalpa,” read the message, advertising romantic private cabins, picnics with spectacular lake views and a golf course “to have fun together”.

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A shout of ‘racist’ could also be heard during the segment at France’s version of the Oscars

A tribute to Brigitte Bardot at the Césars, France’s version of the Oscars, on Thursday was greeted with boos. In a video clip posted by Paris Match, boos can clearly be heard among the applause as the tributes, and a shout of “racist!” is also audible.

Bardot, who died in December aged 91, became arguably the most celebrated figure in postwar French cinema for films such as And God Created Woman and Contempt, but after quitting acting in the early 1970s her later years were marred by increasing political activity on the far right, resulting in a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred.

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Vanillasludge posted a photo:

Kamioka, Nagano

Stockholm said a Swedish navy vessel spotted and jammed the drone on Wednesday in the Oresund Strait, around 13 kilometers from France's Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier, which was there at a stopover on the way to a NATO exercise.

sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: For decades, planetary scientists have pored over a mystery hidden within the Moon rocks retrieved by Apollo astronauts in the 1960s and '70s. Minerals in the rocks record the imprint of a magnetic field, nearly as powerful as Earth's, that existed more than 3.5 billion years ago and seemed to persist for millions of years. But generating a magnetic field requires a dynamo -- a churning, molten core -- and most researchers believed the Moon's tiny core would have long since cooled off, 1 billion years after it formed. Corroborating that picture are other ancient Moon rocks of about the same age that suggest the field was weak -- leaving planetary scientists baffled.

Now, researchers are proposing a new way to solve the puzzle. A paper published today in Nature Geoscience theorizes that between 3.5 billion and 4 billion years ago, blobs of titanium-rich magma melted episodically just above the core, rising in plumes that drove volcanic eruptions on the surface. By intermittently stirring up the Moon's core, these bouts of melting would have caused the Moon's magnetic field to flicker on in short, powerful bursts. The paper "links a few different concepts that people were thinking about separately, but hadn't actually brought together," says Sonia Tikoo, a planetary geophysicist at Stanford University who was not involved in the study.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French firm claims DWP failed to identify rival's bid was 'abnormally low' and alleges govt breached procurement rules

Sopra Steria is suing the UK government, alleging it accepted a bid from rival Capita for an outsourcing contract worth up to £958.7 million that it failed to recognize as too low to comply with procurement rules.…

Waarom is het tv-programma De Verraders zo verslavend? Presentator Alan Cumming van de Amerikaanse versie The Traitors slaat de spijker op z’n kop: “We kijken naar mensen die liegen en we wéten dat ze liegen.”

“We zien ook hoe slecht ze met dat liegen omgaan en hoe weinig ze ervan genieten”, gaat hij verder. Precies dat ongemak maakt het onweerstaanbare televisie.

In een kasteel in de Schotse Hooglanden proberen de getrouwen de verraders te ontmaskeren. Ondertussen stellen de verraders alles in het werk om de rest om de tuin te leiden. De inzet is 24 kilo aan zilverstaven. Maar hoe win je dit uitdagende psychologische spel?

Vergeet oogcontact

Wie als getrouwe meespeelt, moet leugens ontmaskeren. Helaas zijn mensen daar dramatisch slecht in. We scoren amper beter dan wanneer we een muntje opgooien.

Volgens psycholoog Geoffrey Beattie moeten spelers eerst hun aannames loslaten. Het idee dat leugenaars je niet aankijken? “Dat is simpelweg niet waar.” Sterker nog, leugenaars houden vaak juist strak oogcontact om betrouwbaar te lijken. “Vergeet dus dat hele oogcontactverhaal.”

Subtiele signalen

Waar moet je dan op letten? Op subtiele signalen. Een glimlach die ineens als een schakelaar uitgaat, kan gespeeld zijn. Ook onderdrukken leugenaars vaak hun handgebaren of knipperen ze anders. Dat komt omdat liegen meer hersencapaciteit kost. “Liegen vraagt meer mentale energie dan de waarheid vertellen”, legt Beattie uit aan Scientific American.

Een slimme truc is om iemand zijn verhaal achterstevoren te laten vertellen. Een verzonnen verhaal valt dan sneller door de mand.

Zo kom je er als verrader mee weg

Voor verraders geldt juist het omgekeerde: wek vertrouwen. Je kunt bijvoorbeeld iets persoonlijks over jezelf delen om open over te komen. En nog belangrijker: haal de emotie uit het liegen. “Het geheim van een echt goede leugenaar is dat hij zijn emotionele reactie op het liegen verandert.”

Toch is liegen zwaar. Een van de kandidaten gaf toe dat het bedrog hem uitputte. Onderzoeker Sharon Leal vergelijkt het met een glas water vasthouden: “In het begin voel je niets. Maar houd het urenlang vast en je voelt de spanning vanzelf.”

Bron: Scientific American

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De zaak tegen Viruswaarheid-voorman Willem Engel, die in hoger beroep is veroordeeld tot een taakstraf van zestig uur voor opruiing in de coronatijd, moet deels opnieuw worden behandeld. Dat adviseert de advocaat-generaal (AG) aan de Hoge Raad.

Engel plaatste in juni 2020 een livestream op Facebook, nadat de rechter een demonstratie van Viruswaarheid had verboden. Daarin kondigde hij aan op persoonlijke titel toch te zullen demonstreren op het Malieveld in Den Haag en nodigde hij "iedereen uit te komen".

De Hoge Raad doet op 12 mei uitspraak. Als de Hoge Raad het advies volgt, gaat de zaak terug naar het hof.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Onderzoekers van de Vrije Universiteit (VU) in Amsterdam trekken een studie naar het gebruik van een pijnmiddel tegen langdurige coronaklachten voorlopig terug. Er is te veel twijfel of het onderzoek wel volgens de regels is verlopen.

Een commerciële kliniek in Velsen-Noord claimt ruim honderd patiënten met postcovid te hebben behandeld met lidocaïne. Dat middel wordt al jaren gebruikt tegen pijn. Een artikel over het onderzoek verscheen in december in het wetenschappelijke blad eClinicalMedicine, met hulp van de VU. Daarin wordt geconcludeerd dat lidocaïne helpt om de levenskwaliteit van mensen met postcovid aanzienlijk te verbeteren.

De Inspectie Gezondheidszorg en Jeugd onderzoekt of de kliniek daarbij de regels voor medisch-wetenschappelijk onderzoek heeft overtreden. Als proefpersonen een behandeling krijgen die niet onder de reguliere zorg valt, moet een onafhankelijke toetsingscommissie vooraf toestemming geven. Dat lijkt niet te zijn gebeurd.

Inhoudelijke kritiek

De onderzoekers van de VU willen het oordeel van de inspectie afwachten. "Ze hechten eraan dat publicaties niet blijven staan zolang er twijfel bestaat of de studie volledig past binnen de geldende medisch-ethische kaders", aldus de universiteit.

Het onderzoek heeft in de afgelopen tijd ook inhoudelijke kritiek gekregen. Zo waren er geen proefpersonen die een placebo kregen, een middel zonder werking. Daardoor is niet te controleren of lidocaïne echt effect heeft. Het Geneesmiddelenbulletin waarschuwde voor "valse hoop".