Charles Leclerc has opened up on his reasons for extending his stay with Ferrari and his hopes for the remainder of the season in the latest episode of Beyond The Grid.

Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli will face a grid penalty at the Italian Grand Prix – but can he still work his way through the order as these drivers did?

Former Ferrari racer Jean Alesi explains why he has so much appreciation for F1 legend Gilles Villeneuve.

Here is all the information you need to follow the Italian Grand Prix weekend live on F1 TV.

Round 14 of the 2026 season comes from the famous Autodromo Nazionale Monza in Italy – and F1 tyre suppliers Pirelli have confirmed the compounds that will be in play.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Sonos has a new app. Stop me if you've heard this one before. The smart speaker company, long a darling of the audio industry, undid much of the goodwill it earned with its multiroom speakers through a bevy of software updates that broke its app in 2024. Almost all app users hated it, citing the loss of features like volume control and accessibility tools meant to help blind people use the wireless speaker system. Sonos eventually owned up to the mistake, considered bringing back the old app again, then booted its CEO and marched its new leaders out to apologize profusely to win back the company's furious customers.

Now, Sonos says it has a brand-new app update, infused with lots of generative AI features. The company also announced a new soundbar and its second pair of over-the-ear headphones. Sonos representatives say it doesn't want to be seen as a speaker company anymore, but as something bigger and more holistic. "For years people have been seeing us as a speaker company," says Brandon Holley, the interim hardware lead at Sonos. "What we actually are is an audio operating system." The company is calling that operating system Sonos 27, and it manifests in a few ways.

[...] This is a lot of change for Sonos, something the company hasn't always handled gracefully. Sonos' home systems already aren't the easiest to set up, sometimes requiring separate apps for older products. The company may be rejiggering itself as an "audio operating system," but its software has long been the source of its troubles with getting its products to work right. Will AI smarts fix that? Maybe for its newer devices. But anyone with an existing system may still struggle. The AI features on products and in the Sonos 27 app will be opt-in, meaning you can avoid them entirely. "That really is our new approach to our app release," Patel says. "We're going to bring our customers along. We're going to listen more." That would be a good plan. Sounds like Sonos' speakers will be listening more, too. Sonos is emphasizing a more "customer-centric feedback listening approach" after the backlash to its previous redesign. Improvements include easier tab navigation, better room sorting, revamped volume controls, and new system-health tools for diagnosing connection problems.

The centerpiece is Sonos 27voice, a generative AI voice assistant that can handle conversational music requests, connect with services like ChatGPT through Model Context Protocol, and power customizable "Sonos Custom Agents" for tasks such as automatically activating certain speakers. "Obviously AI is something that's very hot these days," Sonos software VP Sid Patel said. "So we have integrated various pieces of AI into our system." However, the features will only work with the newer S2 app, and Sonos cautions that "not every product will support every new feature," with detailed compatibility information coming later.

Sonos is also branding its multiroom networking technology Sonos Fabric, which what Patel calls "the magic that has existed for what Sonos was built on." New Fabric features include portable surround, which lets users temporarily move speakers between rooms and have them automatically configure themselves for surround sound, and Headphone Linking, which lets users seamlessly switch audio between Sonos speakers and headphones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK Parliament's science and technology committee has asked the government to explain how it will avoid conflicts of interest after Anthropic recruited Matt Clifford, chair of blue-sky research agency ARIA. Clifford said he was joining the US AI poster child as managing director of international affairs, "leading the company's work with governments outside North America." He was commissioned to write the "AI Opportunities Action Plan" in July 2024. The government published it in January 2025, adopted all 50 recommendations, and appointed Clifford as its AI Opportunities Adviser. Clifford also chairs the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), the high-risk, high-reward research body modeled on the US agency DARPA. He said he would retain that position and his role at UK venture capital and seed funding company Entrepreneurs First, but would be "stepping back from everything else." Dame Chi Onwurah MP, chair of the House of Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, said Clifford had made a significant contribution to UK AI policy. "While it is a matter of some concern that he is taking his knowledge, experience and government contacts to a leading global AI company, this is entirely within the rules, and we would not want to discourage movement between the public and private sectors," she said in a statement. "However, his intention to remain as Chair of ARIA, which invests taxpayer money in cutting-edge research – much of it AI-related or AI-enabled – creates a clear conflict of interest. The committee looks forward to the AI Minister setting out robust safeguards and clear boundaries to ensure confidence in ARIA's independence." Following Andy Burnham's appointment as Prime Minister, Kanishka Narayan became Minister for Artificial Intelligence, a Cabinet-attending role spanning the Cabinet Office and Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade. Clifford was appointed chair of ARIA in 2022. He reportedly plans to recuse himself from matters involving Anthropic at the agency. In a post on X, Clifford said he had spent the past few years working on some of the major questions AI poses for governments and countries. "It's clear that the decisions that will shape AI's impact shouldn't be made by any one actor – it will take industry, governments and civil society working together. People everywhere want real agency over how this technology is built and used in their societies, and they should have it. Anthropic takes that seriously, which is why I'm joining. I'll be based in London and working with governments across Europe, Asia-Pacific, and beyond." ®

If you thought 72 GPUs per rack was dense, next-generation designs from Nvidia and others will cram hundreds or even thousands of accelerators into a single massive system. But for any of that to happen, they're going to need a lot of optics and technology that's reminiscent of the old-fashioned telephone switchboard. This reality has fueled a flurry of investment in everything from photonics startups to established optical equipment and fiber manufacturing. In March, Nvidia invested $6 billion ($2 billion apiece) in Coherent, Lumentum, and Marvell to advance their optics tech. Some of these investments went to support optical circuit switching (OCS) technology. On Wednesday, Nvidia joined Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital to spend another $125 million to support the development of iPronics' second-generation OCS tech. Why switch packets when you can switch light? Optical circuit switches are switches only in the literal sense. Unlike a Broadcom Tomahawk or Marvell Teralynx ASIC, an OCS appliance can't switch packets. The opto-electrical appliances are the modern equivalent of a telephone switchboard. But rather than human operators manually patching together two telephone lines, a high-speed actuator built using microscopic mirrors, piezoelectric actuators, LCDs, or other technologies reconfigures the network in the literal blink of an eye. OCS isn't particularly common in modern GPU deployments, but they have been used in AI clusters for quite a while. Specifically, Google has used OCSes in its TPU clusters for years now. Traditionally, Google's TPU pods have employed 2D and 3D torus topologies where accelerators communicate in a great big mesh, rather than relying on packet switched fabrics to connect them all together. The trade-off with mesh networks is potentially higher chip-to-chip latency and rigidity. On their own, they're not exactly the most flexible topologies out there. If you want to add, remove, or swap a dead accelerator, someone or something has to reconfigure the network. That something, in Google's case, is optical circuit switching. Traffic from Google's TPU clusters is transmitted optically through OCS appliances, which allows the Chocolate Factory to do things like change the pod size on demand or virtually hot-swap failed accelerators. Optical circuit switching is arguably the reason why Google is able to operate some of the largest single compute domains in the industry. Its network architecture isn't limited to packet switch radix. Smoothing over OCS' rougher edges Existing OCS appliances aren't perfect, however. Many use micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) devices to adjust which components are connected by moving microscopic mirrors. This approach works, but it's not what you would call fast. Reconfiguration times of about 100 ms are commonly quoted. OCS appliances also tend to be quite large, in part because of the mechanisms involved, but also because of the connectors used. Photonics startup iPronics aims to address several of these shortfalls with what it calls a "second-gen" OCS that ditches MEMS and LCD-based systems for a silicon photonics-based design with no moving parts. The company claims its tech can achieve sub-ms reconfiguration times, which opens up the possibility of mid-workload topology changes by hiding the latency during compute cycles. iPronics says that it's also able to achieve higher densities than "first-gen" OCS designs. The iPronics One, for instance, supports 32 ports per chip. We're told the company is now working to bring 72- and 144-port chips to market. Because these chips are built using silicon photonics, they can be crammed into much smaller spaces too. iPronics wagers that using multi-chips and high-density connectors, it'll be able to pack up to 720 port pairs into a single rack unit. For reference, existing high radix OCS switches, like Coherent's 300 port appliances, typically require eight or more rack units. Where OCS fits into the broader AI network Even with sub-millisecond latencies, OCS works best in environments where network paths don't change that often. This is quite different from the approach used by most modern rack systems, like Nvidia's NVL72 or AMD's Helios, which prioritize single-hop all-to-all connectivity and extreme path diversity. But the two aren't mutually exclusive. iPronics isn't ready to talk about the specific topologies its customers are employing. But there are several potential use cases, including hybrid environments melding meshes with switched fabrics. As you may recall, when Nvidia unveiled its first rack-scale compute platform in 2024, CEO Jensen Huang described the 72-GPU system as one enormous accelerator. It achieves this using 18 ultrafast NVLink Switch chips connected in an all-to-all network that enables any one GPU to be just a single hop from the next. You'd think this wouldn't mesh that well with OCS, but it could work using switched fabrics over copper inside the rack and an OCS-based mesh for rack-to-rack communications. The more likely use case, however, will be keeping the massive LPU clusters Nvidia is now peddling from becoming unruly. As we've previously discussed, for every trillion parameters, Nvidia needs eight LPX racks totaling more than 2,000 accelerators. Because these chips largely employ pipeline parallelism, data is processed one chip at a time, meaning they're already good candidates for OCS-orchestrated mesh topologies, and would make resizing clusters for different models a lot easier for neoclouds like Nebius. We're going to need a denser fiber attach Stitching all those systems together is going to require a lot of fiber, and it just so happens another startup, Mixx Technologies, this week revealed a new connector capable of terminating tens of thousands of fibers to a single rack. This is achieved using what Mixx calls its SxC connector, which comprises 64 fibers, whereas MPO typically tops out at between eight and 24. Using its SxC connector, it estimates it can pack 384 64-fiber ports into a single OCP rack unit, enough for 614 TB/s of aggregate bandwidth assuming 400 Gbps SerDes. ®

Waar in West-Europa het traditie is om tijdens een ovatie op te staan als je iets echt, écht heel goed vond, vind je in Nederland nauwelijks nog een voorstelling waar het níét gebeurt. „Dat beleefdheidslaagje hebben we niet nodig. Als je het slecht vindt, is het voor een artiest ‘fijn’ om dat te ervaren.”

Het onderzoek van de fiscus naar belastingontduiking via dure maatpakken breidt zich uit. Ogér moet de complete administratie van de Business Club afgeven voor onderzoek, heeft de kortgedingrechter bepaald. Naheffingen en boetes dreigen bij honderden topondernemers.

Moskou past zijn bekende recept van verstikking toe op Kramatorsk, een van de laatste steden in de Donbas die Rusland nog niet in handen heeft. Toenemende aanvallen met glijbommen, drones en dagelijkse Russische infiltratie maken het front instabiel. „We voelen een tekort aan infanterie.”

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） has added a photo to the pool:

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

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The orchestra – at the Proms this week – is hailed as among the best in the world, if not the best. For my money, that’s quite possibly right, but why?

The Berlin Philharmonic are in London tonight and tomorrow at the Proms, days after closing the Edinburgh international festival in thrilling style. It was their first visit to Scotland in over 20 years, but the orchestra and their chief conductor, Kirill Petrenko, are regular Proms visitors; their Royal Albert Hall concerts are always season highlights.

“The best orchestra in the world”, as it is often hailed, brings programmes that offer the expected and – for them – the unexpected. Tonight there’s Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony paired with Elgar’s Enigma Variations, a piece that’s still an astoundingly rare visitor to this orchestra’s concerts; and tomorrow, the safety-first repertoire warhorse is Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, but it’s paired with Scriabin’s brilliantly unhinged Third Symphony.

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September is the most fun time of year to shop, but it can also be dangerously seductive. Keep your wits about you with these tips

I used to love back-to-school shopping when my children were little. The miniature highlighter pens, the name labels, those pop-out pencil cases from Smiggle, even the intergenerational wrangling over when the price of a water bottle becomes unreasonable. I love the ceremony of new beginnings. The curtain-raising drama of it all.

Luckily for me, you don’t have to grow out of back-to-school shopping even though your children do, because in fashion September is considered the start of the new year. This is eminently sensible, because this time of year is a much better moment for a restart than January. The actual new year is dark and bleak and makes resolutions and projects feel intimidating rather than exciting. But right now, the evenings are still light, and while I’ve still got a bit of a tan pretty much anything feels possible.

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Een gemiddeld huishouden betaalt momenteel €277 per maand aan gas en stroom. In februari was dat nog €224 — een verschil dat op jaarbasis neerkomt op zo'n €600 extra, meldt de NOS op basis van berekeningen van NU.nl. En het stookseizoen moet nog beginnen.

De gasprijs drijft de rekening op

Op de wereldmarkt betalen energiehandelaren nu zo'n €67 voor 100 kuub gas, ruwweg de helft meer dan in februari. De oorlog in Iran heeft niet alleen de handel in olie, maar ook in gas verstoord. Zo'n 7,7 miljoen Nederlandse huishoudens hebben momenteel een vast contract, aldus de ACM. Wie binnenkort moet verlengen of overstappen, krijgt de volle lading — eerder schreven we al dat vaste contracten inmiddels honderden euro's duurder zijn dan begin dit jaar.

Het stookseizoen begint straks, maar de schrik op de energiemarkt is er al.

Hoe meer gas, hoe harder het tikt

Het precieze verschil hangt af van je verbruik. Bij een gasverbruik van 1.000 tot 1.500 kuub per jaar zorgt het huidige tarief voor zo'n €300 tot €450 aan extra kosten per jaar vergeleken met februari. Bij een stroomverbruik van 2.500 kWh komt daar nog eens circa €125 per jaar bij, berekende NU.nl. Wie bovengemiddeld stookt, zit al snel op dat verschil van €600 per jaar — of meer. Hoeveel je verbruikt hangt ook sterk af van je woning: we rekenden eerder voor hoeveel verschil het energielabel maakt.

503.000 huishoudens al in de knel

In 2025 hadden naar schatting 503.000 huishoudens te maken met energiearmoede — 6 procent van het totaal, blijkt uit cijfers van TNO en het CBS. Het gemiddelde tekort per huishouden steeg van €577 in 2024 naar €624 per jaar. Circa 90 procent van de huishoudens in energiearmoede is huurder. Het kabinet beloofde een steunfonds van €193 miljoen, maar dat moet nog worden opgezet. De energiearmoede zal dit jaar waarschijnlijk verder stijgen door de stijgende gasprijs.

Wie de rekening nu al niet kan betalen, heeft weinig aan een fonds dat nog niet bestaat.

En het wordt alleen maar duurder

De ACM waarschuwde recent dat huishoudens die afhankelijk blijven van aardgas de komende 25 jaar steeds hogere tarieven betalen voor gastransport. Een huishouden met een gemiddeld jaarverbruik van 1.000 kuub betaalde vorig jaar €200 aan transporttarieven — richting 2050 kan dat oplopen naar zo'n €790. Dat is bijna een verviervoudiging. De ACM legt uit dat steeds meer huishoudens overstappen op duurzame energie, waardoor de kosten voor het gasnet over een steeds kleinere groep worden verdeeld.

Wanneer loont van het gas af?

Niet iedereen kan nu al van het gas af. Huurders zijn voor verduurzaming en isolatie afhankelijk van hun verhuurder, erkent de ACM. Maar wie wél de mogelijkheid heeft, heeft de cijfers inmiddels in zijn voordeel. Met een gasprijs die structureel hoog blijft, transportkosten die verviervoudigen en energieleveranciers die hun tarieven fors verhogen, wordt elke maand wachten duurder.

Die €277 per maand is geen uitschieter — het is het nieuwe vertrekpunt. En voor wie op gas blijft, gaat de meter alleen maar harder lopen.

Bronnen: NOS, Hart van Nederland, ACM, CBS, Woonbond

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De burgemeesters in het veiligheidsberaad speelden "ministerraadje" rond een aantal grote besluiten tijdens de coronapandemie. Dat zei oud-justitieminister Ferd Grapperhaus woensdag in Den Haag. Tegen de parlementaire enquêtecommissie corona zei de CDA'er dat de 25 burgemeesters in het beraad besluiten volledig over wilden doen.

Grapperhaus noemde onder meer de coronatoegangsbewijzen als voorbeeld. Daarover was een motie aangenomen en vanuit de Europese Unie was daar regelgeving voor gekomen. Toch wilden alle burgemeesters het invoeren hiervan weer bespreken, volgens Grapperhaus. "Ik zei: nu gaan we weer helemaal terug naar het begin. We kunnen nu niet de hele discussie overdoen."

"Het was mijn stellige overtuiging dat er meer basis was voor lokale besluitvorming, maar aan de andere kant werd de richting meer centraal bepaald", aldus Grapperhaus. Het veiligheidsberaad heeft volgens Grapperhaus, ondanks zijn kritiek, altijd goed gefunctioneerd. "Van de eerste tot de laatste keer was het heel constructief."

Er zijn drie zekerheden in het leven: de zon komt op, je betaalt belasting en de Koninklijke Marine entert een 'piratenschip' tijdens de Wereldhavendagen komend weekend in Rotterdam. Maar wat is er nog meer te doen tijdens het evenement? Directeur van de Wereldhavendagen, Sabine Bruijnincx, geeft vijf tips.