BEIROET (ANP) - Het Rode Kruis waarschuwt voor aanhoudende regenbuien in Libanon. Meer dan 800.000 mensen zijn door Israëlische aanvallen op de vlucht geslagen. Velen daarvan slapen op straat. "De stortbuien van de afgelopen dagen raken hen ongekend hard", schrijft de hulporganisatie in een persbericht.
De situatie wordt volgens het Rode Kruis snel "mensonterend". Het ontbreekt onder meer aan stromend water, toiletten en andere hulpgoederen. "En met de stortbuien die ook later deze week aanhouden, lopen de geïmproviseerde onderkomens onder water", aldus de hulporganisatie. "De eersten die hieronder lijden, zijn jonge kinderen, zieken en ouderen. Zij lopen al snel risico op diarree en onderkoeling. Dit is levensgevaarlijk."
Het Rode Kruis maakt zich zorgen om de huidige gezondheidssituatie van de gevluchte inwoners, maar ook om de veiligheid. Sinds de escalatie van het conflict in Libanon begin maart kwamen honderden inwoners om het leven en raakten duizenden mensen gewond. Daarnaast kwamen volgens de hulporganisatie sinds het begin van dit jaar tientallen hulpverleners om het leven. "Hulpverleners mogen nooit een doelwit worden van aanvallen."
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Politieke partijen gebruiken in hun verkiezingsprogramma's voor de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen regelmatig letterlijke teksten van lobbyisten, zonder dit te vermelden, zegt de Open State Foundation. De organisatie onderzocht in samenwerking met NOS Bureau Regio ruim duizend verkiezingsprogramma's en zo'n 2300 lobbydocumenten uit 37 gemeenten via een geautomatiseerde tekstanalyse.
Bij meer dan vijfhonderd van deze programma's waren er overeenkomsten met lobbyteksten. In meer dan honderd gevallen was de lobbytekst letterlijk in het verkiezingsprogramma overgenomen, vaak zonder bronvermelding. "Lobbyen in Nederland is niet transparant, en dat zien we nu weer bij de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen", aldus Serv Wiemers, directeur van de Open State Foundation. "Dat politieke partijen openstaan voor input uit de maatschappij is prima, zolang ze maar inzicht daarover geven. En zolang ze niet klakkeloos teksten van lobbyisten overnemen. De kiezer moet weten welke belangen op welke manier zijn meegenomen."
De onderzoekers benaderden in aanloop naar de gemeenteraadsverkiezingen van komende woensdag griffies van tientallen gemeenten met het verzoek om alle lobbygerelateerde documenten te delen. Ook zijn de verkiezingsprogramma's van lokale partijen in alle 342 gemeenten geautomatiseerd opgezocht en meegenomen indien gevonden. De dataset bestond zo uit meer dan duizend verkiezingsprogramma's. Bij de analyse is met behulp van software gelet op zowel letterlijk overgenomen teksten als op inhoudelijke overeenkomsten.
Lokale partijen
Zo werd een hele alinea uit een flyer van de Koninklijke Metaalunie teruggevonden in het verkiezingsprogramma van het CDA in Deventer. Volgens de onderzoekers gaat het vooral om lokale partijen en is er een "breed palet aan lobbyisten" van onder meer grote bedrijven, brancheverenigingen, maatschappelijke organisaties en overheidsinstellingen die lobbyteksten onder meerdere gemeenten verspreiden. Dit onderzoek geeft een eerste beeld, maar geen volledig overzicht van alle lobby, stellen ze.
De Open State Foundation pleit voor bronvermelding in verkiezingsprogramma's en een lokaal lobbyregister, zodat mensen weten waar informatie vandaan komt. "In de meeste landen om ons heen is lobbytransparantie geregeld, ook op lokaal niveau", zegt Wiemers. "Op nationaal niveau dringt de Tweede Kamer al tien jaar aan op een lobbyregister. Die is nu eindelijk teruggekomen in het coalitieakkoord. Nu nog de gemeenten."
Een kort filmpje van Barack Obama heeft in de VS een storm aan speculatie ontketend. In een teaser van de Obama Foundation scrollt de oud‑president op zijn telefoon, kijkt even in de camera en spreekt over “unfinished business”, afgesloten met de boodschap “to be continued”. Op sociale media was dat genoeg om de hashtag “Obama 2028” te laten ontploffen.
Cryptische teaser zet sociale media in vuur en vlam
Met name op X gingen gebruikers los. Sommigen juichten een denkbeeldige derde termijn toe, anderen spraken schande van het idee dat Obama opnieuw het Witte Huis zou betreden. De begeleidende tekst bij de video – “Any guesses, fam?” inclusief oog‑emoji – was duidelijk bedoeld om het publiek aan te wakkeren tot raden, en dat lukte: de post werd miljoenen keren bekeken en gedeeld.
Toch schuurt de fantasie van een “Obama 2028” hard met de werkelijkheid. Juridisch is een comeback als president simpelweg onmogelijk. Het 22e Amendement van de Amerikaanse grondwet beperkt het aantal gekozen termijnen tot twee. Obama heeft zijn twee termijnen (2009–2017) al gehad en mag dus niet nogmaals als president gekozen worden, hoe groot zijn populariteit ook is. Om dit te veranderen zou de grondwet moeten worden aangepast, via een politiek vrijwel onhaalbare procedure.
Dat de geruchten nu zo snel aanzwellen, heeft ook te maken met de politieke sfeer in Washington. President Donald Trump heeft zelf meermaals hardop gespeculeerd over een mogelijke derde termijn voor zichzelf, wat het debat over termijnlimieten opnieuw heeft aangezwengeld. In dat klimaat wordt elke cryptische boodschap van een oud‑president meteen gelezen als een potentiële politieke zet.
Waarom “unfinished business” waarschijnlijk iets anders betekent
Meer voor de hand ligt dat Obama’s “unfinished business” verwijst naar zijn stichting en het Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, dat symbool staat voor zijn nalatenschap en maatschappelijke projecten. De teaser past in een communicatiestrategie die aandacht en donaties moet genereren, niet in een geheime presidentscampagne. Obama mag dan nog invloed hebben op het politieke debat, terugkeren als president kan hij niet – en dat weet hij zelf waarschijnlijk als geen ander.
Exclusive: Fixing a leak can be simple and equivalent to closing a coal power station, making lack of action maddening, say analysts
The world’s worst mega-leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane in 2025 have been revealed by an analysis of satellite data.
The super-polluting plumes from oil and gas facilities have a colossal heating impact on the climate but often result from poor maintenance and can be simple to fix. The assessment found dozens of mega-leaks, each having the same global heating impact as a coal-fired power station.
Continue reading...Grey-market injectable peptides – a category of substances with obscure, alphanumeric names such as BPC-157, GHK-Cu, or TB-500 – have developed a devoted following among biohackers and health optimisers. To understand how these unregulated substances have become mainstream and what they could be doing in our bodies, Madeleine Finlay hears from journalist Adrienne Matei and from Dr Anna Barnard, an associate professor at Imperial College London who researches peptides
‘People are turning themselves into lab rats’: the injectable peptides craze sweeping the US
Continue reading...In a world teeming with social media and smart devices, there are many ways to upset people, whether you’re checking your watch notifications or sending a voice note without a text to explain the subject. Here’s how to navigate it all
In an age of smartphones, social media and instant communication, it has never been easier to connect … or to offend everyone around us. Many of today’s most common etiquette breaches stem not from malice but from convenience: a badly written message, a thoughtless post, a device that demands our attention. Yet good manners still hinge on the same old principle: consideration for others. From eschewing headphones on public transport to ghosting invitations and sharing thoughtlessly online, here are some of the most common modern etiquette mistakes, why they grate, and how they can be avoided.
Continue reading...Only half the road network is in good condition despite 1.9m repairs last year, says industry body
A losing battle with potholes has now seen the backlog of repairs across England and Wales reach a record £18.6bn, according to an annual industry estimate, despite councils filling in about 1.9m holes last year.
The “national disgrace” of dangerously pockmarked local roads has been exacerbated by a notably wet winter, with only half of the network now reported to be in good condition.
Continue reading...Numerous faked images and a string of startlingly inaccurate responses from Gemini and Grok are part of a tidal wave of AI slop engulfing coverage of the Iran war
The graves, freshly dug, lie in neat rows of 20 across. More than 60 have already been carved out of the earth, with a few clusters of people standing gathered around them. Dozens more are marked out on the ground in front: small chalk rectangles, with diggers poised to complete their task.
The cemetery of Minab, photographed as it prepares to bury more than 100 of the town’s young girls, is one of the defining images of the US-Israeli war on Iran, bluntly capturing the devastating civilian toll.
Continue reading...Audiences draw parallels between the abduction plot of Feels Like Home and Viktor Orbán’s 16-year reign
It’s seven o’clock on a Tuesday night, and one of the most popular movie theatres in Budapest is full, not an empty seat in sight. The audience is not here for a Hollywood blockbuster, but a Hungarian film that barely had the budget to be made.
Feels Like Home (Itt Érzem Magam Otthon) has captured moviegoers not only with its striking visuals but also with its timing – its release coming before Hungary’s pivotal parliamentary elections on 12 April.
Continue reading...Ditched washing machines, a woman’s bare leg, the back of Willem Dafoe’s head … the Oscar-nominated director talks us through his new photography show in Athens – made with his darkroom assistant Emma Stone
In the centre of Athens, a brand new temple has popped up. Walk around the tall white columns surrounding it and you’ll eventually find the entrance to its inner sanctum. It might not be quite as old as the nearby Parthenon but it does hold a unique kind of treasure: the personal photographs of director Yorgos Lanthimos.
Taken over the last few years as he wandered his home country, they offer a glimpse of Greece through the auteur’s absurdist eye. We see a coffin resting against a wall next to a mop, and a couple of horses with their heads chopped off by foregrounded trees. A roadside memorial is shown underneath a sign warning of danger ahead – the wiggly road symbol points directly upwards, as if suggesting the route to the next life for the poor victim. This last image is poignant, strange and funny, eliciting the same awkward clash of emotions you get from watching Lanthimos’s films.
Continue reading...Sweden’s V-Dem Institute warns that the US is no longer a liberal democracy. And autocracy is creeping across Europe too
The US is no longer a democracy. One of the most credible global sources on the health of democratic nations now says this outright. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University reaches the alarming conclusion in its annual report, that the US is hurtling towards autocracy at a faster rate than Hungary and Turkey.
“Our data on the USA goes back to 1789. What we’re seeing now is the most severe magnitude of democratic backsliding ever in the country,” says Staffan Lindberg, founder of the institute.
Continue reading...Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people
In 2025, when Elon Musk joined the government as the de facto head of something called the “department of government efficiency”, he declared that governments were poorly configured “big dumb machines”. To the senator Ted Cruz, he explained that “the only way to reconcile the databases and get rid of waste and fraud is to actually look at the computers”.
Muskism came to Washington soaked in memes, adolescent boasts and sadistic victory dances over mass firings. Leading a team of teenage coders and mid-level managers drawn from his suite of companies, Musk aimed to enter the codebase and rewrite regulations and budget lines from within. He would drag the paper-pushing bureaucracy kicking and screaming into the digital 21st century, scanning the contents of cavernous rooms of filing cabinets and feeding the data into a single interoperable system. The undertaking combined features of private equity-led restructuring with startup management, shot through with the sensibility of gaming and rightwing culture war. To succeed, he would need “God mode”, an overview of the whole.
Continue reading...
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Since Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" just over a year ago, we've seen a rapid increase in both the capabilities and popularity of using AI models to throw together quick programming projects with less human time and effort than ever before. One such vibe-coded project, Gaming Alexandria Researcher, launched over the weekend as what coder Dustin Hubbard called an effort to help organize the hundreds of scanned Japanese gaming magazines he's helped maintain at clearinghouse Gaming Alexandria over the years, alongside machine translations of their OCR text.
A day after that project went public, though, Hubbard was issuing an apology to many members of the Gaming Alexandria community who loudly objected to the use of Patreon funds for an error-prone AI-powered translation effort. The hubbub highlights just how controversial AI tools remain for many online communities, even as many see them as ways to maximize limited funds and man-hours. "I sincerely apologize," Hubbard wrote in his apology post. "My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we've never had access to before. I felt this project was a good step towards that, but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI." "I'm very, very disappointed to see [Gaming Alexandria], one of the foremost organizations for preserving game history, promoting the use of AI translation and using Patreon funds to pay for AI licenses," game designer and Legend of Zelda historian Max Nichols wrote in a post on Bluesky over the weekend. "I have cancelled my Patreon membership and will no longer promote the organization."
Nichols later deleted his original message (archived here), saying he was "uncomfortable with the scale of reposts and anger" it had generated in the community. However, he maintained his core criticism: that Gemini-generated translations inevitably introduce inaccuracies that make them unreliable for scholarly use.
In a follow-up, he also objected to Patreon funds being used to pay for AI tools that produce what he called "untrustworthy" translations, arguing they distort history and are not valid sources for research. "... It's worthless and destructive: these translations are like looking at history through a clownhouse mirror," he added.
A day after that project went public, though, Hubbard was issuing an apology to many members of the Gaming Alexandria community who loudly objected to the use of Patreon funds for an error-prone AI-powered translation effort. The hubbub highlights just how controversial AI tools remain for many online communities, even as many see them as ways to maximize limited funds and man-hours. "I sincerely apologize," Hubbard wrote in his apology post. "My entire preservation philosophy has been to get people access to things we've never had access to before. I felt this project was a good step towards that, but I should have taken more into consideration the issues with AI." "I'm very, very disappointed to see [Gaming Alexandria], one of the foremost organizations for preserving game history, promoting the use of AI translation and using Patreon funds to pay for AI licenses," game designer and Legend of Zelda historian Max Nichols wrote in a post on Bluesky over the weekend. "I have cancelled my Patreon membership and will no longer promote the organization."
Nichols later deleted his original message (archived here), saying he was "uncomfortable with the scale of reposts and anger" it had generated in the community. However, he maintained his core criticism: that Gemini-generated translations inevitably introduce inaccuracies that make them unreliable for scholarly use.
In a follow-up, he also objected to Patreon funds being used to pay for AI tools that produce what he called "untrustworthy" translations, arguing they distort history and are not valid sources for research. "... It's worthless and destructive: these translations are like looking at history through a clownhouse mirror," he added.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Vanochtend is het bewolkt, maar het blijft vrijwel droog. Vanmiddag komt de zon geleidelijk af en toe tevoorschijn. Het is merkbaar zachter, met een maximumtemperatuur van ongeveer 15 graden is het merkbaar zachter dan gisteren. Er staat een matige wind uit het zuiden.
mikeleonardvisualarts has added a photo to the pool:
You’ll be exhausted by then because securing Microsoft’s AI helper is not a trivial task
Gartner analyst Dennis Xu has half-jokingly suggested banning use of Microsoft’s Copilot AI on Friday afternoons, because he fears at that time of week users may be too lazy to properly check its possibly offensive output.…