Lewis Hamilton finished P3 at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, despite dropping behind by a minute during the race.
Calls for release of six Matsadaash staff after one is charged, while whereabouts of other five remain unknown
An Egyptian journalist has been charged with joining a terrorist group, days after an entire newsroom was detained in what rights groups have said is a crackdown on press freedoms.
Last week, authorities arrested six journalists from the independent fact-checking and investigative platform Matsadaash – literally meaning “don’t believe” – accusing them in a statement of being unlicensed and publishing false news on behalf of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.
Continue reading...Education minister says 24 schools have been burnt or ransacked and 78 staff members injured since student unrest began last week
More than 400 schools in France will be closed or partly closed on Monday as authorities brace for a second week of student protests.
Lessons will be totally or partly suspended in 400 to 500 schools because security conditions “have not been fulfilled”, the education minister, Édouard Geffray, said on Sunday.
Continue reading...Reform UK leader was interviewed for half an hour last month over money from crypto billionaire
Nigel Farage has been interviewed by the standards commissioner for an investigation into whether he should have declared a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne.
The Reform UK leader spent about half an hour being questioned over the money, the Sunday Times reported. Farage maintains the gift was for his personal security.
Continue reading...Exclusive: Average of nearly five sexual crimes a day against under-13s were reported to police between 2021 and 2025
Lawyers and campaigners have condemned the “horrifying” scale of child-on-child sexual abuse in schools after a Guardian investigation revealed thousands of sexual offences against under-13s, including multiple rapes, are reported to police every year.
Close to five sexual crimes against children aged 12 and younger were recorded on average by police every day in primary and secondary schools in England and Wales, according to Guardian analysis of police data for 2021-25.
Continue reading...Motion calling for single Palestinian state, which is opposed by most Green MPs, passes by 1,022 votes to 813 at party’s conference
The Greens have formally adopted a policy which equates Zionism with racism and calls for Israel to be replaced by a single Palestinian state.
In a move opposed by the bulk of the party’s MPs, members voted at the party’s annual conference in Brighton to back a motion which calls for Zionism, the movement for a Jewish state, to be “treated as any other form of racism”. It passed by 1,022 votes to 813.
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Fulcrum faces an identity crisis, even as it works on creating one by enabling anyone to imitate another person's writing style. The AI startup, founded in 2025 and previously operating at fulcrumresearch.ai, now uses fulcrum.inc and could easily be confused with one of the handful of other companies named Fulcrum or some variation of that. There's Fulcrum (withfulcrum.com), Fulcrum (fulcrumapp.com), Fulcrum AI (fulcrumai.us), Fulcrum Digital (fulcrumdigital.com), Fulcrum Labs (fulcrumlabs.ai), Fulcrum (fulcrumpro.com), Fulcrum Insurance Technology (fulcruminsure.app), and perhaps more. This Fulcrum is offering a large language model called Echo, which allows you to generate text in the style of a well-known author. Fulcrum appears to have no issue with corporate echoes. It now falls to writers to decide whether they have an issue with non-corporeal imitation. "Echo can do any writing task, from literary fiction to casual chatting, in whatever style you choose," the company says, and then launches into an exploration of how the technology works without addressing whether imitating a person's writing style poses any problems. Suggestions in the Echo Playground, for generating sample text, include Paul Christiano, Emily Dickinson, and Donald Trump. So, the full gamut of literary achievement: from AI safety expert to acclaimed 19th-century poet to the wordsmith who brought us "covfefe." But Echo will echo even the style of not-so-famous scribes, such as this reporter. So I fed the model a recent op-ed to assess its copying capabilities. The result was mixed, but better than the AI-crafted pitches that have been hitting my inbox for the past few months. I asked the model, "What do you think about the possibility that AI is conscious?" Here's part of the response, notionally written in my writing style. I suspect the debate about whether AI is conscious is less consequential than the debate about whether AI is profitable. Consciousness is a word that invites philosophical speculation and TED Talk invitations. Profitability is a word that invites shareholder lawsuits if you get it wrong. If you ask Meta's latest model whether it's conscious, it will probably say something reassuringly vague, trained as it is on the corpus of human equivocation. If you ask Mark Zuckerberg whether Meta's AI is conscious, he will probably say something about how we need to focus on the future being for everyone, because that's a question that doesn't require him to discuss the ad targeting business. The evidence for AI consciousness at the moment is about as strong as the evidence for Zuck's credibility as a futurist. Which is to say, it exists mainly in press releases and earnings calls. What's clear is that software can simulate aspects of human conversation well enough to unsettle people, and that unsettled people are a valuable audience. If you can convince users that your chatbot understands them – or might, someday – you can sell them subscriptions, or better, harvest their attention for advertisers. The style is familiar but makes a lot of choices I wouldn't have made. I wouldn't begin with "I suspect…" – commit or go home. The consciousness/profitability parallel construction is clumsy. "TED Talk invitations" bets on alliteration at the expense of coherence – "discourse" or "chatter" would work better than "invitations." I wouldn't have written "corpus of human equivocation" – a nice turn of phrase, but an unnecessary shot at training data when the point is the model's response rather than the provenance of that response. Though off-topic, Echo did a passable job of reproducing my op-ed's skepticism of Meta and its CEO. The paragraph that begins "The evidence for AI consciousness at the moment…" is succinct and sounds good. It just doesn't make much sense because there's nothing in the text that addresses Zuckerberg's predictions about the future or whether they're credible. And that's not really relevant to the prompt about AI and consciousness – a subject about which I'd be far more dismissive if opining. As AI research, Echo is an improvement on the text emitted by many AI models. But whether the beneficial uses of this technology outweigh the harms is less clear. Generative AI models that imitate artists' visual styles remain controversial and are the subject of ongoing litigation. And voice imitation has also raised questions about publicity rights and the risk of deception. Such concerns have prompted US lawmakers to propose the NO FAKES Act, which would create federal protections against certain unauthorized AI-generated replicas of a person's voice or visual likeness. If writers generally have no copyright in their writing style itself, and limited practical means to stop unwanted automated imitation of it when their published work is publicly accessible, then the surest defense against Echo may be silence.®
China heeft een té machtige positie in de Rotterdamse haven. Dat zegt haveneconoom Bart Kuipers bij zijn afscheid van de Erasmus Universiteit. “Veel van onze spullen komen uit China. Ook zijn de Rotterdamse containerterminals op dit moment voor ongeveer 60 procent in Chinese handen. Dat maakt ons kwetsbaar."
China heeft een té machtige positie in de Rotterdamse haven. Dat zegt haveneconoom Bart Kuipers bij zijn afscheid van de Erasmus Universiteit. “Veel van onze spullen komen uit China. Ook zijn de Rotterdamse containerterminals op dit moment voor ongeveer 60 procent in Chinese handen. Dat maakt ons kwetsbaar."
De brandweer is zondagmiddag in actie gekomen voor een kat die op het dak van een rij woningen op de Rietgorshoek in Spijkenisse was beland. Het dier liet luid van zich horen en kon uiteindelijk met behulp van een hoogwerker worden gered.
De Amerikaanse inlichtingenchef Jay Clayton wordt de belangrijkste toezichthouder op AI namens het Witte Huis. De Trump-loyalist wil net als de president vooral dat AI-bedrijven vaart blijven maken: „Het risico om niet de eerste te zijn, is hoog.”
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Elf keer won hij de Alternatieve Elfstedentocht, voor de grootste afgelegde schaatsafstand in 24 uur behaalde hij een wereldrecord, en lange tijd stond ook het werelduurrecord (36,971 kilometer) op zijn naam. Maar Elfstedenwinnaar werd hij nooit.
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Russia's military said it targeted a route Kyiv used to transport troops and military cargo.
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Proletariërs der Nederlanden, verenigt u! In 1991 werden de communisten opgevreten door GroenLinks. Voor hardcore Oost-Groningen kwam er de NCPN, maar dat was toch een beetje naaien met condoom. Nou, goed nieuws voor alle Bobbers: de CPN is terug, 35 jaar na de gore moord door batardbroodlinks. Op naar de 0 zetels! Nu al zin in 2061: de reïncarnatie van de PvdA!
byb64 has added a photo to the pool:
Les machiya (町屋?, lit. « maison des bourgs ») sont des maisons en bois typique des centres-villes japonais, qui ont servi de logement et d'ateliers aux habitants pendant des siècles, notamment à Kyōto.