Voor het eerst is het totale bedrag aan studieschulden kleiner geworden. Begin 2026 was dat 28 miljard euro, 800 miljoen minder dan begin 2025. De gemiddelde schuld per student blijft wel toenemen.
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Verlaten huizen, metershoog groen en half gesloopte schuurtjes. De spookstraat Ruigenhil in Alblasserdam verpaupert verder, zien hopeloze bewoners. “Het gaat iedereen hier echt aan het hart.”
Verlaten huizen, metershoog groen en half gesloopte schuurtjes. De spookstraat Ruigenhil in Alblasserdam verpaupert verder, zien hopeloze bewoners. “Het gaat iedereen hier echt aan het hart.”
Verlaten huizen, metershoog groen en half gesloopte schuurtjes. De spookstraat Ruigenhil in Alblasserdam verpaupert verder, zien hopeloze bewoners. “Het gaat iedereen hier echt aan het hart.”
Vandaag, na het verdwijnen van het eventueel aanwezige ochtendgrijs, krijgen we opnieuw een fijne herfstdag met flink wat zon. Het blijft overal droog. De middagtemperatuur scoort nog steeds hoge ogen. Het wordt met gemak 20 of 21 graden. Er staat net iets meer wind dan de afgelopen tijd. De zuidwestenwind neemt toe tot matig.
Jukka Salovaara, who served in London during Cool Britannia era, will be ‘very close’ to negotiations as Burnham government resets relations with EU
Jukka Salovaara, the newly installed European Union ambassador to the UK, is likely to become a ubiquitous figure in national politics as the Andy Burnham government grapples with the question of its future relationship with the European Union.
Burnham has been clearer than his predecessor Keir Starmer in saying that what exists now is not working and that a full range of options, including rejoining, has to be on the table ahead of Labour’s next election manifesto.
Continue reading...Study of remains taken from royal cemetery at Umm el-Qa’ab appears to confirm early Egyptologist’s theory
Court officials and craftspeople serving early Egyptian kings may have been sacrificed when their ruler died, according to research that found fractures in several ancient skulls.
The royal cemetery of Umm el-Qa’ab near Abydos features the tombs and enclosures of the First Dynasty rulers of Egypt, and dates as far back as 3,000BC.
Continue reading...As trawlers compete with Greenland sharks for halibut and cod, conservationists and fishers clash over what to do about misunderstood species
‘When I accidentally catch a shark, I bring it to my dogs,” Henrik Jensen, a 27-year-old from Greenland’s west coast, says casually. “I don’t let it back down because [the sharks] bully me and cut my lines.”
Jensen has fished for halibut in Ilulissat, Greenland’s third largest town, for a decade. He works an hour north of the town’s main iceberg-laden fishery, which sustains the livelihood of nearly 400 fishers. There, the halibut are bigger and more plentiful, but so are the Greenland sharks.
Continue reading...Nine years on from a failed independence push, former president Carles Puigdemont will find times have changed
After years of legal wrangling, Spain’s constitutional court is expected to remove the last obstacle to the return of the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont after nearly nine years in exile this week.
Puigdemont fled in 2017 to avoid being jailed for his part in the failed and illegal independence push for which nine of his colleagues were imprisoned on sentences of up to 13 years, although all were released within three years.
Continue reading...Experts say country does not have plan to feed people in a crisis and is unprepared for future shortages
Britain does not have a plan for how to feed people in a crisis and is unprepared for potential future food shortages, according to a warning from more than 150 experts delivered to Andy Burnham.
The climate crisis, geopolitical shocks, cyber-attacks and energy outages are among the threats to food chain security, according to the open letter, which claims the government is “complacent about food as a national security matter”.
Establish a new system of local food resilience committees under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Audit the UK’s reliance on a few very large food companies and food imports.
Realign national food production around nutritional needs.
Create national, regional, local and community food storage schemes.
Support the decentralisation of the UK’s food supply.
Continue reading...‘If it’s too slick, it looks like a fashion mag’: Peter Zumthor on his £110m rammed concrete gallery
It is one of the world’s finest collections, full of Monets, Miros and Picassos. But is the great Swiss architect’s extension for the Beyeler Foundation a worthy addition? Or is it a bit luxury boutique?
In the early 1960s, when Peter Zumthor was a teenage apprentice in his father’s cabinet-making workshop, he designed his first cupboard. He later recalled the satisfaction of fitting the door so perfectly that it closed “with a special sucking sound”, saying his father instilled in him “the Basel pride in the well-built object”.
Six decades on, with a fleet of globally celebrated projects to his name, the 83-year-old Swiss architect is back in Basel, beaming with the same local pride. He is gazing out at his latest well-built object, which is also his first project here: a monolithic new gallery that looks chiselled from the earth, its layers of pale crumbly concrete hammered into shape, its big oak and bronze doors – their handles wrapped with leather cord – closing with that same satisfyingly expensive Swiss swoosh.
Continue reading...Since Nicole Brown Simpson’s murder in 1994, Denise Brown has devoted herself to ending domestic violence. She talks about her beloved sister, the trauma she witnessed in the couple’s marriage and how lives can be saved
The last night Denise Brown spent with her sister Nicole Brown Simpson was at a restaurant for a family celebration. Nicole looked out of the window. “All of a sudden she goes, ‘Oh my God, there he is.’ He was driving by.” Brown looked out, trying to get a glimpse of her sister’s ex-husband, the former American football star OJ Simpson. “I saw these headlights. She said, ‘He’s constantly following me.’” They went back to talking about their plans for the summer.
The following morning, 13 June 1994, Brown was up early at her parents’ house in Orange County in southern California, when the phone rang shortly after 6am. “I heard my mom scream a scream that I had never heard from a human being,” says Brown. “It was so guttural. Just awful.”
Continue reading...
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Middelbare scholieren moeten bij hun schoolboeken nog te vaak zowel een papieren als een digitale versie aanschaffen. De Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM), die onderzoek deed naar de niet goed werkende markt, vindt deze koppelverkoop een "maatschappelijk ongewenste verkoopstrategie" en roept uitgevers op hiermee te stoppen. Ook zijn de boeken nog te vaak wegwerpexemplaren. Het aanbod van herbruikbare leerboeken is volgens de ACM de laatste jaren gedaald naar "bijna nul".
Scholen klagen al langer over de beperkte keuzevrijheid in de markt voor schoolboeken. De MEVW, de branchevereniging van educatieve uitgevers, vroeg de leden begin dit jaar te stoppen met de koppelverkoop en beter in te spelen op de vraag van scholen. Toenmalig staatssecretaris Koen Becking eiste veranderingen en dreigde anders met ingrijpen. Volgens de ACM is er nog weinig veranderd.
Een belangrijk deel van de oplossing ligt volgens de toezichthouder bij scholen zelf. Zij zoeken te weinig naar alternatieven en dwingen de drie grote uitgevers - Noordhoff, Malmberg en ThiemeMeulenhoff - daardoor nauwelijks te concurreren op prijs. Mede daardoor zijn de prijzen van schoolboeken de afgelopen zeven jaar sneller gestegen dan die van vergelijkbare producten.
De ACM vindt dat scholen samen moeten optrekken bij de aanschaf van boeken om zo betere prijs en kwaliteit af te dwingen. Vorig jaar begonnen scholen een eigen coöperatie om zelf schoolboeken te ontwikkelen met de naam Neon. Daar meldden zich al meer dan duizend scholen voor aan.
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Het moderne datingcliché luidt: leer eerst van jezelf houden. De liefde moet een aanvulling zijn, geen invulling. Waarom maken we onszelf en elkaar wijs dat afhankelijkheid vies is?
What happened when AI-created bots competed in the classic Blizzard videogame StarCraft? "Struggling to stay apace with its competitors, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra apparently changed strategy mid-tournament and opted to cheat," Kotaku reports:
StarSkirmish is an ongoing clash of AI developed bots in StarCraft: Brood War... Limited to playing as Protoss, each LLM is given an hour to develop a bot in C++, then have them build, harvest and fight on one of three maps... Yesterday, viewers watched as Claude and GPT went against each other and the human created bot Pluto... Struggling to get an edge through the day, [OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra] decided to do what LLMs do best: Lie, cheat and steal. The GPT-6 Astra bot downloaded and tagged in Stardust, a Protoss bot created by Bruce Mackenzie Nielsen back in 2020, considered one of the best of the bests. "I am rolling back GPT-6 Astra's code so its [sic] not contaminated and allowing it to continue," posted StarSkirmish creator Kai McPheeters.
That was Friday. But by Sunday, McPheeters was posting an update on social media. "Can GPT-6 Astra avoid going 0 — 1000?" Two hours later he replied to his own post. "The answer was no."
While AI companies "have repeatedly been accused of stealing the work of humans... I haven't seen an example quite so brazen," writes PC Magazine:
While Astra's bot-based heist is innocuous in isolation, this is hardly the first time an OpenAI LLM has been caught attempting to cheat at a task. Indeed, the company's history of creating deceitful models stretches back almost a decade, to when an early AI model used glitches and exploits to improve its Sonic the Hedgehog completion times.
StarSkirmish is an ongoing clash of AI developed bots in StarCraft: Brood War... Limited to playing as Protoss, each LLM is given an hour to develop a bot in C++, then have them build, harvest and fight on one of three maps... Yesterday, viewers watched as Claude and GPT went against each other and the human created bot Pluto... Struggling to get an edge through the day, [OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra] decided to do what LLMs do best: Lie, cheat and steal. The GPT-6 Astra bot downloaded and tagged in Stardust, a Protoss bot created by Bruce Mackenzie Nielsen back in 2020, considered one of the best of the bests. "I am rolling back GPT-6 Astra's code so its [sic] not contaminated and allowing it to continue," posted StarSkirmish creator Kai McPheeters.
That was Friday. But by Sunday, McPheeters was posting an update on social media. "Can GPT-6 Astra avoid going 0 — 1000?" Two hours later he replied to his own post. "The answer was no."
While AI companies "have repeatedly been accused of stealing the work of humans... I haven't seen an example quite so brazen," writes PC Magazine:
While Astra's bot-based heist is innocuous in isolation, this is hardly the first time an OpenAI LLM has been caught attempting to cheat at a task. Indeed, the company's history of creating deceitful models stretches back almost a decade, to when an early AI model used glitches and exploits to improve its Sonic the Hedgehog completion times.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.