De relatie tussen Solvinity, het bedrijf achter DigiD, en het Amerikaanse techbedrijf Kyndryl, dat het wilde overnemen, is bekoeld. Kyndryl hoeft Solvinity niet meer te hebben, terwijl de aandeelhouders van het bedrijf nog altijd proberen het verbod op de overname van tafel te krijgen.

Het kabinet heeft bij het nemen van coronamaatregelen veel te vaak het parlement omzeild. Maatregelen werden alvast ingevoerd voordat de Tweede en de Eerste Kamer zich er over…

Tom Meighan

Het Openbaar Ministerie in Rotterdam heeft vijf jaar cel geëist tegen een vrachtwagenchauffeur die zeventien vreemdelingen heeft gesmokkeld in een koelcontainer. Onder hen waren zes kinderen, de jongste drie jaar oud.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Boeren mogen door de aanhoudende droogte deze zomer twee weken langer mest uitrijden op grasland. Normaal mag dat tot eind augustus, maar landbouwminister Jaimi van Essen heeft dit verlengd tot 15 september.

Door de droogte hebben boeren weinig goed gras kunnen maaien de afgelopen maanden. Daardoor is er ook weinig hooi op voorraad voor koeien. Om de boeren een kans te geven zoveel mogelijk gras te kunnen maaien in september, mag er langer mest worden uitgereden, schrijft de D66-minister in een brief aan de Tweede Kamer.

Mest kan het gras helpen groeien, maar op droog en verdord grasland brengt het meer schade aan dan dat het helpt bij de groei van gras.

BBB-Kamerlid Caroline van der Plas had Van Essen gevraagd om de termijn op te schuiven. "Hoop dat de verlenging van de mestuitrijperiode enig soelaas brengt voor boeren en bodem", schrijft ze op X.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Oud-ministers Hugo de Jonge (Volksgezondheid) en Ferd Grapperhaus (Justitie) worden volgende week voor de tweede keer verhoord door de parlementaire enquêtecommissie corona. Ook de voormalige ministers en vicepremiers Carola Schouten (Landbouw) en Kajsa Ollongren (Binnenlandse Zaken) moeten voor de commissie verschijnen, net als toenmalig SCP-directeur Kim Putters.

KATHMANDU (ANP/AFP) - De Nepalese premier Balendra Shah heeft opgeroepen tot eenheid na de dodelijke overstromingen in zijn land. Hij verzekert het volk dat hulp van de staat onderweg is, maar vraagt ook om geduld zodat de hulpverlening goed op gang kan komen.

"De regering neemt de volledige verantwoordelijkheid voor jullie redding, behandeling, voedsel en onderdak", schrijft Shah in een verklaring. "Tijdens een ramp als deze, moeten we samen sterk staan."

Volgens de politie kwamen zeker 95 mensen om, maar de autoriteiten hadden eerder gezegd dat honderden toeristen vermist waren.

Shah belde na de overstromingen al met zijn ambtgenoot uit buurland India, Narendra Modi. De Indiase premier zei dat zijn land klaarstaat om alle nodige humanitaire hulp te bieden.

De 35-jarige Shah is nu vijf maanden premier. Hij was eerder bekend als de rapper Balen, maar ging in 2022 de politiek in en werd direct de burgemeester van Kathmandu. Hij won de verkiezingen na de grote Gen Z-protesten van vorig jaar.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - Het zeldzame bezoek van de baas van de Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst CIA aan Moskou dinsdag had niets te maken met mogelijke Russische plannen om de verdediging van Europa te testen, zegt president Donald Trump. Over de onverwachte visite werd druk gespeculeerd, omdat Amerikaanse inlichtingendiensten volgens meerdere media juist zouden hebben gewaarschuwd dat Rusland op zoiets broedt.

Met plannen voor een Russische speldenprik, een sabotage- of zelfs een gewapende aanval op Europese NAVO-landen heeft het bezoek van John Ratcliffe niets van doen, zei Trump tegen de talkshowpresentator Glenn Beck. De CIA-directeur was volgens de president "op een soort van semi-routine"-bezoek.

"Ik vind het vervelend om mensen teleur te stellen", zei Trump over de gonzende geruchten van de afgelopen dagen. Analisten wezen erop dat CIA-directeuren hoogst zelden Rusland bezoeken. De laatste keer was in 2021, toen met als doel om Rusland te weerhouden van de invasie van Oekraïne.

NEW YORK (ANP/RTR) - Tennissters Serena ​en ⁠Venus ‌Williams hebben een wildcard gekregen voor het dubbelspel op de US Open. Dat maakte de organisatie woensdag bekend. De laatste keer dat de zussen als duo samenspeelden op het Amerikaanse grandslamtoernooi was in 2022. Ze wonnen het dubbelspel in New York in 1999 en 2009.

Venus Williams (46) had eerder ook al een wildcard gekregen voor het hoofdtoernooi in het enkelspel, dat zondag begint. Serena Williams (44) werd dinsdagnacht samen met de Spanjaard Carlos Alcaraz uitgeschakeld in de kwartfinales van het gemengd dubbel.

De zussen zouden deze zomer ook met een wildcard in actie komen in het dubbelspel op Wimbledon, maar door een blessure van Serena Williams ging dit niet door.

The cookbook author and owner of Melbourne’s Beatrix Bakes shares a her ‘100% reliable’ formula for freeing bundts from tins

When all the layer cakes are baked and iced, I will always love a slice of pretty patterned bundt. Especially one that is lightened with the perfect amount of baking powder (overly dense bundts are stodgy sadness) and brightened with limes and yoghurt.

Cake goop – a mix of flour, oil and butter – is a gift of guaranteed cake release that I found on the internet, and it means no more stuck bundts. Bless the baker who invented it! Goop has it all – release, plus enough sticking power to hold the batter as it rises and cools, without slumping. Additionally, mixing the flour with oil means you don’t get that fine, white, dusty crust on the outside of the cooked cake. Goop is 100% reliable with a 100% untarnished release record in my kitchen.

This is an edited extract from Sweet Heart by Natalie Paull, with photography by Rochelle Eagle, available in Australia 1 September through Murdoch Books, $49.99

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Reform MP seeks to heap pressure on Tory leader amid confusion around details of meeting with Giorgia Meloni

Robert Jenrick has accused Kemi Badenoch of telling “a pack of lies” about her meeting with the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, as he launched a deeply personal attack on his former boss.

The Reform UK MP sought to heap pressure on the Conservative leader amid confusion about whether Meloni urged Badenoch at a meeting in Rome to “be her own woman” and resist doing a deal with his party.

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Rearguard reactionaries may try to block the idea of a national commission into proportional representation, but we should want more not less democracy

A poll in the Mail on Sunday at the end of June was remarkable. It had not just Reform as low as 21%, but also Labour and the Tories. It was remarkable because it starkly demonstrated the fragmented landscape of the UK’s electoral terrain, as well as the electoral weakness of its main players.

Polls since have varied, not least with the Burnham bounce, but this week’s YouGov voting intention figures put Reform, Labour and the Tories on 23%, 22% and 20% respectively (although it almost no longer matters which exact figure applies to which party). Add in the Greens and the Liberal Democrats on 13% apiece, the SNP dominating Scotland and Plaid Cymru Wales, then Restore UK and independent candidates and you have an unprecedented variety of options laid out before the British electorate.

Neal Lawson is director of the cross-party campaign organisation Compass

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Songwriter who contributed to the first record made at Motown’s Detroit studio and co-wrote many of the label’s hits

Janie Bradford was a poetry-loving receptionist, not yet out of her teens, when she provided her boss, Berry Gordy Jr, with the lines that helped him complete a song called Money (That’s What I Want). Gordy, then in the early stages of establishing Motown Records and searching for what would become the label’s signature sound, was sitting at the piano in the summer of 1959 when Bradford, who had been listening to him at work, came up with a couplet that drove home the song’s message: “Your love gives me such a thrill / But your love don’t pay my bills.”

Money (That’s What I Want) was the first record to be made at Motown’s new Detroit studios, to be known as Hitsville USA. Sung by the 18-year-old Barrett Strong, it was released in the US in August 1959 and reached No 2 in the R&B charts and No 23 in the pop charts. In recognition of her contribution, Gordy added Bradford’s name to his own in the songwriting credits.

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Like co-star Tom Felton, Grint will once again play the role that made him famous, in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Rupert Grint is set to reprise the role of Ron Weasley in the Broadway hit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

The actor will join the long-running stage show for 17 weeks starting in February 2027.

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For users of vSphere 8, October 11, 2027 looms large on the calendar. That is the day general support for vSphere 8 ends, along with bug fixes and security patches, and the day traditional perpetual licensing for the technology also expires. From then on, customers must upgrade to VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) 9, and shift to a bundled subscription model widely seen as much more expensive and geared toward larger installations. VMware launched vSphere 8 in October 2022, ahead of its takeover by Broadcom in 2023. Broadcom made no secret of its intention to reorganize the VMware product lineup and licensing regime, and train its sights on the biggest, most lucrative users. vSphere 8 offered customers breathing space in which to watch Broadcom's plans play out and plan their own next move. Aside from the higher licensing costs, VCF 9 offers a radically different proposition that includes much more onerous audit requirements. Technically, VCF 9 is a take-it-or-leave-it bundle of products that gives customers less flexibility than its predecessor, which came in Standard and Enterprise Plus editions. According to Harsha Kotikela, senior director for product and solutions marketing at Nutanix, calling this an upgrade doesn't do justice to what shifting to VCF 9 entails. VCF is bundled much more tightly with both vSAN and NSX, the latter of which was an add-on option in vSphere 8. Broadcom's whole vision, he says, is heavily geared toward private clouds. That might work for some businesses but it will go against the grain for many enterprise organizations pursuing hybrid cloud or more distributed infrastructure strategies. Add all this together, argues Kotikela, and what sounds like a routine upgrade starts to look much more like a major architectural migration to a more expensive, less flexible platform by an immovable end date. Customers who want to stay within the VMware ecosystem have an alternative in the shape of VMware vSphere Foundation, which Broadcom pitches as delivering "enterprise-class hyperconverged infrastructure." The platform is widely perceived as a cut-down alternative to VCF, with a narrower range of features and reduced storage per core, along with many of the same drawbacks around unwanted bundled features and costs. It does not offer the broader Kubernetes and AI support found in VCF. That means most customers will still face a decision at some point about how to support these two trends. As Kotikela says: "If an organization decides, 'We can't afford VCF 9 right now, so we're gonna go with this lower cost bundle,' then two years down the road, they're going to be saying, 'Oh, I do want to use AI', then they're going to have to migrate again. That's a hidden danger." The vSphere 8 cut-off may be over a year away, but many businesses are already considering their options, and plenty have identified alternatives and voted with their feet. Gartner research shows that 35 percent of respondents have already migrated or are in the process of migrating their entire portfolios away from VMware. Alternatives to the VMware stack are developing at an accelerated pace, the analyst house added, "with a diverse ecosystem of enterprise-ready solutions projected to reach full feature-parity and operational maturity within the next 24 months." Gartner pointed out that "Nutanix is expanding its ecosystem support, including integration with external third-party storage vendors." Defining your future platform The October 2027 cut-off should be about more than simply finding a replacement for VMware infrastructure assembled over years, even decades. Organizations need to think well beyond a straight lift-and-shift of their existing architectures, Gartner added, and consider broader modernization strategies such as hybrid architectures, open source, and container management. The future of virtualization, Gartner said, is one where "VMs and containers are managed through a single control plane. Hypervisors integrate natively with Kubernetes." That single control plane would allow infrastructure to be provisioned and governed through "declarative automation." That is the Nutanix Cloud Platform architecture, Kotikela says, with workflows, lifecycles, and operations managed in one place. "It's one platform, so, you'll be able to manage both VMs and containers. You have one platform to manage your different clouds, plus on prem." More recently, Nutanix Agent Gateway has added AI agent observability and token management to the platform. The alternative, Kotikela said, is a migration strategy that potentially leaves tech teams juggling separate silos and separate lifecycles for private cloud and public cloud. That is challenging enough during the migration itself, but from a day-two perspective, he says, "It becomes increasingly difficult." Who switched early? Nutanix is keen to highlight businesses that have already shed aging VMware infrastructure to modernize their technology stacks and harvest tangible benefits. Western Union migrated at least 900 applications across a 3,900-core server fleet, while South Korea’s Everland theme park also moved from Broadcom to Nutanix, citing the ease of the migration path. Looming over all of this is the rush toward implementing AI, particularly the promise of agentic AI. As strategic leaders in organizations, Kotikela says, "CIOs are also thinking about where I should drive my organization three years from now, right?" It's increasingly clear that hybrid cloud is going to be the key underlying model for AI, Kotikela argues, and "You have to have a seamless way of managing this distributed environment." Kotikela adds, "The foundation for AI, obviously, is Kubernetes and containers. So, you have to modernize from an application perspective. But it also doesn't make sense that you modernize every legacy application." For that reason, Kotikela said, it's vital that IT should be able to "manage simultaneously both your VM-based applications as well as container-based applications or new applications like AI." That includes the ability to accommodate and manage both CPU- and GPU-based architectures, whether on-premises, in colos, or in the cloud. "That's something that Nutanix provides at the top level," Kotikela says. In the coming years, as businesses move beyond experiments and pilots, which are often on-premises, they will begin deploying inference in production. "It should be able to run anywhere in this distributed environment." Given the scale of the challenge around transitioning to AI, imposing a major migration effort that locks organizations into a single stack, both in AI and other domains, is hard to justify. That is especially true with technology on such a rapid innovation trajectory. CIOs cannot predict or control the innovations in software or silicon they might want to adopt in two or three years' time, Kotikela says. "So, you want to pick a platform that allows you that flexibility to mix and match stuff. So that's what's in your hands, that's what you can control." Sponsored by Nutanix.

Wij hebben gisteren in de Volkskrant gelezen dat plagiaat helemaal niet erg is, zelfs alledaags in de wetenschap, dus misschien kan 'Undercover Econoom' Jona van Loenen binnenkort terecht bij de Erasmus Universiteit. Maar omdat plagiaat helemaal niet erg is, zelfs alledaags in de wetenschap, schrijven wij even dit tekstje van Jan Dijkgraaf over, die ook weer een tekstje van ons heeft overgeschreven, wat trouwens gebaseerd was op een BlueSky-post van Thomas Hogeling. Enfin. Denk hier vooral nog es aan als Jona van Loenen de komende weken gratis reclame komt maken voor zijn boekje, zonder dat er een inspectie is die er iets van zegt. 

"En dan is er dus geen sprake meer van “geïnspireerd op”, maar van ordinair jatwerk.

Zelfde titel als het boek van Eliza Filby.

Vergelijkbare ondertitel als het boek van Eliza Filby.

Hoe ging dat bekende spreekwoord ook alweer?

If it looks like a jatmoos, walks like a jatmoos, and quacks like a jatmoos, then it probably is a jatmoos?

Ik heb zondagavond trouwens in mijn rol als ‘journalist’ een persvraag gestuurd aan uitgeverij Unieboek/Het Spectrum over hún integriteit.

Je moet als uitgever immers maar geassocieerd willen worden met een dief. Sterker: ze bleven na ontdekking van de zwendel (“Verhips, die titel bestaat al!”) gewoon gemene zaken met je doen.

Het is ze niet gelukt om binnen 60 uur antwoord te geven."

Deze zes types ook