Interviews with some of the dwindling number of survivors of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps, including George Takei.

• Hossam Hassan’s side beaten after being 2-0 up late on

• ‘They want Messi to stay in the tournament’

Egypt’s manager, Hossam Hassan, has vowed not to watch another minute of the World Cup after feeling his side “suffered an injustice” against Argentina as Lionel Messi inspired a miraculous comeback from two goals down.

Egypt took an early lead through Yasser Ibrahim and thought they had doubled their advantage early in the second half, only for Mostafa Ziko’s goal to be disallowed for a foul by Marwan Attia in the buildup. Ziko made it 2-0 soon after before Cristian Romero pulled one back for Argentina and Messi equalised, in the process scoring his eighth goal of the tournament and 21st in the World Cup.

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The suspension of the USA striker’s red card after Trump’s intervention has shown what Gianni Infantino’s organisation is trying to turn the sport into: scripted entertainment

Frites 4 Cheats 1. Tintin 4 Tonto 1. Some good news here, perhaps. It seems Gianni Infantino was right after all. Football has united the world. Mainly football has united the world in gleeful satisfaction at the USA exiting its own World Cup tournament as soon as possible following the great and glorious Donald Trump Mr-Fix-It intervention.

This was the tone of the immediate global reaction to the USA’s invertebrate defeat in Seattle on Monday night, soundly beaten by a righteous and highly motivated Belgium: land of beer, waffles and sporting vigilante justice. Ghent 4 Bent 1. Antwerp 4 A twerp 1. Mayonnaise 4 May-have-interfered-in-due-process 1. I can go on. How long have you got?

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JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other major banks have reportedly explored acquiring Fiserv's debit-card networks, STAR and Accel, in a move that could help them bypass federal caps on debit-card transaction fees. A law limits the fees big banks can charge merchants, but only if the transactions are routed through an outside network. There are no caps on these interchange fees over a bank-owned network, however. The Wall Street Journal reports: When Capital One Financial bought Discover Financial in a $50.6 billion deal, it got a network that cut out the need for a middleman in card transactions and allowed it to deal more directly with merchants. Now, big banks are looking on with envy because owning a network can mean exemption from a federal law that caps debit-card fees. Those fees collectively amount to billions of dollars each year across the industry, but banks have long complained the government-defined cap limits their ability to offer customers debit-card rewards and other services. Some have been exploring a small deal that could upend the rules, though they are worried about political backlash if they try.

Big banks including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and PNC Financial Services Group have in recent months held preliminary and tentative discussions about a deal to acquire a network owned by the financial-technology company Fiserv, according to people familiar with the matter. There is no certainty a deal will happen. Several of the banks that looked at the Fiserv network have already decided it would be unlikely for them to move forward, some of the people said. Some have privately expressed concern that such a deal could prompt backlash from lawmakers, regulators and merchants, the people added.

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Magic mountain, Azadeh Nia

Room with a view, Valentin Pavageau

Really really, Rob Hann

The lost patrol, Richard Cartwright

Your Windows is watching you. The US Justice Department's complaint against Peter Stokes for alleged involvement in the Scattered Spider hacking group offers a reminder that it's difficult to hide online activity from Microsoft's operating system (or any other). Scattered Spider, according to US authorities, targeted numerous companies in the US by compromising employee accounts in order to access more than 100 corporate networks and exfiltrate or encrypt data that would be ransomed for payment. The group is said to have obtained over $100 million in ransom payments. The complaint, arrest, and extradition of Stokes relied in part on a Microsoft Windows Global Device Identifier (GDID), among other telemetry records, to link online activity to the suspect. "According to a Microsoft representative, a Global Device Identifier in the Windows ecosystem is a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios," explained FBI special agent Ali Sadiq in an affidavit accompanying the DOJ's criminal complaint. The court filing also notes that Microsoft made criminal referrals to the DOJ implicating Stokes. It points to an October 2024 referral that cites online service telemetry that company security researchers believe linked Stokes to other hacking group members. Social media posts relevant to Scattered Spider, supposedly sent and received by Stokes, look unlikely to help his defense. The affidavit says that members of Scattered Spider used a web tunneling tool called ngrok to avoid network barriers and maintain access to compromised servers, as well as a VPN service called Tzulo. Investigators obtained IP address records from ngrok and the VPN provider and then obtained records from Microsoft that matched the time when that ngrok account had been set up on a Windows machine through a specific GDID. "According to Microsoft records, on or about May 12, 2025, at 19:21 UTC – when, according to ngrok records, the ngrok account was created – the device with the GDID accessed, among other ngrok pages, 'https://dashboard.ngrok.com/signup,' the ngrok page to set up an ngrok account," the affidavit explains. Microsoft's GDID records also showed that the Windows device with that GDID accessed Tzulo servers assigned to the IP address identified by ngrok. And the GDID was subsequently linked to an IP address in Estonia where Stokes resided. The Windows GDID, or at least the infrastructure for it, is said to date back to the release of Windows 10 in 2015. The GDID itself doesn't show up much in online documentation until 2021 or thereabouts. According to a developer writeup posted to GitHub, wlidsvc (Microsoft Account service) provisions the device with login.live.com and gets back a device PUID. The identifier is then stored in the registry. The Connected Devices Platform (cdp.dll / CDPSvc) reads it and registers it into the Device Directory Service (DDS) graph. And after that, Delivery Optimization reports it as the documented UCDOStatus.GlobalDeviceId. Apple maintains similar identifiers, including a hardware UUID and a DSID (Destination Signaling Identifier) [PDF] tied to iCloud, among others. Linux also supports a machine-id. And when presented with a lawful demand for information, most service providers will cooperate and provide whatever information they store. ®

If you're a coder who uses AI agents to write programs for you, you may start losing those talents. Fortunately, a new command line tool can help reinforce your skills before they wither away. Aptly titled Atrophy by Ashutosh Rath, the Bengaluru, India-based developer who created it, the CLI app treats coding abilities like Elo chess scores and pushes devs to reinforce their learning through regular drills in five different skill areas. Syntax recall asks users to write a small function from a spec, debugging presents a code snippet with a hidden bug in it, code reading treats users like a human print command, API memory tests one’s ability to fill in the blank in a stdlib call, and decomposition tests a coder’s ability to outline a design. Exercises test Python and JavaScript skills and come in three difficulty levels, Rath explained in the GitHub readme, with seeded generation for fresh variants of the different exercises. “If AI assistance is quietly eroding your ability to code unaided, the chart shows you - before an interview, an outage, or a day without wifi does,” Rath wrote in Atrophy’s readme. Users take a baseline exam with one exercise in each of the five skill areas to get their starting ratings, which Rath estimates takes around 25 minutes to complete. After that, he recommends users do 5-10 minute drills two or three times a week. Atrophy automatically selects an exercise from the skill that’s been neglected the longest and sets a soft time limit for the exercise. Users can still pass if they exceed the soft limit, but point gain will be reduced if they do so. Rath told The Register that ratings are adjusted after exercises “using an Elo-style formula,” and explained that drills early in one’s Atrophy use will move the number more than later ones. Inactivity in using the app (it has to be triggered manually right now and won’t force users to drill on any set schedule) weakens Atrophy’s confidence in the correctness of its user’s rating, but doesn’t actually lower scores. Rath also suggests users take an AI-assisted drill once a month, scores for which are tracked separately and used to measure one’s skill gap between assisted and unassisted coding so you can see if you’re gradually becoming more dependent on agent assistance as time goes on. As mentioned above, the rating system was based on chess Elo ratings, but Rath told The Register that it’s not a one-to-one copy of Elo’s ranking style. For one, each of the five skill areas is ranked independently and each starts at 1200. There isn’t a hard minimum or maximum, Rath explained, so just know you can keep dropping below 1200 if your coding muscles get really weak. As Rath notes in the readme, drills are just a proxy for real-world skills, so don’t treat the number as an absolute measurement of skill: The value of Atrophy lies in the trends the app suggests over time, which allows devs to hone in on skill areas AI may be harming. “Atrophy isn’t anti-AI,” Rath told us. “I built it to measure the gap between what I can do with AI and what I can still do on my own, because that skill can quietly rust without warning.” There’s plenty of evidence to suggest Rath is on to something. Analysts have been warning for some time that AI can erode skills due to reliance on tools to handle tasks traditionally left to human developers, but anecdotal evidence isn’t all the proof. Researchers at MIT found last year that students writing essays with the assistance of AI chatbots had less brain activity than those writing them without LLM help. The cadre of users relying on AI also had poorer fact retention and an inability to recall what they had written. The end result of AI usage, they concluded, was “shallow encoding” of learning and less ability to operate independently of their agentic companions. In other words, your skills could be disintegrating without you even realizing - might be time to take Atrophy for a spin so you can at least establish a baseline. ®

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo at Gwaneumsa Buddhist Temple with my iPhone 17 Pro Max while visiting and touring Jeju Island, South Korea. I love the design and colorful building that houses the large drum used for various ceremonies…

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn met verliezen gesloten. Opnieuw drukten verliezen onder chipaandelen op de belangrijke graadmeters, ondanks recordresultaten die de Zuid-Koreaanse chipmaker Samsung meldde. Beleggers vragen zich af of koerswinsten voor de sector uit het voorgaande kwartaal nog houdbaar zijn. Na nieuwe aanvallen in de Straat van Hormuz stegen de olieprijzen weer.

De Dow-Jonesindex sloot 0,3 procent lager op 52.924,56 punten. De brede S&P 500 verloor 0,5 procent tot 7503,84 punten en de Nasdaq verloor 1,2 procent tot 25.818,69 punten.

Bij chipconcerns als Qualcomm, Micron, Marvell Technology en Intel waren minnen te zien tot bijna 10 procent, hoewel de koersverliezen per chipbedrijf verschilden. Door de snelle groei van AI-toepassingen zijn ook de verwachtingen voor de halfgeleidersector hooggespannen, wat weer tot koersverliezen leidt bij tegenvallers.

Olie

Een vat Brentolie steeg 5,2 procent in prijs tot 75,74 dollar per vat. Amerikaanse olie werd 5,1 procent duurder tot 72,07 dollar per vat. Na meerdere beschietingen op tankers bij de Straat van Hormuz maakten de Verenigde Staten een einde aan het opschorten van de sancties op Iraanse olie. Wel lopen onderhandelingen over een definitief vredesakkoord door, volgens een Amerikaanse functionaris tegenover persbureau Reuters.

Grote oliebedrijven als ExxonMobil, Chevron en ConocoPhillips wonnen tot 4,7 procent dankzij de hogere olieprijzen.

Cognizant was een opvallende winnaar. Het AI-bedrijf kondigde aan meer samen te werken met Google, waarna aandelen van het bedrijf ruim 6 procent meer waard werden. Elon Musks ruimtevaart- en AI-bedrijf SpaceX wist op de beurs niet te profiteren van de opname in de Nasdaq-100, een index van honderd grote techbedrijven. Aandelen zakten bijna 7 procent, terwijl de opname van een bedrijf in een bekende index vaak een stimulans geeft doordat fondsen of indextrackers er dan automatisch in beleggen.

EINDHOVEN (ANP) - Aan de Brahmslaan in Eindhoven zijn dinsdagavond acht woningen ontruimd nadat er explosief materiaal was gevonden in een kelderbox. Dat meldt de politie. Ook zijn een aantal straten in de buurt afgezet.

Volgens de woordvoerder gaat het mogelijk om vuurwerk. De politie kan nog niet zeggen of het gaat om illegaal vuurwerk. In totaal zijn acht woningen ontruimd.

De politiewoordvoerder laat weten dat er een team specialisten aanwezig is om onderzoek te doen naar het materiaal.

De politie kan nog niet zeggen hoe lang het duurt voordat de bewoners weer naar huis mogen.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Verenigde Staten hebben een vergunning ingetrokken die het Iran tijdelijk mogelijk maakte om olie te exporteren. Vorige maand schortte het Amerikaanse ministerie van Financiën sancties op Iraanse olie op tot en met 21 augustus. Maar na nieuwe beschietingen van tankers in de Straat van Hormuz eindigt die vrijstelling nu, aldus het ministerie.

Een functionaris zei tegen persbureaus AFP en Reuters dat "de acties van Iran in de zeestraat totaal onacceptabel zijn voor de VS en gevolgen zullen hebben". Eerder op dinsdag waren er meldingen van meerdere aanvallen op tankers in de Straat van Hormuz.

De olieprijzen stegen harder na het nieuws. Een vat Brentolie stond ruim 5 procent hoger dan een dag eerder. Iran blokkeerde de Straat van Hormuz grotendeels na het begin van de Amerikaanse aanvallen op het land. Na een voorlopig vredesakkoord ging de voor oliehandel belangrijke zeestraat weer open.

De vredesbesprekingen tussen de VS en Iran gaan nog wel in goed vertrouwen verder, meldt Reuters.

Tony Gatlif