Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news, as South Korea’s KOSPI index slumps by 8%
Shares in European companies at the heart of the AI boom are falling sharply at the start of trading.
Chip firms such as Besi – BE Semiconductor Industries – (-4.5%) and ASML (-3.2%) which makes chipmaking machines are among the big fallers on the pan-European Stoxx 600 index, which is down almost 0.9%.
Continue reading...The Pulitzer-winning author of Less has crafted a breezy confection of fish-out-of-water wit, insecurity and self-discovery set in an Italian paradise
‘There’s a place in Italy in need of someone. Why don’t you look into that?” Inspired by his two-year stint directing a writers’ residency, the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence, with these words American author Andrew Sean Greer launches a hapless, clueless innocent into the Tuscan hills and the embrace of its eccentric aristocracy, in the person of the eponymous Coco, Baronessa Lisabetta.
Variously known as “our young man”, Gio and Giovedi, Villa Coco’s narrator is here to fill the post of “adjutant” for the Baronessa. His duties include pruning roses, emptying drains, hunting the Baronessa’s mortal enemy, the pine marten, and cataloguing the dilapidated Villa Coco’s contents. Among the camel saddles and hat racks, he is assured, lurk priceless works of art, including a Picasso and a Botticelli. He joins a staff consisting of a Sri Lankan cook, her husband and a Lebanese factotum; they share in the sisyphean task of keeping Villa Coco going, and the Baronessa out of harm’s way.
Continue reading...It was once an article of faith that even those who speak words we disagree with deserve protection. As regards Palestine, that’s now not true
Remember the Satanic Verses controversy? Remember “Je suis Charlie”? Remember the constant invocations of Voltaire and Orwell? The great irony of our age is that many of the cadre of politicians who spent years anointing themselves as champions of free speech have become its most enthusiastic enemies when the subject turns to one issue: Palestine.
For decades, western governments lectured the world about liberal values. They declared freedom of expression the hallmark of a liberal democratic society. Protest was deemed patriotic while the right to offend was considered sacred. Then came Gaza. Suddenly, the principles that we were once told were non-negotiable became highly negotiable indeed.
Mehdi Hasan is the editor-in-chief and CEO of Zeteo
The assault on freedom with Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi
At 7.30pm BST on Monday 8 June, join Mehdi Hasan and Arwa Mahdawi at a joint Zeteo/Guardian event to discuss the current seismic changes in geopolitics, the alarming rise of populism and nationalism, and its global implications. Only livestream tickets are now available.
Book tickets here
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OPINION In the time zone of the keynote, it's dystopia o'clock. These days, it always is. The fervent CEO prophet strolls around an empty stage, backlit by a giant altar of light on which they display their magic and impart visions of a future that address none of our fears, choosing instead to add to them. The format has as little variation as a church service, the whoops and cheers of the faithful as predictable as psalms. There are no industry awards for keynotes, even the most brazen hype machines can't go that far. Perhaps there should be. Taiwan's Computex had a great selection. Nvidia's Jensen Huang pushed RTX Spark, a repackaging of existing technologies — another keynote staple — as the next PC platform. It'll make local AI ubiquitous, freeing users from reliance on giant minds elsewhere. Or it would, if those giant minds weren't using all the memory you'll need. Pricey thing, privacy. Another, even more delightful dollop of digital darkness came from Qualcomm's Vogon Captain Cristiano Amon. His vision is of omniscient agents constantly monitoring everything you do on every device, combined with the sort of wireless traffic analysis via 5G that outperforms anything GCHQ and the NSA managed in the cold war. "Resistance is futile," he actually said. Which is curiously comforting. It replicates both Sun Microsystem's 1984 "The network is the computer" and the more notorious quote from Sun's then-CEO, Scott McNealy, in 1999 that: "You have zero privacy. Get over it." He, too, actually said it. Sun was defunct ten years later, and we still have privacy worth fighting for. Just. But the They Actually Said It Award in a keynote didn't come from Ol' Taipei, but rather the streets of that upstart city San Francisco. Here, the keynote for Microsoft Build 2026 was in the CEO-as-Ringmaster format, an option if your company does more than a couple of things. Here Satya Nadella, sadly lacking top hat, tails and a spangly waistcoat, wheeled on act after act culled from underlings blinking uncertainly in the LED lights. Yes, there were plenty of moments where things nobody wanted were presented as inevitable miracles. Shrunken models that might actually run in affordable memory because "sorry-not-sorry about the datacenters." Autopilot, an omniscient, omnipresent trickster god of an agent, that watches everything you do and wilfully inserts itself into your reality. A synthetic demo of agents wandering critical power plants gathering vulnerability data and integrating it into corporate IT. Why on Earth would you want a human doing that, anyway? It's all very exciting, and pffft, security is too trivial to mention. Only — OMG — they did mention it. It came late, after the "We've put grep and Homebrew in Windows' fans service." Imagine shipping your OS with a CLI package manager, eh, Apple? Then, at last, agent security took the stage. In fact, there was a live demo of OpenClaw trying desperately to delete all the files on a desktop and failing. "Six months ago, that totally would have worked," they joshed. The reason Microsoft can finally admit that agents are dangerous AF is because it has rediscovered what an operating system actually is and actually does. The thwarted OpenClaw was sandboxed in a Windows MXC container with very detailed permissions about what agents could access, who they could talk to, and so on. If this sounds familiar, it's because MXC marks Microsoft's discovery that agents need an ID that has to operate under rules and needs to be managed. In other words, once you realize that agents are just another kind of user, all the user and process focused protection of a modern OS can be brought to bear. It was sitting there all the time in the OS, because that's what we've had to evolve to keep things safe. Fancy that, eh? None of this is much good as it stands for Qualcomm's unique cyberpunk dreams. Getting access to all of your services wherever you are, on your own terms, is obvious and as old as silicon. The keynote actinic fever dream videos always show such access to be effortless — the Microsoft keynote had Project Solara showing just that — but the MXCification of OpenClaw is anything but. It's a belated admission that trust and control are prerequisites of agent acceptance, and that currently you can only grok that if you know about menu diving through right-click granular system-level settings. The alternative at the moment is the slightly abstracted model for mobile apps, where the user has to tell the OS to grant or deny permissions as requested by the software. Just hitting accept every time is common, dangerous in apps, and devastating with agents. If the industry is serious about agentic AI, let alone multi-platform auto-porting agents, it needs to create and adopt common interfaces that monitor, manage, and protect wherever agents touch the users, user ID and user data. As Microsoft has now actually said, this is what OSes are designed to do. It doesn't fit precisely into the shimmering nightmare future, but it does into one that's moderately shiny and not entirely unwholesome. That's a difficult proposition to work into a 2027 season keynote but what if it was? That would really be worth an award. ®
Nikol Pashinyan's push to forge closer ties with the West and move Armenia out of Moscow's orbit has angered the Kremlin and drawn rebukes from Putin.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of new words for emotions. Its mission is to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being—all the aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life.
PARIJS (ANP) - Zanger Patrick Bruel is maandagochtend in Frankrijk in hechtenis genomen voor verhoor in een onderzoek naar beschuldigingen van verkrachting en seksuele mishandeling. Dat melden BFMTV en Franceinfo op basis van justitiële bronnen.
Tegen de 67-jarige zanger lopen al langer onderzoeken naar beschuldigingen van seksueel geweld. Volgens Franse media zijn meerdere aangiftes tegen hem gedaan. Bruel wordt nu over een aantal van die zaken verhoord.
De zanger heeft de beschuldigingen steeds ontkend. Zijn advocaten laten in een verklaring weten dat Bruel al langer had aangegeven beschikbaar te zijn voor justitie en zal meewerken aan het onderzoek.
De Franse politie kan een verdachte in een zogeheten garde à vue maximaal 48 uur vasthouden voor verhoor.
NICOSIA (ANP) - EU-lidstaten moeten proactiever zijn bij de detectie van drones, vindt Eurocommissaris Andrius Kubilius (Defensie). De Europese Commissie is bereid lidstaten te helpen bij het effectiever maken van dronedetectie, maar de lidstaten moeten zelf meer doen, zei Kubilius voor de bijeenkomst van EU-defensieministers in Cyprus.
Lidstaten moeten regionale projecten opzetten voor dronedetectie, "want het is erg belangrijk dat die verdedigingscapaciteiten met elkaar kunnen samenwerken", zei de Eurocommissaris.
Als er eenmaal goede detectiemogelijkheden zijn, moet volgens Kubilius worden gewerkt aan een kosteneffectieve manier om de drones te vernietigen.
Roemenië
Dat moet in samenwerking met Oekraïne, vindt Kubilius. "Oekraïne heeft unieke ervaring en die ervaring zou ons zeer van pas komen. Oekraïne kan deelnemen aan de ontwikkeling van die verschillende Europese strijdkrachten van gemeenschappelijk belang."
Recent werd Roemenië meerdere keren getroffen door drones.
Regelmatig drones luchtruim
Ook in andere EU-lidstaten, waaronder Finland, Litouwen, Letland en Polen, zijn regelmatig drones het luchtruim binnengedrongen. Een aantal keer zijn gevechtsvliegtuigen ingezet om deze te volgen of te onderscheppen. Dat is duur. Oekraïne heeft goedkopere manieren om drones te onderscheppen en uit te schakelen, zei Kubilius.
Het beëindigen van de Russische oorlog tegen Oekraïne is volgens de Eurocommissaris de beste manier om problemen met drones te voorkomen die "onze landen invliegen. Daarvoor moeten we Oekraïne blijven steunen om de overhand te krijgen aan het front."
wing of kaz has added a photo to the pool:
宮崎県串間市、串間神社 / Kushima Shrine, Kushima City, Miyazaki Prefecture
calook has added a photo to the pool:
Een 12-jarige jongen uit Vlaardingen is zondag opgepakt aan de Malmö in Schiedam. De tiener had ruzie met een andere jongen en dreigde daarbij om te steken met een mes. Dat is niet gebeurd, maar de jongen is wel aangehouden voor bedreiging.
"Over zorg weet ik alles, maar mijn taal moet beter", zegt Jamila. Als statushouder had ze moeite om Nederlands te leren en als ervaren verpleegkundige uit Syrië moest ze hier nog een mbo-opleiding doen, maar sinds deze week is ze aan het werk in een woonzorgcentrum in Rotterdam. Het kabinet wil dit soort obstakels wegnemen om zo meer nieuwkomers aan werk te helpen.
Ergens aan het einde van de coronakoortsdroom werden we door de politiek de QR-samenleving ingerommeld. Een ongekende inbreuk op burgerlijke grondrechten door bestuurders die de macht over het virus kwijt waren, en daarom maar de macht over de bevolking grepen. Gezicht van die machtswellusige bestuurderskaste was bal gehakt Hubert Bruls, de ongekozen voorzitter van het ongekozen Veiligheidsberaad die zichzelf 'papa' noemde. Hadden we toen maar een Veilig Thuis melding gedaan. Maar nee, dat gebeurde niet. Wat er wel gebeurde was dat Hubert Bruls ging janken omdat iemand hem bal gehakt noemde. Wat een bal gehakt ben je dan zeg. Livestream na de breuk.
Het optreden van Kanye West in het Gelredome is rustig verlopen. Het enige incident dat het optreden enigszins ontsierde was een optreden van Kanye West.
"Er is veel te doen geweest rond het optreden van Kanye West, maar gelukkig is gebleken dat alle ophef grotendeels onterecht was", laat het Gelredome via een woordvoerder weten. "Er stond weliswaar één manische gek op het podium die nummers heeft uitgebracht als 'Heil Hitler' en kleding met swastika's erop, maar dat was een eenling. Laten we dat niet groter maken dan het is."
"Als 34.000 mensen naar het Gelredome komen om twee uur lang naar Kanye West te komen luisteren is het bijna onvermijdelijk dat er een zelfverklaard Nazi tussen zit die dan twee uur lang op een podium staat. Dat is nog geen reden om het concert af te lasten. Dan zouden de goeden onder de kwaden lijden."
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Aymen Hussein, aanvaller van het Iraakse nationale voetbalelftal, is zaterdag zeven uur lang ondervraagd door de Amerikaanse grenspolitie voordat hij het land in mocht.
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