MOSKOU (ANP/RTR) - De Russische president Poetin heeft woensdag Russen opgeroepen om te gaan stemmen voor de parlementaire verkiezingen. Die worden komend weekend gehouden. Volgens Poetin geldt de stemuitslag als barometer voor de steun voor de Russische oorlog tegen Oekraïne.

"Jullie keuze en jullie mening zullen eens te meer tonen dat miljoenen mensen achter onze militairen staan, dat we een eensgezind volk zijn, verenigd door onze gedeelde waarden, historisch besef en liefde voor ons thuisland", aldus Poetin. De Russische autocraat voegde eraan toe dat de stembusgang moest worden gezien als een collectief antwoord op hen die proberen Rusland te verzwakken en de Russische vooruitgang willen dwarsbomen.

De verkiezingen in Rusland zijn allesbehalve vrij en eerlijk. Een grote winst voor het aan Poetin gelieerde Verenigd Rusland wordt dan ook verwacht. In aanloop naar de verkiezingen werd oppositiepartij Jabloko uitgesloten van deelname, vanwege haar anti-oorlogsstandpunten.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - VVD-fractievoorzitter Ruben Brekelmans en PRO-leider Jesse Klaver botsten tijdens de Algemene Politieke Beschouwingen over geld dat mensen aan werken moeten overhouden. Klaver verweet Brekelmans dat hij zei dat jongeren te weinig werken, terwijl iemand van 25 jaar oud volgens Klaver ruim 100 euro meer overhoudt als hij van 32 uur naar 40 uur per week gaat.

"Als je meer gaat werken, moet er meer overblijven dan het bedrag dat Klaver noemt", zei Brekelmans. "We moeten ook de uitkeringen hervormen. Het verschil tussen wat je krijgt als je werkt of een uitkering krijgt, moet groter worden."

Volgens de PRO-leider is de oplossing niet om uitkeringen te verlagen. "Iemand van 25 jaar die helemaal geen uitkering heeft, gaat er dan niet op vooruit, maar wel ten opzichte van een uitkering. U bent zo gefixeerd op het uithollen van de uitkeringen in Nederland."

Brekelmans vindt dat Klaver "serieus het gesprek moet aangaan". Volgens de VVD'er kan dat niet pas "als alle bezuinigingen van tafel zijn".

ROTTERDAM (ANP) - Opnieuw zijn mankementen ontdekt in een belangrijke brug waar een snelweg overheen gaat: in de westelijke Suurhoffbrug richting de Maasvlakte zijn scheuren geconstateerd, meldt Rijkswaterstaat. Die zitten in een van de hoofdliggers. Omwille van de veiligheid sluit de wegbeheerder de twee gewone rijstroken af. Al het verkeer moet over de vluchtstrook.

"We nemen deze maatregel om de belasting van de brug per direct te verminderen", legt Rijkswaterstaat uit. De brug over het Hartelkanaal is onderdeel van de A15. Er ligt een oostelijke Suurhoffbrug naast.

HILVERSUM (ANP) - Acteur Stefan de Walle stopt per direct met zijn rol als Sinterklaas in Het Sinterklaasjournaal. De Walle vertolkte de rol sinds 2011. Wie de nieuwe Sinterklaas wordt, maakt de NTR nog niet bekend.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on back of photograph, “Independence Pass, Sept84"

Fugees

Leefbaar Rotterdam wil een referendum over het betaald parkeren in de stad. Het college is van plan om later dit jaar te beginnen met het uitbreiden van het betaald parkeren naar bijna heel Rotterdam, maar Leefbaar hoopt daar in het stemhokje een stokje voor te steken. “Als ze zo overtuigd zijn van hun plannen, overtuig de Rotterdammer dan maar”, zegt raadslid Joey de Waard.

Band én supportacts hebben zich teruggetrokken uit de tournee van singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran. Ze steunen rapper Macklemore, die uit de tour werd gezet om zijn pro-Palestijnse uitspraken. Sheeran werd mikpunt van kritiek. Maar de meeste succesvolle popartiesten mijden politieke standpunten. Om hun de ruimte te geven zich vrij te kunnen uiten, zou vooral de muziekindustrie om hen heen zich hard moeten maken voor die vrijheid.

Na zijn zege in de allereerste ‘Voice of Holland’ leek de volgetatoeëerde soulzanger een gouden carrière tegemoet te gaan. Maar later kwam hij vooral in het nieuws met gewelddadig gedrag.

From the day I discovered the infamous tail command on I was using it to follow logfiles. Most of the times, after a quick investigation combined with a smart grep command, to filter out noise, or to just catch the errors. I remember complete sessions of following 10 logfiles combined with advanced filtering after each discovery.

But that is past tense, after I discovered lnav.It serves the same purpose, following logfiles. But there is a big difference, it understands logfiles, it has a memory, you can pick up sessions where you left off, and it has advanced filtering on the fly. That means no more ctrl-c arrow-up and edit the last tail command. It is also capable of decompressing zipped logfiles which makes searching in old logfiles so much easier.

Russia is holding elections this weekend for the lower-house State Duma, which has a track record of faithfully approving the Kremlin's initiatives.

Bears are confirmed to have killed at least five people in Siberia over the past month, state media reported.

Fedora Linux 45 beta has arrived with Linux kernel 7.2, a release-candidate build of GNOME 51, and extensive changes beneath the desktop. The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The replacement is kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator that has been in development for more than a decade. Its Freedesktop project page explains that it uses the kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) and Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) facilities to configure the display, while offering better internationalization support. Kmscon was announced way back in 2012, but after a few years' work, developer David Herrmann moved on to other things. Fortunately, another developer, Peifeng Yu – nicknamed Aetf – maintained a fork for a decade until the original team resumed work last year. Some of the benefits of kmscon may sound a little theoretical: it has better Unicode support, which will help people working with scripts and alphabets beyond plain old US English, and it has multiseat support, allowing multiple users to share one PC simultaneously with separate keyboards and displays. We suspect that this isn't so common in 2026, but it could be useful to someone somewhere. We first heard of the advantages of kmscon via a blog post about Veronica Explains' writer deck: she uses it to display more than 16 colors on the console, and it also adds the ability to zoom in and out on the fly in Linux text mode. That does sound useful to us, especially with modern HiDPI screens. GNOME 51 is not yet final, so the closest thing to release notes is a fairly uninformative change log. It doesn't look to be a very exciting release, but there are improvements to keyboard navigation and the Orca screen reader, automatic screen rotation on devices with orientation sensors, refinements in the Settings app, Files, Calculator, and the login screen, and more. KDE users get Plasma 6.7. The browser-based installer now offers initial installation flows for the immutable Atomic Desktops and supports partitioning with Red Hat's Stratis storage system, which we looked at back in 2022. Under the hood, the RPM package manager now enforces package signing, and the higher-level DNF5 packaging tool now avoids switching package vendors during upgrades – which should prevent one category of unpleasant surprise. Atomic Desktop ISO builds now use image-builder, while Fedora CoreOS gains zram memory compression and the systemd-oomd memory pressure handler, although, as we reported last year, the latter is not universally popular. Fedora 45's security tooling has been updated and tweaked in several areas, and as usual, all the various programming languages and runtimes have been updated. Fedora Asahi Remix 45 is also in beta and, as The Register covered earlier this month, it includes preliminary support for Apple's M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, although performant 3D GPU acceleration is not yet available. That is good news for anyone running a headless system, but less useful to desktop and laptop users. For now, though, there is no Asahi Linux support for Apple's M4 and M5 systems. We briefly tried the Fedora Workstation beta under VMware, and it doesn't look very different from before – but we very much like the ability to resize console text with Ctrl and + or -. Even at larger sizes, text remains smooth and sharp. It may be a small change, but we suspect plenty of users will appreciate it. ®

Researchers hope to shed light on conditions such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and rare forms of dementia

Researchers have created mice with half-human brains in an effort to understand and develop new treatments for disorders such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, intellectual disability and rare forms of dementia.

The scientists transplanted lab-grown human brain cells into animals that were engineered to be born without a cortex or hippocampus. This made space for the human tissue to grow inside the rodents’ skulls.

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Celebrity has received the amount of compensation she asked for, lawyer says

A Paris court has awarded €1 to Kim Kardashian for having been the victim of an armed robbery in the French capital in 2016, the amount of compensation she had asked for, according to a lawyer involved in the case.

Kardashian has sought to move on since the court last year found eight people guilty for their roles in what the celebrity described as “the most terrifying experience of my life.” She and stylist Simone Harouche expressed gratitude to the French justice system in a joint statement.

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A new report highlights the dangers experienced by those who seek to serve the public. People are being deterred and your democracy is suffering

There is a rising tide of abuse in our politics and I feel it every day. This week, the Electoral Commission warned that harassment and intimidation are changing how candidates campaign, what they feel able to do and whether they stand again. This is a threat to our democracy – and we cannot ignore it.

The figures are stark. Commission research into the May 2026 local and mayoral elections in England found that 55% of candidates said harassment or intimidation was a problem, up from 47% in 2025. Women, ethnic minority candidates and those with disabilities were most likely to encounter abuse. The experience was so unpleasant that a third considered not standing again.

Dawn Butler is Labour MP for Brent East

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images:

In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrinking it. Benchmarks from the bug report show up to 20Ã-- less memory used during very large image loading, and decoding is up to twice as fast. Since these speeds were quite fast already, there's no perceptible difference to users. Behind the scenes, it's more efficient.

Firefox's built-in PDF viewer starts up to 45% faster in this release. The browser now loads the background PDF.js worker sooner, rather than launching it only when needed.

Sponsored suggestions in the address bar are live for users in France, Germany and Italy (Ouais!, Juhu!, etc). These are already available in some other locales. Don't want them? Disable them via Settings > Search > Firefox Suggest > Suggestions from Sponsors.
Besides that, the rest of this release is primarily bug fixes — worthwhile and welcome as always.


And in about two weeks Firefox 157 will be released, reports PC World. "That update should add support for JPEG XL (JXL), a modern image format that offers the same quality as JPEG at a significantly smaller size. Although JPEG XL was launched in 2021, Safari is the only browser to support it yet. For a short period, Chrome also supported it, but that ended in 2022."

Also, a recent Firefox blog post emphasized that it supports whatever level of AI engagement "is right for you... Because the only person telling you how much AI you need should be you."

Opting out of upcoming and current AI features on your browser should not require endless navigation through multiple Settings pages. That's why Firefox offers an AI controls section within its General Settings panel. A single, easily located place where you can block current and future AI features and related pop-ups with the swipe of a toggle...

For the many people who sit in the middle of the AI usage spectrum, we made sure you can opt in and out of specific features in line with your preferences. Capabilities like AI translations, image alt text in Firefox PDF viewer, tab group suggestions, and key points in link previews can all be individually switched on and off, ensuring you can enjoy such offerings on a case by case basis as it suits your needs...

Smart Window is Firefox's most integrated AI experience, but that doesn't mean it compromises our commitment to choice, privacy, and transparency. Our newest window type, which we've been polishing and testing in beta, uses only the context you share with it to help you move work forward and across the finish line. When permitted by you, its built-in, AI-powered assistant can work directly with your open tabs and browsing history to connect the dots. This means comparing information, generating recommendations, summarizing pages, and planning projects without having to feed every crumb of context from your previous and current browsing activity each time you enter a new prompt.

And if you want to block Google's AI Overviews, there's over 100 extensions to choose from.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The All of the Above Trail Fest is “deconstructing the very definition of a trail race, refiguring it into something more expansive and inclusive”. There are no gender divisions and winners are decided by who gets closest to their predicted finish time.

Idee uit asielparadijs Amsterdam waar ze asielzoekers opvangen op een cruiseschip omdat er niet tegen de asielinstroom op te bouwen valt: ondanks dat er een COA-locatie uit de grond wordt geramd blijft asielcruise MS Galaxy lekker liggen, want één azc is natuurlijk ook maar één azc: "Het idee was dat de noodopvang overbodig zou zijn als binnenkort een nieuw permanent azc de deuren opent in Amsterdam-West. Maar die koppeling laat wethouder Zita Pels (Pro) nu los." Zijn we er dan toch allemaal ingetuind? Nee, want elke blinde tuimelaar kon dit zien aankomen daar het idee ook al was dat het schip maar een halfjaar zou blijven liggen en dat er maar plek zou zijn voor 1000 asielzoekers, terwijl het schip er inmiddels al 4 jaar ligt en er 500 bedjes bij zijn gezet. Nee, helemaal niet verrassend dat het Zita Pels en haar matroosjes niet boeit dat die knoeperd voor ruim 100.000 eurootjes per dag mooi kan blijven liggen waar z'n wortels al jaren liggen drijven.