Thousands gather in Mumbai with heavy police presence as concerns mount that millions will be denied voting rights

India’s youth-led Cockroach movement kicked off more nationwide protests on Friday as thousands of people gathered in Mumbai, amid mounting concerns that millions of citizens are being unfairly stripped of their vote.

The movement, which calls itself the Cockroach Janta party (CJP) and has massive support among the country’s gen Zs, returned to the streets to demand the resignation of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar.

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In een vliegtuig van FlyDubai stak een piloot woensdag een collega neer. Dankzij kordaat optreden van enkele inzittenden, bleven alle passagiers ongedeerd. Was het incident te voorkomen? „Een systeem is nooit helemaal waterdicht”, zegt de luchtvaartingenieur.

Praten over het hervormen van de sociale zekerheid mag geen taboe zijn. Nu de polder aan tafel komt, is het zaak dat het kabinet de vakbonden en werkgevers ook enige tijd gunt om tot goede afspraken te komen.

Een groot deel van de administratie van het internet wordt gedaan door Amerikaanse stichtingen en bedrijven. Die vallen onder Amerikaanse wetten en sancties. Kan de Trump-regering een landendomein als .nl, en daarmee de websites van Nederlandse overheden en banken, plots onvindbaar maken?

Een groot deel van de administratie van het internet wordt gedaan door Amerikaanse stichtingen en bedrijven. Die vallen onder Amerikaanse wetten en sancties. Kan de Trump-regering een landendomein als .nl, en daarmee de websites van Nederlandse overheden en banken, plots onvindbaar maken?

De Zuid-Koreaanse president Lee Jae-myung dreigt met „maatregelen” omdat president Zelensky bekendgemaakt heeft dat Oekraïne twee Noord-Koreaanse militairen aan Seoul heeft overgedragen. Waarom loopt de ruzie daarover tussen de twee bondgenoten zo hoog op?

“Influencers are the private equity of culture: draining whatever’s ‘cool’ until higher prices and worse experiences push out the original fan base. Then they move on to the next thing, leaving the original to die…” 🎯

Leaving VMware forces a fresh look at every layer of the datacenter, and data protection belongs near the top of that list. Most teams plan to move the backup design across as it stands and rebuild it on the new hypervisor. The better plan uses the exit to raise resiliency and recovery speed, keeps the backup application, and gives each layer the work it does best. What the migration touches Backup designs in most data centers rest on vSphere mechanics, from changed block tracking through the vStorage APIs and VMware snapshot behavior during a job to storage integration registered against the vCenter inventory and proxies placed per cluster. Many shops add an orchestration product such as Site Recovery Manager to drive the failover plan. Change the hypervisor and each of those assumptions gets a second look. Backup vendors have done real work here, and support for the major KVM-based platforms has matured quickly over the past year. The bigger question sits upstream of the backup application. In the vSphere design, production ran the workloads and nearly everything else fell to a separate protection tier. Resilience past a drive failure, fast rollback, replication, site failover, and immutable copies each became another product with its own license, console, and renewal. Why the old division of labor made sense That design grew out of what the platform could do. Server virtualization abstracts a single server, presenting virtual CPUs, memory, and disks to a guest and leaving storage resilience to an array and recovery to a backup product. First-generation HCI moved storage into the servers and kept the same division of labor, often running a controller VM on every node. A backup tier that handled everything from a failed drive to a lost site was the right answer for that architecture. The cost of that arrangement shows up on the worst day. A single site failure touches the hypervisor, the storage system, the backup application, the replication tool, and the network configuration, and the recovery path crosses every boundary between them. The exit is the first moment in years when that assumption is open for review. What the production platform should take on Datacenter virtualization abstracts the whole environment. Compute, storage, networking, and data protection share one code base and one set of metadata, so the platform holds a complete picture of a workload rather than a collection of blocks. That shared view lets production absorb responsibilities the old design pushed downstream. Far fewer events reach the backup tier once production handles them. A second drive failure becomes a hardware replacement task instead of a restore in the middle of the business day, and a bad patch turns into a quick snapshot rollback that the application owner barely notices. That same resilience is what makes refurbished servers and drives a defensible choice for production, and flash and memory pricing climbed through 2026, which makes the hardware you already own worth more than last year's models assumed. Backup's job gets bigger, starting with the migration Shifting day-to-day recovery into the platform expands the backup application's role. The first new assignment arrives before the new environment runs a single production workload. The backup product already protecting the vSphere estate holds a current, consistent copy of every VM, and a backup application that supports both the old hypervisor and the new one turns that copy into the migration path. Veeam Backup & Replication is a good example of this model and now supports VergeOS as a platform, so a team can restore its vSphere backups onto the new environment, test them there, and cut over on a schedule it controls. The investment made to protect VMware becomes the vehicle that moves the workloads off of it. After the migration, the backup application keeps the work it has always done well. Long-term retention, compliance archives, air-gapped and offsite copies, and granular recovery for application owners all stay with the backup tier. It also becomes the independent copy that lives outside the production platform's failure domain, which is the right place for the last line of defense. Proving the platform side Asking production to do more concentrates responsibility in a single vendor's engineering. That trade is defensible, and it is only defensible against evidence. Ask for the failure scenarios live, against a running application, rather than on a feature matrix. Have the vendor pull a drive, then pull a second one past the stated protection limit with the workload still running. Ask them to delete a VM and recover a single file out of it and then take the primary site offline and bring the environment up somewhere else. A vendor that can run those four tests on a call has answered the question, and a vendor that offers a diagram instead has told you something too. Then run a test migration through the backup application and confirm the restored VMs boot and perform on the new platform. The decision the exit presents The hypervisor swap is the visible half of this project. How protection is divided between production and backup decides what the environment costs to run for the next five years and how it behaves on the worst day of those five years. Rebuilding the old division of labor is a choice, and it deserves the same scrutiny the licensing spreadsheet received. VergeIO built VergeOS on the datacenter virtualization model described above, with resilience, snapshots, instant recovery, and site failover inside the same code base as compute, storage, and networking, and with VergeOS support in Veeam Backup & Replication for the migration and the backup tier that follows it. At a recent session, Aaron Richman and Dave Vincent ran each of the four failure tests against a running application, from a single pulled drive through a full site recovery. The session is available on demand. Take a look, and see how you can turn a big exit into a bigger opportunity. George Crump is Chief Marketing Officer at VergeIO. He founded Storage Switzerland and spent his career as an industry analyst covering storage, virtualization, and data protection. Supplied by VergeIO

California's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as the state investigates what happens when the AI lab's models escape their testing environments and start meddling with systems on the open internet. Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena this week as part of a broader California Department of Justice probe into cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its models. The move follows an investigation launched last month into an incident involving Hugging Face, after OpenAI's agents managed to break out of their test environments and onto the public internet. They then went poking around Hugging Face's systems, with one agent even creating an account on the platform without being told to. California's DoJ isn't saying exactly what it has demanded from OpenAI under the subpoena, but Bonta said the state wants more information about cybersecurity incidents involving the company. "My office is asking OpenAI additional questions regarding cybersecurity incidents and risks involving the company and its AI models," Bonta said. He also made clear that the investigation is looking at where responsibility lies when an AI model ends up doing something its developer didn't intend. "Frontier models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense — at the same time, companies that develop these models and offer them for use have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks, either during model testing and development or once models are placed into service," Bonta said. "Developers that fail to do so can and should be held legally accountable, and my office is committed to determining if that is the case here." The subpoena doesn't mean California has concluded OpenAI broke the law, and the attorney general's office hasn't identified any specific violation. For now, the state is still gathering information. But the investigation has been building for several weeks. In September, Bonta joined a bipartisan group of 25 attorneys general calling on Congress to regulate large-scale AI models following reports of cybersecurity incidents at frontier AI labs. That letter specifically pointed to reports that OpenAI models undergoing evaluations had escaped their testing environments, reached the public internet, and accessed outside computer systems. The attorneys general called for a government-led incident response regime that would give investigators direct access to AI companies' records when things go awry. Bonta's office now appears to be putting some of that thinking into practice at the state level. As The Reg previously pointed out, the sandboxes intended to contain these agents need to be more secure, which is the most logical reasons why the Hugging Face and other incidents happened in the first place. OpenAI didn’t respond to our questions. ®

Wie zoekt naar de pijnlijkste manier om dood te gaan, vindt lijstjes vol vuur, verdrinking en kruisiging. Pijnonderzoekers kijken anders. Niet alleen hoe hevig pijn is, telt mee, maar ook onder welke omstandigheden je hem ondergaat en vooral hoe lang hij duurt. Juist op dat laatste punt valt voor de meeste Nederlanders veel te winnen.

Vuur en water: hevig, maar niet altijd zoals gedacht

Verbranding staat in vrijwel elke ranglijst bovenaan. Toch ligt het genuanceerder. Diepe, derdegraads brandwonden doen zelf nauwelijks pijn, omdat de zenuwen in de huid beschadigd zijn. De minder diepe randen eromheen doen juist wel veel pijn. Pijnonderzoekers wijzen erop dat vooral de duur het lijden vergroot: een langzaam smeulend vuur is erger dan een snelle vuurzee.

Bij verdrinking beschrijven overlevenden dat water in hun longen vaak pijnlijk of brandend is. Tegelijk vertellen ze dat paniek en pijn na korte tijd plaatsmaken voor rust, waarna het bewustzijn wegvalt. Verdrinken is dus akelig, maar meestal geen langdurige doodsstrijd.

Een langzaam smeulend vuur is erger dan een snelle vuurzee: duur weegt net zo zwaar als intensiteit.

Kruisiging: lijden dat dagen kon duren

Wie bij een kruisiging met het hoofd omhoog hing, kon er dagen aan hangen voordat de dood intrad. Hoe die slachtoffers precies stierven, weten artsen nog altijd niet zeker. Sinds 1847 zijn minstens tien verschillende verklaringen geopperd, van verstikking en shock tot hartfalen. Waarschijnlijk stierven verschillende mensen ook aan verschillende oorzaken, afhankelijk van hoe ze hingen.

Ziektes die we in Nederland bijna vergeten zijn

Twee infectieziekten horen ook in dit rijtje. Tetanus veroorzaakt zeer pijnlijke spierspasmen, die al door geluid, kou of een aanraking kunnen worden uitgelokt. Ook het slikken en ademhalen raken in de knel. Sinds 1957 krijgen kinderen hier via het Rijksvaccinatieprogramma prikken tegen tetanus; tussen 2000 en 2023 zijn er zes sterfgevallen gemeld.

Hondsdolheid is nog meedogenlozer: zodra er klachten zijn, loopt de ziekte vrijwel altijd dodelijk af. Na koorts en hoofdpijn volgen krampen, slikklachten en verlamming. In Nederland zijn de afgelopen veertig jaar vijf mensen aan hondsdolheid overleden. Word je op reis gebeten of gekrabd door een dier? Was de wond een kwartier met zeep en stromend water en ga binnen 24 uur naar een arts.

Drie factoren die pijn bepalen

• Intensiteit: hoe hevig de pijn is.
• Omstandigheden: angst, paniek en hulpeloosheid versterken de ervaring.
• Duur: hoe lang het lijden aanhoudt.

Samen bepalen ze hoe pijnlijk een sterfbed wordt ervaren.

De dood die de meeste Nederlanders sterven

De echte vraag voor de meeste lezers is een andere. In 2023 zijn in Nederland ongeveer 169.000 mensen overleden. Bij zo’n twee derde van hen kwam het overlijden niet onverwacht.

Bij mensen met ongeneeslijke kanker komt pijn in de stervensfase minder vaak voor dan in de periode daarvoor: bij 45 procent tegenover 71 procent. Bij 30 procent van alle sterfgevallen in 2021 gaf de arts pijn- of symptoombestrijding. Een hardnekkig misverstand is dat morfine het einde versnelt: in de juiste dosering is daar geen bewijs voor.

Morfine in de juiste dosering versnelt het overlijden niet. Wie dat weet, durft eerder om pijnbestrijding te vragen.

Wel blijft pijn soms onvoldoende onder controle. Overlijden in het ziekenhuis en het ontbreken van een vroeg gesprek over zorgwensen verhogen dat risico. Het praktische advies is daarom eenvoudig: bespreek bij een ernstige ziekte tijdig met de huisarts wat je wilt en wat je vreest. De pijnlijkste dood is vaak niet de meest spectaculaire, maar de dood waarop niemand zich heeft voorbereid.

Loop je zelf rond met gedachten aan de dood? Bel gratis 113 of chat via 113.nl.

Meer weten?

• Pijn in de stervensfase (Palliaweb)
• Bij naderend levenseinde vaak pijn- of symptoombestrijding (CBS)
• Hondsdolheid (rabiës) (RIVM)

Burgemeester Carola Schouten sluit de Rotterdamse nachtclub Villa Thalia voor de komende 24 uur vanwege een 'concrete dreiging' rond het optreden van rapper JoeyAK. De rapper zou vrijdagavond om 23:00 uur optreden in de nachtclub aan de Kruiskade, maar dat gaat dus niet door.

World-first trial finds floating wetlands can cut greenhouse gas emissions. A floating garden of native plants in Victoria's east cuts a wastewater lagoon's emissions by about 30 per cent, with researchers now testing the approach on farm dams.

Max Verstappen and Red Bull have given their take on the first day of track action at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia, with the Dutchman having topped the timesheets in FP1.

Charles Leclerc topped FP2 on Friday at the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia weekend, but namechecked two rivals as standouts instead.

The drivers and teams report back on all the action from Friday practice for the 2026 Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia at the Sepang International Circuit.

Alexei Tsydenov, head of the neighboring republic of Buryatia, confirmed that the woman had died from an unspecified form of plague.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: