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Dharmendra Pradhan steps down after demonstrations over exam leak scandal, in major victory for protesters
India’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, has resigned after a week of mass demonstrations, handing a major victory to a new youth movement that has posed an unprecedented challenge to Narendra Modi’s government.
In a statement on Saturday afternoon, Pradhan said he had submitted his letter of resignation to the prime minister after student pressure.
Continue reading...Comment follows news Axel Rudakubana had been transferred from prison to psychiatric hospital
The lawyer for the families of Axel Rudakubana’s victims has said the Southport killer is “trying to retraumatise the families from his cell” after it emerged he had been transferred from prison to a psychiatric hospital.
Rudakubana, now 19, was given a life sentence for the murders of Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine, Bebe King, six, and Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and the attempted murder of eight other children and two adults.
Continue reading... Stage 20 runs for brutal 170.9km and concludes at Ale d’Huez
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156km to go My inbox is open for your emails today. I had a lot of incredible submissions when I tried this earlier this week, so let’s go for it again: send me your favourite Tour de France memories. I’d love to hear your stories of watching either on the side of the road, mountain or on your sofa, just a meaningful moment. The email is in the link at the top of the page.
157km to go Barguil and Steinhauser have pulled clear, but Abrahmsen is on their tail. The peloton is not far back, just 33secs. The riders are on the first of four categorised climbs today, this is one of three hors category mountains in today’s road book. The Col de la Croix de Fer is 24km at an average of 5.2%, but much of it steeper than that. It looks bloody tough.
Continue reading...No press briefing has been held for months, as the defence department belatedly or inaccurately releases figures
The Pentagon is taking a “shameful approach” to releasing information about US casualties in the Iran war, Leon Panetta, a former defence secretary and CIA director, has told the Guardian.
The defence department has not held a press briefing for two-and-a-half months. Officials have faced accusations that they are engaged in a cover-up designed to hide the true cost of Donald Trump’s war of choice in Iran, fearing a public backlash before November’s midterm elections.
Continue reading...Lucy Harrison, 23, was shot in 2025 with her father’s gun. He was never arrested and a grand jury chose not to indict him
Lucy Harrison felt that 2024 was her best year yet. The 23-year-old had graduated from university with first class honours, landed her dream job and bought her first house with her boyfriend.
She was a “big girl adult” now, Lucy would say. She shed tears of joy seeing her idol, Taylor Swift, at Wembley on the Eras tour that summer. Life could hardly get any better. “All the hard work, all the tears, everything was coming to fruition,” said her mother, Jane Coates, from Warrington in north-west England.
Continue reading...After a Kyiv visit, rightwing firebrand now supports Ukraine – but perhaps it’s just because Trump favors a winner
Laura Loomer, the online Maga provocateur, has never worked in the White House or anywhere else in the government, but her sudden conversion to the Ukrainian cause this week is significant because her social media posts often have real policy implications in the second Trump administration.
The rightwing commentator has spent the last few days in Kyiv, where she announced a newfound sympathy for Ukraine in its long war with Russia, and admitted that she had previously fallen for Russian propaganda.
Continue reading...WASHINGTON (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De regering-Trump wordt geconfronteerd met nieuwe juridische procedures tegen de recentste reeks wereldwijde Amerikaanse importheffingen die deze week zijn ingegaan. Kleine bedrijven hebben twee rechtszaken aangespannen bij de Amerikaanse handelsrechtbank in New York.
Ze beschuldigen Trump ervan dat Sectie 301 van de handelswet uit 1974 onrechtmatig is ingezet om eerdere handelstarieven te vervangen die door het Amerikaanse Hooggerechtshof onwettig waren verklaard. Trump besloot na het oordeel van de hoogste rechters op basis van de wet uit 1974 snel met nieuwe heffingen te komen.
De Amerikaanse regering kondigde deze week aan dat de Verenigde Staten importheffingen van 10 tot 12,5 procent gaan innen op goederen van tientallen handelspartners, waaronder de Europese Unie. Regeringsfunctionarissen noemden als reden voor de nieuwe heffingen de vermeende lakse handhaving op verboden dwangarbeid.
NEW DELHI (ANP/AFP/RTR) - De Indiase onderwijsminister Dharmendra Pradhan stapt op na de aanhoudende demonstraties in het land, de grootste in jaren. De jonge betogers eisten onder meer zijn vertrek na een reeks onregelmatigheden bij belangrijke examens.
Hun woede ontstond na onder meer het uitlekken van een toelatingsexamen, waardoor miljoenen mensen de toets opnieuw moesten doen, en een storing in een onlinebeoordelingssysteem. De betogingen weerspiegelen ook de onvrede over werkloosheid, corruptie en het gebrek aan verantwoording door de overheid. Het nieuws over Pradhan werd onder betogers met gejuich ontvangen.
Duizenden jongeren hebben zich sinds juni aangesloten bij protesten van de kakkerlakkenbeweging (CJP). Die voerde deze week tweemaal overleg met de regering. Zaterdag is er een derde overleg. Volgens een woordvoerder van de CJP willen de betogers onder meer compensatie voor gedupeerden van de onregelmatigheden en willen zij dat alle juridische procedures tegen de betogers worden ingetrokken.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het Openbaar Ministerie (OM) heeft in 2025 een record aan crimineel vermogen in beslag genomen. Het gaat om 433 miljoen euro aan geld en goederen. Het is het vierde jaar op rij dat de cijfers zijn gestegen.
In 2024 ging het om bijna 410 miljoen euro, het jaar daarvoor ruim 360 miljoen euro. Het OM heeft voor 2,9 miljard aan afgepakte goederen en geld in beheer.
In totaal zijn in 2025 door het OM 3882 witwaszaken afgerond. In Nederland is dat jaar een bedrag van circa 18,3 miljoen euro aan cryptovaluta in beslag genomen. Een jaar daarvoor ging het om veel meer, 46,9 miljoen euro. Ook zijn er vele tientallen miljoenen aan cryptovaluta bevroren of in beslag genomen in het buitenland.
Het OM zegt zich meer te focussen op zaken waarbij de onder- en bovenwereld sterk met elkaar verweven zijn. Verder moet er volgens het OM meer informatie worden uitgewisseld tussen overheden, maar ook tussen overheid en private partijen.
mikeleonardvisualarts has added a photo to the pool:
OPINION Linux now being officially not anti-AI might be good news for projects that are explicitly anti-AI, but we foresee problems with conflict over where the money and development effort come from. A couple of weeks ago, reluctant geek superstar Linus Torvalds declared that Linux is not an anti-AI project. The pro-AI folks are jubilant, and they are especially loud on the internet. (They're probably using bots to write their posts.) However, Torvalds inadvertently issued a rallying cry for the people and projects that are anti-AI. The anti-bot resistance is growing. European volunteer-run code forge Codeberg has changed its Terms of Use to ban projects that "mostly consist of code written by 'generative AI' tools," as well as projects involving cryptocurrencies. Some have questioned the connection, but as Pivot to AI notes right in its name, many former blockchain maximalists switched to promoting LLMs instead after the 2022 "crypto winter." This is just one sign that despite the legions of AI advocates, there is also a growing contingent strongly opposed to AI and its use. As Futurism reported back in March, Fewer Americans Like AI Than ICE. Torvalds' position is pragmatic: his interest is in whether it works or not. That is not the only question. There are other important debates about the legitimacy of the vast data harvesting to build the LLMs; about the environmental costs, not merely of their use, but just as importantly, of their training; about how frequent LLM use impacts their human users; and about LLMs' effects on the job market, and the wider economy. Many of these debates come down to questions about the ethics of AI use. A lot of people in the software world are not accustomed to thinking about the ethical consequences of what they do and how they do it. One result is profound and passionate disagreements – and that could defeat the entire anti-AI cause. Anti-AI FOSS OSes We've seen some superb responses to Torvalds' ex cathedra… well, we'd call it some kind of bull, but that seems unfair: even the Pope has serious misgivings about AI. Long-term observer and reporter on the world of system software OSnews summarized its take: "Asbestos is a tool, just like any other." On social media, one of the more on-target responses we saw was an enjoyably ranty thread by a Fediverse member with the wonderful username of [object Object] (see Bootnote). Among other comments, this one from R. L. Dane gave us a laugh: "Lemme see if I can wrap my brain around 2026 now… Linux is Windows, Windows is Facebook, Facebook is Palantir, and Palantir is basically the devil. Oh, and now BSD is Linux. 😁 🖖🏼 Carry on." The mention of BSD is because NetBSD has treated LLM-generated code as presumptively tainted since 2024. OpenBSD's project lead says that since LLM code can't be copyrighted, it can't be contributed – but as we noted when looking at OpenBSD 7.9, it does grandfather in other projects, such as tmux, which do accept LLM-assisted contributions. A year after NetBSD set its guidelines, FreeBSD was still considering the issue. There is already a list of Linux distros with no systemd, of course, but we feel that there are plenty more things that Linux distributions could do to move in an anti-corporate direction – indeed, we added our own speculations in the thread. There's one obvious place to start. Several of the larger and more controversial projects in the FOSS OS world – systemd, GNOME, Wayland, Flatpak, and more – have received substantial development work and backing from the corporate big daddy of Linux: IBM subsidiary Red Hat. After acquiring Red Hat in 2019, IBM is still slowly absorbing the smaller company. In 2025, the back office was subsumed. A Reddit post says that from the first of October, the company will move Red Hat IT to the parent company. As we reported back in March, Red Hat management has drunk the AI Kool-Aid: it is safe to predict that while the volume of its software output may increase, the quality might not. We happened to come across a review of a "nonconformist" sort of Linux distro while we were researching this article: Vendefoul Wolf Linux. It's based on Devuan, the systemd-free fork of Debian, but it also uses the Xlibre project's X11 server. Alongside some well-known desktops, Vendefoul also offers some less well-known ones, of which three are KDE forks. The oldest is the Trinity Desktop Environment, which we last looked at in May 2025, and the newest is the Sonic Desktop, which we mentioned earlier this month. Sonic is a fork of KDE Plasma that aims to retain X11 compatibility. This is about to become much more important, when the Wayland-only Plasma 6.8 arrives. In addition, Vendefoul Wolf adds another KDE fork: the Katana Desktop Environment, a fork of KDE 4. The most recent update was Katana 4.23, back in September 2023. Vendefoul Wolf's reviews on Distrowatch are patchy. We are not recommending it here – we haven't tried it – but it may turn out to be one of a new trend. Anti-AI web browsers To what we suspect will be the rapidly diversifying field of AI-free Linux and BSD variants, the FOSS world also has to consider what to do about web browsers. As we have been reporting for over a year, Mozilla keeps adding LLM-based functions to Firefox. In response to user unhappiness, rather than stopping the process, or offering an LLM-free edition, Mozilla just let you turn the functions off. Over on Mastodon, Sarah Jamie Lewis, Executive Director of the Open Privacy Research Society, has called for collaboration between Firefox forks. She estimates that there are some 136,000 lines of code in Firefox that "only exist to power the built-in LLM/chat/local AI stuff." She has created a Base Browser Project repository, and among others, a preliminary list of features to remove. She acknowledges that it's a huge task, but necessary. The main potential alternative, the reborn Servo engine, is getting there, but has a long way to go. The main other candidate program, Ladybird, has recently turned to AI coding. Although some forks, like the Zen browser we looked at in 2024, and the Japanese-led Floorp browser, focus on user interface innovation, most Firefox forks are more about privacy. The Waterfox fork started out as a 64-bit Firefox before Mozilla offered that. The project started out by optimizing for performance rather than privacy, but it also disables Mozilla's telemetry – which happened to make it immune to the Foxstuck bug in 2022. It's also explicitly AI-free. One of the other significant Firefox forks is Librewolf, which in its own words is "focused on privacy, security, and freedom." So far, so good. It gets trickier when the net is widened a little further: the Tor Browser is even more privacy-centric, aimed at use on the anonymous Tor Network. It has a close sibling, the Mullvad Browser, which is co-developed by the Tor Project and the eponymous VPN vendor. The Tor Browser and Mullvad Browser are both Firefox forks with significant Mozilla code meticulously excised. They, and Librewolf, are highly relevant to developing a Mozilla-free core browser. But as we covered recently, some people are rapidly going off Mullvad since the news broke that its co-owner had donated millions to an anti-immigration populist political party. This poses another ethical question: if you want an AI-free, telemetry-free, open source fork of Firefox, is it acceptable to use code developed by a company co-owned by someone who funds politics you oppose? Does it change things if it doesn't mean cooperating with that company, as the work has already been done? Anti-AI in general There is a growing movement calling for non-AI software. Back in January, we reported on the fall and rise of the OpenSlopware list. One offshoot of that is even more to the point: The No-AI list. It is far from confined to software. It extends to other disciplines and areas as well. There are rallying cries such as Stop Gen AI, which offers "Mutual Aid and Political Activism." There is a growing problem of unwanted AI advocacy in life in general, as AI and that Guy at the bar explains. (We especially recommend the four links under "what it's doing to people.") It's even a problem in creative writing groups, as the Colonization of Confidence describes. In business, the problem is worse, as AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making recounts. The spanner in the anti-AI machine The movement toward AI-free software, though, faces a serious and little-considered problem, which Vendefoul inadvertently exemplifies. A counter-example here is Codeberg again, in its statement "We stay strong against hate and hatred." This opens by saying "Codeberg is currently suffering from hate campaigns due to far-right forces, and so are our users." The key phrase here is "far-right forces." There are some whose politics lead them to interpret free and open source software as being communist, or at least profoundly left-wing. That too is correlated with Codeberg's decision not to accept cryptocurrency-related software: cryptocurrencies are widely liked in libertarian and alt-right circles. (One of the most original and innovative OS development projects of the 21st century so far was Urbit, but it is closely entwined with cryptocurrencies. Urbit's original creator, Curtis Yarvin, has reportedly espoused some extreme beliefs; The Nation called him The Reactionary Prophet of Silicon Valley.) Privacy and cryptocurrencies are inextricably part of the same issue as presented by the Mullvad political donations controversy. Mullvad makes money selling VPN services. As its pricing page says: "We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL | Wero, and Przelewy24." Desire for strong privacy, VPNs, and cryptocurrencies are overlapping concerns – and this especially applies to people on the political right. Accepting payment in cryptocurrencies is a big hint towards the political leanings of a company's owners. Mullvad's co-owner supports anti-immigration politics. The Xlibre project is explicitly anti-DEI, and members have publicly stated views critical of transgender people. Similar issues have affected the Hyprland project, as have the views of Ruby-on-Rails developer David Heinemeier Hansson; The Register discussed these projects' endorsement from Framework last year. As we repported earlier that year, the price of software freedom is eternal politics. It's an overly simplistic way to reduce a complex and nuanced situation, but one way to consider this is in terms of pro-AI and anti-AI, versus "woke" and "anti-woke." It's not as simple as there being rival camps: individuals, and individual FOSS projects, can find themselves on one side of one argument, but the opposite side of the other argument. What it will come down to is whether the anti-AI groups in FOSS can work together and help each other to hold off the vast and commercially backed pressure from LLM-assisted and LLM-generated code, even though they may find themselves bitterly opposed in terms of politics and ethics. Bootnote Setting your username to [object Object] is a joke because this is what JavaScript commonly produces when software tries to turn an object into a string. The gag dates back to at least this 2019 post from I Am Devloper, and later appeared on Reddit's /r/ProgrammerHumor. Most social networks are powered by JavaScript. The idea is that by setting your username to something that simulates a worrying JavaScript bug, you are likely to give someone somewhere a very bad day. ®
Ooit was hij multimiljonair, maar zijn ambities voor een nieuw Rotterdamse pretpark brachten hem aan de rand van de afgrond. Ondernemer Hennie van der Most blikt terug op zijn opkomst en ondergang. "Ik ben van vijftig miljoen naar nul euro gegaan.”
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that spoke in tongues, sought forbidden love, orbited an orbiter, and performed ritual magic.
First, scientists have uncovered a “golden age” of languages that flourished for millennia before fading into our dark age of linguistic extinction. Then, Alan Turing’s erotica, the search for the first exomoon, and the cave of the Old Ancestors.
As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.
The silence of long-lost languages
Blasi, Damián et al. The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene. Science.
Some 3,000 years ago, a “golden age” of languages dawned around the world, resulting in the proliferation of tens of thousands of tongues over the next 2,000 years. But over the past millennia, we have entered a dark age of linguistic diversity, driven by the rise of “behemoth languages” that have pushed others into extinction.
That’s the conclusion of a new study that reconstructed humanity’s linguistic diversity since the dawn of agriculture, which emerged about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age.
The global human population before agriculture is estimated to have been between 4.4 and seven million people. Modern hunter-gatherer societies can act as rough proxies for the likely distribution, sizes, and linguistic diversity of these preagricultural populations. With that in mind, researchers led by Damián Blasi of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona developed a model based on 171 hunter-gatherer groups, which suggested that humans spoke about 4,500 to 6,000 languages before the dawn of agriculture. That’s fewer than the 7,500 that are spoken today, but still a lot considering how few people there were on Earth at the time.
The team then ran thousands of models predicting how languages diversified and evolved as humans adopted plant and animal domestication, a process that radically increased populations and complexified cultures. The predictions converged around a scenario in which linguistic diversity peaked around 2,000 years ago with possibly as many 75,000 tongues spoken worldwide.
“We uncovered a linguistic ‘golden age’ with tens of thousands of languages 3,000 to 1,000 years ago,” Blasi’s team said in the study.”In our model, this “golden age” was followed by an extremely rapid decrease in linguistic diversity, especially over the last two millennia.”
The spread of colonialism over the past 500 years has accelerated language loss due to the ascent of behemoth languages such as English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Hindi. But the new study suggests that linguistic diversity was already in decline starting at least 1,000 years ago due to the formation of smaller-scale multinational empires. Sadly, this trend of linguistic impoverishment has far-reaching consequences beyond language itself.
“Languages (and their histories) are regularly utilized as proxies for other units of culture because language is often transmitted and acquired along with other cultural traits, including marriage patterns, religious practices, kinship systems, or modes of social organization,” the team concluded. “Therefore, cultural variants with transmission dynamics similar to those of languages have also undergone a recent mass extinction.”
In other news…
The unfinished work of Alan Turing
Alan Turing, the famed British mathematician who helped break the Nazi enigma code, packed a mind-boggling list of accomplishments into his short life. A foundational figure in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, Turing died at just 41 of cyanide poisoning in the wake of horrific persecution from the British government for what was then the crime of being a gay man.
In his spare time from dramatically changing the course of history, Turing also tried his hand at writing fiction, according to a new study about his erotic short story “Pryce’s Buoy.” The draft is an autofictional account of Turing’s affair with his young lover Arnold Murray, a relationship that ultimately forced Turing to endure a sentence of chemical castration to avoid prison in the 1950s.
The draft is cut short before any sexual encounter between the characters—perhaps because Turing’s family censored it, or perhaps because Turing left it unfinished—though the tale is very clearly headed to the bedroom. Sarah Dillon of the University of Cambridge revisits the story in a new study that contextualizes it in the final years of Turing's life and links it directly to the works of gay writer Sir Angus Wilson by revealing that Turing copied many of Wilson’s stylistic choices.
“Wilson braved…dangers—he did not hide his homosexuality, and he did publish his work,” said Dillon in the study. “Turing did not hide his sexuality either, and although he did not publish his story, we cannot say whether this was through choice or because of the abrupt end to his life in June 1954.”
Turing’s life story is heartbreaking, but Dillon emphasized that “Pryce’s Buoy” is an expression of his playful, cheeky side, which persisted even in the midst of the immense injustice to which he was subjected.
That’s no moon—it’s an exosatellite
Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets, which are worlds that orbit other stars, but nobody has clearly spotted an “exomoon” orbiting one of these exoplanets. Now, a team reports the discovery of a Jupiter-sized world that is orbiting a massive object called a brown dwarf that is, in turn, orbiting a star called CD-35 2722, which is about 73 light years from Earth.
This might be the first known exomoon, but the system is so weird and novel that researchers aren’t quite sure that’s the right term. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called “failed stars” because they are about as big as a gas planet can get without igniting nuclear fusion in their cores and transforming into stars. Moons orbit planets, and brown dwarfs are somewhere in between a planet and a star, so the team went with the term “exosatellite.”
“Exoplanet satellites can be easily described as exomoons, but it is not clear if satellites of brown dwarf companions can be called the same, as the term lacks a formal definition,” said researchers led by Kevin Hoy of Diego Portales University. “Perhaps we are approaching the limit of language invented to describe the Solar System, which is entirely unlike CD-35 2722.”
This is why you should always bring a poet! Whether or not the giant exosatellite gets minted as the first exomoon, the discovery is an exciting example of how diverse star systems are increasingly coming into focus.
The cave of the Old Ancestors
For at least 25,000 years, the “Old Ancestors” of Aboriginal Australians gathered to burn grass and perform magic rituals within Cloggs Cave, a cavernous site several hundred miles east of Melbourne.
While the immense significance of the cave is well-known to the GunaiKurnai people of the region, as well as to generations of archaeologists, a new study has confirmed the deep roots of the site as a ritual setting for the Old Ancestors. Researchers led by Elle Grono of the Australian National University unearthed layers of “phytoliths,” which are mineral structures found in plant cells, to corroborate that the cave has been a site of magic and healing for 25,000 years.
“Taken together, the archaeological features and multiple lines of archaeobotanical evidence at Cloggs Cave corroborates traditional GunaiKurnai knowledge and nineteenth century ethnography of ritual practices involving the use of plant resources, indicating that the cave was a special, secluded place used by mulla-mullung, powerful learned men and women, for the practice of magic, healing, cursing and spiritual practices,” said the team in their new study.
In our disorienting time of ephemeral reels and shortened attention spans, there’s inspiration in the incredible continuity of this storied cave, which has witnessed thousands of generations seeking solace in its confines.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.