Days away from a national verdict on Trump 2.0, we check in with nine midterm voters across the US and the political spectrum
US voters will soon deliver a national verdict on the second presidency of Donald Trump. On 3 November, millions of Americans will vote in midterm elections to decide control of the House of Representatives and Senate, as well as the governorships in 36 states and state legislatures across the country. The results could have a huge impact on Trump’s final two years in office.
Our reporters have interviewed nine voters across the country and the political spectrum about extremism in US politics, their confidence in the US voting system, what they hope Congress will tackle first and their views of the president’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth.
Continue reading...It was very cold and the young smoker was barelegged, barefoot and wearing a fur coat … How could the photographer resist?
This Margate shop is now an ice-cream parlour, but back in 2014 it was a vintage clothes store. Mark McEvoy, who had relocated from London the previous year with his partner and baby daughter, approached the young woman to ask permission to take this shot.
“I remember it being a very cold October day, so I was surprised she was barelegged and barefoot,” he says. “My guess is that she was working in the shop, or maybe a friend of someone working there. The fur coat may even have been for sale inside, just something she put on to keep warm during a cigarette break.”
Continue reading...A mile beneath the Black Hills, scientists are building giant detectors to analyse neutrino particles – and possibly find the answer to existence
For more than a century, the mining town of Lead, in the Black Hills of South Dakota, attracted workers with a taste for gold. Now, a flagship experiment being built in the old mine is drawing scientists in search of more intriguing riches: answers to the deepest mysteries of the universe.
Construction of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (Dune) in the former Homestake mine is due to start on Monday. Engineers will begin assembling four giant detectors inside caverns blasted from rock a mile underground.
Continue reading...Defence secretary says value for money and modernisation key for spending to ‘fight the wars ahead’
The defence secretary, Wes Streeting, says he started stockpiling food and water weeks ago in case of a national emergency, as he talked up the threats to the UK and said his department had already begun ramping up its spending in response.
Streeting spoke after the chancellor, John Healey, said he wanted defence spending to reach 3% of GDP by 2030 and 3.5% by 2035; having already asked Whitehall departments to find 1% cuts in their budgets for long-term investment to fund defence spending.
Continue reading...The 15th amateur to challenge Littler in Netflix stream on Friday evening, Sherrock was ‘lost for words’ after winning £501,000 prize
The name of the programme was Beat Luke Littler, and Fallon Sherrock did just that.
On one of the biggest nights of the year for British TV, Netflix, too, there was much at stake: not just £501,000 to any of the 20 amateur challengers who managed to beat Littler in a single leg of darts, but also the jeopardy of whether audiences would choose to watch the streamer’s first UK live entertainment event – or the final of BBC juggernaut The Celebrity Traitors.
Continue reading...Alleged self-dealing by the president and his allies doesn’t look so good as corruption emerges as a key issue for midterm voters
Voters under 50 probably won’t remember the “welfare queen”. But she once embodied Republicans’ claim of the underlying reason for US societal decay: the poor are a bunch of fraudsters.
Ronald Reagan introduced Linda Taylor to US voters at a rally during the Republican presidential primary season in 1976. A resident of Chicago’s South Side, Taylor had been arrested for welfare fraud. “She used 80 names, 30 addresses, five phone numbers to collect food stamps, social security, veteran’s benefits for four non-existing deceased veteran husbands,” Reagan said. “Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”
The Qatari government gifted him a luxury jet, potentially violating the emoluments clause of the constitution.
The UAE gained access to some tightly guarded, high-end American AI chips soon after an investment firm linked to its ruling family secretly bought a $500m stake in World Liberty Financial, the crypto company funded by the families of Trump and his chum Steve Witkoff.
Rich people facing criminal charges have taken to donating to Trump’s political operations and then seeking pardons or clemency. Most recently, Wanda Vázquez Garced, the former governor of Puerto Rico, and the banker who paid her bribes, Julio Herrera Velutini, were pardoned after Velutini’s family gave a $50m deal to Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and donated $3.5m to Trump’s Maga Inc Super Pac.
The first family is also making a killing from the government. The Pentagon lent more than $600m to Vulcan Elements, a rare earths startup, just three months after Donald Jr’s venture capital firm 1789 Capital bought a stake in the outfit.
Powerus, a drone maker backed by Eric and Donald Jr is selling drone interceptors to Persian Gulf allies of the US that are under attack by Iran, enriching the kids from a misbegotten war launched by the dad without consulting Congress.
Continue reading...A temporary injunction in the coastline battle for beaches to be publicly accessible, not sealed off for private developments, is just a step in fighting what islanders call a tourism model that disadvantages Jamaicans
When the Australian human rights lawyer Eva Buzo emerged from the sea on to the shores of One Man Beach in Montego Bay on Sunday after her gruelling, nearly 11-hour-long swim, the thunderous pulse of welcome drums was drowned out by the chants of “free beach” from jubilant supporters.
Here in Jamaica’s tourism capital, against a backdrop of jagged mountains and sunset-tinted clouds, Buzo – a celebrated marathon swimmer – said she was pleased to help support the important work of the Jamaica Beach Birthright Environmental Movement (Jabbem) and others fighting for free public access to Jamaica’s beaches.
Continue reading...The tech mogul’s midterm donations backing Republicans have made him the largest single-cycle political donor in modern US history
Elon Musk has poured so much money into US politics this midterms election cycle that his donations could fund half a dozen SpaceX rocket launches or buy thousands of Tesla Cybertrucks. At the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles, Musk could order more than 31.9m cheeseburgers with the money he has spent on the midterms.
Musk, the world’s richest person, has funnelled at least $445.77m into Republican-aligned political action committees (Pacs) and groups since last year, according to US Federal Election Commission data as of 29 October. The contributions have made him the Republicans’ most prominent financial backer and the largest single-cycle political donor in modern US history.
Continue reading...Strand magazine to feature never-before-seen article from Hungarian-born escapologist who was also a prolific author
Unseen writing by Harry Houdini, the world’s most renowned escapologist and illusionist, is being published in the US on Saturday, the 100th anniversary of his death.
As well as being famous for his magic acts and quest to expose fake mediums and spiritualists before he died in 1926 at the age of 52, Houdini, whose real name was Eric Weisz, was a prolific author, with more than two dozen books, short stories and plays to his name.
Continue reading...
Welcome back to the Abstract—and Happy Halloween! Here are the studies this week that smashed into Earth, put aliens on ice, drank mummy wine, and hugged it out.
First, a century-old theory that comets enriched Earth with the stuff of life is upended by new models of ancient impacts. Then: the case for life in extraterrestrial sea ice, a Halloween-coded medieval concoction, and a scientific embrace.
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.
Did the seeds of life come from above or below?
Carl Sagan eloquently said that we are all made of “star stuff,” but just how much of us is really comet vomit? This is a hotly debated question in science due to the popular theory that comets delivered essential ingredients for life to Earth during impacts more than four billion years ago, paving the way for the curious emergence of Earthlings.
But scientists have thrown cold primordial water on this idea in a new study that challenges “the long-held assumption that cometary impacts played an important role in the origins of life on Earth.” By running more than 100,000 advanced simulations of comet impacts, the team found that key prebiotic molecules found in comets, such as hydrogen cyanide, would be smashed to smithereens during impacts with Earth’s ancient surface in most cases.
Moreover, while Earth was pummeled by these snowballs during its youth—relatable!—this bombardment doesn’t neatly line up with the timeline of abiogenesis, the term of the origin of life. For these reasons, it’s much more likely that life assembled from earthly molecules that leaked out from our planet’s interior, according to the study.
“The most probable timing of successful cometary impact is in the early Hadean…more than 100 [million years] earlier than the estimated emergence of the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) at 4.2 [billion years ago],” said researchers led by Richard Anslow of the University of Cambridge.
“Taken together, the rapid decline in Earth’s cometary impact bombardment and the efficient destruction of fragile cometary organics indicate that the successful delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules was an exceedingly rare event,” the team added.
The researchers didn’t rule out the possibility altogether, but concluded that any impact that had a direct influence on abiogenesis would be an edge case. That said, comets might serve as prebiotic wellsprings on other planets, such as Mars, where key molecules might have faced better odds of survival upon impact due to the red planet's smaller mass and thin atmosphere.
“Mars would have been the more favourable target for the cometary delivery of prebiotic feedstock molecules” which “strengthens the possibility that life could have emerged on Mars,” the study concluded.
In other news…
The tip of an alien iceberg
While we’re on the topic of prebiotic feedstock molecules—a household conversation, no doubt—let’s speculate about their accumulation on weird exoplanets. In a new study, scientists suggest that these molecules might build up in sea ice on a variety of extraterrestrial ocean worlds, providing a pathway to the emergence of aliens.
“Water worlds with potential deep oceans are at the forefront of currently observable exoplanetary habitability,” said researchers led by Edouard Barrier of the University of Cambridge. “Here we outline a location where nutrients could be concentrated in sufficiently high quantities to make abiogenesis possible—at the interface between the open ocean and the surface ice shelf.”
The team studied the dynamics of sea ice on Earth, and modelled how similar features might form on a range of different exoplanets, including hypothetical “Hycean” planets. These are worlds more massive than Earth, but smaller than Neptune, making them part of the “sub-Neptune” class of exoplanets.
The results revealed mechanisms that “may plausibly provide concentrated chemical feedstock for prebiotic chemistry” on many of these exoplanets, suggesting they could be a substrate for the emergence of alien life. This “rich avenue of research…has the potential to significantly advance our understanding of aquaplanet habitability, and particularly to improve the prospects of abiogenesis on sub-Neptunes,” the team concluded.
What a week for the prebiotic feedstock beat! Taken together, these studies point to multiple onramps for life on worlds like Earth, Mars, exotic sub-Neptunes, and more, upping odds that life exists elsewhere in the universe—regardless of whether we ever find it.
Drink the mummy wine
To celebrate Halloween, here’s a trick and a treat all wrapped up in one delightfully grotesque story about mummies. Roughly 700 years ago, someone had the interesting idea of grinding up parts of Egyptian mummies, mixing the residue with wine or other liquids, and prescribing it as a medicinal elixir for people to drink.
This resulting product, known as Mumia vera aegyptiaca, circulated in Arabic and European markets for centuries, but its exact composition and pharmacology remain unclear. You know what that means: It’s time to do science on the medieval mummy cocktails.
Researchers analyzed historical Mumia vera products, mummified body parts, embalming residues, bandages, and two mummified skulls. The team discovered a wide range of formulas for this medicine, including one powdered product that appears to have been derived from a mummified head.
The results demonstrate that “an apparently uninformative powdered material can be chemically linked to a specific mummified head,” said researchers co-led by Tim Berger and Amira Naimi of Marburg University. “This study shows that linking historical texts, material culture, molecular composition, and bioactivity, can open new routes for decoding historical medicines and reconstructing the material biographies of human remains and museum objects.”
So if you are really committed to the spirit of this season, break out some Mumia vera aegyptiaca to pair with your Halloween candy and witches’ brew. Bottoms up—or more accurately: mummified-heads up.
Advances in hug science
What better way to close out this chilling spooky season than with the warm embrace of science? So come on, bring it in for a hug—or, in this case, roughly 15,000 of them.
Hugging is an incredibly common form of affection among humans, and even some other animals, including Halloween favorites like vampire bats. But little is known about “how individual differences shape the remembrance of such experiences,” according to a new study.
To fill this cuddly gap, scientists analyzed survey responses from 15,049 adult participants in the United Kingdom who were recruited in a public broadcasting campaign that included the BBC. The volunteers reported that their most memorable hugs were “for comfort, support, and understanding” and there was a noticeable gender split, as men were more likely to remember hugs that were “arousing” than women.
“Regarding hugs, men have shown different lateralisation and arm crossing patterns when hugging other men compared to women,” said researchers led by Anna Lena Dueren of the University of Bristol. “Furthermore, women were found to experience a stress buffering effect of hugs that was absent in men.”
And for anyone who considers themselves not a “hugger,” you are not alone. Plenty of participants expressed that they found hugs difficult or unpleasant. So whether you love bear hugs or cannot bear hugs, this study has something for you.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
There's a ridiculously simple test you can use to figure out whether AI mandates at a given company are well-considered, or are being shoved out the door by out-of-touch buffoons: What happens when an engineer documents that AI made a task worse? Are they taken seriously, or are they marginalized and eventually managed out? Conveniently, this week Amazon published a treatise by Terk Terkowitz, a VP/Distinguished Engineer/Final Boss of Their Independent Contributor Technical Career Track, on the role of the developer in the age of AI. It was originally an internal missive sent to their software engineers and their managers back in September, which is an interesting lag for a document that sounds this confident. It also maps exceedingly well to what other organizations are struggling with. I think it's a good document, but I can't help but view it with a somewhat cynical eye. I see it as an attempt to make the future of the profession of software engineering feel less bleak. And it's feeling mighty bleak for a lot of folks right now. What's the context? This treatise comes at a time of dramatic upheaval. Tech as an industry is no stranger to change (usually at 3AM, heralded by the pager), but something about the current AI-ification of the world strikes many of us as fundamentally dissimilar from previous revolutions. Folks are scared about their career prospects. "Should I give up tech and get into farming?" is a sincere question multiple people have asked me. I don't know! Tech is already a goat rodeo, so you've got a leg up if you do? This anxiety isn't theoretical. In May, Amazon wisely shut down KiroRank, an employee-built cash incineration leaderboard that ranked people by token usage, after the obvious thing happened: people spun up junk tasks to climb the ranks. This is now called "tokenmaxxing," and the Terkowitz treatise specifically calls it out as being at odds with "frugality." Meta did the same thing with "Claudenomics" and 85K employees that same week. And Amazon reportedly announced another 250 job cuts this week. I can't tell you that these things are related. But I can tell you that every engineer who read the memo assumes that they are. What's the thing say? This document contains a lot of great stuff. I have a tremendous level of respect, both personal and professional, for Amazon's Principal Engineering community; I'm led to understand that that respect may not be reciprocated, but that's okay. I am, by their standards, a lapsed engineer who ran away to join the circus as one of its lesser clowns. Terkowitz's memo emphasizes customer outcomes and engineering judgement, two things I would absolutely not delegate to AI any time soon. (Note: I am writing this in October of 2026, with the full understanding that previous comments on the capabilities where AI falls short tend to age like fine milk.) It documents work that (today) AI tools aren't improving. That's way better than assuming that every objection to AI inherently comes from some self-interested Luddite who's scared of being replaced. It also says something smart about measurement: look at the 90th percentile of AI adoption, at those teams burning the most tokens, and check whether their delivery actually went up commensurately. This is great! Shout it from the rooftops; we should all be doing such things. But still, I wonder. The memo says “If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing.” Document it, bring it to your manager, work through the problem. I agree with every word of that! The question is whether anyone's promo doc is gonna survive citing it. Here's what happens next. The memo concedes that input metrics are "deeply flawed," but then in the next paragraph says to go ahead and use them anyway, carefully. It then warns that non-adopters are falling behind. Those are three different positions within three sentences and they're not at all aligned with one another. That's not muddled; I think it's cover. A manager can cite "a finding, not a failing" when a strong engineer skips the AI tool, and then cite "falling behind" when it's time to PIP someone. Both are congruent with their stated policy; you get to decide which interpretation you want to go with in a given situation. How will managers handle justified AI non-use? Are promotion and performance decisions being made in a way that rewards these long term outcomes? Or are they instead taking the easy weasel way out, optimizing for what's cheap to measure, and rewarding tool activity? Because if you give me a metric, I will turn it into a target. So will an overwhelming majority of employees. When that happens, everyone loses — it's how KiroRank happened in the first place. Everyone's selling tokens — including Amazon I write this after two days of attending GitHub Universe, where they talked about how agents start roughly 40% of PRs now. And yet, Jay Parikh’s keynote argument was that useful output wasn't "more code," but rather completed outcomes: features shipped, bugs fixed, security issues addressed, loudmouth columnists silenced, etc. The problem here is that their entire business model cuts against that; they're billing in a model that charges customers on a consumption basis, not an output basis. There's nothing, today, that ties "AI spend" to "output that was worth the effort." Which brings us back to Amazon. The memo says tokenmaxxing is at odds with frugality, and for Amazon’s internal cost line, it is. Meanwhile AWS bills Bedrock and Kiro customers by the token. Inside the building, tokenmaxxing is a problem to be stamped out. Outside it, it’s the revenue plan. ®
Nee, het is niet zo dat het toevallig gisteren of vandaag misgegaan is en dat ik daarom extra voorzicht geworden ben. Maar het is wél zodat dat ik me steeds bewuster wordt van de risico’s die al die toegenomen mogelijkheden van (nu in mijn geval) Claude Destop en Claude Code met zich meebrengen. Nee, niet omdat ik verwacht dat een blogpost die ik schrijf het einde van de mensheid in gaat luiden. Maar wel dat een deel van de dingen die ik doe, waarmee ik experimenteer of waar ik over schrijf ook tot gevolg kan hebben dat je bijvoorbeeld je TV om zeep helpt, persoonlijke data onbewust gedeeld wordt, je vatbaarder bent voor een hacker dan wanneer je e.e.a. niet gedaan zou hebben.
Ik leer daar zelf namelijk ook nog elke dag over bij en het grappige (of erge) is dat ik daar AI inmiddels heel hard bij nodig heb. Zo bleek bij het hele PHP-verhaal, maar ook bij bv de Sandbox setup voor OpenCode was/is het zo dat Opus 5.5 na inspectie van de setup nog wel weer met een paar ideeën kwam over hoe hier misbruik van gemaakt kon worden door een agent als die aan het runnen is, of (omdat ik hem via MCP aan Zotero gekoppeld had) malafide code in een pdf die de agent dan mogelijk weer iets zou laten doen wat niet okay was. Kortom, een typemachine is veilig, bij AI is het bij elke stap goed om na te blijven denken.
Ik heb dat bij de recentere berichten daarom nogmaals benadrukt door een standaard banner onder de berichten. Ik heb ook de disclaimer pagina en de privacy statements daar bijgewerkt. Ik hou zo meen mogelijk data over bezoekers bij (geen Google advertenties meer, geen IP-adressen) omdat ik die info ook niet nodig heb, heb inmiddels een plugin om YouTube filmpjes niet standaard te laden en een paar plugins waren niet meer in gebruik. Gewoon beetje opruimen dus.
Het bericht Disclaimer pagina bijgewerkt verscheen eerst op ICT en Onderwijs BLOG.
Je doet de laatste aangifte inkomstenbelasting voor je overleden vader en ziet een vinkje bij “ cryptobezittingen”. Wat is dat nou, daar heeft hij nooit iets over gezegd. Notarissen komen deze situatie steeds vaker tegen, zegt notaris en docent Notarieel Recht aan de Radboud Universiteit Lucienne van der Geld tegen Margriet.
Het probleem: crypto komt nooit vanzelf naar je toe. Zonder de digitale sleutel is het “slechts een waarde in de cloud waar niemand toegang toe heeft”, weet Van der Geld. Zo raakt een deel van een erfenis voorgoed kwijt.
Kan de notaris er niet gewoon bij?
Nee. Een bankrekening kun je terugvinden en de bank geeft erfgenamen een overzicht. Bij crypto bestaat zo’n loket niet. “Ook de notaris heeft geen superpower om toegang te ontsluiten, helaas”, zegt Van der Geld.
Joël Verbaken, specialist nalatenschapsplanning bij adviesbureau Grant Thornton, vat het kort samen: “Bij crypto geldt: wie de sleutels niet heeft, heeft het geld niet.”
Nederlandse huishoudens hadden eind juni voor 3,2 miljard euro aan crypto bij Nederlandse platforms als Bitvavo, meldde WEL eerder op basis van nieuwe cijfers van DNB. Crypto in een eigen wallet telt daarin niet mee, en juist die is na een overlijden het lastigst te vinden.
Waar kan de crypto zitten?
Er zijn grofweg drie plekken:
- Op een handelsplatform. Dit is het gunstigste geval. Weet je bij welk platform de overledene zat, dan kan de klantenservice je soms op weg helpen.
- In een wallet op de laptop. Een wallet is een digitale bewaarplaats. Zonder de code van de laptop en de wallet kom je er niet in.
- Op een usb-stick of hardware wallet, een apparaatje waarop je crypto offline bewaart. Weet niemand waar die ligt, dan is het geld onbereikbaar.
Een veelgemaakte fout is om crypto zó goed te beveiligen dat niemand er meer bij kan.
Moet de code in je testament?
Niet de code zelf, wel waar hij ligt. Van der Geld raadt aan om de vindplaats van de toegangscode in het testament op te nemen. Je kunt de notaris ook een aantekening in de kluis laten bewaren, over de code of over de plek van de usb-stick. Denk ook aan het wachtwoord van je laptop.
Verbaken waarschuwt om wachtwoorden of de herstelzin van een wallet niet letterlijk in het testament te zetten. Wachtwoorden veranderen, een testament aanpassen kost geld en medewerkers van het notariskantoor kunnen de gegevens zien. Zet erin dát je crypto hebt en waar de toegang ligt. Hoe een erfenis verloopt zonder testament, lees je in wat er gebeurt als je geen testament hebt.
En als je niet bij de crypto van een overledene kunt?
Meld het aan de Belastingdienst als je de aangifte voor de overledene doet. “Meestal is er coulance”, zegt Van der Geld. Achterhouden raadt ze af: dat komt uit zodra je de crypto verzilvert.
Wat gebeurt er bij een scheiding?
Daar speelt hetzelfde probleem. Er komen steeds meer rechtszaken van ex-partners die hun deel van het digitale vermogen willen, zegt Van der Geld. Is de ex niet eerlijk over wat hij of zij bezit, dan kan ook de rechter vaak weinig. Een overzicht opvragen zoals bij een bank kan niet.
Haar advies: regel het in goede tijden. Ga je trouwen of samenwonen, neem dan de waarde van digitale bezittingen op in de huwelijkse voorwaarden of het samenlevingscontract en houd die jaarlijks bij.
Wat je nu al regelt
- Maak een lijst van je munten, platforms en wallets, en bewaar die apart van de codes.
- Leg vast waar de codes liggen: in het testament, of als aantekening bij de notaris.
- Zorg dat iemand de code van je laptop kan vinden.
- Vertel minstens één erfgenaam dát je crypto hebt; Verbaken raadt aan om erfgenamen al vroeg bij de techniek te betrekken.
- Bewaar je hardware wallet of usb-stick op een vaste plek, zoals een kluis.
Meer weten?
Bronnen: Margriet, Grant Thornton
Marvin Beekhuijzen (40) zat als tiener in een sociaal isolement, maar vond via het spelen bordspellen toch een gemeenschap waar hij zich thuis voelde. Als organisator van de Nationale Spellenweek wil hij nu heel Nederland aan de tafel krijgen.“Je hoeft het tijdens een bordspel niet over zware onderwerpen te hebben en kan gewoon plezier maken.”
