Reform leader says he’s been ‘demonised’ since revelation he received £5m from billionaire before election
Nigel Farage has accused people raising questions about his financial backing of “demonising” him as part of a “coordinated pile-on” to stop Reform UK.
In one of his first speeches since the opening of two parliamentary standards inquiries into his financial support, the Reform leader said he had been “dehumanised in the most extraordinary way” in recent months, after the Guardian revealed in April that he had received a £5m gift from the crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne before the last election.
In de eerste helft van het jaar zijn bij de politie in de regio Rijnmond ruim 10.000 meldingen binnengekomen over mensen met verward of onbegrepen gedrag. In totaal ging het om 10.338 meldingen. Dat is een toename van bijna 21 procent, vergeleken met dezelfde periode vorig jaar. Landelijk gezien staat Rotterdam op de tweede plek als het gaat om incidenten met verwarde mensen.
CUPERTINO (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Apple praat met het Amerikaanse ministerie van Justitie over het schikken van een rechtszaak uit 2024 waarin het techbedrijf wordt beschuldigd van het overtreden van de mededingingswetgeving. Dat zeggen ingewijden tegen persbureau Bloomberg.
De Amerikaanse overheid klaagde Apple aan toen Joe Biden nog president was. De aanklacht hoorde bij een reeks rechtszaken die de macht van grote technologiebedrijven moest indammen. In de aanklacht stelt het ministerie dat Apple concurrenten, softwareontwikkelaars en consumenten heeft benadeeld met zijn vermeende gedrag.
De belangrijkste verwijten draaien om het blokkeren van zogenoemde superapps door Apple. Superapps zijn apps waarin veel verschillende diensten samenkomen, zoals chatten, betalen en winkelen. Je hoeft dan niet voor elke handeling een aparte app te openen. Ook zou het bedrijf onder meer externe berichtendiensten en cloud-streamingapps ontmoedigen en de concurrentie op de smartwatchmarkt belemmeren.
De gesprekken bevinden zich volgens de bronnen in een vroeg stadium, maar zouden al wel in volle gang zijn.
ABC News reports that White House teleprompter operator Gabriel Perez allegedly made more than $100,000 betting on Kalshi markets tied to what President Trump would say in speeches, using his access to prepared remarks and last-minute edits. ABC News reports: According to the sources, Kalshi alerted its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to the suspicious activity on its "Mentions" market, where users can bet on whether specific words, phrases or topics are uttered during a public speech. "Our surveillance team promptly flagged and referred these trades to the CFTC, and we are cooperating and assisting regulators," Kalshi's head of enforcement, Bobby DeNault, said in a statement provided to ABC News.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Thursday afternoon, following ABC News' report, that Perez has been put on unpaid administrative leave. Leavitt said she spoke with President Trump about it, and he thought it was a "disgrace" and made the decision himself to put Perez on unpaid leave. Leavitt said she was unaware of any other White House staffers who have made such trades. "The White House has strict ethics guidelines that we expect all staffers and officials to follow," said White House spokesperson Davis Ingle when contacted by ABC News.
In addition to February's State of the Union address, sources said CFTC investigators discovered that Perez placed bets on more than a dozen Trump speeches over a three-month period, including a December primetime address, a January speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Trump's remarks in March during a Medal of Honor ceremony.
Al elf jaar hebben bewoners last van een vliegenplaag, veroorzaakt door een lokaal afvalverwerkingsbedrijf. Met de huidige hitte wordt het alleen maar erger. Van huisvliegen tot aas- en vleesvliegen. „Zou jij nog mensen thuis uitnodigen?”
Lionel Messi kan zondag, in de finale tegen Spanje, zijn tweede wereldtitel winnen. Op zijn 39ste heeft hij nog altijd een enorme invloed op het spel. Hoe kan dat?
Firefox releases will soon get even closer together – but not ESR ones, which remain annual, with the next one due out soon. The change was announced last week on the dev-platform@mozilla.org mailing list by Mozilla’s director of engineering Sylvestre Ledru: “We are planning to move Firefox Desktop and Android from a 4-week release cadence to a 2-week release cadence starting in September 2026. “This will be an experiment… This does not mean that all work needs to ship twice as fast. Work that is not ready should not be rushed, and features can still take the time they need to bake. “The current target is to release Firefox 155 on September 1, 2026, instead of September 15 … “We will closely monitor how this change works in practice and adjust if needed.” The change is already visible in the upcoming Firefox Release Calendar. At the time of writing, it shows the current four-week cadence for Firefox 153 and 154, with Firefox 155 brought forward to September 1. From then on, it lists releases at roughly two-week intervals. This isn’t unprecedented. The last time Mozilla did it was over a decade ago. Google announced a very similar change for Chrome back in March, and The Register reported on it going to six-weekly releases in 2010 and then four-weekly ones in 2021. Brace for the impact of the next ESR In the meantime, Firefox 153 is nearly here: at the time of writing, it’s scheduled for Tuesday, July 21. Right now, the release notes are blank, but the beta release notes are more forthcoming. You can look forward to further improvements to PDF editing. Version 153 will be able to merge multiple PDF documents into one by a simple drag-and-drop in the PDF sidebar, and insert images into PDFs as new pages. It will also improve highlighting text in PDFs. The new version can generate QR codes for sharing web pages offline, such as in printed documents. It can verify and display the EU’s new Qualified Website Authentication Certificates, or QWACs for short. These are part of the new eIDAS legislation, which is a slightly convoluted acronym for “electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services”. Sounds cumbersome, but if it helps make the Wild West of the Web a bit safer, we’re all for it. Another security tweak is that extensions will lose local-file access by default. As we use one that relies on it - the excellent Multithreaded Download Manager - that's slightly concerning, although users will be able to grant the permission separately, so we'll see. If a tab is using your location, Firefox 153 will highlight this with a map-pin icon in the address bar. The last release could recognize a few keywords in the address bar to mute all sound: this function will get extended, with typed commands for picking colors from pages, and accessing experimental “Labs” features. Come back, Ubuntu Unity and your HUD, all is forgiven. There’s also experimental JPEG XL support. Pop-up video player controls will work better, and if you use Windows and have a compatible GPU and drivers, 153 will play HDR video. On macOS, Firefox supports the Fn+F keystroke for switching to full-screen mode – which means KeyboardControls.com has to update its description of the function. Firefox 153 will also be a significant release, because it will be the next ESR version: it will get security updates for at least 15 months, meaning until late 2027. (And maybe longer: Firefox 115 is still getting updates, and now will until March 2027.) In turn, that means that Firefox 153 is also the basis of the latest beta of the AI-free Waterfox fork, which recently integrated built-in ad blocking. ®
Graag even uw aandacht voor het volgende: op 4 juli werd in Overveen de nietsvermoedende 96-jarige (!!!) oma Mieke na wat boodschapjes te hebben gedaan achtervolgd door een paar ongure idioten. Dat deden die ongure idioten net zo lang tot ze ergens liepen waar ze alleen met de mevrouw waren, om vervolgens hardhandig haar gouden ketting van haar hals te rukken. Een vrouw van ZESENNEGENTIG jaar, nogmaals. Dan graag ook even uw aandacht voor wat kleinzoon BING (23) deed toen hij, zoals dat gaat, van de politie hoorde dat er over ZEVENTIEN DAGEN wel een plekje vrij was om aangifte te komen doen: die trommelde zijn vrienden op en ging toen zelf maar routes uitstippelen en bij zaken langs die routes om camerabeelden vragen. Die beelden bleken er volop te zijn, dus hangen de gezichten van de rovers nu door heel Overveen. Omdat de daders, ahem, ogenschijnlijk niet uit Overveen komen, startte Bing ook maar een campagne op sociale media. Dankzij Bing (en z'n maten) dus BEELDEN van de schoften, waarschijnlijk onderdeel van een bende, na de breek.
6 Best Photo Sharpening Software to Fix Blurry Images
Soft photos lack contrast along edges and lose fine detail upon close inspection. To sharpen blurry images, you will want natural details to be restored, while avoiding an over-sharpened and crunchy look.
If you have tried basic sharpening tools without seeing significant improvement, or if the results ended up smearing out the details, this guide is for you.
In this hands-on test, we evaluate the 6 best photo sharpening software and apps to help you make an informed decision, with tips to upgrade your image quality enhancement workflow.
Scenarios When Photo Sharpening Software Helps
With deep-learning or traditional approaches, these tools cover a variety of scenarios where soft or blurry photos need enhancement:
• Enhance soft photos and edge contrast while avoiding halos.
• Refocus fuzzy subjects, bring clarity back to mild blurriness.
• Develop soft RAW files to crisp clear photos and reduce noise.
• Restore poorly scanned and old photos to modern 4K clarity.
• Upscale for large print to avoid blurriness on physical paper.
During the tests, we evaluate how they preserve natural details and textures, compare before and after differences, and offer tips for parameter and model settings to avoid artifacts.
The comparison starts with Aiarty Image Enhancer as it covers a variety of scenarios. It also offers free trials for readers interested in exploring the quick workflow to fix blurry, low quality photos.
Case Study 1. Fix Blurry Portrait and Restore Face Details
For old portraits, low-resolution archives, or poorly scanned photos, the subject may appear mushy and lack definition in close inspection. As demonstrated in the portrait below, her facial structures lack clean boundaries, and hair strands are not clear.
Settings in Aiarty: More-Detail model, strength 0.92, Face Restoration on, color contrast+2.
Using AI inference in Aiarty Image Enhancer, the model analyzes quality problems and auto-applies noise reduction, deblurring, and natural sharpening to the image. After switching among three AI models to compare the results in real-time, we settled on the More-Detail model, and enabled the Face Restoration feature.
Tips: Adjust the strength slider around 0.75-0.95 to avoid over-processing, and nudge color contrast +2 to fine tune the photo.
Case Study 2. Make Wildlife Photos Clearer and Enhance Focus
For the cropped turaco photo below, the plumage across its cheek is soft, and the contour where the green feather overlaps with the white patch near its eye lacks definition.
Inside Aiarty Image Enhancer, the Real-Photo Model and the More-Detail Model work to fix softness and restore feather details. The textured red ridges around its eye become clearer, and the dark pupil is in sharp focus now.
Case Study 3. Sharpen Architectural Lines and Fix Compression Artifacts
The source photo below is muddy and soft. The window frames and roof structures lack definition, blending into the surrounding pixels.
Settings in Aiarty: More-Detail model, strength 0.85, x2 upscaling.
After processing in Aiarty Image Enhancer, the blurry patch restores to layered tile shapes. It sharpens the intersecting lines and renders the clean edges, while avoiding over-sharpening with strength controls. When zooming in for close inspection, we do not see halos or ringing artifacts.
Case Study 4. Deblur and Upscale for Large Format Printing
Below is the same photo tested in Case Study 3. Using the real-time previewer in Aiarty Image Enhancer, we scroll it down to inspect the lower part of the photo.
Settings in Aiarty: More-Detail model, strength 0.85, x2 upscaling.
Optionally, this image enhancer supports upscaling the photo by x2, x4, x8, to 4K, 8K, 16K, or higher resolutions. Instead of simply stretching the pixels or applying bicubic interpolation, it will upscale the image and restore realistic details with deep-learning algorithms.
With adequate dimensions, proper contrast, and natural details, the large format print stays sharp.
Case Study 5. Develop Soft Raw Files to Sharp and Clear Results
For the succulent photo below, the RAW file is inherently soft and lacks local contrast. The fleshy leaves appear slightly blurry along the edges, and the background twigs lose their fine textures.
Aiarty Image Enhancer supports processing soft images and extracting detail to store natural clarity. The AI models will reduce noise and increase sharpness for a clean base. Optionally, you can use the quick edit panel to adjust color and exposure, or crop to focus on a subject and upscale for more details.
Testing Photo Sharpening Software and Apps
Choosing the right sharpening software comes down to your file types, skill level, and desired output. Some users prefer automated AI inference for speed, while others require manual parameter control.
The following tests cover everything from fully automated AI enhancers and flexible hybrid controls to traditional manual editors, catering to both beginners and professionals handling RAW or compressed formats.
Tools
Deep-learning Models
Batch Processing
Pricing
Topaz Photo
Autopilot AI model suggestions
Yes
Subscription-based
Aiarty Image Enhancer
3 AI models, optional face enhancer
Yes
$99 Lifetime License for 3PCs/Macs
Lightroom
AI enhancement in the latest version
Catalog based culling
Subscription-based
DxO PureRaw 6
DeepPRIME models
Yes
$139.99 Version-based License
Picsart
Auto enhancement
No
Subscription-based
GIMP
N/A
No
Free, open source
Topaz Photo – Autopilot Image Sharpening and Enhancement
Topaz Photo is a subscription-based image enhancer and sharpener with AI models. It offers autopilot and manual options to fix blurry images. After importing low-quality photos and toggling on autopilot, Topaz Photo will offer suggestions such as Denoise, Sharpen, or Adjust Lighting. Each corresponds to an enhancement module and parameters.
For the castle dome photo above, after applying the sharpening module, you can choose whether it is applied to the landscape, subject, or background. The Standard model fixes mild blur and overall softness and works nicely as a starting point, while the Refocus model requires huge computing resources and may fail on less capable computers.
In most cases, the initial sharpening strength around 25-30 fixes the blur and rebuilds details, while a higher value may result in a harsh and overly contrasty appearance.
Topaz License Plans: $39/month for personal use, $69/month in Topaz Studio.
Platforms: Windows 10/11, macOS 13 and higher.
Aiarty Image Enhancer – Photo Sharpening and Quality Enhancer for Natural Details
Aiarty Image Enhancer is designed to enhance photo quality, fix softness, and remove noise, with deep-learning algorithms and manual controls to avoid a plasticky look. As shown in the case studies above, it offers versatile models to enhance details naturally, restore face clarity, and fix compression artifacts.
It supports RAW files and delivery formats like JPG and PNG. For professional photographers and designers, the manual strength controls and editing tools offer more flexibility, while for casual users, the AI models enhance photo quality naturally.
Aiarty Pricing: $99 Lifetime License for 3PCs/Macs with free software updates for a lifetime. Free trials and 1 Year License are also available.
Platforms: Windows 10/11, macOS Catalina 10.15 and higher.
Lightroom – Sharpening Photos as Part of the Developing Process
Lightroom is ideal for photographers who are already inside the Adobe ecosystem, and need workflows from photo culling to editing and RAW developing.
After building up your routine for photo culling and applying basic editing, you can resort to the Detail panel to fix soft photos and enhance sharpness. To sharpen the subject without affecting the background, press Alt while adjusting the masking slider. Only the white areas in the mask will be sharpened.
Testing Lightroom: After basic editing, set NR to 10-12, then nudge back detail to 20-25.
Unlike auto enhancers, a solid understanding of image editing principles is required to use Lightroom effectively. You need to properly dial the amount, radius, and detail sliders, or create a mask to isolate and sharpen the subject without affecting the background.
The built-in AI Denoiser in Lightroom helps clean up the photo before manual sharpening. Still, achieving the right balance depends on user experience. Knowing when to increase edge contrast and when it is too much requires a trained eye.
Lightroom License Plans: annual billed monthly plan $11.99/month, $34.99/month in Creative Cloud
Platforms: Windows 10/11, macOS, iOS, Android
DxO PureRaw 6 – Raw Photo Sharpening In Batch
As RAW files are soft out of the camera, RAW photo sharpening software from DxO serves as a batch processor. Powered by a large database of lens and camera modules, plus the DeepPRIME noise reduction, DxO PureRAW gives your photos a cleaner base to enhance contrast and sharpness.
DxO PureRaw: Apply DeepPRIME for noise reduction, and enable optical corrections.
Under the optical optimization module, you can adjust the strength for lens sharpness optimization. The default settings might produce soft photos from high ISO RAW files. In those cases, you can switch to stronger options for aggressive sharpening.
Tips: DxO PureRaw is mainly built for RAW file processing. For web downloads, old photos, and your existing JPGs and PNGs, use Aiarty, Topaz, or Lightroom that supports both RAW and delivery formats.
DxO PureRaw 6 Pricing: $139.99 new license, $89.99 upgrading from PureRaw v5, v4.
Platforms: Windows 10/11, macOS 15.7 or higher.
Picsart – Online App to Clear Up Blurry Photos
Picsart offers quick fixes to sharpen images online and with mobile apps. It automatically applies x2 or x4 upscaling to the source image besides sharpening. As shown in the comparison above, jagged lines are enhanced to smooth and more defined edges.
Picsart Image Sharpening: Upload JPG for auto enhancement.
It is not built for DNG and camera RAW files as DxO does, but an easy and lightweight solution for casual users and content creators. You can use Picsart to fix low-resolution, blurry images, add text, create collages, and apply stickers and effects for social media and on-the-go edits.
Picsart License Plans: Starting from $15/month with 500 credits.
Platform: Web Browser, iOS, Android.
GIMP – Free Image Editor to Fix Blurry Photos
GIMP is a free image editor with quick options to sharpen an image. While it lacks the deep-learning models of modern AI tools, it offers the traditional unsharp mask (USM) and the high pass filter features for manual controls.
GIMP: Apply unsharp mask or high pass filter to enhance edge contrast.
By isolating edge details onto a separate layer in the high pass filter and setting blend mode to overlay, it helps pull out surface textures and line contrast. USM increases the contrast along the edges to trick the eyes for the perceived sharpness. They won’t restore missing data the way generative models do.
GIMP Pricing: Free, Open Source.
Platforms: Windows 10/11, macOS 11 Big Sur and higher, Linux.
Wrap Up
Instead of ranking a single top-rated choice, we have demonstrated different tools working in many scenarios. For photographers dealing with RAW files, casual users trying to rescue old mobile shots, or content creators batch processing compressed files, the choice of photo sharpening software depends on your specific needs and budget.
If you need dedicated photo enhancers with AI models and manual editing, Topaz Photo and Aiarty Image Enhancer are solid choices for different budget plans.
For photographers needing photo culling, editing, and RAW sharpening, Lightroom and DxO’s lineup builds up the ecosystem. GIMP is a decent free choice with abundant editing features, and Picsart makes it handy for casual users needing instant photo sharpening.
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