Een exclave is een gebied dat geografisch niet verbonden is met het land waar het aan toebehoort. Ceuta is Spaans grondgebied, maar zit vast aan Marokko.
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Wat betekent ‘ontwapening’ precies? Trump kondigde aan dat Hamas de wapens inlevert, maar een Hamas-woordvoerder legt de term anders uit. Ook is er nog niets wat wijst op een ander aspect van de deal: terugtrekking van het Israëlische leger.
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Marja Pruis schreef een boek over haar overleden zus, die zo anders was dan zij, en Marjoleine de Vos over haar overleden broer, die verslaafd was. Hoeveel mag je, wil je prijsgeven over je familie? „Het gevoel dat ik iets uitleverde door over haar te schrijven, ik heb daar veel last van gehad.”
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De bosbranden bij Bordeaux winnen al enkele dagen niet meer aan terrein. Na angstige dagen in een opvangcentrum mogen de bewoners van Cestas naar huis, al moet er wel een noodtas paraat staan. „Er is een leegte, en die voel ik.”
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De serie Off Campus, die in mei in première ging op streamingdienst Prime Video, is inmiddels een hype: 36 miljoen kijkers in de eerste twaalf dagen. Off Campus is gebaseerd op de gelijknamige boekenreeks van de Canadese schrijver Elle Kennedy. „Mannen geschreven door vrouwen.”
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Zeg je Harderwijk, dan zeg je "zoden aan de dijk". Of het rijmt gewoon. Dat op zijn minst. Zoals al langer bekend liggen de Harderwijkers net als best wel veel andere gemeenten in de clinch met het COA. 10 jaar lang mocht in Harderwijk een gigantisch opvangcomplex staan met 800 asielzoekers (met steekpartijen, drugsoverlast en recent nog een uit Harderwijk verbannen vrouwenmeppende Syriër tot gevolg) maar zoals dat meestal gaat, houdt zo'n periode van 10 jaar ook een keer op. Dat gebeurde, maar zoals dat eveneens meestal gaat, slaagt het COA er niet in om op te rotter. Toen kondigde Harderwijk aan dat het overwoog net als alle inmiddels ongeveer alle andere gemeenten DWANGSOMMEN te eisen van de Combinatie Opportunisten en Ambtenaren, 91.000 per dag oplopend tot 8.190.000 euro, maar omdat Harderwijk ook weet dat die dwangsommen voor het COA helemaal NIETS betekenen, zeggen ze nu: weet je wat, prima joh, krijgen jullie daarnaast ook gewoon 2 MAANDEN UITSTEL. De datum waarop de opvanglocatie nu uiterlijk leeg moet zijn is verschoven naar 1 november. Harderwijk, gemeente van Volkert, dolfijnen en DAADKRACHT.
HULL (ANP/RTR) - Een Britse uitvaartondernemer heeft een celstraf van twintig jaar gekregen voor het achterhouden van lichamen. Hij vertelde families dat hun dierbaren begraven of gecremeerd waren, maar in werkelijkheid liet hij tientallen lichamen soms jarenlang liggen. Bovendien stal hij geld dat uitvaartgasten aan goede doelen wilden doneren.
Volgens de aanklagers heeft Robert Bush het vertrouwen van rouwende families "op industriële schaal" misbruikt. Zijn wanpraktijken werden in 2024 ontdekt, toen andere begrafenisondernemers ontdekten dat sommige lichamen jarenlang werden achtergelaten. Een voormalige medewerker omschreef het als een horrorscène.
De politie ontdekte toen 35 lichamen bij de uitvaartonderneming, waar er op dat moment slechts vier hoorden te zijn. Veel van de menselijke resten bevonden zich in ontbindende staat. Een doodgeboren baby werd aangetroffen in een papieren zak. De ouders van die baby dachten de as van hun kind twee jaar eerder te hebben gekregen van Bush.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Sinds het begin van de zomer is in de Europese Unie meer natuur afgebrand dan in dezelfde periode van recordjaar 2025. Dat blijkt uit een analyse van het ANP op basis van wekelijkse cijfers van klimaatdienst Copernicus.
In de door Copernicus gehanteerde meetperiode van 3 juni tot en met 29 juli ging ruim 343.000 hectare verloren aan natuurbranden, ruim twee keer zoveel als in dezelfde periode vorig jaar. Dit komt neer op een gebied ongeveer even groot als de provincie Zuid-Holland.
De grootste schade ontstond in die periode in Spanje, Italië en Frankrijk. Daar legden aanhoudende natuurbranden grote gebieden in de as en werden tienduizenden mensen geëvacueerd. In deze drie landen verwoestten 493 natuurbranden samen bijna 307.000 hectare. In dezelfde periode in 2025 brandde ruim 78.000 hectare af door 338 natuurbranden.
Bordeaux
Het is deze zomer al uitzonderlijk warm en droog geweest, vooral in Zuid-Europa. In Frankrijk is de grootste brand bij Bordeaux grotendeels gestabiliseerd, terwijl brandweerlieden in Spanje nog meerdere natuurbranden bestrijden.
Heel 2025 was het zwaarste natuurbrandjaar in Europa van de afgelopen twintig jaar. In de maanden voor de zomer waren er in 2025 juist meer branden dan dit jaar, maar vooral in augustus nam het aantal en de omvang van de branden sterk toe.
Midfielder may still fly to La Manga on Sunday
Incoming head coach Jaissle to meet squad in Spain
Bruno Guimarães was not on Newcastle’s flight to Murcia on Friday lunchtime as Eddie Howe’s former players prepared to meet their new head coach in southern Spain.
As Guimarães, who is believed to be in Brazil, appeared to inch closer towards a transfer to Arsenal, Matthias Jaissle was completing his managerial move from Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahli. Howe’s successor is expected to arrive at the club’s pre-season training camp in the La Manga complex at some point this weekend.
Continue reading...The prime minister says that the current Fifa general secretary is ‘the wrong man to lead the organisation’
The construction of a new Chinese “super-embassy” in London, which is set to be built near the Tower of London, can go ahead after a high court challenge against the decision to grant planning permission was dismissed, PA Media is reporting.
The Royal Mint Court Residents’ Association (RMCRA) brought legal action against the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
Continue reading...You’ve got to admire the Fifa president’s chutzpah in trying to flog off football’s greatest prize. If only Uefa wasn’t being so pesky about it all
Imagine a plan so distasteful that even the Americans and a Middle Eastern nepo-royal football boss can’t be doing with it. Such is the status of Fifa president Gianni Infantino’s scheme to sell off stakes in the World Cup to private investors. More historically, perhaps, the 55 nations that make up Uefa have reacted to this horror show by voting unanimously to boycott Fifa tournaments, including World Cups, if Infantino presses ahead. That would mean Spain and Portugal boycotting their own men’s World Cup next time around, which you’d think – not to call it too soon – would come off as slightly bad vibes.
A testing moment, then, for the haunted cue-ball. Again. Can it really already be time to turn to Infantino once more, even after he appeared in this spot only on Tuesday, after his 15-page Instagram crash-out about his haters? Yes. Yes, I’m afraid it can. Demanding the federations of the world sell off the World Cup to some fund led by Donald Trump’s son-in-law’s brother will regrettably draw attention to you in ways that will prove difficult to control. As indicated, the Fifa president’s plan has contrived to appear vulgar to the North American confederation, Concacaf, as well as the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...Research analysis to be delivered by 11 September
Decision on expansion could be taken this year
Fifa is pushing ahead with plans to expand the World Cup to 64 teams from 2030 and has opened a tender to research companies to assess the economic benefits on a hugely accelerated timescale.
In another twist during a week of astonishing revelations about the global governing body’s plans to reshape football, the Guardian has seen a “research brief” outlining a consultation process to assess the potential increase from the tournament’s current 48 teams. A period of just four weeks has been allocated for the successful party, which will be selected on 14 August, to analyse the proposed expansion. Fifa has required that the analysis is delivered by 11 September, indicating that a decision could be taken this year.
Continue reading...
Scientists have proposed the existence of a fifth “dark dimension” that governs the behavior of both dark energy and dark matter—and which may be observationally detected in the near future, according to a recent preprint study.
The dark dimension hypothesis could potentially provide an elegant solution to some of the biggest mysteries in science, including the nature of dark matter, an unidentified substance that makes up most mass in the universe, and dark energy, the term for whatever is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.
The idea arose from string theory, a decades-old framework that suggests the universe contains many dimensions beyond the four dimensions that we can perceive as humans—time, and three-dimensional space. In a series of studies published over the past several years, a group of string theory experts have suggested that one of these dimensions could simultaneously govern dark matter and dark energy, and that this dimension changes over time.
“The question was whether or not this extra dimension is frozen or can evolve,” said Cumrun Vafa, the Timken University Professor in the physics department at Harvard University and an author on these studies, including the newest preprint, in a call with 404 Media. “The fifth dimension is somehow related to the value of dark energy, so it's natural that when the value of the extra dimension changes, the value of dark energy also changes.”
When Vafa and his colleagues started to develop this idea, the conventional wisdom was that dark energy had a fixed value, according to the standard model of cosmology, a well-corroborated set of assumptions that explains most laws and phenomena in the universe.
“We were scrutinized by our colleagues for predicting that string theory requires dark energy to change, whereas dark energy looks constant,” said Vafa. “This is not good for our field because you are predicting string theory is inconsistent with observation.”
But the assumption that dark energy has a fixed value, a central tenet of the standard model, has been challenged by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a major survey of the universe based at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, which released its first results in 2025.
To the surprise of many scientists, the DESI release hinted that the value of dark energy may shift over time, a discovery that was in line with predictions of a dark dimension put forward by Vafa’s team.
“We didn't write a model to fit the data, but rather we had a model based on theory,” said Vafa. “Now that fits the data automatically. That is why I believe in it. It's easy to write a model after you know the data to try to fit it somehow. This is not what we did.”
“Our model is still the best model, as far as I know, that fits the DESI results,” he added.
In their newest preprint, which is currently in the process of peer review, Vafa and his colleagues expand on the workings of this possible dark dimension in light of the DESI data. According to string theory, the universe has many dimensions that are “compactified” into subatomic scales that are not detectable by current instruments, which is why we have not discovered them. The hypothetical dark dimension, however, may be enlarged to a micron scale range.
This would allow gravitons, which are the hypothetical particles that mediate the force of gravity, to spill over into the dark dimension, where they would become dark matter particles. In this view, dark matter is not made of some new form of exotic particle. Instead, it’s made up of gravitons that also exist in our familiar universe and have traversed into the dark dimension.
“We are using the extra dimension to our benefit to explain what dark matter is,” Vafa said. “We don't need to introduce a new particle or particles. We are just saying it's the usual gravity.”
As this dark dimension evolves, so does the mass of these dark matter particles in that realm; Vafa’s team predicts they are becoming lighter. Likewise, the value of dark energy weakens over time. In this way, dark matter and dark energy—long thought to be likely unrelated—arise from the properties of the same extra dark dimension.
It’s a trippy and esoteric concept, and it may soon be put to the test. If a dark dimension does exist, then it should manifest as tiny deviations in Newton's gravitational force at micrometer scales. A team at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna is currently designing an experiment to test this idea, which could yield results in the coming years.
Moreover, if dark matter particles are just gravitons that wandered into a dark dimension, then there should be some subtle observational hints of “a fifth force” in the dark sector. For example, scientists plan to test the hypothesis by closely watching the movements of stars in interacting galaxies, which are held together by dark matter halos, to search for a dark fifth force.
When the galaxies come near each other, “the visible matter attracts the visible matter of the other galaxy, and dark matter of one also attracts the dark matter of the other galaxy as well,” Vafa explained. “But there's extra force between the dark matter compared to the visible matter because of this fifth force, so you get a more attractive force pulling the dark matter towards each other more than the visible part.”
“There are multiple fronts where things can come together,” he concluded. “Of course, the most exciting would be the confluence of all of these together, that somehow they agree. That would be really remarkable.”
Starting Aug. 1, voice calls, messaging, file transfers and other digital services within Max will be free of charge for subscribers of MTS, MegaFon, Beeline and T2.
Katalyst Space has confirmed that problems with its LINK spacecraft have delayed its attempt to rescue NASA's Swift observatory, with rendezvous now targeted for the end of August. Katalyst disclosed the delay in an update on the spinning spacecraft. Engineers used a thruster to cut LINK's rotation rate from 9 degrees per second to approximately 4 degrees per second, with further burns planned. Katalyst and NASA are also developing a new attitude controller suited to the spacecraft's reduced capabilities. Engineers are determining which systems remain usable and testing their plans in a simulator before trying them on the vehicle in orbit. The trouble has pushed the targeted rendezvous to the end of August. LINK is supposed to sidle up to Swift, survey it, grapple the observatory, and carry it to a higher orbit. For now, however, Katalyst says: "We're focused on stabilizing the spacecraft and restoring core system functionality." Any rendezvous attempt depends on that work succeeding. LINK launched earlier this month, less than a year after NASA awarded Katalyst Space the contract for a rescue mission. The spacecraft encountered problems during commissioning before going into a spin over the weekend. Earlier this week, Katalyst reported that two of the three reaction wheels, used to control LINK's attitude, were inoperable, but the team was working to stabilize the vehicle using its electric propulsion thrusters. Time is running short. Swift is expected to enter the Earth's atmosphere in the coming months. The observatory has enjoyed a prodigiously long life and far exceeded its primary mission, but its orbit is decaying and it cannot raise itself. LINK's success could add years to Swift's operational lifetime. In January, almost all of NASA's models predicted that Swift would re-enter by the summer of 2026. Most science operations were paused in February to buy more time. More recent predictions indicate that it could dip below 300 km, the altitude beneath which raising its orbit becomes more difficult, around November. Katalyst must now stabilize LINK, secure NASA's approval for its revised plans, and reach Swift before the observatory sinks too low for a practical rescue. ®
In Noordeloos barst deze vrijdagavond een jaarlijkse strijd los: het NK Kuiltje Knikkeren. Al decennialang een traditie in het dorp met heuze knikker-royalty. Elise (19) is dit jaar de knikkerkoningin. ''Dit vergeet ik nooit meer.''
