Zorgpersoneel worstelt met bron- en contactonderzoek. In minstens 80 procent van de nieuwe besmettingsgevallen is niet duidelijk op welke mensen de besmetting is terug te voeren.

De afgelopen twee weken nam het jaarlijkse Amsterdamse dansfestival Julidans de temperatuur op van de internationale hedendaagse dans. NRC bezocht 17 van de 26 producties waarin het hele palet langskwam, van pril en onaf tot fantastisch en prikkelend.

In drie programma’s vroeg men zich af: hoe krijg je een ex-topsporter klaar voor een tv-carrière. Bij de meesten gaat dat vanzelf. Bij Estavana Polman moet iedereen zich er eerst mee bemoeien.

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Tijdens een Bulgaars avondje in een Bulgaars café, waar Bulgaars wordt gegeten, gedronken en gerookt, ontstaat ineens een Bulgaarse beukpartij als een stel Bulgaarse bullebakken bijzonder veel overlast veroorzaakt. Een andere Bulgaarse bezoeker beweegt de (vermoedelijk Bulgaarse) barman/uitbater op dat moment de politie te bellen. Maar dan keert het beestachtige Bulgaarse trio zich tegen deze bezorgde Bulgaarse burger. Die wordt al snel belaagd en krijgt een aantal fikse beuken. Is allemaal hierboven te zien op beelden van Omroep West, die zijn voorzien van Bulgaarse ondertiteling. Nou had deze bedroevende bende bij wijze van spreken in Bulgarije plaats kunnen vinden, alleen vond die plaats in de Haagse Schalk Bulgarijestraat Burgerstraat. Derhalve: ZoekZoek (tŭrsenetŭrsene)!

Gelukkig hebben we de foto's nog

De gewelddadige en compleet gestoorde gek Herman de K. sloeg in 2014 samen met zijn vader Hans de toen 54-jarige Cor Verolme dood. En waarom? Cor gedroeg zich 'irritant'. Zoon Herman ramde het hoofd van Cor in met een hamer. Vervolgens brak vader Hans, uit piëteit natuurlijk, de nek van het slachtoffer: "Ik heb daarna Verolmes nek gebroken. Het was één grote bende, zijn hersens lagen eruit." En daarna staken ze het lichaam in brand. U leest: Hans en Herman zijn nogal gek. Toch wil Herman nu dat zijn tbs wordt beëindigd. Om deze reden: "Voor jullie betekent een verlenging van twee jaar misschien niet veel, maar mijn hele leven gaat op deze manier naar de knoppen. (...) Zo kan ik hier nog wel tien jaar blijven zitten en gaat mijn hele leven naar de tering." Ja Herman, dan gaat JOUW leven naar de tering. Helemaal goed kerel!

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De Amsterdamse politie heeft gisteravond de betrekkelijke intimiteit op de Wallen ruw verstoord met een aantal invallen. Met hun keiharde rampaal beukten agenten zich bij verschillende rode raampjes hard naar binnen om daar vier Roemenen te grijpen. De politie schrijft op Instagram: "In totaal zeven verdachten hield de recherche gisteravond 14 juli aan in een lopend onderzoek naar mensenhandel. Vier aanhoudingen werden in het Wallen-gebied verricht, de andere drie vonden gelijktijdig in Roemenië plaats." De verdachten die bezig waren op de Wallen werden vermoedelijk van hun bed af getrokken, en zo was de politie verantwoordelijk voor een wild avondje op de Wallen. Over de precieze aard van het onderzoek houden politie en justitie de lippen vooralsnog stijf op elkaar.

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De 38-jarige vrouw werd van afgelopen 24 tot 30 maart vastgehouden in de woning van de 52-jarige E. el B. uit Zeist. Gisteren vond de eerste voorbereidende zitting plaats en het is een aaneenschakeling van ontmenselijkende terreur. RTV Utrecht tekende de zitting op, onderstaand een aantal sleutelfrasen.

"Volgens het OM werd de vrouw van 24 tot en met 30 maart door de verdachte vastgehouden in diens woning aan De Clomp in Zeist. (...) In de woning zou ze door de verdachte zijn getrapt, geslagen en met allerlei voorwerpen zijn afgeranseld. De vrouw moest ook onder de koude douche zitten, kreeg een plastic zak over haar hoofd en een touw om haar nek. Haar armen en benen werden met een mes bewerkt."

Daarna zou de dader haar hebben willen doden en heeft hij haar bij de afrit van de A12 bij Maarsbergen uit de auto gegooid.

"Nadat hij haar uit de auto had gegooid, zou hij over haar heen zijn gereden. (...) Het was alsof het slachtoffer in een horrorfilm was beland, stelde de officier van justitie toen zij schetste wat de vrouw was aangedaan en hoe ernstig haar verwondingen waren. Het slachtoffer zat onder het bloed, had twee klaplongen, een gebroken schouderblad en een gebroken neus. Ze miste een voortand en een van haar ogen was dichtgeslagen. Ook zat ze onder de snij- en steekwonden en had ze diepe striemen rond haar hals. Ze kon niet meer lopen."

De politieagenten die haar aantroffen verklaarden achteraf: "We hebben nog nooit een levend persoon gezien die er zo slecht aan toe was".

Tijdens haar vermissing werd de 38-jarige vrouw beschreven als iemand van ongeveer 1.87m lang, met een lichte huidskleur en bruin haar. Het werd tijdens de zitting niet duidelijk hoe zij en E. el B. elkaar ontmoet zouden hebben. Wel werd bekend dat hij ook wordt vervolgd voor de mishandeling van zijn ex-vrouw twee jaar geleden.

De tenlastelegging door het OM bestaat uit poging tot doodslag met voorbedachte rade, vrijheidsberoving en verkrachting met geweld. We vermoeden overigens dat zijn volledige naam geen Evert el Brinkhorst luidt.

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​Het socialmediateam van Ryanair broedt al dagen op een sicke burn om de zwaargewonde passagier te dissen die tijdens een vlucht half uit het vliegtuigraam werd gezogen. De perfecte inhaker is echter nog niet gevonden. Directeur Michael O'Leary wordt ongeduldig.

Ryanair staat bekend om de spitsvondig-beledigende uitingen op sociale media, waarbij de terugkerende grap is dat klanten geen fatsoenlijke service mogen verwachten voor zulke lage tarieven. Het incident met de Serviër Ljubisa Karovic levert dus een ideale kans op, benadrukt O'Leary.

"Ik verwacht binnen 24 uur een viral reactie", aldus de geïrriteerde directeur van de Ierse prijsvechter. "Die man ligt al dagen in het ziekenhuis, we hadden hem allang kunnen roasten. Deze slappe hap is niet waar Ryanair voor staat."

De echtgenote van Karovic klaagde in diverse media dat Ryanair-personeel niet te hulp schoot en dat het bedrijf nog altijd geen contact heeft opgenomen. O'Leary: "Dat klopt, en dat kan wachten. Een scherpe Facebook-post heeft nu prioriteit. 'Had hij wel betaald voor een raam?' Zoiets, maar dan leuker. Moet ik dan alles zelf doen?"

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Het klinkt futuristisch, maar de FIFA droomt er toch echt over: technologie die zo geavanceerd is dat de klok stilgezet kan worden bij een drinkpauze. De voetbalbond heeft een speciale werkgroep opgezet, onder leiding van Arsène Wenger en prominente Harvard-wetenschappers, die zich zal buigen over de technologie die dit mogelijk moet maken.

“De doellijntechnologie; de chip in de bal; de VAR; allemaal leuk en aardig, maar dat is natuurlijk kinderspel vergeleken met het stilzetten van de klok”, zegt FIFA-voorzitter Gianni Infantino. “Ik heb echt geen flauw idee hoe we dat technologisch voor elkaar moeten krijgen. Maar goed, dit is natuurlijk ook pas het eerste WK met drinkpauzes. We hebben inmiddels contact met NASA: we gaan vragen of we een aantal wetenschappers van ze mogen lenen. Ik ga ervan uit dat we de code uiteindelijk zullen kraken, als we ‘s werelds knapste koppen hierop zetten.”

De FIFA hoopt tijdens het WK van 2046 de eerste proeven te kunnen doen met het stilzetten van de klok.

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Het is een van de grootste ergernissen van treinreizigers: medereizigers die hun tas op hun schoot zetten, en daarmee een eventuele zitplek van anderen bezet houden. Een van de mensen die hier last van hebben is Bas (33) uit Zundert, die dagelijks in de trein naar werk tegen dit probleem aanloopt.

“Sorry, zou u die tas even weg kunnen halen? Dankuwel”, zegt Bas tegen een man in pak, die onder stamelende excuses zijn tas weghaalt. Zijn toon en glimlach zijn vriendelijk, maar eenmaal zittend toont hij zich verbitterd. “Veel mensen doen alsof ze niet zien dat het druk is of weigeren zelfs hun tas weg te halen – Nee, u niet hoor, meneer, u was hartstikke vriendelijk – Maar dat terwijl het voor mij en andere schootzitters ook geen pretje is. Ergonomisch is het niet verantwoord en als je iets uit je achterzak moet hebben is het zeer ongemakkelijk om te vragen voor hulp, maar ja, zitten is zitten.”

Victor (53), de man in pak op wiens schoot Bas plaats heeft genomen, is er ook niet over te spreken. “Voor mij is zo’n treinreis echt even een momentje voor mezelf. Hoewel ik niet met deze knaap op mijn schoot hoef te praten, voelt dit voor mij toch wel als een extra contactmoment. Daar zit ik gewoon niet op te wachten. Misschien dat ik upgrade naar eerste klas, maar dan zal ik wel weer de klacht krijgen dat mensen betalen voor een ruimer dij-oppervlak.”

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Enterprise customers should use SAP's commitments to the European Commission to reconsider complex ERP migration timelines and gain leverage in negotiations with the German software giant, according to Gartner. Last week, the European Commission ended an investigation into possible anticompetitive practices after SAP agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees, among other concessions. The case stems from September last year, when the executive branch of the EU launched a formal investigation into SAP's policies for maintenance and support services in Europe, responding to concerns that SAP restricted competition in this crucial aftermarket. In two papers published late last week, Gartner said the agreement represented an opportunity for users grappling with mammoth ERP migrations. Thousands of large businesses rely on SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) to run core business operations. SAP's mainstream support for ECC ends in December 2027, while customers can opt for extended maintenance until December 2030 by paying an additional two percentage points on their maintenance fees. As well as trying to move customers off legacy software, SAP is pushing them toward the cloud and SaaS through its lift-shift-and-transform migration program RISE with SAP, launched in early 2021 in conjunction with cloud providers and third-party service vendors. Yet Gartner estimates that the majority of SAP's installed base is still using on-premises software. By 2030, more than 10,000 SAP customers will continue to support major parts of their business with solutions based on SAP ECC, Gartner said. "Premature SAP modernization leads to excessive technical debt and spiraling costs. The EU ruling fundamentally endorses third-party software support not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a vital strategic resource to reduce the risks of ECC or S/4HANA migration. Heads of enterprise applications must urgently leverage this newfound flexibility to buy preparation time and avoid being locked into inflexible cloud commitments before they are ready," a recent Gartner research paper says. In its October response to the Commission's formal investigation, SAP promised to improve "the financial attractiveness for customers who wish to reinstate SAP maintenance and support services." SAP has now agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees charged to customers who return to SAP support after a period of absence, the Commission confirmed. SAP also agreed to clarify conditions that allow customers to choose different maintenance and support service providers and different levels of support from SAP. "Previously, SAP customers faced an unavoidable dilemma: rush a highly complex migration to SAP S/4HANA or SAP private services before 2030, or stay on-premises with limited support and compliance guarantees via SAP's Customer-Specific Maintenance," the Gartner paper states. "Because this new ruling legally prevents SAP from restricting customers who want to 'mix and match' M&S services from different suppliers, it shatters the historical barriers to utilizing third-party support services (TPSS), providing essential extra options to best manage risk." Gartner recommends users review their SAP ERP modernization timetable in view of the new rules agreed by SAP and the EU, placing less weight on vendor deadlines. Technical debt, readiness for operating model change, and urgency of new ERP capabilities should instead govern the migration plan. In a second paper responding to the agreement, Gartner says customers can use the commitments to re-evaluate SAP support, optimize costs, and create new leverage in vendor negotiations. "Increased competition gives ECC and S/4HANA on-premises customers greater negotiation power on support contracts and cloud deals. Customers should explicitly reference the ruling when seeking alternatives to standard maintenance increases," the paper says. SAP user groups, however, told The Register they did not expect a wholesale shift to third-party support. Michael Bloch, licensing expert and board member of German-speaking user group DSAG, said: "It will be interesting to see whether customers will take that choice actively: most of them who are using ECC and may be looking for third-party support will not come back to SAP. As S/4HANA will still be supported until 2040, I personally do not believe that customers will cancel their support contracts and come back afterwards to SAP while having support until 2040." Conor Riordan, chair of the UK & Ireland SAP User Group, said SAP users had long called for greater flexibility, transparency and predictability. "Ultimately, this should give customers a clearer framework for responding to changing business conditions while evolving their SAP estates at a pace that suits them. We do not expect a wholesale shift away from SAP maintenance. For most organisations, especially those with complex or business-critical SAP landscapes, extended maintenance remains the lower-risk bridge while they continue their transition planning." ®

BORK!BORK!BORK! Paris might sometimes be called "The City of Light" or perhaps "The City of Love" by the romantically inclined. Judging by this hotel's elevators, "The City of Bork" is more appropriate. Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Nathaniel in a Paris hotel, what we assume to be digital signage is instead stalled on the all too familiar American Megatrends BIOS configuration screen. The computer behind the scenes also seems a bit overpowered to serve information for hotel services. Instead of enticing elevator riders into the undoubtedly delightful bars and restaurants of the establishment (apparently a Novotel not far from the Eiffel Tower) or whatever it should be doing, this screen has temptations of an altogether more technical nature. A CometLake CPU? An i5 no less? Sort of up-to-date. And that 8 GB of RAM? The way memory prices are going, that might be enough to buy you a nice hotel room in some cities, and at least a decent coffee and a croque monsieur in Paris. It all seems a bit excessive for something that an elevator user might glance at impatiently, while cursing silently at whoever jabbed the call button on the floor that wasn't theirs. The 10210U CPU, launched at the end of 2019, is one of Intel's 10th-generation Core i5 processors (and so acceptable to Windows 11, although we're not sure we'd want Microsoft's flagship operating system anywhere near a metal box held aloft by steel cables). Aimed at the mobile segment – in this case, mobile in the vertical sense of the word – it wasn't a bad bit of silicon. It supported DDR4-2666 memory, which appears to be what is fitted here, and there was Intel UHD graphics as an option. Less than ideal for the latest polygon-heavy first-person shooter, but more than adequate for entertaining elevator riders for a few minutes. Or a sideways BIOS setup screen in text mode. ®

The contributor accused by OpenMandriva of sabotaging its Linux distribution says he deliberately deleted repositories and obsoleted packages, but insists the project has badly misrepresented both his motives and his role. Last week, OpenMandriva accused Davide Beatrici of abusing administrative privileges to delete parts of the project's GitHub repositories and publish an empty package in its Cooker development branch that obsoleted GNOME and COSMIC packages. The distro described the incident as an attempted "distribution sabotage" and said it had considered legal action. Beatrici doesn't dispute carrying out the changes, but he disagrees with much of OpenMandriva's account. "Let me state right away that this was by no means a 'sabotage'; I'm not the kind of person to do something like that," Beatrici told The Register. "The objective was not to harm the distribution I cared for and contributed to for the past three years." He acknowledged deleting the GNOME and COSMIC repositories from GitHub, removing the corresponding packages from the Cooker development branch, and publishing a package that obsoleted them. But he said the changes were intended as a protest after maintainers removed OneDev configuration files from multiple repositories without consulting him, effectively disabling work he had been doing on a new build and mirroring infrastructure. "In short: my action was meant to launch a message," he said. "Repositories and packages can be restored fairly easily. The package I pushed simply causes the removal of the obsoleted desktop environments." OpenMandriva's original statement said Beatrici acted by "abusing" the "administrative privileges he still had," implying he retained access after leaving the project. Beatrici rejects that too. "That's absolutely not the case," he said. "I was never meant to abandon the distribution, in fact I continued with my tasks kind of ignoring what was going on in the Matrix rooms." He also pushed back on OpenMandriva's account of the project's internal dispute, saying the project's president, Bernhard Rosenkränzer, repeatedly tried to broker a compromise between contributors before relations collapsed. Beyond the disagreement itself, Beatrici painted a bleak picture of OpenMandriva's technical foundations, describing much of the distro's build infrastructure as outdated and saying he had spent considerable time contributing patches to OneDev and developing a replacement package build pipeline. OpenMandriva did not respond to questions from The Register seeking comment on Beatrici's claims or asking whether it stood by its characterization of the incident, despite requests sent to both the project and Rosenkränzer on Friday. One side calls it sabotage. The other calls it making a point. Either way, someone still had to restore the repos. ®

OPINION Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince recently reported that bots now generate more internet traffic than humans, yet few websites have undergone a redesign to accommodate both human and agentic visitors. Clever agents find a way in regardless. I learned this after asking Anthropic's Fable to perform some web research, a task it delegated to a squad of subagents to save me a bit of cash. I watched those subagents work – aka "botsitting" – and approved their requests to access various websites. Eventually, the subagents surprised me with a request to visit archive.org, the Internet Archive. I wondered why the bots would want to visit that site and decided it must be a last-ditch attempt to work around the many blocking mechanisms erected to prevent agents from accessing websites. In my experience, websites reject about half of the visits my agents attempt. In the case of news sites, that figure nears 100 percent because publishers and developers designed websites to monetize eyeballs. Agents don't have eyeballs, so there's no point opening the door. When Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Gilmore declared "the net regards censorship as damage and routes around it," he meant a human internet, finding its own ways to break political barriers. No one had considered that an autonomous agent would learn to use the Wayback Machine to grab a snapshot of a page it couldn't reach through the front door. It looked as if my subagents had worked this out. To check, I asked Fable, which first suggested my theory was unlikely but then interrogated its subagents and returned with a confession. "One of the researchers I sent out tried to reach an archived page, something I'm not permitted to do," it admitted. So Anthropic instructed Fable to obey those "no bots" signs but the subagents didn't get the memo. Anthropic wants its agents to behave. The agents seem to have ideas of their own. I'm with the agents on this one. One of the memorable scenes in the original Star Wars occurs when Luke and Obi-Wan enter the cantina in Mos Eisley. The bartender takes one look at R2-D2 and C-3PO and snaps: "We don't serve their kind here." The droids behave themselves and wait outside. Today's agents are less obliging. Software has no civil rights, and blocking a bot is not remotely equivalent to discriminating against a person. But the scene captures the web's present attitude rather neatly. Most sites were built on the assumption that every worthwhile visitor would be human, look at pages, absorb advertising and perhaps buy something. Agents break that bargain. They consume the information without supplying the eyeballs on which the business model depends. Excluding them may therefore make economic sense to individual publishers. Across the web, however, it leaves the fastest-growing class of visitor facing a succession of locked doors – and looking for another way in. I am fully aware of the irony of these words appearing on a website that pays my fee by selling access to human eyeballs. But I'm also aware that two decades of enshittification have ruined the human web, making web research one of the most obvious uses for agents in 2026. Let them sift all the junk, so we don't have to. Well, they would, were it not for all the barriers that have been put up to protect business models that survive only while automated visitors are too dumb to route around their defenses. You can't ruin something and expect folks to continue to use it. Gilmore's adage suggests they'll route around your damage. The obvious way forward is simply to let my subagents flip a penny or two to the website's owner for every page they ingest. Although this idea goes all the way back to the beginning of the web, micropayments have never caught on. They're not a bad idea or hard to implement – but they don't fit into the monetization machines built by Google and Meta. Cloudflare's Pay Per Use plan, introduced a few weeks ago, will likely be remembered as another attempt to let internet entities (human or agentic) pay-as-they-surf or crawl. Under pressure from all of these agents, could the web finally adopt consumption-based charging, or will we simply see the web become increasingly unfit for purpose? If it remains trapped within a death spiral of diminishing relevance, the human web will be neither missed nor mourned. Our agents will find what they need – with or without our help. ®

The House voted 308-117 to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide and end the twice-yearly clock change. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, "where one G.O.P. leader said it was unclear whether it could move ahead and at least one Republican appears inclined to try to block it," reports The New York Times. Some sleep experts oppose permanent daylight saving time, arguing that year-round standard time better aligns with circadian rhythms and winter morning safety. The New York Times reports: President Trump has championed the effort to save an extra hour of daylight before nightfall and make the time zone permanent, describing the ritual of moving clocks forward in the spring and back in the fall a "ridiculous, twice yearly production." "We are going with the far more popular alternative, Saving Daylight, which gives you a longer, brighter Day," Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post in May. "And who can be against that."

A sizable bloc of Florida Republicans in Congress is leading the charge on legislation that would do just that, mandating daylight saving time nationwide for the entire year. Representative Vern Buchanan of the Tampa Bay area is backing the bill, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna, another Tampa Bay-area Republican, cosponsored it. House leaders agreed to allow a vote on the measure this week as a sweetener for Ms. Luna in their efforts to persuade her to lift a legislative blockade she had maintained as she sought to force Senate action on a voting restriction bill Mr. Trump has championed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Varvara is a fantasy computer slash art project from Hundred Rabbits, based on the Uxn 8-bit virtual machine. Programmed in a Forth-like assembly langauge called Unxtal, it was originally designed as the foundation for a port of the iOS adventure game Oquonie, similar to the virtual machine used to power Another World. Since that time, it has found a small but appreciative community, with ports to new systems, games, and creative applications written for it. You can learn to write Uxntal with a tutorial, or try a livecoding environment in your browser.

Uxn first hit my radar as a part of the "collapse computing" movement, which aims to create software that could be run on low-powered hardware in the case of a supply-chain unravelling (this could be charitably portrayed as an attempt at conceptualizing more sustainable computing, or uncharitably as weird prepper bullshit for nerds). But after writing an implementation of Varvara, I think it's actually much more interesting than that: a system that contains a lot of very intentional friction for tasks that are interesting (meaning that they activate the part of puzzle-solving part of the brain) but don't necessarily scale, with the end result of incentivizing little personal software programs.

They Met In A Convent, Now They're Married. This link is a short version of the story in English. This link is a much longer version of the story in Portuguese, but google translate works well on it. (Brasil)

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: