Three pumped storage hydroelectric power station sites in Scotland on list of 16 long-duration electricity storage plans

The energy regulator has given the provisional green light for the construction of the first new hydropower projects in more than 40 years, part of plans to reduce Great Britain’s reliance on energy imports.

Ofgem has published a list of 16 long-duration electricity storage projects, facilities that can store and release electricity for periods of eight hours or more, it has provisionally agreed can proceed.

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Spain present a formidable obstacle for a Uruguay side needing a win to progress – and quell a rebellious dressing-room mood

In the summer of 2011, at about the time Marcelo Bielsa was arriving at Athletic Bilbao, Luis de la Fuente was leaving. Bielsa was the revolution. De la Fuente was a former left-back with long, curly locks who had come through the academy, played eight years in the first team and coached Athletic’s under-19s and B team but now he was joining Deportivo Alavés, 50 miles south and in the third tier. Eleven games later, he was back again.

Sacked from the first senior club job he had, and the last too, De la Fuente was sure that someone would call but time passed, no one did and he started to wonder whether they would until the Spanish federation got in touch a year and a half later and asked him to coach its under-19s. In the meantime, as the months passed and the concern grew, he returned to Athletic’s Lezama training ground, convinced he had much to learn and that he knew where to do so.

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The novelist on being inspired by Shirley Jackson, discovering the brilliance of Denis Johnson, and finding comfort in Elizabeth Strout

My earliest reading memory
When I was five and starting school, I would catch a coach from the Oxfordshire village where I lived. Twice a day I read the little metal plaque screwed to the upholstery, which gave the warning “Mind your head when leaving your seat”.

My favourite book growing up
In the late 1970s my dad had a copy of Phenomena by John Michell. Each page covers something strange, which might or might not be true: showers of fish, stigmata, spontaneous human combustion. I would lie on the carpet flicking through the pages and loving the chills it gave me that (maybe) there could be such weirdness in the world.

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The film-makers and stars of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders docu-series explain the sisterhood and fights for fair pay behind the pompoms

It’s been 30 years since the Dallas Cowboys – who have long billed themselves as America’s Team – won the Super Bowl. But now, thanks to Greg Whiteley’s Netflix docu-series America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, the most reliable and globally recognizable arm of the Cowboys brand may no longer be the men playing football, but the women dancing on the sidelines.

“The footballers are gonna break your heart,” one fan says in the Season 3 finale. “But the cheerleaders are gonna leave you with a smile.”

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The New York City mayor has made his mark on the tournament to cap an extraordinary run of sporting success over the last few months

A stunning evening sun was setting behind Union City on Wednesday. It made it slightly harder to see the giant screen that had been set up for the Brazil v Scotland watch party in Hudson River Park, but not enough to ruin the vibe of a New York City World Cup evening. Partly it didn’t matter because the clutch of Brazilians watching the game, kitted out in canary yellow and “100% Jesus” headbands, were already in full samba mode, given how comfortable their 3-0 win was. But mainly it was because this was a beautiful World Cup moment.

This is my eighth World Cup. The outdoor screening, combined with the gentle breeze off the Hudson – I had already navigated the hubbub in Times Square, colonised by chanting Germans and flag-waving Ecuadorians – was as captivating as anything I’ve experienced in Marseille, Seoul, Cape Town or Rio de Janeiro. New York City is perhaps the only place in the world where a World Cup may go unnoticed but the tournament genuinely feels like an intrinsic part of life in large parts of the city, certainly since the Knicks’ victory parade finished. In fact, the feelgood endorphins seem to have segued seamlessly into World Cup fever for many in the city.

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The director and activist on her fictional drama Roya, drawing on her experience of imprisonment and torture, and why even in Europe she feels unsafe

Mahnaz Mohammadi is a survivor. The Iranian film-maker and women’s rights activist has been arrested on many occasions and imprisoned several times. In 2011, she was held for months in solitary confinement and tortured. In 2014, she was sentenced to five years and spent several months in prison. A few years ago, she met one of her first interrogators, from an early arrest.

“Do you know what he said to me?” she says. “He said he told his colleagues that after doing all those things, if I were going back behind the camera, it meant they couldn’t do anything with me. When I heard this from his mouth, I thought: ‘He’s right! Nobody can hurt me.’”

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He’s the only person who can keep Nigel Farage out of Downing Street, so let’s embrace his unique blend of optimism and realism

As Keir Starmer bid a brief and emotional farewell at that pillory of a lectern, there was a moment for some to ask: what have we done, and why? He’s not a bad man, not a Boris Johnson or Liz Truss rogue prime minister. How decadent, if lack of charisma has become a sacking offence.

But the reason why isn’t written in Westminster. It’s there in councils up and down the country where the hard-right Reform UK troopers swept through last month, from Barnsley to East Sussex. Look north, where Sunderland has 58 Reform councillors to Labour’s five. Look next door at South Tyneside, where Labour was nearly wiped out, left with only one councillor. Many Labour MPs now find themselves all but alone, their local parties hollowed out in an alien sea of Reform. Here’s why it matters beyond the green benches, beyond MPs’ personal careers, out in the very real world where services are (or aren’t) delivered locally.

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Voor deze rubriek sturen lezers een foto in van hun ouders. Deze keer stuurde Anne-Carin Praasterink een foto van haar moeder Ardina Eva (Dini) Docters van Leeuwen (1937-2007) en vader Mient Jan Praasterink (1935-1996).

We hebben de samenleving zo ingericht dat we voortdurend op ons tandvlees lopen. Dat maakt chagrijnig, maar in plaats van dat gevoel te bestrijden, zetten we de homo chagrijnicus juist op een voetstuk, ziet Arjen van Veelen.

Veteranendag gaat zaterdag in zeer beperkte vorm door. Dat meldt de organisatie op haar website: het defilé van militairen en veteranen door de binnenstad is afgelast, net als…

Middelbare scholen moeten meer doen om te zorgen voor een veilige schoolcultuur, vindt het Landelijk Aktie Komitee Scholieren (LAKS). Uit een enquête blijkt dat ruim 40 procent van de scholieren de afgelopen drie maanden werd gepest.

As the mercury climbs to disgusting heights, The Reg FOSS desk has picked out a few FOSS highlights from its overflowing mailbox, in case you fancy some Super Productivity while monitoring your AI habit. Prism Carbon Tracker The Prism carbon tracker is a neat idea for helping to instill a tiny bit of self control in the more dedicated botlickers on your development team. It's a plugin that integrates into Visual Studio Code. As the developer uses various "online coding assistants," Prism shows an estimate of how much CO₂ they're releasing in the process of outsourcing their mental activity to a datacenter somewhere. As the plugin's homepage says: "It captures token usage from GitHub Copilot Chat, Claude Code, and runtime LLM API calls, then calculates CO₂ equivalents and surfaces them in the sidebar, status bar, and a live dashboard." Prism comes out of a collaborative effort between the University of Bristol and ustwo, a majority employee-owned "global digital product studio." Ustwo's Nick Hegarty said: "Developers are not the problem, but a fundamental part of the solution. By making AI emissions visible during development, we hope to create greater awareness and support better decision-making. We believe even directional estimates can be valuable if they help start conversations and encourage more thoughtful AI usage." The emissions estimate uses "a transparent token-to-energy-to-carbon methodology informed by Green Software Foundation guidance and recent academic research." Super Productivity Maintainer Johannes Milan wrote to tell us about "Super Productivity." Normally a name like that would set our mental alarm bells ringing, but he did it just right. As a handy lesson for all the other breathlessly excited organizations out there, this is how to do it: with no hyperbole, and a terse text-only email with no formatting. He told us: "I maintain Super Productivity, a mature MIT-licensed local-first task manager and time tracker. It runs on Linux, Windows, macOS, web, and mobile; has Linux packages for Flatpak, Snap, AppImage, deb, and rpm; and works without accounts or telemetry." This is a good intro, so what does it do? It is "a local-first productivity app that is not another cloud suite: tasks, timeboxing, Pomodoro, time tracking, review, and issue tracker integrations in one offline-capable app." The phrase "local-first" twice makes us think he has a better idea of our interests than the PR people who tell us that they liked a random article from three years ago and so should write about their new AI-based product. If you want to see the source, it's on GitHub, and if you are more used to a bit of hyperbole, the product's homepage TAMOSS TAMOSS is a far more specialized tool, but may be very valuable to the people who need it. The name is short for Time-Addressable Media Open Source Store, and the product's homepage says "TAMOSS is an open source, Kubernetes-native implementation of the BBC TAMS API." Which of course merely left us wondering what the BBC TAMS API was, but happily, the Beeb has a bit over 100 years of experience at explaining stuff. It has some pretty good educational resources of its own. We suggest starting with the BBC R&D division's TAMS in 2025 – we found the introductory video there packed a decent summary into three and a half minutes. TAMS, short for Time-Addressable Media Store, is an API for a server that "can be used to store, query and access segmented media over HTTP." Most audio-visual media online is in the form of single, big, fat media files, which contain video, soundtrack, subtitles and more, all mixed together. This is very unhelpful if you want to edit the material, split off a soundtrack, or slow part of it down or whatever. It's a lowest common denominator sort of thing, but that's what all the tools understand and what existing servers know how to send. The TAMS spec lets a client request and receive separate parts of this (the sound, or the video, or both, or other data) by timeline using AMWA NMOS-compatible UUIDs over HTTP. NMOS here is the Networked Media Open Specifications from the Advanced Media Workflow Association. Did you know the BBC has its own GitHub? Us neither, but on it you'll find the open source TAMS API spec. The TAMS standard has its own site as well, and the Beeb hosts the BBC R&D white paper that the spec is based on. TAMS is a spec, not a product. There's nothing you can deploy there, which is where LiveWyer, a London-based Kubernetes and cloud-native consultancy, came in. It developed TAMOSS as open source, and it's publishing it for free under the Apache 2.0 license. The company told us "it lets any organisation run a fully functional, TAMS-compatible media store on its own infrastructure, whether that's from a laptop or a production cluster. No proprietary licensing, no vendor lock-in." ®

In de rechtbank in Dordrecht staan donderdag twee vermeende goudrovers terecht. Ze zijn op heterdaad betrapt in een auto met op de achterbank voor 850.000 euro aan edelmetaal. Plots gaat het in de rechtbank ook over een kijkcijferhit van Netflix.

Op de A29 richting Rotterdam is vrijdagochtend een ongeluk gebeurd waarbij een aanhanger op de zijkant is beland in de Heinenoordtunnel. De vertraging liep vanaf knooppunt Hellegatsplein op tot een uur. De weg is inmiddels weer vrij en er is geen vertraging meer.

En voor wie echt dorstig is: slenter met dit warme weer naar de boekwinkel. En doe mee met zomerlezen met Ilja Gort.

Social

Hoop om te doen, die in Duitsland verboden wraakfilm Citizen Vigilante, waar in plaats van een ge-race-swapped fotonegatief van de werkelijkheid, de daders van groepsverkrachtingen van Europese vrouwen ineens gewoon echt islamitische immigranten zijn. En dan zette Elon hem ook nog even integraal op Twitter. Kort verhaal lang: het is, zoals het een werk van regisseur Uwe Boll betaamt, over de hele linie een slechte film. Veel te nadrukkelijk schrijfwerk, slechte cinematografie, maar dan wel met - wegens veelvoudig seksueel wangedrag - gevallen A-lister Armie Hammer in de hoofdrol, die het platte personage naar omstandigheden toch niet onverdienstelijk neerzet. Maar het gaat er even niet om dat het een slechte film is, het gaat erom dat de film het taboe doorbreekt op het benoemen van de daders.

In de tweede helft - onderstaand dus alleen te zien voor GeenStijl Premiums (hier voor slechts 5 euro per maand) - bespreken we natuurlijk ook nog het eigenlijke wereldnieuws, namelijk de nieuwe neus van looksmaxxer Clavicular, zijn bezoek aan Parijs, de bredere betekenis van dit fenomeen onder jongens, en ander lichtvoetig nieuws zoals het nieuwe rapport over de Pakistaanse verkrachtingsbendes in Engeland. Kortom, kijkvoer voor deze airco-binnendag!

(We zijn trouwens hard bezig de Premium-helft ook in alle podcast-apps beschikbaar te krijgen, bedankt voor uw geduld met dit team van slechts zes schrijvers.)
UPDATE: Premium gedeelte DOET HET NU

Tweede helft van aflevering onderstaand alleen voor GeenStijl Premiums!

Keith Midson has added a photo to the pool:

Kelvedon Beach on Tasmania's east coast.