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John Healey is right about the risk of wars. But it has become politically treacherous for Nato leaders to borrow for defence

Since the historic Nato summit in The Hague one year ago this month, European leaders have pledged massive increases in defence spending in the face of increasingly acute threats of Russian aggression. Yet the reality is that key west European governments – especially the UK, France and Italy – are not putting their money where their mouth is for fear of undermining lenders’ confidence in their national debt.

Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni are behaving as if they were more scared of the bond markets than they are of the Russians. The dramatic resignation of the UK defence secretary John Healey in protest over Starmer’s reluctance to ramp up investment highlights how politically treacherous it has become to find these much-needed resources.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Suit filed in US alleges chatbot told Alice Carrier, 24, ‘maybe this is just the end’ as she struggled with suicidal thoughts

A Canadian mother sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US court on Thursday, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her daughter to commit suicide. The lawsuit is the latest in a slew accusing the company of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and the company’s chatbot.

Kristie Carrier said in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco state court that her daughter, Alice, told ChatGPT about her suicidal ideations more than a dozen times leading up to her death but that OpenAI’s safety systems never flagged the conversations for human review or terminated them.

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Hundreds of Labour activists and MPs have ‘made the pilgrimage’ to the seat, where they are pounding the streets

For a few short weeks, the centre of political gravity in Britain has shifted from the Palace of Westminster to the bar of a former Labour club in Wigan.

In London, even as Keir Starmer insists he will fight to stay in No 10, the walls seem to be crumbling around him, especially with Thursday’s resignation of the defence secretary, John Healey.

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He served through the eras of Blair, Brown, Miliband and Corbyn in a party that knows and respects him. It will matter that even his patience has run out

John Healey is not a rash man. Slow to anger, calm in a crisis, loyal and yet beneath it all, formidably determined. He stuck at it through the Jeremy Corbyn years, much as he privately despaired of where the party was heading, keeping his thoughts to himself because all he wanted was for Labour to win again. When it did, under Keir Starmer, he became the understated anchor to a frequently gale-tossed ship of government; the solid citizen everybody liked and nobody distrusted, a natural choice for caretaker leader had Starmer ever fallen under a bus.

Or, perhaps, been pushed under a tank.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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New Farm Bill places caps on non-US foods; nutritionists say it restricts availability of healthy meals for kids

School nutrition workers and advocates have “lots of concerns about bananas”, said Erin Ogden, policy associate for federal child nutrition programs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

Bananas are nutrient-dense foods that many children like. That makes them popular offerings in school cafeterias, since any healthy food that a kid will eat prevents waste and ensures that child isn’t eating either nothing or something less wholesome instead.

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"From the advent of the World Wide Web, consoles have been trying to get online. Browsers on video game consoles were initially very much an attempt to provide a cheap gateway to the web for a casual audience lacking technical expertise, though as time progressed they've become a greater and more integrated part of systems."

Donderdag werd de prestigieuze televisieprijs de Zilveren Nipkowschijf uitgereikt in Het Ketelhuis in Amsterdam. De documentaireserie ‘De Afhaalchinees: Thuisbezorgd’ won. De Zilveren Reissmicrofoon, de prijs voor radio en podcasts ging naar de podcast ‘De Rolverdeling’ van de NTR.

Nooit eerder was waargenomen dat celwanden zo snel bewegen als bij de venusvliegenvanger, een vleesetende plant. Daar zou de mens nog wat van kunnen leren, denken de onderzoekers.

In de bodem leven buisjesvormige schimmelnetwerken in symbiose met planten. Vooral in gebieden met veel grasland zijn die netwerken omvangrijk.

Goed nieuws vanuit het Brabantse Oudenbosch. De anderhalf jaar oude kat Oscar is daar teruggevonden in het bos. Het beestje verdween eind vorige maand uit zijn vertrouwde omgeving in Ridderkerk-Rijsoord. Oscar zou op een e-bike zijn meegenomen. Zijn baasje Remco is blij: “Toen ik werd gebeld, kon ik bijna niet praten."

Datacenters got you down? Worried that even the most innocuous questions will spin up AI models running in water-guzzling, energy-sucking, planet-destroying hyperscalers? You need CrankGPT. No, we’re not talking about surrendering to AI psychosis: we’re talking about a literal hand-cranked machine loaded with a voice agent that can respond to questions and even translate speech into other languages, provided someone keeps the power flowing. There’s an onboard custom-built capacitor board to store some juice, mind you, but it only provides around 20 seconds of crank-free runtime before you’ve gotta keep crankin’ to keep it alive. That, and it takes a bit of time to get it running - according to the documentation website, it’s a 30-second process “from the moment you start cranking to the moment you’re having a conversation with CrankGPT.” According to the AI expert duo behind the device, computer scientist Katrin Tomanek and former Google Advanced Technology and Projects Group technical project lead Alex Kauffmann, CrankGPT still delivers impressive results despite the need to perform some hard physical labor for your tokens (though we’d argue some exercise for your AI might not be a bad thing). “Asking Claude to add two numbers for you is like swatting a fly with a wrecking ball,” Kauffmann told The Register in an email. This tongue-in-cheek demonstration, Kauffmann said, may be a bit of light fun, but it’s an exercise in demonstrating what his and Tomanek’s AI company, Squeez, is all about: small, private specialized AI models that, in a pinch, might not even need very much energy or a connection to the web to operate. “Squeez produces customized, efficient, and private models that can run on small, inexpensive hardware to solve specific problems,” Kauffmann explained, citing tasks like voice recognition for someone with a strong accent or speech impediment, or specially-trained, local AIs that are subject matter experts in topics like gardening or auto repair, but won’t touch subjects outside their wheelhouse. Contrary to the flashy dot-com for CrankGPT the pair have set up, Kauffmann told me, Squeez has no plans to pursue spin cycle class-powered AI stacks for dev teams, though he said if anyone wants to foot the bill, he'd be happy to give it a shot. "Off-the-shelf bike generators are shockingly expensive and they're fussy to build," Kauffmann said. Still, "a good biker can maintain a steady 120W output, so a class of twenty could power a Blackwell." Speaking of wheelhouses, what’s inside that box? If there’s a tiny computer in a 3D-printed box with a crank attached, there’s a good possibility it’s going to be a Raspberry Pi, and that’s the case here. CrankGPT’s brain is built on a stock RPi 5 with 8 GB of RAM and a cooling fan HAT, and audio input and output are handled by a dedicated I/O HAT designed for voice assistants running RPis. Power comes from the aforementioned crank, which is actually an off-the-shelf 20W switchable voltage hand crank unit built for emergency USB device charging, and is stored in the custom capacitor unit the duo built. “The neatest part of the whole thing is that you can actually feel the inference,” Kauffmann told us. “The amount of resistance the crank presents varies depending on the amount of work the board is doing, so when it's really working (generating words for instance), the crank becomes much harder to turn than when it's idling waiting for you to say something.” As for software, the device is running the most stripped-down, bare bones instance of DietPi the pair could compile, which is able to boot into a functional userspace in about three seconds. The voice agent is the truly original piece of work done for the project, as detailed in the documentation page, and was built entirely from scratch. “We wanted to understand the system end to end and have as few dependencies as possible,” the documentation page notes. It’s available on GitHub for those interested in trying it out. Speech recognition is handled by the Moonshine automatic speech recognition engine, chosen for its speed, while text-to-speech synthesis is handled by Piper, chosen again for its low-resource edge inference capabilities. As for the models running on the thinking itself, there are a few that are behind CrankGPT, with Liquid LFM2 1.2B providing a general-purpose voice agent, and Gemma 3 1B being used for translation. CrankGPT can switch between translation and various prompts (e.g., general question answering and games like two truths and a lie) via a knob on the side of the enclosure. “It’s entirely configurable,” Kauffmann told us. “We added a couple of physical inputs (the knob, a button, a switch) to make experimentation easier.” Kauffmann added that he and Tomanek were surprised by how well the translation function worked. “We did no fine tuning, it's just a two-line prompt and it works really well for high-coverage languages,” he explained. While the demonstration focuses on audio prompts and responses, Kauffmann explained that the device supports all sorts of different models, with the only real limitation being inference time and the amount of hand cranking one wants to do to get their response. “We’ve generated images (small), made poetry (bad), and written code using the same setup,” the CrankGPT makers wrote in their documentation, all with “a hand crank, a little computer, and a small stack of speech and language models running locally.” If you’re interested in building your own CrankGPT model, keep an eye on the documentation page we linked earlier in this story, as Kauffmann told us he and Tomanek are planning to release all the plans and schematics in the coming days, while the aforementioned custom voice agent is already available for tinkering. “It's a pretty straightforward setup, the only tricky part is that SBCs like the Raspberry Pi will sometimes draw enough current to trigger a little generator's overcurrent protection,” Kauffmann told us. If you have a spare $300 lying around (that’s what Kauffmann estimates the RAM pricing surge has driven the build cost up to, from the $150 he spent when building CrankGPT last year), then you, too, may soon be able to build your own completely off-grid, standalone AI box so you can keep chatting with your favorite micro LLM if and when its bigger cousins knock the grid offline. ®

Weer voor Rotterdam 🌦️ - 11-06-2026 19:15 CEST

In één oogopslag:
• 13.4°C · Zware motregen 🌦️ | Min 12.4°C / Max 17.2°C | Kans op neerslag 48%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 12.4°C, Max 17.2°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 5.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 48%, 🧭 1017.0 hPa ↘️ -1.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 22.7 km/u (6.3 m/s), richting: ↗ 230°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 20:00: 12.9°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.0 mm, Kans op neerslag 100%, 🧭 1018.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 20.9 km/u (5.8 m/s), richting: ↗ 206°
• 21:00: 12.7°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.0 mm, Kans op neerslag 100%, 🧭 1017.3 hPa ↘️ -0.7 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.4 km/u (5.4 m/s), richting: ↑ 193°
• 22:00: 12.6°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.5 mm, Kans op neerslag 100%, 🧭 1016.7 hPa ↘️ -0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 22.7 km/u (6.3 m/s), richting: ↑ 197°
• 23:00: 12.4°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.5 mm, Kans op neerslag 100%, 🧭 1016.1 hPa ↘️ -0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 22.7 km/u (6.3 m/s), richting: ↑ 202°
• 00:00: 12.9°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.2 mm, Kans op neerslag 100%, 🧭 1015.8 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 21.2 km/u (5.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 212°
• 01:00: 13.2°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 100%, 🧭 1015.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.0 km/u (5.0 m/s), richting: ↗ 224°
• 02:00: 13.9°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.7 mm, Kans op neerslag 100%, 🧭 1015.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 225°
• 03:00: 15.4°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 91%, 🧭 1015.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.1 km/u (5.3 m/s), richting: → 268°
• 04:00: 15.4°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 78%, 🧭 1015.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: → 266°
• 05:00: 15.4°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 67%, 🧭 1016.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 20.9 km/u (5.8 m/s), richting: → 267°
• 06:00: 15.4°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 61%, 🧭 1016.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 20.9 km/u (5.8 m/s), richting: → 272°
• 07:00: 15.4°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.5 mm, Kans op neerslag 57%, 🧭 1016.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: → 275°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• vrijdag 12 juni: Min 13.9°C, Max 17.3°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 3.6 mm, Kans op neerslag 63%, 🧭 1017.6 hPa ↗️ +0.6 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 23.4 km/u (6.5 m/s), richting: → 257°
• zaterdag 13 juni: Min 14.6°C, Max 18.2°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 23%, 🧭 1019.5 hPa ↗️ +1.9 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 24.5 km/u (6.8 m/s), richting: → 275°
• zondag 14 juni: Min 12.1°C, Max 16.5°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 1.6 mm, Kans op neerslag 20%, 🧭 1018.8 hPa ↘️ -0.7 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 19.1 km/u (5.3 m/s), richting: ↘ 306°
• maandag 15 juni: Min 11.9°C, Max 17.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1018.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 10.2 km/u (2.8 m/s), richting: ↘ 307°
• dinsdag 16 juni: Min 12.4°C, Max 23.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1015.3 hPa ↘️ -3.2 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 16.7 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: ↗ 210°
• woensdag 17 juni: Min 15.0°C, Max 23.4°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌤️, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1016.0 hPa ↗️ +0.7 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.7 km/u (4.1 m/s), richting: ↗ 227°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 19:15): 13.4°C (Zware motregen)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 10.0°C (-3.4°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: ↗ 206°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 39.2 km/h (10.9 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 86%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1018.0 hPa ↘️ -1.3 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 18.1 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.3
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 05:22 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 22:00

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 30 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 4.9 μg/m³
• PM10: 8.1 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

Ahead of his home race, Fernando Alonso has reflected on how long he will continue racing in F1.

Plenty of people within F1 are excited about the start of the 2026 World Cup, and the drivers are no different..

A close-up look at some of Spain’s oldest & most compelling cave paintings. “We lost the connection they had to this world. They led the way quite nicely and successfully, and we got…distracted.”

Bizar fragment uit een bizar rechtbankverslag van Rijnmond-ster Paul Verspeek over de zaak tegen Amin el A., die als een totale gek door Rotterdam en omstreken reed in een auto die hij had geleend voor een proefrit, botste met een 86-jarige vrouw die uiteindelijk overleed, er daarna volgens getuigen 'als een haas' vandoor ging om later zijn auto schoon te poetsen en doodleuk de sportschool in te duiken, vervolgens dagenlang de auto niet inleverde om nadat die door de politie was afgepakt, samen met zijn rijbewijs, doodleuk nog een keer een proefrit in een dure auto te gaan maken. 

"De familie neemt het de verdachte zeer kwalijk dat hij is doorgereden: “Welke laffe, waardeloze hond doet dit? Jij dus. Je hebt haar achtergelaten als oud vuil om jouw vege lijf te redden.”

De opmerkingen schieten de advocaat van El A. in het verkeerde keelgat. “Hier is mogelijk sprake van een strafbare belediging.” Hij vraagt de rechter om even op de gang te mogen zitten. “Om te kalmeren.”"

WTF hee. Strafbare belediging. Iemand die een laffe, waardeloze hond is een laffe, waardeloze hond noemen. Strafbare belediging. Ja een belediging voor honden zeker. Hoe krijg je het uit je muil. Wat ben je dan een laffe, waardeloze hond.