Zo’n driekwart van de Nederlanders had in 2025 te veel PFAS in het bloed. Dat meldt het RIVM. In Dordrecht waren de waarden bijna het slechtst van het hele land. Alleen rond de industrie in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen was het nog extremer.

Grote stukken piepschuim, karton, banden en zelfs meubilair: Zwerfie Rotterdam ergert zich mateloos aan al het afval dat in bermen langs snelwegen ligt. Volgens de organisatie die zwerfafval opruimt wordt het steeds viezer langs de snelweg. "Nederland wordt zo steeds vuiler", verzucht Frans van Zaalen, vrijwilliger bij Zwerfie.

UTRECHT (ANP) - De Nederlandse milieuorganisatie Both ENDS dient in Brussel een klacht in tegen Nieuw-Zeeland, omdat het land klimaatafspraken uit een twee jaar oude handelsovereenkomst met de Europese Unie niet zou nakomen. De Nieuw-Zeelandse regering hief vorig jaar een verbod op de zoektocht naar nieuwe olie- en gasvelden op zee op. Ook voerde ze onlangs wetgeving in die een lopende klimaatzaak tegen een zuivelconcern onmogelijk maakte.

Both ENDS vindt dat daarmee de afspraak geschonden wordt dat de EU en Nieuw-Zeeland milieuwetgeving niet zullen afzwakken om investeringen en handel aan te moedigen. Ook zou Nieuw-Zeeland de belofte om zich te houden aan het klimaatakkoord van Parijs niet langer nakomen.

De milieuorganisatie heeft de klacht ingediend bij een meldpunt waar mensen de Europese Commissie kunnen verzoeken om naleving van handelsafspraken af te dwingen. Zij krijgt daarbij steun van Nieuw-Zeelandse milieuorganisaties Greenpeace Aotearoa en Environmental Law Initiative.

Wakker worden tussen de bergen, ontbijten in de Spaanse zon en daarna een stokstaartje, een stel hangbuikzwijnen en een kudde geiten van eten voorzien. Het klinkt als een ietwat merkwaardige vakantie, maar in de Sierra de Gredos kun je er daadwerkelijk voor tekenen. Santuario Dharma zoekt vrijwilligers die tijdelijk willen intrekken op het enorme terrein van de dierenopvang.

Het opvangcentrum ligt in de ongerepte natuur ten westen van Madrid, niet ver van het bergplaatsje Candeleda. Op veertien hectare wonen meer dan honderd geredde dieren. Van honden en katten tot paarden, ganzen, schildpadden en dus dat stokstaartje.

Wie denkt hier gratis vakantie te kunnen vieren, moet alleen nog even verder lezen.

Vier uur werken voor kost en inwoning

Vrijwilligers draaien zes dagen per week ongeveer vier uur mee. Daarvoor krijg je onderdak, dagelijks drie maaltijden, wifi en de mogelijkheid om je was te doen. Ook helpt de organisatie met vervoer naar de opvang vanaf het afgesproken aankomstpunt. Eén dag per week ben je vrij.

Het werk is verspreid over de dag. 's Ochtends begint de grootste ronde: dieren controleren, verblijven openen en schoonmaken en zorgen dat iedereen eten en vers water heeft. Later volgt een kort controlemoment voor onder meer dieren met bijzondere voedingsbehoeften. Aan het einde van de dag worden onder andere de honden en katten nog gevoerd.

Een beetje aanpakken dus. De bewoners van Santuario Dharma zijn bovendien geen knuffeldieren die speciaal voor toeristen klaarstaan. De opvang bekommert zich over dieren die zijn verwaarloosd, mishandeld of gedumpt.

En daar zijn er in Spanje helaas meer dan genoeg van. Volgens Fundación Affinity belanden jaarlijks ruim 285.000 honden en katten in Spaanse opvangcentra. Omgerekend zijn dat honderden dieren per dag.

Geen wijn bij het avondeten

Er zitten behoorlijk wat voorwaarden aan het Spaanse avontuur. Vrijwilligers moeten in principe volwassen zijn, goed Spaans spreken en alleen komen. Je eigen hond of kat meenemen is geen optie.

Ook de leefregels zijn stevig. Tijdens je verblijf eet je veganistisch en alcohol, drugs, sigaretten en vapes zijn niet toegestaan. Verwacht verder geen brandschoon resortleven: dieren verzorgen betekent modder, zweet en vieze kleren. En uitslapen kan ingewikkeld worden als de plaatselijke hanen andere plannen hebben.

Professionele ervaring met dieren is dan weer niet vereist. Motivatie telt zwaarder. De opvang ziet het liefst vrijwilligers die enkele maanden blijven, zodat ze niet net zijn ingewerkt wanneer hun vliegtuig alweer vertrekt.

Wie dus droomt van een tijdje Spanje, graag dieren helpt en zonder sangria, serranoham en sigaretten kan, heeft ineens een wel heel bijzonder alternatief voor overwinteren gevonden.

Bron: Panorama

Soon, Jon Adams

Brett Simmons on how using the stock Mac UI isn’t the easy choice it used to be. “Many of the apps people think look good are not using stock UI.” Simmons’ own quickie redesign of NetNewsWire looks much better to me than the Liquid Glassified version.

GOP senators lash out on Smith, who led criminal cases against Trump, with invective and inaccurate information

Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led two criminal cases against Donald Trump in 2023, faced attacks from Republicans in a wide-ranging hearing on Tuesday that included a basketball mix-up, a reference to the tooth fairy and accusations of perjury.

In the Senate judiciary committee hearing on Tuesday, the Republican senator Eric Schmitt, of Missouri, raised perjury allegations against Smith, seemingly over a mix-up about the Atlanta Hawks and University of Iowa Hawkeyes basketball teams.

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• Aleksander Ceferin condemns FFE and Balogun affair

• Tells club chiefs it is ‘time to say enough’ to Fifa

The Uefa president, Aleksander Ceferin, has attacked his embattled Fifa counterpart Gianni Infantino in a scathing takedown of the failed Fifa Forward Enterprise (FFE) project and other recent scandals, saying “the emperor is naked” and declaring “it is time to say ‘enough’”.

In a pointed address to the European Football Clubs (EFC) general assembly, Ceferin did not mention Infantino by name but made clear his view that Fifa’s leadership must change. He drew on the event’s location, Copenhagen, to make a comparison to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes in assessing Infantino’s conduct, making clear reference to the peace prize awarded to Donald Trump and last summer’s Folarin Balogun affair along with the FFE scheme.

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Texts, including unnamed male defendant appearing to apologize, reportedly sent days after alleged 2024 assault

Excerpts of text messages reportedly exchanged by a defendant in the Cornell University gang-rape case and the woman who claims she was assaulted were published by CBS News on Tuesday, a day after New York prosecutors said they were reopening a criminal investigation.

The texts were reportedly sent within days of the alleged October 2024 assault at a campus fraternity house in which a female student said she was drugged and repeatedly raped over the course of seven hours by multiple men who were alerted to her presence on the social media platform Snapchat.

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The Edinburgh-based writer takes £15,000 prize for Ditto, a ‘beautifully told’ story about domestic abuse in a small Australian town

• Read an extract from Ditto below

Edinburgh-based writer Cherise Saywell has won this year’s BBC national short story award for a “tender” and “taut” story about a young boy caught in the midst of domestic violence.

Saywell was announced as the winner of the £15,000 award, run in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, at a ceremony held at BBC Broadcasting House on Tuesday evening.

A full audio recording of Ditto is available on BBC Sounds.

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When a critical application fails, the last thing an IT team needs is a debate over who's responsible. Yet in complex enterprise environments, network, application, and compute teams often rely on separate legacy monitoring tools, each providing only part of the picture. Identifying the root cause can become a time-consuming exercise while essential services remain unavailable. As organizations expand their use of AI, hybrid infrastructure, and sovereign cloud environments, the challenge is becoming more pressing. The systems supporting critical services are growing more interconnected, while the need for resilience, operational efficiency, and effective governance continues to increase. AI agents are starting to take on some of that operational load, but an agent reasoning from legacy monitoring data sees the same partial picture the humans do. But are enterprise leaders seeing the same risks as the teams responsible for keeping these systems running? Research by Virtana suggests a significant observability gap between what boardrooms believe they know about their IT environments and what frontline operators experience. In this interview, The Register's Tim Phillips speaks with Paul Appleby, CEO of Virtana, about the limitations of legacy monitoring approaches and how agentic observability could help organizations gain a clearer picture of their infrastructure. Appleby explores why fragmented legacy monitoring can leave IT teams struggling to distinguish the cause of an incident from its symptoms, and how agentic observability, which correlates real-time telemetry across applications, cloud, infrastructure, networks, and AI systems, gives AI agents the context to accelerate root cause analysis and remediation. The discussion also examines the growing importance of observability for data sovereignty and AI infrastructure. As enterprises invest in AI factories and increasingly complex workloads, Appleby considers how organizations can maintain visibility across the technology stack, strengthen governance, and address operational risks before they disrupt critical services. For IT leaders, the interview offers a perspective on moving beyond the traditional focus on proving which team wasn't responsible, toward faster resolution, preventative observability, and more resilient operations. It also raises an important question for executive teams: Is investment in governance and operational controls keeping pace with the infrastructure and AI services their businesses increasingly depend on? Watch the full interview below to explore how agentic observability can help enterprises can close the observability gap and strengthen their approach to IT resilience. Contributed by Virtana

The first systems powered by AMD's Gorgon Halo system-on-chip (SoC) platform have arrived, boasting up to 192 GB of unified memory on board. That's enough to put DeepSeek V4 Flash on your desk if you can afford to pay a hefty premium for all that RAM. GMKtec's EVO-X5 Pro is among the first to feature the House of Zen's top-specced Ryzen AI Max+ 495 SoC — you can see why we're just going to call it Gorgon Halo from here on out — but with regular pricing starting at $6,799, all that memory doesn't come cheap. But for local AI enthusiasts and perhaps privacy-conscious small businesses, it might be worth it just to run larger, more capable models from the security of their homes and offices. At 4-bit precision, Gorgon Halo is equipped with enough memory to run models to around 345 billion parameters on Linux or 320 billion parameters on Windows. The difference here comes down to memory partitioning. On Windows, you'll need to allocate 160 GB of memory to the GPU, while the Linux kernel and AMD's GPU drivers enable users to take advantage of nearly all of the available memory. This puts high-profile frontier models like the 284 billion parameter DeepSeek V4 Flash or Z.AI's 320 billion parameter GLM-5.3-Flash within reach of Gorgon Halo customers. The chip Announced earlier this year, Gorgon Halo is essentially a factory overclocked version of the Strix Halo APU that powers AMD's AI Halo workstation that we reviewed this summer. Both chips can be had with up to 16 Zen 5 cores, a 40-compute-unit integrated GPU, and an XDNA 2-based NPU to power all the Copilot+ features you didn't ask for but Microsoft is pushing on you anyway. The big difference between the chips is that AMD has bumped up the clocks by about 100 MHz across the board, and Gorgon Halo now supports 192 GB of faster 8,533 MT/s LPDDR5x memory compared to Strix Halo's 128 GB of 8,000 MT/s. In terms of performance, we don't expect the clock bump to make a meaningful difference. With that said, the faster memory could help a little bit for local AI enthusiasts. Large language model (LLM) inference — that is, the process of running pre-trained models — is predominantly memory bound. That means the faster your memory is, the faster the system can generate tokens. But while Gorgon Halo does achieve high memory bandwidth at 273 GB/s, that's only about 6.5 percent faster than Strix Halo at 256 GB/s. At most, you can expect to see a few more tokens a second on highly optimized models. Priced out of the market Gorgon's main attraction is really the prospect of higher memory capacity. But as we mentioned before, the ongoing memory shortage has not been kind to consumer electronics. A year ago, a 128 GB Strix Halo box would have set you back between $2,000 and $3,000 depending on OEM. DDR5 prices have skyrocketed since then and by the time AMD launched its AI Halo workstation this summer, prices had jumped to $4,000. With 50 percent more memory, you can expect Gorgon Halo-based products to be even pricier. The GMKtec unit is already 64 percent more expensive and the brand is usually on the more affordable side of things. More premium brands like Framework and notebooks like HP's ZBook Ultra G3a will likely command a steep premium. Unfortunately for AMD, there's not a lot that can be done. LPDDR5x is in short supply thanks to the AI boom. Each NVL72 rack Nvidia sells is packed with between 36 and 54 TB of the stuff, and that's just CPU memory. The situation is only going to get worse as AMD embraces LPDDR5x for its own AI-optimized Verano Epycs. If you need a lot of memory right now, you're in for a lot of pain, and the situation isn't expected to improve anytime soon. Earlier this year, Samsung warned that memory supplies are likely to remain constrained through 2028, which is bad news for everyone including AMD's top competitor Nvidia. Nvidia has also seen the price of AI workstations based on its GB10 SoC roughly double over the past year, jumping from $3,000-$4,000 a year ago to $6,000-$8,000 today, which doesn't bode well for its Windows SoC debut. Announced at Computex late this spring, Nvidia's RTX Spark is a family of premium Windows systems from major OEMs based around the same GB10 SoC and offering up to 128 GB of memory capacity. Considering these systems will be offered as both mini PCs and notebooks, we wouldn't be surprised to see them command a premium over existing GB10 boxes. Once again, this puts AMD in a position to undercut its competitor by offering more memory for less, but it's awfully hard to cross shop when you can't afford either option. ®

Psycroptic zijn een soort legendes in de Australische technische death metal scene. Ze bestaan al sinds 1999, en The Pulse of Annihilation is al hun 9e album. Shame on me dat ik er tot recent nog nooit van gehoord had. Maar hee, je kunt niet in elke muzikale niche duiken, toch? Blij dat ik ze nu toch ergens tegenkwam, want dit is werkelijk alleraardigst! Bij deze ook het hele album in de Closing Time, zodat jullie er ook allemaal extra lang van kunnen genieten.

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Ja terwijl de Haagse waan van de dag zich alweer opwindt over de uitgestoken linkerhand van de minderheidscoalitie naar PRO, willen wij het toch nog even over afgelopen zondag hebben. Want ten eerste: wat nou slip of the tongue? En ten tweede, zoals Jan Dijkgraaf vanochtend schreef: wat nou goed georganiseerde en goed gefinancierde organisaties die proberen eerst een kleine groep te pakken, daarna een steeds grotere groep, om alleen maar zelf meer macht te krijgen en de eigen diepe zakken meer te vullen? Is dat gelul van een dronken aardbei? Of weet Rob Jetten iets wat wij niet weten? En zo ja, wat dan? En zou hij die lui dan niet eens heel gauw op hun bek moeten slaan?

Een scheiding, geen tijd, geen geld: om allerlei redenen kunnen kinderen thuis niet de aandacht krijgen die ze nodig hebben. Dan kunnen ze terecht bij vrijwilligersinitiatief Vitalismaatjes voor een maatje. „Sommigen blijven echt járen bij elkaar.”

Gaza is aan gort geschoten. Dat was al bekend via Palestijnen die vanuit Gaza verslag uitbrengen (Israël ontzegt buitenlandse journalisten nog altijd de toegang tot het gebied)…

MHKBB posted a photo:

Rovaniemi, Finland

Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Carl Zeiss Planar T* 2.8/80 C
Film: Ilford XP2 Super
Lab: Prolab, Stuttgart

Reuben “Rube” Goldberg (1883-1970) was known for his comic strips, political cartoons, and unique inventions. His most enduring legacy, however, is arguably the Rube Goldberg machine. Still bearing his name, these contraptions are often comical or playful due to their “overengineered” nature, using complex sequences of simple chain reactions like rolling ramps, weight and pulley systems, domino chains, and pendulum swings.

“Busy Bodies,” created by animator Kate Renshaw-Lewis, is a short film inspired by these straightforward yet intricate mechanisms. The animation presents an imaginative process for what seems to be the creation of red rubber gloves and the packaging of vague fish products. As tiny hat-wearing creatures—reminiscent of factory workers—complete their assigned tasks like clockwork, Renshaw-Lewis emphasizes “the mystery and absurdity behind how we get items that are so readily available to us,” she says.

The moving image is entirely hand-drawn, combining inkjet and screen printing techniques. Throughout the film a satisfying flow of tasks ensues, leading up to a climax that abstracts the visuals into shifting colors and outlines. This “under the hood” perspective provides viewers with a larger understanding of the painstakingly manual process behind the work.

Renshaw-Lewis’ film won the Grand Jury Prize for best animated short at Slamdance Film Festival, and it was nominated for Best Film at Sundance Film Festival. Watch more from the artist on Vimeo, and find some behind-the-scenes tidbits on Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article A Workforce of Creatures Chugs Along in Kate Renshaw-Lewis’ Hand-Drawn Film “Busy Bodies” appeared first on Colossal.