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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John Healey has resigned as defence secretary over the government’s military spending plans, in another significant blow for Keir Starmer.

In a scathing letter to the prime minister, Healey said the long-awaited defence investment plan “falls well short of what is required for defence” and that he would have had to take decisions that “could make Britain less safe”.

Nosheen Iqbal speaks to the Guardian’s policy editor, Kiran Stacey

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Responding to an incident in which she was verbally abused, the actor said that that ‘evil forces are rising everywhere’, as well as expressing support for MobLand co-star Tom Hardy

Helen Mirren has commented on being called an “evil Zionist bitch” while being harassed in the street in London, saying she was “attacked by mistake by a man who was maybe a little over passionate or maybe mentally not quite stable”.

Footage circulated last month of an incident, believed to have taken place last year, while Mirren was walking with her husband, film-maker Taylor Hackford. They were approached and filmed by an unidentified person, who commented on Mirren’s support of Israel and then launched a volley of abuse at her.

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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.

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.

Een Iraans gezin in het azc in Bergschenhoek voelt zich al langere tijd onveilig. De vader stelt dat zijn jonge dochter onder druk wordt gezet vanwege haar christelijke geloof, dat zijn vrouw is bedreigd en dat klachten bij het Centraal Orgaan opvang asielzoekers (COA) nog niet hebben geleid tot verbetering.

Amazon, along with the rest of the industry, has gotten so used to framing everything that happens through the context of AI that it has lost the plot on their Graviton chip lineup, and along with it their own credibility. Which is a shame, because it's actually a triumph of a chip. First, the Wall Street Journal breathlessly reported that Snowflake's $6 billion AWS commitment was "for agentic computing chips." Then AWS's own press release heralded the release of their latest chips "for the Agentic AI era." In both cases, they were referring to their Graviton line. You could be forgiven for thinking this was some kind of GPU. No, that's Trainium. (Technically, Trainium isn't a GPU, nor is it a CPU, but rather a systolic array. Don't worry; most AI engineering software doesn't know what the hell that is, either.) Graviton is AWS's general purpose Arm CPU, which can be used for AI in much the same way as Excel can be used as a database. But that's far from its only, or even primary, purpose. Let's dive into what Graviton actually is. Price / Performance / Reality For the longest time, Amazon refused to issue benchmarks, competitively positioning its then-nascent Arm line against Intel. Many of us thought this meant that the results would underwhelm — so you can imagine my surprise when real-world workload tests showed 35 percent to 40 percent better performance in a wide variety of situations. It was as if Amazon had built something amazing, but was somehow embarrassed to admit it. Those days are long behind us; they trumpet in the subhead of their announcement that Graviton 5 means "apps run 35% faster, ML inference is 35% faster, and databases are 30% faster." To their credit, I was expecting those numbers to be against something ancient, but in a refreshing bout of honesty, they're comparing them to Graviton 4, itself no slouch. They are also 9 percent more expensive. Once upon a time, new generations of AWS instances were notably less expensive than their predecessors. Going from a c4.large to a c5.large meant you'd get better performance, and the instance itself was a whopping 15 percent cheaper. Upgrading was a no-brainer! That started changing, and now upgrading means the instance becomes more expensive. AWS's position is that this is an incomplete analysis, since the improved performance means you'd pay less for a given workload. In some cases, this is correct, but in others, it's akin to saying that a Ferrari offers better price performance than my Honda CR-V because I can drive it to work three times faster. Logic, as well as traffic lights, disagree. Amazon's contention is correct for customers who have large fleets of nodes that they run at high degrees of CPU utilization. Switching those fleets to the new hotness will absolutely result in a price performance improvement, provided the workload and the stars both align. However, for customers who need a fixed number of nodes (think database companies, who offer each customer of theirs a set number of replicas, or workloads of the form "each environment gets three nodes, one in each AZ"), this represents a pure 9 percent price hike going from old generations to new ones. That puts many customers in a pickle: upgrade to new instance families, or stay on the old ones and watch availability become constrained in the coming years as AWS stops racking old chips. (Hi, Amazon PR! If you're about to pop into my inbox to tell me that won't happen, I have a customer I'd love for you to have a chat with!) But this price hike isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening against a backdrop of "an 8GB Raspberry Pi is now $175, over twice its launch price of $85." Components have become fiendishly expensive across the board as giant companies compete for capacity, and AWS has to be feeling that pressure. Two companies each asked to buy all of AWS's Graviton capacity for the year; AWS clearly has room to kick their prices into the stratosphere! Somehow, they're not only resisting the siren song of "please gouge me, business daddy," but also managing to keep availability strong for customers of all stripes; I upgraded my developer node in my tiny unremarkable AWS account yesterday, and it Just Worked. And so... Despite the nonsense marketing, I don't want to detract from just how amazing Annapurna Labs (Amazon's chip division) has been at churning out wildly performant silicon year over year. Their chips are legitimately great, and the Graviton 5 numbers are a triumph. Lost against the backdrop of "Agentic AI," the stuff underpinning all of it continues to work, improve, and largely pass by unremarked. Keep going. ®

Lillakanarie has added a photo to the pool:

Built in 1923, Hakodate, Hokkaido, Japan.