- "Ik word wel ongeduldig", zei Luc Stultiens van PRO donderdagmiddag na weer een gesprek met minister Eelco Heinen (Financiën) over de begroting met Prinsjesdag. De financieel woordvoerder van de linkse fusiepartij hoort "vooral heel weinig" tijdens de gesprekken met de VVD-bewindsman. "Op een gegeven moment moet je ook als kabinet zelf beslissen: wij gaan met links of rechts en we gaan bereid zijn om te schuiven. Dat is nog niet gebleken."

Stultiens wil pas een vervolgafspraak maken als duidelijk is "wat de status en het doel" van volgende gesprekken is. "Want wij kunnen blijven herhalen wat we vinden. Dat hebben we al best wel vaak gezegd. U kunt het allemaal dromen." PRO wil dat het kabinet afziet van de bezuinigingen op sociale zekerheid en ook dat vermogens meer belast worden.

Eerder op de dag sprak Heinen met JA21 en SGP, die tijdens de onderhandelingen samen optrekken. Dat gesprek duurde 2,5 uur. Stultiens verliet na een klein uur het ministerie van Financiën.

BRUSSEL/REYKJAVIK (ANP) - Na het luchtruim van oostelijke NAVO-landen beschermt de NAVO ook dat van IJsland beter. De 'luchtruimbewaking' is ook in het kwetsbare noorden van het bondgenootschap opgeschaald naar 'luchtverdediging' om bijvoorbeeld vijandelijke drones effectiever te kunnen pareren.

De NAVO bewaakt het luchtruim van landen die aan Rusland grenzen al jaren met een "air policing"-missie. Bij toerbeurt staan vliegtuigen uit Nederland en andere NAVO-landen klaar om onwelkome vliegtuigen en grote verkenningsdrones op weg naar het NAVO-luchtruim te onderscheppen, te volgen en weg te sturen. Maar F-35's zijn niet het beste wapen tegen de goedkope drones die het slagveld van nu domineren en geregeld in landen als Polen, Roemenië en de Baltische staten terechtkomen, beseft de alliantie. Daarom wordt er nu haastig gewerkt aan een 'gelaagde' luchtverdediging die met elk gevaar uit de lucht raad weet.

"De hele inrichting van de luchtruimbewaking gaat een tandje hoger", zegt defensie-expert Patrick Bolder van het Haagse Centrum voor Strategische Studies (HCSS).

CHICAGO (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De Amerikaanse verkopen van de Nintendo Switch 2 zijn in juli meer dan gehalveerd in vergelijking met dezelfde maand vorig jaar. Daarmee is sprake van een brede neergang in de hardwaremarkt voor games, meldt marktonderzoeker Circana.

De totale uitgaven aan gameshardware in de VS daalden met 29 procent tot 282 miljoen dollar. Dat is het laagste niveau sinds de coronapandemie. In volume ging de markt nog meer achteruit. Dat daalde met 39 procent.

Nintendo blies het enthousiasme voor gamen vorige zomer nog nieuw leven in met de komst van de Switch 2. Maar het ontbreken van een echte kraker uit de Mario- of Zelda-franchises heeft de verkopen daarna geen goed gedaan.

Mat Piscatella, directeur bij Circana, denkt echter dat er meer aan de hand is. Volgens hem hebben hogere hardwareprijzen, veroorzaakt door een gebrek aan chips en onderdelen, de verkoopcijfers van zowel de PlayStation 5 als de Xbox Series geraakt. "En er hangt ook een prijsverhoging voor de Nintendo Switch 2 in de lucht."

ZANDVOORT (ANP) - Max Verstappen wil optimaal genieten van de laatste Dutch Grand Prix op het circuit van Zandvoort. "Het is hier alle keren heel bijzonder geweest. Ik wil heel graag die laatste keer ook die positieve sfeer ervaren en goed afsluiten", zei de viervoudig wereldkampioen in de Formule 1 in een persconferentie op het circuit in de duinen.

De Formule 1 keerde in 2021 na 36 jaar afwezigheid terug in Zandvoort. In december 2024 besloten de huidige promotors dat de financiële risico's te groot waren om door te gaan. Dit weekeinde is de zesde en laatste Dutch Grand Prix.

Verstappen won de eerste drie edities. "Er ligt hier geschiedenis. Er komen zoveel fans die van autosport houden. Rijden op dit circuit is echt geweldig. Het is absoluut een van de beste circuits op de kalender. Het heeft karakter, dus ik ga het zeker missen. Zelfs als ik geen Nederlander was, zou het geweldig zijn geweest om hier te rijden, en als Nederlander maakte het het nog specialer."

Agreement is among largest third-country deportations driven by Trump administration’s immigration crackdown

The United States sent 20 deportees to Liberia, who arrived on Thursday as part of 1,200 migrants that the African country will receive under a new deal.

The deportees arrived at the Roberts international airport outside Monrovia. The Liberia-US agreement is among the largest third-country deportations driven by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.

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Even film-makers have been inspired by Insomniac’s take on Spidey. But the studio’s tried and tested format might not fit a superhero with such sharp claws

The recent Marvel’s Spider-Man games have become so tightly interwoven with the character’s core that they’ve been cited, by both actor Tom Holland and director Destin Daniel Cretton, as an influence on this year’s blockbuster film Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Now the same development studio – Sony-owned Insomniac Games – is taking on one of Marvel’s other most recognisable characters in his first video game-starring role since some deeply mid-tier film tie-ins back in the 00s. So can they pull off the same trick with Marvel’s Wolverine?

Storywise it certainly takes a similar approach, once again grabbing ideas from a wide selection of inspirations and remixing them into a brand-new continuity. We first meet this version of Wolverine as he is discovered: wild-eyed, wilder haired and practically nude. Before we see his saviour’s face, we hear a well-spoken voice (provided by legendary game actor Troy Baker) promising a safe place “for people like us”. Surely this is Charles Xavier?

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It’s not always about the big things we achieve, sometimes the little accomplishments can be enjoyable. Tell us about yours here

Sometimes it’s the smallest accomplishments which bring the biggest joy. Something as simple as reorganising your cutlery drawer, for example, or repairing garden fence can prove surprisingly satisfying; it needn’t be just running a marathon or writing a novel provide a sense of achievement.

With this in mind, we want to hear about the small accomplishments which give you joy.

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Updates from Headingley after rain delay
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In fact, that’s quite a decent, if soggy, rabbit hole to head down for an OBO discussion. The Butterfly Effect of rain delays. Which games and whose careers might have looked significantly different if the wet stuff hadn’t fallen at a particular time or other?

I’ll wrack my brains, right now I’m just thinking of Tim Henman v Goran Ivanišević in the 2001 Wimbledon Semi Final:

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Using weight loss drugs like Ozempic is not ‘cheating’ – and why does it matter how a person changes their body anyway?

As you might know if you read my columns, see me a mile away, or talk to me for five seconds, I am a card-carrying lifelong member of the Fat Lesbian Club. However, ever since I first laid eyes on the television show Roseanne (very important to me) as a small child, the actor John Goodman has held a special place in my heart. It was confusing for me: did I want to be Dan Conner, or be with Dan Conner? I’m still not sure. He has always been so hot to me, from Dan on Roseanne to Fred Flintstone to Walter in The Big Lebowski. His body has now drawn attention in the last week or so, after a photo of him showing significant weight loss went viral.

It’s not Goodman’s 74-year-old body (his choice) I want to discuss, but instead the arguments that broke out about how he lost the weight. On one side there were many people congratulating him on his hard work. Then there were people claiming he had taken Ozempic so it wasn’t actually hard work, and then there were people defending that by saying he’d been losing weight for years, so he’d done it the “right way”, actually.

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Family relationships remain damaged and there is no clarity on how Sussexes’ security concerns have been resolved

Just as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s departure from the UK six years ago came as a complete surprise, so too is their shock announcement they now intend to return.

Their unilateral decision could fairly be said to have blind-sided the royals. King Charles was only informed on Sunday and is said not to have been involved in the decision making. No mention was made when Harry, Meghan and their two children visited Charles at his private home at Highgrove last month.

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@Marloezovic De KB deed dit met peertube bijv.: https://video.edu.nl/c/nationalebibliotheek_channel/video-playlists

De Amsterdamse Bijlmer is natuurlijk heel erg leuk en gezellig, maar dan moet je wel eerst even door al het onleuke en ongezellige heen kijken. En dat gaat al best heel lang best heel moeilijk. Door alle messentrekkers, drillrappers en wapenwapperaars was het risico op onveiligheid in het gebied inmiddels zo groot dat zelfs Halsema het tijd vond de H-buurt, de K-buurt en het Nelson Mandelapark tot veiligheidsrisicogebied te kronen. Na eerst preventief fouilleren tot een clowneske polonaise te hebben gemaakt en het daarna preventief in de ijskast te hebben gepleurd moet het de Lieve stad nu juist weer een stukje Liever maken. O o o als dat maar niet leidt tot etnisch profileren, want dan is het fouilleerfeest zo weer voorbij en moeten de politiepalen misschien weer uit de prullenbak gevist. De jacht is voor nu dus geopend, en misschien wordt de Bijlmer dan eindelijk weer een beetje de Bijlmer (die van 1975 of zo) en zien we de lieve stad straks nog eens op z'n liefst.

Slack has decided that AI coding agents have spent quite enough time alone with developers and would be better off doing their work where everyone can watch: on Slack. The Salesforce-owned chat factory has introduced Slack Code, which gives coding agents their own project channels where they can work alongside the humans supposedly keeping an eye on them. Slack calls this "multiplayer AI," which is another way of saying the coding bot is leaving the developer's terminal and joining the group chat. Tag an agent from a Slack conversation, and it can create a code channel for the job. From there, people can follow what it's doing, review its proposed changes, view live HTML previews, and tell it to change course when needed. Once the work is finished, the channel can archive itself, leaving behind a searchable record of what happened. Slack says each channel maps to a particular project, presumably sparing the main company chat from several hundred lines of an agent enthusiastically explaining why it has rewritten the authentication layer. The pitch isn't aimed solely at developers. Slack reckons product managers, designers, and other non-engineering staff can participate because they don't need to open a terminal or learn another specialist tool to see what the agent is doing. Its example has a product manager spotting a bug report, asking an agent to work out a fix, and then bringing in an engineer to review the resulting diff before the agent opens a pull request and merges the change. Slack summarizes the process as: "No ticket, no meeting, no waiting – just a fix, shipped." Slack insists humans remain in charge. Anyone in a code channel can pause, redirect, or stop an agent, while higher-stakes actions such as pushing code to production are supposed to be packaged up for an expert to approve. The company also says agents inherit Slack's existing permissions, security policies, and administrative controls rather than requiring organizations to build a separate management layer around them. Slack isn't planning to have the playground to itself. Anthropic, Cognition, GitHub, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Vercel are among those developing integrations for Slack Code, with Claude, Devin, Copilot, and ChatGPT among the agents destined for its code channels. Slack says the APIs will eventually open to the broader developer community, with code channels potentially hosting agents doing jobs beyond software development, from marketing work to legal document review. Alongside Slack Code, the company is giving agents more conventional places to lurk. Agent DMs provide direct conversations with AI workers, while a new Agents tab lets users find agents, revisit sessions, check their status, or stop one that's gone wandering. An "Add to Slack" feature is also intended to make deploying agents built using third-party platforms a matter of a few clicks. Slack's argument is that much of this AI-assisted coding currently happens out of sight. A developer works with an agent in a terminal or browser, then brings the result back to everyone else when it's time for a review. Code channels put that process in Slack from the start, giving colleagues a chance to see what the agent is doing – and object before it gets too carried away. Slack says users can "get started with Slack Code today," although its announcement doesn't spell out which Slack plans have access, how broadly the feature is being rolled out, or which of the named coding-agent integrations are available at launch. The Register has asked Slack for clarification. Whether watching a bot write software alongside your coworkers marks the future of collaborative development or simply gives everyone another Slack channel to monitor remains to be seen. Either way, the coding agent is joining the group chat. ®

Thunderbird is moving to fortnightly releases to keep pace with Firefox's accelerated schedule. Mozilla and its subsidiary MZLA updated their flagship apps this week, releasing Firefox 154 and Thunderbird 154, respectively. Since last month's version 153 releases are the latest Extended Support Releases, users who prefer a slower pace can remain on them for the next year. "ESR" is Mozilla's term for what Canonical calls LTS, Long Term Support. The new 154 versions are therefore short-term, or interim, releases. As we reported, the Mozilla Firefox release schedule speeds up from next month to new versions every two weeks, instead of every four weeks. According to a message from MZLA's Corey Bryant, Thunderbird will adopt the same cadence in September. Firefox picks up a few extras Firefox does get some new features, although most are of little interest to FOSS fans. Several of the additions are Windows-only for now, including the ability to give Firefox a custom app icon. Also reserved for those who like to pay for their OS, Firefox 154 now supports GeForce NOW. The Register covered its launch in 2018. It is a subscription service that lets users play supported games remotely, with the rendering handled by cloudy Nvidia hardware. Outside the Microsoft world, Mac users can now back up their Firefox profiles. The prompt-fondlers out there may enjoy playing with the new Smart Window, which lets you use artificial idiocy to interact with the browser. Sounds awful to us, as AI in general now does to more than half of Americans. Thunderbird brings the bigger payload This time, Thunderbird gets more new features – and, to this vulture's eye, more useful ones. Thunderbird 154 enables Microsoft Graph support for Microsoft 365, using the API that the company announced in 2015 to interact with Microsoft 362.5 services. The addition is timely because the Exchange Web Services API is on the way out for Redmond's cloud products. That makes Graph support a useful addition – although EWS will still work for outfits that host their own Exchange Servers. The release improves handling of messages encrypted with Cryptographic Message Syntax, along with drag-and-drop and context-menu copying of messages and attachments. Attachment previews have also been improved on macOS. Finally, on desktops with a system tray, Thunderbird can now be minimized to it when the last window is closed. This version also handles interrupted connections during large IMAP operations more gracefully – a significant improvement, since this issue has bitten this vulture before. If that sounds arcane, imagine knowing that you will soon lose an email account and you want to back up its contents first. Thunderbird makes this easy: create some local folders, or folders on another server, select everything, and drag and drop it. It's all fine until your internet connection falls over, which, as we all know, tends to happen at the worst possible moment. There are also more than 30 assorted bug fixes and more than 50 security fixes. This is, after all, an internet-facing app. We don't know who or when, but at some point, some damned fool thought: "Wouldn't it be great if you could format your emails in HTML?" The answer to this, of course, is: "NO! No, it would not! That is a terrible idea!" However, that ship has not merely sailed. It had an active service life of several decades before being towed away, broken for scrap, and turned into cutlery. As a result of this, you have a choice: either run an email client that has all the latest web security fixes, or do your email in the terminal and get used to telling people that you couldn't read their important missive. ®

De langverwachte huurtransfer van Lutsharel Geertruida naar PSV is bijna afgerond. De club uit Eindhoven heeft de voormalig speler van Feyenoord medisch gekeurd en wacht op het laatste groene licht van de Duitse club RB Leipzig. Dat bevestigen meerdere media, waaronder het Eindhovens Dagblad.