Het gaat niet goed met de kwaliteit van het Nederlandse zwemwater. In onze regio is het vooral mis in de Waal bij Ridderkerk. Daar zijn meerdere chemische stoffen aangetroffen boven de gestelde norm. Toch is Ellen, die pal aan het water woont, niet bang: “Ik ga het niet mijden.”

Op de A16 richting Breda is donderdag in de staart van de avondspits een ongeluk gebeurd met twee auto's. Daarbij is één gewonde gevallen. De ANWB spreekt van een 'groot ongeluk'. Tussen Dordrecht en de Moerdijkbrug werden drie rijstroken afgesloten.

Op de A16 richting Breda is donderdag in de staart van de avondspits een ongeluk gebeurd met twee auto's. Daarbij is één gewonde gevallen. De ANWB spreekt van een 'groot ongeluk'. Tussen Dordrecht en de Moerdijkbrug zijn drie rijstroken dicht.

Whether it’s scenes from the subway, streets, or Times Square, visions of New York City are often hectic and crowded. For Erin Milez, the hustle and bustle, but moreover the cramped spaces and tightness, characterize a new body of work going on view this month in Everything the Light Touches at Monya Rowe Gallery.

Milez recently moved from New York to Seattle, and she began to examine the nature of human connection, or the lack thereof, in urban spaces. Her expressive paintings draw on the visual language and subject matter of artists like George Tooker and Jacob Lawrence, who approached the theme of urban life through distinctive, figurative compositions. There’s also an unmistakable nod to the blocky, social realist style of Works Progress Administration (WPA) murals, which were often installed in civic spaces like post offices and libraries. For Milez, a similar dynamism informs her detailed, textural paintings, underscored by a very 21st-century sense of detachment.

There is a sense of closeness and intensity in Milez’s compositions that’s simultaneously meditative, as the artist renders light in golden hues and hints at symmetry. Characters are often squeezed into confined spaces or obscured by foliage and infrastructure, wedged together and yet almost completely self-concerned. A pair stopped beneath blossoming branches in “A Giving Tree,” for instance, find themselves in a situation that would be intimate were it not for their inwardness or reticency to say hello.

Other examples include a woman curled up on a crowded beach in “Pick Your Plot” and numerous passengers in “Subway” who are all individually tuned into their own electronic devices. Despite the crowded scenario, no one speaks to one another, and everyone appears calm. “I was surprised to find how many of the figures are cropped, particularly in their facial features,” Milez says of her own work. “This was my subconscious designing these people who are experiencing some sensory limitations, not using their full self to be attentive to the world.”

Everything the Light Touches runs from September 10 to October 24 in New York. See more on Milez’s 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 Denizens of a Crowded City Populate Erin Milez’s Dense Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

OpenAI says its ChatGPT service is recovering from a limited outage this morning amid similar problems affecting SpaceX's Grok and Anthropic's Claude. It might not be a good time for a chat. "A routing error starting around 7:43 am PT on Thursday, September 3 made ChatGPT and Codex unavailable for some users across platforms," a company spokesperson told The Register. "As of about 8:17 am PT on Thursday, a solution was successfully implemented and is continuing to be monitored." The OpenAI status page showed elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex at the time this story was filed. Anthropic's Claude status page shows the service has recovered after a three-hour six-minute outage, during which there were elevated error rates affecting Sonnet 5 and other models. Anthropic confirmed the outage has been resolved. “Claude is fully back up after an infrastructure issue caused a partial outage across Claude.ai, Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and the Claude API earlier today,” a spokesperson told The Register. “Service was restored at 16:16 UTC.” SpaceX's status page for Grok indicates that the company began looking into an outage at 6:30 am PT. "Grok is experiencing issues," the page says. "We are working on restoring service as quickly as possible." The co-occurrence of availability issues at three different AI providers suggests the possibility of trouble at a common provider. But Cloudflare – used in different capacities by all three AI companies – said rather emphatically that its systems are running fine. "Cloudflare is not experiencing any significant service disruptions at this time," a spokesperson told The Register. "Our services are operating normally, and any reporting that deviates from this is incorrect." Meanwhile, the three major US cloud computing providers – AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure – show no sign of relevant technical difficulties on their respective status pages, which don't always reflect problems in a timely manner. We hope you used this brief AI blackout to come up with your own explanation for this unusual coincidence. ®

The disgruntled security researcher known as Nightmare Eclipse (aka Chaotic Eclipse, Infinite Nightmare, and now also MSNightmare) is moving away from their singular Microsoft vendetta and on to other vendors. On Thursday, they dropped a new zero-day bug called FalconFlank that affects CrowdStrike’s Falcon endpoint security platform - albeit with a Windows link. According to the prolific zero-day hunter, FalconFlank is a privilege escalation vulnerability that abuses the Microsoft Office malicious macros remediation feature in CrowdStrike Falcon. This is an automated security tool built into the platform that inspects Microsoft Office documents. If it finds any potentially harmful macros, the feature strips the suspect code and - hopefully - prevents malicious code or other dangerous payloads from executing when users open the document. “We are actively investigating these claims and advise customers to disable the Microsoft Office File Suspicious Macro Removal Windows policy setting,” a CrowdStrike spokesperson told The Register. “Customers remain protected through the Cloud Anti-malware for Microsoft Office Files settings. We refer customers to the FalconFlank Tech Alert in the CrowdStrike support portal.” The proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit works on fully updated Windows 11 25H2 and Windows Server 2025 systems running CrowdStrike Falcon with Phase 3 - Optimal Protection as well as the malicious macro removal feature enabled, Nightmare Eclipse said in a GitHub README. “Obviously by the time I drop this Crowdstrike would already have detections for it so if you want to test you either have to add it to the exclusions or obfuscate the PoC and change the dll load technique,” they wrote. Security sleuth Kevin Beaumont confirmed this exploit works, along with several others Nightmare released over the past week. Beaumont told us that he’s not surprised to see Nightmare digging into other, non-Microsoft zero-days. “Kinda makes sense they’d branch out to other vendors as there’s problems across the endpoint security space with the quality of the security products in terms of…security unfortunately,” Beaumont told The Register. “Hopefully it causes cybersecurity vendors to up their game, stop hyping hypothetical AI attacks, and instead make their own products secure for customers.” FalconFlank follows other vulnerabilities in various endpoint and antivirus products that Nightmare has found and published in the last several days. These include HardBreacher, an elevation of privileges bug in Kaspersky’s endpoint antivirus product. “So the problem is now leaking outside of Microsoft,” Nightmare said when they published the HardBreacher PoC last week. “There was poll held against either finding a bug in the home or commercial version and the poll results were the commercial version. At the time of writing this, the proof of concept works in a fully patched windows 11 25H2 & Kaspersky for Endpoint v14.0.0.504.” Beaumont confirmed that Nightmare’s HardBreacher exploit code works, as does a PoC for an elevation of privileges vuln in Gen Digital’s Avast antivirus software. This zero-day, named PrettyPrague, “will dump the SAM database by abusing a vulnerability in Avast Sandbox and spawn a full SYSTEM shell,” according to the researcher. "Gen was recently made aware of a security vulnerability affecting a subset of Gen products, including Avast Antivirus, that could allow an attacker to elevate their system privileges," Gen Digital told The Register. "We immediately initiated our security response procedures and are actively developing a patch. We take all security matters seriously and are committed to addressing this issue swiftly." Kaspersky did not immediately respond to The Register’s requests for comment. Nightmare also recently released an Nvidia memory corruption zero-day vulnerability dubbed GreenSection, but according to Beaumont, this one just crashes the system. Nvidia did not respond to our inquiries.®

Astra’s arrival comes days after Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, described AGI as an ‘irrelevant marketing term’

The president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, has claimed the world has entered a new era of artificial general intelligence after the release of his company’s latest model, Astra, which it described as the “world’s most intelligent and aligned model”.

Brockman made the claim on Thursday as the San Francisco company released the model only weeks after a serious AI safety incident involving other models under its development caused international concern and a pause in Astra’s training.

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Bartiromo had been a host at the network for more than a decade and Fox gave no explanation for the decision

Fox News Media on Thursday abruptly ousted one of its most well-known hosts and anchors, Maria Bartiromo, without providing an explanation.

“Effective today, Maria Bartiromo is no longer with FOX News Media,” the network said in a press release, adding in a statement: “We thank Maria for her work over the last 12 and a half years and wish her all the best on her next chapter.”

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Ex-secretary of state joins Nancy Pelosi, Jill Biden, Roxane Gay and others in heralding groundbreaking feminist

• Gloria Steinem, groundbreaking feminist campaigner, dies aged 92

• ‘We badly need to raise our boys more like our girls’: Gloria Steinem – a life in quotes

Leading figures from politics, entertainment and wider society led glowing tributes to Gloria Steinem on Thursday, with Hillary Clinton hailing the American feminist icon who died at 92 at home in New York City as “one of the architects of the entire structure of women’s equality”.

Clinton, a former US secretary of state, presidential candidate and first lady, was among the first to jump in with praise early on Thursday when she appeared on the CBS Mornings TV show to share her respect and gratitude for Steinem.

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conspectus_bs posted a photo:

Fomapan 100 with Mamiya RZ67 Pro II and Sekor 50 mm

Liam Lawson will drive for Red Bull at the Italian Grand Prix, with the driver from New Zealand admitting that preparing for the weekend posed a particular challenge.

Charles Leclerc has echoed team mate Lewis Hamilton’s optimism over an engine upgrade that Ferrari will deploy at the Autodromo Nazionale Monza – expressing his hope of delivering another “very special weekend” in front of the Tifosi.

Franco Colapinto arrives into the Italian Grand Prix weekend off the back of signing a contract extension with the Alpine team.

OVERASSELT (ANP) - De politie heeft donderdag het aantal aanhoudingen in verband met de schietpartij in Overasselt naar beneden bijgesteld. Er zijn 34 mensen aangehouden in plaats van 35. Het is nog niet duidelijk of zij allemaal worden voorgeleid. Dat beslist het Openbaar Ministerie vrijdag, meldt de politie.

Dinsdag, de dag waarop de dodelijke schietpartij en de grootschalige politieactie plaatsvonden, werden 33 mensen aangehouden. In de nacht van dinsdag op woensdag hield de politie de 34e persoon aan, legt een politiewoordvoerster uit. De verdachten komen uit Nederland, België, Frankrijk en Algerije.

KYIV (ANP/RTR) - De Oekraïense president Volodymyr Zelensky verwacht de Amerikaanse onderhandelaars Steve Witkoff en Jared Kushner ergens in de komende dagen te ontmoeten in Kyiv. Zij kwamen nog niet eerder naar Oekraïne om daar te praten over het einde van de oorlog met Rusland.

"We hebben voorlopige afspraken", zei Zelensky in zijn dagelijkse toespraak. "Ze zullen een bijeenkomst hebben in Moskou en een in Kyiv."

De Amerikaanse gezanten van president Donald Trump probeerden lang te bemiddelen tussen Rusland en Oekraïne, maar die pogingen kwamen grotendeels stil te liggen na het begin van de oorlog met Iran. De afgelopen weken wordt geprobeerd de onderhandelingen nieuw leven in te blazen.

Witkoff en Kushner gingen al wel meerdere keren langs in Moskou.

Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash model in six weeks, claiming it's their best reasoning and coding model yet (topping the DeepSWE leaderboard). Ars Technica reports: Gemini 3.8 Flash comes in two variations. There's the standard Flash, which Google describes as a "workhorse" model that's good for anything from agentic tasks to software development. Then we have Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, which runs on the same foundations but has been tuned for vulnerability detection and mitigation.

For developers, Google has the same pitch as it did for the 3.7 Flash release just a couple of weeks ago. API access to the model is available at an "introductory rate" through the end of the year: $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. The regular price will be $1.50 / $7.50, but it's likely there will be new models available long before the price changes. Google probably sees the lower prices as a necessity given that other AI labs have recently dropped token pricing to keep increasingly wary businesses engaged with AI tools.

[...] Gemini 3.8 Flash will be available across the Google ecosystem starting today, but Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber is currently limited to trusted testers and governments. Like the past Flash release, you'll need a Pro or Ultra subscription to access Gemini 3.8 Flash in the Gemini app, but you can always visit AI Studio if you want to tinker with it for free.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.