• Football Leaks founder’s information triggered probes

• Has faced legal issues and lives under police protection

Years after his leaks shook the foundations of European football, Rui Pinto is claiming vindication following Manchester City’s conviction for financial fair play breaches. The ruling has once again put the controversial whistleblower and his extraordinary archive of documents in the spotlight.

Pinto, whose leaks of private documents helped trigger investigations into Manchester City’s financial affairs, has spoken about the club’s recent conviction for breaching financial fair play rules in a statement sent to the Guardian and later posted on social media.

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• City found guilty of breaching Premier League rules

• Liverpool finished second to City in 2019 and 2022

The former Liverpool defender Andy Robertson believes trophy-winning Manchester City players should not have their achievements diminished or removed because of the actions of the club’s ownership.

Robertson was flying from a training camp in Spain to Slovenia with the Scotland squad when news emerged that City have been found guilty of multiple breaches of the Premier League’s financial fair play rules. The Scotland captain, who regularly jousted with City during his nine years at Anfield from 2017, was taken aback when news of the upcoming verdict was put to him in Ljubljana.

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"Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com.

Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch from the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University; Tim McCoy, one of the main curators of meteorites at the Smithsonian Institution; and University of Arizona research scientist Melissa Brucker, leader of the Spacewatch program, which has discovered more than 179,000 asteroids.)


The scientists also convinced the International Astronomical Union to name an asteroid after one of Yankovic's major influences, famous musical humorist and political satirist Tom Lehrer, who died last year at age 97. Lehrer's work includes "The Elements," a 1959 song in which he recites the entire periodic table to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song." "He was a mathematician and teacher and also wrote math- and science-themed songs," McGraw said. "We felt that someone who had that kind of science enthusiasm really deserved to have their name up in the sky...." McGraw is hoping that naming space rocks after stars like Lehrer and "Weird Al" will cast some reflected light on two things she's passionate about: asteroid research and science communication.

Six years ago a 92-year-old Tom Lehrer released all his lyrics into the public domain. (Wikipedia notes he'd "largely retired" by the 1970s to become a mathematics teacher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.) Slashdot ran a brief career retrospective when Lehrer died last year at age 97.

And the IAU writes that "Generations of scientists have been inspired" by Weird Al Yankovic's "comedic musical works, including 'It's All About the Pentiums' and 'White and Nerdy'." ("I'm fluent in JavaScript as well as Klingon," Yankovic sings in the latter.) He appears in a song envisioning a rap battle between Bill Nye the Science Guy and Sir Isaac Newton... And in 1999 he recorded a five-minute summation of Star Wars: Phantom Menace, sung to the wistful tune of Don McLean's American Pie. Performing it last month in a NPR Tiny Desk concert, "most of the audience was singing along," remembers an interviewer at NPR. "It felt like something that was very personal to them."



Weird Al: It's one of those songs that means a lot to people, particularly "Star Wars" fans, of course. But I mean, I see a lot of people in the audience cosplaying as Jedi Knights and waving their light sabers... I've even heard that, you know, they play that song at "Star Wars" conventions, and people get weepy, you know... [I]t really hits people in a tender place somehow...

"Oh my, my, this here Anakin guy
may be Vader someday later, now he's just a small fry.
And he left his home and kissed his mommy goodbye,
sayin' soon, I'm gonna be a Jedi."



Yankovic has led a geek-friendly career. In the heyday of Napster, he released an anthem-style parody mocking the arguments of the Recording Industry Association of America, titled "Don't Download This Song. ("Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong...")

"Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law...
you start out stealing songs, then you're robbing liquor stores
And selling crack and running over school kids with your car..."

As a student at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, Yankovic bootstrapped a career in 1979 by recording his first novelty song "My Bologna" (a parody of "My Sharona" by the Knack) while playing his accordion in a bathroom for its acoustics. And even the IAU acknowledged the geeky themes in his 1999 song "It's All About the Pentiums" (a filk on Puff Daddy's "It's All About the Benjamins").

"You're usin' a 286? Don't make me laugh
Your Windows boots up in what, a day and a half?
You could back up your whole hard drive on a floppy diskette
You're the biggest joke on the Internet..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt Youson takes a look at the different pit stop and tyre options that are available to the teams on race day at the Baku City Circuit.

We have picked a four-leg Bet Builder for Baku, including podium finish and top-six selections.

Programming language generics can now ride in style from one language’s compiler to another and back again, thanks to experimental work from Mojo core contributor Evan Ovadia. This former Google engineer has endeavored to turn Rust into a library that other languages can build from, demonstrating a way to pass generic data types and functions between Rust and another language, an action the C ABI doesn’t support. “Technically, this is the most fascinating thing I’ve read in months,” enthused the host of the Let’s Get Rusty YouTube channel, explaining the work, which he characterized as “Rust++.” That's a geeky but hard-won victory to be sure. Ovadia describes his work in an explanatory blog post as the “Golden Spike” that intertwines two different languages, referring to the final spike hammered into the United States’ first transcontinental railroad line. Instead of being stripped down into raw primitives just to be crammed into the coarse wagons of C ABI, libraries of rich capability can be sped to foreign ecosystems on sturdy, high-speed rails. Ditching the C ABI at last The work came about in Ovadia’s effort to create his own language, Valen (an offshoot of an earlier effort called Vale), which he envisions as a speedier, more dev-friendly version of Rust. The problem with creating a new language from scratch, he reasoned, was that he couldn’t use his favorite Rust libraries (notably Rust’s bitchin’ wgpu graphics library). Today, a common way to use a library from one language in a program written in another is through the C ABI (application binary interface), a de facto interoperability layer that defines conventions for passing data and function calls between compiled code. (Rust has its own ABI, though it does not offer stability guarantees.) With the C ABI, if a Rust library exposes its functions as extern "C" and exposes its types as repr(C), then they can be accessed from another language using a Foreign Function Interface (FFI). All well and good, but the problem Ovadia had was that the C ABI did not understand the concept of generics (or placeholders for data types to be provided later), because C itself doesn’t understand the concept of generics. But Rust uses generics quite a bit, and so does Valen, though not in the same way. “So the central question, the central mystery to solve, is how do we do cross-language generics?” Ovadia wrote. Cross-language generics at last Getting two compilers to collaborate is super tricky, as compilers tend to be isolated entities, solitary kings of their own individual worlds. So Ovadia needed to come up with a way for Valen to call a Rust generic function, but also have a Rust generic function that calls back into Valen for needed values. After much rumination, Ovadia arrived at a two-part solution to cross-language generics: first, run the Rust compiler as a library. Surprisingly, Rust already possesses this capability (rustc_driver), which would allow Valen to embed rustc directly into its own memory space. The second step would be to patch Rust so that when it encounters non-Rust Valen types, it hands control over to the Valen compiler to handle its portion, and waits for the compiled result. Ovadia admits that patching the Rust compiler was the “nuclear option.” “Honestly, this was the riskiest part of the whole endeavor,” he wrote. The patch itself is only about 100 lines of code, but it is hacky and assumes Rust is using LLVM for machine code generation, which isn’t always the case. “It works, but it's definitely not upstreamable,” Ovadia wrote. Nonetheless, Ovadia’s cross-language bidirectional generics are a genuine step forward in programming language interoperability. Ovadia has his hands full with Valen at this point, though his cross-language generics work opens the possibility of using Rust to bootstrap other new languages that can be built from Rust libraries. Given a few modifications to Rust itself, the reliance on the creaky C ABI may one day be a thing of the past. On the Reddit and Lobste.rs programmer forums, observers praised Ovadia for tackling such a difficult problem, even as they fretted about the details. “I appreciate the move to replace C as the ‘universal FFI language,’” one commenter wrote. "It is a very bold choice and would require effort.” Another reader commented that Rust may not be the ideal language for interoperability, given the limitations of its own type system. “However, imagine you could build bindings on top of Ada! Now that would be amazing,” they wrote. ®

The somnambulist, Nancy Rexroth

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Progressief Nederland (PRO) en Volt trekken de komende tijd samen op in de onderhandelingen met het kabinet over de begroting voor 2027. Dat laten beide partijen vrijdagavond weten. Als het minderheidskabinet kan rekenen op de steun van deze twee partijen, is er een meerderheid in zowel de Tweede als Eerste Kamer.

Dit weekend gaat het kabinet opnieuw onderhandelen met oppositiepartijen. Vrijdag zei premier Rob Jetten dat er een nieuw kabinetsplan ligt op drie thema's: koopkracht, sociale zekerheid en vermogensbelasting.

Partijleiders Jesse Klaver en Laurens Dassen zullen gezamenlijk die gesprekken gaan voeren met de premier en Eelco Heinen, de minister van Financiën. De bewindslieden praten ook met JA21, SGP, ChristenUnie, 50PLUS en BBB. Het kabinet wil steun van zowel linkse als rechtse partijen voor de begrotingsplannen.

Prinsjesdagplannen

In de gesprekken voorafgaand aan Prinsjesdag trokken JA21 en SGP samen op in de gesprekken. Die twee partijen hebben samen wel genoeg zetels voor een meerderheid in de Tweede Kamer, maar niet in de senaat. De prinsjesdagplannen waren voor geen van de oppositiepartijen goed genoeg om steun toe te zeggen.

Volgende week debatteert de Tweede Kamer twee dagen lang over de financiën tijdens de Algemene Financiële Beschouwingen met VVD-minister Heinen.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Mocht er nog ergens een goede imagodeskundige (niet deze) op zoek zijn naar een klusje dan kan die binnenkort even bellen met Camiel Eurlings. De CDA'er die zijn ministerspost verliet om meer tijd aan een gezin te besteden dat hij niet had, daarna opdook bij KLM, weer wegging wegens wanpresteren, een vrouwenmepper bleek, opstapte bij het IOC, daarna heel lang niet in het nieuws kwam en nu wel omdat hij een hele vlucht (met daarin onder meer het nichtje van Peter Bosz) heeft vertraagd door zijn powerbank te laten ontploffen, blijkt ook nog eens gewoon een hele vervelende man. Dat vertelt een ooggetuige aan onze favoriete Curaçaose website curacao.nu ("Ik wilde net mijn gin-tonic bestellen toen dat ding in de hens vloog", dat zijn quotes, red.), die de heer Eurlings netjes om wederhoor heeft gevraagd maar geen reactie ontving, waarschijnlijk omdat Camiel zijn hoofd te diep in zijn eigen bilnaad verstopt zit.

"Eurlings valt hem al vóór de brand op. Volgens de passagier wordt de oud-KLM-topman via een VIP-service aan boord gebracht en komen zowel de purser als de gezagvoerder hem begroeten. Omdat het toestel vertraging heeft, maakt Eurlings zich volgens de getuige zorgen over zijn aansluitende vlucht vanaf Bonaire. Hij laat naar diens waarneming meer dan eens de gezagvoerder bij zich komen om te vragen of hij die verbinding nog haalt. De passagier benadrukt dat Eurlings zich daarbij niet misdraagt. Wel krijgt hij de indruk dat de oud-KLM-topman zich bewust is van zijn vroegere positie binnen de maatschappij. „Hij misdroeg zich niet, maar hij beroept zich op een status die hij niet meer heeft”, zegt hij." 

Nee. Die status is ie wel een beetje kwijt ja.

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo at the “Peace Museum” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max during a visit to the Peace Memorial Park in Nagasaki, Japan. If you have only one chance to visit Nagasaki, make it this one. It is truly a stunning place, surrounded by beautiful grounds. You won’t be disappointed…

stan.jernigan has added a photo to the pool:

I took this photo of the “Hope Monument” with my iPhone 17 Pro Max while visiting the Peace Park in Nagasaki, Japan. It is located near the Atomic Bomb Museum and the hypocenter. Built in August 2022 to mark the 25th anniversary of the High School Peace Messengers, it is made of red and black granite and features a central circular stone inscribed with the phrase "Though we are minor in power, we are not powerless…”

Premier Jetten en enkele ministers probeerden de internationale positie van Nederland te versterken bij de VN in New York. Een kwestie van de lange adem, want „diplomatie is voortmodderen en ploeteren”. Na afloop moest Jetten terug naar Nederland om de binnenlandse politieke crisis te bezweren.

Populism isn’t just for right-wingers.

Het financieel uitgeknepen Nederlands Film Festival in Utrecht kreeg deze zomer veel kritiek. Met de relevante, maar zware openingsfilm ‘Downtown’ van Michiel van Erp kan het festival beginnen.