Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that both countries have now “resolved all issues” connected to the downing of an Azerbaijani passenger jet in late 2024.

De Tilburgse familie Moonen staat al generaties op de grootste kermis van de Benelux, die deze vrijdag weer begint. Het volksfeest van overgrootvader is uitgegroeid tot stadsgroot evenement waarvoor meer dan tweehonderd attracties gekeurd zijn. Aan de knoppen zit, veel eerder dan gehoopt, de vierde generatie Moonen. „Ik hoop dat ik hem wat heb kunnen meegeven.”

De herdenking van de Slag bij Grunwald begon in 1998 en is inmiddels uitgegroeid tot de grootste historische veldslag die in Polen – en misschien wel Europa – wordt nagespeeld. „We versloegen het sterkste leger van die tijd. Daarna werd Polen een grootmacht.”

Deze week stond er diplomatiek „géén klein bier” op het menu in Brussel, in de woorden van een topambtenaar bij de Europese Commissie. Tot in de vroege uren werd er gesteggeld over klimaatplannen. Terwijl de uitstootplannen politiek gevoelig liggen, lijkt Europa het roerend eens over meer autonomie door elektrificatie.

Het is volop zomer en ik schrijf deze column onder een schaduwrijke boom in een tuin vol vrolijk fluitende vogels.

Nu dwarsligger Orbán weg is, en critici zich niet meer kunnen verschuilen achter de Hongaarse premier, wordt duidelijk hoe de Europese landen écht kijken naar EU-toetreding van Oekraïne. Kritischer, zo blijkt. Nederland gaat daarin voorop.

Incoming PM has deigned to answer some quickfire TikTok questions – also revealing his stance on socks with sandals

It was Tony Blair who wrote that the “leader sets out for the people what they need and not simply what they want. Otherwise, the leader is just a follower.”

The incoming Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, must have been channelling his predecessor when, this week, he started to set out his views on the big issues facing the UK: should milk go in the cup before the tea? What items belong in a Christmas dinner?

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By relaxing visa rules, Beijing has two things on its mind – boosting its economy and improving its self-image

Walk through central Beijing today and one thing quickly becomes apparent: foreigners are back. They are taking photos outside the Forbidden City and sitting in cafes around Gulou and Sanlitun. The shift is visible online, too; YouTube is increasingly filled with videos titled “China Shocked Me” or “My First Week in China”. Most of the creators are tourists, not China specialists or journalists, and many of them are encountering the country for the first time.

The resurgence is striking because to many outside observers China’s story has become one of closure and increased security – of intensifying strategic rivalry with the west, expanded anti-espionage enforcement and increasingly constrained foreign reporting, including the withholding and revocation of visas for US journalists. Yet on the ground, another story is unfolding. When it comes to its relationship with the rest of the world, Beijing increasingly appears to be betting on direct exposure: come to China and judge for yourself.

Zichen Wang is deputy secretary-general at the Center for China and Globalization, a thinktank in Beijing. This article was co-written by Hao Wu, an assistant professor at the School of International Studies at Peking University

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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Escaped flowerhorn cichlids are causing concern for native species and about parasites capable of infecting humans

Escaped ornamental aquarium fish have integrated into a local ecosystem in the Philippines, but scientists say they may be threatening the native biodiversity of the lake.

Flowerhorn cichlids – human-bred hybrid fish prized for their bright-gold colour and prominent head humps – are believed to have escaped from breeding facilities into Lake Sampaloc, which sits in a volcanic crater, during a typhoon.

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From mattresses to saucepans, scientists offer tweaks to help detoxify your space

The problem Whenever we burn anything inside our homes, we cause indoor air pollution, whether we’re cooking using gas, frying bacon, lighting a wood burner, an open fire, a cigarette or incense, or ruining the toast. “ We spend 80-90% of our time indoors,” says Prof Francis Pope, chair of atmospheric science at the University of Birmingham. “And there is potential to have quite high concentrations of pollution indoors. This affects your respiratory and cardiovascular systems; certain components are carcinogenic, and there’s a growing body of evidence that air pollution affects cognition. In the long term, you get awful diseases such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. But relatively short exposures to air pollution are linked to things like educational outcome, workplace productivity and general mental wellbeing.”

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This year’s dominant leader shouldn’t take the boos personally – even Eddy Merckx didn’t always get red carpet treatment

Enduring the ire of French cycling fans is a rite of passage for a majority of the select group of prolific Tour de France winners, as Tadej Pogacar seems be finding out. The first catcalls came on Tuesday’s stage to Le Lioran in the Cantal, and unfortunately, although we can hope for a little courtesy, there is no reason to assume we won’t see more of the same in the Alps next week, because there are zero grounds for assuming the Slovene and his UAE team’s dominance of the race will slip. In fact, given the mountains that await, Pogi and co will probably up the ante.

Chris Froome has been there and Eddy Merckx went there. The American We Do Not Name spent two Julys hoping no one would bung urine at him, while Bernard Hinault and Jacques Anquetil had their moments too. To understand why the big winners don’t always get red carpet treatment, let’s fly back to the 60s, to the rivalry between Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor. Master Jacques and PouPou, a simple – simplistically pantomimic – duality: cold, clinical Jacques, who based his Tours on the time-trial stages, and warm-hearted PouPou, the noble peasant who tried his utmost but couldn’t quite land the big one, although he became the most popular athlete in France and the hallmark for valiant failure in every walk of French life. Let’s call it the MJPP principle.

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Earlier this week, Linux project leader Linus Torvalds told AI haters to fork off, and invited anyone who didn't like his comments to fork the kernel. Well, here you go: linux-0.11-rs, a total reimplementation of the Linux kernel, done in langage de programmation du jour, Rust. No, this isn't really a response to the Emperor Penguin's challenge – for a start, it looks like it was done with AI – but the timing was irresistible. The new project is by an undergrad student at Beihang University in Beijing, China, under the handle Poseidon. Never mind not being a fork – Poseidon's kernel isn't even really a port of Linux. It's a rewrite, and a rewrite of a very early version. It's based on Linux kernel 0.11, whose source code you can peruse on this mirror. This was an early kernel from December 8, 1991 – just a few months after the initial release, Linux 0.01. Version 0.11 was the last release of that first year of Linux. It was followed by version 0.12 in January 1992, then the version number jumped to 0.95 in March, as the young Torvalds started counting down to kernel 1.0 – which arrived two years later. If you read the 0.11 release notice, Torvalds said: "Linux-0.11 has a few rather major improvements, but perhaps most notably, is the first kernel where some other people start making real contributions." He goes on to say: "This is a major milestone, since it makes the kernel much more powerful than Minix was at the time." It's also when "Ted Ts'o shows up as a coder." Poseidon's Rust rewrite is quite a lot bigger than the original. The hackers of the "Orange Site" have been dissecting it with much greater expertise than this vulture can offer. User "dminik" fed it to an automatic code analyzer, and Pajecawav's Ghloc reckoned that it's just over 47,000 lines of Rust. Dminik breaks that down: "It's about 15k lines of code for the kernel and the rest is various utilities, libraries and programs that can run on the kernel." In other words, linux-0.11-rs is more complete than just the kernel. It also includes the core OS as it stood at the end of the year it first appeared. "Poseidon" also credits a tutorial on writing an OS kernel in Rust, which implies to us that this was not an entirely bot-driven effort. Some work has gone into it. Some of the Hacker News commentators call it a waste of tokens, or more pointedly a waste of water and electricity, but it seems to be a kid having some fun, playing around and experimenting. For us, that's a good thing. We hope that they found the exercise instructive. The Reg FOSS desk is not a fan of bot-slop, but we do approve of exploring and learning and having fun. At least for as long as code-generating LLMs are cheap and plentiful, it will be very hard to prevent youngsters and students from playing around and experimenting with them. Nobody is ever going to deploy anything on a bot-generated rewrite of a prototype kernel from 35 years ago – and don't forget that the original was itself written by a 22-year-old who was doing it "Just for Fun." ®

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Nu ook echt voor iedereen & de rest van Nederland: zomervakantie. De sleurhut (Beyerland Vitesse 400-2) uit de stalling, Adilette-slippers aan de tenen, bier in de koeling, file op de Route du Soleil, klapband, ANWB, hitte, blauwalg, Kronenbourg, u kent het allemaal wel. Er is nieuwe muziek van Yard Act, Waylon Wyatt, The Menzingers, wat bonusmateriaal van Metallica en een gedicht van Novica Tadic. Vakantie makkers. Bijna. Prettig weekend.

Waylon Wyatt

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Novica Tadic - Night Passes

Poor us, we are all kings
when we gaze at the starry sky.

The noise of the crowd grows faint
on the town square and in our blood.

The voice will re-enter the angel’s trumpet.
Once again hell will rise on its feet.

The Menzingers

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Quicksand

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Motionless in White

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Bonus

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Voor veel Feyenoorders is het een vast onderdeel van de zomer: de helikopter die nieuwe aanwinsten aflevert in De Kuip tijdens het Feyenoord Festival. Voor de supporters een spektakel, voor de spelers vaak een moment dat ze nooit meer vergeten. Eén van hen is Michael Mols.

Microsoft restored streamer Joshua Khane's 25-year-old Xbox and OneDrive account after it was compromised by a hacker and then suspended, putting years of personal data, baby photos, and thousands of dollars in games at risk. IGN reports: While he was "extremely happy" and thanked Microsoft for its help recovering his account and all the invaluable information therein, he levied some criticisms toward the brand for its initial response, claiming it had told him the suspension was "irreversible" at first. "It's unfortunate that such a big company can bring back your account if you ask them to," he said. "The way it all went, to me, is a little bit shady, because it's not that they can't bring back your account -- they won't bring back your account if you're a nobody."

Khane credited the community for making his story go viral and bringing it to Microsoft's attention, but felt that without their help, he would have been up a creek without a paddle. He also tied the situation to the growing conversation surrounding digital ownership, comparing it to Sony's decision to stop printing physical game discs starting January 2028.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DirtyGlassEye has added a photo to the pool:

Flickr, stop giving me ads for pro, I know there's an upload limit. And you're not going to get a single bit of my money until I've fully lived the limit out. You can wait.
I've been waiting to get a chance to do this one for a long time. I was just waiting for an opportunity since this week has been a bit slow up till now. But I've done 2 washed shots back to back so I thought I'd bring a vibrant one out. I know this looks crowded but I redid the focus as much as possible so that way it didn't feel overwhelming (God please let this do well I worked hard on it). It was hard to get an "establishing shot" as it seems to be called cause of how densely packed it is. Even after 5 years (as of the shot's taken time), there's still a reservation system to get in here (as well as the toad restaurant), which neither of the American parks did. I genuinely don't know why USJ somehow gets more crowds then either of the American resorts (probably Jaws, one of the best rides Universal's ever made, never close it).
Getting back on topic, Things were a bit overexposed and there were people so I began to get into the mindset of needing to edit everything I take in here (and in this park in general) so I jsut went to a railing and tried to see what I could get away with. Most people and excess parts were obscured and removed, a powerful vignette on the bottom and inserted blurred clouds in the sky (blast and curse this haze). Got rid of more people on railings or in yoshi carts on the bridge. I toned down the light on yellow objects and the thwomps. I put more textures on the trees and the pyramids. Smaller details that would draw eyes to the main piece specifically, mount beanpole. And reduced clarity on the yoshis and lamps on the right. I know it's a lot to take in and that the details are either going to help the photo or be it's downfall. I hope I edited enough to make it cohesive to my regular customers.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide July 1977

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: