SpaceX's 13th Starship flight test ended at the launchpad after four Raptor engines failed to start, triggering an automatic abort moments before liftoff. Elon Musk's biz ignited the booster's engines at 2245 UTC on July 16, but the automated system aborted the launch. The boss confirmed: "Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort… To be confident of a good flight, two Raptors will be removed and replaced. Most probable launch timing is early next week." The nature of the problem is not clear, nor is whether the vehicle will need to be de-stacked for engine replacement. Although the abort showcased the booster's anomaly-detection capabilities, it is not a great look for a rocket that must launch multiple times in quick succession to meet the requirements of the Artemis IV Moon landing planned for 2028. Flight Test 13 marks the second test of Starship's V3 configuration. The vehicle hasn't reached orbit, but a successful test - one that demonstrates engine reignition in space - would likely let SpaceX move beyond suborbital flights. That shift is urgent as Artemis III is scheduled to launch next year, and Starship must be qualified for orbital operations by then. The abort won't have done SpaceX stock any favors. Investors had already brought it back to Earth after an early surge made Musk a trillionaire (on paper). By the close of trading, shares had slid to just over $131, below the $135 initial public offering price that valued the loss-making biz at roughly $1.78 trillion. NASA is paying close attention. The agency confirmed yesterday it will use SpaceX's Starlink to deliver Artemis III imagery from Orion. It'd be a shame if that imagery didn't include a rendezvous with Starship because SpaceX is unable to get the behemoth off the ground, let alone into orbit. Despite Musk's suggestions of "early next week," SpaceX has yet to officially confirm a date for the next Starship launch attempt. ®

Europe can build more chip fabs, subsidize domestic manufacturing, and wrap it all in the language of sovereignty, but it still won't escape its dependence on American cloud providers and software anytime soon, according to Forrester. In its first Global Sovereignty Forecast, the analyst concludes that the race for technological independence has already produced two clear winners: China and the United States. Everyone else, Europe included, is left figuring out which dependencies it can live with. Forrester's Tech Sovereignty Index measures countries across areas such as AI investment, cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, software, datacenter capacity, and technical talent. Its forecast puts China and the US far ahead, with overall tech sovereignty scores of 82 percent and 79 percent respectively. Europe's biggest economies, by comparison, barely move between now and 2030: Germany and Spain rise from 34 percent to 36 percent, France from 33 percent to 35 percent, the UK from 30 percent to 32 percent, and Italy from 27 percent to 29 percent. Semiconductors offer one of the few signs of real progress. Governments are spending heavily on domestic production, and Forrester expects chip manufacturing scores to rise sharply in several countries by 2030. The catch is that more fabs do not amount to technological independence. Europe still designs only about 1 percent of the world's chips and has no homegrown equivalent to Nvidia or Qualcomm, Forrester says. Its wider stack is just as dependent: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud account for roughly 65 percent of the European cloud market, while high energy costs and planning constraints continue to slow datacenter expansion. The European Chips Act is unlikely to close that gap. Brussels wants the bloc to produce a fifth of the world's semiconductors by 2030, but Forrester expects Europe to reach just 11.3 percent as other regions expand at the same time. Forrester is also unconvinced by the hyperscalers' "sovereign cloud" pitch. AWS, Microsoft, and Google have rolled out European cloud offerings with separate governance and operational controls, but the report argues they remain subsidiaries of US companies. The datacenters may sit in Europe, but ultimate ownership does not. Rather than chasing complete self-sufficiency, Forrester says most countries should accept that some dependence is unavoidable and focus instead on managing it through alliances, open technologies, and selective investment. "Ongoing geopolitical volatility, AI competition, and semiconductor supply chain risks have put tech sovereignty firmly in the spotlight," said Dario Maisto, principal analyst at Forrester. "Today, tech sovereignty is concentrated in the hands of a few global leaders, creating an uneven competitive advantage for some countries. To compete in the AI era, nations must understand their strategic dependencies and build durable partnerships that safeguard their data, infrastructure, and long-term autonomy." It's hardly the rallying cry sovereignty advocates were hoping for. Europe may eventually produce more chips, but the harder part will be building an entire technology stack that doesn't ultimately answer to someone else's headquarters. ®

Really interesting piece of cryptographic history:

In November 2023, a large cache of his wartime papers—nicknamed the “Bayley papers”—was auctioned in London for almost half a million U.S. dollars. The previously unknown cache contains many sheets in Turing’s own handwriting, telling of his top-secret “Delilah” engineering project from 1943 to 1945. Delilah was Turing’s portable voice-encryption system, named after the biblical deceiver of men. There is also material written by Bayley, often in the form of notes he took while Turing was speaking. It is thanks to Bayley that the papers survived: He kept them until he died in 2020, 66 years after Turing passed away...

"De brommobiel stond aan de stekker om op te laden. Ineens explodeerde de accu en vloog het wagentje in brand." De bewoners van een huis aan de Reigerhof in Rozenburg schrokken zich donderdagmiddag rot toen hun 45 kilometerwagentje vlam vatte.

Afgelopen week kreeg het team arrestantentaken van de politie te maken met een agressieve arrestant die niet wilde meewerken aan zijn overplaatsing. Daarbij werd een agent besmeurd met poep en kregen meerdere agenten te maken met agressie en fysiek geweld. De politie Delfshaven stuurde hen een kaart en een snoeppot als teken van steun en erkenning.

In dit liveblog houden we je op de hoogte van het belangrijkste en meest opvallende 112-nieuws van vrijdag 17 juli.

The Runner by Scarlett Thomas; The Madman by Henning Mankell; Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey; The Spy and the Snake by MJ Robotham; Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki

The Runner by Scarlett Thomas (Scribner, £16.99)
Part thriller, part romantic suspense, Thomas’s latest novel begins in Cyprus, where 34-year-old Jay is literally on the run from someone who wants to kill him. Jay (not his real name) is well used to evading hitmen: the attempts on his life began at university, when a Japanese man arrived at his flat with a samurai sword. People have been trying to murder him ever since, the contract on his life traded like a commodity, in bitcoin. Now his only apparent ally is the mysterious Ellie, although – given his track record – it’s quite possible that she’s trying to off him, too. Just before the reader’s sense of intrigue turns to irritated bafflement, the action rewinds to Jay’s childhood in Kent, and the reasons slowly become clear in this quirky, exciting tale that takes in exorcism, dictators, high finance, con artists and marathons along the way.

The Madman by Henning Mankell, translated by George Goulding and Sarah de Senarclens (Mountain Leopard, £25)
Written in the 1970s and published in English for the first time, The Madman is set in a Swedish town in the late 1940s. The country’s wartime neutrality-on-paper continues to divide: the town’s pro-Nazis want the past forgotten, but the communist sympathisers, bitter about having been interned, want a reckoning. When a letter to this effect appears in the local paper, those accused, including the director of the town’s sawmill, claim that newcomer Bertil Kras has been stirring resentment for political ends. When the sawmill burns down, Kras is blamed for that, too, and the disintegration of the life he has tried to make provokes an existential crisis. An older Mankell might have been more concise, but the slow build towards inevitable disaster makes for true emotional depth, and the theme of othering, isolating and penalising people for their opinions remain horribly topical.

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The industrial dance duo make music for this summer’s heatwave: filled with dread and jangling with pent-up energy

From Manchester, via Peterborough and Shanghai
Recommended if you like Crystal Castles, Mandy, Indiana, acid house
Up next Festival dates including East London Block Party, Brighton Psych Fest and End of the Road

Salford’s Silverwingkiller sound how this summer’s heatwave feels: delirious, dread-filled and jangling with pent-up energy. Named after the Chinese title for Blade Runner, they build pummelling industrial dance music from nervy breakbeats, the acid sounds of the Roland TB-303 synthesiser and the shared sense of creative freedom that James Baca and Yushang Ni discovered on moving to Greater Manchester, from Peterborough and Shanghai respectively.

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Technical class in the fiercest battles was again lacking at the World Cup but there is hope amid the soul-searching

The post-match inquest into England’s elimination was almost over when Thomas Tuchel offered a revealing analysis of Argentina’s knack of instigating late comebacks at this World Cup.

“In their culture, ball possession plays a crucial role. It starts from a young age,” he said. “That is in the DNA and it demands a lot of self-confidence – natural self‑confidence to always want the ball, to always be in the gaps, to always define yourself through the ball. I think that is a crucial thing: to show courage.”

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Moeilijke kwestie die zowel de vrouwensport als de vrouwensportkijker (Mart Smeets) aangaat. Volgens de European Broadcasting Union worden vrouwen in het atletiek te veel geseksualiseerd. Er kan immers zomaar een bil, een borst of een buikje in beeld worden gebracht, wat de onkuise kijker direct aanzet tot allerlei onzedelijke gedachten. Wat zich binnen de bovenkamer van een enigszins potente jongen van het mannelijk geslacht afspeelt bij het zien van een estafettestokje, u wilt het niet weten. Daarom wil de EBU de beelden moslimvriendelijker vrouwvriendelijker maken: "De European Broadcasting Union (EBU) heeft nieuwe richtlijnen opgesteld om vrouwen bij atletiekwedstrijden op een respectvollere manier in beeld te brengen. Het doel is te voorkomen dat atletes in ongepaste houdingen in beeld komen." 

Respectvol omgaan met vrouwen, daar zijn wij uiteraard helemaal voor. Maar we zijn ook tégen censuur en vóór goede sportbeelden alsook vóór gelijkheid. Beeld van een vrouw die bij de start van het hordelopen haar hamstring scheurt zullen we in het vervolg dus moeten missen. Terwijl: stoppen met inzoomen op het lange apparaat dat mannen stevig vastgrijpen bij het polsstokhoogspringen, daar hoor je de EBU niet over. Daarom zeggen wij als bezorgde liefhebbers van de vrouwensport alleszins respectvol: FUCK DE EBU!

NOS braafste inzoomertje van de klas

Snapt u nu de verwarring?

Naasten op de hoogte stellen van een overlijden gebeurt doorgaans door het verzenden van rouwpost. De nieuwe bezorgtermijn bij PostNL heeft negatieve gevolgen voor de kosten die daarmee gepaard gaan.

NRC vroeg fotografen om de zomer dicht bij huis vast te leggen. Wat gebeurt er als je het bekende als vertrekpunt neemt? John van Hamond trok een cirkel van anderhalve kilometer rond zijn huis en belde aan bij ieder huis met nummer 11. „Jeetje mina, dat heb ik allemaal gewoon heel dichtbij.”

De FIFA gaat een onderzoek instellen naar de acties van Argentijnse spelers na afloop van de halve finale van het WK tussen Argentinië en Engeland.

Lunchen is op de Britse werkvloer „een kort en eenzaam gebeuren”. In de kleine kantines speciaal voor taxichauffeurs doet een traditioneel ontbijt van bacon, ei en worstjes het altijd goed.

The conviction means Nadezhdin is now banned from collecting signatures to appear on the ballot for State Duma elections this September.

peaceful-jp-scenery has added a photo to the pool:

Sakurakouji Park
桜小路公園

In another pond in Sakurakouji Park, I saw a double-flowered lotus called Makotohasu, which has many petals.

桜小路公園のもう一つの池では、誠蓮（まことはす）という花びらの多い、八重咲の蓮が見られました。

Fujisawa city, Kanagawa pref, Japan

peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Sakurakouji Park
桜小路公園

In another pond in Sakurakouji Park, I saw a double-flowered lotus called Makotohasu, which has many petals.

桜小路公園のもう一つの池では、誠蓮（まことはす）という花びらの多い、八重咲の蓮が見られました。

Fujisawa city, Kanagawa pref, Japan

Original Mastodon Post

In case someone is interested: Qwythos-9B-V2 running on a Linux PC (Ryzen 9 w/Radeon) + agents & web search skills provide close to Claude experience, even in term of speed 🙏

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The condition that causes people to get lost in their own home. Some estimates suggest up to one in 30 people may be affected by Developmental Topographical Disorientation, a condition that has been described as a lifelong inability to orient oneself — even in extremely familiar surroundings.