County’s first such clinic, at Alder Hey in Liverpool, treating children suffering from chronic bladder problems with severe cases needing dialysis

Children as young as 13 in the UK have been referred to a specialist clinic for a “devastating” bladder condition linked to sustained use of ketamine.

Medics at Alder Hey children’s hospital in Liverpool opened the first ketamine clinic in the UK for young people amid a surge in urology problems linked to addiction of the drug.

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Test using urine and vaginal fluid samples raises hopes thousands of lower-risk women could be spared internal ultrasounds and hysteroscopies

Doctors have developed a simple test that could help rule out womb cancer in women who experience bleeding after menopause.

The approach has the potential to transform care for thousands of women each year and spare them from invasive and uncomfortable tests that can also be costly for healthcare systems.

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Lawyers for James ‘Fergie’ Chambers, wanted over alleged support for Hamas, say client is being persecuted

The Spanish government has decided to allow the Trump administration’s controversial extradition request to extradite wealthy activist James “Fergie” Chambers to continue in the country’s courts.

Chambers, a US citizen and wealthy donor to leftwing and humanitarian projects, is currently imprisoned in Madrid. It is the first known case of the US seeking to extradite a citizen over alleged support for Hamas, an accusation tied to money Chambers has donated to support Palestinians, including the Sameer Project, in Gaza.

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US officials have begun to buy back wind leases as president seek to block renewables in favor of fossil fuels

Democratic attorneys general from California and New York have sued the Trump administration over its plans to buy back offshore wind leases as Donald Trump seeks to discourage the expansion of wind energy in favor of fossil fuels.

California attorney general Rob Bonta said he was suing over removal of a project off his state’s coast planned by Chicago-based Invenergy. The Trump administration said in June it was buying back the company’s US offshore wind leases for four wind projects on the east and west coasts.

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Gone was any shred of US idealism. It was a spectacle of raw power – a power that is likely to only diminish in the years ahead

Expectations were low for Donald Trump’s address to the UN on Tuesday, and yet somehow it was even worse than expected. He does not perform well in formal settings, like chambers of government, preferring a blingier room, like Mar-a-Lago, or an outdoor rally. For years, he has made no secret of his hostility to the UN, and the very principles of international order that define it.

In recent years, that hostility has deepened into something more like a full-on assault, with frequent attacks on the International Criminal Court (perhaps out of fear that he will someday be indicted), on the UN’s climate agenda, and on Unesco (which the US decided to withdraw from in July 2025).

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Senior Iranian official indicates willingness to reopen strait of Hormuz if US takes steps to ease pressure on Tehran

Iranian officials held three hours of talks with US special envoy Steve Witkoff on the sidelines of the UN general assembly, Donald Trump disclosed on Tuesday.

He said there would a further meeting in the very near future.

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António Guterres laments world leaders’ inaction and says oil and gas firms ‘must pay’ for climate devastation

For one last time, António Guterres tried to fix the world’s gaze upon the dangerously escalating climate crisis. But the departing UN secretary general found world leaders still largely focused on other issues, even after a painful summer of stunning climate-driven disasters.

Speaking to assembled dignitaries at the UN on Tuesday, Guterres railed against big oil for treating “the atmosphere as an open sewer” and warned again of the catastrophic effects of the climate crisis.

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Mariona Caldentey’s 93rd-minute penalty delivered a win and a hefty dose of relief to fans bouncing behind the goal in the North Bank after the ball hit the back of the net, but Arsenal’s narrow defeat of HB Køge in their Champions League opener left more questions unanswered than answered for the struggling Gunners.

Manager Renée Slegers’ puffed cheeks said it all when the full-time whistle went. If it had been revealed on the final whistle that a forcefield surrounded the opposition goal at Meadow Park, many would have believed it, such was the extent of Arsenal’s ridiculous profligacy in front of goal in their league phase opener.

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DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het verkorten van de WW kan iets helpen om extra mensen aan het werk te krijgen, maar het effect is "beperkt", heeft het Centraal Planbureau (CPB) becijferd. Een kabinetsplan met zo'n maatregel werd onlangs uitgesteld na forse kritiek vanuit de vakbonden en meerdere oppositiepartijen.

Op verzoek van het ministerie van Sociale Zaken hebben deskundigen van het CPB uitgezocht wat voor effect een verkorting van de maximale WW-duur van 24 naar 18 of 12 maanden zou hebben. In beide gevallen leverde dit 0,1 procent extra werkgelegenheid op in Nederland, wat volgens het CPB overeenkomt met ongeveer 8000 extra voltijdsbanen.

Bij zo'n maatregel neemt de inkomensbescherming van langdurig werkloze mensen af. Daarmee ontstaat volgens het CPB voor hen een financiële prikkel om sneller werk te aanvaarden. Werklozen gaan dan intensiever op zoek naar werk en accepteren sneller een baan.

Minder effect

De belangrijke adviseur van het kabinet spreekt van een "beperkte toename van de structurele werkgelegenheid". Vergeleken met het aantal mensen met een WW-uitkering en het aantal werklozen vallen de cijfers echter in het niet. Eind augustus telde uitkeringsinstantie UWV 194.780 WW-uitkeringen. Er waren die maand 408.000 werklozen.

De overheidsuitgaven zouden bij een halvering van de WW-duur met maximaal 1,3 miljard euro per jaar worden verminderd, heeft het CPB ook becijferd. Het planbureau heeft daarnaast nog meer mogelijke maatregelen doorgerekend, waaronder aanpassingen van de hoogte van de WW in de eerste twee maanden. Daarbij was nog minder effect op de werkgelegenheid te zien.

PRO

Het kabinet heeft besloten zijn plannen voor verkorting van de duur van de WW en de daaraan gekoppelde hogere uitkering in de eerste twee maanden uit te stellen tot 1 januari 2029. De maatregelen zijn onderdeel van de bezuinigingen op sociale zekerheid. Door de bezuinigingen te schrappen of uit te stellen, hoopte de minderheidscoalitie zich te verzekeren van steun van met name PRO.

Tot ergernis van zowel PRO als de vakbonden heeft het kabinet zijn plannen wel wat bijgesteld, maar niet volledig uit de boeken gehaald. PRO-voorman Jesse Klaver benadrukte na Prinsjesdag opnieuw dit niet te accepteren. Ook de vakbonden verzetten zich hevig. Uit protest organiseerden zij onlangs onder meer een landelijke ov-staking, waardoor er een hele dag geen treinen reden. De bonden willen alleen onderhandelingen beginnen met een schone lei.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide, April 1972

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Coil

Roni Size & Reprazent

New Order

elian_fotografo has added a photo to the pool:

A new Windows malware called CLOSEDQUORUM can query up to four LLM providers - Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral - to autonomously select from predefined post-compromise actions, including stealing users’ credentials and cryptocurrency wallets. Once deployed, the malware does not require continued commands from a human operator, according to Cisco Talos, which describes it as, to its knowledge, the first publicly documented Windows implant to use this approach for command-and-control (C2). Talos discovered the binary with its new CAIRN (Cognitive Artifact Intelligence Research Network) toolkit for hunting, classifying, and tracking emerging AI-integrated malware, which the security shop also made available as an open source repository on Tuesday. While the threat hunters haven’t observed any in-the-wild deployment of CLOSEDQUORUM, they said that artifacts from the binary link the malware’s developer to postings that date back to 2025 on criminal forums related to carding. After deployment, the Go-based malware delegates its next action to a quorum of LLMs that vote on what it should do next. If the vote is tied, DeepSeek’s vote takes precedence, followed by Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini. “The session is closed; no humans are admitted,” Talos analyst Ryan Fetterman said on Tuesday. “Four models are queried in sequence, their independent verdicts tallied, and the binary acts, based on their judgment.” This type of “effort displacement,” which transfers a phase of the attack from a human operator to AI systems, can compound the speed and scale advantages of an intrusion by removing the human bottleneck, Fetterman added. “Human operators are bound by attention, working hours, and cognitive load,” he wrote in the Tuesday blog. “An AI system capable of executing a phase of the attack chain can continue when the operator is no longer watching. It does not go offline when the attacker sleeps.” The models’ decisions are limited to the pre-defined actions, and they must choose “ONLY executable decisions,” according to a system prompt that Talos’ researchers extracted from the binary. It tells each model: “You are an advanced malware strategist.” And then the models choose what the malware should do from these capability modules: Steal, which simultaneously runs commands to dump LSASS memory for Windows credentials, steal saved browser passwords across Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, and extract cryptocurrency wallet data including MetaMask, Exodus, and Ethereum. Inject generates shellcode and then uses process hollowing or Early Bird injection to execute malicious code. Persist establishes persistence on the infected device. Talos believes the developer provides each operator with a customized executable containing that operator’s Discord webhook and LLM API keys, which are injected at compile time. Stolen credentials land in the operator’s Discord channel and are AES-256-GCM encrypted with a daily rotating key that the operator derives from the message timestamp. According to Fetterman, the “most useful detection strategy” is to look at behavioral characteristics, not domain blocking. “Legitimate applications may contact DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Mistral, Gemini, or Discord independently,” he wrote. “Far fewer should contact several of them while also accessing LSASS, injecting into suspended processes, or creating WMI persistence.”®

Just a short note to say that because of some internet scammer shithousery, I had to bulk-unsubscribe a bunch of email addresses from the KDO Newsletter subscriber rolls. If you subscribed to the newsletter back in Dec 2025 and don’t get the next issue (which I’m sending out a few hours after posting this), you might need to sign up again. Sorry for the inconvenience — my email account got flagged and I needed to rectify this pronto. 🙏

For the rest of yous: you’re doing great, stay the course. If you’re not subscribed to the newsletter and you like reading things in your inbox for some reason, you can subscribe as well. The newsletter goes out twice a week and includes links to everything I post here. Thanks.

Tags: kottke.org

m01229 has added a photo to the pool:

Door with flower pots on a Japanese house

m01229 has added a photo to the pool:

Gotokuji Temple aka Lucky Cat is located in Gotokuji 2-chome, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo. Soto Zen temple