The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has vowed to stay in office despite heavy losses in two state elections that he described as a ‘disaster’. The anti-immigration, Kremlin-friendly Alternative für Deutschland won with 38% of the vote in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, while the leftwing Die Linke was victorious in Berlin.

Merz has promised political change, but speculation is growing that his party could soon oust him. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent, Deborah Cole.

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Teams are running further and set-piece strikes are in decline as end-to-end football takes over the division

Goals in the Premier League are up. Chaos is returning. End-to-end football is back. The division is more open, in more ways than one.

The figures show a rise from 2.75 goals per game last season to 2.82 so far this year, which is a small average increase – but one that could easily widen. The goals-per-game rate was at least 0.21 higher across the final 330 games than it was for the first 50 in four of the past five seasons. If 2026-27 sees a similar upturn, it will become the second highest scoring season in the Premier League era.

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US president reportedly changed his mind over Saudi Arabia’s pleas for assistance as bombs were being loaded

Houthi fighters are moving to seize strategic heights in Yemen that would cut the Red Sea coast off from areas held ​by Saudi-backed forces after Donald Trump called off US strikes on the group at the last minute, reportedly as bombs were being loaded on to aircraft.

Amid increasingly heavy fighting in Yemen, which has displaced tens of thousands of people in recent weeks, the New York Times reported on Monday that the US president had flip-flopped wildly in recent days after a call from Saudi Arabia for US strikes on the Houthis.

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In Nederland verblijven duizenden asielzoekers in tijdelijke noodopvang als containerwoningen. Minister Van den Brink probeert meer opvangplekken af te dwingen, maar de Onderzoeksraad waarschuwt dat te harde druk de samenwerking met gemeenten kan verslechteren en afhankelijkheid van noodopvang juist verlengt.

Een explosie in het Rotterdamse Zuidwijk in 2024 verwoestte een deel van een appartementengebouw. Er vielen drie doden. De eigenaar van de bedrijfsruimte waar de ontploffing zich voordeed, houdt vol dat hij van niets wist.

Elke week legt Annemiek Leclaire een lezersvraag voor aan deskundigen. Deze week: mag onze dochter (10) een dure tas kopen?

AI infrastructure growth is running into limits on energy, water, and land, according to researchers at Forrester, which predicts governments will increasingly make datacenter operators pay for the resources they consume. Governments, utilities, datacenter operators, and enterprises will have to rethink how that growth is funded, managed, and regulated, the firm said in its 2027 sustainability predictions. The scale of the infrastructure buildout needed to support AI across businesses, governments, and consumer services is beginning to emerge. Earlier this month, PwC put cumulative global datacenter capital expenditure through 2050 at between $22 trillion and $50 trillion, with a central estimate of $31.6 trillion – roughly equivalent to a year of US economic output. Whether grids and communities can support those ambitions is another matter. "Unlimited AI ambition faces a reckoning with limited resources," Forrester said. Forrester predicts that governments and utilities will require datacenter operators to finance grid upgrades, pay for reserved capacity, and provide guarantees against speculative demand. It also expects community impact reviews to become a gate that new projects must pass before construction. Forrester senior analyst Abhijit Sunil explained the reasoning in a blog post: "With unprecedented growth demands, utilities cannot assume that every proposed datacenter will arrive on schedule or consume its promised load. Building generation and transmission for speculative demand could leave households and businesses paying for stranded infrastructure. "Already, the White House has called on hyperscalers to procure their own power, fund upgrades, and pay for reserved capacity even when unused. In 2027, at least two countries will turn this ratepayer-protection principle into tariffs or equivalent obligations. Cloud and colocation costs will become more location-specific, contractually committed, and exposed to power-market risk." Sunil said datacenter operators should expect long-term minimum payment commitments, financial guarantees, energy tariffs, and requirements to reduce their loads when grids are under strain. "Cloud economics will consequently become more dependent on location, electricity contracts, grid maturity, and providers' ability to generate or reduce power. Enterprises rapidly scaling AI capacity will increasingly inherit these costs," he said. The US, however, appears to be moving in the opposite direction on some forms of environmental oversight. In August, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed eliminating federal minimum requirements for public participation in minor-source air permits. The change could make it easier for some datacenter power projects to proceed without public notice, even as Forrester predicts that community scrutiny will increasingly determine which facilities get built. ®

AWS has entered the open source agentic AI game, claiming its new Strands harness matches rivals on benchmarks while using around a quarter fewer tokens. The Strands harness, as its name suggests, is built on AWS’ Strands Harness SDK, but is packaged up and ready to roll out of the box, either locally or deployed to work with whatever AI provider a customer prefers. "The moment you build your own agent, you're on your own," AWS noted in its announcement. "It's tricky wiring up the right primitives just well enough to match that ‘it just worked’ feeling." This new open-source option means that 'all you need is one line of Python or TypeScript to get it working with your choice of model," AWS adds. On top of being relatively plug-and-play in design, AWS claims the Strands harness achieved "nearly equal benchmark scores" versus Claude Code, Codex, and “other popular harnesses” when tested using the Harbor framework, distributed across multiple nodes of AWS’ own EC2 virtual servers for benchmarking tests. Strands consumed 28 percent fewer tokens across six benchmark tests when compared to “Claude or GPT models,” claims AWS, and in some cases had better accuracy than other harnesses too. DeepSeek's harness, AWS admits, was more token efficient but - we're told - was less accurate on the same tests. AWS credits this performance to the Strands harness’ default prompt caching and context management settings. Per the announcement post, it defaults to truncating tool results over 1,500 tokens, automatically compacting its context window when it surpasses 85 percent, and automatically trying to recover context in overflow cases. It’s worth pointing out, however, that AWS describes the Strands harness as being built to be "a general-purpose agent rather than a coding agent." Considering that every agent harness it was compared to in AWS’ benchmarks (Claude Code, Codex, oh-my-pi, OpenCode, and DeepSeek Harness) is billed as a coding agent, it’s worth questioning how other general-purpose AI agents would perform when compared to the new Strands harness. Amazon plans to publish a paper from its researchers with more benchmark details - we’ll keep an eye out to see more of the specifics on how it was evaluated. In the meantime, anyone who wants to give the pre-packaged, open-source, general-purpose Strands harness a shot can do so by using the instructions included in the announcement post. It’s available as a Python or TypeScript library, and also has a CLI. And it ships with a skills file, so plugging in your own preferred tools should be relatively easy; shell, file, and web tools are included at launch. “We believe quickly prototyping with a batteries included harness will create more useful agents,” AWS says of the Strands harness design. It’s live now, so if you’re looking for another open-source option it’s ready when you are, even if a more independent gauge of its performance is currently lacking. ®

Oh my goodness, I love the look of these cups.

They were made by Indonesian potter Nabila Nareswari using the nerikomi technique. From her about page:

Nerikomi is a technique in pottery that creates decorative patterns by stacking, rolling, and slicing colored clay. Patterns produced by it are structural rather than painted on, which allows the potter to make detailed images or complex repetitive patterns on both sides of the clay slabs.

Nareswari posts videos of her process on Instagram; it is painstaking.

Nerikomi takes a lot of patience and heart 🤍

I think Iris is the epitome of trusting a process. No other work of mine takes as much patience as these lovely mugs and cups do. There isn’t really a shortcut to having them done quicker, you just have to do one thing after another, after another, and before you know it, it’s there in your hands! Albeit two months later😜

She has a shop but all of her Iris collection is currently sold out.

Tags: art · Nabila Nareswari · pottery

From March 2027, players of Hot Wheels Infinite Rush will be able to choose from the grid's 11 teams.

ANTWERPEN (ANP) - In Antwerpen is een Nederlandse vader (47) veroordeeld tot een gevangenisstraf van 23 jaar voor de moord op zijn 14-jarige zoon. In januari 2022 overleed de jongen in het huis van zijn vader in Turnhout, waar hij pas acht weken later door de politie werd gevonden. Al die tijd wisten zijn moeder en broers niet waar hij was. In het lichaam van de jongen werd ketamine gevonden.

Vier andere personen die destijds in het huis van de vader woonden, kregen gevangenisstraffen tussen de een en drie jaar. Zij werden schuldig bevonden aan het onthouden van voedsel en verzorging.

De rechter verklaarde dat de man heeft geprobeerd zijn kinderen te isoleren en te indoctrineren met zijn geloofsovertuiging. Daarbij heeft hij volgens de rechter onherstelbaar leed veroorzaakt bij zijn moeder en broers.

Bij het bepalen van de strafmaat heeft de rechter er rekening mee gehouden dat de redelijke termijn voor een veroordeling ruim verstreken is.

Anti-war activists and lawyers say that anxiety is rising, even though helping Russians avoid military service has long been a routine part of their work.

linoleum snede, heel veel puntjes. op deze uitsnede zijn twee kattenkoppen te zien.

Een 19-jarige Amsterdammer moet een jaar de cel in vanwege zijn rol bij een overval op een Capelse juwelier. Met veel geweld overviel de man samen met een plaatsgenoot de zaak in winkelcentrum De Terp afgelopen januari. Ook moet hij het slachtoffer een schadevergoeding betalen.

De Verenigde Naties zoeken een secretaris-generaal die: 
- vrouw is
- houdt van reizen
- kan nadenken
- van een uitdaging houdt
- de mensheid wil dienen
- iets met Palestijnen heeft
- ooit China heeft bezocht of Chinees eten heeft afgehaald
- bekend is met het Russische volkslied
- graag over de South Pavillion Road in Gibraltar flaneert
- weet wat nieuw leiderschap is
- heel stoïcijns kan kijken
- internationaal betrokken is
- internationaal georiënteerd is
- een woordje over de grens spreekt
- over grenzen heen kijkt
- goed is met mensen
- goed is met landen
- van de VN weer de VN maakt
- kan de-escaleren 
- visie heeft
- uit een bananenrepubliek komt
- goed is met resoluties
- goed is met afgewezen resoluties
- Iran in z'n waarde laat
- een voornaam heeft beginnend met de S (pre)
- een achternaam heeft beginnend met de K (pre)
- lid is van D66 (pre)
- Sigrid Kaag heet (pre)
- Sigrid Kaag is (pre)
- ah nee toch ACH, iemand die net zo goed is als Sigrid Kaag en/of Sigrid Kaag kent dan maar

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: