The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Kash Patel defends FBI hiring policy on applicants who have engaged in bestiality

Senators question FBI chief on move to cut restrictions on agent applicants who have engaged in bestiality

FBI director Kash Patel defended his agency’s decision to roll back restrictions on agent applicants who have previously engaged in bestiality, arguing the FBI “did not want to punish victims of bestiality” by automatically disqualifying them.

The unusual topic of bestiality emerged during a Senate judiciary committee oversight hearing on Tuesday after Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican John Kennedy questioned Patel’s decision to remove barriers that previously prevented applicants who engaged in prostitution and bestiality from being qualified for a job at the FBI.

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Ben Jennings on tech leaders’ outcry over the dangers of AI – cartoon

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‘Significant unease’ at the Telegraph over Reform using outlet for ‘spoiler’ tactics

Recent instances of Nigel Farage’s party trying to gain sympathetic coverage lead to debate over reporting practices

The Telegraph and Reform UK are facing claims of undermining public interest journalism and eroding trust between reporters and politicians, after Nigel Farage’s party gave the newspaper stories first uncovered by other outlets.

It is understood there is unease among editorial staff at the Telegraph about Reform’s repeated use of the outlet for “spoilers”: a media tactic designed to pre-empt a problematic story by placing it with a title seen as more sympathetic.

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Ed Sheeran responds to backlash over removing Macklemore from tour after ‘Free Palestine’ comments

English singer outlined his position after US stadium owners refused to let rapper perform after political speech

Singer Ed Sheeran has responded to the backlash over the removal of Macklemore from his North American Loop tour, following the rapper’s “Free Palestine” speech on stage at MetLife stadium in New Jersey.

In a two-minute speech on 4 September, the Grammy-winning artist told the audience he wanted the people of Gaza and “the occupied West Bank” to know “we have not forgotten about them”, prompting owners of subsequent stadium tour venues – including Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots and a prominent supporter of and donor to Israel – to object to Macklemore’s appearance on the tour.

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Army officers ‘let down’ soldier over sexual assault claim before she killed herself, court martial told

Court hears that two officers did not deal properly with allegation Jaysley Beck made against a superior

Two army officers “let down” a teenage soldier who went on to kill herself when they did not deal properly with a sexual assault allegation she made against a superior, a court martial has heard.

Jaysley Beck, 19, told Col Samantha Shepherd that she had been touched on the leg by a warrant officer during a social event at an adventure training exercise, the court was told.

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Howard Webb says accidental handball law ‘a nonsense’ and calls for reform

  • Webb wants to stop ‘ridiculous situations’

  • Says VAR officials in United v City had ‘tunnel vision’

Howard Webb has described the law around accidental handball as “a bit of a nonsense” and called for its reform to stop referees being drawn into “ridiculous situations”.

The chief refereeing officer for English football made his remarks on Tuesday, when he also fronted up over the error that allowed Manchester City to win Sunday’s Manchester derby. Webb said he was “really disappointed” with the video assistant referee call that failed to spot Enzo Fernández interfering with play from an offside position before Erling Haaland scored the only goal.

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Sophie Cunningham says she spoke to Adam Silver about next WNBA commissioner

Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has discussed the soon-to-be vacant WNBA commissioner’s job with Adam Silver after the NBA commissioner reached out to her.

“I have talked to Adam Silver a couple times, and I think he’s a great guy,” Cunningham said on Monday. “He was very knowledgeable and full of wisdom and so getting to talk to him and hear his perspective of how he approaches the NBA is huge, who he’s kind of looking for. I think if you want to know the real answers, you go to him.

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Formula 1 News

Formula 1® - The Official F1® Website

Who impressed our Power Rankings judges in Madrid?

Victory went to Kimi Antonelli at the Spanish Grand Prix after the timing of the Virtual Safety Car scuppered Lando Norris’ efforts. But who impressed our Power Rankings judges over the course of the weekend at the all-new Madring? Check out the latest scores and overall leaderboard below...

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' 'Hehe,' And 'Asdfg'

404 Media reports:



Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was "LMAO."

The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock's "reason" box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something like "investigation," "test," or left the box blank as their search "reason," according to a new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media.
EFF's investigation found cops across dozens of jurisdictions writing "LMAO," "LOL," "Hehe," "Haha," "idk," "blah," "TBD," and "robbery I don't remember the case number leave me alone" in Flock's "reason" box for searches.


They found cops writing "idiot," "fuck this new search engine," "dickhead," "shithead," and "WEIRD KID" in the reason box. And they found an entire class of police button mashers, who ran searches for reasons of "asdfg," "gyghkkghghjkghjk," "jhjhjkhj," "jkhhkjhjk," "nmbvcbnm," and so on and so forth. The searches came from police departments across the country from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock changed how the "reason" box in its search system functions...


Each time a search is performed, a record of it is saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be "as vague as permissible" about the reasons for their searches...

A police department said it investigated a cop who wrote "driving around being weird" in the reason field but found it was for "legitimate public safety purposes."





If a police chief "stood in front of a city council and asked for permission to install hundreds of cameras just so his officers could investigate the high crime of 'haha,' they would be laughed out of the room," argues the EFF blog post, calling this proof that agencies can't be trusted to oversee themselves.

But judges aren't being asked to authorize searches or review evidence, which the EFF post argues shows laws and courts haven't caught up yet with a new technology. Whatever auditing happens is clearly "deficient," the EFF warns, and while many jurisdictions require by law an actual reason for searches, "this keeps happening because police use automated license plate readers as a convenient shortcut around constitutional privacy safeguards." The EFF sees police officers "making a mockery of our civil liberties" by logging reasons like "LOL", "LMAO", "sexy", and "idk" while accessing sensitive location data.


In fact, they argue the warrant-less databases fostered a culture of abuse that "allowed police to treat a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols."


Flock Safety claims it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown list of crimes before running a search-but that only makes it easier for officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the true purpose of the search... Since this update, officers are no longer required to type out why they are digging through a driver's movement history, and instead can select a pre-packaged option like "Traffic infraction" or "Other" in half a second...


Mass surveillance is incompatible with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this data are treating it like a joke. This ALPR mass surveillance — the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion — should not exist. But because it does, EFF continues to urge courts and state legislatures to immediately step in and impose strict, enforceable restrictions to rein in this abuse. At an absolute minimum, this means mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad warrant requirement.

If police want the power to track a person's movements, they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause. They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for "haha."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

thexiffy

Last.fm last recent tracks from thexiffy.

R.E.M. - Exhuming McCarthy

R.E.M.

De benarde situatie van het kabinet maakt de Algemene Politieke Beschouwingen extra spannend

De Miljoenennota bevat diverse politieke ‘cadeautjes’ voor links en rechts, maar oppositiepartijen spreken van een richtingloos kabinet. „We zien een vleugellam kabinet dat nog steeds niet weet hoe het tot een meerderheid wil komen.”


Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

OpenAI werkt met Anthropic en Google samen aan veiligheid rond AI

SAN FRANCISCO (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - ChatGPT-maker OpenAI werkt met zijn concurrenten Anthropic en Google DeepMind samen om veiligheidsproblemen rond kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) aan te pakken. De AI-bedrijven overleggen gezamenlijk over maatregelen, na groeiende bezorgdheid dat de technologie een bedreiging vormt voor de economie en veiligheid.

Chris Lehane, het hoofd beleid bij OpenAI, meldde dinsdag dat het overleg met het bedrijf achter AI-assistent Claude en het AI-onderdeel van Google al enkele weken gaande is. "Het is beter om te proberen samen te werken om prioriteit te geven aan veiligheid", zei Lehane in Washington.

De grootste AI-bedrijven ter wereld werken aan een idee dat is voortgekomen uit een voorstel van Google-onderzoeker Demis Hassabis. Het plan is om een zelfregulerende instantie op te richten naar het model van de Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, de organisatie die in de Verenigde Staten toezicht houdt op brokers en investeringsbedrijven.


Rotterdam - FediMeteo (@rotterdam@nl.fedimeteo.com)

Weer voor de stad Rotterdam Deze bot wordt beheerd door het FediMeteo-project. Voor informatie en contact kunt u de pagina https://fedimeteo.com raadplegen.

Weer voor Rotterdam ☁️ - 15-09-2026 19:15 CEST...

Weer voor Rotterdam ☁️ - 15-09-2026 19:15 CEST

In één oogopslag:
• 20.3°C · Bewolkt ☁️ | Min 17.5°C / Max 23.8°C | Kans op neerslag 1%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 17.5°C, Max 23.8°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1013.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 17.6 km/u (4.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 238°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 20:00: 20.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1013.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 10.8 km/u (3.0 m/s), richting: → 278°
• 21:00: 19.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1013.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: → 269°
• 22:00: 19.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1013.8 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 14.4 km/u (4.0 m/s), richting: ↘ 321°
• 23:00: 18.3°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 8%, 🧭 1013.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 10.4 km/u (2.9 m/s), richting: ↓ 345°
• 00:00: 17.6°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 8%, 🧭 1013.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.7 km/u (2.7 m/s), richting: ↓ 350°
• 01:00: 17.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 7%, 🧭 1013.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 5.0 km/u (1.4 m/s), richting: → 262°
• 02:00: 18.3°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1013.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 5.4 km/u (1.5 m/s), richting: → 259°
• 03:00: 18.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 4%, 🧭 1013.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.7 km/u (2.7 m/s), richting: ↗ 244°
• 04:00: 16.9°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.7 mm, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1013.8 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.8 km/u (1.9 m/s), richting: ↓ 338°
• 05:00: 17.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1013.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.5 km/u (1.8 m/s), richting: ↘ 305°
• 06:00: 16.5°C (Helder) 🌕, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1013.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.0 km/u (2.5 m/s), richting: → 283°
• 07:00: 16.0°C (Helder) 🌕, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1013.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.6 km/u (2.1 m/s), richting: → 282°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• woensdag 16 september: Min 15.4°C, Max 18.4°C (Matige regen) 🌧️, Neerslag 12.0 mm, Kans op neerslag 51%, 🧭 1015.1 hPa ↗️ +1.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 18.7 km/u (5.2 m/s), richting: → 277°
• donderdag 17 september: Min 14.4°C, Max 17.0°C (Matige regen) 🌧️, Neerslag 7.2 mm, Kans op neerslag 47%, 🧭 1011.4 hPa ↘️ -3.7 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 25.9 km/u (7.2 m/s), richting: ↗ 210°
• vrijdag 18 september: Min 13.4°C, Max 17.7°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.8 mm, Kans op neerslag 17%, 🧭 1011.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: ↗ 239°
• zaterdag 19 september: Min 15.4°C, Max 20.1°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 7.5 mm, Kans op neerslag 42%, 🧭 1014.6 hPa ↗️ +3.2 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 22.0 km/u (6.1 m/s), richting: ↗ 228°
• zondag 20 september: Min 15.0°C, Max 18.5°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 6.6 mm, Kans op neerslag 27%, 🧭 1020.5 hPa ↗️ +5.9 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 20.1 km/u (5.6 m/s), richting: → 265°
• maandag 21 september: Min 14.0°C, Max 18.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 10%, 🧭 1028.6 hPa ↗️ +8.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 12.7 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: → 286°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 19:15): 20.3°C (Bewolkt)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 21.1°C (+0.8°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 14.0 km/u (3.9 m/s), richting: → 277°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 29.9 km/h (8.3 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 83%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1013.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 12.8 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.1
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 07:16 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 19:56

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 46 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 6.2 μg/m³
• PM10: 11.2 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo



VK: Voorpagina

Volkskrant.nl biedt het laatste nieuws, opinie en achtergronden

Russisch oorlogsschip vuurt lichtkogels af op Deense helikopter, Navo-straaljagers halen drone neer boven Litouwen

Nog steeds objecten op spoor: metalen staaf tussen Holten en Rijssen verwijderd

Nog steeds objecten op spoor: metalen staaf tussen Holte en Rijssen verwijderd

Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

Auto van Lydia zit vaak onder duivenpoep, maar buren hebben ontheffing voerverbod

Al 44 jaar woont Lydia de Boer met veel plezier in de Mauritsstraat in het centrum van Rotterdam. Haar invalideparkeerplaats voor de deur is geen overbodige luxe, maar haar parkeerplek inclusief haar rode auto worden keer op keer gebruikt als duiventoilet. "Soms kan ik niet eens de auto openmaken zonder stront aan mijn handen te krijgen."

Duiven hebben het gemunt op de auto van Lydia: 'Ik kan niets zien, alleen maar poep'

Al 44 jaar woont Lydia de Boer met veel plezier in de Mauritsstraat in het centrum van Rotterdam. Haar invalideparkeerplaats voor de deur is geen overbodige luxe, maar haar parkeerplek inclusief haar rode auto worden keer op keer gebruikt als duiventoilet. "Soms kan ik niet eens de auto openmaken zonder stront aan mijn handen te krijgen."

Ook al FASCISME: de natiestaat

We zijn weer terug in de jaren '30, toen het ook al bon ton was om iedereen waar je het niet mee eens bent voor fascist uit te maken OH NEE DAT IS PAS NA 1945 BEGONNEN en de Volkskrant is er nooit, maar dan ook nooit mee opgehouden. Omdat je sinds kort niet meer aan AI mag vragen om je Volkskrant-opiniestuk te schrijven is het aantal enigszins normale inzendingen dermate opgedroogd dat ook Tivadar Vervoort een kansje krijgt met zijn stelling dat we de natiestaat moeten afschaffen. "De natiestaat en de rechten die deze verleent zijn gebouwd op het ‘eigen volk eerst’-principe, en dragen daardoor het gevaar van fascisme in zich." Even los van flauwe woordgrapjes over 'nazi' en 'natie' is het ook een beetje zuur om de oude wijn van Adorno, Foucuault en al die andere lui die al die onzin tenminste nog zelf bedachten nu te zien worden opgediend in nieuwe zakken met een modieus snorretje en dito oorringetjes. Maar o wee als een talkshow Fleur Agema uitnodigt, dan is de rechtsstaat volgens Pieter Klok pas echt in gevaar. Wat een armoe.
BONUSLOL: Deze waanzinnige column over ON! (en een aanrijding met een fatbike en een gejatte fiets) van een andere snor waarin een dezelfde Duitse filosofe wordt aangehaald

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A Eustace Tilley State of Mind

Did you grow up amid stacks of the New Yorker? I didn't, but in my early college years I spent a lot of time in such a house. Lacking anything else to do I'd try reading this impenetrably high-brow magazine; naught but the cartoons, the capsule movie reviews and the covers made any sense to me, at the time. But those were 1960s New Yorkers. David O has been "blogging" every issue for over ten years now, he's currently in 1936. Somehow, when reading A New Yorker State of Mind previous entries get hooked together so it becomes an almost endless scroll I get lost in; maybe you will, too.