Uit onderzoek bleek dat Nederlandse media niet neutraal berichtten over de genocide in Gaza. NRC toonde in reactie daarop onvoldoende zelfreflectie, vindt Sebastiaan Dekkers.
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Hij stapte zelf naar de politie met dozen vol bewijs tegen zijn vader. Nu kijken de Filipijnse autoriteiten ook naar Thomas Markle jr. De 60-jarige halfbroer van hertogin Meghan is aangemerkt als "persoon van belang" in het onderzoek naar materiaal over seksueel kindermisbruik.
Hij is uitdrukkelijk nog geen verdachte. Er zijn "aanwijzingen" dat de zoon ook betrokken was, zegt de Filipijnse minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Jonvic Remulla. Maar die informatie wordt nog gecontroleerd.
Meisjes naar zijn huis gebracht
De aanleiding: getuigen verklaren dat minderjarige meisjes naar de woning van Markle jr. in Cebu werden gebracht. Hij zegt zelf dat dat voor TikTok-filmpjes was. Op zijn TikTok-account staan alleen geen filmpjes waarin minderjarige meisjes te zien zijn, aldus de minister.
Daarmee neemt de zaak een opvallende wending. Markle jr. was tot nu toe vooral de klokkenluider.
Hoe het begon
Eind oktober leverde hij bij de politie in Cebu vier dozen met spullen van zijn vader in: telefoons, geheugenkaarten, computeronderdelen, harde schijven en videobanden. Die had hij gevonden in het huis van een vriend in Cordova, waar de bezittingen van Thomas Markle sr. waren achtergebleven.
De 82-jarige vader woonde van januari 2025 tot mei 2026 in Cebu City. Daarna keerde hij terug naar de Verenigde Staten voor medische behandeling.
Een rechtbank gaf op 29 oktober toestemming om de apparaten te onderzoeken. Op drie geheugenkaarten en een van de vijf onderzochte telefoons troffen rechercheurs vermoedelijk misbruikmateriaal aan. Het gaat om ongeveer 7500 foto's en één video. Sommige kinderen zijn naar schatting 10 of 11 jaar oud.
Nog veel open vragen
Die vondst bewijst nog niets over de schuld van een van de twee mannen. Onderzoekers moeten nog vaststellen van wie de apparaten waren, wie het materiaal heeft gemaakt of verspreid en waar het vandaan komt. De Filipijnen vragen de FBI om hulp bij het vaststellen van de eigenaars van een aantal telefoons uit de VS.
Tegen Markle sr. is nog geen aanklacht ingediend. Hij ontkent alles en noemt de beschuldigingen leugens. Hij zou inmiddels in Florida zijn opgenomen in een zorginstelling voor mensen met geheugenproblemen. Dat kan verhoren lastig maken.
Meghan heeft al jaren geen contact met haar vader. Ze zegt dat ze door de aantijgingen "zeer ontdaan" is.
Wat nu?
De Filipijnse politie zegt het onderzoek te "intensiveren". Pas als duidelijk is wie het materiaal bezat, volgt een besluit over vervolging, van de vader en mogelijk ook van de zoon.
Meer weten?
- NOS: Filipijnse politie bevestigt kinderporno op apparaten van vader Meghan Markle
- RTL Boulevard: Autoriteiten kijken naar rol halfbroer Meghan in onderzoek naar vader
- Nieuwsblad: Vader van Meghan Markle onderzocht om beelden van kindermisbruik
De migrantenboot met 38 opvarenden die afgelopen zaterdag aan land werd gebracht in Cadzand, is vanaf Nederlands grondgebied het water op gegaan. Dat meldt het Openbaar Ministerie donderdag.
Waar de boot precies te water ging, wil het OM niet zeggen. De rubberboot werd op radarbeeld gezien, waarna de kustwacht uitrukte.
NEW YORK (ANP) - Wall Street is donderdag verdeeld van start gegaan, na de aandelenrally een dag eerder. De stemming werd ook gedrukt door een tegenvallend kwartaalrapport van chipbedrijf Qualcomm, dat woensdag na het slot werd gepubliceerd. Hoewel de resultaten boven verwachting waren, viel de verkoop van chips voor smartphones volgens marktkenners tegen. Qualcomm werd kort na de opening zo'n 9 procent lager gezet.
De Dow-Jonesindex stond kort na de opening 0,5 procent hoger op 53.602 punten. De breder samengestelde S&P 500 zakte 0,6 procent tot 7641 punten en de technologiegraadmeter Nasdaq verloor 1,5 procent op 25.355 punten.
Woensdag gingen de Amerikaanse aandelenbeurzen nog hard omhoog na de ruime overwinning van de Democraten bij de tussentijdse verkiezingen in de Verenigde Staten. Dat voedde de hoop bij beleggers dat de oorlog met Iran snel kan eindigen. De Dow steeg woensdag liefst 3 procent en boekte daarmee zijn beste handelsdag sinds april vorig jaar. De S&P 500 sloot 1,6 procent hoger en de Nasdaq won 1,4 procent.
Chipsector
AppLovin, het op kunstmatige intelligentie gebaseerde advertentiebedrijf, schoot zo'n 30 procent omhoog nadat het beter dan verwachte resultaten had gepresenteerd. Ook de vooruitzichten overtroffen de verwachtingen.
De chipsector zette de verliezen voort na de daling van de vorige handelsdag. Aanleiding was de verkiezingsoverwinning van de Democraten, ook in enkele belangrijke staten voor datacenters. Daar groeit de publieke weerstand tegen de snelle uitbreiding van de sector. Chipconcern Nvidia verloor dik 4 procent, Marvell Technology daalde rond de 9 procent en Intel leverde bijna 8 procent in.
Texas
SpaceX en Tesla, beide geleid door Elon Musk, verloren respectievelijk 6 en 9 procent en zetten daarmee hun eerdere verliezen voort. Musk besteedde bijna een half miljard dollar aan steun voor Republikeinse kandidaten. Daarbij probeerde hij onder meer te voorkomen dat de Republikeinen de controle over Texas zouden verliezen, de thuisstaat van beide bedrijven.
De olieprijzen herstelden donderdag wat, na de scherpe dalingen een dag eerder. Een vat ruwe Brentolie, oftewel olie uit onder meer het Midden-Oosten, noteerde bijna 3 procent hoger op ruim 97 dollar. Woensdag werd Brent ruim 8 procent goedkoper en kostte minder dan 95 dollar per vat.
For a decade, good-hearted citizens witnessed horrors and insisted: ‘This is not America.’ Finally, the conversation has shifted
For the past 10 years – such brutally discouraging years in the United States – we’ve been hearing good-hearted citizens put forth something they believed to their bones.
“This is not America,” they would insist as federal agents shot people on city streets, as immigrants were called rapists and animals, as Donald Trump and his cronies stuffed their own pockets while they shrugged at the price of gas and groceries, and humiliated the nation on the world stage, alienating allies and sucking up to autocrats.
Continue reading...The writer and activist finds galvanising energy in grassroots initiatives in the face of inequality and the climate crisis
‘Throughout the world confidence in progress has shattered,” notes Natasha Walter. “The certainty – even the hope – that human rights equality might be within everyone’s reach has disintegrated … Everywhere in the world, from west to east, south to north, women are struggling to win and to protect their rights, and to live in safety. They keep coming up against misogynistic violence that never disappears.”
In Feminism for a World on Fire, Walter, an activist and academic, paints a dire picture of 21st-century womanhood. Where the last century saw women making strides towards equality, today much of that progress has been halted or gone into reverse. Social media, previously a place where women were able to come together and organise, now bubbles with hatred and misogyny. The impact of environmental catastrophe on the female population is stark: women are more likely to die from extreme weather events than men because they are more likely to be caring for children and elderly relatives. Meanwhile, male violence against women is rising and divisions in society, particularly over lightning-rod topics such as migration, are deepening.
Continue reading...Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain flexed their muscles, Manchester United fought back and an unlikely star stole the show for AEK Athens
Still without the recovering Vincent Kompany, Bayern Munich are among the favorites to win the Champions League, which would be their first European title since 2019-20. René Marić’s side produced a dominant display at the Metropolitano, playing Atlético Madrid off the field in a commanding 2-0 win. Lennart Karl and Konrad Laimer made the difference, with Harry Kane providing Laimer with a fine assist in his first continental appearance since winning the Ballon d’Or. Bayern remain just outside the top eight, which guarantees automatic passage to the last 16, having won two and drawn two of their opening four matches.
Continue reading...Actor who provided the voice for the ‘tin dog’ K9 in the BBC’s Doctor Who and also worked on ITV’s Beadle’s About
John Leeson, who has died aged 83, was a genial character actor who provided the voice of the much-loved robotic sidekick K9 in the popular BBC TV series Doctor Who. Originally conceived to appear in just one story, The Invisible Enemy, in 1977, K9 was a mobile, dog-shaped computer who produced ticker-tape information from his mouth and had a laser gun in his nose. With a pinched voice, clipped delivery and a tendency towards pedantry, he served as both encyclopedia and guard dog, and was deemed successful enough a creation to retain as a regular character.
K9 was the perfect foil for Tom Baker’s spiky, obtuse Time Lord: Leeson likened the character to King Lear’s fool – a wise and funny factotum licensed to call out his master’s faults and prick his pomposity. Off-screen Baker thought highly of Leeson, and felt that the intelligent, unassuming and witty actor was more interesting that the oft-malfunctioning K9 prop, which caused many delays on the studio floor. Leeson also won the appreciation of his colleagues by attending rehearsals and gamely performing on all fours.
Continue reading...Former comedian long traded on his extreme persona, yet many will wonder how he was allowed to act in plain sight for so long
In the early 1990s, when he was a student at the Italia Conti theatre school, a teenage Russell Brand became so fixated on a classmate that he followed her for 200 miles, trailing her through the streets of London before sneaking, ticketless, on to her train to Wigan.
By his own admission, she did not want him to accompany her, far less come to her family home, but he did anyway, and got into bed with her. There, he “lied and danced and evoked the spirit of Pan till she reluctantly removed her bra” before deploying “tears and emotional blackmail to secure the immolation of her knickers”.
Continue reading...Foreign Office says 10-year sentence shows city’s security law is being used to ‘target individuals for political expression’
The UK and the US have condemned the 10-year sentence given to Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Joshua Wong under a controversial national security law.
Wong, 30, was sentenced on Thursday after pleading guilty to “foreign collusion” under the law. He is the only person to have been prosecuted twice under the legislation that critics say has been used to silence political opposition in the city.
Continue reading...
Een 27-jarige man is vandaag door het gerechtshof in Den Haag veroordeeld tot drie jaar cel, waarvan zes maanden voorwaardelijk. Hij krijgt die straf voor seksuele handelingen met een minderjarig meisje, een poging tot aanranding van een ander minderjarig meisje in Oud-Beijerland en het maken en bezitten van kinderporno.
The move against the Japanese tobacco giant comes amid a sharp deterioration of relations between Japan and Russia.
There's a BlazeTV YouTube video whose thumbnail shows the presenter with his arms around Anakin Skywalker and a gender-flipped Draco Malfoy called Malfoid. “Total Chud Victory?” It says. The video's title: “Young Right is Reclaiming Culture and Liberals Are Mad About it.”
BlazeTV posted the video on November 2, the day before Democrats swept the midterms and started a political realignment in America so overwhelming that Republicans lost control of all the most powerful state positions in Texas.
The video is a profound misreading of the political and cultural moment. It reminded me of stories of the Bolsheviks seizing the Winter Palace to discover tarot card playing courtiers who had no idea a revolution was happening in the streets.
The American version was watching defense contractor Palmer Lucky dress up like Harry Potter on Halloween while standing next to his Malfoid wife. And it was Elon Musk — who spent roughly half a billion on the election only to see his chosen candidates fail — posting an AI generated picture of Anakin Skywalker sitting at the head of a happy fascist Star Wars family two days before the midterms.
This is what they stole from us pic.twitter.com/q1GnpjF394
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The online right has dominated American culture for a decade, or at least has dominated political narratives picked up by the mainstream media. Its memes and conspiracies drove news cycles. At first, the right’s memes filtered from random people on obscure Discord channels to Reddit’s r/the_donald or 4chan to Trump’s Twitter feed. More recently they’ve come from AI slop farms, from Musk, or from the administration itself. Powered by a well-funded media and podcast ecosystem, Fox News (and a propensity for shamelessness) its comedians, podcasters, and pundits became powerful celebrities and influencers, at least within Elon Musk’s X.
This insular, often inscrutable world has given us Ben Shapiro, Nick Fuentes, Gamergate influencers, the streamer Asmongold, and a revolving door of characters who have shuffled interchangeably between Twitterverse celebritydom and actual government; Kash Patel, DataRepublican, Laura Loomer, Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Dan Bongino, the list goes on.
It has been said many times that “Twitter is not real life,” and that posting too much anywhere will rot your brain. Never has that been more apparent than now: Much of Trumpworld spent the week before an election in which they would get utterly trounced using AI to generate barely legible Anakin and Malfoid memes for an inconsequential ingroup on the social media platform run by the biggest loser on the planet.
“It certainly seems like it has had its high water mark and that reality has FINALLY caught up with the Republican Party,” Michael Senters, a research assistant at the Anti-Defamation League who studies online and gaming culture, told 404 Media.
In 2016, 4chan posters talked about “meme magic” — the pseudo-ironic belief that pictures on the internet could manifest great change in reality. According to legend, Trump strategist Steve Bannon was running a World of Warcraft gold farm when he realized the angry gamers could be harnessed into a powerful reactionary political force. Bannon and others would successfully parlay Gamergate into an endless culture war that’s dominated online life in the Trump era.
During the midterm livestream of Bannon’s War Room podcast, his guest read exit polls that suggested the right-wing had lost young men — a group long thought to be its strongest soldiers. The split between the parties was even, the guest explained. “That can’t be right,” Bannon whispered, signalling he’d lost touch with the constituency he’d harnessed on behalf of Trump ten years ago. As the election results began coming in, right-wing podcasters, livestreamers, and newscasters across the internet went through at least a few of the stages of grief. First they struggled to understand what was happening, suggesting the votes must be wrong. Eventually, many of them ragequit.
"Okay, I'm going to be honest. I'm absolutely rage quitting. I'm so frustrated. I am so unbelievably frustrated. I'm so mad. I think Trump didn't do 50 different things he should have done. I think he should have gone a thousand times harder. I think that he wasted his time selling trinkets and nonsense,” Asmongold said as the returns came in. He lives in Texas where Democrats swept in a shock victory.
“I wish that there were more people who thought like me that weren’t sorry about it. But you know what? There’s not. So it’s just me. And that’s fine. It’s fine. It’s OK,” he said, his voice catching in his throat.
Asmongold (@Asmongold) realizing in real time that he's a total fucking moron who got duped by the most cartoonishly obvious con-man of all time and ragequitting his election night coverage pic.twitter.com/XgtnqNjAaf
— kilo (@kilotonics) November 4, 2026
Many right-wing personalities went into Tuesday somehow expecting to win despite a disastrous war, a disastrous economy, disastrous polls, and a doddering president whose closing argument seemed to be more about his ballrooms, golf courses, and the Reflecting Pool than anything else. Since Trump was re-elected, these same people have called everyone else out of touch, convinced by their X algorithm and prediction markets that no blue wave would materialize. The media has similarly spent many thousands of words suggesting that Bluesky is an out-of-touch leftist echo chamber while mostly failing to suggest anything of the sort about the AI-pilled Silicon Valley executives, bots, and racists shitposting on X. Tuesday’s election wipeout highlights how detached from reality the Malfoid/Anakin-shipping, X-brained billionaires and their acolytes have actually become.
“Blueskywave. Those of us on here, across the board, were out of touch. I see no other conclusion,” Joe Weisenthal of Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast (who is a serious, good journalist), said in a post on X after the election amidst a sea of Anakins tonguing Malfoids.
"I see through the lies of the Democrats."
— Utah College Republicans (@UtahCollegeReps) November 1, 2026
VOTE STRAIGHT TICKET REPUBLICAN pic.twitter.com/i1HjdHdAn7
The meme game and general demeanor of Trump and his followers has grown wildly tiresome in his thus far-disastrous second term. Under the guidance of White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, official government accounts have posted racist Halo memes, used AI to put a studio Ghibli face on anti-immigrant propaganda, and fully embraced Malfoid and Darth Vader as cultural heroes. The base on X loved this stuff. No one else did.
As our friend Gita Jackson over at Aftermath wisely put it immediately before the election,”The idea that they can meme magic their way into a red sweep by posting about Anakin Skywalker a lot is pure desperation [...] Their values have been rejected by popular culture at large, and they are now resigned to exist in the margins.”
Senters said the midterms showed the hard limits of memes as a political tool. “The power that memes have has always been, in my opinion, the power to help define linguistic and community lines in the amorphous space of the Internet. You create a community when you ‘get the joke’ behind a meme but memes generally don't persuade,” he said. “I'll be curious to see if the government accounts will continue to post these far-right cultural memes in the wake of the defeat or if they'll change their tune at all. Like do they double down on the meme posting to try to rally their base? Because it very clearly had ZERO appeal to anyone outside their base.”
Yet the right-wing has spent the last ten years acting as if their memes had moved the country politically. “They deluded themselves into believing that memes carry persuasive power and that their bubble on X represented material reality in a meaningful way when that was no way close to the truth,” he said. “They saw how many ‘numbers’ the Malfoid and Anakin memes did on X and convinced themselves that this was a real cultural awakening moment and that the volk were on their side.”
It cannot be overstated how culturally significant Anakin poasting is. I dont think you could engineer a better anti-progressive memetic virus in lab if you tried.
— Max (@minordissent) October 31, 2026
Alyssa Mercante, an internet culture reporter who is writing a book about politics and video games called Rage Game, agreed. “I think what it's really showing is that when you start to get a little bit too deep in the weeds of this hyper online culture war stuff, it cannot escape the internet,” Mercante told 404 Media. “It is not working anymore. The material reality of America is just not good enough.” Gas prices are up. Everything is more expensive. And ICE has killed Americans in the streets.
“This conspiratorial mindset is wrecker mentality. It is just destructive for the sake of destruction. There is no goal beyond pulling away any sort of legitimacy from the media or from democracy,” Mercante said. “When you get so deep in the weeds of this anti-establishment conspiratorial thought process, you just can't make anything or do anything of value. You're just upending tables and pointing at them and laughing.”
Democrats crushed Republicans who leaned into the online culture war during the midterms. Bo French — an overt racist who ran for railroad commissioner in Texas — sent text messages to voters that depicted himself as Master Chief from Halo. His opponent beat him by more than a million votes.
In Nevada, Halo composer Martin O’Donnell ran as a Republican for a House seat and lost to incumbent Susie Lee. O’Donnell announced his campaign on Discord and leaned hard into an extremely online gamer identity. “He’s like, ‘I wrote the Halo music and I’m voting for Trump and you should too.’ He did a Halo LAN party campaign fundraiser. The imagery was him as Master Chief,” Mercante said. “This dude is like: ‘My personality is gamers, gamers are not woke and they're resisting this [...] and Trump is the person that is going to help us resist,’ and he's polling like absolute dog water.”
It’s been 12 years since Gamergate set the tempo for online culture wars and a decade since Trump won in 2016. In 2026, Star Wars, Halo, Harry Potter feel dated in a way they didn’t back then. “What 22-year-old kid is going to be like ‘they took Halo from me.’ They don’t know Halo to have it taken away from them,” Mercante said.
She stressed that so much right wing online culture is about distraction — she likened it to jingling keys to capture the attention of a baby. “If the economy is the number one issue for both Democrats and Republicans going into the midterms, no amount of Malfoid scissoring Anakin Skywalker is going to change that need for people to be in a better financial position,” Mercante said. “The tech oligarchs pushed this stuff straight into our eyes for two years straight unfettered [...] And I wake up and gas is this expensive? I don’t care if you take a Taylor Swift song and make JD Vance walk out to it.”
“[They] really thought that this would just last forever,” she added. “When you build up a meme presidency, eventually the cards just collapse underneath you, and there's just nothing to show for it.”
Though this midterm signals a move away from Gamergate-style culture war politics, both Senters and Mercante cautioned that this type of rhetoric is still dangerous, and can still be destructive. “They’re still very good at doing propaganda on the internet — they wrote the book in many cases,” Mercante said.
ELCAN KE-7A has added a photo to the pool:
2026年9月26日に開催された大洗海上花火大会から、野村花火工業によるスターマイン。Starmine by Nomura hanabikogyo from the Oarai Fireworks Festival on 26 September 2026.
ELCAN KE-7A has added a photo to the pool:
2026年9月26日に開催された大洗海上花火大会から、野村花火工業によるスターマイン。Starmine by Nomura hanabikogyo from the Oarai Fireworks Festival on 26 September 2026.
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