Prosecutors said the main suspect, whom they did not name, was a 59-year-old former officer in the Carabinieri military police who previously worked in the intelligence community.
LAUSANNE (ANP) - De Noordse combinatie verdwijnt na meer dan honderd jaar als onderdeel van de Olympische Winterspelen. Het Internationaal Olympisch Comité heeft besloten de aloude combinatie van skispringen en langlaufen te schrappen uit het programma. Dat zal op de eerstkomende Winterspelen van 2030 in de Franse Alpen al het geval zijn.
De Noordse combinatie was al een olympische discipline op de eerste editie van de Winterspelen in 1924 (Chamonix), maar de populariteit van de sport is de afgelopen jaren sterk afgenomen. Er was op de laatste edities nauwelijks aandacht van het publiek. Bovendien wordt de sport in te weinig landen beoefend. Slechts vijf verschillende landen wonnen medailles tijdens de laatste vier Winterspelen.
AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De 18-jarige Juninhio P., die wordt verdacht van betrokkenheid bij de voorbereiding tot het plegen van een aanslag in Heemstede op 20 maart, zegt door een ander onder druk te zijn gezet. Hij heeft volgens het Openbaar Ministerie twee medeverdachten aangestuurd om een vuurwerkbom af te laten gaan bij de joodse synagoge.
Volgens de advocaat van P. wist hij niet dat het doelwit een joods gebedshuis is en beschikte hij niet over het adres. Hij dacht dat de medeverdachten een cobra zouden bezorgen bij een bedrijf. Hij wist volgens zijn raadsvrouw überhaupt niet eens wat een synagoge is en dat er meer aanslagen waren geweest op joodse gebouwen, laat staan dat hij een terroristisch motief had.
De politie wist de explosie te voorkomen. Dinsdag tijdens de eerste zitting in de strafzaak tegen P. werd duidelijk dat de politie na de arrestatie van twee medeverdachten in Heemstede een jerrycan met motorbenzine vond, met zeven flessen terpentine en een cobra daaraan bevestigd.
ANKARA (ANP) - Een jaar nadat in de NAVO is afgesproken om fors meer aan defensie uit te geven, kunnen de Verenigde Staten zien dat Europa en Canada een been bijtrekken. Dat zei Rob Jetten dinsdag bij de topontmoeting van het militaire bondgenootschap in Ankara. De premier hoopt dat de ook aanwezige Amerikaanse president Donald Trump daarvan doordrongen raakt. "En dat het in zijn belang is dat het NAVO-bondgenootschap iets is wat de Amerikanen moeten koesteren."
Bij de top heeft Nederland ruim 3 miljard aan defensiecontracten en plannen daartoe aangekondigd. Ook andere lidstaten kondigden miljardeninvesteringen aan.
Trump ageert regelmatig tegen de NAVO en speelt daarbij ook met het idee om het bondgenootschap te verlaten. Hij vindt dat de Amerikanen daaraan te veel bijdragen en daar te weinig voor terugzien. Een van zijn grieven is dat NAVO-bondgenoten in zijn ogen te weinig hebben geholpen bij de Iranoorlog. Die klacht herhaalde hij ook in Ankara.
PARIJS (ANP) - Contractuele afspraken die werknemers verbieden om bij een concurrent aan de slag te gaan, hebben mogelijk een negatief effect op de productiviteit. Dat stelt de Organisatie voor Economische Samenwerking en Ontwikkeling (OESO) in een rapport. Concurrentiebedingen worden de afgelopen vijf jaar steeds vaker opgenomen in een contract, ziet de organisatie.
Dergelijke afspraken verhinderen kennisuitwisseling omdat werknemers niet naar een vergelijkbare baan mogen overstappen, en dat zit de productiviteitsgroei in de weg. Bedrijven die achterlopen zouden hun productiviteit juist kunnen verhogen door werknemers met ervaring weg te halen bij concurrenten.
Concurrentiebedingen komen steeds vaker voor in contracten voor werknemers in lagere functies die geen toegang hebben tot vertrouwelijke informatie, waar de afspraak ooit voor bedoeld was.
Daarnaast stelt de OESO op basis van een enquête dat concurrentiebedingen ervoor zorgen dat werknemers minder snel van baan wisselen en minder snel geneigd zijn om een eigen bedrijf te starten.
This 2007 science-fiction thriller is a who’s-who of brilliant actors right before they made it big, and is basically Project Hail Mary’s older, emo cousin
If you enjoyed Project Hail Mary but couldn’t quite stomach its sickly sweet message of intergalactic companionship and the indomitable human spirit, then there’s a movie from 2007 that might be right up your alley: Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which today plays like Project Hail Mary’s older, emo cousin.
The setup of both films is essentially the same: in the near future our sun is dying, threatening all life on Earth and prompting an emergency space voyage by a team of plucky geeks. But while one film came from the folks who made The Lego Movie, the other is by the blokes who made 28 Days Later.
Continue reading...A new exhibition at Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art celebrates the cultural and ecological significance of the eucalypt. Translating as ‘breathing for us’ in Woi Wurrung, the show Ngarn Wa’ngal brings together more than 160 works that capture this defining feature of the Australian landscape. Ngarn Wa’ngal: Art of the Gum Tree opens on 10 July; admission is free
Continue reading...There are more than 3,000 conditions in dermatology, experts warn – and chatbots’ recommendations can be flaky
Read more in the Antiviral series
Who among us has not, in a moment of panic or curiosity, consulted the internet in search of solutions to a medical ailment?
Increasingly, people are turning to AI for health advice, and skincare is no exception. Purpose-built apps promise to identify that rash, while people are sending selfies to AI chatbots seeking “full skincare analysis” and personalised regimens of treatments. On Reddit forums, people post before and after shots of the results from their AI-recommended skin routines.
Continue reading...Scientists call for better land management alongside reduction in greenhouse gases causing the crisis
When storm after storm battered the Mediterranean at the start of the year, drowning fields and sending water spurting from plug sockets, few people were fretting about fires.
But just four months later, the murky brown floods that swamped towns and fouled homes across western Europe have given way to angry red blazes and choking black smoke. Rampant wildfires burned 28,000 hectares (69,160 acres) in France and 50,000 hectares in Spain as of 1 July, more than double the average for that time of year, and more land has been charred by bigger fires in the week since.
Continue reading...Europe doesn’t need to worry about Andy Burnham. He has the makings of a great ally | Jessica Berlin
Defence strategists fret about the next PM’s inexperience. But he knows about local resilience. That’s the kind of skill Nato urgently needs
I recently asked a senior Labour figure what Andy Burnham’s defence agenda might look like. “He doesn’t really have one,” came the reply – offered not so much as a criticism of the UK’s prime minister in waiting, as a statement of fact. Given that Keir Starmer’s resignation came after a mutiny within his own government over inadequate defence spending, some may view Burnham’s lack of direct defence experience as a worrying liability.
But beyond the UK, Starmer was at least viewed as a statesman for his commitment to the defence of Ukraine. Leaders in western Europe’s other capitals may now fear that Starmer’s untested successor will be more focused on “No 10 North” than on Nato and European security.
Jessica Berlin is a political analyst and a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis
Continue reading...
Imagine your refrigerator sits in another building, 100 metres from your kitchen. Every time you cook, you walk over for each ingredient, then walk back to check that you closed the fridge door. That could be another long walk back if you forgot the milk for your morning coffee. Until the agentic era, this was the norm. Data could live in that fridge and get pulled when needed. Applications and humans didn't need millisecond or even live data to make important decisions; humans can work on copies. But that era is ending. Agents think and act in instants, in context. And very soon billions of them will be working 24/7/365. They don't pull a copy and decide later. They need to be governed in the moment, in the context of that moment, and they need to act fast and at reasonable cost. Agents cannot run to a lakehouse, or a fridge, and still meet those requirements. That means intelligence has to be where the agents and data are acting. Think about the exponential rise in digital fraud in payment systems, or the volume of retail returns from digital purchasing. We live in a more complex, integrated data world, and we expect real-time resolutions, solutions, and choices. The lake was never built to run a business (or agents) Your AI and your data need to be available the moment an agent acts: Petabyte-scale data, served in real time, live, not copies, without a walk to the fridge every time. You cannot retrofit a lakehouse to deliver that. Everyone now agrees that the old separation between transactional and analytical systems had to end. The interesting question is what replaces it. This month Databricks offered its answer: LTAP, or Lake Transactional/Analytical Processing. Built on Lakebase, its serverless Postgres®, LTAP puts transactions and analytics on a single copy of data in the lakehouse. It is interesting engineering, but built from the wrong end. The reason is straightforward: the only gravity that matters is the data. Action happens at the data layer, governance has to happen at the data layer, so the data layer is where you build rather than somewhere you move data to. Pulling transactions up into the lakehouse is like moving the house and kitchen to the building with the fridge. A lakehouse is, at bottom, built on a data lake, and the lake was built for analytical work: Large scans, append-heavy patterns, eventual consistency, object-storage economics. Transactions want the opposite: Low-latency reads and writes, strict consistency, row-level locking, the hard ACID guarantees that operational applications have relied on for 40 years. You can engineer a transactional layer onto object storage credibly enough, but you are swimming against the substrate the entire way. The lakehouse is a magnificent place to analyze data, but a strange place to run your order book. The operational database is where transactions already live. It is consistent, governed, the system of record. Agents don't act on copies. They act on the real thing, live and governed, right where it sits. The durable architecture doesn't haul that into the analytical world and re-solve consistency from scratch. It starts from the operational core, the place the business actually runs, and extends analytics, vector search, and agents outward from there, against the same live, governed data, without moving it. The destination everyone is describing is the same: one copy, no pipelines, one governed surface for every workload, whether OLTP, HTAP, or agents. The divergence is the starting point. A lakehouse-first model decides in advance that the data belongs in the lake, then pulls transactions up to meet it. Starting from the operational core presumes nothing: The data stays where it already is, and everything comes to it. Opposite starting points compound: the gap between the two only widens the further you build. For regulated enterprises, true sovereignty is nonnegotiable A lakehouse is a cloud service, on the cloud's object storage, under the cloud's control. For an enormous share of the enterprises that most need agentic AI (banks, hospitals, telcos, governments), "move your transactional system of record into our cloud" is not a deployment detail. It is a nonstarter. These organizations operate under data-residency rules, sovereignty requirements, and, in some cases, air-gap mandates that no amount of elegant lakehouse architecture can make go away. You cannot regulate your way around where the bytes physically sit. This is not only about what regulators permit. Where data does its work should be the enterprise's choice in the moment, not a destination a vendor decided in advance. The moment an autonomous agent can act on regulated data, sovereignty stops being a preference and becomes a constraint. An operational core built on open Postgres runs wherever the data has to be: on-premises, hybrid, across clouds, air-gapped if the regulator demands it. A lakehouse, cloud-bound by design, runs where the vendor's cloud runs. For the regulated enterprise, that single fact settles the question before any benchmark is run. Govern where the data is, not in a catalog above it Governance works the same way. The lakehouse model governs through a catalog, a policy layer administered above a collection of engines. That is a reasonable design for a platform assembled from many parts. For an autonomous agent acting directly on data, a governance layer that lives somewhere other than the data is a governance layer with a path around it. Governance has to be enforced by the database itself, through the same roles, row-level security, and audit trail that already govern human access. Govern where the data is, at the moment of action, not in a catalog hovering above it. The market is already moving This is the shift, and the market is confirming it. The most prominent name in the lakehouse world is now racing to embed an operational Postgres core, spending roughly $1 billion to acquire Neon to get there. When the company that defined the lakehousestarts building toward the operational database, the direction of travel is no longer in dispute. The only question left is which end you build from. The enterprises that get this right will build from the operational core outward, on open Postgres, on infrastructure they own. Transactions, consistency, governance, and sovereignty are the hard constraints; analytics is the part that should come to them, not the reverse. Your AI, your data, your rules, on infrastructure you control. Join the Era of Agentic AI with EDB Postgres AI. Watch the global digital event on demand: https://www.enterprisedb.com/join-the-era-of-agentic-ai-edb-postgres-ai
Mbo-scholen die kampen met dalende studentenaantallen, krijgen vanaf 2029 extra geld. Vooral voor het mbo in de Randstad betekent dat juist minder geld. Volgens onderwijsminister Letschert staat het voortbestaan van het mbo op het spel in veel krimpregio’s.
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Woede en verontwaardiging alom vanwege het schrappen van de rode kaart van de Amerikaanse spits Folarin Balogun, na een belletje van president Trump. Logisch natuurlijk, maar in het topvoetbal, óók in Europa, gelden wel vaker andere regels voor mannen met macht en geld.
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Net zoals wij, doen ze in Amerika aan eten. Maar wat eten ze dan? Dat verschilt nogal en is zeer afhankelijk van de economische klasse. We duiken in de wereld van ultrabewerkt voedsel, fastfood en kip uit blik.
Abonneer je op ons YouTube-kanaal
In Schiedam is het allereerste innovatiecentrum van Nederland geopend waar wordt geëxperimenteerd met mensachtige robots voor de werkvloer. In het Humanoid Application Center kunnen bedrijven nieuwe technieken uitproberen voor de bots. De bedoeling is dat ze in de toekomst menselijke taken overnemen.
