I’m not a fan of improv. I’ve even walked out of a class before—being told to pretend to give birth just wasn’t for me. But its popularity was once never in doubt: people were all too willing to shell out hard‑earned cash to watch performers fumble through impromptu sketches. Nowadays, the form has lost its shine, and Dennis M. Hogan traces whether it still has a place in today’s culture. The inspired title alone means this is a read you should say “yes” to.

During the boom years of the late 2000s and 2010s, improv persuaded many people that it was not just a wacky gimmick but, as I believed, an art in itself. The rise of stars like the improv-trained Steve Carell, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler convinced casting directors and network executives that improvisers had graduated from sideshows to being bankable talents in their own rights. Performances were packed with newbies and aficionados alike. Major theaters added classes and facilities to meet growing demand, allowing many improvisers who never made it big to eke out livings as teachers and theater staff. The gospel of improv spread to those far outside the comedy world, from self-improvement seekers hoping to level up their interpersonal abilities to corporate suits eager to take advantage of the latest team-building and soft skill-optimization fad.

This story moves chronologically through a marriage that begins to unravel—with fatal consequences. The victim is Dan Markel, the ex-husband of Wendi Adelson, but it’s the involvement of Wendi’s domineering mother, Donna, and her brother, Charlie, that leads to his tragic end. Katherine Laidlaw shows how there were far more than two people in this marriage—and far more than two lives destroyed when it fell apart.

Harvey was nominally the breadwinner, but Donna ruled the family. She had strict ideas about how her children should live, pushing them to earn advanced degrees and build prestigious careers. Rob became a doctor, and Charlie became a periodontist, eventually buying his father’s dental practice. Donna obsessed, too, about her children’s love lives, scrolling through online dating profiles and sending them lists of promising candidates. When Rob started seeing a woman who wasn’t Jewish, Donna interfered so aggressively that he eventually broke it off and briefly married someone else. (He has since married his original non-Jewish girlfriend.) At first, Donna was thrilled that her daughter was seeing Dan, then a lawyer at a boutique firm. She was less thrilled when he left to pursue academia, a path that she felt paid poorly and lacked cachet.

Daniel Shailer embeds with the tiny separatist group “Shetland First,” whose members believe the Shetland Islands were never legitimately ceded to Scotland. Its 83‑year‑old leader, Stuart Hill—shipwreck survivor, serial litigant, self‑proclaimed weather‑controller—is such a compelling eccentric that Shailer ends up as absorbed in Hill’s own story as in the broader currents of populism on these remote isles.

Previously, Hill has focused on relatively esoteric points of history and legalese. Now, on the advice of his chief campaign advisor, ChatGPT, he is meeting people where they are: should council tax go up while official salaries get bumped? Is it fair to live in fuel poverty at the footsteps of Britain’s largest onshore wind farm?

‘There are all these injustices, and once you read the history, you can see a basic injustice,’ Hill says. ‘Everybody seems to be kind of comfortable with it, but at the same time there’s a basic undercurrent of dissatisfaction.’

Enterprise security departments have typically been presented with one of two options: either the use of unified threat management systems (UTMs) to achieve a unified perimeter or an IDS solution that can offer greater insight into network activity. However, when considering solutions for enterprise environments running on Microsoft Windows-based products, it appears that both sides are focusing on the wrong issue. The argument from UTM vendors, who market their product as the "one-stop shop" for IT personnel with limited time resources, is that a UTM device provides all necessary functions (firewall, VPN, antivirus, etc.) within a single unit. On the other hand, the vendors of specialized IDS devices argue that the inclusion of these additional functionalities reduces the effectiveness of the IDS function. As such, organizations providing protection for Windows networks continue to be at increased risk due to this way of thinking.

Cybersecurity engineer Samuel Bemi investigated this gap through a controlled comparative evaluation of Snort, an open-source intrusion detection system, and pfSense, an open-source unified security platform, within a virtualised Windows 11 enterprise environment. His evaluation goes beyond the conventional question of whether a security control detects an attack, examining whether that detection remains operationally valuable once false positives, latency, throughput, and resource utilisation are taken into account.

Detection alone doesn't tell the whole story

The experiment simulated three of the most common attack patterns organisations face: ICMP flood attacks, port and service scanning, and denial-of-service traffic. Both Snort and pfSense were configured to defend a Windows 11 host inside an isolated network built specifically for testing.

The results were clarifying, not comforting. Snort detected 100 percent of ICMP flood attempts and 100 percent of denial-of-service traffic, and identified the large majority of port scanning attempts. Within the controlled test environment, Snort achieved strong detection performance against the traffic patterns tested. But the more important finding was that detection performance came with operational trade-offs.  Alongside that success sat a false positive rate high enough to be operationally significant, alongside a measurable increase in network latency and a meaningful drop in throughput once both systems were active.

Bemi's evaluation shifts the question from “which security control detects more attacks?” to a more consequential one: “does the security architecture remain effective when detection accuracy, false positives, and operational overhead are considered together?”  Rather than assessing IDS and UTM controls independently, Bemi's approach examines how detection accuracy, false positives, resource consumption, and network performance interact when the controls are deployed within the same enterprise environment. This perspective provides security teams with a more practical basis for designing defence-in-depth architectures, where protection is assessed not only by what threats a control detects, but also by how effectively it operates within the wider network.

"A 100 percent detection rate cannot be evaluated in isolation," Bemi says. "If achieving that result introduces significant false positives, latency or throughput degradation, the security control has to be assessed as an operational system rather than simply as a detection mechanism."

What UTM alone Mmisses

Bemi’s argument is that IDS will never replace or outperform UTM. Instead, he says both tools solve two different layers of the same issue. Layer one is Perimeter Enforcement (Firewalling, VPN termination, Traffic Shaping, Blocking Known-Bad traffic) as long as you have the correct settings with your UTM devices such as pfSense. The Layer Two that IDS addresses is what happens after you allow something past the first layer. This Layer two provides a level of detail that can't be replicated by UTM alone. In particular, this was very evident during Bemi's testing and evaluation based on Detection Capability and Operational Impact.

" A UTM determines whether traffic should be admitted into the Network," Bemi states. " An IDS answers a completely different Question; namely, now that it is inside the Network, does it appear to be anomalous?" Bemi stated enterprises who use only UTM are typically making only one determination regarding allowing traffic past the Firewall/VPN termination device. Then they are simply relying on anything that passes through to be safe."

Resource cost is a design input, not an afterthought

One of the study's most important findings is that defence-in-depth is not operationally free. Running both controls increased CPU and memory utilisation and introduced additional network latency, demonstrating that security architecture cannot be evaluated solely through detection effectiveness.

He argues the practical barrier to hybrid defence is often less about whether the controls can work together and more about whether organisations have planned for the capacity, tuning and monitoring they require. "Nobody disputes that defence-in-depth is the right architecture on a whiteboard," he says. "The resistance comes at implementation, when a smaller IT team realises that running both properly means capacity planning, rule tuning to bring false positives down, and ongoing log review. That is a resourcing conversation, not a technology conversation. But skipping it does not remove the risk; it just moves the risk from the network into the business."

The practical path forward

For organisations still treating this as a binary purchasing decision, the practical implication of Bemi's evaluation is not that every organisation should deploy both controls indiscriminately. Instead, security architects should treat UTM and IDS as complementary controls, evaluate their combined performance under realistic traffic conditions, and size infrastructure and monitoring capacity around the resulting operational overhead.

Conclusion

The challenge for Windows enterprise security is not choosing between UTM and IDS, but designing an architecture in which both controls address different layers of the same threat landscape. Bemi’s evaluation demonstrates that detection rates alone do not determine security effectiveness; false positives, latency, throughput, resource consumption, and the effort required to operate the controls also matter. The industry therefore needs to move beyond product-versus-product comparisons and assess how security controls perform together under realistic enterprise conditions. In practice, UTM can provide the first layer of perimeter enforcement, while IDS adds deeper visibility into suspicious activity that may pass through that boundary. Organisations considering a hybrid approach should test the combined architecture against representative workloads and establish clear thresholds for performance, false positives, and resource utilisation before deployment. They should also plan for ongoing rule tuning, monitoring, capacity management, and analyst involvement rather than treating these as secondary operational concerns. Ultimately, effective defence-in-depth depends not simply on deploying more security tools, but on ensuring that complementary controls work together in a way that is measurable, sustainable, and aligned with the organisation’s operational needs.

Ali A. had just turned 18 when he decided to drive his brand new BMW X1 over double the speed limit, high on anti-dust spray, striking 33-year-old Dutchwoman Elisabeth in Rotterdam.

On Monday, prosecutors said in court that it was just two days after his eighteenth birthday, in March of last year, when Ali A. drove at 115 km/h in a 50 km/h zone, or 71 mph in a 30 mph zone, with the car which his father had just given him as a gift.

Prosecutors say they want him to be sentenced to eight months in prison and given a five-year driving ban.

Dutch news outlet NOS wrote that Ali A. was weaving his car, driving on the wrong side of the road, and is suspected of having been under the influence of propellant anti-dust spray, a kind of narcotic used by young people.

Netherlands: Iraqi national finally going to trial after hitting and killing 14-year-old Dutch girl Tamar with his car, authorities originally told the mother the suspect was ‘German’

Video footage shows him overtaking a car at very high speed and barely avoiding an oncoming vehicle. Then, he hit Elisabeth’s car, who was on her way to her hockey club, which led her vehicle to slam directly into a tree.

Doctors tried to save her life but she died that same day. She was fourteen weeks pregnant with her first child, who also died.

The suspect, now 19, offered a different account of the accident in the Rotterdam court. He said he lost control of the car and was trying to avoid other cars, but one of his statements also appears to contradict this claim.

“I didn’t know the car well yet and wanted to test it out. I may have been overambitious and thought I was a better driver, but I couldn’t control it,” he said.

‘Parts of a stroller flew through the air’ – 3 men arrested in Germany after plowing their car into a family with toddlers

After the collision, Ali A. ended up in the ditch with his car. He claims he thought he was unconscious for a while and was “in terrible shock” after the accident.

The prosecution argues the man was high on anti-dust spray, but Ali strongly denies inhaling any drugs.

However, police have recorded him fleeing the scene of the accident and throwing away two aerosol cans. He claims that if police had discovered the aerosol cans, it would have given them the “wrong impression.”

“I am aware that the spray is used to get high. I was afraid they would suspect me of that if they had found the cans in the car,’ he stated.

When asked why he did not go help Elisabeth, or call emergency services, he said: “I was in shock.”

The prosecutor went on attack, saying that Ali A. is claiming he is too shocked to help Elisabeth or call emergency services but had the presence of mind to run away and toss the two anti-dust cans.

Germany: Cedomir R. intentionally runs over a cyclist with his BMW, according to police

He had recently bought two cans of the spray because he saw — right after coming home from a short foreign birthday trip — that there was some dust on his PlayStation. He claims his plan was only to clean his PlayStation. When asked why he bought two cans, he said he had no idea how much cleaning product was needed.

The prosecutor rejected that explanation.

“I don’t see any shock, I see someone deliberately dumping evidence,” she said.

The attorney representing the family, Anne Bleeker, said that Ali A is, “Thoughtful, cunning, self-centered.”

German police: Syrian migrant hits and kills 6-year-old boy with Mercedes during illegal street race in Dresden

She added that she does not believe a word of Ali’s story.

Incredibly, the alleged intoxication of Ali cannot be legally proven because the blood sample was destroyed due to a hospital error.

During police interrogations, Ali A. previously said that he could not remember the accident. He said he didn’t notice at all that he had hit someone.

“Temporary amnesia,” he said at the time.

Germany: ‘Speeding maniac’ Syrian migrant gets life in prison for murdering father and injuring entire family while driving 130 kph

Now, he can remember, he told the judge.

“This is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced,” he said, and added that he was also greatly affected by the accident. That claim was heard with disbelief in the packed courtroom.

When Ali said again during his closing words how much trouble and stress he himself had from the accident, several of Elisabeth’s relatives walked out of the room.

Elisabeth’s partner, mother and brother called on him in their victim statements to take responsibility.

“It is completely disrespectful to us. You say you were in shock after the accident and can’t remember anything. I was also in shock after hearing about the accident, but I can still remember everything exactly,” Elisabeth’s partner said, according to De Telegraaf newspaper.

Her mother said she should not have been in court at all today.

“I should have picked out a present for my grandchild’s first birthday…You drove like crazy. There are too many young people like you. Too much testosterone, too little brain.”

“We were happy to become grandparents again, it was [the other parents of the father] who were preparing to become grandparents for the first time. They had already prepared some old baby clothes,” she added.

Her brother also spoke, saying: “A beautiful vision of the future on a sun-drenched day. It turned into horror in the hospital. We were completely devastated.”

The court will rule in two weeks, on Sept. 28.

Various commentators and political figures are outraged by the case, including Eva Vlaardingerbroek.

“Ali A. (18) hit and killed Elisabeth (33) who was pregnant with her first child. He was driving 115 km/h in a 50 km/h zone and was high on laughing gas. The Dutch prosecutor is demanding 8 months in jail. That’s apparently all the life of a Dutch pregnant woman is worth,” she wrote on X.

Ali A. (18) hit and killed Elisabeth (33) who was pregnant with her first child.

He was driving 115 km/h in a 50 km/h zone and was high on laughing gas.

The Dutch prosecutor is demanding 8 months in jail.

That’s apparently all the life of a Dutch pregnant woman is worth. https://t.co/NSJrCjnG7G

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) September 15, 2026

The post ‘We were completely devastated’ – Ali A. kills pregnant 33-year-old Dutchwoman Elisabeth while driving double the speed limit, prosecution demands only 8 months in prison appeared first on Remix News.

Ian Parker does not hold back in painting the egos of the characters in this horse‑world scandal, clearly growing tired at times of the pomposity of Michael Barisone, a U.S. dressage trainer and former Olympian who shot his student, Lauren Kanarek, after an escalating feud. Claiming that Kanarek’s online taunts and complaints drove him insane, Barisone was eventually found not guilty, though later banned from his sport by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Tread carefully as you enter this arena; narcissism lurks everywhere.

The first time I called him, he said, of the case, “You’re going to find it is a John Grisham novel combined with ‘Fatal Attraction’ combined with ‘Yellowstone.’ ” Barisone’s story has its evident hero, and its villain is Kanarek, his victim. In this presentation of events—a “scum of the earth” client, in his words, and a terrific guy who snapped, as anyone would have—Barisone has enjoyed near-universal support from the dressage community, and beyond. In much of the online discussion about the case, including in the forums of The Chronicle of the Horse, a long-established magazine, commenters have identified two victims, not one, and have almost always found Barisone’s victimhood the more compelling. A woman was shot, but a man was driven to shoot her, because she was annoying, and at times belligerent, in person and on social media. Kanarek has been widely scorned as a dressage interloper and as an embodiment of contemporary ills: a bullshitter, an entitled troll.

All roads lead to Rome. It’s one of the oldest sayings in the Western world, and according to a new study in Nature Communications, it isn’t quite true. Led by Adam Pažout, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, the team found that cities like Antioch, Ancyra (modern Ankara), Byzantium (modern Istanbul), and Corinth […]

The site is called Külhöyük, in the Oyaca neighborhood of Ankara’s Gölbaşı district, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of the capital. It’s a tell — the term Near Eastern archaeology uses for an artificial mound built up by layer upon layer of human occupation — roughly 250 by 150 meters (820 by 490 feet) […]

Announcing the severing of diplomatic ties with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Thursday, September 10, Algeria summoned the Emirati envoy and gave him 48 hours to leave the country.​

“Algeria has exercised a great deal of restraint and a high sense of responsibility,” despite the increasingly “provocative or hostile actions emanating from” the Gulf power, the North African country’s foreign ministry said in a statement.​

“Despite these numerous warnings, the United Arab Emirates continued to persist in these actions, which have reached limits where they can no longer be considered acceptable or tolerable within the framework of relations between two sovereign states, nor remain without a response.”​

Later that day, its defense ministry announced that the UAE’s military and civilian aircraft are banned from using Algerian airspace from Friday. The only exemption is for commercial civilian planes, which can continue to fly over Algeria until the existing contract expires at the end of the year.​

Algeria had already initiated the termination of the air services agreement with the UAE in February, when President Abdelmadjid Tebboune alleged attempted Emirati interference in its elections.​

Multiple Algerian media outlets aligned with the state have reported that the UAE has been supporting the Movement for the Self-Determination of Kabylia (MAK), a separatist group Algeria designated as a terrorist organization in 2021.​

Algeria and the UAE also find themselves on opposing sides on several fronts of international relations.​

Algeria aids Western Sahara’s liberation struggle; UAE backs Moroccan occupation​

The support for the national liberation struggle of Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco immediately after it won independence from Spanish colonialism, has been a central plank of Algeria’s foreign policy.​

In 2021, Algeria severed diplomatic relations with Morocco, accusing it of supporting the MAK in retaliation for Algerian support to the Polisario Front (PF), which is fighting for Western Sahara’s national liberation. But there is no equivalence between the PF and the MAK.​

The MAK, which has long had close links to Israel, largely operates from Europe and is based in France, Algeria’s former colonizer. The PF, on the other hand, is fighting for Western Sahara’s liberation, with its military operating in its liberated territory adjoining Algeria. The UN recognizes the PF as the sole representative of the people of Western Sahara, a country it lists among the last few pending decolonization.​

Read more: Western Sahara’s decolonization at a crossroads after 50 years of occupation​

Despite funding and arming the Moroccan occupation, the US had not officially recognized Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over Western Sahara until December 2020, when Morocco signed the Abraham Accords to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel.​

The first Trump administration, in turn, proclaimed that the US “recognizes Moroccan sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara territory” and went on to open a consulate in Dakhla, a major city in the occupied region.

​The UAE was a step ahead, setting a precedent before the American move by opening its consulate on the occupied land in November 2020, a month before Morocco normalized relations with Israel. The UAE had already normalized relations with Israel that September.

​In contrast, Algeria refuses to normalize relations with Israel until the Palestinians have secured their statehood. Algerian media often refers to the UAE as an “Israeli vassal”.

​“Wherever they set foot, blood flows”

​Algeria’s diplomatic break was foreseeable since at least July, when President Tebboune said in a thinly veiled reference to the UAE in a televised interview, “Wherever they set foot, blood flows… We want them to stay away, so that blood does not flow in our country.” He gave the example of Mali, Libya and Sudan.

​A month later, in August, the UN confirmed that the USD 50 million transferred to the Al Qaeda-affiliated JNIM in the form of ransom helped fuel its attack across Mali. A Reuters investigation identified the UAE as the source of this payment to JNIM. The group has also attacked its neighbors, Burkina Faso and Niger, both of which have followed in Mali’s footsteps by expelling French troops.

​Read more: Mali fights yet another wave of attacks on multiple cities by terror groups

The UAE’s supply of arms and mercenaries to the Libyan warlord General Khalifa Haftar, who has been fighting Libya’s UN-recognized government, is also well-documented in multiple UN reports since 2017.

Tebboune’s reference to “blood” flowing from Emirati interference is best demonstrated in war-torn Sudan, where the UAE is funding and arming the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), whose depopulation campaign in El Fasher had all the “hallmarks of genocide”, according to the UN.

Read more: RSF has burnt and buried tens of thousands of corpses in El Fasher, says Yale report

He added in the July interview that a “diplomatic break” with the UAE “would have happened long ago.” Algeria, he explained, had refrained only to avoid adding to the already existing divisions in the Arabic-speaking world.

When the break finally came on Thursday, the UAE’s foreign ministry said it hoped that it “will be temporary, in a manner that preserves the fraternal ties between the two brotherly peoples.”

In an apparent reference to the absence of explicitly stated reasons in Algeria’s statement, Anwar Gargash, the diplomatic advisor to the UAE’s president, Mohamed bin Zayed, said, “Diplomatic relations are managed through reason, communication, and clarity of interests, not through puzzles and signals that require decoding.”

He went on to preach that “successful diplomacy is built on clarity of positions, sound management of interests and differences.”

Gargash’s statement “is revealing above all for what it carefully conceals. Not a word about the actions of this arsonist, predatory state, which thrives on chaos wherever it sticks its nose in Yemen, Sudan, the DRC, Somaliland, and elsewhere,” retorted former Algerian diplomat, Amar Belani.

Describing the UAE as a “state that has made other nations’ instability its economic model,” Belani concluded his response, saying: “As for the lesson on ‘reason and clarity of interests’, Abu Dhabi would do better to reserve it for its partners in the Abraham Accords, with whom it shares complicity in the face of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed against the Palestinian people.” 

This sentiment against the UAE is not limited to the government or the ruling National Liberation Front (FLN), which led Algeria’s liberation struggle against French colonialism and has ruled since, except for a few years in the 1990s.

Mass protests erupted in 2019 against corruption and increasing economic capture by the military elite, strangling an economy already suffering under neoliberal austerity. This movement, known as the Hirak, forced the then president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, a veteran of the FLN, to resign.

But even in these protests against the government and the ruling FLN, “Down with the UAE” and “No to the UAE in the country of martyrs”, were among the popular placards and slogans.

Consumers could be facing higher borrowing costs for longer as bond markets are once again signalling rising economic risk to the finance and investing community.

Consumers could be facing higher borrowing costs for longer as bond markets are once again signalling rising economic risk to the finance and investing community.

In 2016, paleontologist David DeMar Jr. was crawling across a rocky outcrop in northeastern Montana, hunting for fish fossils, when he spotted a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball. He picked it up and looked at it through his hand lens. On its surface was something he didn’t expect: a […]

In a quiet corner of Hadrian’s Villa, wedged between the so-called Amphitheater and a low bench of volcanic tufa rock, sits a marble slab measuring roughly 40 by 35 centimeters (about 16 by 14 inches). It has not moved in some 1,900 years. Two lines of carved capital letters explain why archaeologists are excited: FVLGVR […]

Mary Austin was the woman behind Freddie Mercury, quietly supporting him for decades, from their intense early romance to the long years they remained close friends after accepting that he was gay. The vast legacy he left her—his home, much of his fortune, and his most personal belongings—has been a mixed blessing that she has spent her life trying to navigate with loyalty and discretion. As Simon Hattenstone explores Austin’s life in this interview, the unresolved emotion of the shared past with Mercury is still palpable.

Did the piano change him? “Yes, there was much more purposeful energy. He would sit at the piano, play the odd key, hum a bit and he looked very happy. Transported.” By now they were spending less time together. When she was working at Biba, he would often be sleeping. When she returned home, he would be preparing for a gig.

They’d been living together for four years when Mercury said he had something to tell her. He struggled to get the words out. He said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’ I said ‘No, Freddie, I think you’re gay.’” He didn’t argue. Was that a huge upset? “No, it was a huge relief, because I wasn’t sure whether we were travelling in the same direction any more. Some time earlier I saw a dress and thought, that would be a really nice wedding dress. I asked Freddie, is it worth me buying it, and he looked at me and shook his head. So I knew from there on …”

The Yara Sluiskil plant, the largest commercial carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Europe has started its operations in Sluikil, a village in the Zeeland province of the Netherlands.

The CO₂ will be transported by ship and permanently stored under the Norwegian North Sea at the Northern Lights facility, funded by the EU under the Connecting Europe Facility. The industrial ammonia and fertiliser facility is expected to capture and liquefy up to 800 000 tons of CO₂ annually from ammonia production.

This cross-border project is a direct result of the EU-Norway Green Alliance signed in 2023 – a powerful example of the benefits of European cooperation, combining private investment and public support and bringing together industry, the EU, its Member States, and Norway. Today's inauguration ceremony, attended by Commissioner for Climate, Net-Zero and Clean Growth, Wopke Hoekstra, reflected this partnership with the presence of Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten and President and CEO of Yara International, Svein Tore Holsether.

Yara's Sluiskil plant is a strategic investment in Europe's industrial decarbonisation and competitiveness. It is expected to capture and store around 12 million tons of CO₂ over the next 15 years. It will promote the reduction of emissions from energy intensive industries like fertilisers and ammonia. It will foster innovation, the creation of a strong industrial base and the development of this clean technology, as underlined in the Clean Industrial Deal and the recent proposal for the EU Emissions Trading System review. 

In his keynote speech at the opening ceremony, Commissioner Hoekstra (pictured) said:

"Europe needs practical climate solutions that deliver real emissions reductions while strengthening industrial competitiveness. The carbon capture and storage project at Sluiskil shows what is possible when innovation and cross-border cooperation come together. This is exactly the kind of project Europe needs to combine climate ambition with a strong and resilient industrial base."

You can follow the speech of the Commissioner on EBS.

Related links

• Industrial carbon management
• EU-Norway energy co-operation

A man named Donald Liebenberg tops eclipse-chaser-log.com with a whopping 2 hours, 27 minutes, and 41 seconds of darkness from 27 total eclipses—stats I didn’t even know people tracked until I read Rudi Zygadlo’s piece. It turns out there’s a dedicated subculture of umbraphiles logging every second of totality. Zygadlo meets a veteran British couple who’ve built their lives around these fleeting events, then travels to Spain in August 2026 to see his own first total eclipse. Adding 1 minute 38 seconds to the board earns him a place near the bottom, but judging by the awe he feels in those brief moments of darkness, he may be moving up the league yet.

There are various eclipse-chasing guests in our hotel. You can identify many of them from themed caps and T-shirts. The largest party is an alumni group from UCLA. We meet several by the pool. A couple from Minnesota, a sommelier from New York. “I was in Montreal for 2024,” says Mees from the Netherlands, treading water. “My wife is a virgin.” Everyone is friendly, but somewhat shifty when it comes to the issue of where to watch. We are too.

By 6pm on the day of, we are stationed on the infernal hillside, on a dusty path beneath pine trees and an immaculate sky. There are better vantage points but we have some degree of privacy here. We can hear others, but we can’t see them. The partial phase begins with a yodel at 7:34pm when the sun is eight degrees — or a fist’s length — above the horizon and my father-in-law produces a bottle of local white, which immediately turns warm in the glass. The nibble of the moon turns into a bite then into a crescent and I’m surprised how well my bottom-of-the-range bridge camera with a solar filter over the lens captures the partial phases. Later I’ll wish I never turned the thing on. Meara is quiet. Glowing. She is more pregnant than ever.

The government had declared Monday an official day of mourning and ordered flags at government offices lowered to half-staff.

The government had declared Monday an official day of mourning and ordered flags at government offices lowered to half-staff.

Great Wi-Fi, affordable rent and a laptop-friendly café have long been the checklist for the perfect digital nomad city. But they say little about what it is actually like to live there. Look beyond the usual rankings and a different picture begins to emerge. New research from Holafly finds that 32.2% of frequent and long-stay travellers have experienced burnout linked to their travel lifestyle. 32.3% have felt isolated from their usual social or emotional support network. And even some of the most ordinary parts of daily life — sleeping well, exercising regularly or eating healthily — become harder to maintain when home keeps changing.

Digital nomads are clear about what gets in the way. 33.7% point to unpredictable schedules or changing time zones as their main challenge, 18.8% to the cost of gyms, classes or healthy food, and 20.7% simply to not knowing what is available around them. That led Holafly to examine a question largely missing from traditional digital nomad rankings: which popular nomad destinations actually make it hardest to live well? Holafly analysed 25 established digital nomad hubs across eight wellbeing factors, including community, noise, green space, exercise, healthy food, daylight, cost of living and healthcare.

Using data from official public sources, the World Health Organization, Mercer and Google Maps, each city received a deficit score from 0 to 100. The resulting Holafly Plans Wellbeing Index 2026 reveals how differently some familiar nomad hotspots perform once the laptop closes. The research is part of Holafly's broader focus on the growing number of people living across borders for longer. Holafly Plans, its global eSIM subscription, is designed specifically for frequent travellers and digital nomads, giving them one plan they can use across destinations rather than starting again every time they move.

Lima, Hanoi and Cusco emerge as the three most challenging cities for digital nomad wellbeing in 2026. 1. Lima, Peru 2. Hanoi, Vietnam 3. Cusco, Peru 4. Bogotá, Colombia 5. Da Nang, Vietnam 6. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 7. Cancún, Mexico 8. Medellín, Colombia 9. Tbilisi, Georgia 10. Buenos Aires, Argentina

Lima ranks as the toughest city for digital nomad wellbeing, with a deficit score of 85.3/100. The Peruvian capital records the lowest levels of daylight among all 25 destinations analysed, alongside high noise levels and limited green space. Hanoi follows at 82.7/100, ranking worst for noise and exercise access and tying for the weakest green space, while Cusco takes third place at 76.3/100, largely because it has the weakest social and community network in the study. The ranking also uncovers a broader pattern: six of the eight worst-performing cities — Lima, Hanoi, Cusco, Bogotá, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City — are classic budget-friendly nomad destinations.

It points to a trade-off rarely captured in traditional nomad rankings: a city can be cheap and easy to move to without necessarily being easy to live well in. About Holafly Holafly is the global leader in eSIMs for travellers, offering coverage in over 200 destinations. With a 4.7/5 rating on Trustpilot and more than 25 million eSIMs sold, it has become a preferred choice for international travellers. Its unlimited data and built-in backup data ensures total peace of mind anywhere in the world.

L'articolo Un barchino di migranti tenta lo sbarco a Santa Margherita di Pula, messo in fuga dai bagnanti proviene da Blondet & Friends.