1 week until kick-off of FIFA #WorldCup2026 ⚽️
Latest update: Where to watch it in 4K/UHD with Dolby Vision/HDR 📺 and Dolby Audio 5.1 or Atmos 🔊 on cable, lPTV, OTT streaming, OTA broadcast (DTT) or DTH satellite 📡
Some HDR and audio details missing. More info welcomed! 🙏
@UHD4k Note to self: add Xiaohongshu/Rednote to HDR Ecosystem Tracker, OTT streaming services section, with Dolby Vision [and likely HDR10].
Not sure about Zee Z5. Appears to be 4K SDR (with Dolby Atmos) for now. Need to check.
The French hate air conditioning.
So Paris built a 120-kilometre machine under its streets for producing cold.
It’s called Fraîcheur de Paris, and it does for summer heat what district heating did for winter: centralise the problem.
Instead of every museum, office, hotel, hospital and shop bolting its own cooling plant onto the building, Paris moves cold through pipes.
The network sends water chilled to 2 to 4°C through buried supply lines. The water enters a connected building, absorbs heat through an exchange station, then returns at 12 to 14°C to be cooled again.
It essentially functions with two pipes. One carries the cold out, the other carries heat back.
The production plants cool the circuit from 12°C to 4°C. Some sites use the Seine as a heat sink. In colder periods, the system can use the river’s own temperature for free cooling, which means the machines work less and the electricity demand drops. The Seine water doesn’t become the building water. It stays separate, passing temperature across heat exchangers.
The scale is pretty strange when you see it written down though.
It's got 15 production sites, 4 storage sites, 120 km of underground network with 924 subscribers. This has resulted in 7 million square metres cooled, and 493 GWh of cooling sold.
A cold utility running beneath one of the densest cities in Europe.
The Forum des Halles has been cooled this way since 1979. The Louvre since 1986. Galeries Lafayette, Opéra Garnier, Hôtel de Ville, Station F, La Samaritaine and the National Assembly all sit on the same idea. Tourists stand in the Louvre looking at paintings while a municipal cold loop does part of the dull work below ground.
The boring part is the breakthrough.
Cold can be stored at night in chilled water or ice, then used during daytime peaks. The network is monitored from a control room with more than 125,000 control points. A delivery station inside a building takes 5 to 7 times less space than a standalone cooling installation and avoids the roof and façade clutter that turns cities into compressor farms.
That matters because conventional air conditioning solves heat by moving it somewhere nearby. In a dense city, thousands of private machines mean thousands of outdoor units rejecting heat into streets, courtyards and roofs, plus refrigerants, noise, vibration and maintenance spread across every building.
Paris’s public cooling network has a stated coefficient of performance of 4, against 3 for a wet standalone system and 2 for a dry standalone system. Against an equivalent set of autonomous installations, Fraîcheur de Paris says the network gives 100% higher energy efficiency, 35% less electricity use, 90% fewer refrigerant-fluid emissions and 50% lower CO2 emissions.
The climate backdrop is the real reason this exists.
Paris ran a full crisis exercise called “Paris at 50°C” in 2023. Météo-France’s 2050 reference trajectory for France points to heatwave days becoming five times more frequent, hot nights rising sharply in urban centres, and some local extremes around 48°C becoming possible.
The city signed a 20-year concession in 2022 with Fraîcheur de Paris, owned 85% by ENGIE and 15% by RATP. The contract is worth a projected €2.4 billion. The plan is to extend the network by 158 km by 2042, add 20 production plants and 10 storage sites, and reach more than 3,000 subscribers, including hospitals, nurseries, schools and care homes.
This is basically the infrastructure version of admitting that summer is becoming a public systems problem...
I'm afraid that this is why the US administration wants to shut down ocean observations: they don't want the people to know what is happening in our oceans, as it does not fit their ideology and the interests of their fossil fuel industry funders.
https://t.co/G1E5zXdyid
Russian strike on an ambulance in Kherson today.
Russia is systematically tearing Kherson apart, committing one war crime after another. The city is in a desperate, critical situation‼️‼️
This cartoon isn't an exaggeration—not even 1% an exaggeration.
Weeks ago it seemed this far-right Supreme Court would still block any map intentionally authored to be racist.
We just learned that that's no longer true.
We have reentered Jim Crow, and it's a national disgrace.
@CsabaSzekely7 Going by the bicycle lanes I'd guess NL, though I have no clue where this railtrack would be.
One thing that makes me doubt is trains in NL drive on the right, as opposed to most other countries, though there's not much dual-lane infrastructure here.
Cats and Glass skyscrapers kill more birds than wind turbines
It's not even close
Maga morons believe his BS
They are fools 🤡
Research confirms that domestic cats and reflective glass buildings are two of the leading causes of human-related bird mortality, vastly outpacing the impact of wind turbines
#TrumpIsCorrupt
#TrumpPedófilo
#trumpsgascrisis
Rep. Keating to Rubio: "I'm sure you're aware that Ukraine, country that at the time had third-largest nuclear arsenal, peacefully turned over their nuclear weapons in conjunction with Budapest Memorandum.
And in exchange for U.S. commitment to defend Ukraine if it ever came under threat. The U.S. gave its word to Ukraine that it would defend them.
And I find this amazing. In your opening remarks, as you took us all over the world and mentioned 15 different incidents where you have interceded — 15, the top 15 — not once did you mention Ukraine when you were prioritizing achievements that are there."
Today the EU made American AI illegal in 27 countries.
The reason is ONE sentence Microsoft's own lawyer said under oath:
This morning in Brussels, EU Tech Chief Henna Virkkunen unveiled the Cloud and AI Development Act. It's the most aggressive anti-American tech move from Europe since GDPR.
The law forces EU public sector procurement in banking, healthcare, defense, and energy to apply mandatory non-price factors favoring software and hardware built inside the EU. Microsoft Azure can be cheaper, AWS can be faster, Google Cloud can have the better model, and EU governments MUST legally prefer European alternatives.
AWS, Microsoft, and Google currently control roughly 70% of the European cloud market. Brussels is now openly targeting greater independence from US providers in cloud, AI, and semiconductors.
The largest regulatory market-share transfer in tech history is being written into law right now.
But the real story is how this happened...
On June 10, 2025, a man almost no one outside Brussels had heard of walked into the French Senate. His name is Anton Carniaux, Director of Public and Legal Affairs at Microsoft France.
Senator Dany Wattebled asked him under oath whether he could guarantee that data belonging to French citizens, stored on Microsoft European servers, would never be transmitted to US authorities without explicit consent from the French government.
Carniaux answered honestly. He admitted he could not guarantee it, because Microsoft must comply with the US CLOUD Act regardless of where European data physically sits. One sentence of sworn testimony from Microsoft's own counsel killed every sovereign cloud defense Big Tech had spent five years building.
It became the legal foundation for the law unveiled today.
Then Trump accelerated the divorce.
January 2025 brought executive orders expanding US surveillance authorities. Vance went to Munich and attacked European democracies on stage.
The tariffs followed and so did the Pentagon's $200 million AI contract war that ended with OpenAI replacing Anthropic after Hegseth labeled it a supply chain risk. So did OpenAI's Stargate and yesterday's Trump AI Executive Order, whose Section 3 lets the White House pick which AI companies get 30-day early access to frontier models. American AI was officially declared a US government strategic asset.
Europe heard every word of it.
On May 12, Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch told the French National Assembly that Europe had 24 months to build sovereign AI infrastructure or become a permanent US VASSAL state.
And the response came fast:
April 24: Cohere acquired Germany's Aleph Alpha for $20 billion with both Germany's and Canada's digital ministers in the room at the Berlin announcement. May 30: SoftBank committed up to $87 BILLION for French nuclear-powered data centers, the largest AI infrastructure project in European history.
Yesterday: EU Parliament announced it's dropping Google for French search engine Qwant tomorrow. France ordered every government workstation off Windows and onto Linux.
Today the Cloud and AI Development Act made all of it law.
- Mistral is building a 1.4 gigawatt AI campus near Paris by 2028 with Nvidia, MGX, and Bpifrance
- SAP's EU AI Cloud, launched last November, runs on Cohere, Mistral, and SAP's own sovereign infrastructure
- McKinsey forecasts $600 billion in sovereign AI needs by 2030
None of that money is going to Silicon Valley.
The America First AI policy built a wall around the world's most regulated economy, and American companies are on the wrong side of it.
Microsoft's lawyer told the truth in a Senate hearing nobody watched. Trump turned that admission into a national security narrative while the EU turned that narrative into procurement law.
And one entire continent walked away from the American tech stack...
A message to all sane Republicans:
He pardoned 1,600 violent criminals.
You said nothing.
He bulldozed the East Wing.
You said nothing.
He interfered with the release of the Epstein files. You said nothing.
He took over the Kennedy Center and renamed it after himself. You said nothing.
He accepted a $400 million airplane as a personal gift. You said nothing.
He threatened Canada, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil. You said nothing.
He tariffed just about everyone but Russia, causing inflation and instability worldwide. You said nothing.
He attacked a nation during mediated negotiations. You said nothing.
His ill-conceived war killed 175 children on day one. You said nothing.
He alienated and insulted our allies. You said nothing.
His ICE Army terrorized and murdered U.S. citizens. You said nothing.
He committed murder on the high seas. You said nothing.
He co-opted the Justice Department and directed it to prosecute his political enemies. You said nothing.
It’s time to start talking.
The Trump administration is sending ships to rip 900 ocean sensors out of the Atlantic and Pacific — and Congress already told them twice they couldn't do it.**
They're doing it anyway.
Such a scene is often framed as proof the Dutch are superhuman—they’re not.
The real miracle isn't the Dutch cyclist. It's the environment that allows ordinary people to do extraordinary things. Build the infrastructure, and you'll find your city is full of capable cyclists too.