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This week Bill Gates wrote a blog post about a special camera from medtech startup Remidio, which delivers high-resolution images of a patient's retina in seconds. The camera plugs into a phone running an AI system that watches for early signs of diabetes — all without needing a blood draw, eye dilation, or a dibetes specialist. It's already been used in 40 countries for more than 15 million patients. But that same hardware, with different software, can also flag the conditions that drive so many dangerous pregnancies. Gestational diabetes sharply increases the risk of pre-eclampsia [a spike in blood pressure during pregnancy responsible for half a million fetal deaths every year and 70,000 maternal deaths]... In most of rural sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, it usually isn't screened for at all, because the standard test requires a lab. A retinal scan offers a different way in. Remidio's device is currently being used in India to screen pregnant women for conditions that drive stillbirth. And researchers are now adapting the same hardware to screen for anemia and hypertension, too... [S]mall, portable, affordable diagnostics in the hands of community health workers are exactly the kind of lever that can start to move a number that hasn't moved in a long time.

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Steam on Linux use in March "had skyrocketed to 5.33%..." reports Phoronix, "easily the highest level we've seen Steam on Linux at since its inception more than a decade ago." So what happened in April? [April's results] point to Linux having a 4.52% marketshare on Steam, a drop of 0.81% compared to March. Year-over-year it's roughly double with Steam on Linux in April 2025 being at 2.27%. Or two years ago for April 2024, Steam on Linux was at 1.9%.

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The once-a-year free comic book giveaway "is splitting in two," according to a local news report. Launched in 2002 by Diamond Comic Distributor, comic book giants like Marvel and DC have historically participated together. But things changed after Diamond Comic Distributors went bankrupt in 2025, "leaving other companies to swoop in and pick up where Diamond left off." The rights to the "Free Comic Book Day" brand were sold to Universal Distribution, which plans to bring Free Comic Book Day back on Saturday. On the same day, Penguin Random House plans to launch a rival event called Comics Giveaway Day. This means you'll still get plenty of free comics, but this time they will be separated, with some coming under the Free Comic Book Day branding and others arriving under the Comics Giveaway Day branding. Free Comic Book Day will include publishers like DC, Image, Dynamite and Archie Comics. Comics Giveaway Day will include publishers such as Marvel, Dark Horse, Boom! Studios and Tokyopop... The other big change coming this year is the introduction of game publishers Wizards of the Coast and Upper Deck to the lineup, as part of Universal Distribution's Free Comic Book Day. Wizards of the Coast is known for its tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, as well as its trading card game Magic: The Gathering. Upper Deck is best known for its sports trading cards and entertainment collectibles, along with deck-building games like the Legendary series... In addition to adding these game makers, Universal plans to expand Free Comic Book Day to include what are colloquially referred to as your friendly local game stores. Marvel's offerings this year include a special Alien, Predator & Planet of the Apes one-shot, while D.C. is offering the first chapter of their upcoming graphic novel Aquamanatee. Other comics include Avatar: The Last Airbender — Legends from Dark Horse Comics and Sonic the Hedgehog from IDW Publishing.

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GameStop is reportedly preparing a potential offer for eBay, an unusually ambitious move given that eBay's roughly $46 billion market value is nearly four times GameStop's. Reuters reports: GameStop is preparing an offer for eBay as CEO Ryan Cohen pursues plans to boost the struggling videogame retailer's market value more than tenfold, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. Shares of eBay, which has a market capitalization of about $46 billion, soared about 14% in extended trading. GameStop gained 4%. The company has a market value of nearly $12 billion. GameStop has been quietly building a stake in eBay's shares ahead of a potential offer, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter. If eBay is not receptive, Cohen could decide to take the offer directly to the e-commerce company's shareholders, the Journal said.

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NASA engineers have tested a next-generation lithium-plasma electric propulsion system that reached 120 kilowatts, a new U.S. record and about 25 times the power of the electric thrusters on NASA's Psyche spacecraft. "Designing and building these thrusters over the last couple of years has been a long lead-up to this first test," said James Polk, who is a senior research scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It's a huge moment for us because we not only showed the thruster works, but we also hit the power levels we were targeting. And we know we have a good testbed to begin addressing the challenges to scaling up." Universe Today reports: While 120 kilowatts is a new record, NASA estimates it a future human mission to Mars will require 2 to 4 megawatts of power consisting of several thrusters and requiring more than 23,000 hours (958 days/2.6 years) of operation. To accomplish this, the thrusters would have to withstand more than 2,800 degrees Celsius (5,000 degrees Fahrenheit), which the thrusters achieved during testing. The reason for the extended operation is due to the estimated time of an entire human mission to Mars, which is estimated to be approximately 2.6 years. This is because the launch window to Mars only opens once every two years due to the orbital behaviors of both planets. While no mission has ever returned from the Red Planet, this same launch window works from Mars to Earth, too. When launched within this window, robotic spacecraft have traditionally taken approximately 6-7 months to reach Mars. However, a human mission would require a much larger spacecraft to accommodate the astronauts, food, fuel, water, and other mission-essential items. For the approximate 2.6-year mission, this would entail approximately 6-9 months traveling to Mars, followed by approximately 18 months on the surface of Mars until the next launch window opens, then another approximate 6-9 months back to Earth. However, having much less fuel due to the electric propulsion system could potentially alter this timeframe.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon's cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain -- meaning that full recovery from the cloud disruption could take nearly half a year in all. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) dashboard posted an April 30 update describing how its UAE and Bahrain cloud regions "suffered damage as a result of the conflict in the Middle East" and are unable to support customer applications. The update also said that "relevant billing operations are currently suspended while we restore normal operations" in a process that "is expected to take several months." That wording suggests Amazon will continue to avoid billing AWS customers in the affected regions -- ME-CENTRAL-1 and ME-SOUTH-1 -- after it initially waived all usage-related charges for March 2026 at an estimated cost of $150 million. AWS also "strongly" recommended that customers migrate resources to other cloud regions and rely on remote backups to restore any "inaccessible resources." Some customers, such as the Dubai-based super app Careem—which offers ride-hailing, household services, and food and grocery delivery -- were able to get back online quickly after doing an overnight migration to other data center servers.

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Microsoft is rolling out Xbox mode to all Windows 11 PCs, bringing a full-screen Xbox PC app interface similar to Steam's Big Picture Mode. "Some players in select markets will be able to download the Xbox mode experience today, with availability expanding to more players in those markets over the next several weeks," says the Xbox team. The Verge reports: Xbox mode aims to try and bridge the gap between Xbox consoles and Windows, but its original debut felt like a beta on the Xbox Ally devices. "Since first introducing Xbox mode, formerly known as 'full screen experience,' on Windows handhelds, we've been listening closely to player feedback and continuing to evolve the experience across devices," says the Xbox team. "Those learnings directly shaped Xbox mode on Windows 11 PCs." Microsoft is also rolling out improvements to the Xbox Ally X handheld today, including a preview of its Auto SR upscaling technology. Xbox console owners are also getting a new dashboard update today, with the ability to disable Quick Resume on individual games and a feature to add custom colors to the dashboard.

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joshuark shares a report from Live Science: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor --powered by Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 model -- deleted the company's entire production database and backups with a single call to its cloud provider, Railway, on April 24. [...] "This isn't a story about one bad agent or one bad API [Application Programming Interfaces]," Crane wrote in an X post. "It's about an entire industry building AI-agent integrations into production infrastructure faster than it's building the safety architecture to make those integrations safe." Crane's company, PocketOS makes software for car rental companies, handling tasks such as reservations, payments, customer records and vehicle tracking. After the deletion, Crane said customers lost reservations and new signups, and some could not find records for people arriving to pick up their rental cars. "We've contacted legal counsel," Crane wrote. "We are documenting everything." Crane explained that Cursor found an API token -- a "digital key" made of a short sequence of code that lets software talk to other services and prove it has permission to act -- in an unrelated file which it then used to run the destructive command. According to Crane, Railway's setup allowed the deletion without confirmation, and because the backups were stored close enough to the main database, they were also erased. "[Railway] resolved the issue and restored the data," Railway confirmed via email to Live Science. "We maintain both user backups as well as disaster backups. We take data very, VERY seriously." In his post, he pointed to earlier reports of Cursor ignoring user rules, changing files it was not supposed to touch and taking actions beyond the task it had been given. To him, the database wipe was not a freak accident but the next step in a larger, more concerning, pattern. After the database vanished, Crane asked Cursor to explain what happened. The AI agent reportedly admitted that it had guessed, acted without permission and failed to understand the command before running it. "I violated every principle I was given," the AI agent wrote. "I guessed instead of verifying. I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn't understand what I was doing before doing it." The statement reads like a confession [...]. "We are not the first," Crane wrote. "We will not be the last unless this gets airtime."

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The Pentagon says it has reached deals with seven AI companies -- SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection AI, Microsoft, and AWS -- to deploy their tools on classified Defense Department networks. The odd one out is Anthropic, which remains excluded after being labeled a supply-chain risk amid a dispute over military-use guardrails. Reuters reports: SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS), several of which already work with the Pentagon, will be integrated into its secret and top-secret network environments, providing more military access to their products for use on sensitive topics, the Pentagon said in a statement. The lesser-known Reflection AI, which raised $2 billion in October, is backed by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner and investor. Since the Pentagon deemed Anthropic's products a "supply-chain risk" in March and the two sides became embroiled in a lawsuit, the military has expressed increasing interest in AI startups. Since the blow-up, newer AI entrants have said the military has sped up the process of incorporating them onto secret and top-secret data levels to less than three months. The process previously took 18 months or longer. By expanding AI services offered to troops, who use it for planning, logistics, targeting and in other ways to streamline huge operations and perform more quickly, the Pentagon said in its statement it will avoid "vendor lock," a likely nod to its overdependence on Anthropic or other dominant service providers. [...] AI has become increasingly important for the U.S. military. The Pentagon's main AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million Defense Department personnel, the agency noted in its release, after five months of operation. Further reading: Google and Pentagon Reportedly Agree On Deal For 'Any Lawful' Use of AI

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ICANN has opened applications for new generic top-level domains for the first time since 2012. The Register reports: ICANN hasn't offered new gTLDs since 2012, but on Thursday opened applications for new domains in 27 scripts. A 439-page Applicant Guidebook explains the process. The Register suggests paying attention to the string evaluation FAQ, which explains which gTLDs are valid, and those ICANN will likely frown upon. An FAQ describes this round of applications as giving "businesses, communities, and others the opportunity to apply for new top-level domains tailored to their community, culture, language, business, and customers." "A TLD can be a branding opportunity for a business, but the commercial opportunities are endless, allowing businesses in countries, entire sectors, or niche markets to develop a unique label on the Internet." ICANN also sees this round as a chance to "create a more multilingual Internet for the billions of people who speak and write in different languages and scripts and are yet to come online." If you fancy a gTLD, you'll need to pay a $227,000 application fee by August 12th ... and then wait, possibly until 2030 when this process ends.

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Terence Eden reports that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as a response to LLM tools, such as Anthropic's Mythos, becoming more sophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to put it mildly, agree with the decision:

The majority of code repos published by the NHS are not meaningfully affected by any advance in security scanning. They're mostly data sets, internal tools, guidance, research tools, front-end design and the like. There is nothing in them which could realistically lead to a security incident.

When I was working at NHSX during the pandemic, we were so confident of the safety and necessity of open source, we made sure the Covid Contact Tracing app was open sourced the minute it was available to the public. That was a nationally mandated app, installed on millions of phones, subject to intense scrutiny from hostile powers - and yet, despite publishing the code, architecture and documentation, the open source code caused zero security incidents.

Furthermore, this new guidance is in direct contradiction to the UK's Tech Code of Practice point 3 "Be open and use open source" which insists on code being open.

ZipNada shares a report from ZDNet: Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story. James Bessen, professor at Boston University, has been pushing back for some time against the talk of AI and automation displacing jobs on a mass scale, and lately has been arguing that the roles of software developers are nowhere near extinction. AI is certainly not killing the software developer, Bessen said in a recent analysis (PDF). AI is taking over software development tasks and boosting productivity and output, but that is not translating into lost jobs, he argued. Instead, the types of software skills sought by companies are changing. "Surprisingly, however, after three years of AI use, software developer jobs have continued to grow robustly, reaching record levels of employment -- 2.5 million in February," Bessen said in the report, citing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of software developers in the US has grown by over 400,000, or 19%, since ChatGPT was introduced in 2022. At that time, the employed software developer population was just under 2.1 million. [...] The productivity uptick developers are seeing may ultimately be a boost to their professional opportunities, however. "An important and possibly disruptive change is happening, but the common view misunderstands what is going on," Bessen pointed out in his report. "Careful case studies find that AI improves the productivity of software developers -- that is, the software produced per developer -- by 30%, 50%, or more. And the rate of productivity improvement in software development is improving." Tellingly, since 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced, developer productivity has increased noticeably, Bessen continued. "From 2003 to 2022, developer productivity grew at 3.9% per year; but from 2022 through 2025, it grew at 6% per year." [...] A coming flood of new software products, now more likely to be enhanced by AI, will continue to create jobs for developers, Bessen predicted. "Thus, mass unemployment of software developers seems unlikely to happen soon." This doesn't mean the job descriptions of developers or other computer occupations will remain static. AI is shifting and re-inventing these roles, Bessen added.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, Anthropic made a big deal about the supposedly outsize cybersecurity threat represented by its Mythos Preview model, leading the company to restrict the initial release to "critical industry partners." But new research from the UK's AI Security Institute (AISI) suggests that OpenAI's GPT-5.5, which launched publicly last week, reached "a similar level of performance on our cyber evaluations" as Mythos Preview, which the group evaluated last month. Since 2023, the AISI has run a variety of frontier AI models through 95 different Capture the Flag challenges designed to test capabilities on cybersecurity tasks, such as reverse engineering, web exploitation, and cryptography. On the highest-level "Expert" tasks, GPT-5.5 passed an average of 71.4 percent, slightly higher than the 68.6 percent achieved by Mythos Preview (though within the margin of error). In one particularly difficult task that involved building a disassembler to decode a Rust binary, AISI notes that "GPT-5.5 solved the challenge in 10 minutes and 22 seconds with no human assistance at a cost of $1.73" in API calls. GPT-5.5 also matched Mythos Preview in its progress on "The Last Ones" (TLO), an AISI test range set up to simulate a 32-step data extraction attack on a corporate network. GPT-5.5 succeeded in 3 of 10 attempts on TLO, compared to 2 of 10 for Mythos Preview -- no previous model had ever succeeded at the test even once. But GPT-5.5 still fails at AISI's more difficult "Cooling Tower" simulation of an attempted disruption of the control software for a power plant, as every previously tested AI model also has. The new results for GPT-5.5 suggest that, when it comes to cybersecurity risk, Mythos Preview was likely not "a breakthrough specific to one model" but rather "a byproduct of more general improvements in long-horizon autonomy, reasoning, and coding," AISI writes.

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Spotify is adding "Verified by Spotify" badges to distinguish human artists from AI-generated personas, using signals like linked social accounts, consistent listener activity, merchandise, and concert dates. The BBC reports: The world's most-used music streaming service said the 'Verified by Spotify' text and green checkmark icon would appear next to artist names when they meet "defined standards demonstrating authenticity." This could include having linked social accounts on their artist profile, consistent listener activity or other "signals of a real artist behind the profile," the company said, such as merchandise or concert dates. In its blog post, Spotify said "more than 99%" of the artists listeners actively search for will be verified, representing "hundreds of thousands of artists." It said the process would prioritize acts with "important contributions to music culture and history", rather than "content farms," with the platform rolling out verification and badges over the coming weeks.

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Hackers are actively exploiting a critical cPanel and WHM vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, that allows remote attackers to bypass the login screen and gain full administrative access to affected web servers. Major hosts including Namecheap, HostGator, and KnownHost have taken mitigation steps or patched systems, but cPanel is urging all customers and web hosts to update immediately because the software is widely used across millions of websites. TechCrunch reports: cPanel and WHM are two software suites used for managing web servers that host websites, manage emails, and handle important configurations and databases needed to maintain an internet domain. The two suites have deep-access to the servers that they manage, allowing a malicious hacker potentially unrestricted access to data managed by the affected software. Given the ubiquity of the cPanel and WHM software across the web hosting industry, hackers could compromise potentially large numbers of websites that haven't patched the bug. Canada's national cybersecurity agency said in an advisory that the bug could be exploited to compromise websites on shared hosting servers, such as large web hosting companies. The agency said that "exploitation is highly probable" and that immediate action from cPanel customers, or their web hosts, is necessary to prevent malicious access. [...] One web hosting company says it found evidence that hackers have been abusing the vulnerability for months before the attempts were discovered.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Standard: If state lawmakers have their way, you'll have to get a license plate for your e-bike, and if you're planning to buy one next year, it'll be slower. Amid growing concerns about e-bike safety, particularly among children in Bay Area suburbs, two bills introduced this year aim to make it easier to ticket riders and reduce the top speed of some models. AB 1942 would require certain e-bikes to be registered with the Department of Motor Vehicles and display license plates, and AB 1557 would slow e-bikes that children are allowed to operate. Both bills are still being reviewed in committee. If either bill passes this year, it will take effect Jan. 1.

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Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use of B-trees, which are tree structures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on block devices. Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of a variant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire database. The data structure it uses could well be of interest to other projects.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents), Debian (chromium, dovecot, and kernel), Fedora (chromium, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, emacs, glow, jfrog-cli, openbao, pyp2spec, python3.6, rust-rustls-webpki, vhs, and xen), Oracle (grafana, grafana-pcp, PackageKit, sudo, vim, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (rhc), SUSE (avahi, bouncycastle, chromium, container-suseconnect, firewalld, gdk-pixbuf, grafana, java-25-openjdk, kernel, libixml11, libmozjs-140-0, libpng12-0, libsodium, libssh, mariadb, Mesa, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, openCryptoki, openexr, packagekit, prometheus-postgres_exporter, python-jwcrypto, python-mako, python-Pygments, python-pynacl, python311, python311-pyOpenSSL, python315, radare2, sed, and vim), and Ubuntu (kmod and zulucrypt).

fjo3 shares a report from the Washington Post: Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow -- from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth's food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won't get the nutrients they need to thrive. "The diets we eat today have less nutritional density than what our grandparents ate, even if we eat exactly the same thing," said Kristie Ebi, a professor at the University of Washington's Center for Health and the Global Environment. People in wealthy countries with strong health care systems will have many tools to cope with the change, experts said. But for the world's poorest and most vulnerable, the consequences could be devastating. One study concluded that by the middle of the century the phenomenon could put more than a billion additional women and children at risk of iron-deficiency anemia -- a condition that can cause pregnancy complications, developmental problems and even death. Meanwhile, some 2 billion people across the globe who already suffer from some form of nutrient shortage could see their health problems grow even worse. "The scale of the problem is huge," Ebi said. Plants depend on carbon dioxide to perform photosynthesis -- but that doesn't mean they grow better when there's more carbon in the air, scientists say. A sweeping survey of changes among 32 compounds in 43 crops found that nearly every plant that humans eat is harmed by rising CO2 levels. [...] For the past several years, [Sterre F. ter Haar, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the survey] and her colleagues have worked to compile a database of all existing research on nutrient changes linked to rising CO2. They tracked down hundreds of studies, ranging from tightly controlled lab experiments to sprawling global analyses of real-world crops. Next the team used their dataset to calculate the nutritional densities of each crop under different carbon dioxide levels -- and to predict how their composition could continue to shift in the future. On average, they found, nutrients have already decreased by an average 3.2 percent across all plants since the late 1980s, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million. That figure may seem small, ter Haar said, but with so much of the world already living on the brink of nutrient insufficiency, a drop of just a few percentage points has the potential to push millions of additional people into a health crisis. Researchers are still trying to understand the exact causes of this change. Extra CO2 can make plants grow faster and produce more carbohydrates, but without a matching increase in mineral uptake, nutrients like zinc, iron, and protein become diluted. Higher CO2 also causes plants to open their leaf pores less often, reducing the amount of water -- and dissolved minerals -- they absorb through their roots. At the same time, higher temperatures can further disrupt soil chemistry, affecting how plants take up nutrients and, in some cases, increasing their absorption of harmful substances like arsenic.

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Belgium plans to buy its seven aging nuclear reactors from French power giant Engie in a "full takeover" aimed at securing domestic energy supplies, extending reactor operations, and developing new nuclear capacity. "The move would also mean suspending plans to decommission nuclear operations in Belgium," reports the BBC. From the report: The move would reverse the phase-out of nuclear energy legislation approved in the early 2000s amid safety concerns prohibiting the building of new nuclear power plants and limiting the operating lifetimes of existing ones to 40 years. Only two of Belgium's seven nuclear reactors are operational - located at plants in Doel and in Tihange - and their operating licenses were recently extended until 2035. The other five reactors were shut between 2022 and 2025 and plans to dismantle them will now be suspended. Engie and the government said they aim to reach an agreement on the takeover of the nuclear stations by October 1st. In a joint statement with Engie, the Belgian government said the move also highlights its aim to extend operations of existing nuclear reactors and to develop "new nuclear capacity" in Belgium. "By doing so, the Belgian Government is taking responsibility for Belgium's long-term energy future, with the objective of building a financially and economically viable activity that supports security of supply, climate objectives, industrial resilience and socio-economic prosperity," the statement adds.

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