It would be odds-on that the 39-year-old is the lowest-ranked player ever to qualify for the Masters at Augusta

There are two Masters taking place this year, the one you’re watching, and the one you’re playing in. Well. Maybe not you, exactly, unless you can count your handicap on two fingers, but the best player you know, that guy on the school run who used to play off scratch, that cousin who won the sports scholarship, or the uncle who everyone says could have made it back in the day. His name is Brandon Holtz and, if you haven’t spotted him yet, he is, he says himself, “the old fat guy” who has been playing with the two-time Masters champion Bubba Watson this week.

Holtz is 39 and works full time as a real estate broker in Bloomington, Illinois. He plays as much golf as he can but, given that he has two kids, a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter, it isn’t nearly as much as he’d like. He is currently 3,262 in the world amateur golf rankings. Which of course means he is a hell of a good golfer. And also that he is ranked a full 3,160 places below his nearest competitor among the six amateurs in the field here. And that’s before you even get to the other 10,000 or so professionals in the Official Golf World Rankings, where he is currently unlisted.

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The party’s talk of visa bans for countries seeking reparative justice is not just undemocratic – it displays staggering ignorance about geopolitics

On 29 November 1781, Capt Luke Collingwood faced a decision. He was in command of a ship called the Zong, which departed Accra with 442 Africans to be sold into slavery. However, the crew of the Zong kept getting lost on the way to Jamaica. Now their overcrowded “cargo” was ridden with disease and dehydration. Closing in on their destination, they realised that if these Africans died onshore, this would be a loss for the shipowners. But if they were “lost at sea”, the insurers would cover the cost. Soon, more than 130 people were thrown overboard, starting with the less commercially valuable women and children. At the resulting court case two years later, the main area of dispute was whether this action invalidated the financial payout. None of the city of London’s legal and financial institutions involved considered whether the mass drowning constituted a crime.

This episode from Britain’s inhumane and inglorious history of slavery came to mind this week when I read that in response to a recent, well-supported UN resolution recognising the historic crime of slavery, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK said it would deny all UK visas to people from countries seeking slavery reparations from Britain. Countries such as Nigeria, Jamaica and Ghana, from where Zong set sail all those years ago.

Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University. His latest book, The Next Fix, is out on 4 June

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Amendment calling for step-incest to be included in ban on harmful content passes by just one vote

The government has agreed to ban the production of porngraphy depicting sex acts between stepfamily members following a vote in the House of Lords.

An amendment calling for step-incest to be included in a ban on harmful content was tabled by the Conservative peer Gabby Bertin, who led a review into pornography regulation that was published last year.

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Het Zwitserse techbedrijf Proton verkoopt online privacy. Het is ontstaan in reactie op surveillance van overheden, getekend door Chinese dreiging voor Taiwan, en groeit wegens een toenemende behoefte aan alternatieven voor Amerikaanse tech. Wil zijn oorspronkelijke doelgroep hetzelfde als het grote publiek?

Deze week kondigde Anthropic een AI-model aan dat bijzonder goed zou zijn in het herkennen van kwetsbaarheden in software. Zo goed dat Anthropic ernstige risico’s ziet en het model voorlopig achter de hand houdt. Hoe serieus is het gevaar?

Kanye West, de man die al zijn hele loopbaan van masker wisselt, mag niet optreden in Londen, maar zijn fans laten zich weinig gelegen liggen aan zijn flirts met het nazisme. Jonasz Dekkers heeft het er moeilijk mee en vraagt zich af of we nog wel in staat zijn een grens te stellen.

Trade group warns onshoring demands will leave Americans stuck with older gear

The Global Electronics Association (GEA) warns that the US ban on foreign-made network routers is impractical because few are made domestically, leaving consumers with little choice and delaying access to next-gen products, just as Wi-Fi 7 adoption should be ramping up.…

Charcuterie is a visual Unicode symbol explorer. Click around, search, or use the pencil in the upper left to draw the shape you’re looking for. This is very cool.