This story of Soviet agent and his MI6 handler in revolutionary Iran is a page-turning masterpiece

Ben Macintyre uses the acronym MICE to describe the reasons people betray their countries: Money, Ideology, Coercion or Ego. In the set-piece that opens his latest work of true-espionage, we discover a new reason: erectile dysfunction.

Stressed, drinking too much, under constant surveillance, furious about the corruption of his colleagues and frustrated with his home life, the KGB’s Vladimir Kuzichkin is offering to betray the secrets of his homeland and its Iranian allies, if only a British doctor can help him have sex again.

Continue reading...

Weekenders from Zagreb head to the rolling green Samobor Hills for nature, vineyards, delicious local food and Habsburg-era architecture

‘You’re going to Samobor? You must try kremšnita,” my Dubrovnik friends told me before I set off on my trip north. “But I’ve already had kremšnita in Zagreb,” I told them. They do it better in Samobor, they insisted. I wasn’t about to get embroiled in a battle of the cream cakes in a region where Croatians, Slovenes and Austrians all like to celebrate their own versions of this decadently thick, fat custard slice topped with puff pastry and icing sugar. But I was more than willing – happy, even – to follow everyone’s suggestions to try kremšnita in Hotel Livadić’s Kavana Livadić, in Samobor’s main King Tomislav Square, a mere half-hour drive west of Zagreb.

It lived up to the hype – delicately rich, creamy and with a light touch. After spending a few weeks in sun-bleached Venetian Dalmatia, amid the scrubby, limestone Dinaric Alps, I had swapped empires and was firmly in Habsburg Croatia. Here, in Zagreb County’s prettiest town, handsome baroque houses in pastel shades of buttery yellow, apricot and pistachio, festooned with stucco, line narrow King Tomislav Square, whose umbrella-shaded cafe terraces were filled with Croatians getting their morning fix of coffee and chatter.

Continue reading...

Ze leerde zelf voor het eerst goed hoe ze zuinig met geld om moest gaan, maar Renée Lamboo besloot dat meer mensen baat zouden hebben bij financiële tips. Terwijl ze zelf uit de schulden kroop, deelde ze haar ervaringen online. Inmiddels is Renée zelf helemaal schuldenvrij en helpt ze fulltime anderen met hun geld: “Alles wordt maar duurder en duurder”.

Ze leerde zelf voor het eerst goed hoe ze zuinig met geld om moest gaan, maar Renée Lamboo besloot dat meer mensen baat zouden hebben bij financiële tips. Terwijl ze zelf uit de schulden kroop, deelde ze haar ervaringen online. Inmiddels is Renée zelf helemaal schuldenvrij en helpt ze fulltime anderen met hun geld: “Alles wordt maar duurder en duurder”.

When Microsoft delivered over 970 patches last week, many saw a nightmare for beleaguered security staff. Gartner research vice president Craig Lawson thinks infosec workers might soon see sunlit uplands as their workloads ease. Lawson outlined that scenario at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Australia today and explained it by theorising that the increased volume of vulnerability discoveries made possible by Anthropic’s Mythos and other bug-hunting AI might be getting close to finding most of the flaws in established codebases. “We've never had a situation where massive codebases have been audited to that level before,” he told The Register, and offered the recent series of CVEs found in OpenBSD – which has historically been an unusually secure and stable OS – as evidence that AI bug-hunters are cleaning up. “Think about how much technical debt has been retired in products just in the last six months,” he said. Lawson pointed to the fact security vendors, who in theory know what it takes to create secure products, are also using AI to find flaws in their wares. Those discoveries, he suggested, again indicate AI is taking out potential avenues for zero-day attacks. The high number of CVEs reported in 2026 is a positive signal. Lawson thinks Mythos and its ilk may also create an invisible signal as vendors use the AI to detect more bugs in their future releases. He therefore thinks that 2027 might see CVE numbers fall as vendors finish cleaning up old codebases, and because they use AI to more thoroughly test their next releases. “2027 could be the first year we see a net drop, maybe not in aggregate vulnerabilities, but definitely in severity of flaws,” he told The Register. He thinks AI will also make defenders happy by giving them better tools. Today, he said, a red-teaming exercise is an infrequent and costly event that usually involves hiring an external provider. AI bug-hunters could mean organizations can effectively run a red team every day. And if a red team exercise produces tickets that need solving, he thinks AI will help analysts to identify fixes more quickly. “What if I could spend three minutes going to Gemini and saying ‘Write syntax for an F5 IRule’ that becomes a virtual patch? Everyone can do threat intelligence, enrichment, some of those harder tasks.” When infosec staff make those fixes, Lawson wants organizations to celebrate the impact of their work. Today, Lawson said, security operations centers measure staff by the number of tickets they process and close. He thinks a better approach is to celebrate the fact that cyber-defenders kept a hospital open or stopped a ransomware raid. ®

ARTEIXO (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Het Spaanse Inditex, moederbedrijf van kledingwinkelketen Zara, heeft de topvrouw van de damesmodedivisie Zara Woman na twee jaar alweer vervangen. Het bedrijf heeft Marta Andreia Rodrigues, een ervaren medewerker binnen de organisatie, aangesteld als opvolger van Lorena Rodríguez Veiga.

De benoeming volgt op een reeks bestuurswisselingen binnen de organisatie, die erop zijn gericht Zara hoger in de markt te positioneren. Inditex wil het aanbod uitbreiden met producten in hogere prijsklassen, terwijl het grootste deel van de collectie betaalbaar moet blijven.

Zara is veruit de grootste activiteit binnen de Inditex-groep en omvat dames-, heren- en kinderkleding. Samen met Zara Home en het budgetmerk Lefties was Zara goed voor ongeveer 70 procent van de omzet van de groep in de eerste helft van het jaar. Dat onderdeel groeide in die periode met slechts 4,8 procent, waarmee het achterbleef bij de andere merken van de groep.

WASHINGTON (ANP) - Topman Jensen Huang van chipconcern Nvidia is naar verwachting volgende week aanwezig bij het staatsdiner dat president Donald Trump aanbiedt aan de Chinese leider Xi Jinping. Dat melden Amerikaanse media, waaronder persbureau Bloomberg, op basis van ingewijden.

Xi bezoekt Trump volgende week in Washington. De Amerikaanse president ging in mei al langs bij Xi in China.

Huang is de baas van 's werelds meest waardevolle beursgenoteerde bedrijf. Hij heeft de afgelopen maanden steeds nauwere banden met Trump. Nog deze week nam de techbaas telefonisch contact op met de president, terwijl hij op het podium stond tijdens een conferentie over kunstmatige intelligentie.

Trump hielp ook mee om de exportbeperkingen te versoepelen voor bepaalde Nvidia-chips, die om de nationale veiligheid niet in China verkocht mochten worden. Toch is er slechts een relatief kleine hoeveelheid van deze halfgeleiders daadwerkelijk naar China gegaan, en zijn alleen processors van een oudere generatie toegestaan.

Records of Enemy Surveillance:

The red squares are Flock cameras. They are networked devices with cellular radios and solar panels which read license plates via machine learning algorithms. Police have access to the full network of cameras, and have used it to stalk women, detain immigrants, and enforce anti-abortion laws. [...] In some images, the photographer is visible; she is also under surveillance.

Interview:

My first thought -- and this is a crime, so I didn't do it -- but my first thought was I'm just going to follow some cops around with a drone and do glitch art videos. And I quickly realized after doing the tiniest bit of Googling that I could not. So I was like, alright, well, I'm going to examine some other kind of surveillance, and the Flock thing had sort of been in the back of my mind. [...]

Many people don't want to interrogate their desire for surveillance. They just want to check a box: This makes me feel safe, or this doesn't make me feel safe. Because you go to something in Piedmont and say, "Dude, you have a border set up around your little exclave city that is surveilling everyone who goes in and out. What in your heart of heart makes you think this is OK? What is your goal with that?" And if they interrogate it, it makes them feel horrible. But they don't want to do that.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: