Staat er een filmpje met wurgen op je telefoon? In Engeland en Wales had je dat gisteren moeten wissen. Vanaf vrijdag 6 november is bezit van drie soorten porno daar strafbaar, ook in je cloudaccount. Wat valt eronder, en geldt het ook voor een Nederlander op stedentrip?

Deze drie soorten porno zijn verboden

Het verbod staat in de Crime and Policing Act 2026, een wet die in april werd aangenomen. Volgens de richtlijn van de Britse overheid gaat het om beelden die expliciet en realistisch laten zien:

1. Wurgen of verstikken. Wurgen is druk op de nek; verstikken is iemand de adem ontnemen, bijvoorbeeld door mond en neus af te dekken of op de borst te zitten.
2. Seks tussen mensen die familie lijken of spelen, zoals vader en dochter of broer en zus. Stief- en pleegrelaties vallen eronder als een van de twee jonger is dan 18 of dat speelt.
3. Seks waarbij iemand jonger dan 16 lijkt of dat speelt, ook als het om volwassen acteurs gaat.

De toets is of een redelijk persoon denkt dat het echte mensen zijn. Tekenfilms vallen er dus niet onder.

Op bezit staat 2 tot 3 jaar cel

Bezit betekent dat je het beeld in je macht hebt: op je telefoon, laptop of in de cloud. Publiceren is elke manier waarop je het aan een ander geeft of beschikbaar maakt. Zulk materiaal moest voor 6 november definitief gewist zijn, schrijft het Britse ministerie van Justitie.

Er zijn uitzonderingen. Kreeg je een beeld ongevraagd toegestuurd en bewaarde je het niet onredelijk lang, dan ben je niet strafbaar. Dat geldt ook als je het nooit hebt gezien en niet kon weten wat het was.

Het gaat er niet om onschuldige seksuele voorkeuren strafbaar te maken.

Waarom de Britten dit doen

De wet volgt op een onderzoek van de conservatieve Baroness Gabby Bertin uit februari 2025. Zij concludeerde dat wurgen in porno “volledig normaal” was geworden en deed 32 aanbevelingen. Het verbod komt volgens haar “geen moment te vroeg”, zei ze tegen persbureau PA.

Extreme porno met zwaar geweld is in Engeland al sinds 2009 verboden. Wurgen tijdens seks is sinds 2021 een apart misdrijf, ook als het niet dodelijk is.

Sites lopen al op het verbod vooruit. Het platform iWantClips blokkeert voor Britse gebruikers 17 categorieën, van “breath play” tot facesitting, ook als je die filmpjes al had gekocht, meldt PinkNews.

Content die geweld tegen vrouwen normaal maakt of zelfs verheerlijkt, is gevaarlijk.

Wat het betekent als je naar Engeland gaat

Het verbod geldt alleen in Engeland en Wales; Schotland en Noord-Ierland hebben eigen wetten. Maar het hangt aan wat je bij je hebt, niet aan je paspoort. Staat zulk materiaal op je telefoon of in je cloud, dan bezit je het ook als Nederlander in Londen.

In Nederland is porno met volwassenen die wurgen of familie spelen niet verboden. Beelden waarin iemand jonger dan 18 is of lijkt, vallen hier wel onder het verbod op kinderporno. Hoe privé je pornokijken verder is, lees je in wat porno kijken met je doet volgens onderzoek. Over de opmars van AI-vriendinnen naar wens voor 85 euro per maand schreef WEL eerder.

De Britse regering moet binnen een jaar na april aan het parlement melden hoe pornosites de leeftijd en toestemming van hun acteurs controleren.

Meer weten?

Bronnen: GOV.UK, UK Fact Check, PinkNews

WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - Een nationale rechter heeft tijdelijk het begin van de bouw van een 76 meter hoge triomfboog in de Amerikaanse hoofdstad Washington geblokkeerd. De beslissing van de rechter kwam vrijwel direct nadat een federale commissie groen licht had gegeven voor de bouw van het monument. De triomfboog is een idee van president Donald Trump.

Tegenstanders van het project waren naar de rechter gestapt met het verzoek de werkzaamheden te blokkeren nog voordat ze beginnen. Zij voerden aan dat het bouwwerk de nabijgelegen nationale begraafplaats Arlington zou overschaduwen en de plechtige as tussen de begraafplaats en het Lincoln Memorial zou verstoren. Ook zou het project in strijd zijn met de federale wetgeving, aangezien het Congres er geen toestemming voor heeft gegeven.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Anthropic has new rules for its Opus 5.5 model to “steer it away from recreating someone else’s specific [video] game”. (From a few days ago but I just saw it…)

Bij een ernstig ongeluk langs de provinciale weg N209 bij Bleiswijk zijn twee mensen zwaargewond geraakt. De slachtoffers zijn naar het ziekenhuis gebracht. De N-weg is vrijdagochtend nog afgesloten tussen afrit Moerkapelle en Zoetermeer-Oost.

Na een koude nacht met temperaturen landinwaarts net iets boven het vriespunt, is er vandaag vrij veel zon en blijft het droog. De temperatuur stijgt vanmiddag pas naar 9 of 10 graden en daarmee is het aan de frisse kant voor de tijd van het jaar. Later vanmiddag volgt wat meer bewolking. De wind waait zwak tot matig uit het oosten.

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Rundle Street, Adelaide CBD

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Rundle Street, Adelaide CBD

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Rundle Street, Adelaide CBD

She is completely baffled in the kitchen, but the star valiantly resurrects her family’s famous restaurant. Her journey is chaotic, hilarious – and deeply moving

It starts both very well and very badly does Awkwafina: The Unlikely Cook. On the one hand, our host’s absolute ignorance of how food works – or pans, or knives, or plates – has a refreshing authenticity about it. Too often in these shows, in which a celebrity goes on A Journey to acquire basic knowledge in what is generally considered to be a normal field of human endeavour, their lack of exposure to it or inability therein is pretended or hammed up. But actor, rapper and comedian Awkwafina – real name Nora Lum, which is what she uses for this series beyond the title, for reasons that will become clear – is the real, wholly baffled deal.

Non-game recognises non-game, and as a kitchenphobe myself, I see the truth in her crouched stance by the oven or hob, fearful yet hostile to anything they may ask of her. We see her pour milk over a couple of eggs she has just lobbed doubtfully into a pan, the tentativeness with which she approaches spatulas and ladles, the hatred in her eyes when presented with raw ingredients – it all speaks to someone who has remained truly untouched by the culinary arts and was, at least until a commissioning editor approached with an idea, happy to remain so.

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Sadler’s Wells East, London
Ben Duke’s clever, witty and wholly unpredictable new show, The Last Hamlet, takes big liberties with the story that pay off

Hamlet is trying to get a hire car. He has missed his dad’s funeral because he was at a silent retreat, dealing with his abandonment issues and the disturbing memory of a year 7 disco when his uncle and mum danced together to Yazoo’s Only You.

There have been many takes on the troubled Prince of Denmark, but performer/director Ben Duke, co-founder of Lost Dog, has a talent for fresh readings. If Duke has a shtick – which after similar reworkings of Paradise Lost, Romeo and Juliet and the Medea myth, you could argue he does – it is to turn old texts inside out and douse them in contemporary references, surreal swerves and witty one-liners. A formula of sorts, but one that’s wholly unpredictable.

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The Student List has shown my generation, who protested against the Milošević regime in the 1990s, how we should have done it

On Halloween, a few days after a student-led movement swept aside an illiberal, seemingly invincible regime in my native Serbia, I was sitting on the Vienna tram and watched various friendly and malicious monsters getting on and off around me. Witches, devils and unicorns were politely making their way to their respective parties.

Not all monsters wear fancy dress. Later that evening, I walked past a Serbian restaurant; in front of it stood a group of grumpy-looking men. They were smoking, spitting and swearing. I recognised the hardened, couldn’t-care-less attitude, the smell of corruption, the penchant for violence. Yet they looked as though their lives were coming to an end. These men are the losers of the revolution that is taking place in Serbia. Their smuggling routes and deals are under threat. Their criminal networks no longer function.

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After some so-so albums, can U2’s new one, Carnaval de Luz, restore them to glory? They discuss male egos, working with Dolly Parton, and explain why, despite Trump, they still believe in democracy – at least in their band

La Petite Maison, in Nice, has a certain reputation as a five-star celebrity haunt. Beyoncé eats here. So do Elton John, Tom Cruise, Harry Styles and Leonardo DiCaprio, their meals presided over by the restaurant’s founder, Nicole, variously described in print as “eccentric”, “unique” and “truculent” (she’s standing by the entrance when I arrive, and suffice to say, doesn’t look like someone you’d much enjoy being on the wrong side of).

It’s enough of a celebrity haunt that the arrival of U2 – still incontrovertibly one of the biggest bands in the world 40 years after they could first reasonably have called themselves such – causes barely a murmur of interest among their fellow lunchtime diners. Then again, Bono is a regular. He was eating on the outdoor terrace the night of Nice’s terrorist attack, on Bastille Day in 2016, in which 86 people were killed. “I climbed through that window and hid under there,” he nods, pointing to a table at the rear of the restaurant. “Nicole,” he adds, “didn’t hide.”

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At 15, having the cool 31-year-old PE teacher single me out felt thrilling. It took years to see his praise for what it really was

I was 15 when Paul joined my high school in Queensland, Australia, as a PE teacher. He was fun and handsome, and seemed much younger than his 31 years. I was obsessed with dance, and when Paul complimented me on my gymnastics, I was thrilled the “cool” teacher had noticed me.

He’d always stop for a chat. I was the only child of a single mum and though she was there for me, I didn’t confide in her. But he was easy to talk to and I quickly developed a crush.

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In 1986, Bamber was convicted of the murders of five members of his family. He has always protested his innocence. This year, with the help of leading experts, we have re-examined some of the most compelling evidence

• Warning: this piece contains crime-scene photographs

The White House Farm massacre is one of Britain’s most notorious and horrifying crimes. On 7 August 1985, five members of the Bamber family were shot dead at their farmhouse in Essex, England. This Wednesday marked exactly 40 years since Jeremy Bamber was convicted of the murders of his adoptive parents, his sister and her six-year-old twin boys. He was initially jailed for a minimum of 25 years, later upgraded to a whole-life sentence.

If Bamber did kill his family, it is right that he remains in prison. But there have always been questions about the safety of his convictions, and these have grown recently. My late reporting partner, Eric Allison, formerly the prisons correspondent for the Guardian, spent years investigating the case and we began reporting on these questions together. If Bamber isn’t guilty, the idea of an innocent man spending 41 years and counting in prison, wrongfully convicted of killing his loved ones, is horrifying.

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Rescuers were unable to save the whales after they became beached on a remote and rocky part of the country

More than 40 pilot whales died after a mass stranding event on New Zealand’s remote east coast, conservation officials said on Friday, despite rescue efforts by volunteers and conservation workers.

The Department of Conservation (DoC) said 43 whales had died in the mass stranding along the Ngawi coast on the south-eastern tip of the North Island.

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Dit jaar is een nieuw tijdperk begonnen: AI-modellen bereikten het niveau van de beste wiskundigen. Wat betekent dit voor de wetenschap? En welke rol blijft er over voor de mens?

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area in the Pacific Ocean where debris naturally accumulates, is full of tiny bits of plastic -- so full, in fact, that it seems to be changing the color of the ocean. [...] To better understand how microplastics may have influenced the ocean's color, [Daniel Koestner, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway] and his colleagues looked at 20 years of satellite data from the spot in the ocean with perhaps the most of plastic -- the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a zone between Hawaii and California where trash trapped by ocean currents accumulates.

Between 2002 and 2022, the researchers found, waters near the garbage patch have gotten brighter in both blue and green wavelengths compared with surrounding areas. The results, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment on Thursday, don't yet prove that microplastics have directly brightened the ocean, the researchers emphasize, though their findings are backed up by lab experiments with microplastics. But without taking direct ocean samples, it's hard to know for sure what's causing the ocean's color to change.
"We're still one step away from proving definitively that microplastics are causing the shift in color that that we're seeing," adds study co-author Shea Cheatham, a Ph.D. student also at the University of Bergen. "We just have to get in there [to the garbage patch] to verify."

The hope is that detecting these color shifts could help identify other areas around the world where microplastics have accumulated.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new selection of geometric and psychedelic illustrations by YoAz. Bold color relationships, intricate linework and carefully balanced compositions turn familiar shapes into vivid graphic worlds. This collection reflects an ongoing exploration of symmetry, rhythm and visual storytelling through contemporary illustration.