mikeleonardvisualarts has added a photo to the pool:
peaceful-jp-scenery has added a photo to the pool:
Shibuya Hikarie Sky Lobby
渋谷ヒカリエ スカイロビー
From the observation deck on the 11th floor of Hikarie. It's crowded, it really feels like the big city.
ヒカリエ11Fの展望台から。人が多くてめちゃ都会ですね。
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Rick van R. (29), de man die vast zit voor de dood van de jonge moeder Sam van Buul, heeft begin juni in het bijzijn van de politie nagespeeld wat er volgens hem op 9 november op het Kralingseplein in Rotterdam gebeurde. De reconstructie was met een stand-in, die ongeveer dezelfde lengte had als het slachtoffer. Het vuurwapen, dat Sam het leven kostte, is nog altijd spoorloos.
peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:
Shibuya Hikarie Sky Lobby
渋谷ヒカリエ スカイロビー
From the observation deck on the 11th floor of Hikarie. It's crowded, it really feels like the big city.
ヒカリエ11Fの展望台から。人が多くてめちゃ都会ですね。
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan
Russia’s Embassy in Sweden last week accused local authorities of failing to ensure security at the diplomatic mission after two drones fell on its territory.
Tour de France spectator ban as country along with Spain, Portugal and Greece faces ‘powder keg’ after heatwave
Wildfires raging across southern Europe have forced thousands to flee their homes and prompted officials to ban spectators from a stage of the Tour de France, amid warnings of “powder keg” conditions after a record-breaking early summer heatwave.
Hundreds of firefighters are tackling blazes that have burned through almost 20,000 hectares (49,500 acres) in Portugal, Spain, France and Greece. Strong winds are forecast to fan the flames and temperatures are expected to rise again this week.
Continue reading... Updates from Monday’s play at the All England Club
Osaka stuns Sabalenka | Sinner through | Mail Daniel
Wotcha and welcome to Wimbledon 2026 – day eight!
It’s Manic Monday no more but, absorbing into the schedule of matches here to embrace us over the next 10 or so hours, it’s not difficult to find some replacement alliteration.
Continue reading...Axel Springer boss has ‘bold vision’ for the media group, but identifying a gap is no guarantee of stateside success
As he addressed staff at the London headquarters of the Telegraph Media Group last week, Mathias Döpfner, the German chief executive of Axel Springer and latest proprietor of the most traditional of conservative British newspapers, referred to his company’s decades-long pursuit of the venerable titles.
As staff nibbled Axel Springer-embossed biscuits, Döpfner also exchanged some distinctly European ribbing with the Daily Telegraph’s editor, Chris Evans, about Germany’s World Cup exit. However, it was clear to all that Döpfner’s ambitions for the titles were focused on another country and another continent.
Continue reading...The president has made dangerous inroads in his push toward autocracy. Yet the prospects for his success are dimming
How do we commemorate America’s democracy as Donald Trump undermines it? By embracing his opposition. The United States was founded by breaking from a monarchy. Trump wants to become king. An imperfect yet powerful system of checks and balances is being deployed to prevent him. The resistance is worth celebrating.
This is hardly the first challenge to US democracy. The early nation had no rights for Black people and no vote for women. It survived Jim Crow, the McCarthy era, and the “war on terror”. Yet there is no denying the seriousness of the threat posed by Trump.
Continue reading...I used to think my phone helped me to relax. But setting strict limits on my usage has improved my mood and my relationships
I am a psychotherapist who works with frazzled, snappy parents, and spend my days writing about why we struggle to find calm. I also used to pick up my phone hundreds of times a day, failing to realise that it was making me a snappier, more irritable, less present mother.
My phone was my office, my income, my means of communication. Every time I checked it, there was something to action, a notification of something new, something that told me I was useful and productive, giving me dopamine hits that motherhood didn’t offer. It had become my coping mechanism.
Continue reading...My daughter’s scruffy little pet would fall asleep with me on the sofa, stilling my racing mind. And then he changed my life in an even more significant way …
I never wanted a hamster. My eight-year-old daughter, Lily, on the other hand, had folders. Habitat drawings and wheel specifications – a case for ownership of such rigour it bowled me over. As a boy I’d had a hamster, Jerry, and remembered him as fine – but nothing more than that. So I went to a Cardiff pet shop on a cold January morning in 2021 with no plan whatsoever to fall in love.
At the back of the enclosure was a scruffy one nobody else wanted. Skinny. A bit unkempt. When the staff member lifted him out, he yawned and looked at Lily as if he’d been expecting her. She named him Popcorn Sushi and took him home in a pink carrier.
Continue reading...I love gardening, hate cooking. After five years learning how to grow fruit and veg, I’m now stuck with, well, a load of fruit and veg. Can I get my own tradwife to make them edible?
I’ve spent much of the last week picking, then sorting through berries, making, straining and freezing various compotes and conserves, washing and batch-cooking chard and spinach, podding and shelling broad beans. I’m not having a granny summer, a Sydney Sweeney summer or a nun girl summer (all of which I’ve seen suggested as themes for 2026); I’m having a tradwife summer. It’s basically Ballerina Farm here, without the rosy-cheeked, tousle-haired children, raw milk or plane-company-heir husband – and my tomatoes aren’t even ripe yet.
It’s taken me five years as the genuinely grateful, happy guardian of a garden to fully appreciate the issue with growing fruit and vegetables: once you’ve done it, you have lots of fruit and vegetables. I understand that’s a privilege, not a problem – and indeed, the whole point of the enterprise. And some produce is pure, easy pleasure: strawberries and raspberries, mangetout and lettuce (at least if, like me, you accept the occasional surprise protein bonus in your salad, thanks to slapdash washing). But other stuff that thrives here requires prepping and cooking to be edible, and with my family and friends dodging my calls offering my various gluts, I find myself resignedly donning an apron and doing what I imagine my ancestors spent centuries wishing they could avoid.
Continue reading...Two couples start to fall apart during a midwinter break, involving a lot of shouty dialogue that’s neither realistic nor funny
The interesting premise in this laborious and dispiriting relationship dramedy sadly leads nowhere; all we get is strained shouty dialogue and mugging performances in a film which succeeds neither in being funny or realistic.
Alexandra Daddario (from TV’s The White Lotus) is Debs, a book editor with dreams of being an author herself; her platonic best pal from college is Mitch (Josh Gad), a schlubby guy climbing the ladder in investment banking, and maybe nursing feelings for Debs he can never admit. They go to a cosy, picturesque woodland cabin for New Year’s with their respective partners; Debs is with hunky nature photographer Josh (Daveed Diggs) and Mitch is with Melanie (Ashley Park), uptight author of a bestselling cookbook called Emotional Eating (a good title, actually).
Continue reading...As the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum turns 50, an expansive exhibition celebrates how art has coincided with space
Wearing a shiny silver spacesuit, Alan Shepard clutches his helmet and looks like an archetypal blue-eyed American hero. The 1961 portrait by Bruce Stevenson paid tribute to the first US astronaut in space. It also planted a seed.
James Webb, the then administrator of Nasa, saw the painting and was inspired to start the space agency’s own art programme, believing that artists could bring a unique perspective to exploring the cosmos. From 1962 to 1974 it was led by James Dean, who then became the first art curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Continue reading...Firm reportedly felt it was in public interest to test alibi offered by former duke after Virginia Giuffre accusation
Pizza Express held an internal inquiry to investigate Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s visit to its Woking branch, as he claimed he did on the day he was alleged to have had sex with a teenage victim of Jeffrey Epstein 20 miles away in central London, it has been reported.
According to sources who spoke to the BBC, senior management at the restaurant chain held the investigation because they felt it was in the public interest to test the alibi the former Duke of York had offered. The broadcaster reported that the company had found neither evidence he had been to the restaurant in Surrey, nor evidence to definitively say he had not.
Continue reading...
A police officer speeds 70 MPH down a two-lane highway running over a bridge in the Florida Keys. He passes a dump truck in a no-passing zone, then immediately does it again, crossing over a double-yellow line to pass another truck. He passes a third vehicle, nearly causing a head-on collision with a white pickup truck that veers away from him in the oncoming traffic. The cop keeps driving, and sees the SUV he’s been in pursuit of. He flicks his sirens and lights on and pulls it over.
The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.
Roman told investigators that he saw the woman as a “shiny thing” and knew that using surveillance tools to track her was illegal, according to police records. He told investigators that “I knew that when I put [her into DAVID], I’m like ‘fuck’ and that’s why I stopped right after and nothing else.” But that wasn’t the end of it; he investigated the woman then used a powerful license plate tracking database to find her location and chase her down. In doing so, he also “almost cause[d] a head on collision while passing as a white truck traveling northbound had to veer off the roadway to avoid a collision.”
The shocking and egregious incident highlights the fact that police around the country have abused their access to surveillance tools for their own personal stalking projects, and shows how different law enforcement databases and surveillance tools can be tied together to investigate and follow anyone.
The cop, Lamar Roman, was caught and arrested in March, local news outlets reported. 404 Media has obtained video from Roman’s police cruiser and court records associated with the case that show how Roman met, harassed, investigated, and stalked the woman, who was not suspected of committing any crime, had nothing to do with Roman, and had no idea she was being tracked using a series of police surveillance software, hardware, and government databases.
"he also “almost cause[d] a head on collision while passing as a white truck traveling northbound had to veer off the roadway to avoid a collision," the police report said.
Earlier this month, we reported on the fact that police around the country have been caught abusing Flock automated license plate cameras. Roman used a very similar system called Guardian; Flock has faced lots of scrutiny from journalists, privacy activists, and the general public over the last year, but it is worth noting that Flock is just one player in the booming AI license plate reader surveillance business and other systems face many of the same privacy problems Flock does.
Roman met the woman while working an off-duty security detail for Bad Monkey in early February. According to police affidavits, arrest warrants, and summaries of police interviews with both Roman and the woman, Roman whistled and “catcalled” the woman as she got off a bus for extras on set. Roman shouted “Oh my God, why didn’t nobody tell me we were bringing models to set,” the woman told investigators. The woman said “she was immediately uncomfortable with the situation,” and she did not know whether Roman was a real cop or whether he was playing a cop on the show. The woman “told Deputy Roman she has a boyfriend,” the warrant said. “Roman stated something along the lines of ‘I need your name and number just in case I pull you over someday.’” Roman pressured the woman into giving him her Instagram handle; she told investigators that she tried to be “standoffish,” to deter him. The woman was “pulled away by other extras who she knew and the others acknowledged Deputy Roman would not leave [her] alone.”
The woman “stated during one interaction Deputy Roman stated, ‘I’m going to pull you over.’ [She] stated she responded, "no your not.’ [sic] [She] stated Deputy Roman repeated himself and appeared to be flirting and joking. [She] stated she advised Deputy Roman that her boyfriend would not like that, and he ‘laughed it off.’”
The court records and arrest warrant detail what happened in the days and weeks after Roman left the set. First, Roman looked the woman up in Master Name Index (MNI), a police database, and “went from there,” he told investigators. With her driver’s license number, he looked her up in DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. The records say that he looked up several variations of the woman’s name to obtain her “record detail, signature, vehicles, and current photo.” He wrote that the purpose of the search was a “background investigation.” Roman told investigators that he knew it was illegal to look the woman up in DAVID without a valid reason: “Right when I did that, I was like ‘fuck,” he told investigators. He then looked her and her license plate up the Florida Crime Information Center / National Crime Information Center, which are law enforcement information sharing databases, which contained additional information about the woman and her vehicle from Florida Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles.
Roman then took the woman’s license plate and created a “hotlist” in the Guardian automated license plate reader system. A hotlist allows police officers to create a list of “hot plates” of vehicles that they are searching for. Nominally, hotlist systems are supposed to be used for police officers looking for stolen vehicles or for specific people suspected of crimes. Hotlists send a real-time notification when an ALPR system detects a car on the list driving by a surveillance camera. After he got a ping with the woman’s location, Roman sped down the two lane highway toward her pinged location, dangerously and illegally passed three vehicles, almost caused a head-on collision, and illegally pulled her over for no reason. The police records state that Roman was going at least 70 mph (which triggered a cruiser video recording) while doing this; the speed limit in that part of the Florida Keys is 55 mph.
Roman did not have a body camera on nor did his vehicle capture any audio of the encounter, according to the records. He also did not log the stop in the system the department uses to catalog traffic stops. But the woman described what happened after he pulled her over. She told investigators that she “observed a patrol car cut off the truck behind her and she had a feeling it was Deputy Roman.”
“When Deputy Roman approached she stated, ‘I knew it was you’ and asked, ‘does all my information pop up on your screen?’ and further inquired, ‘How did you know it was me?’ She stated Deputy Roman responded, ‘I told you I'd find you and pull you over.’ She stated Deputy Roman also stated, ‘And I was hoping your boyfriend was in the car so I can pull him out and give him a hard time.’ She stated she responded that she did not think that was a good idea,” the police report reads.
She said that Roman asked her why she didn’t follow him back on Instagram, that she needed to leave, and said she would follow him back on Instagram but didn’t want to text and drive. She told investigators that she “said this to get Deputy Roman to leave her alone.” She “advised Deputy Roman she was late to getting where she was going and repeatedly asked if she could leave. [She] stated Deputy Roman eventually told her she could leave.”
The woman told investigators that she had no idea the extent of the surveillance she was under: “I advised [her] the full extent of which Deputy Roman utilized law enforcement databases to search her and obtain personal information about her,” the police investigator wrote. “I advised [her,] Deputy Roman also utilized the LPR to track her vehicle’s movement in the county. [She] was completely unaware of Deputy Romans use of databases to obtain her personal information.”
Roman admitted to extensively surveilling the woman and driving recklessly in an interview with investigators:
‘So you were pursuing her in an effort to just stop her and say 'hey?’’ Deputy Roman responded, ‘yeah I know it's stupid.’ I asked if there was any legal reason Deputy Roman put Brock's vehicle tag in the LPR, was she suspected of anything? Deputy Roman responded no.”