The revered writer and political exile’s publisher says her ‘legacy in literary history can’t be compared to anyone else’s’
Shahrnush Parsipur, the celebrated Iranian writer whose subversive works of feminist fiction saw her repeatedly imprisoned, has died aged 80.
A pioneer of women’s literature in Iran, Parsipur excoriated the country’s patriarchal culture in novels including Women Without Men and Touba and the Meaning of Night. She was imprisoned four times, under the Shah and then the Islamic Republic.
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When Kathryn Findlay and Eisaku Ushida joined forces, a sensual kind of architecture was born – resulting in a hairy blue pod in Tokyo and a starfish beach palace in Qatar
‘The future of architecture,” pronounced Salvador Dalí on meeting Le Corbusier in 1922, “will be soft and hairy.” Fast forward over 70 years to Tokyo, and his surrealist prophecy was the stimulus for the Soft and Hairy House, one of a series of startlingly expressive dwellings designed by the talented Scottish-Japanese architectural partnership of Kathryn Findlay and Eisaku Ushida. Melding diverse design cultures – Celtic coiling and Japanese “rawness” – overlaid by an interest in the natural world, as well as fractal geometries and chaos theory, the pair contrived a uniquely sensual and surreal architecture.
Completed in 1994, the Soft and Hairy House was based on a classic courtyard plan form, radically reworked for pre-millennial Tokyo, its softness accentuated by plumply rounded contours, its hairiness by a shaggy fringe of greenery embellishing the roof. A bright blue, porthole-percolated bathroom pod intruded into the courtyard like a giant fungal entity. The interior was suggestive of the glamorous dream space of a Hollywood star, with soft draperies and seductive lighting.
Continue reading...Chain apologises after staff at Hartlepool pub demand proof customer’s companion is genuine guide dog
A blind woman felt compelled to leave a Wetherspoons pub after staff demanded proof that her guide dog, Rosie, was a genuine guide dog.
Joanne Hewitson, 31, said she was “livid” and “shaking” after her experience going for breakfast at a pub in Hartlepool. The pub chain has apologised for the incident, with a spokesperson saying an error was made.
Continue reading...Forecaster says curtailing rising costs such as health and pensions ‘are today’s challenge, not just tomorrow’s’
Policymakers must act to prevent public debt rising unsustainably in coming decades as the population ages and defence spending rises, the government’s independent economic forecaster has said.
In a fresh illustration of the challenges facing the prime minister in waiting, Andy Burnham, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said that without government action “debt would move on to what would be an unsustainable, ever-upward path from around the 2040s”.
Continue reading...Passengers say they paid extra for outside views but were seated beside blank cabin walls instead
A federal judge on Monday rejected United Airlines’ bid to dismiss a lawsuit by passengers who complained they paid extra money to sit in window seats – only to discover their seats had no actual windows.
US district judge James Donato in San Francisco rejected United’s defense that “window” referred to the location of a seat relative to the cabin wall and aisle, and the carrier also contended it never contractually promised that seats in the window position would have views outside.
Continue reading...Fans across Belgium watched 4-1 win in early hours
Victory ‘a real slap in the face for Trump and Infantino’
Belgium fans reacted with jubilation after the national team trounced the USA in a World Cup game that was overshadowed by the controversy over Donald Trump’s lobbying to overturn the suspension of the striker Falorin Balogun.
Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, has yet to comment on the national team’s triumph, but the official Instagram account of his cat offered a sardonic, albeit indirect sign of satisfaction. Maximus, De Wever’s beloved cat, was shown lying on a rug holding a soft toy in the image of the US president. “I slept really well last night. And you?” reads the speech bubble in Dutch.
Continue reading...The dreaded bloodsucker will be getting his fangs into the Edinburgh fringe this year – in a deeply creepy, liberty-taking show with a sisterly twist. We meet its director
Who is your Dracula? Max Schreck’s toothy Nosferatu, Bela Lugosi in a tux, the lantern-jawed host of Hotel Transylvania? This notorious shapeshifter “exists for us even before we know who he is” says theatre director Yngvild Aspeli, who is bringing a puppet bloodsucker to the Edinburgh fringe this summer. “There were stories of vampires long before Bram Stoker but he gave new life to them.”
After watching her deeply creepy show Dracula: Lucy’s Dream, that eerily waxen, lifesized puppet has for me become as indelible as top-hatted Gary Oldman or gorily grinning Christopher Lee. It matches Jonathan Harker’s assessment of the count in Stoker’s novel: “The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.” I saw the show on tour in Paris several months ago and it still haunts me: I could swear this Drac disintegrated then reappeared before my eyes, such is the technical sophistication of Aspeli’s French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire. Thanks in part to Emilie Nguyen’s spectral lighting, stunning transformations take place, with the actors and puppets frequently becoming indistinguishable.
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Under the new regulation, hotels with more than 50 rooms must purchase hardware and train staff to use Max before the law takes effect on Sept. 1.
ANKARA (ANP) - De NAVO benadeelt zichzelf als zij Oekraïne buiten de deur blijft houden, vindt president Volodymyr Zelensky. Op de eerste dag van de NAVO-top in Ankara hield Zelensky een NAVO-forum voor dat zijn land als dronegrootmacht bijvoorbeeld zijn gelijke niet heeft.
"Denk je echt dat het goed zou zijn om een land met zulke defensievermogens buiten de NAVO te laten?" vroeg Zelensky retorisch voor een zaal met onder anderen NAVO-topman Mark Rutte en premier Rob Jetten. "Denk je dat echt? Als Oekraïners weten hoe ze op deze manier moeten vechten, is het logisch om die vermogens op te nemen in de alliantie en de gezamenlijke verdediging. Dat zou ons allemaal sterker maken."
Oekraïne lijkt door razendsnelle innovatie momenteel de overhand te hebben in de droneoorlogvoering die de strijd met Rusland domineert. Het deelt die kennis inmiddels met bondgenoten en put daar nieuw zelfbewustzijn uit.
Door verzet van onder meer de VS is NAVO-lidmaatschap voor Oekraïne voorlopig niet in zicht.
BERLIJN (ANP) - Duitse brouwerijen hebben vorig jaar een recordhoeveelheid alcoholvrij bier geproduceerd. De productie van bier zonder alcohol steeg met 6,5 procent naar 616 miljoen liter, meldt het Duitse federale statistiekbureau. Tegelijkertijd daalde de productie van bier met alcohol met bijna 6 procent tot 6,8 miljard liter.
Ondanks de groei van alcoholvrij bier blijft de productie van bier met alcohol dus nog altijd veel groter. De cijfers wijzen wel op een verandering in het drinkgedrag van consumenten. Volgens het statistiekbureau kiezen steeds meer mensen, vooral jongeren, voor alcoholvrije alternatieven vanwege een gezondere levensstijl. Daarnaast drukken hogere kosten voor levensonderhoud op de bestedingen aan alcohol. Daarmee sluit de ontwikkeling in Duitsland aan bij een bredere wereldwijde daling van de alcoholconsumptie.
Die ontwikkeling heeft drankproducenten de afgelopen jaren fors onder druk gezet en gedwongen hun kosten te verlagen en hun assortiment aan te passen.
Toto Wolff has recognised that George Russell isn’t fully comfortable with his Mercedes challenger, even after finishing on the podium at the British Grand Prix.
Ferrari and McLaren continued to press on with developments, with more items introduced at Silverstone.
The majority of companies that deploy AI systems end up shooting themselves in the foot with security, according to DigiCert. Seventy-eight percent of enterprises report "experiencing AI-related security incidents or identifying AI-related vulnerabilities," the digital identity biz said in a commissioned survey. Among respondents, 27.7 percent experienced one incident, 21.9 percent experienced multiple incidents, and 28.4 percent had no incidents but identified vulnerabilities, a company spokesperson told The Register. Incident details were not disclosed, but they were caused by AI agents that were unauthorized or misconfigured rather than flaws arising from AI-generated code. Consistent with its business focus, DigiCert attributes the survey's findings to lack of AI governance. "We wouldn’t allow an employee to operate without a verified identity," said DigiCert CEO Amit Sinha in a statement. "AI agents should be no different." That's become a common refrain. There are several initiatives underway to establish identifiers for bots, such as Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), Estonia's digital IDs for agents, and Microsoft's Agent ID. But bot badging infrastructure remains a work-in-progress, leaving AI agents to run amok in many organizations. DigiCert's findings [PDF] echo a similar report two weeks ago from Spacelift that found 93 percent of organizations experienced AI-caused infrastructure incidents while only 19 percent had a governance plan in place. The survey stands in stark contrast with picks-and-shovels seller Nvidia's State of AI 2026 report, which gushes, "Across every industry, AI is helping increase annual revenue and drive down annual costs while boosting productivity." The DigiCert Q&A involves responses from 1,001 IT and cybersecurity leaders in the US, UK, and Australia, from various businesses. The survey shows that businesses are deploying AI first and asking questions later. While 90 percent of organizations surveyed have discussed AI governance at the board level, just 50 percent have dedicated AI governance budgets and formal governance programs. This allows operational blind spots to persist. Just 53 percent of respondents said their organization could trace AI decisions back to the models and source data that produced those results. "That becomes a problem the moment an AI system produces an unexpected or controversial result," the report says. "Customers, executives, and regulators will all ask, 'Why did it do that?'" And perhaps at some point, companies will ask, why did we deploy that? ®
De rechter heeft de oud-burgemeester van Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht, Herman J., veroordeeld voor het bezit en verspreiden van kinderporno. Hij krijg een jaar cel, waarvan vier maanden voorwaardelijk. Voor ontucht was er niet genoeg bewijs. J. zou zich aan een jongere man hebben vergrepen in de periode tussen 2005 en 2016, dus deels toen hij nog burgemeester was.
Just one exposure to cocaine produces changes to the brains of mice that persist for at least two weeks, and perhaps longer, according to research that will be presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Forum 2026 on Tuesday.
The results suggest that cocaine, a popular drug used by an estimated 25 million people around the world, may rewire the genomes inside cells of the brain’s reward system, called dopaminergic neurons. The finding that could shed light on the mechanisms that drive addiction, and possibly inform treatments in humans.
People can become hooked to cocaine the first time they try it, but it is far more common for addiction to set in on repeated exposures. Decades of research has identified many of the neurochemical pathways activated by cocaine, but much less is known about the disruptive impacts, also known as brain “insults,” on the genomes inside neurons.
“We essentially knew there were some unknown phenomena that were going on in the dopaminergic neurons that were not clear,” said Ana Pombo, Bloomberg distinguished professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University, and guest group leader at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, in a call with 404 Media.
“We were actually interested to know if there is any long-term memory [of exposure], and this has not been studied,” continued Pombo, who presented her team’s research on Tuesday at FENS, Europe’s largest neuroscience meeting. “There's virtually no data we know of looking two weeks after this first exposure. Our experimental design was a shot in the dark.”
Like almost all cells, neurons contain copies of the genome, a genetic sequence unique to each individual organism that folds in complex structures. To observe cocaine’s impacts on the structure of the genome, Pombo and her colleagues studied the neurons of mice exposed to cocaine compared to a control group of unexposed mice. The team used an approach called genome architecture mapping that identifies where parts of the genome are in close proximity, or touch each other, which captures critical information about changes to its overall structure.
After 24 hours, the genomes of the exposed mice showed several changes relative to the control group. Even more significantly, some of those shifts were still present after two weeks. The experiment hints that one cocaine exposure is enough to imprint long-term injuries into the genome, which may prime the brain for a stronger addictive response to the drug on a second exposure.
“This would be like a silent injury, where the genome is altered,” Pombo said. “It looks like everything is normal, the mouse or the animal is going about its life, but if another exposure came along, it would have much more consequences.”
The experiment exposed cocaine’s impact on the brain at the genome level, but it also raises a host of other questions, such as how long these changes last and how they vary between individuals and species. To that end, the team are working toward repeating the experiment on longer timescales, such as six months or more, as well as with different animals.
“There’s going to be some elements of stochasticity,” Pombo said. “Each individual may respond slightly differently, depending maybe also on the time of the day, what's going on, or what's happened the day before.”
“The big question for us, where we believe we can contribute is really understanding the susceptibility, and trying to shed light on why some individuals become addicted and many don't,” she continued. “So many people that get exposed to cocaine don't become addicted. Only a small portion do. Why does this happen?”
The more scientists learn about the underlying mechanisms, the more they can parse that question—and perhaps, figure out ways to reverse the injuries done to the brain to help treat addiction.
“By looking at what parts of the genome are altered, we can identify candidate mechanisms that drive the alteration,” Pombo concluded. “We can also hypothesize ways in which it would be possible to somehow revert or encourage the system, at least the nuclear part, to reverse to the original status.”
New Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books: A Tradcath Wedding. “He pronounced the word ‘nuptial’ as noopt-see-all. If that’s correct, never tell me.”