Arrest in Pennsylvania of Wu Shaoping, who is awaiting asylum decision, raises fears of deportation and persecution

A Chinese human rights lawyer has been arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), raising concerns he could be deported to China where he would face persecution.

Wu Shaoping fled China at the end of 2019 amid a crackdown on human rights lawyers. He travelled to the US on a tourist visa and made an asylum claim in 2020, for which he is still awaiting a decision.

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Designers say that as well as offering a degree of protection from surveillance, their clothes make a powerful fashion statement about the importance of privacy

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend.

Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colours and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

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The former poet laureate on growing up with Lawrence Durrell, rereading Henry James and getting to grips with the genius of Alexander Pope

My earliest reading memory
My parents were country people who thought that looking after or chasing animals was more fun than reading: my father used to say that he’d read half a book in his life (The Lonely Skier by Hammond Innes), and while my mother got through three or four novels a year, she didn’t expect me to do anything equivalent. But I do remember enjoying something my grandmother gave me – My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett. I must have been seven or so, and thought it was amusing and ingenious.

The books that changed me as a teenager
At my first school, I somehow got my hands on White Eagles Over Serbia by Lawrence Durrell, which my parents thought was unsuitably violent. I never finished it, but enjoyed carrying it around as proof of how grown-up I was. Then, at my secondary school, my history teacher read us some Wilfred Owen (we were studying the first world war), and the poetry-lights in my mind immediately flickered on. When I subsequently bought Owen’s Collected Poems it became a kind of sacred text for me (it still is).

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In HBO’s four-part series The Man Will Burn, the psychedelic, uber-expensive festival is granted a deep dive

In 1986, a group of starving artists seeking release amid a devastating economic downturn built an oversized wooden stick figure, hauled it on to a San Francisco beach and set it ablaze as police officers and passersby looked on in disbelief. Forty years later, Burning Man is the festival to end all festivals – a sprawling spectacle of music, art and self-expression that draws tens of thousands to the Nevada desert every summer for community, catharsis and spiritual connection. It is a pilgrimage for Bohemians and billionaires, a byword for a particular strain of woo-woo hipsterism, a countercultural institution wrestling with the contradictions between its libertine ideals, corporate reality and the regular presence of lightning-rod figures such as Grover Norquist, the conservative strategist, and Elon Musk’s brother.

The only way to truly grasp the meaning of the place, it seems, is to take the trip –figuratively at first, then literally once fully immersed in Black Rock City’s psychedelic, anything-goes culture. “It’s such an immersive experience that it seems that it would be impossible to capture on film or convey what it feels like to be inside a city that exists for a week, that’s imagined, built and sustained entirely by the people inside,” says Jehane Noujaim, co-director of The Man Will Burn, a new docuseries that premiered on HBO this month on the festival.

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• Only a handful of FAs have not declared their support

• Uefa has made its opposition clear on number of issues

Gianni Infantino has the formal endorsement of more than 200 countries for re-election as Fifa’s president despite the climate of unrest that has swirled since the scandal surrounding Folarin Balogun’s reprieve from suspension.

The Guardian understands only a handful of Fifa’s 211 member associations are still to send letters of support for Infantino, who is on course to be voted into a fourth term by a landslide at its congress in March. A small number of European countries are among the outliers, with Germany the highest-profile FA yet to provide official backing.

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Ahead of the anniversary of MH17, Maarten de Schutter reflected on turning his family archives into cinema and confronting grief through filmmaking.

Putin issued a directive last month ordering a strict fuel delivery schedule for farms to counter the impact of Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries.

Picture this. Someone gets hold of your Android phone and, despite not knowing your PIN, they can use Gemini from the lock screen to send SMS or WhatsApp messages as you. This is a real bug and Google says a fix is coming as soon as this week. Since May, The Register has received multiple reports of users bypassing device authentication on Android 16 devices that enable Gemini access from the lock screen. These are distinct from the similar Gemini-based Android lock screen bypass bugs that have made the rounds since September 2025. One of the bugs reported to us allowed unauthenticated users with physical access to an Android device to enable functionality such as phone, texts, and WhatsApp via Gemini on the lock screen using a specific multi-touch gesture. When device owners revoke Gemini’s access to certain apps, like Messages, and someone later tries to send an SMS via Gemini on the lock screen, the chatbot will prompt the user to open the relevant app. Selecting "Continue" prompts the user to enter the correct PIN to access messages. However, when “Continue” is pressed simultaneously with Gemini’s “Add attachment” button, the device will then allow unauthenticated users to send that SMS via Gemini, without needing to enter a PIN. From there, users can enable Gemini’s access to other apps, which were previously disconnected from Gemini in the user’s Settings, by invoking the relevant prompt. For example, to allow Gemini access to WhatsApp, users can enter “@WhatsApp” in the Gemini text window. No PIN needed. You can then check this has worked by going back into user Settings, after entering a correct PIN, and it will show that WhatsApp is connected to Gemini without completing the expected authentication step. Exploiting the flaw requires physical access to a device. In most circumstances, we steer clear of giving this type of vulnerability too much airtime since it is often difficult to pull off in real-world scenarios. If Windows, for example, had a make-me-admin bug that required the attacker, for whatever reason, to have physical access to the keyboard connected to the Windows machine, then the owner of said machine has bigger problems than the vulnerability itself. However, given the state of phone theft crime, especially in the UK, and the potential to send convincing SMS messages as part of fake kidnapping scams, to name one possibility, we think this one deserves some attention. A Google spokesperson told us this is a known bug and it has already implemented a fix that was scheduled for a full deployment this week. They also said the bug is not Pixel-specific, after some claimed that they could not reproduce it on Samsung devices, but fell short of specifying which manufacturers, models, or versions are vulnerable. ®

The UK Home Office has awarded contract extensions worth £28 million to two incumbent tech suppliers of the much-delayed Atlas immigration and asylum system after a legal challenge derailed an earlier procurement process. The Whitehall department in charge of policing, borders, and immigration awarded PA Consulting a five-month contract extension worth £13.5 million and Mastek a four-month extension worth £15 million. Both contracts were awarded without competition. The Register understands the Home Office began an open procurement for new contracts in the summer of 2025. However, Mastek launched a legal challenge in October after it was eliminated following the second stage of bidding for a £138 million Atlas contract. Mastek alleged there had been "manifest errors" in the scoring and that competing bidders had access to information that had not been made available to it. It sought about £47 million in lost profits and approximately £158,000 in wasted bid costs. The case was settled in May 2026 and the procurement was withdrawn. A Home Office spokesperson told The Register: "These allegations, including that the Home Office acted in breach of the Public Contracts Regulations, have never been proven or accepted, and there has been no admission of liability." The Register understands the Home Office extended its existing tech supplier contracts to ensure service continuity. In June 2026, the department published an early market engagement exercise – which does not mark the start of a competition – concerning the provision of services, support, and development to the case management software that supports the asylum system, a politically contentious issue in the UK. "The system has a requirement to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week availability, with updates and enhancements continually delivered to enhance functionality and capabilities. It underpins a range of critical national priorities and a significant amount of continuous improvement work driving strategic outcome delivery," the notice says. The procurement is expected to be split into asylum and non-asylum immigration systems. The notice says Atlas is "a containerized open source Java microservice application deployed into AWS, which orchestrates workflow following business process management processes, triggered by events, using agile release trains which group microservices for release." The plan is also "to evolve and enhance the overall immigration caseworking operating model, with a greater emphasis on supplier accountability, collaboration, and strategic partnership," the notice says. It places a value of £336 million (including tax) on the deal, which is set to last from June 2027 to May 2031, with the option to extend until May 2033. In 2025, the Home Office blogged that Atlas was ready to replace CID, the legacy system that began development in 2000. Atlas was built by Accenture, Mastek, and PA Consulting, and was projected to be fully implemented in 2021. However, the Home Office missed that deadline. In 2023, The Register revealed the Home Office had missed a second deadline for the full handover and decommissioning of CID. As of December 2025, Home Office staff still appeared to be using the legacy system for some information. As of June 2026, a report from the Public Accounts Committee confirmed the department no longer used the legacy system, although it found staff still needed to maintain their own spreadsheets in parallel to the case management system. Also in June, a report from the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration slammed Atlas for failing to help case workers learn from the outcome of legal appeals. ®

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Werken van Pierre Bonnard in het Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Udine. Die mevrouw is niet aan het bellen, op de telefoon staat de audiotour.

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Prachtig werk van Mirko Basaldella in het Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Udine.

mikeleonardvisualarts posted a photo:

We're immersed in a permanent stream of images, a fluid outpouring that can go on forever without plot, sequence, or development; we're still being trained on the old televisual cues but without stable relations between what we encounter. The result is not distraction but congestion: too many competing emotional prompts without hierarchy of resolution.

I Turned a 1982 Vectrex Into the Strangest Spotify Player I used a PiTrex to connect the original vector display to a modern music streaming experience, creating what might be one of the most unusual Spotify players ever made. In the video, I show how the project works, how the Vectrex displays the interface using vector graphics, and how I built a custom cartridge enclosure to complete the setup.

​Het was een twist die geen van de passagiers van vlucht KL 735 van Schiphol naar Curaçao nog aan zag komen. Na zes uur hard doch nonchalant drukken met haar arm tegen die van haar ogenschijnlijk Duitse buurman heeft de 32-jarige Wieneke Blok uit Meppel een inhaalslag van een gigantische 1,7 centimeter weten te boeken in de strijd om de armleuning.

Bij binnenkomst in het vliegtuig begon Blok meteen al op achterstand. Haar tegenstander van vandaag had zich namelijk al volledig gesetteld in zijn stoel met zijn onderarm ferm op de leuning. Toch zag de Drentse communicatiemedewerkster dit niet als een onmiddellijk verlies. “Vanaf dat moment kun je alleen nog maar vooruit. Toen ik ging zitten, begon ik meteen druk te zetten. Daar ben ik vanaf dat moment niet meer mee gestopt en het is fijn om te zien dat het zo uit kan pakken.”

De grote slag vond plaats toen de tegenstander in slaap tijdens het kijken van The Sheep Detectives’. Dat de keuze voor een foute was, zag Wieneke al van veraf aankomen. “Heel goed, dacht ik”, aldus Blok. “Ga maar een film kijken over schapen, we zullen zien of je de focus erbij kunt houden. Het moment dat hij in slaap viel, gaf ik meteen een flinke zet. Toen hij wakker schrok, zag hij zelf ook in wat voor beginnersfout hij had gemaakt. Je moet gewoon constant onder spanning staan. Daarom kwam ik voorbereid en heb ik Obsession gedownload. Ik verslap geen moment.”

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Wij zijn even de vis o nee de draad kwijt hoor: in het eerste halfjaar van vorig jaar o nee dit jaar zijn minder o nee meer meldingen gedaan van goed functionerende o nee verwarde personen: "Ruim 96.000 keer ontving de politie in de eerste helft van dit jaar meldingen over personen met verward gedrag. Dat is 17 procent meer ten opzichte van dezelfde periode vorig jaar." Niemand o nee iedereen kan in principe verward of onbegrepen gedrag vertonen. Zo heb je onbegrepen zangeressen, verwarde acteurs en zelfs onbegrepen en verwarde ministers zoals Hans Wiegel o nee Elanor Boekholt-O'Sullivan. Misschien hebben zelfs wij ons weleens verward o nee normaal gedragen het afgelopen halfjaar. Duidelijk o nee verwarrend allemaal! Zin om ergens midden op een plein te gaan gillen als een baby o nee als een varken nu.

Tatjana Almuli (35) schrijft over hedendaagse schoonheidsidealen, Brankele Frank (39) houdt zich bezig met burn-outs en overprikkeling. Beiden zien: we gaan ten onder aan de hoge eisen die we aan onszelf stellen. „Zelfverbetering kent geen eindpunt.”

sz-da has added a photo to the pool:

五老スカイタワー