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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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.

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.

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

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.”

De KNVB moest afgelopen najaar na een door profclub Vitesse aangespannen hoger beroep de proflicentie teruggeven aan de Arnhemse club en deze toelaten tot de competitie. Dit arrest, aangevochten door de voetbalbond, deugt volgens de Hoge Raad.

Ik weet dus echt helemaal niks van voetbal. Voor het WK kon ik amper een speler van het Nederlands elftal opnoemen. Ja, Depay misschien nog net. Nog steeds geen idee bij welke club de beste man speelt. Toch sta ik aan de vooravond van de finale eerste in de voetbalpool van mijn collega’s. Ik zal het maar meteen opbiechten: ik heb met AI hun voetbalpool verpest.

Superster The Weeknd bracht een gigantische robot en een spectaculair decor naar de Johan Cruijff Arena. Hij had er zin in, maar niet alle hits kwamen even goed tot hun recht.

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五老スカイタワー

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福岡県田川市、三井寺（平等寺） / Mitsui-ji (Byōdō-ji), Tagawa City, Fukuoka Prefecture

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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. ®

Bij een ongeluk bij een bedrijf in Schiedam is iemand om het leven gekomen. De man kwam klem te zitten tussen de pallets bij het laden en lossen in een vrachtwagen bij het bedrijf aan de Nieuwe Waterwegstraat. Hij was de chauffeur van de vrachtwagen.

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