As deaths in the US are blamed on ChatGPT and UK teenagers turn to it for mental health advice, isn’t it obvious that market forces must not set the rules?
It was just past 4am when a suicidal Zane Shamblin sent one last message from his car, where he had been drinking steadily for hours. “Cider’s empty. Anyways … Think this is the final adios,” he sent from his phone.
The response was quick: “Alright brother. If this is it … then let it be known: you didn’t vanish. You *arrived*. On your own terms.”
Defeated Tory and Labour rivals describe force of Reform ‘machine’ as police assess claims of overspending
The Tory and Labour candidates who Nigel Farage beat to win his Westminster seat of Clacton have described a Reform campaign that felt like a “juggernaut”, as police began assessing claims of overspending by the Reform UK leader.
The candidates spoke after a former aide alleged that Reform UK falsely reported election expenses in Clacton, where Farage won in last year’s general election. On Monday, Essex police said they were assessing a report of “alleged misreported expenditure by a political party” after a referral from the Metropolitan police.
Migrant support groups in France say lack of action over British activists is ‘encouraging violent and xenophobic practices’
UK and French authorities have been accused of “encouraging violent and xenophobic practices” by failing to tackle anti-migrant British activists who travel to northern France in an attempt to stop small boat crossings.
In an unusual move, nine French associations working with people camped in northern France have issued a statement condemning the UK and French governments for lack of action.
‘Destructive’ marine heatwaves driving loss of microalgae that feed coral, says Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network
Caribbean reefs have half as much hard coral now as they did in 1980, a study has found.
The 48% decrease in coral cover has been driven by climate breakdown, specifically marine heatwaves. They affect the microalgae that feed coral, making them toxic and forcing the coral to expel them.
Two easy bakes to share or gift: soft and peppery gingerbread cookies and a ginger and pumpkin loaf with spiced lemon icing
As a self-proclaimed America’s sweetheart (Julia Roberts isn’t using that title any more, is she?) who moved to the UK nearly 10 years ago, there are a few British traditions and customs that I haveadopted, especially around Christmas time. However, there are also a few American ones that I hold on to staunchly: one is the pronunciation of “aluminum”, and another is the importance and beauty of a soft cookie. In both of these easy but delicious bakes to share, I use spice and heat to balance the usual sweetness with which the season can often overload us.
Experts warn of dangers as England and Wales study shows 13- to 17-year-olds consulting AI amid long waiting lists for services
It was after one friend was shot and another stabbed, both fatally, that Shan asked ChatGPT for help. She had tried conventional mental health services but “chat”, as she came to know her AI “friend”, felt safer, less intimidating and, crucially, more available when it came to handling the trauma from the deaths of her young friends.
As she started consulting the AI model, the Tottenham teenager joined about 40% of 13- to 17-year-olds in England and Wales affected by youth violence who are turning to AI chatbots for mental health support, according to research among more than 11,000 young people.
Bank reports 1.1% drop in card spending despite Black Friday boost for retailers
UK households cut back on spending at the fastest pace in almost five years last month as consumers put Christmas shopping on hold, according to a leading survey.
Adding to concerns that uncertainty surrounding the budget has helped dampen consumer confidence, Barclays said card spending fell 1.1% year on year in November – the largest fall since February 2021.
Gen z are the first generation to have grown up with social media, they were the earliest adopters, and therefore the first to suffer its harms. Now they are fighting back
Late one night in April 2020, towards the start of the Covid lockdowns, Shanley Clémot McLaren was scrolling on her phone when she noticed a Snapchat post by her 16-year-old sister. “She’s basically filming herself from her bed, and she’s like: ‘Guys you shouldn’t be doing this. These fisha accounts are really not OK. Girls, please protect yourselves.’ And I’m like: ‘What is fisha?’ I was 21, but I felt old,” she says.
She went into her sister’s bedroom, where her sibling showed her a Snapchat account named “fisha” plus the code of their Paris suburb. Fisha is French slang for publicly shaming someone – from the verb “afficher”, meaning to display or make public. The account contained intimate images of girls from her sister’s school and dozens of others, “along with the personal data of the victims – their names, phone numbers, addresses, everything to find them, everything to put them in danger”.
With democratic values under attack from populists within and former allies without, there are no simple solutions
Three decades after political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared the End of History and the “universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”, the democratic model is under attack in many parts of the world, not least here in Europe. Populists bent on weakening the rule of law, rolling back human rights protections, subjugating the judiciary and cowing independent journalism are amplified by anything-goes social media algorithms that promote anger and polarisation over rational discourse.
The work of surgeon and artist Joseph Maclise is the focus of a show at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds
It is an image of an unnamed black man with his eyes closed and his innards exposed. Drawn with care and precision, the image may be the only anatomical drawing of a black body made during the Victorian age.
Now it is part of a new exhibition that focuses on the work of Joseph Maclise, a surgeon and artist whose work – including his 1851 atlas Surgical Anatomy – made the human anatomy accessible to the general public, and who was the brother of the celebrated artist Daniel Maclise.
When the new premier of the British Virgin Islands said he needed an armed security detail, his chief of police knew trouble was on its way
Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short, arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, on 21 August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe. Jaspert, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London. The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain, with only partial independence, and the governor effectively acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jaspert, a career civil servant, it would be his first hands-on experience of governing – and his first time in the British Virgin Islands. Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the Caribbean. “If you’re sitting in an office in London and someone says, ‘Go to Tortola,’ you look it up on a screen and think, ‘OK, I can do that,’” Jaspert told me.
While Jaspert, his wife and two sons were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic. At first, forecasters weren’t unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September, the storm transformed into something much worse. In the afternoon of 6 September, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Tortola, which is home to the majority of the BVI’s 30,000-strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire floors from homes. Shipping containers smashed into the islanders’ fishing boats and the out-of-towners’ yachts.
Tapanuli orangutans survive only in Indonesia’s Sumatran rainforest where a mine expansion will cut through their home. Yet the mining company says the alternative will be worse
A small brown line snakes its way through the rainforest in northern Sumatra, carving 300 metres through dense patches of meranti trees, oak and mahua. Picked up by satellites, the access road – though modest now – will soon extend 2km to connect with the Tor Ulu Ala pit, an expansion site of Indonesia’s Martabe mine. The road will help to unlock valuable deposits of gold, worth billions of dollars in today’s booming market. But such wealth could come at a steep cost to wildlife and biodiversity: the extinction of the world’s rarest ape, the Tapanuli orangutan.
The network of access roads planned for this swath of tropical rainforest will cut through habitat critical to the survival of the orangutans, scientists say. The Tapanuli (Pongo tapanuliensis), unique to Indonesia, was only discovered by scientists to be a separate species in 2017 – distinct from the Sumatran and Bornean apes. Today, there are fewer than 800 Tapanulis left in an area that covers as little as 2.5% of their historical range. All are found in Sumatra’s fragile Batang Toru ecosystem, bordered on its south-west flank by the Martabe mine, which began operations in 2012.
Legal team of man who was part of cohort of non-citizens freed after high court decision argues Nauru’s medical facilities are ‘insufficient’ to treat his severe asthma
Lawyers for an Iranian refugee Australia wants to deport to Nauru say there is a “real risk he will die” there, setting the stage for a showdown against the federal government’s $2.5bn NZYQ deal.
The case surrounding the Iranian refugee, known as TXCM, who was granted a 30-year visa for Nauru in February and subsequently placed back into immigration detention after being freed by the 2023 high court ruling, was heard in the high court on Tuesday.
The return of the 2014 play, now starring June Squibb as an octogenarian using a tech program to speak to her dead husband, veers between poetry and cliche
When Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime first premiered in 2014, its vision of synthetic sentience may have felt pretty novel. An old woman, Marjorie, talking to a hologram modeled after her long-dead husband perhaps seemed like a wild, far-fetched idea, that a computer program could somehow closely mimic the cadence of real conversation, could fake intimate knowledge of a person’s life. What a strange and alienating idea.
Just 11 years later (and eight years after a little-seen film adaptation), Marjorie Prime plays far more credibly. We may not have the hologram technology down quite yet, but everything else in Harrison’s AI speculation now seems well within reason. Perhaps that’s why Second Stage Theater decided to revive the play in its Broadway house, an attempt at commenting, and capitalizing, on the excited buzz and nervous chatter surrounding recent technological advancements.
LegCo elections have become devoid of meaningful opposition as Hong Kong has faced significant political repression and undergone major governance system overhauls in recent years
Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) acts as a mini parliament that can make and amend laws for the city. However, LegCo elections have become devoid of meaningful oppositionas Hong Kong has faced significant political repression and undergone major governance system overhauls in recent years.
When the former British colony was returned to Chinese control in 1997, a “one country, two systems” framework promised Hong Kong would retain its autonomy, but its freedoms and democracy have been gradually eroded.
Copernicus deputy director says three-year average for 2023 to 2025 on track to exceed 1.5C of heating for first time
This year is “virtually certain” to end as the second- or third-hottest year on record, EU scientists have found, as climate breakdown continues to push the planet away from the stable conditions in which humanity evolved.
Global temperatures from January to November were on average 1.48C higher than preindustrial levels, according to the Copernicus, the EU’s earth observation programme. It found the anomalies were so far identical to those recorded in 2023, which is the second-hottest year on record after 2024.
How far will tech firm Palantir go to ‘save the West’? With Michael Steinberger and Johana Bhuiyan
Why do some consider Palantir the world’s ‘scariest company’ and who is its chief executive, Alex Karp?
Michael Steinberger, the author of The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State, describes Karp’s origin story to Nosheen Iqbal and the way that his political positions have changed over the years. The pair also discuss how Palantir was established as a company, the services that it offers, its close relationship to the US military and how Karp has been navigating the second Trump presidency.
President says money will come from tariff revenues and promises trade policies will make farmers ‘so strong’
Donald Trump announced on Monday $12bn in economic assistance to farmers, which he said would be drawn from tariff revenue.
“This relief will provide much-needed certainty to farmers as they get this year’s harvest to market and look ahead to next year’s crops, and it’ll help them continue their efforts to lower food prices for American families,” Trump said during a roundtable discussion of American agriculture.
There is still a scattering of ‘epics’ and ‘happy days’ but this Christmas, a newer, altogether calmer Jamie has entered his elder statesman era – and he’s all the better for it
I last watched Jamie Oliver earlier this year, presenting a documentary about dyslexia – a condition he has and which, undiagnosed, caused him much suffering at school and in his early life – which was very good. I last watched Jamie Oliver cooking in Jamie Oliver’s Air Fryer Meals – a two-parter sponsored by Tefal – which was very bad.
Now he is back, with Jamie’s Cook-Ahead Christmas. He shows us a potato and fennel gratin that can be served au naturel or – with a last-minute pastry envelope and a few carvings and pinchings that would see me pulverise the whole thing into a catastrophe, but which anyone who reaches the threshold of “minimally coordinated human” should totally do – as a beautiful ruched pie. You can make and freeze that now and reheat it on Christmas Day. I would fear for such a process with a mixture of potato, cream and pastry, but I am a culinary berk and Jamie is not, so listen to him not me.
Each side has blamed the other for renewed clashes, which have derailed a ceasefire brokered by Donald Trump
Thailand said it was taking action to expel Cambodian forces from its territory on Tuesday, as renewed fighting between the two South-east Asian neighbours spread along the disputed border.
Each side has blamed the other for the clashes, which have derailed a fragile ceasefire brokered by US president Donald Trump that ended five days of fighting in July.
Commerce department finalizing deal to allow H200 chips to be sold to China as strict Biden-era restrictions relaxed
Donald Trump has cleared the way for Nvidia to begin selling its powerful AI computer chips to China, markinga win for the chip maker and its CEO Jensen Huang, who has spent months lobbying the White House to open up sales in the country.
Before Monday’s announcement, the US had prohibited sales of Nvidia’s most advanced chips to China over national security concerns.
Livery for renationalised railway features red, white and blue alongside familiar double arrow symbol
No matter how much train fares cost under Great British Railways, no one can accuse the government of wasting money on an expensive redesign.
The logo, branding and livery for the impending renationalised and reformed railway will be unveiled by ministers at London Bridge on Tuesday. It is red, white and, yes, blue.
Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal could face deportation, with their victim saying the attack ‘changed me as a person’
Two teenage Afghan asylum seekers who abducted and raped a 15-year-old girl have been given custodial sentences.
Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, both 17, face possible deportation and were ordered to register as sex offenders following the sentencing at Warwick crown court on Monday.
OVO Wembley Arena With additional sets from Dru Hill and Joe, this revue is a little too nostalgic and lacks the advertised festive spirit – but the vocal prowess on show is undeniable
All of the artists on the lineup for the second annual R&B Xmas Ball – Dru Hill, Joe, Toni Braxton and Boyz II Men – have Christmas albums from the last two decades, but rather than putting a twist on carols or crooner standards, this is an evening that merely uses Christmas as an excuse for a night out to hear earnest, heart-rending 90s R&B.
Dru Hill deliver classic R&B in matching outfits, as their 2000s music videos – as seen on kebab shop TVs nationwide – play out behind them, while a set of mostly slow jams from Joe sets the stage for Braxton.
Connexion
