The UK is a World Leader in Stomping Peaceful Protest: There is, unfortunately, something we’re still good at.

Trump’s calls with British leaders reportedly left staff crying from laughter: Maybe they were crying for other reasons too.

Dear Trans Kids, You Don’t Need the Government’s Permission to Exist: ‘In every era of US history, queer folks have carved out their spaces despite criminalization, discrimination, and violence.’

‘Sputnik moment’: $1tn wiped off US stocks after Chinese firm unveils AI chatbot: Open-source chatbot DeepSeek can apparently do more AI with less resources.

Spotify Hosts Trump Inauguration Brunch and Makes $150,000 Donation to Ceremony: Sigh.

Björk Says Spotify Is “The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Musicians”: ‘The streaming culture has changed an entire society and an entire generation of artists.’

Let’s Try to Always Provide a Dignified Way Forward: “While dealing with tough student situations, always provide a way for them to come out of the situation with their dignity intact, while still achieving the goal behind the intervention” seems like great advice when interacting with non-students too.

Far-right pundit Matt Walsh rails against women in law enforcement: ‘It’s an absurdity!’: Matt Walsh is an absurdity.

Advocates ‘deeply worried’ as Trump’s justice department halts new civil rights cases: One among many other extraordinarily worrying actions from the new president.

Pope warns Davos summit that AI could worsen ‘crisis of truth’: He was the subject of one of the more famous early deepfakes to be fair.

A rotten Apple: Tim Cook’s betrayal of LGBTQ+ rights: Never love a corporation part 9999.

The Emptiness Of Zuck’s Promise To Move ‘Biased’ Trust & Safety From California To Texas: Zuckerberg’s ridiculous ‘we’ll move the remnants of our trust and safety team to Texas because that’ll make them magically less biased’ stunt is even sillier when it turns out many of them already live there.

How to survive being online: You can use the internet without being Very Online, as they say.

Trump inauguration: Zuckerberg, Bezos and Musk seated in front of cabinet picks: Remember the good old days where it wasn’t the done thing for political leaders to make their chumocratic oligarchy fantasies quite so obvious.

Trump embraces role of demagogue on divine mission to reshape America: Trump kicks off with an utterly shameless, quite chilling speech.

New Year, same American violence: America is a ‘culturally violent place’, as well as having far too many guns of course.

Zuckerberg’s Spineless Surrender: Rehashing Old News To Enable False GOP Narratives: ‘Zuckerberg’s claim that he would stand up to government pressure on moderation is undermined by the fact that he’s revealing this literally while caving to government pressure on moderation.’

The Guardian view on development’s paradox: the rich benefit more than the poor: ‘Developing countries struggle to break out of a trading and financial system skewed against them because the global north’s economic growth still depends on extracting their resources and labour’

The Guardian view on corridor care: the normalisation of crisis is shocking: Medics increasingly having to deliver care in hospital corridors and other unsuitable places is resulting in ‘increased suffering’.

Smartphones Are Hot: A decade-old take on ‘What would Marshall McLuhan make of the smartphone?’

Google Maps turns 20, adds AI features, new countries to beat Apple: Next month sees Google Maps' 20th year anniversary; it is kind of hard to imagine life without this type of software.

‘I’ll kiss the ground’: chaos feared amid Gaza ceasefire as families head home: Many of the 90% of Palestinians who have been displaced by the war are about to set off to see what remains of their homes, presumably under the assumption that the cease fire holds.

TikTok ban: App shuts down in the United States hours ahead of a ban: Whether the ban will last is a different story.

People Left Twitter Because Twitter’s Product Sucks, Not Because of Purity Politics: Hard to know how much of the decline is ethical concerns vs it’s simply not a very good experience for many people.

Call to overhaul obesity diagnoses amid fears of over-reliance on BMI: ‘…there are fears BMI on its own is not a “reliable measure” of an individual’s health and may be resulting in both under- and over-diagnosis of obesity….’