I genuinely don't know if the quality will get worse or improve.

It may get less transphobic and vile, unless they specifically train their AI to be so.

Europe’s largest residential landlord is set to lose €8.4bn (£7bn) as a result of plans by leftwing political party Die Linke to bring more than 140,000 Berlin flats into public ownership.

The real estate company Vonovia, which owns roughly 130,000 apartments in the city and 528,000 across Europe, would be the most affected by the plans, with 120,000 of its apartments set to be put into public ownership.

Die Linke, which won Berlin’s state elections in September, has agreed to talks with the city’s Greens and Social Democrats as part of plans to transfer ownership of flats from companies that own more than 10,000 apartments, with the legislation scheduled to be brought forward in 2028.

Excuse me, but why do we allow companies to own flats at all? Let alone a staggering 10 000 of them? What a joke.

Tbh I doubt this legislation will go through. These firms havevtoo much money to not squash it in some way. Still, it's good they are trying.

But Ofcom found that “at a total level there was no significant change in the proportion of children encountering harmful content over the first nine months after the children’s safety duties came into force in July 2025”.

Examples of harms included children being shown the murder of Charlie Kirk, graphic pornography and weapon-related content making them feel unsafe in their schools and neighbourhoods. Personalised recommendation feeds powered by “for you” algorithms were repeatedly found by Ofcom to be at the root of the continuing tide of harmful material.

“Tech companies have had months to act, yet too many platforms are still built to keep children hooked with their algorithms continuing to push harmful content to their young users,” she said. “We urgently need stronger action from tech companies to rein in features that drive harm to children and stop putting business interests over their safety obligations.”

If you don't start fining them, they won't improve. £1000 / day per person.

The regulator is already facing a wave of legal actions from tech companies challenging its powers including the Instagram operator Meta, as well as TikTok and X, owned by Elon Musk’s SpaceX group. It has warned it risks being “absolutely clobbered legally by deep-pocketed individuals and firms”.

If you're going to enact a law that makes everybody's lives worse and destroys privacy, you might as well do a decent job at what the law is intended for.

“They wanted to arrest young people,” Sandra says. “Two of the policemen said it was because they were short of three people in their quota.”

Homicide rates in El Savador had been falling, but in March 2022 an alleged truce between the government and gangs appeared to collapse when gangs reportedly killed 87 people in three days. Bukele responded by declaring a nationwide state of emergency.

What followed was an unprecedented campaign of mass incarceration. An estimated 90,000 people were arrested. About 120,000 people remain incarcerated – roughly 2% of the population, one of the highest rates in the world.

The crackdown has swept up tens of thousands of people with no proven links to criminal gangs, human rights groups say. The so-called state of exception allows the government to detain suspects for prolonged periods while curtailing constitutional rights.

A judge ordered Hernández’s release at a hearing more than three years ago, she says, but instead of being freed, he was transferred to Cecot, El Salvador’s notorious maximum-security prison, the centrepiece of Bukele’s war on gangs. Sandra has not seen her son since.

Until they handed him over to me in a bag.” When she saw her son’s body, she says he had been “practically tortured”.

Behind the prison walls, former detainees describe a system of malnutrition, physical abuse, degrading conditions and torture.

“The guards tortured us psychologically and beat us constantly. They treat you like a rat, like garbage,” he says.

Detainees were denied medicine, deprived of sunlight, given just one glass of water a day and punished for worshipping

Human Rights Watch (HRW) found that officers faced pressure to meet arrest quotas, with those who fell short risking disciplinary action or losing their jobs

Almost four years into the crackdown, authorities have increasingly resorted to mass trials, trying hundreds of defendants at once by video link.

Defendants are unable to discuss their cases with their lawyers, says Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at HRW, while lawyers are prevented from calling witnesses and witnesses are threatened if they agreed to testify for the defence. “Defence lawyers also operate in a climate of fear, they too are sometimes threatened with being prosecuted or being surveilled,” she says.

“I presented all the evidence to prove my son’s innocence, but they disregarded the case entirely. He was treated like a criminal, despite having a clean record and all his documents in order.”

The state of exception, initially presented as a temporary 30-day measure, has become a permanent fixture of Bukele’s government.

The strongman has won the admiration of the Trump administration and conservative leaders around the world.

It’s a glacier of fridges, more than 3,000 of them.

These eyesores are not particular to Norfolk. All around the UK, old fridges are piling up, including in Nottinghamshire, Durham, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Newport, the last of which found itself with a mountain of 80,000 appliances over the summer. So what is behind it?

by law, fridges have to be dismantled at specialist processing plants. The problem is that the number of these plants is shrinking rapidly in the UK.

If only we had a party in power that cared about the environment enough to invest in recycling.

The drilling project is one of two – alongside the Rosebank oil field off Shetland – which were approved by the previous Conservative government.

Both were approved for drilling licences in June 2022, but this was overturned by the Scottish courts after a challenge from environmental campaigners.

A decision on Rosebank, the largest untapped oil field in the North Sea, is being made separately, with energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh saying it will take “a bit longer”.

UK universities have sanctioned students and academics for donning keffiyehs and using the watermelon emoji as part of a crackdown on Palestinian solidarity protests, a report from Amnesty International has warned.

The human rights charity has warned that universities including Cambridge, Oxford, LSE and Birmingham have taken extreme measures to restrict solidarity with Palestinians amongst students and academics.

Students and academics have faced suspensions, campus bans and threats to visa status for chanting, clapping and wearing keffiyehs, the report outlined. Some institutions used legal and bureaucratic means to restrict protests and events on campuses relating to Palestinian solidarity, they said.

The University of Birmingham, for example, withdrew approval for a staff-student listening session on the legal and humanitarian situation in Palestine in November 2023, citing the appearance of a watermelon emoji in promotional materials.

I didn't expect this post from the Guardian.

In what world is shooting at a car with a child inside (or even without) justified over a shoplifting?

The police drew their weapons. Wiley lifted the baby up to indicate that there was a child in the car. An officer, identified by other records as Sgt Hunter Foster, fired into the vehicle, killing Kohen Wiley and wounding Ferrell. Foster is white; both Wileys and Ferrell are Black.

The Mississippi bureau of investigation, which investigated the shooting, alleged that the driver “drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one”. But the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family, released an independent autopsy that indicated Wiley was shot from the side of the car, not the front, which contradicted officers’ statements that Ferrell headed towards them.

“A one-year-old was shot and killed by an officer of this department, and nearly three months later his family still has not been allowed to see the footage”

He arrived in the UK aged 12, but for the last 14 years Hall has been under threat of being sent back to Barbados – a country he doesn’t remember and where he has no surviving relatives.

All this time he has been kept on a deportation list, which means he cannot work, rent somewhere to live, receive benefits or do anything that would allow him to start rebuilding his life. Instead, he remains on the edge of destitution, reliant on the kindness of family and friends to survive.

In 2001 he was convicted of a serious crime – conspiracy to rob and having a firearm with intent; he spent eight years in prison. He had been planning with friends to hold up a security van taking money to a bank; he was carrying a toy gun, but there was also a real gun in the car. Police stopped them before a crime was committed.

The principle of rehabilitation suggests that Hall, having served his sentence, should then have been allowed to restart his life, as his co-defendants did.

Every fortnight Hall must attend an appointment at a Home Office reporting centre, carrying a document printed with his mugshot above a letter that warns him he is liable to be detained “pending a decision to deport you/because a decision has been made to deport you”. The journey there takes him the best part of two hours, and involves a few stops on the overground, a short bus ride, then six stops on the underground and another bus ride, followed by a queue at the reporting centre, a brief checking of documents and the reverse trip home. By now, he estimates that he has performed this time-consuming ritual more than 350 times.

The outlet, founded in 2015 at the height of support for the then Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, said in a social media post it would be closing “for the foreseeable future”.

In a statement, the Canary said: “After 11 years, we take this action with deep sadness and regret. The extent of the lies, defamation, and harassment by ex-staff – coupled with the constant attacks by the state and those who’d see us destroyed – has become too much.”

However, some journalists at the Canary have said they believed the outlet’s banking issues had been used to distract from wider financial mismanagement. They claim that additional funding received over the summer – believed to be more than £2m – had been squandered on projects including a short-lived newspaper and the purchase of other websites.

Engineers have removed the masts of the SS Richard Montgomery – a second world war cargo ship that sank in 1944 with approximately 1,400 tonnes of munitions onboard – without triggering the kind of feared explosion that has kept the wreck under constant guard for decades.

Umm, why is that still there?! Sounds like. There's no plan to get rid of it. Just ask ships to go around it.