Woman at heart of US trial says she was addicted to social media at age six

The young woman at the heart of the landmark trial about the addictive nature of social media testified for the first time on Thursday, saying she got hooked on YouTube starting at age six and Instagram at nine. By the time she was 10, she said, she had become depressed and was engaging in self-harm.The woman, who is now 20 and known by her initials KGM, is the lead plaintiff in an expansive lawsuit against YouTube and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook. The crux of the case alleges social media companies intentionally create addictive products, leading to mental health issues in young people.KGM testified on Thursday that her use of social media made her anxious and insecure, and features like beauty filters distorted her self-image

Riaz Hasan obituary

My father, Riaz Hasan, who has died aged 87, was a water resources engineer with a distinguished career working across 40 countries – in the 1970s with the British firm Halcrow and, from the 80s, at the UN and the World Bank.Originally from Hyderabad, Riaz arrived in the UK in 1965 with £3 and an A–Z, invited, like many engineers in India at that time, by the government. After completing a master’s degree in water resources at Bradford University, where he developed a love of Yorkshire pudding and received his degree from Harold Wilson (which he described as a real privilege), he embarked on his career designing life-saving, long-term water and food solutions for the most vulnerable and those affected by war, famine and natural disasters.Born in the small town of Warangal, near Hyderabad, to Mohammed, an English professor, and his wife, Khadija, Riaz went to Nizam college. He did his engineering degree at Osmania University, graduating in 1960, then got his first job at the Central Water Power Commission (CWPC) in Delhi

Met police to pilot facial recognition identity checks, mayor confirms

Metropolitan police officers are to start scanning citizens’ faces using automated facial recognition technology to check their identities, in a move backed by the mayor of London but described as “alarming” by opponents.The pilot was revealed on Thursday when Sadiq Khan said 100 officers would use the roaming technology – commonly deployed on smartphones – for six months. The mayor was responding to questioning from an opposition politician amid rising concern about the rollout of AI-powered policing tools. The Met’s website still states it “does not presently use the so-called operator initiated facial recognition”.Face scanning has already been deployed by police with cameras on vans and in fixed locations including in Croydon, Manchester and South Wales

Tell us: how will the UK’s landline switch-off affect you or your family?

UK telecoms companies are retiring traditional landline services and replacing them with internet-based home phone connections.The industry has set a deadline of January 2027 to complete this switch with roughly 3.2 million homes still to move over. While the digital switchover has been straightforward for most households, for some vulnerable customers, such as those with telecare devices, it has been very stressful.In December 2025 Virgin Media was fined £23

‘Unbelievably dangerous’: experts sound alarm after ChatGPT Health fails to recognise medical emergencies

ChatGPT Health regularly misses the need for medical urgent care and frequently fails to detect suicidal ideation, a study of the AI platform has found, which experts worry could “feasibly lead to unnecessary harm and death”.OpenAI launched the “Health” feature of ChatGPT to limited audiences in January, which it promotes as a way for users to “securely connect medical records and wellness apps” to generate health advice and responses. More than 40 million people reportedly ask ChatGPT for health-related advice every day.The first independent safety evaluation of ChatGPT Health, published in the February edition of the journal Nature Medicine, found it under-triaged more than half of the cases presented to it.The lead author of the study, Dr Ashwin Ramaswamy, said “we wanted to answer the most basic safety question; if someone is having a real medical emergency and asks ChatGPT Health what to do, will it tell them to go to the emergency department?”Ramaswamy and his colleagues created 60 realistic patient scenarios covering health conditions from mild illnesses to emergencies

Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more

A handful of companies monopolise the web, with unprecedented access to our data. But there are many more ethical – and often distinctively European – alternativesThere’s not much to love about big tech these days. So many ills can be laid at its door: social media harms, misinformation, polarisation, mining and misuse of personal data, environmental negligence, tax avoidance, the list goes on. Added to which, Silicon Valley’s leaders seem all too keen to cosy up to the Trump administration, to shower the president with bribes – sorry, gifts – and remain silent about his worsening political overreach. And that’s before we get to the rampant “enshittification”, as the tech writer Cory Doctorow describes it, which means that by design many big tech products have become less useful and more extractive than they were when we originally signed up to them