Putin ordered novichok poisonings in show of ‘Russian power’, inquiry finds

The US lobbied several countries in the EU in an effort to block any plans to use frozen Russian assets to back a massive loan to Ukraine

Netflix enters into exclusive negotiations with Warner Bros. for its film and TV studios and HBO Max streaming service

This is the most important story we've published all year 👇

Disney has a massive hit on its hands with Zootopia 2, which has secured an enormous $556 million global opening at the box office. bit.ly/4pKtcuf

Republicans might have emerged victorious in yesterday’s special election, but the margin of victory shows voters swinging away from the party in a district that Trump overwhelming won just a year ago

As the digital-currency market has sunk in recent weeks, projects that the Trump family has promoted are down far, far more

Dozens of high-engagement accounts on X, including some pro and anti-Trump users, have been accused of misleading users following the roll-out of a new transparency feature that shows user locations. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Reform party leader Nigel Farage says that he “never directly, really tried to go and hurt anybody” in response to antisemitism, racism claims

Am I the only person thoroughly unsurprised that so many right-wing ragebait accounts are run from abroad? The same thing happened on Facebook when they introduced page transparency. The big question is whether it will change behavior. My prediction is it won't. 1/3

Ubisoft shares shot up this morning after it announced on Friday that they had closed an investment with Tencent for an investment in new subsidiary Vantage Studios

Easy to say after the fact but there was clearly no way Ubisoft delayed its results because of M&A. The number of people involved in a deal would mean leaks. An accounting error is easier to contain to a small circle. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Ubisoft provoked a wave of fevered speculation last week when it delayed its results at the last minute and asked for its shares to be suspended. Turns out it was just an accounting error. My story from earlier today

NEW: The White House intervened in a DHS investigation. The target? Sex offender Andrew Tate. The WH person? Paul “Nazi Streak” Ingrassia. Who was previously also Tate’s lawyer. A banger from @robert-faturechi.bsky.social & Avi Asher-Shapiro www.propublica.org/article/andr...

ChatGPT and X are among the platforms blocking some users’ access amid a widespread Cloudflare outage

As President Trump's call for National Guard deployments rings out across the U.S., a small contingent of Ohio guard members is quietly expressing concern in an encrypted group chat.

In Italy, a new generation of mafia influencers are exploiting TikTok to normalise their image. The platform has removed thousands of videos flagged for glorifying violence or gangster life since July

Preprint w/ (rapid) analysis of Grokipedia, showing it to be “highly derivative of Wikipedia”, but differing, often on controversial topics, in that Grokipedia includes content/cites from low quality (hyper partisan & conspiracy laden) sources like Stormfront & Infowars. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09685

Chinese students already in Japan and those with planning to go there should closely monitor the local security situation, state broadcast CCTV reported, citing the education ministry

In 2023, The Telegraph published a story on the British government’s decision to deny entry to Renaud Camus. Camus is the author of the Great Replacement Theory, which imagines a shadowy plot to replace Europeans with people from the developing world www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04...

This paper is worth a read. “Inside the mind of a 16-year-old” @demos-uk.bsky.social Shuab Gamote Peter Hyman demos.co.uk/research/ins...

To turn the page on the Corbyn years and win last year’s UK election, Keir Starmer’s party carried out a strategy that was widely described as punching left. Now, the left is punching back - and it’s precisely the success of its purge that leaves Labour vulnerable

Ukrainian drone sets oil tanker ablaze and damages oil-loading facilities in Russia’s Black Sea port of Tuapse

Proud to publish this piece from my former student, who writes that Russia's lawfare in the European Court of Human Rights is "transforming [it] into an unwitting accomplice in one of the most sophisticated disinformation operations of the modern era.” americansunlight.substack.com/p/russias-la...

China and South Korea discussed expanding cultural ties during a bilateral summit between their leaders on Saturday. China’s informal ban on Korean entertainment was imposed a year ago after Seoul’s decision to deploy a US missile defence system

After months of tariff threats and brow beating, President Trump’s three-nation tour of Asia struck a surprisingly optimistic note

Voting opens in Netherlands as polls suggest second Gert Wilders win

Hurricane Melissa makes landfall in Cuba less than a day after becoming the strongest recorded storm to strike Jamaica. Cuban officials were evacuating around 735,000 people ahead of the storm’s arrival on Wednesday morning, local media reported

US President Donald Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that it is “pretty clear” the Constitution doesn't allow him to seek a third term as president

Morning Bluesky,

Moroccan-born Richard Attias is at the heart of Saudi Arabia's global outreach, spending the last decade courting investors to back the kingdom’s economic transformation. “We didn’t create FII for people to come, take the money and run,” Attias said in Riyadh

“That modern howl, “nothing works”, which is heard in Germany now as much as in Britain, isn’t right. “Nothing works, compared to Deliveroo, Expedia and Netflix,” is more like it.” - The FT’s Janan Ganesh on how we’re getting populism all wrong

Donald Trump has posted AI-generated content to Truth Social at least 62 times according to a review by The New York Times. The fake images include attacks on his opponents, flattering depictions of himself and misleading campaign materials according to the paper

I'm sorry but I guessed the 'twist' in #GENV about four episodes ago. While I'm not going to spoil it, I'm keen to know if anybody else watching the show was *at all* surprised by the penultimate episode's revalation?

Your favorite thing is down because DynamoDB at Amazon's AWS US-EAST-1 Regionwoke up with Main Character Syndrome. This is the default /legacy backbone for a ton of things. Including Amazon's own stuff. Massive outages. Here's what's going on & what we know 1/

An AWS outage has knocked out an untold number of sites across the internet, leaving thousands of people unable to access everything from banking to online gaming

Russia is using cryptocurrency to pay its army of European saboteurs in an effort to prevent intelligence agencies from tracking the payments, senior Polish security official says

Battlefield 6 has enjoyed an enormous start on Steam, with over 740,000 concurrent players.

Embattled French President Emmanuel Macron [finally!] appoints a new cabinet as the country’s political crisis continues to rumble on (🎁)

Hamas hands over seven living Israeli hostages to the International Committee of the Red Cross Cross. The other 13 are expected to be freed later today, after a US-led peace deal was reached last week (🎁)

New: Saudi Arabia is the largest contributor to the leveraged buyout of EA, marking yet another victory for the country’s gaming and esports strategy.