When a Finn talks to an AI helper like ChatGPT, they often get the sense that something is subtly wrong. “You really feel that this conversation is not the way that you would have a discussion in Finland,” says Peter Sarlin. For a start, Finnish people are known for a …

It’s a slate-gray Tuesday morning in January, and Sadiq Khan is marching through Camden Market trailed by a caravan of officials, press officers, and the hulking presence of his Metropolitan Police protection unit. The mayor of London bustles with a sleeves-rolled-up, CEOish energy. The 53-year-old is short—famously so—but bantamweight trim, …

When the Egyptian government shut down the internet in 2011 to give itself cover to crush a popular protest movement, it was Nora Younis who got the word out. Younis, then a journalist with daily newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, found a working internet connection at the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis Hotel that …

An air raid alert has just started when Victoria Itskovych joins a Zoom call from Kyiv. “It’s, like, a usual situation,” she says. “But really, it’s not usual.” February 24 will mark the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. For nearly two years now, Kyiv has been under …

Rick Fox has spent a lot of time in Hollywood, so naturally he has more than one origin story. Canadian-born, Bahamian-raised Fox played professional basketball in the NBA in the 1990s and 2000s, starring for the Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Lakers. After retiring from the sport in 2004, he …

The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, says it is prepared to “disrupt” tech platforms that don’t comply with the country’s controversial new Online Safety Act, including cutting them off from payment systems or even blocking them from the UK. The act—a sprawling piece of legislation that covers a spectrum of issues, …

Jeremy Wright was the first of five UK ministers charged with pushing through the British government’s landmark legislation on regulating the internet, the Online Safety Bill. The current UK government likes to brand its initiatives as “world-beating,” but for a brief period in 2019 that might have been right. Back …

The UK government, with its reversals on climate policy and commitment to oil drilling and air pollution, usually seems to be pro-apocalypse. But lately, senior British politicians have been on a save-the-world tour. Prime minister Rishi Sunak, his ministers, and diplomats have been briefing their international counterparts about the existential …

In the era of search wars fought between giants, it’s tough to be small. Berlin-based Ecosia offers a search engine for the climate-conscious, promising to be carbon-negative by investing all of its profits into planting trees—more than 180 million of them since it launched in 2009. It’s not likely to …

Last month, the UK government announced the home for its new exascale supercomputer, designed to give the country an edge in the global artificial intelligence race. The £900 million ($1.1 billion) project would be built in Bristol, a city in the west of England famed for its industrial heritage, and …