Sunday 1 February 2026 The concept of beauty has always been a social artefact. While it is often spoken of as though it were innate, universal or biologically fixed, its actual contours have historically been shaped by power, scarcity, technology and imitation. What artificial intelligence and social media have done is not to invent new ideas of beauty; but to compress, accelerate and industrialise older processes by which aesthetic norms are formed, enforced and monetised.

Sunday 1 February 2026 In late January 2026 a controversy emerged at the intersection of digital privacy, corporate assurance and governmental scrutiny when reports circulated that authorities in the United States were examining claims that Meta Platforms, the owner of WhatsApp, might possess the capacity to read private messages that users believed to be protected by end-to-end encryption. Although the matter has not yet resulted in formal enforcement proceedings, its signif

Sunday 1 February 2026 When a Russian-flagged cargo ship drops anchor, that is normally a matter for harbourmasters, insurers and tired captains seeking shelter. But when she lingers in Bristol Channel beside the thin, unglamorous arteries that carry modern life, anchoring becomes a geopolitical act. That is the context for the recent incident in which the cargo vessel Sinegorsk anchored for roughly fourteen hours on 27 January 2026 within close proximity of multiple undersea

Sunday 1 February 2026 The sight of eight sanctioned Russian “shadow fleet” vessels transiting the English Channel is, on one level, unremarkable. The Channel is one of the world’s busiest sea lanes, governed by long-settled rules of passage that protect global commerce as much as they constrain national impulse. Yet on another level, it is a small floating referendum on whether sanctions are merely moral theatre, or whether they can be made to bite in the one place that matt