Amazon selling a tasteless Christmas baby outfit is Claus for concern

The offensive listing seemed more than a mistake – it was a failure of corporate responsibility, says reader

I found a baby outfit (sizes from newborn to five years) on Amazon bearing the phrase “Santa’s favourite ho”.

This isn’t just a tasteless mistake – it’s a failure of corporate responsibility and consumer protection. A corporation this large should have systems that prevent sexualised or exploitative language being associated with items for children.

Published: November 18, 2025, 7:00 am

The best Christmas gifts for cyclists in the UK, from heated gloves to handlebar bags

Whether it’s a jacket to stay cosy in the cold or a clever multitool, our expert-selected gear means there’s something for everyone who loves life on their bike

• The best gifts for runners

As the proud daughter of the president of St Austell Wheelers cycle club in Cornwall, I know better than to wing it when it comes to giving gifts to a bike rider. That’s why we’ve asked so many people, from coaches to athletes, club riders to young cyclists, what they would like to receive.

Speaking of Dad, this year he has moved from his road bike to the world of gravel riding (check out Fairlight Cycles) and is loving it. He treated himself to a Cornish downpour-proof jacket and a set of panniers for a cycling trip to France – and highly recommends them (see below for details). Less so the bike bell someone told him “everyone” uses in France, only to get there and find not a single cyclist he saw had one.

Published: November 18, 2025, 10:00 am

Cloudflare outage causes error messages across the internet

US company that defends millions of websites against malicious attacks says it believes issue ‘is now resolved’

• Explainer: What is Cloudflare?

A key piece of the internet’s usually hidden infrastructure suffered a global outage on Tuesday, causing error messages to flash up across websites.

Cloudflare, a US company whose services include defending millions of websites against malicious attacks, experienced an unidentified problem that meant internet users could not access some of its customers’ websites.

Published: November 18, 2025, 3:11 pm

What AI doesn’t know: we could be creating a global ‘knowledge collapse’ | Deepak Varuvel Dennison

As GenAI becomes the primary way to find information, local and traditional wisdom is being lost. And we are only beginning to realise what we’re missing

• This article was originally published as ‘Holes in the web’ on Aeon.co

A few years back, my dad was diagnosed with a tumour on his tongue – which meant we had some choices to weigh up. My family has an interesting dynamic when it comes to medical decisions. While my older sister is a trained doctor in western allopathic medicine, my parents are big believers in traditional remedies. Having grown up in a small town in India, I am accustomed to rituals. My dad had a ritual, too. Every time we visited his home village in southern Tamil Nadu, he’d get a bottle of thick, pungent, herb-infused oil from a vaithiyar, a traditional doctor practising Siddha medicine. It was his way of maintaining his connection with the kind of medicine he had always known and trusted.

Dad’s tumour showed signs of being malignant, so the hospital doctors and my sister strongly recommended surgery. My parents were against the idea, worried it could affect my dad’s speech. This is usually where I come in, as the expert mediator in the family. Like any good millennial, I turned to the internet for help in guiding the decision. After days of thorough research, I (as usual) sided with my sister and pushed for surgery. The internet backed us up.

Published: November 18, 2025, 5:00 am

Amazon vs Perplexity: the AI agent war has arrived

A lawsuit over automated shopping reveals a deeper struggle over who will control the next generation of AI and what happens when autonomous agents start acting on our behalf

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery.

Lies, damned lies and AI: the newest way to influence elections may be here to stay

Elon Musk’s Grok AI briefly says Trump won 2020 presidential election

AI is guzzling energy for slop content – could it be reimagined to help the climate?

How Google’s DeepMind tool is ‘more quickly’ forecasting hurricane behavior

Anthropic announces $50bn plan for datacenter construction in US

SoftBank sells stake in Nvidia for $5.8bn as it doubles down on OpenAI bets

US markets struggle amid tech sell-off and economic uncertainty

Published: November 18, 2025, 2:02 pm

Crypto market sheds more than $1tn in six weeks amid fears of tech bubble

Bitcoin price at lowest level since April while FTSE 100 falls as Google boss warns there is ‘irrationality’ in AI boom

• Business live – latest updates

More than $1tn (£760bn) has been wiped off the value of the cryptocurrency market in the past six weeks amid fears of a tech bubble and fading expectations for a US rate cut next month.

Tracking more than 18,500 coins, the value of the crypto market has fallen by a quarter since a high in early October, according to the data company CoinGecko.

Published: November 18, 2025, 12:03 pm

‘Fear really drives him’: is Alex Karp of Palantir the world’s scariest CEO?

His company is potentially creating the ultimate state surveillance tool, and Karp has recently been on a striking political and philosophical journey. His biographer reveals what makes him tick

In a recent interview, Alex Karp said that his company Palantir was “the most important software company in America and therefore in the world”. He may well be right. To some, Palantir is also the scariest company in the world, what with its involvement in the Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda. The potential end point of Palantir’s tech is an all-powerful government system amalgamating citizens’ tax records, biometric data and other personal information – the ultimate state surveillance tool. No wonder Palantir has been likened to George Orwell’s Big Brother, or Skynet from the Terminator movies.

Does this make Karp the scariest CEO in the world? There is some competition from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Palantir’s co-founder Peter Thiel. But 58-year-old Karp could give them all a run for their money in terms of influence, self-belief, ambition and – even in this gallery of oddballs – sheer eccentricity. In his increasingly frequent media appearances, Karp is a striking presence, with his cloud of unkempt grey hair, his 1.25x speed diction, and his mix of combative conviction and almost childish mannerisms. On CNBC’s Squawk Box, he shook both fists simultaneously as he railed against short sellers betting against Palantir, whose share price has climbed nearly 600% in the past year: “It’s super triggering,” he complained. “Why do they have to go after us?”

Published: November 18, 2025, 10:00 am

UK consumers warned over AI chatbots giving inaccurate financial advice

Which? study of ChatGPT, Copilot and others uncovers incorrect and misleading tips on investments, tax and insurance

Artificial intelligence chatbots are giving inaccurate money tips, offering British consumers misleading tax advice and suggesting they buy unnecessary travel insurance, research has revealed.

Tests on the most popular chatbots found Microsoft’s Copilot and ChatGPT advised breaking HMRC investment limits on Isas; ChatGPT wrongly said it was mandatory to have travel insurance to visit most EU countries; and Meta’s AI gave incorrect information about how to claim compensation for delayed flights.

Published: November 18, 2025, 6:00 am

Roblox to block children from talking to adult strangers after string of lawsuits

Gaming platform to use facial age estimation to limit chats to similar age groups, as allegations of grooming grow

The online games platform Roblox is to start blocking children from talking to adult and much older teen strangers from next month as it faces fresh lawsuits alleging it has been exploited by predators to groom children as young as seven.

Roblox has reached 150 million daily players of games including viral hits Grow a Garden and Steal a Brainrot but has been hit by legal claims alleging the system’s design has made “children easy prey for paedophiles”.

Published: November 18, 2025, 12:00 pm

Do you really need to buy a new TV? Seven simple ways to upgrade your setup (some are even free)

Don’t splash out just yet! From a system update to better room lighting, a little fine-tuning could save you hundreds

• Do you really need to buy a new laptop?

Do you really need to buy a new TV? While the latest specs and outrageous screen sizes may well be a temptation, perhaps you can save money (and the environment) by holding off a little longer. With some simple tips and tricks, you can level up your TV experience.

Of course, the Fomo is real. Back in the day, the only reason to buy a new TV was when the old one fizzled and died. One telly was much the same as another, and features rarely changed.

Published: November 18, 2025, 7:00 pm

The 11 best US Black Friday and Cyber Monday travel deals already taking off

From Away, Calpak and REI, here are budget-friendly reasons to upgrade your suitcase, replace your headphones and finally invest in a set of packing cubes

• Snag these home and kitchen Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals

• Sign up for the Filter US newsletter, your weekly guide to buying fewer, better things

While the Black Friday deals landscape can be overwhelming – and you might be tempted to avoid it completely – some actually incredible deals do exist out there, particularly in the travel space. As a travel journalist and the writer of a packing list newsletter, I’m always on the hunt for luggage, clothing and gear that will streamline my travel process. During Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, I keep a trained eye on the retailers with genuine discounts on carry-on suitcases, comfortable loungewear and more. Pro tip: if a specific item catches my eye, I will Google it to see if another website is offering a more enticing deal. (It usually is.)

So if you’re hunting for items that will upgrade your travels without blowing your budget, use my curated guide to inform your shopping. I’ll be regularly updating the deals throughout the holiday sales period, so check back here for more savings over the next two weeks.

The best luggage deal:
Away Packing Pro Bundle

Published: November 18, 2025, 6:47 pm

Amazon selling a tasteless Christmas baby outfit is Claus for concern

The offensive listing seemed more than a mistake – it was a failure of corporate responsibility, says reader

I found a baby outfit (sizes from newborn to five years) on Amazon bearing the phrase “Santa’s favourite ho”.

This isn’t just a tasteless mistake – it’s a failure of corporate responsibility and consumer protection. A corporation this large should have systems that prevent sexualised or exploitative language being associated with items for children.

Published: November 18, 2025, 7:00 am

Roblox rolls out age-verification features in Australia as gaming platform insists child social media ban should not apply

Online gaming company says voluntary age assurance technology will limit teens and children messaging users outside their own age groups

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

As Roblox rolls out new age assurance features to prevent teens and kids from chatting with adults they do not know, it has insisted Australia’s upcoming under-16s social media ban should not apply to its services.

The company, which is releasing the new features in Australia first, said that from Wednesday users will be able to voluntarily have their age estimated by going through the Persona age estimation technology, built into the Roblox app. It will access the camera of a user’s device and take a live estimation of their age based on their facial features.

Published: November 18, 2025, 2:00 pm

Master System at 40: the truth about Sega’s most underrated console

Forty years ago, the Nintendo Entertainment System dominated the markets in Japan and the US. But in Europe, a technologically superior rival was making it look like an ancient relic

There’s an old maxim that history is written by the victors, and that’s as true in video games as it is anywhere else. Nowadays you’d be forgiven for thinking that the Nintendo Entertainment System was the only console available in the mid-to-late 1980s. If you were brought up in Nintendo’s target markets of Japan and North America, this chunky contraption essentially was the only game in town – the company had Mario after all, and its vice-like hold on third-party developers created a monopoly for major titles of the era. But in Europe, where home computers ruled the era, the NES was beaten by a technologically superior rival.

The Sega Master System was originally released in Japan in the autumn of 1985 as the Sega Mark III. Based around the famed Z80 CPU (used in home computers such as the Spectrum, Amstrad and TRS-80) and a powerful Sega-designed video display processor, it boasted 8kb of RAM, a 64-colour palette and the ability to generate 32 sprites on screen at one time – making the NES (based on the older 6502 processor) look like an ancient relic.

Published: November 18, 2025, 12:00 pm

Should the UK brace for a brutal flu season? – podcast

This year’s flu season has begun more than a month earlier than usual, with a mutated strain spreading widely among younger people and expected to drive a wave of hospital admissions as it reaches the elderly. Science editor Ian Sample speaks to Madeleine Finlay about what we know so far and Prof Ed Hutchinson of the University of Glasgow explains how people can best protect themselves and each other

UK hospitals bracing for once-in-a-decade flu surge this winter

Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod

Published: November 18, 2025, 5:00 am

Root canal treatment could significantly lower blood sugar levels, study suggests

Dentists also saw improvements in patients’ cholesterol and fatty acid levels, both associated with heart health

If a looming root canal treatment is putting a dampener on the week, take heart: having the procedure can drive health benefits that are felt throughout the body, according to research.

Patients who were successfully treated for root canal infections saw their blood sugar levels fall significantly over two years, suggesting that ridding the body of the problematic bacteria could help protect against type 2 diabetes.

Published: November 18, 2025, 1:00 am

Neanderthals and early humans ‘likely to have kissed’, say scientists

Study from University of Oxford looks into evolutionary origins of kissing and its role in relations between species

From Galápagos albatrosses to polar bears, chimpanzees to orangutans, certain species appear to kiss. Now researchers suggest Neanderthals did it too – and might even have locked lips with modern humans.

It is not the first time scientists have suggested Neanderthals and early modern humans were intimately acquainted. Among previous studies, researchers have found humans and their thick-browed cousins shared the same mouth microbe for hundreds of thousands of years after the two species split, suggesting they swapped saliva.

Published: November 19, 2025, 12:01 am

Doing your own research isn’t a bad thing, I tell my patients. But just how will they spot the fraudulent papers? | Ranjana Srivastava

While every self-aware doctor knows no one is an expert on everything, the average person turning to the internet cannot distinguish evidence from gloss

One of my children is irate at my deletion of an important school email. I claim that so many useless emails rain into my inbox that some useful ones will surely be missed. This excuse attracts zero sympathy but prompts me to comb through the hundreds of deleted emails. They are from every part of the world – Lisbon to London, Athens to Ankara – and almost all of them are an invitation to shine at a research publication.

In recognition of your scholarly achievements and contributions to the advancement of knowledge in your field, we request you to submit a research paper on a topic of your choice.

Published: November 18, 2025, 2:00 pm