How do I respond to someone who says ‘I’m not racist, but ... ’? | Leading questions

It’s important to express your disagreement: for their sake as much as yours, writes advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith. But first decide on what you aim to accomplish

• Read more Leading questions

How do I respond to someone who contributes to a conversation with “I’m not racist, but … ” and then inevitably proceeds to say something racist, such as talking about immigrants on benefits or getting priority for housing?

I’m referring to social occasions with people that I am not necessarily close to but rather acquaintances I may bump into semi-regularly. I feel myself getting simultaneously angry and tongue-tied and I mostly sit with my frustration to maintain some sense of harmony in the group.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:32 am

‘A step-change’: tech firms battle for undersea dominance with submarine drones

As navies seek to counter submarines and protect cables, startups and big defence companies fight to lead market

Flying drones used during the Ukraine war have changed land battle tactics for ever. Now the same thing appears to be happening under the sea.

Navies around the world are racing to add autonomous submarines. The UK’s Royal Navy is planning a fleet of underwater uncrewed vehicles (UUVs) which will, for the first time, take a leading role in tracking submarines and protecting undersea cables and pipelines. Australia has committed to spending $1.7bn (£1.3bn) on “Ghost Shark” submarines to counter Chinese submarines. The huge US Navy is spending billions on several UUV projects, including one already in use that can be launched from nuclear submarines.

Published: November 28, 2025, 6:00 am

More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate

Workers say the firm’s ‘warp-speed’ approach fuels pressure, layoffs and rising emissions

More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”

The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:50 pm

Small changes to ‘for you’ feed on X can rapidly increase political polarisation

Study finds that a week of political content can bring about a shift in views that previously would have taken three years

Small changes to the tone of posts fed to users of X can increase feelings of political polarisation as much in a week as would have historically taken at least three years, research has found.

A groundbreaking experiment to gauge the potency of Elon Musk’s social platform to increase political division found that when posts expressing anti-democratic attitudes and partisan animosity were boosted, even barely perceptibly, in the feeds of Democrat and Republican supporters there was a large change in their unfavourable feelings towards the other side.

Published: November 27, 2025, 7:00 pm

One in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, NSPCC finds

Harms include threats to release intimate pictures as charity warns against parents sharing photos or details of children online

Nearly one in 10 UK parents say their child has been blackmailed online, with harms ranging from threatening to release intimate pictures to revealing details about someone’s personal life.

The NSPCC child protection charity also found that one in five parents know a child who has experienced online blackmail, while two in five said they rarely or never talked to their children about the subject.

Published: November 28, 2025, 6:00 am

How Amazon turned our capitalist era of free markets into the age of technofeudalism | Yanis Varoufakis

Amazon Web Services owns the basic infrastructure for other businesses to operate online, turning even governments into its serfs. But now some people are fighting back

For the past six years, every Black Friday – that made-up carnival of consumption – Amazon workers and their allies have mobilised across the world in coordinated strikes and protests. At first glance, these disputes look like the standard struggle between a giant capitalist employer and the people who keep it running. But Amazon is no ordinary corporation. It is the clearest expression of what I call technofeudalism: a new economic order in which platforms behave like lords owning the fiefs that have replaced markets.

To appreciate Amazon’s extraordinary power, we must recall the system it is helping to bury. Capitalism relied on markets and profit. Firms invested in productive capital, hired workers, produced commodities and lived or died by profit and loss. But the emerging order is one in which the most powerful capitalist firms have exited that market altogether. They own the digital infrastructure that everyone else must use to trade, work, communicate and live.

Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25 and the author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

Published: November 27, 2025, 5:20 pm

Foreign interference or opportunistic grifting: why are so many pro-Trump X accounts based in Asia?

A new feature on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter allows users to see the location of other accounts. It has resulted in a firestorm of recriminations

When X rolled out a new feature revealing the locations of popular accounts, the company was acting to boost transparency and clamp down on disinformation. The result, however, has been a circular firing squad of recriminations, as users turn on each other enraged by the revelation that dozens of popular “America first” and pro-Trump accounts originated overseas.

The new feature was enabled over the weekend by X’s head of product, Nikita Bier, who called it the first step in “securing the integrity of the global town square.” Since then many high-engagement accounts that post incessantly about US politics have been “unmasked” by fellow users.

Published: November 27, 2025, 12:01 am

After a teddy bear talked about kink, AI watchdogs are warning parents against smart toys

Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation

As the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people’s gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.

The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids’ safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:00 pm

The best Black Friday 2025 deals in the UK on the products we love, from window vacs to sunrise alarms

Black Friday is here. We’ve cut through the noise to find genuinely good discounts on Filter tried-and-tested products across home, tech, beauty and toys

• How to shop smart this Black Friday
• The best Black Friday beauty deals

Like Christmas Day, Black Friday has long since ceased to be a mere “day”. Yuletide now seems to start roughly when Strictly does, and Black Friday seemed to kick off around Halloween. But now, at last, we’ve reached the day that puts the “Friday” into Black Friday.

Black Friday is a devil worth dancing with if you want to save money on products you’ve had your eye on. Some of the Filter’s favourite items spent most of November floating around at prices clearly designed to make them sell out fast. Other deals have been kept back until now, and some won’t even land until the daftly named Cyber Monday (1 December).

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:41 pm

The 20+ best US Black Friday tech deals on TVs, tablets, phones, smart watches and more

The sales you’ve been waiting for all year have arrived. Snag deals from Samsung, Amazon, Sony and more

• The 43 very best US Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, curated and vetted

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

Black Friday started off as a way to score some great deals on gifts, but let’s be honest: it’s also a chance to pick up some nice, deeply discounted goodies for yourself. This is especially true in the world of tech, where high prices and personal taste mean it’s often just safest to buy what works for you rather than guessing on a gift. Don’t worry, we won’t judge.

But when you’re inundated with Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, it’s easy to get spun around by specs: is that really enough storage? Is the screen big enough? Will I regret not getting the newer version? That’s when you turn to the experts.

Published: November 27, 2025, 6:20 pm

Don’t buy new tech this Black Friday: expert tips for buying refurbished phones and laptops

Tech is on its last legs? Refurbished can be the cheaper, greener option. Here’s how to choose well and avoid the pitfalls

• How to shop smart this Black Friday
• How to make your phone last longer

Even if you do your best to avoid it, it’s hard to escape the noise of retailers offering implausible-seeming Black Friday discounts on desirable technology. What they won’t be so keen to highlight is the huge environmental cost that comes from feeding the capitalist beast year on year, given what an obvious sales vibe-killer it would be.

While the best approach for the planet is to opt out completely and observe the alternate holiday of Buy Nothing Day instead, such an approach can prove self-defeating to your finances in the long term. If you shop smart on Black Friday and avoid the lure of impulse buys, it’s a good time to stock up on the things you need, at lower prices than at the rest of the year.

Published: November 27, 2025, 12:00 pm

My family’s excitement about Outer Worlds 2 was short-lived | Dominik Diamond

It’s always crushing when a wildly anticipated game turns out to be a dud, but this RPG’s awful story and clunky dialogue gave my son and I something to talk about

It was an exciting November for the Diamond household: one of those rare games that we all loved had a sequel coming out! The original Outer Worlds dazzled our eyeballs with its art nouveau palette and charmed our ears with witty dialogue, sucking us into a classic mystery-unravelling story in one of my favourite “little man versus evil corporate overlords” worlds since Deus Ex. It didn’t have the most original combat, but that didn’t matter: it was obviously a labour of love from a team totally invested in the telling of this tale, and we all fell under its spell.

Well, when I say all of us, I mean myself and the three kids. My wife did not play The Outer Worlds, because none of those worlds featured Crash Bandicoot. But the rest of us dug it, and the kids particularly enjoyed that I flounced away from the final boss battle after half a day of trying, declaring that I had pretty much completed the game and that was good enough for a dad with other things to do.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:00 pm

Prostate cancer screening not expected to be made widely available in UK

Expert advisers likely to recommend only a few thousand men with genetic variant should be eligible for tests

Prostate cancer screening will not be made routinely available for the vast majority of men across the UK, according to the expected recommendations from a panel of expert government health advisers.

The UK national screening committee is expected to only recommend screening for men with the genetic variants BRCA1 and BRCA2 who are between the ages of 45 and 61.

Published: November 28, 2025, 12:32 pm

Archaeologists say they have proof humans carved huge pits near Stonehenge

Research team uses range of novel methods and equipment to analyse ‘extraordinary’ Durrington pit circle

The presence of an extraordinary circle of yawning pits created by Neolithic people near Stonehenge has been proved thanks to a novel combination of scientific techniques, a team of archaeologists is claiming.

The architects of Stonehenge may have had the heavens in mind when they built the great stone monument in Wiltshire, but the team believes the makers of the Durrington pit circle were more interested in an underworld.

Published: November 27, 2025, 2:02 pm

FDA poised to kill proposal that would require asbestos testing for cosmetics

RFK Jr signed order withdrawing rule that would mandate testing for the cancer-linked toxin in talc-based makeup

The Food and Drug Administration is poised to kill a proposed rule that would require testing for toxic asbestos in talc-based cosmetics, a problem that has been linked to cancer.

Talc is widely used, including in cosmetics, food, medication and personal care products. The order was signed by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement.

Published: November 28, 2025, 1:00 pm

Face transplants promised hope. Patients were put through the unthinkable

Twenty years after the first face transplant, patients are dying, data is missing, and the experimental procedure’s future hangs in the balance

In the early hours of 28 May 2005, Isabelle Dinoire woke up in a pool of blood. After fighting with her family the night before, she turned to alcohol and sleeping tablets “to forget”, she later said.

Reaching for a cigarette out of habit, she realized she couldn’t hold it between her lips. She understood something was wrong.

Published: November 27, 2025, 11:00 am

Is it the beginning of the end for animal testing? – podcast

Patrick Vallance, the minister for science, research and innovation, recently unveiled a plan to cut animal testing through greater use of AI and other technologies, with the eventual aim of phasing it out altogether. To understand how this will affect research and what could be used in place of animal models, Madeleine Finlay hears from science editor Ian Sample, Prof Hazel Screen of Queen Mary University London and Prof Kevin Harrington from the Institute of Cancer Research

UK minister unveils plan to cut animal testing through greater use of AI

Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod

Published: November 27, 2025, 5:00 am