Five key findings from our investigation into the Free Birth Society

Year-long investigation into multimillion-dollar business exposed serious concerns, from dangerous medical claims to FBS-linked stillbirths

• Full story: How the FBS is linked to baby deaths around the world

The Free Birth Society (FBS) is a business run from North Carolina that promotes the idea of women giving birth without midwives or doctors present.

It is led by Emilee Saldaya and Yolande Norris-Clark, ex-doulas turned social media influencers who have gained a global following through the FBS podcast, which has been downloaded millions of times.

Published: November 23, 2025, 7:00 am

Being labelled a Highly Sensitive Person was validating and empowering – until it wasn’t | Miranda Luby

An online personality quiz made me feel understood, but it also created a mental cage

Sometimes, taking an internet quiz on a random Tuesday night can change your life – first for the better, then for the worse.

Are you bothered by intense stimuli, like loud noises, strong smells or caffeine? Are you deeply moved by the arts or nature? Do you become overwhelmed when a lot is going on around you? Do you have difficulty with big changes?

Published: November 22, 2025, 7:00 pm

Meet the AI workers who tell their friends and family to stay away from AI

When the people making AI seem trustworthy are the ones who trust it the least, it shows that incentives for speed are overtaking safety, experts say

Krista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.

Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the “no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”, which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.

Published: November 22, 2025, 2:00 pm

Bro boost: women say their LinkedIn traffic increases if they pretend to be men

Collective experiment found switching profile to ‘male’ and ‘bro-coding’ text led to big increase in reach, though site denies favouring posts by men

Do your LinkedIn followers consider you a “thought leader”? Do hordes of commenters applaud your tips on how to “scale” your startup? Do recruiters slide into your DMs to “explore potential synergies”?

If not, it could be because you’re not a man.

Published: November 22, 2025, 7:00 am

Has Britain become an economic colony?

The UK could’ve been a true tech leader – but it has cheerfully submitted to US dominance in a way that may cost it dear

Two and a half centuries ago, the American colonies launched a violent protest against British rule, triggered by parliament’s imposition of a monopoly on the sale of tea and the antics of a vainglorious king. Today, the tables have turned: it is Great Britain that finds itself at the mercy of major US tech firms – so huge and dominant that they constitute monopolies in their fields – as well as the whims of an erratic president. Yet, to the outside observer, Britain seems curiously at ease with this arrangement – at times even eager to subsidise its own economic dependence. Britain is hardly alone in submitting to the power of American firms, but it offers a clear case study in why nations need to develop a coordinated response to the rise of these hegemonic companies.

The current age of American tech monopoly began in the 2000s, when the UK, like many other countries, became almost entirely dependent on a small number of US platforms – Google, Facebook, Amazon and a handful of others. It was a time of optimism about the internet as a democratising force, characterised by the belief that these platforms would make everyone rich. The dream of the 1990s – naive but appealing – was that anyone with a hobby or talent could go online and make a living from it.

Published: November 23, 2025, 12:00 pm

Chris McCausland: Seeing into the Future – an astonishing look at how tech is changing disabled people’s lives

Prepare to have your perspective shattered by the comedian’s visits to our US tech overlords. The upcoming advancements for those with disabilities are life-changing

Washing machines liberated women to get soul-crushing jobs that ate up their free time. Social media gave the world one revolution – before it destabilised democracies everywhere else. Now AI is here, and its main job seems to be replacing screenwriters. It’s easy to fall into techno-pessimism, but new documentary Seeing into the Future (Sunday 23 November, 8pm, BBC Two) has a different angle. For disabled people, tech has already brought about life-changing advancements. And we haven’t seen anything yet.

It is presented by comedian and Strictly winner Chris McCausland, who is blind. Some of the most casually astonishing scenes occur early on, showing how he uses his phone – essentially, an eye with a mouth. “What T-shirt is this?” he asks, holding up a garment. “A grey T-shirt with a graphic logo of Deftones,” his phone obliges. It can even tell him if the shirt needs ironing. But it’s where all this is going that fascinates McCausland, so he heads to the US, to see what’s in development at the houses of our tech overlords.

Published: November 22, 2025, 7:00 am

Will pay-per-mile raise Reeves money or drive people away from electric vehicles?

Need for new road taxes is clear – but there are concerns that pricing plan could stall transition away from petrol

Three pence: a small charge per mile for an electric vehicle, but a giant conceptual leap for Britain.

Chancellors of the exchequer have long resisted any form of road pricing as politically toxic. That may be about to change next week: Rachel Reeves, perhaps inured to being pilloried for any money-raising proposal, is expected to introduce a charge explicitly linked to how far EVs drive.

Published: November 22, 2025, 6:00 am

Two UK clinical trials to assess impact of puberty blockers in young people

Multi-year studies announced after Cass review found ‘insufficient evidence’ about effects on children with gender dysphoria

Two studies to investigate the impact of puberty blockers in young people with gender incongruence have been announced by researchers in the UK after an expert view said gender medicine was “built on shaky foundations”.

Puberty blockers were originally used to treat early onset puberty in children but have also been used off-label in children with gender dysphoria or incongruence.

Published: November 22, 2025, 7:00 am

Mind-altering ‘brain weapons’ no longer only science fiction, say researchers

UK academics say latest chemicals are ‘wake-up call’ and urge global action to stop weaponisation of neuroscience

Sophisticated and deadly “brain weapons” that can attack or alter human consciousness, perception, memory or behaviour are no longer the stuff of science fiction, two British academics argue.

Michael Crowley and Malcolm Dando, of Bradford University, are about to publish a book that they believe should be a wake-up call to the world.

Published: November 22, 2025, 12:01 am