Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Diane Abbott, Suella Braverman and Sadiq Khan received between them 85,000 abusive messages, study finds

The UK’s most prominent politicians were subjected to a deluge of abuse on X during the general election period, one of the most comprehensive studies of online abuse in politics has found.

Five politicians – Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, Diane Abbott, Suella Braverman and Sadiq Khan – were, between them, sent more than 85,000 clearly abusive messages between 1 May and 30 July, according to the findings from researchers at the University of Sheffield.

Paulomi Debnath has shared a kiss with her husband every morning for 18 years. Ron Hill ran every day for more than 52 years. When does an enjoyable habit become a compulsion?

Anyone who spotted the run Tom Vickery uploaded to exercise tracking app Strava on 18 February last year might have been a little confused. The 30-minute sprint appeared to have taken place right in the middle of the Channel, not far from Guernsey and heading towards the west coast of France. The run was also, curiously, a ruler-straight line, appearing on Vickery’s public profile as an unbending, inch-long streak of orange in the blue swathe of the app’s virtual sea. Oh, and it was at a world record-breaking pace.

Of course, anyone who knows Vickery wouldn’t have been surprised at all. The 38-year-old triathlon coach from Cambridge was on a two-day ferry trip to Bilbao for a holiday and this rather speedy jog was simply another run on his then nearly four-year daily running streak on Strava. Determined not to break his streak on board the ship, Vickery had risen at 5am to run up and down the deck for his allotted 30 minutes, and the boat’s progress through the water meant he appeared to be running faster than any long-distance runner in the world.

Satellite internet service’s antennas are everywhere, from illegal mining sites to isolated Indigenous villages

The helicopter swooped into one of the most inaccessible corners of the Amazon rainforest. Brazilian special forces commandos leaped from its metal skids into the caiman-inhabited waters below.

Their target, lurking in the woodland along Brazil’s Bóia River, was a hulking steel mining dredge, caught red-handed as it drilled into the riverbed, pulverising it in search of gold.

The publishing house is booming thanks to sci-fi and fantasy novels – and a love of artisanal editions

Founded in 1947, the Folio Society was once a membership club known for publishing classic tomes and history books, with a customer base of predominantly “old white men”, according to its boss.

Now, however, more than half the people who buy its books are aged between 25 and 44, and it is selling more sci-fi and fantasy titles, boosted by BookTok and growing gen Z interest in “artisanal” editions.

Millions are rejecting the culture-war hotspots of the major social media sites in favour of apps dedicated to activities they enjoy, while bonding with their fellow users

Singletons looking to shack up with their soulmates online have relied on two key routes in the past decade or so: take your chance on dating apps, or befriend as many mutuals as possible on social media, in the hope that you find the one.

But some have found a third way, using services such as Goodreads and Strava to meet partners with whom they hope to spend the rest of their lives. Those couples proved to be trendsetters. So-called hobby apps – built around activites such as running, reading or movie-going – are having a moment, and not just for love.

Users say harmful content from accounts they do not follow appears even after requests to block it

Debbie was scrolling through X in April when some unwelcome posts appeared on her feed. One showed a photo of someone who was visibly underweight asking whether they were thin enough. In another, a user wanted to compare how few calories they were eating each day.

Debbie, who did not want to give her last name, is 37 years old and was first diagnosed with bulimia when she was 16. She did not ­follow either of the accounts behind the posts, which belonged to a group with more than 150,000 members on the social media site.

The detainment of the murky messaging service’s founder in France shows online moguls can no longer act with impunity

On 24 August, a Russian tech billionaire’s private jet landed at Le Bourget airport, north-east of Paris, to find that officers of the French judicial police were waiting for him . He was duly arrested and whisked away for interrogation. Four days later he was indicted on 12 charges, including alleged complicity in the distribution of child exploitation material and drug trafficking, barred from leaving France and placed under “judicial supervision”, which requires him to check in with the gendarmes twice a week until further notice.

The mogul in question, Pavel Durov , is a tech entrepreneur who collects nationalities the way others collect air miles. In fact it turns out that one of his citizenships is French, generously provided in 2021 by France’s president, Emmanuel Macron. Durov is also, it seems, a fitness fanatic with a punishing daily regime. “After eight hours of tracked sleep,” the Financial Times reports, “he starts the day ‘without exception’ with 200 push-ups, 100 sit-ups and an ice bath. He does not drink, smoke, eat sugar or meat, and saves time for meditation.” When not engaged in these demanding activities, he has also found time to father more than 100 kids as a sperm donor and to rival Elon Musk as a free-speech extremist .

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Journalists and other writers are employed to improve the quality of chatbot replies. The irony of working for an industry that may well make their craft redundant is not lost on them

For several hours a week, I write for a technology company worth billions of dollars. Alongside me are published novelists, rising academics and several other freelance journalists. The workload is flexible, the pay better than we are used to, and the assignments never run out. But what we write will never be read by anyone outside the company.

That’s because we aren’t even writing for people. We are writing for an AI.

Both creator and fan accounts on the platform grew 30% during ‘strong year’ in which its users spent more than £5bn

The owner of the subscription platform OnlyFans was paid a $472m (£359m) dividend last year, taking his payouts from the business since 2020 to more than $1bn.

Leonid Radvinsky has received a total of just under $1.3bn over the past four years from the site, which offers users subscriptions to material provided by creators and is synonymous with adult content.