His blunt, brash scepticism has made the podcaster and writer something of a cult figure. But as concern over large language models builds, he’s no longer the outsider he once was

If some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about “how the AI bubble burst”, Ed Zitron will doubtless be a main character. He’s the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. Just as Christian Bale portrayed Michael Burry, the investor who predicted the 2008 financial crash, in The Big Short, you can well imagine Robert Pattinson fighting Paul Mescal, say, to portray Zitron, the animated, colourfully obnoxious but doggedly detail-oriented Brit, who’s become one of big tech’s noisiest critics.

This is not to say the AI bubble will burst, necessarily, but against a tidal wave of AI boosterism, Zitron’s blunt, brash scepticism has made him something of a cult figure. His tech newsletter, Where’s Your Ed At, now has more than 80,000 subscribers; his weekly podcast, Better Offline, is well within the Top 20 on the tech charts; he’s a regular dissenting voice in the media; and his subreddit has become a safe space for AI sceptics, including those within the tech industry itself – one user describes him as “a lighthouse in a storm of insane hypercapitalist bullshit”.

She started out performing in her living room, charging £1.50 a ticket. Now, having blazed through Love Island and silenced her Strictly haters, the Welsh sensation is really hitting the big time

At the end of last year’s Strictly Come Dancing semi-final, pro dancer Nikita Kuzmin made a tearful appeal to camera, “I speak to the audience at home: guys, just please, please be kind!” His celebrity partner, Love Island winner, Dancing on Ice contestant and musical theatre actor Amber Davies, had been getting a lot of flak online. “You have had so much hate, every single day,” said Kuzmin.

Isn’t it crazy that we have to remind people to be nice to other humans who are just doing their job, I say to Davies, when we meet in a London hotel bar. “I genuinely think it’s getting worse,” says Davies, who has been in the public eye since 2017. “With TikTok, when people jump on a bandwagon, they go for it,” she adds. “But I feel like the nasty comments I was getting [on Strictly] weren’t actually coming from the younger audience, they came from the older audience.”

Aid groups say rise of far-right rhetoric in politics has fed into intimidation, vandalism and hate graffiti around migrant camps

Not far from a camp in Dunkirk where hundreds of asylum seekers sleep, hoping to cross the Channel to the UK, are some chilling pieces of graffiti. There is a hangman’s noose with a figure dangling next to the word “migrant” and, close by, another daubing: a Jewish Star of David painted in black surrounded by red swastikas.

Utopia 56, a French group supporting migrants in northern France, posted the image on X on Christmas Day with the comment: “This is what comes from normalising the extreme right’s rhetoric, a visible, unapologetic, unabashed hatred.”

As a boy, Tom Stoltman was diagnosed with autism and bullied at school. When he became depressed in his teens, his older brother, a bodybuilder, suggested a trip to the gym

Tom Stoltman was a skinny kid: 90kg, 6ft 8in, with glasses and sticking‑out teeth. Diagnosed with autism as a young child, he felt he didn’t fit in. “I was really shy,” he says. “I got bullied in school for being different.” Back then, the boy from Invergordon didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. He lived in baggy hoodies. “Hood up. That was my comfort.” He loved football but “I used to look at people on the pitch and think, ‘He’s tinier than me, but he’s pushing me off the ball.’”

By 16 he’d hit a “crashing point”. He went from football-obsessed to playing Xbox all day. He’d skip meals in favour of sweets. “Sometimes it was four or five, six bags.”

Despite much soul-searching over UK’s inability to build infrastructure, two sections of HS2 under Chilterns are being hailed for their engineering

Seventy metres down, in deep incognito beneath a disguised ventilation shaft in the Chilterns countryside, lies HS2’s buried treasure: two 10-mile tunnels, built to avoid an area of outstanding natural beauty, eerily spectacular in gleaming concrete.

They are, laments a staffer on the high-speed railway scheme, what all of the route should look like by now: pristine, fully constructed, and just waiting for a railway to run through them.

This shocking moment is the outcome of a political, institutional and media environment that is not far off Britain’s

There is not much that can still shock about Donald Trump’s second administration. But the killing of Renee Good earlier this month by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, as well as the regular, often violent confrontations that ICE stages on US streets, show so much that is unravelling in plain sight. The rule of law, the freedom to protest, and even the right to walk or drive in the streets safely without being assaulted by the state, seems to exist no longer in the towns and cities where ICE has made its presence felt. The most disturbing aspect of all this is how quickly it has happened. But for a government agency such as ICE to become the powerful paramilitary force that it is, several factors need to be in play first. Only one of them is Donald Trump.

ICE may look as if it came out of nowhere, but the sort of authoritarianism that results in these crackdowns never does. It takes shape slowly, in plain sight, in a way that is clearly traceable over time. First, there needs to be a merging of immigration and security concerns, both institutionally and in the political culture. Established in the wake of 9/11, ICE was part of a government restructuring under President George W Bush. It was granted a large budget, wide investigative powers and a partnership with the FBI’s joint terrorism taskforce. The work of enforcing immigration law became inextricably linked to the business of keeping Americans safe after the largest attack on US soil. That then extended into a wider emphasis, under Barack Obama, beyond those who posed national security threats, and on to immigrants apprehended at the border, gang members and non-citizens convicted of felonies or misdemeanours.

Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist

PM says US tariffs are in no one’s interests – and Greenland row should be resolved through ‘calm discussion’

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Keir Starmer has ruled out imposing retaliatory tariffs on the US, saying they would be the “wrong thing to do”, after Donald Trump threatened them against Nato allies to try to secure Greenland.

The prime minister said US tariffs would damage the British economy and were “in no one’s interests”. The UK would instead prefer to address the issue through “calm discussion” between allies, he added.

A further 75 people hospitalised after two trains collided and derailed near Adamuz in Córdoba province

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At least 39 people have been killed and 12 are in intensive care after two trains collided in southern Spain on Sunday night in what the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called “a night of deep pain for our country”.

A high-speed Iryo train travelling from Málaga to Madrid derailed near the municipality of Adamuz in Córdoba province at about 7.40pm on Sunday, crossing on to the other track where it hit an oncoming train, Adif, Spain’s rail infrastructure authority, posted on X.

Putin shows no signs of ending Ukraine war and claim adds weight to accusation Trump favours Russian president

The Kremlin has announced that Vladimir Putin has been invited to join Donald Trump’s “board of peace”, set up last week with the intention that it would oversee a ceasefire in Gaza.

The Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, told journalists on Monday that Russia was seeking to “clarify all the nuances” of the offer with Washington, before giving its response.

Maryam Eslamdoust, the leader of the TSSA transport union, says GMB officials tried to push her out of her job

The GMB union is facing fresh claims of bullying behaviour, after the female leader of a rival Labour-linked union accused its officials of trying to push her out of her job in a way that affected her health.

Maryam Eslamdoust, the first ever female leader of the TSSA transport union and a former mayor of Camden council, said the actions of GMB officials caused her significant stress and suggested that a male leader would not have been treated in the same way.