Afghanistan’s Taliban leader has banned smartphones for every government employee at work. The order, issued by Hibatullah Akhundzada and enforced through Taliban military courts, means officials caught with a touchscreen phone get their phone destroyed and are themselves referred to a tribunal. A monitoring list now records each employee’s name, post and phone number, so the ban can actually be checked. The Taliban already pushed members to cut back on smartphone use in 2025. This is the version with teeth.
📊 Number of the Day
4.7 million
That’s how many child accounts TikTok and YouTube have just switched off in Indonesia: 4.1 million on TikTok and 600,000 on YouTube. The deactivations follow a March regulation requiring platforms that Indonesia considers high risk to remove users under 16, a list that already included X, Instagram and Roblox. The stated goal isn’t just keeping kids off the apps. It’s cutting their exposure to harmful content, scams and bullying.
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🇬🇧 Britain Weighs Putting Its Thumb on the News Scale
What It Is: The UK government is considering rules that would require platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to boost the visibility of “trusted” news sources in feeds and search results. The list centres on publicly funded broadcasters, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, alongside other regulated providers. Officials say the aim is to fight misinformation, particularly during crises, at a time when most UK adults get their news from social media, and four in ten say they’ve encountered misinformation within a single month.
Why It Matters: Assume the government means exactly what it says: it wants people to see news it considers credible. The mechanism it’s reaching for is still a government deciding which outlets get algorithmic priority and which don’t. Public broadcasters get the boost. Independent outlets, regardless of their actual accuracy record, don’t automatically qualify. This can be a very slippery slope pretty quickly.
The Big Picture: The BBC and its peers aren’t neutral by default. Coverage of Gaza, the Iran-Israel conflict and Ukraine has drawn accusations of double standards from multiple directions, and trust in mainstream media sits at historic lows in both the UK and the US. Build a state-sanctioned visibility list now, with supposedly good intentions, and you’ve also built the machinery for whoever holds power next. Labour wants to boost the BBC today. A future Reform government could make the same case for GB News tomorrow. Once a country normalises ranking news based on government approval, the precedent spreads, and rival states point to it and ask why they can’t do the same. Social media’s real value has always been that people found voices they trusted on their own. Hand that dial to whoever’s in the office, and that’s gone for everyone.
🇨🇳 China Built the World’s Fastest Computer
What It Is: China’s LineShine, built at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen, has taken the title of the world’s fastest supercomputer from the US machine El Capitan, hitting 2.198 exaflops, about 20% faster than its American rival. It’s the first Chinese system to top the global ranking since 2017, and the first machine ever to clear 2 exaflops running entirely on general-purpose CPUs rather than specialised chips.
Why It Matters: A supercomputer ranking is a scoreboard, but it’s a real one. Raw compute is the foundation of the AI race, and this result shows China can now build and run that foundation at the frontier, on its own hardware approach, without relying on the GPU supply chains the US has tried to choke off.
The Big Picture: This didn’t happen overnight. China has spent years leading the world in published research output, and that base is now showing up in hardware results. Meanwhile, the US has historically pulled ahead in tech partly by attracting talent from everywhere: a huge share of American R&D has been built by people who came from elsewhere to do it. An immigration climate that makes the US harder to get into doesn’t just affect who lives there. It affects where the next generation of researchers chooses to build their careers, and China is positioned to benefit. None of this guarantees an outcome. But if the current trajectory holds, a CPU-only Chinese exaflop machine in Shenzhen looks less like a one-off headline and more like an early marker of who leads the AI race.
🇬🇱 The Geopolitical Case for All-You-Can-Eat Shrimp
What It Is: Tom Dans, the Trump-appointed chair of the US Arctic Research Commission, told The New Yorker his case for the US acquiring Greenland: “the United States could take all the seafood Greenland could produce, and cut out the middleman, and keep it from China, and you could bring back all-you-can-eat shrimp at Red Lobster.” Dans was offering personal speculation, not a White House position. The administration’s actual case for Greenland rests on security, Arctic positioning, shipping routes and resources.
Why It Matters: Read it once, and it sounds like a joke too strange to be real. Read it twice, and the joke is the point: an appointee in a real federal post, with real influence over Arctic policy, framed annexing a NATO ally’s territory as a fix for a seafood chain’s supply problem. Greenland belongs to Denmark, a NATO member. Floating its takeover as a shrimp logistics solution just shows the casual nature of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy, with no regard for allies or past norms.
The Big Picture: Dans saying something ridiculous out loud isn’t really the issue. We only know about this particular version of the idea because he happened to say it to a reporter. If this is the version polished enough to put a name to, it raises a real question: what else is being floated around the president in private, by people whose judgment apparently runs to annexing an ally to restock a buffet? This story is not evidence of careful policy thinking happening behind closed doors.
🌐 Around the Globe
Denmark: The government is reviving a push to ban the Islamic call to prayer nationwide, with minister Morten Bodskov saying it “shouldn’t sound like a suburb of Islamabad.” It’s the third attempt at this ban since 2020.
Taiwan: The military is moving to formally fold female reservists into its mobilisation system on equal terms with men, as Chinese aircraft and naval activity around the island continues to intensify.
South Korea: The defence ministry plans to train half a million troops as “drone warriors”, with the defence minister arguing every soldier should be able to use a drone “like a second personal firearm,”.
Paris: With hospitals overwhelmed by heat-related emergencies and a record 40.9C day behind it, the city has banned public drinking until the current heatwave alert lifts, after ambulance crews recorded cardiac arrests at four times the normal rate in a single day.
Netherlands: A child under 12 has been euthanised for the first time since a 2024 law extended the option to younger children with incurable, unbearable suffering. The health minister confirmed the death but withheld the child’s age and illness.
Burkina Faso: The ruling junta has cut diplomatic ties with France, accusing Paris of backing militants in the Sahel, the latest break in a relationship that’s been unravelling since the 2022 coup.
Ireland: New data confirms it’s now the most expensive country in the EU for housing, healthcare, alcohol and electricity, paying roughly 40% above the EU average on power alone.
Norway: Generative AI will be banned for elementary school students starting this autumn, with the government redirecting funding toward books rather than tablets, following its 2024 classroom smartphone ban.
🍄 Good News of the Week
A trial in Devon found that bags of woodchips seeded with turkey tail mushroom spores, dropped straight onto riverbeds, filtered out 80% of E. coli, along with most of the phosphorus and nitrogen from sewage and farm runoff. The mushrooms’ dense root structure acts like a physical mesh, while the enzymes they release chemically break down the bacteria. The results were strong enough that the UK water regulator, Ofwat, awarded Anglian Water nearly $2 million to scale up the project, with universities including Imperial College London now involved. It’s a simple fix, and it’s already filtering rivers at scale.
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🧠 Brain Food
✨ Quote of the Day
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
— George Orwell
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