James' World 2

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In February 2012, as Vladimir Putin was gearing up to steal the Russian presidential ‘election’ that year, the performance art group Pussy Riot staged an audacious and provocative work inside the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Dressed in colourful outfits and balaclavas, several members of the group burst into the church flashmob-style, dancing in front of the altar and singing expletive-filled ‘punk prayers’ in protest against Putin. Three women from the group were subsequently arrested and later sentenced to two years in prison on the charge of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’. They had, the judge said, ‘plotted to undermine civil order’.

In a moving interview with the historian Simon Schama in December last year one of those young women, the artist and activist Nadya Tolokonnikova, talked about what happened to her during her time in prison. After being transferred to the notorious gulag IK-14 in the remote region of Mordovia, Tolokonnikova was forced to work in slave labour conditions for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, sewing police and military uniforms. She described the effect this kind of punishment has on people’s sense of self: within a short time it stripped her of her identity and made her lose any hope, agency or motivation. Her life became meaningless. It’s an experience she has not fully recovered from more than ten years later. Of course, Tolokonnikova’s real crime was to express her thoughts publicly about Putin’s corruption, mocking him in the process.

Our right to political protest is something we take for granted here in the UK. Amusing protest placard expression is like a national sport. But these rights are not set in stone and citizens of democratic countries must always be vigilant for their slow erosion — witness, for example, the current regressive laws on women’s reproductive rights in the USA at the moment.

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Pussy Riot perform at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in 2012. Photo: Philip Cosores

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In post-World War II Britain, national records began to reveal a concerning trend. Deaths by suicide were rising in the war-battered nation, an increase that

would continue from the end of the war into the early 1960s. Then, in 1963, that trend mysteriously reversed. The graphs began to teeter downward. Experts puzzled over the reasons behind this drop in the suicide rate. Was it the birth of the Samaritans counseling services in 1953? Was it better psychiatric services offered under the National Health Service? But the reality turned out to be something entirely unexpected.

In the early 20th century, domestic gas that was used to warm British homes and cook people’s dinners was made almost entirely by heating coal, which created a gas mixture imbued with a hefty dose of carbon monoxide. Consequently, ingestion of carbon monoxide poisoning from a gas oven became the most common method of suicide. In the early 1950s, new and cheaper methods of gas production were brought in—with a carbon monoxide content hovering near zero.

Suicides by domestic gas poisoning in the UK began to fall rapidly, bringing down the national suicide rate. Between 1963 and 1970, deaths by suicide fell by a quarter. By 1975, suicides by gas poisoning had pretty much disappeared. The experts were not quite sure what to make of this; could it really be that simple? A 1976 paper on the topic pondered how “the removal of a single agent of self-destruction can have had such far-reaching consequences.”

This question gets to the heart of what’s called “means restriction”—reducing access to methods people use to take their lives. Across the world, means restriction has had a huge impact. Over the past three decades, suicide rates have slowly and steadily dropped; between 2000 and 2016, the global mortality rate from suicide dropped by about 33 percent. So while it may feel like the world is crumbling into a war-torn, authoritarian shit show ravaged by rising temperatures and politicians who stand idly by, we can take solace in knowing that we’ve become better at preventing suicides

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ILLUSTRATION: ANJALI NAIR; GETTY IMAGES

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Molly was 88 years old and in good health. She had outlived two husbands, her siblings, most of her friends and her only son.

“I don’t have any meaningful relationships left, dear,” she told me. “They’ve all died. And you know what? Underneath it all, I want to leave this world too.” Leaning a little closer, as though she was telling me a secret, she continued:

Shall I tell you what I am? I’m strong. I can admit to myself and to you that there’s nothing left for me here. I’m more than ready to leave when it’s my time. In fact, it can’t come quickly enough.

I’ve interviewed many older people for research. Every so often, I’m struck by the sincerity with which some people feel that their life is completed. They seem tired of being alive.

I’m a member of of the European Understanding Tiredness of Life in Older People Research Network, a group of geriatricians, psychiatrists, social scientists, psychologists, and death scholars. We want to better understand the phenomenon and unpick what is unique about it. The network is also working on advice for politicians and healthcare practices, as well as caregiver and patient support.

Professor of care ethics Els van Wijngaarden and colleagues in the Netherlands listened to a group of older people who were not seriously ill, yet felt a yearning to end their lives. The key issues they identified in such people were: aching loneliness, pain associated with not mattering, struggles with self-expression, existential tiredness, and fear of being reduced to a completely dependent state.

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With brand-name bottle fads and gallon-a-day water challenges trending on TikTok, hydration is in, and that’s good news for health. The average human body is more than 60% water. Water makes up almost two-thirds of your brain and heart, 83% of your lungs, 64% of your skin, and even 31% of your bones. It’s involved in almost every process that keeps you alive. So if you’ve hopped on the water-drinking bandwagon, you’re doing yourself a big solid.

“Water is essential for your body’s survival,” says Crystal Scott, registered dietitian-nutritionist with Top Nutrition Coaching. “It helps regulate your temperature, transports nutrients, removes waste, lubricates your joints and tissues, and it also plays a crucial role in maintaining the delicate balance of electrolytes and fluids in your body.”

You lose water when you breathe, sweat, urinate, and metabolize food and drink into energy. If you don’t replace that fluid, your health can go downhill, and fast. Without food, your body can keep ticking for as long as three weeks or more. But without water, you’ll die in only a few days. There’s just too many systems that depend on it.

“I like to correlate our bodies with planet Earth,” says Scott. “Our Earth is made up of a large percentage of water. If that amount got too low, what would happen to our food systems? Our forests? Animal life? It’s a domino effect.”

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Digital technologies are fundamentally transforming how industries operate and provide value to customers. To keep pace with the disruptive forces of digital transformation, businesses must rapidly innovate to compete. However, these innovations introduce new cyber risks, as businesses adopt new technologies or leverage existing ones in novel ways, creating new pathways for cyber attacks. With the growing importance of digital innovation in business operations, products, and services, the potential risks and consequences of a successful cyber attack continue to increase, making the stakes higher than ever before.

To be successful, companies must ensure that their products, services, and business operations are proactively resilient to cyber attacks by changing the role of cybersecurity in digital innovation.

Proactive Resilience

When constructing a mountain road, builders do not simply decide on the road’s placement and wait for cars to fall off the cliff before implementing safety measures like guardrails. Instead, they analyze the nature of the road and its associated risks and proactively put the necessary protective measures in place.

Similarly, in successful digital transformations such as ecommerce, banks, and retailers don’t implement a means for exchanging sensitive information or conducting transactions, only deciding to implement protective measures after a hack has occurred. Instead, they recognize the potential risks in advance and proactively implement cybersecurity controls as the foundation to safeguard against them.

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Big Tech is liking the look of its new leaner shape.

Companies from Meta to Microsoft to Salesforce have cut jobs in recent months, often in the pursuit of efficiency and increased profit margins. By some estimates, more than 250,000 tech workers have been laid off since the start of 2022.

There have been many more roles that have gone unfilled as these industry giants slow down on hiring. Recent data from Indeed shows a more than 50% decline in software-development job postings compared to a year ago. 

As my colleague Hasan Chowdhury has written, that strategy is working financially, with Salesforce, Meta, and Microsoft recently reporting stronger-than-expected earning results. 

And now, thanks to the rise of AI, many of those jobs may be permanently lost, even as these companies get back to growth. 

In a recent note by Morgan Stanley analysts led by Brian Nowak, the bank said “AI-based productivity drivers are coming.”

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Are programmers no longer untouchable? andresr/Getty Images

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Some content on this page was disabled on April 15, 2025 as a result of a DMCA takedown notice from Guardian Media Group. You can learn more about the DMCA here:

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Over the past months, ChatGPT has gained a lot of users because it’s so good at writing emails, blogs, code, and more. However, there are other tools that use the model behind ChatGPT to go beyond what ChatGPT can do.

In this article, I’ll share a list of tools that I believe are better than ChatGPT because they offer extra features, can be customized, and were built for specific use cases using GPT-3.5/GPT-4.

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All of that is by design. Pi, released this week by the richly funded artificial intelligence start-up Inflection AI, aims to be “a kind and supportive companion that’s on your side,” the company announced. It is not, the company stressed anything like a human.

Pi is a twist in today’s wave of A.I. technologies, where chatbots are being tuned to provide digital companionship. Generative A.I., which can produce text, images, and sound, is currently too unreliable and full of inaccuracies to be used to automate many important tasks. But it is very good at engaging in conversations.

That means that while many chatbots are now focused on answering queries or making people more productive, tech companies are increasingly infusing them with personality and conversational flair.

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Janice Chang

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