The government has promised to introduce curbs on social media use as soon as its consultation concludes this summer. Measures being considered include a total ban on under-16s; the restriction of addictive features such as “infinite scrolling”; and a limit on children’s interaction with AI chatbots. “It’s not a question of whether we take further action,” a government source tells The Times, “but what that action is.” Russia’s Wagner Group is pivoting to European sabotage, says the FT. According to Western intelligence officials, Moscow is using former members of the mercenary group to recruit economically vulnerable Europeans to carry out arson attacks and other acts of disruption on Nato soil. Team GB enjoyed a Super Sunday at the Winter Olympics yesterday, scooping two gold medals. Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale stormed to a surprise victory in the mixed snowboard cross, securing Britain’s first ever gold on snow, before Tabitha Stoecker and Matt Weston (pictured below) added a second in the mixed team skeleton.

Last week, with his leadership hanging by a thread, Keir Starmer declared how proud he was to have “the most working-class cabinet in the history of this country”. It was the latest example, says Matthew Parris in The Times, of this government’s “increasingly conspicuous weaponising of class”. It started gently, with ministers euphemistically talking of “working people” and “working families”. Yet which adults don’t work in Britain? Pensioners? Students? The sick, the disabled, the unemployed? Were these the groups Labour meant to snub? Of course not. We knew what they meant. Now, with “little else to trumpet” and firmly in hock to the left of the Labour Party, Starmer and co are saying the quiet part out loud.

You might ask what’s wrong with politicians trying to pitch their appeal to the “broad majority”. But the use of words like “working” and “ordinary” – another popular euphemism – is designed not to broaden Labour’s appeal but to narrow it. The whole point of this language is the “implicit reminder of whom it excludes”. Rachel Reeves is about the only person left who is permitted to “whisper encouragement” to those paying the taxes that fund Labour’s much sought-after “rebalancing”. Politically, this is a self-defeating strategy. The wealth creators are only reminded of their exclusion, while the millions of voters who have been lumped together and patronised as “ordinary” will instinctively think the government must be talking about someone else. (There’s a reason “proletariat” will never be a term of endearment.) And morally, it’s beyond the pale. Class antagonism has always been a “nasty element” in Britain’s cultural mix. Shame on our “desperate” government for fanning the flames in a bid to “save their own skins”.

👏❌ I recently remarked to a friend from a “grim northern council estate” that people there must be proud of their “class warrior” Angela Rayner. “You’re so wrong,” he said. “They’ll think her rude and ignorant: an insult to her origins; and that she should behave with the dignity her new position calls for. It’s north London Labour voters who’ll admire her as some kind of mouthy mascot for their inclusiveness.”

The kids are starting to sound like their grandparents, says Sam Corbin in The New York Times. No longer content with making up new nonsense like “skibidi” and “6-7”, Gen Z are embracing words that had their first heyday a century ago. “Yap”, “skedaddle” and “diabolical” are now all in common usage among the young. And social media is full of pleas to bring back others to suit the present political context, including “lummox”, “bloviate”, “bumptious” and “hoodwink”. Fandabidozi.

If you know a skier who fancies themselves as not far off professional level, says Alan Dymock in The Daily Telegraph, show them the video above. On the left is Team GB slalom racer Billy Major; on the right is the team’s ski technician, Ryan Farrow, an “advanced-level amateur skier” himself, taking on the same slope. Major clocks in at 30kph faster than Farrow, achieving 33 more turns per minute, and ends the run 47.85 seconds ahead – in an event where the top 30 competitors can sometimes be “within three seconds of each other”.

Remember February 2020, asks Matt Shumer on X, when a few people were talking about a virus in China but no one knew their entire lives were about to change? Today, we’re at the same “this seems overblown” phase with AI – only the change is going to be “much, much bigger”. Those of us who work in the industry know of the impending disruption to white collar work because it’s already happening to us. Coding skills are basically redundant: if I want an app, or a widget for a website, or any sort of digital tool, I ask AI to build it “and it just… appears”. Even a couple of months ago I’d still need to tweak the final product. Now, it’s “usually perfect”.

This experience of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do” is about to befall pretty much everyone working in other knowledge industries: law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, customer service, everything. The managing partner of one large law firm tells me he already spends hours every day using the tech and thinks it won’t be long before it can do most of what he does. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI head, reckons most white collar work will be “fully automated” within 12 to 18 months. One reason ordinary people are sceptical is because they’ve only used the free-tier versions of ChatGPT, say, or Anthropic’s Claude. But that’s like “evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone”. For anyone who works with a laptop and thinks AI isn’t coming for them, take it from me. “The future is already here. It just hasn’t knocked on your door yet.”

🤖📈 Here’s what the AI revolution looks like on the ground, says Dan Cox, the chief technology officer of Axios. Six months ago, anticipating what was coming, we cut our tech and product workforce by 30%. “The team doubled its output in January and will double that again this month.” One of our best engineers recently completed a task similar to one that took him three weeks a year ago. This time he did it in 37 minutes.

The “attention span crisis” isn’t limited to reading, says Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic: professors can’t even get film students to sit through whole movies. At one university, less than half the class even start the films on the course and only a fifth make it to the end. Professors elsewhere say new students struggle to name a single film they’ve watched recently, and that many arrive having seen “only Disney movies”. In a recent multiple-choice exam at UW Madison, students were asked what happens at the end of François Truffaut’s 1962 classic Jules et Jim. More than half picked wrong, saying characters hide from the Nazis – the film is set during World War One – or get drunk with Ernest Hemingway, who doesn’t even appear in the movie.

It’s the T-650, part of a fleet of British-made drones known as the “Land Rover of the sky”, says Ben Spencer in The Sunday Times. The unmanned aircraft, which can carry up to 300kg, is designed to transport patients from the battlefield but makers BAE Systems say it could also be used for motorway crashes and mountain rescue. The heavy-lift drones are already being used by oil companies to move kit between offshore rigs and by the Royal Navy to ferry supplies from ship to ship. “Why use a helicopter,” says Dave Holmes, head of the aerospace giant’s air research division, “if all you are doing is taking a box?”