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China’s authorities appear to have implemented an enhanced version of the country’s internet censorship regime in the central province of Henan, subjecting tens of millions of residents to even stricter controls on access to information than people in the rest of the country.

A research paper published this month by Great Firewall Report, an internet censorship monitoring platform, found that internet users in Henan, one of China’s most populous provinces, were, on average, denied access to five times more websites than a typical Chinese internet user between November 2023 and March 2025.

“Our work documents an alarming sign of regional censorship emerging in China,” said the researchers, who include authors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Stanford University.

China has the world’s most sophisticated and extensive internet censorship regime. Internet users cannot access most western news websites or social media platforms, including services provided by Google, Wikipedia and Meta.

Within what has been dubbed the “great firewall”, online content is monitored and censored by a mixture of government authorities and private companies complying with laws that require them to delete any content considered “sensitive”. That includes any information about historical or current events that goes against the Chinese Communist party’s official narrative.

The researchers began looking into the topic after internet users in Henan reported that websites accessible in other parts of China were inaccessible in their province. They found that millions of domains that were not blocked by China’s centralised firewall were at some point inaccessible in Henan.

By buying servers from internet cloud providers, the authors tested the flow of internet traffic from locations within Henan. They tested the internet’s top 1m domains daily between November 2023 and March 2025, with a gap of several months in 2024. The results showed that the Henan firewall blocked nearly 4.2 million domains at some point during the research period, over five times more than the roughly 741,500 domains blocked by China’s national firewall.

The domains that were specifically blocked in Henan were mainly from business-related websites. There have been several finance-related protests in Henan in recent years, which the researchers speculated could be the reason for the additional controls on access to information about the economy being controlled.

In 2022, thousands of people in Henan took part in several demonstrations after they were blocked from withdrawing cash from their bank accounts. The crisis escalated when protesters reported that their mobile health codes, part of the pandemic control measures in place at the time, had turned red, preventing them from travelling or entering buildings. Five officials were later punished for abusing the health code system to quell the protests.

Other parts of China have also been subjected to enhanced internet controls. In July 2009, following deadly ethnic riots, the Chinese government imposed an internet blackout in Xinjiang, a region in western China home to the Uyghur minority, that lasted 10 months. Since then, the use of the internet in Xinjiang has been much more tightly monitored than in the rest of the country. Online activities in Tibet are also strictly controlled.

The emergence of a regional censorship regime in Henan is unusual because it is not a region of China that is normally considered especially restive by the Chinese authorities.

The researchers could not determine if the enhanced controls were imposed by the local authorities in Henan or the central government in Beijing.

Rapid advances in China’s artificial intelligence companies are a boon to both the censors and those who wish to evade them. China’s Ministry of Public Security (MPS) recently unveiled new surveillance tools that can monitor people who use virtual private networks, software that allows people to circumvent the internet firewall. The MPS’s research institute also showcased a tool that it claimed could monitor accounts on Telegram, a messaging app. The tool has already collected more than 30bn messages, the institute claimed.

Mingshi Wu, the lead author of the Henan study, who uses a pseudonym to protect their identity, said: “On the one hand, AI could be leveraged to create more sophisticated, adaptive, and efficient censorship and surveillance tools. On the other hand, AI also enables new opportunities for those seeking to understand and circumvent censorship. For example, AI can assist in developing more agile testing tools for detecting censorship.”

The Henan Cyberspace Affairs Commission could not be reached for comment.

Additional research by Lillian Yang

People should confront their family members who read news from “nefarious” sources, suggests the environmentalist Mike Berners-Lee.

“Challenge your friends and family and colleagues who are getting their information from sources that have got nefarious roots or a track record of being careless – or worse – with the truth, because we need to make this sort of thing socially embarrassing to be involved in,” said Berners-Lee, the brother of the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.

Speaking at Hay festival on Saturday about his most recent book, A Climate of Truth, the writer encouraged people to ask themselves “really discerning questions” about their basis for trusting the media they consume.

Berners-Lee, 61, said that lack of progress on climate issues comes down to political “deceit”, which he likened to abuse.

If a media personality “is found to have groped someone even once, that’s the end of their career, because we’ve decided collectively that that’s abuse, and it’s disgusting, and we’re not having it”, he said. “If a politician abuses us” by being deceitful, “we need to start screaming about that” too.

Though there have been 29 Cop conferences in the past 30 years, there is “no evidence whatsoever that those Cops have made any difference” to the rising trajectory of the global emissions from fossil fuel use, he said.

“Those 29 Cops have been totally corrupted and destroyed by the very cynical, very well-funded, very calculating, very sophisticated efforts of the fossil fuel industry to make sure those Cops don’t get where they need to get to,” he said.

While energy companies argue they are helping the world meet rising energy needs, Berners-Lee said: “We don’t have rising energy needs, not at the global level.”

Technology is not the obstacle to solving the climate crisis, he said. “We’ve got all the technology we need, for example, for an energy transition and vast improvements to our food system.”

The “simplest mechanic by a mile” for “helping the fossil fuel to stay in the ground” is a carbon price, he suggested.

This creates a revenue stream which can be used for “all kinds of great things” including relieving poverty and supporting “all the technologies that we need”.

He said that humanity’s “time is going to be up” if we carry on business as usual.

“We’ve got all this energy and technology at our fingertips, and we don’t yet have the wisdom and care to be able to wield it,” he said.

“We’re like children running around the playground with machine guns, and we’ve got to put that straight, otherwise we’re going to be in for a very, very, very nasty time, and I don’t think it’s too far away.”

In 2019, when Sophie* was 12, her classmates sent her “extreme and traumatising” videos that included an al-Qaida beheading, pornography and bestiality. She recalls an adult player in an online game persuading her to meet in person. Although her dad worked in IT, looking back she thinks: “My parents’ generation simply didn’t have a clue.”

Now aged 18 and a student at the University of Edinburgh, she wouldn’t allow her children to have a smartphone until they’re adults. “As a teen I would have been the biggest advocate on everyone having a phone, but I’ve 100% changed my opinion,” she said.

“Until you’re an adult and able to recognise the many ways in which people act deviantly to advance their own interests, you should not be online. The minute there is instant messaging I think it gets dangerous.”

Social media fuelled bullying at Sophie’s school, including competing for likes and using anonymous confession apps to share cruel comments. She also wonders what else she might have done with the time wasted.

Sophie is one of many so-called digital natives who are growing sceptical of the largely unfettered access to technology that they grew up with. A poll this week suggested that almost half of young people would rather live in a world where the internet does not exist, and a similar number would support a digital curfew, while more than three-quarters felt worse about themselves after using social media.

Meanwhile, Netflix’s hit four-part series Adolescence has sparked a wide-ranging conversation about the harms to children of social media and the online misogyny that has taken root on some platforms.

Izzy Bouric, 24, an artist from Brighton living in Paris, thinks part of the problem is the way the boundaries between child and adult spaces have blurred on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and Roblox in recent years.

“I was on [online children’s game] Club Penguin at their age – what you could actually say and type was limited and you got banned for using bad words because it was a child-friendly space, and now you have 12-year-olds on Instagram reading Nazi comments,” she said.

Despite this, Bouric says, “I was definitely exposed to things I shouldn’t have been, growing up”, adding that “everyone from my generation has an experience of being on chatrooms and getting solicited by someone who is much, much older”.

She would only allow her children to have a smartphone from age 17. “It’s not for children, it’s not for people who don’t have developed brains,” she said, adding: “Your parents not knowing what you’re doing is not the safest thing in the world.”

She feels that in recent years social media has become oppressive and “cannibalised by advertisements and corporations” as well as spreading misinformation around sensitive topics such as mental health and neurodivergence. “Suddenly, instead of my friends, my phone was filled with tiny people shouting at me, saying I was doing everything wrong, and then begging me to buy something from them.”

The shift left her feeling anxious and unwell and prompted her to opt for a flip phone, which she feels is a breath of fresh air that has allowed her to reclaim time and mental space.

Tobias, 20, from Austria, received his first smartphone aged 11 or 12, and noticed a change in his classmates. “You just sat down and started scrolling and you didn’t really talk to the person one row behind you, you texted them.”

Although his school had a policy to keep phones turned off, teachers soon gave up on enforcing it. “They were just buzzing and there were notification sounds all the time,” he said.

In his late teens, he began watching videos on YouTube and Instagram. “I found myself in moments of despair after watching short video content for two to three hours straight and wondering, ‘Wow, that went fast and I have no time left for things I actually want to do.’”

Tobias was particularly unnerved to see his interest in first-person shooter games resulted in his algorithm showing content from creators showcasing real guns and violent acts. He now concludes: “The longer children and teens have restricted contact with smartphones, the better.”

Lethe, 20, a student paramedic from near Birmingham, England, wouldn’t allow her child to have a smartphone until they were 16 and would only allow restricted media access.

She didn’t get her first smartphone until she was nearly 18, but she noticed how her friends who had them were bullied, had reduced attention spans and spent their time scrolling through social media rather than chatting or being creative.

Two years on from her first phone, she says: “It definitely has changed me. I’m less good at being bored, and my attention span has decreased. I struggle to live in the moment. Algorithms on social media have led to me seeing things I wouldn’t really wish to see.”

Nora, 23, a project manager from Spain, wouldn’t allow social media access until age 13 and would restrict use and install content filters, although she would want to open a dialogue with her child, explaining the risks. “I would hope to have built enough trust and understanding for them to feel comfortable coming to me if they ever encountered something scary or unsettling,” she says.

She remembers this growing up. Aged 13, she and other girls in her school started receiving messages from a stranger on Google Messages. He convinced some to send inappropriate images and was eventually imprisoned for paedophilia.

She also recalls classmates bullying people on messaging services. “I struggled with some nasty messages,” she said.

Later, she found that social media exacerbated her eating disorder through comparing herself to other girls and watching weight-loss transformation videos, which can promote unhealthy habits. She also chased likes on Instagram, which she has since deleted. “It was not very healthy for me.”

Now, she fears for her 16-year-old brother. “His TikTok is filled with super misogynistic ideas and toxic masculinity – his friends say very nasty things about women’s bodies. That wasn’t a thing for me and my friends.”

* Name has been changed

If you love your iPad and are constantly chatting on WhatsApp, there’s some very good news. After years and years of waiting, the Meta-owned messaging service has finally launched a dedicated app on Apple’s popular range of tablets. That means you can now access all of your messages on these devices without having to use annoying workarounds such as WhatsApp via the web.

WhatsApp app on iPad has been something millions have wanted – in fact, WhatsApp says it’s been one of its “biggest requests”.

It’s unclear why it’s taken so long to release, but the wait is over. Now it’s officially available, with the team behind the service saying, “We’re excited to announce that WhatsApp is now available on iPad.”

Once downloaded, you’ll see all of your chats just like they appear on your iPhone. However, WhatsApp also says it has made this new update for iPad ideal for multitasking on the larger display, so users can get more done.

“Take advantage of iPadOS multitasking features such as Stage Manager, Split View, and Slide Over to view multiple apps at once, so you can send messages while browsing the web, or research options for a group trip while on a call together,” the chat service confirmed.

Another bonus of this new iPad application is that it also works with Apple’s Magic Keyboard accessory and the Apple Pencil stylus.

It will also sync to all other devices – such as your iPhone – so there’s no worries about missing a message when switching between Apple gadgets. WhatsApp also boasts that it gets the same level of security, which makes sure all chats stay safe.

“WhatsApp for iPad uses our industry leading multi-device technology to keep everything in sync across your iPhone, Mac and other devices while protecting your personal messages, calls and media with end-to-end encryption, no matter what platform or device you’re messaging,” WhatsApp added.

“Our extra layers of privacy, such as chat lock, mean that you can have private conversations in confidence even if you share your iPad with others.”

If you fancy giving it a go, head to the App Store on your iPad now.

The internet is an unpleasant place, full of grim headlines, misinformation and social media content designed to make you feel ugly and unsuccessful. But there are good bits too.

Take Jackie and Shadow, a happy couple who live in a home with breathtaking views of Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino county, California. They currently have two children, Sunny and Gizmo, who are preparing to leave home and make their own way in the world. They are, in many ways, the purest embodiment of the modern American dream: reality stars, and also bald eagles.

The family has been on camera since October 2015, when the environmental non-profit group Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) started a live stream of the nest. For years, fans have watched live as the eagles share meals (mostly fish), relax and tease each other. Sometimes Shadow nips at Jackie’s tail or wing “to get a response out of her”, says Sandy Steers, the executive director of FOBBV. “It’s hilarious.”

The eagle cam was Steers’s idea. She started watching the nest years ago, though from the ground, back when it was still occupied by Jackie’s parents, Ricky and Lucy. “I got to watch Jackie grow up through a spotting scope, and it completely hooked me,” she says.

Over the years, the feed’s numbers have soared like a majestic bird of prey. The YouTube page has more than 638,000 subscribers, and as I write this, 46,000 people are watching with me. Multiple news outlets have referred to the eagles as “celebrities”. And there’s merch: FOBBV sells Shadow and Jackie plushies ($30), tote bags ($20) and sweatshirts ($45).

“I think what draws people is that nature is fascinating, and most of us haven’t really had the chance to sit and study it,” Steers says. “It connects people with themselves and their emotions.”

The emotions these eagles elicit seem to be pleasant. Besides the birds, the page includes another wonder of the natural world: a wholesome comment section.

“Love you Jackie, Shadow, Sunny, and Gizmo, you’re in my heart forever!” one fan writes in the live chat.

“What gets me through the day is to watch this beautiful family thrive,” writes another.

The eagles inspire such fervent adoration because of their personalities, says Steers. “Jackie is serious and she’s the boss, absolutely,” she explains. “Shadow knows all of Jackie’s rules, and at the same time, he’s independent.”

Jackie and Shadow’s love is the stuff of romcoms. After Rick and Lucy left, Jackie occupied the nest with her first partner, Mr B. In 2018, they had two chicks, but only one survived. That summer another eagle appeared – a charming, impish and stubborn young man who began hanging around the nest and wouldn’t leave no matter how much Mr B snapped at him. Eventually, Mr B gave up and left.

Don’t bald eagles mate for life? “For the most part, but apparently not always,” says Steers.

Now, the family is mostly settled. Sunny and Gizmo are the couple’s fifth and sixth offspring. The Eagle Logwhich is run by FOBBV members and posts regular updates on the nest, recently confirmed Gizmo is a girl, based on her overall size, behavior and “obsession with food”. The jury is still out on Sunny’s sex, but the group hopes to have more clarity in the next couple of days.

At 11 weeks old, the eaglets are almost ready to fly, and a “fledge watch” is under way as fans eagerly wait to see them take to the skies.

“They don’t look quite ready to me,” says Steers. “But maybe that’s just me hoping they stay longer.”

I first heard about the eagle cam years ago from a friend, and ever since Gizmo and Sunny first hatched back in March (they’re both Pisces), I’ve kept the live stream open in a tab on my computer. Between work tasks, I click over to see how my feathered pals are doing. It’s become a happy break for me.

I’ve watched Sunny and Gizmo grow from tiny balls of gray fuzz into big glorious raptors with razor sharp beaks and claws. I’ve seen Jackie feed the eaglets tiny bits of fish, and watched Gizmo hop in the air and practice flying (“We call that ‘wingercising’,” says Steers).

Sometimes the feed is quiet – perhaps the kids are napping and Jackie and Shadow are out hunting. I enjoy the serenity of the trees swaying in the wind and the lake’s glitter too. As Steers wrote in a recent post in the Eagle Log: “Sometimes a quiet, observant, appreciative loving day is simply essential to the joy of living for all beings.”

The EU executive has launched an investigation into four pornographic websites over alleged failure to prevent children from seeing adult content.

After analysis of company policies, the European Commission accused Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX and XVideos of failing to have effective age verification measures to stop minors accessing their content.

The investigation was opened under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), a wide-ranging law to combat online harms, including disinformation, cyber-attacks, hate speech and the sale of fake goods. The act also includes tough provisions to protect children online, including preventing damage to mental health caused by seeing adult content.

According to the commission, all four platforms had one-click self-declarations to verify age, which it deemed ineffective to prevent under-18s from viewing adult content.

“Today is a good day for minor protection online in the EU, because with the enforcement actions that we are launching … against four very large online platforms with pornographic, adult content, we are clearly showing that we mean it when it comes to the effective protection of minors under the DSA,” an EU official told reporters.

There was no fixed timetable to complete the investigation, the official said, while stressing “a commitment to act relatively fast on potential next steps, depending on what the reaction of the platforms will be”.

The platforms could resolve the investigation by producing forms of age verification deemed effective by EU regulators. But if the complaint is upheld they could be fined up to 6% of global annual turnover.

Under the DSA, the commission regulates platforms with more than 45 million users, such as Google, Meta and X, while national authorities in the 27 member states are responsible for those below this threshold.

The commission said on Tuesday that Stripchat was no longer designated a “very large online platform”, after an appeal by the company, meaning its activities would in future be regulated by Cyprus, where its parent company, Technius Ltd, is based, rather than Brussels.

The investigation into age verification tools will continue, however, as the new designation does not apply until September.

Stripchat’s child protection obligations remain the same.

The parent company of Pornhub, Aylo Freesites, said it was aware of the commission’s investigation and “fully committed” to ensuring the safety of minors online.

“We will always comply with the law,” the company said. “We believe that the real solution for protecting minors and adults alike is to verify users’ ages at the point of access – the users’ devices – and for websites to deny or permit access to age-restricted materials based on that verification.”

Technius was approached for comment. A Brussels-based lawyer who has recently represented the parent companies of XVideos (WebGroup Czech Republic) and XNXX (NKL Associates) in EU legal proceedings was also contacted for comment.

COVID-19 cases are rising again as a new variant begins to circulate in some parts of the world. The World Health Organization said Wednesday the rise in cases is primarily in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and western Pacific regions.

Airport screening in the United States has detected the new variant in travelers arriving from those regions to destinations in California, Washington state, Virginia and New York.

The new variant is called NB.1.8.1. It arrives as the United States’ official stance on COVID-19 vaccination is changing. On Tuesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that COVID-19 shots are no longer recommended for healthy children and pregnant women — a move immediately questioned by several public health experts.

The new variant, increasing globally, had by mid-May reached nearly 11% of sequenced samples reported. The WHO has designated it a “variant under monitoring” and considers the public health risk low at the global level with current vaccines expected to remain effective.

The WHO said some western Pacific countries have reported increases in COVID cases and hospitalizations, but there’s nothing so far to suggest that the disease associated with the new variant is more severe compared to other variants.

The variant called LP.8.1 is currently the dominant version in the U.S. and globally. ___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

NEW YORK — Scientists have identified a new pod of ancient hunter-gatherers who lived near the land bridge between North America and South America about 6,000 years ago.

Researchers are still charting how human populations spread across the Americas thousands of years agoarriving first in North America before veering south. Groups that split off developed their own collection of genes that scientists can use to piece together the human family tree.

Discovered through ancient DNA, the group lived in the high plateaus of present-day Bogotá, Colombia — close to where the Americas meet. Scientists aren’t sure exactly where they fall in the family tree because they’re not closely related to ancient Native Americans in North America and also not linked to ancient or present-day South Americans.

The new study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

“Up to this point, we didn’t believe there was any other lineage that would appear in South America,” said archaeologist Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos with Florida Atlantic University who was not involved with the new research. “This is unexpected.”

Just 4,000 years later, these ancient humans were gone and a genetically-different human clan inhabited the area. Scientists aren’t sure exactly what happened to make them fade away — whether they mixed into a new, bigger group or were pushed out entirely.

Analyzing more genes in South America will help confirm if this new group truly did disappear or if there could be evidence of their descendants elsewhere, said Campelo dos Santos.

Studying these ancient Colombian genes are important to piecing together the history of the Americas since ancient people had to cross this land bridge to settle in and spread across South America.

The area is “the gateway to the South American continent,” said study author Andrea Casas-Vargas with the National University of Colombia.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.