As ‘political depression’ enters public discourse, therapists are encouraging people to engage with their communities

When Rebecca McFaul woke up in her small farmhouse in Logan, Utah, on a cold January day, she felt the same way she’d been feeling for months: “A certain kind of terror and horror at it all.” Most of her family lives in Minnesota, and for weeks, she’d watched from afar as families were taken by agents, activists were shot and tear gas hung in the air.

A music professor at Utah State University, she’d spent the day with her students, but struggled to focus. Then she came home and read more bad news, this time, a piece in the newspaper about two Maga influencers railing against the dangers of compassion in response to the detainment of 5-year-old Liam Ramos in Minneapolis. “It was such a betrayal on every level,” McFaul said. “Of sisterhood, of motherhood, of decency.”

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Sarina Wiegman made a few positional adjustments as a showdown with Spain looms, and Georgia Stanway and Lauren James shone

There were few fireworks, but six points from six meant “job done” for England in their first two World Cup qualifiers. They might have preferred to score more goals to boost their goal difference, but these victories were essential in England’s quest to top this qualifying group before they face Spain.

With a warmly anticipated meeting with the world champions in April at Wembley, what will they have learned from these two competitive yet ever-so-slightly experimental qualifiers, a 6-1 win against Ukraine in Turkey on Tuesday and a 2-0 victory over Iceland in Nottingham on Saturday?

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The Bridgerton star has told of her horror at being approached by a fan who only wanted to talk about her body. Surely it’s time we focused on something else

Nicola Coughlan is sick of the subject of “body positivity”, and thank God, because so am I. “The thing I say sometimes that pisses people off is I have no interest in body positivity,” she said in a recent interview. Like Coughlan and no doubt many, many other women, I’m sick of talking about it, thinking about it, reading about it, all of it (I do recognise a certain irony in my writing about it, but hear me out). In the same interview, Coughlan recounted an encounter with a fan: “I remember this really drunk girl once talking to me in a bathroom being like, ‘I loved [Bridgerton] because of your body’ and started talking about my body, and I was like, ‘I want to die. I hate this so much.’”

She continued: “It’s really hard when you work on something for months and months of your life, you don’t see your family, you really dedicate yourself and then it comes down to what you look like – it’s so fucking boring.”

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author of Female, Nude

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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From Gates to Musk and Altman, today’s ultra-rich steer AI and tech, raising questions about who decides the future

When Bill Gates became the first modern IT mogul to reach the apex of wealth and power in 1992, the world was a very different place. Gates joined the top 10 on Forbes magazine’s billionaires list alongside Japanese, German, Canadian, South Korean and Swedish billionaires, including those with family fortunes from Britain and America. A broad mix of industries was on the list: Retail and media, property management and packaging, an investment firm and a couple of industrial conglomerates. Their fortunes almost added up to $100bn – equivalent to about 0.4% of the US’s GDP that year.

The oligarchy has changed drastically since then. Bernard Arnault, of French luxury group LVMH, Amancio Ortega, the Spanish clothing mogul, and Warren Buffett, the US investor, were the only old-school billionaires among the top 10 in 2025. The rest largely made their money from high-tech: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Steve Ballmer and Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page. The top 10 amassed over $16trn, which is about 8% of US GDP.

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Would you move sunrise to 9 a.m. in Detroit? Or to 4:11 a.m. in Seattle...
Though both options have problems, "There's no law we can pass to move the sun to our will," argues the president of the nonprofit "Save Standard Time". The Associated Press explains why America remains stuck in that annual ritual making clocks "spring forward, fall backward..."

The U.S. has tinkered with the clock intermittently since railroads standardized the time zones in 1883. So has a lot of the world. About 140 countries have had daylight saving time at some point; about half that many do now. About 1 in 10 U.S. adults favor the current system of changing the clocks, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted last year. About half oppose that system, and some 4 in 10 didn't have an opinion.

If they had to choose, most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time. ince 2018, 19 states — including much of the South and a block of states in the northwestern U.S. — have adopted laws calling for a move to permanent daylight saving time. There's a catch: Congress would need to pass a law to allow states to go to full-time daylight saving time, something that was in place nationwide during World War II and for an unpopular, brief stint in 1974. The U.S. Senate passed a bill in 2022 to move to permanent daylight saving time. A similar House bill hasn't been brought to a vote.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who introduces such a bill every term, said the airline industry, which doesn't want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up. U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, is proposing another approach. "Why not just split the baby?" he asked. "Move it 30 minutes so it would be halfway between the two." Steube thinks his bill could get bipartisan support. The change would make the U.S. out of sync with most of the world — though India has taken a similar approach and in Nepal, the time is 15 minutes ahead of India.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

peaceful-jp-scenery has added a photo to the pool:

Lake Inawashiro
猪苗代湖

Lake Inawashiro and Mount Bandai seen from Shidahama. There were lots of swans.

猪苗代湖、志田浜からの磐梯山です。白鳥もいっぱいいました。

Inawashiro-cho, Fukushima pref, Japan

peaceful-jp-scenery posted a photo:

Lake Inawashiro
猪苗代湖

Lake Inawashiro and Mount Bandai seen from Shidahama. There were lots of swans.

猪苗代湖、志田浜からの磐梯山です。白鳥もいっぱいいました。

Inawashiro-cho, Fukushima pref, Japan

Mother and daughter discover contender for world's largest known coral colony. Mother and daughter citizen scientists find what is believed to be the largest coral colony on the Great Barrier Reef and possibly in the world.

KUALA LUMPUR (ANP/AFP) - De grote zoekactie naar vlucht MH370, die eind vorig jaar begon, heeft niets opgeleverd. Er is een gebied van 15.000 vierkante kilometer afgezocht, maar dat resulteerde niet in "bevindingen die de locatie van het wrak bevestigen", melden de Maleisische autoriteiten. Deze zondag is het precies twaalf jaar geleden dat de Boeing 777 van Malaysia Airlines met 239 mensen aan boord vermist raakte. Onder hen was één Nederlander.

Het bedrijf Ocean Infinity deed begin dit jaar onderzoek met onder meer onderwaterdrones die tot zes kilometer diepte kunnen duiken. Die operatie is op 23 januari afgerond.

Nabestaanden van een aantal Chinese vermisten hebben zondag premier Anwar Ibrahim van Maleisië een open brief geschreven. Ze danken hem voor het zoeken, maar zeggen graag meer en persoonlijkere aandacht te willen voor de zaak.

Er zijn al meerdere grote zoekoperaties geweest. Toch zijn het vliegtuig, inzittenden of de zwarte dozen nooit gevonden.

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